This is not the moment for the same old same old response

America has become the abused spouse of a sociopathic liar who is stealing money from her purse to get drunk on power.

As we honour those who made the ultimate sacrifice, that we might be spared from the shackles of tyranny. Americans are faced with the reality of having to live with a serial abuser who is intent on filling his pockets and those of his rich friends with their hard-earned savings.

The President of the United States is on a mission to asset-strip the country and sell the family silver to the highest bidder purely to enrich himself. The Constitution is the guiding light that has illuminated the path to the American Dream for over two centuries. It is now being extinguished at the altar of greed and absolute power.

The Constitution’s preamble is clear:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

To leave no doubt of its intent:

The Constitution of the United States of America is the supreme law of the United States. Empowered with the sovereign authority of the people by the framers and the consent of the legislatures of the states, it is the source of all government powers, and also provides important limitations on the government that protect the fundamental rights of United States citizens.

Be in no doubt, Trump and his acolytes would reimagine the Constitution in a heartbeat, which is why their ambition is to call for a Constitutional Convention. They want to rewrite the rule book entirely, and this is why we are in such a perilous moment in history. It is a shock to the system because the enemies of democracy have hitherto been foreign actors. Not anymore. The enemy of American values has now formed a homegrown international criminal extortion gang at the seat of power, operated from the Oval Office by a man committing daily crimes against oratory and sentence structure.

I find it challenging to articulate the danger America faces as a result of the actions of 32% of eligible voters in the November election. The way Trump was able to manipulate not just voters but the very systems put in place to stop what he did is by any measure impressive. History tells us, this level of political chaos and disruption is rarely resolved peacefully. It’s the stuff of burning lanterns and pitchforks at the dead of night.

It would be easy to direct this fight at Trump, but believe me when I say, he’s just the useful idiot front man for what is a truly dark underbelly of raw authoritarian ambition. A reimagination of American society in a way most would find difficult even to comprehend. The real villain in this Shakespearean tragedy is Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, described by The Atlantic as The Visionary of Trump 2.0

In an article by McKay Coppins, he states:

‘Behind all the DOGE pyrotechnics, Vought—who serves as director of the Office of Management and Budget—is working methodically to advance a sophisticated ideological project decades in the making. If Musk is moving fast and breaking things, as the Silicon Valley dictum goes, Vought is taking the shattered pieces of the federal government and reassembling them into a radically new constitutional order.’

He goes on to say:

Vought’s agenda includes shrinking the government, but it goes deeper than that. His vision of state power would effectively reject a century of jurisprudence and unravel the modern federal bureaucracy as we know it. A devotee of the so-called unitary executive theory, he wants to see the civil service gutted and repopulated with presidential loyalists, independent federal agencies politicised or eliminated, and absolute control of the executive branch concentrated in the Oval Office.

If you have trouble viewing the full article, let me know. This is a gifted link from my Atlantic subscription, but The Atlantic can be a bit of a pain when sharing gifted links.

What I’m trying to highlight is very important. This man is likely one of, if not the most, dangerous individuals in the United States. I don’t say that lightly, because there are numerous dark forces at work in America today. Vought, for those who don’t know his history, was the co-author of Project 2025. If you haven’t seen this undercover report before, I highly recommend you take some time to familiarise yourself.

Vought has dedicated his life’s work to establishing a white Christian nationalist theocratic state, and he is now working in the shadows at the heart of government to make his dream a reality. Trump is transactional, he just wants to get obscenely rich from his second spell in office, and it’s all going to plan. It’s now estimated that up to 40% of his current wealth has been realised in his first three months in office.

The cabal that Vought serves understands Trump and what makes him tick. Vought served as vice president of Heritage Action, the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, which spearheaded the creation of Project 2025. In April 2024, he was named Vice President of Communications for the Foundation. If I were to draw a historical comparison, Vought is to Trump what Himmler was to Hitler; he is the author of the final solution for the federal government.

