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“I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time. Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning.”

That’s the lede to this powerful piece, which includes a series of paragraphs that begin with the same syntax:

“Understand what it is to pray in Chicago…

“Understand what it is to sleep in Chicago…

“Understand what it is to live in Chicago…

“Understand what it is to be Chicago…”

Many of us have been closely following the Trump administration’s crackdown on Chicago’s neighborhoods, as agents snatch immigrants off construction sites, mount an overnight helicopter raid on an apartment building, and fire tear gas into residential neighborhoods. But who can tie all those discrete incidents into one powerful narrative?

My nominee is Kyle Kingsbury, a five-year Chicago resident who isn’t a journalist or a typical commentator on current events. Kingsbury is a software consultant. He analyzes databases for a living. His website, Aphyr.com, tends to feature headlines like “Geoblocking Multiple Localities with Nginx” or “Why Is Jepsen Written in Clojure?”

This past week’s column stemmed from what he has seen and heard for many days. “It’s grim. It’s anguishing,” he told me in an interview this week, as his piece was going viral on social media. “Everybody I talk to is talking about this. It’s every neighbor. It’s every friend. Everyone has either witnessed an abduction or has talked to someone who has.”

The brutality, he added, “has been circling in my head for six, eight weeks. Every night I sleep maybe four to five hours because I keep thinking about it. Every day there’s a new horror. And I don’t know how to process it unless I write.”

Write he did, spurred by a rally for a woman who was grabbed from the Rayito de Sol preschool, a few miles from Kingsbury’s home. Armed agents had stormed the Spanish-immersion school and dragged the worker out, while children, parents, and caregivers cowered in horror. Said Kingsbury: “I don’t think anybody living at this time hasn’t drawn a parallel to the diary of Anne Frank.”

Kingsbury is a meticulous writer, peppering his sixteen hundred words with around fifty links to primary sources and news accounts. That comes naturally to someone whose business is all about detail, accuracy, and documentation. “My job is to report factually on database safety and to chase claims down as carefully as I can. I tried to do that here. I really do care about getting it as right as I can, like watching the video, trying to find actual court transcripts.… I link to every claim, so people can go read the source. I’m hoping that that, for readers, builds trust.” 

He also notes his debt to local news organizations as well as to other independent Chicago writers, including Kelly Hayes, Cam Rodriguez, Laurie Merrell, and Dan Sinker, whose recent essay helped inspire Kingsbury’s. 

I’ll give Kingsbury the kicker here, which serves the same purpose in his essay:

“I want you to understand what it is to love Chicago. To see your neighbors make the heartbreaking choice between showing up for work or staying safe.… To form patrols to walk kids safely to school. To join rapid-response networks to document and alert your neighbors to immigration attacks. For mutual aid networks to deliver groceries and buy out street vendors so they can go home safe. To see your local journalists take the federal government to court. To talk to neighbor after neighbor, friend after friend, and hear yes, yes, it’s all hands on deck.

“I want you to understand Chicago.”

C’mon, admit it. Who amongst us does not love a good hypocrisy story? There are so many examples in this genre: the Tennessee congressman who got millions in farm subsidies while demanding cuts in food stamps; the Georgia pro-life candidate who paid for his girlfriend’s abortion; the Bible-thumpin’ televangelist who was photographed outside a Louisiana motel with a sex worker. 

But sometimes, the hypocrisy arrow can point in a direction the reporter doesn’t expect.

Last week, Alex Thompson, Axios’s national political correspondent, published a strange piece on James Talarico, the telegenic Texas state representative who is running for the Democratic nomination for US Senate.

Talarico is a tempting subject. He’s young (thirty-six), gets kudos from party bigwigs (like President Obama), happily appears on Fox News and Joe Rogan, and professes his Christian faith openly. It’s that last part that got the attention of Axios.

Axios’s scoop, if you can call it that, is that Talarico follows several adult-film stars and OnlyFans models on his Instagram account. Thompson (or a political operative who tipped him off) apparently sifted through the 3,700-plus people Talarico follows to find ten women who model their wares, though they all appear to be clothed and engaged in, at most, PG-13 activities. (I will confess that I did not sort through all of their photos, but then again, I read Instagram solely for the articles.) And while Thompson never comes out and says it, he is clearly contrasting these accounts with how Talarico “wants to win back Christians…by exposing how Republican policies on immigration and other issues don’t align with biblical values.”

The gruel gets thinner the deeper you get into the piece. Talarico’s campaign bio makes no mention of a spouse, so the Seventh Commandment seems safe. There’s no evidence that Talarico is a client of one of these women, or that he has interacted with them on a personal level. Talarico’s campaign, according to Axios, “has messaged with only one of the accounts,” and it shared a screenshot of the exchange that “was a simple ‘thank you’ for an Instagram story appearing to promote his campaign.”

It is possible, of course, that this story is just the tip of some sordid scandalous iceberg that will scuttle a promising political career. Evidence of such is not evident in the Axios piece.

But there was one redeeming part of the piece—this comment from Talarico’s spokesperson: “While James was unaware of how these women make money, he does not judge them for it and will not play into an effort to smear them for clickbait articles. That’s exactly what his Christian faith calls him to do.”

Or, to paraphrase a famous biblical figure, “Smack down not, lest ye be smacked down even harder.”

State school superintendents tend not to make a lot of national headlines, but Ryan Walters got more than his share when he had that role in Oklahoma. You might remember this culture warrior/educator for his anti-union, anti-woke campaigns, or perhaps you recall that he once tried to allocate more than three million dollars to place, in every classroom, Bibles that precisely match the sixty-dollar version put out by President Trump. 

Walker left his position with the state in September to lead the Teacher Freedom Alliance, a conservative educators’ group. But even though he is gone, he is not forgotten by local media. Spencer Humphrey, a reporter at KFOR, a Nexstar-owned TV station in Oklahoma City, has been covering the detritus of Walters’s reign with a fine magnifying glass. One day it’s Walters directing COVID funds to unqualified private religious schools; another day he’s doling out five-figure “performance bonuses” to staff just as he’s leaving office; on another, he’s helping himself to a signed guitar from country singer Lee Greenwood. 

“Just really doesn’t pass the smell test,” as a former assistant state attorney general told Humphrey. (And this isn’t Humphrey’s first CJR laurel.)

As the death toll of Trump’s air campaign against alleged drug traffickers hit seventy-six this week, some key questions have lingered: Who is being killed in these strikes, and what are their roles in the narcotics trade? 

It’s not easy to get the answers. Many of these people come from poor Venezuelan villages, where the government’s repression has left citizens reluctant to speak to reporters, much less go on the record. Nonetheless, Regina Garcia Cano and Juan Arraez from the Associated Press made their way to the Paria Peninsula, home of some of the men, including those who have disappeared and whose bodies may never be retrieved. In dozens of interviews with their relatives and friends, Garcia Cano learned that while some of the men were likely involved in the drug trade, there is no evidence that they were big-time traffickers.

“They were laborers, a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver,” Garcia Cano wrote. “Two were low-level career criminals. One was a well-known local crime boss who contracted out his smuggling services to traffickers.… Residents and relatives said the dead men had indeed been running drugs but were not narco-terrorists or leaders of a cartel or gang.” 

And the people left behind are angry about the lack of due process: “In the past, their boats would have been interdicted by the US authorities and the crewmen charged with federal crimes, affording them a day in court.” The Venezuelan government is of no help, either: “I want an answer, but who can I ask?” one relative told the AP. “I can’t say anything.”

Garcia Cano’s intrepid reporting is worth your time, as is this Q&A with Del Quentin Wilber, her editor on the story, explaining how she got it.

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