Do You Hear What I Hear?

"The Lord was not in the wind... nor in the earthquake... nor in the fire: but after the fire a still small voice." 1 Kings 19:11-12

The Sound of Desperation

Do you hear what I hear? On the final Saturday of May, the sky over Massachusetts split with a sound like the end of something. A meteor, traveling at seventy-five thousand miles an hour, tore across the bedrock of these United States and broke apart in a blast that NASA measured at the equivalent of three hundred tons of TNT. It shook buildings and rattled windows, and the boom was heard from Delaware to Montreal. For one single second, that sound replaced every other sound. And then it was gone. What returned in its place was the sound that has been with us all spring, the sound that never truly left. The sound of desperation.

For that is the sound a party makes when it has run out of ideas. It is not the sound of vision or conviction. It is the sound of noise, of manufactured crisis, of recycled faces and borrowed fear. We are hearing that sound now, and anyone willing to listen can recognize it for what it is.

Begin with the cry about redistricting, because that is where the desperation shows itself most plainly. The Democratic Party would have us believe two contradictory things at once. They want us to believe they are winning the fight over the maps, and at the very same moment they want us to believe the maps are being stolen from us. Both cannot be true. A party that is winning does not cry foul. A party that is losing does, and loudly.

Consider what has actually happened. In California, Democrats redrew the map to gain five seats, and the courts let it stand. They celebrated. In Texas, Republicans did the same, and the courts let that stand as well. In Virginia, Democrats pushed a redistricting plan that would have handed them as many as four additional seats and reduced Republican representation to a single congressman. The Virginia Supreme Court struck it down. Democrats ran to the Supreme Court of the United States, which rejected their emergency appeal in a single terse sentence, with not one justice noting a dissent. The same tactic they praised in California they called a threat to democracy in Virginia, and the highest court in the land was unmoved.

What makes it worse is that they had already given up. Before the Supreme Court even ruled, the governor announced the state would proceed with the existing map regardless of what the justices decided. The appeal was theater. They knew it would fail, they had already moved on, and they filed it anyway so they would have someone to blame. And blame they did. When the one-sentence denial came down, the response was not reflection but outrage at the court, as though three million votes had been stolen by the justices rather than lost by a party that broke its own state's rules to draw the map in the first place.

The contradiction is not subtle. The principle is supposed to be the thing that matters. Either drawing maps for partisan advantage is acceptable or it is not. It cannot be democracy in one state and tyranny in another simply because of which party benefits.

What makes the Virginia story worth lingering on is what happened inside the party once the plan collapsed. Governor Abigail Spanberger, who signed the Virginia redistricting into law herself, has now publicly distanced herself from Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader whose allied groups poured tens of millions of dollars into the effort. When asked about Jeffries and future plans, Spanberger said that talk of some future point is a distraction from the task at hand, and that on redistricting, that time is over now.

It is obvious these are not the voices of a unified party. That is the language of a governor putting distance between herself and a failure. And it is worth remembering that this same governor once wrote that gerrymandering is detrimental to democracy and that opposing it should be a bipartisan priority. Then she signed a gerrymander into law. The voters are not required to forget what was said yesterday simply because it is inconvenient today.

There is more. After the Virginia ruling, some Democrats floated to Jeffries an idea so brazen it deserves to be named. They considered lowering the retirement age of the state Supreme Court justices to clear the bench, installing seven new justices, and rehearing the case to reach the result they wanted. Spanberger does not support the scheme. But the fact that it was floated at all tells us something. When you cannot win under the rules, you consider changing the people who enforce the rules. That is not a defense of democracy. That is the opposite.

And here is the part that should trouble every American Black voter in particular. As they lose these battles, they reach for the oldest tool in the drawer. They warn us that we are being returned to the days of Jim Crow. They invoke our grandmothers and our grandfathers, the marches, the dogs, the hoses, the blood. They do this not to honor that history but to harvest our fear. They need us frightened, because frightened people do not ask hard questions. Frightened people do not notice that the party invoking Jim Crow is the same party whose ancestors built it.

And it does not stop at fear. The same pundits who serve the party have found a new front in their war against the Supreme Court, and they are willing to spend our children to wage it. They are now suggesting that Black athletes at colleges in states with contested maps should stop playing, as though our young people should be made into instruments of a political fight they did not start. Think on what is being asked. They will invoke Jim Crow to frighten us and then turn our own sons and daughters into bargaining chips in the same breath. That is what desperation looks like when it reaches for leverage. It will spend our children to make a point.

I have written before about who wrote the laws of segregation and who defended them, and I will not relitigate the whole of it here. But I will say this plainly. A party that needs to frighten you with the past while offering you nothing for the future is a party that has run out of anything else to give.

Next listen to the outrage coming out of Los Angeles where Mayor Karen Bass may lose her seat. The race is a statistical tie. One of the candidates clustered at the top with her is Spencer Pratt, a figure who has gathered support from the right and a nod of approval from President Trump. Whatever one thinks of that race, the picture of an incumbent Democratic mayor in one of the most Democratic cities in America fighting for her political life is not the picture of a healthy party. It is the picture of a party whose own voters are no longer convinced.

How about Maine, where Senator Susan Collins faces Graham Platner. Platner is the kind of candidate a desperate party produces. He has been dogged by reports of a Nazi-linked tattoo, by resurfaced social media posts, and by reports that his own wife told campaign staff he had sent sexual messages to other women. This is who they are running. Not because he is the best they have, but because the anger they have stoked needs a vessel, and he is the vessel available.

Now listen to the sound the party makes about its own past. The leaked autopsy of the 2024 campaign, the party's own report, authored by a Democratic consultant and then disavowed by the party that commissioned it, described Democrats as incapable of projecting strength, unity, and leadership, and said voters have drifted away. The report was so damaging that party leaders tried to bury it. It was riddled with errors. It never once mentioned Gaza, despite the evidence that the war cost the campaign dearly. A party confident in its future does not hide its own analysis of its past.

And what is their answer to all of this? Who do they offer us as the way forward? The same faces. Kamala Harris, who declined to run for governor of her home state and left the door open for another presidential run, is making the rounds again. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is being positioned as a front-runner. The party that just lost is offering us the architects of that loss and calling it renewal.

Watch how Harris in particular comes back to us. She is once again presenting herself to the American Black community as one of us in the fullest sense, as a daughter of the American descendants of slavery, when her own story is more complicated than the image she sells. Authenticity is not a small thing in our community, because we have been sold counterfeit champions before. We have every right to ask whether the people who claim our struggle have lived it or merely learned to perform it when an election draws near.

And consider how Ocasio-Cortez courts the very communities she needs. She has stepped into our pulpits, and just days ago she appeared at an Eid al-Adha event in the Bronx alongside Mayor Zohran Mamdani wearing a hijab. Understand what that is. It is the putting on of a people's customs as a garment, worn for an afternoon and removed by evening, in order to harvest their support. The offense is not that she honored a community. The offense is the assumption underneath it, that we are too uninformed to see the performance, that we cannot tell the difference between someone who shares our condition and someone who has learned to dress like she does.

She was not the only one to hear the objection. Women who escaped life under compulsory hijab laws spoke up, among them an Iranian activist who has fought that very garment, who said plainly that the hijab is not cultural tourism, that women have died over the freedom not to wear it. When the people whose lived reality you are borrowing tell you that you have turned their suffering into a costume, that is not solidarity. That is spectacle.

And spectacle is the whole of it. Ocasio-Cortez believes she can win, not on the strength of any record of bringing people together, but on something as hollow as a follower count, a number inflated in places by accounts that are not even real people. She has mistaken visibility for leadership and attention for trust. Make no mistake about what she is reaching for. There is a Senate seat in New York she could pursue, the one Chuck Schumer holds, but a woman who has spent her time on the global stage and turned up everywhere a camera waits is not testing the waters for the Senate. She is testing them for the presidency. The party that lost in 2024 looks at her and sees its future, when what it is actually seeing is a mirror of the same performance that lost it the country.

Now the sounds thumping on the streets in New Jersey, where the pattern becomes impossible to miss. For months there was quiet. Now, weeks before our primary election, there is chaos outside the Delaney Hall detention facility in Newark. Sparks are flying between federal agents and protesters, and the timing deserves our attention. A party that needs energized voters has a powerful incentive to manufacture the kind of scene that energizes them.

Governor Mikie Sherrill is performing a familiar two-step. She calls the protesters peaceful while she sends state troopers into the very crowd she is praising. The state police have said that some in the crowd retrieved gas masks, fireworks, rocks, and projectiles, that they surrounded a law enforcement vehicle, and that they threatened the personnel inside. Federal officials say they agreed to pull back to lower the temperature, and that the governor refused to let state police assist them. And yet the story being sold to us is that the protesters are peaceful and the agents are the aggressors.

I want to be fair, because fairness is what separates argument from propaganda. There were two crowds outside Delaney Hall, one supporting ICE and one opposing it, but the pro-ICE presence was small and the anti-ICE crowd dwarfed it. The disorder, the fireworks and the projectiles and the arrests, came overwhelmingly from the larger side. The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey has condemned the state police response and called the protests overwhelmingly peaceful, and that view deserves to be on the table. The one thing genuinely open to debate is whether the police response was proportionate. But the governor cannot have it both ways. She cannot call a crowd peaceful and deploy riot police against it in the same breath, then blame everyone except herself when the two collide. Either it was peaceful, in which case the troopers were unnecessary, or it was not, in which case the word peaceful is being used to manage us rather than to describe what happened. And it is worth noting who was arrested. The governor herself admitted that five of the six people taken in on one night were from outside New Jersey, and that national extremist groups had involved themselves. That is not a neighborhood rising up. That is something imported.

These are the sounds. The sounds of desperation. The sounds of a party that cannot win on ideas, so it manufactures crisis. It cannot inspire, so it frightens. It cannot offer new leaders, so it recycles old ones. It cannot defend its record, so it buries the report that describes it.

Pete Buttigieg, Mark Kelly, and Gavin Newsom are already maneuvering quietly toward the front of the line for 2028, each of them carrying records and policies that have done little to bring people together and less to solve the problems in front of us. They are not running toward a vision. They are running away from a wreckage, hoping we will not notice the difference.

It is the cries of utter madness, and it is the particular madness that comes when a movement has no effective policies and no ideas capable of uniting people. When you cannot build, you burn. When you cannot persuade, you panic. And when you cannot win, you cry that the game is rigged, even as you reach for the levers to rig it yourself.

We are not required to be frightened. We are not required to forget. And we are most certainly not required to follow a party off the cliff of its own desperation simply because it shouts the name of Jim Crow while marching us backward. We have eyes. We can see. And what we see is a party that has lost its way, dressing its panic in the language of principle and hoping we will not know the difference.

We know the difference.

The Annotated Bias

"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves." — Thomas Jefferson

Why We the People Hold the Pen

We are approaching New Jersey's primary election, and I have already cast my ballot and will be working the polls on June 2 as a Black woman in America exercising a right that generations before me fought to secure.

Over the last few weeks, I have been reading the Federalist Papers while also working my way through Melissa Murray's book, The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader. Reading the two side by side has been a fascinating exercise because they approach the Constitution from very different perspectives.

Before discussing the book itself, it is important to understand who Melissa Murray is. Murray is a legal scholar, former dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, and currently the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Birnbaum Women's Leadership Center at New York University School of Law. She is also one of the hosts of the podcast Strict Scrutiny, alongside Leah Litman of the University of Michigan Law School and Kate Shaw of the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

By any measure, these women are accomplished scholars. They have spent years studying constitutional law, Supreme Court decisions, and the legal framework of the United States. Yet one of the things I have come to realize while reading Murray's book and listening to Strict Scrutiny is that scholarship alone is not enough. Knowledge, credentials, and expertise are valuable, but absent common sense, humility, and a foundation rooted in something greater than ourselves, expertise can become its own blind spot.

That realization shaped the way I read Murray's book.

Reading Murray's book alongside the Federalist Papers left me with a very different impression than I believe she intended. Rather than convincing me that the Constitution is a fundamentally flawed document in need of constant correction, the experience reinforced my appreciation for the durability of the Constitution itself. More importantly, it highlighted how constitutional interpretation is often influenced by the assumptions, cultural values, and political perspectives that readers bring to the text.

Murray's book is, at its core, a rereading of the Constitution with a heavy emphasis on the amendments. As I worked my way through the text, I found myself wondering whether that emphasis was intentional. It seemed to me that the amendments occupy center stage while the Constitution itself often recedes into the background.

I suspect this emphasis reflects a broader debate that has shaped constitutional interpretation for decades. On one side are those who believe the Constitution should be interpreted according to its original public meaning and historical understanding. This approach is often associated with jurists such as Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and, to varying degrees, Chief Justice John Roberts. While these justices do not always agree with one another, they generally place significant weight on the text of the Constitution and the historical context in which it was written.

On the other side are those who view the Constitution as a living document whose meaning evolves alongside society and culture. Under this view, constitutional interpretation is not limited to the original understanding of the text but must take into account contemporary circumstances, evolving social values, and modern realities.

As I read Murray's book, I came away with the impression that she largely embraces the latter view. The amendments are presented not merely as additions to the Constitution but as evidence that constitutional meaning expands over time as society changes.

What I found myself questioning, however, was whether the existence of twenty-seven amendments proves that the Constitution was fundamentally flawed. To me, the opposite conclusion seems more persuasive. The Constitution has existed for more than two centuries, yet only twenty-seven amendments have been adopted. The first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 out of twelve that Congress had proposed in 1789. Of the two left unratified, one concerned congressional pay, and it remained dormant for more than two centuries before it was finally ratified in 1992 as the Twenty-Seventh Amendment. Rather than demonstrating constitutional failure, the relatively small number of amendments demonstrates the durability of the constitutional framework.

More importantly, the amendment process itself suggests that the framers anticipated change. They created a mechanism by which the Constitution could be modified when necessary. That is very different from the idea that judges should revise constitutional meaning through interpretation based on evolving social and cultural values.

Before examining the broader constitutional debate, it is important to address what I believe is one of the central weaknesses of Murray's book: the degree to which her political and cultural assumptions shape her analysis of the Constitution.

No writer is free from bias. I certainly am not. The issue is not whether Murray has a perspective. The issue is whether that perspective is acknowledged and whether competing constitutional interpretations are given fair consideration.

Throughout the book, Murray frequently critiques positions associated with President Donald Trump and Supreme Court decisions that reach conservative constitutional conclusions. One example is the ongoing debate surrounding the Fourteenth Amendment and birthright citizenship. Murray appears to treat the issue as largely settled and views efforts to reconsider the scope of the Citizenship Clause with skepticism.

Yet it is not unreasonable to ask questions about the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. The amendment was adopted in the aftermath of the Civil War to overturn the injustice of the Dred Scott decision and to establish that formerly enslaved Black Americans and their descendants were citizens of the United States. The historical circumstances surrounding its adoption are well known. The modern debate is not whether those individuals were citizens. The debate concerns whether the Citizenship Clause extends as broadly as some modern interpretations suggest.

Reasonable people can disagree about that question. My concern is that Murray often presents one side of the debate as though it is the only intellectually serious position. Yet the issue is significant enough that it has found its way before the Supreme Court. The very fact that constitutional scholars, lower courts, and Supreme Court justices continue to debate the question suggests that it is not as settled as some commentators claim.

Another example of what I perceive as selective framing appears in Murray's discussion of Jim Crow and the racial oppression that followed Reconstruction.

To her credit, Murray does not ignore the discrimination, violence, and legal barriers that Black Americans faced in the South after the Civil War. Those realities are an undeniable part of American history and deserve serious discussion. What struck me, however, was the way the political actors responsible for many of those policies were often described.

Throughout these discussions, references are frequently made to historical movements, political coalitions, or broader social forces. Yet there is comparatively little direct acknowledgment that many of the Southern politicians who enacted and defended segregation, disenfranchisement, and Jim Crow laws were Democrats. The historical record on this point is not particularly controversial. Those individuals held office, passed legislation, and exercised political power under the banner of the Democratic Party of their time. I am aware that the political coalitions of that era differ from those of today. My point is simpler. If historical accuracy matters, the identities of the political actors involved should not be obscured. Readers should be given the full picture, even when that picture complicates contemporary political narratives.

I cannot know Murray's intentions, nor do I claim to. What I can speak to is the effect. The cumulative effect of the language, examples, and historical framing throughout the book is that certain aspects of the historical record receive considerable attention while others appear less central to the narrative being presented.

I also found Murray's choice of language and examples revealing. Throughout the book, she frequently refers to a hypothetical president as "she." There is nothing inherently wrong with using a female president as an example. Nor am I suggesting that America should never elect a female president. My observation is simply that examples are rarely chosen at random. They often reveal the assumptions and priorities of the writer.

Considering that every president in American history has been male, the repeated use of "she" struck me as a deliberate choice reflecting a modern cultural perspective. By itself, this would be insignificant. However, when viewed alongside the broader themes of the book, it becomes part of a larger pattern in which contemporary concerns about gender, identity, and social change shape the constitutional analysis being presented.

Before there was a Constitution, there was a Declaration. Before there were amendments, there was the belief that human beings are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Constitution provides the framework for governing a free people, but the Declaration explains why those freedoms matter in the first place.

It is here that I find myself parting ways with Murray and many modern constitutional scholars. They frequently invoke the Constitution to defend the rights of the individual, yet when the discussion turns to abortion, the analysis often begins with the assumption that the question concerns only the rights of the woman.

If constitutional principles are rooted in the protection of individual rights, then the first question should not be whether a woman has autonomy over her body. The first question should be whether the life developing in the womb possesses any claim to protection under the law. If the answer is yes, then the constitutional analysis becomes far more complicated than a simple appeal to personal liberty. If the answer is no, then that conclusion itself must be defended rather than assumed.

What troubles me is that many modern discussions seem to bypass this question altogether. The debate is framed almost entirely around choice, autonomy, and reproductive rights, while the question of life is treated as secondary. Yet reproduction has already occurred. The issue is no longer whether life will begin, but whether a developing life will be permitted to continue.

Furthermore, I find myself wondering how the founding generation would have approached this question. The men who drafted the Declaration of Independence and later framed the Constitution were far from perfect, but they spoke often about natural rights, human liberty, and the protection of life. Their writings reveal a deep concern for limiting government power and preserving the rights of individuals.

“Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

— — John 20:29 (KJV)

Would they have viewed the unborn child as entirely outside those protections? I cannot say with certainty. What I can say is that it seems like a question worth asking.

Modern constitutional interpretation often extends certain legal protections to non-citizens because they are human beings entitled to due process and equal treatment under the law. If our constitutional tradition recognizes a measure of protection based on our shared humanity, then I struggle to understand why the humanity of the unborn is so often dismissed before the discussion even begins.

Even Christ told Thomas, blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe. He was speaking of belief in Himself, of the countless believers across the centuries who have never laid eyes on Him and yet hold Him as Lord. But the same principle reaches further. Before we hear his first cry, before we cradle her small body in our hands, we already believe it is a life, and we move to protect it.

After all, the unborn child is not a foreign invader, nor an outsider seeking entry into the nation. The unborn child is a developing human life, one that, absent intervention, will cross the threshold from the womb into the world and become a citizen of the United States. If constitutional principles are broad enough to recognize the humanity of those who do not belong to the political community, should they not at least compel us to seriously consider the humanity of those who are on the verge of entering it?

This question does not resolve the abortion debate, and I do not pretend that it does. What it does reveal is how incomplete the constitutional conversation becomes when one life is given consideration while the other is treated as though it does not exist. That same concern, the question of who is seen and who is overlooked, runs through the whole of how we read the Constitution.

Bringing me back to Murray's book, about the U.S. Constitution, I found it to be a relatively simple and accessible read. It is written for a modern audience and serves as a guided tour through the Constitution and its amendments. While Murray discusses some of the historical debates surrounding the Constitution, the book does not deeply explore the struggles, disagreements, and competing visions that shaped the document during its creation. Nor does it spend much time wrestling with the intellectual battles that took place between the framers and their critics during the ratification process.

To be fair, Murray does provide useful historical context and raises questions that readers should consider. There were sections of the book that I found informative and engaging. My concern is not that the book lacks intelligence. My concern is that it often presents constitutional interpretation through a particular ideological lens while giving the appearance of neutral explanation.

The danger is this: many readers, especially younger readers, may approach a work written by a respected scholar with the assumption that they are receiving an objective account of the Constitution. Yet constitutional interpretation is rarely objective. Every scholar, judge, commentator, and citizen brings assumptions to the text. Murray is no exception.

I worry that readers who have never read the Constitution for themselves may come away believing they understand the Constitution when what they have really encountered is one scholar's interpretation of the Constitution. There is a difference between the two.

If I have one recommendation after finishing this book, it is this: read the Constitution for yourself. Read the amendments for yourself. Read the Federalist Papers. Read the arguments of those who agree with Murray and those who disagree with her. Wrestle with the text before allowing anyone else to tell you what it means.

The Constitution belongs to the American people. It was not written exclusively for scholars, judges, professors, or constitutional experts. It was written to establish a government and preserve liberty for a free people. The best way to understand it is not through the lens of any single commentator, no matter how accomplished, but by engaging directly with the document itself.

After reading Murray's book alongside the Federalist Papers, I came away convinced of one thing: the Constitution is far more resilient, far more enduring, and far more capable of speaking for itself than many modern scholars seem willing to admit.

“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy.”

— — James Madison

Wiping Red Lines Off Their Faces

“Nothing could be more ill judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties.” — Alexander Hamilton

The Gerrymandering Wars and the Awakening of American Black Voters

What has become painfully obvious this week is the infighting beginning to ripple through the Democratic Party ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Much of it centers around political gerrymandering, a tactic both parties have used for decades, but one Democrats long believed worked overwhelmingly to their advantage through modern Voting Rights Act litigation and racial bloc redistricting strategies. Republicans have now begun using many of the same structural tools with increasing effectiveness, and Democrats are suddenly up in arms.

When considering these battles over voting maps, representation, and political power, it is essential that we step back and examine the policies and historical shifts that helped create the political landscape we are living in today. Perhaps there is no better place to begin than with the conditions of the American South after the Civil War, through the New Deal era of the 1930s, and ultimately to the desk of Lyndon B. Johnson, where the modern political realignment of American Black voters accelerated in ways that still shape our politics today.

The Party Switch Myth

To keep many American Blacks voting for Democrat candidates, left-leaning scholars, commentators, and policymakers often invoke what is commonly called the party switch in the South. The argument generally goes like this. American Blacks, who were initially overwhelmingly Republican following the Civil War, gradually abandoned the Republican Party after Jim Crow, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights era transformed the political landscape.

