A Letter to the American People — Civilian Sovereignty

My fellow Americans,

I want to talk to you plainly about something that is happening to you right now, today, whether you know it or not.

You are being watched.

Not in the way that feels dramatic when you say it. Not by someone in a trench coat. Not by a government agent with a warrant. By something far more pervasive, far more precise, and far more profitable than anything a government could build on its own.

Your phone knows where you sleep and where you worship. The apps on it sell that information twenty times before breakfast. Your credit card knows what you eat, what you drink, what you buy when you are stressed, and what you buy when you are celebrating. That information has been sold to companies you have never heard of, who have built a file on you that is more detailed than anything your doctor holds. Your search engine knows what you are afraid of. What you are ashamed of. What you are thinking about at 3 in the morning when you can’t sleep. And it has sold that too.

This is not speculation. This is the documented, operating business model of the surveillance economy. And it is legal — entirely, completely, deliberately legal — because the people who built this system also helped write the rules that govern it.

But here is the part I really need you to hear.

This information is not just being used to sell you things.

It is being used to shape what you believe. The algorithm that decides what you see on your screen was not designed to show you what is true. It was designed to show you what keeps you engaged. What makes you afraid. What makes you angry. What makes you feel like the other side — whoever that is in your version of the story — is an existential threat that must be defeated.

A divided, frightened, distracted population is a manageable population.

I need you to sit with that for a moment.

Because if you look at the last twenty years of American political life and ask yourself — why do we feel more divided, more afraid, more exhausted, more certain that the other side is evil, than at any point in living memory — the answer is not simply that things have gotten worse. Things have gotten worse, yes. But they have also been made to feel worse than they are, more hopeless than they need to be, by systems that profit from your despair and your division.

That is not an accident. That is the product.

I want to tell you about a framework for understanding American power that most politicians will not touch because it implicates the people who fund their campaigns.

The system that governs your daily life is not primarily governed by the people you vote for. It is governed by three interconnected forces.

The first is the institutional holders. BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity. They are the largest shareholders in virtually every major company in America simultaneously — your bank, your employer, your insurance company, your grocery chain, your social media platform, and every data company that has ever collected information about you. They exercise governance power over all of these entities at once. They answer to no electorate. They serve no public interest mandate.

The second is private equity. These are firms that raise money from pension funds and wealthy investors, take over companies in every sector of American life, extract maximum profit in minimum time, and leave behind whatever is left. They have moved into healthcare. Into housing. Into local news. Into the data broker industry. Everywhere private equity goes, the logic is the same: the people inside the system are costs to be cut, and the people the system was built to serve are secondary to the return.

The third is a Congress that has, for decades, been more responsive to the capital that funds campaigns than to the people who cast votes. This is not a statement about bad people. It is a statement about a structural reality: when the people who write the laws are financially dependent on the people those laws are meant to regulate, the laws do not regulate effectively.

These three forces — institutional capital, private equity, and captured legislation — have together built the surveillance and behavioral control infrastructure that currently reaches into your home, your pocket, and your mind without your meaningful consent.

Here is what I want you to understand about where we are.

This is not the first time in American history that a small number of powerful actors have built a system of control over the majority of the population and then argued that the system was natural, inevitable, or for the population’s own good.

It has always been argued that way. It has always been wrong.

The slaveholder built a system of total behavioral control — monitoring movement, surveilling communication, punishing non-compliance, manufacturing consent through fear and economic dependency. The slaveholder did not need every person in chains at every moment. The architecture itself was the instrument of control.

The corporation does not need you in chains. It has something more efficient. It has your data. It has the algorithm. It has twenty years of your behavioral history, processed by artificial intelligence, and used to show you exactly what keeps you compliant, distracted, divided, and consuming.

I am not saying the situations are morally equivalent. I am saying the structural logic is identical. And I am saying that Americans — who ended one system of total behavioral control through blood and constitutional amendment — are more than capable of ending this one through law.

I also want to tell you something specific — something that 40% of Americans did not know until recently.

