If for Nothing Else
I openly struggle with the American Empire. I find it a tiresome and arrogantly accosted mantle that was torn from the British after the Second World War. Our noble moment of leadership during the Suez Canal crisis, where we asserted that the British should not be entitled to the use of force to control the canal and that Egypt’s claim of ownership was valid, was our first show of world leadership. It was likely what propelled us into a respected status with other countries who had grown tired of the British dominance of all corners of the globe. Our teenageish hubris, uninformed about the spinning plates that must be spun to manage an empire, allowed us the luxury of principles. Our ability to lean into the ideals of republicanism and self-controlled destiny that any country is entitled to by natural law felt like a new dawn in the long trail of colonialism. This new American era would be a much less British-centric future. It seemed that this dramatic change had come as the result of these Jeffersonian idealists from the last continent, who were convicted deeply by their belief in the idea that these self-evident truths; “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Would allow for a new vision of governance, “where governments would be instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
It was a titanic shift in thinking that instantly crowned the United States as the new leader of a brighter, post-war future. Eisenhower had made the decision not to join the French and British in their Empire management when Egypt took over the canal, and by the time the crisis was over, the Empire age was over. There were new things to sort out. But for the rest of the world, it was clear who would be the voice of reason at the table. Forget that Eisenhower immediately had regrets over his decision and that the instability in the Middle East moved from a salty, quiet undercurrent to outward agitation. America had the keys to the empire world, and they had no idea how to drive it.
By the election of JFK, the internal wars between agencies and executives were in full swing. Kennedy still acted as if he were the head of the government, but the deep state was asserting itself as the real leader of America. They believed, as the British had demonstrated, that managing the world wasn’t as simple as letting everyone live out their destiny. If we were going to lead the world, we had to lead it from a managed technocracy. Everything from money to oil to who was allowed to be the head of any state needed to be first vetted and approved by the agency world of the U.S. Government. Kennedy was ushered into the Bay of Pigs, believing that the agencies and the executive branch were operating in the best interests of the country. By the end of that episode, Kennedy had fired Allen Dulles, and the deep state was angry. It all came to a tragic end on the streets of Dallas with a dead president and a full assertion of power by the plate-spinning controllers of the closeted Empire.
A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;
But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.
And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.
-A Little Poem by George Orwell
Advance the calendar 60 years on from the streets of Dallas, and the American Empire is one of the darkest to ever manage the globe. It lurks in a strange callousness of pretending not to be what it is and suicides itself by lunacy and tragic decision-making. The modern world is built upon its fake money, its heavy hand, and its faded teenage leadership. There is an old phrase in banking and business that says if you get large enough as an entity, the bank will need you more than you need it. When things go bad in business, if you are leveraged to the point that the bank has no choice but to play along with your solutions, the leverage has changed completely. This is the empire we are in. The world is a slave to our choices. As Jefferson once said of that tumultuous position, “We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”
This is where the world finds itself. As much as it may want to let us go, it dares not do it for fear of the consequences. We have built a globalist power and economic web entirely dependent on our deep state and systems. It has boiled up time and time again in the form of resentment and anger by other countries. When people try to step off the rail, they find out quickly that the wilderness is lonesome or violent.
Muammar Gaddafi was murdered in his streets by our bad actors for his desire to remove himself from the fiat world that the United States had forced him to live in. Desperately desirous to detach himself from the petrodollar and take his country back to a sane system of gold apart from the United State, he found himself on the wrong end of a rifle and a Clinton, and was dead.
The list is long of the people who have wanted off the ride, and the list is equally as long of those who found out that the desire to get off the rollercoaster ends in violence and death. Panama, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chile, Cuba…all of them learned quickly that the game and the rules are American-made and disobedience will never be tolerated.
