The Republic Our Founders Built Is Gone. Welcome to the American Empire.
Our Nation Stopped Being a Republic the Night We Kidnapped a President
Editorial Notice for My Fellow Republicans (and you Democrats too):
I need to remind you of something before you read this article, because somewhere along the way we forgot what we’re supposed to stand for.
What is a Republic?
A republic is a system of limited government that operates under the rule of law. The government derives its power from the consent of the governed.
It cannot do whatever it wants.
It is constrained by a constitution, by checks and balances, by the rights of citizens and the sovereignty of other nations.
This is what our founders built. This is what we claim to defend.
An empire is something else entirely. An empire swings its dick around and takes what it wants. An empire does not ask permission. An empire does not recognize limits on its power. An empire kidnaps foreign leaders in the middle of the night and dares anyone to do something about it.
We are supposed to be a republic. We are NOT supposed to be an empire. We were NEVER supposed to be an empire.
In fact, our Founding Fathers watched their friends bleed out on frozen battlefields specifically to protect us from empire. They knew what unchecked power looked like because they lived under it, and they designed an entire system of government to make sure it could never take root here.
To call yourself a Republican is supposed to mean something. It means you support a republic, a nation of laws that apply to everyone, a government with limits, a system where no single man becomes bigger than the institutions. It does not mean you let a cult of personality develop around a charismatic demagogue until one morning you wake up and realize the republic is gone and you’re saluting an emperor.
I am a registered Republican who has never voted Democrat in my life, and I am telling you that what I watched happen this weekend terrified me in a way I have not felt since September 11th. But this time the threat is not coming from outside. This time we are doing it to ourselves.
I pray I am wrong. But I cannot stay silent while I watch my party abandon everything we claimed to believe… and now onto the article.
Yesterday the United States of America kidnapped the president of Venezuela from his bed in the middle of the night, and today he stood in a Manhattan courtroom pleading not guilty to drug trafficking charges while the rest of us are expected to pretend this is somehow normal.
Let me be clear about something before the tribal screaming starts. I am not a Democrat, I do not watch MSNBC, and I did not vote for Biden or Harris or Clinton. I grew up on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, I believe in limited government and individual liberty, and I am telling you that my party just did something that should make every conservative’s blood run cold.
We kidnapped a head of state.
Not arrested through proper channels, not extradited with legal cooperation, not brought before an international tribunal with the consent of the global community. We sent special forces into a sovereign nation in the middle of the night, grabbed a sitting president and his wife from their home, and flew them to Brooklyn like they were common criminals snatched off a street corner in Queens.
The Romans had a phrase for moments like this:
‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes’.
Who watches the watchmen?
Think about what that question really means, because it cuts to the heart of every system of power humans have ever created. Every society needs someone to enforce the rules, whether that means police or courts or governments with armies. But what happens when the enforcers themselves break the rules?
Who arrests the police when the police commit crimes?
Who prosecutes the prosecutors when they abuse their authority?
Who holds accountable the very people we empowered to hold others accountable?
America appointed itself the world’s policeman decades ago, and we have been playing that role with increasing aggression ever since. We decide which countries are following the rules and which ones need to be punished. We decide who gets sanctioned into poverty and who gets invaded into submission. We lecture the entire planet about democracy and human rights and the rule of law while our drones circle overhead and our aircraft carriers patrol every ocean.
So here is the question that should keep you awake at night: who polices the country that polices the world?
The answer right now is nobody.
Other than God, there is no higher authority that can tell America no, and this weekend proved it beyond any doubt. The United Nations held an emergency meeting and warned that we may have violated international law, but so what? What exactly are they going to do about it? Sanction us? Invade us? Send a strongly worded letter that our representatives will use as kindling?
When the most powerful nation on Earth decides that the rules no longer apply to itself, we do not have a world order anymore. We have a world empire, and empires do not ask permission. They take what they want and manufacture justifications after the fact, which is precisely what happened in Venezuela this weekend.
If you think this precedent only applies to foreign dictators you do not like, you have not been paying attention to history.
