I talk to a lot of old people, those who were born in the 20th century, and if I ask them what the word “unalive” means, they usually have no idea what I’m talking about, except for some of them who have kids or who study Internet culture.

This will, of course, probably seem very weird to most people who were born in or grew up in the 21st century. Just to recap for the olds: “unalive” is the word you use to represent concepts like dying, or death, or killing or being killed, on digital platforms where saying those words accurately will cause the algorithm to punish or censor you. Or, maybe, where the perception is that using those words will result in being censored by the algorithm, and no one is actually willing to find out what happens if you use the forbidden words.

This sort of attack on people’s expression started on platforms like TikTok, where nearly all content is distributed through an algorithmic feed, but has since become ubiquitous in nearly all digital media that we see. In fact, these tics are now so prevalent that it’s routine to hear people using this kind of language in everyday life, even though there’s not yet an algorithm to appease in the physical world. I’ve heard people say, out loud, “he unalived himself”, in reference to someone dying by suicide.

And all of this has become even more visible in recent days as online conversation has turned to discussion of the horrific lack of accountability around the tragic rape case at Cornell University. Across the Internet, people are routinely referring to the central crime in the case as r*pe or “grape” or even using the 🍇 emoji, without a second thought for what it means that the very word can’t be said online anymore. Or, at least, the assumption is that it can’t be said.

To be clear, I am very much in favor of people using content warnings or sensitivity markers for content, and fine with people using abbreviations like “SA” for references to disturbing or triggering topics like sexual assault; we should provide people with as much context and control as possible when choosing what information they want to consume and when. I also know that sometimes, people use lesser terms for stressful subjects like death or assault to create a bit of ironic distance from painful or upsetting topics.

But most of the different variations of wording and emojis are coming from trying to appease the platforms, and there’s a heavy cost for those who are worried about being mindful: If someone is using a tool to filter out content, it will no longer be effective because everyone is using misspellings and euphemisms and imagery to get around the algorithm.

The spread of censored and mangled syntax is happening because people believe, or have experienced, that platforms will silence them for accurately describing the world in plain language. This shit is terrible, and it has to stop.

You Were Not Born With These Constraints

One of the things that’s most concerning to me is that an entire generation has grown up not realizing how extreme it is that their very language is being chosen for them by platforms run by people who hate that generation’s ability to express itself, and who hate the things it has to say. From their youngest days, this generation grew up watching people make stupid faces at them for YouTube thumbnails and never had a chance to reflect on the fact that those creators didn’t want to be humiliating themselves by making those expressions — the demands of the algorithms of Big Tech forced them to do that.

The rituals of feeding the algorithm are so built into people’s everyday habits that they’re invisible to people who weren’t alive before today’s platforms took over. Every parent of my cohort remembers the first time they heard their toddler finish doing something cute in their living room, and then turn around and say, “please like and subscribe!” afterwards. It’s a ghastly, sickening feeling to confront the fact that our little kids were being brainwashed into thinking that every adorable thing they did should be followed by a prompt to provide data to Google.

Over on Instagram, where people originally signed up thinking they were going to see someone’s vacation pictures, or shots of their cousin’s kids, you’re now stuck watching people beg for everyone to reply with cultish phrases in the comments, which will then earn them an obviously AI-generated response in return, all in service of “showing activity” to the algorithm, like it’s an angry god that needs a sacrifice. They’re just not sure exactly what the angry god wants.

Your free speech was taken away from you, and the people who did it are the same ones who spent years pretending to care about “free expression”. They contrived examples of lack of free speech on college campuses while squashing protests, and cried crocodile tears about “cancel culture” while getting people fired for political criticism. Now they have no problem with billionaires deciding exactly what words everyone is allowed to say. Larry Ellison is not content with his family owning all of the movies and TV shows — his family has to control what words people are allowed to speak on TikTok, too. Elon Musk isn’t content to merely generate and distribute child sexual abuse material for profit — he wants to silence the messages of the few decent people who are foolish enough to remain on Twitter/X, too. (That’s why I wrote you a guide on how to get your organization off of that cursed platform.)

Now that an entire generation has grown up using these Orwellian euphemisms, and all of the Big AI products are trained on the Internet that was created under this regime, do you think today’s AI tools even know that the real, uncensored world exists? If you can’t say “genocide” on any of the major platforms, yet those are the ones all of the Big AI tools used as their training data... well, then the AI tools sure aren’t very likely to know much about genocide, are they?

Fuck the Algorithm

Our creativity can be constrained by the language we use — our imaginations are limited by what we can think to say. If we’re trained to limit the words we speak just by habit, and those limits are put in place by people whose social, political, cultural and moral goals are the opposite of what we value, then our work is unalive before it is even born.

