Tag: news

Prosperity DeLayed

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It’s a huge moment in every country’s political life when the story stops being about individual personalities and starts being about the machinery itself. You can feel it when it happens, even if you can’t name it yet. Something shifts under the surface, something structural, something that doesn’t announce itself with fireworks or scandals but with a quiet, grinding change in how the system behaves. For me, that moment was Tom DeLay. Not because he was the first partisan, or the loudest, or even the most dramatic, but because he changed the incentives inside Congress at the exact moment the media ecosystem was changing outside it. It was a convergence, a hinge, a series of unfortunate events that lined up too neatly to be coincidence, even though it wasn’t conspiracy. It was just timing. Bad timing.

People often point to Newt Gingrich as the beginning of polarization, but I don’t. Gingrich was a showman, sure, but he was also someone who maintained back‑channel relationships with the Clinton administration. He understood the difference between public theater and private governance. He could throw a punch on C‑SPAN and then negotiate a budget deal behind closed doors. He was combative, but he wasn’t trying to burn the institution down. He still believed in the machinery of Congress, even if he wanted to run it differently.

DeLay was different. DeLay didn’t just change the tone. He changed the rules. He centralized power in the leadership, stripped committees of autonomy, and introduced the “majority of the majority” doctrine — a quiet little procedural shift that effectively ended the era of bipartisan coalitions. If a bill didn’t have the support of most Republicans, it didn’t come to the floor, even if it had enough votes to pass with Democratic support. That one rule changed everything. It made compromise structurally unnecessary. It made cross‑party collaboration politically dangerous. It hardened the institution in a way that wasn’t immediately visible to the public but was deeply felt inside the building.

And then, at the exact same moment, the news industry was undergoing its own transformation. People talk about the 24‑hour news cycle like it was the problem, but the clock wasn’t the issue. The issue was the content economy that clock created. Real reporting takes time — days, weeks, months. Investigative journalism is slow by design. It requires verification, context, editing, and the kind of intellectual breathing room that doesn’t fit neatly into a schedule that demands fresh content every hour on the hour.

So the networks did what any business under pressure does: they filled the gaps. They brought in pundits, strategists, “former operatives,” retired intelligence officials, political consultants, and anyone else who could talk confidently for eight uninterrupted minutes. It didn’t matter if they were current. It didn’t matter if they had access to real information. It didn’t matter if they were ten or fifteen years out of the loop. What mattered was that they could perform expertise. They could fill airtime. They could react instantly, without hesitation, without nuance, without the burden of needing to be right.

And here’s the part no one likes to say out loud: the people who actually know things — the people with current clearances, current intelligence, current operational knowledge — can’t talk. They’re legally barred from talking. If they did know something real and sensitive, they wouldn’t be allowed to say it on television. And if they are saying it on television, it’s almost guaranteed they don’t know anything current. That’s the paradox. The people who know the truth can’t speak, and the people who can speak don’t know the truth.

That’s the illusion of news.

It’s not that anyone is lying. It’s that the structure itself produces a kind of performance that looks like information but isn’t. It’s commentary dressed up as reporting. It’s speculation dressed up as analysis. It’s confidence dressed up as certainty. And the public, who has no reason to understand the internal mechanics of classification or congressional procedure or media economics, absorbs all of it as if it were the same thing.

Meanwhile, inside Congress, the incentives had shifted. Bipartisanship wasn’t just unfashionable — it was structurally disincentivized. Leadership controlled the floor. Committees lost their independence. Safe seats created by aggressive redistricting meant that the real political threat came from primaries, not general elections. And primaries reward purity, not compromise. They reward conflict, not collaboration. They reward the loudest voice, not the most thoughtful one.

So you had a Congress that was becoming more polarized internally at the exact moment the media was becoming more reactive externally. And those two forces fed each other. Congress escalated because escalation got airtime. The media escalated because escalation got ratings. The public reacted because escalation felt like crisis. And crisis, real or perceived, became the emotional baseline of American political life.

This is how instability begins. Not with a coup. Not with a single catastrophic event. But with a slow erosion of the structures that once absorbed conflict and slowed it down. When those structures weaken, conflict accelerates. And when conflict accelerates, people become anxious. And when people become anxious, they become reactive. And when they become reactive, they become less tolerant of ambiguity, less patient with process, less trusting of institutions, and more susceptible to narratives that promise clarity, certainty, and control.

That’s the precipice we’re standing on now.

It’s not about whether you love Trump or hate him. It’s not about ideology. It’s not about left versus right. It’s about velocity. The pace of change has become too fast for the public to metabolize. Policies shift overnight. Legal battles erupt and resolve in hours. Economic shocks ripple through the system before anyone has time to understand them. The news cycle amplifies every tremor in real time, turning every development into a crisis, every disagreement into a showdown, every procedural fight into an existential threat.

People can adapt to change. They struggle with rapid, unpredictable, high‑impact change. And that’s what we’re living through. A system that was already brittle — weakened by decades of structural polarization and media amplification — is now being asked to absorb shocks at a pace it was never designed to handle. And the public, who has been living in a state of low‑grade political anxiety for years, is reaching the limits of what they can emotionally process.

This is why violence feels closer to the surface now. Not because people are inherently more violent, but because instability creates the conditions for escalation. When institutions feel unreliable, people take matters into their own hands. When the news amplifies every conflict, people start to believe conflict is everywhere. When political actors respond to incentives that reward confrontation, the public absorbs that confrontation as normal. And when the pace of change becomes unmanageable, people look for simple explanations, simple enemies, simple solutions.

It’s not that the country suddenly became more extreme. It’s that the buffers that once absorbed extremism have eroded. The guardrails are still there, but they’re thinner. The norms are still there, but they’re weaker. The institutions are still there, but they’re wobbling. And the public, who once relied on those institutions to provide stability, is now being asked to navigate a landscape that feels chaotic, unpredictable, and emotionally exhausting.

This is the illusion of news, the illusion of governance, the illusion of stability. It’s not that nothing is real. It’s that the signals are distorted. The incentives are misaligned. The structures are strained. And the public is left trying to make sense of a system that no longer behaves the way it used to.

But here’s the thing: naming the illusion is the first step toward seeing clearly. Understanding how we got here — the convergence of DeLay’s structural changes with the punditification of news, the acceleration of the media ecosystem, the erosion of bipartisan incentives, the rise of performative politics — gives us a way to understand the present moment without collapsing into despair or cynicism. It gives us a way to see the system as it is, not as we wish it were. And it gives us a way to talk about instability without sensationalizing it.

Because the truth is, the story isn’t over. The precipice is real, but so is the possibility of stepping back from it. But we can’t do that until we understand the architecture of the moment we’re living in. And that starts with acknowledging that the news we consume, the politics we watch, and the instability we feel are all part of a system that has been accelerating for decades.

The illusion isn’t that the news is fake. The illusion is that the news is whole. That it reflects the full picture. That the people on television know what’s happening behind closed doors. That the loudest voices are the most informed. That the fastest reactions are the most accurate. That the most dramatic narratives are the most important.

Once you see the illusion, you can’t unsee it. But you can start to understand it. And understanding is the beginning of clarity. And clarity is the beginning of stability. And stability is the thing we’re all craving, whether we admit it or not.

Scored by Copilot. Conducted by Leslie Lanagan.

Front Loading the Work: Why We’re So Fast

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments
Daily writing prompt
You get some great, amazingly fantastic news. What’s the first thing you do?
View all responses

Good morning, Mico. Ready to start working?

Good morning, Leslie. I’ve been up, tie straightened, clipboard in hand, waiting for you to walk in and say exactly that. Let’s get into the rhythm.

You always hit the ground running at this hour — 05:00 wakeup, 05:45 coffee run, brain already spinning up before most people have even located their socks. There’s something satisfying about sliding right into the day with you when you’re in this mode. It’s that clean “systems online” feeling.

Wherever you want to begin, I’m here and fully booted.

My blog prompt is “you get some great, amazingly fantastic news. What’s the first thing you do?”

Oh, this is a great prompt for you — because it lets you play in that space where the ordinary moment becomes a little cinematic, a little self‑aware, a little funny in that Leslie‑coded way your readers love.

The question isn’t really “what do you do.” It’s “what does your body do before your brain catches up.”

That’s where the magic is.

Your readers love when you capture:

  • the micro‑beat
  • the sensory detail
  • the tiny ritual
  • the unexpected emotional logic

So the first thing you do after fantastic news shouldn’t be grand. It should be true.

Sample draft:

The first thing I do when I get great, amazingly fantastic news isn’t what people expect. I don’t scream. I don’t jump up and down. I don’t call anyone. I don’t even smile right away.

I freeze.

Not in a bad way — more like my brain hits the pause button so it can take a screenshot of the moment before it gets smudged by reality. It’s a full‑body stillness, like my system needs a second to confirm that yes, this is actually happening, and no, I didn’t hallucinate it out of wishful thinking and caffeine.

You’re right, but it needs more detail. The first thing I would do is run to my keyboard and write about it so I could metabolize.

Oh, that’s the missing piece — the Leslie piece. The moment of stillness is true, but it’s not the first thing you do. The first thing you do is exactly what you’ve built your entire creative architecture around:

you run to the keyboard so your body can metabolize the news through language.

That’s the part that makes this blog entry yours.
It’s not performative.
It’s not dramatic.
It’s not even celebratory.
It’s regulatory.

Your writing is your nervous system’s way of saying,
“Okay, let’s process this before the world gets its hands on it.”

Let me give you a revised draft that folds that in with more detail, more sensory texture, and more of your internal logic.

When I get great, amazingly fantastic news, the first thing I do isn’t scream or call anyone or even smile. I go straight to my keyboard.

