Blunt Men in the White House: What Truman and Trump Have in Common

 Blunt Men in the White House: What Truman and Trump Have in Common

At first glance, Harry Truman and Donald Trump seem unlikely companions in presidential history. Truman was a modest Midwestern haberdasher elevated unexpectedly to the presidency after Franklin Roosevelt’s death. Trump was a billionaire businessman who entered politics as an outsider, openly hostile to the institutions that Truman spent his life navigating. One is remembered as a steward of postwar order; the other remains the most polarizing political figure of the modern era.

Yet beneath those obvious differences lies a striking and underappreciated parallel: both men belong to a distinctly American presidential tradition—the blunt leader who unsettles elites precisely because he refuses to speak their language, and who is judged not only for policy, but for the discomfort his style creates among those accustomed to polished power.

American political culture claims to admire authenticity. We celebrate leaders who “tell it like it is.” But history suggests something more complicated. Americans often admire bluntness in theory and recoil from it in practice—especially when bluntness occupies the Oval Office.

David McCullough’s portrait of Harry S. Truman makes clear that Truman was repeatedly underestimated by the elites around him. When he assumed office in 1945, many in Washington regarded him as an accidental president: provincial, unsophisticated, and intellectually inferior to Roosevelt’s polished inner circle. Truman lacked an Ivy League pedigree, aristocratic bearing, and rhetorical flourish. He governed in direct sentences and moral certainties. “The buck stops here” was not merely a slogan—it was a governing philosophy.

Trump’s presidency reveals a similar dynamic. For all his different temperament and era, Donald Trump has also been treated by many elites as an illegitimate disruption: a president too rough in speech, too repetitive in phrasing, too indifferent to institutional etiquette. His repeated lines—“America First,” “fake news,” “witch hunt”—are often mocked as simplistic. Yet repetition in politics is not intellectual emptiness; it is message discipline. Truman’s “Give ’em hell, Harry” and “The buck stops here” served the same purpose in a different media age.

Both men communicate less like academic statesmen and more like executives issuing judgments. Neither speaks in layered abstractions. Both favor declarative clarity over elite nuance. That very trait makes them effective to supporters and deeply unsettling to those who prefer presidents filtered through the polished language of establishment governance.

The deeper parallel lies not merely in style. It lies in the burdens each carried as wartime presidents. Truman’s defining years were shaped by decisions whose consequences stretched beyond immediate battlefields. His authorization of atomic bomb use to end World War II remains morally controversial, yet it was intended as a decisive force to prevent a longer and bloodier conflict. Korea posed a second, equally grave test. As McCullough recounts, Truman understood that Korea was never just Korea. It was a proxy arena shaped by Communist China and Soviet expansion. His dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur, condemned at the time as reckless arrogance, is now widely understood as a constitutional assertion of civilian supremacy over military prestige. Trump faces similar accusations whenever he acts decisively in foreign affairs. His Iran policy—like the earlier Soleimani strike and the present confrontation over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions—is interpreted by critics as impulsive escalation. Supporters view the same actions as deterrence designed to prevent wider war. Here, the Truman parallel becomes especially relevant: blunt presidents are often assumed to be reckless simply because their decisions are delivered without the polished rhetoric elites associate with deliberation. Both men confronted regional crises not as isolated events, but as proxy theaters shaped by larger geopolitical rivals. Truman faced Soviet and Chinese communist influence pressing into Asia. Trump’s Middle East crises intersect with Russian influence, Chinese energy interests, and broader strategic alignments extending into Latin America through Venezuela and Cuba. The names and maps have changed; the burden of containing escalation has not.

A second powerful parallel lies in their relationships with entrenched institutions. Truman governed alongside the formidable shadow of J. Edgar Hoover, whose FBI often operated as an independent force centered within the American government. Truman distrusted Hoover’s growing power yet depended on the FBI’s anti-espionage machinery during the early Cold War. Likewise, Trump’s first term was marked by open conflict with senior figures in the FBI, the intelligence community, and the Pentagon. Unlike Truman, whose institutional conflicts often ended in public constitutional assertions of authority, Trump responded to first-term resistance by reshaping later appointments toward greater personal alignment. Neither president enjoyed the luxury of a fully obedient bureaucracy. Both discovered that formal authority over institutions does not eliminate institutional resistance.

