You can skip the first three paragraphs of this post if you just want to get to the heart of today’s piece. I just wanted to take a moment to concede that yesterday’s post was not my finest hour, because I really struggled with articulating the emotions I was feeling about using starvation as a political weapon. I messed up the headline, which I later had to amend, and I felt like I came up short for the first time in a long while.
The love of my life asked me later in the day, ‘What’s wrong, you look like someone just died,’ to which I replied, ‘Yes, my ability to express myself properly. ’ I really hadn’t realised how much this work has come to mean to me over the past nine months. I think what threw me was how mindful I’d become of how long my posts can be, and the fact that it’s not gone unnoticed.
After really careful thought, I have concluded that I can’t allow myself to sacrifice how I write in pursuit of a more concise delivery style; it sucks the soul out of my train of thought. I know writing is an art form, and it’s an art in which I am still in the foothills of discovery. While I feel I have grown since I began this journey into long-form writing, I know I still have much to learn, and all I can do is hope readers will give me the space to get better over time at being more concise.
TODAY’S PIECE BEGINS HERE
Who would have thought that the alleged richest and most powerful country on earth, were it a signatory to the Rome Statute (the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court (ICC)), would have a president who, on November 1st 2025, would be guilty of committing a crime against humanity? Of course, the US does not recognise the International Criminal Court and withdrew its signature from the Rome Statute on May 6th 2002, under Bush. That, however, does not diminish the sickening reality of the moment. It is, though, good news for Trump when it comes to the extrajudicial executions he is undertaking in the Caribbean right now, which are clearly in violation of international law—just another example of his reckless disregard for any rules.
I make the above point not as a performative act of commentary, but rather to emphasise that this is a president out of control. I can’t say the government is out of control because there isn’t one. The government is shut down, and Trump could not be happier.
He said of his Billionaire Benevolent Bill in his press conference in Japan on October 28th:
“We got everything done,” adding, “I said, ‘Put it all into one bill and if we get it done, we’re done for four years.’ We don’t need anything more from Congress.”
Not the first time he’s made such a statement, he also recently said:
“We took care of everything. ... We didn’t know where we’d stand in a year or two years from now, so we put every single thing that we wanted in that bill for four years. So we don’t need any more votes.”
And that’s before we talk about his address prior to the 2024 election, when at Turning Point Action, he said to an audience of White Christian Nationalist evangelicals:
“In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”
There is no question that, from the very outset, Russell Vought and the legislative planners of this regime knew what they were proposing would be unpopular and, as a result, their agenda would be under threat if they lost the House in the 2026 midterms. So it was all about front-loading legislative action as early as possible. What’s important to understand, is that the Heritage Foundation created a carefully crafted plan to allow Trump to rule as Caesar, as was his and their wish. Everything else is gravy.
Vought no longer has to focus on a legislative agenda, so he’s free to mastermind the theft of the midterm elections by allowing Republicans to select their voters rather than the other way around. Anyone who doubts their intent needs to understand that Trump ally Scott Leiendecker, who previously served as the Republican director for the St. Louis City Board of Elections, purchased Dominion Voting Systems, which is now called Liberty Vote. Dominion voting machines are used in 27 states by tens of millions of voters to cast their vote. These are now under the control of a 2020 election denier. Call me old-fashioned, but once we’ve reached this level of risk, how can any American be assured of there ever being a free and fair election ever again? We’ll be covering this in my last post of this series.
The regime is well aware that executive orders can be revoked as soon as a new president is sworn in. However, as a failsafe, the plan is to ensure that should a Democratic president be elected, he/she will inherit a socio-economic wasteland as Trump and his acolytes seek exile in Saudi Arabia or some other far-distant sympathetic autocracy, to avoid accountability. Rest assured, they will do everything necessary to retain power, but want to ensure that in the event they fail, all that will be left are ashes. Those opposing Trump must understand the objectives if they are to counter the threat.
