Remarks delivered at the NO KINGS rally — Centennial Plaza, Wake Forest, NC — March 28, 2026.
Tom Baker IV is the publisher of Wake Forest Matters, a Navy veteran, and a strategic analyst who has spent the last decade studying political violence and extremism.
I. Where I Come From
My name is Tom Baker the Fourth. I was born and raised right here in Wake Forest. My family has called this area home since at least 1730, nearly three hundred years on this soil, before this was a state, before it was a country. I am a 12th-generation American, a Navy veteran, a civic journalist, and a strategic analyst who has spent the last decade studying political violence and extremism.
I was 17 years old on September 11th, 2001, sitting in Coach Steve Rivers’s weight room at Wakefield High School when we watched the planes hit the towers. Both of my grandfathers served in the Army during World War II. One nearly froze to death in training at Camp Hale, Colorado. men died up there before they ever saw an enemy. My grandfather Harold fought in the Pacific: the Luzon campaign, the Battle of Baguio in the Philippines. When Japan surrendered, he went ashore with the occupation force and walked through cities that had been reduced to ash and rubble. He saw what it looks like when the world goes all the way.
A Hundred Years of Perspective
Harold turns one hundred years old this July. I spent New Year’s Eve with him as he entered his hundredth year. We talked about what he is watching happen in the world right now — about the parallels to what he lived through. He finds them disturbing. A man who survived the Pacific and walked through the ruins of modern war, with a century of perspective, and what he sees right now disturbs him.
That generation paid everything, believing it was the last time. Never again. Here we are.
Enlisting felt like following in their footsteps, duty, service, protecting something worth protecting. When I left for boot camp in 2003, I thought I understood what I was walking into. Eleven deployments proved me wrong. Today, the people I served with are watching their kids enlist into the same machine.
II. How We Got Here — and Who Kept Us Here
After my deployments, I studied political science because I needed to understand how I ended up in a war built on lies. What I found was that Iraq was not an accident or a mistake. Instead, it was the latest chapter of a story that started in 1945, and that every administration since, Democrat and Republican alike, has kept writing.
February 14th, 1945: FDR’s ship drops anchor in the Great Bitter Lake on the Suez Canal. Roosevelt meets the Saudi king. The deal was simple — American military protection for the Saudi monarchy in exchange for access to Gulf oil. That handshake is the original entanglement. From that moment forward, American foreign policy in the Middle East has been organized around one thing: controlling the oil. Democracy was never the priority. Human rights were never the priority. Oil was.
A Pattern That Never Changed
In 1953, the U.S. overthrew Iran’s elected government to protect that oil. Washington installed a king and trained his secret police. He fell in 1979, and the blowback produced the hostage crisis, Desert One, and forty years of hostility that the United States created and then acted surprised by. In 1980, the Carter Doctrine formalized it: the Gulf is a vital American interest to be defended by military force. Every president since has honored that commitment with American lives, and every one of them handed the next a worse situation than they inherited.
In Baquba, Diyala province, on election day in Iraq in 2010, I was part of a Naval Special Warfare task force supporting the 5th Special Forces Group. That year, the top leadership of al-Qaeda in Iraq was killed and called a victory. In reality, clearing that leadership paved the path for ISIS to rise. By 2015, I was back at Al Asad Air Base in Anbar Province as a contractor, resetting the same base for anti-ISIS operations — declared victory, left, then back again four years later fighting the enemy our victory had created. In 2014, I was in Afghanistan during their presidential election, thirteen years into a war supposed to be over in months, asking the same question I’d asked in Iraq: what for? The government we spent twenty years and two trillion dollars building collapsed in eleven days in 2021.
This war on Iran follows the same pattern. Two days before the strikes began, American and Iranian negotiators were meeting in Geneva through Omani mediation, talks were active, and a deal was within reach. Despite that, the strikes were ordered anyway. This war did not have to happen. Moreover, the people who started it will not fight it. They never do.
III. To Those Still Serving
We did not sign up to be deployed against the people of this country. ICE raids that tear parents from children — that is not what we signed up for. Operating extrajudicial detention camps on American soil, serving as anyone’s personal enforcement arm for a political agenda — none of that is what the oath means. The oath is to the Constitution, not to a president, not to a party.
The Gap Between Lawful and Just
I wish someone had told me clearly, when I was in, that legality and morality are not the same thing. I was trained to follow lawful orders and refuse unlawful ones. However, nobody told me how to reckon with the gap between a lawful order and a just one — how to sit with the knowledge that everything you did was technically within the rules, inside a war that should never have been authorized. That moral injury is real. It does not go away.
If you are currently serving and receiving orders that do not sit right with you, know this: you have more options than they tell you. Questions can be asked. A JAG officer can be consulted. Document what you see. The National Guard should not be operating in American cities, and governors have the authority to refuse those deployments. Those options are real.
IV. What This War Is Costing You at Home
The Strait of Hormuz carries twenty percent of the world’s oil. It is now contested — and that should surprise no one. Every serious strategist who looked at this situation knew that closing the Strait was Iran’s primary lever. The people who ordered these strikes knew that, too. They did not care.
