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  "description": "This isn’t going away. It’s going to get worse. We haven’t even scratched the surface of the rot. And you can’t rebuild trust until you cut all of it out.",
  "path": "/america-is-united-on-only-one-issue/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-12T00:30:01.000Z",
  "site": "https://goodoil.news",
  "tags": [
    "**James Hickman**",
    "Sovereign Man"
  ],
  "textContent": "**James Hickman**\n _James Hickman (aka Simon Black) is an international investor, entrepreneur, and founder of Sovereign Man._\n\nIn 1431, a boy named Rodrigo was born to a minor noble family in Valencia, Spain.\n\nHe was bright, ambitious, and lucky. His uncle Alonso was a bishop with powerful connections who had climbed the ranks of the Catholic Church.\n\nUncle Alonso leaned on those powerful connections in the year 1455 when he was elected Pope Callixtus III.\n\nThe new pope was considered pious and personally austere – well respected by all. But he was even more committed to the most important cause of all: ensuring his family’s power and legacy.\n\nSo, one of the pope’s first official acts was to promote his nephew Rodrigo (now 25-years-old) to be a cardinal.\n\nRodrigo did not share his uncle’s piety. In fact the new cardinal was a known womanizer, spending the next several decades collecting mistresses and fathering at least seven children.\n\nGiven the family’s power, Rodrigo didn’t even bother denying his transgressions; rather than keep his bastards in the shadows, Rodrigo publicly acknowledged his illegitimate children, including sons Cesare and Giovanni, and a daughter, Lucrezia.\n\nNone of this stopped his rise to power, either.\n\nBy 1492, Rodrigo had been named vice-chancellor of the Catholic Church – effectively the second most powerful man in Christendom.\n\nHis uncle had long since passed away at that point, and several popes had come and gone in the interim. So when Pope Innocent VIII died in August 1492, Rodrigo saw an opportunity to orchestrate the most openly corrupt papal election in history.\n\nRodrigo bought the papacy outright, distributing silver, castles, and lucrative church offices to every cardinal whose vote he needed.\n\nAnd it worked. Rodrigo Borgia became Pope Alexander VI.\n\nHis corruption and depravity would make “Borgia” one of the most infamous names in Europe.\n\nOne of his illegitimate sons, Cesare (aged just 17) was made a cardinal. Another son Giovanni was made Duke of Gandía. Daughter Lucrezia, just 12, was betrothed to a nobleman whose alliance Rodrigo needed.\n\nThe blatant nepotism was scandalous, but that was barely the tip of the iceberg.\n\nIn 1497, Giovanni’s body was fished from the Tiber River with nine stab wounds: suspicion fell immediately on his brother Cesare, the cardinal. Rodrigo shut down any investigation into the murder.\n\nThe following year, Cesare renounced his position as cardinal and took command of his murdered brother’s armies.\n\nAnd with daddy’s money, Cesare conquered city after city across central Italy, slaughtering rivals with a ruthlessness that impressed none other than Niccolò Machiavelli, a Florentine diplomat at the time.\n\nMachiavelli was sent to observe Cesare’s campaigns firsthand. Years later, he’d use Cesare as his model ruler in _The Prince_.\n\nMeanwhile, Lucrezia’s second husband was strangled in his bed – almost certainly on Cesare’s orders – after he’d outlived his usefulness.\n\nRumors of incest between Lucrezia and her father and brothers circulated as well; they were never proven, but the family scandals were so widespread and well-documented that even the most salacious accusations seemed plausible.\n\nOne reliable account of Borgia depravity comes from Johann Burchard, the Vatican’s official master of ceremonies, who kept meticulous diaries of papal events.\n\nOn October 30, 1501, he recorded what became known as the “Ballet of the Chestnuts,” in which 50 courtesans were invited to a banquet that devolved into a sort of ‘sex Olympics’.\n\nPrizes were awarded to the men who could have sex with the most women – all while Pope Alexander VI watched alongside his children.\n\nThis was supposed to be the holiest man on the planet… who inscribed policy that told all of medieval Europe how to live, how to worship and how to be moral.\n\nInstead, the Borgias murdered, bribed and betrayed. They turned the Vatican into a brothel and the papacy into a weapon. They even had their own signature poison for their enemies.\n\n(Rodrigo was not shy about having critics and detractors executed for heresy.)\n\nAnd yet, even as depraved and corrupt as the Borgias were, they were never accused of child sex trafficking.\n\nNo… that level of evil has been reserved for modern sleazeballs. Because the more of these Epstein files that are released, the more it appears that every major institution, from government to academia to big business, is overrun with evil, disgusting perverts who, at a minimum, knowingly associated with a convicted pedo… and at worse, may have participated themselves.\n\nAmong them:\n\nLarry Summers – former US Treasury Secretary and President of Harvard, i.e., the institution that became the epicenter of the social justice movement that now tells the rest of America how to think about race, gender, and morality.\n\nNoam Chomsky, the man who spent 50 years as the intellectual godfather of the American left, lecturing the world about power, ethics, and imperialism.\n\nBill Gates, who has wagged his finger at the world for everything from vaccines to carbon emissions.\n\nThe people involved have tried everything to make this story go away. I’m sure they hoped Epstein’s ‘suicide’ would close the case and all would be forgotten.\n\nThink about all the ways in which our attention has been hijacked since Epstein’s death. Covid, George Floyd, BLM riots, January 6th, Ukraine, immigration, Gaza, political prosecutions… every possible distraction imaginable.\n\nAnd the Epstein story still won’t die.\n\nThis is extraordinary given that America is so deeply fractured on EVERY other issue… except this one.\n\nIt turns out that people actually do care – that Americans, whether left, right, or center, want to know if their leaders are depraved pedos.\n\nFrom the angriest MAGA voter in fentanyl country to the wokest, purple-haired activist in San Francisco, they/them agree on exactly one thing: it is outrageous that some of the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world were raping kids. And none of them has gone to prison for it.\n\nThis isn’t going away. It’s going to get worse. We haven’t even scratched the surface of the rot. And you can’t rebuild trust until you cut all of it out.\n\nFourteen years after Rodrigo (Pope Alexander VI) died, a German monk named Martin Luther nailed his complaints about corruption to the door of a church in Germany. And within a generation, the Reformation had torn the old order apart.\n\nIt will eventually get better. But this is step one in the recovery process: admitting there’s a problem.\n\nThis article was originally published by Sovereign Man.",
  "title": "America Is United on Only One Issue",
  "updatedAt": "2026-02-12T00:30:01.000Z"
}