The Drug Story Does Not Add Up
The official justification for this operation is that Maduro ran a narco-state flooding America with cocaine and fentanyl, and this is the story they desperately need you to believe. This is the narrative that makes kidnapping a foreign leader palatable to the average American who scrolls past headlines between cat videos and sports scores without ever stopping to wonder whether any of it is true.
There is one glaring problem with this story: it is not supported by decades of the government’s own data.
I spent hours reading through DEA National Drug Threat Assessments going back to 2015, which are the official annual reports where the Drug Enforcement Administration tells Congress and the American public where illegal drugs are coming from and how they enter our country. Venezuela does not appear as a major source or transit country for cocaine or fentanyl in any of them, not once, not in any meaningful capacity.
The documented pipeline for fentanyl is crystal clear and has been for years. Precursor chemicals ship from China to Mexico, where cartel laboratories manufacture the finished product, which then crosses our southern border through established smuggling routes that have operated for decades. This is not my opinion or some conspiracy theory I found on the internet. This is what the DEA itself has stated publicly, repeatedly, for nearly a decade.
Cocaine follows a similar pattern, and this is where the Venezuela story falls apart completely. Yes, coca can technically grow in Venezuelan soil, and some small-scale cultivation probably exists in remote areas. But Venezuela has never been a major cocaine producer, and the reason is so blindingly obvious that you have to wonder how anyone falls for this narrative.
Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia depend on coca production because their economies lack meaningful alternatives, and cocaine money has become woven into their rural economies in ways that decades of expensive eradication programs have utterly failed to untangle. These are the countries the DEA has identified for decades as the source of the cocaine reaching American streets, because these are the countries where growing coca makes economic sense.
Venezuela, on the other hand, sits on 303 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, which represents 17% of all the oil on the entire planet. More than Saudi Arabia. More than Russia. More than anyone else on Earth by a considerable margin.
Why would the country with the largest oil reserves in human history build its criminal economy around growing coca in the jungle when they have black gold gushing out of the ground? The idea that Venezuela’s government needed drug money so badly that they built an international trafficking operation is laughable on its face, and anyone who thinks about it for more than thirty seconds should recognize the absurdity.
This was never about drugs, and it was always about oil.
Do not take my word for it. Take Trump’s.
At his press conference, the President said we are going to “run” Venezuela now, and Secretary of Defense Hegseth talked openly about gaining “access to wealth and resources.” They are not hiding it, they are not even pretending anymore, and they told you exactly what this is about while the media dutifully repeated the drug trafficking cover story like stenographers.
The fentanyl narrative was the excuse. The oil was always the point.
The Pattern We Refuse to See
This is not the first time we have watched this exact sequence of events unfold, and the historical pattern is so consistent that ignoring it requires willful blindness.
Iraq switched its oil sales from dollars to euros in November 2000, and we invaded in March 2003 with claims about weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be completely fabricated. Within months of our victory, Iraqi oil was selling in dollars again, but nobody seemed to connect those dots or ask whether the currency switch might have mattered more than the nonexistent weapons.
Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi proposed a gold-backed African currency in 2009 that would have allowed African nations to trade oil outside the Western financial system, and NATO bombs started falling in March 2011. By October he was dead, killed by rebels we supported, and the gold-backed dinar died with him. Hillary Clinton’s own emails, released in December 2015, explicitly cite Libya’s 143 tons of gold and the threat of a pan-African currency as motivations for intervention, but somehow this never became a major story.
Now Venezuela follows the same script with minor variations. Independent central bank that does not answer to Western financial institutions. Massive oil reserves that dwarf anything in the Middle East. Trading relationships with China and Russia that bypass the dollar system entirely. And suddenly, after decades of never appearing in DEA threat assessments as a major drug trafficking hub, we are told the situation is so urgent that we must send special forces to kidnap their president in the middle of the night.
The pattern is not hidden. It is not even subtle. Countries that challenge the financial order we built after World War II eventually find themselves facing regime change, and the justification always sounds righteous and necessary until you look at what we actually gained from the intervention.