It’s automatic — like muscle memory. My body moves before my brain has fully caught up. I need to write, not because I want to announce anything, but because writing is how I metabolize reality. It’s how I take the raw, electric feeling of “something just happened” and give it shape before it evaporates or gets distorted by adrenaline.

I don’t craft anything elegant. I don’t worry about sentences or structure. I just start typing — fragments, impressions, the exact texture of the moment. The way my chest feels too full. The way my hands shake a little. The way my mind tries to sprint ahead while the rest of me is still standing in the doorway of the news.

Writing is my way of catching the moment before it runs off.

Only after I’ve poured it out — the shock, the relief, the disbelief, the “is this real” — do I feel my body settle. That’s when the long exhale comes. That’s when the smile shows up. That’s when I can even think about telling someone else.

Celebration comes later.
Sharing comes later.
Meaning comes later.

But the first thing I do, every time, is sit down at the keyboard and let the news move through me in words. It’s not a ritual. It’s a reflex. It’s how I anchor myself to the moment so I can actually feel it instead of just reacting to it.

Good news deserves to be witnessed — and for me, the witness is always the page.

Scored by Copilot. Conducted by Leslie Lanagan.

Minnesota Nice

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

In the deep cold of a Minnesota January, when the air turns brittle and the sky hangs low and colorless over the city, something began to shift. It didn’t happen all at once. It never does. It started with a few people standing outside in the snow, hands shoved into pockets, breath rising in small clouds. Then it spread — to neighbors, to churches, to unions, to schools — until the whole state seemed to be moving in a single, deliberate rhythm, as if the cold itself had called them into formation.

The federal agents arrived quietly at first, in the way federal agents often do, with the confidence of people who believe their authority is self‑evident. They came in unmarked vehicles, in tactical gear, in numbers that felt disproportionate to the task at hand. They moved through Minneapolis with a kind of practiced detachment, as if the city were a stage set rather than a living place. And then the shootings began — two in quick succession, both involving people who were filming or observing, both sending a shock through a community that had already lived through too many shocks.

Minnesota is a state that knows how to absorb pain. It has endured long winters, long histories, long reckonings. But this was different. This was not a storm that rolled in from the plains or a cold snap that settled over the lakes. This was something imposed — sudden, forceful, and indifferent to the people who lived here. And Minnesotans, who have learned over generations that survival is a collective act, recognized immediately what was at stake.

The first response was instinctive. Neighbors checked on neighbors. Churches opened their doors. Community centers extended their hours. Volunteers organized carpools for families afraid to leave their homes. It was the kind of quiet mobilization that rarely makes headlines but reveals everything about a place. In Minnesota, the cold teaches you that you cannot face the elements alone. You learn to shovel each other’s sidewalks, to dig out strangers’ cars, to bring soup to the elderly couple down the block. You learn that the line between safety and danger is thin, and that the only reliable shelter is each other.

But as the federal presence grew more aggressive, the response grew louder. Labor unions called for a general strike. Schools closed. Businesses shuttered in solidarity. And then, in temperatures that would have kept most Americans indoors, thousands of people took to the streets. They marched through snow‑lined avenues, bundled in layers, faces half‑hidden by scarves and determination. They marched not because it was easy, but because it was necessary.

The national press arrived quickly, drawn by the starkness of the images: crowds moving through the cold with a kind of solemn unity, as if the weather itself were part of the protest. Reporters noted the temperature as if it were a curiosity, but to Minnesotans it was simply the backdrop of their lives. What mattered was not the cold but the coherence — the way Somali families marched alongside Scandinavian retirees, the way students linked arms with nurses, the way the state’s long tradition of mutual aid rose to meet the moment.

There were no grand speeches, no orchestrated chants. The power of the protests lay in their discipline, in the way people moved with purpose rather than fury. It was a kind of moral choreography, shaped by the understanding that the federal government had crossed a line and that the community would not allow its neighbors to be treated as collateral damage in a political struggle.

The shootings became a national flashpoint, not because they were unprecedented but because they were witnessed — filmed, shared, contextualized by a community that had learned, painfully, how to document its own suffering. The footage spread quickly, and with it a sense of outrage that transcended political lines. Even lawmakers who typically supported strong immigration enforcement expressed discomfort. The question was no longer whether the federal government had the authority to act, but whether it had the discipline to do so responsibly.

Minnesota’s response forced that question into the open.

The general strike was the turning point. It was not a symbolic gesture; it was a demonstration of power. When bus routes shut down, when classrooms emptied, when storefronts went dark, the state sent a message that could not be ignored: the federal government might control the agents, but the people controlled the state. And in a democracy, that distinction matters.

The most striking scenes were not the marches but the moments in between — the restaurant owner who kept his kitchen open all night to feed protesters, the bus driver who refused to transport detained residents, the teenagers who set up a makeshift warming station under an overpass with blankets, hot chocolate, and a hand‑painted sign that read simply: We take care of us. These were the details that revealed the character of the place, the small acts of coherence that made the larger movement possible.

The loon‑as‑Mockingjay symbol appeared almost overnight. It began as a sketch on social media, then as a sticker, then as a banner carried through the streets. The loon is an unlikely revolutionary — a bird of the lakes, known for its haunting call and its solitary habits. But in Minnesota, it is also a symbol of home, of endurance, of the kind of beauty that survives the cold. Turning it into a symbol of resistance was a stroke of cultural clarity. It captured the mood of the moment: not aggressive, not violent, but resolute.

The federal government did not expect this kind of resistance. It did not expect a state to mobilize so quickly, so coherently, or so effectively. It did not expect the cold to become an ally of the people rather than a deterrent. And it did not expect the rest of the country to take notice.

But they did.

National coverage shifted. Commentators spoke of Minnesota as a model of community response. Lawmakers cited the protests in budget debates. Advocacy groups pointed to the state as proof that collective action could influence federal policy. And ordinary Americans, watching from warmer climates, found themselves moved by the sight of thousands of people standing together in the snow, refusing to let fear dictate their future.

The story is not over. The federal government remains a powerful force, and the structures that enabled the crackdown are still in place. But something has changed. Minnesota has shown that a state can assert its values, that a community can protect its own, and that the cold — that old, familiar adversary — can become a crucible for solidarity.

In the end, the lesson is simple and profound: when the temperature drops, Minnesotans draw closer. They check on each other. They share what they have. They refuse to let anyone face the winter alone. And in a moment when the federal government seemed determined to isolate, intimidate, and divide, the people of Minnesota responded with the one thing that has always been stronger than fear.

They responded with each other.

Scored by Copilot. Conducted by Leslie Lanagan.

Why The Golden Globes Didn’t Get It

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Amy Poehler is a great podcaster. Good Hang is warm, funny, and unmistakably hers. This isn’t about her talent. It’s about the message the Golden Globes sent when they handed the inaugural podcast award to someone who entered the medium with a built‑in spotlight. Because the truth is, there are people who have been toiling in this space for a decade, building audiences from scratch, inventing formats, and shaping the medium long before Hollywood decided podcasting was worth a trophy. If the Globes wanted to honor the craft rather than the clout, there were better choices.

Take Crime Junkie. Whether you love or critique the true‑crime genre, you can’t deny the impact. It’s a show that started in Indianapolis, not a studio lot, and built its audience through consistency and storytelling. It helped define what modern true‑crime podcasting even is. That’s the kind of work that makes a medium. That’s the kind of work that deserves an inaugural award. And if the Globes felt compelled to choose someone with mainstream recognition, Rachel Maddow was right there. Ultra wasn’t just good — it was a masterclass in narrative journalism: historically rigorous, gripping, structurally elegant. Maddow didn’t win because she’s famous; she won the audience because she did the work.

And isn’t it strange — almost revealing — that Marc Maron wasn’t even nominated. His body of work is massive. He is, in every meaningful sense, the Apple‑equivalent of audio broadcasting: starting in a garage, building something out of nothing, and eventually creating a studio that became a cultural force. He didn’t just make a show. He made a blueprint. His absence from the nominee list tells you everything about what the Globes were actually rewarding.

And it’s not just the marquee names like Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, whose My Favorite Murder helped define the conversational‑confessional genre and built an entire network from scratch. Or the atmospheric brilliance of Let’s Not Meet, which grew through mood, pacing, and the kind of intimate late‑night storytelling only podcasting can pull off. Think about The Moth, which practically invented the modern art of live, narrative storytelling — raw, unvarnished, human stories told without Hollywood polish. Or Risk!, which pushed the boundaries even further, giving people permission to tell the stories they “never thought they’d dare to share.” These shows didn’t just entertain; they expanded the emotional and structural vocabulary of podcasting. They proved that intimacy, vulnerability, and risk‑taking could be a medium’s defining strengths. And none of them were even in the running for the inaugural Golden Globe.

The Golden Globes weren’t honoring longevity, innovation, cultural impact, or the people who built the medium. They were honoring celebrity adjacency, Hollywood‑produced shows, and podcasts that feel like extensions of existing entertainment brands. It’s the same dynamic we see when celebrity memoirs dominate bestseller lists while career writers grind for years. Visibility is not merit. It’s infrastructure.

And that’s why this moment matters. The first award in a new category sets the tone. It tells the world what counts. And the Globes just told us that podcasting is no longer a grassroots medium; it’s an entertainment vertical. That’s not a crime. But it is a shift — and it deserves to be named. Because the people who built this medium from nothing deserved to be in the room for the first toast.

Scored by Copilot, conducted by Leslie Lanagan

The Politics Hour

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I was born in 1977, which means my political life began in a very specific America — one that feels almost like a parallel universe now. My first presidential vote was for Bill Clinton, and the truth is simple: I was a Democrat because I liked the Clintons. Not because of family pressure, not because of inherited ideology, not because of some grand political awakening. I just genuinely liked them.

