{"id":1946,"date":"2026-09-12T05:08:36","date_gmt":"2026-09-12T05:08:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationallogisticspost.com\/?p=1946"},"modified":"2026-09-12T05:08:36","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T05:08:36","slug":"scott-mckays-the-necessary-men-episode-10-consequence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationallogisticspost.com\/?p=1946","title":{"rendered":"Scott McKay\u2019s The Necessary Men<\/i> \u2014 Episode 10: Consequence"},"content":{"rendered":"

W<\/span>elcome back to the world of Mike Holman.<\/em><\/p>

If this is your first stop, here\u2019s what you need to know: Mike Holman is the independent journalist, podcaster, and inveterate maker-of-enemies at the center of Scott McKay\u2019s bitingly satirical thriller series \u2014 four novels (so far) chronicling one man\u2019s habit of ending up in the middle of the very stories the rest of the media is too scared, too compromised, or too incurious to tell. Catch up on the whole series, read past episodes, and find links to every book at \u201cThe Mike Holman Novels at\u00a0<\/em>The American Spectator,\u201d\u00a0and soon, see the video-novel version of this and the previous books at\u00a0MikeHolman.com.<\/em><\/p>

Read more Transforming 9\/11 Into Trump Derangement Syndrome<\/a><\/p>

We\u2019re now serializing the fourth Mike Holman novel,\u00a0<\/em>The Necessary Men, right here at\u00a0<\/em>The American Spectator\u00a0\u2014 new episodes dropping every Wednesday and Saturday. The full book goes on sale September 26th at Amazon and the new\u00a0MikeHolman.com\u00a0site, and you can\u00a0pre-order a signed copy right now.<\/em><\/p>

Where we left off: Candela has fled, communism has died, and Diego is now at the helm of a new Cuba, which has paid off Pierce\u2019s grand plan.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>

Here are Chapters Nineteen and Twenty, plus the Epilogue, of <\/em>The Necessary Men.<\/em><\/p>

\n

\"Black<\/figure>\n<\/p>

Chapter Nineteen<\/h2>

Jupiter, Florida \u2014 December 22, 2026<\/p>

Sibel Y\u0131ld\u0131r\u0131m had come to the United States as a college student from Turkey. She graduated with a double degree in Gender, Sexuality, and Women\u2019s Studies and Middle Eastern Studies from Penn. That was in 2003. She then got a job as an organizer with the Palestine Action League as its \u201cGay and Lesbian Alliance\u201d coordinator, which made her somewhat famous in certain circles as the Muslim woman in a hijab speaking at gay-pride events.<\/p>

At the time, Sibel Y\u0131ld\u0131r\u0131m was an illegal alien, having overstayed her F-1 visa. Rush Limbaugh noted that fact on his show, citing a story he\u2019d found at the Drudge Report, after she had led a parade of drag queens through the Capitol to protest the war in Afghanistan. That was in late 2005. For about a week, there were lots of conservatives screaming about Sibel Y\u0131ld\u0131r\u0131m and demanding to know why she wasn\u2019t being deported.<\/p>

Then in January of 2006 she married Ari Rosenberg, who happened to be her immigration lawyer. And that was how Sibel Y\u0131ld\u0131r\u0131m got her green card. By 2011, she was a citizen, and she and Ari had taken a quick trip to Splitsville.<\/p>

By 2013, Sibel Y\u0131ld\u0131r\u0131m had married Abubakr Al-Rahman, a Palestinian activist from Gaza with known ties to Hamas. Al-Rahman managed to get a green card while he was under indictment for material support for terrorism, which didn\u2019t affect his employment with the Muslim-American Friendship League or the Omobba administration\u2019s treatment of his immigration case.<\/p>

And in 2018, just more than seven years after becoming a U.S. citizen, Sibel Y\u0131ld\u0131r\u0131m was elected to Congress from a district in Philadelphia. She was sworn in as Sibel Al-Rahman.<\/p>

For the next seven years and change, she\u2019d been one of the most outrageously anti-Semitic, anti-capitalist, and anti-American members of Congress anybody had ever seen. She\u2019d been arrested several times, the most recent case involving burning an American flag at a Fourth of July \u201canti-fascist\u201d demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, and each arrest made her a greater and greater hero in the eyes of the American Left.<\/p>

But in early December, after barely knocking off a guy named Wendell Jackson in a close race for re-election, Sibel Al-Rahman was in Newark at a protest in front of the ICE facility at Delaney Hall. A female protester had tried to stand in front of an ICE vehicle which was attempting to transport three illegal aliens from Colombia (two were cartel thugs, one had sexually assaulted a 12-year-old) to the Newark airport for deportation to Bogota, and ICE officers had picked her up and carried her out of the way of the vehicle, dropping her on the ground in an unfriendly manner.<\/p>

Sibel didn\u2019t take well to that event. She walked down the street to her vehicle, a Subaru Forester, got behind the wheel, and drove it right to the gate of the ICE facility.<\/p>

And she ran over an ICE officer who attempted to stop her, breaking the woman\u2019s leg.<\/p>

Chaos then ensued. A surge of protesters swarmed the gate; shots were fired, though no one was injured, and forty-six people were arrested. But Sibel Al-Rahman managed to escape the scene, having been driven off in a stolen Toyota Camry that was later found torched under an I-95 overpass. News reports dubbed her the \u201cFugitive Congresswoman,\u201d and she became, virtually overnight, the single most controversial figure in American politics.<\/p>

And this was more than a sideshow, because by the time Al-Rahman pulled her caper at Delaney Hall, the balance of power in Congress had come into question.<\/p>

In the Senate, Republicans had actually gained a seat and a 54-46 majority was locked in. But in the House, what looked like a 227-207 GOP majority, with one Libertarian expected to caucus with the Republicans, began to look\u2026<\/p>

\u2026different.<\/p>

Four races in California which had been \u201cwon\u201d by as many as six points based on the vote count from Election Night melted away following three weeks of vote-counting. The same happened with a race in Wisconsin. A race in Colorado went from 54-45 R to 49.7-49.6 D after 11 days of mail-in ballots being counted. Two races in Arizona went the same way. So did one in Nevada. And when a congressional race in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, was also called for the Democrat after 24 days of vote-counting and litigation, the final balance of the House of Representatives was 217-217.<\/p>

Counting Sibel Al-Rahman as one of the Democrats, that is.<\/p>

Chad Dudenberger, the comic-book store owner from Vermont who\u2019d become the first Libertarian ever elected to Congress, was now the fulcrum of American politics.<\/p>

And on December 15, Dudenberger showed up at a press conference on the steps of Capitol Hill with Jeff Hakim, at the time the House Minority Leader, and Dolores Gramsci-Ramos, who was the chair of the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee, and announced that he was caucusing with the Democrats.<\/p>

\u201cThey\u2019re gonna agree to back my bill for tax-free weed,\u201d said Dudenberger. \u201cThat\u2019s what I ran on. It\u2019s the only issue that matters. That and findin\u2019 out who\u2019s hidin\u2019 all the UFO bodies.\u201d<\/p>

The multiple questions asked of Dudenberger by the Washington media, which came immediately after, were not answered well. Gramsci-Ramos called an end to the spectacle by announcing that Dudenberger was getting an assignment to the House Oversight Committee so that he could help to uncover the answers to \u201cpressing questions the American people want answered.\u201d<\/p>

And in a later interview that day, without Dudenberger present, Gramsci-Ramos announced that her first hearing as the chair of the House Oversight Committee was going to be about violations of the Logan Act with respect to Cuba.<\/p>

Speaking of Cuba, I hadn\u2019t been back there since Diego\u2019s installation as the country\u2019s interventor. PJ and I were hard at work on the book, and I\u2019d been doing a lot of media interviews about PGFI\u2019s work in turning over the regime. The thing was that Diego and the team he brought with him, which was mostly Cuban exiles, a lot of Cuban dissidents who\u2019d been fished out of the prisons and immediately given jobs working for TODO on the governmental side of the new administration \u2013 the public position was that Cuba was getting out of politics for a while, but there were still unavoidable things that had to be handled \u2013 and the Cuban Army guys who\u2019d attached themselves to Diego as the best thing going, were taking over and doing a pretty good job of it.<\/p>

Trent was our big administration guy at PGFI. He had our end handled. Stan, with his rum distillery under construction and his joint venture with the Uribes cranking up, was more involved in Cuba than I was. And Marisol had gone through Melissa to get to Kaylee Russo \u2013 who was the executive producer of the Holman Media podcasts \u2013 and score a job as its Cuba correspondent. She was a little rough around the edges as on-air talent, at least at first, but Marisol made up for that by making herself a bird dog.<\/p>

I\u2019ll take a little credit for it, because I did give her some lessons on how good stories get told in media, at least within the context of the book I was writing. Marisol definitely paid attention. She was sniffing out some terrific anecdotes about the changes in Cuba.<\/p>

Like, for example, the X-ray machine which made it to San Nicol\u00e1s de Bari, southeast of Havana. The local doctor had been diagnosing broken bones by feel since the last X-ray machine had gone on the fritz a decade earlier; all of a sudden, the medical clinic in that little town finally had the basic equipment they needed. Or the youth baseball league in Mariel, which was finally able to put together a real schedule because the lights on the fields could stay on at night. Or the fish markets, which were suddenly robust and full of catch because the fishermen had gas and outboard motors again rather than having to row out on the water and row back.<\/p>