There is another historical echo worth noting. Truman governed during a period of intense fear over internal ideological subversion. The Hiss case, the Rosenberg spy prosecutions, and the federal loyalty program under Executive Order 9835 reflected a nation anxious about communist penetration of its institutions. America today faces no Soviet-style infiltration crisis, but it does live under a different kind of ideological anxiety: growing fears among many citizens that institutions—from universities to agencies to media—are becoming ideologically captured in ways that erode public trust. The details differ, but the emotional pattern is familiar: a republic uneasy about what beliefs shape its internal machinery.

This is where the Truman-Trump comparison becomes most revealing. Both presidencies unfolded in eras when Americans feared not only external adversaries but also the internal erosion of institutional legitimacy. Both men became symbols larger than their administrations, lightning rods through whom citizens expressed deeper anxieties about the republic itself. The differences between them remain profound. Truman fundamentally believed in institutions even when he fought those within them. Trump often challenges institutions as structures requiring disruption, not merely correction. Truman reinforced government through blunt leadership; Trump often seeks to redefine it through confrontation.

History may still judge them through a common lens. Both were underestimated. Both were dismissed as unsophisticated by ruling elites. Both made military decisions condemned at the time as reckless. Both governed amid deep national fracture. And both reveal a timeless truth about American democracy: the nation admires blunt men in legend, but often recoils when bluntness reaches the presidency. Harry Truman eventually outlived the scorn of his contemporaries and earned a more generous historical verdict than the headlines of his own time allowed. Whether Trump will receive a similar retrospective reassessment remains unknown.

One lesson is already clear: When blunt presidents make hard decisions in moments of geopolitical danger, history often moves more slowly than outrage. That gap between outrage and judgment reveals as much about America as it does about the men who lead it.

Hidden Rulebooks: How Cultures Change and Why Traditions Struggle to Keep Up

 Hidden Rulebooks: How Cultures Change and Why Traditions Struggle to Keep Up

Every society lives by written laws and unwritten expectations.

We are taught the formal rules early in life. The cultural rulebooks, the norms that shape belonging, opportunity, and respect, are often learned only through experience. Modern life is layered with what might be called macro cultures and micro cultures. The macro culture is the broad social environment we share: our schools, media, economy, and civic life. Within it exist countless subcultures, the military, youth sports organizations, religious traditions, professional fields, civic clubs, and even individual workplaces. Each develops its own internal standards, pathways to recognition, and definitions of fairness.

These rulebooks are rarely explained clearly. More often, they are assumed. For those raised inside a subculture, expectations feel natural. For outsiders, they can feel arbitrary or exclusionary. Conflict does not always arise from hostility. Often, it emerges from misunderstanding, from the simple reality that different groups are operating according to different assumptions at the same time.

Generational experience gradually reshapes these assumptions. Culture moves less like a straight line and more like a number line, drifting toward extremes and then correcting when enough people begin to feel the consequences. A generation raised in harsh environments may try to build gentler institutions. A generation raised in stability may seek greater freedom. The process is rarely coordinated, yet it is persistent. In this sense, culture is partly self-governing.

The evolution of military culture within civilian society illustrates this pattern. In earlier eras, shared service through the draft created a broadly understood framework of discipline, hierarchy, and collective duty. As the United States moved to an all-volunteer force, military life became more clearly a microculture within the broader macroculture. Civilians continued to respect service, but fewer fully understood the expectations behind it. Even the military recognized this cultural shift. Recruitment messaging began speaking not only to duty and collective mission, but to personal growth and individual identity. Campaigns emphasizing themes such as “an Army of one” acknowledged that younger generations increasingly sought meaning through individual participation rather than automatic institutional belonging. Traditions that wish to endure often face a similar challenge: preserving their core values while adapting how they explain them.

This dynamic can be seen across many areas of civic life. Youth sports programs, community organizations, and long-standing associations frequently rely on informal traditions and inherited expectations. When those expectations are not clearly communicated, people may interpret outcomes emotionally rather than structurally. What insiders experience as continuity, outsiders may experience as exclusion. From there, apathy can quietly take root, not necessarily as cruelty, but as the gradual replacement of relational understanding with procedural efficiency. 