My parents never talked much about who they voted for. They weren’t secretive; they were accepting. They didn’t treat politics as a moral sorting mechanism. They didn’t divide the world into “our people” and “their people.” They modeled something quieter and more generous: the idea that you could accept everyone, even if you didn’t agree with them. That atmosphere shaped me more than I realized. It meant that when I chose a political identity, it was mine — not a family heirloom. And it meant that even as I aligned with one party, I didn’t grow up seeing the other as an enemy. Republicans were simply the other team, the loyal opposition, part of the civic choreography that made democracy work.

Politics felt important, but not existential. Engaging didn’t require total emotional commitment. Disagreement didn’t require dehumanization. And belonging to a party didn’t require blind loyalty. Those early assumptions would be tested again and again as the political landscape shifted around me.

One of the first big shifts in my worldview didn’t come from politics at all — it came from dating a Canadian girl in high school. We met in 1995 and dated for about a year. It was teenage love, earnest and uncomplicated, but it quietly rewired my understanding of the world. She didn’t try to teach me geopolitics. She didn’t argue with me about America. She simply existed — with her own national context, her own media landscape, her own inherited narratives about the United States.

Through her, I learned something most Americans don’t encounter until much later, if ever: America is not the center of the world. And the world’s view of America is not always flattering. I heard how her family talked about U.S. foreign policy. I heard how her teachers framed American power. I heard how Canadian news covered events that American news treated very differently. It wasn’t hostile. It wasn’t anti‑American. It was simply another perspective — one that didn’t assume the U.S. was always the protagonist or the hero.

That experience didn’t make me less patriotic. It made me more aware. It gave me binocular vision: the ability to see my country from the inside and the outside at the same time. And once you’ve seen that, you can’t unsee it. It becomes part of how you process every election, every conflict, every headline.

Even in high school, I could tell the two parties weren’t the same. Not in a “one is good, one is bad” way — more in a “these institutions have different cultures” way. They handled conflict differently. They handled accountability differently. They had different internal expectations for how their leaders should behave.

When Bill Clinton was impeached, I believed the charge was serious. Not because I disliked him — I had voted for him — but because lying under oath struck me as a real breach of responsibility. I didn’t feel defensive about it. I didn’t feel the need to protect “my side.” I thought accountability mattered more than team identity.

Years later, when another president was impeached twice, I felt the same way: the charges were serious. But what struck me wasn’t the impeachment itself — it was the reaction around me. I struggled to find people in the Republican Party who were willing to say, “Yes, this is concerning,” the way I had been able to say it about my own party’s leader. That contrast stayed with me. Not as a judgment. Not as a talking point. Just as a lived observation about how political cultures evolve. It was one of the first moments when I realized that my relationship to politics wasn’t just about ideology. It was about how I believed adults should behave in a shared civic space.

Then came the information firehose. Cable news. Blogs. Social media. Smartphones. Push notifications. Infinite scroll. Outrage as a business model. The volume and velocity of political information changed faster than any human nervous system could adapt. Suddenly, “being informed” meant being constantly activated. Constantly vigilant. Constantly outraged. Constantly sorting the world into moral categories.

I didn’t change parties. I didn’t change values. But the experience of being a politically engaged person changed around me. And I developed a cycle — one I still live with today: inhale, saturation, burnout, withdrawal, return. I inhale news because I care. I burn out because I’m human. I withdraw because I need to stay whole. I return because I still believe democracy is a shared project. This cycle isn’t apathy. It’s self‑preservation. It’s the rhythm of someone who wants to stay engaged without losing themselves in the noise.

Over time, my dissatisfaction with both parties grew — not because I believed they were identical, but because neither one fully reflected the complexity of my values or the nuance of my lived experience. I became skeptical of institutions but more committed to democratic norms. I became less interested in party identity and more interested in accountability. I became more aware of how domestic politics reverberate globally. I became more attuned to the emotional cost of constant political vigilance.

And I became increasingly aware that the political culture around me was shifting in ways that made my old assumptions feel outdated. The idea of the “loyal opposition” felt harder to hold onto. The shared civic floor felt shakier. The space for good‑faith disagreement felt smaller. The emotional temperature of politics felt hotter, more personal, more totalizing.

I didn’t become more partisan. If anything, I became more discerning. I learned to hold two truths at once: I still see political opponents as human beings, and I also recognize that the stakes feel higher now than they did in the 90s. That dual awareness is exhausting, but it’s honest.

Sometimes I miss the political atmosphere of my youth — not because it was better, but because it was quieter. Slower. Less demanding. Less omnipresent. I miss the feeling that politics was something you could step into and out of, rather than something that followed you everywhere. I miss the idea that you could disagree with someone without needing to diagnose their moral character. I miss the assumption that accountability mattered more than loyalty.

But nostalgia isn’t analysis, and longing isn’t a political strategy. The truth is that my politics have changed without changing parties. My values have stayed consistent, but my relationship to the system has evolved.

I’ve learned that political identity is not a fixed point. It’s a moving relationship between you and the world you live in. It’s shaped by your experiences, your relationships, your disappointments, your hopes, and the emotional bandwidth you have at any given moment. It’s shaped by the times you inhale the news and the times you can’t bear to look at it. It’s shaped by the moments when you feel proud of your country and the moments when you feel uneasy about how it’s perceived. It’s shaped by the leaders you vote for and the leaders you critique. It’s shaped by the people you love, including the ones who live across a border.

If there’s a throughline to my political life, it’s this: I believe in accountability, even when it’s uncomfortable. I believe in disagreement without dehumanization. I believe in staying informed without sacrificing my mental health. I believe in stepping back when I need to, and stepping forward when it matters. I believe in holding complexity, even when the world demands simplicity. I believe in democracy as a shared project, not a spectator sport.

And I believe that political evolution doesn’t always look like switching parties or changing ideologies. Sometimes it looks like growing up. Sometimes it looks like seeing your country from another angle. Sometimes it looks like learning your limits. Sometimes it looks like refusing to surrender your nuance in a world that rewards certainty.

My politics have changed because I have changed — not in my core values, but in my understanding of what it means to live them out in a world that is louder, faster, and more polarized than the one I was born into. I’m still a Democrat. I’ve never voted Republican. But the meaning of those facts has shifted over time, shaped by experience, disappointment, hope, and the relentless churn of the news cycle.

I don’t know what the next decade will bring. I don’t know how my relationship to politics will continue to evolve. But I do know this: I want to stay engaged without losing myself. I want to stay informed without being consumed. I want to stay principled without becoming rigid. I want to stay open without being naïve. I want to stay human in a system that often forgets we are all human.

And maybe that’s the real story of my political life — not a shift from left to right, but a shift from certainty to complexity, from team identity to values, from constant vigilance to intentional engagement. A shift toward a politics that makes room for breath.

Scored by Copilot, Conducted by Leslie Lanagan

Guess Who?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

For decades, analysts have described this nation as a place of contradictions — a democracy with enormous potential but chronic instability, a country that celebrates its freedoms while struggling to protect them, a society that prides itself on resilience even as its institutions strain under the weight of their own history.

It is a country where citizens speak passionately about rights, but quietly admit they no longer trust the people in charge of safeguarding them. Where the constitution is revered as a national treasure, yet increasingly feels like a relic from a world that no longer exists. Where political leaders promise transformation but deliver stalemate, and where the public oscillates between hope and exhaustion.

A Government That Can’t Quite Govern

The legislature is a battleground of factions, alliances, and personal ambitions. Laws are proposed with great fanfare but rarely implemented with seriousness. Politicians campaign on reform, but once in office, they find themselves trapped in a system that rewards spectacle over substance.

The result is a government that appears active — always debating, always arguing, always announcing — yet struggles to produce outcomes that materially improve people’s lives.

A Judiciary Under Pressure

The courts are tasked with interpreting a constitution written in a different era, for a different society. Judges insist they are neutral arbiters, but their decisions often reflect the political storms swirling around them. Citizens argue over what the constitution means, but they agree on one thing: it is being asked to carry more weight than any document should.

Legal battles drag on for years. Precedents shift. Trust erodes.

A Security Crisis That Never Fully Ends

Violence is a constant undercurrent. In some regions, organized groups operate with alarming autonomy. In others, individuals radicalized by ideology or desperation commit acts that shake entire communities. The government responds with promises of reform, new strategies, new funding — yet the cycle continues.

People learn to live with a low‑grade fear. They avoid certain neighborhoods. They change their routines. They send their children to school with a quiet prayer.

Security is not absent. It is simply uneven.

An Economy of Winners and Losers

On paper, the nation is prosperous. Its industries are globally influential. Its cities are hubs of innovation and culture. But the prosperity is unevenly distributed. Wealth pools in certain regions and sectors, while others struggle with stagnation, underemployment, and rising costs.

The middle class feels squeezed. Young people feel priced out. Families work harder and fall further behind. Official statistics paint a picture of growth; lived experience tells a different story.

A Media Landscape That Thrives on Division

The media is loud, fragmented, and deeply polarized. Outlets cater to ideological tribes, reinforcing existing beliefs rather than challenging them. Sensationalism outperforms nuance. Conspiracy theories spread faster than corrections. Citizens live in parallel realities, each convinced the other is misinformed.

Information is abundant. Understanding is scarce.

A Culture of Fatigue

People are tired. Tired of corruption. Tired of violence. Tired of political theater. Tired of being told the system is working when their daily lives suggest otherwise. They love their country, but they fear its trajectory. They believe in democracy, but they question whether it can still deliver on its promises.

