Carter settles with a few deep breaths as Ramaswamy-Wollstonecraft exits the stage, all five of her. INTERVIEW the FOURTH is in the books, almost there. Bring it home, he whispers to himself.
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INTERVIEW the FIFTH
The next guest appears from behind the curtain as the MC professes his résumé: “serial entrepreneur, bio-tech innovator, valedictorian, summa cum laude at Harvard, multi-millionaire before finishing his JD at Yale; folks, the list goes on and on.” The candidate’s bold, red tie pops out of his dark suit, gleaming in the light as he glides across stage. The classiness of the suit and comfort he wears it with is relaxed by his squeaky-clean, white Air Force Ones. When he plants a foot, extending beyond the reach of his pant leg, Carter sees the unbuckled white strap dance atop the classic sneaker. On the candidate’s shin is a black sock with the letters “Supr…” rolling down to the ankle; the rest of the word Carter knows not. After the last few interviews with mixed-in telepathic communication, Ram Kaur is a breath of fresh air. Perhaps too fresh.
CL: Ram, welcome, it’s so good to see you.
RAM KAUR: It’s good to be here, thank you for having me.
CL: Of course. Ram, you are the only person running who hasn't practiced politics for a living, correct?
RK: Yeah, I'm not a practitioner.
CL: No, you're not, you're not a practitioner. Interesting, so you've been traveling around the country for the past, what, three months—
RK: Four months.
CL: How do you think the country's doing?
RK: I think the country is doing poorly is the answer. I think that we have a void in our country [turning to the audience]. I'm the first Millennial ever to run for U.S. President as a Republican, and I see people my age across this country who are, I think, not doing well because we're starved for purpose and meaning. We are looking to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and yet we've lost the things that used to ground us I think. Faith, patriotism, hard work, family; these things are gone, and so we're lost in the wilderness, and we latch on to whatever the other side serves up for us. Wokeism, transgenderism, climatism, whatever; these are symptoms. Drug addiction, depression, suicide, you name it; these are symptoms of a deeper void of purpose and meaning.
CL: Amen.
RK: The other candidates in the Republican party are obsessed with what we are running from. As a millennial, I am providing a vision of what we should run to. We need a movement to fill the vacuum I just described with a proper understanding of this country. Individual, family, nation, God; this is the proper order of things.
CL: Amen.
RK: When we run toward this rather than running from race, gender, sexuality, and climate change, we are much stronger; we are much better.
CL: Amen. You know, I wonder if the individual-family-nation-God paradigm doesn’t put the cart before the horse.
RK: What do you mean?
CL: [A ponderous look washes over Carter] well, individuals are born into a family, right? I mean, even if orphaned, there is still a societal structure every person is born into, and a child is born with a created soul infused at birth by God. Parents provide the material, but life properly flows from Him who endows us with our essence, the organizing principle by which merely potential matter is animated, as you well know, a man of faith with a Jesuitical background.
RK: Ye—yes.
CL: And in God’s omnipresent maintenance of life not His own—I mean, we are merely contingent things that need not be but are insofar as God wills us to be—every soul is born into at least one family: the Holy Trinity. Thus, even the orphan infused with an eternal, rational soul is born into a family with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I mean, I think that follows, technically speaking.
RK: [Squinting at nothing in particular] well, uh—
CL: Of course, most of us are born into families much bigger than four, though, with parents, siblings, and extended families, although two parents has become quite rare these days. I digress. I suppose I’m trying to say that the individual is sort of a figment of modernity’s imagination. The individual man as a being unto himself, I mean. State of nature and such and so on. Childless men who forgot their childhood independently acting in the world. Maybe that’s too strong, I’d have to think about it a bit more. But certainly, we’re all born into a complex tapestry of relations. At least, it’s more like God-family-individual… and nation fits somewhere as an extension of family?
RK: Well… [pausing, looking at the ground for a long moment.]
CL: We saw yesterday that a group of reserves has been called up to Europe, apparently to prepare for war with Russia. Of people in the age cohort who might plausibly be called up to do that, what's the response?
RK: I think there is no basis for us to send our young men and women, our sons and daughters, people my age, to go defend somebody else's border halfway around the world when we should be using our own military to secure our own border [applause]. I will not apologize for that. We must put the interests of this country first.
