Founder · Journalist · Executive Operator
Five-time founder. Accountability journalist. Producer of 2,500+ events in 75+ countries on all seven continents. Forty-five years in American politics, from dropping Jimmy Carter leaflets in Warren County, Iowa, in 1976 to running one of the most aggressive accountability operations in the country today.
Entrepreneurial executive with 35+ years of global experience founding, scaling, and leading organizations across politics, technology, media, marketing, and live events. Proven ability to win business, drive revenue, and deliver impact for Fortune 100 companies, governments, nonprofits, and political campaigns. Built and led organizations on all seven continents, managing teams of 5 to 120+ across 75+ countries and producing 2,500+ large scale events and campaigns with measurable results. Known for getting things done under pressure, creating disruptive strategies, and rallying stakeholders behind high stakes missions. Trusted by presidents, policymakers, CEOs, and media leaders to deliver transformative outcomes.
Since 2025, operating as a one-person product studio: directing AI coding agents daily to build, ship, and run a portfolio of political data, media, and publishing products. The section below is what that looks like in practice.
Every product below was designed, built, deployed, and is operated by me, with AI agents doing the engineering under my direction. No dev shop, no staff, no venture money. Specs in the morning, production by the afternoon.
Accountability journalism and political action, 2021 to present
The PAC that helped end Madison Cawthorn's congressional career in 2022 and has kept sustained national pressure on Lauren Boebert since. Runs a full fundraising stack I built from scratch: a 239,000-contact database, email and SMS pipelines, an 11-tier membership program, donation processing at a 2.75% fee instead of ActBlue's roughly 6%, and failure-only alerting so the machine runs itself.
Editorial property and newsroom
Independent accountability reporting on Boebert, Chuck Edwards, FEC complaints, and the grifter class. Includes a court-ordered live broadcast pipeline for courtroom coverage (the first of its kind secured by a PAC-affiliated newsroom), an automated "Grifters" docket, and a Rogues' Gallery of accountability targets with a daily Putin Watch Index.
Donor intelligence platform
Built on 86.9 million FEC records covering every federal race from 2000 to 2026. Programmatic race pages for the 2026 cycle, incumbent audits, a donor match and propensity engine, and a published analysis putting structural waste in small-dollar giving at $666 million. Architected to institutional-grade security standards from day one.
Behavioral election forecasting
A two-speed forecast model with a correlated error structure (national, regional, and race level), backtested across six election cycles. Fed by a licensed CivicScience data stream of more than one million daily inputs. Licensing conversations underway with prediction-market platforms. Currently running a public survey of ten large language models on their 2026 midterm calls, to be scored against results on November 3.
Political satire, merch, and daily autoposting
A fake federal agency that renames landmarks every day and posts the results across Bluesky and the major platforms automatically. Rename generator, Trump Atlas, share certificates, a Printful merch store, and a satirical filing-fee schedule that routes donations to the PAC. Bill Murray approved the seal.
Voter resource site
A clean, no-data-harvesting voter information site (register, check registration, vote by mail) routing to official sources. Built as a counterweight to a billionaire-funded site with a confusingly similar name.
Crooked Crayon Press
A 126-page political coloring book on Lauren Boebert, with a cover blurb from James Carville. Published on Amazon. A book-length Boebert investigation is in progress.
With Col. Moe Davis
Co-hosted with the former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay. Companion "Rogues' Gallery" video series is produced end to end by an automated pipeline.
Targeted independent expenditure programs
Rapid-deployment fundraising and radio-ad campaigns for races that need them: South Dakota (Brian Bengs vs. Mike Rounds), rural Florida radio against Byron Donalds, and North Carolina radio on Michael Whatley. Landing page to warm-donor send in under a week.
Forty-five years, starting at age 11 with a stack of Jimmy Carter leaflets in Warren County, Iowa.
A few of the ones I get asked about.
On January 28, 1995, about a hundred runners from the deck of a converted Russian research ship ran 26.2 miles across King George Island in the South Shetlands, past the Russian Bellingshausen station and the Uruguayan and Chilean bases, through mud, glacial melt, and wind that pushed sideways. It was billed as "The Last Marathon," the first ever held on the continent, and it gave birth to the Seven Continents Club. I was 29 and ran production for the event through Protocol International alongside Thom Gilligan of Marathon Tours and Travel. Everything that could go wrong at the bottom of the world did, and the race finished anyway. It still runs today.
