Warning: You might not like parts of this. But it is exactly how things went down over the course of three days in a declining American neighborhood, no exaggerations or modifications.

I love going back to my old neighborhood. Because I don’t spend a lot of time there anymore, whenever I walk the streets I get hit with all sorts of flashbacks.

The small ones are my favorites.

The curb where I picked rocks out of my leg after crashing my scooter. A driveway I shoveled where the guy tipped me five extra bucks. My wet hair freezing on the walk to the bus stop. You get the idea.

So when I had the excuse to go back to town recently to help clean out an old house a friend of mine had purchased, I took it.

I landed Sunday morning and got to the house that afternoon. My friend unexpectedly had to cover a shift at the restaurant he works at, so I ended up all by myself and completely unprepared the first day of work— but determined to impress him by getting as much done as I could solo!

There were some masks, regular brooms, a dustpan, trash bags, and gloves at the house already. But there was some big furniture I would now want to try to haul out on my own and a lot of debris on the floor. So I needed to track down a dolly and a push broom, two things I wasn’t about to just buy for a couple days work.

Fortunately, I thought I had a lead. When I had walked around the outside of the house assessing things, I’d noticed that one of the neighbors had a homemade (but well-constructed) trailer out back, had seemed to put up their own carport, and had various other signs of being the type of occupants that would likely have a dolly and a push broom.

As a guy who has knocked on thousands of doors in his life, I strolled walked through their neatly trimmed crabgrass yard, up the cracked but clean concrete porch steps, and knocked on the door.

Immediately, A large dog went ballistic behind the door. I heard someone yell at it from the back of the house and some movement in the depths. Half a minute later, a slightly disheveled older man cracked the door open with his right hand, holding his truly vicious looking dog back with the left, and peeked out.

“Hey, how’s it going?” I said.

Shirtless and wearing jeans, he looked me up and down while trying to hush up his dog so he could hear.

“Hold on a sec,” he shouted, “Let me put him away.”

He closed the door and I heard him and the dog fade away into the house.

I sat down on the concrete post at the top of the stairs and looked around while I waited. The porch was extremely neat and clean, like someone swept it every morning. A couple of black metal chairs sat on the right side of the door and a wooden one sat to its left. A decorative cross hung between two windows and a couple of small, concrete, religion-themed statuettes, like you find on many Missouri porches and yards, rounded out the exterior decor. I think there was an empty bird feeder and maybe an empty hanging plant pot, too, but I can’t remember for sure. Everything was worn and showed its age, but was well taken care of.

The reason I remember everything so well is because I basically had an eternity to look around with nothing else to do. A minute or so after the man and his dog had left, the house had gone quiet and there wasn’t any more sign of movement or noise inside for at least five minutes. I actually think it was more like ten, but ten minutes is a pretty long time and people usually overestimate time when they’re waiting so I don’t want to over estimate here. But it was long enough that I began to wonder if he was going to come back at all, and had started assessing the dolly-and-broom potential of other houses nearby when I finally heard another sound at the door.

The man was back!

As he walked through the doorway he proclaimed, in good spirits, that I’d better not be selling something, then sat down in the metal chair closest to the door and smiled, waiting for me to talk.

He was now wearing a clean wrinkle-free t-shirt, a black mariner hat, nice shoes, and I swear he had even taken the time to comb his white mustache. Out in the light he looked to be somewhere in his mid seventies and I guessed from his current meticulous presentation that he didn’t get many, if any, visitors, and wanted to make a good impression.

“Even worse,” I retorted, “I’m just here to mooch off ya!”

He chuckled and sat down.

“Alright, let’s here it.”

I explained that I was cleaning out the house next door and realized I didn’t have a dolly or push broom. “I heard you out on the back porch earlier jamming some classic tunes and after a look at how you take care of your place, figured you might be the type of guy who would have those sorts of things.”

Shameless flattery, I know. Busted. But who wants to move a whole rotten refrigerator out of a house by themselves without a dolly?

He feigned embarrassment, seemed pleased with himself, said something about how he liked blue-toothing his music back there, and then asked me if I was his new neighbor.

“No, Sir, I’m just doing some work for the guy who owns it. I’m Lucas by the way.” We shook hands and introduced ourselves.

“Well that’s too bad,” he said. “And sorry about earlier,” referring to his dog, “He gets a little excited whenever someone comes around. It’s just me and him now, my wife passed away a few years ago, so there’s not too much going on.”

“No worries. I hope you’re holding up ok without her. He seems like a good dog to have around if you’re by yourself. I know the neighborhood can be a little rough sometimes.”

“You know, it’s mostly pretty quiet.”

“I believe that,” I replied, “It used to be wild around here, I grew up in this neighborhood and there were kids running everywhere back then.”

“Hmmm, well, that would sure beat what we have across the street these days.”

“Oh, what’s that?”

“Oh, you know. Just a thousand people crammed in that house. Random folks coming and going all the time. Parking on the wrong side of the street. Facing every which way. Going to cause an accident sooner or later. Not to mention partying and yelling and all that.”

As he spoke, he became more and more animated, and it was clear this was something he dwelled on.

“Damn, that sucks,” I said, following the line of his finger toward a house across the street and up from him.

“You be it does. I’ve gotten into it with some of em over and over again about coming on my property. You know what the worst thing is, though? You can’t even call the cops. They don’t do nothin. You know what happened the last time I called?”

“What?”

“They sent out some woman cop who couldn’t do a damn thing. Shameful. Just shameful. I sat right here on my porch and watched the whole thing. The man who lives there just blew his dope in her face and told her to fuck off and you know what happened next? She just did! Can you believe that? She just did like he told her. Up and left. You know what woulda happened if I’d done that? I’d be thrown in jail. That’s what. Straight away. But him? Nothing. That’s the world we’re living in now. And she just drove off.”

“Wow,” I said, giving him some space to cool off.

He pulled out a cigarette, loaded it into a white plastic holder, lit it and smoked for a minute, glaring at the house across the street. Then he looked at me.

“You know what? I do have a dolly and broom I can lend you. Can you do me a favor, though?”

“Maybe, what’s up?”

“I need you to tell the owner something for me.”

“Yeah?”

“First, though, do you know is he going to rent it or live in it?”

“I think he’s going rent it,” I replied.

“That’s what I figured. Now I’m not against a guy making a buck. I don’t have a problem with that. So it’s not that…” He paused and seemed to be choosing his next words carefully. “And I know I’m not supposed to say it like this, but… I just don’t care anymore.”

He was getting animated again.

“I’m old enough that I’m gonna say what I mean. And I want you to let him know that if he moves any n*****s or Mexicans in there, well there’s just gonna be trouble.”

So that had been a glimpse of confederate flag tattoo I’d caught when he first opened the door.

He gave a cautious sideways look, as if this statement had been a way to try to gauge where I stood on things. I wanted to make it clear that I wasn’t with him on this, but not in a way that would end the conversation because my friend, the homeowner, is Mexican, and I wanted to try to find out what this could mean for him.

“Is that right?” I asked.

The neighbor took a long searching look at my face and thought about things for a second.

“Yes, Sir, it is,” he implored, as if he was now trying to convince me rather than gauge me.

“I’m tired of ‘em all. The one, like them over there,” he waved in the direction of the house across the street, “don’t work and just cause trouble. As for the Mexicans, I’ve seen who he’s got working there on that house and I’d bet a silver dollar that he’s thinking about letting some migrants live in there. It’s not right. Them thinking they can just take over everything.”

He took a drag on his cigarette. I waited.

“Do you know if that’s his plan or not?” He asked.

“As I understand it,” I figured it was best to just be straight with him, “He’s going to rent it on the open market, like on Zillow or something, to whoever can pay the rent and deposit. If it doesn’t rent, he may rent it to a friend or a worker. I don’t know, it’s his house. He’s not gonna discriminate, though, I’m sure of that. So I imagine you’re probably just gonna need to accept that whatever happens happens, and accept it. I’m positive he’s not gonna have troublemakers in there, though.”

“Hmph,” he grumbled.

“And,” I added, “It’ll definitely be an upgrade over who was in there before.”

“You mean “A”?” he replied, seeming excited at the chance to sort-of change the subject. “Nah, he was alright. His problem is he was just dumb as bricks, that’s all.”

I gave him a skeptical look. I knew the previous tenant, if you can call him that.

“Dumb? Is that what they’re calling it now?” I laughed pointedly. “I went to school with that guy. He was squatting there and turned it into some sort of drug den and filled it up with a bunch of other squatters. I’m cleaning out his trash right now, it’s disgusting.”

“Well, maybe he was a little crazy, too,” the neighbor said awkwardly, “But I never had any trouble with him!”

“Well, that’s good,” I said, “because I think he might actually still be your neighbor. I saw a bunch of mattresses, tarps, and boxes in the woods back there.”

He glanced in the direction of the woods and shifted in his chair, clearly not thrilled at the idea of “A” still being around. He mulled things over again, dragging on his cigarette.

I returned to brainstorming a secondary source for a dolly and a push broom.

Suddenly, out of the blue, he asked me a question.

“Do you ever watch Newsmax?”

I laughed again, but this time only in my head. Apparently he was in the mood for second chances.

“No,” I answered, “I don’t really watch much of anything outside of some Netflix shows with my wife, but I’m sure that type of thing is up my ally.”

“You’ve really got to.” His eyes actually lit up. “I mean really. I’m telling you. There’s this guy on there, Carl Higbie, he’s a Navy Seal. He just doesn’t give a fuck. Man says right there on national TV he’d shoot anyone who came on his lawn or caused him a problem. You really gotta watch it.”

He paused, and added with a flourish: “It’s admirable.”

What a curious choice of a word, I thought.

Also curious, I thought, was the fact that by default I appeared to be in a club that I never gave any indication I shared a single value with. The only information this man knew about me was my first name, that I am white, somewhere around 40, grew up in the neighborhood, and was working on the house. I was wearing a sweat-soaked dusty and grimy gray t-shirt and a pair of work pants (the house didn’t have power or AC) and I needed to borrow a dolly and push broom. And I hadn’t engaged positively with any of his sentiments.

“I mean, I’m a marine, so I guess it’s cool that he was in the military, but I think I’ll just stick with Love is Blind,” was my answer.

“Hmmm. Well, I think you’d like it if you gave it a try,” he said, standing up, and not seeming to care that I am a Marine, which was interesting, and apparently oblivious to the existence of the American classic known as Love is Blind.

I stood up, too. He tamped out his cigarette and put the holder in his pocket.

“Come along now, let’s get you what you need.”

In a bit of shock that this was still happening, I followed him around the side of the house to the back. His dog, now on the back porch, went viciously crazy again the second we turned the corner. He half-heartedly told him to shut up, which had no effect, and unlocked and opened his garage.

“Just give me a sec,” he said, “I was welding up the trailer the other day so I gotta get this off of here.”

I looked around the garage as he unstrapped some welding equipment from the dolly he was apparently about to lend me. I had been in this garage a couple of times as a kid and was flashing back to what it used to look like. Presently, it held several sparkling Harleys and a bunch of work stuff.

He rolled the empty dolly over to me and asked, “Now where’d that broom go?”

The question was clearly directed to himself, but when he headed the opposite direction of the one I’d seen in the corner, I answered it anyway.

“I think I saw one over there,” I said, pointing in the corner, “Although I don’t know if it’s the one you’re looking for.”

He looked over and sure enough it was.

We stepped outside and he yelled over the barking “Just put ‘em back here when you’re done with ‘em.” And he went back inside.

Later that afternoon, as I worked cleaning out the house, sure enough, random cars would occasionally roll up out front on the street and another older man, this one maybe in his 60s, would come out to meet them, talk for a minute and go back inside.

At one point, while I was struggling to take apart an old piece of furniture so that it would fit through the door, two cars sped up out front a minute or two apart from one other. The second vehicle parked the wrong direction on the street and quite crookedly, exactly as the neighbor had complained about earlier. Two young men exited the crooked car and two young women the other. This time, the older man didn’t come out to meet them.

The crooked car left its loud music on and they started having an animated, but friendly, conversation out front while it blared.

I really needed a screwdriver for this furniture, but I didn’t want to go next door again, so I thought what the hell, might as well meet all the neighbors, and went out front. I walked up to the young group and shouted “Do any of you all live here?” and pointed across the street.

The guys looked at me but didn’t answer. One of the women smiled and waved and yelled that she did. I asked her if by any chance she had a Philips screwdriver I could borrow. She said the pointy one? I said yeah. She said of course, if she had one I could, and waved for me to follow her up the walk.

I found myself waiting on yet another neighborhood porch while the guys hung out by their car. I wondered if the the neighbor from earlier could see me out there and if so, if he would now be wanting his broom and dolly back.

The woman brought out two options for me, one almost completely rusted through and the other one broken on the end, but serviceable. I said thanks and asked if I should just bring it back or leave it on the porch or something. Jovially, she said anything works, but they were usually around so it wouldn’t be a problem either way.

When I got the furniture apart, the two young men were still in their wrongly parked car, but the women seemed to have gone inside, so I walked across and knocked on the door. A four-year-old-ish little girl answered. I asked her if she could find a grown up so I could give them back some tools, and the older gentleman who I had seen greeting cars earlier came and took them from me without saying a word. Pushing my luck, I asked if I could borrow some scissors for two minutes to cut a wire. He grunted and brought me some, which I returned a few minutes later. I thanked him and he nodded in response.

The next day I saw him sitting on his porch when I was preparing to take some photos and video of the work I had done out front. I walked over and let him know that he might end up in some of them if he was out front, in case that mattered to him. This time he laughed and said no problem, he wasn’t worried about it, and wished me good luck on the work.

I saw the young woman again later at the smoke shop/mini-mart on the corner when I was buying a $7 bottle of orange juice and a $4 off-brand mini Hostess pie. This was the only location for food anywhere nearby. She and the cashier were bantering back and forth about the merits of Miami Mint flavored vape and paid me no attention.

As I sat on the front step of the house in the 100 degree heat eating my pie, I reminisced about how once a month, on payday, my dad used take us to the now-bulldozed neighborhood grocery store to pick out one of these pies, and how when I was little I always sucked out the inside before eating the crust.

The dolly-and-push-broom neighbor drove by in his immaculately washed mid-90’s pickup. He waved hello and I waved back. Either he hadn’t seen me cavorting with his enemy or had decided he didn’t care.

That was the only other time I saw him. I kept his stuff for three days before putting it back behind his garage, and he never complained or came to find it.

On my way out of town, I relayed my earlier conversation with him to my Mexican friend who owns the house.

He was astonished, said the guy had always been nice to him and they had complained together about the folks across the street and even about the squatter who used to live there (and who continued to occasionally break in and did in fact still live off and on in the nearby woods).

I guess that’s America.

Lucas

PS As always, if there’s someone you think might find this post or one of the other ones on this substack interesting, please share them!

One of the ones I got the most on the campaign trail in Missouri: “Where have all the Democrats gone?”

And probably the question I’ve gotten the most over the last year, some variation of: “Why doesn’t the Republican Party stand up to/distance themselves from/ditch President Trump given his high disapproval ratings?” (Recent polls reflect just 35% approval and 61% disapproval for the President)

For the second question, people often pose all sorts of theories from cowardice, to apathy, to Republicans simply just believing in the Administration’s policies and actions despite polling seeming to show a lot of Americans aren’t fans. I’m sure everyone has their own varying shades of personal reasons for supporting the President, but for the Republican Party as a whole, whether they like the President or agree with him isn’t nearly as important as one great overriding factor: math.

Which brings us back to “Where have all the Democrats gone?”

People in Missouri are very interested in this question because up until 2016, Democrats held nearly every statewide elected office in Missouri and now they hold none.

To get a feel for what’s happening, let’s compare my US Senate election in 2024 (Presidential + Senate year) to 2016, the last time there was both a Presidential and Senate election in the state.

The difference ii percentages is stark. In 2024, I lost my senate election in a wave Republican year by 13.8%, while in 2016, Democratic challenger Jason Kander barely lost his bid for the Senate by just 2.8%.

But looking at the raw vote totals is confusing.

In 2024, I received 1,243,728 votes.

In 2016, Jason got 1,300,200 votes, not even 60,000 more votes than I did.