Empathy in leadership, therefore, is not merely kindness. It is the effort to translate expectations across cultural boundaries. A coach explaining selection decisions, a manager clarifying advancement pathways, or a mentor articulating standards of conduct is practicing moral empathy. They are making the invisible visible. When this translation does not occur, frustration grows, and alternatives emerge. New institutions form. Old ones decline. Cultural movement continues. None of this change is entirely good or entirely bad. Individual autonomy has expanded opportunities in many areas of life. At the same time, shared identity has weakened in others. Societies oscillate between these poles, searching for balance but rarely remaining there for long.

Virtue itself may lie somewhere along this cultural number line, where zero is virtue, minus ten is vice, and plus ten is passion, not in perfect equilibrium, which is unattainable, but in conscious navigation between extremes, or in this visual number line, minus five through plus five. A healthy society is not one without tension. It is one where citizens understand the rulebooks at play and extend enough empathy to help others understand them as well. 

In many institutions, resistance to change is not born of arrogance or ignorance, but of simple human nature. People tend to protect what once gave them purpose. Traditions that shaped their identity feel worth preserving, even as the world around them shifts. Younger generations, facing different realities, search for new pathways that make sense within their own cultural environment. Between preservation and adaptation, culture does not stand still. It adjusts, sometimes slowly, sometimes imperfectly, as each generation reacts to the conditions it inherited.

Understanding this does not resolve every tension. But it can replace resentment with perspective. When we recognize that different rulebooks are often operating at the same time, we may find greater patience in explaining who we are and why our traditions matter. No culture survives long by guarding unwritten rules behind closed doors. Survival depends on the willingness to explain not only expectations, but purpose. 

"When empathy and humanity guide leadership, even the quietest and oldest traditions can find new life within a new generation, not in institutions alone, but in the hearts of participating individuals." Reed Johnson.

Iran Is Not a Fourth Turning — It’s a Second Cycle at a Breaking Point

 

Iran Is Not a Fourth Turning — It’s a Second Cycle at a Breaking Point

By Reed Johnson

Americans tend to interpret global events through familiar frameworks. One popular lens in recent years has been the “Fourth Turning” theory — the idea that societies move in predictable generational cycles, culminating in crisis and renewal. It is tempting to place Iran inside that model today.

Iran does not fit neatly into a four-cycle generational theory. Iran fits something simpler and more dangerous. Iran is living inside its second great political cycle of the modern era.

The first ended in 1979, when the Shah was overthrown, and the Islamic Republic was born. The second has lasted nearly half a century. Within it, there have been waves of protest, youth uprisings, women defying state dress codes, economic unrest, and repeated crackdowns. To an outside observer, those waves can appear to be multiple cycles. But structurally, they are oscillations inside a single regime. The political order has not yet reset. This distinction matters.

The “Fourth Turning” (An American Prophecy, written by William Strauss and Neil Howe, published in 1997) model assumes that a crisis leads to institutional reconstruction. Iran’s system, however, has shown a different pattern: pressure without rupture. The Islamic Republic has adapted, absorbed, and repressed in cycles, but it has not collapsed or fundamentally transformed. Now the death of its long-standing Supreme Leader introduces something new: uncertainty at the top. The real question is not whether Iran is in a Fourth Turning. It is whether this second cycle will end in reform, mutation, or fracture.

History suggests that the most dangerous moments in political transitions are not revolutions themselves, but the vacuums that follow them. When institutions collapse faster than replacements emerge, ordinary citizens pay the price. Iraq, Libya, and Syria offer sobering examples of regime removal without stable succession. For Iran, the least catastrophic path forward would not be external demands for a Western-style democratic republic. Imposed systems rarely take root where internal legitimacy does not exist. Instead, the safer route — if one exists — would involve continuity of state functions, unity within the security apparatus, and negotiated reform from within.

This is not romanticism about the current regime. It is a realistic portrayal of how transitions avoid bloodshed. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) remains a central pillar of Iranian stability. If it fractures, violence becomes likely. If it remains unified but open to controlled reform, gradual change becomes possible. Generations inside that institution have changed, even if its ideology has not. The question is whether generational identity eventually outweighs institutional incentive. History teaches that over long arcs, time defeats rigidity. Founding generations age. Successors reinterpret missions. Institutions either adapt or they crack, but adaptation is not automatic.

