Executive Summary
What if the most dangerous threat to American self-determination isn’t a villain at the top — but an empty chair on your block?
This week on The Mel K Show, Steven E. Kuhn — military veteran, international entrepreneur, co-founder of the Civil Coalition of Germany, and author of multiple books written specifically for citizens stepping into office — sat down with us for a conversation that connects every dot we have been chasing for years. Not theory. Not speculation. Documentary history, lived experience, and a working playbook.
There are roughly 720,000 precinct seats across the United States. More than 100,000 of them are empty right now. On top of that — over 200,000 city council seats, mayor’s offices, and other local positions sit unfilled or quietly handed to insiders. The architecture above us has spent decades teaching We the People to ignore those chairs. Steven and Mel walk through exactly why — and exactly how to flip that script in your own zip code this month.
Along the way, we cover the surveillance apparatus that DARPA and In-Q-Tel funded into existence, the seven companies that were building dossiers on our children through remote learning during COVID, the weaponized-debt machine that keeps tired Americans from showing up on Tuesday nights, the AI takeover already rewiring local government, and the small American towns that have already stopped the federal government cold by deploying the tools the Founders left us.
This is not a blackpill. This is the recovery roadmap. Knowledge — understanding — courage — action. In that order. We the People are the answer, and the answer starts with the chair on your block.
Scroll to the bottom for Key Takeaways.
The Number That Should Stop Us Cold
There are roughly 720,000 precinct seats across the United States. Over 100,000 of them are empty right now.
Not held by bad actors. Not rigged. Empty. Waiting.
A precinct seat is the highest political position in your voting district. The person in that chair decides who makes the ballot, who gets the money to run, and who organizes the block. If the chair is empty, somebody else’s machine fills the vacuum. It always does.
On top of those precinct seats, there are more than 200,000 city council seats and mayor’s offices across the country — many of them filled without an election. Steven shared a story of a small town where someone walked into the office, asked who the mayor was, and was told, “Nobody — but a woman just showed up and we’re going to make her mayor.”
So here is the question. Who rules, when We the People don’t show up?
The Long March Was Documented — And It Worked
This is not conspiracy theory. This is documentary history.
In 1962, American Marxists made a strategic pivot. Put down the sword. Put down the bat. Pick up the pen. Fill the school boards, the city councils, the zoning boards, the precinct chairs. Yuri Bezmenov, the KGB defector, later described the doctrine — ideological subversion as a 15-to-20-year project, one local seat at a time. The Cloward-Piven strategy that came out of Columbia University was the financial accelerant. The Frankfurt School supplied the curriculum.
They did the work. We did not.
Why We Didn’t Show Up
Because we were tired. Because we were in debt. Because roughly 80 percent of Americans cannot scrape together $400 in an emergency — and a population that exhausted does not fight zoning battles on Tuesday nights.
Debt is a chain, and the dealers forge those chains early. Credit card tables at freshman orientation. Thirty-year mortgages. Auto loans the day you turn 16. The chains do not have to be heavy — they only have to be constant.
Steven told the story of a cop during COVID who broke a man’s nose for not wearing a mask. When confronted, the officer said he had three years left to his pension and could not lose the job. “So civil liberties are worth about $40,000 a year?” Steven asked. The honest answer the officer gave back was the most dangerous answer in America. Yes.
Get out of debt — so you have nothing to lose.
The Surveillance State We Funded With Our Own Tax Dollars
Here is what most of us still have not accepted. DARPA and In-Q-Tel funded social media to build a surveillance apparatus. Not primarily to entertain us. To watch us, profile us, and sort us into demographic groups for targeting.
Once the apparatus existed, psychological warfare moved in. These platforms are engineered conflict amplifiers — outrage is the fuel, division is the product, your attention is the revenue stream. They will not just show you what you love. They will show you what you hate, on purpose, because rage keeps you scrolling. Speak the words “dog food” out loud near your phone and watch the ads appear inside twenty minutes.
During COVID, a deep dive into who was behind remote learning turned up seven different companies building dossiers on our children. Reading speed. Attention patterns. Emotional triggers. Most parents still have no idea — which is exactly why Mel keeps saying, you better run for school board, because at some point soon you are going to be the one who says, “No, we are not hiring that company. They sell our kids’ data.”
The AI Wave Is Already Here
Cities across America are — right now, this fiscal year — replacing human government services with algorithmic systems. Permits, code enforcement, school placement, social services, predictive policing.
Who writes the algorithms? Who decides how far the surveillance goes? Who decides what AI runs in your child’s classroom?
If it is not you on the school board — if it is not your neighbor on the city council — then the answer is Larry Fink. Or whoever funds him. Or the Agenda 2030 architecture that has been planning a global public infrastructure of technocratic management for decades. To fight that, you have to have a position to fight from.
The Four-Step Break-Through When the Trigger Hits
Steven’s framework for protecting your family and seeing the engineered outrage coming before it hits:
- Back up — when the outrage spikes, step away from the screen.
- Stop the emotions — the trigger is engineered; recognize it.
- Look — why are they trying to trigger you? Who benefits?
- Ask — what can I actually do with this information?
Take thirty seconds. That pause breaks the engineered loop. The pause is the recovery moment in miniature.
Local Action Still Beats the Federal Machine
Need proof the tool still works?
In Social Circle, Georgia, the federal government quietly bought a warehouse inside town limits — at three times market value — stripping roughly $500,000 a year in property tax revenue from the community without so much as a phone call. The intended use? A federal ICE detention center.
