UN response to Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire's January 1994 "Genocide Fax," instructing UNAMIR to take no reconnaissance or other action pending guidance from UN Headquarters.
Source: National Security Archive / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Everything in this series is documented. Every claim has a source. The truth is disturbing enough.

Two Requests

Twice in the last decade, the United Nations has asked the world for something. Not conquest. Not command. Something quieter, and in some ways harder to refuse: trust. Reorganize around our framework, the UN said in 2015. Fifteen years, seventeen goals, every nation on earth pulling in the same direction. Ten years later, in the middle of a pandemic whose institutional response had already cost the WHO a great deal of public trust, the UN asked again, this time through its health arm, for something with real legal teeth attached.

The first request came wrapped in idealism. The second came wrapped in treaty language. Between them sits a single fax machine in Kigali, and one unanswered message that still shadows every new promise.

Rwanda: The Fax They Buried

In October 1993, the UN deployed a peacekeeping mission to Rwanda called UNAMIR, twenty-five hundred soldiers, sent to oversee a fragile peace agreement between the Rwandan government and Tutsi rebels. The force was commanded by a Canadian lieutenant general named Roméo Dallaire.

On January 11, 1994, Dallaire sent a cable to UN Headquarters that has since become known as the Genocide Fax. An informant inside the extremist Hutu Power movement had come to him with a warning: militias were being armed and trained, Tutsis in Kigali were being registered, and in the informant’s own words, relayed by Dallaire, his men could kill up to a thousand Tutsis in twenty minutes. Dallaire asked for permission to raid the weapons caches his informant had identified.

The UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations said no. The raid, they told him, exceeded UNAMIR’s mandate. The head of that department at the time was Kofi Annan, a man who would go on to become the UN’s Secretary-General four years later.

Dallaire didn’t stop. He sent five more warnings over the following two months, January 22, February 3, February 15, February 27, March 13, pleading for a broader mandate and more troops. He was turned down every time.

On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying Rwanda’s president was shot down. The genocide began within hours. Extremist militias, the same ones Dallaire had been warning about since January, armed with machetes, began slaughtering Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the streets.

Rwandan customs records examined by human rights investigators show that between January 1993 and March 1994, the same window as Dallaire’s warnings, import licenses were issued for roughly 581,000 kilograms of machetes, a sharp increase over prior years. Businessman Félicien Kabuga, later indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for genocide, was among the largest documented importers, accounting for tens of tons personally. Some of these shipments, including at least one traced to Kabuga, moved from Chinese manufacturers through the Kenyan port of Mombasa before reaching Rwanda. This is what a thousand deaths in twenty minutes actually required. Not sophistication. Just supply.

Here is where the UN’s actual response, as opposed to its stated principles, becomes impossible to soften. Within days of the killing starting, the Security Council did not reinforce Dallaire’s force. It voted to cut its authorized ceiling from twenty-five hundred soldiers down to two hundred and seventy. On April 21, ten Belgian peacekeepers were tortured and killed after being ordered to hand over their weapons. In the fourth week of the genocide, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali ordered a full withdrawal of all UN troops from Rwanda.

Dallaire refused. He called it an immoral order. He stayed, along with roughly two hundred and fifty personnel, close to that reduced ceiling, and did what a skeleton crew with no mandate and no weapons to spare could do. History credits that remnant force with saving thousands of lives that would otherwise have been lost, Tutsi and moderate Hutu alike, sheltered, hidden, and protected by soldiers who’d been told to leave and didn’t. Whatever else this story is, it isn’t a story where every person wearing a blue helmet failed. Dallaire didn’t. His fax didn’t fail either. It was the machine above him that failed to answer it.

Roughly eight hundred thousand people were killed over the next hundred days.

In 1999, Kofi Annan, by then Secretary-General, commissioned an independent inquiry into the UN’s conduct during the genocide. Sit with that fact before you read what it found: the same man who headed the department that refused Dallaire’s raid request in 1994 was, five years later, the one who ordered his own institution investigated for it. The report, when it came, did not spare him or the UN. It concluded that the UN and its member states failed Rwanda in deplorable ways, ignoring evidence that genocide was planned, refusing to act once it was underway, and finally abandoning the Rwandan people when they most needed protection. It found, specifically, that Dallaire’s January cable had reached Annan’s desk and was never shared with the Security Council. It never received the follow-up a warning like that deserved.

Military assessments since have estimated that a reinforced peacekeeping presence of around five thousand troops, twice what UNAMIR had at its peak and roughly twenty times what remained after the Security Council’s cut, could have stopped the worst of the killing. The UN had the smaller number on the ground already. It chose to shrink it.

This is the same body, structurally, that would go on seventeen years later to ask the entire world to reorganize its policy priorities around a shared framework, and thirty-one years later to ask for a legally binding health treaty. The fax and the framework aren’t the same thing. But they were written by the same hand, and one of them is documented proof of what that hand does when the stakes are highest and the mandate is thin.

Agenda 2030: The Ask

On September 25, 2015, all 193 UN member states unanimously adopted General Assembly Resolution A/RES/70/1, formally titled “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” It laid out seventeen Sustainable Development Goals and 169 underlying targets, covering everything from poverty and hunger to climate, gender equality, and institutional governance, all meant to be achieved by the year 2030.

The document’s language is careful, and worth reading closely rather than taking secondhand. The resolution explicitly states that it applies to all countries while taking into account different national realities, capacities, and levels of development, and respecting national policies and priorities. It commits to respecting national policy space for states. By its own text, the Agenda claims no binding authority over any nation’s sovereignty. It asks. It doesn’t order.

What it does ask for is substantial: a voluntary realignment of national priorities, backed by a financing structure, an annual review process through the High-Level Political Forum, and Voluntary National Reviews that nearly every member state has now submitted at least once. Whether a review process without legal teeth still produces real pressure to conform is a fair question, and not one the resolution’s text answers either way. Nations that fall behind get named in public forums. Nations that comply get held up as models. That’s not sovereignty overridden. It’s a different kind of leverage than a treaty carries.

The Agenda’s reach extends past economics and infrastructure into gender equality targets, educational transformation, and what the document itself calls values-based programming, intended to apply universally, across every culture, every tradition, every faith. That’s a genuinely different kind of ask than a poverty target or an infrastructure goal, since it touches on questions nations, and the people within them, have historically answered for themselves. It’s also worth noting what “universally” actually means among this particular membership. Independent monitors flagged roughly thirty UN member states this year alone for restricting the practice of faith, through imprisonment, violence, or discriminatory law. A call for shared values across every faith carries different weight depending on whether it’s addressed to a nation that protects its citizens’ freedom to hold that faith in the first place, or one that doesn’t.

Eleven years in, the record on all of this is now public, and it’s worth reading in the UN’s own words rather than anyone’s characterization of them. On July 7, 2026, the UN released its official progress report on the Agenda it adopted in 2015. Of the 139 SDG targets with usable trend data, only 36 percent are on track or making moderate progress. Nearly half are advancing only marginally or not at all. Fifteen percent have regressed below where they stood in 2015, meaning the world is now further from those targets than when the Agenda began. An independent academic tracker, the Sustainable Development Report published weeks earlier by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, put it more bluntly: only 16 percent of targets are projected to be met by the 2030 deadline. That same report identified the United States as having moved into what it called active opposition to the sustainable development paradigm, ranking the U.S. last of all 193 member states on commitment to UN-based multilateralism.

The global extreme poverty rate sits at 10 percent in 2026, barely three points below where it stood in 2015, nowhere near the Agenda’s stated goal of eradication. Official development assistance, the funding meant to carry all of this, fell by 23.1 percent in 2025 alone, the largest annual decline ever recorded. The financing gap needed to close the distance now stands at roughly four trillion dollars a year.

An institution asked the world, eleven years ago, to reorganize national priorities, funding, and in some respects cultural values around a shared, globalized framework. With four years left on its own timeline, that same institution’s own numbers show most of the world falling not buying in, and in some cases moving backward. Whether that gap is a warning about voluntary ambition outpacing voluntary compliance, or evidence the ambition itself was mismatched to what nations would actually commit to, the four years remaining on the Agenda’s own clock will be the test.

The Pandemic Agreement: The Ask Expands

On May 20, 2025, the 78th World Health Assembly formally adopted, by consensus, the world’s first Pandemic Agreement. It’s only the second legally binding health treaty in the WHO’s seventy-seven-year history, the first being the 2003 Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. That alone should tell you how rare and significant a step this was.

The sovereignty question here gets misrepresented constantly, in both directions, so it’s worth reading the actual clause rather than anyone’s characterization of it. The Agreement’s own text states that nothing in it shall be interpreted as providing the WHO’s Secretariat, including its Director-General, any authority to direct, order, alter, or otherwise prescribe the domestic law or policies of any party, or to mandate that parties take specific actions such as banning travelers, imposing vaccination mandates, or implementing lockdowns. That sentence is in the treaty. If a piece claims this document hands the WHO command authority over sovereign nations, that piece is wrong.

Here’s what’s true and worth your attention instead. The Agreement’s real operational core, the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing system, the part that would define binding terms like affordable pricing and a twenty percent allocation of pandemic-related products, wasn’t finished when the treaty was adopted. It was deferred to a separate annex, still being negotiated as of this year, with the Agreement structured so it can’t even open for signature until that annex exists. Member states signed onto a framework before its most consequential terms were written.

And the sovereignty concern, while overstated by some, wasn’t invented from nothing. The United States did not participate in the final round of negotiations, following its January 2025 announcement withdrawing from the WHO entirely, and won’t be bound by the pact regardless of what the annex eventually says. Eleven other countries abstained. A peer-reviewed analysis published through WHO-affiliated literature itself attributes the American non-participation specifically to concerns over the binding nature of technology transfer provisions, sovereignty, intellectual property obligations, and financial commitments, concerns serious enough that one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical-producing nations walked away from the table entirely. If I were writing from opinion, I’d count it a mercy, but I promised myself and my readers just the facts, just what the paper trail proves.

So: an institution whose own track record you’ve just read asked, a decade ago, for the world to trust it with a voluntary framework it is now publicly failing to meet. It has just asked again, this time for a binding legal instrument whose central mechanism doesn’t exist yet, and one of the most consequential nations on earth didn’t feel that trust was warranted enough to stay in the room.

Oil-for-Food: What Happens With the Money

If Rwanda shows what the UN does when lives are on the line and Agenda 2030 shows what it does with an unenforceable promise, Oil-for-Food shows what happens when the UN is actually handed money to manage.

The Oil-for-Food Program ran from 1996 to 2003, a sixty-four billion dollar humanitarian operation letting Iraq sell oil under UN sanctions to buy food and medicine for its own people. In April 2004, following reports of massive fraud, Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed an Independent Inquiry Committee chaired by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, alongside South African Justice Richard Goldstone and Swiss law professor Mark Pieth, to investigate.

Their final report, released in October 2005, found that more than 2,200 companies and individuals, roughly half of everyone participating in the program, paid kickbacks and illegal surcharges, letting Saddam Hussein pocket 1.8 billion dollars at the direct expense of the Iraqi civilians the program was built to feed. Kickbacks flowed from entities in sixty-six countries. Illegal surcharges came from forty. Volcker found conclusive evidence that Benon Sevan, the UN official actually running the program day to day, had placed himself in an irreconcilable conflict of interest by personally participating in the selection of oil purchasers, a direct violation of UN rules.

Annan himself wasn’t cleared of everything. The Committee found no evidence he’d personally influenced a 1998 contract awarded to the company employing his own son, Kojo, but Annan told the Security Council he accepted full responsibility for his own failures and regretted his lack of diligence in pursuing investigations into alleged misdeeds happening under his watch. Separately, Volcker’s investigators discovered that Annan’s chief of staff had approved the destruction of his chronological office files right around the time the inquiry began, which Volcker termed an unfortunate incident without formally accusing anyone of concealment.

Interim findings from the investigation had already produced criminal indictments in the United States, Switzerland, and France before the final report was even published. It remains, by most accounts, the largest financial scandal in the UN’s history.

Peacekeeper Abuse: A Pattern That Hasn’t Stopped

The UN’s own reckoning with this problem goes back to 2005, when a report commissioned in the wake of the Congo scandal, known as the Zeid Report, found peacekeepers engaged in the exchange of sex for money, food, or jobs, and recommended a comprehensive accountability strategy. That’s the UN documenting its own problem in writing, two decades ago, before most of what follows had even happened yet.

The reason this problem persists decade after decade isn’t a mystery, and it isn’t rogue individuals slipping through the cracks. It’s written into the paperwork. Status of Mission and Status of Forces Agreements between the UN and host countries, alongside separate Contribution Agreements between the UN and troop-contributing nations, both reserve full legal jurisdiction over a peacekeeper’s misconduct to that peacekeeper’s own home country. The UN can investigate. It can repatriate. It cannot prosecute. Everything that follows is what that gap has produced in practice.

The Congo mission, first called MONUC, saw allegations surface publicly in 2004: over 150 cases of sexual assault, including 68 cases of rape, alongside prostitution, child pornography, and children fathered and abandoned by peacekeeping personnel. Human Rights Watch investigators interviewed girls as young as thirteen who’d been raped by MONUC soldiers, and others between twelve and fifteen engaged in what’s clinically termed survival sex, trading their bodies for food, money, or protection in a war zone where they had few other options. The UN’s own after-action review of the mission found something worse than isolated misconduct: a management culture, both civilian and military, that had encouraged the abuse by refusing to take it seriously, ignoring reports, and standing by as staff who tried to report abuse were harassed and ridiculed for it. Between September 2001 and January 2004, despite a code of conduct that had existed since 2002, MONUC’s own security branch investigated a grand total of sixteen cases.

The numbers didn’t shrink as the years passed. MONUC faced 181 abuse allegations between 2007 and 2010. Its successor mission, MONUSCO, faced 224 between 2010 and 2021. In the Central African Republic, at least ninety-eight girls reported being sexually abused by peacekeepers from Burundi and Gabon in 2014 and 2015, in incidents that included forced acts of bestiality. The UN identified forty-one troops accused.

The jurisdictional gap is exactly why, when 134 Sri Lankan peacekeepers were found in 2007 to have run a child sex ring in Haiti abusing at least nine confirmed children over three years, 114 of them were sent home, and not one of them ever served a day in jail. Former Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon himself called this pattern a cancer inside the UN system. Those are his words about his own organization.

This isn’t history you have to reach back decades to find. A UN report released this past April details new sexual abuse investigations tied to the Kenya-led security mission currently operating in Haiti, including a case involving a twelve-year-old child. A UN human rights official responded to the findings by saying four cases is four too many, and calling for independent investigation, prosecution, and real transparency. As of this writing, that call is still being answered, or not, in real time.

The Paper Trail Continues

I keep coming back to the fax. Twenty minutes, the informant told Dallaire. That’s how long it would take to kill a thousand people, and the men with that plan wrote it down, said it out loud, handed it to a general who believed them enough to warn New York five separate times.

New York had a mandate that said no.

That’s the story underneath every part of this piece, whether the subject is a genocide, a corruption scheme, a pattern of abuse spanning three continents, or a resolution asking every nation on earth to trust a fifteen-year plan. An institution’s stated intentions and an institution’s demonstrated conduct are two different documents, and only one of them tells you what actually happens when the moment arrives. Agenda 2030 says it respects national sovereignty, and by its own text, it does. The Pandemic Agreement says the same, and by its own text, it does too. Neither document is the thing to be afraid of.

What’s worth sitting with is the space between what an institution asks permission for and what it does with the authority it’s already been given. Rwanda had a mandate. It was thin, and it was honored to the letter, and eight hundred thousand people paid for that letter being followed instead of a warning being heeded. Oil-for-Food had oversight structures on paper. Peacekeeping missions have had a zero-tolerance policy on paper since before most of the worst abuses even happened. Agenda 2030 has a sovereignty clause, true by its own text, and a compliance apparatus that raises real questions about what that clause is worth in practice.

Paper isn’t the problem. It never has been. The problem is what happens after the paper is signed, and that’s not a question any resolution can answer in advance. It’s only a question the record can answer after the fact. Rwanda answered it in the worst way imaginable. Agenda 2030’s own numbers are still being written, four years out from its deadline, and what they say about the distance between what an institution asks for and what it actually delivers is something every reader of this piece is equipped to judge for themselves.

The paper trail continues

I do not have a paywall for my work, and I never will. I simply want to expose, through paper trails and documented evidence, the corruption among people and entities holding a great amount of power and influence. I am the wife of a Veteran who serves this Republic, and the greater good for our world, to this day. I do not contribute to our household income, because I left the school system —both public and private— and chose to teach my own children at home rather than be an educator teaching in a classroom within parameters that I believe harm our future generation rather than equip. I add the donate link below, only for your consideration to support even a dollar, if you desire. Yet, your reading my work and sharing truth with just one person is priceless, and I value that action more than any donation.

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Sources

Rwanda

• Roméo Dallaire’s January 11, 1994 cable to UN Headquarters (”the Genocide Fax”)

• Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda (the Carlsson Report), commissioned by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, December 1999

• UN Security Council records on UNAMIR troop reductions, April 1994

• Contemporary reporting on the killing of ten Belgian peacekeepers, April 21, 1994

• Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda, Human Rights Watch / Fédération Internationale des Ligues des Droits de l’Homme, 1999

• National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide (CNLG), Genocide Planification report, January 2021

• Pierre Galand and Michel Chossudovsky, report on the role of international financial institutions and creditors in the Rwandan genocide, 1996 (source of the Rwandan customs import data on machetes)

• International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, indictment of Félicien Kabuga

Agenda 2030

• UN General Assembly Resolution A/RES/70/1, “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” adopted September 25, 2015

• The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2026, United Nations, released July 7, 2026

• Sustainable Development Report 2026, UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, released June 23, 2026

The Pandemic Agreement

• WHO Pandemic Agreement, adopted by consensus at the 78th World Health Assembly, May 20, 2025

• Reporting on U.S. nonparticipation following its January 2025 withdrawal from the WHO

• Peer-reviewed implementation analysis, WHO-affiliated literature, on member state objections to the Agreement’s binding provisions

Oil-for-Food

• Independent Inquiry Committee (Volcker Committee) final report, October 2005

• Kofi Annan’s statements to the UN Security Council on the Committee’s findings

• Contemporary reporting on related criminal indictments in the United States, Switzerland, and France

Peacekeeper Abuse

• A Comprehensive Strategy to Eliminate Future Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in United Nations Peacekeeping Operations (the Zeid Report), 2005

• UN Office of Internal Oversight Services investigation findings on MONUC, Congo, 2004-2005

• Human Rights Watch investigative reporting on sexual abuse and exploitation by MONUC personnel

• Associated Press investigation of UN sexual abuse and exploitation data, 2017

• Reporting on the 2007 Sri Lankan peacekeeper case in Haiti

• Reporting on 2014-2015 Central African Republic abuse allegations involving Burundian and Gabonese peacekeepers

• UN report on sexual abuse allegations tied to the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission in Haiti, April 2026

Religious Freedom Context

• U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, 2026 Annual Report

The World Economic Forum doesn’t hide what it is. It publishes, announces, sends out press releases about it, and posts the videos on its own website.

What it counts on is that most people are too busy working and too distracted, doomscrolling from mental exhaustion, to ever read the press releases. There’s an entire body of research on those thirty-second TikTok videos and what happens to your brain during that dopamine loop.

I read the press releases and I hope more people will do the same. We ought to pay attention to the agencies shaping the world we live in and our children will inherit.

Before we go further, let me say something directly to the skeptic in the room, because I know you’re there and I respect you for it. The entirety of The Paper Trail is written through the lens of a skeptic. I set my own intuition and conclusions aside. I demand proof. I gather evidence. I hold myself to the same standard I hold every institution or person I write about.

A list this long, connecting this many names to a single organization, can sound like exactly the kind of thing your most conspiracy-minded cousin forwards at Thanksgiving. So let me be clear: not everyone on this list shares an ideology. Not everyone trained by this program emerged from it as an agent of anything. What the documentation lists isn’t a unified conspiracy, but a unified pipeline. One organization with a private selection process for a multi-year training program feeding people into the positions that shape your daily life before you ever had a chance to vote for or against them.

No theory, it’s just what Klaus Schwab said out loud in his own words.

I’m not writing this to tell you the World Economic Forum, or anyone connected to it, is evil. I’m showing you what’s documented: the reach of one unelected organization, and a string of names and events tied to it that have already raised more than an eyebrow on their own, without my help. What that adds up to is yours to decide.

The World Economic Forum was founded in 1971 by a German professor named Klaus Schwab as a non-profit foundation under Swiss law, headquartered in Cologny, just outside Geneva, and supervised by the Swiss federal government. It hosts an annual meeting in Davos, a ski resort in the Swiss Alps, where heads of state, central bankers, CEOs of the world’s largest corporations, media figures, celebrities, and representatives of international organizations gather each January to discuss the state of the world.

No one elected them to do this.

The World Economic Forum is a private organization, because it’s an NGO. Quite clever, eh? Its members aren’t chosen by voters. Its agenda isn’t approved by any legislature, nor do its recommendations carry any legal authority. And yet the people who implement policy in the governments, banks, media organizations, and international institutions that shape your daily life attend its meetings, participate in its programs, and in many cases were trained by it before they ever held public office.

But the World Economic Forum didn’t emerge out of thin air, and its roots tell you something important about what it was always meant to be.

In the 1960s, Schwab studied at Harvard under Professor Henry Kissinger, with whom he formed what has been described as a lifelong friendship. Kissinger at that time was directing the Harvard International Seminar, a program it was later revealed had been funded by the Central Intelligence Agency to the tune of $135,000. The CIA funding was exposed the year Schwab left Harvard. Kissinger recruited Schwab and introduced him to John Kenneth Galbraith and Herman Kahn, both connected to the Council on Foreign Relations. The founding panel that shaped what would become the WEF included Melvin Conant of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and a representative of a research center funded by Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie money.

Kissinger first spoke at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in 1980, declaring the world had entered an age of global interdependence. He appeared at Davos as recently as 2022, in conversation with Schwab, discussing the war in Ukraine and the reshaping of the global order. His profile remains on the WEF’s own website to this day.

The Rockefeller Foundation is currently listed as a formal WEF partner, described on the WEF’s site as working across health, food, power, and economic mobility.

So: a CIA-funded Harvard program produced the founder. Rockefeller money was present at the creation. Kissinger spoke at Davos from 1980 until his death. And the Rockefeller Foundation is a current documented partner.

The organization Klaus Schwab built didn’t emerge from European idealism, but from the American national security and financial establishment of the Cold War era, carrying those roots into the twenty-first century while presenting itself to the world as a neutral Swiss philanthropy.

Schwab understood exactly what he was building. In a 2017 interview, he said the Forum takes pride in how its Young Global Leaders program lets it, in his own words, “penetrate the global cabinets of countries.” Penetrate. His word, on record, and published.

He said it more than once, and more than one way. At a public reception for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Schwab told the room that more than half of Trudeau’s cabinet were, in his words, “actually Young Global Leaders.”

More than half of a sitting prime minister’s cabinet. Trained by a private Swiss foundation before they ever held public office. Named by its own founder, on the record.

The Young Global Leaders program, formerly called Global Leaders for Tomorrow when it was founded in 1992, isn’t a public conference. It’s a private, multi-year instructional seminar. Candidates are screened without their knowledge before being invited to apply. They’re nominated by existing alumni, serve six-year terms, and are subject to veto during the selection process.

Over 1,400 people have completed the program. They come from more than 120 countries. And the list of their names is the most important document in this installment.

Read it slowly.

Heads of government and senior officials trained by the World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders program:

Vladimir Putin. Emmanuel Macron. Justin Trudeau. Angela Merkel. Jacinda Ardern. Sanna Marin. Tony Blair. Boris Johnson. Alexander De Croo, Prime Minister of Belgium. Mamuka Bakhtadze, former Prime Minister of Georgia. Carlos Alvarado Quesada, President of Costa Rica. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is listed as an unspecified WEF member.

Media figures trained by the program:

George Stephanopoulos. Anderson Cooper (son of Gloria Vanderbilt). Van Jones. Sanjay Gupta. Leana Wen. Maria Bartiromo. Bret Stephens. Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Pause on Leana Wen for one moment. She was recruited to the Young Global Leaders program because of her role as a professor of health policy. Years later, when CNN needed a COVID expert to appear on camera and tell the American public what to think about a pandemic, it chose Leana Wen out of every health policy academic in the country.

She’d already been trained.

Business and finance figures connected to the WEF:

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, sits on the WEF board. Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, is a WEF Agenda Contributor. Jeff Bezos is a WEF Agenda Contributor. George Soros is a WEF Agenda Contributor. He’s delivered speeches from the Davos stage itself. The Open Society Foundations doesn’t write checks to the World Economic Forum. It doesn’t need to. The two organizations fund many of the same groups across more than a hundred countries, pointed in the same direction, each without a single vote ever being cast. If you read the previous installment of The Paper Trail, you already know who George Soros is. What this piece shows you is that he wasn’t operating alone. He was operating in the same room.

Bill Gates was selected as a Young Global Leader in 1993, decades before Event 201, decades before the Gates Foundation became the largest co-sponsor of pandemic preparedness exercises on earth. Mark Zuckerberg. Jeff Bezos. Peter Thiel. Sam Altman, the architect of OpenAI. The men who built the platforms that decide what you see, what you buy, and increasingly, what you’re permitted to say, were trained inside the same program before any of those platforms existed at scale.

American politicians across the political spectrum:

Pete Buttigieg. Gavin Newsom. Nikki Haley. Dan Crenshaw. Adam Kinzinger. Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s closest aide for over two decades. This isn’t a partisan list. The program doesn’t appear to care which party trains the next generation of American leadership, only that it does.

Celebrities and cultural figures:

Leonardo DiCaprio, recruited to the Young Global Leaders program in 2008, addressed the United Nations on climate change in 2014. Bono, Young Global Leaders program, 1993. Ashton Kutcher. Charlize Theron. Wyclef Jean. Priyanka Chopra. Chris Tucker. Roger Federer. Megan Rapinoe. Tony Hawk. Yo-Yo Ma, who also sits on the WEF board.

These aren’t people who attended a conference. They were trained. In a private, multi-year program, nominated by people who’d already been through the same program. Klaus Schwab called it penetration into all important areas of the world. It appears the goal was well met, even exceeded.

The WEF has a strong theme around globalization. Davos meetings and initiatives routinely focus on sustaining and evolving globalization, and the WEF even posted on its own website, this sentence before eventually deleting it: “You will own nothing. And you will be happy.”

Deleted things have screenshots. The internet remembers.

In 2020, Klaus Schwab published a book called COVID-19: The Great Reset. In it he described what the post-pandemic world should look like: a restructured global economy, redesigned social contracts, transformed institutions of government. He wrote that the pandemic represented, in his own words, “a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.”

The same year that people were following arrows on grocery store floors. The same year that two empty hospital ships sat in American harbors while nursing home directors were ordered to admit COVID-positive patients. The same year that the Event 201 recommendation to suppress counter messages was being implemented across every major social media platform.

Klaus Schwab saw that year as a rare window of opportunity.

Now we arrive at the thread that connects the World Economic Forum to the first installment in The Paper Trail series.

Jeffrey Epstein called himself the Davos concierge. That’s his own word for himself, documented in emails released by the United States Department of Justice. For years, before and after his 2008 conviction on charges including procuring a child for prostitution, Epstein used the lure of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting to broker meetings between his contacts and the billionaires and government officials who gathered there. He promised access. He delivered introductions. He operated in the margins of the most powerful private gathering on earth.

DOJ documents and emails from Epstein’s Yahoo account show him arranging meetings at Davos between senior European politicians and financial executives. In January 2008, while under investigation for crimes against children, he connected an Emirati billionaire to the European competition commissioner. In 2010 he arranged meetings between the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer and a senior JP Morgan executive.

In 2013 he wrote to Larry Summers, former US Secretary of the Treasury, suggesting they coordinate a meeting at Davos.

Borge Brende, President and Chief Executive Officer of the World Economic Forum since 2017 and former Norwegian foreign minister, had attended at least three business dinners at Epstein’s Manhattan home. He’d exchanged emails and text messages with him. After one dinner, he emailed Epstein to say the conversation had given him plenty to think about, and closed by calling him, in his words, “a brilliant host.”

Epstein replied that both he and a guest were, in his words, “very impressed with you.”

In another exchange Brende wrote just four words: “Missing you Sir. —Borge.”

On February 26, 2026, following an independent investigation and the release of those documents, Borge Brende resigned as President and CEO of the World Economic Forum.

Klaus Schwab had already resigned the year before, in April 2025, after anonymous whistleblowers alleged misconduct including mistreating employees and misusing organizational funds. The WEF board’s own investigation, concluded that August, found no evidence of material wrongdoing by Schwab. It did note minor irregularities stemming from blurred lines between personal contributions and Forum operations.

The founder of the organization that penetrates global cabinets resigned amid a whistleblower investigation that ultimately cleared him. His successor resigned after DOJ documents showed him corresponding warmly with a convicted child sex offender.

The organization continues.

Trained Young Global Leaders continue to hold the positions they were placed in before most voters knew the program existed. None of them were chosen by the people they now govern, inform, or sell to. They were chosen by an organization in Geneva.

I read the press releases.

I followed the thread.

It started with a hotel in Manhattan on a Friday morning in October 2019, where fifteen people gathered to design the communications architecture for a pandemic that began thirty days later. It ran through the nursing homes of New York, where people died alone while governors signed directives and then falsified the counts. It ran through a cow pasture in Georgia where someone carved instructions for the post-apocalyptic management of the human race into granite and hid their name. It ran through twenty-five centuries of censorship, from the censor of Rome to the checkbook of George Soros, a man who fancied himself a god and spent thirty-two billion dollars on the proof.

And it runs here.

To a private organization born from a CIA-funded Harvard program, carrying Rockefeller and Kissinger DNA from its first days, registered under Swiss law, meeting annually in a ski resort, training the people who run the governments and the banks and the newsrooms and the health agencies of one hundred and twenty countries, in a program most voters have never heard of, selected without the candidates’ knowledge, nominated by people who were already in the program, serving six-year terms with no public oversight and no democratic accountability of any kind.

The CEO wrote missing you sir to a convicted child sex offender and resigned when the documents came out.

And somewhere in the margin of all of it, a man who called himself the Davos concierge was brokering access to the world’s most powerful people from the margins of the most powerful private gathering on earth, before and after his conviction for procuring a child for prostitution, until the day he died by suicide in a federal jail cell while facing sex trafficking charges.

The pattern isn’t hidden. It never was.

It’s published on their websites and in their press releases. It’s in the DOJ documents. It is in Schwab’s own book. It’s in the resignation letters of the men who ran the organization until the files came out.

I didn’t need aa gift or any special insight to find any of this. I only needed to read what they’d already published.

And so, now, have you.

The paper trail continues.

Buy Momma Jess a Coffee

Sources

1. World Economic Forum. About page and founding history. weforum.org

2. Klaus Schwab interview, 2017. Quote: “penetrate the global cabinets of countries.”

3. Klaus Schwab. Public remarks at reception for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Quote: “actually Young Global Leaders.” Documented via Door to Freedom and multiple secondary sources citing WEF/Trudeau footage.

4. Young Global Leaders, Wikipedia. Program founded 1992 as Global Leaders for Tomorrow. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Global_Leaders

5. World Economic Forum. From Entrepreneurs to Scientists: Meet the 2022 Class of Young Global Leaders. Press release, April 20, 2022. weforum.org

6. World Economic Forum. Meet the Young Global Leaders Class of 2025. Press release, April 15, 2025. weforum.org

7. Human Events. Who Are the World Economic Forum’s ‘Young Global Leaders?’ The Names May Surprise You. November 10, 2022. humanevents.com

8. Swiss Policy Research. The WEF Young Global Leaders. Comprehensive alumni documentation. swprs.org/wef-young-global-leaders

9. Door to Freedom. The Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum. doortofreedom.org

10. Wikispooks. WEF/Young Global Leaders documentation, including Schwab penetration quote with citation.

11. World Economic Forum. “You will own nothing and you will be happy,” original WEF publication, subsequently deleted. Archived via Wayback Machine.

