Throughout the chaos of dozens of moves and almost as many new schools and a revolving door of step-parents, I had one method to deal with the upheaval…I always wrote letters to god. So many letters that I wrote and placed in the highest point in my bedroom — the top of my closet. I left the letters open and face up so god could see them and read them easily.

I don’t recall ever receiving a response, however, I learned to manage my anxiety and fear and disappointment by writing out my thoughts and feelings to an all-knowing god.

My letters got me through childhood well enough, and it may have even turned into the career I have here on Substack. My writing follows the same pattern — point to the pain and try to diagnose it and then write a letter to file a grievance or ask for help or demand punishment or just tell the story of what is happening.

But these days, instead of waiting for divine intervention, I go straight to the source of the pain. Usually via an elected official.

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I was raised in the Southern Baptist Church, but I think there should be quotations around the word “raised.” I moved so often that I never really had a church home. We would attend for a while and then move and then find a new church. I don’t even know if we ever really settled on being Southern Baptists, or enjoyed the doctrine, but the religion was dictated by the rural areas of the Southern states I lived in.

Everyone was Christian, and most were Southern Baptists.

I was officially baptized in a creek under a grove of trees in Bunch, Oklahoma, when I was in 7th grade. I had also been saved at the altar of at least three or four different churches. I was always scared that I wasn’t really saved, and the rapture would happen, and I would be left behind with the unbelievers to go through a tribulation that would likely kill me and other believers for simply being Christian.

The doctrine I was raised under is often referred to as “trauma” these days, and I think I might agree, though I did find so many good people in the church who were loving and caring. Especially the women who devoted their lives to others, while being forced into domestic submission by the church doctrine.

I did not raise my children in the Evangelical church because of the fear and anxiety I felt growing up in the church.

I didn’t want my children to hear a train whistle at night and think it was the rapture. I didn’t want them to be told that someone was quite literally crucified and suffered on a cross and died for their “sins.” I did not want to interrupt their childhood with thoughts of devils and demons and hellfire. I didn’t want to pass on the rules of patriarchy to my sons, or the rules of submission to my daughters.

It’s not that faith itself is bad, but the feelings of being under the constant watch of a vengeful god, while being under a constant threat of a secular society, while also trying to comply with a system of constant guilt, that made me want to avoid it completely while raising my own children.

So I did.

Another issue with the SBC is the rampant misogyny which is seen in the recent banning of women preachers in the church. The Southern Baptist Church overwhelmingly voted for an amendment to their constitution in June, 2026. The SBC voted for amendment language requiring the exclusion of any church that acts, “to affirm, appoint, or endorse a woman serving in the office or function of a pastor/elder/overseer, specifically preaching to the assembled congregation.”

The misogyny of the SBC is as untenable for me as is the control.

The Southern Baptist Church is an example of a high-control religion and authoritarianism. It is the reason so many Evangelicals vote for perceived strongman leaders. It is the reason so many Evangelicals have a tolerance for total submission to a leader. It is the reason so many Evangelicals vote against their own self-interest. They believe they are martyrs for a higher purpose.

It is part of the reason my state is in the shape it is in. Indoctrination and fear.

And fear is a tool of control. Of authoritarianism. Of tyranny. And my former church was built on fear and suggested that authoritarianism is the only way for society to work. That the patriarchy is as natural as a woman’s need for submission. That if we just acquiesce to authority, they will take care of the pesky details.

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In case you’re wondering, I haven’t found the god of my childhood, and I left the church decades ago. I don’t write letters to a god anymore, and I am not waiting around for answers.

I don’t advocate for any religion, though I am naturally tolerant of most — I still struggle with Evangelicalism. With the Southern Baptists. With the trauma of my youth and the years of enlightenment I lost to fear and intimidation and misogyny and control.

I lost curiosity to fear. I was expected to obey rather than question. And as a woman, I was to endure and forgive and remain sweet and quiet. I was taught that my salvation depended on my submission.

The authoritarianism I see around me every day feels very familiar. It is a natural consequence of the religion of my youth — the religion of so many of my elected officials. The religion that still impacts my daily life.

And I still write a lot of letters, but they look different these days. I write letters when I am angry and when I am afraid and when I see people being harmed by systems, religious or otherwise, that others call righteous or inevitable.

The difference with my letters is that I no longer place them on the top of my closet and wait for someone powerful to notice…

I put them where people can read them.

Thanks for reading them.

~Jess

If I were not so involved in Missouri politics, I might have been confused about the sign.

Amendment 3 is a ballot question about abortion rights — it has nothing to do with “gender transition” surgeries. The simple fact is that no minor in the state can obtain gender transition surgery or most hormones in the first place because both were outlawed by a 2023 ban written and passed by Missouri Republicans.

But back to the original intent of Amendment 3 — another abortion ban. I wrote these lines over two years ago:

I was indeed right about Missouri. We were the first state to overturn an abortion ban. But here is the thing that makes my prediction so sad: We are voting on abortion rights again this November.

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Missouri Republicans decided not to accept the will of the people on the constitutional amendment for abortion rights we passed two years ago. Republicans kept writing abortion bans even after we overturned them, and until June of this year, it was still nearly impossible to access an abortion in the state — a full year and a half after Missourians overturned the ban.

And this is just the beginning of the fight here to keep abortion legal in a state where we are losing OB access and rural hospitals are closing and where the maternal mortality rate is double that of California and nearly triple that of Massachusetts.

Another abortion ban in a state where thousands of Missourians are expected to lose access to Medicaid in just a few months once the new work requirements are in place.

Another abortion ban in a state with almost 13,000 children currently in the foster system.

In 2024, Missourians needed 180K signatures to put reproductive rights on the ballot. We gathered 380K signatures. 200,000 more than we needed. We crushed it. We killed it. We proved that not only do most folks want to vote to restore abortion rights, but that hundreds of thousands would drive an hour or more to find and sign a petition.

When I was gathering signatures in rural Missouri, one woman was waiting for us as we set up the petition, signed it, and then texted her Bible group to remind them to come by and sign it.

Yes, her Bible group.

The bad news is that the first time we passed Amendment 3, it was by a pretty small margin. 51% of Missourians voted to establish a Constitutional right to abortion. It won by less than 100K votes statewide, but it was enough to pass, and it sent a message that more people in the state want bodily autonomy than want to deny rights to women.

The good news is that this isn’t 2024, and things have shifted in Missouri in the last two years. Big shifts.

When I ran for office in 2022, over 40% of Missouri seats went uncontested. This year, only 2% of Missouri seats are uncontested. That is just the beginning.

I work with Blue Missouri, and we have helped to recruit down-ballot Democrats to run. This year, Blue Missouri grassroots donors supported 70 nominees with over $300K. That is more funding than we have ever been able to send to down-ballot Dems, and the money is already being put to use in some of the reddest and toughest districts across the state.

Blue Missouri is one of the largest donors to the Missouri Democratic Party and the biggest donor to down-ballot races.

I didn’t list those metrics to brag. I listed them to show that things are changing in the state, and I am just one rural Democrat working. There are thousands of us in every corner of the state speaking to our neighbors and showing up for candidates.

Making calls. Knocking doors. Putting up signs. Sending donations. Voting.

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Missourians also just had a couple of massive wins against the overreach of the Missouri GOP.

Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe’s major campaign platform for the state included eliminating the income tax and replacing it with higher sales taxes among other new taxes. Kehoe and his wealthy donors threw everything behind the ballot measure titled Amendment 5. Republican donors spent millions to try to pass the scheme that was basically a giveaway to the wealthy.

The amendment went down in flames just a few weeks ago. It was rejected by over 80% of Missouri voters. It was defeated in every single county in the state. The failure of Gov. Kehoe’s biggest goal for his administration was a resounding shot across the bow at the overreach of Missouri Republicans.

The same fate awaited Amendment 4, which was another ballot initiative to eliminate Missouri’s ballot initiative process altogether. It was an attempt by Missouri Republicans to silence the will and voices of Missourians. This amendment was also soundly beaten, with over 80% of voters rejecting it.

Missouri Republicans are over their skis, and they know it. Dangerous territory.

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The billboard I saw while traveling across the state isn’t about trans kids and it’s really not even about abortion. It’s about power. Consolidating even more power in the Republican supermajority. It’s about silencing Missourians.

We have already made our voices clear on several issues that keep popping back up on the ballot. Over and over again. I am sick of it. My neighbors are sick of it, and recently, I’ve heard more than one Republican claim to be sick of it as well.

This November, we have yet another chance to tell the lawmakers who refuse to listen…our bodies and our votes and our Constitution do not belong to them. They belong to us. The people.

They can buy billboards. They can lie about Amendment 3. They can try to confuse us and scare us and wear us down. But they can’t outwork a movement made up of Missourians who have already shown that they will show up and vote for our rights.

Vote NO on Amendment 3.

Let’s win this. Again.

~Jess

I can’t give credit for the quote because it has been around for a while, and it is used on everything from t-shirts to mugs to signs to billboards. I’ve seen it at protests and rallies. I’ve heard it from both folks on the Left and the Right.

I think about the quote a few times a week these days…

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I was a Literature teacher for years and basically a professional reader my entire life. I have read several pieces of fiction that prepared me for what I see around me daily…

The Parable of the Sower. Animal Farm. The Handmaid’s Tale. 1984. The Giver. The Road. The Hunger Games. Fahrenheit 451. A Brave New World. The Lottery. The Stand. It Can’t Happen Here.

That last novel was the hardest for me, and it is because I didn’t pick it up until a few years ago. I found it almost unbearable because of the prescience of the author. Sinclair Lewis was able to envision the backsliding of our democracy with clarity, and it scared me. I listened to it on audio, and I should tell you that it took me months to get through it.

You know the feeling of reading something that is too much on the nose. Too true. Too frightening in an already scary situation.

I found out that it could indeed happen here.

But some of the novels were difficult reads because of the way society changes when authoritarianism enters the frame. Some of the people in dystopian societies written into the novels become as bad or even worse than the people in power. The societies become more hateful as hateful rhetoric is used and encouraged by those in power. The societies become more violent. The societies start to crave brutality. Even bloodshed.

The book that has haunted me for 15 years now is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I read it while pregnant with my daughter, which made it all that much worse.

I won’t spoil the book for you if you’ve not read it, and please go and read it if not, but the scene in the cellar with the people trapped awaiting their fate and the scene with the pregnant woman in the woods will never leave me.

When I read what was on the spit over the fire in the woods, I screamed out and woke my husband. I am not an especially emotional person, but I sobbed into my pillow, while my husband asked in earnest why I would ever read something so horrible.

Because I am a reader, and in my defense, I didn’t have any inclination that either scene would be written, and it didn’t matter anyway because I had to finish the novel to find closure for the main characters.

After I finished The Road, I reflected on the books that felt similar in their cruel, apocalyptic settings. I immediately thought of The Stand by Stephen King. And then the short story The Lottery by Shirley Jackson which led me to think about The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and back to one of my favorite novels, The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler.

Similar themes: Societal collapse due to disease or war or an election. Chaos. Conformity. Blind obedience. Mob mentality. Violence that begets violence. Widespread brutality and cruelty.

Yesterday, a few of those themes came to mind when I read an AP article on ICE.

I found it interesting that the same agency that claimed to not have enough funds to purchase body cameras for ICE agents now has $20 million to spend on gloves that can essentially act as tasers during traffic stops and raids. I guess it all depends on where the Trump regime and Border Czar Tom Homan actually want to spend taxpayer dollars, and it seems they’d like to spend money on brutality rather than accountability.

Things got much worse when I opened the comment section of the AP article that was linked on Facebook. Much worse.

Some of the comments included, “ICE, ICE baby” and “They could just comply” and “I hope local LEOs can get in on this” and “Good!”

I recognized what I was reading. Apocalyptic dialogue. Dystopian discourse.

