“[the] idea of a guaranteed up-front bond from corporations has been inserted into the data center bill that should see floor action this week.”

Carl’s in Edinburgh right now, but he provided a video update for our MidwesTurn followers:

You can watch Carl’s data center testimony, and read some of his proposals for equitable adoption of this new technology, by visiting our pinned post. And while you’re here, please click over to DJ’s article on the opportunities presented by the growing resistance to private equity-backed hyperscale data centers:

The Rooster

Data centers are a generational Democratic opportunity in rural Ohio

The Rooster is still passing the hat for the Freedom Defense Fund for legal fees attached to last week’s arrest for telecommunications harassment constitutionally protected free speech…

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6 days ago · 32 likes · 4 comments · D.J. Byrnes

We will continue to bring you updates on the progress of legislation regarding data center construction, as well as in-depth stories on the impacts of these projects on our local communities.

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Farmers, teachers, welders, veterans, doctors, philosophers, mothers and fathers, activists, young, old, the over educated and undereducated alike all feel this moment in our history as distinctly apathetic to the realities of human existence, if not outright antagonistic to those realities. We are demanding an explanation now, at this bottleneck of infrastructural development which the technology titans, who are leading us into this not-so-bright future, rely on to power its progress.

Humans are not in the way of development. The citizens of Ohio are not the problem. Our concerns about the future of our environment, communities, and economy should not be ignored. The demands made by data center property developers and their end-users make it clear that they do not consider the environment we occupy, its needs, our place in it and how we leave it to our children, as important as their profits and bottom line.

I have personally coordinated protest efforts in the Village of Perry for months. I have attended meetings in Portage County, where property developers and tech company representatives claimed questions would be answered, only to watch residents leave angrier than they were when they showed up.

I’ve spoken to city managers, council members, trustees, county commissioners and state reps who all feel a combination of insulted, misled, confused and frustrated with the way investors and trillion-dollar industries can sequentially take full advantage of our planning processes at a local level, while manipulating governing bodies at the state and federal level to ban referendums, initiatives and moratoriums.

This leaves local officials with a choice to lose their right to represent their communities through censure, or lose their seat at the ballot box.

Some of these situations are the results of bad-faith property purchase agreements that leave municipalities who want to see economic development in their communities outgunned at the negotiation table. Some end up with purchase agreements with no cap on renumerations if the community rejects zoning plans, environmental plans, or the tax abatements themselves.

Residents wake up to news that their local officials signed non-disclosure agreements, and are now legally bound not to share the process or the terms and conditions with their constituents until the contract is signed, and wet ink binds their community’s future to a technology that no one is willing to explain or, in most cases, which no one even understands themselves.

These projects are all backed by private equity investors that see a chance to speculate wildly on the next big thing. In the last ten years, most speculations have been theoretical, happening in the cloud or “on-line.” Today, we find the field for speculation is bursting into our communities and the players pushing these speculative investments already have a robust network of lobbyists, PR firms, consultants and lawyers to manipulate national policy environments. They have been doing it for decades—enriching themselves by deregulating governing agencies and calling it “prosperity.” Now they are aiming these engines of manipulation at local townships, villages and municipalities, and those local governments feel abandoned and outgunned.

The easiest way to see the truth in this new technological ecosystem is by looking at the details of these proposed projects. When these companies claim “there won’t be any environmental impact,” it’s proof that their specialists know environmental claims made in Ohio will only be enforceable after the project is completed, and if there is a negative impact.

Early data centers used ground water to cool their GPU processing banks in open loop systems. Now, every proposal to communities magically showcases “closed loop cooling systems” that will use only thousands of gallons of water a day, instead of hundreds of thousands. However, when permits are requested, the request becomes half-a-million gallons per day, as was the case in the Village of Perry. That is more water than a midscale brewery would use to make a product that is 95% water.

The public relations approach these companies follow is to “tell them what they want to hear.” These developers know that once trucks are on site, materials are in the flat, and the building trades have won their bids, the local governments will have to issue a variance for any changes to the plans they already forced through the zoning process. They know how the system works—the property developer will get what they want, and the only losers are the people naïve enough to believe that the developers were ever going to spend enough money to do it the right way.

The second claim that pops up in every proposal is the impressive amount of jobs these data centers will create. These data centers are sold as the epitome of technological efficiency for processing raw data collected through surveillance of our social media accounts, patterns of our consumer behavior, and data from the constantly monitoring technology that is infecting our lives in a suffocating way.

The entire ecosystem is designed to take things that used to just be human nature, aspects of our daily lives that were routine, and collect them, analyze them, and figure out a way to use that data to get us to pay for things that we used to exchange for free, as part of our way of life. It is a technological wonder that is designed to take our lives, and even our souls, turn them into commodified units, and process that data into new ways to make us pay for more things, and add fees to aspects of our lives that never used to cost us anything.

So, at its simplest, a data center is a manufacturing facility for data. Raw material comes in, it’s processed, and a finished product comes out, to be sold or traded by tech companies so they can enrich themselves off our behavior.

It is completely asinine to think that these facilities need 200 employees to operate them. They are designed to eliminate jobs, and to turn us into indebted consumers with no way to make a living like we used to.

Why would a data center employ 200 people? It’s always 200 people, in every presentation. In Perry, Shalersville, Conneaut, Slavic Village, it is always 200 people—because 200 people is enough to add to the tax base, but not enough to overwhelm a local school district. It’s a safe, non-threating number made up by consultants who are paid to come up with the best strategy to get approval for a project in a small community, without too many questions.

The truth is, when that data center is built, it will employ about a dozen full-time employees, if that.

No one will be held accountable when the promises being made fail to come true.

The consultants and lawyers and representatives for the companies behind these projects will change at every step of the process.

The team that negotiates the sale, the team that asks for approvals, the team that asks for the abatements, and the team that shows up to build the thing won’t ever be the same.

No one will be held accountable when the promises are never fulfilled, and the long-term benefits will never materialize, because these are tech advancements that change in months, not decades. Data centers need to be built NOW because the IPO craze is about to start, and no one wants to miss at their chance to speculate and win big before it all implodes and leaves more damage than a nuclear reactor meltdown.

Local and state authorities need to demand guarantees from these companies for the promises, made in the form of cash.

They need to demand these in the form of bonds that are paid to local governments and held for the projected period of time over which developers claim the projects will benefit our communities.

They come into our townships, villages, small towns, and big cities and tell us they will bring in hundreds of millions of dollars over 31 years of operation, when we all know the “groundbreaking” technology that fills those buildings will likely fit in a handheld device in less than twenty years.

If they want access to our water, our electricity, our land, and our public infrastructure, and they are representing industries that brag about their trillion-dollar CEOs and history-making initial public offerings, then they can afford to pay us, too. There is no reason why they can’t give us financial, environmental, and employment guarantees, and generously contribute to our tax base.

If the only thing making their valuations so historic is that they need to extort our resources from us at a local level, then what valuation do they really have in the end?

It’s time to stop letting these companies take over our communities and leave nothing behind but a financial and environmental crater where farmland, schools, roads, and peace used to be.

We are standing up for our communities. We only ask—to our local, state and federal officials—that you stand with us.

One destination on that road show of American industrial production was not a disappointment. It also wasn’t necessarily on the list of contacts that Mike Ripich brought to our little adventure. I first heard about Last Arrow Manufacturing when I was working on automation solutions for the fabrication of fermentation vessels via Mike’s white metal’s division. White metals, in case you don’t know, is a cool way of saying corrosion resistant metals. Zinc alloys that most people would colloquially refer to as “stainless steel”, but that also include other high-end metals like titanium, Inconel, and AL 6XN. I loved working with Mike and learning about the steel industry for the simple reason that it wasn’t supposed to exist anymore. When I was a kid, despite union steel workers sitting in front of Congress pleading for protections and government programs to save American steel, LTV Steel closed operations in Cleveland. I remember an emotional US Rep. Dennis Kucinich lamenting the death of the last great American steel town. “The Rust Belt” was the preferred name for the area of America where I grew up. Springsteen songs about industrial decay and the closure of the last union halls would testify in pop culture that America’s ability to produce steel, and eventually anything else, was declared dead. The meaning for a kid from the Rust Belt to travel the world and return to North East Ohio and work in steel fabrication in Post Covid America was not unlike that moment in Jurassic Park when you first see living dinosaurs in the wild.

