Illinois U.S. Primary Interviews

U.S. House – Illinois District 13
Dylan Blaha

U.S. House – Illinois District 15
Kyle Nudo
Paul Davis
Randy Raley
Jennifer Todd

Illinois State Primary Interviews

Illinois State Senate – District 56
Marsie Geldert-Murphey
Kevin Hall

Illinois House – District 111
Rosetta "Rosie" Brown

We encourage viewers to review the candidates, research the issues, and make a plan to vote on March 17.

Additional voter resources:

Illinois State Board of Elections

Ballotpedia

Vote411

Follow the Money

Track AI PAC

Girl I Guess

Sunken Press, as produced by Longshot Media, will be coming to a close following the release of our final in-progress episodes. The existing archive, including all Substack content, will remain available as free public content.

Cory plans to continue independently and relaunch under the Sunken Press name in the future.

Nicole plans to tackle other creative endeavors while taking time to grieve the closing of this chapter.

Producers Ryan and Missy will pause to recharge and consider future projects as they move forward from this transition.

We’re proud of the work created during this chapter and grateful for the time, energy, and creativity each of us brought to it.

Thank you to everyone who supported Sunken Press over the past year. We appreciate the community that formed around this project and look forward to what comes next for all of us.

The council unanimously passed a resolution to move forward with building a 30-acre plot of land near the Amtrak station into a business development center. The former Robert P. Wadlow Golf Course, Macklay argued, would be much better suited as a nature preserve. It is already maintained by the Piasa Palisades Chapter of the Sierra Club.

During the Wednesday night meeting, Macklay cited the number of business centers Alton currently holds, which includes Downtown, Milton, Upper Alton, North Alton, and the already heavily corporate Homer Adams Parkway. She cited how many empty storefronts currently populate Broadway, where her business is located as well.

Sage and her husband, David, moved to Alton from Virginia in 2020 after she said they “fell in love with the place.” The reason she told the council that they set down roots in Alton was not due to the many businesses already along Homer Adams that people can find anywhere in the country, like Home Depot and Applebee’s. Instead, she said, they came for what is unique to Alton, like our people, environment, and small businesses.

She lamented the fact that she and her family have to travel to Edwardsville, Godfrey, and even as far as St. Louis to enjoy nature and natural beauty. If Alton had such a place, she reasoned, folks would travel here to enjoy it and spend money in our local economy.

While the former golf course is still mostly well-manicured grass, there are a lot of native plants as well as a small creek running through the area, which provides a natural habitat for many animals. Still, Sage offered other alternatives as well, including a sculpture garden and hands-on learning for students enrolled in natural science.

She is not alone in her call for the city to halt its plans to develop the area. A petition circulating started by Macklay has garnered 522 signatures as of Wednesday night’s 6:30 pm meeting after only being active for around a week.

We at Sunken Press unabashedly support this effort to keep this greenspace green and, like Sage, would love to see empty storefronts filled before new corporate bullshit is built. Not to sound like the Counting Crows covering Joni Mitchell or nothing, but we cannot let them pave paradise and put up a parking lot. A better world has more natural beauty and less fucking Applebee’s.

Also, go to Funky Planet and get some shit. It’s in your head now. You need to just go do it. They didn’t pay for me to say that, but I’d let them if they wanted to.

It should be noted at this time that camping is illegal now in Alton, thanks to a ban passed in the city. This ban is similar to other recent camping bans passed across the U.S. and, like the rest of them, it criminalizes homelessness. Following the story of goodwill, we got word that several police officers were around the area the next day, where Riverbend Patriots had just done their mission of spreading holiday cheer and goodwill toward their fellow humans.

The person who gave us the tip was worried the police had followed the Riverbend Patriots into the situation and then exploited them to find the encampment and make arrests the next day. If the encampment is on private property, the police often alert the owners and ask if they would like to clear out the folks camping on the land they own. If the owner says yes, the encampment is cleared, even if that land isn’t being used for any other purpose or even maintained by the owner. The way corporations work, some folks own land on which they have never set foot. Something about that seems very wrong, but I digress.

Instead of breaking up the encampment as a whole, police were escorting a few folks out who wanted to return to their homes. There’s a lot of problematic stuff that goes with that, but let’s shine the spotlight onto people all sides of the political spectrum view as heroes — veterans.

Veterans compose the local group Riverbend Patriots, a 509(a)(2) public charity. They support veterans and first responders as well as their families across Madison, St. Clair, and Jersey counties. They formed in 2023 after noticing a “growing gap” between services that were allegedly available on paper for veterans and firefighters, and the actual services they received at the usual organizations, such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and American Legion, according to Brad Yount of the Riverbend Patriots.

He described the mission of the group as such: Riverbend Patriots is a veteran and first-responder-led organization dedicated to empowering those who serve and strengthening the Riverbend community. We connect veterans, service members, and first responders with healing resources, purposeful initiatives, and opportunities for fellowship. Through service, storytelling, and community action, we honor their legacy and protect their future.

Due to that mission, they were called to serve those who found themselves in dire predicaments in the modern housing market. Yount said the group wanted to “provide immediate relief and identify veterans who may be in crisis” while bringing aid to an unhoused encampment in Alton. As much as 5.3% of the homeless adult population are veterans, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. As much as 20% of men who are unhoused are veterans. This breaks down to around 33,000 veterans facing homelessness each night across America. As many as 1,200 of them are in Illinois.

Yount said that there are around 176 benefits available for veterans, adding that most of them are overlooked. These are at the federal level as well as the state level. Yount said most veterans only know about healthcare, disability compensation, education, and specialty license plates. After that, he added, “The system becomes a maze.”

“We met Vietnam-era veterans who have never applied for a single benefit and younger [Global War on Terror (GWOT)] veterans who are hesitant to even walk into a VA office,” Yount said. “Lack of benefit knowledge isn’t just an inconvenience — it can be the difference between stability and crisis.”

Accessibility of those benefits is also a problem. While younger veterans may be able to easily navigate the VA’s website, Yount said older ones much prefer face-to-face support. That is difficult in the Riverbend, as Jersey County has a one-person office that only takes walk-ins, Madison County has appointments booked as long as three weeks out, East Alton is only open on Monday, and St. Clair is appointment-based.

These gaps, Yount said, push folks closer to homelessness. Without help navigating the maze of complicated VA benefits, many veterans do not take full advantage of their entitlements for serving their nation, even to the point of homelessness and financial ruin.

“People experiencing homelessness are often on the move, and most rarely have more than a day’s worth of food on them,” Yount said in an emailed response to questions from Sunken Press. “By going directly to the places where people are living, we take a proactive approach to assistance instead of waiting for someone to find us. Outreach is one of the most effective ways to locate those who need help, but aren’t connected to services.”

Upon making that contact, Riverbend Patriots distributed blankets and food. Yount said several local eateries provided meals for folks, including Sonny’s Main Street Bar and Grill, Tony’s Ranch House, Godfrey Meat Market, Sammi’s Sandwiches, and Roper’s Regal Beagle. Each provided 20 meals, which gave 100 meals for the group to distribute. Riverbend Patriots themselves provided 60 blankets as well as resource information.

Outside of one action, Riverbend Patriots operates a mutual aid network for area veterans and first responders that has the goal of removing structural barriers between folks and what they have earned through their service. They do benefits navigation, emergency assistance (including food, clothing, transportation, etc), community events with opportunities for fellowship, wellness activities with peer support and family engagement, historic preservation and education, the Patriot Connect App, and Victory Farm, an upcoming agricultural program focused on healing, food security, education, and community service.

The Victory Farm is one of the ways community members can support Riverbend Patriots. They accept volunteers as well as financial contributions from the community at large. They are also open to partnering with local businesses to supply their missions.

Future plans also include a “Resource Rig” with Yount described as a “mobile outreach unit” that can bring resources directly to where they are needed, as well as provide transportation to veterans. Yount said a peer support group with a focus on aiding “long-term stability” is also in the works to “ensure no one has to face their challenges alone.”

A better world looks like what Riverbend Patriots are doing for their fellow veterans, and mutual aid groups of all sorts could look to this for inspiration.

Folks can bring a donation of a nonperishable food item and enjoy an otherwise free day of talking to folks in the know about local history, folklore, and hauntings. The event will include speakers and authors. We encourage everyone to join them!

While this event objectively sounds good and fun, it underscores something about the world around us we may not like looking at — our capacity for care diminishes as the world around us gets busier and harder, while the empire crumbles. After the surplus of the holidays, pantries are often empty and forgotten, which is why Taylor and the gang have been doing this for nearly three decades — the need isn’t new, but it is increasing.

Today, the temperature is expected to reach around 50. This will melt a lot of the snow across the region and probably create long lines in local car washes and the newly-opened Hit-N-Run drive-thrus. It will also make us forget how cold and hard it still is without the luxury of a home.

Recently, the Overnight Warming Locations (OWLs) experienced nearly two weeks of activations as this area faced a brutal cold snap that continuously dropped overnight lows below 20 degrees — the threshold for OWL activation. That being said, many recent nights have fallen to around 22-25 degrees, which does not facilitate the warming locations being opened.

Because of the dismal daytime cold and street conditions, Riverbend Family Ministries opened its doors for daytime warming as well. Volunteers organized transportation, which almost could not occur due to the condition of Alton’s streets during a recent heavy snowfall.

This, of course, creates fatigue in volunteers. So, the people who do actually care and put the most effort into tangible compassion in our community are exhausted, and the people who don’t want to be bothered outside of some virtue signaling have moved on to something else.

Living under late-stage capitalism, global tensions, national fascism, the complete loss of manufacturing, crumbling labor unions, increased healthcare costs, and profound existential dread at the looming climate crisis (yes, it can and inevitably will get worse) takes a toll on the privileged and housed. Those lost in the margins have been begging for it to stop for generations, only to be unheard until it directly affects those with capital and social privilege.

I’m currently working on a profile for the Riverbend Patriots group, a benevolent organization of local veterans who care for their community. Veterans are usually folks from impoverished classes chasing the American Dream of healthcare and education. Like most of us, those dreams are fractured by conditions beyond our control as well as our own issues.

Again, the American mind lionizes its love for its veterans just as it touts its compassion for the downtrodden. Like the downtrodden, who are only considered during Christmas, and when the upper middle class tries to ask ChatGPT how best to demand the city get rid of them without sounding like a Nazi, veterans are only remembered during their state-appointed holidays and when folks are trying to win elections.

Sometimes I say “no war but class war,” and it’s because the system discards us all and plays us against each other. I hate to say it, though, but that minimizes and degrades the multifoliate social structures built against us. To fight for those whose cause and root issues you do not understand is to fight a losing battle. To properly win the class war, we have to understand the intersectionality of race, gender, privilege, etc., as well as accept the common denominator of being at the whims of a Christo-fascist, white supremacist, hyper-capitalist, heavily-compromised octopus of a governing body feeding us lies, propaganda, and bullshit.

There’s a fucked up irony in buying cans of Campbell’s soup to help feed folks when that company’s CEO allegedly mocked poor people for eating his own product, adding his own doubts about the quality of the ingredients. Most of what we eat is sold to us by the same corporations that wear different masks to appeal to different demographics. Even the “healthy” supplements peddled by crunchy moms on TikTok are just capitalist lies sold without any regulation.

