On the record.

Consider what happens to a steer raised on a Central Montana ranch, grass-fed and well-managed, the product of a family that has worked the same ground for three or four generations. That animal goes to a processing facility in another state, gets packaged under a brand owned by a corporation headquartered somewhere else, and lands in a grocery store with nothing on the label indicating it came from Montana.

The rancher gets a commodity price. Someone else builds the margin. The value that this state's land, water, and generations of accumulated knowledge created flows out of Montana as reliably as a spring runoff, with nothing coming back to match it.

The direct-to-consumer shift

Run the same operation through a direct-to-consumer model and the picture changes completely. A family ranch that ships beef directly to subscribers across the country, with their name alongside the Made in Montana mark, keeps the margin here.

Customers who care about where their food comes from will pay a meaningful premium for that direct connection; the relationship builds over time into something more durable than a commodity contract and considerably more resilient than commodity price swings. Calling this a niche market misses what it actually is: a structural shift in how agricultural value flows, already happening in states that have made it legislatively straightforward.

What's actually in the way

The barriers are not mysterious. Direct-to-consumer meat shipping involves a tangle of USDA inspection requirements, state licensing, and carrier logistics that large operations can navigate and that genuinely burdens a family ranch.

Strengthening the Made in Montana program means building a traceability infrastructure that small producers can plug into rather than build from scratch, one that lets a buyer anywhere in the country know exactly which operation their food came from. Support for small-scale USDA-inspected processing facilities in rural Montana removes one of the biggest bottlenecks in the chain. None of this requires complicated policy; it requires a legislature that treats agricultural producers as a constituency worth investing in, not just a backdrop for campaign photos taken once every two years.

More than a business

The multi-generational dimension matters at least as much as the economic argument. A ranch that has been in a family since homesteading is not simply a business, and losing one to a combination of cost pressure, estate complications, and lack of succession infrastructure is a permanent change to what Montana is. The land endures; the families who know it and love it are considerably harder to replace.

Read the full position on Montana producers →

What the public didn't see

Two bills working through the current legislative session, both related to data center development incentives, have received relatively little public attention given what they actually authorize. Testimony in support came primarily from development interests.

The public comment window moved on a timeline that made substantive community organizing difficult, which is not unusual for infrastructure legislation and is worth paying close attention to regardless.

The provisions that matter

Reading the full text rather than the one-page summary circulated by supporters reveals several provisions that deserve scrutiny from any legislator representing a rural district with constrained water and power resources. Tax abatement structures in both bills carry limited clawback provisions; developments that underperform on promised employment figures face minimal financial consequence, and that risk lands on the public, not the developer.

Water consumption estimates in supporting testimony rely on operational projections rather than contractual commitments, and for a region where agricultural water rights are already contested, that distinction is material.

Why an independent reads it differently

Spending years as an intelligence officer at the DIA and Pentagon, where the gap between what an agreement says and what it actually commits to is a professional concern, gives me a particular orientation toward documents like these.

Both party candidates have structural incentives to align with their leadership's position on economic development legislation. An independent member has one incentive: whether the bill actually serves the people who sent them to Helena. That is the lens I would bring to these votes, and it is one the current conversation is short of.

Read the full position on data centers →

District 37 has a choice in November that it has not had in a long time. Two party candidates will arrive in Helena carrying obligations that predate anything this district asked of them. A third candidate—one with no caucus to answer to, no donor network to protect, and no party leadership expecting a return on investment—changes what that choice actually means.

What intelligence work actually trained

The background I bring to this is specific. Years as an intelligence officer at the DIA and Pentagon trained a particular skill: reading past the version of events someone needs you to believe and finding what is actually there.

Bills get written with specific beneficiaries in mind. Regulatory frameworks contain carve-outs invisible in the summary version. Testimony coordinated well in advance shapes the legislative record in ways that public comment rarely corrects. That capacity, brought to the work of representing District 37 in Helena, is the specific thing this candidacy offers.

The structural difference

Caucus relationships, state party expectations, and donor networks operating well above the district level create real and ongoing pressure, and that pressure runs in one direction. Running as an independent removes all of it.

The accountability here runs to the residents of District 37, full stop. No party. Just solutions. That is the whole argument, and it is the one I intend to make all the way to November.

See where I stand on the issues →