On assuming good faith — in a family, and in a country — and what the research says happens when people lose their voice.
Everything else on this website documents what an institution did. This page is about something different, and I want to start it honestly.
My mother says she was hoping I would get a referral out of the Dell evaluation. My sister says she was trying to help. I take them at their word. I had a loving family before this happened, and I do not think anyone in it woke up one morning intending to cause harm.
But intent is not the only thing that matters, and I want to hold both halves of this honestly: I do not think they meant harm, and I spent months writing to them asking to be heard, and I was not heard. Both of those are true. Neither one cancels the other.
The institution is a different question. A family under stress making a bad call is one thing. A medical school that documented the coercion in its own report and proceeded anyway is another. Those are not the same, and I have kept them separate throughout this record.
But I keep noticing that the shape of what happened inside my family is the shape of what is happening in the country right now. And I do not think I am the only one who has noticed.
Around year sixteen or seventeen of the illness, I read The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk and The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté.
What I found there was a body of research I had never encountered: that sustained, unresolved stress does measurable physical damage — that the nervous system does not distinguish between a threat outside the body and a threat inside a household, and that a person kept for years in a state of not being heard pays for it in inflammation and immune function.
I had been sick for a very long time and had tried a great many treatments. Reading that was the first time anything had explained the part the treatments were not reaching.
So I brought it to my family. Not as an accusation. As the thing I had found.
I said something like: I think part of why I am not getting well is that I have spent my life not being heard in this family, including by myself, and I think that has a physical cost. And what I need is a break from protocols and a chance to reset my nervous system.
They took offense.
And here is the part I did not expect, and still find hard to write. Their response to being told they were not listening was to not listen. Not to argue with the research. Not to say that is not how we see it, here is why. They responded by deciding the problem was that something was wrong with me — and paid $15,000 to have an institution say so.
They proved the thing I was describing, in the act of rejecting the description.
There is a trap inside this, and I want to name it because it explains a great deal beyond my family.
A person who cannot hear criticism cannot hear that he cannot hear criticism. The one message that would let him correct it is the exact message the condition prevents him from receiving. Every attempt to raise it registers as an attack, and every attack confirms he was right to defend.
That is a closed loop. It does not open from inside. It opens only when someone outside it sets a limit that holds.
I could not set that limit with my family. I had no leverage — I was sick and financially dependent, which is precisely what they used.
But I recognize the loop now on sight. And I see it operating at the top of this country.
Tell the President the war should stop, and it does not stop. Tell him a nominee has a conflict, and the answer is a threat. Tell him a bill has passed with bipartisan majorities, and he refuses to sign it — calling landmark housing legislation "a big yawn" and "of minor importance" — because he wants a different bill passed first. In March he announced he would sign no bills at all until the SAVE America Act cleared the Senate.
That is not disagreement about policy. That is holding legislation the country needs as collateral until he gets what he wants. It is the same instrument my mother used on me: you will comply, or I withhold the thing you need.
And when two senators would not fold on a nomination, the answer was to revive a $1.776 billion fund out of public money and to threaten to withdraw the nomination and keep his man in place until those senators are gone.
Same loop. Same instrument. Vastly different scale.
I want to be precise about what actually happened, because I have the record.
Before I describe what happened, there are some things about me I did not fully understand myself until recently, and they matter to why the request was what it was.
I have ADD. In plain terms that means a naturally low baseline of dopamine — the neurochemical that produces focus and, more importantly, the wanting to do things at all. This is not a character description. I know it is chemical because when I take a single tablet of medication that raises dopamine, I want to do things and I get them done. Nothing about my character changed in the intervening forty minutes.
Lyme disease and Bartonella deplete dopamine further. And I had been a physically capable person my whole life — an athlete — so seventeen years of not being able to move my body the way I always had drove it lower still.
By the fall of 2024 I was facing an eight-to-nine month antibiotic protocol to kill the bacteria. It is a brutal thing to undergo. The die-off produces headaches that have to be detoxed through sauna and other measures. And I did not have the internal fuel to begin it. There was not enough left to start.
I had reached a point where I was not certain I wanted to keep going at all.
So I asked myself a practical question: what would make me want to be alive enough to do the treatment?