But, desperate people buy it because it’s cheaper than the horrifically exploitative American healthcare system.

Anyway, that’s enough doom spiraling for the day. I have a very busy afternoon tomorrow, moderating a town hall for U.S. Congressional candidate Dylan Blaha, who is primarying incumbent Nikki Budzinski. Blaha has some good policy ideas that would attack some of these problems. However, we can’t vote our way out of a system this broken. If you want to join us, be at the Wood River Public Library by 2 pm tomorrow.

At some point, we must seize the means of production and ensure all people have a plate and a place to sleep before any greedy pig dog goes back for seconds.

Until then, I am grateful for folks like Troy Taylor, OWLs, Riverbend Family Ministries, Riverbend Patriots, Crisis Food Center, Community Hope Center, Oasis Women’s Center, and everyone operating mutual aid boxes and community pantries. We are doing what we can.

A better world is each according to their abilities and each according to their needs.

So, today, Sunken Press was presented with an interesting issue in our modern media and political climate. Our producers, Missy and Ryan Long, were out and about today, mailing off a T-shirt to a fan in Indiana (it was the last of our limited Lovejoy run, so keep an eye out for our next limited, locally-printed design). They saw what appeared to be a confrontation in the parking lot of the strip mall containing China Wok, Imo’s, and Subway where North Alton meets Godfrey. You know the place.

Anyway, a motorist was confronting unmarked law enforcement vehicles, who he alleged to our producers nearly ran him off the road with their reckless driving on Homer Adams Parkway. Not realizing they were with law enforcement, the Longs said the man followed the vehicles due to some good old-fashioned Alton road rage.

These members of law enforcement were witnessed by the Longs to have had two in custody, including a woman wearing a scarf over her head. Believing that they had encountered a potential run-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Ryan left his vehicle and confronted the situation.

Editor’s Note: While I’m not condemning Ryan’s instincts or actions as a member of the media, I would never advise any of you to engage in any sort of direct confrontation with law enforcement for a variety of reasons, ranging from your safety to the legality of obstructing justice. Know your rights as a citizen and act appropriately and legally for the situation.

Ryan detailed his account here:

Federal agents lied to me a few moments ago. Missy and I were returning home from running errands and noticed an SUV being searched with all doors open in the parking lot of Piasa Center in Godfrey (right in front of Subway and Great Clips). I thought it looked strange because the two other vehicles were unmarked black vehicles, a pickup truck and a sedan, with the stealth-type emergency lights.

I pulled over and started walking to the scene. They appeared to be apprehending a woman and a man from the SUV. As I approached, the conversation went a little like this.

Cop: “Get back!”
Me: “Fuck you!”
Cop: “Get back!”
Me: “Who the fuck are you?”
Cop: “Do you own this property?”
Me: “Do you? Who are you with?”
Him: “Get back!”
Me again: “Fuck you, I have a right to be here.”
Him: “Are you press?”
Me: “Fucking right I am. Who are you with?”
Him: “ICE.”
Me: “Eat a dick!”

Taking him at his word that this was actually ICE, as we feared, I walked back to my car shouting “ICE!” at the top of my lungs. Another guy there comes up and says he just survived those same officers nearly causing an accident on the Beltline moments earlier. He said they flew past him at 90mph without lights on and were driving extremely dangerously, then flipped their lights on when they got to the intersection. This dude was a trip. Hope he is good.

I got back in the car and laid on the horn. People started coming out of Dollar General and other businesses in the strip mall and started yelling and filming with their phones and honking their horns, too.

Then the officers quickly got the suspects into their vehicles and started to leave the scene. They certainly were appearing to act in a way that indicated they were actually ICE, like they didn’t want the attention and wanted to leave the scene quickly.

I positioned the wagon to follow. I managed to get in front of one of the “ICE” vehicles and did my best old man driving to try to split the two vehicles up/slow them down. They got past me, exited the lot, and I lost them at some lights trying to follow them out.

See that? That is a compelling narrative regarding a situation that is all too common today, especially in states like Illinois and Minnesota. Ryan was acting as a member of the media to get the story, as well as his previous experience as a Marine who took an oath to serve our country and uphold the Constitution. I know he was absolutely pissed.

Given the information I had, I said that we should post photos as soon as we could and get an alert on the situation, as Ryan said the federal agent identified himself as ICE. I’m not surprised by this. I’ve covered federal roundups in my previous life as a non-biased, objective reporter.

I recounted the tale I was just given to him. He replied immediately.

He said it had nothing to do with immigration.

So, we didn’t post it. See, I fucked up last year believing an innocent man’s modded Jeep was ICE. I posted it on my Facebook, which is insanely well-trafficked, and it caused undue panic among folks. I have immigrant friends in our community, and I felt awful at the needless stress my mistake caused. I also felt terrible for the guy whose Jeep it was. He made contact with me, and we discussed the incident civilly and I expressed remorse.

Things are chaotic. Fucking up is fine. You have to take accountability, make amends, and most of all, grow from those mistakes. Sunken Press is a collection of sooooo many mistakes I’ve made in my career in the industry spanning more than a decade. And I’m only a quarter of our general management.

But, I do want to know why my producer was just told someone was ICE who wasn’t actually ICE. That seems like it would make everyone’s jobs harder. Such a lie directed at someone who identified as a member of the press could potentially cause the sort of panic in our community I actively wanted to avoid with double-checking.

I could rack my brain about it for hours.

But for real, stay safe out there and don’t break the law trying to prove a point unless you’re cool with going to jail.

If you want to go out of your way to legally resist ICE, find your local activists and ask them how to help. The ACLU is one good resource. There are protocols that have been developed by lawyers who know our rights and how to best enforce them. There are years of best practices that have been sharpened over time by folks who cared just as deeply as you and tried as hard as you would try. Join a movement already in progress.

See, the set had labeled a dinosaur with an armored back, spiked sides, and no tail club as Ankylosaurus. I knew Ankylosaurus had a tail club. So, I started raising a stink about it and even wrote a letter to the company. My mom obliged me and mailed it. They returned with a complete dinosaur set, including a corrected Ankylosaurus.

While I love Ankylosaurus, I was your traditional T. Rex kid. Jurassic Park dropped when I was four, and my mom read me Michael Crichton since I was in utero. As I’ve become an adult, I’ve added other theropods (bipedal, usually meat-eating dinosaurs and birds themselves, including Velociraptor, T. Rex, and Spinosaurus), but, in my heart, I am still a T. Rex kid.

When I first saw the robust female T. Rex known as “Sue” discovered in Hell Creek, Montana, I was in awe. I was also 26. I had eaten edibles with my girlfriend, and she decided that we should hit the Field Museum in Chicago. She was absolutely right. I went through the entire prehistoric exhibit, delighted in the insane creatures found in Illinois’ own Mazon Creek Formation (especially our state fossil, the Tully Monster). I got a blue plastic Triceratops from a vending machine.

On my right forearm, there is an Allosaurus skull. Allosaurus was a smaller Jurassic cousin of T. Rex. More time separated those two animals than T. Rex and the 9/11 attacks.

I have even gone to Cincinnati and marveled at the smaller T. Rex cousin known as Daspletosaurus.

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Well, even as an ignorant child with lofty dreams of one day being a paleontologist, I fucking hated Jack Horner. When millions of Epstein files dropped last Friday, I was completely vindicated in that feeling.

I mean, the man was fired from the Museum of the Rockies, where he spent more than three decades, even advising the creators of Jurassic Park on what was — at the time — a decently scientifically-informed depiction of the dinosaurs (despite Velociraptors being the size of turkeys and from Mongolia).

He was fired at the age of 65 because he was married to his 19-year-old grad student. I know a 19-year-old is legally an adult and therefore has the agency to do whatever she wants, but I am fucking disgusted by the entire thing, and I am glad he got fired from a museum that houses some of my favorite creatures, including my beloved Allosaurus.

But my grudge was beyond that. In fact, I cite that obvious abuse of a power dynamic by a sick dinosaur freak as the first vindication of my hatred of Jack Horner.

In the early 1990s, when my toddler ass was reading dinosaur books and telling my mom gray aliens taught me how to do it (I’ll tell you that story in Sunken Secrets if this story here makes a big enough splash), I came across a theory on some Discovery Channel program that originated from the fucked up creep mouth of Jack Horner. He claimed that the coolest thing that ever walked this Earth (that we know of), T. Rex, was not a predator. Instead, Horner claimed T. Rex was a dim-witted and slow scavenger.

I was pissed. I remember the day a man on the TV tried to compel me into seeing the banana-sized teeth in that giant thing’s mouth with more crushing power than any other animal known to humanity was a vulture of its time. Don’t get me wrong, vultures are beautiful and essential creatures who are breathtaking to gaze upon for anyone with discerning taste. They are also dinosaurs. That being said, T. Rex was not a vulture.

Research into T. Rex skull brain casings have shown the animal had a sense of smell exponentially better than a modern bloodhound. That adds to the idea of it being not only a hunter, but an exceptionally dangerous one capable of ambush.

Despite being that fucking wrong about the best dinosaur ever, the fine people who made Jurassic Park consulted him and even based the beloved character, Dr. Alan Grant, partially on Horner himself. Puke!

To his credit, Horner did discover the genus Maiasaura, which also included some of the first fossilized juvenile dinosaurs and nesting sites known to modern science. Because of this, Maiasaura translates to “good mother lizard.”

Horner also uncovered a T. Rex bone in 2003, which contained proteins recovered in 2007.

A year after he married his child bride in Vegas, Horner was honored with the Romer-Simpson Prize — the highest prize in the field of paleontology. He was then able to retire from Montana State University in 2016 and was given a $3 million MacMillan Foundation Grant to continue his bullshit forever.

I got all that off the guy’s Wikipedia; however, the worst shit about him comes alongside the worst shit about every other famous person in every conceivable field and walk of life. It comes from the Epstein files.

In an email to disgraced financier, notorious pedophile, trafficker of children, and international intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein, Horner thanked “the girls” for a time he had on Epstein’s abundantly creepy Zorro Ranch in New Mexico. The email was sent in 2012 when Horner was 65 and married to a fucking 19-year-old student. THERE WERE SIGNS.

Folks from Montana State University have indicated that Horner did, in fact, travel to New Mexico to dig up fossils at Epstein’s ranch in 2012. Epstein’s first charges for being a fucking creep came in 2008.

Also, that “Dinochicken” shit referenced in the email was some cockamamie nonsense Horner cobbled together, claiming that, through genetic engineering, one could bring back dinosaur traits in a common chicken, such as teeth and claws. I don’t know why we need chickens with fucking teeth, but I guess fucking kids rots your God damned brain, no matter how cool the dinosaur you discovered in the 1970s was.

Also, I’ll just say it, Maiasaura fucking sucks. I mean, if I’m so real, no dinosaurs sucked, because they are all deeply fascinating creatures, but Maiasaura isn’t one you show a child to inspire a lifelong passion in the subject, especially now that we know the tragic irony of the dinosaur credited with good parenting was discovered by a fucking pedophile.

Fuck you, Jack Horner.

Long live the Tyrant Lizard King!

