The 2020s | Carolina Quotes

I’m more in touch with my emotions and the visceral sensory from childhood than any other part of life. I don’t know if it helps with creativity, but I do know that when I talk to other writers they talk about their childhood in great detail.

I am very comfortable writing as a man, and I think that’s because I had really good men in my life. They made me feel comfortable and I thought, ‘OK, they’re not so different from me…’

I know the world does not need another book from me, but I have nothing else to do with myself. I have no hobbies. So then I feel guilty when I say to my agent, ‘I seem to have another book ready if you want to take a look at it…’

…‘I think I was a better writer when I was younger.’…I was more detailed, I took more time. It’s not as if I’m in a rush now, but I trust the reader more. I don’t feel like I have to say that much about the character’s inner feelings. But then as I read The Accidental Tourist I thought, ‘Well, it’s kind of nice to see all of Macon’s inner feelings there.’

A nation of lost and fatherless boys and drifting young men is terrified that we have too much patriarchy. Why, it reinforces my belief in the existence of demons: unassisted man could never be so blank and stupid as to fear that fathers have too much authority when boys and girls by tens of millions grow up with none at all. Only Beelzebub can explain it. A nation of fornicators, sodomites, divorcees, pornographers, and users of pornography, a nation of casual obscenity, erupts in wrath against boorish flirting. A nation of cultural amnesia tears down memorials. A nation that murders a million of its children every year is full of benevolent neighbors who have the social workers at your door if they see your child riding a bicycle without a helmet. A nation of the religiously indifferent, ruled by innumerable and anonymous puppet-masters of bureaucracy, suspects a theocrat around every corner.

It was very obvious that Vice President Biden cared, as he extended to Jacob Jr. a sense of humanity, treating him as a person worthy of consideration and prayer

Jacob Jr. told Sen. Harris that he was proud of her, and the senator told Jacob that she was also proud of him and how he is working through his pain. Jacob Jr. assured her that he was not going to give up on life for the sake of his children.

I don't have to have a political office. I do it because I think it's public service. And if there was a position I thought I could truly render public service, I would consider it. But I don't know what that would be right now.

Ppl seem to operate under the false assumption that the majority of Americans are on the side of equality & progress at any given time in history when it's most often the opposite that's true. That's why the true story of democracy & rights in the USA is one of prolonged struggle

The casual nature with which they replay the murder video at all hours of the day on tv says so much about the entire society

The conversation around the need to defund and abolish police is still a new concept for a lot of folks. They still don’t quite understand that concept, like how we could have a society without police forces, but everybody understands that the rent is too high. But of course that intersects with policing all these other issues—that’s what you can bring everybody to the table around.

A major disconnect between the people and the politics is one of the things that the housing crisis has made even clearer. There are millions of people facing eviction right now, and from the way that these politicians are acting around this issue, you would not think they saw the same thing. I think it just shows how this is something that doesn't touch them—they have health care, they have housing, you know what I mean? They’re so disconnected from the reality of how many other people are living, I don’t think that they really recognize just how wide that wealth inequality is. The politicians are generally not able to respond because they’re so disconnected from that experience.

The USPS situation is very serious because we need a national postal service. That’s also just an extension of the whole conservative movement’s attack on public services, period. It’s tied to the elections, but it’s also just about this whole effort to try and privatize everything. That’s why having a systemic analysis is really important—because then you understand the throughline with all of those things and how all of those things are connected.

We want to be careful, especially as the idea of taking down these monuments becomes more mainstream. The establishment will try to co-opt it and repackage it in a certain kind of way. We have to be careful that we don’t allow them to do that, because what they’ll do is take the monuments down and say, “Oh, we’ve solved racism. Let’s carry on.” At the same time, the monuments are significant, or else it wouldn’t be such an issue. There wouldn’t be such a showdown over whether or not to take it down. You wouldn’t have people fighting so vehemently to keep these Confederate monuments in place because they do mean something. It’s an ideological battle. There’s a reason why, particularly throughout the South, in front of every county courthouse, you have this same Confederate soldier monument. It’s supposed to send a message that even though the Confederacy lost the war, white power is still the order of the day in the South. I don’t see a scenario where all of these issues are resolved, we’re on the other side of systemic racism, and we still have monuments of the Confederacy up. Erecting the monuments was part of the colonization process all around the world—a part of the way that they indicated that we are in control and the way to constantly send the message that they’re in control. So that is a part of the process. Taking down monuments to [Christopher] Columbus and these other colonial figures is a part of the decolonization process.