There is truth inside parts of that history. American Blacks were historically aligned with Republicans after the Civil War. Men like Blanche K. Bruce, who became the first American Black United States Senator in 1875 representing Mississippi, emerged directly out of that Republican Reconstruction tradition. It is also true that Jim Crow violence, disenfranchisement, economic hardship, and later federal social programs changed Black political alignment over time. By the mid-twentieth century, Black voters increasingly aligned themselves with the Democratic Party, especially during and after the New Deal and the Civil Rights era.

Now before someone rushes to invoke the Southern Strategy, let me say plainly that I am aware political coalitions shifted after the Civil Rights era. Southern whites moved politically. Black voters increasingly aligned with Democrats. Electoral maps changed. None of that is disputed. What I dispute is the lazy conclusion that modern Republicans simply became the segregationist Democrats of the past. I also dispute the companion claim that Democrats transformed overnight into the moral opposite of their historical governing instincts. Neither party crossed the aisle ideologically. The coalitions shifted. The philosophies did not.

Political coalitions changed. Voters changed. Regional loyalties changed. The deeper ideological debates over federal power, economic control, dependency systems, labor expansion, local governance, and constitutional structure remained far more continuous than modern political shorthand admits. When people speak of the party switch today, it is often used less as a historical explanation and more as a moral accusation. The implication is that modern Republicans inherited the spirit of Southern segregationists while modern Democrats became the sole heirs of civil rights and racial progress. History is far more complicated than partisan mythology.

Even as voters shifted, the broader philosophical instincts of each party remained recognizable. Democrats continued expanding federal social programs, centralized economic management, and dependency-driven systems. Republicans continued emphasizing constitutional restraint, limited government, local control, markets, and fiscal conservatism, even if both parties evolved over time and often contradicted their own principles in practice.

Trapped in the Framework

Since 1965, American Blacks have largely been trapped within the framework of Democrat policies. For decades we have voted overwhelmingly Democrat, yet many of our urban communities have declined in measurable ways involving education, wealth, institutional stability, self-awareness, family structure, and economic independence. Still, we continue aligning ourselves almost exclusively with the same political machine.

This has everything to do with political power and gerrymandering. Voting maps have often been drawn in ways that pack Black communities into concentrated districts that maximize Democrat political control while limiting broader influence elsewhere. Our votes are harvested in bulk, but very little meaningful institutional investment returns to many of our neighborhoods. As Malcolm X once warned, politicians often help themselves first and only afterward return to Black communities asking, what do you need. The pattern has become painfully familiar.

Over the last several years we have also witnessed growing tensions surrounding illegal immigration and the expectation that Black communities should quietly absorb the economic, educational, and social pressures that come with rapid demographic change, often without serious public debate. These realities are not random. Many of the same voting districts are intentionally engineered and politically protected through racial bloc mapping and partisan redistricting strategies.

The Maps Begin to Fall

Earlier this month, in Louisiana v. Callais, Democrats suffered a major setback. On April 29, 2026, the United States Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision written by Justice Samuel Alito that Louisiana's congressional map, which created a second majority-Black district stretched across the state, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Court concluded that race had improperly dominated the drawing of the district lines, and that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to use race as the basis for redistricting. The decision narrowed the standard that future challenges under Section 2 must meet, and it sent a clear signal to state legislatures across the country.

The next major blow came in Virginia. On May 8, 2026, the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled 4-3 to strike down the Democratic redistricting amendment that had been narrowly approved by voters in an April referendum, finding the General Assembly had failed to follow proper constitutional procedure in placing the measure on the ballot. The new map would have shifted Virginia's congressional delegation from a 6-5 Democratic edge to a 10-1 Democratic supermajority. The ruling killed the map. Democrats were left wiping red lines off their faces.

The consequences are now creating fractures inside the Democratic Party itself. Democrats believed aggressive redistricting efforts would help them flip the House. Republicans, encouraged by the Callais ruling, have successfully redrawn maps in several states in ways that now threaten Democratic incumbents and expose internal party conflicts over race, representation, and political survival.

Crockett, Cohen, and Wasserman Schultz

In Texas, the redistricting wars helped reshape the Democratic Senate primary. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, the Dallas representative known for her sharp tongue and her loyalty to Black Democratic constituencies, entered the Senate race in December 2025 after Texas Republicans redrew the congressional map in a way that scrambled Democratic House prospects across the state. On March 3, 2026, she faced state Representative James Talarico, a white seminarian from Austin, in the Democratic primary. Talarico won, 53.1 percent to 45.6 percent.

Black voters delivered for Crockett. Polling before the primary showed her winning more than 71 percent of Black Democratic voters. Prominent Black Texas politicians lined up behind her. Yet Talarico, the white challenger, outraised Crockett nearly three to one with money largely coming from outside Texas, including a viral surge of national exposure when his interview on a major late-night show went out on YouTube after being cut from the network broadcast. The Black base showed up for Crockett. The party machinery and the donor class showed up for Talarico. The pattern is familiar.

In Tennessee, the story took a different shape but ended in the same place. On May 15, 2026, Congressman Steve Cohen announced he would not run for reelection after the Republican-led state legislature dismantled the Memphis-based 9th Congressional District, Tennessee's only majority-Black congressional district, splitting Memphis into three districts all redrawn to favor Republicans. Cohen, who is white, had held that seat for nineteen years with the consistent support of Black Memphis voters. He called the redistricting Republicans silencing the Black vote, and he was right to call it that.

The harder question is one Black Memphis must eventually answer for itself. Why did the only majority-Black congressional district in Tennessee remain represented by a white Democrat for nearly two decades. Cohen by all accounts served his constituents well, and Black voters kept electing him. That was their choice and it must be respected. The deeper truth is that the district he served is also one of the poorest, most violent, and most institutionally neglected urban districts in the country. Memphis remains plagued by failing schools, concentrated poverty, generational public housing, and the kind of chronic disinvestment that nineteen years of representation by a senior Democratic congressman did not meaningfully reverse. The conditions did not change. The representation did not change. The political loyalty did not change either.

The Democratic Party's grip on Black political loyalty meant that when Republicans came for the district, no Black Democratic successor was in position to defend it. The political bench was thin because the machine had not built one. The district was vulnerable not only because Republicans drew the lines, but because the party that claimed to protect Black representation had spent two decades comfortable with a representation that did not have to be Black, and a constituency whose conditions did not have to improve.

Then came Florida. On May 22, 2026, just two days ago as I write this, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced she would run for reelection in Florida's newly redrawn 20th Congressional District, a majority-minority district whose Democratic electorate is overwhelmingly Black, after Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed a new Florida map on May 4 that carved up her current 25th District into five pieces. The 20th District seat had been vacated when Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Black Democrat, resigned in April under the weight of ethics charges. Several Black Democrats had already declared for the seat. Wasserman Schultz, who is white, announced her run anyway, framing the campaign as a fight to preserve Broward County's political influence.

Black Democrats inside the Florida party did not stay quiet. Florida State Senator Shevrin Jones, the Democratic leader in the state Senate and an American Black, said publicly that he had personally asked Wasserman Schultz not to run. He told reporters, Black representation is a non-negotiable for me, and added that everyone deserves to have a seat at the table to ensure communities are represented by those with their same lived experience. Elijah Manley, a Black Democrat already running in the primary, called her Jim Crow Debbie and said her decision was an attack on Black representation. The criticism did not come from Republicans. It came from Black Democrats inside her own party.

The Mask Slips

The same party that endlessly speaks of protecting Black representation now finds itself openly fighting over who gets to control Black districts, who gets to inherit Black voting blocs, and which communities are politically useful enough to preserve. Democrats spent decades building political power through racial coalition politics, district engineering, and dependency-driven voting blocs. The very systems they cultivated are now turning inward, producing infighting over race, representation, identity, and political ownership inside the party itself.

The consequences of this political alignment have been devastating for many of our communities. Despite decades of initiatives, political theater, symbolic gestures, and the constant invocation of slavery and civil rights during every election cycle, many urban Black communities continue struggling under the same conditions generation after generation. We continue to see failing urban schools, generational public housing, concentrated poverty, violence, declining literacy, shrinking ownership, institutional collapse, and growing dependence on federal systems that rarely create lasting independence. Housing remains a crisis. Wealth creation remains limited in both scope and accessibility. Entire neighborhoods continue living at the edge of economic survival while political leaders return every few years offering the same promises wrapped in new slogans.

The tragedy is not simply that these conditions exist. The tragedy is that many politicians have learned how to politically survive because these conditions exist.

For decades Democrats used fear to keep Black voters politically aligned in the South during Jim Crow. Today many of those same fear tactics have simply been repackaged. The language changed. The strategy did not. Fear of Republicans. Fear of losing benefits. Fear of losing protections. Fear of stepping outside the political plantation. The whip became a carrot dangling from a thread, but the dependency remained.

The Awakening

Many of us are beginning to see clearly. The cracks started becoming visible in 2020, when Donald Trump received roughly twelve percent of the Black vote nationally, a notable increase over previous Republican performances. By 2024 that number had risen further, to roughly thirteen to fourteen percent overall, and the shift among Black men was sharper still, climbing to roughly twenty-one percent according to NBC exit polling. The trend was clearest among younger Black men, who cited the economy, inflation, and jobs as their top concerns and who increasingly judged Democratic governance by outcomes rather than rhetoric.

Whether or not one agrees with the political shift itself, the underlying point is harder to dismiss. American Blacks are beginning to question the political arrangement that has existed for generations. We are the voices of the underdog in our communities. It is up to us to stop depending entirely on organizations like the NAACP and the Southern Poverty Law Center, on politicians and commentators, and on podcasters and influencers who continuously insist we are better off permanently tied to one political party no matter the outcomes in our communities.

The NAACP and the SPLC are not the organizations they once were. The NAACP, founded in 1909 by an interracial coalition that included W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, and Ida B. Wells, was created to advance justice specifically for the colored race in America. That mission produced real victories. Brown v. Board. Voting rights litigation. The dismantling of legal segregation across the courts. In recent decades the organization has expanded its stated mission from securing the rights of American Blacks to securing the rights of all persons. Its advocacy now includes immigration reform, environmental justice, and broad civil rights coalitions that extend well beyond the specific historic mandate that brought it into being. Whatever one thinks of that expansion, the practical effect has been a diffusion of focus at a moment when the conditions in American Black communities require more focused advocacy, not less.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has traveled a stranger road. Founded in 1971 to fight Klan violence through the civil courts, the SPLC pioneered a strategy of using wrongful death suits to bankrupt white supremacist organizations. That work was real. In recent decades the organization became better known for its expansive hate group designations, which have been challenged in court by groups across the religious and political spectrum, including settlements such as the 3.375 million dollars the SPLC paid in 2018 to the Quilliam Foundation and Maajid Nawaz after wrongly labeling them anti-Muslim extremists. More recently, on April 21, 2026, a federal grand jury indicted the SPLC on charges of wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The indictment alleges that the SPLC operated a covert network paying individuals associated with violent extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, and that roughly three million dollars in donor funds was paid to eight informants between 2014 and 2023 through bank accounts opened in the names of fictitious entities. The SPLC has defended the payments as standard infiltrator and informant practice and has not been convicted of any crime. The case is pending. What is undisputed is that an organization originally founded to combat the Klan stands accused of having funneled donor dollars to individuals embedded inside the very groups it publicly denounced.

Neither organization has demonstrated the political independence to challenge Democratic policy outcomes in Black communities, and neither has produced an honest accounting of why decades of political loyalty have not produced the conditions they promised.

While we are told to remain loyal, another reality is unfolding right before our eyes. The same political machinery that once relied almost exclusively on Black voting blocs is now preparing the next coalition of dependent voters to maintain political power. The strategy changes faces, but the structure remains familiar. That may sound harsh, but history often tells uncomfortable truths. Uncomfortable truths do not become false simply because they offend us.

At some point we must stop asking what a political party says about us and begin asking what decades of political loyalty have actually built around us.

It is time we counted what loyalty has cost us.

“Much depends upon us for the help of our colour.” — Richard Allen

The Document They Cannot Rewrite

“We are Americans, not only by birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals, our language, our religion.” — Frederick Douglass

Memorial Day, the Constitution, and the American Black Inheritance

May is quickly being washed away, and June is coming in with the heat of summer. Monday is Memorial Day. It is a day Americans set aside to honor those who gave their lives, not only for the United States, but for the Constitution upon which this republic stands. The flag they died under was not merely cloth. It was a document. It was a framework. It was the deliberate handiwork of men who feared concentrated power and built a system designed to outlast them.

It is not lost on me that one of the earliest such observances on American record was organized by American Blacks who had been slaves only weeks before. They did not call it Memorial Day. That name came later. They called it Decoration Day, because the act itself was the decoration of the graves of the Union dead with flowers. On May 1, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina, freed men and women exhumed the bodies of 257 Union soldiers who had died in a Confederate prison camp at the Washington Race Course. They reburied those men with dignity. They built a fence around the graves and inscribed it with the words, Martyrs of the Race Course. Then ten thousand people, most of them American Blacks newly released from bondage, walked in procession with flowers and song to honor the dead who had fought for their freedom.

You probably did not learn this in school. There is a reason for that. The Decoration Day at Charleston was buried in the American memory for more than 130 years. It was Yale historian David Blight who recovered it in the late 1990s, finding a file labeled First Decoration Day in a Harvard archive. Blight has said openly that white Charlestonians suppressed this founding from memory. When the United Daughters of the Confederacy later asked the Ladies Memorial Association of Charleston whether the May 1865 commemoration had actually happened, the response was that no official information could be gathered. The event of ten thousand people, the parade of three thousand schoolchildren, the reburial of 257 Union soldiers, the inscription Martyrs of the Race Course, all of it had been quietly washed out of the record.

Sit with that for a moment. The first hands to consecrate what would become Memorial Day in this country were the hands of former slaves, and the act was suppressed because the witnesses were Black. They understood something many of their descendants and many of their critics still do not understand. The Constitution of the United States, even imperfect, even bloodied, was the document that contained the seeds of their freedom. They honored the men who died defending it. They aligned themselves with the Union, with the framework, with the republic. And the record of that alignment was hidden because it told the wrong story about who built this country and who has bled to keep it standing.

That alignment is not accidental. It is prophetic. And the suppression of it is part of the same pattern we will trace through the rest of this piece. American Black loyalty to the Constitution gets minimized so the framework itself can be reinterpreted by people who arrived later with different commitments. Decoration Day got buried for 130 years. The Electoral College is the next thing on the chopping block. The instinct is the same. Only the century has changed.

The Federalist Papers and the Fear of Faction

I have been spending time in the Federalist Papers, and the more I read, the more I see that the framers were not naive men. They were students of history. They had watched republics rise and fall. They knew that pure democracy, unrestrained majority rule, tends to devour itself. James Madison, in Federalist 10, warned plainly about the danger of faction, by which he meant any group, majority or minority, animated by passion or interest hostile to the rights of others or the permanent interests of the community.

Madison's solution was not to abolish faction. He understood you cannot abolish human nature. His solution was structure. A republic, not a pure democracy. A union of states, not a single undifferentiated mass. Representation rather than direct mob rule. Multiple chambers, separated powers, layered checks. The Electoral College sits inside that architecture. It was placed there deliberately so that presidential selection would not be a simple headcount dominated by the largest population centers, but a federal process in which states themselves carry weight.

That design is the brake. Without it, the most densely populated and ideologically uniform regions of the country would forever decide the fate of every other region. Wyoming would never have a voice against California. Rural Pennsylvania would be erased by New York City. The framers knew this. They built a system in which competing interests must form coalitions to win, in which no single faction can run the table by sheer numerical weight.

The Seeds the Framers Refused to Plant

Now here is something worth saying plainly. The Constitution as ratified in 1787 did not free anyone. The framers wrote slavery into the document in three explicit places. The Three-Fifths Clause, which counted three out of every five slaves toward congressional apportionment, inflating the political power of the slave states in the House of Representatives without granting any voice, vote, or right to the slaves themselves. The Fugitive Slave Clause, which required free states to return escaped slaves to bondage. And the twenty-year protection of the international slave trade, which guaranteed that the trafficking of human beings would continue uninterrupted until at least 1808. So at the moment of framing, slaves did not gain. They were written into the document as property and as a bookkeeping entry that rewarded the men who owned them.

Yet the principles inside the framing contained the seeds of abolition, even when the framers themselves refused to plant them. The Declaration of Independence, which the framers treated as the philosophical ground of the constitutional project, asserted that all men are created equal. The Preamble of the Constitution itself named the blessings of liberty as a constitutive purpose. The Bill of Rights named due process and equal protection under law as foundational. None of this applied to slaves in 1787. The framework was built such that, once the moral and political will arrived, the document could be extended to honor what its own principles already declared. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments did exactly that. The framework absorbed the correction without breaking.

Frederick Douglass made this exact argument in 1860. On March 26 of that year, speaking before the Scottish Anti-Slavery Society in Glasgow, Scotland, in an address titled The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery, Douglass broke with the Garrisonian abolitionists, the followers of William Lloyd Garrison, the prominent white publisher of The Liberator, who held that the Constitution was a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. Douglass had once agreed with that view. He changed his mind. He came to argue that read on its plain text, the Constitution contained no explicit endorsement of slavery as a permanent institution, that the document had to be accepted at face value rather than read through the secret intentions or political compromises of its writers, and that its principles were ultimately incompatible with chattel bondage. He argued that the Constitution, properly read, was an anti-slavery document whose own logic would eventually break the institution that the framers had compromised with.

Douglass was right. The compromise did break. The principles held. And the people who held the principles to their own text, against the compromise written around them, were overwhelmingly American Blacks and the abolitionists who stood with us. We were not strangers to this document. We were its most insistent readers. We took the framers' words at face value and forced the country to honor them. We held the Constitution to its own oath.

So when I say American Blacks have a peculiar and prophetic relationship to the Constitution, I am not being sentimental. I am being accurate. The document was not written to free us. It was written with us already inside it as property. But the principles it contained were larger than the compromise its writers made with our owners, and we have spent the entire history of this republic insisting on those principles against that compromise. Every gain we have ever made in this country has come from holding the Constitution to its own stated commitments. That is the inheritance. That is the witness. And it is exactly the witness now being shrugged off by scholars who would rewrite the document and officials who treat their oath as one consideration among many.

Melissa Murray and the Interpretive Bias

A few weeks ago, on May 5, Melissa Murray appeared at NYU's Kimmel Center for a live recording of The Briefing with Michael Waldman, promoting her new book, The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader. Murray is a professor of constitutional law at NYU and a co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast. At the end of the conversation, she was asked what single thing she would change about the Constitution. Her answer was the Electoral College.

Let me say first that Murray's book is not, in my judgment, a book worth your serious time if you are looking for a faithful guide to the document itself. It is an annotated guide filtered through a particular ideological lens. It is the Constitution as Murray wishes to interpret it, not the Constitution as the framers wrote it. That distinction matters.

This is the problem of interpretation. Interpretation is the move people make when a document does not say what they wish it said. You see it constantly with the Bible. When a passage cuts against a person's preferred belief, they reach for interpretation rather than submission to the text. The text does not change. The reader changes the text in their own mind to fit their own life. The Constitution suffers the same fate at the hands of modern legal scholars who treat it less as a binding framework and more as a living suggestion to be rewritten by each generation's sensibilities.

Murray is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants. She was born in Brooklyn and raised in Florida. I do not raise her background to dismiss her. I raise it because it is honest to name where a person's instincts come from. Her family arrived in America by choice, into a system built by others, and her scholarly career has been spent reinterpreting the foundations of that system through frameworks she finds more congenial. When she says she would change the Electoral College, she is saying the quiet part out loud. She would remove the very constitutional safeguard that prevents her preferred ideological coalition from running the country uncontested.

She is a scholar, yes. She is also a partisan. Both can be true at once.

Invasion By Other Means

The framers feared foreign invasion. They wrote about it. They built provisions into the Constitution against it. When most people hear the phrase foreign invasion, they picture armies and warships. The framers understood the threat was broader than that. A republic can be invaded by ideas as well as by armies. A republic can be reshaped from within by populations who do not share its founding commitments. A republic can be hollowed out by representatives who serve the interests of other nations or other ideologies more loyally than they serve the Constitution they swore to uphold.

We are watching that happen now. Sanctuary policies in states like New Jersey, where I live, divert the resources of citizens to support populations who entered the country in violation of its laws. Foreign born officials are seated in legislatures and city halls while still holding the passports of the countries they came from. The constitutional framework is being tested not by armies at the border, but by the slow ideological reshaping of the country from within its own institutions.

Dual Loyalty in the People's House

Let me be precise here, because precision matters. American law currently permits dual citizenship. A naturalized citizen may legally retain the passport of the country they left. A sitting member of Congress may legally maintain ethnic, cultural, or international attachments. None of what I am about to describe is, strictly speaking, illegal under current law. That is not the argument I am making.

The argument I am making is constitutional and cultural, not criminal. The oath taken at naturalization and the oath taken upon entering Congress both demand the same thing. To support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. To bear true faith and allegiance to the same. Without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion. Those words are not procedural. They name a hierarchy of loyalty. They say that whatever else a person may also be, attached to, descended from, or culturally aligned with, the Constitution sits first. Everything else sits below.

What has changed in this country is not the oath. What has changed is the cultural assumption that constitutional allegiance is the primary frame at all. We now live in a political culture that increasingly treats constitutional loyalty as one option among many, sitting alongside ideological loyalty, ethnic loyalty, transnational loyalty, religious loyalty, and a vague global cosmopolitanism. These competing frames are no longer subordinate. They are openly named and openly preferred, and the Constitution is treated as a procedural backdrop rather than the binding hierarchy it was written to be.

Consider Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. She was born in Somalia, fled with her family during the civil war, spent four years in a Kenyan refugee camp, and immigrated to the United States in 1995. She became a naturalized citizen. She swore the oath. In January of 2024, she stood in a hotel in Minneapolis and addressed a Somali audience in the Somali language. The translation she herself reshared has her telling that audience that for as long as she is in the United States Congress, Somalia's waters will not be taken, that she sits in Congress to represent their interests, and that they should sleep in comfort knowing she is there to protect the interests of Somalia from inside the United States system.

Her defenders point to context and to translation disputes, and that is fair. The argument is not that she has committed a crime. She has not. The argument is that a sitting member of the United States House of Representatives stood before a foreign-language audience and described her congressional seat as a platform for advancing another nation's interests, and the framing did not strike her, her audience, or much of her party as a contradiction. That is the cultural shift. A generation ago, that framing would have ended a career. Today it barely registers.

Consider Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor of New York City. He was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991. He came to the United States at age seven. He was naturalized in 2018. He swore the oath. He was elected mayor of the largest city in the United States and took office on January 1, 2026. He still holds Ugandan citizenship. He chose to retain it. That choice is legal. It is also revealing. A Ugandan journalist who mentored him as a teenager told the Associated Press that Mamdani is basically global, not so much Ugandan and not so much American.

