[upbeat music] By now, you're probably familiar with our rebranded why. It's called Actually Pro-Life.
What can I do, of course, is the how, and if the name Actually Pro-Life is deliberate, a choice if you will, then so is the logo.
Because like I said in our intro that you can read or watch or listen to, we're reclaiming pro-life from the same people who blame kindergartners for getting shot at school. But we are gonna ground it in evidence.
Evidence like, does this action make it measurably less likely or more likely that kindergartners will get shot at school?
Because an action can really only go one way, and we only go one way here, and you can go our way, or you can go your own way, in which case, go fuck yourself. Now let's talk some pixels and protests.
Have a look at the logo again.
If you are listening to this while you're driving or doing the dishes or walking the dog or what have you, if you look at the episode art, you can see the logo we're talking about, or there's a link in your show notes.
You can click and get to it there. Let's start with the asterisks. Actually. The word actually is bracketed by asterisks, a word I will obviously mispronounce until the day I die.
These offer the same emphatic punctuation you might use in a group chat or Slack or an email or whatever, whenever to emphasize a word or a phrase or a message. "Actually, I didn't eat your yogurt, Susan."
That's not accidental. It is protest punctuation. It's the typography of calling attention. It says, "Pay attention to this word," because this word and what it stands for
is what differentiates the phrase from the one you've heard weaponized for decades now. And it's also native, again, to how we communicate these days. It's got markdown emphasis for my nerds.
It's inline text formatting without taking your fingers off the keyboard. It is the visual language of digital discourse. The asterisks say, "I mean this literally," not just politically, not rhetorically, actually.
Have a look again. Did you see the hidden word? If you didn't, it's ally. Look at actually. The letters A-L-L-Y are set slightly larger than A-C-T-U.
And like many things in twenty twenty-six, hopefully once you see it, you can't unsee it. The word contains its own secondary meaning. You're not just actually pro-life. You're an ally. You say that that's your identity?
Then you'd better know that's what you're signing up for here. It's not a slogan. It is an identity. You measurably stand with people, not above them, not apart from them, because we are all in it now.
This framework only works if it's together. Okay, have a look at the black bars. The angled black rectangles behind pro-life are declaration banners, right? Another idea we gleefully stole from organized religion.
Imagine them on protest placards, picket signs, and water bottles. It is the framing of typography of people who show up, who drive what we call compound action. And look at pro in one frame and life in another.
Did you notice that pro is just slightly askew? These are two parts of a declaration that belong together. They operate together.
They're two placards held up by marchers, two pieces of a statement that only makes sense as a whole together. But each piece matters. The angle here creates urgency. This isn't static. It is an ongoing fight.
This is not intended to be a corporate logo to be forgettable.
It is designed and rooted in history to be worn and carried and displayed and declared now and forever by everyone together on a T-shirt, soon on a sticker, soon on a picket sign, on your face, emblazoned atop a webpage or an email or whatever.
Every choice here, every word matters. And for now, it comes in just two colors, black and cream.
Not to be confused with one twelve's category-defining single peaches and cream, today we're talking here about pure black and off-white. No gradients, no complexity. There's no time for any of that.
The Actually Pro-Life banner could be printed cheaply, right? Screen printed on a T-shirt, stamped on it, run on newsprint. I love newsprint. We'll talk about that in a second.
This could be photocopied in a church basement, stickered on a laptop or a lamppost. This could have been made in nineteen sixty-eight. It was made in twenty twenty-six, and that's the point.
The struggle against the long defeat is our job now. It's continuous. The conviction, though, has to be full-time. 'Cause if your principles are part-time, they're just hobbies, friend, and we're not doing that here.
The aesthetic says, "This has always been true." We're just finally putting a name on our version of it here. So let's talk a little bit about the lineage, about h- how this logo got here. This mark has history.
It draws from visual traditions that carry earned moral authority, historical weight, and best of all, confrontational clarity.
When you put on an Actually Pro-Life T-shirt, you know exactly what the fuck you're signing up for. So our first example is from the civil rights movement, of course, the I am a man signs.
Look at these Memphis sanitation workers and their placards. This is from nineteen sixty-eight. Black text on white, heavy sans serif, no ornamentation. It's iconic.The message is the design.
The power comes from stripping everything away until only the declaration remains. You cannot possibly miss it or misunderstand it. Actually Pro-Life borrows from this radical simplicity.
Declarative statements that don't need explanation. Next example, uh, a legendary one from ACT UP. "Silence equals death." Gran Fury's work for ACT UP, that pink triangle, it's in the MoMA.
It's legendary confrontational design. "Silence equals death. Ignorance equals fear." Phrases that cannot be unheard all these years later. Remember, the more zappers who zap the zappy, the better the zap.
Actually Pro-Life's reclamation of pro-life has the same energy, I hope, as silence equals death's reclamation of that pink triangle.
