issues

We’re standing on the edge of losing rule of law in this country, if it isn’t gone already. The Trump Regime has deployed an unaccountable army of secret police into our communities who didn’t ask for them and don’t want them there. They are disappearing people to a foreign concentration camp and have begun to physically assault Democratic lawmakers.

Let me be clear: If the Federal Government won’t follow its own laws, then Law no longer exists in this country. There is only rule through terror and force. Small-minded people with no concept of community or government might be ok with that, but I am not.

The Trump Regime is ruling like they don’t expect the Democratic Party to ever be in power again. Like they don’t intend to ever face an election again in this country. The so-called “constitutional conservatives” have proven that they were lying about their principles and show us that they’re just Racists who can Read.

We need to make a change to oppose this rising storm of tyranny. We cannot continue on with those who have sat in power for 30 years while fascism brewed under their watch. We cannot continue on with a party apparatus that thinks they can somehow bring back the 1990s if they ignore progressives hard enough.

I will be clear: the first thing a new Democratic Administration must do is to abolish the DHS. Every 2004 Lib who told us that it would become an unaccountable gestapo has been proven right. This fascist cancer growing at the heart of our republic must be destroyed, and all those who worked there to undermine our constitution must be punished to the fullest extent of the law and never allowed near any kind of political power ever again.

If elected, my first priority will be preserving the biosphere of the only habitable planet in the known universe. Unlike all of the visionless sellouts in Washington who get led around by the nose with lobbyist money, I know what my purpose on this Earth is. I’m here to protect our environment and prevent the greatest tragedy in history or to die trying.

Right now, atmospheric carbon is further from normal than the last ice age was. We’re about an ice age and a half above the normal amount of insulation in our atmosphere. That is a death sentence. That means that it will be too warm for the enzymes in corn to work in the middle part of the US by the end of the century. That means that someone with nukes is going to run out of fresh water sometime in the middle of this century.

We need to treat this situation like an emergency because it is one. If you were born after 1985, you probably won’t retire because of climate change. If you just had a kid, they might get a nuclear warhead dropped on their head when they’re about my age. Climate Change breaks M.A.D. There’s no reason not to use your nukes to conquer some livable territory if your existing land is uninhabitable. Add in authoritarian governments on the rise, and we have all the ingredients ready to decarbonize the world economy via a 90 minute thermonuclear exchange.

There isn’t a 2100 where we still have a fossil fuel industry. We’ll either transition away from it over the next 30 years with sensible economic policy, or we’ll do it all at once. If I seem a little crazed or cynical at times, it’s because I’ve had to come to terms with all this in order to be a productive member of society.

Fortunately, we still have time to stop this, we know we can do things on this scale, and we know it’s usually really good for the country when we do. We need somewhere between an Apollo Program to a WW2 level of effort to fix this problem, and it’s going to be an excellent opportunity to fix a bunch of other problems while we’re in a transition period and the inertia to change is lower.

We’re told a lot of stuff about how our economic system is supposed to work on paper. How businesses are supposed to make products to meet consumer demand, how a worker does a job to fill some roll in society, how the market is supposed to be a tool we use to work together more efficiently.

That is not the world we live in. Instead of being a tool we use, the market has become a thing we worship. When we learn economics, we’re taught about the producer and the customer, but they don’t talk about the shareholder who can and will sue the producer if they don’t do everything they can to fleece the customer while providing a low quality product.

Our overly-financialized economy is choking the life out of the American worker. No longer is it enough for a business to make a profit, now if something doesn’t create 12 millionaires it apparently just isn’t worth doing. This is why you only see “luxury” housing being built. A profit could still be made off of more affordable housing units, but because it isn’t the most profitable option available, banks and financiers will always choose to build fewer modest houses and more mcmansions, more unaffordable glass towers instead of practical apartment blocks.

This is how the big lie of Reaganomics ruined our nation. The fact is that a high top marginal tax rate discourages extreme rent-seeking, and low taxes on immense profit makes such behavior more desirable. We’ve been told over and over that low taxes will bring jobs back to America, when the opposite is true. Reagan, Bush, Trump, all of them cut taxes, and manufacturing suffered uner all of them. That’s because it doesn’t make sense to outsource a job if the government is just going to tax the profits, but it sure does when you allow and encourage extreme profit margins.

We need to remember that the economy exists to serve the needs of the people, not the other way around. Right now, we’re all diminished by the capital-over-people mindset where we have to make the main purpose of our lives justifying our existence to this unfeeling machine we’ve built. We all know the system we’ve got now can’t last. We all know that it’s making us miserable. We need people in Washington who aren’t afraid to try something different.

I’m running a campaign that completely rejects the notion that we have to choose between environmental quality and jobs for our workers.

