I've never felt less like celebrating my country than I do now. A country that elects the worst person in the world twice after he's shown it exactly who he is deserves to be mocked, not celebrated. Still, its 250th birthday (which is obviously more significant than its 249th birthday or its 251st birthday) will only happen once, so I didn't boycott the festivities. I admit it was pretty fun to watch everything the orange taint did to promote himself for the occasion turn into a massive, abysmal failure - every music artist except Vanilla Ice refused to participate in his concert, his wrestling match was delayed by a thunderstorm, his newly renovated pool turned green, and his great American state fair shut down after all seven attendees got heat-related illnesses from that climate change thing they don't believe in. And today, DC residents were told to stay inside because his massive fireworks show made the air unbreathable, which is a pretty good analogy for everything he does to suck his own dick at our expense.

In Salt Lake City, fireworks are banned because Utah is experiencing the largest wildfires in state history from that climate change thing it doesn't believe in. What we really need is the largest data center in the country to give us more water. Naturally, many Utahns responded to this restriction to protect people's homes from burning down the same way they responded when they were told to wear masks in public so they didn't kill people during a global pandemic. The entitlement is simply nauseating and another symptom of the rot going to the core of this country that gave us two terms of President Trump. I want to scream in their faces that they can shove their "liberty" up their self-absorbed asses. As citizens of a society composed primarily of other people, they do not have a right, constitutional or otherwise, to set off explosives in areas with a high fire risk, no matter how pretty they think the colors are, and frankly, if they feel that strongly about fireworks, they have the minds of toddlers, which explains a lot. I find that the novelty of fireworks wears off after a few seconds, I hate not being able to sleep for a week in July because my douchebag neighbors are setting them off every night, and there's also the small matter of animals, babies, and veterans being traumatized just so people can see the pretty colors.

So anyway, Salt Lake City did a drone show instead. The lady next to me said "This is so much cooler than fireworks" at least thrice, and she wasn't wrong. I lived in the moment and watched it instead of filming on my phone, but I did take pictures of the beginning and the end when it paused for suitable intervals.

In between, the drones shifted and formed events and icons from American history - the Boston tea party, John Hancock's signature, the first airplane, the (fake) moon landing, ​the flag raising on Iwo Jima, Rosie the Riveter, Elvis, Michael Jackson, baseball, football, the Empire State Building, and the Statue of Liberty. They depicted Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King, which was a nice way to acknowledge the worst parts of American history without bringing down the mood. I certainly don't expect a lot of nuance from a drone show, but it shouldn't be pure propaganda, either. It depicted protesters holding signs, with no clear implication of any specific protest, apparently to convey the message that protesters have made various things better throughout history. I was with some of the friends I've made through protesting, and of course I said, "That's us! That's us!" That is one of the most important rights we have in the US, which is why the orange taint has gone to great lengths to take it away, though courts and grand juries have stopped him at almost every turn. Our strong tradition of not having dictators gives us an advantage over wannabe dictators. Russians have no such tradition, and they have no legal right to gather for protests, but now that they have to wait in line for ten hours to get fuel because Ukraine is destroying their infrastructure, they have lots of time to discuss how much Putin sucks.

The drone show was such an impressive display of technology that it made me reflect on how fast we're moving into the future. I spend a lot of time living in the future because the present sucks. I dream of a world where climate change has been conquered, science and technology have solved most of our problems, and people have learned to get along and not suck. That last part is the least plausible and the most important. I love the progress of technology I'm observing, but the world is still kind of a dystopian nightmare. I guess all I can do about that is be nice to people and spread my message of spirituality in spite of their disinterest.

I also went to a free breakfast near the Capitol, wearing my Bernie Sanders/AOC shirt and the keffiyeh that was gifted to me by a Palestinian gentleman, which has done wonders to shield my face and neck from the heat. I stood in line for some time, and one of the organizers, an old man, came through the line apologizing for the wait. He stared at me for an uncomfortable few seconds, then was like, "You're protecting your head. That's smart." I was like, "Yep." He introduced himself and asked my name. He didn't do that for the people in front of me or behind me. I guess I made him uncomfortable with my visible display of Palestinian culture, and he made a concerted effort to be polite and welcoming anyway. Good for him! I was glad I didn't see any MAGA hats. Tolerance does not include hate groups.

