Sean Ongley

Category: Politics

  • Finding Kokesh, or, WHY DIDN’T I TAKE THE ACID?

    Finding Kokesh, or, WHY DIDN’T I TAKE THE ACID?

    We have all heard this notion that anyone who actually wants to be President of the United States has to be insane, and therefore unfit for office. I believe most people agree with that.

    So what if that candidate’s platform is to dissolve the federal government? Which candidate is crazier, the one that wants the job or the one that wants to make the job go away?

    This is Adam Kokesh. He is a bona fide madman, but I would trust him with power because he doesn’t want it, and ran for President in 2020 with the Libertarian Party on this platform.

    Whether or not I agree with his position to destroy all federal power, we share the same anarchistic ethos.

    Kokesh calls himself a voluntaryist. Personally, I relate, as I have always considered volunteering an important part of my life. Ten years ago, I had no space in life for a job because everything I did was volunteered. I still basically live that way, but I make money.

    The Libertarian Party is no less statist than the Green Party, when it comes down to it. Can you call yourself an anarchist and be involved with a political party? I certainly think you can tolerate political parties, as it is not your responsibility to ban them. I just don’t see how it works the other way around.

    The characters attracted to and involved with Libertarianism have always varied from anti-federalists like Kokesh to corporatist millionaires simply out to protect their wealth by leveraging federal power to skirt regulations that actually protect communities and individual rights. The resulting policy platform becomes, like the Green Party, off-center but far from any radical change.

    Adam Versus The Man was a very big YouTube show. Kokesh sat down with Joe Rogan in the early years of his podcast. Adam is a combat veteran that became an anti-war activist, but I haven’t frankly researched much further than our direct contact.

    Today, he is damn near cancelled. Last week, he was beefing with Spotify and Rogan for removing his episode from the platform, even though the JRE video is up on his own YouTube page. His Twitter profile remains intact, and that is how we got in touch.

    Marcus from Aquarian Anarchy podcast was his press secretary during the campaign. I was on that podcast in January, and before that, two of the hosts were on my own livestream. Maybe that is why Adam’s girlfriend The Commander in Kief followed me back on Twitter.

    Shortly after that, Kokesh was arrested for possession of federally regulated drugs, in Saguache County, Colorado, even though they have been legalized in Denver County. His core supporters mobilized to get him out, launching the hashtag #FreeKokesh.

    Kief began showing pictures of her relationship with Adam. This was a clear PR move, but whatever, that’s how I learned they were connected. I followed him and he followed back.

    The chargers against him were eventually dismissed, due probably to his purposeful lack of cooperation, and public support. 

    I contacted Kief, saying that I’d like to visit their compound in Ash Fork, Arizona. I make the annual trip to visit family in Tucson, but this was an extra destination.

    I am about to make a life-changing transition from urban to country, I am considering leaving Pennsylvania to come back out west. Alternatively, I could try for two properties — this really is a dream to own at least two places where I love to be.

    When I arrived in Phoenix early Friday morning, I picked up my rental car and made my way north to Ash Fork. I cruised around the region to scope out some parcels.

    Much of the area is just not acceptable for my needs, from topography to land values. Pretty much, the sweet spot is Ash Fork. I know a good investment when I see it.

    The town is dilapidated and scary, on an irrelevant stretch of Route 66. The motels look dangerous, there is very little commerce. All of this spells opportunity to me.

    Adam assured me that if I texted him, he’d be available. That’s why I got nervous when he didn’t answer. After a few hours, I figured I might as well walk about the main street and get to know the community by sitting in a bar. 

    The Oasis Lounge lured me like a mirage on the sand. 

    I walked in, immediately I was invited into the community. I met an engineer and builder couple with seven children who had given up their careers for a free lifestyle. They worked in the Portland area the last year I lived there. They bought me a round. Their daughter was the bartender, aged 19 and still wearing braces. The regulars ambled about like it was their living room.

    That’s when I got the text back from Kokesh. I invited him down for a beer, he accepted, as he was on his way to the Family Dollar down the street. 

    When Adam walked through the door, it was obvious, with his wild hair and beard, the ill-fitting work clothes, and the intensity of his gaze. I jumped up from my stool, extending my handshake to say, “Mr. Kokesh!”

    “Hey! Sean…” he replied.

    “Nice to meet you, glad you made it — have a seat!” showing him the beer selection.

    “I’m sorry man, I forgot you were coming. I’m a dick.” He conceded. 

    Shrugging it off, just happy I wasn’t stood up, I said, “It’s all good.”

    “I’m on mushrooms too.” He wanted me to know.

