Everyone has a path that led them here. Mine led me to this moral obligation.
A teacher before a candidate
I earned my BA in history with secondary social studies certification at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I started teaching at my old junior high on my twenty-second birthday. Just twenty-four days later, 9/11 happened. A generation of Americans—whether Gen X, Oregon Trail (me), Xennial, or Millennial—afterward lived an experience where the previous world we knew, and the explanations that described how it could improve, no longer seemed true.
Three years later I was teaching at my old high school. As a James Madison Memorial Fellow, I pursued graduate study aimed specifically at strengthening the teaching of the Constitution. That included the Foundation’s Summer Institute at Georgetown University. There I determined to become a scholar in my own right.
I “worked off” my Fellowship and in 2010 came to Delaware’s Land, Sea, and Space Grant university to work with its stars, not least the two Bancroft Prize winners on my committee. I earned my PhD in history there in 2018. I then taught two UD courses that inform this campaign: I supervised preservice teachers during student teaching, and I taught a well-received course on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
When I came to Delaware, my views were ordinary; the political ground has moved around them, as it has for us all.
My Colorado-purple politics hit an inflection point in 2016, and I planted my feet on my—and all Americans’—bedrock principles of classical republicanism and Lockean liberalism and a public sphere that acts as the sentinel of the people against the state. We need a government that assumes the worst of humanity and structures itself accordingly, even as it organizes the power for change; we should jealously guard our private person, too, against the intrusions and controls of the state. Speech and conscience matter. Privacy matters. Government needs limits, but democracy must also possess the power to help people flourish. The party label changed. My EFF-shaped, rights-first spine did not.
History as public work
Since 2019, I have been at the American Philosophical Society in postdoctoral research and project roles spanning early American history, digital systems, and public education—from a massive bibliography of the American Enlightenment to America’s Scientific Revolutionaries for the nation’s 250th anniversary.
The National Endowment for the Humanities highlighted its yearlong (2021–22) support of my book project The Creation of American Catholicism: From the Revolution to the Early Republic, 1773–1844. No emoluments here, because good books take time to write—I’m trying to very delicately write the interior life of a free black girl, the niece of Venerable Pierre Toussaint, formerly of Haiti but more lately interred at St. Patrick’s in NYC, the church he helped build.
I’m like a beaver who can’t stand the sound of running water
I have an insatiable curiosity, deep memory, and a low tolerance for problems I think I can solve. When I arrived in 2019, I moved a copy-and-paste workflow into automation. By September 2024, I had determined our America 250 project would begin AI-native. By last winter, the tools and models were beginning to cohere in ways that by December were just new and different and sharp. That was when I finally bought the makings of a newer-than-2012 PC to complement my M3 Pro MBP.
Why I’m running
Alas, like many of you, I learned in January my life plan for the next three years changed: the project I was on got canceled. I licked my wounds for a month. I decided to see what I had in my 90 GB work file. At 3:11 a.m. on Feb 13, a sick and stuffy Jeff opened Codex (now folded into ChatGPT). By 7:55, I had told my wife: it needs to be me, or somebody like me, in charge of this thing. By 9:44, I was sure we needed a universal basic income. I’m a historian. I already expected to record these events, to write about them. Instead, I started just taking screenshots to try to record the event.
About a week later we visited our Aspirant daughter at the Sisters of Saint John Bosco. Two men shattered that peace. As I detail in Foreign Entanglements & Global Solutions, it proved the general wisdom of Washington’s Farewell Address and its warning against entanglement abroad.
By the end of May—bullets in the air during a “ceasefire,” an odious 1.776 billion fund looming, continued genocide and a lack of will or independence to say “enough is enough,” and the Holy See calling for an end to just war theory and a revived prosocial human approach—I had fully worked myself up into the sense that I had to offer myself up for your consideration. It would be immoral of me, with my expertise on constitutional governance and artificial intelligence, to do what I frankly wanted, which was to live a small life and hang out with my granddaughter. If the people of Delaware found out, they would be mad. So would the nation. And if I hadn’t gone all in, I couldn’t look myself in the mirror. It is a moment when people of virtue have to play Frodo—to do the hard thing because it is the right thing, even when it seems a little dangerous, even as Gandalf winces at the costs. The good news is that I’m not alone: we’re all going to play Cincinnatus.