A dictator falls and Western "liberals" and "leftists"... fucking complain

The last straw of a fallen ideology. I'm done.

There is an insanity going on. A deep one. Feels like brainwashing, feels like reality mattering less and less. Entrenched warfare. Brains rotting in front of screens.

A dictator has fallen. A man who deserves to be crucified on the streets, a man who left more than 80% of his population in abject poverty while enriching himself and his caste. A man who forced over 8 million Venezuelans to leave their home country in order to not starve to death. Venezuela, the country with the largest oil reserves on Earth should be thriving under even a somewhat competent government. Yet the only thing that has thrived under Maduro’s socialists is suffering, political imprisonment, and corruption.

And now watch what happens when reality commits the unforgivable sin of not matching the script some got stencilled into their brain folds.

So, a dictator is removed from power—taken alive, no less in a precise Military operation the likes of Russia can only be jealous of—and millions of Venezuelans do the most human thing imaginable: they celebrate. Not because they think paradise has arrived. Not because they’re naïve and stupid. Not because they’ve never heard the name Trump before. Not because they think the US intervened because of their wellbeing and personal freedom. They know it’s about oil, resources, whatever. Yet they fucking celebrate because that one specific boot is no longer on their necks. Because the man at the center of the rot is gone. Because the psychic fog lifts for one second and they can breathe and scream and dance in the streets like their bodies just remembered their existence.

And then the West logs on. From the comforts of their cozy homes, with running water and plumbing, food and material wealth to make renaissance aristocrats jealous.

Not “the West” as a geopolitical unit—I mean the weird priest caste of Western liberals and online leftists, those people whose entire moral identity is now built as a negative space around one man. Their religion is not justice. Their religion is Anti-Trump, and like every religion, it comes with rituals, purity tests, heresies, and a sacred rule:

If Trump does it, it must be evil.

So when Venezuelans erupt—in Caracas, in Madrid, in Miami, in any city with a diaspora heart still beating—the priest caste doesn’t ask the obvious question (“What have these people endured?”). It asks a different one:

“How can I frame this so that Trump is still the villain?”

This is where the insanity becomes visible and unbearable. Because they end up defending a literal fucking dictator, or at minimum laundering him into a “complex situation,” because they cannot psychologically survive the alternative: that something good might have happened in the world while Trump’s name was attached to it.

So they reach for the oldest, laziest weapon in the arsenal: infantilisation.

Ah yes, let’s continue infantilising the idiot Venezuelans.

Surely they are absolutely uninformed and have never heard of imperialism. Surely we, the educated people of the West, who know everything about the situation in Venezuela (heard about it two weeks ago), know better what is good for them.

Pah, these fools! Don’t they know they are stupid to be happy?

It’s disgusting. And it’s everywhere.

You see it in the Reddit meltdowns (Reddit is basically unusable now—a swamp of smug armchair moralizing). You see it in the tone: that soft, superior scolding voice, the one liberals reserve for the “vulnerable” when the vulnerable refuse to behave correctly.

Like Venezuelans are NPCs in a Western discourse game. Like their joy is a bug in the narrative. Like their lives are not real, but merely a backdrop for our ideological theater.

Never able to realize: the Venezuelans are not behaving like children. They’re behaving like adults who have lived through hell.

Venezuelans are painfully aware. In every interview I’ve heard. They’re not delusional about what comes next. They know this is only the beginning. They know chaos might very likely follow. They know that removing a dictator is not the same thing as building a functioning state. They’re talking about who must go next—about the whole fucking caste of supposedly socialist psychopaths, about the hydra heads still attached to the machine.

And yet they still say: this is a win. A massive one. A crack in the wall. A door opened. A step away from the abyss.

But online leftists can’t tolerate that kind of reality. Because reality doesn’t give you the clean dopamine hit of being morally superior. Reality is messy, asymmetric, rude. Reality doesn’t ask permission from your ideology. You can actually hate both Trump and not defend fucking dictators, did you know? YOU CAN DO THAT! DID YOU KNOW?

Instead, the priest caste performs another of its favorite moves: the eternal victim identity.

They must always be against something. They must always be the resistance, like in some fucking Disney Star Wars movie. They must always be the righteous minority standing against “fascism.” Evidence doesn’t matter. Venezuelans celebrating doesn’t matter. The fact that actual Venezuelans are telling them to go fuck themselves— joyfully, relentlessly—doesn’t matter. The ideology has been chosen, therefore it must be defended.

The result is surreal:

I can’t fucking believe what I’m seeing.