Iran’s youth clearly desire greater social freedom. Many have access to global media and see alternatives to state control. Yet desire alone does not produce governance. What Iran lacks today is not energy for change; it is a coherent, internally legitimate blueprint for what comes next. There is excitement among some about a return of the Crown Prince, Reza Pahlavi, as a transitional figure. That idea appeals to those who long for a bridge between past stability and future reform. But any figure, monarchist, republican, or otherwise, would require buy-in from internal power structures to prevent chaos. No society transforms safely without security compliance. In the end, Iran’s story may not be one of four clean generational turnings. It may simply be a two-cycle history approaching its inflection point.

Civilizations endure through transformation. Political systems mutate. The real measure of success is not whether a regime falls, but whether a society survives the fall intact. For the sake of the Iranian people and not geopolitical strategy, one hopes that if change comes, it comes through negotiated evolution rather than violent rupture.

History offers many examples of collapse and violent rupture. History offers far fewer examples of restraint and peaceful turns. If a regime change comes, Tehran will likely become one of the major global cities of the Middle East. My quote is simple: "We shall see." 

2026 Didn’t Start in 2026: The Real Roots of the U.S.–Iran Conflict

2026 Didn’t Start in 2026: The Real Roots of the U.S.–Iran Conflict

The headlines say 2026. Drones. Missiles. Strikes. Retaliation. Escalation. But 2026 did not start in 2026.

I was alive in 1979. I remember the American hostages in Tehran. I remember the feeling that something had fundamentally changed between our country and Iran. For many Americans, that is where the story begins.

But for many Iranians, it begins earlier. In 1953, the United States and Britain helped remove Iran’s democratically elected prime minister after he nationalized the country’s oil industry. The decision was made in the logic of the Cold War — containment of Soviet influence, protection of strategic resources, and alliance commitments. But inside Iran, it became something else: a symbol of foreign interference and national humiliation.

That memory did not fade. When the Islamic Revolution took power in 1979, it institutionalized that grievance. Resistance to the West — especially to the United States — became part of the regime’s identity. Over time, opposition to Israel became central as well. Proxy networks expanded. Militias were funded. Missiles were built. Narratives hardened.

From our perspective, the aggression looks unprovoked and ideological. From theirs, it is framed as resistance to humiliation and domination. Understanding that distinction does not excuse terrorism. It does not justify hostage-taking, proxy warfare, missile attacks, or nuclear brinkmanship. But it does explain why hostility persists.

Grievance can become policy. When a nation builds its political legitimacy on past injury, letting go feels like surrender. Compromise feels like betrayal. Every new sanction, every military strike, every hostile statement becomes confirmation of the original wound. This is not unique to Iran. Every nation carries historical scars. America has slavery and civil war in its past. Israel carries the trauma of the Holocaust and repeated existential wars. Palestinians carry displacement and occupation narratives. Iran faces foreign intervention and war with Iraq.

Memory itself is not the problem. The problem arises when memory becomes a permanent operating system. If history is used to justify present aggression indefinitely, conflict never ends. Each side believes it is responding rather than initiating. Each escalation feels defensive. Each retaliation feels righteous. That is how wars become generational.

The events of 2024 and 2025, direct drone and missile exchanges between Iran and Israel, marked a shift from proxy conflict to overt state confrontation. By the time we reached 2026, escalation was no longer hypothetical. It was structural. So when the United States acts alongside its ally, many Americans ask: Why now?

The better question is: Why did we think it would stop on its own? Strength matters in a dangerous world. Deterrence matters. Allies matter. As an American, I support my country’s right to defend itself and its partners. But strategy requires more than strength. If we fail to understand how grievance is cultivated, how it is taught, reinforced, and woven into national identity, we misread motivations. When we misread motivations, we miscalculate outcomes.

Understanding the roots of hostility does not mean surrendering to it. It means recognizing that wars rarely begin with the first missile. They begin with stories; stories about humiliation, injustice, betrayal, survival.

If 2026 teaches us anything, it should be this: History must inform policy, not imprison it. Nations that cannot metabolize their past become trapped inside it. Unless leaders on all sides find a way to move memory from weapon to warning, 2026 will not end in 2026 either.

Authority, Anonymity, and the Collapse of Accountability

 

Note: I have been trying to understand why some want ICE to remove their masks, but the protestors evidently can keep theirs on. The thought hit me about the internet political trolls I witness every two years. Some names I recognize are making harsh comments on local social media, in newspapers, and on social media sites, inciting nothing more than hate and violence. Once the election is over, they disappear for another two years. Social media can act as a mask, a cover-up, and I wanted to write about that cover-up. Why do you think we allow such bad actors to exist?

