From Venezuela to Greenland and Beyond: The Story Behind the Story

We're only a month into 2026 and already several of the stories Drilled has been reporting on and following for years are back in the headlines. Because we've stayed on them, we've been able to move quickly to bring you some of the critical context that is lacking from most media coverage.The thing is, for us to keep on top of these stories requires time, rigorous reporting, fact-checking, all the hard work you’ve come to expect from the Drilled team. To keep that up, we need support from readers. There’s a few ways to do that – but the very best way is with a paid subscription.

When the U.S. bombed Venezuela and abducted its leader, we immediately wondered whether the U.S. oil majors were whispering in Trump's ear. We knew Maduro had been threatening to seize its neighbor Guyana’s oil for years, and had recently escalated to threatening Exxon’s oil tankers directly.Sure enough, in the lead-up to the U.S. attack on Venezuela, Marco Rubio had done a press conference in Guyana and threatened Maduro with military action if he didn't stop messing with Guyana and ExxonMobil (and yes he explicitly talked about protecting Exxon). Because we knew where to look, we were able to put together a detailed timeline that showed how the oil stories in Venezuela and Guyana are intertwined. It’s not so much that fossil fuel companies want back in Venezuela’s oil fields as that they want to control the impact Venezuela has on the region’s burgeoning oil industry - to which US corporations have hitched their future profits. We also looked at the legal implications of the US oil grab, in light of last year’s landmark ICJ ruling.

Amid new threats by the Trump administration to "take" Greenland, we resurfaced past reporting on the network state—the idea that we would all be better off living in fiefdoms governed by CEOs than we are in democracies—and the tech bros' obsession with it. The state-sponsored violence against peaceful protestors in Minnesota has us thinking about our "The Real Free Speech Threat" series chronicling the increased repression of environmental protestors worldwide, and the links between the backlash to the Standing Rock protests and the treatment of "Free Palestine" campus protests.

All of it connects to what's happening right now and provides critical context for figuring out how to navigate the moment.

Between government crackdowns and philanthropic cowardice, it has never been riskier to do the sort of accountability journalism Drilled is known for. We have ambitious plans for 2026, so please join us! We need your support to keep this work going and there are several ways to do that:

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