In seeking power, one shows who one is

Power is hard to grasp. It flows, fills, overfills, and bursts. The man who reaches for it rarely conceals himself for long. Ambition leaks. The stories he tells about himself, the waiting he claims is humility, the crises he rides — these are the inventory of character.

Joe Biden sought power all his adult life. He played the humble waiting game poorly. The early presidential run collapsed when the stories about his life and credentials fell apart under ordinary checking. He became vice-president as a compromise because Barack Obama would not accept the more openly ambitious Hillary Clinton. Then, in the vacuum that followed the departure of both, COVID arrived. Hysteria, already being questioned internationally, produced the astounding polling fact that Biden looked more popular than Obama had ever been. The garage became a stage. The crisis did what decades of ordinary politics had not: it delivered the office.

That is one way power arrives — not by conquest or dynasty, but by a panic that no one in the room quite believed they would have to account for later.

Canada’s Allison Inquiry, held 8–11 September 2026 on Parliament Hill, is part of that later accounting. Conservative MP Dean Allison convened four days of sworn testimony from people who say they were injured by COVID vaccination. More than 1,400 applied; about fifty were heard. The inquiry has no power to compel witnesses or force government action. It is unofficial. Official Canadian figures still record more than 59,000 adverse-event reports after COVID vaccination, more than 11,000 classified as serious. A physician testified that fourteen reports he submitted were rejected as coincidence. The forum exists because Canada never held the kind of official inquiry other democracies eventually did.

U.S. Senator Ron Johnson was the first witness. He used the platform to return to February 2020: Fauci’s private estimate of a case-fatality rate like a bad influenza (0.2–0.3 percent) against the public figure of 2–3 percent that justified lockdowns and mandates. Johnson’s argument was not merely epidemiological. Fear expanded control. Lockdowns struck blue-collar workers and small businesses far harder than white-collar employees or large retailers. Billionaire wealth rose sharply in 2020. A cases-versus-vaccination chart was shown to argue that the wave had already peaked before high coverage. The virologist Geert Vanden Bossche’s early warning that mass vaccination during a pandemic could select for immune-escape variants was cited again. Mainstream Canadian coverage treated the same days more narrowly — personal stories plus attacks on Fauci — and noted that the inquiry makes no formal findings. That is how power prefers the record: testimony without consequence.

The fourteenth of September has seen other watersheds. Power changes hands in different styles, and each style is a portrait.

In AD 81 Titus, popular, the conqueror of Jerusalem, died of fever on 13 September at the Sabine villa where his father Vespasian had died two years earlier. He was forty-one and had ruled barely two years. His younger brother Domitian, kept in the background under both father and brother, was proclaimed emperor by the Praetorian Guard the same day; the Senate confirmed him on the 14th. Ancient writers alleged Domitian left Titus for dead and later slighted his memory. There is no proof of poison. What is clear is the character that emerged once the waiting ended: fifteen years of autocracy, building and campaigning, then assassination and senatorial damnatio. The man who had been denied a share of power took all of it.

In 629 (some sources 628) Heraclius entered Constantinople after six years of campaigning that broke the Sasanian Empire. Nineveh in December 627, Khosrow II overthrown in early 628, the frontiers restored, the True Cross recovered. The ceremonial entry — Hiereia, prostration by son and patriarch, elephants, standards, relics — was the triumph of a commander who had led in person. He was hailed as a new Scipio. Within a few years the Arab conquests would undo much of the recovery. Military restoration is another face of power: costly, visible, and temporary.

On the night of 13–14 September 786 three things happened in the Abbasid court. Caliph al-Hadi died after fourteen months — ulcer, or smothered on his mother’s orders because he meant to cut her out of the succession. His brother Harun, in his early twenties, was proclaimed caliph. That same night a Persian concubine gave birth to the son who would become al-Ma'mun, and then died. The night of the three caliphs: the dying, the new, and the infant who would rule. Harun’s twenty-three years became the high-water mark of the dynasty and the backdrop of the Nights. He later divided the empire between two sons and thereby prepared the civil war that followed his death. Court intrigue and dynastic accident are a third style.

