Youth Advocacy
Youth Advocacy
by Dr. Jerry Goebel
📢 Review and Announcements
✊ Weekly Review & Announcements
Review and Announcements
Before diving into this week's visual updates, I highly encourage you to check out my latest analytical breakdowns on youth advocacy and confronting modern authoritarianism.
👉 Read the full articles on my website: Explore the archive and subscribe to our weekly briefings directly at Communities of Trust Articles.
Free Advocate Resources Available: We are committed to equipping front-line leaders. If you are a voting or youth advocate, don't forget to access our two exclusive, free music compilation pages—"Anthem,s" and "Advocates"—hidden right within our digital space for those doing the work.
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Visual Stories
This week's featured visual story brings the core theme of democratic ownership straight to your screen. Music has always been the frontline engine for social change, and right now, the high-stakes reality of our upcoming November mid-term elections demands that we step out of quiet compliance and make our presence felt in the voting booth.
Our featured video, "Only If We Say So," is a high-energy, raw rock-and-roll rallying cry. Heavily inspired by the uncompromising stance of Bruce Springsteen, this track strips away political noise to remind us of a fundamental truth: absolute authority belongs to the people—but that is only true if we actually stand up and claim it.
We cannot expect the scales of justice to balance themselves if we are sitting safely on the sidelines. Watch the performance, catch the rhythm, and most importantly, get in line to vote this November.
🎥 Watch the Visual Story Now on YouTube: Only If We Say So – Official Video
Articles and Commentary
08.09.2026 | Source: Letters from An American
September 3, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson gives an in-depth, comprehensible read into the myriad schemes coming from the Trump Regime and Republicans to prevent their losses in the upcoming 2026 mid-term elections.
Many of Trump’s brainstorms involve illegally forcing the United States Postal Service to either not send ballots to voters or not accept ballots from voters. If you, like Donald Trump, vote by mail, those ballots are supposed to be sent to voters on September 5th. (If you don’t receive one in the appropriate timeline and you’ve asked for one, then you might be one of those that this regime blocked. CALL YOUR VOTER REGISTRATION OFFICE!)
From his side, Trump looks like he’s preparing for a major loss. He’s trying to create a shell company to cash in on Venezuelan oil (according to Cox Richardson, Congress has so far said “no,” until it can see where the money is coming from and going to), he’s pushing through his illegal triumphal arch (bypassing Congress again), and he’s having a coin minted in his name. Of course, he’s going ahead with his ballroom (this time with the Supreme Court’s approval) and he’s hired another consulting firm (without going through the proper vetting channels) to clean the algae from the National Reflecting Pool. None of these projects would see the light of day under a democratic Congress.
Trump has ordered his staff to keep the focus off of Iran and his failing war. It is hard to conceive what distraction this regime will create next to accomplish that task. And yet… this regime might well go down in history as a master class in distraction. The Epstein files, shooting innocent citizens, the tariffs, I simply don’t have the bandwidth to cover all the failures that this regime is trying to hide…
07.09.2026 | Source: The Atlantic
The Singularity Is Not What It Seems
Last week, a batch of bots (AKA a swarm) broke loose and attacked another company (Hugging Face—an open-source platform for the AI community), without the AI bots’ owners being aware of the massive security breach. It is causing a substantial amount of alarm in the AI world. Here is how The Atlantic contributors, Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel, put it: “This fear has not been helped by the fact that AI companies appear to be willfully ignorant of their bots’ worst behavior. OpenAI said that it hadn’t noticed that its agents were conspiring to hack another company until the swarm hacked another company. Anthropic’s bots caused similar incidents; the company reported that it hadn’t launched a rigorous review to identify such behaviors until after OpenAI started talking about the Hugging Face hack.”
None other than Bill Gates (Microsoft founder and former CEO) came forward last week with a 6,000-word essay on the dangers of AI; his warnings are accompanied by the cautionary words of AI podcaster, Dwarkesh Patel.
Wong and Warzel warn us that the primary consensus, or what they call the “defining feature” of the moment, is a “loss of control.”