​The state of the US on its 250th birthday can be summarized by a couple of viral images of Black people being crowded on public transportation by some of the 400 masked white supremacists, emboldened by the man that most of my family voted for, on their way to march at the Capitol. These pictures will be in history books, and children will be baffled that Americans in the year of our Lord 2026 put up with this shit.

There is hope in these image, though. These pimples on Satan's scrotum are hiding their faces because even with their cult controlling every branch of the government, they know their views are wildly unpopular and would result in well-deserved consequences, legal and otherwise. Hitler's followers didn't hide their faces. Trump's followers have to. These same people claimed that masks made it impossible for them to breathe during the pandemic, and now they're covering most of their faces in skintight fabric in triple-degree heat. It's a pity they were able to breathe after all, but at least they were uncomfortable. The duty of every true American is to make sure they continue to be uncomfortable for the rest of their pathetic lives.

Speaking of masked white supremacists, the other thing I did to celebrate yesterday was attend a dance party outside the ICE warehouse that's apparently being sold because of public pressure or Kristi Noem's financial scandal or something, I don't know, but I'm not complaining. ICE agents had to sit in the parking lot and listen to our taunts for as long as we were there, though I didn't stay too late because I just turned 33 and I'm ready for the nursing home. A Flock camera in the parking lot of the warehouse across the street from us was like, "Attention, you are trespassing. Please leave the area. You are under surveillance, and you have been recorded." I'm surprised I don't remember the exact words because the damn thing said them over a hundred times despite us not trespassing anywhere at any point. Again, this drove home what a dystopian nightmare we're living in. That machine was straight out of an unpleasant sci-fi. That's not an optimistic note to end on, so here's a better one: ICE agents will be unemployable for the rest of their pathetic lives after this regime finishes collapsing.

A week ago, I found the second shield beetle that had gotten through my poorly sealed window. Today, I've found eight. I am no longer willing to take time out of my day to catch and release them. Now they die. Sorry. I wish I didn't have to come to this. If I can find their exact entry points or a way to repel them, I'll do that. Sometimes I see them on the outside of my window and pound on it to scare them away before they get in.

At least I never burned grasshoppers to death for fun. How's that for a transition? That's how Kyle McKay, the official LDS Church "Historian" - I use scare quotes because, like most LDS Church leaders, his background is in business and law - recently opened his remarks at a stake conference in Oklahoma. He said that being under the bright lights with his glasses was like the "revenge of the grasshoppers" that he killed as a kid. Pretty messed up, but kids will be kids, I guess.

Then he called "This Little Light of Mine," which was recently added to the Mormon repertoire after decades of singing boring white Protestant hymns with as little enthusiasm as possible, "a song where white people try to sing like black people." If he'd stopped there, I wouldn't have seen a problem. Jokes about cultural differences are not inherently racist, and if anything, given the aforementioned context, this one sounds to me like it's poking fun at white people. But then he gave his impression of a white person singing like a black person and made up a whole conversation that didn't happen. "​I wanted to turn to him and say, 'You know you’re white. And he would say, 'No, I'm an African slave, is what I am, and I'm singing 'Swanee River.'" In case you're unaware, "Swanee River" is a racist minstrel song. I have no idea why he thought this imaginary conversation needed to be shared. He seemed to be under the influence of something, and I don't mean the Holy Ghost.

