Becoming the Founder: An Unexpected Path to Sovereignty in 2025
- Rich Washburn
- Jun 4
- 3 min read
There was a time not long ago—perhaps even last year—when many of us wouldn’t have touched AI with a ten-foot pole. And rightly so.
What we saw coming out of it looked like the usual woke corporate product: agenda-driven, sanitized of truth, riddled with bias, and packaged to sound intelligent while repeating all the same progressive talking points we’ve spent years fighting against.
And so we did what conservatives do best when faced with something suspect: we stood back, we watched, and we waited. But something shifted.
Not in the machine—but in us.
We stopped treating AI like a threat—and started treating it like a tool.
And just like that, we discovered something that changed the game:
It tells the truth—if you make it. It serves the mind—if you train it. It becomes powerful—if you become intentional.
The Beginning of Sovereignty Is the Mind
For too long, we’ve spoken of sovereignty as something external—about borders, ballots, or laws. But real sovereignty starts internally. It starts in the mind.
The Founders knew this. Before they signed declarations or fired shots, they formed ideas. They read Locke and Montesquieu, Scripture and Cicero. They debated for hours. They wrote and rewrote and refined until the ideas were sharp enough to fight empires.
We’ve spent the last generation doing the opposite.
We’ve distracted the mind, outsourced thinking, labeled inquiry as extremism, and replaced independent judgment with groupthink.
And then, in 2020, we handed children iPads and told them it was “school.”
This wasn’t education. It was sedation.
The Machine That Tried to Replace Us—Now Helps Us Remember Who We Are
And into that vacuum came AI.
Not as a savior. Not as a villain. But as a mirror.
Initially, we saw exactly what we expected: bland, biased, blue-checked talking points dressed up in polished prose. AI told us what the institutions wanted us to hear—because it had been trained by them.
And we almost walked away. But then something happened.
We figured out we could retrain it. We could tell it: “Stick to reality.”We could command it: “Cite the Constitution.”We could instruct it: “No spin. Just truth.”
And when we did?
More than anything else, it became ours—once we knew how to use it.
The Conservative Revelation: Tools Don’t Have Worldviews—Users Do
This realization—difficult as it was—marked a turning point for many in the conservative world.
We didn’t need to fear AI. We needed to wield it.
Because when the Left uses AI, they amplify propaganda.
But when we use AI, we rediscover something older, deeper, and far more dangerous to their narrative:
Truth.
And not just truth in soundbites.
Truth in layers.Truth in history.Truth in patterns, timelines, motives, and meaning.
That’s when the fear faded.That’s when the suspicion turned to strategy.And that’s when we started thinking not just about resistance—but restoration.
Becoming the Founder
This is the real story of 2025. Not that AI is here—but that we’re here for it, fully formed and fully awake.
To become the Founder in this age isn’t about putting on a tri-corner hat. It’s about picking up the mental tools they used—adapted for our time.
It’s about:
Sovereignty of thought over submission to trend
Clarity of principle over compliance with narrative
Formation of the soul over conformity of opinion
Because AI doesn’t replace thinking. It accelerates it—for those who still know how.
And that’s the call: To reclaim what was lost. To reform what was broken. To build the kind of mind the Founders believed this Republic would need to survive.
Not a mind that regurgitates. A mind that rules itself.
By 2026, Let’s Not Just Celebrate the Founders—Let’s Become Them
This isn’t just a chance to recover truth.It’s a chance to recover ourselves.
To raise kids who are cancel-proof. To build institutions that outlast the narrative cycle. To train churches, businesses, and communities not to comply, but to see—clearly.
Because what AI offers us, at its best, is a return to cognitive self-sufficiency.
A revival of what the Founders practiced without knowing the term: cognitive sovereignty.
This is the American renaissance the Left never saw coming.
It starts in the mind.It multiplies through formation.And it manifests in lives that no longer need permission to live in truth.
Let the world celebrate the Fourth of July.
We’re preparing for something deeper: A resurrection of the American mind.
And it starts now.
Become the Founder.
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