Somewhere along the way, the American government had to figure out how to manage its own people, too. Radicals like JFK could never be tolerated again. It was too dangerous to allow for populist people to rile up the citizens or advocate for peace. The deep state depends upon its inability to be discovered or untangled and it must always have enemies. It insists upon total control, and the biggest hole in the bucket for all of it was the average American. They had to be managed into a soft compliance. Money, they decided, would be the tool to placate the powerful and wrangle the poor. It could be manipulated and distributed through their Federal Reserve system to make sure the winners would win and the losers would die a mundane death. Nothing that happened in the economy or in the management of the world that would ever be too dramatic. It would all just move slowly enough to be tolerable. Certainly, people would complain, and they might even organize, but the deep state would manage the money, the media, the politics, and the bureaucracy. Nothing would be left to chance. It all worked fine, too. Nothing that came America’s way was ever really that drastic. And when events like 9/11 would come, the government could always use it to its advantage. They could implement their long-desired and necessary controls to continue maintaining their status as the managers of the Empire.
They were really good at it all, too. They could get populations to move in their desired directions. If they wanted free trade, they could divide the people with their chosen media mouthpieces and get the results they wanted. They would even allow the people to think that it was their doing when politicians like Barack Obama and George W. Bush were elected. There were election horse races, dramatic courtroom battles, and giant stages with Grecian columns of grandeur that supported the illusions. Americans were led to believe that the politics they fought for, donated to, and invested their time and passions in were genuine needle movers. It was a beautiful theater and entrenched the deep state into their permanent positions. Everything was working perfectly.
There were certainly a few moments of tumult for the deep state along the way. Ronald Reagan, the firebrand conservative and former Governor of California, who once was the star of The Winning Team with Dorris Day, put a winning message together in 1980 and became the president. He spoke about dismantling the Department of Education and the shrinking of the federal government, and a return to sound money. Those words were enough to get the deep state to find a patsy in John Hinckley, who would took the fall and attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan. Hinkley told us all, through his love of Jodie Foster that he was insane. They shipped the would-be assassin off to prison, and the once brazen conservative faded slowly into the behavior that was allowed, fearful for what might come again and with any straying misbehavior and with vivid memories of the horror outside the Washington Press Club still readily available. Reagan became lovable and filled with red meat rhetoric. They even let him win in a massive landslide in 1984, but he was forever diminished in his capacity to govern as the conservative rebellion leader he had promised he would be.
It all bounced nicely along until 2016, when a man with more money than he could be bought with and a personality that rivaled the city he came from decided that America needed him as a leader. He was laughed off the stage by everyone but the people. He connected instantly to anyone who wasn’t from the political class or who had been steeped in traditional American style politics. Admittedly, I did not like him. He wasn’t principled, and I thought he was going to make a mockery of the election. He would leave us with a destroyed Republican landscape politically for generations, and we would have to endure Hillary and her ilk for eight or more years. But he proved everyone wrong as he endeared himself to the average American who had had their entire lives extracted from by a cancerous government. He said what was happening in the country, the worn-out steelworker and the out-of-work machinist saw Donald Trump as the necessary middle finger who was going to fight for them. They had been subjected to an abusive relationship with the government, and they wanted an advocate to stop it.
He was a total wrecking-ball in the campaign. He spoke of locking up his opponent and the crooked press to thunderous applause. He said America had been ripped off, and the working people of the country nodded their heads, knowing that to be all too true. The system had been “rigged” he said to the praise and shoulder lifting exhales of the working class. The streets of America had been flooded with cheap labor, fentanyl, and destructive social degradation that sucked the soul out of places in Iowa and Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The heartland, which had been dead for decades, found a pulse in the brashness of Donald Trump and it came to life.
They understood a secret that no one would say out loud, but their backs proved out every day: That ever since the Civil War, it was the poor, the South, and the heartland that had sent their children to die for the country. They were the ones that were expendable for the profiteers of Wall Street and the pockets of the Washingtonians. They had paid the taxes, built the businesses, farmed the fields, and taken the kick in the netherworlds that the government loved to dish out. They had paid a disproportionate price for the maggots of Martha’s Vineyard to live the life they wanted. It was dark and sinister, and everyone knew what had happened – and only Donald Trump would say it out loud and with such bombastic clarity.