Also, in that email, I assume the food being referenced is babies, because these demonic bastards probably eat babies. These emails are world-shattering, and no one is doing anything, and it’s making me crazy, but fuck you, Jack Horner. Fuck you and the Dinochicken you rode in upon!

Your legacy deserved to be tainted the way you tried to taint my Tyrant Lizard King. And, no, “Tyrant Lizard King” isn’t the final boss of the antisemitic reptilian conspiracy, nor is it what would have happened if Jim Morrison was exposed to a Fire Stone. Tyrannosaurus Rex translates to “Tyrant Lizard King.”

A better world has paleontologists who aren’t pedophiles. It also has new discoveries ahead of us that we cannot even fathom. Hold tight, comrades. A better world is inevitable. Let’s help each other live to see it.

Following the homicide of Pretti, who served as an intensive care unit (ICU) nurse at the Veterans Administration (VA), former acting ICE head Greg Bovino was sent back to California, where he will soon retire without consequences on his pension paid for by our tax dollars. He was replaced by Tom Homan. Homan was alleged to have been recorded on audio by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) accepting a $50,000 bribe. That allegation has not been proven nor disproven, as the FBI under the Trump Regime has ceased its investigations. The White House has denied this allegation.

Anyway, ICE is still harassing Minneapolis, despite an alleged truce between Trump and Minnesota Gov. and failed vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz. They have been reported going door-to-door and were operating under the idea that they could enter homes without a judicial warrant.

Since Pretti’s killing, and even earlier with the shooting death of Renee Good at the hands of 10-year ICE veteran Jonathan Ross, demonstrations across the nation have erupted against ICE.

Alongside the radicalization of wine moms, I have watched the increasing awareness of just how bad things are getting, as well as the progressive politics required to overcome them (at least in the short term) in rural areas. One of the shining stars has been Macoupin County’s Indivisible organization, championed by recent friends of the show, Chelsa Pruden and Kelley Hatlee.

Watch their episode here:

They hosted a vigil for Pretti/protest against ICE Sunday afternoon outside the Macoupin County Courthouse in Carlinville. Pruden told me in a Facebook message that around 100 folks gathered on Sunday. Some of them even brought candles to quietly mourn the slain VA nurse from Minnesota. Others came with signs, because they are upset with how things are going, Pruden said.

“That felt right for the moment we’re in, because grief and anger can sit side-by-side while people are hurting,” Chelsa said in a message Monday afternoon. “The tone was peaceful, respectful, and very human. My dear friend Marcella Polera Cloud shared a beautiful prayer that really grounded the space and reminded us why we were there. People showed up because they’re tired of feeling hopeless, and being together in person reminds you that you’re not alone, especially in a rural community like ours where people sometimes assume no one here cares or is paying attention.”

Counter-protesters, who I can only assume are pro-murder of VA nurses, did arrive at the event. Pruden said they followed the movement. When the naysayers passed in their vehicles, the group made a showing of turning their backs to them.

“What stood out most to me was the sense of community,” she said. “People stood shoulder to shoulder, whether they came to grieve, to pray, or to protest, all there because they believe human life and dignity matter. That’s really what the day was about.”

While a lot of people may find groups like Indivisible to be too little too late under the growing, insidious umbrella of fascism and late-stage capitalism, at least they are doing something to network and build community. They stood out in the cold to mourn a stranger they likely never met, just to show solidarity with a man killed by the federal government while attempting to assist a woman who was being brutalized by fascist thugs.

We all need to be doing something about it. I don’t know how any of you can read the Epstein drops and not have the attitude of ‘just burn it all to the ground.’ Until then, protesting in Carlinville against tyranny is a step in the right direction.

But, no, I want you to read shit like this, and I want you to know it existed. Over the weekend, Alton Police Chief Jarrett Ford dropped me a line and linked me to his department’s 2025 report. I obliged and read through the document, which, as all of you devoted fans are about to hopefully do as well. I found a lot of it very interesting.

So, let me guide you through an adventure in civics called “how to analyze an annual report!” I promise, this will be fun for everyone from ACAB to Blue Lives Matter. The latter of you, however, will most likely not like my takes, but the former of you is already leery that I’m doing this at all. I appreciate your well-deserved skepticism.

Anyway, here’s the link to it so you can follow along at home.

The second page of it, after the cover sheet with a patrol vehicle, has a pretty run-of-the-mill greeting from Chief Ford. I like that he ends it with his hopes that we can both “enjoy” and “learn from” the 22 pages ahead. I just had an edible, so you know I absolutely will do each of those things.

DAMN, WE’RE DOING THE STATS ON PAGE THREE? BOLD MOVE, CHIEF FORD. THAT’S THE ONLY REASON MOST OF US ARE HERE. YOU THINK ANYONE WANTS TO READ PAST BIG NUMBERS ON A PAGE? THIS IS AMERICA!

Anyway, here are those stats for those among us too lazy or disinterested to click that link to a document your wages were skimmed from to pay for:

• TOTAL INCIDENTS - 28,555

• TRAFFIC STOPS - 3,820

• FELONIES CHARGED - 691

Hold on. Damn. Yep. They misspelled “Misdemeanors.” It’s OK. We’re all human. We all fuck up. But, yeah, I am enjoying this actually. I am having a blast.

• MISEMEANORS CHARGED - 1,006 (that’s how it looks on the page)

• JUVENILE PETITIONS - 109

• JUVENILES CHARGED - 77

• SCHOOL PATROLS - 557

• BUSINESS CHECKS - 1,454

• ABANDONED VEHICLES - 350

• BUILDING AND ZONING REFERRALS - 29

Ladies, when that man drops you off at work in your Nissan Altima because his broke ass doesn’t have a car or a job, remind him that there are 350 abandoned vehicles in Alton every year, and his ass needs to get one of those.

Anyway, it’s also important to put these numbers into context. Nationwide, there are 0.7-1 emergency calls per year per capita. These numbers vary widely by state. The average incident rate for police departments in the U.S. is approximately 409 incidents per 1,000 people. This means around 0.41 incidents per person. Alton’s numbers do not reflect that.

Alton’s population is hovering around 25,000. So, we divide the total number of incidents by the population to determine how many incidents per capita per year the Alton Police Department (APD) handles. The number of incidents — 28,555 — divided by the population — approximately 25,000 — is 1.1422. That means Alton is more than double the national average for incidents reported to police. That means we have a very busy police department.

Pages four and five bring each month’s officers of the month. They then highlight their employees who have been awarded by the community on page six. These are usually pretty cool. These go to things we actually want public servants to do, like rescuing people and contributing aid to our communities.

Detective Jacob Stewart receives the 2025 Optimist Club Officer of the Year Award for his efforts in combating violent crime. That sounds good on its face, but I believe you should always be suspicious of police and their public reports. So, what is the Optimist Club?

The Optimist Club is a volunteer organization dedicated to service with a global reach. They contribute a lot to student sports and speeches with the goal of creating an optimistic outlook for the future. It sounds nice. I'd better add another layer of scrutiny.

I shall add “controversy” to the tail of my search. Wow, outside of some isolated incidents of people stealing or being sketchy at local chapter levels, it is a pretty good, albeit rapidly aging, club. I even added “reddit” to my search. Alright, they check out.

So, I then searched the officer’s name, found the article in Riverbender covering his award, and learned the backstory. It seems Detective Stewart quickly identified multiple suspects after a shooting in Oakwood. No, it wasn’t the shooting in Oakwood leading to the death of a young teen on the Fourth of July weekend. It was one a month prior on June 8, 2025.

Stewart’s investigation took him to Springfield, where he worked with state, local, and federal police to attain several felonies and get six illegally-owned firearms off the street. Unfortunately, the gun used to kill 17-year-old Shabrya Hudson was not one of the guns removed from the streets. But, that’s not on him. He did the work and helped the community. Violence prevention is something I genuinely believe police should be doing.

If only we could have real discussions about prison reform and abolition…. BUT I DIGRESS, LET’S KEEP GOING.

Detective Dan Jensen received the 2025 Boys & Girls Club Officer of the Year Award for aiding in investigations of crimes against children. As someone whose beat included those cases, some of the deepest human interactions I have ever had included law enforcement investigating and prosecuting those crimes. They see and handle a certain darkness that most people couldn’t fathom.

Anyway, the Alton Boys & Girls Club is a great organization helping bring a sort of after-school program that instills great values into our area’s children. I’ve covered Al Womack’s efforts there for years, and many of the items collected in our SNAP Into Action Food Drive went into their walk-up pantry. As someone who lives in the neighborhood, I can tell you that the food and hygeine supplies were gone the next day. Therefore, I vouch for them.

Again, my old editor Dan Brannan at Riverbender, has an article about Detective Jensen’s award. He investigated and arrested a repeat sex offender and also led the investigation that charged an actual child pornographer. Detective Jensen is doing more to stop pedophilia in our own backyard than anyone is doing about the Epstein drops.

The third award seems more of an industry one, given to Mike Morelli from the Tyler Timmins Memorial Foundation for the department’s K9 unit. The foundation is named in honor of an officer killed in the line of duty. Given the prevalence of dogs being used against protestors during the Civil Rights Movement as well as how often they are used to enforce the War on Drugs, I think the idea of K9 units are controversial to say the very least, and probably unconstitutional. I like their usage for rescue, bomb-sniffing, and cadaver hunting, however, because those are essential needs for public safety.

Page seven congratulates Lt. Seth Stinnet for being accepted into the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) National Academy in Quantico, Virginia. I get that it’s a huge honor for a cop to become a bigger and more powerful cop like a Metapod evolving into a Butterfree (pardon my Pokémon reference there). I do not understand why anyone would want to be a part of the fascist force that is the federal government and its multiple apparatuses. Unless…. Anyway, he’s on lucky page seven, but is the 13th officer in the APD’s history to make their way to the big leagues.

Page eight shows the street patrol having fun and being more diverse than many local departments, but someone should give those children some shoes (if you’re following along, you’ll get it). Page nine shows the boys having fun monitoring the situation at dispatch.

Dispatch handled 31,118 calls in 2025, including 17,583 911 emergency calls. Now that we have more numbers, we can plug them into the calculators all of us actually have in our pockets and figure out how busy our dispatch office is in this city. Given that they received more calls than people in the city this year, I’d guess they are busier than the average dispatch.

Each year, around 240 million calls to 911 are made in the U.S. Again, these vary from state to state, but that averages to around 0.7-0.8 calls per capita annually or 700-800 calls per 1,000 residents. For calls to 911 specifically, we take 17,583 and divide it by the approximate population number of 25,000 again. When taking just 911 calls, the first number is smaller than the second. This means the result will be a decimal or fraction.

The results may shock you. Alton’s 911 calls are exactly at the low end of the national average, with approximately 0.70332 calls to 911 per capita.

Page 10 shows off the unconstitutional heckin’ doggos for which Paw Patrol manufactures consent with its trifling copaganda. The K9 units live with their handlers and become part of their families, which is cute, however, they are named like Call of Duty callsigns, with Crash being deployed 77 times, Rico being deployed 116 times, and Riggs being sent out 23.