12. Schwab, Klaus and Malleret, Thierry. COVID-19: The Great Reset. Forum Publishing, 2020.

13. Henry A. Kissinger. World Economic Forum profile page. weforum.org/people/henry-a-kissinger

14. World Economic Forum. Kissinger: The challenges facing the world right now. Davos 2022 session. weforum.org/stories/2022/05/kissinger-these-are-the-main-geopolitical-challenges-facing-the-world-right-now

15. Shukla, Ashish. The man who runs the World Economic Forum you know nothing about. Medium. Documentation of Kissinger-Schwab Harvard relationship and CIA-funded seminar. ashishshukla-92505.medium.com

16. Truth In News. Henry Kissinger Was The REAL WEF Creator. Documentation of founding panel including Rockefeller Standard Oil and Rockefeller/Ford/Carnegie-funded research center. thinkaboutit.online

17. Dartmouth News. Kissinger Enjoyed Close Ties With Nelson Rockefeller. November 2023. home.dartmouth.edu

18. Rockefeller Foundation. World Economic Forum partner page. weforum.org/organizations/the-rockefeller-foundation

19. Oxford Academic / Socio-Economic Review. Rise and fall of private advocacy forums. Documentation of Rockefeller connections to WEF founding era. academic.oup.com/ser

20. George Soros. World Economic Forum Agenda Contributor profile. weforum.org/stories/authors/georgesoros

21. Foreign Policy. Philanthropist George Soros delivers speech on sidelines of World Economic Forum in Davos, January 24, 2019. foreignpolicy.com

22. Bloomberg. Jeffrey Epstein Davos Emails Reveal His Use of WEF to Broker Elite Meetings. February 17, 2026. bloomberg.com

23. SWI swissinfo.ch. Davos ‘Concierge’ Jeffrey Epstein Used WEF to Broker Elite Meetings. February 17, 2026. swissinfo.ch

24. The Hill. WEF CEO Brende Epstein emails dinners probe. February 6, 2026. thehill.com

25. Al Jazeera. World Economic Forum head Borge Brende quits after Epstein links revealed. February 26, 2026. aljazeera.com

26. Fox News. World Economic Forum faces fresh scrutiny as Epstein ties revive past scandals, criticism. March 14, 2026. foxnews.com

27. US Department of Justice. Epstein files document release, 2026. Source of Brende-Epstein correspondence and Davos networking emails.

28. Berndpulch.org. The Davos Connection: WEF Elite and the Epstein Index. Epstein Index Project, forensic data initiative. February 27, 2026.

29. Federal Bureau of Prisons / Office of Inspector General. Official finding: Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide while in federal custody, August 10, 2019, while facing federal sex trafficking charges.

30. World Economic Forum. News release: Board of Trustees concludes investigation into whistleblower allegations against Klaus Schwab, finds no evidence of material wrongdoing. August 15, 2025. weforum.org/press/2025/08/news-release

31. CNN Business. WEF CEO Børge Brende steps down as the Epstein files claim another top executive. Confirms Schwab stepped down as chair in April 2025, cleared by August 2025 investigation. February 26, 2026. cnn.com

I am not the best tender to plants. Even though I name them and truly love to care for them, inevitably I forget to water and my thumb is closer to black than green. I have killed succulents, which I understand takes a special kind of talent. My friend Lindi gifted me a golden pothos for the fact that these plants really are one of the most forgiving houseplants, and it can come back from looking almost entirely dead, even from a single cutting with one healthy node. You can forget to water it for weeks and it'll just sulk a little, dropping a leaf or two, and then perk right back up the first time you remember it's alive. You can let it get leggy and bare near the base, snip the whole sad stretch of vine clean off, and it'll send out new growth like it never happened. I have read that you can take a single cutting off an otherwise dead plant, root just that one piece in a glass of water, and grow the whole thing back from there. Something in me needed a plant like that. Something that would hold on even when I forgot to hold up my end.

Let me tell you a story about a plant that couldn't recover no matter what.

There’s a science experiment I still think about, all these years later, and I wasn’t even the one who did the experiment. I was just the girl in her mid-twenties working at a high school, a lifetime ago, who wound up in the same classroom that day, probably removing a virus or installing software updates on the teacher’s laptop.

A student had grown two trays of seedlings at home, same soil, same water, same light, same temperature and humidity level, as best a kid running an experiment can control. Every variable she could account for, she’d matched. Except one. She’d set an iPhone down next to one tray and left it there, day and night, right at the start of that stretch of years when all of us were trading in our flip phones for something “smarter”, something that never really slept.

The seedlings without the phone came up thick and green, the way seedlings are supposed to.

The ones next to the phone died.

I remember her standing up there, a kid, on the brink of understanding this thing we now all have glowing in our faces may have consequences we don’t realize. Or, by now, maybe we do, and yet the gadget stays in our hand, our pocket, and on our bedside table as we sleep.

I’ve thought about those trays in correlation to my phone often. Even told my Momma about it this past 4th of July weekend while informing her of EMF protection. If I handed you this story today and told you to treat it as evidence, I’d be lying to you, and you know by now I won’t do that. But I’m not handing it to you as evidence. I’m handing it to you as a door. Because it turns out that teenager wasn’t the only person who’s stood in a room watching something green do something it wasn’t supposed to do.

Back in 1966, a man named Cleve Backster hooked up a polygraph machine, the old lie detector kind he’d spent his career reading, to a plant sitting in his office. He was just curious how fast water would move up through the leaves. But the needle didn’t do what he expected. It jumped the way a person’s does when they’re startled, or scared, or lying. So he thought about burning the leaf, just thought about it, hadn’t even moved toward a match, and the needle jumped again. He went on to run stranger tests, tests involving brine shrimp dying in another room where the plant couldn’t have seen or heard a thing, and the needle kept responding like it knew.

Backster called it primary perception, a kind of awareness that didn’t need eyes or ears or a nervous system to notice what was happening around it. His work became the backbone of a book called The Secret Life of Plants, and it swept through the seventies like a fever, part science, part longing.

Nobody could reproduce what Backster saw under real controls. Researchers tried, at Cornell and elsewhere, and what they found instead was static electricity, shifting humidity, a loose electrode, the ordinary ghosts that haunt any experiment run without enough rigor. Even MythBusters took a crack at it decades later and came up empty on the meaningful readings. Backster, for his part, tended to answer every failed replication by saying the other researchers hadn’t properly removed human consciousness from the room, which is the kind of explanation that can’t ever be proven wrong, and so can’t really be proven right either.

And still… Plants are not the inert, deaf things we were taught to believe in. They signal each other through the air with chemical warnings when something’s chewing on their leaves. They pass resources leaf to leaf, root to root, through fungal networks so extensive that scientists have taken to calling it the wood wide web. They bend toward light with something that looks like desire. None of that is consciousness in the way you and I have it. There’s no brain in there, no self looking out. But there is response. There is a kind of listening, even if it isn’t listening the way we interpret the word.

There’s another thing plants do, and this one isn’t fringe science at all. Any gardener will tell you the same thing an arborist will. A plant only has so much energy to go around, so much water, so much sugar it can make and move. A branch that’s dead or dying doesn’t quietly step aside and let the rest of the plant alone. It keeps drawing. It pulls water toward tissue that will never leaf out again, it gives disease and pests a foothold to spread from, and it shades out the growth that’s still trying to reach the light. That’s why you prune. Not out of tidiness, but because the living parts of the plant cannot fully thrive while they’re still feeding what’s already dead. Cut the dead wood away, and the plant doesn’t just look better, it redirects everything it has toward the branches that can still bear something.

Scripture never had trouble believing the Created world could hear and answer. Isaiah said the mountains and the hills would break out in singing before the Lord, and the trees of the field would clap their hands. Paul told the Romans that all of Creation groans together, like a woman in the pains of labor, waiting on something it can’t yet see. The Psalms are full of rivers clapping and hills singing for joy, and I don’t think the writers meant it only as decoration. I think they meant that the world God made is not a stage set standing empty behind us while the real story happens in human hearts. I think they meant it’s alive to Him, and alive to us, in ways we’ve trained ourselves out of noticing.

And Jesus reached for the very same picture when He wanted us to understand our own lives. I am the true vine, He said, and my Father is the gardener. Every branch that bears no fruit at all, He takes away. And every branch that does bear fruit, He prunes back, so that it can bear more. He goes on to say that a branch cannot produce anything on its own strength, cut off from the vine, and neither can we, cut off from Him. And He doesn’t soften what happens to the branch that stops abiding. It withers. It gets gathered up and burned. It isn’t a threat so much as a description of how a vine actually works, the same way that student’s dying seedlings weren’t a curse, just a plain account of what happens when something living keeps its closest company with something that drains it. Jesus wasn’t inventing a metaphor out of nothing. He was naming what every gardener knows in their hands and calling us to notice it in our souls.

We are, all of us, living through the strangest experiment of our lifetimes, carrying something that hums and glows and never fully rests, keeping it close at hand the way that student kept a phone next to that tray. I don’t know what killed those seedlings. But I know I haven’t forgotten it, and I know that not forgetting it has made me a little more careful about what I let sit close to the things I’m trying to grow, and about what dead wood I’ve let stay attached far longer than it should have. The habits and company that quietly draw on a life without ever giving anything back to it.

Psalm 42 knew what we keep forgetting, that everything made by the same hand still answers when it's called.

Maybe that’s the whole point of a story like this one, Backster’s or the student’s. Not proof. Just a small reminder that we were made for a garden that could hear us calling it by name, long before anybody needed a needle on a dial to tell us so. And some part of us, plant or person, still knows the difference between what gives life and what quietly, invisibly, takes it.

I was sitting on the porch watching the last light go orange through the pines, listening to the woods settle into their evening conversation, the cicadas first, then the tree frogs answering them back the way they always do, call and response, ancient and unhurried, unbothered by a single thing happening in Washington D.C. Somewhere out back a rooster crowed at the fading sun. People don’t always know that about roosters, they don’t just crow at dawn. They crow at sunset too, as if they’re arguing with the dark, insisting the day isn’t finished yet.

I had been reading about birthright citizenship all day.

I do not recommend mixing Supreme Court opinions with a Southern evening. One of them is going to win, and it is not going to be the Supreme Court.

But here is the thing about growing up where I grew up, in a family where the television news ran like background music to whatever else was happening, you absorbed things before you had the vocabulary for them. You heard words like citizenship and jurisdiction and amendment coming out of the TV and your child brain did what child brains do. It translated them into something it could actually understand.

I think I was four years old. Somewhere in the1980s. My Little Ponies were holding court under the coffee table, which was their castle, as was right and proper. The news was on. My parents were talking in the kitchen about the headlines of the time. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was a huge news story and birthright citizenship was part of the surrounding conversation.

I thought about this very seriously for a little girl holding court under the coffee table.

And then I asked:

So if I was born in Japan, I would be Japanese?

My parents paused.

And have pretty eyes just like… this?

You can imagine the rest.

The thing is, I still believe the logic of that question. A baby born on Japanese soil to American parents isn’t Japanese. She is American, carried there, born there by geography and timing, belonging by blood and allegiance to something that has nothing to do with which hospital she arrived in.

I believe the same thing works in reverse. A baby born on American soil to parents who are citizens of another country, who owe their allegiance elsewhere, who are here temporarily or illegally or passing through — that baby is not American by virtue of the address on the birth certificate any more than I would be Japanese for having been born in Tokyo.

That’s not really a radical position. That is, as it happens, what the people who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment said they meant.

The amendment was ratified in 1868. Its purpose was specific and documented and ought to be honored on its own terms: to guarantee citizenship to the formerly enslaved people of this country — men, women, and children who had been born on American soil, raised on American soil, who had built this country with their hands and their blood, and who had been told by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 that they were not and could never be citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment said: they are. They always were.

That is a beautiful and necessary thing. It deserved to be written into the Constitution. It deserved to be enforced with the full weight of federal authority. It still does.

What it was not, what its own authors said it was not, was a blanket guarantee of citizenship to every person physically present on American soil at the moment of birth, regardless of allegiance, regardless of status, regardless of why they were here or for how long. The 1866 Civil Rights Act, which preceded the amendment and informed its language, stated plainly that citizenship applied to persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power. Not subject to any foreign power. A child born to parents who are citizens of another country, who travel here for the express purpose of giving birth, is subject to a foreign power. Her parents are. And the amendment’s own authors said that mattered.

Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan, the principal author of the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause, said so on the Senate floor during debate in 1866. His words are in the Congressional record:

This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.

The man who wrote the clause said foreigners and aliens were not included. That’s not interpretation. That is the author’s own stated intent, preserved in the primary record.

If you need further proof that the original interpretation was narrower than what courts have since applied, consider this: American Indians were not granted citizenship by the Fourteenth Amendment. They were born on this soil. Their families had been here longer than anyone. And Congress had to pass a separate act — the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 — to make them citizens. If the Fourteenth Amendment meant everyone born here regardless of parentage or allegiance, that act would have been redundant. It was not redundant. It was necessary.

June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to uphold birthright citizenship as currently interpreted, striking down President Trump’s executive order. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority that citizenship is the right to have rights. Three justices — Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch — dissented.

Justice Thomas (whom I consider quite a National Treasure) wrote in dissent that the Court had added to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed slaves but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.

Justice Alito put the question plainly: suppose a person’s only connection to this country is that he was born here to a mother who was present just long enough to give birth and then quickly returned to her native country. Suppose that country is a strategic adversary or enemy of the United States. According to this court, that person is a citizen of the United States.

I’m not here to tell you the Supreme Court was wrong in its application of existing precedent. Precedent is what it is. Wong Kim Ark v. United States in 1898 set the interpretation that has governed birthright citizenship ever since, and courts are bound by it.

What I am here to say is: precedent and original intent are not always the same thing. And that a four year old lying under a coffee table with her ponies in the 1980s understood something the legal system has been arguing about ever since. They should probably stop acting like toddlers having a tantrum every three minutes and serve the citizens of this nation.

There is, however, a door left open in the wreckage of yesterday’s ruling, and it was left there deliberately.

Justice Kavanaugh joined the majority but wrote separately to say something the other five did not. He agreed that Trump’s executive order could not stand, but not because the Constitution forbids what Trump was trying to do. It cannot stand, Kavanaugh said, because it conflicts with a federal statute: 8 U.S.C. § 1401, passed by Congress in 1952, which codifies broad birthright citizenship into law. The Constitution itself, in Kavanaugh’s reading, does not lock this policy permanently in place.

A constitutional provision requires a constitutional amendment to change — a process so difficult it has succeeded only twenty-seven times in more than two hundred years. A federal statute requires a simple majority in the House, a simple majority in the Senate, and a president’s signature. Congress could, if it chose, amend the statute. Kavanaugh said so explicitly. His own words:

The Constitution’s Citizenship Clause may well be ambiguous on this precise question. But Congress resolved that ambiguity by codifying birthright citizenship broadly in 8 U.S.C. §1401(a). The executive order doesn’t violate the Constitution — it violates Congress’s statute. And Congress can change that statute.

President Trump heard him. Within hours of the ruling, Republican senators were already announcing plans to reintroduce legislation, including the exact language of a bill written not by Republicans but by then-Senator Harry Reid in 1993, which defined children born to non-citizen mothers as subject to their mother’s foreign jurisdiction, not America’s. Reid’s bill never failed. It simply expired in committee. It can be reintroduced.

The fight isn’t over. It has simply moved from the executive to the legislative branch, which is, constitutionally speaking, exactly where this argument belongs.

You are not what the ground beneath your feet says you are.

You are who your people are. Where your allegiance lives. What you would defend and what you would grieve.

The tree frogs don’t know any of that. They just sing when the light goes.

And the rooster out back keeps arguing with the dark, insisting the day isn’t finished yet.

Maybe he’s right.

I was standing in my living room with a baby on my hip.

It had already been a year of things I didn’t have words for. In February, I watched the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, stand behind President Trump on the floor of Congress and tear his speech in half. On live television. Behind his back. While the chamber cheered or groaned depending on which side of an aisle they occupied that had become something closer to a trench.

By spring we were following arrows on grocery store floors. Masking, some even masked alone in their cars. Keeping six feet of federally recommended distance from other human beings while being assured this was temporary, two weeks, just until we flattened the curve.

By summer Minnesota was burning.

Not a metaphor. Actual fire. The Third Police Precinct. Buildings. Businesses. The life’s work of people who had nothing to do with anything people were burning the city over. And in Seattle, something that officials called an autonomous zone had materialized in the middle of a major American city — a city within a city, ungoverned and celebrated in some quarters as a form of civic expression while the people who actually lived there described something closer to occupation.

A member of the United States Congress, Maxine Waters, told her supporters to confront people in restaurants, in gas stations, in department stores, and make sure they knew they were not welcome anywhere.

The jab was coming. The people who knew something about it were not being encouraged to share what they knew. The message, stripped of its careful language, was this: shut up and take it.

I want to be honest about the timeline. Those years — 2020, 2021, the months that bled into each other without seam — collapsed into something that did not feel like time passing so much as a sustained detonation. The sequence of events gets lost in the blur of it. What doesn’t get lost is the feeling.

The feeling that it was not random.

Chaos does not have a direction. What I was watching had a direction.

His name is George Soros.

You have heard it. Maybe you’ve dismissed it. You may have even been told that saying it out loud is itself a form of bigotry, that the name has become a vessel for antisemitic conspiracy theories and that reasonable people do not traffic in it.

I am going to ask you to set that framing aside for a few minutes. Not because the concern about antisemitism is illegitimate. It is not illegitimate. It is, in fact, a concern George Soros himself has activated deliberately, because the most effective way to insulate a documented record from scrutiny is to make the scrutiny itself the story.

What I am going to show you truly is a paper trail.

It begins in Budapest, in 1944, when a fourteen-year-old Jewish boy named György Schwartz was hidden by his father inside a false identity. His father, a lawyer named Tivadar, had changed the family name to Soros years earlier to avoid the growing tide of antisemitism in Hungary. When the Nazis occupied Budapest, Tivadar arranged for György to pose as the Christian godson of a Hungarian government official named Baumbach. The arrangement kept the boy alive.

Baumbach’s job was to take inventory of Jewish properties being confiscated by the state. György went with him and helped with the inventory. His own father recorded it in his diary.

In December 1998, on CBS’s 60 Minutes, correspondent Steve Kroft asked George Soros — György, now an American billionaire — about that time.

Kroft said: my understanding is that you went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.

Soros said: yes, that’s right. Yes.

Kroft asked: was it difficult?

Soros said: not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t see the connection. But it was — it created no problem at all.

Kroft asked: no sense of guilt?

Soros said: no.

Kroft pressed further. He asked whether Soros had ever thought: I’m Jewish, and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.

Soros said: well, of course I could be on the other side, or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was — well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets. That if I weren’t there — of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would be taking it away, anyhow.

In a funny way. Just like markets.

Somebody else would have taken it anyway.

He didn’t offer that as a confession, but as a justification. The logic of a man who had already decided that the social consequences of what he does are not his concern — applied backward, at fourteen, to the confiscation of his own people’s property.

The same logic he would carry forward for the next eighty years.

You will decide what to make of that. What I will show you is what he did with the decades that followed. And what he said, in his own published words, about who he believed himself to be and what he believed the world should become.

In 1987, George Soros published a book called The Alchemy of Finance. In it he wrote this:

I have always harboured an exaggerated view of my self-importance. To put it bluntly, I fancied myself as some kind of god or an economic reformer like Keynes, or even better, like Einstein. My sense of reality was strong enough to make me realise that these expectations were excessive, and I kept them hidden as a guilty secret.

Six years later, in 1993, he told The Independent of London that the guilty secret had become something else entirely.

It is sort of a disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, he said. But I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.

In 1987 he called it excessive. A guilty secret. Something he kept hidden because reality had not yet caught up with the fantasy. By 1993 he had begun to live it out. And he felt comfortable.

What changed between 1987 and 1993 was not his ambition. What changed was his resources. In September 1992 George Soros shorted the British pound, a single speculative trade that forced the United Kingdom out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, cost the British treasury an estimated three billion pounds in a single day, and made Soros approximately one billion dollars in profit.

He broke the Bank of England. One man. One trade. One day.

He was asked in the same 60 Minutes interview about being blamed for the financial collapse of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan and Russia.

He said: all of the above.

He was also asked, in that same interview, about the social consequences of his financial operations.

I am basically there to make money. I cannot and do not look at the social consequences of what I do.

That sentence is from his own mouth. On camera. In 1998.

Now read what he published.

The sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions.

That is from The Crisis of Global Capitalism, 1998.

We need a new international authority that transcends the sovereignty of states to promote an open society.

That is from The Washington Post, 1999.

The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.

That is from The Atlantic, 2003.

Hijacking fully fueled airliners and using them as suicide bombs was an audacious idea, and its execution could not have been more spectacular.

That is also from The Atlantic, December 2003, describing the September 11 attacks.

These are not things written about George Soros. These are things written by George Soros. In his own books. In his own name. Published and available to anyone who wants to read them.

The sovereignty of states must be subordinated. The United States is the main obstacle. The execution of September 11 could not have been more spectacular.

Now look at what he built.

In 1984, George Soros signed a contract with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. It was the founding document of what would become the Open Society Foundations.

The name came from a book. Karl Popper’s 1945 work The Open Society and Its Enemies argued that free societies require active defense against forces that would close them. Soros read it and built an empire around it. By 2025 that empire had distributed more than $32 billion across more than 120 countries.

The New York Times described it as a sprawling political and philanthropic empire that seeks to advance a liberal, democratic agenda around the globe.

That is the New York Times, owned and controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family since 1896 is certainly not a conservative publication. The newspaper of record describes one man’s private philanthropic network as an empire with a political agenda spanning the globe.

Here is what that empire built in the United States alone.

Beginning in 2015, George Soros began funding district attorney races. Not senate races or presidential campaigns. District attorneys — the men and women who decide, in every county in America, what gets charged, what gets prosecuted, and what gets set aside.

His operation worked through a network of pop-up political action committees established by his longtime treasurer Whitney Tymas. The PACs were created specifically for targeted races. They injected hundreds of thousands of dollars — sometimes millions — into local elections that had never seen that kind of money. Then they dissolved. The candidates won. The PACs disappeared. The money was untraceable to the casual observer but fully documented in campaign finance records available to anyone who looked.

Researchers at the Capital Research Center tracked more than $29 million in documented Soros funding across DA races in at least 30 states between 2016 and 2022.

The names of the recipients are on the record.

Kim Foxx in Cook County, Illinois — Chicago — boosted into office with $2 million in Soros money. Under Foxx, Chicago recorded its largest spike in homicides in more than thirty years. Her office dropped charges against thirty percent of felony defendants during 2020.

Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, supported by more than $2 million funneled through the Pennsylvania Justice and Public Safety PAC. Under Krasner, Philadelphia became the murder capital of the United States among the country’s ten largest cities in 2021. Aggravated assault with a firearm increased eighteen percent. Violent crime overall rose five percent in a single year.

George Gascon in Los Angeles, the beneficiary of nearly $6 million in Soros-connected spending. Murders in Los Angeles climbed from 258 in 2019 to 397 in 2021 — a fifty-five percent increase.

Alvin Bragg in Manhattan. Kim Gardner in St. Louis. Rachael Rollins in Boston. The list runs across thirty states, from the cities you know to the counties you have never heard of.

What all of them shared was a philosophy purchased with the same checkbook. Reduce incarceration. Stop prosecuting quality of life crimes. End cash bail. Treat the criminal justice system as the problem rather than the solution.

And if you asked what institution had the power to reshape the criminal justice system of the most powerful nation on earth without passing a single law or winning a single national election, the answer was sitting in a Manhattan office building with $32 billion and a network of pop-up PACs that dissolved after they had done their work.

Now look at who stood up to celebrate him.

In 1995, George Soros told PBS: I do now have great access in the Clinton administration. There is no question about this. We actually work together as a team.

In 2004, at the Take Back America conference in Washington, Hillary Clinton took the stage to introduce him. She sang his praises. She affirmed a close relationship. She described what he was building as something worth celebrating. The event is preserved on C-SPAN.

By 2016, Soros had donated nearly $11 million to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and three main super PACs. His foundation had given up to $6 million to the Clinton Foundation.

Meanwhile, sovereign governments around the world were reaching a different conclusion about the team.

In 2015, Russia formally declared Open Society Foundations an undesirable organization and banned it from operating on Russian territory. The official statement said the activities of Open Society Foundations represent a threat to the foundations of the constitutional system of the Russian Federation and the security of the state.

In 2016, India’s Ministry of Home Affairs placed Open Society on a watchlist, forbidding it from extending financial assistance to any NGO or individual without prior government permission.

In 2017, Pakistan ordered the foundation to cease operations.

In 2018, Hungary passed what it called the Stop Soros laws, criminalizing the act of aiding undocumented immigrants seeking asylum. Open Society closed its Budapest office and moved to Berlin. Viktor Orbán, who was born in the same country as Soros, called it foreign interference in domestic affairs.

In 2018, Turkey announced the closure of Open Society operations.

During the second presidency of Donald Trump, federal prosecutors were directed to investigate Open Society Foundations.

Russia. India. Pakistan. Hungary. Turkey. The United States.

These are not ideologically aligned governments. They don’t agree on much. What they agreed on — through their own separate processes, in their own separate languages, for their own separately stated reasons — is that one man’s network of privately funded organizations had gone beyond philanthropy into something that threatened the sovereignty of the state.

George Soros wrote in 1998 that the sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international institutions.

Several states declined the invitation.

In 2023, George Soros transferred control of Open Society Foundations to his son Alexander. Thirty-two billion dollars. One hundred and twenty countries. A network of prosecutors, media organizations, civil society groups, and political action committees built over four decades — passed to the next generation like an inheritance.

No election. No accountability. No vote. Because that is precisely what a non-governmental organization is — non-governmental, by definition, unaccountable by design, and in this case, actively shaping the government the rest of us have to live under.

I was standing in my living room with a baby on my hip, watching a country come apart, and feeling something I did not yet have words for.

I have the words now.

What I was watching was not spontaneous. The burning cities had prosecutors who had been purchased in advance. The arrows on the grocery store floors and the mandate to take a jab that no one was permitted to question were products of the same institutional machinery I had been documenting for months — the Event 201 recommendation to flood media with approved information and suppress everything else, the financial incentives that paid hospitals to code everything as COVID, the PCR methodology revised without explanation on inauguration day.

And underneath all of it, funding the organizations that trained the activists, backed the prosecutors, shaped the media narrative, and worked — in the words of the New York Times — to advance a liberal democratic agenda around the globe, was one man.

A man who said in 1987 that he fancied himself a god and kept it as a guilty secret.

A man who said in 1993 that he had begun to live it out and felt comfortable.

A man who said in 1998 that the sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international institutions.

A man who said in 2003 that the United States is the main obstacle to a stable world order.

A man who said on national television that the confiscation of his fellow Jews’ property created no problem at all and that he felt no guilt.

A man who said he cannot and does not look at the social consequences of what he does.

He has been looking at them. For forty years. He has been funding them. He has been building the infrastructure that makes them possible and then stepping back while the pop-up PACs dissolve and the prosecutors take their seats and the sovereign governments that noticed what was happening get labeled authoritarian for noticing.

George Soros didn’t burn Minneapolis. He didn’t write the Event 201 recommendation. He didn’t sign the nursing home directive or falsify the death counts or send the hospital ships that sat empty in the harbor.

He funded the network of organizations and prosecutors and political operations that reshaped the institutional landscape of this country while most people were following arrows on grocery store floors and trying to figure out why their city was on fire.

The baby on my hip is older now. She will inherit whatever we allow to be built while we are not looking.

I am looking.

The man who fancied himself a god donated $32 billion to make his fantasy real, transferred it to his son so it would outlast him, and said on camera that he feels no guilt and sees no problem.

He was not hiding anymore.

And neither are we.

The paper trail continues.

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Sources

1. CBS News: Nancy Pelosi tears up copy of Trump’s State of the Union address. February 4, 2020. C-SPAN preserved footage. c-span.org

2. Minneapolis Third Police Precinct fire, May 28, 2020. Associated Press and Reuters documented reporting.

3. Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ/CHOP), Seattle. Established June 8, 2020. Seattle Times and AP documentation.

4. Representative Maxine Waters. Statement at Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, April 17, 2021. Congressional Record and C-SPAN footage.

5. Kaufman, Michael T. Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire. Knopf, 2002.

6. CBS 60 Minutes. Steve Kroft interview with George Soros. December 20, 1998. Full transcript available via CBS News archives.

7. Soros, Tivadar. Masquerade: The Incredible True Story of How George Soros’ Father Outsmarted the Gestapo. Arcade Publishing, 2001.

8. Soros, George. The Alchemy of Finance. Simon & Schuster, 1987. Republished 2003.

9. The Independent (London). Profile: George Soros: God of All He Surveys. June 3, 1993.

10. Bank of England Black Wednesday documentation, September 16, 1992. HM Treasury records.

11. CBS 60 Minutes. Steve Kroft interview with George Soros. December 20, 1998. Exchange on social consequences of financial speculation.

12. Soros, George. The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered. PublicAffairs, 1998. Quote: sovereignty of states must be subordinated.

13. Soros, George. The Washington Post op-ed, 1999. Quote: new international authority that transcends sovereignty of states.

14. Soros, George. The Bubble of American Supremacy. The Atlantic, December 2003. Quote: main obstacle to stable world order is the United States.

15. Soros, George. The Bubble of American Supremacy. The Atlantic, December 2003. Quote: execution could not have been more spectacular.

16. Open Society Foundations founding document. Contract between Soros Foundation/New York City and Hungarian Academy of Sciences. May 28, 1984.

17. Open Society Foundations. Reported expenditures exceeding $24.2 billion since establishment. opensocietyfoundations.org

18. New York Times description of Open Society Foundations as sprawling political and philanthropic empire. Referenced in multiple NYT profiles.

19. Capital Research Center. Living Room Pundit’s Guide to Soros District Attorneys. Parker Thayer. January 2022. capitalresearch.org

20. Capital Research Center / Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund. Justice for Sale: How George Soros Put Radical Prosecutors in Power. June 2022. policedefense.org

21. Fox News. George Soros-backed district attorney candidates sweep elections. Joe Schoffstall. November 2022.

22. Washington Times. George Soros-funded DAs oversee big cities with skyrocketing crime. August 2020.

23. Campaign finance records: Pennsylvania Justice and Public Safety PAC. Larry Krasner 2017 DA race. State campaign finance filings.

24. Campaign finance records: Soros funding of George Gascon, Los Angeles DA race 2020. California campaign finance filings.

25. Chicago homicide statistics 2020-2021. Chicago Police Department annual reports.

26. Philadelphia homicide statistics 2021. Philadelphia Police Department. Philadelphia became murder capital among 10 largest US cities.

27. Los Angeles homicide statistics 2019-2021. LAPD annual crime reports.

28. George Soros. PBS interview, 1995. Quote: I do now have great access in the Clinton administration. We actually work together as a team.

29. Hillary Clinton introduces George Soros at Take Back America Conference, 2004. C-SPAN archived footage. c-span.org/clip/5154643

30. Washington Times. Hillary Clinton embraces George Soros radical vision. October 20, 2016. Campaign finance analysis: $11 million to Clinton campaign and super PACs.

31. Clinton Foundation IRS Form 990 filings: Open Society Foundations contributions up to $6 million.

32. Russia prosecutor general’s office. Declaration of Open Society Foundations as undesirable organization. November 2015. Reuters documented report.

33. India Ministry of Home Affairs. Open Society Foundations placed on watchlist. 2016. Official government notification.

34. Pakistan government order to Open Society Foundations to cease operations. December 2017. Reuters.

35. Hungary Stop Soros legislation. Passed June 2018. Hungarian Parliament official records.

36. Open Society Foundations announcement of Budapest office closure, relocation to Berlin. May 2018. opensocietyfoundations.org

37. Turkey: Open Society Foundations announced closure of Istanbul and Ankara offices. November 2018.

38. Trump administration direction to federal prosecutors to investigate Open Society Foundations. 2025. Documented in multiple press reports.

39. Open Society Foundations. George Soros transfers leadership to son Alexander Soros, 2023. Announcement: opensocietyfoundations.org

40. Alexander Soros announced layoffs of 40 percent of international staff and significant changes to operating model. 2023.

The truth is stranger, and harder to digest, than fiction.

I can’t help it if I was a well-informed child. I grew up surrounded by adults who enjoyed politics, history, and debates. Reading the newspaper from beginning to end was one of my favorite hobbies, too. Not that the news always handed the public the truth, but I liked to be in the know.

I did not expect to get in trouble for telling the truth. That was my first mistake. The assumption that truth and safety occupied the same space, that a raised hand and a respectful voice were sufficient armor for an inconvenient fact.

Third grade. Ms. Richardson’s classroom. We were doing a math lesson with paper money, the kind that comes in a Monopoly box, pastel colors and obviously pretend. For whatever reason, and decades later I am grateful for whatever reason it was, I raised my hand and waited to be called on.

When she called on me I said: “did you know that the money we get from the bank is just like Monopoly money? It isn’t worth anything. We don’t even have gold anymore!”

My name went on the blackboard. A checkmark beside it. I would miss recess.

I had never had my name on that board. My face burned the way only an eight year old’s face can burn — total, consuming, the awful humiliation of being made an example of in front of every person whose opinion matters to you. I sat with that burning through the rest of the lesson and through the walk to the door while my classmates filed out into the sunlight.

And then, sitting on the red clay hill watching my friends play, the embarrassment finished burning and left something harder behind.

I was ticked off. As much as an eight year old girl can be ticked off.

Because I had raised my hand. I had waited. I had been respectful. And what I said was true. Richard Nixon had taken the United States off the gold standard in 1971, before I was born. The dollar in my mother’s purse was backed by nothing but the government’s word and the public’s willingness to believe it. I had not invented this. I had learned it. And I had connected it to the bright pretend bills spread across my desk and said so out loud.