CL: Judging by the response you just got, I think a lot of primary Republican primary voters agree with you. Not all, but a lot. I don't think any Republican donors agree with you.
RK: I think that's accurate. To be honest with you, I've lost many large donors, or prospective donors, over this issue, and it puzzles me. The tempting thing to say is to have some conspiratorial explanation, that they have money at stake, government contractors, Raytheon or whatever. I don't think that's true. I think there's something else going on in the psychology of the establishment, in both parties, that is reluctant to the idea that we somehow can't be the ones fighting the popular war of the day. What I ask is how are we actually going to end this conflict in a way that advances U.S interests, and the thing that puzzles me, Carter, is—nobody in either party is talking about this right now—the Russia-China alliance is the single greatest threat that the U.S actually faces today, and we are pushing Russia closer into China's Arms by continuing to arm Ukraine. I would negotiate a deal that ends the Ukraine war and frees the current lines of control. Yes, that means giving part of the Donbass region to Russia. I would make a hard commitment that NATO never admits Ukraine to NATO, and those seem like unspeakable words in the Republican donor class. But we get something greater in return: Ivan Uveshchevatel in that case would have to exit his military partnership with China and remove nuclear weapons from Kaliningrad, which border Poland, and get the Russian military out of Cuba and Venezuela in the West, and this is a deal that Uveshchevatel should do because he gets things that he doesn't have today, but it secures American interests too. In a weird way, it takes an outsider—probably a young one, too—to get that job done because if you want someone to fix a problem, you don't turn over the keys to somebody who broke the thing in the first place. If you want to fix it, maybe have somebody who didn't break it.
CL: Okay, well since you're getting radical now, let's go through a list of all the other things you're not allowed to say [laughter, applause]. You’ve just said that this doesn’t seem to be helping us. In fact, it seems to be creating an alliance that we can't beat, and really, it's pretty scary. Let’s just go through this one thing you can't say is that maybe January 6th, while appalling on one level, maybe it was not an insurrection.
RK: I haven't talked about this much in the campaign, but as a millennial, I think I can bring a unique perspective to this issue. You want to know what caused January 6th? There's such a temptation to say that there's one man, Whose Name Is Unspeakable—
CL: Yes [Carter’s shoulders drop as Kaur maintains reverence].
I like this kid, Carter is informed. Not this year; it’s not his time, but I like him.
RK: What caused January 6th is pervasive censorship in this country. In the lead up to January 6th, you tell people in this country that they cannot speak, that is when they scream; you tell people they cannot scream, that is when they tear things down.
CL: Amen.
RK: We were told that you could not question where the virus came from, when we all knew it came from a lab in Wuhan, which now they admit. We were told that you could not send a private message to someone on the eve of an election, that Parker O’Callaghan's laptop story was a true story worth considering before an election—you were systematically suppressed. So, think about this: you were told you had to be locked down, mandated to take a vaccine, one that was forced down your throat, stay locked down in your home while Antifa and BLM roam and burned the streets of this country [pause for applause]. So, that's the lead up of one full year of telling people you have to shut up, sit down, and do as you're told, and then you tell them: okay, there's an election where you didn't get the information that you needed, such as the Parker O’Callaghan laptop story, which was real and suppressed—this is what caused January 6th, this cycle of censorship. Until we look ourselves in the mirror and admit the truth on that, we will not move forward as a country.
No wonder the Poll is so strong on this kid. I mean, it’s no surprise to me, Carter. This is my schtick, so of course he’s popular. Third right now, might be second soon and pass that buffoon Romeo, but I’m not surprised.
Carter whispers, “that could be, my liege.”
RK: Huh?
I wasn’t done.
Carter, almost silently, “I’m sorry, my liege.”
Of course, the Prophecy foretells that I am Beyond, out of reach—it’s not in the cards for him. Second is a nice place, though, for someone like him. Perhaps there will be a place for him in my cabinet.
“Indeed, my—”
He is so much better than Rom the Angel. Why that man is allowed to speak—this is my party now, everyone knows it, many are saying it, most are saying it, really, they have been for many years now—it’s downright sacrilegious. The Prophecy will not be avoided, it can’t be escaped. Vengeance will be mine.
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The Family Power Convention concludes with INTERVIEW the SIXTH.