Ken Klippenstein: Will Francesca Hong and Abdul El-Sayed Get Elected?

Will Francesca Hong and Abdul El-Sayed Get Elected?

Washington's plan to block them

KenKlippenstein August 3rd 2026

El-Sayed and Hong

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As we move closer to the midterm elections, two candidates stand out for their independence from the institutional Democratic Party.

The first is straight-talking chef Francesca Hong, whom I’ve interviewed and is the clear frontrunner to be governor of my home state of Wisconsin. The second is doctor Abdul El-Sayed, who enters Tuesday’s Senate primary in Michigan with a double-digit lead in polls.

Yet the Democratic Party and a compliant mainstream media is not accepting the clear will of voters. Instead, they’re busy manufacturing the sense that if the two candidates are nominated, losses in the general election would be inevitable because they are too “extreme” for ordinary voters.

The evidence for this is largely just vibes. In fact, a leaked memo shows Hong is privately seen by Republicans as the most formidable candidate, as I’ll detail in a moment. But first, take a look at the orgy of fear-mongering by the Party about these candidates.

“The Dem race for governor in WI feels like a slow-rolling car headed for a cliff,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist in his 2008 campaign.

Democratic Party elder James Carville went further, declaring “the two-party system is just under tremendous stress” due to the rise of figures like left-wing commentator Hasan Piker, whom Hong has campaigned with. (When asked if she’d condemn Piker, Hong’s characteristically blunt response was simply “No,” as shown in the video below.) 

Party leaders have thumbed the scales in both primary races — Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers in his state, Chuck Schumer in Michigan — each backing the party establishment favorite. The Democratic establishment keeps advancing candidates who aren’t gaining any traction; but instead of asking why they are so out of touch with what the people want, they are resorting to tearing down the popular choices. The Party doesn’t like anyone who it hasn’t anointed and who hasn’t risen through its ranks.

The Democratic Party sits at its lowest level of popularity in at least 30 years. It has been fighting the people’s choices since Zohran Mamdani emerged as mayoral frontrunner in New York last year. When he beat the Party’s candidate last year, the smug reaction from election knowers was that his victory was only possible in a deep blue state like New York.

Turns out that was bullshit. Neither Michigan nor Wisconsin is New York. Nor are they lefty outliers. Trump carried both in 2024!

Now the Party hacks and their elite media buddies are trying to put the fear of god in voters that if they choose the candidate most of them want, it is playing into the hands of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, and so on. Though disguised as a warning, it is actually a threat. 

It bears mentioning that this is not the view of congressman Tom Tiffany, the Republican who will actually have to run against Hong.

“We Need To Take Francesca Hong Seriously,” reads the subject line of a memo prepared for U.S. Tiffany’s gubernatorial campaign by Republican consultants. Leaked and reported on by Jessie Opoien of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the April memo correctly anticipated Hong’s dominance in the primary. It also described her as “uniquely dangerous in the general election” and that “general election strengths are formidable.” 

Per the memo, as reported by Opoien:

• Hong’s “combination of grassroots momentum, unapologetically progressive ideology, and a platform centered on high turnout makes her uniquely dangerous in the general election.”

• Hong’s platform is “broadly popular and difficult to counter.”

• Her agenda “is built around kitchen-table issues that poll strongly with independents, working families, and even some rural voters.”

• “more moderate and establishment Democratic alternatives would likely produce lower base motivation and depressed turnout.”

Now compare that with the doomsaying national media coverage. It’s almost surreal how different it is.

The “electability” argument is always a claim about what your neighbors will tolerate, made by someone who has never met them, delivered with the confidence of arithmetic. As a campaign staffer once told me, the horse race’s main function is propaganda to induce voters to feel like voting a certain way is prudent or responsible.

This is all about telling people who they can or cannot vote for. Sometimes it’s barely even concealed. Third Way, the centrist think tank, said in a strategy memo this year that Democrats “cannot run candidates who are far outside the mainstream of their district.” 