At 11, we get a deeper dive into the criminal investigations of police departments. All my homies hate the police, but most of them have a soft spot for real detective work. I mean, how could you not? Oh wait, the insane War on Drugs and resurgence of the War on Terror aimed inwards at leftist organizers and agitators, aided by the private-public surveillance partnerships made in cities of every size across the nation, are all pretty bad.

They investigated around 150 felony-level drug cases in 2025, which is one for every Pokémon if you exclude Mew. However, the APD asserts that they only target the dealers and not street-level users. Still, this is a nonviolent crime for the most part, unless you count selling someone something that you know will probably kill them as violence, which I absolutely do, but am still for prison abolition.

On page 13, they showcase school resource officers, which simultaneously stand guard against the epidemic of school shootings in this nation and also enforce the school-to-prison pipeline most popularly used against black students, as well as students from other marginalized communities, with undiagnosed disabilities, and facing homelessness.

We then move on to the traffic division, which used to annoy the shit out of me when I simply wanted my 1993 Pontiac Bonneville to do front-wheel-drive burnouts and exceed speeds of 85 miles per hour on the Great River Road. They also have a cadet program if your jobless 18-21 boyfriend who takes your Altima to the streets while you’re working to pay his bills is also a narc.

Training is the topic of page 15. Training is a buzzword liberals like to use to give more money to agencies that use that money to enforce laws upon the populace. It’s why, despite Jonathan Ross being a 10-year Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, Democrats referred to agents as “untrained” following him shooting Renee Good in Minneapolis. It’s a way to manufacture consent to funnel more money to a federal agency, they only scold when they don’t have power above it.

However, de-escalation, mental health, implicit bias, crimes against children, and speaking to victims of trauma are the sort of training most folks should want their local police to have. This year, all the training for all officers is compliant, the report states. The training is not detailed, outside of OSHA mandates and sexual harassment.

The 93 employees of the APD, which includes sworn and non-sworn folks, completed 1,807 training courses, which included online and in-person formats. The department trained for 4,898 hours, averaging 52.67 hours of training per employee. Let’s cross our fingers that the training was to help us and not shoot us in the head more accurately.

Like most departments, the APD is not having a great time recruiting new officers. Most people don’t want to be cops. A lot of the ones who do would rather be in ICE, so they face zero accountability for anything they do, instead of just getting their murder charge dropped from a first to a second degree after shooting a woman in the face in Springfield. At least that bastard is facing two decades in jail.

Anyway, it’s not fun, cool, or socially acceptable to want to be a cop these days, and it’s because being a cop sucks and most cops suck. However, the APD is working to turn that tide and public opinion, or at least saying they are. They hired eight new officers in 2025, and six are currently employed while two are doing more training. Of those six, four are black, and three are women. Four of them also have strong roots in the community.

While these sound like platitudes posted from an arm of a fascist nation rooted deep into its genocidal and slave-owning past, it is a form of progress to have a police department whose demographics match the folks they claim to serve and protect. More black officers were something many folks in Alton’s black community have demanded in the past. Community leader, political critic, and prominent Democrat Lee Barham was one of them. He held a sign demanding it on the sidewalk outside the police station two years ago declaring as such.

On page 17, I learned that Alton’s jail is the only municipal jail in Illinois to house federal detainees. That’s pretty wild. They said 63 were in their custody this year. The total number of folks booked into that jail, however, was 2,189. Wait. That seems like a big number. Is that a large number? It’s time to do some more math.

So, around 469,000 people went to prison in 2022, but people went to jail around 7 million times. The U.S. population in 2022 was approximately 333,287,557. So, I guess we divide 7 million by that big ol’ population number. That number is 0.02, or 2% of the entire population of the U.S. So let’s do it for Alton using our approximate population of 25,000. Ok, so it is four times the national average at 0.08 per capita or around 8% of the population of Alton. In short, the average Altonian loves going to jail four times as much as the average American.

Page 18 has the Special Response Team (SRT), which covers a large region of the state. They do counter-terrorism and specialize in weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), which sounds pretty fucking wild for a municipal police department. The commander of the regional team is Alton’s own Brandon DeSherlia, which I guess is cool, but the militarization of police is fucking scary, even if the keys to it are in the pocket of a hometown boy.

Mental health and wellness, which are two things we spoke about with both Chief Ford and Megan Tyler of Sacred Spaces of Care on our podcast, are the stars of page 19, which showcases police going to things such as a Wellness & Trauma Conference, therapy, nutrition, wellness workshops, and a mural painted by a local artist.

Page 20 shows Restorative Intervention Support Efforts (RISE), another Sacred Spaces of Care venture, which resulted in a Narcan vending machine in the lobby of the APD. Narcan is an essential aspect of harm reduction, which prevents many folks from dying of opiate overdoses while using.

Page 21 shows some of the results of that harm reduction approach to policing. Sacred Spaces of Care touts 57 have been provided case management as a result of police intervention, 49 have been transported into the care of a facility dedicated to treating their mental health and/or addiction, 94 have been referred to shelter, maintained housing, found temporary shelter, or were reunified with their families, and 185 received help for immediate needs.

These numbers are good, however, I feel like we need to learn more about the lasting effects of these programs. How many of these people are sober, or at least functional and out of harm’s way right now? How many of these people are still housed? We don’t have this data, and probably need it before we make an informed judgment on the matter. That being said, I like these programs personally and would believe these estimates to be true due to my own discussions with people involved.

Page 22 has some reviews with original names changed regarding the APD’s partnership with Sacred Spaces of Care. Here is one of them:

Matthew was facing eviction and requested assistance with housing options, along with substance use and mental health services. Through resource navigation, Matthew was able to secure housing and has accessed new methods of recovery support along with maintaining sobriety and consistent mental health treatment.

While there is no way of independently verifying it that wouldn’t sacrifice this person’s anonymity, the fact that this is the sort of thing the APD wants a direct association with is great.

In the spirit of fairness, I tried to find Google reviews of the APD, but found that Google had turned off that function. The APD also disables comments on all of its posts. So, outside of this controlled narrative, it is difficult to find a review of the APD. That’s why you have to talk to your friends and neighbors about them. Given how busy they are, most people have stories. Ask around. Share yours in any of our comments sections.

For a deeper look at the APD and Sacred Spaces of Care, check our interviews with Chief Jarrett Ford and Megan Tyler below!

To clarify my personal biases, I find the entire institute of American policing to be a fascist outgrowth of slave catchers and Indian killers from the early days of this sinful nation. However, I personally like Jarrett Ford and find him to be a decent and honest man. That doesn’t mean I don’t think he’s a bastard on some level. I am sure he feels the same way about me as a member of the media, especially after reading this. While I have had my previous beefs with the APD, they are nothing compared to the beefs I have with other departments.

That guy with the sign in Wood River that says “Wood River Police stink!” and that they’re allergic to soap is correct and speaks only the truth. If anyone can put me in contact with him, he will become my top guy for the next episode.

Anyway, a better world will come faster if you become more engaged with the public services for which you are paying with your labor. Stay informed. I love you.

After dawdling for around a month, the Department of Justice (DOJ) released a pile of millions of documents relating to disgraced financier and notorious human trafficking pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. They revealed an aspect of the world that I can only describe as “totally fucked.” Again, I am a wordsmith.

Before I go into it, I would like to first treat you to a bit of my background. I am 36. In 2007, I was 18 and using dial-up internet in rural Jersey County. Like most other edgy disgraced Catholic school kids who owned radioactive green Mountain Dew hoodies, I discovered 4Chan.

For those of you who are innocent of this vile abomination, 4Chan was a collection of anonymous image boards. This basically meant folks could converse with each other without revealing who they were and they were able to post images. Of course, this meant that there was a plethora of horrific stuff. Everything from freshly created crime scenes to child sexual abuse material (CSAM) was posted there.

It was also the incubator for what we now know as meme culture. Folks could use their creativity to spread ideas and jokes through fun little images. I mostly used it for paranormal stories on the /x/ board and Pokémon memes. Back in those days, the “Random” board, or /b/, was the cesspool. By the early 2010s, after I found myself disgusted with the entire thing, /b/’s chaotic anarchy’s vile nature was subverted by /pol/, the board’s “politically incorrect” forum.

This board birthed the “Kek” movement. Named after the South Korean word for laugh out loud (lol), Kek was a growing far-right anarchist movement fueled by terminal irony. Their entire identity and emotional intelligence could be conveyed by one of many “Pepe the Frog” memes. The cartoonist behind Pepe, Matt Furie, has condemned the usage of his intellectual property for this far-right clade that treads the line between irony and nihilism like a drunk guy failing a sobriety test.

There was even a movement within this movement, believing that it was a pre-ordained chaos ritual from an Ancient Egyptian frog deity of primordial chaos named Kek. I’m being 1000% serious. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) posted an entire informative article about it. As something of a chaos magician myself, their dark lore was somewhat compelling, despite the ideology being absolutely abhorrent.

Even if you are unaware of all of this, you are aware of things born from 4Chan and its many copycats, like 8Chan. You have seen a meme. You have seen Pepe the Frog. You know of the hacking collective Anonymous. What you may not know is how well organized the fascist creep was through these message boards. I did.

When I evolved from college libertarian to leftist journalist, I studied my old internet haunts. I saw the actions of the fascist ghoul Steve Bannon before I was forced to gaze upon his pockmarked alcoholic mug. When he was building a real-world living off of World of Warcraft gold schemes, he was radicalizing the basement-dwelling edgelords who didn’t have any other social outlet outside of their weird forum bubbles.

What I didn’t know is that 4Chan’s mythical and controversial founder, Moot, met with Jeffrey Epstein the day /pol/ was returned to the board in force. Bannon worked with Epstein as he was also helping the campaign of Donald Trump in 2016. The allegedly dead pedophile’s brother Mark Epstein confirmed Bannon himself has hundreds of hours of interviews with Jeffrey Epstein locked away, adding that Bannon was trying to launder the creep’s reputation.

This actually does change everything.

One of the things that converted me from a college libertarian was reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and finding the entire damn thing insufferable. Another was playing Minecraft when it first dropped in beta while listening to lectures from notable academic anarchist Noam Chomsky. It was Chomsky who opened my eyes to the oppression of the Palestinian people long before I sat at an event featuring a woman who survived the Nakba.

So, of course, when I saw him canoodling with Epstein and discovered Epstein funded his research, I realized that I had been played. The Marxists were right. The wrong town crier against manufactured consent died last week. Rest in peace, Michael Parenti.

Manufactured consent is one of those phrases you hear and it makes sense, but you have to apply it in all situations. My favorite examples come from the regime of terror administered by George W. Bush. We would constantly get word that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). In fact, it’s the entire reason we had to go into a sovereign nation that had absolutely no tangible ties to 9/11.

When someone is falling into manufactured consent, they say, “We have to stop them from getting weapons of mass destruction, or else we will die!” It’s a normal human response to hearing that a country you are told hates you and wants you and your children dead could get the means to do it. What manufactured consent fails to mention — outside of the obvious, Iraq isn’t pursuing WMDs — is that Iraq wouldn’t be a danger even if it had them.

Another aspect of nuclear war no one considered when the bipartisan 24-hour news cycles played propagandistic lies on repeat to a nation made traumatized by the three days of constant coverage of the 9/11 attacks a couple of years earlier is that Iraq couldn’t even get the United States with a nuke if it had one.