We're going to have to build our way out of the carbon crisis, and that's going to mean a lot of jobs for everyday americans.  Every welder, electrician, pipefitter, and construction worker in this country will have overtime every week if they want it.  It means thousands of miles of new transmission infrastructure, millions of housing units located close to where people work and play, and restarting the energy sector growth that made the American Middle class great. 

It isn't a coincidence that the purchasing power of the median American worker stopped growing in the 1970s when the fossil fuel industry failed to keep up and collapsed the economy with multiple oil shocks.  It also isn't a coincidence that median purchasing power started growing again in the 2010s when renewables and fracking both got good at the same time.  We're actually destroying our planet for a laughably small amount of energy. 

Imagine if we burned all the fossil fuels in the United States, every bit of coal, oil, and gas we have, and how much energy that would release.  How long would the sun have to shine on the US to give us that same amount of energy?  A year?  Ten years?  A Century?  Nope.  The answer is five and a half hours.  It's not going to be an easy fix, but in the long term we're looking at essentially limitless growth in the energy sector and the return of the American Middle Class.

But we’re not doing that right now, and why is that? It is because our government has been captured by fossil fuel interests who want to get full use out of their $2 trillion in oil infrastructure to pull $13 trillion of old dead gunk out of the ground so we buy it and burn it. And at the end, we’ll have no energy and will have to replace hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of ecosystem services we used to get for free.

There is no reason for people to suffer from preventable disease in the richest country on this planet. The fact of the matter is that we pay more for healthcare in the US for worse outcomes than we see in more mature, responsible nations with socialized healthcare programs. This is true on both a national spending level, and on an individual home finance level.

Healthcare is not a consumer good. If I get hit by a car, I can’t shop around and negotiate price while fluids pool in my skull and my lungs collapse. I’m going to be minding my own business one minute, and waking up with a $100,000 bill the next.

The health insurance business model is a Ponzi scheme. For every other kind of insurance, there is a decent chance that your policy will never be paid out. Most houses don’t burn down, most cars don’t crash, and thankfully most life insurance policies are never cashed in. But for healthcare, everyone is guaranteed to need to take out what they put into the system. Everyone gets sick, eventually fatally so. The only way the insurance model makes money off of healthcare is by giving back less to the average person than they put in, by denying them necessary care for shareholder profits.

The insurance model does not train doctors. It does not invest in R&D for new medicine. It does not manufacture medical devices. It does not exist to serve us. It exists to extract value from us when we are at our most vulnerable.

Our politicians have sold us out to this system because it generates enormous shareholder profits. They enshrined the private insurance model as national law in 2010 and decided that was enough. They do not advocate for a public option because they haven’t felt healthcare insecurity since they were elected, and probably never did before that either.

If elected, I will be an advocate for the United States to join the civilized world in having a national healthcare program. I will stand up to the health insurance/big-pharma industrial complex. I will be someone who can say that the problem with our healthcare system is not the doctors and scientists who’ve dedicated their lives to incredibly stressful careers to help others. The problem is the legion of empty-suit middle men who see a sick person and decide to exploit them.

I would like to congratulate the Republican Party for successfully destroying public education in this country. Once again, people are dumb enough to consistently vote for them.

Education has lost its way in this country. Working as a substitute teacher for Aurora Public Schools has been one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life. I’ve met 4th graders who can’t read and 6th graders who won’t read. I’ve also met incredibly smart kids who will probably go on to be more successful than me. I’ve met teachers with roommates, and have friends who left teaching due to the stress and low pay.

The fact of the matter is, we don’t value education enough in this country. Kids won’t pay attention if they don’t think that learning can help them. They won’t respect their teachers if they know society doesn’t value them. And they certainly won’t go to college if they think it’s a scam.

And is college a scam? I think it depends on what you’re studying and what you want out of it. If you just want a university education so you can be a more knowledgeable, better-rounded person, then it still does that just fine. If you expect any degree to be an instant job unlock slip, then you will probably be disappointed.

The tuition model that has functionally turned every college into a for-profit institution plays a big part in that. It means that schools have every incentive to increase attendance, no matter what the results are on quality of education or the utility of the degrees they grant. We need to return to the publicly-funded university model that created the internet, put men on the moon, and invented the modern world as we know it. We need to reign in wasteful spending at universities if we want to do so without breaking the bank.

And we need to do something to reduce the burden carried by those of us who invested in ourselves and funded our education with student loans. Much has been said by those who want to forgive student debt, and much more has been said by those who don’t. Naturally, I favor student loan forgiveness, but I also have an additional proposition: Make all student loan payments tax deductible, interest and principle. Work-related education expenses are 100% deductible for businesses, why shouldn’t the same be true for people?

In 2022, I watched as Starbucks systematically under-scheduled their workers to keep us poor, punished baristas who worked overtime, and fired the manager who was attempting to unionize our store. Again, illegal, and again, unpunished due to our pay-to-win legal system.

