An Open Letter to Skylar Holden
This is an open letter, not only to Skylar Holden, but also to any other farmer, or anyone else who has been harmed by the heedless funding cuts of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
Dear Mr. Holden,
It was good to hear the news that the grant money intended for your farm has been unfrozen. Our small farmers and ranchers are vital to maintaining the health of our country.
You said in your first video about this subject that you determined which candidate would get your vote by answering a questionnaire from Opencampaign. Out of curiosity I took the quiz. I found one major flaw, a deal breaker. It provided an answer based on stated policy positions of the candidates. The deal breaker was that the stated policy positions may or may not have been the actual policy positions. All politicians paint themselves and their party in the most favorable light. That's political spin. Some go further and spout "alternative facts." Some tell people what they want to hear, in other words, they lie. A questionnaire can only tell you what a candidate says about their positions. It cannot tell you if that candidate is telling the truth, or spinning, or outright lying. Thus an online questionnaire is a week reed in supporting candidate choice.
Aside from that, there is an undercurrent that has been running in American politics for more than fifty years. A short and at least partially accurate statement about the beginning of this sequence of events would be that the hippies and flower children scared the living daylights out of the military-industrial complex of the sixties and seventies. And said complex countered with a number of organizations that would attempt to protect the status quo. It didn't end with just protecting the status quo however. Paul Weyrich infamously said he didn't want everybody to vote. Lewis Powell wrote a memorandum about influencing the courts. In 2005, George Carlin, talking about the big corporations, said "They own you." In 2015, Jimmy Carter said that we had become an oligarchy.
Now, fifty years after the wealthy began their campaign of influence, what we see is the world's richest man trying to grab even more money than he already has, and the power that goes with it. The Federalist Society has picked three out of the last four Supreme Court Justices and our current leadership is based on shock and awe. Corporate dark money is now in control.
At some time around 1970-1971, Paul Weyrich, Ed Feulner, Joseph Coors and several others founded the Analysis and Research Association, Inc. Its ideology and mission would eventually evolve into the Heritage Foundation. The Vietnam War protests, Woodstock, and the hippie culture in general had a part in the concern of the corporate executives of the day. The "tune in, turn on and drop out philosophy didn't fit in with the goals of the military-industrial complex or corporate thinking. The people who were dropping out were potential laborers. If the industrial machine lost too many cogs from the wheel, the fear was that it would cease to function. The corporate powers of that time responded with a knee jerk reaction, to grasp for control of the government.
This is the age old story of a supposed aristocratic class thinking that their wealth gives them the right of control, almost the right of ownership, of the middle class and the men and women who labor with their hands.
This is the legacy inherited by Musk and Trump. It's almost certain that Donald Trump would not have won the election without the quarter of a billion dollars, or more, poured into advertising by Elon Musk and the heavy influence of the social media site X, formerly Twitter. The big corporations have almost succeeded in seizing the reins of government, as was dimly, imperfectly envisioned in the early seventies.
This wicked stew has been simmering for more than fifty years. Whether or not it's too late to stop the corporate takeover of America remains to be seen. One thing is for sure. If we don't come to some sense of unity and protest en masse the corporate dark money will have won and the average American will have lost.
The guy traipsing around a stage while brandishing a chainsaw (a publicity stunt) briefly touched you and your farm. Your problem was solved, and I'm thankful for that. However, there are many victims of the chainsaw guy who have been left behind, cancer patients on experimental treatments, victims of natural disasters, farmers hurt by retaliatory tariffs, veterans in need of healthcare, affordable housing for seniors and pitfalls which we haven't even discovered yet.
The immediacy of your problem has been solved, but not really, for all of the problems caused by this indiscriminate budget slashing is also yours. And it is mine. We are all in this together, brothers and sisters of the human family. We must speak with one voice. We must continue to call our elected representatives and let them know what they are doing wrong. And what the executive branch is doing wrong.
Most of all we need to make sure that those we elect next time will protect our best interests, not the interests of the billionaire class and the big corporations. Become familiar with the Heritage Foundation, Heritage Action and the Federalist Society. They concern themselves with the interests of the very wealthy, not those of us who have worked for a living, or are still working for a living. Whoever they support, the best advice is to vote for the other candidate.
America is at a crossroads. What we do now will determine whether our heirs will live in freedom or live in a dystopian corporate vision of control and bondage. This is an all hands on deck moment. America needs you right here and right now. Our beloved Ship of State needs all of us.
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/25/business/doge-personal-data-access-federal-agencies/index.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/pilots-quite-literally-flying-blind-111200885.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c977njnvq2do
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/31/politics/trump-policy-project-2025-executive-orders-invs/index.html
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/trump-congress-political-violence
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/e/edwards-ideas.html?