Republicans have spent years turning gender into one of the central fronts of the American culture war.

Trans women in sports. Drag shows. Bathrooms. Pronouns. Children’s books. Clothing. Story hours. Again and again, the argument is framed as a defense of something natural and obvious: Men are men. Women are women. Children should be taught the difference. Society functions best when everyone stays inside the role assigned to them.

What is strange is how much political power apparently has to be deployed to preserve something we are repeatedly told is simply the natural order.

If these distinctions are inherent, immutable, and obvious, why do they require legislation, funding threats, public shaming, and constant government intervention?

That question matters because much of the modern conservative argument about gender is not merely an argument about biological sex. It is an argument about social hierarchy.

Traditional gender roles have historically placed men above women. Men were expected to lead households, control property, dominate politics, earn money, and make decisions. Women were expected to support, nurture, submit, and depend.

Those roles have weakened significantly, but the hierarchy underneath them has not disappeared. There remains a political movement deeply invested in restoring a world in which masculinity conveys authority and femininity conveys a subordinate social position.

That makes anything that destabilizes those categories politically threatening.

A trans woman does not simply challenge a definition of womanhood. Her existence challenges the idea that masculinity is an inherently superior status that no rational person would voluntarily leave.

Drag does something similar through performance. A man putting on a dress, makeup and a wig turns supposedly rigid gender presentation into something that can be adopted, exaggerated, played with and discarded. And that appears to bother some people enormously. We got a particularly revealing example of that here in Missouri.

This summer, Secretary of State Denny Hoskins and state Sen. Rick Brattin held a press conference condemning a children’s story time at Daniel Boone Regional Library. Much of their criticism centered on the book Big Wig, which depicts a child participating in a costume competition.

Hoskins complained that the book tells children that “it’s OK to cross dress and it’s OK to dress in drag,” something he called inappropriate for toddlers and preschoolers.

When reporters pressed them about whether anything illegal had actually occurred, Hoskins said that if it was not illegal, he had heard from legislators interested in filing bills “to ensure this is illegal in the future.”

That is where the argument becomes much more revealing.

Because once the objection moves from sexual content to clothing, we have left the realm of protecting children from pornography and entered the realm of enforcing gender presentation.

• What exactly would the state be prohibiting?

• Would Missouri need to determine which articles of clothing legally belong to men and which legally belong to women?

• Are women still allowed to wear pants?

That may sound deliberately ridiculous, but it is worth remembering that women wearing trousers was once considered a violation of acceptable gender presentation. Fashion changes. Culture changes. The meaning we assign to clothing changes.

High heels have been worn by men. Wigs have been worn by men. Makeup has been worn by men. Robes, tunics, jewelry, stockings, and garments resembling skirts have all been considered masculine in different times and places. So what exactly is the legal standard?

Would a man wearing a kilt qualify?

What about Halloween costumes?

What about children playing dress-up?

What happens to theater?

Cross gender performance is not some invention of modern drag culture. Theater has played with gender for centuries. Shakespeare’s plays were originally performed entirely by men and boys. Women have famously played Peter Pan. Actors routinely wear costumes associated with people unlike themselves because pretending to be someone else is quite literally the activity we call acting.

If the principle is that children should not see someone wearing clothing traditionally associated with another gender, suddenly we need to start making some very strange distinctions.

Why is one costume acceptable and another dangerous?

Why can an actor portray a fictional person of another gender onstage, but a drag performer becomes a political emergency?

Why can a little girl put on her father’s jacket without threatening Western civilization?

Why can a little boy pretend to be a pirate, a wizard, or a dinosaur, but a dress requires legislative intervention?

There is no coherent way to police gendered clothing without eventually admitting that the government is not protecting an objective biological boundary. It is enforcing a social one. And that brings us back to the larger culture war.

The panic around drag and trans women makes more sense when viewed not simply as discomfort with gender difference, but as discomfort with what gender flexibility implies about power.

If masculinity is inherently stronger, more rational and more suited to leadership, femininity should not pose much of a threat to it. Yet femininity appears to require extraordinary containment.

A man in a dress becomes scandalous. A boy wearing something feminine becomes a cause for alarm. A children’s book suggesting that cross-dressing is acceptable becomes important enough for statewide elected officials to threaten library funding and discuss changing the law.

That is an astonishing amount of institutional anxiety over fabric. Perhaps the anxiety exists because the hierarchy is more fragile than its defenders would like to admit. If men deserve authority because God ordained it, there should be no need to constantly reinforce their position.

If men naturally rise above women because biology makes them better suited to leadership, society should not require laws and cultural punishment to keep them there.

If masculinity is inherently superior, then femininity should not be dangerous. But if those positions were never guaranteed by nature or granted by some divine authority, the story changes.

Then male dominance becomes something created and maintained by people. It becomes a political system. And political systems require enforcement.

They require rules about who may hold power. Rules about what men and women are supposed to do. Rules about what behavior deserves respect and what behavior deserves ridicule. Rules about whose independence is threatening and whose authority is assumed.

Historically, those rules have been backed not simply by social expectations, but by law, economic dependence, exclusion and violence.

That is the uncomfortable possibility underneath the current gender culture war. Maybe the panic is not really about dresses. Maybe it is about what happens when people stop believing that a man belongs at the top simply because he is a man.

Because once hierarchy loses the protection of nature, tradition, and God, the people sitting at the top have to answer a much harder question. What actually entitles them to be there?

MAGA’s greatest messaging success was convincing millions of Americans that the people with the most education were the people with the most power. Democrats have spent years defending expertise instead of challenging that premise. But as MAGA has moved from anti-establishment insurgency to governing power, the contradiction has become harder to ignore: the people most aggressively reshaping the rules, restricting choices, and consolidating control are not the intellectual elites MAGA taught voters to fear. They are the political actors now holding the levers of government.

The attack on intellectual elites worked because education and access to information really have helped reshape American culture. Ideas about race, gender, sexuality, economic inequality, bodily autonomy, and other issues became more widely accessible. People carried those ideas into their families, workplaces, and communities, and younger generations grew up exposed to perspectives their parents and grandparents may rarely have encountered.

That does not mean education automatically makes someone progressive. Broader access to information makes talking points easier to question, and cultural change becomes harder for any political movement to control.

MAGA rhetoric has focused heavily on indoctrination and brainwashing. The accusation is not merely that universities are liberal. It is that universities make people liberal. Teachers are influencing children. Journalists are manipulating voters. Experts are pushing agendas. The anxiety underneath all of it is about losing control over how people understand the world. Pretty rich coming from a group of people who are largely Christian and want to indoctrinate everyone else to be, too.

But when people hear the arguments, consider the information, and still make decisions you do not like, attacking the people supposedly influencing them is no longer enough. The voter themself becomes the obstacle.

That contradiction extends well beyond the culture war. Republicans have spent decades running on the argument that government does not work. Government is wasteful. Bureaucrats have too much power. Programs are inefficient. The solution is less government and more control in the hands of ordinary people. And then they get elected with the goal of breaking the government they claim isn’t working, all the while consolidating power for themselves. Reducing government has not meant reducing power. It has meant relocating it.

Programs and institutions that provide services, regulate powerful interests, or operate independently can be weakened as authority becomes more concentrated in the hands of those running government. The parts of government that help people become expendable. But the power does not.

Missouri provides a clear example of what happens when voters have their own way to push back. Missourians reliably elect Republicans to statewide office and give Republicans overwhelming control of the General Assembly. Yet we have repeatedly used direct democracy to enact policies Republican lawmakers opposed or refused to pass themselves.

• We expanded Medicaid.

• We legalized marijuana.

• We increased the minimum wage.

• We approved paid sick leave.

• We protected reproductive rights.

Missouri is not secretly a progressive state. It’s a very gerrymandered state, but not secretly progressive. What it suggests is that Missourians understand policies that help them, but are unable to connect those policies to the Democratic Party.

Missourians elect Republican lawmakers and still reject the idea that those lawmakers should have unlimited authority to make decisions for us. We can vote Republican and support Medicaid expansion. We can identify as conservative and protect abortion rights. We can distrust Democrats and still raise the minimum wage. The psychology of this is information for an entirely different topic, but the point remains that Missourians don’t make the connection between the Republicans they elect and the legislature passing laws that don’t benefit them.

But winning an election does not give politicians ownership of the people who elected them. And when we have a mechanism to make decisions for ourselves, Missourians have repeatedly shown that we are willing to use it. We demonstrated that again this August.

Republican lawmakers placed Amendment 4 on the ballot, proposing to make it substantially harder for us to amend our own state constitution through the initiative petition process. Instead of requiring approval from a statewide majority, a citizen-initiated amendment would also have needed majority support across the state’s congressional districts. Missourians rejected it overwhelmingly.

Amendment 5, backed by Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe and designed to create a path toward eliminating Missouri’s individual income tax, was rejected even more decisively. Missourians looked at two proposals championed by the political party that dominates our state government and said no.

Then, on the same day, Secretary of State Denny Hoskins refused to certify two citizen-driven measures that would have shifted power away from Republican lawmakers and back toward us.

One was the referendum challenging Missouri’s newly drawn congressional map. Hundreds of thousands of Missourians signed petitions seeking a statewide vote on whether that map should take effect.

The other was a proposed constitutional amendment designed to strengthen Missouri’s initiative petition process and limit lawmakers’ ability to alter policies we had already approved.

Hoskins argues that both measures are unconstitutional, but that question ultimately belongs in the courts, not with the secretary of state. His role is to administer the petition process, not to have the final word on what the Missouri Constitution means.

By withholding certification, he can force the state into months of litigation while the policies being challenged remain in place. In the redistricting fight, delay could mean Republicans get to use the new congressional map in 2026 before we ever have a chance to vote on it.

It is a test of how far officials can push their power before someone stops them. We see this federally with Trump, and we’re seeing it happen in states all over the country.

Missourians have repeatedly used direct democracy to reject policies Republican lawmakers want. Now, when we are trying to challenge those lawmakers directly, exercising that power becomes slower, harder, and more expensive.

The point is not simply to win an argument in court. Preserving control long enough for the delay itself to matter can accomplish much of the same thing. What we are watching is not the disappearance of government power. It is the relocation of it.

And that should make the MAGA sales pitch look very different.

Working families were told that the people taking away their power were professors, journalists, bureaucrats, and other intellectual elites. They were told that MAGA was the movement that would tear down the establishment and return control to ordinary Americans. Missouri shows what happens when ordinary Americans actually try to exercise that control.

We vote for policies our lawmakers oppose, so lawmakers try to weaken the initiative process. We reject that effort overwhelmingly, and state officials find another way to keep citizen measures from reaching the ballot. We gather the signatures, follow the process, and demand a vote, only to be told that the people already holding power should decide whether we get one.

The people claiming to protect us from elites are testing how much of our own political power they can take away. That is the lie Democrats need to expose.

And MAGA succeeded with working families because it understood something Democrats too often did not: many people do not experience politics primarily as left versus right. They experience it from the bottom looking up.

Who has enough money to shape the rules? Who can make a decision that affects your family without ever living with the consequences? Who gets heard? Who gets ignored? Who has power, and who does not? MAGA gave people an answer to those questions. It was just the wrong answer.

Now some voters are beginning to see that. The anti-establishment movement they supported is governing like an establishment determined to protect its own power.

But recognizing that MAGA sold them a lie does not mean those voters are ready to become Democrats. Many still believe the political system is failing them, and many still see Democrats as part of the same system that failed them in the first place.

Democrats cannot simply wait for MAGA to collapse and assume those voters will come home. They have to understand why the argument worked. The opening is not left versus right. It is top versus bottom. And if Democrats want working families to believe they are on the bottom with them, they are going to have to prove it.

My brain immediately froze: Nothing.

That was the answer that came to me. Not because it was true. I knew it wasn’t true even as I thought it. But I couldn’t come up with a single thing. My mind was blank.

I’ve done plenty of work this year. I’ve written grants and policy analysis. I’ve worked on advocacy campaigns, communications strategies, and accessibility. I’ve built things and fixed things and learned things I didn’t know how to do before. And most importantly, I’ve added work to my portfolio. Those are all wins.

But proud? That’s harder. Because as soon as I try to feel proud of something, my brain begins building the case against it.

Someone else did more. It wasn’t entirely my accomplishment. I was just doing my job. It isn’t finished yet. It could have been better. It didn’t produce the result I wanted. Someone else could have done it better.

There is always a qualification. Then someone asked me a different question: What do you respect about yourself?

And I had an answer. I respect my ability to develop strategy.

I respect my ability to look at a complicated situation, understand the larger system around it, identify what actually matters, and figure out a path forward. I can see how pieces connect. I can anticipate consequences. I can look beyond the immediate task and ask what we’re actually trying to accomplish.

I know I’m good at that.

And somehow, saying that doesn’t feel like pride. It feels like telling the truth. Maybe that’s the difference.

Pride asks me to celebrate myself. Respect asks me to tell the truth about myself.

I can respect something without pretending it’s perfect. I can respect my contribution without claiming I did everything alone. I can respect work that is unfinished, an effort that didn’t succeed, or a skill that hasn’t received external recognition.

Respect allows for complexity. Pride, at least for me, has always felt more dangerous.

I have spent years working in politics and advocacy, spaces where visibility can come with a cost. Disagreement is rarely confined to the issue at hand. People remember. Factions form. Personal grievances become political strategy. Sometimes the goal stops being winning an argument or advancing a cause and becomes punishing the person who dared to challenge someone.

I know this because I have lived it.

I’ve had people carry anger toward me for years over things that should never have warranted that kind of hostility. I’ve seen personal resentment become more important to people than the well-being of the communities we were supposedly trying to serve. I’ve watched people become willing to damage the work itself if doing so might also damage me.

That kind of experience changes you.

Trauma is often discussed as though it makes us afraid of things that aren’t actually happening. As though the work is simply learning to convince ourselves that we’re safe now.

But sometimes the threat was real.

Sometimes people really did attack you. Sometimes they really did try to damage your reputation. Sometimes they really did punish you for speaking, challenging, leading or simply asking to be treated fairly.

And when that happens repeatedly, you learn.

You learn that visibility can be dangerous. You learn that speaking up can make you a target. You learn that being competent, confident, or influential can make someone decide you need to be taken down.

So you adapt. I adapted by making myself smaller.

Not all at once. There wasn’t a single moment when I decided to disappear. I just gradually stopped doing things. I participated less. I shared less. I became more cautious about claiming my accomplishments. I learned to qualify my contributions before anyone else could accuse me of taking too much credit. I learned to point out my own flaws before someone else could use them against me.

I diminished myself because it seemed like the easiest way to reduce the attacks. And then, years later, someone asks me what I’m proud of, and my brain says nothing. Maybe those things are connected.

Maybe when you’ve spent enough time learning that visibility has consequences, pride starts to feel like another form of exposure. To be proud of something means standing beside it and saying: Yes. I did this. I think it’s good.

It means resisting the urge to immediately explain why it doesn’t really count.

That’s hard for me. Respect feels different.

I don’t have to be the best strategist in the world to respect my ability to develop strategy. I don’t have to pretend I’ve never made a bad decision. I don’t have to prove that no one else could have done the work. I don’t have to wait for unanimous approval from people who may never be willing to give it.

I can simply look at myself clearly and say: This is something I do well.

Politics has taught me many things, but one of the hardest lessons has been how quickly a disagreement can become personal and how long people can carry resentment when they believe you’ve challenged their power, their judgment, or their place in the room.

Trauma taught me to anticipate that resentment.

It taught me to scan the room before speaking. To calculate the possible cost of being visible. To wonder who might feel threatened, who might retaliate, and who might still be angry years later.

That’s exhausting. And worse, it doesn’t necessarily work. I made myself smaller, and it didn’t buy me peace.

I became more cautious, and people still found reasons to be angry.

I qualified my accomplishments, and it didn’t make everyone fair.

I tried to become less threatening, and some people still decided I was the enemy.

So maybe I’m not ready to answer the question, “What are you proud of this year?” Maybe pride still makes my brain freeze. But I can ask myself what I respect. And suddenly, I have answers.

I respect my ability to develop strategy. I respect my mind. I respect the work I’ve done. I respect my ability to see what others miss and find a path through complicated problems.

I can respect myself without pretending I’m perfect. And perhaps, for now, that’s enough. Perhaps respect is how I begin finding my way back to the parts of myself I made small in response to other people’s anger.

Not by pretending the attacks never happened. Not by convincing myself that criticism can’t hurt me. Just by refusing to let other people’s hostility be the final authority on who I’m allowed to be.

What I’ve had to learn to do when pride feels impossible:

1. Replace pride with respect

Ask what you respect about your work, your judgment, or the way you handled something. Respect does not require perfection.

2. Separate contribution from ownership

You do not have to accomplish something alone for your role to matter. Name what you specifically brought to the work.

3. Stop using outcomes as the only measure

A good decision can still lead to a bad result. Evaluate the quality of your thinking, effort, and judgment, not only the final outcome.

4. Catch the automatic qualification

Notice when you immediately say, “but someone else did more,” “it was just my job,” or “it could have been better.” That is often self-erasure pretending to be accuracy.

5. Name the skill underneath the accomplishment

Instead of asking what you achieved, ask what the work proves you can do. Develop strategy. Lead. Write. Persuade. Organize. Solve problems.