State after state abandoned the illusion that the Democratic Party had purported to be and the working man migrated to this flowing-haired billionaire that they believed would change the country. They voted to take out the system that had betrayed them and the Rust Belt became rust red on election night.
The deep state panicked. They couldn’t believe that he had won. They had tossed all the normal stuff at him, and none of it worked. Trump had a counterpunch to everything. When the Access Hollywood tape came out, which would have sunk every other Republican ever, he doubled down and brought all the women who had accused Bill Clinton of rape to the debate and sat them in the front row for a wide eyed Willy to glance at with astonishment. When they dug into his business dealings and tax returns, something that would have been a fatal blow to any other candidate, he proudly pronounced that he had used the system as it was designed, just like all of Clinton’s donors had, to pay the least amount of taxes possible. Nothing stuck, and the deep state was in total meltdown mode.
After the election they spent years sabotaging him through Russia collusion, pissing prostitutes and other accusations attached to impeachments that gained no traction with the public. When all of the normal tactics failed, they brought a shadowy figure out from the bowels of the darkest corners of government to send in the kill shot. This Dr. Frankenstein character, who believed his role to be just inches from God, had one of his lab-created concoctions released upon the world. Dr. Fauci stood at Donald Trump’s side, the Brutus of the moment, and stabbed him in the back with a panic-laden, Ides of March virus that his team had paid for and developed for just such a moment. Lockdowns and mail-ins were just what the diminutive Doctor ordered. Trump was trounced by late-night trucks and unexplainable spikes in vote counts – he was made to look the fool and the traitor and was run out of town at midnight, cordially uninvited to the deep states party, that even the sourest of pusses could adorn their mittens for.
The parma-government had its perfect puppet in the Swiss cheese-brained Joe Biden. He was the ultimate Washington insider whose mind had evaporated and whose desire for the position outweighed any internal conscious about what might be best for the people of the nation. The Washingtonians could parade him anywhere, and the jovial “average” Joe could lick his ice cream, string together a few “listen man’s” and play the part of the president on any phony stage they made for him to play it upon. Anyone but Trump would do for the Beltway. The dollar value evaporated, and the state locked down harder on its dissenters. It imprisoned its “insurrectionists” and heretics. It spent money at a rate unseen in history, and it told everyone else who questioned it to “sit down and shut up, this is your penance for Trump, you miserable fools!”
By the spring of 2023, the entire world knew exactly what the United States was. A hollow, vapid, and soulless empire that had no leader that was a genuine or the voice of the people. Joe Biden had been “elected,” but the entire world knew that he was not in charge. They saw the Congress wholly ineffective and a man playing a President who was falling off of bicycles and mumbling through pressers. The press played along, dutifully convincing itself and anyone who couldn’t change the channel from Morning Joe that somehow Biden was the leader of the free world. We were the bullies that no one dared make fun of, but who, behind closed doors and in private conversations amongst countries who have no love for America, were ignored and plotted against. The globalist’s system which operates off the spine of the American citizen and their guaranteed payouts in taxes and labor confiscation, was as happy as ever. The machine could grind on, and no one was ever going to mess with it again. They had proved their point once and for all: They were in charge and while the ending wasn’t as dramatic as Dallas and Trump was alive, he was a destroyed pariah that no one would ever take seriously again.
The moment seemed deeply contrived and hopeless for many. Trump said he was running for president again, but so many felt alienated from it all. The former president had been steamrolled by the monsters of the Mall, and it seemed like he would be maligned all the way to another election defeat. The Democrats were going to go to bat with their hollowed out corn husk, and Trump had all the support of the base. Ron DeSantis fizzled out of contention, and it was shaping up to be a rematch of the 2020 contest again, much to the dismay of many.