However…

In 2024, Josh Hawley got 1,651,907 votes.

While in 2016, Roy Blunt received just 1,378,458 votes, nearly 300,000 fewer than Hawley did.

The Democratic votes in the Senate race essentially stayed the same, but I was beaten by 400,000 votes and Jason only lost by 78,000.

In fact, even if I had the same amount of votes in 2024 as Jason had in 2016, and they were taken directly from Hawley’s total, I would have still lost by nearly 300,000 votes: 1,595,435 to 1,300,200.

So what gives? If I had close to the same amount of votes as Jason, why were the results so different?

Election numbers can be interpreted in zillions of different ways, but my experience with the electorate and these numbers don’t make it seem like all the Democrats are necessarily gone. And it can’t be a red population increase swamping Democrats, because Missouri’s population only increased by about 150,000 people between 2016 and 2024 (which includes non-voters and kids).

So what is the most likely answer?

It’s Donald Trump.

Does anyone remember the early 2010’s when Obama was President and pundits everywhere were talking about the future death of the Republican Party due to American demographic changes?

The subtitle for this article is “Where have all the Democrats gone?” Ironically, in 2009, people were asking literally the exact opposite question, like this article that is literally titled “Where have all the Republicans gone?”

The truth is that Donald Trump saved the Republican Party from what many deemed an unavoidable slow death by creating hundreds of thousands of new Republican voters in Missouri and millions more across the country. And these new voters are enthusiastic about it, too (or at least they were in 2020 and 2024 in Missouri).

It’s been a massive boon for the Republican Party with real coattails, because since 2016, President Trump has both taken over the Republican Party and also educated all of his voters that that must vote for Republicans in order to support him.

I experienced that on the campaign trail. Missouri used to have a huge amount of ticket splitting, yet over and over again I was told on the by voters that they couldn’t stand my opponent and liked me (which was backed up by favorability polling), but that they had to vote Republican in order to support President Trump.

He hasn’t just transformed the Republican Party, he has transformed the electorate in a way that the Republican Party desperately needed in order to bounce back from the demographic and other challenges that they didn’t have another answer to.

So when you wonder why the Republican party doesn’t distance themselves from President Trump, it’s important to remember that (like the President says), he IS the Republican Party. He was the miracle they needed to turn what seemed like an insurmountable tide. And if they abandon the new slice of electorate he delivered them, which is generally working class and in a vacuum probably more amenable to liberal than conservative policies, particularly economically, they risk returning to an era where they were staring down a political landscape with no real future.

In the end, the question isn’t necessarily where have all the Democrats gone, it’s where have all these new Republicans come from? And the answer is the reason they stick by the President no matter what.

Lucas

Growing up, my mom had to get creative looking for cheap or free ways to keep us kids entertained during the summers. The standard strategy included: swimming lessons at the public pool, long hours at the public library, and attending every single vacation bible school in town.

And when I say every single one, I mean… Every. Single. One. Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Disciples of Christ, Southern Baptist, you name it...

You’d think this diversity of faiths and locations would have kept things interesting. However, the truth is that you did basically the same thing at all of them. The same coloring sheets. The same songs. The same parachute games. The same ten stories.

Once a summer, however, we got to do something special. Lincoln University, right down the street from our house, hosted a program called Learning Unlimited, where you got to do all sorts of cool stuff. Write plays, make pottery, cook exotic food, play red rover, learn integers.

Well, ok, maybe it wasn’t ALL cool, but it sure beat coloring in a cutout of Daniel in the Lion’s Den and pasting it onto a popsicle stick for the tenth week in a row.

Learning Unlimited is also where I first met my friend for life and future best man, Benyam (whose Washington Post op-ed about running black in America I featured in a previous substack). His parents, refugees of the Eritrean war of Independence against Ethiopia, were drawn to mid-Missouri because they had family here and because Lincoln University, as an HBCU, was a welcoming environment for them. Benyam’s mom graduated from Lincoln and his parents worked there until their retirement.

In all the years growing up learning how to eat injera and dance like a habesha at his house, Benyam’s dad was quietly in the background. Always supportive and entirely encouraging, sometimes funny, but never standing out in any way. Certainly not as your macho-masculine tough guy.

To be real about it, Benyam’s mom, Turu, seemed like the badass of the house. I mean, she smashed spiders with her bare feet and ate ground beef raw out of the package! The hardest thing we ever saw Benyam’s old man do was gargle rubbing alcohol. Which is admittedly pretty fierce, but not exactly worth any street cred with the other kids. And the most interesting thing about the collected old man was probably that his toes were kind of crooked.

Well, that or maybe his weird name: Tesfai (which is pronounced tess-fi, with the fi like the fi in wifi).

Benyam and I are still friends, and a few years ago, when I was stationed at the Pentagon, Benyam called me upset. One of his uncles had gotten agitated at a family gathering and told Benyam that a man who had tortured his dad years ago in the home country was now a cab driver here in the US.

Tortured?! I asked, incredulous.

Yeah, man, it’s nuts. I had no idea, said Benyam. Absolutely crazy. Apparently Pops was thrown in a black hole and nearly tortured to death for who knows how long back in the day. And now we know that the guy who did it is here, just living the good life, like it’s nothing. I can’t just sit here. I gotta go after this guy. Expose him. He’s a damn war criminal. I’ve at least gotta confront him. How can I be a man knowing that this guy is out there just living free in America after what he’s done?

Benyam obsessed over the idea of confronting the man who had tortured his father. He dug into whatever details he could find. He interrogated relatives in pursuit of more information on what had happened. He talked to just about everyone he could. Well except, his dad, of course.

Time went by. Benyam and I mulled over ways to approach the man who had tortured Tesfai. Get into his cab. Ambush him on a podcast. Report him as a war criminal. But first we needed to know more.

Then, in 2021, we were at Benyam’s parents’ house in Jefferson City for the Fourth of July. Sitting in their living room, with Benyam’s two little girls and his parents, someone asked Benyam’s parents to tell us how they came to America, thinking it would be a fun all-American immigration story for the Fourth.

His parents talked about growing up in then-Ethiopia in the 50’s and 60’s. Benyam’s mom showed us a picture of her being honored by the Emperor of Ethiopia at her high school graduation and another photo of Tesfai with a live lion. She talked about how her family and Tesfai, who she was only dating at the time, had encouraged her to escape seek a better life during the wars. How a relative of Tesfai’s in Missouri had eventually gotten Turu to Jefferson City, where she attended Lincoln and worked at the Hotel DeVille’s restaurant to make ends meet. At the time, Tesfai worked for Ethiopian Airlines, and was able to get to Kansas City through work, so they could still occasionally see each other.

Ultimately, as the conflict in Eritrea intensified, Tesfai decided to give up his job and come to America to be with Turu. But he needed to take one last trip back to Eritrea to get everything in order. It was a classic love story intertwined with the American Dream. From the way they spoke, you could feel the light that America held for the rest of the world during those years.

Back home, however, the story took a dark turn. Before Tesfai could depart, he was snatched for questioning by local police. If not for a family member seeing it happen, he would have simply disappeared and no one would have known.

As Tesfai spoke, Benyam was riveted to his seat. This is what he had been wanting to hear for years but never knew how to ask for. He wanted all the details. We quietly bribed his little girls to go to the other room with their tablets while Tesfai continued.

It was a common story in Eritrean Ethiopia at the time. Tesfai had just been unlucky. In the wrong place at the wrong time.

He was taken into captivity and accused of political crimes he didn’t even know had happened and wasn’t in the country to commit. They accused him of being a revolutionary. They locked him away, hidden from the world, and without communication. They tortured him to get a confession. He described some of the terrible things they did. One relentless man in particular. We learned how he had gotten his crooked toes. We heard what it was like to break, to get to the point where you would say anything or do anything to make the pain stop.

Turu talked about how her dreams disappeared when Tesfai did. About what it was like, being in America, such a safe place, surrounded by prosperity, while Tesfai was locked away. She didn’t know what he was going through, she wouldn’t have even known why he hadn’t come and why he wasn’t writing her if that relative hadn’t been lucky enough to see him taken and let everyone know. She talked about how overwhelming it was not knowing if he was alive or dead, or if she would ever know.

One day, Tesfai said, nearly a year later, he was simply set free. With no explanation, no direction, no nothing. Just dumped back on the street. He made his way back to family and tried to put his life back together.

From then on, everywhere he went he was terrified. Looking over his shoulder, waiting to be taken again. Travel out of the country was restricted, yet his old boss at the airline secured him a flight to America, an incredibly risky thing for him to do. Tesfai couldn’t leave, however, unless someone was willing to sign an attestation and vouch that he would return. He couldn’t ask someone to do that, because he knew what would happen to them when he didn’t come back.

An older gentleman, barely an acquaintance, a friend of a friend, heard about Tesfai’s plight when they were all at a bar commiserating about what life had become. The old man approached Tesfai and calmly and simply told him that he would vouch for him.

Tesfai, in shock, refused. He couldn’t put this man at risk. But the man, who was ready to risk his life for a stranger and a love story, insisted. Tesfai asked him to sleep on it.

The next day the man signed the papers.

Tesfai was too afraid to call Turu and tell her, in case someone was listening. His anxiety grew as the day of his flight came closer. Tesfai had second thoughts. Perhaps it was a set-up and the man was a government agent. But Tesfai wouldn’t have another chance and, as he had learned, danger lurked around every corner.

When the day arrived, Tesfai made his way to the airport. He was sure he wouldn’t make it onto the plane and expected that tap on his shoulder at any moment. In his mind, every sound was the sound of armed guards pushing through the crowd to carry him off. Once airborne, every shift in the sky was the plane turning back to take him back in. The delay during his connection was because security was coming to grab him.

But, then, just like that, he landed in America. And he was free.

The rest, as they say, is history. His grandchildren were called back into the room. Benyam’s parents told us about re-uniting, marrying, and having their two boys. How they raised them as Missourians, and worked full productive careers in America before finally retiring a few years ago.

Benyam was speechless. This was his moment to dig, but he was frozen. I stepped in and told Tesfai what we had heard. That the man who tortured him was living in America. That he would likely never answer for what he had done. I asked him what he thought about that.

Tesfai looked at us like we were two schoolchildren.

“Let him have peace,” Tesfai said calmly and without hesitation. “I made peace with it a long time ago. If I had chosen hate, or resentment, or dwelled on what he had done, it would have ruined this beautiful life we made here in America. I would have lost even more than he had taken. Jesus showed us the power to forgive. I follow his example.”

He took Turu’s hand and they smiled at us, the sound of their grandchildren playing in the background, gearing up to watch the fireworks over the Missouri River that night and celebrate 245 years of American freedom with their grandpa, an American hero.

Happy Fourth of July,
Lucas

Today, I’ll talk about how campaign finance juggernauts like AIPAC, big tech, and crypto leverage their money on candidates and elected officials, the pressure my team personally felt during our campaigns, how we approached it, and then some things everyone can do about the problem both in the short term and long term.

I’ll use an example for Republicans and an example for Democrats showing how politicians are willing to sacrifice their deepest core principles on the altar of big money and what I believe to be the top reason why they do it.

First, the Republican example.

It has to do with how, year in and year out, the GOP, including the most vocal anti-abortion activists in the party, shower money on one of the world’s largest free abortion clinics, and nobody says a thing or even acknowledges it (including Democrats).

In case you’re somehow not familiar, the Republican party has been staunchly anti-abortion since 1984, when its official platform first adopted the position that the 14th amendment, protecting life and liberty, applies to embryos and fetuses.

It has been avidly fighting to restrict or eliminate abortion access in America ever since.

One of its biggest targets in this fight has been Planned Parenthood, the non-profit national reproductive health provider that provides a litany of reproductive and preventative health services, including abortions (where legal).

Since using Federal funds for abortions, including through Medicaid, military health plans, federal employee health plans, and other programs, has been banned since the Hyde Amendment was first passed in 1976, nearly a decade before Republicans adopted their current positions, they have waged their war against Planned Parenthood not by arguing that Federal dollars can’t go to abortions, but by arguing that because money is fungible, any federal money paid out to Planned Parenthood for any reason, even for services that aren’t related to abortion in any way, goes toward abortion and therefore must be ceased.

Money for cancer screenings is the same as money for abortions, their logic goes, so federal funds cannot go to Planned Parenthood for cancer screenings.

And they have consistently acted on that logic.

In 2019, for example, President Trump established the “Protect Life Rule” that prohibited any and all taxpayer dollars from going toward Planned Parenthood and other organizations that provide or refer for abortions – no matter how the money gets there or what it is intended to be used for.

The same ideology was codified by the Republican Congress in 2025’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” so that, as of today, Planned Parenthood can’t receive Medicaid insurance payouts for any service, including non-controversial services like STD testing, contraception, or pregnancy tests.

The GOP’s stand against any money going to an organization that could even refer someone for an abortion is so firm that they won’t even fund everyday American healthcare services that have nothing to do with it. In other words, it is such a foundational and entrenched position that they would deny Americans access to cancer screenings in order to preserve it.

And yet, curiously, at the same time, they advocate loudly and wholeheartedly to pour billions of American tax dollars into an organization that spends millions of dollars every year providing free abortions through one of the world’s largest free abortion clinics.

I’m referring to the Israeli government and its national healthcare system, which provides free abortions to pretty much any Israeli woman under a very wide set of circumstances. And anti-abortion activists are well aware of it.

Be’ad Chaim, an Israeli anti-abortion group, posts on its website that 1/5 of pregnancies in Israel end in abortion, that the state sanctions about 20,000 Israeli abortions each year, and that since 1948 “more babies have been aborted in Israel than the number of children that died in the Holocaust,” adding that “Israel is one of the only countries in the world where it is legal to abort a baby up until birth.” Nearly identical talking points to those used here in America against Planned Parenthood.

If Republicans are committed to the idea that paying for cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood is the same as paying for abortions at Planned Parenthood, shouldn’t the same logic apply to money given to Israel?

Of course it should. But they don’t just ignore the fact that they’re funding one of the world’s biggest abortion clinics, they embrace it.

And you don’t hear anything about the hypocrisy from Democrats, either.

Why is that?

We can’t be sure, but we do know that one of the most feared Political Action Committees in America is the America Israel Public Affairs Committee PAC (AIPAC, for short). A non-partisan PAC that is both massive Republican campaign funder and seeder of chaos in a lot of Democratic primaries, AIPAC spent more than $100 million on Congressional and Federal races in 2024, which I believe made them the single biggest contributor to Congressional races.

Of course, there are a lot of groups that contribute to and support candidates, and it has always bought real power and influence.

But a little while ago, AIPAC innovated a unique and seemingly more efficient way to engage with American Democracy: using money not just to get access and influence with supportive candidates and officials, but also to surgically target people who speak out against them or their causes with tsunamis of negative spending, a tactic that breeds fear and eliminates opposition.

They have been the difference maker in race after race, injecting massive amounts of negative campaign spending against candidates they don’t like. We saw it here in Missouri where they spent $8 million dollars in a Democratic primary, making it the most expensive congressional primary in history, to knock Cori Bush out of Congress in 2024.

The last thing that anyone running for office wants to do is land in their crosshairs, particularly because, like it or not, until recently most American voters didn’t even care about or pay attention to the issues that AIPAC wants people to take positions on.

The influence this situation creates in American politics is absolutely massive. I can tell you from personal experience that every single campaign in America takes into consideration whether or not things they do or say are going to make them a target of AIPAC and they have to plan for it.

My campaign certainly did. I’m going to tell you how we approached the situation and how it sort of ebbed and flowed over the course of the two campaigns because I think it is illustrative of just how much though and effot is put toward this dynamic in American political campaigns.

There was no particular reason for AIPAC to target me. Yet they had jumped big into Democratic primaries in the past, and they had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for my second campaign’s eventual general election opponent, Josh Hawley, so the spectre constantly loomed in the background of my campaign and was discussed multiple times.

We knew starting out that we would never be AIPAC’s pick no matter the configuration of the primary — neither when we were facing an establishment-backed state senator nor when facing a self-funding billionaire heiress. And while they had mainly focused on House races before, we knew they had begun looking more closely at Senate races.

