The Sunday Interview: Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State with Caleb Gayle
Caleb Gale discusses his book Black Moses, detailing Edward McCabe's failed 19th-century attempt to create an independent Black state in Oklahoma Territory. Gale explains how McCabe's utopian vision clashed with zero-sum frontier politics, forcing Oklahoma to adopt Jim Crow laws instead of embracing self-determination. Connecting McCabe to figures like Henry Highland Garnett and his own Tulsa family history, Gale argues that this story reveals the crushing weight of racism on American dreams, while speculating on potential film adaptations for actors like Aaron Pierre. Ultimately, the narrative underscores how systemic barriers dismantled Black autonomy long before modern civil rights struggles. [Automatically generated summary]
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Welcome to the Straight White American Jesus Sunday interview.
I'm Leah Payne, author of God Gave Rock and Roll to You, A History of Contemporary Christian Music and host of Spirit and Power, Charismatics and Politics in American Life.
Today I am speaking with Caleb Gale about his new book, Black Moses, a saga of ambition and the fight for a black state.
Gale is an award-winning journalist.
He's also a professor at Northeastern University and a contributing writer at the New York Times magazine.
His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Time, The Guardian, and many other prominent news outlets.
Black Moses has been long listed for the National Book Award for Nonfiction, named one of the Washington Post's best nonfiction books of the year, and was selected as a New York Times editor's choice.
In this powerful work, Gail tells the remarkable story of Edward McCabe, a black political leader who attempted to establish a black state within the United States, a bold vision shaped by the hopes of Reconstruction and ultimately thwarted by racism, politics, and competing claims to land in the American West.
Welcome, Caleb Gale, to the Straight White American Jesus Sunday interview.
Thank you for having me.
Actually, I want to start with a question about how you decided to introduce the characters, the main characters in Black Moses, because it's very cinematic.
The introduction to the book that when I first started to read this excellent, excellent book, I enjoyed that they're listed as cast of characters.
Was that your choice?
How did you come to frame this in such cinematic terms?
Yeah, I mean, you know, you and I are both, you know, creatures of the academy.
And so as such, we don't usually think in those sorts of terms.
This book initially was, or at least presented, the first kind of draft of it was about 30,000 words of an intro about Quakers and questions of fugitivity.
And my editor was like, no.
Editors take all the fun stuff out.
They do, they do.
And so as the book was revised heavily over the course of a couple of years, I had buried this scene of Edward McCabe, the main character, getting shot at.
And I had buried it like 50,000 words deep.
And my editor was like, well, doesn't that just encapsulate everything?
And so then as it felt more and more and more cinematic, we then realized that it would be really helpful for the reader, just for their knowledge, so they could follow, if they could see this cast of characters, almost like the rolling credits before and after a film.
And that's what really was, I would love to take credit for that, but that was really the creation of my editor who was like, all of what you've presented to us sucks.
How about you make it suck less by ensuring that people can follow along?
Yay, editors.
Well, I think that's very helpful.
In fact, the thing that I was picturing, and maybe because of it's the setting, is I was picturing the kind of old Western where you get a little picture of someone.
Maybe you get a little reel and then their face is frozen and it's sepia toned.
And so that's what I was picturing as I opened the book.
This is helpful feedback because that's what we were aiming for.
At least that's what the archive of material lent itself towards.
And so it's great to hear that that resonated with you in that way.
For people who haven't read Black Moses yet, hopefully by the end of this interview, you will have ordered your copy.
There are some very well-known characters, people that almost need no introduction.
Theodore Roosevelt is one that most people know who that is.
Abraham Lincoln, heard of him.
But you're introducing readers to a figure who I think most Americans have never heard of, Edward McCabe.
And I would love for you to share, first of all, what drew you to his story and why you think someone with such ambitious political goals has largely disappeared from mainstream histories of the United States.
And also, I'm thinking of the American West since we brought a Western into it.
What drew you to Edward McCabe?
Sure.
So I think there are two things that drew me.
One, which is like some thematic obsession that I have.
And then two, which is kind of what I'm going to call the luck of the Irish.
So the thematic draw that I have is that I'm really attracted to losers or people who are kind of that history is kind of deemed as losers, right?
