Aim true: Anna Thomasson sets her sights on empowering women through firearms training



There’s something about firing an AR-15 on full auto that puts a big smile on your face.

At least it does for my colleague, Helen Roy. It’s also addictive, apparently; no sooner has she emptied the entire magazine into the target than she asks, “Is that all?”

'A lot of the ladies that do come on a regular basis call it "lead therapy," because while you're out there, you're going to feel all this energy hitting you, and then you just want more of it.'

Behind her, David Prince laughs knowingly. A tall, grandfatherly former CPA, Mr. Prince (as everybody calls him) owns the spacious and immaculate Eagle Gun Range, where we’ve just spent the last few hours getting a crash course in how to shoot.

Beaming next to him with almost maternal pride is Helen's instructor, Anna Thomasson. She — along with her husband, Bryan Wertz — has been kind enough to spend the afternoon giving us a highly condensed version of the extensive firearms training she offers women through her company, Dallas-based Aim True.

Matt Himes

Although Thomasson grew up around firearms, she was always more observer than participant. "My family is very traditional,” the petite Texan explains. “My dad is ‘boys shoot guns and girls stay in the kitchen.'”

That changed in 2015, when Thomasson was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her husband, Bryan Wertz, was a lifelong avid shooter; during her recovery he suggested she join him at the range as a way to spend time together while getting outside and getting some sun.

Thomasson found she enjoyed it. And not only that — learning to handle a firearm seemed to restore some of the inner strength sapped by her medical ordeal. “I got the feeling I could be confident in the world again,” she says.

She never looked back, taking course after course and honing her skills. She formed Aim True in 2017 as way to teach firearm self-defense to other women. She also organized the “ladies-only” training group Diamonds and Derringers.

Like Thomasson, Helen has always been comfortable around guns. Her father and her older brother (military veteran and active military, respectively) both enjoy shooting, as does her husband. While she's often joined them at the range and has fired off a few shots of her own on occasion, she's never gotten much, if any, formal training. She's here to rectify that. Helen tells Thomasson she should consider her a beginner.

Gun-shy

We start in a tidy, well-lit classroom tucked away near Eagle Gun Range’s front desk. When I ask how they met, Wertz and Thomasson smile as they describe their courtship, more or less finishing each other’s sentences.

There’s an ease between them that automatically puts us at ease, and it sets the tone for the hours to come. As Thomasson runs the training, Wertz sits to the side, doing work on a computer, every so often interjecting to expand or emphasize a point Anna makes.

Thomasson begins by explaining what’s different about firearms training for women.

To begin with, says Thomasson, many of her students are motivated by a newfound sense of vulnerability.

“I have a lot of clients coming to me when they’ve had a divorce, or they’ve lost their spouse, or they’ve had a break-in at their home,” she says. “They’ve never wanted to hold a gun before, they've never had any interest in it, and now a situation has dictated that this is something [they] have to do.”

Matt Himes

According to Wertz, this reluctance tends to make women who do show up for the course very diligent students.

“We always say that a man feels like he was born to stick a gun in his pants and walk around with it,” says Wertz. A woman, on the other hand, “says I really want to know about this gun and I want to make sure that I don't hurt someone with it, that someone doesn't hurt me with it, that I really understand all aspects of it and how to use it and be confident.”

When that confidence finally comes, it’s often a revelation, says Thomasson. “Sometimes they have an emotional reaction to shooting the first time. And sometimes it just goes straight into, oh my gosh, I am going to be able to take care of myself and I don't have to rely on anybody else.”

Pick a holster

When it comes to buying a gun, Thomasson likes to start with an often overlooked question: Can you find a holster for it? “My clients go to Highland Park Village, get a really pretty gun, and I say, ‘And you can leave it on your bedside table because there's no holster to fit it,’” says Thomasson.

Unless you’re planning to use your gun exclusively out in the country, Thomasson recommends a concealed-carry holster, typically worn inside the waistband.

Choosing the right gun

“Our hands are different from men's,” notes Thomasson. “They're usually a little bit smaller.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean you want a smaller gun, but rather a “grip size that we can actually reach the trigger on.”

Ultimately, says Thomasson, how a gun fits your hand can come down to personal preference. She likens choosing a gun to buying shoes. “I can't buy you a pair of shoes and say, ‘Love these shoes. You should wear them.’ But [I can] teach you the aspects of the gun and what you should be looking for.”

Sometimes bigger is easier

One common misconception Thomasson encounters is the assumption that a smaller gun will always be easier to shoot.

“This is our mindset as women. We think the bigger the gun, the harder it is to control, and the smaller the gun, the easier it is to control.”

Thomasson recalls a recent exchange with a client.

“[A woman] in her 70s called and she said, ‘I'm about five foot tall and I don't have much strength. I have a really big gun, a 9mm, and I think I want to sell it and have you teach me how to use a smaller gun.’”

Thomasson quickly got her to reconsider. “I talked to her about the recoil … and the weight of that bigger gun taking some of that recoil away from your hands and your shoulders. Whereas a smaller gun doesn't have the weight to [absorb] that recoil … and it ends up hitting you harder.”

For Thomasson, this is an essential part of the training she offers: “learn[ing] how to figure out what kind of gun is going to suit you best for your hand strength … [and] your situation.”

Loading the magazine

Thomasson leads us over to a table on which she’s placed a Glock semiautomatic pistol with a special slide for training as well as a pile of inert dummy rounds — in this case, spent Simunition blank cartridges. She begins by teaching Helen to load the magazine, which she recommends bracing against the tabletop.

Laughing at how surprisingly difficult she finds it, Helen says, “You know what, this is very important. How do you do gun stuff and maintain a manicure?”

Thomasson has anticipated the question. “You know there's always a girl way and a boy way,” she says, fetching a small device from a nearby shelf and handing it to Helen. It’s called an UpLULA, and before long it significantly increases Helen’s efficiency.

Trigger warning

Matt Himes

Now that the gun is loaded, it’s time to pick it up. But first Thomasson imparts a basic principle of gun safety: “[You] don't ever want to touch the trigger until [you’re] ready to touch the trigger.”

“This gun is developed to be comfortable in your hand when your finger is on the trigger,” explains Thomasson. “So that's the way that your hand is going to want to pick this up.”

To avoid this, says Thomasson, we have to force ourselves to rest our finger on the frame as we grab the rest of the gun with our hand.

Thomasson points to the fleshy webbing between Helen’s index finger and thumb. “When you pick this gun up … I want you to see how high you can get this part of your hand up here,” she says, indicating the curved little overhang separating the top of the grip from the rest of the pistol.

Helen does, which gives Thomasson the chance to point out an important physiological difference between men and women. “Now if I had one of the boys pick this up, then all of the meat [between his thumb and index finger] would be squished up at the top. But females don't have that kind of muscular development in that part of our hand.”

It’s a difference that can often be overlooked, says Thomasson. “A male instructor will tell the female you need a higher grip, you need a stronger grip. And the lady says, ‘This is all the grip I've got. I don't have any more hand.’”

It's something neither of us have ever thought about, apparently. "It's almost as if men and women are different," marvels Helen with mock incredulity. She examines my hand and compares it to hers.

"I do have that space," she says, smiling brightly. "Confirmed woman!"

"Confirmed woman!"Matt Himes

When it comes to finding a properly fitting gun, Thomasson says it’s all about how your finger reaches the trigger. You want to have it close enough that you comfortably pull it back, without it being so close that your finger wraps around to the other side.

Proper stance

After teaching Helen how to complete the grip with the placement of her non-shooting hand, as well as how to use the pistol’s metal sight, Thomasson talks proper stance.

“Did you notice that you leaned back?” she asks Helen. “The minute you picked up that gun, you got away from it.”

Thomasson says this is an unconscious expression of fear — “we think the gun is going to go off and cause a big bang and we’re already scared of it.” This is precisely what her training seeks to overcome.

Lead therapy

After Thomasson advises Helen on the proper stance, it’s time to dry fire — that is, “shoot” the gun without any live ammunition. We all know it’s loaded with inert rounds, but as Helen aims, the tension in the room builds, and when the hammer makes its quiet little “click,” there’s a tangible sense of release.

Helen lets out a deep exhale and smiles. She looks a little flushed.

“What went through your mind?” asks Thomasson gently.

“Something about having bullets in the gun made me a little nervous,” says Helen. “It's weird, there's so much psychological stuff built up around guns. And I have shot guns before, but ...”