Chaos. Conformity. Blind obedience. Mob mentality. Violence that begets violence. Brutality and cruelty.

I was speechless, but if I could have spoken, I would quote the line I wrote at the beginning of this essay: The boots you lick will stomp you too. The regime is just breaking in the boots they will place on your neck. This doesn’t stop with immigrants or with ICE.

It stops when there is no one left to resist.

Conformity and blind obedience do not give you a pass. They just give you a little more time. Mob mentality will rob you of your decency and morality. The violence you cheer will beget the violence they use on you. The brutality and cruelty you praise will be aimed in your direction.

The boots will stomp you too. Maybe not today. Maybe you are still useful to the regime, but eventually, they will come for you too.

The story details change. Different oppressors. Different uniforms. Different slogans. Different targets for abuse. But the themes remain the same. The power identifies someone as less than human and promises safety to everyone else and then waits for the crowd to applaud.

But no one who applauds the regime gets to decide where it stops. In every version of the story, those who applaud become the next chapter.

If I have learned anything from the literature I mentioned, it’s that we have two choices: resistance or compliance. I want to resist, and I want others to resist. I want them to read and understand our stories and react when they recognize the boots.

We aren’t just reading these stories anymore.

We are watching them in real time.

We are living them.

~Jess

Analyses by the Center for Progressive Reform, an organization tracking the progress of Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation indicate that about 53 percent of the domestic administrative policy recommendations outlined in Project 2025 have been initiated or completed.

The Project is a far-right governing blueprint, and the Heritage Foundation has never been shy about its agenda. Project 2025 told us what they wanted to do to government, and a new report published by the Heritage Foundation tells us what they think about women.

We are not partners in public life, but people to be managed and separated and minimized.

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I happened across a sentence in the new Heritage report entitled, “Title IX’s Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Parity.” The Report was released by the Heritage Foundation on July 8, 2026.

Here is the sentence that caught my attention:

That sentence shook me. I couldn’t believe I read it in a report from an organization that is actively working inside the Trump regime. Trump appointed several contributors and authors tied to Project 2025 and the Foundation, such as Russell Vought (Office of Management and Budget), Tom Homan (border policy), and Brendan Carr (FCC). The Heritage Foundation is now fully embedded in the Trump regime.

I went on to read the entire report on Title IX, and I could barely contain my anger and outrage.

The plan is to end, or severely limit, women’s competitive sports and return to sex-segregated opportunities for men and women in schools across the country. To assert that women never needed sports in the first place. To prove that Title IX has become a tool of “feminist social engineering.” To demonstrate that women don’t need competitive sports and that “clubs, intramurals, and exercise classes…” would suffice.

To instead encourage “activities that emphasize rhythm, coordination, community, and graceful exertion.” To prove that women don’t need to compete at elite levels, but rather benefit from activities that build, “health, good habits, vigor, grace, confidence, and beauty.”

The report outlines that the goal for women’s sports should be, “…virtue and health grounded in reality and freedom, not the imposition of a male-oriented competitive ideal.”

I know a little about competitive sports. I am married to a Head Football Coach, and we have five kids. They played varsity sports, and two were recruited to play at the collegiate level, including our oldest daughter. She has played softball on competitive teams since her middle school days. She also ran the 4x100 and competed in the long jump.

But her true love was softball. She excelled at softball and I can tell you that the Title IX that insists that girls have the same right to a competitive sport as boys, made a difference in her life. A competitive sport gave her confidence. It gave her stability. It gave her lifelong friendships. It gave her the ability to understand teamwork and her own role in life.

Softball made her the person she is today. Competition made her better prepared for her adult life. She understands persistence and grit. She knows what it’s like to win and lose. She handles both well thanks to elite competition.

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I read the entire Title IX report produced by the Heritage Foundation, and it took a while. Not because it is that long, and certainly not because the report is complex — it’s a 45 minute, easy read.

It took me a while because I couldn’t stand to read the faux-academic drivel. I couldn’t bear to read the anti-woman words formed into random sentences. I couldn’t stomach the pseudoscience used to prop up the thesis that women do not need competitive sports.

So, I did a little digging into the man who wrote the report: Scott Yenor, PhD. He is the acting Chair of the American Citizenship Initiative and a Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

The page dedicated to him on the Heritage Foundation’s site has praise for his work, saying: “Yenor is a student of the hostile forces of feminism and liberals that rip the family apart or prevent families from forming.”

Well, there you go...a lengthy report that I am positive will land on the Department of Education’s desk, written by a man spewing venom toward feminists and liberals. Toward women in general it seems.

Yenor included so many anti-woman tropes that it would be impossible to include them all, but the goal of the report, beyond ending competitive sports for women and girls is to add more sports for men. Yenor consistently argues that adding women’s sports created a system unfair to men’s sports. That men derive more benefit from competitive sports than do women.

From the report:

The “weaponization” Yenor is referring to is the inclusion of women and girls in school sports.

Sounds like the old and tired DEI arguments from the Right. Giving equal opportunity to women and people of color is somehow diminishing the opportunities of others. We can clearly see where anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion have landed us since they have been dismantled by the Trump regime.

Our country is not better without DEI — we could argue that it is worse.

The irony in all of this is not lost on me. The Heritage Foundation has consistently fought to “save” girls’ sports and has taken a stand against trans athletes in sports. They argue that “male genetics and physiology provide inherent competitive and safety advantages that undermine fairness for female athletes under Title IX” all the while the true intention was to dismantle women’s sports.

The “men in women’s sports” rhetoric was just anti-trans rhetoric. The anti-trans sports fight was always a vehicle for a broader rollback of women’s sports protections.

The Heritage Foundation was never committed to an effort to save or better women’s sports. They used their anti-woman, anti-trans, anti-inclusion talking points to try to attain their true goal: the elimination of competitive sports for women. To keep women segregated from men starting in school sports.

Ultimately, to keep women in their place — limiting women’s ambition and opportunities. Away from competition and excellence.

~Jess

~Marshall McLuhan

I consume a lot of words every day. I work with words every day. I have been trying to read more books than I have in the last few years, but I still always end up reading dozens of articles on current issues every single day.

I start with AP and Reuters on my phone. I move on to the Missouri Independent and the KC Star and then scroll on social media to see if I missed anything newsworthy from other states or outlets. That usually takes well over an hour, and sometimes two if I do any research on the articles.

After that, I make sure that I finish anything I skipped in my weekly New Yorker and my monthly Atlantic.

And then I try to read fiction for an hour a day. That is becoming more difficult with distractions, so I plug my phone in to charge in another room and silence the notifications so I am not tempted to scroll or respond to comments.

I have to take extreme measures to protect my reading time. I have always loved to read books and even I find it harder and harder to do.

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In last month’s Atlantic magazine, I read the title of an article: The End of Reading is Here by Rose Horowitch. I was hesitant to read it because I was scared to read it. I can see the end of reading all around me, and I saw it several years ago while still in the classroom. It was becoming harder and harder to assign reading because many of the kids just wouldn’t do the reading.

And I didn’t end up actually “reading” the Atlantic article, but I listened to it in the car on the way to a speaking event way down in Cape Girardeau a few weeks back.

In fact, I was listening to the article while driving down I-70, which is an absolute mess with construction right now. The lanes turn into what appears to be narrow cattle chutes. I was about 15 minutes into the article, and about an hour east of Kansas City, when a semi didn’t see me in the passing lane and started merging into my lane — I ended up hitting a concrete barrier. I did enough damage to my car that it is still in the shop two weeks later, but I was unharmed, and what stayed with me wasn’t the wreck. It was the article.

After a quick rescue by a State Trooper and a loaner car from one of my kids, I was able to continue the hours-long drive to Cape. I started the audio once my brain settled, and I can’t say that listening and thinking about the end of reading made me feel any better. I even referenced the article in my keynote speech to the Democrats gathered in Cape.

From the Atlantic article: “According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: In 2025, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.”

My god. We are overwhelmingly choosing not to read. I read those stats and immediately thought of a book I taught. Fahrenheit 451.

I know I don’t have to explain to my audience the plot of Fahrenheit 451, but I will remind you that in Bradbury’s book, the firemen in the dystopian future actually set fires to burn books. Sometimes they also set fires to people who refused to relinquish their books. Spoiler alert: by the end of the novel, there is an outcast, but intellectual community, who is purposely setting to memory the words of the classics before the words are burned or just forgotten altogether.

That also makes me think of the Library at Alexandria, which the article also speaks to. The event that may have supercharged the Dark Ages. I can’t help but wonder if we are headed that way as well — and the new Dark Ages won’t be because of arson. It will be because our society has decided to forgo reading for short snippets of information and AI summaries and influencer content.

In red states, the issues with reading can be even deeper with book bans. These bans are created with the explicit purpose of prohibiting reading and literacy.

In St. Joseph, a city south of me, several members of a local church filed book challenges on classics in school libraries and used in classrooms. The attempted bans did not get Board approval and I can’t help but think that part of the reason is that several of the folks complaining about certain books admitted to not even reading the books.

Just yesterday in Missouri, two Republican lawmakers, Secretary of State Denny Hoskins and State Senator Rick Brattin, threatened to pull funding from the Columbia, MO library system because of a Rainbow Story Time in which two age-appropriate storybooks about inclusivity were read to young participants. In a statement to the press, Hoskins admitted to not reading the books he was threatening to ban and pull library funding over.

I don’t know how this timeline gets any dumber. I feel like we’ve been plunged into a real life Idiocracy, a movie I couldn’t even finish because it is as prescient as it is ridiculous.

It can feel hopeless to slip into a postliterate society with an entire political party rooting and cheering for illiteracy.

McLuhan was right. The liberal world by definition is literate.

And if literacy is the foundation of liberal democracy and of empathy through shared stories and of citizens who can think critically about power, then we have to defend books and literacy. We can’t be at the end of reading.

Every book we read and every story we share and every library we defend is an act of resistance.

So, go start a book club. Go to your local library’s story time. Open a free little library. Donate your used books. Join your library board. Encourage your friends and family to read more.

I hope you join me in resisting. And in reading.

~Jess

Well, I already knew that instinctively, but my thoughts were confirmed when I came across a CNBC study of the worst ranked states in the country. Here is the ranking:

1. Tennessee

2. Texas

3. Indiana

4. Louisiana

5. Georgia

6. Utah

7. Missouri

8. Alabama

9. Oklahoma

10. Arkansas

States ranked at the bottom of the list were penalized for high crime rates, low health care access, a lack of livable wage policies, a lack of worker protections, and laws that restrict civil and reproductive rights.

Yep. Missouri resembles those remarks…

I bet you noticed something else immediately, though. Each of the states listed is dominated by the Republican Party. They all have a GOP-dominated government and many of the states listed, like mine, have had a GOP supermajority for decades and also have a Republican trifecta holding the Governor’s office and the Statehouse and State Senate.

This is where I state the obvious: Republicans can’t govern. And they don’t want to. It was never about governance. It was always about consolidating power.

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You can imagine how many lawmakers I have talked to or listened to over the years. It’s been more than I care to count. I am an expert on the stump speech at this point, and some of them have been pretty terrible, but a few will always stick out in my memory as complete and total bullshit. I will never get that time back, but what really stuck with me are the folks running for office with naked ambition — many of them felt no reason to even hide it.

The worst stump speeches always come from an incumbent Republican or, for that matter, any Republican running for a seat in a safe district. A district like mine that hasn’t elected a Democrat in 34 years and never a woman.

These wannabe politicians rarely hide their hubris and regularly double-down on propaganda and nonsense. This includes running as a “pro-life” candidate in a state with an abortion ban or on school vouchers for the private religious schools that do not even exist in many safe red districts.

They run on “anti-woke” agendas in towns so small that there are no stoplights but three Baptist churches — and not a woke agenda in sight. They push anti-trans legislation in school sports in places where the local school has nine kids per grade and has to co-op with two other schools to fill out an 8-Man football team.

