Where My Heart Actually Is: Hopegirl
I want to explain where my heart is at right now, and why we’re moving in this direction. We want to help people right now, with real solutions — not scare you into oblivion with more technology reports. People need real help with learning basic survival skills in our current time of war scenario more than they need endless streams of transhumanism white papers shoved in their face that they feel they can’t do anything about.
I know how many of us are struggling. The cost of groceries, the news cycle, the sense that everything is in a downward spiral — you’re not imagining it, and you’re not alone. I feel it too. My husband feels it too. I see it all over the internet in compilation videos of people getting evicted, of rent reaching astronomical levels, of people afraid to eat contaminated vegetables, of scary 3D printed meat and crickets ground into your food. The surveillance state, the Flock cameras, the datacenters, the pollution, the sickness… and the endless stress every single American is collapsing under. I am not going to stick my head in the sand and pretend that all of this isn’t happening. People have real pain. I won’t belittle that or gaslight anyone into thinking “everything is just fine.”
We’re living through a season that feels like wartime, even for those of us who will never see a battlefield. This war is different; this battlefield is different. Rising prices. Real wars overseas. A news environment that seems built to keep us terrified instead of informed. I’m not going to pretend I have an answer for all of it — I don’t think anyone honestly does. What I do know is what it’s doing to people: a lot of us feel hopeless, helpless, and quietly depressed, even while we’re still showing up every day and doing what needs to be done.
Proverbs 6:6-8 points to the ant — gathering food in harvest, not out of panic, but quiet, steady wisdom. That’s really what I want this next season of our content to be. Not fear. Just foresight.
Here’s something I need to say plainly: I’m done making content that only scares people. We’ve spent years covering technology, policy, and the kind of white papers most people will never read cover to cover — and somewhere along the way I realized that reporting on what’s wrong isn’t the same thing as helping someone do something about it. A video that leaves you more afraid and no more capable isn’t actually serving you. It might get a click. It doesn’t get you anywhere.
I want to be different. Not because doom doesn’t sell — it sells extremely well, which is exactly the problem — but because I have actual knowledge, skills, and talents that can help people right now, and so does my husband. I’d rather spend that on something useful than on another video that leaves you doom-scrolling at midnight with nowhere to put the fear.
So this week — what I’m calling Bridge Week — I’m making that shift out loud instead of quietly.
Our generation largely doesn’t know how to cook real food from scratch anymore, let alone preserve it. And right now, that’s not a nostalgic skill gap — it’s a real one. The headlines about food quality, water quality, and grocery prices aren’t exaggerated; they’re just usually handed to you without an answer. There is an answer. Someone just has to actually teach it. That’s what this next season of homesteading content is about — not another explainer on what’s broken, but real, practical skills: how to preserve a harvest without refrigeration, stretch a grocery budget, grow food even in bad soil, and build the kind of household that isn’t quite so dependent on everything else going right.
Having these skills is one of many solutions to making yourself a little more free from the control system. Ask yourself, how would it feel if instead of struggling as badly as those who just went along with it all, you chose a different path, decided to get yourself some of these basic skills, and now you and your family have what you need to survive in this warzone and even get a little bit of peace? I want that for you, so does my husband. That is why we are pouring all of our creative time, work, and energy into creating new content that will help you.
I created four pieces this week — four videos with four sourced articles — to bridge the transition from the old way we made content to the new way. Here’s exactly why each one exists, no spin:
Why We Changed Everything: The Great Restructuring Explained — This one explains the real financial pressure our audience and our business have both been under as the economy has shifted, and how content that gets algorithmically buried stops being able to support either one. Straight talk about a hard season.
Why Conspiracy Channels Are Losing — What the Data Actually Shows — This one gets into how certain framing patterns get automatically flagged and under-recommended by platform algorithms, which means the message stops reaching people even when nothing gets removed. It also walks through the actual numbers on how audience interest is shifting and which formats are losing ground.
Leaving MAGA, QAnon, or Church? The Great Transition — For everyone who’s felt the ground shift under a movement, a party, or a community they used to belong to. This one names that feeling of disenfranchisement and betrayal honestly, backs it up with real numbers, and doesn’t tell you what to conclude from it.
Grandma’s Tea vs. The FTC (publishing Tuesday) — This one is the least emotional and the most necessary: a plain explanation of the legal landscape around what small businesses can and can’t legally claim about their products, why that forced real changes to our own wording, and why I can no longer answer the flood of medical-advice questions I get in the comments. Not because I don’t care — because the law doesn’t allow it, and I’d rather tell you that honestly than pretend otherwise.
This is for those who’ve followed us for years and for anyone finding us for the first time — all of whom deserve to know exactly why we made this change.
I got a comment from a reader who was confused. They thought it wasn’t the “Real Hopegirl” that I was going “Mainstream,” and that my decision to make different kinds of content automatically means that I don’t support any of the Health Freedom movement doctors I supported in the past. They even asked, “Where’s Tivon?” — as if my husband had mysteriously disappeared. They were also concerned about why I am not only speaking about the WBAN, as that is the content that helped them in the past.
I want to answer this directly, because I know I wasn’t the only one thinking it.
