This is my last article for 2024, although 2025 has a lot of uncertainty, my family plan is to control what we own. Just remember, you are never fighting alone.
My mission for 2024
This is a bit more of a personal article, reflecting on my life for the past year, and what I foresee for 2025. You’re welcome to reminisce with me, because what I will say will certainly affect you, even if we have never met, or we have not spoken in years. The world as we coming into 2025 won’t be easy. But hopefully we can change the tide of any negativity together. However, it will be harder than 2024, and the strategy will have to adjust accordingly.
I’ve not been shy about saying this, because I still have my First Amendment Right to do so… There are people in the highest levels of government, not only in the USA, but around the world, who are either moving towards or have instituted an authoritarian system. This seems “new” to the USA, but in reality, it is a playbook that is well-known abroad and through history.
The indicators were extremely obvious, yet the people with platforms that could DO something about it, even when they had good intentions, fell into the authoritarian propagandists’ traps, and even as I type this… many still talk themselves into corners. That, despite the fact they are “convinced” they are the correct ones. They fail to understand that the propagandists have already laid a trap for them to chase that shiny object. And they do. This is too part of the aforementioned playbook.
AUTHORITARIANISM & PROPAGANDA The Puppet Master Tools
First Edition! Available worldwide on eBook and Paperback
But as any playbook, the tactics are fluid, there will be adjustments along the way, and an exploitation of any targets of opportunity. That too is where many people keep failing to realize that the game is tilted, in favor of the propagandist, and against the “good guys” – who are convinced they are onto something… then “shocked” when they realize that they were also scammed in one way or the other. I’ve made it my life’s mission to teach others about these tactics, and how to defeat the propagandists.
The problem, admittedly, it is supposed to be a team effort. Most people prefer to be individuals instead of team players. They have their little clouts, even if it has a couple millions of subscribers… and fall into the same bubbles, where they talk about the “other side’s” echo chamber – while failing to realize they are inside an echo chamber themselves.
I’ve reached to them, they keep talking in circles, and I get crickets in return. Then when what I was going to warn them about inevitably happened, exactly as I was warning them, they act “shocked” on camera. Of course, I am yet to receive an acknowledgement. And you know what? I’ve resigned myself to the fact my words will remain a time capsule, and the small solace that at least some of my few thousands of readers benefited from my message.
A year of contrasts
Around this time last year, I was counting the days to my retirement after 20+ years of service in the US Navy. My last day wearing a uniform was going to be in February, and my retirement date on the last day of April. About 10 years before, I promised my daughter that I would retire from the Navy wherever I reach that time frame. I kept my promise. And my daughter’s life also improved by leaps and bounds as we were finally able to spend more time together.
As I type this, she is making me company as she watches her favorite videos after I prepared her brunch. We have a lot of things planned for today, but we are nowadays able to take our time. Sammy was patiently waiting her whole life to ensure I was not far away somewhere else, being stuck in an office, a watch floor, somewhere in the other side of the world, or onboard a ship. For years she waited patiently, she was taller every time the ship returned. Now I get to see her every day. And I love it.
I love my house too, because it is a home. Home is where my two girls are… my wife Alicia and my daughter Sammy. I was so excited to finally be able to control my own schedule and be there for my daughter whenever she needed me. I cannot stress enough how difficult that has been… essentially her entire life until that point.
A huge thing I advocate for is consent, and I give my daughter her freedom to spend time as she desires. Why? Because she has to learn how to better maximize her time and have a say on her privacy. And she does, Sammy is very active, and her activities range from spending quiet time with one of her many books, to dancing to her favorite songs, and anything in between. I am just happy to be nearby when she wants to spend time with me. And yes, she is always happy to go out to run errands with me.
After I retired, I let my beard and hair grow. I never particularly liked shaving, so this is glorious for me. Also, one of my biggest regrets was getting persuaded to cut my hair about a year before I joined the Navy. I love the fact that I don’t have to cut it anymore, and as it grows, I feel like another part of me that has been dormant for years is slowly awakening every day. I’m a multimedia artist, and matching my personality with my actual look is very liberating.