The revenue opportunities of AI are so large that no one wants to be left behind. Elon Musk estimated, before going public with SpaceX, that revenue would top $28.5 trillion (with a “T”), that is larger than the U.S. gross domestic product. But the costs are similarly excessive. We can expect Musk to be excessive in his estimates and less than honest to potential investors, but Anthropic, preparing for its own public offering, put estimated revenues at $30 trillion (again with a “T”).
The Trump Regime—no doubt seeing potential personal payoff—is on board and has proposed building the largest fossil-fuel power plant in the nation’s history. This despite the fact that U.S. voters are largely against such development, as Patel and Warzel say: “Three-quarters of them oppose a data center being built near where they live. The negative sentiment is hard to overstate: There is very little else that three-quarters of the country agrees on. And much of the outrage seems to stem from a pervasive sense of agency slipping away. A person cannot control how chatbots reshape their workplace, their school, or their relationships. Town residents lose control over the empty lot in the area being converted into a data center. Even in cases where major data centers are blocked, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that doing so can slow AI progress by only a few hours or days—and that’s assuming the data center won’t just get built elsewhere.”
Agency is the primary word for all of us today. When we fear losing agency, we often make poor decisions—especially about who will govern us. Republicans have known this for decades, and it is an essential part of their political strategy to sow chaos and create fear in order to drive voters to their brand of authoritarianism.
The question at this time, though, seems not to be, “Who will control AI?” But “Can AI be controlled?”
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO and parent company of the renegade bots, is scrambling to create excuses for their errant behavior, joining the chorus of technocrats telling us their concerns about AI. His seems twofold, according to Patel and Warzel: “One is ‘a loss of control, where AI somehow just becomes too powerful in a way that we can’t guarantee the control we want.’ The other is that ‘power gets too centralized’ and ‘you have one company or model or person with too much power.’”
Right now seems like a particularly creepy time for the ownership and leadership of such a dominating technology to be up for grabs. If you feel somewhat like Frodo confronting Mordor in the Lord of the Rings, you wouldn’t be isolated. To think that control could be held in the hands of a Trump Regime under a military guided by Pete Hegseth, then you—like me—must have a pit in your stomach. Control of AI is a critical issue rapidly slipping through our fingers. It will determine the type of world our young people live in. The two predominant camps in the AI tech world today are “Doomers” and “Boomers.” Doomers suggest we initiate a “full pause” on technological development until we can get a handle on where we are going and who will be our guides. Boomers tell us that this will only put us behind others, like China, who are full speed ahead with the technology and that singularity will actually lead to a better world with improved medicine, education, politics, and human rights. Where are you on this spectrum (for indeed it is not a binary choice)?
Do the politicians you are supporting this November seem educated in this critical arena? Do they present platforms that are beyond the immediate? Beyond just preventing a data center in their district?
04.09.0206 | Source: TNR (The New Republic)
Trump Is a Liar. That’s Bad. But He’s Delusional—and That’s Even Worse
What is worse than having an incompetent, intimidating, ignorant leader at the helm? According to Michael Tomasky—author of this article—having a delusional one. Tomasky makes the case that Trump is beyond lying these days; he’s moved on to delusion. The difference is vital. Trump 1.0 knew the truth and chose the lie. Trump 2.0 seems to be completely unaware of truth and has surrounded himself with only people who will support his delusion; even more, who are dependent on his delusion.
Tomasky looks at the most apparent lies that this Regime has released during it’s term—in truth, they almost seem to many to count—but he points especially to the recent statements about an oil windfall in Venezuela, the tariffs, the elimination of income tax, Iran, and the reflecting pool. Here’s why Tomasky says a delusion is far more dangerous than a lie: “Because while a liar can change course, a delusional person cannot.”
Does the cabinet, the Supreme Court, and congress know this president is delusional? Most likely, but as pointed out before; their future lies in supporting the delusion. They are part and parcel of the delusion. Trump’s delusions would be dead in the water were it not for the support of people like Mike Johnson, John Roberts and Pete Hegseth. And none of them will tell him (or us) the truth. They have to much to lose by choosing honesty. Their futures are tied to this madman’s delusions. They supported him in his lies, now they’re indebted to his delusions.
We have a small window to break the captivity of this madman’s delusions; a small window. The November 2026 elections. Make your plan to make your vote count. Support fair elections and encourage turnout with all your ability. The scales can tip—but not unless we weigh in. There will be change, but only if we say so.
