On August 26th, a chunk of ice and rock the size of a neighborhood let go off Langtang Lirung and fell into the river below it. It hit hard enough that seismometers in Germany picked it up. All that debris plugged the river like a thumb over a hose, and for a few minutes everything downstream got quiet. Then the plug blew out. The water came down the valley at 30 feet high and it took the villages, the bridges, the hydropower plants, and the border crossing with it. Some of the people who died were found 150 miles away in India.

Now, more than 1,000 people are confirmed dead with thousands missing, including 85 Americans. Most of them are still up there under the mud. It is a tragedy that’s difficult to comprehend.

People will say it was a freak event, an act of God, that nobody could have seen it coming. Some of the first reports said an earthquake caused it, and you will see people repeat that. But the USGS looked at the seismic data and said the signal was caused by the landslide itself, not by an earthquake. The collapse was so big it registered as a magnitude 5.2 all on its own. There was no earthquake. There was just a mountain coming apart.

And this is the second time this exact river has flooded like this in fourteen months. Last time, nine people died. As climate change heats our planet, with the Himalayas warming at twice the global average, there are hundreds of glacial lakes hanging above villages that threaten millions of people downstream. Researchers have officially identified 47 potentially dangerous lakes, but the real number is much higher. Research from China’s second Qinghai-Tibet scientific expedition, published in 2025, identified 1,256 high-risk glacial lakes. Of these, 182 were classified as posing an extremely high risk of outburst flooding.

Almost none of these lakes have any kind of alarm on them. And we can put alarms on them, like the system that helped save hundreds of lives in Blatten, Switzerland. It’s like a smoke detector for a mountain. There are sensors and satellites and sirens in a village. Nobody wakes up excited to hear their smoke detector going off. You put batteries in it and you don’t think about it for years. It costs a few dollars to keep a battery in, and then one night it screams and you and your family get out of the house alive. You pay almost nothing for years so that you get eleven minutes of warning on that one night out of hundreds.

So why weren’t smoke detectors installed in Nepal, and who took the batteries out?

In 2025 the Trump administration’s DOGE efforts, led by Elon Musk, canceled $329 million in aid to Nepal. You can read the list of what got killed. One of the lines on it is “support the government’s disaster risk reduction efforts.” Another one is about understanding earthquake and landslide hazard in Nepal. Those are the smoke detectors. We yanked them off the wall and threw them in a dumpster, and we did it in a country that sits directly downhill from the largest pile of melting ice on the planet.

In the initial response to the flood, the US government sent $500,000, for a disaster that erased entire towns and left almost one hundred Americans missing. That is less than Trump spent on a pedestal. This June, Mother Jones obtained contracting documents showing the National Park Service paid $527,226, in a no-bid contract, just to build the base for a statue of Caesar Rodney, a man who enslaved nearly two hundred people. They put it in Freedom Plaza, which was renamed in 1988 to honor Martin Luther King Jr.

The US has now pledged more than $3.5 million in humanitarian aid. But it is still pennies on the dollar compared to what we are spending on the Iran war. The Pentagon told senators in a closed-door briefing that the first six days of the Iran war cost at least $11.3 billion. That’s about $1.9 billion a day, or $78 million an hour. Our entire humanitarian response to Nepal is less than three minutes of that war.

I acknowledge that many Americans are struggling to afford groceries and gas, and that funding for Nepal isn’t a high priority. I hear the “America first” rhetoric. I get it. We can’t solve every problem in the world. But we have a choice of what our taxpayer dollars support. Funding programs like USAID and disaster relief after catastrophic flooding, accelerated by climate change, is what we should prioritize. It’s soft power. It shows the world we’re good global citizens and neighbors, and it builds goodwill toward Americans. As the wealthiest country in the world, we could do so much to help Americans and others if we didn’t spend so much on war and on hurting people. ICE alone received roughly $75 billion in the last reconciliation bill alone, and it is being used to forcibly arrest and detain people without due process, many of whom are lawful immigrants or US citizens. Our national debt is now approaching $40 trillion. I get that we can’t spend on everything. But Nepal is a drop in the bucket. I don’t think that should be controversial.

Before I get into my other argument about why we should fund disaster relief for Nepal, and for FEMA here at home, I want to talk about why the ice is coming apart in the Himalayas in the first place.

Ice is what holds the big mountains together, in the Himalayas and the Alps and the Andes and Alaska and a lot of other places. It’s like mortar in a wall. It fills the cracks in the rock and freezes them shut. When it stays frozen, the whole mountain stays in place for ten thousand years and looks permanent. But when you warm it up a couple of degrees, the mortar softens, the cracks open, and one day a piece of the wall the size of a town falls off. That’s what we’ve known was going to happen for a long time.

Exxon, the oil and gas company, knew it first. Their own scientists ran the projections back in the 1970s and 80s. In 2023, researchers published a study in the journal Science where they went back and looked at those projections to see how accurate they were. Exxon’s scientists were right. Between 63 and 83 percent of their projections matched reality.

After they ran those initial projections, they spent the next thirty years and an enormous amount of money telling the public that the science was unsettled, that the models were shaky, and that nobody really knew.

It’s like reading an avalanche forecast. As a professional athlete, avalanches are one of the greatest risks I face, so I spend every morning in the winter reading avalanche forecasts to understand what the forecaster is seeing and to decide where to put my body in the mountains. That relationship only works because I trust that the person writing it is telling me the truth about what is buried in the snowpack. If I ever found out that a forecaster looked at a loaded slope, understood perfectly well that it was going to slide, and then wrote that conditions were stable because somebody paid them to write that, I would call that a lie. It could kill me. It’s deception. It should be criminal.

Exxon was the forecaster. They read the snowpack. They knew the slope was going to go. They told the whole world it was safe to ski it, and they kept profiting the entire time.

So when people ask whose fault this is, it is every executive who signed off on the deception, delay, and distortion campaigns. It’s every consultant who got rich writing talking points that muddied the water and confused the public. It’s every politician who took checks from fossil fuel companies and stood up and repeated those lies. They bought denial and delay, and the invoice came due in a valley in Nepal.

I know someone is going to point out that I flew to Tibet to climb those mountains, and that I’ve burned plenty of carbon getting to the places I love. That’s true. It’s also exactly why I don’t accept that this is a story about individual choices. The people who spent thirty years lying about this would love for us to spend the next thirty arguing about each other’s flights. I’m not doing that. I want the people who profited from the lie to pay for the damage. Exxon should pay to help rebuild this part of Nepal (they made $160 million per day last quarter as oil prices have surged).

The United States has put the vast majority of climate-warming emissions into the atmosphere to build the wealth we have. The people of Nepal have used the smallest amount of fossil fuels. They did not profit from it. They just happened to be standing underneath. The people getting hit the hardest contributed the least.

So please contribute to Nepal and Tibet relief today. I trust the Nepal Red Cross Society and the American Himalayan Foundation, all of which work directly with communities in these districts and have been on the ground there for years. Then contact your senators and representatives and tell them to restore the disaster aid and USAID funding we cut, because a siren in the mountains is cheaper than a funeral and a rescue operation in a remote Himalayan village. And stop letting anyone in a suit tell you that the companies who lied about this for thirty years should not have to pay for the damage.

In other news, Patagonia sued the Trump administration over the National monuments. I went down there last week to explore Trump’s shrinkage, to visit the parts of the monument that were cut with my friend . More to come on that. Then, I had the opportunity to join professional skipper Francesca Clapcich on a 60-foot racing sailboat that’s currently racing to France from New York City. Thank you for subscribing, share with a friend, and consider becoming a paid subscriber. It helps me continue doing this work.

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What’s taking its place right now, at every level of American politics, is a loyalty test. Surround yourself with people who flatter you. Treat criticism as betrayal. Punish dissent. Reward only the allies who never questioned you. We’re watching this happen at the national level in real time. It’s also happening quietly in states like mine.

I’ve been carrying this story for almost two years. I’m finally writing it down.

I’ve known John Curtis for a long time. Long before I ran against him, I worked with him as an environmental advocate. I sat in a small meeting with him for hours, alongside climbers from the American Alpine Club, talking about Bears Ears. He listened. He asked good questions. He was an advocate when it mattered. I enjoyed his sense of humor, his socks, his love for the outdoors. When he replaced Jason Chaffetz in Congress, it felt like an upgrade. I thought he was someone Utah could depend on.

That’s the John Curtis I’m writing to.

I ran against him for U.S. Senate in 2024. Nearly half a million Utahns voted for me. I raised real concerns about the climate crisis, public lands, reproductive freedom, and the dangerous influence of Project 2025. I lost. He won, decisively. After the dust settled, I did what I thought was the basic thing a former opponent should do. I asked for a meeting.

In December 2024, I messaged his chief of staff, Corey Norman, before a trip to Washington. I was flexible: a hallway chat, a walk-and-talk, anything to show that we could move forward with respect, even after disagreement.

His response was, “We’re full. Sorry.” Then he sent screenshots of my social media posts. He told me my criticism was “bad behavior” and said he wouldn’t “reward” it.

That same week, I saw John Curtis at the airport. I approached him calmly and said the campaign had been spirited, but I wanted to put the past behind us to work together on climate and public lands. He scolded me at baggage claim while waiting for his moving boxes. He asked if I really believed the things I said about him. He told me I had a credibility problem.

That was almost two years ago. It’s stayed with me since.

