"History is Written by the Victors"
There was nothing remarkable about my childhood except for how happy I was growing up. I disappeared outside with neighbors, swam in the lake, rode bikes with marvelous friends, had family dinners seven nights a week and played Nintendo until bed. I loved the wooded island I grew up on, a suburb outside of Seattle, Washington. Based on my childhood, nobody could have guessed the life I was about to lead.
At age 27, I would establish the largest online church in human history, and by age 32, I would see no choice but to abandon it all.
After graduating highschool, I attended the University of Washington. Adoring Seattle, being near the water, and reasonable tuition were all the reasons I needed. I didn't want to leave school with student debt, so I stepped on the gas and graduated in 3 years with a B.S. in Economics.
In my final year of college, I served as an unpaid Budget Intern at the Seattle Center. Seattle Center is home to the Space Needle, the Pacific Science Center, McCaw Hall, fountains, and art – a truly special place.
My months at the Seattle Center budget office made a huge impression on me. I met civil servants who graciously guided me through the inner workings of Seattle Center's accounting and spoke about what they were doing for the community with passion. Seattle Center provides the region with a place to discover, connect, watch sports games, see operas, attend outdoor concerts, watch laser shows, and party as a community. Harder to measure, it also attracts enough tourism money into Seattle to make it a permanently sustainable entity.
My biggest honor was being asked to take a stab at creating a budgetary maintenance schedule to project out annual amounts that Seattle Center would need to replace items like carpeting, roofs, windows for all their various buildings, on a staggered basis, many decades into the future. To my manager's delight, the numbers that I produced were solid enough to take to the Seattle City Council directly in an annual budget request. It filled me with joy to assist the community in such a tangible way.
After college, I spent a year renting a house with friends in one of Seattle's glorious old neighborhoods of the past – built in the 1920s. The houses were grand, the streets wide with sidewalks, and you could feel that it used to be a nicer area than four recent college graduates could afford.
“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.”
In the summer of 2005, on my regular walks to the grocery store, I had to cross the I-5 freeway overpass. From one week to the next, I noticed that the vagrant population was exploding. What started out as one vagrant sign-holder turned into sign-holders on every corner. "Need Food", "Need Beer", "Need $5 for a Ride out of Town" they'd often ask. Soon, there were guys sleeping next to the guys holding the brown cardboard signs. At least the guys holding the signs are putting in some effort to improve their lives, I thought.
At this time, I was working to launch my first website, one that connected poker players on a local level, so they could figure out where to play and how to get better at the game. It was an exciting time for poker. Chris Moneymaker had recently won the World Series of Poker, and people were quoting lines from the movie "Rounders" at every weekly home game while eating oreos like Teddy KGB. Local card rooms were overflowing with energy and players, and the online poker industry was hosting hundreds of thousands of simultaneous players. I wanted in on that action!
Slowly emerging from my general ignorance of the world, I learned that web sites need advertising in order to grow. People don't just instantly flock to businesses without advertising. The trouble was that as a 22 year old, I had no money to advertise.
My solution was two-fold. I'd bring attention to the growing Seattle homeless issue, and I'd get free advertising for my new web site at the same time. I'd use satire, and I'd name it Bumvertising. Little did I know at the time, this decision would change the course of my life forever. I had unknowingly meddled in WA State's favorite political wedge issue and the burgeoning homeless industrial complex.
A panhandler inspects a bag of cookies after attaching my sign to his.
“I love it when a plan comes together.”
The concept of Bumvertising was a simple one. I'd use packing tape to attach my poker advertising signs to the bottoms of the signs that the panhandlers were already holding. No extra work for them. I'd bring them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, water, apples, and a few bucks every time I saw them. It worked and it worked instantly. I became fast friends with all the bums in my area, and I heard their stories. Some, I even got to know over chats in our front yard. For the most part, these were capable, good people who had hit a roadblock or two, made bad decisions, and fallen into drug and alcohol abuse. I'll go as far to say that 100% of those I met fell into this category.
