Why I am Voting for Eric Greitens for Senate

We need an anti-establishment fighter who believes there's no such thing as 'too cynical.'

Jun 16, 2022

When someone takes a stand that some of his friends consider unwise, it seems appropriate to offer a detailed explanation.

This courtesy is even more important when the stand means voting against an old friend running for political office. In this case, a friend who is also an excellent public servant and one of the best attorneys general in the United States.

I support Eric Greitens for US Senate because the rescue operation to save America failed. It is time for recovery, and recovery requires an outside fighter who doesn’t give a damn what people think.

Best Wishes to Eric Schmitt

For a time in the early-to-mid 20-teens, then State Senator Eric Schmitt was gracious enough to meet me for coffee every month or so. I enjoyed these chats, which always lasted twice as long as scheduled. Mr. Schmitt and I had very similar backgrounds—Catholic schools, sports, early indications of classical conservative bent.

Mr. Schmitt was, of course, more deeply involved in the Republican Party in Missouri than I was. As an organizer of the Tea Party movement in Missouri, I held the Republican Party at arm’s length, while Schmitt depended on that party to help navigate state politics as he climbed the ladder. St. Louis Tea Party Coalition was proud to help then-Senator Schmitt pass a municipal court reform bill to prevent municipalities from practicing “taxation by citation,” as Schmitt eloquently put it.

Schmitt’s party loyalty—and his willingness to make sensible deals as a Senator—have paid off. Schmitt became Missouri’s Attorney General when Josh Hawley moved on to the US Senate.

Schmitt has been an excellent AG for Missouri. He championed the fight against Biden’s dictatorship during the Covid persecutions. He used the power of his office to file—and win—numerous lawsuits against the corrupt US government.

I should also note that Schmitt has the temperament of a stereotypical US Senator. He gets along with the other side, often working closely with liberal politicians and organizations. That’s not a bad thing when applied to just causes. The court reform legislation required the support of the ACLU and Arch City Defenders—both radical left.

In any prior era of my life, which now spans nearly 60 years, I would be Schmitt’s biggest supporter in race for the US Senate.

But 2022 is not 1980, and the federal government of the United States can no longer be “conserved” or even protected by men and women of conscience. As a Senator, Eric Schmitt would perpetuate what has become a force for evil in the world. He would protect federal institutions while promoting reforms. He would defend that fetid and festering swamp from which crawls permawar, police statism, and dictatorship. Scmitt would not promote those evils; he would go along with them in pursuit of some nebulous and ever-evasive “greater cause.”

A House Divided . . . and Then Some

The United States government and all of its uncountable departments, agencies, bureaus, branches, and offices has made itself the enemy of all that is good and holy. Reforms will only make its wickedness stronger while allowing the decay to spread from bad timbers to good. Schmitt would paint over the active termite colonies instead of exterminating the vermin and mercilessly chopping out the rot.

Lincoln said “a house divided against itself cannot stand" but, in this present crisis, a different and more intense historical assertion comes to mind. Let’s go all the way back nearly a century before Lincoln’s 1858 speech to the words Jefferson wrote to King George and the whole world:

. . . whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.

At this moment in history, anyone who believes in America’s founding principles must work against efforts aimed at repairing the visible damage to our country and culture. We need men and women who will drive out the enemy, rip out the rot, and rebuild our house with steel beams—steel mined, smelted, and forged with American capital by American sweat.

That’s why I give 100 percent of my support to former Governor Eric Greitens for the United States Senate.

I’ve know Mr. Greitens since 2014. Back then, to be honest, Greitens had a lot of faith in our institutions. Like most of us, he believed our elected officials and public servants shared our belief that man is endowed by his Creator with unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that a strong voice and willing cooperation would help people see the errors of their ways and join us in the task of making America great again. Like me, Greitens believed most politicians of both parties meant well and pointed towards a common goal.

When I met Mr. Greitens, I was already supporting Dr. Ben Carson as Barrack Obama’s replacement. I believed that our country wanted and needed the calm, intelligent, and quiet leadership of a humble man of faith like Dr. Carson. After eight years of seemingly constant and often violent strife between the United States government and the grass roots movements, I saw 2016 as a chance to put adults back in charge, to cool the rhetoric, and to win hearts and minds with intellectually and scientifically superior arguments.

I was wrong.