Or the dissidents who\u2019d been in prison for decades, in deplorable conditions, getting to see a new Cuba full of hope, opportunity and activity.<\/p>

Marisol was doing little podcast segments a couple of times a day in between the stuff she was doing at TODO\u2019s headquarters, which had set up shop in Candela\u2019s presidential palace. They had her serving as a translator, but she was also sort of plugging in wherever Diego needed her. He texted me and said she was a hustler, and that he couldn\u2019t live without her.<\/p>

When I heard that, I asked her if she was getting any sleep.<\/p>

\u201cI don\u2019t need sleep,\u201d she said. \u201cWho can sleep with everything going on?\u201d<\/p>

Hank had set up shop in Havana with his app company. They took up the top floor of the Gran Manzana Kempinski Hotel a couple of blocks from El Capitolio, and they\u2019d hired a bunch of Cubans to help build out TODO\u2019s reconstruction portal. It was built off a combination of Conduit and the TODO app that had sprung from the comms app, with elements of RKTech built in. You\u2019d take pictures of your house so that the app could construct the floor plan, and then particular photos of damage that needed to be repaired, and you\u2019d upload that to your TODO account, and the app would sort you into an \u201caid bucket\u201d \u2013 that was the English term Hank\u2019s team had set up \u2013 which either would offer you a grant for repairs or reconstruction, or a loan (generally for smaller repairs), or a full-on buyout of your property if it was damaged beyond repair. And the app would show you several AI-generated options of what your place would look like once it was finished; if you agreed, TODO\u2019s work crew would already have the building materials, fixtures, or whatever in hand when they made it to your house.<\/p>

And that happened on a schedule which was faster than anybody in Cuba could imagine. Especially with the Cubans pouring back into their country to take part in the rebuilding.<\/p>

But it was more than that. Trumbull\u2019s Department of Homeland Security had identified Cuba as the country of choice to provide asylum to migrants from all over Latin America who applied to come to the U.S., and those asylees who were being deported were getting recruited by TODO to come to Cuba.<\/p>

\u201cAnd it\u2019s ramping up,\u201d said Hank, talking about TODO\u2019s reconstruction portal, \u201ceven though we had a lot of trouble early on.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWhat kind of trouble?\u201d I asked him.<\/p>

\u201cSo the straight-up way you\u2019d access this portal is that you\u2019d put in your name and address, and from that information all of the public-records stuff would populate a lot of the forms \u2013 zoning, square footage, the topography of your lot, all of that. That\u2019s what RKTech does in America, right? Except in Cuba, they don\u2019t want to do that.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWhy? They\u2019re worried about going on a government list or something, right?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cExactly. These people think that putting their house in for a grant or a loan for repairs would be tantamount to complaining about the regime, and so they don\u2019t want any record of what they\u2019re doing.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYeah, that\u2019s not rational,\u201d I said, \u201cbut I guess it\u2019s not altogether crazy, either.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cRight. So we built this amazing portal that could get people plugged into orders for building materials, work crews coming in, the financing, the design, all of it. And we put up billboards all over Havana and the other cities, and all we got was a trickle of people as early adopters. Until we let folks sign into this thing anonymously, and then the flood came in. They\u2019ve all got nicknames like MamaBala571, and ElTigreBueno, and TODOFan016. Nobody uses their real name.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cBut you still have their address, though. It\u2019s not like\u2026\u201d<\/p>

\u201cIt\u2019s psychological. Maybe it\u2019s dumb, but why fight it? We don\u2019t know what these poor people have been through.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThat\u2019s a good point,\u201d I said.<\/p>

The other thing Hank was involved in was that his company had built an app for TODO that did job testing based on general knowledge and skills and personality traits. They were getting people coming into testing centers they\u2019d set up around the country, and TODO was training people who\u2019d applied for jobs and then tested into them.<\/p>

\u201cIt\u2019s busy as hell,\u201d he said. \u201cThis country is freakin\u2019 energized. They told me Havana used to mostly shut down after dark the last few years. Not anymore. It\u2019s not just that people are drinking and partying all night; they\u2019re working. All of these people have two or three jobs. They\u2019re making money hand over fist, and a lot of them have never had a pot to piss in.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cIf they didn\u2019t have relatives in the U.S. or somewhere sending them cash,\u201d I said, \u201cit would have been impossible for them to make money. Unless they were with the Party, I guess.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYeah, well, those flights to Madrid and Barcelona are pretty full. The commies are buggin\u2019 out with whatever they can carry. Nobody even misses the loot, because it\u2019s small potatoes compared to what Cuba is starting to generate.\u201d<\/p>

Then he told me the story that seemed to wrap up what Cuba was becoming.<\/p>

\u201cSo in the building across the street from the hotel,\u201d Hank said, \u201cand this used to be a really cool structure 75 years ago, but it looks like it\u2019s going to fall on top of you if you walk in, there is this coffee and pastry shop that opened. It\u2019s called La Sierra Maestra, after the mountains in the southeast where all the coffee used to come from. They make it a point that all of their stuff is locally sourced and Cuban. And here\u2019s the interesting part \u2013 there\u2019s a line out around the block!\u201d<\/p>

\u201cHank, Cubans waiting in line isn\u2019t something new.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYeah, I know that. Which is what makes this so much fun. They\u2019re not waiting in line because there\u2019s no coffee or pastelitos. They have tons of both. They\u2019re waiting in line because their stuff is so freaking good that everybody in central Havana is beating a path to their door.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cAhhh,\u201d I said.<\/p>

\u201cYou go get in that line, and the folks will tell you that getting stuff which is actually good, rather than just edible, that comes from real, fresh ingredients, and it\u2019s actually available to Cubans rather than foreigners in these five-star hotels, is, like, this impossible miracle. It\u2019s an emotional thing for them, man. That Cubans are capable not only of producing great stuff but that they can do it to serve each other. The pride in this deal is so thick you\u2019ve got to saw through it.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cSounds like these guys need a drive-thru,\u201d I said.<\/p>

\u201cYeah, well, I talked to the owner and I\u2019m gonna put some money behind him and see if we can\u2019t get him to put up locations all over Havana. And believe me, his place would make it in Florida.\u201d<\/p>

\n

\"Black<\/figure>\n<\/p>

Hank\u2019s experience in Havana was strange but positive. Hal\u2019s mission there, helping Brigante restructure the Cuban Army into a smaller, more focused fighting force rather than a monopoly corporation where the country\u2019s private sector should have stood, had a different character.<\/p>

There was resistance among the officer corps to the new reality, because essentially if you were a FAR officer before, you could wet your beak in both ponds. Now you were having to choose, and it was happening at a time when Cuban military people were getting processed out of their overseas deployments with once-friendly regimes like in Venezuela and Peru.<\/p>

Pierce had smoothed a lot of that over by just writing a check to give all the Army people who wanted to be professional soldiers a sizable raise, and the ones who\u2019d joined the Army so they could get a good job working in the things the Army owned were getting discharged and put to work.<\/p>

But then there were the intelligence services, the DSE, which was internal, and the DI, which was external. Hal and a commission of folks from Sentinel Security as well as a team of Cubans, mostly dissidents, were doing a deep dive through the DI\u2019s files. He kept telling me that the things they were uncovering were going to change a lot of what people thought about history, politics, and even culture.<\/p>

\u201cCare to elaborate?\u201d I asked him.<\/p>

\u201cNot quite yet,\u201d he said. \u201cHonestly, I don\u2019t think the world is ready. But I will say this \u2013 if this Dolores Gramsci-Ramos woman wants to make trouble on the Oversight Committee out of our project, I\u2019m happy to fire the first shot.\u201d<\/p>

And he did, after I hooked him up with Flip Johnson at Holman Media.<\/p>

A couple of days later, Manny Menendez, who was Gramsci-Ramos\u2019s chief of staff, became famous in a way he didn\u2019t want to be. Flip had posted an expos\u00e9 based on the DI\u2019s files that showed continuing contact and influence between Menendez and the Cuban intel agency going back 18 years, from the time he\u2019d traveled to Cuba as a recruit of the Venceremos Brigade \u2013 which was a communist training program the Cubans ran for left-wing American activists going all the way back to the 1970s. Menendez\u2019s name was all over the files, and Flip cut loose the raw documents as part of his expos\u00e9, and by the end of the week the Justice Department had indicted him under FARA.<\/p>

And that begged the question whether the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee wasn\u2019t herself a Cuban intel asset.<\/p>

Which Gramsci-Ramos denied.<\/p>

But then, something unusual happened, and Flip was tipped off to it. A safety camera on a delivery truck recorded an accident in a warehouse in Queens, which wasn\u2019t in Gramsci-Ramos\u2019s district but rather next door in her best buddy Naomi Yanko-Munsch\u2019s. It seemed that the truck\u2019s pallet jack clipped a stack of cardboard boxes labeled as \u201cFair Trade Coffee Table Books\u201d in the warehouse, and tumbling out of the rip were thousands of copies of a Spanish-to-English pamphlet with Fidel\u2019s face on it, extolling the virtues of Third Worldism as it fought racist capitalism and American imperialism.<\/p>

