Youth Advocacy
📢 October 20, 2026
🔍 Weekly Review and Announcements
Welcome to this week's strategic briefing. This blog purposefully steers clear of the daily, chaotic distractions engineered by the current regime to overwhelm and confuse the public. Instead, our mission is to analyze deep-seated structural trends, empowering you to understand these authoritarian maneuvers on a fundamental level while fiercely advocating for our youth. Today's rising generation faces two unprecedented existential threats: the systemic demise of democracy and the unchecked, corporate-driven expansion of artificial intelligence. We are here to provide the insights and tools needed to protect their future.
🖋️ Choosing Stupidity vs. Fighting for Truth: We explore how structural "stupidity"—the stubborn choice to resist learning and self-correction—is weaponized by elite political and corporate actors to accelerate existential threats like unregulated artificial superintelligence, highlighting the press corps' relentless questioning as our vital line of defense.
🖋️ Dismantling Corporate Dynasties: We look beyond individual wealth taxes like California's Proposition 40 to expose how corporate power, low-wage loopholes, and historical rollbacks like Citizens United systematically manufacture billionaires at the expense of working families, calling for structural shifts like steward ownership.
🖋️ The Reality of Modern Remote Drone Warfare: We dissect the long-term, devastating consequences of transactional, short-term executive decision-making, contrasting Ukraine's calculated defense of democratic stability with a broader, unconstrained escalation of international drone tech.
🖋️ Exposing the Depth of Regime Corruption: We pull back the curtain on the transactional corruption driving illegal foreign policy deals—such as illicit diesel imports from Putin's regime—and detail the necessity of systematic legal accountability to strip bad actors of ill-gotten gains.
🖋️ Weaponizing Law Enforcement Against Dissent: We confront the dangerous weaponization of federal agencies used to execute racist, revenge-driven politics against domestic critics like Representative Ilhan Omar, marking it as a critical violation of the constitutional separation of powers.
🎶 Free Resource for Election Defenders: If you are actively working on the frontlines to protect and assist in fair elections, you can download a completely free musical collection—including multiple powerful protest anthems—directly from our hidden Anthems Page.
If you are a youth advocate navigating these systemic shifts on the ground, please access your custom resources on our hidden Advocates Page.
🎬 Visual Stories
Reclaim the Future: Watch "Take It Back"
✊ We invite you to experience the official visual story for "Take It Back," a driving musical anthem explicitly composed for youth advocates and voting rights organizers fighting back against institutional corruption. Watch the full video for free right now on our YouTube Channel and share it with the leaders in your network to amplify the resistance.
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🖋️ Articles and Commentary
Source | Psychology Today
Stupidity Threatens Everything
Question Everything
Guy P. Richardson wrote a book entitled, “Think: Why You Should Question Everything.” In this article, Mr. Richardson differentiates between “ignorant” and “stupid,” and delves into why we could face global catastrophe because of the latter.
First, we should understand his terminology: “Once a medical term, ‘stupid’ has been thoroughly popularized and weaponized in our everyday interactions. But this word is much more than a mere insult. Stupid does not mean uneducated or ignorant. Ignorance is an absence of knowledge, a condition remedied by learning. Stupidity, however, is a lack of desire and/or effort to acquire new and better information. Stupidity emerges from the stubborn resistance to learning and self-correction in light of new and better information.”
In short, one can lack intelligence, but one must choose stupidity.
The author suggests we are choosing stupidity in the face of some very dangerous global and national issues. Here are some of the issues raised by Richardson: “Today’s greatest perils—nuclear war, climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics, ecosystem destruction, the possible rise of an artificial superintelligence—are all unnecessarily complicated and worsened by stupidity.”
Fortunately, the writer reminds us that stupidity is not incurable and suggests that each of us must do our own part to question the world around us. He points out that we have a responsibility to recognize there are unethical players in the world around us using stupidity to manipulate us and goes on to call out those who actually create a political or corporate strategy to maximize and exploit stupidity.
This leads him to the strategy of “Question Everything.”
This week, reporters questioned Trump’s new appointee to White House Press Secretary, Katie Zacheria, who introduced herself to the reporters as a “lawyer.” When asked where she passed the bar exam, she said she studied in China. I find it rhetorical that, of all the people who have lied in this White House, the only one to be fired for lying is a woman. Thank you to the White House Press Corp for relentlessly questioning everything. It is getting to Trump and his regime. Now, the rest of us must do our part. Question Everything!
Source | Time
Billionaires Are the Symptom, Not the Disease
Making Billionaires
Christopher Marquis of Time Magazine does a good job explaining to us why billionaires are symptoms of economic and political problems within the U.S., but they are not the cause. The cause is corporate power and—though he agrees with current proposals to tax the wealthy (such as California’s Proposition 40)— taxing billionaires is not going to solve how billionaires are created and the undue influence they have on the politicians they buy.