6. Keep a record before your brain rewrites it

Write down decisions, work, praise, results, and moments of competence as they happen. Memory gets unreliable when self-criticism is in charge.

7. Practice making a claim without apologizing

Say one true sentence about yourself without softening it. Then stop talking.

Competence may be your baseline, but that does not make it invisible, effortless, or unworthy of recognition. I’m still trying to learn that, myself.

The people who know the least are often the most certain. The people who understand how power, budgets, laws, turnout, messaging, coalitions, institutions, and implementation actually work tend to speak with more caution because they know how many moving parts there are.

That is not because experienced people are weak. It is because experience teaches you where the landmines are.

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes the gap between what people know and what they think they know. In politics, that gap is everywhere. It shows up when people confuse having an opinion with having a strategy. It shows up when someone reads one headline and suddenly understands Medicaid, tax policy, election law, campaign finance, school governance, and international conflict before lunch. It shows up when the person who has never knocked doors, raised money, read a statute, built a coalition, or sat through a local government meeting is the first person to declare that everyone else is doing it wrong.

The maddening part is that sometimes they are right that something is wrong.

They are just not always right about why it is wrong, how it got that way, who has the power to change it, or what happens if you pull the wrong lever.

That is where politics gets dangerous. Not because ordinary people should stay out of it. The opposite. More people should be involved. But involvement without humility becomes performance. It becomes a confidence contest. It becomes a room full of people diagnosing complex systems with the precision of a Facebook comment section.

The people who know the least often have the cleanest answers.

Just vote them out.

Just run someone better.

Just file a lawsuit.

Just make a viral video.

Just say the thing louder.

Sometimes those are pieces of the answer. Rarely are they the whole answer.

People who have been inside political work for any length of time usually sound less certain because they understand the constraints. They know money matters. They know turnout matters. They know candidate quality matters. They know timing matters. They know laws are written badly on purpose. They know coalitions are messy. They know one loud person can derail six months of careful work because they need to feel brave in public.

And social media made all of this worse. Social media gave everyone a platform for whatever they want to say. That can be good. People who were locked out of traditional media can now tell their own stories, challenge institutions, organize communities, and force issues into public view that would have otherwise been ignored.

But the same tools that make civic participation more accessible also make misinformation easier to spread. That is especially true for people who choose politics as their lane.

If you want to post about your lunch, your dog, your garden, or the weird thing your neighbor did with a leaf blower at 7 a.m., the stakes are usually pretty low. Annoying, perhaps. Spiritually damaging before coffee, sure. But low stakes.

Politics is different.

When you build a platform around politics, your words can shape what people believe about elections, laws, candidates, public agencies, ballot issues, civil rights, taxes, health care, education, and who is responsible for the problems people are experiencing.

That means the responsibility is higher.

And I am including myself in that.

I have gotten things wrong. I have shared things too quickly. I have trusted a summary when I should have read the source. I have reacted to the version of the story that was moving fastest instead of slowing down enough to check what was actually true.

That does not make me uniquely terrible. It makes me a person on the internet. Recently, in the course of my job, I find myself in coalition meetings with people who are definitely smarter than I am, people who have been involved in public policy their entire career. Imposter syndrome is real. I have gone home feeling like I should quit everything because I have not structured my whole adult life around becoming a political expert. I fell into it. And I feel uniquely unqualified. My confidence has been shattered. And I would consider myself to be at the very bottom of the confidence curve in the chart.

Politics requires more than being online and having opinions. If we are going to use our platforms to talk about public life, we have to accept the responsibility that comes with it. That means reading past the headline. It means checking the source. It means asking whether the claim is current, whether it applies locally, whether it is legal analysis or wishful thinking, whether the person posting it actually knows what they are talking about, and whether we are sharing it because it is true or because it confirms what we already wanted to believe.

The danger is not just that someone might be wrong. The danger is that they might be wrong, with an audience.

And now we have added artificial intelligence to the confidence machine. Someone can open ChatGPT, ask a broad question about public policy, get a clean little answer in five seconds, and walk away feeling like they have done research.

They have not. They have received a summary, maybe. If they asked the right question.

That is not the same thing as understanding the law. It is not the same thing as reading the bill. It is not the same thing as knowing who has jurisdiction, what agency implements the rule, what the fiscal note says, how the funding stream works, who benefits, who gets hurt, what courts have already said, or what political tradeoffs are hiding underneath the language.

AI can be useful. I use it. Plenty of serious people use it. But using it well requires knowing enough to know when it is wrong, incomplete, outdated, or smoothing over the hard parts. That is the entire point behind understanding prompt engineering AND being knowledgeable enough in your field to know when AI is giving you slop.

That is the catch. The tool is most dangerous in the hands of someone who cannot tell the difference between a plausible answer and a reliable one.

Public policy is not an opinion project.

It is laws, budgets, regulations, administrative rules, court decisions, eligibility standards, implementation timelines, and human consequences. It is boring until it is not. It is technical until it hits someone’s rent, medication, child care, disability services, voting rights, or ability to stay alive.

That is why fake expertise is not harmless.

When someone uses AI as a shortcut to authority, they are not just misunderstanding an issue. They are often flattening the people affected by that issue. They are skipping the work and then expecting to be treated like they did the work.

A recent example made this painfully clear.

Someone asked whether it was possible to file a complaint about political misinformation. That is a fair question. It is also exactly the kind of question where the answer depends on details: who said it, where they said it, what kind of misinformation it was, whether it involved a candidate, a campaign, a committee, an election authority, a government office, a mailer, an ad, a disclaimer, a ballot issue, or something else entirely. It matters if it was state or federal.

AI gave an answer that sounded useful.

The problem was that it was wrong.

Not completely wrong. That would have been easier to spot. It was wrong in the more dangerous way: close enough to sound credible, but off base enough that someone with compliance experience could see it did not actually fit the situation being described.

That is the risk.

In politics, a bad answer does not have to be wildly false to create problems. It only has to be slightly misapplied. It only has to point someone toward the wrong office, the wrong process, the wrong legal theory, or the wrong remedy with enough confidence that they stop asking better questions.

In this case, I knew the answer was off because I had context that the AI did not. I have worked around compliance questions. I knew this was not a new issue. Larger political actors have already explored similar questions, and the answer was not as simple as “file a complaint, and someone will handle it.”

That is what AI often misses. It can summarize the general landscape, but politics happens in the details. And the details are usually where the answer lives.

AI is a tool. And tools are only as useful as the judgment of the person holding them.

As a communications professional, my job is to pretend I know everything. Let me be clear that I don’t, but my external communications need to be accurate enough so that people have confidence in what is being output. So my job is actually to know how to ask better questions. That means building a network of people who know more than I do. It means having people I can call when I need to understand the Medicaid implications, the legal risks, the legislative process, the fiscal impact, the administrative reality, or the political context. I don’t know everything. The internet does not know everything. Sometimes lawyers don’t know everything. But we can all work together to build consensus on something that is as accurate as possible, but might change in light of new information.

It means being humble enough to say, “I think I understand this, but I need someone smarter than me to check it.”

That is the difference between using AI as a starting point and using it as a costume.

I have been thinking about this a lot while developing a podcast. One of the safeguards I built into the process is sending previews to people with deeper expertise before anything goes public. Not because I enjoy being corrected. I do not. Nobody wakes up and thinks, “You know what would feel great today? Discovering I confidently misunderstood a regulatory issue on camera.” And yes, that has happened. Egg on my face.

But that is the point.

There have been times when I was wrong. Not vague wrong. Not “we could phrase this better” wrong. Wrong wrong.

I had read about an issue. I had thought about it. I had shaped the argument in my head. I had spoken with confidence. And then someone who knew more than I did looked at it and said, essentially, “Nope. That is not how that works.”

So I fixed it.

Sometimes that meant rewriting a section. Sometimes it meant changing the framing. Sometimes it meant refilming entire parts because the original version was too far off to salvage. I have a whole folder of media pitches and press releases that got abandoned because I misunderstood something that was the main story.

That is annoying. It is humbling. It is also the job.

Because wrong is easy.

Wrong is so easy.

It is easy to misunderstand a statute. It is easy to miss a jurisdictional issue. It is easy to confuse what should be true with what is legally true. It is easy to read a national explanation and assume it applies locally. It is easy to trust a summary because it sounds clean. It is easy to mistake confidence for comprehension.

That is why the correction process matters.

The difference between responsible communication and misinformation is not that responsible people are never wrong. Responsible people are wrong all the time. The difference is that they build systems that make it harder for their wrongness to reach an audience unchallenged.

That is why I am here.

Not because I am immune to the problem, but because I know how easily I can become part of it.

The problem is not that people are asking ChatGPT questions about public policy. Honestly, I wish more people were curious enough to ask questions before forming opinions. The problem is when the AI summary becomes the end of the learning process instead of the beginning.

Because public policy does not become real when it sounds clean in a paragraph. It becomes real when it hits implementation. It becomes real when someone loses a service, misses a deadline, gets denied coverage, cannot access transportation, or finds out the “simple fix” was never simple at all.

That is where expertise matters.

Not because experts are always right. They are not. Not because credentials should shut down debate. They should not. But because serious work requires more than confidence. It requires friction. It requires being corrected. It requires letting someone with deeper knowledge interrupt your clean little theory before you march it into public and make it everyone else’s problem. Shout out to Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon.

The dangerous version of politics is not people asking basic questions.

The dangerous version is people asking basic questions, receiving shallow answers, and then performing certainty in rooms where certainty can do real harm.

A healthy political culture would reward learning. It would make space for people to ask basic questions without shame. It would value lived experience and technical knowledge. It would understand that anger can be morally justified and still strategically useless if it is not paired with discipline.

Instead, we often reward the person who sounds the most certain.

And certainty is cheap.

Politics needs passion. It needs anger. It needs people who are willing to say that something is wrong. But it also needs humility.

Democracy is in danger of disappearing under the wave of misinformed content creation.

The problem is that healthy food costs money. A lot of it.

You cannot shame people into better nutrition while making nutritious food harder to afford. You cannot tell families they need to buy more fresh produce while refusing to fund the program that helps them do exactly that. That is not public health. That is moral theater.

And that is where the talking points matter.

We hear, over and over again, that people living in poverty are poor because they made bad choices. We hear lawmakers talk about public assistance as if it were a reward for irresponsibility rather than a safety net for human beings. We hear them argue that the government should not be responsible for helping people, because churches should handle charity.

But the churches are not handling it. They are not, and in many cases, they do not want to.

I recently heard a pastor tell a room full of people that it is not really the church’s job to meet people’s material needs. That churches are overwhelmed by requests. I understand being overwhelmed. I work in nonprofit spaces. I know what it means to have more need than resources.

But as an atheist who studied theology at a Christian university, I still found that statement stunning. Because yes, actually, according to Christianity, it is the job. It’s the whole job.

Modern churches have increasingly moved toward a model where care is reserved for the congregation, and outsiders need not apply. But that is not the model we see in the teachings of Jesus. We see Jesus feeding people. Healing people. Touching people other religious leaders rejected. Telling a story where the moral hero is the Samaritan, the outsider, the supposed enemy.

Even in the Old Testament, Ezekiel 16:49 describes the sin of Sodom as arrogance, excess, complacency, and refusal to help the poor and needy. Not drag brunch. Not rainbow flags. Not whatever cultural panic is being served fresh from the pulpit this week. The sin named in the text is that people who had enough refused to care for those who did not.

Over and over again, the central command of Christianity is to love God and love your neighbor as yourself. That is not a side quest. That is the assignment.

And yet, we see churches spending enormous amounts of money on buildings, branding, production, and growth models designed to generate revenue, while people in their own communities are hungry, unhoused, uninsured, isolated, and desperate.

What good is a bigger building when people are starving outside of it?

This is one of the reasons I left religion.

I attended a Christian and Missionary Alliance university. I studied theology. But more than that, I observed. I observed people who signed statements of faith and claimed moral authority treat each other with shocking cruelty. I watched people turn on someone who came out as LGBTQ. I watched housing being taken away from someone the week before Christmas because they had not “volunteered” enough to deserve a place to stay. I heard religious people tell parents to turn their children out onto the streets unless those children repented for being gay.

Eventually, I had to admit what I was seeing.

These people did not walk the faith they claimed to believe.

I found more compassion in secular humanism than I ever found in evangelical spaces. There was such a mismatch between what Jesus said and what many churches actually did that I stopped seeing holiness there. I saw hierarchy. I saw abandonment. I saw people using God as a cover for their own cruelty.

And now we see that same theology reflected in public policy.

Lawmakers say government should not help people because churches should do it. Churches say they are too overwhelmed to help people. And somehow, the person who needs food is still the one being judged.

Missouri’s SNAP policy is what happens when lawmakers are more interested in supervising poor people than feeding them.

People do not need moral supervision. They need food. Health care. Housing. Transportation. Dignity. A public system designed to care for the people who live here.

And we should be honest about the moment we are in. Food costs are already high. Global instability, fuel prices, supply chains, fertilizer costs, and transportation disruptions all affect what ends up on grocery store shelves and what families can afford to put in their carts. This is exactly the wrong time to make food assistance narrower, meaner, and harder to use.

But that is what Missouri is choosing.

The state is telling people to eat healthier while refusing to fund the help that makes healthy food affordable. It is telling poor people to make better choices while taking away their choices. It is blaming hunger on character instead of policy.

And nationally, we are watching public priorities become grotesque. There is money for spectacle. Money for power. Money for vanity projects. Money to tear apart and rebuild pieces of national symbolism. But when people need food, suddenly everyone becomes very concerned about personal responsibility.

Funny how that works.

We have lost the plot. America loves to tell the story of itself as a place where people came to build better lives, where communities worked together, where neighbors helped neighbors, where public systems existed because none of us can survive completely alone.

That story was always incomplete. It was always more myth than reality for many people. But even the myth understood something today’s lawmakers seem determined to forget: a society has obligations to the people who live in it.

Instead, we have allowed a cruel prosperity gospel logic to infect public life. Poor people are treated as sinners. Rich people are treated as blessed. Greed gets baptized. Neglect gets called discipline. Hunger gets rebranded as accountability.

Very convenient theology for people who do not want to share.

But at the end of the day, what churches do or do not do is not the central question of public policy. The government still has a responsibility to maintain a basic social safety net. The government still has a responsibility to make sure people can eat. The government still has a responsibility to protect human dignity, especially when private charity fails or refuses to meet the need.

Because “let them die” is not a serious policy position. It is a moral failure.

Linda, in this framing, is the local Democratic Party operative. The longtime volunteer. The committee member. The person who knows everyone. The person with relationships inside the party structure. The person who can either help an insurgent campaign understand how power actually moves or, apparently, must be replaced so a new group of people can call the shots.

As someone who would probably be considered a “Linda” in this framework, I have thoughts.

Not offended thoughts, exactly. More amused, then annoyed, then deeply concerned in the way you get concerned when someone confidently explains your own job to you while holding the map upside down.

The problem is not that the post talks about local Democratic infrastructure. That part matters. Local parties matter. Committees matter. Delegates matter. Relationships matter. The people who show up before there is a presidential campaign, after the presidential campaign leaves, and during the boring parts nobody livestreams matter.

The problem is that the post treats those people as obstacles rather than assets.

There is also a basic reality that gets skipped in these conversations: the Democratic Party exists to elect Democrats.

That should not be controversial. A political party is not a general-purpose activist clubhouse. It is not a public comment section with bylaws. It is an electoral institution designed to support candidates who run as Democrats and help Democrats win elections.

And party resources are thin. Painfully thin. County parties are often running on volunteer labor, donated snacks, outdated VAN access, and one person who still knows the password to the email account. Those resources are not endlessly available to people who want access to the party’s ballot line, volunteer base, institutional knowledge, and organizing infrastructure while refusing to actually be part of the party.

That is like working in a union shop, refusing to join the union, and then demanding full union protection without paying dues.

And if your politics tell you that is reasonable, it may be worth asking: why are you mad at the party that protects labor instead of the party trying to bust it?

That labor point matters in campaign work, too.

Being proud of working for free is not morally superior. It is often just a sign that someone has the privilege to work without pay. People deserve to be paid for their labor, including people who work on campaigns. Normalizing unpaid campaign labor shuts out people who cannot afford to donate their time, and it keeps political work accessible to the people who already have the most flexibility, stability, and outside support.

That is not a movement. That’s classism.

Offering to work for free can also function like union busting, whether people intend it that way or not. It devalues the labor of people who campaign for a living, undercuts the people trying to build sustainable political careers, and makes it harder to insist that progressive politics should include progressive labor practices.

And it’s not a strategy. That is how you fracture your own coalition, depress your own turnout, and hand the opposition an opening they did not earn.

The “Lindas” they are describing are often not confused moderates waiting for someone to explain democracy to them. They are the people in policy meetings while legislation is being drafted, amended, negotiated, stalled, revived, and quietly murdered in committee. They are the people who know which lawmaker is movable, which coalition partner is nervous, and which sentence in a bill will trigger opposition. They are the people who develop talking points and advise legislators because they have more institutional knowledge after term limits were implemented.

They have built networks full of people who do not agree with each other. That matters.

Anyone can build a discord of people who already think the same thing. That is not coalition building. That is an echo chamber. Ironic coming from people who describe Linda as someone who “spent her entire life being misinformed about how the party’s power structure actually works.”

