As we reach the end of a year that in many ways defies description, we have borne witness to what can only be described as a cultural revolution. In 2024, 70 million Americans chose to elect a madman as president of the alleged most powerful nation on earth. If you voted for him and belong to the bottom 90% of US earners, this was the most significant act of economic self-harm in modern history.
The truth is that Trump was elected by just 34% of those eligible to vote; they elected a man destined to collapse the US economy and make 90% of America poorer. They chose to vote for the persona of a TV reality show who had convinced them that six bankruptcies, numerous sexual assault allegations, theft from his own charity and 34 felony convictions were all part of a conspiracy to prevent him from becoming president for a second time. This, despite the fact that he had been responsible for the unnecessary deaths of an estimated 200,000 Americans in his first term, after which he left behind an economic wasteland with millions out of work.
In any country blessed with the ability to indulge in critical thinking, this would have been impossible, so Americans have to take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask one simple question: WHY? There’s a straightforward answer: 90 million Americans sat on their hands and let it happen. There’s never a shortage of people who engage with my work who say, “We know things are a mess. Instead of telling us what we already know, tell us about solutions.”
My initial reaction is, I didn’t vote for this, so don’t shoot the messenger. The bottom line is that until Democrats deliver a leadership team that’s up to the challenge, there is no effective opposition and ‘we the people’ are on their own. When they had leverage on the ACA subsidies, Democrats folded and decided to spend their entire time using that weapon of mass destruction, ‘reputational damage’, to attack a man void of moral decency, integrity, or the remotest sense of shame. What could possibly go wrong with creating an attack campaign using the Epstein files and the suffering of child sexual abuse victims to tap into public outrage for political gain?
As the father of a daughter sexually abused as a child, I believe that the victims of this industrial-scale abuse, for the gratification of men who breathe the rarified air of unaccountability, absolutely deserve to see their abusers locked up and the keys thrown away. This should not be political; it should be a police investigation carried out without fear or favour. However, the case has proved beyond doubt that, were there no political advantage to be gained from tying Trump to these heinous crimes, these women’s search for justice would not have advanced an inch. It’s a sad fact we have to come to terms with: the judicial system shields the rich, and it’s nothing new.
We have one man who has quite literally taken a hatchet to both the American dream and American values. Meanwhile, the only answer the opposition has is to tie an obscenity of man to the crimes of his paedophile best friend. Is it essential that EVERYBODY involved in these heinous acts is held accountable? Absolutely, it is, but when the president controls all the levers to deliver justice, and he’s decided he’s not going to be the turkey voting for Thanksgiving, this is what you get.
Real Clear Polling, which aggregates polling across a span of polling organisations, has Democrats:
Meanwhile, here are the Republican numbers:
Any Democrat who is telling you the Democratic party has turned a corner is either on drugs or lying to your face. The American people have had it with BOTH political parties. The truly terrifying observation is that a party that is destroying the economy, disappearing people off the streets, setting up concentration camps across the country, stealing healthcare from millions of Americans and food from the mouths of hungry children, is on par with a party that should be streets ahead, sharing a new vision for the future.
You don’t have to dig too deep to understand why that’s not happening. This is the same party that is refusing to publish its own investigation into the 2024 election, in which they lost the House, the Senate, the White House, and the popular vote. People are NOT flooding back to the Democratic Party; they are voting Democrat because it’s the only way to send a loud message to Trump that they are not happy with what he’s doing. Democratic Party leadership is AWOL, and the Democratic ship is drifting rudderless into a likely midterm win in 2026 on the back of Trump’s failure, NOT a vision from Democrats for a better tomorrow.
Before Dems can take a real step forward, they need to say sorry to the American people for what happened in 2024. There has never been an apology for abandoning the working class or failing to listen when they said they were struggling in what they were constantly being told was a booming economy. Instead, they blamed these voters for voting against their own interests in a time of desperation. If it’s one thing the American people have learned over the years, it’s that every four years they shake hands with the same corporate America wearing either a red or a blue suit.
Right now, Democratic leadership has no incentive to listen very hard to those who elect them because it’s much easier to rely on special interest funding. There is often a misconception that large political donors give more to Republicans than to Democrats; the evidence shows the opposite to be the case. As reported by OpenSecrets in relation to the 2024 cycle :
‘Of donors giving more than $100,000 to a candidate or party, 51.55% favored Democrats and 46.28% gave to Republicans.’