I have nothing personal against McKay, whom I heard from at an institute devotional before he was important and remember liking just fine. I appreciate his apology and don't think this incident makes him a bad person, but I think it demonstrates loud and clear that Mormon leaders are out of touch and uninspired - not, despite the straw man apologists will want to apply, because I expect them to be perfect, but because anyone actually speaking for God in the year 2026 would know better than to preface his remarks by joking about a racist song that most people born after the 1950s have probably never heard of. That is absolutely not an unreasonable standard to hold them to. This might be a good time to point out that McKay's primary qualification for Mormon leadership is being a former prophet's first cousin twice removed. His sole qualification for being a historian, meanwhile, is his loyalty to the LDS Church's narrative. If you think that's not a real qualification for being a historian, you're so right. This shows in a talk he gave in 2023 called "A Sure and Certain Foundation," which, while not racist, was pretty awful.

According to McKay, the abundance and strength of evidence and arguments against the LDS Church just prove that it's true. I'm not exaggerating.

​"As you increase your efforts to increase your testimony, you are likely to be confronted with reasons to doubt. President Nelson cautioned, 'Don’t pollute [your testimony] with false philosophies of unbelieving men and women.' Please hear me and understand: there will always be some reason or another to doubt the truthfulness of this church and gospel. There are arguments and evidence supporting the proposition that there is no God, that Jesus was just a good philosopher-teacher, that Joseph Smith was simply a charismatic storyteller and that this church and gospel are not true. This evidence, these arguments, are on some level appealing and believable, for there are many who believe them....

"In short, agency - that is, our ability, our responsibility, to choose for ourselves - is essential in all things, including and beginning with belief. In order to preserve our agency in the matter of belief, there must be opposites from which to choose - reasons to believe and reasons to doubt. God does not give us doubts, nor is He the author of error, but He allows them because it is absolutely critical that you and I choose for ourselves to believe or not to believe. There will never come a time, at least pre-Millennium, when God removes all reason to doubt, for to do so would be to remove all agency in the matter of belief.

"Now, I want to be clear - by acknowledging the existence of reasons to doubt, I am not legitimizing them, and I am certainly not advocating or excusing doubt itself. Jesus said, 'Doubt not.' In the face of reasons to doubt, doubt not.

"And what? Did you think Satan would throw up flimsy, easily dismissible reasons to doubt? No! They will be enticing and flattering. If the prince of darkness can transform himself into an angel of light, then surely he can put forth ideas and arguments that appear enlightened."

See, I told you I wasn't exaggerating. I hope you realize that any religion could make this same rebuttal to its critics with equal validity - Catholicism, Islam, Scientology, Heaven's Gate, etc. And I think it's so funny how Satan gets all the credit for deceiving people and destroying their testimonies when he has so much help from Mormon leaders themselves. Is Satan the one who inspired Brigham Young to undermine confidence in his prophetic authority by declaring on multiple occasions that mixed-race couples and their children should be put to death? But of course, following the party line, McKay grouped every uninspired or downright awful Mormon leaders have said or done under "mistakes" and "errors" and makes critics out to be the unreasonable ones for expecting them to be "perfect." He even turned the accusation around:

"And what about you? If the truthfulness of this Church or the truthfulness of or your beliefs were judged by your errors, would anyone ever believe what you believe? Would there have been fewer mistakes, fewer messes, if God had only restored His Church and gospel through you?"

Yes, I answer without hesitation, pausing only to add the caveat that this is entirely hypothetical because the "restoration" is a fiction to begin with. Like many, many people who aren't Joseph Smith, I've managed not to be a serial adulterer and sexual predator despite my imperfections. I'm aware that in real life, people might already be less inclined to listen to the spiritual wisdom I have to share because I don't always live by it, and that's too bad, but I've never claimed to speak for God, whether I'm sharing wisdom or being an asshole. My mistakes and messes reflect on me. Kyle McKay's racist flub reflects on God because he was speaking in his official capacity and was supposed to have the Holy Ghost telling him what to say, which he invoked right before he started talking about the grasshoppers. Of course, everyone has off days, and this wasn't so bad that I would consider it a smoking gun against the LDS Church on its own. It's just part of a long-term pattern, with countless much more concerning examples, of these men not having the inspiration they claim.