The driver emailed the MP4 file to Flip, who marveled at both its high definition and cinematic quality, and then Flip started digging and found out the warehouse was leased to an LLC with Manny Menendez as its registered agent \u2013 something that had been the case since before Gramsci-Ramos hired him as her chief of staff.<\/p>

Menendez\u2019 lawyer refused comment about the warehouse and the pamphlets, and the left-wing media outlets pretended there was no story there. But when a reporter for the Daily Signal hit up Gramsci-Ramos about that warehouse, she went utterly ballistic.<\/p>

\u201cI have never set foot in that warehouse in my life!\u201d she said.<\/p>

Except an intern at Holman Media, a college kid at Georgia Tech named Allison something, went and found a five-year-old photo of Gramsci-Ramos at a Marxist Union of America fundraiser in that warehouse, standing in front of that exact stack of pamphlets. She and Menendez were grinning and holding one up for the camera.<\/p>

You\u2019d think this would have been enough to make Gramsci-Ramos go away with respect to Cuba and the stupid Logan Act. And you\u2019d be wrong.<\/p>

Flip called me after he ran that photo at the site.<\/p>

\u201cHey, what about the other stuff you\u2019ve got?\u201d he said. \u201cShould we put that out there?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cLook,\u201d I said. \u201cAt some point it starts to look like you\u2019re just a hatchet man working for me, and I know you\u2019re far more than that.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cNah,\u201d he said. \u201cA hatchet man puts out lies. I\u2019m just lettin\u2019 the people see who this is.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cAll right, fair enough,\u201d I said. \u201cBut let\u2019s hold off on this other bombshell of ours. We\u2019ll want something big if she really does want to come after PGFI with these dumb hearings.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYou\u2019re the boss,\u201d he sighed.<\/p>

It got crazier and crazier. The week before Christmas, Diego was invited to speak at the U.N. in New York.<\/p>

And Gramsci-Ramos and the city\u2019s mayor, another Marxist Union of America member named Borat Madmani, held a press conference in which Madmani threatened to arrest Diego under the Logan Act if he came to New York. Yanko-Munsch was there as well, and so were three other MUA members who\u2019d just been elected to Congress. They all had New York Yankees hats on, which apparently was an attempt to pander to baseball fans in the city who\u2019d had their hearts broken repeatedly by Diego\u2019s exploits on the mound for the Red Sox.<\/p>

The attorney general immediately put out a statement assuring the nation that Madmani had no jurisdiction over the Logan Act, that he had no power to arrest anyone, and even if those two problems didn\u2019t exist, Diego was an acting head of state of a foreign country and as such would be immune from any jeopardy under the Logan Act.<\/p>

Dudenberger was doing Rogan\u2019s podcast the next day, and he got asked about what he\u2019d gotten himself into aligning with these people.<\/p>

\u201cSee,\u201d Rogan asked him, \u201ceverybody thought that you\u2019d caucus with the Republicans as a Libertarian. I mean, the Democrats are, like, literally communists. What\u2019s a Libertarian doing hangin\u2019 around with commies?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cGettin\u2019 to the bottom of the UFO thing, that\u2019s what,\u201d said Dudenberger.<\/p>

\u201cWait \u2013 Michaelson didn\u2019t promise you that?\u201d<\/p>

John Michaelson was the outgoing Republican House Speaker.<\/p>

\u201cWell, yeah, but\u2026 he acts like it\u2019s not important. And he told me that tax-free weed is dead in the water on the House floor.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWell, because it is.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cIt\u2019s what I ran on, bro. Besides, I made a promise. And I\u2019m a man of my word.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThis might be a mistake, you know,\u201d Rogan said.<\/p>

\n

\"Sketch<\/figure>\n<\/p>

And then, Diego was in New York to speak at the U.N. And that was something. We were watching it at PGFI\u2019s offices; Melissa had gotten Cuban sandwiches delivered from Caf\u00e9 Vincennes in Little Havana for the occasion.<\/p>

Diego stood behind the lectern in the General Assembly hall, in the same gray seersucker suit he\u2019d worn on the Capitolio steps, and I watched him take a second before he spoke, the way he always did before a big pitch, like he was finding the rubber with his foot.<\/p>

\u201cMr. Secretary-General. Delegates. Members of the press,\u201d he began. \u201cI want to thank you for the invitation to speak here today, because I understand that for some of you, it was not an easy invitation to extend.\u201d<\/p>

A ripple of laughter, uncomfortable in places.<\/p>

\u201cI know there is a mayor in this city who has announced, on television, that he intends to have me arrested the moment I set foot on American soil. Mayor Madmani, if you are watching \u2013 and I assume you are, because you never miss a camera \u2013 I am staying at the Palace Hotel on Madison Avenue, room 1407. The doors are unlocked. Come and get me. Bring your friends from the Marxist Union of America. Wear your Yankees hats. I will even sign a baseball for you before your officers put the cuffs on, because I understand you do not get to see very much winning where you come from.\u201d<\/p>

That got a real laugh, and a few scattered claps from delegations that clearly hadn\u2019t meant to.<\/p>

\u201cBut he will not come,\u201d Diego went on, \u201cbecause he knows, as I do, that a man cannot be arrested under the Logan Act for the crime of being the head of state of the country he represents. And that is what I am today. Not a politician. Not an ideologue. The interventor of the Republic of Cuba, appointed to hold that country together with both hands until it can stand on its own.\u201d<\/p>

He paused, let the room settle.<\/p>

\u201cI am here to tell you something, and then I am going to say something else, and you will not like either one.<\/p>

\u201cThe first thing is this. Cuba is withdrawing, effective today, from every political committee, council, working group, and caucus of this organization to which it currently belongs. The Human Rights Council. The Special Committee on Decolonization. The G77. All of it. We are not doing this because we do not care what the world thinks of us \u2013 we have spent sixty-seven years caring far too much what the world thought of us, performing a version of ourselves for cameras and delegations while our own people starved in the dark. We are done performing. Cuba does not have the time, the money, or the appetite for politics right now. We have a country to rebuild, and every hour our people spend voting on resolutions about someone else\u2019s border dispute is an hour they are not spending running clean water to a town that hasn\u2019t had it in fifteen years.<\/p>

\u201cSo we are taking a leave of absence from the business of politics \u2013 all of it, ours and everyone else\u2019s \u2013 until we are standing on our own feet again.<\/p>

\u201cI did not come here today to participate in what this body does. I came to tell you Cuba is stepping outside of it, and to say that we are, for the first time in six decades, genuinely open \u2013 open for trade, open for investment, open for tourists, open for anyone who wants to come see what a free people can build when nobody is stealing what they build.\u201d<\/p>

Somewhere in the back of the hall, even watching on TV, I could feel the Cuban delegation\u2019s own old guard \u2013 the handful of Candela-era diplomats who hadn\u2019t gotten out in time and were still, technically, credentialed \u2013 shifting in their seats.<\/p>

\u201cNow. The second thing.<\/p>

\u201cI did not want to be standing in front of you today as the leader of anything. I wanted, thirty years ago, to be a boy who grew up to pitch baseballs, and Cuba\u2019s government decided that a boy\u2019s dream was a threat to the state, and so I had to leave my own country in the hold of a boat to go chase it somewhere else. I have hardly lived one day of my adult life inside the nation of my birth, because the men who ran it decided that my ambition belonged to them and not to me. That is the plain, ordinary cruelty of what you call communism, and I would ask every delegate in this hall who still defends that system to sit with the fact that it took a five-year-old\u2019s dream and treated it as contraband.<\/p>

\u201cAnd when the time finally came to help my country, after sixty-seven years, it did not come through this body. It did not come through any of your councils or your resolutions or your special rapporteurs. It came because a private American businessman and a journalist had to lie their way onto a beach in Gibara, in the dead of night, because that was the only way in. Let that sit with you. In the twenty-first century, freeing ten million people required a smuggling operation.<\/p>

\u201cI am also aware that certain governments are unhappy that the mines and surveillance installations they built quietly across my country are now being run, honestly, by a company that pays its workers, obeys its contracts, and does not disappear anyone. If the government of the People\u2019s Republic of China wishes to file a formal protest about the disposition of its nickel and cobalt concessions in Moa, I would be glad to accept it \u2013 right after they explain what happened to Simon Lim. Mr. Lim spent billions of his own dollars trying to bring food, medicine, and electricity to the people of a country he was not even born in, because he believed decent people should not have to live like this. I will let this body ask his government why that made him a target, instead of a hero.\u201d<\/p>

The Fox News camera hit on Essie, standing in the gallery, her hand over her mouth.<\/p>

\u201cSo. That is what I came to say. Cuba is stepping out of your politics, and Cuba is open for business. Do with that whatever you like. I have a country to go rebuild, and unlike some of you, I intend to actually get something built before I come back here to talk about it again.\u201d<\/p>

He didn\u2019t wait for applause. He gathered his notes, nodded once to the Secretary-General, and walked off the dais while half the room was still deciding whether to clap.<\/p>

\u201cHoly shit,\u201d said Trent. \u201cThat was\u2026\u201d<\/p>

\u201cFuckin\u2019 awesome,\u201d said Stan.<\/p>

\u201cI mean, I just love them as a First Couple,\u201d said Melissa. \u201cShe\u2019s sooo glamorous and, like, elegant. And he\u2019s a leader. Y\u2019know?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWell, yeah,\u201d I said.<\/p>

