A Country in Reflection
An Easter reflection on power, responsibility and the country we still share
Editor’s Note: Easter Reflection
Today marks 253 days since the launch of The Fourth Turning Point.
This publication began with a simple goal: to study power, institutions, markets, and political decisions honestly enough to understand where this country is heading and help change its trajectory for the better.
This project did not appear out of nowhere.
I have been obsessed with markets, politics, power, and history since I was a young boy.
Long before this publication existed, I spent most of my days reading about these systems, trying to understand how they actually work and why countries rise, stabilize, fracture, or fall.
The Fourth Turning Point is simply where that obsession became public.
I started writing this because I believe something is shifting in the country and in the world. I wanted a place where those shifts could be studied in real time.
Sometimes that means writing about markets.
Sometimes it means writing about war.
Sometimes it means writing about politics or institutions.
All of it is part of the same system.
I also wanted a public place to record my thinking.
A place where predictions, judgments, and analysis are written down before events unfold so anyone can go back later and see what was right, what was wrong, and what actually happened.
Too much commentary in politics and markets exists without accountability.
This project creates a living record.
It also forces me to be early and visible about what I believe is coming.
If I am wrong, everyone can see it.
If I am right, everyone can see that too.
More often than not, the analysis here ends up closer to reality than the consensus coming out of television studios, campaign war rooms, and think tank panels.
Not because I know everything.
Not because I am the smartest person in the room.
It is because I am not trapped inside the rooms where everyone has to pretend the system is functioning normally.
Independent thinking has advantages.
My goal here has never been partisan loyalty.
My goal is understanding.
Not one party.
Not one ideology.
Not even just the country itself.
But the forces shaping the world we are all living through.
This piece is written as an Easter reflection, a moment meant for moral inventory.
Easter is about resurrection, accountability, and the possibility of renewal.
Those themes apply to nations just as much as individuals.
Sometimes renewal begins with honesty about where we actually are.
Before the reflection begins, a few personal disclosures are appropriate.
Political Disclosure
A few things about me should be said honestly for both new readers and returning ones.
I am a registered Republican.
In the 2024 election, I voted for Kamala Harris.
Those two sentences alone will make separate halves of the country uncomfortable.
That is fine.
I still call myself a Republican because I believe in market solutions, fiscal responsibility, institutional stability, and a strong military used with legal authority and restraint.
I believe the government that governs least governs best.
I believe free markets with honest rules create more broadly shared prosperity than systems where connected insiders write the rules for themselves.
I believe in those things.
They used to be Republican ideas.
I did not leave the Republican Party.
The Republican Party left the ideas that made me one.
Almost none of them describe what the Republican Party actually does when it holds power.
The party I technically belong to spent four years telling us a man who lost a free and fair election had actually won it.
It elevated the people who stormed the Capitol and called them patriots.
It passed a budget cutting food assistance for one in eight Americans while adding $3.4 trillion to the debt and called it fiscal responsibility.
It started a war during active nuclear negotiations, watched the body count climb past 38,000, and called it almost done.
It had the opportunity to choose differently.
After January 6th, there was a window.
It lasted about three weeks.
Then the party decided the base mattered more than the country.
Then the window closed.
I belong to a generation that came of age during the financial aftershocks of 2008, the polarization of the 2010s, a pandemic, and now a period of rising geopolitical instability.
I studied markets seriously from a young age.
Markets punish certainty and reward humility.
That lesson applies to politics too.
I do not believe loyalty to a party should require denying reality when reality becomes inconvenient.
Politically, I often feel party homeless.
Though I do not feel intellectually homeless.
This publication is not an arm of any party, active campaign, ideology, or institution.
It is solely my attempt to publicly understand what is actually happening.
Life Disclosure
I am 22 years old.
No institutional pedigree.
No family endowment.
No decades in the room.
My father understands finance at a level most people never reach.
He taught me what he could, and what he gave me was real.
But he did not inherit that knowledge from a wealthy father handing it down to him either.
Whatever I build here, I am building from the ground up, the same way he did.
I found markets young.
Lost money young.
Markets are a fast and merciless teacher.
They do not care about your confidence, your story, or your true intentions.
They price in your mistakes before you finish making them.