Three mid-September hinges, three revelations. Fever and the Guard. A hard-won procession with the Cross. A night of death, accession, and birth. In each case the man who takes power is already visible in how he takes it — in what he does with the waiting, the crisis, the vacuum, the mother, the army, the story he tells about the dead brother or the recovered relic.

Biden’s long search showed a man who needed the extraordinary to finish what ordinary competition would not allow. The vaccine-injury testimonies of September 2026 are the overflow of that same period: the reports that did not fit the story, the coincidences that were not accepted as coincidence, the unofficial hearing because the official one never came. Power filled, overfilled, and is now leaking in sworn statements that still have no legal force.

The seekers are known by the means they accept and the accounts they later refuse. The fourteenth of September keeps returning the same lesson in different costumes. Power does not hide the man. It displays him.

Dog-whistling Trump may have killed Charlie Kirk — and it still endangers conservatives everywhere

A year on from Charlie Kirk’s murder, the trial proceeds and the facts have not become kinder to the people who spent years describing him as a machine of hate. The shooter did not need a treatise. He needed a permission structure: Kirk as “hatred,” Kirk as a danger to people like his partner, Kirk as someone who could be “taken out.” That structure was not invented in a lone bedroom in Utah. It was supplied, daily, by a media and political class that treats conservative argument as moral contamination.

The claim that Trump — and by extension Kirk, Turning Point, MAGA — is “fascist” is not a careful historian’s term. In public use it is isometric with Nazism. It does not mean “I dislike his tariffs.” It means this man is the next Hitler, his voters are the next brownshirts, and resistance is therefore not politics but emergency. Harris said yes, she thought Trump a fascist. Biden’s White House agreed. Clinton, AOC, Clyburn, Crockett, Tlaib, Warren, Pressley and a DNC chair used the same family of words. Generals and chiefs of staff were quoted as oracles. Cable opinion treated the question as settled. That is not “holding power to account.” That is sacralising one side and profaning the other.

Kirk was fitted to the same template. He was said to be manipulating students into the GOP. In fact his method was the opposite of a closed shop: a hard opening line, then “change my mind.” He said he was content if a student voted Democrat provided they understood what they were voting for. He was painted as a reflex anti-trans ideologue seething at gay and trans people. He was a Christian who put God, not gender, at the centre, and warned that standing before God with gender as the idol was dangerous. That is theology and argument, not a hunting licence. The coverage promoted the accusation and starved the defence. The “balanced” paragraph arrived as a mumbled “Kirk claims,” after the smear had already done its work. The audience was left with a feeling, not a record: this man hates; this man would not tolerate a Democrat; this man is a stooge of reaction. Footage of wit, patience and faith was treated as a curiosity, not the story.

Once a conservative is placed outside the moral community, the public takes the hint. Brett Kavanaugh was doxed; his family was threatened. His televised “defence of character,” in the circus that passed for confirmation theatre, was reduced in the popular mind to beer. The method is the same: collapse a life into a cartoon, then act shocked when someone treats the cartoon as a target.

Australia is not innocent. We did not match Harris’s on-camera “yes, I do.” Our leaders, in office, mostly protected the alliance and talked tariffs, AUKUS and “no running commentary.” That caution is real. It is also not the whole climate. Albanese, before he needed the White House, said Trump scared the shit out of him, that Jan. 6 was incitement and violent insurrection, that Morrison had gone too far by sharing a stage. Penny Wong said Trump trashed alliances for personal interest and undermined American democracy. Turnbull, out of office, called him a bully. News.com.au’s political class, Malcolm Farr among them, spent years treating anti-Trump as the default setting of seriousness. Kevin Rudd dumped on a Republican president, then as ambassador discovered on camera that the man he had disparaged could run rings around the self-certified genius. The press here still talks as if MAGA spokespeople get a “free pass,” while the same outlets have spent a decade defining conservatism as a pathology.

Two timelines are constantly mashed together to keep the story neat. Yes, “fascist” talk about Trump began in 2015–16, before George Floyd. Yes, it spiked after Jan. 6 and during impeachments and prosecutions, because “threat to democracy” makes a legal case feel like a crusade. That is mobilisation. It does not follow that Trump endorsed BLM or Antifa. He denounced both. The street violence of 2020 — riots, occupations, Antifa assaults — was not his crowd. If fascism is to mean anything, it cannot mean “the side that lost the newsroom.” Classical fascism had party militias, a war cult and a one-party state. MAGA is a noisy electoral coalition. Calling it Nazism while treating actual left violence as “mostly peaceful” or as a response to “hate” is not analysis. It is a defence of illiberal behaviour by people who still get called the adults.