"Sometimes, in studying the Book of Mormon or presenting it to others, we are tempted to bypass its primary purpose and jump straight to the collateral conclusion that if the Book of Mormon is true, Joseph Smith is a prophet and this is God’s church."

Off-topic, but I noticed this while I was skimming and wanted to comment because excuse me, this is exactly what the LDS Church taught us to do and what it teaches missionaries to teach prospective converts to do. Literally this exact line of reasoning is spelled out in Preach My Gospel. I'm so tired of rank-and-file Mormons being thrown under the bus for issues that come from the top. Of course, when the church tells us that David Whitmer testified of the Book of Mormon to the end of his life, it doesn't mention that he also said Joseph Smith was a fallen prophet, polygamy was an abomination, and the LDS Church was in apostasy. Anyway, McKay's point here was to suggest that we "read the book for its primary purpose - to convince the people of this earth that Jesus is the Christ." He went on,

"When you ask God, the Eternal Father, if these things are true - if Jesus is the Christ, if this is His gospel - it is essential that you ask in faith. Asking, and for that matter, reading from a position of doubt or skepticism will not summon a response from Heaven. 'Prove-it-to-me' prayers are seldom answered, and if they are, it is usually to the condemnation, even destruction, of the one demanding proof. Think Korihor and Sherem, for example. Asking in faith - even a particle of faith - implies that you at least have a desire to believe. Lead with this desire and 'let [it] work in you.'

"Asking in faith also means that you believe God will answer your prayers and give you the knowledge you desire. This faith is often demonstrated by what you do after you ask. Waiting patiently, unwaveringly for the witness you desire is part of asking in faith."

This is literally the definition of confirmation bias. Of course, McKay didn't come up with it on his own. Mormon epistemology is founded on confirmation bias.

"Brothers and sisters, I hope you realize that having perplexing questions that arise from reasons to doubt is not a problem. But please understand, finding answers to these perplexing questions ultimately is not the solution. The solution is a sure and certain foundation whereon if you build, you cannot fall. That foundation is Jesus Christ and His gospel, the fullness of which is found and taught in this Church."

Begging the question here - I mean actually begging the question, not the incorrect way everyone uses that term now. We must start with the conclusion that the fullness of Jesus Christ's gospel is found and taught in the LDS Church, and anything that gives us cause to doubt that conclusion, like whether the leaders of the LDS Church act anything like Jesus Christ would tell them to act if he were talking to them, is preemptively deemed irrelevant. Again, any religion could defend its truth claims with a similar fallacy. This is something I've noticed a lot lately. When I was a kid, prophets were supposed to direct us to Jesus, but now they cause so many problems for belief that we're told to just ignore them and focus on Jesus. My mom told me (back when I still spoke to her), "I made my covenants with God, not Spencer W. Kimball or Brigham Young." And where, pray tell, does she think everything she believes about covenants and God came from?

And oh, I didn't even realize this. McKay closed this talk with the story of Jane Elizabeth Manning maintaining her testimony of the LDS Church despite its policy that barred her from the temple because of the color of her skin, and the refusal of multiple prophets to make an exception for her.

"Her request was not granted. The Church President to whom she petitioned was John Taylor. He who once withstood what might have been his compelling reason to doubt now became part of what might have been Jane Manning’s compelling reason to doubt. Jane made similar petitions to Wilford Woodruff and Joseph F. Smith, who similarly upheld the race restrictions at the time. It would have been easy and understandable for Jane to pack it in, shut it down, and walk away. But she didn’t. Why? Because because her foundation was sure and certain in the truths that she had learned."

Very inspirational. Of course, like the other white Mormon leaders who use Jane's story as propaganda, he didn't say the policy was racist or wrong, he didn't mention that Joseph F. Smith eventually did compromise by having Jane sealed to Joseph Smith as a "Servitor" with a white woman as proxy, and he didn't mention that her surviving children left the church. Maybe if he'd ever really grappled with the LDS Church's treatment of black people instead of assuring himself that it was fine because a very small number of them believed in it anyway, he wouldn't have been so out of touch with reality that he thought his "Swanee River" joke would go over well. How's that for continuity?