Finding the core problem would take us back to the Supreme Court affirming “Citizens United” in 2010, which crushed any semblance of fairness in political funding. Now, Marquis says, “Over the past half century, political spending has become a core business strategy and arguably the highest-return investment a large company can make.”
Part of the issue, that Marquis points to, is not just the lack of taxes that corporations pay, but how corporations, like Wal-Mart, create loopholes whereby taxpayers essentially fund their business model. Here again is Marquis’ take: “The Walton fortune rests on wages so low that a federal watchdog found Walmart among the biggest employers of workers on Medicaid and food stamps. In other words, taxpayers are subsidizing the payroll beneath a dynastic fortune.”
So, what does the Republican “Welfare Queen” really look like? It looks like Jeff Bezos’ $500 million yacht, “Koru,” which costs $30 to $50 million a year, just to maintain. And it comes with a $75 million dollar support vessel (shadow vessel) to service the yacht.
Marquis offers multiple business models that would prevent the obscene funding of corporate dynasties. Again, let’s turn to Marquis’ words as he can describe the models much better than I: “It also means redesigning ownership itself. In my research on alternative corporate models, I have studied companies that are deliberately structured so that no one can extract a dynastic fortune, because the equity is legally locked to purpose. When Patagonia's founder moved the company into a purpose trust in 2022, such extraction became impossible by design; Bosch has been majority-owned by a foundation for decades and competes ferociously. Steward ownership, employee ownership, and benefit corporations are working alternatives operating in thousands of companies around the world and address wealth concentration at its source.”
As we encourage the new wave of politicians (that will hopefully be certified in January 2027), let us also encourage them to look beyond just taxing billionaires and have them consider ending the process of making billionaires.
Source | The Atlantic
Ukraine Finds a New Set of Targets
The new world of drone warfare
When I say “long-term consequences,” very few people would associate Donald Trump with that phrase. In fact, just the opposite: Trump has two basic modes of thought: “What’s in it for me?” and “Do it Now!” Even when warned by his own intelligence agencies, if it goes against what he already believes, he rejects it. Proof-positive? His unilateral decision to go to war with Iran and then watch helplessly as the Strait of Hormuz is closed.
In this article, long-time war correspondent and staff writer for The Atlantic, Simon Shuster, points out the obvious consequences of short-term thinking in the new world of drone warfadddre being utilized by small but mighty countries like Ukraine and Iran.
Trump asked Zelenskyy to stop bombing oil depots in Russia, but also told him, “there are plenty of other targets.” Trump did not ask Russia to stop targeting civilian targets in Ukraine and, in fact, Putin has only increased bombing such targets in the last months. As Shuster points out: “The most recent casualty report from the United Nations said that the Russian bombing campaign reached ‘a new level of intensity’ last month, killing at least 200 civilians and injuring 1,234 from September 1 to 24, when the report came out.”
While Trump plans on sending billions to Putin, he expects Zelenskyy to capitulate or the people of Ukraine to pick a new leader who will capitulate to Putin’s land invasion and internationally illegal land grab. While the Ukrainian leader has largely prevented drones from targeting civilian sites, he has allowed his defense department to continue with plans (including manufacturing drones with the capability) to take out such targets.
Shuster points out that one such plan he reported on prevented Moscow’s airports from functioning (the M&M plan); even stifling Putin from landing there after a trip abroad. No airports were destroyed and no civilians harmed, but the airports were shut down for a significant time.
It is clear the Ukraine is running out of options to defend itself, and with Trump seeking to fund Putin through an illegal back door, those options are only going to become worse.
Of course, it wouldn’t be long before Iran began writing from the same playbook, and they have already been targeting airports throughout the Middle East. But, Iran does not have the same moral restraints shown by Zelenskyy. They have sent drones to take out airports in cities such as Riyadh, Jeddah, Dubai, Iraq, Kuwait, and multiple targets in the UAE.
In the meantime, madman Trump is generously offering up U.S. targets in California. Does he have any understanding of the power of drone warfare and their ability to be manufactured and operated remotely anywhere in the world? Of course not…
That would be thinking ahead. That would require long-term planning. That would mean listening to people who have been experts in international intelligence for decades.
Obviously, Donald Trump does not understand the new world of drone warfare. Or, if he does, he’s already calculated the cost to be acceptable. It isn’t his family or him that is on the line. He’s got the safety of his new ballroom/war room to retreat to with his tender little bone spurs. Donald Trump stands to make money from the wars in Iran and Ukraine. When we find out how, we will find out how to end these drone-saturated conflicts without sacrificing civilians.
