Dr. Ron Paul turns 91 today. Hard to believe that this voice for liberty is still wandering around as cheerful as ever. At times, it’s hard to understand his cheerfulness. Ron Paul has sadly lost almost every political battle that he ever took on. He was known as Dr. No in Congress, and what he advocated for from a position of liberty in that citadel of crap are all losses. His acolytes, like Justin Amash and Thomas Massie, are no more. What remains of the Tea Party movement that came from his 2008 presidential run are old collector T-shirts and blurred soundbites from old news programs. Sadly, nothing that seemed so resonant with the millions of us who fell in love with the squeaky-voiced Texan is a part of the behemoth government that gloms onto the average American's life like a cancerous blob. He was a siren that no one in that terrible town wanted to listen to. They loved to make fun of him and impugn his kookiness. They saw him as a useful idiot who could be a great marketing tool to help win elections for the average dopey Republicans by fear-mongering about the nefarious deeds that they all secretly loved behind the scenes. March out Dr. Paul at election time so he could sing about the awfulness of government, and glom onto the “liberty” talk until the first Wednesday in November.

In 2008, I was 32. I don’t exactly know when I discovered Dr. Paul for myself, but the moment I heard him, he spoke to the idealism and American mythology I'd always hoped I could believe in. He was a modern-day Patrick Henry. Liberty or death seemed an equally honest sentiment for both Dr. Paul and Henry. I had four infant-to-toddler-aged sons, and Dr. Paul was talking about the America I wanted for those boys. I bought his Revolution book and never looked back. I wanted the fixes that Dr. Paul described. His most brilliant discussion was the elimination of the Federal Reserve as the impetus to destroy the military-industrial complex. I was already embarrassed by my shilling for war, and Dr. Paul helped me understand why it was all necessary in the American version of empire that Washington loves. He had the solution that made the most sense and could be the most dramatic fix that my children would benefit from. He stood in stark contrast to the other Republican bozos who wanted to argue about grain subsidies and top marginal tax rates. Dr. Paul was speaking about something radical: a total shift in how the American experiment should work.

Dr. Paul got me interested in Austrian economics. He showed me Mises and Hayek and helped me enthusiastically defend farmers' market capitalism and name the crony lunacy we call “free-market capitalism” for what it is: a fraudulent, pay-to-play system. He was the first one to describe how Washington actually worked. How money and influence keep the system functioning “as-is,” with no real possibility of fixing it with the traditional Punch and Judy fights on CNN. He was calling for radicalism. This mild-mannered grandpa was the fire of a revolution that many of us believed possible. But, as with most things with Dr. Paul, the system wanted him nowhere near the levers of fixing, and they trounced him out of the primary through party politics and shrewd maneuvers. The party wrote the rules, and those of us who tried to caucus or campaign for Dr. Paul didn’t understand the game. I was escorted out of my local 2008 caucus in Colorado for not wanting to participate in the John McCain show. By the time March rolled around, Dr. Paul was out, and no matter how many of us wanted a different conclusion, the party machine had made sure he was nowhere near the final results. Instead of Dr. Paul, we got Yosemite Sam from Arizona and his Russia-from-my-front-porch Veep. They were trounced by the smoothest politician of my life, and by 2010 we had Obamacare, more wars, NSA permission to spy on the citizens, and the economic crisis that made debt an irrelevant conversation in American government.

Truth be told, though, despite the losses, I am still thankful for 2008 and 2012. What Ron Paul offered was incredible. It helped me see that many people want something more than the American empire we have. Dr. Paul is an American treasure. Irreplaceable. God bless his son and Congressman Massie, but ultimately it was Dr. Paul who galvanized a generation around the concept of a free life. I’ve been looking for him ever since. I thought RFK Jr. might be the next iteration. And, in many ways, he was. And if there is a bright lining to the Kennedy campaign, it is that before the merging and lawfare that removed him from the ballots in key states, Kennedy was pulling support from nearly 15% of the population. That’s a significant increase from the Revolution days. Maybe politics is just a slow and arduous steering of an aircraft carrier, and 20 years from now we will have abandoned, either by necessity or enlightenment, this silly empire version we have insisted is the peak American experience. If that is the case, many of us will look back fondly on the giggling grandpa from Texas as the leader of the fix. History may look at him the way it does James Otis today. The intellectual rabble-rouser who stirred the youth to their feet to demand a life unshackled to the crown. Ron Paul is an American hero despite his political losses. He, as someone once said to me, is the Velvet Underground of American politics. The man who had a limited following but made a million liberty-minded people through his defeats. God bless Dr. Paul. I will always be thankful for him.

In honor of Dr. Paul, I present my first article from Mises.org

Epcot and The Dream of Freedom

I recently took a trip to Orlando, Florida, for the International Home Builders’ Show. After touring the floor and having my suspicions about the industry’s corruption and collusion verified, I decided to invest some time in a different, more inspiring place — Disney World. I love the Disney theme parks. They are creative, fun, and have some of the best-executed designs anywhere in the world.

At one point during the excursion, I had the chance to visit a new attraction: a museum about Disney’s Florida project. A fascinating video shows Walt Disney speaking about the project one month before his death. It was a political video used to persuade the Florida legislature to allow Disney to construct Disney World. It also aimed to persuade the state government that, because of the project's size and scale, the company would need relief from code requirements and the creation of the Reedy Creek District, an autonomous pseudo-government that oversees the entire Disney property. The district gave Disney authority over its own property and relief from significant oversight by the Florida state government.

In the video, Walt Disney spoke of his dreams for EPCOT (the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow).

EPCOT will be an experimental prototype community of tomorrow that will take its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry. It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing and testing and demonstrating new materials and systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.

I thought that Walt’s saying “EPCOT will always be a showcase … of American free enterprise” was a nice line, and given his propensity for being avuncular, it came across as quite folksy; it harked back to a bygone era. It stirred in me a fondness for the past and a thought that there must have been an era sometime in America when people spoke openly of profit and free enterprise. I felt the urge to wonder if there was more to our history than the simple statement that “we’ve always been at war with the capitalists.” Perhaps there was a time when we were freer, when it was copacetic for businesspeople to celebrate free enterprise.

After spending a few days in the Disney World parks and seeing the full expression of creativity, I began to wonder whether, even though EPCOT was never implemented in the form Walt Disney envisioned, it was still accomplishing that altruistic goal of showcasing American free enterprise. Because of the early work that the Walt Disney Company did to establish its own pseudo-government entity, it appeared there was more flexibility in how they could work and design on the Florida property than in the heavily regulated field of commercial development within the confines of a city or town jurisdiction.

I thought for a moment about my travels to this showcase of free enterprise and wondered just how much of the free-enterprise system was left in America. I began to recall the elements of my trip and quickly realized that, while we may hold out the idea of being a free society, government and its regulators have their mitts on just about every facet of our lives.

I remembered it started with my Greek yogurt the morning I left — I could see that what I was consuming had no fat and 20 grams of protein. This information was printed on the back label of the product, a label mandated and standardized by the FDA.

As I kissed my wife goodbye and put on my coat, I noticed that it had a mandatory materials label.

I locked the front door behind me, and even that was tested by an EPA-approved method that let me receive my certificate of occupancy to live in the home—because my home energy rating had been acceptable to the state in which I live.

I scraped the ice off my window to find a federally mandated vehicle identification number and emission sticker. The government required my car manufacturer to provide the label so it could track my vehicle, license it, and potentially reveal my private information.

The emissions sticker verified that the car had originally been built to CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards and that my emission levels were tolerable for state licensing.

I sat down and put on my safety belt, a required part of the driving experience in my state.

I exited onto Interstate 25 on a federally mandated exit radius and drove the state-mandated speed limit to the government-owned airport on a highway designed to federally mandated standards.

Along the way, I stopped to purchase gasoline sanctioned as clean enough by the state, through a pump tested by the state, with a credit card subject to ever-rising federal regulations.

I parked my car and headed inside to take my place in the TSA‘s Fourth Amendment-free zone. I was subjected to a warrantless search and seizure. I was treated as the common criminal I am not and asked to remove my shoes, belt, and any other item required to enter any café in the airport—another state regulation from the health department, I might add.

I proceeded through the checkpoint and down to the terminal. The PA announcer reminded me that the Department of Homeland Security had raised the terror alert in 2006 to “orange.”

Once on the plane, I spent the first few minutes of taxi being reminded of all the federal regulations I could violate in this sardine can in the air.

I was shown how to put on a seat belt in a safety demonstration required by the FAA. We were told about the federal violations of smoking a cigarette, tampering with a smoke detector, and sitting in an exit row if under the age of 16. I was also told I had to refrain from using my electronic devices for the first ten minutes of the flight.

After we were finally in the air, I was reminded that gathering at the front of the airplane to wait for one of the two bathrooms allotted for 300 people was a federal offense under federal regulation.

Once in Orlando, my traveling companions picked me up and whisked me to the hotel. I crossed the street intersection using a federally mandated ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) handicap ramp with federally standardized truncated domes, climbed into the federally mandated, state-inspected elevator, and went to our room. Once there, the strange bathroom layout left three of us to use one awkwardly located toilet, because our room helped the building meet ADA compliance.

We traveled to one of our favorite and most inspiring hotels, Disney’s Wilderness Lodge, and caught a bus there. It smoothly lowered to comply with the ADA and let us on.

Once in Disney World, I saw a crane that was working on Cinderella’s Castle in Fantasyland. I also saw several signs that Disney was adhering to the demands of OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration). OSHA requires a construction fence, the wearing of mandated hard hats, and the use of awkward safety ropes — none of which was contributing to the illusion of Fantasyland or actually making workers safer.

The silt fence that surrounded the construction site was mandated by the EPA to help keep the water (which Disney uses for recreation and to derive a premium on their properties) clean.

We made our way to Space Mountain, a high-speed roller coaster that is entirely in the dark. By “entirely,” I mean with the exception of the government-mandated exit signs that distract from the overall theme and scene of a futuristic rocket in space. It struck me as odd that I had to know where the exits were at all times while I was strapped into my harness, blazing past them at 20 miles per hour.

I needed a bathroom break and noticed that the toilet I used had a federally mandated “gallons per flush“ tattooed on the top of the porcelain. I thought it was interesting that Disney has no legal ability to analyze the most efficient toilet and use a different kind if they choose. I am certain they would be the best judge of which toilet improves their bottom line. If more water makes toilets clog less, and their paid staff has to clean up the ultimate disaster less frequently, can’t Disney be the judge of that efficiency? After all, I know from attending several Disney Institute business seminars that the company spends millions of dollars on efficiency studies and monitoring each year to save itself millions in the future.

Finally, it was time to retire to our hotel, so we boarded the monorail, a futuristic mode of transportation that Walt Disney helped create. When I was younger, I loved riding in the front car along with the pilot, as he explained the ins and outs of driving this sleek method of transport. This time again, the door to the cockpit was open, and we made our way to the front. We asked if we could ride with the pilot in the front car designed for passengers, and we were politely denied.

When we probed further, we learned the federal government had reclassified the monorail from a theme-park attraction to a mode of transportation, and it now fell under the watchful eye of the TSA. Like many other forms of transportation, it was now subject to all the rules passed in a frenzy after the 9/11 tragedies. The TSA is now spending effort and energy monitoring the monorail at Disney World, the very safest method of transportation, which has had one fatal accident in over 50 years of service.

The sheer intellectual dishonesty of the state, which has concluded that Disney has no private interest in monitoring its own safety at as high a level as possible, indicates to me that the rules are not about keeping people safe. Disney has significant financial and aesthetic incentives to keep the water around its properties clean and the environment it has invested billions in as pristine and wonderful as possible, so it can continue to derive the highest possible dollar from its free-enterprise endeavor.

It is obvious that Disney has a high stake in ensuring its workers are safe and free of situations that might cause any litigious heartache. In the end, all this makes one aware that none of the current system of regulation is about people's actual safety or benefit. It becomes crystal clear that the government’s goal is maintaining as much power as possible over people and free enterprise.

If one thinks further about the confiscation of money through all the additional taxes levied on each event in my trip, the control bureaucrats have over our lives is astounding. Walt Disney maintained his desire to promote America's free-enterprise system as the solution to the issues societies face. The unfortunate reality is that Disney World is becoming more of a museum of a bygone era than a workable showcase for the future. Inventiveness and creativity have shifted toward finding ways around the government codes the company must meet, rather than ways to promote free enterprise.

When I was 19 and flailing through community college, I fell in love with fly fishing. I come from a long line of fly fishermen. My great-granddad was an avid lover of the sport and even wrote his own book: All That Fly Fishing Has Taught Me About Fly Fishing. The pages were all blank. My dad purchased my first rod and reel for me at the Buttrey Osco in Sheridan, Wyoming, for my 9th birthday. We would spend hours on the river tangling leaders and flies and catching nothing, but when I watched my dad cast, and the magnificence of the whole art came together, I couldn’t help but be mesmerized by its beauty. But I was pretty lousy at the whole thing when I was young. It required a coordination I never grasped, and so I often set my fly rod down for the traditional Diawa spinning rig. But by my 19th birthday, the frustrations of the sport had subsided, and I took almost every chance I could to race up the 34 Highway to Estes Park and fish the rivers that found their origins in the high mountains of Rocky Mountain National Park. The sport is wildly expensive, especially for a 19-year-old with a part-time job and tuition to pay. So, for my graduation from High School, I had received enough money to buy a Thomas and Thomas 2-weight rod and a rudimentary fly-tying kit. It was the perfect combo for me. Watch old fly-fishing movies on the VCR downstairs and tie flies. I would finish a batch and rush up the canyon to try them out. I found out in those cold waters that my whipfinish knot sucked, and that head cement was my only salvation from a bare hook and a handful of feathers. One of those movies was called the Golden Ring. It was a series of shorts, tied together under the premise of the 300 mile radius that surrounds Yellowstone National Park. It basically covers all the classic western waters that come from that mystical spot in the corner of Wyoming. The movies adventures have always been something I’ve wanted to try to emulate at some point in my life.

In college, I met my best friends. They all fly-fished too — kind of. So on one of our music excursions to Canada as a band, we all brought our fishing rods to try our hand at a few rivers along the way. One late night, after we had all run out of sunflower seeds to keep us awake, and far from anything resembling an affordable hotel, we pulled over just across the Wyoming/Montana border and convinced ourselves we could drive another half an hour as long as it was to a place we could sleep. We were near the hollars of my youth, so I told the guys I knew a place. We drove into Dayton, Wyoming, and down the dirt road to the Tongue River Canyon. We rolled our sleeping bags out on the gravel beach and fell fast asleep. When the morning arrived, we found ourselves on the banks of an amazing fishery. We stayed there for several days, much to our parents' worry, who expected us home days earlier. It started a fishing trip that has become an annual tradition for the last 27 years. Year after year, we found a way back to Sheridan to spend at least a weekend on the water together. We laughed, told the same dumb jokes, consumed too much beer, and fished from the first light of day until we couldn't distinguish, by the fast-approaching darkness, the people in our party from the moose in the willows. In those campgrounds and along the banks of those creeks, we learned how to be men; how to be fathers, husbands, business owners, and people who made the world better by our contributions. It became something unmissable.

After the first 15 years, we needed to be available for our wives and businesses, so the beautiful upper Tongue River basin, free of all horrid technological invasions, became less feasible. That began our excursions to other great fisheries of the West. Crested Butte, the Roaring Fork Valley, and Bozeman all had a veritable cornucopia of Airbnbs and plenty of ridiculous Wi-Fi. It sustained the trip and made it possible for us to be together while still dedicating the necessary time to first-world customer problems and wives who were overwhelmed by the sheer number of children that this group of six had produced. (17)

Every February the texts start: “Where do you guys want to go this year?” and “What dates work for everyone?” One of the more type A personalities in the group takes the first indicia of dates as confirmation worthy of buying tickets and booking hotels. I love him for it because it is as far away from my style of living as possible, which is why he is as good a friend as he is. This year was no different. We’d decided on Driggs, Idaho. The very center of The Golden Ring. But there was one major difference that made my yes more hesitant. I had a wedding for one of my sons with unannounced dates, and potentially two other sons headed to the East Coast for college in August. I didn’t know when the youngest was expected in North Carolina, so I went along with the hyperactive booking and figured that I would figure it out as the horizon became clearer, and I wasn’t about to miss this Golden Ring with my best friends. By mid-July, however, it was painfully evident there would be a headlong conflict between dropping my son off at college and the fishing trip. On one hand, I am so thankful this trip has enough inertia to happen with or without me. On the other, I was going to be horribly disappointed to miss it. I was glad the guys had made a plan and taken on the adventure as their own, but very sad I would be sitting this one out. But, I played coy, lowering expectations for my participation. It would be the last weekend I would have my boys home with me together, so that seemed really irrational to head off to Driggs to fish while I missed some precious time with them.

The same friend who had arranged the trip, though, extended the invite to my sons. “Bring the boys; we would love to have them.”

I asked my wife after I read the text, and she enthusiastically affirmed that opportunity. So we made a plan. I would drive up through the Golden Ring and spend a few days fishing with the guys and my boys. It was a perfect compromise. So two Fridays ago we loaded up the pickup and set out for the first stop. Lander, Wyoming.

Lander

We fished the Popo Aggie and spent the night in Lander before heading over Togwatee Pass into Jackson and eventually Driggs. Lander is a special spot in Wyoming. Think a cowboy Boulder. Surrounded by world-class rock climbing, hunting, fishing, and all the kinds of people those sports attract. The town has great food, great coffee, and even better landscape. Wild mountains like the Bridgers and the Winds create the Lander Valley. The Wind River Reservation borders the town to the north, and to the south, places like Hell’s Half Acre and Muddy Gap keep the tourists away. We arrived around 3:30 and headed straight up to the river. It was an incredible night of fishing with my faithful fishing friend Scott and my two sons. Lots of fish and amazing scenery.

After fishing, we headed into Lander for dinner at Cowfish. It is one of the cultural centers in town. It was teeming with people, and the brewery, ice cream shop, and restaurant that surround the outdoor patio were bustling with conversation and laughter. The food was excellent, and we enjoyed a nice finish to the evening.

Our night was topped off by staying in tipis on the Wind River Indian Reservation. There was no more memorable moment of our trip. There were plenty of funny things about it: more dogs than I thought existed on Earth, barking all night until sunrise, which was seamlessly replaced by the crowing chickens. All of that was ceremoniously greeted at sunrise by a rifle shot —thankfully not at the tipis. But despite the bugs and the loud noises, there were more laughs and corny jokes than any other time in our weekend.

Ignore the dumb puns. It’s unavoidable with Gen X men.

Dubois

After leaving the tipis, we headed up the road to Wind River, just outside Dubois. This is another favorite town in Wyoming. Exceptional fishing and a friendly western vibe that matches the wooden boardwalks of the main street. We grabbed coffee, flies, and local intel from the shop, then headed back east of town to a beautiful stretch of water. The Wind is the upper waters of the Bighorn River. It flows into Boysen Reservoir exactly 100 miles out of town. From there, it makes its way through the Wind River Canyon and changes names at the Wedding of the Waters south of the town of Thermopolis and becomes the Bighorn River. Fur trader François Larocque named the Bighorn River in 1805 for the bighorn sheep he saw along its banks while exploring the Yellowstone.

We left the lower Wind and made our way towards Togwatee Pass, stopping for some non-productive but beautiful fishing on the headwaters of the Wind. It was lovely to watch my boys cast, and even though the fishing was not exactly robust, the few we did catch were beautiful cutthroats and native whitefish. It was a beautiful spot, and being together there was worth the stop.

The drive over Togwotee Pass (pronounced Tow-got-ee) is normally one of the better views of the Tetons. The fires, however, kept our views limited to the backside of the Absaroka Range in Yellowstone. The blessing in all of that is that the Breccia Cliffs caught our attention, and their stair-step beauty was amazing. The pass is named for Togwotee, a subchief under Chief Washakie of the Sheepeater tribe, a branch of the Shoshones. Togwotee led the Jones Expedition over this pass in 1873. Before the expedition, the pass was reported as an important trade route for Native tribes.

We met up with a few of the other guys from the trip on the Snake that afternoon. They had flown in from Chicago and were ready to go fishing. We stumbled awkwardly into a wedding taking place on a picturesque flat above the river, took our pictures of the peaks, and decided that the Hoback was going to be our afternoon river of choice.

After a nice dinner in Jackson, we drove over Teton Pass to check into the house where the rest of the guys would be staying on for the week. Driggs is a place I have grown to love over the past few years. It’s an interesting intertwining of rural agriculture, ski town, and an economic relief valve from the billionaires in Jackson that makes for an eclectic town filled with great food, easy access to millions of acres of incredible wilderness, and a hometown vibe of a long-forgotten mountain-town era. It is filled with great places to stay and a great marriage of mountain architecture and rural landscape.

The Henry’s Fork

My friends had booked a few boats for Sunday. The best part about fishing in Driggs is that the choices are too numerous to count. So, showing up at the Teton Valley Lodge on Sunday meant that we were going to go where the guides were willing to take us. Maybe it would be the Teton River or the South Fork of the Snake, or perhaps something completely different. Our morning started off with a guide who accidentally slept in, but it made for a good laugh and an extra cup of coffee. We learned from the guides who had not decided to take in the sermon from Pastor Pillow about the Lord being his comforter that we were headed about an hour and a half away to the canyon of the Henry’s Fork of the Snake. This is a bucket-list river for any fly fisherman. It is the quintessential dry fly fishing river, and the waters below the “Ranch” are as challenging as any in the sport. Our guides told us that we would be just below the Ranch in the faster water. That we might have a shot at some big fish, but that the scenery would be like nothing we had ever fished before. They were right. Every mile of the river was stunning, and in one of the more surreal moments of my fishing life, we were the only boats on this legendary water all day. Just my friends and my sons, floating through the pristine wilderness above Mesa Falls. We caught hundreds of fish between the three boats, and we had the perfect day on the water.

The Passage Of Time

I am fortunate to have the friends I do. I can’t imagine going through life without them. In the 1500 miles we traveled from Friday to Monday night, across the wide expanses of Wyoming, I oscillated between gratitude and sadness. I knew that by Wednesday morning, I would be taking my youngest son away to start his new adventures in College. As I drove past the Bridgers on the Pinedale side of the drive, I was taken back to the last real adventure I had with my grandpa. He took all of the “Everitt” men on a horsepack trip into the wilderness. He was 75. My own father turns 75 this January. I knew that by the time I got on the airplane to take my son to school, so much would change. These mountains, which have in so many ways defined my life, were the backdrop for this parting. A quiet drive with a good cup of coffee and some resonant music, watching my sons stare out the truck window, made me sharply aware that the life we have lived has been fuller than most. I remember the pack trip like it was yesterday, and these 27 years of fishing with old friends all seem to blend together in a giant collage of laughter, beauty, and a fly rod in my hand. In the greatest act of grace, my friends invited my children into the sacred circle we as friends have built. At the dinner in Jackson, my friend said how thankful he was that we had made the effort. Then he turned to my sons and said, “Find your tribe.”

He is right. Men need friends for this brutal journey. Yes, they need a gentle woman at their side, but they also need men who can help them discern how to lead in the harder moments, like the one I faced with my son's departure. This grand weekend in Wyoming was another signature on my soul. The wild winds of the deserts and the cool, sharp air of a Teton morning are the recipe for finding the path forward in hard times. Adventure is always grander than sullenness. Friends by your side in that wildness are all that one could ask for. Find your tribe, boys; it will be the best thing you ever do.