Ms. Richardson did not tell me I was wrong or why she put my name on the board. Perhaps it was that I interrupted the lesson. Or perhaps I was opening a can of worms that would become inconvenient to explain to my peers.

For the record, Ms. Richardson, wherever you may be: I was right.

I have never forgotten my name on that board, with a checkmark might I add. Because what happened in that classroom was not a teacher correcting a mistaken child. It was an institution encoding its first lesson, the one that comes before reading and arithmetic and everything else, the one that underlies all the others:

Some truths are not welcome.

Learn which ones. Keep the others to yourself.

I did not learn that lesson.

The truth has a way of insisting. It sits in you like a splinter, working its way out regardless of what you decide about it. And eventually you stop deciding and start writing.

What Ms. Richardson’s classroom taught me, what I did not understand until I was old enough and had the resources to trace the pattern backward across twenty-five centuries, is that the checkmark on the board is not a modern invention. It is not a product of political polarization or social media or the particular anxieties of our moment.

It is an ancient tool in the archive of human power.

And it has always worked exactly the same way.

They gave it a name in Rome.

In 443 BC, the Roman Republic created an official government position called the censor. The word itself, from the Latin censere, meaning to judge, tells you everything about what the office was designed to do. The censor conducted the census, managed public morality, and maintained the lists of citizens in good standing. He decided who belonged and who didn’t, what was acceptable and what wasn’t.

The Romans did not invent the impulse. They just gave it a title and a salary.

In 213 BC, the first emperor of a unified China, Qin Shi Huang, ordered the burning of every book in his kingdom. Every book, with the exception of works on agriculture, astronomy, medicine, and divination — knowledge that served the state. Everything else, the philosophy, the history, the poetry, the record of every dynasty that had come before his, went into the fire. Scholars who refused to comply, who hid texts or continued to teach from memory, were buried alive. The historical record suggests 460 of them.

The goal was precise and stated without apology: history would begin with the Qin dynasty. Everything before it would cease to exist. The past was not to be remembered. It was to be replaced.

He was not the last ruler to understand that controlling the past is the most efficient way to control the future.

In 399 BC, a philosopher named Socrates was brought before an Athenian jury on charges of corrupting the youth and acknowledging unorthodox divinities. He had spent his life asking questions in public in search of truth and wisdom. The jury found him guilty and the sentence was death. He drank the hemlock without apology and without recanting.

What Socrates had done, in the language of every institution that has ever silenced an inconvenient voice, was this: he questioned the narrative in search of the truth.

In 8 AD, the Roman poet Ovid was banished from Rome by Emperor Augustus for writing poetry that undermined the emperor’s agenda of moral reform. Ovid’s offense was not that his poetry was false. His offense was that it was inconvenient. Augustus was building a Rome of restored virtue and traditional values. Ovid was writing about love in ways that complicated the project. He was exiled to a remote outpost on the Black Sea, where he spent the rest of his life writing letters home that were never answered.

He died in exile, still writing, never recanting. His books survived him by two thousand years and are available today on your phone for free.

In the first century AD, the Roman statesman and philosopher Seneca was exiled and his works banned by Emperor Nero. Seneca wrote of his situation with the precision of a man who understood exactly what had happened to him:

I am forbidden to enter Rome and to approach the emperor’s ear, for fear lest some truth escape my lips.

For fear lest some truth escape my lips.

He named it clearly and without drama, in a sentence that could have been written yesterday by any one of the doctors who lost hospital privileges in 2020 for questioning a ventilator protocol.

The tools change. The fear does not.

The tools of censorship changed over time, but the goal remained the same.

In 1559, Pope Paul IV established the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Index of Prohibited Books. The Index told Catholics which books they were forbidden to read under pain of mortal sin. Its targets included works of science, philosophy, theology, and literature that the Church considered dangerous to faith and to order.

Galileo, Copernicus, Hobbes, Hume, John Milton, Daniel Defoe, and Voltaire were on it. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables remained on it from 1864 until 1959 because the Church was wary of political revolution and the dangerous idea that liberty, equality, and civic brotherhood were worth fighting for.

The Index was enforced until 1966. Within the living memory of people reading these words right now.

In 1597, Queen Elizabeth I discovered that Shakespeare’s Richard II contained a scene in which a king was deposed from his throne. She ordered it removed from every copy of the play. It did not reappear in print until 1608, after she was dead. A sitting monarch had reached into a work of literature and removed the part she found inconvenient.

In 1933, the part that was found inconvenient was an entire category of human thought.

On the night of May 10, 1933, Nazi students and officials carried books into the public squares of Berlin and dozens of other German cities and set them on fire. Thousands of volumes, reduced to ash in public, by firelight, in front of crowds.

A German poet named Heinrich Heine had written in 1820, more than a hundred years before the fires: where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people too.

He was right. Within a decade the same regime that burned the books was burning the people.

Josef Stalin, with the full resources of the Soviet state, altered photographs to remove the faces of people who had fallen out of favor. Colleagues who had stood beside him in images that documented history were erased. Rome had called it damnatio memoriae — the damning of memory. Stalin called it necessary. The effect was the same: the past was adjusted to match the present’s requirements.

The photographs still exist, before and after, side by side in archives anyone can search today.

Each decade brought a new tool, a new justification, and a new category of inconvenient people whose voices needed managing or information controlled.

In 1956, the Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a program it called COINTELPRO, short for Counter Intelligence Program. Congressional investigations later found that COINTELPRO was responsible for at least 204 burglaries by FBI agents, the use of 1,300 informants, the theft of 12,600 documents, and more than 20,000 illegal actions against American citizens. Not foreign agents. American citizens. On American soil. By their own government.

The most documented target was Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1963, COINTELPRO director William C. Sullivan wrote a memo concluding that King was the most dangerous Negro in the future of this nation. He wrote that it may be unrealistic to limit their actions against King to legalistic proofs that would stand up in court or before Congressional Committees.

Read that sentence carefully. A senior FBI official wrote, in an internal government document, that the law and the Constitution were obstacles to what he intended to do to a man whose crime was organizing nonviolent protests for basic civil rights.

The Bureau wiretapped King’s phones. It bugged his hotel rooms. It harassed publications that wrote favorably about him. It attempted to provoke IRS investigations against him. It sent him a tape to prove he had participated in orgies with prostitutes.

And then it sent him a letter.

The letter, delivered in November 1964, was anonymous. It told King he was done and there was only one way out. It urged him to commit suicide before the tape was released to the media.

COINTELPRO was not fully exposed until 1971, when an activist group broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania and stole classified documents that were sent to newspapers and members of Congress. The Senate’s Church Committee held hearings five years later. Congressional committees concluded that COINTELPRO operations exceeded statutory limits on FBI activity and violated constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and association.

As of January 2026, the COINTELPRO Full Disclosure Act has been introduced in Congress. The full record has still not been released to the public. Fifty years later.

COINTELPRO was the government silencing inconvenient voices. What the Church Committee uncovered next was something more sophisticated, and more disturbing.

The CIA was not merely suppressing the truth. It was manufacturing a replacement.

The Church Committee’s 1976 report confirmed that the CIA had maintained secret relationships with at least fifty American journalists. Carl Bernstein’s landmark 1977 Rolling Stone investigation expanded that number dramatically — more than 400 US press members had secretly carried out assignments for the CIA, including journalists at the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS, and Time magazine.

The Church Committee’s published findings stated directly: the CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets. Senator Church estimated the cost of this misinformation apparatus at $265 million per year to American taxpayers.

The declassified CIA Family Jewels documents confirmed what the Church Committee had uncovered. Memos showed discussions of specific journalists, editorial decisions influenced by agency preferences, and deliberate coordination between intelligence officials and media figures. These were not allegations. These were the agency’s own records.

In February 1976, CIA Director George H.W. Bush announced a new policy: effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any US news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station. He then added that the CIA would continue to welcome the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists.

The paid relationships were over, but the welcome mat remained.

The censor had completed its evolution. It no longer needed to silence inconvenient voices. It had learned to replace them.

While the CIA was placing assets in American newsrooms, the United States Public Health Service was conducting a study in Macon County, Alabama.

In 1932, the USPHS — the federal agency that today houses the CDC, the FDA, the NIH, and the office of the Surgeon General — began the Tuskegee Syphilis Study as an experiment to understand the effects of untreated syphilis in black men. The study involved 600 black men in Macon County, Alabama. The study leaders did not tell the men the truth about the purposes, risks, or benefits of the study.

They told them they were being treated for bad blood. They were not being treated at all.

Although effective treatments to reduce the severity of the disease had existed since the 1920s, and penicillin for the treatment of syphilis was widespread as of 1945, the study investigators withheld treatment and continued to examine the untreated progression of the disease. More than 100 died as a result.

By the end of the study in 1972, only 74 of the test subjects were still alive. Of the original 399 men, 28 had died of syphilis, 100 died of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis.

The study ran for forty years. It was not a secret within the medical establishment. It was an open secret: known, discussed, and protected from public disclosure by the institutional silence of the people who could have ended it.

Peter Buxtun was born in Prague in 1937. His family fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and came to America in 1939. He grew up, attended the University of Oregon, served as a combat medic in the US Army, and eventually went to work as a venereal disease investigator for the United States Public Health Service in San Francisco.

In the early 1960s he walked into the coffee room of his clinic and overheard a colleague talking about a study in Alabama.

He later said: I didn’t want to believe it. This was the Public Health Service. We didn’t do things like that.

But they did. And Buxtun knew it immediately, because a man who held the history of the Nazis conducting medical experiments on prisoners in Germany recognized what he was hearing. He filed an official protest in 1966. He was summoned to Atlanta and chewed out by agency officials for his impertinence. He filed another protest in 1968. It was ignored. He left the Public Health Service, went to law school, and spent years unable to let it go.

In 1972 he gave documents to an Associated Press reporter. Those documents made their way to investigative journalist Jean Heller, who later said of the moment she read them: revulsion. I literally didn’t want the story to be true because I could not believe that that could go on in this country.

On July 25, 1972, the Washington Star published the expose. The following day it appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Congressional hearings followed. A class-action lawsuit produced a ten million dollar settlement. The study was shut down. Forty years after it began.

Peter Buxtun died on May 18, 2024, of Alzheimer’s disease in Rocklin, California. He was 86. The men he tried to save were long gone.

The institution that chewed him out for his impertinence still sets American public health policy.

Now consider what happened in 2020 when a COVID vaccine was developed and health authorities expressed frustration that black Americans were hesitant to receive it. The hesitancy was labeled a misinformation problem. It was studied, analyzed, and managed as a public health communication failure.

It was not a misinformation problem. It was a memory.

The same government that had told 600 black men in Alabama they were being treated when they were being observed — that had withheld a known cure while men died, while wives were infected, while children were born into the consequence of institutional deception — was now asking those same communities to trust its assurances about a new medical intervention developed in record time.

The Event 201 recommendation called for flooding media with fast, accurate, and consistent information and suppressing counter messages. It did not call for acknowledging that the institution delivering those messages had spent forty years lying to the people it was now asking to comply.

That omission isn’t an oversight. It’s the mechanism.

In 1971, the same year COINTELPRO was exposed, a defense analyst named Daniel Ellsberg leaked a classified 47-volume Pentagon study to the New York Times. The study, commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, documented what four successive presidential administrations had actually known and done in Vietnam, and how systematically they had lied about it to Congress and to the American people.

The Nixon administration obtained a court order forcing the Times to stop publishing. It was the first time in American history that the federal government had used prior restraint to stop a newspaper from printing the news. The Washington Post began publishing the same documents. The government sued them too. Within two weeks, fifteen newspapers were publishing portions of the Pentagon Papers and the government was suing all of them.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the press.

The administration then charged Ellsberg under the Espionage Act — not for passing information to a foreign enemy, but for informing the American public about their own government’s conduct. It was the first time a source for a journalist had been charged under that law. The charges were eventually dismissed after it emerged that the Nixon White House had ordered the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in an attempt to find damaging personal information. The same people who burglarized the psychiatrist’s office later burglarized the Watergate complex. The president of the United States resigned.

One act of suppression. One chain of consequences.

In 1977, the 95th Congress opened hearings into the CIA’s top secret mind control research program, code named MK Ultra. The program had run for decades. Its existence was not in dispute. When a survivor attempted to testify before the Congressional Permanent Select Committees on Intelligence Oversight in 1995, the National Security Act was invoked to censor that testimony. The official record was closed. The testimony was published as a book instead because the official channels had been deliberately shut.

In the months before March 2003, a body of intelligence assessments was presented to the American public as settled fact. Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The evidence was solid. The case was beyond dispute.

What was not presented to the public: the International Atomic Energy Agency had already delivered a judgment, a full month before the invasion, that the aluminum tube claims at the center of the nuclear argument were incorrect. A document cited as evidence of Iraqi deception was later revealed to be plagiarized from a graduate student’s dissertation describing Iraq’s weapons programs in 1990 — not 2003. Senate Intelligence Committee investigators later confirmed that senior officials had cherry-picked raw intelligence to support a political position that had already been decided.

The United States invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003.

No weapons of mass destruction were found.

David Kay, the man appointed to lead the postwar weapons search, testified before the United States Senate on January 29, 2004: we were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2004 report confirmed that analysts had overstated the certainty of their conclusions and that the intelligence had been shaped to fit a conclusion that preceded it.

Hundreds of thousands of people died on the basis of information that the record shows was managed, shaped, and presented without the inconvenient parts. A full installment on 9/11 and on January 6 will be published at a later date not yet determined. Each deserves their own piece.

In 2021, the primary system the United States government uses to track adverse events following vaccination — the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, known as VAERS — began receiving reports of myocarditis following COVID-19 mRNA vaccination. The numbers were not ambiguous. Peer-reviewed research confirmed that in 2021 there was a dramatic increase in myocarditis reports linked to the COVID-19 vaccine, far higher than reports from all other vaccines combined over the previous thirty years. The signal was strongest in young males.

The response wasn’t an investigation. The response was discrediting. Studies analyzing VAERS data were dismissed as unreliable. Physicians who raised concerns publicly found themselves facing the same professional consequences that had greeted doctors who questioned ventilator protocols in 2020. The data existed. It was inconvenient. And it was managed.

In September 2016, federal investigators discovered a laptop belonging to former congressman Anthony Weiner containing hundreds of thousands of emails connected to the closed investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information. Among the files was a folder labeled life insurance.

In November 2016, FBI Headquarters blocked the Clinton Foundation investigative team from accessing the laptop’s contents. Deputy Director Andrew McCabe recommended the material be routed to a different team. Senate Judiciary Committee records later confirmed that after the investigation was reopened in 2017, prosecutors were provided with documents that omitted information about FBI and DOJ leadership’s interference.

The life insurance folder has never been publicly disclosed as of the date of this article.

On October 18, 2019, fifteen people gathered in a luxury hotel in Manhattan and recommended that governments partner with social media companies to flood media with fast, accurate, and consistent information — and that counter messages be suppressed including through the use of technology.

They called the counter messages misinformation.

They published the recommendation in January 2020.

By spring of that year, posts were being removed. Accounts were being suspended. Doctors were losing privileges. A Nobel Prize winner’s concerns about PCR methodology were dismissed without engagement. A laboratory origin hypothesis supported by credentialed scientists was labeled a conspiracy theory and quietly deleted from platforms used by billions of people.

The bonfire was still burning. It had just moved indoors.

Ms. Richardson put my name on the board in third grade because I said something true that complicated the lesson she was trying to teach. She did not tell me I was wrong. She could not tell me I was wrong. She simply made clear that the truth I had offered was not welcome in that room.

Qin Shi Huang burned the books because they complicated the dynasty he was trying to build. He did not argue with Confucius. He buried the people who taught him.

The scale is different. The mechanism is identical.

Some truths are not welcome here.

That lesson has been taught in every language, in every century, by every institution that has ever held enough power to enforce it. It has been taught with hemlock and exile and bonfires and blacklists and anonymous letters urging men to kill themselves and cherry-picked intelligence that sent soldiers to die and checkmarks on blackboards and the quiet removal of posts from platforms in the middle of the night.

It has never, in twenty-five centuries of trying, permanently worked.

Socrates is still being read. Galileo’s observations still govern our understanding of the solar system. Les Misérables is still in print. The burned books were rebuilt from memory by the scholars who survived. The altered photographs exist in archives beside the originals. The Pentagon Papers are in every university library. The laboratory origin hypothesis is now an active area of scientific inquiry acknowledged by the FBI, the Department of Energy, and the Senate. The COINTELPRO files are being demanded in Congress fifty years after the program ended.

And a third grade girl who missed recess for telling the truth is sitting down to write it all out again.

The truth has a way of insisting.

The paper trail continues.

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Sources

1. Livy, History of Rome. On the office of censor, 443 BC. Translated J.C. Yardley. Harvard University Press.

2. Dirk Rohmann, “Book Burning as Conflict Management in the Roman Empire (213 BC-200 CE).” Ancient Society 43 (2013).

3. Frederick H. Cramer, “Book Burning and Censorship in Ancient Rome.” Journal of the History of Ideas 6.2 (1945): 157-196.

4. Plato, Apology. On the trial and death of Socrates, 399 BC. Primary source.

5. Ovid, Tristia. Letters from exile, 8 AD. Primary source.

6. Seneca, Letters from a Stoic. Trans. R.M. Basore. Primary source.

7. Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Pope Paul IV, 1559. Last issued 1948, abolished 1966.

8. Catholic Church records: Index Librorum Prohibitorum entries for Galileo, Copernicus, Hobbes, Hume, Milton, Defoe, Voltaire, Hugo.

9. Shakespeare, Richard II. First folio documentation of the deposition scene removal by order of Queen Elizabeth I, 1597.

10. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Documentation of Nazi book burnings, May 10, 1933. ushmm.org

11. Heinrich Heine, Almansor: A Tragedy (1820). Original publication of the book-burning prophecy.

12. David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia. Metropolitan Books, 1997.

13. Executive Order 11615, President Richard M. Nixon, August 15, 1971: Suspension of convertibility of the dollar to gold.

14. FBI COINTELPRO Records. Vault.FBI.gov. Released under FOIA. vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro

15. U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee). Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans. Senate Report No. 94-755, Book II. 1976.

16. FBI-King Suicide Letter. Discovered during Church Committee hearings, 1975. National Archives and Records Administration.

17. Sullivan, William C. Internal FBI Memo on Martin Luther King Jr., 1963. Declassified and published in Church Committee records.

18. Federal court findings: COINTELPRO responsible for 204 burglaries, 1,300 informants, 12,600 stolen documents, 20,000 illegal actions. Cited in Church Committee Report, 1976.

19. Congresswoman Summer Lee. Press Release: COINTELPRO Full Disclosure Act introduced January 22, 2026. summerlee.house.gov

20. U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations (Church Committee). Final Report, Book I: Foreign and Military Intelligence. April 1976. U.S. Government Publishing Office.

21. Bernstein, Carl. “The CIA and the Media.” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.

22. CIA Family Jewels Documents. Declassified and released June 2007. Available at CIA.gov reading room.

23. CIA Director George H.W. Bush. Public statement on new journalist relationship policy, February 1976.

24. United States Public Health Service, Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, 1932-1972. National Archives and Records Administration.

25. Buxtun, Peter. Official protest letter to Chief of Venereal Disease Branch, CDC, 1966. Documented in Reverby, Susan. Tuskegee’s Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

26. Associated Press, Jean Heller. “Syphilis Victims in U.S. Study Went Untreated for 40 Years.” July 25, 1972. Washington Star; reprinted New York Times July 26, 1972.

27. NAACP v. United States. $10 million out-of-court settlement, 1974.

28. President William J. Clinton. Formal apology to Tuskegee study survivors. White House ceremony, May 16, 1997.

29. Peter Buxtun obituary. Died May 18, 2024, Rocklin, California. Alzheimer’s disease. Age 86. Reported by AP, NPR, Washington Post, July 2024.

30. Ellsberg, Daniel. Pentagon Papers leaked to New York Times, June 13, 1971. National Security Archive, George Washington University. nsarchive.gwu.edu

31. New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971). U.S. Supreme Court, decided June 30, 1971.

32. U.S. Department of Justice. Charges against Daniel Ellsberg under Espionage Act of 1917, 1971. Dismissed May 1973.

33. Freedom of the Press Foundation: The Pentagon Papers documentation. freedom.press

34. U.S. Senate, 95th Congress. Hearings on CIA MK Ultra program, August 3, 1977. Congressional Record.

35. National Security Act of 1947, invoked to suppress congressional testimony, 1995. Documented in O’Brien, Cathy and Phillips, Mark. TRANCE Formation of America. Reality Marketing, 1995.

36. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Report on Pre-War Intelligence Assessments on Iraq. Released July 9, 2004.

37. International Atomic Energy Agency. Interim judgment on aluminum tube claims, February 2003.

38. Kay, David. Testimony before the U.S. Senate, January 29, 2004: “We were almost all wrong.”

39. Arms Control Association. Intelligence and Arms Control Experts Analyze Powell’s UN Speech. February 2004. armscontrol.org

40. Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Event 201 Joint Statement, January 17, 2020. centerforhealthsecurity.org

41. Event 201 Recommendation 7: Communications. Published October 18, 2019. centerforhealthsecurity.org

42. Facebook policy change announcement, May 2021: Removal of policy prohibiting posts suggesting COVID-19 was man-made.

43. Office of the Director of National Intelligence: Declassified COVID-19 Origins Assessment, 2023.

44. U.S. Senate report on COVID-19 origins, October 2022: Laboratory leak as most likely origin.

45. FBI Director Christopher Wray, public statement on COVID-19 origin assessment, February 2023.

46. U.S. Department of Energy assessment: COVID-19 most likely originated from laboratory leak, February 2023.

47. Peer-reviewed findings: myocarditis reports in 2021 exceeded all other vaccines combined over previous 30 years. Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine, 2024. onlinelibrary.wiley.com

48. Lai et al. “Risk of myocarditis after three doses of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in the United States, 2020-2022.” Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine, 2024.

49. CDC MMWR: Reports of myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination, particularly among young male vaccine recipients, April 2021. cdc.gov

50. U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York. Search warrant for Anthony Weiner laptop, September 26, 2016.

51. Senate Judiciary Committee. New Records Reveal DOJ’s Yearslong Efforts to Shut Down Investigation into Clinton Foundation. judiciary.senate.gov

52. U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Senator Ron Johnson letter to DOJ regarding Weiner laptop investigation. hsgac.senate.gov

The state of Georgia is known for a number of interesting things along the state’s history. Peaches, for sure, although peanuts remain the number one crop. The birthplace of Coca-Cola and countless musicians shaping culture – Ray Charles, Alan Jackson, and my personal favorite, The Allman Brothers Band – just to name a few. Georgia is home to a number of spectacular geographical miracles like Amicalola Falls, Tallulah Gorge, and the Okefenokee Swamp. The Chattahoochee river is the dividing line between Georgia and Alabama, and has been turned into a whitewater rafting adventure. I’m from the area and I know that we call the River the black death and the drowning machine for a reason. As much as I love to look at her and the wonder of her underwater vortex surface, I know good and well if that current snatches you under, you ain’t coming back up.

I lived in Georgia for more than forty years before I broke the age old rule and moved across the River to Sweet Home Alabama.

I was born in Georgia when Ronald Reagan was in the White House and the Cold War still felt like it might end the world. I was there through the nineties, through September 2001, through every election and every crisis and every ordinary humid day that makes up a life lived in one place for a very long time. I know a good bit about the state and the history.

I never once heard of the Georgia Guidestones.

Not from a neighbor. Not from a history teacher. Not from a news broadcast or a road sign or a conversation at a church potluck. Ninety miles east of Atlanta, in a cow pasture in Elbert County, stood a granite monument nineteen feet tall, weighing nearly 120 Tons, inscribed with instructions for the future of the human race in eight modern languages and four ancient ones. It had been there since 1980. It drew 20,000 visitors a year by the time it was destroyed in 2022.

I found out about it while researching The Paper Trail.

That little detail matters more than it might seem. I had already been writing about population control, about forced sterilization programs, forced abortion policies, pandemics, wars, about the documented machinery by which powerful institutions have decided, in various eras and various languages, that there are too many of the wrong kinds of people on the earth. I had already been sitting with that material when I came across a granite monument in my home state that said, in plain English, chiseled into stone meant to outlast civilization itself:

Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.

The current world population is eight billion people.

Someone built a monument in Georgia during my lifetime to say that number needs to come down by roughly 93 percent. And they built it anonymously, which means they either expected no consequences or they knew exactly what consequences to avoid.

Both possibilities are worth considering.

In June of 1979, a man walked into the offices of the Elberton Granite Finishing Company in Elbert County, Georgia.

He gave his name as R.C. Christian. It was not his name.

He told Joe Fendley, the company’s president, that he represented a small group of loyal people who had been secretly planning a granite monument for twenty years. He said they believed civilization was heading toward catastrophe — social, nuclear, or economic — and they wanted to leave instructions for whatever remained of humanity on the other side of it. He had specifications, a scale model, and knew exactly what he wanted.

Fendley thought he was a nut.

He responded the way a reasonable businessman responds to someone he wants to get rid of: he quoted a price several times higher than anything the company had previously undertaken, a number designed to send the man back out the door he came in through.

R.C. Christian accepted it without hesitation.

Fendley passed him to the local banker, Wyatt Martin, reasoning that if Christian could actually produce the funds, the project might be worth taking seriously. Martin met with Christian and told him he would need to provide his real name for the financial arrangements to proceed.

Christian provided it. He also had Martin sign a non-disclosure agreement and made him promise to destroy all the paperwork once the project was complete. Martin agreed. He kept Christian’s secret for the rest of his life. He took it to his grave.

From that point forward, Christian communicated with Martin only by mail. The letters came from cities all over the country and never from the same place twice.

The monument was completed in nine months. It was unveiled on March 22, 1980, before an audience of between 200 and 400 people, depending on the account. A congressman was present. A message was read on behalf of the sponsors: ‘we believe our precepts are sound and they must stand on their own merits’.

The name of the group was never disclosed and the identity of R.C. Christian was never confirmed. A documentary filmmaker in 2015 claimed to have found him, a man named Herbert Kersten, with alleged ties to eugenics organizations and Rosicrucian philosophy. Though the claim was never proven, the pseudonym itself is widely understood as a reference to Christian Rosenkreutz, the legendary founder of the Rosicrucian order — a secretive mystical brotherhood whose origins trace to fifteenth century Germany.

Whether that connection is intentional or coincidental, no one alive can say with certainty.

What can be said is this: someone spent the equivalent of $400,000 in today’s dollars to chisel a message into granite designed to outlast human civilization, then made absolutely certain no one would ever know who they were.

That’s not quite the behavior of a person with nothing to hide. Its also not the behavior of a person who expected to face consequences. In other words, it just don’t add up.

And the behavior of a person who was very confident about what was coming.

The monument was built from stone quarried at a place called Pyramid Quarry.

Three miles west of Elberton, where workers had to dig more than one hundred feet into the earth to find slabs of granite large enough for what R.C. Christian had in mind. Pyramid Blue Granite. From Pyramid Quarry. For a monument built to outlast civilization.

You are welcome to decide what you make of that.

The structure itself stood nineteen feet and three inches tall, made from six granite slabs weighing a combined 237,746 pounds — nearly one hundred twenty tons of stone. Four outer slabs arranged in a paddlewheel configuration. A center column called the Gnomen Stone (like a sun-dial). A capstone connecting them all. The astronomical specifications were so precise that the Elberton Granite Finishing Company had to bring in an astronomer from the University of Georgia to execute them.

Here is what those specifications required.

A hole drilled through the center column at an angle, precisely calibrated so that the North Star could be seen through it at any hour of any night, in any season, regardless of the time of year. A slot carved through the same pillar aligned with the rising sun on the solstices and equinoxes — the four hinge points of the ancient calendar used by every major civilization that predates our own. A 7/8 inch aperture in the capstone positioned so that at noon each day a beam of sunlight passed through it and illuminated the exact day of the year on the center stone below. The four outer stones oriented to mark the limits of the 18.6-year lunar declination cycle.

This isn’t the same type of thing as elaborately decorating a house in high-cotton. This is a functioning astronomical observatory built into a granite monument in a cow pasture in Elbert County, Georgia, using the same principles that governed the construction of Stonehenge, the Egyptian temples at Karnak, and the Mayan calendar complexes at Chichen Itza. The comparison to Stonehenge was made immediately and has never been disputed. What those ancient structures shared, beyond their astronomical precision, was this: they were built by people who understood that knowledge encoded in stone outlasts knowledge encoded in any other medium. They were built to be read by whoever came after.

R.C. Christian understood this and his specifications prove it.

The site itself was not chosen at random. Christian selected the highest point in Elbert County, commanding unobstructed views to the east and the west, essential for the solstice and equinox alignments. What he may or may not have known, and what the New Georgia Encyclopedia records without commentary, is that the Cherokee people had a name for that area long before any granite company operated near it. They called it Al-yeh-li A lo-Hee.

The center of the world.

As detailed as Mr. R.C. and his fellow friends were, I have a gut feeling he knew this quite well and chose it on purpose.

The capstone that sat atop the monument carried its message in four languages. Not the eight modern languages of the inscriptions below — English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian — but four ancient ones. Babylonian cuneiform. Classical Greek. Sanskrit. Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Let these be guidestones to an Age of Reason.

The choice of those four languages cannot be incidental. Babylonian cuneiform is among the oldest writing systems on earth, developed in Mesopotamia, the cradle of recorded civilization. Sanskrit is the sacred language of the Vedic tradition, the root of the oldest continuously practiced religious texts in human history. Classical Greek is the language of philosophy, of Plato and Aristotle, of the intellectual foundations of Western thought. Egyptian hieroglyphics are the language of a civilization that built structures of such astronomical precision that modern engineers still study them.

These are not languages chosen for reach. Arabic reaches more people than Sanskrit. Latin reaches more scholars than Babylonian cuneiform. These four were chosen for what they represent — the oldest, deepest streams of human knowledge, all of them rooted in astronomy, sacred geometry, and the measurement of time.

Someone who chose those four languages knew exactly what they were doing.

Now consider the name on the monument. R.C. Christian. A pseudonym, admitted freely and from the beginning. The initials R.C. have a documented history that predates this monument by several centuries. The Rosicrucian Order, a secretive philosophical brotherhood whose origins trace to late medieval Germany, established foundational rules for its members. The fifth rule stated that the letters R.C. should be their seal, their mark, and their character from that time forward. The sixth rule specified that the Fraternity should remain unknown to the world for one hundred years.

Two anonymous manifestos published in Germany, Fama Fraternitatis RC and Confessio Fraternitatis, outlined the society’s interests and intentions while maintaining the complete secrecy of its membership. Anonymous documents, published without attribution, outlining a philosophy intended to guide humanity toward a new age of reason.

The Georgia Guidestones were anonymous, published in granite, outlining a philosophy intended to guide humanity toward an age of reason.

The Rosicrucian order sought, in its own stated terms, to prepare a new phase of religion for a coming age. It was explicitly opposed to Catholicism. It held a doctrine built on esoteric truths of ancient Egypt, Babylon, and the Druids — concealed from ordinary people — that provided insight into nature, the physical universe, and the spiritual realm. It was linked historically to the Knights Templar before it and the Freemasons after.

None of this proves R.C. Christian was a Rosicrucian or a Mason. What it proves is that whoever he was, he used their initials, their methods, their languages, their timeline, and their stated purpose and then built it into one hundred and twenty tons of stone quarried from a place called Pyramid Quarry on land the Cherokee called the center of the world.

You are, again, welcome to decide what you make of that.

Here is what was written on the stone.

In English. In Spanish. In Swahili. In Hindi. In Hebrew. In Arabic. In Chinese. In Russian. The same ten lines, repeated in each language, facing outward in every direction, meant to be read by whoever survived.

One.

Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.

The current population of the earth is eight billion people. The number carved in stone calls for a world of five hundred million. That is a reduction of ninety-three percent. Whoever survives the catastrophe — the social, nuclear, or economic calamity R.C. Christian believed was coming — inherits a world with room for one in every sixteen people alive today.

Two.

Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.

The word for the managed improvement of human reproduction through selective breeding has been in use since 1883. It is eugenics. The Guidestones do not use that word. They don’t even need to.

Three.

Unite humanity with a living new language.

A single global language. Not the preservation of existing languages — a living new one. Designed. Implemented. Universal. Antithetical to Genesis 11, when God specifically confused the people’s languages due to their unholy acts.

Four.

Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.

Faith is listed here alongside passion and tradition as a thing to be ruled — governed, managed, subordinated to reason. Not protected. Not preserved. Ruled.

Five.

Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.

Six.

Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.

A world court. A single international body with authority to resolve conflicts between nations. Not a suggestion. A principle carved in stone and addressed to the survivors of civilization’s collapse, as the foundational structure of whatever comes next.

Seven.

Avoid petty laws and useless officials.

Eight.

Balance personal rights with social duties.

Of all ten principles carved into the stone, this one might be the most dangerous precisely because it sounds the most reasonable. It has the cadence of civics. It reads like something that belongs in a school textbook or a UN declaration, and in fact language nearly identical to it appears in both. Not alarming and not provoking.