“Because you loaded this and you made that action happen,” says Thomasson. She puts her hand on Helen’s shoulder. “How are you doing?”

“I'm good. It's kind of powerful, though. Do women often have an emotional reaction when they shoot?”

“I would say 75% of the females that I have, the first shot they go into tears. We put the gun down and we step back and we hug and we talk about it for five or ten minutes. A lot of the ladies that do come on a regular basis call it ‘lead therapy,’ because while you're out there, you're going to feel all this energy hitting you, and then you just want more of it.”

Get a grip

At this point Bryan chimes in to emphasize the power of a good grip.

“So a lot of times, ladies will ask Anna, you know, should I have a gun because I'm tiny and a man will take it from me?”

He demonstrates by trying to pull the gun out of Helen’s hands. He can’t. “I'm just not going to get it from you before you could use your blaster.”

He then addresses how to hold the gun before you’re ready to point and shoot; for example, if you’re preparing to defend yourself against what could be an intruder in your house. In this case, says Wertz, its best to hold the gun pointed down toward the floor.

He demonstrates on Helen. If she holds her gun above her head, pointed toward the ceiling, it’s easy for him to keep her from bringing the gun level.

Wertz then shows what happens if he grabs Helen’s gun when it's pointed to the floor. “If you kneel, then what am I giving you? I’m giving you the perfect first shot.”

Home on the range

David Prince is old enough to have had an entire career before this one, but he radiates boyish enthusiasm when he talks about Eagle Gun Range.

He opened it in 2012, after noticing that there hadn’t been a range built in the Dallas area for 30 years.

“My wife's inspiration is my perspiration,” he jokes. After building a fence and a rock garden, among other projects, they decided to think bigger. “Let us build a gun range. … I can do that.”

“We wanted someplace [that was] really family-friendly,” Prince says. “Especially friendly to the mothers and the women, because stereotypically, women and guns don't mix. … We wanted a place for them to come and feel safe.”

A big component of Eagle Gun Range’s family-friendly atmosphere is its state-of-the-art air filtration system, which removes the contaminants produced by firearm discharge. “It’s cleaner in the range than it is outside,” says Prince.

It’s clear that he’s proud of what he’s created. “Our mission statement says it all: to have a place that's safe and fun to shoot.”

And it’s not that he’s pandering to the ladies, either.

“Indoor shooting is a great co-ed sport,” he says. “Women outshoot guys all the time. Women are great shooters. It’s a fun sport. It doesn't take massive muscles. You can do it and compete against each other, and it's a fun thing, especially for families. Kids get to shoot against the parents. It’s something the whole family can enjoy.”

Shots fired

Now it's time for Helen to put her classroom training into practice.

We head to the private bay Prince has graciously arranged for us, and Thomasson introduces Helen to the first gun she'll be shooting. It's a Glock 9mm, the same as the practice gun she used. Only this one, of course, shoots real bullets.

Matt Himes

Helen loads the magazine, sorts out her grip, and gets into her stance. She aligns her sights at the paper target, then finds the trigger. She takes a deep breath and very slowly pulls it back.

Bang. We all exhale. Helen smiles. "There we go. That was fun."

It was a decent shot, hitting the human silhouette just above the bull's-eye over the chest. Helen fires off another. This one still hits the target, but a little wide. Thomasson reminds her to take it slow.

"When you pull it really fast, you kind of jerk the gun down, and then that's when you end up with shots that are not in the target. Not that, if you were defending yourself, it still wouldn't hurt the person. But if we want to get that perfect shot, [we need] control of the trigger."

Thomasson then has Helen shoot the same cartridge in a smaller gun: a subcompact Glock in turquoise. This gun's grip is significantly thinner and shorter than the previous one; Helen's pinky just barely wraps around the bottom.

When she shoots, the kick is powerful enough that her left hand slips off a little. Helen also notices that because the gun's size allows her finger to wrap all the way around the trigger, it has a tendency to pull to the right when shooting.

It's all a vivid demonstration of Thomasson's earlier point about women and gun size. "[They] say shrink it and pink it and that's how you sell it to a woman," says Wertz. "Well, that's no good because then it's just a pink gun and it's tiny."

As an alternative, Thomasson shows us the Walther PDP F-Series, a full-size 9mm pistol designed for shooters with smaller hands. To get the gun's ergonomics and fit just right, Walther consulted with expert female shooters, including Olympian Gabby Franco.

'Smith and Wesson ... and me'

Noting that the training so far has used Austrian and German pistols, I ask Wertz about the American gun industry.

"When we get into rifles, bolt-action rifles, semiautomatic rifles, carbines, we win," says Wertz, "but the Europeans kind of have a hold on the striker-fired market. The polymer lower, steel upper type gun like Glock, Sig, H&K, Walther, all really great handgun manufacturing companies."

Wertz is quick to add that Smith & Wesson does make an excellent striker-fired pistol that many competitors use.

Of course, the iconic American brand has other claims to fame. "Smith & Wesson makes a better revolver than anybody in the world," says Wertz. "And then if you want a 1911-style, old kind of World War II Heritage American pistol, nobody makes them better than we do."

In this latter category, Wertz singles out Florence, Texas-based Staccato. "Anna's got a Staccato that she carries a lot, and they make a better gun than than just about anybody else."

'It's gonna get sporty'

Matt Himes

According to Prince, Helen is something of a natural. He pulls her target and examines it with admiration. "This is extremely good shooting. She's at five yards, but she shot with several firearms, not having any practice rounds."

Helen does equally well on the AR-15 rifle Prince offers her; in fact, she finds it to be her favorite firearm of the day. "I feel so much more confident with [the AR-15] than the smaller ones," she says, when asked if she'd rather have it or a pistol for self-defense.

Wertz says that despite the media's relentless propaganda about "assault rifles," this is a common reaction from women after they shoot an AR-15. "You can see how accurate you were with very little effort and without having any training."

Then it's time to try the rife on full auto. Prince is thorough and professional as he coaches Helen on what to expect; at the same time, you can tell he can't wait for her to let it rip. "It's just natural — when you first squeeze the trigger, you're going to let it rattle off about five rounds. You're going to let go. We're going to reload. Squeeze. Turn around and smile."

Just before Helen pulls the trigger, Wertz smiles. "It's gonna get sporty."

Matt Himes

To watch some of Helen's training with Aim True at Eagle Gun Range, check out the video below.

For more information about Aim True and the wide variety of firearms and emergency preparedness training it offers, see here.

To learn more about Eagle Gun Range or to explore its online store, go here.

Rick Rescorla: Led thousands to safety on 9/11



Studying and emulating the lives of great men is a useful practice with a long history. Our culture, however, tends to promote celebrities, self-improvement gurus, and politicians.

Although no such luminaries proved of much use during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many “ordinary” people found it within themselves to act with stunning courage and determination.

The story of Rick Rescorla offers an especially poignant lesson for these times, involving as it does the triumph of individual know-how, experience, and common sense over bureaucratic “expertise.”

While serving as a platoon leader in the Vietnam War, the British-born Rescorla calmed his troops by singing to them. Years later, he employed the same tactic while helping evacuate the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

Twenty-three years on, it’s clear just how woefully unprepared our leaders were for 9/11. Rescorla, on the other hand, was ready.

Even before he became head of corporate security for Morgan Stanley, he had long warned anyone who would listen of the Twin Towers’ vulnerability to attack. When American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower, the Port Authority ordered Rescorla to keep everyone at their desks.

His response, given his somewhat more intimate view of the unfolding crisis, was appropriately blunt: “Piss off.” The evacuation plan he’d insisted all employees rehearse through countless surprise drills went smoothly. His defiance saved some 2,700 lives.

Having led his charges at Morgan Stanley to safety, Rescorla went back into the building in search of more people to help. He was last seen on the 10th floor. He had never been comfortable calling attention to his wartime deeds, for which he was awarded a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. "The real heroes are dead," he would say. When the South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m., Rescorla joined their ranks.

'Please give me a reason to stay' — desperate Springfield, Ohio, citizens speak on Haitian migrant crisis



Below is a selection of citizen statements from the City of Springfield, Ohio, Commission meetings from August 13 and August 27.

David: 'We don't have the resources to do this properly'

Springfield has a long-term population of 57,910, I believe, as of May of this year. It's hard to know the exact number, but I count a population of 20,000 newcomers.