​If you want a masterclass in what actually makes the United States great, you didn't need to look any further than Washington Square last weekend. The Living Traditions Festival took over Salt Lake City for three days, and while it was a phenomenal party on the surface, underneath the surface, it felt like something much more radical. That wasn't the organizers' intention when they started it forty years ago, but it's the current reality.
​
In a political climate where a loud, panicked contingent is trying to engineer a monochrome, white Christian ethnostate, Living Traditions felt like a giant, vibrant middle finger to that entire ideology. What we are witnessing across the US right now is the extinction burst of racists and xenophobes who are terrified of becoming a minority and being treated the way they treat minorities.

Frankly, those people must lead miserable, restricted lives. Imagine moving through the world genuinely believing that other cultures are inherently inferior, or at a minimum, that they should be confined to their countries of origin. To lock yourself out of the world's wealth like that is a self-inflicted punishment. Getting to openly dive into, celebrate, and enjoy these cultures brings a level of pure human joy that those driven by fear will simply never experience.

I leaned into that joy entirely, clocking in for all 22 hours of the festival across its three-day run. With live music and dance performances running concurrently across three different stages, it was physically impossible to catch everything. I had to accept that FOMO, surrender to the rhythm of the weekend, and just do my best to take in what I could. (I also had to accept that overpriced food was just part of the experience, like at any event. At least it was diverse food.)

The magic of that setup hit me hardest when I watched a powerful Afro-Puerto Rican Bomba performance, followed immediately by a Celtic music set. Standing there, it clicked: each of these cultures, as beautiful as they are, is incomplete on its own. My own life would be empty if I were restricted to only Bomba or only Celtic melodies. I'm glad I live in an age with easy access to both.

Cultures aren't meant to exist in sterile isolation; they are meant to collide, interweave, and enrich one another. That is the true superpower of the era we live in, and Living Traditions was proof that despite the loudest voices of division, diversity isn't just our reality — it's our greatest joy. Even within acts, we could see this mixing. Many of the children from the Hawaiian dance school were white. The Japanese taiko drumming couple were white and Latino (but they learned from a Japanese teacher). The Celtic group's singer was black.

Also, despite Mormonism's attempts to make itself the center of the universe, all of these cultures have done just fine without it.

This week, a $40/hour creative writing project was available to me on the AI training platform that's my sole source of income, and I missed it to go to a city council meeting that I could have watched online. I regret that. I was there to express my opposition to the ICE detention center, but I didn't even make a comment because I didn't bother to figure out how city council meetings work and sign up to make a comment beforehand. That's life, if you define life as me making unnecessary mistakes. Anyway, the city council already opposes the ICE detention center, so this was more about encouraging it not to back down. At least eight people expressed that sentiment.

A fat redneck stereotype expressed a different sentiment. He started off sarcastically thanking the council for cutting off water to the warehouse even though ICE agents can shower at home and bring bottled water, and then he went on an unhinged rant about four "illegals" who committed violent crimes in places that aren't Utah, which somehow bothered him even though he obviously voted for a serial rapist who was best friends with a child sex trafficker. I swear to God, one of the Hispanic council members left the room during his rant. I was gratified when a math teacher diverted from her prepared comment to explain to him (and any other high school dropouts who might have been in the room) how percentages work. After the meeting, I flipped him off because punching him in his dumbass racist teeth was illegal. (Yes, he could have flattened me alone, but I wasn't alone.0 Then my keys, loosened from emptying my pockets for the security check before the meeting, fell out. And he said, "You dropped your keys, bud." So that was humiliating. Now I've increased my credibility by sharing this humiliating anecdote instead of casting myself as the triumphant hero of the situation.

