What value do you think opinion journalism can add to local news?

So this is really, to me, a whole key part of it, right? So I work at Kansas Reflector.

We're a statewide nonprofit news outlet.

We have a staff of about five right now.

We're part of the state's newsroom network.

Um, I started as opinion editor there in the summer of 2021.

And I mean, I write this at the start of the book, but I realized when I came on board that I was one of only two full-time, um, opinion people in the entire state.

So please introduce our listeners to White and tell us more about his complicated legacy.

Tell us a little bit about why did you choose her and what was interesting to you about her story?

So Mamie Boyd was interesting to me for a lot of reasons.

I think, first of all, and this might seem really basic, but she lived, I believe, to be 97 years old.

She lived deep into the 1970s.

She knew William Ellen White.

She knew all of the folks in the Kansas press at the time.

When she died, she had lived literally for almost all the existence of Kansas, like 80% of the time that Kansas had been a state, she was living in it.

born in Missouri, so we will allow

Republican meant something different back then.

Right.

And then, you know, likewise in the South, you had, you know, you know, an incredibly persistent Democratic majority in the southern states.

Right.

And again, Democrats perhaps meant something a little different.

But you had, you know, decades and decades of Democratic dominance in the South.

And then, you know, the great shaking out of the 20th century was essentially that all of these coalitions kind of shifted.

But they haven't been Democrats.

All right, keep going.

And so, so, so it's im- so and I, and I use that as the context to say that while we have, while Kansas almost always elects Republicans to US Senate, there is that tradition of electing Democrats to other offices.

And so one of our two senators, uh, Senator Roger Marshall, is up for re-election this year, and of our two senators, he is by far the one who has hitched his wagon closest and most publicly to Donald Trump.

And so when all of the DOGE, Department of Governmental Efficiency, stuff started happening last year, when you started to have town halls, when people t- would show up and be very upset with their Republican members of Congress, Marshall and his folks were really taken aback.

They didn't handle it very well.

At one point he claimed that they were all paid agitators who were showing up.

Um, and you began to really get this sense that Marshall was kind of uniquely vulnerable because he did, he had not spent a lot of time building up that, that kind of moderate, pragmatic reputation, which is important even for Republicans in Kansas to have.

Oh my g- oh, oh