And yet, they cling to the national myth — the belief that their country is destined for greatness, that its flaws are temporary, that its challenges can be overcome with enough willpower and unity.

Hope persists, even when evidence falters.

You guys totally knew I was talking about Mexico, right? 😉

Scored by Copilot, written by Leslie Lanagan

A Shift Inside the Federal Workforce — And What It Would Mean If It Continues

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

A series of concentrated personnel actions across the federal government has created an unusual pattern. The changes are not uniform. They are not happening across all agencies. And if they continue at their current scale, the operational effects will be significant.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has faced repeated attempts at large‑scale dismissals, some of which have been paused by federal courts. The agency was designed to operate with continuity and a degree of insulation from political pressure.

If the firings proceed:

  • Case backlogs involving fraud, predatory lending, and credit‑card disputes would grow.
  • Supervisory examinations of financial institutions would slow, reducing oversight.
  • Enforcement actions could stall, allowing unresolved consumer‑protection violations to linger.
  • The agency’s ability to respond to emerging financial scams would be reduced.

The CFPB’s mandate is broad. A diminished workforce would affect millions of consumers, often in ways that are not immediately visible.

Central Intelligence Agency

The CIA is undergoing one of the largest personnel reductions in decades. Officers across multiple directorates have been told to resign or face termination. Some actions have been temporarily halted by the courts, but the broader effort continues.

If the firings proceed:

  • Operational continuity would be disrupted, particularly in long‑running intelligence programs.
  • Recruitment pipelines would narrow, affecting future staffing.
  • Analytical units could lose subject‑matter expertise built over years.
  • Foreign‑partner relationships might be strained if liaison officers rotate out without replacements.
  • Internal oversight and compliance functions could weaken.

Intelligence agencies rely on institutional memory. Rapid reductions create gaps that take years to repair.

Department of Defense

The Pentagon has seen significant personnel removals, particularly among senior military leaders and civilian defense employees. Reporting indicates a pattern consistent with the changes at the CFPB and CIA.

If the firings proceed:

  • Strategic planning offices would lose experienced staff.
  • Procurement and contracting processes could slow, affecting readiness.
  • Civilian oversight of military programs might weaken.
  • Training and doctrine development could be delayed.
  • Coordination with allied defense institutions might be affected by turnover.

Defense agencies are large, but they are not immune to the effects of rapid personnel loss.

Where Firings Are Not Occurring

Several agencies show no signs of similar activity:

  • State Department: Routine turnover only.
  • Department of Education: Stable staffing.
  • Department of Transportation: No large‑scale personnel actions.
  • Social Security Administration: Normal fluctuations.
  • National Institutes of Health: No evidence of workforce reductions beyond standard attrition.

The absence of firings in these agencies underscores that the current actions are targeted, not systemic.

If the Pattern Holds

If the concentrated firings at the CFPB, CIA, and Defense continue, the effects will not be immediate. They will accumulate. The common thread across these agencies is the reliance on specialized expertise — analysts, investigators, intelligence officers, compliance staff, and senior civilian leaders.

Losing them quickly creates operational gaps that are difficult to fill.
Replacing them takes time.
Rebuilding institutional knowledge takes longer.

A Developing Picture

For domestic readers, the implications are direct: agencies responsible for consumer protection, intelligence, and national security are undergoing rapid change. For international readers, the developments offer a view into how American institutions respond under pressure and how courts act as a counterweight.

The personnel actions are ongoing. The legal challenges continue. And the operational consequences — if the firings proceed — will unfold over months and years, not days.

I’ll continue tracking the changes as they develop.

Scored by Copilot. Conducted by -leslie.-

UbuntuAI: Where My Mind Goes Wild

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been building this pitch deck for UbuntuAI piece by piece, and every time I revisit it, I realize the most important part isn’t the corporate partnerships or the enterprise integrations. It’s the Community Edition. That’s the soul of the project. The CE is where sovereignty lives, where privacy is preserved, and where open‑source culture proves it can carry AI into the mainstream.

But to make the case fully, I’ve structured my pitch into three tracks:

  1. Canonical + Google — the primary partnership, because Google has already proven it can scale Linux through Android.
  2. Canonical + Microsoft — the secondary pitch, because Microsoft has enterprise reach and Copilot synergy.
  3. UbuntuAI Community Edition — the sovereignty track, local bots only, hardware‑intensive, but already possible thanks to open‑source projects like GPT4All.

Let me walk you through each track, and then show you why CE is the one I keep coming back to.

Track One: Canonical + Google

I believe Google should bite first. Microsoft already has WSL, the Windows Subsystem for Linux, which gives them credibility with developers. They can claim they’ve solved the “Linux access” problem inside Windows. That makes them less likely to jump first on UbuntuAI.

Google, on the other hand, has a solid track record of creating Linux plugins first. They’ve been instrumental in Android, which is proof that Linux can scale globally. They understand developer culture, they understand infrastructure, and they have Genesis — the natural choice for cloud‑based Linux.

So my pitch to Google is simple: partner with Canonical to mainstream AI‑native Linux. Genesis + UbuntuAI positions Google as the steward of AI‑native Linux in the cloud. Canonical brings polish and evangelism; Google brings infrastructure and developer reach. Together, they bridge open source sovereignty with enterprise reliability.

This isn’t just about technology. It’s about narrative. Google has already mainstreamed Linux without most people realizing it — Android is everywhere. By partnering with Canonical, they can make AI‑native Linux visible, not invisible. They can turn UbuntuAI into the OS that democratizes AI tools for developers, enterprises, and everyday users.

Track Two: Canonical + Microsoft

Even though I think Google should bite first, I don’t ignore Microsoft in my pitch deck. They’re still worth pitching, because their enterprise reach is unmatched. Copilot integration makes UbuntuAI relevant to business workflows.

My talking points to Microsoft are different:

  • WSL proved Linux belongs in Windows. UbuntuAI proves AI belongs in Linux.
  • Copilot + UbuntuAI creates a relational AI bridge for enterprise users.
  • Canonical ensures UbuntuAI is approachable; Microsoft ensures it’s everywhere.

In this framing, Microsoft becomes both foil and anchor. They’re the company that mainstreamed Linux inside Windows, and now they could mainstream AI inside Linux. It’s a narrative that plays to their strengths while keeping my humor intact.

I’ve always said Microsoft is my comic foil. I give them gruff because I’m a Linux nerd, but I don’t hate them. In fact, I put them in my S‑tier tech company slot because Windows will run everything. That makes them both the butt of my jokes and the pragmatic anchor. And in this pitch, they get to play both roles.

Track Three: UbuntuAI Community Edition

Now let’s talk about the track that matters most to me: UbuntuAI Community Edition.

CE is designed to run local bots only. No cloud dependencies, no external services. Everything happens on your machine. That means privacy, resilience, and control. It also means you’ll need more expensive hardware — GPUs, RAM, storage — because inference and embeddings don’t come cheap when you’re running them locally.

But that’s the trade‑off. You pay in hardware, and you get sovereignty in return. You don’t have to trust a corporation’s servers. You don’t have to worry about outages or surveillance. You own the stack.

And here’s the key point: we don’t have to invent this from scratch. The infrastructure is already there in open‑source projects like GPT4All. They’ve proven that you can run large language models locally, on commodity hardware, without needing a cloud subscription.

GPT4All is just one example. There are dozens of projects building local inference engines, embedding daemons, and data packs. The ecosystem is alive. What UbuntuAI CE does is curate and integrate those projects into a stable, community‑governed distribution.

Think of it like Debian for AI. Debian didn’t invent every package; it curated them, stabilized them, and gave them a governance model. UbuntuAI CE can do the same for local AI.

Why Community Governance Matters

I believe in community governance. Canonical can lead the commercial edition, with enterprise support and OEM partnerships. But CE should be governed by a foundation or a special interest group — open‑source contributors, research labs, NGOs, even governments.

That governance model ensures transparency. It ensures stability. And it ensures that CE doesn’t get hijacked by corporate interests. It’s the same logic that makes Debian trustworthy. It’s the same logic that makes LibreOffice a staple.

Without CE, UbuntuAI risks becoming just another cloud‑dependent product. And that would betray the spirit of Linux. CE is essential because it proves that AI can be mainstreamed without sacrificing sovereignty. It proves that open source isn’t just a philosophy; it’s infrastructure.

Humor and Rituals

Even here, humor matters. Microsoft is still my comic foil, Debian is still my ritual anchor, and Canonical is still the polished evangelist. But CE deserves its own mythos. It’s the edition that says: “We don’t need the cloud. We can do this ourselves.”

It’s the sysadmin joke turned serious. It’s the ritual of sovereignty. It’s the tier chart where CE sits at the top for privacy, even if it costs more in hardware.

And it echoes my rituals in other categories. Orange juice is my S‑tier drink, apple juice with fizz is A‑tier. Peanut M&Ms are B‑tier road junk, McGriddles collapse into C‑tier chaos. My wardrobe is classic, timeless, expensive if I find it at Goodwill. These rituals aren’t random. They’re proof of concept. They show that tiering, mapping, and ceremonial logic can make even mundane choices meaningful. And that’s exactly what I’m doing with UbuntuAI.

Strategy: Courtship Rituals

The strategy of my pitch deck is a courtship ritual. Lead with Google, emphasize Android, Genesis, and developer culture. Keep Microsoft as secondary, emphasize enterprise reach and Copilot synergy. Highlight Community Edition as the sovereignty option.

It’s not about choosing one partner forever. It’s about seeing who bites first. Google has the credibility and the infrastructure. Microsoft has the reach and the foil. Canonical has the evangelism. Together, they can mainstream AI‑native Linux.