Delivering a nuclear weapon to the United States means crossing vast oceans, or at least over the North Pole, for most nations wanting to attack it. The nuclear triad — the ability to deliver nuclear weapons via bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and sea-based submarines — means the United States, China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and Israel have most of these bases covered. Iraq definitely does not.

So, if Iraq had a nuclear weapon, what would have happened? My guess is that hundreds of thousands of its citizens would not have been destroyed by an American invasion, subsequent power vacuum, and every ripple from that. It’s the reason we’ve never formally invaded North Korea or assassinated its leadership. If Ukraine kept its nuclear weapons following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia wouldn’t have invaded it. If Iran had one, Israel and the United States wouldn’t attack it.

But, no, Americans heard that Saddam Hussein could get a nuke and instantly thought he would incinerate their Midwest, backwoods, Bible-thumping children. In fact, he wanted to attain one so our troops wouldn’t do the same to his. Even dictators have to keep the people happy and unincinerated.

So, what I am telling you is that Jeffrey Epstein had a direct hand in creating the fertile ground for both the alt-right and the informed liberal anarchist alike. In fact, one of the only political ideas not directly entangled in Epstein’s tentacles was Marxism.

Liberal darling Bill Gates, who is hated by every right-wing nutjob who thinks he hid microchips in Covid vaccines and every left-wing comrade who hates tech trusts and worms who run shady non-profits designed to funnel more money to bloated pharmaceutical companies, was caught trying to drug his wife with antibiotics. Melinda Gates cited her ex-husband’s ties to Epstein as a reason for their divorce. She described Epstein as “evil.” He was, but so was her wormy little husband, trying to secretly cure the sexually-transmitted infections (STIs) he passed to her from Russian sex workers trafficked by Epstein.

When Epstein didn’t coalesce with Gates, Gates banned him from Xbox Live. The ban came in 2013, five years after Epstein was originally convicted of procuring children for sex in 2008. Convicted sex offenders like Jeffrey Epstein are not supposed to be allowed to be on Xbox Live, yet he was until Gates banned him for trying to blackmail him over the whole trying to secretly drug his wife to cover the infidelity thing.

I remember when Gates was the richest man alive. However, now we have proof that the current richest man alive, Elon Musk, was snubbed by Jeffrey Epstein when he tried to invite himself onto Little Saint James, aka “Epstein Island.” Other released emails implied Elon had attended parties on that island with his ex-wife. That’s pretty rich coming from a guy who denied it and then threw his great friend Donald Trump under the bus on the social media platform he owns.

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Which brings us to Trump. There is a lot of shit about Trump. The DOJ even tried to delete a lot of it before reposting it. These files detail abhorrent behavior alleged to have been conducted by Donald Trump. Now, this is where we have to have some media literacy. A lot of those yellow-highlighted allegations making their rounds literally everywhere come from tips given to authorities. Literally anyone calling them can say whatever they want, and it is recorded.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) isn’t a credible agency at this moment, but the proximity of many of those calls to the 2020 election cannot be rightfully ignored. At that point, the media claimed Epstein committed suicide in his jail cell, and Donald Trump was already implicated in that mess. Anyone who wanted Joe Biden to win, or at least Trump to lose, had a horse in that race. So, it would be safe to assume that many of those calls are less than credible.

If you are of the liberal persuasion, I would like to point out the similarities between these calls and multiple reports given to the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC’s) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). During the rollout of the Covid vaccine, multiple people posted side effects on that site. Because of the amount, the average person could assume that the vaccines were dangerous. However, an investigator would have to take more time poring through these claims to find an actual one. Like every vaccine, the Covid-19 ones had side effects. That being said, Covid-19 itself has much worse side effects than its vaccine.

So the idea of Trump killing and raping children isn’t that far out of the realm of possibility, given the depth, scope, and absolute horror of the entire Epstein rabbit hole, however, it is far from a proven fact at this point. I’m not here telling you Donald Trump didn’t kill and rape kids, because I totally think he did. No one’s eyes are that beady and soulless without committing several crimes against humanity. I am just saying these heinous allegations are not the hills to die upon with your right-wing family members…. yet.

If you want some shit that probably actually happened, look into a lawsuit filed against Trump and Epstein regarding their rape of a 13-year-old girl. I’m not saying the rest of that stuff didn’t happen. I am saying again that this particular part of the file drop isn’t proof.

What these files do prove, however, is that our entire political reality is a game funded by inhuman capitalists. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon funded the new documentary on Melania Trump to the tune of $70 million. The movie was made by Brett Ratner, himself a member of the Epstein files, photographed with a redacted female next to Epstein and another redacted female. Ratner had his arms around her. Add to it the popular anecdote that Trump met Melania through Epstein and first had sex with her on Epstein’s plane, the Lolita Express.

Fun Fact: Donald Trump’s campaign plane once belonged to Epstein, but it wasn’t the notorious Lolita Express that took everyone who lords over the proletariat to Little St. James to rape children.

All of this reminds me of something said by George Carlin. It should do the same for a lot of people. “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”

Personally, I am glad I am not in a club that exploits the labor of the world’s workers while raping its children. I feel like I am better off in my soul being a lower-middle-class propagandist who likes adult women over the age of 25. That being said, I, like the rest of us, have fallen into propaganda traps set by Jeffrey Epstein.

For those of you who need led to water, 4Chan and 8Chan evolved their conspiracies into such wonderful threads as PizzaGate, which accused a D.C. pizzeria of harboring and trafficking children based on its owners’ weird ass Instagram as well as the cryptic emails between Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Director John Podesta and random people talking about maps, pizza, and spirit cooking with a flashy occultist named Marina Abromavich.

Inside of me dwells a conspiracy theorist who believes that PizzaGate was a distraction from whatever the fuck those weird emails actually meant. Seriously, read some of the source material for PizzaGate and tell me what the fuck John Podesta was talking about — I dare you.

PizzaGate, of course, led to QAnon, which upped the ante. QAnon was an anonymous poster, or series of posters, who were doing a live action roleplay (LARP) of being an agent of the U.S. Department of Energy who had (an actual designation) Q-level clearance. Q, as they were called, promised that Donald Trump and the U.S. military were rounding up all the secret liberal pedophiles from Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey to Ellen DeGeneres and Hillary Clinton.

One of the best things that came from that was the rumor of FrazzleDrip, an alleged video of Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin eating a child and wearing their face allegedly discovered on Abedin’s partner, disgraced New York politician Anthony Weiner’s hard drive while he was (actually) being investigated for sending lewd images to a child.

So, yeah, that’s how deep into the miasma I go when investigating a psychological operation (psy-op). I learn about all of this horrendous shit so you don’t have to poison your own minds. Because of how deep I went, I knew Charlottesville’s Unite the Right movement would be big, stupid, and violent. I knew that Jan. 6 was going to happen. I know about the Proud Boys, Patriot Front, and Oath Keepers.

What I didn’t know is that every seed for it was planted by fucking Jeffrey Epstein. The world in which we live was crafted by an intelligence asset who trafficked kids, could barely spell, and played Wesley Willis on his Spotify. Look around. It’s pretty obvious.

And, it’s not just the scum of the earth sections of the internet with his tendrils in them, either. MaxwellHouse, one of the most prolific Reddit users of all time, was the mask for Ghislaine Maxwell. That den of liberal thought, paired with the most annoying jargon of any website and really fucked up and sketchy amateur pornography, was partially crafted by Epstein’s personal fixer, ex-girlfriend, and procurer of children.

She was active around the same time the site had a crisis of subreddits dedicated to topics such as non-consensual pornography and "jailbait,” which are post-pubescent teenagers under the age of consent posted in a sexual fashion. It’s almost as if they worked as a pair to ensure the future would be more open to sexualizing children and comfortable for the sick fucks out there who partake in it.

Here we are, having to face that the majority of our ruling class either rapes children or maintains relationships with people who do, and we feel powerless. Not to get myself on any more watchlists, or get the sort of visit that requires a warrant for me to give them entry to my home, but pedophiles in power are no biologically different than the ones in our neighborhoods and families. They can meet the same ends as them. Personally, I think that means an arrest, trial, and punishment to follow.

However, no one is arresting them. In fact, they are in charge of the people murdering us in the streets and sending us to concentration camps on foreign shores and in our own backyards. These are the people who send our wages to assist in genocides and buy guns and tools used against us.

But, that email about George Bush eating a child he killed on a yacht, including the waste from the intestines, is probably true. I have no reason to think that other than vibes, but the vibes are there for sure. If they fuck kids, they probably kill and eat them, too.

If a story, video, or episode mattered to you, and you’ve got a few bucks to spare right now, you can tip us here. Any amount. One time or recurring monthly. If you can’t afford to contribute right now, that’s fine. Reading, watching, listening, sharing, and talking about our work is just as valuable.

Tomorrow, activists around the nation are calling for the Minnesota strike to go national. We agree it should. In solidarity with strikers, we will not be posting anything tomorrow, January 30. I also will not be posting on social media personally. Take that time to relax with your friends and family and meditate on what your labor means to those who work to exploit it.

It’s our taxes funding the billions of dollars in ICE funding. Those taxes could be used to get universal healthcare, rebuild our failing infrastructure, and develop new futuristic technology like clean energy and cures for diseases. They should go to those things as well as education, reparations, and forgiving student loans.

While I am usually using my soapbox to tell everyone to arm themselves, familiarize themselves with their weapon, and build mutual aid with community, I am now telling you that a general strike with clear and precise goals would do more to get our needs met than every gun and food bank in the United States combined.

One of the reasons so much money has been spent to rally against the idea of Communism since Karl Marx penned the sacred texts is that Marxism reminds folks that our labor is the thing that runs everything. Workers have been alienated from that labor. Those who own the means of that production (capitalists) set the wages as low as they possibly can while charging the most they possibly can for the products of that labor. In short, most of us are alienated from the true value of our labor.

In a nation full of billionaires and economic narcissists who believe they are temporarily poor and are among the future elites, the truth of our exploitation is deeply unpopular. Of course, the submissive libertarians among our ranks will say some weirdo shit about volunteerism and the contract of trading time and labor for cash with a capitalist, but — outside of a union — when was the last time you could shop around for a wage?

We are even trading highly-skilled positions and years worth of knowledge and practice for badly-trained artificial intelligence (AI), itself a parasite sucking our creative labors and mindlessly spitting out the knowledge it was told to ascertain for the capitalist masters who would gladly replace us with it.

It’s fucked up. You should be mad about it. You should do something about it.

So, join us. Join the hottest person alive, Pedro Pascal. Don’t go to work. Don’t buy shit. Watch our videos with an ad-blocker. We have a great interview that was set to drop tomorrow with Macoupin County Indivisible. That will now drop mid-afternoon on Saturday. There will also be no Lovejoy Desk. I will also not shit post. Friday is a day to reflect on the value of our labor and strike against the bullshit parasites who suckle from it in order to steal our time and wages. We bought the guns aimed against us with the labor they alienated from us.

We can fight back by doing absolutely nothing.

We got this, comrades. Solidarity!