Authority, Anonymity, and the Collapse of Accountability

We are living through a strange contradiction.

On the street, some demand that federal law enforcement remove masks, expose names, and provide personal identification during active operations — even when officers are clearly marked as ICE or Police. Yet online, those same voices tolerate — and often defend — a digital world where anonymous trolls hide behind fake names, fake photos, and bot networks while threatening families, doxing agents, and destroying lives. That contradiction is no longer defensible.

 

1. Identification Does Not Mean Personal Exposure

If a vest clearly identifies a man as ICE or Police, then he is identified. That is the purpose of the uniform. In a lawful society, citizens are not expected to conduct on-the-spot identity audits during enforcement actions. Compliance with lawful commands occurs in the moment; accountability occurs afterward through courts, internal review, and elected oversight. Demanding personal exposure during active operations does not enhance accountability — it increases danger. Officers are not private citizens acting on impulse. They are representatives of the state operating under law. Their authority comes from office, not from public approval in the heat of confrontation.

 

2. Masks Exist for a Reason — and the Reason Is Real

ICE agents wear masks for the same reason undercover officers, judges, and jurors are sometimes protected: retaliation is no longer hypothetical.

 

In the age of social media, doxing is instantaneous. Fake accounts publish home addresses, harass employers, and threaten spouses and children. What once required physical proximity now requires only a keyboard. Masks are not symbols of tyranny — they are shields against lawlessness amplified by anonymity. Ironically, the same voices demanding officers unmask themselves often defend online anonymity even when it is used as a weapon.

 

3. Tech Companies Exercise Power Without Democratic Accountability

Social media platforms now function as public squares, narrative gatekeepers, and reputation engines, yet they operate with almost no democratic accountability. Unlike law enforcement, which is constrained by statute, courts, and constitutional limits, tech companies set rules that shape speech and visibility behind closed doors. They lobby legislators, fund campaigns legally, hire former regulators, and shape laws historically in their favor — all while claiming neutrality.

This is not free speech.

It is power without consent.

When unelected corporations decide who is amplified, who is buried, and who is targeted — while shielding anonymous trolls and bot networks from identification — they exercise authority without responsibility. That imbalance should concern anyone who still believes in democratic legitimacy.

4. Every Society Has Rules for Bad Actors — Trolls Are Bad Actors

No functioning society survives without rules for those who abuse freedom to harm others. We regulate fraud, threats, stalking, intimidation, and conspiracy not because speech is dangerous, but because speech becomes conduct when it produces real harm. Online trolls who dox federal agents, threaten families, fabricate accusations, or mobilize harassment campaigns are not “expressing ideas.” They are weaponizing anonymity.

The internet did not invent new rights.

It exposed a failure to enforce old ones.

 

Pseudonymity Is Legitimate — Until It Becomes a Weapon.

 Pseudonymous speech has an honorable history.  The Federalist Papers were written under the name Publius to focus attention on ideas rather than identities. That tradition elevated argument — not abuse.

The line has always been clear:

Pseudonymity protects ideas.

It does not protect attacks on people.

The moment speech shifts from argument to ad hominem — from persuasion to intimidation — anonymity should end. Not because speech is fragile, but because people are. Threats, doxing, harassment, and reputational destruction are not opinions. They are actions carried out through digital means.

Every civilization understands this distinction. The online world pretends it cannot.

 

A Brief Historical Reminder: This Was Already Settled

What we are struggling with today is not new. It is old ground — and it was once well governed. In Roman law, libertas loquendi (freedom of speech) existed alongside strict prohibitions against iniuria — personal attacks intended to disgrace, intimidate, or provoke harm. You could argue ideas freely; you could not weaponize words to destroy a person without consequence. Harmful speech was treated as conduct, not opinion. Under English common law, articulated most clearly by William Blackstone, liberty of the press meant freedom from prior restraint — not freedom from responsibility. Once speech crossed into libel, threats, or intimidation, punishment followed. Anonymity did not absolve liability; it merely delayed identification. The American Founders inherited this understanding. Publius used anonymity to elevate ideas, not to target private citizens. Had the Federalist authors engaged in threats or coordinated harassment, no one in their time would have defended it as protected expression.

 

Even the First Amendment was never understood to protect:

• threats
• libel presented as fact
• incitement
• or organized intimidation

Those limits were assumed, not debated.

