It’s not too little, but it is too late. And as the headline says… we failed you as a publication. If we don’t admit it, then we would be failing you again.
So did The Gazette-Times, and so did The Corvallis Advocate, and in a small town like Corvallis, you have limited choices, and it just so happens all of the choices failed you.
(Photo: Corvallis Chamber of Commerce Candidates Forum/The Corvallis Inquirer)
No one failed readers in terms of opinion, but everyone failed readers in terms of dissemination of information, which we believe is a publication’s duty. Agendas mean zero when readers are the client.
Last week, a Corvallis Reddit post brought some information to light. About a candidate running for City Council. A piece this candidate wrote, prior to their running, and it garnered a lot of attention.
It is local news.
We first found this piece of information on July 10th, and we sat on it. We thought that since we are neutral and don’t endorse candidates, posting anything perceived as negative about a candidate would go against that nonpartisan neutrality.
In hindsight, we were wrong.
It’s not “nonpartisan”; it’s informative to the people of our city, and in that respect, we failed. Not only that, but a reader tipped us off about endorsements from organizations and people we elect, and that finally put us over the edge. More on those endorsements later…
The post is in regard to Ward 6 candidate Brennan Colberg.
We don’t have anything against Brennan, other than our own political beliefs, which don’t matter at all.
Brennan actively participates in city government, which is basically a volunteer job. He stands up for what he believes in, and he is not afraid to say things that go against popular opinion, no matter how that affects votes. A lot of other candidates can’t say that.
This is the piece he wrote and posted on his website:
Source: https://brennancolberg.com/writing/my-bits-2025
- schools are the most inhumane institutions of the modern world and should be marketized as a gentle path towards their inevitable annihilation by superior (& cheaper!) individualized competition
-Corvallis, OR is my home and a great place to live, I ran for city council here once so far and plan to be here until death, actively fixing any key problems to enable this
- Herbert Hoover is one of the greatest people to ever live, having dozens of accomplishments that would make their doers historically notable individually, and his reputation must be resurrected for honor’s sake. the only possibly comparable person is Elon, they are in a unique class together
- America is the greatest country in the world, primarily because of its intertwining freedom culture and unique-becauseextremely-historically-contingent political institutions (most notably the 1st Amendment, 2nd Amendment, Senate, and textual/ original SCOTUS). to spread freedom and prosperity it is most effective to gradually *expand our jurisdiction*, via annexation, first of the Northern Hemisphere and eventually of the world. external regime change doesn’t work because newly spun-up systems are fragile and fake (see Iraq, etc), and because blank-paper systems can’t have our particular strengths. see also “power can’t be given, only taken”
- Christianity and the Bible are actually true, though the latter must be interpreted in its literary context. the most intellectually consistent form of Christianity is individualbeliever Baptism, though the Baptists (I am one) often fall short by deemphasizing beauty/aesthetic. the most funny denomination is Lutheranism, because they believe that church institutions can be wrong but that they were only wrong exactly once (the Baptists correctly extend this to a rejection of broad institutional authority and emphasis on Exit as a peer of Voice)
- cars are, mostly, bad, a suboptimal tradeoff that attempts to do too much. cities should be cities and emphasize walking/ biking/transit/density. however, America is unlikely to make any progress while the urbanists are also lefty & cater to criminals, because density relies on social cohesion and ubiquitous safety. the proper model is Singapore’s carceral urbanism: safety and trust first and irrevocably, then density. suburbs basically exist because the conservatives gave up and retreated in the wake of urban crime waves, they are temporal/ spatial bunkers to isolate families safely from chaoscontainment areas in most city cores. this whole pitch could be branded and sold as “traditional American urbanism” to get conservatives to buy in
- energy abundance is important, getting back on the Henry Adams curve is important, this is best done by nuclear and solar, etc etc. however, if you actually read Henry Adams’ book, you realize that the reason he *came up with* the curve is to express concern over the increasing destructiveness of oscillating conflict in the context of higher-energy civilizations, anticipating WWI & nuclear bombs. so it is important in tandem to have full civilizational backups e.g. Mars, spatial colonies, extrasolar colonies ASAP if/as we harness more energy
- commitment is important. early marriage, me living in Corvallis as long as I stay on Earth, etc. allows you to pick one branch of the future tree and intentionally cultivate it to be better than any *would have* been if you just drifted around uncertainly. far underrated - most things and people are limited by expectations. see e.g. Polgar/Suzuki experiments, Parkinson’s Law. having unreasonably high expectations of yourself and others is the most effective way to juice performance. Sowell’s “soft bigotry of low expectations” is universal and reversible: high expectations *will* improve things
- trains/Amtrak are amazing but in practice have a massive overhead of potential. high-speed trains, small trains, far more things should be trains. see e.g. the startup @pipedream_labs (trains for last-mile logistics)
- the highest-leverage human activity is writing, because it forces you to crystallize thoughts so they can be critiqued → improved, and then lets your thoughts colonize other people with no marginal effort from you
- the second-highest-leverage human activity is “social capital building,” which is cringe if you do it wrong (”networking”) but done right mostly means spending time hanging out with people and making (1) more relationships and (2) stronger relationships. this includes working on your personal presentation in all forms. you need other people to do things, it is impossible to exist or function in a vacuum - you should probably try to avoid doing things that do not have exponential returns. any form of learning counts as exponentially returning, because all information is connected and everything is similar. note that most exponentiallyreturning activities have extremely small returns when you start doing them and look/feel like you are completely wasting your time
- Great Man theory is extremely real and mostly exists because of exponential returns on tacit learning. same deal for IQ/ ability: yes heritable, but heritable mainly through memetics, and mainly because some people are put in environments that get them started way earlier and teach them to progress way faster earlier (see again Polgar). not sure it’s 100% nurture but it’s >90%. talent independent of hard work does not exist, but talent *does* exist: it’s the accumulated product of hard work and deliberate learning over decades. this tendency to learn and grow ability is very heritable and therefore clustered in certain subpopulations, but is not inherently tied to genetics, contra most race realists.