So like many Democratic candidates and campaigns over the years who faced disadvantages in funding and establishment support, especially before the Israel’s government’s recent atrocities in Gaza, we sought in the 2021-2022 cycle to keep AIPAC at bay through a strategy of limited reactive engagement without any public action. When they reached out, we gave simple responses and did a Zoom.

On the Zoom, they said their chief concerns were what they described as two factions in Congress, and I’m paragraphing: moralizing politicians who sought to apply their standards for human rights on Israel, and isolationists who advocated for ending American entanglements in the Middle East — and they were concerned I was the latter. In our responses across the engagements, I relied on my background in the Marine Corps to navigate me through what was at times an awkward conversation.

This was in 2022, before the razing of Gaza and everything that came with it, so it wasn’t that hard of a thing to do. I’d served in the military in the middle east and had always seen Israel as an ally. Harry Truman, my political hero, had first recognized Israel. And I believed that the Iron Dome was good because it hopefully meant that Israel could defend itself from strikes without invading its neighbors and sparking more regional conflicts. Obviously, a lot has changed since then and I was wrong about how the Iron Dome played out under Netanyahu, who apparently sees it as a shield that lets him wage regional war with limited consequences.

Our approach to AIPAC was in stark contrast to our approach to JStreet—an organization that advocates for a two-state solution, dignity for Palestinians, and peace in the region—who we proactively cultivated a relationship with and sought support from, as have many candidates across the spectrum of the Democratic Party’s politics.

For AIPAC, our strategy of hopeful avoidance and limited engagement was suggested initially by operatives working on several progressive candidates at the time, including the Senate campaign of then-candidate John Fetterman — and I’ll note it was surprising for me (and I’m confident to those operatives as well) to see over the years that for Fetterman, it was not simply misdirection.

But while Fetterman would publish columns and do interviews during his campaign dedicated to Israel-related issues at AIPAC’s request, when AIPAC requested at times in both cycles that we do several public things to show some kind of support for the Israeli government’s actions of the day — like asking for a post celebrating the visit of the Israeli president to Congress — we simply didn’t, hoping our initial engagement was enough to avoid gaining any significant negative attention from them.

And while we were certain we would have been up against some amount of AIPAC support for a Republican opponent in 2022, we at least appeared to be successful at avoiding AIPAC’s involvement in our Democratic Primary.

In the following cycle, it did not initially appear we’d be as lucky. Now-Congressman Wesley Bell’s entry into our primary was followed by whispers of his ongoing conversations with AIPAC, which truly would have been a difference maker in our primary. But after October 7th, 2023, AIPAC’s priorities significantly shifted, and within a few weeks, he exited the Senate primary to instead challenge then-Congresswoman Cori Bush with millions of dollars from AIPAC at his back.

And after that, I don’t believe we received any other outreach or attention from them in our primary — something we hoped to keep that way. They of course supported our Republican opponent in the general election.

It’s pretty crazy, though, that our primary campaign for Senate in Missouri, that I’m sure AIPAC was never paying attention to, felt compelled to take the time to make sure it wouldn’t become the target of an organization that had nothing to do with Missouri or the campaign at all. And I’m sure it still happens every day across our country because the power and money AIPAC wields is immense. Immense enough that, as far as I can tell, the entire Republican party is willing to overlook one of its core principles regarding abortion to avoid rocking the boat.

While AIPAC was an early-mover in adopting the strategy of primary election wrecking ball, they are no longer the only bully on the block.

Big tech and the crypto industry have long been the antithesis of what Democrats purport to support. They are anti-worker, anti-union, pro-massive wealth accumulation, anti-regulation, and accumulate wealth by taking advantage of everyday people. And yet Democrats have been reticent to speak out against them and many full-throatedly support them. If the crypto industry and big tech hadn’t made peace with President Trump, I actually believe you’d find the Democratic party in full support of both as they generally used to be.

Although not the only reason, I believe one reason is because they’ve adopted the AIPAC methodology to influencing campaigns.

In 2024, pro-Crypto groups spent $10 million in the California Senate primary in order to keep Katie Porter out of the Senate. More recently, they spent $6.5 million in a Texas Democratic primary to successfully knock one of their most vocal opponents, Representative Al Green, out of Congress. The message is clear to Democrats: oppose us and risk personal annihilation. Large swathes have fallen in line, and some have even aligned with Republicans to openly support Crypto, like Senators Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks.

My campaign knew that these guys wielded that type of power and, just like with AIPAC, it was something we had to take seriously.

Although it seemed very unlikely that the Crypto folks would come in strong for Josh Hawley, and despite the fact that, again, there was no particular reason for them to target me, a significant amount of time was also spent examining our published positions to see if there was anything that might trigger an avalanche of spending against us on that front.

Similar to AIPAC’s issues before the fall of 2023, in the pre-data center era that my campaign existed in, most Missourians didn’t care or even think about crypto or most tech issues beyond Facebook being bad. So it honestly didn’t really matter to our constituents what positions we took, and decisions were basically made based on balancing my personal convictions with what the crypto industry was interested in.

Which really makes you wonder: is it right that such groups should have so much influence on American politics despite the fact that their issues aren’t even central to most people’s lives? Should the litmus test on being a Member of Congress really be a candidate’s positions on just a few niche issues that the people who spend the most care about?

Because that’s what’s happening. When a power PAC goes after someone they don’t like, they don’t attack them for their positions on what the PAC cares about. No one would care. They don’t usually mention their central issue or motivations at all, and often make an effort to hide them while they pour millions of dollars in generic negative attack ads in against their targets.

It’s messed up that things work this way. The ability of AIPAC, crypto PACs, and others like them to influence our government and our politicians is unamerican and bad for our country. It’s one of the reasons we’re in the situation we are in. How can you trust politicians that are willing to sacrifice even their most core beliefs when the money is at play, like we see with Republicans on abortion funding and Democrats on tech?

As more big-money groups begin to understand how they can grow their power by surgically targeting anyone who disagrees with them, it’s only going to get worse.

The good thing is that there is a path forward.

In the short term, the one thing that kept us somewhat independent throughout the campaign was the fact that nearly all of our donations consistently came from small dollar independent donors. It’s not perfect, we still felt like we needed to take actions to keep them from turning the big guys into our enemies and negating those donations, but at least we didn’t have to adopt all of their positions and parrot their ideology, we just had to refrain from making big enemies out of them.

In the long term, real campaign finance reform, possibly even something like public funding for campaigns that reject PAC assistance, and an end to Citizens United and infinite outside spending will be critical to restoring integrity in our politicians and our elections.

So thank you to all of you who supported campaigns around the country so that they can compete in this twisted political landscape and so that we can continue the long climb out of the hole that our democracy has sadly fallen into.

Lucas

I will start by saying, that as you probably know, a lot has happened in the world the last few weeks, but also in our family. We took a little break to go on an family vacation and, with 4 children, you can imagine how our hands were quite full. Right after that, Lukie turned 1 year old! Time absolutely flies—that little one took his first few steps that same week.

And lastly, Lucas got knee surgery done right after that. He has been in recovery, and it has been heavier on his body than he expected. He had not had surgery since he was a kid and thought he’d be back on his feet right after. Moms that have had C-sections like I did with both my kids, will understand when I say this: bless his heart. But I am very respectful of his situation, as he injured his knee while he was on active duty as a Marine. Another reason to love the VA.

But like I said before, he will be back soon, hopefully in the next week or so. Now that we’ve caught up, we can dive into the world outside and today’s Substack issue.

Data center fights are everywhere right now.

If you haven’t seen in the news, Utah is fighting against a massive data center that was recently approved, despite the many residents’ protest against it. And not for little reason, this Data Center’s footprint is roughly 2.5 times larger than the island of Manhattan. Bigger than Bryce Canyon National Park. Bigger and hungrier than most of us can even imagine.

There’s been a similar fight here in Independence, Missouri, where we live (right outside of Kansas City, Missouri for our non-Missourian readers) with leaders similarly approving a new data center echoing all sorts of company promises. Like the byline on the actual tech company’s website: “Nebius is a private, European-based technology company. The development is expected to bring tens of millions of tax dollars to the City of Independence.”

According to most report, Nebius is going to pay about $30 million dollars to the City of Independence each year. It would have been around $300 million per year if the city hadn’t given the data center a 90% tax break during their negotiations. But, then again, to be fair, the land currently generates just a few thousand dollars a year just sitting there, so even after the abatements it’s a lot more money than was originally coming.

Which makes it sound like a win, right?

Unfortunately, one of the big problems with these negotiations is that they often focus on tax dollars and don’t think about all the other costs and consequences. So, what should towns across the country, like Independence, be negotiating before saying yes to AI?

This is important for everyone to know so that we can hold our leaders accountable and don’t just say yes to data centers while entering into deals we may not fully understand. Because the reality is that despite all their promises, once a data center is built it doesn’t employ the towns, it plugs into it.

What’s actually being built?

To put it simple, a modern AI data center isn’t just another commercial building. It’s heavy industry. More like the kind of infrastructure you’d find in places like Louisiana’s petrochemical corridor (“Cancer Alley”): facilities that run constantly, draw enormous resources, and reshape the systems around them. Except instead of refining oil, these facilities refine data. And they do it at a scale that’s easy to underestimate.

The Nebius plant in Independence, for example, is projected to use the same amount of electricity as 400,000 Independence homes would. Note: there are only 50,000 households in all of Independence… That’s a pretty big change.

The largest new AI projects go even further. Some proposed clusters, like OpenAI’s, are expected to consume as much power as New York City and San Diego combined during peak demand. To quote some writers and experts, “it is scary”.

Basically, these data centers add a large city’s worth of energy demand to much smaller towns. And this is not a slow shift. It’s an explosion that sends electricity prices through the roof for everyday people.

Bloomberg analyzed electricity price increases in regions located near significant data centers and found that electricity per month costs as much as 267% more than it did just five years ago.

Let’s do some back of the napkin math for Independence to see just how quickly the promised $30 million a year in tax revenue evaporates and then goes very, very negative for the people of Independence.

With 50,000 Independence households spending about $150 per month in electricity bills, we’re talking about $90 million per year in total household electric bills. If the Independence electricity rate goes up just 33% because of that massive data center, which it certainly will, then the $30 million per year in revenue is already zeroed out.

Anything after that, and the people of Independence simply have less money than they did before the center came. When the price of electricity doubles, which is highly likely based on the Bloomberg data, the people of Independence will be paying $90 million more in electricity than they were before the data center arrived, and only getting $30 million in exchange.

The math ain’t mathin, it is absolutely brutal.

Anywhere you live in the Midwest, an equally bad deal is coming for you, too.

Big AI is targeting places like Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and Indiana. Not by accident, but because the Midwest has cheap land, a willingness to generate power, cash-strapped local governments, and water.

So what about water?

Data centers run on water as much as they run on electricity.

Servers generate heat. To prevent overheating, many facilities rely on evaporative cooling systems, which consume outstandingly large volumes of water every day.

We’re talking about a demand that eventually require hundreds of millions to over a billion gallons of water per day nationally, placing significant strain on local systems, especially the smaller municipalities that these data centers target.

Water systems in the US are highly fragmented, with more than 50,000 separate systems around the country. Most Midwestern communities rely on these small independent water systems that were never designed for large industrial-scale continuous demand.

And something we rarely hear about when talking about water consumption in Data Centers, is that after the water has been used in them, a large portion of the water used doesn’t come back in a form communities can easily reuse.

Part of it evaporates into the air as part of the cooling process, meaning it doesn’t return into the local water system, it is effectively removed from the watershed.

The remaining water, known as “blowdown” is discharged as wastewater.

This wastewater contains concentrated minerals and treatment chemicals that often require additional processing before it can safely re-enter municipal systems.

That means that when a data center comes in, the question isn’t just “do we have water?” It’s: can our system handle sustained high-volume withdrawals all year round? What about on hot summer days when data centers use 30 times as much as their daily average? Or in a drought year? And, most importantly, what infrastructure do we need to add to make it that way and who is going to pay for it?

No one knows how much extra the people of Independence are going to pay on their water bills, in addition to their higher electric bill, because nobody properly looked into it.

The only thing for certain, is that we are essentially paying the data center to come here and suck wealth out of our community for almost nothing in return.

Because unlike factories or other large employers, despite demanding major infrastructure support, Data Centers create relatively few permanent jobs.

Will these Data Centers bring many jobs to the town that hosts them?

This is usually the first thing people hear: jobs.

It is the reason many communities say yes.

And at first, they do, actually.

Building a data center takes hundreds, sometimes thousands of workers. There are contractors, electricians, engineers, and suppliers. Local hotels fill up. Restaurants get busy.

It feels like growth.

But it’s short-lived.

Once the facility is built, the number of permanent jobs drops sharply. A large data center can operate with dozens of employees, not hundreds. Many roles are highly specialized. Many systems are automated.

Ironically, the companies and communities pouring billions into AI are actually reducing their workforces and their efforts are likely reduce overall jobs in the long run.

Over 100,000 workers were impacted by AI-related layoffs in 2025. Over 70k more in these first months of 2026. More than 45 CEOs have explicitly cited AI as a reason for cutting jobs.

So I guess I was wrong when I said we are just paying them to come in and suck wealth out of our community. We are also essentially paying them to come in and destroy jobs!

What’s Already Changing and What Still Needs to Be Asked

Fortunately, some people are beginning to realize these are not ordinary developments and that they shouldn’t be treated that way.

Just last month, for example, Independence voters ousted everyone on the municipal ballot who had forced through the data center approval!

Kansas City recently passed one of its first major zoning changes specifically targeting data centers, limiting where they can be built and requiring more public review.

And in Peculiar and St. Charles, Missouri, residents actually stopped the data centers from coming in at all

But, so far, it’s hard to see any concrete examples of communities setting the right terms for these companies before they arrive. It’s been a bit of an all or nothing approach. And community leaders are still often only asking “home much revenue will this bring in” without also asking “how much is this going to cost our citizens.”

I wanted to share all of this information with you today because I believe that can change if we all know what’s actually happening and what we are up against and can educate our leaders. So that instead of accepting the terms from these companies, we start setting them.

So, as always, please share this with anyone who is thinking about or could be impacted by a data center, thank you for reading, and keep on fighting!

Marilyn Kunce

*On a different note, truly there are a lot of news coming at us at once these days, it is hard to pick a topic when so much is going on around the world. We are hoping to write more about some of these pieces of policy that are being rolled back and bring very bad consequences for everyone. Lucas and I have each very different areas that we personally focus our work on, which makes it great for bringing you loads of great insights.

Some ideas I have, personally, are regarding the environmental rollbacks, let me know in the comments if you’d like me to write a piece for each? Or if you’d prefer if I grouped them on themes? Or if you want a list with the big picture points and what to look for? I want to be able to dive hard on the policies, the consequences, what it means for the Midwest and our family’s health and future. Should I do a podcast on these? Truly, I have so much to tell you all, that I am really thinking about putting a podcast out every other week with the major rollbacks in simple words. Let me know what you guys want, and I will do my best! I also have the honor to work with some people who are absolute experts on certain topics, and I am more than happy to talk to them, and break it down to simple words.

Many Mexicans believe that the US could play a role in countering narco-terrorism. After all, narco-terrorist organizations wouldn’t exist without massive US drug demand and an equally large flow of money and weapons back into Mexico—often supported by corporate and financial structures located in the US. But as much as many can imagine a path for cooperation, there is a lot of uncertainty, fear, and distrust in the US’s ability to do it right.

Now, Marilyn recounts the sadness and fear she encountered living among terrorists, and potential paths forward. -Lucas

This past Sunday, news outlets once again turned their eyes to Mexico. Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, the elusive leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), was killed in a military operation carried out by Mexican security forces with U.S. intelligence support. He led a criminal enterprise with tentacles throughout Mexican territory and into all 50 US States and over 40 countries.

Headlines like this about Mexico today might not be shocking, but to me, that wasn’t always the case. I have talked before about growing up in Mexico. In those days, Mexico felt wide, safe, and unguarded.

My earliest memories are of long highway rides, where the biggest threat was a coyote darting into the road or the rare encounter with a drunk driver. My parents talking in the front seat, the stereo playing my mom’s favorite songs, the landscape rolling out peacefully before us. We roamed freely in the back of our purple 1991 Ford E-150 van.

