When people ask me what I believe politically, I tell them I am a civil socratic epistemologist. They usually blink. Then I explain: I believe civilization is a question that never got answered properly, and the only way to fix it is to keep asking—while refusing to accept “because” as a response.

I did not arrive at this through a college seminar. I arrived at it by reading the Constitution after I had already sworn an oath to defend it, and realizing that large portions of it were being ignored by the very institutions claiming to uphold it. The coining of money, for instance, was delegated away to a private banking system despite the document being fairly explicit about who holds that power. Once you see one crack in the facade, you start seeing them everywhere. And once you see them everywhere, you have two choices: pretend you did not notice, or start asking why everyone else is pretending.

I chose the latter. It is a lonely choice. It is also the only honest one.

How I Got Here

I am left-leaning. Not the performative kind that shows up for protests and goes home to a corporate job. I am socialist in the sense that I believe resources should flow toward need, not hoarding. I am a little libertarian in the sense that I believe the people are the final check on government, and any system that removes that check is illegitimate by definition.

These are not contradictory positions. The government I want is one that provides the floor—healthcare, education, housing, food—and then gets out of the way. Not a nanny state. A foundation state. Build the floor so people can stand on it, then let them decide what to build above it.

I do not trust corporations to do this. I do not trust billionaires to do this. I do not trust charity to do this. I trust systems—transparent, accountable, democratic systems—because people are fallible and systems can be designed to correct for fallibility. Individuals are biased. Good systems encode skepticism of that bias.

Guns

Guns are a necessary evil. So long as militaries exist—and they do, and they will—the capacity for lethal resistance must remain distributed among the population. This is not about hunting. This is not even primarily about home defense. This is about the final check.

Every government in history that has consolidated a monopoly on violence has eventually used it against its own people. Not always dramatically. Sometimes slowly, through economic violence, through police violence, through the quiet violence of letting people die preventable deaths. But the pattern holds.

I do not fetishize firearms. I simply recognize that disarming the population while leaving the state armed is a structural asymmetry that always resolves in favor of the state. And I do not trust the state that much.

Foreign Policy

Foreign policy should be simple: be as self-sustaining as possible. Engage with the world only to improve it, not to extract from it. This is not isolationism—it is anti-imperialism with a door left open for cooperation.

The United States has spent most of its history treating foreign policy as a resource extraction mechanism with a military backup plan. I reject that entirely. If we cannot trade fairly, we should not trade. If we cannot intervene without making things worse, we should not intervene. The burden of proof is on the interventionist, not the skeptic.

I believe in helping. I do not believe in dominating under the guise of helping.

Speech

I am a free speech maximalist. This is the hill I will die on, and I do not care whose feelings get bruised in the process.

But maximalism cuts both ways. You have the right to say terrible things. And everyone else has the right to respond—verbally, socially, economically, and yes, sometimes physically if you are inciting immediate harm. I believe in the old standard: fighting words are not protected, and if you are dumb enough to use them, you should be prepared for the beating that follows. More importantly, I believe a wise populace has the power to refuse to enforce unjust laws. A jury that refuses to convict someone who punched a Nazi is not a broken system. It is a system working exactly as intended—the people checking the state.

The government should not police speech. The people should police the consequences of speech. There is a difference.

Climate

Climate is a priority. Full stop. I am not going to debate this. The science is settled. The only question left is whether we act like adults or keep deferring to the quarterly earnings of industries that should have been transitioned decades ago.

If your economic system cannot survive a transition to sustainability, your economic system is poorly designed. Fix the system. Do not protect the broken thing because it is familiar.

Immigration

Open the borders. If someone needs a home, we should give them one—and then make them part of the project. Not assimilation. Contribution. Bring your skills, your perspective, your labor, your ideas. Learn the system, improve the system, vote in the system.

The idea that we should hoard prosperity behind a wall while people flee violence and starvation is obscene. It is also economically illiterate. Immigration drives growth, fills labor gaps, creates demand, and keeps a society from stagnating. The only reason to oppose it is fear—fear of change, fear of the other, fear of losing relative status. I do not govern by fear.

Accountability

I want a civil audit corps. People paid at ludicrous rates—six-figure starting salaries—to audit government agencies. Not the camera-in-your-face circus audit. I mean verifying that agencies are doing everything according to the Constitution and then the law. And if someone gets in the way, treat them with the same punishment as mail fraud. Fuck with the auditors and get fucked with back. No bribing. No fuckery. Actual accountability, backed by consequences that hurt.

It is important to note that while we have offices of accountability, they currently lack teeth, are not apolitical, and are generally spineless in the face of corruption. The civil audit corps would have the authority to investigate and prosecute corruption with no fear of retribution. It would be a parallel structure to the current system, operating outside of the normal chain of command—answering only to Congress, and by extension, the people.

Congress

Congress makes me want to throw a chair. Specifically, the spectacle of elected officials complaining they cannot accomplish anything while sitting on powers they refuse to use.

Article I, Section V. Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings. They could declare the absence of a quorum right now. They could bring the entire legislative circus to a grinding halt and force a reckoning. They do not because they are comfortable. Because chaos threatens their reelection funding. Because actually wielding power is riskier than pretending to be powerless.

I want to watch them try it once. Just once. Invoke the quorum rule, let the cameras roll, and show the American people exactly what happens when you stop playing theater and start playing hardball. It would be messy. It would be glorious. And it would remind everyone that the rules are not the problem—the cowardice of the people charged with using them is.

Public Meetings

And then there are public meetings. People accept time constraints on public comment like it is normal. It is not normal. The Constitution puts no time limit on speech. Show up to the meetings and speak forever. Grind them to a halt until they provide transparency on where the money is going. We all know the game: “$150,000 for renovating the courthouse lobby.” Where is that $150K going? Last I checked, an accurate account of the receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time. Where is the accuracy?

Show up. Ask. Get thrown out. Get trespassed in mass. Show up to court. Clog the system. The system only works because people participate politely in their own exclusion. Stop being polite.

Voting

I vote. I vote in everything. I learn my candidates. I do not vote based on party, personality, or advertisement. I vote based on record, stated positions, and whether they have the spine to answer a direct question with a direct answer.

I believe everyone should vote. I also believe the current system makes informed voting nearly impossible—gerrymandered districts, corporate funding, media consolidation, short attention spans engineered by the platforms that profit from them. So yes, vote. But also fix the system that makes your vote feel like shouting into a well.

The Core of It

Most of our problems are not complicated. They are simple problems protected by complex systems designed to prevent their solution. Hunger is simple: feed people. Illness is simple: treat people. Ignorance is simple: teach people. Homelessness is simple: house people. The complexity is artificial—introduced by people who benefit from the problem persisting.

My politics are the politics of refusing to accept artificial complexity as an excuse. Ask why. Keep asking. When someone says “that is just how things are,” ask who benefits from them being that way. When someone says “it is too expensive,” ask what we are currently spending money on instead. When someone says “it is not realistic,” ask whose reality they are protecting.

That is what a civil socratic epistemologist does. We do not have all the answers. We simply refuse to stop asking the questions.

“It is important to draw wisdom from many different places. If you take it from only one place, it becomes rigid and stale.”

— General Iroh