The Deluge, page 21
The door popped and scraped open loudly, and finally Russ Mackowski, West Virginia’s Far Right firebrand, arrived, trailed by his chief of staff, Dave Montreff. Mackowski made the rounds, shaking hands with curt hellos. He was big and barrel-chested with steel-gray hair and a red, weathered face. When he shook my hand, his palm felt like tree bark. He pumped my hand once and said “Goodtoseeya” before moving on.
Tom Levine, our Capitol Hill vet, now whispered in the ear of Coral Sloane, our policy director, while Kate herself took Mackowski’s hand, smiled huge, and gave him a joyful “Senator!” The old Republican did not return the enthusiasm despite the fact that Kate practically got him elected over Elmer Nolan.
In addition to the four of us from FBF, Fitzpatrick had invited only one advisor, a man of South Asian descent, thin, intense, and severe looking. He stood with his arms crossed and shoulders hunched, staring through rectangular glasses directly at the floor. He had not bothered to introduce himself but appeared to be listening so intently, the effect was somewhat creepy.
The eight of us—four civilians, two politicians, and their aides—crammed together in that little office with a window overlooking the darkling Capitol—felt uncomfortably intimate. As the introductory chatter wound down, Tom Levine leaned into my ear to mutter, “You’re in the big leagues now, Stanton. But don’t worry. Once you watch these esteemed members finger every turkey wrap on the tray before picking one, you quit going gooey. Generally, all these fuckers live solely to get on TV.”
“Enough with the throat clearing, Cy.” Mackowski’s voice boomed inside the small room as he cut off Fitzpatrick’s efforts at glad-handing. Mackowski popped his index finger at Kate. “This meeting that doesn’t exist has one objective: me and this gal.”
“We’re just as curious why we’re here,” said Coral. Their words stuck on their lip ring. They wore a black short-sleeve button-up and tan slacks, dressed like they were going bowling rather than meeting with senators. “We’ve got an election in less than two weeks, and it’s hard to see how our interests might align.”
“Cy didn’t mention that we may have found a piece of common ground?” Mackowski’s disdain with them was plain to see. He projected a military bearing (though he’d never served) and stood stock-straight with his ample arms crossed over his chest like a drill sergeant.
“ ‘Common ground’ is a phrase usually reserved for people who don’t quote white supremacists in speeches,” said Tom.
“Oh, fuck off, Tom,” groused his chief of staff. Dave Montreff was a slick cardboard College Republican, who made sure to lounge with his hands in the pockets of his Dockers. “That story was bullshit—”
“Okay, children!” said Fitzpatrick, calmly pushing the air down. “How ’bout we get some facts on the table? First, Mary Randall is going to win. If the numbers hold, she’ll be governing with a Republican Senate and a Democratic House. Maybe a recipe for four more years of fuckery, but maybe an opportunity to actually pass something big. Second, this Climate X nonsense you”—he nodded at Kate—“have been plugging on the talk-show circuit, that’s not going to happen without a hell of a lot of ball-busting and backdoor dealing.”
Kate twisted a pen in her large, rough hands; she never wrote notes but liked to fiddle with the tool while she listened, the notepad on her lap so pristine it could be resold.
“All Climate X means is we treat the most important issue in the world like it’s actually the most fucking important issue in the world. And we’re not settling for anything less than the whole package. Shock collar, tough new regs, Just Transition, and a big helping of investment and redistribution. You’re going to love it, Senator,” she said, teeth shining in Mackowski’s direction.
“Sure, and the rainbows will break through the clouds and the nymphets will start feeding me grapes. Ha!” Fitzpatrick barked at his own joke. Behind him, his aide took a pen and pad from his breast pocket and began furiously scribbling notes. His concentration was so intense, I couldn’t help but be distracted by it. “Point is, legislation is coming down the pike. These kids made sure of that.”
“And there’ll be resistance,” said Montreff.
“And we’re ready,” I added, and felt sweat on my brow as all eyes briefly found me. Kate threw me a smile, and I could tell she was happy with that line. Nevertheless, I settled into holding my tongue.
Mackowski expelled a condescending snort. “What did you call me?” He smiled big at Kate. “The oil industry’s meat puppet?”