I have to admit, the last six months have been a slog as it relates to American politics. I derive almost no enjoyment from writing about it. Long-winded explanations about how the empire is destroying itself are akin to a tree falling in the forest - no one cares. America turned two hundred and fifty this summer, at least the America that Jefferson and Adams and Washington all proclaimed they wanted to create. I’ve been attempting to make a distinction about it in my conversations with people, though. The Declaration is 250. The United States we live in, however, is a derivative of those early principles, and might embrace the soaring rhetoric of it all, but rarely lives them out in practice; that country is not rounding the corner on 250, but instead is much more likely the one birthed after the Civil War, amalgamated with the New Deal/ Post War vision of managed empire. The founders would not recognize much of the government that they supposedly instituted all those years ago. Neither would they recognize the economic system as the one they wished, but rather the one they revolted against. The modern moment looks a lot more like the crony system of the East India Company and the Crown than some kind of Adam Smith city-on-a-hill. I would love nothing more than for our nation to be much more Jeffersonian, or Wythe-ian than it is, but the hard reality is that idealistic rhetoric only gets us so far in a world filled with conflict, national interests, and political donations.

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I was back in Greenville again this week. Well, technically Spartanburg, but the region seems to be an entity unto itself. I was dropping off my youngest son to swim at his new college in North Carolina. It was another difficult adventure for a dad and mom who have adored every minute of parenthood—but I will save that sentimentality for later this week. As a parenthetical note on this whole childhood-coming-of-age event, I want to thank all of you who keep reading whatever I have pushed out over the past few months. It has been a bit of a slog. What used to come quite easily became arduous. Writing has always been something I love, but in recent days and months, I have felt disconnected from it. Chasing down the wordsmithing necessary to retain an audience is the exact wrong way to do any of this. In the business world, you learn to listen to the customer and make business choices based on what seems to be demanded by those the business serves. Writing, however, has hard lessons about that kind of customer chase-down. I am re-learning that my opinion is actually why people come and read what I am writing. My thoughts are actually the product. So, hopefully now that a summer of weddings and college drop-offs is over, I can return to writing more regularly. I hope to provide more for those of you who pay to subscribe. You have definitely been on the shorter end of that transaction these past few months. Thank you for sticking with me through it. The politics of the moment, the intensity with which people hold their positions, and the fear that whatever I say will disappoint some have made the last few months more challenging than they otherwise should have been. I will remain a heavy skeptic of government, no matter whose team has occupied the political chambers and offices. It is the right endeavor for any citizen.

So, as I was saying, I was back in the South this week, and I have to say, each time I return, I fall a little more in love with it. Yes, the heat is burdensome, and there are too many bugs for my wife, but there is a lot to like about what the South provides. Its culture is really beautiful. The more sophisticated Yankee finds a lot wrong with the people and the rough edges of it all, but in the best, quietest moments of my journey, I realized the South may be the last bastion of an old American culture. Thankfully, gone are the days of separate drinking fountains and Jim Crow attitudes amongst the majority, but what is left off the main highways is an agrarian world with kind-hearted people. There is a pace to it all that feels better than the highly competitive version I live in, in Colorado. The towns have old street layouts left over from farming and horses. Radial spokes from the town center that make driving feel more organic than the highly efficient versions of newer parts of America. It seems less chain-ey I suppose too. Yes, there are still Olive Gardens, but there are also diners and BBQ spots that are integral to the communities' ethos. Men and women still go to work at the family business and spend their time and money in their own communities. This is certainly a generalization, but from the perspective of someone whose world has been driven by growth over the last thirty years, the South has far less of what makes the rest of America feel sterile by comparison.

There’s still a lot of “y’alls” and “honey” in the lexicon. People smile, say friendly things, and seem invested in their towns. There's tremendous pride in what makes a place like Travelers Rest as special as it is. You can hear it in every conversation. Perhaps it's what comes from being the only people who have faced the full wrath of their own government put upon them. No other people, with the exception of the Native Americans, have been subjected to being invaded by the United States military except the South. Set aside the vision of trouble cast by a 21st-century mind upon the South’s past, a Southerner knows defeat like no one else in America. That heritage is epigenetic. It cannot be extracted from the Southerner, and it translates into the chip they have on their shoulders and the humility with which they approach the rest of America.

This week, as we fulfilled our stated objective of dropping off my son, we still made time for what we love to do in new places. We watched and took photos of towns we love, and ate at places we have never heard of. We tried to converse with people from all walks of life to discover why they love their homeland. As always, it was deeply rewarding.

So here is another traverse across the mountains and foothills of North and South Carolina.

Spartanburg

We rented an Airbnb in Spartanburg's historic district called Hampton Heights. It was the perfect spot for our family to enjoy our last few days together before the dramatic change of college took hold for all of us. From some internet research: In the mid-to-late 19th century, the area was mostly farmland owned by the Kirby family (their home site is now Bethel Methodist Church). Union Army troops were encamped there during Reconstruction. As Spartanburg grew economically in the 1880s–1890s, it developed as the city’s first suburb for upper-middle-class business and professional people seeking homes near but outside the urban core. Residents built large Victorian houses (many Queen Anne style) along Spring Street and the newly opened Hampton Avenue, which also had a small Irwin family dairy farm and a Methodist mission. Homes soon lined other streets, including Hydrick, Lee, Carlisle, Brookwood Terrace, Hampton Drive, Perroneau, Irwin Avenue, and others. The oldest surviving home dates to around 1885, but most were built from the 1900s to the 1930s. In the early 20th century, the neighborhood filled with Arts and Crafts bungalows. It was a comfortable, family-oriented area with oak-lined sidewalks where children played. Notable residents over time included two South Carolina governors (Olin D. Johnston and Ibra Charles Blackwood) along with other civic and business leaders. The Hampton Heights Historic District (with strong early-20th-century architectural integrity) was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 27, 1983.

Spartanburg has a lot to offer. Especially the downtown. The minor league baseball stadium was abuzz every night with games and events. Main Street is a pedestrian corridor filled with live music and great food. We decided to grab groceries at a Fresh Market (think Whole Foods but smaller, and stocked with just the right stuff for a vacation) before our evening reservation.

Our dinner was at The Kennedy. This was an excellent meal set in a wonderfully restored Art Deco building on Kennedy Street. From Town Carolina: “Under the restaurant’s kitchen manager, Chef Anna Scott, The Kennedy’s staff is constantly searching for premium ingredients from around the globe to pair on the plate with those fresh, local products. ‘The idea of fusing a beautiful international product and tying it into, say, sweet potatoes from Bradford Family Farm [in Sumter, South Carolina], that’s the philosophy that backs up everything we do,’ Moore says. ‘That’s what takes it to another level. That’s what makes it blast off.’”

The next day we found Pharmacy Coffee, the perfect spot for a pre-dorm move-in cup of coffee. Operated by Little River Roasting, this is a beautifully designed coffee shop and an even better cup of coffee.

After a predictable morning of moving and trips to Walmart to acquire too much stuff for 150 square feet, my college-aged sons were turning hangry. We made our way to a small BBQ joint on the road between Boiling Springs and Shelby, North Carolina, called Thelma Lou’s. The portions and flavors were just what the doctor ordered. This is the perfect representation of Southern BBQ and a community restaurant. The staff was awesome. The food came quickly, and there were more “honeys” tossed out by our Southern-accented waitress than a full hive of bees. It was amazing, and the place was absolutely packed for lunch. I loved this spot.

We went back to campus for our son's induction ceremony and put the final touches on the dorm. It is so hard to describe the challenges of letting a child go. I am very close to all of my sons, so this process feels especially challenging. It happened when I dropped my oldest off in Boston, and the feelings were all too familiar as I dropped off my youngest this week. There is something about it all, though, that has goodness at its core. I want my children to excel in all they do and find new adventures I could never provide unless they branched out from our home, but as each hour passed, I could feel the impending sadness creeping over me. The hardest tickets I ever book are the one-way tickets for my kids. There’s a strange finality to it that leaves me with an emptiness. I know that life goes on, and it’s not as if I really ever feel like something is dead or over, but the temptations for my mind to exclusively grab onto the existential troubles of a finished moment are alive and well in the moments of saying goodbye to a child. He is going to thrive at school. Everything about it felt like it was a glove fitting a hand perfectly. Nonetheless, Dad and Mom both had our moments of wondering what would become of us. This is a new landscape for us. Memories of our pre-child world have faded. Our youth has been replaced by aching joints and a weathering that leaves us low on energy and enthusiasm for new adventures, or for some panacea of retirement. I don’t know what will become of the next season of life, but the wrestling match is real for us. If you're the praying type, we'd certainly relish it. There are real unknowns on the horizon. I have been calling it my Moby Dick moment - filled with foreboding simply because of the sublimity of it all. I know the whale is out there somewhere, but the wondering may be worse than the real thing. I am sure we will soon find out.

Travellers Rest

My favorite moment of the trip was our evening in Greenville and Travelers Rest. I have written about Greenville before, so it seemed familiar. There was a comfort to the evening we spent here, simply because it didn’t seem nearly as foreboding as the rest of our endeavor was. Standing on the bridge watching the water, my wife asked me why a waterfall is so calming. I answered her with a half-thought-through answer, but one I believe is right. There is more voice of God in a waterfall than in almost any other natural wonder. Theologically, the allegories are tremendous. The passage of time, the steady whisper of the water, the eroding, shaping power of water on the rocks, even the water itself, in its journey from inception to the ocean, all are imbued with the fingerprints of God. Maybe I will write more deeply on this in the future, but standing there, overlooking the falls, was the perfect respite for my wife and me.

Before our night at the waterfall, though, we had dinner in Travelers Rest, at Topsoil. A James Beard finalist and included in the 2025 Michelin Guide, this was my favorite meal of the trip. We had no idea when we booked the reservation that we were about to embark on an evening of real culinary exceptionalism. We were woefully underdressed for the caliber of food, but the staff made it clear that casualness is part of their restaurant culture. Chef Adam Cooke has created a marvelous menu that specializes in local farm products and prioritizes their use. The menu showcases the farm and the products right in the text. For someone who loves great food, and particularly food that comes from great sourcing, this night was off the charts. As Cooke describes on their website: "I have always found cooking and eating vegetables to be the most rewarding experience, especially when it accompanies close relationships with the farmers. It's easy to be creative in the kitchen when I'm so closely tied to the ingredients."

Travelers Rest sits on the Swamp Rabbit Trail and seems like a gateway to the Smoky Mountains in South Carolina. If I had more than just an evening in the town, it would not break my heart. Every spot seemed teeming with activity and energy. It quickly made its way to my “must return” list.

This trip was certainly about moving my son in, but it was also about the conversations around the table about what this next phase of life would look like for all of us. Perhaps that’s why we spent as much time as we did in great restaurants. I love how food focuses the conversations. This parting is a uniquely American experience. The normality our culture has about children leaving home and heading out for landscapes filled with opportunities is a distinctly American endeavor. We have it as a part of our heritage. Kentucky was a land filled with Virginians who wanted to find a better, more opportunistic world. The Oregon Trail, California, Alaska — each a land further from home and parents, and old stigmas. Each a place where someone could carve their own path, and each with some kind of parting. A decision deep inside that meant leaving what they knew for something with the potential to be better. We used to go west. Now we go where we feel opportunity is calling, or where the Lord might be leading. But deep inside of us, the restlessness that stirs men’s souls is louder here in the land we call America. It is no different for my son. I know that the opportunity here in Colorado has lessened over my lifetime. The world and career I know have changed. Our family business of real estate is no more. Bureaucracy has overrun our ability and community longevity. My sons will likely not work in the same field I have—and on so many levels, I'm overwhelmingly grateful they have dramatically different options. This land we call America is brimming with opportunities if we are willing to try our hands at them. The leaving and departing from home just broadens the reach of the nets they will cast. And as much as I would love for all of them to live on some kind of compound out of my back door, they will need to find their best lives.

Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow

Our last dinner together was an incredible experience. We headed back to Greenville to Fork and Plough. This half-grocery, half-restaurant is a must for anyone in the area. Another chef committed to freshness and local ingredients, the menu here changes twice daily. Beautiful food, great drinks, and a casual atmosphere made this the perfect spot for our words to fall upon my son in a celebration of his new adventures. The tomato cakes were my favorite, but the peach salad and the Carolina Catfish were lavishly praised around our table.

Our home will not be the same without my youngest. But if I am honest, it has been in a state of perpetual change from the moment they arrived in our world. It was more controlled, more at the pace at which their mother and I could tolerate the losses, but it was always changing. I wouldn’t still want a crawling baby every day, and neither would I want my sons to be limited by my expectations of having a nuclear family of six for the remainder of my time here on earth. I want the brightness that these moments seem to induce. To see the light in the eyes of my son, who is torn by his excitement and his grief at knowing what must come in order for his own life to thrive. I am proud that he was able to see the distinct beauty of the land he will call home for a while; that he saw the Southern culture as something intriguing and good. That means he's been paying attention to our nightly discussions at home about America and what we should be striving for. It means my son in New England saw the beauty of America's academic heritage and wanted that same thing for himself. They are each finding their own landscapes to live in and add to. Carving out, as myriad Americans have before them, spaces for their own successes. Isn’t that what we all hope for our children? It seems these remnants of an older America have a call on my sons’ hearts. I will celebrate with them and, obviously, come along anytime they ask me to treat them to great meals and conversations.

This week, I spent some time with my closest friends fishing. We are all self-employed people who do well enough financially to take annual fly-fishing trips. A signal of our affluence that screams louder than most other sports. But at one of our breakfasts, we all discussed how difficult it seems these days to keep up with the cost of living, grocery bills, and the myriad unexpected pop-up costs that seem to arrive like Guido from a dark alley to bust our kneecaps with a crowbar. We all wondered aloud why things feel as arduous as they do. Each of us said that if, in 1999, when we started this annual trip, someone had said that each of us would be earning the money we are in our careers, we would feel like gazillionaires, but somehow we all feel a strange, impending doom over our finances. For a room full of middle-aged men, the discussion was rather deflating.

For most of us, the current version of our money system is really discouraging. We all work incredibly hard at our jobs and do all we can to help support our families. We live well, but feel pressed by a dollar that seems not to buy what it once did. It was easy to blame the government, COVID, Joe Biden, Strait of Hormuz wars, and anything in between. But somehow all of that rings really hollow. There isn’t a political will to dismantle the structure. We keep griping about the same stuff, voting for people constrained by an unbreakable bureaucratic system, and wondering why the dollar we earned today feels like less than the one we spent yesterday. Truthfully, the math just doesn’t math these days, and the attempts to fix it feel exceedingly futile.

I have insisted for as long as I have been writing about these things that the most pernicious part of living in America is the progressive tax system. Somehow, under the guise of fairness, we have been convinced that taking labor, in the form of money, from someone and sending it to a government in a Citadel Capitol of Crap that has no capacity for budget management is somehow the best system we can design to keep people satisfied. I have heard all the arguments for this tax system. How use taxes disproportionately affect the poor and how graduated, progressive systems are the fairest to everyone. But in this late-stage empire that continues to crumble under its own largesse, I refuse to buy the premise that this is about fairness.

42 trillion in debt means it is collateralized somewhere, or no one would lend the money — not China, Japan, not even the quantitative-easing drunks at the Federal Reserve. We are the collateral. The government has instituted a system that leverages their ability to make war, spend on nonsense programs, and NGO spiderwebs on their ability to tax into perpetuity. My unnamed and unborn grandkids are already part of the collateral, and sadly, my grandkids’ great-grandkids are too. That is not a fair system. It’s evil.

So on the long drive home from Idaho on Monday, I dreamed up this calculator. Could I easily illustrate the real damnation of how our terrible money and tax system works? I thought it might be possible, so I built it.

https://taxreplacementcalc.oneapp.dev

Go ahead and play around with it. I think you will find it rather discouraging. Enter what your rent costs, your morning coffee, or your insurance bill, and see how much it will take to replace those dollars. It’s disgusting. Most people aren’t aware of their tax bracket, so here is a simplified table you can use to understand what rate it is you are being collateralized at.

I know there are a few of you out there who are tax accountant-type people who will say this is too simplified, that it doesn’t take into account all the wonderful deductions you can have, or the depreciation on your rental properties, or your new car, or blah blah blah, but honestly, go find a mirror and say that sentence to yourself out loud. It's completely ridiculous. And after you help us find all those magic beans for deductions in our box filled with receipts, you'll send us a bill nearly equivalent to the “savings” you found us. So for this exercise, I’m going to just say that it all comes out in the wash, because for many of us, we are finally realizing that there is no way to “get off the ride.” Whatever I earn today is worth less than it was yesterday, and it will take nearly twice as much work to replace what I just spent.

This calculator does a couple of things. It takes into consideration the federal tax rate and the state you live in. Those are simple math numbers. But it also includes whether you are self-employed or a W-2 wage earner. Those of us who are self-employed get an extra 7.5% dose of tastiness for being ambitious. It also has a calculation about debt. If you end up buying the $20 burrito on credit, there’s a calculation of the 22% interest rate that average credit card companies charge. If you use your HELOC to buy that small engine repair your kids need, you can calculate that too at the current 12% annual rate those are going for.

Finally, it also takes into account the actual inflation the country is experiencing. The Chapwood Index is a calculation of real inflation across 50 major US cities. That hidden tax from the government’s overspending and inflationary policies is tossed into the soup, too. What you will find is pretty infuriating. Some of you might say, “This is the perfect reason to be frugal and spend less.” I appreciate the channeling of your inner Dave Ramsey, but the fact remains that statistics say that the average American family spends nearly $79,000 on basic expenses. That's just the cost of being alive. That’s not tossing in some extravagant escapade to Mickey Mouse land, or buying fancy dinners at one of the restaurants featured on Chef’s Table. This is what it costs to heat a home, pay for the government-required insurance, purchase the Roundup-laden Cheerios, and pay the veritable conucopia of use taxes we’ve not even discussed, like property, gas, or tobacco taxes. So go ahead and put that number in the calculator, and you will see why American families are not making it. Even in the lowest tax bracket, people have to chase an ever-diminishing return on the money they have already earned to replace it next year. A person who works for a company in Wyoming, earning and living off $45,000 in cash this year (an unlikely specimen), will need to earn $56,004.98 next year.

Something about that seems really wrong. Not just a “nibble-around-the-edges” of the tax code kind of wrong, but something intrinsically criminal about stealing the labor of people to keep them in a perpetual state of digging out. I think there are solutions to this, but it starts with the idea that all Americans should be released from the burden of being collateral to a government whose only aim is to grow itself and create wealth loopholes for those who have chosen to graft their successes to the will and direction of the federal government.

If we want this to change, we have to understand it. Sadly, the nefarious brilliance of what has been created is that, because of our need to catch up to next year, our heads are always down, working to make the next dollar, ignoring the fact that we are being used. Share the calculator around with people. I think it helps us understand what we are being subjected to, and perhaps, if enough of us are made aware of what has happened to us, we might be willing to argue that the tax system is egregious and demoralizing to the average American.

I live with my own disappointments with the reality that government, regardless of who is in charge, is seemingly immovable. I have watched as people who I wanted to win the election to “drain the swamp” or “fix Washington” have all struggled to make any substantive moves through that molasses morass of a city. Endless panels of task forces, designed to make sure that real discussions are always sidelined. Vaccines? Nope…but food dyes? That’s the ticket. The bureaucracy is the fourth and most powerful branch of government, and until we admit that voting has no power to fix that, we will be left with boisterous campaign rhetoric followed by itty-bitty, incremental movements. Our insistence that “little wins” are “how politics works” is the secret ingredient that allows Washingtonians to make sure the American people never see anything of substance change.

I took a long break from it after February this year. I tried to write as much as my mind would allow, but everything I typed sounded the same. A noisy cymbal, yelling about a war that no one but Ben Shapiro wanted, and a government that is too big to be anything but a bully. So I stopped. There were better things to do. One of my oldest sons was getting married in the summer, and my youngest would be off to college by August, so sitting down to type out another diatribe about the government's abuses seemed futile. I wrote one last scathing piece about my frustrations, and when I realized it had only caused harm, I took it down, closed the laptop, and resolved not to engage in any of this again. Life is far too short to make people angry, especially when the anger has no results. There were plenty of people who could take on the ire in the podcast sphere for me. Besides, all of that had grown tiresome too. Who hates Candace more, the seventeen things about Charlie Kirk that don’t add up, blame Israel for everything, RFK is a charlatan, are all daily covered in the podcast world with great aplom.

I hate the war because we aren’t good at winning them, not because there’s some kind of secret operation by a bungling foreign government to destroy the United States. I am easily frustrated by how quickly we are manipulated by tribal politics, and how principles are irrelevant as long as the Red or Blue team, depending on my predisposed tastes, wins. Washington is silly; state governments are silly; the post-World War two world has been created for the stability of the government, not the benefit of the citizen. It’s nearly impossible to argue the opposite perspective. The citizen is at the bottom of the machine. They are the ones burdened by regulation, taxation, and behavioral modifiers in every situation. The people in the cubicles in Arlington, or Langley, or on Constitution Avenue, will always get next year’s CPI increase, will never miss a paycheck, will always have health care, all at the cost of the people whom they purport to serve. But yelling about it from my keyboard in Colorado is not terribly effective, and if there were anything more damaging to my health than my battles with craving too much salt and my love for the taste of beer, it would be my hyperactive obsession with the dysfunction of government.

I had done pretty well with ignoring it too. We had a lovely wedding for my son. I have had the chance to travel with my son, who is leaving for college, and we have even managed to sneak in more fishing than I thought we might this summer, given the schedule. I rediscovered my love for music, and my wife and I played more concerts than we ever thought we would.

But they just had to march the diminutive doctor from Brooklyn back into the foreground.

And like a tape in hypersonic rewind, hearing his voice again took me right back to the early days of COVID. The voice, the smug answers, even how he pleaded the Fifth, were all bad reminders of why I had become so activated in politics. We have never been a “news” family. We have no television, canceled our cable package in 2002 when we couldn’t afford it and never looked back, and after 9/11 and the clear manipulation that the media put upon the American people, have no trust in anything that the “mainstream” media writes. So, when on a ski trip with my dad and my youngest son in March of 2020, just before the lockdowns, my father turned the television on to Fox News as we settled in for bed at the hotel, my youngest son looked at me with perplexity about what this panican machine was saying.

And there, for the first time, was my introduction to Dr. Fauci. For so many, his avuncular presence seemed a nice-tempered restraint on the orange man. The now-famous photo of Fauci with his hand over his eyes standing behind Donald Trump became the meme of the moment. He embodied how many felt about Trump’s response to the pandemic, and he confirmed their biases that Trump was an idiot. Dr. Fauci gave them someone in the room they trusted, and he became a national hero to those who really loathed the Fifth Avenue monster. No one wanted to say it at the time, but the reality was that they loved Fauci, not for his “science” or his “doctoring” but because he was a kryptonite to Trump. The pandemic would be managed by credible people in their minds. Trump could say whatever he wanted, but in the background, Fauci and his team were the real heroes, stopping Trump from his panacea of horsepaste and malaria cures.