    Sadly that was the end of his stash. I had my hopes set to shroom that night.

    He already wanted to know what my plans for Ash Fork were, looking to see whether or not I had some role to play in his community. I told him I still needed to feel it out.

    He downed his cider and we boogied, following him home through miles of unpaved road. He wanted to work alone until sunset, so I walked about the perimeter, hung out with the dogs, Thelma and Louise.

    The compound is powered by wind, solar, and locally harvested wood. Structures made from natural, recycled, and reusable materials are scattered over ten acres.

    Adam is 40 years old and I am 39. We are both fixed on starting families, supporting them with self-sufficient properties, and a community of creative freedom-oriented people.

    After finishing his work, he set up my bunk in the sound studio. There was a plaque on the wall from YouTube representing his achievement of acquiring more than 100K subscribers, around a decade ago. I asked him, “Has YouTube cancelled you yet?”

    “Oh Yeah,” he replied.

    He cannot post new content, although there are 263K subscribers to his channel today.

    “Too bad you don’t get a trophy for being cancelled too,” I said.

    “Yeah they should,” he said, laughing.

    We retired to his cabin and proceeded to drink his rum and fruit juice concoction. He offered me food, but I declined, as my metabolism had already settled on booze that afternoon at the Oasis. You can feel it when that happens. We smoked.

    We argued about government. 

    My argument is that we are not culturally prepared for that level of responsibility. The federal government might be the necessary component to maintain liberties across the fifty states.

    “You’re familiar enough with my body of work that I don’t have to explain…” Feeling out my level of fandom.

    I interrupted him, “No, I’m not!” 

    I had only heard his one appearance on Aquarian Anarchy, after his candidacy was over. I told him exactly what I thought about him then, I literally just thought, “I could hang out with this guy.” It was never my ambition to do so. It kind of just happened.

    Adam’s position is that the federal government can be eliminated in relatively short order. All programs can be carried out by the states. This means each state would become an independent nation.

    He called me out as ADD because I was, at that point, impatiently jumping in a lot. He demanded that I articulate my purpose and vision for my life. Every moment was friendly and good natured, but challenging. Friends should challenge each other like this, without accompanying judgement.

    “I see your skills. I see your potential,” but he was trying to discover if there was some reason that I was in his life suddenly, as we were truly strangers getting drunk together in his house.

    I came to the conclusion that my vision and purpose has been clear to me for many years. The problem at this point is confidence.

    “The fact that I am here with you right now is an expression of my purpose,” I insisted.

    “I am so grateful and excited about twenty more years of hardcore work ahead of me,” explaining that I blew my purpose-driven life once already by letting insecurities hold the wheel.

    I started feeling emotional, carrying on that He and I were in the upper percentile of people that even try to follow their purpose and vision outside of what is prescribed for them by institutions. I began tearing up because I know from experience how most people give up before they even start, driven by fear, doubt, and insecurities, and those who pursue their vision without handling those issues, like myself, inevitably crash and burn, or they burn everyone around them to maintain control.

    Conversation had crescendo’d. He ushered me to my bunk. “Thank You for your hospitality,” I said, ready to sleep off the red eye flight.

    It was eight degrees when I woke up, but I was wearing a T-shirt and jeans by the afternoon. Immediately east of Ash Fork toward Flagstaff, it becomes forested desert, ski lodges and tourism, while immediately west, you’re back in pure desert.

    My purpose, in the morning, was breakfast, for which I drove thirty miles to the nearest diner. It was a good opportunity to ruminate on our talk.

    The truth is that I continue to struggle with the idea of individual purpose. I don’t believe anyone’s purpose is fixed. For example, I believe my technical purpose in life is to produce media and music, however, the real purpose behind that is to connect people into community, to open consciousness. This has always been the effect of my most successful projects. 

    Everyone’s God-given purpose connects along the same principles, regardless of how specific you get into someone’s individual situation, because our realm truly operates on base principles.

    When I got back, ready to work, I found Adam cutting lower limbs off trees. I was smoking a joint. He said, “Hey! You should know I dropped two tabs of acid. Do you want one?”

    I cracked up, “No!” I worried about driving home. That, and I never really lifted my personal rule to only do naturally growing drugs.

    He asked, “What do you want to do with your day, man?”

    “I told you I would put in some work and I’m going to do that,” reassuring him.

    We grabbed some gloves, a rake, and loppers, to go about clearing area for camping. I volunteered to rake the tumbleweed.

    He went back to his work and I went to mine. I sought the martial arts in the work. Pulling the rake by leveraging my body weight, I was able to reduce the stress on my body and clear a big area in a fairly short time.

