18 April 2022
My fellow Missourians,
In 2001, this newspaper likely printed an AP photo of me and my recon team, sitting near the trash pit fire of Kandahar airport in Afghanistan during the first waves of the invasion. Last year, when I boarded a plane to depart Kabul a week before the city fell, there was a sense of relief, but also disappointing betrayal.
What was it all for?
Sadly, after all these years, we know. And we could have all just stayed home.
Why are our towns dying? Why are our hospitals and schools and institutions all hurting? Have we not sacrificed enough of our culture, our time, our dignity, our freedom? Are we not working just as hard?
The answer is yes – yes, we are. But there’s an invisible thief in every one of our pockets.
Money, much like America herself, is a social contract we make amongst ourselves. And much like America herself, the monstrosity that has seized our federal government has subverted that contract. They’ve materialized generations of future wealth into the present through printed debt and bled off trillions of our prosperity. For fifty years, our currency has been debased and its value stolen, and now we arrive at the endgame of this insidious plot.
There exists now a conglomerate of professions, an industry, that seeks to keep us divided. This ‘population management class’ is intent upon keeping every possible distraction forefront in our minds – constant confusion about gender, war, race, family, health, education, labor – anything to keep us from noticing all the while our real wealth is being siphoned off. The federal legislature is no longer made up of leaders; it is made up of managers meant to portray the illusion of choice, while merely being tools of the establishment that fortifies them in their offices.
We should be insulated here in rural Missouri. We still have communities. We still have common sense. Who here would care if there’s a new fad in the urban blight where people can’t make sensical decisions about what bathroom to use? Or if some national news show overtly blasphemes its profession and our guarantee of a free press? What is it to us if a far-away state or even a nearby city locks down its sheepish population?
The problem, fellow citizen, is we still get the distinct displeasure of paying for it.
Perhaps things are going fine for you. Perhaps you’re doing alright, and you don’t mind the fuel prices. Maybe you believe the current administration’s line that it’s some foreigner’s fault. Maybe there’s a new show on some new streaming service with some new product that can distract you from the trendline of political decline – for now. If that’s you, then continue not to vote, or vote for the same people that have led us here. They appreciate it.
If, though, you see what I see – if you feel as I feel – then I would ask you to stand with me this summer. I’m simply one of the first of a wave of veterans returning, after two decades of endless war, to hometowns that are shadows of the vibrant communities they remember. We are returning to enjoin the fight you’re already in every day to save what precious little we have left.
I never foresaw becoming a congressman. I wanted to come home, get married maybe, and have a family. Fix up the farm and put some horses on it. Have a wood shop and join the PTA. Maybe I still will – I’d like that. But, like you, I don’t want a fifth of my wealth to be stolen every year to finance the latest ‘temporary’ federal program that is just a cover for grift. I don’t want half of the rest to be taxed away by a federal leviathan that is sucking dry the very heartland the generations before us have built.
We don’t have much time. Our economy, an inescapable reality for every citizen, has now begun a hyperinflationary cycle, and some new or old distraction, absurd and tragic, will soon be unleashed upon us. Ask yourself if you have any – any – faith left in our current political class.
Missouri – I am your son, and I’ve come home, and yet I ask you to send me to one last battlefield.
Yours, in service,
Dustin Hill
Sergeant, a long time ago, USMC
Candidate for U.S. Representative, Missouri’s 3rd District