Lamentations about the Constitution spanning across the generations, from the Great Depression unto today.
The better strands of my family have been Democrats for generations. The reason was simple: unions. I’ve heard a plethora of reasons people give for supporting one party or another over the years—some better than others—yet it doesn’t get any more basic for us: without the efforts of unions, I may very well not exist. It’s pretty hard to argue with that.
Nonetheless, a Democratic heritage doesn’t imply that we’re out-of-touch or aimlessly centrist. Although my late friend and cousin Tony worked with the famously centrist Joe Manchin, Tony himself—and my family by extension—are not so similarly inclined: Tony lamented to me that he will likely never get the chance to vote for Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez to be President of the United States. That’s probably not something you’d hear very many West Virginian politicians—current or retired—say out loud, regardless of party. But Tony admired competency and charisma, and he was plenty accomplished enough in life to have no reason to lie about his two cents on that.
Overall, it’s accurate to say that I am a labor Democrat. While my views also overlap considerably with today’s progressives, I am much more fervently a fan of the descriptor radical liberal, in Hamiltonian font. The two greatest Founding Fathers are the ones on your money who were not Presidents.
As a child, I grew up quite poor by American standards. My grandfather was a truck stop worker for his entire life, trying to feed a family of four without welfare or crime on a sixth-grade education. My mother didn’t finish school and has worked a variety of jobs after leaving the U.S. Army a disabled veteran. Some of the most povertous periods of my childhood happened right here in North Carolina: driving northbound on N.C. Highway 50, our 1980s Ford Thunderbird finally quit on us, leaving my mother, my sister and I to futilly push it forward in the autumn rain until a family in a minivan stopped to take us home.
Things started to shape up for me when I got married, but I still had a lot to learn and for much of my marriage thus far it has been a lonely team effort between my husband and I to stay above water in an economy that is rapidly dissolving any pretenses of sanity it still has.
I have a variety of skillsets that in an ordinary economy would have completely absolved me of poverty and perhaps even bought me an upper middle class lifestyle if I could steward the money responsibly. Mainly, this is being a self-taught informatician and software developer, which at one point in 2022 allowed me to land a job at a Silicon Valley startup funded in part by the luminary Sequoia Capital.
Had this happened even 10 years earlier I would be set quite nicely, but alas, it was not to be. The economy has been continuously ripped apart at the seams in such a way that obscures the blight from both wealthy elites and established participants in the labor force – think of it like a system that wants to maximise the amount of money siphoned away from others while minimising its exposure to ways that the exploit might be uncovered beyond any reasonable doubt. The economy has thrown young people like myself overboard because older people are content to lie to themselves and blame young people for not getting hired without any hard evidence demonstrating it’s their own fault.
In lieu of this delusion that is manifesting everywhere, there are only two things then that people can still count on in order to have a career nonetheless: engaging in various kinds of corruption as we have seen all around us, or having a skillset that is both genuinely needed and understood as needed by stakeholders that is also hard enough to hire for that they will cut the crap about college degrees and other artificial and increasingly meaningless hurdles to being considered. A good example of this are quantitative trading firms: make a few million dollars on your own in an app like Charles Schwab, and you’ll probably get a call from one of them with a job offer. This is not a reasonable floor of engagement for the entire economy.
Being an informatician, the place I belong in is the tech industry. As you are likely already aware, this industry has become notoriously corrupt and sleazy to an extent only rivalled in politics itself. What’s more, the stakeholders that ruined my industry have been inviting themselves into politics proper, bringing all their terrible habits and delusional frames of thinking to new arenas. And so, I have no choice but to give chase.
I have spent my entire adult life until now trying to earnestly engage with productive society, and I continually run headlong into the sleazy, poorly-documented underbelly of the rotten incentive structures that have been siphoning wealth away from the public for over 40 years. It’s enough to make basically anyone just give up entirely on life.
Many of these struggles have been chronicled exhaustively on my
Stack, but suffice to say that it’s time to solve my problems by
solving it for everyone.
I’m absolutely not the only
one being screwed over by the consolidated empire of stolen American
wealth.
This campaign website is built to explain why I’m running, but I
still need you to go out and vote. The only way these
problems can begin getting solved is if the people decide to start
putting folks with intelligence, integrity, credibility and morality
into the positions to do it.
Brad Knott doesn’t care to stand
up against the tech mob asking for a $500 billion blank check,
but I do.