It’s the very definition of mainstream that is at stake here.

If there’s one thing that ties together Mamdani, Hong and El-Sayed, it is that they have distinct personalities and they talk without the prevarications and doublespeak of what we’ve come to know as “moderates.” Things like democratic socialism are, in my view, a small element of their popularity. That they are willing to directly buck the establishment is their appeal. And when they talk about affordability, it comes from experience and living among normal people rather than the lanyard class that dominates Washington.

As the Republican consultant memo about Hong warns, her “working-class biography and populist economics [could] blunt ‘radical socialist’ framing.”

I have no idea what will happen in the election. Neither does anyone else. But I do know what’s happening in America. People are tired of the establishment, tired of the blow-dried, overproduced version of everything that seeks to manage rather than move.

“I think they’re underestimating voters,” Hong said back in May of the commentariat and their negative predictions. “That has always been a problem for the Democratic Party — that we are not listening to how they are feeling.”

She seems to hear it loud and clear.

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Leak: Rubio’s WMD Scandal Is “Far-Left Terrorism”

 Leak: Rubio’s WMD Scandal Is “Far-Left Terrorism”

U.S. targets "anti-tech," "pro-Iranian" & "antisemitic networks" with new three-letter designation.

Ken Klippenstein July 15th 2026

Little Marco sits atop his throne

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Tomorrow, Marco Rubio will open a summit unveiling a new designation branding his political opponents as terrorists, documents leaked to me reveal.

The unveil will happen on the opening day of the 60-nation summit — which I reported on here — titled, “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.” 

That this summit is happening at a time when the Iran war is literally exploding, and while so much else in the world seems to be on fire, is a baffling way for the Secretary of State (and National Security Advisor!) to spend his precious time.

Welcome to the War on FLT, short for “Far-Left Terrorism,” a new acronym appearing in State Department documents about the summit and which I obtained. 

A three-letter acronym for an imagined threat that could be radioactive to a politician’s presidential ambitions. Sound familiar? It’s this generation’s WMD. And it’s going to haunt him.

Rubio, who fancies himself a deep thinker and is already being anointed as the experienced middle-of-the-road alternative to JD Vance, is revealing his true stripes: Trump flunkey, oblivious, and lost in the sauce of the bureaucracy’s ideological hotbox.

Far-left is hard enough to define (who decides what’s “far”?) but to add terrorism takes it to another level of crazy. Not that Rubio cares. The summit will introduce a new visa policy under which State targets “far-left terrorist and other aligned groups” not just for violence against actual people but also “economic sabotage including against public and private property” — a phrase broad enough to cover a broken window or a boycott. 

Rubio has spent a decade cultivating the image of the responsible statesman — fourteen years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the grown-up steadying a chaotic administration. The FLT designation is a good place to watch that image dissolve. The State Department is being turned into another clown car, and Rubio seems happy to be the driver.

State’s talking points drop any pretense that this is a politically neutral endeavor. Officials are instructed to rely on the following talking points (per the leaked documents):

• “We go where the threat is. Political terrorism is resurgent, and far-left terrorism specifically poses a unique and distinctive threat today. Addressing and defeating that is the focus of the Ministerial.”

• “The United States has observed a concerning convergence between violent far-left and anarchist networks and other violent extremist actors, including violent pro-Iranian and antisemitic networks, as well as militant anti-tech and eco-terrorist movements. This is a trend we are monitoring closely and engaging partners to address.”

• “The Ministerial will focus world attention on the resurgence of political terrorism and bring together the United States and foreign partners to address the terrorist actors, particularly far-left terrorist networks, operating across Europe, Asia, the Western Hemisphere, and beyond. It focuses on improving coordination, information sharing, and practical law enforcement cooperation to counter political terrorism, including violent far-left attacks on law enforcement, critical infrastructure, political figures, and state institutions.”

