I just returned from three weeks in the Amazon jungle. Three weeks without a phone, connection to Internet, the latest news headlines, or social media. Sounds like heaven, yes?
This time away from civilization gave me the opportunity to do a lot of thinking, to be alone with the thoughts that came up. And yes, it was also a time to learn more about ancestral plant medicine, to learn from the indigenous practitioners of these medicines, and to continue to learn from the plants themselves.
To understand what this means, how I got here, and where I plan to go next, I need to take you back to when this journey started: 2020. Covid happened. Or said more accurately, government authoritarianism — throughout the world — happened under the guise of the overblown public health event called Covid.
It was a stunning reversal of all my work over many years toward advancing a free society. I learned that, despite all my efforts to free people, all that needed to happen to upend progress was for some politicians to use a purported crisis to sign papers ordering free humans about, and those otherwise free humans would in turn surrender their freedoms.
They’d willingly leave their jobs, willingly stay home. Businesses would willingly close. People dutifully agreed to stay six feet apart and wear masks, as instructed, shame those who didn’t, take their shots, and some would even turn into government snitches, who’d go so far as to mock or call out or have arrested those who didn’t comply with government edicts.
Even some of the center-right think tanks I worked with were offering up ways for government to determine when it was “safe” to reopen the economy, giving legitimacy to illegitimate acts.
Disheartened, in April 2020, I went to a retreat center Orlando, Florida, to seek the aid of plant medicine to help show me what to do next, whether it was worth continuing the fight as I had.
I did not know what to expect. I had only heard that such medicines might promise answers or clarity. I certainly did not plan to do anything more than be present for a single weekend of medicine ceremonies and that’s all. But I got exactly the answers I was looking for. Hard as this may be for some to believe, and spirit of the medicine — Mother Ayahuasca — encouraged me to fight on, to fight harder, even, and that I had the burden of responsibility to do so. I gave that burden my voice.
I returned to Idaho, to my beloved Idaho Freedom Foundation, and dug deeper, fought harder, and became even more uncompromising on the principles of liberty. I made it my cause to free everyone everywhere in any way that I could. The IFF argued that people should disobey government Covid restrictions. Go to work. Reopen businesses. Party with your friends. You decide, we said, what is safe and what is not. You have agency. You have your God-given right to determine the best course of action, which might be different from someone else’s decision.
Where previously I was content with revising or repealing a statute here or there or finding some way to work around an inflexible federal government and recalcitrant state bureaucracy, I positioned the IFF to be an even more passionate and unflinching defender of liberty. Of all the think tanks in the country, ours was the most vocal and the most dedicated to the idea that government had no authority to mess with people’s rights and choices.
As I continued my freedom work, I also dove deeper into the work with plant medicine, seeking more answers, working with new entheogens, chiefly through a medicine man I met in Mexico named Freddy. Together, and over the course of many ceremonies over several years, I uncovered new questions and more layers.
Freddy helped me work on my own healing, too, to understand my mind, my soul, to dig deep into what drives a passion for liberty I have had since childhood, and to also understand and embrace the parts of my being that are distinctly masculine and distinctly feminine. My taste in music changed, finding modern music to be discordant.
Other parts of my life changed, too. I ate with intention, meditated more, journaled more, developed deeper friendships, and I opened my heart more.
By 2023, I was thoroughly engrossed in this process, having attended multiple medicine ceremonies in many locations in different countries. I continued to learn, heal, and be inspired, and it still was not enough.
Amy, a medicine sister, encouraged me to diet a plant, which essentially involves fasting and ingesting, over several days, a tincture made from the components of a plant or tree, in this case Noya Rao, found in the Amazon and revered by the Peruvian Shipibo as the Tree of Light.
This experience only deepened my connection to the plants, and they are the ones that sent me on a path in which I would facilitate the healing of others. I trained to do that, hosting my first ceremonies in October 2023. I have served and facilitated the healing process for businessmen and women, veterans with PTSD, people with depression, anxiety, husbands, wives, sons, and daughters. In a single weekend, I have seen stunning transformation, and I continue to hold space for those people who trusted me with keeping them safe on their journeys.
By this time, professionally, I started to see more clearly what the public policy space had become, and what it really is: Center-right think tanks had largely abandoned the focus on achieving broad liberty in favor of smaller, easier solutions.
The size and scope of government was growing but a marginal victory here or there would serve as a rallying point to ask donors for more money so they can serve up more small, insignificant, fleeting victories as liberty continued to erode. I didn’t like it. The path for the IFF remained crystal clear, but few followed. It was a damned lonely road.
At the same time — or maybe it’s always been this way and I simply became hyper aware of it — the work became less about policy and more about politics. And politics was clearly just distraction, noise, illusion, and theater. Yes, one could win elections — and we won our share of them — but the default culture was to be a supplicant and worship at the alter of government, and therefore to put everything on the outcome of elections.