I also own a web-development multimedia company called BeeZee Vision, LLC, so I am able to do what I love when I choose to accept assignments. My company turned 11 years old this past July. Although most of the time I dedicated it to educate about the dangers of authoritarian propaganda. I did this voluntarily, because it is important. And yes, I’ll recur to this topic because it is THAT important.
For 20+ years I wore a military uniform, and although it was a great chapter in my life, every good story has a final page. And for us Veterans comes in the DD-214 form. If you know you know. But I would be remiss if I was failing to point out that I do miss a lot of the people. Not everybody though, some of them where indeed insufferable, and if I don’t see them ever again, that is too soon. Hey, they might feel the same way about me, and I won’t lose a wink of sleep over them, and I haven’t.
But one thing that I have lost a lot of sleep over is the looming cloud of authoritarianism hovering over America. It has already taken a foothold of many places around the world. That is why I dedicated the majority of this year to combat it. Even though I could be doing ANYTHING else, I have consciously set this as a priority. Why? Because everything else becomes a moot point if you ignore the underlining factors.
AUTHORITARIANISM AND PROPAGANDA The Puppet Master Tools
Revised Edition! Available on Paperback and Hardcover
Why I write about Authoritarianism?
Let’s put it this way. Let’s say that you have a home, and it is beautiful. You’re about to host a wonderful dinner party with all your closest friends. But suddenly a lit candle falls on your carpet and it caught on fire. You can either ignore it and soon enough the entire house will burn down, or you can address it before it gets worse. I choose to address it.
The problem is that it is also a team effort. Therefore, I reached to countless “influencers” and other places to talk about this. And anywhere I’ve spoken is linked on my website. But for every thousand people I talk to, several million others were led to believe a false narrative. That is why I reached to others with a platform to teach them the playbook… they did not decline, they just ignored it. That included the Harris campaign, and even the White House itself.
And for anybody who thinks that I am too pretentious as to think that I know something that the White House didn’t, well newsflash… I did… what I warned them about happened. Also, the same blind spots that the Harris campaign later conceded to were something I was desperately trying to point to them… yet they ignored it. And understand that a lot of times the voices of reason are ignored, while the most bombastic voices are propped exponentially. That too is part of the authoritarian playbook. Ironically, I anticipated all that too.
But you know what? I do all this because I have integrity, not because I wanted clout nor accolades. In fact, I created an entire free educational tool at my own expense, called Info in Context – and I’ve done all I can to explain what I can say on an open forum. I would never write about anything classified, but even if they are not classified – you don’t play poker by showing your cards. The people that need to listen to this ignore it, but the adversarial forces are paying attention. Why? Because they redact the truth to stay several steps ahead, and I show you how to read through it.
WOKE & PROUD The Charlatans' Inconvenience
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That is why I wrote my books AUTHORITARIANISM AND PROPAGANDA The Puppet Master Tools and WOKE & PROUD The Charlatans’ Inconvenience. I had those manuscripts already in 2023, because I knew this was coming. Sadly, I’ve had a lot more perfect strangers reading it and buying it than any person close to me. And that should be heart-breaking, but not unexpected. People close to you tend to take for granted what you say, and it is only those who are ready to understand the message who will perk up the ears. That’s the majority of my book sales… people I’ve never met before.
This year I spent a lot of time and effort in making this warning message about this increase of authoritarianism available to anybody who was decent enough to listen. I finally gave up on many “marketing” people who were reaching about my book. Most people that reach out to me want tons of money in exchange to “talk about my book” – and they have not read it themselves. They don’t care about the message. And if they don’t care about it, then I reciprocate with not giving them any money. I will spare you the stories for this article, but there are many… and I have been very forthcoming and brutally honest with them about why I won’t give them a cent.
That said, I decided to release a revised edition for my debut book, just so I can lower the price point as much as possible. I tell people the truth – I am not worried about selling a book, I’m more worried about transmitting the message. I would tell it to anybody for hours if they can sit with me to tell them what is in there… but that is mathematically not possible. Hence, I also provided countless of articles and resources to describe in detail the message I am trying to convey.
