Remember last year, I reviewed "Jack Ryan" on Amazon, and pointed out that while being pretty faithful to the characters' histories they took some liberties that weirdly didn't fit?

Well, now they've really gone off the rails. Less than fifteen minutes into the first episode of season two, Jack is lecturing to one of his classes (apparently he kept up the teaching after going to work at the CIA, but it's clearly not in Annapolis), about major world threats and brings up Venezuela to set up the season arc. The point is that Venezuela's immense natural resources, geographic proximity to the US and lack of a functioning state make it an appealing target for takeover by a hostile power (and BTW, undermines his so-clever teaching technique of asking class a question to make them all give wrong answers to prove how smart you are: he asks them to name the country that's the biggest threat and then when no one guesses Venezuela, he starts talking about it to show why it's the biggest threat - except it clearly is not: he's actually listing reasons why it could be a target/asset to one of the real threats his students mentioned).

Anyway, in the Amazon-Ryanverse, Venezuela is in a shambles thanks to the incompetent fictional president, who rode into office on a rising "tide of nationalism" and destroyed the country in his first term. Not all-encompassing social welfare programs that the country could not afford when the oil market dropped and suddenly there was nothing productive left to tax after socialist policies effectively ruined or drove away any revenue-generating or job-providing industry.

That's going to be the new Leftist talking point to explain away the latest launching pad explosion of a new socialist workers' paradise: they are going to start calling Chavez and his predecessors "nationalists", cite his hostility to America's regional dominance as evidence of that claim, remind stupid people that they 'nationalized' the petroleum industry, among others, to make it sound more plausible, and then claim that Trump's nationalism is going to lead us down the same drain.

During Jack's lecture, he shows a picture of a woman I have seen in motion in teasers for this season, so we know she's going to be a thing, and says she's a presidential candidate and far superior to not-Chavez simply by virtue of "not being an asshole". She's a history professor turned activist, running on "a platform of social justice."

Uh huh.