The other thing I have pointed out is this whole narrative around peaceful protests. When it all first started out, people were peacefully protesting and the cops were tear-gassing them. The establishment was not out in front saying, “Oh, don’t tear gas the protestors.” People started looting, they started burning things down, and then the establishment was, “Oh, no, we embrace peaceful protest.” Their primary concern is always commerce and continuing with capitalism and the status quo, everyday business, and protecting property. That’s always the primary concern above anything else.

There’s power in naming our heroes and lifting them up. We don’t have many monuments to Black people or women—especially Black women—like, anywhere. If it weren’t significant, then it wouldn’t be an issue, right? I remember when people were like, “Oh, don’t just put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill—what is that doing? How does that address capitalism?” That’s true, but at the same time, if it didn’t have any power, then they wouldn’t have any problem with doing it. The reason that they don’t do that is because they don’t want people thinking about this revolutionary figure. Imagine if every time you saw a $20 bill, you saw Harriet Tubman and you’re reminded of slavery. You’re reminded of how we’re still struggling. There’s value in it, but I don’t want us to over-prioritize that above addressing the material conditions of our people—because, again, what the establishment will do is say, “OK, yeah, we’re going to take down a Columbus statue, put up a Harriet Tubman statue, take down this statue, put up a Frederick Douglass statue,” [and] that will become the project while people are still homeless. People are still not going to have living wages, and that [ends up] becoming the new neoliberal project.

They just renamed a road in Chicago after Ida B. Wells, [and] that’s powerful. You see that, and you’re like, “Well, who’s Ida B. Wells?” If you didn’t know, you’re going to learn. It’s going to be a reminder of that history.

If you spend your time saying "it can never happen" while occupying a position to make it more likely to happen, you're part of the problem.

6 ppl hold > wealth than the bottom 50% of America. There's more wealth inequality today than any time since the gilded age. Biden accepted the most billionaire $ in the primary. They're paying him to reject MedicareForAll in a pandemic. Imagine not being mad at billionaires.

It's hard to define "progressive" but it seems to me you shouldn't label yourself as such if you don't think that decent housing and healthcare and food etc are human rights.

What you’ve seen in this latest slate of picks is a lot of emphasis on the identity of the individuals picked, a lot of firsts in the group. And even folks with less — or less, shall we say, more attenuated relationships to traditional identity characters have gone as far as to talk about the struggles of their stepfather’s family, right? And I think that’s very intentional, because substantively several of these individuals have real problems, and none of them truly represents a progressive in the mindset of most Americans, especially those who identified with Bernie Sanders. And Neera Tanden is someone, in particular, who was very notorious for being openly antagonistic of Senator Sanders, who, again, represented the largest coalition of progressive voters in this country

All of the emphasis on the firsts, of the diversity of this crew, but less emphasis on whether or not these individuals represent the interests of the group that they are assumed to represent because of what they look like, right?

In a world where student loan debt, especially in the course of the primary, was still being characterized by the overwhelming bulk of Democratic Party candidates as something that was a far-left, inappropriate policy to pursue, and which, even in the context of Joe Biden, is still being framed as something that should be pushed in a very minimalist way — right? — he has the power to cancel all student debt on day one but is talking about canceling a maximum $10,000; Chuck Schumer, some others are pushing for more — I’m not overly optimistic that this policy, which is one of few that Biden has control over, is going to be dealt with in the maximalist way that the crisis compels.

We are in the middle of the largest protest movement in American history. And it’s a protest movement that’s all about finding nonpunitive, noncarceral solutions to the kinds of economic problems that are plaguing disproportionately Black and Brown communities, but all Americans, especially right now in the middle of this additionally historic global pandemic.