I paid some of that tuition early and learned the kind of humility that only comes from watching capital leave your account because of assumptions you were certain about.
I also live with bipolar disorder.
I am not burying that in a footnote.
Thats my everyday life.
It has shaped how I think, how I work, and how I have experienced the world.
There were years of genuine instability.
There was a long rebuild.
Discipline, for me, is not a productivity habit or tiktok hack.
It is something I had to construct deliberately after losing it entirely…repeatedly.
Experiences like that leave you skeptical of confident narratives and attentive to long term consequences.
Systems punish illusions.
Markets do it immediately.
Institutions do it eventually.
I have watched these systems from more than one vantage point.
I studied abroad while American politics moved through one of the most volatile periods in modern history.
Watching your own country from the outside changes how you see it.
Distance strips away some of the noise.
Eventually I began writing publicly and building this publication from nothing.
That choice comes with consequences.
Every framework, every judgment, every prediction now lives on the record before the outcome is known.
Most commentary about politics and markets appears after the outcome is already obvious, dressed up to look like foresight.
I have no interest in that.
I will be wrong here sometimes.
Predictions will fail.
Assumptions will not always hold.
(Although most are right)
That is unavoidable when you are studying complex systems while events are still unfolding.
The goal is not to appear correct after the fact.
The goal is to build a public record of thinking, learning, correcting, and improving over time.
Understanding the world is a lifelong process.
This publication is simply where mine happens in public.
Publication Status — Day 253
Today marks 253 days since the launch of The Fourth Turning Point.
What began as a small writing project and a place to free my mind has quietly grown into a community of readers spread across all 50 U.S. states and more than 60 countries.
Across the platform:
• Subscribers: 1,200+
• Followers: 2,600+
• All-time views: 50,000+ and growing
None of that existed eight months ago.
The numbers themselves are not the point.
What matters is that a group of people from different places, backgrounds, and political perspectives has gathered around the same idea: that markets, politics, institutions, and history are part of the same system, and that understanding those systems requires honest analysis.
That community is the reason the work continues.
Current Analytical Series
Several ongoing analytical projects operate simultaneously within The Fourth Turning Point.
Strategic Conflict Assessment Series
A live conflict analysis tracking the Iran war across military developments, energy markets, geopolitical escalation, and second-order economic consequences.
These briefings examine how changes on the battlefield translate into broader instability across financial markets, supply chains, and global political systems.
Ten briefings have been published so far.
Electoral Pressure Index (EPI)
A structural model measuring pressure within the U.S. electoral system.
The index converts polling trends, institutional trust indicators, economic expectations, and coalition movement into a single score designed to estimate midterm political stress before it appears in election results.
Current Reading:
80 — Major Wave environment
Why This Publication Exists
The purpose of The Fourth Turning Point is simple.
To understand the forces shaping the country we live in. Markets, institutions, political decisions, and historical cycles.
And to confront them honestly.
This project exists because I have spent most of my life trying to understand how power actually works.
Why some societies stabilize while others fracture.
Why institutions endure in some moments and fail in others.
And how markets react when those pressures begin to build.
Sometimes that means challenging one side.
Sometimes that means challenging the other.
Sometimes it means challenging my own assumptions.
“We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
— Abraham Lincoln, 1862
What follows is an Easter reflection written in that spirit.
Happy Easter.
To every American who woke up this morning still believing this country means something, still showing up, still paying attention, still refusing to look away.
This message is for you.
And to everyone else, this message is for you too.
Especially you.
The Record
To the ones who decided hate was a governing philosophy and packaged it as common sense.
Who took a country full of real frustration, real pain, real economic anxiety, and handed it to a man who has never spent a single day of his life thinking about anyone but himself.
A man who has declared bankruptcy six times, stiffed contractors, cheated students at a fake university, paid hush money to cover up affairs while his wife was home with a newborn, and somehow convinced millions of people that he was their champion.
That took talent.
The wrong kind, but talent.
To the voters who looked at all of that, looked at the Access Hollywood tape, looked at the 34 felony convictions, looked at the two impeachments, looked at January 6th, looked at the classified documents stacked next to the pool at Mar-a-Lago, and said: more please.
Four more years of this.
He is exactly what America needs.
To the ones who spent a decade screaming about law and order and then watched their guy get convicted by a jury of his peers and called it a witch hunt.
