Watching the Empires Fall
by Karen Kwiatkowski
LewRockwell.com
Address in NYC, Webster Hall, on September 26, 2011
It’s great to be here. I’m honored and delighted and thrilled all at once to be in the company of such great people and great minds.
Like many of you, I have traveled a long road to get here, philosophically speaking. Many of you have traveled pretty much the same one. I was raised by Goldwater Republicans. I voted for Ronald Reagan. I served in the military. I left the GOP in the 90s, after watching it pay lip service to the Constitution, and watching it lie, spend and borrow like there was no tomorrow. I whistleblew on the neocons and their falsely justified war in the Pentagon in 2003. I embraced the anti-state, anti-war, pro-market message of Lew Rockwell, and the economic perspectives of Murray Rothbard. And today, I’m back inside the GOP challenging a twenty-year incumbent RINO – Republican in Name Only – to represent the 6th District of Virginia.
Along the way, I bought some guns, a little gold, and some land. I rediscovered my agricultural roots, and started learning a few skills of survival. I connected with people who could teach me important things. I signed up my husband to sit on the local Selective Service board – so we’d know if and when a draft was coming. Even though along the way I earned a PhD, it wasn’t until afterwards that I started learning about the real American history, and starting to put into perspective the nature of government growth, nationalism, socialism, corporatism and empire.
Today, the empire – foreign and domestic – is ending for America, and I think the state knows this, and is fighting it, and is going to fight it with everything it can muster. Luckily, the state can’t muster up like it once could, but I’ll get to that!
We are all familiar with the foreign empire – the DoD is the world’s largest employer, and there are US bases, installations, and personnel in 150 countries, more or less. We also run drones and computer warfare from basements in D.C. and elsewhere, striking flickering targets around the globe. The hypocrisy of our foreign policy, the criminality and waste of our foreign aid programs, the expense of our undeclared wars, and the damage done to our own country by persistently ignoring the Constitution – any of these is reason enough bring home the troops, stop borrowing money to pay for it, stop taxing the rest of us to pay the interest on the spending. The lenders to our government are themselves finding that America as global policeman is not such a great investment anymore.
The Rest…HERE
