When the election is over we need a plan

With less than 20 days to go, soon America will decide for more of the same, or a road to accountability and the restoration of hope. We’re going to need tools to help us on the road out of tyranny.

Please note that this post is two pieces rolled into one because I won’t have time to create a separate post on Monday. I’ve indicated where people can stop by and pick up the rest when they have a moment. If you have the Substack App, you can listen on the go.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned since 2024, it’s that the road to redemption involves sacrifice, and it always has. The Civil Rights Movement understood it better than anyone. That’s why, from the day the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, those on the right began dismantling decades of progress piece by piece at every opportunity, just like they have dismantled union membership and waged war on community organising.

In this time of tyranny, the US stands on the precipice of no return. If on November 3rd, Democrats don’t win by a margin too big to dispute, I fear for the future of democracy in America. It’s time to recognise that decades of living in a country where education is the preserve of those at the top of the economic food chain sustains the asset class while pulling up the drawbridge on social mobility. The American dream is no longer a dream; it’s a carefully crafted nightmare designed to suppress hope.

It’s not a mistake that 28% of US adults have low literacy skills (PIAAC, 2023) and 54% of US adults aged 16–74 read below a sixth-grade level (Gallup analysis, 2020); it’s how the system has been designed to operate. The ‘Keep ’em dumb and keep ’em poor’ is a deliberate tool of understated ambition. It’s not for nothing that Trump and his acolytes promote Christian Nationalism, the sedative of those for whom critical thinking is now extinct.

For those who have retained the ability to read between the lines and understand the objectives of actors that would harm us, it’s deeply frustrating, because repairing the knowledge deficit eating America from the inside out is becoming a distant dream. I listen to Trump at his rallies and to the right-wing talking heads who promote and amplify his cynical narrative of deceit. In some ways, one can’t help but have a grudging respect for how he’s managed to poison the minds of close to a third of the American population who have become loyal dogs of war in his campaign to drive the bottom 50% of Americans into economic slavery. It seems they are happy to survive on the crumbs of the rich man’s table.

What he’s managed to do in under two years should not only terrify Americans not infected by this cult of personality, but also send a clear warning to democracies around the world: if they lower the guardrails that protect them, this is what happens.

On November 3rd, the world will find out whether good can truly prevail over evil as the US hits an inflexion point that will either redeem the soul of a nation, or send it spiralling into a future of social Darwinism. No middle ground exists in this attempt to take a nation hostage to the malign ambition of a chosen few seeking global economic dominance, headquartered in the US.

Weaponised religion has long proved its credentials as the opiate of the masses. Politicians soon realised it was the perfect ingredient for delivering captive control for its perpetrators. As a result, it was injected into the right-wing narrative to slowly create a permissive environment in which Trump could rise to power. The truly disturbing part was its rapid adoption: people who should have known better rode the wave of his ambition for self-enrichment to fill their own pockets.

The left often fails to grasp that the right needed only about 30% of the voting population to make it happen. Margins of victory in American politics have grown tighter over the years, to the point where a 5% swing is often enough to win. That is why the MAGA movement was so vital to Trump’s victory. There’s nothing more contemptible than those who have used Trump’s rise to power to accumulate wealth at the expense of those at the bottom and the vulnerable. There should be a special place in hell reserved for them.

It will certainly be interesting to watch how they turn into the concentration camp guards when the regime falls, as it WILL. They will claim, ‘We were just following orders. We knew he was a bad man, but what could we do?’ They are the worst among us, and that’s why I have always said that unless there is a day of reckoning for Trump’s enablers, America will never be free from the possibility of a repeat performance in the future.

I believe we are living in a moment that will either make or break democracy’s future. It’s really as simple as that. For far too long, far too many have assumed someone else will fix their problems. They believed politics is something to run away from rather than engage with. People like me and those in power should have done better, and that’s on us. We’ve spent decades slowly burying civic responsibility while allowing propaganda to shape the narrative. As a result, the whole world is paying the price for those of us who knew better and took our eyes off the ball.

I have long asked myself, ‘Can I do anything to make a meaningful contribution to helping people understand the value of social responsibility?’ I’m a 67-year-old man who, if I’m very lucky, has no more than 20 years to make any meaningful contribution to a world my children and grandchildren will be forced to inherit because of the bad choices so many of us have made before them.

In a world of sound bites and throwaway values, I’m faced with a choice. Leave the future to others, or attempt to make a contribution that can help shine a light on the cancer that is slowly squeezing the life out of hope for all but the privileged few. Look, I’m not saying I can change the world, but I can spend the rest of my time giving back to a world that’s treated me well.

The Truth Matters Project I am building will be my last hurrah, so to speak, my chance to say, ‘Well, I tried’. I didn’t have the luxury of an Ivy League education; I left school in my teens, and I’ve spent my working life building for myself without the safety net of a salary. These words and musings come not from a classroom or a university lecture hall, but from a man speaking from lived experience. I’ve seen good times and desperately bad times, but I’ve always kept it on my terms.

