With just over a week until midterms, I know people will be anxious. I know I am, and I’m an ocean away. While I may have been somewhat absent from political commentary over the last ten days or so, I still believe the Truth Matters Project will prove significant moving forward, even if it may not seem important given the gravity surrounding November 3rd. On that note, I want to thank the small band of truth seekers who attended last night’s Zoom update on the project. Building movements for change is never easy, and this project is no different.
It’s all about believing in what you’re doing, and I have never believed more in anything in my life than I do in this project’s ability to deliver a new way of thinking about transparency in government and holding those we elect to account. I have said all along, revolution starts as a spark; it takes time to gather the kindling, let embers simmer, and ignite the fire of change.
Some will challenge its audacity and scoff that one person can’t make a difference. I am not so arrogant as to believe this project is the answer to all the problems that currently blight our lives, but you have to start somewhere, and my instinct tells me foundations built on facts are a good place to start. Will I see it bear fruit in my lifetime? I hope so, but if it takes longer, then so be it, and I’m happy to pass it on to new custodians.
In a world of sensationalism and populist dog whistles, a guy toiling in a study 18 hours a day doesn’t make headlines. It’s the kind of under-the-radar work that often goes unnoticed. It’s thankless work: studying data and finding ways to translate tens of millions of pieces of information so everyday people understand how government works. My challenge is to make it make sense, so people can make better decisions when electing those who serve their interests.
I now operate on the understanding that plenty of very competent people are willing to hold this regime to account if given a chance. I’ll just keep being the backroom boy I’ve been most of my life, grafting away behind the scenes to shape a system anyone can access FREE of charge. I’ve always maintained that locking the truth behind a paywall is indefensible, and it will NEVER happen with my work.
So the task now is how to move forward. In that spirit, I thought I’d take a moment today to share my thoughts on my role. I’ve had plenty of time to think about it, and here’s what I’ve concluded. To fund my work on this project for change, I need a revenue stream. Not for me, but for the work I am doing. Hosting, managing, and developing an enterprise solution is NOT cheap. I’ve carefully planned every aspect of the project to date in order to deliver tangible results. The current rollout plan is designed to ensure that, as the work continues, people can access it, get hands-on experience, and assess its value for themselves.
In these early stages, that value may not be as clear as some people would like in a world of instant gratification, but rest assured, like every great work of art, it gets better the more you see it. It’s impossible to make data collection and shaping sexy; NOBODY can. It’s a meticulous, time-consuming exercise where you assess, ingest, validate, and consider every data stream for inclusion. The scale of available data is beyond most people’s comprehension, so picking the right data becomes an art in itself.
The challenge doesn’t stop once you have the data; that’s just the first step. You can have all the data in the world, but without knowing what to do with it, it’s worthless. As they say in the database world, ‘Rubbish in, rubbish out’. The next challenge is trust. Can we believe the data? It’s a fair question, and the honest answer is yes, largely, because we can test it against decades of trusted collection methods. We are right to be sceptical of an administration that appears to spend most of its time hiding the truth.
My contention is that the government might be able to create a false narrative to hide what’s really happening from the public, but that’s much harder with data. The reality is that the government can’t operate without accurate information, however bad it might be. To deceive, it has to store the real data somewhere before it creates the false narrative. With that in mind, I feel I have solid ground to move forward.
A week out from the midterms, which offer an opportunity for change, it’s right that people should focus on delivering the ability to hold this abhorrent regime to account for the crimes I believe they have committed against the American people. Indeed, the resident of the Oval Office was a convicted felon before he re-entered the Oval Office; that’s a simple fact.
The truth is, politics is awash with money, especially at election time. Gone are the days when holding government to account was a vocation; now it’s a goldmine for political consultants, media organisations, and influencers alike. Someone like me can’t compete with the money people are willing to spend in their ‘pay-to-play world’. There’s no question that there are millions to be made on reporting every fart and nonsense statement from a man who crucifies the English language. He trains daily for the deceit Olympics. I don’t want to swim in that swamp.
