Politically POMP

06/01/2026

Pride didn’t start as a brand campaign. It started as a riot.

The first Pride was an uprising against police raids at the Stonewall Inn, led by q***r and trans people who were tired of being criminalized for existing. Decades later, we’re still watching lawmakers target q***r and especially trans people with bills that make life smaller, scarier, and more controlled.

I just published a new piece on Substack, “Pride Started With a Riot, Not a Rainbow,” digging into the history of Pride, the folks who helped shape law and policy, and why any conversation about “Pride” in 2026 has to be about power, not just parades.

Link in comments

06/01/2026

Sending love this Pride Month to everyone discovering who they are, everyone living out loud, and every ally making room at the table. You belong. You matter. Keep shining. 🌈

05/31/2026

The fall of America is starting to look a lot like the fall of Rome.

But instead of Caesar, we got Nero.

He offers nothing in terms of policy, instead we get:

A self-branded “peace prize” medal.

AI “art” carving himself into Mount Rushmore.

And now a literal cage-fighting arena rising on the White House lawn to celebrate his birthday and America’s 250th.

Rome gave the people bread and circuses.
Our emperor keeps the circuses and leaves the rest of us the bill.

05/29/2026

I’ve been working on this one for a while.

Any time I hear someone say they’re “pro‑life,” my whole body tenses, not because I hate life, but because I’ve seen how often that phrase is used to justify policies that make living harder, poorer, and more dangerous for the people actually giving birth and raising kids.

This piece is me laying out what I hear when someone says “I’m pro‑life,” why I think so much of our current politics is really pro‑control, and what a genuinely pro‑life agenda would look like if we truly cared about people’s lives before, during, and after pregnancy.

What I Hear When You Say You’re ‘Pro‑Life’

05/28/2026

You can oppose antisemitism and oppose what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza. You can love Jewish people and say you don’t want your tax dollars funding war crimes.

I unpack AIPAC, Gaza, the ICC, and the way evangelical theology has been used to demand blind support for a nation‑state.

Let this be said as plainly as possible: it is not antisemitic to criticize the policies of the modern State of Israel, to object to the mass suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, to question why U.S.

05/27/2026

What I really find fascinating is this wave of right-wing influencers suddenly “distancing” themselves from Trump and talking about him like he’s become unrecognizable.

He hasn’t changed. What’s changed is the cost of defending him.

When it was good for their clicks and careers, they were happy to sell the myth. Now that it’s blowing back on them, they’re pretending they just discovered the con.

Trump is still exactly what he has always been: a con man, the best fertilizer salesman on either side of the Mason–Dixon line.

05/25/2026

Most of us meet Memorial Day somewhere between a three‑day weekend and a “summer kickoff.” But this year, I wanted to take a journey back to the very first Decoration Day.

In 1865, on a former Confederate racetrack in Charleston, South Carolina, newly freed Black Charlestonians dug into a mass grave, brought Union soldiers’ bodies out of the trench, reburied about 257 of them in individual graves, built a fence, and covered those graves in flowers. The first time this country held a ceremony like that, it was people who had just been freed honoring those who had fallen.

Since then, every generation has added its own traditions, its own rituals, its own names to the history of this country. Flags at Arlington. Flowers in small‑town cemeteries. Folded triangles of cloth handed to families who would give anything not to be “honored” this way.

Our Memorial Day is all of that layered together:

A holiday that traces back to newly freed people insisting the dead would not stay anonymous.

A day where families right now are still standing at graves, still saying names, still carrying losses the rest of us might never see.

I wrote about that journey, from the racetrack in Charleston to the cemeteries and living rooms of today...

A lot of us wake up on Memorial Day thinking about plans.

05/25/2026

Just a reminder: Tyranny requires us to be complicit and quiet.

05/24/2026

Not sure who needs to hear this but: Greatness comes from progress, not taking us back to a time that never really existed to begin with. ✌🏼