On that same ski trip, we had dinner at a local steakhouse called the Mint. It’s a favorite stop of ours: a cook your own steaks on a grill, rummage around in an old salad bar type of place. The owner was in real panic. Not the kind on Fox News, but the kind I knew from my life in business. “The governor is going to bankrupt me if he keeps talking about shutting everything down.” He continued, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

I have no medical training, and, as I have often expressed here, I haven’t been to a doctor in a long time. The whole system is so broken that I barely trust anyone or anything in relative proximity to it. So you can imagine that my skeptic's alarm bells were firing early and often during the pandemic's early days. Shutting everyone in their homes and locking everything down did not seem like a solution for a free people, nor did it seem like the right one even if we had been living in Soviet Russia. Nothing like the proposed worldwide governmental response had ever happened before. There were no precedents for a national or global lockdown. But there we were. And just like that, daily press briefings from the president, or the vice president, who would step embarrassingly aside in sheer demure to allow for the “experts” to have the podium. Dr. Fauci seemed to love the whole thing. There didn’t seem to be a camera he didn’t want to be on.

With each passing week, month, and year, Dr. Fauci's stature grew. Trump was vanquished in the 2020 election, and Fauci, to so many, was the hero who had helped make it happen. He was the most important person in America to anyone who didn’t like Donald Trump.

The MAHA Seeds

But there was a group of people who didn’t want to be forced into the choice of surrendering their autonomy as people for a political win. They may or may not have liked Trump. They might have been like me, skeptical of government power, and well aware that whatever power is conceded to government by force must be wrested back by the force of the people. They could have been anti-vaxers who knew the playbook and didn’t want to see the inevitable coming mandates and societal pressures that would be lathered upon the people. Whoever they were, and whatever political persuasion they came from, they formed a resistance. It was a coalition of farmers-marketeers, libertarians, and anti state/business collusion watchdogs that gathered in the shadows to express their frustrations with the government's response.

For that group, Dr. Fauci became the target to call out. He was the one presenting his case minute by minute on television. He played his “expert” card often and would shut down dissent with a mere laugh or scoff. He had led the initial response, the charge for the vaccine, mask mandates, and anything else that could impede the normal way of life that had existed pre-COVID. That’s probably, in retrospect, giving him far too much credit, but at the time, he was the easiest and most visible person to frame the discussions around. And for that group, their pseudo-reluctant raising of a hand in question about the government’s response usually meant being throttled and labeled as a January 6th, science-denying, MAGA-tard.

My Own Story

In 2011, I had been hospitalized with Myocarditis. It was on the heels of a particularly stressful season, and could have been much worse had I not gone to the emergency room. So anytime I hear that word, I tend to listen. One of the early studies on the COVID-19 vaccine showed indications of that being a side effect of the drug. A doctor from my church and I spoke, and I expressed my concerns about it given my medical past. He agreed and said it might be best to wait until there was more data about it for someone like myself. That choice, however, had many consequences in a world obsessed with vaccinations. I was part of the problem. I was the one preventing everyone from “returning to normal.” There was talk of my real estate state license being revoked without proof of the shot. At the other business I run, I couldn’t enter the building to talk to my team unless I was registered as vaccinated. I resigned from my real estate brokerage, and created a workaround at the other business, but I was a second-class citizen in the eyes of many. Friends with whom I thought I had a long-standing relationship became angry and condemning. Some of whom I have never spoken with again.

The propaganda was very strong. Safe and effective or not, it was clear that society had made the choice that those of us who were refusing the vaccine were the problem. It was us who were killing grandma and not allowing everyone to get back to normal. Our selfishness was the problem. Their worlds were being impeded by our choices. I remember being in situation after situation in which the first question I was asked was not who I was, but if I had been vaccinated. Walkthroughs for real estate transactions required a COVID test or proof of vaccination. We couldn’t see my wife’s family in Canada without that same proof. The places we loved to go were off-limits because we would either have to lie and fake a vaccination card or be barred from participating. We had to mask up skiing, and our normal bula-type neck gators didn’t count. Only the stupid paper masks over our bulas were acceptable. We talked about moving to Wyoming or South Dakota, somewhere else where there at least were some sensible people in charge of public policy. It was the strangest time of our lives as a family. It wreaked havoc on my teenage kids. It has taken us years with our oldest to even return to something resembling what we had before the lockdowns.

For those of us who chose not to participate in the ways society wanted us to, the consequences were real and difficult. We were not seen as champions of freedom or the Constitution. We were pariahs.

A Bad Memory Faded

Until I saw the Doctor in Congress this past week, memories of that era had faded. I knew how I felt about it, but for the most part had wanted to forget it. My disillusionment with Washington had helped me shove the memories away. It is clear there will be no consequence for the actions of people like Dr. Fauci. He has a preemptive pardon, a plethora of defenders, and his cultural status is forever protected because, for half the country, he was the “sane” answer to Donald Trump. For the record, I didn’t want to see a second term of Donald Trump when the ‘24 election got underway.

(The first video I created that caught the attention of The Kennedy Campaign)

I wanted to see RFK Jr. become president almost exclusively because of his desire to protect the Constitution and because, during the campaign, he emphasized that the government’s sole responsibility is to protect citizens' constitutional rights. He was one of the voices willing to stand up and say that what the government was doing was wrong. He put a magnifying glass on the bad choices that the bureaucrats and politicians were making and was unashamed to say so. He showcased how the Washington machine worked. The revolving door of money, politics, and pay-to-play in government was evident to anyone willing to shed even the slightest shade of skepticism about the system. I loved him for it. I will always be thankful for him. He was a voice that helped so many of us find our own bravery to speak up and ask whether the government was as pure as the wind-driven snow it was proclaiming itself to be. Even in his choice to join Trump at the end of the ‘24 campaign, I saw someone who was trying to do the best thing he could for the country. Perhaps he has become too politically malleable and partisan, but regardless of my disappointments about what I see as the small incremental gains he is allowed to make by the Trump administration and the Washington money machine, he will always be an admirable character who gave a voice to millions.

For My Public Health Friends

I’ve spent a lot of time this past year becoming friends and acquaintances with a number of people in the public health space. My pseudo-regularity on the podcast “Why Should I Trust You?” has introduced me to a group of really well-intentioned people who I genuinely like. So, before I totally destroy their readership of my writing, I want to try to articulate why Dr. Fauci needs to be separated from public health if public health is ever going to regain any trust with the average American. I know he is being given a wide alley of forgiveness right now by most who are in the health space, and the theater of Washington did seem like a pig-pile on an old man who should be sailing off into the sunset of retirement, but for so many of us, Fauci is the centerpiece of all that is wrong with the scientific backbone of the healthcare system. Any honest assessment of how he handled himself during COVID must include his faults. I think it is important to understand why he and those who surrounded him during the pandemic dismantled trust in the institution.

Politics

Dr. Fauci became a political figure. Like it or not, Fauci played Trump’s nemesis and was embraced politically as the momentary solution to someone who seemed unstoppable at the time. History will look at the decline of Trump’s popularity in his first term from the State of the Union speech in February of 2020, where Nancy Pelosi tore up the speech, and Rush Limbaugh was given the Medal of Freedom, to his loss in November of that year as the fastest decline of an incumbent in American politics. He was soaring in February of 2020. He was popular with his base; he had outlasted an impeachment, a Russian collusion narrative, plus a dozen other “scandals” and seemed poised to easily win re-election. The Democrats had a Bernie problem, and Mayor Pete, Joe Biden, and Amy Klobuchar were not going to fix it. Trump seemed ready to coast to a rather easy second term. A month later, it was all gone. Bernie was ganged up on by the three also-rans and was out, and Trump was buried by a virus. He had some initial skepticism toward the people telling him what was going on, but the media and the inner Washington circle made him appear crazy for suggesting things like that it was a virus from a lab in China, or that there were perhaps medical alternatives to try. And stepping into the spotlight was Dr. Fauci. He was the answer for nearly everyone who disliked and distrusted Trump. He was like a breath of fresh air to Democrats who believed that Fauci made Trump look crazy. He seemed like the trustworthy figure in the room, and while the Donald could bluster and ramble, when his rants fell flat, it was Dr. Fauci who could calm the room down. No one may say it out loud, or even be willing to make this analysis, but Fauci was much more than a doctor to many. He was their answer to a political problem. Their disdain for Trump elevated Fauci to the leader of the rebellion against the “fascist” Trump regime. Public Health must be honest about this embrace. Most people who work in the public sector are more politically aligned with whoever isn't Donald Trump.

Surveys of public-health faculty, researchers, and practitioners (and broader health-sciences faculty) repeatedly find large majorities identifying as Democrats or left-of-center in their voting and politics. Republican or conservative self-identification is typically in the single digits to low teens. Similar imbalances appear in FEC campaign-contribution data for employees of major public health agencies, schools of public health, and medical schools. For many, COVID was a political opportunity to showcase Donald Trump's buffoonery and eliminate him from the public sphere of politics. Fauci was the key figure in this political exercise. And before an argument can be made that he was an unwitting figure in this and shouldn’t have all of these political issues cast upon him, his own diary reflects an understanding that he was the “inside the building” opposition to Donald Trump. Here are just a few examples:

• March 28, 2020 (describing a meeting):
  “It was a disturbingly rambling discussion since he kept talking about TV ratings, and HC [hydroxychloroquine], and influenza and virtually everything else as I was trying to keep him on track (with the help of the VP).”

• May 22, 2020:
  “Trump getting out of control in pushing to open up the country and get the economy back before election day. He is desparate. This is all about re-election.”

• July 28, 2020:
  “The POTUS is playing a weird game of acting Okay with me in person and saying that our relationship is fine to the press and then retweeting stuff that attacks me. He is a very strange guy.”

• October 15, 2020:
  “Trump is on the campaign trail spewing nonsense. He is really out of control. A true embarrassment.”

• November 16, 2020:
  “POTUS has no interest at all in the Pandemic. He is focusing on blocking Biden from being POTUS. He is embarrassing the USA. However, 72,000,000 voted for him. Difficult to understand. Craziness has overtaken part of our country.”

• March 29, 2021:
  “[Trump] is truly an obnoxious adolescent.”

• June 6, 2021:
  “The entire extreme right wing republican group in the House and Senate have completely sold their soul to the infinitely lying ex president trump.”

Dr. Fauci embraced his role as political thwarter. He saw it as some kind of noble effort to make sure that Trump looked like the inferior mind as it related to the pandemic. He embraced the way he embarrassed Trump in the media. He took on the political hopes of the people around him and projected a persona that was the cure for Trump.

If public health ever wants to regain trust, it has to first admit this bias. They were in part cheering on Dr. Fauci, not because he was solving the problems of the pandemic, but because he was helping to vanquish Donald Trump. Embracing behind-the-scenes politics while attempting to serve a 50/50-aligned public is a complicated tightrope to walk for an institution that is supposedly there for the health of the people it serves.

Control the Info

Public Health is filled with a great deal of daily heroes. People who work tirelessly for less-than-ideal dollars, because they want to help others. At the beginning of the pandemic, the spirit of medicine was on full display. Doctors were sharing information with one another, in an attempt to help find a cure for what was clearly a threat to the public. There were doctors trying therapeutics and seeing success. There were still others using already approved drugs to help shorten the symptoms and keep people out of the hospital. But early on, it became clear that Fauci and others at the top of the bureaucracy wanted to control what information was out there, and how people were supposed to treat the disease.

While there is some plausibility that his hesitation to support these early successes stemmed from his view that most of it was anecdotal, by the summer of 2020 it was becoming evident that Fauci wanted to be the primary source of information distribution. In a Wall Street Journal article about the diaries by the Editorial Board from July 27, 2026:

“Dr. Fauci gloated to himself about his viciousness toward critics. July 14, 2020, saw him trying to quash a skeptical memo about his policies by Journal contributor Stephen Moore. “I told [White House aide Alyssa Farah] that the White House (either Meadows or the POTUS) need to shut up Stephen Moore and stop his publication of ‘Dr. Wrong’ paper. If he does not the entire academic community will dump all over the POTUS.”

He attempted to freeze lockdown skeptics out of policy-making roles. He refers to Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldorff, authors of the lockdown-critical Great Barrington Declaration, as “the 3 stooges.”

I believe that if Public Health wants to understand the ire around this suppression of information, it has to understand the role Dr. Fauci played in silencing alternative conversations. Fauci was the dominant public scientific voice from early 2020 onward. He repeatedly characterized reports of success with HCQ and (later) ivermectin as “anecdotal” and insufficient without large randomized controlled trials. NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines (which Fauci’s agency heavily influenced) recommended against routine use of both drugs outside clinical trials. And while these weren’t enforceable government edicts, devotion to Fauci and his team among public health professionals, potentially due to the aforementioned political biases, shaped hospital protocols, physicians' practices, and media coverage nationwide.

And Then There Was The Hubris

Perhaps nothing raises the hair on the back of the necks of those who opposed the COVID world more than hearing Dr. Fauci talk about himself. He was good at it during the pandemic, and the more he was challenged by people like RFK Jr. or Senator Rand Paul, the more an undercurrent of arrogance surfaced. To be certain, no man is designed for that much spotlight, and fame is a destructive cancer to even the best of people — if you are predisposed to the “love of self”, the consequences of embracing fame can be disastrous. For those who opposed Dr. Fauci, nothing was more galvanizing than his insistence on being the central figure in the pandemic. The longer it went on, the more he wanted the spotlight. It seemed no one loved the sound of their own voice more than Dr. Fauci. For people who were unable to bury their loved ones because of the lockdowns, or see their dying parents in rest homes, or others who were cast out of society or lost their livelihoods because of their refusal to comply with government lockdowns, edicts, or mandates, Dr. Fauci’s pursuit of fame and the camera were reprehensible. He seemed evil in his blatant disregard for what was actually happening to the American people. His diary is a confirmation to many of us of what we suspected at the time. Fauci seemed in it for himself. He loved being the center of attention, and the heartbreak and devastation his policies caused were seemingly met with callous indifference by someone who never seemed to shy away from a running camera. Reading his diary stirred all of that up again for me. From the pages of his writing (spelling kept intact to the original):

• March 2020: “Many print profiles and features on me. Ridiculous – too numeous [sic] to count!”

• March 10, 2020: “For better or worse, I am becoming an international celebrity. Calls from all over the world.”

• March 22, 2020: “Press is going wild with me. Front page in Washintgton Post [sic] yesterday and Op Ed by Maureen Dowd in NY Times today about me and my relationship with the POTUS. Profile by Peter Nicholas on me in The Atlantic.”

• Around March–April 2020: “The ‘swag’ around me is getting really ridiculous. You can buy Fauci T-shirts, mugs, donuts, sweat shirts, candles, pillows, etc. Geeeez!! I do not like this one bit.”
  “Continued crazy stuff: Petition to name me ‘Sexiest Man Alive’; video games named after me; Fauci Bobblehead; dishes in restaurants named after me, and on and on.”

• Around the same period (referencing merchandise and publicity):
  “Brewery in Georgia named a beer after me.”
  “Bobbleheads of me being made in massive quantities in China.”
  “Intense publicity about me continues with stories of granmothers who have crushes on me.”

• May 3, 2020 (after listing global and U.S. case/death figures): “Fauci-maddness continues with multiple articles and every sort of paraphernalia and restaurant and foods named after me.”

• May 21, 2020: “Big front page article abut me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson [sic] in the world. Countless profiles on me in multiple media. I cannot even read all the things that are written abuyt [sic] me since I am so busy….seriously.”

• Other entries note: being followed by “a horde of at least 20 paparazzi,” Secret Service agents waving him through without ID checks and chatting casually, invitations to Dancing with the Stars (“no thanks!”), standing ovations and being “totally mobbed” for selfies (claiming “at least 100”), and frequent celebrity contacts (Julia Roberts, Barbra Streisand, Joan Baez, etc.). One entry states “Millions of people idolize me.”

While millions of people had to deal with the real-life consequences of his policies and “recommendations,” Dr. Fauci was lost in his own world of celebrity. It was so detached and filled with idolitry that many of us began to reject everything he said simply on the merits of his own self-aggrandizement. The lesson for public health in all of this is to ensure that, if this ever happens again, no single voice is elevated to speak on behalf of the community. Science is the work of consensus building around ever-changing data sets. Science isn’t ever, by its nature, “settled” as many acolytes of the era claimed. Dr. Fauci was even an early advocate for “let(ting) the science speak,” and that “you’ve got to evolve with the science. Science is a self-correcting process.” But by the time the information reached the public, especially through the government’s recommendations, there were only narrow lanes for people to access. Fauci’s hubris about himself in the moment discredited him with a large swath of people in the country. Fixating on bobbleheads, even if he “didn’t like it,” was out of touch with what millions were enduring for months and years because of the policies he and his team instituted.

I want trust to return to all of our institutions. But there has been tremendous damage, and no figure embodies it more than Dr. Fauci. That may be unfair, and to be certain, Donald Trump played a huge role in all of the decisions that were imposed upon the people of the country too, but if public health wants to try and rewrite the slate, which I believe it is incumbent upon them to do, not the people who were harmed by their policies in the pandemic, then they have to distance themselves from Dr. Fauci.

He may be their political hero, but as long as he remains so, they will not be trusted again. The diaries are damning and embarrassing, I am sure, to him, but they should be. They should be to public health too. Those who are this era’s on-the-ground leaders need to admit that embarrassment. Forget the Washington mess. I don’t think anyone there is going to fix it, but those on the frontlines need to learn to exercise their muscle of independence. Speak out, as Dr. Craig Spencer has about the need for transparency. Do I agree with every assessment Craig writes? No. But I admire someone who sits in a very different political seat than I do for attempting to take an honest look at the issues that created an environment that could manifest a Dr. Fauci.

Dr. Fauci will face no consequences for the COVID era, which will disappoint the die-hards. Admittedly, if I had been someone who couldn’t bury a loved one or be by their side during their death, I would be a person with uncontrolled rage at the people who were responsible for all of it. I wish there were more accountability in government, but there isn’t, and our system isn’t designed for justice — so it will remain in the realm of the theatrical for the foreseeable future.

I don’t want government involved in any of this health space. But given our broken political world, and the insistence by most in the public that it is the government's responsibility to continue to be a central character in healthcare, the best we might be able to muster up is the reappropriating of power to the people who face the challenges of the American medical system firsthand. Patients need Doctors to be at their best in the moments that they need them. That requires something very different than how it went down in COVID. No patient needed Dr. Fauci, and if they were honest, no Doctor needed him either. He represents the broken aspects of our system, and he should be left alone to retire to whatever beach house he might aspire to own in Maryland. I do hope that people recognize his role in dismantling public trust in public institutions. His Fifth Amendment serenade last week should be enough for people to understand that there is at least a political witch hunt that engenders distrust of public health, and, at worst, some true cover-up criminality involving gain-of-function research in which he has a hand. Either should be enough for people in Public Health to bid the doctor adieu.

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Apologies for the long gap in my writing. Between a wedding for my son, a busy summer of travel, concerts in Los Angeles, and a general sense of frustration with the immovable aspects of Washington, my mind has been given to other things besides politics or the state of the world. I ceased checking in on X. Probably the best thing I have done in some time for myself. The hyperbolic, crisis-by-the-second world that exists in that endless stream of consciousness is too much for the human mind to grasp. I stopped wondering who was to blame for Iran. It remains the most puzzling aspect of the Trump administration, but in the end, it feels eerily similar to all other misadventures that the “intelligence” class drags the country into: a long, unwinnable, undefinable excursion with no real end and no real objective ever achieved. I still listen to podcasts to fall asleep, but even those have become dull. No one really seems fully “correct” about anything, so they are a series of long discussions about fearful possibilities, but no real wisdom. I say all of this, not to excuse my lack of participation, but to give a general sense of my disillusionment with our current state of affairs as a country, and why, after being so feverishly devoted to writing and speaking, I have had a lesser appetite to engage in it all.

“America” turns 250 years old today. Quite a birthday. I suppose on many levels, there is something majestic to celebrate. This country is still spectacular. Last night as I heard the clean, soft beauty of a solo trumpet at the Colorado Symphony, I was reminded of how creative our people are. Airplanes, Cars, Computers, Movies, and jazz are all American creations, all born of a country that freed itself from the old ways of monarchy and allowed for an experiment in liberty. Imperfect and flawed to be sure, but unique in its premise: that mankind needed no king to direct its path.

As I lay in bed late last evening and heard the early firework blasts, I was reminded of the coming Independence Day celebration. My thoughts took me to George Wythe. Of all the founding fathers, he has become my favorite. His intellect, wit, and wisdom seem to be something our political class lacks in our modern moment. I discovered him through our trips to Colonial Williamsburg over the years.

It has become a place we gravitate toward for family vacations, or simply to retreat from the hyperactive pace of the twenty-first century. A stroll along the streets or a step into the blacksmith shop seems to ease the frenzy of a world that has seemingly gone mad. In the last ten years, they have added Mr. Wythe to their cast of interpreters. His speeches on the Charlton Stage or in the Palace Gardens resonate more deeply with me than even Mr. Jefferson these days. I revisited a few of them this morning from past trips as a way to celebrate the Fourth, and remembered why his wisdom is so necessary as we venture, upon our own vessel, into the next years of our country.

There isn’t much new under the sun. Our struggles seem eerily similar to those of the past. Frustrations about inflation and ruling-class leadership were there almost instantly when the Declaration was signed, and then when the Constitution was adopted. We have inherent tendencies as a species. We look for answers in places that were never designed to hold them. As Mr. Wythe so eloquently describes, the system that we have chosen is one in which we “took the crown off of one sovereign, and placed it upon the heads of thousands.” That comes with a terrifying responsibility. I have the duty to absorb the same work of a soverign king. To rule over my own world with the kindness and fairness that a good king would.

Admittedly, I placed too much emphasis on finding the “right” person to run the country. That exercise will never be an endeavor with much fruit. There is no man or woman capable of such a burden. The machine that has been built is designed for stability, regardless of who sits atop the theater. That stability is defined by those who run the government and is exclusively for their benefit; something I find disappointing and filled with frustration. The American people are in want of a newer form, I believe. They seem to be saying it with the people they elect. Democratic Socialists are gaining momentum in local elections, as are populist voices on the right. The system does seem to have morphed from being one designed and owned by the people to something run and enforced by edict by those already in power. What we celebrate today is an idea that has probably faded from possibility under the current constructs. Self-government is hard. The Israelites clamored for a king. The Romans longed for empire. America, burdened by the mantle of global leadership, buckled under the pressure and made its own closeted form of empire too. Mankind is interested in abdicating his responsibilities at almost every opportunity. Someone, somewhere will fix this mess. Elections are brief placating moments to subside the frustrations of the cumbersomeness of the blob-designed world. But we play into it well. It is why understanding Wythe is even more important than ever. It is one thing to say we love liberty and freedom; it is an entirely different thing to create a world for our children and future generations of Americans that allows for it. That is the difficult work. We have conditioned our people that government is designed as an enforcer. A blunt end of a bat that can bring our disagreeable neighbors or political enemies to heel. Attend any city council meeting if you think that’s an exaggeration. We want the people behind the desk to do the hard work of being a neighbor. When my “rights” conflict with yours, who shall prevail? Not an easy question to answer. The twentieth century said that it should be the responsibility of the bureaucrat or the politician to sort those conflicts out. Perhaps that is the system we think most effective and beneficial for our safety and happiness, but what has been built is not oriented toward liberty, but rather toward the gods of “order,” “rightness,” and “self.” Wythe knew that conflict would be central to the debates of building a nation.

