The issue is never the issue.

The appearance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, before the Pfizer Tribunal at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Thursday reminded me of the truth of that famous saying of Saul Alinsky.

The issue is never the issue. What is always the issue, according to that community organizer nonpareil, is power.

Ostensibly, Secretary Kennedy came to answer questions about COVID (remember that scam?) and the performance of people at—or, rather, recently at—the Centers for Disease Control. He recently fired the new, freshly confirmed director, Susan Monarez, for being “untrustworthy,” and some 1000 staffers walked out in solidarity or—what’s that other word beginning with an “s”?—Oh, right: in a snit.

One by one, the senators, mostly Democrats but also a few Republicans, screamed and gesticulated at Kennedy, accused him of being a “charlatan” and worse, and demanded that he resign or be fired.

One friendly questioner asked whether Kennedy thought that the response to COVID had been “politicized.” Indeed, it had, Kennedy said. Moreover, the government and the media lied to the public about many aspects of the disease, beginning with its origin. (No bats were involved in this entertainment.)

The public was also aggressively lied to about the danger of the virus—overwhelmingly, the only vulnerable parts of the population were the elderly, the obese, and the diabetic. We were lied to about the efficacy of “social distancing”—it was a made-up nostrum—and cloth masks. They are worse than useless. I still see damaged souls driving around in cars or walking outside by themselves wearing a mask. You might as well, as some wag proposed, wear a seat belt while walking around as a sort of safety blanket.

But the largest load of lies concerned the various COVID vaccines. Kennedy’s views about the efficacy and safety of vaccines are often caricatured. You may or may not always agree with him, but his views are nuanced, well-informed, and subtle. Several senators seemed surprised that Kennedy could agree with the proposition that President Trump deserves the Nobel Prize for overseeing Operation Warp Speed, which produced a spate of COVID vaccines in a matter of a few months, while also remaining highly critical of the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines.

But there is no contradiction. Remember, the public was assured by everyone from President Biden on down that the vaccine would prevent one from contracting COVID and also prevent one from transmitting the disease. “When people are vaccinated, they’re not going to get infected,” quoth Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the NIH. “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” agreed Joe Biden. “Vaccinated people do not carry the virus and don’t get sick,” said Rochelle Walensky, former Director of the CDC. Et ad nauseam cetera.

The public was also told, untruthfully, that the vaccine was more potent than the natural immunity one achieved from contracting the disease. Moreover, the public was told that everyone was at risk and needed the vaccine—and many doses—when only a tiny fraction of the population was at risk. Furthermore, the public was left in the dark about the serious health dangers the vaccine posed to young men and women.

The point to bear in mind here is that most of this misinformation was not the result of innocent mistakes. It was the fruit of deliberate lies.

So was what we might call the kinetic side of the government’s draconian response to COVID: closing schools, work, and social gathering places, shuttering the economy, and seriously handicapping large swathes of the population.

We await a full accounting of the social and economic damage done to Western societies that capitulated to the totalitarian zeal of the health police. Aspiring social engineers like Klaus Schwab, founder and former head of the World Economic Forum, were among those who welcomed the COVID epidemic as an opportunity to embark on a “Great Reset” in which all of society would be remade according to the socialist blueprint furnished by Davos.

But in an important sense, the criticism of Kennedy for his views on COVID, vaccines, and the staff at the CDC was merely a pretext. The issue is never the issue. Yes, Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has received $1,224,145 from Big Pharma, did her psychotic squaw routine against Kennedy. Bernie Sanders ($1,953,613) and Ron Wyden ($1,207,873) joined in the war dance, as did many others.

But the thing to appreciate about the melodrama is that it had very little to do with COVID or the CDC or even U.S. health policy writ large. The real protagonist was someone who wasn’t even present, viz. Donald Trump. The fire was directed at Kennedy, but the ultimate target was Trump. The strategy is to discredit and then destroy Kennedy, a potent outgrowth of the Trump administration. If the Dems can destroy Kennedy, he would represent the outer skin of the onion. They would then proceed against other Trump lieutenants.

Robert Kennedy wants to find out why Americans are fatter, sicker, and more plagued by chronic disease now than ever before. He wants to know why cases of autism have skyrocketed and why 8 out of 10 young adults are not fit enough to join the military. Is it because of what they eat, the medicines they are forced to take, or something else? The Democrats want to play what Bill Clinton (and later Hillary) called “the politics of personal destruction.”

The issue is never the issue, but determined truth-tellers like Robert Kennedy and his boss in the White House are a demonstration that “the issue” can be made to succumb to the awful clarity of common sense, bolstered by that other real issue, the executive power of the presidency.