Source | The Atlantic
Trump’s Affection for Russia Is No Mystery
Putin’s Darling Donny
Jonathon Chait, of The Atlantic, seeks to unwrap for us the reason(s) that Trump is Putin’s Darling Donny. In light of Trump’s illegal action to buy diesel from Putin, many people are asking the same question: What does Putin have over Trump that makes this president so willing to do his continual bidding?
The effect of the diesel Trump is buying will have no real impact on world reserves, but it will essentially supply Putin with much-needed money to continue his war against Ukraine.
Make no mistake, the action is illegal. The law clearly states that buying oil from Russia is not unlawful “unless it makes peace with Ukraine.”
Even (and I do mean, even) some Republicans are calling for the President to nix this deal. They appear to be fine with his criminal convictions, hiding the Epstein files, and the conspicuous graft, but buying oil from Putin is a step too far.
Somewhere, in Donny’s magic fairy-tale world of global economics, this blip of diesel on the market will alleviate the price problems the U.S. is facing prior to the midterms.
Chait examines multiple theories of why Putin pulls Darling Donny’s strings so easily. The three primary theories are:
Putin masterfully strokes Donny’s ego;Trump admires dictators;
A third possibility, according to Chait, depicts “Trump as merely amoral, driven by transactions and indifferent to moral concerns.”
None of these seem to adequately explain the depth of Trump’s idolization of Putin, so Chait examines another possibility: Trump’s pure corruption and the manipulation by Putin of that character deficit. Once again, let’s turn to Chait to explain:
“During the 2016 campaign, Russia dangled a lucrative deal to develop Trump-branded properties in Russia that would deliver hundreds of millions of dollars in profit with no risk. More recently, The New York Times reported that Trump advisers and Russian officials have floated deals that would enrich Trump’s inner circle as part of ending the war.”
With Trump’s attempt to rename national buildings, oceans, and build gilded monuments to himself in the U.S. somewhat stymied, perhaps he is hoping that streets will be renamed after him in Russia.
The corruption of this president is unmatched in history; we should not be surprised if he is willing to sell out the United States for a hotel in Russia or the Donbas region of Ukraine, or beachfront property in Gaza. His family and he will need someplace to continue raking in the “hundreds of millions” after they are thrown out of the U.S. Is this all part of an asylum deal as Trump begins to realize he will face constant prosecution post-presidency, perhaps even as early as post-midterms?
Trump’s Supreme Court has virtually guaranteed that Trump cannot go to prison for his behavior as a president, but that doesn’t prevent him from going to prison for other crimes he has committed. Jack Smith’s prosecution will go to trial, the Epstein files will be read, and the illegal killings around the world—and in the U.S.—will be tried. It is our duty to make sure that the Trump family is left with none of their ill-gotten gains so they can’t continue to haunt us after Trump has finally died.
Putin’s Darling Donny and his entire family must be banished, shamed, and made an example of to the world. Even as he attempts to dismantle the International Criminal Court (ICC), we must make sure he—and his lackeys—are prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Source | Esquire
There Are So Many Things Wrong with What the DOJ Is Doing to Rep. Ilhan Omar
Racist, Revenge Politics
There are only two possible reasons for the FBI “break-in” of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s DC residence: Racism and Revenge.
Here’s how Esquire columnist, Charles P. Pierce, puts it:
“First, this is another example of the president weaponizing law enforcement to play out the demonology in his increasingly superfluous brainpan. Second, it also is a shocking violation of the separation of powers. And, yes, the cowardly sycophantic behavior of the Republican majorities made Congress vulnerable to institutional sabotage. But many of the Republicans in Congress are just as rabid about Representative Omar as the president is. Their bigotry cannot replace the constitutional order, even under this president, who wouldn’t know the constitutional order if it fell on his head, which, one day, I hope will happen.”
Omar has two primary issues going against her: 1) She is Somali, and 2) she has been adamant in her opposition to this administration and its Republican regime. Lesser threats have not worked against her, so this last-ditch effort of breaking into her residence is similar to the attack on Jack Smith by a Republican Senate panel that backfired only weeks ago. Trump has continually called the Representative from Minnesota “crooked” and “garbage.” She was a prominent member of "The Squad,” and Omar is an outspoken domestic critic of Trump's agenda. She has actively campaigned against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in Minnesota and has aggressively challenged executive mandates—such as pushing back against Elon Musk's interventions into the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
If you are tired of a racist, revenge-focused, Republican regime that illegally targets opposing voices with attacks such as these against Omar and Smith. Your time to show it is just weeks away. Don’t let anything stop you from voting this November. And if you are one of those brave souls showing up to monitor voting at the polls, I have a gift for you. If you go to my website, there is a free download of my protest music available. Go to my “Anthem Page” for more information.