“Sounds like me,” said Kate.
He scratched his eyebrows and bits of dandruff flaked off. I could smell his aftershave from five feet. “That a good idea? Making enemies of those who might be holding an awful lot of power someday?”
“You got, what? Thirty-seven delegates in your lame bid for the Republican nomination?” said Tom.
“He entered the race late,” said Montreff.
“Yeah, as an alternative nobody wanted. The Trump years are history, Senator.” Tom adjusted thick black glasses. From where I was sitting, I could see little spouts of AR information—his meeting notes most likely—glowing dimly within the lens. I didn’t understand how people focused with those things on their faces. “Look at Tracy Aamanzaihou in Houston. Oil and gas districts are flipping to renewable-energy labor leaders. My professional political opinion is that you and your whole coalition are about to be deeply fucked.”
Tom crossed muscular arms over his chest and sat back, very satisfied. He was a good enough guy, but also enthralled with himself. Montreff looked like he wanted to kill Tom, which meant they’d likely been in some kind of political knife fight previously. He looked at us the way many staffers did these days, with disdain, fear, and often envy. We were the upstarts. Every room we entered, eyes darted, and I felt like I had some bold new haircut. All through the mid-2020s one could feel the momentum shifting. Randall’s win in the Republican primary cemented it. Still, what happened next took us all by surprise.
“Aren’t you even curious about what I want?” said Mackowski.
Coral, Kate, and Fitzpatrick simultaneously replied: “We are, Senator,” “So let’s hear it,” “Batten down the hatches!”
Mackowski cracked his knuckles. He motioned to Fitzpatrick. “We want A Fierce Blue Fire to endorse Randall for president. Right now. In the eleventh hour.”
We all sat there for a minute, stunned. Coral said it first: “What?”
Mackowski shrugged, big boulder shoulders lifting his suit. “We all have our reasons.”
I looked to Fitzpatrick. “You want us to endorse the Republican running to unseat your party’s president?”
Fitzpatrick tilted his big head back and forth in a gesture of indifference, his wheelchair creaking as he did so. “Let’s just say, I’m a team player, but sometimes you get a quarterback who keeps tossing passes into the bleachers. Jo is not a bad person, but she is a bad president. For reasons I’m sure you’re familiar with and a few you probably aren’t.”
“Oooh! Palace intrigue! I’ve got the shivers,” cried Kate.
“Look, my sweet darlings,” said Fitzpatrick, swiveling in his wheelchair and then rolling to his desk. “You turned this into a one-issue election. Climate, climate, climate. Biospheric crisis this, ocean acid bath that. Set your hair on fire, start screaming, grab the first gal you see, and ask her to dance—and I’ll tell you something: I’m not far from the finish line here. And I don’t work for the Democratic Party, I work for the American goddamn people, fucking lunatics though they may be. A Republican president, a Black woman no less, can get the glory for finally turning the dime on the climate issue. She’s captured the folks’ imagination, and we need to ride that wave to a better world. Meanwhile, Jo Hogan…” He let out a slow whistle. “All she really cares about is slaughtering uppity A-rabs half a world away because she knows it gets the Blob, the press, everyone in this town, hard as a rock.”
I looked to the quiet man behind Fitzpatrick who’d not lifted his eyes from his notepad even once. He was making a strange shadow puppet gesture with his pen. At the mention of “A-rabs” he quickly scribbled another line or two, and like me, Mackowski watched him.
“This meeting is off the record,” Mackowski told him. I thought of how he’d won his Senate seat promising the mass surveillance of mosques and an end to all Muslim immigration.
“Don’t mind him,” said Fitzpatrick. “He’s just a thinker.”
When I later came to know Ashir al-Hasan, I’d learn this was quite the understatement.
“What’s your angle, Senator Mackowski?” Coral asked, always about the bottom line.
Mackowski blew a long breath and seemed to contemplate how much he should share. “I like to gamble. Mostly craps, some slots, and I can’t get enough Texas hold ’em. I’ll sit in a casino for a day without blinking, swear to Christ. My thinking is gambler’s thinking. You endorse Randall, she probably still wins, but the base hates her even more than they already do. Then in four years, eight years, whatever it might be, a lane opens up for me again. Simple as that.”
