2025! Can you believe it? It was the year 2000 when Gordon May and his son, Byron, launched SB Magazine. This year is our silver anniversary. It seems like only yesterday that we were anticipating a complete technology shutdown with Y2K. Think about it. We’ve gone from using a floppy disk to using flash drives. “Google It” is a common phrase. YouTube is the most popular video-sharing website in the world. I remember telling my mother as I was talking to her on my “bag phone” (you can google that), “One day, I will be able to call you and see your face.” Skype. Bluetooth keeps us connected without tangled-up wires to frustrate us. We have electric cars – driverless cars are not too far in our future. We have 3D printing (I’d love to publish SB Magazine in 3 dimensions). Most impressive is gene editing, which could hopefully eliminate some major diseases. And there’s Facebook, which can be a good thing or a very bad thing (bullying and doxing – it happened to us this past year). A platform that people can hide behind and make themselves appear better than they are. Or it can be a fabulous way to do business, spread joy and kindness, and reach people you haven’t heard from in years. SB Magazine has over 21000 Facebook followers. Our goal on our Facebook page and physical magazine is to share news, discuss the good things happening in the SBC, promote area businesses, and lift up our community. Sure, we’re going to make mistakes. We’ll misspell names, get them out of order, and forget a period or two here and there. (I can’t count how many times my own name has been screwed up in print – it happens). But we will spend the next 25 years striving for perfection because our readers enjoy the physical experience of reading SB. The information we provide is absorbed differently when read from a page instead of a screen. What’s more, people can keep SB around for longer than five minutes to pick up and re-read or share an article with a friend – always a bonus for our advertisers.

We have been so blessed by the support of our readers and advertisers over the years. We can’t thank you enough, and I hope the next 25 years will bring even more great things to our community through SB Magazine. Let’s enjoy the journey together in 2025.

Governor Landry got the who’s who of endorsements from the Republican Party, not only in the state but in the country: former President Donald Trump, his son Donald Trump, Jr., current Speaker of the House, and our representative, Mike Johnson, as well as the Republican Party of Louisiana, all officially endorsed the governor. Landry has earned these high-profile endorsements from a body of work not only as Louisiana’s Attorney General but going back to his time in Congress representing the Third District, where he made waves for holding up a sign that said, “Drilling=Jobs” during President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress.

Years later, nothing has changed: Landry rose to national prominence as our Attorney General after his stint in Washington, D.C. Not content to only oppose President Obama in Congress, Landry joined 17 other Republican attorneys general in a lawsuit in 2018 (ultimately called Texas v. United States at the Supreme Court, where it wound up) challenging the Affordable Care Act as unconstitutional once the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 repealed the individual mandate tax penalty for not having health insurance. A district court judge in Texas ruled in favor of the lawsuit, prompting celebration from its proponents but condemnation for Landry from Governor Edwards, saying he “did not think this through.” That lawsuit was eventually struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 7-2 ruling because the Court determined Landry et al. did not have standing to sue. Landry was also part of a concerted effort led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton with nine other Republican attorneys general (one of whom eventually withdrew) in 2017 to pressure the Trump administration to finally rescind DACA, an Obama-era memorandum from the Department of Homeland Security, threatening legal action if he did not. “We are a nation of laws, not of men, and we must act in a way that respects the process of legal citizenship,” he said at the time. The Trump administration did terminate DACA after Landry’s effort, yet the Supreme Court later overturned the termination because it was considered “arbitrary and capricious.” Landry released a celebratory statement after a federal judge in Texas declared DACA unlawful and stopped new applications to the program in July of 2021, calling it a “win…for the rule of law” (DACA has been ruled against multiple times since its inception, including as recently as 2023, yet it still remains in judicial limbo, not officially legal, but not officially gone, either). Louisiana has approximately 2,000 DACA recipients.