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.