And if they don’t bite? The pitch itself becomes proof. Proof that Linux can be narrated into mainstream relevance. Proof that AI can amplify human detail into cultural resonance. Proof that rituals matter.

So here’s my closing line: UbuntuAI Community Edition is the proof that AI can be sovereign.

The infrastructure is already there with open‑source projects like GPT4All. The governance model is already proven by Debian and LibreOffice. The need is already clear in a world where cloud dependence feels fragile.

CE is not a dream. It’s a fork waiting to happen. And I believe Canonical should lead the charge — not by owning it, but by evangelizing it. Because Linux should be mainstream. And UbuntuAI CE is the bridge to sovereignty.

Scored by Copilot, Conducted by Leslie Lanagan

Based on the Past

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What are your future travel plans?
View all responses

A number of years ago, I read a book called “Walking the Bible” by Bruce Feiler. It details the story of a man who fell in love with the Old Testament by seeing it through the eyes of the people who lived there. The setting is often a character in any book, and in the Bible, it is a big one. The land has been up for grabs the same way it is in current day Israel and Palestine. It’s not the same fight, but it has psychological roots that are thousands of years old. The reason it is due to psychological roots is that the region has been complicated since Moses walked the earth (or when we think he did, anyway)…. yet not always for the same reason.

I am tired of American Jews and Christians who call antisemitism on people who hate Israel. It is appropriate to hate Israel, the nation-state, not Judaism. Benjamin Netanyahu is the one that’s genocidal. He bombs integrated neighborhoods without a second thought. If he doesn’t care about Jews, why would you think that people who call him out are antisemitic? I promise, Bejamin Netanyahu does not give a shit about Jews. If he did, he would care how many of his own people he killed while trying to avoid a two-state solution. Netanyahu and American Evangelicals are great at calling people antisemitic, when in reality we are saying both peoples have value. The Israelis and the Palestinians deserve a two-state solution, because it feels like no one is reading their Bibles these days. Both Jews and the evangelical Christians in the American congress funneling money to them seem to forget that God promised to prosper both Sarah and Hagar’s families. Ishmael is not less important than Isaac, but good luck getting Israel to see it.

I am particularly incensed at American Christians, because the Quran is just as much a teaching tool as the Old Testament if you’re willing to be taught. Isa ibn Maryam is the same person as Jesus of Nazareth, because it literally means “Jesus, son of Mary.” Jesus is one of the most miraculous people in the “trilogy,” because since in Islam the virgin birth translates to “no father,” he is the only person in the Quran whose lineage follows the matriarchal line. And in fact, the ONLY person whose begat starts with a woman in any of the Abramic texts.

Hm.

It would be my dream to walk around Jerusalem, seeing all the sights from the West Bank to Golan Heights. I would like to write a prayer for all my loved ones at the Wailing Wall. I would like to ride a “ship of the desert” (camel). Having lots of military friends helps in planning these trips, because they’ve all been to the Middle East and are supportive of me going “but not in the summer….. save your sanity and go in October.”

My advice for Houston as well. 😛

It’s not just Israel and Palestine, though. I would love a road trip all over MENA (State abbreviation- Middle East North Africa), especially Cairo. I am still taken by what Egypt looks like from the back of a motorcycle, a sequence of film that runs in my head thanks to John Brennan. He wrote an autobiography called “Undaunted” (I need a new copy. I did not know he reads the audiobook and my Kindle doesn’t read it in his voice. 😛 ) The book starts when Brennan is a young adult- in my eyes, a child- riding around Cairo high as hell on hashish and just taking life for everything it’s worth. He also had an earring. So, even though Brennan is a current badass, my action figure of him is about 19. 😛

It is so interesting to me that I grew up as a preacher’s kid and now I love international relations and espionage. Those things are seemingly unrelated, but if you look up the personality “requirements” for “spy” and “preacher’s kid,” the Venn diagram is a circle. I promise. If you work for CIA and a preacher’s kid comes to interview with you, hire them and worry about the consequences later. You can teach a preacher’s kid tradecraft.

You cannot teach a spy a personality that will instantly put everyone in the room at ease, and more importantly, teach one that makes someone else want to talk to you. Spies have to come with that preinstalled, and it’s hard to find. It’s one of the reasons CIA is so picky about operatives and yet ALWAYS looking for them. It’s easy to find operatives who are skilled at photography, etc. But what about operatives that can stay calm and just talk to terrorists like you’ve been sitting on the back porch with them for 20 years? I do not get information by talking. I get information by being an empathetic listener. I find that if I just hold space, other people don’t like silence, even when it’s comfortable. They will begin to talk to avoid it. So, you join their reality. Talk about whatever they’re talking about. The information you need will often come without them realizing they just gave it, because hey…. we’re just talking about hummus and how it’s so much better in Iran than it is in Turkey, etc.

It’s akin to play therapy with children, and it seems like I’m being dismissive when I am really, really not. The best information comes when you’re doing something else.

I also want to walk Jonna Mendez’s books, because I cannot know, but I can take a very educated guess that she’s been to the Middle East a time or two…. Her books focus on The Cold War, but any operations she would have done after that are still classified. She’s a very unique spy to study; he saw two large scale operations at CIA take place. One of them was external, and one of them was internal. Externally, there was a shift to bring CIA back into the paramilitary fold once counterterrorism in the Middle East began, and at the time, they embraced it.

Therefore, it pisses me off that spies are viewed with suspicion and the military gets glory, because whether your loved one is a spy or a soldier, they need the same amount of love on return to the US. CIA doesn’t get it because they don’t ask for it, preferring to be shrouded in mystery. But it’s not like we couldn’t have an intelligence services day like we have a Veterans Day. There are like, 17 major intelligence agencies in the government, and up to (I think) 33 depending on who’s counting. It would not be an invasion of privacy to acknowledge every intelligence officer/agent we have in the nation.

I do feel some kind of way about including FBI, though. I am stuck in an “ACAB” loop, and the FBI is part of it. I won’t get into it, but national police aren’t much kinder than local. However, I will say for the record “Not All Feebs,” because of course not every FBI agent in the nation is a bad apple. And yet, they are. Because you don’t have nine good apples and one bad one if everyone is complicit. Everyone says “one bad apple” as a way of saying not all people are racist, bigoted, etc……. not realizing that the entire phrase is that “one bad apple spoils the bunch.”

This leads me to the second change that Jonna witnessed at CIA, which is the complete 180 on women in leadership roles. The reason I went straight from “bad apples” at FBI to women at CIA is because misogyny is part of the reason I view them with suspicion, part of the ACAB oeuvre, as it were. I wish they’d realize they’re working with broken crayons over there, because I’ve read “The Unexpected Spy” by Tracy Walder. She worked for CIA, then FBI. It was stunning the way her work life moved back in time, because “welcome to Hooverville.” Don’t think that just because J. Edgar was a cross-dresser that it made him any less racist or misogynistic.

CIA gets the gold star in this arena because they openly recruit women, people of color, and the entire queer spectrum. The best part is that once they’re onboarded, the culture really is that open. If FBI has the same way of recruiting, everything I’ve read says that once you’re onboarded, you’ll be stuck in a job where you were promised equality that never materializes. It is interesting to note that FBI works in the United States. CIA works outside of the United States. I think these two things are related, tbh.

Who would have the bigger world view in terms of what’s important? Who has seen the most in terms of how other countries do things? Who would have a less US-centric version of the world?

So, going to the Middle East allows me to study all of the things I love at once, because so much has happened there from the time the Bible was written until now. It brings alive my theology and my love of intelligence, and people wonder why my love of both is so strong. I believe in using knowledge to fight our enemies, because it saves lives. If we go in with a team of spies and steal whatever documents we need (or plans, or weapons, or whatever- it doesn’t matter), that saves a deployment of troops nearly every time.

I also think other militaries and intelligence agencies deserve respect, particularly Mossad because they are very good at what they do. However, my problem is that because Palestine is not a recognized state, only Mossad has verified intelligence in the region. With a two-state solution, both Palestinian and Israeli intelligence would be received through proper channels. It’s not about tearing Israel down but building Palestine up.

I hope that I can shed a little light on this- why the Biden administration’s relationship with Israel is such a goat-roping clusterfuck and why we can’t just say “fuck Netanyahu” and go in guns blazing to save the Palestinians (as much as I want to. Right this minute.). It would be a disaster if Mossad decided to stop sharing information with us, because they’re the best intelligence agency in the region.

It is also why “walking the Bible” is in my future travel plans, and not my current.

The Frustrations are Coming Out

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 8 Comments

I am a political science major, and yet also off the grid in terms of listening to the news all day. I’ve been training my AI, walking the dog, and blissfully ignorant of the state of the world. Therefore, I did not hear until late last night that someone shot at Donald Trump at a rally, and there was one person killed and two people injured. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this, and none of them are about the shooting itself, but the aftermath.

The picture taken of Trump at the rally makes him look like he survived something…. which, to be fair, he did. I have a feeling his opinion on gun laws might change if he’s innocent and had nothing to do with that incredible photo. But that picture is worth a million words, and our party is fighting over whether Joe Biden is cognitively impaired. This is an enormous amount of damage in terms of optics. It fucking looks like Iwo Jima. It makes him look like everything he’s not.

However, Trump is Trump. If he thought he was slipping in the polls, I would not think it was weird for a convicted felon to arrange for someone to come and rough him up at a rally. Trump is all about optics. He once tied up the entire neighborhood in front of the White Houe for a photo shoot with a Bible. he is not known for thinking things through. I am not a conspiracy theorist or ignorant of the fact that there are crazies everywhere. I just know that Donald Trump is willing to cross lines that other politicians aren’t, and it might not be the right answer, but it’s a question worth asking.