The harder work is building relationships across differences. It is knowing when to push, when to pause, when to let someone else carry the message, and when to stop talking because the person who needs to hear it will only hear it from someone else.

That kind of work is not flashy. It does not usually go viral. It rarely comes with applause. But it is politics.

The most insulting part of the “replace Linda” logic is its assumption that institutional memory is the enemy of progress.

Sometimes institutions protect themselves. Sometimes people cling to power. Sometimes party structures become so self-preservationist that they forget they are supposed to serve voters, not just maintain seating charts.

But that is not the same thing as saying everyone who knows how the system works is the problem.

There is a difference between gatekeeping and experience. There is a difference between protecting power and understanding risk. There is a difference between blocking change and knowing what it takes to make change survive contact with reality.

A lot of Lindas are not trying to stop anyone from building power. They are trying to keep people from confusing a seat at the table with control of the room. They are trying to stop others from becoming gatekeepers who are after a power grab.

That distinction matters.

The fantasy version of politics says the problem is that the wrong people are in charge. Replace them, and everything changes.

The real version of politics says power is relational. You do not just take it. You build it, negotiate it, share it, test it, protect it, and sometimes spend years trying to keep it from being wasted by people who think showing up angry is the same thing as showing up prepared.

If the goal is a more democratic Democratic Party, then the work cannot simply be replacing one faction with another faction that behaves the same way once it has the votes. The goal should be more shared power, stronger participation, clearer pathways into leadership, and a party infrastructure that can handle disagreement without treating every disagreement as sabotage.

That requires Lindas. It also requires new people. Politics is not built by one type of person. It is built by ecosystems.

The better question is not “How do we replace Linda?”

The better question is “What does Linda know that we have not bothered to learn?”

What coalitions has she held together? What fights has she already seen? What relationships has she protected? What losses shaped her risk tolerance? What does she know about the community that is not visible from the outside?

That is what “meeting Linda where she is” actually means.

It does not mean flattering her. It does not mean deferring to her forever. It does not mean accepting broken systems because someone with a clipboard has been there since 1998.

It means respecting that people who understand processes are not automatically enemies of progress.

In fact, they are often the people who can tell you how to turn a demand into policy, a policy into a bill, a bill into a vote, a vote into implementation, and implementation into something people can actually use.

The Democratic Party has plenty of problems. Nobody needs to pretend otherwise. There are stale power structures, bad incentives, cowardly consultants, donor distortion, risk-averse messaging, and local fiefdoms that should have been gently retired sometime during the Obama administration.

But if your plan for fixing that starts by insulting the people who understand the machinery, you are not building a strategy. You’re just being a jerk.

Linda is not the problem. The problem is assuming that people with institutional knowledge are disposable. The problem is mistaking collaboration for weakness. The problem is believing the only way to gain power is to remove everyone already doing the work.

The most difficult work in politics is coalition building: getting people with different thoughts, priorities, histories, and ideas moving in the same direction. Any work that dissolves those coalitions, or treats them as disposable because they cannot be fully controlled, is not movement-building. It is political sabotage.

And if you are serious about power, you should probably learn from Lindas before you try to replace them.

I assumed my endorsement meant exactly nothing to anyone except my friend. Certainly not to the broader political ecosystem, which is why it was so amusing to watch other people react as if my silence toward the other candidate carried some kind of message.

I was not trying to send a message. I was just supporting a friend.

But the reaction stuck with me. It exposed something bigger about the culture of politics: how quickly people confuse relationship with obligation, and how often loyalty is assumed by people who have never invested in earning it. In a lot of ways, this post started there.

Because the person I supported was my friend. Not my closest friend, not someone I talk to every day, but a real enough friend that the relationship existed outside politics. This was someone who had called me, talked with me on the phone, shared ideas, done favors, and treated me like a person instead of a political accessory. We are not that close, but we are a hell of a lot closer than a total stranger. And when people run for office, most of us assume their friends will support them. That’s normal.

What seemed less normal was the expectation that I should be equally vocal about someone else, someone who had never built a relationship with me at all. Someone who couldn’t even accept a friend request from me on social media.

Another friend once told me I am not invited to have a seat at the big table because I do not have money, and I do not have influence. I get that. I respect that. It hurt, but it is the truth. And no amount of strategy work is going to overcome my upbringing. I am not particularly special. I am not some major political player. I’m just a voter.

And that is part of what makes this dynamic so revealing. If I am not important enough to court, not connected enough to prioritize, not wealthy enough to matter in the rooms where strategy gets made, then fine. I understand the structure. What I do not understand is why that same structure so often acts entitled to my loyalty anyway.

When Shared Ideology Replaces Relationship

That is where politics starts to lose me.

Because shared party affiliation is not the same thing as a relationship. Shared ideology is not the same thing as trust. And too many people in politics, especially Democratic politics, act like those things are interchangeable. They are not.

And to be honest, in my own experience, it has not always looked like simple neglect. Sometimes it has looked like active alienation. People have avoided building a relationship with me. They have diminished or trashed my work product. They have tried to push me out. That is also part of what makes electoral politics so corrosive. It is not just transactional; it is often petty and ego-driven.

One of the reasons for that is simple. Electoral politics attracts too many people who want power more than they want a relationship. Not everyone, obviously. But enough to shape the culture. In that kind of environment, relationships are not always built for mutual trust or shared purpose. They are often built for access, control, usefulness, and status.

And if you are not useful, compliant, or easy to absorb into someone else’s orbit, you can find yourself ignored, alienated, diminished, or pushed aside.

When that is the culture, loyalty stops being something earned and starts being something demanded. This is personal for me, but it is also bigger than me.

I think one of the reasons modern politics feels so hollow is that we have replaced relationships with optimization.
We sort people.
We target them.
We score them.
We segment them.
We model behavior.
We track engagement.
We study persuasion.
We build ever more sophisticated systems for finding the right person with the right message at the right time, and then wonder why none of it seems capable of producing durable loyalty.

Because people know when they are being treated like data. And to be fair, I am not standing outside this problem. I am inside it, too.

I have also looked at campaigns like data points, because politics often gives us very little time to do anything else. When the stakes are high and the clock is short, relationships can start to feel like luxuries instead of the foundation.

You sort people. You prioritize. You make fast judgments about who is likely to give, who is likely to show up, who is movable, and who is not. That does not always come from cynicism. Sometimes it comes from scarcity. Sometimes it comes from urgency. Sometimes it comes from the fact that campaigns are built to chase outcomes faster than trust can form. But that is also the trap.

Because if we only ever meet people in campaign mode, then of course, they start to feel like assets instead of people. And if people only ever experience politics as a transaction, then of course they do not build the kind of loyalty or long-term investment that movements actually need.

On Relational Organizing

That is part of what relational organizing is supposed to fix.

At its best, relational organizing is not just a fancy turnout tactic. It is an acknowledgment that people move through a trusted messenger. Through repeated contact. Through mutual respect. Through actual conversation. Through knowing that they matter even when there is no fundraiser, no canvass launch, no urgent email, no panic text, no immediate ask attached.

But even relational organizing can get flattened into just another tactic if we are not careful. Another app. Another spreadsheet. Another way to map people’s social connections without honoring them. Another way to instrumentalize community while pretending to celebrate it.

If all we are doing is finding better ways to access people through their relationships, that is not relational organizing. That is just smarter extraction. We have recognized that relationships are important, but we haven’t figured out how to fast-track building a community.

The Generational Gap

And younger people can feel that.

A lot of younger voters are leaning toward some version of “both parties suck,” and I do not think that is just apathy or ignorance. I think many of them have inherited a political culture that asks them to attach themselves to institutions that do not feel responsive, hopeful, or even particularly alive. People build communities around sports all the time, but they do it around shared love, shared identity, and the thrill of winning. They do not build lasting attachment around losing, anger, and being told to lower their expectations. Yet that is often what politics offers: not meaningful participation, but a demand to keep showing up for institutions that feel weak, joyless, and out of one's control.

That kind of politics makes loyalty feel irrational. And if their vote never changes anything, they also feel like their vote doesn’t matter.

Why would younger people want to hand over their identity to institutions that do not feel responsive to them, do not share power with them, and often do not even pretend to know them? If politics feels like something you watch instead of something you shape, cynicism is not some bizarre character flaw. It is a pretty rational response.

And maybe part of why this is getting worse is that we are asking people to build political community after spending years failing to build social community.

We have isolated young people. We have let screens mediate more and more of our relationships. We have normalized bullying, alienation, and performative public life, then acted confused when they struggle with trust, belonging, and real-world connection.

A lot of young people are growing up with constant visibility and very little rootedness. They know how to perform identity. They know how to consume content. They know how to read a room online. But many have had far less practice building durable, embodied, local relationships that can actually sustain civic life.

So when they enter politics, they are often not entering through mentorship, neighborhood ties, labor networks, churches, civic clubs, or long-term community structures. They are entering through clips, outrage, discourse, branding, and algorithmic conflict. Of course, politics feels flatter there. Of course, it feels more cynical. Of course, it feels like a game nobody really controls.

We did not build a culture that taught people how to belong to each other. Then we handed them a voter file and told them to organize.

Conservatives Doing It Right

And here is the part Democrats especially do not like to admit: conservatives have not lost the relationship piece in the same way.

That does not mean their politics are better. It does not mean their communities are always healthy or inclusive. But in many places, conservatives are still operating inside real social infrastructure.

Churches. Bible studies. Volunteer groups. Family systems. Shared rituals. Repeated gatherings. Existing networks of trust. Their politics are often reinforced through community structures that already know how to create belonging.

That matters.

Because when conservatives ask for loyalty, they are often asking from inside a relationship structure that already exists. The politics may be harmful. It’s probably a cult. The conformity may be real. The gatekeeping may be intense. But the social connection is there. It is lived. It is practiced. It is reinforced week after week. Like a cult.

Meanwhile, liberal politics too often tries to replace community with branding, urgency, and data. It shows up as a fundraising email, a last-minute endorsement ask, a cold text, an event invite, or a panicked reminder that democracy is on the ballot again. Then it wonders why people feel less attached.

One side is still drawing from belonging. The other keeps trying to automate belonging and then acts surprised when the results feel thin.

Politics v Sportsball Teams

And people do not like backing losers.

That sounds mean, but it is true. People will build communities around almost anything if there is shared love, shared identity, and some sense of possibility. They will do it for sports teams, fandoms, churches, hobbies, and neighborhoods. But they do not build durable attachment around losing, anger, resentment, and the constant demand to sacrifice for institutions that feel joyless and out of their control.

They do not want to pour energy into something that only remembers they exist when there is money to raise or a seat to win. They do not want to be treated like interchangeable pieces in someone else’s campaign model and then be lectured about loyalty when they fail to feel inspired. They especially don’t want to be thought of as the token minority for a campaign.

Winning is not just about finding the perfect message or maximizing the right universe of voters. It is also about whether people believe they are part of something real. Something relational. Something alive. Something that sees them as more than an input. That is where loyalty comes from.

Not from party labels.
Not from assumption.
Not from panic.
Not from guilt.
Not from the letter next to someone’s name.

Loyalty is built through investment. Through reciprocity. Through time. Through the slow, unglamorous work of showing people they matter before you need something from them.

So no, you do not get to assume my loyalty because there is a D next to your name.

And honestly, that is not just a message for candidates. It is a message for all of us. Because I am guilty of it too. I have looked at campaigns like math problems. I have treated people like probabilities. I have operated from urgency instead of connection. I understand why we do it. But I also think it is part of why politics feels so brittle now.

We have built a system that is very good at asking and very bad at investing. Very good at targeting and very bad at trusting. Very good at counting people and very bad at making them feel counted.

Where Do We Go From Here?

So what is the answer?

Part of it is painfully simple. We have to start building a political community before we need something from it.

That means investing in people when there is no election six months away. It means creating places where people can share ideas, build trust, argue, laugh, disagree, and still feel like they belong. It means treating young people like participants instead of demographic problems to solve. It means mentoring them, inviting them in early, and giving them actual ways to shape outcomes before they are old enough to be burned out by them.

It means building networks that are not purely transactional. Not just donor lists. Not just volunteer universes. Not just a database of people to contact when things get dire. Real networks. Real relationships. Real community life. The kind that can survive a bad cycle, a weak candidate, a lost race, or a disagreement without collapsing into resentment. It means picking up the phone and calling me.

People do not need to be insiders to deserve respect. They do not need to be wealthy to deserve a relationship. They do not need to be influential to deserve being seen.

And for those of us inside politics, it probably means slowing down enough to ask a harder question than who is likely to vote, donate, or volunteer. It means asking who feels known, who feels valued, and who only hears from us when we want something.

Because if loyalty has to be demanded, it probably was never loyalty in the first place. The future of organizing cannot just be better data. It has to be a better belonging.

And if we want people to act like democracy matters, then we have to give them a real experience of a community that that shows up for them.

As a woman in my 40s, I’m tired.

My generation grew up with a set of promises about what adulthood was supposed to look like. We were told that if we worked hard, got educated, found a partner, built a family, and did all the right things, life would open up for us. Stability. Partnership. Respect. Security. Meaning.

A lot of women learned too late that those promises were built on a lie.

What we were often being asked to do was not simply build a life. It was to pour our bodies, labor, care, time, and ambition into systems that expected us to give more than we got back. Marriage was supposed to protect us. Motherhood was supposed to fulfill us. Work was supposed to liberate us. Instead, too often, women found themselves carrying unpaid labor, physical risk, emotional management, child care, and the daily burden of holding everything together while being told this was just what adulthood looked like.

And now many of us are trying to make sure our daughters see it clearly. We are trying to pass down not the lie, but the warning.

At the same time, women are being asked to navigate an increasingly toxic culture shaped in no small part by male resentment. Online, that resentment has hardened into an entire ecosystem that normalizes entitlement, anger, coercion, and contempt toward women. It has made dating more dangerous, public life more exhausting, and politics more willing to cater to fragile masculinity at women’s expense.

So when I read Levi Asher’s Substack essay “How Democrats Win Back Young Men,” I do not come to it as someone indifferent to male pain. I come to it as someone who is already exhausted by how often women are asked to absorb the cost of it.

Asher’s piece is trying to answer a real political question. Young men have shifted right, Democrats have clearly lost ground with them, and too many people on the left still seem uncomfortable talking about male pain without sounding either dismissive or defensive. That part is true. It is worth wrestling with.

But Asher’s piece does something more slippery than simply naming a real problem. It takes real suffering, wraps it in a grievance narrative, and overstates the evidence in order to suggest that Democrats have failed men in some unique and symbolic way. The result is not a serious road map for winning back young men. It is a smoother, more respectable version of a story that too often drifts toward manosphere logic.

Some of the statistics in the piece are real. Men do die by suicide at much higher rates than women. Men also make up the majority of fatal overdose deaths. Men are also overrepresented in homelessness. Those are serious disparities. They deserve to be taken seriously. On many levels, we as a society have failed men, and that has also been by design.

But none of that proves the larger political story Asher is trying to tell. Social breakdown is real. Male distress is real. That is not the same thing as proving that Democrats have uniquely excluded men, or that the solution is to center politics around male grievance. That leap is where the argument starts to wobble.

The Numbers Tell a Different Story

The election data are a good example. Asher writes as though Joe Biden basically split young men in 2020, only for Donald Trump to win them big in 2024. But the comparison most often used in this conversation tells a more precise story. Biden won young men ages 18 to 29 by 56 percent to 44 percent in 2020. In 2024, Trump won young men by that same 56 percent to 44 percent margin. That is a dramatic reversal, but it is not a story of Biden barely hanging on and then losing young men by nearly 20 points. It is a mirror-image result. The distinction matters because overstating the shift makes the rest of the argument feel more urgent and more emotionally satisfying than the numbers actually justify. And in 2024, Biden was not on the ballot, but a Black woman was. Let’s put a pin in that idea.

The DNC Website Example Does Not Hold Up

That same pattern shows up in the piece’s symbolic examples. The screenshots included here do not support the claim that Democrats excluded men from their constituency language and later corrected it. I went and pulled a sampling of pages between 2024 and today.

The page in question appears to have been “Who We Serve,” not “Who We’re Fighting For,” and the archived versions do not show a stand-alone category for men at any point. They also do not show that men were later added. What they do show is that men were already included throughout the page in categories like veterans, seniors, people with disabilities, Black Americans, and Americans abroad. The existence of a women-specific category is not proof of anti-male exclusion. Women are treated as a distinct political category because women are still marginalized in ways men are not, including through legislation aimed at controlling our bodies, reproductive autonomy, and access to health care. There is no equivalent regime of body-focused legislation targeting men. Recognizing women as a category is a response to material inequality, not evidence that men were erased. Even if men are struggling, the answer is not to recenter men within the party at the expense of women. Men were never absent from the coalition. Rewriting the platform around male grievance would not correct an exclusion. It would create a new one.

New York Was a Youth Mobilization Story, Not a “Young Men” Story

The Zohran Mamdani example does similar work. It is presented as proof that Democrats can win back young men by focusing on the right issues and using the right media. But the strongest public numbers from that race are about young voters as a whole, not young men specifically. Public reporting shows that about 75 percent of under-30 voters backed Mamdani in the 2025 New York City mayoral race, and estimated youth turnout at 28 percent, which is high for a municipal election. That is strong evidence that he mobilized young voters. It is not strong evidence that he built a uniquely male coalition.