• “Political terrorism is resurgent, particularly among far-left terrorist networks that have grown more sophisticated. They leverage decentralized cell structures, encrypted communications, and transnational coordination to carry out attacks on rail, energy, and telecommunications infrastructure, as well as targeted violence against political figures and their families. In 2024 alone, there were 21 far-left and anarchist terrorist attacks in the EU — nearly matching the number of jihadist attacks that year.”

• “These are not isolated incidents, but are part of a sustained, transnational campaign of political terrorism that is growing in sophistication and lethality, aimed at dismantling the foundations of self-governing societies.”

• “The Department of State is committed to confronting organized political violence, including from far-left terrorist and other aligned groups that engage in or support terrorist or criminal activities, economic sabotage, or support far-left terrorist-led violent actions.”

• “In support of this effort, the Department of State is announcing a new visa restriction policy that targets members of far-left terrorist and other aligned groups who have supported or incited acts of terrorism; supported violent criminal activity; participated in economic sabotage including against public and private property; financed, recruited, or provided logistical support for violent or criminal actions committed by far-left terrorist and other aligned groups; and/or facilitated the convergence of far left terrorist and other aligned networks for the purposes of economic sabotage.”

• “…this policy will protect U.S. citizens and safeguard the American homeland by restricting entry of foreign nationals who finance, recruit, incite, or otherwise enable terrorist, violent, and criminal far-left terrorist networks — closing the visa pathways that far-left terrorists and other aligned groups could exploit to threaten American lives, undermine economic stability, and coordinate violent actions on U.S. soil.”

Consider who Rubio is comfortable putting in charge of the summit, names I gleaned from an internal State Department roster detailing the event.

Tera Dahl, a senior advisor in State’s Bureau of Counterterrorism, is a Michael Flynn colleague from the first Trump administration who was pushed out of the National Security Council by H.R. McMaster. Before that, she wrote for Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, co-founded the now-defunct Council on Global Security — a think tank devoted to warning about the dangers of Islam. There, she worked with Katharine Gorka, wife of current Trump terrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, authoring a string of pieces praising Egypt’s strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi for “leading Egypt towards democracy” as he jailed his critics.

Dahl got her start as a staffer for then-Representative Michele Bachmann — which is its own kind of full circle. In 2012, Bachmann and four House colleagues sent letters to federal inspectors general alleging that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the U.S. government, singling out longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin. The claim was baseless enough that John McCain went to the Senate floor to rebuke a member of his own party.

Then there’s Monica Jacobsen, another senior official at State’s Counterrorism Bureau, a holy warrior who prioritizes the defense of Global Christians. She testified to Congress this year that her agency would “hold governments’ feet to the fire when they fail to address terrorist threats that undermine religious freedom.”

Then there’s Brent Munyon, Senior Adviser to the Deputy Secretary of Management and Resources. A few years ago, he was a partisan dirt digger for the Republican National Committee. Finally, there’s Oscar Buynevich, Special Advisor for the Office of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, another Breitbart commentator whose career amounted to shoveling culture war slop.

It’s a rogues’ gallery befitting the imaginary Iraqi WMD fiasco, the main contributor to the mess we are still in more than 20 years later. Think Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle.

Welcome to Rubio 2028.

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Ken Klippenstein: Exit Mitch McConnell, Enter Abdul El-Sayed

Exit Mitch McConnell, Enter Abdul El-Sayed

McConnell's wife leaves country; Democrats leave old school politics

Ken Klippenstein July 6, 2026. On Substack

McConnell sits behind his wife, Elaine Chao

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“Elder abuse” — that’s what Charles Booker, the outsider Democratic candidate to replace Senator Mitch McConnell, calls the effort to keep the bedridden 84-year-old in office.

By saying what everyone is thinking but Washington refuses to acknowledge, he embodies the new generation of Democrats rejecting the time-honored tradition of saying nothing in favor of saying something. 