Automation is a dirty word in labor circles. It’s assumed to be a jobs killer. A tool of capital to crush labor and lower costs. More realistically, automation, as a production asset, is intensely limited, uncreative and only really excels in defined spaces, or “closed cells”. “AI” will be the next thing that will scare the shit out of people that don’t understand the production of things, but for now that title is still held by the boogie man of automation. When you do due diligence on spending money on automation, the reality is that you can do a very limited set of simple things in repetition with closed cell automation, but the minute you need to make decisions on the fly, make adjustments due to inconsistent inputs or simply want to change something, automation is more a set of hand cuffs than popular opinion understands. If something changes, the entire system needs to be reprogrammed. A qualified software engineer, that bills by the hour, needs to gain remote access and rewrite your programs, or you need to hire a human being in house to do that. I was learning this in real time as Mike and I tackled the problem of trying to lower costs on American made brewery equipment while also improving the fabrication capabilities of some of his other divisions. Most of our dimensions were too big and the closed cells would need to be custom designed to the larger specifications, exponentially raising the cost and lowering the probability that it would ever really save you money.

I was becoming a little frustrated about the probability of finding a way to compete with subsidized Chinese competitors, especially when I didn’t have unlimited cheap labor to throw at the problem. Then someone recommended that I contact Lincoln Electric and talk to them about their co-robotics program. Co-robotics? Like Robocop? Hells yeah, Carl, just like Robocop. I was intrigued and scheduled a meeting with their head of sales in the Fanuc/Lincoln Electric robotics division. The salesman was a salesman, he said things that couldn’t possibly be true, but that sounded great. “We have clients that regularly beat Chinese job shops on parts that have 500+ unique weld seams.” When you “torch metal” or “lay a seam” it means you are using electricity and a welding wire to create a contact environment where melted media is laid down, or literally “drawn” into voids left into the metal, called bevels, to create areas where two edges can be “welded” together.

(Cartoons teach kids that welding is a flame and the assumption that the metal is being melted together somehow by a directed torch. Cartoons are often wrong. What you are actually doing in most welding environments is filling voids designed into the metal’s edges to create new mass via the melting of a wire media that is delivered at the point of contact. There are other kinds of welding that use fusion, but for the most part you are adding metal to create a bond. It is fascinating. I hope my son learns to weld. I also hope he gets a PhD and creates the art that is inside his heart. I never did any of those three, but there is a future in my mind where every American youth can learn all three without choosing a side.)

The biggest complaint that welding students have is the heat. The torch head produces an insane amount of energy in order to melt the wire and fuse it in the void and leave a weld seam behind. Co-robotics use interactive robotic arms, cameras and interactive operating systems to let a human operator weld more efficient seams, from farther away, in a faster period.

Salesmen being salesmen, they want you to buy something. They would convince you of that things ability to solve world hunger and create world peace if they knew their commission would clear before you realized you bought a bona fide piece of junk. If you need any convincing that sales is a dark art, watch anything on social media by “executive coaches” in the sales industry. You’ll want to take a shower with hydrogen peroxide after. I wasn’t in the metals industry for long at this point, but I was skeptical and demanded to talk to a reference. The salesman didn’t bat an eye and said, “you need to talk to Matt B. at Last Arrow Manufacturing.” Mike and I had been trying to solve this problem for the better part of a year at that point and so I jumped at the chance to meet anyone who was already using equipment in the fabrication space that made them competitive against Chinese peers. I got Matt B.’s contact information and texted him later that day. He was happy to have us come by. Like an idiot, I asked him where he was located. Matt B. responded, “across the street from your white metals division.” We had built two prototype tanks, traveled across the country meeting with component suppliers, ran model after model and the answer was about two football fields away.

When I first visited Last Arrow MFG I found Matt’s arrogance to be refreshing. Politics are what they are, but people who truly love America and want to see us regrow our ability to manufacture physical things, will always have my attention. Matt’s one of those people. The first time we had lunch I picked him up at his shop and we went into Wooster, OH. On the way back he asked me to swing by the gun shop to pick up a rifle that was being repaired. I laughed and said sure. When we walked in the first thing I saw was a rack of t-shirts sporting, “January 6^th was a riot!” and “Let’s Go Brandon” merch. The best way to understand the other side is to walk into a place that makes you uncomfortable and then try and understand its appeal.

“I regularly out bid Chinese jobs shops.” was not something I expected to hear after all the previous visits had depressed me so much. It was music to my ears. Matt told me a dozen times that, “…with one co-bot I can increase the efficiency of one man by about 350% with minimal investment in training.” His turnover reduced for new operators because the tech could stand up to ten feet away and be completely unaffected by the heat. He invested in two from day one because if he had capital sunk into two, he would be twice as likely to successfully deploy the equipment without just selling it, unused, to someone else a year later. Within six months he had six co-bots and as of this writing I assume he has at least fifty.

Co-robotics in welding is ONE example of next generation technology that is available for ONE industry that is wildly under-utilized across the American market. There are thousands of “like” examples in just about every manufacturing and production environment across America. Why? Because there is risk inherent in “change” and no one wants to overexpose themselves to risk when they are being told that America can’t win anyway. Industries buy production equipment (assets) generationally. If you have assets that haven’t depreciated fully yet than you are likely to just continue using the old equipment and making little to no adjustments in how you operate your business. This is how manufacturing dies.

A good example is the aluminum can production industry. Aluminum cans used for beverages are produced or “punched” by the millions and are preprinted (think a can of regular Coca Cola that is painted offset directly on the can vs. a can of hipster dufus craft beer that has a paper label on it) at a minimum order quantity (MOQ) of 200,000 cans per design. Why is the MOQ for preprinted cans so high? It’s because the printer is inline and was designed to print cans for Coke, Budweiser and Miller. Turning the printer on, counting to thirty, and turning it off can usually print about 5,000 cans. Most of America’s largest can producers are located within a stone’s throw from canning plants for one of those three brands. America’s production assets were designed and implemented when we were of the mindset that all we needed was one or two things for as cheap as possible. The problem is that the consumer economy changed at some point and Americans decided they preferred variety over low margin, high output mass market brands. Consumer change presents a challenge because those changes aren’t always predicted by the mass market brand owners or the owners of the means of production. Sometimes little, agile creative brands start a trend and force the mass output production assets to adapt and offer smaller MOQ’s and more flexibility for a lot of smaller customers, instead of just negotiating with a handful of mass producers. The result has been the investment in smaller MOQ digital can printers all over America that can take blank cans from the can producers and meet the needs of the newest generation of brands.

Now replace cans with cars, replace cars with TVs, replace TVs with tennis balls, your economy is hardwired to the amount of capital you have that is willing to finance the replacement of old equipment with newer, more efficient, production assetts. The market demand doesn’t always keep up with the means of production’s ability to adapt. Or the market is often choked by the rigidity of production. The result can be that foreign markets who haven’t had their first generation of production asset investment yet, can find a friend in their own government who is willing to finance that market’s ability to leap frog a slow, rigid, competitor like Europe or America. Competition is good, especially when money is cheap.

The Japanese handed Detroit their lunch because Detroit invested in means of production and management systems once and refused to adapt to compete with the next generation of car manufacturers.

Televisions used to be made in America until the technology started advancing too quickly and the industrial base needed to keep up with the advancements had already been offshored to China to produce computers and other consumer electronics. The equipment itself needed to build the new technology was easier to build in places like Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China. But China has run away with the television manufacturing sector because the National Development and Reform Committee will always issue cheap capital to upgrade production assets if it means high employment and a return on that capital in the form of tax revenue to meet the demands of a market that it assumes will never stop buying new TVs.

Tennis balls aren’t even made in China anymore. They have moved from America to China, China to Vietnam, and Vietnam to India. Most are hand made using equipment that keeps being sold from one old producer to the next new producer.

All four of these things can be made in America more efficiently and cheaper against international competition. The only thing missing is the desire to make it and a willingness to finance the next generation’s means of production. Places like Last Arrow have already proven the concept that with the right approach to production efficiencies, even an archaic business like metal fabrication can out pace China on price and quality. Sometimes all you need to do is cut copy paste a good idea and add in a little bit of cheap money to achieve the next American industrial revolution.

Now let’s step into the reality of 2025 America. Republicans, god help them, are doing their best to cosplay as the party of blue collar Americans. Most republicans could give a shit about the working class, if they did than the tariffs would’ve been prefaced with a six month “Build and Make America” period. BAMA would provide low to no interest loans to any production or manufacturing investment that wanted to reshore jobs lost to overseas competitors. After the commissioning of next generation assets used to produce for markets identified by the “Department of BAMA (or, for those wanting to get cute, D-OBAMA)” as crucial to national security and American manufacturing health, the company would hold the note on those assets for a seven-year period paying interest only on the assets for seven years, if it was an interest baring note. If a basket of expertise, credit rating and good business designations are met then the note could be determined to be interest free. If a tax revenue threshold of XX was met within the first two years and maintained through the seventh year than the government would forgive the principle at the beginning of year eight. If the tax revenue minimums were not met the principle would be repaid over ten years with a nominal interest rate that would be set at between one percent minimum, and a maximum limit equal to the money market interest rate. Next generation production assets also work around the age old “government overreach” complaints from conservatives when it comes to environmental regulations and pollution standards. A policy that would support the commissioning and installation of new production assets would also provide capital to upgrade inefficient and energy wasting assets.