In our corner of Mexico, like most of the country, there was no such thing as a “narco culture.” No sense that violence could interrupt on an ordinary Tuesday.

Then, in 2010, in my senior year of high school, the ground shifted.

That year we were supposed to take a school trip to some touristic part of the country. It was a rite of passage at our school, permission to see more of our own country that was vast, beautiful, and ours to discover without fear. My sister had gone to Puerto Vallarta on hers. My brother walked among pyramids and ancient ruins on his. Now it was finally my turn!

I wondered whether I would finally make it to a beach washed in gold light, I imagined stepping onto warm sand for the first time. My friends and I speculated endlessly at every break we had between classes.

But it never happened.

What had once been routine became unthinkable almost overnight.

That year, everything changed for us back in my hometown, and stories of carefree school trips became a distant memory.

We learned what it meant to shelter in place, not for a storm, but for men with rifles. We spent days inside while what sounded like a war zone unfolded outside our windows. Streets emptied into ghost towns. Schools closed. Businesses shuttered. Government offices locked their doors.

2010 brought a darkness we had never known in my hometown, nor in so many corners of Mexico. Town officials were killed in front of their families. Police officers were assassinated or resigned because resisting was futile. The cartels did not merely outnumber them; they outgunned them, wielding weapons and bulletproof glass that most of us had only seen in films and that certainly weren’t made in Mexico.

And then there were the disappearances, boys I grew up with vanished. More than half of the missing and unlocated persons cases were in the age range between 15 and 34 years. We heard whispers that many were coerced into working for the cartels to protect their families, a pattern unfolding across the country. In Durango alone, my hometown, the trend of disappearances that spiked in 2010 is clear.

We did our best to adapt. We learned new routes home. We stopped lingering in the plaza after dark. We lowered our voices when certain names were mentioned. Survival began to masquerade as normalcy.

I will tell you now my own encounter with narcos, and how by fortune alone, I am here to recount it:

In 2011, I moved to Durango City to attend college. I was an 18-year-old freshman and the city felt both thrilling and unfamiliar. I had visited a number of times with my family before, but this was my first time moving around solo.

I had to learn how to navigate buses. A large number of students move around town using the bus system. The routes are long, stretching across neighborhoods and outskirts, and by the time the buses reach the halfway point, there is often no room left for anyone else. The drivers simply pass the remaining stops without slowing down.

My classes began early, the first one of them at 7am. I would plan to catch an earlier bus and if it was too full to stop, I could still take the next one and arrive just on time.

One day, just like any other day, I was at the bus stop waiting for the 6:15am bus, as I had done multiple times now. This was during light saving season, so the morning was still deeply dark.

I saw headlights in the distance from what seemed to be a large vehicle approaching. It could have been a bus, though in that darkness it was hard to tell. I did not think much of it until it passed me.

As it did, a chill ran through my whole body.

I knew exactly who drove vehicles like that in the city. Big trucks were common in rural areas, built for crops and battered roads. But in the city, no one drove those oversized machines without meaning to be seen.

They drive them through town as a statement of dominance.

The only people who drove through Durango City in trucks like that were the cartels.

Another chill ran through me when I saw the vehicle brake, then reverse slowly until it stopped right in front of the only light pole near us. I was the only person there besides them.

I turned as the driver stepped out. A large man, perhaps in his thirties, walked toward me. I could see the gun tucked into his waistband. I tried not to let my eyes linger on it.

Even now I can recall his outline more clearly than his face. The darkness softened his features into fragments. Dark eyes. Dark hair. A broad nose. A poorly trimmed beard. Heavyset. His voice was raspy, words slurred, though not enough to dull his intent.

He smiled.

“What is a young, beautiful lady like yourself doing here all alone? It is dark, you know that, right? It is not safe out here.”

I forced a smile in return and steadied my voice. “Yes, I know. I am on my way to college. The bus is just taking a while. But it should be here any minute now.”

I wanted him to imagine witnesses arriving, a bus full of students pulling up behind him. I wanted him to feel exposed.

He laughed. I exhaled slowly.

His eyes moved over me, unhurried, enjoying the power of being the one who was not afraid.

He said next, almost casually, “I can give you a ride. My truck is right there. My friend is in it. I am sure he will not mind. In fact, I know he will enjoy your company.”

By then my nerves were visible. Running felt useless on that wide, empty road. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to outrun a bullet. So instead, I turned my back to him.

“No, thanks. I will wait for the bus. It should be here very soon.”

I said it as if dismissing a persistent stranger. I hoped he would lose interest.

He did not. And turning your back on a man with a gun is foolish. He drew it and pressed it to my head, grabbing me from behind. I could smell alcohol on his breath as he whispered into my ear, “You are coming with us.” He stated.

There was no space for resistance. I walked to the truck and slid into the passenger seat, nodding at whatever they said. The two of them talked about the night before, laughing at memories I could not follow. I barely remember the details. I remember the weapons. One pressed against my side from the back seat. Others lying on the floor.

At some point they mentioned the highway toward Sinaloa. They spoke of a girl already there, waiting. They said she and I would be fun.

My heart pounded so hard. I understood then that release would not come by asking. I studied the roads without turning my head, trying to fix landmarks in my mind. They avoided main avenues, slipping through smaller streets. I wondered whether the man behind me was drunk enough to miss if I ran. His words were still slurred. I decided that if even the smallest chance appeared, I would take it.

Then, a miracle happened.

A car cut in front of us, forcing the truck to stop abruptly. In that same breath, I realized the door beside me was unlocked. I opened it and ran. I did not hesitate. I turned the first corner I saw, then another, slipping through an alley. To my shock, I was not far from campus.

I ran straight to the college building. I did not look back.

Inside, I saw a familiar face and collapsed into sobs.

I had made it.

That morning, a miracle stood between me and becoming another statistic.

El Mencho

The man we have all been hearing about in the news, Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes was born in rural Michoacán, where boys have long grown up watching legal agriculture and illicit cultivation co-exist. The line between survival and crime blurred early for them and power was measured in weapons and loyalty. He was typical of a generation shaped by expanding criminal networks, whose started learning the trade young and whose most direct path to upward mobility was through the cartels—which meant a unique relationship with the United States.

El Mencho immigrated illegally to the US in the 1980s and got his next level of narco-training in the San Francisco Bay Area, . While there he was arrested for weapons and narcotics offenses, served several years in prison, and was deported back to Mexico. While in the US, he became embedded with members of the Valencia crime family, eventually strengthening those ties through marriage. After his return to Mexico, he rose through organized crime ranks and eventually co-founded what became the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG).

He shaped the group into a force structured like an army and managed like a business.

CJNG became a vertically integrated criminal enterprise: producing and distributing fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin; operating clandestine laboratories; acquiring high-powered weapons; stealing and smuggling fuel; extorting businesses and agricultural producers; running timeshare and real estate fraud schemes; engaging in human smuggling and trafficking; expanding into illegal mining; and laundering vast sums through shell companies and cross-border financial networks.

The group earned a reputation as one of the most violent criminal organizations, linked to tens of thousands of deaths over the past decade.

Rosalinda González Valencia, more than simply the spouse of “El Mencho,” was widely identified by U.S. and Mexican authorities as a key financial operator within the network tied to the CJNG, and its associated money-laundering structure known as “Los Cuinis”.

Rosalinda was alleged to have helped manage a web of businesses across the hospitality, retail, agriculture, and real estate sectors. These companies were accused by the U.S. Treasury of serving as vehicles to move, disguise, and legitimize cartel proceeds.

González Valencia was first arrested in 2018 on charges related to illicit financial operations and organized crime, later released on procedural grounds, and then re-arrested. After years of pretrial detention and legal challenges, she was released in 2024, citing insufficient evidence to sustain organized crime charges, although financial investigations had surrounded her case.

Her case highlights a central tension in dismantling narco enterprises: arresting armed leaders is one battle; proving intricate financial conspiracies inside layered corporate structures is another, often far more complicated one.

The Relationship Between the Cartels and the US

It is impossible to understand the rise of CJNG without acknowledging the role the United States has played, even if indirectly, in creating the conditions that strengthened it.

First, there is demand: The constant U.S. demand for narcotics, intensified by the opioid crisis and the rapid expansion of fentanyl has proven enormously profitable.

Second, there is energy supply convenience: In Texas, cartel-linked networks have been documented operating near border regions and energy hubs, where stolen crude and fuel are smuggled across the southwest border into the United States and integrated into the legal energy market before eventually being resold and refined.

This has raised serious questions about why the illegal economy continues to mix with the legal one in Texas, especially given political rhetoric about border protection and energy security when these systems remain vulnerable to exploitation by transnational criminal organizations.

Third, profitable firepower: The flow of American weapons is directly linked to increased violence and homicide rates in Mexico, and there is a thriving cross border gun market. Data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) indicates that between 70% and 80% of firearms seized in Mexico and submitted for tracing originated north of the border. Estimates suggest that over 135,000 firearms are trafficked across the U.S.-Mexico border each year.

Fourth, revenue streams: Sophisticated organizations launder funds through legitimate sectors, embedding themselves into legal markets, often in the US, until illicit capital appears ordinary.

If the goal is to meaningfully weaken organizations like CJNG, the strategy cannot rely solely on arrests and military operations, and it certainly can’t remain as haphazard as it has been.

When Mexicans think about the US helping solve the problem they have helped create, trust is probably the biggest sticking point. The messages and actions have been so mixed its hard to believe that the US is serious about taking on the problem.

Whether through pardons for individuals convicted of drug related crimes, including the late 2025 pardon of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández after his U.S. drug trafficking conviction, or the entering of 17 family members connected to Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, to the United States through negotiated legal arrangements, the federal government sends conflicting messages about the most basic thing: accountability, which makes it hard to believe that it will be trustworthy about anything.

Protecting Americans, and by extension Mexicans, requires consistency: strong enforcement, transparent standards for clemency and immigration decisions, and financial oversight of corporate infiltration.

Beyond the Man

El Mencho’s death marked a symbolic milestone. But without addressing the economic and corporate infrastructure that enriched and protected CJNG, its unlikely to be meaningful long term.

The CJNG case illuminates a broader trend: Narco influence is no longer peripheral to the global economy; it is embedded within it.

Policymakers in the United States and around the world, must acknowledge that this cartel already operated, both legally and illegally, across all 50 U.S. states and over 40 countries, and has done so for more than a decade.

That complexity is the sobering truth. The environment that shaped him, the normalization of Narco power as parallel governance, cannot be undone with one operation.

Although the narcos eventually pulled back from my hometown, they did not return to where they began. Instead, they expanded their reach. Their territorial footprint across Mexico is larger now than it was during my childhood, increasing the likelihood that more boys are being socialized within the same violent ecosystems that produced El Mencho.

In order to get real change, we need to rebuild institutions strong enough that we ensure the next boy growing up in a rural town sees a different ladder to climb. The U.S. could, and maybe even should, contribute to that effort give the outsized role it has played in fueling the problem, but only in ways that respect Mexican leadership and sovereignty. I think the biggest barrier to that right now is is that US inconsistency, and perceived double standards, leave Mexicans questioning whether deeper U.S. engagement would be politically viable or even successful within Mexico.

It’s a question much of the world seems to be grappling with when thinking about talking to the US right now, and that’s a hard truth to accept. In towns like mine, little girls once imagined America as a place that stood for something steady and hopeful. Now it appears less like an exception and more like another potentially bad actor in a complicated, sometimes frightening world.

Marilyn Kunce

As you may know, I am Mexican. And anyone who looks like me or sounds like me has been scared to go out for a while now, even if, like me, they have done everything by the book. Because “aggressive immigration enforcement” is actually just code for racial profiling. And we are all targets. In Minnesota, police chiefs have been speaking out because they are tired of their off-duty members being illegally harassed by ICE. Proving what we already knew, they report that every single one of their people who have been stopped is a person of color.

It’s incredibly hard on parents.

Anyone with kids in this country, like me, who are mixed race or who speak their parents’ native language, is scared to keep teaching them their traditions.

When children are heard screaming on the other side of immigration detention facilities, in unsafe and inhumane conditions such as limited access to clean drinking water, spoiled or contaminated food, and inadequate medical care, it becomes impossible to look at your own children without worrying that they could be taken away, regardless of whether they are citizens and you are here legally or not.

If you want to talk about crimes being committed, lets talk about the crime against humanity that is detaining and separating children from their families. Especially when investigations have shown that federal agencies lack any comprehensive system to track detainees across transfers, leaving families desperate for answers after the kidnapping has occurred.

On top of holding my kids tighter, I want to thank every single one of you who are out there fighting this. Standing up for humanity, decency, and what is right. Fighting for the American way that is under attack. Risking your lives to stand up against something that is so patently wrong.

The idea of separation on its own is terrifying. I work from home. My kids are used to seeing their mom nearly 24 hours a day. If I disappeared from one day to the next, I am certain it would be deeply traumatizing for them.

But it becomes even more horrifying when you see what is actually happening. Disgusting reports of an immigration officer sexually abusing a mother in exchange for allowing her to see her detained daughter. An abuse of government power against someone who was completely vulnerable.

Does that woman have a husband? Do those who claim this cruelty is God ordained believe her desperation was a sin too? Because what happened was not moral. It was coercion. It was violence.

People go missing in these facilities all the time. And there is no reliable public accounting of how many people have died in immigration custody or have been transferred across borders without families being able to locate them.

So thank you again, because seeing Americans in the streets protesting and defending immigrants gives us all a sense that we are not alone, that Americans who can will use their voices when others can not. I am in awe at how brave you are. You are still out there, even after Renée Good was shot and killed by a federal agent during immigration protests in Minneapolis and Alex Pretti was killed while standing between armed agents and a woman who was being surrounded and forced to the ground.

Alex was an ICU nurse who cared for veterans. He was a son, a friend, and a member of his community who spent his life easing others’ pain.

Renee was a mother. She had three children waiting for her at home.

They didn’t have to be there, but they were, standing up for the country they love and the decency it used to have.

I want everyone to be safe. I feel sickened by this uncalled-for violence. These deaths are part of a growing list of immigration enforcement related fatalities documented this year alone.

The violence continues in Minnesota, and all I want is safety for everyone involved. To those standing up for us, your bravery matters. It is making a difference, even when it feels impossibly heavy.

As many of you know, I had a baby last year. Lukie is the sweetest bundle of joy, and he and Harvey, along with their two older brothers, fill our days with chaos and laughter. I have not spoken much about the postpartum depression I have experienced since this pregnancy. I am fortunate to have a strong support system, an involved husband, family nearby, and the ability to care for my mental health. Recently, I started moving my body again, and that has helped more than I expected.

Today, I had a realization.

What is happening in this country around immigration is giving me debilitating anxiety. I have been pushing it aside, blaming lack of sleep, exhaustion, and postpartum depression. But the news, the killings, the apprehension of children, the lack of transparency and justice, all of it has been building inside me.

I am Mexican. I came here legally. I had a work visa. I did everything the so-called right way. I have written about my immigration story before, but that is not what this piece is about.

The latest events in Minnesota sank my spirit in a way I had not felt before. And while I experience this from the safety of my home, with access to care, medication, and comfort, my mind is not a safe place. It is dark. Rage shows up sometimes, but mostly, hope feels like it is slipping away.

And then I realized something else.

This is exactly what fear and cruelty are meant to do. They want us exhausted. They want us silent. They want us numb.

We can not give in to that.

Do not give up to these forces.

Thank you for using your voices when others cannot. Your presence matters. Your courage matters. Please stay. We need you out there, protecting us

And we will need you now through election day. Lucas is not running this cycle, but there are so many who are running whose victories can change the course of history. More than anything, we need them to win so that we can turn the tide. Please help them.

Tonight, I will tuck my children in. I will speak my language to them. I will teach them where they come from. I will keep loving loudly in a world that wants us afraid. That is how I hold on to hope.

I am afraid. I am angry. I am still here. And I am not done hoping.

Hope does not look like optimism right now. It looks like refusal. Refusal to forget. Refusal to be silent. Refusal to let fear decide who we become.

Thank you for everything you do.

Marilyn Kunce

Every year, on Martin Luther King Day, I feel that it is important to to remember and talk about how real the fight for equality still is.

