The verdict is in: Americans are sick and tired of the Democrats, Republicans, and the extremely wealthy and influential corporate and media interests that support them.

As Americans struggle financially and our nation faces grave threats both domestic and abroad, they are greeted on their television screens by Anthony Scaramucci, the founder of a $12.4 billion company, who served as media spokesman for one day in order to orchestrate a pre-determined coup of Reince Priebus.

I wish I could say that the alternative, Hillary Clinton, would be any better. However she is equally as corrupt and dangerous, just in a different way. The American people need to take back their government.

The answer isn’t to elect another Democrat who is beholden to pharmaceutical companies, George Soros, wealthy donors, lobbying firms, big oil and above all else, a very corrupt party.

The answer is for every disgruntled American to get over their egos and coalesce behind one centrist third-party candidate and propel them into the White House. Then and only then will our government change.

Democracies are, by nature, oligarchical. Neither Clinton nor Trump had driven their own car in over 20 years. Each represented what was wrong with our democracy, with Clinton being the government version and Trump the corporate version.

Naturally, any third political movement has an overwhelming majority of over 95% of Americans if we look at it through this lens.

The reason it never happens is because of the media and money. A few media conglomerates -- six to be exact -- control most of the content any of us will see.

Plus, it takes hundreds of millions of dollars to run a serious presidential campaign. Without that sort of exposure, it’s impossible to reach the millions of disgruntled voters and give them a cause to rally behind.

Our country faces grave threats that have gone unmentioned by any candidate in the debates, and by the new administration.

Staring with foreign policy, for 36 years our politicians have sat back and watched as North Korea has developed nuclear-armed missiles that can reach the US. They’ve tried everything from sanctions to talks to getting China to act, all to no avail.

No one has effectively dealt with the situation, because they are too focused on the next election, not the next generation.

Now we’ve inherited a world in which the country that is sworn to our destruction is, as I type, perfecting the means to deliver nuclear armed ICBMs to a major urban center near you. Well done.

On the fiscal side, Brooking’s William Gale and Berkeley’s Alan Auerbach, two of our nation’s top economists, project the nation’s true fiscal gap to be $206 trillion.

Of course, the Office of Management and Budget has kept the public blind from this by failing to report future defense and social security expenditures, while simultaneously including those programs revenues into the conclusion.

The numerous officials from both sides of aisle who have tried to expose this have been fired.

Senators Tim Kaine and Rob Portman endorsed the INFORM Act asking for the government to be more transparent in their fiscal accounting. However, the media and government disregarded the cause.

Social Security’s annual report indicated that the program now has a $34.2 trillion unfunded liability (i.e. my payroll tax, as a 23-year-old, is paying current retirees benefits because our government took the money they invested into the system and spent it.)

This same figure was $32.1 trillion last year and will continue to grow until it is addressed.

However, since WWII, our politicians have won elections by promising higher benefits and lower taxes in order to get elected, while those who tell the unfiltered truth get ignored. This startling statistic was hardly mentioned in the news

These are just a few of the major problems our country faces, yet our politicians are yet to articulate serious proposals to fix them.

The unfortunate part is that those who are most vulnerable (i.e. young people) either can’t or don’t vote, making politicians even more prone toward promising the ship to the old while burying the young in a pile of debt.

The answer in 2020 isn’t Trump. It’s not Chuck Schumer, or Bernie Sanders or Mark Zuckerberg. And it’s not an extremist libertarian or Green Party candidate that though well-intended, has no serious policy proposals.

What we need is an American Emmanuel Macron.

Macron’s political party, En Marche!, was developed in 2016. He took out an 8 million Euro personal loan and courted $6.5 million in donations. A handful of people working 20 hours a day were able to launch the campaign.

The reason he was successful is because like America, the politics in France were archaic and had moved to the extremes. Le Pen was a reactionary, and Fillon represented the corrupt, old-fashioned establishment.

Macron disrupted French politics and gave the voters a fresh, moderate, common sense thinking individuals could vote for. And they did in droves.

Now France certainly isn’t America and Macron is far from perfect. However, the general principle still stands. The two-party system in America is outdated, as are the media’s monopolistic control on information unlikely to remain.

There is a very high demand for a common-sense, unifying independent candidate to run for office, from president on down. What we need is for all of those people to unite, and also for said candidate to arise.

Failing to do so will has and will continue to have catastrophic consequences for our nation and our children.

“Blind party loyalty will be our downfall. We must follow the truth wherever it leads.” - DaShanne Stokes

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