Arthur "Brent" Porter · UT Austin '87 · lifelong Republican voter
Twentieth year with Lyme disease
"I was wrong."
Three of the shortest words in the language, and only a secure person can say them. Not a strong-looking person. A secure one — someone who can survive being mistaken without it costing him who he is.
Everything that follows is what happens when nobody will say them.
I'd had Lyme disease since 2007. Then I read two books and understood something no lab had told me: unresolved stress, carried for decades, holds a body in a state where it cannot heal.
Nothing is sold here. If they help you the way they helped me, that's the whole point.
Gently. In writing. With the research attached.
My illness has more than one author. Your part in it is real. I can't keep carrying the whole blame so you never have to look at your share.
This is the man who taught me truth-telling was absolute. At twelve, he drove me to a neighbor's door to correct a single sentence I'd said wrong.
So instead of an answer, I got an ultimatum: attend a $15,000 psychiatric evaluation — or lose all financial support. I'm on disability.
What it cost them: $15,000, and a son.
What it cost me: a false medical record, nineteen months of my life spent on paperwork instead of treatment, and infections that are still untreated in my twentieth year.
Sticking with a bad plan is never the cheaper option. It's only the more expensive one, later.
My sister's own email, before I had agreed to anything:
A family friend from our church sits on that medical school's behavioral health advisory board. That is the door. It is not a door available to a stranger with the same symptoms and no connections.
The scheduler was engaged, the appointment claimed, and every other family member had already agreed — before anyone asked me.
Under the American Psychological Association's own standards, coercion voids consent. The evaluation was invalid before it began.
Two more scores their report itself calls "exceptionally high" had the numbers left off the page entirely. And a bipolar code appeared in my file that the same report says had no evidence behind it.
Honest mistakes scatter in both directions. A thumb on the scale never does.
We have an aunt with bipolar disorder, so years ago I had it checked. My test was negative, and I told my sister so.
She wrote to Dell anyway, three weeks before the evaluation, instructing me what to report — including "periods of mania or psychosis." During the evaluation she contacted the team directly. A clinician asked her for a letter about me. That letter has never been produced to me, though she confirmed in writing she sent it.
The final report then states: "no evidence of any mania." And a bipolar code sits in my file anyway — dated during the evaluation, disclosed to me only after a federal agency forced it into the open.
Requested by family. Contradicted by their own findings. Recorded regardless.
Six institutions. One apology — and it came from my mother, the person with the least power in the entire story.
The chairman of the department that evaluated me built a forty-year career proving one thing: chronic, unresolvable stress raises CRF, drives inflammation, and produces disease.
A false record I cannot correct, with every door of appeal closed, is the textbook version of that stressor — uncontrollable by design.
So every month nobody says three words, my body pays the interest.
Seventeen inspectors general fired in a single night — more than every previous president combined. Prosecutors fired for saying an order was unlawful. Agencies that would investigate, disbanded or told to stand down.
None of that stops wrongdoing. It stops wrongdoing from being found.
My complaint didn't fail on the merits. The machinery that would have examined it was switched off above me.
I had the reasoning to catch it, the records to prove it, nineteen months to fight it, and a federal agency was still required just to show me my own file.
So how many people has this happened to who could not argue?
Not only at that one program — where any third party can pay for an evaluation of another adult — but everywhere, now that the office meant to investigate has stopped investigating. Watch the Attorney General hearings and you can see the same principle being decided at national scale: whether anyone with power can still be told no.
The ones without the documents, the stamina, or a 97th percentile are not going to raise their hands. That is exactly why I am raising mine.
If my father admitted 2024 was wrong, then 2020 was wrong, and four years of treatment were wrong. If the Senate admits the articles should move, it admits 2021 was wrong.
The longer you wait, the bigger the admission becomes — so waiting gets easier every single year.
That's not politics. That's the same arithmetic that ran in my kitchen.
How I treat you sets the standard for how I may be treated. That's it. Confucius, Hillel, Jesus, and Kant each arrived at it separately, with no contact between them.
It's not a soft rule — it's the most rigorous one there is, because it's testable. Any gap between what I do to you and what I'd accept done to me is not a difference of opinion. It's hypocrisy, measured.
Apply the rule, and there are only two possibilities:
There is no third option. The second one has a name, and the name is hypocrisy.
People follow laws they believe are legitimate — and legitimacy comes from having a say. Strip the say, and you haven't removed the grievance. You've removed the lawful channel for it.
What comes next isn't calm. It's disengagement, distrust, and eventually the kind of trouble that shows up in a community's streets rather than its ballots.
I'm the small version. Deny one man a hearing and he writes a website. Deny a district a voice and you get something else.
Texas investigated twenty-nine school districts this year to make sure the Ten Commandments are posted on classroom walls.
The ninth is thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. A state medical school wrote false witness about me and no one has investigated that at all.
Asked who counts as a neighbour, Jesus answered with a Samaritan — the man of the wrong tribe. Redistricting is the practice of sorting people into tribes to decide whose voice counts.
I studied Greek at seminary for two years, trying to read it in the original. I am not questioning anyone's faith. I'm asking how the words and the map fit in the same hands.
Not a coup. The offices all stay standing — they simply stop working. An Office for Civil Rights that exists and will not investigate is that sentence, alive, in my mailbox.
At the Virginia Ratifying Convention, George Mason warned that a President might "pardon crimes which were advised by himself."
James Madison's answer: then the House can impeach him. Not one option among many — the reason the design was safe.
Already written. Already filed. Unmoved.
I grew up in Texas. I played high school football against kids whose grandfathers had to fight for the right to vote at all.
A President from New York asked my governor to reduce their voices, and my state did it.
He had no standing to ask. Texas had no business agreeing.
You cannot pray beside a man on Friday night and dilute his vote on Monday and call both of them honest.
I'm sixty-one, in my twentieth year with Lyme disease, Bartonella and Babesia, on disability. Every hour spent fighting a false record is an hour not spent getting well.
All primary documents — the eight chapters and the 467-email chronology — are in the companion case file.
It goes to treatment and filing costs. Nothing on this site is for sale — no book, no course, no ads.
Not a confession of villainy. Just the ordinary human sentence that a course was mistaken and can be corrected.
"We were wrong."
My mother couldn't say it, and I'm still sick. A party can't say it, and a country is still waiting. If not now — when?
Arthur "Brent" Porter · native Texan · great-grandson of an Oklahoma sharecropper who farmed corn · bowandvector.com