\u201cAnd it\u2019s pretty cool that Essie is Hispanic and Diego is black. That sort of brings all of Cuba together, don\u2019t you think?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThey\u2019re both Hispanic, Melissa,\u201d I said.<\/p>

\u201cWhat?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThey\u2019re both Hispanic. What you\u2019re trying to say is that Essie is white.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cOh my God. I mean, you\u2019re right, but like\u2026 wait, am I the racist in this room?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cNo,\u201d said Trent. \u201cYou\u2019re just too recent a college graduate.\u201d<\/p>

Melissa shrank in her seat. Then the phone rang. It was PJ.<\/p>

\u201cI don\u2019t know what this is,\u201d she said. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s a subpoena, but it\u2019s\u2026 you\u2019re being called to testify at a House Oversight Committee hearing on, it says, \u2018actions of Americans in Cuba in flagrant violation of the Logan Act.\u2019\u201d<\/p>

\n

\"Black<\/figure>\n<\/p>

Chapter Twenty<\/h2>

Washington, D.C. \u2014 January 7, 2027<\/p>

The 120th Congress of the United States of America convened under, as Ben Shapiro labeled it, \u201ca cloud of disgrace.\u201d<\/p>

He wasn\u2019t wrong. As we watched it, Sibel al-Rahman was in the House chamber with 434 other elected members of Congress. They\u2019d managed to sneak her into the chamber through the basement tunnels despite the U.S. Marshals covering the Capitol grounds. Trumbull had given a 90-minute speech that morning, screaming about how absolutely disgusting \u2013 \u201cfilthy\u201d was the word he used \u2013 it was that a federal fugitive who\u2019d nearly caused an ICE officer to lose her leg was about to give the Democrats political power.<\/p>

And Jeff Hakim, who was set to take over as the House speaker, had promised he was going to impeach Trumbull. But the impeachment wouldn\u2019t be first; first would be the Logan Act hearings starring yours truly.<\/p>

I had an entire team of lawyers and lobbyists working behind the scenes for weeks to call this thing off, but we decided it would be bad optics for me to outright refuse to testify. They would have just subpoenaed me anyway. I was going to have to go to Capitol Hill and let Dolores Gramsci-Ramos and her friends berate me for most of a day.<\/p>

And I knew that if this thing went according to the chalk, particularly after the way Hakim and Gramsci-Ramos had stacked House Oversight in the new Congress, it was unavoidable, regardless of what I said or didn\u2019t say at the hearing, that they\u2019d vote on a criminal referral to the Justice Department for violating the Logan Act.<\/p>

It wouldn\u2019t go anywhere; Tim White, the attorney general, had already said there was no evidence that PGFI had done anything in Cuba that was fundamentally different \u2013 we had rendered humanitarian aid and done private-sector commercial deals with various Cuban entities, and had made no government policies that anyone could identify \u2013 than the various leftist NGO\u2019s sending people to Cuba had done.<\/p>

But that wasn\u2019t the point. The point was they were going to get their pound of flesh, and forever after the hearing they were going to call me a criminal. And they were going to say the same thing about Pierce and Diego, but they couldn\u2019t get to Pierce or Diego.<\/p>

I was the guy they could get to.<\/p>

And I told PJ, as I watched the House chamber prepare the vote to make Hakim the speaker, that I felt like all of these shenanigans were aimed at me.<\/p>

\u201cIt\u2019s like there is this demon out there on the water,\u201d I said. \u201cI can\u2019t see it yet, but it\u2019s coming for me. And this bullshit on the TV? It\u2019s like the demon\u2019s putting his shoes on.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThat\u2019s a little dramatic, honey,\u201d she said. \u201cI mean, I\u2019ll allow it and all, but I think you should be happy. Whatever they do, it won\u2019t amount to anything. And the president is going to get it a lot worse than you will, so, y\u2019know\u2026 by this weekend it\u2019ll be over.\u201d<\/p>

The roll call vote began. Al-Rahman, the federal fugitive facing a host of charges including domestic terrorism and the attempted murder of a federal officer, stood when her name was called \u2013 early in the process, as she was one of the \u201cA\u2019s\u201d \u2013 and yelled \u201cHAKIM!\u201d<\/p>

And the entire Democrat caucus stood up and cheered.<\/p>

The cameras panned to the other side of the aisle. Most of the Republicans sat slack-jawed. Billy Ray Hammonds, a freshman Republican from Alabama, jumped from his seat and made for Al-Rahman; several of his colleagues managed to catch him before he could do any damage. Hammonds\u2019 outrage was thus restricted to some very audible choice words I won\u2019t repeat.<\/p>

And when Chad Dudenberger stood to announce his vote for Hakim, it was obvious he wasn\u2019t enjoying his chosen affiliations.<\/p>

The final count was exactly what everyone expected: 218 for Hakim, 217 for Michaelson.<\/p>

Then there was the mass swearing-in of the members, and there was Al-Rahman taking an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Fox News had Newt Gingrich on as part of their coverage, and he was beside himself. \u201cThis is extraordinary,\u201d he said. \u201cHere you have somebody who almost killed a federal law enforcement officer who was doing her duty to support and defend the Constitution by deporting criminal illegal aliens, and she just swore that oath that everybody knows is false, and there is nothing anybody can do about it because her party stands by her. For sheer political power. That\u2019s it.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cHe\u2019s right,\u201d said PJ.<\/p>

\u201cOf course he\u2019s right,\u201d I snapped.<\/p>

Hakim started his speech and promised that he would lead a Congress that enforced accountability for the \u201clawlessness of the Trumbull administration.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThat\u2019s it,\u201d I said. \u201cI can\u2019t look at another second of this shit.\u201d<\/p>

I got about as far as the kitchen. I\u2019d poured myself a glass of water and was standing at the sink looking out at the bay, trying to let the knot in my stomach loosen a little, when I heard PJ yell from the other room.<\/p>

\u201cMike! Get in here!\u201d<\/p>

I didn\u2019t run, but I didn\u2019t dawdle either. By the time I got back to the couch, the chamber was in chaos \u2013 not the orderly, gavelled kind of chaos Congress usually manages, but real chaos, the kind where the anchors stop finishing their sentences.<\/p>

Two U.S. Marshals in windbreakers were moving up the center aisle, and behind them, Capitol Police were doing crowd control on a knot of members who\u2019d surged out of their seats to see. Al-Rahman was still standing near her chair \u2013 she hadn\u2019t tried to run, hadn\u2019t tried to hide; she was just standing there with her chin up like she\u2019d been waiting for this exact moment since Delaney Hall.<\/p>

\u201cSibel Al-Rahman,\u201d one of the Marshals said, and even through the TV speakers I could hear how flat and procedural his voice was, like he was reading a parking ticket, \u201cyou\u2019re under arrest.\u201d<\/p>

She didn\u2019t fight the cuffs. She just started talking, loud, pitched for the cameras rather than the room.<\/p>

\u201cAbolish ICE!\u201d she shouted, and a knot of the MUA members near the back took it up like a call-and-response. \u201cAllahu Akbar! You cannot silence the people!\u201d<\/p>

Nobody on the Democrat side was cheering anymore. I watched the camera catch Hakim at the dais, his face doing something complicated \u2013 not quite regret, not quite satisfaction, something in between that told me he already knew exactly how this clip was going to run on every network for the next forty-eight hours and there was nothing he could do about it now.<\/p>

The marshals walked her out through the well of the House, past members who wouldn\u2019t look at her and members who couldn\u2019t stop looking at her, and the chant kept going, fainter and fainter, until the doors swallowed it.<\/p>

\u201cThey let it happen right there,\u201d PJ said quietly. \u201cOn the floor. In front of God and C-SPAN and everybody.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThat was the whole point,\u201d I said. \u201cThey needed the vote. They got the vote. Now they let the marshals do their job, and by tomorrow they\u2019ll act like they were appalled the entire time.\u201d<\/p>

I opened the sliding glass door to the backyard, dodging Robby, Thor, and Sancho as they stampeded out to play.<\/p>

\n

\"Two<\/figure>\n<\/p>

And then I was on Capitol Hill.<\/p>

Luckily, I wasn\u2019t the first to speak. And I also wasn\u2019t a sitting duck. In fact, I\u2019d lit something off that was guaranteed to turn Gramsci-Ramos\u2019s hearing into an even bigger circus than that fiasco she and her pals had put on at the swearing-in.<\/p>

It was a video. More like a highlight video, actually, because there were 22 different clips in it.<\/p>

One was shot in Gibara. It was from the day we were setting up for Diego\u2019s homecoming there, when we\u2019d found those waterlogged cardboard boxes under the tarps at the ruined warehouse by the pier. I haven\u2019t told you what was in that video that caused poor Harvard Forklift Girl such immeasurable emotional trauma; that girl might not have had a single item of useful information in her head, but she knew damned well how bad the optics were of hundreds of boxes of the book From Each to Each<\/em>, by Dolores Gramsci-Ramos, sitting under a tarp in the ruins of a warehouse in communist Cuba.<\/p>

Next to boxes containing T-shirts celebrating the Atlanta Falcons\u2019 victory in Super Bowl LI.<\/p>