But read it again, and ask the question it never answers.

Who decides when the balance tips? The individual is not the arbiter of this balance, by definition, because the individual is one half of the equation and the social duty is the other. Someone external to you must determine when your personal right has exceeded its permitted weight. Someone with the authority to enforce the correction.

Nine.

Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.

Ten.

Be not a cancer on the earth — leave room for nature — leave room for nature.

The last line is the only one repeated. It appears twice on the stone. Be not a cancer on the earth. The word chosen for humanity’s relationship to the planet is cancer. Not steward. Not inhabitant. Not creature. Cancer.

These ten principles covered, in the monument’s own stated terms, four areas: governance and the establishment of a world government. Population and reproduction control. The environment and humanity’s relationship to nature. And spirituality.

A world government. Controlled reproduction. Managed population. Faith subordinated to reason.

That is what was written on the stone.

Now set it beside what was written in New York in 2015.

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted unanimously by all member states, describes itself as a plan of action for people, planet, and prosperity. It calls for universal goals applicable to every country on earth. It calls for global partnership, collective action on population and environment, and governance structures that transcend national boundaries. It establishes 17 goals and 169 targets to be implemented by the same international institutions the Guidestones called a world court.

The Guidestones said: let all nations resolve external disputes in a world court. The 2030 Agenda established the UN High-Level Political Forum as the central global platform for review and accountability of every signatory nation’s progress toward the goals.

The Guidestones said: guide reproduction wisely. The 2030 Agenda includes targets on reproductive health, population planning, and what it calls sustainable consumption — meaning how many resources each human life is permitted to use.

The Guidestones said: rule passion and faith with tempered reason. The 2030 Agenda commits all signatory nations to gender equality targets, educational transformation, and values-based programming to be implemented universally — across every culture, every tradition, every faith.

The Guidestones were carved in 1980 by an anonymous group that had been planning for twenty years.

The 2030 Agenda was adopted in 2015 by every government on earth.

The language isn’t identical, but I will leave the conclusion to you.

On July 6, 2022, at approximately four in the morning, someone detonated an explosive device at the Georgia Guidestones.

CCTV footage captured the detonation. A vehicle was recorded leaving the scene. The explosion destroyed the Swahili and Hindi language slab and damaged the capstone — the stone that carried the message in Babylonian cuneiform, Classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Egyptian hieroglyphics. The one that said: let these be guidestones to an age of reason.

Later that same day, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation arrived with a backhoe and demolished what remained. Within hours of the bombing, the stones that had stood for forty-two years were rubble.

The GBI investigation produced no arrest and no suspect was named publicly. The case remains open.

Here is what else the demolition produced: when county officials dug six feet beneath the explanatory tablet — the stone that had announced, in plain English, that a time capsule had been placed six feet below this spot — they found nothing. No capsule. No contents. No record of what was to be opened, or when, or by whom. The fields on the stone reserved for those dates had been left blank from the beginning. Whoever built the Guidestones either never buried the capsule or removed it before anyone could look.

Something was always meant to be there. Whatever it was, it was gone.

Now consider the timing.

In the spring of 2022, a Republican candidate for governor of Georgia named Kandiss Taylor made the destruction of the Georgia Guidestones a centerpiece of her campaign. She called them satanic. She said she would tear them down. She lost the primary in May. The stones were bombed in July.

No connection between Taylor’s campaign and the bombing has been established. The GBI said it was investigating and has not announced a conclusion.

The mayor of Elberton announced plans to reconstruct the monument exactly as it was. The city council voted instead to return the land to its previous owner and donate the remains to the Elberton Granite Association. As of the writing of this installment, no reconstruction has taken place.

Whatever message was meant to outlast civilization lasted forty-two years when someone or some people decided this thing has to go.

More than forty years living in Georgia and I found out about them while following a paper trail that had already taken me through a luxury hotel in Manhattan, a directive signed on March 25, 2020, a nursing home death count that was falsified for political reasons, two empty hospital ships, and a financial incentive structure that paid thirty-nine thousand dollars to put a dying person on a ventilator.

The Guidestones did not cause any of that. They preceded it.

They were built in 1980 by a group of people who believed civilization was heading toward catastrophe and wanted to leave instructions for what should come after. Population under five hundred million. Reproduction guided wisely. Faith ruled by reason. A world court. A living new language.

By 2015 those instructions had been adopted, in different language and with different branding, by every government on earth.

By 2020 a global crisis had demonstrated, in real time, how efficiently the machinery for managing populations, suppressing inconvenient information, and consolidating institutional authority could be activated — and how precisely it followed recommendations that had been written and published before the crisis began.

By 2022 the stones were gone.

I don’t know who built them. I don’t know who destroyed them. I don’t know whether the catastrophe R.C. Christian believed was coming has already happened or is still ahead of us.

What I know is what the record shows.

Someone wrote instructions for the world after the end of the world, carved them into stone, and hid their name.

Someone else came in the dark with explosives and made sure the stones couldn’t be read anymore.

Both of them knew something the rest of us were not supposed to.

The paper trail continues.

Buy Momma Jess a Coffee

Sources

1. New Georgia Encyclopedia: Georgia Guidestones. Last modified July 11, 2022. georgiaencyclopedia.org

2. Wikipedia: Georgia Guidestones. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones

3. Wired Magazine: “American Stonehenge: Monumental Instructions for the Post-Apocalypse.” 2009.

4. All That’s Interesting: “The Georgia Guidestones, The Granite Monument Built To Be A Solar Calendar — And A Post-Apocalyptic Guide.”

5. Elbert County Chamber of Commerce: Georgia Guidestones history and construction documentation.

6. Georgia Bureau of Investigation: Press releases on the July 6, 2022 bombing and demolition.

7. United Nations: Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Resolution 70/1, adopted September 25, 2015. sdgs.un.org

8. United Nations: The 17 Sustainable Development Goals. sdgs.un.org/goals

9. Rosicrucian Order (AMORC): Fama Fraternitatis RC and Confessio Fraternitatis — documented historical manifestos, 17th century Germany.

10. Crystal Links: Georgia Guidestones documentation. crystalinks.com/gaguidestones.html

11. Elberton Star: Report on excavation revealing no time capsule beneath the explanatory tablet, July 2022.

12. AtlasObscura: Georgia Guidestones entry. atlasobscura.com

13. Compact Histories: “The Mystery of the Georgia Guidestones.” compacthistories.com

14. R.C. Christian (pseudonym): Common Sense Renewed. 1986. (Published statement of authorship of the Guidestones inscriptions.)

I had known Anna long enough to know that if our eyes met while I was preaching, it was finished. Something in her receives the Holy Spirit the way a field receives rain, openly, completely, and if I looked at her when the Spirit was moving I would cry my way through the rest of whatever I was trying to say. It happened often. She was that kind of soul-sister.

The first day we were allowed to worship together again, I was standing at the door of the church wearing a mask and dispensing hand sanitizer, a substance I knew was doing no one any good, into hands belonging to people who were desperate simply to be in the same room with God and each other. I stood there because I loved my ministry. People had been begging to come back. This was the price of the door being open, so I paid it, hating every moment of bowing to what I knew was not right.

Then I saw Anna’s kind blue eyes, filled to the brim, behind a masked face.

I set the hand sanitizer down.

Can we hug, I asked.

She nodded.

When we embraced, our entire bodies shuddered. The weight of everything that had been taken, every ordinary moment of human contact that had been legislated away, came out of both of us at once. We held each other and we sobbed.

She was the first non-relative I had hugged in six months. I will never forget that moment.

My second-born daughter had purchased her prom dress two weeks before the world shut down. It was gorgeous. It hung in her closet through the spring while the date came and went without ceremony, without a gymnasium, without a single photograph in a backyard with friends. Just a dress and a date on the calendar that passed like any other day.

She was homeschooled, so her education continued. What didn’t continue was everything else. When graduation came, we sat on the couch together with a bowl of popcorn and watched the ceremony on television. Names and pictures flashed across the screen one by one. Congratulations, Hayley. You just graduated.

That was it. That was the ceremony. A screen and a couch and popcorn because there was nothing else available to us.

After a few weeks, by April, the cabin fever became something physical. Like a pressure in the walls. We decided one afternoon to simply take a drive, not to go anywhere or accomplish anything, just to move through the world like human beings for an hour. What we drove through looked like the end of life. Empty streets. Closed storefronts. A ghost town made of a place we had known our whole lives.

And we were tense. Genuinely, physically tense. Afraid of being pulled over for driving down a public road in America. Afraid that the act of not being locked inside our house might be enough to bring consequences down on us.

That fear was not entirely irrational. It was the logical response to what was being communicated from every official channel available: stay home, stay safe, and do not ask questions about either instruction.

We were healthy and alive. And afraid to drive.

I was working for a church during this time. Of course, we were completely closed for months. The leadership decided to manage its congregation on what I can only describe as a traffic light spectrum. Greens were those of us — like me — who opposed the lockdown, the masks, all of it, and were ready to return to normal life. Yellows were cautious. Reds were the ones who would have stationed guards at the entrance of every public place if given the authority. The Reds held quite a bit of authority as it turned out.

A church. A body of believers gathered around the premise that all people stand equally before God. It color-coded its members by their willingness to be afraid.

I was green. Green meant problem.

The suppression of counter-messages that the Event 201 recommendation called for did not operate only at the level of social media platforms and hospital privileges. It operated in churches across America. It operated on ordinary people who asked reasonable questions and paid for asking them.

The liquor stores stayed open, though.

Now let’s talk about the people who couldn’t drive anywhere. The ones who couldn’t leave at all. The ones who had pressed their own hands against their own windows and watched the world go quiet outside. The ones whose families stood in parking lots and held up handwritten signs because there was no other way to be seen by the people they loved.

While my daughter’s prom dress hung in her closet, while my family drove through ghost towns afraid of being arrested for moving, the governors of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and California were signing directives that would send COVID-positive patients into the buildings where the most vulnerable people in America lived and could not leave.

In New York, the order came on March 25, 2020.

It was addressed to nursing home administrators, directors of nursing, and hospital discharge planners. It stated, in the language of the New York State Department of Health, that all nursing homes must comply with the expedited receipt of residents returning from hospitals. It stated that no resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to a nursing home solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19. It stated that nursing homes were prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.

Read that again.

They were prohibited from testing a person before their entry into nursing homes full of fragile people.

More than 9,000 COVID-positive patients were sent into hundreds of New York nursing homes under that order. More than 6,000 of those were new admissions, not returning residents. The order remained in effect until May 10, 2020.

The day after Cuomo signed it, a prominent national coalition of long-term care professionals publicly denounced it. They warned, in their own published statement, that it wasn’t consistent with science or patient safety principles. They called it a short-term and short-sighted solution that would only add to the surge.

Howard Zucker, New York’s Health Commissioner, later testified under oath that he had no knowledge of those warnings. State Senator Tom O’Mara, who questioned him directly, said he did not believe him then and did not believe him after.

By June 7, 2020, the data was already inside the building.

An internal email to Commissioner Zucker that day contained charts showing that nursing homes which had admitted COVID-positive patients under the March 25 order were dying at a rate of 8.1 percent. Homes that had admitted no such patients were dying at a rate of 4.1 percent. Half.

They had the numbers and then they wrote a report that said something different.

On July 6, 2020, the New York State Department of Health released its official findings. The report concluded that the March 25 admission policy was not a significant factor in nursing home fatalities. Andrew Cuomo held a press conference. He said the criticism of nursing home deaths had no basis in fact. He said it was pure politics and it was ugly politics.

Someone inside his own administration had already written, in an internal email, that the mandatory admittance policy was going to be a great debacle in the history books. The same email asked: don’t you see how bad this is? Or do we admit error and give up?

In January 2021, New York Attorney General Letitia James released her own investigation. She found that Cuomo had understated COVID-19 deaths in state nursing homes by as much as fifty percent.

Then came the admission that explains everything else.

Melissa DeRosa, secretary to the governor, privately told Democratic lawmakers what had happened. She said the administration had frozen. She said they were not sure if what they were going to give to the Department of Justice was going to be used against them politically.

The deaths were real, the cover was political, and the data was buried because it was inconvenient to the people who had generated it.

Fauci, in July 2020, while the cover-up was active and the true death toll was still hidden, publicly called New York’s COVID response a model. He said they did it correctly.

New York had 14,450 deaths across 698 long-term care facilities. Twenty-one deaths per facility. Arizona, which never issued a must-admit order, had 2,505 deaths across 1,000 facilities. Two and a half deaths per facility. Same country. Same virus. Same year. Different decision.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held a hearing in 2023 titled Like Fire Through Dry Grass. Witnesses testified that it was known from the early data and science that COVID-19 would be lethal in elderly care facilities. Witnesses testified that state officials prioritized personal political gain over the health of elderly Americans. In October 2024, the subcommittee referred Cuomo to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution. A criminal investigation was opened in 2025.

Meanwhile the Navy had sent two hospital ships.

The USNS Comfort, a 1,000-bed vessel with a 1,200-member crew, arrived in New York Harbor on March 30, 2020. The USNS Mercy, its sister ship, docked in Los Angeles the same week. They were deployed, at enormous cost, as relief valves for hospitals overwhelmed by the surge. The justification for the nursing home directives, in every state that issued them, was that hospitals needed to free up beds. The crisis demanded it. There was no choice.

The Comfort left New York on May 2, 2020. It had treated 182 patients.

The Mercy left Los Angeles on May 15. It had treated 77.

At the height of the crisis, the two ships combined had fewer than 20 patients on board. The head of New York’s largest hospital system called it a joke. He said it was pretty ridiculous. He asked what the purpose was.

The ships sat empty in the harbors of the two hardest-hit cities in America while COVID-positive patients, untested, were being sent by order of law into buildings full of people who could not leave.

Now, follow the money.

Under the CARES Act, signed into law March 27, 2020, the federal government paid hospitals a 20% bonus on the entire Medicare bill for every patient designated as a COVID case. A standard pneumonia admission without COVID generated approximately $7,700. With a COVID designation, that same admission generated over $9,200. A patient requiring ventilator support without COVID generated approximately $40,000. With COVID, the enhanced rate applied on top.

Dr. Scott Jensen, a physician and Minnesota state senator, stated it clearly in April 2020: thirteen thousand dollars for a COVID admission. Thirty-nine thousand dollars if the patient went on a ventilator. Three times as much.

The federal government also created a separate Provider Relief Fund, ultimately totaling $186.5 billion, distributed to hospitals in proportion to their prior Medicare business. A Kaiser Health News analysis found that hospitals in states barely touched by the pandemic received the equivalent of approximately $300,000 per reported COVID case. The Foundation for Economic Education wrote, in April 2020, that the economic incentive to add COVID-19 to diagnostic lists and death certificates was clear and did not require any conspiracy.

Hospitals that didn’t use their COVID relief funds according to federal terms were required to return them, with interest. The government reserved the right to pursue collection.

Hospitals were also paid a separate bonus for administering remdesivir, an antiviral drug costing $3,200 per treatment course that the World Health Organization reviewed and recommended against, finding no survival benefit. The FDA’s own prescribing information mandates liver monitoring because the drug is known to cause hepatotoxicity. Studies raised documented concerns about kidney injury, particularly in elderly and vulnerable patients, precisely the population filling those hospital beds.

Every positive test meant money. Every admission meant more. Every ventilator meant more still. And anyone who asked whether the coding was accurate, whether the protocols were appropriate, whether a dying person might have benefited from something other than what the reimbursement structure incentivized, that person was asking questions that the Event 201 recommendation had already classified as a problem to be managed.

Now notice what disappeared.

In the 2019-2020 flu season, according to the CDC’s own published data, approximately 38 million Americans were sickened by influenza. Twenty-two thousand died.

In the 2020-2021 flu season, 700 Americans died of influenza. Of 931,726 flu tests reported to the CDC, 0.2 percent were positive. In prior flu seasons the peak positive rate ran between 26 and 30 percent. One child died of influenza in the United States that year. In prior years the range was roughly 40 to 200 children.

The CDC attributed the disappearance to masking and social distancing.

Perhaps. But the same masking and distancing did not prevent hundreds of thousands of COVID deaths, according to the official count. And the official count was generated by the same diagnostic and coding infrastructure that paid thirteen thousand dollars for a positive admission and thirty-nine thousand for a ventilator.

I will ask you to simply draw your own conclusions. The numbers are the CDC’s.

And here is the question I won’t stop asking: was it coronavirus — or was it a really tough flu season? I don’t have enough proof to share an answer. I know what the incentive structure paid for. I know what virus vanished from the diagnostic record the moment COVID arrived. And I know that the people best positioned to answer that question were the same people writing the reports to say the nursing home deaths weren’t their fault.

Reflecting back to my hug with my friend Anna, the way we stood there in the wreckage of whatever we had just released and I felt, underneath the relief, something harder settling into place inside me.

We had been played.

Not manipulated in any ordinary sense. Not misled by a bureaucratic mistake or a model that turned out to be wrong or a well-intentioned policy that failed in execution. Played. Deliberately. By people who had gathered in a luxury hotel in Manhattan on a Friday morning in October 2019 and spent three and a half hours designing exactly this — the fear, the silence, the compliance, the suppression of every question that might have interrupted the sequence.

While we were isolated in our homes, performing our compliance, the nursing homes were filling. With untested, COVID-positive patients, sent by order, into buildings full of people who could not leave, whose families had been told to stay away for safety, who died in rooms where the window was the last border between them and everyone they loved.

The ships sat empty in the harbors.

The money moved.

The flu disappeared.

And I am asking for the truth. Because some people never got to ask.

Buy Momma Jess a Coffee

Sources

1. New York State Department of Health Advisory, March 25, 2020: “Hospital Discharges and Admissions to Nursing Homes”

2. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, September 2024: Internal Cuomo Administration Documents (Empire Center for Public Policy coverage)

3. New York Attorney General Letitia James, Report on Nursing Home Deaths, January 2021

4. ProPublica, “Fire Through Dry Grass,” July 2020

5. House Select Subcommittee Hearing, “Like Fire Through Dry Grass,” October 2023

6. Department of Justice Press Release, August 26, 2020: Data Requests to Governors of NY, NJ, PA, MI

7. USNI News: USNS Comfort and USNS Mercy patient counts, May 2020

8. Washington Examiner, April 3, 2020: “It’s a joke” — Michael Dowling, Northwell Health

9. CARES Act, Section 3710: 20% Medicare add-on for COVID-19 patients

10. Kaiser Health News analysis of Provider Relief Fund distribution

11. Dr. Scott Jensen, Minnesota State Senator, Fox News interview, April 8, 2020

12. Foundation for Economic Education, April 2020: COVID-19 diagnostic coding incentives

13. HHS Provider Relief Fund: Total $186.5 billion distributed; HRSA repayment terms

14. WHO review of remdesivir: No survival benefit finding

15. FDA prescribing information for remdesivir: hepatotoxicity monitoring requirement

16. CDC FluView data, 2019-2020 season: 38 million cases, 22,000 deaths

17. CDC FluView data, 2020-2021 season: 700 deaths, 0.2% positive test rate

18. CDC MMWR, September 2020: “Decreased Influenza Activity During the COVID-19 Pandemic”

19. Fox News, February 2021: Fauci praises New York response: “They did it correctly”

20. WITF/PA Post, June 2020: Pennsylvania nursing home directive, March 18, 2020

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. — Marcus Aurelius

Before the Game Became Real

My momma called me in February 2020.

Have you heard about this China virus, she said. I’m scared.

I told her the truth as I understood it then and as the documented record has since confirmed.

I am not afraid of the virus, I said. I am afraid how people are going to react. People are going to panic.

I’m not even sure if she fully understood what I meant. Most people didn’t yet. The machinery that runs on human fear is quieter than a pathogen and far more patient. It doesn’t need to kill you. It only needs you frightened enough to stop asking questions.

By March, most had stopped asking questions.

By April, the questions themselves had become dangerous — socially, professionally, in some places legally. Any person who asked whether the models were accurate, whether the protocols made sense, whether the fear was proportionate to the actual risk was not engaging in reasonable inquiry. They were a threat. They were selfish. They were the reason people were dying.

That wasn’t an accident. It certainly wasn’t the organic emergence of public sentiment in a crisis.

It was a documented recommendation carried out with remarkable precision.

Let me show you where it came from.

On October 18, 2019, fifteen people gathered by invitation at The Pierre, a luxury hotel in Manhattan. It was a Friday morning. The exercise began at 8:45 a.m. and ran until 12:30 p.m., three and a half hours, after which the participants went home.

The exercise was called Event 201.

It was hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The participants were senior representatives from multinational corporations, international banks, global public health organizations, and government agencies. Among them was Dr. George Gao, Director-General of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The scenario they were given was this: a novel coronavirus — they called it CAPS, Coronavirus Associated Pulmonary Syndrome — had emerged from pigs in Brazil. It was spreading rapidly. It transmitted easily between people through respiratory droplets. Communities with mild symptoms were unknowingly carrying it across borders. There was no cure. A vaccine was at least a year away.

In the simulation, CAPS infected people globally within six months. By the eighteen month mark it had killed sixty five million people and triggered a global financial crisis.

The participants spent three and a half hours on a Friday morning in October working through what institutions should do “if” something like this happened.

Thirty days later, on November 17, 2019, the first documented case of what would be called COVID-19 appeared in Wuhan, China.

Event 201 was not a secret. The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security published it on their website. The World Economic Forum issued a press release. The sessions were recorded and made available. The participants were named. The recommendations that emerged from the exercise were published in a joint statement on January 17, 2020, the same month the world began to understand that something was spreading in China.

This is important. The exercise was not hidden. Hiding it would have been unnecessary and counterproductive. What matters isn’t that it was concealed but what it recommended, and how precisely those recommendations shaped what happened next.

The Event 201 recommendations covered seven areas. Corporate capabilities and public-private partnerships, international stockpiles of medical countermeasures, maintaining global travel and trade, surge manufacturing of vaccines and therapeutics, business engagement in pandemic preparedness, reducing economic impacts of outbreaks, and the seventh:

Communications.

The seventh recommendation is key.

The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation jointly recommended, in their own published language, that governments and the private sector should assign greater priority to developing methods to combat mis- and disinformation prior to the next pandemic response. They recommended that governments partner with traditional and social media companies to develop approaches to countering misinformation. They recommended developing the ability to flood media with fast, accurate, and consistent information.

And then this: media companies should commit to ensuring that authoritative messages are prioritized and that counter messages are suppressed including through the use of technology.

That sentence was written on October 18, 2019.

It was published in a joint statement on January 17, 2020 — the same month the world began to understand that something was spreading in Wuhan.

By spring of 2020, social media platforms were removing content that contradicted WHO guidance. By summer, doctors who questioned ventilator protocols were losing hospital privileges. By fall, the laboratory origin hypothesis, the possibility that the virus had emerged not from a wet market but from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a biosafety level four research facility eleven kilometers from the market, had been labeled a conspiracy theory by major platforms and quietly removed from circulation.

In May 2021, Facebook changed its policy and announced it would no longer remove posts suggesting COVID-19 was man-made or manufactured. The platform offered no explanation for why the information it had suppressed for more than a year was now permissible.

No one who had been silenced received an apology.

The recommendation had called for the suppression of false messages. But, the laboratory origin hypothesis was not false. It remains an active and unresolved area of scientific inquiry. What it was, in 2020, was inconvenient to the ones controlling the narrative. It was not the only inconvenient thing suppressed.

The PCR testing methodology used to diagnose COVID-19 at scale carried problems that credentialed scientists raised from the beginning. The cycle threshold, the number of amplification cycles used to detect viral material, was set at levels that many scientists argued produced significant numbers of false positives. Kary Mullis, who invented PCR and won the Nobel Prize for doing so, had stated before his death in 2019 that the test was not designed as a diagnostic tool and that cycle threshold settings could be manipulated to find almost anything in almost anyone.

On January 20, 2021, the day of the presidential inauguration, the WHO quietly revised its PCR guidance, recommending lower cycle thresholds and noting that results needed to be interpreted alongside clinical symptoms. This revision was not announced with the urgency of the original guidance. No one explained why the standard had changed nor accounted for what the previous standard had produced.

The case counts that shut schools and closed businesses and kept families from the bedsides of dying people were generated by a methodology that was revised without explanation the moment the political moment shifted.

There is a word for the suppression of inconvenient information in the language of public health and crisis management. The word they chose, in their own published recommendation, was misinformation.

That’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s a documented timeline.

Now look at who was in the room.

Among the fifteen players at Event 201 was Avril Haines, then a private citizen and former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In January 2021, President Biden nominated her as Director of National Intelligence, the nation’s highest intelligence position. She was confirmed by the Senate and took office while the pandemic response she had helped model was still shaping policy across the country.

Among the fifteen players was Matthew Harrington, global chief operating officer of Edelman — one of the largest public communications firms on earth, whose annual Trust Barometer shapes how institutions understand and manage public perception globally.

Among the fifteen players was Dr. George Fu Gao, Director General of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention — the man who would be responsible for China’s initial reporting on the outbreak that began in his country thirty days after he left that hotel in Manhattan.

Among the fifteen players was a Vice President from Johnson and Johnson, a company that would receive emergency use authorization for a COVID-19 vaccine in February 2021 and generate billions of dollars in revenue from that authorization.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did not send a player to sit at the table. It built the table. Along with Johns Hopkins and the World Economic Forum, the Foundation co-hosted Event 201, co-authored its recommendations, and co-signed the joint statement published in January 2020. The Foundation's global health portfolio, spanning vaccine development, distribution infrastructure, and public health policy across more than a hundred countries, positioned it to benefit directly from the pandemic response its own recommendations helped architect. Between 2020 and 2022, the Foundation committed more than two billion dollars to COVID-19 response efforts including vaccine development and distribution. The companies and organizations it funded were central to the response it had helped design.

These are not accusations. These are names attached to roles, present in a room, on a date, with recommendations they put their institutions’ names on and published for the world to read.

The paper trail doesn’t tell you what to conclude.

It simply shows you who was at the table before the game became real.

My momma has not fully awakened. She is suspicious now in a way she wasn’t before 2020, but the fear is still there. It lives in her the way learned responses live in the body long after the original threat has passed. She texted me recently, worried about an ebola outbreak. She had seen it on the news.

I told her “fake news” and to watch what happened next.

The headline came. The fear spiked. The coverage intensified for a news cycle, just long enough to feel like the beginning of something, and then it receded. As quickly as it came. Quietly and without explanation. Without the all-clear that should logically follow an all-hands alarm.

It left because enough of us are no longer available to be moved or controlled by it.

That’s not a small thing. It’s a wonderful shift. The result of people who looked at what happened in 2020 and made a decision, not a political or ideological decision, but a deeply human one — that they would not surrender their capacity for independent thought to an institution that had already demonstrated, in its own published recommendations, that it considered that capacity a problem to be managed.

The machinery that runs on human fear requires a one specific ingredient that can’t be manufactured or stockpiled or distributed by any public-private partnership no matter how well funded.

It requires your willingness to be afraid.

My momma called me in February 2020 and told me she was scared. I told her I was not afraid of the virus. I was afraid of a people in panic.

What I know, and what the record now confirms, is that the panic was not a byproduct of the crisis.

It was the product.

The next installment will show you what was done with it.

Buy Momma Jess a Coffee

Sources

Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Event 201 Pandemic Tabletop Exercise. October 18, 2019. centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/tabletop-exercises/event-201-pandemic-tabletop-exercise

Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum, and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Public-Private Cooperation for Pandemic Preparedness and Response: A Call to Action. January 17, 2020.

World Economic Forum. Live Simulation Exercise to Prepare Public and Private Leaders for Pandemic Response. Press release, October 15, 2019.

Event 201 Player Biographies. Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. centerforhealthsecurity.org

Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Avril Haines confirmation and appointment, January 2021. dni.gov

Facebook. Policy update on COVID-19 origin claims. May 2021. Reported by multiple outlets including Reuters and The Verge.

World Health Organization. Statement on novel coronavirus, January 30, 2020. who.int

South China Morning Post. First confirmed COVID-19 case traced to November 17, 2019. Reported March 13, 2020.

The Woman Who Ran the Machine

Her father survived the Holocaust, built a media empire, served in Parliament, and was suspected by three different intelligence services of working for all of them simultaneously.

Robert Maxwell was a Czechoslovakian-born British publishing magnate who died in November 1991, falling from his yacht into the Atlantic Ocean under circumstances that were never fully explained. What followed his death was the collapse of everything he had built. His publishing empire was discovered to be hollow at its center. He had secretly siphoned approximately 1.2 billion dollars from two of his flagship public companies and employee pension funds. Two of his children were charged with fraud. The family lost its social standing in Britain almost overnight.

His youngest daughter was left with Oxford credentials, fluency in multiple languages, a Rolodex that crossed continents, and the practiced ease of someone who had spent a lifetime moving among the most powerful people in the world.

She also arrived in New York with nothing left to lose.

Jeffrey Epstein was waiting.

There is something in the documented record that the federal indictment could not capture and that a sentencing guideline has no category for.

Ghislaine Maxwell was ferocious in her devotion to Jeffrey Epstein. Not merely complicit or present. Ferocious. The testimony of household staff, the organizational precision documented in federal filings, the rules imposed on everyone around her — all of it points to a woman who calibrated every detail of another person’s comfort and pleasure with an intensity that went beyond partnership or even loyalty. She managed Epstein the way someone manages a thing they are terrified of losing.

I am not saying this in her defense. I am saying it because it is the most complete picture of what she was.

She had learned this from someone.

Robert Maxwell was the kind of man whose approval was never fully available. He built an empire on secrecy and demanded everything from the people around him, and when he died it was discovered that he had taken from the people who trusted him everything they had and left behind a wreckage his children were expected to survive. Ghislaine was his youngest. The last one still auditioning when the curtain came down.

She spent the next thirty years devoted to a man who had the same hunger her father had. The same appetite for power, for access, for the pleasure of having things other people couldn’t have. Epstein was hollow at his center too. The money and connections were real. What was not real was the possibility that a woman could ever do enough to fill what was empty in him.

She tried anyway. With a ferocity that destroyed the lives of girls who had nothing to do with what Robert Maxwell had done to his daughter.

That is not an excuse. It is the full weight of what a damaged person can become when no one stops them and everyone looks away.

Maxwell and Epstein’s association began earlier than most people assume. Their connection dated to the 1980s, before her father’s death, not after it. She had been sharing her social network with Epstein for years.

After their romantic relationship ended in the 1990s they remained close. Epstein described Maxwell as his best friend. The friendship was also a business arrangement. What Maxwell brought to the operation was irreplaceable: access, legitimacy, and a social fluency that Epstein, for all his money, could never fully manufacture on his own.

Between 1994 and 2004, Maxwell coordinated, facilitated, and contributed to Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of women and underage girls. Those are not the words of a prosecutor or a journalist. They are the words of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, written in its published opinion affirming her conviction.

The operation had a structure. Maxwell recruited. She groomed. She normalized. She was present.

She was not a passive bystander who looked away. The federal record is explicit on this point.

What the Federal Record Shows

Court testimony from Juan Alessi, the former house manager of Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion who worked there from 1995 to 2002, detailed Maxwell’s role in the household. From the day she arrived, he testified, she immediately took over as lady of the house. She imposed strict rules on staff. She took photographs constantly, keeping an album of images on her desk.

The Department of Justice documented Maxwell’s grooming methods in federal filings. She would take young girls on shopping trips. She paid for travel and education opportunities. She discussed their personal lives with them. She was present during their initial interactions with Epstein, providing the assurance and comfort of an adult woman who seemed not only to approve of what was happening but to invite it.

She discussed sexual topics in front of victims. She undressed in front of them. She normalized what was coming by making herself familiar first.

I have spent a long time with the primary source material in this case. The files. The testimony. The depositions. And the detail that has never left me is not from a legal document. It is from a girl’s diary.

Virginia Giuffre wrote about her confusion over why Maxwell — the woman she had come to trust, the woman who had paid attention to her and taken her places and seemed to care about her — was allowing this to happen. Allowing it. That word. As if Maxwell were a passive presence in the room rather than the architect of it.

That confusion is the most precise documentation of what grooming actually does. It doesn’t make victims complicit. It makes them unable to locate the betrayal until it is too late. Because the betrayal is wearing the face of someone they believed was on their side.

Of course, Maxwell understood this. She built it deliberately. The shopping trips and the conversations and the photographs on her desk and the practiced warmth of a woman of the world who seemed to find these girls worthy of her attention — all of it was architecture. All of it was the machine running exactly as designed.

The Verdict

On December 29, 2021, following a one-month jury trial in the Southern District of New York, Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty on five of six counts.

The convictions: conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts. Conspiracy to transport minors to participate in illegal sex acts. Transporting a minor to participate in illegal sex acts. Sex trafficking conspiracy. Sex trafficking of a minor.

Five counts. Convicted on all five.

Federal prosecutors sought a sentence between 30 and 55 years, citing the number of victims and what they called Maxwell’s utter lack of remorse. They described her in sentencing filings as a calculating, sophisticated, and dangerous criminal who preyed on vulnerable young girls and groomed them for sexual abuse. Her practice of targeting vulnerable victims, they wrote, reflected her view that struggling young girls could be treated like disposable objects.

