An anniversary that feels like an eternity

Five years ago, I began That Being Said in a world that would soon change forever

My first attempt at a logo, 2019.

It was at midnight on December 1, 2019 when I hit “Publish” on my first post to this site. I had been watching a band perform at White Water Tavern in my home city of Little Rock, Arkansas at the end of a long Saturday night and I was nervous and excited. I knew when I hit that button I couldn’t un-ring that bell. For better or worse, it was out there.

I had long toyed with the idea of doing something like this but had only recently done the research and spent the money to make it a reality. I suffer from being a perfectionist, so I don’t want to do anything until I feel I’ve gotten it right. Often that prevents me from doing new things. But I was determined to make this happen.

I quickly learned I needed an established platform like Substack to host, but I wanted my own URL. I learned I could do both. The original one I wanted, richiegraham.com, wasn’t available. It had been taken by a very accomplished landscape photographer who shared my name. I consoled myself that I had gotten the plum “richiegraham” Instagram handle as an early IG user. I settled on “That Being Said” when I found that, surprisingly, that domain was available for purchase. I was willing to spend more than I should have for it.

I didn’t really know what to refer to this site as. I didn’t like the term “blog” (and still don’t) because to me it implied a daily stream-of-consciousness kind of thing about random topics. I wanted to do occasional in-depth articles on focused topics, mostly in geopolitics. That distinction was probably mostly in my head. If I’m honest, this has from the start been an intermittently updated blog written in a semi-formal style.

The next iteration, 2021.

My first effort at an article took on the subject of Iran’s relationship with the Western world. The country was in the news due to widespread protests there just six months after President Trump had withdrawn the US from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Re-reading it, I think it was a worthy first effort. Among other things, I detailed how the country became one of the CIA’s first targets for regime change, with agency operatives working successfully to overthrow a democratically elected government in a 1953 coup that installed a dictatorial American puppet regime under the Shah that would last for 25 years. I pointed out that that and other things could go a long way in explaining Iranian attitudes toward us.

The trouble with Persia

In the wake of that initial excitement, I had decided I was going to make 2020 a year of travel. So, my second article was written and published in an upper-floor hotel room in Savannah, Georgia that featured a small balcony overlooking a stretch of mossy live oaks. It was an unseasonably warm early January morning in a new year and new decade that seemed full of possibilities. I paid little attention to news about an unidentified new respiratory illness spreading in Wuhan, China. Details were sketchy.

I managed to get only three trips completed, including one to Mexico with friends in late February and early March where I worried in vain about Trump sealing the border and stranding us there, before all hell broke loose in mid-March with the start of the Covid shutdown madness in the US. I met a friend at a local bar knowing it was our last opportunity before bars would be forcibly shut the next day for who knew how long. I was already skeptical enough to know 14 days was just talk. This was something else.

It wasn’t until May when the shock had begun to wane and the isolation had begun to wear that I posted again, lauding Sweden’s “soft touch” approach to battling the virus. For the rest of the year and most of the next this became a Covid and mRNA vaccine blog. I was completely caught up in an obsession to understand what was going on and where it was leading.

Sweden's soft touch in the age of narrative control

I began consuming any information I could find from skeptics and contrarians I believed to be qualified to speak on their topics. These are people who I think are more apt to speak the truth, as they understand it, over establishment sources who too often succumb to groupthink, confirmation bias, and financial self-interest. I find the latter often resort to appeals to authority to shut down discussion rather than engaging in explanation, reasoned argument, or debate.

I was shocked to find out how tenuous the science was behind the Covid tests. The inventor of the technology on which they were based had been a critic of Fauci’s and had cautioned against its use as a diagnostic tool. I learned how easily the tests could produce a large number of false positives the way they were being administered across the country. Reading about that in a revealing New York Times article (paywall) that somehow made it past the editors to print sparked an intense period of research on my part, on that topic and basically all things Covid.

When I began researching the planned vaccines that were already (suspiciously) being touted as the only way out of the pandemic months before they arrived, I was genuinely deeply disturbed to find that they involved not traditional vaccines but a brand-new, completely different type of vaccine technology based on mRNA signaling. They had never been tested at scale in humans prior to 2020 and would normally have taken a decade or more to test given their novelty. That meant medium-to-long-term safety data was nonexistent.

My blood ran cold when I learned that a key US public health official had said as late as October 2019 that the industry needed an “entity of excitement out there that’s completely disruptive” to come along and accelerate the transition to these patentable (and thus potentially quite lucrative) technologies from the old, “egg-growing” way of making vaccines. He was sitting next to Anthony Fauci when he said it. Fauci himself had publicly predicted in 2017 a “surprise outbreak” of an infectious disease during the Trump Administration.