It’s well worth reading the stats in the OpenSecrets report to examine the details, which leads me to the conclusion that while money remains important, the key is how that money is spent rather than the amount involved. In 2024, Democrats outraised and outspent Republicans, yet Trump still won.
If we dig in deeper to OpenSecrets reporting, it’s well worth examining a report from January 14th 2020, entitled:
More money, less transparency: A decade under Citizens United
This is a report by Karl Evers-Hillstrom, with contributions from researchers Doug Weber, Anna Massoglia, Andrew Mayersohn, Grace Haley, Sarah Bryner and Alex Baumgart.
A paragraph that stood out for me was this one:
“In our 35 years of following the money, we’ve never seen a court decision transform the campaign finance system as drastically as Citizens United,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics. “We have a decade of evidence, demonstrated by nearly one billion dark money dollars, that the Supreme Court got it wrong when they said political spending from independent groups would be coupled with necessary disclosure.”
We often speak of Corporate America’s role in the dismantling of democracy in America, but believing that, would be to fall victim to a misdirection. Has Citizens United helped Corporations influence elections? Absolutely, but here’s the real story:
‘The 10 most generous donors and their spouses injected $1.2 billion into federal elections over the last decade. That tiny group of major donors accounted for 7 percent of total election-related giving in 2018, up from less than 1 percent a decade prior.’
The report continues:
‘The balance of political power shifted from political parties to outside groups that can spend unlimited sums to bolster their preferred candidates. Election-related spending from non-party independent groups ballooned to $4.5 billion over the decade. It totalled just $750 million over the two decades prior.’
Bear in mind that this report covers only the impact of Citizens United through the 2020 election cycle. In 2024, Elon Musk and others became involved, and political donations from individuals continued to skyrocket. The argument from Democrats is always that Republicans are the primary beneficiaries of big money donors, when the evidence does not support that assertion.
I respectfully suggest that the American people are once again being told a fairytale. The whole political agenda of BOTH parties reflects a broken, deceitful tapestry of lies in which the voting public is nothing more than an inconvenient means to an end. The truth is that pay-to-play is entrenched in the American political establishment. Corruption is to politics what oxygen is to human survival. It’s become like a ticking clock on a wall. After a while, you don’t notice it’s there anymore.
The difference in 2025 is that Trump willingly decided to rub that corruption in our faces and boast about it. It’s no longer a quiet undercurrent in politics; it’s ‘out and proud’, as the bottom 90% are extorted and exploited to reward the have-yachts who have paid to create a 21st-century economic slave colony. I can tell you without fear of contradiction that uneducated voters will always pose a much greater threat to the US than undocumented workers.
I’m going to quote a young woman called Madison Briggs, who is a biomedical engineer :
“There’s a war happening right now, not over borders, not over power, but over our minds—a war on education, a war on intelligence and a war on curiosity itself. Somewhere along the line, ignorance got LOUD, real loud. It started SHOUTING, and people started clapping, like being uneducated was something to be proud of. You see it everywhere, people condemning cultures they’ve never studied, mocking words they can’t pronounce, hating what they never took the time to understand.
They call educated people elitist, and they call knowledge arrogance, and they call truth bias, because it’s easier to throw stones than open a book…….. There is nothing more dangerous than a person who knows how to think. You can’t manipulate someone who questions you. You can’t control someone who understands you, and you damn sure can’t silence someone who knows exactly what’s going on.”
You can find Madison’s full monologue by clicking on this link. My question is this: how did we allow "stupid" to become the new "smart”? America has always been seen from the outside as a divided nation, but one divided by race, when all along it was by intellect. ‘Keep ‘em dumb and poor’ has long been the mantra of deep red states, where women should be in the kitchen or on their backs incubating the next generation of compliant slave labour. I wish I could frame it less bluntly, but you can’t overcome subjugation when 54% of the population has a literacy level of 6th grade and below.
People last week asked me to share my thoughts on how the US can navigate its way out of this swamp of corruption and deceit, so I’ve decided to take up the challenge and share my as ever unvarnished thoughts. Let’s call this the first part of my brain dump, an attempt to lay it out as hopefully an easy-to-understand roadmap for change to help save America from itself.
Read PART TWO
This is the most succinctly written statement of what has happened to Americans critical thinking regarding our values and the American dream. Citizens United changed everything. Both parties are complicit. I look forward to the rest of the series and hope many others do too.
THANK YOU!