Three years ago, during my campaign for US Senate, I spent MLK Day in a mostly black town (92%) called Howardville. It’s in Missouri’s far southeast “Bootheel” region, the same area as Hayti Heights, another all black Missouri town whose struggles with clean water and sewage I wrote about a few weeks ago.

In the spirit of Dr. King, my friend and Howardville resident, Vanessa Frazier, had gathered a group of other local residents together to figure out how they could protect their access to voting, which had recently taken a serious blow.

You see, Vanessa, and everyone else who lived in Howardville, had received letters telling them that their polling places had been shut down.

The letters read: “Please do not think we think you are not important, but with only 263 registered voters in the precinct, it is just not fiscally responsible to set up a polling place…”

A third of polling places were closed in New Madrid County, a county that stretches across 700 square miles.

It was another reminder that Dr. King’s fight for the democratic and economic empowerment of everyday people is far from over. With zero public input, Howardville residents were told they’d need to travel miles and miles just to vote — as would hundreds of their other friends in nearby towns. At the meeting, many residents said that they or their neighbors don’t drive and that the voting alternative for them was a joke: an option to vote by mail—with a notary—which most people there said they had no access to and which added another layer of burden to voting.

People from all around the area showed up at Vanessa’s Howardville MLK Day event to talk about how they were blindsided by this. Republican and Democrat. Black and white.

But mostly black. And overwhelmingly poor.

If you’ve ever seen the movie Braveheart, the leadership in Missouri followed the same strategy as the English king at the Battle of Falkirk, firing indiscriminately into an infantry melee to take out as many people as possible, regardless of their side:

“Archers”
“I beg your pardon, Sire, but won’t we hit our own troops?”
“Yes, but we’ll hit theirs as well. We have reserves. Attack.”

The reasoning: the English king had more total troops than the Scots, so an equal depletion in numbers favored him because it increased the ratio in his favor. And besides, they were just poor commoners, so who cares?

Welcome to the strategy behind modern voter suppression.

A theme in Howardville that MLK day, a day we should have been celebrating equal rights and the legacy of Dr. King, was that the deck is still stacked against the Howardville community. Just like it’s always been.

Here they were, in the 2020s, battling local leadership that thinks they are irrelevant, to try to retain access to voting. But that’s not all they talked about. They talked about some attitudes never change. About growing up attending local segregated schools nearly fifteen years after the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, because the local leadership of that era felt the same way the current leadership felt— that they weren’t equal.

One of those old segregated school buildings, now falling apart, is actually on the national register of historic places because it was such a late segregated school.

Politicians have been obsessed with attacking DEI lately. Because it seems unfair. And it feels unfair.

But the real reason they obsess over it is because they don’t want us to talk about something that’s even more unfair: being born black in America.

The situations in Howardville and Hayti Heights aren’t exceptions or outliers. They are indicative of a problem that a lot of people want us to forget or go back to ignoring.

A lot of the time we think of racism as big acts or overt actions. And while these exist, perhaps the deepest impact of race in America is that it works a lot like a casino. The odds of you having a good outcome in any given situation are always worse if you are a minority, particularly if you are black. And these small disadvantages compound over time.

Healthcare is a good example. Black infants are more than twice as likely to die as white infants. Black moms are more than twice as likely to die as a result of childbirth than anyone else. They’re also more than twice as likely to die from breast cancer. Your doctor is less likely to respond to you. Your provider is less likely to listen to you or prescribe needed medication. And even less likely to believe what you tell them.

And forget about hiring. Just having a black name makes you significantly less likely to get a call on a job application. Even crazier, white men with criminal records are more likely to get a job application call-back than black men without criminal records. Does that sound fair?

That doesn’t mean there aren’t financially well-off black people. A lot of black Americans have worked very hard and used a lot of talent to overcome the odds. Many of them supported me on the campaign trail. Developers, business leaders, engineers, doctors, you name it. Giants in their fields. And a common theme in all of our discussions was that they just wanted the next generation to have fair odds.

Because they aren’t examples that the system is equal. They have beaten the odds, just like some people who walk into a casino actually walk back out richer. It doesn’t change the fact that, overall, the house wins.

This is something I’ve been on the better side of numerous times in my life.

When I was a young man I got pulled over quite a few times, for running stop signs, for speeding, and other things. Those tickets would have broken me if I had gotten them all, but despite being pulled over 10 times in a two year span (oops!), I only got one ticket.

In a multiyear study of more than 60 million traffic stops across 20 states, Stanford University’s Open Policing Project found that black drivers are not only more likely to be stopped than white drivers, but that black and Hispanic motorists are also more likely to be ticketed and have their cars searched for less cause than whites. There have even been reports of local authorities freely discussing and making light of violence against black people, and actually advising recruits to shoot young marijuana users if they’re black.

On April 4, 2015, an unarmed black man named Walter Scott was shot in the back five times and killed in North Charleston by a police officer. Scott, who had been stopped for a burnt out tail-light but had spent time in jail for not paying child support, was fleeing from the officer when he was shot. I remember getting in an argument at the time with someone who said that a person gets what they deserve if they don’t listen to the police.

I strongly disagreed. You see, when I was eighteen years old, my roommates and I lived on the fourth floor and watched a little too much David Letterman. Letterman used to toss random things off of his roof, which was super cool, so we started doing the same thing out of our window when no one was nearby. Bouncy balls, a broken chair, a watermelon… It was dumb. One day we went a little too far by stuffing a cereal box with toilet paper, lighting it on fire, and dropping it out into the snow. Someone called the cops and we were arrested.

The judge gave us each a “suspended imposition of sentence”– which meant that if we stayed out of trouble, the convictions would disappear.

Unfortunately, I was mischievous, and several months later, while exploring a subterranean steam tunnel, a police officer discovered me and yelled at me to stop. Not wanting to get caught trespassing, because it would put my suspended conviction onto my record, I ran. I know, I’m not painting the most flattering picture of my young adulthood…

But I ran. And I got away. And it never crossed my mind that running from the police could have led to my death like it did for Walter Scott.

And yet, for my best friend growing up and high school cross country teammate, Benyam, even now in 2026, he has to keep that in the back of his mind that just running around his neighborhood could lead to his death. A couple of years ago, after a string of black men were shot while exercising, Benyam published his running-while-black checklist in the Washington Post:

Is my beard too thick?

Is it too dark outside?

Am I dressed like a runner? God forbid I wear mesh b-ball shorts and a loose T-shirt in the suburbs of Dallas.

Then, while on the run, I have to consider:

Is my rap music too loud? Can they hear it?

Does my cap, worn backward, send the wrong message?

Do I open up my stride now or wait until I get out of the neighborhood and into the open roads so I don’t appear to be running away from something or someone?

How many times have I looked over my shoulder on this block? Does that look suspicious?

Then there is scenario planning while running — if this, then that:

-If you see a young white woman on same path, cross street immediately and try not to make eye contact twice.

-If there is a white older woman/man on same path, wave/nod/smile, cross street casually.

-If you’re running behind them and they don’t hear you, cough loudly/clear throat, cross street.

-If the sidewalk is narrow, always give way to walkers or bikers and step into the grass or street, even though you’ve shattered your ankle twice, once on grass and once stepping into the street from the sidewalk.

-Turn down volume on music when passing by neighbors. Need to be able to respond if they say something — don’t want to come off profiled as angry black man.

-If a raised pickup truck approaches, immediately take to the sidewalk and get a good look at driver. High alert. Ready to dive into someone’s yard in case he swerves into me.

I have never experienced what it’s like to be black in this country. I only know what it was like to grow up white in a black area of Jefferson City, Missouri, and it’s been eye opening for me to look back.

And I don’t just mean that city maintenance was neglected and that the neighborhood is now falling apart.

I mean the things that people don’t say out loud or write about or pretend don’t exist.

Things like people looking down on where I lived. Other kid’s parents hesitating for them to come over. White kids calling my black neighbor kids the n-word consistently throughout my school years. High school classmates telling me that I lived in “porch monkey” land.

I remember being a 20-year-old Yale student back home over break and spending time on the other side of town with the fancy folks. Hanging with adults in high-up positions who oversaw hiring for their organizations and hearing them casually drop the n-word when referring to black people.

It’s no surprise to me that people like that would interview white convicts for job interviews instead of black men without criminal records.

This isn’t to say that everyone I interacted with held those views. The vast majority of people in my hometown were decent and cared about one another. But plenty were not, and that stacked the deck.

Being black now isn’t really any different than it was then. The deck is still stacked, and it really isn’t fair.

That’s why this MLK Day, I’m hoping you will join me in celebrating some of the great black women leaders I met during my campaign who are fighting every day to get their communities the respect and voice they deserve.

Vanessa down in Howardville, who fought for her neighbors to have the right to vote. Mayor Catrina in Hayti Heights, who saved her city’s water and sewage systems. Shalonda Webb, St. Louis County Councilwoman and the hardest working public servant I’ve ever met. And all the others across this great state who work hard every day, against the odds, to make life just a little bit better for everyone around them, no matter what color they are.

I hope they try even bigger things some day and even if the odds are against them, as they always have been, I’ll be there for them and I hope you will be, too.

Lucas

If you want to understand what is going on in politics right now, or are frustrated by this “post-truth” era, and maybe even brainstorm ways to overcome it, it is critical to understand what is going on here:

Right now, there is literally no downside to lying in politics, and a ton of upside.

I got the type of inside look into that as a candidate that many of you will never get the chance to have, so I’d like to share that with you now.

For background: at one point near the end of the election, my opponent’s team left their billboard-like bus illegally parked across six spots in a private lot across from one of the busiest malls in the St. Louis area.

As it accumulated illegal parking stickers and started getting media attention, their campaign responded by saying that it was all a hoax and that I had sent my team out to put fake Amazon parking violation stickers on their bus.

This was blatantly untrue, the security folks at the parking lot were later interviewed and said that they had put their parking-violation stickers on the bus because it was illegally parked. But their campaign had no problem making the allegation because it was what they wanted to be true.

As the morning went on, someone on the bus kept coming out and removing the stickers until a tow truck was called and they finally left.

Now, with that background, it’s time for the interesting part.

A short while later, I was interviewed by a local news outlet. The interviewer struck up a conversation beforehand and said something along the lines of “Isn’t it wild that Hawley’s bus driver accidently parked his bus in that lot and created such a headache for the campaign?”

I replied with a question of my own.

“Maybe. But what makes you so sure parking a billboard across from a busy street and the mall was an accident?”

“Well, that’s what their campaign said.”

I was astonished.

“Their campaign also claimed that I sent my people out to put parking stickers on his bus, which one interview with building security disproved. So if they’re willing to make up a story that’s so easily exposed, for such a small and unimportant thing, when they could have just said ‘oops,’ why would you believe the next thing they say?”

He shrugged. “We just report what they say.”

That’s where we are at right now.

People lie in political ads despite the fact that they will get fact-checked and proven wrong because exponentially more people will see their ads than will see the fact checks.

I hate to say it, but the truth really just doesn’t matter anymore. All that matters is the narrative. And so, in politics, events are no longer sets of facts to be analyzed. Instead, they are opportunities to advance your narrative.

In a world of gerrymandering and polarization, where energizing the base is more important than persuading the few remaining persuadable voters out there to switch sides, this strategy has become critical to victory. And operatives who are good at it are rewarded.

The campaign representative who said I sent my people out to put stickers on my opponent’s bus, for example, is now a spokesperson for the White House.

I wish I had an easy button solution. There has to be some sort of carrot for honesty again, though. And a stick for dishonesty.

Perhaps that could come from voters again if we were able to reduce the influence of money in politics. As I learned, a more critical local media could help, but that’s been hard to come by now that most local media is owned by large conglomerates. Perhaps some level of media antitrust would be helpful there. Or rules around truth in advertising for political ads. Every ad comes with a fact check from the station played right after it? Same with statements made by campaigns? Would anyone even believe it? Would the media be trustworthy enough to do it given their ownership and incentives? Are there even enough independent thinkers for it to matter? Those are the questions we would need to answer.

In the meantime, I’d like to thank everyone out there for sticking with this substack for a full year now! You’ve been wonderful, your comments have been insightful and interesting, and I’m looking forward to what the next year will bring.

Lucas

I know I’m not alone in that feeling. Many of you have shared it with me over the past months over social media, sometimes with anger, sometimes disappointment, sometimes disbelief. I read those messages. I feel them too.

Despite the national political storm, our family was fortunate because 2025 brought us something small but beautiful. We welcomed our fourth son into our family, Lukie, or “Cookie,” as Harvey calls him. Little Lukie arrived healthy and full of light, and watching all of our boys as they grow has become the highlight of our days.

And only now, with a bit of distance, have I found the space to look back and begin to process 2024, and I want to share with you my thoughts as the wife of a candidate who has been asked if I thought all that time campaigning was lost with the campaign.

My husband, Lucas, ran a Democratic U.S. Senate campaign in the Midwest, in Missouri, what some call a deeply red State. I joined him on the campaign trail and we spent our days listening to people across the state: on porches, in union halls, in churches, at town halls and local events. Lucas and his amazing team worked relentlessly day and night to get to as many people as possible with the resources we got from every corner of the state, and from many of you nationally. I am grateful for every single donation, for believing in us, for showing up every day with us.

In the end, we lost, in one of the biggest red waves in history.

The morning after losing has a particular quiet to it.

Not the dramatic kind, no shattered glass, no raised voices. Just the ordinary hum of life continuing as if nothing important had happened. Coffee brewed. Kids needing breakfast. Emails still coming in. And somewhere underneath it all, the lingering question:

Was it foolish to care this much?

The 2024 election didn’t just end our campaign, though, it marked the beginning of a new era, one where Democrats lost the presidency and lost both chambers. And beyond the headlines, something more fragile slipped even further away: faith. Faith that participation is valuable. That effort matters. Faith that politics can still be a place where good intentions aren’t quietly punished.

I’ve heard people say, “I almost don’t believe anymore,” and they don’t say it angrily. They say it tired. As if belief itself has become an expense they can no longer afford.

And they say it with good reason. It’s hard to believe in the system anymore. To the point that many of us are wondering if we’ve all just been spinning our wheels and wasting our time. I mean, somehow, even today, with things as bad as they are, it seems like the Democratic Party can’t gain any traction. And if we win in 2026, which I do think will happen, it seems like it will be because we backed into it rather than because we seized the moment.

This is why campaigns like the one we ran, and many more across the country in red states, have brought me to what might sound like a radical conclusion:

Even though we lost, we didn’t lose our time.

The time spent organizing. The time spent listening. The time spent showing up in places where it would have been easier not to. The time spent believing that a different kind of politics was possible. Investing that time in red midwestern communities showed us the way that Democrats can seize the next election. By delivering the kind of politics we read about that make us feel heard and hopeful for the future. The kind that leaves a world filled with opportunities for our children to thrive.

We spread that message across Missouri and outperformed the national ticket significantly — against an incumbent Senator who outspent us by a ton. There is a message and a way that works. And we aren’t the only ones in a red state or district who have shown what it can do, even when it’s hard.

For me, being a part of that effort is far from a waste. And the type of cynicism that buries Democrats depends on convincing us that it was.

I know this because running blue in the heartland requires a particular humility. Not the performative humility of a slogan, but the quieter kind, the kind that understands the math may not be in your favor and still knocks on the door anyway. Still introduces itself. Still asks people what they need and listens to the answer, even when their beliefs don’t align with yours.

Running blue in the heartland isn’t ideological. It’s relational.

Most days on the trail weren’t about persuasion. They were about recognition. About reminding people that politics wasn’t something happening somewhere else, done by people who didn’t know their roads, their schools, their fears. It was happening right there, on their porches, in towns that national conversations too often overlook.

We talked to people who disagreed with us entirely, who were tired of being told that they were voting against their own interests. I talked to people who had stopped voting altogether because they were exhausted, and still, opened the door to hear us out.

Again and again, I heard versions of the same sentence:

“I just don’t think anyone’s really fighting for us.”

That sentiment didn’t belong to one party. It belonged to people who had learned to expect very little and to be disappointed anyway. Lucas, being a Marine veteran, understands what it means to fight, for his country, for principle, for others. We took those words seriously and gave everything we had.

