Before we begin our daily journey into the madness today, I wanted to address some concerns someone raised about my perceived anger toward Americans in yesterday’s piece and how it was demotivating for some readers. If I’m absolutely honest, I AM angry, in a wider context, but I am NOT angry with the Democratic base and the large number of advocacy groups fighting every day for a better tomorrow.
Not only do I support these groups, but I also donate to some of them. My problem is NOT with the Democratic base, but rather with Democratic leadership, who have, on the whole, been unconscionably absent and silent since losing the election in 2024. Having read the piece again, as it weighed heavily on my mind, I feel it would be disingenuous to edit it, as it reflected how I felt in that moment.
Having said that, I think the language was clumsy, failing to recognise the extraordinary work being done on the ground in communities across America by an army of resisters pouring their heart and soul into fighting for the preservation of democracy. If that’s how you felt as a reader, I want to apologise unreservedly, because that was absolutely not my intention; I wanted people to feel as angry as I was. It’s very true to say that ‘all politics are local’ and I absolutely need to be more mindful of this important fact moving forward. You have my word that I will do that.
As an outsider looking in, focused on the big picture, it can be easy to fixate on the federal elections. I think that comes from the realisation that the key to escaping from this tyranny lies in control of the US House and Senate, but in no way do I wish to diminish the importance of state and even local government, because Republicans have shown that when you focus effort on building state trifectas, the Supreme Court can be weaponised and federal legislators can be circumvented when your party is out of power.
Back to the matter in hand. In recent history, no US President has ever decided to unashamedly govern only for those who voted for him. The sinister reality is that he had no intention of governing for the 70 million Americans who voted for him. His sole intention all along was to govern purely for the benefit of the top 1% who bought him the keys to the White House. The problem he faced was that you can’t get elected with just the votes of the top 1%, so to govern for them, he had to lie to 68.5 million who were sympathetic to the lies he was peddling. If there’s one thing we know, it's that Trump is a very accomplished liar.
The fantasy world he has created since returning to office is difficult to comprehend. As a result, it induces levels of mental anxiety and exhaustion that people rarely experience in peacetime. I like to think of myself as reasonably mentally resilient, but some days he leaves me mentally wasted, and that’s a function and not a bug. Almost everything he does is counter to long-established norms and rests on the assumption that we accept that what he says is true, even though we are bombarded with lies from him every time he opens his mouth.
The man is a pathological liar who, by the end of his first term, had made approximately 30,573 false claims (Washington Post Fact Checker 2020). He’s the very definition of a man not to be trusted. Yet we often find ourselves having to double-check his statements, because how stupid would we look if his latest outrageous lie proved true? It is exhausting, and it’s designed to be like that. He consistently takes a grain of truth to lend credibility to the lie he wraps it in.
I highly recommend reading "All the President’s Lies: Repeated False Claims and Public Opinion," by Raunak M. Pillai, Eunji Kim, and Lisa K. Fazio, published in Public Opinion Quarterly by Oxford Academic in 2023. It’s a fascinating study that looks at how the administration has been an exponent of the “illusory truth effect.” It’s all about repeating the lie; the more you repeat it, the more the human brain perceives it as familiar, and that is why the weaponisation of misinformation is so powerful, yet so simple to achieve. Dozens of experiments have proved that if you hear the truth once and the lie twice, your brain becomes more familiar with the lie, and you begin to question the truth. If you hear the lie over and over, those susceptible to it slowly believe it to be the truth.
Familiarity can, as a result, become the enemy of the people. For example, time and time again, Trump has repeated that he created the “greatest economy in the world,” which is utter nonsense, but if you hear it over and over again, even if you know it to be untrue, your brain starts saying to you, ‘there might just be something in this, because I’m hearing it everywhere.’ Trump has now won two elections, exploiting the “illusory truth effect,” and he has no intention to call a ceasefire anytime soon. This shows the importance of giving equal exposure to the truth on key issues that affect voters. The only other person to use it to use it to similar effect was Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister.
I really do think it’s time to ridicule the ridiculous and point out to the American people at every opportunity what a ridiculous lie it is that Trump has stopped eight wars and brought in $18 trillion of investment. It’s time to get the truth out there, but that can’t be achieved at scale just by writing on Substack; it needs to be visually presented to the American people across the entire media landscape.