Global. Not so much American. Again, that framing came from a friend, not a critic. And again, it is not illegal. What it is, is symptomatic. The mayor of New York City describes himself, and is described by those closest to him, in transnational rather than constitutional terms. He campaigned on freezing rents, fare free buses, city run grocery stores, and aggressive taxation of wealth, a platform openly drawn from democratic socialist tradition rather than from the American constitutional order. He has refused to clearly condemn slogans calling to globalize the intifada. He has positioned himself rhetorically against the closest American allies in the Middle East. All of this is legal. All of this is also a portrait of a political culture in which constitutional allegiance is no longer the primary frame.

The framers anticipated this risk. They did not anticipate it in the form of dual passports or hyphenated identities, because those categories did not exist in their world. They anticipated it in the form of faction. They knew that men would form attachments to particular interests, particular regions, particular causes, and that those attachments would compete with loyalty to the constitutional whole. Their answer was structure. The oath. The federal design. The separation of powers. The Electoral College. The deliberate friction that prevents any single faction from running the table.

What we are watching now is not the violation of those structures. It is the quiet abandonment of the assumption that those structures matter most. When a Representative names a foreign nation as the interest she serves from inside Congress, when a mayor of New York keeps the passport of the country he left, when a constitutional law professor announces she would erase the Electoral College, the issue is not that they have broken the law. The issue is that they no longer treat the Constitution as the document that ranks above their other loyalties. They treat it as one consideration among several, and often not the highest.

That is the invasion the framers feared. Not armies. Not ballots alone. The slow cultural displacement of constitutional allegiance by every other available identity. And when that displacement is complete, the document does not need to be repealed. It simply stops being the frame anyone is arguing from.

Who Is An American

The deeper question underneath all of this is the question of identity. Who is an American. The answer cannot only be legal status, because legal status can be granted to anyone who clears a procedural bar. The answer must include something about allegiance. Allegiance to the Constitution. Allegiance to the framework. Allegiance to the principle that no faction, no ideology, no foreign attachment, takes precedence over the document that holds this country together.

American Blacks, the descendants of those who were brought here in chains, have a peculiar and prophetic relationship to that question. We did not arrive by choice. We did not arrive with another country in our pocket as a backup loyalty. We were built into the soil of this nation by force, and we fought for the Constitution to be honored on our behalf. We bled for the Union. We organized the first Memorial Day. We marched, sat in, sued, voted, served, and died to make the Constitution mean what it said. We are not strangers to this document. We are its most insistent witnesses.

That is why it should disturb every American Black who reads carefully when a constitutional law professor announces she would erase the Electoral College, or when a sitting member of Congress describes her seat as a platform for protecting another nation's interests, or when the mayor of New York City keeps the passport of the country he left. The issue is not whether any of these acts crosses a legal line. The issue is that they reflect a political culture that has stopped treating the Constitution as the binding hierarchy of loyalty. They are not breaking the framework. They are quietly walking out of it, and inviting the rest of the country to walk out with them. The federal structure is what gave smaller and dissenting communities room to fight back through the long civil rights struggle. Hollow out the cultural commitment to that structure, and you hollow out the protections that came with it.

Memorial Day and the Watch Ahead

On Monday I will think about the soldiers buried at Hampton Park in Charleston. I will think about the freed slaves who washed their graves and laid flowers on the soil. I will think about the men and women in uniform who have died since, defending not a piece of cloth but a written document. I will think about the framers who feared faction and built a republic instead of a democracy, knowing that pure democracy is one of the surest paths to tyranny.

The Constitution is not yours to rewrite because you do not like the outcome. It is not Murray's to rewrite. It is not Omar's to rewrite. It is not Mamdani's to rewrite. It is not the sanctuary movement's to rewrite. It is the inheritance of every American who has paid in blood, in labor, in struggle, in faith, for the promise contained in those pages.

American Blacks have stood with this document longer and harder than its current critics. We will not be the ones to hand it over.

Memorial Day exists because somebody died for it. Honor that. Read it. Defend it.

They Pack Us, They Crack Us, Then They Send Us AOC

“The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society.” — James Madison, Federalist No. 57

On gerrymandering, Ebenezer, and the Memphis seat the Democrats never wanted us to have

There is a story unfolding right now that the Democrat Party does not want American Blacks to look at too closely. It is the story of a single congressional district in Memphis, Tennessee, and what it reveals about who actually controls Black representation in this country.

For nearly twenty years, Tennessee’s Ninth Congressional District, the only majority-Black district in the state, has been represented by Steve Cohen. Cohen is a seventy-six-year-old white Democrat. The district was drawn in the early 1980s specifically as a majority-minority district, designed, we were told, to guarantee Black political voice in Memphis. For two decades, that “Black voice” has worn the face of a white man from a party that has run Memphis into the ground.

And challenging him, election after election, has been an American Black woman from Memphis named Charlotte Bergmann. She has run against Cohen since 2010. She is a native Memphian, raised in a Christian home of ten children by a Baptist minister father, the first in her family to earn a college degree. She worked her way through State Technical Institute of Memphis and Christian Brothers University, built a career as an IT project manager at FedEx, and survived a season of her life as a single mother who lost her job and became homeless. She credits her faith with carrying her out of that valley. Her grandson was shot in the back and killed in the streets of Memphis, and crime in her community is the reason she runs. She has served on the Tennessee Republican State Executive Committee since 2018 and was named Statesman of the Year by the state party that same year.

She is, by every measure, exactly the kind of woman the Democrat Party claims it wants representing Black America. An American Black woman. Faith-driven. Memphis-born. A story of overcoming. A grandmother who buried a grandchild murdered in the very streets she now wants to fix.

There is only one problem. She is a Republican.

So the Democrat Party has spent more than a decade making sure that the American Black woman from Memphis does not win, while sending the old white man back to Washington every two years. They drew the district to guarantee Black representation, then made sure Black representation never actually arrived.

What did Memphis receive in exchange for that loyalty?

Gangs. Crime. Poverty. Violence. Failing schools. Drug epidemics. A grandmother burying a grandson shot in the back on a Memphis street. Twenty years of straight-ticket Democrat voting in one of the poorest, most violent congressional districts in America, and what did our people get for that loyalty? A representative who, when asked about crime in Memphis, told Charlotte Bergmann to her face that he “deals with Federal issues.”

He did not represent that seat. He occupied it. There is a difference between a man who holds your district and a man who carries your district. Cohen held it. He did not carry it.

Meanwhile a grandmother in his own district was burying a child in the streets he was paid to fight for, and she had to run for his seat six times just to be heard. Six times. The party that calls itself the protector of Black America watched an American Black grandmother grieve a murdered grandchild and then spent millions of dollars to make sure she never reached Washington to do something about it.

Call it what it is. Abandonment dressed in party colors.

The Bucket on the Witness Chair

If you want to know what Steve Cohen actually thought of the district he represented, you do not have to read his voting record. You only have to look at what he chose to do on May 2, 2019.

The House Judiciary Committee had scheduled an oversight hearing with the Attorney General of the United States. The subject was serious. The hearing concerned whether the nation’s top law enforcement officer had mishandled the Mueller report and whether the executive branch was obstructing the constitutional authority of Congress to oversee it. Cohen sat on that committee. He represented a Memphis district where American Black grandmothers were burying grandchildren shot in the streets. He represented a district where the federal response to crime, drug trafficking, and gang violence mattered more than almost any policy issue in Washington.

And what did Steve Cohen bring to that hearing?

A bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. A ceramic chicken statue. He set the bucket on the witness chair where the Attorney General should have been sitting. He ate the fried chicken on camera at nine in the morning. He held the chicken statue up for the press cameras. He called the Attorney General “Chicken Barr.” He turned a constitutional oversight hearing into a comedy bit.

Sit with the picture. A white Democrat representing the only majority-Black congressional district in Tennessee, on national television, performing with a bucket of fried chicken for laughs. The hashtag trended. The cable shows played it on loop. He later said the chicken “wasn’t wonderful” and admitted comedian Sarah Silverman had become his advisor “on the Twitter.”

American Blacks have spent over a hundred years fighting the fried chicken caricature. It appeared on Jim Crow postcards. It appeared in minstrel shows. It appeared in racist cartoons used to dehumanize our grandparents and great-grandparents. It is one of the oldest visual slurs in the American iconography of Black degradation. Any white politician with even basic cultural awareness understands what that image carries when a white man performs with it on a national stage.

Steve Cohen represented Memphis. He represented us. And he chose, on his own, with no one forcing him, to step into one of the most degrading racial tropes ever used against American Blacks. For a joke. For a hashtag. For attention.

Disrespect would have been the kinder reading. What he actually performed was contempt dressed in levity. That is a man who looked at the seat he held, looked at the people who kept sending him back to Washington, and decided that the picture of him eating fried chicken from a bucket on national television was an acceptable way to represent us.

He is Mr. Chicken Man. He earned that name. The Democrat Party, the Congressional Black Caucus, AOC, Raphael Warnock, every one of them who is now mourning the loss of his seat, watched him do it and said nothing. They watched him perform that stunt and kept calling him our representative. They watched him become a meme on the back of one of the cruelest racial caricatures in our history, and they sent him back to Congress three more times anyway.

Charlotte Bergmann would never have done that. Because Charlotte Bergmann actually comes from us.

The Map Finally Changes

This week, the Tennessee legislature redrew the Ninth District. The Supreme Court’s recent Callais decision held that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act does not require or authorize states to draw congressional maps based on racial outcomes. Tennessee acted on that ruling. Steve Cohen announced yesterday that he is ending his re-election bid. Charlotte Bergmann, the American Black woman who has been ignored, dismissed, and shut out of that seat for fifteen years, is now favored to win it.

Memphis may finally elect a Black representative to Congress for the first time since Harold Ford Jr. left the seat in 2006.

The Democrat Party is calling this a tragedy.

The Ebenezer Performance

On Mother’s Day, while this story was unfolding in Tennessee, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez walked into Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the historic church where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, the church now pastored by Senator Raphael Warnock. Warnock invited her to the pulpit. She stood before a predominantly American Black congregation, on Mother’s Day, in one of the most sacred political pulpits in our history, and delivered a speech about redistricting.

She said, and I want you to read this carefully, that legislatures in the South are seeking to “draw Black Americans out of power.” She named Tennessee specifically.

Tennessee. The state where an American Black woman is about to replace a white man in the only majority-Black district. The state where Black representation is finally arriving after twenty years of being promised and never delivered. The state where the white Democrat she was defending sat on national television eating fried chicken out of a bucket. That is the state AOC stood in a Black church and accused of erasing Black voices.

Make no mistake. This is the game. Charlotte Bergmann does not count as a Black representative to AOC and to the Democrat machine because she is the wrong kind of Black. She thinks independently. She is a faith-driven conservative. She does not belong to them.

Notice what the Ebenezer appearance actually was. AOC is not a pastor. She is not a theologian. She is a representative from the Bronx with no historical, cultural, or lived connection to the specific American Black experience descended from slavery. Yet she was elevated above the pulpit on Mother’s Day, given the stage, given the microphone, and treated as a voice of moral authority over a Black congregation.

Raphael Warnock is an American Black man. He is a senator. He is the senior pastor of that very church. The Black community needed no AOC at that pulpit. The pastor was already there. The Black senator was already there. The Black congregation was already there. So why was she elevated? Because the Democrat Party is desperate to manufacture a national figure, and they have decided that the path runs through Black churches, Black audiences, and Black trust.

Coalition does not look like this. What happened at Ebenezer was colonization of our pulpit for the political ambitions of someone the party is grooming for a 2028 run.

Her Own District Is the Indictment

Before American Blacks accept Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a national leader, we should look at what she has actually done for the district she already represents.

New York’s Fourteenth Congressional District covers parts of the Bronx and Queens. AOC has held that seat since January of 2019. That is over seven years. Seven years of social media stardom, seven years of magazine covers, seven years of cable news appearances, seven years of speeches at rallies and conventions and now Black church pulpits on Mother’s Day.

And what does her district look like today?

Roughly twenty-eight percent of the residents of her district live in poverty. That is more than double the national average. Her constituents include some of the poorest census tracts in New York City. The South Bronx, which sits inside her district, has been one of the most economically depressed urban zones in America for decades. AOC inherited that crisis. The question is what she has done with seven years of power to change it.

The answer is almost nothing.

Her legislative record consists primarily of appropriations requests for public housing. She has secured federal funding for NYCHA, the New York City Housing Authority, which runs the projects in her district. She has not authored a single major bill that passed both chambers and became law. She has not led any landmark legislation on jobs, on wealth creation, on small business growth, on educational reform, or on community ownership. Her policy footprint is project housing. That is her record. Project housing. Rentals. Dependency. Government as landlord.

That is what she has built for the poor people in her own district while she travels the country building her own brand.

And now she wants to bring that record to American Blacks in Atlanta, in Memphis, in Detroit, in Philadelphia, and ask us to make her the next President of the United States.

I want every American Black voter to read that sentence twice. The woman whose own district is twenty-eight percent poverty, whose only legislative achievement is funneling federal money into more project housing, whose constituents in the South Bronx live in some of the worst poverty in the country after seven years of her representation, is the woman the Democrat Party has chosen to walk into our churches and tell us how to vote.

If she cannot fix the Bronx, why are we letting her stand in Ebenezer?

Why She, of All People

The Democrat Party is in crisis. It has no national leader. The bench is empty. So they have settled on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the next face to push forward, not because of her record, not because of her wisdom, not because of her depth, but because she has social media reach and ideological branding. She was elevated by Bernie Sanders and the democratic socialist wing of the party. Her legislative accomplishments are thin. Her policy expertise is shallow. Her appeal is performance.

That is the figure they have decided to walk into a Black church on Mother’s Day. That is the figure they want American Blacks to accept as a leader. Not because she leads, but because she is malleable, telegenic, and ideologically obedient.

Meanwhile, the American Black senator who pastors that church, Raphael Warnock, was reduced to the role of host. The American Black male leader was the warm-up act for the Hispanic congresswoman from the Bronx who came to tell us how to feel about gerrymandering. She had more authority in that pulpit than the man who actually pastors it. Sit with that for a moment.

What Gerrymandering Actually Did to Us

Here is the truth the Democrat Party has spent decades hiding. Majority-Black districts have been used to concentrate American Black voters into politically predictable, politically controlled, politically captured boxes. The strategy has a name. They pack us into a few districts so our vote is wasted on guaranteed Democrat wins, and they crack us across other districts so we have no real influence anywhere else. They call it Black representation. It is actually Black containment.

The Memphis Ninth District is the perfect example. American Blacks were told the district was drawn for our voice. The district then elected a white Democrat for twenty years while an American Black woman who actually lived in Memphis was shut out repeatedly. The district was never about Black representation. It was about Democrat representation wearing Black numbers.

When the maps were finally redrawn this week, and when an American Black Republican woman finally has a real chance at the seat, the Democrat Party went into mourning. The Congressional Black Caucus called it “the theft of fair representation.” AOC called it Black erasure. Cohen called it a racial gerrymander.

A racial gerrymander that may seat the first Black representative from Memphis in twenty years.

The mask is off. They were never fighting for Black representation. They were fighting for Democrat representation in Black-numbered districts. And the moment Black representation showed up wearing the wrong party label, they declared it a tragedy.

The Pattern Has a Purpose

Look at the pattern the Democrat Party has built and ask yourself what it is actually for.

They cry gerrymandering. They say Tennessee is erasing Black voices. They march into Ebenezer Baptist Church on Mother’s Day and preach a fake sermon to a Black congregation about how the South is stealing Black power. And the messenger they choose to deliver that sermon is not an American Black senator, not an American Black congresswoman, not an American Black pastor. It is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A Hispanic congresswoman from the Bronx. The same woman they are now putting on every podcast, every magazine cover, every global stage, every late night show, building her brand week after week, positioning her as the next face of the Democrat Party for the 2028 presidential nomination.

Sit with that.

The Democrat Party has harvested the American Black vote for over sixty years. We have given them every major city. We have given them the Congressional Black Caucus. We have given them their margins in every presidential election since Lyndon Johnson. We have given them Atlanta. We have given them Detroit. We have given them Philadelphia. We have given them Memphis. We have given them our pulpits. We have given them our grief. We have given them our grandmothers, our grandfathers, our churches, and our turnout.

And when the moment comes for them to put forward the next face of their party, the next candidate for President of the United States, who do they choose?

Not Raphael Warnock, the American Black senator from Georgia who actually pastors Ebenezer Baptist Church. Not Hakeem Jeffries, the American Black House Minority Leader. Not Wes Moore, the American Black governor of Maryland. Not Cory Booker. Not anyone from the deep bench of American Black politicians the party constantly parades in front of us at election time and then files away for the next cycle.

They choose Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

A Hispanic congresswoman with a thin legislative record, a heavy social media following, and an ideological loyalty to democratic socialism that the Black community has never voted for in any meaningful numbers. They are building her into the next nominee in real time, and they are using our churches, our audiences, and our trust to do it. They are running her through Ebenezer the way a coach runs a prospect through scrimmage. They are testing whether American Blacks will accept her as our voice. They are seeing how much performance we will tolerate before we walk away.

They Came for the Black Justice Too

If you still doubt the pattern, look at what AOC herself has done with her career so far.

In July of 2024, the same Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who walked into Ebenezer Baptist Church on Mother’s Day to preach about protecting Black voices personally drafted and filed articles of impeachment against Justice Clarence Thomas. She introduced them on the floor of the House of Representatives. She called for his removal from the Supreme Court of the United States. She named him a threat to the rule of law and said his impeachment was a constitutional imperative.

Clarence Thomas is one of two American Black justices on the Supreme Court, and the only one the Democrat Party wants removed. Ketanji Brown Jackson, the American Black justice appointed by President Biden, has never faced impeachment papers from AOC or any other Democrat. She rules in alignment with Democrat policy preferences, and so her seat is safe. Thomas does not. He is the longest-serving justice currently on the bench. He grew up in Pin Point, Georgia, in a house with no plumbing, raised by his grandfather after his father abandoned the family. He fought his way from the segregated South to Yale Law School to the highest court in the land. He is also the most conservative member of the Court, and that is the real reason AOC filed papers to remove him. Not because he is unqualified. Because he is independent.

And AOC filed papers to remove him.

This is the woman now being walked into Black churches as our supposed advocate. This is the woman the Democrat Party is grooming for the presidency on the backs of Black audiences. The same woman who tried to strip an American Black justice from the Supreme Court is now standing in Raphael Warnock’s pulpit lecturing American Blacks about how the South is erasing our power. The hypocrisy is not subtle. It is on the record. It is in the Congressional Record. It has a date and a bill number.

Here is what the Democrat Party means when it says Black representation. They mean Black bodies in seats they control. They do not mean American Black voices speaking for themselves. The moment an American Black voice speaks against Democrat orthodoxy, that voice must be silenced. Clarence Thomas spoke against them. They moved to impeach him. Charlotte Bergmann ran against them. They spent millions to bury her. Winsome Earle-Sears stood up against them in Virginia. They organized the entire state apparatus of the Democrat Party to defeat her.

Virginia, 2025

Six months ago, on November 4, 2025, the state of Virginia held a gubernatorial election. The Republican candidate was Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears. She is a Jamaican American woman, a former United States Marine, a small business owner, and although she is not ADOS, she is the first Black woman ever elected to statewide office in the Commonwealth of Virginia. She was running to become the first Jamaican American governor in Virginia’s four-hundred-year history.

The Democrat Party ran a white former CIA officer named Abigail Spanberger against her.

Spanberger won fifty-seven to forty-two. She is now the governor-elect of Virginia.

The Democrat Party celebrated her victory as the election of Virginia’s “first female governor.” The Congressional Black Caucus said nothing about the Jamaican “black” woman who lost. AOC said nothing. Raphael Warnock said nothing. The same machinery that mourns Steve Cohen’s seat in Memphis as the loss of “Black representation” had nothing to say when a real American Black woman, with a story straight out of the descendant tradition, was defeated by a white candidate they handpicked and bankrolled.

Earle-Sears was a Republican. She thought independently. She did not belong to them. So they ran a white woman against her and called the result progress.

That is the rule. The Democrat Party will support an Black candidate only when that candidate is fully owned. The moment we think for ourselves, the moment we cross the line, the party that calls itself our protector becomes the party that funds our defeat. They will run a white former CIA officer against a Marine veteran from Jamaica. They will run a white Democrat in a majority-Black district for twenty years. They will run a Hispanic congresswoman from the Bronx for President of the United States before they run any of the American Black politicians sitting on their own bench.

This is the pattern. This is what it is for. They harvest our votes. They harbor our trust. They send us their chosen messengers. And when one of us steps out of line, they erase us.

They Packed Me Too

I want to speak now in the first person, because the Democrat Party assumes the American Black voter I am about to describe does not exist.

I am a middle-class Christian American Black woman in New Jersey. I work for a living. I pay my taxes. I read my Bible. I raise my standards. I built what I have through faith, work, and ownership. I am the demographic the Democrat Party counts on at the polls and ignores in the policy room. I am the voter they assume will turn out for them every November without ever asking what I actually believe.

So let me say what I actually believe.

I believe my tax dollars should go to United States citizens, not illegal immigrants. The schools, the hospitals, the housing, the social services, the food assistance, the medical care that American Blacks fought generations to access were paid for by American workers and were promised to American citizens. I do not believe the answer to my community’s crisis is to flood that community with people who entered the country illegally and who now compete for the same scarce resources my neighbors are already fighting to access.

I do not agree with teaching transgenderism to children. I do not believe in confusing little boys and little girls about their bodies. I do not believe in surgically altering minors. I do not believe schools should hide gender transitions from parents. That is not progress. That is harm. And I will say so even when the Democrat Party calls me a bigot for saying it.

I believe abortion is a sickness in our community. I have watched my people convinced that ending Black life is freedom. I have watched the Democrat Party position abortion clinics on every corner of every American Black neighborhood in this country and call it healthcare. It is not healthcare. It is the most efficient depopulation tool ever deployed against American Blacks, and the party that calls itself our friend has been its loudest sponsor.

I believe wealth is not built in project housing. Wealth is not built in low-income rentals where my people pay landlords for the privilege of remaining poor. Wealth is built through ownership. Through deeds. Through equity. Through generational property that gets passed from one American Black hand to the next. The Democrat Party has spent sixty years offering my community rent assistance and food stamps when what we needed was mortgages, business loans, and trade skills. They built a dependency model and called it compassion.

I believe American Black children deserve the same education suburban children receive. The same books. The same teachers. The same standards. The same expectations. The same college pipelines. I have watched the Democrat Party run our urban school districts into the ground for decades while telling us this is the best we can hope for. It is not. The schools in the suburbs prove it every single day.

