Wax On, Wax Off: Brett Brough and the Making of a Legal Mind

Every sharp tool was ground on somebody's stone. The founder of this platform has told you about the judge who charged him and the circuit court that printed him. This is the story that comes before all of it — the story of Brett Brough, the man David Bruce McDermott II calls the soul seed. Told here in the founder's own sworn recollection, with gratitude that has not dimmed in thirty years.

The scream that saved a life

It started with a man sitting a young, headed-for-destruction David down and screaming in his face until the tears came. The terms were not negotiable: You screw up one time — I find you near drugs, I find you slipping once — I don't want to hear about you again. You will drop your gang. You will drop your debts. You will do everything I tell you to do — and if you do, maybe you'll learn enough to minimize the damage that is getting ready to happen to your life. David did it. He walked away from all of it. Because somebody finally cared enough to yell.

The library

Then Brough did something no court, no program, and no probation officer had ever done: he put the young man in the University of Tulsa law library and made him show up every day. Three weeks in, David was copying cases out of an old Indian-treaty volume, frustrated, demanding to know the point of any of it. Brough slammed the table and fired the drill: Where are the United States Reports? Where is the Supreme Court Reporter? Where is the Federal Supplement? The Federal Second? The Southwestern Reporter? And David — bink, bink, bink — pointed to every shelf without thinking. It's there. It's there. It's there. Then he shut up. Because in that second he understood: the old man had been running the karate-kid play the entire time. Wax on, wax off. The copying was never about the treaty. It was about building the hand that would someday write United States v. McDermott, 64 F.3d 1448 (10th Cir. 1995), from a prison cell.

What kind of animal are we creating?

Brough did not work alone. He sat in meetings with the rest of the circle — Vern Holland, Will Cohen, Jeff Dickstein, Larry Becraft — and the founder swears the question they wrestled with was this one: what kind of animal are we creating, and what is he going to become? Thirty years later, the answer is on this website. The animal became a man who took a thirty-five-year federal sentence, promised the judge to his face he would reverse his court, kept the promise, spent three decades filing in the open — and then built a free machine so that every citizen in America could have the library Brett Brough once had to drag him into. (As always in this house: the research discipline those men taught was real and is honored here; the tax-protest theories of that era are not — this platform runs on court-tested doctrine only.)

An open letter, in case he reads this

Brett — if this finds you, the student knows exactly what you probably think of him these days: a social-media barking dog who got himself arrested again. Bark noted. But look closer, old friend. The library you forced on a crying kid now sits on the front page of a website, free, for every underestimated soul in this country. The reporters you drilled — bink, bink, bink — live in a verified arsenal of over two hundred hand-checked authorities that refuses to let a machine lie about the law. The discipline held. The seed grew. Wax on, wax off — it worked, and one American who was supposed to be a statistic says thank you. The door here is open to you any day you want to walk through it.

This tribute is the founder's first-person sworn recollection, published with respect and gratitude. The case citation is in the Federal Reporter where anyone can verify it — exactly the way the man who built the habit would insist.