Carson was too trusting, kind, and calm for the moment of history into which God has placed us. And the duty God has foisted upon us is too important for traditional methods of collegial debate. Western Civilization is in a war for survival.

America and the whole world are on the precipice of a dystopian horror show in which all government is owned by private individuals who hate you, me, and everything America once stood for. “You will own nothing and be happy about it,” is not just a quaint, communist saying; it is the official policy of both American political parties, even if only one says so out loud.

And those who seek to divest you of your guns, your children, your property, and your agency are not bound by moral or civil law. They do what they want, when they want, responding only to the law of the jungle.

Two Democrat lawyers who tried to kill New York City police officers were given a plea deal amounting little more than probation
Antifa terrorists who assaulted police and civilians were given no sentence at all
A 17-year-old repeat felon who ran down a young mother and her baby was sentenced to summer camp at a resort
Joe Biden’s son illegally obtained and brandished two guns and received no punishment
Border patrol agents doing their job by the book face career-killing punishment as retribution for Joe Biden having humiliated himself by calling them criminals
Decorated and honorably discharged military veterans rot away in DC Gitmo for merely attending a political event in 2021
Millions of illegal ballots were counted in the 2020 election, yet not a single state or federal agency will lift a finger to punish the criminals involved
Five conservative Supreme Court justices are under constant threat of violence or death, and neither the Justice Department nor the FBI will take a single action to protect them
Thousands of pro-abortion terrorists threaten and intimidate the Supreme Court in violation of federal criminal law, but the Justice Department and the FBI refuse to enforce the law they’re sworn to uphold
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has declared Americans the number threat, and the military trains daily to attack us
Congress and the DOJ conducted a two year sham investigation of President Trump knowing with absolute certainty he did. nothing wrong.
Republican leaders in Congress now support legislation allowing anyone to demand you be barred from owning weapons

And this list of anti-American abominations could fill books. Suffice it say, America is not just on the ropes; she’s on the canvas, broken and bleeding.

At the first Tea Party on February 27, 2009, I told the story of Mrs. Powell who asked of Benjamin Franklin at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, “What have you wrought us? A republic or a monarchy?” To which Dr. Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

We couldn’t.

The generations alive and working now took our blessing for granted. “The blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.” We’re the posterity, and we blew it like trust fund babies with Hunter Biden’s crack addiction.

This is not a rescue, but a recovery. The senatorial skills that made America great 40 years ago will only hasten dystopia today.

Whatever you learned in civics class in high school—forget about it.

Whatever you think you know about civil discourse—forget about it.

Whatever you think about standing in line and waiting your turn—forget about it.

In this war for civilization’s survival, Republicans are just as guilty as Democrats. Mitch McConnell wanted Trump impeached—twice—and worked secretly to make it so. Like a shrewd operator, he cast his vote with the winners, not with his conscience. He has no conscience to consult.

I support Eric Greitens because McConnell is his enemy, and I Eric Schmitt is McConnell’s friend.

Mitch McConnell supports “red flag” laws that will allow any human on earth to declare you mentally deranged, requiring officials to ransack your home in search of weapons, and remove them. You will have no recourse or due process.

I support Eric Greitens because he will fight to the end, making enemies even on the right, to preserve the Second Amendment. Eric Schmitt will do what his party leaders want him to do, because that’s what a good Republican does.

Karl Rove, who leaves a stinking trail of swamp slime wherever he slithers or sits, conspired to defame Eric Greitens. Mitch McConnell was involved. That’s because things that live in swamps fear the sort of disinfectant men like Donald Trump and Eric Greitens splash around like holy water at a baptism.

I support Eric Greitens because he holds no illusions about reptilian predators like Karl Rove and Mitch McConnell. Greitens won’t let the rescue party interfere with recovery operations.

We Have Nothing Left to “Conserve”

Conservatism is dormant until we recover something worth conserving.

America is not the country I served from 1984 to 1994. It is not the country whose men stormed the beaches at Normandy or descended on Usama bin Laden’s lair. Faster than you could bat an eye, the United States government and its two major parties retooled into despotism factories bent on subduing and miniaturizing human nature. Sometime after 9-11, Tocqueville’s warning of 1840 came to pass as the government, with its leeches that feed on the people’s labor, have become a source of human suffering rather than human flourishing:

It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.1

As Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

Eric Greitens hates that vision-turned-reality as much as you and I. He is as a man who rose above the crowd while he still could. And, unlike the swamp monsters who run the GOP and the government, Greitens will fight—does fight—to liberate man from that suffocating slime that coats our people in filth.

