Social media has revealed politicians in a way we couldn’t have imagined before.

A few months ago, I reached out to Jean Evans, executive director of the Missouri GOP, because I was working on a story about harassment faced by women in public office. I had talked to several Democratic elected women, and wanted to include an equal number of Republican women. I didn’t hear back from Evans at first, but she eventually said she was very busy two weeks before an election.

I had contacted 10 different Republican elected women, but none replied. After the story ran, Rep. Chrissy Sommer of the Missouri House said she had left me a voicemail. When I checked, I found her missed voicemail. I apologized, and offered to write a follow-up column with her perspective, since no Republicans had replied. She said she had not experienced any intimidation or harassment in office, and politely declined.

Weeks later, however, Evans shared on Twitter the real reason for their silence.

“You have openly expressed disdain with everyone on the right without an ounce of objectivity,” tweeted Evans. “Every single female with whom I shared your request said ‘No Way’. #ZeroCredibility”

It’s Evans’ prerogative not to want to talk to me because she disagrees with my views. I have, however, repeatedly applauded those on the right who have pushed back against the worst actions of the current administration. Perhaps those conservatives don’t count as “on the right” to the executive director of Missouri’s GOP.

I was surprised a few weeks later to see another tweet directed at me, this time from the official Missouri GOP account. (The account’s bio doesn’t reveal who runs it.)

The tweet read: “What happens when the beauty editor attempts to do politics? Hint: It ain’t pretty.”

It included an emoji of a fingernail being polished and referenced this tweet I had posted: “That the President of the United States keeps trying to illegally overturn an election to stay in power ought to be the lead story in every paper, every newscast and the main topic of conversation on every news program. That it isn’t shows just how low he’s dragged us.”

If Missouri’s GOP had a problem with this point, I wonder why didn’t they respond to that instead of dragging beauty editors. Maybe they thought calling me a beauty editor was a snarky way of diminishing my work or opinion. Unfortunately, they misjudged how much I value the work of beauty editors.

I have an amateur interest in all manner of beauty. I have written about mascaras, red lipsticks and questionable skin treatments. In a future story, I plan to share the travails of lightening my hair for the first time during the pandemic.

Beauty, in all its forms, enriches our lives. Social commentaries on what and whom we consider beautiful, and how we strive for beauty, are also political observations. Who and what we choose to diminish reveals who and what we consider worthy of public discourse.

Interestingly, the Missouri GOP tweeted its swipe at beauty editors around the same time a man wrote an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal advising incoming first lady Jill Biden to drop the title “Dr.” He wrote that it felt “fraudulent and a touch comic” since she only had a doctorate in education. (The writer has never earned a doctorate in any field of study.)

It would, in fact, be fraudulent and a touch comic to describe me as a beauty editor. A Google search, or even a glance at my Twitter bio, would reveal that it’s not my job. I tend to write more often about the ways in which the political is personal: how education, health care, racial injustice, gun violence and immigration affect ordinary people’s everyday lives.

If someone wants to talk about these issues, I’m interested in what they have to say -- whether the person is a stay-at-home mom, bartender, farmer or beauty editor.

In fact, I’d love to hear beauty editors’ thoughts on the Missouri GOP’s attempt to “do politics” by using their profession as a smear.

If you ask me, it ain’t pretty.

Sara Koelsch has started to regret some of the choices she made in the November election.

“I will probably regret that a lot more once I start paying attention to things outside my house,” she said. Right now, she’s consumed with bigger worries.

Her husband, Don, got COVID-19 back in September, which ravaged his lungs. After nearly a month at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, he was put on a ventilator last week. Doctors said he needed a double lung transplant to survive.

He died Dec. 9, before even getting on the transplant waiting list.

Don Koelsch was just 38.

He had moved to Winfield, Missouri, about a year and a half ago from Vermont after getting a job as a truck driver. He was making good money, and saved enough to move his wife and their 11-year-old daughter here five months ago. He was careful about wearing a mask and taking precautions about the virus from the start: He had an autoimmune disorder that put him at higher risk for complications. But his condition was controlled with medicine, and he led an active life.

Don got sick while out on the road. When he got back home, he tested negative for COVID -- twice -- but kept getting sicker. Eventually, doctors transferred him to a hospital in St. Louis, where a lung biopsy revealed he had indeed contracted COVID, and that it had irreparably scarred his lungs.

Sara joined Don in Missouri shortly before November’s election. She was unfamiliar with local and state politics, didn’t have any connections in town and couldn’t get involved in much because of the pandemic. She knew she wanted to see a change in the federal government, but she figured that her husband had been thriving in Missouri before he got sick, so she voted for Gov. Mike Parson in hopes of staying the course.

“It’s a horrible way to vote, I acknowledge that,” she said recently. Her husband had been on the road on Election Day and was unable to vote, but he likely would have done the same, Sara said, adding that he had been opposed to mandatory masking laws.