They also run on Trump. No, seriously. They run on being the biggest Trump suck-up.

There are two Republican candidates running in my Congressional district who box each other’s ears over who is the biggest Trump sycophant. They have each sent out mailers with Trump’s image claiming to be the biggest MAGA simp on the planet. They don’t bother to wipe the brown off their noses. You would think the bootlicking is embarrassing enough, but not for these men.

These candidates attack each other not for stances on policy or healthcare or schools or roads or even farms. They attack each other claiming the other doesn’t stand with Trump. It’s bizarre.

It’s also sickening when you think about what Trump policies have done to my rural, agricultural district. Much more sickening when you think about what Trump has done to women like E. Jean Carroll.

Missouri is ranked as one of the worst places to live and Republican candidates all around me run on absolutely nothing. Sometimes even worse than nothing — and they keep winning. In landslides.

It’s maddening that the Republican playbook is not even subtle. They say the quiet part out loud. They are running to consolidate Republican power in a red state.

Republicans call it leadership when the roads crumble and the hospitals close and the public schools starve and the people they claim to represent are left with nothing in a state that continuously fails its citizens.

And that’s the thing: at the end of the day, what does all of the Republican loyalty get the average red state voter? Nothing. Less than nothing. Bottom of the barrel status.

Messaging on culture war propaganda is much easier than speaking about policies. It’s also easier to vote for a culture warrior than it is to figure out which politician is running with your best interest at heart.

Some voters just like to vote for a brand and then quit paying attention once the ballot is cast, but I think that bit has run its course. Voters can’t look away from a war of choice and high gas and food prices. They can’t look away when their school goes to a 4-day week and their local hospital closes. They can’t not see their towns folding in front of their eyes.

The culture war distractions only work as long as people are willing to ignore the results. But the results are here anyway. They are measurable and personal.

Missouri isn’t failing by accident — it’s failing by design under leaders who never intended to govern in the first place. Republicans can’t govern and they don’t want to. It was always about consolidating power.

The only way out of the bottom of that CNBC list is for voters to demand something better…something like actual leadership.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If we keep voting for the same performance, we’re going to keep getting the same outcome. If we keep voting for the same party, they will keep doing what they have done for over two decades.

We already know exactly where that leads.

~Jess

P.S. If you would like to help fund down-ballot Democratic nominees in Missouri, please join Blue Missouri. We will be calling candidates in just two weeks to let them know how much their campaign will be receiving from Blue Missouri donors. We are one of the largest donors to candidates in the entire state — we fund the reddest and toughest races across the state.

You can join here.

So many consultants are ignoring the people who actually know the issues to win in rural America, and candidates are paying for that mistake.

I live in a GOP-dominated state in a very rural area, and I know my neighbors and understand rural spaces. I drive to other rural communities two to four times a month to talk to other rural Democrats who are organizing in their own red communities.

I can answer the question, “Why do they vote against their self-interest?”

Self-interest is subjective. Self-interest can only really be known by the person casting the ballot, and some people believe that suffering economic hardships in order to vote for an anti-abortion candidate is truly in their “self-interest.” And sometimes, more often than not in hyper-local races, rural folks only have Republicans on their ballot. They couldn’t vote in their self-interest if they tried.

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I also know that farmers and rural industries still feel the impact of NAFTA, though Democratic folks have stopped talking about it. I know monopolies and corporate agriculture have gutted rural spaces. I know public school defunding and the collapse of rural health systems are hammering the final nail in the coffin of rural areas across the country.

I know and understand rural people and communities as do my friends doing the same work across the country. There are hundreds of us on the ground working every single day to reach our neighbors.

And yet, I rarely get calls from political consultants who would like to better understand the people I speak to on a daily basis. In fact, I have stopped spending much time in rooms with people who say they want to understand how to win back red spaces because I usually leave these rooms feeling like I am treated as a unique oddity and then dismissed because my advice is that the only way out is directly through the middle of Republican country.

I’ll tell you what’s hardest to swallow — the massive amount of money poured into political consulting each year.

Basic consulting for a small campaign can run anywhere from $10K-$50K. Big national campaigns may spend $100K per month on consulting.

I am tired of so many consultants making so much money on so many campaigns across the country while not listening to organizers with decades of experience on the ground. I am tired of their bad advice to candidates and the way they gloss over the need to listen to the people.

And I am not just talking about rural organizers — I am talking about the people on the ground across the country in urban and suburban spaces. Those with the intimate knowledge of their own communities being dismissed by highly-paid consultants who lose race after race for their candidates and go on to run even more unsuccessful races while filling their own pockets with the grassroots donations from hopeful folks who really are hungry for change.

I understand spending money and losing a race, but most losing local races keep campaign dollars in their own communities. The down-ballot Democratic candidates I work with every single day usually don’t have the money to hire consultants, but nearly every dollar they raise and spend goes to a local or statewide vendor.

Supporting a down-ballot candidate for state office is a boon to local printers and event spaces and vendors of all sorts. The money sent into these campaigns stays in the communities involved in the race. Grassroots donors are often giving $10 or $25 hoping to build something in their communities, and local campaigns are really good at recycling money through the community.

Investing in the cheap seats is a wise use of a political donation.

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And speaking of money, here is where I will give away some of my local grassroots candidate knowledge…how to raise money for a rural race.

You likely know I ran for the Missouri Statehouse in 2022. You may not know that I raised more for my race than any other State Leg candidate in the entire state. I raised almost $275K for a rural seat in deep red Missouri and the question I have been asked for years is just how I managed that.

Easy. I didn’t really ask for money. I was too embarrassed to ask for donations for my campaign. I never completed one minute of call time and I never reached out to donors through registries or paid lists. I didn’t call up my friends or relatives and ask for donations. I didn’t do any of the things I was supposed to do to raise money for my race.

But I did use social media and a lot of it. I posted daily videos and updates about my area and my platform and how I wasn’t alone in a rural area. The money started coming in, and with every few thousand dollars, I would make a post showing donors what they had purchased for the campaign and how I intended to use it whether it was signs or T-shirts or campaign lit. After each post, several more folks would donate and I repeated the process until I had outraised every single candidate who had ever run in MO House District 1.

I filmed myself knocking doors and making calls and showing up at parades and forums and debates. Through the entire process, I created hope that all isn’t lost in places like mine and in other difficult races across the country.

Raising so much money did not in fact win the race, but it was a game changer for rural Missouri politics — it put my district on the map and let Republicans know that they aren’t invincible. And just by showing up against the odds, I helped others realize they could do it too. And they are doing it. All over the state.

Missouri has almost every state race contested this cycle, and that is the first hurdle to change. But would an out-of-state political consultant understand that? I am not certain.

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We can’t continue to ignore local knowledge and local organizers who know their neighbors and the issues important to their neighbors. We can’t use national messaging for state races. We can’t chase the optics that some consultants want to see at the risk of losing the voters’ reality.

The best way for candidates to get their messaging is to talk to organizers on the ground, and of course, the gold standard, talking to voters in meetings and rallies and forums across the particular district.

Show up in local spaces and get to know local organizers.

Use vendors as close to the community as humanly possible to help fund local infrastructure.

Consider paying organizers rather than high-priced consultants…especially in state level races.

~Jess

Jennifer was in her early 30s when she and her husband divorced. She had two little girls and worked as a nurse. She started thinking about dating about a year after her divorce. She was introduced to a paramedic working a few towns over, and they hit it off.

They started dating exclusively within weeks.

Jennifer’s new boyfriend seemed to be in love with her and asked her for selfies often — she usually sent one over. He also asked for more risqué photos the longer they dated, and she obliged. After all, they were in a relationship, and she was flattered that he liked the way she looked. She sent several nude or half-nude photos to him over the course of a year.

And then Jennifer found out that her paramedic boyfriend had several girlfriends in several counties. She also found out that he had shared her intimate photos with some of his friends and coworkers.

She was devastated, but she moved on.

That was over a decade ago, and Jennifer is now remarried with a new baby and a new job working in politics and fundraising. It was at this time that I became familiar with Jennifer and her work.

She is smart and progressive and cares about her community and state and understands the policies needed in healthcare. She is an advocate for the disabled community, and she works tirelessly to help marginalized communities get the healthcare services they need.

I have told her on many occasions that she should run. Many, many occasions.

Jennifer has turned me down every time I have offered to help her run. And she eventually told me why she refuses to run when she knows she is more than qualified and can run a good campaign.

The nude photos.

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Jennifer said she contacted her ex after their breakup to ask that he delete the photos, and he told her he did, but she still has a hard time believing him. She said that she knows she could raise a lot of money to run and would therefore be a credible threat to a Republican opponent, and she has always feared that opposition research could dig up the boyfriend and the photos.

The pictures still haunt her. She is adamant that she will never run herself because of the embarrassment of photos she consensually sent to a boyfriend a decade ago that could be leaked.

I met Becky, who is a community advocate, and is retired from teaching. I asked her to run for office a few years back and she said she couldn’t because her oldest son had been convicted of minor in possession of alcohol at a college party years ago. She was afraid that opposition research would find his conviction and publish it.

Her son is now working as a teacher, and she was afraid to hurt his career by running for office.

I know Stacy, who is retired from the electric company as an Administrative Assistant, but she won’t run because she had a stint of bad health years ago and ended up with thousands of dollars in medical bills and a bankruptcy due to those bills.

She is embarrassed of the financial state that so many Americans face every day.

I know Joyce, who would never consider running because she has three speeding tickets, and Mary, who won’t run because she is 65 and considers herself too old.

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And then there is me.

I was asked to run for years before I actually did because I was worried about my family. I didn’t want my boys to suffer the consequences of their mom going up against the GOP supermajority and all of its money. I didn’t want my husband to have to bear the comments and the actions of those who didn’t want me in office.

But more than that, I had my own dirty secret. An embarrassing secret.

I debated running for office for years because I had an old tax bill — that was paid off in full — but I was worried that my late payment would make me look irresponsible to voters a decade later. I agonized over that mistake for years before deciding to run.

And it did indeed come out to the public. There was post after post after post on social media by Missouri GOP insiders, and it stung, but it didn’t work as the GOP wanted. No one was particularly interested in my late payment as it turned out.

It seems there are a whole lot of folks struggling to pay their monthly bills, and too many could relate to my own struggle.

I did get skewered on Facebook on the local Republican page, but it just wasn’t enough to do more damage to my candidacy — I was already damaged running as a Democrat in rural red Missouri. It seems a late tax payment just made me more relatable.

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Women self-vet themselves harder than any oppo research could vet them. They tend to judge themselves in too harsh a light on things that most of us have done.

Women are harder on themselves when thinking of running for office than the voting public would be. We hold ourselves to a higher standard in many cases. A higher bar. And that’s not a bad thing, except when the standard isn’t universally held.

Some women use fear to disqualify themselves for office, while some men bypass it entirely.

I am speaking specifically about Graham Platner. A progressive candidate for Senate in Maine. The hardworking regular guy who managed to win the nomination for Senate.

The problem isn’t that he is a progressive and therefore not vetted — information has been leaking for months — his folks had to know details would eventually come out. The problem is a man who knows his own history running for higher office in the first place.

Platner has been accused by a former girlfriend of sexually abusing her. He has stated the allegation is false, and of course he is innocent until proven otherwise. But this isn’t a one-off accusation.

In June, The New York Times published accounts from three women who previously had romantic relationships with Platner, and characterized his behavior as "unsettling." They described how Platner could be demeaning toward women, and in one instance, physically threatening.

The point of my essay isn’t to say, “Women good. Men bad,” or to imply Platner is guilty of any crime. It is to say that we need to talk to candidates about the things that should keep them from running vs things that are common and not likely to hurt a candidacy.

