Proud to be American

I just watched USA win hockey gold and want to reflect on patriotism.

The Academy vs Courthouse Steps

When I was a graduate student at UF, I didn’t set out to become a “politics and religion” guy. I set out to restart a student group that had gone dormant, because it felt unhealthy—intellectually and civically—to let “religion” be treated as the default, unquestioned atmosphere.

Inscrutable AI, Deep Math, & A Legitimacy Problem

This morning I ran into a Rousseau quote that felt like it had been smuggled out of a sci-fi novel.

Theonomy Goes Mainstream

The phrase Christian nationalism is having one of those weeks where it stops being an abstract grad-seminar category and becomes a live description of power.

Tariff Man Faces Reality Check

Today’s Supreme Court ruling is the kind of event that forces a blunt question: do we believe in the Constitution as a real governing framework, or as a ceremonial prop we invoke when it flatters our side?

Memo to the DNC

If Democrats want to exploit the openings Republicans have left, they can’t do it with a vibes-only pitch about “normalcy.” I say that as someone who voted for George W. Bush twice and, then as now, found the old conservative catechism genuinely persuasive: local control, constitutional restraint, civil liberties, sober budgets, personal moral leadership. Whatever else “conservative” meant in the 1980s and 1990s, it was at least marketed as a philosophy of limits—an argument that power should be hemmed in by law, custom, and conscience.

Dark Apex Politics

This is not a campaign argument or a psychological critique. It’s a systems diagnosis: what happens to politics when friction is removed. The moral failure at issue here isn’t ideological; it’s geometric. Individuals matter less than the curvature they impose on the moral field.

Hope & Change vs MAGA

“Hope and change” and “Make America Great Again” are often treated as dueling policy visions, but that framing misses what they actually are. They’re not governing programs so much as identity postures—two different ways of relating to change inside a complex society that can no longer pretend it has a final form.

Moral Signaling vs Moral Perception

One of the most persistent moral confusions of modern life is the belief that being informed is the same as being morally awake. We speak as though exposure to the right facts, narratives, or injustices automatically sharpens ethical vision. But information and moral perception are not merely different—they often work at cross-purposes.

This confusion is not accidental. It is structurally produced.

Cost, Coherence, and Rotational Literacy

I don’t write because I have something to say. That’s the explanation people expect, and it’s not wrong, exactly—but it’s anemic. I write because not writing causes my perceptions to atrophy. Writing, for me, isn’t output. It’s maintenance. Its teleology is formative, not expressive. When I stop doing it for long enough, I can feel the degradation: distinctions blur, intuitions lose calibration, moral judgments flatten into slogans. Writing is a non-negotiable discipline because it preserves the conditions under which perception remains trustworthy. 

Manly Moral Geometry

Time to talk about masculinity without culture-war fog, nostalgia, or self-help slogans. Not traits. Not vibes. Orientation.

Masculinity, at its core, is how agency bears cost under constraint. Not dominance. Not stoicism. Not confidence. It’s where power bends when suffering enters the system.