The sign holding hobos that participated in Bumvertising were far more organized among themselves than you might suspect. Instead of begging for a period of hours each day, they continued until they had collected $40. Once that happened, a new vagrant would take his spot. My extra few bucks a day meant that they didn't have to be on the street for quite as long as normal. In 2005, from my very informal survey, meth and heroine were their drugs of choice, and I believe that $40 was roughly the increment they purchased them in. These were not people who had been laid off of work and needed cheap housing. These were people who needed substantial help getting off drugs and perhaps some help with psychiatric care. Some struggled to transition out of prison and could have used some help there too.
It appalled me that they were being ignored. I didn't have a solution, but I had the start of a solution. I was going to bring light to what was going on and introduce the idea that we needed to try something radically different if we wanted these people off the street.
“Is this cat for real?”
Bumvertising was an overnight sensation. Within weeks, I was doing interviews and debates on multiple radio stations per day. I made all the local news channels, the national news, front pages in several regional newspapers, all the way up to a mention in the New York Times. One of my friends saw me on CNN while on vacation in Mexico. I did interviews in New Zealand, I did live audience talk shows, and it culminated with a very funny Daily Show segment with Jon Stewart at his peak. To amplify the satirical nature of Bumvertising, I drove my glorious 1986 Mercedes sedan to every interview, put on my only button-up shirt, and attempted to make the distinction between the bums and my character, "the business tycoon", as stark as possible.
I shrugged off some early signs that I was upsetting the machine. To my complete surprise, homeless advocate organizations protested the most. Then came the WA State Department of Labor and Industries audit. They sent me a full packet asking for pages and pages of absurd information about my employment relationship with the sign holders and copies of their time cards. Records of Bumvertising's corporate minutes? Where was their sense of humor! Was my satire honestly bothering someone in government? Maybe they were responding to my satire with a joke of their own and I was the one without the sense of humor. In any case, it turned me off from exploring this homeless issue much further. I had at least started a conversation.
After months in the spotlight, my press eventually ran its course. The success of Bumvertising and the poker site elevated me substantially in some more reasonable circles and led me to some fun adventures abroad. I'll save those stories for another time.
“I'm a priest, not a saint.”
After some years toiling in sales and the Seattle startup scene, I set out on my own again. What I would create next would become the largest online Christian Church that the world had ever seen. It'd provide prayer and comfort to millions of Christians in the United States and world wide. It'd be cheaper, easier, and more convenient to pray and provide prayer support to other Christians than any land-based church could possibly match. It'd have the reach of televised Christian programming, but it'd allow Christians to interact with eachother and get personal attention versus listening to one-way large format sermons on TV. It was 2010 and the ubiquitous use of touch-screen cell phones was still some years off.
The concept was not complicated. Anyone could create a free account, post a prayer request, or alternatively, read and pray for other people's prayer requests. Additionally, I personally wrote regular uplifting e-mails to my congregation, and I responded to as many people as I had time to write back to. What started as dozens of emails per day became hundreds, then thousands. Everytime I pressed reload in my e-mail program, a flood of new messages appeared. More than 99% of the e-mails we received were overwhelmingly positive, and perhaps less than 0.1% were haters. I eventually brought in friends and family to help with the church, and we prioritized our responses based on who had contributed financially. We read every e-mail they sent in and responded as we would to our friends, just as pastors would respond to their parishioners – often personally to every email. My goal was to run the church with the efficiency of a business – to deliver the best product possible to my customers, to not waste resources, to get repeat traffic, and to grow.
Cards and letters of gratitude poured in.
The minimum amount we asked for was $9 and the most was $45. The vast majority of our members enjoyed our services for free, giving and receiving prayer support as they desired. The Christian Prayer Center was an extraordinary comfort to people, and praise reports flooded in on a daily basis. Some miracles even seemed too good to be true – alas, the power of prayer. Most of the revenue of the church was used for outreach (i.e., lots of ads), a bunch for operational costs, plus some profit for myself.
