Banned In Your State

Hello and welcome to the new world order:

I’m not proud of how long it took me to figure out how to port everything over to Beehiiv. Substack was wonderful in that it had like 5 features and all of them were useful. Beehiiv, like every other God-cursed platform in 2024, has 3,000 features and about 15 of them are useful. I’ve figured out how to use maybe 12 of them so far.

Anyway, here we are, with a brand new look and a brand new name, thanks to Anthony Dye, who submitted “Banned In Your State” via email. Thank you to everyone who submitted entries — you did not make this choice easy for me at all. Dye has won bragging rights, the warm and fuzzy feeling of naming the newsletter, and the opportunity to shout something out:

I’d heard the Queer Liberation Library mentioned in passing but had never checked it out, and I’m glad to have rectified that now. This is an incredible resource that I plan to take full advantage of going forward. Also, while you’re there, tap that “quick exit” bar on the top and then try to press the back button to re-access the website. 10/10 safety feature. 10/10 all around.

Anyway, you can now access the entire newsletter on bannedinyourstate.com, where it will live forever. Paid subscriptions have been transferred over, so there should be no interruption in the warm and fuzzy feeling of supporting this newsletter. The one exception is you big beautiful founding members, which Beehiiv could not get its head around because they only have two payment tiers (monthly and annual). In the next couple days, you’ll be receiving a “gift subscription” for your remaining time, which is not a gift at all but the thing you very generously paid for. If anyone runs into any problems, please reach out and let me know, because Lord knows I have no idea what I’m doing and it’s virtually certain that I have messed something up, somewhere.

My battle with technology has enervated me and I have no takes to speak of at this time, save that this Eagle’s Pass thing in Texas seems both very funny and a troubling harbinger of things to come, and that it would be really cool, for so many reasons, if we could not go to war in the Middle East. Keep an eye out over the next couple days, when I’ll shake off this ennui and purge myself of whatever technological knowledge I have acquired in the name of, I assume, getting angry about the bipartisan border bill the Senate just signed off on. I haven’t read it yet. Maybe it’s great. Maybe we’ve found a way to streamline the immigration process and create more paths to legal immigration. Perhaps it also enacts stiff penalties against states-rights nullification governors down in the Lone Star State who put up barbed wire fences and prevent a federal agency from doing their goddamn job and stand by while people seeking a better life in America drown in the Rio Grande. Something tells me not so much, but dare to dream.