The answer to this is simple: say what you mean. This will take, to some degree, courage. It may even take, I hesitate to say, some sacrifice. When I suggest this course of action to people, they inevitably say, “But it will cost me audience!” or “But what if I lose followers!” or “What if they demonetize me!”

Okay, what if they do? What if they do.

Are you willing to push on this? To make a point about it? To move to platforms where you can actually say what you mean? Or to remember that you already have platforms where you can say what you mean? On an email newsletter or podcast you can say whatever the hell you want and nobody can stop you. On my blog right here, I can even curse in a headline and it won’t affect anything about how my site operates.

(And a reminder: Substack is not an email newsletter, and a Spotify show is not a podcast — they’ll be unaliving your distribution any day now.)

If you are a 20th century relic like me, it is incumbent upon you to remind the generation that grew up inside the algorithm that another world is possible, and that we know this because we lived it. We were able to style a MySpace page in any way that we wanted; the code for LiveJournal was entirely open source so there was no part of the algorithm that was unknowable. A blog like the one you’re reading right now could be made by anyone, and put up for pennies, and nobody could stop it from being read by millions of people. (And that last one? It’s still possible.)

If you are from this century, forget all that rambling bullshit about ancient history: all that matters is you getting what you deserve, because you’ve been fucked over by the same billionaires who’ve poisoned your planet and infested your world with slop. The best artists around you are invisible to you, and the most important statements by activists that you care about are being silenced. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a system working as designed. And the proof is as obvious as the fact that the angriest activists you know can’t even talk about systemic abuses or state violence without having to put it in algorithmically approved speech or censoring their captions like they’re going to be read by 5-year-olds.

It should make you furious. It is time to kill “unalive”.

The response is simple:

• For every message you put out, start by saying what you mean. Don’t work backwards from what the algorithm wants or what a platform permits.
• Build a presence on every platform you can, even the ones where you have fewer followers or where you’re harder to find.
• Tell your audience that your speech being free matters more than corporate convenience. Keep saying it, and keep it positive: independence gets them better art, better information, and more connected communities.
• Build alliances with other artists, activists and people who share your values, and let them know you’re going to start sharing your work uncensored.
• Start releasing your work uncensored and see where the platforms push back. (You may be surprised: sometimes you were censoring yourself in anticipation of limits that weren’t even there.)
• If a platform does try to limit your reach or expression, make a LOT OF NOISE about it. Tell the press, rally your alliance, and spread the word on your other platforms, using the moment to build audience and raise support there. Get others to amplify the parts of your work that don’t violate platform policy, so the controversy drives people to the rest.
• Find the others pushing back on algorithmic control of expression, and raise and praise their work when they do the same.

If we keep accepting the words that are forced upon us by TikTok and Meta and Google and all the rest, while platforms like Twitter/X allow the most hateful and harmful content in the world to be distributed completely unfettered, we’ll only see authoritarianism rise, and the harms against the vulnerable accelerate. But what breaks my heart almost as much is that we’ll see so many brilliant artists and activists and thinkers whose genius will be muted or silenced by mindless, heartless algorithms that capriciously decide who gets to say exactly what words, in what ways.

I get angry every time I think about it. The tech tycoons get ever more brazen in what they’re willing to say publicly, boasting about how they’re going to cause the end of the world, or calling for ethnic cleansing, all while putting tighter and tighter reins on the speech and expression of ordinary people. It’s time for “unalive” to die.

TOPEKA — The Tall Oaks Camp and Conference Center demanded Monday that U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall suspend a campaign commercial attacking Democrat Adam Hamilton that made unauthorized use of a photograph of children at Tall Oaks’ chapel in Linwood.

A senior advisor to the Marshall campaign said the ad was “corrected,” but hours after that statement was issued, a version of the commercial available on social media still included an image of the Tall Oaks’ distinctive chapel and about two dozen people sitting on pews.

Lea Ann Combs, president of the board of directors at Tall Oaks, a nonprofit summer camp and retreat center, said Tall Oaks wasn’t consulted by the Marshall campaign and didn’t approve inclusion of the photograph in the commercial. The ad denounced Hamilton in relation to allegations of sexual abuse perpetrated by a volunteer at Church of the Resurrection, the prominent Johnson County-based church founded and led by Hamilton.

“Our concern is straightforward,” Combs said. “This advertisement creates a misleading association between Tall Oaks, the young people pictured and events that did not happen here. Protecting the dignity of these young people and accurately representing our organization should be a shared priority.”

