“Sure, there could be cute outfits,” Rekia assured her. “Why not?”
“From my understanding, socialist countries tend not to have cute outfits. Also, every day I get to see how Kate dresses.” And she went back to typing.
Liza designed our logo, blue flames conflagrating against a black background. It was a trip when I began seeing that image on social media profiles or graffitied onto a wall or tattooed on someone’s arm.
We were just kids trying to find something that worked. The trajectories of the two major political parties shaped much of our lobbying experience, the Republicans in wounded disarray, trying to rebuild their party while frequently staving off primary challenges from suburban neo-Nazis, the Democrats playing a perpetual game of three-card monte, releasing aspirational platforms and progressive wish lists while mostly doing the bidding of Wall Street, Big Tech, and the military–national security–industrial complex.
There was a great deal of excitement when Joanna Hogan took office, but that dissipated as her schizophrenic presidency advanced and Green New Deal aspirations died quickly. The memes of Hogan’s face and blond bob photoshopped onto a former WWF star’s body as she appeared to tear apart yellow spandex swarmed, and Democrats spent a full week rejoicing at that eye-rolling moment in the last debate of ’24 when she told her Republican opponent, “Eat your vitamins and say your prayers because next thing you know I’ll be hanging curtains in the White House.” But Kate knew who Hogan was as a president before Hogan probably did, and the former governor had no appetite for confronting the coal and gas interests she’d gotten comfortable with in the Missouri statehouse. In public, Kate struck as respectful a tone as she could manage, but in private, she despised Hogan.
At first we were ignored, mostly meeting with low-level aides and science advisors. But then a few key House Democrats began to coalesce around FBF’s policy ideas. Joy LaFray of Oregon began backing the “shock collar” while Tracy Aamanzaihou of the Clean Energy Labor Coalition publicly pronounced FBF “the insurgents the movement needs.” Then Vanity Fair called.
Following Moniza’s article, there was nary a podcast, talk show, or Slapdish worlde that didn’t want Kate. She was a natural in any format, attractive but accessible, playful but passionate. She delivered her galvanic message with a smile and her armpit hair showing. Even when things got testy, as they did on Colbert when she challenged the show’s sponsorship arrangements, she was too agile to lose either host or audience.
“Okay, but how do I change anything, Kate!” Colbert cried, after she’d rattled off a dire assessment of the world’s overheating oceans and their falling pH levels. “I’m just a guy with a television show, and if I tell people to turn off their air-conditioning, Fox News will be mad at me.”
“I’ll tell you what you can do, first and foremost, is drop your sponsorships from oil and gas companies. Tell them you won’t accept their advertising, no matter how much money they throw at you.”
Colbert threw the camera a comedic Uh-oh. The happy-go-lucky We’re working on algae fuels, we swear! advertising had just preceded Kate’s segment. Kate shot the audience a quick, wry glance, and there were uneasy titters as she launched in.
“These fossil-fuel companies are creating the conditions for mass planetary extinction and then funding a political force to stall action on it. Our grandchildren will look at Chevron and Exxon ads the way you and I look at swastikas.” Colbert began objecting to that, but Kate talked over him, practically snatching the entire show for herself. “No, no—see, this is why you should go back to the Comedy Central days and forget this ‘reasonable shill for the center-left’ persona.”
And with that small joke, Colbert couldn’t help but laugh, and Kate took her moment. “I know that sounds hyperbolic, but those are the facts. That is what is happening. People ask what they can do, but usually they are in a position to do something, they just don’t want to see it. Now this industry, oil and gas, has been going state by state for a decade, passing laws essentially making resistance to their operations illegal. They’re codifying the illegality of our speech, assembly, and dissent. So, what shows like yours and sports leagues that claim to care about Black lives and any other powerful person can do is stop accepting money for their propaganda. And if they want to keep passing laws to make our speech and assembly and resistance illegal—then fuck it, man. Make me an outlaw.”
Without even trying, she forged these clips that surged across the internet. Fox News raged that she would compare patriotic American companies to Nazis. Our allies despaired that Kate had tripped so easily over Godwin’s law and invoked the laziest analogy. Even Coral was unhappy with her: “What happened to creating on-ramps to the movement?” they wondered sharply. But that clip lived on, and within a month it wasn’t just Colbert dropping those sponsorships. Even the New York Times was forced to confront its advertising arrangements with Big Oil.
She could describe the situation with such magnetism, simplicity, conviction, doom, and hope. Before I met her, I’m sure I never thought about the issue for longer than thirty seconds, and if I did, figured it was still an open debate. Then I started to do my due diligence. It’s difficult to describe what happened to me during that time. I came home to the person I loved, we adopted a timid little Australian cattle dog we both adored and named it Dizzy, I congratulated my sister on her wedding plans, I chipped balls at the Langston Golf Course and felt that little glow of accomplishment when they dropped right—yet looming over all of it now was this monolith of dread. This dark pillar was overwhelming, painful to confront; it began to nag at me absently all the time. Because even the people who do understand the science, who are maximally frightened, they’re in denial as well. When I first heard of the “climate Robin Hoods” blowing up pipelines on the plains, I wondered what kind of lunacy it took to do that, but really, I was the mad one. I’d lived my whole life thinking nothing about this. I hadn’t realized that the natural cycles of the earth warming and cooling were laughably insufficient explanations, like saying your house fire began because of the arrival of spring. I didn’t know that scientists could easily trace the carbon produced by human fossil-fuel burning in the atmosphere or the truly horrifying changes that befell the planet when carbon concentrations had been this high in the past. I hadn’t understood the speed at which it was all occurring, that in just a single human lifetime we were precipitating changes that had before taken hundreds of thousands of years. Because once you’ve taken that journey and understand the alarmingly simple science, you can’t unknow it. For a while, I stopped sleeping. I’d lie awake staring at the ceiling and a despair would come over me. I’d reach for Kate, who fell asleep instantaneously whenever she felt like, and I would grip her, stuff my face in her thick, fragrant hair, and imagine our children, what kind of frightening, disintegrating civilization they would be born into.
Kate and I were supposed to leave for North Carolina that Monday, but first she called a meeting to discuss the offer from Senators Mackowski and Fitzpatrick. We were spending Halloween at my parents’ house on the coast even though it was a week out from a landmark election we’d been working toward for upwards of a decade. My mom, who treated Halloween with more reverence than Christmas, badly wanted the whole family there and twisted both our arms until we agreed.