Over the past two months, I have been working in the background on something called the Political Truth Portal. The objective is to create a resource that people can use to find the truth on key issues. It’s NOT a place designed for liberal preaching; it’s a place for reasoned, fair evaluation of the facts to better inform voters of all stripes as we approach the midterms and then move on to 2028, a year that will be the most consequential election in a century.
My work here will continue as usual, but from February 1st, articles will be published Monday to Friday. The Truth Matters Substack will serve not only as a library of my long-form writing but also as a gateway to the Political Truth Portal project. This will be a hub for short-form messaging and original video content. It will also provide a resource for cross-referencing members’ votes with corporate PAC donations to determine whether they are representing their constituents or their donors.
The intention is to bring together both short- and long-form video content, a weekly podcast, research resources, and a messaging library to give activists access to key messaging suggestions to promote forward-thinking policy initiatives. This has been months in the making, and I have to admit I'm pretty nervous about how it will be received, but those who have come to know me here and on other platforms know that I’m all in on this fight to escape Trump's tyranny. I’ve funded the project development with a mix of my own money and funds from paid subscribers.
This is about proving that the project works and delivers on its promise. People will soon have an opportunity to make that judgment for themselves. My hope is that as people see the quality of the output, more people will become paid Substack subscribers and, by default, stakeholders in the project. 2025 was about consolidating a strong subscriber base on Substack. 2026 is about making a concerted effort to move the needle. For now, it’s just about getting the show on the road and taking it step by step.
The first political video content will begin rolling out on 27th January, the same day the website goes live, so as you can imagine, I’m pretty stressed out at the moment. It’s essential that the site creates an emotional connection with visitors. This is about building trust and confidence in what I know is an ambitious vision: a resource for a people-first proposition in 2028. The aim is to use the midterm cycle to fine-tune the model and ensure that we are firing on all cylinders for the 2028 cycle. Will there be mistakes? No doubt, but the key is to learn from them and be better.
I just want to be very clear that the content here will be FREE forever; NOBODY should have to pay to read the truth or not have their say on what’s written, so nobody should feel in any way obliged to become a paid subscriber. What I would say is that those generous enough to contribute to my work already make a HUGE difference by helping me cover some of the costs of research tools, subscriptions to important periodicals and news resources, as well as stats databases, key studies and research papers that are often not free.
I like to feel we are all stakeholders in this mission, whether your contribution is amplifying the messaging you believe in or helping to support what I do financially; each plays a vital role. In recent months, I have received some founding member subscriptions, which is an extraordinary gesture from those who have chosen to be a substantive part of this journey. Equally, a small number of people have given one-off donations, which is equally generous. Mechanisms have now been established to facilitate these support methods using the secure Substack payment processor. The aim is to try to build a war chest to help support video production between now and November. If anyone is unfamiliar with my video work, you can find a library here.
Thank you so much for your continued support. It’s as humbling as it is vital.
A Democrat who has not been silent is Pete Buttigieg. He has consistently posted videos about current events, explaining in plain language what is happening, why, and what we can do about it. He is booked for public addresses around the country that instantly get sold out, and is a regular on all forms of media. He is a trusted voice and we need to hear from someone we can trust more than anything.
I’m dicking around at work so I can’t read the whole thing because “Capitalism” but I did want to thank you for the opening. Like, none of this is fucking normal. I’m in a steadily simmering rage every fucking day. I call my congressmen (So much so one of them sent me a LETTER. In the MAIL.), I advocate for my coworkers at my job every day and am slowly but surely trying to get people to wake up. (Employer public employee forums. Utilize them!!!! Call out your leaders publicly! All the time!)
But I’m one person, and I nearly put my hand through a wall over something that fell behind the bed I couldn’t see. Thank god my spouse wasn’t home, because I never want him to see me like that.
I understand what you were doing, and the clarification is super helpful, because we get a lot of this “WHY AREN’T YOU DOING ANYTHING?!” when this country is fighting to get shit done without a civil war, and NONE of the people in charge understand what the fuck they’re doing and how allowing this shitstain to go unchecked is bad.
Fuck man, I even wrote to the UN 3 times to get them to do SOMETHING other than treat trump as a peer.
We shouldn’t be here, and Democratic leadership fucked off and left us to rot.