There is a certain amount of arrogance that is needed to run for office, but I think there is also a certain amount of fear needed. That fear should do the vetting for candidates, even before the opposition research, but obviously it isn’t applied equally across all candidates.

In my experience, more women seem to internalize the fear and miss the moxie.

Several women coming forward with allegations of harmful behavior should be vetted, and if found credible, end a candidacy. A speeding ticket or a child’s MIP or a consensual photo sent to a boyfriend ten years ago shouldn’t close the door on a candidacy.

I hope we recognize the qualified people who think they can’t run versus those who shouldn’t.

~Jess

The picture was taken by photographer, Jacob Moscovitch at a St Louis rally for abortion rights eight long years ago. The woman in the photo with me is Veronica…I just stood next to her at a town hall for local representatives a few weeks ago.

You’ll notice the sign I am carrying says, “Governor Parson, SHAME on YOU.” The fight for abortion access in Missouri has been going on so long that Governor Parson termed out and has been replaced by Governor Kehoe.

The Missouri GOP supermajority passed a cruel abortion ban in 2018. We lived under tyranny until Missourians collected enough signatures to put abortion access on the ballot in 2024. It won.

We have had a Constitutional right to abortion for over a year and a half, but until just last week, women in our state could not access abortion. A Jackson County judge finally ruled that Missouri women must have the right to medication abortion.

Per the Missouri Independent:

Medication abortion will be available in Missouri for the first time since 2018 after a judge determined most of the state’s challenged abortion regulations are unconstitutional, including laws requiring hospital privileges, complication plans, and special clinic licenses.

But it doesn’t stop there. Even after the majority of voters approved bodily autonomy for Missourians, Republicans refuse to listen to the people and plan to put abortion back on the ballot in November. Likely with confusing language and ballot candy due to a maniac serving as the Secretary of State. His name is Denny Hoskins.

His ballot summaries are the stuff of nightmares, purposely confusing voters.

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I have been at several rallies with my friend Veronica over the years — the terrible news is that we have been protesting together for nearly a decade. Terrible because we have to keep protesting the same things in the same state. Abortion access. Public school funding. Access to the ballot. Democracy in general. And recently we have met up at anti-ICE and anti-data center meetings and rallies.

We are both part of a group of mostly women in the St Joseph area called Persisterhood. I like the name — it makes sense. Sometimes it seems that is what we are best at. Sisterhood and persisting.

I mean, we are living in a state that would test the patience of Job…

The Persisterhood group is made up of mostly women (and a few men) of all ages. Most of the women active in the group and in leadership roles are retired, but several are in their 20s and 30s, and that makes for a nice mix of expertise and experience. We also have folks from nearly every walk of life, but there is a theme of retired teachers and professors that I see in so many activist groups — public speaking and organizing and multi-tasking comes a little easier for some retired teachers.

Ask me how I know.

There is a misconception about teachers, though…well, about some teachers. It’s common for folks to assume the patience and tolerance of people in the classroom. I have to say, we aren’t all patient. We aren’t all passive or obedient either. We come in all personalities.

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I was a high school teacher for most of my career, but I did spend quite a few years teaching 8th grade English. For the most part, I enjoyed it.

One year, though, there was a schedule change, and I was moved to 7th grade. I have to say, it was the worst year of my life. No shade to the 7th grade teachers of the world, but I was not cut out for teaching that specific grade.

I remember teaching a lesson once, and I heard a loud noise that sounded like a screeching goat from the back of my classroom. It happened once, and I let it go. It happened again, and I addressed it and had the young man stay a minute after class to talk about the distraction.

He was mortified because he really was a good kid and never made trouble. I will never forget asking him why he acted out in class and made such a loud noise during a lesson…I asked him why he would do that. And with every fiber of his being, and in complete honesty, he said, “I don’t know why I would do that and I hope I never do it again.”

I talked to a peer at the end of the day, and she directed me to a study on middle school aged children and their brains. It told me all I needed to know, but I realized I just wasn’t cut out for goat noises during lessons, so I made my way to teaching high school.

The point…not every teacher has an abundance of patience or the ability to deal well with irritation. It’s the same with organizing.

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And that’s where another Persisterhood member, and former teacher, Nancy comes in.

Nancy has been organizing protests and rallies against a proposed data center in our area. She has led several local folks to attend city council and county commissioner meetings. She took the lead on handing out signs and T-shirts and information about data centers, and she led a rally in our small town last weekend.

I did not attend, as I was speaking in a nearby town with local candidates, but I did read her messages in our Persisterhood group chat. She said there were several people in attendance, and that a man she didn’t know arrived to protest the data center. He stood right next to Nancy in his Make America Great Again hat.

Remember the patience of Job? Well, it’s not me, but thank goodness it is Nancy.

There is no way I would have been able to calmly protest next to a red hat. I have no patience for MAGA, and it’s not because I haven’t tried. It’s precisely because I have tried. Many times. Over and over.

A red hat on the street feels like a screaming goat from the back of my classroom. I can try to overlook it once, but I can’t keep acting like it’s okay. I can’t be quiet about it either. I can’t not address it. I can’t walk away.

And that’s exactly why we need so many organizers, and so many that have different personalities. Some that are better at reaching folks who differ widely from our own beliefs. Some who can make inroads.

Some who can hear a screeching goat and let it go.

That ain’t me, and that’s okay, because I work with Nancy and I work with Veronica and I work with dozens of other activists doing the work on the ground every single day in a state that would make a lot of other people look at moving somewhere else.

I don’t have to be everything, because I am not doing this alone.

I have stood next to Veronica for nearly a decade now, holding signs that somehow never seem to go out of date or lack relevance.

I get to work alongside Nancy, who shows up with a steadiness and a patience I admire more than I can put into words. It’s more than I can do.

I get to be part of a group of women who just keep showing up, over and over again, in a state that keeps asking more of us than it should. More than many can bear.

Missouri keeps testing us, but we keep finding each other and holding on for dear life, leaning on each other. Resisting. Persisting.

And that’s about as much as any of us can say.

~Jess

I am also watching this play out across the country while in a state with a near authoritarian-type legislature. Missouri has been under the boot of a GOP supermajority for over two decades. And I do mean under their boot. They are suffocating us.

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I know what it’s like to vote and have my voice silenced by my own representatives. I know what it’s like to have my life threatened under a cruel abortion ban. I know what it’s like to send my kids to defunded schools. I know what it’s like to lose my health insurance and my access to healthcare. I know what it’s like to watch my paved roads and my sidewalks degrade to rubble. I know what it’s like to watch my state slip from a common sense democracy to a theocratic authoritarianism.

I also know that paternalism is a major factor in Missouri. Our state officials act as if they know better what we need than we do — and they are wrong. Our reps consistently overturn the will of Missouri voters and in essence, pat us on the head when we present a new amendment or proposition, and then do whatever they want…or rather, what their donors want.

As I write this, Missouri Republicans are trying to eliminate our citizen-led petition process. The only way Missourians have been able to fight back against the overreach of the GOP — we collect signatures to put a measure on the ballot, and when we collect enough, the measure will be voted on by the people.

This initiative petition process is the only way we were able to expand Medicaid and overturn an abortion ban and raise the minimum wage and fight Right to Work and legalize marijuana. Our lawmakers refused us on each measure, and we did it anyway at the ballot, which is why Republicans are hell bent to eliminate our process and our voices.

I am sick of it, and so are so many of the folks I speak to on a regular basis. The problem is, we keep electing Republicans who keep directing us down a bigger hole that is increasingly harder to get out of. After decades of defunding and dismantling, it’s going to take a lot of time to get our state back in order — back in the business of taking care of our citizens.

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But there is a problem separate from our Republican problem — there is an establishment Democratic problem as well, and it makes me a little uncomfortable to write on it, but I feel the need to say some things. As a Democrat, but especially as a rural Democrat. A dirt road Democrat.

Rural spaces throughout the country were devastated in the first waves of the GOP takeover — before Donald Trump and his ilk, we suffered under Republicanism, but also under the “moderate” Democratic leaders who tried to be as conservative as possible to win in this red state.

Rural ballots don’t need a “Republican lite” on the ballot when we always have a Republican on the ballot.

In Missouri, we haven’t seen progress in decades, but the regression is around every corner. And nothing will get better without the big ideas I am seeing in the new politicians across the country.

I am going to write something scary to some — the politicians I am talking about are Democratic Socialists, and I am supposed to be scared of them and their ideas. I am supposed to believe that I am in the big tent party while thinking progressives are too far left. I am supposed to link the term “socialism” to “communism.” I am supposed to be repulsed by the very idea of socialism, even if the word “Democratic” precedes it.

I’m not.

Can you imagine trying to scare me with the term “Democratic Socialist” while I live under a GOP supermajority that would literally sign my death warrant to force a pregnancy? They have defunded my daughter’s school. They have defunded our roads and healthcare and services. They silence our vote. They cheat and gerrymander. They have unapologetically imposed authoritarianism for two decades.

I am not scared of Democratic socialism because I have lived under a Republican-dominated legislature for over two decades. I have nothing to fear from the word socialism, and here is some good Missouri common sense to prove it:

This isn’t just New York politics, either. There is a wave of progressivism across the country, and I see it when I speak in Missouri and Iowa and Kansas and Nebraska and Illinois. The movement is often referred to as “Prairie Progressivism” or “Prairie Populism.”

It originates from the spitfire prairie progressives of the last century. The folks who led the way in workers’ rights and advocating for public schools and fair trade for farmers and healthcare. These folks often run as Democrats, but are deemed further left, though I am not sure that definition fits anymore. The new left-of-center is pretty much just common sense these days.

And that’s what voters want — common sense and policies that work. It doesn’t seem like it should be hard to convince Democrats that people want what the progressives are offering.

When someone tells me to be afraid of “Democratic socialism,” I have to wonder…afraid of what, exactly? I have seen it work in the happiest countries across the globe and the biggest city in the US.

In the end, this isn’t just a New York City movement. It’s not a trend. It’s not a phase.

It’s a movement of people across the country who are done being told to settle for less. It’s people who know that common sense should mean something again — something that actually improves their lives. All of our lives.

That’s what this new wave of progressivism is tapping into, and we aren’t scared. The Democratic Party should not be scared either. Progressives and Democratic Socialists belong under the big tent just as much as moderates.

Progressivism is just the simple belief that the government should take care of its people. The people deserve it.

~Jess

No, really. My high school mascot was a Hillbilly. I graduated from Ozark, Arkansas, in 1993 — Home of the Hillbillies. To my knowledge, it is the only school in the country with that mascot.

The West Virginia Mountaineer is a wink and a nod to the hillbilly spirit, but while the WV mascot wears a buckskin outfit and coonskin hat and carries a musket, more of a frontiersman, the Ozark Hillbilly of my alma mater wore torn denim overalls and a worn felt hat and carried a shotgun.

Our Friday night football games were special in that we had a real hillbilly on the sidelines who carried a shotgun and fired a blank into the air after each touchdown. Brother Ted from the local Baptist church still carries on the tradition as far as I know. He ditched the corn cobb pipe and switched the moonshine jug for a bottle of water, though.

Since my graduation over three decades ago, the school officially pictures the mascot unarmed — a wink and a nod in itself to the modern day of school shootings.

One of our school chants was HPRD. It is an acronym for “hillbilly pride runs deep.” And I think that pride truly does run deep — when I mention my mascot from time to time, most might think I am embarrassed of my hometown, but I’m not at all. It is part of who I am, but I think there is a misconception about hillbillies and mountaineers and rednecks and rural people in general.

I am not talking about white trash. That is a different term altogether.

Some of the folks I mentioned could be white trash, but the term is not a default for rural or poor or mountain folk. White trash can be used demonstrably for any white person, regardless of region or income, who acts with rudeness and a lack of civilization and couth.