This system would flourish with or without the existence of tariffs, but in combination with tariffs it would achieve a net positive for the American economy based on the implicit desire to build things in America again.

When I returned to the United States during the first Covid 19 outbreak in China, all I saw was unmet potential. It really bothered me how pessimistic everyone in America was about America while America gave almost all of them the most comfortable lifestyle in the history of the world. I’ve come to view most of America as a sleeping giant, or more accurately, a comatose giant. The cause of the coma is comfort. We don’t feel an urgency, or, in some cases, we lack true desperation, and it seems we just kind of slip into this malaise that is only interrupted by our dissatisfaction with change or our revolt against being reminded that we’re actually in a better position than our ancestors. We get angry when we’re reminded that we should likely just keep perfecting this Union.

From an infrastructure and natural resource perspective, the Cleveland area won the lottery. We have freeway systems and roadways that were initially planned under the assumption that we would have a million residents in the city limits, a projection that didn’t assume the capital class’s multiple attempts to take industrial production behind the barn and put a bullet in its head. The book “Divided Highways” is a great read and touches on why cities like Cleveland have more miles of interstate in a couple of counties, than entire states have total. I’ve spent my entire life being told that Cleveland was dead, dying, over, a relic, a warning against reliance on industrial assets. It was a prelude to the death of America. It was in decay. Then I left. I traveled the world, witnessing the transformation of poverty into stability and the conversion of nothing into something.

I watched as China built the tallest “this”, or the longest “that” or the biggest “the other”. At first it was evidence of America being quickly surpassed, then I looked closer, eventually starting to build my own things, and I was reminded about the story of Mao Ze Dong anticipating his meeting with Nixon. His feeling of inadequacy and his excitement at finally getting to normalize relations with America were all based on the desire of one revolutionary to meet the generational representative of another country based on revolution. There was an anger in the top echelons of the Chinese Communist Party that America chose to rebuild Japan, the United States’ enemy during World War 2 and the geographic antagonist of China for half a millennia, rather than recognizing fellow revolutionaries and helping to rebuild China, their wartime ally, at that point now under the control of the CCP.

When your brother is a jerk, you want to beat him, but deep down you want him to just accept you and tell you that you are just as cool as he is. China’s economic development was robust, although likely misrepresented and exaggerated statistically, but it wasn’t really that unique. It was just the road map of most other developing countries as they transition to “developed”. Most notably, it resembled, to a T, the growth of the United States. Just like when a younger brother emulates the gate, style and even haircut of his older sibling. There was a lot of “look at what I can do!?!” vibes whenever China would finish their “Hoover Dam” or their “Golden Gate Bridge” and we continue to see it with their desire to land on the moon. What I witnessed in China was not an example that America was being surpassed as much as it was a screaming example that with the right focus and policy, an entire economy can lurch forward and achieve things that no one thought possible. Especially if you are trying to impress your bigger brother in the process.

The same thing is possible in the United States in 2025. I’ve felt it in my bones for five years. That feeling started to seep into my soul after my return from China in 2021. America is not done. We have a capability and foundation that would cost a country like China another couple of trillion dollars to acquire, build or emulate. The Chinese short-hand name for America is “Beautiful Kingdom”. No where else in the world do they have an ocean of sweet water all to themselves, (We share a couple with Canada, but Canada doesn’t claim any to itself). No where else in the world has a congruous, non-islandic, coast to coast expanse, soaked in the blood of conflict, oppression, failure, perseverance and hope. No where else in the world have more natural resources been held in reserve and conservation than entire other continents have in total. There is no other place that is built on the hope of self-determination and the experiment of choosing to co-exist.

My wife reminds me all the time that this experiment is a civil contract, that just happened to be executed on a pile of dirt and rocks and basins and ranges that can provide immense abundance. An abundance equal only to the hope of the people that, a majority of whom, put their lives on the line for the chance to make it here, or stay here, and try to find their dreams or their peace. Every other example of a system that “works” is not built on the desire to try, from scratch, something completely different. Scandinavia and most of Asia are insanely tribal places that, in most cases, having robust social services only because they reflect the desire to take care of those that look and act exactly like you. The UK is a mess that, historically, most of the UK doesn’t really want to belong to because it means being subjected to England and their sectarian class divisions and overall… Englishness. Europe is Europe. Cool to visit, but if you think America has prejudice, misogyny and racism, I can draw a straight line back to Europe from whence we inherited it and where it is still thriving.

Seeing America through her eyes, watching her at her naturalization ceremony and holding the little souvenir flag was one of the most emotional moments I’ve had in years. That unique American expression of acclimation and being folded into our national tapestry is something to be cherished, amplified and encouraged. Watching her experience also taught me that there is rejuvenation in taking risks and lurching yourself into the future.

As a result of being inspired by her, I took the chance to work in the steel industry in Cleveland, an industry that I spent my entire life believing was dead and buried, I wanted to put my gut on the line and try and push a small part of my America into the future. For two years I got to operate as an executive consultant to a metal fabricator’s fourth generation CEO. We tackled several problems together and I was able to visit peers in the industry and talk to their ownership and executive management about the future of American fabrication and manufacturing. What I found after a coast-to-coast tour of American steel fabricators was that most were not the cavalier and brave mindsets that we often assume would inhabit such an industry. I found a professional managerial class, void of Carnegies, Fricks or Rockefellers. Most were operating on a scarcity mindset and almost all had some sort of direct or shared trauma when it came to taking risks against foreign competitors. If it wasn’t Japanese steel dumping, it was Korean IP theft and if it wasn’t Korean IP theft it was most certainly just the word “China”.

I tend to find myself in very interesting rooms doing things that I can only assume haven’t been done before, but when I traveled America meeting the generational benefactors of the guilded age industrial revolutions, I often walked away confused and sad. Comments and conversations varied, but the main themes are as follows:

No one can beat China

China monopolized global white metal (zinc alloy and corrosion resistant metals like 300 and 400 series stainless, Inconel and titanium) fabrication

The Chinese government will supplement and subsidize any export focused manufacturing business

It’s pointless to compete with China

It’ll make you more money to just stay out of competition with China than you’ll ever make competing with them

This wasn’t one or two industrial concerns; this was an entire rolodex. I was shocked. I thought all titans of American industry read ‘The Art of War’ and at least understood the idea of strategic incursion, probing and theatrical feints. When asked, some even admitted that their entire mindset was based off quoting one (1) bid against a Chinese competitor and losing. ONE. Singular. That’s all it took to break the back of the American industrial system. A handful of losses to China when bidding small to moderate sized fabrication jobs. Boilers, telescopic cranes, mining equipment, truck rails, on the carbon steel side and then pressurized tanks, nautical corrosion resistant application for shipping vessels and cruise lines and food processing equipment, if the finished work could fit the dimension of a forty foot shipping container, American manufacturers just kind of stepped out of China’s way and then perpetually shared stories of the boogie man that scared them out of the forest and forced them to find shelter inside their walled cities. I tried to elucidate the reality of true Chinese resiliency and the concept of a “paper tiger” when it comes to competition in this space and asked them why they didn’t fight back.

The reality is that Chinese manufacturers during the 90s and early 2000s were operating under the pressure of the local party security and the National Development and Reform Committee (NDRC). Less lock step with the government and more at the whim of and as an extension of CCP policy. They needed to show strong export numbers, and they needed to hire as many people as possible, in exchange for filling those two quotas, they would, to an extent, have access to low interest/no interest loans. And that’s about it. Cheap money always works on a long enough timeline of economic competition. China’s timeline was never super long when it came to runway, they just scared enough American and foreign industries on short enough timelines to abscond with entire markets. The first wave of competition that was backed by cheap government debt was then overrun with smaller private companies in the late 2000s and 2010s, that were backed by Wall Street and American private equity money first and then backstopped with government debt once those first waves of investors cashed out or were simply pushed out of the way. If America’s manufacturing industry was backed and supported by the same development philosophies and access to cheap money that was guaranteed by the US government, no one would be able to compete with us on a fair or even slightly unfair footing.

I would share these thoughts and ideas if the rooms had enough patience, but usually the response was “listen kid, I think we all understand China a little bit better than ‘some guy off the street’”. I would laugh and grit my teeth and then lament for the lack of organized and strategic industrial planning in the United States and shed a tear for all the lives that have been ruined and communities that have been gutted as a result.