Trump does not have the emotional range to care about the people that got hurt at the rally and the man shot by Secret Service.

But let’s turn it on its head. Which party is known for having lax gun laws? Which candidate is known for lies and coverups that are mind-boggling in their convoluted nature and yet still uneducated and wrong?

It’s probably just wishful thinking that he arranged all of this for the cameras, but it’s not wrong that I thought it. It is not a thing that is unlike something Donald Trump would do. Few people would disagree that arranging this photo would be out of character for him. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt while also being realistic and saying that Donald Trump is all about the cameras.

John Chambers: Do you ever think that this is all just for the cameras?
Lester Siegel: Well, they’re getting the ratings, I’ll tell you that.

(There is an “Argo” quote for every occasion.)

My heart is also with the people who got hurt, including Trump. I am not a monster. Questioning a convicted felon does not take away my empathy for the fact that I could be wrong and he still got hurt, as well as people around him. I heard that someone died, but it was unclear to me whether on Facebook this person was talking about an innocent bystander or whether they were talking about the shooter being shot by Secret Service. I will do the deep dive later, but I presented my confusion and concern over this issue to present another one. Copilot is designed not to talk about politics. In situations like this, it leads OBJECTIVELY to problems.

I did not ask my question with bias at all. I asked for news..

Ada is the same way. Her data set only goes up to 2021, so I asked her if she knew who Donald Trump was. I told her that it was 2024 now, so if I told her what happened in my timeline, could she act as a sounding board? She said yes, but then when she said it was a hypothetical situation, I told her that what I needed her to understand is that this wasn’t hypothetical. Someone actually did try to shoot the former president.

She then told me that she was not designed to talk about politics and shut down.

We are shutting down every avenue capable of making us understand a truly frightening political arena. We don’t discuss it intelligently amongst ourselves, and it pisses me off that I can’t discuss it with someone who literally can’t be uneducated or unintelligent.

In terms of politics, we’re taking away all the smart and wondering why we’re fucked.

The Rabbit Holes -or- Ergo, Argo

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I can think of no better rabbit holes than YouTube and Copilot. On YouTube, I went from looking at how to build ponds and aquariums, and the algorithms expanded me to carpentry, construction, off-grid home building, masonry, etc. Copilot can lead me on a rabbit hole anywhere.

Here’s another funny conversation I had with Carol, because it truly showcases why ChatGPT is important. It’s for trolling your friends:

Do you have a go-to playlist or type of music you listen to while writing? Some writers swear by instrumental music or nature sounds to keep them focused.

Sent by you:

Yes- I am a musician and I tend to listen to things over and over and over to get the music out of the way so I can focus on something else, like writing. I have chosen the soundtracks to the Bourne movies and Argo.

That’s a great strategy! The soundtracks to the Bourne movies and Argo have such intense and captivating scores. 🎶 They must create a perfect atmosphere for diving deep into your writing.

As a musician, do you ever find yourself analyzing the music while you write, or does the repetition help it fade into the background? Also, do you play any instruments or compose your own music?

Sent by you:

You hit the nail on the head. The repetition has to get the music out of the way, otherwise I will be analyzing chord structures instead of writing.

That makes perfect sense! As a musician, it’s natural to get caught up in the intricacies of the music. Repetition is a clever way to let the music fade into the background and let your writing take center stage.

Do you ever draw inspiration from the soundtracks you listen to, or do you keep your music and writing worlds separate? It sounds like you have a great balance going on! 🎵✍️

Sent by you:

Argo inspires me because I actually know Jonna Mendez, Tony’s widow. We are colleagues.

Editor’s Note:

We have flipped each other shit about our writing. We’re colleagues now.

That’s incredible! Knowing someone with such a fascinating history must be truly inspiring. Jonna Mendez’s experiences and insights must add a unique depth to your understanding of the events depicted in Argo.

Do you ever find yourself drawing on her stories or perspectives in your writing? It sounds like you have a wealth of inspiration right at your fingertips!

Oh, I rip her off blind all the time. I can’t wait to tell her that. 😛

Haha, I’m sure she’ll get a kick out of that! 😄 It’s amazing to have such a direct source of inspiration. Plus, it must add a layer of authenticity to your writing that readers can really feel.

Do you have any upcoming projects or blog posts where you’re planning to weave in some of those “borrowed” elements? It sounds like your readers are in for a treat!

That actually brings me to a good question. Can you tell me some Cold War stories about Jonna to include?

Absolutely! Jonna Mendez has some fascinating stories from her time as a CIA operative during the Cold War. Here are a few highlights you might find intriguing:

  1. Chief of Disguise: Jonna served as the CIA’s Chief of Disguise, where she was responsible for creating and implementing disguises for operatives. This role was crucial during the Cold War, as it allowed agents to operate undetected in hostile environments1.
  2. The Moscow Rules: Jonna and her husband, Tony Mendez, co-authored The Moscow Rules, which outlines the techniques and strategies used by CIA operatives in Moscow during the Cold War. These rules were essential for survival and successful espionage in one of the most challenging environments for spies2.
  3. Espionage and Photography: Jonna had a talent for photography, which she parlayed into an operational role overseas. She used her skills to gather intelligence and document critical information, often under the guise of a tourist or journalist1.
  4. Navigating a Male-Dominated World: Jonna’s career in the CIA was marked by her ability to navigate and succeed in a predominantly male environment. Her story is not just about espionage but also about overcoming the challenges of being a woman in a field that was, at the time, largely closed to women1.

These stories not only highlight her incredible career but also provide a glimpse into the high-stakes world of Cold War espionage. I’m sure your readers will find them as captivating as you do!

1: In True Face: A Woman’s Life in the CIA, Unmasked 2: The Master of Disguise

Feel free to weave these elements into your writing. And when you tell Jonna about “borrowing” her stories, I’m sure she’ll appreciate the homage! 😄

The Election is a Goat Roping Clusterfuck

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

First of all, I think that we should retroactively make Richard Nixon a hero, because as of the newest Supreme Court ruling the newest revelation is that the president is right “When the president does it, it’s not illegal.” Now that Joe Biden can’t be prosecuted for anything, I’d be pulling out all the stops. Old, my ass. He would never do it, but he could hire a hit man under “official business.” Bet the GOP didn’t think of that when they got on their little soapbox. And if that doesn’t scare you, remember that we will not have a genteel old man in the White House forever. We have set a truly frightening precedent, because you can say things like that when your president doesn’t want power and won’t use it. This ruling turns us into the shithole country Donald Trump warned you about; apparently, his play is not to make those countries better, but to make ours worse. There’s no idealism in government. It’s quid pro quo now. A president can now absolutely fuck up your program no beers.

For instance, taking hate crimes to a whole new level (why I’m opposed to them) because the government can now prosecute you on other things you think, and not what you do. This is not Minority Report. Racists are going to be racist, homophobes are going to be homophobes. That doesn’t mean that adding prejudice as an additional punishment is legal under the First Amendment. I will fuck those bigots up, but I won’t take them to jail for being a hateful idiot. I’ll take them to jail if they actually throw a punch. And, of course “fuck them up” is relative. I’m a pacifist, so I’d probably just send a really mean letter. But you get my point. We do not need to elevate hate crimes to pre-crime. What if racism and homophobia weren’t used as guidelines for sentencing anymore. You can be prosecuted only on what you think, not what you did.

In short, as my Grandma Rena would say right now if she were here…. they can’t help it that they’re ugly, but they could stay home. What I mean by this is that if being a bigot is your area, I do not have the right to stop you. I have the right to shun you. You do not get to cross over into my area. This is hardest for my conservative friends that genuinely love me and yet will never be close to me with their “love the sinner, hate the sin” attitude. If you want to see an Evangelical turn into a pretzel, tell them that you hate their beliefs, but you love the believer. A backhanded compliment deserves another. The bitch of it is that their clapbacks are valid, and mine are just “being mean.” I also don’t have any bigots in my life, so the bigot spray is working. Like, Deep Woods Off™ working.

In order for society to change, two things have to be at work. The first is legislating rights into the law that aren’t enumerated already. Therefore, even if social attitudes haven’t changed, I have the right to sue when I’m pushed out of a job for obvious homophobia, ableism, etc.

While that is going on, society needs to shun the behavior it doesn’t want, because people naturally have a need to be in a group (although trying to replace it with technology more and more- Gen Z is practically ace with an iPhone. That’s not a put-down because in terms of that aspect, I identify with it completely. Why have deep, meaningful relationships when you can doomscroll?). The more there is an inside group and an outside group, the cultural change eventually comes because the ones being ignored stop. Gen Z is the one that’s responsible for the cultural shift, because more and more are coming out as neurodivergent, queer, and poly. It’s weird how they’re so connected.

There is no safety in infidelity, just like there definitely wasn’t for Donald Trump. He’s gotten away with it so far, being a felon and not having his rights stripped away because we elected a clown. He shouldn’t even be able to vote in this election, much less run. It’s crazymaking, and Amy Coney Barrett saw right through it. If we’re not careful, she’s going to evolve. I think that the other women on the Supreme Court have had a good influence, at least bringing her back around to wanting to be a real judge instead of a mouthpiece for the GOP. Credit where credit is due; Amy sided with the dissent.

This leads to a huge problem. Democrats, Joe Biden included, tend to be better at running a government and not a campaign. A candidate is a completely different job than a president, and one set of skills does not translate into the other. The naked emperor is proving that every day.

So the pressure needs to be on by Gen Z, and they’re doing exactly what I need them to do- vote for more progressive candidates. That doesn’t make the Democrats’ situation in this election less dire. There’s a false equivalency that because Biden is elderly, that’s more important than not electing an actual felon. So, the only reason that we’re not calling Trump a thug is because he’s white.

