Let me get this out of the way up front: I have absolutely no desire to be a social media influencer.
None. Zero. I did not start The Veterans Phalanx so I could develop a personal brand, chase a follower count, or figure out what the algorithm wants from me on a Tuesday. There is an entire genre of veteran content out there that is all posture and no work — the gear, the squint, the slow-motion walk, the caption about sheepdogs. Some of the loudest accounts in this space have never actually helped a veteran do anything. I am not interested in joining that lineup, and I am not interested in becoming a guy who talks about service more than he performs it.
So social media and I have an uneasy arrangement. I have accepted it as a necessary evil.
Why I Accepted It
Here is why I accepted it.
Our motto is Facta Non Verba. Deeds, not words. I believe that all the way down. But there is a hard edge to that motto that took me a while to sit with: a deed nobody knows about only helps the people who were standing in the room. If we serve a meal and nobody outside that kitchen ever hears about it, the meal still mattered — it mattered enormously to the people who ate it. But it does not bring the next veteran to the next one. It does not tell a guy sitting alone in his living room in Nassau County that there are people twenty minutes away who would be glad to see him walk in.
That guy is the whole reason I made peace with this.
He is not searching for a nonprofit. He is not reading a newsletter. He is scrolling at eleven at night the way most of us do, and the only way he finds out we exist is if something of ours crosses his screen. Every post is a flare. Most of them go unanswered. Some of them don't. I will put up with a lot of nonsense for the ones that don't.
There are three other reasons, and they are all downstream of the same idea.
People who want to help need a way in. Volunteers do not materialize because an organization exists — they show up because they saw something real and thought, I could do that, I'd like to be part of that. The picture of eight people cleaning up a shoreline is not a trophy. It is an invitation with a date attached.
People who fund the work have every right to see it. When someone gives us money or gives us their Saturday, they are making a bet on us. They should be able to look at what we do and judge for themselves whether the bet is a good one. Visibility is not vanity in that context. It is accountability. If we are going to ask people to trust us with their resources, we had better be willing to show our work.
And there are the receipts. If you are going to build an organization on Deeds, Not Words, you have to be able to produce the deeds on demand. Anybody can put a Latin motto on a logo. Our feed is, in a very literal sense, the evidence file — proof that the thing we claim to be is the thing we actually are.
That is the whole argument. Social media is a distribution channel for proof, an invitation, and a flare. It is a means to an end. It is not the end.
The Rules We Hold To
Which is why I hold us to a few rules, and I would rather say them out loud than have you take them on faith.
We post the work, not the pose. The camera points at what is happening, not at me. If I am in the frame it is because I was doing something, not because I needed to be in the frame.
We do not turn veterans into content. Nobody we serve becomes a sad photo with a stirring caption. No trauma on display, no pity, no rescue narratives where we are the heroes and a veteran is the prop. We ask before we post, and if the answer is no, the answer is no and there is no negotiation about it.
We do not fake anything. No AI-generated people, no invented moments, no borrowed footage, no manufactured urgency. If it didn't happen, it doesn't go up.
We are not chasing virality. I would rather one post reach four people who needed it than thirty thousand people who felt a vague warmth for six seconds and kept scrolling.
I still find the whole enterprise a little ridiculous, and I probably always will. But my personal distaste is not a good enough reason to leave a veteran isolated because he never heard our name. That trade isn't close.
So we will keep posting. Not because I have anything to prove about myself, but because we have plenty to prove about the work — and because somebody out there needs to see that this exists.
If you see it, don't just like it. Show up.
Facta Non Verba.
Share this article