Canadian conservative and political theorist William Barclay joins The Spectacle Podcast hosts Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay to discuss the future of Venezuela, the relationship between Canada and the U.S., and the rising problems posed by progressive ideology and identity politics.
The White House was conducting back-channel communications with Venezuela’s hardline interior minister Diosdado Cabello months before the US operation to seize President Nicolas Maduro, and has been in communication with him since then, according to Reuters, citing multiple government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
h/t handy n handsome
The broker told his client he had a relative in the “little red party” with links to the “famous Suns” who, for an up-front fee, would guarantee safe passage of the container with the cocaine onto the ship docked at the Venezuelan port.
The cocaine — a batch of 32 kilograms hidden inside two electrical generators — was destined for Libya.
I’m surprised CBC didn’t blame Trump.
The enfeebling ambiguity of Canada as a government and a state among the nations of the world is underlined almost every week. The prime minister’s statement on the removal of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro was commendably critical of the former president and skirted international law questions in a way that permits Carney to claim to recognize them without aggravating our relations with the Trump administration with whom delicate trade negotiations are underway. All the while, agitation continues in Parliament for the criminalization of those who would justify the native residential school system or minimize the negative consequences of it.
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who just keeps racking up job titles, could have another one soon, President Trump hinted.
The commander-in-chief mused that Rubio, who once held four big administration jobs simultaneously and has been floated for more, could become president of Cuba, where his parents fled in the 1950s during the brutal Batista regime.
With Cuban ally Maduro ousted, Trump warns Havana to make a ‘deal’ before it’s too late
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — President Donald Trump on Sunday fired off another warning to the government of Cuba as the close ally of Venezuela braces for potential widespread unrest after Nicolás Maduro was deposed as Venezuela’s leader.
Cuba, a major beneficiary of Venezuelan oil, has now been cut off from those shipments as U.S. forces continue to seize tankers in an effort to control the production, refining and global distribution of the country’s oil products.
“…THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”- President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/bHEIysJ7q1
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) January 11, 2026
h/t Mauser
The U.S. raid on Venezuela has raised the threat level in Canada. The immediate concern has been whether it would dent Canadian oil exports, though the bigger worry is if the apparent success of the military operation in Venezuela makes this country next. Donald Trump has never backed away from his suggestion that Canada should become the 51st state, and the White House has laid hungry eyes on our mineral resources.
It was meant to be a testament to Venezuela’s promising future as an oil-rich nation on the rise, an architectural wonder called the Helicoide spiraling around a massive rock in the center of Caracas.
Today, it is a notorious prison where the United Nations says political prisoners have been held for years and tortured under the regime of strongman Nicolás Maduro, who was captured in a U.S. raid last weekend and renditioned to New York to face trial.
🚨This account from a Venezuelan security guard loyal to Nicolás Maduro is absolutely chilling—and it explains a lot about why the tone across Latin America suddenly changed.
Security Guard: On the day of the operation, we didn't hear anything coming. We were on guard, but… pic.twitter.com/392mQuakYV
— Mike Netter (@nettermike) January 10, 2026
h/t Mauser
In the middle of the night on Jan. 3, my WhatsApp lit up with hundreds of messages, videos and reports describing unfolding events in Caracas and other cities throughout Venezuela. Confusion gave way to elation when the news finally broke: Nicolás Maduro was in U.S. custody.
President Trump suggested Wednesday that the US will oversee Venezuela for at least a year following the Jan. 3 arrest of the South American country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, on federal drug and weapons charges.
“We will rebuild it in a very profitable way,” Trump told the New York Times in a lengthy interview. “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil. We’re getting oil prices down, and we’re going to be giving money to Venezuela, which they desperately need.”
In the wee small hours of January 3, Canada’s economic future sustained a serious blow.
It was at that time that American law enforcement, supported by the US Army’s Delta Force, apprehended the brutal Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, enforcing a years-old indictment for narco-terrorism, drug trafficking, and related offenses.
(Incognito)
For years, the Cuban regime has insisted that its presence in Venezuela was benign—limited to doctors, nurses, and sports trainers offering humanitarian solidarity. The deaths of 32 Cuban military and intelligence personnel while defending Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro have now shattered that fiction.
As early as March 2019, Cuba’s ambassador to Canada, Josefina Vidal, appeared on CBC News to denounce Canadian reporting on Cuba’s security intervention in Venezuela. She dismissed the claims outright: “The assertion that thousands of Cubans would allegedly be inserted into the structures of the armed and security forces of Venezuela, supporting the government of (legitimate) President Nicolás Maduro, is a scandalous slander,” she said, demanding proof.
Those who equate democratic action with tyrannical abuse in the name of international law will not be remembered as cautious but as complicit.
The United States’ decision to act decisively against Nicolás Maduro has already triggered a familiar chorus of condemnation. Once again, the language of “international law” is being weaponized not to defend human dignity but to protect tyranny.
This moment is not unprecedented. In 1989, the United States intervened militarily in Panama to remove Manuel Noriega, a narco-dictator who had turned a sovereign state into a criminal enterprise. Then, as now, critics warned of catastrophic precedents. Then, as now, they were wrong.
History judged that intervention not as an act of imperialism, but as the overdue enforcement of accountability when all other mechanisms had failed. President George H. W. Bush understood what many of today’s Western leaders appear to have forgotten: that law divorced from justice degenerates into farce.
The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the Islamic Republic of Iran may seem an unlikely pairing in the effort to make sense of the world at the moment, but the dramatic events unfolding in these two decrepit kleptocracies aren’t just coinciding in an inconvenient competition for front-page headlines.
It’s all part of the same story. If you get it wrong you’ll end up badly misreading U.S. President Donald Trump’s theatrically brilliant exfiltration of the Venezuelan caudillo Nicolás Maduro over the weekend. You might even conclude that the United States is truly “locked and loaded and ready to go,” as Trump himself put it last Friday, to defend Iran’s protesters against the Khomeinist regime’s guns.
Occam’s razor is the principle that the most plausible explanation of events is the simplest. Most often this is true. To account for Donald Trump, however, we need a different hermeneutical instrument.
Say hello to Occam’s kazoo: the principle that the most plausible explanation, so far as Mr. Trump is involved, is invariably the stupidest. To understand his motives in any given situation, pick the most aggressively simple-minded, crudely self-serving, absurdly moronic rationale you can think of. You will not be far wrong.
Coyne needs help.
Utter bullshit. Contemptible, criminal, murderous bullshit. https://t.co/3GXyqkByDT
— Andrew Coyne 🇺🇦🇮🇱🇬🇪🇲🇩 (@acoyne) January 7, 2026
Failing to intervene would have allowed a narco-terrorist state to wreak havoc at our doorstep.
On Saturday, President Trump ordered the capture and arrest of Nicolas Maduro. The American military successfully extradited the Venezuelan leader to New York, where he awaits trial in federal court.
While skeptics charge that Trump is simply making an oil grab, the facts paint a different picture. America’s intervention in Venezuela could enhance U.S. security, liberate an oppressed nation, and expand freedom in our hemisphere.
🤣🤣🤣🎯👇 pic.twitter.com/tA218BTIZW
— Vince Langman (@LangmanVince) January 6, 2026
