America needs political Narcan

As society's breathing slows, the light of democracy and the American dream fades. The voice of hope becomes a distant memory of what could have been if Democrats had just listened to the people.

I have spent my entire life as a solution provider, both in business and on more than a few occasions in my personal life, but America, I have to say, you have me experiencing an inbound sense of despair. You will never meet a person for whom the glass is half full more than me, but the last 72 hours have shaken me to my very core. I remember back in January 2021 being shocked as I witnessed a brazen attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power, a brazen bid to overturn the will of the people and seize power. Only for right-wing politicians and talking heads to tell the world it had merely witnessed a ‘tourist day out’ and a ‘love fest’.

It was the very first time in my 61 years that I was left questioning my own sanity. The same man whose gross incompetence in managing the COVID pandemic led to the unnecessary deaths of an estimated 200,000 Americans, is now defending the murder of a religious white 37-year-old US citizen and mom, attempting to flee from a masked, openly aggressive ICE officer intent on dragging her from her vehicle. An action which saw her being falsely painted as a ‘domestic terrorist’. It is a reflection of the times in which we live that I have to deliberately use the words ‘white’ and ‘religious’ to describe the murder victim, to emphasise the fact that nobody is safe when it comes to having the audacity to dissent as permitted under the Constitution.

For those studying propaganda, this is indeed a golden age, as the world endures one of the most sophisticated and carefully crafted attempts to seize the minds of a population. I was among the very first people on social media to warn about Project 2025. I was ridiculed and accused of catastrophizing, a foreigner who should keep his nose out of US politics. I might not be the most widely read author on Substack, but I challenge anyone to look at my contribution to the political conversation since 2019 and tell me I didn’t get it right 90% of the time.

I’ve learned so much over the time I have been commenting on US politics. Taking up residence on Substack was the best decision I've ever made, because it finally allowed me to speak the unvarnished truth without fear or favour, something I never had the ability to do while living inside the Democratic bubble. It wasn’t until I could zoom out and take a more objective, pragmatic view that the fog cleared. This has allowed me to view American politics through a lens that had eluded me for half a decade.

From the moment I stepped into the media world of American politics, it took me almost 2 years to be taken seriously. But thanks to Substack, I believe I’ve built an audience that looks to me for fact-based, deeply researched, often brutal commentary. I wake up each morning around 6 am, spend a couple of hours listening to and reading the news, as well as scanning social media to get a feel for issues that catch my attention. The day ahead is spent researching and gathering resources to support my thoughts and feelings on my chosen subject, before sitting down to write.

I am blessed to be a retired, outspoken guy who has found an outlet for his passion for geopolitics with a focus on social justice. When I first got into US politics, my intention was to try to contribute to Trump's removal from the White House in 2020 and then walk away to focus on UK and European politics. Not sure what happened, but here I’ve remained. In the early days, I mixed social media commentary with the creation of political Ads in support of the Biden-Harris campaign, an archive of which you can find on my YouTube channel. It was this relentless work that eventually saw me welcomed into ‘the resistance’, a badge of honour I wear to this day.

When I look back on the Ads and short films I have created over the last 5 years, I am immensely proud of the work I have done on both social media and now here on Substack, where I have published over 350 largely in-depth articles. I have learned the value of my outside-looking-in perspective on events. At my core, I’m a social-democratic pragmatist who understands the challenges of building an equitable society in what has become a deregulated, out-of-control, free-market capitalist bonanza. In the West, we have become part of a ‘me, me, me’ society in which we behave as we do ‘because we’re worth it’. For far too many, protests and direct action have become impediments to consumption, self-obsession, and giving a damn.

Once you create a society where the top 10% of the population own 70% of the wealth and the bottom 50% own just 2%, you don’t need to be a math major to understand that this might represent a problem. A report titled Measuring the Income Gap from 1975 to 2023 by the nonpartisan RAND Corporation, published in February 2025, found that nearly $80 trillion in wealth in the United States has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1% over the past 50 years. That’s more than twice the value of the current US national debt. It’s worth pausing to think about that for a moment. I think we can safely assume that this is a structural economic failure of government over the last half-century, which has led to the destruction of the middle class.

Tax evasion in 2026, largely from the top, will likely exceed $1 trillion. In a piece by Anna Isaac in The Guardian on December 26th 2025, she notes:

A stock market boom in artificial intelligence companies has added more than half a trillion dollars to the wealth of America’s tech barons in the past year, data shows.

The top 10 US founders and bosses of some of the world’s largest technology companies saw their finances swell to nearly $2.5tn, up from $1.9tn, in the year to Christmas Eve, according to figures from Bloomberg.

Elon Musk’s net worth alone has increased by nearly 50% year-on-year to $645bn. I think we can safely assume that this represents structural economic failure when between 36 and 37 million Americans live below the poverty line. It will also not have escaped your attention that Musk had dinner with Trump over the holidays at Mar-a-Lago, after he said he was returning to politics to save Republicans from destruction in the midterms.

