In late April, the Hondurasgate platform and Spanish media outlet Canal Red began leaking incriminating audio about recent plots by the United States and Israel in Latin America.
For example, some of the audio shows that Israel financed the release of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving a 45-year sentence in the United States for drug trafficking and other crimes. According to an article on the Honduras Gate website, Hernandez will now play a key role in implementing US and Israeli military and economic plans in the region.
The name Hondurasgate is, of course, a play on Watergate, the infamous political scandal that rocked Washington in the 1970s and ended President Richard Nixon’s term. Nevertheless, this scandal has, well, not become a scandal. The news has been largely ignored by Western corporate media, but has been reported by various Spanish-language news outlets.
There can be several reasons why you might lose interest. The first is that the Honduras leak is a little less shocking because the United States and its accomplice Israel have a long history of pulling dirty tricks in Latin America, including arming right-wing dictators and training death squads in the art of massacring farmers.
The second is that perhaps the world has reached such a decidedly abhorrent state that nothing can shock us any more.
The report is a reminder that Hernandez, a convicted felon, was pardoned by US President Donald Trump, also a convicted felon, in December, just a month before Trump oversaw the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on trumped-up narco-terrorism charges.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to congratulate the US military on its “perfect operation” in Caracas. Never mind that it’s illegal in every way. So are Trump’s other novel tactics of randomly blowing up boats near Venezuela and extrajudicially killing people on board.
But as soon as we all started processing the Maduro abduction case, Trump embarked on a new mission to starve Cuba and otherwise disrupt Cuban life. And at the end of February, the US and Israel decided to start a crazy war against Iran, disrupting the Middle East and pushing the entire planet towards the apocalypse. On April 7, the US head of state warned Iranians, very professionally, that “tonight the entire civilization will perish, never to rise again.”
Add to this Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, which, despite a purported “ceasefire,” has proceeded rapidly with US support and has officially killed nearly 73,000 Palestinians. Earlier this year, an Al Jazeera Arabic investigation revealed that thousands of Palestinians had been “evaporated” in Gaza thanks to Israel’s stockpile of American-made thermo-thermobaric weapons that “vaporize” human bodies.
The ostensible “ceasefire” in Lebanon has not stopped Israel from continuing its genocide and crushing southern Lebanon. Meanwhile, televangelist Paula Whitecain, director of the White House Office of Faith and personal spiritual advisor to President Trump, called on her followers to donate 10% of their gross income to her ministry, especially to help poor and victimized Israel get back on its feet.
In short, daily news these days is like a morbid version of the satirical news site The Onion. But the proliferation of scandals ultimately has a numbing effect. When we receive shocking stimuli from all directions, we cease to be shocked.
In other words, scandals are the new normal. It’s called Everything Gate.
Of course, to some extent this is always the case. Israel has always massacred Arabs, the United States has always wreaked havoc in every corner of the globe, and politicians have always said and done ridiculous things.
But Trump and Netanyahu are taking it to another level. This is partly due to a shared megalomaniac urge to carry out acts of unpolished brutality with impunity, and partly because the propagation of international atrocities can help distract from domestic scandals.
After all, why deal with corruption charges and the Epstein file when you can just commit genocide and bomb Iran?
Prime Minister Netanyahu prefers to maintain a Hannibal Lecter-style calm in public, but President Trump is not one to hold back. On May 7, he posted a typically surreal rant on his Truth Social platform, in which he detailed the U.S. attack on Iranian drones and said, “Like a butterfly falling into a grave, it fell into the sea more beautifully than ever!”
The president went on to say that “Iran is not a normal country” and is instead “guided by LUNATICS.” To be sure, it’s not Iranians who are uploading AI-generated images of themselves. Nor are they uploading images that resemble the AI swimming trunks and golden inflatable chairs at the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool.
In fact, looking at President Trump’s social media posts sometimes brings me back to when I was a kid, standing in line at the supermarket with my mom, looking at tabloid headlines like “President Clinton Rides a UFO!” and “Hillary Clinton Adopts Alien Baby” on magazine shelves.
But today’s news is that the alien baby has defeated them once and for all.
The fact that a recent tabloid candidate claims it is 100 percent true has something to do with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s 50th birthday celebrations for National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. His birthday cake was decorated with none other than a gold rope to commemorate the new law that allows for the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners of war, but not Jewish citizens of Israel.
During the celebration, Ben Gvir received a phone call from Prime Minister Netanyahu and they laughed together after the Prime Minister charmingly guessed his age as 17.
There are so many scandals at the moment, and it is also quite scandalous that scandals have become the norm.