I believe that if the Democratic Party wants to win again, it must be more aggressive, not cruel, not careless, but convicted. And I don’t just mean that it should be equally mean on twitter or something. People respond to clarity and courage far more than caution and calibration. Decency without urgency often reads as distance.

And in the vacuum that the Democratic Party hasn’t been able to fill with clarity, hope, and conviction, division has become powerful because it’s easy. It asks nothing of us but allegiance and anger. Hope asks more. It asks us to stay open when retreat would be simpler. To refuse the lie that trying was foolish. To believe that time spent striving toward something better still counts, even when the result breaks your heart.

I’m writing this because, in the current political climate fueled by division, I don’t want caring to become something we apologize for. People want their representatives to care. We learned that over and over again out there in red communities. It was the biggest differentiator between the way people perceived us and our opponent. What I want is for candidates to run with clear passionate conviction that is believable and doesn’t sound calculated.

We can be convincing and compassionate at the same time, steadfast without being apologetic.

It’s not foolish to care, even against the steepest odds, as long as we take the time to learn and not let it go. Some of the best lessons are hard-earned.

There is hope in 2026. As we think about the year to come, I hope it brings you joy, hope, happiness, health, and community. We will continue to show up, and we will keep trying.

I’ve quoted my husband before on this, but as Lucas often says:
“Keep fighting. Never stop.”

Love,

Marilyn Kunce

I’ll keep the questions open all day Friday, and then I’ll answer on Saturday (since I’m at work all day Friday!).

This is something I like to do for the financial supporters who make this substack possible, so unlike my usual posts, the comments section for this one will be visible to everyone but only paid subscribers will be able to comment/question.

So drop your questions in the comments today and I’ll let the questions come in some today and start answering tonight and through tomorrow morning!

Lucas

PS. As always, although you can ask me anything and I will answer, I reserve the right not to answer directly!

Yet, on the flip side, I discovered during that same campaign that many Missourians outside the Democratic Party felt like electing Donald Trump was the single most democratic choice they had made in their lifetimes.

How can that be, and what can we learn from it?

At the root of this difference is a long growing frustration among Americans that our democracy is just an illusion. Many people, of all walks of life, believe that the Democrat and Republican parties of the last couple of decades had essentially merged into a “uni-party” whose primary objective was to those who have money, access, and power with little regard for how the rest of us were doing. Sure, the politicians fought about things on the margins, but they always seemed to agree on who should have power in this country: the “elites.” Academics, financiers, lobbyists, large corporations, big donors, etc.

This belief is strongly reflected in polling and surveys.

70% of Americans, for example, believe that the people who live in a representative’s district have too little influence over the decisions their representatives make. An even larger percentage believe that lobbyists, special interests, and large campaign donors have too much influence. I suspect many of you are among that majority.

And Americans think the barriers to changing this are insurmountable; a full 85% of agree that the cost of political campaigns make it hard for good people to run for office.

It’s not just a feeling, either. It’s backed up by fact. In 2024, 94% of federal house races were won by the person who spent the most money. My personal experience bears that out. In each election I was a part of, both primary and general, the winner was the one who had the most money (thank you to everyone who supported and made sure I was in that column at least once!).

Money, special interests, and lobbyists are a huge reason people think American democracy is an illusion, but the doubts don’t end there. Access to higher office has been gatekept for generations not just by campaign donors, but also by a small group of political insiders, in many cases, even the same families.

Our country is beset by political dynasties from the bottom all the way to the top.

Was George W. Bush really the most meritorious person in our country to be nominated by the Republican Party and then be President? Was Hillary Clinton the best nominee in 2016 for that matter, or was she also just part of the right family? How are there always Kennedy’s running around in multiple offices regardless of their talent-level or scandals? Would people be talking about a Trump kid or Michelle Obama running for President if not for their next of kin?

I don’t think so.

Crazy stat: There are more than 700 families in which two or more family members have served in Congress. In 1978, the most recent statistic I could find, these 700 families accounted for nearly 20% of the 10,000 total men and women who had ever served in Congress.

That’s mind-blowing.

And it’s at every level of our government. Every state and even municipality has multiple political families. The guy running for State Senate in my hometown? Son of the previous state senator. In St. Louis, political family members casually pass statehouse seats off to one another. If you walk through the halls of the Missouri Capitol and look at the classes of Senators and Representatives you’ll find the same names over and over and over and over again.

It’s pervasive in both parties. It feels anti-democratic and people are finally tired of it.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Congressman Chuy Garcia of Chicago gave us a classic example by literally hand-selecting his own Chief of Staff to serve as his successor in Congress by quietly withdrawing his re-election filing on the last day of the filing period, making sure that his Chief of Staff was the only person who knew he was retiring and who would be able to file before the deadline ended. He didn’t even hide it – he was literally the first person to sign her signature petition document days before he announced his retirement!

As far as a lot of folks can tell, the parties, the entrenched politicians, and the donor class pick candidates for the rest of us to choose between and make sure that, regardless of who we pick, it’s going to be someone who serves the “uni-party” interests. Normal people have no path to real representation and will never have access to the levers of power.

Ask them who they think is in charge in this country, and who is making the decisions, and essentially no one is going to say “the people.”

With that background in place, we come to the intoxicatingly empowering feeling many got by voting for Donald Trump.

Voting for him was the first time a disenfranchised voter felt like they could stick it to the “uni-party” and claw some power back for themselves. Because voting for Donald Trump, and Donald Trump winning, was a voter-led rejection of every single insider from both parties who were absolutely against him becoming president.

Not only that, but it felt even more democratic to vote for him in 2016 and 2024, the two times Trump won, because of how undemocratic the selection process for his opponent seemed, with the people in charge literally deciding what option voters would have and telling them how it was going to be.

In 2016, the Democratic superdelegate machine and others lined up behind Hillary Clinton and forced her nomination through to the finish line. In 2024, there wasn’t even a primary(!), and by the time Joe Biden decided not to run the only candidate who could take his place was Kamala Harris, a 2020 presidential hopeful who had been forced to drop out of that race before any primary or caucus voting even took place because she had so little support.

The Democratic candidates were machine picks running against a man that the machine hated.

I know a lot of people reading this don’t want to believe it, but electing Donald Trump was the first time that many Americans felt true democracy had been fulfilled in our country in their lifetimes. For them, it was a win over a broken system that had cast aside the will of the people for way too long. A feeling that made it natural for them to accept that the 2020 election was rigged. Of course the same people who hated Trump and had spent decades systematically subverting American democracy and neglecting the needs of the American people would rig an election to protect a rigged system. They had been rigging elections with money, power, and gatekeeping for as long as anyone could remember.

I heard all of this and more traveling the state of Missouri for four years over the course of two campaigns.

And I believe it is a massive mistake to ignore it or think it’s stupid. It is a strong signal that there is a massive group of voters who will vote to buck the broken system, regardless of party (the mythical Obama/Trump voter was likely doing that by voting for Obama in 2008 and again by voting for Trump in 2016).

And if a party can capture that aura going forward – by rejecting certain types of money, by running fresh faces and ideas, by saying things that the machine can’t stand – there is a massive victory there for the taking. The type of victory Democrats secured in the wake of the 1920s.

But right now, I don’t think there’s any way to tell where those voters are going. I would say now, more than ever, particularly after the chaos of this last year and the dragging economy, that they are open to breaking in the direction of either party, if someone captures that spirit.

But capturing that spirit is critical. It’s not going to come on the back of “protecting the ACA” or “returning to normalcy” or any of those half-measure talking points that don’t really mean anything. It’s going to take actions that look like real sacrifice– changes and positions that hurt. That’s how a party becomes believable and gains the trust of a very wary group of voters. Big moves like changes in leadership or changes in funding. Or truly bold ideas or bold rejections of past positions that seem comfortable for politicians but that have failed the people.

Whoever is willing to make those moves is going to be in the position to capture those votes.

If neither party tries, then who knows. The pendulum might swing back to Democrats, although the party’s favorability is still hovering near its decades-record low.

Or it might not.

Lucas

Boxes of the most known brand cereals lined the photo. And beneath it, the news that one of the world’s largest corporations is bowing to political and consumer pressure: no more Red 40, Yellow 5, Blue 1, or the cocktail of artificial dyes parents and scientists have warned about for years.

Artificial food dyes are linked to behavioral difficulties in children and harm to memory and learning, allergies, and even potential carcinogenic effects under certain conditions. And there are plenty of foods we’d never suspect contain artificial food dyes but actually do, including some seemingly healthy foods. Here is a good source to read more on this, I found a few items I actually wasn’t aware of their use of dyes.

So I was surprised to see Wal Mart moving in the right direction on this.

Although I really shouldn’t have been. Corporations are all afraid of the MAGA+MAHA movement right now and the writing has been on the wall for food dyes since RFK came in. So Wal-Mart was really just doing what many corporations are doing right now: identifying and then doing the smallest things they can in order to fend off MAGA ire, while completely ignoring even larger public health issues that MAGA funders have quietly told political people not to worry about anymore.

Because here’s the bitter irony: while our breakfast bowls are being cleaned up of fake colors, the very seeds that make our food remain coated in toxic chemicals that most of us never see, never consented to, and that RFK used to call poison— until he joined an administration that was owned by the poison vendors, of course.

I guess for him selling out to big chemical companies is a small price to pay for the opportunity to potential eliminate vaccine regimes that save millions of American lives every year…

But I think we all need to know about these seed companies and chemicals regardless of who funds the folks in power, so I want to share with you what is happening there.

In short, the seed-industry has adopted a widespread practice of coating most of the seeds it sells with toxic chemicals, particularly a type known as Neonicotinoids. Just like with artificial colors, most of us don’t know about this. And why would we? Mounting evidence shows that neonic seed treatments often deliver little or no yield benefit in many cropping systems, so it’s not like its some sort of broad societal success that we would have heard about. It’s only real success, in fact, is that it’s profitable and allows seed companies to charge more for their seeds by claiming that each kernel is an all-inclusive product.

It’s the same story as food dyes. The food-industry slipped synthetic dyes into breakfast cereals under the radar because “kids like bright colors” the same way that the ag-industry slipped neonic coating into every kernel because “farmers need protection.” The chemicals slipped into our daily lives, not because we demanded them, but because it was profitable to sell them that way. They exist because of the culture of sale.

Here in the Midwest, seeds don’t come plain anymore. Corn, soy, and even vegetables are all coated in these neonics and fungicides before they ever hit the soil. And the coatings are supposed to provide invisible “protections” come at a steep cost: bees and pollinators are collapsing, waterways are contaminated, soils degrade, farmworkers inhale dust, and farm families are exposed during planting.

If one of America’s biggest corporations is finally acknowledging that yes, we deserve food without hidden chemicals and is getting Red 40 out of cereal, why can’t we get neonics out of seeds?

When I read the Walmart story, I remembered the work a colleague of mine at NRDC is working on, and decided to reach out to learn more about this issue. She’s been working on sustainable ag, soil health, and seed reform on Colorado’s fields, and by extension, what that might mean for the Midwest.

She explained exactly what these chemicals are.

Neonics are a class of synthetic, neurotoxic-active insecticides developed in the mid-1990s. They’re now among the most widely used insecticides in the U.S. agricultural system.

They are systemic chemicals. Once applied, they travel through the plant’s tissues, so leaves, pollen, and nectar, even dew, all bear traces of them.

In insects, neonics bind to nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nerve-cell channels) and effectively lock them into over-drive. The insect’s nerves fire continuously until the system collapses: tremors, paralysis, death. Because the binding is strong and not readily reversible in the insect nervous system, the harm is effectively permanent for that individual.

They are indiscriminate killers. pollinators and beneficial insects cannot avoid exposure simply by “staying away from sprayed fields.” Neonics travel easily through soil and water, contaminating plants and waterways throughout agricultural areas. And even in tiny, “sublethal” doses, neonics interfere with insect learning, reproduction, navigation, and immunity.

In 2015, the U.S. Geological Survey study found neonic pollution in more than half of the streams it sampled nationwide, from agricultural regions to urban creeks. That was a decade ago. Given that use of treated seed has exploded since then, it’s reasonable to assume the contamination footprint is even larger today.

Zoom in from the national picture to a single field, and the story gets even more revealing.

If you follow the trail of the science, it tells a simple story: most of the neonics we coat on seeds never actually reach the pest they’re meant to control. Instead they stay behind in the soil, in the dust, and in the water.

Research following neonics through irrigated fields has found that residues persist in groundwater months after planting. Instead of vanishing up through the plant and into insects, much of the insecticides migrate downward and outward, and move through the ecosystem like runoff from an oil slick, one layer deeper with every rain.

Even inside the plant itself, most of the chemical doesn’t stay for long. Tests on corn and cotton show that the concentration of neonics is almost 100 times higher in tiny seedlings than it is by the time the plant reaches maturity. In other words, the seed is drenched with insecticide at the very start of life, when pests aren’t even a major threat, and by the time the plant might actually need protection, most of that chemical has already faded or washed away. What remains lingers not in the crop, but in the soil and the water, far from the parts of the plant that need protection, but directly in the line of fire for beneficial insects and others. a

And here’s the part we rarely think about, what happens next? Those chemicals don’t just disappear when they fade from the plant. From there, they work their way into the food chain, touching everything that feeds, drinks, or nests nearby.

Neonics don’t stop with the bug they’re meant to kill. They spread through the food chain—into the bodies of birds, fish, and pollinators—rippling through entire ecosystems. Studies tie their use to dramatic bird losses and fishery collapses, and in 2023 the EPA warned that neonics are now pushing over 200 already-threatened species toward extinction.

For a Midwest farm, when you plant treated seed, you’re introducing into the soil more than just germinating kernel and nutrients. You’re introducing a chemical load that lives in the seed, transfers into the plant, drifts or leaches into the environment, and affects non-target insects (pollinators, beneficials), soil health, water bodies animals and even humans.

Here is a video that explains further the toxic truth about neonics.

What it means for American families

When we shift from the field to the dinner table, the story of neonics becomes personal. This isn’t just about farm policy or environmental science. It’s about what ends up in our bodies and our children.

Neonics were designed to act like nicotine, mimicking it inside an insect’s nervous system. But that same mechanism affects mammalian brains and nerves, including our own. And these systems in animals and people are critical for healthy brain development, growth, and function.

Research has found that neonic exposures during pregnancy are linked to heart and brain defects, autism-like symptoms, and reduced cognitive abilities in children. In adults, the effects are no less alarming: lower testosterone and sperm counts, altered insulin regulation, and changes to fat metabolism have all been observed in populations exposed to neonics.

Today, neonics are measurable in roughly half of the U.S. population at any given time. Biomonitoring studies of pregnant women have detected neonics in over 95 percent of participants, and those levels are still rising.

And exposure isn’t just from standing in a treated field. Neonics regularly pollute drinking water, where chlorination often fails to remove them and may even make the water more toxic. They also show up in the food we eat. Residues have been found in 86 percent of U.S. honey, and in fruits and vegetables, including many children’s favorites like apples, cherries, strawberries, potatoes, and leafy greens. Because neonics are systemic, and come from the very seed the food comes from, they don’t just sit on the surface; they’re inside the fruit itself. You can’t wash them off or peel them away.

While Europe has banned outdoor uses of the major neonic chemicals since 2018, and Canada has moved to significantly restrict some of their most widespread uses, little has changed in the United States. Several states are demanding to ban these pesticides, the latest in the list is Colorado, with their campaign for “The Seed We Need”. (Their website includes more info on how to make this change possible, make sure to visit it!)

And yet, because the chemical industry is a political powerhouse in America, strong enough to silence RFK, of all people, nothing changes here, no one talks about it, and we continue to unwittingly ingest poison while celebrating Wal-Mart doing something it was already going to have to do.

I’m writing this because I’m tired of the way that these big industries seem to silence their critics so easily and I want people to know. We all deserve better

Marilyn Kunce

Through the course of my Senate campaign I met hundreds of striking workers on strike lines in industries like retail, nursing, trucking, manufacturing, labor, and the building trades.

Not a single one of them took the decision to strike lightly. Many of them were proud of what they made, the work they did, or the people they served. They were scared to go without pay while on the strike line or, even worse, scared that their employer would shut down their worksite and move away rather than negotiate.