China and America share a lot in common. We both have long standing and intertwined relationships with imperial island colonizers. We both love chicken wings. Most of our compared populations learned how to be funny by watching a combination of Friends and South Park for different reasons. But, for the sake of this essay, the one thing where we are incredibly similar is we are both terribly inefficient at workforce development. The United States of America and the People’s Republic of China are two of the three most populated nation states in the history of the world. In our own individual contexts, we both have a surplus of humans. There are twice as many children aged 0-2 years old in America than there are people in Ireland of any age, total. There are more people in China that don’t like spicy food than there are people, total, in the European Union.

When America was pushing westward into the frontier of first nations territories and hunting grounds everyone from Pontiac to Tecumseh and Sitting Bull to Crazy Horse all shared the same dread; no matter how many we kill or scare away, ten more ships land on the East Coast and pour more Europeans into the chasm of potential and brutal expanse that was the American West. The book White Trash by Nancy Isenberg accounts in detail that America’s wealth for its first hundred years was divided between the enslaved and the indentured. Labor has always been a source of immense pride in American communities and a huge part of our national identity, but its misapplication is also a massive scar on our national psyche. The value of a human and that human’s relationship to production and their place in society is as important a conversation today as it has been for the last two hundred years and will be for the next century.

In China, the value of a person is weighted against the benefit that they provide to the ruling class. If you’ve ever wondered why Chinese laborers continued to attempt to enter America, even after the Anti-Chinese Labor Act was passed, you needed to only look at what they were attempting to leave behind. The allure of self-determination is undeniable when you compare it to being just another slave in the service of an emperor, warlord, and landlord. This was a huge part of the Communist Party’s rise in the early 20^th century and why the People’s Liberation Army attracted so many in the countryside to join its ranks and help take control of Beijing by 1949. They weren’t using “Liberation” to hide their evil intentions as much as they were using it as a recruiting and marketing tactic to ask the indentured and the enslaved peasant class to leave their master’s and break their own chains. They just didn’t know at the time that there would be a different type of chain to to take their place.

The biggest issue with the well intentioned is that they rarely have a better plan and whatever revolution that does take place ends up resulting in nothing more than a bad copy of the regime before. In the second half of the twentieth century, under the rule of Mao Ze Dong, China’s working class was subjected to horrible experiments of agricultural and industrial transformation that left tens of millions starving to death in cities and rural areas alike. These policies put China’s first generation of Communist Party leadership in a position where tearing down culture and established societal norms was the only way to break the inevitable counter revolution from mounting a challenge to their power. Waiting in the wings, the second generation of CCP leadership would make the decision to emulate, not revolt against, the merits of market-based Capitalism.

The common theme through all these changes and reforms and revisions and revolutions was the suffering of the working class in China. Under the Deng Xiao Ping model of “Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics”, China started to once again leverage its most abundant and least expensive natural resource: Human Beings. Massive labor projects were undertaken, and bodies were thrown up against the machine of economic development. Everything from the primary and secondary education systems, the household registry system and the College entrance exam structure is designed to keep labor available and to force people to do the things the ruling class needs, where they need them to be done. China is incredibly effective at appearing to be much more put together and polished than they are. It goes back to a basket of Chinese philosophies, military strategies and idioms that essentially amount to the idea that if you appear bigger than you are, than most adversaries won’t bother attacking you. The problem and the reality in China are that via the results of the one-child policy, their workforce is dying. Every parent of every single child worked their entire life to make sure that child got an education that was good enough to ensure that the one child would have enough economic stability to provide for the parents in their old age. That, combined with the Central Planning that promoted rural people moving to the cities and the creation of more engineers, government officials and scientists than welders, plumbers and food service workers, China is on the precipice of one of the steepest declines of workforce availability in the history of the world. Inefficient.

America has an inefficiency issue that is a bit more… American. Nothing is planned. Nothing is forced or quota’d or required of anyone. We let the invisible hand have far too much control over how and when we need or don’t need labor. Workforce development has been an issue of debate and stump speeches for as long as I can remember, but it’s questionable as to whether those debating workforce development have ever really needed labor or have ever really labored themselves. We tend to just let our youth fail themselves into success or, more likely into lifelong, cyclical debt/credit traps and bad decisions. Some of the more successful workforce development programs are only successful because there is a user of labor within a geographic adjacency that supplements the funding for workforce development if you develop the kind of workforce that benefits the service of the capital that funded it.

My recurring theme of anything that is pushing me to run for anything is the idea that not everything needs to turn a fucking profit. Workforce development should be wasteful and, in some places, even reckless with budgets. We should cherish our youth. We should give them the benefit of failing in a controlled environment. Specifically, our workforce development programs should be designed to help the youth of America figure out exactly what they DON’T want to do as quickly as possible. When the number one purpose of workforce development is to help the owners of the means of production make more money, you will overwhelmingly end up with management and ownership that resent the labor class, as well as a workforce that will most likely end up hating their job, their lives, while having little to no hope in the future. Inefficient.

I can drown you in anecdotes. Everyone has an example that supports their worldview. My experience, however, is a little more robust given what I’ve experienced in my life. My father was a tool and die maker because his mother refused to allow him to serve in Vietnam and arranged an industrial apprenticeship for him so he would avoid the potential of combat. He hated every minute of his time in a machine shop and found every other distraction known to man to try and deal with his resentment of having a life chosen for him. In the steel industry, much like hospitality and food production, you meet a lot of people who “end up” in their jobs; they got pregnant early, they had problems managing their credit reports, they are in recovery, they are an excon, they are running from something, they are running to something. At no point in their stories do you hear, “I had the chance to decide what I wanted to do and tried out a bunch of options in a controlled setting and was able to make a decision based on what I like to do, the amount of money I want to make in my lifetime and the conditions under which I want to work.”

When my wife decided to start a restaurant in America, I owed her a debt. In China, I wanted to make beer, and she supported me. She stood up to corrupt officials and thugs with me. She sold an apartment to finance our little gamble, and she was with me every step of the way through our highest successes to the lows of staying up all night to make sure I wasn’t alone while I was being held against my will halfway around the world in a medical detention center. When we signed over full control of the company under threat and duress to ruthless private equity funds, she was there. We mailed the last of the documentation surrendering control of the company we founded and sacrificed everything for at a UPS window outside of Rapid City, South Dakota. We immediately went to Black Elk Peak and climbed through a snowstorm because I was hell bent on seeing the grave of Valentine McGillycuddy, buried with honors by the Lakota Nation after he retired from the Indian Affairs Office. She was there. She’s always been there. Once we figured out how to get our feet under us after licking our wounds a bit, she decided to follow her passion of Chinese cooking. I would find her equipment at auction, help her hire and train new staff and help her do property searches and arrange for pop-ups and residencies at the best restaurants and bakeries in the city of Cleveland. For every ten people we interviewed for various kitchen and front of the house positions, you met someone that truly loved working in kitchens and had hope for their future. Most people are transitioning or feel stuck. It was similar in the welding and metal fabrication worlds and the brewing worlds.

My time in the brewing industry took me around the world. Some people feel like they “have to” work. On rare occasions you met people that also wanted to work the job they had. The highest ratio of have-to’s and want-to’s were always German. Germany does not have an expendable amount of population to throw against the machine of the market. They also happen to be an annoyingly efficient people by cultural and societal standards. I think my desire to understand efficiency is due to my heritage of “being German” rubbing up against my time as an American in Germany. When you identify as something but have no real experience in the current version of that place, it’s easy to say something like, “I’m German American” everywhere in the world except when you are actually in Germany. It sounds weird in Germany. When you are standing in it, you realize how little you have in common with it. I adapted fast though and fell in love with how passionate Germans are about the idea of doing things the right way. It’s even more fun when you realize they can also be wrong about what the right way really is.

My time working with groups like Krones Engineering and Dohler International exposed me to their system of apprenticeships in blue collar positions. The breakdown is roughly 50/50 between youth who chose a path that would take them to university versus a path that would take them through an apprenticeship to learn a trade. I’m an Americanist, if that is a thing, and I believe that Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America have amazing systems that work for their populations, but cut, copy, pasting those systems or ideas to America will always lead to failure. America always needs a custom solution because our experiment is weird and beautiful. But my time working with Germans always made me wonder what system would be more efficient for America’s unique problem with workforce development.