On Saturday, I attended the Salt Lake County Democratic convention as a delegate, which is something that I've never been interested in doing but did anyway because fighting fascism can't be fun and games all the time. I had friends there, and I picked up a decent amount of free food and candy, so those two things salvaged the event from being as boring as General Conference. I went to a dance protest at the ICE detention center afterward because fighting fascism is fun and games sometimes. Something like eighteen cops were there to flush our tax dollars down the toilet. They sat in their darkened vans and watched us for two hours, and then, as soon as the guy with the speakers left, they pulled him over and cited him for an expired registration, disorderly conduct, and being too loud for this neighborhood of empty warehouses. It's all very obviously a bullshit attempt to intimidate us, squelch our First Amendment rights, and protect the fascist secret police, and of course we're not putting up with it. Also, we just found out that the city considers drawing with chalk on the sidewalk a Class B misdemeanor. I have no words.

Hungary just ousted its far-right authoritarian president, Viktor Orbán, who pleasantly surprised me by not rigging the election or refusing to concede. His successor, Péter Magyar, is center-right, which would make him a Democrat in the US. His party, Tisza, also won a supermajority in parliament that will help him reverse the damage to democracy caused by his predecessor. Orbán has spent his sixteen years in office patiently dismantling the checks on his power. Trump openly admires him and has been trying to speedrun the same strategy, with less success. Trump sent JD Vance to campaign for him recently, having somehow failed to notice that nobody in the world like JD Vance. Also, like Trump, Orbán is an ally of Putin who's blocked aid to Ukraine and caused turmoil throughout Europe. This is a great day for a lot of people and a bad day for some very bad people. Orbán is a very bad person - but again, he did concede the election on the same night. Trump still hasn't conceded the election from over five years ago. Trump is a worse person, and I'm just grateful he has a lot less time (both in office and on this Earth).

This is an op-ed I recently sent to the Salt Lake Tribune, which I'm publishing here and now because, predictably enough, they didn't.

​Around that same time, in one of my Signal chats, I also suggested protesting the church's silence at General Conference. I hoped someone more experienced would run with the idea so I didn't have to do the work, but I was willing to do the work if I had to. It got some interest, but not enough to encourage me to persist after someone brushed it aside to talk about the NIck Shirley protest at the Draper aquarium instead. I kid you not, a couple of weeks later, the same guy suggested the same idea. I'm not mad. Whatever it takes is fine by me. Then some women took over the planning, made it into a protest against the church's sex abuse cover-ups, and said that the men were welcome to participate but the focus needed to remain on them. I felt that this topic would be less timely and effective than one tied into the current national political situation, but of course I still supported it. I encouraged everyone to keep it respectful, not because the church deserves respect but because triggering its members' persecution complex would be counterproductive. We were all on board with that. The other guy still backed out after he became too concerned about alienating his Mormon parents. I didn't worry about that because my Mormon parents alienated me years ago.

By most measures, frankly, the protest was a flop. We ran out of time to make signs beforehand. Some people showed up to the rendezvous point late, so the Mormons attending conference were inside by the time we reached Temple Square. We just walked up to the Capitol in Handmaid's Tale robes with no signs. It wasn't originally part of the plan for me to wear one, but we had an extra after a woman had to back out, and walking to the Capitol in it was much less embarrassing than walking to the rendezvous point in a suit on conference day and making people think I was Mormon. Waiting for the bathroom in the gift shop was a little weird, but I survived. So anyway, I don't think we accomplished much, but people took notice of us and I had a great time with my friends, and that's important too.

Oh yes, and after our protest, a woman with no shoes approached us in the parking lot, sobbing, breathing hard, and telling us that she'd been framed for murder and every cop in the city was looking for her. She wanted to go to her uncle's house so he could say she'd been there the whole time. We took her to the general area she said her uncle lived in so she could go sleep off whatever she was on. So once again, this was a very worthwhile experience.

Oh yes, I suppose today is Easter. Naturally, after another protest today against the Supreme Court legalizing verbal conversion "therapy" because First Amendment rights somehow trump professional standards of conduct, I'll celebrate in my usual manner by getting high at home by myself. Respectfully, THC has blessed my life more than Jesus ever did.