The Grocery Store and the Gas Pump
Gas is already up — you felt it this week. Food prices follow an energy shock by thirty to sixty days, and that lag is almost up. What you will pay at the grocery store next month was set in motion on February 28th. Beyond the gas pump, consider urea — the primary nitrogen fertilizer used on virtually every row crop in this state. Because urea is manufactured from natural gas, when energy prices spike, urea prices spike too. North Carolina farmers were already facing punishing input costs before February 28th. Urea is also a component of diesel exhaust fluid — DEF — which every school bus and farm tractor in this county must use to operate legally. When DEF prices go up, so does the cost of running every school in this district.
Notably, the major producers of urea include Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Gulf states — the same region this war is destabilizing, the same chokepoint every serious strategist knew would be disrupted the moment the first bomb dropped. The fertilizer for your food, the fluid your school buses run on, the steel for your fire station — all of it connected to the same region, all of it knowable, all of it known. They did it anyway.
What the Numbers Mean for Wake Forest
Right here in Wake Forest, property values have risen fifty-three percent, with legacy residents priced out of their own homes. Capital needs over the next five years total $532 million — $91.7 million in year one alone. Fire Station Six is coming, and every bid package for steel, concrete, and materials is priced in commodity markets tied to the same energy supply chains this war is disrupting right now. Additionally, $23.4 million in bond proceeds must be borrowed this October, and the interest rate on that debt is set by bond markets being whipsawed by oil shock and war inflation. With a total budget of $139 million and debt service already at $11.4 million — twelve cents of every dollar collected — this war is making every one of those numbers worse, right now, this year, in this town.
Who Pays the Price
For the young family: your grocery bill is going up, and the school bus costs more to operate. For the first-time homebuyer: the Fed was signaling rate cuts earlier this year, but war inflation killed that signal. Every quarter point the Fed cannot cut is roughly $150–$200 a month on a median home mortgage in this market. For the single mother: she feels every one of those pressures with no margin to absorb any of them. For the retiree on fixed income: Social Security adjustments always lag behind actual costs, and their property taxes already went up fifty-three percent.
There is a phrase for this — one we all learned in school: taxation without representation. Every one of those costs is a tax levied on you without your consent, by a president who did not ask Congress, and by a Congress that has so far refused to use the authority the law gives it to stop him. The founders went to war over this principle — and it is precisely why we are here today, and why it says No Kings.
Where This Is Headed
A U.S. submarine already torpedoed and sank an Iranian warship off the coast of Sri Lanka — the first torpedo sinking of a warship since World War II. Russia is fighting a land war in Europe, and the strategic linkages between Moscow and Tehran are not coincidental. The 82nd Airborne is deploying three thousand troops to the region. The Army has raised its enlistment age to 42 and is issuing waivers for disqualifying factors. I watched the same thing happen before Iraq. I know what that pattern means.
An air campaign against Iran is not a strategy — it is an opening move. Iran has ninety million people, three times Iraq’s population. Its terrain makes Afghanistan look manageable, and it has a professional military, ballistic missiles, and proxy forces across the entire region. When the air campaign stalls — and it will stall — the pressure to put troops on the ground will be enormous. A ground invasion of Iran would be the largest American military operation since World War II. The recruiting waivers, the raised enlistment age, the 82nd staging in theater — these are not coincidences. They are preparation.
In 1956, Britain and France launched a military operation to seize control of the Suez Canal. That campaign ended their standing as world powers almost overnight. The United States forced them to stop, and the world declared: this is not who you are allowed to be anymore. That moment marked the end of the British Empire. What we are watching right now is our Suez.
V. What Needs to Happen — Right Now
On April 28th — thirty-one days from today — the sixty-day War Powers clock runs out on this war. The law requires Congress to vote on whether to authorize it. Ted Budd and Thom Tillis already voted once to let this president keep going without authorization, and ten of our fourteen House members did the same. What they do next will be on the record for a long time.
Before you leave Centennial Plaza today, make one phone call.
- Ted Budd (R-NC): 202-224-3154
- Thom Tillis (R-NC): 202-224-6342
- Find your House member: house.gov
Vote yes on the War Powers resolution. End this war. And make sure they know you are watching. Thirty seconds, a staffer answers, and every call is tallied. Make yours today.
My grandfather turns one hundred this July. He survived the Pacific believing never again. I gave eleven deployments to this country believing in the institutions he fought to protect. The people I served with are sending their kids into the same machine. We are not going to let that stand.
Tom Baker IV is the publisher of Wake Forest Matters and a Navy veteran with eleven deployments. He is a Wake Forest native and 12th-generation North Carolinian. Tips and story ideas: publisher@wakeforestmatters.com
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Tom Baker IV is the publisher of Wake Forest Matters, Wake Forest’s only independent local newsroom. A Wake Forest native, Navy veteran, and intelligence professional, Tom launched Wake Forest Matters to bring serious accountability journalism to his hometown. Tips and story ideas: publisher@wakeforestmatters.com