We ended up counting 247 boxes of Gramsci-Ramos\u2019s book in that warehouse in Gibara that day. At 30 books a box, it was just more than 7,400 copies. And when TODO went through and started inventorying government warehouses in other cities and towns throughout Cuba, her books were found, in various quantities, in 21 other places.<\/p>

There were almost 150,000 copies of From Each to Each<\/em> stashed in Cuba, seven years after she\u2019d written it as a predicate for her 2020 presidential campaign. She\u2019d even won the New Hampshire primary before her campaign fizzled.<\/p>

The folks at Holman Media had compiled that video into one highlight clip that ran about three and a half minutes, and it led the front page of the site that morning. Flip Johnson\u2019s story talked about the fact that there\u2019s nothing illegal about writing a book and selling it to whoever will buy it, but this is the preferred way politicians get bribed in America today, and the obvious main question is why these books were sitting in warehouses throughout Cuba, of all places.<\/p>

So as I hopped into the back of the Tahoe Victor was driving that would take me from the Hay-Adams Hotel to Capitol Hill, I was scrolling on my phone and watching X catch fire. There were a lot of reactions from people asking when the hearings on Gramsci-Ramos and her treason were going to take place, along with the expected squawking about how this was Mike Holman trying to distract from his violation of the Logan Act.<\/p>

Nothing very illuminating there, I judged.<\/p>

And then, I was at the table as Gramsci-Ramos gaveled in the hearing. She gave a long-winded, utterly stupid and dishonest rant about sovereignty and American imperialism and how what PGFI and TODO had done displaced and toppled a popular, legitimate government. She said this was an illegal thing for a private company to have done, and that neither the American nor the Cuban people had been asked to vote on the \u201ccounter-revolution\u201d we had staged.<\/p>

It went on and on, and finally it ended. But like I said, I wasn\u2019t the first one to testify.<\/p>

Burro was.<\/p>

He\u2019d caught me before the idiocy started and shook my hand.<\/p>

\u201cHey,\u201d he said, \u201cyou know what they say. No good deed goes unpunished. You guys are heroes. Everybody knows it but these people.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI hope that\u2019s true,\u201d I said. \u201cBut if this is all the suffering that comes from what we did, I\u2019ll say it was a win that came cheap.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI agree,\u201d he said with a chuckle.<\/p>

Gramsci-Ramos called on him with ice in her voice. That was sort of a famous thing with her. She was an idiot, a true political dunce whose rise was inexplicable to both the Right and Left, other than that it could be attributed to the sheer volume of media appearances and noteworthy\/notorious things that came out of her mouth. But the one thing Dolores Gramsci-Ramos had, in prodigious amounts which she managed to monetize within her own party, was vitriol.<\/p>

Read more It\u2019s About Free Markets, Stupid<\/a><\/p>

She was the meanest woman in American politics. It worked for her. People stopped resisting her because she would make any conflict so unpleasant that nobody could sustain it.<\/p>

You\u2019d think that wouldn\u2019t constitute political talent, but it did. The old Twain quote resonates: never argue with a fool; bystanders often can\u2019t tell the difference. Nobody made out well in a conflict with Gramsci-Ramos because she never stopped screaming, and you either looked weak for having given up or you inevitably descended to her level.<\/p>

But Burro was up for at least a limited round with her. He opened his speech with a few entirely insincere words of bipartisanship and a hopefulness that the 120th Congress would be remembered for the productive cooperation on substantial issues that lay ahead. He gave that in a dry tone which masked the sarcasm that lay underneath, and then he moved on to the hearing.<\/p>

\u201cI must admit that I\u2019m confused about today\u2019s proceedings,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause no one in the administration, at least not to my knowledge, has voiced any concerns that Mr. Polk, Mr. Maceo, Mr. Holman, or anyone else affiliated with the Polk Global Freedom Initiative or the TODO de Cuba company has departed from U.S. policy toward Cuba. We gave them a waiver from our trade embargo for the purposes of hurricane relief, and to the best of my understanding, they\u2019ve followed the terms of that waiver.<\/p>

\u201cNow, the Cubans have made Mr. Maceo a de facto head of state, and there is nothing inappropriate about that. After all, he is a native Cuban citizen as well as a naturalized U.S. citizen, and he\u2019s also the CEO of the TODO de Cuba company. It\u2019s true that TODO is something new \u2013 a corporate entity which has essentially become a general contractor for an entire country. But that\u2019s still within the realm of private-sector activity and hurricane recovery; they\u2019re not spending American tax dollars, and they aren\u2019t doing anything counter to U.S. policy toward Cuba.<\/p>

\u201cIn short, there is no good reason why we should be here today. But this morning, thanks to a report by Holman Media which seems to be making waves online, we got a glimpse into the bad reasons why this hearing was called. Madam Chair, would you object to me playing the video for this committee?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI do object,\u201d she said. \u201cThat is\u2026\u201d<\/p>

\u201cMadam Chair,\u201d James Cumberland, the Kentucky Republican who\u2019d been the committee chair in the previous Congress, cut in. \u201cYou might as well let him play it, because every one of us is going to introduce it into the record.\u201d<\/p>

I saw a staffer rush up and whisper in her ear, and her face seemed to fall.<\/p>

\u201cVery well,\u201d she said.<\/p>

The clip played, and Burro smiled at Gramsci-Ramos.<\/p>

\u201cWhat I hope comes out of this hearing is an answer to a little different question than is on the agenda,\u201d he said, \u201cbut it\u2019s one I think the American people would most want to know. Why is your book so popular in the warehouses of Cuba, Madam Chair?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThat\u2019s enough!\u201d Gramsci-Ramos screamed, banging the gavel as laughter burst forth from the audience. \u201cMr. Secretary, you\u2019ve been in enough of these hearings to know that you aren\u2019t the one asking the questions of me. I ask them of you!\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWell, by all means, then,\u201d said Burro, \u201cask away. I can even answer my own question for you, though I doubt you\u2019ll like that answer.\u201d<\/p>

She brushed that off.<\/p>

\u201cSecretary Burro, did you direct Mr. Holman and Mr. Polk and their confederates to overthrow the government of Cuba?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWell, Madam Chair, I\u2019m only the secretary of state. I don\u2019t have the power to direct anyone to do anything like that. You\u2019d probably have to ask that question to the president. I can say that I expect he would tell you that our administration is delighted to have a new regime in charge of Cuba, one with whom we can build a productive, prosperous, peaceful friendship. And I\u2019ll also say that I would have fantasized about a scenario that such a reality could have been created with a very minimal loss of life.\u201d<\/p>

Dolores Gramsci-Ramos turned three different colors, and she unleashed a torrent of vituperative abuse on Burro, accusing him of abetting fascism on the peaceful island nation of Cuba, calling Pierce, Diego, and me stooges of the Trumbull administration, accusing the State Department of \u201clying\u201d to the Cubans and letting us \u201csteal\u201d LCTC from Peter Chang. It went on well past her allotted time, and finally, Cumberland started yelling at her that she was abusing her power as committee chair.<\/p>

That seemed to settle her down, or at least the staffers whispering in her ear as Cumberland was berating her did, and then things came back down to normal.<\/p>

I was looking at my phone, judging the reactions on X to what was happening. My guess was that Gramsci-Ramos\u2019s staffers had been doing the same thing.<\/p>

The committee then questioned Burro for an hour or so, and I noticed most of the questions were not about the Logan Act. Even the Democrats were straying from the subject.<\/p>

Then it was my turn.<\/p>

Gramsci-Ramos admonished me before I opened my testimony that she expected truthful answers because contempt of Congress was on the table following my stunt that morning.<\/p>

So I took the written testimony that the lawyers and I had agreed on and made a theatrical showing of dumping it into the trash can beside the witness table.<\/p>

\u201cWell then, Madam Chair,\u201d I said, \u201clet me start by saying you should go ahead and have your vote post haste, because the contempt I have for this Congress, and I imagine I\u2019m with the majority of the people in America in saying this, is utterly without bounds.<\/p>

\u201cThis hearing is evidence of, as a very wise man said to me today, no good deed going unpunished. What we did in Cuba through the Polk Global Freedom Initiative was to provide humanitarian assistance to people who haven\u2019t had a full day of electricity in years, if not decades. In Gibara, the town I directly helped with, they\u2019d been most of a week without running water because a basic repair clamp for a broken water main was too much trouble for the Cuban regime to produce. We fixed that problem in three hours. We built piers, we paved roads and airport runways, we repaired and constructed power systems, we distributed agricultural equipment, we created capital investment, created jobs and small businesses, gave people an opportunity to communicate with the outside world without interference.<\/p>

\u201cWe did things most people on this planet, and especially Americans, and including you, Madam Chair, take absolutely for granted. And in a matter of months, we measurably improved the lives of more than nine million people.<\/p>

\u201cNow, as I gather from your rather long-winded angry fusillade a few minutes ago, you\u2019re accusing me of overthrowing Manolo Candela\u2019s dictatorship in Cuba. Well, maybe you\u2019re right. But I just told you what I did, and it might not be an exhaustive list, but everything that PGFI did in Cuba fit into the same category: humanitarian aid. Now, you should stop and think about something \u2013 if that activity brings down a regime, then exactly what kind of a regime are we talking about?<\/p>