The motion has since been postponed, but it was put forward by First Ward Alderperson Chris Bohn (my least favorite). It would limit the time speakers have at meetings to three minutes instead of five. If there were more than 10 speakers, it would bring it down to two. It would also force folks to address the committee “as a whole” instead of singular entities.

Obviously, the city council wants to go home earlier from long and controversial meetings. I myself have spoken at city council meetings on behalf of the Overnight Warming Locations (OWLs) when former Alton Mayor Brant Walker wanted to prevent them, against a camping ban that would criminalize homelessness in Alton, against Studio 420 owner Zachariah Yinger alongside someone who accused him of abuse, and against Kyle Hulker’s Bluebird Tattoo getting TIF funding for their parking lot. I used my full five minutes in each of these.

During each meeting, I waited patiently as other people spoke with various degrees of passion regarding a mix of things that the people of Alton hold dear. I’ve heard about water bills, homelessness, snow plows, etc. I wait for my turn to speak, I speak my mind, and I yield the podium. Whether or not the council listens, the people who care enough to attend the meetings or watch their streams at least get to hear something from the public.

I firmly believe that people should have the ability to speak their mind to public officials. While I understand a time constraint for practicality, I am even against the five-minute limit for the cause of freedom of speech. If people don’t want to hear from their constituents, they shouldn’t run for office. You should appreciate being a representative of a city that gives a shit about itself.

To limit or hinder free speech in Alton or anywhere is a grievous error. While I understand a counterargument for things like deplatforming such fucked up people as the chronic right-wing liar Alex Jones and alleged human trafficker and picture of toxic masculinity Andrew Tate, I also disagree. I wish people had more education, empathy, and media literacy so they could sort through bad ideas and throw them in the toxic waste bin where they belong, but someone has every right to say whatever they want to each other. I would argue that it should be even further expanded when speaking to the government.

Kudos to the city council for postponing that vote. While such things as the abolition of late-night liquor licenses make sense from each side of the debate, there is absolutely no benefit for the people of Alton to have less time to yell at their elected representatives.

Also, kudos to fellow local podcaster C.J. Nasello for his take on the matter. He attacked the part of it that would force speakers to address everyone instead of certain representatives and department heads.

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For years, I thought of her as a puzzle, frantically trying to make the pieces of her that have been shared with me fit. Only they never have. Not because they weren’t real, though. Every single person in her life had a different version of her, for better or worse. She will never be described by adjectives that are cohesive and agreed upon. I’ve learned to not only accept that, but to embrace it.

So, to honor her today, I want to share what I DO know about her and how I came to know it.

The first thing that people learn about her is that she died in 1990 from a heroin overdose. The day she died is the only real memory I have of her. I was raised for many years in her childhood home by the same people who raised her. According to my grandma, she would take home stray dogs and claim they followed her home so she could keep them. I know she loved Raggedy Anne. I know we looked exactly alike. I know she loved to read. I know that her loss haunted my grandparents, and it was something they never recovered from. It hurt them to talk about her. I didn’t know why until I was a teenager.

When I was a little girl, I would sneak up to her bedroom as often as I could. I would sit on her bed and touch the knick-knacks on her dresser. I never really got farther than that because it was against the rules. I spent so many years angry at my grandparents for keeping her from me. I wanted to know her. I wanted to graze my fingers over a book she once held. I wanted to wear her favorite sweaters. I wanted to feel connected to her. Now that I’m older and have children of my own who can break things by only looking at them, I get it. They lost their only daughter. They didn’t know how to navigate that loss.

Last October, my childhood home was sold. I did not know about the sale until the very last moment. I had less than a week to save everything and anything I could before the new owner cleaned it out. It was the first time I was allowed to touch ALL of her things. I found her resume, her childhood artwork, all of our baptismal sets, her books (one had a bookmark still in it, like it was just waiting for her to pick it up again), her clothes, her 8-tracks, a balloon from my own baby shower that is STILL inflated, her yearbooks, her cap and gown, her First Communion set, and so much more.

I learned she was an EMT. I learned she was a bartender. I saw her handwriting for the first time in my life. I learned she was actually super weird in the best ways and had years’ worth of date books where she cataloged everything she did. I learned she really loved creepy-looking clowns and that we both loved learning about witchcraft and vampires.

I found her coke straw in her wallet and laughed for hours about it. That week, I learned more about my mom than any story I was ever told. She died 35 years ago that month, and it was the first time I saw how she lived.

I found feathers she had saved from her most beloved birds. She was an avid bird lover who bred cockatiels. She had an awesome sense of style. She was Cher’s biggest fan. She went to a drag show in Vegas in 1982. She kept a detailed log of her social life for years. And most of all, she loved her children. She kept every single one of our baby memories — our newborn outfits, baby shower cards. Even in her addiction, she loved us. Until her last breath, she loved us.

My mom was adopted as a baby. Not knowing where she came from was something she struggled with. She wanted to know if she was loved, if her biological mom ever thought of her. It was one of the many reasons she turned to drugs. One of the things I found in her room was her records from her search for her birth mom. She never found her. Closed Catholic adoptions are tricky to navigate, and she was attempting this in the ’80s.

Last year, I made it my mission to find them. And I did. It was my gift to her. I connected with her cousin — my cousin. Her aunt was my mom’s mom. I came to learn that giving my mother up for adoption haunted her biological mother every day. She struggled with her own mental health issues and addiction. She knew she had made the right choice. She wasn’t going to be able to give my mom the life she deserved. My mother was loved. And I hope she can rest easier knowing that she was always worthy of it.

Her childhood friend, Bruce, told me about how they met in their U.S. History class and bonded over their gap teeth. He hadn’t seen her since the 1970s and didn’t learn about her death until 2016. He reached out to me to share memories and express his condolences. My mom was a baddie, obviously. I’ve always considered it a testimony to her character that she was still thought of fondly after so many years. While I am uncertain of what happens to us after death, there is one thing I’m sure of: she brought Bruce into my life, and I thank her every day for that. He is the kindest, strongest man I know and the closest thing to a father I have and will ever have.

My oldest half-brother told me a story about how she got wasted and urinated on herself in the sand on the beach. My half-sister, Dawn, told me how she lied about my dad molesting her just so she could get placed into foster care and away from my mom. She once told me it scared her how similar I am to my mother. My cousin Lynnie told me about how, after she overdosed, my dad’s whole family showed up at her dealer’s house to beat his ass. Being that we are from the South Side of Chicago, I like to imagine a Shameless-esque style brawl.

I don’t tell you these things to tarnish her memory or discount the good ones. The puzzle pieces never fit because humanity is too complex for that. More than one thing can be true. My mother was a person who loved and was loved, AND she caused hurt to a lot of people. She was a beloved mother and daughter, AND she was an addict. She loved me, AND that love couldn’t save her. It wasn’t until I stopped thinking I had to either idolize her or demonize her that I truly began to know her and grieve her.

She lost her battle with addiction, but that didn’t make her weak. In fact, dealing with my own mental health issues, addictions, and parenting my children while doing it has made me realize just how strong she really was. She showed up every day until the very moment she died. One of the most profound things my therapist has taught me is that every one of us is doing the best we can at any given moment. She woke up every day until the day she didn’t wake up at all. If you have ever struggled with mental illness and addiction, you know the strength it takes to do that.

So when I tell my kids the story of their grandma and our family, I’ll tell them everything I told you — without shame. And I’ll tell them that we get to choose how we narrate our experiences. I spent so much of my life surrendering to the notion that my trauma meant I was broken and doomed to repeat her mistakes. It was destiny.

I was wrong. I want them to know that some experiences do define us, but it’s up to us to create the meaning of them. We have choices, even at times when it appears we have no control. I’ll show them pictures of her birds, and I’ll show them a coke straw from the 1980s. That’s how my mom gets to live on in this world — through the breaking of generational curses and by her children always showing up, even on the hard days.

I wasn’t able to celebrate my mom growing up. Today, I am. I’m having cake with my kids and blowing out a candle for her. I’m going to wear her sweater I found in my childhood home for the first time.

And I’m going to donate to The Porchlight Collective. They keep people like my mom alive until they can find a way to keep themselves alive. They are a grassroots harm reduction organization — the only one like it in our area. They meet people where they are at. They understand that sometimes complete sobriety isn’t realistic. They meet that understanding with compassion and without judgment. We are so lucky to have something like this in our area. I urge you to read more about them here.

You can help by donating to their Venmo here.

It would be sweet if you could put “Happy Birthday” in the memo for her.

I miss her every day. I wish organizations like this were a thing back then. It may have saved her life. But your donation will definitely save someone else’s.

Happy birthday, Mom

Currently, OWLs can only activate when the weather drops below 20 degrees. This is because of the amount of resources and volunteers available to bear the mantle of that care. As the weekend approaches, this area is under the threat of heavy snow. While accumulation estimates vary wildly, one thing is for certain — it’s going to get cold. As I write this early Friday morning, I do so with single digits outside my window. Windchills are expected to dip below zero in the coming nights.

If there is a drop of empathy or compassion in your bones, you will recognize the need for shelter in such conditions. So, I talked to OWLs spokesperson and Alton’s Second Ward Alderperson Martha Renken Pfister regarding how the OWLs are bracing for this blast of extreme cold. She said the OWLs have activated 16 times this season as of Jan. 21. They were also opened last night (Jan. 22). The first activation was on Nov. 27.

Pfister said that they expect to nearly double that number with 11 consecutive nights under 20 degrees on the horizon at the very least. The first of those nights occurred Thursday into Friday morning.

“The season had a challenging start when our region experienced extremely cold temperatures earlier than is typical,” Pfister said in a Facebook message. “January is when we typically see back-to-back activations, but in late November to early December, we had a stretch of 5 activations in a row. This was a strain on our volunteers, especially coming right out of the Thanksgiving holiday.”

She said each of the three OWLs has three teams on a rotation. The determination to activate is made around noon based on how low overnight temperatures are predicted to drop. Even with three teams on a steady rotation, Pfister said 11 consecutive days will be precarious.

“Due to the emergency nature of this kind of schedule, it’s expected that there will be volunteer illness and conflicts that can come up, meaning our volunteer coordinators are also tasked with reaching out to subs as needed,” Pfister said.

Another issue is feeding everyone, she continued, saying that many area restaurant owners have been “incredibly generous.” That being said, not knowing an exact schedule of activation makes planning those generous offerings especially difficult. Pfister said these logistics make back-to-back activations grueling and daunting.

OWLs have improved a lot since their founding, however. Pfister said each year the organization sees improvements in both systems and procedures, often learning from what has worked and what has not. Their guest check-in system is much more streamlined, she said. New policies ensuring consistency between all three locations have also been implemented as OWLs have grown. Community support has also become essential.

“This year, Madison County Transit (MCT) reached out to us offering a transit hotline number to allow a transportation option for guests to get from a designated bus stop to the OWL on activation nights,” Pfister said. “We provide bus tokens to guests when they leave, thanks to the support from the Agency for Community Transit, and having the added MCT support for transportation to the OWL is continuing to eliminate some barriers.”

