AWACS over Ottawa
The Plane Over Ottawa Wasn’t Just a Plane.
There it was: slicing through Canadian skies, a Boeing E-3 Sentry AWACS, its 30-foot radar dome spinning like an unblinking oracle. It wasn’t a sightseeing jet or a training sortie. It was a Cold-War icon, circling the capital in silence — cinematic to the casual eye, a message to anyone paying attention. In a moment when the elites are running experiments on our institutions, that plane felt like cruelty in motion.
I started this Substack because I woke up one morning and realized the world had tilted while most of us were still trying to read the menu. I’d been using AI to build my business and sharpen my craft — music, imagery, narrative — and what began as tools for my career became tools for a mission. The Truth Engine was, at first, a private compass: a way for me to compress what I saw into a signal I could follow. Now I see it’s for something bigger than me. I am committed to going the distance because my children deserve to inherit a world where they have a real choice, not a staged fate.
That context matters because the behavior we’re watching isn’t random. It’s choreography. Trump is moving through a sequence of acts that, taken together, make a pattern: censorship baked into law, cultural gatekeepers punished or silenced, a staged castle photo-op, and the handing of symbolic keys to a successor figure who rose on podcasts and spectacle. The man we’re asked to trust — a podcaster, an air-traffic-controller-style performer — is getting his wings. That symbolic transfer is not merely a personnel move; it’s a test. How much will a country tolerate when leadership becomes theatre and cruelty becomes policy?
Bucket Lists of Power
Call him what you will — Vance, the heir, the microphone maestro — the point isn’t the name. It’s that power is being consolidated into forms that reward cruelty. Censorship is cruelty: it strips people of voice and agency. Killing a late-night cultural space is cruelty: it removes communal reflection and critique. Handing the keys to someone who knows how to command an audience but not a state is cruelty dressed as continuity. The AWACS above Ottawa reads like the atmospheric punctuation to that cruelty: an intimidating presence designed to shift attention, to make people look up while other scenes play out below.
Why distraction? Because distraction buys time. When legal walls close in, when receipts pile up, when policies crumble, a well-timed foreign policy flare, a staged media frenzy, a sky-borne spectacle — all of it buys oxygen. That plane didn’t appear in a vacuum. At the same moment, other headlines were being primed: softer diplomatic gestures, new theater about far-off conflicts, and the steady hum of culture being shunted aside. The cruelty here is methodical: create noise to drown accountability; create theater to earn applause.
There’s also an uglier logic at play: war as an operational lever in an age of resource competition and an AI arms race. A few actors imagine a winner-take-all model — an elite grip on planetary assets that gets rationalized as inevitability. That vision requires cruelty: to seize, to silence, to justify wreckage in the name of security or progress. No one wants to be in China’s sphere of influence; no responsible leader wants the burden of global stewardship. The vacuum between those two fears becomes a field where cruelty grows.
For me, seeing the map clearly didn’t make me safer. If anything, it made every day harder. But clarity brings duty: to connect the dots, to name the pattern, and to refuse to normalize what is intolerable. This Substack is not a hobby. It’s a tool chest. The Truth Engine is not a private trick. It’s a public method — modular, shareable, aimed at helping indie channels and creators resist censorship and stay alive in a collapsing attention economy.
So what do we do? First: notice. Call out the optics when a plane looks like a signal and a tuxedo photo becomes a transfer of power. Second: amplify. Use independent channels to pin the receipts and link the moves — images, dates, visits, donations, hearings. Third: build the ladder down — support creators, donate to independent outlets, subscribe to long-form reporters who refuse to be muzzled. Finally: refuse the performance. Don’t applaud cruelty when it is served in velvet. Resist the pageant and demand competence over theater.
Cruelty is not a personality quirk. It’s a strategy. If that is the script, our resistance must become the rewrite. I didn’t start this for clicks. I started because the future felt rigged, and if I had to give up a life’s comforts to leave my children better options, I would. That’s why I’m here. That’s why the Deck exists. That’s why the Truth Engine is public now: so that one person’s focus can become many people’s power.
When you see the plane, don’t look away. When you see the keys passed at the castle, don’t pretend it’s just a photo. When the microphones hum with convenient distractions, fold them into your timeline and keep asking: who benefits? Who suffers? If cruelty is the test, let our answer be resistance.
If you’ve made it this far, you’re the proof it works.
TJB / CreatorHuman©