Alexander Brown: ‘Black-bagging’ a communist narco-terrorist who steals elections is not bad

Much to the chagrin of prominent Canadian Liberals and progressives.

(Pictured: Nicolás Maduro following capture.)

Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way: American regime-change efforts, on occasion, tend to age like oxidized guacamole. The teenage version of this writer remembers well the empty sugar-high of “Shock and Awe.”

A powerful aphrodisiac gets released when Things Actually Happen. To ignore the impacts of tribalism and the potential for another misappropriation of neocon bloodlust would be to ignore another elephant. But enough on the family Elephantidae and the order Proboscidea.

We may be as cold as Minnesota, with its miniature Horn of Africa engulfed in a real “learing” not “learning” opportunity after years of runaway fraud, but as Canadians, we should surely be looking inward at our own failings on the home front, our lack of leadership in foreign affairs, the hate we allow to fester in our streets, and the cozy relationships we foster with the most dubious of allies. But of course, we’re not.

Nicolas Maduro, one of the world’s great monsters, was ‘black-bagged’ and perp-walked along with his wife yesterday, following a Swiss-watch-precise Delta op that only our neighbours to the south are capable of.

Let us not stand on the false pretence of a violation of ‘international law’: Maduro’s tenure was defined by a series of widely condemned and fraudulent electoral processes designed to ensure his grip on power. His track record includes a 2018 presidential election, dismissed by the international community as neither free nor fair. He banned major opposition parties and jailed or exiled key opponents.

This pattern escalated during the 2024 presidential election, where, despite independent tallies showing a landslide victory for opposition candidate Edmundo González, the Maduro-controlled National Electoral Council declared Maduro the winner without the data to prove it. The 2024 process was further marred by the disqualification of popular leader María Corina Machado, the intimidation of voters by paramilitary “collectives,” and a brutal post-election crackdown, known as “Operation Tun Tun,” that resulted in over 2,000 arrests and dozens of deaths.

And yet, as Hugo Chávez’s mausoleum smoulders, hundreds of thousands continue to flood the streets to celebrate, and the experts of “experts say” journey down from ivory towers to shoot the wounded and feign retroactive understanding of an op that took most by surprise, perhaps nowhere has the oppositional-defiant kvetching been louder than inside Canada’s elite Liberal circles, so much so that you almost have to applaud the utter lack of self-awareness and the sheer selfishness of it all.

Nowhere has this argument been more prevalent than on the Twitter/X account belonging to Kevin Vickers, Canada’s still-very-much-heroic former Sergeant-at-Arms, who once aided in the shooting death of homegrown Canadian terrorist Michael Zehaf-Bibeau: a career criminal and miscreant who should have been in jail or in the ground far earlier than 2014, leading to the tragic murder of Corporal Nathan Cirillo.

Vickers’ argument, that sought to tone-police Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre’s support for the Maduro raid (Poilievre’s wife, Anaida, is of Venezuelan descent, and is an outspoken critic of the undemocratic regime), bizarrely fixated on well-trodden, “elbows up”-adjacent ground, understandably setting off a wave of response and consternation.

“Makes no sense to me,” the now-retired and increasingly partisan Vickers opined. “The consequences to Alberta and Canada’s economy will be severe. Oil prices and shares of Canadian oil and gas companies will go down. Canadian shareholders hurt. Pension funds hurt. Don’t get it . . . all to do with oil.”

Similar sentiments were echoed by the NDP, yet to lose its affinity for wooing the support of the teachers’ lounge over returning to its roots with Canadian workers, Tru-anon, and among political animals looking for a Poilievre “gotcha” where one shouldn’t exist.

That our ruling class’s first response was to again tone-police, fixate on Canadian pensions, and suddenly worry about oil prices after a decade spent sin-taxing our economy and treating our potential for energy abundance and independence as some great shame, not a gift, is an incredibly telling moment for a Liberal apparatus often accused of running a “gerontocracy.”