From Zohran Mamdani to Melat Kiros, the old guard extinction event is here. These new Democrats are unapologetic about their views. That stands in glaring contrast to their predecessors’ neurotic obsession with focus-grouped sound bites that might poll well but radiate insincerity. You might not agree with the new Democrats, but you don’t need a decoder ring to decipher their positions.

Charles Booker

If the polls are to be trusted, these new Democrats could make up nearly 10 percent of the Congress after the midterms. Wondering what’s driving this upheaval? Look no further than the old guard’s refusal to address the obvious reality that McConnell is circling the drain.

“I don’t want to speculate on anyone’s health,” Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear said last week when asked during a press briefing about McConnell’s hospitalization.

I, on the other hand, have no problem “speculating,” like about the fact that only a tiny fraction (fewer than five percent) of octogenarians survive an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest like the one McConnell suffered.

I’ll speculate further: even if he’s part of that lucky few, he’ll have brain damage, as the vast majority of survivors do.

Speculation is necessary here because McConnell’s office has refused to say why he’s been in the hospital for the past three weeks, what his current status is, or when he’ll be out. This has led to a lot of confusion, as seen in the following post from an X/Twitter account that provides daily updates on whether McConnell has passed. 

All of this “speculation” is common sense to just about any ER nurse or medical expert, who are all over TikTok expressing their bafflement that the media is entertaining the possibility that McConnell will soon be wheeled down the Senate chamber like Hannibal Lecter.

This Weekend at Bernie’s routine explains the success of all the current insurgent candidates: they’re willing to say and do the thing that’s obvious and necessary, rejecting the ways of those with political “experience” (read: expedience) whose slogan might as well be: The buck stops somewhere else. The old guard believes in procedures over results and hide behind things like decorum and civility as an excuse for doing and saying nothing. 

Let’s talk about decorum and civility.

McConnell, who has held his Senate seat since 1985, embodies the old ways perfectly. In his final years he became one of the only Republicans willing to break with Trump — voting against his most controversial nominees, including Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — and took to the Senate floor to call Trump “practically and morally responsible” for January 6 (while voting against his impeachment). He lamented that his party had grown too populist, too isolationist, too Trump. The decorous man was, by the end, a man without a party.

It’s hard to imagine now, but McConnell was once a moderate — a Rockefeller Republican, pro-choice and pro-labor, who in his first run for local office courted unions so aggressively that he won the AFL-CIO’s endorsement by promising to back collective bargaining for public employees. (Once elected, he reneged.) His biographer Alec MacGillis titled his book, bluntly, The Cynic, tracing McConnell’s shift “from a moderate Republican … to the embodiment of partisan obstructionism” — driven less by any change of conviction than by a bottomless appetite for power.

His first wife, Sherrill Redmon, a Democrat, divorced him in 1980 as he calcified into that operator; she became a feminist scholar at Smith, where she ran the Sophia Smith Collection and worked with Gloria Steinem on an oral history of the women’s movement. In 1993 McConnell married Elaine Chao, who would serve as labor secretary under George W. Bush and transportation secretary under Trump I — and whose family’s China-based shipping fortune, and the millions it delivered to the couple, has trailed him for decades. 

As transportation secretary she drew a criminal referral from the department's inspector general for using her staff and office to benefit her family; the Justice Department declined to pursue it. Chao resigned in the days after January 6, one of the “decorous” exits that changed nothing.

McConnell — a lifelong Washington operator who started as a legislative aide to Kentucky Senator Marlow Cook before becoming a deputy assistant attorney general under Ford — hated public speaking and courting voters, preferring a data-driven war room to the stump. This is exactly the politics voters are rejecting. They want to be in the room where it happens, as participants rather than spectators

Which brings us to the insurgent leading the Democratic primary for Michigan's open Senate seat: Abdul El-Sayed. He's a rejection of everything McConnell stands for, distilled into a single slogan: "Money out of politics, money in your pocket, and Medicare for All." Agree or disagree, you know where he stands.

