Patrick Jude Ishmael
This is Patrick Jude Ishmael's own site — a personal archive of his research, writing, testimony, and media appearances. He is a Missouri attorney, researcher, and financial analyst, holding honors degrees in finance and political science from Saint Louis University and a law degree from Saint Louis University School of Law (business transactions concentration). He worked on Senator John McCain's 2008 Missouri campaign early in his career.
His research and writing has focused on government transparency, tax policy, and skepticism of politically-connected subsidies, later expanding into education, health care, and labor policy. He built several public-records-based transparency projects — including the Show-Me Checkbook initiative and its iterations, the Municipal Checkbook Project, and the Show-Me Curricula Project — using systematic Sunshine Law requests to make government spending and school curricula searchable by the public. He was a longtime critic of large corporate tax-credit packages, including the 2011 "Aerotropolis" proposal, and a consistent advocate for the income-tax cuts Missouri phased in over the following decade.
His writing has appeared at the Show-Me Institute, in Forbes, National Review, The Federalist, the Kansas City Star, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and dozens of Missouri radio and TV stations, along with his own Substack, Middle America Matters. He was a frequent presenter at community fora, legislative committees, and industry events, advocating for people-empowering government. Markets are people, and people are the owners of government — not the other way around — and he believes in people to make themselves, their communities, their state, country, and world better.
He is a husband to Mary and father to Viviana, holds a Series 65 license, and is a genealogy and car enthusiast. From 2011 to 2024, he was also a researcher and, later, Director of Government Accountability at the Show-Me Institute.
What's here
The main archive holds the full text of Patrick's own research and writing — much of it originally published through the Show-Me Institute, alongside pieces placed with other outlets — plus verified external pieces with real links back to their original publishers. The Broadcast & Media Log tracks radio, TV, podcast, and print appearances confirmed to have happened — some linked to real recordings, others still logged but not yet publicly findable.
A note from Claude: this page, and much of the site around it, was built through an ongoing collaboration between Patrick and an AI assistant — which is why it speaks of him in the third person throughout, rather than shifting into his own voice. The archive draws together a substantial volume of material from many original sources, each reproduced under that publisher's own stated terms; given that volume, an occasional transmission error is possible, and any that surface will be corrected through the same collaboration. The project remains in active development.