Thread by @SenatorBrakey

Doing a lot of podcasts lately. A lot of new people following.

Thank you for your interest.

I'm going to do something different for Twitter, and tell you about myself, and how I got here.

I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland called Shaker Heights. It was a wealthy community known for strong public schools.

My parents (who left Maine for work in Ohio) scraped by to afford the property taxes so we could get good educations.

Looking back on it, I was kind of a strange kid.

Born on 8/8/88 (as a kid, I always thought 8 was my lucky number), I was the third of four brothers: Matt, Sean, Eric, and Stephen.

Today, they are all accomplished in their own very different ways. I was fortunate to grow up with them (despite the occasional bullying).

I was always one of the youngest, shortest, and scrawniest kids in my class.

...And I wasn't very good at t-ball.

For obvious reasons, the coaches always had me out in left field.

I didn't catch the ball very often --- but in those t-ball games that were "just for fun," all the kids knew I was keeping score in my head and would regularly ask me for updates.

Every summer, our parents would take us home to New Gloucester, Maine to meet family...

... to meet lobsters ...

... and to learn how to swim in Sabbathday Lake.

I don't know if it was the Maine culture of my mom and dad rubbing off on me, but I never quite fit in anywhere in Shaker Heights.

Still, I did my own thing, made my own friends, and found my own way. It was a good place to grow up.

As I grew up, our church youth group was a big part of my life. Youth mission trips took us to Racine, OH, Almost Heaven, WV, and Juarez, Mexico.

Sometimes we built houses, other times we just helped with community needs.

Every time, I learned something important.

Theatre became a great passion in my freshman year.

...Unfortunately, I wasn't any good at it.

After three years of persistence through failure, I learned to stop judging myself so harshly. That's when everything clicked and I got my first role as a lead in Twelfth Night.

The @shakertheatre Arts Department really had a huge impact on me, helping me grow up from being an awkward and gangly kid.

I know a lot of the people over there these days don't share my politics, but I'm eternally grateful to them and everyone I grew up with there.

One of the greatest memories of my high school career was performing with the Shaker Theatre Senior Acting Ensemble at the Cleveland Playhouse.

For those unfamiliar with Shaker Theatre, Senior Ensemble was like the varsity team, but for theatre.

I always ended up in Advanced Ensemble (think junior varsity), but I learned about leadership a lot there.

Wouldn't trade those years for the world.

...Still, when I was invited to join Senior Ensemble halfway through my senior year (a very irregular thing to do), it was the fulfillment of a long-held dream.

I wanted it badly, but I only achieved it once I stopped clinging to it so tightly.

I should note (partly as an apology to all my friends growing up), I was even more annoying about politics back then.

Shaker was a very liberal community --- and I was outspoken about my Republican politics, repeating (without always understanding) from my father and Fox News.

During senior year, I threw caution to the wind and shelved my (more practical) plans to get a degree in business and applied to @ohiou's Honors Tutorial College to study in the School of Theater.

With scholarships and in-state tuition, I poured the next 4 years into acting.

I learned an important lesson at Ohio University.

When someone doesn't cast you in their show, gather together with all the other misfits and create your own show.

Why waste your time for others to give you something? Go out and do it yourself.

As I prepared to graduate in 2010, during the Great Recession and the rise of the Tea Party, I started to question all those things I'd been told by Fox News over the years.

And that's when I realized the only person talking any sense was @RonPaul.

I moved to New York City to become an actor --- and that means I worked a lot of temp jobs to pay rent.

But I did have the joy of collaborating with some very talented people in many Off-Off-Broadway shows.

And because I needed a second job that didn't pay any money, I spent my free time as a political activist with the Ron Paul NYC Liberty HQ, learning from many great liberty champions like @mkauai and @nickspanos.

... and I made a few other Liberty friends along the way.

(That's me in the background working the table as @AP4Liberty took selfies.)

Oddly enough, that activism work did lead to a paying job.

When I left NYC (and my budding acting career), I thought it was temporary. But I landed in my family home state of Maine to work for the Ron Paul 2012 Campaign, and I never left.

It was an honor to work for one of the most genuinely decent and honest individuals in modern politics.

There has never been anyone quite like Ron Paul. To this day, I try to learn from the example he sets in the fight for liberty.

Ron's message of freedom naturally connected with the rugged, independent spirit of the Maine people.

The crowds that came out to see Ron as he toured Maine were astounding. Freeport had never seen anything like this.

Freedom is popular.

Is it petty to love knowing I'm the one who put up that @RonPaul banner behind @MittRomney at the York County caucuses (which showed up in the NY Times?)

Thanks to grassroots activist Valerie Page for making those banners and bringing them with her that day.