In fact, even the limited age-by-gender data that circulated after the race point in the opposite direction. A CNN exit poll suggested Mamdani won men ages 18 to 29 by a wide margin, but won women ages 18 to 29 by an even larger one. That suggests broad youth appeal, not a special breakthrough with young men. The lesson from New York is not that Democrats need a separate male grievance strategy. The lesson is that young people respond to concrete economic issues, cultural fluency, and strong get-out-the-vote work. It is a youth mobilization story, not proof of a uniquely male one.

That is not even a new lesson. Barack Obama did not win young voters in 2008 by telling them the party had ignored them as a class. He won them by offering a compelling vision, building a massive organizing infrastructure, and meeting them where they were. Mamdani’s strategy may have used TikTok instead of Facebook and podcasts instead of email blasts, but the basic formula is not revolutionary. It is an updated delivery, not an entirely new political insight.

Texas Proves Less Than People Want It To

The Texas example is even shakier. James Talarico’s victory is treated as another sign that Democrats can reach young men if they communicate differently. But what exactly does that race prove? Public reporting does not show strong evidence that Talarico’s main breakthrough was specifically with young men. And once you look more closely at the race itself, the story gets more complicated, not less. Talarico, a young white man, was running against Jasmine Crockett, a prominent Black woman. Any interpretation of that race that ignores race and gender is pretending politics happens in a vacuum.

That does not mean every voter who picked Talarico consciously chose whiteness or masculinity. Most voters are not doing that kind of self-examination in the booth. Bias rarely shows up in the mind as bias. It shows up as instinct, comfort, relatability, likability, tone, or electability. And “electability” is where people often hide all kinds of unexamined assumptions. When voters say a candidate seems easier to win with, they may mean they personally feel more comfortable with that person. They may mean they believe the broader electorate would be more comfortable with that person. Usually, it is some mix of both. Exit polls cannot separate that cleanly, and most people are not consciously trying to.

That matters because electability talk often gets treated like a neutral strategy when it is really a stew of personal preference, stereotype, and prediction about other people’s prejudice. In a state like Texas, where voters know full well that racism and sexism are alive and well, a white man may genuinely seem like the safer bet to some people. But that does not make bias irrelevant. It means bias is built into the calculus, whether it comes from the voter, the electorate they are imagining, or both.

Put the New York and Texas examples together, and the article’s thesis gets weaker, not stronger. Neither race gives us especially strong evidence of a campaign that uniquely cracked the code with young men. New York looks like a strong youth mobilization story. Texas looks like a race where campaign style, candidate identity, and perceptions of electability all overlap in ways that cannot be reduced to one simple lesson. In neither case do we get the clean proof of a young man’s strategy that Asher seems to think we do.

The Manosphere Problem

And this is where the piece starts to feel manosphere-adjacent, even if it presents itself in more polished terms. There is a real difference between addressing the instability that many young men face and validating the entitlement some of them have been taught to feel. If a young man is worried about wages, housing, debt, loneliness, addiction, or whether he will ever be able to build a stable life, that is a legitimate political problem. If what he wants is a return to older gender arrangements that made women more dependent, more accessible, and easier to exploit, that is not an unmet policy need. That is grievance politics.

A lot of the rhetoric around winning back young men blurs those two things. It starts with real pain and then quietly expands to include resentment toward women, feminism, or social change itself. That is where the argument becomes dangerous. Politics can address social isolation, instability, and loss of purpose. It cannot, and should not, promise men easier access to women’s bodies, labor, or emotional caretaking.

The problem is not that Democrats forgot how to talk to men. The problem is that the manosphere has spent years radicalizing them with a steady diet of misogyny, resentment, and lies, then teaching them to experience women’s freedom as theft. We cannot out-message that kind of propaganda. We cannot fix cult-like behavior by recentering men in the party platform at the expense of women.

And in a world of limited funding and political capital, every new priority forces a question about what gets less attention, less urgency, or less investment in return. If we decide we need a separate push to address issues framed as uniquely male, what are we pulling resources away from to do it? For hundreds of years, this country has centered men politically, socially, and economically. Now that there have finally been some shifts toward addressing the systemic marginalization of women and other groups, we are suddenly hearing a new chorus of “what about the men?” about the very people who have historically been centered all along. That sucks.

Supporting Men Cannot Mean Re-Marginalizing Women

That point matters even more when conversations about “fatherhood” and “supporting men” happen in political environments that are still openly hostile to women’s autonomy. Women are still the ones carrying the physical risks of pregnancy, the burden of maternal health failures, the career penalties of caregiving, and the daily vulnerability that comes with weak child care systems and weak labor protections. Men may benefit from parenthood and marriage. Women still bear far more of the bodily and economic cost. So when politics starts centering male frustration without centering women’s reproductive autonomy, maternal care, paid leave, and child care access, it turns the real hierarchy upside down.

What Democrats Actually Should Do

None of this means Democrats should ignore young men. They should not. They should talk to young men the same way we talk to young women, directly and seriously about housing, wages, debt, addiction, health care, loneliness, and the collapse of stable pathways into adulthood. They should communicate in ways that make sense in the current media environment. They should build campaigns that feel culturally literate and materially grounded. But that is very different from recasting broad youth distress as a uniquely male political injury, or treating resentment toward women as a constituency concern.

Male pain is real. That still does not make every grievance narrative about men true.

The Actual Lesson

The real lesson is much simpler than the article wants it to be. Recent campaign wins are not a roadmap for how Democrats pull men back through some special set of male-focused talking points. The strongest evidence in the races Asher cites points to broad youth mobilization, not uniquely male appeal. Young men do not need a politics that flatters their worst impulses. They need a future. And the evidence suggests young voters respond when a campaign offers one.

Sources

Levi Asher, “How Democrats Win Back Young Men,” Substack

Levi Asher

How Democrats Win Back Young Men in 2026 (part 1)

What do a democratic socialist from Queens and a seminarian from Austin have in common? They both figured out something that most Democratic campaigns still haven’t: young men will show up when you actually speak to them. This isn’t a 2024 autopsy. That election is over. This is about what Democrats do in the next year — and the playbook already exists…

Read more

5 months ago · 6 likes · Levi Asher

CIRCLE at Tufts, “Young Voters Shifted Toward Trump but Still Favored Harris Overall”
https://now.tufts.edu/2024/11/12/young-voters-shifted-toward-trump-still-favored-harris-overall

CDC, “Suicide Data and Statistics”
https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html

CDC, SUDORS Fatal Overdose Data Dashboard
https://www.cdc.gov/overdose-prevention/data-research/facts-stats/sudors-dashboard-fatal-overdose-data.html

HUD, “The 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report to Congress, Part 1”
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2024-AHAR-Part-1.pdf

CIRCLE at Tufts, “Young Voters Power Mamdani Victory, Shape Key 2025 Elections”
https://circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/young-voters-power-mamdani-victory-shape-key-2025-elections

CNN, 2025 New York City mayoral exit poll results
https://www.cnn.com/election/2025/results/new-york-city-mayor-exit-polls

The Guardian, “Obama’s victory is all down to the internet”
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/jun/25/barack-obama-david-plouffe

Pew Research Center, “Social Media and Political Engagement”
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/legacy/DIRECT-ACCESS-FINAL.pdf

Texas Tribune, “James Talarico wins Texas Democratic primary for U.S. Senate”
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/03/03/texas-jasmine-crockett-james-talarico-us-senate-democratic-primary/

Associated Press, “Talarico wins Texas Senate Democratic nomination while Cornyn and Paxton head to Republican runoff”
https://apnews.com/article/texas-election-senate-crockett-talarico-cornyn-paxton-hunt-4d2fa601c0dab451c2cbd7c6f1483547

But it’s not that simple.

If this proposal passes both chambers and voters approve it on the ballot in November, Missouri will eliminate the individual income tax system. And unless lawmakers create a separate way to preserve it, the circuit breaker will disappear with it. So far, they have not explained how they would prevent that from happening.

The Tax Credit Most Missourians Only Discover the Hard Way

Most people have never heard of the circuit breaker. That is not surprising. It is one of those programs you only learn about when you suddenly need it.

The circuit breaker is a Missouri property tax credit that helps eligible seniors and people with disabilities offset part of what they paid in rent or property taxes. For people living on fixed incomes, it matters. For some households, that refund is not extra money. It is the money that keeps everything else from sliding. Right now, the credit can be worth up to $750 for renters and up to $1,100 for homeowners, depending on what they paid and their household income.

It helps people cover the gap between what life costs and what their income actually allows. That’s why this matters so much, even if lawmakers are barely talking about it.

The circuit breaker is not some separate pot of money floating outside the tax system. It is built directly into Missouri’s income tax structure. The credit is applied against income tax liability, and if the credit is larger than what someone owes, the remaining amount is treated as an overpayment of income tax.

In other words, the program runs through the very system lawmakers are proposing to eliminate.

If the income tax disappears, the circuit breaker disappears too, unless lawmakers build a new structure to replace it. Right now, there is no outlined plan to do that.

That may be unintended. It is still a consequence. And it is a consequence that would land on people who can least afford it.

Because when this eventually reaches the ballot, a lot of voters are going to hear “no income tax” and get excited before they ask the obvious next question: how does the state replace that money?

The answer is not “no taxes.” The answer is shifting taxes.

When “No Income Tax” Turns Into Higher Taxes for Most People

This proposal would allow lawmakers to rely more heavily on sales taxes in order to eliminate the income tax. That means the tax burden does not disappear. It moves. And according to analysis from the Missouri Budget Project, the bottom 80% of earners in Missouri would pay more overall under that shift, while only the top 20% would see tax reductions.

So let’s say that plainly.

This is not a plan to cut taxes for everybody. It is a plan to cut taxes for people at the top while shifting more of the burden onto everyone else.

That matters because sales taxes hit regular people harder. Wealthier people can save and invest more of their income. Working people spend more of what they earn on everyday life. Clothes. Home goods. Services. Supplies. The basics. When a state leans harder on sales taxes, the people with the least breathing room end up carrying more of the load.

Now add the loss of the circuit breaker to that equation.

The state would be shifting the tax burden downward while at the same time risking the loss of one of the few credits that help seniors and people with disabilities offset housing costs.

That is not some small technical glitch in the policy. That is a real problem. But that is exactly why people should be paying attention now, before it’s time to vote.

Once something reaches the ballot, it tends to arrive polished. Simplified. Marketed. What often gets left out is the list of tradeoffs and who gets stuck paying for them.

The circuit breaker is one of those tradeoffs. It may not be the part lawmakers are talking about. But it is one of the parts that matters most to the people who can least afford to lose it.

And unless lawmakers come up with an actual plan to preserve it, the disappearance of the circuit breaker will also occur.

Picture what that actually looks like in real life.

A senior living on Social Security. A fixed monthly income that does not stretch any further, no matter how high prices climb. Rent. Utilities. Groceries. Medication. Gas to get to appointments. Every dollar already has a job before it even arrives.

The circuit breaker refund, maybe a few hundred dollars, helps close the gap. It might cover a utility bill. It might buy a few weeks of groceries. It might be the cushion that keeps someone from falling behind.

Now imagine that same household after this tax shift.

The circuit breaker is gone.

Sales taxes are higher.

And the cost of everyday life keeps rising. Food. Gas. Utilities. The basic things people need just to survive.

For someone living comfortably, that might feel like a policy debate. For someone living in extreme poverty, it is the difference between stability and crisis.

That is why the circuit breaker matters.

And that is why voters deserve to understand exactly what is at stake before they are asked to approve a policy built around the phrase “no income tax.”

Because when the math finally lands, the people who will suffer are the seniors and families already hanging on by a thread, sacrificed so lawmakers can deliver another tax break to the wealthy donors who funded their campaigns.

And before anybody tries to drag this into a fake argument about showing an ID at the polls, no. This is not that.

A lot of bad-faith messaging is trying to blur the difference between voter ID at the moment you vote and proof of citizenship at the moment you register. Those are two different policies with two different impacts.

What’s True and What’s Not

This debate is about voter registration, not what you show at the polling place. In-person voter fraud is as close to zero as you can get, because impersonating other people is actually a lot more difficult than people think it is.

Under federal law, noncitizens are not eligible to vote in federal elections. That part is not up for debate.

What is often missing from the conversation is how the federal registration system has worked for decades. Since the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the country has largely operated on an attestation model for voter registration. You affirm you are eligible, including that you are a United States citizen, under penalty of perjury. In general, you do not have to attach documentary proof of citizenship just to get registered for federal elections.

That 1993 framework is why voter registration is offered through common, scaled channels, including motor vehicle offices, mail-in registration options, and standardized federal registration processes. It is designed to make registration accessible for eligible citizens, while still making fraud a crime.

The SAVE Act, and the rebranded version often described as the SAVE America Act, is built around a simple headline: only citizens should be able to register and vote.

Sure. Agreed. That is already the rule.

This is where the “facts versus feelings” test matters.

Multiple organizations across the spectrum, including think tanks and election administration groups that are openly motivated to find voter fraud, have been tracking alleged illegal voting for years. Even with that incentive, they keep running into the same wall: confirmed noncitizen voting is extremely rare, and initial “flag” numbers in state sweeps frequently shrink after basic follow-up because many matches are administrative errors, outdated records, or bad data.

If this were a widespread, decades-long problem, the paper trail would be thick. Instead, the receipts are anemic.

The new part is the method. Instead of attestation under penalty of perjury, the SAVE approach pushes documentary proof of citizenship at the point of registration. That sounds tidy until you translate it into real life.

If this model becomes the norm, voter registration stops being a standardized civic process and starts acting like a checkpoint. And the intent behind the checkpoint is to stop citizens from voting, not non-citizens. We should be making it easier, if not compulsory, to vote. Not harder.

“Only Citizens”, Now with a Subscription
This is why the “only citizens” messaging hits a nerve. It is branding.

And in Missouri, that branding was not even presented cleanly to voters.

In 2024, the “only citizens” language change was packaged inside a ballot measure whose main payload was a ban on ranked choice and approval voting. Critics warned at the time that the citizenship line was misleading because noncitizen voting was already illegal, and that it functioned as ballot candy, a popular sentence designed to sweeten an unrelated restriction on how elections can be run.

Now, that same language is being treated like a blank check.

Lawmakers are pointing to the 2024 vote and claiming it is a mandate for documentary proof of citizenship requirements. But voters were not asked, in a clean, standalone way, whether they wanted a new paperwork gate at voter registration. They were asked to vote on a bundled package, and the bundling did the work.

If they want a mandate for documentary proof, they should have to defend documentary proof on its own merits, with real evidence and real numbers, not with a slogan that was stapled to a separate election policy fight.

Missouri already bans noncitizens from voting. So when politicians repeat “only citizens” like they discovered fire, what they are really doing is soft-launching a subscription service.

Only Citizens.

An actual fee plus paperwork, time, and access. The documents being demanded are not free.

A certified birth certificate costs money. A passport costs money. Replacing lost records costs money. Getting copies, notarizations, and mailing fees costs money. Transportation costs money. Taking time off work costs money.

In my case, just assembling the documents that a proof-of-citizenship regime would require would run about $80 to $150. That is not a theoretical burden. That is a paywall with a price tag. I opted to go the passport route, just in case, you know, we become refugees.

And because I changed my name after marriage, the checklist does not stop there. I would also need bridging documents to connect the name on my birth record to the name I use now. That is extra time, extra fees, extra risk of getting stuck in a bureaucratic loop.

That barrier is not evenly distributed. It lands harder on people who change their names, which, in practice, is more often women. Most men are not being asked to build a paper trail just to prove they are the same person.

A certified birth certificate fee, a passport fee, transportation, time off work, childcare, standing in line during business hours, and the bonus round, where your name has changed, and your documents do not match what the system expects. That is what pay-to-play looks like.

Missouri’s SB 986 Propaganda

In testimony on March 2, 2026, on Missouri Senate Bill 986, the bill sponsor argued that the 2024 “only citizens” language is a mandate for requiring proof of citizenship to register.

He also leaned on an idea that is intellectually dishonest: even one illegal vote can have a ripple effect, because some races are decided by a single vote.

Here is the problem. That argument skips past what the evidence and the existing system already show.

Yes, close elections exist. But the sponsor’s argument quietly assumes something that does not match how elections are actually run.

To have noncitizen voting at scale, you would need a pipeline that lets large numbers of ineligible people both register and then cast ballots without being caught. That is not what the evidence shows.

Even when states run large sweeps and announce alarming “flagged” numbers, those numbers often collapse after basic follow-up because records are outdated, data matches are wrong, or people became citizens after an old record was created.

And here is the practical point that gets skipped in hearings. Registration is not an automatic green light. County election authorities already review registrations and verify eligibility as part of the process. So even if an ineligible person tries to register, that attempt is often caught at the registration stage, before a ballot is ever cast.

Which raises the uncomfortable question for the sponsor. If Missouri’s elections are being administered by county officials who already verify eligibility, and if many of those officials are Republicans, is the argument that their own county election authorities are failing at their jobs, statewide, for years, without evidence that it is happening?

Unfortunately for them, Missouri does not currently run elections on a trust fall.

