A Time For Choosing, 2025
By Paul Grant Truesdell, J.D., AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC
The Truesdell Companies of Ocala, Florida
Thank you for the opportunity to share with you a talk I’ve titled: A Time For Choosing, 2025. I have borrowed the title from the October 27, 1964, speech by Ronald Reagan on behalf of Senator and Republican nominee for president, Barry Goldwater.
And so, I want to talk about something most Americans do not want to face
We Are At War Right Now.
Not a future war.
Not a hypothetical war.
A real war.
Now, this is not the kind of war we grew up watching on television. There are no G.I. Joe columns marching across Europe. There are no battleships parked off the coast of Normandy. And this is not the Gulf War. which, for many Americans, was the last time war felt familiar: tanks in the desert, jets taking off from carriers, a clear enemy and a clear front line. That era is gone. What we are witnessing today in Ukraine is the future — drones by the thousands, satellites blinking on and off, electronic warfare scorching entire brigades, artillery adjusted by cell phones, soldiers hiding under trees to avoid thermal detection, and billions spent on tanks that are being taken out by drones that cost less than a night in a Holiday Inn Express. Ukraine is showing the world exactly what the next war will look like — fast, chaotic, technological, and lethal beyond anything most people can imagine.
This war is multi-front and dimensional. It’s global, and relentless. It involves cyber warfare, industrial sabotage, drone swarms, satellite tracking, financial manipulation, propaganda, espionage, and psychological operations delivered straight through your television, your phone, your smart refrigerator, your security cameras — everything in your kitchen, everything in your garage, everything you plug in.
And I want to make this perfectly clear: the war is already inside the American home.
If you bought it from China — and most people have — it can be accessed, mapped, tracked, and manipulated.
If you hold a bundled financial product — mutual funds, ETFs, pensions, variable annuities — you are likely funding Chinese expansion whether you know it or not.
And if you trust institutional money managers who worship China’s growth story, you are allowing Beijing into your retirement portfolio.
This is not paranoia, but rather, blunt and unvarnished reality.
I recently gave a talk in Stone Creek, another 55 plus retirement community, titled: “War Is Coming to the Kitchen.” We were filled to the brim as I discussed how ever device you own — not just your phone — is part of the battlefield.
And I say that as someone who lived through another era of hidden tentacles. I served in law enforcement in the 1970s and 1980s during the cocaine-cowboy years, when Fidel Castro flood our streets with people, and Columbia with cocaine. I watched as drug money, murder, mayhem, and corruption stretched into every corner of Florida. Most people thought it was just Miami. It wasn’t. And it wasn’t a fake television show or movie. No, it was real and the tentacles were everywhere — from Key West to Pensacola. In 1980, TIME Magazine put Florida on the cover, the title read: Paradise Lost. They were not exaggerating.
Miami and South Florida had become the murder capital of the United States — bodies were turning up constantly — and that violence stretched all the way into Tampa, where we dealt with organized-crime families like the Trafficante mob, led by Santo Trafficante. They played hardball with us, including the assassination of one of our sergeants, Richard Cloud, by staging a fake UPS-style delivery and gunning him down in the doorway of his home.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am telling you right now: the spiderweb of war with China, Russian, and North Korea, is bigger, darker, and more sophisticated than anything we saw back then. And the stakes are much higher, but the game is the same.
Before I go deeper, let me step back for a moment — because history always tells us where we are.
When Teddy Roosevelt sent the Great White Fleet around the world, he was not bragging. He was sending a message: America is awake. America is capable. America intends to remain free. He understood something timeless: peace comes through overwhelming strength.
Decades later, Ronald Reagan picked up that mantle. When he launched the Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan was mocked by the leftist media as “Star Wars” nuts, saying “the old man has lost his mind. Old, yes, out of his mind? Not one bit. You see, Reagan set in motion the technological race that bankrupted the Soviet Union. He believed in power, innovation, and clarity. Reagan lived long enough to see the Berlin Wall come down and the Soviet Union collapse.
But the story did not end there. Under Clinton, Obama, and Biden, the Soviet empire rapidly rebuilt itself. Putin reorganized the KGB. China surged into the World Trade Organization. Our manufacturing base was hollowed out. Critical industries were sold off. Supply chains were shipped overseas. And while our leaders patted themselves on the back, the CCP have run well-oiled espionage campaigns across Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Wall Street, our universities, and even our farmland. And yes, our farmland, and they now own over one percent of our farmland. That’s one percent too much,
And this brings me to today.
I want to pause and say something personal — because leadership matters. Years ago, when Marco Rubio was a state representative, Speaker-elect of the Florida House, he traveled around the state gathering what he called “100 Ideas.” He came to the old Central Florida Community College — now College of Central Florida —I sat with him and we talked. I was impressed then, and I remain impressed today. Marco Rubio, now our Secretary of State, has always been serious about the threats facing our nation, especially from China, and he has never forgotten that government exists to protect the people, not the other way around.
The same goes for Senator Rick Scott. A Navy man. A man who understands that the aircraft carrier is not just a ship — it is the beating heart of American power projection. He has fought relentlessly to keep the carrier fleet strong, modern, and untouchable. And he knows better than nearly anyone in Washington what happens when a nation falls behind at sea. And we are falling behind at a rapid pace and scale
Those two men understand something too many in Washington do not: we are running out of time.
Fortunately we have leadership rising that understands the stakes. One of those key players was Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point — a young patriot who was assassinated on September 10th, of this year, for one reason and one reason only: he spoke the truth, and he lit fires in the bellies of young men and women who realized there is no turning back. His assassination did not to silence a man or frighten a movement. Instead, it did the opposite. It awakened a generation.
This now brings me to one of the most important American patriots alive today — a young man who gets almost no credit outside of defense circles. His name is Palmer Luckey. At age 14, Palmer Lucky was building virtual reality headsets in his garage. He founded Oculus. And Facebook bought it for $2 billion when Palmer was 21. And then, in 2016, they fired Palmer Lucky because he contributed $9,000 to Donald Trump for President Campaign.
Well, that firing was the biggest mistake the tech elites in California ever made.
You see, Palmer Luckey walked out the door, founded Anduril, and decided he would rebuild American defense technology from scratch. Today he has built autonomous fighters, undersea drones, border sensors, electronic-warfare systems, and next-generation military helmets. His work is transforming warfare faster than any legac...