And yes, the message does resonate with those who read or listen to my words. I’ve done what I could, and my conscience is in peace. I’ve extinguished that candle that fell on my carpet. However, there are candles falling all over the place, and many burned their houses down to the ground. I’ve went out of my way to do what I can. I even created the I TOLD You! Podcast just so I can document what I was saying and teach those important lessons in mini-lectures fashion. Again, I realized it that it will likely be a time capsule.
I’ve supported any person who is receptive to my message. They are realizing that everything I’ve been saying it is true. You can look at my articles listarticles list and see the time stamp to realize that there was a lot of merit on all my predictive assessments. The point being is that I don’t have a crystal ball, it is more like a recipe. You know what the ingredients are, and what happens when you prepare them, and how it will turn out if you deviate from the formula. It is cause and effect. I have delineated the indicators. My mind is at peace, but my paranoia remains because those with a platform refuse to read the damned playbook, and ultimately that is what will make 2025 a lot more difficult than it should have been.
Authoritarian propagandists always redact the truth, and the puppet master is often the person who is generally unseen, as they put a bombastic moron front and center, and convince these morons and their naive clout that they are in charge. They are not, they are pawns and useful fools. Some with larger clouts than others. The way to realize of whether you’re on the correct or wrong side of the equation is if the rhetoric is divisive or not. What does that mean?
I told you that authoritarian propagandists always redact the truth. When something is true, the math adds up automatically no matter how complex. But when something is false – or redacted, the math won’t add up somewhere – no matter how well-crafted the lie. Those miscalculation are where the propagandist inserts all kinds of false equivalences. The most cynical, and often more naïve segments will think that what I am saying is nonsense, or at best hyperbolic. What they fail to realize is that it does not matter what they “think” – because opinions are not the same as facts. Further, when a propagandist redacts the truth, the correct answer will seem counterintuitive to the bamboozled person.
I did what I could in 2024. Sorry to say, but 2025 is going to require us to have a very different strategy. What I mentioned before still will apply, but it will not be on an “I told you so” fashion, rather than a predictive analysis. It won’t be safe for us to speak the same way we are speaking now. The authoritarians are themselves in a constant civil war, hence the next few months will be a shitshow. It is what it is. People who had a platform could have prevented it, but instead they were a catalyst.
AUTHORITARIANISM & PROPAGANDA The Puppet Master Tools
First Edition! Available worldwide on eBook and Paperback
These are my predictions for 2025
Note that some of these might change if the Democratic party actually grows a spine and realizes that the MAGA-controlled GOP stopped playing by the rules long ago. These are in no particular order. And I hope I am wrong on a lot of them. Not all these will fully occur in 2025 because the process will likely take years. But it will have its genesis on 2025.
- Everyday MAGA voters will get FURIOUS at Trump, because they will realize that his campaign promises were hogwash. As I describe next.
- Prices on EVERYTHING will go up. This includes groceries, energy, cost of living, inflation, etc. However, those at the very top of the economic scale, mainly billionaires will make a lot more money – short term.
- The tariffs, and other Trump policies will have to be railed back, but not after they cause damage. In fact, it will be because Trump won’t be able to hide the damage it is making, or deflect it against the Libs, or anybody else – why? Because the ENTIRE US Government will be MAGA controlled. But the discontent will transcend MAGA loyalties.
- The billionaires will start a civil war among each other. Particularly the first one to go down will be Elon Musk. The rationale will be that he has gotten drunk on power, and he will continue pissing off the MAGA-GOP who have a vested special interest.
- Some GOP elected leaders will finally choose the USA over the MAGA insanity. They will either switch parties or go against the party. Particularly this will happen after the current Speaker of the House MAGA-Mike Johnson will have his ass handed to himself in early January, and he will likely be subsequently ousted. If they get a GOP Speaker of the House, it will have a hard time getting the votes. I wouldn’t be surprised if they will get Democrat Minority Leader Jeffreys as the new speaker.