That is who I am. That is what I believe. And I am not represented in my community.

I live in New Jersey. American Blacks in this state have elected the same Democrats for more than twenty years. We have given them every urban district, every mayor’s office, every state house seat that touches Black neighborhoods. And what has changed in those neighborhoods in twenty years? The crime is still there. The failing schools are still there. The housing crisis is still there. The drug trafficking is still there. The same politicians keep getting elected, keep collecting their salaries, keep showing up at Black churches in October, and keep doing nothing the rest of the year.

Voters like me have to relocate to find representation. We have to leave our own communities, move into suburban districts, and accept that political alignment with our values requires geographic distance from our own people. That is the cost of independent thought in the Democrat Party’s America. You either accept what they assign to your zip code, or you move.

That is packing. That is cracking. That is what the gerrymandering this blog opened with actually does to the woman who lives inside it.

I am not the only one. There are thousands like me in New Jersey alone. American Black women who own homes, run businesses, raise children, sit in pews, and vote our values. We are not loud. We are not televised. We are not invited to Ebenezer Baptist Church on Mother’s Day to address Black congregations. We are the voters the Democrat Party packed into districts where our votes would be absorbed and our voices would be ignored.

But we are here. And we are counting.

The Question for American Blacks

This is the question every American Black voter needs to sit with this week. If the Democrat Party fought for fifteen years to keep Charlotte Bergmann out of the only majority-Black district in Tennessee, while sending a white Democrat back to Washington over and over, then what exactly are they fighting for? It is not us. It is not our voice. It is not our representation. It is their power, painted in our color, sold to us with our pulpits.

We have been packed. We have been cracked. We have been moved across the board like pawns, and the party that moved us has the audacity to send us Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Mother’s Day to tell us how oppressed we are.

I will say what needs to be said. No party owns American Blacks. No politician inherits our vote. No representative speaks for us simply because she was sent into a Black church with a microphone. Charlotte Bergmann is an American Black woman from Memphis. She has fought for that seat for fifteen years. She is not a traitor for being a Republican. She is not less Black for thinking independently. She is exactly the kind of leader the Democrat Party claimed it wanted, until she actually showed up. Clarence Thomas is an American Black man on the highest court in the land. Winsome Earle-Sears is an American Black woman who almost made history in Virginia. Each one of them was attacked, defeated, or marked for removal by the same party that claims to fight for us.

American Blacks are waking up. We see the game. We see the packing. We see the cracking. We see the pulpit performance. We see the bucket on the witness chair. We see the impeachment papers filed against the American Black justice who refused to vote the way they wanted. We see the white CIA officer chosen over the Black Marine veteran in Virginia. We see the twenty-eight percent poverty in AOC’s own district. We see who we are. And we are no longer afraid to ask the question that terrifies the Democrat Party more than any Republican ever could.

What if we all leave?

The Pill, the Panel, and the Lottery

“Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.” - The Lottery, Shirley Jackson

This Mother’s Day finds the country in an uncomfortable position. On the same Sunday that we set aside to honor the women who carried us, fed us, walked the floor with us through fevers and disappointments, and offered up parts of themselves they will never get back, the Supreme Court is preparing to decide by tomorrow afternoon whether the chemical ending of pregnancy may continue to be ordered through the mail. The two events sit beside each other on the calendar without apology. We light candles for our mothers in the morning and read the legal briefs in the evening. We post tributes online to the women who chose us and scroll past headlines about the drug that ends the choosing. The strangeness of it ought to stop us in the doorway, and yet for most of the country it will not.

I am writing this on Mother’s Day for that reason. The juxtaposition is not an accident of the news cycle. It is a window into what we have become, and what we are still becoming, as a people who once knew how to call motherhood sacred without irony.

On May 1, 2026, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling in Louisiana v. FDA that required mifepristone, the drug used in roughly six out of every ten abortions in this country, to be dispensed only in person at a clinic or pharmacy. Two days later the manufacturers, Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, raced to the Supreme Court asking for emergency relief, and on Monday, May 4, Justice Samuel Alito issued an administrative stay that paused the Fifth Circuit’s ruling until tomorrow, May 11, at five o’clock in the afternoon. By the time most readers see this piece, the country will already know whether the high court intends to keep the pill flowing through the mail or whether it will allow the appellate ruling to stand. Either way, the argument I want to make today does not depend on which way the justices rule. It depends on what we have already become as a society long before the ruling arrived, and on what we will choose to remember about motherhood once the news has moved on.

“Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children...— ”

— Genesis 3:16 (KJV)

Reading the briefs filed by the drug companies, you would think the matter at hand is purely technical. Telehealth, dispensing protocols, regulatory chaos, the orderly function of the Food and Drug Administration. I do not dismiss the procedural questions as merely cosmetic. There are real arguments to be made about how a federal agency should regulate a drug, about the limits of agency discretion, and about the chaos that follows when courts and regulators contradict one another. Reasonable people, including some who share my convictions about the unborn, will disagree about whether the Fifth Circuit panel reached the right legal conclusion. What I am after today is something the briefs themselves cannot say out loud. The language is corporate and procedural, as it always is when the subject is one we no longer wish to confront in plain terms. The state of Louisiana, for its part, says in equally measured language that the telemedicine pathway undermines its laws protecting unborn human life and forces it to spend Medicaid funds caring for women injured by the drug. Every word in the case is carefully chosen to keep the reader at a distance from what is actually happening, which is the chemical termination of a developing human being inside a woman’s body, sometimes alone in a bathroom, sometimes after a fifteen-minute video call with a clinician hundreds of miles away, sometimes ordered through the mail like a prescription for blood pressure medication.

The legal complexity is real. The federal questions in this case are real, the Trump administration’s own FDA review of the 2023 dispensing policy is real, and the conflict between Louisiana’s near-total abortion ban and the federal regulatory framework is real. None of that, however, is the question I sit with on this particular Sunday as a believer and as an American Black woman watching this country argue about the unborn the way it once argued about us. There is a deeper question underneath the legal one, and it is older than the Fifth Circuit, older than the Comstock Act, older than mifepristone itself. It is the question first whispered in Eden, and it has not changed in form even though the speakers and the institutions have multiplied beyond counting.

Hath God said. That is the original challenge. The voice in the garden did not deny that the tree existed or that the fruit was real. It only suggested that what God had clearly said about the tree could be redefined, softened, reframed into something more reasonable, more sophisticated, more compatible with what the human creature wanted to do anyway. Surely you shall not die, the voice said. Surely God did not mean what you think He meant. The pattern has not changed. When I read the legal arguments and the public commentary surrounding the abortion pill, I hear the same refrain dressed in newer clothing. Surely that is not a life. Surely this pill represents healthcare. Surely this is simply part of the reproductive process. I am aware that thoughtful people, including some who would call themselves pro-life in their own way, hold a gradualist view, arguing that early development represents a different moral category than later development and that the chemical ending of pregnancy in the first weeks should not be weighed the same as the ending of a born life. I respect the seriousness of that position more than I respect the slogans, and I still cannot accept it, because the line drawn at week six or week ten or week twelve is a line drawn by the convenience of the one drawing it, not by anything inherent in the developing life itself. The institutions change and the intellectual frameworks become more elaborate, but underneath the layered language is the same redefinition of reality so that we may live at peace with what we have decided to do.

We are told, in the most credentialed voices we possess, not to trust what is plainly unfolding inside the womb. Not to trust the moral intuition that has belonged to mothers and grandmothers across every culture and century. Not to trust the continuity of human development that any honest embryology textbook will describe in the first chapter. Instead we are encouraged to trust the language of the pharmaceutical companies that profit from the continuation of this market, the legal theorists who construct the scaffolding around it, and the commentators who appear on our screens to assure us that the ritual is humane and the women are heroic and the question of what is being ended is, somehow, beside the point. That is what troubles me most. Once a society becomes comfortable redefining life itself in order to justify what it has chosen to do with that life, truth becomes increasingly difficult to recognize anywhere else. The same culture that cannot say what is in the womb will eventually struggle to say what is in the prison cell or the nursing home. These are the places where life is most easily questioned, because the people inside them cannot stand up and answer back. We have already watched this happen in our own lifetimes, as the man in solitary confinement became a case number, as the grandmother in the nursing home became a billing code, and each redefinition was defended by people who believed themselves to be reasonable. The redefinition does not stay in one place. It never has.

I have thought often, in the years since the public conversation around abortion shifted from the language of tragedy to the language of celebration, of Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery. Most American readers encountered it in high school. A small village gathers on a clear summer morning. The children are gathering stones. The adults are chatting about the weather and the planting. Old Man Warner reminds everyone that there has always been a lottery, that to abandon the ritual would be to abandon civilization itself. The proceedings are calm, orderly, even cordial. Names are drawn. A slip of paper is unfolded. With the same neighbors who had been laughing a few minutes earlier, the stoning begins. What Jackson understood, and what made the story unbearable to the readers of The New Yorker in 1948 who cancelled their subscriptions in protest, is that violence does not require monsters. It only requires a community willing to ritualize what it cannot bear to face directly, and a vocabulary respectable enough to keep the face from showing.

When I listen to the most credentialed voices in our culture defend the abortion pill as a matter of healthcare access, when I watched, during the last presidential cycle, the public celebrations of women who had ended pregnancies and been brought forward to tell their stories as acts of empowerment, when I hear the language of liberation applied to the chemical ending of a developing human life, what I am hearing is the calm and orderly procedure of a village that has decided the ritual is necessary. The participants are not cruel. Many of them are kind, educated, and sincerely persuaded that they are on the side of progress. The vocabulary is sophisticated. The framework is humane. The procedures are regulated by federal agencies and reviewed by appellate courts and defended by manufacturers in well-written briefs. Everything is in order. At the center of the ritual, no matter how many layers of language we wrap around it, a developing human life is being ended, and we have decided collectively that we will not look at that fact directly. The selected, in this version of the lottery, are the ones who cannot speak.

I want to be careful here, because I know that women who have walked through this decision often carry it for the rest of their lives, and many of them carry it with grief that the public celebrations do not acknowledge or allow. My argument is not against those women. My argument is against the cultural machine that requires their stories to be sorted into the approved categories of empowerment and liberation, that cannot make room for the fuller and harder truth, and that recruits the language of medicine and law and progress to keep us from facing what is actually being done. I have known women who were broken by what was sold to them as freedom, and I have known women who believed it was the right decision and still wept when no one was looking. The cultural ritual cannot account for either of them honestly, because the ritual depends on the redefinition holding firm.

The Fifth Circuit’s ruling, whatever its legal fate by the end of the day tomorrow, did one useful thing. It interrupted the smoothness of the procedure. It made the country argue, briefly and uncomfortably, about how a drug that ends a pregnancy should be obtained, and in arguing about the how, the country was forced for a moment to remember the what. That is why the manufacturers’ briefs sound so urgent. Not only because of the logistical disruption, real as that is, but because the public attention itself is dangerous to the ritual. Rituals work best when no one looks too closely. The whole point of the mail order pathway, beyond convenience, is that it removes the act from the clinical setting, removes it from the in-person encounter, removes it from the place where another human being might ask a question or pause a moment, and relocates it to the privacy of a bathroom where the woman is alone with the pill and the consequence and the silence. Whatever one thinks about the legal questions, that relocation is not a neutral act. It is the further refinement of a ritual that has always preferred not to be witnessed.

I do not know how the Supreme Court will rule. I do not know whether Justice Alito’s stay will be extended, dissolved, or replaced by a more substantive order. I do know that the deeper question, the one that has hovered over this republic since long before mifepristone was approved in the year 2000, will not be resolved by any panel of judges or any FDA review or any executive order. The court will decide tomorrow what the pharmacy may do. The older question is what the people will do, and that question is not on any docket. It is whether a people who once held that all human beings are endowed by their Creator with the right to life can keep that conviction alive while simultaneously building a sophisticated infrastructure for the chemical ending of human life in its earliest and most defenseless form. I do not believe a people can hold both. I believe that one will eventually overtake the other, and that we are watching, in real time and at considerable speed, which one is winning.

The voice in the garden has never stopped speaking. It has only learned to use better lawyers, better doctors, better marketers, and better legal briefs. The question for those of us who claim to follow the One who answered that voice with the cross is whether we will keep saying what God has said about the human person made in His image, even when the saying of it costs us our place at the cultural table.

So as we celebrate the sacrifice mothers make today, the women who carried us when carrying was hard, the foremothers who labored under conditions this country has still not fully reckoned with, the women in our own families who chose us when choosing was not the easy or the celebrated path, the daughters now becoming mothers themselves and learning what their own bodies can give and forgive, let us also remember what motherhood actually is. It is the willingness to receive a life that is not yours and to spend yourself for it. It is the original sacrament of the human story, written into the body itself before any law was ever written about it. The women I am thinking of this morning, including the one who carried me, did not ask whether the life inside them was convenient. They asked what was required of them, and they paid it. That is the older lottery, the one in which the mother accepts that her own ease will be drawn against the life of another, and offers herself instead. We used to know how to honor that. We are forgetting, and the forgetting is showing in our laws, our pharmacies, our headlines, and our hearts.

The pill, the panel, and the procedure may all hold for now. The truth still stands. The mothers still stand. So do I.

By Jacqueline Session Ausby | DahTruth, LLC | @dahtruth.com

Much Ado About Nothing

Article XV.

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude—

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Louisiana v. Callais and the Manufactured Crisis

May did not arrive with the sweet scent of spring flowers but with the stench of bad ideology and heat of rhetoric.  It arrived with a chorus of outrage so loud, so coordinated, and so emotionally charged that you would think the country had been hurled back into the 1950s, complete with fire hoses, police dogs, and the open defiance of basic civil rights. The alarm has been sounded as if Jim Crow itself were making a full return, as if American Black people are on the brink of losing the fundamental voting protections secured in the 1960s. That framing demands scrutiny. We are being asked to accept, without question, that this moment represents the collapse of civil rights in America. That claim does not just raise concern. It raises the temperature of the conversation to a level that does not match the legal reality of what the Supreme Court actually decided in Louisiana v. Callais.

The Chorus of Alarm

Within hours of the decision, the rhetoric was deployed in nearly identical form across multiple platforms and from multiple voices. Derrick Johnson, President and CEO of the NAACP, called the ruling “a devastating blow to what remains of the Voting Rights Act” and accused the Supreme Court of betraying American Black voters, betraying America, and betraying democracy itself. He compared what the Court did to the dismantling of “the most significant piece of policy legislation of the civil rights movement.” The NAACP convened an emergency Zoom town hall the following day. The President of the NAACP joined that call from a booth in an airport, framing the moment as so urgent that he could not wait until he reached his destination. During that call, the decision was compared to Dred Scott v. Sandford.

Congressman Bobby Scott of Virginia, Co-Chair of the Congressional Voting Rights Caucus, declared that the decision “sets voting rights back decades” and accused the Court of creating “a nearly impossible standard to challenge racial gerrymandering.” Kristen Clarke, speaking through the NAACP, called Callais “one of the most consequential and devastating rulings issued by the Supreme Court in the 21st Century.” Ellie Mystal, appearing on the Dean Obeidallah show, went further. He argued that without the Voting Rights Act of 1965, only four American Black members would have served in Congress in the 1960s, and that the very ability of women, particularly American Black and Hispanic women, to be politically represented flowed almost entirely from that legislation. He framed the entire decision as the culmination of John Roberts’ lifelong crusade against the Voting Rights Act, traceable to his work in the Reagan administration. He declared that racism in America has now been made “unprovable” under federal law.

On the Native Land podcast, the ruling was described as a step back toward Jim Crow, framed as weakening and even dismantling Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Much of that argument leaned heavily on the dissent written by Justice Elena Kagan, with portions of her dissent presented as if they directly resolved the majority’s reasoning.  As if a dissent, is more than an opinion.  They treated her words as a one-sided understanding of what the Court actually decided and why.

What the Court Actually Decided

To understand whether this rhetoric matches reality, you have to understand what actually happened in Louisiana. After the 2020 census, Louisiana redrew its congressional districts, as every state is required to do. Plaintiffs argued that the state needed to create a second majority-Black district under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. A federal court agreed and signaled that the state would likely be found in violation of Section 2 if it did not comply. In response, Louisiana redrew its map. The new configuration created a second majority-Black district by connecting geographically distant American Black populations, stretching roughly 200 miles across the state, winding through Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette, and Baton Rouge.

That map was challenged. The challengers argued that the district was drawn predominantly on the basis of race, that race had become the dominant organizing principle of the map, and that this constituted an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The case made its way to the Supreme Court, and the question became this: when does compliance with the Voting Rights Act cross the line into unconstitutional race-based redistricting?

The Court applied the framework established in Thornburg v. Gingles, the long-standing three-part test that governs Section 2 claims. The first prong asks whether a minority group is large and geographically compact enough to form a majority in a reasonably drawn district. The Court found that the plaintiffs failed this prong because their illustrative maps did not satisfy the state’s legitimate non-racial districting goals, including political objectives. The second and third prongs ask whether minority voters are politically cohesive and whether majority voters consistently vote as a bloc to defeat their preferred candidates. The Court found that the plaintiffs offered evidence that American Black and white voters supported different candidates, but their analysis did not separate race from party. In a state where race and party often track closely together, that distinction matters. Finally, on the totality of the circumstances, the Court found that the plaintiffs relied on historical evidence and broad claims about societal discrimination rather than evidence of present-day intentional racial discrimination in Louisiana’s voting system.

“Because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, the State had no compelling interest to justify the use of race as the predominant factor in drawing its congressional map.”

— Justice Alito - Majority Opinion

The Court did not strike down Section 2. The Court did not eliminate the Voting Rights Act. The Court raised the evidentiary bar and clarified that race cannot be used as the dominant organizing principle of a congressional map without satisfying every prong of the legal test. That is a meaningful shift, but it is not the end of voting rights. It is a redefinition of what plaintiffs must prove in a political landscape where race and party are deeply intertwined.

The Asymmetry No One Wants to Talk About

Here is where the rhetoric begins to collapse under its own weight. The loudest voices framing this decision as catastrophic are concentrated in states where the Democratic Party already holds significant power. Within hours of the ruling, Politico reported that some Democratic strategists were already discussing the possibility of diluting their own majority-minority districts in blue states in order to spread American Black voters across more districts and pick up additional Democratic seats. Read that again. The same political coalition that is publicly mourning the loss of Section 2 protections was, in private, already discussing the strategic dismantling of majority-Black districts when it served their partisan interests.

That is the asymmetry. In red states, the political map was already going to be redrawn after the next census, with or without this ruling. Republican legislatures in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and elsewhere have been redistricting aggressively for years, and they will continue to do so. The Callais decision does not fundamentally change that trajectory. What it does change is the strategic landscape in blue states, where Section 2 has often been used as a shield to preserve majority-minority districts that, in some cases, also serve as reliable Democratic strongholds. Strip away the legal protection, and those districts can be redrawn, repackaged, or repurposed by either party, depending on who holds the pen.

That is why the rhetoric feels so disproportionate. If the concern were truly about American Black political representation, the response would be the same regardless of which party benefits from the maps. Instead, the response is sharpest where the partisan stakes are highest. The defense of Section 2, in much of the public commentary, has begun to look less like a defense of American Black voters and more like a defense of a political coalition that has assumed American Black voters will always vote one way.

The Monolith Assumption

That assumption is the heart of the problem. Justice Kagan’s dissent, while legally serious, rests on a framework that treats racial voting patterns as stable and predictable enough to function as a legal proxy for political behavior. Ellie Mystal’s commentary goes further. He treats the political alignment of American Black voters as essentially fixed, framing any disruption to that alignment as either suppression or manipulation. He argues that without majority-minority districts, American Black political power evaporates, because the assumption built into the entire framework is that American Black voters will vote together, vote Democrat, and vote in a way that produces a single political outcome.

““Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was designed to root out voting practices that deny minority voters an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.””

— Justice Kagan - Dissent

That assumption is increasingly hard to sustain. The 2024 election demonstrated measurable movement among American Black voters, particularly among American Black men, toward Republican candidates. Donald Trump received the highest share of the American Black vote of any Republican presidential candidate in modern history. That shift did not happen because of voter suppression. It happened because American Black voters, like every other group of voters in this country, are not a monolith. We have political diversity within our community. We have theological diversity. We have economic diversity. We have generational diversity. To build a legal framework that assumes otherwise is to flatten the very people the framework claims to protect.

There is also a piece of history that is rarely mentioned in these conversations. American Black Republicans existed in the South long before the Voting Rights Act. They were oppressed, disenfranchised, and silenced, often by the very Democratic political machines that controlled Southern states. To now turn around and argue that American Black voters must be packed into specific districts because they will reliably vote Democrat is to repeat, in different language, a version of the same assumption that silenced American Black Republicans for generations. It treats American Black political identity as fixed by race rather than shaped by conviction.

The Comparisons That Do Not Hold

Comparing Callais to Dred Scott is not just inaccurate. It is irresponsible. Dred Scott v. Sandford declared that American Black people could be treated as property and denied citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment was passed specifically to overturn that ruling. Nothing in the Callais decision approaches that territory. Nothing in the decision touches citizenship, personhood, or the legal status of American Black people. To suggest otherwise is to use one of the most morally serious rulings in American history as a rhetorical prop, and that cheapens the memory of what Dred Scott actually was.

The Jim Crow comparison is similarly overstated. Jim Crow was a regime of poll taxes, literacy tests, white-only primaries, lynch mob enforcement, and explicit legal segregation. The Callais decision does none of that. It does not reinstate poll taxes. It does not reinstate literacy tests. It does not strip American Black people of the right to vote. It addresses how districts are drawn and how race may be used as a factor in drawing them. Reasonable people can disagree about that legal question, but to call it Jim Crow 2.0 is to suggest that the protections won in the 1960s have been erased, and they have not.

The Question We Should Actually Be Asking

The question worth asking is not whether racism still exists. It does. The question is what kind of nation we are now, and whether the legal frameworks built to address the racism of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s still describe the country we actually live in. We have 67 American Black members in Congress.  A man allegedly considered American black but not ADOS has served as President of the United States. We have even had a women serve as VP and although she pretended to be ADOS and will go down as one of the worse vice presidents in American history, it is worth nothing she did serve Vice President of the United States.  Harris attempted to pass as ADOS to win an election, and she came very close to winning.  Clearly, we have measurable shifts in political alignment within our own community. We have economic, geographic, and theological diversity that simply did not exist in the political imagination of 1965.

None of that means racism has been eradicated. None of that means the work of justice is finished. What it does mean is that treating the political landscape of 2026 as if it were the political landscape of 1965, is not honesty. It is rhetoric. And when rhetoric replaces analysis, the people who suffer most are the very people the rhetoric claims to protect, because they are denied the dignity of being seen as full political agents capable of making their own choices.