Taking a mark or a phrase that's been weaponized and forcing people to confront what it should mean, what they've been using it for all this time, what it actually means now.
Next up, of course, close to my heart, the long history of labor movements, union badges. From throwback IWW graphics to AFL and WGA membership cards. I've got 'em. SAG membership card, got it.
There's a woodcut boldness of materials designed to be printed cheaply and distributed widely and proudly and loudly.
There's a formality to union materials that I love, and Actually Pro-Life, I think, borrows those, too. It's this badge as credential energy. I am a proud union man, and we desperately need now, more than ever,
to belong to something with structure. But understand this, and we'll talk much more about it: membership implies commitment. This isn't just a bumper sticker you can buy in our store soon. This is, "I'm in.
You can call on me." Not just look for the helpers, be the helper. Again, you don't wear this sign, this logo by accident, friend.
Look at our next piece from the abolitionist broadsheet, and again, [laughs] I fucking love print. These, The Liberator, The North Star, heavy typography, declarative headers. Ornate at times, but purposeful. It says,
"We're here." These were designed to look like they mattered, like the official documents of a moral cause. Carrying and reading these were part of your identity. We want that masthead energy.
The typography of documents that changed history, that got us this far. A sense that this has weight and will outlast our current moment, and that together we will turn the tide and finally outlast the long defeat.
Here's the last ones from Catholic worker and liberation theology, which I love. "Yes, I am a radical." Look at Dorothy Day's beautiful tension of humble woodcut production values, again, with profound moral content.
It is like social gospel in print, right? It is faith and works. And this is particularly relevant for Actually Pro-Life reclamation because if nothing else, there is a visual
and actionable tradition of actual Catholic social justice that actually predates the later right's appropriation of pro-life. And friend, it looked and acted nothing like contemporary pro-life pretenders and graphics.
This is the aesthetic of people who fucking mean it, who will fight for it, even and especially if they've never had to. Look, here's why this all matters now. We didn't create this mark to be clever.
We created it out of spite, actually, like the name. We created it to hit back, 'cause it's time to hit back, and God, does it feel fucking good to hit back.
For decades, pro-life has been appropriated by people whose policies demonstrably shorten lives, increase suffering, and abandon the vulnerable the moment they're born.
This phrase became this rhetorical cudgel, something you claimed without ever having to prove. Actually Pro-Life says, "Show us your fucking receipts."
We've got 160-plus measurable positions mapped to over 1,500 specific actions for all over the world, and each one traces back to the foundation that no life is worth more than another, full stop.
Each position has a number, a target, a way to know how we measure up today, how far we have to go.
And look, if you're someone who's worried about this being some kind of perfect purity test, you're both right and wrong.
The point of politics is power to help people and this one Earth of ours and everyone and everything we share it and will ever share it with. But we can't just be right. We have to be effective.
We can't get and hold power without a huge tent of people who commit to, at the very least, these absolutely fundamental human rights
and then go from there to recruit and campaign for and elect young, imperfect people who represent many more of us in so many different ways, but who all at least start here. That's the only test.
We have come so far, but to be very clear, compound action, progress, it takes all of us and it takes time.
So whether you're an elected official already or a sci-fi fan or a birder or a foodie or an exhausted parent or a teacher or a wind turbine tech in a world where we're banning wind turbines or a bartender or any combination of all these things, as long as you agree and will fight for these principles,
we will have you. When you slap one of these stickers, coming soon, on your Owalla, you should know exactly what the hell you're doing.
You should know you will not go a minute in public without attracting attention in either direction, and that is not a bug. That is the point. Remember what we talked about in our first video, post, whatever.
Always remember what Seward said to Lincoln about slavery.The time has come for sharp definitions of opinion and boldness of utterance. That time is now. All together now.
And yes, you might have noticed we have a new tagline too. Together or nothing. Our new primary tagline, together or nothing. It, I think, builds on our old ones.
Science for people who give a shit and the world won't unfuck itself might even be bolder than that. And it really operates on two levels, together or nothing. First, solidarity.
Building on a world based on actually pro-life is going to require all of us. But it also means no one gets left behind. The framework is meaningless if we're not fighting for everyone.
But second, every kind of action together. Donating, organizing, investing, buying stuff, learning, teaching, volunteering, being heard. No person and no action is too small. No single action is enough.
The compound action of all of them across time until now and in the future is what changes and deconstructs and rebuilds systems. Together or nothing. This mark should hopefully do exactly what actually pro-life does.
It takes something that has been corrupted and returns it to its literal, measurable meaning. It exposes pretenders and draws a line in the fucking sand. It's bold because it has to be. Look around.
It's simple because these truths are actually self-evident. And it's timeless because bad guys are real and have always been real and the work is continuous. So it's together or nothing. I'll see you out there.