Chapter 4: Learning the Language of Power

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1 — The First Arrest
Early rupture, authority, and the beginning of resistance

Chapter 2 — Before the File Was Opened 
Gifted education, faith, discipline, and early legitimacy

Chapter 3 — Becoming a Problem
Work, exhaustion, collapse, and the cost of visibility

Chapter 4 — Learning the Language of Power
Courts, probation, jail, campaigns, and proximity to decision-makers

Chapter 5 — The Apprenticeship
Training, mentorship, restraint, and learning how power actually works

Chapter 6 — Staying Power
Policy victories, documentation, long-term impact, and avoiding burnout

Chapter 7 — Why I Never Left
Containment, bad actors, ethical boundaries, and knowing when to walk away

Chapter 8 — What the Media Gets Wrong
Narratives, incentives, misinformation, and pretrial risk
Legal Note: Pretrial Publicity, Jury Pools, and Media Risk

Chapter 9 — The Record vs. the Narrative
Why documentation wins when attention fades

Chapter 10 (Epilogue): — What Remains

Author’s Note

Principles — Staying Effective Without Burning Out

Chapter 4: Learning the Language of Power

The first time my name appeared on the front page of the newspaper, it didn’t feel like vindication.

It felt like translation.

By then, I had already refused to comply with probation drug testing for marijuana on religious grounds. I had already filed motions. I had already testified publicly. The system had responded the way it always does when someone refuses to quietly resolve a problem: it slowed everything down, then narrowed the options.

A year before my probation was set to end, the court offered a resolution.

I would be discharged early.

But there would be a price.

The discharge came with sixty days for contempt of court—not for a new crime, not for a failed test, but for refusing to comply with marijuana drug testing and refusing to attend rehabilitation. My probation officer had told me plainly: if I didn’t do rehab, he would send me to prison.

I told the judge that was illegal. Unconstitutional. Religious freedom was either going to matter or I would go to prison in protest. I even asked for additional time as contempt if sent to prison for practicing my religion.

That exchange ended up in the news. It was the largest article ever written in my hometown news paper. The article got sent around the country. I couldn’t go to the grocery store for a year without someone recognizing my face.

The court’s solution was procedural elegance: no revocation, no admission of error, no precedent set. Sixty days in county jail. Probation discharged. Problem contained.

I accepted.

Jail teaches lessons quickly, whether you want them or not.

During those sixty days, another inmate held a knife to my throat while he and a second county inmate told me to stop being a weed activist. There was no ideological debate. No argument. Just instruction, delivered efficiently, in the language people use when they believe consequences are physical.

I listened. I survived. I remembered.

When I was released, I had no home to return to.

I went to the Bethel Mission homeless shelter in Des Moines. From there, I tried to enter a year-long Bible study program the shelter ran—one that promised job placement at the end. Structure. Stability. Redemption, packaged and scheduled.

It didn’t last.

In Bible study, I asked questions. About scripture. About authority. About marijuana. The same curiosity that had followed me since confirmation classes followed me there.

I was asked to leave after three weeks.

After that meeting, I went outside, smoked a bowl, and prayed. I stashed my belongings in a garbage bag under a bush in the worst part of Des Moines.

Then I walked to the Hansen House of Hospitality, a halfway house run by Pastor Bob Cooke. He opened the door himself. Told me he had no beds. Paused. Then said I could sleep on the couch.

I promised I’d find work within three days.

I did.

That summer—2010—I worked sixty-five hours a week landscaping for Wright Outdoor Solutions in West Des Moines. Physical work again. Predictable rules. Effort that translated directly into outcomes.

Stability returned slowly.

That fall, I enrolled at DMACC to study paralegal work at the urging of the halfway house’s leadership. Bob Cooke lived on-site, not as an administrator behind a desk, but as a supervisor in the building. Accountability wasn’t theoretical there. It was shared.

Around the same time, I volunteered for a gubernatorial campaign running on a third-party ticket.

That campaign changed everything.

I became the campaign manager. Not because I was qualified on paper, but because I was willing to work. The campaign taught me media handling, volunteer management, message discipline, vetting people, and how political operations actually function when money is scarce and attention is limited.

I learned how to door-knock. How to write literature. How to organize people who believed different things but wanted the same outcome.

We toured all ninety-nine counties in Iowa.

Every day meant eighteen-hour shifts, seven days a week. I rode the campaign bus from town to town, calling local media ahead of time, scheduling interviews, coordinating arrivals. We would drop the candidate off at a radio station or newspaper office while I drove the bus around town, dropping off door-knockers.

I operated a megaphone from the bus, announcing to crowds that our candidate was in town. When interviews wrapped up, we held meet-and-greet events. Then we packed up and drove to the next town.

Over and over. Every moment was like riding a motorcycle. Exciting, fresh, needing full attention to avoid obstacles.

What I learned wasn’t ideology. It was mechanics.

Politics wasn’t persuasion alone—it was logistics. Attention. Timing. Relationships. Knowing who mattered and when. Understanding that power doesn’t announce itself; it schedules itself.

Near the end of the campaign, while attending a Rand Paul event at the University of Iowa, I met members of Campaign for Liberty. They told me they supported marijuana reform. They talked about Ron Paul. They introduced me to a college organization called Young Americans for Liberty.

I didn’t know it then, but that conversation was a handoff.

Young Americans for Liberty would take me into four states. They would teach me everything I know about political organizing, pressure, coalition-building, and how power responds when it realizes you understand its language.

That came next.