An MD and epidemiologist, El-Sayed comes not from politics but from medicine — a world whose failures he's clearly passionate about fixing. He ran Detroit's health department after the city's bankruptcy gutted it, then led Wayne County's, serving 1.8 million people. This is not the usual lawyer-to-Washington pipeline of most career politicians like McConnell.

The dinosaur establishment, meanwhile, is spending real money to stop him, which tells you everything.

And McConnell? This weekend it was reported that just three days after his resuscitation and hospitalization, Chao traveled to Beijing to meet the Vice President of China, Han Zheng — for talks Chinese state media described as strengthening U.S.–China ties. Business ties, that is.

McConnell’s wife meeting with China’s VP last month

Contrary to the movies, CPR is brutal: it breaks ribs, cracks the sternum. McConnell, in what are very likely his final days, has been in excruciating pain — alone, at least from his wife.

How’s that for civility?

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Social Democrats Win Big in New York City Democratic Primaries

Source: NPR

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

Anyone who reads this blog, and my occasional contributions to it, knows that I have long argued that the era of domination by the two major capitalist parties over U.S. political and economic life is drawing to a close.

 

It has been a long time coming. Americans are so disgusted with both the Democratic and Republican parties that in national elections tens of millions simply opt out, convinced that neither party represents their interests. It is important to recognize that even in the last presidential election, a little over 30% of eligible voters (including those that opted out) voted for Trump.

 

The statistics bear this out. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 63 percent of U.S. adults agree that the Republican and Democratic parties do such a poor job of representing the American people that a third major party is needed.

 

The desire for change extends beyond dissatisfaction with the political system. 

 

Around two-thirds of Americans believe that government should ensure health coverage for all. How this should be achieved varies, of course, and we have to take into account the decades-long propaganda campaign against any form of socialized service in the United States. When I arrived in this country 52 years ago, many workers told me they opposed a national health care system like that in Britain because they had been convinced it was communist and inherently inefficient.

 

Similarly, more than 80 percent of Americans believe that housing should be made more affordable. I could go on, but you get the picture.

 

Against this backdrop, Tuesday's Democratic primary elections in New York City amounted to a political earthquake. In addition to Zohran Mamdani's victory in the mayoral primary, the three congressional candidates backed by Mamdani all won their respective races.

 

The significance of these victories should not be underestimated. They reflect the declining authority of the Democratic Party establishment and the growing appetite for alternatives. Investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein summarized the scale of the defeat for the party leadership:

 

"In New York, the Democratic Party's heaviest hitters — all from the state — lost big. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries endorsed the incumbents and campaigned hard against the Mamdani slate. Chuck Schumer, the other great power of New York Democratic politics and Senate Minority Leader, said almost nothing about his own party's candidates, which tells you how eager he was to distance himself from the fight. Governor Kathy Hochul lined up behind Representative Dan Goldman in Manhattan.

 

Between the three, they couldn't deliver a single race."

 

All three victorious congressional candidates are members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization that has grown substantially since Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign in 2016.

 

There is no denying that these results represent a major rebuke to the Democratic Party leadership and to policies that have failed to address the needs and aspirations of large numbers of Americans. Nor is this sentiment confined to New York City as some pundits have argued. Across the country, people are demanding change, and both parties of capitalism are widely distrusted. So it’s also possible that these results foreshadow broader gains for insurgent and progressive candidates elsewhere. 

 

However, I still do not see the Democratic Party as the vehicle through which major reforms can be won. Sanders had an opportunity a decade ago to break from the party and attempt to build an independent left reform alternative. Whether such a project could have succeeded is impossible to know, but his campaign demonstrated that there was a substantial audience for it.

 

Who might have joined such an effort is also impossible to say. Perhaps Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib—politicians who have shown considerable courage at various points. Ocasio-Cortez has since become a rising star within the Democratic Party and is unlikely to return to the position she once expressed when she observed that only in the United States would she and Joe Biden belong to the same political party.