It is challenging even to begin to articulate just what evil intent this man brings to this administration. Every meticulous step is carefully planned and instigated by this unelected harbinger of destruction to anyone not a member of his chosen race and religion. His perverse advocacy of social Darwinism holds no bounds, and he is the man with his hand firmly on the tiller of America right now. What you need to understand is that Vought is on a religious crusade to burn everything to the ground and start again. He doesn’t give a damn about the pain Americans will feel because he believes he’s on a mission from God, unlike his co-conspirators “neo-reactionary” thinker and far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin and Michael Anton, who is now Trump’s Director of Policy Planning at the State Department. I have never lifted a metaphorical rock and sensed so much malign intent focused on one goal.

If you want to find out more about Yarvin, take a moment to read this piece by Jason Wilson investigative journalist on a piece for the Guardian from December 2024

Yarvin, who considers liberal democracy as a decadent enemy to be dismantled, is intellectually influential on vice president-elect JD Vance and close to several proposed Trump appointees. The aftermath of Trump’s election victory has seen actions and rhetoric from Trump and his lieutenants that closely resemble Yarvin’s public proposals for taking autocratic power in America.

It’s all about joining the dots in a complex matrix. However, once you see the connections, you begin to see exactly where this is going. Yarvin is an associate of Michael Anton, Trump’s current Director of Policy Planning at the State Department. He was previously a senior fellow at the powerful right-wing Claremont Institute, whose growing influence during the Trump era has seen it described as the “nerve center of the American right.”

In an anthology of essays, Anton wrote:

“The universities have become evil”, “Our economy is fake”, “The people are corrupt”, “Our civilization has lost the will to live”.

If you want to know who Anton is, you can read his 2020 book, ‘The Stakes’. He believes in autocratic “Caesarism” as a means of resolving American decadence. He openly describes it as a “form of one-man rule: halfway … between monarchy and tyranny.”

These people are all cogs in a dangerous machine now operating at the heart of government, fueled by an unholy alliance of white religious fundamentalism, tech oligarchs and a brand of radical right-wing ideology that is beyond terrifying. But the cog everyone should be worried about is the Vice President. To Vance, Curtis Yarvin is ‘The cool kid on the block’, though it appears the feeling was initially not reciprocal. Vance is understood to be highly influenced by Yarvin. So, what does Yarvin believe? In a report by The New Republic in July 2024, they ask, " Where did J.D. Vance get his Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas?” The report begins:

In 2008, a software developer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin, writing under a pseudonym, proposed a horrific solution for people he deemed “not productive”: “convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.”

Yarvin, a self-described reactionary and extremist who was 35 years old at the time, clarified that he was “just kidding.” But then he continued, “The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass. However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide.”

One final cog I’d like to add to the machine, aside from Elon Musk, of course, is Peter Thiel. He’s another one of the uber-rich tech bros who has long been a benefactor to Vance. Thiel, Anton, Yarvin, and the rest are all part of a malignant cabal, and I believe Vance is their true ‘chosen one’. I believe Trump was TOLD to make Vance VP because this is all part of the big plan.

I provide this information to help people understand that Trump is NOT the source of this existential threat to America; he is merely the delivery system. If he drops dead tomorrow, JD Vance will pick up the baton and run with it as it is intended he will anyway. Like all terrorist organisations, when you cut off the head of the snake, two more appear in its place. To defeat the current threat, you need to better understand its source.

The problem I fear is that Democrats are not looking at the big picture. They are, to some degree, still in a state of shock from November. My biggest fear, aside from them not understanding the extent of the threat, is that they are very slow to adapt to the evolving news and messaging landscape. I spoke yesterday about MeidasTouch Network of which I am a big admirer. The brothers didn’t gain overnight success, they have worked for years to build trust and recognition for their excellent contribution to truly independent news. Katie Phang with support from Meidas has just launched a new YouTube channel which incidentally, I would highly recommend you pay a visit to. You might also be interested to know that this type of independent news is surging and will be added to on July 1st, when I’ll be launching Truth Matters TV, for which I’ve just been added to the YouTube creator program.