Out of the most unexpected place, a voice entered the race that was genuinely profound. It was raspy and strained, and it spoke like old politicians used to speak. He talked about liberty and freedom. He lionized the value of democratic institutions and the voice of the citizen. Like his father had during the Vietnam War, he saw the moment in politics that required a different conversation. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knew the inner workings of the mess, and he was anything but Trump. A near-sacrosanct name, a history of Democratic causes and successes, and a life that had been sidelined but never silenced by his most ardent enemies.
When he spoke, he called to many of us. He wasn’t Trump, and he seemed smarter and more savvy than the bombast or the bumbling. He was a gateway to an old America – one that many of us believed might exist, but had been murdered by the deep state for its own benefit. He talked about Jefferson, the Declaration, and the Constitution. It was profound and energizing to millions of Americans.
I was one of them.
I didn’t care if he was a Democrat or a Republican; he was speaking my language. He had stood up against the profit-worshiping collusionists of COVID-19 and said that the vaccines and the protocols for lockdown were wrong. When he spoke about money or the environment, it was exactly what I thought about it all. When he talked about autism and toxins, I could feel my own heartache for my son, whom I have suspicions about his own exposure to the barrage of shots and ensuing learning issues and struggles that seemed to accompany those medical money printing “medicines.”
While Trump had tapped into the broken workers, RFK Jr. had tapped into the broken mothers and fathers: The ones who lie in bed at night and talk about what they can do to help their child. No parent ever gives up on their kids, but they also never dream of having a child who cannot function within the confines of society. So they lay awake at night, plagued with worry and troubles. They cry for what might have been, and what will never be, and for what they know they will face the next morning when they start it all over again. RFK understood that person and his sympathy and boldness built a bond that would become unbreakable over the next 18 months.
RFK Jr. had always been up against an insidious machine that is a cousin and symbiotic necessity to the deep state for all of his career. This dark apparatus is the funding arm of the media and the payoff wing of Congress. He understood how dark they are and to what lengths they will go to preserve the status quo. These monsters do not give up easily, and they vilify anyone who comes near their sacred cows and their wealth generating injections.
His presidential campaign drew attention to these forces. He activated the mothers of kids and people who have felt betrayed by the authoritarian response to the pandemic, to be on his side. They table-topped and campaigned for him. They were accosted by party die-hards and kept out of discourse everywhere they went. But RFK encouraged everyone to keep going. He knew that the conversation was being elevated. He understood that the mothers and fathers who could get out of bed to fight another day for their children would have the fortitude and courage to do it for him. He never took it for granted or lightly, and he always placed the mission of helping the most bereaved of our citizens at the top of his objectives. I think there was a moment he thought he could win, and so did a lot of us. It was an uphill battle, but so many of us who have suffered through the consequences of a mercantile medical system had a champion and we weren’t going down in this political battle without giving him a sword and piece of ground to stand on. It wasn’t just Pollyanna-type optimism, it was a deep connection to our visceral heartache and our hope that a good man might actually occupy the White House. He was better on nearly every topic than his competitors, and almost everyone in America who heard him knew it. He reached his peak on the night of the Real Debate, where his guerrilla campaign tactics projected art and video on the CNN building and the Federal Reserve, and his answers in an online simulcast were better than the mush-minded Biden or the standard weave-o-rama from Trump.
Those of us rooting for RFK were rooting for our kids. We wanted answers to the really complex questions that no generation had been faced with prior. Why were our kids different? Why would we be burdened with this new dilemma and struggle that seemed to come at rates unseen in lives past? We weren’t the victims of a better diagnosis and to suggest so was gaslighting and insulting. Our children had been harmed, and it had been done for money. No one can imagine the kind of deep reaction that solicits amongst mothers and fathers unless you are one. If you trusted that the lab-coat-deities had your children’s interests in mind, and then found out that their fancy cars and luxury condos in Myrtle Beach had been paid for by their complicit cooperation with the companies that knew full well they were harming the children you had entrusted them to, your rage would know no bounds.
