“Cosy Moments cannot be muzzled!” the titular Psmith cries again and again in British humorist P.G. Wodehouse’s early novel “Psmith, Journalist.” Over the course of the comedic tale, Cosy Moments—once a dreary homebodies’ magazine—is transformed by Psmith into a rip roaring little publication, a scrappy exercise in real muckraking.
Like Christopher Hitchens, I hope I have embodied at least a little of the spirit which Psmith thus espoused so clearly whilst trying to do my part in keeping the Alabama public informed throughout a year in which the news so frequently fell in sheets. The five stories I selected for this brief retrospective reflect both what I think was my most important work—and will continue to be relevant as we now begin 2026—as well as what may have managed to capture some small portion of that Cosy Moments spark.
State universities suspend student magazines, face lawsuit over anti-DEI law
The state of freedom of speech and academic freedom at Alabama’s universities is easily one of the most important stories of the past year. Since Senate Bill 129 was signed into law in 2024, professors have reported being worried about whether they’ll end up facing consequences for teaching classes on controversial topics. Students have similarly decried the loss of resources they had long relied upon, like LGBTQ+ resource centers.
This year, I reported about the ongoing lawsuit Simon v. Ivey, where professors and students at state universities are challenging the constitutionality of SB129. Documents filed as exhibits in the suit showed that professors believed the law made it harder to teach while a member of the administration said they preferred warning everyone about possible violations to any one professor actually being being sanctioned.
Thus far the lawsuit has largely resulted in little success for the professors and plaintiffs, with a judge denying a request for a preliminary injunction in August. The plaintiffs recently appealed this decision.
The general atmosphere created by SB129, as well as support from important figures in Alabama state politics, also likely contributed to conservative students at the University of Alabama this year pushing back against a previously noncontroversial anti-discrimination statement in student organizations’ constitutions.
As left-leaning groups on campus responded to this perceived threat, the president of the UA Queer Student Association told me frankly that “nothing about UA’s requirement of a non-discrimination statement or the statement itself can reasonably be argued as an infringement of First Amendment Rights.” Despite this, after initially giving an individual exception to the campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, the University eventually changed its nondiscrimination statement to a version that does not enumerate the list of protected categories.
Finally, in December the University of Alabama suspended two student magazines, citing not SB129 but federal guidance. Several student journalists at the school told me they felt the decision was manifestly an infringement of their First Amendment rights. An alumni nonprofit has since raised enough money to help both publications release one final issue each this spring semester.
SNAP hangs in the balance
With approximately one in seven people in Alabama reliant upon SNAP benefits to help pay for some share or all of their groceries every month, changes and disruptions to the program are massively important. And this past year there were quite a few of those.
Early in the process of Congress debating a new federal budget, experts were already concerned about plans to move more of the costs of administering SNAP, and of SNAP benefits, onto the states.
While the actual cuts ended up not being as drastic as the ones included in some of the House’s earlier proposals, the state legislature will still need to address them in the upcoming 2026 Legislative Session. In July, Senator Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, told me simply that “the state will need to find the money.”
Orr had also announced his support for requesting a waiver preventing the use of SNAP benefits on soda or candy, an initiative that has grown popular in conservative states over the past year in connection with the “Make America Healthy Again” movement spearheaded by Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Representative Ingram, R-Pike Road, has already prefiled a bill to request such a waiver and told APR that “we don’t want anybody going hungry, but it’s got to be a nutritional injection that we put in if we’re going to inject money into that program.”
Then, due to the federal shutdown late in 2025, Alabamians were set to miss their SNAP benefits for November as the Trump administration initially refused to use available contingency funds to keep the program running. Agreeing to obey court orders and the eventual end of the shutdown, however, meant Alabama families did eventually receive their full SNAP benefits for November, albeit later than expected and after much confusion.
How Project 2025 was promoted in Alabama
It may seem a tad quaint now, but just a year and a half ago, conservative politicians were clambering to tell voters about how much they really did not approve of “Project 2025,” a recruitment-slash-policy program put together by the Heritage Foundation and a coterie of like-minded think tanks.
