KyleK_CS

During my announcement speech more than a year ago, I said that I have so many skeletons in the closet that if they could vote, I would be king of the world. I knew much would be made of my past. I have been around politics. I know of its hazards. I also knew that my vision and policies would inspire resistance in the establishment. When you declare yourself foe to widespread corporate-government corruption and declare yourself counter-friction to a runaway war machine (a war machine killing innocents and draining our country’s coffers), you will inspire resistance in the establishment. (Put another way, many powerful people want to make sure the gravy train never stops. And I derail gravy trains.) When you point out the morbidity of our two-party system -- a system that our first president warned us about, a system that is now largely predicated on hating fellow humans -- you will inspire resistance in the establishment. When you’ve spent much of your life successfully fighting against our biggest corporations and worst polluters; fighting against mining, timber, hydroelectricity, and oil industries on behalf of the voiceless and the indigenous; fighting against agribusiness barons blithely ravaging the lives of small farmers and small towns, you will inspire resistance in the establishment. When you remind Americans that censorship and other curtailments of our civil liberties always arrive burnished with a moral and patriotic gloss, you will inspire resistance in the establishment. When you invoke our crisis of meaning, our deaths of despair, the addiction, and the many children lost to screens, ill health, and ennui, you will inspire resistance in the establishment. When you are wary of reductive partisan ideology and group-think; and when you refuse the common coin of today’s public discourse -- a glib second-rate cruelty delivered via the screen -- you will inspire resistance in the establishment. When you assert that to better our country we must work toward a politics that heals this divide and affirms our mutual belonging, you will inspire resistance in the establishment. As you perhaps know, I am used to such resistance -- used to the bile and malign distortions that accompany speaking out on high-stakes issues. And I know that the establishment’s treatment of me -- while challenging -- makes perfect sense. The dark and elaborately refined arts of partisan politics deployed to end my campaign (the documented censorship and shadowbanning; the out-in-the-open, anti-democratic, and well-funded attempts to keep me off ballots through expensive, complex, time-consuming legal challenges; the thwarting of debate access; the withholding of secret service protection; the paid staged protests; the sundry campaigns of defamation and scandalmongering) are the logical reactions of a threatened -- and very unwell -- status quo. And underneath all of this -- underneath much of this election cycle, underneath much of this moment in our nation’s politics -- is a sort of destitution. A destitution of heart. It’s no small wonder so many people have withdrawn from civic life and democracy altogether. A broken bond needs to be reestablished in our country. We need more soul-searching and less partisan warfare. Our work as Americans, whether we like it or not, transcends all labels and all parties. It seems we will recognize this reality and act accordingly; or be broken into it. History is not made occasionally on great stages by the privileged few but made daily in the depths of each human soul. Ours is a beautiful nation, still. According to the Internet, our country (and our world) founders in chaos. But in post offices, parks, grocery stores our beauty still heartens and shines. We all see it every day. It is in the name of that beauty that I work. It is in the name of that beauty that I run to be your next president. The true power of America is not its comfort, wealth, or military might, but its ideals of liberty, democracy, and generosity. This campaign is about honoring and restoring those ideals -- regardless of the defamation, evasion, and trickery. We knew those were coming. We will not be deterred on this necessary journey.

Now is the time for every American who loves our country to step back from the division, renounce all violence, and unite in prayer for President Trump and his family.