2020: High Crimes, Deep Politics
In my essay, “The Deep Political Realities of the 2016 U.S. General Election,” I argued that it mattered who was president during the 2017 JFK file-release deadline.1 The JFK Act was the defining, yet unspeakable aspect of that election. President Trump continues to criminally withhold and redact those files. That crime supports my argument that Hillary Clinton, had she won, would have allowed their release. With Trump’s new file-release deadline now in 2021, the JFK Act remains the defining, still unspeakable aspect of the 2020 election.
I pointed out in my first essay in the inaugural issue of the journal Garrison, and again at the 2019 Olney conference, that in an assassinocracy, voting for purist policies gets you only more assassination. I asked, “How does one become a post-RFK president? ... If you want a democracy, you have to resolve the Kennedy assassination.” I pointed to a second track to power, opened in June 2018 by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in response to Hillary’s loss. By accusing the CIA of killing his father and uncle, Robert Kennedy Jr. made this “Track II” a direct attack on the assassinocracy.2
In 2019, Tulsi Gabbard allowed herself to be photographed in public with the book JFK and the Unspeakable. By doing so, she became the only candidate to test Track II, albeit too cautiously.
Hillary doubled down, to say the least, on the indirect approach. In October 2019, Hillary called Tulsi “the favorite of the Russians,” saying they were “grooming her to be the third-party candidate.” Tulsi responded, “This is not about Russia,” explaining, “This smear campaign is coming from people like Hillary Clinton and her proxies, the foreign policy establishment, the military-industrial complex, who obviously feel threatened by my message and by my campaign because they know that they can’t control me.”3
Tulsi is right that the deep state is threatened by her message. She is wrong that they cannot control her. Politics is about power. To have power, she has to become president.
There is a famous quote about this. It goes, “I had rather be right than president.” Henry Clay, five-time failed candidate for president, said it on Feb. 7, 1839. Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, differentiated between his personal views and what he could do officially as president. He neither campaigned as an abolitionist nor considered himself one. He did not call for the immediate end of slavery everywhere in the U.S. until it was in the Republican platform for the 1864 election. Lincoln did what he had to when he had to do it. He knew the reality of politics and power.
George Orwell wrote in his essay, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham”: “Power can sometimes be won or maintained without violence, but never without fraud, because it is necessary to make use of the masses, and the masses would not cooperate if they knew that they were simply serving the purposes of a minority.” Orwell was studying Burnham just before writing Nineteen Eighty-four.4
Science fiction is never about the future. It is always about the present. There is another great work of science fiction with a valuable lesson about the assassinocracy. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story can be summed up with this quote from the Bible: “Any story sounds true until someone tells the other side and sets the record straight.” (Proverbs 18:17) Jyn Erso, the main character in Rogue One, is the daughter of Galen Erso, a scientist who develops the Empire’s Death Star superweapon.
Galen is despised and hated by everyone who opposes the Empire, including Jyn, until she learns his secret: Galen has secretly sabotaged the Death Star by implanting a self-destruct device deeply inside it. Jyn is told the secret by a rebel insurgency leader who knows it from a secret message Galen smuggled to him through a defector. The message directs them to his plans showing them how to trigger the device.
Jyn explains to the rebels that her father made the difficult decision to sacrifice 15 years of his life infiltrating the Empire because he knew the weapon would be finished with him or without him and he could try to stop it. The movie’s director, Gareth Edwards, said, “It’s the reality of war. Good guys are bad. Bad guys are good. It’s complicated, layered; a very rich scenario in which to set a movie.”
Rogue One is a story of espionage, similar to the real-life one I tell in this essay about Hillary Clinton’s attempt to infiltrate the Deep State. The lesson is you can’t judge spies by their covers.5
Now that Hillary is attempting to enter the 2020 campaign as a running mate,* I would update the ending of this essay only: “If the Clintons retake the White House and continue to survive, the final test of this perspective will be their response to the criminal violation of the Assassination Records Collection Act.”
(Originally published in Garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics, Issue 005, Aug. 2020, pp. 10-11.)
*Authors note (Jan. 3, 2023):
In Feb. 2020, Clinton was reported to be under consideration for VP by Mike Bloomberg’s campaign after internal polling found that a Bloomberg-Clinton ticket would be a “formidable force.” Bloomberg’s campaign, while not denying it, publicly downplayed media reports that he was considering Clinton as his running mate.
Potential supporters of a Clinton-Biden ticket included Jen O'Malley Dillon, who became Biden's campaign manager in March 2020, and formerly Beto O'Rourke's. She had worked campaigns for Al Gore, John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Tim Kain. She advised Clinton in 2016 and praised Beto O'Rourke's campaign for hiring of Hillarys former delegate operations consultant Jeff Berman in May 2019. Dillon had Hillary’s “bake cookies” quote as her Twitter cover photo in August 2020. Her Precision Strategies partner, Teddy Goff, headed Clinton 2016’s digital strategy, and Precision Strategies partner Stephanie Cutter had worked for Ted Kennedy.
Long-time Clinton-Kennedy friend, Chris Dodd, headed Biden’s VP selection committee. Late in the VP-selection process, despite Kamala Harris being on Biden’s VP shortlist, Dodd publicly opposed her as having “no remorse” for her anti-Biden debate attacks. Harris was the obvious CIA/Deep-State choice, used to misdirect the media from a Clinton choice. Lisa Pease, in her book, A Lie Too Big to Fail, on the RFK assassination, called Harris, “the senator most responsible for the latest cover-up of these crimes.”
Biden followed only 26 Twitter accounts prior to August 11, 2020. They included Hillary Clinton’s, Elizabeth Warren’s, Michelle Obama’s, and even Lady Gaga’s, but not anyone on his alleged short list for running mate. Only two were added the day he announced his choice, Kamala Harris and her husband, Douglas Emhoff.
In January 2021, with Biden’s choice of Cass Sunstein for DHS and his wife Samantha Power for USAID, it became clear there would be no lawful JFK file release by Biden. Mr. and Mrs. Sunstein are the focal point of the anti-Hillary, anti-JFK-file-release faction of the deep state. Sunstein co-authored the 2008 paper with Adrian Vermeule, “Conspiracy Theories,” recommending government action in line with CIA memo 1035-960. Power was the 2008 Obama campaign advisor who called Hillary a monster and had to resign over it. At Yale, she was in the Aurelean Honor Society, the fifth oldest secret society of the Ancient Eight, the oldest of which is Skull and Bones.
President Biden continues to criminally withhold and redact the JFK files.
ENDNOTES:
Bartholomew, Richard, The Deep State in the Heart of Texas. San Antonio, Texas: Say Something Real Press, 2018, pp. 416 - 421.
Bartholomew, Richard, “2020: The Deep Political Realities,” Garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics, Issue 001, Jan.-Feb. 2019, pp. 12-18.
Musto, Julia and Rambaran, Vandana, “Gabbard says Clinton ‘Russian asset’ remarks are part of ‘smear campaign’ as 2020 Dems voice support,” Oct. 19, 2019, Fox News. Accessed Jan. 24, 2020. (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/tulsi-gabbard-2020-democrat-candidates-hillary-clinton)
Orwell, George, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” Accessed Feb. 29, 2020. (https://orwell.ru/library/reviews/burnham/english/e_burnh.html)
Stilwell, Blake, “This is why ‘Star Wars’ is actually a series of WWII-style spy thrillers,” We Are the Mighty, December 13, 2016. Accessed Mar. 5, 2020. (http://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/this-is-why-star-wars-is-actually-a-series-of-wwii-style-spy-thrillers)