But, even more compelling than fear was their desire to get a respectable share of the fruits of their labor, have long term security for their families, and live the American dream, a dream that shouldn’t be reserved for just management and shareholders.

Frequently, the men and women I met on picket lines were striking because their employer had tried to double or triple their healthcare costs in the latest contract offer.

Sound familiar?

Supposedly, that’s why certain Members of Congress were holding out on passing the budget year, causing the most recent government shutdown. They were, for all practical purposes, putting America on strike to secure healthcare subsidies for working Americans.

But there’s one thing I learned from workers on the strike lines of Missouri that these Members of Congress apparently don’t get: you don’t go on strike unless you mean it, because a strike hurts. And I can tell you right now, when working people decide to put themselves, their coworkers, their families, and their community through a strike, they sure as hell aren’t going to go without work for weeks or months only to settle for exactly what was offered to them on day one.

None of the striking workers I met ever failed to stand in solidarity and, because of that, eventually all of them got better than they were initially offered, in many cases, historically more.

So if everyday people understand the concept that you don’t go on strike unless you have the grit to see it through, why don’t these Members of Congress get it?

Just like basically every worker has made it clear that they are not fond of strikes or the pain that come with them, I’ve made the point many times in the past that I am not a fan of government shutdowns. But you know what? People aren’t stupid. We understand that sometimes fighting for something meaningful for yourself or others is going to hurt. But that it is the right decision if real gains are made.

On the flip side, we also understand that it’s both ridiculous and embarrassing to initiate a painful fight you’re not willing to see through to the end. What a waste.

In this case, the Members of Congress who put the country on strike and then decided to quit won absolutely nothing for putting everyone through it.

When Democrats asked me on the campaign trail why Democrats aren’t liked, or why they are considered weak, this is a perfect example of why. The only thing people are going to remember from this whole ordeal is the confirming feeling that Democrats are spineless and don’t stand and fight for anything.

The excuses they are giving are pathetic. Saying things like “the funding bill needed to pass as a ‘clean’ funding bill” and therefore it was wrong to demand the inclusion of healthcare subsidies.

Give me a break. Again, people aren’t stupid and nobody is going to accept that.

The bill package was vast and included, as just one example among many, according to the Senate Appropriations Committee’s own Majority report, provisions as wide-flung as “Prevent[ing] the unregulated sale of intoxicating hemp-based or hemp-derived products, including Delta-8, from being sold online, in gas stations, and corner stores, while preserving non-intoxicating CBD and industrial hemp products.”

They could toss in something as niche as preventing the unregulated sale of Delta-8, but voting for healthcare subsidies was not possible for the bill to remain “clean?”

Try selling an excuse like that as a reason to break solidarity for anyone who has ever walked a picket line.

No, really, I mean it. Try it.

Because that’s exactly the swath of voters that has switched parties in recent years. And if they don’t buy it, well, that will tell you something about how well it’s going to sell.

Lucas

As always, the views expressed in this Substack are those of the individual only and not those of the Department of Defense. Use of military rank, job titles, and photographs in uniform do not imply endorsement by the Department of the Navy or the Department of Defense.

Here are some insights on what that has been like.

The thing that jumps out the most for me is how incredibly scary the shutdowns are for junior enlisted service members and many others who are living on the edge. If you’ve lived month-to-month before, you understand the fear and the anxiety. It’s especially troubling because a lot of people who join the military grew up as children in paycheck-to-paycheck families, and one of the huge draws of the military (or the government, for civilian employees) was that it would finally give them stability.

At the beginning of the shutdown, for example, I overheard a conversation between a junior service member and his senior enlisted boss. They were going over how little the junior service member had eaten in the last couple of days, how he supported his parents and siblings back home, and how he wasn’t sure what he was going to do if his next paycheck didn’t come in. He and his mentor were developing a plan to get some food in his stomach and take care of him, in case that paycheck didn’t come through.

To be real about this: a lot of military service members are on the edge. We are talking about a large group of people who are making very little money– but, like that kid, still make a lot more than anyone in their family is making or ever made while they were growing up. They have real “eat or not eat” obligations not just with immediate family, if they have one of their own, but often with their parents, grandparents, siblings, or others.

Fortunately for this servicemember, and many others on the edge, after an immense amount of stress, their pay did come through on the 15th this month. But the anxiety hasn’t gone away, because unlike my first shutdown, in 2013, there hasn’t been a last minute deal by Congress and the President to approve paying the troops.

At the same time anxiety is building over their pay, stress is building because, with the civilian workforce furloughed, the military folks are doing more work than ever before to cover the gap.

And we haven’t even gotten into the hundreds of thousands of military reservists, many of whom rely on their reserve duty and paychecks to make ends meet, who can’t work and aren’t getting paid at all. For those of them who are federal employees and reservists, their entire income is gone.

Meanwhile, the civilians who are at work are working for no pay (although they are required to get back pay when the government re-opens, so they will eventually be made whole).

Now, as bad as that is for individuals, I don’t think it’s even the worst part of these shutdowns. The biggest long-term risk of these shutdowns is the institutional damage it does to the government.

You see, we are living in a time where a lot of people question what the government does, and there are a lot of claims floating around that federal employees laze around all day and don’t do anything.

These “shut-downs” reinforce that idea in people’s minds because despite the fact that everyone is told the government is shut down, it isn’t really. In fact, a lot of the things that normal people would immediately notice haven’t shut down at all.

People still got their SNAP benefits (although we’ll see if they keep that up), social security still came, and so did many of the other things that people have come to rely on from the government. The military is still there defending them and most of the gears are still churning because the “essential” personnel who keep them running are all working without pay to minimize the impact on everyone else as much as possible.

With supposedly the whole government shutdown and there being no obvious and immediate impact on people’s lives, the whole situation just reinforces the misconception that the government doesn’t do anything for anyone. A belief that, in the long term, is detrimental to us all and the result of which will leave America weaker. And it’s not like we have some sort of national service requirement to help folks learn the importance of our institutions when they are younger.

So, as much as they say that these shutdowns are bad in the short term, the long-term impact on perceptions might be the thing that ultimately leads to the most damage and it’s the thing I hope you all can help prevent when you are talking to people about the government shutdown.

I hope everyone is doing ok out there!

Lucas

The views expressed in this Substack are those of the individual only and not those of the Department of Defense. Use of military rank, job titles, and photographs in uniform do not imply endorsement by the Department of the Navy or the Department of Defense.

The fight, similar to many playing out across the country right now, is about whether or not to give billions of dollars in handouts to the billionaire owners of the Royals and Chiefs, who are threatening to leave town with their teams if they don’t get it.

I want to talk about today because the story provides a perfect example of why politicians rarely stand up to special interests and the price they pay when they do.

The first battle in this stadium war took place in 2024, with the teams and their allies fighting to get an initial $2 billion from Jackson County taxpayers (with more needed in the future) to start building a new stadium for the Kansas City Royals and renovate Arrowhead for the Super Bowl Champion Chiefs.

For many in the community– trade unions, politicians, businessmen– there was never really a choice but to support the project. They had to support it, despite the fact that these stadium projects always have a terrible return on investment, because these are big projects and big projects are hard to come by. Plain and simple, our country has no investment or large capital vision that doesn’t include paying a tax to billionaires, so people just accept it as a cost of doing business in order to get what they can for their members and their communities. Which I get. We need structural change, and right now most folks need to advocate for their people within the structure they have, because there are mouths to feed.

Yet, in this particular fight, an unlikely political figure decided to stand, nearly alone, in opposition to the scheme: embattled Jackson County Executive Frank White. I say embattled because Frank and the county legislature are often at odds, some people in the county blame him for soaring property tax assessments, his primary re-election campaign in 2022 was a close, and there were even scattered ineffective efforts to try to recall him.

Frank, however, a hometown baseball hero and former Royals second baseman who had occasionally feuded with his former team post-retirement and may be predisposed to skepticism of the Royals, was in a unique position to push back. And boy did he.

At first, the Royals claimed they needed a new stadium because their iconic Kauffman Stadium, which fans love, supposedly had “concrete cancer.” But when Frank White and some others asked for the evidence, the Royals refused to provide it and outside experts opined that the stadium would be fine for decades. So the Royals said that that reason didn’t actually matter, they didn’t really need or care about reasons, and they were going to move the team if they didn’t get a new stadium and the billions of taxpayer dollars they wanted to pay for it with, so we’d better just pony up.

The Chiefs then jumped in and both teams started making menacing statements indicating they would leave town if they didn’t get the money, while at the same time refusing to make various documents public about the funding and how the money would be used. The typical shady stadium funding stuff.

In response, the Jackson County legislature voted to put a vote to the people on a 40 year 3/8 cent sales tax equal to $2 billion— or four times the county’s entire annual budget. Frank vetoed the measure, repeating that we didn’t know enough to put the vote to the people and that it was a bad deal.

The legislature over-rode his veto, and the vote went to the people anyway. Frank, undeterred, campaigned against the measure as a bad deal for taxpayers, calling out the flaws, and continuing to ask questions. Aside from the KC Tenants organization and Frank, there was no real organized effort or expenditure against the vote.

The teams, on the other hand, invested millions of dollars in glitzy ads featuring their stars telling everyone how important it was to give their owners billions of dollars.

Then, in a massive surprise, the tax was overwhelmingly defeated by voters who, it seems, agreed with Frank that throwing money at billionaires without asking questions shouldn’t be the solution anymore.

Since then, the teams have pitted the states of Kansas and Missouri against one another in a race to the bottom to see who will give them the most money with the fewest strings attached. Yet, to this day, a year and a half later, the owners haven’t gotten their handout from Jackson County, in large part due to the stand of its executive, Frank White.

But a war is more than one battle.

I mentioned that, prior to the stadium vote, there had been scattered efforts to recall Frank for the myriad things certain people were mad at him about, but that they hadn’t gone anywhere.

That all changed after Frank had the gall to question the stadium deal.

Suddenly, and ironically, after he had supported an overwhelmingly popular and winning position with voters, the effort to recall Frank became real.

You see, the folks who wield real power in our country needed to make an example of Frank and punish him so that nothing like this ever happens to them again.

And punish him they have: the recall vote for Frank White is now on the ballot for next Tuesday, September 30th. An expensive random unplanned Tuesday election that’s going to cost county taxpayers $2 million to administer for just one question: “Shall Frank White, Jr. be recalled from the office of County Executive in Jackson County?”

Poetically, the billionaire class is spending two million taxpayer dollars to punish a politician who refused to hand them two billion taxpayer dollars without asking questions.

The ballot might as well be changed to read: “Should anyone ever stand up to the ruling class again?”

Even if you think that Frank is a terrible County Executive and should have been recalled long ago, this recall should be a stark reminder of who has power in this country. It isn’t you. Or me. Or Frank. Or the vast majority of people in this country. We know that because Frank wasn’t recalled when you wanted him recalled, or for any of the things you or his normal political opponents wanted him recalled for.

No, the option to recall him only became a real option when he pissed off the ruling class. And that should worry not just Frank or his supporters, but his opponents and anyone else who isn’t a part of that class.

I’ll be watching next Tuesday’s election closely because, if they do succeed in running Frank White out of office, whether your support him or hate him, it will be just another sad confirmation of who has power in this country and the cost of standing up to it.

My biggest fear is that this example will succeed and, going forward, our local elected officials will be even less likely to take positions against and question the powers that be.

Which is just going to make the billionaire tax we all pay for large projects even higher, and leave fewer crumbs for the rest of us.

Lucas

Yes, actually it did. Because I’m not talking about that murder. I’m talking about a murder on Main Street, thousands of miles from Utah, in Crossville, Tennessee. A murder that I would argue is even more emblematic of where we are politically as a country right now, and that demands as much thought and analysis as the one the media can’t stop talking about.

Albert Sturgill, Jr., was the type of guy many of us know from our own hometowns across the country. You’ll probably understand what I mean when I say that, on August 22nd, he was conducting one of his usual activities: pacing back and forth alone in front of the Cumberland County Veterans Memorial muttering to himself and sporadically flipping his middle finger at the monument.

Something Sturgill was well known for in the community.

Only this time, for whatever reason, rather than leaving him alone, some passers-by decided to stop and teach him a lesson in patriotism.

The first, Eric Garrison, apparently felt particularly disrespected and compelled to engage Sturgill because – while neither he, nor his father, nor his grandfather had ever served – his great-grandfather had gotten a purple heart in World War II…

As Garrison lectured Sturgill on respect and how “these people died for you,” a second man jumped in and began cursing angrily at Sturgill. Sturgill, for his part, according to Garrison’s wife, didn’t respond.

As the crowd grew, Garrison, the second man, and a third began closing in on Sturgill. When he was closer, Garrison noticed that Sturgill had a “stick” tied to his waist, ran around behind him, and tried to take it from him.

Sturgill, a 62 year old disabled man with a prosthetic foot, finally responded by struggling with the 42 year old Garrison to keep possession of his walking aid. Which he ultimately retained by yanking it back and hitting Garrison over the head with it.

Video footage, according to NBC news, shows Sturgill backing up from the three men and waving his arms while Garrison, now incensed, runs off camera back to his car, grabs a firearm, returns– with his wife physically clinging to him and trying to hold him back and stop him–and shoots Sturgill at point blank range. Police sirens approach in the background and the three men just walk away, leaving Sturgill lying there to bleed out.

Larry Doster, a Vietnam veteran who owns the shop across the street summarized it like this: “I don’t care what he was doing. He didn’t deserve to be shot. He had every right to object to whatever he wanted to, even though I don’t agree with it.”

This, of course, is the great irony of the situation. And even the murderer, Garrison, recognized it. According to Garrison’s wife, Garrison started the confrontation with the words: “I know this is a free country. I know you have freedom of speech, but what you’re doing is wrong. These people died for you.”

Garrison knew, in his heart, that the men who were memorialized at that monument died for Sturgill’s right to free speech, and that he, Garrison, was doing wrong by trying to stifle it. But he did it anyway.

Because, right now, for many in our country like Garrison, symbols of freedom have become more important than freedom itself.

The substance of things no longer matters to them. They have embraced a new spirit of symbolic freedom in lieu of the foundational freedoms our country was founded on— even when the two directly contradict one another.

You can see that every day in our politics. In the lore of our country, when rights were more important than symbols of those rights, the prize of winning in politics was the opportunity to manage the country and make decisions about the best way forward. Who those decisions were best for, or whether they were good or bad decisions, was always up for debate, but the people in charge were at least nominally “managing” things.

But management isn’t sexy and it doesn’t get you TV coverage or clicks. So in the last decade of hyper-charged attention and social media, and perhaps even as a direct result of earlier mismanagement by those we trusted, many people and politicians have accepted a new end goal of politics: winning itself.

And, with the media profiting over every single play and churning out 24/7 coverage, every day has become a new game in the never-ending season of politics.

It might sound cynical, but what we are seeing right now is what happens when politics is reduced to winning and losing.

A few days ago, a friend of mine asked me if I thought the murder of Charlie Kirk was “a professional hit.” Another friend asked me a similar question the day of the UnitedHealthcare murder, which I consider a political killing.

My answer for both the Kirk and UnitedHealthcare murders was that no, I didn’t think they were “professional” hits (which was subsequently confirmed in both cases).

First of all, I don’t think there’s such a thing as professional hits like most people imagine from the movies. There aren’t legions of professional murderers for hire running around and, if there were, they wouldn’t be doing it with firearms from rooftops in broad daylight.

Furthermore, what we are witnessing right now isn’t refined. It’s a symptom of this dark win-at-all-costs political era woven with division, fear, anger, inequality, and desperation. In that mess, motivated individuals, inspired by their beliefs, or perhaps just by the belief that they are irrelevant, feel compelled to jump headlong into America’s newest blood sport.

There are dozens of articles recapping last year’s political violence, mentioning things like the presidential assassination attempts, state lawmaker murders in Minnesota, firebombing of the governor’s house in Pennsylvania, a Tesla truck firework bomb set ablaze, shootings at campaign offices and the CDC, the list goes on.

We’ve all seen how crazy fans get at football games. Imagine if, just for a second, fans had the opportunity do more than just yell, but actually get into the game and impact whether their team would “win” that day. How many of the 80,000 roaring Sunday afternoon football fans would push a secret button under their seat if it meant that it would take out one of the opposing team’s players? How many would push that same button to kill an opposing player?