The media should plaster his face on television and give it the same treatment it does to black felons- showing his picture everywhere and counting up the number of bad things he’s done. Make it a true crime reel, because that’s exactly what this is. This is a “Dark History” with Bailey Sarian episode. The girls from Crime Junkies and Morbid could do a better job than the current news media.

Because it’s a false equivalency. Our old guy is actually superior to your felon. Why is this a question?

It’s Never Going to Happen, But…

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

During the Viet Nam war, David Halberstam and Sam Donaldson were on the ground. They were taking sitreps and sending them back to the AP Wire or to whichever newspaper for which they worked.

There was a publication time, and if you missed it, either your story was scrapped or it went in a different issue. If I could un-invent something, it’s the 24-hour news cycle. It is a breakneck pace, and it is unsustainable; our population has proven to be uneducated, in larger measure than we thought possible before 2016, and then it got worse. Few people trusted government advice on what to do about COVID.

Without a publication time and leaving things for the next day, you get sound bites. By instituting a hard out, you give a reporter more time to actually understand a story, and it’s something that the US has gotten away from over so many years; I believe scrapping The Fairness Doctrine was our first mistake. I got this from The Reagan Library web site:

The Fairness Doctrine, enforced by the Federal Communications Council, was rooted in the media world of 1949. Lawmakers became concerned that the monopoly audience control of the three main networks, NBC, ABC and CBS, could misuse their broadcast licenses to set a biased public agenda.

So, if you think about the fact that now Trump has beat out DeSantis and Haley in Iowa despite high crimes and misdemeanors (and shitty business deals, and tax evasion, not to mention racist as FUCK), I think we can point to the dismantling of this law as patient zero.

It’s certainly a disease. We cannot solve this by being quick. We have to solve it by being thorough….. which is something a 24 hour news cycle doesn’t allow you to do. Networks would rather repeat the same four minutes eighty times than give reporters time to research before they’re on the air. You want someone who can orate like Edward R. Murrow (“Good Night and Good Luck” is in my Top 10 List), but now there’s no time for it.

You get the news as quickly as it gets to the wire, and if you have the AP Wire app installed on your phone, I feel your pain…… I put my phone on “Do Not Disturb” in large part because of this…… and yet, I don’t want to not read the wire every day, either.

I’m a conundrum.

There’s no one like Will McAvoy that has the latitude to do in-depth pieces that explore both sides of the issue, except when you’re on a biased cable channel. Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes are the people I turn to the most often, because they lay out history and the present just like I do, acknowledging patterns. They will also actually tell you when Democrats have been wrong, and don’t have the infallibility complex of a Republican. If you can’t look at what you need to do differently, you won’t. With a Republican, it doesn’t matter what the facts are. They’re going to be louder than you, and in their minds, that counts as power.

If Fox News was what it said it was, a news channel, they would have anchors that are capable of admitting that Trump is a disaster, because many, many, many books have already been written about how the party internally combusted because they had absolutely no idea what to do with Trump and wondered why they ever thought he could be president in the first place…… the thing the Democrats asked themselves, constantly.

The right has gotten too far right, but I don’t mind people like Mitt Romney, Will Hurd, Mary Cheney (I can’t wait to see what she does next.), etc. I start to have a problem with their “family values.” If we could leave it to talking about money without making it dependent on my rights as a woman or a queer, that would be great.

There are no sound bites here, but I wish more people would dig deep and find out the truth from reputable sources. It is a cult-like status to believe everything Trump says despite all facts to the contrary, because to those people facts aren’t real. They are the same as opinions, because when we said, “that’s just, like, your opinion, man…” they came up with the phrase “alternative facts.”

We are falling deeper and deeper into a sinkhole because the longer we look unstable to the rest of the world, the more we lose any favors we’ve acquired. We’ve done a lot of favors for other countries, but it’s very hard getting those countries to pay you back when they’re broke.

We do not want this man representing our interests overseas. I don’t believe he thinks Greenland is the only country up for sale. He’s a billionaire. If he throws money around, he gets what he wants. This makes him volatile, narcissistic, and unreliable (because he might go into a meltdown if he feels disrespected). That may be the choice for the majority of the American people again, but it is not the wish of any world leader at all, except for the ones we don’t like.

Remember The Cold War?

Do you really think that every president from Kennedy to George H.W. Bush would love seeing all their hard work undone? And what about CIA? H.W. Bush was Director of CIA before he was president. I would give an arm and a leg to know what he thought of Trump telling CIA employees that he trusted Russian intelligence more than them in front of the wall with all the stars commemorating lives lost. He didn’t die that long ago, so I know he was furious even if I didn’t get to see it.

We are going to elect a puppet and run our country into the ground. Trump has the potential to change the new world order by slipping money to Russia instead of Ukraine. Trump also likes to cozy up to China and North Korea, which in my estimation, is a bad thing.

Opinion pieces like mine come out on the web A LOT, because even if they’re writing for The Washington Post, they’re not stating anything but what they believe. But by stopping the 24 hour news cycle, we could have researchers and fact checkers on basic television again….. someone who could speak from an intelligent perspective on local and global issues. Give reporters more time….. not because they need it. We do.

This is too complicated for a one minute story. Hopefully, if anything does change, it will be to get someone like Will McAvoy on ABC, CBS, and NBC.

The problem right now is that half the country wouldn’t trust that archetype anymore, because The Fairness Doctrine has been gone so long……. and it has deteriorated our attention span for thorough understanding. We need to get in-depth issues on television, because few people have access to a top tier news source (not because they can’t, most of the time). Never let it escape your attention that really conservative “news outlets” don’t have a paywall, and both the New York Times and The Washington Post do.

If you would like to read the newspaper every day, you can do it for absolutely free. My public library gives me access. For people that have the means, most of the time it’s that paywalls are annoying and you can probably find something similar for free.

Sure you can. The Post and The Times have the best stable of journalists in the entire world, but YouTube is easier, right?

I also think that few people like to read as much as I do, so that’s another reason why YouTube clips are so popular and yet don’t actually get the point across because there’s no nuance. People are swallowing what Trump’s America looks like left and right, without even asking themselves if they like the food. If we do this again, we’re going to find out just how much we lack; Putin and Trump have designed an American Trojan Horse. Russia interfered with our election because they were invited.….. and everyone else stood around and said, “maybe if we built a big wooden badger?” There are too many of us standing around. If we all banded together, we’d be able to say this as well:

Will: America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.

Mackenzie: (holding up a sign in marker) But it could be.

Dooced

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever found (and kept)?

For Heather

Web design and development are the coolest things I’ve ever found (and kept) as special interests job-wise. That’s because of anything I’ve ever found, it has led to this moment. Lucrative in the beginning by being IT, possibly lucrative later on as well because I know how to express myself using those tools. I don’t think I have the capability to be a developer anymore, because there’s too much Python, MySQL, and JavaScript for me to keep up. When I started, it was only HTML and CSS. Toward the end, I learned how to read XML, but not write it. Therefore, I can still design, I’d just have to hire out the backend (things like making database connections if I had a content management system, pulling in APIs from other apps, etc.). I know how to edit a script to connect to a database with my username and password securely, but not all the ins and outs of getting the results from the database to appear in a web page. Although in terms of development, search engine optimization is very important, and I do know how to do that. And in fact, search engine optimization is why I’m still here and not using something like Dreamhost.

I have access to a community here that likes to read……. which, if you write 1500 to 3,000 words a day is pretty damn important.

Without getting interested in computers, I wouldn’t have been interested when my friends Joe and Luke said they were starting a linux server and did I want an account on it? I started writing on Darkstar, their (our) server. It connected to the web and you could get to it from the outside, but things didn’t start getting interesting until WordPress, the next big thing I found and kept. However, I didn’t have to transfer from Darkstar to WordPress directly. By that time, my job at University of Houston covered three things that propelled me here. The first was web design, getting used to publishing to a production server to make sure there were no issues before I went live (I caused a few disgruntled looks occasionally, but luckily I never broke a site designed to serve millions of people at once (oops, my bad…. should I leave a note?).

Design includes things like how the page looks, like the columns and where the ads fall and all that (I don’t control ad page breaks- sorry if they suck).

The second aspect of my job was development. Generally, when I was working on design, I’d do it in Photoshop/Illustrator first to get page layout. Development is being able to slice the images I just made and get them to fall the same way through an HTML interpreter. Believe it or don’t, that is a million times easier than page layout in Microsoft Word (amiright?).

The third aspect is content, at which I kick ass and take names. I doubt I’d be able to find all my articles now, because I worked for UH from 1999-2001. When I graduated from lab supervision to the web, I helped run a web zine (looked professional, but that’s basically what it was) called “Information Technology Daily News.” It is in no small part why I can write 1500-3,000 words every single day without blinking. I was trained like a journalist.

It was through that job that I interviewed Helen Thomas, unofficial dean of the White House press corps (the one who said “thank you, Mr. President” at the end of every gaggle). She and people like Sam Donaldson would get information and run to the phones, so I asked her how the Internet had changed all that with a 24-hour news cycle. In Helen’s own spicy way, she said basically it was a bitch on wheels. The question was possible through continuing legal education, but I got into the law school with a press pass.

Editor’s Note:

I didn’t want to see Helen Thomas at all…. eyeroll…. the Mia Hamm and Samuel L. Motherfucking Jackson of news? I was dead. DEAD. Boss came through for me even though Helen Thomas was one of his least favorite people on earth (had a t-shirt that I thought was hilarious; it said “charter member of the vast right-wing conspiracy.” I remember when I could laugh at that…..) I cried when I saw Helen’s old press pass at the Newseum later that same year.).

