War Crimes and Whiskey
How The New York Times “The Morning” Packaged Imperialism as Lifestyle Content
If one ever needed a definitive document to illustrate the moral rot of the American liberal establishment, Sam Sifton’s January 6th edition of “The Morning” stands as a towering monument to the banality of empire. Here, in a newsletter consumed by millions of coffee-drinking professionals, the violent conquest of a sovereign nation is sandwiched between anecdotes about fly-fishing and updates on domestic austerity, all delivered in the breezy, conversational tone of a brunch recommendation.
The newsletter is a masterclass in what I am going to start calling “Lifestyle Imperialism.” Sifton, the Times’ Assistant Managing Editor, does not begin his analysis of the US invasion with the bombing of Caracas, the violation of the UN Charter, or the deaths of 80 people. Instead, he begins with a travelogue. He centers his experience as a tourist in Los Roques, fishing in “turquoise water,” and dining in Chacao, the wealthiest enclave of the Venezuelan opposition.
By anchoring the narrative in a “chic and sexy” restaurant where the menu involves “tweezers and foam,” Sifton explicitly aligns the reader’s sympathies with the Venezuelan boliburguesía and the traditional oligarchy. The anecdote about Johnnie Walker Black is not merely atmospheric; it is ideological. Sifton frames the consumption of imported whiskey as a “marker of success” and a signifier that one is “part of the capitalist engine.” The subtext is screamingly loud: civilization is defined by the ability to consume Western luxury goods. The implicit villain, therefore, is the “socialist engine” that threatens this access to scotch and “elevated Venezuelan cooking.” By centering the Chacao elite, the newsletter renders the vast majority of Venezuelans, the mestizo, the poor, the dark-skinned, the inhabitants of the barrios who mobilized against the coup, entirely invisible. They are not the people Sifton dined with; therefore, they do not exist.
The transition from culinary nostalgia to military occupation is handled with a sociopathic smoothness. “I’ve been thinking about those tables in Chacao… as I’ve watched the U.S. attack,” Sifton muses, as if the bombing of a capital city were a contemplative backdrop for a memory of a good meal. This rhetorical maneuver serves to domesticate the violence, stripping the invasion of its horror and presenting it as a complex, perhaps inevitable, geopolitical development to be pondered over coffee.
When the newsletter finally addresses the invasion itself, the language acts as a solvent for legality. The section titled “Trump’s Proxy?” frames the US military occupation not as a crime, but as a management challenge. Sifton asks, “Who will implement the administration’s agenda?” effectively accepting the premise that the US has a legitimate agenda to implement within Venezuela’s borders. The acknowledgement of “19th-century gunboat diplomacy” is offered not as a condemnation, but as a detached historical observation, a “strange posture” rather than an illegal act of aggression.
Crucially, observe the visual and textual framing of Nicolás Maduro. The header image shows him in handcuffs, flanked by a DEA agent, a deliberate “perp walk” visual designed to criminalize the head of state in the American mind, reinforcing the “narco-terrorist” narrative debunked by material reality. In the text, Maduro’s assertion that he is a “prisoner of war” who has been “kidnapped” is placed in scare quotes, subtly signaling to the reader that these claims are dubious, despite the objective reality that he was seized by a foreign military on sovereign soil.
The newsletter’s treatment of the “One in three Americans approves” poll is a spectacular feat of statistical gaslighting. By framing 33% support as the headline, the Times obfuscates the reality that a clear majority of Americans do not approve of the raid. A neutral outlet would headline this: “Majority of Americans Reject Venezuela Raid.” The Times, acting as the manufacturing plant for consent, spins minority support as a significant political fact to bolster the legitimacy of the operation.
Finally, the inclusion of Stephen Miller’s comments on Greenland (“Nobody’s going to fight the United States”) and the domestic cuts to social services creates an inadvertent but telling continuity. The newsletter presents a world where the US empire takes what it wants, be it Greenland’s territory, Venezuela’s oil, or the lifeline of its own poor children, simply because it can. Sifton presents this “might makes right” reality without moral friction.
This newsletter reveals the ultimate function of the corporate press in the imperial core: to make the reader feel comfortable with atrocity. It tells the liberal professional class that it is okay to watch a country be devoured, provided you can contextualize it through the lens of a nice dinner you once had in the capital. It is propaganda disguised as sophistication, washing the blood off the hands of the empire with a splash of Johnnie Walker Black.