“Satan’s Son”

Nobody Elected The Man With The Switch

There is a picture I cannot get out of my head this week. It is not a picture of a battlefield. It is a picture of a switch. One switch, in one man’s hand, and on the other end of it, a war.

Here is what happened. Ukraine fights with drones. Those drones talk to each other and to their pilots through a satellite network. That network is owned by a private company, and that company is run by the richest man in the world.

This month, right in the middle of one of Russia’s biggest attacks of the war, the speed on that network got cut back. Ukrainian officials say it crippled their drone defense. Drones that could have knocked down Russian missiles sat there useless while the missiles came in.

Who made the call? That depends on who you ask. One report says the rich man ordered it. Another says the order came out of the White House. A third says he pitched it and the president agreed. Both men have pointed somewhere else. A group of senators from both parties has asked for an investigation.

It does not matter which story turns out true. In every version of it, one man who was never elected by anybody had his hand on that switch.

Think about how our country is supposed to work. If America wants to change how it helps an ally in a war, there is a process. Congress votes. The president signs. The generals carry it out. Every one of those people answers to voters in some way, sooner or later.

The man with the switch answers to nobody. Not to voters. Not to Congress. Not to the soldiers on the other end of it. He answers to his board, and he owns most of the board.

This is not the first time, either. A few years back, the same man refused to let his network reach far enough for a Ukrainian attack on Russian ships. He said he was afraid of starting a bigger war. Maybe he was. But nobody asked him to make that choice. He just made it.

what he does with his money.

In one Senate race down in Texas, he has put close to one hundred and ninety million dollars into the fight. Most of it went through outside groups, all legal on paper. One hundred fifty-eight million dollars of it went to a single committee buying ads for one candidate.

That is more money than most counties in this country see in a year. It is being spent to pick one senator in one state. And that senator, if he wins, gets a vote on everything from your Social Security to whether we send help to Ukraine.

Do you see the circle? The money picks the senators. The senators decide the war. The satellites shape the war. And the same man sits on all three.

Our Supreme Court opened the door to this kind of spending back in 2010. They said money is speech. Maybe so. But if money is speech, then one man just got to shout over a whole state of people who only get one vote apiece.

Nobody is saying a rich man cannot have opinions. He can. Nobody is saying he cannot build a great company. He did. The satellites work. Ukraine needed them and still does.

What I am saying is simpler. Building something does not give you the right to run the country with it. Henry Ford built the cars, but he did not get to decide which roads the army could drive on. That was the government’s call, because the government answers to us.

When a private man holds the switch on a war and the purse on a Senate race, the line between business and government is gone. And when that line goes, so does your vote. Because what good is a ballot if the real decisions get made in a boardroom?

Some folks will say this is just politics. That one side hates him and the other side loves him. I understand that. But try this. Imagine the same man, with the same switch and the same money, backing the side you can’t stand. Would you be comfortable then?

If the answer is no, then you already know it is not about sides. It is about power. Power without a vote behind it, without a law over it, and without anybody able to say no.

The founders of this country fought a war over exactly this. They did not want one man, born rich and answering to no one, to decide their fate from far away. They called that man a king. We do not have to call this man anything. We just have to notice what he is doing.

Here is what you can do. When you go to vote, look at who paid for the ads you saw. Look at where the money came from. If one man’s name is behind most of it, ask yourself whose senator that will really be.

Then ask your own representatives one question. Who checks the man with the switch? If they cannot answer, they are not doing their job.

Ukraine’s soldiers did not get a vote on that switch. Neither did you. But on November third, you do get a vote on the people who are supposed to be watching it.

Use it like the switch depends on it. Because it does.

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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.

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