I said hard things about his record during the campaign. I stand by them. I said he had lied. He had. I said he campaigned for Donald Trump in other states. He did. I said he put corporate interests ahead of the environment. His voting record proves it, and nineteen months in, his lifetime environmental voting record is worse than Mike Lee’s. None of those critiques were personal attacks. They were about votes, about money, about the gap between what he said and what he did. I criticized the senator. I never went after the man.

The numbers back this up. The Heritage Foundation is the architect of Project 2025. Heritage Action, its lobbying arm, gives Curtis a 94% score for how he’s voted this session and an 89% lifetime score. During Trump’s first term, when Curtis was in the House, FiveThirtyEight found he voted with Trump’s position 94% of the time. He can call himself a moderate. The numbers tell a different story.

I ran because I believed a strong opponent could push John Curtis to become the senator he was capable of being. A statesman in the tradition of Mitt Romney or John McCain. A senator who hadn’t been radicalized. Who voted his conscience. Who put principles above party. Utah needs that kind of senator right now. As Trump dismantles environmental protections, guts the agencies that keep our food, air and water safe, and sells off public lands, we need someone who will actually push back. Not talk. Push. Nineteen months in, Curtis is doing the bare minimum. He can do more. He has done more, in the past, on issues that mattered.

A senator who feels secure in his mandate doesn’t need to refuse meetings with the people who disagreed with him. A senator who trusts his own record doesn’t need his chief of staff sending screenshots as a form of punishment. A senator who understands the office doesn’t scold a former opponent at baggage claim. These aren’t questions of personality. They’re questions of what the office requires.

I want to be honest about why I waited this long to write it down.

I could have written this in December 2024. It happened. I had the receipts. Any editor would have run it. I didn’t, because I kept hoping the story would resolve. That some meeting would happen. That he would grow into the office. That the pattern would break on its own. It didn’t. He is not becoming Mitt Romney. He is becoming exactly what I said he would become during the campaign.

I also didn’t write it because I was afraid. I still am, honestly. I know what it costs to disagree publicly. I’ve paid a version of that price for almost two years. Brand partnerships paused. Inbound opportunities slowed. Doors that used to open easily started sticking. Some of that is just how brands manage uncertainty. Some of it is the cost of running for office as a working content creator. But the threshold for what counts as “too controversial” is lower for women who challenge established male authority. That’s not a theory. That’s the bill I’m still paying.

What I’ve paid is nothing compared to what a senator risks when he breaks with his party or his president. But that’s exactly the point. The office comes with more power and more protection than any of us have. If moral courage is possible anywhere, it’s possible from a Senate seat. Utah didn’t send John Curtis to Washington to do the safe thing. We sent him to do the right one, even when it costs him.

I know there’s a cultural piece to this in Utah that goes unspoken. In a state where cultural power has long flowed through older men, particularly within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, younger women who challenge that hierarchy get read as “out of line” before anyone considers what they actually said. A man my age raising the same questions about Curtis’s record might be called ambitious. I got called difficult. Corey didn’t engage with anything I said on the merits. He sent screenshots and a scolding. It doesn’t have to define this relationship going forward.

What changed for me is what I’m watching at the national level from President Trump. There’s the loyalty tests, the punishment of dissent and the treatment of criticism as betrayal. That’s exactly what Curtis’s office did to me on a smaller scale, and I’d been reading it as personal when it was actually structural. It’s the same playbook. Small offices practice what large ones execute. If I don’t name the small version, I have less standing to challenge the big one.

Senator Curtis will be in the Senate until January 2031. That’s four and a half more years to decide what kind of senator he is going to be. Four and a half more years to decide whether he wants to be remembered as someone who grew into the office or someone who shrank inside it.

If I could go back and respond to Corey now, here’s what I’d say:

I appreciate your message, and I’ve been thinking about this for the past nineteen months. During the campaign, I raised policy concerns that nearly half a million Utahns shared when they voted for me. That’s not bad behavior. That’s democracy. At a time when autocracy is on the rise, we need to show what respectful disagreement and reconciliation can look like. I’d still like to meet with you, or the Senator, or your staff. I’d even love to do a podcast or an Instagram Live to show how we can move forward and work together. That kind of leadership matters more than ever. Thanks for considering. I hope we can turn the page.

That offer still stands.

Here is what I’m asking. Take the meeting. Not with me, necessarily. With the allies you’ve been icing out. With the constituents who voted for a different direction and deserve to be heard by their senator. With the people who challenged you and who might, if you let them, sharpen your thinking rather than threaten it. Nearly half a million Utahns are waiting to see whether you represent them too, or only the people who flatter you.

The John Curtis I met years ago in that Bears Ears meeting would take the meeting. He would listen. He would ask good questions. He would remember that the office belongs to all of Utah.

I still believe that senator exists. I’m inviting him back.

You have been quiet.

You have been quiet while people get pulled off the street by masked agents who will not show a badge or a warrant. You have been quiet while tens of thousands of people sit in detention centers, most of them are Black and brown, and most of them have never been charged with a crime.

You have been quiet while this administration moves to strip protections from more than 86 million acres of public land. That is not an Utah problem. That is the Boundary Waters. That is Alaska. That is the forests your customers drive to every weekend. Three million of those acres are the two Utah monuments now open to mining claims, while bulldozers plow through a national park.

Your industry runs on immigrant labor. Every one of you knows this. The J-1 students who run the lifts and the rental shops. The H-2B workers who clean the rooms, cook the food, and keep the whole operation moving all season long. You cannot open your doors without them. You built your business model around them. And now you will not say their names.

I am tired of watching an entire industry decide that saying nothing is a strategy. Do not tell me this industry does not do politics. In 2017 you pulled Outdoor Retailer out of Salt Lake City over Bears Ears. You knew exactly how to use your power then. Nothing about the last nine years made you weaker. It made you quieter.

The best time to speak up was before this monster got elected. The next best time is right now.

I am not asking you to do something I have not done. I have lost partnerships for saying this out loud. I ran for the U.S. Senate to try to stop us from getting here. I know exactly what it costs.

I am telling you it costs less than you think, and a lot less than what we lose if we all keep quiet.

And let’s be honest about what this has cost you. The tariffs raised the price of every piece of gear you sell and every piece you make overseas. The crisis around the Strait of Hormuz has driven up fuel and shipping costs, which means everything on your shelves costs more to get there. Trips are getting canceled. People are holding onto their money. And the attacks on public lands and the refusal to do anything about climate change are coming straight for the snow and outdoors you sell.

You are hurting. Your margins are hurting. Your season is hurting.

What did the quiet get you? Tariffs anyway. Shipping costs anyway. Your public lands opened to mining anyway. You bought nothing.

Your industry is being decimated by the same administration you are afraid to name. You have every reason in the world to use your voice and every lever of power you have.

This is not a policy disagreement. If they can do this to immigrants without due process, there is nothing stopping them from doing it to anyone. You are next. Your employees are next. Your customers are next.

I know what you are afraid of. You are afraid of being targeted by this administration. But you are complying in advance, which is far more dangerous. You are afraid of alienating customers. But I’d argue that Neo-Nazis and white supremacists should be alienated. If someone stops buying your skis because you said people deserve due process, that is not a customer you needed. And every day you stay silent to protect that sale, you are telling the rest of us exactly what your values are worth.

So here is the one thing I am asking you to do. Register your customers to vote.

You have millions of people walking through your doors, standing in your lift lines, and opening your emails. Put voter registration in your stores. Run drives at your base areas and your trailhead events. Put a link in every newsletter you send. Give your employees paid time to vote. None of this is partisan and none of it is risky. It is the single most powerful thing a company your size can do, and it is sitting right there.

If you do not want to say anything about immigration or public lands, fine. Register your customers to vote and let them handle it. That is how we vote these assholes out.

You have marketing budgets. You have millions of followers. You have lobbyists in Washington. We are a trillion dollar industry. Let’s start acting like it.

All of this comes from a kid who got her start as a green vest cashier at REI. A kid who snuck into her first Outdoor Retailer on a borrowed badge because she wanted in so badly. I grew up in this industry. I have made my living in it. I love these mountains and I love these companies and this gear and these customers with my whole heart.

That is why I am asking. I am not trying to burn this down. I am trying to make sure there is something left of it.

Find your moral courage. Find your backbone.

In other news:

Bulldozers started clearing land inside Big Bend National Park in Texas. The contract is worth 1.7 billion dollars and covers roughly 200 miles of patrol roads and 17 miles of barriers through one of the wildest places left in this country. Half a million people visit Big Bend every year.

Santa Elena Canyon is already fifteen hundred feet of wall. It has been working fine for millions of years.

You do not fix immigration by bulldozing a national park. If you want to tell your members of Congress that, I made it take about ninety seconds.

I got back from the Western Arctic, where I spent 8 days paddling 70 miles to see new oil wells drilled last winter by ConocoPhillips that were approved by Trump in a special area that should be protected. I keep thinking about 60,000 caribou that are born there and the Inupiat people who depend on the caribou for subsistence.

More on that soon.

Thank you for subscribing and if this resonates please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work and sharing it with others.

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That is the largest shrinkage of protected public land in American history. It is bigger than what he did in 2017, and that was the record.

Trump stood in front of the cameras and said this: you can’t do anything, you can’t go hunting, fishing, you can’t walk on it, we’re remedying that today. That is a lie. And it is not a gray area or a difference of opinion. It is a lie you can check yourself in about five minutes.

Here is Clinton’s 1996 proclamation creating Grand Staircase-Escalante:

Nothing in this proclamation shall be deemed to diminish the responsibility and authority of the State of Utah for management of fish and wildlife, including regulation of hunting and fishing, on Federal lands within the monument.