The answer was the same thing it had always been — physical challenge that demands full attention. Skiing does it for me; I am good at it, and it takes everything I have. But it was not winter. The other thing I had always wanted to learn was surfing — hard on the body, brutal on coordination, absorbing enough that nothing else exists while you are doing it.
That is not a whim. I will come back to the research on it, because it turns out to be considerable.
That is what the November 4 email asked for. Not a vacation. A dopamine intervention, so that I would have enough left to survive a nine-month treatment protocol.
On November 4, 2024, I wrote my family an email called "Moving Forward." On November 18, I wrote another called "Seeking Alignment." On December 18, I wrote to my sister and brother-in-law and said plainly that I was not being heard, that I had spent my life not speaking up, and that I was trying to now — and I asked them to help me do it. I copied Dell on that correspondence. It is all in writing, dated, and I still have it.
The answer to the first one was no. Not no, we cannot afford it — the answer was, in substance, not your way. Our way.
Then I learned what their way cost. Fifteen thousand dollars for a psychiatric evaluation at Dell.
So on November 18 I wrote back and proposed Stanford instead, where Medicare would have covered most of it, and suggested the difference could go toward family counseling — which was the thing I had been asking for all along. I was trying to spend less of their money, not more. I said so directly, because I knew how it might sound.
My mother's reply accused me of backtracking and of trying to redirect their money. And then she told me that if I did not go to Dell, she and my father had determined they could no longer support me financially.
I proposed the cheaper option and was accused of taking their money. Then I was told to comply or lose support.
I want to show you how that request appears in the report Dell Medical School signed on February 3, 2025. This is their sentence, exactly as written:
"He was quite bitter about the fact that his parents have not acquiesced to his insistence that they pay for him to relocate to Hawaii, where he could dedicate time to surfing and other endeavors to allow his central nervous system to recover."
Read what that sentence does.
My emotional state is characterized first — quite bitter. A request becomes his insistence. A temporary intervention becomes relocate. A treatment becomes dedicate time to surfing and other endeavors, which sounds like a man asking to be sent on vacation.
And the word acquiesced is worth pausing on, because the same report uses it six paragraphs earlier — about me: "He acquiesced to their request." That was their description of me submitting to a financial ultimatum. The identical verb is then used for my parents declining to fund a treatment. Submission under threat and refusal of a request are given the same word.
They do state my actual reason at the end of the sentence, accurately: to allow his central nervous system to recover. But by then it has been framed as bitterness and insistence, so it reads as a rationalization rather than a rationale.
Under Treatment Recommendations, the same report — signed by the same faculty — says this:
"The patient does appear to fulfill criteria for chronic fatigue syndrome. In addition, the mainstays of treatment for chronic fatigue syndrome and POTS are greater exercise, strength training, adequate hydration, generous salt intake and compression stockings."
They characterized my request for demanding physical activity as bitterness, and then prescribed demanding physical activity.
That is not a difference of clinical opinion about what would help me. They agreed with me about what would help me. They wrote it into their own recommendations. The only thing that changed between page three and page nine was who was asking.
And the evidence has since gotten stronger. A 2025 study from San Diego State University, published in Frontiers in Psychology, followed 41 veterans with PTSD through a seven-day surf therapy program: anxiety down 59 percent immediately and still 30 percent lower at thirty days, depression down 44 percent, PTSD symptoms down 38 percent and still 35 percent lower a month out. All statistically significant. The lead researcher specifically credited the flow state produced on the waves.
I was not asking to go surfing. I was asking for the intervention that their own treatment plan recommends, delivered in the form my nervous system would actually accept.
So the damage was not that we both stopped assuming good faith. I kept assuming it, on paper, for months. I kept explaining. I kept asking.
The damage was that I was asking to be heard, and I was not heard. In April 2025, my sister acknowledged in writing that what she had written about me to the evaluators would be hurtful if I read it. She was right. But the hurt was not mainly the content. It was that the letter existed at all — that the conversation about me had moved somewhere I could not reach it, while I was still writing emails asking to be included in it.
That asymmetry is the whole thing. And it is what I recognize now when I look at the country.
People who are being redistricted are not refusing to engage. They are asking to be heard. And the response is not counter-argument — it is the removal of the ability to be heard at all. That is a different act than disagreement. It is the same act that was done to me, at a different scale.