    “Thanks for you work, man, it’s already looking great,” he said.

    “You’re welcome. I’m here to learn about this land, to discover what it means to manage this kind of property,” I said. I mean it truly, you have to feel it before investing.

    “I’m glad you see it that way,” he said.

    His neighbors came over and they continued the tasks just about when I had to go.

    Now I wished I had taken the acid. I realized, there was a headspace that I should have shared with this guy, to fully embrace my visit. I’m a psychonaut too! I really had enough time to peak, come down, and drive. I know I can handle my psyche. I am not afraid of it. One tab was not going to make me nuts. Truly, the universe was trying to say that it was time to try acid.

    When I got home and he retweeted our selfie, that’s when I realized how much this guy means to people, how legendary he is to so many. I was like, “Oh damn, he’s huge!” I don’t care if someone is famous or rich or whatever, so long as they are genuine people who live well.

    This, Adam is, for sure. He is a balanced man with masculine energy, a fighter, that is also concerned with beauty, love and truth, applying artistic creativity to his property, bringing a range of open-minded people together in community for the purpose of mutual empowerment. He generously offers of himself and wants the same.

    The best has yet to come, for both of us. He’s coming to a place where I believe if he runs again, he’ll be much more prepared, not just for the fact that he owns the tour bus and stuff like that, but because he is growing as a man. He was only 38 in his candidacy.

    The only problem I see in his message breaking through is his image. Not his personality, but for how the media will characterize him. How to get ahead of that is pretty darn hard, except, he hides nothing. The currency of the corrupt is secrecy. I don’t know if he has a secret.

    I see an absurdly transparent man, building his property out, preparing for a family. I could see him semi-retired from the public eye to enjoy the fruits of his labor, but the problem with that is, his purpose might be tied to public life. I am not sure if he can resist it.

    I know I cannot.

    Myself smokin’ a J in front of his tour bus.
    My preferred area has this clay soil.
    Beautiful moon over one of the domes.
  • Guest Appearance on Aquarian Anarchy

    Guest Appearance on Aquarian Anarchy

    The guys over at Aquarian Anarchy, whose roster of guests include the leaders from the anarchy, hotep, and libertarian communities, were gracious enough to have me on last week.

    Two of the three hosts of the show were guests previously on my livestreams. They are very open people and believe in taking a chance on building relationships.

    Liberty through leftism is what they wanted to focus on. To most of my community, I have become alt-right. To these guys, I am still a lefty.

    I had to concede that I am more of a civil libertarian decentralist. This means that I have not concluded that the federal government is inherently a bad construction, as it can levy power in a decentralized way toward freedom in the fifty state system.

    I believe the federal government should be reduced to where local communities are self-determined, and the federal government is there to protect that.

    We argue about secession, which I find to be a dangerous move.

    We relax and talk about music, stuff like that. For a two-hour podcast, I think this one is compelling and entertaining, and reviews many of the most important issues surrounding us.

    There was a little stuff that I didn’t choose to argue. I am sure that my social justice friends will be appalled by one or two statements here, but I am not defending anybody. My own views are unsettled sometimes anyway.

    As a civil libertarian decentralist, I want everyone’s rights to be respected. I don’t have to understand someone to respect them. Minding my business and taking care of my own, this is the ethic that outlives all liberal and leftist mores.

    Where pure anarchists I believe go wrong is that they forget that we are the world and the world is us i.e. the state. Leftists also play into a victim mentality, forgetting that they have agency over themselves but not others, and so the government isn’t meant to protect and save us. The only people who seem to realize they are the state are the state is them are ones taking advantage of it. The real victory, to me, is flipping this mindset in America.

  • Could “Intellectual Apartheid” Be a Thing?

    Could “Intellectual Apartheid” Be a Thing?

    Those not watching our planet becoming a mess of conflict may be too embroiled in their own concerns to see it happening. Some people, not just social scientists, journalists, and the like, make it their personal concern to see how the world and its leaders are managing their business. If someone has been observing this conflict over time, it is clear we are in a period of great tension. It is not yet civil war, but threats are made. We fight over the same reality, the same world, because from our own eyes it is somehow different from one person to the next.

    Because there is not a consistent honest narrative across media platforms, which are ideologically fragmented, those differences lead us to fight amongst each other, rather than observe the common threat, which is unfettered power over the people.

    Some argue that it is in fact the consolidation of corporate media, from hundreds of local and regional media companies, and broadcasters, to just a handful. This is a valid argument, however complicated by the new media ecosystem evolving out of podcasting. I think we would be remiss not to analyze the phenomenon of literacy and self-liberation from intellectual oppression.

