January has a way of stripping things down to essentials. Our mornings are frosty, our breath steaming the air. The daily work does not care who won an election, only that it be done. Out here at the ranch, the seasons keep their own rhythm, and that perspective matters when the nation feels like it’s lurching from headline to headline, crisis to crisis.
We literally picked ourselves up out of our comfortable blue bubble of Capitol Hill, Seattle, and moved into a rural, economically depressed, red-bubble mountain community. We did it right after the Bush/Gore hanging chads mess, when Democrats were talking about leaving safe ground, going where we weren’t wanted, and doing the slow work of change anyway. We believed that call then, and we believe it now. We wanted to make progressive change manifest in the world through hospitality, literally opening our home to the public daily, since buying a blank parcel of land in 2005.
We were here for the worst of #43—the Great Recession of ’07–’09—when everything felt fragile and unfinished and the ranch itself was still finding its legs. We were here for the magic of #44, watching hope collide with a parallel conservative reality that took shape almost immediately. The local chatter was ratcheted, unhinged, and easily debunked.
We were here for the upheaval of #45, when emboldened radicalization found permission from the top. Locals said out loud that they hated us, in townie Facebook groups. Groups that were moderated by conservatives, who mistook cruelty for “free speech,” while silencing dissent from liberal and minority voices. As above, so below: the behavior modeled nationally became license locally. Trans people were targeted and unalived at an accelerating pace. Hate stopped whispering and started shouting.
We were here for #46, when the nation—handed over like a crash victim—was painstakingly stabilized. The ship was patched, righted, and set back on a steady course. But oligarchs and their echo chambers insisted otherwise. Red hats stayed on and banners stayed up, grievances calcifying into identity.
And we were here for the election of #47. Fireworks, gunshots, and roars of triumph echoed through the valley from conservatives convinced their long-promised reckoning had finally arrived.
Then something interesting happened.
By February, fewer red hats in town. By April, the house with the banner-lined fence along the American Legion cemetery went quiet—everything taken down. By May, old election signs disappeared. By summer, the right-wing minority in this blue state retreated from governance and leaned into social media trolling, shifting from civic life to grievance performance in comment threads.
By November 2025, those radicalized bubbles were growing smaller, tighter, and more rabid. They’ve been fed a steady diet of fear: the immigrant, the trans person, the drag queen, the Black or brown neighbor. They are told they are the majority by virtue of skin color and religion, even as their communities are beginning to move on without them.
Out here at the ranch, we’ve learned something that’s easy to forget in the churn of national politics: change doesn’t announce itself with fireworks. It shows up quietly, like conservative moderators in townie Facebook groups being removed because intolerance is no longer tolerated.
For those fighting this administration, for those exhausted by the chaos conservatives have sown nationally, here is the lesson the land keeps teaching us: stay.
Stay visible. Stay rooted. Stay boringly, stubbornly present.
The right thrives on spectacle and exhaustion. They want us to burn out, move away, go quiet. The antidote isn’t matching their volume—it’s outlasting them. It’s building community that doesn’t center them. It’s caring for each other in ways that don’t trend but do endure.
We didn’t move out here to win arguments. We moved out here to live our values where they were least welcome. That choice carried us through recessions, demagogues, and national whiplash. It carries us now.
As the turbulent new year proceeds, the work ahead is not glamorous. It looks like mutual aid to neighbors. It looks like protecting trans kids in small towns and shielding immigrants from state violence. It looks like refusing to cede rural America to people who confuse hate with heritage. It looks like planting trees whose shade we may never sit under.
At the ranch, winter always gives way to spring. Not because it’s promised—but because it’s practiced. Day after day. Chore after chore.
So take the long view. Do the quiet work. And remember: even here in the rural mountains—especially here—progress is happening, whether the loudest people notice or not. Keep up the resistance, or as my Italian immigrant forebears fighting fascism would say: “Bella ciao, Bella ciao, ciao, ciao.”
