2025 was an important year in the work that I have been doing ever since you started following me online. It's not enough for me to talk the talk of media literacy, community engagement, and fostering inclusive spaces for public ideation and consideration. While I have spent a lot of time and energy helping point out that in-person engagement is the major differentiator between successful left-wing and right-wing rhetoric campaigns, I, myself, must walk the walk.
As we slide toward the 2026 mid-term elections on the heels of one of the most progressive candidate victories in recent years, our work together informing and engaging public citizenry as public citizens has never been more important. I wish I could say I've taken time away from all of this, but the truth is that I've been hard at work collecting data, planning out technical tools, and engaging with people locally to figure out the right direction to orient myself toward these next few elections.
You as a supporter obvious understand how important this work is. I know I have been silent for a while, but this work is not wide and shallow like a lot of social media content these days. The work I do is deep and rigorous, and while I have tried and failed before to create a more robust engagement mechanism for today's misinformation industrial complex, I believe last night I have made a solid, measurable, actionable breakthrough.
The future is too important to worry about what I did right or wrong in the past, whether I posted the right kind of work, stayed away the right amount of time, focused my energy on the right projects. I have to trust my instincts here—the ones that you've generously enabled me to lean on—and keep going. We all, really, have to keep going.
Lawsonry as a content publishing system is going to either evolve significantly or migrate into this new iteration of what I am doing. Writing thought pieces and trying to engage the public at large with them just doesn't have the right kind of critical engagement I am looking for. There are too many echo chambers out there, too many misinformation engines... What I'm looking to produce is more bite-sized, actionable chunks of analyses that can be integrated into other peoples' content networks. I'm thinking on a larger, more wide-spread scale than just one blog with one set of perspectives. This is more national; this is more citizenry-sized...
So imagine, if you will, a website, designed by me, where you can take any article from any news organization, and paste the URL. That article goes into a queue, and then a human intelligence analyst trained in mass media and psychology provides a simple, easy to follow breakdown of what we are being asked to believe, the weaknesses and exposure points in the rhetoric, and simple questions you can use in combating misinformation when these are provided to you online or in person.
The ultimate goal is a system where the following can happen:
- You and someone else are engaged in a debate about something related to policy
- You ask for sources, they share a link
- You plug in that link to this tool, and are given what is essentially talking points to help you lead the conversation toward engaging with that work critically—identifying the weak points, and walking them through why it's not a good source
This is a very high-level elevator pitch that I need to polish. It's also something that is better explained by just showing it — which I do intend to do on TikTok as time permits.
We have so much work to do as we build a better world to hand off to newer generations of humans, and building tools to help all of us in service of that mission is what this is all about.
I hope your 2026 is off to a great start. Remember to breathe, exercise (walking for a couple minutes each day at a bare minimum—you can do it!), and drink plenty of water every day.
Keep an eye out for more updates soon,
Jesse