She said support from the community in large has been “incredible.” Outside of the restaurants, fundraisers such as a 2024 inaugural trivia night cater to sold-out crowds with businesses across the area eager to help sponsor. Pfister said OWLs are grateful for the financial contributions of these sponsors, but added the spirit of the donation is just as important to OWLs and their mission.

“When businesses get behind what we do, whether it’s through a donation, or a round-up campaign, or any other kind of contribution, it’s more than just the financial support,” she said. “Publicly backing our mission goes a long way in continuing to build support and trust in our community, and we are very grateful to evry business and organization that has partnered with us.”

The most important and pressing need the OWLs have from our community currently is people. Pfister is calling for more volunteers, despite having so many “amazing” volunteers as it is. No matter how amazing someone is, however, 11 back-to-back activations can cause burnout in the most willing of hearts. She also said they want their volunteers well rested. In a week of activations, a single volunteer may get called to stay overnight as many as three times. These volunteers would be assisting with as many as 100 guests over all three locations.

When the word “guest” is used here, it means a person seeking shelter from the cold. This doesn’t necessarily only mean unhoused folks. It can also mean people who may not be able to afford ever-increasing power bills under a fossil fuel monopoly and the parasitic effect of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers raising costs across the board.

When Sunken Press first started in 2019, before fizzling out before its rebirth, one of the reasons was because of the pushback from the City of Alton under the administration of former Alton Mayor Brant Walker and former Alton Police Chief Jason “Jake” Simmons to the idea of having these in the first place. I started this as advocacy for our unhoused and unheard neighbors. They are also one of the reasons I brought it back when recruited by a great team.

During that time, a lot has changed in the world — one of those being an overall change of attitude towards our unhoused neighbors. OWLs have more support now than ever. That being said, advocating for our unhoused neighbors is still difficult with Madison County finding every excuse possible to not host a homeless shelter, and camping bans being passed from the bullshit Supreme Court to the rest of the nation, including Alton itself. So, I asked Pfister how she has perceived that shift in attitude.

“There is a lot of compassion in our community, but there is also fear,” she said. “There is fear that helping our unhoused neighbors will invite more problems or unintended consequences. When we can provide more visibility and proximity, we’re able to garner more support. People tend to be especially compassionate during times like this when the weather is very cold, and we all tend to feel a real urgency to help.

“There is also stigma,” Pfister continued. “There is a tendency to see homelessness as a personal failure rather than a systemic issue. Increasing opportunities for learning and connection is important, but it’s also important to protect our guests and allow them to share their own stories, so we’re always navigating how to increase understanding in the community without exploiting the stories of our guests.”

Conditions of someone’s unsheltered status are not important when the need for shelter is so prescient in dangerous weather. She said that folks do not have as many criticisms about OWLs and their mission when the weather is this cold, and the need is this urgent. People have contacted OWLs and said their current threshold of 20 degrees is too low, demanding they open at higher temperatures, because 25 degrees is also dangerous.

“And I love that kind of frustration, because it not only calls out our need for increasing capacity through having more volunteers, but it also demonstrates that the community agrees it’s essential the OWLs exist,” Pfister said.

Connection and wellness are prevalent themes for the future of OWLs. She said that folks receive essential care items after staying the night there before heading back into the cold at morning. Volunteers and guests chat, share meals, and play games with one another. Wellness is something that Pfister said OWLs are working toward in the future.

First, however, they have to get through the next 11 days of expected back-to-back activation with the threat of a heavy winter weather event over this coming weekend. If you would like to help, all links can be found on the OWLs Linktree page here.

Applications for volunteering with OWLs (the most needed thing by them from the community right now) can be found here for Alton, here for Edwardsville, and here for Granite City.

Financial donations (which are constantly needed) can be made here.

You can also purchase a table or become a sponsor of the OWLs Trivia Night, which will take place on March 7, 2026, at the Great Rivers Hotel at 3559 College Ave. in Alton. It will be hosted by me. You can book your table or secure your sponsorship here.

A better world looks like what OWLs are doing. Support them if you can. Follow them on social media and spread their word if you cannot contribute yourself. Everything helps. Each according to their ability; each according to their need, comrades.

In September, the Madison County Board voted to memorialize Charlie Kirk following the right-wing free speech absolutist’s assassination while speaking at a Utah college. Wednesday’s legislation was a direct response to that decision last year. Several were in attendance to speak on behalf of the legislation, with one speaker coming out against it, calling Good a “harpy.” That person was identified by several in attendance as a counter-protester to an Edwardsville Martin Luther King, Jr. Rally. Activists reported to Sunken Press that the man got a bag of ice and poured it at their feet to celebrate ICE.

He probably felt like the smartest man in the world. Attendees said the man looked like an “old hippie,” adding they were surprised by his stance.

Other folks arrived to speak against a recent post from Madison County Republicans on their Facebook page. Check more details on that here:

Kate Kite, who spoke regarding that post, sent her comments to Sunken Press via Facebook message following the Wednesday night meeting. Here is her address to the board:

“Madison County Board, I have been a resident of Wood River for 19 years and very recently moved from Brynn Kinchloe’s district into Donald McMaster’s district. I am asking you all, and especially you, Messrs Kinchloe and McMaster, to publicly renounce the recent Facebook posts on the Madison County Republicans’ page. This is the official Facebook page of the Madison County Republican Party, and its recent post from January 18th is racist, xenophobic, and absolutely sickening. If you don’t know which one I’m referring to, you — as elected officials — should be more aware of the message those speaking on behalf of your party are putting out.

“It’s garnered so much outrage that the page has turned off commenting on the post. This outrage is by design and means to anger and further divide. Is this the message you want in your name? Do you want to be associated with that? Your own Facebook pages make it very clear what you’re about. Be elected officials out of honor and condemn, not condone, these repulsive posts.”

In moves that should shock absolutely no one paying attention, the Madison County Republicans on the board neither condemned that racist and xenophobic post nor voted in favor of memorializing Good.

Edwardsville-based activist Anna Bell, who alerted Sunken Press to this legislation, said advocates had a “line of speakers” in support of Good. She added that the man who called Good a “homicidal harpy” also described proponents of legislation in her honor as “Marxist KKK.” It should be noted that the KKK hates Marxists and always has.

Prior to the meeting, Bell was joined by local pastor and mutual aid organizer Sharon Autenreith at the Madison County Government Relations Committee Meeting. Autenreith previously spoke at a vigil held for Good outside the same administration building earlier this month. We published her speech in its entirety here:

Autenreith spoke in favor of the legislation memorializing Good at the committee meeting prior to the Madison County Board meeting. At the meeting itself, she said Madison County Board Member Doc Holliday, a Democrat from Alton, read a “lovely tribute letter” regarding Good prior to his yes vote. She then shared her own remarks she delivered to the board to Sunken Press.

Here is the body of her message to the board:

As a pastor, I stand before you longing for all of that to become a reality in Madison County. These virtues — decency, democracy, compassion, and human rights — are coherent with my faith and with the founding documents of our country, even if they have always been aspirational rather than fully realized. However, even these aspirations seem like a pipe dream when many of our leaders, nationally and locally, deny the dignity of Renee Good’s life and the injustice of her death.

It’s also hard to have hope for unity when the Republican Central Committee for Madison County chose the day before MLK Day to post a grotesquely racist meme. We can and MUST do better.

Renee Good held the same core moral principles that drive me and are articulated in the resolution before you. According to her wife, Becca Good, “Renee was a Christian who knew that all religions teach the same essential truth: we are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole.”

Renee got involved in ICE Observation work through her child’s school. She cared enough about her immigrant neighbors to DO something — and it led to her extrajudicial murder. Every American who genuinely believes in decency and democracy, compassion and human rights, needs to ask him or herself some hard questions about what we are prepared to do, what we are prepared to risk for love of our neighbors, both immigrant and native born. As a board, you have an easy task before you. All we are asking of you is that you vote yes on a resolution that honors the value of every life, that calls us to be our best selves, and that challenges us to love and serve our neighbors.

I know that in a fraught political climate, every vote has high stakes. But as board members, you have the opportunity to point us toward unity. You also have the opportunity to show us who you are. To quote Dr. King, “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” Please vote yes on this resolution.

Thank you for your time.

Paul Nicolussi, a Republican who represents parts of Collinsville and Maryville to the county board (and wears a dumb little hat all the time), joined fellow Republicans Dalton Gray, who represents Troy, and Mick Madison, who represents parts of Bethalto, in speaking against the legislation.

Bell said Gray, who sponsored the legislation to honor Kirk, said that Good “wasn’t from Illinois,” unlike Kirk. Because of that, Gray believed that Good had no connections to Madison County in the slightest.

She added that Madison and Nicolussi spoke on Good’s death as if she had impeded ICE and posed an actual danger to Ross with her vehicle. They said people needed to respect law enforcement more. Bell said the crowd started yelling, including slogans such as “REMEMBER TO VOTE,” adding Nicolussi “smirked” and “started filming.”

It should be noted here that Nicolussi penned a letter to the editor grossly in favor of honoring Charlie Kirk and I really, really, really, really hate his little dumb shit hat.

LOOK AT THAT LITTLE DUMB SHIT HAT. SERIOUSLY. AS A BALDING GINGER, SHAVE YOUR HEAD AND GET COOLER HATS. I LOVE STUPID HATS, BUT EVERY MAN HAS A LINE IN THE SAND, AND GOD DAMN IT, HIS STUPID FUCKING HAT IS MINE.

It cannot be emphasized how much I want to see every Republican County Board member voted out of office for doing shit like honoring Charles Entertainment Kirk and not giving two shits about a woman murdered by Trump’s Gestapo. Not only are they performative, they are Christo-fascist and weird.

Anyway, a lot of people feel like this, especially given the wanton cruelty on display throughout the country. Bell said folks who are disappointed in tonight’s vote, the racist shitpost, or the fascists in general should gather on Feb. 1 from 1-3 p.m. in Collinsville at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 309 at 2000 Mall St. Folks are invited to meet future leaders of the local Democratic Party in an effort to help them win elections.

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In a direct response to that, Alison Lamothe, Ph.D., who represents a northern portion of Edwardsville on the Madison County Board, has put forward legislation that would honor Renee Good in the same fashion. The bill is not expected to pass, given the Republican majority seated on the county board.

Those wanting to speak on the matter are encouraged to address the board. A form to get time allotted for speaking to them can be found here. Local organizers who have spoken at length regarding the importance of memorializing Good plan on bringing that same energy and information to the county board meeting at the Madison County Administration Building at 5 p.m. this evening.

“I think the praise for Charlie Kirk, while those same people demonize Renee Good shows exactly where our country is,” Edwardsville-based activist Anna Bell said in a text Tuesday. “It shows exactly how some are so willing to align themselves with white supremacy. But the amazing thing is it also shows how many people are willing to stand up when a mother is murdered and say ‘not in my fucking country,’ and fight back and protect one another.

“As hard as this past year has been, I am grateful for the amazing community it has given me. This administration thought it would break us, but it has made us so much stronger. It’s honestly been beautiful to watch.”