The Legal Absurdity
Think about what just happened here. A foreign head of state, accused of crimes allegedly committed entirely within a foreign country, is being tried in an American court under American law as if our jurisdiction extends to every corner of the globe. The United States legal system does not have authority over foreign nations, and we cannot simply declare that our laws apply everywhere on Earth and then enforce them at gunpoint whenever we find it convenient.
This is not how international justice is supposed to work, and we used to understand that.
When the Allies wanted to try Nazi war criminals after World War II, they did not kidnap them and haul them before American judges in American courtrooms. They established the Nuremberg Tribunal through international cooperation, created a legal framework that the global community could recognize as legitimate, and conducted trials that set precedents still cited today. It was messy and imperfect, but it was lawful.
When we wanted to prosecute war crimes in Yugoslavia, we went through the United Nations and established the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. When we wanted accountability for genocide in Rwanda, we did the same thing with a separate tribunal. These processes were slow and frustrating, but they maintained the fiction that international law means something and that powerful nations cannot simply impose their will by force.
There was a right way to pursue justice against Maduro if we genuinely believed he was a drug trafficker, and this was not it.
The comparison that haunts me is Israel’s abduction of Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in 1960. Mossad agents grabbed him off the street in Buenos Aires, drugged him, and flew him to Tel Aviv to stand trial for his role in the Holocaust. Argentina protested furiously, and the UN Security Council condemned the action as a violation of Argentine sovereignty. Even many people who desperately wanted Eichmann to face justice acknowledged that the method was legally problematic.
We used to understand that kidnapping people from foreign countries, even genuinely bad people who probably deserve punishment, sets a dangerous precedent that will eventually be used against us. We used to at least pretend to care about international law and sovereignty and the principles we claim to represent.
Now we do not even bother with the pretense, and the comparison to Israel’s extralegal operations keeps nagging at me, especially considering Trump appears on an Israeli-issued commemorative coin and our foreign policy increasingly seems designed to serve interests other than America’s.
The Wife Question Nobody Is Asking
Here is something that has not received nearly enough attention in the coverage of this operation: we did not just kidnap Maduro. We kidnapped his wife too.
Cilia Flores appeared in court today with bandages on her forehead and right temple, and her lawyer said she suffered “significant injuries” during her capture. She is charged alongside her husband as a drug trafficker, facing the same potential life sentence.
I have a question that I would love someone to answer. When we went after Pablo Escobar, the single most notorious drug trafficker in recorded history, the man who built a cocaine empire that generated billions of dollars and waged literal war against the Colombian government, did we kidnap his wife?
Maria Victoria Henao lived with Escobar throughout his entire reign as head of the Medellín Cartel. She was with him when he died in 1993. She was never extradited to the United States. She was never grabbed from her bed in a military raid or charged as a co-conspirator. She eventually negotiated her own surrender to Colombian authorities and served no prison time whatsoever.
But Maduro’s wife is apparently so dangerous, so integral to this alleged drug operation, that we needed to grab her too. In a world where actual drug kingpins’ spouses are routinely left alone. In a situation where we have never before kidnapped a first lady alongside her husband.
This makes sense only if the goal was never really about prosecuting drug crimes. This makes sense only if we wanted to maximize the humiliation, to demonstrate that we can take whoever we want whenever we want, to send a message to every other leader who might consider defying American interests. The cruelty is the point, and Cilia Flores’s bandaged face is the evidence.
The Speed of Injustice
Maduro was seized on Saturday, and he was arraigned on Monday. That is less than 72 hours from capture to courtroom.
Meanwhile, American citizens accused of crimes routinely wait weeks or months for their initial court appearances while sitting in county jails that are already overcrowded. Our courts are backed up for years in some jurisdictions, and justice moves at a glacial pace for ordinary defendants who lack resources or connections. But somehow we managed to fast-track the arraignment of a foreign president like it was a traffic ticket.
The speed tells you everything you need to know about what this really is. This is not about careful prosecution or building a solid case or ensuring that justice is served through proper procedures. This is about spectacle. This is about creating images for the evening news, about giving cable networks dramatic footage of a dictator in handcuffs, about moving so fast that nobody has time to ask difficult questions before the narrative hardens into accepted truth.