Research on documentary proof of citizenship requirements indicates that roughly 1 in 10 voting-age citizens do not have proof of citizenship readily available. Meanwhile, the best documented estimates of suspected noncitizen voting that get referred for investigation come out to about 0.0001 percent of votes in large multi-jurisdiction reviews.

So SB 986 is aiming a big new barrier at around 10% of eligible citizens to address a problem that shows up at less than 0.0001%, and often gets filtered out by existing verification long before anyone ever casts a ballot. County election authorities already verify eligibility during the registration process and maintain voter rolls. That is part of their job today, even without SB 986.

So the honest question is not whether a single illegal vote would be bad. Of course it would.

The honest question is whether Missouri is justified in building a statewide documentary proof gate that will predictably block or delay real citizens, based on a rare problem, often caught in existing processes, and frequently exaggerated by bad data.

That is the shell game.

Only citizens are already the people allowed to vote.

SB 986 is not changing that rule. It is adding a new paperwork gate in front of it.

So the sponsor is using a true statement that is already law to justify a “solution” to a problem that is not showing up at scale, and the predictable result is that eligible citizens get blocked or delayed from their constitutional right to vote. That’s their goal — stopping citizens from voting.

Fact vs Fiction

Fact: Noncitizens are already barred from voting. This is not new.

Fact: Federal voter registration has long relied on sworn attestation, with penalties for fraud, rather than requiring every eligible citizen to produce documentary proof of citizenship just to register.

Fact: Noncitizen voting is so rare that even right-leaning think tanks can’t find meaningful numbers to support evidence to the contrary.

Fiction: A constitutional phrase like “only citizens” automatically authorizes the most restrictive possible registration system.

Fiction: Missouri has a documented noncitizen voting problem big enough to justify a statewide paperwork gate.

The Epstein Class vs Everyone Else

Only citizens are already the eligible voters. That is not what is changing.

SB 986 is a policy choice to make voter registration contingent on paid documents and bureaucratic steps that many eligible citizens will not have readily available, especially people whose names have changed, people with less flexible work schedules, and people with fewer resources.

It is being sold as a response to a problem that is extraordinarily rare and often caught in existing verification, while the burden is guaranteed to land on actual citizens.

This is not a left versus right issue. It is the Epstein class versus everyone else, the people with staff, spare time, and tidy document folders versus the people who have jobs, kids, name changes, and zero patience for being paywalled out of a constitutional right.

That is the point. Not election integrity, but an access gate designed to be easy for the Epstein class and harder for everyone else. To return voting back to people who are wealthy, white, land-owning, and largely male. This is about stripping the constitutional right to vote from citizens of our country. That should make everyone angry.

Act shocked.
Act like this came out of nowhere.
Act like the system failed by accident.

I am not doing that.

I am angry. I am disgusted. I am not surprised.

If you have watched the manosphere pipeline for the last decade, none of this is hard to understand. We built a culture where contempt for women gets branded as honest criticism, domination gets sold as masculinity, and empathy gets mocked as weakness. Then we act confused when exploitation shows up in elite circles, like it is some random glitch.

It is not a glitch. It is a pattern.

And for years, the public was told the Epstein files were a nothing burger, overhyped, irrelevant, old news, move along. That framing was not neutral analysis, it was narrative management. If the files were truly meaningless, power would not have spent so much time minimizing them, delaying disclosure, and policing the conversation around them. We still see that narrative being pushed mostly by people on the right who believe that Trump is the savior of the country. Because hearing that Trump’s name is in the files over 38,000 times is not consistent with their reality.

And now comes the second pattern, the cover story.
When powerful men are exposed, women get blamed, women get discredited, women get turned into the cautionary tale, and women are told to carry the social cost so male power can survive intact.

That is not an accident either.
That is enforcement.

Senator Jon Ossoff put language to part of this reality with the phrase Epstein class, a class of people at the top who behave as if rules are for other people. The phrase resonates because people have seen this movie before. Different names, same structure, same immunity reflex.

Here is where people get tangled, so let me say it plainly: Top versus bottom does not replace left versus right. It explains a different layer of power.

Left versus right still matters. It shapes healthcare, labor rights, schools, civil rights, taxation, courts, public spending, and whether government serves people or donors.
Top versus bottom explains who gets protected when accountability gets close to the powerful.

Both are true.
Different axis, same country.

Now let’s talk about the part people keep minimizing.
The fallout gets managed through selective blame, and the public gets handed a short list of villains while the full protection network stays offstage. The partially unredacted files are blowing holes in existing power structures globally. Good, bring them all down. But also, let’s look at who is going to take the fall in our country.

You can see this blame shifting in real time. One possibility is that some officials are positioned to absorb public anger while broader circles of power stay protected. In that reading, Pam Bondi becomes the visible face expected to take the fall, while other actors wait in the wings to steady the system once the heat shifts.

That is a theory, and it should be tested against records, timelines, communications, and staffing decisions, not treated as fact without evidence. The harder truth is that cover-ups are rarely solo acts. They are institutional behaviors, legal strategies, media framing choices, donor pressure, and political risk management working together.

If former MO AG Andrew Bailey is part of that next phase, the public deserves proof and oversight, not rumor. Because the rumor is that he was brought in to help cover up the Epstein files. Public officials should face the same transparency standards they demand from everyone else.

That is the enforcement mechanism. Narrow the blame. Protect the structure. Keep the hierarchy intact.

This is why the manosphere conversation matters here.
Not because every man in those spaces commits crimes. They are training people in those spaces not to even view abuse towards women as a crime.
Because those spaces train an audience to reinterpret abuse as drama, boundaries as manipulation, and accountability as persecution.
That is the cultural prep work.
By the time a major scandal breaks, millions of people are already conditioned to doubt women and protect power first.

I learned how deep this runs a few years ago, when I met a former cop who told me it was standard practice in his department to treat domestic violence calls as women trying to get men in trouble. He claimed that nine times out of 10, there was no actual abuse, and that women were not reliable narrators of events. That assumption is backwards. People in trauma often recount events in fragmented ways, which is exactly why trained investigators are supposed to proceed with care, not contempt. He told me this was CPD policy.

This was in Columbia, Missouri, where law enforcement was previously tied to years of failure around a trafficking operation. For decades, officers reportedly told the FBI the person running the ring was an informant. It was not until the FBI began investigating the trafficking of a minor in June 2016 that Barry Manthe appeared to face serious legal exposure for decades of human trafficking.

If you want a bipartisan reminder of elite impunity, look at Bush and Cheney. They are not names that appear in the Epstein files, and that matters for factual precision. But not appearing in those files does not make their record good, clean, or beyond scrutiny. The post 9/11 torture regime was documented and condemned in international legal and human rights arenas, yet senior architects largely avoided a full criminal reckoning.

Power outlasted outrage. Again.

Not every case is identical.
The protection logic is.

So no, I am not surprised by elite abuse allegations.
I am surprised by how many people still act surprised by the blame transfer that follows.
The pattern is old.
Protect status.
Diffuse responsibility.
Punish women socially.
Move on.

If we actually want accountability, periodic outrage is useless.

Because this is the cycle. A burst of headlines, a flood of hot takes, a round of hearings, then institutional fatigue. Attention moves on, networks close ranks, and the same people who demanded consequences get told to be realistic. If people do not sustain pressure through records requests, oversight, investigative reporting, elections, and legal follow-through, this will blow over like it always does, and the structure will reset for the next scandal.

We need language that clearly names conduct.
We need survivor-centered policy, not survivor-themed media cycles.
We need platform accountability for ecosystems that monetize dehumanization.
We need legal and political systems that stop treating wealth and access like immunity.
We need media standards that stop laundering male violence through euphemism.

And we need to be honest about what comes next if we do nothing.
Women will be asked, again, to carry the shame for male abuse so existing power dynamics stay intact.

That is the bargain.
That is the trap.
That is what must be rejected.

Left versus right decides policy.
Top versus bottom decides who gets away with it.
And in both fights, women are still expected to pay the bill.

At the same time, political and business fallout has spread beyond the U.S., with high profile resignations and investigations tied to newly surfaced Epstein related records. That matters here in Missouri because it reinforces the same lesson women have been shouting for years, exploitation is usually shielded by money, influence, and social cover, not by the most vulnerable person in the room. Criminalization does not erase sex work. It just makes the people with the least power easier to punish.

HB 2450 Is a Harm Reduction Bill

Which brings us to Rep. Elizabeth Fuchs’s HB 2450 in Missouri. It is pragmatic for exactly that reason. It does not pretend one bill can fix patriarchy, capitalism, and human exploitation by next Tuesday. It makes one critical shift, who gets criminalized. And that shift is the whole point.

And honestly, that is already a big deal.

It also lands at a moment when the Epstein files conversation is reminding people of something women have said for years. Exploitation is usually protected by power, money, and social cover, not by the person with the least leverage in the room. People right now are clearly understanding that survivors are not the ones who should be punished. So if Missouri is serious about safety, the focus should be obvious. Stop criminalizing the easiest woman to arrest, and put the full legal weight on coercion, trafficking networks, and the people who profit while pretending they had no idea what was happening. That is the policy lane HB 2450 opens, and it is exactly where this debate needs to go.

In college, at my Christian university, I was assigned this debate. I was ready to change my position if the evidence demanded it. The other side relied on moral panic, not facts. Even after clear data was put on the table, minds did not move. That day taught me something ugly and useful. For a lot of people, this is not about safety or outcomes. It is about preserving a moral hierarchy where women carry the blame for male violence. That is why evidence-based policy matters, and that is why criminalizing survivors has to end.

When Survivors Fear Arrest, Predators Win

When we punish survivors, we teach them the system is not safe for them. We teach them that calling law enforcement could mean handcuffs instead of help. That is how violence stays hidden. That is how coercion keeps operating in plain sight. Criminalization does not eliminate abuse, it suppresses reporting, drives people underground, and gives predatory people exactly what they want, silence around vulnerable targets.

For decades, we have treated prostitution policy like a public safety strategy. In practice, it has often functioned as a poverty trap with paperwork. Arrest, court, fines, record, fewer job options, less housing stability, more vulnerability, repeat.

If your policy creates that loop, it is not protecting women. It is processing women.

HB 2450 appears to move away from that by decriminalizing prostitution for individuals while still keeping penalties aimed at coercion, trafficking, and exploitation through third party profiteering structures.

Translation:
Stop arresting people for survival.
Keep targeting people who exploit, coerce, and profit from abuse.

That is not radical. That is what competent policy looks like.

Missouri Needs Outcomes, Not Moral Theater

Now for the part where we can hold two truths at once, because grown women can multitask better than most state legislatures.

Decriminalization is better than criminalization for women’s safety and autonomy.
Decriminalization alone does not magically erase exploitation.

Even with decriminalization, people can still get trapped in unequal arrangements if someone else controls clients, housing, transportation, safety, or income.

So this is the right frame.
Decriminalization is phase one.
Worker protections are phase two.

If Missouri wants this to work for women in real life, not just in bill language, then next steps matter.

Yes, sex work has a long history.
Yes, it gave some women income when most legal and economic systems shut them out.
Also yes, many women were exploited, trafficked, and controlled under violent systems, especially women pushed to the margins.

The conclusion should be to regulate harm where harm lives and stop criminalizing people for being the least powerful person in the transaction.

This should be simple.
Women deserve safety.
Women deserve agency.
Women deserve policy that can tell the difference between survival and exploitation.

If the state can understand nuance in tax code, it can understand nuance here too. HB 2450 is not the end of the conversation. It is the first honest step. And yes, there is a real chance this bill never gets a hearing because the sponsor has a D next to her name. If that happens, the policy argument should not disappear, it should get louder.

So, what can we do?

1. Host public conversations outside the Capitol with survivors, legal aid, public health experts, and anti-trafficking professionals.

2. Keep asking one question on repeat. If lawmakers reject this approach, what is their plan to reduce coercion without punishing survivors.

3. Track inaction publicly. No hearing, no alternative framework, no funding for survivor safety, no serious plan.

4. Keep the frame clear. This is not morality theater. This is a safety issue, a justice issue, and a women’s policy issue.

So if someone says this is not enough, agree with them. Then ask if they are ready to pass the next step instead of defending a failed one.

It is being sold as accountability. But accountability to what, exactly?

If the state wants fewer people needing help over time, policy should be judged by whether households gain stable employment, higher wages, and a durable financial footing. By that standard, Medicaid work requirements are the wrong instrument. They do not measure work readiness well. They measure paperwork endurance in unstable lives.

And that is a costly mistake.

What work requirements actually measure

Supporters describe work requirements as a way to encourage employment. In real life, these systems mostly measure whether people can navigate reporting rules while juggling irregular schedules, caregiving, illness flare-ups, transportation breakdowns, and inconsistent internet or phone access.

That is why people often lose coverage for procedural reasons, not because they became financially secure.

When policymakers treat administrative disenrollment as success, they confuse a smaller enrollment number with a stronger economy. Those are not the same thing.

The fiscal claim sounds neat and breaks in the real world

The sales pitch is simple: reduce enrollment and reduce spending. But that is line item thinking, not system thinking.

When eligible people lose health coverage due to paperwork barriers, costs move into more expensive places.

• Emergency room utilization rises when routine care is delayed.

• Untreated chronic conditions become acute episodes.

• State and contractor administrative costs climb through churn, notices, appeals, and reenrollment.

• Local systems absorb spillover through shelters, crisis services, and county-funded supports.

• Families take on debt, miss work, and lose stability, which reduces earnings and tax capacity.

That is not durable savings. It is delayed spending with interest.

A state can absolutely lower one visible budget line while increasing total public cost across other lines. Calling that conservative does not make it fiscally responsible.

The disability issue is bigger than paperwork status

People already approved for disability benefits should be exempt. They have already completed a formal evaluation and approval process. That is straightforward.

But stopping there creates a second injustice. Many people live with real disabilities that are not visible, not fully diagnosed, or not yet recognized by formal adjudication. Some conditions are episodic. Some are psychiatric. Some are in active evaluation. Some are obvious to families and clinicians and invisible to bureaucracy.

A policy that protects only people with finished paperwork will still punish people with legitimate limitations. If the state is serious about fairness, it cannot build a system that confuses missing documentation with missing need.

The real goal mismatch no one wants to name

There are two different goals in this debate.

Goal one is to cut state spending now.
Goal two is to reduce long-term dependence by increasing stability and earnings.

These goals are not interchangeable. They generate different policy choices and different outcomes.

If the real objective is immediate caseload reduction, the state will prioritize restrictions and compliance gates.
If the real objective is long-term independence, the state must invest up front in the conditions that make sustained work possible.

Missouri keeps trying to use goal one tools while claiming goal two outcomes.

That is how policy fails.

What a serious Missouri workforce strategy would look like

If lawmakers want employment gains that hold, the replacement for work requirements should be specific, measurable, and enforceable. Not slogans.

1. Guarantee 12-month continuous Medicaid eligibility for adults

People cannot hold steady jobs while cycling in and out of treatment. Coverage continuity supports medication adherence, preventive care, and work consistency. Midyear closures should be limited to clear fraud findings or voluntary withdrawal, not minor reporting misses.

2. Eliminate benefit cliffs through gradual phase-downs

Households should never be worse off for taking a raise or extra hours. Benefits should taper as earnings rise, not collapse all at once. A combined cross-program calculator should be public so families can see net income effects before they make work decisions.

3. Create a targeted work support account

Most job loss drivers are practical, not motivational. Transportation gaps, child care copays, phone data, licensing fees, uniforms, and emergency car repair should be eligible supports tied to verifiable work and training milestones.

4. Fund paid training only when tied to real hiring agreements

Stop subsidizing training disconnected from actual openings. Providers should be paid partly on retention and wage growth outcomes, not enrollment volume alone.

5. Use one navigator per household

Fragmented systems create failure by design. One accountable navigator should coordinate health coverage, workforce services, child care support, and crisis referrals. Set caseload limits and require cross-agency coordination standards.

6. Protect people with recognized and unrecognized disabilities

Yes, exempt formally approved disability beneficiaries. Also, allow temporary clinician attestation and provisional exemptions for people with functional limitations while formal determinations are pending. Include episodic and behavioral health conditions explicitly.

7. Recognize caregiving as a valid community engagement

Unpaid caregiving is labor that stabilizes families and reduces public costs. Policies should not penalize parents, elder caregivers, or disability caregivers for doing work that the formal economy depends on.

8. Set job quality standards for employers receiving public workforce dollars

Publicly subsidized employment pathways should require baseline wage transparency, predictable scheduling standards, and compliance with accommodation rules. Churn jobs create churn outcomes.

9. Pause compliance burdens during economic and public disruptions

Layoffs, school closures, extreme weather, and public health events should trigger automatic stabilization rules. People should not lose health coverage because local systems temporarily fail.

10. Simplify administration by law, not by memo

Require plain-language notices, multi-channel outreach, cure periods before closure, and rapid reinstatement for procedural terminations. If data can verify eligibility, agencies should not ask families to reproduce records the government already has.

How to measure whether reform is working

If the state adopts a serious strategy, success metrics should include

• 6-and-12-month job retention

• median wage growth over time

• coverage continuity rates

• reduction in avoidable emergency utilization

• reduction in procedural disenrollment and reenrollment churn

• net fiscal impact across Medicaid, county systems, crisis services, and uncompensated care

Disenrollment counts should never be treated as a standalone success metric. A smaller program is not automatically a better outcome.

