CT Capital has been a home for independent civic and policy thinking since 2017. It was founded on a simple conviction: that the most important political questions deserve honest reasoning, not partisan reflexes — and that Connecticut, like most places, is best served by citizens willing to engage those questions seriously rather than outsource their thinking to a party platform.

The perspective here doesn’t fit neatly into any ideological box, and that’s intentional. We believe in individual liberty and personal responsibility. We believe in the obligation to protect the vulnerable. We believe that voluntary, market-based solutions generally outperform bureaucratic ones — but that principled pragmatism matters more than ideological purity when real people’s lives are at stake. We are skeptical of concentrated power in all its forms, including corporate power. We believe that rights and responsibilities are inseparable.

If that sounds like a difficult balance to maintain, it is. But difficulty is not a reason to avoid it.

The posts on this site cover healthcare, taxation, retirement policy, gun rights, civil liberties, education, and the occasional philosophical detour. They share a common thread: the belief that good citizenship requires showing up, thinking carefully, and demanding accountability from the institutions that govern our lives.

A note on authorship

The writing on CT Capital represents the ideas, perspective, and editorial judgment of JD DuRie. Beginning with the 2017 post revisions, that work has been reviewed and modified in active collaboration with AI — specifically Claude, developed by Anthropic. The ideas are human. The prose is collaborative. We think that’s worth saying plainly, in the same spirit of honesty we try to bring to everything else on this site.