And if that’s too much for you, then please unsubscribe from my Substack now. I know I’ve gathered lots of you here because I have been like you and written the same shit from the comforts of my cozy home. But this is over, this situation with Venezuela was the final straw that has completely disillusioned me from the left. Fuck off. I’m embarrassed for what I once believed in. I believe nothing now.

People protesting on Times Square with communist flags and “Free Maduro” banners, and then being confronted by actual Venezuelans is a video for the history books. It’s the song of the final fall of liberalism and leftism in its current state. Perhaps something new can be built from the ashes of that ideology. I hope so.

These last days have been the most eye-opening days in a long time, because they revealed to me a core sickness.

Which brings me to Europe. Oh, Europe. The ones who believe the world order is maintained by words and reasonable discourse.

Europe’s contribution to history lately is an op-ed, a regulation, and a press statement that says we are monitoring the situation closely—which is now a meme because it perfectly captures the continent’s spiritual condition: self-important impotence.

Important news from the European Union, guys.

They’re monitoring the situation.

Is there a more useless, self-congratulatory, irrelevant group than the current state of the EU? A continent led by people still in denial about the real world, still banging on about the “rules-based international order” as if such a thing ever existed beyond the shadow of American aircraft carriers and credible threat. They can’t shape the world because they can’t even bring themselves to secure their own borders. They chant “net zero” like an incantation while the rest of the planet plays power politics and laughs. The Financial Times can publish ten thousand wanky essays about “European values”—whatever that is supposed to be—and it won’t change the fact that Europe is, right now, a museum that still thinks it’s an empire.

If it were up to the holy, pious EU, nothing would ever happen. Nothing can happen. Just “we condemn,” “we urge restraint,” “we call for dialogue,” “our thoughts are with you,” and of course: “we will monitor closely.”

Word-salad that means nothing. Pure category error. Pure bureaucratic theology. European bureaucrats, always promoted upwards with no hint of work done, will continue to collect massive salaries while history happens without them.

Meanwhile, in the real world, you have clips like the video of a Venezuelan mother and her son crashing a leftist pro-Maduro demonstration in Puerto Rico. She says: we have waited for this for 26 years. The son says there isn’t a single Venezuelan among the pro-Maduro protesters.

Of course there isn’t.

That’s the whole point.

The Western liberal (and leftist) is now so trapped in its own symbolic morality play that it has become detached from the people it claims to love. It loves “the oppressed” as an idea. It loves the aesthetic of struggle. It loves the posture. But it does not love actual oppressed people when those people refuse to follow the script.

So it burns the American flag in Paris while Venezuelans celebrate freedom right next to them.

There are few Venezuelans mad at Trump for arresting Maduro. (Mostly those who have profited from the dictatorship.)

Because when you’ve lived through true institutional collapse — when you’ve watched your country hollow out, watched friends leave, watched basic needs become luxury items — you don’t have the privilege of treating politics as a personality quiz. You don’t have the luxury of seething because the “wrong person” did the “right thing.” You take the oxygen when it arrives. You take the crack in the wall. You take the dictator out of the palace and you say: good.

This doesn’t mean the US is morally pure (very, very far from it). This doesn’t mean Trump is a good guy (even farther from it). This doesn’t mean interventions are clean. This doesn’t mean what comes next won’t be chaotic, even horrific. Venezuelans know that better than anyone. But they’d rather be a US colony if it meant food, water, electricity, medicine—because that’s what collapse does to a person: it makes dignity synonymous with basics.

And yes outlets like the Guardian call it an illegal coup. Of course they do. The same moral reflex: protect the aesthetic of “international law” even when it’s obviously unenforceable against real power. Because the entire worldview collapses if you admit the simple thing we all know but rarely say out loud:

There is no magical “rules-based order.”
International law is not a spell.
No supranational body has real authority over a superpower.
At the state level there is basically anarchy—interests, leverage, deterrence, threat.

But the official Europe can’t deal with that. It would mean that their ideology is for nothing. Emptiness that shatters against the real world.

And this is all is not me celebrating cynicism. This is me being furious that adults still pretend the world is run by polite words.

The Venezuela moment widened the cracks and exposed the truth.

It showed how quickly “democracy” becomes optional when ideology is threatened. How quickly the left’s supposed love for “the people” becomes contempt the moment the people celebrate the “wrong” liberation. How discourse becomes impossible because the first move is always moral supremacy, not curiosity, not humility, not just fucking listening to the actual people affected.

I get that you hate Trump. I do too.

But if you can’t take a moment to appreciate that a literal monster was taken alive and millions of oppressed people are now a little freer than they were yesterday then we literally have nothing left in common.

Because you are not fighting for humans. You are fighting for a story in which you are always the hero. And reality doesn’t care about your story.

It just keeps happening.

Antonio Melonio

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