RFK was the lone, weakened vocal chorded voice that when he spoke, drove a dagger into the heart of the evil that many knew to be the reason their lives had been unalterably derailed. No mother or father could be separated from that bond. RFK had endeared himself by saying out loud what many of us suspected – that the interests of the deep state’s funding mechanism were the beneficiaries of the collateral damage that they had been foisted upon the unsuspecting. It was a crime that those of us whom had been victimized by it, lay awake at night vacillating between sadness and seething.
But as American politics always proves, there will only ever be two choices. Joe Biden had been swapped out by a hand picked prototype and the buzz and circus of that change had, if all but briefly, given the momentum of the race to the Democrats. By July, most of us knew that RFK wasn’t remaining competitive in the horse race anymore. The assassination attempt was the final blow to the independent hopes for a third way, and even though we hung on believing that a miracle might still be out there, the quiet voice in our heads said that RFK remaining in the race might deliver the unwanted outcome of a Harris victory. What so many of us had endured through the Biden years was an unacceptable option for the future. As much as we may not have liked Donald Trump, he had one thing going for him: he was not the deep state. We continued to soldier on as RFK supporters, hoping that something might come that was different than the fait accompli of two-party politics, but our hearts likely knew something had to give.
Rumors began to swirl in mid-August that something was afoot between President Trump and RFK Jr. There was a leaked phone call between the two of them with Trump talking about the sickness of our kids and vaccines. Insiders had whispered about a Vice Presidential offer that had been turned down by RFK. It was also said that there was a softening between the two of them in their discussions and that they actually even had come to respect and like one another. When Mr. Kennedy announced the suspension of his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump, he moved millions of people who he had built an indestructible bond with in the direction that would ultimately overwhelm the election in November. Many of us trusted that what he wanted to accomplish in his campaign would be a part of the deal to endorse President Trump. Most suspected that he would be nominated for either the Attorney General or the Secretary of HHS. While nothing could be written down, we believed implicitly that RFK would not have given up on his campaign and then persuaded his supporters to vote for Donald Trump for some Under Secretary to the Secretary’s Secretary. We hoped that he was giving up on this grander dream for the benefit of those of us who had long suffered from the injuries and harm that the corporatist system continued to grind out at the expense of our children. It wasn’t guaranteed, and it was risky given Trump’s reversal on Mr. Kennedy and a vaccine commission during his first term. Trump’s adoration of Operation Warp Speed gave many of us pause, but we also knew that if we could get “our guy” into the building, we would have an inside voice advocating for us. Many of us made the bet along with Mr. Kennedy and went to the polls to pull the lever for President Trump.
When the election dust had settled the results were much more one-sided in final vote counts than most from the past. Kennedy fans were elated at what might be coming. Mr. Kennedy was named the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and I along with many others celebrated a victory that most of us never believed possible. Finally, a person who could punch for us against the powerful interests that had punched down on us for so long.
After the fun parties of the inauguration and the highs of the win, we watched in anguish as the captured senators harangued and brutalized our hero. They were awful actors in an awful theater. Deals were made and hands were shaken to secure his nomination. When he politically dodged the questions we most wanted answered, we all tolerated it, knowing that Washington’s machine was coming for him with the fullest capacity of its darkness. We listened as Senators, whose jackets would look like a NASCAR driver’s filled with patches of Big Pharma’s logos, told everyone that they would reluctantly vote for him as long as Mr. Kennedy was handcuffed by a list of handicaps as long as the medals that drape from the Joint Chiefs’ chests. It was a political-horse-sized pill, but we knew we had to tolerate it to get “our guy” to the table.
