Weaponized Regulators shut me down. So I did this...

Life is all about the [difficult] choices we make.

Me holding our final two checks.

My company wasn’t on Yelp, didn’t rely on Google, and I have no boss, so when I was outed as UnWoke, Cancel Culture Warriors had no avenue to come after me. Weaponized Regulators showed up to harass and Cancel me instead, five years ago.

source: Brave Search

Over the last five years I’ve met and interviewed people in many walks of life who’ve been Canceled - from a lawyer getting disbarred to a family owned construction company, and even a child psychologist who argued against masking children, then lost her license. I started on a mission to give these people voice because I’m going through it too and because the world should know how and why small business - and especially conservative small business - is almost completely gone from the American landscape… and how we bring it back.

Along the way, on our path to calling out Woke Wall Street and revitalizing America, this unexpectedly happened, but more on this later…

Watch the short PMA Explainer Video below for more on this.

I’m sharing my story for three reasons:

1. If anyone wonders why I’m being so relentless, now you’ll know: I’m outraged. My objective was forced to change from “The Small Business American Dream” to “when weaponized agencies give you lemons, make lemonade.”
   The people we entrust with the very foundations of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness should never turn against us.

2. Others going through the same thing need to know you’re not alone, there’s hope. Embrace the “make lemonade when life gives you lemons” theme. As cliché as it may sound, keep putting one foot in front of the other. Keep going. Keep getting back up, dusting yourself off, and trying again. Don’t ever give up.

3. In my podcasts I sometimes reference Weaponized Regulators and pressure to close my business. I also dive into the reasons I advocate for PMAs, the need for Free Speech, and for much more public awareness of what Wall Street is funding with our money, along with 3-letter-agencies’ efforts to silence anyone who challenges the objective. Hopefully, this post lends some clarity.

Many people will take to social media/media to talk excitedly about the growth of their business. Few will make posts to talk about how their business is down over 90%. But that’s exactly this post.

How I got here is a long, but suddenly very short, story. I advocated for a return to traditional education and against masking and jab mandates in America’s K-12 schools. Newsmax, Nightline, Epoch Times and others picked up on what I was doing. Around the same time, I started publicly speaking out against “Woke Wall Street”, revealing harmful things being done with investor’s money.

Weaponized Regulators showed up like an angry tsunami in 2020. Suddenly, interacting with them was a wildly different experience than previous years: hostile, accusatory, filled with lying and double-talk; every answer turning into more demands; insanely short deadlines and calendar-killing requirements to drive places in order to spend full days answering questions in-person (when all previous exams had been local or virtual); shouting wild demands and insisting that they have special authority to get me to data-mine clients (I fought them and won on this one).

Flash forward: It’s 2025 and the business that was my pride and joy is now down over 90%, not for reasons you might guess. This happened not by market conditions or competition, but via the crushing death-grip of Weaponized Regulators; quasi governmental agencies that have unchecked power to decide which companies survive and which don’t.

Weaponized Regulators weren’t even very clever about efforts to run me out of business and silence me. In March of 2021, I and two of my friends received nearly identical letters, from completely different regulatory agencies headquartered in our State Capitol of Columbus, Ohio. These letters were sent out within days of each other, with approximately the same wording. All three of us have been thoroughly familiar with the regulatory processes in our fields, yet these three letters were all a drastic departure from our normal communications. The other two people were told that “anonymous complaints” had been filed against them, but they’re not allowed to know the name or identity of their accusers, or whether or not the accuser(s) had ever been a client or co-worker. None of us had ever received a client complaint, then suddenly two had anonymous complaints to try to answer. This unsubstantiated claim of “anonymous complaints” simultaneously made life infinitely harder for my friends and gave special powers to their regulators.

As someone who’s built a business from concept to fruition, I can tell you that few things are as painful as watching your life’s work taken from you; however, I’d not do it any other way. I know too many who sold their proverbial soul and now regret it, empty shells of their former selves. Plus, the friends I’ve made along the way after deciding to fight instead of cave are invaluable, great people and solid friends!

I’m probably meant to be a lesson to others: don’t ask questions or we’ll crush you… but I’m actually an example of the opposite: hopeful & optimistic.

The good news:

I saw this coming and planned for it, so that I may continue to call out Woke Wall Street, alert people to what’s really happening, and build the template Financial PMA.

Through a planned strategy spanning the last several years, we’ve moved nearly all of our clients elsewhere, away from the regulatory compliance environment we now find ourselves in. Unwilling to subject them to attempts to data-mine, unable to keep up with the onerous “compliance” questioning, and out of an interest in maintaining UnWoke.Academy’s crucial voice, we set an objective of getting as close to zero regulated clients as possible. The companies we were designed to serve are no longer clients.

Some continue to use me as an outside consultant, others thanked me for the years of dedicated service and are now on their own. It took years of planning to move all business away from my company and out from under “regulatory” purview.

Now for an entirely new business plan; one that allows for us to continue calling out the Woke on Wall Street.

The final two checks have arrived from our last institutional client at the company I was so proud to build. It was a good run, but Weaponized Regulators crushed us… nearly completely.

Rhetorical question: if you owned a small business and were faced with the prospect of either losing it or giving up your right to express the truth, which would you choose? I made the difficult decision and I’m happy I did.