“The Constitution does not tolerate the use of race as a proxy for political belief.”

— Justice Thomas - Concurring Majority

Much Ado About Nothing

That is why, when I look at Louisiana v. Callais, I do not see a constitutional rupture. I do not see Jim Crow returning. I do not see the death of the Voting Rights Act. I see a legal dispute about how race interacts with redistricting, how far Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act can be extended before it collides with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. There may be legitimate debates about fairness and representation, but those debates should be grounded in what the Court actually decided, not in assumptions imported wholesale from a different era.

What must be restated is the reality that we are not living in the 1940s, 1950s, or 1960s. The political landscape has changed, including within American Black communities themselves, where political affiliation is not as uniform as it is often portrayed. Reducing that complexity to fixed assumptions about how we vote, or how we must vote, flattens reality in ways that ultimately weaken the very argument being made. The hard-won protections of the Civil Rights Movement have not vanished. The question is how those protections are being interpreted, applied, and contested in a modern political environment where race and partisanship are deeply intertwined.

For all the urgency in the public response, the legal outcome in Louisiana looks less like a constitutional rupture and more like a disagreement over how race should function in modern districting. In that sense, much of the reaction surrounding it begins to feel, at least in legal terms, much more like rhetoric than reality. Much ado about nothing.

When the Violence Comes From Within

Reflections on a Bloody Week in the American Black Community

When I was growing up, we did not hear stories like the ones we are hearing now. There were no mass shootings inside our homes. There were no fathers walking through bedrooms killing children in their sleep. There were no headlines about former officials murdering their wives and then turning the gun on themselves. The neighborhoods were not perfect, but they were not graveyards either.

The older I got, the more violence began to invade our streets. It came in slowly at first, then all at once. The drugs arrived like weeds pushing through cracked concrete. Vials, needles, and broken glass scattered across sidewalks where children once played. Nobody could quite explain how it all got there. We were young, but we were not stupid. We knew the drugs did not grow in our neighborhoods. Somebody brought them in. Somebody profited. Somebody allowed it. The music shifted with the streets, and a generation that wanted out of the projects ended up celebrating the very things keeping them trapped.

That is the long backdrop. That is the soil. What grew out of it is what we are now forced to confront.

Here is what I have come to believe after watching this last week unfold. The deepest crisis in our community is no longer simply the violence done to us from the outside. It is the moral and spiritual violence we have learned to accept against ourselves. Until we name that honestly, no policy, no program, and no protest will save us.

A Week That Should Stop Us Cold

The middle of April 2026 was one of the bloodiest weeks the American Black community has seen in recent memory. A young woman traveled to an island for her birthday, met someone, and ended up dead. A Black podcaster went away with her white boyfriend to another island and never came home.

Then came the two stories that broke something inside me.

In Shreveport, Louisiana, a 31-year-old man named Shamar Elkins entered the homes of the two women who had borne his children and opened fire. When the morning was over, eight children were dead. Seven of them his own. The youngest was three. Most were shot in the head while they slept. He carjacked a vehicle, fled, and was killed in a confrontation with police a few miles away. In one act, he more than doubled the city's homicide count for the year.

That same week in Annandale, Virginia, former Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax shot and killed his wife, Dr. Cerina Fairfax, in their home. He then turned the gun on himself. Their teenage children were inside. Their oldest son made the 911 call. Court records released afterward described a man who had been ordered to leave the house by April 30, who had already lost custody of his children, who was drinking daily, and who had spent years obsessed with restoring a reputation damaged by a sexual assault scandal. He was, by every available measure, a man losing everything.

Two stories. Two households. Two communities forever marked. One carried out by a man the people around him describe as struggling with mental illness and untreated trauma. The other carried out by a man who once stood at the second-highest seat in Virginia government. Different worlds. Same outcome. Black families destroyed by the hands of Black men who were supposed to protect them.

I want to be careful here. I am not saying this kind of violence belongs only to us. It does not. White men, Latino men, Asian men, men of every background commit horrific acts of violence every day in this country. If you measured per capita, the picture would shift dramatically in places the cameras rarely visit. There are rural counties, suburban subdivisions, and quiet small towns where domestic violence is a way of life and nobody is reporting on it. The media zooms in on us because our urban centers are easy to map, easy to film, and easy to turn into a story. That is its own injustice, and I will not pretend otherwise.

Still, when the camera does find us, we have to look honestly at what it shows.

How I Knew Before I Knew

Before I saw a single face or read a single name in either case, something in the shape of those stories told me exactly what I was hearing. Not because Black men are more violent. They are not. The reason I knew was because of what the violence was aimed at. Not strangers. Not enemies. Not rivals. Their own. Their wives. Their children. Their households. That registered immediately. That sounded like us.

There is a particular pain when violence is directed inward. The Shreveport councilman said it plainly: more than thirty percent of homicides in his city are domestic in nature. That is not a statistic about strangers in the dark. That is families. Bedrooms. Kitchens. Front porches. People who shared a name and a meal and a child.

The Mental Illness Conversation

Whenever something like this happens, there is a rush to explain it away. Commentators like Roland Martin and others move quickly to mental illness, to systemic racism, to historical trauma. I do believe mental illness was part of what happened in Shreveport. The reporting confirms Elkins had been hospitalized for mental health treatment, had attempted suicide just two months earlier, and had told family members he was having dark thoughts. Something was wrong. Something was unaddressed. That is real.

Annandale feels different. That feels like a man who, faced with consequences he could not control, chose annihilation over accountability. He could not keep the marriage. He could not keep custody. He could not keep the house. He could not keep the reputation. So he took the only thing left he could control. That is not mental illness in the clinical sense. That is rage. That is pride. That is the refusal to be made small. That is what happens when a man decides that if he cannot have the life he wants, no one else gets to live either.

We must stop sanitizing every act of destruction by calling it mental illness. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes it is moral collapse. Sometimes it is generational sin finally walking into the open. We do ourselves no favors when we refuse to name what we are looking at.

What Our Children Are Being Taught To Want

Our community has become desensitized to self-destruction. We see it in domestic violence, in fathers abandoning children, in mothers suffocating under the weight of raising kids alone. We see it in drug culture, where poison is sold to people who look like us, live beside us, and trust us. We see it in the exploitation laid bare in the cases surrounding Sean Combs and R. Kelly, where countless American Black women and girls were used and discarded by men from inside the same community. We see it in how casually life itself is treated, as if children are disposable, as if family is optional, as if responsibility is a burden instead of a duty.

None of this stays inside our homes. It is being taught, hour by hour, to our children through the screens in their hands. Walk through any teenager's TikTok feed and tell me what you see. The rapper flashing a Draco at the camera while his toddler crawls across the floor. The athlete with three baby mamas, each one filming her side of the drama for content. The young woman explaining how she made fifty thousand dollars on OnlyFans last month and calling it entrepreneurship. The trapper teaching little boys how to count a stack and bag work in the kitchen, set to music, looped on a fifteen-second clip. The influencer who has never been in the streets pretending she was raised in them because that is what gets the views.

This is what our children are being taught to want. Not character. Not covenant. Not craft. Not calling. They are being taught to want clout, currency, and the appearance of power. They are being told that the fastest path there is to look dangerous, sound dangerous, and be desired by the dangerous. The boy who picks up a gun at fifteen did not invent that image. He saw it ten thousand times before he ever held one. The girl who sells her body at nineteen did not come up with that on her own. She was being marketed to since she was twelve.

The platforms know. The algorithms reward what destabilizes. Outrage, lust, violence, and humiliation move faster than virtue ever has. The companies count the money. The labels count the streams. The brands count the engagement. We count the funerals.

Why I Am Reading Nietzsche

If you want to understand why a culture that has discarded God ends in funerals, you have to sit with the philosopher who told us, more than a hundred years ago, that the discarding was about to begin. So I have been reading him.

I have been reading Friedrich Nietzsche lately. Will to Power, specifically. I will be honest. When I first picked it up, I was opposed to him. He writes from hindsight. He writes without God. He writes as a man who believes the entire moral structure of Christianity was a long lie told to keep the strong from being strong. He called Christian morality slave morality. He believed humanity could move beyond God and create its own values through will, power, and self-definition. He believed people could decide for themselves what was right and what was wrong without needing any higher authority to tell them.

Something shifted in me as I kept reading. I realized Nietzsche is not arguing against God. He is arguing as if there is no God and then asking what follows. That is the experiment. That is the world he is describing. A world where man is the measure. A world where the strongest will writes the rules. A world where good and evil are inventions of the weak. The more I read him, the more clearly I could see something he could not. He was not describing a future he hoped for. He was describing the world we are already living in. And that world is exactly what is killing us.

That is the bridge from those murders to that book. Every act of violence we just discussed is a small Nietzschean act. The will of the self, exercised over the life of another, with no higher authority to answer to. The father in Shreveport decided whose children lived. The husband in Annandale decided whose wife lived. The trapper on TikTok decides his neighbor is prey. The girl on the live decides her body is currency. Strip away God, and this is what is left. Strip away the moral order, and the strong consume the weak. Reading a man who wrote without God has done the opposite of what he intended in me. It has driven me deeper into God. Because I have seen, in real time, what the world looks like when his ideas are left to run.

I know what some will say. Plenty of professed Christians have abused their wives. Plenty of pastors have preyed on the children in their pews. Plenty of so-called believers have done exactly the kind of violence I am condemning. That is true. I am not naive about it. The argument is not that Christians do not sin. They do. The argument is about what holds when the moral foundation itself is removed. A Christian who sins still answers to a standard outside himself. A man who has made himself the standard answers to no one. The first is a hypocrite. The second is the architect of his own permission.

Nietzsche thought he was freeing humanity. Look at us. According to CDC data, the abortion rate among Black women is nearly three times that of white women, and we account for roughly thirty-eight percent of abortions in this country while being only about thirteen percent of the population. Look at the children being told they can transform into something they are not. Look at the institutions, even our historically Black colleges, drifting into moral confusion they once would have stood firmly against. This is what self-made morality builds. Not freedom. Not flourishing. Graveyards.

When you remove God from the center, something else always takes His place. Money. Sex. Pride. Violence. Status. Self-worship. Survival at any cost. None of those things can save us. None of those things have ever saved anyone.

What Returning To Christ Actually Looks Like

There is healing that needs to happen in our community. Real healing. Not the performative kind that shows up at vigils and disappears by the next news cycle. Not the political kind that turns every dead child into a talking point. Returning to Christ is not a slogan and it is not a feeling. It is a thousand specific decisions made by a thousand specific people on a thousand ordinary Tuesdays.

It looks like a father coming home and staying home. It looks like a husband loving his wife enough to walk away from the argument instead of reaching for the gun. It looks like a mother turning off the live and opening the Bible at the kitchen table with her babies before bed. It looks like the church mothers in the neighborhood being free to correct somebody else's child again without fear of being cursed out on the porch. It looks like a teenage boy being walked into manhood by men who actually know his name. It looks like a teenage girl being told by her father that her body is not currency and her worth is not measured in followers. It looks like a marriage covenant that means something even when it gets hard, especially when it gets hard.

It looks like the deacon who finally tells the truth about what he saw the pastor doing. It looks like the sister who calls her brother out instead of covering for him one more time. It looks like the artist who decides he is not going to glorify the trap anymore even if it costs him the deal. It looks like the influencer who deletes the page because she finally counted the cost of who she was teaching her cousins to become.

It looks like policy too. We need illegal guns off our streets. We need real investment in our young people. We need real schools, real mental health resources, real intervention in homes where children are being raised in danger. We need to stop pretending that the absence of fathers is acceptable. We need to stop pretending that aborting our future is liberation. We need to stop pretending that what we glorify on a screen is not training the next shooter, the next abuser, the next mother weeping over a coffin too small for any mother to ever carry.

Most of all, we need to come back to Christ. Not as a sentiment. As a structure. As a daily, governing, household, neighborhood, community-shaping reality. Because a community without God will eventually become a community without restraint, without purpose, and without truth. We are watching that play out in real time.

The Word We Have Been Avoiding

A week of funerals. A week of headlines. A week of explanations that do not explain anything.

The word we have been avoiding is repentance. Not for what was done to us. For what we have allowed to happen among us. Repentance for the music we let raise our children. Repentance for the lifestyles we glorified. Repentance for the abortions we framed as freedom. Repentance for the husbands we never held to account. Repentance for the wives we did not protect. Repentance for the institutions we let drift. Repentance for the silence in our pulpits and the noise in our feeds.

Nietzsche bet his life that man could become his own god. We are the proof of what that bet costs. The way back is not forward into more self. The way back is down. To our knees. To the only One who has ever been able to heal a people.

And that One is not us.

—

Jacqueline Session Ausby

DahTruth.com

Pawns On The Board

“A pawn that never questions the board will always be sacrificed for the game.” — Jacqueline Session Ausby

On Black Leadership, Borrowed Houses, And The Wages Of Loyalty

I came across a LinkedIn post this week from Wes Moore, the Governor of Maryland. The post opened the way they always open these days. It pointed at gas prices. It pointed at tariffs. It pointed at wars overseas. It pointed at Donald Trump. Once that throat-clearing was done, the post pivoted home and listed the wins. Lower electricity bills. New laws preventing grocery stores from gouging customers. More housing being built. Investments designed to help businesses build wealth. Protections around the right to be vaccinated.

It read like progress. It read like leadership. It read like a man who is doing the work.

Then I sat with it for a minute. I asked myself the only question that actually matters when a politician posts a list. Whose life looks different because of any of this? In Maryland, where the Governor is American Black, where the Mayor of Baltimore is American Black, where Black leadership is finally seated at the table the ancestors begged for, what has actually changed for the people those names are supposed to represent?

The honest answer is the answer nobody on a podium wants to give. Not nearly enough.

Here is what I have come to believe. We are not being led. We are being managed. The policies change packaging every four years. The faces delivering them get darker while those benefiting from them get lighter. The conditions in our neighborhoods stay the same. We are pawns on a board, moved two squares forward, two squares back, and sometimes pushed to the front line to be taken. Until we name that out loud, no vote and no victory speech is going to save us.

“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”

— Hosea 4:6

The House You Do Not Own

Start with housing, because housing is where wealth either takes root or never grows. In a state celebrated for its first American Black Governor, in cities run by American Black mayors, homeownership for our people is still out of reach for far too many families. Lending is harder. Credit thresholds are higher. Down payments are heavier. The doors that other communities walked through fifty years ago are still being negotiated for ours.

Meanwhile, the policy emphasis remains on rental support. Section 8 expands. Voucher programs are praised. Politicians cut ribbons in front of new apartment complexes and call it progress.

Section 8 is not stability. It is the appearance of stability. A family living in a house they do not own, on a voucher they did not earn equity from, one missed payment away from eviction, is not secure. They are housed. There is a difference. Stability is what you can fall back on when life turns. Equity is what you draw from when the job ends, when the diagnosis comes, when the child needs college, when the parent needs care. Renters do not have that. They have a roof and a deadline. The wealth that should be building underneath their feet is building somewhere else, in the bank account of the landlord, in the portfolio of the management company, in the property tax base of a city that does not return the favor.

Programs that keep our people renting forever are not neutral. They are extractive. Every month that voucher hits, somebody who is not American Black gets a little richer off our presence in a property we will never own. That is not a conspiracy. That is just how rent works. The question is why the most visible housing solution offered to our community is the one that builds wealth for everyone except us.

If American Black leadership in Maryland was going to do something historic, it would have been a pathway to ownership. Not a voucher. A door key. A deed. A stake in the ground that says my people are not passing through. My people are staying. That is not the legislation being passed. The voucher is the legislation being passed.

Cities Run By Us, Failing Us

Look at Baltimore. Look at Chicago. Look at Memphis. Look at Detroit. Look at every urban city in this country that has been under unbroken Democratic leadership for forty, fifty, sixty years. Look at the school systems. Look at the homicide rates. Look at the percentage of children reading on grade level by fourth grade. Look at the number of fatherless homes. Look at how long the bus takes to get to the grocery store that finally opened ten miles away.

The Mayors are American Black. The City Council members are American Black. The Police Commissioners, the school superintendents, the housing directors, the prosecutors are American Black. Representation has been achieved. Representation has been celebrated. Representation has not changed the outcomes.

In Baltimore, the school system continues to rank near the bottom nationally year after year. In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson stands at podiums talking about a city moving in the right direction while teenagers run circles around the police department and shoot each other in numbers most of America has chosen not to think about. In every one of these cities, the script is the same. Crime is down according to the press release. Crime feels different according to the grandmother who has not let her grandbabies play on the porch in three years.

If leadership, policy, and representation have all been pointed in the same direction for half a century, the outcomes are not an accident. They are a result. They are what the system was actually built to produce. We have to be honest about that, even if it costs us our comfort.

The Loyalty Industry

The next layer is the messaging machine that keeps us locked into the same vote no matter what the vote produces. Black political media has become an industry, and like every industry, it has shareholders to satisfy.

Roland Martin tells us how to vote. Joy Reid told us how to vote until her show ended and now she tells us from a podcast. Don Lemon, in his second act, tells us how to vote. Angela Rye tells us how to vote. Eddie Glaude Jr. tells us how to vote in the seminar voice that pretends it is just analysis. Jemele Hill tells us how to vote between sports takes. The Native Land Pod tells us how to vote in the cadence of friends who already know the answer before the question is asked.

None of these voices are wrong simply for having a position. The problem is that the position is non-negotiable. Disagreement is treated as defection. Independent thought is treated as betrayal. If you raise a question about a policy that has not delivered for our community in three generations, you are accused of carrying water for the other side. The conversation collapses before it begins.

Then there is the other flank. Briahna Joy Gray, Marc Lamont Hill, Sabrina Salvador, voices that present themselves as the more authentic alternative because they reject mainstream Democratic policy. Look at what they actually offer in its place. A more aggressive form of the same dependency. A socialism that requires even larger government. A pan-African or foundational frame that rejects American identity altogether and offers no functioning replacement, only grievance dressed in academic language. They are not a way out. They are the same trap with different paint.

All of these voices are paid. All of them have podcasts, speaking fees, brand deals, book contracts, university appointments. They are not suffering from the policies they recommend. They are profiting from the loyalty those policies require. Their bank accounts grow whether the boy on the corner of West Baltimore lives or dies. We carry the cost of the alignment they sell. They carry the receipts.

Why Is Israel Suddenly The Threat?

Now turn on any panel show, scroll any timeline, listen to any rally aimed at our community, and tell me what the loudest topic has been for the past two years. Israel. Gaza. Foreign policy. The map of a country most of us have never visited has somehow become the moral center of conversations about American Black freedom.

Foreign policy matters. Innocent life matters everywhere. None of that is in dispute. The question is why the energy spent on a war ten thousand miles away is not being spent on the war happening on our own blocks. Black boys are killing each other in our streets. Black girls are being trafficked through our cities. Black mothers are burying their children at rates that would shut down any other community in America. Black families are being priced out of neighborhoods their grandparents built. Black schools are graduating students who cannot read the diploma they are being handed.

None of those crises are trending on the panels. None of those crises are organizing the marches. None of those crises are setting the agenda for the next election.

It is easier to point outward than to look inward. It is easier to indict a foreign government than to indict the city council you voted for in eight straight elections. It is easier to grieve the children on a different continent than to grieve the children on the corner because the children on the corner require us to ask what we have allowed.

The outward gaze is not righteousness. It is avoidance. And the leaders directing our attention away from our own house know exactly what they are doing.

When The Pulpit Joins The Machine

Even the church has gotten in line. I listened to a sermon recently from Jamal Bryant. The text was Habakkuk 2:3, the vision tarrying but coming in its appointed time. The application was something else entirely. Write down what you want God to do for you. A new job. A house. Tuition paid. Healing. A breakthrough. Then plant a seed, by which he meant a financial offering, and watch every word on your list come to pass in God's perfect timing.

I am not naming Bryant because he is the only one. I am naming him because he is the latest example of a problem that has spread through American Black pulpits like rot through a beam. The problem is not faith. The problem is what faith has been reduced to. A vending machine. Insert seed. Receive desire. The vision is no longer about the kingdom of God advancing in a generation. The vision is about the individual believer's wish list.

Habakkuk was not writing a personal prosperity plan. Habakkuk was crying out about the violence and corruption of an entire nation, and God answered him with a vision about justice and the destruction of the proud. That is not the sermon being preached. The sermon being preached turns the prophet into a life coach and the offering plate into a coin slot.

Where is the pulpit calling our community to repentance for the children we have aborted, the marriages we have abandoned, the boys we have left to the streets, the girls we have surrendered to the screens? Where is the pulpit naming the conditions instead of monetizing the longing? Where is the pulpit telling us that the seed God actually requires is obedience, not currency, and that the harvest He promises is righteousness, not real estate?

When the church starts selling individual breakthrough while the community burns, the church has stopped being the church. It has become another podcast with stained glass.

There is one more thing about that sermon I cannot let pass. Bryant is a Baptist preacher. He preached the entire message and never once spoke the name of Jesus Christ. Not in the opening. Not in the application. Not in the close. He had time to walk the congregation through how to write a vision, how to plant a seed, and how to wait for the harvest. He had time, at the very end, to tell the congregation to get out and vote. He reminded that that early voting was beginning the very next day.  He did not have time for the name of the Savior whose blood the church he stands in was built on. A Baptist pulpit that finds room for the ballot but not for the name of Christ has chosen its kingdom. It is not the one in scripture.

The Wounds Nobody Will Touch

Underneath all of this is a layer of pain leadership has refused to address for decades. Mental health in our community is a quiet catastrophe. Our boys are growing up traumatized and untreated, which is one of the reasons they are picking up guns and using them on each other before they can legally drink. Our girls are growing up traumatized and untreated, which is one of the reasons they are turning their bodies into commodities by sixteen and calling it confidence. Our mothers are exhausted and untreated. Our fathers, when they are present, are stretched and untreated. Our elders are grieving and untreated.

National incarceration numbers may be dropping, but the boys our system sweeps up are still disproportionately ours, and the boys it spits back out are still being released into the same neighborhoods that broke them in the first place, with no policy of restoration, no real reentry, no pipeline back to school or work or family or faith. They went in damaged and untreated. They come home damaged and untreated and now also marked. We act surprised when the cycle continues.

Gang violence is treated as a news cycle, not a policy priority. A child dies, the Mayor holds a press conference, the candle vigil is filmed, the headlines move on by Tuesday, and the next Friday another child dies on the same block. Where is the legislation? Where is the long-term mental health investment? Where is the trauma-informed schooling? Where is the federal task force? Where is the national conversation that lasts longer than a hashtag?

There is none. Because the leaders who are supposed to address it know that the conversation, if held seriously, would lead to questions they cannot afford to answer. So the silence holds. And the children keep dying.