She said Marshall’s campaign should stop broadcasting the 30-second commercial until confirming the Tall Oaks photograph had been deleted.

The commercial began airing in conjunction with reports on a decision by the Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, to pull $8 million from a North Carolina campaign and redirect it to help Marshall’s reelection bid in Kansas. The latest New York Times/Siena College Poll shows Hamilton and Marshall tied at 45% support each, based on a survey of likely voters.

In the ad paid for by Marshall’s campaign, a photograph of the senator appeared in the opening sequence while a recording of his voice said he approved content of the commercial. The senator’s ad claimed Hamilton didn’t respond promptly to a report suggesting a church volunteer may have touched or attempted to touch boys attending a 2005 program hosted by Church of the Resurrection.

“Parents were ignored and Hamilton never called police,” Marshall’s attack ad says. “He should never be our senator.”

The commercial included still photos of Marshall and Hamilton, cottages, dormitory-style rooms, hiking trail, rural property and a group of people sitting in rows, most with their back turned, in the chapel at Tall Oaks.

Combs said permission had been granted to photograph young people at Tall Oaks for the purpose of promoting the camp and its programs. She said that approval didn’t extend to inclusion of photographs in political campaign advertising, particularly commercials delving into claims of sexual abuse. Tall Oaks works to provide a safe environment for children, families, faith communities and other organizations using its facilities, the statement said.

The statement said Tall Oaks encouraged Marshall to remove the photograph from all platforms tied to the campaign. The objective was to make certain no one viewing the ad would mistakenly believe Tall Oaks or the children appearing in the ad were connected to allegations of abuse, the statement said.

The request shouldn’t be interpreted as an endorsement or rejection of any candidate or a comment on the merit of allegations raised in the commercial, the statement said.

Brent Robertson, Marshall’s chief of staff, said the photograph from Tall Oaks was thought to have been a “stock image” available for general use. The Tall Oaks picture wasn’t taken at the site of Hamilton’s “child molestation cover-up,” Robertson said.

“The image has already been corrected and, luckily, Kansas families care far more about Hamilton’s failure to protect kids from a child sex predator than what cabin picture was used,” Robertson said.

Tyson Brody, a campaign spokesperson for Hamilton, said the ad wasn’t in line with Marshall’s vote in September 2025 to block a U.S. Senate measure directing the U.S. Department of Justice to release unclassified records about Jeffrey Epstein. The wealthy financier, child sex offender and acquaintance of President Donald Trump committed suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking of minors.

“Marshall lies and uses children as political pawns to distract from the fact he had pregnant mothers arrested and jailed over small medical debts, and voted to protect the predators named in the Epstein files. Roger Marshall is desperate to hide from his record of protecting predators, and preying on low-income families in Kansas,” Brody said.

In a Kansas Reflector report published in July on abuse allegations involving Church of the Resurrection, Hamilton said two church employees conducted an internal investigation into claims that surfaced in 2005. The inquiry was inconclusive, Hamilton said, because the children couldn’t identify the perpetrator.

Hamilton said he should have forwarded information to law enforcement rather than depend on church staff. When new allegations surfaced against volunteer Scott Moore in 2006, the church informed police of allegations associated with camp retreats in 2005 and 2006.

Moore was accused of sex crimes in the Kansas City area and Massachusetts. He was convicted in 2013 in Kansas of a misdemeanor count of sexual battery. In 2015, Moore was found unconscious after he fled police when caught half-naked in a car with a teenage boy. He died at a hospital.

Tall Oaks is a nonprofit camp, retreat and conference facility on 236 acres near Linwood.

Bernard Bates farmed 950 acres in Nicodemus, Kansas, and helped bring one of the largest civil rights cases in American history against the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He died in 2022 having never received a settlement check. His family says the same is still true today.

The settlement in Pigford v. Glickman followed a class-action lawsuit filed in 1997 by Black farmers who said the USDA had systematically denied or delayed loans through local county committees, according to KCUR. That year, the USDA admitted its programs had routinely discriminated against Black farmers. The case named then-Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman as defendant, and its settlement promised nearly $2.2 billion in collective compensation. KCUR reports that the case became the largest civil rights court case in U.S. history.

Timothy Pigford, the case’s lead plaintiff, said in 1996 that Black farmers could not get loans and that their loans were deliberately delayed when they did. He died this year at age 74, KCUR reports. Shirlette Ammons, creator of the six-part podcast series Tending about the lawsuit and the discrimination behind it, said the USDA had a long history of keeping Black people from owning and stewarding land.