Hunting and fishing stayed under Utah’s control the entire time. Grazing permits kept running. The document says so.

Here is Obama’s 2016 proclamation creating Bears Ears, describing what the land offers:

world class outdoor recreation opportunities, including rock climbing, hunting, hiking, backpacking, canyoneering, whitewater rafting, mountain biking, and horseback riding

Hunting is listed by name. So is climbing. So is mountain biking. These are the documents they tore up today, and the activities they claim to be restoring are written into them.

I have adventured on this land for twenty years. Nobody ever stopped me. Nobody ever stopped anyone.

So what did monument status actually block?

New mining claims. New oil and gas leases. New coal and geothermal leases. That is the list. The legal language in every one of these proclamations withdraws the land from “entry, location, selection, sale, or other disposition under the public land laws,” from “location, entry, and patent under the mining laws,” and from “disposition under all laws relating to mineral and geothermal leasing.”

This order does not give the land to Utah. The land stays federal, under the BLM. The only thing that changed is that a mining company can stake a claim on it again, and the federal government can lease it out.

So this was never about your hiking boots. It is about uranium under Bears Ears and coal under the Kaiparowits Plateau in Grand Staircase. It is about who gets to own what is underneath. After Trump cut these monuments in 2017, new mining claims went up on ground removed from Grand Staircase, and the BLM’s preferred plan would have opened more than 550,000 acres to mineral leasing. In 60 days, the land will open up for mining.

Inside the original boundaries of the monuments are nearly 100,000 archaeological and cultural sites at Bears Ears. Cliff dwellings, petroglyphs, burial grounds, and ceremonial sites still in use today.

Bears Ears was the first national monument in American history created at the request of a coalition of tribal nations. The Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the Zuni Tribe, and the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation spent years building the case. In 2021 they signed a first of its kind agreement to co-manage the land with the federal government, and they spent nearly three years writing the management plan.

Today all of that was thrown out, and not one of those nations was consulted before it happened. They found out the same way you did.

In Trump’s proclamation shrinking the monuments, they claim petroglyphs and pictographs are common across the West and did not warrant a monument. Then they carve out 693 acres to protect a vertical oil well drilled in 1926. A cowboy line cabin made the cut too. So a wildcat oil well from 1926 is a treasure worth saving, and thousand year old rock art is not. That is in their document.

Grand Staircase is one of the great paleontology labs on the planet. Nearly two dozen new dinosaur species have been named there since the monument was created, along with at least 660 species of native bees. Over 150 scientists signed a letter this year asking that it be left alone. Paleontologists will tell you we have barely started digging.

You cannot un-mine a mesa. You cannot un-loot a grave. There is no version of this where we get it back.

They say this what Utahns want, which is another lie. Seventy-one percent of Utah voters want to keep Bears Ears. Seventy-four percent want to keep Grand Staircase. Eighty-nine percent say tribal nations should have a strong role managing their ancestral lands. Sixty-five percent of Utah Republicans support keeping monuments at their current size and number.

John Curtis said today that Utahns manage this land better than people two thousand miles away. I want to believe that. But I live in a state with the largest open pit mine on earth and a drying Great Salt Lake that now blows arsenic dust into the lungs of two and a half million people. That is our management record. Saying otherwise does not make it true.

This spring, Mike Lee tried to gut Grand Staircase’s management plan through Congress. About 600,000 calls and emails came in against it and he lost. So he went to the president instead, with no tribal consultation and no public comment period.

They did it this way because they knew they could not win the honest way. It also tells you that pressure works, because it already did once. The land opens to new mining claims and mineral leasing 60 days from signing, which is around September 11. That is the clock we are working against. You can’t hike, run, camp, drive or explore on an active mining claim. Every lie they say is a projection.

The Antiquities Act lets a president create a monument. It says nothing about letting him take one apart. Congress kept that power. Tribes sued over this in 2017 and they will sue again.

Where do we go from here:

Support the groups doing the work (among others).

• Native American Rights Fund

• Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition

• Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition

• Grand Canyon Trust

Call your representative. Link to other actions here. Share this with someone who loves our public lands.

In 2017, nearly three million Americans rose up when this happened. We won that fight in the end. We can win this one.

I’m writing this from a boat in the Tsugaru Strait in Japan where my husband is going to make history.

The water between Honshu and Hokkaido is deep blue and cold and moving in ways you can’t see from shore. On the port side, my husband Rob is swimming toward Hokkaido. He’s been swimming for 8 hours and has gone over 18 miles/30 km. He’ll be swimming for ten to fifteen total and will cover 25-28 miles/40-45 km.

Yesterday I did a 30-minute ocean swim in the same water. In a wetsuit. I was freezing. Rob will be out here for ten to fifteen hours in nothing but a Speedo, a cap, and goggles. No wetsuit allowed. He’s coated head to toe in diaper rash cream — zinc — because it’s the only sun protection that stays on through that many hours of salt water. That’s why he’s glowing white out there. War paint, basically.

To survive the cold, he’s gained 20 to 30 pounds of brown fat for insulation. He intentionally remade his body into a different kind of machine. We talk a lot about loving the bodies we have. Rob keeps redefining what a body can even do.

If he reaches the other side, he becomes the first person in history to complete the Double Seven — the Seven Summits and the Oceans Seven. Every continent’s highest peak. Every one of the seven hardest open-water channels on earth.

Sixteen years. fifteen expeditions (because it’s our second time on Tsugaru). One last swim. Follow the tracker here:

https://live.garmin.com/session/4535967f-f025-8256-ace5-1e74102d2e01/token/385B6549885A80B2A617BCF6BD0A3D0

Tsugaru is the one that got away. In 2023 he was pulled from this same water, told he wouldn’t make the time limit. He came home, said almost nothing about it, and started training again. The record is the headline. The years of getting back in the cold are the actual story.

Right now, he’s battling a strong 4.6 knot current that is pulling him off course. We can’t physically fight it. So he keeps swimming as the coast he’s trying to land on gets further and further away.

Here’s what it actually takes, from where I’m sitting.

He can’t touch the boat. Not once. Any assistance and the swim is over. So every hour I toss him a bottle on a retractable dog leash — 350 calories of liquid nutrition, the only fuel he gets. He drinks it treading water and keeps going. I tried to swim alongside him earlier with fins on. I couldn’t keep up. He doesn’t have fins.

The cost of this stuff is real, and it isn’t pretty. After Molokai, he developed SIPE — swimming-induced pulmonary edema — two days later and ended up in the ER. In the English Channel and the North Channel, he was stung by jellyfish hundreds of times and kept swimming. On Everest, both our bodies were slowly dying at altitude. On Vinson, in Antarctica, we battled 40 below.

We’ve learned not to ask each other how we’re doing in the middle of these things. The question only makes you remember the pain. So instead we just say, “You’re doing good, yah?” Not a question, really. A reminder. A small act of holding each other up across cold water.

There’s something in both of us that goes looking for the edge. But out here it doesn’t feel like punishment. It feels like an awakening. A celebration of what the mind and body can actually do when you stop negotiating with them.

We’ve learned not to ask each other how we’re doing in the middle of these things. The question only makes you remember the pain. So instead we just say, “You’re doing good, yah?” Not a question, really. A reminder. A small act of holding each other up across cold water.

We make a quiet trade in our marriage. He cheered for me through the Boston marathon and a Senate campaign — knocking doors, holding the camera, holding me together on the hard nights. Now it’s my turn. To watch the GPS track. To throw the bottle. To send calm seas across the water and trust that he knows how to do the hard thing.

You don’t get to do anything this big alone. Behind every person attempting something impossible is a boat full of people who believe it’s possible too.

I’ve lost friends to the mountains. I know how thin the line is between a story you tell at the finish and a story someone else has to tell for you. So I don’t romanticize the risk. I’m just deeply proud of a person who decided one impossible thing wasn’t enough, and went looking for the second.

Whatever happens out here today, he already did the hard part. He kept showing up.

If this stirred something in you — some thing you’ve been afraid to start — send it to the person you’d want in your boat.

By the end of this, you’ll understand why people in every state should learn them too. Because what happened here is a blueprint they are trying to replicate all over the country.

MIDA stands for the Military Installation Development Authority. The state created it back in 2007 for one specific job: facilitate the development of military land in Utah. It was a narrow and defensible job.

This spring, MIDA approved a 40,000-acre data center and natural gas power plant in Box Elder County. It’s backed by the “Shark Tank” guy, Kevin O’Leary. And it’s on private ranchland, not military land.

MIDA was built for a small, specific purpose, and it’s being stretched to cover something enormous and completely different.

Picture a soccer match where one team also gets to be the referee. They call their own fouls. They move the goalposts mid-game. Oh, and they wrote the rulebook, and the rule they wrote says nobody else's rules apply to them. In a single agency, it is:

• The government that approves the project

• The tax collector

• The regulator that’s supposed to set the rules

• And the business partner that profits from the deal

There’s no opposing team. There’s barely a referee.

And it gets more specific than that. In black-letter Utah law, section 63H-1-202, MIDA and the land inside its projects are not subject to:

• The county land-use laws

• The city land-use laws

• Any local ordinance, including ones about health, business licensing, even franchises

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They wrote themselves out of the health rules and the land-use rules that protect you and your neighbors in the actual code.

On top of that, MIDA has statewide reach, it never expires (”perpetual succession” is the legal term), it can act outside its own project areas, it has police power “as though it were a city,” and its sub-districts can use eminent domain to take property, and even the groundwater underneath it.

