Who the Hell is This Guy?
I grew up in Northeast Tennessee, watching America get taken apart. The factories shut down. Main streets emptied. Families who once built stable lives on a single income now struggle with two or three jobs. This wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t inevitable. It was a choice.
But I also grew up in the shadow of something different—the Tennessee Valley Authority. TVA was the last time America built something at scale for the people, turning one of the poorest regions in the country into a hub of industry and energy. It wasn’t charity. It wasn’t trickle-down. It was government doing its damn job.
I come from Trump country, and I get it. Like Bernie Sanders, Trump named villains that the political establishment wouldn’t. He promised to tear down the institutions that failed us. When you’ve watched your town collapse while politicians tell you everything’s fine, that message lands.
But a wrecking ball isn’t a plan. Trump, like every other fraud before him, had nothing to rebuild with. All the bluster, all the populist talk, and what did it get us? Tax cuts for billionaires. A trade war that changed nothing. A movement that turned into a cult.
I’ve seen this system from the inside. As Bernie Sanders’ senior advisor and AOC’s communications director, I worked at the highest levels of progressive politics. I co-founded Justice Democrats, helped launch the Green New Deal, and saw exactly how Washington operates.
And here’s the truth:
America doesn’t have a funding problem—it has a competence problem.
We pour money into healthcare, education, infrastructure, the military—more than almost any country on Earth—and what do we get? Sky-high costs, crumbling roads, overpriced degrees, and a military that still got caught off guard when China tested a hypersonic missile.
This country still knows how to build. We see it in the military, in the projects that still get done when elites actually care. The problem isn’t that we can’t—it’s that we won’t.
Because the government doesn’t build anymore—it just writes checks. And the private sector doesn’t compete—it extracts.
That’s why I started America’s Undoing.
Not to mourn what’s broken. Not to beg for better leadership. But to lay out exactly what went wrong and how to fix it.
We built the TVA. We built the Arsenal of Democracy. We built an industrial powerhouse out of nothing. We can do it again.
Or we can keep letting this place get strip-mined for parts.
Your call.