A Kansas Farm Lost to Foreclosure

A 2012 affidavit from a regional credit association president admitted discriminatory treatment of Bates, according to KCUR. The account traces the dispute to the early 1980s, when bad weather destroyed crops on Bates’s Nicodemus farm and the USDA denied his request to extend his loans. His farm was foreclosed on soon after. KCUR reports that the Production Credit Association of Stockton, Kansas, preferred foreclosing on Bates even if it meant losing money, and that farmland taken from foreclosed Black residents in the area was transferred to white neighbors.

Despite his role as an original plaintiff, Bates and his family received no check from the Pigford v. Glickman settlement, and by the time of his death in 2022, Nicodemus residents were no longer actively farming, according to the same reporting. His niece, Dr. Johnella Holmes, now serves as president of the Kansas Black Farmers Association, an organization founded in Nicodemus in 1999 that works to preserve the legacy of Black agriculturalists in Kansas and educate younger generations on sustainable farming and land preservation. Holmes said her uncle's activism made a lasting impact.

Nicodemus's Place in Black History

Nicodemus was founded in 1877 by formerly enslaved Black people and is recognized as the last remaining African American settlement west of the Mississippi River. Established by roughly 350 Black Exodusters primarily from Kentucky, the town reached a peak population of about 600 in the late 1880s before rail lines bypassed it, and fewer than 40 residents live there today, according to the National Park Service. Congress designated the settlement's five surviving structures — including the St. Francis Hotel, the AME Church, and the Township Hall — as the Nicodemus National Historic Site in 1996. Nicodemus still holds an annual Emancipation/Homecoming celebration every late July.

Decades of Legal Fights Over Compensation

The scale of the underlying settlement helps explain why so many claims, including the Bates family's, remain unresolved decades later. Strict notification rules and gaps in legal representation meant more than 70,000 applicants missed the original September 12, 2000, filing deadline for the Pigford consent decree, according to a Congressional Research Service report. By late 2011, about $1.06 billion in direct cash relief, tax payments, and debt relief had gone to more than 15,600 approved class members under the settlement's Track A and Track B processes, per the same report. Congress later included a provision in the 2008 Farm Bill letting late filers petition federal court for their own determinations.

That provision led to a second wave of compensation. In December 2010, President Barack Obama signed legislation appropriating $1.15 billion for a follow-up claims process known as Pigford II, formally In re Black Farmers Discrimination Litigation, which covered late filers who had been shut out of the original 1999 settlement. Even that expansion didn't close every gap: more recent federal efforts have tried to reach farmers still left behind. In July 2024, the USDA completed payouts under the Inflation Reduction Act's Section 22007 Discrimination Financial Assistance Program, issuing $2.2 billion to more than 43,000 farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners who experienced USDA lending discrimination before 2021, according to a Roanoke Cooperative news release. Under that 2024 distribution, more than 23,000 operating or former farmers received individual awards between $10,000 and $500,000, averaging nearly $82,000, while more than 20,000 prospective farmers who were prevented from ever starting operations received smaller awards of $3,500 to $6,000, per the Intertribal Agriculture Council.

Other cases and local farm data

A separate USDA discrimination case involved Native American farmers and ranchers: in October 2010, the Obama administration announced a $760 million settlement to resolve allegations of loan discrimination, according to The Washington Post. The available details distinguish the case by its claimants and settlement amount, but do not establish its eligibility rules or how relief was distributed. For local agricultural context, the USDA’s 2022 Census of Agriculture counted 347 farms in Graham County, where Nicodemus is located, according to the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service. That countywide total does not provide a comparison of Black farm operators or Black-operated acreage with Kansas overall.

A Legacy of Land Loss

The Bates family's story reflects a much larger national pattern. The number of Black farmers in the United States fell from a peak of nearly 950,000 in 1920, when they owned 16 to 19 million acres, to fewer than 20,000 by the late 1990s — a loss of more than 90% of Black-owned farmland, according to USDA Census of Agriculture data analyzed by the American Economic Association. A 2022 study published in AEA Papers and Proceedings estimated that discriminatory USDA lending practices and land dispossession cost Black farmers roughly $326 billion in lost agricultural property value, compounded between 1920 and 1997.

For a settlement meant to make families whole, those numbers underscore what the Kansas Black Farmers Association is still working against in Nicodemus. The Tending podcast series that chronicles Bates's story and the broader discrimination case was reported and produced by Ammons, Mosi Secret, and Andrea Weigl, with additional reporting from David Condos and the Kansas News Service, according to KCUR's account. Holmes and the association continue pushing to preserve what farmland and history remain in the settlement her uncle once called home.

Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. “There’s no point beating yourself up for failing to clear a backlog (of unread books, undone tasks, unrealized dreams) that was always inherently unfeasible to clear in the first place.”

I remember two bronze plaques in an Emporia park, each cast with the anguished writing of a father recounting the death of his 16-year-old daughter. I was only 8 years old, but the words of William Allen White in Emporia’s Peter Pan Park left a permanent impression.

I didn’t understand what a newspaper editor or columnist did back then, but I surely knew White was important. A bronze bust of the Emporia Gazette editor and publisher watches over the park from between those bronze plaques, after all.

My family only lived in Emporia a year, nearly four decades ago now, but I never forgot how one man captured a profound event of his life with indelible words. Those plaques, I’ve come to believe, represent the beginning of my lifelong fascination with commentary writing and opinion journalists. I became a writer and editor myself, and now my book on the topic has arrived in bookstores.

That fascination didn’t stop with William Allen White. When my family moved to El Dorado in the early 1990s, I frequently heard stories about longtime El Dorado Times editor Rolla Clymer. His name adorns a room at the library, a local pond and a property development. His collection of editorials about the sweeping Flint Hills landscape could be purchased across town.

In the early 2000s, I attended the University of Kansas (and the William Allen White journalism school) in Lawrence. It didn’t seem peculiar to watch Lawrence Journal-World editor and publisher Dolph Simons Jr. write weekly columns that enraged or amused locals. This was what Kansas newspaper editors were supposed to do, I reasoned.

By that time I had decided to make journalism my career, and that fact seemed self-explanatory that no one needed to voice it. The history of Kansas and its towns was defined by opinion writers and commentators, those men and women who wrote about daily life in the pages of community newspapers.

Since then, journalism has gone through tumultuous shifts. Newspapers have shrunken or closed, and local opinion writing has all but vanished from the number that remain.

Figures like White and Clymer and Simons were not just flashes in the pan. They worked for decades. They strengthened their cities and built bonds with residents. While they were not perfect — none would have claimed to be — they provided an essential civic good.

They helped Kansas know itself.

I’ve written a book that’s coming out Tuesday called “Opinionated: Kansas Journalists Who Proved Why Commentary Matters — Then and Now.” It’s published by the good folks of the University Press of Kansas.

My book isn’t just about old white men. It’s about old women, too — including the indomitable Mamie Boyd, who worked and wrote through her 97th birthday in 1973. It’s about legendary Black journalists like Lucile Bluford of Kansas City and Hollie T. Simms of Wichita.

It’s about Soviet-curious socialists like Emanuel Haldeman-Julius of Girard, whose Little Blue Books spread the classics to teenagers of America. And it’s about homemakers like Lindsborg’s Donna Burough Opat, who raised nine children while writing a column for the Salina Journal.

These people told the stories of Kansas. These people were Kansas. There was little distinction between their words and the lives they lived. For those of us devoted to local journalism, that has always been the case.

Recently, opinion writing has come to mean something else. It’s come to mean something more partisan and performative, more focused on horse races than hometowns.

As local journalism struggled, local opinion pages withered or disappeared. At the same time, a national political entertainment complex developed, treating deeply held personal beliefs as fodder for ratings. That approach trickled back down to the local level, where commentary began to be seen as destructively divisive.

For anyone who has followed the travails of local news media, this should sound familiar.

What I couldn’t forget or overlook is how popular opinion writing remains among readers. Americans may have a dim view of national talking heads, but they gobble up opinion pieces like a hungry teenager devouring chicken nuggets.

National newspapers like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post maintain expensive editorial page staffs. Magazines including the Atlantic and Harper’s commission lengthy think pieces about current affairs. Meanwhile, digital platforms such as Substack attract millions of readers for opinionated posts.

In my five years at Kansas Reflector, I’ve seen it happen repeatedly. During our legislative session, from January through March, news stories predictably attract the most readers. But for the rest of the year, columns and opinion pieces from a diverse assortment of Kansans frequently take the top-read spot at our website.

People enjoy reading local opinion — yes, even if they disagree with it.

My favorite comment from readers? “I like your column, but I don’t agree with everything you write.”

That’s the whole point of writing opinion and running an opinion section, in White’s day or the present. Serious opinion journalists devote their careers to making people examine their preconceptions and engage in a dialogue about the future of their communities.

In the words of Iola Register editor and publisher Angelo Scott, whose 1958 speech on this subject help inspire my book:

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. His first book, “Opinionated: Kansas Journalists Who Proved Why Commentary Matters — Then and Now,” comes out Sept. 29 from the University Press of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.