That brought me to the idea of creating a program that could be an alternative to how cool college really is, even though it comes with immense debt and all too often a degree that doesn’t correlate fully with the careers that college graduates find themselves in. A program where Juniors and Seniors in high school can apply for a tour of the trades, in which participating companies would host students for 4-6 weeks over a circuit of up to twelve trades over two years. Students would get high-school credit and up to $8 an hour in the form of a bond that would be liquidated upon finishing the program, to work inside of different trades for short bursts. They would get an overview of the business, what the work entailed and spend time with hands on mentors. After the tour of trades students would apply for their top final four trades and participating companies would host applying students for six months for each of the final four. Students would receive $7 an hour from the participating businesses as well as $8 an hour from a state fund, amounting to $15 dollars an hour paid via the program on a week delay every two weeks. The biggest problem related to retention in labor conditions is new workers feeling regret and anxiety connected to how the job was marketed versus the reality of the work. When students have an opportunity to work in a field knowing that it’s a finite period, they would be more likely to complete the six-month exposures. There would be an audit of each participating business at the end of each six-month cycle and reviews and assessments of each student would be filed by the participating businesses in correlation.

Following the two-year final four exposures, students would rate their final four occupations from most to least desirable and enter a statewide draft where any companies looking for certified graduates would bid on them based on demand. The employer would be getting a team member who already decided what they didn’t want to do and cultivated a reasonable understanding of the work and the industry they chose. Certified graduates would start with not only the wages made during the training program but also their bond from the first two years as high school participants. We would see a workforce develop that had more exposure to invested mentors and enthusiastic employers with less personal debt and more of an opportunity to value their labor and their future. Efficient.

Now imagine they also qualified for Medicare for All W-2 employees?

My time in China reflected my identity as an American. I saw themes and similarities everywhere. Some of the biggest similarities were in how everyone was trying to convince me the ways in which China was different from America. My family was a family of immigrants. My mother descended from relatives that identified as British and German and my father was 100% German. To the point of reading his high school yearbook and assuming my father had been legally named “Kraut” and changed his name to “Bob” later in life. My parents, like a lot of other first and second-generation Americans, were something else first, and American second. German American, Italian American, Polish American, Croatian American, African American, Chinese American, the North East Ohio region is filled with museums and national cultural centers from countries long left and long exchanged for the dream of America.

The roots are there if you allow them to be, and in America, our roots tangle with the strands of this new culture and new experiment to create one, big, confusing, beautiful, shared identity. I never went to a friend’s house in America and felt that the older generations were disrespected. I never entered the home of anyone in my family and left hungry or hermetically sealed off from their troubles, dreams and hopes. But if you listen to anyone explain the idea of America in China, than we’ve lost the idea of big family in the States. In their explanation, which is more like a well prepared sermon that you have to listen to, far too often, that very idea is what makes China better, not different, better than America. I would always listen to this and laugh, to myself, about how they clearly didn’t ever enter my grandfather’s home and forget to greet his father first. The idea of big family or filial love is human. Culture can define how we express it, but at the end of the day, family is family no matter where you are.

I took this with me through every aspect of my decade and a half submerged in Chinese culture as an American, often trying not to drown. When the love of my life and I decided to get married, I asked her mother for her daughter’s hand in marriage. She started to cry. Tears of anger and frustration. The wrong kind of tears for that moment. My wife lost her father to a botched open-heart surgery when she was five years old. Asking her mother was a dry run for asking her paternal grandparents. Her grandmother, Li Shidong, and grandfather, Liu Shao Zeng, were salt of the earth people. To the point of her grandmother most likely having more sodium in her DNA than Lot’s wife. They could do no wrong in my eyes and if they had cried those kinds of tears at me asking for their granddaughter’s hand in marriage I might have never recovered. The experience with her mother was expected. My wife and her mom aren’t particularly close, and I was warned that it wouldn’t be a warm story to tell people 18 years later. As a result, when I asked her grandparents I was sensitive to their reaction. Grandma stopped me halfway through and asked, in only a way that she could, “are you sure?”

I had no idea what to say, of course I was sure. I affirmed that yes, I had never been more sure of anything else. She said “well, you need to be, this one can’t cook or clean or do anything around the house, you’ll be on your own and will have to take care of her.” I was the one that teared up when I told her that taking care of her granddaughter would be the joy of my life. She smiled and said, “good, then of course, you’ll be ours from now on.” It’s only fitting that my wunderkind wife would discover her passion for cooking later in life after relocating with me to America, opening a restaurant and already being named a Plate Magazine National Chef to Watch and a Julia Child’s Foundation Fellow.

Immediately following our wedding ceremony in Shandong Province in 2009, her grandparents would move in with us on my insistence. Grandpa wasn’t getting satisfactory health care in their hometown, and I felt responsible to make sure he had the dignity of comfort in his old age. My experience with the Chinese health care system is, let’s just say robust. I have not only stayed in medical detention centers in China for extended periods of time, I’ve also had to hold the hand of a dying man for weeks on end surrounded by the coldest and most bereft of dignity conditions imaginable. There are a lot of assumptions about the health care of everywhere outside of America. Assumptions that our system is inherently broken and assumptions that everywhere else is better in every other way. OR, on the other end of the spectrum, our system is amazing and every attempt to reform it or make it better is akin to Marxism and will make all our lives worse. My perspective is neither, America has an amazing system of health care that is about 93% of the way to being exactly what all Americans need and deserve. Revolutions are for children and the desperate. We are neither, we’re just kind of comfortable to the point of being in a coma most of the time. When we’re shaken out of our comfort induced coma we tend to overreact in both directions.

I started the year of 2019, in a state of deep sadness. In 2014, grandpa had beaten lymphoma, and we were gifted five more years with him. That gift, the gift of extended life after cancer goes into remission, was rescinded when we noticed he had a sore throat that wouldn’t heal and couldn’t eat solid foods comfortably. Lunar new year that year was emphatically joyful with a shadow of finality in the background. It’s impossible to describe the Chinese medical system to people that have never experienced it. Essentially, Chinese people are defined by where they are from. If were born in Peoria, Illinois, you are hardcoded to Peoria for your entire life. You can move to Indianapolis but cannot work unless you apply for a special work registry. Your children must go to school in Peoria. Your health insurance can only be fully utilized in Peoria. If you buy a house or a car in Indianapolis, you must register as an out of town owner or out of town driver. You get the point? Zero freedom of permanent movement. It’s called the Hukou or Household Registration System. The only thing that can disconnect your registration from where you are born and transfer it to a place of higher standing in the hierarchy of China regional registrations is if the place you hope to move to has a special program for people with international master’s degrees (or higher) or domestic doctorates (or higher) and you happen to have one of those things, or if you marry into a family (up until a couple years ago, a family whose son is marrying an out of town woman, not the other way around), or are a party member and have qualified for the honor of being “transferred” to a better place.

My wife was from the same place that Confucius was born, lived, and where he is buried, but Confucius, although the ultimate culprit when it comes to systems like these, was from the middle of nowhere. Her status in the Chinese Hukou system was pretty much the bottom of the barrel, meaning so was her grandfathers. We lived in Beijing. That meant for her grandfather to even find an oncologist we needed to beg, bribe and demand some sort of medical attention. Otherwise, the first glance at his Hukou would’ve sent him back to his hometown, where, I’m not kidding, they still treat diabetes and some forms of cancer with antibiotics.

China also demands cash or equivalent payments and deposits before any treatment can be given. It’s basically the most mercantile health care system in the history of the world. We had team members who worked with us for years at our brewery experience absolutely horrific accidents while trying to simply exist in Beijing and until someone showed up and paid cash for their treatment they would be left bleeding in the hallway. One such incident woke us up in the middle of the night and I’ll never forget that the elevator bay at the ICU had an ATM machine and the pin pad still had blood on it from the last time someone needed to pay cash for their life to be saved.

In juxtaposition, my wife arrived in America during a pandemic, eleven weeks pregnant with our second child. We boarded that plane because the city of Beijing determined that prenatal care was non-essential during the outbreak of Covid 19. We boarded a flight to America in haste and anxiety with our, then 8 year old, son in tow. We arrived in Cleveland, uninsured for the birth and with no prior residency or ties to the region for the last twenty years. We immediately found an OBGYN that still contacts my wife regularly to ask about our daughter and life in general. We found a way to insure an at the time non Green Card holding spouse of a U.S. citizen. We found a way to be calm.

In certain rooms, certain people would tell me that China’s health care system outshines America’s due to amazing socialized health care insurance systems because TikTok or Instagram told them it did. Others would say that China’s health care system is better because the equipment is all brand new and because the doctors are all patriots and America’s is decaying and filled with foreigners because Facebook and Youtube told them so. The reality is that the American system is more empathetic, warm, sympathetic and more ready to serve the sick and huddled masses that most others in the entire world. It’s the way we have to pay for it that is broken.