    The United States has produced more citizens with college degrees — sometimes multiple degrees — than ever before, by an incredible margin. The gender gap narrowed and crossed over in 2015 so that women are now better educated than men. This is an incredible reversal since 1940, when women also first entered the work force.

    The percentage of Americans with four years of college education or more has improved from 5% to 35%, which doesn’t sound so impressive until I point out this represents a 700% increase since 1940 — we had already become a modernized nation with world leading literacy rates and universities across 48 states.

    Without getting into the weeds, we also know that literacy rates have improved globally, while ethnic minorities and immigrants enter higher education at increasing rates. Speaking as a White Male, I am not threatened because I believe in a diverse world where gender roles and ethnic cultures are celebrated in a political-economic system that cherishes everyone’s inherent contribution. That is not what we have now.

    The dominant class demands specific social attitudes and economic adherences or you and your business will not be able to survive. Millions of Americans reflect the feeling that they have to compartmentalize their real opinions and feelings from one relationship to the next. I believe this is natural, to some extent. You should not be intimate with your boss, or submissive to your spouse. What I am concerned about is people conforming their behavior to accommodate those that hold power over them, be it their boss or their spouse. We should all be nice to each other, polite, and considerate, out of genuine concern, not fear of repercussion. Civility is disappearing as a symptom of what I am analyzing here.

    I watch the privileged white liberal class going around calling their opponents racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic, while the number of white males in positions of power, their educational advantage down to their share of labor jobs, all declining.

    Let me tell you what I am: I am arachnophobic, and I’ve been one step ahead of the spider my entire life. The spider is the global elite, friends, and their webs are in the media, the education system, politics, and they drive the economics. 

    When your identity is rooted in economic class, you are together with the 90% of Americans. Only the upper 10% have seen any kind of wage increase since 1970, while the 1% enjoyed an incredible period of wealth accumulation over the same time. The average CEO was paid about ten times wealthier than their lowest paid employee in 1950, whereas today they factor in the hundreds, and that is on average. If you compare Warren Buffet to his janitors, or Jeff Bezos to his fulfillment clerks, we’re looking at an easy thousandfold disparity. Everybody is marginalized in today’s economics.

    Nobody wants to study the decline of the American white male out of fear of repercussions from the dominant liberal class. I could be labeled alt-right just for observing this even though my personal ideology puts all genders and ethnicities into an anarchist-libertarian cooperative society that would make it impossible for any single identity to become dominant, because power is not held in leaders, rather, in cooperative bodies.

    I do not get to live in that world, I am required to abide by the neoliberal capitalist framework in America regardless of the cognitive dissonance this puts me through, regardless of the mediocrity of my superiors, and the failures of their systems.

    Why is the steady decline of workforce participation among white males totally ignored in the narrative of white privilege? Because narratives aren’t facts. Facts educate the mind. Narratives entertain and condition the mind. You are better controlled by narrative. They give us the facts, but very few people study them. I suggest you study them.

    Women and ethnic minorities competed for wages, won the jobs. Employers got away with reducing salaries for all.

    It is good to see wealth transferred from the few to the many, but that is not what happened in the period following civil rights and women’s liberation. The total share of earnings was diluted by workers accustomed to less pay, in a system where entry workers cannot negotiate their wage.

    The American workforce participation rate declined, most sharply in 2009 when President Obama supposedly saved the economy, and it never recovered. Important to understand when unemployment goes down but the workforce participation rate remains flat, then the percentage of remaining unemployed transfers over to workforce participation rates. Lo and behold it was down 5% from 2007 as President Trump touted the best unemployment rate of all time.

    Corporations hired women for decades, improving their wages to the detriment of total household wealth. See this clearly, because it is good that women and non-whites are getting better jobs and pay on a positive trend line since 1970, but it is unfortunate that average wages have flattened over the same curve, thereby reducing household wealth over time, stealing from everybody, installing the two-income paradigm.

    I am not even discussing the extraordinary drag on American wages resulting from free trade agreements with China and Mexico. Millions of good paying jobs were exported. The whole phenomenon is complex, but to simplify, we no longer compete only with American laborers and immigrants, we also compete where we cannot even access the labor market.

    The few have become less and less a group of white men. The 1% would prefer it that you not see that they are also becoming more diverse than ever, because they know they have an effective narrative at play when the people fight amongst each other for scraps.

    All you have to do is look at the Forbes Billionaire List to see who the billionaires actually are. They belong to a special club, and they know one another. It is the billionaire scene. It is far more classist than racist, or sexist. The foundation of identity politics, few understand, is class identity.

