MeidasTouch Sunday Message

Hey everybody, this is Ben Meiselas, co-founder of the MeidasTouch Network, here with my Sunday message.

As you know, the Sunday message is my favorite post I do every week, where we can reflect on what’s already occurred and what’s happening in the week ahead.

I want to thank all of our subscribers at the outset for making this network possible.

Our growth is made possible thanks to you. As we expand our international coverage, our Washington, D.C. bureau, our expansion into different channels, that’s all made possible by you, so thank you.

All right, let’s get into it.

Obviously, the economic picture got grimmer this week, and Donald Trump seems to continue to plunge this country into more difficult times.

That’s an understatement.

Oil is at record highs, which means gas and diesel are at record highs. We saw some diesel shortages in areas like North Texas and Southeast Michigan and certain stations in Orlando.

We’ve been paying close attention to the depletion of our strategic petroleum reserves at the salt caverns in Texas, at Bryan Mound, where the integrity and structural foundation of the salt caverns that hold the reserves is also facing real strain.

We saw escalation in the form of the U.S.-backed Saudi regime and their proxy forces striking deep within Yemen to try to stop the Ansar Allah advance east, after Ansar Allah took over Western Yemen.

MBS apparently thought the U.S. security umbrella would still provide some assistance, but quickly found that they were defenseless as Ansar Allah struck hard deep in Riyadh.

The East-West pipeline was hit, with power stations going down. Refineries and storage facilities from Yanbu to Abqaiq in the east were hit hard.

Further adding to the issues there, we’ve got European countries all basically saying they expect imminent hybrid warfare against them by Putin, and making preparations for war spreading throughout the continent.

One top French defense official told Le Monde that there are already conventional military responses taking place against Russia. This, as Russia has set a curfew for certain areas that border Estonia.

Sometimes a critique I get at the MeidasTouch Network is that we’re being alarmist, or hyperbolic, or over the top in our assessment. My response to that is, far from it. I think I’m giving a sobering assessment of what’s happening, and I think the reality may be far more profound than words have the ability to capture. I’m just trying to call it what it is right now, and sadly or presciently, I think we’ve been spot on.

You also had Ukraine striking deep in Moscow. Moscow refineries were hit hard last night. We did videos on it this morning.

I’ve been doing a number of interviews, and I hope you’ve appreciated the long form ones this week.

This past week I did the interview with Colin Kaepernick, about an hour long.

We hit on all these major topics, and it was really incredible to share my friendship with Colin with all of you, and to be in a position now, nine years after I first met Colin, to do that interview.

Then I did a big interview with David Corn from Mother Jones, where we talked a lot about Russia’s strategy geopolitically right now.

And then I did an interview that was perhaps very unexpected. I interviewed pro-Houthi reporter Hussein Al-Mukhaibiti, a top reporter in Sana’a, the Houthi capital in Yemen, whose brother Mohammed Al-Mukhaibiti is one of the top political leaders for Ansar Allah.

Hussein described in detail from Sana’a how they feel about Trump and how they view him as a fool. They have a word in Yemen for someone who lies all the time and doesn’t keep their word. They call a person a “Trump” if you lie and you behave like an idiot.

He explained that they never agreed with U.S. foreign policy and were always against it, which I guess is an understatement, of course, but they never viewed the U.S. as weak and behaving like losers. Now, he said, they view the U.S. as having its reputation ruined from the perspective of power, and they look to China and Russia as being much stronger.

That was a real serious realization to see that’s how the Houthis view us now.

I think it’s important to get perspectives the way we do here on the MeidasTouch Network. It was an illuminating conversation, so I hope you have an opportunity to watch it.

The coverage we’re doing here is very different from what you see anywhere else, which is what we all wanted to build.

You know I have a certain perspective, and you know where my values and principles are. But whether you agree with me on everything or not, we can just get you the facts. I hope you feel that with all of the videos we put out on our channel and all the channels MeidasTouch helps operate, it is a wealth of information that’s needed in an environment that feels tainted by Trump regime propaganda.

That’s really important.

As we head into this next week, it’s not going to be easy.

We know that.

There’s some strong polling data going into the midterms, however, showing how much all Americans, even Republicans and former MAGA people, despise Trump, and generic ballots are showing Democrats surging ahead of Republicans. But I know that behind these numbers is the fact that Trump has been such an abject failure, which sadly has translated into a great deal of failure for our country.

It hasn’t just trickled down to the American people, it has hit like a tsunami. We often talk about a blue tsunami and a blue wave in the election, but there has been a tsunami of awful consequences from this Trump regime that has really hurt people.

When I think about this network and what we’re building, I think about always standing and fighting shoulder to shoulder with people, and making this always about a people-powered movement.

That’s why the Colin Kaepernick interview was so important, and why Colin’s message has always transcended politics.

Back in 2017, I think it frustrated some people that Colin wasn’t more political, per se. They were asking why he wasn’t talking about electing this person or that politician, why he wasn’t being more political. That was going on in 2017 to 2018, and even into 2020 and 2021.

Colin’s view was always that this is bigger than that. This is about an oligarchy. This is about billionaires screwing over workers and labor and the people. Let’s start with that as our foundation and go from there.

We shouldn’t be chasing these politicians. They should be chasing us, and we should be standing firmly behind values and principles.

In this moment, once again, Colin was right. The awareness of this oligarchy, the awareness of oligarchy enablers, the awareness that Trump is a uniquely destructive force in his oddity and weirdness, his self-promotion, his malignant narcissistic and demented behavior. But that he is also a vessel of the oligarchy. He is a vessel of their fraud, a vessel of their exploitation, a manifestation of it. That awareness and awakening is profound right now, and that’s what we always have to remember. That was Colin’s warning back from 2017.

So that’s my reflection on this Sunday.

I have a lot more to say, but I’m sure you’ve seen how busy we’ve been getting videos out and posting interviews on this Substack. I hope you’ve appreciated the work we’re putting in.

We’re grateful for you. Let’s keep doing this. Subscribe if you can, for real. It’s a game changer when you subscribe, so make sure you do. Tell others about this.