And so there’s a great deal of frustration that there is this choice not only to nominate a candidate who is known as the author of what is actually called the Joe Biden crime bill, but that he’s gone and also selected a running mate who is known for being the top cop from California, the state that has the second-highest number of incarcerated people in America. And moreover, Kamala Harris is someone who has had these criticisms leveraged at her throughout, very early on, at the start of her campaign, and, to many people in the activist community, has done very little to assuage people’s concerns about her previous stances or to demonstrate the level of growth that we would like to see.

Joe Biden has articulated very clearly that he is the candidate who promises that nothing will fundamentally change.

There has been an implication, online at the very least, that the people who have raised concerns about Kamala Harris and her record are not the base, are not Black people, are white leftists. The “Bernie bro” mythology has been raised as a specter again, when the reality is there’s a lot of grassroots frustration with the fact that this, again, unprecedented political movement is basically being ignored, or at very least a nose is being thumbed at what’s going on in the streets right now.

With respect to the Democratic National Convention, you know, I think the party is sending a very clear signal about whose votes they are reaching for and whose they aren’t. They have John Kasich, who is a Republican and who has attempted to pass some of the most draconian anti-abortion laws in the state of Ohio, in a prime spot, when there was news for a while that suggested that they weren’t even going to allow AOC to speak. Of course, they now have. But they have made gestures like barring The Young Turks, one of the preeminent lefty news organizations, from having a press pass to a digital event. Why you would do that, other than to send a kind of signal to progressives that you’re not interested in their vote, I don’t know. So, it’s a really curious choice. It feels again like it’s 2016, and there is a dynamic being set up where there is a kind of wanton disregard for the values and interests of what is coming up to be the new base, the insurgent left wing of the party, the part of the party that just celebrated the victory of Cori Bush last week and Jamaal Bowman and Mondaire Jones. And it is telling that the only people under the age of 40 — under the age of 50, rather, who are speaking at this event are AOC and Pete Buttigieg.

When I think of emancipation, I think of all of the people who fought for freedom but who never got a chance to experience it. The end of slavery did not happen overnight, it came from intergenerational work by those who fought for a better world they knew they might never see

Just so we're clear, there is no way to have an honest conversation about immigration from Central America without talking both about the impact of climate change and about a history of US intervention that politically and economically destabilized many of these countries.

Rewatching the Freedom Riders documentary, seeing the face of a young John Lewis, and I'm reminded of how so many of the ppl who spit on, cursed at, & assaulted these riders are ppl who are still alive today. Still alive, still voting, still here. None of this was that long ago.

Worth repeating that all of the police violence you see happening right now has been happening for a long time before there were any camera phones to record it. It's a daily phenomenon in communities across the country. It's structurally embedded into how these forces operate.

I've said this before, but for all the people who believe you definitely would have been abolitionists in the era of slavery, who you are today is who you would have been then. You don't need to imagine scenarios of living in the 19th century, there's work to do here and now.

Saying "I worked very hard for it" to justify your position as a billionaire is one of the most absurd things I can imagine when there are people working multiple jobs who still don't make enough to feed their children and pay their rent.

I've said this before, but if you're doing an MLK day service project consider bringing King-level analysis to it. Don't just serve lunch at a soup kitchen, interrogate why millions of ppl live in poverty in the first place. King's legacy isn't about charity, it's about justice.

If you ever wonder where we're at on the dystopia scale, consider that it's normal to believe the government is spying on you, and crazy to believe that they're not.

I never imagined that I would live to see our courts condemn the NSA’s activities as unlawful and in the same ruling credit me for exposing them.

It turns out "Hey Alexa" is short for "Hey Keith Alexander." Yes, the Keith Alexander personally responsible for the unlawful mass surveillance programs that caused a global scandal. And Amazon Web Services (AWS) host ~6% of all websites.