    I am a white male, but my history shows a combination of factors that are comparable to communities of color. I graduated high school with a D average. I worked hard after that, earning a 3.65 GPA for my Associates Degree at community college. I have never earned, in my best years, the median individual income. I have been fired from several jobs due to personality conflicts. I rarely get called for job interviews for anything paying more than $12 per hour. I have experienced housing insecurity. My Father has a felony on his record, a problem that haunted our household. They cleaned homes and offices for a living for ten years. Half of my public school classmates were non-white in the Mexican immigrant neighborhood I grew up in. I was latchkey, they rarely helped with schoolwork because they usually worked themselves into the night. By Junior High, I did most of the house cleaning. We moved to Arizona to fend off rising costs in California, and because my parents had no risk management skills, because finance is an upper class trait that nobody taught them, and they went bankrupt. Their parents were gambling addicts and alcoholics. I was a first-generation college graduate, again, from community college.

    Add to the balance that I was born into the Church of Scientology, making me a weirdo at school. I am permanently traumatized from being identified as the outsider, ever year K-12, because that identity was instilled so early on. My parents bypassed personal responsibilities by funneling me through Scientology coursework, further alienating me from them, from myself, and the average person at once. My entire adult life can be observed as a struggle from one position to the next, never quite fitting in, often feeling dismissed on personal grounds, then emotionally lashing out from it, bringing myself down and burning bridges all the time.

    I struggle to find my privilege. I am a highly marginalized individual with a story that doesn’t fit into the logic of identity neoliberalism, just because I am a white male does not mean all the doors have opened for me. Mostly they have slammed shut. 

    Don’t tag the victim card on me, because this is not the point. The point is, if personality is what gets you passed the job interview, that enables people to be taken seriously in debates, that makes you a social media influencer, a television journalist, then personality is exactly what makes me unprivileged, rather, I am disastrously marginalized. And it demonstrates class privilege above all.

    If our world is a cult of personality, then those folks who do not match up will be prevented from sharing their talents and contributing their genius. This is the world I believe we live in. It is driven by a global financial order, not a white one. It infuriates me to see the white liberal class turn the truly marginalized artist class into a mouthpiece for the global elite.

    My argument is that personality has become the number one factor for marginalization today. What matters is your orientation to authority. This is why China and the Chinese people are close to knocking the United States off the global pyramid. Again, I am not threatened, because I know the people of China want liberty too. The more educated they become, the more they will demand liberty. That is why Xi Jinping has consolidated power and control using internet technology, in addition to good old brute force. That is why the Occupy Movement was shut down in brute force. That is why we have been quarantined.

    As more and more folks are educated, there are personalities that don’t fit the mold who take their genius into manual labor, doing rote work, where they are stuck with their brilliant ideas for which they cannot access capital. If we are lucky, we get to listen to podcasts at work, while yearning to interject that conversation rather than pack boxes for Amazon. We are deeply frustrated. Some folks are inclined to fall into depression and addiction, so lo and behold, we have the opioid epidemic at play. Then the liberal elite solution is just to give them safe injection sites and to selectively enforce trafficking laws while continuing to deprive people of universal health care, the only thing that would actually prevent rampant self-medication.

    I suppose the bottom line I am making is that most people now are smart enough to see that the narratives are not adding up, the stories we’re hearing are not real, but we blame and shift our trust into different authorities rather than awaken our powers of discernment. We seek enemies of convenience when we fail to see the common enemy. I know that folks are smart enough to realize when they have been duped, so I worry about that day coming, because I think it is a little bit backed up by now.

    We are smart enough to develop arguments and have opinions, but we are not cautious enough to hold off before pointing the finger. We are deliberately placed into this social media industry as willing tools of their profit to become addicted to the fear and anger that it generates in us. This is a clearly understood, documented marketing strategy. It is disgusting.

    I believe that someday we will come to realize that we live under the invisible regime of intellectual apartheid. If this is a form of apartheid, where the most intelligent people in the country are told what to think by the media, by the politicians, and by social media influencers, there will not be conformity without resistance. I believe we are watching right now the divide reach unprecedented tension, and it will snap.

    With the most educated populace ever, the pressures will continue to mount until our workplaces are democratized, our financial systems are democratized, our scientific discourse is democratized — a whole revolution of liberalization within the American constitution. I believe that our constitution and our system can accommodate extraordinary progress over time. All advancements can be made peacefully.

    I don’t know if we need to be led out of this, or if we need to wake up individually. If I am right, we’ll see authoritarianism rise to be challenged and defeated, or completely defeat us.