“You want us to torpedo Randall with the right wing for you?” asked Tom. “Even by D.C.’s rat-fuck standards, that seems weird.”
“Look, I can’t promise you I’ll vote for your socialist superbill when it comes down the pike, because I won’t. Ryan Doup and the rest of the RINOs will do what their president says, and I’ll resist. But I can promise that I’ll make strategic choices about who I’m pressuring. I can offer you breathing room. Hell, if a Green New Deal passes, it’ll give me something to run against in ’32 or ’36.”
We all sat there for a minute, stunned. In all the years I’d been in D.C. I’d never been surprised by the cold calculations people made, but they rarely phrased them so overtly.
Finally, Kate oozed forward in her chair and looked Mackowski dead in the eye, almost seductively.
“Senator, you’re never going to be president.”
“Oh no?”
“I’d never let it happen,” she said, nonchalant, like she was the actual puppeteer of the universe and really did hold that power. “If it came to it, I’d drive every swing-state voter to the polls myself. And please. You’re a total phony anyway. Little prep school kid with a fake drawl playing at right-wing populist.” She was smiling so happily, her eyes locked on his.
“That a fact, huh?” said Mackowski.
“Oh, I’d rock that ass, boy,” said Kate. “I promise you that.”
Fitzpatrick’s aide abruptly snorted a laugh and then quickly touched a hand to his mouth to stifle it. Other than that, the hideaway was silent, all eyes on Kate and the senator.
* * *
Driving out of Wyoming and across the empty expanse of Nebraska, Missouri, and Illinois, wind roaring through the windows because her truck’s AC was broken, how was I to know that I’d one day work for Kate? In 2022, as A Fierce Blue Fire gained steam, she offered me a job doing media outreach. The boss hiring her boyfriend made “logistical, financial, emotional, and unethical sense,” she joked.
This was right as they were able to afford office space and Kate began to grow her trusted inner circle. My desk was beside that of Coral Sloane and their encyclopedic brain. At first, I couldn’t help but study their tattoos: a red shooting star on a forearm, David Bowie in full alien garb on their bicep, Winnie the Pooh, sitting contentedly in the crotch of a tree with his pot of honey, on their shoulder. It was such a strange collection of ink for someone so sober and unrelentingly level-headed. Coral could listen to an argument or idea and instantly deliver a complex analysis of its merits and drawbacks. It was Coral who began laying the seeds of doubt around the version of the Green New Deal that emerged early in Hogan’s term. “It’s become a catchall for any and all progressive ideation while also letting industry off the hook,” they said.
Coral led the charge in developing a fifty-state strategy, particularly in congressional districts with a coastline vulnerable to sea level rise and climate disruption. They led the push to begin funding climate Republicans and third-party challengers in select districts and supported Kate in building the Outposts.
But Coral was also not the ultra-serious, Harvard Kennedy taskmaster I’d expected. The first day, as I set up my desk, I noticed the Alien action figure from my favorite movie franchise. Its eyeless banana head glowered from Coral’s desk.
“Which one is your favorite?” I asked. Coral looked at me with pure befuddlement.
“That’s an absurd question to even ask, Stanton.”
“Obviously, it’s the Cameron?”
“Game over, man! Game over!”
We quickly became friends, and when Kate was out of town, traveling to new Outposts and offices, Coral and I would get together for movie marathons or to play VR games. Kate called me from the road once, and I said I’d have to call her back because Coral and I were watching Starship Troopers. She laughed.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” said Kate. “You guys are cute is all.”
The quagmire produced by the climate politics of the Biden years influenced Kate’s next two hires. The first was Tom Levine, who came to Kate’s attention through the D.C. grapevine. The organization needed an outside game, an infestation of climate in every facet of public life, but it also needed a better inside game, a creature of the swamp with sharp elbows. Foul-mouthed, funny, and occasionally a vitriolic asshole, Tom Levine chomped through a tin of tobacco a day, kept whiskey in his desk, and always seemed to have cocaine on him. He was also a damn smart guy who hated every faction in American politics. This included the entire wingnut Republican establishment and spineless Third Way Democrats, but he reserved his most vicious rancor for the self-righteous progressives he’d spent his career working for.