What fiscal responsibility actually requires

Real fiscal discipline is not about pushing costs off one ledger and onto another. It is about reducing total system cost while improving household stability.

Missouri can keep funding churn and paying for preventable crises later, or it can fund stability and lower long-run costs through better design now.

That is the choice.

SJR 103 represents the churn model.

If the state wants genuine independence for working families, it needs the stability model instead.

This proposal is not on the ballot yet, and the process is far from over. SJR 103 still must clear additional steps in the Senate, then move to the Missouri House for referral and a House committee hearing. That House hearing is a key public entry point, because people can usually testify in person or submit testimony through the House witness system online. If the resolution passes both chambers, then it advances to voters.

So this is the moment to stay engaged, track committee calendars, and prepare testimony now. The next hearing window in the House is where public pressure can still shape the outcome. At the very least, we can read real criticisms of work requirements into public record.

Now the rollback is officially headed to the ballot in November 2026. The measure is designed to repeal what voters approved in 2024 and replace it with a narrow set of exceptions. It also bundles in a ban on gender transition procedures for minors, because culture war bundling is apparently the state hobby now. Democracy is not supposed to work like a subscription renewal, where you keep getting billed until you cancel.

Here is the part that makes my eye twitch. In 2024, Josh Hawley said,

That was the pitch. Let the people decide.

The people decided.

Now the same political ecosystem is trying to make Missouri do it again.

This is the wear-down strategy

The rollback effort is not built around a sudden surge of public regret. It is built around persistence and money.

Keep forcing votes until people get tired
Keep forcing votes until people stop donating
Keep forcing votes until it feels normal to ignore a statewide vote

And the money side matters because money buys repetition, and repetition buys doubt.

Follow the money, what changed after 2024

In 2024, abortion rights supporters in Missouri had a massive fundraising advantage. The pro Amendment 3 campaign raised more than $31.5 million, while anti abortion fundraising was split across multiple efforts totaling less than $4 million. That gap showed up everywhere, from advertising to organizing to legal capacity.

So the opposition learned. And for 2026, they are building a more centralized structure earlier.

The state-level committee built for 2026

The main state-level committee supporting the rollback is Her Health, Her Future PAC. It was created in September 2025, and it is tied closely to Gov. Mike Kehoe’s political operation, with Missouri’s first lady, Claudia Kehoe, serving as treasurer. The public goal from their own advisers is early fundraising and organizing, explicitly to prevent the kind of spending disparity they faced in 2024.

This is not a small detail. It is a signal. They are planning for a long campaign, and they are planning to spend.

The national money layer, dark money, and big ad plans

Then there is the national layer.

Axios reported in December 2025 that Josh Hawley and Erin Hawley are launching a new dark money group, the Love Life Initiative, aimed at reviving anti abortion politics through ballot measure fights and national advertising. They described Missouri as a proving ground for the effort. They also talked openly about ambitions for major advertising, including a Super Bowl ad-style national buy.

So yes, this fight is about Missouri. It is also about building a national model for how to keep coming back until voters get exhausted.

What this means for everyone who is tired

If this feels disrespectful, that is because it is.

Missouri voters were told to decide. They decided. Now the political class is asking for another vote because they did not like the result.

That is why Stop the Ban matters. It is the statewide campaign committee organized to defeat the rollback in 2026, and it is already raising serious early money because this is going to be expensive.

The opposition is trying to outlast people. The only real counter is to out-organize them and out-fund the wear-down strategy.

If you care about this, donate if you can. Share if you cannot. Fatigue is the product they are trying to manufacture. Do not buy it.

Donate to Stop the Ban

Sources

1. Missouri Secretary of State, 2026 Ballot Measures, Amendment 3 summary language describing repeal of the 2024 constitutional protections and the new restrictions. https://www.sos.mo.gov/petitions/2026BallotMeasures

2. Associated Press reporting on Missouri lawmakers approving a referendum aimed at repealing the 2024 abortion rights amendment and placing it before voters in November 2026 or potentially earlier via special election. https://apnews.com/article/c4f7beb07e7b3de64f3e2460bcb539c0

3. St. Louis Public Radio reporting Josh Hawley’s 2024 comments supporting letting Missouri voters decide on abortion via ballot, including “you gotta let the people decide.” https://www.stlpr.org/government-politics-issues/2024-04-26/missouri-abortion-ballot-item-republican-candidate-outlook

4. News From The States reporting on Her Health, Her Future PAC, Claudia Kehoe as treasurer, and the 2024 fundraising disparity, including more than $31.5 million raised by abortion rights supporters and less than $4 million across anti abortion efforts. https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/missouri-first-lady-claudia-kehoe-tapped-treasurer-2026-abortion-ban-campaign

5. Missouri Ethics Commission committee information pages for Her Health, Her Future PAC and Stop The Ban, showing treasurer information and supported or opposed ballot measure context. https://mec.mo.gov/MEC/Campaign_Finance/CommInfo.aspx?mecid=C253648
   https://www.mec.mo.gov/mec/Campaign_Finance/CommInfo.aspx?MECID=C253606

6. KCUR reporting that Stop The Ban began receiving six figure donations early for the 2026 campaign against the rollback amendment. https://www.kcur.org/politics-elections-and-government/2025-10-02/missouri-abortion-ban-amendment-campaign-2026-election

7. Axios reporting on the Hawleys launching the Love Life Initiative, planning national ad campaigns, and using Missouri as a proving ground for abortion ballot measure fights. https://www.axios.com/2025/12/12/hawley-abortion-ballot-measures

And Trump calling it “magical authority” is like calling a sledgehammer a “desk accessory”. It is cute right up until someone swings it.

What the Insurrection Act is

The Insurrection Act is a set of federal statutes that lets a president use the armed forces inside the United States in specific circumstances. It is the main exception to the Posse Comitatus tradition that generally keeps the military out of civilian law enforcement. Once this authority is invoked, the line between policing and soldiering gets blurry fast, and that is where civil liberties go to get mugged in a dark alley.

What the law actually authorizes

The modern Insurrection Act lives in Title 10, Chapter 13, sections 251 through 255. Broadly, it provides three routes a president can point to.

1. Federal aid for a state government when there is an insurrection against that state, typically after a request from the state

2. Enforcing federal law when “unlawful obstructions” make it impracticable to enforce the law through normal courts

3. Responding to insurrection or domestic violence that blocks the execution of laws or deprives people of constitutional rights when state authorities cannot or will not protect those rights

There is also a procedural step that sounds small but signals something huge. The law requires a presidential proclamation ordering people to disperse before forces are used under the chapter. That proclamation is the formal moment where protest can get relabeled as “insurgents,” and that label is the gateway to escalation.

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Why Trump keeps circling it

The danger is not only the statute, it’s the fixation.

Taylor described a moment in 2019 when Trump wanted to insert an invocation of the Insurrection Act into the State of the Union and had to be talked down, and he described the broader pattern as a long search for “the excuse, the right moment, the pretext, the visuals.” Taylor shared this on The Briefing with Jen Psaki, describing the internal scramble to stop an invocation and the push, over time, to find a scenario that could be sold as legally and politically justifying it.

“This has been ten years in the making. He has been searching for almost a decade for the excuse, the right moment, the pretext, the visuals that would justify him invoking the Insurrection Act. And I can remember Jen when he first thought he had it or one of the times he thought he had it.

It was the eve of his State of the Union address in 2019, and we had to rush to the White House to intercept him in the map room as he was practicing on the teleprompter and keep him from having the stenographer type in an invocation of the Insurrection Act into the address.

And we went to White House Counsel’s office and helped them talk the president down because he wanted to invoke it at that moment on the border. There was a caravan headed towards the United United States and that’s what he wanted to use as justification. Remember, Jen, the law says there needs to be an invasion of the United States, a rebellion or an insurrection. And a group of people coming to the United States border to claim asylum didn’t meet any of those criteria.

But I will tell you this, towards the end of my time in that administration, I sat down with Stephen Miller in his office on the second floor of the West Wing, you know the space, and Stephen told me about how if Trump won reelection, it would be a shock and awe he would invoke the Insurrection Act and try to run it up to the Supreme Court as fast as humanly possible to get a decision. I would not be surprised in the least if this year, Donald Trump does it. He spent last year trying to foment circumstances in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland to justify it. All of those failed. Now, in Minneapolis, they see circumstances which, to them, might seem acceptable for the invocation. To anyone else, it will look lawless and unconstitutional because it will be. And it will completely militarize the streets of Minneapolis.”

The phrase “magical authorities” is the tell. It is the mindset that the law is not a guardrail, it is a lever. Pull the lever, call it lawful, dare everyone else to stop it.

The “drunk on power” problem, in the boss’s own building

There is also a separate warning sign coming from inside the White House orbit. In a Vanity Fair interview, Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, said he has “an alcoholic’s personality” and “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.” That is not the vocabulary of restraint. That is the vocabulary of someone who believes the office itself is permission.

That description reads like someone drunk on power, even if the bottle is imaginary.

Why the current moment is a red alert

This is not abstract. In mid January 2026, Trump again threatened to use the Insurrection Act, tied to unrest and conflict around federal enforcement actions in Minnesota. Multiple outlets have reported the threat and the growing tension between federal operations, local leadership, and public protest.

That matters because the playbook is simple.

1. Flood a place with federal force

2. Frame resistance as lawlessness or insurrection

3. Claim local government has “failed”

4. Invoke extraordinary authority

5. Put a uniformed force on the streets and call it order

At that point, the conversation stops being about public safety and starts being about who controls the country when people say no.

What happens if it is invoked

1. The military can be used domestically in ways that are normally restricted, because the Insurrection Act is an explicit exception to those restrictions

2. Escalation becomes structurally easier because the executive branch is no longer operating in the normal civilian lane, it is operating in an emergency lane

3. The legal fight becomes slower than the physical reality, because courts move on briefs while streets move on commands, and deference to executive claims of necessity is a well-worn path

4. The precedent becomes the point, because once it is used successfully, the next “acceptable” use becomes easier to argue, easier to sell, and harder to reverse

The part that cannot be shrugged off

This is the moment to stop treating the Insurrection Act like a trivia fact from civics class.

It is a mechanism that can turn political conflict into military control while still wearing a suit labeled “law.” It is how a president can claim to be restoring order while actually changing the rules of what order means.

The most dangerous part is not one deployment. It is the normalization of the idea that domestic dissent is a security threat, that cities are enemy territory, that federal force is the answer to political disagreement, and that the president’s instincts are the standard for when the republic needs saving.

That is the road to authoritarian government that still insists it is constitutional. The paperwork will be immaculate. The damage will not.

References

1. Miles Taylor, Defiance essay describing Trump’s “magical authorities” language and the long push toward invoking the Insurrection Act. link

2. U.S. Code, Title 10, Chapter 13, including the proclamation requirement. link

3. Brennan Center explainer on the Insurrection Act as the primary exception to Posse Comitatus. link

4. Reuters explainer on what the Insurrection Act is and why it is controversial. link

5. Apple Podcasts listing for The Briefing with Jen Psaki episode featuring Miles Taylor. link

6. MSNBC opinion piece referencing Miles Taylor’s warning about pretext and the Insurrection Act. link

7. Vanity Fair interview quoting Susie Wiles describing Trump’s “alcoholic’s personality” and belief that nothing can stop him. link

8. Time report on Trump threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota and what it would mean. link

9. Al Jazeera explainer on the Minnesota threat and the Insurrection Act. link

10. Guardian reporting on the Minnesota situation and the Insurrection Act threat. link

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Missouri is about to move more than $814 million into actual dirt and fiber, connecting more than 200,000 unserved and underserved locations. That is a real win. Then the governor’s press release tried to hand the trophy to Trump, and that’s where the story stops being about broadband and starts being about propaganda.

On January 6, NTIA approved Missouri’s final proposal under the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program, BEAD. Two days later, Governor Mike Kehoe announced the approval and said it will allow Missouri to sign agreements with internet service providers, who then have four years to build out the projects.

The state also disclosed a few key details that matter more than the applause line.

1. Roughly 7,200 locations lost eligibility during the process, tied to changes in the FCC broadband map or providers claiming planned service during the state challenge process.

2. Most awarded locations are planned for end-to-end fiber, with smaller shares for low-earth-orbit satellite, fixed wireless, and coaxial cable.

3. Missouri claims it was able to award all eligible locations while saving $900 million of the state’s $1.7 billion BEAD allocation, pending further federal guidance on how remaining funds can be used.

All of that is the governing part. It’s measurable, it’s time-bound, and it’s the part families will actually feel.

What Kehoe is doing here is not governing, it is branding

Governing is the boring part, mapping needs, writing rules, signing contracts, tracking deadlines, enforcing penalties, and making sure people actually get connected. Propaganda is the fun part, grabbing the microphone at the milestone and shopping for the most useful villain or hero.

This press release is a perfect example. The state is celebrating a real administrative step — NTIA approving Missouri’s final proposal. But the credit line is aimed at party identity, not public understanding. The BEAD program exists because Congress created it in the 2021 infrastructure law and NTIA administers it, regardless of which party is currently in charge.

The credit line is the problem

Kehoe’s statement thanked the Trump administration for approving Missouri’s plan.

That’s a neat trick, because the program itself was created and funded under the 2021 infrastructure law signed by President Joe Biden. NTIA administers it, but the money, the structure, and the mandate didn’t magically appear in January 2026. They’ve been in motion for years.

This isn’t inside baseball; it’s basic accountability. If voters can’t tell who built the program, they can’t tell who to hold responsible when the next vote decides whether programs like this live or die.

The credit grabbing is extra obnoxious

BEAD literally has equity in its name; it is built to reach the places the market skipped. And Trump has not exactly been shy about attacking equity-framed broadband policy — he publicly targeted the Digital Equity Act, a companion program created under the same 2021 infrastructure law, calling it racist and “woke,” and moved to end it. So, the Missouri press release is basically thanking someone for a program their movement has been trying to torch, because the only thing more powerful than ideology is free money with a ribbon on it.

Governing is being replaced by party propaganda

Here’s what propaganda politics looks like in practice.

1. A policy is passed, funded, and launched under one party.

2. The other party attacks it as wasteful, woke, or socialism.

3. Then, when the benefits reach home, the same officials take credit because nobody wants to campaign on “I voted no on money for your community.”

This pattern is well-documented with the 2021 infrastructure law. Multiple Republicans have touted projects funded by legislation they voted against, and others who criticized the law as candidates later sought funding from it once in office.

So, when Kehoe frames a Biden-era investment as a Trump-era accomplishment, it fits a broader trend. Less governing, more branding. Less implementation, more performance. The microphone becomes the product.

Who benefits from this lie

The part Republicans don’t want to say out loud is that Republicans are benefiting from Democratic governing while pretending it never happened.

Democrats did the hard, unglamorous work that actually helps people, passing the law, funding the program, building the federal process that states now use to connect real homes and businesses. Republicans spent years attacking that same agenda as wasteful, woke, or socialism, then show up at the finish line to claim the ribbon cutting. It is political credit laundering, take the benefits, deny the authors, repeat.

Kehoe’s Trump thank you fits that pattern. Missouri is moving forward because a Democratic administration and a Democratic Congress delivered the program, then federal and state staff did the grind to get Missouri to an approved plan. Republicans still get to celebrate the outcome, broadband expansion is good for everyone, but they do not get to rewrite the origin story to match party talking points.

And voters get the worst deal of all: they get broadband, but they also get trained to believe government outcomes are detached from who they elect. That’s a great way to keep people cynical and compliant.

What Missourians should demand next

If Missouri Republicans want credit, they should earn it the boring way.

1. Publish plain-language project timelines, with milestones that can be tracked quarterly.

2. Show the enforcement plan when providers miss deadlines.

3. Address affordability and adoption so “available” doesn’t mean “technically exists, practically unusable.”

Do that, and you can take a victory lap. Until then, the victory lap is just cardio for the ego.

I am glad he found that comforting.

Because the lived headline of 2025 is not just disappointment with a single politician or even a party. It’s the realization that the whole system is running a credibility deficit, and it is starting to bounce checks.

Trust is the real casualty

When voters say they are tired of lying, they rarely mean one specific false statement. They mean the feeling that politics is now a performance where the incentives reward whoever can say the biggest thing with the straightest face, then walk away from it with no consequences.

That is why this moment is bigger than “Trump did not deliver.” For a lot of people, the lesson is darker.

• If campaign promises are just content, why believe any of it?
• If institutions cannot correct obvious falsehoods, who is in charge?
• If outcomes do not match rhetoric, what is the point of participation?

That is how distrust spreads from a person to a party, then from a party to the entire idea of government.

The promise gap, when the pitch becomes the product

A lot of disillusionment right now is transactional. People voted for specific outcomes, especially around affordability and stability, and expected visible follow-through.

Instead, many got the familiar combo: grand claims, simple slogans, constant noise, and a governing reality that looks nothing like the sales pitch. When the message is “I will fix it,” and the experience becomes “it is complicated, also look at this new feud,” people do what customers do when the product does not match the ad.

They get angry, and they stop trusting the brand.

That is the point where “maybe he did not mean it” becomes “maybe nobody means it.”

The lying fatigue, when people stop grading on a curve

Some voters treated lying as survivable background static. They assumed it was an exaggeration, marketing, or a personality quirk. That is a rational adaptation to a culture where outrageous statements are often performative, meant to provoke, not to govern.