Who told us no one is above the law.
And then demanded their guy be above the law.
Who said the rule of law was sacred until the law touched the one person they needed it not to touch.
To the ones who said they hated elites.
Who railed against the establishment, the donors, the Wall Street crowd, the people who looked down on regular Americans.
And then watched their guy fill his cabinet with billionaires, hand trillion-dollar tax cuts to the wealthiest people in the country, gut the agencies that protected workers and consumers, and cut food assistance while the stock portfolios of his donors grew.
That is not anti-establishment.
That is the establishment laughing at you while you cheer.
The Silence
To the ones who told us they loved the troops.
Who put the bumper stickers on the truck, flew the flags, posted the tributes every Veterans Day.
And then stayed quiet when their guy called fallen soldiers losers and suckers.
Stayed quiet when he attacked Gold Star families.
Stayed quiet when he tried to use the military to stay in power after losing an election.
Stayed quiet when his Secretary of Defense shared active military strike plans, aircraft types, launch times, and attack sequencing on a consumer messaging app and accidentally added a journalist to the chat.
The Inspector General later found it unnecessarily risked the lives of the military personnel those bumper stickers were supposed to honor.
Who then started a war during active nuclear negotiations, on a four-to-six-week timeline, with no plan for what happens after, and watched the body count climb past 38,000 while calling it almost done.
Who watched an 11-year-old Iranian boy die at a Tehran checkpoint and said nothing.
Who watched families celebrating Nowruz get killed when a bridge collapsed on them and gloated about it on social media.
Who watched a U.S. F-15E shot down over Iranian territory and two American airmen forced to eject into hostile terrain.
Who watched one of them disappear into the Zagros Mountains while Iranian forces, local tribesmen, and U.S. special operations units raced to find him.
Who watched a massive combat search-and-rescue operation unfold involving hundreds of American personnel and dozens of aircraft.
Bombs dropped to keep Iranian convoys away from the rescue site.
Helicopters taking fire.
Aircraft destroyed on the ground to keep them from falling into enemy hands.
And who said nothing about how close that moment came to ending very differently.
That silence said everything the bumper sticker did not.
The Alliances
To the NATO skeptics.
To the ones who looked at an alliance built on the bones of fifty million people who died in the deadliest war in human history, an alliance that kept the peace for eighty years, that stood down Soviet tanks, that responded to September 11th as an attack on all of us, and decided it was a bad deal.
Who decided that the man sitting in the Kremlin, who poisons dissidents, bombs hospitals, and has made territorial conquest and genocide his life’s work, deserved more benefit of the doubt than the allies who bled alongside us in every conflict since World War Two.
Who called Zelensky a dictator while calling Putin strong.
Think about what that says.
Think hard about it.
To the ones who wrapped themselves in the Constitution at every opportunity and then supported a man who suggested terminating it.
Who claimed to love free speech and then cheered when journalists were attacked, when press credentials were pulled, when a president stood at a podium while his followers called for his first Vice President to be hanged and called the free press the enemy of the people.
In this country.
In America.
The Numbers
To the ones who said they cared about the deficit.
Who made it their entire political identity for eight years under Obama and another four under Biden.
Who screamed about debt being a moral failure, a generational theft, an existential threat.
And then voted for a law that adds $3.4 trillion to the national debt over ten years while cutting Medicaid by $917 billion, cutting food assistance that one in eight Americans depends on, and cutting student loan programs, and said nothing.
And then funded a war that costs $1.3 million per minute.
The Pentagon requested $200 billion to fund it.
A Harvard economist estimated the total future cost at over $1 trillion, including $600 billion in future medical costs for troops.
The first six days alone cost $12.7 billion.
The same people who made the deficit their entire political identity for eight years are voting to fund a war at $1.3 million per minute while cutting Medicaid by $917 billion.
Those two things are happening in the same legislative session.
The deficit did not stop being real.
You just stopped caring the moment your team was the one spending.
The Children
To the ones burning through democratic norms and calling it revolution.
Who spent years being told the system was rigged and decided the answer was to rig it harder in their direction.
Who packed courts, gerrymandered maps into shapes that do not exist in nature, passed voter restriction laws targeting specific zip codes with surgical precision, and then told us with a straight face that they were protecting election integrity.