\u201cAs for this supposed stunt that the folks at Holman Media are accused of pulling, that\u2019s what\u2019s known as an act of journalism, Madam Chair. There is nothing dishonest in it, and I resent, on their behalf, your implication otherwise. In fact, I was there in Gibara when we opened those boxes and saw thousands of your books under a bunch of tarps. They\u2019d been there for years. That regime didn\u2019t even bother to distribute the damn things. In my mind, and even in the minds of the deluded Omobba Brigade kids who were there, this was evidence of you taking a bribe from Manolo Candela and the Cuban DI, and I expect we\u2019ll see much more where that came from. But if I\u2019m wrong and there\u2019s an explanation, then you just go right ahead and provide it.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYou can\u2019t accuse me\u2026\u201d she started screaming.<\/p>

\u201cI just did!\u201d I screamed back.<\/p>

Bedlam ensued, and the staffers were back, and Gramsci-Ramos gaveled the committee into a recess.<\/p>

\u201cHoly shit,\u201d Burro said, laughing at me. \u201cI thought I\u2019d<\/em> given her hell.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYeah,\u201d I said. \u201cProbably too much.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cAre you kidding? Right now you could go in in 2028 as easily as Diego did down in Cuba.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cNo thanks,\u201d I said.<\/p>

When the hearing finally gaveled back in, things had toned down significantly. I still got nasty questions from some of the Democrats, but most were performative, going-through-the-motions things. It was a lot of five-minute speeches with yes-or-no questions at the end.<\/p>

And the Republicans were giving me tongue-baths. I was immortal as far as they were concerned. I knew some of them; that didn\u2019t hurt.<\/p>

But toward the end, and this is when I knew the disaster was complete, Gramsci-Ramos called on Naomi Yanko-Munsch, her roommate in that house in DC\u2026 and Yanko-Munsch declined to ask me anything.<\/p>

That, I could tell, was not what Gramsci-Ramos intended to happen. She immediately skipped over the final Republican in line, a female freshman representative from suburban Indianapolis, to the objections of all of the Republicans in the room, and she called on Chad Dudenberger.<\/p>

\u201cS\u2019up, Mr. Holman?\u201d he asked me.<\/p>

\u201cNot a lot,\u201d I said. \u201cJust waiting for this to be over so I can get the hell out of here.\u201d<\/p>

He laughed.<\/p>

\u201cLook, ummm, I saw the video of Maceo doin\u2019 his thing in \u2013 how do you pronounce it? HOLE-gun?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cOl-GEEN,\u201d I said. \u201cThat tripped me up, too, at first.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cRight. So that was the first, like, pro team he played for, and he went there, and that was a massive crowd, right?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cIt was absolutely one of the most magical things I ever saw. Same thing in Santiago, same thing in Havana. I don\u2019t think there is a single American who is loved so thoroughly by our people as Diego Maceo is in Cuba.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cCooool,\u201d said Dudenberger. \u201cVERY cool story, bro.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cIs that all you have, Mr. Dudenberger?\u201d Gramsci-Ramos asked.<\/p>

\u201cNah, actually, and this is\u2026 I don\u2019t know who can answer it, but how do I caucus with the other side?\u201d<\/p>

\n

\"Illustration<\/figure>\n<\/p>

I flew home to a hero\u2019s welcome from the PGFI folks; PJ decided to throw a little party at the house, and the whole office, plus half the neighborhood, was there. My wife could barely walk; she was so pregnant, and she didn\u2019t last far into the soiree.<\/p>

Which was fine.<\/p>

I\u2019d gotten invites to fly to New York, back to D.C., to Los Angeles, and even to London to do interviews about the Cuba project. I turned everything down because I\u2019d spent enough time away from PJ for a very long while and I insisted that, at least until the baby was born, I wasn\u2019t going anywhere.<\/p>

Not to mention we were worried about reprisals.<\/p>

PJ and I had blocked out a home defense plan when we moved into the house, and that plan involved both of us. She\u2019d been in the Secret Service before I\u2019d met her, after all; she was a very good shot, and she knew her way around a tactical situation. I\u2019d hunted all my life, and I was a regular at the gun range, so while I\u2019d never killed anybody, I at least had the ability to defend myself with a firearm.<\/p>

Our plan had to change given PJ\u2019s condition, though. And Hal had texted me during the party, asking me about security.<\/p>

I called him the next morning and told him that the big plate-glass windows in the back of the house were all bulletproof; the house was wired up with cameras that went to a security service, we had two Dogo Argentinos who were just about the best guard dogs anybody could have, plus Victor and Chris were splitting shifts as outdoor security working out of Sentinel\u2019s Miami office.<\/p>

\u201cDo you have a panic room in the house?\u201d he asked.<\/p>

\u201cWhat we have is a ballistic screen that rolls to cover the entrance to the walk-in closet in the master bedroom,\u201d I said. \u201cIt makes that closet function as a panic room, though it\u2019s not as hardened as a panic room.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cOK,\u201d he said.<\/p>

\u201cOur plan is, if God forbid something happens, that PJ takes Little Mike and barricades herself in there. I\u2019ve got gun safes in the coat closet in the foyer, the master bedroom, and my office on the other side of the house, so I can get my hands on a gun pretty quick anywhere I am.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cAll right, that\u2019s fine.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWhy, Hal?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI\u2019m just being careful. You know that we\u2019ve repurposed that Chinese listening station at Bejucal into a Sentinel Security facility; we\u2019re building an international threat assessment and tracking network that\u2019ll run out of our Miami offices.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYeah. I knew that. Congrats on the new gig running the place, Hal.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThanks. But with the Avispas Negras all being out of a job, and the DI and DSE being disbanded, and the cartel thugs being displaced out of Cuba\u2026\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI know. Miami\u2019s the place to try to watch \u2018em from. I get it.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI\u2019m just on edge. It would be natural for them to come after our people.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWell, if you think I need something else, let me know.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI\u2019d say you\u2019re OK. But Roman\u2019s coming in tomorrow and we\u2019re going to go through the protocols for all of the PGFI people in case\u2026\u201d<\/p>

\u201cJust let me know, all right?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI will. By the way,\u201d he said, chuckling, \u201cI read Johnson\u2019s piece about this guy Dudenberger. What a jackass.\u201d<\/p>

Holman Media had broken the story about the Justice Department investigation into the unnamed donor who had supplied the resources for Dudenberger to place his mother, who had a moderate case of Alzheimer\u2019s Disease, in a very high-end memory care center in Alexandria, Virginia. The reporting focused on Friends of Friends, a nonprofit organization the DNC Chairman sat on the board of. Dudenberger refused comment, though a staffer who had just tendered his resignation was quoted as saying, \u201cThey bought him, and he flipped because he knew he was screwed. Maybe he\u2019ll sing to the feds and they\u2019ll let him keep his job.\u201d<\/p>

Which would have created an interesting situation. If Dudenberger had resigned from Congress, it was virtually assured the Democrats would win his seat in a special election, and then they\u2019d have 218 seats for real. So he probably would be in a position to keep his job.<\/p>

But later that day, Sibel Al-Rahman resigned her seat in Congress. She\u2019d been as useful as they could make her. And until the special election to replace her, that took the Democrats down to 216 seats.<\/p>

The country had a case of whiplash. Michaelson gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation saying that it was unfortunate that Cuba\u2019s politics seemed to be more stable than America\u2019s. And I wondered, if I was going to be as paranoid as Hal was getting paid to be, if I ought to be less worried about Cubans than the lunatics among my countrymen.<\/p>

PJ didn\u2019t want to hear it. She made a big thing of paella that night, and we just hung out with the kid and the dogs.<\/p>

\u201cWhat I want,\u201d she said, \u201cis decompression. I am gonna pop any minute, and I want no stress until then and no stress after. When Pierce calls with some new save-the-world scheme, you are gonna tell him no.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThankfully,\u201d I said, \u201che\u2019s got his hands so full doing in Cuba what he did in Guyana that I think we\u2019ve bought ourselves a good six months to a year.\u201d<\/p>

She smiled and said she didn\u2019t believe me, but she left it at that.<\/p>

And the next day was more of the same, though we did spend some time trying to agree on where in the backyard we would finally get around to installing a home for Simon\u2019s cross. It had been sitting in the utility room, which I had felt was a sin, for several months at that point, but I was sort of paralyzed by indecision as to what to do with it.<\/p>

\u201cYou should have seen how he had it, PJ,\u201d I said. \u201cIt was in this little pagoda, so he could close it off and protect it from the weather. But when he opened it, he could pray in front of it and behind it you\u2019d see the Singapore Strait and then the Singapore skyline. Our place is nice, but I can\u2019t compete with that.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cDo you hear yourself?\u201d she said. \u201cJust decide on something and let\u2019s put the cross up. If not, we\u2019re donating it to the church.\u201d<\/p>

Then that night, after I did a Dan Bongino segment from the office, I\u2019d let Thor and Sancho out \u2013 Robby had decided to crash in his doggie bed in the nursery with Little Mike \u2013 and we were on the couch. I was giving her another foot rub.<\/p>