Tying health care to employment likely won’t change anytime soon. The people who execute our health care in America are unique, amazing and deserving of our support and appreciation, but the people that administer and bill after said health care is provided are not that different than their counterparts in other ecosystems. I’m pretty sure if no one stopped the corporations behind our health care networks, they would prefer we pay in cash up front. Humans are human, and when left to their own ends, people with power will always abuse it unless there is someone to say no. There are certain aspects of our lives that shouldn’t be about turning a profit. Education, infrastructure, defense, and health care should likely be fine with breaking even.

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are not wrong in proposing that Medicare should be available to all Americans. In fact, I support the idea, it makes me feel like a good person. Unfortunately, it’s a strategic dead end. Just like hard wiring our children’s education to the property tax system, we’ve hard wired the idea of health care to having a job and being a productive citizen. Probably meant well at the beginning by whoever it was that made the final decision, but it’s rife with political and class conflict that keeps people from seeing the value of a Universal Health Care system.

I’ve felt for a long time that if you walked into any board room or labor union hall or household kitchen in America and asked those in attendance what they would think about expanding Medicare to All… W2’d employees, what the reaction would be? I know a lot of MAGA Republicans who dawned three point hats and balled up dollar bills and threw them at people during protests against Obamacare who, once they turned 65, realized Medicare was amazing. AMAZING. I only ever saw my father shocked by health care policies twice in my life. Once was when I took him to a hospital in Taiwan to have his hearing checked and have hearing aids prescribed. “They won’t let me pay them any money!” Yes, Bob, you are a guest in their country, they would prefer you can hear the bus coming, the alternative can get a bit messy. The second time was when he qualified for Medicare and encountered the same thing. “Everything is covered, it’s amazing.” Yes, Bob, it really is.

If I ran a campaign in 2026, I would have a bunch of MAGA baby boomers in a commercial wearing their MAGA gear and explaining their experiences with Medicare. Then I would explain that all American workers deserve to feel that level of dignity. That’s called a plan. Within ten years you would have Medicare for All, because there wouldn’t be anyone left to say “well, if I work hard and I don’t get it, then why do… those people?!?” Sometimes you need the experience of seeing how bad something can be somewhere else, while you hold the hand of a man you hold in your heart as a hero, in a dirty room, with no toilet, no food, no shower and no place to lock up your most important belongings, to really see the value of what has already been architected in America. Some of us cheer when we watch some jackass with a chain saw talk about ripping our system to pieces because we assume our system is broken. It isn’t. There’s just more money to be made off of our pain, our hope, our desire for upward mobility, and until capital gets to make a maximum profit off of every aspect of our lives, there will always be a jackass with a chainsaw.

Expanding Medicare to all W2 employees would see the overall cost of healthcare in America plummet. The anxiety of the American worker would dissipate just that much more. The quality of care that the elderly recipients of Medicare received would also improve because the pool of those included under the coverage would get younger and healthier on average. Kids would play in the streets. Parents would see doctors more regularly and increase their total lifespan with their kids and grandparents. Mothers and fathers would have more children and you would likely see less ads for ambulance chasing lawyers and pharmaceuticals during your daily life.

We would take a system we should all be proud of and make it a system that truly shines for the betterment of all Americans.

It wasn’t until we spoke about my industrial experience, including building and growing production facilities in China in the craft beer industry bookended with a childhood that was surrounded by the manipulation of metal in the industrial pursuit of growth and a recent consulting contract that put me next to the fourth generation CEO of a metal fabricator in Cleveland that Kevin’s curiosity became enthusiasm. I described why I chose to live in central China right out of college and how similar the environment in the mountains of Hubei Province felt to the agricultural wealth and the industrial base of the Cleveland area. That smell of end mill lubricant once again popped into my head as a common theme. When you meet working class people striving for upward mobility by laboring in environments that if you closed your eyes might as well be the same as your very own home, you start seeing a commonality to all human beings. The desire for their children to have a better chance than the generation before them. A hope that those same children will work smart and not hard, will trade resentment when the clock is punched to excitement to tackle new problems tomorrow. Humans all share the same 90% of their humanity, culture makes us unique, but humans are all human.

Kevin wasn’t sure if I was really sure I wanted to run for office, or rather, he wasn’t sure if he wanted me to run for office, he acknowledged the uniqueness of my story and the reality of my wife and kids being the perfect targets for mudslinging, but he also was adamant that the things that would make me a target also made me a strong potential candidate. His invitation to come to the meeting, where I found myself curbside and unable to yet peel myself out of my car, was an opportunity to see if my ability to communicate my story to him could translate to a larger room of people that had no idea I existed before I appeared in front of them. I told him I’d be happy to come and see if there was a “there” there.

I sat in my car watching others pull up with home-made signs to sell and looks of indignation on their faces. I wondered if this was a huge mistake. I also had a pestering cough and knew exactly how many cough drops were in my pocket. This also wasn’t the first time I wondered why I insist on throwing myself into weird situations. During Justin Bibb’s candidacy for the Mayor’s office in Cleveland I had arranged for a tour of my employer at the time. Michael Ripich and I would give then candidate Bibb and his team a tour of one of the largest format metal fabricators in the world. Photos would be taken, a short speech in front of team members, typical campaign stuff. It seemed so obvious while I was arranging all of the moving parts. But then I found myself sitting in my car before that event with the same thought in my head, “what am I doing?” No one asked for this. I knew it would be of value, but at the same time wondered if during the tour someone would ask, pointing at me, “why is this guy here?”

Half-way through the tour a reporter that had been following now Mayor Bibb for an article published on Governing.com turned and asked me “why are you here?” Far from my worst nightmare, the power of being talked at versus being spoken to is always underrated. I simply told him that I had arranged this tour, and I was hoping that Justin Bibb could represent generational change for the city of Cleveland and ultimately the region. Three and a half years later I found myself stepping into another “well let’s see if this will work” style scenario. Kevin met me at the door of the Bricklayers’ Union to tell me that Justice Bill O’Neill was also at the meeting following his announcement earlier that month that he would be running for a seat that I was considering. I took my pocket full of cough drops and my Starbucks coffee and found a seat in the back of the room to listen and figure out exactly what needed to be said in that moment and how to say it.

The room itself was what you would expect. Loud posters of protest were plastered to the walls that barely represented the anger oozing from the souls in attendance. I listened to some of the Robert’s Rules of Order type banter. The beginning of the meeting had a lot to do with the current Republican congressman, Dave Joyce, not showing up to town halls and the assumption that he wouldn’t show up at debates either. The first speaker was a rep with an update from the AFL CIO. My eyes wandered to signs describing MAGA as ‘brain damage’ and huge block letters declaring “RESIST” and various usages of words like MORON etc. At some point during the AFL CIO presentation someone asked a question. I can’t remember if it was a Q&A or just a frustrated attendee blurting it out. But someone asked “what can we do to convince the working class they are voting against their own interests?!?”

I watched a room of well-meaning liberal advocates and activists sit silently as the guy from the AFL CIO attempted an answer, so I just kind of yelled out “Stop calling them morons, that’s a good start”. I wondered if I would be asked to leave, or at least have my potential invitation to speak to the room evaporate because I broke some cardinal rule of meeting-ing. Despite my doubts, no one seemed particularly upset and the meeting moved on with a speech from Justice Bill O’Neill. He’s a nice enough guy. I’m sure under certain circumstances he would be a good table buddy at a charity event. As a political candidate he struggles to connect his irritations with the current political landscape with the angst exhibited by the public. I do mean THE PUBLIC, not necessarily just the anger on the left.

I listened to his talk with an open mind and hoped for more. There were some canned lines about “not letting a South African run our government” that rang oddly jingoistic even in its full context. He wanted the room to know that they didn’t have to worry, he was here now, and he would fight for them instead of continuing to enjoy his retirement on the golf course. He also wanted to assure the room that Dave Joyce was a good man and a friend of his. The resulting groan very much sucked the air directly out of the room. When Justice O’Neill had finished, the chair announced that there was another speaker who was considering running and then introduced me.

I walked to the front doing my best Mark Twain, making fun of the fact that I was the guy that couldn’t stop coughing, “I have two kids and kids are gross.” Always start with a joke. In three minutes, I described my upbringing, asked the room to realize that the working class needed a better plan that represented a stronger future for all of America. That we must stop telling them that what they believe to be the truth makes them dumb. That we must come up with a better option or we need to be happy with losing. I then challenged Justice O’Neill to use his Amex card to rent out some billboards in Lake County calling Dave Joyce a coward for not debating him. To resist is to passively aggressively disagree, to fight is to take ground and build a coalition. To resist is to surrender to the idea of scarcity and die defending something of dwindling value. The best defense is a robust offense. Several people reacted, but I put my head down and walked as quickly as I could back to my room temperature Mocha.