Pawns On The Board

This is what it feels like to be American Black in this country in 2026. We are voted on, voted with, voted at, and rarely voted for. We are placed on the board to make a play look balanced. We are sacrificed when a sacrifice is needed. We are paraded forward when a victory needs a face. We are pushed to the front line when the casualty count needs to come from somewhere that will not cost the party anything important.

Our pain is currency. Our stories are evidence. Our faces are the defense when the institution gets investigated. Our votes are guaranteed. Our outcomes are optional.

That is not leadership. That is not representation. That is not progress. That is positioning. And every American Black man and woman with a microphone who is paid to keep us in formation is part of how the positioning holds.

The way out is not another election. The way out is not another speech. The way out is not another sermon promising you a job if you sow a seed. The way out is the truth, told plainly, told repeatedly, told regardless of who it offends.

Our leaders are not delivering. Our media is not protecting us. Our pulpits are not preaching repentance. Our policies are not building wealth for our people. Our cities are not safer for our children. Our schools are not teaching our babies to read. Our boys are not coming home. Our girls are not being protected. And every four years we are asked to vote again as if any of that has changed.

It has not changed because it was not designed to change. It was designed to keep us exactly where we are, useful enough to stay, broken enough to need them, loyal enough not to ask.

I am asking.

—

Jacqueline Session Ausby

DahTruth.com

Whitewashed Tombs: A Three-Part Series on Christ, Nation, and Mendacity

✝️ “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness.” Matthew 23:27

Part One

When Christ Becomes a Tool

Resurrection Sunday and the Political Use of Jesus

April is the season when Christians around the world celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is the time when believers reflect on the truth that Christ was crucified, buried, and rose again on the third day. Because of this, Jesus Christ is recognized as King, and for over two thousand years the world has paused to remember His life, His sacrifice, and His victory over death.

When you consider it fully, it is remarkable that one man could have such transformative power across nations, cultures, and generations. That alone is awe-inspiring, and this season draws people together in recognition of Jesus Christ.

At the same time, something else is unfolding, and it must be named plainly.

Over the past month, there has been an increasing trend of individuals using Jesus Christ not as Savior, but as a tool to support ideological and political positions. This is happening across the political spectrum, from the far left to the far right, and it has become especially visible in conservative and nationalist circles.

Just this past week, imagery circulated of Donald Trump portrayed in a Christ-like manner. He stood over a man as though healing him, with light surrounding the scene, as if he were the savior of America. The image was astonishing and, quite frankly, blasphemous. It was criticized on both the left and the right and was eventually removed, which was the right decision. The fact that it was created at all points to something deeper.

What we are witnessing extends beyond political division and reaches into spiritual confusion. Everyone claims Christ. That claim now appears across political, cultural, and religious lines, each asserting moral authority while pointing to the same source. They cannot all be right.

Within that confusion, there is a strain of thought, increasingly visible in right-leaning circles, that aligns American identity with whiteness and presents that alignment as both natural and necessary. What is being advanced is not simply a political position, but a redefinition of belonging.

That redefinition carries consequences. It places American Blacks and Native Americans outside the very identity they helped form. It overlooks the presence of Native people who existed on this land before it was named America, and it dismisses the generational labor, sacrifice, and blood of Black Americans who helped build the nation that now claims to define itself without them.

It is presented as order and argued as preservation, defined as truth, when in reality it narrows the definition of belonging to fit a particular image and then uses that image as the standard by which others are measured and excluded.

When Christ is drawn into that framework, the distortion deepens. He is no longer presented as Savior over all, but as a figure used to affirm boundaries that were never His to establish.

“Mendacity: the act of presenting falsehood as truth, not only through direct lies, but through distortion, omission, and the manipulation of reality in a way that persuades others to accept what is untrue as though it were true.”

— Definition of Mendacity

Mendacity and the Claim to Possess God

What we are witnessing is mendacity. It is not limited to false statements. It takes shape in identity, in authority, and in claim, presenting what is false as truth and reinforcing it until it is accepted.

This pattern appears in both religious and political leadership.

The pope presents himself as a moral authority who claims proximity to divine truth while lacking the spiritual clarity such authority requires. He wears the garment and performs the role, yet what is revealed beneath that appearance reflects what Jesus warned about: a structure that looks righteous outwardly while concealing what is corrupted within.

The same danger appears in political leadership.

Donald Trump presents himself as a force for what is right in matters of war and conflict. I have more respect for Donald Trump than I do for Pope Leo, because Donald Trump recognizes that he is flawed. He knows he is capable of sin and capable of repentance. Pope Leo does not present himself that way. He does not recognize that he is a man. He is not God. He is not the holder of truth. No man is.

No man is the representative of Jesus Christ except Jesus Christ Himself.

Political leaders and religious leaders alike remain subject to that truth. The moment either begins to take on the imagery, authority, or symbolism of Christ, the line has already been crossed.

Jesus described such men as whitewashed tombs. Beautiful on the outside, but filled with dead men's bones.

Known by Their Fruit

Jesus said we will know them by their fruit. What a man professes and what a man protects will eventually reveal who he is. The concern here rests with the individual who believes he can define, contain, and speak for Christ as though God operates within the limits he has established.

Scripture has always addressed the question of who can claim proximity to God, and one of the clearest examples appears in the book of 2 Kings.

The account tells of Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army, a man of authority who suffered from leprosy. The path to his healing did not begin with his position, but with a young Israelite servant in his household, who pointed him toward the prophet Elisha.

Naaman approached the situation expecting a display that matched his rank. He anticipated a direct encounter, an invocation, an act that aligned with what he believed such authority required. Instead, the instruction came through a servant, directing him to wash in the Jordan. The simplicity of the command conflicted with his expectation, and he turned away from it. Only after setting aside that expectation and submitting to what had been spoken did the healing come.

His response afterward reveals something deeper. Naaman declared that he would worship no god but the God of Israel and asked for soil from the land to take with him. That act reflected allegiance. The God he encountered was not found within the structures he knew, nor in the power he carried, but in the authority of God's word.

Christ later pointed back to this moment, noting that while many in Israel suffered, it was Naaman the Syrian who was cleansed. The significance rests in where God chose to move. Proximity did not determine access. Identity did not determine outcome.

While certain voices speak with certainty about the side on which they believe God stands, they overlook the pattern Scripture reveals. God does not move according to expectation, status, or proximity. He moves according to His own authority.

When Christianity is fused with national identity and treated as something to be held and preserved within a particular image, the result is distortion. What begins as conviction shifts into possession, and what belongs to God is drawn into human structure and defined by human terms. That movement does not produce alignment with truth. It produces conflation.

Truth does not submit to identity, and it does not remain confined to the structures built around it. It stands on its own.

In Part Two, I will name what these men are actually arguing for, in their own words.

Part Two

The Argument They Are Making

On Joel Webbon, Dale Partridge, and Calvin Robinson

That same mendacity did not remain confined to political or traditional religious spaces. It surfaced this week on the far right in a conversation on NXR Studios, where Joel Webbon, joined by Dale Partridge and Calvin Robinson, framed Christianity and American identity in ways that tie faith to race, lineage, and national structure, raising serious questions about who belongs and who does not. All three men identify as Protestant. Two of them, Webbon and Partridge, are white. Calvin Robinson is of mixed English and Jamaican heritage. That detail matters, and I will return to it. What was presented carried the appearance of order and conviction, yet rested on a narrowing of truth that cannot sustain itself under Scripture.

Come with me as I walk through the major points being made, the arguments used to justify exclusion while denying its name, and the structure that allows it to stand.

Race, as it has functioned in America, is not a fixed biological reality but a social construct shaped by law, history, and power. It was used not only to organize and separate, but to assign belonging to whites and exclusion to Blacks in particular. That structure did not emerge by accident. It was built into the system itself, often enforced through measures as rigid as the one-drop rule, where the presence of any African ancestry placed a person outside of whiteness.

At the same time, the reality remains that all people share a common humanity that cannot be reduced to these categories. The tension between what is constructed and what is real has shaped the American experience from its beginning.

It is within that tension that this conversation must be understood. In their discussion, Webbon, Partridge, and Robinson take the language of race, nation, and identity and move it in a specific direction. They frame American identity and Christianity in ways that align with a particular vision of nationhood, one that narrows belonging and places American Blacks and Jews outside of it, while presenting that framework as consistent with Scripture.

That distinction requires clarity. The Jewish faith, as it is practiced today, does not affirm Jesus Christ as the Messiah or as divine. Christianity rests on the belief that Christ has already come, that He is the Son of God, and that salvation is found through Him alone. Judaism continues to await the Messiah and does not accept that claim.

This difference matters, and it should be stated plainly. Disagreement with Jewish theology does not translate into agreement with the arguments being made here, nor does it justify broad or disparaging claims directed toward Jewish people and American Blacks as a whole.

The same standard must apply across the board. Entire groups cannot be judged collectively while the historical record of others is minimized or ignored. The history of European expansion, conquest, chattel slavery, and the formation of this nation carries its own weight and cannot be set aside when defining who belongs.

Their position unfolds as a layered framework. A nation, in their view, is not simply a political structure but a combination of land, lineage, language, laws, loves, liturgy, and faith, with race and ethnicity treated as essential components rather than incidental features.

From that foundation, they move toward a vision of stability that depends on uniformity. A nation must remain unified in its composition in order to endure. That unity is not limited to culture alone, but extends toward a preference for a mono-ethnic, mono-cultural, and at times mono-religious society, where difference is treated as a source of disorder rather than strength.

From there, they move to a reading of American history that frames the nation as fundamentally European and Christian in origin. Immigration and demographic change are then positioned as threats to cultural continuity. That concern is not without historical context. The issue arises in how it is applied and who is included within the definition of the nation itself.

American identity is not reserved for European descendants. It is inseparable from American Blacks, descendants of those who built this nation through forced labor, and from Native Americans, whose presence on this land predates its naming.

Within their framework, stability requires sameness. Diversity becomes fragmentation, and change becomes decline. Immigration is then framed as a moral violation, at times described as theft, shifting the language from governance to judgment.

At the same time, Christianity is positioned as the force that should shape national identity, binding faith to governance, culture, and law. The church is called upon to develop a theology of nationhood that aligns belief with race and lineage.

The conclusion becomes clear. A nation defined in this way cannot remain multi-ethnic without losing what they believe it was meant to be. What is presented as preservation becomes a narrowing of identity.

The Slavery Problem They Will Not Solve

There is a tension at the center of this argument that remains unresolved. Immigration is described as theft, yet slavery is not addressed with the same clarity.

If crossing a border unlawfully is framed as taking what does not belong to you, then the forced removal of human beings, the stripping of identity, the separation of families, and the exploitation of generations must be understood for what it was.

It was theft in its most complete form. It was theft of body, of name, of language, of land, of lineage, of faith, and of future. The very elements they use to define a nation were taken from my ancestors.

That reality does not sit comfortably within their framework, and it is often avoided. The argument begins to resemble a desire to return to an earlier order while denying the full truth of how that order was established. The claim that the nation belongs to those who built it cannot stand without acknowledging who labored, who was forced, and who paid the cost.

An argument that treats immigration as a moral violation while softening the reality of slavery does not hold. It applies judgment selectively. It names one form of taking while minimizing another that was far more expansive and far more destructive.

That is not a theology of nationhood grounded in truth. It is a framework built on selective memory.

A Man Arguing Against His Own Existence

There is one more thing worth saying before moving to the answer. Calvin Robinson, sitting at that table, is himself of mixed English and Jamaican heritage. By the standard the three men are arguing for, he would not be considered fully English under their own framework. Race is biology, they said. Blood and lineage define a nation, they said. A man of partial Caribbean descent does not fit that picture cleanly. The fact that Robinson sits comfortably defending an argument that, taken to its logical end, would exclude him, is one of the strangest features of the whole conversation. It is also a reminder that ideology has a way of asking people to argue against their own existence.

In Part Three, I will answer them. Not with abstraction, but with my own lineage, and with the witness of Scripture itself.

Part Three

Land, Lineage, and the God Who Will Not Be Owned

An American Black Answer to Mendacity

There is a point where argument must give way to clarity.

The framework these men advanced attempts to define belonging through lineage, to anchor identity in ancestry, and to align nationhood with a particular vision of race and faith. It presents order as something that must be preserved through sameness and suggests that deviation from that sameness leads to decline.

That framework does not account for my existence.

I am an American Black woman. My lineage is not a matter of abstraction. It is tied to this land through generations of labor, displacement, survival, and faith. My ancestors did not arrive here by choice, yet their hands helped build what is now called America. Their presence is not incidental to this nation. It is foundational.

Land

My great-great-great grandfather married a Cherokee woman. That woman was not an immigrant. She was not a settler. She was born of the soil this nation now occupies. Her people walked this land before there was an America to call it America. That ancestry ties me to this place in a way no European descent can match. The Cherokee were here. They are part of who I am.

The men who argue that America belongs to them by lineage came here from somewhere else. England. Scotland. Ireland. Germany. The Netherlands. They came across an ocean to a land already inhabited, already named, already known by the people who had walked it for generations. By their own logic, the original claim belongs to those who were already here. By blood, I am also one of those people.

Lineage

My African ancestors did not come to this country. They were brought here. The first documented Africans arrived in the Virginia Colony in 1619. That is more than one hundred years before most European immigrant families set foot in America. Our roots and our ties were cut, just as the white man's roots and ties were cut when he left Europe. We became loyal to this land because this land became the only land we had. Africa was severed from us. America became us.

I can trace my legacy to a family that came out of slavery and built a community in Nacogdoches, Texas. That community exists today. I do not have to look at a photograph to prove it. I can go and stand on the ground where my people built. They did not migrate here. They were forced here, and then they built. That is American lineage. That is generational presence. That is the very thing these men say defines a nation, and I have it in two directions, by Native ancestry and by African ancestry, both rooted in this soil.

Labor

They want to talk about who built America. We should talk about it. The American Constitution was written by European men. The American economy was built on the backs of African slaves. Both things are true. Cotton became the largest export of the United States in the nineteenth century. That cotton was picked by the hands of slaves. The wealth that funded northern banks, southern plantations, and the broader American economy passed through the labor of people who received nothing for it. Parts of the United States Capitol and the White House were built using slave labor. That is a documented fact, not an opinion.

Black Americans have served in every major American war. The Revolutionary War. The War of 1812. The Civil War. The First World War. The Second World War. Korea. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. We have shed blood for a country that has not always been willing to shed its prejudice for us. That is loyalty by any measure these men claim to honor.

The God Who Will Not Be Owned

Christ does not belong to a nation. He does not belong to a race. He does not belong to a structure built by men. He is not preserved through lineage, nor is He confined to a people who claim proximity to Him.

He reveals Himself according to His own authority.

Scripture makes this plain. He spoke to those who were not expected to receive Him. He moved among those who were considered outside. He established a kingdom that did not follow the lines men had drawn.

Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well. Jews and Samaritans did not associate with one another. He crossed that boundary on purpose. He told her that God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth.

"God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth."

— John 4:24

Rahab was a prostitute, and she is in the lineage of Christ. Ruth was a Moabite, and she is in the lineage of Christ. The Roman centurion was an outsider, and Jesus said He had not found such great faith in all of Israel. The Ethiopian eunuch was the first recorded African convert in the book of Acts, baptized on a road in the desert by a Spirit-led evangelist. Naaman the Syrian was healed when the lepers of Israel were not. This is not a modern invention. This is the original pattern.

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

— Galatians 3:28

Paul wrote that in the first century. He was not a liberal theologian. He was a former Pharisee writing under inspiration to a young church trying to figure out whether Gentiles needed to become Jewish in order to be Christian. His answer was no. His answer remains no. Ethnicity does not determine standing before God. Status does not determine standing before God. National identity does not determine standing before God. Faith does.

"After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb."

— Revelation 7:9

That is the final vision. Every nation. Every tribe. Every people. Every language. Not one race elevated above the others. Not one ethnic group designated as the true heirs. The throne room of God is the most diverse gathering in all of Scripture. Anyone who tells you that Christianity requires racial uniformity has not read the last chapter of the book they claim to follow.

The Retraction

The attempt to bind Christ to national identity reverses the pattern Scripture establishes. It takes what is not owned and presents it as possession. It takes what is given and reshapes it into something to be defended. It replaces revelation with structure and substitutes identity for truth.

That movement is not preservation. It is distortion.

What we are witnessing in this country is a retraction. There were ancestors, men and women, who thought they were better. They killed. They robbed. They raped. They stoned. They lied. For centuries, they pretended to be something they were not. Now that some of that has been corrected, even partially, there is a movement to go back. They want to relive a time when they were foul and called it good, because in their minds they hold an image that is a lie. It is a false image. It is mendacity.

Mendacity does not always appear as an obvious falsehood. It often presents itself as conviction, as order, as clarity. It speaks with confidence and appeals to history, to tradition, and to authority. Over time, it becomes familiar enough to be accepted.

But it does not stand when examined.

Truth does not depend on who claims it. It does not shift with identity, and it does not remain confined to the structures built around it. It stands on its own.

They claim Christ. They cannot have Him on those terms. Christ belongs to Himself, and through His own choosing, He gives Himself to all who come in spirit and in truth. The Samaritan woman knew it. Ruth knew it. Rahab knew it. The Ethiopian on the desert road knew it. My ancestors, who took a faith that was used against them and reshaped it into a faith that set them free, knew it.

I know it too.

No man is the representative of Jesus Christ except Jesus Christ Himself. No nation is the inheritor of Jesus Christ except every nation, together, before the throne. No race is the bearer of Jesus Christ except the human race, made in His image, redeemed by His blood.

The whitewashed tomb is beautiful on the outside. Inside, it is full of dead men's bones. We have seen the outside long enough. It is time to call what is inside by its name.

Mendacity.

Jacqueline Session Ausby

DahTruth.com  |  DAHTRUTH, LLC

The Shed and the Line: What Justice Jackson Sees in One Place and Refuses to See in Another

📖 “And it came to pass, when Jezebel heard that Naboth was stoned, and was dead, that Jezebel said to Ahab, Arise, take possession of the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite… So Ahab arose to go down to the vineyard of Naboth… to take possession of it.” 1 Kings 21:15–16

The Supreme Court of the United States has been more publicly active in the last few years than at any point I can remember in my lifetime. Live-streamed oral arguments have pulled the Court into the daily life of ordinary Americans in ways that used to be reserved for lawyers and law students. The justices themselves have stepped out from behind the bench. Over the last few years, Justice Samuel Alito sat for an extended interview on the Hoover Institution's Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson. Justice Amy Coney Barrett sat for her own episode of the same program to discuss her new book. Last week, she participated in a Q&A at her alma mater, Rhodes College. Justice Sonia Sotomayor made remarks at the University of Kansas School of Law about a colleague's immigration concurrence, then this week issued a rare public apology for those remarks. Justice Brett Kavanaugh has appeared on joint panels with other judges. Justice Clarence Thomas has been on the speaking circuit. This past week, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson delivered the James A. Thomas Lecture at Yale Law School.

It was notable that the two American Black justices on the Court both stepped before the American public in recent weeks to address the issues facing this country. Justice Thomas offered a broad view of how ideology shapes American identity. Progressivism has infiltrated the American Black community, and its impact is obviously devastating. It does not represent American values. It threatens the very system on which American life is built.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson used her platform to speak on process. The process of the shadow docket, the unfairness it creates for those waiting in line to be heard by the Supreme Court, the pressure it places on the schedules of the justices themselves, and the way it strips power from the lower courts.

“The concern is that emergency relief can be granted without a true showing of urgency and without the careful balancing that equity requires, allowing courts to effectively decide outcomes before full consideration of the merits.”

— ⚖️ Ketanji Brown Jackson (Yale Framing)

Her lecture was titled "Equity and Exigency: A First-Principles Solution for the Supreme Court's Emergency Docket." That title carries the whole argument inside it. Equity is the old common-law principle that fairness, not just rigid rule-following, must guide a court when extraordinary relief is requested. Exigency is the requirement that something genuinely urgent must be at stake before a court bypasses its ordinary process. Jackson's claim is that the modern Supreme Court has lost its grip on both. It grants emergency relief without showing real urgency, and it does so without the equitable balancing that has historically constrained such relief. To make the case, she walked her audience through a scenario she called the shed.

Two neighbors dispute ownership of a backyard shed. Neighbor A wants to tear it down. He says it does not belong on his property. Neighbor B disagrees and goes to court asking for a preliminary injunction to keep the shed standing while the question of ownership is decided. The lower court grants the injunction. Neighbor A is impatient. He runs to the appeals court asking for a stay so the demolition can proceed right now, before the merits are ever heard.

Jackson's point is simple. If the appeals court grants that stay, the shed comes down. The case becomes meaningless. Whoever actually owned it loses, because the thing in dispute no longer exists. Emergency procedure has been used to lock in a permanent outcome before anyone decided who was right. There was no true exigency. There was no equitable balancing. There was only the appearance of urgency and the reality of finality.

She told the Yale audience that this is what the shadow docket has become. Savvy parties know how to skip the line, get to the Supreme Court fast, and walk out with a result before a case is ever fully heard. Average people stuck in normal court proceedings cannot do this. The line, she said, is no longer fair.

She is right about that to a certain extent. It is my belief that certain dockets should proceed when the President of the United States deems a matter urgent, or in capital cases where a person's life hangs in the balance. With that said, I wonder whether she has sat with her own argument long enough to see where else it applies.

*

Let me say plainly what this is not. I am not making an apples to apples argument. In her argument, two neighbors are arguing over a shed, and the dispute is about ownership of a thing. The same argument, however, can be applied to the birthright citizenship case Trump v. Barbara, in which Jackson took the opposite position. An American citizen and an illegal immigrant are not arguing over the same thing. The citizen already holds citizenship. The immigrant is not claiming the citizen's status. The shed analogy, on its own terms, does not map onto the border.

What it does do, if we are honest, is point us toward the deeper mechanism Jackson refuses to name. Her concern is that emergency procedure can lock in permanent outcomes before the merits are reached. That concern, taken seriously, applies with even greater force to what birthright citizenship has become at the southern border.

Here is the truer picture. A person enters the United States without legal authorization. They have a child on American soil. That child, under the current reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, becomes an American citizen at the moment of first breath. The child cannot be removed. The parents become very difficult to remove, because removing them now means separating an American citizen from their family. The unlawful entry, which should have been a question for the courts, has produced a fact that no court can undo. The merits never had to be reached. Biology beat procedure to the finish line.

This is not Neighbor A asking to tear down a shed. This is Neighbor A planting a tree whose roots grow under Neighbor B's foundation, so that even if a future court rules Neighbor A had no right to be on the property, the tree cannot be removed without taking the house down with it. The tether is permanent. That is the design.

*

The cost of that tether falls on American citizens, and it is not abstract. It is structural and it is daily.

