What does it mean to serve your country?
What does it mean to be a patriot?
What does it mean to dedicate your life to something, only to have it ripped away from you?
And how do you manage to keep your oath when the press, supplied by hostile foreign powers, spread lies about you?
You could defend yourself but to even respond is to dignify the attack. To dignify it is to give it power. The mind and the soul are a sort of territory and you can’t ever let your guard down.
The way the enemy destroys you is by denigrating you and then deplatforming you. It’s all about a concerted effort to limit your effectiveness. It’s in these moments where you learn who your friends are.
“The people who mind don’t matter and the people who matter don’t mind,” Paul Behrends would say with a glint in his eye, swirling his wine, when I would complain about the unfairness of it all. I can see him now in the Trump hotel, holding court, offering advice, and always planning to do his duty, his best for our country.
When I was being smeared in the press by a hostile press corps, supplied with intelligence from a hostile power, he was there for me, too, and I did everything I could to be there for him. Paul and I have known each other for more than a decade. He was that rare honest, good man in Washington D.C. We met foreign presidents and billionaires and ambassadors and spies and journalists together—all in the service of our great country.
While his boss and friend Dana Rohrabacher likes to say his motto is “fighting for freedom and having fun” Paul exemplified it. He was a mentor to me and a great friend as he was to so many, of all ages and types.
When things were particularly rough I shared with him the poem, “If,” by Rudyard Kipling, especially the line about “Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies…” And now, thinking of him, I play the song, “Weight of the Badge” by George Strait, especially the lyric about not buckling under the weight of the badge and “lays his life on the line.”
We are in the midst of a great information war. While Paul Behrends will be remembered as a loyal soldier in the cold war – his best friend Mike Waller has written about his rather amazing past fighting the communists – I like to think of him as a patriot in that great information war. Its features are the sub strata of every day life: spy vs spy, billionaire vs. billionaire, blogger vs. blogger, hacker vs. hacker, and so on and so forth. Oftentimes the foreign threat even uses our own intelligence services against us. It certainly uses our press against us.
Indeed that great information war is very much ongoing and we were both soldiers in it: he in his official capacity as a Marine and staffer and I in my role as a technologist, investor and inventor. To be involved in it is to know that the first thing the enemy tries to do is make you into a pariah. They’ll say you are crazy when you are a visionary. And if you’re not careful they’ll destroy you. Paul was always careful. He erred on the side of doing too much, of being bold, rather than timid.
As Catholics Paul and I understand that the truth shall set you free. So what then is the truth about Paul?
The truth is that he had his career destroyed by the Russia hoax but never his spirit nor his will. He may have been down but he was never out of the fight. No, not what the Russia hoaxers lied about him and got him booted from the House committee on which he served.
Give it to Paul. He understood that corruption, especially on the House foreign affairs committee, is a bipartisan affair, especially when it comes to selling out America. No, the Swamp and the Blog lied about Paul — in the Daily Beast, online, and elsewhere and say that Paul was trying to “thwart human rights legislation” — as if!
This was a man whose very fiber was human rights rightly understood and always #AmericaFirst. Semper Fi, indeed. He wore the uniform and red, white, and blue was in his veins.
Paul was targeted by a political class and Deep State class for wanting a peaceful world with the foes he once killed. He wanted to turn Russian nuclear weapons into plowshares against the far greater Chinese threat.
As the intelligence community wakes up to the Chinese threat, Paul’s four kids should appreciate that their father was prescient—and right, as he was about so many things.
There is no justice to a world in which Paul, meeting with Russians in the service of peace as part of his job as a hill staffer is smeared while Congressman Eric Swalwell sleeps with Chinese spies—and keeps his job.
Paul believed that oligarchic billionaires like George Soros and tax frauds like Bill Browder had no place in our national discourse. And he was willing to make a stand and build allies when and where he could.
There are many, many stories about the real Bill Browder.
You can even watch a film about his corruption, a film which Paul wanted to show the world and which cost him his job and his reputation but not his iron will to tell the truth about Browder. It is, I would submit to you, your duty to watch that film after the Russia hoax destroyed Donald Trump’s presidency. Indeed Paul, often alone, sounded the alarm early on the Russia hoax.
Browder did everything he could to make comity between Russia and America impossible, including pushing fake investigations into the FBI.
It’s not a coincidence that Browder has many connections to those pushing the Steele dossier and starting the Russia collusion witch hunt.
Naturally Browder has many in the American media hoodwinked — especially the New York Times — but the truth will out, just as it always does. It’s already starting: first in Unz Review, later in independent journalist Lucy Komisar’s blog, and now in Der Spiegel, Germany’s paper of record. This is a start.
You can watch a rather great discussion about it.
The compliant, lying media insinuates that Behrends was a Russian asset because he wanted to expose frauds like Browder and malefactors like Soros. This is the greatest of calumnies and it is promoted actively by foreign assets and frauds and deep state charlatans. Paul saw through them all and sometimes nearly all alone.
Perhaps a just God will settle those accounts in the Hereafter. Alas he did not see fit to do so during Paul’s life. That is our duty as his friends to bear witness when so many others won’t.
But for Paul: “blessed are the peacemakers…”
Goodbye, my friend. I hope they serve red wine in heaven.
Thank you for everything.