I find myself conflicted in how I respond to terrible people. I lived my life on the wild side for my early 20’s. From the time that I was 13 until I was about 23, there were more than a few things I did that would have made me a felon. I was blessed to not get caught. This is a blessing some of us forget when we judge the kid applying for a job with a felony on his record for possession with the intent to distribute. 

Yes, I sold drugs as a kid, but gave it up soon after turning 18. I witnessed more than a few shootings, although I never shot anyone or at anyone. I never did any of the things that would have landed me in jail for longer than 10 years, after all I am by all accounts white despite my family makeup. Like it or not, sentencing deviations do occur with minorities. 

It took the birth of my daughter for me to truly settle and decide that I had to break the cycle of my upbringing. I was focused on success, but now I needed to concentrate on my daughter. I love my family more than air, but my childhood was not ideal in the least. When my daughter was born, my entire outlook changed in a matter of minutes. An avid reader, a searcher of opportunity, and someone who loves to learn; I knew I had to be a better man, or forfeit the opportunity to unselfishly love and protect my children, and my daughter at the time. 

Later on I had some early success and quickly learned that there was never anything I could not do. I started a construction management company, a car dealership, a company that combined technology and music retail opportunities called 808 the Movement, a record label that focused on rap music, and I even played in the cell business for a short time all before I was 30. 

Then came 2008… Couple that with a huge ego, no belief that I could fail, the inability to think small, and a mind that moved faster than most, some bad habits I learned along the way, and a no quit focus…I failed miserably. My world crashed as I mismanaged people and capital. I had people stealing from me at a rapid rate all while trying to grow a new business of scale with ZERO understanding of enterprise level operations. 

I did not have Jesus in the car with me. He was more of an after thought. A “of course I believe in God” mentality that did not honor my obligation to Him while I was laser focused on being a father. My life and business had crashed. I had two kids, I was divorced, and I partied like a rock star. At the same time I was a soccer coach for my son, never missed a fencing match for my daughter, helped the kids with their homework and rarely missed anything including volunteering at their school. Yet with fast cars and even faster money, I never slowed down until God slowed me down, abruptly. 

I went from the darling of the business world, the quintessential Golden child to zero, and it did not take very long. I lost millions. I bet everything left on my next venture. We were actually the first to sell digital music at kiosks in malls, student unions, and airports across the nation… think iTunes before Apple. We had a partnership with Napster, Archos, and others… then the industry literally ate my lunch, spanked me, and told me to go home. And home I did go.

Yet this is when Jesus found me. I spent the better part of the next 6 years working in the Middle East and Africa doing some crazy stuff. I was busy solving problems and getting paid fairly well to do it. I never worked for the US government. I travelled to a lot of countries while talking to Muslims about Jesus, learning about why Christians run from other Christians, and seeing the intersection of problems colliding in a third world environment. I can tell you without a doubt, my perception paradigm as a man crashed and I learned that NOTHING is as it seems. 

I saw firsthand the work of what we now call the “establishment cabal”. I saw things that made no sense and remember being told to not say anything. “This problem is bigger than you”. Looking back, they never were. I used to tell people that I had mismanaged people and capital, blew up two companies, and crashed in magnificent fashion in what could only be considered a “God thing” as no matter what I did at the time, it just did not work out, and I fell and failed flat. 

I watched people die around me. I spent the first year studying my failures while traveling around the world solving real problems. When I returned, I cut grass at my home that we turned into an event center and settled into learning about Jesus. My new nickname was “thumper” as in Bible Thumper. My life… was so different. In all this, I never stopped looking back and appreciating the lessons I learned. I read more and settled into doing God’s work. I had no desire to enter the business world again. What I was doing really mattered. In that time, I voted for Obama (the first time). I was desperate for someone who could unite our nation and thought he had the family dynamic and he talked so smoothly. Then reality set in, and he was a disaster for the people. Still, I found myself conflicted with the left vs right, democrat vs republican dilemma. I did not make the same mistake twice, I voted for Romney the second time… and he lost. 