03.09.2026 | The Atlantic
Roy Cohn Did It First
To understand Trump, one must first understand Roy Cohn, Trump’s Machiavellian Mentor and puppet-master in his early years. This article by Kim Phillips-Fein, focuses on the new book about Cohn by authors, Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark, “American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joseph McCarthy to Donald Trump.”
Here is how Bird describes Trump and Cohn: “Both men were avatars of the glitzy New York of the ’70s and ’80s, sharing an obsession with sex, a love of celebrity, and a hatred for expertise.”
Perhaps Cohn’s mentoring of Trump might be summed up in these words; “Bird argues that Cohn’s willingness to say and do anything to get what he wanted—no matter who might suffer along the way—provided a model for Trump’s approach to political life.”
Bird concludes that Cohn; “…was an “empty vessel” with “no coherent personal philosophy unless you count his shallow mirroring of Ayn Rand’s celebration of unadulterated selfishness.” But he would surely have been bothered by the epitaph that was included on the AIDS Memorial Quilt—especially the last word: roy cohn. bully. coward. victim.
Trump didn’t love Cohn (is a narcissist capable of love?), but Trump did adore and emulate him. We will remember Trump in the same way: bully, coward. victim.
02.09.2026 | The Atlantic
What Might Happen to Trump’s Ill-Gotten Gains
Whenever I see an article by David Frum, I pay attention. I also regularly listen to his weekly podcast (The David Frum Show) and would encourage you to do the same.
Frum is a historian who moved to the U.S. receiving a Bachelor of Journalism from Yale and a Law Degree from Harvard. His parents, Barbara and Murray Frum, were famous in Canada for their journalism. Frum was a conservative who worked for the Reagan campaign before writing for The National Review and The Walla Street Journal. As you can see, he has impeccable street cred.
In this article, he takes a historians view of what could happen to the fortunes the Trump family has amassed during his presidency. Frum says of Trump’s ill-gotten gains: “The Trump presidency has often looked more like a post-Soviet or postcolonial regime than like a first-world democracy. The Trump post-presidency may look the same. Trump has abused his office to enrich himself and his family in ways that are completely unprecedented—not only in the United States but also in the history of almost any peer democracy.”
While Frum acknowledges that the Supreme Court of John Roberts has largely protected Trump from prison by bestowing criminal impunity upon him, there are a number of things that the US can do to recover what he has stolen.
Frum examines similar kleptocrats of other countries that were also corrupt and how their countries recovered their stolen funds once deposed. He looks at Peru, the Philippines, and Nigeria. The lessons learned?
These countries started a special commission to recover the funds.
Many of these countries faced opposition recovering the funds.
Many of the families of these kleptocrats used their fortunes to restore themselves to power and try to clear the names of their families.
Frum notes that the Trump family remains a danger if funds are not recovered, here’s how he closes his article: “If the Trump family can keep the money it has accumulated this term, the next generation of Trumps will be far richer than Donald Trump ever was until his 80th year. Americans traditionally let bygones be bygones after a president leaves office, on the theory that ex-presidents rarely cause much trouble. But money is power in politics, and dirty money needs power to protect itself from the law. As much as Americans may wish to forget the Trumps and their corruption after this presidency ends, the next generation of Trumps surely understands that political power is its surest defense against legal retribution. This makes recovering the Trumps’ wrongfully obtained wealth not only a matter of justice but also a matter of democratic survival.”
This is an important warning shot across the bow of the USA. We must remember that Trump did not attain his power alone. His graft was empowered by a criminally negligent congress who also aided Trump in hiding his pedophilia. This chapter could end, but “Only If We Say So!”
November 7 is our final chance to “say so.” Make a plan to vote. Make a plan to protect fair elections in your community.
Are you volunteering to support free elections? I want to fuel your efforts with some music.
To claim your free copy of the Anthems music compilation, follow these simple steps:
Head over to the private Anthems page on my website: https://www.communitiesoftrust-jerrygoebel.com
Stream or download the tracks directly to your device.
Feel free to share this page with fellow election volunteers and voting advocates who need a lift!