I no longer have faith or hope in the United States, but I have undying, unquenchable confidence in the American people and the principles upon which this country was founded. History tells us that freedoms lost are never restored out of the mercy of the despot. Slavery was abolished through a brutal war, and its sinful legacy remains a nagging ache in our national body today. The American Ideal cannot be recaptured without a fight. You will not be liberated by the politics that put you in chains.

If we are to restore God to His rightful place, to smash the shackles that bind our minds and bodies, to drain the swamp, we must elect men and women who have been punched and kicked by the system and came through eager to fight on.

Our founding documents have not failed. We have failed them. By failing those ideas, we have failed those who fought, suffered, and died defending them for over 200 years. To say, “I support the Constitution, but let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater,” is akin to saying, “I’m personally opposed to abortion, but who am I to force my opinion on someone else?”

The next and future Congresses must not approach their mission as a rescue, but a recovery. A recovery mission under hostile fire, low on ammunition, short on supplies, and with compromised communication channels. There’s no point in speaking in code because the enemy has the key. There’s no time to assess the damage, because the bullets are still flying.

This is a moment when commander’s intent becomes the only path forward. We know we will emerge into something different. We know the maps and plans given us did not match the reality we face. We know that to stand still is to die. We must seek courage and guidance from God and follow the leaders who burned the maps, scrapped the plans, picked up weapons of opportunity, and said, “follow me.”

Eric Greitens was brutalized by his own Missouri Republicans and corrupt Democrats. He was lied about, driven from office, and ridiculed. As a former boxer and Purple Heart recipient, he never faced an enemy as cruel as 21st century American politics.

But, as he wrote in Resilience:

Life’s reality is that we cannot bounce back. We cannot bounce back because we cannot go back in time to the people we used to be. The parent who loses a child never bounces back. The nineteen-year-old Marine who sails for war is gone forever, even if he returns. “What’s done cannot be undone,” and some of what life does to us is harsh2 . . .
Don’t expect a time in your life when you’ll be free from change, free from struggle, free from worry. To be resilient, you must understand that your objective is not to come to rest, because there is no rest. Your objective is to use what hits you to change your trajectory in a positive direction.3

Eric Greitens is not the man who became governor in 2016 believing the best about our country, state, and parties. Like the 19-year-old Marine who never returns from combat, Greitens is a different man, forged in the merciless battle of the swamp wars. His plans and maps proved useless, as did mine. He knows there’s no turning back, no barracks to retreat to, no chow hall to grab a meal.

Like the rest of us Tea Party remnants, he has only the gear his ALICE pack, the weapons in his hands, the grace of God in his heart, and a clear vision of the commander’s intent: to drain the swamp and recover the principles upon which we built what was the greatest civilization in the history of man.

This mission is not for the party regulars who climbed the ladder according the rules. This is a street fight for the soul of America, for the preservation of Western Civilization, for the total destruction of that network of small and complicated rules—and the rulers who weaved it.

This a time for warriors who’ve learned that the life they expected is a life they can never live—hungry to push through pain in pursuit of excellence. Again, from Resilience:

But—and I want to emphasize this—we do not grow because of the pain. We grow when we recover from the right pain in the right way.4

Our mission is not a rescue but a recovery. The pain is ours. The future is ours. But only if we embrace the pain and drive through to the end.

In this mission, we will lose old friends, just as warriors lose comrades. We will lose friends who want the old party system to remain intact. Friends who are frozen in time.

When soldiers freeze, they become easy targets. To remain with the frozen is to die clinging to the erroneous map and blindly executing a flawed plan. Tocqueville had such people in mind when he wrote:

It is indeed difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed; and no one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people5

The only candidate in the race for the US Senate from Missouri who will keep moving under fire is Eric Greitens. He has been through the grinder and came out stronger.

Forget about whatever you “know” about the way politics works. That world is over. We lost it. But that’s no reason to stop.

Pick up what you can, and follow the bloodied man who’s yelling “follow me.”

The mission will be accomplished.

Vote Greitens and keep moving.

Tocqueville, Alexis: Democracy in America, volume II, book 4, chapter 6.

Greitens, Eric. Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life . Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition. Location 428.

ibid. location 452.

Greitens, Eric. Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life . Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition. Location 2797.