In the early 1990s, with the Soviet Union freshly gone and nobody certain who was in charge of anything, Protocol International produced an edition of the Moscow Marathon from Red Square. There was no playbook for a Western-style professional sporting event in post-Soviet Russia: permits were handshakes, sponsors paid in things other than rubles, and the course had to be walked the night before to make sure it still existed. It was one of the first professionally produced sporting events in the new Russia, and the experience of running operations in a country with no functioning rulebook became the template for everything I did afterward in 75 other countries.
Protocol International opened offices in London and France and produced hospitality and sponsor programs around the London Marathon and the major-city marathon circuit, along with corporate events in London for clients including Clarion Events. That same era included IndyCar hospitality for Motorola in 15 cities for 18,000 guests, and a dozen head of state visits to the United States, including the President and Premier of China under contract with the Chinese Embassy.
In the summer of 2006 the Des Moines Register's Iowa Poll had John Edwards at 30, Hillary Clinton at 26, John Kerry at 12, and Tom Vilsack at 10. Barack Obama was not on the list. By the time he announced in Springfield on February 10, 2007, he was running fourth or fifth in Iowa behind Clinton, Edwards, Vilsack, and Kerry. I led advance for his first Iowa swing as a candidate: a town hall at Kennedy High School in Cedar Rapids that afternoon, a meet-and-greet in the Central Middle School gym in Waterloo that night, breakfast at a farmhouse in Iowa Falls the next morning, then Ames. The Ames rally had been booked into a theater at the Memorial Union. We gave out 2,700 tickets by Thursday noon and moved it to Hilton Coliseum. Eleven months later he won the caucuses.
For a national civic event on the riverfront in Burlington, Iowa, the stage and seating plan only worked if the river was about a foot lower than it was going to be. So I negotiated with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to temporarily lower the Mississippi. They did. I have used that line in a lot of meetings since, and it has never once failed to land.
When Barbara Eden came to Des Moines for an ABC television production in my senior year at Norwalk High School, I was her driver. I was 17, the car was not mine, and I got Barbara Eden everywhere on time. It was my first lesson in the two rules of advance work: the principal never waits, and the principal never knows what it took.
Years later, producing a program in Dubai where Glenn Close was a featured guest, I had a cake built large enough to hold a grown man, and the man inside it was her husband, David Shaw, who had flown in without her knowing. He popped out. She screamed. The room lost its mind. Event production is mostly logistics, but every so often it is theater, and you only get one take.
After moving to the North Carolina mountains in 2010, I collaborated with Andie MacDowell, a longtime Asheville resident and honorary chair of the Asheville Film Festival, on a project in Asheville. Small city, big talent, and one of the reasons I stayed.
At Ambassadors LLC, the publicly traded travel and events firm founded by Peter Ueberroth that I was brought in to turn around (annual sales went from $25 million to $75 million in two years), I directed the University of Southern California Board of Trustees' overseas meetings in China, Korea, and India. The 2006 China trip, through Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong, was where USC President Steven Sample announced the USC U.S.-China Institute. Moving a university's board and its spouses across three countries with full security and protocol is the most demanding kind of event there is, and the only kind I ever really wanted to do.
On September 27, 2024, Hurricane Helene put several oak trees through the roof of my round house in Spruce Pine and cut Mitchell County off from the rest of the world for weeks: no power, no water, no cell service, no roads. We lived through it the way everyone in these mountains did, with chainsaws, generators, and neighbors. The kids were fine. The house got fixed. The pot belly stove is still waiting on its chimney.
My first bylines ran in the North Warren Town and Country News in Norwalk, Iowa, in January 1980, when I was a sophomore at Norwalk High School. The assignment was the Iowa caucuses. In one week I interviewed President Carter's son Jack at a kitchen table in Norwalk, cornered John Connally's son Mark in Indianola, and co-wrote the front page story on caucus night under the headline "North Warren voters show their stuff at caucuses." Forty-six years later the job description is the same: find out what the powerful would rather you did not know and print it. The tools changed. The job did not.
Essays go out on the American Muckrakers Substack. Video lives on the American Muckrakers YouTube channel and the MUCK YOU! podcast.
Profiled and quoted in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Politico, The Guardian, and major broadcast networks. A selection of live links, newest first within each group.
Spruce Pine, North Carolina