The Hollywood Reporter is reporting:

If YouTube was a standalone business, public comps suggest the business would be worth $475 billion to $550 billion, or about 30 percent of Alphabet’s current valuation, Nathanson wrote. “YouTube has the potential to become the central aggregator for all things professional video, positioning itself to capture a share of the $85 billion consumer Pay TV market and the ~$30 billion streaming ex. Netflix market in the U.S.”

Given the number of internet-connected TVs and the ever-increasing popularity of podcasts and news channels, Meidas is ideally positioned to assist partners like Katie Phang and others in creating a space for political news and commentary. The uncertainty surrounding TikTok means it’s essential to establish a thriving ecosystem for common sense factual political news and commentary. I believe that established brands should join together to create a coalition for good leading up to the 2026 midterms, using it as a dummy run for the big fight in 2028. The only problem I foresee, is that any coalition brings with it risk and the potential dilution of revenue streams to long-established entities like The Meidas Network which is the last thing we need.

I will be running an experiment to see how long it takes to build a YouTube political commentary channel from a standing start. It’s a huge challenge, but I’m not one for turning down a bet. Truth Matters is in a unique position as a trusted brand to test the proposition. I already have in-house production facilities and the skill set to produce high-quality output; it’s just a matter of funding, at least some of it, so I don’t have to bear the whole cost myself.

We spoke yesterday about how Substack has been a blessing because it’s enabled me to fund media production. Hopefully this would also grow as a YouTube channel starts to generate income from subscriptions in the same way. I believe advocacy organisations and political campaigns should develop a YouTube-first approach to media creation. Create high-value media content for YouTube, then propagate it to social media. New advanced editing tools provide fast formatting of content for vertical platforms without affecting the integrity of the original content. In addition, there are now new tools to streamline the distribution, removing the need for time consuming reposting of content.

AI will play a pivotal role in 2026 and will likely dominate the 2028 campaign. I work very closely with video AI, which will play a critical role in messaging. In some instances, it gets a bad name for good reason, but let me assure you, it can be leveraged for good. The simple fact is no man is an island, so this has to be a collective effort, not just in funding but in delivery too. I worked on a project I’ve discussed before to bring this together for over two years from 2022-2024, and could not get it over the line because it was viewed as ‘ too radical’ at the time, but I bring all this knowledge to the table for this new fight.

The bottom line is, I can continue to write here on Substack, which I fully intend to do anyway. However there is an additional opportunity for a collaborative extension of my work those who are interested. I believe such a project could make an important difference. I have always believed that good can prevail over evil and that the human capacity to make a difference is never far away in times of threat.

We can’t win with more of the same old, same old because we are fighting a whole new enemy able to draw on a bottomless pot of funding. We have to fight this as an insurgent media war and challenge the technology boundaries to embrace new tech that is ready to prove its value. We need to circumvent the algorithms and fight a gloves-off campaign sharing truth and facts, but delivered by tech they won’t expect.

I don’t want to document the technology I’m thinking of because we need to avoid discussing it in a public forum, but I am more than willing to host some webinars to discuss it further and see if anyone is interested in participating. I think ‘Digital Pitchforks’ is a great name.

As for messaging itself, we can almost strip the politics out of it and coalesce around issues that have broad appeal across the country. The challenge is how to present policy on healthcare, paid family leave, a living wage and affordable child care. We need to message a forward-facing immigration position, and the economy needs to be front and centre. We DO NOT want messaging that has been tested to within an inch of its life with focus groups; we need to start trusting our instincts again and build a raft of emotionally connective messages aimed at kitchen table discussions.

I did a series of what I called ‘Coffee Conversations’ in 2022 with various candidates, and it proved really popular—simple political conversations about the effect on daily life based on political policy issues. We MUST find a way back to emotionally connect with voters and meet them where they are and on their terms, and this needs to be a collective effort. I know this might all sound very pie in the sky, and it certainly is for one person alone, but as they say, a problem shared is a problem halved.

Regardless of your views on my proposition here, I’ll still be turning out my thoughts as usual. Making the best of the comprehensive knowledge I have built up at the coalface for six years seems to make sense. Give it some thought. I’m all ears.