This is all about understanding the level of meticulous planning that the Heritage Foundation coalition did over the last four years. It’s easy to underestimate what has been a military planning exercise to euthanise democracy. It is the very reason why Republicans always seem to be two steps ahead of any Democratic response. They are war-gaming every angle ahead of time, in order to anticipate responses to the actions they take.
It’s indisputable that Republicans have the most efficient and sophisticated media messaging machine ever to exist. What’s more, they are exporting it to right-wing political parties across the world. People need to understand that the likes of Steve Bannon are training would-be dictators across Europe. This is, without question, a right-wing global assault on the existing political world order that is being headquartered in the US.
This is where I get to my point about the Democratic Party's response. Now, I doubt that any political party would have been prepared for what happened in the US in January when Trump was sworn in. During the election, Democrats did, to be fair, run a campaign warning voters of the threat a new Trump administration posed to democracy. The problem was that, despite people like me screaming about the imminent danger of Project 2025, it was a good six months before Democrats picked it up and raised the real alarm.
Add to that, they were deaf to the working class screaming that they couldn’t afford to put food on the table. Instead, they chose to chase the middle class, while black and Hispanic men, along with the abandoned working class, crossed to the dark side, in search of Trump’s promised land of milk and honey, with a pinch of permission to hate immigrants, which has always seemed odd to me.
If you want to examine the arrogance and total confidence the Heritage Foundation had in its plan, look no further than the 900-page ‘Mandate for Leadership’ (Project 2025) it printed and put out there for everyone to read. They did it in the knowledge that after the election, they could say people knew precisely what they were voting for; we didn’t hide it—we put it in writing. It’s irrelevant that Trump claimed he knew nothing about it. ‘That’s just what Trump does, ’ they would say. Why were Democratic strategists not awake to the threat, given that in his last term, Trump implemented 64% of the Heritage Foundation’s policy agenda?
I’m not here to relitigate the past. I am merely pointing out that while the Republicans out of office were disrupting Biden’s administration at every twist and turn, they were upping their game in preparation to reimagine America, if they could just get Trump elected for a second term. This is where the oligarchs stepped in to invest whatever was required to make that happen; this was an opportunity beyond their wildest dreams. The rest is history, and all the while, the Democrats failed to evolve politically to counter the threat.
You don’t have to read or listen very much to understand that there is almost a ‘How could you let this happen to us?’ attitude that unfairly exists among many voters who sat it out and can’t accept they played a part in this debacle. Instead, they want to lay it at the Democrats' feet for losing. ‘There’s nothing stranger than folk, ’ as they say.
It’s sometimes difficult for me to articulate the key threat and response requirement because there are so many moving parts, as Trump continues to ‘flood the zone with shit’ as Steve Bannon so eloquently put it. There is so much misdirection and disinformation, that bringing clarity to the situation is becoming increasingly difficult. I’ve already made my position abundantly clear on the fact that the Democratic politburo needs to be put out to pasture. I believe that absolutely no progress can be made until that happens. The rest of this piece is irrelevant without it.
The question is, what does the Democratic Party look like without them? I believe, as I have always said, that this will set the stage for a new people-first Democratic Party to rise from the ashes of an organisation submerged under special interest money. The question is: does the Democratic Party want to be Republican Lite, or a party for the people, by the people? This isn’t about whether it’s the right thing to do, but whether there is an appetite to do what’s right? I’ve talked about it over and over. It’s all about the audacity of ambition and a commitment to place a vision for a better tomorrow on the table, letting voters decide for themselves whether freedoms should prevail.
Many times, I’m accused of being a hopeless romantic when it comes to the politics of hope. Here’s what I say to that. We would not need hope if politicians chose to do the right thing, if they decided not to act like the domestic abusers of the American people. For far too long, the world of politics has been the preserve of those with inherited wealth or political connections. It remains largely an ‘old boys club’ that would be even more male-dominated had it not been for the likes of Nancy Pelosi, AOC, and many other strong female political pioneers.
