I have spent my entire career staring into the sun of human stupidity, but even I found myself blinking in disbelief at the latest dispatch from the BBC’s 'Verify' unit. They are currently investigating the claim that Venezuela 'stole' oil from the United States. Let that sink into whatever remains of your critical thinking faculties. The BBC—those taxpayer-funded arbiters of the obvious—is busy 'verifying' whether a sovereign nation, which happens to be sitting on top of the largest proven oil reserves on this miserable planet, has committed larceny against the United States by, well, existing on top of its own resources. It is a level of cognitive gymnastics that would make an Olympic gymnast weep with envy, or perhaps just throw up in a bucket.

The premise itself is a masterpiece of imperialist gaslighting. The U.S. government, with the kind of naked honesty that usually only comes from a drunk relative at a funeral, has made it abundantly clear that 'access' to Venezuelan oil is a primary driver for its recent meddling. Note the word 'access.' It is a beautiful, sanitized, corporate word. We don't say 'plunder' anymore; we say 'strategic access.' It implies a pre-existing right, a divine mandate from the gods of the Internal Combustion Engine, suggesting that if the oil is under someone else's soil, it is only there temporarily until the rightful owners in Washington decide they need a top-up. The sheer, unadulterated gall required to frame a country’s refusal to hand over its resources as 'theft' is the kind of intellectual dishonesty that keeps me awake at night, wondering if the asteroid shouldn't just hit us already.

On the other side of this pathetic ledger, we have the Venezuelan regime—a masterclass in how to turn a gold mine into a landfill. Maduro and his band of 'revolutionary' sycophants scream about 'imperialist theft' while they preside over an economy that has been managed with all the finesse of a toddler playing with a loaded gun. They claim to represent the people while the people queue for bread, and they use the oil as a personal slush fund to maintain a grip on power that is as tenuous as it is brutal. They aren't the victims here; they are just the junior partners in a global game of greed. It is a choice between a giant shark and a school of piranhas, and the only people losing are the millions of Venezuelans who can’t eat 'sovereignty' for breakfast.

Now, enter BBC Verify. They are looking at the ledgers, the contracts, and the diplomatic cables, trying to determine who truly 'owns' the molecules of carbon. It is the height of absurdity. They are fact-checking the laws of power as if they were checking the ingredients on a cereal box. Geopolitics is not a matter of facts; it is a matter of who has the biggest stick and the fewest scruples. To 'verify' whether oil was stolen is to ignore the reality that the entire global energy market is a crime scene where the evidence is burned every single day to keep the lights on in London and New York. The US wants the oil because it needs to fuel a lifestyle that is fundamentally unsustainable, and it will use every rhetorical trick in the book—from 'democracy promotion' to 'fighting corruption'—to justify taking it.

We live in an era where the masks have not just slipped; they have been incinerated. The Left will bleat about the sanctity of Venezuelan sovereignty while ignoring the fact that the Venezuelan government is a kleptocracy. The Right will drone on about 'national security' and 'energy independence' while they drool over the prospect of cheap crude, regardless of how many human rights must be trampled to reach the pump. Both sides are playing a game of pretend, and the BBC is there with a clipboard, asking if the rules were followed. There are no rules. There is only the extraction of value from the weak by the strong, and the subsequent layering of bureaucratic nonsense to make it look like a legal transaction.

I find the whole spectacle exhausting. Why do we need a 'verification' unit to tell us that the US wants what Venezuela has? Why do we need an investigation to confirm that a resource-starved empire is acting like an empire? It is a pathetic attempt to bring order to a world governed by raw, animalistic hunger. The oil is in the ground, the politicians are in their counting houses, and the rest of us are left to watch this tedious play-acting until the wells run dry and the charade finally collapses. Until then, I suppose we can all take comfort in the fact that the BBC is on the case, making sure we know exactly which lie is the most 'accurate.' If this is the peak of our civilization’s intellectual output, then we deserve every bit of the catastrophe that is coming for us. I’m going to go pour a drink and wait for the lights to flicker.