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Born and raised rural and mostly poor, I understand the term “white trash,” and I have spent my life trying to dodge the claim or association. It is one of the most harmful terms that someone stuck in the lower socioeconomic class could be labeled. I knew how not to get caught in the white trash net, because I had something that a lot of folks in my predicament didn’t have: I was born into situational poverty, not generational poverty.

I was the daughter of teenage parents who made a series of mistakes that led us to our place in society, but my grandparents and extended family were educated and as well off as many could hope to be. My parents went on to graduate college and trade school and do better for themselves and for me — we came up out of the poverty that many can’t escape because we knew how to navigate universities and job interviews and the mannerisms of the middle class, though we weren’t considered middle class. We weren’t stuck without a manual.

Situational poverty creates stories. Generational poverty creates despair.

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Last week, when I opened my news app to get my daily dose of no good and awful things happening in the country, I saw a strange contraption pictured in an article by the AP. It turned out it was a cage for an UFC fight with the White House in the foreground.

The People’s House was framed by literal violence.

I likely reacted just as you did when you saw the construction of a fight cage on the White House lawn. I had heard it was coming for months, but with a war and gas prices and grocery prices and losing my health insurance due to a lack of ACA subsidies, I didn’t pay much attention to a nearly bare-knuckles fight in our Capitol. I assumed it wouldn’t come to fruition.

I was wrong, but this is where my expertise in all things white trash is helpful in the understanding of the event, which I can say without a doubt, is white trash “culture” held in a place that is meant to create reverence and awe.

It was barbarism on display.

Our nation’s Capitol was defiled and belittled and polluted by a small man dictating violence. A cage fight was held on the ground that represents American Democracy. Men beat and pummeled each other in front of Our House. The entire debacle was a trashy carnival, complete with hate and racism and violence.

The fact that fistfights broke out in the crowd is no surprise, and even less surprising was a statement by a UFC fighter calling Michelle Obama a man.

It is a disgusting conspiracy thrown about by racist, knuckle-dragging, white trash troglodytes…

White trash behavior can come from any socioeconomic spectrum — Donald Trump and his ilk are the embodiment of white trash. They are wealthy, but they display the uncivilized and immoral lawlessness of the term. The stigma of a lower-status, lower-wage person aptly defines the most powerful man in the country and his genre of rich folk…trash.

The term has always been used to target poor and rural people, but what it actually describes is behavior. Trump’s behavior.

When I use the term “white trash,” it is usually self-deprecating, but I see the actual epitome in Donald Trump. The manifestation in his regime. The incarnation in his actions. The personification in his dictatorship.

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What happened on the White House South Lawn was not culture, but gross corruption. It was propaganda and blood sport, and it was cheered on by people who confused bare knuckles and physical dominance with strength and leadership.

The nasty voices in this regime claiming to speak for the “real Americans” are the ones who have never respected America.

I may be rural, and a hillbilly to boot, but I am not white trash. Trash is trash, no matter the bank account. The stigma applies to the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

I should know.

~Jess

It’s also where my ugliest trolls pop up.

I still have my old Facebook page that I opened about 15 years back. It was full of family updates and photos of my kids through the years, and is now scrubbed clean of family references and photos, because there are crazy folks out there, and I work in politics in a very red state. I don’t post on that Facebook page anymore, but I do log in a few times a month to scroll through Facebook Marketplace.

I may not want anyone to see my kids or grandkids, but I am a sucker for a deal, and Marketplace is one of my favorite haunts.

I have been looking for end tables for my living room for several months. My current mismatched ones are fine, but I’d like the look of something farmhouse-like but not farmhouse kitsch. The real stuff. Old farmhouse antiques.

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When I logged into my old Facebook to start scrolling for treasures, a post from a local woman caught my attention because I saw my State Senator’s name. I paused to read the long post about the same meeting I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, and my Senator’s smug appearance in town.

The lady writing the post had a different point of view. She was gushing praise for our lawmakers who showed up “when they didn’t have to.”

What? Showed up when they didn’t have to?

That is one of the biggest responsibilities in being a Representative — they are supposed to show up and listen, but they rarely do, so I don’t think they need praise for doing the bare minimum, but it wasn’t my post, and I digress.

The lady went on for a few paragraphs, and then towards the end of her post, she referenced the folks in the audience who were “unhinged.” She had an apology for the lawmakers who were subjected to questions — unhinged questions from a constituent.

Reader, she was likely referencing me.

I was not unhinged in that meeting, but I did shout out a question to my lawmaker, asking him to address the hundreds of thousands of dollars he has accepted from an organization that sends Missouri taxpayer money to private religious schools. I did tell him that I was forced to shout a question because he refuses to answer emails and phone calls asking him the same question.

Unhinged is not a word I would use to describe a constituent calmly asking a hard question of her Representative, but I do think the word is applicable to many folks in the meeting, including the one who made the post in the first place.

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Unhinged behavior is working a low -wage job and standing behind a Representative who voted to take away your right to earned sick time.

Proposition A was approved by 58% of Missouri voters in 2024. It gave eligible workers the right to earn 1 hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked up to 40 hours annually. After the proposition passed, Missouri Republican lawmakers passed HB 567, which struck the paid sick leave mandate from the law and stripped out cost-of-living adjustments to minimum wage.

My Representatives voted against the will of their constituents and made the lives and health of Missouri workers worse. Voting for any of these lawmakers is unhinged in my book.

Unhinged behavior is existing as a woman in this state and voting for lawmakers who would sign your death warrant with a cruel abortion ban and restrict access to reproductive health, even after Missourians passed a Constitutional amendment to secure the right to reproductive care.

Even more so, these same lawmakers just signed a “Born Alive Bill’ that could ban palliative care for dying newborns, tying the hands of doctors in tragic medical scenarios, including lethal fetal anomalies. In these cases, parents and doctors may currently choose palliative care to ensure the infant does not suffer, rather than undergoing aggressive, futile, or painful resuscitation.

I wholeheartedly believe that voting for lawmakers who would force cruelty onto suffering babies and grieving parents is unhinged.

Unhinged behavior is sending your kids and grandkids through Missouri public schools while voting for lawmakers who defund those schools to send taxpayer money to private religious schools.

Unhinged behavior is knowing that our current income tax covers two-thirds of Missouri’s budget, but voting for a lawmaker who wants to eliminate the income tax in lieu of a massive sales tax that will harm Missourians. Knowing that the most vulnerable seniors and those living on fixed incomes could see their taxes double just trying to buy groceries.

Unhinged behavior is voting for lawmakers who vote to put loaded guns on city buses and arm school teachers and give guns to domestic violence offenders.

Unhinged behavior is voting for the same party over and over again, even after that party has promised to decimate your schools and hospitals and post offices and sidewalks and libraries and put your state on the fast track to the bottom of the barrel.

Unhinged behavior is joining a cult masquerading as a political party and pretending that any of this is normal.

It’s not.

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No one has to like how I asked the questions at the meeting with my Reps. No one has to agree with my politics. Call me unhinged if you want. I’ve been called much worse.

But I hope folks will look at what’s actually happening in Missouri and ask if this is what you voted for. Because this isn’t about me being “unhinged” at a meeting — it’s not about me at all.

It’s about whether the people we elect are listening, or if they’ve decided they don’t have to anymore. Do they just do the bidding of their highest donors?

I already know the answer to that question. At least in my state.

And that’s something all of us, no matter the political stripe, should be concerned about.

~Jess

I was raised with a strict “no crying” policy, and I have not been able to shake my stoic inheritance, no matter the occasion.

The problem is the embarrassment I feel at crying in public. I definitely don’t think it makes me any better than anyone who cries in public…it may make me worse. Makes me look cold, when I am really soft and mushy inside.

A bleeding heart liberal who can’t bleed in public.

I just can’t muster the courage to cry in front of folks…but there have been a few notable exceptions in my life, and many of them came when I was teaching.

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I taught American Literature for years, and one of my favorite units of study was the Civil Rights Era. We are all familiar with the movement for civil rights in our country. We are also too familiar with the violence perpetrated onto Black Americans during the time.

One of the poems I taught during my Civil Rights unit was The Ballad of Birmingham written by Dudley Randall. The poem was written in the aftermath of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in which a Klan member placed dynamite in the church and killed four little girls. A truly horrific crime that Martin Luther King, Jr described as, “one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.”

I taught the poem every year, and every year I called on a student to read it after I presented the premise of the poem. I could not read it aloud and keep my composure — my eyes welled up during the reading, and I always walked to the back of the class in case my eyes started to leak despite my best attempts to keep them dry.

I think the mother in me can’t imagine the prospect of losing a child and I could not fathom the pain the mother feels when she finds her child’s shoe in the bits of glass and brick and she knows her baby is gone. Especially when the mother knew the dangers of a deeply racist country, and only relented to her child knowing she would be in a sacred place. In a church.

But she wasn’t safe.

She was murdered because she lived in a hateful, racist country. And this was the part that always hurts the most — I know that we still have those fears to contend with. The Civil Rights era is still upon us. We made a little too much progress, and we are being pulled back…kicking and screaming. Back into the past. Back into the fear and pain. Back into racism and all of the terrible isms.

Make America Great Again harkens all of the ugly. It encompasses the past. It enshrines the hate.

Makes me want to rage. Makes me want to cry.

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I had that overwhelming feeling this Tuesday in a moment that should have felt like a celebration. I wanted to cry instead.

I was lucky enough to be involved in a documentary a few years back. It was called “Dirt Road Democrat” and it was shot and compiled by videographer Catherine Hoffman, who worked with Kansas City PBS.

The short film turned out so well that Catherine was nominated for an Emmy. She didn’t win, but the film was widely seen…even by the folks who compiled artifacts for President Obama.

My picture and a quote about rural schools are inside the Obama museum. It’s pretty unbelievable to tell you the truth. The archivists reached out to me over two years ago, and I remained completely silent on the topic because I thought that there was no way I was actually going to be included in the museum, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself.

Turns out — I am in it.

Reader, you should know, I was never obsessed with Obama. I thought he was a fine man and a good President, but I sleepwalked through his Presidency by working two jobs and raising two kids and finishing my BA and MA. I was busy and didn’t think too hard on DC politics.

It was only after he was gone that I understood the horrors to come. It was then that I reflected on his Presidency, but especially his words. His actions. His presence. His decency.

That’s what hit me in the museum. His voice is everywhere, and he isn’t spewing hate. His image is projected throughout the museum with his words over the images. His speeches are shown on walls and his quotes are painted everywhere.

I felt the tears well up, and I got very uncomfortable. I was incredibly touched by the vocabulary and literacy and decency. Something I haven’t heard in years.

And that’s when it hit me — we are living in hell. We have been living in hell. We are in Dante’s Hell. I feel like I’m in the first circle, even though I did no harm and committed no sin, but I am punished in a purgatory that won’t end.

It feels like an eternity of living without hope. An eternity of separation from others and yearning. An ache for what was. A desire for normalcy and civility.

I managed to keep my emotions in check for the entirety of my visit and I was so happy to be included in something so big that I had no business being included in.

The funny part is, after reflecting on our current hell and our current civil rights fights, I couldn’t help but think about our future. The future we all share. The future referenced over and over and over again in the museum.

Obama was not a perfect man — I don’t know any perfect people. He did seem to be laser-focused on making things better. Looking forward. Thinking positively. Trying to find something good in most folks.

And that’s what I took away from my short visit to Chicago. Hope. I haven’t felt it in my bones like that since…well, since 2016. I lost something that November, and I bet you did too.

We all lost something that we have been searching for since.

I didn’t cry at the museum for the same reason I don’t cry anywhere — I am too exhausted for the activity. I am too tired to let the tears fall. I am too busy to waste time drying my eyes.

I’m embarrassed that I am too worn out to cry.

I will continue to feel the grief and the anger and the weight of what this country has done and continues to do, but I will also carry the naive hope that I took away from the museum, if for nothing else but stubbornness.