Pause for a moment and think. For all the reporting and narrative-challenging, what’s changed? Trump is still the monster he was when he took office. He has a group of dangerous people around him who have crafted a media landscape in order to create a permissive environment for evil not just to exist, but to feed on the vulnerability of the human condition. In some ways, you have to admire the sheer level of audacity, determination and effort the regime has invested in dismantling American values and the long-lost dream that anyone can make it in the land of the free, where absolutely NOTHING is free.
Imagine if they had invested as much time and effort in serving the people they were elected to serve as they appear to have, stuffing their pockets with money taken from American workers. If they had put PEOPLE first instead of their bank balances, maybe society would be a better place. Never have we seen a moment in time when millions of people celebrate a man, like the Pied Piper, who marched them, laughing and cheering, into economic slavery. It’s no mean feat, that’s for sure.
For decades, America has been hailed as the shining example of how democracy can deliver peace and prosperity to the world. The veneer has held up long enough to largely sustain peace since the horrors of the Second World War. It was so successful that the world turned a blind eye to segregation and the inequality that has always been part of the DNA of a let-them-eat-cake mentality. It’s not a glitch that the Democratic Party’s values have, over the decades, converged with conservative values while abandoning the working class. It’s a software update, a socioeconomic patch to build a bridge to corporate control of the legislative process.
This is a good point to break, if you’d prefer to split this piece into two
I said I would be returning to my political writing again today, and here I am. I’ve been away from my writing seat for two weeks, and it breaks my heart to see that nothing has changed. Oh, as for the Democratic Party believing the nation has decided to welcome them back into the warm embrace of the American people’s faith and trust, get some help. The people may not despise the Democratic Party quite as much as they have come to despise Trump for what he’s done to them. However, they absolutely don’t trust Democrats as far as they could throw them.
Of the many subscriptions I invest in each month for background and great journalism, none are better right now in the election cycle than the Cook Political Report, and it’s well worth a moment of your time to look at the numbers here. I was struck by a piece I can’t share because it’s behind a paywall, but here’s the key statement I took from a piece by Charlie Cook entitled:
Margin-of-Error Races as Far as the Eye Can See
As for the very dubious—and in many cases, amateurishly conducted—polls promoted by hope-ium dealers in Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, and South Carolina, I am not buying any of them. In a couple of cases, the Democratic, or faux-independent, candidates are interesting, but the situation is nearly impossible; in others, the situation theoretically offers an opportunity for a Democrat in a gale-force political environment to make it close, but the candidate is insufficient to get across the finish line. We can expect Democrats to win in a lot of places where they usually don’t, but even in this environment, they are not going to win everywhere.
I spent a little time looking at aggregated polling data from RealClearPolitics today to match the polling data I usually include in my posts. I like their site and how they organise the information. I highly recommend taking a look. Since they now have a connector for Claude, which I am using to develop the Truth Matters Project, I’ve connected Claude, which I’m working with, to the site via MCP for my research. As part of that process, I created the charts below to show the state of the races. I updated these charts at 5 pm today to keep them current.
The key point is that, as you can see below, BOTH parties are underwater in popularity. In my opinion, this is reflective of an ‘any port in a storm’ mentality. There’s no evidence of an ideological shift; it’s simply a cry for help from a nation that made a mistake, and the only way to attempt to fix it is to settle for the lesser of two evils.
I’m approaching my work differently now. There is no question I want the Democrats to win BIG next week, because if they do, it will reaffirm my view that the American people did NOT vote for what Trump has delivered. That said, I thought they would win in 2024, and how did that turn out?
I’ve said it many times: this is a dangerous inflexion point, and I’m reluctant to say where the cards will fall, but I can guarantee one thing: the day after the election, this war will still be in its early stages, and there will be a mountain of work to do.
