Pete Hegseth Murdered A Bunch Of People On Boats And All We Got Was ALLL THIS COCAINE
It's almost as if the $4.7 billion murder campaign did nothing but kill nearly 200 people.
Donald Trump and Secretary of Day Drinking Pete Hegseth’s illegal murder campaign against boats that may (or may not!) be carrying drugs hasn’t had any effect on the amount of cocaine coming into America, the New York Times reported Friday (gift link). So far, the campaign has burned though $4.7 billion, struck 59 small boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, and killed 196 people, all without congressional authorization. The campaign also provided an excuse to invade Venezuela and topple President Nicolás Maduro so Trump could steal Venezuela’s shitty oil. Funny thing: That splendid little war didn’t do a thing to offset the oil price shock resulting from Trump’s stupid war against Iran. It’s as if Trump’s most murderous foreign policies have only made the world worse, somehow.
The Times reports that, nine months after the boat murders began, “epidemiologists, addiction scientists and public health experts say cocaine, by far the top drug smuggled out of South America, is as easy to get in much of the United States as it was before the strikes began.”
On the other hand, Pete Hegseth sure feels manly and tough, so having virtually no effect on the supply of cocaine was probably worth every last penny, not to mention the nearly 200 lives snuffed out in extrajudicial murders. But they were all “narcoterrorists” anyway, or at least it’s possible that they might have been, so killing them wasn’t like killing humans. Heck, as Hegseth explained using AI slop featuring the Canadian children’s book character Franklin the Turtle, state-sponsored murder is actually very amusing!
Dr. Carl Latkin, a public health prof at Johns Hopkins who tracks cocaine use in Baltimore, a top destination for cocaine from the Caribbean, told the Times, “Cocaine remains highly available, highly prevalent and relatively inexpensive.” Nice that at least prices for one consumer product haven’t skyrocketed under Trump.
Latkin argues that the drug boat attacks are illegal and ineffective, because addiction in the USA isn’t a problem you can solve by bombing boats from Venezuela whose cargo is usually destined for Europe or Africa.
“In addition to being morally abhorrent, this method is as likely to succeed as much as would bombing a handful of McDonald’s in Dallas, Texas, and claiming that you’ve made America healthy again,” Dr. Latkin said.
As of press time, it doesn’t yet appear that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has followed up on this suggestion by demanding Hegseth launch airstrikes on fast-food restaurants.
Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at Paypal — let us know if you want the newsletter subscription too! they’re separate! — or we have a Patreon too.
Needless to say, Hegseth insisted in November that the murder campaign has been “highly effective,” at least when it comes to killing the people on the boats. They are very much dead. Notice though, that Hegseth stopped well short of saying anything that could be quantified or fact checked about whether the attacks had any measurable reduction in drugs entering the US.
The killer vibes are all that matter, plus some gratuitous panic-mongering about Afghan refugees, who are all murderers. But why would you even try to hold a man who lies about his job title to the truth?
The Times notes that, along with the murder strikes, Coast Guard interdictions and seizures of drugs were up by about three times their usual level in 2025, which says a lot more about the conventional, non-lethal approach to dealing with smugglers than it does about blowing boats up and killing people. And even there, the amount of drugs interdicted is always a tiny fraction of the cocaine coming into the US from South America.
Still, the story points out, the boat murders have had an effect — just not on the amount of actual cocaine reaching the US:
Signs are also emerging that traffickers are simply adopting other methods for smuggling cocaine, such as shifting to land routes through Central America or placing cocaine in container ships, while absorbing the occasional loss of shipments on small boats.
But there’s little evidence that the US cocaine supply has been affected. Public health researchers point out that Cocaine street values are roughly the same as they were before the killing spree began, and the purity of the drug is unchanged as well. If cocaine were in shorter supply, you’d expect both prices and adulteration with other substances to increase.
Even the larger amounts of coke being seized doesn’t necessarily mean law enforcement is constraining the supply, as the Times explains.
While large seizures might initially look like a sign that law enforcement is successfully stopping the flow, researchers view seizures as a proxy for tracking the total volume of trafficking. If border agents were to find significantly less cocaine, that could imply less cocaine flowing to the United States.
But that isn’t happening.
OK, but aren’t overdose deaths down? Surely that must mean Trump won! But again, the stupid facts get in the way: Overdose deaths were already declining before the boat murders began, and researchers say that has nearly nothing to do with the amount of drugs entering the US (which, remember, hasn’t actually declined anyway).
Addiction experts generally attribute the fall in lethal overdoses to various factors, including the increased availability of medication that rapidly reverses opioid overdoses and changes in the way some users consume opioids, moving from injection to smoking, which reduces fatal overdose risk.
Adam Isacson, a researcher with the nonprofit Washington Office on Latin America, told the Times, “They’re not moving the needle at all,” and asked, “Is that worth killing all these people?”
But those are totally different matters. Isacson may assume the point of the airstrikes was to reduce drug trafficking, but that was all just propaganda anyway. Their real purpose has always been to make Trump feel like a hot-shit dictator, like the thugs he admires most. In particular, Trump always had a murder boner to emulate the murderous former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, who was responsible for as many as 30,000 extrajudicial killings of people suspected of selling or using drugs, or being on the street when his thugs were on a killing spree. Duterte is currently awaiting an International Criminal Court trial set for November on charges of crimes against humanity. No word on whether Trump and Hegseth are contemplating a raid on The Hague to rescue him.
If Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth really want to cut down on drugs entering the US, maybe they should ask Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to stop drug shipments from South America. Those guys really know how to shut down boat traffic.
[NYT (gift link)]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if you’d like to make a one-time (or recurring) donation, you can click this here button. And as the song says, She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie … because she’s not Trump.
Once again...
Fuck you, stupidest, most hateful Americans for putting these depraved motherfuckers in power.
Good morning! 🌞
OT (but related) . . .
Richard Hanania @RichardHanania
NYT reports that Trump thinks JD Vance is lame, criticizes his shoes, and makes fun of him. But the one thing he appreciates is his loyalty like when he chooses Trump over the Pope. He’s told Vance he should stop interrupting and be more subservient like those around Xi Jinping.
10:36 AM · May 30, 2026
https://xcancel.com/RichardHanania/status/2060732201508253976