This has resulted in a number of issues. There have been firsthand reports [of] wrong-way drivers on one-way streets, drivers ignoring stop signs and red lights and other traffic issues.

There is the impact on businesses having to deal with language, cultural differences. There is strain on public resources, both governmental and private services, including health.

Part of our response is to help the newcomers adjust to our culture by offering a variety of training, including learning English, how to drive, and other things like simple customs of waiting in line for your turn instead of barging to the front of the line.

We don't have the resources to do this properly ... and it depends on how many of the newcomers are willing to try and adjust to the customs and laws of their host.

I would like to ask with a rhetorical question to the commission, who have taken an oath to protect and serve citizens of Springfield, Ohio: What are you going to do to address this situation?

Shannon: 'These are not civilized people'

I was out and about yesterday driving around Springfield. I was looking at the giant holes in some of our buildings. I noticed all of the old familiar spots bearing new signs in an unfamiliar language.

I watched as groups of strangers walked around the city like lost tourists, and it was like the punch in the gut. A terrible sadness came over me, and I began to cry. I immediately started to think back to when I was little, walking from my grandma's house on South Fountain through downtown and all the way to Snyder Park, going to Wren's to get new school clothes and shoes.

And now all those warm memories are becoming fuel to the fire of anger inside of me. I feel like we have been invaded by some sort of pest. I'm angry that my friends and family are packing up and moving away.

I'm angry that foreigners are using up the resources that were set up for the Americans that reside here. I'm angry that another country's flag was being flown in our city. I'm angry when I see our businesses and recreational areas littered with garbage left by people who do not know or understand our laws and culture and are making no attempt to learn about them.

And let me be clear, this is not about race. This is about people being given the privilege of coming here from another country and having no respect for our people, our land, or our life's work. People living their life here the way they did in Haiti.

Angry, stealing, polluting, living in filth, and acting like animals. These are not civilized people. Opening containers in our grocery stores, helping themselves to what's inside, and throwing the rest onto the shelves and floors.

Pulling off of the highway to publicly clean and gut the roadkill. Lying there in front of anyone that passes.

Stealing animals from farmers and leaving their severed heads ... where children play.

Relieving themselves in public.

Making some barbaric stew out of the birds that live in our park.

This is insanity, and it has to stop. What will become of Springfield? Where will we be in five years? The thought terrifies me. Will it be some sort of dystopian wasteland — with most of our original residents having moved away and those that cannot afford to move being locked inside their homes living in fear?

This thought is keeping me awake at night. I just want the old Springfield back. I know it was far from perfect, but at least it was still ours.

Nolle: 'I don't understand what you expect from us as citizens'

I'm done with what I'm seeing. It is so unsafe in my neighborhood anymore. I have the homeless that were trying to camp out, and I have made concessions with them, and I try to help them the best I can to keep them from trying to squat on my property.

But it is so unsafe. I have men that cannot speak English in my front yard screaming at me, throwing mattresses in my front yard, throwing trash in my front yard. And I can't. ... Look at me. I weigh 95 pounds. I couldn't defend myself if I had to.

My husband is elderly, and last night, after living in this home for 45 years, he said, "Noelle, guess what? It's time to pack up and move." He said, "We can't do this anymore." He said, "It's killing both of us mentally."

I don't understand what you expect of us as citizens. I mean, I understand that ... they're here under temporary protected status, and you're protecting them, and I understand that our city services are overwhelmed and understaffed.

But who's protecting us if we're protecting them? Who's protecting me? I want out of this town. I am sorry. Please give me a reason to stay.

Al: 'They have a kindergarten to second-grade education'

I really wish we could deal with this as a community ... with the council instead of going through NAACP or all this other rigamarole. Because we are a community.

I work IT for a living; I'm also a videographer — I do video editing.

I have these Haitians along with Somalis, Mexicans ... I have them all.

Haitians, they need extra attention.

In all honesty ... they have a kindergarten to second-grade education. The state teaches people on our public courses at a fifth- to sixth-grade education level.

if you can do something visually, they can see something visually — no words, no nothing else — they can learn, and they will learn.

But we actually have to step down that low and slowly bring them up to our level and that takes a while.

Lisa: 'I would like to see them have some common respect'

My name is Lisa, and I am a resident of Springfield, Ohio, and I'm also a registered voter. I'm a mother, I'm a grandmother, and I'm a great-grandmother.

I would like to know how many of you sitting up there tonight go into the grocery stores here in the city, Walmart, here in the city to do your shopping?

[I'm] 64 years old, and I don't know what kind of label you can put on this, but I'm taking my cart down the grocery aisle, and I have three immigrants [blocking] the aisle. Seeing me coming, would not budge. I said, "Excuse me," maybe they didn't understand what I was saying, but I'm sure they understood that I was trying to get through that aisle.

So I have no recourse now but to bust through it. I'm not afraid to do so. You know, I would like to see them have some common respect, some common decency. Do not try to bully your way through Springfield, Ohio.

Diana: 'Color has nothing to do with it'

Argentina, Sweden, Venezuela, France, Haiti.

What do these words have in common? These are countries. They are defined by their culture and their language, not their color. When folks stand up here and describe what is happening to them, they are often painted with a broad brush of racism.

That has nothing to do with it. Color has nothing to do with what we're facing. It's culture.

There's not a roundtable for us. There's a roundtable for the Immigration Accountability Task Force, which I've come to find out has nothing to do with us getting any better but making it easy for you to be an immigrant.

That roundtable should have started in November, when this was brought to your attention. The core group that has been coming up here ... Tuesday after Tuesday, have great ideas, and it won't cost the state a dime, and it won't cost us a dime.

But we have not a better approach. But I'm being asked to go to a little roundtable held by the NAACP. I listed the other one. I didn't like it. I don't think any solution is going to come out of that.

We could have started in October, and we'd be well ahead. Shame on you.

Anthony: 'Who is getting paid?'

All right, I'm 28 years old, and I'm a social media influencer, and I just be on TikTok and stuff.

I do YouTube. I think it's kind of odd that a guy like me has to come out from doing what I do on a daily basis to have fun, because I see what's going on in these streets, and I see you guys just sitting up there in those comfy chairs in suits.

And I'm getting out here every day, and I'm broadcasting this, and you guys are just sitting up there in suits. I really challenged you guys to get out here and do something.

These Haitians are running into trash cans. They're running into buildings. They're flipping cars in the middle of the street. I don't know how, like, y'all can be comfortable with this.

Like, I don't know, like, who's getting paid from it.

I honestly feel like someone's getting paid from it in the background. You got a bunch of people on a bus getting dropped off at a gas station to come down here.

I know a single mom that FaceTimed me tonight, FaceTimed me this morning at the welfare office.

And it's nothing but immigrants over there. And I don't even want to seem like I'm coming down on the immigrants because it's the people that's bringing them down here because wherever they're at, that's what they're used to, bro.

They're in the park, grabbing up ducks by their neck and cutting their head off and walking off with them and eating them.

Y'all get the highway state patrol down here every week ... and they look for guns, and they look for dope and this and that and so forth. That same people that y'all got riding up and down Limestone [St.] doing U-turns, pulling people over for blinkers and pulling people over for, like, going left the center in like a couple miles over. ... They can go over and teach these Haitians how to drive.

I'm getting thousands of views on these, and it's gonna get bigger, and it's only going to get worse and y'all sitting up there in these chairs. Y'all need to get out here and do something. Y'all making hundreds of thousand [of] dollars just to wear a suit and sit in a chair.

You need to put on a T-shirt and some Crocs and then y'all need to come out here in these streets.

I'm out here before the police. Somebody told me they walking from the school and a Haitian almost ran into him.

Who is getting paid to bring them over here? I know it's deeper than them.

I know that's where they come from and that's what they do. That's they country, I don't know what they got going on over there, but they can't do that over here.

Y'all gotta really, like, step up. It's lame, bro. Like for real.

Slaying the 'multiheaded beast' of woke business



American consumers have a message to any company that wants their business: Hold the politics.

Just ask conservative filmmaker Robby Starbuck. What started with a single post on X taking Tennessee-based Tractor Supply to task for its DEI policies has morphed into a growing national movement, sparking public outcry and prompting policy change from John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Jack Daniels, and Lowe's.