In 2023, I was wrongfully fired from my job in the air emissions testing industry when I was subject to whistleblower retaliation by the oil industry. I learned very quickly that our so-called “worker protection” laws aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, as you need a lawyer to take your case for free for those laws to be enforced.

And now in 2025, the University of Denver has chosen to fire all of its research assistants due to the Trump Regime’s illegal seizure of federal funds. I’ve done the math, their endowment could pay our wages for 500 years. But no, DU would rather sit on its dragon hoard than be an institution that supports research and values knowledge.

In every case, what we needed was a Union. It is not a coincidence that the time when American workers earned the largest share of their productivity was when we had the highest union membership.

The only group of people to ever limit the power of the world economic elite at any point in human history were the American Workers. We told them “No, we won’t work for starvation wages in death-trap factories” in the progressive era. We told them “No, we will not starve to death because you mismanaged the economy” with the New Deal. And then we told them “No, you cannot shut someone out of a job because of the color of their skin” in the Civil Rights movement.

And they have never forgiven us for that. Every move by political conservatives for the last 60 years has been to cut our middle class at the knees so that we turn on each other. They want us to hate the immigrant, the refugee, the gay man, the trans woman. They want us looking anywhere but their hoard of treasure for why we can’t get by anymore.

Unfortunately, it’s working. We need to provide a new message to workers if we want them to come back to our party. We have to tell them that we value them more than billionaire political donors, and we need someone who has had to apply for jobs at some time in the last 30 years to say it.

We have enabled a crime without name in Palestine. There is no better example of the establishment’s Islamophobic 9/11 revenge fantasy. No amount of dead Muslims will ever turn back the clock and make our career politicians feel safe like they did in the 1990s. We are not one bombing campaign away from peace in the middle east.

I reject the false dichotomy that the establishment has imposed on the American people that the only options are to either give the Netanyahu government a blank check, or to be an anti-Semitic terrorist. Of course nations have a right to defend themselves against aggression and the US should defend our allies.  We can defend Israel without giving them a blank check.  We can maintain a security guarantee without subcontracting it to a foreign military. 

Anyone with eyes and a brain can tell that this defensive counterinsurgency war turned into a war of conquest and extermination some time ago.  It's just bad policy on every level.  Morally, it is completely inexcusable.  Strategically, we're giving up the whole map for one tile.  And Electorally, we're pissing off the people that should be the party base in order to pander to imaginary centrists who don't exist.  If it didn't matter, then why did the right fund a bunch of ads in swing states about it?

And now, we see that carrying water for the Islamophobia-as-policy cabal has enabled the Trump Regime’s violent crackdown against universities, students, teachers, and anyone they deem not supportive enough of their genocidal policies.

We need to have this conversation. If we do not, the Democratic Party is finished. I have a lot of liberal and progressive friends who will never vote for Democrats again if the party does not make a hard switch. It may sound harsh, but having your signature on the checks paying for a war of extermination is a fireable offense in my Democratic Party.

If you want justice for the people of Palestine, vote for me in the 2026 Democratic Primary. You can flip Denver from a “yes" vote for endless war in the middle east, to a “no” vote for wasting your taxpayer money funding a war of conquest and extermination. And if I ever sway from that view, I want you to vote me out.

UPDATE: And now we find ourselves on the precipice of war with Iran because we have taken every action to enable Israel and escalate the conflict. And the Netanyahu government has the gall to call up the United States and order us to carry out their war of regional domination for them. These are not the behaviors of an ally to a nation that is supposed to stand for peaceful coexistence and self determination. We must end our policy of blank-check imperial diplomacy. If our leaders will not do so, and continue to sleep-walk towards global war, they must be replaced.

We’ve been told time and again that the reason we have to spend so much money on our military is that we need a large standing army in case Moscow tries it. Well, now Moscow is trying it, and our politicians have utterly failed to provide Ukraine with the support it needs. In fact, they have played into Moscow’s hands by pursuing a maximalist foreign policy in the middle east and collapsing their political power, just as Vladimir Putin planned.

Ukraine must win this war. We need to abandon our bad foreign policy so we can double down on the areas where we’re in alignment with our allies and honoring the principles of self-determination that so many Americans have fought and died for. In my opinion, Ukraine should be supplied with everything they desire short of nuclear weapons and our most advanced aircraft. The slow-drip of aid we are giving them is a cruel policy which will maximize the amount of human lives lost during this unjust invasion.

This is a wakeup call that our politicians have been hitting snooze on for three years. Unfortunately, we are not at the end of history and great power conflict is still very much on the table. We’ve been reminded that our foreign policy and our defense budget exist to stand against expansionist empires like the old USSR or today’s Russia, not to play world-police in the sandbox.