  • The Wheel of Contradiction Turns on Yemen

    The Wheel of Contradiction Turns on Yemen

    Analysis of the Yemen crisis recalls a lost narrative.

    This article was originally published at THRU.Media on June 5, 2015, as “Yemen Crisis and the Wheel of Contradiction.” It has been edited for quality without updating information or altering the original narrative.

    The Yemen Crisis only recently grabbed my attention during the usual morning routine of reading the news over breakfast. A story of violence, destruction, extremism, and political crisis breaks nearly everyday. Not only are there too many civil wars going on around the world to keep track of, they tend to read like sports analysis detailing the offense and the defense and how their plays were executed from each side. I’ve been focused on Syria and Palestine, but Yemen has had enough compelling detail to it that I had to carve out a couple days to research and digest the matter. The history of Yemen reveals internal collusion with al-Qaida and the exploitation of the United States War on Terror.

    Before researching this essay, I was only clear on the fact that Saudi Arabia’s air campaign in Yemen was against a militant faction called The Houthis. Now I understand that the Houthis deposed President Hadi from office and palace early this year. Hadi fled to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The Houthis have staked claim over the government by controlling the capitol, Sanaa. Saudi Arabia claims that the Houthis are a proxy force of Iran.

    Rumors of al-Qaida and Islamic State expanding their presence, thanks to the chaos of the scene, have been circulating. Setting the stage is a long time conflict between north and south Yemen, and a corrupt President who used terrorism to maintain power for decades.

    History Coming to Blows

    There is a religious and tribal connection that can be traced back generations, even if the exterior of the conflict is a modern political one. A fair place to begin is the Shia versus Sunni Islam conflict at play: Shi’ite Houthis hold a majority in the north while Hadi comes from the Sunni-dominant south. Iran is majority Shia, Saudi Arabia is majority Sunni. Al-Qaida is Sunni and Houthi is Shia. Both Houthi and al-Qaida roots go back in the 1980’s, and both took a turn with the collapse of Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed government in 1991, with the disintegration of the U.S.S.R.

    Osama Bin Laden operated a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and believed that Yemen had an important role to play in global jihad. His influence produced terrorist groups like Islamic Jihad in Yemen, Army of Aden, and eventually al-Qaida in Yemen, throughout the 1990’s, so that by September 11th, 2001, there was already a history of Yemeni attacks from Islamist militia against western nations.

    Hussein al-Houthi established the Believing Youth movement in 1992 to teach Zaidi Islam through school programs and summer camps. With 20,000 student attendees of the summer camps by 1995, there was a growing cult-like following in reverence of the al-Houthi family. Its teachings included lectures from Hassan Nasrallah, now Secretary General of the Lebanese political party with armed forces, Hezbollah.

    President of North Yemen throughout all of this is Ali Abdullah Saleh. He rose through the ranks with a vicious military career in the Yemen Arab Republic from 1960 to 1980. By 1983, he was President, and remained in that position until Soviet-backed South Yemen collapsed, like Afghanistan. He swiftly absorbed the South and became the first President of the new unity government.

    Saleh worked with the United States as an ally in the region, supporting Kuwait in 1990, and was supported in return for resisting communist insurgencies subsequent to the fall of the Soviet Union. Marxist secessionists sought regional liberation from the rule of Saleh. To squash insurgencies, Saleh utilized unemployed jihadists from Afghanistan trained by Bin Laden. These terrorists would evolve into early al-Qaida formations.

    In 1994, the Vice President of Yemen is appointed by the name of Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, recognized for his military role in keeping the secession movement down. His role in the administration is ceremonial.

    Houthis were relatively quiet until anti-west sentiment developed after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. They got Saleh’s attention as their numbers had grown and they had become increasingly armed. Without any particular provocation, members of the movement were arrested. Hussein al-Houthi launched the first insurgency against Yemen in June 2004 and was killed on September 10th. Every year since, there has been some kind of offensive measure from the Houthi movement. By 2011, they played a meaningful role in the revolution that ousted Saleh.

    That revolution was part of The Arab Spring, which is an ongoing geopolitical struggle. It has been a violent process but also led to international reforms and liberated many people from oppressive government rule. The nations still seeing great unrest are dealing with waves of humanitarian crises, civil war, and terrorism. The Yemeni Revolution has been one of the most unstable movements in the bunch.

    Water and Air Strikes

    One major yet ignored backdrop to the whole conflict is that Yemen is experiencing the greatest water crisis in the world. The prospect of Yemen being the first to run out of water has been rumored for many years, and yet, to this day, nothing is properly being done about it. Post-revolution reforms were met with a lack of political will from Hadi’s government. Social instability is a massive distraction.