Are people aware of the extent of the intrusion? Are people aware of what is happening? And is it necessary? Is it something they consented to? And I think for the vast majority of people, the answer is no.... Z

When Facebook is sort of grinding down your privacy, you don't see it. And although you will feel it, you won't feel it for years.... these companies have quietly created perfect records of everything you've done, everywhere you've gone, everything you've clicked, everything you've liked, how long you've stayed on a page, you know, when you had to scroll up to reread a section. All of that is captured, and they use this to model ways to influence your behavior to actually shape and manipulate the decisions you make as a human being.

And then they sell... or... rent this capability. Facebook says they don't sell data, which is absurd because...they're collecting all of the data and then they're selling... to the highest bidder... what they're selling is access to your eyeballs...access to your mind.... It's you being exploited, and you don't see it happening....

For example, AT&T has been storing all of our movements... cell-site location information - for every handset [customers & non-customers]... that happens to be connected to one of their towers....

Going back to 2009, they're storing this. They have the last 10 years of your movements, and everyone you know, more or less...

Here's the thing - they sell that as a service to law enforcement agencies without a warrant. They don't have to go to court and say, you know, we need a warrant... They can do it on much lower authorities, like subpoenas and things like that... that's just this location information... What about your actual calling records? ...calling records are a proxy for what's called a person's social graph... that's the state of play today.

These technical services are intentionally designed to be monopolies, to exploit...the network effect, particularly in secure messengers, things like Whatsapp or Facebook itself, which is not secure at all, so that the only way you can talk to someone or the only way you can read this is that you must use this service...

Eric Schmidt, former head of Google, argued that, you know, privacy is dead, that culture's changed, that we don't care about this anymore, that it's not right.

The political argument that we get here all the time is if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

And for us to hear that today, to begin with, should just, you know, raise the hairs on the back of our neck a little bit and go, why do we have any rights? What are rights for? If we're in a democracy - right?

Privacy is not about something to hide. Privacy is about something to protect.

The United States is probably the only advanced democracy in the world that does not have a basic privacy law.

The Fourth Amendment... Is not a basic privacy law. That's a specific prohibition against the government to engage in particular kinds of searches, but it does nothing to protect you from sort of the predatory activities of companies.

We have to raise our expectations for the centers of power in society if we want to have a fairer society.

A friend unexpectedly died yesterday. He was young. I searched my email because I remembered he recently sent a kind note. I had a response in my drafts that I never finished. I feel awful. A sad reminder life is short.

I can't breathe.

Telling stories or trying to portray a message through a body, how that body looks in a garment, and how the garment affects the way the body moves; to modeling, which is bringing garments to life with your body; then to acting, which is bringing a character to life with your body and mind. It feels linked in a lot of ways. That's been the project of my life. Just trying to feel seen and learn how to see others correctly.

I've always believed a woman's superpower is how deep she can love, you know? And one of the things growing up in Baltimore, I grew up around a lot of Black women that didn't have, necessarily, resources to give, right? But they had their strength and they had their love to offer.

Immigrant parents don’t want their children to suffer or have to live harder than they did.

I think that with a book, you can excavate a story so much more because you're really in the character's head and you can go into much deeper detail. In a movie, what you might spend pages describing, you can do that in a flash. But there's also a feeling that you have to really streamline a movie too so it stays on the right track. And I think I would say that there are definitely changes made, but I think that to me, the spirit of the story is there. And that was what was most important to me, was just that people walked away with the same feeling that they had when they read the books, which is just, I hope, feeling a warm-hearted, cozy feeling.

Schools across the country celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Day today... Many schools show his historic “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, a speech given before hundreds of thousands... Dr. King's commitment provides a wonderful example for all of us, but particularly for the young. By the wisdom of his teaching, the justice of his cause, the intensity of his commitment, he helped transform America. Today, Dr. King's example is more important than ever. Inequality has reached new extremes. We have a president that purposefully rouses racial and ethnic fears and divisions. Politics has become bitter, partisan, and increasingly marked by extreme and often hateful rhetoric. We are spending more and more on the Pentagon—already the largest military budget by far in the world—and cutting back on programs for the vulnerable, everything from food stamps, to Medicaid, to public housing and aid for poor schools and students. We end up with guided missiles and misguided young people—a tragic waste. Today, a new Poor People’s Campaign is building, organizing lines of race, region, and religion. It has been marching on state legislatures and now is increasing pressure on Washington. It is not about right or left, but about right and wrong. Dr. King called on us to express the better angels of our souls. Now, as we celebrate his life, we would do well to put his lessons into practice.

