Welcome to No Neutral Ground! I assume you are here because you have some idea of what I do, but I am still getting used to the idea that anyone may care about what I have to write, so however you found yourself here, allow me to introduce myself.

I am an organizer and lawyer, and a freelance writer for outlets like Slate, The New Republic, Talking Points Memo, Balls & Strikes, and Liberal Currents. In my writing I focus on breaking down the mythos around institutions and other centers of power to reveal the ugly ideologies both undergirding the “normal” status quo and motivating the right-wing attacks on even that unjust system to reshape it in their twisted image.

I’m not going to lie, I am much better at destroying than creating. I want a world where people are first, power is shared, and all communities are cherished and supported. As a cishet white guy who grew up in the suburbs, I shouldn’t be anywhere near the controls when it comes to actually creating that community—I simply do not have the perspective needed. There are amazing organizers and thinkers with the study, dedication, and lived experience to build the world we need, and I will follow wherever they lead.

What I can do is use my position of relative privilege to highlight the lies that are fundamental to our politics and how they are propagated and reinforced in support of existing power structures and right wing movements. I’m not the one building a better world or even the one crashing down the gates of the old one; I’m just a guy inside the gates who hopes that if I keep flipping switches, more people like me will do the same, and together we can open enough of the gates that the people on the outside can break through so that we can all tear this shit down together.

In addition to my legal training and organizing experience, I bring my own experience to my writing, to the point of probably oversharing sometimes, but I only started sharing after seeing others do the same, so I’m not going to stop anytime soon. These issues do not come up explicitly all that often, but they color my perspective in ways that I would not change.

I was sexually assaulted by a priest when I was six years old. I never told a soul or even acknowledged it to myself until I was in my mid-thirties, and I never felt safe in personal relationships for most of my life. I did everything I was expected to because I believed deep down that there was something bad and broken inside of me. Eventually I couldn’t deal anymore. I dropped out of college to join the Army airborne infantry, not realizing it but hoping I would die. Having grown up with a cop dad and wanting to do the “right” things, I thought that this might at least give my death meaning.

I came back from Iraq with a promotion and a team of soldiers to lead, and also combat-related PTSD to go with the c-PTSD I came in with. I almost killed myself, went AWOL for a bit, and got kicked out with a less-than-honorable discharge. I went back to college and got a degree in chemistry because I was good at it, even though I didn’t like lab work. I then made the amazing decision to do lab research full-time in a PhD program, where I worked in a structural biology lab characterizing protein structures. The content of the work was interesting, but again, I was a terrible scientist. I left after almost six years with just my Masters.

The good news is that in my off-time, I started organizing veterans around access to benefits. It started as an effort to expand access to veterans with less-than-honorable discharges, which disparately impact veterans based on race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability. Through a class action lawsuit, we got the access I needed and new reviews for tens of thousands of others, and through legislation, we changed eligibility standards to make access easier. The campaign grew to include many issues affecting marginalized veterans and made me want to do justice work full time.

So I went to law school (ha), and what I found was yet another system designed to prop up those already in power and extract from everyone else. I got involved in organizing campaigns on campus and in the community, working on racial justice, housing access, and judicial reform. I graduated from law school but never did become a “real” lawyer. Now while I work with the People’s Parity Project to organize lawyers and law students toward a legal profession that actually works for the people, I write on the side about how these experiences have colored my perception of law, politics, and power.

Along the way, my maladaptive coping to my trauma led me to almost destroy my marriage multiple times, and I am so grateful for my partner’s support and for our commitment to build a better life together for ourselves despite our baggage. I am especially proud of our four children, who we have the privilege to homeschool in community with an amazing progressive co-op and a wilderness/mindfulness school (you will likely see a lot of writing about right-wing “parental rights” extremism here—we see a lot of it).

I hope that all of this and a genuine desire to understand other people and be in community will make some of this writing valuable. If you are interested, go ahead and subscribe, and you can probably count on at least one article per week (more if my paid work isn’t being picked up 😉). In the meantime, hang in there and hold tight to your people. Community is everything.