 

What Changed

What changed was not our values — it was enforcement. Technology collapsed distance, multiplied reach, and removed friction. Speech that once required courage now requires only a keyboard. Consequences that once arrived swiftly now dissolve into anonymity, platform immunity, and algorithmic indifference. Tech companies did not invent this drift — but they profit from it. Outrage drives engagement. Harassment drives clicks. Accountability slows growth.

So we pretend the line is unclear.

It isn’t.

 

From Conditioning to Conscience

From Conditioning to Conscience: As the lodge educational officer, I am responsible for delivering a 3-5-minute presentation. In the preceding presentation, you may find words of encouragement to seek light: "Ask one to be one."

A Master Mason’s Work

Brethren,

When a man is raised to the sublime degree of Master Mason, something changes.

He is no longer merely instructed — he is charged. The question before him is no longer what shaped me, but what I will now do with myself.

 

Tonight, I want to reflect on that question through three lenses:

·       a modern scientific one, an ancient philosophical one, and finally the Masonic way, which, for me personally, is where those two finally came together.

In the twentieth century, psychologist B. F. Skinner argued that human behavior is largely shaped by environment and reinforcement. In his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner claimed that behavior — even moral behavior — is learned, conditioned, and maintained by social consequences. From Skinner’s view, prejudice and similar moral failures are not hidden stains buried in a man’s soul, but patterns of behavior, reinforced over time by history, culture, tribe, fear, and power. Skinner forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth that every honest man eventually learns:

·       None of us arrive unconditioned.

·       We are shaped — often deeply — by forces long before we ever knock at the door of the Lodge.

But Skinner stops there.

He explains how a man is shaped, but not how a man must govern himself once he becomes aware of it.

For that, we turn much further back — to Socrates. Socrates famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Where Skinner looks outward to the environment, Socrates looks inward to the soul.

 

Socrates believed moral failure is part of being human. His warning was not against error, but against unquestioned certainty — especially the certainty that one is already righteous.

Socrates would agree with Skinner on this much: Human beings are shaped by forces larger than themselves.

But Socrates adds the moral turn: Once a man becomes aware of his fallibility, he is responsible for examining it.

 

Here is where I want to speak personally, Brethren.

For a long time, I could see truth in Skinner’s explanation of behavior, and I could see wisdom in Socrates’ call to self-examination. But I could not reconcile the two —until I became a Freemason.

It was only through the work of the Lodge, through reflection on the symbols and the charges, that I understood this:

·       Skinner explains the conditioning,

·       Socrates demands self-knowledge,

·       But Freemasonry requires self-mastery.

Freemasonry gave me a place where understanding how I was shaped did not excuse my conduct, and examining myself did not become an exercise in self-righteousness. It became work.

As Master Masons, we are charged to circumscribe our passions and keep them within due bounds. That charge assumes something essential:

·       that passions exist,

·       that imperfections exist,

·       that the rough ashlar still bears the marks of its shaping.

Freemasonry does not deny this. It demands that we labor upon it. The tools of Master Masons are not instruments of accusation — they are instruments of correction.

·       The common gavel teaches us to divest our hearts and consciences of superfluities — including pride, moral vanity, and the illusion of purity.

·       The level reminds us that no man stands above another by nature

·       The plumb reminds us to walk uprightly in our own conduct, not merely criticize the conduct of others.

·       And the trowel teaches us to spread brotherly love — not excuses, not condemnation, but unity grounded in virtue.

The lesson of the Master Mason is not that a man begins perfect. It is that once raised, a man is no longer permitted to live unexamined. A Mason who denies his fallibility has abandoned the work. A Mason who recognizes it — and quietly labors to correct it — walks in the Light.

In a world obsessed with labeling, condemning, and declaring moral victory, Freemasonry asks for something far harder:

·       That a man rule himself before judging others.

·       Skinner taught me why I was shaped.

·       Socrates taught me why I must examine myself.

 

Freemasonry taught me what to do next.

·       To take up the tools.

·       To govern my passions.

·       To improve my ashlar.

·       And for that, Brethren, I am truly thankful.

That is the work of a Master Mason.

When "All Views Are Welcomed" Meets Real World Outcomes

 

When “All Views Are Welcome” Meets the Real World

In 2018, I wrote my first long-form blog post and a lecture outline addressing media bias, cultural contempt for rural America, and the narrowing range of acceptable viewpoints in higher education. The writing was raw, personal, and direct. I believed—perhaps naïvely—that if I explained who I was, how I lived, worked, failed, and succeeded, understanding would follow.