 

The larger question concerns the limits of reform in the era of late-stage capitalism. I do not believe that major reforms can be won, nor that a genuinely independent working-class political alternative can be built, without a mass movement capable of confronting the capitalist offensive in a serious and sustained manner.

 

Such a movement would inevitably seek its own political expression. In my view, any durable independent working-class political force is more likely to emerge from mass struggle, organization, and collective action than from electoral maneuvering within the framework of the existing parties. 

 

It is from such movements that an independent political alternative will ultimately arise.

Graham Platner: Another Rising Star Emerges in The Democratic Party

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

HEO/GED

05-31-2026

I agree with a lot of what he says, he speaks to the very basic things people desire and need. But he's not the first one to do that. And, he's right, capitalism makes us sick though he doesn't give the culprit a name.  What is his solution? As far as I can see it is in transforming the Democratic Party in to party that can bring about the reform he talks about in this video. I believe that experience teaches us that this is not the case.. 

Look at AOC. Look at Sanders or Mamdani, so many will fall in to place as they refuse to recognise that there is only one way any of these, mild reforms really, can be realised and that is through a mass movement, a working class mass movement that would welcome small capitalists like Graham Platner as allies in this struggle. 

Small capitalists, that middle layer, are also super exploited by big business. Some of them can move to the right but some can move to the left and be allies of  workers and the labor movement depending on the balance of class forces and the program, strategy and tactics of the workers' movement. They will, as will most workers, be drawn to a program that speaks to their needs and a movement that has the power to win it.

In addition, an independent political party of the working class opposed to both the big business parties is key, none of what he says is possible without that development. How that will develop is another issue, but as a mass movement on the ground develops it is inevitable in my mind that it will take political expression, candidates will arise out of that movement, maybe individually at first who can say. The ability to trap such movements and usher them in to the Democratic Party is waning. 

I will wait and see what he does when the power gives him options. Mamdani has no program for dealing with them. They are ruthless, they are killers. Both Democrats and Republicans have supported, armed and defended a genocide. Only a powerful and committed movement of the working class, committed to ending this system of production and building an economic system of production based on human need not profit can accomplish this social transformation. 

It's not about integrity, he seems like a decent guy. That's not the issue; the road to hell is paved with good intentions. 

The mid terms are looking to be very interesting indeed and we can return to this issue again.

Ken Klippenstein: Iran War vs. Epstein Files

Iran War vs. Epstein Files

Politician whose background is secret challenges one who released Epstein files

Ken Klippenstein May 17, 2026

Thomas Massie attends debate alone that challenger Ed Gallrein skipped 

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There’s a heated primary election for Congress this Tuesday that is nothing short of a referendum on “national security” — and fittingly, one of the candidate’s background is almost entirely unknown because, he claims, it’s classified.

His name is Ed Gallrein, a Trump-backed retired Navy captain challenging incumbent Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. The focus of Gallrein’s campaign (and one of the few things he seems willing to talk about) is his claim of having served in SEAL Team 6, the secretive commando group most famous for the killing of Osama bin Laden. He certainly knows how to operate in the shadows: I can count on one hand the number of interviews Gallrein has sat down for, and he’s skipped literally every debate, each attended alone by Massie. Gallrein’s campaign touts endorsements from unnamed military officers, their identities and other supposedly sensitive details redacted to burnish the security theater. He’s even called civilians “sheep.”

The strategy seems to be to let Trump's endorsement and the SEAL mystique do the work — and to avoid as much public scrutiny as possible. In the few appearances Gallrein has made, his message to voters is consistent: the most important things about him are classified, the president has seen the file, and that should be enough.

“The president is playing five-dimensional chess,” Gallrein told a local NBC affiliate, in response to a question about the Iran War’s effect on gas prices last week. By the next day, the game had mushroomed to “nine-dimensional chess,” as Gallrein later described Trump’s handling of the war to commentator Mark Levin.

