Anika Smith is an associate editor at The Stream. She grew up in a small logging community on the West Coast, where she took part in her first political protest, against the spotted owl (“families first, owls last”), at age 5. She moved to Seattle for college and spent a decade falling in love with the greatest city ever, even if its denizens did call her a Stepford Wife Republican™ after she wrote a column in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer supporting Sarah Palin’s VP nomination. She has been leading worship for fifteen years and occasionally talks her friends into performing with her at parties. She wanted to go to heaven for her sixth birthday because her dad told her that she could sing with Roy Orbison when she got there. Before working at The Stream, Anika was as an editor the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a project director at the National Association of Evangelicals, and a policy analyst at the Discovery Institute.