A Letter to the American People
A plea into the abyss, by someone trying to love this thing we call America.
Do you love your children? I want you to reflect on that question and what it means. Because I think loving your children is not about a hug or a kiss. It’s not about the things you say or do. It’s about the world you leave for them.
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The world you are leaving for them right now is on fire.
Not metaphorically. The largest liquid natural gas facility in the Gulf is burning on your social media feed. The Strait of Hormuz — through which a significant share of the world’s energy supply passes — is closed. A war that Congress never authorized, that the Constitution explicitly forbids the executive from starting alone, is worsening by the day. And the supply shock now moving through global energy, transportation, and food chains will arrive at your grocery store, your heating bill, and your gas pump with a force that will make the inflation of 2021 to 2023 look like a mild inconvenience.
Your children will feel this. For years. Possibly for the formative years of their lives.
I want you to hold that thought while I tell you how we got here.
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A foreign head of state — a corrupt, post-truth demagogue operating under criminal indictment in his own country, who attempted to seize control of his nation’s Supreme Court to keep himself out of jail, who by the documented accounts of his own former intelligence officials channeled money to Hamas to pursue a divide-and-rule strategy against his political opponents — has manipulated the machinery of the United States federal government to start a war without your consent.
Not with your consent. Without it.
No declaration of war. No congressional authorization. No vote by the representatives you elected to make exactly these decisions on your behalf. The Constitution of the United States — the document that men and women have died for, that generations of Americans have fought and bled to preserve — designates Congress, and Congress alone, as the body with the authority to commit this nation to armed conflict.
That authority was not exercised. It was bypassed. And the people’s representatives, the members of the Article I Branch who took an oath to defend that Constitution, have stood still while it burned.
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I want to speak to you not as a partisan, but as a fellow American who has been reading the Gospels, and the Stoics, and the Founders, and the philosophers, and the historians — and who has arrived, through all of that reading, at a very simple conclusion.
We are being robbed.
Not of money, though that is coming. We are being robbed of our inheritance. The inheritance that was purchased at extraordinary cost by people who believed — who genuinely, at great personal risk, believed — that human beings could govern themselves. That the ancient yearning to breathe free from the bondage of kings and potentates and the primitive hierarchies of raw power could be made real. That a republic of laws, not of men, was not merely an aspiration but an achievement worth protecting with everything you have.
That achievement is being dismantled, systematically, by people who have decided that their wealth, their power, their donor networks, their sense of being somebody — that these things matter more than the inheritance they were entrusted to protect.
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I know that many of you are tired. I know that the daily assault of outrage and crisis and breaking news has a numbing effect, and that this is not an accident. The exhaustion is part of the strategy. If you cannot sustain your attention, you cannot sustain your outrage. And if you cannot sustain your outrage, you cannot sustain your resistance. The people doing this to you are counting on your exhaustion.
Do not give it to them.
Think about your children instead. Think about the world you are leaving for them. Think about whether, when they are old enough to understand what happened in these years, you will be able to look them in the eye and tell them what you did. Not what you felt. Not what you believed in private. What you did.
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The republic is not lost. It has survived worse, though not much worse, and not without cost. What it has never survived is the silence of the people who knew better and said nothing. What it has never survived is the decision, made by enough ordinary citizens, that the inheritance was too abstract to fight for, and the comfort of looking away was too immediate to resist.
You are not those people. I refuse to believe you are those people.
The members of Congress who are standing still while this burns — they are calculating whether you care enough to hold them accountable. They are betting that you are distracted. That you are tired. That the inheritance feels distant and the inconvenience of civic action feels close.
Prove them wrong.
Not for yourself. For your children. Because loving your children is not about a hug or a kiss. It is about the world you leave for them.
And right now, the world you leave for them is being decided.
Thank you, Mike for speaking up on behalf of the world's children. Everybody please restack this.
Mike, appreciate all you do to wake up the American people. You must feel like Chicken Little some days, running around squawking into the wind, but those of us who are paying attention know how vital and necessary your work is.
Slava America, to borrow a phrase from friends! 🇺🇸