Like all campaign promises, these denouncements appear to have been quickly swept under the rug once everyone had cast their ballots, but it is a reporter’s job to remember everything politicians would rather the public forget. So when the nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets published a massive leaked database of responses to a Project 2025 questionnaire for prospective jobseekers, I started poking around.
Before the 900-odd page policy document caused a major furor, I noted, a host of Alabama-based organizations had apparently been actively promoting Project 2025 to their interns and within their activist networks.
A former intern for Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville seemed to have credited their “time interning in Senator Tuberville’s office” and “conversations with many staffers and contacts in the area” with drawing their attention to Project 2025. (Tuberville’s communications director, Mallory Jaspers, called the set of questions I sent a “ridiculous and totally fabricated inquiry.”)
Other people who filled out the form credited figures at the conservative Alabama Policy Institute, the Alliance Defending Freedom and Eagle Forum Alabama with putting them onto Project 2025.
Additionally, a couple of apparent respondents who were actually hired into positions in the second Trump administration had deep ties to Alabama politics, including over a decade working for members of the state’s Congressional delegation. Shockingly, it seems like politicians might, on occasion, lie to the public in order to win votes.
Alabama and the “One Big Beautiful Bill”
One of the biggest national news stories of the first half of 2025, the first federal budget of President Trump’s second term will have major ramifications for Alabama over the coming years. Beginning in the first months of the current administration, advocacy groups and policy analysts began warning about the potential consequences of cuts to public health insurance programs, Medicaid and Medicare, even for states like Alabama that have not yet expanded Medicaid.
When the Trump administration released its official budget proposal, I worked to summarize what that initial proposal would actually mean for Alabama households if adopted wholesale, from cuts to the heating and cooling subsidy program LIHEAP to dramatic reductions in funding for NASA that could have had major ramifications for the Huntsville area.
The budget actually introduced and debated in Congress still included major cuts to Medicaid, in the form of work requirements and other restrictions that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would reduce funding for the program by almost $500 billion between 2027 and 2034. Over the next few years, rural hospitals in Alabama are likely to be especially hard hit by these changes.
I also spoke with three experts—Liz Hipple, Kathryn Anne Edwards and Joe Adams—about the large-scale consequences of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on rural counties in Alabama, low-income families and economic inequality writ large.
The secret lives of candidates for lieutenant governor
This past year, I was thankfully able to help inform Alabama about two of the current candidates for lieutenant governor: Dean Odle and Nicole Wadsworth.
Odle, a pastor in Opelika whose last major foray into politics was unsuccessfully mounting a primary challenge to Governor Kay Ivey in 2022, is also a self-published author. So in January, I took a couple of days to read his 2019 book, “Like Clay Under the Seal.”
With a title taken from a verse in the Book of Job, the book is a barmy testament to Odle’s belief that the Earth is flat and everything is really orchestrated by the agents of Satan who control “the Vatican, Islam, and Judaism.” At several points, Odle also appears to veer into overt antisemitism.
Wadsworth, on the other hand, has a more traditional background for an aspiring politician. She’s the wife of state Representative Tim Wadsworth, R-Arley, who is also serving as her campaign treasurer. Before marrying Tim Wadsworth, she had briefly run for public office in 2017.
But after the Wadsworth campaign sent out a frankly bizarre email requesting that all media outlets refer to her exclusively as “Dr. Wadsworth” and her campaign manager clarified that she had received a PhD in economics from my alma mater, the University of Alabama, I began investigating her academic past.
As the lists of students graduating from the University of Alabama are public, and all economics PhD students must submit a dissertation, which is then archived online, I was able to grow quite confident rather quickly that Wadsworth had never received a PhD from the school.
Shortly after I sent several questions about this to her campaign manager, he issued a statement saying that Wadsworth had, in fact, just “begun graduate coursework” at my alma mater, before eventually receiving a PhD from North Central Theological Seminary.
That seminary, which is and was not officially accredited by any recognized organizations, then confirmed to me that Wadsworth had actually received a PhD in “Christian theology,” not economics. Moreover, she had been given a waiver from their requirement to write and submit an 80-page thesis.
Odle and Wadsworth are both still running for lieutenant governor. According to the December campaign finance reports, Wadsworth has almost $250,000 on hand for her campaign and Odle has a relatively meager over $17,000 for his.