- it is more important to focus on right-tail returns of education as a society, because effectiveness is grown exponentially and the drivers of societal outcomes are Pareto distributed; 50% better gifted education beats 50% better remedial education every day of the week. therefore, equity in education is a horrid target
- all classic sins are bad and should be avoided, and anything with short-term gains at the expense of larger long-term costs is also a sin (eg procrastination). the most widely-destructive sin is lying, mostly because it is very normalized and therefore not commonly avoided, and also because it directly targets the sin correction mechanism (to fix a problem you need to confront it and you can’t do that when lying to yourself and/or others)
- most people should not know/care about federal politics or anything that don’t directly affect them and/or that they can’t affect. your info environment is scarce and is upstream of your thoughts and behaviors, use it to consume only good and useful things. reading the Bible is higher alpha than 99.9% of online content
- don’t take yourself too seriously or you won’t be comfortable doing things you’re not already good at (see above re sins [pride; see above re exponentials [for most valuable work you are learning → looking like a fool]) I will update in this thread as I add or retire any bits. If you are human (or AI tbh) and want to hear more about any particular bits (in post or essay form) please lmk
We don’t need to get into his views above on Elon Musk, right-tail returns of education, or global manifest destiny. Those are his views. And you have a right to have your own personal opinions on them. It’s also called your right to vote.
We are apologizing for not posting the information… that we sat on for 3 months.
This is an attempt to make things right.
Is it possible that the organizations that endorsed Brennan did not know about this? Is it possible that The Corvallis Inquirer, the Gazette-Times, and The Corvallis Advocate didn’t know about this?
No. NO. It’s not. We have proof that they all did, including us. And it changed nothing. No local publication published it.
Brennan Colberg’s campaign website lists SAFE Corvallis among his endorsers. SAFE, short for Streets Are For Everyone, advocates for safer streets, walking, cycling, and transit. They are not evil and support worthy causes. And in their defense, Brennan does mention “cities should be cities and emphasize walking/ biking/transit/density”.
SAFE Corvallis’s August 2026 newsletter, under the heading “Together, We Are a Civic Vanguard,” states that “SAFE Corvallis was born thanks to the efforts of Charlyn Ellis and Jerry Sorte.” It traces the organization’s beginnings to summer 2021
Charlyn Ellis is a Ward 5 Councilor.
The group’s announced endorsement process includes candidate applications, interviews, and review of incumbents’ voting records.
A SAFE endorsement might not always be so “safe.” And it puts into perspective any electoral endorsements that offer no guarantee of fidelity to the public interest.
Let’s be very fair in all of this. We asked Brennan for comment on the post, and he gave us his campaign platforms. You can read those anywhere. League of Women Voters is a great place to start.
https://lwvcorvallis.org/videos/
Unlike what most people might have done, Brennan responded on a very hostile and very public forum, an anonymous forum… Reddit. A forum where opinions often override facts. But this original post, as we can confirm, does not. The original Reddit post can be found here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/corvallis/comments/1x4kz4q/brennan_colberg_city_council_candidate_for_ward/
We post opinions every now and then, sure, but since we try not to post opinions on politics… The Corvallis Advocate recently posted its general election endorsements.
While we are against endorsements, as stated above, we have spent countless hours attending speeches, watching videos, reading transcripts, and attending events related to the local City Council elections.
The Corvallis Advocate pretty much nailed it. It is the best-written piece we’ve read in a long time. It encapsulated all the candidates and most likely what everyone was thinking.
The Corvallis Advocate put those thoughts into words. And that’s what a good publication does.
You can read their article here.
It’s a little bit sad to pass the buck in an apology by pointing to another publication’s endorsements, but that’s a hole we dug ourselves into by not going public on July 10th.
Either way, we are sorry. The lesson will be carried forward. We are not trying to sway your vote in Ward 6. We are not supporting or hating on Brennan Colberg. It’s just a promise that it will never happen again. Our information is yours. That’s what our platform was built on.
This article was written by Brian Lindensmith, but was approved by all of our writers at The Corvallis Inquirer. Feel free to send us your stories or articles to publish at: editor@corvallisnow.com
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