Which brings me to the question I am actually asking, and I want to be careful that it is a question and not an accusation:
Why? Why did my family not listen? Why is my party redrawing lines against people we grew up with, played high school football beside, lined up next to on the same field? And why did Senator Grassley — who is called the Godfather of Whistleblowers, who runs a whistleblower contact form on his own Senate website, who gave a floor speech on January 8, 2026 saying that Justice Department whistleblowers "have a responsibility to blow the whistle" and "oftentimes don't get any respect" — run over a Justice Department whistleblower in his own committee room six months later?
Because that is what the record shows. Blanche signed a settlement in which the government he leads never defended itself against a suit brought by the man who appointed him — a suit a federal judge found was "nothing more than a pretext," between parties who "worked in tandem and were never actually adverse."
Her own written testimony describes what that cost her. She did not sleep the night she refused. The next afternoon a colleague pulled her out of a meeting to tell her security officers were waiting. She was handed a three-sentence memo signed by Blanche, terminated effective immediately, with no notice and no explanation. She packed her belongings into a grocery bag and officers walked her out of the building.
It did not end there. She testified that Blanche retaliated against her and her family repeatedly afterward — directing U.S. Marshals to deliver an intimidating letter to her home in an effort to stop her from informing Congress, and filing a professional misconduct complaint against her with the bar where she is licensed.
That is what she came to the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 16, 2026 to report: that the man nominated to be Attorney General fires career officials who refuse unethical orders, then uses federal law enforcement to discourage them from telling Congress about it.
Senator Grassley did not ask her about any of that. He asked her about clemency recommendations she had made in a previous job. He pressed her on whether she had contacted victims' families — "You can't even tell me if you contacted the victim's family? You can't say yes or no to that?" — while she cited the same executive privilege the nominee had invoked the day before. Coverage of the hearing describes him as having hammered her over her own credibility. Senator Hawley told her her judgment was "astoundingly terrible." Senator Schmitt told her she had "no credibility to talk about Todd Blanche" and that he was glad to have exposed her hypocrisy. The committee's own Republican press office published a release attacking her by name.
She answered: "Sir, what I am proud of is the fact that I took my job as pardon attorney extremely seriously."
I recognize this exchange, because a version of it happened to me. It is the move where an institution, presented with a factual complaint it does not want to answer, puts the complainant's character on trial instead. The subject changes from what was done to who is this person. I have never once seen it fail to work, and I have never once seen it be honest.
And I know he is capable of grace, because I watched him extend it freely nine days later. On July 23, at Darline Graham's first Judiciary meeting after being appointed to her late brother's seat, he opened by telling her the committee deeply admired her brother. That was right, and she deserved it, and she had done nothing to earn it beyond grief.
Two women. One received warmth for who her brother was. The other took a stand that cost her a career, and was treated as the problem in the room. I am not claiming to know what is in anyone's heart. I am saying these things are on the public record and they do not fit together, and that the man who built a career on protecting whistleblowers had one in front of him and did not protect her. I am asking why, and I would genuinely like an answer.
Because most people on both sides want approximately the same ordinary things. A decent life. Their kids doing better than they did. To not be afraid. To be treated fairly.
We are one family here. We are telling lies about each other that are not even true.
Fifty years of peer-reviewed psychology — Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's Self-Determination Theory, developed at the University of Rochester — identifies three needs a human being requires to function well: autonomy, the ability to choose for oneself; competence, being seen as capable of something; and relatedness, belonging to people who care about you.
When one is taken away — especially by people you depend on — wellbeing declines and the nervous system enters a documented state of chronic stress. I lived that. What I want to raise here is a question, not a verdict: does this scale? Does a group of people, told their vote counts for less, experience something structurally similar to what one person experiences when their voice stops mattering at home?
Some real research suggests it might.
Robert Sampson and colleagues surveyed 8,782 ordinary residents across 343 Chicago neighborhoods — not people with criminal records, just neighbors. They found that "collective efficacy" — trust between neighbors plus a shared belief that they can act together for the common good — was one of the strongest predictors of lower violence, stronger than poverty itself. The effect of concentrated poverty on violence was largely explained by how much it eroded collective efficacy, rather than by poverty acting directly.