Will Maduro be able to post bond? Of course not. He will sit in a Brooklyn jail cell for however long this theater piece takes to reach its conclusion. The prosecution will drag out discovery, the trial will be scheduled for some distant date, and the whole time Venezuela’s oil will be flowing into American tankers while we “run” the country just like Trump promised.
The Timing We Are Supposed to Ignore
I need to mention something that makes me uncomfortable, because I genuinely do not like conspiracy theories and I try to avoid connecting dots that may not actually be connected. But the timing of this operation is impossible to ignore for anyone paying attention.
The Department of Justice recently released files related to Jeffrey Epstein, and President Trump’s name appears in those documents repeatedly. There are serious allegations about his conduct with underage girls spanning decades, and this is not speculation or rumor but documentary evidence released by our own government.
And right when people start asking questions about those files, right when the news cycle might focus on deeply uncomfortable allegations against our sitting president, we get the most dramatic military operation in decades. We get wall-to-wall coverage of special forces and helicopters and a deposed dictator being perp-walked into a federal courthouse while reporters breathlessly describe the historic nature of it all.
I am not claiming that the Venezuela operation was planned specifically as a distraction from the Epstein revelations. I am saying that the timing is extraordinarily convenient, that anyone who questions the official narrative about Maduro is going to be drowned out by flag-waving coverage of our brave troops taking down a drug lord, and that if you wanted to change the subject from questions about our president and teenage girls, you could not possibly design a better news event.
Make of that what you will.
The Tribal Trap That Keeps Us Stupid
I know exactly what happens next because I have been doing this long enough to predict the responses before they arrive in my comments section.
Republicans will accuse me of being a secret Democrat, a RINO, a traitor to the conservative cause who has been infected with Trump Derangement Syndrome. They will refuse to engage with any of the evidence I have presented because their entire identity is now wrapped up in defending this president no matter what he does, and admitting that Trump might have done something wrong feels like admitting that they were wrong, which is intolerable.
Democrats will use this piece to score political points while conveniently ignoring that their own party has supported similar interventions for decades. They will pretend that American imperialism started in 2016 and that everything was fine when Obama was droning weddings in Yemen or when Clinton was cackling about Gaddafi’s death. They will share this article not because they care about Venezuelan sovereignty but because it makes their political opponents look bad.
And nothing will change.
This is the trap that keeps us stupid and powerless while the people who actually run things laugh at our impotent squabbling. We have sorted ourselves into teams and we defend our team’s actions regardless of the facts, regardless of the evidence, regardless of whether those actions violate everything we claim to believe. We have become so tribal that we cannot even agree on basic reality anymore, and we have traded the responsibilities of citizenship for the cheap dopamine hit of political fandom.
I am not interested in teams. I am interested in truth, however uncomfortable it might be.
And the truth is that both parties serve the same masters. The same banks that crashed the economy in 2008 and paid no meaningful price. The same defense contractors who profit from endless war and donate to both sides. The same oil companies who write our foreign policy with one hand while funding climate denial with the other. The same pharmaceutical giants who got a generation addicted to opioids and then rebranded as the solution to the crisis they created.
These entities are not opponents. They are colleagues who attend the same parties and send their kids to the same prep schools and rotate seamlessly between government positions and corporate boards. And they laugh at us, they genuinely find it amusing, watching us tear each other apart over cultural grievances that pose no threat to their wealth or power.
The Smell Test
Something stinks here, America, and I am exhausted from being one of the few people willing to say it out loud.
The story does not add up when you actually examine the evidence. The justifications crumble when you compare them to the government’s own data. The methods violate everything we claim to stand for as a nation. And yet most people cannot smell the rot because they are not paying attention, not really, not in any meaningful way.
They are scrolling through feeds designed to keep them scrolling. They are consuming content engineered to provoke emotional reactions without inspiring critical thought. They see a headline about a drug dealer dictator getting taken down by American special forces, they feel a brief surge of patriotic satisfaction, and they move on to the next dopamine hit without ever wondering whether any of it is true.
I am sick of being the only person in the room who smells it.
I am sick of reading government reports that directly contradict government press releases. I am sick of watching the same pattern repeat with different countries and different excuses while everyone pretends each intervention is unique and justified. I am sick of pointing out the obvious and being dismissed by people who have not spent five minutes researching anything.