To the ones who said they wanted to protect children and then cut school lunch programs, gutted Medicaid, eliminated after-school funding, and opposed every piece of legislation that would have actually made a child’s life safer or healthier.
Who wanted to protect children from books but not from poverty, from hunger, from guns in their classrooms.
Who stayed quiet when a girls elementary school was destroyed by a missile strike that multiple independent investigations concluded was carried out by the United States.
On February 28, the first day of the war, a U.S. strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls elementary school in Minab.
More than 175 people, mostly children, were killed.
The New York Times investigation concluded the strike was carried out by the United States with outdated targeting data.
UN human rights experts characterized it as a potential war crime under the Rome Statute.
The administration is still investigating.
The children are still buried.
Who stayed quiet when an 11-year-old girl in Gainesville, Texas took her own life after classmates spread a rumor that ICE would deport her family.
Who wanted to protect children from drag shows but not from this.
The War
To the ones cheering for this country to fail.
Not reluctantly, not quietly, but openly, enthusiastically, as a badge of ideological honor.
Who measure victory not by what gets built or who gets helped but purely by who gets hurt.
Whose entire political identity at this point is the performance of cruelty dressed up as toughness.
This war is the clearest distillation of everything in this letter.
It started during active nuclear negotiations.
The Omani foreign minister had said peace was within reach.
Iran had agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium and to full IAEA verification.
Talks were scheduled to resume on March 2.
On February 28 at 1:30 in the morning, the bombs started falling.
Thirty-five days later, Trump said on April 1 that he is no longer concerned about Iran’s enriched uranium buried underground.
The thing that required a war to prevent is the thing he is no longer concerned about.
The war started to achieve objectives that are now being declared unimportant.
The people who died between those two positions died for the gap.
Call it what it is: a confession.
Easter
And on Easter Sunday, while the Secretary of Defense called for prayers for military victory in the name of Jesus Christ, Pope Leo XIV responded directly.
He said this thinking is entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.
He said God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.
He said people mistake power for righteousness when they consider themselves victorious when they destroy.
On the day Christians mark the resurrection of a man who died for others, the Secretary of Defense continued to ask Jesus to bless the killing.
And the Pope said clearly that is not who Jesus is.
The Country Is Still Here
To all of you: this country is still here.
The alliances you called obsolete are still standing.
The press you called the enemy is still printing.
The courts you called corrupt are still ruling.
The democracy you tried to end on January 6th is still functioning.
The people you counted on to give up have not given up.
And the country is answering.
Thirteen percent of Trump’s own 2024 voters now say they regret how they voted, concentrated in the exact groups his coalition needed most: young voters, Hispanic voters, lower-income voters, the people for whom prices are the top concern and who are now watching their finances fall behind at the highest rate since 2022.
Forty-six percent of Americans say their personal finances are falling behind right now.
Only 10 percent say things are going well in the country.
On March 28, eight million people filled the streets in 3,300 locations, more than two-thirds of them outside major cities, in red states and rural counties and bellwether towns, in the largest single-day protest in American history.
Sixty-five percent of Americans believe Trump will order a large-scale ground war in Iran.
Only seven percent support that idea.
The country is not confused about what it wants.
The country knows.
The question is whether the people making decisions are listening to it.
The people did not give up.
They showed up.
America is not your property.
It never was.
It belongs to everyone who shows up for it, defends it, believes in it even when it disappoints them, and refuses to hand it over to people who want to own it for personal gain.
So from the bottom of my heart, with full sincerity, on this Easter Sunday:
Happy Easter.
To every single one of you.
The rest of us will be here when you are ready to rejoin us.
“The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men"
— Plato, The Republic
Thank you for this reminder of where we are, and how we got here so fast and so soon.
I've just discovered your platform. Really impressed and inspired by your analysis and writing. And the very clear call to action. Appreciate the interconnectedness and yet the focus. It is a complex system and with prompters like yourself, I sincerely hope more people will start to see the patterns and be moved to take responsibility and action. I just finished reading "These are the plunderer's" which pulled the curtain back for me and which seems to align with some of your writing. The greed driven theft (and needless suffering and death) have to stop. Great work. I'll be reading! And taking action.