Five years ago this week, a mob breached the United States Capitol waving flags of grievance, grievance masquerading as patriotism, grievance fed by lies repeated until they felt like oxygen. January 6, 2021 is now filed away by some as an aberration, a bad day, an unfortunate moment that polite society would rather forget.
But that’s not how systems fail. And it’s not how truth erodes.
I’ve spent much of the last five years living inside the consequences of truth-telling — not as a spectator, but as someone who learned firsthand how fragile truth becomes when political power decides it is inconvenient.
Mesoscale News exists because of that fragility.
I didn’t set out to become a whistleblower, or a public figure, or a lightning rod. I was a geographer and data scientist tasked with something unglamorous and essential: telling the public the truth about a fast-moving crisis. When COVID hit Florida, the data mattered. Not as talking points. As life-saving information. And when that data cl…