Wythe understood the fallibility and fickleness of humanity. That a strange conflation of self-interest and self-government would intersect in places that made it difficult to sustain liberty. Our slavish devotion to the god of economics has made it difficult to live generously for those who come behind us. We surrender and ignore our responsibilities to the next generation to ensure we have “enough” to weather future storms of inflation or tax burdens. We see the present as the only thing that matters. And truthfully, that was always an inherent flaw in our system. Adams knew it. He said that without the restraining forces of virtue, the Constitution would become wholly inept.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” - John Adams

Admittedly, these last months have been sad and frustrating to watch. Why politicians decide to do what they do is often beyond me. I can only know one thing: that I am not in the room. What we see from afar is often only the curated version that political enemies hope to present. That is no excuse for the choice to go to war, or for the abandonment of key campaign promises, but it is the fruit of reality that the people have placed too great a demand upon its leaders, and on a system that is no longer designed to lift up and encourage the flourishing of liberty. The solutions, as Wythe believed, are only available to those who place the burden of governance upon their own heads.

We have a lot to celebrate this anniversary of the Declaration. No place has given a greater birth to so much. Our challenge resides in the ability to pass it on to our children. They struggle to believe in the promise because we have demonstrated to them that self-interest is all that matters. Our future lies in our ability to resist temptations offering momentary benefit at the expense of those coming behind us. Our ability to sustain this great vessel upon the waters of self-government depends upon surrendering our past patterns and dedicating ourselves to those whom we may never know, but who should prosper in a life on the waters of freedom and liberty.

Here’s to the next 250 years.

I have a lot of admiration for my wife. There’s a lot to her story that makes her who she is, but let’s just say that I ended up on the better end of the deal. She has been the most amazing mother to our boys, and all the while has given of her time and energy to so many others. We met 26 years ago, in August. She was working at a camp in Pigeon Lake, Alberta, and my band was playing the music for several weeks. A friend of mine ran the camp, and it was a great way to end the summer touring season. It was a free place to stay and free food, so, as a struggling band, it was a great reprieve from arguing with venues about getting paid or splitting up 10 bucks for dinner. When we arrived, my bass player said that one of the camp administrators had been at their music school in Edmonton and had asked if she could play with us. I had several bad experiences with other players joining for chapel time in the past, so I was a firm “no.”

Of course, she took the news with grace and understood my rationale and didn’t say anything more. On the second night of camp, I walked into the chapel to find her sitting by the piano playing and singing. I heard her play for a few measures and then interrupted her.

“Would you like to join the band?”

She was fabulous. Her voice was spectacular, and she played piano differently than anyone else I had heard before. Much more beautiful and concise than the standard church lady who used all 10 fingers to make the piano cover every register of sound. She could pick a spot on the keyboard and make the chords sound full and perfectly placed within the music. She was clearly a better musician than most of us in the band, and particularly me. We loved playing together over the next few weeks, and by the end of camp, there was clearly something developing between the two of us. I knew the band was planning to move to the United States the following summer, so I started making plans to have her be part of it. Selfishly, I wanted to make sure that she would be a much larger part of my life too.

That fall, we decided to date long distance. Her from Vancouver, British Columbia and myself in Colorado. Month after month, we would visit one another. Sometimes in Colorado, sometimes in Vancouver. Pretty early on, we realized that we had both found the right person.

On one spring trip to Vancouver, she introduced me to her closest friend: Jen. Jen has Down syndrome, but it hardly defines her. She and my wife met at the grocery store while they were both working there. My wife was the checker; Jen was the bagger. Anna knew that Jen’s life was much more difficult than her own, and, as a sign of how my wife would live the rest of her life, she befriended Jen, and they soon became lifelong companions. Anna, my wife, noticed something about Jen. Every time people would come to her till, Jen would inevitably brighten their day with her smile.

Jen is loud. She has no filter. And there is no one who can make a room laugh faster than her. We have taken her on a few trips over the years, and she always brightens everything.

My wife wrote this song about her. It’s touching and kind, but it also perfectly describes who Jen is. My wife understands what’s behind the way Jen lives. Jen lives as if today is the only day, and in many ways, that ultimately is the call from Jesus about his provisions for us.

From Matthew 6

²⁶ Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? ²⁷ Which of you by worrying can add one ^[a]cubit to his ^[b]stature?

²⁸ “So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; ²⁹ and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not ^[c]arrayed like one of these. ³⁰ Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

³¹ “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ ³² For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. ³³ But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. ³⁴ Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

One final note on this creation of my wife and Jen. On that trip to Vancouver years ago, we took Jen out shopping. She loved the flea market, and she was especially fond of the Spice Girls. She wanted to collect any paraphernalia she could find related to all of those sassy lasses from the UK. Jen never has any money. We count on a call at least once a month from her for a little help with groceries, to cover rent, or to buy a mattress. We are usually hard-pressed to say no. But on this particular day, Jen had just received her Canadian government disability paycheck, and the flea market was full of Spice Girls swag. By the time we left, she had spent nearly everything on posters, ceramic plates, and plastic wizbangs adorned with the images of Posh, Ginger, and Scary. We knew that she had just blown her paycheck —and that it was going to make it pretty tight for the next few weeks—but Jen didn’t care. She was thrilled at her collection.

When my wife showed Jen this song, sitting at her out-of-tune piano in her cabin, Jen sat there and listened. After it was finished, she said, “It’s nice, but can we listen to the Spice Girls now?” It made my wife laugh. She didn’t need Jen’s approval. She had lived life with her, and they cared for one another deeply. My wife knew that it was her way of saying she was thankful for it.

We have been playing this song as a band lately, and it’s been fun to hear it come to life again. If you happen to live in Wyoming, we are playing at the WYO Theater in Sheridan in July. It’s a full-circle moment for me. The town I grew up in, in a theater where I watched Empire Strikes Back, my wife, sons, and I have the chance to play music about our lives. Songs like this express what it is like to live as a believer in a troubled world. Jennifer’s smile is one of the reasons we can rest assured that no matter how hard the circumstances, the provision for our lives is taken care of.

“Cannot you see… that it is we who are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it.” - E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

The other afternoon, I was home hanging out with a few of my sons when we started to reminisce about the old Batman show with Adam West. I don’t remember what brought the topic up—perhaps an Instagram reel of the Joker and Batman dueling it out with a set of dumbbells and cartoon “Kapows” across the screen— but whatever it was, it prompted us to put one of them on. In this particular episode, the Riddler was setting up the dynamic duo to entrap them in a scheme of some sort. There were the usual camera-turned-sideways shots of Robin and Batman walking up the side of a building, and the fake fights, but something else caught our attention. The dialogue would often be interrupted by an admonishment from Batman to Robin about crossing the street or the necessity of “honest policemen”. Robin, at one point, even discussed how important it was to brush his teeth after using them to escape from a lumber saw. Holy molars Batman!

My kids picked up on it right away.

“This is almost a strange propoganda dad.”

He wasn’t wrong. The America of the 60s was wrestling with many of the same things we are today. A sense that the order that had been was changing. The civilization was becoming something different. The morals and ethics of the 1800s were over. The last remnants of a world that existed prior to the Civil War were now only memories, relegated to the backward corners of the South. America was trying on the suit of empire and struggling to find its footing. The media and the political order of the day were all trying to understand how to get the population to come along for the new experiment. The Vietnam War was in full swing, and the quiet unrest of the early 60s was giving way to overt restlessness and civil disobedience. There has been a distinct need in this age of pseudo-empire to ensure that what the leaders wanted was believed in. The system morphed into a strange deity, complete with doctrine, theology, and dicastery. It required adherence in order to function. Standardization became the highest and best goal of the government and the surrounding entities of Washington.

Religious systems require standardized points of order. Doctrines and social pressures within the institution can easily corral mass numbers of people into manageable lots. The use of these tactics wasn’t new in the 60s, but something distinctly different had happened. Prior to this social upheaval, Western governments had always deferred to the natural order of the world, particularly the idea that governments and the men who served in them were subservient to a creator. The moral underpinnings of good government came from a deference to God. The entire fundamental of self-government was based upon the concept that a moral order didn’t come from the whims of man, but rather from a code embedded within the universe, as well as the souls of those who trod upon the earth. In other words, it wasn’t up to man to create the constructs; those were self-evident. The creator had infused everything within the universe with them.

An Unbreakable Compact

But the 20th century had disrupted all of that. Most pinpoint the World Wars as the turning point for the decay of Western Civilization, and to be certain, they clearly destroyed what was left of it. But the cause of self-government was truly placed on unstable ground in the American Civil War. The world of Lincoln and Davis, waged in the battles of Lee and Grant, was the defining moment in the experiment in representative government. Leading up to that war, the debates over tariffs and enterprise were the agitators that intersected with a strong federal government and the autonomy of the states. Our elementary school versions of this war make for easy, tidy answers about right and wrong, but the war was much more about how each individual society within the United States saw its relationship to unity.

Jefferson had always declared that each state was sovereign. The primary author and intellect behind the secessionist document of 1776 saw it as the duty of each state to push back against the powerful central government. He wrote as much in the Kentucky Resolution of 1798:

“That the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government; … that the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; … but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.”

Great intellectual leaders on representative government, like John C. Calhoun, would embrace this concept as the core of their political careers. Calhoun discussed this conflict of government interests in what he described as Negative Power. In his masterpiece, Disquisition on Government, he wrote:

“It is this negative power,— the power of preventing or arresting the action of the government, be it called by what term it may, veto, interposition, nullification, check, or balance of power,— which, in fact, forms the constitution.”

The battle in the United States was over how the central government would be restrained. Almost every political storm from the Constitutional Convention to the final shot at Appomattox Court House was about this conflict of ideology. What is the role of a central and powerful government? The founding generation saw it as an imperative to liberty to throw off the central authority of a king. By Lincoln’s day, the winds had shifted back, and radical Republicans believed it necessary to centralize authority. They saw the Constitution as an unbreakable compact: once in, never released from its bind. Lincoln argued as much in his first inaugural address in 1861, just months after “secessionitis” had started to make its way through the southern states:

“I hold, that in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper, ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination.

Again, if the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade, by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it—break it, so to speak—but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?

It follows from these views that no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void; and that acts of violence, within any State or States, against the authority of the United States, are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances.”

Lincoln was asserting the supremacy of the federal government. He and many others from the Republican Party argued that the power the Constitution granted the Central Government was an unbreakable contract. No one could leave unless everyone decided to leave. Effectively meaning that it would have everlasting authority unless dismantled by unanimous consent.

I am convinced that our lack of understanding about the Civil War is the reason we have little capacity to undo the wildly out-of-control federal government today. We venerate Lincoln. He has a massive temple built to his memory in Washington. Our discussions about great presidents always start with him as the greatest. “Saved the Union and freed the slaves.” But behind the easy-reader versions of history, what was really at the core of that moment was a battle over who decides the fate of the citizen. Is government a mechanism of the people? A lever that can be pulled and prompted that reacts to the needs of the people. Or is it the other way around? Is it the government that dictates what makes a civilian a good citizen? The war determined the winner not only of the battlefield but of the ideology of the American form of government. The vanquishing of state restrictions on federal power meant the end of something that Jefferson and his generation had left for the flourishing of a people. Government was an entity unto itself — a deity fully autonomous of those it governed.

Progressive Era Control

The last decades of the 1800s were a wrestling match of this new philosophy. The platitudes and intellectual leftovers from the country that existed before the Civil War still constrained the government, but by the turn of the century, a confluence of centralized wealth and political winds enamored with order and science had created the perfect petri dish for the total dismantling of democratic self-government. Intellectual leaders of the time, like John W. Burgess (1844–1931), the founder of American political science at Columbia University and a major progressive theorist, explicitly framed a world-state as the ultimate requirement for the “perfection of humanity” and the civilization of the world:

“The ultimate end of the state is defined as the ‘perfection of humanity, the civilization of the world; the perfect development of the human reason and its attainment to universal command over individualism; the apotheosis of man.’
This end can be realized, however, only when a world-state is organized, and for this, mankind is not yet ready. Men must first be organized into national states, based on the principle of nationality.”

The ethos of that era was to manage people toward perfection, and to most intellectual leaders, it was the mythology of the American form of government, particularly its elevation of the individual, that was preventing smarty-pants management from working. Walter Lippmann, another progressive intellectual, perhaps gave the most clarifying words on why a universal government and world order were necessary:

We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it. To traverse the world men must have maps of the world.”

The Great War

I have often wondered what it was that caused this immeasurable tragedy. The story, as presented, of an obscure duke being assassinated, plunging the whole world into something that would ultimately destroy Christian Europe, has long been short of rationality. The insistence that some nationalist-style dogmatism meant that peace could not be achieved is closer to the truth, but as I look back on the twentieth century, I have lingering suspicions that it may be more about progressive sentiments of control and global management than about the murder of Ferdinand.

The 1899 and 1907 Hague Peace Conferences represented the main progressive/internationalist effort for peaceful dispute resolution through arbitration and laws of war. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia called for the first one in 1899. He invited the major powers of the world to meet because he saw “the maintenance of general peace and a possible reduction of the excessive armaments which weigh upon all nations” as “the ideal towards which the endeavors of all Governments should be directed.” The leaders of the world at that time were all grappling with a shifting world. The American Revolution had proven an anomaly. France had undergone a multitude of governmental changes, European boundaries were constantly shifting amid revolution and political upheaval, and even America had become something different from its founding after its catastrophic Civil War. The intellectuals of the time wanted the confusion of national interests and the Enlightenment ideology of individualistic elevation to end. They believed that nation-states were outdated and that republic-style governments were too ineffective to maintain a world of order and peace. These conferences were designed to restrain the individual desires of nations and place them under a global order of control. At the first conference, however, it was clear that not every nation was on board with submitting national interests to progressive desires.

Germany participated but repeatedly resisted stronger measures, especially obligatory arbitration and arms limitations. Some contemporary progressive observers noted this as a division between “progress” and “opposition. Colonel Gross von Schwarzhoff (German military delegate) spoke against the Russian disarmament proposals, arguing that military preparedness was a national necessity and that talk of disarmament was unrealistic or sentimental. He was described by contemporaries as the “chief anti-sentimentalist.”

Theodore Roosevelt called for the second conference in 1904, but it was postponed because of the Russo-Japanese War. When it finally convened in 1907, it was clear that the causes of the world's inability to agree on disarmament had become much clearer. In the official proceedings of the 1907 Second Hague Conference, one delegate summarized the split this way:

“Thus the world was divided into two camps of very unequal importance. On one side was the mass of the states of the world, great and small, representing progress; on the other, Germany, representing the opposition…”

Germany was seen as the primary holdout (often joined by Austria-Hungary), blocking what some liberals and progressives hoped would evolve into more binding international law. Baron Marschall was the most famous of the delegates to resist a call for disarmament. The 1922 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica describes him as “an advocate of a strong naval policy for Germany, he was the exponent of Germany’s resolute and successful opposition to any practical discussion of the question of restriction of armaments.”

As Germany resisted the world's pressure to comply with its demands, tensions escalated. The world stage was a battle between the naval and colonial powers of Germany and Great Britain. Both countries’ inability to restrain their aspirations for global territorial and maritime dominance exacerbated tensions. The 1907 conference left the door open for Germany to challenge Britain for the title and role of world hegemon. This ran counter to the philosophical ideals of the progressives, who were biased toward a British-American world order and believed that any peace should be one constructed and maintained by their version of the world. When Germany refused to play along with the premise, the world was ripe for war.

1914-1945

Historians are increasingly treating this window of time in the twentieth century as a single era. The First and Second World Wars, interrupted by a major global economic crisis, all draw from the same thematic roots of conflict. The wars, in essence, were one long war with a twenty-year interruption of economic boom-and-bust. This grand series of world battles, both on Flanders Field with bullets and Wall Street with crashing stocks, was the last gasp of national states' struggle for sovereignty against the pressures for internationalism. But if we take a further step back, these conflicts might be better framed in a philosophical battle between the sovereignty of the individual and the supremacy of the state. Perhaps the American Civil War was the first battle in a much longer war that vanquished the ideals of the Revolution and created a global superstate. If the timeline includes the struggles in the valleys of Virginia, it becomes clearer that governments, once empowered to be entities in their own right, are relentless in their desire for more control and dominance over those they rule. Perhaps the broader historical context of mankind, who are far more accustomed to being ruled than to practicing self-government, demonstrates that this battle began with King George and ended with the creation of a global surveillance state, backed by the full force of an empire. George lost the battle, but ultimately the philosophy of oligarchy won the war.

The New Kings

The world that emerged after the World Wars was much more in line with the progressives' vision from the early years of the century. Every country became subservient to the greater global good. The institutions established, the economic systems, the management, and the expert class were all fundamentals of this new religion-like entity. All choices that were made by governments or their appendages were in support of the global order. People were to be managed for the benefit of the wealthy and to propagate endless micro-crises that would keep them dependent on the system for their survival and protection. Governments would be fundamentally transformed from having a duty to protect their citizens and the interests of the nation-state to being hell-bent on managing the population into a kind of mediocre compliance. Life for the average person would be one they could tolerate, but cease to thrive in. There would be a perpetual threat of war, of nuclear destruction, of famine, of disease, of economic uncertainty — all with the objective of realigning the citizen away from self-reliance, back to dependence on the soverign. This time, it would not be called a king but rather a litany of monikers: The bureaucracy, The Government, The alphabet agencies. There was no single point to blame, and there would never be a single point of solution. The new kings would sometimes be in Davos or on the Council on Foreign Relations, and sometimes they would sit behind a cubicle wall in a county office, but they would work harmoniously to create a world where those who served the state could be king at any moment over the citizen.

This new world would require devotion to it, and once the citizens realized it wasn’t as wonderful as promised, the new kings would run the same risk as the old ones. They might enrage the citizenry enough to cause their own demise. So they developed a religious construct and made it taboo to ask questions about the system itself. The conversations became narrower and narrower about what could be discussed. Money and inflation? Never. Instead, it became an entire industry of acronyms and terms that made the average person feel dumb and shut their mouth. Government’s overreach and heavy hand in regulation? Not if you needed to use, achieve, or succeed with your land, farm, business, or idea. Instead, they build a culture that demands that anyone come with a hat in hand and a tail between their legs, begging for their permission to do anything. What of terrible injustice, or a court system that acted as unelected deities regardless of the will of the people? Silence! The system has always said the courts have the final say.

The world became a theater that demanded obedience to the story, no matter how ridiculous or punitive the story became to the citizen. The new kings would placate the illusion of a vote, but they knew their world would remain safe because the existing infrastructure was too immovable and too difficult to hold to account at any one point. If anything ever slipped past and was deemed too outrageous by the public, the system would work to fix the leak so it would never happen again. The system demanded full and unadulterated devotion to itself. Aborations and failures that the public was allowed to see were treated as a cancer that needed to be cut out. Not for the sake of the citizen, but for the protection of the system itself.

Media, music, and art all became the house organs of state celebration. Everything was crafted to bolster the system's narrative. These new Kings knew that if the public ever stopped believing in the system, it would collapse quickly. Those who sat on these new thrones of power knew that the money was fake, the institutions were fake, and that civility was in a tenuous bond. They understood that their only real responsibility to the citizen was to keep them in a neutral state. Entertained and softened. Undereducated and unaware of how things actually work in their world. The celebration of belief in the state is all that holds any of it together. If the people nullified the system, all of it would be over in a matter of moments.

They standardized everything — creating new religious doctrines. Housing design, energy consumption, technology all were designed to bring life into a strange mediocrity. Appliances would take twice as long to do half the work of those built just 50 years earlier. Computers would become information-gathering tools. Every keystroke was monitored to determine the operator's buying and consumption habits. Phones would have tracking devices in the name of convenience, and because they were so expensive that a loss would be financially devastating to the average person. Trash would have to be sorted. Masks would have to be worn. Cars would have to shut off at stoplights. All of it was standardized for the subtle reminder that the state was God.

Over time, the citizens just became used to the misery. They shook their heads as they were required to download another app to park, or a waitress shoved an intrusive handheld computer in their face, asking for their tips. Each new step, another lowering of the expectations, and a reinforcement that the state is doing all it can for the citizens. Each fall, they would dutifully march out to fulfill their civic duty and vote, but regardless of who they wanted to lead or what changes they hoped to see enacted through representation, the System would ultimately prevail.

The Divine Reality

This morning, my oldest son was asking me about some theological fundamentals. The kinds of questions young twenty-year-old men ask about the world they are interacting with. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do some people act in evil ways? How come our culture doesn’t value children? We talked about how I see the world and how morality is built on the premise of the eternality of the human soul and its relationship to the divine. That constructs built by humans are more about human control and behaviors than they are truly based on a code from eternal truth. He asked me how people can hold such hypocritical viewpoints on life and death in our culture. How can someone be against murder or abortion but a devotee of the state’s love of war? They are hard questions to answer, but I told him that what I am hopeful for is an end to the modern System that demands incongruous morality. I hope that as this current version of globalism collides with the reality of a more restless public, it might degrade and be held in contempt by the citizens. I told him that what I hope for is a truer understanding of what most religions, and particularly the Christ has said about mankind’s relationship to the Creator. I believe fervently that Jesus was showing his disciples that the religiosity of the Hebrew people of his time was a broken construct. He was saying that the temple and system of sacrifice needed to end. He recognized that the people were no longer doing things from a place of a pure heart. Sacrifices were no longer offered by the fruits of a household’s labor but rather purchased on the way up the temple steps. And while the system looked powerful and strong, the corrosive cancer within it had rotted its core.

I think the same is true of the moment we live in. Something does feel off. The slogans and sirens from the state no longer seem to be ringing with as much effect on the people. In some ways, it seems we are trapped inside one of the old Batman shows; we know it's fake, we know it's strange propaganda, but this week’s episode must “go on!” In the real world, however, people know that they are beaten up by a system that demands their loyalty and, in return, only rewards them with deeper hardships. There’s no glossing that reality over, Batman.

There seems to be a craving for a reorientation to the divine. To be called from the place of humanities’ eternal components —their souls— into deeper things. The institutions are much like The Wizard from Oz. They have been caught in their own incapacity to fulfill their demands for order, and the people are starting to question whether they remain obligated to the falsehoods the wizard insists must be adhered to.

In his 2013 book The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey, Colorado University professor Michael Hueme argues that the state has no special moral status that ordinary people or organizations are somehow in short supply of.

“Political authority is a moral illusion…Acts that would be considered unjust or morally unacceptable when performed by nongovernmental agents will often be considered perfectly all right, even praiseworthy, when performed by government agents. Why do we accord this special moral status to governments?”

Thankfully, the draw and compulsion of the human soul is to liberty. To live a free and peaceful life. Ultimately, those desires will prevail against the demands of a machine built on fakery. Jefferson knew it when he and his committee wrote their letter of divorce from King George; we will have to do the same from the kings who have made the trenches of obedience they insist we must live in. Break out of the religion of the State and the System. The world can be remade again. It is time to banish the control Gods and cease to give them the power to overrun the lives of the citizens.