Edward McCabe, Robert Preston McCabe had this grand vision, as is clear with the subtitle of my book, to create a black state in the American West, specifically in the Oklahoma Territory at the conclusion of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, right after Reconstruction had faltered and as redemption had rolled through the American South, introducing Jim Crow and really decimating the dreams of a lot of African Americans.
So that's kind of that I am deeply interested in people who dream very big and lose very big.
And McCabe was that, because that feels very iconically American, that someone would envision something so quote unquote crazy and get really close, but very much like Icarus, get those wings singed on the way up and down.
So that's why.
And I think that's also part and parcel why his story is relatively obscured from view.
Even if in the remains of what he built were 50 black towns, 13 of which don't stand tall in Oklahoma, several of which still stand tall in Kansas, that his work was really to try and architect a narrative of black belonging in America that was done by their own hands.
And I think that runs quite counter to the narrative of black people, especially at that time.
So that's one.
Two, this is the luck of the Irish is that I long time ago saw McCabe a plaque in Guthrie, Oklahoma, where he had his office.
And I just swore he was an Irish or a Scottish man because no black man that I would ever I've ever met would be like, yeah, I want my own black state that I would run as the governor or senator or congressman or both or all three.
I don't know.
And so to some extent, I think that's what really drew me is that this loser who I thought was not a black guy was in fact black and got close, but ultimately failed.
That's what attracted me most.
I love thinking about him as a in a long line of dreamers and maybe even alongside utopian American utopian communities.
So the Oneida community or John Alexander Dowie.
So I think that's, I love thinking about him that way because it sort of gives you a roadmap for that audaciousness because it is kind of out there to just say, hey, let's do it.
But Americans are kind of out there.
Definitely.
Definitely, especially relative to their peers all over the world.
And you mentioned Oneida.
Like, of course, not only is he kind of an inheritor in the sense that Sadia Hartner would talk about, where we choose our inheritances.
I mean, who we believe to be his pastor, who's featured very prominently earlier on in the book, Henry Highland Garnett, gets a lot of his training in abolitionism as a part of the Oneida community, right?
He's he's part and parcel an inheritor, both by choice and by lineage, if you will, of this effort to try and reach for something as close to utopian as possible, but to also do so in a way that also positioned him in a narcissistic way, a lovingly narcissistic way, as the progenitor and leader of said utopian effort.
It makes a lot of sense in a lot of ways because you have to have a pretty healthy sense of self to make such a claim.
So I totally understand that.
Puts him kind of in the same territory as Joseph Smith, those types.
You have to have a vision that people want to participate in.
One of the things that I think is really distinct about him is being a black American who wants to create something new in the American political system, in the American political project.
And you talk about this a little bit in the book.
I wonder if you could tell me or tell us a little bit about how his vision compared to his contemporaries in this era.
What was really striking about what he was trying to do versus the many other efforts at black liberation that were going on that might not have done it in this way?
Certainly.
Yeah.
So I think the easiest way to answer the question is that the question of the quote-unquote Negro problem had been attempted to be answered by so many people.
And in this book, you're not just going to stay in the American West.
You're going to go to Liberia.
You're going to go to Haiti.
You're going to go to a lot of different places because there were efforts made on behalf of Black people, often without their consultation, to create homes for them elsewhere, right?
To dispatch them outside of the United States to go elsewhere.
And part of the innovation that McCabe is offering or offered was that, how about we do it right here in the United States of America?
And I can solve your Negro problem by consolidating them all into one constituency in America within the Oklahoma Territory.
And that is the peculiarity, if you will, of the McCabe idea is that, well, I'm going to take it under my own consultation to take my counsel from other black people here in America.
The difference is, is that even though Haiti didn't work, Liberia didn't work, they were supported heavily by both private and public interests, in part because it wasn't a black person leading said effort, right?
Was.
It was in many cases, white guys in rooms deciding probably, over some good bourbon.
I would imagine that let's figure out a solution to the Negro problem.
That doesn't require much of us.
In fact it it requires expelling them from this place in order to see a future come that we might actually agree with.
There were two iconic western images that were in my mind when I was reading this book.
One, Gold Rush.
I was thinking about the Gold Rush.
The other, Transcontinental Railroad, its construction, and I was thinking about that kind of that hurry pacing of, I mean, it was closing the frontier, it was making, you know, commerce and military industrial, military efforts a lot more doable for this growing American empire.