It’s a city you never voted for with no mayor you can fire that can take your land and your water.

So who is watching them? Every government is supposed to have a watchdog. For most Utah agencies, that’s the State Auditor. But here’s the trick: MIDA hires and pays its own private auditor. The state’s independent auditor is locked out.

Picture taking a test where you grade your own paper, you pick the teacher, and you sign her paycheck. Would you trust that grade? That’s the oversight MIDA gives itself.

After MIDA approved the O’Leary project, thousands of us did something simple. We wrote letters. We called. We flooded the State Auditor’s office demanding answers about what MIDA even is. State Auditor Tina Cannon actually listened.

She built a public website with an interactive timeline going back to 2007 with a history of who sits on the board, and a map of every MIDA project across the state. She put hundreds of documents, all in one place where normal people can see them.

And then she did the bravest thing a public official can do. She told the truth about the limits of her own power. Her office, she confirmed, does not audit MIDA, and has no control over the private firm that does. Cannon shined a light on it, and she did it because we made noise. We made that happen.

You can see what she built at transparent.utah.gov/mida.

On Cannon’s site, you’ll find MIDA’s own brochure. It brags that MIDA has “extreme oversight” and “transparency.” On the same website, the auditor’s own description says MIDA operates “without any other governmental oversight.”

Here’s the sentence that should worry every American. MIDA’s own plan for this project calls it a “replicable model.” That’s their word. They’re advertising it as a blueprint other places can follow.

And the blueprint is simple:

1. MIDA picks the land, and designates it a “project area.”

2. The county signs one consent paper. A Box Elder commissioner called it irrevocable. It’s one signature, no take-backs.

3. The environmental review comes after the deal, not before. You find out what it does to your water and air once it’s already approved.

That’s how you move a billion-dollar industrial complex past an entire community before they can organize. And it’s already spreading. There’s a separate project in Millard County, a 12-gigawatt campus on thousands of acres, that broke ground using a different fast-track tool. Utah has built several of these vehicles to route giant infrastructure around local democracy.

If they can cram a project this big down our throats here, with this little say from the people who live here, it can happen in your state next. The data-center boom is national. The pressure is coming everywhere. Utah is the test kitchen. It’s a system built to skip the public, copied and sold as a model, in the middle of a nationwide rush to build.

But the people who designed this counted on one thing: that you’d never hear those four letters. That it would stay quiet and technical and boring enough that nobody looked.

We blew that up. We turned MIDA into the most-asked-about agency in the state. We pushed the State Auditor to act. We’re united, left and right, ranchers and city folks, people who agree on almost nothing else, because this isn’t a partisan fight. It’s a who-gets-a-say fight.

Go look at the dashboard at transparent.utah.gov/mida. Share this with someone in another state. Call your legislators and ask them one question: why is MIDA exempt from the laws that protect the rest of us?

They wrote themselves out of the rulebook. We’re going to write them back in.

We will fight to protect Utah, and we’ll hand every other state the warning we wish we’d gotten.

Sources: the Utah State Auditor’s MIDA dashboard at transparent.utah.gov/mida; MIDA’s project area plans, ordinances, and fact sheets compiled on that site; Utah Code 63H-1-202 and the MIDA Act; and Salt Lake Tribune reporting.

He told a national audience that I’m “putting out falsehoods,” that I’m being funded by BEAR and Earthly Education propped up by Australian money, that Australia is “a vector for the Chinese,” and that he has an “international team” digging into me. He mispronounced my name and couldn’t say what party I belonged to. But he could stand on a national stage and suggest I’m a foreign operative. Here’s my response:

First of all, My name is pronounced Glyk — like “I like Gleich.” Commit it to memory, Kevin, because you’re going to be hearing a lot more from me.

The accusation is a lie, and it’s projection.

Earthly Education has never paid me, funded me, or partnered with me in any capacity. I have not received a single dollar for any post I’ve made about this project. I’ve spent days of my own time on this, for free, because I live here and I love Utah.

He said in a social media post that 90% of the protesters are not people that live in Utah, that they’re being bussed in. Accusing someone of being paid or bussed in for protesting is the oldest trick in the book. If you can’t discredit the message, then try to discredit the messengers. It’s also peak DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender).

His project has drawn international outrage and global attention. But global attention is not foreign funding. Those are not the same thing, and a man who built his brand on finance knows the difference.

Here’s what makes the accusation rich. Kevin O’Leary is a citizen of Canada, Ireland, and the United Arab Emirates. He wrote on his own LinkedIn that he believes “Abu Dhabi is going to become the capital of capital in the next 10 years” and that he wants “to be part of it.” The American Conservative (not exactly a left-wing outlet) has documented how the UAE hands citizenship to high-value foreigners as a strategic asset.

The only foreign dollars flowing into Utah around this data center are his. He is the foreign actor here, arriving under the banner of national security and accusing the locals of being the threat.

Every accusation is a confession.

The group O’Leary smeared on NBC is BEAR, the Box Elder Accountability Referendum. BEAR is a grassroots group of local Utahn trying to hold their own county commissioners accountable through a ballot referendum.

O’Leary says he wants to win the trust of Box Elder County residents. He can start by not calling them Chinese sleeper cells on national television. That is not a man acting in good faith. That is a man making false statements with reckless disregard for the truth.

Here’s what’s actually not misinformation, Kevin:

Scientists at the University of Utah and Utah State, with their names attached, have analyzed this project. Utah Clean Energy’s analysis finds that at full 9-gigawatt build-out on combined-cycle gas turbines, the facility would emit roughly 30 million tons of CO₂ a year. That would raise the entire state of Utah’s carbon emissions by about 55%. The same analysis puts the water needed just to run the gas turbines at 16.6 billion gallons a year, enough to fill roughly 25,000 Olympic swimming pools.

The Great Salt Lake has lost the majority of its volume and sits 6.5 feet below the minimum healthy level. The exposed lakebed is a toxic dust of heavy metals threatening the air of two million Utahns downwind. The entire state is in a drought.

And when more than 3,800 Utahns each paid fifteen dollars to file formal protests against the project’s water application, the developer pulled the application rather than face them.

The biggest issue is that this whole development was rammed through with zero public input and zero environmental impact studies. This project was fast-tracked through MIDA, which is Utah's Military Installation Development Authority. MIDA was created for a legitimate reason: to support development around Hill Air Force Base. MIDA has drifted a long way from defending an air base. It now functions as a vehicle that can hand a private developer enormous tax concessions and override the normal checks, with no daylight for the public. There was not a single meaningful opportunity for public input before this moved forward.

And consider how Utah law gets made. In the 2026 legislative session, lawmakers introduced 1,015 bills and passed 540 in 45 days. The median bill gets only a few minutes of total debate across both chambers. Senator Todd Weiler said it plainly: “I know that the public wants every legislator to read and comprehend every bill, but in our 45-day session, it’s not realistic.” He even stood up, described a bill, and got it passed with no discussion, except he’d described the wrong bill (it was later corrected).

Lobbyists likely fill that vacuum. According to public records reviewed by Fox 13, O’Leary hired Lincoln-Hill Partners to lobby for this development. That firm has a long history with Utah politicians, including Senate President Stuart Adams, who sits on the MIDA board. The bills move faster than the public and lawmakers can read them. This process should bother every Utahns regardless of how they vote.

O’Leary says his international team is researching the protesters, spending money to investigate private citizens who showed up to exercise their first amendment rights and oppose his project. All because we keep asking questions, like what are these data centers actually going to be used for? Because computers at this scale, used for state surveillance and to monitor the people who protest, could become the infrastructure of exactly the thing he claims to be defending against. AI without guardrails, pointed at dissenters, isn’t national defense. That’s the authoritarian playbook. He is accusing us of being the threat while building the capacity to be one.

I’d love to make this case to the same national audience O’Leary used to smear me. As of now, NBC has not agreed to host me on broadcast for a rebuttal. So the accusation got the national stage and the correction did not.

The one thing Mr. Terrible has actually accomplished is uniting us. Republicans, Democrats, Independents, people who’ve never voted in their lives are coming together to defend Utah from a genuine foreign threat. O’Leary says he wants to support the people of Box Elder County. But the people who actually need funding here aren’t billionaires with three passports. They’re Utahns fighting to protect our air, our land, our water, and our future.

If you want to put money where it matters, chip in $5 or more to BEAR, the residents of Box Elder exploring every option to hold their commissioners and their state legislature accountable. Or support my Substack here:

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That’s where the real Utahns are. That’s where your money should go.

It’s called Stratos and once built, it will occupy forty thousand acres in Box Elder County with giant warehouses stuffed with servers running AI for whichever hyperscaler, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, signs the lease. Your chatbot question in Tokyo gets answered by a server in Box Elder County. The profits fly to Wall Street. The pollution stays here.

This project isn’t going through normal county zoning. It’s being pushed through MIDA (Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority) by calling it a national security project. That label lets it skip the rules every other developer in Utah has to follow. MIDA admitted on the record: there’s been no environmental study, no traffic study, no studies at all for forty thousand acres, a 9 Gigawatt natural gas plant larger than anything in Utah’s history, and up to 13,000 acre-feet of water rights (which is over 4 billion gallons a year). They wanted a vote without a single study.

They got it.

Approved Without a Single Public Comment

On May 4, the Box Elder County Commission approved the agreement. They declined to hear public comment. Hundreds of residents showed up anyway, holding signs in the back of the room while commissioners voted away their valley.

