I believe in individual liberty, personal responsibility, and government that stays out of your life and your wallet.
Every person is sovereign over their own life. Your rights do not come from government, and they do not end where a bureaucrat’s comfort does.
The smallest minority in the world is the individual, and I will defend the rights of the smallest minority first.
What I believe
You own yourself
What you knowingly and voluntarily consume, the risks you accept with your own health, money, and safety, and how you live your peaceful life are your decisions.
Government’s job is to stop force and fraud, not to manage you. If you are old enough to vote, serve on a jury, or serve in the military, you are old enough to make your own decisions about alcohol, tobacco, and firearms.
Speech and conscience are not government property
I oppose censorship in every form. Speech that offends someone is not violence, and hurt feelings are not a crime.
The same goes for faith: worship how you choose, or not at all, and government should neither help nor attack any religion.
LaGrange County is proof liberty works. Our Amish neighbors live by their faith and conscience in ways the modern world finds strange, and that freedom to be different is worth defending, not regulating away.
Privacy is a right, not a privilege
You have the right to be secure in your person, your home, your property, and your communications.
Government spying on everyone, all the time, just in case, is not public safety. It is a dragnet, and dragnets catch the innocent by design.
Peaceful people are not criminals
A crime needs a victim. I favor repealing laws that create crimes out of peaceful behavior.
I support the right of juries to judge the law itself and not just the facts, and I support ending qualified immunity so officials who break the law under color of law answer for it like anyone else.
Self-defense is a right
The right to keep and bear arms inheres in the individual.
I oppose laws at every level restricting, registering, or monitoring the firearms of law-abiding people, and I oppose prosecuting anyone for defending their own life, liberty, or property.
What that means in LaGrange County
No mass surveillance on your dime
The county pays Flock Safety $25,000 a year in recurring service alone, for 10 cameras at $2,500 each, and the vouchers posted on my Flock Records page total $111,050 since 2023 once software and replacements are counted.
All of it runs a camera network whose scans land in an indexed, searchable database.
Recording a plate is one thing. Logging every driver’s movements into a database the government can query later is a search of everyone, all the time, with no warrant and no suspicion.
I sent the county a letter demanding these contracts end, the scans stop, and the stored data be deleted. On the Council, I will vote to defund it.
County councils in Kosciusko and Marshall counties have already used this exact power over the council’s purse to end Flock funding. LaGrange can too.
Your money should not fund the dragnet
Liberty is lost through budgets as often as through laws.
Every appropriation that treats the whole county as suspects, or spends tax dollars tracking peaceful people, will get a no vote from me and hard questions in public.
What I will do on the Council
The Council does not write the criminal code, and I will not pretend it does. It holds the purse strings, and purse strings are how a county pays for liberty or pays for its opposite:
- Vote to defund Flock/ALPR surveillance and any county system that logs residents into searchable databases
- Scrutinize sheriff, jail, and court budgets and ask, in public, what county money is buying
- Defend open meetings, public comment, and transparent records, because a government that fears its own people talking has already answered the question
- Oppose any county spending that restricts the speech, faith, privacy, or self-defense of law-abiding residents
Freedom is not what is left over after government takes what it wants. Freedom is the starting point, and everything government does has to justify itself against it.
No coercion. No extortion.