I had increasingly no interest in that.
Political speeches, much like the music I once enjoyed, became discordant. I grew tired of political events. I didn’t particularly want to listen to the musings of “conservative” speakers who existed merely to throw red meat about in order to get an audience to chew it up but not really advance liberty.
I saw something else: While there are handfuls of rare people in the political arena who are pure of heart and really just want freedom for people, far more are easily motivated by worldly measures of success such as invitations to national talk shows and events, clicks, likes, selfies with famous people, selfies in special places, and other trivial displays of popularity and self-importance.
The news media, where I started my career in public policy, also plays a role in keeping up the illusion that something meaningful is occurring whenever there’s “breaking news” from some government building. The media are a big part of the deception. But I’ll save that for another day. For now, let’s just say that “blue states” and “red states” are a media construct, and that much of what passes for discourse about public policy is a product of the division sowed — knowingly but sometimes unwittingly — by media agitators.
Much of what we see in a state legislative or congressional setting is mere distraction. It’s noise. It’s a waste of time. Most importantly, I saw that humanity could be so much more, that we, as powerful beings are kept down by a system designed to limit our power. We live in an open-air prison. The people we call “governor” or “senator” or “representative” or who hold any other positions of seeming power are, more or less, prisoners, too. Some don’t realize it. Others do.
But elected officials are not deciding how to spend your money, what laws to pass or what programs to create. To continue the prison metaphor, they’re deciding how to decorate our cells and where to deploy the prison wardens — state or federal employees — who are also part of the fantasy that they’re doing something meaningful or self-directed.
In December 2023, I attended a meeting in Washington, D.C., wherein some state and national center-right think tanks were urging states and Congress to put welfare and labor programs under a single roof, following a model that Utah had been using since the mid-1990s. These organizations (bless their hearts!) weren’t interested in ending government welfare, but instead they focused on making welfare more efficient. Again, to me, it looked like how to make the prison work better, and it wasn’t for me.
Consistent with my beliefs about government, I wanted to end the use of force to fund terrible government programs. I wanted to stop the worship of agencies, politicians, and bureaucrats. I found myself, once again, largely alone, in the battle for freedom from big government.
That evening, having packed the legally permitted less than 3 ounces of a liquid — in this case, ayahuasca — in my carryon suitcase, I was called to journey once more, to ask the medicine about my next steps. During this ceremony on the floor of my hotel room, as clearly as though I were carrying on a conversation with a friend, I heard the words, “you already know what to do.” A week later, I told the IFF board of directors that I was ready to make my exit.
I left the Freedom Foundation January 8, 2024, capping more than three decades in government and media. That winter, for the first time in 30 years, I paid little attention to what the Idaho Legislature was up to. I focused on serving medicine, traveling to venues in several states to help people in their healing journeys. I traveled to Arkansas to see my parents. We watched the solar eclipse together. And then I returned to Pacific Northwest to facilitating additional healing spaces.
All this brings me to my recently concluded trip to the Peruvian Amazon. In that time, I attended ten ayahuasca ceremonies, sang Shipibo icaros, reconnected with Noya Rao, and dieted a new plant ally, Bobinsana. In each of the journeys, the medicine and my plant allies shared more wisdom in how to facilitate the healing of others.
The medicine also taught me that reality is distorted, overtaken by evil forces that try to subjugate humanity, and implored me that I must continue the fight for a free society, but in new ways outside of politics and the halls of power. I was encouraged to use my voice, my words, my knowledge, all in the pursuit of the next stage of human liberation.
I am doing just that, identifying and exposing the ways in which humans are held back from being their highest selves, usually at the hands of government and a nefarious network of education, healthcare, and military industrial complexes. I am to help raise the frequency of the planet, to get us beyond the phony controversies and contrivances that are used to divide people. With insights from experience and from ancestral medicines, I move with the grace of a butterfly, and I speak with a confidence and power found in a lion’s roar. The objective is to do my part so that humanity can level up, flourish, and be free.
As I wrote this essay, the same friend who encouraged me to work with Noya Rao sent a me quote from the mystic and poet Rumi: “Absorbed in this world, you've made it your burden. Rise above this world. There is another vision. All your life you've paid attention to your experiences, but never to your Self. Are you searching for your Soul? Then come out of your prison. Leave the stream and join the river that flows into the Ocean. It will not lead you astray. Let the beauty you seek be what you do.”
Idaho politics is no longer my burden, nor is the outcome of individual races or ballot measures. I have joined the river of others whose mission is to level up humanity. My focus is to free people from the impossible prison created over centuries. My work takes place in medicine circles and anywhere my voice will carry, the beautiful places that are outside the political world of distraction, distortion, and theater.
(Final note: I do not have an editor so please feel free to let me know of any typos, missing words, or incomplete thoughts. Thank you!)