Hope. I can feel it.

Hope. Yes, we can.

~Jess

I install a new Dexcom device on the back of my arm every fifteen days so I can better track my diabetes and my sugar levels. The app has been helpful in tracking what makes my blood sugar spike, and things I should stay away from.

I know to watch all sugar and most carbohydrates, but I learned that coffee — even black coffee — spikes my sugar levels, and I have had to give it up, which has been quite the adjustment. And like everyone else, I have heard that stress can spike blood sugar, but now I have the data to prove it.

Every time I speak in public, I can watch my blood sugar rise in real time.

It’s not because I am nervous…I got over that years ago. It’s because what I speak about makes my blood boil, and that causes a spike. Weird that abortion bans and voter purges and defunding schools and ICE raids and Trump Republicans can do that to a body, right?

So, when I sent my husband that Dexcom screenshot, he asked what I had eaten or if I’d snuck a cup of coffee because it was only 10 am. I told him I hadn’t had a morsel of food or a sip of coffee. Instead, I had listened to my State Senator lie and make excuses for an hour at a public hearing in town.

I arrived on time for the public town hall of sorts put on by the local Chamber of Commerce, hosting my State Rep, Jeff Farnan, and my State Senator, Rusty Black.

The meeting started off with the Chamber organizer announcing the lawmakers to the crowd of about 100 people…who remained silent. This was stunning. I speak all over the heartland several times a month, and I have never been introduced to a silent audience. It was both embarrassing and well deserved. These two lawmakers have not been representing their constituents, and their constituents gave them an apt welcome.

Silence.

My State Representative was first to speak and had a list of bills that had passed. He remarked on one that made my head spin. First, he asked the crowd if we knew that pregnant women in Missouri could not finalize a divorce in the state until a bill was passed this year to allow it. He was proud to say that in 2026, pregnant Missourians may be granted a divorce.

Yes, Representative Farnan, I did in fact know that was a law. When I filed for divorce from my first marriage 17 years ago, the first question my lawyer asked me was, “Are you pregnant?” I was taken aback, and asked him why that mattered. He told me that I should not get pregnant in the interim before my divorce finalized, or I would be stuck married for quite a bit longer because Missouri did not finalize the divorces of pregnant women.

That’s how I knew about the law, but since my Rep is not capable of pregnancy while living under the tyranny of a “pro-life” state, this may have been news to him…

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My State Senator, Rusty Black, was characteristically smug with the crowd.

He admitted that he wants Missouri to adopt a no-income tax law, which will trigger a regressive sales tax that would harm over 80% of Missourians, including retirees and those working for the lowest wages.

He admitted that he is “unpopular” for defunding schools and, at one point in the meeting, asked the crowd to raise their hand if they “hated Rusty Black.” Several hands went up all over the room while he smiled.

He admitted with a smirk that Missouri is ranked 49th in starting teacher pay, and we now rank 48th in the nation for education funding sent by the state to local districts. He shrugged it off as no big deal — he said it had been like that since he was a public school teacher…

And that right there should be the thing that should shock you. My State Senator was a public school teacher for over 30 years, teaching in several rural districts around me. It’s shocking because this same man has sold his soul to the Herzog Foundation.

The Herzog Foundation, in my opinion, is currently the most dangerous organization to Missouri public schools.

The official mission of the Herzog Foundation is to “catalyze and accelerate the development of Christ-centered K-12 education.” That sounds benign, but it’s more complicated. The Foundation is one of six organizations in the state to dole out taxpayer dollars to private religious schools. And yes, 98% of Missouri vouchers go to private religious schools.

Since funding school vouchers is against the Missouri Constitution, the scheme to siphon taxpayer money to religious schools had to start at the statehouse, and that’s where things got very convenient…

The Herzog Foundation quite literally employs a State Representative. Rep. Josh Hurlburt (R-Smithville) works as a Scholarship Coordinator for the Foundation, and in his first term in Jeff City, he wrote bills to help send taxpayer money to private religious schools.

Seems like a conflict of interest, but it gets worse.

The Herzog Foundation Chairman, Todd Graves, is my Congressman’s brother. My Congressman — who also received thousands in donations from Herzog entities — is retiring and the man favored to win the Republican primary in my district is Chris Stigall…a full-time employee of the Herzog Foundation.

I hope Chris doesn’t win the seat, but if he does, the Herzog Foundation will have a member of Congress in their corner, if not on their payroll.

And this isn’t the half of it, but I can’t take you on a deep dive without writing 20,000 words about this foundation. The Missouri Independent has already done the work here.

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I realized the meeting with my Reps was about over after the Chamber organizer said there was time for only one more question, and she didn’t call on me…and that’s when I decided to let decorum go, and demand to ask a question of my Senator.

I raised my hand and said I had tried to speak with Rusty Black on several occasions through multiple emails and calls and that I was going to take my chance at that meeting to ask him why he had taken $250,000 from the Herzog Foundation.

I asked him if he thought it was a conflict of interest to have a PAC in his name for a quarter of a million dollars from an organization that wants public dollars for private schools, while he sits on the School Funding Task Force in the Senate that has shorted Missouri public schools $190 million while sending $60 million to private religious schools.

Sen. Black stated that I needed to get my facts straight. My facts came straight from the Missouri Ethics Commission. He then told me that organizations like the Herzog Foundation can’t fund political candidates.

That’s a lie. It’s a work around. We all know about Citizens United and dirty money.

But Sen. Black was right about something. My facts were wrong. I accused him of taking $250k in Herzog donations, and I was wrong. In front of everyone. I did my due diligence, but I still made a huge mistake.

Senator Rusty Black did not accept $250k from the Herzog Foundation and related entities…he accepted $335,600 in donations in one election cycle alone.

My god.

Organizations like the Herzog Foundation help normalize a rigged system where public money is funneled into private religious schools and legislators with dark money connections are used to write legislation to defund public schools.

I may get another letter from Herzog lawyers for speaking the truth, but so be it. I’m still at the same address, boys.

I am also done pretending that men like Senator Black deserve the benefit of the doubt when every vote and every donation and every smug little smirk means the same damn thing.

They don’t care about us.

They are governing for themselves and the billionaires who bankroll them.

~Jess

I heard that from someone in rural Nebraska a few months back, and though I can see where the sentiment is coming from, I have to disagree. Republican lawmakers know exactly how mad we are, but they have no plan to change course or try to win over voters before the midterm election.

Instead of trying to win over voters, Republicans are trying to keep us from voting. Can you imagine the things we could be accomplishing if we had lawmakers as focused on policies as they are on redistricting and suppressing or erasing votes? If they were focused on bettering our lives instead of stripping our voices?

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I usually travel to speak at least once a week these days, and this week is no different. I always arrive early so I can talk to folks…I speak to audiences full of rural, red-state Democrats. They are angry. Very angry.

They didn’t vote for any of this, and they have a right to their anger. I fall into that category.

But I also live and work in a rural space surrounded by MAGA voters and apathetic people who do not vote at all. And these are the people that folks ask me about most often. Not the rural Democrats I know, but the MAGA voters I know. And I am always asked the same question: Why do they vote for Republicans?

They voted for Trump because they think their religion tells them to or because they are a “pick-me” trying to fit in with others or they are racist, misogynistic homophobes or they lack critical thinking or they are wealthy enough to qualify for the tax cuts.

The only category I am the least bit sympathetic to is the religiously indoctrinated.

Voting for Trump has little to nothing to do with policies or economics…it’s cultural. It’s being in the right club. Being a Republican Trump voter in my neck of the woods is the default — of course, you’re a Trump supporter. Most of the Trump voters I know aren’t making policy calculations. It’s their identity. It’s belonging. It’s social pressure. It’s the massive cost of stepping outside groupthink.

But I don’t want to talk about those folks. I am sick of talking about them or explaining them or their motives.

Instead, I want to talk about the strongest people you will ever meet. Red state Democrats. Rural Democrats. Progressives in small towns across the country. The people not fitting in — the ones who stand out. The ones willing to do the difficult work year after year, cycle after cycle. Loss after loss.

You won’t find a better bunch of patriots on the planet.

The red-state, rural Democrats are another breed altogether. They are doing the work Republicans are trying to stop. They are standing in front of their neighbors, taking the stray comments and accusations that they don’t deserve. They stand up for people who voted for all of this to happen, and they take the abuse that comes with it.

And they have been at it for years.

These rural Democrats put up yard signs that alienate them from neighbors. They organize potlucks to fund local candidates who are likely to lose in their first cycle. They knock doors that slam in their face. They make calls and get cussed for their trouble. They write postcards that are sent back with vague threats scrawled across them. They speak at town halls and city council meetings and school board meetings to jeers and taunts.

And they do it over and over again. Year after year. Cycle after cycle.

There can be isolation in the work in red states and rural areas. And that is by design…the GOP oppression is supposed to make them stop. Make us retreat into our own homes and mind our own business. Stop making waves. Be quiet.

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Republicans can’t win a fair fight, so they change the rules. They redraw the maps — without putting it to a vote. They purge rolls or make it difficult to obtain the IDs needed to vote. They close the polling places or remove mail-in voting. They flood the zone with shit and dare anyone to keep up or fight back.

It can be exhausting. It can be overwhelming. It can feel useless…but it’s not. Just by showing up, we let others know it’s okay.

And I see the progress.

A small group of folks from Cameron, Missouri reached out to me four years ago. They were concerned about an extremist church in the town that was attempting to infiltrate the school board to ban books and LGBT references in books.

The group of people who asked me to come speak to them gathered in a church basement in town. The feeling I got while walking down the stairs into the basement was one of dread and fear. These residents weren’t comfortable publicizing their meeting or speaking in public…yet.

I returned to Cameron a few weeks back to speak at a rally for candidates running. I returned to a room that was standing-room-only. Where six local candidates have their name on the ballot. Where not only was the same town hosting us in the light of day, but they advertised it and didn’t have the space to hold all of the folks who came to hear a Democratic message from other rural Democrats.

Cameron, Missouri started with twelve people gathered in a basement to over a hundred in a meeting hall. Progress. Hope. Something concrete to grab a hold of. Something to think about.

We all know this election is going to be the most important election, because every election since 2016 has been the most important election. We have to stop the corruption and the demise of our democracy. We have to stop the authoritarian creep that has turned into a landslide. We have to stop the fascist dog whistles that turned into bullhorns.

We have to stop Trump and his enablers in the Republican Party. And we can’t do that by continuously pleading with the unwilling and uninterested. The three-time Trump voter.

When folks ask me how to flip Trump voters, I always say the same thing. You can’t. There is no use in beating your head against a brick wall or a stubborn racist willing to vote against his self-interest.

Find the willing. Find the folks with no political home. Bring them along.

Red-state, rural Democrats are not a lost cause. In fact, getting rural people to the polls to vote against Republican tyranny is the cause. We can change the country when we remember the spaces we ceded decades ago.

Rural Democrats are here and doing the work. They have always been here.

And we aren’t going anywhere.

~Jess

P.S. You can help me directly fund Missouri down-ballot candidates in 2026. I am the Executive Director of Blue Missouri and we are the only organization to specifically fund the reddest and most rural districts in the state. We are one of the biggest donors to Missouri down-ballot candidates by donating almost 500K to candidates since 2017.

You can join here.

Usually, my statement is in response to someone asking me what makes the best or perfect candidate…especially in a rural space. I have always said the best candidate is the one who is from their community and the one who knows their community. I still stand by those statements, but recently, I’ve started to think there might be a better candidate…

I am thinking of New York Mayor, Zohran Kwame Mamdani. The same man we were supposed to fear is turning out to be the politician so many of us hope to see run and win. The lawmaker who will tell us what he plans to do, and upon winning, does exactly that.

I mean…I haven’t seen anything like it in my life, and I hope to see more of it. I know that Mamdani is not perfect, but he is doing the thing a lot of progressives have hoped to see. He is supporting his constituents and public services while partially paying for those needs by taxing the wealthy.