This enthusiasm harmonizes with a new study released by the nonprofit 1792 Exchange in conjunction with WestGroup Research and the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy.

The study finds that almost 80% of Americans feel that companies have gotten too political.

Affiliated with Troy University in Troy, Alabama, the Johnson Center seeks to oppose such ideological capture by training the next generation of business leaders in free-market principles.

Align recently spoke to Johnson Center executive director Allen Mendenhall about Starbuck's methods, the need to puncture the myth of corporate omnipotence, and why there's nothing "right-wing" about applying constitutional principles to company policy.

Prudent adaptation

ALIGN: Critics of Robby Starbuck claim he's motivated by a "right-wing agenda." But isn't he rather advocating for neutrality — a return to "business as usual"?

Allen Mendenhall: It strains credulity to label a faithful and thorough application of the 14th Amendment as a "right-wing" position. Yet this is precisely the narrative some progressive voices assign to corporations seeking to comply with the reasonable rulings in two landmark cases: Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina.

These decisions, which are far from partisan, determined that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Ultimately, these rulings represent a recalibration of how constitutional principles are interpreted and applied within academic settings. When a corporation adjusts its practices in response to these decisions, it is not a political act but a prudent adaptation to evolving legal standards.

Similarly, Starbuck's position could be seen as advocating for a return to a more traditional corporate focus, emphasizing business fundamentals like customer satisfaction and shareholder value rather than pursuing a specific ideological agenda.

He is not seeking to eliminate existing legal protections but rather question the extent to which companies should actively engage in social causes beyond their primary business functions. That isn't "right-wing." If anything, Starbuck advocates for a more focused, less politicized approach to corporate governance and strategy.

ALIGN: What does it say about these policies that they can be so easily and quickly abandoned in the face of a little pressure? Has something changed to make this pressure more effective than it was before?

Allen Mendenhall: The boycott of Bud Light that followed its to decision to make Dylan Mulvaney a spokesperson was nothing short of a rupture in the ideological fabric. It exposed the truth that consumers possess powerful potential despite the fantasy of corporate omnipotence.

No matter how mighty the shareholders are or how aggressively marketers attempt to impose their controversial politics, this resistance was an important reminder: Consumers, when provoked, can reassert themselves and disrupt the narrative from within. No company wants to be the next Anheuser-Busch, the subject of social media mockery with plummeting sales.

Slaying the Hydra

ALIGN: The right often thinks of "wokeness" as a kind of centrally controlled monolith; in a recent article, you point out that it is more accurate to describe it as a "loose confederation." Why is this more dangerous — and why is it important that the right avoid a simplistic understanding of the forces pushing ESG on us?

Allen Mendenhall: The word I used in my original draft was "concatenation," but a great human, Mike Sabo, who edited the piece, judiciously removed it to improve readability. Yet it's the perfect word.

If ESG were Goliath, you could kill it with a slingshot and a stone. But it's plugged into networks of interlocking institutions across different countries. As I say in the piece, ESG is not a leviathan but rather a hydra — a multiheaded beast of disparate interests; a loose confederation of academic theorists, corporate opportunists, bankers, investors, lobbyists, non-governmental organizations, and misguided do-gooders all jockeying for position to appear as the most righteous.

ESG is dangerous partly because it involves a subtle form of control that shapes how institutions and individuals understand their societal roles and responsibilities. Its power does not derive from one centralized authority but from its capacity to spread and integrate itself into core institutions, government-driven investment vehicles, and the administrative state. But most people cannot even explain what it is.

ALIGN: Given that "wokeness" is a "hydra," is going after it company by company (as activists like Starbuck do) the most effective strategy? What other methods might we consider?

Allen Mendenhall: First, embrace truth and courage. I feared backlash when we launched our anti-woke business program for undergraduates at the Manuel H. Johnson Center. However, the nationwide support we received was overwhelming.

CEOs shared with me insights into the inner workings of ISS and Glass Lewis, while professors expressed interest in creating similar programs at their institutions.

Even when banking lobbyists threatened my job and career following my remarks at the Alabama statehouse, the support from across the country emboldened me. What initially felt like isolation soon became a realization that a powerful coalition stood with me.

This experience proved the necessity of boldness and honesty — qualities that anyone can embody, regardless of their position.

Facilitating meaningful change requires a comprehensive strategy on a larger scale that includes legal action, in-depth research, tactical boycotts, legislative efforts, and thorough education. It means exposing weak politicians beholden to the lobby core. We must also separate taxpayer funds from ESG-weighted portfolios.

We should think outside the box, exploring partnerships with peoples and communities worldwide who share more traditional values — perhaps even those we have historically not yet considered allies.

With declining birth rates and populations in Europe and countries more inclined toward leftist ideologies, we may see, over time, a natural decline of these potentially harmful ideas. This decline will result from the destructive nature of these ideologies and the dwindling number of their supporters.

Ultimately, strength in numbers, even among less influential groups, provides a foundation for effective resistance. This is a long-term vision that recognizes demographic changes and the evolution of ideologies over time.

Common ground

ALIGN: The need to bring back American manufacturing has become something of a bipartisan issue. Is there an effective way for ESG opponents to appeal to potential allies "across the aisle" while avoiding irresolvable ideological arguments?

Allen Mendenhall: Setting aside the manufacturing issue, there is potential for the left and right to find common ground on ESG. Leftist groups frequently protest against companies like BlackRock, but they get little attention from the legacy media.

For my students on the left, I recommend reading a few books: "Woke Capitalism" by Carl Rhodes, "Our Lives in Their Portfolios" by Brett Christophers, and "The Problem of Twelve" by John Coates.

Though I may not always agree with these authors, we share a common understanding of the underlying issues. It is frustrating to see uninformed journalists criticize the anti-ESG movement from what they perceive to be a leftist standpoint, especially when they lack a full understanding of the topic and are being manipulated by those who do understand.

Some leftists are prepared to abandon the traditional focus on class and poverty in favor of embracing the riches, status, and influence that come with fully committing to environmentalism and identity politics.

ALIGN: To what extent do you see local business as a solution? Can rampant ESG be a spur to entrepreneurship?

Allen Mendenhall: I will withdraw my deposits from Truist and bank with a local community bank that does not promote ESG and values at odds with mine. I hesitate to encourage people to withdraw deposits from Big Banking en masse because a run on the banks wouldn't help anyone.

But I don't think local for the sake of localism is necessarily helpful from an economic standpoint. The entrepreneurship approach is far better, and I suspect we will see exciting changes across investment and financial services. We are already seeing them.

Pushing back

ALIGN: What can our subscribers do to fight ESG?

Allen Mendenhall: People of varying financial means must approach the fight against ESG in different ways. Those who are just getting by can focus on purchasing products only from companies that align with their values or are at least politically neutral.

However, those with more financial resources can have a more significant influence in the investment arena. We need more corporations acquiring substantial shares of publicly traded companies to have a stronger voice in decisions on shareholder proposals during proxy season.

While I am generally cautious about turning to politics for solutions, we have seen significant progress from state treasurers and legislators who are becoming aware of the implications of ESG. They are starting to push back by divesting from asset management firms that prioritize ESG and ensuring that public funds are not wasted on investments that favor ideological values over financial returns.

It seems counterintuitive that fund managers or their clients would favor underperforming ESG investments and business strategies over more profitable options. However, a recent survey by the Hoover Institution reveals that young investors — who are often less financially secure than their parents were at the same age — are willing to sacrifice 11% to 15% of their savings to support ESG-driven initiatives related to social causes or the environment.

It will be interesting to observe how these younger investors' priorities evolve, just as the counterculture youth of 1968 became, for the most part, the Reagan-voting yuppies of the 1980s.

In contrast, Baby Boomers prefer a more traditional investment strategy, expressing a reluctance to incur financial losses with their retirement savings.

If young investors are truly passionate about issues like net-zero emissions or gender diversity, why not invest directly in charities or philanthropic efforts dedicated to those causes? Alternatively, why not aim to maximize their investment returns to have more resources to support their preferred political and social agendas?

Sabo strikes! 'Kamala's Illegals' signs hit gang-ravaged town



The video is shocking.

An apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado, invaded by heavily armed men, reportedly members of violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Locals say the gang has taken over the complex.

Residents of the complex — those who haven't managed to flee — are living in fear, waiting for the next shoot-out.

Blame it on nearby "sanctuary city" Denver, which has welcomed the largest number of migrants per capita of any American city — more than 40,000 since December 2022.