The speedboats could not make the trip, and this one detail should unravel the entire narrative for anyone willing to think about it. The official story requires us to believe that Venezuelan drug traffickers were running massive quantities of cocaine and fentanyl to Florida in go-fast boats, those sleek speedboats you see in movies about drug runners.
These vessels are designed for coastal operations, short sprints of 100 to 200 miles along shorelines where they can outrun Coast Guard cutters and duck into hidden coves. Venezuela to Florida is 1,300 miles of open Caribbean with no refueling stops and no shelter from weather. The boats do not have keels, which means they cannot handle the swells that build in open ocean. They get maybe one mile per gallon at speed, which means a round trip would require approximately 9,000 gallons of fuel. They carry 200 to 300 gallons maximum.
The math does not work. The physics do not work. The story does not work. I know this because I spent summers working my uncle’s charter boat operation in the Gulf and I understand what different vessels can and cannot do. But nobody bothers to check the math because checking math requires effort, effort requires caring, and caring requires treating citizenship as a responsibility rather than a spectator sport.
What This Actually Means
If we can kidnap the president of Venezuela, we can kidnap anyone, and that is not hyperbole or alarmism but simple logic.
If we can ignore international law whenever it becomes inconvenient, then international law does not actually exist. It becomes nothing more than a set of rules we enforce on weaker nations while exempting ourselves.
If we can manufacture drug charges against foreign leaders who threaten American corporate interests, then no country that defies us is safe. Any nation with resources we want can expect to see its leaders accused of spectacular crimes, its sovereignty violated by special forces, its wealth extracted by American companies operating under military protection.
This is not the republic I grew up believing in. This is not the limited government that conservatives claim to support. This is not the rule of law that we lecture every other country on Earth about.
This is empire, the thing we supposedly fought a revolution to escape, the thing our founders warned us about in language that could not be clearer. And most Americans will not notice because the game is on and there are new memes to share and the president says we got the bad guy so it must be true.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes… Who watches the watchmen.
Right now the answer is no one, because the watchmen have convinced us that watching is someone else’s job. They have taught us that citizenship means voting every four years and maybe posting about it online, that our role is to consume and react rather than to question and investigate.
I refuse to accept that definition of citizenship.
I will keep reading the reports they hope we ignore. I will keep asking the questions they hope we forget. I will keep pointing out when the official story does not match the available evidence, even when it makes people uncomfortable, even when it costs me readers who would rather feel good than think hard.
Something is deeply wrong in America, and you can feel it even if you cannot name it. The center is not holding. The institutions we trusted are failing us or actively betraying us. The people we elected are serving interests that have nothing to do with our wellbeing.
It is time to wake up before the smell becomes so overwhelming that even the sleepwalkers cannot ignore it.
By then it will be too late.
The Wise Wolf is an independent publication that survives entirely on reader support. We do not take money from corporations, political parties, or advertisers who might want us to soften our message. If this article made you think, made you angry, or made you question something you previously took for granted, consider becoming a paid subscriber. It costs less than a cup of coffee and keeps us digging through government reports so you don’t have to.
Here’s something most people don’t understand about how these platforms work: the algorithm decides who sees our articles based on engagement. Every like, every share, every restack tells the machine that this content matters and should be shown to more people.
Without that engagement, we’re shouting into a void while corporate media drowns us out with their unlimited marketing budgets. Our junior reporter Lily keeps joking she’s going to start an OnlyFans if subscriptions don’t pick up. She’s kidding, obviously, but the truth behind the joke is that I can’t afford to hire her full-time after she graduates. If we can’t grow this thing, she’s going to end up writing celebrity gossip for some content mill instead of doing real investigative journalism. Every share matters. Every subscription matters. Help us keep doing work that actually matters.
And hilariously, Maduro has been charged with illegal possession of a firearm....As an attorney, I would simply ask, in what country? It would have to be Venezuela , over which the S.D. NY has absolutely no jurisdiction.....Bondi is hilariously incompetent...
My Friend You Lost Nothing … You Found and Wrote Truth.