- DOGE will [thankfully] won’t be approved, because Musk and Ramaswamy already burned those bridges. And a lot of the Left wing, and more moderate GOP will have to concede to kick both of them out, because they were never actually elected, and DOGE does require Congressional approval. Surprisingly to some, it will be some of the MAGA folks who will be very vocal about not having them anywhere near making policy. The recent Twitter storms from Musk and Ramaswamy insulting Americans, and the almost government shutdown will be cited among other reasons to give them the boot.
- Trump will help reluctantly Ukraine for now just out of spite because Putin just told him via his diplomats that Trump can f*ck himself regarding Ukraine. Putin made Trump look weak again, after Trump promised he could fix the Ukraine-Russian war and have a peace deal on day one. Trump will fail again. Russia is not winning in Ukraine either, or if Trump won’t play ball, Russia will also get more aggressive against the USA. Likely using the classified information that was scattered in Mar-a-Lago that was likely compromised and is already in enemy hands.
- Trump will either have to tuck his tail between his legs regarding Canada, Greenland, and Panama – of risk being isolated. Putin is going to put a lot more pressure on Trump if Trump starts “talking tough” to Putin. Trump will likely find an offramp to frame his bad geopolitical strategies as though he was being “funny” or “sarcastic” – and a lot of his loyalists will actually believe that bullshit. However, this will also wake up a lot of everyday MAGA.
- Vance will be working on ousting Trump using the 25th Amendment, unless the Democrats can get ahead and use the 14th Amendment to prevent Trump from taking office.
- A lot more prominent racism will become normalized among some of the most violent segments of MAGA. There will be retaliation, and it will be a shitshow.
- China will pose as the grown up in the room, adding where Trump is failing to gain support from the world after he was threatening the sovereignty of many countries, Trump will isolate the USA in many ways. This will also isolate Canada, as they are geographically stuck up north. Many of the countries around the world will cease support for the USA, as they will look for another alternative. Likely China.
- Billionaires who thought they had it good under Trump will realize that their lives are worth the same as the lives of billionaires who spoke out against Putin. They will start falling from balconies, or some other stupid deaths… this will be a type of control… Trump won’t be the mastermind, he never was. Neither was Musk, they are both useful fools to adversarial regimes. These two useful fools just have egos too big to realize they are being played outright. Especially Musk, he is being outmaneuvered while thinking he was in control.
- Musk will realize that all his money cannot buy him real friends, nor a personality. The MAGA groups will humiliate him mercilessly – even more so than now. Musk will double down on his tantrums, and he will continue telling people in front of everybody to “f*ck themselves,” but he is really going to be crying on a corner – likely spending tons of money or controlling the algorithm to try to appease himself. This will be as Twitter (X) will continue plunging in value, and a lot of the leopards he raised will eat his face. Musk’s downfall will be very pathetic, as he will try to buy his way out of humiliation. He will fail.
- MAGA people will start waking up as the prices, and the cavalier corruption will increase. Trump will be attempting another tax break to the ultra-wealthy, but he will also fail to deport as many people as he thought, because it is extremely expensive and difficult. Sadly, this will spark even more overt racism, but it will also be “protected” by some ultra-rich, because they will realize that it is hurting their bottom-line.
- The USA might have to go through a tough talk about having a special election and depose Trump for incompetence, corruption, and foreign interference. This will also extend to Vance, because despite his best efforts to protect himself, it will show that he was either involved, or he failed to speak truth to power – as it was his duty to do so.
- There will also be a mass overturn of MAGA-GOP acolytes in Congress, and possibly the Supreme Court. This will stem from the Gaetz Ethics Report the MAGA-GOP tried to hide. A lot of other stuff the MAGA-GOP has been hiding from everyday MAGA will come to light, and at some point, the MAGA-handlers won’t be able to gaslight their base anymore. How? Because their cost of living will go up, and Trump’s promises will fall flat, and things will be very hard for the USA.
- There will be a nationwide effort to kick Musk out of the country, he will likely lose his citizenship, and any fortune derived from government contracts. When HE will lose his government contracts, Space X will be handled under a different name and ownership – perhaps nationalized. How? Likely keeping all the good workers and experts, make a parallel company leaving Musk out of it. Tesla will also plunge, and Musk will go from riches to rags, because a lot of his foreign government meetings he fails to disclose for his security clearance will uncover that he was indeed a security risk as it has been reported. We can expect also at least some sort of link to aiding other adversarial governments – to include spillage (sharing classified or sensitive information) and/or conflicts of interests.