Some, we assume, are good people. And some are affiliated with the same ruthless criminal organization as Jose Ibarra, the Tren de Aragua member accused of attacking and killing 22-year-old University of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley in February.

The Aurora video is just the latest dispatch from our ongoing immigration crisis. It will no doubt soon be forgotten in the relentless churn of our news cycle.

But dissident street artist Sabo decided to do what he could to keep our focus on what's happening in Aurora — and the larger crisis it represents — for at least a few moments more.

As he tells Align: "I put these up in Aurora, Colorado, last night. Nome St. is the street where the apartment complex [in the video] is. I was saying the Lord's Prayer while putting them up."

"Within hours, half of them were torn down," he adds.

But not before the local press noticed the "racist" and "anti-immigrant" signs.

Sabo, not surprisingly, disagrees with that characterization.

"'Racist' is [using] our tax dollars to put violent illegal aliens, not migrants, on our streets to terrorize the poorest people of color in our communities," he says.

Sabo's latest installation — which debuted earlier this month at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago — also captured the imagination of Denver Mayor Mike Johnston and Colorado Governor Jared Polis, both Democrats.

Sabo remains philosophical about these high-profile critics. Like any artist, he's just happy to get his work out there.

"This is a master class on how to turn six signs only a few people would have seen into a viral story that will reach thousands," he says. "Thank you, liberal press."

Below, we're proud to present some images of Sabo's latest exhibition.

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Jerry Lewis: curious, risk-taking craftsman



Very few people have seen Jerry Lewis' “The Day the Clown Cried."

This hasn't kept the never-released 1972 film — in which Lewis directs himself as an alcoholic circus clown in Auschwitz who finds redemption entertaining children on their way to the gas chambers — from becoming an inside joke among cineastes and comedy nerds. The sheer, misguided hubris of such an undertaking fits perfectly with our image of late-period Lewis: the maudlin telethon host; the obnoxious, out-of-touch elder statesman; the egocentric self-mythologizer.

And yet as critic Richard Brody points out, the Holocaust as we now know it was rarely discussed in the early 1970s. The term itself had yet to come into widespread use. Long before Claude Lanzmann or Steven Spielberg or Roberto Benigni (whose “Life Is Beautiful” won two Academy Awards with a similar premise), Lewis “went where other directors didn't dare to go, taking on the horrific core of modern history and confronting its horrors.”

Lewis was always one to take big swings. In 1960 he launched his career as a director by producing, writing, directing, and starring in “The Bellboy,” a plotless tribute to comedies of the silent era that Paramount was nervous would be a flop. Audiences loved it.

Lewis continued to push himself as a filmmaker, not only with his unforgettable performances and stunning set pieces, but also with his technical mastery. Insatiably curious, Lewis prided himself on knowing every member of his crew and understanding just what they did. This led to innovation: Lewis developed and was the first to use the now-ubiquitous video assist.

Long before he became a legend, Lewis thought of himself as “the total filmmaker.” In his 1971 book of the same name, he is frank that his intense, all-in approach comes at a cost.

It is often torture when you have complete personal control. … Eventually, you may beg not to have autonomy so that the morons can pass judgment. You can lie back and bleed, whimpering safely, "Look what they did to me."

Whatever his artistic failures and personal foibles, it is to Lewis' credit that he never succumbed to this temptation.

Interview: Beck & Stone co-founder Andrew Beck



Last April, Andrew Beck wrote an article in First Things commemorating the 10-year anniversary of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich's forced resignation from the company he co-founded.

Eich, the tech visionary behind JavaScript, was undone by his quiet support of Proposition 8, legislation opposing same-sex marriage in California. After opponents of Eich's appointment unearthed a series of small donations (totalling $3,100) he'd made years before, the online firestorm was sufficiently distracting that Eich stepped down after just eleven days.

So yeah, I want to be McKinsey, but I want be McKinsey from 1985, when the economy was awful.

Beck, working in the New York City tech scene at the time, remembers this moment as "a major escalation in the culture war," a warning that "ideological conformity to the top-down, programmatic transformation of the country that was rapidly taking place was all that mattered."

Indeed, in Eich's early "cancellation," the then-nascent progressive regime created a template for dealing with dissidents; it has since been used many times over.

But what interests Beck isn't the tediously familiar script employed against Eich but rather how Eich responded to that script.

Instead of protesting his unpersoning in the same rigged court of public opinion that enabled it, Eich put his head down and continued to do what he'd always done: developing technology in the service of human prosperity and freedom. His company released the popular, privacy-focused browser Brave in 2019.

As a devout Catholic, Eich can understand his work in terms of a transcendent good, bigger than both himself and his attackers. For Beck, it's the difference between a career and something more like a calling.

Beck doesn't mention it in the article, but Eich's resignation roughly coincides with another, more personal milestone: the day Beck and his partner, Austin Stone, founded the brand consultancy Beck & Stone in 2015.

Since then, Beck & Stone has built a successful business based on a rather countercultural conviction: Wisdom, beauty, and truth sell. In Eich, the company has found an example of how to persevere and even thrive in an environment hostile to such a philosophy.

"Finding work to do that makes you fearless will make you unstoppable," writes Beck. "Setbacks will become stepping stones to a more refined vision of one’s vocation. The wrongs done to you will become opportunities for cultivating wisdom necessary for your next iteration, making you stronger, more resilient, less fragile."

Fearless is hardly the first word that comes to mind when one thinks of the "creative services" industry. Brands often tend to be safeguarded by risk-averse courtiers, each with one eye on his or her own precarious status within the company. Companies that seek their business do well to take a similarly neurotic approach.

The kind of cloying, self-congratulatory language with which many agencies turn pushing a noxious influencer-branded "energy drink" into a feat of maverick shamanistic thought leadership is notably absent from the Beck & Stone website.

Instead, a series of elegantly written yet eminently practical case studies summarize the thoughtful, design-driven work the company has done for clients like First Things, the New Criterion, and Upward.

Beck himself embodies this pleasant mix of humility and ambition. And he really does have a vision, one compelling enough to attract high-level talent to the firm and genuinely disruptive enough to make enemies.

Even though Beck is suffering from a slight cold, his voice booms from my computer screen as he fluently and precisely diagnoses the current malaise afflicting American business and culture, while still conveying a measured but wholly uncynical optimism for the future.

The following are excerpts from our conversation. They have been condensed and edited for clarity.

On the return of competency

[Beck & Stone] is completely bootstrapped. People pay us money; we pay other people money. What we have left over is what the shareholders make. Capitalism simply doesn't work that way any more. It hasn't for a long time.

People understand the system. People are smarter than we give them credit for when it comes to smelling out where there is reward. And so I always talk about perverse incentives. And it's just perverse incentives all the way down at this point. It's seeping into every institution.

[But] the social engineering programs of the 21st century, which is this DEI stuff, they're starting to fall apart. Because now competency is the thing, right? The easy money is starting to run out. Now we gotta make the hard money. People want to see profits, actual on-paper profits.

Companies that have all the earmarks of the liberal worldview come to us because they say, "We can't trust a progressive firm to seek our best interest; they're ultimately trying to placate someone else."

[Progressive firms] haven't hired for competency. The reputation that McKinsey used to have, in the '80s, they would come in and they would tell you the hard truths. You know, a good consultant tells you what you need to hear because they're telling you the truth, and the truth will always hurt. So a consultant hurts you.

Now, it's "You need to tell me what I want to hear. You need to tell me that everything is good."

And look at the reports that have blown up in McKinsey's face, the DEI report, the ESG report. They made billions of dollars of capital move in that direction, whole corporations move in that direction. The whole green program, too — a complete disaster.

I mean, look, it can always get worse. You can become South Africa, where they just flat-out say white people can have jobs once the black people have [their jobs]. So technically it could get worse. But there is hope.

The real hope is that things become miserable enough before they become irreversible. Miserable enough so that liberals and people who enjoy nice things and who want to live in a relatively safe, peaceful, and prosperous society say, "I don't like this, something's wrong here, something's really wrong."

On the need for economic literacy

The more I've done this, the more I've realized [how crucial] economic literacy is. Looking at Instagram and seeing people talking about inflation or shrinkflation or these different things, and they repeat the lines that they hear from Elizabeth Warren, from Barack Obama, from Joe Biden.