American citizens pay the taxes that fund the schools, hospitals, emergency rooms, and public services that absorb the cost of the tether. American citizens wait in immigration lines behind families who used the tether to leapfrog the legal process. American citizens watch their wages stagnate in the trades and service industries most exposed to a labor pool that arrived outside the law. American Black citizens, in particular, sit at the bottom of every economic indicator that immigration policy is supposed to consider, and they are routinely told their concerns matter less than the concerns of those who came illegally. The vote of an American citizen is gradually diluted in districts whose population was never legally adjudicated. None of this is the citizen claiming ownership of someone else's child. It is the citizen pointing out that a permanent change to the body politic is happening through a procedural shortcut that nobody is allowed to question without being called cruel.

This is the exact mechanism Jackson denounced at Yale, and the same vocabulary applies. Where is the exigency? There was no genuine emergency that required the unlawful entry to happen before the legal process. Where is the equity? The balance of harms falls heavily on the citizen who follows the rules and lightly on the one who does not. Procedural delay, used by parties who know how the system works, locks in an outcome before the merits are heard. She called it corrosive when the federal government does it through the Supreme Court. She does not call it anything when individuals do it through unlawful entry plus a child born on American soil. The mechanism is the same. The line-jumping is the same. The displacement of average people who tried to follow the rules is the same. The only difference is who pays the price, and who Jackson is willing to see paying it.

*

Although in the United States there is a separation of church and state, the principle at issue here is not foreign to Scripture. The idea that an outcome can be secured before the merits are fully heard appears in the book of 1 Kings.

Naboth owned a vineyard that King Ahab coveted. Naboth refused to give up what belonged to him. Instead of allowing the matter to rest or be resolved through a just process, Queen Jezebel arranged a proceeding that carried the appearance of law but lacked truth at its core. False witnesses were brought forward. Accusations were made. Judgment was carried out with urgency. Naboth was put to death, and only then did Ahab take possession of the vineyard.

The outcome was secured before truth was allowed to speak. By the time the matter could have been examined, it no longer mattered. The vineyard had already changed hands. The process had produced a permanent result before the merits were ever established.

Underneath every proceeding that produces an outcome before the merits are heard, there is a covetousness that cannot wait for a lawful answer.

This same principle carries forward into the present. The focus here is on unlawful entry that takes place outside the legal framework and produces a lasting outcome before the courts can fully address the underlying questions. When entry occurs outside the process and a permanent condition takes hold before full adjudication, the sequence is reversed. What should follow the judgment begins to precede it.

In many cases, entry into the United States outside the legal process is not incidental. Some cross through organized smuggling networks and cartels that exist precisely to move people across the border outside the law. Others enter lawfully on a visa and simply remain after it expires, turning legal entry into unlawful presence by the passage of time. Still others present themselves at the border and file a claim designed to secure a foothold inside the country while adjudication drags on for years. The pathways differ. The mechanism is the same. When entry, status, or presence is established outside the legal framework, and a permanent outcome follows before the courts ever reach the merits, the process has already been overtaken. The result begins to precede the judgment.

*

Jackson made a second point at Yale that deserves attention. She said the legitimacy of any process depends on equal access to it. She worried that the Supreme Court's modern emergency docket creates a two-track system where well-positioned parties get faster relief while ordinary litigants wait. That is a fairness argument, and it is a serious one.

Apply it honestly. The person who waits in their home country for a legal visa, fills out the forms, pays the fees, and stands in a line that can stretch for a decade or longer is the ordinary litigant. The person who crosses unlawfully and files a claim from inside the country is the savvy party who knows the system. One is following the rules. The other is using the gaps in the rules to get a faster, better outcome. By Jackson's own Yale framework, that is precisely the kind of unequal access that erodes public trust in the law.

She cannot see this. Or she will not.

*

The shadow docket itself is not new. It has existed as procedural infrastructure for as long as the modern Court has existed. Every administration in living memory has used it. Bush used it sparingly. Obama used it sparingly. Biden used it more. The current administration uses it the most by a wide margin. What is also true is that the Trump administration has faced more resistance from lower courts than any administration in recent memory, because its policies do not align with the left-leaning ideology that has long dominated elite institutions, academia, and large portions of the federal bench. Trump's policies often run against that ideological majority and in favor of ordinary Americans whose concerns have been treated as minority concerns for decades. That last fact is what changed Jackson's tone. The procedure did not change. The political direction of the rulings changed. She had little to say about the shadow docket when its outcomes ran her way. She has a great deal to say about it now.

That is the part worth naming plainly. This is presented as a structural critique of process. It functions as a political argument about outcomes. A truly principled fairness argument would apply itself wherever the same mechanism appears. It would not stop at the courthouse door of one issue and refuse to walk across the street to another.

If the shed cannot be torn down before the court rules, then the tree cannot be planted before the court rules either. Either the line matters or it does not. Either ordinary citizens deserve protection from those who know how to skip ahead, or they do not. The principle does not get to be selective.

Justice Jackson's shed is a good story. It deserves to be told all the way through, including the part where the roots reach the foundation, and including the part where Naboth's vineyard was taken before truth was ever allowed to speak.

Jacqueline Session Ausby

DahTruth.com  |  DAHTRUTH, LLC

Please Don't Shoot the Messenger

“I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” — Genesis 3:16 (KJV)

I want to begin with an apology. What I am about to say will offend some people, and I am genuinely sorry for that. I am not speaking about all women. I am not dismissing the very real pain of those who have been truly victimized. Sexual violence is real and it is serious and those who have suffered it deserve justice and compassion without question.

What I cannot do is sit quietly and accept every media narrative without applying the same scrutiny I apply to everything else. I have never been able to do that. DahTruth was built on the conviction that truth matters even when it is uncomfortable, and this week the truth is very uncomfortable indeed. So please do not shoot the messenger. Just hear what I have to say.

What I also believe, and what I have watched play out repeatedly, is that the media is not simply reacting to pressure. It is often making deliberate choices about which stories to elevate and when to elevate them. There is a selectiveness to what is amplified and what is ignored. There are moments when a public figure is no longer protected, when the culture has decided they are no longer worthy of defense, and that is when the full weight of exposure is allowed to fall. That does not mean every accusation is false. But it does mean we have to question whether the timing, the attention, and the narrative are being driven by truth, or by a decision that it is time for that person to fall.

Before I go any further I want to tell you where I am standing when I say what I am about to say.

I am an American Black woman. And I have spent my entire life watching American Black men be accused, convicted, and destroyed by allegations that the broader culture accepted without question and the legal system processed without mercy. That history lives in me the way it lives in anyone who grew up knowing the names and knowing what those names cost.

Emmett Till was fourteen years old. A child. Murdered in Mississippi in 1955 over an alleged interaction with a white woman that decades later she admitted she had fabricated. He did not live long enough to defend himself. There was no trial that mattered. There was only a casket and a mother who insisted the world see what had been done to her son. Mamie Till made sure we looked. We should never stop looking.

Harper Lee gave us To Kill a Mockingbird as fiction but the story it told was not fictional to anyone in the American Black community. Tom Robinson was a composite of every Black man who had ever been accused by a white woman and handed to a system that had already decided the outcome before the first word of testimony was spoken. The accusation was the conviction. That was not literature. That was life.

In my own generation I watched it continue in different forms. Tupac Shakur faced rape charges that were later dropped and yet he was convicted of sexual assault and served time. Mike Tyson was convicted of rape and most people in my community did not believe those accusations reflected the full truth of what happened. Bill Cosby spent years as America's beloved father figure before allegations surfaced, accumulated, and ultimately resulted in a conviction tied to a relationship that by any honest account had elements of consent woven through it. Jay Z has faced allegations in recent years that have not held up. Shannon Sharpe has faced accusations that the facts have not supported.

I am not saying powerful American Black men are incapable of wrongdoing. They are not. R. Kelly is a man whose crimes against young women, many of them American Black girls, were known and tolerated by an industry that chose profit over protection for decades. He is guilty and the record bears that out. Diddy is a more complicated figure in my mind. I see him less as a predator in the traditional sense and more as a man who built and fed an entire culture of excess and illicit behavior, the way Hugh Hefner did, where the line between willing participation and exploitation was deliberately kept invisible. That culture consumed people. Whether it consumed them with or without their consent is a question the courts will have to sort through. What is not a question is that he curated it and called it a lifestyle.

What I am saying is that I have watched this weapon used against American Black men my entire life with a precision and a cultural willingness that left no room for doubt or scrutiny. The accusation arrived and the verdict followed. That history made me a skeptic. Not a blind one. A historically informed one.

Now I look at the current moment and I see more white men facing these allegations publicly than at any point in my lifetime. Part of me understands the cynical reading of that. That finally the machinery is turning in a direction it avoided for centuries. That powerful white men are being held to a standard that American Black men never had the protection to hide behind.

But I do not think that is the whole truth either.

Because the pattern I am describing, the willing transaction rewritten as victimhood, the accusation deployed when the arrangement stops serving one party, the media narrative that accepts one version of events without asking the obvious questions, that pattern does not belong to any race. It belongs to human nature. It has always been there. It was just aimed more precisely at some people than others for most of American history.

What I want is the same standard applied in every room and in every direction. The same scrutiny. The same questions. The same insistence that the whole truth be told regardless of who is telling it and who it is being told about. That is not cynicism. That is just honesty. And honesty is the only place I know how to start.

It started in a garden.

The serpent did not force Eve. He enticed her. He offered her something she wanted, knowledge, elevation, the ability to know what God knows, and she looked at it, desired it, and reached out and took it. Adam ate too. Both were accountable. But the transaction began with a desire and a deliberate choice. Nobody dragged Eve to that tree. She went because she wanted what was on it.

And God did not look the other way. He held Adam to a higher standard because Adam carried a higher charge. The ground that had never needed to be tilled before now required his labor for the rest of his life. The consequence was real and it was lasting. That is the standard men in positions of power and trust are still meant to be held to. When you carry authority you carry accountability. There is no separating the two.

That dynamic did not end in the garden. It has followed humanity through every generation, through every palace and every political chamber and every back room where power and desire have found each other. There is a particular kind of woman, and I want to be clear that I am speaking about a particular kind and not all women, who understands what she has and uses it deliberately to get what she cannot obtain through skill or merit alone. She makes the transaction with open eyes. She takes what is offered. And history is full of her.

The problem we are living with today is not that this woman exists. She has always existed. The problem is that she has discovered she can rewrite the terms of the transaction after the fact. And a media culture desperate for a particular narrative will help her do it.

Let us go back to Warren G. Harding.

Harding, America’s 29th President and former US Senator.  He was a weak and scandalous man who spent much of his political life entangled with women who were not his wife. Two of those women deserve particular attention here because their stories illuminate something the current moment refuses to see clearly.

Carrie Fulton Phillips was a close family friend of Harding family.  From their hometown of Marion, Ohio. She and Harding carried on an intense affair for years, exchanging letters that left no question about the nature of their relationship. But Carrie was not simply a woman swept up in a powerful man's orbit. She was calculating. When Harding was moving toward a Senate vote on declaring war against Germany, Carrie threatened to expose the affair unless he voted no. She attempted to use her intimate access to a United States Senator to influence American foreign policy. That is not a woman who did not know what she was doing. That is a woman who understood exactly what she had and exactly how far she was willing to take it.

The Republican Party's response tells you everything you need to know about how power protects itself. They did not expose her. They paid her. They arranged for Carrie and her husband to be sent to Japan so the whole matter could be buried before it reached the public. The cover ran all the way to the party level.

Nan Britton, another family friend came next.  She was younger and perhaps more sympathetic in the way that lovesick people often are. She was an admirer from Marion who became deeply entangled with Harding in a relationship that produced a child. What began in cheap motels eventually moved to the White House itself, where Harding would spend stolen time with Nan, not in a bedroom but in a closet.  A black space reserved for coats and shoes became the place they carried out an affair. Nan went inside that closet willingly. She accepted monthly support payments for years. When Harding died in 1923 and the payments stopped, she told the story publicly in her 1927 book, The President's Daughter. DNA testing in 2015 confirmed that Harding was indeed the father of her daughter Elizabeth Ann.

Here is what Nan Britton did not do. She did not walk out of that closet and claim she had no idea what she was walking into. She told her story honestly, including her own role in it. Whatever her motivations, she did not reframe herself as an innocent victim of a predator. She told the truth about a willing relationship between two people who both knew what they were doing.

Harding died in August of 1923 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The circumstances of his death have never been fully resolved. Florence moved quickly. She dismissed the doctors, relied on a single physician, and had his body embalmed immediately after his passing. She refused an autopsy. There are those who have suggested she may have played a role in his death, that a woman who had spent years burning letters and protecting a man who never protected her may have finally reached the end of what she was willing to endure. We will never know. Florence made sure of that.

Florence Harding made no transaction. She played no game. She simply loved a man who was not worthy of it and paid a price she never earned. She attempted to burn all his letters and bury his secrets, giving everything she had to preserving the image of a man who had never once deserved her loyalty. She is the one in that story whose suffering was real and undeserved and whose name history has largely overlooked in favor of the scandals that surrounded her. She is Florence Harding in every generation. And there is one in every story.

Now let us come forward to today.

Allegations have surfaced against Eric Swalwell, the California congressman currently running for governor. Women have come forward with accounts of sexual misconduct. I want to be careful here because allegations are allegations and legal determinations have not been made. I am not saying what happened or did not happen in those rooms.

What I am saying is that the details being reported publicly raise questions that honest people are allowed to ask. Accounts describing voluntary contact on more than one occasion, text messages running in both directions, and no contemporaneous report of assault deserve scrutiny. Going to a hotel room does not mean a woman consented to sex. That is true and it matters. What is equally true is that returning voluntarily to the same situation a second time, maintaining ongoing contact, and only raising the alarm when the story becomes public, at a particular time, raises legitimate questions about the narrative being presented.

Imagine if Nan Britton had walked out of that White House closet and said she had no idea what she was going in there for. Nobody would have believed her. Because context matters. Choices matter. And the whole truth matters, not just the part that serves the story being told.

There is an irony in the Swalwell situation that should not go unnoticed. This is a man who called loudly and publicly for the release of the Epstein files. He positioned himself as someone who believed in exposure and accountability and the public's right to know what powerful men had done in private rooms. The chickens have now come home to roost. The same standard he applied to others is being applied to him. He cannot play hide the ball with his own record while demanding transparency from everyone else. That is not how accountability works. That is not how truth works.

He has been called to resign his seat in the House and to step back from his run for governor. As of this writing he has admitted nothing and resigned nothing. He is carrying his cross publicly, insisting on his innocence while the weight of the allegations presses down on his political future. Whether he survives it remains to be seen. But Adam did not escape the garden simply by denying he had eaten the apple. The juices were dripping his lips.

The ones I think about most in all these stories are the wives. The women at home who made no transaction, sent no texts, walked into no hotel rooms, and woke up one morning to find their lives altered by choices they never made. They are not in the headlines. They are not telling their stories on camera. They are simply living with the wreckage.  Florence Harding on repeat.  Faithful to a fault. And paying the highest price of anyone involved.

The serpent is still in the garden.

Lucifer has just learned to dress differently depending on the decade. The offer is the same. The desire is the same. The choice is the same. And the aftermath, the cover, the spin, the selective outrage, the media performance, the wife sitting quietly at home, that is the same too.

Men in power are still called to a higher standard. That part has never changed. What has changed is that we have lost the willingness to tell the whole truth. We pick the parts that serve us and call it justice. We rewrite our own choices and call it survival. We silence the questions that do not fit the story and call it compassion.

But truth does not disappear because we stop looking at it. It waits. And eventually, the way it always has, it finds its way into the light.

Please don't shoot the messenger.

The Rise of Lazarus

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.” Dostoevsky, From Crime and Punishment

We are living in a world that has lost its grip on truth. Not because truth has disappeared, but because we have decided we no longer need it the way we once did. What has replaced it is performance. What people present and construct for the eyes of others has become the new currency of reality. And beneath all of that performance is deception, sometimes deliberate, sometimes so deeply practiced that the person performing it can no longer tell the difference between what is real and what they have built.

We rely on one another's version of truth as though opinion were the same as fact and feeling were the same as foundation. Truth has been stretched and bent and reshaped so many times that it no longer carries the weight it was meant to carry. It has become something people claim rather than something people discover.

But what I have come to understand is that real truth does not disappear simply because we ignore it. It waits. And it waits. It sits beneath the noise and the performance and the carefully constructed versions of reality that we present to the world and to ourselves. And then it breaks through. When it does, there is no argument. There is no debate. It rises. It reverberates. It resonates at a level that goes deeper than anything that can be reasoned away. You do not decide to receive it. You recognize it. Something in you that was already awake to it finally has the language it has been waiting for.

That is what happened to me reading Crime and Punishment.

Crime and Punishment is a novel about a murder. But it is really a novel about a man who decided he could define truth for himself and live inside that definition without consequence.

Raskolnikov is the son of a deceased father, raised by a poor mother with a beautiful and devoted sister named Dunya. He leaves home to attend university but by the time we meet him he has already withdrawn. He has dropped out and is living in near isolation, cut off from society and from any real sense of purpose or direction. There is a heaviness to him, a quiet despair that sits beneath everything.

What stirs him is not ambition but desperation. He learns that his sister Dunya is preparing to marry a man nearly twice her age. It is not a marriage built on love. It is a sacrifice. She is willing to give herself over to a life she does not want in order to relieve the burden on her mother and her brother. Raskolnikov understands exactly what she is doing. And that knowledge does not humble him. It pushes him toward a darker kind of thinking.

He turns his attention to an old pawnbroker in the city, a woman who lends money to the poor at high interest, keeps what is given to her when people cannot repay, and hoards everything she collects. Raskolnikov convinces himself that her life holds little value. That her death would go unnoticed. That removing her from the world could even be justified as a kind of service.

He builds that reasoning piece by piece until it feels undeniable to him. By the time he is finished the act no longer appears as murder. It appears as something almost necessary. And that is the most dangerous place a human mind can arrive at, the place where sin has been reasoned into righteousness.

I will not walk through every detail of what happens after Raskolnikov commits the murder. What I will say is that the weight of what he has done does not leave him. It presses in. It follows him. And in the middle of his unraveling he finds his way to a young woman named Sonya.

Where Raskolnikov is divided, Sonya is grounded. Where he has built his life on reasoning and pride, she has built hers on faith. Sonya is a believer in the Word of God despite the life she has been forced into. She is a young woman who has sold her body to support her family, reduced to the lowest place that society could put her. And yet she is the one who carries truth. Not because she is powerful, educated, or recognized by the world. But because she knows what it means to suffer and remain faithful anyway.

Together they are brought face to face with what they have each done and what they have each endured. And in one of the most powerful moments in all of literature, Raskolnikov asks Sonya to read to him. He asks her to read the story of Lazarus.

She reads of a man who had been dead. Not sick. Not weakened. Dead. And Christ called him out of that death by name. He did not argue Lazarus back to life. He did not reason with him. He called him and the dead man rose.

“Lazarus, come forth.”

— John 11:43

That moment in the novel is not just a scene. It is the entire point. Because both Raskolnikov and Sonya are sitting in their own kind of death. He in his guilt and his constructed truth. She in her suffering and her sacrifice. And the story of Lazarus holds up a mirror to both of them that neither can look away from.

Truth had been waiting. And in that room it finally broke through.

Sonya does not excuse what Raskolnikov has done. She does not soften it or help him manage it. She tells him plainly that he must confess. That he must bear the weight of what he has done. That carrying his cross is not punishment alone but the road back to life.

And so they suffer.

Raskolnikov is sentenced to Siberia. Sonya follows him into that exile. She does not abandon him in his guilt. And in the midst of punishment and shame and the long road of consequence, something neither of them could have manufactured on their own begins to take place. Redemption moves in quietly the way it always does, not announced, not performed, but real.

By the end of Crime and Punishment we do not simply witness justice. We witness resurrection. Two souls bound together not by comfort or ease but by suffering. And standing in the middle of that suffering is Christ himself. Not distant. Not abstract. Present and active, calling two dead people back into life the same way he called Lazarus from the grave.

This is what the world has forgotten.

We have been told that the road to life runs through wealth and prosperity and recognition and power. That happiness is the destination and comfort is the sign that you have arrived. But Crime and Punishment tells a different story. And so does the Gospel.

The road to truth is narrow. It often runs directly through suffering. It requires that everything you have constructed about yourself and about reality be stripped away until what remains is only what is real. That process is not comfortable. It is not celebrated by the world. But it is the only road that leads anywhere worth going.

Raskolnikov had to lose everything he believed about himself before truth could reach him. Sonya had already lost everything the world valued and found that truth was still standing when everything else was gone.

That is the hope.

Not that suffering will be avoided. But that suffering is not the end. That Christ still calls. That no matter how deep the grave clothes have wrapped themselves around you, the voice that called Lazarus is still speaking. And when it reaches you, and it will reach you, there is no argument. It rises and settles in a way that cannot be reasoned away.

And you will know it is true.

A Revelation on Resurrection Sunday: Take up your bed and follow Christ

“If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.” Luke 9:23

My Dear Fellow Preachers, Teachers, and Fellow Worshippers,

It is Resurrection Sunday morning and it is raining here in New Jersey. The kind of soft, quiet rain that does not demand your attention but simply surrounds you. Outside my window I can see yellow marigolds, that stubborn, faithful yellow that blooms even when the sky is grey. And somewhere in the air is the fragrance of bell flowers, that clean and tender scent that arrives with spring as if it were its own announcement.

It is, without question, the season of resurrection. But I want us to sit with that word today and ask ourselves honestly: whose resurrection are we actually preaching? Because from where I am sitting, and from what I have been hearing, there are many resurrections on offer this spring. The resurrection of your finances. The resurrection of your career. The resurrection of your breakthrough season. And all of them, without exception, carry a price tag. On this morning when we ought to be standing in awe of an empty tomb, too many pulpits are occupied with a far more profitable miracle. And too many of us, preachers, teachers, and worshippers alike, have grown so accustomed to it that we no longer hear the difference.

The Season of the Refund

It is no secret that February and March have become the months of the federal tax refund. And it has become tradition in our community for ministers to know exactly when those deposits land. There is no greater season for what I will call spiritual financial manipulation than this one right here. Give a thousand and expect it returned threefold. Sow your seed in this ministry and watch your harvest come. Give your last and God will make a way. Some have even specified amounts. Some have promised triplets, three blessings for one offering. And the faithful, the struggling, the genuinely believing, reach into wallets already stretched thin and give because a man standing behind a pulpit told them God said so.

No man of God has the authority to make that promise. None. What is being sold in these spaces is not faith. It is fear dressed up as generosity, and it is keeping our people in bondage.