Our biggest complaint was that we asked for money. Without revenue, however, the product delivered would never have been the same. The more money the church brought in, the more I advertised on Google, Bing, Facebook, etc. Spend $10,000 per day on outreach? Let's go. With that came strength in numbers. Our motto was “Thousands Will Pray for You”. They truly did. It was an incredible moment in history. I felt indescribably fulfilled when I could make someone feel better about their individual tragedies and give them hope when nobody else was offering it. Multiply this feeling by over a million members and that's how I felt for a few years.
"He was I, and I was him, the pastor with the biggest nuts."
Just as Jesus renamed his disciples (Mark 3:16-17), I too chose a new name under which I could operate in my service to the church. I went by Pastor John Carlson. I combined the names of two pastors that I greatly admired – my Great Uncle, Pastor John Berger and my youth pastor as a child, Pastor Woody Carlson. For good measure, I paid the WA Secretary of State an additional fee to list “Pastor John Carlson" as an official, publicly viewable trade name attached to my business license.
I decided to operate the church as a for-profit entity. This means that I paid full taxes on any profits. It means that contributions were not tax-deductible. It was unique to operate a church like this. It meant I paid a lot of money in taxes, but it also meant that my church was less restricted in how it could operate.
During my dark period in exile years later, it dawned on me that I could have made political statements using my church because for-profit entities are not restricted by law against being political, but non-profit entities are restricted. Unwittingly, I had assembled a massive Christian audience that I could share opinions with -- my opinions -- and Godwilling I could have shared unpopular opinions at my heart's desire. While I never used it for political purposes, and had never even considered it, I believe that the savvy political machine saw the growing threat of a large free speech engine such as I had developed, and they decided that they needed to stop it.
The first barrage of Bob Ferguson's unconstitutional demands.
My church and myself would eventually be decimated by an unconstitutional attack by the WA State Attorney General, Bob Ferguson, and his minions.
"A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason."
What's hard to see from the outside is the damage that lawfare does – regardless of the outcome. Even if you win, you lose. In my case, my full attention to running a church and responding to my congregation's needs was diverted toward legal work. Lawfare involves the demand of an overwhelming amount of information and documentation. The siege against me began with a manila envelope about an inch thick.
For months on end, I was tied up compiling information and sensitive documentation about my church in order to be in full compliance of this demand by the WA State Attorney General. I knew that my 1st amendment rights were being infringed upon, but I had nothing to hide or be ashamed about, so I provided everything they asked for. I was shocked when they came back and asked for an amount of money that would have bankrupted me in order to settle out of court. I weighed the threats and enormous costs of litigation and eventually agreed to a lesser consent decree that I could just barely afford. I couldn't sustain the fight.
A consent decree is essentially an agreement that says nobody has done anything wrong, but along with this, I agreed to pay them a huge shakedown amount for their taxpayer funded legal costs, and I also agreed to say what they coerced me to say about the case to my congregation. They also required that I offer refunds to all my members, which was silly since that was already a policy we had in place. When they went to the press, they disingenuously insinuated that I would be returning $7.8M to my members, the total sum of the church's gross revenue throughout the years. Of course, the vast majority of this gross revenue went to paying expenses of the church. Mentioning the $7.8M was deceptively used as part of the smear campaign against me. I paid the AG's office half a million dollars directly for their legal fees and there were no penalties. The amount in refunds was trivial, despite national attention. I had a happy congregation and they didn't want their money back.
Ironically, consent decrees don't give the defendant of lawfare their "day in court". The defendant just has to take their lumps and move on. I never spent a day in court, I never met my attackers in person, and the issue was completely settled the moment I succumbed to their threats. It was an attractive option for someone as beaten down and overwhelmed as me. The attorney general was told by my lawyer that my my wife was having complications with her pregnancy, and he might have also known that I had a 2 year old daughter at home. This didn't slow him down though. It probably encouraged him to increase the burdensome nature of his attacks due to my confessed weakness. From what I've read, Bob Ferguson is a master chess player, and I'm the first to admit that I was outmatched.
