ABOUT
I spent 22 years in the anti-abortion movement, 12 of them leading the nonprofit I co-founded. I thought I would be doing that for the rest of my life.
I left to do this.
That’s not a disavowal of everything I did. It’s more complicated than that. But after nearly two decades training people to have honest conversations across deep disagreement, I kept watching the broader political culture move the other way. More cruelty, less honesty, more tribal loyalty, less willingness to follow an argument wherever it goes. Real people are suffering while the rest of us dig in, comforted by a daily layer of confirmation bias from pundits and podcasters who tell us what we already want to hear.
At some point I felt more urgency about that than about anything else I was doing.
Wide Angle is my attempt to be useful in that space. Not by adding another voice to the outrage, but by doing the thing I actually know how to do: helping people on opposite sides understand each other, and building the kind of friendships where truth gets discovered together instead of defended to the death. I want to help people learn things they wouldn’t have learned otherwise. I want to grow empathy to the point that it changes what we actually do to each other, because right now the lack of it is ruining real lives.
The name is intentional. Wide-angle thinking means stepping back far enough to see the full frame, including the parts you’d rather not. It means noticing when your own side is wrong, even when that’s uncomfortable. It means caring more about getting the answer right than winning the argument.
I’m a registered independent, though that label undersells how much my thinking has shifted. I spent most of my adult life as a conservative. Over the last decade, partly through the work of genuinely listening to people I disagreed with, my politics drifted left. Not to the point of partisan loyalty, but enough that I can’t pretend I’m neutral. I think the Republican Party has moved somewhere dangerous, and I think too many people on both sides let team loyalty override their judgment. That’s not a carefully calibrated middle position. It’s just where I landed after paying close attention for a long time.
I won’t be limited to one subject here. I’ll cover the things I can’t stop thinking about: immigration and the moral case too many people are failing to make, the epistemics of how we form and change political beliefs, what good-faith dialogue looks like when someone is doing it right, and whatever else matters enough to slow down and look at closely.
If you’d rather understand something than be told you’re right, you’re in the right place. Come think with me.
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