When I returned to my seat, I assumed the room was happy to be rid of me. I don’t tend to hear reactions, I get told about them by confused people who don’t understand why I can’t hear positive praise. Authoritarians train you to assume you are in trouble. I’ve always been in some sort of trouble. Whether in church, at school, at various en loco parentis environments, with the governing authority of China, with investors, with the CCP again and then ultimately, in my own mind, with everyone that I meet with moving forward, I am always expecting punitive action. I once asked a friend who oozed confidence if he thought people without confidence could convince themselves to be confident. He thought about it for a minute and then confidently said “yeah, hell yeah, of course they can, they just have to believe they can.” That always makes me laugh, when people ask me why I think I’m in trouble, I remember that and think, “well, if you’ve never been held captive and told it was because you were in trouble, I guess it’s easy to assume you can just believe in yourself.”

I had another commitment and felt the need to escape as quickly as possible. When I arrived at the exit there was a group of people waiting for me. They helped me answer the question about whether or not there was a venue within the Democratic Party for a message that fought for a plan, fought for the working class and fought for a will to put up a fight. It’s not an easy decision to throw yourself into harms away, up against a machine that has been designed to devour those willing to simply try and fight. It’s not easy to eventually throw yourself into an environment notorious for rejecting those motivated by principle. The only reason I haven’t announced a candidacy or committed to running for any office is because I wonder if there is anyone else out there who is having trouble sleeping due to their desire to advocate for the future of my little family. I look at the faces of people and wonder if they deserve to feel the cold reality of indentured servitude and an unwilling, and eventually unpaid, service to capital. I wonder if the middle class is something that can be saved. I wonder if it’s too late. I wonder why there is no plan already.

In a quiet moment, my son asked me if I was thinking about running for office and how much more of my time that would take away from him. I thought for a minute and told him that any citizen has two choices, the first being they can put their own little tribe in a position to climb the tallest tree to safety during a flood, the risk being that the flood may reach a point deeper than the highest tree. The second choice being to build a fleet of boats so that everyone can float above the deepest floods and rebuild society together. To be selfish in the case of your own family’s safety or to be selfless in the hope that society makes the right decisions after the flood recedes.

Either way, it’ll be hard for anyone to retire to the golf course if no one plans for a future to avoid the flood in the first place.

In 2018, I flew from Asia to Ohio to vote for Sherrod Brown in person. He was a political figure that I felt a kinship with. He saw labor as important. He saw the working class as a large part of his own identity, as a large part of the identity of the region. At that time in my life, I had scaled my first company in a market where commercial success was not assumed. My brewery, Great Leap Brewing Company, in Beijing, China had gone from a small nano brewery in a historic courtyard residence to a four location retail group. Earlier that year we had successfully closed a Series A fundraise securing both U.S. based Private Equity funding and Hong Kong Family office funding. This gave us the ability to build a production brewery in the industrial development zone of Tianjin that would be capable of distributing our beer in cans and kegs to every province in China and abroad. I was living the American Dream in China.

My upbringing was unconventional at best. I was born to a lower middle-class family in Painesville, Ohio. My father was a journeyman tool and die maker and my mother was a social worker. Both found comfort in a version of Christianity that Christ would’ve had a hard time identifying with. A separatist non-denominational cult, Shiloh Christian Church devolved into anti-government rhetoric and doomsday preparations in the hope that the Y2K computer “virus” would lead to a hard reset and realignment of the United States Government with evangelical fundamentalism. As a homeschooled youth, I would not have guessed that by the age of 30 I would find myself on the cover of the USA Today and featured on Rock Center with Brian Williams as an example of the American spirit shining brightly in foreign lands. I was punching above my weight when it came to upward mobility. I wasn’t successful because I was homeschooled, I found myself on a path that had been paved by patient, empathetic people who saw a spark in me regardless of the hate-filled vitriol that was a common aspect of my identity through early to mid-twenties. It’s something that we often forget as co inhabitants of any society, no one is finished yet. We are all evolving identities and personalities, effected heavily by those moments in our life when we are most vulnerable and in need. I was exposed to the ideologies of what is now lazily called “MAGA” at a very young age. A bundle of xenophobia, religious ideology and prideful ignorance to the “other”. My growth within and through extreme conservative circles showed me what doesn’t work in complex, dynamic environments.

The prohibitive and punitive aspects of irrational ideological communities is a source of comfort for the chronically insecure. Marx called religions the opiate of the masses, but I’ve always found this to be heavy handed and lazy. Religion is a million different things to the billions of people that find comfort and hope in its practices. If you want to create a movement, tell someone yearning for hope derived from religion that they are stupid, if you want a martyr, tell the same person that religion is forbidden. It’s a fool’s exercise to censor, censorship creates curiosity and desire where the full and open debate of religion creates understanding, boredom and apathy. Religions are only dangerous when you try and suppress them, when suppressed they turn into movements. Irrational ideologies are always dangerous. Marx was being satirical and lazy in his prose, which was common in most of his written ideas. If he truly understood how a cult becomes an organized religion, he would have seen the value of letting religions do themselves in by exhausting their talking points.

I watched the cult of my youth morph into a national movement from ten thousand miles away, while I was creating some of the most American expressions of hope and creativity. It wasn’t hard for me to understand really. My father was radicalized via shortwave radios, church pulpits and newsletters from North Dakota P.O. Boxes. An incredibly inefficient way to reach the angry and fearful. The internet and targeted marketing have made this conversion cycle insanely efficient. What used to take months or even years can now be part of the common culture belief system within weeks.

I read about Tim Ryan’s desire to run for Senate from a Chinese medical concentration camp. The same cot I had witnessed the January 6^th insurrection from. The juxtaposition was clear to me in that little room. We, as the Democratic Party, were responding to anger so palpable and so focused as to attempt to siege Capitol Hill through violence with a political platform and candidate that was the definition of inoffensive, safe and entirely unimpressive. The GOP and Peter Thiel would cede their nomination to JD Vance. When that reality truly sunk in, on a hard cot, illuminated by fluorescent light 24 hours a day and on a diet of 800 calories per day, my heart exploded with anger and regret. Anger that there wasn’t anyone awake and in power on the side of the DNC to see how absolutely terrible this match up would end up being. And regret that I believed that it wasn’t my fight. A moment in history that resulted in eventually placing an oligarch’s stuffed suit within one heartbeat of the Presidency.

It's impossible to express how important a plan is. From the age of 16 forward I have been adjacent to the scheming of the ideologically minded. I didn’t know what grooming was at the time, but my church started a mentorship program that led to me being paired with an attorney that was attending our church regularly. He was a Marine Corps reservist with the billet of being a Judge Advocate. He immediately started coaching me on my future. How I would need to enlist in the Marine Corps, serve four years, use my GI Bill to obtain a four year degree, apply to Officer Candidate School at Quantico, attend law school and then run for Congress. Does that sound familiar? Watching JD Vance ascend off the check book of his billionaire benefactors is a point of irritation that keeps me up some nights. I stayed in China too long, I wasted too much time dealing with investors and the regulatory machine of Beijing. I should’ve sold my brewpubs in 2016 and moved home the minute it became clear that Trumpism wasn’t just an SNL sketch. When it became clear that he would become a magnet attracting every anti-federalist, anti-regulatory and anti-tax political action group into a coalition that we are currently watching attempt to hack our civil society to pieces.

Democrats don’t seem to realize that they are fighting against a well laid out plan. They think this is proof of America’s inherent racism, evidence of late-stage capitalism or proof that America hates women. It isn’t not those things, but it’s much more than that, it’s a calculated attempt to turn us all into renters and indentured debtors. The other bits that so captivate the American left are just happy side effects of what it looks like when unchecked capital has an opportunity to finally rid itself of the opinions of the working class. It’s just a cherry on top that they are using the very disenfranchised working class to eat itself alive.

I’ve chosen to stop wallowing in my regret of not returning earlier. I wouldn’t be the same version of me today if I hadn’t lost my brewery to the meat grinder that is Private Equity. I wouldn’t be the same version of me if I hadn’t experienced first-hand what being denied the Writ of Habeus Corpus actually feels like. Regret is a thief.

Instead of regret, I’ve chosen to understand what it takes to make the decision to participate. What it takes to actually make the choice to run for a political office with the intention of not just “resisting” an opposition intent on changing the very configuration of our society. What it takes to come up with a better plan, a plan capable of convincing those that feel unseen and despised that they matter. Their work matters. Their kids matter. Their dignity matters. Maybe we should devise a plan that includes them?