\u201cI hope you realize that after the baby comes, these are gonna get a lot less frequent,\u201d I said. \u201cI\u2019m saying you are spoiled rotten.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI\u2019d argue,\u201d she said, \u201cbut you\u2019re probably right. By the way, on Monday we\u2019re gonna see the OB-GYN and I\u2019m gonna basically demand that she induce labor. This kid is a procrastinator.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYou\u2019re nine and a half months,\u201d I said. \u201cIt\u2019s\u2026 not freakish, but that is plenty.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cLook, Holman, you married into some very fertile people. I\u2019m one of four kids; my mom was one of five. You know that, right?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cOh yeah. I\u2019m aware.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cExcept this?\u201d She patted her belly. \u201cThis is knocking the stuffing right out of me. I don\u2019t know if I can do this again.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWell, we said we\u2019d do a boy and a girl,\u201d I said. \u201cSo\u2026\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWe said we\u2019d do at least one of each. So if this is a she, then, y\u2019know.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cUh-huh,\u201d I said.<\/p>

\u201cShould we have asked what sex the baby is?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cNah.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cOK. I mean, I want to know, but\u2026\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWait, what was that?\u201d I asked.<\/p>

\u201cWhat? Fireworks?\u201d<\/p>

\u201cYou know better than that.\u201d<\/p>

PJ\u2019s face changed, and for a moment she wasn\u2019t pregnant anymore. She leapt off the couch and was hustling to the nursery to get Little Mike per our plan. I ran for the coat closet in the foyer at the front of the house.<\/p>

\u201cThunk! Thunk!\u201d came a sound behind me. I turned and saw the two spider webs in the ballistic glass.<\/p>

Then I was opening the gun safe, grabbing and loading the Beretta 9mm pistol I was most comfortable with, and\u2026<\/p>

The loudest boom and crash I\u2019ve ever heard threw me into the side wall of the closet, knocking the breath out of me and doing a number on my eardrums.<\/p>

I was disoriented, and I staggered backward into the foyer. Then I felt a hard punch on my left shoulder. The pain woke me up, and I could see somebody coming through a big hole in the plate glass in the back of the house.<\/p>

I raised the Beretta and fired, and I could see a spray of red spread out from his head.<\/p>

He fell, and the guy behind him was disoriented by the blood hitting him in the face, and I had a clear shot at him. Center mass, got him. He was dead before he hit the ground.<\/p>

But the third guy was shooting. It happened really fast. He was shooting, I was shooting, we were both in the open. I hit him at least twice, but I felt a hard punch in the gut. And then, as I was trying to get behind the credenza in the foyer, I took another on the hip and all of a sudden, my right leg stopped working.<\/p>

I crashed into the credenza. The lamp was knocked over and fell on the floor, a bunch of PJ\u2019s decorative stuff flew everywhere, and Father Soto\u2019s rosary beads, that I kept in a ceramic bowl on that credenza, fell on the floor as the bowl shattered.<\/p>

And I went down just a few feet from that rosary.<\/p>

The third guy was limping toward me. I raised the gun and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. That was frustrating. So I pulled it again and got the same result.<\/p>

Dammit.<\/p>

I wanted to check the slide and see if it was jammed, but I couldn\u2019t move my left arm. It was just limp. It didn\u2019t work anymore.<\/p>

I tried to sit up and couldn\u2019t do that. The guy kept coming so I pulled the trigger again and nothing happened.<\/p>

And I had this incredible headache that made it hard to keep my eyes open.<\/p>

The guy was standing over me. He was holding his side with one hand. And he was bleeding pretty profusely from his thigh.<\/p>

And he reached in his pocket and took out a clip.<\/p>

\u201cI betchu wish you had one-a these, cabron,\u201d he said in a thick Cuban accent.<\/p>

He reloaded, and then he took off his ski mask, and I recognized him. This was Lido, the skinny thug who\u2019d been with Cabrillo. How did he get all the way here, in my house?<\/p>

I pulled the trigger again. It was all I could think to do.<\/p>

\u201cI fucking shot you,\u201d I said, my voice barely a whisper. \u201cYou\u2019re gonna die.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI fuckin\u2019 shot you, too, maricon<\/em>. We both gonna die.\u201d<\/p>

He laughed, and he pointed his gun at me. I closed my eyes.<\/p>

And then I heard three shots. But they came from behind me, not in front of me.<\/p>

I opened my eyes, and there was Lido, lying on the ground in front of me, the left side of his head caved in.<\/p>

\u201cPJ!\u201d I heard somebody yelling. \u201cPJ! If you\u2019re here, get out here right now!\u201d<\/p>

It was\u2026 Roman. I recognized his voice.<\/p>

I tried to turn my head to look at him. To say something. I couldn\u2019t.<\/p>

Nothing was working.<\/p>

Then he was turning me over on my back. Looking me over. Robby was licking my face, a panicked energy about him. It irritated me. I wanted him to stop and I tried to tell him so, but nothing came out.<\/p>

Because nothing was working. And I was getting more and more pissed off about that. Why wasn\u2019t anything working?<\/p>

\u201cOK, Mike,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s over, buddy. EMS is coming and we\u2019re gonna get you all fixed up. You stay with me, you hear?\u201d<\/p>

I looked at him. I blinked once. Blinking once was yes, right?<\/p>

Then I saw Father Soto\u2019s beads. I reached for them. I could move my right arm, but it was so damned slow.<\/p>

Then PJ was near me. She was crying. I didn\u2019t like the look in her eyes. I thought, \u201cI don\u2019t ever want to see this look again.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cHow did this happen?\u201d she was screaming at Roman. \u201cHow could\u2026\u201d<\/p>

\u201cI\u2019ve been calling you for an hour!\u201d said Roman. \u201cYou and<\/em> Mike! Couldn\u2019t get an answer!\u201d<\/p>

And I thought, oh, shit. I forgot to take my phone off silent after the Bongino hit.<\/em><\/p>

He was telling her that they\u2019d tracked cell phones. That they knew who the attackers were. That he was there because the system in Miami worked.<\/p>

\u201cBut you\u2019ve got to fight, Mike,\u201d he said. \u201cFight, boy. Stay with us.\u201d<\/p>

I blinked at him, and then I reached for Father Soto\u2019s beads again. Then PJ was in my face, filling up my vision.<\/p>

\u201cMike,\u201d she said, \u201cdon\u2019t you DARE die on me. You hear me? DON\u2019T YOU DARE DIE ON ME.\u201d<\/p>

\n

\"Detailed<\/figure>\n<\/p>

Epilogue<\/h2>

Miami, Florida \u2014 July 29, 2027<\/em><\/p>

I didn\u2019t die on PJ.<\/p>

I gave it one hell of a shot, but I didn\u2019t die. God must have pulled the hook out of my mouth and thrown me back in the water, but let me tell you, I got a good damned look at purgatory.<\/p>

I got that at St. Mary\u2019s Hospital in West Palm, which is where they brought me. I\u2019d lost so much blood that they had to give me transfusion after transfusion just to keep me alive while they tried to stabilize me. I was in a coma for three days.<\/p>

I had to have major surgery \u2013 well, multiple major surgeries \u2013 in three places.<\/p>

That bullet which tore through my shoulder blew up my humeral head, and I got a standard shoulder arthroplasty out of it. That was basically an afterthought, though.<\/p>

Compared to the wound to the abdomen. That bullet lodged in my small intestine, and they had to go in and section off three feet of the thing and stitch it back together. I fought off sepsis while I was in the ICU. They fed me through an IV tube for weeks while my bowels healed. I lost 54 pounds.<\/p>

And that wasn\u2019t the worst of it. The worst was the bullet to my hip. It shattered my pelvic bone, and the shards caused massive internal bleeding. Transfusion after transfusion while they stabilized the pelvic area, and for a while, the doctor told me they thought they had a losing battle on their hands. The doctor later told me it was a similar wound to the one Steve Scalise suffered. And after I was out of the woods, Scalise came to see me. He was on the way to a confab at Trumbull\u2019s place in Palm Beach and he dropped by.<\/p>

He didn\u2019t say much. He didn\u2019t have to.<\/p>

I was seventeen days in the ICU. Eleven weeks overall at St. Mary\u2019s. And then an unknown period of time in rehab before I can say I\u2019ve made a full recovery.<\/p>

Who am I kidding? I\u2019ll never recover from this. Every time I close my eyes, I see that sonofabitch standing over me.<\/p>

I\u2019m walking again, though. Little Mike started walking without help well before I did. But it\u2019s gradually coming. The physical therapy works, though there\u2019s so much damned pain. And I absolutely refuse to become an opioid addict, so I bear it.<\/p>

I bear it with alcohol. I can tell that makes PJ nervous, but she tries not to say anything.<\/p>

When I came to, I found out what had happened. PJ told me.<\/p>

The team that came for us was using a cellphone jammer. It wouldn\u2019t have mattered that my phone was on silent \u2013 it was \u2013 or that PJ had left hers in the nursery and forgotten about it. The calls wouldn\u2019t have gotten through anyway.<\/p>

There were five of them. I killed those first two who came through the hole in the glass, Roman killed Lido, and PJ got the fourth guy who made for the bedroom while I was trading lead with Lido. She\u2019d pulled the ballistic shield mostly closed but left a gun slit, and when he came into her line of sight, entering the bedroom, she\u2019d blasted him in the temple.<\/p>