Even the Republican commissioners had been sounding alarms days earlier. Commissioner Tyler Vincent called it “drinking from a fire hose.” Commissioner Boyd Bingham said: “if we vote for this, we lose control.”

They voted yes anyway.

The first time most Utahns heard about Stratos was a few weeks before the vote. MIDA had been quietly working on it for a year.

The “Paid Protesters” Smear

After the vote, Kevin O’Leary, Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank, the project’s celebrity face, did something straight out of the DARVO playbook. Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.

He went on social media and told the country that the people opposing his project weren’t really Utahns. He claimed, without evidence, that “over 90% of the protesters are actually not people who live in Utah.” He called them “professional protesters,” but he said Utahns weren’t stupid and would see right through out-of-state interests making decisions about their state. Project CEO Paul Palandjian called them “paid thugs” bused in from out of state.

The actual record: no bus was observed, the protesters were Utahns. Neighbors, ranchers, mothers driving to the county building during nap time because they saw it on Facebook that morning. The only out-of-state person flying in to make decisions about Utah was Kevin O’Leary. Every accusation is a confession. When the developer can’t win the argument or answer the questions, he attacks.

Cox at the Podium

A few days before the county vote, the Governor went to his monthly press conference and went off.

He said every state has “an obligation” to host data centers like this one. He said taking time to study things is “the dumbest thing ever.” He said people who object to industrial projects have “destroyed our country, destroyed our industrial base, destroyed our mining base.” He said: “those days are over. We’re done with that.” He compared it to the nuclear arms race. He said it was a national security imperative. He also said it wasn’t really about the economy.

If it’s not really about the economy, then why are we handing so much water to it? If it’s not about jobs, then what IS Utah getting in exchange for a 9 gigawatt gas plant in one of the driest states in the nation? If it’s about national security, why it is being championed by a reality TV investor whose last data center campus has been stalled for a year?

What Utah Gets

In exchange for our water, our air, and 40,000 acres: MIDA slashed its standard 6% energy tax to 0.5%. Eighty percent of the property tax flows back to the developer as a rebate. Personal property tax on the equipment is waived entirely. Box Elder County is promised $30 million a year early on, $100 million at full buildout, which is pennies against what the developer keeps.

O’Leary himself, on Facebook in February, said the project needs “every incentive we can get out of that state.” The deal only works because Utah agreed to give it.

We hand over the water, the air, and the land. They hand us a check and a thank-you note.

This data center was approved without studies, without an opportunity for public comment, in a process most of us never heard of. Box Elder County Residents have filed a referendum to undo the County Commissioner’s approval. It’s pending and if approved, the decision will go back to the voters.

This should be a warning to every other American. This is not how government is supposed to work, in Utah and America. But Utahn’s aren’t dumb, and we are fighting.

Support my work by subscribing to Substack or contribute to a new tool I’m using called Chilli App here (matched up to $2K this month by Chilli):
https://app.chilli.club/memberships/carolinegleich/flow

Coming Monday: Why this is a public health emergency. Utah just lived through the worst water year in recorded history. The Great Salt Lake’s exposed lakebed is already worsening air quality which is linked to a 16% increase in miscarriage risk and thousands of premature deaths each year. Stratos is being built directly into that crisis. Subscribe so you don’t miss it.

I’ve run seven marathons and ultras, all in the mountains. But I’ve watched Boston on TV dreamed about that finish line on Boylston Street. Now I’m going to find out what it feels like.

I found running when I was going through something I didn’t know how to talk about. Someone was harassing me online for years, calling me a glacier killer, leaving voicemails during Thanksgiving dinner, telling me there would be celebrations when I ended up like my friend Liz, who died in an avalanche.

Running was the only thing that made my nervous system settle. Something about the pitter patter of my feet on the ground, the wind in my face, the simple act of moving my body forward. Ten minutes and I felt like a different person.

So on April 20th, I’m running 26.2 miles for the climate, the very thing people harassed me for caring about.

This winter was hard to witness. Utah’s snowpack sat at roughly half of normal. Resorts opened terrain late and closed early. The mountains I’ve built my life around are changing, visibly, season by season.

I’m running as part of the B.A.A. Climate Crew. Every dollar goes directly toward making one of the world’s greatest races more sustainable: compostable cups across the entire course, 79% waste diversion in 2024, and a target of 42% emissions reduction by 2030. It is supporting real progress, not greenwashing.

My fundraising goal is $3000. Will you help me get there? You can donate via the link below or Venmo @carolinegleich - every bit helps!

Chip in here

We all need something that brings us back to ourselves right now. Running is mine. Whatever yours is, hold onto it.

Thank you, Caroline 🏔️

P.S. Never run a road marathon before. Drop your best Boston tips if you have them.

This morning, the United States joined Israel in striking Iran in what Trump himself called a “massive and ongoing” military campaign. There was no Congressional vote or declaration of war. Most lawmakers learned about it after American planes had already left Iranian airspace.

Congress was on recess. Most members were fundraising.

As an athlete, activist and former US Senate candidate, I’ve spent years engaging with NATO’s framework for collective security largely from the inspiration of my 94-year-old dad, who served in the Air Force (and also protested the Vietnam War) He told me, “NATO is a force for good in the world. NATO will help us prevent the mistakes of history.” As a mountaineer, I’ve walked the alleys of Skardu, Pakistan where “down with the USA” was graffitied on the walls. I’ve met with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. I ran for the US Senate in Utah because I believe these institutions matter, including the Constitution, the alliances, and the democratic checks and balances that separate us from the autocracies we claim to oppose. What’s happening right now tests all of it.

Iran’s regime is genuinely dangerous. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is genuinely dangerous, having armed terrorist proxies, killed Americans and destabilized the region for decades. But we struck Iran while they were actively negotiating nuclear concessions. History will ask us why. We’ve also learned from the mistakes of history that external actors “freeing” countries from their governments rarely goes well.

As of today, reports confirm Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei was killed in the strikes, along with top IRGC leadership. What comes next, succession crisis, regime collapse or something more dangerous is anyone’s guess. That uncertainty alone demands Congressional oversight.

Bombing a country during active diplomacy, without congressional authorization, sets a precedent about who holds war powers in this democracy. The current answer appears to be one man, alone, without a vote. That should concern us all. In 2012, Donald Trump warned Republicans in a tweet

Trump’s own approval rating has dropped 14 points since taking office. Midterms are eight months away. He has now done exactly what he accused Obama of planning. His own words are the indictment.

Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, a libertarian Republican and a progressive Democrat, already had a War Powers Resolution ready. Senators Tim Kaine and Rand Paul introduced a companion resolution in the Senate. Both chambers vote next week on it. Every member of Congress will go on record, including Utah’s.

I'd also note that Senator Curtis's own 2024 financial disclosure, filed August 2025, public record, shows he currently holds a Director position at ATI Founders Inc., which sells shooting range equipment under the Action Target brand to the Department of Defense, with between $500,000 and $1,000,000 in personal holdings. When he calls this campaign an act of strength, Utahns deserve that context.
I don’t have all the answers about Iran. Nobody does. But I know this: the people who will fight this war, fund it, and live with its consequences for decades deserve a Congress that shows up to vote on it.

The Constitution requires it. Our future demands it.

Contact your representative. Demand a vote on H. Con. Res. 38.

After the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti sparked protests across the country, I couldn’t shake a feeling I didn’t quite know how to name. Watching the videos online, it felt close. I kept imagining what it would mean to step between someone vulnerable and harm and not come home.

Helping people shouldn’t cost you your life.

I feel much less safe in America than I did a year ago. Not because of immigrants but because armed federal agents have shot and killed people during enforcement operations, and the government’s response was lies rather than truth. That unsettles me. So I showed up.

I stood outside during this abnormally warm winter alongside students, parents, veterans, alumni, neighbors, people trying to understand what “security” now means in America. I kept circling back to that word: Security.

One afternoon at a protest against ICE recruitment at BYU, a mom stood with her child on her shoulders, neon signs glowing in the sun. She asked her daughter, “Who does Jesus love?” The little girl answered without hesitation: “Everyone.”

The crowd roared. That child knew what adults sometimes forget; her answer was instinctive. It was what belonging sounds like before we complicate it.

At UVU, students held a sit-in during another ICE recruitment event on campus. Since the shooting of Charlie Kirk earlier this year on that same campus, tensions have been high. I was admittedly nervous to enter. But what I remember wasn’t confrontation, it was a movement powered by love.

Students walked the halls singing:

“It’s okay to change your mind.
Show us your courage, leave this behind.
It’s okay to change your mind.
You can join us here anytime.”

It wasn’t angry or shaming. Despite the trauma many students carry from witnessing a murder firsthand, they showed up with moral courage and invited others to join. That lyric has stayed with me.

On a warm winter afternoon outside the City and County Building in downtown Salt Lake City, speaker Samantha Reagan’s questions echoed:

“Did your undocumented neighbor raise your rent?
Did your undocumented neighbor cut your wages?
Did your undocumented neighbor lay you off?
Did your undocumented neighbor raise your grocery prices?
Did your undocumented neighbor deny you healthcare?

Undocumented or documented, my neighbor is still my neighbor, and they have more in common with me than any billionaire does.”

Security isn’t just about who crosses a border. It’s about who shapes the system.

When I think about what the Department of Homeland Security should mean, I don’t picture masked ICE agents on the streets, recruitment tables at universities or Kristi Noem flying in a private jet. I think about what makes people feel secure. A roof overhead. Heat in winter and cool in summer. Food on the table. Access to healthcare. Clean air and water.
Knowing that if disaster strikes, someone shows up.

