I'm a dad of two teenage daughters, and this site exists because of them.
I've been fascinated by politics for about as long as I can remember. As a kid, I was proudly part of the conservative, religious right, an identity shaped almost entirely by my parents' beliefs, the way these things usually are. I have a specific memory of hand-lettering “Reagan for President” signs and taping them to the sides of my desk in my elementary school classroom. On days when there was no dress code requiring it, I'd wear a thin knit tie to school, doing my best Alex P. Keaton impression. Looking back, I was, by any fair account, a dork who'd been a little too influenced by politics a little too early.
As I got older, my thinking evolved, not away from caring about the country, but toward a clearer idea of what I actually think government is for.
Representatives are supposed to represent. That's the job description. Our tax dollars pay their salaries, though it's increasingly obvious that corporate money and organized interests pay a lot more than that, and it shows in whose calls get returned.
I still believe in the basic promise: a government that works for the benefit of all its citizens, not just the ones who can afford access. But I don't think we're close to that anymore. Money and entrenched interests have worked their way so deeply into the system that the standard American citizen, regardless of party, isn't really being represented. That's not a partisan talking point to me. It's just what I see when I look at how Washington actually operates.
He told a lot of disillusioned people, many of them people I recognized because I grew up around them, that he was different. That he'd fight for the guy who felt left behind by the system, forgotten by both parties.
I understood the appeal, because I understood the disillusionment. I'd felt it myself.
But I don't think he delivered on it. I think he's a con man: someone who read the anger and the exhaustion accurately, then used that read not to fix the imbalance, but to enrich himself and the people around him even further. Look past the rhetoric to the actual record, and that's the conclusion I keep arriving at.
I don't think it stops at self-enrichment. I think in doing this, he's building an authoritarian state, and he's not building it alone. Pair a government less and less constrained by norms with corporations that already track our every movement through our phones, our purchases, and license-plate readers like Flock cameras posted on street corners in ordinary neighborhoods, and we're not as far as I'd like from what George Orwell described in 1984. Some days I think Mike Judge and Etan Cohen's Idiocracy is the more accurate prophecy. Either way, I don't think this is an accident. I think the people who benefit most from the current arrangement are nervous, and they're looking for every available way to lock in their control before it can be taken back.
At the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, someone reportedly asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government the delegates had created. His answer: “A republic, if you can keep it.” Some people I respect think we've already lost it. I'm not there yet.
Both of my brothers are smart people, and both are disillusioned with where we've ended up. One of them has checked out entirely: no news, no local politics, no national politics. He's just done. My other brother, also whip-smart, has a whole framework, a literal diagram, for what he calls his circle of control. His view is that national politics sits so far outside that circle that engaging with it is a waste of energy better spent elsewhere.
I understand both of them. I suspect they're more at peace than I am most days. But I can't get there myself. I believe we have one last chance to keep this republic what it's supposed to be, and I'm not willing to spend it looking away.
Here's the specific problem this site is trying to solve: I think this administration is running an informational blitzkrieg. The storylines change so fast that most of us can't keep up. A new one arrives before we've finished processing the last, let alone connected it to the one before that. I don't think that's incidental. Flooding the zone is a strategy. It's exhausting by design, and exhaustion is what makes people stop paying attention.
The only real countermeasure I know of is to keep the whole narrative in one place, dated and sourced, so the throughline doesn't disappear. We are, all of us, the employers here: these are our representatives, paid with our tax dollars, acting in our name. We're entitled to the complete story of what they're doing with that authority, not just whatever fragment of it survived the last 48 hours of news cycle.
I want to be straightforward about this: I'm one person doing this alone, not a newsroom. Every entry on this site is sourced from reputable, established news organizations. I maintain a subscription to the New York Times and pull additional reporting from the AP, the BBC, NPR, and similar outlets. I read and save the underlying stories myself, and I use an AI-assisted process I've built to help organize that reporting into the timelines and topic sections you see on the site. The judgment about what's important and how it connects is mine. The underlying facts come from the news organizations doing the actual reporting, not from me and not from the AI.
I've often wondered how an ordinary German citizen in the 1930s let the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party happen in front of them, let alone the atrocities that followed. Was it apathy? Fear? Did people actually believe the propaganda? I don't know the full answer, and I try not to be glib about a comparison that heavy. But I know I don't want to find out, decades from now, that I was the kind of citizen who did nothing while it mattered. If you're reading this site, I suspect you feel some version of the same thing.
I take some comfort in the fact that people have felt this outmatched before and kept going anyway. A sixteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin wrote his Silence Dogood letters as public commentary under a pseudonym, needling the powerful because he had no standing to do it any other way. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay wrote the Federalist Papers to argue for a constitution that, at the time, was very much not guaranteed to succeed. They were arguing against the most powerful government structures of their era. I have to imagine they felt outgunned plenty of times, and that the events of their day looked, to them too, like something well outside anyone's circle of control. They kept writing anyway.
I also built this for my daughters. They're teenagers now, old enough to start paying real attention to the world they're inheriting. I wanted there to be an honest, factual record they could go back to on their own, one that doesn't ask them to trust any single person's memory of events, mine included.
I grew up believing in this country's institutions. I still do. This site is my small effort to hold them, and the people currently running them, to the standard I think they deserve.
I'm signing this the way I opened it — with a pen name, not because I have anything to hide, but because Franklin didn't need his own name to make his case either. He was just a printer's apprentice with something he thought needed saying. I'm just a dad with the same problem.