On June 28, 2022, Maxwell stood before the court in shackles and spoke. She addressed the victims briefly. She said she was sorry for the pain they had experienced. But, I have listened to her deposition tapes. I didn’t feel an ounce of remorse from Maxwell over her actions.

Then, on that 28th day in June, she told the victims: Jeffrey Epstein should have been here before all of you.

Even then. Even standing in shackles before the women whose childhoods she had helped destroy. She pointed toward Epstein.

Judge Alison Nathan sentenced Maxwell to 240 months in federal prison. Twenty years. She was also fined $750,000, the maximum allowable under law. The federal Probation Department had described the crimes as heinous and predatory in nature.

Every Door Closed

Maxwell did not accept the verdict.

She appealed on multiple grounds. She argued that the 2007 Non-Prosecution Agreement negotiated in Florida should have barred her prosecution entirely, that the indictment violated the statute of limitations, and that juror misconduct during voir dire entitled her to a new trial.

Every argument failed.

On September 17, 2024, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld Maxwell’s five felony convictions and her twenty year sentence in a published opinion. The court ruled that the NPA bound only the Southern District of Florida, not federal prosecutors in New York. The same document that had protected Epstein from federal prosecution in 2008 could not protect Maxwell sixteen years later.

She petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States.

On October 6, 2025, the Supreme Court declined to hear her case, without comment, leaving her conviction and twenty year sentence intact.

Every door closed. Every appeal exhausted. The conviction stands.

Ghislaine Maxwell is currently serving her sentence at FCI Tallahassee in Florida. Her earliest possible release date, accounting for good behavior, is in the late 2030s. She will be in her seventies.

What the Federal Case Did Not Answer

Here is what the documented record does not resolve.

The federal case against Maxwell covered the years 1994 to 2004. Ten years. But Epstein’s operation did not stop in 2004. Victim testimony and the Virgin Islands civil suit document activity continuing as recently as 2018. Maxwell’s conviction addressed one decade of a much longer pattern.

The indictment named four victims. Thirty six women were identified in Julie K. Brown’s investigation alone. The full scope of what Maxwell coordinated, facilitated, and contributed to remains incompletely prosecuted.

The Non-Prosecution Agreement that Acosta negotiated in 2007 extended immunity to unnamed co-conspirators. Those names have never been made fully public. Maxwell was convicted. But the document that protected others from the same fate remains in effect for those still unnamed within it.

The client list that prosecutors described has never been released in full. The flight logs showed names. The deposition testimony named names. The civil suits named names. The full accounting of who participated, who knew, and who was protected has not been made public.

The fact that the girls trusted her is heartbreaking. Trusting someone can be an undoing in the most terrible form, if evil lives within the trustee.

Some of them may have even initially loved her the way young girls love a woman who seems to see them, who takes them places and asks about their lives and moves through the world with the kind of confidence that makes you feel safe just standing near it.

Maxwell was that woman to them at first. Polished. Credentialed. Connected. She arrived in their lives like something rare and generous, like someone who had chosen them specifically out of everything available to her. For girls without enough protection, that choosing felt like grace. Almost every victim testimony includes a notion that the victim thought Ghislaine wanted to help them.

It was the oldest trick in the world dressed in the finest clothes.

She is in prison, rightly so. The men who wore the finest clothes are not.

That accounting belongs in a future installment.

Buy Momma Jess a Coffee

Sources

United States v. Maxwell, No. 20-cr-330 (S.D.N.Y. 2021). Federal indictment, trial record, and sentencing filings.

United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Opinion affirming conviction, September 17, 2024.

Supreme Court of the United States. Order declining certiorari, October 6, 2025.

Alessi, Juan. Trial testimony, United States v. Maxwell, December 2021.

Farmer, Annie. Trial testimony, United States v. Maxwell, December 2021.

Department of Justice. Sentencing memorandum, United States v. Maxwell, 2022.

Brown, Julie K. Perversion of Justice. Dey Street Books, 2021.

Giuffre, Virginia. Civil deposition testimony. Various federal filings.

Virgin Islands Department of Justice. Civil suit against Epstein estate, 2022.

Non-Prosecution Agreement, United States v. Epstein, Southern District of Florida, 2007.

This is the second installment of The Paper Trail — a series built on primary sources, documented records, and the discipline of following evidence wherever it leads. If you haven’t read the first piece on the Jeffrey Epstein Non-Prosecution Agreement, it lives on my Substack and website. Before you read what follows, you may also want to revisit my recent piece Israel Was Not in the Room — because what I’m about to show you is what was already built before anyone sat down at that table. The seventy-two hour clock on the Iran nuclear deal expires tomorrow. I am not telling you what that means. I am showing you what exists and urging you to do your own research in order to form your conclusions.

He had been a man of impossible strength and ordinary weakness.

The Nazirite vow marked him from before his birth. No razor would touch his head, no wine would pass his lips, no unclean thing would defile him. He was set apart. Consecrated. The angel who announced him to his mother didn’t come to his father first. Didn’t come to the elders or the priests. Came to a barren woman standing alone, and told her that the child she would carry was already spoken for.

Samson grew into his gift the way a river grows into a canyon — by force, by wearing everything around him down. He killed a lion with his bare hands and told no one. He burned the Philistine fields with three hundred foxes, tails tied together, torches fastened between them. He struck down a thousand men with the jawbone of a donkey and stood in the aftermath and made a joke about it. The text doesn’t flinch from any of it. Neither should we.

But he was undone the way consecrated men so often are. Not by his enemies. By his own appetite, and by something deeper than appetite.

Delilah didn’t take his strength. She took his secret. And you don’t surrender a secret like that to someone you merely want. You surrender it to someone you have made the mistake of needing.

Three times he lied to her. Three times she called the Philistines waiting in the other room and three times his strength held. The text says she pressed him daily with her words and urged him until his soul was vexed to death. That phrase deserves to sit for a moment. Vexed to death. He told her everything not because she outsmarted him but because he was tired. Because the weight of being what he was had worn him through. Because somewhere in the wearing down, she had become the only place he allowed himself to rest.

They came for him while he slept in her lap. They shaved the seven locks from his head and he woke to find himself ordinary. He didn’t know, the text says, that the Lord had departed from him. That detail is almost unbearable. He rose to fight and reached for something that was no longer there.

What followed was not quick. The Philistines didn’t kill him. They put out his eyes, both of them, the text specifies, as if one would not have been enough of a statement, and brought him to Gaza, the city he had once carried the gates of on his shoulders and walked away laughing. They bound him with bronze chains and set him to grinding grain in the prison. The champion of Israel, blind, chained, doing the work of an animal in a circle that never ended.

But the text notes something the Philistines didn’t think to watch for.

His hair began to grow again.

The lords of the Philistines gathered for a great feast to celebrate. Their god Dagon had delivered their enemy into their hands, and this called for thanksgiving, for spectacle, for the particular pleasure of watching a fallen giant humiliated. The temple filled. Three thousand people on the roof alone — men and women who had come to watch Samson perform, to laugh at what he had become. The lords were there. The rulers. The ones who had paid Delilah her eleven hundred pieces of silver each.

They sent for him. Let the blind man entertain us.

A young boy led him by the hand into the temple. Samson asked the boy to guide his hands to the pillars — the two central columns that held the weight of the roof, the weight of the crowd, the weight of everything above them. The boy placed his hands on the stone.

The text records his prayer with plain economy. He asked God for strength one more time. Just once more. He wanted to pay back what had been done to his eyes.

And then he said the words that would name a nuclear doctrine three thousand years later.

Let me die with the Philistines.

Not let me live to fight again. Not let my people be delivered. Not let your name be glorified. Let me die with them. Let the roof come down on all of us together — on the lords and the rulers and the three thousand watching from above, on the guilty and the incidental alike, on everyone in this building including the man pushing these pillars.

He pushed.

The text says the dead he killed at his death were more than those he had killed in his life. The temple came down on the lords and on all the people in it. His family came to collect what was left of him and bury him in his father’s tomb.

It’s not a clean story. It wasn’t meant to be.

I have never been able to read Samson without being pulled in two directions at once.

He was a narcissist. That much is plain in the text — a man who used his gift like a personal weapon, who made riddles for sport and burned fields for revenge and turned the sacred into transaction. He is not a clean hero. The book of Judges doesn’t ask you to read him as one.

But something in him has always made me sad.

Maybe it’s the hair.

Across millennia and across cultures, hair has carried the weight of identity in a way that resists easy explanation. The Samurai’s top-knot was not decoration. It was rank, it was honor, it was the visible mark of what a man was. When the Meiji government forced samurai into the streets to have their knots cut off, they were not changing a hairstyle. They were performing an unmaking. A woman who shears waist-length hair in a moment of private breakdown understands something ancient about what she is doing; that she is taking the shears to something that represents her, something that grew slowly and meant something, something she cannot get back quickly.

Samson’s seven locks were not just hair. They were the seal of everything he had been set apart to be. And Delilah did not just cut them. She had them cut while he slept in her lap, in the place where he had finally allowed himself to rest, in the arms of the person he had made the mistake of needing.

They took the most sacred thing about him in the moment he was most exposed.

And then they put out his eyes so he couldn’t see what he had lost.

I think about that when I think about what was built in the Negev desert. About what was named after him. About the kind of power that survives its own humiliation and goes quiet and waits and grows back in the dark.

Every doctrine needs a name. Names are chosen carefully by people who understand that language shapes perception, that what you call a thing determines how people are willing to think about it. Military planners know this better than anyone.

Someone looked at a blind man chained to pillars in a temple full of people who had destroyed him, a man with nothing left but the strength returning quietly in his hair and the willingness to die if he could take everyone in the building with him, and they said: that is the posture we need a name for.

Not victory. Not defense. Not deterrence in the clean Cold War sense of mutually assured destruction where both sides theoretically survive long enough to regret it. Something older and more absolute than that. The willingness to pull the roof down on yourself and everyone else in the room when there is nothing left to protect except the refusal to be the only ones who die.

They called it the Samson Option.

And unlike Samson, they built it in secret.

The desert southwest of Beersheba holds a particular quality of silence. The Negev is not empty — it only presents itself that way to people who haven’t learned to read it. In 1955 the Israeli government began construction on something in that silence that it would spend the next several decades officially describing as a textile factory. Then an agricultural research station. Then, when the size of it made those explanations implausible, a nuclear research center for peaceful purposes called Dimona.

The French helped build it. A secret agreement between Israel and France in 1957 provided not just a reactor but a plutonium reprocessing plant — the piece of the architecture that transforms nuclear research into nuclear weapons capability. France was simultaneously negotiating its own place in the postwar world order and found in Israel a partner whose secrecy requirements matched its own ambitions. The arrangement was kept from the United States. Deliberately. By both parties.

By the time American U-2 surveillance flights spotted the construction in 1958, something significant was already in the ground.

The question then became what to do about what they had seen.

The answer, it turned out, was very little. And then, eventually, nothing at all.

The United States had a problem.

It knew, by 1960, that Israel was building something in the Negev that could not be plausibly explained by agricultural research or textile production. The CIA knew. The State Department knew. President Kennedy knew, and unlike his predecessors and successors, he pushed. He pushed hard enough that the Israelis agreed to allow American inspections of the Dimona facility.

What followed was one of the most elaborate deceptions in the documented history of nuclear nonproliferation.

The inspectors who arrived at Dimona were shown a facility. They walked through rooms, examined equipment, and wrote reports. What the declassified State Department cables and the work of historian Avner Cohen — whose 1998 book Israel and the Bomb nearly resulted in his prosecution by the Israeli government — documents is what the inspectors were not shown.

There was an elevator that went down, but the inspectors were not taken to it.

There was a reprocessing plant beneath the visible facility — the machinery that takes spent nuclear fuel and extracts from it weapons-grade plutonium. It was the most significant piece of the entire operation. It was not on the tour.

Walls were constructed before inspection visits to conceal tunnel entrances. Equipment was removed temporarily. What the Americans were shown was, in the language of intelligence, a Potemkin facility — a constructed facade with nothing behind it but the intention to keep them looking at the facade.

The inspectors returned home and their reports noted no evidence of weapons development.

Kennedy was not satisfied. He pressed for more access, more rigorous inspection, inspectors of American choosing rather than visits arranged by the Israelis. His letters to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion on the subject are part of the documented record — direct, pointed, reflecting a president who understood exactly what was at stake if a Middle Eastern nation acquired nuclear weapons outside any international framework.

Ben-Gurion resigned in 1963 before the inspection regime Kennedy was demanding could be formalized.

Kennedy was assassinated in November of that year.

His successor did not press the matter.

Lyndon B. Johnson, the declassified record shows, moved American policy toward what would become its permanent posture on Israeli nuclear capability — a posture with a name as carefully chosen as the doctrine itself.

They called it ambiguity.

Six years before Moshe Dayan stood in a war room invoking the destruction of the third temple, another incident was written into the permanent contested record of what the United States is willing to absorb in silence when Israel is the one holding the weapon.

June 8, 1967. The Six Day War was four days old and nearly won. Israeli forces had already destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground, had taken the Sinai, were moving on Jerusalem. In the eastern Mediterranean, in international waters, an American naval vessel was doing what it had been sent to do — signals intelligence collection, monitoring communications from all parties in the conflict.

The USS Liberty was not a warship in any combat sense. It was a technical research vessel. It was flying its American flag. The day was clear. The sea was calm. Israeli aircraft had conducted reconnaissance passes over the ship hours earlier — close enough, survivor accounts would later establish, that crew members could see the Star of David markings on the wings and wave at the pilots.

What happened next lasted approximately two hours.

Israeli aircraft attacked first — unmarked at the outset of the assault, a detail that would become one of many points of contention in the years that followed. Rockets. Cannon fire. Napalm. The Liberty’s communications antennae were among the first things hit, limiting its ability to call for help. When crew members attempted to deploy life rafts to evacuate the wounded, the rafts were strafed.

American aircraft were launched from a nearby carrier to assist. They were recalled before they arrived. This is documented. The recall came from the highest levels. Survivors have testified that the ship was left to absorb the attack without assistance for reasons that were never formally explained.

Then the torpedo boats came. Five of them. Israeli torpedo boats struck the Liberty with a torpedo that killed twenty-five men in a single compartment. By the time the attack ended thirty-four Americans were dead and one hundred seventy-one were wounded. The Liberty was so badly damaged it should not have stayed afloat. It did, because the crew kept it afloat through the kind of effort that gets memorialized and then quietly forgotten.

Israel apologized within hours. Called it a tragic case of mistaken identity.

The United States accepted that explanation within twenty-four hours.

The Naval Court of Inquiry was convened and completed in ten days. For an incident in which a United States naval vessel was attacked in international waters with the loss of thirty-four American lives, ten days is a remarkable pace. Survivors who sought to testify about details that didn’t fit the mistaken identity explanation have stated under oath that they were warned — by superior officers, in explicit terms — that the matter was closed and their careers depended on understanding that.

The investigation’s supervising officer was Admiral John Sidney McCain Jr. His son, the late Senator John McCain, would spend decades in public life during which the Liberty was never formally reinvestigated despite repeated requests from survivors and their advocates.

NSA intercepts that survivors and researchers argued showed Israeli forces had identified the Liberty as an American vessel before the attack was completed were classified for decades. What they contain in their released form remains disputed by the parties with the most to lose from a definitive answer.

What is not disputed is what happened to the men on the ship.

What is not disputed is how quickly the official explanation was accepted.

What is not disputed is that no one with the authority to demand a fuller accounting ever did.

On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel simultaneously. It was Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the Day of Atonement. The timing was not accidental. Israeli intelligence had failed catastrophically. The army was unprepared. In the first hours and days of the war, Israeli forces were being pushed back on two fronts in ways that hadn’t happened since 1948.

By October 8th, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was telling Prime Minister Golda Meir that what he was watching was the destruction of the third temple.

That phrase was not hyperbole. It was a reference and anyone in that room understood what it meant.

Meir authorized the assembly of thirteen nuclear warheads. The weapons were configured for delivery by aircraft and by Jericho missiles aimed at Egyptian and Syrian targets. Israeli Air Force pilots were briefed. The weapons were not yet armed for launch but they were no longer in storage. They were in the pipeline between storage and use, which is a different thing entirely.

This is documented. Seymour Hersh reported it in detail in 1991 drawing on intelligence sources. William Quandt, who served on the National Security Council during the crisis, has confirmed the American awareness of what Israel was preparing. Avner Cohen’s research corroborates the assembly and the alert status.

What happened next happened fast.

American intelligence detected the alert. The nature of what Israel was preparing was communicated to Henry Kissinger, then serving as both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, a concentration of foreign policy authority in a single unelected official that itself deserves its own paper trail. Kissinger understood immediately that if Israel used nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union, which was resupplying Egypt and Syria, would have no choice but to respond. The regional war would become something without a ceiling.

The United States initiated an emergency military airlift to Israel. Tanks, ammunition, aircraft, artillery — everything the Israeli military needed to fight conventionally was loaded onto American transport planes and sent. The resupply was massive enough to turn the tide of the conventional war.

The nuclear weapons went back into storage.

But something had been demonstrated that October that no official statement would ever acknowledge. The Samson Option was not a theoretical deterrent. It was not a philosophical position or a strategic abstraction. It was a set of weapons that had been taken out of their containers and pointed at cities while a defense minister compared the moment to the destruction of the Second Temple.

The roof had not come down. But the hands had found the pillars.

In 1968 the United Nations opened the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty for signature. The logic of the treaty was straightforward in the way that logic often is before it encounters political reality. Nations that already had nuclear weapons would commit to eventual disarmament. Nations that didn’t have them would commit to never acquiring them. In exchange, all signatories would have access to peaceful nuclear technology under international inspection.

One hundred ninety-one countries have signed it.

Israel has not.

This is not a secret nor a disputed fact. It is a matter of public record that generates almost no sustained American political discussion, which is itself a kind of answer to the question of why it matters.

India has not signed. Pakistan has not signed. North Korea withdrew in 2003. These absences are noted, condemned, sanctioned, and used as justification for significant American foreign policy pressure up to and including military action in the case of nations deemed to be pursuing the capability Israel already has.

The framework applied to Iran — the negotiations, the sanctions, the threat architecture, the entire diplomatic superstructure of the last two decades — rests on the foundational argument that a Middle Eastern nation cannot be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons outside the NPT framework.

Iran has signed the NPT.

Israel has not.

This asymmetry is not an oversight. It is not a bureaucratic anomaly or a historical accident that no one has gotten around to correcting. It is a policy. It has a name. The United States government calls it deliberate ambiguity, and it has been the official posture of every American administration since Lyndon Johnson looked at what Kennedy had been pressing for and decided that pressing was not something he intended to do.

The policy works like this. The United States does not officially acknowledge that Israel has nuclear weapons. Israel does not officially confirm or deny that it has nuclear weapons. In exchange for this arrangement, the United States does not apply to Israel the nonproliferation standards it applies to every other nation on earth. American foreign aid to Israel — which has totaled over one hundred fifty billion dollars since 1948, more than to any other nation — continues regardless of the provisions in American law that prohibit assistance to countries pursuing nuclear weapons outside the NPT framework.

Those provisions exist. They are written into the law. The Symington Amendment of 1976 and the Glenn Amendment of 1977 explicitly prohibit American foreign assistance to countries that deliver or receive nuclear enrichment technology outside international safeguards.

They have never been applied to Israel.

Not once. Not by any administration. Not by any Congress.

The legal mechanism by which this is sustained is not a formal waiver or a declared exception. It is silence. The law exists. The situation exists. The acknowledgment that would require the law to be applied does not exist. And so the aid continues and the weapons continue and the doctrine continues and the American government continues to describe its position as one of not confirming or denying what the CIA, the State Department, and every serious nonproliferation scholar on earth has documented for sixty years.

Mordechai Vanunu was an Israeli nuclear technician who in 1986 provided the Sunday Times of London with photographs and detailed technical descriptions of the Dimona facility — the real one, not the Potemkin version shown to American inspectors. His evidence allowed nuclear experts to conclude with confidence that Israel possessed between one hundred and two hundred nuclear warheads.

He was lured to Rome by a woman working for Israeli intelligence. Drugged. Smuggled to Israel on a cargo ship. Tried in secret. Sentenced to eighteen years in prison, eleven of which were spent in solitary confinement.

He was not tried for lying.

I have thought about those eleven years. A man alone in a cell for telling the truth about something that everyone with a security clearance and a reason to know already knew. There is a real kind of violence in that. Not the violence of the drugging or the smuggling or the secret trial, though those are violence enough. The particular violence of the solitary years. The message they were designed to send to anyone watching.

We have time. We have patience. We will wait you out in a room by yourself until the telling stops feeling worth it.

It works. It has always worked. The taxonomy of silencing is older than any government that has ever practiced it. Sometimes it is a prison sentence. Sometimes it is professional excommunication — the career warning, the reassignment, the funding that quietly disappears. Sometimes it is the simple arithmetic of making an example so visible and so prolonged that no one who might follow requires an explicit threat.

And sometimes it is something more permanent than any of those.

Vanunu was released in 2004. He was prohibited from speaking to foreign nationals or journalists. Prohibited from leaving the country. Those restrictions have been repeatedly renewed. He has been rearrested multiple times for giving interviews.

The United States government made no formal objection to any of this.

When the truth is dangerous enough, the silence of powerful nations is not passive. It is a choice. It is a wall built around the man in the cell to make sure the cell does the work it was designed to do.

The textile factory. The mistaken identity. The deliberate ambiguity.

And eleven years alone in a room.

I have spent a long time with this paper trail. Long enough that when October 2023 arrived I did not experience it as a surprise. I experienced it the way a person experiences something they have been reading the conditions for and with a kind of dread that has no clean name because it sits at the intersection of sorrow and recognition.

What the documented record shows is this:

On October 7th, 2023, an attack on Israeli civilians killed approximately 1,200 people. It was the deadliest single day for Jewish people since the Holocaust. The images were real. The grief was real. The dead were real.

What followed was a military campaign in Gaza that has by documented international accounting killed tens of thousands of people in one of the most densely populated territories on earth. The overwhelming majority of Gaza’s population has been displaced. The infrastructure — hospitals, universities, water systems, homes — has been systematically destroyed in ways that humanitarian organizations have described in terms the United States government has declined to formally adopt.

I am not going to tell you what to think about any of that.

What I am going to tell you is what exists in the Negev desert while all of it is happening. What doctrine is active policy in the hands of a government operating under what it has publicly and repeatedly described as existential emergency. What cabinet ministers have said out loud in radio interviews that got them suspended for a news cycle and then quietly forgotten.

The paper trail doesn’t tell you what October 7th means.

It tells you what was already built before it happened.

Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu was asked in a November 2023 radio interview whether dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was an option. He said that was, in his words, one of the possibilities. He was suspended from cabinet meetings. He was not removed from the government. His words were described as not representing official Israeli policy.

No one in the Israeli government explained what official Israeli policy actually was. They couldn’t. Official Israeli policy is that there is no nuclear arsenal to have a policy about.

The deliberate ambiguity that Lyndon Johnson institutionalized in the 1960s had arrived at this moment — a cabinet minister publicly discussing nuclear weapons use in an active war, suspended for a news cycle, and then the subject closed because opening it requires acknowledging something that sixty years of American policy has been constructed to never acknowledge.

Itamar Ben-Gvir. Bezalel Smotrich. These are not fringe figures in the current Israeli government. They are senior ministers with documented records of statements about Palestinian civilians, about the acceptability of collective punishment, about the nature of what Israel is and what it is entitled to do to survive. They govern in a coalition that would have been politically unthinkable in Israel a generation ago.

This matters to the Samson Option for a reason that is structural rather than personal.

The doctrine was conceived as a last resort — the pillar option, the roof-comes-down option, the we-have-no-other-move option. It assumed governments that understood it as such. Governments that would reach for it only when the alternative was national annihilation.

The question that the current moment forces, the question that the paper trail demands be asked, is what happens to a last resort doctrine when the definition of last resort expands. When the officials holding the option include people who have publicly described civilian populations as legitimate targets. When the regional war involves Iran, whose nuclear program has been the stated justification for American policy in the Middle East for two decades, and whose proxies are engaged in active conflict with Israel on multiple fronts simultaneously.

Iran has its own calculations. It’s watched what happened to Iraq, which did not have nuclear weapons when the United States invaded in 2003. It has watched what happened to Libya, which gave up its nuclear program in 2003 and whose government was gone by 2011. It’s watched North Korea, which has nuclear weapons, and drawn its own conclusions about what those weapons provide.

The nuclear logic of the Middle East right now is not stable. It is not a Cold War standoff between two superpowers with enough to lose that the math of mutually assured destruction holds. It is a region with one undeclared nuclear arsenal, one near-threshold program, several American military installations, multiple active proxy conflicts, and a doctrine named after a man who decided that if he was going to die he was going to take everyone in the building with him.

The United States is in the building.

So is everyone else.

The text of Judges does not record anyone trying to stop him.

Three thousand people in that temple. Lords and rulers and servants and the simply unlucky. People who had come for a festival, people who were doing their jobs, people who had nothing to do with what had been done to Samson’s eyes and everything to do with what was about to happen to the roof. The text does not record a single voice saying "‘wait. Do not do this. There is still another way.’

Perhaps there wasn’t. Perhaps by the time a man has found the pillars in the dark the moment for other ways has passed.

Or perhaps the silence in the text is just the silence of people who understood what was happening and had no language for stopping it and so said nothing and hoped the math would work out differently than it did.

That silence has a modern equivalent. It lives in sixty years of American foreign policy. It lives in the Symington Amendment that has never been applied and the inspections that showed a textile factory and the Naval Court of Inquiry completed in ten days and the career warnings given to men who wanted to testify about what they saw from the deck of a burning ship. It lives in every press briefing where a spokesperson has said the United States does not comment on the nuclear capabilities of other nations and moved on to the next question.

It isn’t ignorance or oversight. It is a choice, made deliberately, maintained consistently, passed from one administration to the next like a document that everyone signs and no one files.

Samson did not bring the temple down alone. He had help getting to the pillars.

He always does.

Buy Momma Jess a Coffee

Sources

Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991.

Cohen, Avner. Israel and the Bomb. Columbia University Press, 1998.

Quandt, William B. Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967. Brookings Institution Press, 2005.

National Security Archive, George Washington University. Declassified documents on Israeli nuclear development. nsarchive.gwu.edu.

U.S. Department of State. Declassified cables regarding Dimona inspections. Available via National Security Archive.

Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, 1968. un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/npt.

The Symington Amendment. Section 669, Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as amended 1976.

The Glenn Amendment. Section 670, Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as amended 1977.

USS Liberty Veterans Association. Survivor testimony and documented record. ussliberty.org.

Naval Court of Inquiry findings, USS Liberty incident, June 1967. Declassified.

Vanunu, Mordechai. Sunday Times (London) disclosure, October 5, 1986.

Arms Control Association. Israeli nuclear weapons documentation. armscontrol.org.

Kennedy, John F. Correspondence with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion regarding Dimona inspections, 1963. Available via National Security Archive.

Eliyahu, Amichai. Radio interview, Kol Berama, November 2023. Reported by multiple outlets including The Times of Israel.

What the Government Signed

Installment One of The Paper Trail: The documented record of how Jeffrey Epstein

was protected, location by location, by the institutions built to stop him.

On September 24, 2007, a document was signed in Southern Florida that should have never existed. It was called a Non-Prosecution Agreement. What it actually was, was a rescue. A federal lifeline extended to a man the FBI had already built a case against. A case that, by every legal standard, should have ended in federal charges, a trial, and a sentence measured in decades.

Instead, Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to two state-level prostitution charges. He served 13 months in a county jail and was permitted to leave six days a week on work release. The victims were not told. Not notified, consulted, or warned that the federal government had quietly folded its hand while they were still waiting for justice. That silence was not an oversight.

A federal judge ruled in 2019 that it was a violation of the Crime Victims Rights Act. That ruling is public record. The man who signed that agreement was Alexander Acosta, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. He would later become the United States Secretary of Labor. He resigned that post in July 2019. Not because of a political scandal. Not because of policy failure. Because a Miami Herald reporter named Julie K. Brown refused to let a sealed document stay buried.

The document existed. The signatures were real. The protection it provided was extensive. And someone made sure the victims never knew.

* * *

The Non-Prosecution Agreement was not a short document hastily assembled. It was fifty three pages. It was negotiated over months between Acosta’s office and Epstein’s legal team, which included prominent defense attorneys Alan Dershowitz and Jay Lefkowitz. The negotiation itself was conducted in secret, away from the victims, away from the public, and away from the prosecutors who had spent years building the federal case.

What the agreement contained was extraordinary even by the standards of generous plea arrangements. Epstein would face no federal charges. His named associates would face no federal charges. But the provision that has drawn the most scrutiny is the one extending immunity to unnamed co-conspirators. People whose identities were not listed. People the document protected without ever acknowledging publicly that they existed.

Read that again slowly.

The United States government granted immunity to unnamed individuals in connection with one of the most extensive sex trafficking investigations the FBI had ever built. And then sealed the document so the victims could not read it.

Courtney Wild was fourteen years old when Epstein began abusing her. She was one of the victims who fought in federal court for the right to simply be informed. To be told what had been decided on her behalf. That fight took years. Judge Kenneth Marra ruled in her favor in 2019, finding that prosecutors had violated the Crime Victims Rights Act by concealing the agreement from victims like her.

The government had an obligation to tell her. They chose not to.

* * *

The terms of Epstein’s work release designated his Palm Beach office as his approved destination. Six days a week he left the county jail. Six days a week he was, by legal arrangement, supposed to be conducting legitimate business. The Palm Beach Sheriff’s office was responsible for monitoring that compliance. What that monitoring actually looked like became its own documented scandal. A subsequent investigation raised serious questions about whether the terms of his work release were adequately enforced. Whether anyone was genuinely tracking where Jeffrey Epstein went and what he did on those six days every week for thirteen months.

The investigation into the Sheriff’s office is public record.

Victim accounts, documented in legal filings by victims’ attorney Bradley Edwards, allege that the abuse did not stop during this period. These are not anonymous claims. They are statements made by named individuals in federal legal proceedings. They are part of the documented record of this case.

What is not in dispute is this: a man the FBI had identified as a serial predator who had abused dozens of minors was granted the privilege of leaving his jail cell six days a week. The agency responsible for ensuring he complied with the terms of that arrangement failed to do so adequately by its own documented record.

Thirteen months. Six days a week. Inadequate monitoring. Victim accounts alleging continued abuse.

The Non-Prosecution Agreement did not just protect Epstein from the past. There is documented reason to believe it created conditions that allowed the present to continue.

* * *

The Non-Prosecution Agreement might have stayed buried permanently. Epstein served his arrangement, registered as a sex offender, and returned to his life largely intact. His properties. His foundations. His social connections. His aircraft.

The Senate confirmation process required Acosta to answer for his record. Under oath, on congressional record. Senators questioned him directly about the Epstein plea deal. About the secrecy. About the victims who were never notified.

Acosta’s defense was striking. He claimed that federal prosecution had been uncertain. That the case might not have held up. That the arrangement had secured at least some accountability where none might otherwise have existed. Career federal prosecutors who had worked the case disagreed. Publicly. On record.

FBI agents who built the original case have stated in documented interviews that the federal case was solid. That the evidence was there. That the decision to stand down came from above the investigators who had done the work.

Acosta was confirmed. He took office.

Then Julie K. Brown published her investigation in November 2018.

By July 2019 Acosta was standing in a White House driveway announcing his resignation. He said he did not want the Epstein case to be a distraction. He did not dispute Brown’s reporting.

The victims are still waiting for a full accounting of every name that document protected.

* * *

9 East 71st Street, Manhattan

The townhouse at 9 East 71st Street sits between Fifth and Madison Avenues on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It is known formally as the Herbert N. Straus House. Seven floors, twenty eight thousand square feet. One of the largest private residences in Manhattan.

Les Wexner bought it in 1989 for approximately 13 million dollars. Wexner was the founder of L Brands, the retail empire behind Victoria’s Secret, Bath and Body Works, and Abercrombie & Fitch. He renovated the property extensively. In 1991, Wexner granted Epstein power of attorney over his finances, a role that gave Epstein nearly limitless control over one of the largest private fortunes in America. That power of attorney allowed Epstein to hire people, sign checks, buy and sell properties, borrow money, and do anything else of a legally binding nature on Wexner’s behalf.

In 1998, Wexner sold the townhouse to Epstein for 20 million dollars. What happened next is documented in property records. In 2011, Epstein transferred the mansion to Maple Inc., a U.S. Virgin Islands entity, for zero dollars in recorded consideration. Epstein signed the transaction documents for both sides: as representative of the seller, and as representative of the buyer. There was no independent party on either end. One person, two signatures, and one of Manhattan’s most valuable residential properties moved offshore without a dollar changing hands.