Your data is being sold. Right now. Today.

In transactions you never agreed to, through a chain of buyers and resellers you have never heard of, for purposes that were never disclosed to you.

Your location data — including where you went to church, which doctor you visited, whether you attended a political rally or walked into a reproductive health clinic — is a product. It has a price. It is being sold to advertisers, political campaigns, employers, landlords, and government agencies every day.

In 2024, a United States senator revealed that a data broker had sold location data tied to visits to nearly 600 Planned Parenthood clinics across 48 states. An anti-abortion group purchased it and used it to target those individuals with millions of personalized ads. Those people did not consent to that. They did not know it happened. And it was completely legal.

Your psychological vulnerabilities — the grief that keeps you up at night, the financial stress that makes you desperate, the loneliness that makes you susceptible — have been mapped by AI systems trained on your behavioral history, packaged into a profile, and sold to whoever will pay the most for it. Not to help you. To exploit you.

I want to say this as plainly as I know how: a person’s psychological vulnerabilities are not a product. They belong to the person who carries them. In a country that believes in human dignity, they are not for sale. Period.

79% of Americans are concerned about how their data is used. 84% want the federal government to pass stricter data privacy laws. 73% say they don’t have enough control. These numbers are not partisan. Republicans, Democrats, independents — all of them, in poll after poll, saying the same thing: stop this.

They have been saying it for years. Washington has not listened. This administration will.

Every time a government creates a new agency to protect the public, there is a risk. That agency can be captured. It can be defunded. It can be turned around and used as a weapon against the very people it was supposed to protect. Against the states. Against citizens who dissent.

I am not willing to do that to you.

So here is what we are building instead.

The Constitutional People’s Counselwill be an independent officer of Congress — not of the executive branch. No President can fire the People’s Counsel. No administration can cut its budget. No political party controls it. It belongs to the public. It will take corporations to court. It will take federal agencies to court. It will take state governments to court. And if necessary, it will take the President to court. On your behalf. Without asking anyone’s permission.

This is not a new bureaucracy. It is a public defender for the Constitution — funded by law, accountable to Congress and the public, and permanently insulated from the political pressures that have corrupted every other watchdog in living memory.

Here is what I will do.

On my first day in office, I will sign an Executive Order closing the public-private surveillance loophole, prohibiting federal agencies from purchasing your data without a warrant, and immediately banning the sale of psychological vulnerability data as a commercial product. That stops on day one.

I will send to Congress the American Civilian Sovereignty Act— converting that Executive Order into permanent federal law, establishing the Constitutional People’s Counsel, and creating two new institutions the American people have been asking for:

The National Do Not Sell Registry— free, permanent, simple. You register once. No covered entity may sell your data after you register. Anywhere. To anyone. Ever.

The National Data Transaction Registry— so that any American can look up every transaction that has involved their data: who bought it, what they paid, and what they said they would use it for. The supply chain that has profited in the dark will operate in the light.

And I will call on Congress to send to the states the American Civilian Sovereignty Amendment— establishing permanently in the Constitution that American civilian data is not a commodity, that psychological vulnerabilities are not for sale, and that the rights protecting you from government overreach apply equally to every corporation, platform, and AI system operating at population scale.

These are not incremental reforms. They are a structural answer to a structural problem.

I want to close with something personal.

I grew up understanding that America is not just a place. It is a promise. The promise is that here, you are free. Not free in some abstract future sense. Free now, in your daily life, in your ability to think and speak and believe and organize and dissent and build without being surveilled, profiled, and managed by power you did not choose and cannot vote out.

That promise is being broken. It has been broken quietly, profitably, and with the cooperation of people in both parties who understood exactly what was being built and chose not to stop it.

I am running for president because I believe the American people, fully informed and fully organized, will not accept a managed existence. I believe that when you understand what has been built and what it is being used for, you will demand something different. And I believe it is the job of a president to make that demand into law.

You were not born to be managed.

You were born to be free.

Let’s build that country together.