I grew up in a separatist cult. It wasn’t one that registered high on the scale of counterculture groups that predicted the end of the world in the 90s. It was poor, mainly white, rural under educated and fearful people trying to find community. We went from meeting in the gymnasium of a public school in Painesville, Ohio to meeting in a renovated barn on the border of Lake and Geauga Counties. The property was selected mainly because it was far from federal interstates and had multiple access points to well water. We were taught to fear the government, fear other religions, fear neighbors that weren’t members of our group and to stockpile food, water, fuel, and most importantly, firearms. We weren’t waiting for the end of the world, we hoped for it via the dissolution of the American government at the time so it could be replaced by a theocracy that forced the nation to follow Christian principles. Again, this was the 90s.

Fear is an important factor in the manipulation of the human psyche. It’s not, in and of itself, an emotion that anyone just has, it is almost always the result of or reaction to anger, insecurity, anxiety, regret, ignorance and in most cases the absence of healthy relationships that make the lives of both people involved better. Fear is contagious. It spreads faster than almost any other social connectivity device. I watched fear destroy my father’s mind. He grew up a member of the baby boomer generation. His father was an American GI and his mother was a German “war bride” that met my grandfather on VE Day in Frankfurt and fell in love. She was also a Nazi. My grandfather mainly ignored her foundational belief system because for his generation, in opposition to that of his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, they operated out of hope and enthusiasm. As a result my grandmother never really spoke of Hitler or her Nazi worldview in his presence. The feeling that the world is getting better is so much more powerful than the fear that it is getting worse.

My father grew up in relative comfort. He lived on a farm that wasn’t needed to be operated as a farm for the family to survive. My grandfather liked living in the countryside, but he worked in the city of Cleveland for the Plain Dealer newspaper. My father’s childhood wasn’t necessarily healthy. His mother struggled with alcoholism and drug abuse and his father was eccentric to the point of it being a liability. In spite of these negative imprints, they never almost lost their house, they never missed any meals, they had cars and pets and clothes and all the other things you associate with the generation raised following World War II. My father attended a well-funded public school and married briefly at the age of 18. The divorce was almost immediate, and he wouldn’t marry again until after his lifestyle had already taken him to Europe, Jamaica, Canada and across the United States several times. He never worried about his credit score and he worked only when he needed money and casually toured marijuana hotspots when he needed a break from factory work. The one thing absent from his childhood, was the fear of a worse future.

He met my mother when they were both in their 30s and married almost immediately. To the point of both their families’ assuming it was due to an unplanned pregnancy. It wasn’t. They just didn’t have much to fear at the time. The result of a changing world and my mother’s experiences as a child pushed my family into a cycle of fear a generation earlier than the rest of America. The contagion is pretty easy for me to see as a pattern, and has defined my political ideologies later in my life. My mother’s parents got divorced in the 1960s. A full generation and a half before it became more accepted in society to come from a single parent home. Back when it was still firmly described as a broken home. My mother’s father was a paranoid schizophrenic who struggled with PTSD and depression. He left when she was a young teenager and wouldn’t appear in her story again until my own fourth birthday when he knocked unsolicited on the door of my childhood home. His departure gave my mother a lifelong insecurity of being abandoned or poor. She spent most of my early childhood making sure I knew that we weren’t “hillbillies” or the dreaded “white trash”. She also spent the rest of her life looking for a replacement for the father figure she lost when her dad skipped town.

Not all children of divorce find themselves in a situation of insecurity, but when a child is insecure, they are more likely to assume a worldview of fear and negativity than one of hope and confidence. My mother brought this to her relationship with my father and both spiraled into a world of fear that eventually led our household to exposure to what is now commonplace but was novel and fringe in the 1990s and 00s. My father was always susceptible to conspiracy and hidden meaning. Our mailbox was usually stuffed with newsletters espousing the secrets of the illuminati, masonic lodge, a need to return to the gold standard, FEMA as a tool of genocide, lizard people, biblical giants, flat earth, the dangers of vaccines and occasionally, the coming race war. His love of feeling like reality was not all it appeared to be and the desire to find the real truth was connected to my grandmother’s need to justify the realities of World War II by blaming it on everyone but her own party and Adolf Hitler.

My grandmother’s beliefs about race were ridiculous to me as a child. My father had a closer connection to the idea of why we should fear the other. I regularly did my homework while my father listened to his shortwave radio and believed every word that was broadcast out of North Dakota, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming separatists’ compounds preaching the idea of sovereign citizens and the unconstitutionality of income and property taxes. As I type this, I’m transported back to the smell of freshly erased math homework while sounds of paranoia wafted through the atmosphere as I would chuckle, not realizing that my reaction was that of a child determining something adult was indeed childish.

My mother would roll her eyes at my father’s extracurricular conspiratorial activities unless they were related directly to our religion. She was concerned when he joined “the Ohio militia” and would tell him to calm down when he would overreact to broadcasts about what would become LGBTQIA+ rights or women’s health issues. She wasn’t comfortable unless my father was being led in his paranoia by a leader of which she approved. There was a comfort for her in having a designated religious leader put his stamp of approval on irrational acts of fear and anger. If my father had told us that we would spend Saturday mornings holding pictures of aborted fetuses in front of planned parenthood clinics in downtown Cleveland, she would’ve told him that was too much for kids to be exposed to, but because the leader of our cult mandated it, it was our duty to participate. If my father said that he wanted to buy an above ground fuel tank and military grade generator, she would’ve protested the expenses. But because Pastor Phil demanded it of the members of our group, it became our mandate as the chosen of God and so there was room on the credit cards to make sure we were obedient followers.

My father found a deep well of belief in this weaponized version of evangelical Christianity. A good primer to understand the environment in which I was raised would be Tara Westover’s “Educated”. Our group invested years of preparation and money into the hope that the Y2K computer virus would send society back to the 19th century. My father believed so completely that it would be the result that he did not speak about it after the turn of the millennia for about a month and it was only after he convinced himself that it did destroy civilization and the appearance that it had not was a conspiracy in itself. Many of the mainstream policies of the conservative right were foundational beliefs of our church. God and guns, anti homosexual, anti abortion, anti women’s liberation, anti UN, anti globalization and anti science. It was such an extreme fringe of the Christian Right that we made other Christians in the area uncomfortable and built in the rejection of mainstream Christian thought as a cornerstone of our identity.

The only reason to allow yourself to be manipulated in such a fundamental way, as so often extreme ideologies are capable of, is because of fear. “I don’t want to be left out, left behind, subject to punishment, or worse, left to make my own decisions.” These fear responses have proliferated as the world became, on average, safer. We are more well fed, and exposed to more luxury and comfort than at any other period in human history. I can fly anywhere in the world on money that I don’t have and experience cultures, cuisines and geography that previously were only permitted through acts of war or forceful international diplomacy. Our access to information, entertainment, knowledge and even love are available without getting out of bed, whenever we want, for as little as a couple dollars a day. And we all hate and fear more as a result of it. Our access to comfort is making us less optimistic and more afraid than any other moment in the history of the modern world. We have franchised the fear that before was only associated with the threat of nuclear war and applied that same level of uncertainty to whether the world is, indeed, round.

My life and worldview is much different from most others. I’ve lived in places that some only dream of. I speak a second language that is often used as a hyperbolic example of confusion itself. I’ve worked with some of the wealthiest people in the world, in some of the most oppressive countries currently in existent. I’ve been brainwashed, radicalized and deprogrammed. I went from a homeschooled alt right cult member to winning the Beijing LGBT Center’s Ally of the Year, multiple years in a row. I’ve been detained for suspected drug trafficking, placed in medical concentration facilities, accused of acts of hubris, disloyalty, and abomination by those from whom I desired love and acceptance from the most. Looking forward from my youth into the future, it would be hard to describe what my justification was for not marching on the capital on January 6th, or why I’m not a card-carrying member of a conservative secret society bent on achieving a Christian theocracy.

The only thing I can point to that explains how and why I am where I am in and the state of mind I’ve found myself in, is because at a certain point, through the kindness of others, I decided to not be afraid. I hope through this outlet of writing about my background and experiences others can also realize that fear leads to the absence of things and there is more yet to be done in America than there is to fear.

Even more importantly, you can’t shame the fearful into being unafraid. Only through patience and understanding can you pull someone away from the fringe and back into a realm of rational and logical participation in society. You have to listen to them, regardless of how ridiculous they sound, and maybe as a result they will listen to you in return. Hopefully someone who is currently in the position I found myself in 20 years ago finds a hook in what I write about, and it pulls them back to what used to be described as reality.