The property was valued by New York City at approximately 56 million dollars in 2019. It was not just a residence. Victim testimony entered into federal court proceedings and documented in Julie K. Brown”s investigation identifies this address specifically. It is where girls were brought and abused. Where the pattern documented by the FBI played out across years. Where staff worked and where prominent visitors came and went. When federal authorities searched the property following Epstein’s 2019 arrest, they found a collection of material believed to contain images of children. This is a documented finding from a federal search of the premises.

The townhouse eventually sold in 2021 for approximately 51 million dollars. Funds from the sale were transferred to the Epstein Victims Compensation Program. The identity of the buyer was not disclosed.

In February 2026, Representative Ro Khanna revealed that the FBI had once listed Les Wexner as a potential Epstein co-conspirator. That disclosure is part of the congressional record. Wexner has not been charged with any crime.

* * *

Little St. James, U.S. Virgin Islands

If the Manhattan townhouse was where Jeffrey Epstein operated in plain sight, Little St. James was where he disappeared entirely from oversight.

Epstein purchased Little St. James in April 1998 through a company called L.S.J. LLC for 7.95 million dollars. The island sits approximately one mile southeast of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Roughly seventy acres. Accessible only by helicopter or private boat.

He called it Little St. Jeff’s.

The seclusion was not incidental. The U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General stated directly that the island’s isolation was designed to make it difficult for government officials to monitor Epstein’s behavior, and even harder for the young girls brought there to escape.

Over two decades Epstein developed the island extensively. A main residence. Guest houses. Additional structures. By 2019 it was valued at approximately 63.8 million dollars. In 2016 he purchased the neighboring Great St. James Island, 162 acres, for 22.5 million dollars.

He made Little St. James his primary legal residence. That decision carried significant tax advantages under U.S. Virgin Islands law. A predator operating a trafficking network had arranged his legal domicile on a private island accessible only by aircraft or boat.

The Virgin Islands Attorney General’s civil suit alleged that over two decades Epstein transported young women and girls to his private Caribbean islands by helicopter and boat and subjected them to sexual abuse. The alleged activity occurred as recently as 2018. The suit alleged victims as young as eleven years old. These allegations are contained in a civil enforcement action filed by the government of the United States Virgin Islands under that territory’s human trafficking statutes.

One victim statement contained in DOJ files states: “One day I was in severe distress and afraid. I tried to escape Epstein and the others by trying to swim off Little St. James. After spending the day being raped, bullied, and belittled, Epstein and Maxwell, brought me back as if nothing happened.”

That statement is in the federal record.

In a separate documented incident, a fifteen year old who was forced into sexual acts with Epstein attempted to escape by swimming off the island. Epstein’s crew assembled a search team, found her, and took her passport.

Two days after Epstein’s death in August 2019, the FBI executed search warrants on Little St. James. Agents arrived by helicopter and boat. Documents, electronic devices, and physical evidence were seized from multiple structures on the property.

In November 2022 the Virgin Islands reached a settlement with the Epstein estate for 105 million dollars in cash plus half the proceeds from the planned sale of the island.

JPMorgan Chase separately settled related claims with the U.S. Virgin Islands for 75 million dollars in 2023.

A major American bank. Seventy five million dollars. Settled.

That line will be addressed in full in a later installment.

* * *

Zorro Ranch, New Mexico

Zorro Ranch sits thirty miles south of Santa Fe in the high desert of New Mexico. Seven thousand six hundred acres. A 26,700 square foot hilltop mansion. Guest houses. A pool. A firehouse. Heated garages. A private airstrip with a hangar and a helipad.

Epstein purchased it in 1993 from Bruce King, a three-time Democratic Governor of

New Mexico. He was never charged with a single crime related to what happened there. Multiple victims have alleged abuse at Zorro Ranch. Virginia Giuffre provided photographs of herself at the property in legal filings. Annie Farmer and a victim identified in court proceedings only as Jane both testified about abuse they experienced at the ranch during Ghislaine Maxwell’s federal sex trafficking trial. That trial ended in a conviction. Their testimony is federal court record.

Chauntae Davis told CBS News in 2019 that she was raped at Zorro Ranch at least twice.

The ranch’s former manager told the FBI that Epstein flew in guests and masseuses to the property and hired local massage therapists to work there. That account appears in the Epstein files.

Federal document files place Epstein engaged in sex with underage girls on a daily basis during his stays at the ranch, and identify Ghislaine Maxwell as present during multiple visits, actively recruiting victims there.

* * *

The documented victim testimony from Zorro Ranch is federal court record. It was entered into evidence at Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial in December 2021. Maxwell was convicted.

Annie Farmer testified using her real name, the only accuser in the Maxwell trial to do so. She told jurors she was sixteen years old in 1996 when she accepted an invitation to Zorro Ranch, believing Epstein and Maxwell wanted to help fund her education. When she arrived, she had been told there would be many other people at the ranch.

There were not.

During what was framed as a massage, Maxwell fondled her breasts. Epstein climbed into her bed without her permission. Farmer testified that she felt frozen. She knew she was in an isolated location with powerful adults and she did not know how to respond. Throughout her testimony Farmer read aloud from her teenage diary. She said she knew the ranch was isolated and she felt she could not speak out or fight back. “I thought I just needed to get through this and I would be fine”, she told the jury, her voice breaking.

She was sixteen. She was alone. And she was right that she just needed to survive the weekend.

A victim identified in court proceedings only as Jane testified she was fourteen years old when Maxwell and Epstein recruited her. She was flown to Zorro Ranch and forced to participate in what she described as orgies. Her testimony is part of the federal record that convicted Ghislaine Maxwell.

Federal document files place Epstein engaged in sex with underage girls on a daily basis during his stays at the ranch, and identify Maxwell as present during multiple visits, actively recruiting victims there.

These are not rumors. They are the evidentiary foundation of a federal conviction.

* * *

Yet no one was ever charged with a crime specifically related to Zorro Ranch. The property operated for more than two decades. Victims came forward. Tips were filed. Investigations were opened and then quietly closed. The New Mexico Department of

Justice’s first criminal investigation ended in 2019 at the request of federal authorities, who said the state’s investigation could overlap with the federal prosecution. Epstein died that same year. The federal prosecution ended with him. And Zorro Ranch remained unsearched.

In 2019, two separate communications were sent to authorities raising alarms about Zorro Ranch. Both were documented. Both were filed. Neither resulted in a search of the property.

The first was an anonymous email received by Albuquerque radio host Eddy Aragon alleging that two foreign girls had been buried in the hills outside the ranch on orders of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The sender claimed the girls died by strangulation. Aragon forwarded the email to the FBI.

The second was a communication from a retired New Mexico State Police officer who had patrolled the area around Zorro Ranch for fifteen years. He described a barn on the property with a garage door configured as a sally port and a chimney, and stated his concern that the property could potentially have an incinerator concealed within the barn. He told the FBI there had been a lot of high-profile people seen frequently at the ranch.

The FBI received both communications in 2019. In the months that followed, federal agents searched Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, his Palm Beach mansion, and Little St. James. They deliberately excluded Zorro Ranch.

The ranch was not searched for the first time until March 2026. Six years later.

What compelled that search was not a change in investigative priorities. It was the forced public release of documents the government had spent years fighting to keep sealed, released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act signed into law in November 2025. The tips had been buried in those files. When the files became public, the tips became undeniable.

Physical evidence recovered during the March 2026 search has not been publicly described. The New Mexico Attorney General”s office has stated it will not comment on the active investigation.

A New Mexico legislative truth commission has been established with subpoena power over fourteen state and federal agencies. A state prosecutor serving on the commission stated publicly: “this commission will build a complete documented public record. We will name who was responsible and we will do so with the evidentiary rigor that survivors deserve.”

That investigation is ongoing as this is written.

The anonymous tip may prove to be false. Tips sometimes are. But a documented tip alleging that two girls were buried on a property where federal victims testified to daily abuse was received by the FBI in 2019. The FBI searched every other Epstein property. They did not search the ranch. That is not allegation. That is the documented record.

And someone needs to explain it.

* * *

SOURCES

Non-Prosecution Agreement (2007): U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida, filed and

unsealed 2019

Crime Victims Rights Act ruling: Judge Kenneth Marra, U.S. District Court, S.D. Florida, 2019

Miami Herald: “Perversion of Justice”; investigative series, Julie K. Brown, November 2018

Ghislaine Maxwell trial transcript: U.S. District Court, S.D. New York, December 2021; Maxwell convicted on five counts including sex trafficking of a minor

Virginia Islands AG civil suit: USVI v. Epstein Estate, filed January 2020; settled November 2022 for $105 million

JPMorgan Chase settlement: $75 million, U.S. Virgin Islands, 2023 (Reuters)

Victim statement re: Little St. James escape: DOJ Epstein file release, January 2026

15-year-old passport incident: USVI AG civil complaint, court record

Property records: NYC property valuation records; USVI property records; New Mexico property records

Les Wexner power of attorney: documented 1991, revoked 2007; congressional testimony and Epstein file releases 2025-2026

Wexner as potential co-conspirator: Rep. Ro Khanna, House Oversight Committee, February 2026

FBI tips re: Zorro Ranch: Epstein Files Transparency Act document release, January 2026; World Socialist Web Site reporting, March 2026

First search of Zorro Ranch: New Mexico AG Raul Torrez, March 2026

New Mexico truth commission: NM House vote 62-0, February 16, 2026; subpoenas issued June 2026

Annie Farmer testimony: Maxwell trial, December 10, 2021 (CBS News, Reuters, Al Jazeera court reporting)

Acosta Senate confirmation hearings: U.S. Senate HELP Committee, 2017, congressional record

Acosta resignation: July 12, 2019, White House press statement

Epstein Files Transparency Act: signed November 19, 2025

Next installment: Ghislaine Maxwell. The conviction. The sentence. The questions that remain.

Buy Momma Jess a Coffee

Judaism as a whole cannot be blamed for the greed and misdeed of the infiltrators.

“The present proves the past.”

I. The River

The river did not care that they were God’s people.

The Chebar ran flat and brown through the plain of Mesopotamia, indifferent to the feet of the exiled, indifferent to the dust of Jerusalem still caught in their sandals, indifferent to the sound of a people trying to remember what home had smelled like. Cedar. Sacrifice. Stone warmed by Levantine sun. They carried those smells in their bodies because their bodies were all they had left. The Temple was ash. The city was ash. The king of Babylon had taken everything that could be taken and left behind everything that could be used.

That is the first thing to understand. Nebuchadnezzar did not take everyone. He took the useful ones. The priests. The nobility. The craftsmen. The people who knew things. He left the poorest of the land — the am ha’aretz, the people of the earth — to tend the vineyards and the fields. Babylon was not interested in farmers. Babylon was interested in leverage.

And so the exile began not as a single tragedy but as a sorting. A selection. The ones who arrived at the Chebar were already, by definition, the ones the empire had decided it could use.

What happened next has never been fully reckoned with. Not really. History has called it captivity, called it purification, called it the crucible that produced the synagogue and the canon and the deepest theology Israel ever wrote. All of that is true. And inside all of that truth, something else was happening. Something that would take centuries to fully surface, and millennia to name.

Babylon was not only a place of exile. It was a classroom. And not everyone was being taught the same lesson.

* * *

II. The Fork in the River

The ones who wept were the honest ones.

Psalm 137 did not come from the nobility. It came from the gut of ordinary people sitting at the water’s edge, harps hung silent in the willows, unable to sing the songs of Zion in a strange land because those songs belonged to a place that no longer stood. That grief was clean. It was the grief of people who knew exactly what they had lost and refused to pretend otherwise.

But grief is not the only response to catastrophe. There is another response, older than Babylon, older than Israel, as old as the human capacity for calculation. It is the response of the man who looks at the conqueror’s palace and begins to take notes.

Babylon was the most sophisticated civilization on earth. This is not mythology — it is archaeology, it is cuneiform, it is the surviving administrative records of an empire that had been engineering power for a thousand years before the first Hebrew stepped onto its soil. The ziggurat of Marduk rose in seven tiers above the plain, each level painted a different color, its peak housing the bridal chamber of the god. The Babylonian priesthood was not primitive. It was a precision instrument — astronomical, financial, occult — a class of men who had developed systems of celestial divination, temple prostitution, and compound interest simultaneously, understanding intuitively that the control of heaven, body, and debt were three expressions of the same power.

Into this the priestly nobility of Jerusalem arrived. Educated. Ambitious. Displaced.

Ezekiel was among them. And Ezekiel, alone on the banks of the Chebar, received a vision so overwhelming, so cosmically violent in its imagery — wheels within wheels, living creatures with four faces, a firmament like terrible crystal, the glory of God moving, mobile, no longer fixed to any temple — that scholars have argued about it ever since. But the vision’s first meaning is simple. God was telling his prophet: I am not contained in what Babylon burned. I am here. I am watching. And so are you.

What Ezekiel watched was not only the grief of the faithful. He watched the other thing. In the eighth chapter of his book he is lifted by a vision to Jerusalem itself, to the north gate of the inner court of the Temple, and shown what the elders of Israel were doing in secret chambers — every man in his room of pictures, burning incense to carved images, convinced that God could not see them. “Son of man,” God says to him, “hast thou seen what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the chambers of his imagery?”

This was not the am ha’aretz. The people of the earth had no access to the inner chambers of the Temple. This was the leadership class. The ones Babylon had taken because they were useful. And they had been useful in ways that preceded the exile — ways that the exile was now accelerating.

Babylon did not seduce an innocent priesthood. It recognized a familiar one.

That is the second thing to understand. The infiltration did not begin at the Chebar. The Chebar is where it consolidated. The prophets — Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos, Hosea — had been screaming about a corrupted priestly and noble class for generations before Nebuchadnezzar’s army ever appeared on the horizon. Amos named them directly: the ones who sold the righteous for silver and the poor for a pair of shoes, who lay on beds of ivory and stretched themselves on couches, who were not grieved for the affliction of Joseph. Jeremiah called the prophets and priests alike — “from the least of them even unto the greatest of them every one is given to covetousness, and from the prophet even unto the priest every one dealeth falsely.”

These were not outside accusations. These were inside witnesses. Israelites, called by God, documenting the betrayal of ordinary Jewish people by their own leadership class — before Babylon, during Babylon, after Babylon.

The exile did not create the problem. It gave the problem a graduate education.

* * *

III. The Return That Carried Babylon Inside It

They came home carrying Babylon inside them.

The return looked like restoration. Cyrus of Persia issued his decree and the exiles were released and the road back to Jerusalem was open and the people who had wept at the Chebar now wept again, differently, the way you weep when you have stopped believing something will happen and then it happens anyway. Ezra stood in the square and read the Torah aloud from morning until midday and the people stood and wept and the Levites moved through the crowd explaining what was being read because the people had been gone so long some of them had forgotten the language of their own inheritance.

That weeping was real. Do not let what comes next erase it.

But watch the architecture Ezra builds while the people are weeping.

Watch who sits on the council. Watch who controls the Temple treasury. Watch the emergence of the Great Assembly — the governing body of priests and scribes who will consolidate religious authority in Jerusalem for the next several centuries. Watch what they bring back from Babylon that is not in any scroll Jeremiah or Isaiah or Moses ever touched. A secondary law. An oral tradition. Claimed to have been given to Moses on Sinai simultaneously with the written Torah — transmitted not in text but in whisper, priest to priest, generation to generation, inaccessible to the am ha’aretz standing in the square weeping at the sound of their own scriptures read aloud.

Inaccessible. That is the word that matters.

The written Torah belonged to everyone. Ezra read it in public. The people wept to hear it. But this other thing — this oral tradition that would eventually become the Mishnah, then the Talmud — this belonged only to those who held the keys. And the men who held the keys had spent seventy years in the most sophisticated religious and financial system on earth, studying under a priesthood that understood, in its bones, that the control of sacred knowledge is the control of everything.

The ordinary Jewish people coming home to Jerusalem did not know what had come home with them.

But some Jews knew. And they left.

* * *

IV. The Ones Who Went to the Desert

Sometime in the second century before Christ, a community of Jewish men walked away from Jerusalem. Not to another city. Not to another country. Into the desert. The Judean wilderness above the Dead Sea, where the land drops toward the lowest point on earth and the air tastes of salt and the cliffs are honeycombed with caves. They built a settlement at a place called Qumran and they lived there for two centuries and they wrote, and what they wrote they sealed in clay jars and hid in the caves above their settlement and the caves kept their secret for two thousand years until a Bedouin shepherd threw a stone into the darkness in 1947 and heard it hit pottery.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are the testimony of people who saw what we are talking about and could not stay.

Their own documents name what they fled. The Teacher of Righteousness against the Wicked Priest. The corrupted Jerusalem establishment — the high priesthood that had been appointed not by God but by foreign rulers, that had made the Temple into an instrument of political and financial power, that had taken the sacred office and bent it toward everything the Torah forbade. The Essenes called the Jerusalem priests what they were. Usurpers. Defilers. Men who wore the robes of Aaron while serving something else entirely.

These were not outside critics. These were not Romans or Greeks or Samaritans casting aspersions. These were Jewish men, deeply Torah-observant, so committed to the covenant that they chose the desert over compromise. Their Community Rule, their Damascus Document, their War Scroll — these are the documents of people who had looked at the leadership of their own people and recognized the infiltration and refused to normalize it.

They are your witnesses. Hidden in jars. Preserved in the dry air of the desert. Waiting.

Because something else was coming to Jerusalem. Something that would walk into the Temple courts and look at the tables of the money changers and the seats of those selling doves and would not calculate or accommodate or take notes on the sophistication of the operation.

He would overturn the tables.

* * *

“It is not as though God’s word had failed.

For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel.” Romans 9:6

V. Yeshua Came In on a Donkey

Not a warhorse nor a chariot. Not with the apparatus of conquest that every other man who had ever entered Jerusalem with the intention of changing it had brought with him. A donkey, borrowed, its owner apparently asking no questions, and a road covered in cloaks and palm branches by people who had been waiting so long for someone to see what they saw that they would pave the road with their own clothing just to mark the moment.

The am ha’aretz recognized him. That is not incidental; it’s the whole story in miniature. The fishermen and the tax collectors and the prostitutes and the lepers and the woman with the alabaster jar and the blind men on the roadside and Zacchaeus up in his sycamore tree — these were not the Jerusalem establishment. These were the people of the earth. The ones who had always borne the weight of the system without access to its levers. They heard him and they knew him and they followed him in numbers that terrified the people who ran things.

The people who ran things were watching.

He went to the Temple.

What Jesus found in the Temple courts was not an aberration. It was a fully developed system, administratively sophisticated, financially precise — the money changers were not there by accident nor by individual entrepreneurship. They were there because the Temple tax had to be paid in a specific currency, Tyrian shekels, which meant every Jewish pilgrim who arrived in Jerusalem with any other currency had to exchange it, at rates set by the men who ran the tables, in the outer court of the house of God. The dove sellers were not there by accident. Sacrifice required animals certified as ritually pure, which meant the certification belonged to the men who sold them, which meant the price belonged to them too. The whole apparatus sat in the Court of the Gentiles, the one part of the Temple complex where non-Jews were permitted to pray, filling the only space available to the nations with the noise and smell and transactional machinery of a financial operation wearing sacred robes.

Jesus looked at it and overturned the tables.

The Greek word used in Matthew’s account is anestrepsen. He turned them up. He scattered the coins. He drove out the sellers with the cracking of a whip. He would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the Temple courts. And then, in the ringing silence of scattered money and fled merchants, he said: “It is written, my house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.”

He was quoting two prophets simultaneously. Isaiah 56 and Jeremiah 7. He was telling the men who ran the Temple that he had read their file. That the prophets had named them before he arrived. That what he was doing in that moment was not innovation but confirmation, the same voice that had spoken through Amos and Jeremiah and Ezekiel was speaking again, in a body, in their house, scattering their coins on the stones of their own floor.

The chief priests and scribes heard him and began looking for a way to destroy him.

Matthew 23 is the document that cannot be softened or spiritualized into abstraction. Jesus stands in the Temple and addresses the scribes and Pharisees directly, publicly, with the crowd listening, and he does not lower his voice. Eight times he says woe. Eight times. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites — the Greek word is hypokrites, it means actors, men wearing masks, men performing a role that does not correspond to what is happening behind their eyes. He calls them blind guides. He calls them whitewashed tombs — beautiful on the outside, full of dead men’s bones within. He says they travel land and sea to make a single convert and make him twice the child of hell that they are.

And then he says the thing that makes the whole piece shudder:

“You build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous and say if we had lived in the days of our fathers we would not have taken part in shedding the blood of the prophets. You testify against yourselves.”

He was telling them directly. You are the descendants of the ones who killed the witnesses. You would have done what they did. You will do what they did. And in saying so he was protecting, defending, the ordinary Jewish people standing in that crowd from being confused with the institution towering over them.

The Pharisees were not the am ha’aretz. The chief priests were not the fishermen from Galilee. The Sanhedrin was not the woman who lost her coin or the father who ran down the road toward his prodigal son. Jesus drew that line with precision and fury and love and he drew it inside Jewish life, defending the people of the earth from the people who had made themselves their masters.

Revelation would name it clearly. Twice. The synagogue of Satan: those who say they are Jews and are not. John was not inventing a new accusation. He was recording the conclusion of everything the prophets and the Essenes and Jesus himself had already documented. There is a counterfeit. It has a name. It wears the robes of the covenant while serving something the covenant forbids.

The infiltrators saw what Jesus was doing and they moved.

What happened next is the hinge on which two thousand years of innocent suffering turns. The leadership class, the high priests, the Sanhedrin, the men whose tables had been overturned, handed Jesus to Rome. Pilate found no fault in him and said so publicly and then handed him back and washed his hands of it and the crowd. The same crowd who a week before waved palm branches, in the same city, at Passover, manipulated and gathered for exactly this purpose by exactly the people who needed this outcome, cried for his blood.

And for two thousand years the bill was sent to the wrong address.

Not to the Sanhedrin. Not to the priestly class that had been consolidating Babylonian-educated power since Ezra came home from exile. Not to the infiltrators who had turned the house of prayer into a den of thieves and the covenant people into a human shield. The bill was sent to every Jewish person in every country in every century who had never set foot in Jerusalem, who had never sat on a council, who had never sold a dove or changed a coin, who had wept at the Chebar or hung their harp in the willows or simply tried to live faithfully inside a tradition that had been weaponized above their heads without their knowledge or consent.

That is not justice. That is the infiltration’s greatest achievement. Getting someone else blamed for what it did.

The ones who built the tombs of the prophets killed the last prophet. Then handed ordinary Jews, true Jews, the sentence.

* * *

VI. Scatter the Sheep, Keep the Shepherds

That is what the diaspora was, underneath the theology and the tragedy and the centuries of wandering that have been called everything from divine punishment to historical accident. Look at who survived the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD with their institutional power intact. Look at who did not.

The Zealots died fighting. The Essenes at Qumran were almost certainly massacred by Roman troops, their settlement shows evidence of violent destruction, their scrolls hastily hidden, their community ended. The followers of Jesus scattered and were hunted. The am ha’aretz of Judea were killed in numbers that stagger. Josephus records over a million dead in the siege of Jerusalem alone, numbers historians still debate but none dismiss entirely. The ordinary people of the land bled into the stones of a city the Romans then plowed under and salted and renamed so thoroughly that even its geography was meant to be forgotten.

And the Pharisees?

Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai escaped the siege of Jerusalem hidden in a coffin, carried out through the Roman lines by his students, and presented himself to Vespasian and asked for one thing. Not the city. Not the Temple. Not the survival of the people dying inside the walls behind him. He asked for Yavneh. A small coastal town. Permission to establish a school.

Vespasian gave it to him.

What ben Zakkai built at Yavneh was the institutional succession of everything that had sat in Jerusalem. The Sanhedrin reconstituted itself. The oral tradition was preserved and systematized. The rabbinic authority that had operated through the Temple apparatus now operated without a Temple, which meant it operated without the one institution that had at least required physical presence in one place. Now it could travel. Now it could follow the scattered people wherever Rome had thrown them and establish itself above them in every city in every country in the known world.

The destruction of the Temple did not destroy the institution that had corrupted it. It liberated that institution from its only fixed address.

This is the thing that has never been adequately reckoned with. The rabbinical class did not share the fate of the people. It reconstituted above them in exile exactly as it had operated above them in Jerusalem — controlling access to the sacred, defining the boundaries of the community, enforcing compliance through the only tools exile left available. You could not be excommunicated from a Temple that no longer stood. But you could be excommunicated from the community. From the burial society. From the marriage market. From the network of trade and mutual aid that was the only infrastructure keeping Jewish families alive in hostile cities across the Roman Empire and beyond.

Israel Shahak, Jewish scholar, Holocaust survivor, a man with no conceivable motivation to fabricate what he documented, described what this looked like on the ground across the centuries of rabbinic control. He called it one of the most totalitarian systems in human history. Not as an accusation from outside. As a witness from inside. The physical coercion. The rabbinical courts ordering flogging and imprisonment. The ghettos that were not only imposed from outside by hostile governments but created and maintained from inside by a leadership class that needed separation to maintain control.

Shahak’s argument, documented, sourced, written by a man who loved his people, is that the ghetto served the rabbinical class as much as it served the antisemites who surrounded it. Separation enforced dependence. Dependence enforced compliance. Compliance enforced the authority of the men who defined what compliance meant.

The ordinary Jewish people living inside that system were not its architects. They were its raw material.

And periodically, when the raw material became inconvenient, when the symbiotic relationship between the rabbinical leadership class and the governing nobility of whatever country they inhabited became politically untenable, when the people who had been used to administer oppression became the visible face of a resentment that needed an outlet, the leadership class made arrangements.

The arrangements always looked the same. The wealthy and the connected left first. They had foreknowledge because they were party to the decisions. The ordinary people found out when the edict was posted. The expulsions from England in 1290, from France in 1306, from Spain in 1492, the largest and most prosperous Jewish community in the medieval world, the Sephardim, cast out of Iberia with weeks of notice, their property forfeit, their Torah scrolls sometimes their only portable inheritance, these were not bolts from a clear sky to the people who ran things. They were managed transitions. The capital moved before the people did.

The people moved in grief and terror and died on the roads.

Sabbatai Zevi arrived in the seventeenth century and almost brought down Judaism entirely. A false messiah, charismatic and apocalyptic, who gathered hundreds of thousands of Jewish followers across the Ottoman Empire and Europe in a frenzy of messianic expectation, and then, when the Ottoman Sultan gave him the choice between conversion to Islam and death, converted to Islam. The movement should have collapsed. For ordinary Jewish people it did collapse, in grief and humiliation and shattered faith. But his inner circle, the Sabbatean Frankists, the initiated, the ones who had understood from the beginning that the public performance was not the private theology, continued. They went underground. They converted outwardly to whatever was required: Islam, Christianity, Enlightenment rationalism — while maintaining privately a theology that inverted the Torah’s values deliberately and systematically. Sin as sacrament. Transgression as the path to redemption. The public identity as costume.

This is not conspiracy theory. This is documented religious history. Gershom Scholem, the greatest scholar of Jewish mysticism in the twentieth century, documented the Sabbatean Frankist movement in exhaustive scholarly detail. What he documented was a movement that survived its own public failure by going underground and continuing to operate beneath the surface of whatever identity its members publicly wore.

The ordinary Jewish people knew nothing of this. They were busy surviving. Busy keeping Shabbat in cramped apartments in cities that tolerated them provisionally and expelled them periodically. Busy teaching their children the aleph-bet and the prayers and the stories of a God who had promised never to abandon them even when all available evidence suggested abandonment.

They kept faith in the dark. While above them, in the rooms with the closed doors, other decisions were being made in their name.

* * *

VII. The Letter Was Addressed to a Banker

Not to a rabbi. Not to a community elder. Not to any of the millions of ordinary Jewish people scattered across Europe who had been praying toward Jerusalem for two thousand years, who had kept the faith in the cramped apartments and the ghetto streets and the villages of Eastern Europe where Yiddish was the sound of survival and the Shabbat candles were the only reliable light. The letter that would determine the fate of an entire people, that would set in motion the displacement of one population and the militarization of another, that would reshape the Middle East in ways still bleeding today — that letter was addressed to Walter Rothschild. Second Baron Rothschild. One of the wealthiest men on earth. A House that lives and controls to this day.

It was November 2, 1917. Arthur James Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, wrote eleven lines. His Majesty’s Government viewed with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. Eleven lines. A country promised by men who did not own it to men who did not consult the people who would have to live in it. Men who were Jews in name only.

The ordinary Jewish people of Europe did not draft those eleven lines. They did not negotiate them. They did not know they were coming. They were the people the letter was ostensibly about: their ancient longing, their covenant memory, their centuries of exile weaponized as justification. And they were the last people in the room to know when it was written.

Theodor Herzl had been dead for thirteen years by the time Balfour signed his name. But Herzl had built the architecture the letter moved through, and Herzl had left behind his diaries, and his diaries are among the most clarifying documents in this entire history because Herzl did not always remember to be careful.

In 1895 he wrote: “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.” He was not writing this in horror. He was writing it as strategy. Antisemitism, in Herzl’s framework, was not the enemy of Zionism. It was its engine. Persecution drove Jews toward the need for a homeland. The worse the persecution, the more urgent the need. The more urgent the need, the more leverage the Zionist leadership had with the European powers who wanted the Jewish question resolved and the Jewish people relocated somewhere other than their own countries.

Herzl understood this with cold clarity. He wrote about the mass of ordinary Jewish people — the Ostjuden, the Eastern European Jews, the ones in the villages and the ghettos — with something that cannot charitably be called love. They were, in his framework, a problem to be solved. Raw material for a national project. People whose suffering was useful precisely because it was suffering.

Chaim Weizmann, who negotiated the Balfour Declaration with the British government, was more polished than Herzl but no less precise. He understood that the British wanted something in return: a strategic foothold in the Middle East, a friendly state in a region about to become enormously important as the Ottoman Empire collapsed. The Jewish people’s ancient covenant connection to the land was the justification. British imperial interest was the mechanism. Rothschild money was the infrastructure.

The ordinary Jewish people were the justification. They were not the negotiators.

Jacob Schiff sits in this history like a stone in a river, undeniable, impossible to route around. An American banker of enormous influence, a partner at Kuhn Loeb and Company, Schiff in 1904 personally financed Japan’s war against Tsarist Russia to the tune of two hundred million dollars. He said so publicly. He was not ashamed of it. His stated motivation was to punish Russia for its treatment of Jewish people. The logical consequence — the anti-Jewish violence that followed in Russia, the pogroms that intensified in the wake of Russian humiliation — drove two and a half million Jewish people out of Russia and into the United States.

John Hays Hammond said clearly that Schiff had done more to worsen the situation of Jewish people in Russia than any other single man, because of his boastful public statements about using Japanese military victory against Russia. The people who suffered the consequences of those statements were not bankers. They were families. They were the ones on the roads again, the ones whose villages were burning again, the ones who arrived at Ellis Island with everything they owned in a single bag.

The pattern is Babylonian in its precision. Create or intensify the conditions that make ordinary Jewish people desperate and mobile. Then direct that desperation toward the project that serves the architects rather than the people.

In Germany it reached its terminus in ash.

The Holocaust is the hardest place in this entire history to speak carefully, because the scale of the suffering demands a silence that writing cannot fill and because the suffering of ordinary Jewish people in Nazi Europe was absolute and real and must never be instrumentalized for any argument, including this one. Six million people. The am ha’aretz. The ones who wept. Families. Children. The scholars and the farmers and the tailors and the grandmothers who remembered when things were different.

They must be named as what they were. Innocent. Betrayed. Sacrificed.

Rabbi Moshe Shonfeld, himself a witness, wrote in Holocaust Victims Accuse what no one who had not earned the right to write it could write. He documented the behavior of the Judenräte, the Jewish councils the Nazis established in occupied territories, populated by existing Jewish leadership and community organizations, and the behavior of the Zionist leadership in Palestine and internationally during the war years. His conclusion was not comfortable. The Zionist leadership in Palestine knew. They had information. And their internal correspondence, documented, archived, not disputed by serious historians, shows a calculus that is almost impossible to read without grief and rage.

Yitzhak Gruenbaum, head of the Jewish Agency’s rescue committee, said in 1943: “One cow in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews of Poland.” He said it at a meeting. It was recorded. He was talking about resources, about whether diaspora Jewish money should be redirected toward rescue operations in Europe or toward building the infrastructure of the future state in Palestine. He chose the state.

The Haavara Agreement of 1933, the Transfer Agreement negotiated between the Zionist Federation of Germany and the Nazi regime, allowed German Jews to emigrate to Palestine, transferring a portion of their assets in the form of German export goods. It kept Zionist immigration to Palestine flowing during the early years of the Nazi regime. It was negotiated by Zionist leadership over the explicit objections of Jewish communities worldwide who were calling for a boycott of Nazi Germany. The boycott would have cost the Nazi regime economically at its most vulnerable moment. The Zionist leadership chose the immigration pipeline over the boycott.

These are not allegations. They are archived documents.