Two years in Wonderland

The entire tenor of the discussion in the media about the futility of repurposing existing treatments against Covid and the certainty that new vaccines would be the only way out seemed way, way off to me. Frontline physicians who had demonstrated early success against the virus in clinical settings and spoke up about it were silenced and demonized. You literally could access their videos one day and they’d be gone the next. I couldn’t help feeling we were all being brazenly manipulated to see reality in a certain way by people and organizations with virtually unlimited funding and power with which to do the manipulating.

And even more disturbingly, I was dismayed to see most people accepting it without question. Even many quite intelligent people. The fear fanned by the pandemic seemed to make anything and everything that public officials wanted to do acceptable, including levels of corporate-government censorship that would have been considered unthinkable a short time before. It was terrifying to experience.

And so I wrote about it. Fairly often. And writing about it helped.

I now look at the unlikely timing of the birth of this site at the very beginning of the Covid era as maybe not coincidental for me. Knowing I had a platform on which to publish, and feeling a certain level of responsibility to do my homework and to carefully think through the facts I was presenting and the conclusions I was drawing from them, sparked and nurtured a very personal evolution in the way I looked at the world. It solidified some things for me that I had tenuously been moving toward for years. I am in some key ways a different person today than I was in 2019, and the process of researching, writing, and editing this site was a contributor to that.

The Covid craziness gradually subsided, of course, and other national and global obsessions replaced it — the Ukraine war in 2022, October 7th and the (continuing) Israeli massacres in Gaza in 2023, and the remarkable political resurrection of Trump in 2024. I’ve written about them all. Some of it I’m proud of; some of it was half-baked efforts.

I’ve had a level of uncertainty about what direction I should take with this site from the beginning. That uncertainty continues. I worry sometimes that in my writing I come across as a bitter and negative person, with a far too pessimistic view of the world, and that I should leaven that bread with some optimistic takes and topics more often.

I’m not a bitter or negative person. I enjoy life and I like people. I know that even among the authorities I distrust there are many good people out there trying to do their best. I know life is a miracle. And someday I may write about that and more.

But at the same time I’ve concluded that the power structures that have a vice-grip on our federal government and many global institutions are corrupt to the core and aren’t motivated in the least by any rational person’s conception of individual freedom or the public good. It’s a topic I like to opine about and my conclusions about it are mostly negative. I’ll continue to write about that as well. Unapologetically.

The mark I settled on in 2022.

But there have been regrets with this project too. My biggest so far was planning to write a multi-part series on the JFK assassination beginning on the 60th anniversary last year that I never followed through on after the “Part 1” introduction. Remember that perfectionism thing that prevents me from taking on big tasks?

I still plan on following through, but I don’t have any of them written and don’t know when I will. The idea of managing that task, getting the right balance between providing enough information to make my case but also keeping it high-level enough not to get bogged down in the series, is intimidating to me. Self-contained articles are more satisfying to write because there’s an instant payoff psychologically when you publish. You’ve said basically everything you want to say on the subject, wrapped up like a bow. That’s why I eventually allowed myself to put the series on hold and return to writing after a long hiatus following my JFK writer’s block.

My most popular article had come just prior to that, and is among those that I’m most pleased with. Published September last year, “When Did the World Go Crazy?” was a summary of events over the previous 20+ years that illustrated how unhinged I felt the world had become. Compared to the relative calm and normality that prevailed the first three decades of my life, the difference, I pointed out, was stark. It was a big a topic to try and summarize in one article, but the writing was punchy and just seemed to flow, fully formed, from the keyboard. It’s a great feeling when that happens, like when the scissors start to glide across the wrapping paper.

I struck out this summer with my very confident prediction that Kamala Harris would not only be crowned the replacement nominee for Joe Biden but also be elevated early to the presidency as Biden’s position would become untenable after being forced out of the race. I was convinced the establishment would think it beneficial for her to take the reins early, that maybe a certain gravitas would be conferred on her by occupying the office. But in the end they opted for a strategy of concealment, shielding her even from press scrutiny. They must have known better than I that her very evident weaknesses would have been laid bare in office.

Now, as we enter the second half of the 20s, I find myself wondering what the next five years and beyond will bring to write about. It feels like we’re approaching some kind of inflexion point for the world, like events could swing in a darker, more authoritarian, or more violent direction, and it maybe feels like that’s most likely. But things could just as easily develop in a better, more hopeful trajectory. Humans are capable of correcting a lot of wrongs when the right conditions and the historical moment arrive. When two roads diverge in a yellow wood, to borrow a phrase from Robert Frost, I don’t pretend to know which one we’ll take.

But whichever it ends up being, I’m here for it.

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.