- Russia and China will get a lot more aggressive against the USA and the west on America’s interest. The club of aggression will be also perpetrated by North Korea and Iran. I don’t see actual WW-III starting – yet. But the road to conflict will certainly move forward by leaps and bounds.
- Ramaswamy will be mercilessly decimated upon, and he’ll realize that sadly the very group of people he tried to win over under MAGA were extremely racist against him, and that they were merely tolerating him, but that they are going to go on the offensive – the first sign will be on denying him the DOGE appointment, and will (insidiously) include very racial tropes against him. It won’t be pretty, but they (the racists) will strike under the pretense that he insulted Americans and American culture first.
- The H1B Visas will frizzle and won’t go further than it is, because the narrative that it is indeed wanted to replace US skilled workforce with foreigners was not for diversity, but for tech-bros to underpay skilled workers, and threaten to deport them if they become inconvenient in any way. In other words, an American citizen can quit if they want, but an H1B visa holder would be deported – and get paid a fraction for their labor. In other words, indentured servitude.
- With the attempts to deport immigrants from the USA, and destroying the department of education, and the destruction of child-labor laws, the insidious realization will dawn that MAGA-elites wanted to send the children to work for the work fields the deported immigrants were once filling. At first MAGA will be OK with that, until they realize that their children are also part of that equation.
- Trump will finally be served the convictions he is due, because it will be proven that he had a lot more foreign-regime interference than he was admitting. This will also include the fact that a lot of the highly classified material he had at Mar-a-Lago indeed fell into adversarial regime hands, and they used that information against the USA. And that is by the way an accessory to treason against the USA. This will also cause some sort of reversal on the SCOTUS immunity against Trump.
I’ll end up here for now. There is a lot more, but I’ll write about them in due time. Some of these will seem very positive – and yes, we need something to look forward to in the middle off all this gloom and doom. The catalyst is the AMERICAN PEOPLE. For better or worse Americans are already great, most of them who voted for Trump were not given the full context. And although many remain stubborn, the epiphany will come.
For some will be painful but swift, for others will be painfully slowly as they yo-yo through the stages of grief, defaulting on denial. But at the end of the day facts don’t care about our feelings. They are what they are. And if ever day MAGA folks failed to take heed, which they did, and elected this person – then what I am describing is what we will see burning down because we collectively failed to extinguish that fire before it went out of control.
I’ve given the example before. The USA is like a ship out to sea that got struck, it is on fire and sinking. It will sink regardless, so we can either tow her to harbor to refloat her or let her sink on the deep water and lose her forever. The indicators are showing that we are at least now pointing towards the harbor, the towing has not started yet. That needs more people.
Right now, the bad guys are winning – because we let them. I’ve done all I can for this year. There are literally months’ worth of material you can review, and I’ve broken it down in long, short, and extreme short formats. I’m switching gears for 2025. I won’t be writing as often about political stuff. I’ll control what I can. I’ve had most of my say. I’ll chime in on what I can. I dedicated my lessons well before it was a problem. I hope you can read what I’ve said and share it. Anything else I’ll say will derive from those lessons I’ve repeated over and over again.
As I close this article. The last one for 2024 - I am sitting next to my daughter. We have several things we are doing together before new year’s. To me the start of a new year sets the tone for how it will be. And I want my next year to be in the company of my daughter and wife and controlling what I own. And what I own is our home and what we already have to make our life fulfilling – even if the word around falls apart, we’ll do what we can to make the best out of each day.
In other words, 2025 for us will be to be grateful for what we have and use our resources in the best possible way to navigate the contentious waters ahead. None of us can change the world, but we can change our perspective and learn about our environment. Like it or not it will affect us regardless. That is why I left my lessons already laid out. If they resonate, that will make me happy. If they don’t, at least I know that I was in the correct side of history, and I have the receipts to show what I did, and not what I “could have done.” Happy 2025 to you all! HLC