The fifth guy was the boss. He was Cuban like Lido, but he wasn\u2019t like Lido. That guy was a major in the Avispas Negras, the Black Wasps \u2013 Cuban special forces. Those guys had been put out of business when the regime fell; the regular army didn\u2019t want anything to do with them and put them out on the street. And the boss had set up a hide with a clear shot to the front door of my house, and when the rest of the team came through the back, with enough noise to spook Victor, who was parked in the front driveway, he\u2019d popped Victor in the lung as he got out of the Tahoe.<\/p>

Poor guy. Victor was three doors down from me at St. Mary\u2019s. He made them wheel him in to see me as soon as both of us could take visitors.<\/p>

\u201cI\u2019m sorry, Mr. Holman,\u201d he said. \u201cI should\u2019ve\u2014\u201d<\/p>

\u201cStop right there,\u201d I said. \u201cYou took a bullet for me. You don\u2019t apologize for that. Not to me, not ever.\u201d<\/p>

He didn\u2019t say anything else. He didn\u2019t need to.<\/p>

Roman told me the boss had bought it that night as well. He didn\u2019t get shot; \u201che got run the fuck over.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cWhat seems like happened,\u201d Roman said, \u201cwas that he was waiting on that front door. Anybody came through it, he\u2019d take \u2018em down. But when he heard all the gunfire in the house from you and your boy Lido, I think he realized his fire team was in trouble, so he left his hide to join the fight. Guy did everything right, but his timing was poor, because I clocked him as I came up the drive and he wasn\u2019t any kinda match for a Dodge Charger.\u201d<\/p>

I asked if there was any evidence of a chain of command at work.<\/p>

\u201cWell, you won\u2019t like the answer I have for you,\u201d said Roman. \u201cWe don\u2019t know who the boss\u2019s boss is. We don\u2019t know what kind of network still exists. But what we do know? Not great.\u201d<\/p>

He told me the other three assassins, the two I killed and the one PJ dispatched, were Americans. Antifa. And he explained that their means of transportation to my dock was a Cuban-made submersible drug boat.<\/p>

When Pierce\u2019s facility at Bejucal went online in December, they realized that they could track those submersibles by the GPS transponders they used. Sentinel Security managed to break the encryption on those transponders. As a result, the Navy had taken three of them out on the high seas just by using old-fashioned depth charges.<\/p>

And one of those boats was sitting in a swamp in Islamorada, having dropped off its 10-ton load of coke, but its crew didn\u2019t want to chance heading back where they came from. Lido and the three Antifa lunatics, Roman theorized, had commandeered the thing, turned off its transponder, and sailed it around the South Florida coast up to Jupiter.<\/p>

Pierce\u2019s surveillance system picked up Lido\u2019s phone \u2013 he was still using a TODO phone, which tells you I was nearly killed by an abject moron \u2013 when it popped on just off West Palm Beach. I\u2019m assuming they used that phone for GPS; if not, they\u2019d rehearsed sailing a boat to my back dock. Which is a frightening thought.<\/p>

I guess Boss Estrada made his way to the front of my house by car. But his car was never found, which is no bueno.<\/em><\/p>

So I don\u2019t get to feel like it\u2019s over.<\/p>

And PJ won\u2019t set foot in our house. We cleaned it up, cleaned it out, put most of our stuff in storage, and the rest came with us to this condo in the sky in Edgewater where we\u2019re living now. It\u2019s nice, but it\u2019s a prison. We can\u2019t go anywhere, not even to walk the dogs, without a team of bodyguards.<\/p>

That idyllic home she and I built is shattered. It\u2019s gone. The Jupiter house is for sale, and we\u2019re having \u201cdiscussions\u201d about what we\u2019ll do next. Probably a house on a mountain in North Georgia, or maybe something defensible in the exurbs outside of Nashville. Pierce absolutely demanded that we let him buy us the house.<\/p>

\u201cMoney is no object,\u201d he said. It never is with him. And while I want to say no, the best I can come up with is \u201cnot yet.\u201d<\/p>

Because I don\u2019t know what I want to do. I\u2019m still so pissed off about losing Jupiter. I don\u2019t even want to think about it. Besides, right now all I need is a comfy couch, a comfy bed, a well-stocked bar, and a treadmill to torture myself on so that it\u2019s not immediately apparent that I\u2019m a cripple.<\/p>

But the next house won\u2019t be on the water. Neither of us is comfortable with that. Thirty stories up in this skyscraper we\u2019re living in now, and we\u2019re still nervous about somebody hitting us from the water with an RPG like the one that destroyed our home in Jupiter.<\/p>

And my heart is broken over that.<\/p>

Or maybe that\u2019s not quite accurate. I\u2019m not heartbroken. I\u2019m furious<\/em>. I have a barely-controlled rage about me. And I know what Simon meant when he said I was going to need to lean into my faith. It\u2019ll take a lot of prayer for me to let this \u2013 what happened, and what\u2019s still potentially out there \u2013 go.<\/p>

As dire as it sounds, though, we\u2019re going to survive this. When I came out of my coma, it was to meet my daughter Mary Pauline Holman. She might have been slow into the world, but one look in those eyes of hers is all the proof I need that she\u2019s going to be the quickest one of us.<\/p>

PJ says she\u2019s happy to try again. It might not be a bad idea. I want to surround myself with as many allies as I can.<\/p>

Cuba under Diego is the hottest thing going. They\u2019re talking about the U.S. Coast Guard opening a base at Cienfuegos, Toyota signed a deal to make pickup trucks in Holgu\u00edn, Eli Lilly is setting up a big production facility east of Havana that\u2019ll employ six thousand people. In the fall, they\u2019re going to have local elections across the country, but the politicians aren\u2019t going to have a lot to do.<\/p>

I wish that was true in this country.<\/p>

But even there, some good things did happen.<\/p>

Dolores Gramsci-Ramos probably had an even worse January than I did. The week after I got shot, after Chad Dudenberger switched parties and John Michaelson regained the speaker\u2019s gavel, she got stripped of all her committee assignments. The word was that was the deal Michaelson cut with Hakim to keep her from being expelled. Naomi Yanko-Munsch moved out of their little pleasure pad in D.C., and then Gramsci-Ramos took a \u201cleave of absence\u201d from Congress about a week before the news broke that the DOJ was investigating her for a FARA violation. Menendez, her former chief of staff, agreed to plead guilty; the rumor was that he was rolling over big-time, and not just against his boss.<\/p>

Trumbull called me and said that when I could make it to the White House, he was going to give Pierce and me and Diego the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I\u2019d tell you that I told him something noble like \u201cgive it to the Cuban people,\u201d but I didn\u2019t.<\/p>

I want that damned thing. I think I earned the shit out of it. And when I told him so, he laughed.<\/p>

And then he agreed.<\/p>

\u201cI wish I could give you a fuckin\u2019 Purple Heart, Mike,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s what you earned. And believe me, I know.\u201d<\/p>

And we did donate Simon\u2019s cross to the church.<\/p>

But not our church.<\/p>

It now sits above the altar at the Iglesia Parroquial Mayor del Esp\u00edritu Santo in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba, which is the church where Father Soto tended to his flock before those animals got to him. I thought it would be one way to honor Simon \u2013 and the priest.<\/p>

I kept Father Soto\u2019s beads, though. I\u2019m never going to have them too far away to reach again.<\/p>

\n

\"Black<\/figure>\n<\/p>

Before <\/strong><\/em>The Necessary Men<\/strong>, Mike Holman had already learned that trouble has a way of finding him \u2013 and that doing the right thing usually makes it worse. The previous Mike Holman novels deliver a hard-charging mix of intrigue, danger, and humor. Catch up on Mike Holman\u2019s earlier adventures \u2014 and discover the road that led him straight into the Cuban crossfire.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>

Read more The Spectacle Ep. 465: The Left and Right Are WRONG About Lindsay Clancy<\/a><\/p><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A most wonderful article<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1938,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-necessary-men"],"yoast_head":"\nScott McKay\u2019s The Necessary Men \u2014 Episode 10: Consequence - National Logistics Post<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nationallogisticspost.com\/?p=1946\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Scott McKay\u2019s The Necessary Men \u2014 Episode 10: Consequence - National Logistics Post\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A most wonderful article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/nationallogisticspost.com\/?p=1946\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"National Logistics Post\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-09-12T05:08:36+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/nationallogisticspost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/c26e98d6fd9a038e8d4a788b6742c2e4.png\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"300\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"198\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"67 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationallogisticspost.com\\\/?p=1946#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationallogisticspost.com\\\/?p=1946\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationallogisticspost.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/af6e6ad9b3cf5bfe495dc5541ee6a5cc\"},\"headline\":\"Scott McKay\u2019s The Necessary Men \u2014 Episode 10: Consequence\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-12T05:08:36+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationallogisticspost.com\\\/?p=1946\"},\"wordCount\":13450,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationallogisticspost.com\\\/?p=1946#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationallogisticspost.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/81a3f7ccba0643e213a5cb563a6d0cef.png\",\"articleSection\":[\"The Necessary Men\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/nationallogisticspost.com\\\/?p=1946#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationallogisticspost.com\\\/?p=1946\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationallogisticspost.com\\\/?p=1946\",\"name\":\"Scott McKay\u2019s The Necessary Men \u2014 Episode 10: Consequence - 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