Episode Details

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 s