I think about immigrants who build our houses, run our favorite restaurants, and train at the Utah Olympic Oval. I think about athletes like Shruti Kotwal, chasing Olympic dreams on the fastest ice in the world, yet forced to navigate a broken visa system and legal uncertainty just to stay and compete. I think about scientists, students, and entrepreneurs deciding whether this country feels stable enough to build a life in. They are the people making our communities better.

Right now, the government is shutdown over immigration funding. This makes our questions even more important. Trump tells us that immigrants are the root of economic instability, but that instability is actually driven by concentrated wealth and policy decisions that his own administration’s policies only intensify.

He points the finger at the vulnerable so we don’t notice how he and his allies are profiting from the chaos.

If security means anything, it should mean clarity and fairness.

More immigration judges to clear backlogs.
Modernized visa processing.
Realistic legal pathways aligned with workforce needs.
Transparent oversight.

That’s what real governance looks like. Maybe the bravest thing we can do right now is ask ourselves what security actually feels like, and who it includes.

“It’s okay to change your mind.”

I’m still thinking about that.

If this piece resonated with you, I’m asking you to do two things today to help us build a more secure and transparent community:

1. Keep Shruti on the Ice: Shruti Kotwal is India’s fastest woman on ice, and she trains right here at the Utah Olympic Oval. Her O-1 athlete visa expires this June. We are raising funds to cover her immediate legal and immigration filing fees so that a visa deadline doesn’t end her Olympic dream.

   👉 help keep Shruti on the ice

2. Demand Accountability from Senator John Curtis: It’s hard to trust our leaders to fix a broken immigration system when they are profiting from it. Senator Curtis holds a financial interest in Action Target, a Utah company that makes millions from DHS and ICE contracts. Join me in asking him to divest from these interests or recuse himself from votes that affect his own bottom line.

   👉 sign the petition here

This talk comes from years of advocacy, climbing mountains, working with communities, and watching how decisions, good and bad, ripple across generations.

Here’s the core idea:

When women lead, the planet wins.
Data shows it. Communities around the world prove it.

And yet, we continue to treat women’s leadership as optional instead of essential.

In the talk, I introduce a concept I call Auntie Intelligence, a different kind of AI.
It’s a leadership style rooted in care, courage, community protection, and thinking seven generations ahead.

It’s the kind of AI that doesn’t crash, doesn’t hallucinate, and always remembers to bring snacks.

My hope is that this idea resonates, challenges, expands or inspires you and you’ll watch, share, and sit with this question:

What could our climate future look like if women’s leadership wasn’t the exception , but the norm?

Share

Watch the full TEDx talk here:

When politicians manipulate the maps to lock in their power, it becomes nearly impossible for communities to choose leaders who actually represent them.

And when representation breaks down, so does everything else.

You see it in the failures to act on climate, housing, healthcare, and basic infrastructure. You feel it in the gridlock, the blame games, and the way no one seems accountable for anything.

And you feel it in your own disconnection.

Because there’s another layer people don’t talk about enough:
Gerrymandering is confusing is hell.

Districts gets sliced, shuffled, and scrambled. Neighborhoods get split or cracked in ways that make no sense. People don’t even know who represents them, or which district they’re in from one year to the next.

That confusion is strategic, because the more confused and disempowered voters feel, the less likely they are to engage, not out of apathy, but out of exhaustion.

Gerrymandering suppresses turnout, not just through direct voter suppression, but through cynicism, burnout, and disillusionment.
It sends the message: “We’ve already decided the outcome. Your vote won’t change anything.”

And sadly, over time, that message sticks.
Turnout drops. Participation shrinks. And the system becomes even more insulated, dysfunctional, and extreme.

And I’ll be honest, it’s deeply depressing to live in Utah under a gerrymandered system.

Our state legislature doesn’t reflect our people. The majority of voters in several counties are regularly ignored. Maps are drawn to silence us, not represent us. We pay taxes to a government that doesn’t represent our views.
That’s taxation without representation.

It’s the same injustice this country was supposedly founded to fight against.

Now, we’re watching it unfold again with Trump pushing Texas to redraw maps mid-cycle to secure more GOP seats, and California threatening to do the same. The whole thing feels like a zero-sum war.

Maybe Democrats have to fight back just to stay competitive. But if both sides feel forced to cheat just to survive, what kind of democracy do we have?

That’s why it’s important to recognize the Texas Democrats who are fighting back the right way by refusing to cheat the system.

They’re showing that we can stand up to authoritarian power grabs without sacrificing our principles. It’s harder, and it takes longer, but it’s the only way to truly restore trust in democracy.

Still, organizing alone isn’t enough. We need structural reform.

We need the For the People Act to ban partisan gerrymandering nationwide.
We need independent redistricting commissions.
We need a system where voters choose their leaders, not the other way around.

Because until we fix the maps, we can’t fix anything else. And we’ll keep living in a democracy that only exists on paper, while the people it’s supposed to serve are left confused, voiceless, and shut out.

I was about to walk onstage at the University of Utah’s Huntsman Center to introduce Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders at their Fighting Oligarchy tour. Fifteen thousand Utahns packed the stadium. Tens of thousands more watched the livestream.

The energy was electric, more rock concert than political rally. A roar of defiant, rebellious rage at a broken status quo.

Not too long ago, I was like many of those participants, full of anger, rage, and disgust. I was tired of seeing mediocre men hold enormous power and make poor choices with our hard-earned taxpayer money. I looked at our politicians and thought, I can do better. Most of us can.

Why I Ran

In 2024, I ran for U.S. Senate in Utah. I had an inkling of how unpleasant it would be, but I couldn’t sit on the sidelines while people and places I loved were under threat.

In Utah, our Republican party leaders were pushing policies to the extremes, banning books and targeting our LGBTQ+ community by enacting bathroom bans. Our federal leaders celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, removing access to critical life-saving reproductive healthcare.

And despite the Biden administration’s national progress on protecting our air and water, politicians were using taxpayer subsidies to keep polluting coal power plants running while eroding protections for our treasured public lands. Our state legislature’s Republican supermajority had illegally gerrymandered districts to silence progressive voices.

As I told the crowd at the Huntsman Center:

“I ran because I saw our state and country going backwards.”

And I wanted my voice to be heard.

Harder Than Any Mountain

Let me be clear: running for Senate was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

As a ski mountaineer and environmental advocate, I’ve been in tough situations before. I grew up struggling with depression and anxiety. At thirteen, I ended up in rehab after turning to drugs and alcohol. Skiing and climbing gave me purpose, meaning, and a way to ease the pain.

Adrenaline. Exposure. Risk. Pain. Repeat.

I’ve been in tough situations on high peaks, when the pitch steepens, the rock crumbles, and the ground disappears beneath your feet. You’re alone, without a rope. Frozen with fear. But your only choice is to keep moving and search for something solid to hold onto.

That’s what running for office felt like. Only scarier.

The moment you file, you become a target. It’s like walking through your community with a bullseye on your back, open to harassment, political violence, online mobs, and relentless public judgment. You lose your privacy. You risk your safety.

As a candidate, especially for a seat like the U.S. Senate, you’re expected to raise millions of dollars. Suddenly, consultants and vendors circle like vultures, seeing you as a dollar sign. You’re sleep-deprived, under relentless pressure, and it’s easy to make costly mistakes.

You walk into room after room to speak to groups, either to win their vote or their money. As a 5’2” woman, I heard over and over, “I was skeptical about you until I heard you speak.”

Skepticism and doubt are the default, and constantly proving your intelligence, your worth, your value to voters adds more exhaustion. You feel like you’re for sale—maybe if you can charm enough donors, you’ll be able to reach your next fundraising goal.

But I’m used to being underestimated and proving people wrong. When you grow up in a body like mine, you understand power because you’ve rarely had it.

Yet the emotional toll is staggering. Every moment of weakness is weaponized. Strangers question your worth. Allies sometimes vanish. And if your campaign goes into debt? You’re personally responsible for paying it back.

Running for office isn’t just hard. It can be brutal. Traumatizing.
And we need to stop pretending otherwise—because if we want more women, more young people, more working-class Americans to step up and lead, we must change the system that punishes them for trying.

But for me, running for office was in service of something bigger than myself.

If you, too, have ever used intensity or endurance to outrun your inner demons, it’s the perfect way to turn your darkness into purpose.

We Need You

Women, moms, teachers, nurses, cashiers, scientists, artists - your experience is needed in politics. We desperately need people who understand what it’s like to struggle, to serve, to be part of a community.

Utah has never elected a woman to the U.S. Senate. I was only the third woman ever nominated for this seat. Currently, there are three times more men named John serving in the Senate than women who are mothers of minor children.

It’s not because mothers of minor children are not qualified. It’s because the system is rigged against outsiders.

But the right message and candidate can break the spell. And recent rules from the Federal Election Commission now allow candidates to take a salary and use campaign funds to pay for childcare, making it easier for working-class people and non-wealthy individuals to run.

The Senate shouldn’t be limited to multi-millionaires, retirees (the average age is 65), political nepo-babies, or people named John.

We need more citizen candidates, people like you.
There are now countless organizations to help get you started: Run for Something, Emerge America, and Arena.

You don’t have to wait your turn. You don’t need a political last name.

You are readier than you think.

Why It Was Worth It

Running for office was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
Early mornings. Late nights. Constant calls and texts.
Bullies. Trolls. Public scrutiny. Private doubts.