See the trident?

By contrast, Thomas Massie is a vocal critic of the national security state — and it has cost him. He voted against Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill,” pushed for release of the Epstein files alongside Democrat Ro Khanna of California, and has been one of the most vocal congressional opponents of the Iran War. Whatever you think of his views, he's one of the few members of our pathetic Congress who is willing to defy his own party's leadership. For that, he's been buried in out-of-state spending and made a personal target of the president.

"We'll get a 100% vote except for this guy named Thomas Massie," Trump said while promoting the Big Beautiful Bill. "There's something wrong with him." Now he has escalated to calling Massie "the worst Republican Congressman in History” and demanding his ouster.

Into this fight steps Gallrein, whose pitch beyond Trump loyalty is a story he tells repeatedly about his first visit to the Oval Office. By his account, when he arrived, Trump had a leather binder containing his complete, classified “top secret” career file sitting on the resolute desk. The lesson, Gallrein told the Maywood Country Club:

“He [Trump] knows everything about me. He knows what I did for you in uniform. He knows what I’ll do for you in Washington. I’ll be your champion.”

The message here is as insulting as it is creepy: Trump has seen the classified record, the classified record establishes fitness, therefore voters need only ratify the commander-in-chief’s decision. Voters’ job isn’t to evaluate; it’s to trust the officials who have.

Ed Gallrein poses next to Donald Trump

Gallrein is pro-Iran War (and as far as I can tell, any other war) pro-Trump, and pro-“national security,” but that’s about all we’re allowed to know. If you’d like to know more about this figure that could well be representing the country next year, too bad. The campaign slogan might as well be Shut The Fuck Up and Salute.

He also rails against "politicians" who burned SEAL Team Six's cover by talking publicly about the bin Laden raid — but those politicians include the president and other democratically elected leaders who represent the only real check on the secret world that exists (at least in theory.)

His contempt for the public’s right to know presents itself almost like a verbal tic.

"Foreign policy and national security are inseparable,” Gallrein told a podcast called USA Cares. “You can't talk about one without talking about the other. If you are, you're an amateur." 

In other words: what your government does overseas, from Gaza to Venezuela, isn’t any of the public’s business. Your only job is to perform gratitude. As Gallrein told the Optimist Club: 

“You should be proud to know as Americans there’s units like Delta Force, our Army sister unit, and SEAL Team Six, that the kind of operation you saw to get Maduro, they’re standing ready 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year for you and your family. Mercifully and fortunately, all the things they do don’t hit the press. I’m sorry to disappoint the media, but that’s what I can share with you.”

Note the framing: they work for “you and your family.” Constitutionally and legally, they work for the elected president. Gallrein knows this (or should).

If you think I'm reading too much into his paternalism toward the civilian world, he literally calling civilians “sheep” and SEALS “sheep dogs.” Per his USA Cares interview:

“I don't know if you've heard this, the famous theory there's three kinds of people in the world. There are sheep, there are sheep dogs, and there's wolves. SEALs are sheep dogs. We don't care what letter jacket the adversary wears. If they're bad people and they mean, mean harm to our sheeps, we're on it.”

Civilians are the sheep. The special operators are the sheepdog, their self-appointed protectors. The sheep don't give the sheepdog orders. This is the worldview of someone running for an elected position in which he would oversee the sheepdogs!

And as for sheepdogs, it’s not even clear how much he really was one. Military sources tell me that Gallrein not only went to the Naval Postgraduate School as a young Lieutenant, but that he served in a number of educational and training positions, including the head of instruction at the Joint Special Operations University before he retired. He stresses in interviews that SEAL Team 6 isn’t just the combat operators but support staff as well. 

I wonder what his job was!

