Before the coffee gets cold, remember that silence in the face of falsehood is not neutrality — it's a decision, and it has a cost. This week's Finding Truth explores why calling out lies and moral wrongs is an act of respect, not rudeness, and how to hold the line without losing your integrity in the process.

Devices used to mean laptops and phones. Now they mean containers, microservices, and AI agents that can act on their own. This week's Zero Trust Foundations post runs the AAVI model through the Device pillar, with real 2026 breach headlines showing what happens when device and workload trust gets skipped, whether the "device" in question has a keyboard or not.

Identity is where Zero Trust starts, but it cannot stand alone. In this post, we run AAVI through the Identity pillar by documenting transaction flows, writing Zero Trust policy statements, enforcing MFA, retiring legacy authentication, and showing how visibility, automation, and governance keep identity decisions honest.

Polls and surveys can reveal what people believe, but they can also be designed to shape what people believe. In this Finding Truth coffee conversation, Cletus Taylor explains how loaded questions, selective sampling, answer scales, timing, and headline framing can turn public opinion into packaged persuasion—and how A Student of Truth can spot the difference.

Federal grants can reflect lawful policy priorities, but they should not become tools of political punishment after awards are made. This Finding Truth post examines recent court filings, clean-energy grant cancellations, and why public trust depends on process as much as policy.

Zero Trust does not become real by buying a tool or redrawing the network diagram. It becomes real when we assess how trust is granted today, adapt existing controls, verify that the changes work, and keep iterating. This post introduces the AAVI model for turning existing environments into functional Zero Trust one protect surface at a time.

Pull up a chair. Today’s coffee chat is about claims, counterclaims, court rulings, primary upsets, and why truth usually needs more time than the news cycle is willing to give it. Some political stories are born complicated. Election stories are usually born complicated, raised by suspicion, sent to school in campaign season, and then shoved into a headline before they have even found their shoes. That is not a criticism of reporters trying to make sense of a loud public squ

The Five Pillars help make Zero Trust decisions, but the cross functions keep those decisions visible, consistent, and governed. In this post, we look at Visibility and Analytics, Automation and Orchestration, and Governance as practical operating functions for a functional Zero Trust Architecture. The goal is not a fully automated security ecosystem on day one. The goal is to prove trust decisions, implement controls consistently, reduce policy drift, and measure whether ris

Intelligence is not the same as evidence. This Finding Truth coffee chat looks at Gulf of Tonkin, Iraq WMD, and today’s headlines to ask how citizens can take threats seriously without rushing uncertainty into certainty.

Before changing controls, we need to understand what our Zero Trust Architecture is supposed to do. This post uses the Five Pillars—Identity, Device, Network, Application, and Data—to show how legacy security assumptions can be evaluated and transformed into better trust decisions.

Zero Trust works best when we stop trying to fix everything at once and start with one meaningful protect surface. This post explains how to choose that first surface, avoid common pitfalls, and use a practical checklist to make Zero Trust manageable with the tools and capabilities you already have.

What does it mean to love America well? This Fourth of July reflection explores the difference between patriotism and nationalism, and why truth, humility, and civic responsibility matter more than ever.

A republic is in trouble when honest disagreement starts sounding like a crime. This Finding Truth reflection explores why questioning power is not a threat to America, but one of the ways citizens help keep the republic alive.

Zero Trust is more than a security buzzword. Learn how Zero Trust changes IT work, why legacy authentication and flat networks must evolve, and how practical security decisions reduce risk in today’s threat landscape.

Grab a cup of coffee and pull up a chair. This post kicks off a new series for ZT Foundations where we will walk through some of the key ideas from my new book, ZT Foundations: Building Zero Trust with the Tools You Already Have. My goal for this series is simple: take the mystery out of Zero Trust, talk about it in plain language, and show how it can be built from practical decisions instead of shiny buzzwords. Over the next few weeks, we will compare traditional security st

Every now and then, a story comes along that makes anyone who calls themselves a student of truth pause for a minute. Not just to react to the headline, but to sit with it. To ask what it means today, what it could become tomorrow, and what kind of responsibility comes with knowing. This week, that story is about autonomous weapons, or “killer robots,” as the headline writers like to call them. According to New Scientist, drone-maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy said a one-time Ukr

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering why smart, thoughtful people can hold so tightly to beliefs that don’t seem to stand up to much scrutiny, you’re definitely not alone. It’s one of those deeply human things. Emotion, especially strong emotion like fear, anger, or hate, can move a lot faster than logic, evidence, and sometimes even our own better judgment. And when someone questions a belief that’s tied to those emotions, we usually don’t respond in the calm, measured wa

So pull up a chair, grab a cup of coffee, and let’s get real for a minute about Zero Trust. Not the polished conference-slide version. Not the tidy marketing version. The real version. The version where meaningful change is hard, legacy assumptions get challenged, and progress usually starts with a few uncomfortable truths. Let’s be honest: starting the Zero Trust journey can feel a little like deciding to renovate your house while you’re still living in it. You know it needs

General election season in Texas always brings noise, but this year the noise is doing more than filling airtime. It is shaping perception, steering emotion, and pushing voters toward reaction instead of reflection. In this post, I take a closer look at how both parties, along with powerful outside groups, use fear, outrage, and selective truth to influence the races for governor and U.S. senator, and why a Student of Truth has to learn to see through it all.

How Citizens United reshaped campaign money, and what the United States can still do about it. Let's talk campaign money, constitutional power, and civic choices. Start with the basic question Here is a question worth sitting with over coffee: when an election costs billions of dollars, who actually has the loudest voice? Many other democracies place firmer limits on who can give, how much can be spent, and how visible that money must be. That matters because campaign finance