January 6 Wasn’t the End. It Was the Warning.

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 clashed with political narratives, the response wasn’t debate—it was suppression.

That was my January 6, long before January 6.

The same forces that fueled an insurrection — disinformation, loyalty tests, punishment for dissent — were already embedded in public health, climate science, and disaster response. The Capitol riot was not a beginning. It was a symptom.

Mesoscale News grew out of that realization. If institutions could be bent so easily, then independent analysis wasn’t a luxury—it was infrastructure. We need people willing to read the footnotes, track the anomalies, and say plainly when something doesn’t add up. We need watchdogs who don’t flinch when the backlash comes.

And the backlash always comes.

Over the years, I’ve faced smear campaigns, coordinated harassment, legal intimidation and the quiet closing of doors that once stood open. I’ve watched anonymous accounts try to rewrite my record, bad-faith actors twist data into weapons, and powerful people make misplaced bets that exhaustion would do what censorship could not.

But exhaustion is not the same as defeat.

Mesoscale News is my refusal to disappear quietly. It’s where climate data meets political reality, where disaster response is treated as a moral issue, not just a logistical one. It’s where we connect hurricanes to housing policy, pandemics to labor rights, heat waves to voter suppression. Because these aren’t separate stories. They’re the same story, told in different fonts.

Because the climate crisis is not just about carbon—it’s about power. Who gets protected. Who gets sacrificed. Who gets silenced. January 6 made that power visible in its most grotesque form. But the quieter versions — the rewritten reports, the buried datasets, the experts pushed out of the room — are just as dangerous.

Five years later, the threat isn’t gone. It’s professionalized.

That’s why independent journalism matters more now than it did in 2021. Not journalism that chases clicks or outrage cycles, but journalism that slows down, checks sources, and refuses to pretend that neutrality means looking away from lies. Journalism that understands that democracy depends not just on free elections, but on shared reality.

Mesoscale News is small by design, but stubborn by necessity. It’s built on the idea that truth doesn’t need permission—and that sunlight still works, even when it’s filtered through smoke.

January 6 taught us what happens when lies are allowed to metastasize unchecked. The climate crisis, the next pandemic, the next disaster will test us again. Whether we meet those moments with clarity or chaos depends on what we build now.

I’m still here. Still publishing. Still documenting what power would rather you not see.

Five years later, that feels less like defiance—and more like duty.

If you value that work, if you believe truth is worth defending before it’s under siege again, I hope you’ll read, share, and support Mesoscale News.

Because democracy doesn’t just collapse in one dramatic afternoon.
It erodes quietly—unless someone is watching.