Trump breaks that assumption. He is often candid about intent, then dishonest about impact. He will openly describe the force he wants to use, the punishments he wants to inflict, the norms he wants to break, and then he will claim the outcome is prosperity, peace, and restored order. The point is not just that he lies. The point is that he can be sincere about the transgression and deceptive about the consequences. That is how trust collapses. If voters cannot agree on what was promised, what was done, and what happened next, participation starts to feel pointless.

When governing started, the lies stopped being cosmetic. They became operational. People felt like they were being asked to deny their own eyes, their own bills, their own memory of what was promised.

His voters did not misunderstand the intent. They applauded it. They wanted the hard line, the crackdown, the punishment, the full body slam of politics. For a while, it felt satisfying, like finally getting to stop pretending the rules mattered.

Then reality collected its fee.

The impact did what impact always does: it landed somewhere specific, on someone specific, in a budget, in a job, in a school, in a hospital bill, in a family plan. It showed up as higher costs, lost stability, fewer options, more fear, and more chaos for regular people who were promised relief.

And when it landed on them, the story changed. Suddenly, it was not a righteous purge; it was their life getting harder.

That is when the lie stops being abstract and starts feeling personal. Because he does not just spin. He denies. He tells people they are not experiencing what they are experiencing. That is gaslighting, and it feels violent because it is an attempt to overwrite reality in front of the person living it.

You do not need a psychological label to explain the fallout. But a lot of his voters have never come face-to-face with malignant narcissism as a leadership style: the need to dominate, the inability to admit error, the reflex to punish anyone who insists on reality, and the absolute conviction that rules are for other people.

Disillusionment is a fork in the road

Disillusionment is not automatically a win for anybody else. It is a fork.

Some people disengage; they stop voting and stop listening.
Some people harden because conspiracies are the fastest way to explain humiliation.
Some people want an exit ramp, something boring and functional again.

If you want that third group, the answer is not better messaging. The answer is a different offer.

The exit ramp: dignity, clarity, receipts

Here is what actually helps rebuild trust with disillusioned voters, regardless of how they got there.

• Give people a face-saving exit
  Nobody changes their mind because they were mocked into wisdom. Treat disappointment as rational. Wanting lower costs and stability is not a character flaw. Believing a promise is human; that is the point of a promise.

• Make it about outcomes, not identity
  Identity politics cuts both ways. It turns disagreement into a personal attack. Outcomes are negotiable. Anchor on real-life signals: grocery totals, rent renewals, insurance premiums, commute time, classroom staffing, city services, and public safety that is more than a slogan.

• Replace slogans with timelines
  People do not need a ten-point plan; they need a plan they can picture. What happens in the first 30 days? What changes by summer? What is measurably different by the end of year one? If you cannot time-bound it, it sounds like branding, and branding is how people got burned.

• Translate “the economy” into the bill pile on the counter
  This is where Biden and Harris missed badly. They talked about progress in a way that did not match how many people felt. Even when the direction was improving on paper, it was not landing in households the way speeches implied. Voters heard “it’s better,” while their receipts said “not for you.” That disconnect feels like a lie even when the data is defensible. Politics does not grade on technicalities; it grades on lived experience.

• Replace the strongman fantasy with the competence contract
  Strongman politics sells the fantasy that one person can bulldoze reality into submission. Competence politics sells something less cinematic and more useful: a contract.

  • Here is what I will do.

  • Here is how you will know.

  • Here is what happens if I do not.

That last sentence is the one the system has been skipping. Accountability cannot be a surprise twist; it has to be part of the offer.

Voters vote forward, not backward, especially locally

This matters even more in local elections, where people are not voting on ideology as much as they are voting on whether their life feels manageable.

Voters want to hear what candidates are going to do, not a greatest hits album of what they already did. Past accomplishments matter, but mostly as proof that a forward plan is real.

In city council and school board races, people are thinking about potholes, property taxes, classroom disruptions, public safety, and whether someone will answer an email. A candidate who can explain, plainly, what they will do in the first 30, 60, 90 days will usually beat the candidate who keeps pointing backward.

Why “I will fix it” worked, and why it backfired

Trump’s “I will fix it” pitch worked because it was emotionally clean and required zero homework. A lot of low-propensity voters were voting on relief, not policy mechanics. Many did not understand how unlimited political lying can be, especially when the lying is not a bug, it’s a feature.

Now the product is disappointing. The danger is that the disappointment does not just attach to Trump, it attaches to the entire idea that voting leads to improvement.

Missouri: where “why vote?” becomes a learned behavior

If you want to understand how trust collapses at the system level, look at Missouri.

Missourians have repeatedly watched voters pass initiatives, then watched politicians in Jefferson City try to undo them, stall them, underfund them, or rewrite the rules so it is harder to do it again next time. Even when the policy eventually survives, the civic lesson is brutal: your vote is negotiable.

Medicaid expansion is a case study of this damage. People voted. The legislature tried to block implementation by refusing to fund it. Courts got dragged in. Years passed. Regardless of where someone landed on the policy, the process taught a lot of people that the system can treat a statewide vote like a suggestion.

On top of that, Missourians keep seeing laws passed that make great campaign material and then face constitutional problems in court. That cycle has a predictable emotional result. Voters start to feel like the legislature is passing things nobody asked for, then acting surprised when reality vetoes it.

At a certain point, cynicism stops being an attitude and becomes a rational response. That is when you hear it out loud, at the kitchen table, at the gas station, at the school pickup line.

Why vote? They will do what they want anyway.

Rebuilding Post-Trump

Karl Rove can argue that 2025 was not one of the worst years. Fine. But a country cannot spreadsheet its way out of a trust collapse.

If the next era of politics is built on humiliating disillusioned voters, the system loses. If it is built on dignity, timelines, and receipts, the system has a chance to earn credibility back.

A lot of people voted for outcomes and got content. The fix is not better content. The fix is competence you can measure, and promises that survive contact with reality.

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The claim leans on a real phrase buried in certification language. The rest is a familiar propaganda trick, turning normal administrative ambiguity into public fury.

The bait: a real committee name in official paperwork

Missouri certification paperwork for voting systems includes language referencing “observations” from the Missouri Automated Voting Equipment Qualification Committee. A publicly available Missouri certification packet for Hart’s Verity Voting 2.3 includes a certificate stating the secretary of state reviewed the committee’s observations as part of approving.

That is a fair starting point for a transparency question, and a terrible foundation for panic.

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The switch: “no responsive records” becomes “never existed.”

The page’s storyline depends on a translation that is not supported by the Sunshine response screenshot.

A Sunshine response that says an office found no responsive records to specific requested categories is not a statement that a thing never existed. It is a statement about what was produced based on how records are kept, how the request was framed, and what the office says it has in its possession.

That difference matters because “no responsive records” can mean records were not retained, were stored elsewhere, were categorized differently, or the “committee” label described a staff workflow that never generated formal minutes and rosters.

The myth needs that nuance erased. Outrage runs on simplified villains.

A local explanation makes the story less exciting and more plausible

A Missouri county clerk who previously worked in the secretary of state’s office described the “committee” as mostly an internal review process in recent years. In that account, vendors demonstrate equipment, answer questions, and staff review requirements and sign off that systems meet what state rules require.

That explanation fits what election administration often looks like: technical review, documentation, approval, and boilerplate language that outlives whatever early structure existed. The “committee” was just staff. And they aren’t about to put their names and addresses down in sunshineable records just for fun.

But the propaganda goal is not accuracy, it is adrenaline.

The page’s own footprint signals what it is selling

People’s Lobby Missouri’s public Facebook “About” page describes a mission to “expose corruption” and lists a Florida address and contact information.

The email on that page matches the branding of a media outlet, Real Talk 93.3. The show page for “The Robb Carter Show” uses the language of “propaganda techniques,” “manipulation of perception,” and “exposing corruption,” framing politics as an information war. Another Real Talk page repeats the pitch that the show will explain how “branding and propaganda” are being used to change America.

That matters because the “mystery committee” story reads like content built to generate distrust, not a careful inquiry into how certification records are created and retained.

The money problem: “expose corruption,” but keep donors invisible

The donation disclaimer says People’s Lobby Missouri Inc. is a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization and includes a “paid for by”, typical of what we would expect for an entity engaging in influencing elections.

That structure is often used because donor identities are generally not publicly disclosed. The IRS explains that tax-exempt organizations are generally not required to publicly disclose the names or addresses of contributors listed on annual returns.

Transparency advocates commonly describe election-related spending where the true funding source is not visible to the public as “dark money.”

Even if the group is not yet naming specific candidates or ballot measures, the credibility tension is still real: a page built around “exposing corruption” is asking the public to trust serious accusations while the public cannot easily follow the money behind the messaging.

What “exposing deception” looks like in this case

The most effective way to puncture this kind of propaganda is to show the method, not just argue the conclusion.

The method here is context stripping, wording substitution, and escalation.

Context stripping: a committee name from a certificate becomes a standalone scandal.

Wording substitution: “no responsive records” becomes “admission, the committee never existed.”

Escalation: a recordkeeping question becomes “every election is at risk.”

That escalation is the tell. It is persuasion, not investigation.

A real accountability story would ask for the supporting materials behind a specific certification decision, including the referenced “observations,” internal checklists or memos, and communications around vendor demonstrations. Those documents would either confirm a normal process or reveal a genuine transparency problem.

Either outcome is useful. Only one outcome feeds the outrage machine.

Outrage is the business model

Truth is slow. Outrage is fast, and it pays.

This kind of content is not built to be accurate. It is built to be shared, to keep an audience angry, and to convert that anger into attention, donations, and influence. The missing context is not an accident, it is the fuel.

Once outrage becomes the business model, accuracy stops being the point. Correcting the record becomes “backing down.” Nuance becomes “covering up.” Any fact that complicates the story gets treated as the enemy.

That is why the lies keep coming. Not because the people pushing them are confused, but because confusion is profitable.

Why it matters that the Boone County GOP shared it

A local party committee sharing a claim like this is not neutral amplification. It is a credibility transfer. When the Boone County GOP posts it with commentary, it signals to followers that the claim has been vetted, or at least that it is worthy of trust. That is how propaganda works at the local level: a national style outrage script gets laundered through familiar community channels until it feels like common knowledge. The damage is bigger than one post, it is the normalization of treating suspicion as evidence and anger as civic engagement.

This is what propaganda looks like in real life. A technical phrase in a government document gets pulled out of context, a routine records response gets rewritten into a confession, and the gap between those two things gets filled with the most profitable emotion on the internet: rage.

The point is not to inform voters, it is to keep them activated, suspicious, and easy to steer. That is why corrections never catch up, and why the story keeps escalating from paperwork to fraud to “elections are at risk.”

And it is why the Boone County GOP sharing this matters. It is not just passing along a post, it is lending local credibility to a narrative designed to break trust on purpose.

Missouri Voters Keep Demanding Transparency and Republicans Keep Rewriting the Rules to Hide What They’re Doing.

The Sunshine Law in Missouri isn’t complicated. You send a request, they respond within three business days, and if they need more time, they’re supposed to tell you why and when you’ll get the records.1

That’s the deal.

Missouri Republicans are breaking that deal over and over, then acting offended when anyone notices.

They love to brag that we’re the Show Me State. What they’re actually building is a system of Show You Nothing And Dare You To Sue.

You’re not imagining it. This is a strategy.

What The Sunshine Law Actually Says

Here’s the basics in plain English.

The law says government meetings, records, votes, and actions are supposed to be open to the public unless there’s a specific legal exemption. When in doubt, it’s supposed to be open.2 Anyone can request records. You don’t have to explain who you are or why you want them.

The custodian of records has to respond “as soon as possible,” and no later than the end of the third business day after they get your request. If they can’t produce everything that fast, they’re required to tell you why and give you the earliest date and time when the records will be available.

Agencies are allowed to charge for copies and staff time, but only at the rate of the lowest-paid staffer who can do the work, and only for actual search and copying time.3 The Missouri Supreme Court has already said they can’t pile on “attorney review” charges just to make records unaffordable.4

On paper, that’s a strong transparency law. It gives you a timeline, a right to sue, and real penalties when officials knowingly or purposely violate it.

Nobody in Jefferson City is confused about what this statute says. They’re ignoring it because ignoring it protects them.

What The Missouri GOP Is Actually Doing

Here’s what Republican controlled offices are doing in real life.

They sit on simple requests for months.

They treat ordinary emails and calendars like state secrets.

They let backlogs balloon into the hundreds, then point to the backlog they created as the reason they can’t answer you. When Catherine Hanaway took over as Attorney General in September 2025, she inherited 126 unfinished Sunshine requests, and her own office admitted that was actually an “improvement” over the 224 pending requests Andrew Bailey inherited in 2023.5

They’ve also spent the last couple of years rewriting the rules to make it easier to kill your request without ever saying “no.” Recent changes pushed by Republicans let public bodies demand full payment of fees upfront, treat your request as “withdrawn” if you don’t pay within their deadline, and treat it as “withdrawn” if you don’t jump on every clarification email fast enough. Pending requests that aren’t fully paid by a set date can even be declared dead on arrival unless you’ve already filed a lawsuit.6

If you don’t have the cash or the time to babysit every request, you fall off the list, and they get to pretend you walked away.

This isn’t a resource problem. It’s a choice.

If they wanted to comply, they’d staff to comply, they’d design systems that actually hit the three-day deadline most of the time, and they’d treat backlogs like an emergency instead of a lifestyle.

They’re not doing that because delay works.

My Request, Their Stall Tactics

Here’s what this looks like from my side of the inbox.

In September, I filed a Sunshine request for a very simple set of records: one week of emails from one person in a specific office. That’s it. One person, seven days.

The custodian wrote back and told me the records would be ready by the end of November. In that same reply, they told me the office had 86 open Sunshine requests.

Annoying, but fine. I put a reminder on my calendar and waited.

November came and went. No records. No detailed explanation, just the usual vague “we’re working on it.”

When I followed up, I was told not to expect the records until February.

In the same breath, they told me the office now has almost 100 open requests.

So in a few months:

• A simple one-week request slid from a November delivery date to February.

• The backlog climbed from 86 open requests to nearly 100.

If you can confidently tell me in September that my request will be done by the end of November, you can do the work by the end of November. If you don’t, then either your office is broken, or you never intended to prioritize it in the first place.

And let’s be clear about what they’re actually slow walking. I’m not trying to see pictures from the office holiday party. I’m sunshining conversations that are likely to show legislators telling one story to voters and a very different story to each other, in writing. The kind of emails where they reassure constituents that everything is fine while privately acknowledging the opposite. The kind of records that put the lie in black and white.

If you’re stalling that, it’s not “because the printer jammed.” It’s because you know exactly how bad it looks when people get to read the receipts.

And when the backlog keeps going up instead of down, it’s hard to believe anyone in charge actually wants to fix it.

At some point, this stops looking like incompetence and starts looking like a plan. Delay long enough, and maybe I’ll give up, the story will go cold, the people involved will move on, and the mess will be harder to prove.

They’re counting on that.

The Price Tag On Sunshine

Here’s the other lever they use to shut people up: money.

Sunshine isn’t always free, and they’ve figured out how to weaponize that.

The law lets agencies charge for staff time and copies, supposedly to cover reasonable costs. In practice, padded estimates and nickel and diming have become a quiet way to tell regular people to sit down and be quiet without ever writing the word “denied.”

We’ve already seen courts smack them for abusing this. In one case, the Missouri Supreme Court had to step in and say public bodies can’t charge for attorney review time after the governor’s office tried to stick a requester with “exorbitant” legal fees and months of delay just to see public records.

The Department of Social Services took the games even further. In 2024, a Cole County judge found that DSS “knowingly and purposefully” violated the Sunshine Law, wrongfully withholding records based on who was asking instead of what was being requested. The judge ordered DSS to pay more than one hundred fifteen thousand dollars in legal fees, plus a civil penalty for what they pulled.7

In my own work, DSS has been very clear that they now charge for every single Sunshine request I file with them, no matter how small or straightforward. There’s no good faith conversation about waiving or reducing fees when the request is obviously in the public interest. There’s just a bill.

If you’re a big newsroom backed by a national nonprofit, that’s a line item.

If you’re one person digging into fraud, waste, and abuse inside state systems, those fees come out of the same money that pays for rent, groceries, and gas.

When I send a request, I’m not doing it as a hobby. I’m doing it because there’s a credible reason to believe public money is being misused, rules are being broken, or people are being harmed.

That takes time and real money. So I’m going to be blunt.

If you value this kind of work, I need you to pay for a subscription.

Paid subscriptions aren’t a tip jar. They’re how I pay Sunshine invoices. They’re how I can keep sending requests into places like DSS that have decided every single question comes with a price tag.

If you want more receipts instead of fewer, that support isn’t optional.

What Happens When The Offender Is The Attorney General

There’s a special kind of nightmare here.

What do you do when the office that is slow-walking your request is the Attorney General, the same office that’s supposed to enforce the Sunshine Law on everybody else?