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Lost to history is how the document actually came to be. Most people credit Jefferson as its author, and while it is true that it was his pen that scratched ink on paper, it was a document wrestled with by a committee. My dad has often said that Roger Sherman is one of his favorite founding fathers. Sherman was on the committee and provided incredible clarity on the outline and structure of what would be included on the page. Of course, most of us know that Ben Franklin and John Adams were also on this committee, but there was also Robert R. Livingston, another brilliant mind of this era. All contributed to the final version that went before Congress to be picked, parsed, and pried apart, and all are why we have the clarity and lasting brilliance of a document from 250 years ago.

My dad has helped create this movie with an incredible team of kids who tell this story in the most compelling way. Its creativity and message speak for themselves. In this tumultuous era of division and frustrations with government, it is a keen reminder that it is the youth who capture the spirit of revolution and cry deeply for liberty. They are the ones whose future depends on the survival of freedom, and governments' rightful place as servants to those they govern. I am so thrilled for my dad - this has been a long process to get this story told. He has tried multiple times, and each one comes up short of capturing what might have gone on all those years ago. I think he finally has his storytellers, and it is a pleasure to see this moment in history come to life.

Enjoy, and please share with all you might know — our country needs a reminder of its great past, of its rich culture and philosophical brilliance. It also needs the call back to the Creator, to the one who established the soul’s cry for liberty.

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I wrote this piece several years ago as we were in the heart of the 2024 presidential election. In my frustration with the current state of government, I have spent a lot of time lashing out at the wrong things. The characters and actors who make up the face of government that the media lets us see are just bit-part players in a much larger mechanism. There were decades of abuses in the colonial era that led to the American Revolution, but the most pervasive amongst them were the stripping of self-determination and the ability of a people to chart their own course by the crown. The mercantilists had a collusive grip on the English Empire, and every decision that affected the colonies was a backroom deal between the men of money and the government. We are in a similar position today. There is no such thing as a free market in America. Perhaps there are remnants of it at the farmers’ market, but even there, sales tax licenses and city government politics play a role in who gets to trade. We have become the very thing we threw off, but because of technology and the amount of money that is in the global economy, the government has become a nation unto itself. There are very few levers of restraint left for the people to use. Protests or voting make incremental impacts, but the insatiable hunger of government to control more, and be in charge of everything, overwhelms any progress ever made by the citizens.

I often wonder what it was that made so many of the intellectual and civic leaders of the late 1700s throw everything they knew off. The cause of liberty sounds romantic, but it seems to have less than a revolutionary appeal to the modern generation. I continue to ask people to pay attention to the undercurrents of the 20-somethings in our nation. There is something happening there that has a harmonic ember to the fires of 1776, but it is being squelched simply by lethargy, entertainment, and discouragement. That generation is giving up on the American idea, and that should make us take a moment to at least reflect on what we can do to change the trajectory. That discouragement will not end in a revolution of principle; it will be one much more in line with other revolutions around the world. Driven simply by the economic disparity between the rich and the poor. The Declaration is truly a brilliant document. It turned the ire of 20 and 30-year-olds towards a greater vision of what could be. They saw what they were living under and decided that there was a better option for the future. They were willing to give up their economic system, their safety and security provided by the British Empire, and the benefits of stability in order to rewrite the future. That takes philosophers and thinkers, not agitators. It was James Otis and Thomas Jefferson who enabled the Revolution to sustain itself, not Sam Adams and the rabble-rousers.

This essay took on some of my favorite grievances, ones we still feel are happening to us in the modern version of America. We often know the flowery language of the Declaration by heart, but the grievances were the meat of the document. They were the impetus for throwing it all off.

The Grievances

I have always loved traveling to Colonial Williamsburg. When I was in my early 20s, I was captured by the incredible spirit of liberty in the air. It’s an amazing place that has spent its philanthropic mission telling the story of the former colonial capital of Virginia. It’s a unique area, suspended in time, where you can hear Patrick Henry orate about his thoughts and life right alongside Thomas Jefferson. I have always loved history, but that first adventure I took there spurred something in me, a profound awakening. I found myself attracted to the enlightenment and the concepts of natural law.

Certainly, Williamsburg is a romanticized version of the colonial era...but every time I go, I find a conversation around liberty and revolution that is compelling and beautiful. Regardless of the 21st century’s interpretation of the time, there are some undeniable truths and people of mythological proportion that come from the era. The brilliant minds that were in confluence on this isolated continent, 3000 miles from their homeland, are nothing short of a historic miracle of providence.

Among those people placed perfectly in time on this young continent, Thomas Jefferson is among the most interesting to me. His brilliance with the pen and his consistent dedication to the fundamentals of natural law throughout the founding are always worthy of study.

Regardless of our 21st-century projections upon his flaws, his words and thinking are still fundamentally the flame that motivates our concepts of government, life, entrepreneurship, and rugged individualism.

From our perspective as a people 250 years removed, the founding seems like a time that was filled with what must have been overwhelming oppression by the king. We believe in modernity, that the force must certainly have been more brutal, more imposing, and more affronting to the colonists. We think of ourselves as the heirs to this revolt - left with a good government that was the result of this heroic people, and that the disruption to the world they caused is no longer needed. The principles of the Declaration of Independence and the ordering laid out in the Constitution certainly have preserved their good government, and we live a free life, with the powerful in check and the people’s voice first and foremost in the minds of our representatives.

But our 21st-century world has become increasingly bizarre. What was once considered unbelievable is now the standard fare for the day. A world at war, a people divided, and a government that is drunk with power and brutality. The Jeffersonian flame has become but an ember of what once was, and our citizenry is downtrodden, deprived of its liberty, and detached from its founding principles.

The founding documents seem like fading rational thoughts and ideas that have no pull on irrational people.

Perhaps it’s too late - waving our constitution at the evildoers and shadowy figures in the bureaucracies has no impact on their governance. They raise their brutality and retribution on the honest and take their handouts and kickbacks from the powerful. The government we have wrought is a self-imposed prison, a place where the locks on our doors are only to keep out the honest people, but I do have a glimmer of hope when I return to the ideals of Jefferson.

Most everyone had to memorize in the rote prisons of education, the preamble to the declaration, but a small few actually have read the entire document. The beautiful language that spells out the principles of natural rights, and the inherent rights of people over power, is certainly the groundwork for the rebellion that has left us with this nation of America, but with a little energy and time, one can also find out that there is an inherent nature to the power that they were rejecting in the founding as well.

There are 27 grievances in the Declaration. 27 reasons as to why this long train of abuses was enough for the colonists to give up their lives, fortunes, and sacred honors. These abuses were real. They were fundamental assaults on the colonies and her peoples. They were enough to change the course of history and realign the order of the world from King and Subject to the individual. I would posit the thought, however, that most Americans have never read the grievances that are the very things that pushed the founders to the edge and caused a revolution.

In our upside-down time, filled with a once again oppressive government, there is value in understanding what caused this transformational reordering of the world. Here are just a few of them, so that, as Jefferson noted, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

Grievance 1 -

“He has refused his ascent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.”

The king refused to ratify the laws the colonists or parliament made about the colonies, decimating self-government and causing the people to feel their voices were irrelevant. They were second-class citizens as British subjects.

How many times have the people of the modern United States petitioned for common sense laws regarding the border, immigration, money, wars, and property, only to be silenced at the legislature, or worse, overturned at the courts by an unelected oligarchy?

Grievance 10-

“He has erected a multitude of New Offices and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat our their substance”

The federal, state, county, and city governments of America are rife with offices and officers that cause the people of the land to ask permission for nearly any aspect of life. What they can do with their business, their land, their children, and their money is all subject to an unelected officer - who has been appointed by a politician long vacant from office. Law upon law and rule after rule are created and enforced upon the citizens, and a prison of words and fear keeps the people compliant and demotivated.

Grievance 12 -

“He has affected to render the military independent of, and superior to, the Civil Power”

America is a military state - every political decision is no longer subject to the civil authority. The commander in chief, a supposed civilian, is at the mercy of the military or the industries that support it. No modern president has control over the military, and war is never governed or consented to by legislatures. The military is its own cancerous borg that has replaced the liberty soul of the nation with one that is hellbent for destruction, oppression, and war.

Grievance 13 -

“He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and un-acknowledge by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended legislation”

Our involvement in the G7, WEF, WHO, United Nations, NATO, and other pseudo-governments creates rules and regulations we are subjected to without representative consent. No citizen alive in America has ever been represented by an elected person at these powerful groups. Our citizens live and abide by these institutions’ thoughts, ideas and power, having never surrendered in representation to these authorities.

Grievance 15 -

“For protecting them, by mock trial from punishment for any murders witch they should commit on the Inhabitants of these states”

In the founding, this grievance was about the British military, but in our era, there is no question that there is a different tier of justice for the citizens and the well-connected. There are mock trials for them, but no one in government ever really goes to jail for their sinister deeds. The average person can be arrested and convicted in a matter of moments in the surveillance state, but the client list for Epstein is still mysteriously missing. There is no justice if people are not subjected to equality before the law.

Grievance 17-

“For imposing taxes on us without our consent.”

The government tax code is hideous. New rules are created each year, and the people of the country are at the mercy of a voluntary system that makes examples out of the honest, and a mockery of the system by those who are wealthy enough to exploit it. The codes are written by the very people who should be paying the most - and they find a way to punish those who cannot afford the lawyers or accountants to navigate the maze. A fundamental principle for self-governance is that no representative body can bind another body to their taxes. A congress from 1917 should not be allowed to bind a congress from 2022 to the same taxes without new consent. America does nothing of the sort - we are bound by rules from people who have long ago left the legislature by retirement or removal by vote, yet the people, regardless of their wishes, are still bound by their taxes. We are no longer represented in this very significant space.

Grievance 18-

“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of a jury trial.”

In America today, the process of going to court is the punishment. It is an expensive, lengthy process that is regulated by fear, and fear alone. Juries are a diminishing aspect of any court, and judges or prosecutors are the ones making the “justice”. Most cases are settled or adjudicated by a single judge. Very few actually make it to trial, where their case can be heard by a jury of their peers. There is no speedy trial in our system. It is stretched out on purpose so that people will self-convict and the state will grow its influence.

Grievance 22-

“For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases, whatsoever.”

There has been a pressing move towards government consolidation since the 1900’s. Centralized power in Washington has become the principal method by which all other governments are subjected to it. State and local governments are subservient to the will of Washington, in effect making local legislation simply clarifications of rules passed by the power brokers in the nation's capital. Our legislatures are, in effect, suspended - beholden to the will of one central state, and we can only affect change to the implementations of the laws. Rights are usurped consistently, and local and state laws are frequently overturned by the courts, insisting that the real rules come from one centralized, powerful federal government.

Grievance 25 -

“He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.”

Leading up to the revolution, the king hired Germans to come fight the colonists so that British citizens did not have to harm their fellow countrymen. The Germans, in theory, could fight without conscience, British subjects without guilt or internal conflict. Today, America is sending foreign mercenaries to far-off lands, causing harm and destruction, while our citizenry is removed from the horrors of war on the ground. We send money and material to corrupt foreign governments and then bring our bullied selves to the brink of war with those same governments - all removed from the guilty conscience of the American people. The media and politicians insist upon these mercenary wars for the safety of our nation, all the while creating the very blowback that is destructive to our citizenry.

A word long lost in the dumbing down of our people is Perfidy - the idea that, in trickery, one side in conflict promises to act in good faith, with the intention all along of breaking the promise once the other side complies. This kind of behavior is the basis of American foreign policy. We consistently make promises to others, then break them when they act upon that promise. This is what has become of a once decent people - the dark forces by alphabet agencies that deceive the world and use our once high moral credibility to puppeteer behaviors in our government's interests and live in a perpetual state of war crimes.

These are just a few of what Jefferson and his peers found egregious enough to overturn the order of the King and the British Empire. All of the grievances in some way are being done to us today by our own “elected” governments.

It should be time to consider the darkness that we face - perhaps it is even time to revolt against this entire machine, and send it packing into the same hinterlands as the British crown in 1776 America. There may be time to save it if we are dedicated to it - self-government requires our response, requires our dedication, requires our disobedience to tyrannical impulses. It mandates our insistence that natural, inherent laws of humanity and of governments be attended to. Individualism will always be opposed to government, and government will always be opposed to the individual. It is a natural conflict that can be healthy and beneficial when people understand it requires diligence and attentiveness. The founders understood that - and hoped that we could keep Jefferson’s flame alight with enough understanding and dedication to the ideals.

The Irish have always expressed the intersection of the divine and the natural world, the places where we feel more closely connected to the spiritual world, as “thin places.” I wasn’t sure what to expect this past week when I traveled to Omaha for a wedding of an old friend’s son, but what I found was just such a thin spot.

Twenty-five years ago, Omaha was another stop for gas on my way to Chicago. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be there; it was that in those days, getting to where I was going was more important than what was on the journey. Omaha was just another Loaf n’ Jug in the thousands of miles I was covering to get to the next concert or home base. Chicago and Minneapolis were the center of my musical life then. One was a trip past Des Moines, and one was a turn north in that town. Either way, Omaha was just a convenient spot for gas or a quick bite to eat.

Those years in Chicago were the most formative ones of my life. I had met a group of guys at bible college, and they lived in Batavia. It was a perfect American suburb. A great downtown, sleepy meandering cul-de-sac streets, and a youth group that was always willing to host my band for the kickoff of the touring season. The guys who lived there became my best friends. We have seen every significant moment of our adult lives together. We were there for each other's weddings. We have witnessed the birth of our children. Traveled together. We have been on the other end of a phone call about the passing of a parent. No moment of the last twenty-five years, of any significance, has not been surrounded by this friendship. So, when Matt called last fall to tell us his son was getting married, we all figured out how to get to Omaha this past weekend. We wouldn’t dare miss it. The lives of our kids are incredibly important to each of us. Every summer, when we take our annual guys fishing trip, most of what we talk about in the serious moments is how our kids are doing. We have all held one another’s children in our arms. We’ve been there for the parental meltdowns of exhaustion that come from sleepless nights after coming home from the hospital. We have stood by one another as we celebrated their successes. Our kids know each of us as their dad’s best friend. It’s admittedly unique in our maximalist culture. We have, albeit from a distance, been integrated into the lives of one another’s families. Our wives travel together. We have taken countless family vacations to Yellowstone, Williamsburg, or the Denver Zoo. This is a deep and profound friendship. I recognize it every time we are together, and for as long as I live, I will never take it for granted.

A few of us live in Colorado, and the rest live in either Chicago or Wisconsin, so Omaha was the perfect halfway point for all of us. It’s also just close enough to debate whether to fly or drive. Our friend, who loves long runs but loathes long drives, decided to fly. The rest of the Colorado crew decided to drive. I love the road trip. There is something so profound about seeing America from the road. It gives me a perspective about our country and about my own smallness that is beautiful. In the front seat of a car, the sky is bigger, the landscape more profound. It’s a different experience. Less convenient for sure, but also something much more in line with an older age. The summers on the interstate or the highway have always seemed very American to me. Truck stops and bad gas station food, accompanied by incredible selections of music from the person riding shotgun and a myriad of Points of Interest that have a siren’s call, all combine to make the road trip the perfect American experience.

We picked up our friends at 6 a.m. on Thursday with hot cups of coffee and shopping bags filled with great snacks. We headed east, and by mid-morning, we were in eastern Colorado. My heart was suddenly struck by the passing of time. This once-familiar drive had faded from my memory. I used to be able to do all of it without the map. My stash of Gazetteer Atlases in the back pocket of the front seat never came out for my trip to Chicago. I knew the route like the back of my hand. But as we crossed into Sterling, Colorado, high above on the bluff overlooking the South Platte, I realized the roadways had become foggy in my memory. I didn’t recognize where we were. The town had grown, and the roads had realigned. The coffee shop from all those years ago was gone — replaced by the predictable chains of the American heartland landscape. The sky was still as beautiful as I remembered it. Rain walls and Toy Story clouds pressed hard against the blue sky of the early day, and the residue of spring green on the dryland wheat fields. Its holiness hit me. Life had moved on from my youth. And while I still believe myself to be twenty-five, the reality of the morning sky reminded me that life is finite. No amount of money in a bank account, or status in a job or town, can arrest the seconds from racing past. We are all about to be forgotten, and there will be no point of interest on a highway to commemorate our lives. That is strangely refreshing. The pressure to produce is self-induced and self-indulgent. My great-great-grandkids will know nothing of me other than what photos and videos my kids have passed on to their children and their children’s children. I will be a clip, a reel, or some other futuristic holographic assemblage of ones and zeros that replicates who I was, but there will be no digital ability to replicate what my human experiences were as I drove across the Nebraska plain, and to my great relief, there will be no monument for it.

Omaha came quickly. We arrived at our hotel in the early afternoon and settled in. All of the events for the weekend were either at the hotel or within a short distance of it. We found our friends whose son was getting married and grabbed a bite to eat with them at a restaurant down the street. I asked the father how he was doing. There was a solemnity in his face. Not sadness or fear, but a quiet recognition that something new is about to happen. He answered honestly. “Good, but there are a lot of emotions in this deal.”

I know that answer well. My own family is at the end of its time under my roof. My son is also getting married next month. So many endings. So many beginnings. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I feel lost in it. I have had a singular focus for twenty-plus years. Raise my children. Provide for their needs. I have worked at things for years that have simply been to pay the bills. They aren’t jobs that provide a thrill or a mental sense of accomplishment. They are pragmatic, as most fathers know, for the sake of those around them. Somehow, though, what seems to be coming feels like something dramatically different than the last twenty years of life.

We ran some errands with the father of the groom, told our usual jokes and old dumb stories, and made reference to the fact that each of our weddings didn’t feel like they were all that long ago, but there was something different about this moment. A friend's son is now at the stage of life we were at when we met. That means time has moved on, and, unbeknownst to us, we have moved with it. We stopped by with some groceries for the groomsmen at their Airbnb, and we made the rounds being introduced to them. I was struck by how well my friend had raised his son. This young man, whom I can vividly remember holding in my arms as I sat on the couch in his parents’ home in St. Charles, was demonstrating the kindness and grace to his friends, that we all know so deeply as friends of one another. That small legacy had been passed on to him. He watched us as we lived life together, recognized its profound benefits, and chose, in his own life, to make it a centerpiece of his growing up.

Later that evening, there was the traditional rehearsal and a welcome dinner for guests. Our group of friends was seated together at the same table. Perhaps it was the low light, or the emotions of what I felt was coming, but there was a strange flickering between our current moment and our youth. It was almost as if I could see us each at our own weddings, but glitching back to the current versions of ourselves. We are clearly older. My wrinkles and grey hair in my beard are just the outward indicia of what has happened. We each have had our own inward journeys too. No marriage has come through unscathed by the demands and toil of this hyper-paced American life. We have lived through the troubled moments of raising kids, the crumbling of churches we chose to serve, and our own addictions. Every one of those hardships, another chink in the armor. We wear it on our faces now, but we're all somehow sitting there at the table together, celebrating this new rite of passage for one of our own.

I knew something had shifted as I sat there. I felt it. Life is fading, and while I hope I have many more days ahead, I know that, by the statistics of the average human life, I have far fewer days ahead than I have already lived. That evening at the table, it came as clearly to me as light through a stained-glass window. The work I have been assigned by the divine, and not the vocational nonsense that I do to keep numbers in a checking account, is what these next years will be about. Watching my kids get married, grandkids arrive, and watching my friends live through the same. Getting that dreaded call that one of us has gone on to be with the Lord, or that one of our wives is sick and needs desperate intervention, all are coming. So it changes how I must live in the time I have left. I know that there is an end now. The vigor of youth and far-off horizons have changed. It makes me so thankful for the good men and women who have been grafted into my soul. It makes me want to pursue those friendships further.

In my sleepless nights, which have become much more frequent in recent years, I have felt a desire to run away from the moment. To bury myself in distractions or work so as not to be confronted with the hard reality of the change. But what I have experienced is too rich to fade into isolation. I have to lean into this moment and into my friends and family to complete the work the divine has given me. Perhaps it was the vows or the laughter around a table filled with old friends, but clarity seems to be coalescing around living life well. Weddings remind us of our youth. They bring clarity to what God has designed for the human experience. Leaving and leaning into life's richness is how the partnership is designed. I saw that in the aging faces of my friends. It’s hard to say how many walks I have left into the Twin Buttes or the Powder River, but being together again, somewhere in the middle of America, made me realize that what I have been given is a gift not to be wasted.

Jesus’ first miracle was at a wedding. They are significant in the human experience. They signify the transition from one state of life to another. Jesus turned water into wine. He changed the very essence of what was in the barrels. Perhaps that’s what we all witness at a wedding. The change of nature. The change of father and son, to something new. The change from young friends to old ones.

“Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water”; so they filled them to the brim. Then he told them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.”

They did so, and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside and said, “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.”

What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.”

What happened in Omaha was a very in-my-face reminder of my own mortality, and it strangely called me to a deeper belief in things eternal. In my youth, I was always chasing the destination as quickly as I could. Get there, be first, get the most, ignore the roadside stops; gas and go, I used to say. The wedding reminds me that the path to the destination is more important. The final stop is inevitable. The meandering, the transitions, and encounters along the way are what make life worth living.

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From Matthew 20:1-16 comes a strange tale about what it is like in the kingdom of God. Often used as an overview of Jesus' grace, this story seems to have much more in it than simply what appears on the surface. In a few weeks, I will be doing a homily on this at our church, and I thought it might be helpful to break it down in the context of our modern moment. In America, we strive for fairness. We want what is “right” for our actions and our work . This is a meritocracy after all. The first will be first, and the last…tough luck. We love the leathery feel of the American story. Pulling ourselves up by our efforts and our bootstraps. To be certain, great things can come with hard work, but in the kingdom of God, work seems to be a less-than-dominant part of the equation of life.

I love the Jesus stuff in the bible. It is often like seeing a bright light in the darkness when I read his words. This incredible moment in history where the God of the universe humbles himself to take on human flesh and dwell among us. What we see in that incredible transformation is an intervention from the divine. He knows our struggles and our complexities. He knows why we are tempted and why we choose sin over the ways of grace. The miracle of Jesus is that scripture says he was tempted in every way that we are, and chose the right path. It’s hard to articulate how profound that is. I think sometimes we read scripture and brush it off—of course, he didn’t sin, he was God! But if we understand it from our own hurting souls, we must embrace the depth of the temptation. If it were easily avoided, the sacrifice would ring hollow. Jesus was tempted by what we are tempted by. Lust, greed, power, money —scripture says he was tempted in every way. That is profoundly good news in light of the depth that sacrifice means. There isn’t a temptation I have failed in that he has not overcome. That’s exceptionally good for the end of the story. It means that his full humanity had to wrestle with what I have. He was tempted by anger and cynicism, just as I am, and while I fail, he passed the test.

So as I opened up the Bible to break down this parable, I was stunned at the depth of what God was offering in this story. Of course, it is easy to see the parallels to the end of the story of sacrifice and death on a cross, but all of that understanding is in hindsight for us. At the moment he is telling this story, no one knows the ending of his time on earth. There is no crucifixion or resurrection when he sits his disciples down to tell them about a vineyard, a crazy owner, and the insatiable desire of man for fairness and earthly justice.