First — I’m still me. Making different kinds of content doesn’t mean I’ve walked away from what I’ve supported in the past. I still stand behind the doctors and the Health Freedom work I’ve talked about before — that hasn’t changed, and it’s not going anywhere. What’s changing isn’t my convictions. It’s where I’m putting my new energy.
And on the WBAN specifically — I haven’t dropped it, and I’m not pretending it doesn’t matter. I still plan to cover it going forward. I have created four pillars for my new content: 1. Homesteading, 2. Biblical Wisdom, 3. Current Events, 4. Technology. WBAN and related emerging tech new releases will be in the Technology playlist of my channels. We’ve been reporting on this since 2017 — thousands of hours of work, videos, articles, and interviews are all archived and available on my 14-year-old blog, hopegirlblog.com, if anyone wants to go watch it. Everything to learn about the WBAN is all there and will always be there on our own self-hosted website.
But I’ve been sitting with something for a while now: reporting on a threat, over and over, without ever handing you something you can actually do with that information, starts to feel less like informing you and more like just adding to the weight you’re already carrying. You already know the world is complicated and very frightening right now. What most of us are missing isn’t more evidence of that — it’s actual, practical footing to stand on while we live through it.
Where’s Tivon?
My husband Tivon is fine — the only place he’s disappeared to is his lab. Whether you already know this or not: Tivon is a brilliant engineer and inventor. He’s put his own projects on hold for years now so we could spend our time doing the research and interviews about technology, and so we could build and run our small business. Now he’s working on creating his own channel, doing something similar to what I’m doing, using his own talents and gifts to help people. Tivon’s focus is the energy crisis — people struggling with high electricity bills and the basic need for reliable power. He’s got a handful of his own DIY energy solutions, all of which will be open-sourced, and he’s building a channel to present them and teach others how to build their own — so they can be a little more free and a little less dependent on the grid. He’s always been solution-oriented, and we’ve finally carved out the space and priority for him to have his own platform to show his work for anyone interested in this kind of thing. It’s not launched yet, but it will be soon — and when it is, of course, I’ll share it.
So that’s the shift. Not away from what I’ve always believed. Toward giving you something to hold, not just something to fear.
What’s Coming — Starting This Week
If you have no idea how to cook from scratch, how to preserve food, or how to manage the food supply in your own house — don’t be intimidated. I made this series for you. If no one ever taught you, that’s not a personal failing, and there’s no shame in it. These are skills we lost as a culture, not skills you failed to learn. We need to get them back, starting now.
Here’s what the next few months look like, starting now. (with Thumbnail Previews)
Learning to preserve your own food. This isn’t theoretical anymore. In April 2025, USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service issued a public health alert after finding wood fragments in cilantro used in several frozen soup and bowl products — including some Campbell’s-branded foodservice varieties. [Note: not their canned retail soups — this was foodservice/institutional product, worth being precise about since accuracy matters more than alarm here.] Separately, we’ve all watched vegetable contamination alerts and recalls become almost routine background noise, while the price of packaged, processed food keeps climbing regardless. I’m going to teach you how to preserve your own food at home — so you’re not dependent on any single supply chain, any single company, or any single inspection process working perfectly every time.
Organizing your family’s food supply and cutting your grocery bill. Dehydrating, freezer strategy, long-term dry storage — the actual systems, not just the theory. This is about giving you a real plan, not just a pantry full of good intentions.
Sourcing the right meats — and preserving them for years. Beef prices have climbed sharply this year, and just this month USDA issued a Class I recall — its highest risk category — for nearly 30,000 pounds of raw beef imported from Argentina, after it entered the country without the required import reinspection. To be precise: no illnesses were reported, and the issue was a skipped inspection step, not a confirmed contaminant. But it’s a real, current example of why knowing your source matters. I’m going to show you how to find meat you actually trust, and how to preserve it for years using canning, brining, and smoking — so a good buy doesn’t have to become a freezer gamble.
Raising chickens, preserving eggs, and understanding what’s changing. I’ll teach you how to raise a backyard flock and preserve eggs so they last. I also want to walk you through something a lot of keepers don’t realize until it affects them: registration requirements for backyard flocks are expanding in a growing number of states — not as one uniform federal law, but state by state, largely driven by avian flu biosecurity response. Some states, like Maryland, already require every flock to be registered regardless of size. I’ll show you what to actually check for in your state, what registration does and doesn’t mean for you, and how to stay both compliant and prepared either way.
Growing your own food, even in hard soil and harsh climates. Clay soil, extreme heat, short growing seasons — I’ll teach you how to grow real food anyway, wherever you’re starting from.
Budgeting and time management for all of it. None of this matters if it’s not sustainable for a real family with a real schedule. I’ll show you how to fit food prep into an actual week, not a fantasy one, so your family has a healthy, uncontaminated food supply without it taking over your life.
I don’t know how to fix the economy or end a war. But I do know how to teach someone to preserve a harvest, stretch a dollar, and feel a little less at the mercy of everything falling apart around them. That’s where I can actually help — so that’s where I’m putting my energy.
If this is the kind of thing you want more of please subscribe, that’s where the homesteading series, the deeper dives, and everything else will live.
Eyes open, hands dirty. I’ll see you in the next one.