It only takes one.

And with politics in America raging every single day, all day, and millions and millions of fans who have much more on the line than who wins or loses on a Sunday afternoon, it’s no surprise that things keep happening.

Particularly because this change in atmosphere has twisted people’s minds and reduced other people to one of two things: teammates or opponents.

All of the quotes I’ve read about Charlie Kirk’s killer were some variation of the line that he had “only recently become involved in politics.” What more impactful way was there for him to contribute to his new team, whether it was right v. right or something else, than to take out what he considered an opposing player?

Looking back, I don’t think that Eric Garrison killed Albert Sturgill Jr. because he was flipping off the veterans memorial. I suspect that Garrison killed him because he was ashamed that he’d gotten his red-blooded-9-line-t-shirt-wearing-faux-patriot-ass whooped by a crazy old crippled man in front of a crowd of people.

But he started the fight by revealing how twisted his mind was: acknowledging that Sturgill had a right to free speech, but trying to silence him anyway. And he ultimately didn’t blink at killing him, despite his wife clinging to him and pleading with him to stop, because in his mind Sturgill wasn’t another person, but an opponent.

The question is, what do we do now?

I see at least two ways to approach an atmosphere like this: by recruiting more people to your team, or by changing the paradigm. And while I don’t think they are mutually exclusive, the first strategy would have to be carefully coordinated in order to maintain the latter.

I, for one, want to do both, and am curious what you all think— so please let me know in the comments.

My goal is to start exploring tangible things we can do in the next few weeks. In the meantime, if you’d like to read more about a time when we faced a similar situation and came out of it — an era when a Congressman was murdered, on average, every 7 years, and two presidents were assassinated — you can check out my earlier Substack “On the Brink of Anarchy,” or just the excerpt below.

Thank you for reading and supporting, and please share with anyone you think might find it interesting!

-Lucas

EXCERPT FROM ON THE BRINK OF ANARCHY

In the late 1800’s wealth inequality was skyrocketing, workers were organizing for power against an elite profit-maximizing class, and political polarization was at a zenith. As a result, people caught political fever, and it became contentious. Check out how familiar this description of the late 1800’s sounds:

“Such public politics became, in the words of one comedian, “our great American game.” Political rancor grew precipitously. Saloons resounded with heated debates. On train cars, Americans took straw polls to see how strangers would vote. At dinner tables, families bonded—or broke up—debating an upcoming race. Even when exhausted Americans threw down their newspapers, they looked up only to find partisan broadsides slathered on every wall. “Ignorance is bliss now,” complained one woman as she canceled her political newspapers, weary of the whole spectacle.”

Did you know that the highest sustained participation in elections, something we are seeing a surge in right now, was actually during the late 1800’s?

Elections were also closer than ever before. No president in this period came to office by winning a majority of the popular vote.

At the same time, workers who were tired of being abused started fighting for an 8 hour work week. Anarchism and “propaganda of the deed,” like what Mangione and Livelsberger did, proliferated.

And some of them even became martyrs, like Mangione and Livelsberger appear to aspire to. For example, in 1886 Chicago, “a rally at Haymarket Square was organized by labor radicals (note: their word, and one often chosen by those who take more than their share to label those who want a fair piece of it) to protest the killing and wounding of several workers by the Chicago police during a strike the day before at the McCormick Reaper Works.”

When police arrived at the rally to disperse the crowd, someone threw a bomb at the officers. Mayhem ensued, and in “August 1886, eight men labeled as anarchists were convicted in a sensational and controversial trial in which the jury was considered to be biased and no solid evidence was presented linking the defendants to the bombing.”

Most were hanged, but they are remembered, and despite being called anarchists, they are not remembered in a bad light. Quite the opposite, in fact. There is a memorial to them standing in Chicago today that is listed on the National Parks Service website.

Political violence was everywhere during this time. On average, a sitting US Congressman was murdered every seven years. Two presidents were assassinated, in 1881 and 1901.

We are there again. Multiple assassination attempts on a (former) President and presidential candidate. Propaganda of the deed proliferating with Mangione and Livelsberger. And political polarization and doubts in democracy everywhere.

Have you heard someone say that democracy is failing because people are stupid? (Come on, you’ve probably thought that yourself) Or that dumb and uneducated people have more children than smart people so we are doomed?

Here is a quote from an 1878 treatise on the failure of democracy by Francis Parkman, an elite of the era, bemoaning the growing democratic power of the lower classes:

“It is aggravated by the fact, generally acknowledged "by those most competent to judge of it,” that intellectual development and high civilization are not favorable to fecundity, so that the unintelligent classes, except when in actual destitution, multiply faster than those above them. Thus the power of ignorance tends to increase, or rather the power of the knaves who are always at hand to use it.”

Jon Grinspan, of the National Museum of American History, whose article I quoted a couple of times above, lists even more similarites:

“Others attacked the rising immigration rates, like Francis Willard, the leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, who blamed America’s out-of-control politics on “alien illiterates.” Others still aimed (more accurate) attacks at railroads, corporations, robber barons and lobbyists who seemed to be buying up America. The muckraking reporter Henry Demarest Lloyd wrote that “liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty.”

So how did this era end and is there anything we can learn from it?

According to Jon, the political and voting fervor began to die down as those in charge stifled voting access in order to decrease turnout. Which, you can see in the turnout chart above, appears to have had the intended result.

At the same time, however, labor unions started winning 8 hour workdays left and right, antitrust laws were passed and enforced, and a feeling of fairness started to return the country. In short, normal people started getting results and maybe weren’t as interested in politics anymore.

So, if we want to move on from this, and not fall into twenty years of political strife and violence, perhaps the best way to do that is to make things fair again. To get big money out of politics and government, to pass laws so that insurance companies can’t reject bionic arms for little girls, and otherwise bring a sense of fairness back to America.

Will I ever run again?

It was a particularly hot question at the beginning of August, when something I hadn’t even realized started going around: that in the midst of last year’s Republican landslide, with your help I managed to get 49% of the vote in Missouri’s 2nd Congressional District– a Republican held seat. At a time when Democrats are searching for answers, it seems that we must have done something right that could be built upon going forward.

So to cut to the chase: yes, I do plan to run again. The longer answer is below.

To be honest, I would run right now if I could. So much is at stake, and I’m not one to shy away from a challenge. But I won’t be able to run again, at least not successfully, until I take care of a few things.

First, I took nearly four years off of work to run in back-to-back Senate cycles. As many of you know, I have no family money or other resources to fall back on, so I need to work for a little bit first to get back on my feet and afford another go– which is why I took a one year activation in the Marine Corps starting this summer.

On a related note: thank you to everyone who has stuck with this Substack over the last year, and particularly this last month when I had to take a pause to adjust to the new job. Your support here is what makes a future run possible. The type of campaign where we aren’t beholden to anyone but each other and can continue to engage and experiment with messages that make it possible not just to get 49% in Republican territory in their landslide year, but to actually crest the hill and start winning again.

Now that I’ve gotten settled at work, I feel good about being able to write in the evenings and weekends again. So we are going to look at what is going on in our country, how we can respond effectively, and how we can build change.

We will examine the darkness to better learn how to overcome the hopelessness and rage that is smothering our society.

So, tomorrow, we will return to murder. And, after that, something I studied over the last month that I think is a clue to the way forward.

Thank you again for the continued support and engagement.

Lucas

The views expressed in this Substack are those of the individual only and not those of the Department of Defense. Use of military rank, job titles, and photographs in uniform do not imply endorsement by the Department of the Navy or the Department of Defense.

During Lucas’ US Senate run, many people asked me why I decided to join him on the campaign trail all over Missouri. After all, not every spouse is interested, or thrilled, about the constant travel, the late nights, and the sacrifices a family makes to cover every corner of the state and meet as many people as possible. On top of that, at the beginning I was pregnant with our little boy Harvey. Later, we had a newborn to care for, I was juggling my master’s degree, and I still had a full-time job. On paper, it probably looked like the worst timing in the world. But my answer was always the same: once you’ve seen what I saw across this state, you can’t unsee it, and when the people in power don’t care about the struggle and suffering, it’s the job of the rest of us to pick up the slack.

On our travels I saw, up close, how Missouri leaders were letting their campaign funders strip our state and the people here, who I’d come to love, for parts. The people they were destroying, senior citizens, mothers, workers, young adults, children, frequently came to us with tears in their eyes about situations they couldn’t control and couldn’t overcome.

In our travels, I really fell in love with Missouri and Missourians. With the farmland and the people who work it. With the stories shared over kitchen tables and in folding chairs at town halls. I fell in love with the stories, the conversations, the connections we made across the state. The more I listened, the more I knew: I wasn’t going to walk away from them. That just isn’t in me.

I’ve mentioned in past posts that I grew up on a farm, and I’m not trying to repeat myself here, but I can’t leave behind the fact that my heart sank each time we visited rural communities and felt how deep the worry and sadness ran. You could see the weight in people’s faces, not just worry, but the kind of quiet desperation that comes from feeling you’ve been doing everything right, and still the deck is stacked against you.

And that sinking feeling is about to get much worse throughout our state because one of the things that people brought up the most, their inability to pay their utility bills, is about to get even more impossible thanks to the people in charge of our state and country.

In Missouri, our newly elected governor, Mike Kehoe, alongside his pals in the state legislature, pushed through Senate Bill 4, an energy package that critics warn will raise costs for families while cushioning utility profits. Under SB 4, utilities can now pass the cost of building new power plants onto customers, even before those plants are up and running, a practice known as Construction Work in Progress, which voters banned back in 1976. Despite the risks, Governor Kehoe signed it on April 9, 2025, under the promise of “securing Missouri’s energy future,” even as consumer advocates warned it would drive household bills up by as much as $1,115 a year.

At the federal level, this past April, RFK Jr. fired the entire Missouri staff of the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, otherwise known as LIHEAP. A program that helped about 216,000 Missourians pay their utility bills in 2023 and also provides funding to weatherize and make homes more energy efficient, saving us all. And yet the President’s FY26 Budget for LIHEAP proposes eliminating $4 billion in assistance to about 6 million very low-income households that rely on LIHEAP to pay their home heating and cooling bills.

This hits Missouri hard, across just the eight counties Central Missouri Community Action, a LIHEA service provider, serves, for example, nearly 14,000 individuals in nearly 5,000 households utilized LIHEAP funds to keep lights on and temperature controlled. The majority of them are people with disabilities or elderly households. This comes at the worst possible time considering that one in six families are already behind on their energy bills. For them, it comes down to choosing between groceries, medicine, and the power bill.

Katrina Metzler, executive director of the National Energy & Utility Affordability Coalition, summed it up bluntly: “My fear is that quietly in their homes, grandmothers will die this summer”.” As for winter, there is no indication of anyone new being hired to run the program or get utility funding to those who are in danger without it.

But it doesn’t end there.

Passed on July 4, The One Big Beautiful Bill Act makes sweeping changes to federal energy policy that benefit fossil fuel interests while reversing investments in energy efficiency and renewables.

Here is what the bill means for energy efficiency and energy costs in a nutshell:

• The law is expected to reduce U.S. electricity generation capacity by 340 gigawatts by 2035, making it harder to meet growing demand and weakening American manufacturing competitiveness.

• Wholesale electricity prices are projected to increase 25 percent by 2030 and 74 percent by 2035.

• Consumer electricity rates are projected to increase 9–18% by 2035, pushing average household energy bills up.

• Missouri households may face annual costs of up to $640 by 2035 

• National economic output is also expected to suffer. The law would reduce U.S. gross domestic product by $980 billion cumulatively by 2035.

• Workers are projected to lose 760,000 jobs by 2030, particularly in industries supported by clean energy manufacturing and construction.

• Immediate phasing‑out of clean energy tax credits for solar, wind, batteries, and efficiency programs, undermining new clean generation. This slows the addition of new power to the grid and saddles customers with rising costs. 

The corporate gains and moving from renewable energy are costing us, nearly 60 utilities across the country have already raised or proposed rate hikes in 2025 alone, representing $38.3 billion in electricity customer costs and $3.5 billion in gas customer hikes, amounting to 56.7 million electric households and 26 million gas customers impacted. In other words, while claiming to cut taxes, the Missouri Governor and President Trump are actually massively increasing taxes for the middle class and poor through their utility bills, and transferring that money directly to fossil fuel and utility company shareholders.

It’s an American tragedy, and we could have so much better.

One thing that never failed to excite the crowd was Lucas’s The Marshall Plan for the Midwest. It was his way of thinking through how we could keep our region on the map by investing in the build-out and production of the next generation of energy right here in Missouri, to create good jobs, improve the efficiency of older buildings and homes, and save everyday people money. The ideas were practical, things that could help lower utility bills, modernize what we already have, and give families a little breathing room instead of watching their paychecks vanish into outdated systems.

The plan was based on a knowledge of Missouri and what it is really like here on the ground where older homes are harder to keep cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and there are more of them in historically red-lined neighborhoods.

The “St. Louis Energy Burden Report” dives into census tracts across the state, using real data from Missouri utility bills to understand how costs overlap with factors like race, income and even rates of childhood asthma.

The report found that residents with an average income of about $35,000 pay $2,408 a year for utilities, while residents with an average income of about $85,000 pay $2,082 a year, according to the report. Meaning that low-income Missourians pay more utilities than wealthier counterparts, which seems counterintuitive since higher income people usually have larger houses. But it happens because people who are lower-income live in older more broken-down housing, which is significantly less efficient. Since lower-income people are also more likely to be renters who pay their own utilities but don’t own their homes, the decisions about energy efficiency or appliances in their homes aren’t up to them, but to their landlords.

If you live anywhere in the Midwest, you’ve felt it already. Your energy bill is climbing fast. A big part of that is that heat waves are becoming more dangerous, especially here in Missouri, where summer temperatures have been climbing steadily over the years.

But another part of that is the reason that the tech bros have buddied up so much with President Trump and the Republican Party: their insatiable thirst for energy.

U.S. electricity demand, after being flat for nearly two decades, is projected to grow at about 1.7% per year through 2026, with commercial and industrial demand rising faster. New data centers, especially those serving AI and cloud infrastructure, now consume 4.4% of U.S. electricity and are expected to triple by 2028, according to the US Department of Energy. And, of course, much of that cost is being picked up by the public, the working poor, subsidizing the Big Tech’s power bill.

New power plants like the natural gas plants that some utilities are proposing to serve new data centers, are extremely expensive to build. And when build new plants, expand old ones, build transmission lines, or update grids for AI or data centers, the costs are largely passed on to everyday ratepayers.

For example, In Louisiana, customers of the state's major public utility could be responsible for $5 billion in costs associated with new natural gas plants and transmission lines needed to serve a Meta data center.

And as we all know, the current administration is doubling down on the outdated energy sources, relying on oil and gas to power AI as the future of fossil fuels.

Putting it together, older, inefficient homes coupled with more extreme weather leave residents exposed to higher bills. Rolling back energy-efficient upgrades and solar incentives removes the tools many families use to reduce costs. Utility monopolies ensure rate increases are passed directly to consumers without relief. And for regions like Missouri, the combined effect may mean extra hundreds of dollars per household per year by 2030–2035, while local economies suffer job losses.

Midwestern families are being squeezed at the meter while big energy flows upward.

And our job has to be to connect the dots for people who don’t understand how or why they have to choose between groceries and heat or cooling.

-Marilyn Kunce

Her dedication to St. Louis County and its residents, particularly those whose voices are the least noticed, is unmatched. I’ve said it before, but she is the hardest working public servant I’ve ever met. The first time I saw her speak at a town hall was one of the most humbling moments for me on the campaign trail—she not only inspired me to be better, but fired me up to do some real work! Before I knew it I was back in her district doing a community clean-up in Castle Point.

I say all this because, in my MLK post this year (“Please do not think we think you are not important, but…it is just not fiscally responsible to set up a polling place”), I closed by saying that I hoped she would try bigger things some day, that I would be there for her, and that I hoped you would be, too.

I stand by that statement.

Whether she stands up to run for county executive, or something even bigger, Shalonda Webb is the type of leader we deserve.

-Lucas