Celebrating Clear Thinker's Two-Year Anniversary

How a bullet in Butler woke me up, and why Clear Thinker was born that day.

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Two years ago, Donald Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania.

I remember vividly where I was when it happened.

I was in my living room, watching the video on my phone.

I saw Trump, blood streaming down his face, raise his fist in defiance.

I felt a sensation in the center of my chest. The feeling was ineffable—like a heatless, pure fire enveloping me. The raw sensation of aliveness.

I was shocked.

Not just at what I was seeing.

But at the fact that I felt so strongly about it.

I had never been a political person.

I had voted for Democrats, more out of routine than conviction. I voted against Trump in 2016.

But it all felt removed. Voting was just a ritual I did every 4 years.

Fast forward to 2024, and I’d started paying attention.

Started mentally detaching from the Democrats as I realized many of their actions and positions didn’t align with my views.

And perhaps most troubling—how they obscured Biden’s declining cognitive health.

So I started inspecting my own beliefs.

And I realized how many of them were not based on what I’d actually researched and deeply considered, but were simply the default beliefs of my tribe.

I started to realize that—although there were plenty of legitimate criticisms one could make of Trump—many of them were just…based on flawed premises. For example, the claim that he called neo-Nazis and white supremacists “very fine people.”

All of that, coupled with the hyper-tribal, antibody response that the Left had to Trump, made me realize—politics had been captured with narratives over nuance, and whatever his flaws, Trump had been demonized and dehumanized to a dangerous degree.

And rather than have conversations where we could resolve our differences through speech, leaders and institutions on the Left were using force—cancellations, convictions—to enforce their beliefs.

But I was still deeply uncomfortable with Trump.

Eight years of hearing only negative things about him from my information sphere does that.

But to me, that moment that he was shot transcended politics.

It was about the human condition.

We’d watched force be used to resolve disagreements, rather than conversation.

First through cancellations.

Then through convictions.

And finally, killing.

We still don’t know why Thomas Crooks tried to kill Trump—and I’m not going to say he was from the Left.

But it didn’t matter.

This was beyond sides.

We’d reached a point where humans were willing to kill people over politics.

And that is a horrible place to be.

I also saw something in Trump that I didn’t expect to see.

Courage. The kind that cannot be faked.

And I realized he wasn’t just some freewheeling businessman. He wasn’t just “The Apprentice” guy.

He actually had convictions, and was willing to die for them.

So I was willing to listen.

I say all of this now, but these are all realizations I had about my motives in hindsight.

In that moment, all I had was that burning in my chest.

And I knew I had to say something.

I didn’t know what I was going to say.

I just had to get it off my chest.

So I did.

I was scared.

Scared of being viewed as the black MAGA race traitor.

Scared of being viewed as endorsing Trump.

Scared of being labeled as a conspiracy theorist.

My mind scrambled after I recorded the video to figure out whether I should post it.

After all, what if I was wrong?

But I knew that feeling in my chest was telling me something.

The video didn’t have a bunch of citations. It wasn’t as refined as my videos today.

But it was real.

So I posted it.

The next day I woke up to something I’d never experienced.

Hundreds of thousands of people watched it.

Then millions.

It was getting watched everywhere—X, Instagram, TikTok. Even the New York Times.

And that’s the day that this journey and mission I’m now calling Clear Thinker began.

A name that, in case you’re wondering, I did not come up with. It came from Elon.

That was cool.

It’s tricky talking about politics on the Internet.

As much as I try to make my content impersonal, to talk about politics is to expose yourself personally.

People’s natural impulse is to want to categorize other people—right, left, black, white, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, etc.

I don’t like labels and I’m wary of tribes.

But I’ll readily acknowledge that in the current moment, I agree with the Right much more than the Left.

But it’s really beside the point.

What I think really isn’t that important. My name, Kaizen, means evolution. That means my ideas and positions will evolve as I do.

What I want to be constant is the value I provide to you.

I hope that you come away from every word I share feeling that I helped you think more clearly.

I hope you come away from my posts feeling calmer.

I hope you come away feeling like you took a breath of fresh air amidst the polluted atmosphere of politics.

I hope that when I inevitably provoke you, it’s thought-provoking.

(I promise, I don’t like triggering people for its own sake.)

I want people to be reminded that we can talk about hard things, without devolving into personal attacks.

Or worse, physical attacks.

I hope that’s what you’ve been getting out of Clear Thinker, regardless of how often you agree.

Because I’m going to keep bringing it.

Thank you for trusting me with your time and mind.

Happy Anniversary.