The ordinary Jewish people of Europe did not make these calculations. They were the ones the calculations were made about. They were the ones who needed rescue. They were the ones who died when rescue did not come. And they were the ones who, if they survived, found themselves directed toward a strip of land on the Mediterranean that the architects had already decided would be a war state, surrounded by people whose displacement would guarantee permanent conflict, in a region where peace was never the actual goal.

Because peace would have ended the project’s usefulness.

David Ben-Gurion understood this. In 1938, when the British proposed rescue plans that would have taken Jewish children to countries other than Palestine, Ben-Gurion said: “If I knew it was possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, I would choose the second alternative.” He chose the land over the children.

He said it. It is documented. It is in his own words.

The ones who built the state on the suffering of their own people then wrapped themselves in that suffering as permanent justification and permanent protection. The Holocaust became, in the hands of the architects, what Herzl had always said antisemitism could be — the ultimate argument ender. The trump card. The thing that could be played whenever the project required cover.

And ordinary Jewish people around the world, traumatized and grieving and trying to make sense of a catastrophe whose scale had no precedent, were handed an identity built on that trauma and told that the state that had made its calculations in their name was their salvation and their home and the only guarantor of their future.

They deserved so much better.

They deserved the truth. They deserved leaders who chose them over the land. They deserved the rescue that was possible and not chosen. They deserved not to have their grief turned into a weapon wielded by the people who had made calculations about their lives in rooms they were never invited into.

* * *

VIII. The Real Jews Have Always Been the Ones Who Wept

The present proves the past.

The pattern that began at the Chebar: the sorting, the selection, the leadership class that served itself while wearing the covenant as costume, did not end in the ancient world. It did not end in the Second Temple. It did not end when the tables were overturned or when the scrolls were sealed in jars in the desert caves above the Dead Sea.

It arrived at the modern world wearing a new name and carrying a flag and building a wall and it is still, today, handing the bill to the wrong people.

The real Jews have always been the ones who wept.

They are still weeping.

And it is time — long past time — to say clearly, in the full light of documented history, that their tears and their suffering and their covenant faithfulness do not belong to the project that used them. That the am ha’aretz, from Babylon to Berlin to the present, have been not the perpetrators of this history but its most consistent victims. That the ones who claimed to lead them led them into fire. That the ones who claimed to speak for them spoke for themselves.

That the synagogue of Satan is not Judaism.

That the people of the covenant are not the people of the project.

And that the truth, documented, archived, witnessed, sealed in jars and hidden in desert caves and written in the diaries of the architects themselves, has always been available to anyone willing to read it without flinching.

* * *

The river did not care that they were God’s people.

But God did.

And so must we.

Buy Momma Jess a Coffee

He left when I was six weeks old. Chased a party girl with a red car right out of our lives and into someone else’s, because that’s the kind of man he was — the kind who leaves, and keeps leaving, a trail of children he didn’t stay for. Next was a mall clerk. Then the circus girl. And a trail of children. Momma never said so. Not once. Never said his name in anger, never planted the seed of abandonment in me, never let her wound become my wound. I was just smart enough to see through, and loved by her so completely that it didn’t matter anyway.

She was nineteen.

Nineteen years old, six weeks postpartum, and she picked me up and she held on. I have the photographs. I hold the story of Momma’s younger sister’s boyfriend saying “give me that baby’s bassinet”… helping her transition back home to her own momma and daddy. She is so young in them it breaks something open in my chest now to look. Dark blonde curls, soft glossed lips, smiling like she meant it. Holding me like I was the whole world. Because I was. Because she decided I would be.

I don’t know when I understood that I was taking care of her too. It was before I had words for it. I remember her crying, uncontrollably, and me — not yet two years old — pulling at my own diaper tabs because I had to do something. I had to fix it. I didn’t know how. I just knew I couldn’t bear her tears.

I remember lying across her lap on a Monte Carlo bench seat while Journey played on the radio and she shakily lit a cigarette. Her hand trembled. I was small enough to fit across her lap and I was already reading her. Already tracking her steadiness.

She worried about me, always. Worried I’d be taken. She never once made me sleep alone when I was scared, even when I was sixteen. Some people might call that too much. I call it a woman who understood loss at the cellular level and refused to let her child feel it. She knew how fast someone could be gone. She was not going to let that happen twice.

She never knew how much I worried - still worry- about her.

The song is called “Send Her My Love.” The narrator is the one who left. Writing back. Asking someone else to carry what he couldn’t — the tenderness, the apology, the acknowledgment that something real was broken. He sends his love from a safe distance because he cannot bear to deliver it himself.

But it was me. I was the one who could not bear her tears. I was the one who stayed. I was the one bearing those lyrics “send her, send her my love”.

A baby cannot leave. But I grew up and I still didn’t leave. I learned.

Momma is a bit worn down now by a whole lot of life. Life took more from her than one man leaving — the first stepfather broke her and me in ways that went deeper, lasted longer. Then the third stepfather, names we don’t speak. They don’t deserve it. But Momma still sees beauty. She’s not as cynical as me. I love her childlike view of goodness. Case in point… in my twenties, I was driving, Momma was the passenger. The guy in the car next to us was paying special attention..Momma giggled… I held up two middle fingers and honked the horn with my knee.

She has deep faith, the kind that doesn’t come from an easy life. The kind that’s been tested down to the wire and came back, scarred, still standing.

And she still hopes for love.

After everything. She still hopes for love.

That is the most defiant thing I have ever witnessed. Not the nineteen-year-old smiling in those photographs with her whole heart blown open and her arms full of me. Not the woman who protected me so well from bitterness that I had to figure out the truth on my own. Not even the mother who showed up in the dark every time I was scared.

This. This is the bravest thing.

That after all of it, she still believes love is real and coming and worth waiting for.

She taught me that. She taught me by doing it in front of me for forty three years while I watched.

Momma and me, holding it together since 1983.

I would not have it any other way.

Yesterday, the United States and Iran reached a peace agreement. Pakistan’s Prime Minister announced it. Trump posted it on Truth Social. The signing ceremony is set for June 19th in Switzerland. The Strait of Hormuz, which has been largely closed since February, will reopen. Military operations on all fronts — including Lebanon — are to cease immediately and permanently.

Iran’s Supreme National Security Council confirmed that Tehran had finalized a memorandum of understanding, declaring all military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon, would cease “immediately and permanently.”

Read that again. Including Lebanon.

Israel was not at the table for any of it.

Netanyahu has said Israel is not a party to the negotiated deal, and the agreement in its current form is considered a deep disappointment by Israel’s government. Netanyahu struck Beirut anyway, hours before the announcement, and Trump said publicly that Netanyahu had almost “derailed” the deal with that airstrike on Lebanon’s capital.

Think about what just happened structurally. The United States and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran together in February. They went to war as partners. And yet when it came time to negotiate an end to that war, Trump praised Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin for helping advance the settlement, while criticizing Netanyahu directly, calling him “a very difficult guy” and saying he should be “very thankful” for what the US negotiated on Israel’s behalf.

An American president thanked Russia and China for this deal. That sentence alone deserves a long pause.

The exclusion of Israel from the negotiating table wasn’t incidental. The peace terms specifically address Israeli military behavior — attacks in Lebanon, regional operations — conditions that could only exist in a framework Israel had no hand in shaping. You cannot negotiate terms about a party that is sitting across from you at the table. The architecture of this deal required Israel’s absence.

Whether that signals a genuine shift in the relationship, or a temporary rupture driven by frustration, is something we don’t yet know. What we do know is that this is not normal.

And while that diplomatic drama was unfolding, something else was moving quietly through Congress.

Section 224 and the Back Door

Section 224 of the House version of this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), introduced on May 26, 2026, proposes a new mechanism for continued close collaboration between Israel and US military and intelligence agencies. Section 224 would not only allow the exceptionally close military relationship to continue, but would also shelter it from the vagaries of regular congressional votes on military aid and make it almost impossible to uproot.

The NDAA funds the entire framework of the Department of Defense. Things buried in it have a way of becoming permanent.

Section 224 would require the US defense secretary to appoint an “executive agent”, a single official to coordinate military cooperation between the US and Israel, covering joint research and development, shared production of weapons, and the linking of military systems and data.

The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft put it plainly: Section 224 “would give Israel deeper military integration with the US than any country in the world, including NATO allies.”

Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned over US arms policy toward Israel and now runs the advocacy group A New Policy, said it directly: “What Congress is trying to do now is find different ways of entrenching the relationship so deep in America’s own defense industrial base that it’s impossible to root it out.”

As political pressure builds to reduce US military assistance to Israel, Section 224 provides the framework for continuing and expanding those ties by entrenching Israeli technology within the US defense supply chain in a way that would shield it from the annual appropriations process. Translation: if this passes, future Congresses and future presidents face a structural obstacle to changing course, one built by this Congress, right now, while the country is watching Lebanon burn and waiting to see if a peace deal holds.

On June 4th, Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna introduced an amendment to strike Section 224 from the bill. The committee voted it down. Republican Thomas Massie has said he will oppose the provision on the House floor. The full Congress has not yet voted.

Netanyahu has recently claimed he wants to end Israel’s reliance on US military aid within ten years, and critics note that provisions like Section 224 would ensure Israel gets American cooperation by other means, bypassing the public accountability that comes with a straightforward aid package.

This is the part worth watching. A peace deal was just announced without Israel’s involvement. And simultaneously, a provision is moving through Congress that would make the US-Israel military relationship harder to monitor, harder to debate, and harder to undo than it has ever been.

Those two things are happening at the same time. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a competition between diplomatic momentum toward a new regional order, and a legislative effort to lock in the old one before the window closes.

Where Does Trump Stand?

That’s the question nobody can answer cleanly right now, because Trump hasn’t said.

Section 224 is a Congress initiative, not a White House one. The analysts tracking it describe Israel’s supporters in Congress as racing to lock in the relationship while they still control the legislature, before the November midterms and public opinion hardens further, before the political window closes. They are moving fast precisely because the climate is shifting.

And the climate is shifting in part because of Trump himself. On the same day he announced this peace deal, he publicly called Netanyahu a difficult guy, credited Russia and China for the outcome, and said Israel should be grateful for American protection. That is not the posture of a president eager to permanently fuse America’s defense industrial base with Israel’s.

Congressman Khanna made that same argument during the committee debate, framing his opposition to Section 224 in explicitly Trumpian language: “I am for Team America. I am for the interests of this country, and I believe that’s what Donald Trump ran on. That includes American interests against any foreign country.” The committee voted him down anyway.

The American people are paying attention. A May 2026 poll found that only 16% of Americans want the United States to keep supplying Israel with weapons without new restrictions, while 38% want weapons transfers stopped entirely.

Congress should be listening to that. The question is whether Trump will make them.

A final thought…

Netanyahu struck Beirut hours before the announcement, which suggests he was racing against the clock. And now the ceasefire terms explicitly cover Lebanon, negotiated without him in the room.

The wildcard is enforcement. The agreement says military operations on all fronts cease “immediately and permanently”, but Israel has consistently said it doesn’t consider itself bound by the deal’s terms. So the real pressure point becomes Trump. If Israel continues strikes on Lebanon and Trump follows through on withdrawing support, that’s a genuinely new dynamic. If he blinks, the agreement’s teeth come out fast.

What’s worth watching is how Israel responds in the next 72 hours before the June 19th signing in Switzerland. That response will tell us more about where the US-Israel relationship actually stands than any diplomatic statement will.

Buy Momma Jess a Coffee

You thought they were giving you control over your body. They were training you to accept their control under a propaganda label.

That label has been “family planning” in Peru, “birth control” in Harlem, “population policy” in Beijing, “reproductive health” in Saskatchewan hospitals where women woke up from surgery they didn’t consent to and were told it was for their own good. The branding changes. The architecture does not.

What follows is not a political argument. It is a historical record. The bodies are real. The governments are named. The quotes are documented. Read carefully, because the people who did this never stopped believing they were right.

Part One: The American Architect

Before China, before Peru, before the forced sterilization campaigns that the Western press would later call human rights abuses committed by other governments — there was Margaret Sanger. Founder of what would become Planned Parenthood. Celebrated. Awarded. Quoted on the walls of institutions. The woman who coined the phrase “birth control” and packaged population reduction as women’s liberation.

She said what she meant. We simply stopped reading it.

From The Birth Control Review, which she edited: “Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need... We must prevent the multiplication of this bad stock.”

From The Woman Rebel, Volume I: “The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

From her 1922 book Woman, Morality, and Birth Control: “Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.”

In her 1932 speech “My Way to Peace,” Sanger outlined a compulsory program in which “morons, mental defectives, epileptics” would be sterilized as a first step. Those she classified as “illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends” would face a choice: sterilization or placement in state work camps, which she described as farms and open spaces under government medical protection.

She called birth control “the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”

Human weeds.

She accepted an invitation to speak to a women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan, which she recorded without apology in her own autobiography.

She wrote to a colleague that her clinics in Black communities needed to be managed carefully: “We don’t want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”

This is not fringe interpretation. These are her words, in her publications, under her name.

She did not invent eugenics. She industrialized it.

Part Two: The Supreme Court Agrees

In 1927, the United States Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Buck v. Bell that the state of Virginia could forcibly sterilize Carrie Buck, a young woman the state had labeled “feeble-minded.” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority opinion in fewer than one thousand words. He dismissed her right to bodily integrity with a single, now-infamous line:

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Carrie Buck was not feeble-minded. She had been raped by a relative of her foster family. The pregnancy that resulted from that rape was used as evidence of her deficiency. Her daughter Vivian — the third “imbecile” in Holmes’s tally — later made the honor roll at school before dying at age eight from a childhood disease.

The court did not care. Eight justices signed their names to a ruling that opened the door for thirty-some states to sterilize more than seventy thousand Americans across the twentieth century. The targets were the poor, the disabled, the institutionalized, and disproportionately, women of color.

Buck v. Bell has never been overturned. It remains active American law.

Adolf Hitler cited the American eugenics movement as a model and precedent. That is documented. That is not hyperbole. The architects of the Third Reich were students of what we built here first.

Part Three: One Child, No Choice

In 1979, the People’s Republic of China introduced the One-Child Policy — officially framed as a necessity for managing population growth and eliminating poverty. By the time it was relaxed in 2015, it had remade the bodies of hundreds of millions of women.

According to Chinese state records reported in 2013: 336 million abortions were performed under the policy. Between 1980 and 2014, 324 million women were fitted with IUDs and 107 million underwent tubal ligations to prevent pregnancy. Many of those devices were installed without meaningful consent. Many of those devices are still inside women’s bodies today, decades after their safe lifespan ended, because no one came back to remove them.

Enforcement did not rely on persuasion. Local officials operated under quotas. One government directive from a town party committee in 2003, entered into the U.S. Congressional record, set targets of 818 IUD insertions, 1,369 sterilizations, and 271 abortions — including 108 late-term — over a thirty-five-day period. These were not suggestions. They were performance metrics.

A firsthand account published in The Lancet describes what the quota system looked like in practice: officials would order women to present for abortion, arrest them when they refused, and hold them under psychological pressure. Those who still refused were physically dragged into the medical clinic, held down on the operating table, and aborted and sterilized against their will. Some were in the third trimester. Some were already in labor.

Women were reported by neighbors. Homes were demolished by family planning enforcement teams as punishment for noncompliance. Relatives were detained and tortured when a woman was accused of violating the policy. One account in congressional testimony documents a man whose head was smashed open and who was left permanently disabled because his wife had a second child. Another documents a father beaten to death because his son was suspected of the same.

Blind legal activist Chen Guangcheng spent years documenting what was happening in Linyi County, Shandong Province. In a single year, he documented 130,000 forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations. For compiling this evidence and trying to bring it before the courts, he was arrested and imprisoned. He was beaten in prison. He was denied medical treatment. Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world while he was being starved in a Chinese cell.

The gender consequences of son preference under this policy are difficult to comprehend at scale. An estimated 20 million baby girls disappeared over thirty years — through sex-selective abortion, through abandonment, through infanticide. The demographic hole they left behind created a generation of Chinese men who cannot find wives, a condition that has directly driven trafficking networks across Southeast and Central Asia. Women from Vietnam, Myanmar, North Korea — kidnapped, sold, delivered into forced marriages because a government policy once decided that daughters were not worth being born.

Part Four: The Architecture Was Global

China’s One-Child Policy did not operate in a vacuum. It operated with the United Nations in the room.

The UN Population Fund — UNFPA — began providing assistance to China in 1979. That is the same year the One-Child Policy launched. For the next three and a half decades, as hundreds of millions of women were fitted with state-mandated IUDs, as women were dragged to operating tables in the third trimester, as local officials ran sterilization drives with monthly quotas — UNFPA continued its “cooperation” with the Chinese government, received Western funding, and published reports describing its partnership in terms of mutual progress and shared goals.

A 2012 report from the U.S. House of Representatives found that the default relationship between UNFPA and the Chinese government was “one of direct support and mutual congratulation.” A 2011 UNFPA document reviewed by the House committee glowingly reviewed three decades of what it called “UNFPA’s cooperation with the Chinese Government.”

UNFPA officially opposed coercion. They said so repeatedly. And while they were saying it, they operated in counties where forced abortions were being documented. Institutional presence without accountability is not opposition. It is cover.

This was not an accident of proximity. The broader architecture of global population control was built deliberately, in corridors most people never saw.

On December 10, 1974, the U.S. National Security Council completed a classified document — National Security Study Memorandum 200, known as The Kissinger Report. Declassified in 1990 and transferred to the National Archives, it is available to anyone who wants to read it. Its subject: “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” It was the product of collaboration between the CIA, USAID, and the Departments of State, Defense, and Agriculture.

The document identified population growth in developing nations as a strategic threat to American resource access and geopolitical stability. It explicitly recommended routing population control efforts through the United Nations and international NGOs rather than the U.S. government directly — so that, as Alan Guttmacher, one of the population control movement’s most prominent figures, put it: “it’s not considered genocide. If the United States goes to the black man or the yellow man” pushing population reduction, it looks like imperialism. Route it through the UN, and it looks like development.

That quote is on record.

NSSM 200 recommended financial incentives for countries to increase their abortion and sterilization rates, and suggested conditioning foreign aid on a country’s willingness to implement population control programs. It was signed into official U.S. policy by President Gerald Ford in 1975.

China’s One-Child Policy launched four years later, with UN infrastructure already in place.

The women on those operating tables in Shandong Province did not know any of this. They did not know about classified memos or international population conferences. They only knew that the door was locked and the instruments were cold. Afterward, they lie on gurneys. Their dead, mutilated babies on the same gurney. A reminder. A warning.

Part Five: The Indian Problem

In Peru, they didn’t call it eugenics. They called it fighting poverty.

From 1996 to 2001, the government of Alberto Fujimori ran the National Reproductive Health and Family Planning Program. Publicly, it was described as a way to give women “the tools necessary to make decisions about their lives.” In the government documents published by the Peruvian human rights ombudsman’s office, it was described as a response to “resource depletion” and “economic downturn” — euphemisms, as researchers have documented, for what Fujimori and earlier Peruvian leaders called “the Indian problem.”

The problem, in their framing, was that Indigenous Peruvians were having more children than Peruvians of European descent.

Over 300,000 women were sterilized. The majority were Indigenous, rural, illiterate, and poor. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women found that the procedure was performed by non-specialized medical staff in inadequate sanitary conditions. Maria Mamérita Mestanza was coercively sterilized, developed complications, and died. She was thirty-three years old. Her family filed charges. Judges twice ruled there was insufficient evidence. The case was archived. Reopened. Archived again.

A woman named Celia Ramos died in 1997 after being sterilized without valid consent at a local medical outpost. In May 2025, twenty-eight years after her death, her case was argued before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights — the first forced sterilization case from Peru ever brought before that court.

Twenty-eight years to reach the first hearing. No individual perpetrator has ever been convicted.

The program was called family planning. The program was described as a gift to women. The women who survived it say they were told the procedure was reversible. Some were asked to consent while already under anesthesia.

Part Six: The Civilized Nations

Canada is regarded internationally as a model of human rights. Canada has a universal public health care system. Canada has issued apologies for residential schools, for the Sixties Scoop, for the documented crimes against Indigenous people that spanned generations.

Canada has not stopped forcibly sterilizing Indigenous women.

Alberta enacted its Sexual Sterilization Act in 1928 and did not repeal it until 1972. British Columbia followed in 1933 and repealed in 1973. In Alberta alone, more than 2,800 people were sterilized under the law — disproportionately Indigenous and Métis women. When Alberta finally apologized in 1999, one of the victims responded that he hoped “something like this will never happen to anybody again.”

It happened again.

Between 2005 and 2010, an external review of Saskatoon Health Region documented that sixteen Indigenous women experienced pressure to consent to sterilization immediately after giving birth. A class-action lawsuit was filed in Saskatchewan in 2017 representing sixty women with allegations stretching back thirty years. Reports then came in from women in the Northwest Territories, the Yukon, Manitoba, Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, and Quebec. More than one hundred women came forward.

Some sterilizations had occurred as recently as 2017. One woman described waking from surgery to be told her uterus had been removed during what she understood to be bladder surgery.

In communities in Canada’s North, a missionary’s 1976 survey found that in some Inuit communities, between a quarter and nearly half of all women of reproductive age had been sterilized.

The law was repealed. The practice was not.

Part Seven: The Common Thread

These events span a century. They span continents. They span governments of every ideological variety — communist China, fascist-adjacent Peru, democratic Canada, progressive America.

What they share is not geography or politics. What they share is a belief: that some people’s fertility is a problem to be managed. That reproduction is not a right but a resource, and that the state — or the scientist, or the public health official, or the doctor who will not be criminally liable — is the appropriate manager.

They share something else. In almost every case, the program was introduced using the language of liberation.

Margaret Sanger told women she was giving them freedom. Fujimori told Indigenous women he was giving them tools to make decisions about their lives. The Chinese government told its citizens the policy was for national prosperity. Canadian health workers told women they were providing reproductive health services.

The cover story is always the same. You are being helped. You are being modernized. You are being freed from the burden of children you cannot afford, in a country that has decided you cannot afford to have them.

What was actually happening was simpler and older than any of the ideological frameworks used to justify it. Someone looked at a woman and decided she should not reproduce. Someone with authority over her body acted on that decision. And someone with a pen and a podium called it care.

A Note to the “My Body, My Choice” Generation

This phrase has been repeated so many times it has lost its shape. It is used now as a kind of incantation — proof of political loyalty, shorthand for reproductive freedom. People say it at rallies. They put it on bumper stickers. They genuinely believe it describes a movement built to protect women.

Here is what it actually describes, read against the history above: the same ideological infrastructure that funded Margaret Sanger’s eugenics clinics, that provided institutional cover for China’s sterilization quotas, that drafted policy memos recommending population reduction in developing nations as a matter of U.S. national security — that infrastructure also built and promoted the language of reproductive “choice” in the West.

You were handed the vocabulary of liberation by the same people who were deciding, elsewhere, which women didn’t get to choose.

This is not a conspiracy theory. The Kissinger Report is in the National Archives. Sanger’s writings are in her own published journals. The UNFPA’s cooperation with China is in their own documents. The sterilization quotas are in the U.S. Congressional record. The women who survived these programs gave testimony before courts and legislative bodies for decades.

The question the “my body” framework was never designed to ask is: whose body? In China, it was the body of a woman whose door was broken down because she missed a pregnancy check. In Peru, it was a Quechua-speaking woman in the highlands who was told her tubal ligation was reversible. In Canada, it was an Indigenous woman who came to a hospital to give birth and left unable to have children again. In Virginia in 1927, it was a rape survivor whose reproductive capacity was terminated by court order.

All of them also had bodies. None of them had choice.

The movement that claims the slogan did not build clinics in the communities where these things happened. It did not march for Chen Guangcheng. It was not in the room when the Kissinger Report was written, demanding that women in developing nations be counted as persons rather than strategic variables.

If “my body, my choice” is a principle and not just a position, it applies to all of them. It applied then. It applies now.

But if it only ever applied here, and only in one direction, then it was never about bodies at all.

It was about cover.

A Final Note on Language

The term “family planning” was not invented accidentally. It is soft. It is domestic. It carries the image of a couple at a kitchen table, discussing the future with hope. It does not carry the image of a woman held down on an operating table in the third trimester. It does not carry the image of a Chinese village where family planning police demolished a home because a woman missed a pregnancy check. It does not carry the image of a teenage girl in Virginia who was raped, then sterilized by the state, then cited in a Supreme Court ruling as evidence that her bloodline deserved to end.

Language like this is not accidental. It is architectural. It is built to make what is being done feel like what is being offered.

You thought they were giving you control over your body.

Look at whose hands were on the instruments.

Because I have been through trauma, and I know what a trigger can do, I am linking photos here for only those who wish to look. The majority simply capture the heartbreak. In my research, I have seen things I will never share, even under a warning label. But, the images here are of the fight of women. the defeat. the heartbreak. of women who never were given the chance to parade “my body, my choice”- and liberal US NGOs funded almost exclusively all of it. Their bodies were mutilated. Their infants murdered. In these photos, it is mostly agony and tears, and women fighting the real fight to bodily autonomy.

Remember These Women

Sources: U.S. Congressional Record (Chen Guangcheng testimony, 2009; China coercion documentation); The Lancet (forced abortion, China, 2012); CNN (one-child policy legacy, 2024); Center for Reproductive Rights (Celia Ramos case, 2025); UN CEDAW Decision (Peru, 2024); The Conversation (Fujimori sterilization program, 2025); The Canadian Encyclopedia (sterilization of Indigenous women); CBC News (Saskatchewan class action, 2019); Global News (Canada, 2023); Wyoming Humanities / Harvard Petrie-Flom Center (Buck v. Bell); U.S. House Report 112-361 (UNFPA and China); NSSM 200 / Kissinger Report, National Security Council, December 10, 1974 (declassified 1990, U.S. National Archives); Margaret Sanger, Birth Control Review; Margaret Sanger, “My Way to Peace” (1932); Margaret Sanger, Woman, Morality, and Birth Control (1922); Margaret Sanger, The Woman Rebel, Vol. I.

I write this article because I have done enough research to realize the majority in America has no idea the pain caused by the funding of those they laud as “heroes”. This article is one that is close to my heart, but is yet a tip of the iceberg addressing the corrupt infiltration to this nation. I will continue to write, and I will not be silent on behalf of truth. The title “feminist” became inverted as most things do. This is me fighting to tell women here in America, how deeply you have been betrayed by propaganda. This is me, as a mother, who’s soul aches knowing our big money NGOs stripped barren mother’s abroad against their will. Less developed countries were easy targets.

American woman, what happens when forced sterilization, and forced any-term abortion or infanticide becomes you. It isn’t irrational thought. You aren’t immune. You were the propaganda voice so loud, horrors to your fellow women around the globe suffered in silence.

I write this because no one has the authority to decide to control “population”. Tend to God’s Creation. God’s Creation will tend to us. Resist evil in every thought.

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Nobody tells you that you become soup.

They tell you about the hot flashes. The sleeplessness. The moods that arrive without warning and leave without apology. They hand you pamphlets. They lower their voices. They say change of life the way people say I’m sorry for your loss — like something is ending and the kindest thing they can do is be gentle about it.

Nobody tells you what is actually happening.

Your body is doing something ancient. Something precise. Something it has been quietly preparing to do your entire life. It is liquefying everything you were — every performance, every role, every carefully maintained version of yourself — so that everything you were always meant to be can finally take shape.

This is not a loss.

This is a blueprint activating.

The caterpillar doesn’t know it’s becoming a butterfly.

It only knows the dark. It only knows that the body it has always lived in is coming apart, and there is nothing it can do to stop it. Scientists call what happens inside the chrysalis imaginal soup — the caterpillar dissolves almost completely. Muscles. Organs. Structure. Everything it was becomes unrecognizable. Nothing survives intact.

And then something extraordinary happens.

Tiny clusters of cells, present since the caterpillar’s very first moments of life, dormant, waiting, patient, wake up. They’re called imaginal discs. And they build, from the ruins, from the soup, from the wreckage of everything the caterpillar used to be, the creature it was always meant to become.

The butterfly was always inside the caterpillar.

It just needed everything else to dissolve first.

She doesn’t know she’s becoming a butterfly either.

She just knows the dark. She knows the body she trusted is unfamiliar now. She knows the rhythms she built her life around for thirty years are gone. She knows she cries without knowing why, rages without wanting to, disappears inside herself in the middle of a conversation and can’t find her way back.

She thinks something is wrong with her.

Nothing is wrong with her.

She is in the chrysalis.

The woman she has been — the one who held the temperature of every room, who existed in relation to everyone else’s needs, who performed and produced and poured herself out until there was nothing left that was purely hers — that woman is dissolving. Not because she failed. Not because she is broken.

Because she was always meant to become something more.

What comes after is not spoken of enough.

The stillness. Not the stillness of exhaustion — she knows that kind, has carried it for years. This is different. This is the stillness of a woman who has been through her own dissolution and is no longer afraid, because she has already survived the worst of the dark and discovered something waiting for her on the other side of it.

Herself.

The unperformed version. The one who existed before the world got hold of her and started telling her what she was for. The girl who walked into a room like she had every right to be in it. Who spoke without calculating the cost first. Who knew, in her bones, exactly who she was.

She didn’t go anywhere.

She was waiting in the soup.

The imaginal discs don’t build something new.

They build what was always encoded. What the creature was always meant to become, the form that required everything that came before, and required it all to end, to finally arrive.

So here is what no pamphlet will tell you:

You are not declining. You are not disappearing. You are not becoming less.

You are in the chrysalis.

And what is being built from your ruins, from your imaginal discs, from the cells that have been waiting since the beginning, is the most complete version of you that has ever existed. Sure in a way that cannot be shaken, because she has already survived her own undoing. Peaceful in a way that cannot be faked, because everything that wasn’t real fell away in the soup. Powerful in a way that needs no announcement, because she has already been through the fire and she knows exactly what she’s made of.

The butterfly doesn’t mourn the caterpillar.

It lifts.

You are not losing yourself.

You are finally meeting her.

And she has been waiting a long time.

Love,

Momma Jess

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“There was a time when our children stood at attention, and with pride, put their hand on their heart, and in one united voice recited the Pledge of Allegiance.”

A Morning Ritual and What It Meant

It wasn’t just a few words at the beginning of the school morning. It was a posture. Children rose, turned toward the flag, placed their right hands over their hearts, and spoke in one voice. Whatever they were fighting about at recess, whatever divided their families at home, for those thirty seconds they were the same thing: Americans. That shared moment was not nothing. It was, in fact, everything.

It was my favorite part of the school day routine. I felt both pride and adoration standing at attention and focusing on that beautiful American flag. My classmates did, too. Ten years later, in high school, the scene was different. Students slumped in their desks. If they didn’t refuse to stand, they certainly didn’t say the pledge nor hold their hand over heart. It infuriated me. So, I decided to make up for the silent ones and said my pledge with a loud voice on the edge of earning myself detention. I would have served the sentence with pride. I don’t know what changed, or when it did. But, that change was the beginning, in my lifetime at least, of a journey of lost patriotism, respect, and gratitude for the freedoms won for us with the lives of many.

The Pledge of Allegiance has a longer and more complicated history than most people know. It was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister with a flair for civic theater. His explicit goal was to use the public school as a forge, a place where children of every origin and background could be shaped into a common national identity. He was not wrong about the need. The country was absorbing millions of immigrants from dozens of cultures, speaking dozens of languages, carrying loyalties to a dozen other flags. The Pledge was a daily, spoken act of choosing America.

Congress formally adopted it in 1942, in the early days of World War II, when national unity was not a sentiment but a survival strategy. The words “under God” were added in 1954, during the Cold War, as a deliberate distinction between a free, faith-acknowledging republic and the officially atheist Soviet Union. Each of those additions tells you something about what the country believed it was fighting for at the time.

For most of the twentieth century, reciting the Pledge in school was simply what American children did. It was as unremarkable as learning the alphabet. And like the alphabet, its value was not in the ceremony itself but in what it built: a shared language. A shared story. A sense that however different we were, we were part of the same thing.

“At the beginning of the 21st century, U.S. adults were nearly unanimous in saying they were extremely or very proud to be Americans. But that national unity has eroded over the past 25 years.”— Gallup, 2025

So what happened?

The First Crack: Courts and Conscience

The first formal challenge came not from cynicism but from genuine conviction. In 1943, the Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette that students could not be compelled to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The case had been brought by Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose faith prohibited pledging loyalty to any earthly symbol or government. Justice Robert Jackson wrote the majority opinion, and it remains one of the most quoted passages in American constitutional history: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.”

It’s worth pausing here to note what this ruling did and what it didn’t. It didn’t remove the Pledge from schools. It didn’t condemn patriotism. It said, precisely, that a free country cannot force its citizens to perform loyalty. The dissent was genuine, the principle was sound, and many Americans, then and now, would agree with it. Freedom includes the freedom not to speak. It’s not a radical idea. It’s a deeply American one. I may not agree with anyone choosing not to pledge to our flag, and it bothers me deeply. But, we are a free people.