While I was overseas, I kept finding myself in places I did not belong, with people I did not belong, speaking about things that I had to research and come up on very quickly. My reading and studying became more incessant. I would study Arabic on the long flights and learned to compare the Bible to the Quran so I could understand and bridge the divide of conflict and pain in the Middle East. I told you at the beginning I was conflicted. You will at some point find out why. 

I hated Muslims before I went to the Middle East. Truly, hate is too kind a word. I remember being at restaurants and looking across the waiting area thinking to myself, “terrorist”. Only when I got to the Middle East and went just below the surface, what I found was quite contradictory to that perception. I remember being in room with a man who had lost his entire family to an errant US bombing. Not just his mother and father, but an entire generational loss. He lost his brothers and sisters, mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, nieces and nephews, and even the wives and husbands of family members. He was one of the few to survive. He was angry and he too hated me as an American, because I was the symbol of the pain he endured. It was then that I had a revelation… we were creating an entire generation of terrorists, seeded in the pain of their loss, just as we were seeded in the pain of our loss. 

I got a look into the actual mechanics of our nation. I studied TRQs (Tariff-Rate Quotas which is how global agriculture and price control happens), US foreign policy, sanction statuses, limitations for investment, state department protocol, NGO mechanics, food and resource allocation, banking regulations, and the list goes on. It was intense and it was awesome all at the same time. I met Kings, Presidents, and world leaders. I found myself in the room as the dummy as I like to call it. It truly was like Forrest Gump in a crowded room trying to figure out the dynamics and solutions all at the same time. It was then I developed the triggers and identifiers for negotiations. I understood what they wanted.

It was at this time I started studying models and scenario planning as it relates to fixing the seemingly unfixable. I would later apply that same model years later to our election fraud situation here in the United States.

I traversed intense and dangerous situations, many of which I am still surprised I survived. Even more surprising were the prayer meetings with Muslims, Christians, and Jews looking for peace and reconciliation. It will go down as the thing in my life I miss the most, and what gave me the most peace in my life. I made a lot of money, but it was not the money that mattered… it was the work. I could solve something in a week that took them a year. Likewise, I know I changed them and they changed me. Yet I became a target. It appears everyone no matter what side of the aisle you are on, is a target if you are not doing the bidding of the “man”. Finding out who was really in charge, proved to be elusive for not just me… but for everyone I encountered. I think it was then I just gave up caring and switched to the “just do it” mentality. Worked for Forrest Gump, gotta work for me. 🙂 

The entire time I was going through all of this, I was on the President’s advisory board for Youth for Christ International. I was helping kids in need by mentoring incarcerated youth and a slew of other things to help others. Then I stopped working overseas the year my daughter went to High School. As she would tell it, her life was a wreck. She went from straight A’s to C’s and D’s. I decided I could go back to negotiating and problem solving after my kids were through high school completely. 

I never saw myself getting back into business. God had other plans. Over the course of the next 10 years I built a number of successful companies. The largest of which was a MARCOM data company. And then, well you know what happened. I stepped out in March of 2020 when they locked down the country and I watched as good people suffered, lost everything, and some lost their lives. I lost my friend in March 2020 and that set the stage for a fire that burned in me that we were lost as a country and I was asleep at the wheel. I was angry watching the suffering. I had also seen the rhetoric and propaganda we had experienced in the United States before… the same as the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. Same story, different place.

I saw firsthand that nothing they say in the media in the US aligns with reality in the regions, especially the war torn parts where death and even starvation are common occurrences. The US actors were largely in the middle of it. It is as if they enjoyed it. Hence, I never did any work for or with the US government. The evil of it all was evident and thick. Yet I did see one Ambassador change his heart (and he was semi-quickly dismissed from his position) and another Ambassador lost his life loving the people because of collaboration between terrorists and the US (Benghazi/ Chris Stevens). 