To be honest, I’m past thinking if anyone is listening. My work here now has a structured purpose, and I really don’t want to get embroiled in the persistent political bun fights that dominate the narrative every day. My work is what it is: the unvarnished truth, spoken without fear or favour. I believe my journal of events will stand the test of time and scrutiny.
Whether I remain a man with a few friends trying to set things right, or a man spearheading a movement for change, is not in my hands. All I can do is keep doing what I’m doing, and history will take care of the rest. I’m back to political writing, but I want it to take a new shape where I zoom in on the things that, if not addressed, will hurt innocent families whose only crime is not being greedy or being vulnerable to the jackboots of a regime willing to throw them under the bus for power and wealth.
That’s not the world I want for me, my children, or my grandchildren; they deserve better, and I’m determined to do everything in my power to say I didn’t walk away, drop the ball or chase the money when it came time to do the difficult work of being a responsible world citizen. To those who have supported my journey to date, I extend my heartfelt appreciation. Paid subscribers have helped bring the Truth Matters Project to life, but they’re not the only ones. People have given their time to read and amplify my thoughts, and that matters just as much.
We are living in challenging times for so many, yet it seems they are never challenging enough to prevent politicians from spending more than half a billion dollars on a race in Texas that has nothing to do with the people of the state and everything to do with rich white men dominating the political narrative at the altar of power. I’m sick and tired of it. I’m exhausted by the stress it brings, but the flame of hope for a better tomorrow will not be extinguished; that is why this project has given my work a whole new meaning.
I want to take the data and facts they are hiding from view and put them on the kitchen table, so we can talk in plain English about how politicians on both sides of the aisle play games with people’s lives EVERY DAY. They seem empowered by the belief that nobody will take the time to put the pieces together and weaponise the truth against them. They clearly don’t know me.
I don’t trust anybody, and you shouldn’t either. In my view, many of those we’ve entrusted our future to have simply thrown it back in our faces to get their tickets punched by special interests on the gravy train. That’s totally unacceptable, and it has to change. That’s what makes a transparency layer mission-critical to meaningful progress. That’s where I come in; I want to focus on politics in a way that addresses what everyday Americans face, not through a political lens, but through shared human values. Values don’t have to be steeped in political ideology to count. Independents are the largest single bloc in American politics, and that says everything you need to know.
They will not only deliver the deciding vote in the midterm outcome; they’ll likely decide the most consequential election in US history in 2028. It’s my honest belief that they’ll choose a president not by listening to incumbent charlatans selling snake oil to the masses, but by being born-again critical thinkers, and I want to feed the yearning for that.
So here’s where I’m coming from. My work now has three strands, and I’ve set up how I work going forward to deliver on all three.
First, this newsletter. I’ll keep sharing my thoughts here as usual on the political issues shaping today and the future.
Second is Matter of Record, the nonpartisan record of Congress built from primary sources. The same rules will apply to every member. Every figure links to its official source. This is part of the Truth Matters Project, a space to rediscover the art of critical thinking, and it’s FREE for ANYONE to use.
Finally, Truth Matters is a social and political advocacy site that shares MY political views. This will be the place in which I build my arguments using data from Matter of Record. The record doesn’t take sides. I do, and I will ALWAYS keep the two apart.
If you’d like to help, I’ve set up a page where you can choose what to support: a subscription to this newsletter, the whole project, or Matter of Record on its own. Donations to Matter of Record will be used only for that aspect of the project.
Alternatively, all the links are shown below
A subscription to this Substack newsletter: my writing and commentary.
The Truth Matters Project: the whole of it, the record and my advocacy, shared equally.
Matter of Record on its own: the nonpartisan record of Congress, and nothing else.
NOTE: Donations to Matter of Record are used only for that part of the project.
I missed the Zoom again?!! I didn’t see that it was scheduled for Sunday night! Hopefully I can find in somewhere in your TM Project!!
amen