In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Mark Antony stands over the murdered leader’s body and repeats with cold irony: “For Brutus is an honorable man; so are they all, all honorable men.” The line works because the audience understands that the repeated claim of honor is itself the accusation. We have been living inside our own version of that scene.
For years, a network of officials in the intelligence community, the FBI, and the permanent foreign-policy apparatus presented themselves as the last defenders of democratic norms. They spoke constantly of duty, institutions, and a “higher loyalty.” They told the country that extraordinary measures were required to deal with an unacceptable threat. When their actions were questioned, they protested too much.
These honorable men launched and sustained the Russia collusion operation. They used the powers of the state to plant resentment and turn institutions, media, and portions of the public against a presidential candidate and later a sitting president. When that effort began to lose force, they shifted to lawfare and procedural warfare. They did this while insisting they were acting out of institutional duty rather than ideological hostility.
It is worth noting that many of these officials held positions whose explicit statutory purpose was to prevent exactly this kind of coordinated political interference. The FBI’s core responsibilities include countering domestic threats to the constitutional order and protecting the integrity of elections. Yet it was the Director of that same agency who helped design and execute an effort to plant false narratives and use the powers of the state against a lawfully elected president.
Then came COVID. These same circles and the institutions they influenced helped design and enforce policies built on shaky science and sustained by fear. Main Street was ordered closed while big-box stores remained open, accelerating a massive transfer of wealth to the largest corporations through food-delivery and e-commerce platforms. Enormous sums flowed to social media companies, content platforms, bandwidth providers, and the hardware and software vendors that powered remote work, remote schooling, and the public-information campaigns that accompanied the restrictions.
Time, labor, and scarce supplies were diverted to endless cleaning protocols, plexiglass barriers, and arbitrary distancing rules. Social isolation drove a surge in mental-health treatment even as liquor and cannabis stayed readily available. Schools and churches were shuttered; those who defied the orders by opening a gym or attending church risked public prosecution. In multiple jurisdictions, policies effectively injected the virus into the most vulnerable populations by requiring nursing homes and hospices to accept COVID-positive patients.
Over it all ran a daily drumbeat of fatality counts that sounded uncannily like the casualty tallies of the final years of the Bush administration. Working people bore the heaviest costs. Resistance was framed as dangerous and illegitimate. When a black-swan event arrived, some among them appear to have treated it less as a national crisis to be managed carefully and more as another instrument that could finish what the Russia operation had started.
All of this was done in the name of protecting the republic. These honorable men told us they were acting out of necessity. They told us the threat justified the methods. They told us their institutions remained trustworthy. And throughout, they lied, leaked classified material, pressured
media and technology companies, violated privacy and security statutes, and used government power to influence elections.
The deeper project behind these actions seems the pursuit of a managed decline of American power in favor of a more Euro-socialist model — one in which national sovereignty, energy production, and working-class bargaining power would be subordinated to global coordination and elite institutional preferences. President Donald Trump represented the most direct political obstacle to that project. Removing or crippling him became the overriding imperative.
The consequences extended far beyond one man. The sustained campaign against Trump created the crisis atmosphere and moral panic in which the Democratic Party became vulnerable to capture by its most radical factions. Economic concerns that once defined the party’s relationship with working people were subordinated to ideological and foreign-policy projects. This capture is visible in the growing distance between the Democratic Party and organized labor. The Teamsters under Sean O’Brien have broken with decades of automatic alignment. Blue-collar trades unions have expressed similar frustrations. Even some senior leaders of traditionally aligned public-sector unions have distanced themselves from DNC leadership, citing the party’s failure to broaden its appeal to working-class voters.
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Like Brutus, who justified his actions by claiming “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more,” these men and women convinced themselves that their higher purpose required any means necessary. Through declassified testimony and internal communications, we can now see how they coordinated efforts to plant resentment and sever Trump from his base.
But Trump is not Caesar. The plot did not succeed in destroying him. What it did succeed in doing was weakening the republic far more than the minuscule Russian disinformation efforts of 2016 ever could. It helped fuel an atmosphere of rage and division that contributed to unsuccessful assassination attempts against him.These honorable men have had their way. Had they not launched and sustained these operations, it is highly likely Trump would have been re-elected in 2020 and would already be out of office. Instead, their actions helped extend the conflict, deepen the division, and accelerate the capture of one of the country’s major parties by its most radical factions. The country will long suffer the results.
Michael Breeden is a retired Air Force chief master sergeant with 29 years of service as a combat controller in special operations. He writes on sovereignty, culture, and institutional accountability.