Human tendencies are the same in every season. Contextually, Jesus is wandering through a world controlled by powerful Jewish religious figures embedded in the Roman Empire. At the time he’s speaking, there’s no Adam Smith or Thomas Jefferson in the first-century Galilee. We are centuries away from any form of enlightenment or free-market capitalism. Yet here in this story, we see how working and money relate to the human spirit. In our moment, we like to blame the “capitalism” or the “system” for the natural ills of our society, but it’s incredibly clear in this parable that Jesus knows the human soul, regardless of the time or the fancy books that will eventually come that describe the exchange of labor for money.

The Parable of the Vineyard Workers

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard.

About nine in the morning, he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He told them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went.

He went out again about noon and about three in the afternoon and did the same thing. About five in the afternoon, he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’

‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered.

He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’

When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’

The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. So when those who were hired first came, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’

But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’

So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

I can almost feel the resentment 2000 years removed. People have demanded fairness forever. What is often overlooked in our number-driven readings of the Bible is that just ahead of this, Peter is asking about his own life and sacrifice. "We have left everything to follow you! What then will there be for us?" Peter wanted to know what reward would be given to those who give up everything to follow Jesus. This parable is Jesus’ response. Instead of telling Peter that “life isn’t fair,” Jesus decides to tell a story about how the kingdom of God actually works.

What is interesting to me about this pivot is that sometimes I think we believe that our circumstances, desires, or sinfulness as humans are just modern phenomena, brought in by cultural influence or the debauchery of YoMTV raps. But what Jesus demonstrates, and why scripture is as timeless as it is, is that humanity showcases its fallibility regardless of culture. First Century Galilee is equally as depraved as our own moment, and our sinfulness never changes. We desire to elevate ourselves above others or to be celebrated for our goodness. We bathe ourselves in self-righteousness, making excuses for our need to be seen, or have purpose, or be significant. Peter is asking Jesus, what about us? Haven’t we given up everything to be here with you? What good things will come to us for having done so much for you?

Jesus, in his patient and good way, tells Peter a story about the economy of God. He tells him that the kingdom isn’t built on human expectations. On the surface of the parable, this is a story of grace. All who believe are going to be saved, and it is going to be difficult to understand how generous the grace will be. But deeper than that, Jesus digs into the expectations that people build by telling the story from the perspective of equal pay for unequal work. Somehow during the moment of being paid, the workers who were first build in an expectation, that their pay will somehow be more than what they had agreed upon. Jesus explicitly tells the story that the owner of the vineyard had them line up in the order in which they came to work; those who were last are to be first in line. Jesus understands that everyone who is listening to him is going to see this as a story of abundance. Of course, those who worked longer are about to get more because the people who barely worked are getting what they had been promised. “We’re going to be rich!” because this owner is so incredibly generous. Jesus knows that in the hearts of his disciples, they each are projecting a story upon the setting. The understood expectation is that being paid more is the “fair” way to treat the situation. The people listening would already be building up in their own minds how the story is going to end. The world will treat those who work harder with a better reward.

But Jesus finishes the story by saying that everyone was paid equally, and it’s discouraging to the ones who toiled in the vineyard longer. Why am I not being treated fairly? Why do I not get what I expected? Jesus answers their puzzlement by saying, "Why did you build up your expectations?” What about what I said as the vineyard owner would have implied that you deserved more than what we had agreed to?

We want fairness. We want equality. We think that efforts and work always translate to something more for us. But it simply isn’t true. The most rewarding things we ever do in life are the ones where the gain is less than we expected. Thankless things are often the most transformative experiences we can have as humans. God is gently reminding us that our life is not a series of trades and bargains to get ahead. And while our culture and our financial system and our governments all operate from the earthly perspective of work and rewards, the kingdom of God is exactly the opposite. Jesus casts a vision of what it means to be a human in the economy of God. Our work is for the betterment of the vineyard, and even if we are compensated for our efforts, it will often seem unfair on this side of the spiritual divide. The gospel tells us that grace is abundant, and that regardless of our own capacity and our failings, the grace and goodness of God are available for all. Thankfully, our ability to connect with divine things isn’t limited to our efforts or our own goodness, and our expectations about what we deserve don't reflect reality either.

The kingdom of God is not what we have on earth. Yet we operate within our faith as if it is. We build programs and constructs to help us “deepen our faith” or “be a better Christian.” All of which are the projections and expectations we put upon God about what we will deserve for all of our efforts here on earth. Jesus says that isn’t how this is going to go. There is no hierarchy in the kingdom based upon our earthly efforts. We should be willing to analyze that in our own lives and choose to embrace the reality of God’s good grace to us. Our striving is for us. The kingdom of God has its own design —and it isn’t what we think.

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“Remember, you must never use your position to lord it over the people. Instead, you must humble yourself and earn their respect through your own quiet faith and the power of the Holy Spirit. The missionary must seek nothing for himself, no seat of honor or hope of fame. Like the cabhorse in London, each of you must wear blinkers that blind you to every danger and to every snare and conceit. You must be content to suffer, to die, and to be forgotten.”
― Nikolaus Zinzendorf

It's raining here in Colorado, and there isn’t enough gratitude we could have for it. It was an abnormal winter, with snow in short supply, and our reservoirs in desperate need of replenishment. But I must admit, it is adding to my melancholy today. On Saturday, in what can only be described as an impatient and ill-thought-out post, I let my own shallowness and sinfulness get the better of me. I had spent the week with a lot of young people who were lamenting the moment they found themselves in, and something about their parade of frustrations got to me, and made me look to the wrong places to point my anger. My kids are all leaving for other parts of the country for college this fall, and as I look at my horizon, I likely spend too much time in self-pity about the changes coming that I have little interest in being a part of. All of it combined into a post that took my frustrations out on the wrong things, and it was overly negative about what we all are facing. In reality, we live in a country where our mistakes and even our lashing out can be said with little fear of recourse — and that is amazing. So, even in my weakest moments, I will not find myself in prison for lashing out against a government or its foundations. I find myself frustrated with the current iteration of government in the United States. I want people to understand the depth of the Declaration, how profound a shift it is in human history, and why we should be calling people into a space of understanding it. Jefferson’s words changed everything for mankind. I want people to know and love the form of government that the Constitution helped establish. No other form has ever given people as much opportunity to flourish under self-governance as the one those men put to paper in the late 1700s. I want people to demand that our leaders live by the wisdom of both documents and stand firm in the principles they establish. When our government doesn’t, sometimes it’s easy to think that tossing it all out and starting over is best. Especially when it seems apparent that the men and women of the Potomac have long ago abandoned what was established as the rules for a robust and flourishing society. It is easy to get angry at them for cheating us out of something we know could be better, and to blame the system for failing to protect us from the criminals in Washington.

When I see our debt and our strange relationship to war or realignment of global interests, I get discouraged that we are too far from the founding principles to ever return to them. When I hear the heartbreak in the voices of our youth, it’s easy to tear things down and get angry. To point at anything that looks like Washington and rip it apart. I stand by the fact that what we have in Washington is nothing like what the documents say it should be, that the government that rules over us is only a husk of what it should be.

On Saturday, I blasted the documents and the country for failing to meet the needs of our youth. At the end of the day, though, it isn't the documents that are flawed; it’s us, the citizens, who choose not to look more deeply at them and hold the leaders accountable for failing to follow them. It is because we, as Americans, don’t even know what they say or why it matters. We probably couldn’t tell the 4th ammendment from Article 4 if we’re honest with ourselves, and that leaves us unable to ask the leaders to live by them because we don’t know them well enough to keep account of their abuses. We don’t understand the principles of the Declaration. We can barely remember the preamble, let alone the richness of its theological underpinnings, or its wholesale realignment of mankind to rulership. So we fight in the theater realm, the shallow pool of political pettiness, because we can’t engage in anything else. That failing is on us, and it’s especially on me when I let anger overrun my own capacity for logic.

I don’t like what is going on in some of these congressional races, and I'm really bothered by how much power national congressional battles are given. The people of Kentucky should be worried about Thomas Massie, not the people of California or New Mexico. By all accounts, though, the problem is not with the system; it is with us. We are the ones who lack the moral accountability to sustain the republic that the founders drafted and put in place. We fail to see that the framework they created, we have a duty to uphold. My lashing out and blaming other generations, or bad politicians, for the flaws of the Constitution were misplaced. I attacked the wrong thing and used language that caused people to doubt that this country is as good as it is.

The good news about recognizing my mistake is that it means there are truths beyond myself, and, thankfully, that means there are opportunities to fix our situation if we allow ourselves to lean into the fundamentals at the core of America. Beneath all of this is the call to become more than just political hacks who argue on the surface about the details. We can actually ask the deeper questions about what makes a republic possible, and what we can do to fix it.

I love the quote at the top of this piece because it reminds me that my job is not to proselytize about a political party or a politician, but for the gospel. My time on earth is closer to the end than it is to the beginning, and it seems a grave error to spend it on anything other than the good news of Jesus. I have been a reluctant participant in a deeper personal faith. It is always easier to fixate on the temporary and to placate spiritual hollowness with light and inconsequential actions. This politician is the problem, or this fundamental is why we have a broken democracy, etc. But beneath all of that stuff, which is much easier to talk about, is the need for my own repentance and belief that the God of this universe has something much more in store for all of us than whether or not the income tax is ever eliminated, or the Strait of Hormuz is opened up in June, or we end up in World War 3. I fixate on those things because they scare me, and it's easier to talk about than my own spiritual depravity. Those dramatic scenes on our glass pocket portals toy with the worst of my soul. Each new reel or piece of breaking news begs me to spend my time on those things rather than the good news of Jesus. Fear always leads to unnecessary destruction and ultimately to isolation. There may be no better example than the culture we currently find ourselves in. That magnetic draw to fear will never benefit the republic, or my friends, my parents, or my children.

The truth of the moment is that without Him, it matters not what the policy from Washington is. The government is too big, but we are the only ones who can fix it. It won’t be at the ballot box either. It will come when we repent and decide that our morality is surrenderable to the greater truth of the universe, and that forgiveness and kindness, and a love of justice are more important than temporary financial gain or the love of power that helps us bludgeon other citizens. If we were somehow able to do that, the Declaration and the Constitution would once again come to life in the hearts of the citizens, and we might have the chance to live upon a plain of liberty.

I messed up in my placement of ire. It isn’t America that needs attacking; it is the morality we have so comfortably surrendered to the faux-religion of government. In my own desire to see something fixed, I forgot the fundamental principle of living a good life, which is to take the plank from my own eye before I call out my neighbor for their speck.

I don’t think it's helpful to engage in the political theater we're currently in. Instead, over time, my writings and the content on this site will reflect a deeper dedication to sharing the good news of a life lived under the grace and goodness of God. My children need a better example than a negative spiraling about the pitfalls of power. They need to see a man who loves his neighbor and his enemies more than he loves a like or a comment on a Substack post. I don’t ever need to be famous for my political commentary. I am a no one in this conversation. Which, as I have recognized this weekend, I am deeply thankful for.

I am hopeful to have the chance to read the Declaration together and break it down. My dad has done that for decades now with me and countless others in our community, and it has given many of us a depth of understanding about it that I am forever grateful for. It has helped me recognize when things are off course in our politics, and in my own thinking about a life of liberty.

I also want to talk with you about the parables in the gospels. Look deeply into the words of Jesus about what the divine saw in the human experience, and shared with us about the kingdom of God. It will be a much better use of all of our time than to sit around complaining and berating a country that has given me too much to count.

I will still advocate for the right things in politics, but it will be tempered by something much deeper than the temporal needs of comfort, government behaviors, or financial success. The country needs a great awakening again about what it means to surrender our own successes and elevated statuses to the greater morality of Christ.

My apologies again - sincerely.

It was the spring of 1991. My best friend was trying to talk me into joining the swim team. My dad was a swimmer, so I was familiar with his stories of competing and the excitement of being on a team, but like most things in my life in my teenage years, I always had too much fear to really try adventurous things. I swam in the pool for fun when I was a kid, but I didn’t think I had enough courage to be on the high school team. My friend talked me into going and trying it for the day. I showed up in my board shorts, no Speedo, and tried to swim. I couldn’t make it the length of the pool. The head coach, Don, came over, made sure I was okay, and made me laugh enough to know he valued me. Just a split second, maybe less than a minute of interaction, and I didn’t want to quit. I wanted to get better and try to make an impact on the team. I was terrible. I swam in our conference meet my first year and was probably last place in the 100-yard breaststroke. I don’t remember my time, but it never mattered. I had found something I loved being a part of, something bigger, something about challenging myself to belong to something better.

I did get better. I was the alternate for our state team my senior year of high school. I loved every minute of being with the team. I loved my coach for it. He had become a friend and a mentor. Certainly, I had become better at swimming, but something much more meaningful had happened. I grew up. I learned about self-sacrifice and being dedicated to something, even when it seems much more plausible to quit.

I still love the pool. In my less busy seasons, swimming laps clears out the cobwebs in my head. I still hate the first dive in when the cold shocks the system, and there is always that lingering feeling that creates a moment of decision. Should I do this? Maybe it would be easier to check my phone to see if someone needs me at work. I doubt I need to really swim today. And then the mental will to overcome all of the excuses rises up, and I dive in. I love watching great swimmers in the Olympics, and I still want to figure out how to swim faster, even at 50. I am not nearly disciplined enough to be great at it anymore, and the pressures of work and life have made swimming one of the things that rests comfortably at the bottom of my list of things to do, but in the best of moments, there is something so exhilarating about being in the water.

In 2019, I heard that my old high school coach had started a swimming club. I took all of my kids to a practice and had them all try it. A few of them really enjoyed it, and much like me, probably enjoyed Don more than the sport itself. But my youngest son, my most competitive kid, was instantly transformed. He fell in love with all of it. Being coachable, getting better, watching times improve, and laughing with his coaches. And he was naturally good at it. He just seemed to have an above-normal ability to cut through the water. He was at home every time we walked into the pool facility. Covid zapped him of his first year of competition, and he was visibly depressed by it. By that summer, coach Don was looking for competitions in Wyoming and South Dakota for his swimmers - he knew that they needed to be in the pool and that they needed to stop sitting in their houses waiting for the world to open back up again. My son, Elias, blossomed. He never wanted to miss a practice. He loved being with Don, and in one of the more beautiful blessings of life, my son was being coached by a man who had changed my life. It was one of the more unique parts of this past season of life. My coach was older, but that same glimmer of love for the sport was there, and he was passing it along to my children.

In 2024, Don retired from coaching and suggested that my kids join the local swim club from a neighboring town. Marty was the coach, and he had coached with Don when I was in high school. Marty was really who I had spent the most time with in those early years of my swimming experience. He was Don’s assistant, and while Don was working with the more advanced swimmers, it was Marty who was left to teach the rest of us how to get better. Marty was funny and a great teacher. When we walked in to talk to him that first day, it was clear that Marty had become a premier-level coach. He loved the sport and had spent the last twenty-five years educating himself on how to get the most out of the kids he was coaching. Elias took to him immediately. He told me on the way home from the first meeting, “Marty is going to make me better.” So, morning after cold morning, Elias would jump in the pool and listen to Marty’s instructions. It was so fun to watch. Each meet, Elias got faster, and his first long-course season was filled with new milestones and personal bests.

The golden jewel of any young man’s swimming career, though, is High School swim team. It’s almost a different sport. The meets are fast-paced, and the team itself is genuinely in the game together. It’s loud and filled with cheering parents and students. It’s the peak experience of being on a swim team at that age. We have always homeschooled, so when the time came for our kids to join up with the local high school, they were both nervous. They had heard that the coach was tough and that Windsor was a great team. Trevor was a year younger than me and had swum at a rival school when I was swimming. I knew of him and understood he would have very high standards for the boys. Each year that they swam with Trevor, they got better. They understood the pressures of the competition, and both of my sons wanted to live up to their coach’s expectations.

Last night, we had a signing for college commitments at the high school. As I watched my son be celebrated by his swim team, as well as by members of the staff and community, I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed with gratitude for the coaches who have poured their energy into my kids. These men have been there for every dive off the blocks, for every session in the water, for the long travel meets to faraway places, all so that my sons could succeed in their sport. We are not a sports family. I don’t watch football on Sundays, and I only occasionally go to the baseball park to partake in the novelty of it all, so the culture of sports is foreign to us. But seeing how much participating in it can mean to those involved is one of the things that has to be celebrated about American culture. Teachers and coaches who pour far too many hours into other people’s children are not just admirable, they're heroic. They instill in our kids our spirit of excellence and unstopableness as a people. They tell them that there’s nothing that they can’t achieve if they work at it.

To say our world is broken would be generous. We live in troubled times, where our politics and our conversations are far too tribal and petty. Our politicians solve very little, and besides their ineffectiveness, we also see a government that is adversarial to its people. We see a degrading education system and a failing end of empire at almost every vista we look from, but down there on the side of a swimming pool, we see the real things that make America still bleed a glimmer of hope that our people can salvage this mess that their leaders have left. I have a full heart of thanks for the coaches who have helped my sons. There’s a beauty in all of it that is irreplaceable. I would never have suspected that in those noisy, chlorine-filled buildings, my children would get their chance to shine and thrive, but there, before my unbelieving eyes, it happened. The men who walked hundreds of miles, twenty-five yards at a time, watching the intricacies of arm entry points and the distance between their fingers, deserve to be celebrated. It was wonderful to see my son celebrated for his success, but there was a much better story sitting in the bleachers last night. One of the men who helped my son see his potential.

Elias is off to Gardner-Webb to swim in a division one program, with another coach who appears to be outstanding. I would never have guessed all those years ago, as I watched him learn to flip turn or swim the butterfly, that his life would take this path. His mother and I have a lot we will wrestle with this fall. All of our children will have moved on from the full-time care of our home. That isn’t very easy for us. Our dedication to homeschooling and intentional time with us is leaving a terrifying landscape in front of us. We aren’t sure what any of it will look like, and it feels so strange to watch it all change this quickly. I don’t know what it will be like to not be sitting in the bleachers at every meet, watching our kids try their best, and seeing their first tastes of success. No one tells you this is how those magical moments in the delivery room, or under the sun at their first look at the ocean, or their first slide down a hill on skis end. No one really ever prepares you for this transition. I know that as we race to the finish line of this beautiful moment in life, I don't have a lot of answers about how it will all look when we get there, but in the brief moments I can look backward, I am filled with gratitude for the people who selflessly invested in my kids.

“The future inhabitants of the Atlantic & Mississippi states will be our sons. We leave them in distinct but bordering establishments. We think we see their happiness in their union, & we wish it. Events may prove it otherwise; and if they see their interest in separation, why should we take side with our Atlantic rather than our Mississippi descendants? It is the elder and the younger son differing. God bless them both, & keep them in union, if it be for their good, but separate them, if it be better.” — Thomas Jefferson to John Breckenridge 1803

So Virginia, the grand Old Dominion, had an election the other day. Perhaps you saw it in your X feed. There was, as there always is, a lot of commentary about it all. Big time rhetoric about “unconstitutional overstepping” and “fascism on the rise.” Scary words that are intended to strike fear into the hearts of millions of X readers. The boogie men are out again, ready to stomp on the people. The CIA cutout governor of Virginia is going to punish the red counties because they voted for the Orange Man. Our “rights” will be taken away again, and in mere moments, thousands of old confederate great-grandkids will summon their inner Stonewall Jacksons and be holed up in their hills as resurrected Randy Weavers.

I have to toss in a little bah-humbug on this one. How many of these America-ending events are we going to continue to argue are the trampling of liberty and justice for all? Frankly, if Covid didn’t get a revolution started, I am fairly certain a gerrymandering game of politics will have escaped the rage of the Twitterverse by 4 pm this afternoon. All of it feels so silly and predictable to me. Politics is a zero-sum game. When you win, you have extracted power from someone else. As Barack Obama famously noted, “elections have consequences.” The monstrosity that resides in the District of Columbia, or in the state house in Denver, or the domed rotunda in Montpelier, has overrun the citizen, and our insistence on fixing it within the confines of the current structure has become a fool’s errand, where the people continuously beg their leaders for a more benevolent method of ruling their lives from sunup to sundown.

I have honestly lost interest in the arguments. The whole thing is tiresome. No one ever asks better questions. No one proposes “out of the box” solutions. It’s just the same old losers that parade themselves out in front of a camera on Capitol Hill to let everyone know that the Democrats are bad, or the Republicans are Hitler, or whatever sophomoric train of thought that passes as smart thinking on Boomervision, is today’s profundity of political theater. It’s become a giant waste of energy. All expended on the insistence that we have to govern ourselves always as we’ve always been governed. There’s a strange, holy sanctity around 100 senators, 435 representatives, and 50 states, and a powerful president, and a 9-robed oligarchy that has the final say, because of their spiritual connection to the Constitution Gods. Total and utter madness.

But, in come the election results from Virginia, and instead of asking a more fundamental question, about why the people in the hills of Appalachia should have to bow to the will of Governor Spanberger, we get to debate the constitutionality of their political retaliation. Begging and praying that some judge somewhere stops it all before it’s too late. And when they find one who will do it, as they have, it will be appealed, and appealed up to the “highest court in the land,” where, in some unsurprising manner of peer pressure that will come from the pages of the New York Times and the DC cocktail hour, Amy Coney Barrett will have a late-night epiphany handed down to her by the deities in the national archive paintings, that Virginia can do what it wishes with its elections. And in the end, that will likely be the correct, “constitutional” judgment because all elections are governed by local entities. But that foreseeable 5-4 vote will ramp up the “post-for-a-living” social media goobers, and more screaming will follow. The cycle of stupidity will continue. The consultants and lawyers will get richer. The think tanks will get more think-tankier, and the American people will be once again disenfranchised from good, representative government.

I have argued too many times that we are underrepresented in Washington, Colorado, or on the city council. This old dusty document was designed for an agrarian people. It was intended to give voice to federal issues with a great concentration of representation. The Framers thought that 20 to 40,000 people could be represented by a congressman. That number is closing in on 750,000 people per congressman today. It’s a fake theater. No one can get the ear of a person in Washington without buckets of money. I met a congressman from Colorado once, but it was only because he recognized my last name and saw dollar signs attached to it. Once he realized, over the course of our lunch, that I had no money to give him, my ability to air my grievances to him disappeared. That’s how all governments work. Lots of scratching backs and donations from PACs are the only way the machine functions.

But I’m sure the more we yell about it and wave our Constitutions around, the sooner it will change. Hogswollop.

The only real solution I see that avoids what appears to be a coming violent revolution is to figure out how to make the states much more aligned with their demographics. Is there some reason that the bureaucrats from Northern Virginia have to behold the overall-ed moonshiner from the Blue Ridge to their needs? And is there some reason that the farmers of Eastern Colorado have to hold the Front Range to their bumpkin values, while the people of Boulder see trans-ing their kids as a right of passage into liberal Nirvana? The only current reason is that there are 435 congressional seats, and raising money works best if it’s nearly a 50/50 split. So they bluster and rouse us to the voting booth in order to justify their “democracy.” And, each voting cycle, we get our ever-increasing waistlines off the recliner and do it again, election after election, year after year, until one day we are 75 and we don’t recognize our country. But golly-gee, we sure did vote hard all those years.