Yeah and, and then I was thinking I had never really thought about the in some ways, that the pace at which Americans, both black and white, were trying to adjust to Post-Civil War life and what that would look like what, what role black people would play in the United States.
So I, your book helped me think about what must have felt uh, like I wonder if in some ways it felt sort of frantic like how like, how do we do so?
I loved the pacing that you thank you yeah, thank you um, and I just wonder, with that Western imagery in mind, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how McCabe's work is situated in this concept of the Western frontier and how his vision was.
Yeah, you know, without taking your listeners through Aryan historiography, which should should, you know, don't.
If you ever hear someone starting to go into that, you can just push pause and move on.
What I will say is, is that look we're, we're probably all familiar, even if we don't attribute it to this guy, Horace Greeley.
We're familiar with the go west young man.
Right right um go go, try and figure it out, strike out on your own.
These parts of America are settled, but the west is completely unsettled, and we know that that was false.
Part of the.
The conflictual nature of McCabe's project is that he called it the Negro colonization scheme of Oklahoma and, for your listeners who might not be aware, there were a lot of people already in Oklahoma who were promised the Oklahoma and Indian territories as the last instance in which the United States government would interfere with their lives as indigenous people and nations.
And so, as such, what made it that much more kind of quote unquote, iconically American, an iconically American Western story is that he was doing what a lot of people in these westerns do.
Land of Opportunity and Colonization00:15:49
Oh yeah, come on out, it's going to be great, right far and away.
Tom Cruise and Nicole.
I thought of that when I was here exactly, Daniel Plainview, and there will be blood.
It's gonna be like Cormac McCarthy and blood and reading.
It's gonna be amazing.
But there were already lives customs rules laws nations, people with generations of history, An attachment to those places.
And so, what makes it iconically American isn't that they were destroying any one person's dreams, is that McCabe was really kind of representing the collision of many people's dreams in an environment that had been constructed to be very suited to kind of zero-sum politics.
So, that if any black person won, that meant that several other indigenous populations or white people or poor white immigrants, as portrayed by Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, and Far and Away, like it means that someone has to lose.
When in actuality, there could have been perhaps an opportunity for lots of shared abundance.
So, even though I wrote this book in part to kind of get away from our toxic zero-sum politics, I found myself enmeshed with it just about 100-plus years before.
That's really fascinating, and it's fascinating how Oklahoma-I don't know of any other place where this would have been possible.
When I think about other forms of American expansion and other forms of colonizing forces, this one particular place, you can see that it's a land of opportunity, but then it also for someone like McCabe, but then it's also sort of makes what had been happening in a variety of contexts for Indigenous people, it makes it so literal.
Like this land is just gone.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah, that's really fascinating.
I did think of Far and Away when I was when I was reading this because I was a certain age when that movie came out.
And it took you in.
I mean, it takes everyone in when you watch it.
Yeah.
Oh, my goodness.
Absolutely.
That last image where their hands are in the stake in the land.
I mean, I haven't seen it in 20 years.
And I thought of that when I was reading your work.
I wonder, one of the things that I found to be so impressive about McCabe was how he was able to, and I just want to emphasize how close he came to doing, to succeeding in his goal, which is an incredible accomplishment.
And how savvy he was about coalition building and lobbying and political maneuvering.
And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about his skill on that front.
I was very impressed.
Yeah, you know, I think what, you know, first of all, thank you.
But also, what I think is instructive about McCabe is that I didn't find him to be a lofty oratorical, you know, person who believed that all of the power came through rhetoric.
In fact, he's quite sparing in his public remarks, but quite stated in his political actions.
Like he was focused explicitly, part of the reason he got so close is that he wasn't offering these lofty speeches at the, you know, said Republican or Democrat National Convention.
No, in fact, he was just saying, I'm going to advertise explicitly to black people.
I'm going to get as many black people.
Oftentimes, by stretching the truth and making it seem as if Oklahoma would be easier to quote unquote colonize, I'm going to just say this is my town.
I'm going to call it.
I'm going to actively start to put the pieces in place such that even if the president of the United States doesn't say, and here is McCabe's land and it shall be called Black Oklahoma, even if that didn't happen, that when it came time for Oklahoma and Indian Territory to become the state of Oklahoma, he felt as if if I could just get enough black people here, I will be undeniable.
