260 THE BiG DROP
messed up they are, you’d be a lot more relaxed about con-
spiracy theories.
There is no “government”. There are many, many, many
agencies, individuals, bureaus, departments and branches
all over the country and the world — and certainly all over
Washington, DC and northern Virginia.
I like to joke that we have two governments: the down-
town government and the Virginia government. Downtown
are the Treasury and the Fed, and in Virginia are the Pentagon
and the intelligence community.
The simple fact is that the government is not monolithic.
You can go around the different agencies of the government,
as I do, and hear different views. People reach out to me, say-
ing, “Jim, you won’t believe what my boss is doing,” or “I can’t
even believe what my agency is doing.”
There are individuals who are dealing in good faith, work-
ing hard and are patriotic who don’t like what they see inside
the bigger nexus. My advice is not to assume the government’s
monolithic or uniform.
One thing I’ve heard my whole career, which is now tiptoe-
ing up to the 40 year mark, is that, “Jim, you never do what
anybody tells you.” There’s some truth in that, and I think
that’s good because it enables me to have some originality,
which is what I try to bring to my Strategic Intelligence newslet-
ter. People who know me well will understand this, too.
The notion that the insiders have like wound me up a clock
or a little robot and turned me loose to warn the world, it’s
not true. I take it upon myself to do what I do. I always tell
people my 84-year-old mother motivates me. She lives on a re-
tirement check. Thank goodness she’s fine, but there’s nobody
who’s more vulnerable to inflation than my mother because
she relies on that check to make her ends meet.
She’s a good anchor for me. She’s helps me think of the
tens or maybe scores of millions of Americans who are in the