Arlington Heights, IL – A New Year’s Day post in the Facebook group Really Everything Arlington Heights exploded into a local proxy war over national power, a U.S. raid in Venezuela, and whether the Constitution is a guardrail or just a talking point.
The thread started with Amy Babington Somary, who framed the election as a civics test and Trump as the guy who failed it.
“Sometimes, even when there’s no perfect candidate, you have to vote for the one who respects the United States Constitution,” Babington Somary wrote. “Now, we’re at war with a foreign country because he wants their oil.” She accused Trump of “corruption” and called his foreign-policy moves evidence of an executive branch “running wild.”
Outside the thread, the underlying news is not hypothetical. Reuters and The Associated Press reported Monday that Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro was captured in a U.S. operation, flown to New York, and arraigned on federal charges, with the U.N. Security Council debating the legality of the raid.
Maduro, in a New York courtroom, claimed he was illegally taken. “I am innocent… I am still president of my country,” Reuters reported him saying through an interpreter before being cut off by the judge.
“Training mission” vs. “dangerous precedent”
Commenters split fast.
On the pro-Trump side, Jeff Van Buren waved off concerns about war powers and portrayed the raid as routine.
“It’s just a training mission for the amazing US military might,” Van Buren wrote. “This operation was like me going into the back yard to take care of cutting the grass.”
Babington Somary kept coming back to the same question, again and again, like a reporter who smells a dodge.
“How do you feel about a U.S. president taking over a foreign country without congressional approval?” she asked Van Buren and others.
Chris Reckling argued the operation was justified by narcotics and geopolitics, and said oil was not the main driver. “Maduro gone. Big win for all of us,” he wrote, adding that “no U.S. service members were killed in the operation.”
But Devin Gee tried to separate outcome from method. “You can support the outcome while condemning the tactics,” Gee wrote. “There is no precedent for what just happened.” That tracks with the wider blowback Reuters described, including questions by international law experts and debate at the United Nations.
The pardon argument, and the contradiction at the center
Babington Somary’s sharpest line of attack was not Maduro, it was Trump’s pardons. Her argument was simple: you cannot sell a dramatic overseas operation as a crusade against narcotics while also cutting loose a major narcotics defendant.
In the thread, she repeatedly pointed to Trump’s pardon of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been sentenced to 45 years in prison in 2024 after a U.S. jury conviction for cocaine-trafficking conspiracy and related firearms offenses.
That pardon is real, and documented. A Congressional Research Service writeup hosted on Congress.gov reports Trump granted the pardon on December 1, 2025, and Hernández was released the same day.
Some commenters admitted they did not like the pardon but still backed the Venezuela raid. Reckling told Babington Somary, “If I was President, I would not have pardoned him,” then pivoted back to celebrating the Maduro operation as “Good guys = 1, Bad guys = arrested and removed.”
When it turned personal, and ugly
The thread did what these threads do. It stopped being about policy and became a contest for humiliation and dominance.
There were drive-by insults (“you are an idiot,” “take your meds daily”), accusations of “TDS,” and one exchange that veered into a hostile insinuation about a commenter’s sexuality after a debate about religion. It was less civic discussion than online street fight, with identity and loyalty doing the work facts used to do.
One of the most extreme posts, from Lisa O’Donnell Rasmussen, denied being the author of a profanity-laced comment but then endorsed it anyway, writing, “I posted it because it true… I love it in fact.” (Her earlier comment said she did not write it and did not approve of the language.)
Misinformation showed up, as usual
False claims also got traction.
One commenter claimed Trump “won $15 million” from CBS in a libel suit tied to “rape” language. The widely reported $15 million settlement was ABC News, not CBS, and it was tied to Trump’s defamation lawsuit involving on-air phrasing about the E. Jean Carroll civil case.
That matters, because the thread was not just partisan. It was people building arguments on bad facts, then treating corrections as tribal attacks.
Local group, national rage
Several commenters complained the group should “keep it local.” Babington Somary rejected that outright, arguing civic responsibility includes paying attention to national power.
“Other than faith & family, what is a better use of my time then supporting/promoting democracy?” she wrote.
Meanwhile, Reuters reported Trump openly talking about oil access, saying, “We’re in charge,” and described U.N. concern about instability and the legality of the strike.
That’s why the fight landed in an Arlington Heights Facebook group in the first place. People were not arguing about a textbook. They were arguing about what power looks like when it stops asking permission.
Related coverage
- Reuters: Legality of US capture of Venezuela’s Maduro in focus at United Nations
- AP: Maduro says “I was captured” as he pleads not guilty to drug trafficking charges
- Congress.gov: CRS overview on the Hernández pardon and implications
Editor’s note: Quotes are drawn from a Facebook thread and are presented for news reporting and context.