Reaganomics was supposed to be good for the economy. It meant small government, low taxes, trickle down economics, deregulation, and all of these turned out to be bad... The slogan was to starve the beast... the government...

Reagan lowered the taxes on the top bracket and that made the [top] 1%... super rich.

Today 21% of [total] annual income goes to 1% of households. ...That cannot be the basis of a good democracy.

Blackboard economists said that globalization would be good for Americans. ...It had a few winners and... many losers. ...It ...led to an epidemic of Deaths of Despair in which so much was destroyed in America. Hyper-globalization destroyed... neighborhoods and cities and everything in the Rust Belt... It was like an atomic bomb hit... Alcohol poisoning, drug overdoses accelerated... the destruction of human lives.

Deregulation was supposed to make the economy more efficient... but instead it led to the financial crisis... and Blackboard Economists did not even see the crisis coming when it was around the corner.

[H]ousing prices had doubled by 2005 in 10 years time, which would have made sense if incomes had also increased substantially, but they didn't.

[H]ousehold incomes... weren't going up. You don't need a Ph.D. in economics to figure out that something's not right with that.

[I]n 2016. ...Trump ...said ...this is a good economy ...tremendous, we've never had it so good... but... people do not kill themselves [or kill strangers] to the extent of 150,000 people per annum in a good economy. You've got to generate a lot of despair in order to do that...

They were also disregarding the real true unemployment rate... even in January of 2016, among African Americans 16%... were unemployed... so this is not full employment... and by education, among African Americans [those who did not finish high school] 32% were unemployed. Now you know why the George Floyds get into trouble with the law. They are not able to find their place in the legal labor market. ...So this is what Marty Feldstein and Donald Trump think of [as] a good economy. Not in my view!

The meltdown of 2008 was a wasted crisis... because the homeowners were not bailed out. The financial sector was bailed out, the banks... the bankers... but... 8 million homeowners were thrown out of their homes.

Usually the relationship between the true unemployment rate and the official unemployment rate is 2:1.

The new normal is what I call Bailout capitalism because Ben Bernanke put a lot of money [creation of $trillions by the Federal Reserve] into the financial sector.

Here is the Lehman Brothers, 2008... the assets of the Federal Reserve is under $1 trillion... and within weeks you have more than a doubling of the assets of the Federal Reserve, and then comes quantitative easing 2 and... 3 and by that time you're at $4 1/2 trillion... and then... comes the Covid crisis and we're up to $7 trillion. Now... that kind of a Capitalism is unsustainable. ...[N]o wonder that there is asset inflation as a consequence... and the stock market went through the roof.

The US became a dual economy... which generated a lot of despair. Half the population is doing well and the other half is getting by... or getting by in very difficult circumstances... Trump would not have won otherwise in 2016. That's the basis of the Trump revolution... against... the political elite, the foreign policy elite, the intellectual elites.

So why were economists so wrong? The problem is that economics is an axiomatic theory, it's deductive, based on assumptions almost all of which are false [with] too many omitted factors, and they don't care about contradictions. They don't care about people killing themselves... That's not an economic problem.

The economic playing field is not level.

[Imperfect information is ubiquitous.] People with more [or better] information can take advantage of people with less information, so exploitation becomes a real possibility.

People who are cheaters, swindlers who can take advantage, especially of poor people... [who] do not have the education... the information. They cannot afford to buy the information so they get the short end of the stick... [O]pportunistic behavior is a big problem in the economy, and economists are not paying... attention...

People are not rational. Mainstream economics is pre-Freudian... because they don't think about the subconscious mind. Daniel Kahneman... has proven that rationality is impossible for mortals, human beings [with finite minds]... We're not superhuman.