At this point in my life, I’ve been lucky to find an audience for my thoughts, and I can’t tell you how much that means to me. Don’t misunderstand: I’m in no doubt that if my voice disappeared tomorrow, the world would forget it by the day and move on; that’s just the world we live in. What I’ve come to learn, however, is that the opportunity DOES exist to make a contribution that might survive my departure, and this is what this project is all about.

We find ourselves in a rarely witnessed time of change. A time of technological revolution. Generations have lived through such times before, and they have largely advanced our lives, but never without pain. From the Industrial Revolution to the advent of the Internet, each has brought good and bad, but one thing remains constant: hard-working everyday people have always picked up the tab for those at the top, who have persistently drained the fruit of their labour for their own gain. The AI revolution is no different.

History shows that the rich have written rules that have slowly shifted wealth from the bottom and middle to the top. They do this by carefully crafting laws that let their wealth grow while keeping those at the bottom from reaching for the pitchforks. The primary driver for this has been education. We live in a world where the offspring of the rich get the best education alleged ill-gotten gains can provide. Meanwhile, the ‘hired help’ are left to fight for scraps of knowledge so sparse that the hope of a better life is always just out of reach. It’s how the status quo has been maintained for decades.

Those breathing the rarefied air of their wealth have created a world of slogans and social media for good reason. It provides a delivery mechanism to mainline their narrative into the social bloodstream. It’s a mind control experiment that has been remarkably successful, and that’s why this regime has entered into a Faustian pact with the tech bros. Social media has become the religion of the masses, and their addiction to it is what has provided the fertile ground for Trump to rise to power.

This is a good point to break, if you want to pick this up later

PLEASE NOTE: Details of tomorrow's Zoom event are in the second part of this post. It’s an image, so scroll down to see the details.

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People are crying out for refuge, a safe space to step out of the tsunami of disinformation into a world where someone cares. A world that seeks to ‘Make America care again’. A place where truth still matters. I believe there’s still a market for truth, integrity, and moral decency. We don’t have to live in a world where the rich and powerful dictate the terms, and we just suck it up. Compassion, empathy, and diversity aren’t weaknesses; they are our superpowers. That’s why I believe the Truth Matters Project is an important vehicle to find our way home.

This project is my attempt to prove there’s a better way to fight tyranny. No power is mightier than education, and I believe the project demonstrates that facts and truth can still set you free. Anyone who believes that one accident or serious illness should result in bankruptcy and the destruction of their future needs to step back and take a long, hard look at the rules they are being forced to play by.

It’s time to take back control of the direction of travel and chart a path to a better tomorrow, and we can only do that armed with the facts. I have long understood that some people won’t share my outlook on life, and I’ll always defend their right to do so. Indeed, without healthy debate, democracy won’t survive anyway. Dialogue and compromise will always be the prerequisite for progress. The question is what it costs to finally reach that conclusion. We are seeing proof of this right now.

The question isn’t whether the regime will fall; it’s when. Then the next question is: how long will the road to recovery be? I fear the uncomfortable truth is, it will take at least a generation to recover from the catastrophic self-inflicted wound the American people inflicted on themselves not just once, but TWICE. No good will ever come from a man who has never respected the rule of law. Someone who, for God’s sake, was ordered to pay $2 million for misusing his own charity’s money, whose company was convicted of tax fraud, while a federal judge wrote that he ‘raped’ E. Jean Carroll.

Trump’s a man who, in the world the rest of us inhabit, would fail vetting for a job at Foot Locker (no disrespect to Foot Locker), yet he holds the most powerful office in the world. That didn’t happen by accident; it was by design, and I’m afraid the Democratic Party has, at best, been an unwitting facilitator in his rise to power.

Because corporate interests appear to control the legislative process by owning enough politicians, America finds itself in the perilous position of sleeping with the enemy, regardless of who they vote for. Trust in politicians is rightly near an all-time low because far too many elected representatives have chosen to serve themselves, becoming legislators for hire to the highest bidder. Everyday Americans can’t compete with special interests until they understand the collective power they have to stop this madness.

I believe two things lie at the heart of this problem. MESSAGING and EDUCATION. Social media and the AI summary at the top of every Google search seem to have switched off our bullshit monitor. Unfortunately, humans seem to accept anything that makes life simpler, even accepting the first thing we see after a web search as fact. It’s heaven-sent to the propagandist.

We’ll be forced to believe whatever version of those in charge of the technology choose to feed us. It’s a propagandist’s wet dream. Even as things stand, those with malign intent can skew the information available to us, making it harder to make informed decisions. For example, the masters of narrative manipulation, the Israeli government, have weaponised AI search to contaminate the truth. They hired Brad Parscale’s firm Clock Tower X to shape what chatbots say (US foreign-agent filings, 2025–26), a contract reported to be worth $46.5 million over a year. At this scale, disinformation can force aggregated search to ignore real reporting. This was a deliberate attempt to shape opinion by using a network of innocuous-looking websites. Their planted narrative made it easy for many to accept AI search results with little critical thinking, delivering highly efficient propaganda. It’s genius, really.