If I were in the new, singular red district of Virginia, I would just not participate. I would call a convention of people and say we are a new state. Call it Monogahela or something else, since West Virginia is already taken, and just refuse to play along with the charade until the Virginia legislature allows you to be unbound from their dreams of Liberalandia. Make the argument that statehood benefits both parties, and move along. This strange sentiment that everyone has to hang on for the good of the state or the union, or whatever dumb old mythology is out there, is really nonsense. Become a state, get two new senators, and force the House of Representatives to expand. Demand it by nullifying and disobeying any edict that comes from Virginia.

Your neighbors to the North did it in the 1860’s, and it was a far less compelling constitutional maneuver that, somehow, was deemed legal by that same council of robe wearing wizzards in Washington. The case of West Virginia is a perfect model for the future of Virginia’s politically red hills. No one in the 1860s asked permission to leave the state; they just did it, got a rubber stamp from Washington because it benefited the North, and, when the war was over, the “Supreme Court” made the whole thing legal. Do the same. Disobey the masters and choose a free life.

It will never happen. The “conservatives” are too purchased by the myths of America to ever be disobedient. They will scream about it from their GiantPatriotEagle468 profile, but in the end, they will pay their taxes and head right back down to the servitude farm of their political masters. I’d love it if it were different. I would love to participate in breaking this behemoth up, but the government knows it can’t be undone, so it lives unfettered in its abuse of the people. Who is going to stop them? No one in the Twitterverse will ever cross the Rubicon of disobedience.

I love the people of this nation. They deserve so much more than the system they are allowed to subsist in. They deserve better money, better roads, better food, better government. They have been the backbone of the global hot potato of debt-based fakery that has ruled the world from the perch of the military-industrial complex for too long. Their agitation is palpable. The mother who has to become a lawyer in order to fill out her Medicare paperwork for her disabled son, or the American manufacturer who was forced to compete with China and lost the battle to a communist state, all deserve a government that will simply represent them. But if they keep going back to this well, hoping that some political savior will rescue them, they will sadly continue to get only what the lords of this earth allow. I want off the reservation. I have no interest in propagating this system. It is a failure in its basic premise: representing the people. It’s time to fix that by asking better questions.

I was on the podcast again this week, and it was another good conversation with people who earnestly want to fix the problems that the American people are facing. It was unanimous among those on the call that people want Medicare and Medicaid. Everyone sees it as a necessity in the current American healthcare landscape, which we have been propagandized into believing is the “best in the world.” I suppose those programs are necessary, but only because the money is awful, the medical machine and insurance worlds are collusive, and because we have become a very sick people. Ultimately, the government has to be part of the solution when the people feel so unable to afford what could ruin their lives or bankrupt them if or when they get sick. But when the diversity of issues and probabilities of random circumstances are more prolific than the paperwork that chases it, fixing it feels very unlikely. We talked about fraud, Minnesota, and the issues that surround the current atmosphere in Washington. As I heard the discussion, I couldn’t help but wonder about the deeper questions we aren’t willing or able to ask. I wrote this as a reflection on it yesterday, after the show ended.

“So, what is the real story behind the fraud in our medical system? Turns out no one really knows. I argue that this should indicate a fundamental flaw. Yet we continue to insist that the central government should solve this one, and then, when they fail, we act surprised and feign our massive disappointment. This entire episode of politics and YouTube theater shows it's too big to have meaningful capacity to help the people who really need it. The government's only solution to fraud is always going to be adding another punitive piece of paper to the pile, ultimately harming the people who actually need help and giving the fraudsters a new challenge to work around in some kind of sick game. The bigger the system, the less honorable its ethics, and Medicare and Medicaid prove it.

There are times I feel like the American people are cows in a feed lot, pining for greener pastures, but all we ultimately argue about is not how to get to the pasture, but instead how to add more length to the chute that still leads to the slaughter truck, thinking that somehow more length within that fence will possibly make our inevitable death by paper cut less painful. Talk about mad cow disease...”

The conversation is worth listening to if you have some time, but what you will hear is how we discuss the details and semantics of keeping the sinking ship less sinkey. The people are not well represented in Washington, and while most can’t pin their disillusionment on that fundamental fact, their actions demonstrate it. Why don’t more people vote? Perhaps they realize it doesn’t matter. Why don’t more people show up to city council meetings? Because they know that no matter what, their voices will be marginalized or belittled. Whenever a representative government has failed, you will find disillusioned people. They look around and see a system forced upon them, and have little hope of ever escaping it. So getting off the couch to go vote on a random Tuesday in April is going to have ever-diminishing returns.

We live in a strange land of scriptural or covenantal mythology where Conservatives believe their best and only duty is to defend the Constitution against the assault of liberals, or to defend the American form of government, especially when it’s run by Republicans, as if the form is an infallible device left here shortly after Jesus ascended into heaven for his 2000-year-long break from planet earth. Every time conservatives do that, or MAGA maniacs defend another lunatic tirade on Truth Social from President Trump, we crawl right back onto the political plantation we are destined to remain in forever. Our devotion to the forms gives Washington unlimited and unchecked power. Our worship of a version of America that died at Appomattox Courthouse has not helped us deal with the overpowering dominance of the federal government. We keep talking about the Founding Fathers, but that whole system has been gone for a long time. Jefferson would be aghast at this mess. Even suggesting that what we have is a proximity to his vision for what might become of America is insulting. He, of all the revolutionaries, saw the pitfalls of a powerful central government, and as he referenced in a letter to another friend, Joseph Priestley, about the Louisiana Purchase, the creation of states or what he envisioned as new “nations” should be necessary for the people who inhabit those lands happiness:

“Whether we remain in one confederacy, or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies, I believe not very important to the happiness of either part. Those of the western confederacy will be as much our children & descendants as those of the eastern, and I feel myself as much identified with that country, in future time, as with this; and did I now foresee a separation at some future day, yet I should feel the duty & the desire to promote the western interests as zealously as the eastern, doing all the good for both portions of our future family which should fall within my power.”

But the symmetry of 50 stars looks so nice, doesn’t it?

I’m not sure how much longer the American people will tolerate the aesthetics of a long-dead, mythological government while they remain beleaguered by its ineffectiveness and punishing size, especially as they step over the overdosed fentanyl zombies on their way to the DMV. The aesthetics ring pretty hollow in the face of the realities of the American empire. The revolution that should come should be about breaking this thing into as many states as necessary to ensure the liberty of the people who live within this thing we call the “United States.” Make the people's voices the paramount ethic of the American form of government. Right now, the will of the people is given fake placation. The more accurately people are represented, the less their grievances will boil over.

Or, just continue to argue about Virginia’s usurpation of rights on X. I’m sure someone is listening.

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There are hundreds of moments in my life that I barely remember. First dates, sports team victories, and long drives across the country are all hazy images in my head. Vagaries that seem like cuts of old home movies and disconnectedness. But not fly fishing. I remember nearly everything about my first time on the water with a fly rod. I was nine. My father took me to our local sports store where he purchased a nine foot six weight, eagle claw rod. The handle was a cheap foam, and to call it a six-weight was generous. It cast like a two-by-four, but it was glorious. We lived in Wyoming at the time and had Fridays off from school. We drove up in our Jeep Cherokee to Prune Creek at the top of the Bighorn Mountains. The South Fork of the Tongue River meandered its way through the campground we were staying at for the next few days, and there on its banks, my father gave me my first instructions on how to cast. I had watched him for years with a spinning rod in my hand as he cast to a rhythm that seemed to call to me. I was overwhelmed that day with the privilege of casting a rod in a cold mountain creek. In many ways, that weekend on the water has defined so much of who I am. I love fly fishing. No sport has ever captured my imagination as it does. An evening on the Frying Pan with my sons is unrivaled in my life experiences.

I have passed this sport on to as many people as I can. I know what it has done for me, and I know it does the same for so many others. On those crazy days at work, when all I want to do is escape from the mundanity of repeated conversations, I know the stream is always available for a momentary relief. I love everything about fly fishing. I love the immersion in nature, the savvy tactics of hunting down a big fish, and the blaze of humor that comes from a stream filled with thousands of brook trout. I love tying little flies with little knots, and casting big equipment at hundred-pound ocean monsters. If I were tempted with the real opportunity to make fly fishing my living, I would take it in mere seconds. I have had the fortune of interacting with dozens of men and women who make it their career, and I am always compelled by their response to the siren call of the sport. How did they find their way into it? What was the insatiable clawing at the soul that made them jettison the norms of society to spend their days on the water?

A few years ago, when my lifelong fishing buddy and I were floating down the Bighorn in Fort Smith. After an amazing day with another gifted guide and storyteller, we sat on the porch of the Bighorn Trout Shop and wondered to ourselves if we couldn’t tell the stories of these amazing men and women? Wouldn’t it be great to let people know about this niché culture of people who spend their days learning about the weather and the waters, watching for hatches and subtle rises that indicate that the hunt is on. In the new era where access to media outlets is as simple as a microphone and an Instagram account, we drove home after our trip and started the Fly Guides Podcast.

Our first guests were our friends. People we knew from our firsthand experiences with them on the water. They were gracious to us as we learned how to ask better questions and keep a conversation flowing, but in those moments, we realized something really amazing was happening. We were discovering the humanity behind every story, every person who had willfully surrendered to the magic of the sport. We couldn’t believe the opportunities we were being given to talk with such a vast array of amazing people. One guide referred another, and another, and then those referrals gave us more names, until we suddenly had a full season of episodes with guides from all around the world. Since then, we have completed nearly three seasons of shows. Almost 70 episodes of guides from all over the world. Frenchmen in Chile, Tsars of Fly Fishing in the kingdom of Bhutan, and dozens of women who are thriving in a traditionally male-dominated sport.

I feel fortunate that we have the chance to expose the stories of these guides to thousands of people each week. It brings my co-host Scott and me such pleasure that people who have lived in relative anonymity, doing something they love, have the chance to tell their stories to other fly fishermen. Our little show is growing, and it is thrilling that instead of telling people about the sport, we are telling the stories of the people who make it the most compelling sport on the planet. As one of our recent guests described about why it is he has a love for the job:

“Flyfishing is the great equalizer. I can be sitting in a boat with a billionaire, and they are looking to me for what fly to use, is it time to put on my coat, where should I cast? The class system disappears.”

I love that about the stories we get the privilege to tell. I feel honored that they would trust us with the depth of inner personal moments that compelled them to change their lives. To hear a young man break down, speaking of his father and his goodness to him even when he didn’t deserve it, or a young woman who wrestled with what her life would be like without the sport, and the beauty of the Appalachian Mountains, is better content than I could have ever imagined available. I hope you get a chance to listen. It’s a lot of fun, and it reminds each of us why we love this sport as much as we do.

Listen to the Fly Guides Podcast anywhere you stream content:

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Politics is never as simple as winning elections. The dumb version we pretend to adore here in the United States is insufferable because of the exaggerated illusion that politics is permanent. The supposed benefits of democratized systems are in their stability. Americans believe, with a great deal of sincerity, that their duty ends at the ballot box and that because they voted, they get to return to a comfortable and stable world where they can live their lives, take their vacations, raise their children, and watch their Netflix relatively unbothered by the Washington machine. For the last 80 years, that has been relatively true. With little exception, there have been few disruptions that cause them to reexamine their political system. They may not like Democrats or Republicans, respectively, but they tolerate it because their 401k continues to rise, and the blessed GDP is always more than it was last year. The existential threats of nuclear war, terrorism, or authoritarianism are always over-exaggerated by the political class and the alternative media. Bill Clinton was the next Fidel Castro, or Donald Trump was the next Hitler, according to the talk radio hosts. Barack Obama was the devil if you listened to Fox News. But practically speaking, the machine marched on - uninterrupted in its objectives because its impacts on the citizen were limited or in insufficient numbers to impact enough people to ever cause a revolution. But Covid changed all of that. Citizens realized firsthand how powerful governments at every level had become. Suddenly, their lives were dramatically impacted, and they wanted to see a change in the course and trajectory of the government’s response.

The rumblings of the people have been evident throughout most of the twenty-first century. The wars and surveillance state have made people much more aware of the US government’s ability to tune out the voters and railroad its agenda through. Donald Trump in 2016 was elected, in large part, because he was saying out loud what people felt about their government. It was too oppressive, too interested in foreign wars, too disinterested in the American citizen, and far too involved in its role as the world hegemon. His win in 2016 was the perfect confluence of a terrible Democratic Party candidate and his ability to persuade the Rust Belt that he was interested in restoring American jobs and placing focus back on their beleaguered existences. The win stunned the Washington class, and for the next four years, they threw everything at him. Impeachments, scandals, and investigations, and many surmise, the entire COVID episode was part of the plan to remove him from office. Mail-in ballots and a ridiculous set of rule changes made it possible for Joe Biden to garner the most votes of any candidate in American history, and by 2 am on election morning, Trump was vanquished, and despite his claims of a stolen election, he was unceremoniously bounced out of Washington after the January 6th theatrics.

The Joe Biden presidency was the quintessential Washington experiment. An old, nearly senile man was paraded out a few times a week in his basement studio to say a few lines, while behind the scenes, the thirty-year-old smarty-pantsers were running the country. The American Presidency, the last real troubled spot in the federal government theater, had been solved. The office didn’t need a leader; it needed a figurehead, and Joe Biden illustrated that it all could be done. While Joe picked between his favorite ice creams, the authoritarian and surveillance apparati were in full gear. The border was opened wide, and the sexualization agenda was amped up. People were still under the thumb of the Covid Stasi, and the moment felt rather dire even to the average citizen. Most people wondered what in the world was going on and why the government had decided to turn up its punitive actions against the citizens. There was a palpable disdain that came from all levels of government that was directed at the citizens, and most people felt it.

The 2024 election was a reaction to this ethos. People had received a taste of a punishing government, and they wanted something different. Trump found his way back to the top of the Republican ticket, Joe Biden fell asleep at the debate, and the pesky RFK campaign became the key group that would decide the election. Kennedy had mastered the podcast circuit. He was liked by nearly all with whom he interacted. His campaign relied heavily on his appearances. His damaged voice and long-winded, nuanced answers were terrible for typical boomervision. But Kennedy made inroads in almost every demographic that was skeptical of the MAGA version of America. He scored well with independents and skeptical moms. He was better on almost every issue than either of the two and a half other candidates. When his campaign was blocked from the debates and he was sued out of the contest, his decision to team up with Donald Trump was a turning point in the campaign. The droves of reluctant independents signed on for what might be possible, given what we believed Kennedy was interested in accomplishing, and the seeming generosity of Donald Trump to welcome him into his inner circle. The podcasters started to have Trump on, and he made inroads with them, too. The MAHA moms who didn’t like the bombast and arrogance of Trump allowed themselves to get past his personality and join with the masses in hopes of a Kennedy involvement in the administration.

The election win covered the tenuousness of the coalition. In a stroke of political mastery, Trump allowed Kennedy, Gabbard, and Tucker Carlson to hit the road together to project their independent sensibilities upon the candidate and convince the public that Trump was something different from what the media and Democrats said he was. It was a generational coalition. It was built upon what the people thought they heard Trump say through his surrogates. He was going to be anti-war. He was going to put America first. He was going to drain the swamp, release the Epstein files, show who murdered JFK, and allow DOGE to take an axe to the budget. It was sold to this skeptical band of funny bedfellows under the guise of Trump’s learned lessons. This new cabinet was coming in to dismantle the deep state, and they were going to be placed in positions in which that could happen. Kennedy was nominated to oversee the Health and Human Services wing of government, the largest department by budget in the government other than defense. Gabbard was put in charge of the intelligence agencies that had spied on her. There was the USAID shutdown by Elon and a very public release of the Epstein files. The first year felt amazing. The government was being steered in the direction that the people who elected Trump wanted. Of course, Congress was awful as usual, and there were no real “cuts” to anything that would shrink the size of government. But the appearance was that Trump was doing, or at least what the people had projected upon what his team had said he wanted to do.

In the background, there were petty political fights. Elon and Trump had the most public and terrible divorce. Musk even brought up the Epstein files in a famous post on X to try to land blows on the president after his public distancing from Musk. Musk went back to his rockets and cars, and calculatingly saw that changing government was a waste of energy and money. Israel rumbled under the surface, too. Prime Minister Netanyahu made his monthly pilgrimage to the White House to make sure that Trump knew that Iran was just a few seconds away from their nuclear weapons, but all in all, Bibi was rather ignorable based on the successes of the administration’s first months. But by June of last year, the shine had worn off. The shiner or Musk’s eye and the bombing of Iran’s nuclear program were railed against by many in the coalition. Charlie Kirk pleaded with the president to avoid war. Tucker went to Washington often to advocate for cooler choices to prevail. The cracks in the armor were starting to show, and it was becoming harder and harder to ignore the dissent. Libertarians and anti-war peacenicks left first. Many called for Trump’s impeachment after the June bombing. That spread to the most skeptical of the podcasters, who began to distance themselves from Trump and the administration. Theo Von called out the government for the use of his image in social media posts they were putting out. Von said he didn’t approve of the administration and wanted them to stop using his likeness and voice.

Rogan openly questioned the president, along with dozens of others from the podcast arena. Candace Owens, who seems to truly have some bona fide personal issues and a deep struggle with how she was treated at the Daily Wire, promoted the Scooby Doo gang and continued to promote anti-Israel conspiracies. Tucker, too, started slowly to ask questions about why we went to war and openly criticized Israel’s heavy influence on the administration. Laura Loomer and Mark Levin jumped on the questioning quickly and labeled all of it anti-Semitic. Others glommed on and made discussing Israel impossible. Dave Rubin and Bill Ackman all played strict defense against anyone who wondered out loud about Israel. For the average American, however, it was all still inside baseball stuff. The typical Washington politics and infighting that happens around the power centers of the world.

September 10 was the last normal day of under-the-radar fighting within the coalition. Charlie Kirk was dead on a Utah field of grass, and the one voice that seemed to be able to hold all of it together was gone. At his memorial service, people set down their differences to mourn the loss of a bright American star. Carlson, a longtime friend, gave an impassioned message about Charlie and the gospel, but was blamed for an anti-Jewish slander about hummus and killing Jesus. Within 48 hours of the service, everything had started to crumble in the coalition.

Tucker seemed to take the attacks against him personally and began to invite stronger anti-Israeli government voices on to his show. Candace, likely devastated by the death of a close friend, chased every rabbit down every rabbit hole available in the Utah mountains. Tim Dillon asked almost daily, “What the hell is with Israel!” The podcasters nearly vanished from the support of Trump. Israel was the biggest conversation on every platform, and it overshadowed any positives that the administration accomplished.

So here we sit on the Wednesday after Trump promised to end a civilization with a veiled threat of the use of Nuclear weapons, and what was once the coalition of a lifetime, is on the mat, punched out by its own hands. Trump insists that everything is fine — as he is apt to do, no matter what evidence is in front of him. Advocates of Israel are happy with the moment and are ruthlessly rubbing in their seeming victory within the administration. Tucker will never be back in the Trump White House. Nor will MTG or Massie or any of the other people Trump has dismissed as “low-IQ losers.”

The alternative media have also picked sides. The podcast sphere has abandoned Trump, while the usual Fox Newsers and more mainline conservative voices like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity have made it clear they are on Team Trump. The unity of a year ago is totally gone.

Who is to blame? I’m not sure.

I remain rather convinced that we should have a governing system that can be taken at face value. If we need layers upon layers of deceit posing as 9D chess in order to accomplish 10% of what Americans want, it’s not a system worth advocating for. The Trump team says he has to operate this way. That it is “his style” to negotiate from the apocalyptic position, and then work his way back to a win. Meanwhile, the average person is uncomfortable with the instability that seems to cause. It cannot be ignored that people spend time on social media, and that within the threads and scrolls of that terrible invention, rampant speculation and conclusion drawing are the standard engagements. And, even if we set down the speculative nature of it all, one has to admit that crazy Easter morning tweets are not the norm within the world of American government. Maybe it is what Trump needs in order to bring about world peace, but to many of us, the process and the empirical evidence of war and bombing are unacceptable.

I was a Kennedy supporter because I didn’t think Trump did the right things during Covid. I thought he was steamrolled by the town he said he could fix. I reluctantly signed on at the end and advocated for the election of Trump, but I was always a little on edge about what would happen if a crisis found its way back to the halls of the West Wing. Unfortunately, that awful pandemic experience hangs within my memory that even if Trump is playing a grand game of chess, while the rest of us are playing checkers, his failure in Covid is still painfully embossed in my head. The covid chess game was a loss, and many of us found ourselves on the losing end of his supposed maneuvers. That undercurrent is still there this time, only it feels like the stakes are even higher. Nuclear weapons and civilization annihilation are not just funny posts that Catturd and Loomer can “inject directly into their veins.” Trump and his buddies, who are celebrating the dismissal of Tucker and others, come across as cavalier to many of us, and with the taste of 2020 still on our tongues, it’s hard to justify advocating for unconditional devotion.

The coalition was tenuous because those of us who came into it late were the most skeptical of government. It was why I wanted Kennedy to win. I wanted his skepticism to prevail in Washington. Devotion to figures and politicians was never what I signed up for. Politicians lie, and they lie a lot. No amount of being scolded as a panican or a low IQ loser is going to derail me from holding a firm position that the federal government is too powerful and that our foreign policy is a disaster and has been since Vietnam. Trump can be celebrated when he accomplishes the things he was elected to help usher in, but 2 wins out of 50 don’t obligate me to silence my criticism when he fails to live up to what he said he wanted for America.

I can’t just say that the things I wanted in America are ok to set down because Trump or others in his administration say that I need to for the greater good of his eventual success. Politicians only perform when they are held to account for their promises. Washington is designed to keep all but incremental wins away from their machine. It makes people compromise in order to eventually win a small battle.

All of this reminds me of that revelatory scene in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in which the hero, Jefferson Smith, finds out the senior Senator has been controlled by the business titan of his state. The conversation is a poignant reminder of how people talk themselves into position changes simply so they can remain in power.

Senator Payne: Hello, Jeff. Come in. Did you have a talk with Taylor?

Jefferson Smith: He said he'd told you what to do for twenty years. I called him a liar.

Senator Payne: Come over here and sit down, son.

Jefferson Smith: I don't feel like sitting down.

Senator Payne: I know how you feel. I was hoping you'd be spared all this. That you'd see the sights, absorb a lot of history, and go back to your boys. You've been living in a boy's world. For heaven's sake, stay there! This is a man's world, a brutal world. You have no place in it. You'll only get hurt. Forget Taylor and what he said about the dam.

Jefferson Smith: But you still haven't answered me. Can Taylor tell you what to do?

Senator Payne: Now... listen, please. And try to understand. It's tough to run head-on into facts. But you must check your ideals outside the door like you do your rubbers. Thirty years ago, I had your ideals. I was you. I had to make the same decision you were asked to make today. I made it. I compromised. So that I could sit in that Senate
and serve the people in an honest way. You've gotta face facts. I've served our state well, haven't I? We have the lowest unemployment and the highest federal grants, but…I've had to compromise. You can't count on people voting. Half the time, they don't vote. That's how states and empires have been built since time began. You can take my word for it. That's how things are. I've told you all this because...I've grown very fond of you. About like a son, in fact. I don't want to see you get hurt. When that deficiency bill comes up tomorrow, don't say a word. There are great powers behind it.
They'll destroy you. For your own sake, and for the sake of my friendship with your father. Please... don't say a word.

