"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction."

We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.

This is PART THREE of a series of essays attempting to navigate a path from tyranny to a better tomorrow. If you want to catch up, these are the links to PART ONE | PART TWO.

The words that make up the title and subtitle of this piece are the words of Ronald Reagan, which should be ringing in the ears of every American as the dark clouds of tyranny deny light to hope in search of the fuel required to wake democracy from enforced hibernation. We do not live in a new Golden Age, but rather in a fake gilded cage designed to enforce compliance through deceit, misdirection, and media control.

History is no stranger to tyranny born out of social and economic despair. Never has there been more fertile ground than the political disengagement which has led the US to this inflexion point. At the risk of repeating myself, the convicted felon that now inhabits the people’s house, when taxpayers aren’t paying him to play golf, or retreat to the crime scene known as Mar-a-Lago, won the 2024 election with just 34% of eligible voters, on a 65% turnout rate.

Trump did NOT win a majority; he won a plurality of the vote, the same type of victory HAMAS won in the 2006 Palestinian elections when they secured a win with 42.9% of the vote on a 77% turnout. While Trump is correct when he claims to have won the popular vote, it’s essential to understand that it can hardly be termed a popular win when nearly 90 million Americans decided not to vote at all. Republicans will claim, ‘you have to be in it to win it,’ but attempts to claim Trump has, in the words of his cult, a mandate are NOT supported by the facts.

In part two of this series, I pointed out that to find a path out of this made-for-TV disaster movie, you first have to understand the problem, and that is where the Democratic Party falls well short. For over a year now, they have lived in denial that they have lost the trust of the American people. The philosophy of ‘vote for us because we’re not the other guy’ is frankly insulting, not only to the American people, but to a base that has lost faith, too. The DNC is an analogue relic attempting to operate in a digital world dominated by an opposition it has no answer to.

The election of a convicted felon can be laid directly at the feet of a party that snatched defeat from the jaws of victory as a result of gross mismanagement and the hubris of a president who, aside from this one single fatal flaw, had delivered the fastest post-pandemic economic recovery of all G7 nations. Biden claimed he would be the bridge to the next generation of Democratic leaders, only to go back on his word and leave them with just 100 days to win a presidency. Before the infamous debate, there was this absurd assumption that a man who looked increasingly fragile was somehow the only guy who could beat a crook. Think about that for a moment; it was electoral suicide.

People wanted me to share my thinking, but I’m not that sure they’ll feel the same when I spell it out in the way it needs to be said. It really is time for those writing what they think people want to hear to STOP, grow a pair, and, regardless of whether it costs them subscribers or followers, just tell the truth. Please don’t do what the DNC are doing by burying their autopsy of the 2024 election. Just have the balls to say, ‘We failed the American people, we’re sorry, that’s on us. We’re listening, and we are committed to change for 2026 and 2028’

I learned, while I was a member of Democratic advocacy groups on Twitter, that if you failed the loyalty test at any point, you were placed in the penalty box. If you continued to deviate, you were excommunicated. Despite my misgivings at times, I supported the Biden administration to both get elected and went on to support Kamala Harris in her attempt to pull off what I saw as a long-shot victory at best. I began this journey in 2019, and have since produced over 200 political Ads to support the various campaigns.

It’s often claimed that Democratic messaging is their Achilles heel. There’s no question that they seem to have an inability to articulate their achievements, and to be fair to them, a more equitable society message can’t compete with the mass deportation and anti-immigrant message. In reality, I fear this is more an indictment of American society than it is of Democratic messaging. At the end of the day, there’s little point in walking over well-trodden ground. However, you can’t walk anywhere at all without competent leadership, which is totally absent in the Democratic Party, I’m afraid.

Anyone talking about third-party opportunities at this moment needs to stop taking those drugs. While I don’t doubt that a wider choice in political representation is long overdue, now is not the time, no more than it is time for a radical, progressive approach. Before anyone jumps off into the deep end, I’ll discuss my thinking in more detail in the next episode. Transformational change is not a sprint; it’s long been proven to be a marathon, no more so than in a moment when big money interests own so many politicians.

This is a series of pieces because we have to navigate a complex web of powerful forces battling for the soul of America. MAGA is now like a trapped animal that can sense the threat to their control up ahead. They know that straightforward logic dictates that governments rule by consent, regardless of what wannabe emperors might want to believe. Be in no doubt: Trump and those pulling his strings are very aware of the threat, and that makes them very dangerous as we move into the midterm cycle.

While we may live in an instant-gratification society where everyone is in search of a social media soundbite solution, that’s not how change will be delivered. Will it play a role? Absolutely, but this is going to take some serious out-of-the-box thinking that takes the Democratic Party way outside of its ‘same old same old’ thinking that has long since lost its shine. The days of left versus right are long gone. Democrats seem to believe that they can win by parking their tanks on the old car park of the traditional Republican Party. Once you make this a race to the right, the only winners are the oligarchs and corporate America.

The key question is this: Is there an appetite for political change in America? Off-season elections proved beyond doubt that there absolutely is. The big problem with the results, which were clearly a referendum on Trump’s presidency, was that Democrats convinced themselves while trying to convince others that the results were an endorsement of the Democratic Party. Nothing could be further from the truth. Democrats had merely become a refuge for Trump protest votes. The suggestion that Dem voters were returning home, bringing with them some MAGA friends, was and remains utter nonsense. The December polling numbers absolutely prove my point. Voters don’t trust Democrats; they are simply choosing the best of a bad bunch, because nobody can be worse than the lunatic in the White House.

For decades, Dems have taken their base for granted; be it black voters or Hispanics, they have worked on the assumption that these demographics have nowhere to go. How did that work out in 2024? Have they learned nothing from the fact that, were it not for black women voters in 2020, Trump would have won, despite presiding over the unnecessary deaths of 200,000 Americans resulting from his abject failure to manage the COVID crisis?

Dem leadership is telling its base that, despite having promised to release the findings of its autopsy of the 2024 election campaign, it has decided not to release the report because there’s no point in looking back. My first question is, who paid for the autopsy report? My second question is, if you have decided that transparency is a dirty word, why are you sending out daily emails begging for money to the same supporters you are denying access to the report? Make it make sense.

All this, as the same supporters bear witness to a complete failure of leadership from the day Trump was handed back the keys to the White House. Why are many incumbent Democrats continuing to enrich themselves by trading stocks based on privileged information? I can tell you without fear of contradiction that leaders are working on the same strategy they did in 2024, ‘Vote for us because the other guy’s a fascist’. They are creating a safe haven for Trump protest votes, while welcoming corporate America into the log cabin with a promise to present them with a new blue suit in 2028. That’s not victory, it’s appeasement at the expense of the American people.

I think it's safe to say that even if Democrats do nothing, they may win back the House in 2026 because Trump will have destroyed the economy long before November. If people are happy with that, then they and America deserve what they get: more of the same. I happen to believe that Americans deserve MUCH better, and I know for a fact that the Democratic base is looking for real change, not just a handing over of the blue suit to corporate America to call the shots.

I’ll be the first to admit this is a searing indictment of the state of the Democratic Party, but someone has to say it out loud, and it might as well be me. The reality is that the Democrats are the only game in town, and with that comes a huge responsibility to prepare the foundations for a big win in 2028. This, I fear, is impossible with the current leadership team, which seems to have no compelling vision for the future.

In the next episode, it’s time to focus on ambition, vision and the difficult choices that come with the need to deliver a better tomorrow for ALL Americans. It’s time to face the harsh truth about what needs to be done, and to explore what sacrifices people are prepared to make to restore absent American values.

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