The Truth Matters Project is a one-man army’s attempt to break the fever of blind acceptance of a weaponised information stream. I can’t force people to believe what I say; I can only help turn the tools they use against us back on them to protect us. I have no doubt I will be attacked for it, and right now I’m just a lonely man on a walk, but those who want to protect their hold on the narrative will do everything in their power to ensure I don’t attract a crowd to join me, turning one man on a walk into a movement for change. That’s why I split it into two separate projects.

• The Matter of Record

• Truth Matters

One is a neutral repository of primary-source data: the simple facts as they exist in the public record. The other is unapologetic political and social advocacy that represents my thinking on where we are as a society. It’s about framing the facts from the Matter of Record to support an advocacy position. The two, while both driven by the truth, differ in that one allows room for opinion, while the other is simply a matter of record.

My view of a political issue might differ significantly from that of someone who believes in small government and deregulation. While I’ll always support anyone’s right to disagree with my conclusions, I won’t deliberately misrepresent the facts. Will I make mistakes? Of course I will; I’m only human. However, you will always get from me as much attention paid to correcting that mistake as I give to any opinion.

Truth Matters goes to the very heart of who I am and what I believe. I don't know whether people are ready to join this journey and support what I’m trying to do. Frankly, I don’t have time to let hurt feelings or rejection distract me.

As my hero, the late, great John Lewis, said:

“Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society.”

He wasn’t wrong, and I think we sometimes forget the collective power ‘We the People’ hold in this moment of peril. Nobody is coming to save democracy; that’s on us, and I’ll be damned if I sit idly by while these monsters steal the hard-fought-for rights of the likes of John Lewis and those who fought and died on the battlefields of Europe in the struggle against fascism in the Second World War. Future generations deserve better, and rest assured, they will not thank us for our seeming inability to tolerate sacrifice or inconvenience that blight their right to a better tomorrow.

John Lewis also said:

“When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something; you have to do something.”

This project is me speaking up and saying something, but it’s much more than that; it’s me giving others the tools to do the same. Passionate people around the world sometimes struggle to articulate how they feel about the state of the world and what in their lives causes them pain. This project aims to help them find their voice through education and easy access to facts.

The Truth Matters Project will be a refuge for those seeking escape from an ocean of disinformation and deceit. A place where people can expand their knowledge and understanding of today’s issues. A place where facts are clearly laid out to encourage critical thinking. I have come to the same conclusion as most people: I don’t trust a word a politician says until they can prove they believe in a ‘people first’ approach to representation. Those who do will always have a place in the advocacy part of this project to share their views, even if I disagree with what they say.

This will NOT be a space for Democratic propaganda. Nor will it provide oxygen for Republican nonsense arguments. It will be a people-focused project dedicated to the belief that no family should be left behind, and no child should go to bed hungry. It will be a space that believes healthcare is a human right, along with affordable housing and education. It will be a space that believes schools should not be forward operating bases against the threat of classroom massacres, but rather sanctuaries of learning that prepare the next generation of talent to create justice and prosperity for all. It will be a home that celebrates ‘different’ and wears tolerance and diversity as a badge of honour.

For over three years, I have had this vision locked in my head, and it’s about to take its first breath in the real world. Today, I’ve poured out my heart for the whole world to see, for better or for worse. My sometimes clumsy language and imperfect literary skills make me who I am, but they can’t disguise the passion I feel for what I believe in. I’m not a guy with a pile of money in the bank to make this work on my own; it will only survive with the help of others. If it fails, never let anyone say I didn’t leave everything out on the field.

The rest of this story is in your hands, not mine. What I would say is this. As reported by Axios, Texas has seen the Senate Leadership Fund, the Republican super PAC, invest $131 million in just 17 days in an attempt to elect a man impeached for corruption by his own party in the Texas House. The Israel lobby, as well as the fossil fuel and gun lobbies, are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in a continuing pay-to-play scheme that has persisted in American politics for decades. If this project attracted 0.1% of what is spent to corrupt democracy, it could fully fund it for a decade, pay staff a living wage, and help preserve democracy in America and anywhere democracy is under threat.

I’ll leave you with that simple statement of fact. Tomorrow, I’ll host a Zoom call to give a face-to-face overview of what I’ve built and show exactly how gathering big data on those elected to serve us is far more powerful than the big data they collect to control us. It’s time to use the tools they have weaponised against us for the greater good. Explaining the project in writing would take a trilogy of books, so I’m offering to answer any questions you might have about what I’ve created, with no hidden agenda, just plain-speaking answers. If you would like to join the call scheduled for 2 pm US Eastern Time (ET) tomorrow, email info@truthmatters.org.uk with the subject TM PEEK, and I’ll send you a link to join.

Since I don’t know how many people might want to join, Zoom has a cap, so I’ll send invites on a first-come, first-served basis. If we exceed the limit, don’t panic; I’ll arrange a follow-up session. For anyone who can’t attend, I’ll record the demo part of the event to share on YouTube.

If you’ve made it this far, I believe you, and I share the same passion, so why not join this exciting journey? It will be bumpy, but I guarantee it will be rewarding.

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