I met and worked with so many Maine people who loved freedom and were willing to fight for it during that campaign.

Together, we rocked the establishment and won Maine for Ron Paul at the State GOP Convention.

When the @MittRomney Campaign tried to kick out the elected Maine @RonPaul delegation to the 2012 RNC, we took our fight all the way to the convention floor.

Maine's fight became the fight of grassroots Republicans from all across the nation (like Jeremy Blosser of Texas).

We would not be silenced --- not even by Joan the Silencer!

John Boehner and Reince Priebus ignored all rules of parliamentary procedure and the will of the body, as we voted to seat the Maine delegation and reject a massive power grab in the party rules.

Half the convention marched out, chanting, "As Maine goes, so goes the nation."

At that convention, we all vowed to "Remember the Maine."

Remember that the party establishment doesn't care about the rules or the grassroots of the party. They only care about power.

Many of us involved in that 2012 fight went different ways after that.

A colleague of mine, @DavidWBoyer, and I founded the Defense of Liberty PAC to help liberty candidates win elections to the Maine Legislature with grassroots door-knocking.

Most proudly, we knocked on doors to help re-elect Representative Aaron Libby of Waterboro.

Aaron is an apple farmer and Ron Paul supporter who championed Constitutional Carry and Defend the Guard during two terms in the Maine State House (2011-14).

I learned a lot from him.

With some spare time, I reconnected with my theatre roots at the @LACLT1 as Felix Ungar in "The Odd Couple..."

... and Mortimer Brewster in "Arsenic and Old Lace."

That was in 2013, and I haven't had the time to act on stage ever since. I miss those days very much. One day, I hope to return to the stage.

Life changed when I ran for the State Senate in 2014.

No one really thought I was going to win. I was a 26-year-old kid taking on an incumbent who had held elected office for 36 consecutive years.

But I went out there and knocked on 8,000 doors to connect directly to voters.

And with the support of grassroots liberty donors, we broke state fundraising records, getting the message out on social media, through mailboxes, and even in the playbill of my local theatre.

On Election Day, it was a landslide no one predicted, as we won with a nearly 20 point margin and flipped the Maine Senate into GOP control.

Shortly thereafter, I swore my first oath of office to uphold the US Constitution.

I have never forgotten it.

I owe a special thank you to my Campaign Chairman, former State Senator Lois Snowe-Mello, who was there with me that day.

She believed in me when few did. She is no longer with us, but she taught me a great deal. I will never forget her either.

My first term was a whirlwind, chairing the Health and Human Services Committee and sponsoring over 20 bills.

Most proudly, I worked with thousands of grassroots 2A activists to get Constitutional Carry onto the desk of Governor @PaulRLePage1 who signed it into law.

As 2016 rolled around, I was the State Chairman for Rand Paul.

By the time we reached the Maine GOP Convention, however, supporters were split between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

When I ran for National Delegate, apparently I was the only candidate both sides voted for.

This time, when I arrived as a delegate from Maine at the RNC, they didn't kick me out.

I served on the Platform Committee and led the fights for medical cannabis, Audit the Pentagon, declassifying the 9-11 Report, a constitutional foreign policy, and many more liberty issues.

Then I went back home and won re-election.

After that, there was a "Liberty for the Little Guy" campaign for US Senate.

At one point in the US Senate campaign, this happened. (I choose not to explain and let you wonder about it.)

We knew that was a long-shot race, but we earned more support against the incumbent, Angus King, than any campaign in state history.

I still appreciate everyone who contributed time or dollars to join me in that fight.

Tyranny never rests, so I jumped back into the fight, founding the Free Maine Campaign and organizing efforts to defeat Red Flag Gun Confiscation and the National Popular Vote.

With strong grassroots pressure, we won on both counts in a Democrat-controlled legislature.

I debated running for my old state senate seat in 2020, but instead, I grew a beard and ran for Congress to "Free Maine and Free America."

We ran hard, with strong fundraising and grassroots support.

When Janet Mills delayed the primary election due to COVID, it created an opening for old enemies (a John Bolton Super PAC) to flood Maine with attack ads against me in the final weeks.

We got beat.

Still, the fight for a Free Maine and a Free America continues, and that fight is bigger than any one person.

That's why I am now working with @YALiberty to elect and support the next generation of liberty legislators across America.

If I can do it, so can others.

This has been an exceptionally long Twitter thread.

If you are still reading, I suppose I should say thank you for going this deep down the rabbit hole with me.

This has been a good personal exercise for me. There's a lot to remember in one life --- and much more to come.

Also, amidst all the campaigning, I got married last year! (Can’t forget to mention that.)

Very blessed to spend the rest of all that is to come with with love of my life and one of the most brilliant people I know.