He’s doing it. And it may just be working.

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I am rural. I live in a town of 480 people on the Missouri/Iowa border. I am surrounded by cornfields and bean fields. I have been to New York City once in my life. I probably have no business commenting on the Mayor of the largest city in America, but I can’t help myself.

The first time I heard his name was from my teenage daughter. She has a private TikTok account to follow politics — she is her mother’s daughter. For weeks, she walked around the house singing a song spelling out his Mamdani’s name.

Set to the tune of “Hollaback Girl” by Gwen Stefani, the lyrics are: “The name is Mamdani. M-A-M-D-A-N-I.”

And with that little bit of genius marketing, and the earworm it creates, every young person in the US knew who was running for Mayor of NYC and how to pronounce and spell his name. His team built on that momentum and kept putting out videos on policy. My teenage daughter from rural Missouri knew the policies Mamdani promised to implement, including universal childcare and library funding and higher taxes on corporations and billionaires.

Before the election, I asked my daughter if she knew which party Mamdani belonged to…she said she assumed he was a Democrat. I told her that he is actually a Democratic Socialist. Her response? Cool.

The good news is that the word “socialism” is not the least bit scary to the kids. There’s hope there, because Republicans have been able to scare generation after generation with one word.

From Missouri’s own Harry Truman:

Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.

Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security.

Socialism is what they called farm price supports.

Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance.

Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.

Socialism is the name for almost anything that helps all the people.

Give ‘em hell, Harry.

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Mamdani inherited a $12 billion deficit, and his new budget shows that he has made huge progress on that deficit — it looks like he’s made some concessions to balance the budget, but he’s showing it can be done.

He has expanded access to early childhood education and secured $1.2 billion in funding for universal child care. He filled 10,000 potholes. He secured over $9 million in restitution for workers and delivered $34 million in housing judgments for tenants.

So far, he has been able to do these things without slashing services or raising property taxes.

One of Mamdani’s plans could generate approximately $500 million annually from an estimated 11,200 second homes with market values above $5 million, and as of this month, the tax plan will go into effect.

Every politician for every single year of my being has told me that taxing the wealthy was impossible. It seems they may have lied, or at the very least, never tried.

Mamdani said he’d tax the wealthy to pay for services, and he has passed the plan. That’s progress. And that’s the thing: I haven’t seen much progress in my life. I have seen regression.

Status quo. The norm. The same.

And now that Trump is in his second term, the unraveling of our democracy and nearly every single thing we’ve ever held dear about our country.

Regressing right back to hell.

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And here is the part where I come back full circle to my introduction…the perfect rural candidate.

Here’s my advice — swing left. Yes, in rural spaces. Swing for the fences. In left field.

I know it is not conventional wisdom. I know folks think rural candidates should be conservative. Even Republican light. But I don’t think that is what anyone out here wants, and if there is already a Republican on the ballot — and there is always a Republican on the ballot — why would anyone vote for the lesser of the two?

If I were knocking doors in a hypothetical election with Trump and Biden on the ballot, I know how most of the doors out here would go. Doors closed in my face. If I were knocking doors in that same hypothetical election with Trump and Bernie on the ballot, there would be several pauses at the doors.

Why?

Bernie isn’t recognized as a Democrat as much as a fighter. Whether that is true or not really isn’t important. The perception is real, and people are tired of the status quo. Sick of boring lines and do-nothing politicians.

We need bold candidates in every race, but I’d like to say they are more than welcome in rural spaces. We need big ideas. We need curious candidates willing to say and do the fearless things.

And with everything on the line in November, we have to have boldness to snag young voters and get them to the polls — they have to turn out for Democrats.

The good news is that a Yale Youth Poll conducted in March found Democrats opening large leads among voters under 30, reversing narrow Republican advantages seen with some Gen Z voters in the 2024 election.

We have the momentum. We have the candidates. We need them to take a chance and commit to doing big things. Bigger things than we’ve ever imagined.

Mamdani is not a perfect lawmaker, nor was he the perfect candidate. There is no perfect candidate. But there is a better-than-average candidate.

Bold. Audacious. Unafraid.

And there is no need to nudge this candidate to the center. Turn them loose and let them swing for the fences with all of the audacity.

~Jess

I am positive you are familiar with The Crucible and likely read the play in high school. I taught it in American Literature. We always read it in the first semester. Within weeks of the beginning of each year.

Before I started each school day, I read ahead in the play and wrote the name of each character on the board. The students were always a little reluctant to sign up for a part at the beginning of the unit, but by the second or third day, the kids were jogging to my room to sign up for a part before others could make it in the door.

They usually fought over the parts of John Proctor or Abigail Williams.

I tried to make reading the play coincide with Autumn because I couldn’t stretch out the curriculum to make it to October, much less Halloween, which is the season we usually think about when reading about witches.

It didn’t really matter, though. The play isn’t actually about Salem witches. Setting it in spooky season wasn’t needed.

The play is scary enough.

My American Literature course was set up much like a history course…it followed a timeline. It was linear. It was set up in that way so that students could understand the literature in the context of the time period, but The Crucible denied that timeline. It was set in Puritanical New England, but the play didn’t belong in that time period in the curriculum.

The play was about the Red Scare and Communism.

It was about McCarthyism.

It was about neighbor against neighbor and fear.

It was about America and hysteria.

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Arthur Miller (who was accused of being a Communist sympathizer) wrote The Crucible in 1953 during the Red Scare. He wrote it to warn us against mass hysteria and to plead for freedom and tolerance in a time of fear and finger-pointing. It is a perpetual plea for persistent problems — the same issues we see today.

You likely know who and what were targeted by the Red Scare. Hollywood. Universities. Roosevelt and his New Deal policies that helped the common man. Every day people as well.

The Red Scare was a time of baseless accusations. Blacklisting. Ruining the lives of supposed Communists. It was political repression and free speech oppression. It was political persecution. It was scapegoating.

Sound familiar? I could be speaking of our current political climate.

History may not repeat, but it does rhyme.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about The Crucible and witch hunts lately. I am positive you have heard of James Comey and the seashell incident…

“A federal grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina returned an indictment charging former FBI director James Comey with making threats to harm President Donald J. Trump.”

Threats to the President? Comey posted a picture to Instagram with seashells arranged in a pattern to spell out “8647.” The caption stated, “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.”

We all understand that a picture of seashells did not threaten the President, just as we all understand that the reason for the indictment is to intimidate and prosecute an enemy of Donald Trump. The man whom Trump feels slighted him. The one he feels is a critic of his regime.

Donald Trump is weaponizing the DOJ to destroy the reputation of James Comey and prosecute him for his lack of loyalty and fealty to the regime. He’s conducting a witch hunt.

Sounds familiar…

Just two days ago, FBI agents reportedly raided the office of state Sen. Louise Lucas, the Virginia legislator and leader of the state’s recent redistricting effort that likely won Democrats four more seats in the House of Representatives.

So far, there is no reason to believe that this raid is anything but political theater meant to harm the career and reputation of the Senator. The Senator who might just have helped the Democrats take back the House in November.

Last year, NY Attorney General Letitia James, the attorney who was successful in her civil fraud lawsuit against Trump, was indicted by a federal jury on mortgage fraud charges. The indictment was a sham. A fraud. An attempt to take revenge on an enemy.

The case against her was eventually thrown out.

And the hysteria of the regime in retaliating against Trump’s opponents doesn’t stop with people in his way — he is also attacking organizations.

The Southern Poverty Law Center was recently indicted and charged with wire fraud and bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering based on payments to informants who infiltrated white supremacist groups.

This is an outrageous indictment and seems as politically motivated as it can get. The SPLC recently criticized the Trump regime for ending federal funding for hate crime prevention and the regime’s effort to roll back civil rights and increase focus on “reverse discrimination.”

Another witch hunt.

There are a dozen more retaliatory actions I could have listed, but you see the theme. You understand the threat to democracy. You know the danger of giving a madman, a wannabe king, the power to use the DOJ and the FBI to retaliate against his political enemies.

Hysteria.

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By the end of The Crucible unit, my students understood the dangers of a theocratic government and mass hysteria. They knew the consequences of destroying a reputation to consolidate power. They grasped the themes of intolerance and the fear of the unknown and the misuse of power.

I hope they remember the lessons all these years later.

My students would often ask why The Crucible is titled so, as the word is never uttered in the play. I asked them to look up the definition of “crucible” and report back on why they thought Arthur Miller would name a play about The Red Scare using the Salem Witch Trials as the setting, and they always surprised me with their well-thought-out responses.

A crucible is a severe test. It is also a container in which metals may be melted or subjected to very high temperatures. Both definitions apply.

A crucible doesn’t just melt and destroy. A crucible reveals. It’s a test of character and will.

Arthur Miller did not write The Crucible as a history lesson. He wrote it as a warning. It is not just about McCarthyism, but about every period that looks like it — like the moment we currently inhabit. The paranoia turned into policy and called patriotism.

The play was not a history lesson, but history is watching us. The crucible is a test, and it’s on all of us to make sure we pass it this time.

~Jess

I also knew I was in the right place because I saw bumper stickers on the cars in the parking lot that said things like, “Voting matters” and “Democracy dies in darkness.”

I found a seat at the front and introduced myself to some of the folks…two women who sat behind me asked for a selfie and then talked about Josh Hawley — a person Missourians love to hate. As I talked with them about the infamous Senator, I saw a man waiting patiently to speak to me. He has something in his hand and a smile on his face.

He introduced himself and asked if I would accept a jar of homemade jam from his farm outside Moberly. Well, yeah I accept food, and especially jam that I can use for my daughter’s PB&J lunches. It was a strawberry/blueberry blend with fruit he grows on his farm.

Months later, that jar is empty and now living life on my windowsill full of pothos cuttings with his farm label still affixed.

The man from Moberly came over to talk to me about his utility bill — specifically his light bill. He told me his bill had jumped $120 in the last few months to nearly $500 per month. I was sympathetic as I listened. I hear this everywhere I go in the state.

And the AI data centers proposed all over the state are only going to make things worse.

I have been hearing about soaring rates for electricity and gas since I started traveling around the state, but it has picked up in the last year or so. The fact that so many folks are struggling with the basics is telling when a large part of the audiences I speak to are retired or nearly retired people.

I have heard from these folks as the parents of adult children. They were finally able to start saving for their retirement, only to find out that they would instead be sending money to their adult children, who can’t make ends meet with grocery prices and gas prices and childcare prices while making stagnant wages.

These are adult children who did everything right…they got their education, but they inherited a nightmarish economy and live under a regime that is as arrogant as it is incompetent.

I spoke at an event in Milan, Missouri a week back. Milan is a tiny town in north central Missouri — the event drew about 70 people, which is a big deal when you consider they haven’t been meeting regularly since 2018. They recently started their county club and central committee as a reaction to renewed interest in the party in the local area.

While at the event, I heard a candidate relay a story to the crowd. The Congressional candidate spoke with a woman from a town south of Milan — Mexico, Missouri. The woman’s dad lived about three blocks from the rural hospital that was shuttered in March, 2022.

About 19 of Missouri's 57 rural hospitals are at risk of closing due to financial problems. Many of these problems were exacerbated by the Missouri GOP’s failure to pass Medicaid Expansion.

The woman said her dad suffered a massive heart attack at his home. While only three blocks from the former hospital, paramedics were forced to take him to a hospital 45 minutes away. Her dad did not make it. She said while she couldn’t say for sure that the hospital in Mexico could have saved him if it weren’t closed, she couldn’t help but think he would have had a better chance.

My god. The systems are failing, and the only thing holding this mess together is us. No one is coming to save us…this is on us.

And this is where I tell you the good news…at each of the events I have attended and spoken, I am surrounded by candidates running to step up for their communities. At every rally and stop, I meet someone who had just had enough and decided if no one else could or would run, they would do it.