But then,

A little girl looks at you like you’re her hero.
A grandparent tells you about their transgender granddaughter who died by suicide, and asks you to be a voice for her.
You stand on public land, remembering how the mountains helped you heal and how much you want to protect them.
You share a stage with AOC in front of thousands of Utahns, full of joy and defiance. And suddenly, it all matters.

After the rally, still riding the enormous high of adrenaline, I had the opportunity to spend a few moments with AOC and Bernie.

I told Bernie how badly I wished I was serving in the U.S. Senate.
When he asked how my race went, I said that while I lost, I still received more total votes than any non-Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Utah history.

He smiled and said:

“Keep going. It took me four runs before I got elected.”

You are the leader you’ve been waiting for.
And even if you don’t win this time, you’re preparing the soil for someone else to grow.

That is public service. That is legacy.

Now go run.

This morning, I had the honor of speaking with Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-NM) on a special live-streamed episode of The Caroline Gleich Show to mark the launch of the bipartisan Public Lands Caucus—a bold new coalition in Congress dedicated to protecting America’s public lands from privatization.

Photo courtesy of Rep. Vasquez

As Rep. Vasquez explained:
"We launched this caucus to protect the public lands that define our identity as Americans. These lands are not just acres on a map—they're sacred spaces that belong to all of us, not commodities to be auctioned off."

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Why Now?

Vasquez and other members of Congress created the caucus in response to renewed threats:
"We've seen some efforts that have continued to come back from the dead in states like Utah and other places in an attempt to privatize federal lands."

That’s why he and Rep. Ryan Zinke—yes, a former Secretary of the Interior—are teaming up across party lines to introduce legislation like the Public Lands in Public Hands Act, which, in Vasquez’s words, "prevents the wholesale or transfer of federal lands to private entities."

What’s at Stake?

We talked about the push to sell off public lands as a slow and sophisticated strategy:
"By cutting the workforce, it's also a way to cut access and say the federal government is unable to adequately manage federal lands. So maybe somebody else could manage it better. And then that translates to saying, 'Well, we can sell it to a private entity.'"

He warned:
"If you go to a state like Texas where only 2% is public land, you see how limited access is. You have to pay for access. I think folks who want to capitalize off of that industry—hunting, fishing, skiing—they want to make you pay for it."

A Tool for Advocates

This new caucus gives advocates a centralized place to engage.
"This is going to be a great tool for advocates. We have endorsements from over a dozen conservation organizations."

Even if your member of Congress isn't on the caucus yet, they can be:
"We'd love to have your help. Our office is the point of contact. You can send an email, make a phone call, or tag your member of Congress on Twitter encouraging them to join."

Bears Ears, Escalante & What You Can Do

We also spoke about the danger facing places like Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante:

We also spoke about the threats facing places like Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante:

"We saw the last administration reduce those monument boundaries. That means folks have to stand up again—get off the trail and into a legislator's office, make calls, send emails, participate in a local group."

"It's exhausting. And I think that's part of the plan for folks who want to privatize these places—they want to tire us out."

But there’s hope in action:
"It just really takes everybody—business owners, tribal communities, veterans, environmental advocates, birders, hunters, anglers—to come together once again to defend these places."

Final Word

"Public lands are the great equalizer. On a trail, it doesn't matter how much money you have or where you're from. Nature treats you just the same."

I hope you'll take this as your sign to stand up.

Call to Action:

📢 Write your lawmakers to support the Public Lands in Public Hands Act.

🏔️ Outdoor brands: Join the Brands for Public Lands coalition with The Conservation Alliance.

📣 Share this post and the livestream/podcast to spread the word.

Let's protect the wild places that restore us. Let’s keep public lands in public hands.

Basecamp: Rain, Cold, and the Shadow of the Grasberg Mine

We set up basecamp at 14,000 feet, surrounded by the constant hum of rain. It rained every day, often heavily, creating waterfalls cascading down the mountain’s face. The cold was biting, and the dampness seeped into everything, making it difficult to stay warm.

Only 2.5 miles (4 km) away from basecamp was the Grasberg Mine, one of the largest gold and copper mines in the world. The mine loomed as a stark reminder of the region’s history of exploitation—environmental destruction, displacement of indigenous communities, and ties to human rights abuses. It has long fueled tensions between the Indonesian government and the Free Papua Movement, adding an extra layer of unease to the climb.

The region’s history of conflict also meant that safety was a concern. In the past, climbers have been kidnapped and held for ransom, so armed guards with AK-47s were stationed at our basecamp for protection. It was a sobering reminder of the risks we were taking, not just from the mountain but from the political situation surrounding it.

Summit Day: A Careful Ascent

Summit day began at 4 a.m. after a light breakfast. We started with a 15-minute climb up a scree slope before transitioning to technical climbing. The rock was sharp and grippy but also wet and loose in places, so we moved carefully to avoid dislodging rocks onto climbers below.

After several hours, we reached the ridge at nearly 16,000 feet, where we navigated the sky bridge and two other technical sections before finally reaching the summit.

For Rob, this was his sixth of the Seven Summits, a goal he’s been working toward for over a decade. For me, it was my fourth. Reaching the top was exhilarating, but as every climber knows, the summit is only halfway. We descended carefully and celebrated our success back at basecamp with Bintang beers. We were safe and relieved, but the hardest part of the expedition was still ahead.

Meeting Mama and Elsa

At basecamp, I had the privilege of meeting two extraordinary women: Lilie Wijayati and Elsa Laksano. They weren’t like other climbers—in the best of ways. At 59 and 60 years old, they were experienced Indonesian women climbers on a mission to climb Indonesia’s seven highest peaks.

Lilie introduced herself to me as “Mamak,” and she was a bright light, full of warmth and humor. Seeing other women on the world’s highest peaks always makes me happy, but the Indonesian team stood out—they had at least four women! Mamak and Elsa were outgoing and exuberant, their smiles contagious. They were role models, proving that climbing big mountains isn’t just for the young; it’s for everyone.

The Storm

Mamak and Elsa’s team began their climb the day after we summited Carstensz. What started as a pleasant, normal day took a turn for the worse. A ferocious storm blew in, with heavy rain and high winds. While rain was normal during our time on Carstensz, the high winds were not. This storm was cold and blustery, and teams hunkered down at basecamp, holding tent poles to keep them from snapping. Some tents didn’t survive the night.

Eight climbers were stranded in the storm. Three were rescued by Indonesian guides in the night. Three others spent a cold, hard night on the summit ridge at 16,000 feet and were later rescued by our team’s lead guide, Ben Jones, along with Garrett Madison and Tashi Lakpa Sherpa. They brought food, warm clothes, and dexamethasone to the stranded climbers. On their way up, they encountered two other climbers—Mamak and Elsa—lower down on the route. Both had died of hypothermia and exposure during the night, together.

The Weight of Loss

Learning that Mama and Elsa had died was devastating. It’s hard to put into words the heaviness that settled over me when I heard the news. These two women, who had radiated so much joy and determination at basecamp, were gone. I had just met them, but their energy was unforgettable—Mamak’s warmth and humor, Elsa’s quiet strength. They were role models, not just for women climbers but for anyone who dreams of pushing boundaries, no matter their age. To know they had perished together, in such a harsh and unforgiving way, reopened wounds I thought I had learned to live with but never fully healed.

The mountains have given me so much—freedom, purpose, and connection—but they’ve also taken so much away. Losing Mamak and Elsa brought back waves of grief from other losses I’ve carried with me over the years. When I was 15, my half-brother Martin died in an avalanche. I remember the shock of it, the way it shattered my understanding of the world. He was my hero, someone I looked up to, and suddenly he was gone. That loss was my first real encounter with the fragility of life in the mountains, and it left a scar that shaped who I am today.

Then, when I was 28, I lost my best friend Liz. She was my partner in adventure, someone who understood the pull of the mountains as deeply as I did, and wasn’t afraid to wear mascara while climbing and riding steep lines. Her death was a reminder that even the most experienced, capable climbers are not immune to the risks we take. Losing her felt like losing a part of myself, and it took years to find my footing again.

And then there’s Hilaree Nelson, my inspiration, my role model. Her death hit me in a way I didn’t expect. Hilaree was someone I admired not just for her accomplishments but for her spirit, her ability to balance motherhood, leadership, and pushing the limits of what’s possible in the mountains. She showed me what was possible for women in this space, and her loss was a reminder of how unforgiving the mountains can be, even for the best of us.

Each of these losses has left its mark, and learning about Mamak and Elsa’s deaths brought all of that grief rushing back. It’s a strange thing, this duality of the mountains. They are places of such beauty and inspiration, but they are also places of immense risk and heartbreak. I’ve spent my life trying to reconcile those two truths, and moments like this make it feel almost impossible.

But what I’ve learned, through all of this, is that the grief never really goes away. It becomes a part of you, woven into the fabric of who you are. And while it’s painful, it’s also a reminder of the love and connection we share with those we’ve lost. Mamak and Elsa’s smiles, their laughter, their determination—they will stay with me, just as Martin, Liz, and Hilaree do. Their lives, though cut short, were full of meaning and inspiration.

The mountains demand so much from us, and sometimes they take more than we’re willing to give. But they also teach us to carry on, to honor those we’ve lost by continuing to climb, to live, and to love as fiercely as they did. That’s what I’ll hold onto as I move forward, carrying their memories with me every step of the way.

They’ve dubbed themselves pronatalists, and they’re sounding the alarm: Civilization will collapse, they say, if we don’t increase the number of children born in the United States. They propose baby bonuses, fertility education, even reshuffling transportation funding to favor towns with high birth and marriage rates. Some are reportedly pushing the White House to act fast — as if birthing more humans is a patriotic duty.