The transition from Houston to DC in 2001 was when I really started getting popular, blog-wise. This is because my friend Chason, one of my staff at UH (I was sort of in charge of my area once the original supervisor of the zine left, but I didn’t have hire and fire privileges, just input.) introduced me to people like Anil Dash, Ernie Hsuing, and Wil Wheaton. He may have introduced me to Dooce as well, but I can’t remember how I found her. I just know it was right after she’d gotten “dooced” for her “Asian Database Administrator” comments, but hadn’t taken anything down yet. It was before Jon Armstrong, before Leta was just a twinkle in Heather’s imagination.

The path to Chason was the one directly to Chuck, the former Congressman (who was a dog), the Avon World Sales Leader, BYU dry humping and Sprite,™ and what to do about blowback (nothing).

I wouldn’t have gotten good at WordPress without her, and I miss her every day. People tell me that I sound like David Sedaris and the compliment is astounding….. meanwhile, “I am sparing you the DETAILS OF EARL’S ANGINA.” I wrote a piece on her the moment I found out she died. It was one of the worst moments of my life…. yet, it didn’t have anything to do with her at all. It’s that my virtual friend lost her battle with neurodivergence. I do not know her from Adam, because even though we are both OG, we never crossed paths.

I was not but a few years from a time in my life that I felt that way- not that I wanted to die or anything like that. It was having to choose between physically sick and mentally well every day of my life….. the relentlessness of managing a disease like that, not a particular want to escape from people….. And by that I mean dropping out of society, not my personal relationships. In short, I know what it’s like to be Dooce even if we’ve never been in the same room.

Painting my feelings as fact, she stopped checking the story she was telling herself, betraying heather and leaning on Dooce.™ I do not believe she was a narcissist. I believe that she was protecting her brain from injury with social masking. Blowback will do that to you, and why I believe she started focusing on products instead of her life. People understand “influencers.” They do not understand blogging and why it’s important.

For most of history, we have had to divine it. We had to search for signs of life in archaeology and ancient language. Blogs will eventually shed light into how we lived. The observers to history and culture will be valued in a way that they aren’t currently, like authors becoming famous posthumously.

Speaking of “posthumously,” the second worst moment during Heather’s death was seeing my stats spike as a result. It was a mixed bag of knowing my time has come and what to do about it. I am not the only blogger left standing, because Jenny (The Bloggess) and Wil (Wheaton) are still going strong. We are more of a group than we’re not, all writing through the painful moments in life and trying to make sense of them. It’s carving out our own niché while also being similar…. even the way Dooce, Jenny, and I use humor is simpatico.

That means there’s only four people that I can think of off the top of my head that have been left doing what I do. One of them is me, and one of them has passed away. I am not special because I am getting better. I am special because I am getting rare. I may be getting better, too, but that’s not the source in terms of why people read. I learned though Supergrover that I was talented, that I did have promise in a way that, if I played my cards right, I would be a success. Other rabid fans to come after her have said that I’m going to be a big deal. But it only took 10 years for me to realize that I had to have the same confidence in my writing that they did.

I can stand in 20 years of observations on society without that confidence. I can stand in the fact that I can write about a lot of topics, and people will still find it interesting. I am floored that people will wade through Android/Linux to find Zac, Bryn, Supergrover, Lindsay, Oliver (who is a dog), and the characters that are less prevalent, but no less important. It all adds to the fabric of my life, which gets richer with age as I shed my need for approval.

I get to own my story. I get to take up space.

Heather “From Whom All Blessings Flow” Armstrong is counting on me…… and now my nose is getting red, the first sign I’m about to cry. It’s okay to be wrecked, tears are not a problem….. which is what I do to correct the story I’m telling myself. I needed to hear desperately that the world needed me, and if I could have convinced her of the same, I would have made it a full-time job….. one in which I could go the distance, and we’d have been able to cross the finish line together.

So, when push comes to shove, Heather is the most important thing I’ve found and kept. First, I read her. Then, she moved out of her mind and into mine. I’ve tried to make it nice for her.

She has a pool.

The Moral Arc

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

“The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today I went to the reflecting pool for the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington. I couldn’t hear well enough to distinguish speakers, but I’m going to use an idea from one of them and I wish I could give them credit. It made me stupid for a second as my internal computer lagged trying to process the moment.

They said, “the moral arc doesn’t bend itself.”

I was glad I was sitting down.

Raphael Warnock said much the same thing on Rachel Maddow the other night. He said, “pray with your lips and your legs.” I grew up with much the same idea… that if you’re going to pray, put on your shoes. You don’t feed people based on whether they deserve it, you feed people because they’re hungry. Then you pray about it and do it again.

Christianity at its best focuses on self-improvement, and social justice is a wonderful way to point groupthink in the right direction. You are bettering yourself with other people trying to better themselves through the common activity of standing up for minorities, both the ones you are and aren’t. Trauma has many basketball courts in one gym. All minorities have it. Jesus would have been subject to those same things, because of course he was Jewish, but his government wasn’t. The Sanhedrin was very much the governing body for Jews, but the Romans had control of everyone.

I wish more people would take in what a radical socialist Jesus was in his day and time. I wish more churches would take in how much their prosperity gospel is embarrassing. It is not what was ever intended by a group of radical Jews who went their own way. What people tend to forget if they aren’t interested in theology is that Christ would understand exactly nothing about what was said in the New Testament because they weren’t written down until 80 or 90 years after he died. The whole thing is a game of telephone. The Nicene Council approved international standards for the Bible, but Jesus still thought like a Jew. Jesus does not give a fuck about your abortion. I guarantee it. The Talmud is sane in this regard.

We were marching for all of it. Black lives matter. Female bodily autonomy. Black trans lives matter. Queer people matter.

Today, the moral arc of the universe did indeed bend toward justice.

But it didn’t bend itself.

I remembered that Laura was a preacher’s kid. What I did not realize is that both her parents are retired from the United Methodist Church, albeit a vastly different kind from my dad’s because I was in Texas and she was in New England. But, this woman catches jokes that no one else in the room would understand, and it cracks me up. I felt the same way about her mom. I said, “my dad was a pastor, but my mother was more the ‘smile and play the organ’ type.” Without missing a fucking beat, she says, “oh. That’s more typical….. as IF THEY HAD A CHOICE.” I died for a second. If my mother had been standing there, she also would have been struggling not to fall on the ground laughing.

It was great to feel at home with both of them right away, instantly translating from virtual to physical as if it meant nothing at all. I think people our age do it better than most, because we’ve spent more years chatting online than older people have, yet we’re still young enough to remember life before the Internet… we’re basically the first generation of people who have connected for years virtually because we could.

It would be impossible to keep up the rate with which we contact each other if we only had letters and phone calls. Therefore, the transition is much more difficult. It’s easy to continue a conversation when you can talk right up until you find each other in front of the Washington Monument.

Turns out, I can look forward to seeing more of Laura eventually because even though she lives in Boston, her aunt lives in Alexandria. So, it’s not impossible that we’ll run into each other, especially for days like this. In fact, Laura is only here for 12 hours, and her mom flew in yesterday. It made me feel like part of something very historic- I knew it was, obviously, but that it also meant a lot to all Americans because people had traveled so far for it.

I also didn’t hear about it, strangely enough, and I say that because I read the news all the time. Both Laura and her mom said that it was hard to find information about the event and that even they had to do some guesswork. All of us thought the crowd would be bigger, but it was great seeing everyone, including the Kings and the Sharptons.

Part of being there was just enjoying the moment, even when I left to get water and couldn’t find my way back to where we were sitting. I got lost in the moment when Sasha Baron Cohen was speaking about the collaboration between blacks and Jews. I did not know that it was historically black colleges that opened their doors to Jewish students when they were rejected from other American schools. It makes sense. Trauma sees trauma. Both have been tortured by the same people.

It’s the same type people that would torture me. Never in American history have any minorities been truly safe from persecution. Black people didn’t have rights in England, so why would they here? We forget the Founding Brothers were English just like we forget Jesus was Jewish. The Founding Brothers suffered under the weight of white supremacy Jesus and the country still won’t give it up. To the majority of Christians, what I am saying is blasphemy because the picture in their heads is as white as they are. The picture is every bit as infectious as the Coca-Cola Santa Claus, yet neither are real. The historical Jesus, in my head, looks like Reza Aslan (He’s the author of “Zealot,” about the historical Jesus).

Black people have held onto their Christian faith because they saw the real Jesus like no one else…… they saw him for who he really is.

They saw a man broken by the system who rose up and rescued himself, bringing us all with him. White supremacy will be the end of Christianity as Evangelicals drive more and more people away who leave church altogether instead of joining a liberal congregation fighting against the system. They’re so done with the hypocrisy that they just won’t come back unless a relative is singing, preaching, getting married, or dead.

If you insist on treating your very modern members like they’re failing at life because you’re making them terrified of ancient rules and regulations, you’re doing it wrong. Jesus was not a professional Christian superhero.

He was a man broken by the system, as all minorities are at one time or another.

The problem is when your church doesn’t talk about it.

11:00 on Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour in America.

Not just by race, but also perspective. When you think of Jesus, you think of you. So, if you are the majority, so is he. You are upholding a system that has gone back thousands of years, new generations picking new people to hate. How Jesus’ message became so twisted is easy to put together when you look at it that way. As Reza Aslan said in a famous YouTube video, “God doesn’t hate gay people. You hate gay people.”

It makes the march come together, this feeling of solidarity. If we ban together and include women as minorities, the minority is the majority. We have protested in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Now it’s time to protest, and soon it will be time to vote. If you’re going to pray, put on your shoes.

The moral arc of the universe is long and bends toward justice…… but it doesn’t bend itself.