Welcome to Rural Reboot

The polite era is over.

The Rural Reboot series exists because someone had to say it—and say it straight.

We’re not here to pat backs, stroke egos, or draft love letters to small-town dysfunction. We’re here because civic leadership is asleep at the wheel, the community confuses niceness with progress, and the same recycled ideas keep getting applause like it's still 1955.

Co-founded by T.C. Andrews and Axel Calloway, Rural Reboot was born from witnessing our own small hometowns decay from the inside out—while the locals keep smiling, waving, and "praising Jesus” as if it were the cure-all for civic rot. We’ve seen school districts that struggle to spell “accountability,” city councils that can't manage a lemonade stand, and communities more committed to high school athletics than to improving student literacy rates.

We'll be writing about:

• Failed leadership—the kind that hides behind family names that have been ever-present for generations, “experience” while clinging to control like a drunk clings to a barstool.
• Civic apathy—a silent epidemic more dangerous than any outsider ever could be. Where unity, effort, and "civic duty" are cus words.
• Generational decline—where parenting stopped, pandering started, and discipline was traded for screen time and soft excuses.
• Work ethic erosion—in a culture that demands success without sweat, and then mistakes responsibility for oppression.
• Religious hypocrisy—from pastors and congregations who preach love but practice exclusion, and alliances that pretend to lead but rarely show up or accomplish anything.
• Economic and cultural decay—where hometown festivals and parades mask financial rot, while nostalgia keeps towns chained to their own downfall.
• Educational faceplants and student indifference—from incompetent administrations, ignorant, broken boards, parents who are MIA, and a system that teaches nothing to disinterested students obsessed with TikTok and becoming a famous, wealthy "influencer".

This is not a series for the timid. It’s a reckoning for the complicit.

Why? Because sometimes, there just isn’t a nice way to say it.
And we’re done pretending otherwise.

If you’re tired of fluff, fakery, and civic theater—this is your place.
No spin. No filters. No B.S.
Just sharp truths, overdue conversations, and a steady supply of reality checks.

Because silence isn’t neutral—it’s permission.
And we’re not asking anymore.