All these people talking about how it's greed. It's just greed.

"See, all these [rich] people, they have money and they're not giving you that money. You know, that's the real problem here. If they just took less ..."

No. Do you want everything to go out of business? Do you want food? You're not a farmer. You're not a hunter. You live off of these plastic-wrapped goods. Do you want those plastic-wrapped goods to show up in your supermarket? You better start paying attention to how things like supply chains and how economic incentives work.

On rebuilding the American brand

The American brand needs to be rebuilt. It's been so damaged.

The most visited website on the planet is YouTube because people are isolated and they want to see what other people are doing. Much of what has driven a lot of mass migration — really these invasions of Western countries — is social media.

They look at their situation. Trump called it. Trump said, "These people live in sh**holes and we don't." And once you have that information, [your mentality] becomes: "Well, now I'm going to live there no matter what you say and no matter what you do, and you're going to help me."

Whereas before [the idea] was, "There is this greater land of opportunity, and I'm going to go and I'm going to make it work. And I'm going to prove to the people who are there that I'm worthy of being one of them." That's a completely different mindset [that] social media and the internet have done away with.

The American myth is dead, and that's the real danger: People can now see behind the curtain. [Now] the American ideal is if you go there, you will have a nicer, easier lifestyle than you ever thought possible. You can steal things; you won't go to jail. You can squat in houses. No one will kick you out.

On good propaganda

Really good propaganda seeps into the bloodstream of the ones who are being propagandized. So then they themselves create propaganda. That's what the internet, social media, and giving everyone a smartphone have done. It's created these contagions where now you can even have bots that replicate that behavior and spread it even more. So creating something that can act as the contagion is the goal, right?

[On the right], we're trying to centrally plan a propaganda campaign to change people's minds. We give too much credit to the propagandists and too little credit to the person [with a phone] in their hand. You're actually more susceptible to propaganda that's coming from your neighbor than you are propaganda that's coming from some central authority. That's what Black Lives Matter was.

War has been declared on us, basically. And what conservatives have done since [at least] Obama is try to build up these little fortresses where we can now defend against — first it was the liberals, then it was Obama, then it was the feds, now it's the woke, it just goes on and on and on.

We build fortresses for defense instead of building fortresses [the way] the Normans did — build fortresses in enemy territory and then use them for offense and to subjugate the enemy. Instead we think, "We can just hide in here with our little group of people and hopefully wait it out."

You're not gonna wait them out because you're ceding all the territories to them. You're ceding all the resources to them.

And how conservatives do that is through branding. "I'm conservative. I am a patriot American, MAGA, anti-woke." All the different words they say because they don't have much and they know it.

But there's this niche — growing, maybe, but it's still a niche — of people who will be very interested in this. So we capture them and we'll make sure we get our little fortress and those people [will] come to us. We have our fortress, and now I'm gonna be king of my little castle

It would be nice [for us] to realize how close we are to victory. I don't want to stifle competition, I don't want to stifle entrepreneurship, I don't want to stifle the will and the pioneering mindset that Americans should have.

You always have new companies popping up. I mean, look at Anduril and Palantir in defense and how they're challenging IBM and Boeing.

On being 'the McKinsey of the right'

I would love [Beck & Stone] to say, "We're here to take down McKinsey."

People call us the McKinsey of the right. And I say I just want to be McKinsey. I don't care if it's right-wing or not. I just want to be known as, "You're the killers who come in here and cause pain, but you cause pain because you're telling us the truth. You're going to work with us on resolving these pain points so that we can make money, so that we can grow, so that we can benefit."

These basic principles have been completely lost because people have been living in a fantasy world of easy money that is going away. And I can't wait.

I know, yes, we're a small team, we have 14 full-time employees and 10 or so freelancers who are rotating in and out. But McKinsey also used to be small. They just had very smart people who were able to go and were able to focus on something and work through those issues and then move on.

Now scaling out means that you're proposing broad strokes versus looking at individual situations. "Everyone needs to get on this ESG thing and you'll make money." It's all BS. It's all a pitch deck where they're giving you some thoughts and some bigger plans. ... That's not consulting.

The value proposition of consulting is that we will actually get our hands dirty. You have to be very diligent in terms of the tactical execution of what you are proposing. And then your reputation lives or dies based upon: Did your plan work? Was your diagnosis correct? Did you help resolve it?

This doesn't exist any more at a larger scale. [Companies like] Deloitte, McKinsey, IBM get a government contract [and it's all] soft deliverables: Fill out this form, write this email, copy and paste this from this column to that column. Horrendous waste, but people think that that's consulting.

So yeah, I want to be McKinsey, but I want be McKinsey from 1985, when the economy was awful. And when [clients] had to say, "We're going down, and we already had to cut 200 jobs. But all 2,000 of these people will lose their jobs unless we get some other minds in here and make a little investment so that we can turn this place around."

I gave this talk at this parallel economy conference. You know, people say, "Oh, this is the guy who hacked the parallel economy."

I succeeded in the parallel economy because I don't operate in the parallel economy. That's the whole point. You want to participate in the real thing. So you want to see it as the perpendicular economy where you're just coming at it from an oblique angle and you're trying to disrupt something that is all going in one direction. They're all doing the same bad things. And now you have to act differently in order to make your mark.

And that's risky. It's painful. It takes time. It means you have to be content to work for less. It means you have to be content to spend more time.

On building a company culture

It's incredibly difficult to find even 14 people who are very good. It is so hard.

Part of it is generational for sure, but much of it is also fighting through the perceptions. Okay, people think we're the right-wing McKinsey. They come in here and think that they don't have to work.

Everyone's working here, from the partners down to the interns. This is a brutal life. If you don't want to work, go not work somewhere else, right? Because we can't afford it. We will literally not be able to afford it.

However, it then means that for the people who do work here and who do put effort into it, we have a quarterly bonus structure. If you make us money, you will make money. You may have to work harder, you may have to start with less, but the rewards are going to be there for you taking ownership of the thing that I ultimately own. It's because the incentives have been corrected.

We have always had this mentality that client success is our success. Our success is tied to the client success.

You set up metrics the best you can. But you also need to be able to triangulate metrics and say, "I know what a vanity metric is versus a real metric."

If we were going to have two [most important] values, it would be quality of life and quality of work. And these feed off of each other. If you do quality work, you will have a quality life. If you have quality of life — if you can enjoy yourself working hard — you're actually gonna produce good work.

So these things have to work. If one of those things is broken, if I'm not seeing improvement for the client, I'm asking, "What's happening with the work? Is there some quality of life problem that someone is dealing with? Is it [because it's] remote? Are they lonely? Are they distracted? Do they need me to jump in here? Do they need help? Are they in over their heads?"

Because it's so difficult to work at Beck & Stone, the people who end up coming here want to impress us right away. And so they end up biting off more than they can chew and getting a lot of stress.

So we need to get them to relax. If you've proven yourself and you're in, you're in. You just need to focus on delivering. And talk to us. Communication, honest communication. And this is the bottom line: Tell the truth. Truth hurts, and truth also sets you free.

It may hurt to say, "Beck, this account is struggling. There isn't growth and I don't know what I'm doing wrong." But honest conversation between me and the person working creates an honest conversation between me and the client. Then we can figure things out together.

If there is no way forward, we will just tell the clients that there is no way forward. "This cannot and will not work. We don't want to take your money any more."

On healthy conflict in the workplace

I've been surprised at how often the original thesis has been validated, but it's not a thesis based on the type of client we want to attract — that we only want to work for conservative or libertarian or classically liberal intellectuals and think tanks or the people who have been influenced by those ideas.

Through our work, these ideas have become more commonplace. And I'm proud of what we were able to accomplish in getting some of these things into the bloodstream when we started out nine, 10 years ago. But we did not purposely try to make a firm that just talked about this stuff.

We wanted to make a firm based upon truth and based upon honesty. It starts with the partners. Austin Stone, he isn't as plugged in to the firm these days; he's more in an advisory role, both because of health issues and also just knowing where his true value is. But us having that honesty where could fight with each other [was essential].

Guys fighting with each other is actually normal. And many times it's good.

But having serious arguments with your co-workers is not allowed any more. It goes right to HR and then HR has to decide who's in the right, who's in the wrong, who's going to manage it. It turns out whoever can say whatever the company guideline is, whatever the HR mandate is, they win. And it has nothing to do with the actual task.