I met Bekki, who is a grandmother running to fund Missouri public schools.

I met Casey, who is an MRI technologist from rural Missouri running because she has seen the gaps in care for rural residents who need specialized care.

I met Josh, an architect, who is running for a Congressional seat because his congressman has been MIA for twelve years and refuses to listen to his constituents.

I met Judy, who stepped up to run on the last day of filing, because she saw an important seat was going to go uncontested to the State Senator who is defunding rural public schools.

I met Clayton, a community advocate, who is running in Missouri’s 8th District — the poorest district in the state. He’s running for economic fairness and clean water and strong schools.

I met Clayton’s primary opponent, Chris, an Army veteran and IBEW union member who is running on worker rights and to stand against endless wars.

I met with my friend Fred, an Army veteran and all-around great guy, who is running for Congress and says that Missourians just deserve a fair shot.

I met Luke and LaTonya and Gena and Shereka and Pam all in one night. They are all running in NWMO, where they will be facing opponents who are funded by Republican PACs designed to overturn the will of the people and do the bidding of the wealthy.

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I know I have left out a few candidates, and I am so sorry for my poor memory. I have been to so many events and rallies in the last few weeks that I had to refer to my calendar to remember the counties and states I have been in. While digging through my calendar, I just remembered that I am back at it again this Saturday.

I think I should tell you that I think this mess is going to get better and soon. I know I tell stories that are unbearable and heartbreaking, but I also want you to know that there are people out here determined to make it better. Those who won’t stop organizing or running or volunteering. Those who refuse to look away.

I am in text chains and Signal groups that organize every day. They don’t stop because they can’t stop until the work is done. They give me hope.

In church basements and community centers and libraries, folks are showing up. They are running when no one else will. They are organizing when it would be easier to quit. To walk away.

If anything is going to save Missouri, it won’t be a last-minute miracle — it will be ordinary people refusing to let go of each other.

That’s the work. That’s the hope. And it’s already here.

~Jess

The tennis shoes were cute, but for some reason, they dragged my socks down and by the time I walked across the room, my heel was bare, and my arch had half my sock bunched up uncomfortably in the middle of my shoe. I loved the way the shoes looked, but I felt like a toddler with a crumpled sock.

I looked like a toddler peeling them off and tossing them across the room in frustration.

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I bought the tennis shoes at Dick’s Sporting Goods, which is just down the highway from the East Hills Mall in St Joe. That place will make an 80s or 90s kid cry.

The mall is a ghost town and went the way of several shopping malls. It is over 600,000 square feet of almost nothing. JCPenney remains, but the store has a street entrance, so you don’t have to see the humiliation lying inside the mall.

The mall died a public death and now sits rotting for the whole town to see. A massive corpse in the middle of the city.

That corpse feels relevant to something we see happening at this very moment. Happening across the country. A mess of miles of concrete and buildings doing nothing for anyone.

I opened my local paper, The Maryville Forum, a few days back, and saw an article on a new AI data center that looks like it has been in the works for a while. I am sure you know that if anyone stays on top of the news, it’s me. If anyone regularly reads and subscribes and pays for news, it’s me.

And I didn’t know anything about a data center coming to my own county.

I had no idea, and by the time I did have an idea, it looked as if the “planning” part of the AI data center deal is well past the planning stage. It looks like some developers came in and met with county officials without making noise. It also looks like there may already have been at least one NDA signed with the data center developers, and that just doesn’t sit right with me. Why would anyone need to sign a non-disclosure agreement with a developer?

You should know, most new data centers are coming to rural America, even though I know most of my neighbors have never heard of Claude or ChatGPT and aren’t in the habit of creating memes or AI slop.

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My county commissioners said that developers have contracted with the owners of more than 500 acres on Highway 71 South of Maryville. The commissioners said the site was selected because it checks four important boxes: access to land, energy, fiber internet, and water.

There it is…water. And I don’t even have the space to write about the power the center will need, or where they will get it, and what type of power it will be.

Based on estimates from the data center developers, the center will need “a couple hundred thousand gallons of water” per day. That estimate was put forward, though, after their initial plan called for over 1 million gallons of water a day. I am fearful that the original estimate is more in line with the hyperscale data center being proposed.

Something else is bothersome too — it seems my County Commissioners are also already talking about tax abatements for the data center.

Great. So, the data center developers can take the water and pollute it and create a noise and an environmental catastrophe and not even pay taxes to my community? Not even act like they will help support the folks who are forced to hand over our water and quality of life?

What a ripoff, and for what? The data center is only projecting 100-130 jobs, and I am not sure I believe that number. There has been no transparency on what kind of jobs or how long they would last.

My god…I feel like we are being sold a pile of shit, and they aren’t even bothering to wrap it with a bow.

I am angry and I’ll tell you why: I am sick of rural resources being sucked out of rural America with not so much as a thank you. We are being looted. Robbed in broad daylight. Old-school pillage and plunder.

I feel like my front door is being kicked in while I am forced to watch and play nice as the corporate thieves take my possessions out one by one, winking as they pass by.

This all feels familiar.

The data center debacle feels much like the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) that were imposed on rural America by big AG corporations. These large-scale feedlots and barns replaced nearly all small-farm hog operations decades ago while polluting rural air and water. One hog CAFO can produce millions of gallons of waste per year, and guess where all that waste goes, and tell me you’re surprised that it ends up in rural drinking water?

These corporate farms robbed small farmers of the life their grandparents had and robbed small communities of clean air and water. The corporate farms also served to drive up the price of land so high that unless you inherit land, or are a multi-millionaire, it’s very difficult to buy ground or farm it.

We are priced out of our own communities.

Let’s talk about the corn and soybeans and the farm policies that forced both row crops onto farmers. US farm policies subsidize both crops, and over the years, this has incentivized farmers in states like Iowa to grow even more. And according to data, Iowa farmers use 5.27 million metric tons of fertilizer a year to grow corn and beans.

I probably don’t need to tell you where that fertilizer ends up because you know Iowa has water quality and cancer problems.

And here’s a fun fact…Iowa has some of the richest farmland in the country, but has to import almost all of its food. Iowa grows corn and beans for animal consumption and for export to other countries.

And I have run out of space to write about the rural resources the Armed Forces takes from rural America. Our rural sons and daughters are serving at a massively disproportionate rate.

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I have heard from folks in Democratic-leaning states for years that they are tired of sending their tax money to GOP-dominated states, and I can’t deny their feelings or the validity of the statement. Both are true, but something else is true too: rural America is being drained of every resource we hold dear to send somewhere else while we suffer under terrible policies and corporate greed.

Data centers are just the newest iteration of an issue that has been generations in the making. More extraction from rural spaces. More pollution and decay. More hollowed-out communities.

I have already seen how this story ends.

It’s sitting off the Belt Highway in St. Joe. It is 600,000 square feet of promises that didn’t last, and economic development that moved on leaving a rotting shell behind. A massive carcass for all to see.

If we don’t hurry up and ask the hard questions and demand better answers, we will just continue our current path. We can’t let that happen. I won’t let that happen.

Not again. Not in my backyard. Not on my watch.

~Jess

If someone is planning to steal my identity, I hope they can raise my credit score…

I was invited to visit Harvard by a friend who is a fellow in the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative. Her resume is long and distinguished, as are the resumes of the folks who make up the Initiative. I was delighted to be invited to speak to them on rural organizing and rural politics.

The entire time I was in Cambridge, I was overwhelmed with academia. It exudes from every library and book store and coffee shop. Literacy and intelligence drip from the spring blooms in Harvard Yard. Socratic Circles and debates happen naturally with students gathering on lawns to talk and reflect and discuss. I felt like I was in a movie. It didn’t feel real.

I was in my element…

Except I wasn’t. I felt like a fraud. An imposter. I have not had access to that level of academia, and it shows.

I am jealous of those who have access to such good schools, and I’m not just talking about Harvard. I am talking about an educational system set up from pre-K to guide students through learning experiences that kids from my region usually don’t have access to.

Maybe jealous is not the right word. Maybe the word is irate.

Why can’t all the kids have all of the education?

Because we’ve starved their schools of the teachers and resources that open doors.

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A big part of my talk on rural organizing is about rural schools and schools in red states in general. You’ve likely heard me quote these stats, but Missouri ranks dead last in the nation in teacher pay. We are near last in the nation for educational funding.

The lack of funding and investment in public education shows up in tests. Recent NAEP reports show roughly 27% of Missouri 4th graders scored proficient or above in reading.

I dislike standardized tests as much as the next person, but there is information gleaned in the process that can be used to improve teaching and learning.

A standardized test does not always accurately measure a student’s work and learning, but tests are part of how we assess students’ growth and education in America. It is a snapshot in time at the abilities of a group of kids in a particular school or state. It is not the be all and end all, but it is a benchmark nonetheless.

So, who is to blame for what is happening in Missouri? And why the drop in student performance over the last few decades? In my opinion, it’s devaluing of teachers and the profession and disinvestment in public schools and education.

A cult leader once said, “I love the poorly educated.”

It’s the old bait and switch. Defund the system, wait for cracks to emerge, tell folks the system never worked, and then privatize the system.

Rinse. Repeat.

A few years back, we had some pretty bad scores for reading and math after COVID, and Missouri GOP lawmakers couldn’t find a microphone fast enough to proclaim Missouri’s “failing” public schools and teachers.

Their solution? Vouchers and school choice.

My response to these lawmakers: who has been in charge of public education in the state for over two decades? Who defunded the schools? Who cut teacher prep and lowered the bar for teacher certification? Who paid teachers the lowest wage in the country? Who forced schools into four-day school weeks?

The GOP has had a supermajority in the legislature for over two decades. If they want to assign blame, they should look in a mirror.

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The school voucher scheme is only making it worse.

In 2021, Missouri Republicans started a voucher system that diverted public school funds. Missouri taxpayers could receive a dollar-for-dollar tax credit that paid for private school vouchers. It worked for a year or two, and then there were not enough private donors to fill the coffers of religious schools. GOP lawmakers then passed legislation to pay for private religious school vouchers outright from Missouri’s general funds.

That is against the Missouri Constitution.

But a judge just ruled on Tuesday that taxpayer funds can keep floating the $50 million in voucher funds in a lawsuit brought by the Missouri National Education Association.

From the Missouri Independent:

In a 57-page ruling, Judge Brian Stumpe wrote that lawmakers could directly appropriate funds to the (voucher) program because state law does not “expressly prohibit” it.

Judge Stumpe went on to say, “The General Assembly’s choice to spend money on a scholarship program does not inflict harm on public schools when the legislature has not diverted funds from public schools to cover the scholarship program.”

He is wrong. Legislators did just that — funds are pulled from the general budget and diverted from public schools to cover the voucher scheme.

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And Wednesday night, in the middle of the night, Missouri Republicans voted to replace the income tax with an expanded sales tax. A regressive tax.

The same Republicans who eliminated the capital gains tax this year, are the ones planning to eliminate the income tax — the income tax supports two-thirds of Missouri’s budget.

Rural schools are going to be the hardest hit in all of this mess, and I’m so tired. It’s already a fight to get an education in this state, and now the legislature diverts what little we have for public schools to private religious schools.

You know, while in Cambridge, I looked up the stats for rural students who end up in a place like Harvard…they make up 9% of the students enrolled. Did you know that rural people make up around 40% of Armed Forces recruits?

Think about that.

We can and should do better for our kids. That starts and ends with education. I shouldn’t have to publish a hundred essays on this topic to get through to my lawmakers, but they always give me something to write about.

Missouri invented Kindergarten. Missouri was once a haven for great public schools. Missouri wasn’t always this way.

What if we reclaimed that legacy?

~Jess

P.S. The airline responded to my inquiry and someone found my wallet. Whew!