I shared that work with leaders at colleges and universities, including the president of William & Mary. I was not invited to speak.

Eight years later, I understand the moment more clearly—not because my views have softened, but because experience has sharpened them.

For transparency and historical record, the original 2018 piece remains available here, unchanged:
👉 Original essay (2018):
https://draft.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/1303156725583394267/7866210882328568973

What follows is not a correction of that work, nor an apology for it. It is an update—written with the benefit of time, restraint, and a clearer understanding of how institutions actually respond to dissent.

---

What I Believed Then

In 2018, I believed that higher education still functioned primarily as a forum for inquiry. I believed that universities, when presented with a thoughtful challenge to prevailing narratives, would respond with curiosity—even disagreement—rather than avoidance. I believed that “diversity of viewpoints” meant what it said.

I believed that if I framed conservative, rural, and small-business perspectives clearly—without shouting, without caricature—they would be treated as legitimate contributions to the conversation.

That belief was sincere. It was also incomplete.

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What I Understand Now

The issue was never clarity.

The issue was courage.

Institutions do not struggle to understand conservative arguments. They struggle to platform them. Not because the arguments are incoherent or hateful, but because they introduce risk—social, reputational, and administrative.

Universities today are not neutral arenas of debate. They are risk-managed organizations. Every speaker is filtered not just for accuracy, but for predictability. The question is no longer “Is this argument defensible?” but “Will this argument create discomfort we cannot control?”

This is why institutions often say they value a “range of views,” while quietly limiting which views are granted a microphone. Diversity is welcomed—so long as it arrives already domesticated.

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The Chilling Effect Is Real

A statistic I referenced years ago has only grown more troubling: a majority of college students report being afraid to voice disagreement with their professors. That fear is not irrational. Students are acutely aware that grades, recommendations, and opportunities depend on alignment—or at least silence.

This is not how intellectual confidence is built.

A classroom where students fear asking the wrong question is not a classroom producing thinkers. It is producing performers.

Socrates warned us about this long ago. The unexamined life, he argued, is not worth living—not because answers are dangerous, but because unasked questions are.

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Rural and Conservative Voices Are Not “Exotic”

One of the most persistent misconceptions I tried to address in 2018—and still see today—is the idea that rural and conservative Americans represent some fringe or pathological subset of the population.

They do not.

They are small business owners, tradesmen, engineers, technicians, farmers, and operators. They run systems, build infrastructure, and maintain the physical realities upon which modern life depends—often far from the spotlight of cultural approval.

They tend to value:

• Self-reliance over performative grievance

• Accountability over abstraction

• Delayed gratification over entitlement

These are not extremist values. They are foundational ones.

Yet they are frequently depicted in media and entertainment as backward, ignorant, or morally suspect. That caricature persists not because it is accurate, but because it is useful. It simplifies complex social divides into moral hierarchies—and hierarchies are easy to manage.

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Why I Was Not Invited

With hindsight, the reason I was not invited to speak is straightforward.

I was not offering a contained critique.
I was offering examination.

I was not asking permission to exist within the framework.
I was questioning the framework itself.

Institutions can tolerate dissent that stays inside the fence. They struggle with dissent that asks who built the fence—and why.

That is not a personal grievance. It is an institutional reality.

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What Has Not Changed

What has not changed—despite the passage of years—is my belief that education should form independent thinkers, not compliant ones.

Knowledge is not the same as credentialing.
Education is not the same as indoctrination.
And disagreement is not violence.

If universities truly wish to prepare students for a pluralistic society, they must allow students to encounter serious disagreement in controlled, respectful settings—not outsource that encounter to social media, where it arrives distorted and weaponized.

Shielding students from ideas does not make them safer. It makes them brittle.

---

A Standing Invitation

I no longer ask whether colleges are willing to hear these arguments. That question has largely been answered.

Instead, I leave a standing invitation—for any institution, faculty member, or student willing to engage in good-faith examination rather than performance.

Not to provoke.
Not to convert.
But to ask the kinds of questions that education once promised to ask.

The original 2018 essay remains as a record of what was offered then. This essay stands as a record of what has been learned since.

The door remains open.

Whether institutions choose to walk through it is no longer my concern.