[F]our economists have received Nobel Prizes for Behavioral economics... [T]hat should be the default model. ...Forget about rationality. That's a silly assumption.

IQ, intelligence quotient is normally distributed. ...The smart can take advantage of those with low IQ. That's not going to be the basis of a good economy and a good democracy if if people take advantage of one another. ...That's especially true of an educational system that is mediocre for a goodly portion of the population.

Economists disregard the... crucial result that people can be conditioned and... corporations can take advantage of that.

The character is formed during the first few years of life, and the corporations have an impact on the way we think... so consumer sovereignty... is not realistic, because producers spend an incredible amount of money in order to condition children and youth to drink Coca-Cola, to depend on the iPhone, to go to hamburger joints, to McDonald's... So adult economics, forget it! You've got to start the analysis with children, and that means that tastes are endogenous [determined within the economic system! ...The assumption of exogenous tastes is toxic.]

Status seeking is important. Relative incomes matter... Mainstream... economists said inequality was not a problem, and that's how we got an oligarchy [and populism].

We're not Robinson Crusoes. We live in a society and we're influenced by social forces, social processes, and that's not included in the DSGE models.

Wealth is... political power... and that's how we got from a democracy, to an oligarchy, to a plutocracy. Economists forgot completely about the need for countervailing power... and the oligarchs have taken over...

Power is the ability to control the action or thought of others. ...The oligarchs use their power also to control the thinking. They invested heavily... to control the thinking of the population.

[Oligarchs] are spending a lot of money on lobbies to influence government, and... the laws are made to benefit those that already are privileged.

Future generations cannot influence our decisions today unless we approach the problem from a moral perspective.

[The need for [j]ustice [and morality] is innate in human beings, and mainstream economics neglects [ethics,] justice [and morality].

[J]ustice is as important as efficiency.

Most of the models pertain to perfect competition. Forget about it! The default model should be oligopoly or monopoly.

Path dependence means that many processes are non-reversible... Poor people who go to poor schools... can't get into college and their whole life course is messed up...

Taxes are not all bad. ...[T]axes are used for infrastructure investments, for schooling, for basic research, and to bail out markets when they go haywire.

[M]arkets were not made in heaven... and they are helping the privileged, as they are constituted today.

[M]ainstream economics is fundamentally flawed [and] ignores the elephant in the room, which is the real existing economy.

I am advocating... a new paradigm of humanistic Rawlsian economics which puts human beings at the center... and not income, not growth, not GNP...

[T]he current system depends too much on luck. If you choose your parents right and you live in a decent neighborhood, you can grow up and become a productive member of the society... and John Rawls argues that... [luck] cannot be the basis of a just society.

Rawls says... let's design an economy... in such a way that you would be willing to enter that society at random. That's a just society... You don't know your position in it. You don't know whether you're smart or dumb. You don't know your skin color. You don't know your gender. You don't know your parents. You don't know anything about yourself. ...[In that case] we wouldn't design a society like it is today. You would make sure that there is an equitable distribution of power.... that the power is not concentrated... that there is countervailing power, that wealth is not concentrated...

[I]f we're not able to shift our paradigms, if we are stuck in the Arrow–Debreu world, then we're going to become the neoserfs of the oligarchs. Just like Aldous Huxley predicted in his novel, a Brave New World

Friedrich Hayek made a tremendous mistake in arguing that The Road to Serfdom leads through tyrannical governments... because there are multiple roads to serfdom... [A]nother... leads through the tyranny of oligarchs.

[[w:Humanistic economics|[H]umanistic economics]] advocates a creation of a capitalism with a human face. That requires a paradigm shift... away from a rat race, [away from] a social Darwinistic economy with a few winners and many losers.

Capitalism with a human face would require the elimination of poverty... the reduction of inequality... the establishment of real true... full employment... a less stressful life. ...Economists disregard stress.

We’ve been doing this for awhile, when you’ve been doing this a long time, you cross your fingers and hope for the best, but you never know. To find an audience that’s passionate, that’s as good as it gets.