The black state will be inevitable if I can get enough black people, if I can get a university founded in the name and honor of a good friend of his, John Mercer Langston.
He thought, if I can just start putting the pieces together such that it's not a function of distant academic or opinion punditry, it was much more a function of organizing on the ground that he thought would get him even closer.
And admittedly, it did, right?
It got that much closer and probably closer than we ever have been and closer than we ever will be ever again to anything of the sort.
I'm really fascinated by the idea that he has a lineage to the Oneida community, these visionary upstart type innovators.
And I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the influences that would have made, how do you make a McCabe in this era?
What are the ingredients that go into making someone with that kind of vision and also that style of leadership?
Because you're right, when you think about the charismatic figures that would create such a project in other settings, you think of Sage on the stage type of person.
Exactly.
What made him him?
Yeah, I mean, I think a few things.
One, he was born far and away, just keep on using that.
Far and away from the horrors of American slavery.
He was born in New York.
He became a, you know, a feature on Wall Street.
He advised people in Chicago.
He was relatively unattached from that experience.
Two, he wasn't doing it alone.
What this ends up being is, even though it's called Black Moses, it's that at the time, and your listeners who will soon hopefully become my readers will encounter people who were telling themselves and telling reporters at the tail end of Reconstruction, look, we've tried Lincoln, we've tried Jackson, we've tried all of these people, but every man is his own Moses.
It's the direct quote from a formerly enslaved person who was like, I'm getting the heck out of the South and I'm going to the American West for some sums of opportunity.
And I'm not just doing it similar or akin to what we would see in the Great Migration during the 20th century.
It was that we were going to build explicitly to construct our own place because we're done trying these other figures who might not be able to deliver to us this total salvation that we're looking for here in America.
And I think the last thing is, is that what really, really made him was examining the failed projects from some of his other peers, right?
There are the Blanche Bruces, right?
The very first black person elected to the U.S. Senate to serve a full term from Mississippi.
Governor Pinchback, Lieutenant Governor Pinchback, who then became governor of Louisiana, Pinchback, the work of people like John Mercer Langston, that he would often go about naming towns or streets in the towns that he would create after some of these figures.
But in many cases, they were providing case studies through Reconstruction and its failure that presented to him clear examples of what not to do or what not to count on.
And so to some extent, I think he was an astute learner of his peers, propped up by a lot of his peers who decided to enter into that project with him, the thousands of black people that came over to really help make the case on his behalf.
But then also, he grew up incredibly privileged, like incredibly, incredibly privileged.
And I think that offers a very different lens through which he likely viewed what was possible.
I think I really appreciate that point about him growing up in a privileged setting because he would have had some insight into how bureaucracies work and things like that.
And I think, at least, I think I could see someone who has had a certain amount of privilege being able to analyze political realities in a way that would be helpful for his organizing.
But of course, this story, I don't want to spoil too much of it, but this is the, it's not a surprise to say that there is no independent black state in the United States to any listeners that I know of.
But his vision ultimately collides with forces of white settlement, political ambition, racism.
And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what his particular failure.
So he learns from other failed projects, what the failure that he experiences tells us about the limits of those reconstruction era possibilities.
Yeah, I think that it was the main lesson that he learned in real time was that America without giving away too much was that America made its bet.
And its bet was not on the future that he wanted, but it was on the South.
And, you know, there's, there are tons of really phenomenal works that your listeners can kind of go read, but, you know, Imani Perry's South to America as an example, where you really can't understand America without understanding the power that the American South has had for many generations.
And it's really forced over the course of this country's history, it's forced the hand of the government to contort itself to accede to the wishes of it.
So Oklahoma decided when Oklahoma was becoming a state, not necessarily to depart from the lessons of the American South, but rather to align itself with the American South.
There's a reason why part of the book, both books that I've written, kind of contemplates the moments at which Oklahoma became the American South, where it embraced Jim Crow philosophy, not just in a broad way, but explicitly through its very first set of laws that it passed.
It wasn't, you know, water rights or what kids should be.
Other things you'd expect.
Other things you'd expect.
Even in examples of the American South, right?