You can’t seriously expect that office to police itself. Filing a complaint with them about themselves is a dead end by design. Reporters and open government advocates have been pointing out for years that the AG rarely enforces Sunshine against other state agencies at all, especially when those agencies are treated as his “clients.”8

And it’s not like that office has a clean record. Under Josh Hawley, a Cole County judge found the Attorney General’s office “knowingly and purposefully” broke the Sunshine Law by hiding emails between Hawley’s taxpayer-funded staff and his political consultants because they were worried the truth would hurt his Senate campaign.9 That mess left taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and penalties.

The uncomfortable truth built into the law is this: the Sunshine Law only has teeth when somebody takes the violation to court. Any “aggrieved person,” taxpayer, or citizen can sue, along with the AG or a local prosecutor, and courts can order records released, impose civil penalties, and award attorney fees. That’s great on paper. In practice, it means this:

If you want the law to matter when the AG is the problem, you’re talking about lawsuits.

Lawsuits mean filing fees and attorneys. Attorneys mean money. If you can’t afford to sue, the law turns into a suggestion that powerful offices can ignore.

And remember those new changes that let agencies declare your request “withdrawn” if you don’t prepay fees or respond quickly enough to their questions. None of that applies if you’ve already filed suit over the request. So if you’re broke and busy, they get to treat your request as expired. If you’ve got a lawyer and a case number, suddenly they remember the law exists.

That’s not a bug. That’s a feature.

This Pattern Isn’t New: Clean Missouri, Dirty Maps And Disappearing Messages

If any of this feels familiar, it should. Missouri voters keep trying to force basic fairness and transparency into the system. The Missouri GOP keeps finding ways to undo it.

In 2018, voters passed Amendment 1, better known as Clean Missouri, with about 62 percent of the vote.10 It created a nonpartisan state demographer to draw fair legislative maps, tightened lobbyist gift limits, and added ethics rules. The whole point was to curb gerrymandering and drag some of the map-making process into the light.

Republicans at the Capitol hated that.

So in 2020, they pushed Amendment 3, which basically gutted the core of Clean Missouri. Amendment 3 scrapped the independent demographer, handed map drawing back to partisan commissions, and rewrote the criteria in ways that made it easier to protect incumbents and tilt power toward older, whiter, more rural areas.11 It passed 51 to 49. The fair map reform voters demanded just two years earlier was ripped out.

Voters said, “We want transparency and fairness.” The Missouri GOP heard “we should find a way around that.”

Same energy as former Governor Eric Greitens and the Confide app. Greitens and his staff downloaded a self-destructing text app that auto-deleted messages after they were read, then claimed there were no “records” to turn over because the messages didn’t exist anymore. Sunshine lawsuits challenged that.12

An appeals court eventually said that while using Confide pretty clearly sidestepped the spirit of the Sunshine Law, it didn’t technically violate the letter of it. In other words, they found a tech loophole big enough to erase the paper trail, and the law hadn’t caught up.

Lawmakers saw exactly how easy it was to make conversations disappear. They didn’t respond by strengthening record-keeping rules or modernizing the Sunshine Law. Instead, they went after Clean Missouri, made it harder to pass citizen-led reforms, and kept making public records more expensive and harder to get.

Meanwhile, courts and watchdogs keep catching them. DSS got nailed for knowingly and purposefully violating the law. Hawley’s AG office got nailed for knowingly and purposefully violating the law while he was climbing the political ladder.[10] And just this year, Kansas City admitted in a settlement that it violated the Sunshine Law by failing to respond to three records requests within the three-day window, agreed to overhaul its public records system and train staff, and got publicly scolded by the current AG for behavior the state itself engages in all the time.13

So when you see delays, backlogs, vanishing messages, and new rules that make it easier to declare your request “withdrawn,” you’re not seeing a glitch. You’re seeing a pattern.

Why This Should Make You Angry, Not Bored

This is the part where people sometimes check out and say, “This all sounds like paperwork.”

It’s not paperwork.

Sunshine requests are how we get proof of what government officials are doing in your name and with your money. They’re how we find out:

• Who actually wrote the talking points your representative reads into a microphone?

• Who coordinated messaging around a ballot measure you voted on?

• Which donors and lobbyists show up in inboxes right before a bill appears?

• Who tried to cover up harm to vulnerable people when a program failed?

And yes, they’re how we get copies of the exact conversations where legislators tell constituents one thing and admit something very different to each other. When you can put those two versions side by side, the press release and the email thread, it stops being “he said, she said.” It becomes evidence.

When officials slow walk or overcharge for these records, they’re not just being rude. They’re actively blocking you from seeing how they wield power.

And when the party doing this is the same party screaming about “law and order,” “government overreach,” and “the will of the people,” they’re counting on you to clock the hypocrisy and then shrug.

I’m not interested in shrugging.

What I’m Asking From You

I’m not asking you to become a full-time open records litigant.

Here’s what I am asking.

If you want someone in this state who’s willing to file requests, push back on delays, document the nonsense, and when it makes sense, talk to lawyers about taking cases against the people in power, then support the work.

Paid subscriptions to this Substack fund two very specific things:

• The Sunshine fees that agencies use as a barrier to records.

• The conversations with attorneys and potential lawsuits that become necessary when the worst offenders are the ones who are supposed to enforce the law.

If you’re an attorney who does media law, civil rights, or government accountability work in Missouri and you’re tired of watching this from the sidelines, I want to hear from you. I’ve already got live examples and timelines, including my September request that was promised by the end of November and is now allegedly coming in February. I need legal partners who are willing to take these cases on, ideally with creative fee structures, pro bono time, or sliding scale arrangements that recognize this as public interest work.

If you’re not a lawyer but you’re furious reading this because you understand exactly what it means when a government realizes it can ignore its own transparency law, then a paid subscription is how you turn that anger into fuel.

The Missouri GOP is betting on regular people being too tired, too broke, and too overwhelmed to fight over records.

I don’t plan to stop. But I’m also not going to pretend I can keep doing this with good intentions alone.

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The same country can praise one government check and demonize another because most people do not process “government help” as a line item. They process it as a character judgment.

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Deservingness is the real policy platform

Political scientists have a word for this: anti-intellectualism, and its cousin, the deservingness filter. When people decide whether help is “fair,” they’re often asking questions like who caused the problem, who worked hard, and who counts as “us.” That filter has less to do with economic logic and more to do with identity and resentment. Researchers have linked anti intellectualism to motivated resistance to expert consensus, which is basically the polite academic phrase for “I don’t care what the facts are, I hate the people saying them.” 1

And that is how you end up with wildly different emotional reactions to two programs that are structurally similar.

Why farm payments feel like insurance, not a handout

In 2019, USDA’s Market Facilitation Program paid about $14.4 billion to about 644,000 farming operations USDA said were hurt by trade disruptions and tariffs. 2 Congress’s research arm described the 2018 trade aid package as including direct payments through MFP, plus commodity purchases and trade promotion. 3

That is not a small niche program. That is a major federal intervention, responding to a political decision, to stabilize an industry.

But the framing matters. The story told to the public was “farmers got hit by forces outside their control, so we’re offsetting losses.” It lands as compensation. It lands as protecting food supply chains. It lands as the government doing what it always does when something essential is disrupted.

No sermon required.

Student loans are a raw deal, and the interest is the trap

Student debt gets framed as a personal choice problem. That framing is convenient, because it lets policymakers ignore how the system actually works in practice: interest accrues relentlessly, and for millions of borrowers, the math is designed to run faster than their income.

Here’s one of the most quietly brutal truths about federal repayment: if you’re on an income driven plan and your payment is low, it may not even cover the monthly interest. The CFPB spells it out plainly: unpaid interest can stack up and your balance can grow even while you’re making payments, which is called negative amortization. 4

That is not “people refusing to pay.” That is a system where the price of being poor is watching your balance rise anyway.

It’s also not rare. Pew found that within five years of entering repayment, more than 75% of borrowers in income driven plans owed more than they originally borrowed. 5 If you want to understand why people describe student loans as a debt trap, start there.

And yes, the interest rates matter. For new federal Direct Loans first disbursed July 1, 2025, through June 30, 2026, the rates are 6.39% for undergraduate Direct Subsidized and Unsubsidized, 7.94% for graduate Direct Unsubsidized, and 8.94% for Direct PLUS. 6 Those are not “credit card levels,” but they’re also not what most people picture when they hear “government loan,” especially when wages have not kept pace with tuition and housing.

Whether you think the system was designed to keep people poor or it simply evolved to protect lenders, servicers, and government budget optics, the effect is the same for a borrower who can’t get ahead: your balance grows, your credit gets damaged, and your life gets smaller.

The Personal Choice Lie

Student loans get framed as a personal choice because that framing lets policymakers and pundits pretend the system is neutral. You willingly signed, you willingly owe, end of story. It turns a decades long public policy shift into a morality play about individual discipline.

Here’s the problem: a whole generation got raised on a message that was not subtle. College degree equals stability. Start hearing it in kindergarten and it sticks. Then adulthood hits, and you realize the deal was a lie. Only now you’re under a mountain of crippling debt.

What changed is not that young people got lazier. The deal changed. Jobs changed. We were supposed to be rewarded with a high paying job and what we got were zero tolerance policies, pensions transitioned into unstable 401ks, and no advancements or raises.

College was cheaper because we treated it like a public good

A big reason boomers remember college as affordable is that, for many families, it actually was more affordable relative to wages and aid. The maximum Pell Grant used to cover a much larger share of costs, CBPP notes it covered close to 80% in 1975, and by 2016 to 2017 it covered about 29% of the average cost at public four-year colleges. 7 That is not “kids today want free stuff.” That is the public share shrinking while the private bill grows.

At the same time, states cut higher ed funding in ways that shifted costs to students. CBPP documents significant per student cuts after the Great Recession and explains how those cuts helped push costs onto students through tuition increases and reduced support.8 When public funding steps back, tuition steps forward. It always does.

So the story is not “you chose debt.” The story is “we privatized the cost, then blamed you for not being born earlier.”

We expanded loans and called it opportunity

Federal policy also shifted toward loans as the primary tool. Research on the 1992 Higher Education Act reauthorization describes it as cementing a move away from need-based grants toward broader loan availability, including loans not limited by need.9 Congress’s text for the Higher Education Amendments of 1992 includes the creation of unsubsidized Stafford loans. 10 Loans were sold as access and mobility, which sounds noble until you notice the access comes with interest and the mobility comes with a monthly bill.

This is the part where “personal choice” becomes propaganda. You cannot spend years telling kids the only safe path is college, then act shocked when they take the path you told them was the only one.

The non degree path got narrower on purpose and by policy

When people say “why didn’t you just get a good job without a degree,” they are describing a labor market that a lot of lawmakers helped dismantle.

Union membership has fallen sharply over the last several decades. BLS reports union membership rates dropped from 20.1% in 1983 to 9.9% in 2024. 11 That decline is not just a feeling or “people stopped joining,” EPI documents how corporate practices and legal changes undercut workers’ ability to organize and bargain in the private sector. 12

And as wages stagnated and unions weakened, employers also started demanding degrees for jobs that did not used to require them. Harvard Business School and Burning Glass called this degree inflation, showing how employers raised credential requirements even when the job did not truly need them, shutting out capable workers without degrees. 13

So yes, people were pushed toward degrees because the alternative ladders got kicked out from under them. Then they were told the resulting debt was a personal lifestyle choice. They broke the system, then blamed you for getting stuck in it.

You can’t preach “college is the only way out” for thirteen years, then call the bill a personal failing when people take you at your word.

The myth of the rich graduate is political gold

The right’s propaganda frame depends on a cartoon version of the borrower: privileged, smug, latte holding, and basically asking taxpayers to fund a lifestyle.

Reality is more complicated, and the data exposes the con.

Pew reports that among young college graduates with student loans, 48% have household incomes of at least $100,000. Pew also notes the key detail people always leave out: household income includes a spouse or partner, and college graduates without student debt are even more likely to be in that income bracket.14 That nuance matters because the “wealthy borrower” story often smuggles in a second person’s income and calls it the borrower’s moral superiority.

Also, a huge portion of the student debt crisis is driven by borrowers who never got the payoff that people assume a degree guarantees. Pew found nearly six in 10 borrowers who did not complete the degree or certificate they borrowed for experienced default, compared with 23% among those who completed. 15

That is not elitism. That is paying for a ladder and not being allowed to climb it, then getting mocked for not reaching the roof.

Default is also not evenly distributed. Pew found half of Black borrowers and 40% of Hispanic borrowers have had a loan default, compared with 29% of White borrowers. 16 That’s a flashing red sign that the repayment system is amplifying inequality, not reducing it.

So why does the “borrowers are rich” lie stick? Because it is emotionally satisfying. It turns a complex system failure into a simple moral story, and moral stories are easier to sell than policy reform.

How the right built this framing, and why it’s propaganda

This isn’t an accident, and it’s not just “people having opinions.” It’s a coordinated political project that does two things at once.

First, it demonizes education as a cultural enemy. Gallup found that among Americans who lack confidence in higher education, 41% cite colleges being “too liberal,” trying to “indoctrinate” or “brainwash” students, or not allowing them to think for themselves. 17 That is the propaganda line, repeated so often that it now shows up as a top reason people give in surveys.

Pew finds the split inside the Republican coalition is especially sharp: just 20% of conservative Republicans say colleges have a positive impact, compared with 53% of moderate and liberal Republicans. 18 When a political identity is built around distrusting institutions, universities become a perfect villain because they produce knowledge, credentials, journalists, teachers, and researchers. In other words, they produce the people who might call your story a lie.

Second, it reframes “educated” as “elite,” then pretends “elite” means “wealthy,” even when the borrower is a teacher, a nurse, or someone who never finished school and is now in default. The propaganda isn’t that elites exist. They do. The propaganda is that your enemy is the struggling borrower, not the systems and donors that keep wages low, prices high, and safety nets conditional.

This is also why attacks on education show up in legislation, not just rhetoric. AP has reported on Republican lawmakers backing dozens of bills targeting DEI efforts in higher education, and on GOP led states ramping up anti DEI restrictions that extend into what’s taught. 19 20 You don’t pass that many copycat bills across that many states unless there’s coordination, shared strategy, and a political payoff.

Anti-intellectualism isn’t just an attitude, it’s a strategy used to make people distrust experts, so they’ll accept propaganda instead of evidence. It helps populist politicians reject experts, dismiss institutions, and sell you a simpler story where only their side is “common sense.” Scholarly work on anti-intellectualism and populism shows how distrust of intellectuals and experts connects to resistance to expert consensus. (1)

Gut punch: if they can convince you that knowledge itself is the enemy, they never have to answer to facts.

Why this propaganda is useful to the right

Because it keeps working people split into “deserving” and “undeserving,” while the real beneficiaries stay off stage.

When you’re angry at a borrower, you’re not asking why tuition rose so fast, why housing costs so much, why wages lag, why interest accrues the way it does, and why repayment can function like negative amortization for low income borrowers. (4) (5)

When you’re angry at “educated elites,” you’re not paying attention to actual elites, the ones who can buy policy, shift tax burdens, and never have to worry about a bill they can’t pay.

And it gives politicians a reliable villain. Farmers are “our people.” Borrowers are “their people.” One check is framed as protecting the nation. The other is framed as rewarding the out group. Same tool, different story.

A better way to talk about this, if you’re trying to persuade people

Start by naming the double standard without insulting the audience. “We already do stabilization payments when the government creates market disruption, we just pick which working people deserve grace.”

Then describe the mechanism. “Student loan balances can grow even when people pay, because their payments don’t cover interest.” (4)

Then puncture the elitism myth with the default reality. “The people most likely to default are often the people who didn’t finish a degree and never got the earnings boost everyone assumes.” (8)

Finally, bring it back to values. “If we can accept trade aid as a rational response to policy fallout, we can at least have an honest conversation about whether the student loan system is functioning like a long term poverty engine for millions of borrowers.”

America doesn’t have a government help problem.

It has a propaganda problem, a deservingness problem, and a politics that profits when we keep arguing about which struggling people are morally worthy of breathing.

The elitism problem, for real

We do have an elitist problem. It’s just not the one cable news wants you to picture.

The real elite signal in America is asset ownership, not a diploma. Land, businesses, capital, the stuff that quietly turns into power. And this is where the farmer versus student borrower story gets uncomfortable for the people who love calling everyone else a freeloader.

USDA data makes it plain that many farm operator households are not just scraping by. In 2023, USDA puts median farm household wealth at about $1.44 million, and the median for commercial farm households is about $3.6 million, largely because farmland and equipment are massive capital assets. 21 USDA also reports median total household income among farm households was $97,984 in 2023, above the $80,610 median for all U.S. households. 22 That doesn’t mean every farmer is rich, it does mean the stereotype of the farmer as the default “little guy” is often a story we tell ourselves, not a balance sheet.

Meanwhile, the people getting branded as elites because they pursued education are often not living an elite life at all, especially if they’re carrying debt, didn’t finish, or got shoved into low pay work in a high cost economy. Pew found that half of student loan borrowers say they don’t feel financially secure. 23 Even when college grads do earn more on average over a lifetime, a credential is not the same thing as wealth, and student debt can delay homeownership, savings, and basic stability in the years where wealth usually starts compounding.

So yes, let’s talk about elitism. Let’s just talk about the right version.

If you want to be mad at elites, aim up, not sideways. A borrower trying to crawl out of compounding interest is not an elite. A system that builds wealth through ownership while using shame to police who deserves help is the thing wearing the crown.