It’s the way that town has seemingly always worked. Trade off ideals for longevity. Backroom deals and congressional negotiations are always a part of how policy gets handed down to the people. I will leave room in all of this that Trump knows exactly what he is doing, and that three months from now, he has a triumphal return to the head of the coalition, but as it looks from here, it seems like a great risk. Tucker and others are going to keep at this because they were played as fools before in American misadventures. Maybe Tucker is paid by Qatar or whatever other Middle Eastern entity needs him to be a mouthpiece for their positions, but there’s a sincerity that I can’t get past, because I project my own past trusting of government upon the statements he makes. I lament that I was ever an advocate for war, and when Tucker says he won’t do that again, I feel a resonance with it that I cannot get over.

No person is infallible, and I am sure Tucker and others in the crumbling remnants of what once was have plenty of foibles to criticize. But I also will be forever bent to the distrust of government, even when, or maybe especially when, the people I wanted to win are in office. This feels like an overplayed hand, especially the less time I spend on Twitter. Each coffee house conversation I have with people my age or younger indicates that they are uninterested in this version of Trump. They aren’t celebrating anything. Because the only action that has been taken, despite the myriad list of fraud and corruption in government, is to head once again to the sparkling waters of the Mediterranean for another war. The voices like Kennedy and Gabbard, who just 18 months ago were on the campaign trail advocating for Trump, have been confined to the corner. Gabbard is silent. Kennedy has been neutralized by the court and a less-than-hearty backing by the president, and he’s been asked to go out and defend the administration’s positions on things he was never for in the campaign.

Strangely, it demonstrates that this government is never going to be fixed with the tools we have in our quiver. It seems to degrade into these small choices domestically that are indistinguishable from the other party in real, practical ways, and the reality that war is the backbone of the American economic experience. We aren’t going to fix this with better leaders. We will remain subjects of the political class until the whole thing is jettisoned for a smaller, more realistic mechanism that people can engage with and call a stable and good government.

It was Palm Sunday this past weekend, and it’s already the Saturday after God Friday today. I was once again struck by holy week’s allegorical poignancy for our moment. As I watched the evangelical tradition of young kids dancing, waving palm branches, and intermittently hitting their siblings with the palms from the stage as the band played a song about Hosanna, I was forced into the reality of the fickleness of man. Palm Sunday was supposed to be Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem to overthrow the Romans and unmake the religiosity of the Jewish leadership. The people of the city were enthusiastically awaiting his arrival. They chanted “Hosanna,” or as it might be translated into our language, “God Save Us!” Jesus was supposed to be the undoing of everything that had oppressed the people. The hero had finally come to restore Israel to its kingdom status. The Romans would be miraculously expelled from the holy land, and Jerusalem would be the seat of the new kingdom. Hopes could not have been higher on the first day of the week for the people of Judea.

Oh, how fickle we are.

By the following Friday, Jesus would be dead. Chosen to be crucified by the Roman governement the people despised, over a known criminal, Barabbas. The scene in Matthew 27 depicts the crowd in a rabid state, willing to go to any lengths to silence an unwanted version of the messiah:

Meanwhile, Jesus stood before the governor, and the governor asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?”

“You have said so,” Jesus replied.

When he was accused by the chief priests and the elders, he gave no answer. Then Pilate asked him, “Don’t you hear the testimony they are bringing against you?” But Jesus made no reply, not even to a single charge—to the great amazement of the governor.

Now it was the governor’s custom at the festival to release a prisoner chosen by the crowd. At that time they had a well-known prisoner whose name was Jesus ^b Barabbas. So when the crowd had gathered, Pilate asked them, “Which one do you want me to release to you: Jesus Barabbas, or Jesus who is called the Messiah?” For he knew it was out of self-interest that they had handed Jesus over to him.

While Pilate was sitting on the judge’s seat, his wife sent him this message: “Don’t have anything to do with that innocent man, for I have suffered a great deal today in a dream because of him.”

But the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus executed.

“Which of the two do you want me to release to you?” asked the governor.

“Barabbas,” they answered.

“What shall I do, then, with Jesus who is called the Messiah?” Pilate asked.

They all answered, “Crucify him!”

“Why? What crime has he committed?” asked Pilate.

But they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!”

When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” he said. “It is your responsibility!”

All the people answered, “His blood is on us and on our children!”

Then he released Barabbas to them. But he had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified.

Triumphal entry leads to world darkness.

Persia

I’ve been quiet over the last month since the war started. I am fully disillusioned with politics. In my middle-aged life, the efforts to arrest the Washington machine have been less than fruitful. I was fully engaged in the last election, and for the right reasons, I believe. I wanted to see if the people still had a voice that could overcome the government that spends its energies figuring out how to make the citizens' lives more difficult. I wanted to believe that our democratic institutions could steer the ship away from the edge of destruction. I heard the right messages from the Trump and Kennedy teams, and I really believed both of them about war and their lack of interest in starting new ones. It’s hard to describe how little I want the United States to participate in new wars. I’ve said it often here, but I have been on the wrong side of cheerleading our foreign misadventures too many times. And while I wouldn’t describe myself as a one-issue voter, with four war-aged boys, it would be fair to say that war is the most pressing one for me. I have no interest in remaining the global principal. Our judgments about who and what is right in foreign policy have been below average at best. I like how Mark Steyn puts it, “So I have grave misgivings about the latest adventure - not because I'm following the intra-right bitchfests on American social media, but because, if you'll forgive me getting a little technical, I think the Pentagon is total crap-crappity-crap. Okay, I'll nuance that John Kerry-style: it's total crap-crappity-crap at any mission lasting longer than the twenty minutes their lavishly-endowed "Afghan National Army" took to fold.”

We have demonstrated in our last 80 years of pretending-not-to-be-an-empire, empire that we are not good at being the kinder version of the Brits. Empires have historically been created for the enrichment of the nation at the head of the table. Empires are about resources and the easy flow of commerce. From the Egyptians to the British, every empire in between was about making sure that they could have unlimited resources that were easily extracted and exchanged. In every case, until the American version, empires used force to make it all happen. They ruled the land and the sea, and they did it with ruthlessness. It was their imperative to crush the will and spirits of those whom they ruled over. Force is the necessity of empire. To rule the world, you have to make sure that all dissent and insurrection are squashed before they ever catch fire. The Americans, however, never took to that as a natural fitting suit. All presidents and congresses, no matter how hawkish, have inserted a level of resistance to playing full throttle, force-driven empire. We wanted the free flow of commerce in our interests, but also wanted to do it in such a way that it didn’t appear as if we were forcing people into our version of the world.

We used the CIA and limited skirmishes in the name of liberation and democracy to play empire, but cloaked as the revolutionaries. We told our people and anyone who was gullible enough to listen that we were out to help create a world filled with Thomas Jeffersons. We sold our empire-like desires to our people by telling them that we were the good guys. We weren’t the ole’ British style brutes. We were the kinder, gentler version of the past. Empires were passé and oh so twentieth century.

When the Soviets were vanquished by their own hubris and inability to supposedly compete economically, our propaganda was verifiable. The good guys had won, with their limited force philosophy, and the insistence that democracy was prevailing as the new rules-based order of the world. Empires were dead, and the 21st century would be the New American version.

America spent an uncountable fortune in real money and lives lost trying to uphold this illusion. From Vietnam to Kabul, the American government attempted to pretend that its bullets were somehow kinder; that the drone strikes of men named Muhammad Al Whocaresi were somehow immune from the ire of the people left behind to sort out their new reality that was left from the night vision dust clouds. Year after year, the American government insisted that its version of empire was restrained. Kosovo or Kuwait was simply the “right thing to do.” We were the good guys fighting terrorists over there, so that we could keep the world safe.

Demographic Troubles

The central bank theory of money always works if there are more people in the next generation than in the last. All great scams know this truth. If there are more people who can be convinced to come in on the scam than in the last round of the offering, the deal can go on in perpetuity. Ponzi knew this better than anyone except the designers of the fiat system we live under. When the First World War started, it was necessary to design a money machine so complex that the average person would eventually accept its lower volatility in exchange for the devaluation of the money they held in their wallets. The world before the war to end all wars was free of income taxes. It was free of central banks. It was robust, and in America, most benefited from the abundance of resources that the continent provided. The richest farmland, the freshest water, and the isolation of the world’s two largest oceans all made the United States the wealthiest nation in history. More people were lifted from poverty and the daily tasks of survival than at any other point in world history. The best-intended people saw the prosperity of this land and wanted to find ways to lift the last remaining people out of poverty and finalize the American utopia that this incredible continent seemed to be making possible.

The most savvy and wealthiest of the Americans, the Robber Barons, as they were critically named, did not resist the pleas of the government and the progressive politicians, but instead decided and claimed that the new system would be managed by themselves. They concocted a monetary machine that was centrally managed, and decoupled the entire economic system from the roots of a free market. They created the Federal Reserve and decoupled the world’s supply of money from the fundamentals it had always been subjected to. This new, ultra-confusing system, which depended on people’s inability to understand it, created the fertile ground necessary for perpetual government spending, wars, and debasement of the value of money. The framers of the fiat system were able to fundamentally utilize the debasement to build a world that they always owned. They were always on the winning side of every bet. Every downturn, they were ahead of. Every war, they were able to profit from. Every influx of dollars they were on the winning side of, either in asset acquisition or by betting on the ravages of inflation.

The secret to it all, however, was that in a nation like the United States, all they ever had to have happen to perpetuate the ruse was to have the population growth outpace the last one. And in the United States, the prosperity of the land made it an almost certain outcome that the perpetuation of larger and larger generations would be assured. Regardless of war or financial depressions, it could be counted on that America would always be on the rise. The Baby Boom after the Second World War proved the thesis, and any governmental scheme or program could be afforded by borrowing money against the future wages and productivity of an ever-larger “next generation.” And it almost worked. Until the Baby Boomers realized that they could be the beneficiaries of the unlimited wealth that the system had handed to them. They chose to restrict their childbearing to a lesser number than their parents. They normalized birth control, feminism, and abortion so that all the children they had were “wanted.” They raised their children as trophies rather than edifying their lives, and within one generation, the birth rate had collapsed.

That leaves an empire with a problem. How to perpetuate the scheme. If I could have Americans understand one thing about the system they live in, it wouldn’t be about voting or the difference between Democrats and Republicans, or some kind of veneration of their Constitutional fetishes; it would be about how the Washingtonians have destroyed their money, and what that has done to their country. There’s a trend on X to show old 1950s and 60s images and movies of America, to demonstrate the vast difference between then and today. It’s radicalizing. People realize that the country of their parents and grandparents no longer exists — and that the world on the screen was seemingly stolen from them. And if people were able to assess it without the noise of the talking boxes, they would understand that all of that transformation happened because the money and the scheme to keep the war and entitlement engine running depended on an ever-growing population. Americans couldn’t fill the replacement needs, so it meant mass migration was necessary all across the West. If they didn’t have the migration, the leaders would be shown for the frauds they were because the money was in default. The leadership of the West recognized that they needed to make sure that no one saw the pending collapse of the money. When Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, it was because the game was up, but they couldn’t let anyone really know. Vietnam had bankrupted the nation, and the inevitability of the failure of the money had to be hidden.

So another fifty years pass. And the country looks radically different than the ones in old Super 8 movies. Suits and ties have been replaced by pajamas. And if the modern generation’s waistlines were any indication, healthy-looking people appear to have been eaten by their progeny.

The money in our wallets and bank accounts is inextricably linked to the failing demographics of the country. The West needed new taxpayers, new bodies to backfill the gap that was left by the baby boomers. The Federal Reserve, in cooperation with the governments around the world, could hide its inflationary practices through new innovations in the market. Computers and robots made up the productivity gaps at the expense of the American worker. Finance replaced manufacturing as the main source of wealth creation in the United States, and the scheme survived a little while longer.

9/11

President Eisenhower, one of the most important figures in the 20th-century story, on the night he left office, warned the American people about the rising influence of the Military Industrial Complex. He was shouting from the highest office in the world that he feared for what was coming. The illusion after the Second World War was that fascism had been defeated. Capitalism had bested out government sponsored industry. Contrary to the dumbed-down version in modern America, where everyone who disagrees with the trends of the last five minutes is Hitler, Fascism is actually an economic system.

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
― Benito Mussolini

Most Americans are unaware that fascism was created and installed into the Western consciousness by Mussolini. He was the one who popularized its rise. Hitler was fascinated by the transformation that it seemed to have brought to Italy and decided to implement it in the German model. The concept was simple. The government controlled everything about what was made and how it was made, under the umbrella of private industry. They placed the orders, controlled the style, set the wages and the hours of production, the government chose the color, use, and customer purchases, but everything else, Musollini said, was up to the manufacturer.

Somewhere along the way, the American form of enterprise, the one that makes people billions of dollars, was captured by the same economic philosophy as the one promoted by El Duce. So even though the United States and the Allies won the Second World War, the reality of the economic model of the late twentieth century, and the one that Eisenhower warned his citizens about, was the one that both Hitler and Mussolini championed. Fast forward through the last years of the century, and we see a country that on the outside looked to be the envy of the world, but which in reality was rotting from the inside out. NAFTA and other geopolitical events were creating an economic system that was inseparable from the government. Bigger rounds of entitlement, more military interventions, dying demographics.

When the fireproof pasported Saudi’s departed on the morning of 9/11, the twenty-first century was about to pull its mask off and reveal its true, under-the-hood, machinery. The war on terror and the new American Century were in full swing. There was an ever-growing influence from Israel, and devotion to toppling all of the Middle East in order to secure the safety and security of the American citizen. At home, technology took off at a prior unseen pace, and the surveillance state was welcomed with open arms by the government. The security theater at the airport, with its tight-tonged zipper brigades, was there for the wearing down of the citizens, but behind the scenes, the tech we carried in our pockets was far more intrusive than any heavy-set pat-down Patty at the TSA. 9/11 was the final chapter in the conversion from the American form of government that was started with the Constitution, revised after the North invaded the South and destroyed its heritage and devotion to the founding, and set in motion by the progressives in the 1900s. There were no memories of the old America left, and in its own brutal Orwellian ways, the memories of what once was, were evicerated with the championing of diversity and multiculturalism. The people were convinced that with the introduction of new, more sophisticated technologies and educational pressures to conform to a standard set of ideological norms. The old ways of the United States were only for fuddy-duddies and old men who loved to yell at the sky. The new machine was the only way to make the world safe and to keep the people imprisoned in the government’s money-extracting farm.

From Suez to Hormuz

Since we only recognize our history as what happened since last Wednesday, frosted with some George Washington mythology, it is worth revisiting another transition of empire that isn’t that far removed. At the end of the Second World War, the British had exhausted their empire. They had lost hundreds of thousands of their young men on the fields of Europe, India was a continuous problem to govern, and all of their African and Middle Eastern colonies were on the verge of rebellion. In 1937, India, the prize of the British Empire, voted to begin its independence process. But the war divided the people of the nation. The Indian Congress resigned over Viceroy Linlithgow's unilateral declaration of India as a belligerent state on the side of Britain. Linlithgow had made the decision, as most appointees of an empire do, without consulting the elected Indian representatives. It began a ten-year period of internal conflict within the colony, all while the Second World War was raging. One of the major issues of having an empire that the sun does not set upon is that there are dozens of probable places where the traditional methods of force fail to restrain the discontent of a ruled-over people. The British had exhausted their resources. Its coffers were bare, its people fatigued of war, and the philosophical leanings were that the model of empire needed to face its necessary end.

It would be an understatement to say that 1947 was a consequential year in the British Empire. India was released to its own model of governance. Palestine was changed to Israel. New Zealand ratified the Statute of Westminster (1931), removing the last legislative controls from the UK and confirming its full independence within the Commonwealth. Burma and Pakistan were both set free from British rule.

India’s independence was the single most significant event of 1947 for the empire. It accelerated Asia and Africa’s decolonization. While Britain still controlled vast territories in some parts of Africa and the Caribbean, the loss of India symbolized the empire’s inevitable contraction. The year also saw domestic challenges in Britain. The nationalization of the coal industry, which reflected the shift toward a war-exhausted and degrading state at home, in which the political demands were for governmental attention directed to the people of the British Isles, was elevated, and the demands to shrink the empire abroad were politically unignorable.

But empires don’t just retract and crawl back into their smallness overnight, and Britain battled esoterically with its diminishment. Their government still acted as if their empire were intact. They exerted shows of force wherever their interests were threatened. Empires and modern cultures need energy, and island states have limits to their resources. Britain was no different. Its last gasp for control over its Middle Eastern resources happened in 1956.

The Suez Crisis (also called the Second Arab-Israeli War or Tripartite Aggression) was a major Middle Eastern conflict that was triggered when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal. It involved a secret alliance between Israel, Britain, and France against Egypt, but ended in a political victory for Egypt after U.S. and Soviet pressure forced a withdrawal. In the early 50s, the rebuilding of the world by the Allies was a significant model for how the new world, under the United States’ leadership, would take place. The Nile River is the life force of Egypt. Controlling its erratic flooding and managing the water for farming was seen as an imperative by the British and the Egyptians for stability in the region. The British began construction of the first Aswan Dam across the Nile in 1898. Construction lasted until 1902, and the dam was opened on 10 December 1902. After the Second World War, plans were drawn up by the Egyptians to build a larger and higher dam to replace the low dam. The British were advocates for it and had pledged, along with the United States, the funding to build it. On September 27, 1955, the acting head of state, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader of the Egyptian revolution in 1952, publicly announced a major arms agreement with Czechoslovakia. The Soviet satellite state acted as a front for the USSR. This arms deal was the first large-scale Soviet-bloc arms transfer to a non-communist Middle Eastern country. It included tanks (T-34 and IS-3), MiG-15 jet fighters, Ilyushin Il-28 bombers, artillery, armored vehicles, and more, worth over $83 million, which was roughly 85% of all foreign weapons shipped to the Middle East from 1951 to 1956.

After the deal was announced, the British and the Americans, along with France and Israel hold emergency talks about the deal struck by the Egyptians and the proxy Soviet State. By July of the following year, the United States and Britain withdrew their offer to fund Egypt’s Aswan High Dam project, triggering a retaliatory action by the Egyptians. Just six days after the announcement, newly named Egyptian President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company, something previously controlled by British and French interests. He promises canal tolls will fund the Aswan Dam.

From July to October, Britain, France, and the U.S. held emergency talks with Britain mobilizing its armed forces. In the midst of the talks, A 22-nation international conference meets in London to discuss the canal, where Egypt rejects the coalition’s plans for international control, enraging the Brits.

That September, secret military planning began between Britain, France, and Israel for the retaking of the canal. Israel becomes a major influence in the decision to use military force, and in October of 1956, Israel launches Operation Kadesh and invades Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, advancing toward the Suez Canal. By the end of October, Britain and France issued a joint ultimatum demanding that both Egyptian and Israeli forces withdraw 10 miles from the canal. When neither party relented, Britain and France began air strikes and bombing of Egyptian targets.

On November 5, 1956, British and French paratroopers landed near Port Said at the northern end of the Suez Canal as part of what was deemed Operation Musketeer by the British. Just a day later, under intense pressure from the U.S., Soviet Union, and United Nations, including threats of sanctions and possible Soviet intervention, a UN-brokered ceasefire takes effect. Britain and France halt operations. By December, UN Emergency Force (UNEF) peacekeepers began deploying to the Sinai and the canal zone, and by the end of December, the last British and French troops withdrew from Egypt. The last to leave were the Israelis, who reluctantly completed their withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip (under U.S. pressure), with UN forces taking over both areas.

Militarily, Israel, Britain, and France achieved short-term gains, but politically, it was a major setback for the colonial powers. Nasser emerged as a hero of Arab nationalism, the canal stayed under Egyptian control, and the crisis accelerated the decline of British and French influence in the Middle East while boosting U.S. and Soviet roles in the region. For all intents and purposes, the British Empire surrendered its influence when the crisis was over.

If the story above weren’t in the past tense, it would sound eerily familiar to our current moment with Iran. An aggressive empire, beleaguered by the extent of its reach and its addiction to war are reluctantly partnered with Israel to finalize the instability of the region and usher in the hegemony of the junior ally. The British and Israelis wanted control of Suez. The Americans and Israelis want control of Hormuz. The world, as it is currently constructed, depends on oil. It needs to be cheap, free-flowing, and less than irritating to oversee and manage. The Strait of Hormuz has been a troubling spot since the Iranians overthrew the Shaw and installed their Islamic government. Cheap oil means that the destroyed money that has been debased by inflationary policy and governmental addiction to war and spending can help hide the real cost of life in the United States. Cheap oil means we can have cheap food and cheap transportation. It may not be as glamorous to fly alongside the purple-haired pajama lady, but it has been democratized and commodified to the point that the ends justify whatever degree of degradation the means have been subjected to. Cheap oil hides the industrialized food production that has landed around our waistlines. Cheap oil makes heating our homes, driving our cars, and playing with our new Chat GPT counselor unnoticed upon our pocketbooks relative to our diminished purchasing power in an inflationary system.

So what is happening in Iran is a big deal, and not just because it’s another ill-advised war that will inevitably cost too many American lives, but because it means the end of the American way of world leadership. The empire, or the pretend-we-aren’t-an-empire-empire, is over. In my best moments, I hope that this is a 76D chess game that is being played out by President Trump to bring an end to a United States government and military that is far too large and overextended. In my deepest moments of reality, I fear this was a grave mistake born from bad advice and the arrogance of Washington and Tel Aviv. I don’t know when it will end, but the end of what has been the world order since Eisenhower was the president is crumbling as it crosses the finish line.

Perhaps it is best. The future isn’t very bright under the current pathway. While I had hoped that politics, as constructed within the context of the brilliant American Constitutional system, would arrest the march towards the collapse, I no longer think we’re fixing this with the old wine skins. America will retreat, as it has from the other wars in the region, diminished. But this time, there will be nothing left to prop up as there has been in the past.

The Fickleness of People

Which brings me back to the story of Christ and his last week in Jerusalem. We rightfully crave and expect political solutions to our troubles. Politics is supposed to be the buffer from war and conflict. The Jewish people of the first century knew that they were being abused by the Roman Empire, and they wanted to see if they could solve their grievances politically. When Jesus arrived on Palm Sunday, they thought that this miracle-working, authority-defying rabbi from Galilee was going to be the one to fix the problems and usher in the end of Roman rule. Obviously, for Christians, we know the end of the story, and that what Jesus had come to do was to transform the inner soul, not the external circumstances. Sadly, when the people realized he was not going to do what they wanted him to do, they turned on him and spared Barabbas instead. I have spent too much time over the last month wondering how this was ever going to be fixed. Why did we go to war? Who got to President Trump to convince him that the neocon path was the right one? But in the end, the transformation that is necessary is internal. I must restrain myself from the temptation to hope that politics can solve the inevitable destruction of a country I have been blessed to live in. The only hope for a future is one of inner discipline. I will never be able to write enough words to fix the decline. There are libraries filled with books that have failed to save the world from its own decline. There is only one reality on this Easter weekend. The world will continue to fail. Empires will come and go, but only the timelessness of Christ will endure. He has proven that capacity despite the destruction of the human enterprise. Instead of cheering for a political messiah, perhaps this easter we should look to the enduring one instead.

For those who might struggle with the headline reference, here’s the old British song that was originally from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “On The Road To Mandalay.”