“That a fact, huh?” said Mackowski.
“Oh, I’d rock that ass, boy,” said Kate. “I promise you that.”
Fitzpatrick’s aide abruptly snorted a laugh and then quickly touched a hand to his mouth to stifle it. Other than that, the hideaway was silent, all eyes on Kate and the senator.
Driving out of Wyoming and across the empty expanse of Nebraska, Missouri, and Illinois, wind roaring through the windows because her truck’s AC was broken, how was I to know that I’d one day work for Kate? In 2022, as A Fierce Blue Fire gained steam, she offered me a job doing media outreach. The boss hiring her boyfriend made “logistical, financial, emotional, and unethical sense,” she joked.
This was right as they were able to afford office space and Kate began to grow her trusted inner circle. My desk was beside that of Coral Sloane and their encyclopedic brain. At first, I couldn’t help but study their tattoos: a red shooting star on a forearm, David Bowie in full alien garb on their bicep, Winnie the Pooh, sitting contentedly in the crotch of a tree with his pot of honey, on their shoulder. It was such a strange collection of ink for someone so sober and unrelentingly level-headed. Coral could listen to an argument or idea and instantly deliver a complex analysis of its merits and drawbacks. It was Coral who began laying the seeds of doubt around the version of the Green New Deal that emerged early in Hogan’s term. “It’s become a catchall for any and all progressive ideation while also letting industry off the hook,” they said.
Coral led the charge in developing a fifty-state strategy, particularly in congressional districts with a coastline vulnerable to sea level rise and climate disruption. They led the push to begin funding climate Republicans and third-party challengers in select districts and supported Kate in building the Outposts.
But Coral was also not the ultra-serious, Harvard Kennedy taskmaster I’d expected. The first day, as I set up my desk, I noticed the Alien action figure from my favorite movie franchise. Its eyeless banana head glowered from Coral’s desk.
“Which one is your favorite?” I asked. Coral looked at me with pure befuddlement.
“That’s an absurd question to even ask, Stanton.”
“Obviously, it’s the Cameron?”
“Game over, man! Game over!”
We quickly became friends, and when Kate was out of town, traveling to new Outposts and offices, Coral and I would get together for movie marathons or to play VR games. Kate called me from the road once, and I said I’d have to call her back because Coral and I were watching Starship Troopers. She laughed.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” said Kate. “You guys are cute is all.”
The quagmire produced by the climate politics of the Biden years influenced Kate’s next two hires. The first was Tom Levine, who came to Kate’s attention through the D.C. grapevine. The organization needed an outside game, an infestation of climate in every facet of public life, but it also needed a better inside game, a creature of the swamp with sharp elbows. Foul-mouthed, funny, and occasionally a vitriolic asshole, Tom Levine chomped through a tin of tobacco a day, kept whiskey in his desk, and always seemed to have cocaine on him. He was also a damn smart guy who hated every faction in American politics. This included the entire wingnut Republican establishment and spineless Third Way Democrats, but he reserved his most vicious rancor for the self-righteous progressives he’d spent his career working for.
“The first thing you’ve got to remember about this town,” he told me soon after I came aboard, “is that every lawyer is angling for the Supreme Court, every doctor for surgeon general, every cashier for a lobbying gig. No one actually does their job. They all have a mental chessboard and are calculating five moves ahead.” He lit a cigarette at his desk and walked away, spraying a bottle of Febreze behind him.
Rekia Reynolds came aboard in ’24. Rekia, a veteran of Black Lives Matter, had first come to our attention when she wrote a piece decrying Kate as a “white apologist’s fantasy girl for deracialized discourse,” and that her vision “glossed over the country’s foundational organizing principle of white supremacy in favor of a kumbaya story about post-racial eco-camaraderie.” This was the first true blowback we’d gotten from the Left, and it felt deeply unfair. I spent two nights up until 3 a.m. drafting a detailed rebuttal to Rekia’s argument: all of our outreach to BLM groups, the Outposts we were building in urban centers, and oh yeah, the fact that Kate was actually biracial, which this stupid woman had not even bothered to learn.
Kate took one quick skim of the letter and said, “Dude, don’t publish this.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because she’s got a point. We very intentionally gloss over all kinds of histories of power in America. Purposefully, though! Purposefully.”
“Oh, great, Kate. Agree with this identity politics witch who just trashed you.”
“I think we should offer her a job.”
During Rekia’s interview, she stuck to her guns, lecturing Kate about the legacy of environmental racism and the movement’s inhospitable stance toward communities of color. She was short, curvy, and dark-skinned, with an urgency to her every word and gesture. I’d come to learn that Rekia ordered takeout like she was telling people there was a fire in the kitchen, and I got my first glimpse of this energy during her interview.
“Rekia, let’s take a breath,” said Kate when she finally got a turn to talk. “The fact of the matter is that we are having this fight in the context of a demographically changing country with a toxic history of racism. It’s also a fact that our political system gives rural, mostly white regions disproportionate influence in the electorate. That’s an iron-clad reality we must deal with as we navigate this emergency. So we need to go out and start winning those regions and not cede them to the Trumpists and Mackowskiites. Not just because it’s the tactically correct path but because it’s the morally correct one. We offer our hand even when it’s slapped away. We have to meet people where they are, and that means not cramming various guilts down their throats—”
“How the hell?” Rekia demanded. “You’re spinning this fantasy and forgiving behavior—”
“We’re trying to forge an effective counterforce against powerful institutions, and we need an aspirational vision of our common humanity. Solidarity! Now do you want to continue lobbing tweets from the sidelines or do you want to actually join a movement that’s trying to remake the world? In other words, do you want this fucking job, bitch, or not?”
Through all of this, Liza Yudong remained the innovator, the unsung brains behind our social platform, small-donation operation, voter data project, and finally, as Slapdish exploded in the public consciousness, our “worlde.” Liza tutored me on the new terrain: a “worlde” was an interactive virtual stage where people could gather to hang out, debate, listen to a speaker, or, for our purposes, fundraise. Our worldes were all pristine nature, from golden meadows surrounded by snowy mountaintops to glistening wild rivers. “Xperes,” on the other hand, were experiences. The user didn’t interact, they watched. Liza’s xperes were much darker. Fires raging, floodwaters crashing, refugees trudging by your eyeballs, gazing at you miserably, and though these people were looking at a camera operator perhaps years earlier, one could not help but cast their eyes down. These tools proved astonishingly effective and our fundraising soared. Liza was a “one-woman Cambridge Analytica,” according to Tom. Though each and every candidate and cause had its own chop shop of psychological profiling and voter suasion, it always felt like Liza was a step ahead. She was also, I thought, quite funny, though her sense of humor was an acquired taste. Pretty and petite, she dressed like she’d pieced together a brand-new outfit from a vintage store every day. Once, I heard her tell Rekia and Coral, “I feel like I would be a more full-throated eco-socialist revolutionary if anyone could convince me that there will still be cute outfits after capitalism crumbles. I refuse to wear Birks.”