Being precise about the limits: this study measured neighborhood trust and organizational participation, including participation in local political organizations. It did not measure redistricting against crime rates. No study I have found walks that entire chain in one paper. What exists is a well-supported set of links — people's sense that they can affect their own community predicts real outcomes — and a reasonable question about whether diluting political voice weakens that sense. I am raising the question, not claiming the study proves it.
Using health data from the Health and Retirement Study linked to state-level disenfranchisement rates, researchers found that residing in states with higher levels of racialized felony disenfranchisement was associated with more depressive symptoms and more functional limitations among Black Americans, after adjusting for individual and state-level factors. The authors describe political exclusion as a psychosocial stressor with measurable health consequences — social exclusion, low control, unfair treatment.
A broad literature on discrimination and chronic stress documents the physiological pathway: repeated stressors that are persistent, uncontrollable, and threatening to a person's sense of self produce cumulative wear on the body's stress-response systems — a process called allostatic load, linked to inflammation and cardiovascular risk. Researchers studying survivors of political repression in the former East Germany found the same pattern, under a very different political system.
I want to be careful here. I have not measured anyone's stress hormones, and I am not claiming a study proves that any particular map caused any particular harm. What I am saying is narrower and, I think, hard to dismiss: the general mechanism — losing control over your own circumstances damages people measurably — is documented science, and it does not check anyone's party registration before it works.
What did you dream of becoming, before you became who you are now?
I wanted to play at Wimbledon. I wanted to play in a World Cup. Then I saw people sleeping outside in Austin while I was in college and I could not walk past it, and that changed what I did with my life. It cost me academically. I do not regret it.
I do not believe anyone runs for office dreaming of drawing lines to make their neighbors' votes count less. I think that happens the way it happened in my family — gradually, under pressure, with everyone convinced they are protecting something that matters. Nobody decides to stop assuming good faith. It just erodes, and then one day the erosion is the whole relationship.
So I am not asking anyone to feel guilty. I am asking the question I wish someone had asked at my own kitchen table two years ago, before any of this: what would actually be fair here? Not what wins. What is fair.
My father's mother was a Baptist, and her people came up through Mississippi. What she taught me was the Golden Rule. I have tested it for fifty years and I have come to think it is not a devotional saying. It is the most rigorous ethical standard I know, and it holds whether or not you share her faith.
The reasoning is simple. The way I act sets the standard by which I may be treated. If I treat a man with contempt, I have asserted that treating a person with contempt is acceptable, and I have surrendered any principled objection when it is done to me. That principle is not sectarian — Confucius, Hillel, Matthew 7, and Immanuel Kant arrived at it separately, and Kant got there by pure reason with no scripture at all.
But for those of us who do hold the faith, it is worth being precise about what it actually says.
Jesus was asked which commandment was greatest. He gave one answer, and then volunteered a second that nobody had asked for: "The second is like it: love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these." He ranked it himself, unprompted.
And when a lawyer tried to narrow the term — "and who is my neighbor?", looking for a manageable definition — the answer was the parable of the Samaritan. The neighbor turns out to be the man of the wrong tribe. The people who walked past him were the religious professionals.
Redistricting is the practice of sorting people into tribes to determine whose voice will count. The parable was told against precisely that instinct, to a man who was hoping to be told the category was smaller than he feared.
I am not going to call anyone a hypocrite. I do not think that word opens a door. But I would like to ask a question honestly, because I cannot answer it myself:
How does a state that calls itself Christian redraw its own maps to reduce the voice of its own citizens — at the request of a President — and hold both of those things in the same hand?
I have asked myself that a great deal. I have not found an answer I can live with. I would take a serious one from anyone willing to give it.
In November 2020 I asked my mother if we could change the plan — Costa Rica for twenty days instead of a six-month lease, researched and priced and cheaper than what they were already spending. Her answer: not now, Brent — stick with the plan.
In November 2024 I asked again. Stanford instead of Dell. Same answer.
It took me years to understand what was actually being refused. Not the trip. Not the hospital.
What could not happen was that they had been wrong. Changing the plan in 2024 would have meant the plan was wrong in 2020, and four years of treatment had been wrong, and nobody could hold that. So they stuck with it, and I got sicker.
