I’ve been inside the Delaney Hall Signal chats for a week now.
Right now they’re falling apart.
In-fighting. Finger pointing. Nobody agrees on who’s leading what. People questioning strategy in real time.
It’s beautiful.
More to come
I was “randomly” stopped again at the Tampa Airport. I’m sure it’s just another coincidence. Did I state that I don’t believe in coincidence?
Increased “random searches” occurred the day after my May 20th #SPLC testimony and again the next time I traveled on May 27.
Random searches became a regular occurrence during the Biden/Obama reigns. @TSA@FBI@DOJ I chose the pat down over the scatter machine.
It’s just what I do for my country and public service. My great grandson, Hezekiah, was the photographer.
On our MAHA journey, we have introduced the following:
100% grass-fed, grass-finished beef ✅
100% beef tallow fries ✅
100% beef tallow tots ✅
Grade A Wisconsin butter ✅
A2 whole milk ✅
Cane-sugar Coca-Cola ✅
Elimination of all microwaves ✅
And we are working on changing our buns!
We are committed to becoming seed-oil free, because we are committed to making fast food the best it can be.
@mattvanswol YES!!!! I grew up much more feral than you as I'm older and when I raised my girls, who are now in their 30's, I did my best to give them a more feral upbringing than their friends. Neither had social media or a phone until Senior Year in high school and they both did great.
I keep getting asked why I'm so angry and so focused about repeat-offender crime.
This photo right here… this is why.
I grew up in a country where childhood felt free.
Not perfect, but free.
We hopped on our bikes after breakfast and didn't come home until the streetlights flicked on.
No phones.
Just a bunch of kids pedaling through the neighborhood... cutting through yards, racing down hills, stopping at a friend's house because you saw their bike was in the grass out front and knew they were home so you knocked on the door and got hit with a water-balloon.
That's the start of a life-long friendship.
We went to public pools with a diving board and a high dive (they tore those down)
We played soccer in the front yard with whoever happened to be outside... sometimes they were kids you knew from school, but often times they were kids you only knew because you saw them every summer riding past your house.
It was normal for my parents to assume their kids would ALWAYS come home in one piece and my parents NEVER knew where we were growing up.
That's the America I knew, and the one I grew up in.
My kids are not growing up in that America.
I don't get to just be the parent yelling, "Be home by dinner!" I have to be the parent running risk calculations in my head. Because all of us parents know the public spaces aren't safe anymore.
There's no headline for "OH LOOK AT THAT! Another neighborhood kept their kids indoors today and gave them iPads!"
But go ahead and talk to ANY parent you know… it’s happening.
We all know it's happening.
It's the slow, quiet theft of my kids' childhood... and your kids childhood.
A childhood we ALL once had and one they will never know.
It wrecks me just thinking about it... I hate it for them.
So when I talk about repeat offenders... when I post the screenshots of their 50+ arrests every single day…
Please understand something…
It's because I want my kids, and your kids, to have what we had.
I want the biggest concern at a park to be a skinned knee.
Not a st*bbing.
I want streets where the sound of bicycles and laughter is louder than that of sirens.
This is why I won't shut up about it.
I'm not asking for a perfect world.
I'm asking for the radical idea that childhood should be safe enough to look like this picture again.
And honestly, I just don’t think it’s all that radical of an ask…
My wife planted a little hummingbird/butterfly garden outside the greenhouse last ummer just for this! This little guy has been flying around us all morning
An Iowa woman moved to South Dakota to single-handedly save 950 acres of native prairie.
Her name is Tracy Rosenberg. She grew up on an Iowa farm in a state that had once been 85% Northern Tallgrass Prairie. By the time she graduated high school, that number was down to one-tenth of one percent.
She spent 35 years in Des Moines. A divorce forced the sale of the small farm she'd been planning to convert. She started looking for native prairie to buy in Iowa, but there wasn't any left to find.
Then she read a 2012 Star Tribune article about prairie conservation that mentioned Pete Bauman, an ecologist with the Nature Conservancy working in the Dakotas.
She emailed him. Within an hour, he wrote back and told her that the Benedictine monks at Blue Cloud Abbey near Marvin, South Dakota, were closing and selling their land, including some of the last unplowed native sod in the state.
So she packed up and moved to a place she had never been.
In 2013, Tracy bought almost 1,000 acres of virgin tallgrass prairie. She named it Abbey Grasslands of the Prairie Coteau. Then she got to work with prescribed burns, intensive rotational grazing, and integrated pest management.