There was this organization called the Fellowship with Doug Coe. They concentrated their entire goal to bring Jesus to the hill. They were demonized by the radical left and the media. I watched as the National Prayer breakfast, that I attended about 5 times turn from about faith, to about money and power all in a matter of those 6 years. The erosion of trust and purpose was so evident you could see it with your eyes closed. Now this part of what I did was only a small part of what I was doing there, but there were many times I would look up and see something and say to myself (and sometimes others)… what in the living heck is this?? 

I was largely oblivious to the political landscape. I had started Conservative Daily towards the end of my adventures but I had a team that ran it, and frankly I took nothing out of it. It was just investing back into itself and pushing a voice of conservatism and giving the people a voice to be heard by their national elected leaders. A voice of truth and advocacy. Until, I woke up. Then I paid attention and started speaking out about the tyranny and erosion of our basic rights that appeared to happen all in just a few months in 2020. We soon learned that was not the case… It had been happening over the last couple decades and it was much worse than we ever imagined, yet we never paid much attention to any of it. We were waking up to the stark reality that we had for several years sacrificed our kids to the growing evil in our primary and secondary education systems. 

I guess the reason I say this is because that is my “why”. I am a Conservative Christian. I am conflicted because I know how easy it was for them to brainwash the people in the Middle East and Africa and how hard it was to gain their trust and get them to realize that they were off their rocker. I remember all too often coming back to the US and having to be the arbiter of reality as to what was or was not true. I even defended Obama for the first year or so of his presidency… until well, I didn’t. I am conflicted because I am in battle mode. I have already lost much of what I was passionate about. I cannot go back to tech in the traditional sense, cannot go back to working overseas, cannot go back to a simple life that I enjoyed…. I only have the pathway I believe God put me on yet I am afraid I will become the very thing I am fighting against.. It is really hard. Why protect an Antifa guy? I owe him nothing. Why do I even care? It really would not have affected me. Would it? I mean the outcome was bigger than me and frankly bigger than all of us. It is an evil in our government that has seeded itself for generations and has only become more evil and sociopathic with each passing day. Well… then there is the, “It is not bigger than Jesus”. And so here we are, and so I become the useful idiot for a ship that appears not to have a rudder or captain. The most frustrating part is the lack of unity.

I have God, all of you, my family, and my knowledge of system architecture and math. I have what I cannot unsee yet I still love people but hate shitty people. I do not like Antifa or BLM because they mule people into a victimology that keeps them poor and gives then an excuse for failure. They cause the problems and then point at the dumpster fire they created… They are everything they say they are fighting against making them the devil, incarnate. And if you remember what the noble says the devil will look like. “It will look MOST beautiful.” Making it impossible to do anything other than fight against it with solutions and wake people up along the way. 

In the end, my life is nearly 75% over. I am in my mid 40’s and I have done what I think I needed to do. Now it’s time to secure the future of our children, no matter the sacrifice. That is how I see it. That is why I fight. I have been blessed beyond what I deserve. I know what poor looks like and it was not so bad. I know what it is like to have abundance too, and to be empty and alone. In the end we have to find a healthy balance and remind each other when we stray off the path. Easy to do and hard to recognize. We need to fight like William Wallace and pray for them when we are done. There is a ton of hope, and a path to success; as the Bible says, have faith and act in that faith. James 2:17 

There is a saying… “Courage is more infectious than fear” and they certainly fear us. Not for being Conservatives. They fear us for standing as Americans in faith. They fear us more when we act with God in us. I cannot tell you what your “why” is. I can only tell you why I made the very difficult yet necessary choice to stand up for you and our nation. Soon enough, our why will be something none of us can ignore. FEC United I pray is just a vehicle for our “why” to help Americans stand together.  You have to ask yourself why. You have to ask yourself where the line is, and never let yourself get pushed over it. God bless you. I will see you in the fight…

Joe Oltmann
Founder FEC UNITED