“The first thing you’ve got to remember about this town,” he told me soon after I came aboard, “is that every lawyer is angling for the Supreme Court, every doctor for surgeon general, every cashier for a lobbying gig. No one actually does their job. They all have a mental chessboard and are calculating five moves ahead.” He lit a cigarette at his desk and walked away, spraying a bottle of Febreze behind him.
Rekia Reynolds came aboard in ’24. Rekia, a veteran of Black Lives Matter, had first come to our attention when she wrote a piece decrying Kate as a “white apologist’s fantasy girl for deracialized discourse,” and that her vision “glossed over the country’s foundational organizing principle of white supremacy in favor of a kumbaya story about post-racial eco-camaraderie.” This was the first true blowback we’d gotten from the Left, and it felt deeply unfair. I spent two nights up until 3 a.m. drafting a detailed rebuttal to Rekia’s argument: all of our outreach to BLM groups, the Outposts we were building in urban centers, and oh yeah, the fact that Kate was actually biracial, which this stupid woman had not even bothered to learn.
Kate took one quick skim of the letter and said, “Dude, don’t publish this.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because she’s got a point. We very intentionally gloss over all kinds of histories of power in America. Purposefully, though! Purposefully.”
“Oh, great, Kate. Agree with this identity politics witch who just trashed you.”
“I think we should offer her a job.”
During Rekia’s interview, she stuck to her guns, lecturing Kate about the legacy of environmental racism and the movement’s inhospitable stance toward communities of color. She was short, curvy, and dark-skinned, with an urgency to her every word and gesture. I’d come to learn that Rekia ordered takeout like she was telling people there was a fire in the kitchen, and I got my first glimpse of this energy during her interview.
“Rekia, let’s take a breath,” said Kate when she finally got a turn to talk. “The fact of the matter is that we are having this fight in the context of a demographically changing country with a toxic history of racism. It’s also a fact that our political system gives rural, mostly white regions disproportionate influence in the electorate. That’s an iron-clad reality we must deal with as we navigate this emergency. So we need to go out and start winning those regions and not cede them to the Trumpists and Mackowskiites. Not just because it’s the tactically correct path but because it’s the morally correct one. We offer our hand even when it’s slapped away. We have to meet people where they are, and that means not cramming various guilts down their throats—”
“How the hell?” Rekia demanded. “You’re spinning this fantasy and forgiving behavior—”
“We’re trying to forge an effective counterforce against powerful institutions, and we need an aspirational vision of our common humanity. Solidarity! Now do you want to continue lobbing tweets from the sidelines or do you want to actually join a movement that’s trying to remake the world? In other words, do you want this fucking job, bitch, or not?”
Through all of this, Liza Yudong remained the innovator, the unsung brains behind our social platform, small-donation operation, voter data project, and finally, as Slapdish exploded in the public consciousness, our “worlde.” Liza tutored me on the new terrain: a “worlde” was an interactive virtual stage where people could gather to hang out, debate, listen to a speaker, or, for our purposes, fundraise. Our worldes were all pristine nature, from golden meadows surrounded by snowy mountaintops to glistening wild rivers. “Xperes,” on the other hand, were experiences. The user didn’t interact, they watched. Liza’s xperes were much darker. Fires raging, floodwaters crashing, refugees trudging by your eyeballs, gazing at you miserably, and though these people were looking at a camera operator perhaps years earlier, one could not help but cast their eyes down. These tools proved astonishingly effective and our fundraising soared. Liza was a “one-woman Cambridge Analytica,” according to Tom. Though each and every candidate and cause had its own chop shop of psychological profiling and voter suasion, it always felt like Liza was a step ahead. She was also, I thought, quite funny, though her sense of humor was an acquired taste. Pretty and petite, she dressed like she’d pieced together a brand-new outfit from a vintage store every day. Once, I heard her tell Rekia and Coral, “I feel like I would be a more full-throated eco-socialist revolutionary if anyone could convince me that there will still be cute outfits after capitalism crumbles. I refuse to wear Birks.”