Sticking with a bad plan is never cheaper. It is only more expensive later.
And nobody ever asked the other question — this is not working, what do you want to do? Not through academic probation, not through a career I did not choose, not through seventeen years of illness. One question at any point would have changed the whole arc.
I think this is the mechanism underneath most of what goes wrong between people, and I think it scales. A family that cannot say we were wrong keeps a sick man on a failing plan. A party that cannot say it keeps a country on one.
We were wrong may be the three hardest words in the language. They are also the only real test of integrity, because every one of us will eventually be wrong about something that matters. The only question is whether we can say it before the cost grows.
I have never voted for a Democrat. The last President I researched carefully and voted for was a Texan. I say that not as credentials but so you know which side of the table I am sitting on when I ask this.
We are the ones redrawing the maps right now. Texas, Indiana, Tennessee. I am asking the same thing I asked my own family, and I am asking it the same way — not as an accusation, but as a question I actually want answered:
Is this who we are?
Is this what you pictured when you first thought about serving? I have a hard time believing anyone stood in their kitchen at twenty-five and dreamed of the day they would help make sure their neighbors' votes counted for less. That is not a dream. That is something that happens to people gradually, under pressure, when winning starts to feel like survival.
I understand that pressure. I watched my own family act under it. They were not villains. They were scared, and they wanted control of a situation that frightened them, and they told themselves they were helping. I believe they believed it. And it still caused harm, and the harm was still real, and someone eventually had to say so out loud.
I want to be careful not to say the whole party has gone. It has not, and that matters.
Senator Cornyn and Senator Tillis are holding the line right now on a nomination, at real political cost, over a principle about written commitments. Senator Collins said plainly that people who committed violent crimes on January 6 should not have been pardoned. Senator Murkowski said she feared the message it sent to the officers who stood by us. Senator Thune voted to certify an election in 2021 when it was expensive to do so.
If this standard were impossible to meet, none of them would be meeting it. Some are. That is not a small thing, and it is the reason I am writing an invitation rather than an obituary.
I spent two years at Dallas Theological Seminary studying Greek, learning to read the text in the language it was written in. What I took away from it was the oldest distinction there is: the letter of the law and the spirit of it. You can be perfectly correct about the letter and completely wrong about what it was for.
I have put real research on this page because it exists and it is worth reading. But I want to be plain: I do not need a peer-reviewed study to know what happens when you take away a person's ability to affect their own life. They do what they have to do to survive. That is not a political claim. It is what every one of us would do.
And here is the part I think gets missed. Those people do not live somewhere else. They live in our cities. Their children go to school with our children. Their emergency room visits are on the same county budget as ours. Their despair is in the same air we breathe.
When we make life harder for people who have less, we do not export the consequence. We import it. Crime goes up in the places we also live. Health costs go up in the system we also use. The instability we create finds its way back to our own front doors, usually within a decade, usually right when we have stopped connecting it to what we did.
Believing otherwise is not conservative. It is just shortsighted. Real conservatism has always understood that a society is a system with a long memory — that you are not only accountable for what you intended, but for what you set in motion.
So: empathy says do not do this to people. Logic says do not do this to yourself. They point the same direction. I have never found a case where they did not.
Here is the same idea in a different arena, because I think it clarifies the principle.
We spend enormous sums making other countries into adversaries. The same money could go toward education, exchange, and communication — including the tools now available that make understanding across languages and cultures cheaper than it has ever been in human history. A country you have helped educate is a different kind of neighbor than a country you have bombed. Both cost money. Only one of them compounds in your favor.
People can hold different beliefs and still be worth making friends with. That is true of Iran. It is also true of the person across the aisle, and the person across the dinner table.
Not agreement. I am asking for the thing I asked my own family for and did not get: engagement with the reasoning. If something here is wrong, show me where. That is a conversation I want to have.
The instinct to assume the other side is acting in bad faith is the single most expensive assumption in American life right now. It cost me my family for two years. I think it is costing the country considerably more. And the way out is not a better argument — it is the willingness to believe that the person you disagree with also wants a decent life, and to start the conversation there.
Systems thinking and simple decency are not two different arguments. They arrive at the same place.