Bell also penned an engaging letter to us regarding Good’s death. You can find it here:

For those who have been living blissfully under a rock during the fall of the American Empire, Renee Good was shot multiple times by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agent Jonathan Ross. Ross claimed to have suffered internal injuries following the fatal interaction in which he claimed (and the fascists in power currently also assert) that Good attempted to strike him with her vehicle. Folks who have seen multiple angles of the event, including one uploaded to Minnesota-based right-wing media from Ross’s phone, have disputed these claims, alleging the 10-year ICE veteran shot Good in cold blood unnecessarily.

In response, the federal government under the Trump regime has granted blanket immunity to Ross and other ICE agents, and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem has even called Good a “domestic terrorist” following the shooting, which has been met with protests of increasing intensity as well as a surge of ICE agents conducting raids in the Twin Cities.

At a town hall in Swansea for Progressive Candidate Dylan Blaha, who is primarying incumbent IL-13 Democrat Nikki Budzinski, Blaha was asked if he would support such a measure as memorializing Good in response to the Charlie Kirk vote in Madison County. The person who asked him expressed that she found this measure to be performative when there are so many other issues in Madison County to address. Blaha agreed, saying he would avoid legislation such as this if he were elected and instead fight for actions with substance.

It should also be noted that on Monday (Martin Luther King Jr. Day to be exact), the Madison County Republicans Facebook page dropped a deeply offensive and racist meme. Bell told us via text that folks are also encouraged to come to tonight’s county board meeting and express their frustrations with that. More on that awful shitpost here:

While I can appreciate the call made by Blaha last night to avoid what could be described as “performative legislation,” I genuinely believe such things more boldly underscore the hypocrisy occurring in our nation and how it is mirrored in our own backyard. Someone like Kirk, who was murdered while celebrating the need for guns being more important than the bodies of children, and asking how many “gang-related” mass shootings there were after decrying trans people, gets more honors and accolades than a wife and mother who was trying to leave a scene after filming ICE raids against her neighbors.

What we really need to ask has been asked by Bell and others — why did it take a white woman being shot by ICE for us to talk about how many immigrants and people of color have been killed in ICE custody or completely disappeared to offshore concentration camps or countries of origin they haven’t seen since they were children. While I do support tonight’s legislation, ultimately, we need to see a complete abolition of ICE.

A better world has ice on its polls, not fascist thugs in our streets.

Alton Pride is an amazing resource in our area. Not only do they throw an incredible yearly festival full of music, family-friendly activities, drag shows, vendors, and educational resources, but they also support our community all year long through outreach, holiday events, and partnerships with other community organizations.

One of the most tangible impacts they have on our community is through their Alton Pride Scholarships, which are currently taking applications for 2026. We are here to bring you everything you need to know about how to apply.

In 2026, they will be awarding four Riverbend-area high school seniors with $1,000 scholarships to be used by those pursuing higher education.

LGBTQ+ youth grow up to be adults in leadership roles, and Alton Pride’s 2026 essay prompt showcases their desire to prepare applicants for this future.

Applicants will respond to this future-focused essay question:

If you could start a project, club, event, or movement for LGBTQ+ youth in the Riverbend area, what would it be? Share the idea, how you would implement it, what resources you would need, and why it matters.

This year’s prompt aims to elevate youth leadership by inviting students to propose real-world solutions and offer insight into the programs and supports they want to see in their communities.

As with any scholarship fund, there are requirements. Students must:

• Be a current high school senior

• Have completed at least 20 hours of volunteer work with Alton Pride or another nonprofit

• Live in the Riverbend region

• Submit a short online application and a 300–500 word essay

The deadline to apply is February 28, 2026, and winners will be announced in late spring of 2026. An online application is available at altonpride.com.

In our current political climate, it is more important than ever to support and protect our LGBTQ+ youth and their families. We NEED to be loud. We NEED to be proactive. Our LGBTQ+ youth are our future teachers, community leaders, politicians, and more. Alton Pride’s scholarship fund creates a bridge for students to access higher education, and Sunken Press stands behind the LGBTQ+ community and its allies.

Even if you don’t have a student who is eligible, we urge you to connect with Alton Pride as a volunteer and support their mission.

For those who are unaware, we have been dropping several lessons in media literacy. I don’t know if this counts as that, because I believe it is a bit below the skill level of our readership. If you’ve made it here, you probably have pieced together that this is racist and xenophobic propaganda. You at least clocked it as one of those, but it is definitely both.

So, like our last lesson, we check the source. Did this come from the actual Madison County Republican page? I don’t know. They blocked me or maybe I blocked them. One of us blocked the other. Several folks commenting on my Facebook claimed they were blocked after dropping comments critical of that shitpost. One aspect of media literacy is that organic trends are worth looking into. If enough real, actual people report the same experience, it likely happened.

I did a little trick of using one of my multiple fake shadow accounts, and sure enough, the actual Madison County Republican Facebook page shared that piece of racist and xenophobic propaganda. They seemed to be blocking everyone who was saying it was fucked up and deleting their comments. Despite containing elected officials within the party, the party itself isn’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), so unlike the City of Alton, I cannot demand to know who did it as a member of the public entitled to the information.

For those of you who do need a basic lesson in media literacy, this meme showcases Somali pirates — a group of well-armed folks in shabbily built speedboats using plundered military hardware to commandeer merchant ships en route to the Suez Canal by way of the Red Sea, which borders the East African nation of Somalia.

Why would such characters be in the landlocked State of Minnesota’s National Guard? Well, lately U.S. Fascist President Donald Trump has made many comments regarding Somalians, and has sent 2,400 members of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to attack Minneapolis-St. Paul and terrorize citizens and non-citizens alike. The Twin Cities have the largest concentration of Somali immigrants to the U.S. They are fleeing the same ongoing civil war that led to both the poverty and weapons plunder of the Somali Pirates.

What would surprise many Americans absorbed in the same right-wing propaganda, leading to a major political party feeling emboldened enough to post that racist and xenophobic meme, is that 87% of Somali immigrants in the country are legal naturalized citizens. As many as 58% were born on American soil, guaranteeing them the same degree of citizenship as everyone else born here. Trump has eyed the destruction of birthright citizenship, a right enshrined in the Constitution, since the beginning of his second acursed term.

Because so many legal Somali immigrants live in the Twin Cities, and that’s the most populated area of Minnesota, racists like Trump and whoever posted this shit from the Madison County Republican Party think it’s a genuine belly laugh. When Minnesota Governor and failed Democratic candidate for the vice presidency Tim Walz said he would activate the Minnesota National Guard in response to protests against ICE (more likely to be used against protesters than ICE agents), these bastards felt it was right to post this.

This equates Somali folks with their worst examples. It also paints Somali pirates as villains without stories or causes. This doesn’t touch upon the harsh economic, geopolitical, and racially-based issues leading to this piracy. This would be like posting a picture of a bunch of inbred KKK sympathizers as all Americans, only worse, because we actually elect those sorts to elevated positions in our nation.

Anyway, this is very similar to the election season attack on Haitian immigrants in Ohio claiming they were eating the dogs, eating the cats, and eating the pets of the community. When it was revealed to be a complete fabrication used against another group of black refugee immigrants, current U.S. Vice President and alleged couch-fucker J.D. Vance said: “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

I hate seeing it in our own backyard. I know I try to remain optimistic, and I will always assert that a better world is inevitable, but it is sometimes crippling to know the inner seething hatred existing in the ever-decaying hearts of our fascist neighbors. I don’t worry as much about the sycophantic nature of these pedophile-supporting frauds shitposting racist nonsense on social media as I do the random people who follow it, support it, and decide to vote for that venom.

Even when shown that this propaganda mirrors that created and espoused by Nazi Germany, folks will double down in their beliefs. Vance admitted the third Trump campaign fabricated the eating pets story, yet the true believers of this fascist regime will allow their children to go no contact, dying on that hill that it was in fact real. It’s a sickness.

But, hey, at least we got this out of it:

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Last year, we reported on the often-overlooked Wabash Faultline, which runs through the central and eastern parts of Illinois. Check out this in-depth piece I did about earthquake preparedness early in our Substack journey:

That story was in regard to a 3.3 earthquake reported in the central part of Illinois as well. Much like this one, it was also felt in Decatur. However, this quake was also reportedly felt throughout the Riverbend and St. Louis. I awoke to it being an alert on my NextDoor app, which I use for purely journalistic purposes, not at all for gossip and drama.

This quake was relatively shallow, being located 8.8 kilometers below the ground. Anything below 70km is considered shallow. Shallow quakes can cause stronger waves, much more capable of damage and shaking than deep ones. The seismic waves produced by shallow quakes are much more dangerous to homes and infrastructure than deeper ones. The quake occurred just before 1:30 a.m. Tuesday morning.

This was the only quake from the area over the past three weeks. However, a series of small quakes ranging from 1.5 to 2.6 on the Richter Scale have rippled through the still-active New Madrid Faultline over the last month, which is not necessarily out of the ordinary.

According to the USGS, there is a 25-40% chance that the New Madrid will experience a very dangerous and damaging earthquake rated at 6.0 or greater on the Richter Scale over the course of the next 50 years. As I wrote in the article shared above, the Wabash Fault, also affecting our state, is another silent and often not considered threat in our area. Small quakes like the one last night are great opportunities to brush up on safety protocols in the event of the scary inevitable. Such a quake would cause massive loss of life as well as billions in damage to property and infrastructure.

The American Red Cross has simple instructions on earthquake safety that families should practice if they live in an area under threat of damaging quakes. When the shaking starts, DROP to your hands and knees. This will allow you to maintain balance and crawl to a protected space. COVER your head and neck with your arms. Find something sturdy to shelter under or at least stay away from windows and crawl to an interior wall. HOLD ON until the shaking stops, careful to protect your head and neck from injuries.

Folks are also strongly encouraged to secure their spaces in the case of an earthquake. Look through your home. Identify things that could fall in an earthquake. Secure them accordingly. TVs, shelves, bookcases, water heaters, framed images and art on the wall, and heavy items in open cabinets could all be potential hazards and devastating expenses following a quake.

Also, for all emergencies, have enough provisions to last two weeks (I try to budget for 6) in your home. Rice, beans, and water can go a long way, especially with a well-ventilated camping stove and a reserve of propane. Having additional batteries for cellphones, two-way radios, and a battery-operated weather radio may all be great investments for emergency preparedness. Flashlights, batteries, electric candles, and solar-powered chargers are as well. These things are not just great for earthquake safety. They also work well for other disasters, including tornadoes. Illinois led the nation in 2025 tornadoes, so the equipment most likely will be useful at some point.

Practice this stuff with your family, neighbors, and community. Build a network of mutual aid in case the government isn’t funded enough or doesn’t actually care to help us. Our communities are the building blocks of all recovery from tragedies, and earthquakes are no exception. Be prepared. If you can get extra for those who are not, you should. We are ultimately all in this together, regardless of how much you do or don’t prepare for the future.

A quick note on Patreon

We’re winding down Patreon-exclusive content.

Patreon was originally set up with the idea of bonus material and extras for paid members. In practice, that model hasn’t really worked for us or for most of our audience. Rather than keep pretending we’re going to build a separate content track there, we’re being honest about it and simplifying.

Patreon will remain open for now for anyone who prefers to support us that way, but we won’t be producing exclusive content there in the near future. If you’d like to stay, you’re welcome to. If you’d rather cancel and support us another way, please do that without guilt.

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