What we hadn’t realized as we fought and advocated for the Kennedy voice in Washington was just how powerful his message had become. His simplified conversations about health and the degradation of our countenance as a people grafted into the American psyche faster than any other topic of politics ever had. Everywhere one looked, people were talking about food dyes and Round Up and how unhealthy we all felt eating the filler they call food in America. Mr. Kennedy had been the spark that ignited a conversation that almost no one, save the interested parties, could argue with. He was soon surrounded by voices, the Means Twins, carnivore dietitians, and alternative health gurus, who all endorsed the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement. It was a profound and seismic shift in the conversation. Suddenly, the topic that everyone knew were real, but could never talk about out loud, were on the table, and the masses were flocking to the ideas and solutions being presented. He was gaining momentum in the conversations by picking of the lowest lying fruit and engendering trust with people who had never before had the connections to him. He became a popular figure amongst average Americans and they correlated the abuse of Washington’s extraction of them to yet another issue that was visible in their growing waistlines.
That connection further opened the eyes of many to what had happened to our country. They saw that during the course of the American conversion to a fascist economic system through fiat dollars an evil had been perpetrated upon them. We were the recipients of deep fatigue and fatter bellies, not because we suddenly became gluttons, but because the entire system of food had been stripped down to the most profitable version available for the companies that made the best political donations. The cycle started with terrible food filled with inedible poisons that could be covered up by “medicines” that would alleviate one set of symptoms and replace it with an endless cycle of pill popping and doctor’s visits. We understood it and knew that a system that had never advocated for us was suddenly being exposed by RFK Jr., and the proverbial cheers from the crowd were raucous and uncontrolled.
This week, when he was named one of Time Magazine’s top 100 most influential people, we didn’t care if the drivel that was written under the photo was a hit piece to diminish his accomplishments; we knew deep inside that he actually was deserving of the title. He had changed the course of the election, he had given voice to millions who knew something was wrong with our health. He had promised to so many forlorn and exhausted parents that he would get to the bottom of what had happened to our children and that lifted our shoulders as we exhaled and said, “finally, someone is listening.” His influence, for so many of us, was more than deserved. He had earned it by being an advocate. He chose to use his influence and storied name to make our lives better, and it endeared him to us. It has been said that only Trump can separate himself from his voters, but I might argue that Bobby has an even deeper connection to those of us who know what he has given up to be here.
No one can separate him from my admiration and gratitude. Not angry voices, not my own impatience, not even people I respect and admire for their own contributions and boldness can drive that wedge between us; because only Bobby put the weight of the abandonment of his family, the end of friendships, the destruction of his career, the risk of his own life on the line to run for president and sway the election that created this moment of possibility. For the hundreds of thousands of us who saw that act as a choice for the betterment of our kids, nothing will ever make us abandon him and his mission. No political calculation he makes, no typed up tweet by a staffer about vaccines, no seemingly prolonged silence…nothing. It’s not blind admiration that deepens that devotion, it is witnessed experience from a long career and a long list of personal losses because of his choice to remain in this fight, that has shown us he has us in mind with every painful choice he has, or will make.
The deep state functions on dysfunction. It thrives in darkness and secrets. It survives off the mercantile symbiosis of corporate money and political payoffs. All of those long years they have marched us to this moment in an incremental soft mediocrity might be coming to an end, and that will have be celebrated by millions of moms and dads who have been told by that same sinister machine that what they see with their own eyes in their children isn’t really happening. The sleuth with the slyest shrewdness, who will surgically dismantle this malicious system, won’t exclusively be the one who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or the one who oversees an electric car company. The person in government, who has navigated his way to this powerful table that no one wanted him sitting at, who has the highest chance of success, will most likely will be a man in a skinny 60s tie of his father’s, who can still do more pull-ups than most of us, and whose smile warms the hearts of parents all across the country. It will be done with surgical precision by an attorney who has never lost an advocacy case and whose strained voice we stop and lean in to listen to anytime it speaks.
So, Time Magazine can write their piece and try to diminish the credibility of our advocate, and the critics outside the arena can shout and exclaim how “Bobby better get to doing a better job,”but all of that noise and criticism will only reinforcing and affirm what most of us already know: that if for nothing else, having our man at the table, and directing the conversations that no one wants him to have will have been worth it.