Enter the UnWoke, Free Market, Freedom Economy, America-First Movement.

This is where you come in.

I’ve built several things that I ask you to consider. Before I dive into these, you should know that all of the research I’m doing for UnWoke.Academy is FREE and publicly available. I even use publicly available web-tools to spotlight issues, so that anyone can follow along and retrace my steps.

New business model: aggressively counter destructive woke polices and practices in the world of investing, redirect investment capital into funding companies that are NOT woke, and reduce or eliminate management fees for investors.

Ways to get involved:

1. Follow us on social media. the Likes, Shares, and Comments help:

Rumble | Twitter/X | Truth Social | Telegram | Gab | YouTube | Facebook

2. Financial PMA Membership: watch this short PMA Explainer Video recorded 8/21/2025 to learn more:

The Financial Private Membership Association is looking to add 100 more Members in 2025, will you be one? Join the community, join the movement, find like-minded friends, and finally know what you’re funding. (For a basic description of a PMA, click here.)

source: Brave Search

If you want to go UnWoke in your financial life, wherever you are, and would like to do so in a community of like-minded American Patriots, consider joining the Financial PMA. This is where a growing group of like-minded people collaborate and encourage each other with research, guidance, experience, and opinions on the financial world, without bounds or boundaries, and without interference.

Once a few hundred people join the PMA, we’ll have replaced the Regulated business we did with Free Market, Freedom Economy income, clearing a path to keep going with UnWoke.Academy, training the nation to move on from Woke Wall Street and anti-West Globalist Banks.

3. For Financial Planning, consider our friends Matt & Drew at Inspire Advisors (the same company that runs Inspire Insight). They’ll run a FREE Impact Report for you, just mention UnWoke. If you decide to work with them them, a small bit of their fee comes back to support us. Here’s their commercial:

4. Become a supporting subscriber: on platforms like Substack, we’ve built a subscription model. If you like our work, consider supporting us so that we can continue the important research & work of UnWoke.Academy. Supporting subscribers are treated to occasional early access.

5. Corporate and non-Profit Pension Consulting. Do you know the people involved with running your company’s workplace retirement plan? Introduce me. I offer a very different conversation than they’re accustomed to; not only potentially adding options in the plan that aren’t woke but also; I created FeeBased401k.com and FeeBased403b.com over a decade ago which disrupted the retirement world by moving plan advisor fees to zero, giving employees more of their hard-earned money while ditching conflicts of interest and getting better servicing at lower cost.
   I do this by forming an internal Plan Fiduciary Committee and then coaching the committee as a member - this keeps all fiduciaries neutral with our roles clearly defined, keeps all of the providers in check, and eliminates the possibility of self-dealing, while allowing for better fee and service negotiations. Doing this for a flat-fee is virtually unheard of.

source: Brave Search

If you’ve ever wondered how much better your investments would do with much lower fees deducted (and having access to investment options that aren’t the usual “woke” trap), this is your chance.
If you happen to know what ERISA is, I’m a subject matter expert. That’s what I built my career around and it’s what launched my company. For the people who need such a person, I’m one of perhaps 30 or so in the country without conflict or affiliation.

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P.S.: Looking for more details on the battles that took place between Weaponized Regulators and me over the past five years?…

The letter I received in 2020 was like staring into the headlights of an oncoming locomotive. The next nearly five years were like getting tossed around in a slow-motion wreck.

Prior to questioning things like mandates or Wall Street, I’d always had cordial relations with regulatory agencies. After, it’s the business equivalent of being taken to a “black site” for interrogation; anything goes, there are no rules, and truth doesn’t exist.

Five years of getting yelled at, harassed, lied to… massive demand letters that take months to answer but being given only 30 days, each reply resulting in new waves of additional and expanding requirements, then being told that previous answers were not received. At one point, I discussed one of my responses with a Regulator, while he was holding it, I could see he had a copy of my written response with him, then he accused me of not providing it.

In one conversation someone shouted that I should hire more lawyers to answer the questions. That’s when the lightbulb went on. The process is meant to exhaust people like me mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and financially. Five years of anything-goes interrogation tactics, with the business I built on the line.

Somewhere along the line I resigned myself to the unpleasantness of it, and simply decided to let whatever they throw at me roll off. Then they began to demand that I data-mine my clients and provide them with information they’ve no right to. I answered that they can have whatever they might like to know about me, but fought them on data-mining clients, and I won. Things got even worse after that.

It’s not a surprise, but it is still an absolute gut-punch, to lose your business for no good reason. No one did anything wrong, there were no issues or problems, I simply got on the wrong side of “Wall Street”, teachers unions, and others, and was marked for endless harassment.

To put this into context, know this: while Big-Box Financial has formed close ties with politicians and regulators, creating an impenetrable wall of lawyers, compliance departments, laws & regulations that favor them, my regulator burden grew to roughly 30 hours of annual work for every client we took on. This means a roughly 3-to-1 ratio of hours serving clients and hours answering to regulatory overreach. Even slight, perceived missteps mean catastrophic threat to me, all while Big-Box Financial remains free to do massive harm to markets and investors (which constitutes the need for UnWoke.Academy).