Biden & his criminal cronies are not going to sleep well tonight. Well, Biden might because he probably forgot the name Scytl. His co-conspirators know name well. They also know the name Paragon, company which purchased Scytl in 10/20. Every will be revealed.

The thing about this time is everyone is under pressure to feel like they're being productive and they're not wasting time but I feel like that pressure has become unhealthy for me. I'm just ensuring I channel it in the right way.

Esther trusted God to lead her as she let go of fear in her life-changing moment.

She was not a powerless bystander. She was an ethical queen.

The Esther Effect was of Godly righteousness, humility, and peacefulness.

It was a was a hard road to come back from, but it definitely taught me perseverance and grit, but also it taught me empathy, which I think I would not have learned otherwise.

I think you go through a lot of it, just kind of repressing that stress. You’re like, ‘Everything’s great, everything’s fine. Everything’s fine. Nothing bothers me.’ And then one day it just kind of hits you in the face. You know, where you have to acknowledge [the stress]. …There’s a stigma about complaining about work, I guess because it’s so hard to do what we do and it’s a dream for so many people. You feel like you don’t have the right to complain about anything.

It feels great to not be standing behind a bunch of men, but to actually be standing in front of it as women with something that we made, something that we’re proud of and something that we put our blood, sweat and tears into.

I think I automatically pick things up…I feel like I’m able to use my body and pick up the choreography in order to use it to move the story and character forward. That was something I was used to doing in ballet — and performing in pieces where I’d be creating a character with my body and expressing it that way. So that’s something that I still really love to do, and I think that’s partly why action is something that I’ve really taken to.

I think it’s been a very slow progression for me in terms of shifting the perspective. I did a lot of really, really small films that, at least for me, shifted my trajectory in terms of the way that I saw myself as an actor and the projects that I wanted to pursue. I think it helped me bring a deeper level of understanding to the characters that I play, whether they’re in small films or big films. So I think taking some time out to focus on really small, character-driven roles helped lead me to those bigger projects that were also really character-driven and demanded a certain level of depth that I might not have had without those smaller, more character-focused independent films.

I tend to try to be pretty level in my everyday life and on set as well. When I’m not acting, I try to be pretty even-keeled and level. I try to keep myself as calm as I can be. It’s sort of a good state to be in if you don’t know what state you’re going to have to put yourself in from day to day. As an actor, you don’t necessarily know exactly how far you’re going to have to go or what you’re going to have go through for a character. So I try to focus on being calm and happy. I try to keep my stress level pretty low so that I’m not bringing any of that home with me.

I just learned how to drive a stick shift on my last film, finally. I had never learned to do that, so that is something that I’m planning on continuing to take with me. Also, my martial arts training is something that I want to keep up with after doing it three movies in a row now. I feel like it would be a real waste to just stop that when I do feel like I’ve been progressing quite a bit.

I am the most conservative, most constitutional and most pro-life legislator in Missouri, and I’m the most of those three in this particular Senate race too.

…The song does remember the deceased, and it’s the song that helps the deceased move on—to ascend, in the words of the poem, to the next life. I wanted to take that and apply it to senses of transition and, hopefully, ascendance within life, moments where one feels one has to move on and move up. I didn’t know it would become an ongoing, theoretically endless series—

I also think that in today’s industry, the financial repercussions of making a bad story have been mitigated by streaming services and cable fees, so that many movies are greenlit based on factors other than good story-telling. Connection to an audience is less important than impressing the decision-makers above you in the food chain, because they are the gatekeepers. Aligning with the popular messages or attitudes of the day have caused a lot of sloppy and obvious scripts to be funded and made, and that is why, IMHO, that the product coming out of Hollywood has been less popular — and mistrusted by a large part of the potential audience.

People on the right have been very afraid of a narrative that doesn't deify our founding, that actually forces us to confront it, because that leads to change. When people know better oftentimes they do better. We are seeing that now.

This has been a fundamental problem with news institutions, now and in the past. They attempt to cover racism and inequality without understanding it themselves.