It’s pretty clear to anyone who’s paying attention that plans are already being put into place for an attempt to repeat the purchase of extended control of the US legislature. However, unlike in 2024, Trump now has the entire tech sector in his pocket, almost total control of corporate and legacy media, and 90% of social media platforms. This isn’t by accident; it is all part of implementing Project 2025, which I warned about from the very beginning.

When Trump lost power in 2020, the Heritage Foundation set out to ensure that, if Republicans gained power in the next electoral cycle, they would never lose it again. This wasn’t a plan created by drunken idiots on the back of a beer mat on a boy’s drunken night out. It was a meticulously crafted plan reminiscent of the Nazi’s ‘final solution.’ Let me explain why I am totally comfortable using this comparison. I don’t use it in a literal sense, as it relates to the extermination of a racial group, but rather the extermination of societal values to erase the perceived weakness born of diversity. inclusion, empathy and moral clarity.

Yes, it has a racial component born from the ambition to create a white Christian nationalist state, using religion as the narcotic to drive a fabricated holy crusade. A crusade enlisting their false God as justification for the elimination of rights that the Civil Rights Movement fought for decades to secure. Project 2025 and its successor, labelled ‘Restoring America’s Promise’, represents a reimagining of American society, the foundations of which we are enduring through mass deportation, the terrorisation of the vulnerable and the extortion of the American people through a federal sales tax masquerading as tariffs.

The question I have is what Democrats have done since losing the election, or is it a secret? The same old same old does NOT win elections.

Trump is prosecuting a campaign of rolling political ‘shock and awe’ with little regard for societal collateral damage or legal challenge. Get in the administration’s way and suffer the consequences. This is not a presidency remotely interested in abiding by the rule of law, domestically or internationally. In an exclusive, wide-ranging interview with reporters from The New York Times on January 8th, the Times noted:

Asked in a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times if there were any limits on his global powers, Mr. Trump said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

I have to tell you that if the world is depending on Trump’s morality, we’re well and truly doomed. One thing that’s very evident is that Trump believes he’s invincible. He’s living the dream after decades of bankruptcies, false accounting, and tax evasion. US taxpayer dollars are allowing him to fulfil the dreams of a lifetime, to paint over the failure and criminal behaviour on which he has built an illusion of economic competence. In the eyes of the world, he has become the poster boy for the story of the Emperor with no clothes, yet his malignant narcissism prevents him from seeing that he’s perceived abroad as a dangerous fool.

On Friday, we saw a room full of senior oil executives held captive in the Oval Office in front of the press as props to support the illusion that he’s going to make Venezuela great again. It’s just one fantasy narrative after another. NOTHING has changed in Venezuela; all that’s happened is one thug dictator has been replaced by an extortion gang boss working remotely from the White House, who has now added pirate to his resume.

Trump is not asking, he’s attempting to strong-arm US oil executives into spending $100 billion in a dilapidated oil infrastructure based in one of the most dangerous countries on earth. Overnight, Americans were being told by the US State Department to flee the country or go into hiding as the mighty US military off the coast is unable to come and rescue them. This, despite 20% of the US fleet being parked just offshore.

As I noted in my piece last week on the Venezuelan situation, the country is lawless:

In a piece in the Guardian today by Tom Phillips, opens with:

The United States has urged its citizens to leave Venezuela immediately amid reports that armed paramilitaries are trying to track down US citizens, one week after the capture of the South American country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.

In a security alert sent out on Saturday, the state department said there were reports of armed members of pro-regime militias, known as colectivos, setting up roadblocks and searching vehicles for evidence that the occupants were US citizens or supporters of the country.

Trump has little interest in the welfare of either the Venezuelan people or any Americans stranded there. This is about stealing tens of millions of barrels of oil that could not be moved during the blockade. Just to add the icing on the cake, he is also attempting to shield the stolen oil from the courts, where ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil filed an action in 2014.

A subsequent World Bank arbitration tribunal ordered Venezuela to pay Exxon Mobil $1.6bn. However, Trump is now attempting to prevent them from being paid; he said, "We're not going to look at what people lost in the past because that was their fault." You really couldn’t make it up.

He’s now transformed himself into Long Don Silver, pirate of the Caribbean.

The world is upside down, and I’m going to be brutally honest and say that there seems to be little appetite from the American people for the level of economic disengagement required to topple the government before the midterms. I don’t doubt there will be more street protests labelled as mass resistance, as we’ve seen over the weekend. Don’t misunderstand, I have no problem with such expressions of dissent; they are a great opportunity for a day out with like-minded people, which I think is a good thing. However, please don’t think they are anything but a minor irritation to the administration.

The kind of protest required to topple governments are the type of protest currently underway in Iran, the ones that inevitably lead to the deaths of protesters. The American versions are great days out and profitable for T-shirt sellers and banner suppliers, not to mention hot-dog trucks and street-food vendors. However, any assumption that single-day events move the needle is, I’m afraid, delusional. That is not to say they shouldn’t happen, it’s just about being realistic about what they achieve.

I reiterate, as I have for months, the only solution on the table is economic disengagement, but sadly, there is not enough collective commitment to make it work, so America is left having to hang on to the hope that the midterms will deliver redemption, to which I say '‘Don’t hold your breath.”

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