It's all open office now, of course. You can't fight with each other because no one has private offices. There's no privacy. Everything is under the watchful eye of the HR regime. And so everyone is frozen.

People make a huge deal about not being able to make jokes, but that's small potatoes compared to the actual work that is inhibited, the actual honesty and that comes through conflict.

I can remember [earlier in my career] pitching to Nasdaq, and I wanted to change the pitch. I said, "I think that this is off." Fortunately I was working on it with an old-school guy. We fought, he yelled at me, and I just didn't back down. And he storms out. He says, "All right, let me think about this."

And someone leaned over to me and said, "I can't believe that just happened and you're still here." But I didn't have that same fear because I was a contractor. They knew I had my own firm.

We're all equals here [at Beck & Stone]. I understand if someone's your boss, there needs to be a level of deference that you show. Just as if it's someone who is your employee, there's a degree of sensitivity you need to show because of the power imbalance.

But you should be able to fight things out without people taking it personally, which also means that people can't act personally either.

Having this pattern of being able to hash things out has created a culture where you are judged by your work and the quality of your ideas, not by your ability to navigate an HR regime.

On conservative journalism

It used to focus on business. It used to focus on people who are doing good work. You were being praised, you were being given honor. And what does honor mean? Honor means reward, okay? You're getting a reward for something that you've done. And business was a place where you could do that. There's nothing like that any more. Everything's about issues.

No more issues, okay? Just show us some people who are doing cool things. Tell us about cool technology. Tell us what's going on in the world that maybe we should be aware of that could impact business.

Everybody wants to make our brands based upon who we're not. And based upon how we're being attacked. After a while, that makes you look weak.

We need to be respected for the work that we do. We need to get out of the habit of jumping on whatever the hot topic is right now, [whether it's] trans or woke or whatever.

Commentary is oversaturated. Anybody can do commentary. What starts the commentary? That's what's becoming prized.

James Stockdale: POW who knew the power of facing 'brutal facts'



Eight presidential contests ago, when another upstart businessman was making a run at the White House, America was briefly introduced to James Stockdale. He did not make a good impression.

Stockdale was an old friend of independent candidate Ross Perot, who asked him to be his running mate. Stockdale obliged and then was more or less left on his own. He didn't know he was going to be at the vice presidential debate until a week beforehand; he and Perot never had a conversation to talk about their political positions.

Stockdale began the debate with a pair of rhetorical questions: "Who am I? Why am I here?" Unfortunately, he never got the chance to answer them to anyone's satisfaction. The proto-viral moment became a joke about a befuddled old man thrust onto the national stage. At one point, Stockdale missed a question because his hearing aid wasn't turned up.

Who was Stockdale? It's a sad irony that he had a background far more compelling than that of his opponents, Dan Quayle and Al Gore. A Navy vice admiral and fighter pilot, Stockdale was shot down over North Vietnam in 1965; he subsequently spent more than seven years in the notorious Hoa Lo Prison, otherwise known as the "Hanoi Hilton."

As the highest-ranking naval POW, Stockdale created a code of conduct for his fellow prisoners, summarized by the acronym BACK US: don't Bow, stay off the Air, admit no Crimes, never Kiss them goodbye, and Unity over Self. By helping the prisoners summon the will to resist aiding the enemy under torture, it also had the effect of boosting their morale by giving them a sense of dignity and purpose.

Perhaps nobody was more scrupulous about adhering to the code than Stockdale himself, who spent extended periods of time in solitary confinement and in leg irons, while enduring beatings, malnourishment, and the denial of medical care. When his captors informed him that he was to make an appearance on television as an example of how well the POWs were being treated, Stockdale beat himself in the face with a stool and slashed his scalp with a razor.

We all know the importance of keeping a positive attitude in a crisis. But optimism can destroy you as well. In an interview with writer Jim Collins, Stockdale noted that the first of his fellow prisoners to break were the optimists — those who persisted in believing their rescue was imminent, until they suffered one disappointment too many. Nor did those who succumbed to total despair survive.

The key, according to Stockdale, was to find a middle way: "You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

Some brutal facts we might confront, based on the last few years: Our leaders don't have our best interests at heart; our media seeks to inflame rather than inform; and our national institutions are increasingly dysfunctional.

In other words, help is not on the way. This would seem vital to remember, especially during this presidential election season. A Trump victory is indeed the best outcome we can hope for, but we should also be prepared for defeat. We should do what we can to support a victory without dissipating our energy on what's beyond our control.

That energy is better spent strengthening ourselves, our families, and our communities. Ultimately, the truest answers to the two questions Stockdale posed so long ago will always be found closest to home.

An artist and farmer cultivates creativity



"May I?"

I've just asked artist Stacy Tabb how she's managed to learn so many trades — web designer, leather crafter/shop owner, ceramicist, printmaker, and now orchard farmer, to name a few — and her husband, Dan, politely volunteers an answer.

'They're buying your story. They're buying a little part of you, which is not as horrible as it sounds. I'm out there for a reason. I'm happy to give that.'

Apart from a quick sidebar about pest-control strategies for small-scale tobacco growing, Dan has largely stayed off camera during my online interview with Stacy. But his wife is clearly a topic at least as near and dear to his heart as the caterpillar-liquefying efficiency of bacillus thuringiensis.

"I'm very proud of her because she has taught herself every single thing she does. She wanted to learn how to cook Turkish food; she learned how to cook Turkish food. She wanted to learn how to be a farmer; she learned how to be a farmer. She wanted to learn how to weave; she taught herself how to weave. She's taught herself everything she knows how to do right now. ... We get it from reading. We get it from doing our research."

"We're 55 years old and starting a farm," shrugs Stacy. "We've never been afraid to fail."

Stacy Tabb: Artist and orchard keeper(All images courtesy of Stacy Tabb)

You are what you eat

Farm?

I’ve contacted Stacy to talk about her art, which she sells online and at shows throughout the South, specifically her “You Are What You Eat” series, striking folk-art-inspired prints depicting a range of different wildlife composed of their primary food source: a humpback whale whose torso is made up of mackerel (some of which, in turn, reveal a tiny squid within), a Galapagos tortoise containing cacti, a Virginia opossum with a belly full of strawberries.

But just as we’re getting into the details of navigating a career as a professional artist, she casually mentions their side hustle: a 28-acre former hay farm in north Alabama the Tabbs purchased from Stacy's parents, who were downsizing.

Dan and Stacy are busy turning it into Ironspring Orchard & Farm, which they eventually intend to operate as a place visitors can come and pick their own fruits, vegetables, and flowers. “It's not open for business,” says Stacy. "I went ahead and made the website because I'm an idiot like that.”

Black walnuts and Red Devils

Or someone who’s always looking for one more project. Currently the largest part of the farm is dedicated to chestnut trees — five acres in total. They’re hybrids that maintain the character of the original American chestnut (once “a huge food crop in this country,” says Stacy) while offering resistance to the Japanese-imported blight that wiped them out in the 1800s.

They also have three acres of black walnut trees. Stacy: “Husband always wanted to grow black walnuts, even though it'll be our kids that are harvesting them — and harvesting them for lumber."

Another three acres boast over 110 fruit trees. “We planted the trees as we bought them,” says Stacy, “which we thought was kind of crazy but also kind of interesting.” They avoided widely available fare like peaches and pecans in favor of pears and cherries and many varieties of heritage apple, including Arkansas Black, Yellow Bellflower, and Red Devil.

Summer Rambo apples

Not to mention “masses of crabapples,” which Stacy notes some people still like to use to make pies.

Stacy is quick to point out that they’re not homesteaders. While they do maintain an Instagram account, you won’t find them posting the kind of carefully curated tableaus of pastoral bliss that have become the standard for a certain type of influencer.

“We want to grow fruit and we want to grow nuts and we want to grow flowers and we want to grow food that we can sell or give to our friends,” says Stacy.

Planting chestnut seedlings

Chestnut trees and fruit trees

Don't kill the good bugs

All while being good stewards of the land. “We don't want to kill the good bugs,” says Stacy, who explains that this is a matter of knowing “when to use pesticide at the right time so you don't impact the pollinators but still are able to protect your trees.”

“Right now we have Japanese beetles stripping our pear trees in the orchard, but we're able to use one of the harsher insecticides because none of those things are blooming. So they've got nothing [else] on them. No wasps, bees, nothing.”