As they tend to do, legal principles have cultural consequences. Once the question was raised — Should we have to do this? — it could not be unasked. Other challenges followed. In 2002, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the Pledge unconstitutional because of the phrase “under God,” though the Supreme Court eventually sidestepped that ruling on procedural grounds. Decade by decade, the courts chipped away not at the Pledge itself but at the cultural assumption that civic belonging was something we owed each other.

Again: reasonable people can disagree about the legal questions. But the cumulative message to children was harder to miss. The Pledge became a controversy. And controversies have a way of becoming optional.

The 1960s and the Great Unmooring

If the courts opened the door, the 1960s walked through it. What happened to American civic culture in that decade wasn’t simple, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed or romanticized. The country was genuinely asking hard questions about who belonged to it and on what terms. The civil rights movement was forcing a moral reckoning. Vietnam was tearing communities apart and exposing real dishonesty in how the government spoke to the public. The credibility gap between official statements and reality, between what leaders said and what soldiers experienced, was real and it was corrosive.

But something else happened alongside the legitimate grievances. A generation of young Americans, particularly those on college campuses, moved from critique of specific policies to a wholesale rejection of American identity itself. The counterculture of the 1960s was characterized by what historians describe as a rejection of conventional social norms and established institutions, including the government and organized religion. The slogan was “question authority.” The assumption was that authority was, by definition, suspect. The heartbreak was soldiers returning home and , instead of the celebratory welcome given to former veterans, our soldiers were often met with shameful hostility, rejection, and indifference. The war’s divisive politics spilled over and led to a generation of veterans who carried their pain in silence for decades.

This skepticism isn’t without value. A democracy needs citizens who push back. But there is a difference between questioning your country’s actions, and abusing soldiers who had no choice but to serve and ultimately proving loyalty to this nation was a stain on one’s identity. One posture leads to reform. The other leads to disconnection. By the late 1960s, many of the institutions that had once formed civic identity — the school, the church, the local civic organization, the flag on the schoolroom wall — had been recast as tools of oppression rather than pillars of a shared life.

“Students are taught what to reject without ever learning what to defend. They encounter America only as an abstraction: a set of sins rather than a project of progress.”— American Enterprise Institute, 2025

The counterculture largely collapsed by 1973, as its adherents aged, the Vietnam War wound down, and the economy tightened. But the seeds it planted in academia took root. The faculty who came of age in those years shaped the curriculum for the next half century.

The Classroom Loses the Conversation

The decline of civic education in American schools did not happen overnight. It happened in stages, each one seeming reasonable at the time, the cumulative effect visible only in retrospect.

Through the 1960s, American public schools still required civics and U.S. history as core subjects. Students studied the Constitution, the structure of government, and the history of the republic. Many schools included daily pledges and regular American history courses as foundational requirements. Then, beginning in the 1970s, these subjects were gradually reduced through curriculum reforms, and further sidelined by federal testing policies in the 2000s and the adoption of the Common Core initiative, which prioritized standardized reading and math scores over historical and civic knowledge.

The New Social Studies movement of the 1960s had reframed civic education as critical inquiry rather than civic formation. This wasn’t entirely wrong, rote recitation without understanding produces neither good citizens nor curious thinkers. But the pendulum swung hard. Where the old curriculum sometimes promoted blind patriotism, the new one often promoted reflexive suspicion. Curricula began emphasizing America’s failings without equal attention to its remarkable capacity for reform, its founding ideals, the power in the hands of informed citizenry, and the global rarity of the democratic experiment it represents.

The result, as the American Enterprise Institute observed in 2025, is a generation of students taught what to reject without ever learning what to defend. They encounter America only as an abstraction: a set of sins rather than a project of ongoing progress. Critique, when it is the only mode of engagement available, doesn’t build citizens. It builds lazy spectators and cynics.

In 1987, a national commission of distinguished historians found that history education in the U.S. was already inadequate and recommended significant expansions of history instruction. The recommendations were largely ignored. By the time the No Child Left Behind Act arrived in 2002, testing mandates had effectively pushed history and civics to the margins of the school day. What could not be measured, could not be funded. And civic identity, it turns out, is not easily reduced to a multiple-choice question. Why, you don’t say…

The Numbers Tell a Story

What has all of this produced? The data isn’t too comforting.

A Gallup poll released in the summer of 2025 found that only 58 percent of Americans described themselves as “extremely” or “very” proud to be American, the lowest level since the question was first asked in 2001. At the turn of the century, roughly nine in ten Americans expressed high national pride. That number has been in steady decline for twenty-five years.

The generational breakdown is striking. Among the Silent Generation — those who grew up reciting the Pledge as a matter of course, who watched World War II reshape the world — 83 percent still express high national pride. Baby boomers come in at 75 percent. Generation X at 71 percent. Millennials at 58 percent. And Generation Z, the first generation to grow up entirely in the post-9/11, post-Columbine, social-media-saturated world: only 41 percent say they are proud to be American.

Each generation is measurably less proud than the one before it. The slope is consistent. It has not leveled off.

“Each generation is less patriotic than the prior generation, and Gen Z is definitely much lower than anybody else.”— Jeffrey Jones, Senior Editor, Gallup

These are not just statistics about a sentiment. They are signals about belonging. A citizen who does not feel proud of nor connected to the country she lives in is less likely to vote, less likely to serve, less likely to invest in her community, and less likely to extend goodwill toward a neighbor she perceives as fundamentally different from herself. National identity, at its best, is not tribalism. It is the thing that makes civic life possible across tribal lines. When it fades, something has to fill the gap. In our current moment, what fills that gap is usually partisan identity, or algorithmic community, or nothing at all.

What We Were Really Saying

Here is what is easy to miss about the morning ritual described at the opening of this essay: the Pledge of Allegiance was never primarily about the words. It was about the act. Thirty children, different in every way that mattered in their small lives, standing together, choosing together to name themselves as part of a single story.

There’s a reason the moment happened every morning rather than once a year. Civic belonging is not a condition you achieve; it’s a practice you maintain. Like prayer, like marriage vows repeated in daily choices, like gratitude cultivated by the habit of naming it, allegiance is renewed by expression. When you stop saying it, you don’t simply stop performing a ritual. You begin to lose the thing the ritual was making.

The philosopher Charles Taylor wrote about what he called “social imaginaries” — the shared understandings, stories, and images by which a society makes sense of itself. The morning Pledge was part of America’s social imaginary. It placed children inside a narrative: we are part of something larger than ourselves, something that was handed to us and that we are responsible for handing on. When we stopped cultivating that imaginary deliberately, it didn’t vanish just yet. It eroded. And erosion, by definition, is slow enough that you rarely notice it until you are standing at the edge of something that used to be solid ground.

It isn’t sentimental to say that something real and valuable was lost. It’s just accurate.

The Harder Question

None of this means the Pledge itself is the solution, or that we can simply return to 1955 and find everything in order. History does not run backward, and some of what was lost deserved to be questioned. The civic life that excluded Black Americans from the republic it celebrated is not a model to restore. Patriotism that demands unquestioning loyalty and punishes dissent is not a healthy civic culture.

But it’s possible to hold two things at once: to believe that a nation should honestly reckon with its failures, and to believe that honest reckoning requires a prior commitment to the project you are reckoning with. You cannot reform something you have abandoned. You cannot improve a story you have stopped inhabiting.

The question isn’t whether America is perfect. It never was. The question is whether America is worth belonging to, worth improving, worth defending as an ongoing experiment in self-governance that, despite its failures, has extended more freedom to more people over a longer period of time than any arrangement in human history.

That question deserves a thoughtful answer. What it does not deserve is the reflex of contempt that has, over the past several decades, come to substitute for one.

A Way Forward

There is reason for genuine hope, and it comes from an unexpected direction. Across this great Republic, educators, parents, citizens, and civic organizations are rediscovering that patriotism and honest inquiry are not enemies. It is as if a great awakening is being borne from a long slumber. The Jack Miller Center supports hundreds of professors and programs that teach the American founding, constitutionalism, and the substance of democratic governance — not as propaganda, but as serious intellectual content that students deserve to encounter and wrestle with.

Homeschooling families like ours, in particular, have often preserved what institutional schools discarded: direct engagement with primary sources, daily attention to the habits of self-governance, and the understanding that civic formation is not a department of the school day but the underlying purpose of education itself. There is something quietly powerful about a child who learns the Constitution the same year she learns to read, who grows up understanding that the republic is not a background condition but a living inheritance requiring active stewardship.

The path forward is not a mandate. It isn’t a law requiring children to recite words they have never been helped to understand. The research on civic education is clear: what builds civic commitment is not compulsion but genuine engagement — understanding why the founding documents matter, how the republic has reformed itself, what ordinary citizens have sacrificed to extend its promises, and what is actually at stake when those promises are abandoned.

The morning ritual was powerful not because the words were magic but because they were shared. They created, day after day, the small, renewable experience of belonging to something. That experience is not gone. It’s waiting to be rebuilt, one classroom, one family, one conversation at a time, by people willing to say: this Republic, complicated and unfinished as it is, is still worth standing up for. Now, possibly, more than ever.

* * *

John F. Kennedy said it plainly in 1961, standing at the exact moment the country stood at its own crossroads: "Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country." He was not asking for blind obedience. He was asking for investment. He was asking Americans to see themselves as owners of the republic rather than passengers in it. That is still the ask. It has not changed.

The numbers that appear in this essay are drawn from Gallup polling conducted through the summer of 2025, the American Enterprise Institute’s civic education analysis, and historical records from the First Amendment Center, the National Constitution Center, and the Congressional Research Service. The legal history of the Pledge draws on published decisions in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943) and Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow (2004

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I wrote this article because I love this nation and I am grateful to belong to her. We have an opportunity now to remember who we are as a united citizenry of The United States of America. We the People, hold the power. Far too long, we have forgotten that principle.

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Nobody asked why Dorothy’s shoe color changed.

For decades, audiences accepted ruby slippers as though Baum had always written them that way, as though the most famous pair of shoes in American storytelling had always been red. They hadn’t. In L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel, the magic shoes are silver. Practical. Lunar. Quietly powerful in the way that modest things sometimes are.

Hollywood changed them. Because, of course it did. On purpose. A symbol.

The official explanation is Technicolor, the new three-strip process could render red with a vibrancy that would make audiences lean forward in their seats, and silver would have read as dull, maybe even gray. A production decision. A technical consideration. Perfectly reasonable. Right?

Right.

When you change a symbol, you change what it means. Silver carries the moon, restraint, hidden power, the kind that doesn’t announce itself. Red carries blood. Red carries desire. Red carries a history so old and so layered that the people making costume decisions in 1938 may not have fully understood what they were reaching for when they dyed those slippers. Or, maybe they did.

Symbols always know. They carry their histories whether we do or not. And symbolism will be their downfall.

The Cost of Red

Before red was a fashion choice, it was a conquest.

The ancient world wanted red desperately and could barely have it. The richest, most stable red dye came from kermes, tiny insects harvested from oak trees across the Mediterranean, crushed by the thousands to yield a color that faded slowly and ran deep into fiber. It took staggering quantities of the creatures to dye a single garment. The labor was backbreaking and the yield was small, but the color? The color was extraordinary.

And so red became the color of people who could afford to consume without restraint.

Tyrian purple gets most of the historical attention, but red was its close cousin in the economy of restricted color. Roman magistrates wore it. Warriors returning in triumph wore it. The Roman general given a triumph, that rare, nearly sacred honor, had his entire body painted red for the procession. Red was not decoration. Red was declaration.

Then the New World opened, and everything changed.

When Spanish conquistadors arrived in Mexico, they found the Aztecs producing a red so saturated, so luminous, so absolutely unlike anything Europe had ever seen that it would eventually upend the entire global textile market. The source was cochineal. A scale insect living on prickly pear cactus, harvested by indigenous hands, dried and crushed into a powder that produced a red of almost violent intensity.

Spain recognized immediately what they had. They classified cochineal as a state secret. The identity of the source, what creature, plant, and process, was suppressed for nearly two centuries. European dyers were working with something they couldn’t explain or replicate, dependent entirely on Spanish supply chains that ran through conquered land and broken people.

Red cloth dyed with cochineal became one of the most valuable commodities in the world.

Think about that the next time you see the color hanging casually on a rack.

The red that draped the powerful was red purchased with empire. With forced labor. With the systematic extraction of indigenous knowledge and indigenous bodies in service of a color that European aristocracy wanted on their backs. Every cardinal’s robe, every royal slipper, every flag that flew over a seat of power, that red had a price paid by people who never got to wear it.

Which brings us to the ones who did.

Shod in the Blood of Martyrs

For more than a thousand years, the Bishop of Rome wore red shoes.

Not as fashion nor as preference. As theology made visible.

The papal red shoe is one of the oldest continuous symbolic traditions in Catholicism, and its meaning was never ambiguous to the people who understood it. The red did not signify wealth, though wealth was certainly present. It didn’t signify power, though power was certainly implied. The red signified blood. Specifically, it was proposed to signify the blood of the martyrs, those first Christians ground under Roman heel, fed to lions, set aflame in Nero’s gardens. Those whose suffering was understood as the very foundation upon which the Church was built. That is the story.

Every pope who slipped his feet into red shoes was claiming to make a statement of theological succession: ‘I stand where they stood. I walk in what they shed. The Church was purchased at a price, and I carry that price on my body.’

The shoes appeared in papal dress as far back as the early medieval period, codified and ritualized over centuries into something inseparable from the office itself. They were part of the broader tradition of papal red: the mozzetta, the camauro, the saturno hat in earlier eras, a whole vocabulary of crimson that wrapped the pope in the color of sacrifice. Red was not merely what he wore. Red was what he represented.

When a new pope was elected, he was led to the Room of Tears, so named because of the weight of what had just happened to a man, and there, among the white cassock and the white zucchetto, were the red shoes. Waiting. A symbol that had outlasted dynasties and heresies and schisms and reformations and two world wars. A symbol that said: this office is older than you, heavier than you, and you will carry it now.

And then Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis.

And he left the red shoes in the room.

Francis walked out in plain black orthopedic shoes. The same ones he had worn as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. The gesture was so quiet and so pointed that it landed like a thunderclap in Vatican-watching circles. He wore black shoes throughout his pontificate. No red. No blood on his feet. No visual continuity with the thousand-year tradition he inherited.

The explanations offered on his behalf were characteristically humble. He was used to them. They were comfortable. He is a simple man. I am not Catholic and hold a long lens of suspicion, but, even I respected and understood that maybe, just maybe, Francis was different.

But symbols are never simple, and Francis knows this better than almost anyone alive. A man who chooses his words and his gestures with the precision he consistently demonstrates does not accidentally decline a thousand years of theological symbolism. He declines it on purpose, or he accepts it. There is no neutral.

What the refusal meant is something Catholics and observers have argued since 2013. Some read it as humility, a deliberate distancing from the imperial trappings that have accumulated around an office meant to represent a carpenter’s fisherman. Some read it as a rebuke of tradition, one in a series of gestures that have defined his papacy as one long argument with his predecessors. Some read it as something more unsettling: a severing, intentional or not, from the specific theology, biblical or otherwise, the red shoes carried. The weight of what was purchased.

You can disagree about what Francis meant. You cannot disagree that he knew exactly what he was doing.

When a symbol that has endured a thousand years is set aside, the setting aside is itself a symbol.

And red shoes, as we are about to see, have a way of meaning things whether their wearers intend it or not.

The Girl Who Could Not Stop

If you happen to be a literary fanatic like me, you know that fairy tales are not so sweet. In fact, they are almost always, without fail, telling the ugliest truth, wrapped up in a tale. That is how fairy tale writers tried to show the world the facts. Shakespeare did the same. It’s an age old tactic to inform the public. Fairy Tales are in truth the horrific acts of humanity, just in story form. Fairy tales are the stuff of nightmares.

Hans Christian Andersen was not writing a children’s story. A century and a half of being shelved in the nursery section has done serious damage to what The Red Shoes actually is. It’s a story about pride, coveting, and divine judgment so fierce that it would make a Puritan uncomfortable. Andersen dressed it in a little girl and a pair of dancing shoes, but the bones underneath are Calvinist, almost severe. A moral architecture that assumes God is watching, that vanity has consequences, and that some desires, left unchecked, will destroy you.

Here is what actually happens in the story, stripped of sentiment.

Karen is a poor child taken in by a wealthy old woman who is nearly blind. When it comes time for confirmation, that solemn moment of Catholic commitment, of standing before God and the congregation and declaring yourself, Karen fixates on a pair of red shoes. Not the white shoes appropriate to the occasion. Red shoes. The shoes of vanity and desire, the color of wanting what isn’t yours. She wears them to her confirmation. She is thinking about them during the ceremony, during the sacrament, when her attention should be entirely elsewhere.

Andersen makes the moment of transgression precise. She is not merely vain. She is vain before God, at the altar, at the exact moment consecrated for something other than herself.

And then the shoes begin to dance.

They dance at appropriate moments first, which is almost worse. They dance at a ball, where dancing is expected, but Karen cannot stop when she wishes to. The shoes have her. Then they dance at the graveside of the old woman who sheltered her. They dance past the church she cannot enter. They dance through night and weather and exhaustion until Karen, desperate, finds an executioner and asks him to cut off her feet.

He does.

The feet in the red shoes dance away without her. Karen is fitted with wooden feet and crutches and spends the rest of the story in penitent service until she is finally granted grace, but not restoration, not the return of what she lost, but grace. Forgiveness. Enough.

Andersen knew exactly what he was writing. He said so. The story was autobiographical in the way that fairy tales sometimes are, not in the literal details but in the spiritual ones. He was writing about desire that possesses rather than liberates. About reaching for symbols of a station you haven’t earned and don’t understand. About what happens when the thing you covet becomes the thing that controls you.

The red shoes in Andersen are not evil in themselves. They are dangerous because of what Karen brings to them: the hunger, the pride, the willingness to wear them before God at the moment most requiring humility. The shoes simply reveal what was already there.

This is theologically serious. The shoes don’t corrupt Karen. Karen corrupts herself, and the shoes make it visible and then inescapable.

There is an old idea, woven through Scripture and through the best of Christian moral theology, that our desires shape us. That what we reach for, we become. That coveting is not merely wanting. It is a reorientation of the self toward the wrong thing, and that reorientation, left unrepented, bends you permanently out of truth.

Andersen put that idea in red shoes and sent a little girl dancing to her own destruction.

He understood something about the color that the Aztec harvesters understood, that the Roman generals understood, that the medieval popes understood, and that Hollywood would deliberately choose in 1938.

Red is not a neutral color.

Red wants something from you.

The Shoes That Would Not Let Her Go

Michael Powell understood Andersen completely.

That is the only explanation for what he made in 1948 — a film so visually ravishing, so emotionally devastating, so theologically precise beneath its ballet-world glamour that it stands nearly eight decades later as one of the great works of British cinema. The Red Shoes is not an adaptation of Andersen’s fairy tale so much as it is a parallel translation. The same moral architecture, the same terrible logic, dressed now in tulle and ambition and the particular cruelty of the artistic world at its most demanding.

The setup is deceptively simple.

Victoria Page wants to dance more than she wants anything else on earth. Boris Lermontov wants dancers who want to dance more than they want anything else on earth. They find each other, and for a time it is perfect. She ascends, she is cast in the company’s new production of The Red Shoes, she becomes what she was always meant to become. Then she falls in love with Julian Craster, the young composer who scored the ballet, and Lermontov is forced to choose between them.

He chooses the dance. He always chooses the dance.

And here is where Powell is doing something more than telling a love story. Lermontov is not simply a jealous impresario or a cold-hearted villain. He is a man who has made a total consecration. Every human impulse subordinated to art, every relationship evaluated by what it produces or destroys in the work. He believes, with the fervor of a religious devotee, that great art requires this. That you cannot serve two masters. That the dancer who chooses love has chosen against dancing, and he will not pretend otherwise.

He is not entirely wrong. That is what makes him so disturbing.

Vicki cannot resolve the contradiction. She loves Julian. She loves the dance. She cannot cut one away cleanly, as Karen’s executioner cut away her feet, because both loves are genuine and both run all the way down to her foundation. Lermontov offers her the stage on the night Julian has come back for her. She puts on the red shoes.

And then Powell does something extraordinary.

He lets the shoes decide.

Vicki in the red shoes moves toward the stage, and then past it, and then to the balcony railing above the railway below, and she goes over. The shoes carry her to her death as surely as they carried Karen through the graveyard and past the church door. Julian reaches her in time only to hold her as she dies, the red shoes still on her feet, the performance beginning without her on the stage below. This was the ballerina ghost story that haunted all of us young ballerinas even at the (purely haunted) Springer Opera House in Georgia - the ballerina who fell into the pit and died.

Lermontov walks to the microphone and announces to the audience that Vicki will not be dancing tonight. His voice breaks, the only moment in the film where his devotion to art fails to hold him together. Then the ballet proceeds. The spotlight finds an empty space where she would have stood.

Powell is asking the same question Andersen asked, in a different register.

What happens to a person wholly possessed by a desire? What happens when the thing you were made to do becomes the thing that unmakes you? Is the desire itself the problem, or is the problem the world that cannot hold two great desires in one human life without destroying both?

Andersen answered with theology: pride and coveting bring judgment, and judgment is severe but grace is available to the penitent.

Powell answered with tragedy: some contradictions cannot be resolved, only survived or not.

Both answers live inside the red shoes. Both answers have lived there since before Andersen, since before the papal cobblers, since before the conquistadors watched cochineal dissolve into water and turn it the color of blood.

The shoes carry everything we have ever put into them.

And Then the World Democratized the Symbol

Christian Louboutin was twenty years old when he first sketched a shoe with a red sole. I have, unfortunately, not done my diligence as of this article into researching who and what Louboutin was connected to. As famous as his red bottomed footwear became among elites, I can speculate with almost certainty.

He has told the origin story many times, with the ease of a man who knows a good myth and has made peace with telling it. He saw an assistant painting her nails red. He grabbed the bottle and painted the sole of a prototype. He liked what he saw. The red sole became his signature, eventually his trademark; legally defended, culturally recognized, one of the most successful acts of personal branding in the history of fashion.

But Louboutin did not invent the meaning. He inherited it.

The red sole is the sumptuary law inverted. For centuries, red on the body was legally and economically restricted to those with the power to claim it. Royalty, clergy, the highest reaches of the aristocracy. Common people were forbidden the color not merely by price but by law. To wear red above your station was not a fashion mistake. It was a crime.

Louboutin’s genius was to take that thousand-year-old signal of restricted power and put a price tag on it. Now anyone can wear the red. Anyone with enough money, which is its own form of the old restriction — the barrier has shifted from bloodline to bank account, but the barrier remains. The red sole says what the cardinal’s shoes said, what the papal slippers said, what the conquistadors’ cochineal-dyed cloth said to every eye that saw it in the markets of Europe.

I have access to something you don’t.

The women who wear Louboutins are not loudly claiming publicly, for the most part, their footwear is about martyrs’ blood or Aztec insects or Andersen’s Karen dancing past the church she cannot enter. They are, for all public purposes, apparently thinking about the shoe. The height, the line, the particular confidence that comes from wearing something beautiful and expensive and recognized.

But the symbol thinks for itself. Symbolism will be the downfall.

It carries its history in the dye, in the leather, in the flash of red sole visible with every step. A signal so old that it works on people who have never heard of kermes beetles or papal tradition or a little girl who wanted what wasn’t hers to have.

Red has always done this.

It bypasses the mind and speaks directly to something older.

What the Symbol Knows

Symbols do not require understanding to function.

That is the thing worth sitting with at the end of all this history. The Roman general didn’t need to explain the theology of red to the crowds lining the triumphal route, the color worked on them anyway. The peasant who saw a cardinal’s scarlet robes didn’t need a lecture on martyrdom to feel the weight of what he was looking at. July Garland in 1939 didn’t need to know about cochineal or sumptuary law to experience the real and horrible weight of being cast to wear those ruby slippers.

The symbol carries its own meaning. It has been doing so for thousands of years.

And this is what I find myself returning to, sitting with the full sweep of this history laid out like a long red thread through the centuries.

Powerful people have always known this.

Those powerful people have always understood that symbols speak when you are not speaking. That the right symbol worn in the right room says something to the room that your words never could. And always counting on the public to never notice.

I think about this when I notice red shoes in places that feel deliberate. On people who have access to enough money and enough counsel and enough cultural fluency to know what they are reaching for. On people who collect symbols the way others collect art. Not randomly, not casually, but with the appetite of those who understand that symbols are a form of power. Symbolism will be their downfall.

I am not making an accusation, or maybe I am. But, moreover, I am asking a question that the history demands.

When someone who moves in circles of significant power reaches for one of the oldest symbols of blood and authority and transgression, do they know what they are holding?

And if they do know, what are they saying?

Andersen’s Karen wanted the red shoes because they were beautiful and because they marked a world above her own. She did not understand what she was reaching for. That was precisely her undoing.

The people I am thinking of are not Karen. They are not naive about symbols. They have staffs and advisors and the accumulated cultural knowledge that comes with generations of operating at the highest levels of power. They do not reach for things accidentally.

So I come back to the question.

The shoes are red. They have always been red. They were red when they were painted on the feet of Roman generals and red when they were placed in the Room of Tears for a new pope and red when a costume designer in Hollywood dipped them in dye without fully understanding why it felt so right.

What does it mean when the powerful wear them now?

I am supposed to say the acceptable thing, that I truly don’t know.

But I know that symbols accumulate meaning across centuries like rivers accumulate silt — quietly, steadily, until the weight of what has settled there is enormous. And I know that the people who understand that are never quite the same as the people who don’t.

The red shoes know what they mean.

They have always known.

The only question is whether the we can discern if the people wearing them do too.

By a tired momma a coffee

I have many personal opinions formed by researching the history of the powerful people behind the creation of the Fed and the chokehold on President Wilson. These opinions carry real weight with my opposition that the creation of the Fed violated our Constitution, however, my oath in this series is to always only publish the facts and so, that is what I have pulled together here. Let’s dive in.

In the autumn of 1907, the United States economy nearly collapsed. Not because of a war or a drought, because of a rumor.

A failed attempt to corner the copper market had spooked depositors, and word spread that the Knickerbocker Trust Company in New York was going under. Within hours, thousands of people were lined up on the sidewalk to pull their money out. The panic spread to other banks. Credit froze. The stock market lurched. The most industrially powerful nation on earth was hemorrhaging.

The federal government had no mechanism to stop it.

The man who stepped into that vacuum was not a senator or a treasury secretary. He was a private banker named J.P. Morgan. He convened the most powerful financiers in New York in his personal library on Madison Avenue, locked the doors, and refused to let anyone leave until they had agreed to pool enough money to stabilize the system. According to historical accounts, he kept them there through the night. By morning, they had a plan. The panic subsided.

Congress looked at that episode and asked an uncomfortable question: what happens next time, when J.P. Morgan is not there, or not willing?

The Problem the Fed Was Built to Solve

Before 1913, the United States had no central bank. The First Bank of the United States had been allowed to expire in 1811, and the Second Bank followed in 1836 after President Andrew Jackson declared war on it as a symbol of concentrated financial power. What remained was a banking system held together with good intentions and seasonal luck. It was, at its core, pure red white and blue American.

The core vulnerability was what economists called an inelastic currency. When farmers needed credit at harvest time, or when a factory town had a bad quarter, the money supply could not flex to meet the need. Reserves were concentrated in New York. When New York sneezed, the rest of the country caught pneumonia.

The panics came with grim regularity: 1873, 1884, 1893, 1896, and then the Panic of 1907 that finally forced the issue.

Congress passed the Aldrich-Vreeland Act in 1908, creating a National Monetary Commission to study how other countries handled this problem. Senators and bankers traveled to Europe and looked closely at institutions like the Bank of England. What they found was that most stable economies had a central authority capable of acting as a lender of last resort, a place banks could turn to for emergency liquidity rather than turning on each other.

The debate that followed was one of the genuinely great political arguments in American history.

The Fight Over What to Build

Nobody agreed on what the solution should look like, and that disagreement reflected something real about American political identity.

Bankers wanted a powerful central institution, privately managed, with the expertise to act quickly and the independence to act wisely. Critics, especially the Populist and Progressive voices of the era, were deeply suspicious of that vision. Senator Robert La Follette and others warned that putting monetary power in private hands was simply handing the economy over to Wall Street. William Jennings Bryan, who had spent decades fighting for farmers and workers against concentrated financial interests, refused to support any plan that looked like a bankers’ bank.

President Woodrow Wilson threaded the needle. The Federal Reserve Act, signed into law on December 23, 1913, created something that had no precise precedent: twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks scattered across the country, each serving its own district, overseen by a central Federal Reserve Board in Washington appointed by the president.

It was a deliberate compromise. The regional structure was a concession to those who feared centralized power. The federal oversight board was a concession to those who feared private control. Neither side got exactly what it wanted. The act passed anyway.

The original stated purposes were concrete and specific: furnish an elastic currency that could expand and contract with economic conditions; provide a place where banks could rediscount commercial paper in times of stress; establish more effective supervision of banking; and improve the flow of money and credit across the country.

What it was not, at its founding, was a tool for managing the broader economy. The dual mandate that Americans hear about today, requiring the Fed to pursue both maximum employment and stable prices, came much later, shaped by the Depression, the postwar economy, and legislative amendments in the 1970s.

The Constitutional Question

Whether the Federal Reserve is constitutional is a question that has generated serious legal scholarship for over a century. The honest answer, the one that holds up to scrutiny, is that courts have never struck it down, but the debate isn’t settled and the questions aren’t trivial.

The most frequently raised concerns cluster around a few constitutional provisions.

Article I gives Congress the power to coin money and regulate its value. Critics have long argued that delegating broad monetary authority to an independent body, one that sets interest rates and conducts open market operations largely outside direct congressional control, stretches that provision beyond its meaning. This is the non-delegation argument: that Congress cannot simply hand its constitutional responsibilities to another institution and walk away.

Courts have not agreed, at least not yet. Since the 1930s, the non-delegation doctrine has been nearly dormant. Congress can delegate broad authority as long as it provides what courts call an intelligible principle, some guiding standard for how the power is to be used. The Fed’s mandate qualifies, courts have concluded, and no challenge on these grounds has succeeded.

A second set of questions concerns the Appointments Clause of Article II, which governs how officers of the United States are selected. The Federal Open Market Committee, which sets monetary policy, includes the presidents of regional Federal Reserve Banks. Those presidents are not appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by the Senate. They are selected through a process that involves the boards of regional banks, boards that include representatives chosen by private member banks. Critics argue this is a constitutional problem: significant government power exercised by officers who were not appointed through the constitutional process.

This argument has reached the courts. In the 1980s, Senator John Melcher challenged the FOMC’s composition directly. The case was dismissed on procedural grounds and the Supreme Court declined to hear it. The constitutional merits were never resolved.

More recently, the Supreme Court has been actively rethinking the limits of for-cause removal protections for agency heads. In cases like Seila Law and Collins, the Court placed new limits on Congress’s ability to insulate executive officers from presidential removal. The Federal Reserve Board governors have such protections. Whether those protections survive the Court’s evolving doctrine is genuinely uncertain.

What is telling is how the Court has signaled it views the Fed’s unusual status. In 2025 procedural orders, the Court distinguished the Fed as a quasi-private entity with a unique historical pedigree, language that suggests the justices are aware that invalidating the Fed’s structure would carry consequences unlike striking down any other agency.

That awareness is quite important. When courts evaluate structural challenges to institutions, they do not operate in a vacuum. The Federal Reserve sits at the center of the global financial system. Whether that practical reality should shape constitutional interpretation is itself a contested question, one that goes to the heart of what judicial review is for.

The originalist side of the debate offers its own counterpoint. Supporters of the Fed’s constitutional legitimacy point to the Necessary and Proper Clause, which gives Congress latitude to create institutions needed to carry out its enumerated powers, and to early historical precedents like Hamilton’s Sinking Fund Commission, an independent body with monetary functions established by the very first Congress and approved by George Washington. If the founding generation created independent monetary mechanisms, the argument goes, the Constitution cannot be read to forbid them.

No court has ever found that the Federal Reserve or its actions violate the Constitution. That is the current state of the law. But no court has definitively resolved the structural questions either.

What This Means for a Republic

The Federal Reserve now controls the interest rate that determines what you pay for a mortgage, what your savings earn, and how much it costs businesses in your community to borrow money. It can purchase trillions of dollars in financial assets to stimulate a sluggish economy. It acts as the lender of last resort for the global banking system. It was created by statute, and it can be reformed or abolished by statute. Congress has amended the Federal Reserve Act before. It can do so again.

The founding question has never really gone away: in a self-governing republic, who should control the money supply?

The men who created the Fed in 1913 argued about it fiercely. What they ultimately built was a compromise, an institution designed to be expert enough to act effectively and independent enough to act without daily political interference, while remaining legally accountable to Congress and theoretically subject to democratic reform.

Whether that balance has held, whether it was ever the right balance to strike, and whether the institution that emerged from a single man’s library on a panicked autumn night remains fit for the republic it was built to serve: those are questions every citizen of this republic is entitled to ask.

Sources for this column include the Federal Reserve’s own historical archives, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and published legal scholarship on the constitutional structure of the Federal Reserve System.

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