She had texted him several days ago to ask if he still felt the same way.

“I disagree with nanny laws,” he wrote back. “However, masks keep others safe, as well. It’s not like a helmet law, where it’s just your head. I think while we are in such a dangerous situation, we should all be taking as many precautions as possible. If we want to keep our families safe, friends safe, people safe, I can see how a mandatory mask (law) is beneficial.”

That evening, Sara and her daughter, Amelia, decorated their Christmas tree while Facetiming with Don from his hospital bed. Later that night, he struggled to breathe for hours, even while on oxygen.

A nurse held his hand while he was intubated.

This week, his three months of short-term disability benefits ended, and his job security was uncertain. A friend started a GoFundMe to help the family with the bills that are piling up.

Sara said it’s hard to see people in her community shopping in stores without masks while her family’s lives have been turned upside down. She wonders if the governor she voted for has ever spent time with a family who is suffering from the pandemic the way they are.

“Maybe he needs to spend a day with a family who’s living it,” she said.

The governor recently took time off to be with his family. Meanwhile, Don was being tested for COVID twice a week, hoping for a negative result so he could be added to the waitlist for a new pair of lungs.

It never came.

When most kids her age are making Christmas lists, Amelia said she had one request for her mom: “I need you to promise me that you won’t leave me, too.”

It’s unusual to find a doctor like Dr. Lara Kenney practicing in such a small town.

She works in Leeton, a town of about 500 people in west-central Missouri, about an hour south of Kansas City. She’s a cancer doctor, specializing in hematology, oncology and hospice and palliative care, but she also treats people in nearby counties who just need to see a physician.

About a month ago, patients started calling her about COVID: Maybe they had symptoms, a positive test result or just questions after a close exposure. The calls multiplied by the day. A week later, the county reported a 30% positivity rate.

“It was like dominoes,” she said.

She wasn’t prepared for what happened next, even though the community is familiar to her.

Kenney grew up in rural Oregon and came to Missouri for medical school. After graduating, she enlisted in the U.S. Army, completed her residency at Fort Sam Houston and was deployed to Iraq several times as a medical officer. Kenney came back to Missouri for her specialized cancer training. It’s where she met and married her husband, who had grown up in rural Clinton, Missouri.

In 2014, they left the suburbs of Kansas City and moved back to his hometown, where they wanted to raise their kids and lay down their roots.

Working in such a small town, Kenney knows all the patients in her practice well. Two of them have died of COVID.

“Neither one was in a condition that I would expect them to pass,” she said, adding that they’d been living independently, not “limping along.” They had to be sent to hospitals in Kansas City, where they suffered for weeks, alone.

“I’m a cancer doctor,” she said. “We deal with death on a fairly regular basis; it’s part of our job. But we didn’t plan on it being like this.”

Normally, she would hug her patients when they entered hospice. She would hold their hands. Tell their adult children how much their mom or dad meant to her.

“All of that has been ripped away,” she said.

Instead, Kenney hears comments in her town about how the people who are dying were old, or sick, or going to die anyway. She hears people say, “I gotta live my life” as they continue to attend weddings and social events.

“I’m working my butt off here trying to help people, but I guess ...,” her voice trailed off. “I don’t even know what to say anymore.”

She has said plenty to patients who tell her the virus isn’t a big deal. She asks them: Why would doctors be worrying about it if it wasn’t worth worrying about? They don’t have answers when she challenges them.

Kenney says she’s not really surprised that she hasn’t been able to change many minds, even in a place where people know and trust her.

“We’re nine months into this thing,” she said. “For someone to look back and say they were wrong would mean (acknowledging) they have contributed to someone they love getting ill or even dying. To accept that their behaviors may have changed things for our community.

“We’re pretty far down the rabbit hole for people to change their minds without having a serious reckoning with themselves about the choices they made.”

It also means having to question the people they trusted who misled or lied to them. She said she’s been astounded by the failures in leadership during this crisis. Her military and medical training, combined with what she’s seeing happen on the ground, prompted her to make a personal plea to Missouri Gov. Mike Parson:

“As disappointed as I am in the failure up to this point to do the hard things that are required of a leader, the time to do something is now,” she said, adding that there are no negative consequences to issuing a statewide mandatory mask order. “To not do something so simple is mind-boggling.”

Given Kenney’s rural background, you might think Parson would listen to her; he tends to listen to people in rural Missouri, who have been vocal in their opposition to mandatory masking.

The reaction in her community and the state she’s adopted has her questioning her place here.

She and her husband have discussed moving out of the state once this pandemic is over -- leaving their dream house and the schools where their children are growing up -- and finding a place where she feels her work is more valued, her sacrifices appreciated.

“Knowing that there’s a large percentage in my community that doesn’t respect my concerns or knowledge ... You can’t unsee that,” she said.