    In a nation where 75% of men are addicted to a legal stimulant-narcotic known as qat, where food crops are being replaced by the demand for and profit from qat, where water drilling is unregulated, where cultivation of qat is estimated to be responsible for as much as half of the disappearing water table (6.5 feet per year), where nearly half the population is hungry, there is a severely torn social fabric, communities are reeling and desperate, and something has been deeply corrupting the government.

    For about one year after the revolution, Saleh remained President but essentially powerless. His successor, Hadi, was elected amidst unrest and instability. He was unopposed. By 2014, it seemed that his rule, though flawed, was likely to continue with reelection in 2015. This is when the Houthis started to dig in.

    Houthis rose to victory, building their control and support from the north, and in the summer of 2014, they descended upon the central capitol of Sanaa. On January 22nd, Hadi was run out of the Presidential Palace, resigning from office along with his entire cabinet, escaping to Riyadh, where Saudi Arabia took him as the President-in-exile. Abdel Malik al-Houthi became the first President of the Revolutionary Committee of Yemen.

    When they took the city by force and marked their territory like a gang, dissolving parliament and forming this farcical Revolutionary Committee, a considerable portion of the Yemeni public, Arab Gulf Cooperation Council, and United Nations called it an unwelcome coup d’tat.

    It took about two months of failed peace talks mediated by United Nations for Saudi Arabia to intervene militarily. The UN condition was that Hadi would remain in office and his government would be restored. That is a difficult pill to swallow, so it is understandable that Houthis would capitulate. February and March continued without the successful formation of a new government. Al-Qaida and Islamic State would infiltrate the insecure nation, to simultaneously fight the Houthi uprising and thwart the return of Hadi’s regime.

    Before Hadi was rushed out of the country, Houthi protests in Sanaa were violently squashed with security forces under Hadi’s command opening fire on peaceful crowds.

    Rutgers Associate Professor of Middle East studies, Toby Jones, speaking on Democracy Now, points out that Yemen has been a fractured, troubled nation for longer than the Houthi insurgency. He acknowledges that the Houthis had accomplished nothing “but [to] kill a thousand Yemenis.” Both politically and socially, they are stuck, but he stresses that they are one among many factions calling for political solutions while staging peaceful protests.

    Jones says, “The Houthis aren’t the only ones who have put pressure on Sanaa’s old central government. Pressure has come from the south, it’s come from tribal confederations, all of whom have suggested that the political dialogue, the national discussion, about the post-Arab-uprising political rapprochement that was necessary, had been a deeply flawed process. The Houthis didn’t call for war, and they coordinated closely with actors on the ground. They’re the ones who were being attacked, even though they’re the ones who have been calling for a political settlement to a deeply broken system all along. The fact that the Saudis have recast this in a language that the Houthis are the villains and the ones acting dangerously is remarkable.”

    With the claim that Iran was backing the Houthis, that they represented a threat to national security because of their control of a Saudi border region, and that militants had produced a humanitarian crisis, Saudi Arabia launched Operation Decisive Storm on March 25. Toby points out that Houthis have no desire to invade Saudi borders, and that the humanitarian crisis happened in their backyard for more than a decade. “This is a place that has rapidly run out of water,” Toby continues. “It has very little in the way of natural resources. The Saudis are just making a bad situation worse.”

    Backlash of Saudi Air Strikes

    The mission of Decisive Storm was to degrade Houthi capability and was announced as a success on April 22. The following mission, Renewal of Hope, began immediately on the 23rd. In a personal narrative from Casey L. Coombs, an American journalist stuck in war-torn Sanaa and landlocked thanks to Saudi bombing, describes the desertion of a usually thriving city and the difficult circumstances of taking a commercial flight in an occupied nation where Saudi jets have bombed the airport.

    Shuttled around on a motor-bike taxi, he was unable to find a Western Union or other common services, and Coombs points out, “The one market that appears unaffected — at least in terms of supply — is qat, the mildly narcotic plant that is almost universally chewed in Yemen. A qat dealer once told me that the qat is recession-proof — the qat markets are always up and running.”

    The story about Iran supporting the Houthis militarily has been published many times in numerous publications, yet the assertion is flawed. Beyond the possession of weapons traceable to Iran, there is no evidence of direct collusion as a proxy actor. Merely tracing arms to a weapons manufacturing nation is virtually irrelevant, and the double-standard glares when you look at al-Qaida or Islamic State weapons that are traceable to the United States.