So a thousand-person village got to work. Probably twenty people, Steven said. They sat down at a city council meeting. They read the zoning code. They figured out that without water and sewage, the operation could not run — and the town controlled both. They flipped the switch. The federal government, which had refused to talk to them, suddenly wanted to talk.
One town. Twenty neighbors. Correctly deployed local authority.
Another town discovered the new “smart lights” going up on Main Street were surveillance hardware — owned by a company that would also own everything those lights surveilled, on a no-bid contract. A small group of local women dug into the contract, raised the alarm at the council meeting, and got the lights pulled.
The states and the people — we are the republic. We have the power, and we have the authority.
Maricopa, Arizona — A Citizen Filling the Seat
Inside forty days of Steven going public with the empty-seats numbers, his team has placed 30 to 40 citizens into open precinct and local positions. One man in Maricopa County — Gary, a successful business owner with no political background — watched the video, walked into his church, asked where the precinct captain was, had coffee at Starbucks, and walked out with the seat. Inside one month, Gary was on a first-name basis with the governor’s race, the state senator, and the local sheriff. “Dude, I feel like I am actually doing something.”
That is the new revolution. A neighbor with the right zip code, the right meeting, and the courage to show up.
Mission Over Ego — The New Barns, Bridges, and Walls
We have been conditioned to say, “We will not stoop to that level.” Our morals are higher. We are better than that. As a description of individual character, that is true. As a political strategy, it has cost us a generation of seats.
You do not have to be immoral to do the right thing. The right thing is to fund honest people, train them, and put them in the empty chairs while the chairs are still empty. Mission over ego. Principles above policies. Team America — not as a slogan but as a practice.
This is the American Revolution analogy Steven kept coming back to. The Brits told the colonists to come out into the field and fight in rows, getting shot in the chest. We said no. We hid behind the barns, the bridges, and the stone walls. We knew our turf. We made them come to us. That is how we won.
The precinct seats and the local chairs are the new barns, bridges, and walls.
The Covenant Is Still Ours
Knowledge. Understanding. Courage. Action. In that order.
We the People are the answer. Not a party. Not a billionaire. Not a savior in Washington. The chair is empty, the pen is on the table, and the American experiment is still ours if we want it.
Be the Paul Revere of your sphere of influence. You do not need a million online listeners. You need your block, your church, your school district, and the courage to walk into one meeting this month.
Key Takeaways
- More than 100,000 precinct seats and 200,000+ city council and local positions sit empty across America right now — somebody fills the vacuum either way.
- The Marxist long march through American institutions started in earnest in 1962 — documentary history, not theory, openly described by KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov.
- Weaponized debt is the chain that keeps tired Americans from showing up — get out of debt and you have nothing to lose.
- DARPA and In-Q-Tel funded social media as a surveillance apparatus from the start; the dossiers on our children are features, not bugs.
- AI is already replacing local government functions — if you are not in the room when the algorithms are written, Larry Fink and Agenda 2030 are.
- A thousand-person village in Social Circle, Georgia stopped the federal government from opening an ICE detention center by correctly deploying water, sewage, and zoning authority.
- The precinct seats and the local chairs are the new barns, bridges, and walls — the citizen-filled seat is the working tool the Founders left us.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does a regular citizen actually find an empty precinct seat in their county? The seats are listed by county election offices, but Steven’s team has found that 80 to 85 percent of those listings are accurate at best — many counties intentionally do not publish vacancies, especially when a seat would tip a partisan balance. The fastest path is to walk into your county party office, ask where the precinct captain is, and request a seat directly. That is exactly how the Maricopa County citizen Steven described got placed in under a month.
If DARPA and In-Q-Tel really seeded social media as surveillance, why has no one been charged? Because the architecture that built it is the same architecture that regulates it. The intelligence-funded venture network, the platforms it spawned, and the regulatory bodies that oversee them share personnel, board seats, and incentives. That is why the work has to happen from the bottom — at school boards, city councils, and state legislatures — where the captured federal apparatus does not yet have full reach.
Why is the Democrat Socialists of America allowed to run candidates as Democrats if it is a globally funded Marxist program? Because nobody at the local level is challenging it. Ballot access, party-affiliation rules, and candidate vetting all happen at the precinct and county level — exactly the seats that have been left empty for decades. This is a precinct-by-precinct fix, and it requires citizens in those chairs.
What did Steven mean when he said civil liberties were worth $40,000 a year to that COVID-era cop? He was describing weaponized debt in one sentence. The officer admitted he was three years from his pension and could not afford to lose the job — so he was willing to violate his own oath, on a public sidewalk, to keep the paycheck. The recovery move is the same one we teach in the rooms — get out of debt so you have nothing to lose, then you can act on principle.
Is there really anything a small town can do against the federal government in 2026? Yes — and Social Circle, Georgia just proved it. The federal government bought a warehouse there at three times market value to stand up an ICE detention center, stripping roughly $500,000 a year in tax revenue with no notice. About twenty neighbors read the zoning code, identified that the operation needed water and sewage the town controlled, and forced the federal government to the negotiating table. The Constitution still works when We the People deploy it.
Watch the full episode on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v78n81c-icymi-take-america-back-a-strategy-for-us-all-w-stevenekuhn.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp_a
For my readers – Yes, we used AI to turn this episode into something readable for you. My team reviews everything first and does their best to sound like me. If it doesn’t, that’s fair, the robots aren’t perfect…yet. If you want the real thing – unscripted, unfiltered, and exactly how I said it – that’s what the full episode is for. You can always find it here [https://rumble.com/v78n81c-icymi-take-america-back-a-strategy-for-us-all-w-stevenekuhn.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp_a]