Whatever the case, he sure loves to talk like some kind of shadow warrior. In fact, in just the few interviews he’s even done, I counted at least a dozen references to secrets he claims he’s not at liberty to divulge, including:

• “I can’t speak to any classified operations I may or may not have ever been involved in.” — The Mark Levin Show 

• “SEAL Team six is different, classified, won’t go into it...” — Maywood Country Club Meet and Greet

• “Let’s talk about Seal Team Six for a minute. This is all I can tell you.” — Maywood Country Club Meet and Greet

• “…SEAL Team Six; can’t talk much about that, but it was an honor to lead those great Americans...” — The Mark Levin Show

• “The only reason you know about SEAL Team Six is ‘cause politicians ran their mouth about it after we got Osama Bin Laden and Captain Phillips, didn’t they?” — Optimist Club Speaker Series

• “I continued to be a senior advisor for what we would call s—uh, let’s just call them security activities and special operations, i.e., the black world...” — The Mark Levin Show

• “Think pager bombs, black ops, and things that happen that don’t get divulged, mercifully, unless politicians talk about it.” — Optimist Club Speaker Series

• “It just manifests itself in some very interesting activities and operations. Of course, we can’t talk about that, ‘cause that’s TS/SCI, it’s SAP [Special Access Program] information.” — The Mark Levin Show

• “And I could go into some detail about that, but- Yeah ... there’s a movie about it and so forth and so on. But I will not disclose anything classified, ‘cause I still have a- I appreciate that, yeah ... a clearance and I, I will abide by- Yes ... uh, the, uh, the agreements I have made with our US government as they pertain to such.” — USA Cares Podcast

• “I’m very familiar with it. I’ll say no more.” — USA Cares Podcast

• “...many times we would deploy in the dark in the night- Mm-hmm ... and we would come back in the dark at night- Yeah ... ‘cause our nation asked us to. Right. And I won’t go into any further details.” — USA Cares Podcast

• “I won’t share the confidential private pieces that are classified or otherwise I shouldn’t divulge...” — Optimist Club Speaker Series

A few things here are worth flagging. Gallrein refers to "security activities" — that phrase does not exist in military or intelligence parlance; the correct terms are "special activities" or "sensitive activities." He also describes a classification level as "secret compartmented information" — it's sensitivecompartmented information. 

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As if the whole Chris Kyle cosplay isn’t enough, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is en route to Kentucky to campaign with Gallrein, according to the local press.

There is one episode in Gallrein’s post-military career that exists in full public record — and it cuts against his vaunted expertise.

After retiring, he took a job as a Safety and Security Specialist at the Department of Energy’s Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the country’s most sensitive nuclear facilities. He was fired in May 2013. He filed a whistleblower complaint alleging retaliation for raising concerns about deficiencies in security training programs.

The complaint was dismissed. Among the reasons: he had reported his concerns to a fellow subcontractor employee — not a DOE official or his own employer’s chain of command, as the regulations required. The man campaigning on mastery of the classified world filed his whistleblower complaint with the wrong person and lost his job at a nuclear security facility. He has not mentioned any of this on the campaign trail.

	Gallrein Whistleblower Determination 253KB ∙ PDF file
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This hiding behind national security is not a partisan phenomenon. Last year I wrote about the Democrat national security moms, officials like Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill, and Elissa Slotkin. The political establishment loves these figures because national security is an official-sounding way to tell the public to shut the fuck up and let the professionals handle things.

Gallrein seems to think that “his country” or “the nation” is some disembodied entity that doesn’t have elected officials, that “national security” is what gives him orders, and that the secret world is an autonomous entity. Most important though, he believes that the people are sheep and that those in uniform (the pack of wolves) have some license to protect them regardless of pesky politicians, and that that license derives from some secret regulation rather than from laws and the Constitution.

What Gallrein represents is something both parties have been quietly building toward for twenty-five years: the national security state as its own source of political legitimacy, floating above democratic accountability, not answerable to the public it claims to serve. 

The sheep vote Tuesday.

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