She's spent the last 13 years restoring degraded sections and protecting the intact ones. The federally threatened Dakota Skipper butterfly, gone from most of its historic range, has been documented on her land.
Tracy received the USDA NRCS Earth Team Individual Award and was named Conservationist of the Year by the National Organization of Professional Women.
She gives talks at national prairie conferences, hosts educational tours for ranchers and tribal college students, and runs the property as a working classroom.
Less than 4% of America's tallgrass prairie remains. The nearly 1,000 acres Tracy is protecting is some of it.
What do these 6 kids all have in common?
They each completed our 50 Yard Challenge by mowing 50 FREE lawns in their communities for the elderly, disabled, single parents, and veterans.
With every 10 lawns, they earned a new color shirt, and at 50 lawns they received their black shirt (like a black belt in karate) 🥋—along with a brand-new mower, weed eater, and blower!
👉 Will your child be the next to take on the challenge?
Kids can join from any city, any state. Raking leaves and snow shoveling count too.
Sign up here: https://t.co/cUXfnpDBhS
(These kids are from previous years.)
My birthmom was raped. That is how I was conceived. She was young, not quite 16. Family demanded she abort me, and offered to pay. She said no.
During an ultrasound, doctors saw I would be special needs. I was diagnosed with hydrocephalus. The only thing that changed was she sought out a family who would want a special needs baby.
My parents were qualified and willing to raise a child with special needs.
Of course, when I was born there was no sign of hydrocephalus, but that's a story for another time.
Special needs babies deserve life. They deserve love, care, and life.
@yesnicksearcy Incredible. Most definitely God at work in that moment at the Waffle House. Thank you for sharing this story with all of us. You made my day.
From my book, JUSTIFY THIS, in the chapter about GOSNELL:
"We were filming the movie in Oklahoma, and there was one role that we still had not cast. I just had not seen anyone that struck me as right for the role.
On a Sunday after the second week of shooting, I went to a Waffle House (my favorite restaurant chain by the way) in Oklahoma City. The place was very busy, and the manager was going around apologizing to everybody for their meals being late.
I kept looking at her. There was something about her. She was very attractive, and she had a tattoo on her neck. There was a certain toughness about her, and she way she carried herself was so poised and competent. There was a strength and a wisdom to her that I thought would really read on camera.
I felt moved to go and talk to her. I waited until she had a free moment, and I said, “Look, I know this sounds like a crazy pickup line, but…um, have you ever done any acting?”
Obviously having never been asked that question, she predictably responded, “Um, no.”
I said, “Look, I know this might sound like a cliche pick-up line, but…I really am a director from Hollywood and I really am shooting a movie here in town, and there’s a part in it that you would be right for. Would you mind if I got the script and let you read it with me to see if it’s something you want to do?”
“Um, okay.”
I drove home and got the script and went back to the Waffle House and sat down with her in a booth to read the script together. I explained that the character only had three or four lines, but they were very important to the story. I said, “I think you could do this. Would you be willing?”
She was understandably skeptical of this guy who suddenly showed up at her job claiming to be a Hollywood director and offering her a role in a movie. “I don’t know. How much would it pay?” she asked.
I said, “Well, it’ll probably be at least two or three days of work—and it’ll pay about eight hundred and thirty dollars a day.”
She said, “Okay.”
Probably a little better than Waffle House.
The first day she came to work, she practically brought her entire family with her to make sure I wasn’t some sort of crazy serial killer. We shot with her a couple of days, and she did very well. She was a natural. I kept telling her, “Tessya, don’t try to be interesting. You’re interesting enough. Just tell the truth. Let the words do the work for you.” And she was terrific.
On the third day, one of the producers, Ann, came over to me and said, “You’re not going to believe this.”
I replied, “Oh no. What now?” I was sure someone had quit, or some location had fallen out, or some other low-budget-movie disaster had occurred.
She said, “The thing that happened to her character in the movie happened to her in real life.”
I said, “What are you talking about?”
“Tessya, in her real life, went to have an abortion, and when they let her listen to the heartbeat of the baby, she decided not to go through with the abortion. She had her baby, just like her character in the movie.”
I was floored. I felt the hand of God was at play here. I believe God led me to that Waffle House to find her. That something inside me, telling me, when I first saw her, “She can do it! She can do it!”—was Him.
She is now the proud mother of three boys, including her firstborn, whose heartbeat changed her life.
@sagesteele@WaffleHouse