    It is however a matter of public foreign policy that the Saudi government helped keep in place a failing regime with Hadi as the head, surrounded by former President Saleh’s family members.

    April and May of 2015 were characterized by failed ceasefire attempts and continued bombardment from the Saudi-led coalition, which included all Gulf-region nations and other allied countries. Accusations from the UN against the coalition have circulated about the dropping of cluster bombs, an indiscriminate weapon of mass destruction. Al-Qaida continues to be targeted in the south by American drones, even as jets bombard their Houthi enemy.

    On May 11, Saleh announced his alliance with the Houthis after his home in Sanaa was bombed by the coalition, killing three guards while leaving him apparently unscathed. This lends all forces loyal to Saleh over to the Houthi cause, to engage in a desperate attempt at retaining power.

    Where The Wheel Turns Next

    A former al-Qaida member and informant to Yemeni anti-terrorism units under Saleh has cast alarming accusations on the deposed President and his military between 2006 and 2011. Hani Mujahid provided information that could have thwarted two terrorist attacks, one targeting Spanish tourists, the other targeting an American Embassy.

    That Saleh was both creating and controlling al-Qaida in Yemen with U.S. backing in order to receive foreign aid is made credible by the Mujahid revelations, and supported by outspoken U.S. authorities. The post-revolution government that was backed by Saudi and U.S. diplomats left many of the same military officials in place.

    The Houthi coup points mostly to the political impossibility of reforming an overthrown regime into a satisfactory democracy by using that same old regime. Yet this plan is what the international players are fighting for. My persistent question is, Why?

    To give the international players the benefit of doubt, I could suggest Hadi is currently supported because during his three years of rule, he gradually reorganized the military with a certain bias for cutting out the Saleh power hub. It seems that the process has continued in exile. Yesterday, following the Mujahid revelations, by Presidential Decree (in exile) Hadi relieved Brigadier Ammar Mohammed Abdullah Saleh (nephew of President Saleh) from his post in Ethiopia.

    Hadi’s presence in Yemen is by proxy, making few public appearances. His strategy has focused on international relations, unlike his predecessor, who could work with opposing factions in a masterfully sociopathic kind of way, politically effective in dealing with homegrown issues.

    Hadi, as Vice President, and now President, cannot be disconnected from the corruption, from aiding al-Qaida. He pushes back against Saleh’s rule, but not substantially. His relationship to real civilians is disconnected after 21 years at the top of Yemen’s government, with a reputation for cracking down on people’s movements.

    On June 3, peace talks were arranged for June 14, in Geneva, moderated by the United Nations. This came after the deaths of at least 58 Yemenis under coalition bombing last week. The conflict has seen over 2000 related deaths, with many more injured, and half a million refugees since the start of the Houthi insurgency.

    Also on June 3, Former Senator and Co-Chair of the 2002 House-Senate Joint Inquiry into 9/11, Bob Graham, called for the declassification of allegations concerning Saudi Arabia’s financing of al-Qaida members which led to 9/11, declaring, “If the American people knew the full truth, I believe there would be an outrage that a country which alleges to be such an ally of ours has engaged in so many actions that have been so extremely negative towards the United States.”

    In Yemen, public support for a Houthi regime is simply vanishing, despite all the real damage done by coalition air strikes. It is strange that Houthis would be willing to align with Saleh, the same man who had their leader killed. They might gain something valuable in the short term, but they will lose public support.

    That Saleh would turn against al-Qaida is not surprising considering that he used them to get on America’s good side. When a Saudi air strike degrades Houthi territory and capability, al-Qaida is conveniently there to dig in. Saleh probably just has nowhere else to turn but against the enemy of his enemy.

    Saleh intentionally manipulated America’s War on Terror toward personal gain. Saudi Arabia did not commence air raids on his government. It was only when that government was removed that they stepped in, with the U.S. assisting in the name of fighting terror. If Houthis succeed, which is impossible, then Saleh could continue in power.

    Experts have already called this Saudi Arabia’s Vietnam. Tactically, geographically, it is relatively similar, and therefore extremely unlikely to be successful. But, if Hadi is put back into place, then a very similar situation will continue, with al-Qaida holding its presence, targeting both Houthis and the regime, indefinitely, for a dissatisfied population.

    This is a nation that needs to focus on social stability, food production, and water conservation. It can’t do that with any of these factions. It could take years to build a government, and the water crisis should have been handled years ago.

    I am no more clear about who is running Yemen than anyone else, but if you trace the contradictions far enough, you should begin to see the power in the shadows. The wheel of this story will turn all kinds of corners, but eventually it gets somewhere and parks.

    SUPPORTING DOCUMENTS