While not a single allegation was substantiated, it was egregiously claimed that my use of a trade name as the head pastor was deceptive. They also couldn't believe that the praise reports on my site were real, even though I had just copied and pasted them from incoming emails. What type of government agency wants to know intimate details about a church's congregation anyways? Where was clergy-penitent privilege and why was the highest lawyer in the land ignoring basic constitutional law?
“He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness… Live, then and be happy beloved children of my heart and never forget that until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words – wait and hope.”
In 2016, after settling the case, I decided to close the church along with all other business that I had in WA state. My wife and 2 year old daughter were left traumatized, and I had an infant baby that deserved to see smiling faces. Privileged information from the case had been leaked to the local news, and reporters were showing up at my door, harassing my family. My soul was crushed, my name and my church's name had been dragged through the mud by a complicit media machine, and my will to lead my Christian flock had been ground into dust. I gave up.
The threat was implied that if I were to fight and win this battle, I would be targeted by lawfare from some different agency. As it is, within months of responding to their initial demand for information, a brand new WA DOR tax audit appeared on my doorstep. This is how the machine works when you resist them. If you are in the way of their agenda, they must move you aside or bury you. Their weapons of choice are paperwork and intimidation. The Bumvertising guy at it again? Let's get him! I've always imagined a brightly lit, shabby government building full of bureaucrats drawing straws for which entrepreneurs they'd stifle next.
State and Federal regulatory agencies don't act like humans. They don't act in good faith and they aren't seeking truth. They exist to extract their pound of flesh, punish their target, and protect the monopolies that keep them in power. They exist to justify and expand their bureaucratic presence. They aren't looking to keep safe the citizens who fund them through taxpayer dollars. I pray that the 21st century reign of regulatory terror soon comes to an end.
May God forgive me for folding so easily, but I took my distressed family and pledged to dedicate my life to loving my children and showing them peace as small children. Having such a happy childhood myself, I felt an obligation to at least dedicate what was left of my life to giving them the same happiness I once had.
I went into self-imposed exile abroad for years, pondering what had occurred, why it had happened, what I would do with my life. In my time abroad, living in the rural mountains of Costa Rica with my humble little family, I met other Americans who had experienced similar injustices. I learned from them and they helped me see what had happened. Through self-reflection, by committing to a positive outlook, and by only allowing myself to dwell on the good attributes of other humans, I eventually regained my strength, my joy, and a new sense of self.
“I don’t think man was meant to attain happiness so easily. Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.”
For whatever comes next, I'm not naive and I'm not a coward anymore. I cherish the opportunity to resist and defend the rights of my family and the rights of other American citizens who haven't been targeted quite yet or who are unaware that they are victims at all. I will use my experience, my willpower, and all my resources to fight against injustice whenever I am granted the opportunity. My purpose now is clear, and I thank higher powers for the liberation this country has embarked upon. It will be a rocky road, a road more treacherous than we can imagine. Government overreach will always exist as long as mankind is alive, but it's important that we resist even in tiny ways when we know our rights are being ignored.
With a new small government approach, free speech, privacy, a lack of censorship, and the restoration of basic constitutional rights, I truly believe that our children and grandchildren will see a brighter future – one more reminiscent of the glorious 1980s I grew up in.
A Patriot's Prayer
May new ideas flourish, may unpopular opinions be safe, may innovators be protected and praised. May the joy of prosperity spread so deeply into our culture again that we never forget what true freedom tastes like. May we see the good in people and have patience and sympathy for the bad. May we preserve our most cherished friendships throughout the dangers that are to come. May we emerge united. Amen.
Think we should chat?The writing on this page represents my opinions and interpretations of events based on all the information known to me. This speech is protected under the 1st amendment of the constitution of the United States.