You can look at Arkansas, you can look at Texas, you can look at Missouri.
Like a lot of the first laws that they passed had nothing to do with the divisions based upon race.
But in Oklahoma, they decided we're going to bear hug this because like we have done throughout American histories that we're going to bend to the worst impulses of the American South that we can imagine.
And that's exactly what they did.
And that's what undid McCabe ultimately.
This is fascinating to me as someone who I was raised on the West Coast, lived for a number of years in Nashville, Tennessee.
Oh, no.
Yes.
And one of the confusing things to people who are not Southern is that Southernness is so much more than a geographical location.
Exactly.
I was very confused about that.
And I think if you just look on a map where Oklahoma is, you can see how you can see that in action.
Yes.
So that is very helpful.
And I can appreciate it didn't necessarily have to be that way.
I think that's really a helpful takeaway from this book in particular.
So one of the things that I've been thinking about, listeners to this podcast are really interested in the intersection of religion and politics and race and ethnicity.
So for listeners today, especially in a moment when conversations about race and democracy and self-determination are so intense.
What do you think McCabe's story reveals about the unfinished project of American democracy?
That's a weighty question.
And I'm certain that there's a dissertation that I'd love to read about that.
I think what's interesting to me is that I remember when I turned my book in and my agent read it and my editor read it.
And they're like, whew, that's a tragic tale.
And for me, I didn't see it as such.
I saw it as yet another attempt and an encouragement to keep on attempting.
Like you have to kind of imagine, like America had in the early phases of McCabe's efforts to try and found a black state.
None of us currently are trying to do that.
We're trying to hold on to existing laws on the record.
We're trying to not see the complete demolition of all diversity efforts.
We're holding on for things that have theoretically been agreed to in the law, right?
Whereas McCabe was literally imagining.
And there is something very powerful about the imaginary because it then extends what you then ask for, understanding that you might not get it.
And so to some extent, I found McCabe enlisting us long after he had gone in this project of imagining what can we achieve, right?
What can be possible, right?
Not just, you know, how do we maintain contract rule fairness when it comes to the issuing of vendor agreements at the state and local level for women and people of color?
It's not just that.
Like we should dream a touch bigger than that.
Yeah, we should fight for those things.
Yes, we should aim to ensure a certain degree of fairness and equity along matters of race and identity.
But can't we possibly be doing more?
And it's not as if the, you know, the U.S. government has asked federal troops like they did in the 1870s to withdraw from places that were actively becoming more hostile towards black people.
We're not asking them to do some base level considerations of safety.
Perhaps then in that case, we should do more than just fight for these scraps.
Because I think what McCabe was offering, or at least what he was aiming for, was a much more abundant life, right?
Not just theoretically, black people were free.
They were allowed to vote theoretically on paper, but he was not satisfied with that modicum of opportunity.
He wanted more.
And so I think likewise, to answer your very complex question, hopefully somewhat succinctly, is that we should be dreaming for more.
We should be aiming for much more.
What I find fascinating about your response there is that it echoes something that I heard the newly elected mayor of New York say recently about the left or progressives or Democrats.
I can't remember which version he was talking about, that they needed to take bigger swings in terms of creating a vision.
And he compared national level politics in the DNC unfavorably to the RNC by saying, hey, look, you know, on the right, they've got vision.
And I don't really see that on the left.
So this is a really fascinating potential call to action in that regard.
So dream bigger dreams because of what we're saying.
Exactly.
Haunted Past in Tulsa00:03:44
I like that.
Do you have 10 more minutes?
Sure.
Okay.
Okay.
So I want to ask you one question and feel free.
I can take this out of the interview if you don't feel like you want to listen or respond to it.
But I was thinking about, because I've known you from this other podcast where you shared a lot of your personal story.
And I was thinking about your own family's history in Oklahoma, Tulsa.
And I wondered how, if you'd be willing to share how your personal background informed the way that you wrote this book or even just the way that you approached McCabe.
I, so for listeners who aren't familiar, my family moved from New York to Oklahoma when I was younger.
And like we weren't in Florida, New York or Westchester County or upstate or Western New York or Buffalo.
Like it was a radical culture shock to go from New York, New York to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
But what has always struck me, I mean, from like the days after we moved, was that even though I expected to not see one other black person, because I, like you on, on listening to this podcast, probably have a very distorted or myopic view of what Oklahoma was and is.
