Hi! I’ve added a mission statement to Pancake Brain since first publishing this post: America is currently an oligarchy organized by the hierarchy of the white supremacist patriarchy. Pancake Brain is a Friday newsletter dedicated to replacing the status quo with equitable public power, and a community dedicated to building the discipline of democracy that equity requires. We move through the world committed to a daily practice of activism and critical thinking. We reject limitations and embrace the possibilities of social imagination, certain that the queer future is better than anything we’ve yet dreamed up. We insist on our right and duty to the political conversation, and empower others to join us. Out of love for ourselves and the collective, we are engaged in a sustainable practice of freedom, endlessly un-fucking our brains.
It seems the only reasonable way to begin is to say thank you.
I mean it when I say I am grateful to each and every one of you at an individual level (because I am a Pisces who feels a lot of feelings, and also because I added all of your emails to Substack one-by-one like a fucking idiot). So many of your messages made me smile. There a bunch of goofballs with giant hearts on this list, and I couldn’t be more excited to write to you all.
Let’s get right to it then, shall we?
I’m planning to send out weekly blog posts through the lens of “How to Start a Revolution.” To be quite clear, my goal with this book, and everything I do, is to burn the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy to the ground and replace it with equitable public power. Through personal narrative, cultural research, and interviews with hundreds of young people around the country, I have documented the shift among the youngest demographics from passively navigating the status quo to actively seeking to change it. In short, “How to Start a Revolution” is a journalistic documentation of the post-Trump political awakening that aims to build a culture of constant resistance. Indeed, democracy is not a thing we have, it is a thing we must DO, and all the goddamn time.
Now, it’s not unlikely that you initially discovered my Twitter account from my “gaslighting” op-ed for Teen Vogue. Contrary to my mother’s insistence that I get paid for every utterance of the word, I did not invent that term, I unpacked it in terms the average person could easily mess with. I am hoping that “How to Start a Revolution” can do for the concepts of citizenship and the political industrial complex what that article did for gaslighting. (If you haven’t read the book yet and would like to hear more, here’s video of me yelling about my mission on CBS Local.)
To this day, my work hinges on the crux of the piece that first catapulted me to this massive platform: Our ability to participate as citizens requires a solid foundation of fact. In these newsletters, and, for at least a little while longer on the waking nightmare known as Twitter dot com, I will continue to do my part to empower you with information, working at the height of my intelligence to hold up both middle fingers to the bizarre, secret rules that preserve the status quo.
I’m so excited to get to do more of that work here, in long form, unfiltered and unedited, for readers who are interested in my thinking. It’s a thrilling thing to write directly to folks who are picking up what I’m putting down. I’ve seen a lot of ugliness over the past few years, and, on more than one occasion, my resolve has been tested. Your love and support, in its many forms, has given me the resolve to keep going. I would never have found the will to carry on without so many guardian angels, and for that I am forever grateful.
Thank you for everything, pancake brains. It means a lot to me that you appreciate all the whacky Hermione energy I’m blasting into the world. I promise to use it to keep fighting for the brighter future we all deserve.
With earnest irreverence,
Lauren