Foreign leaders almost never used the F-word to Trump’s face. They talked trade, NATO and Ukraine. The fever is American media and American party rhetoric, exported through the same English-language feed that reaches a campus in Orem and a school staffroom in the Territory.

None of this requires a conspiracy minute. You do not need a memo that says “kill Kirk.” You need years of language that says Kirk is hate, Trump is Hitler, conservatives are an “enemy within,” and then a young man who already thinks some hate “can’t be negotiated out.” Journalists will reply that they did not pull the trigger. Correct. They built the weather. A year later the trial will argue DNA, texts, a rifle and a rooftop. It will not try the adjective. The adjective has already done what adjectives do when they are allowed to mean untermensch.

Kirk’s own standard remains the rebuke. Say the hard thing. Invite the reply. Let the student walk away a Democrat if the argument fails. That is liberalism. The other thing — the endless fascist brand, the weakened defence, the cartoon of Christian hatred — is what gets people hurt. Conservatives in every English-speaking country now live under that weather. Pretending it is only “robust debate” is how the next rooftop gets its moral alibi.

The Battle of Marathon is misremembered

The famous runner did not sprint from the battlefield to Athens with the news of victory and then drop dead. That story is a later legend. Pheidippides ran before the fighting, all the way to Sparta, to ask for help. The Spartans said they would come after the Carneia festival ended — after the full moon. In other words: do not wait. Athens had to decide without them.

That decision is the real story of 490 BC.

Athens was a young, still-fragile democracy. The Peisistratid tyranny had ended only twenty years earlier. Cleisthenes’ reforms of 508/7 had created the assembly, the ten tribes, the Council of 500, and the ten elected generals. The city was not yet the naval empire of the next generation. Its strength was the hoplite militia of citizen-farmers. The last tyrant, Hippias, was sailing with the Persian fleet. He hoped a landing at Marathon would produce a coup inside the city and restore him. Some aristocratic houses were later accused of being willing to open the gates.

When Eretria fell and the Persian fleet turned toward Attica, the Athenians faced a choice: stay behind their walls or march out. The walls of 490 were not the later Themistoclean circuit. The Acropolis was the real strongpoint. Waiting inside risked a siege, possible treachery, and the ruin of the Attic countryside. Miltiades, one of the ten generals and a man who had once ruled in the Chersonese under Persian oversight, argued they must meet the enemy in the field before the Persians could use their cavalry or receive help from inside the city. The assembly voted to march.

Roughly 9,000–10,000 Athenian hoplites and 1,000 Plataeans left for Marathon, about 40 km away. They left the city itself thinly garrisoned.

They chose the ground. They thinned the centre and weighted the wings. They charged across open ground to close the distance under arrow fire. The Persian centre pushed the Greek centre back; the Greek wings broke the flanks and wheeled inward. The Persians broke for their ships. Callimachus died in the pursuit. Herodotus’ numbers — 6,400 Persian dead, 192 Athenian — are unusually precise and broadly accepted as in the right order of magnitude.

It was not one-sided. The Persians had numbers, cavalry, and a large fleet. They simply did not anticipate the wing manoeuvre, or they could not bring their horse into play in time. They would fight again.

Victory at Marathon was not the end of the day. The Persian fleet put to sea and rounded Sounion, apparently intending to strike Athens while its army was still in the field. The hoplites force-marched back and arrived in time. The Persians saw the army already in position and sailed away.

The victory gave the new democracy prestige and confirmed it in the eyes of many citizens. It did not make Athens safe. Ten years later a far larger army under Xerxes forced the complete evacuation of the city.

That is the Athens of 490: a recently democratised city-state of citizen-soldiers, still small by later standards, betting everything on a single battle rather than a siege. The runner who mattered was the one who went to Sparta. The choice that mattered was the decision to fight in the open rather than wait behind walls for a tyrant and a fifth column. The rest is memory layered on top of a hard, closely run day.