Photo by Aly Niklas

But here’s the part they never say out loud: it’s not really about saving the species. It’s about control.

Let’s be clear — choosing to have a child is one of the most personal, vulnerable, and high-stakes decisions a person can make. It involves physical risk, emotional labor, and lifelong financial commitment.

I haven’t had children yet, but a few years ago, my partner and I decided to freeze eggs and embryos. It was empowering, but also painful, expensive, and exhausting. I injected myself with hormones, had repeated ultrasounds, took time off training, and landed in the ER with ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome. And that was just to preserve the possibility of future parenthood. I know it pales in comparison to what so many women experience through pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum, and parenting — but it gave me a glimpse into the strength and sacrifice it takes to build a family in today’s world.

Now imagine doing that in a country that barely supports pregnant people, where Roe v. Wade has been overturned, where IVF is under legal threat, and where women are being criminalized for miscarriage. That’s the America today’s pronatalists have helped create.

You can’t claim to care about birthrates while stripping people of their reproductive freedom.

And you can’t ignore the real economic conditions driving people away from parenthood. If Elon Musk and his allies were serious about helping families, they’d be fighting for:

• Universal paid parental leave

• Affordable childcare and universal pre-K

• Postpartum mental health and pelvic floor care

• Legal protection for IVF, contraception, and abortion access

• Wages that actually keep up with the cost of living

• Affordable housing in safe, healthy communities

• Common sense gun laws, so parents don’t fear sending their kids to school — and kids aren’t traumatized by active shooter drills

• Climate action and clean air/water protections, so children aren’t growing up with asthma, poisoned drinking water, or a planet that’s too hot to survive

• Strong, independent public health agencies like the CDC and FDA, so we can trust our vaccines, prevent outbreaks of diseases like measles, and keep our food and medicine safe

Instead, we get dystopian tweets, fertility propaganda, and billionaires like Elon Musk — who, according to The Wall Street Journal, has fathered at least 14 children with multiple women and is building a private compound in Texas to house his “legion” of offspring — while the rest of us can’t even find an OB-GYN taking new patients.

I’ve been told online that I “work better as a ho than a senator,” that I should “go back to making sandwiches,” and that I “look breedable.” These aren’t isolated comments — they’re part of a loud, coordinated movement to take us backward.

But we’re not going back.

We won’t go back to a time when women’s roles were limited to birthing and obedience. We won’t go back to policies that ignore the realities of modern parenthood and environmental collapse. We won’t go back to lawmakers criminalizing fertility care while ignoring the daily crises that families face.

Because being truly pro-life means supporting quality of life. Not punishing women. Not forcing birth in a healthcare desert. Not sacrificing our kids to gun violence, polluted air, or preventable diseases.

As someone who’s climbed the world’s highest mountains — and fought for equality every step of the way — I can tell you this: building a just, compassionate society is a lot harder than building a family compound in Texas.

If you’re with me, join the movement. Subscribe, share this with a friend and if you’re a free subscriber, consider upgrading to paid. Let’s build a future where every person has the freedom to decide if, when, and how to have a family. And the support they need no matter what they choose.

Not because I want to protest.
Because I have to.
Because I still believe in what this country could be—if we’re brave enough to fight for it.

We’re in a defining moment.

Not just for Utah. Not just for the United States.
For the world order we’ve led for generations.
For the principles of democracy, dignity, and decency that hold society together.

This is not about left vs. right.
This is about progress vs. regression.
Freedom vs. control.
Hope vs. fear.

So what do we do?

We build a mass movement.

Research by political scientist Erica Chenoweth shows that it only takes 3.5% of a population engaged in sustained, nonviolent resistance to bring down authoritarian regimes. That’s not a dream—it’s a strategy backed by decades of data. (BBC article on the 3.5% rule)

We get to 3.5% by organizing.
By showing up.
By texting our friends. Talking to our neighbors.
By refusing to be silent.

This Saturday is one step of the process. There will be more rallies and strikes. More fights. More moments that test our courage.

But I will not back down. And I’m asking you not to either.

📍 Park City | April 19 | 12–2 PM | City Park Bandstand
🌐 Find a rally near you: fiftyfifty.one

I choose a future where laws are stable, business can thrive, and workers earn a fair wage.
Where we lead the world in curing disease, advancing science, and building climate solutions.
Where we celebrate differences instead of punishing them.
Where public lands stay public, and families can afford to live, breathe clean air, and dream big.

That’s what we’re fighting for.

But the Trump administration- and the politicians and billionaires who enable him- have made their choice too.

They want to roll us backwards.
To gut climate science.
To silence educators and scientists.
To strip away diversity, equity, and inclusion—despite the proof that diverse teams outperform, innovate, and lead.
They want to impose tariffs that disrupt economies and cost real people their livelihoods.

They’ve made it clear: they’re willing to destroy institutions, abandon allies, and consolidate power at any cost.

They are not conserving anything. They are burning it down.

And when you defund the CDC and remove the scientists working there, our public health will suffer—leaving us more vulnerable to future pandemics and health crises. That means the next outbreak could hit our kids' schools, our nursing homes, or our rural hospitals with devastating speed.

When you gut the EPA, our air and water become more polluted—especially in frontline communities already facing disproportionate environmental harm. PFAS and other toxic chemicals will continue to contaminate drinking water, increasing cancer risks for families, including pregnant women and children.

When you kneecap the FDA, food recalls are slower. Dangerous drugs stay on the shelves longer. Contaminated baby formula, mislabeled allergy warnings, and toxic additives in everyday products make their way into our kitchens and medicine cabinets.

When clean energy programs are dismantled, we don’t just lose innovation—we lose tens of thousands of good-paying jobs. We lose cheaper, safer energy options. We lose the chance to leave our kids a livable planet.

When DEI programs are dismantled in schools, workplaces, and government agencies, we don’t become more fair—we become more divided. Talented students and workers are pushed out. Veterans, single parents, people with disabilities—all lose the support systems that help them thrive.

This is how democracy backslides—not all at once, but by a thousand cuts. And each cut harms real people.

This is our time to rise. To show what we’re made of.
We won’t go quietly. We will go together.

We can win this. We must win this.
Because if we don’t fight for progress—no one else will.

It was the greatest honor to introduce AOC, who inspired my own run for office, challenged the establishment, spoke truth to power and WON.

I will cherish this selfie forever.

Standing on stage at the University of Utah’s packed Huntsman Center, I was flooded with the same feeling I get skiing a big, committing line. The kind where everything flows. The snow is perfect. The stakes are high. You drop in, and the earth feels good beneath your feet. Your body keeps up with your mind. You're in the zone.

That’s what it felt like giving this speech.

Photo by Cade Robertson

The energy in the arena was electric. The cheers were deafening—at points, I could barely talk over the crowd. People tuned in to the virtual livestream from all over the world: Canada, France, Australia, Belgium. And in that moment, I felt something shift.

Utah is rising.

And the people in power here? They feel it. They see the change coming—and they’re nervous. Because this isn’t politics as usual. This is a movement rooted in dignity, democracy, and people-powered action.

Last year, I ran for U.S. Senate—not because it was easy, but because I saw our state and our country sliding backward. Our leaders banning books and Pride flags while hate symbols go unchecked. Silencing voters through rigged maps. Policing bathrooms while letting polluters poison our air. Selling off our public lands.

That’s not democracy. That’s authoritarianism in disguise.

Like so many Utahns, I’ve known the fear of losing my job if I get injured or decide to become a parent. That’s not freedom. That’s not the American Dream.

The real American Dream is simple: If you work hard, you should be able to breathe clean air, see a doctor, afford a home, and retire with dignity. But that dream is being stolen by billionaires and extremists who treat our lives like line items on a balance sheet.

That’s why I said it loud—and the crowd roared it back even louder:

OUR PUBLIC LANDS ARE NOT FOR SALE.
OUR DEMOCRACY IS NOT FOR SALE.

Photo by Cade Robertson

This isn’t red vs. blue. It’s the people vs. power. The many vs. the greedy few.

And here’s the truth: we are the power.

We can balance the budget without gutting Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security—by making billionaires finally pay their fair share. We can get big money out of politics. We can send a message to every corrupt politician:
If you sell us out, we will vote you out.

Now is our moment. To run for office. Donate. Volunteer. And together, we’ll reclaim the American Dream—not the billionaire version, but the people’s version: a future worthy of our children and our planet.

And after the rally, I got to meet Bernie.

I told him I’d run for U.S. Senate last cycle and that I wished I was working alongside him in Washington. He looked me in the eye and said:
“It took me four tries to win.”
Then he smiled and told me:
“Keep going.”

Photo by Joey Sackett

So I will. Because this fight—for public lands, for clean air and good jobs, for democracy—isn’t over. And if last night showed me anything, it’s that the people of Utah are ready. We’re rising.

And I want to say thank you—to Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—for coming to Utah. For standing with us. For believing that the people here are worth fighting for.

Photo by Joey Sackett

Watch my entire speech here:

Media Coverage:

• KSL: Bernie Sanders’ Fighting Oligarchy Tour

• Salt Lake Tribune Recap

• ABC4 Utah Rally Coverage

• Fox13: Sanders & AOC Speak to Sold-Out Crowd

• Inside Utah Politics Interview

Call to Action:

• Get involved with local climate, democracy, and workers’ rights orgs

• Support grassroots candidates

• Join us April 19 at the Utah State Capitol for a major protest to defend democracy, protect public lands and working people.