If there’s one thing we have learned from politics, it’s that power corrupts. Tragically, self-preservation and the wealth politicians attract from those seeking to buy favours soon take priority over the representation of the people who lent them their vote. You don’t have to look very far in the Democratic Party to see shining examples of that within leadership and establishment figures. The biggest challenge is that once the invasive nature of self-enrichment takes hold, removing it becomes a daunting task.
In an article on the Partnership for Public Service website, they note:
A new survey conducted by the Partnership for Public Service in the spring of 2025 shows that trust in the federal government remains low. Only 33% of Americans trust the government, while 47% do not, and 13% are neutral.
There has long been no trust in politicians, and that’s hardly surprising given their behaviour on both sides of the aisle. But you find me a politician who agrees with this assessment, and I’ll show you where to find rocking horse shit. Criticism is labelled as an overreaction or the public’s inability to understand the complexity of governing. It’s nonsense, and was a significant cause of why 90 million Americans sat out the election last November. America is no longer a two-party electorate. It’s a three-party one: Republicans, Democrats and the pissed off. The two main parties no longer individually make up the majority of voters. That belongs to those left behind by both parties.
I have to conclude that Democrats are either stone deaf or want nothing to do with change, and I rather suspect it is the latter. Now this is where it gets interesting because three labels have always represented the superpower weapons of the right:
Communism
Socialism
Marxism
For decades, they have said to American voters, ‘Look into my eyes, rampant unregulated capitalism is good, anything else is communism, socialism or Marxism’ It was nonsense in the days of an alleged cross-dressing FBI director who weaponised sexuality against so-called ‘enemies of the state,’ underlining the fact that obsession with transgender people really is nothing new for Republicans.
This trifecta of trigger words has propagated fear amongst the US population for as long as most can remember. We have reached a point where anyone to the left of Mussolini is a radical communist. The ‘radical left’ tag is probably the most effective weaponised messaging trigger the right has in its armoury.
No method can be used to diminish the messaging impact of the term ‘radical left.’ The public doesn’t hear ‘radical left’, they hear ‘fear’ and ‘threat’, and I’m afraid that can’t be erased, even by the term ‘Democratic Socialist’. By using the word ‘socialist’, you hand Republicans a gun to shoot you with, and this is where my term ‘People First Democrat’ was born.
You can’t use the label ‘people first’ with socialism or communism; it simply does not work. The phrase ‘people first’ is by its very nature people-focused. Even the term ‘progressive’, which fits nicely into ‘progressive radical’, ‘people first radical’, is just vaguely ludicrous. It’s just a label, you might say, but look what the ‘socialist’ label has done to halt socioeconomic progress for decades in America, so labels do matter.
I’ve done it again: this has morphed into a long post, and I still have important points to make, so it is a natural time to take a break for the day. I can conclude this tomorrow because I know you'll want to hear it, even though nobody within the Democratic Party who can effect change will likely read this.
The key founding document that explicitly asserts the right and duty of citizens to revolt against an unjust government is the Declaration of Independence (1776) — primarily authored by Thomas Jefferson.
Here’s the most relevant passage:
> “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. … But when a long train of abuses and usurpations … evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Source:
📜 The Declaration of Independence, adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776.
This is the foundational American statement affirming that people not only have a right but also a duty to resist and replace tyrannical government.
The United States has long worked to avoid any accountability that participating in international norms (like the Rome Statute) would cause, knowing that supporting the Rome Statute or the ICC would put them up for an unfavorable examination of the history of and current list of crimes of humanity and genocide in the US. When the original author of the word genocide advocated for protection from genocide be extended to economic and cultural groups (in addition to racial, ethnical, national, and religious groups), the US and other powers at the time ensured that that definition never made it into international law since they knew then they would all be guilty.