Somehow, some way, at a moment of understandable questions about what comes next — but what also surely should have been appreciation for doing something hard, and well, and deposing of scum — Canadian online discourse defaulted to wanting to make it about us, and to hyper-fixate on how this would impact the 60-or-so per cent of Canadians over 60 who presently support the Carney Liberals.

If that’s our factory setting, it’s no wonder our young, working-aged, and increasingly beleaguered poll overwhelmingly Conservative, and that they don’t appear all that rosy about their future prospects.

No matter who does the black-bagging, Zero Dark Thirty-ing communist narco scum isn’t bad, and it’s ludicrous that we have to argue otherwise. Even worse, for those to hate America so much they’re willing to prefer Venezuela be run by Iran or China is an astonishing admission.

There are inherently reasonable criticisms and concerns of American regime change that don’t come close to being addressed by more of the same from the elbows up crowd, who are an often vain, cynical, and short-sighted class of people, who seem incapable of realizing they’re the Buchanans from Gatsby. They break, take, and inflate, while acting as if they’re innocent and above it all. It’s a tired act that has served us poorly.

Perhaps the former Sergeant-at-Arms and the Bluesky crowd should be demanding better of their Laurentians. The world never waited for Canada to get its act together; the United States under a second Trump term is only making that point explicit.

We’re no longer relevant to their decision-making process. We should be, but we aren’t, and we have no one to blame but a decade-plus of the exact wrong leaders at the exact wrong time. Our economy shouldn’t have to rely on a continued narco-terrorist’s reign to prevent its feelings from being hurt, and thus exposing further vulnerabilities.

To be blunt, and to quote a reader and freedom-loving Iranian-Canadian immigrant: “[Canadian progressives] prefer Venezuela to be governed by a dictator so we look better, instead of fixing our shit at home. We are surrounded by retards.”

If we’re worried about being lapped, if we truly take umbrage with waning influence and our role in the periphery, surely the best response to Trump, or the throes of ‘TDS,’ would be to “become less peripheral” and again “make things that matter.”

“It’s not the critic who counts,” President Roosevelt once taught us in his much-revered “man in the arena” address. But before pretending we’re still in that arena, we must first endeavour to again get our own house in order.

In the case of precision operations streamed live from Mar-a-Lago, and the promise and peril that the next few months bring for the legitimacy or illegitimacy of regime change and America’s not always steady hand: those who can, actually do.

Those who can’t, won’t, or don’t — they tend to subsist on word salads, and on impossible conditions that will never be met. And yet, this was as peaceful an overthrow of a brutal dictator that any could have possibly hoped for.

Yes, this is also about oil. That’s no trump card for an argument, nor some secret being held close to the vest; POTUS is telling the world just that.

It’s also about our own oil. We taxed it, banned it, left it in the ground.

Our friends and allies aren’t always perfect, but they should always be admired for refusing to settle, and for understanding that you can just do things. North of the border, where a portion of our electorate hastily reassembled out of a refusal to act on reform, and where many pretend it’s still the 90s seemingly out of spite, settling is kind of Canada’s thing.

That doesn’t mean the rest of us have to settle for Saturday’s putrid display from our progressives.

What comes next is anyone’s guess — and I assure you, politicos and I.R. professionals are guessing. What is certain is that if Canada continues to eschew the difficult, to sun-down in the name of protecting pensions and Ponzis over looking forward, and upward, and engaging in what’s good and true, a nation won’t just retire from clinging to irrelevance; it will die off.

We don’t have long, but for all the problems they’ve caused us of late, we have just the neighbour to shake us out of our apathy.

Like it or not, like a no-knock raid in the middle of a Venezuelan night, our reckoning for taking a decade off is here.

Alexander Brown is Managing Editor of Without Diminishment. He is the Director of the National Citizens Coalition, and a host on Juno News. Of late, his work has appeared in The Hub, and in the Toronto Sun.