I just thought Oklahoma was a bunch of white people.
And to some great extent it is.
But I didn't realize that when I would see black people riding horses to Walmart to go grocery shopping in the middle of a major city in Oklahoma like Tulsa or Edmond or what have you, Yukon, Oklahoma City, Lawton,
Fort Sill, that they were hearkening back, whether they realized it or not, to a much grander story about the ways in which we experimented with extending our dreams beyond what we thought, you know, was possible, right?
That it harkened back to a story where the very first black rodeo was founded just miles from where I grew up in a plat town called Bowley, Oklahoma, which was created by black people who were once formally enslaved by the Muscogee Creek Nation, right?
That sentence probably made your head spin, listener.
But that's what happened, that in fact, most of the PBR, the professional bull riding circuits, challenges, bulldogging, hog tying were invented down the street by a bunch of black people.
Like that story is as odd as it is true.
And so kind of the task in many cases, as Imani Perry would say, was not for the past to haunt me, but for me to haunt the past as a way of better understanding my present and future.
So this entire book was very much inspired by the eight-year-old kid who was bewildered when he would see an entire family of people who shared my skin tone riding on horseback in the middle of the street as we were driving on such street.
Well, one thing that I'm struck by is the power of media to shape our imaginations.
Of course, this shouldn't be a surprise, but I remember being, I was in like honors high school history class when I was shown by my teacher, Mr. Rosh, a picture of some of the earliest pictures of cowboys.
And there were not that many white people in the picture.
And I remember that being very a big surprise to me.
But of course, that was because my imagination had been shaped by 20th century American film and all of that.
Cinematic Vision for Film00:02:31
So I really appreciate that to that to that point.
This is such a cinematic book.
Maybe this seems like a silly question, but this should be made into a film for sure.
And so we've talked about a lot of deep and heavy stuff, but I would like to know who would you cast as Edward McCabe.
Has anybody asked you that?
Because I want to know.
Yeah, that.
So that has been a topic of much discussion lately because of some interest from several folks, both about this as well as the story that I wrote about the Bully Rodeo.
That one definitely needs to be a film.
Okay, keep going.
Yes.
But, you know, I am so, I don't know, actually.
You know, I think that there are what I, what I find really interesting about McCabe is that he was as committed to the doing as he was to the speaking.
And he was so committed to it that he was not the best father or husband, as you will come to learn.
And so to some extent, you know, I could see like an Aaron Pierre playing him, right?
The guy that you all might remember from Rebel Ridge is going to be in the Lantern series.
I could likewise just as easily see a host of other people.
I could see, you know, John David Washington and others play him.
But, you know, I just, I don't know.
That's a great question.
And it's been the response that I've given to people who actually do like need to know.
Like, who would you cast?
And I am completely flummoxed.
I think even Lakeet Stanfield, especially after seeing him, Judas and the Black Messiah, I could see Daniel Kaluya playing one of McCabe's best friends, A.T. Hall Jr.
So there are a lot of people who I could see playing a part, but admittedly, I don't know.
I had a thought, not for casting, but I was thinking about if I were watching a movie about this, I almost wondered if his best friends, funny that you brought him up.
If Hall could make a good proxy for the viewer, maybe he's the character.
Anyway, the audience, Hollywood.
The audience avatar, for sure, because he lived to over 100 years old.
He lived a really long life, was a newspaper man, was kind of an iconic figure of Kansas and Pittsburgh politics.
So, oh, yeah, it'd be very interesting.
I could see him telling his great grandkids and make it happen, Hollywood, is what we're saying.
I want to thank you for joining me.
And to everyone who's listening, please go out and buy Black Moses by Caleb Gale.
Casting the Audience Avatar00:00:41
And to find out more about Caleb's work, check out his website, CalebGale.com.
All right, I'm going to ask Caleb one more question.
Subscribers, stick around.
And if you are not a subscriber, today is the best time to sign up.
See the show notes to get access.
Thank you for listening to the Sunday interview at Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Leah Payne, author of God Gave Rock and Roll to You, A History of Contemporary Christian Music.
Find me at drleapayne.com or at Dr. Leah Payne on Substack and most other social media platforms.
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