“We don't want to ruin the soil,” Stacy adds, “and we’re trying to do this in as old-fashioned and non-chemical a way as we can. But we’re not evangelicals about ‘organic.’ It costs a lot of money to get organic certified, and the quality of the food that you get isn’t any better."

A growing obsession

While Stacy has been making art since she was a child — “my first memory of drawing something was a bird that I [got from] a magazine or a schoolbook and they asked me if I traced it” – and went on to study graphic design, drawing, and printmaking in college, agriculture is an interest she and Dan developed later in life.

The couple met, married, and started a family in Stacy’s hometown of Huntsville (Dan is originally from California). When their two children were very young, Dan’s job as mapmaker took them to Lakeland, Florida.

"We lived in a [suburban] neighborhood because the children were small and we wanted them to have neighborhood friends,” recalls Stacy. “But we had a little quarter-acre lot, and we would always start seeds in pots with the kids when they were little. ‘Hey, let's grow some plants.’ Just another thing to teach them, another thing for them to enjoy.”

As Stacy continues, I begin to understand that she and Dan are both the kind of people for whom a modest container garden could easily lead to more ambitious undertakings. To paraphrase Ron Burgundy, it escalated quickly.

“And then we tilled up a section of the yard and grew broccoli one very cold winter. It just went crazy from there. We tilled up the entire back yard. We were growing corn, we were growing tobacco, we were growing pumpkins. We got a 55-pound pumpkin off a vine one year. It only had a cup of seeds, which I thought was kind of funny, but they were very good when we roasted them.”

Going pro

It was also in Lakeland that the Tabbs began to pursue art as a profession. Dan, a disabled Navy veteran who served during Desert Storm, had spinal surgery in an attempt to alleviate debilitating back pain from his injuries. While recovering, he was unable to work for three months.

Even after this, the pain still remained. At inpatient therapy for pain management, they told him he needed to find an activity that would keep his hands moving. He chose leather crafts, reactivating the skills his father had taught him as a boy. He even had his dad’s old tools.

Once again, there were no half measures for the Tabbs. “He started making things fast and crazy at home,” says Stacy. “And I was like, we can't live with all this stuff in our house. Let's go to the market in downtown Lakeland. And so we did.”

Stacy, meanwhile, had begun designing websites for the burgeoning blogosphere. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit was an early customer, and the business soon took off. “I did a design for every single conservative blogger that there was — and some of the lefties too.”

But she soon threw herself into learning knitting, crocheting, and weaving. After a few years of selling their wares every Saturday, the Tabbs had honed their skills enough to score a grant from a local incubator to open a studio, where they taught classes in addition to selling their creations. It went well for three years; then came COVID.

Officially deemed “non-essential,” the store had to shut down. “It killed our business and broke our hearts,” says Stacy.

Hare print...

...and "translated" to clay

Sweet home Alabama

Shortly thereafter, Dan and Stacy moved back to Alabama. With their children now grown, they settled into their current life as artist farmers. Balancing the two is all about scheduling, says Stacy.

“It’s so bloody hot right now. [We do] farming in the morning, arting in the afternoon in the air conditioning. They kind of work out pretty well that way.”

Dan is also an artist, a sculptor working in stone. “Because he's a disabled veteran, he decided to pick the heaviest thing in the world to work on,” Stacy jokes.

I ask him about his work, and this time it is Stacy who fields the question for Dan. “His pieces are all related to being a disabled veteran — the challenges that veterans face. The very first one he did is called ‘23 of 22’ because it's about the veteran who chooses not to kill himself that day.”

“He makes people cry at art shows when he tells them about his pieces,” says Stacy, whose booth at art shows is usually beside her husband's. “I hear him making people cry and I’m saying, ‘Yeah, this whale has squid inside of it.’”

Dan Tabb and some of his pieces

Making it

The Tabbs hit the art show circuit in the spring and fall. The travel can be a grind, but in Stacy’s experience her art sells better face to face. “They're buying your story,” she says. “They're buying a little part of you, which is not as horrible as it sounds. I'm out there for a reason. I'm happy to give that.”

Meeting her buyers can also serve as a kind of market research. It was at the art fairs that Stacy first floated the idea of her latest print in the "You Are What You Eat" series: Godzilla.

"I had been teasing this one at art shows for a long time, and they said, ‘Well, what's he going to eat?’ And I said, ‘Tokyo.’"

Stacy later reconsidered. “That wasn’t accurate. Honestly he'd only ever eaten a train, and he didn't really eat it. He just chewed on it.” Reasoning that nuclear radiation was the legendary kaiju’s main source of nourishment, Stacy ended up putting a mushroom cloud in his belly.

Sharing these details, says Stacy, helps buyers connect to the art. “It's a thing they'll put up in their house, and they'll remember that you gave them a good story.”

The internet offers the chance to reach a far larger audience, but Stacy is clear-eyed about the challenges of cultivating buyers online.

“No matter what website [you use to sell your art], whether it's Etsy or your own personal website, unless you are driving traffic to it from a third party like your social media, it's not gonna do anything. You just hang it out there with the billions of other sites that are out there.”

"It's a slog,” Stacy admits. “You have to try and figure out what the algorithm wants, and nobody knows what that is. Nobody can tell you. I try to post once a day. I don't always do that, though.”

“The way it works is the more people you have commenting and liking and sharing your piece, the more the algorithm likes it. That is very tricky to make happen.

"A lot of times people scroll and read, [but] they're not liking anything. They're just scrolling and reading. They might appreciate something, but if they don't stop and like it or drop a comment on it, it doesn't help us very much. I'm glad we're entertaining them, but it doesn't do a thing.”

Building an art career requires patience and persistence. Apparently the same could be said about running an orchard.

“We're going to have to fight the birds for every cherry that we get,” says Stacy. “The cherries flowered this year, but they didn't fruit. They're not quite ready yet. Next year we expect to have to fight. We're going to have to fight everything for fruit.”

It’s a fight Stacy seems to enjoy, just as she seems to enjoy what she calls the “fiddly,” technically unforgiving process of carving her designs into linoleum print blocks.

“I start with the drawing, I put the drawing on the block, and then I have to start carving. And if a blade slips, then I have to do something different or I have to start over. It can be monstrous.”

Stacy plans to conclude the “You Are What You Eat” series with its 50th piece, which she intends to be a bald eagle. Then she’ll put them together in a book.

And after that? Stacy repeats a bit of advice she once gave a young painter about feeling stuck. It’s advice that she and Dan have clearly taken in forging the adventurous yet grounded path of their life together.

“Do something different. Go work in clay, work in printmaking, work in [fabric]. Do anything different as long as it's still creative and as long as you're keeping the avenue open.”

Stacy's studio

Stacy's press

The making of a print: Humpback Whale

The photos below show the progression of "You Are What You Eat" #30: Humpback Whale from initial drawing, to carved linoleum block, to print, and to watercolored print.

Frederick Douglass: American patriot



In 1852, Frederick Douglass was invited to give a 4th of July speech in his hometown of Rochester, New York. After praising the framers of the Constitution and the nation they established, Douglass turned to the cruel hypocrisy of commemorating American independence while millions remained in the bondage he had only recently escaped, pointedly addressing white Americans in the second person:

"What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? ... To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; ... There is not a nation on the Earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour."

If anyone had reason to condemn America as irredeemably lost, it would be a man like Douglass, legally reduced to chattel for the first 20 years of his life. And yet Douglass ended his speech with a stirring affirmation of faith in “the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions.”

He had the wisdom to distinguish the lasting ideals of the founders from the human wickedness that had perverted them. For Douglass, these ideals remained worth protecting; indeed, they are what allowed him to hope that his abolitionist cause would soon triumph.

Ten years later, as the American Civil War raged, Douglass gave another 4th of July speech. This time, he used the third person plural, aligning himself with both his countrymen and the Founding Fathers and describing the Union effort as “continuing the tremendous struggle, which your fathers and my fathers began eighty six years ago.”

Douglass had urged President Lincoln to let black soldiers fight for the Union since the war began. When the 1863 signing of the Emancipation Proclamation permitted this, two of Douglass' sons were among the 200,000 black Americans who enlisted.

In a little less than two years, America will celebrate the 250th anniversary of its founding. As we contemplate that milestone from this particularly volatile moment in our history, may we ponder what divides us and, like Douglass, strive to discern the unity it conceals.