Fiddler on the Roof: A Story About God's Faithfulness When Everything Is Taken

One of my favorite films of all time is Fiddler on the Roof. Most people speak of it as a story about tradition, and it is. But before we get to Tevye's daughters, I want us to understand the full weight of the world in which this family lived. These were Jews living beyond the Pale of Settlement in Tsarist Russia, a people who had been tolerated just barely, confined to the margins of a society that did not want them, governed by a power that could revoke their existence at any moment. They were not simply people of faith living in difficult times. They were a people perpetually at the mercy of a government that viewed them as a problem to be managed. And in the end, the Russian government forced them out. Out of their homes. Out of their village. Out of everything they had ever known.

What Fiddler on the Roof shows us, underneath all of the singing and the tradition and Tevye's conversations with God, is a portrait of a people carrying their faith into displacement. And when the order finally came to leave Anatevka, Tevye's family did exactly what the gospel of Christ calls every one of us to do. They took up their beds. And they followed. They did not know where they were going with certainty. They did not know if they would ever see one another again. But in that moment, standing at the edge of everything familiar, they picked up what little they had and walked into the unknown. That is not just the story of a musical. That is the story of faith.

Take up your bed and follow Me. Jesus did not promise comfort. He did not promise that the road ahead would look familiar. He promised presence. He promised that the One calling you into the unknown would be with you in it. The tradition in Fiddler on the Roof was never the point. It was the container. The real story is whether the God inside the container is still being trusted when the container breaks.

The Daughters: One Degree at a Time

Now let us talk about Tzeitel, Hodel, and Chava, Tevye's three eldest daughters, and what each of them reveals about the nature of drift.

Tzeitel, the eldest, refuses the match her father arranged with the well-off butcher Lazar Wolf. She has already made a pledge to her childhood friend Motel, a poor tailor, and she pleads her own case before her father. Tevye wrestles with it, argues with himself, argues with God, and ultimately bends. He gives his blessing to a marriage born of love rather than arrangement. One degree from tradition.

Hodel falls in love with Perchik, a radical young man who wants to challenge the Russian government. He is eventually arrested and sent to Siberia. And Hodel, rather than accepting a safe arrangement at home, chooses to follow the man she loves into exile. On a snowtorn morning, when the wind was at its most fierce, she says goodbye to her father at a train station, not knowing when or whether she will see him again. Tevye bends again, though it costs him something. Another degree from tradition.

Then comes Chava, the third daughter, and this time Tevye cannot bend. Chava falls in love with Fyedka, a young Russian man, and chooses to marry him outside the faith entirely. Tevye disowns her. The tradition breaks. The family fractures. What restores them in the end is not the tradition returning to its original form but grace arriving through the most unlikely person. Fyedka, Chava's Russian husband, leaves Russia in protest over the government's persecution of the Jews, and through that act of conscience the family finds a way back to one another. But the tradition is permanently altered.

Each daughter pulled away from where they started by just one degree. Each step seemed reasonable in the moment. Each felt like love. And yet the cumulative distance from where Tevye began became impossible to ignore. As I watched Tevye and his daughters, I thought about my own youngest son and his struggle in this life. I understand his plight in a way that only a mother can. My prayer on this Resurrection Sunday morning is that God raises his faith and keeps him strong, and that He gives my son the opportunity to see clearly the difference between tradition and the love of God. Because tradition can shift and crack and fall away entirely. But the love of God does not move. This is the story of the American Black Church, and it is the story of every family that has ever watched someone they love drift one degree at a time from the truth that was meant to hold them.

How the Black Church Lost Its Way

When I grew up, fornication was addressed from the pulpit. Pregnancy outside of marriage was addressed. Living together without the covenant of marriage was addressed. Not because the church was cruel, but because the church understood what was at stake. That standard held the community together even in its imperfection, because we knew the difference between what God called holy and what the culture called convenient.

Then drugs entered our community. Then AIDS. Then mass incarceration. And under the crushing weight of that devastation, the conversations quietly shifted. One degree at a time. The preaching on holiness became labeled as judgmental. The call to repentance was reframed as harmful. The naming of sin became something to be avoided in the interest of being welcoming. And slowly, not all at once, not in a single dramatic break, but one small surrender at a time, the Black Church stopped having those conversations.

The trouble is that we still believe we are holding tradition. We still believe we are preaching the same gospel. We still believe we are the pillar and ground of truth. But the truth is demonstrating itself right in front of us, and too many of us are laughing at what we see rather than confronting it.

We Are Laughing at Our Own Chains

I recently watched a self-proclaimed minister on social media explain his approach to ministry. He stated openly that he does not discuss sin. He said he talks about love and doing no harm because addressing sin might cause harm, and it simply does not resonate with him. As I listened, I recognized something in that voice. Not just theological error. Something older and more dangerous than that. It was the quiet deception that has kept the Black Church in spiritual bondage for generations, the idea that love and truth can be separated, that you can genuinely care for someone while refusing to tell them the truth about where they are headed.

You cannot. A physician who will not diagnose disease because the diagnosis is painful is not compassionate. He is negligent. A minister who will not address sin because the congregation might leave is not feeding the sheep. He is leaving them to wander without a shepherd.

The gospel begins with repentance. John the Baptist understood this at the cost of his life. He stood before the most powerful people of his day and called out sin by name. He named the corruption of Herod Antipas directly, declared openly that it was not lawful for him to have his brother's wife, and he did not lower his voice to make the powerful more comfortable. He was imprisoned for it. And then, at the whim of a dancing girl and a foolish oath made at a birthday party, John the Baptist was beheaded. His head was brought on a platter to a woman who wanted him silenced. That is what preaching truth into the halls of power cost him. John did not preach a comfortable gospel. Jesus did not preach a comfortable gospel. The apostles did not preach a comfortable gospel. They preached repentance. They preached holiness. They preached the cost of sin and the grace of God, and many of them paid for that preaching with their lives.

Many of today's generation of American Black preachers will not lose their heads for naming sin from the pulpit. They will not be imprisoned. They will not be exiled to Siberia. They may lose followers on social media. They may see their attendance drop. Someone may post a negative comment. And yet the message has been so thoroughly softened, so carefully managed, so relentlessly shaped around what the audience wants to hear, that we have ended up with ministers who cannot even say the word sin without apologizing for it. John the Baptist went to his grave before he would compromise the truth. What is our excuse?

When comedians create skits mocking the Black Church and we laugh, that laughter is a confession. It means the satire resonates. It means somewhere inside us we already know the truth about what has happened to us. We laugh at the prosperity preacher, at the performative worship, at the minister who sounds more like a motivational speaker than a servant of Christ. We laugh and then we go back to the same pew the following Sunday. That laughter is not freedom. That is what resignation sounds like.

The Resurrection Christ Actually Promised

Here is what I want us to remember on this rainy Sunday morning, with the marigolds outside and the fragrance of bell flowers in the air. The resurrection of Jesus Christ was not the beginning of a comfortable life for those who loved Him. The disciples were still hiding behind locked doors when the risen Christ appeared. The road to Emmaus was walked by two men whose hope had shattered. Mary Magdalene wept at an empty tomb before she understood what the emptiness meant. The resurrection did not remove suffering from the picture. It redeemed it.

Christ never once told His followers that life would be easy. He told them that in this world they would have tribulation. He told them to take up their cross daily. He told them that the servant is not greater than the master, and that if the world hated Him, it would hate them also. He told them that the path was narrow and that few would find it. These are not the words of a gospel that promises comfort in all things. These are the words of a Savior who walked through suffering Himself, who had no place to lay His own head, who sweat blood in a garden before facing the cross, and who rose on the third day not to hand out financial blessings but to conquer death itself.

Our tradition has slowly replaced that risen Christ with a more convenient one. A Christ who wants you to prosper financially. A Christ who asks very little of you. A Christ whose primary concern is that you are comfortable and affirmed. And in building that version of Christ, we have robbed our people of the very hope that carried a displaced Jewish family out of Anatevka and across the world. We have robbed them of the hope that held John the Baptist steady in a prison cell. We have robbed them of the anchor that scripture says is sure and steadfast, entering into the presence of God Himself behind the veil.

Sometimes your bed is not made in this life. Sometimes the bed God has prepared for you is made in heaven. And there is nothing weak or defeated about trusting that. It is the most radical act of faith a believer can demonstrate in a world that is constantly trying to sell you a cheaper substitute. The hope we carry is not the hope of a tax refund multiplied. It is the hope of a resurrection that changes everything, not just for a season, but for eternity.

Stay Close to His Word

Traditions will shift. They always have. Tzeitel, Hodel, and Chava each pulled away from what Tevye had built, one degree at a time, and the world that shaped their lives kept moving whether the family was ready or not. The Black Church has been doing the same thing, one small compromise at a time, while believing all along that it was standing firm.

But the Word of God does not shift. The gospel of Jesus Christ does not renegotiate its terms based on the cultural moment. What was sin in the days of John the Baptist is sin today. What holiness required of the early church it requires of us. And what resurrection meant on that first Sunday morning, when the stone was rolled away and death itself was defeated, it still means right now, on this rainy Resurrection Sunday in New Jersey, with the marigolds standing in the rain outside my window and the fragrance of bell flowers somewhere in the air.

My prayer this morning is for my son, that God raises his faith and keeps him strong and gives him eyes to see the difference between the shifting traditions of men and the unchanging love of God. But my prayer is also for the church. That we would stop performing and start repenting. That we would stop selling and start preaching. That we would stop laughing at our own decay and start returning to the gospel that was never ours to edit in the first place.

Tevye's family took up their beds and followed into the unknown, and God was faithful to them in the wilderness of displacement. Christ rose from the dead and walked among His grieving disciples, and God was faithful to them in the wilderness of fear. We are called to do the same. To take up what God has given us, to follow where He leads regardless of the comfort of the road, to stay close to His words even when every tradition around us is shifting, and to trust that the bed He has prepared for those who love Him is far greater than anything this season, or this culture, or this generation of prosperity preachers could ever offer.

He is risen. That still means everything.

Truth spoken in love may wound for a season.

But silence in the face of sin wounds for a lifetime.

And the hope of the resurrection was never meant to be sold.

It was meant to be lived.

“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.”

— Matthew 24:35

Jacqueline Session Ausby

Founder, DAHTRUTH, LLC  |  DahTruth.com

Rising Like Dracula, Afraid of the Cross

“I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid.” — Romans 11:1 (KJV)

On the Catholic Co-opting of Charlie Kirk, the Weaponizing of a Widow, and What Christ Is King Actually Means

To Catholic Worshippers and to Those Who Believe They Are Doing God's Work by Tearing Down the Dead,

I speak as a Bible-believing Protestant Christian who is paying attention. And what I am watching deserves to be named plainly.

Charlie Kirk was a Protestant. That is not a detail, it is the foundation of everything that follows. He was not a Catholic. He did not embrace the worship of Mary, the authority of priests as mediators between man and God, confession in a booth as the pathway to redemption, or any of the rituals that define Roman Catholic practice. He said so. He demonstrated it through the theology he defended publicly and through the ministry he supported. The fact that photographs exist of him attending Catholic services is not evidence of conversion or spiritual sympathy with Catholic doctrine. It is evidence that his wife, Erika Kirk, was raised Catholic. A husband attending a service with his wife is not a theological statement. It is what married people do.

Charlie Kirk is dead. He was shot and killed, and a man named Tyler Robinson is facing trial for that death. There is substantial evidence in that case. A weapon with fingerprints. Camera footage placing Robinson near the scene. A prosecution building its argument on documented facts. A jury will decide the outcome. That is how justice is supposed to work. You present evidence. You make your case. You let the facts lead.

And yet here we are watching something entirely different operate in the media space around his death. What we are watching is the use of a dead man's name and a grieving widow's image to build audiences, drive engagement, and advance a religious narrative that Charlie Kirk himself did not endorse while he was alive.

Figures like Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and others operating in their orbit have used the circumstances of Kirk's death as fuel. They have circulated speculation that Erika Kirk had involvement in her husband's death. There is no evidence for this. She was not present. There is no communication tying her to the act. There is no motive established. There is a man on trial for the crime with physical evidence attached to his name, and still the speculation about Erika Kirk continues because speculation generates clicks, clicks generate followers, followers generate income, and income is the actual god being served in these conversations. You also have figures like Druski putting content out there that disparages Erika Kirk directly, using her grief and her name as material, as though a widow navigating the death of her husband and the future of his organization is content to be consumed. George Farmer, Candace Owens' husband, has been particularly active in shaping this environment, positioning his wife as an investigator of Kirk's story when what she is actually doing is harvesting the grief of a widow to grow a platform. That is worth saying directly.

There is a religious divide running underneath all of this that also deserves to be named. The loudest voices casting suspicion on Erika Kirk tend to come from the Catholic ideological camp, while figures like Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles, who are also Catholic, have been less willing to make that leap without evidence. What Owens and Fuentes represent is not Catholicism at its most honest. It is Catholicism weaponized for audience capture, dressed in the language of truth-seeking while operating entirely on the logic of the algorithm. And the algorithm rewards outrage. It rewards accusation. It rewards the kind of content that makes people feel they are witnessing something being exposed when what they are actually witnessing is someone's grief being monetized.

This is the modern echo of what Martin Luther confronted in Wittenberg. Not the theology alone, though the theology matters enormously. It is the institution's willingness to dress greed in the robes of righteousness. Luther saw a Church selling indulgences, selling access, selling the idea that redemption could be purchased through a system designed to enrich itself. What we are watching now is that same spirit operating through a different medium. Instead of indulgences, it is impressions. Instead of confession booths, it is comment sections. Instead of a priest deciding your penance, it is an algorithm deciding your reach. The commodity being sold is outrage, and the currency being collected is attention. Charlie Kirk's name is the product. Erika Kirk's grief is the inventory. And the consumers are the followers who believe they are receiving truth when they are being fed a narrative engineered for engagement.

Now I want to address something specific that has emerged from this space, and it requires a direct confrontation with Scripture. The phrase Christ is King has been used by figures in this orbit, particularly by those with documented hostility toward Jewish people, as a slogan. As a weapon. As a way to signal contempt for Israel and for Jewish identity while wearing the costume of Christian devotion. Candace Owens has posted Christ is King publicly while her disdain for Jewish people has been equally public and documented. Nick Fuentes has used that same language in spaces that are openly antisemitic. These are not theological declarations. They are slurs with a cross attached to them.

But here is what Scripture actually says. In Romans chapter 11, the Apostle Paul addresses the question of Israel directly and without ambiguity. He asks whether God has rejected His people and answers his own question immediately. He has not. Paul describes Israel's partial hardening as something that has come in order that the fullness of the Gentiles might come in, and then he states plainly that all Israel will be saved. This is not a peripheral verse. It is a doctrinal cornerstone about the faithfulness of God to His covenant people. Paul himself was a Jew. The disciples were Jews. Jesus Christ, whose name these individuals invoke while spreading contempt for His own people, was born of the tribe of Judah. He came first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. He wept over Jerusalem. He came to save sinners, and Jewish people are among the sinners He came to save. To take His name and weaponize it against the very people He mourned over is not Christianity. It is a counterfeit wearing Christianity's face.

And here is where the poison inside this particular use of Christ is King becomes fully visible. The narrative being pushed in certain Catholic media spaces carries an undertone that goes beyond theology into something far darker. It suggests, not always openly but consistently enough to be felt, that Christ came to save the world with a silent exception. That somehow the Jewish people stand outside the reach of His redemption because of the crucifixion. That the Jews killed Christ and therefore Christ is King is a declaration against them rather than an open door for them. That is the venom dressed in the slogan.

But consider what that argument destroys the moment you apply it to Scripture. If the Jews who participated in the crucifixion are permanently condemned by that act, then what do you do with the Jews Christ personally chose to build His Church on? Peter, who preached the first sermon at Pentecost and saw three thousand souls added to the Church in a single day, was Jewish. John, the beloved disciple who stood at the foot of the cross and received the mother of Jesus into his own home, was Jewish. Paul, who wrote the letters that form the theological backbone of Christian doctrine and who carried the gospel to the Gentile world at the cost of his own life, declared himself a Hebrew of Hebrews. The Church did not begin among Gentiles and reach outward toward Jews. It began among Jews and through them reached outward toward every nation under heaven. You cannot condemn the branch while standing in the fruit it produced. You cannot declare Christ is King as a weapon against the very people He used to establish His kingdom.

The crucifixion itself does not support this narrative either. The theological weight of the cross is not that a group of people committed a crime for which their descendants bear permanent guilt. It is that the death of Jesus Christ was the willing sacrifice that opened the door of salvation for the entire world, for Jews and Gentiles alike, for every person who has ever lived and will ever live who comes to Him in faith. If the cross is the price paid for sin, and if the resurrection is the proof that death did not win, then the cross is not a weapon to be handed to one group to use against another. It is the door. And Christ is King means He is King over everyone who walks through it, not a selected few who have decided they hold the guest list.

This is how you discern the spirit behind what you are watching. Not by the size of the following. Not by the boldness of the declaration. Not by how many times someone posts Christ is King or how forcefully they claim to love truth. You discern it by the fruit. Jesus said you will know them by their fruit. A tree that produces antisemitism, that mocks a grieving widow, that builds its platform on the suffering of a dead man's family, that calls Protestants demons while practicing a form of Catholicism that Luther himself identified as idolatry, that tree is not bearing good fruit. It does not matter how large it grows.

The largest crowd is not always the right crowd. Scripture is full of moments where the majority was wrong, where the popular position was the corrupt one, where the voice with the most followers was the voice leading people away from God rather than toward Him. Elijah stood alone against the prophets of Baal. Noah built an ark while the world mocked the forecast. The road that leads to life is narrow, and the road that leads elsewhere is wide and well-traveled and very loud.

So when you see a widow with children being attacked without evidence by people who proclaim Christ as their king, when you see a dead Protestant man's name being harvested for Catholic algorithmic gain, when you see the phrase Christ is King deployed as a weapon against the Jewish people that Paul explicitly says God has not abandoned, you are not watching a revival. You are watching a counterfeit. And the way you stay on the right side of it is the same way it has always been. You go back to the Word. You test what you hear against what is written. And you refuse to follow noise into the place where truth used to be.

Charlie Kirk was a Protestant who supported Israel and defended Scripture as the authority over tradition. His name deserves to rest in the hands of those who honor what he actually believed, not in the mouths of those who are using his death to build what he spent his life pushing back against.

Africa, You Do Not Speak For Us

“For I will set mine eyes upon them for good, and I will bring them again to this land: and I will build them, and not pull them down; and I will plant them, and not pluck them up. And I will give them an heart to know me, that I am the LORD…”Jeremiah 24:6-7

You Do Not Speak For Us

A Response to the United Nations Resolution on the Western Slave Trade

My Dear Brothers and Sisters, and Members of the United Nations,

I speak as a child of God, an American Black woman, and a descendant of slavery. I speak without apology and without permission from anyone who believes they hold authority over my story.

Last week, the world watched as the United Nations issued a formal condemnation of Western nations for their role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. During the General Assembly's commemoration of the International Day to Remember the Victims of Slavery, Assembly President Annalena Baerbock declared that the slave trade and slavery stand among the gravest violations of human rights in human history. She went further, describing the transatlantic slave trade as mass resource extraction, arguing that African nations were hollowed out after losing generations of people who could have helped their countries prosper.

Even the language used is striking. Mass resource extraction. Because today they are describing slavery this way, speaking of human beings, our ancestors, in the same cold economic terms that once justified their exploitation. The very people who were kidnapped, chained, and sold as property are now being described as resources extracted from a region, as though generations of lives can be summarized as the removal of raw materials. Our ancestors were not resources. They were fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, innovators, leaders, and builders whose lives were violently interrupted. To reduce them to an economic category now, in the name of justice, is its own form of dehumanization.

Ghana's President, John Dramani Mahama, echoed similar sentiments, reinforcing the narrative that the Western slave trade stood apart as uniquely inhumane. He argued that racialized chattel enslavement made the Western trade distinctly more grave than other forms of slavery throughout history. He was specific. He named 1619, the year the first enslaved Africans arrived on American soil. He named the Virginia law of 1662, Partus Sequitur Ventrem, that which is born follows the womb, the law that declared a child born of a slave mother is also a slave, binding generations into bondage by legal design. He named Texas. He referenced Prager U. He built a careful, detailed case aimed directly at America.

“King Gezo said in the 1840’s he would do anything the British wanted him to do apart from giving up slave trade:

”The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth…the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery…””

— BBC News

And then, in the same speech, President Mahama said something that he intended as a defense but that I intend to hold up as an indictment. He acknowledged that some believe it is not acceptable to judge the social norms of the past by the standards of today, and he said that people use that argument loudly and proudly to escape accountability for the harm perpetuated by others. He is right about that. I agree with him completely. You cannot build a monument to selective memory and call it justice.

But President Mahama, that principle does not belong only to the West. If we are holding the past accountable by the moral standards of today, then that accountability must run in every direction without exception. He called to remembrance 1619, the year the White Lion arrived in the United States. I will name the slave forts. The barracoons. The castles. The factories. The dungeons along the West African coast where African men and women were held before being auctioned and shipped. Those forts may have been built by the British, the Dutch, the French, and the Danish, but the market was stocked by Africans. African rulers raided neighboring communities. African traders kidnapped and sold their own people for gold and ducats. African kingdoms profited from the transaction and used those profits to expand their own power. If we are judging by today's standards, that too must be named. You cannot invoke the moral clarity of the present when it serves your argument and then retreat behind the complexity of historical context when it does not.

And it was not only the Western slave trade. The Arab slave trade ran for more than thirteen hundred years, devastating populations across East Africa and the Sahel, stripping men, women, and children from their communities and selling them into bondage across the Arab world. Mauritania did not officially abolish slavery until 1981, and the practice continued into 2007.

Morocco also stood among those nations voting to declare the Western slave trade the most inhumane in history. Yet today, within its own borders, there are well-documented issues of anti-Black racism that remain largely unaddressed by its government. This is a nation on the African continent, not outside of it, and not removed from the history it now attempts to distance itself from. To stand on a global platform and condemn one form of inhumanity while ignoring the realities within your own society is not moral clarity. It is selective accountability.

Arab nations systematically trafficked and emasculated African men and boys, a practice that constitutes nothing less than genocide, and yet twenty-two Arab nations stood at that United Nations podium and voted to call the Western slave trade the most inhumane in history without a single word about their own nations' treatment of Africans.

China voted yes while actively repressing and exploiting the Uyghur people in Xinjiang.

The hypocrisy is structural. It is a deliberate attempt to condemn the West while refusing to pull the beam from their own eyes.

The horrors of slavery do not need to be introduced to us by international leaders’ centuries removed from the lived consequences. We carry that history in our families, in our communities, and in the very foundations of this country. We know slavery was evil. We know it was brutal. We know it stripped people of their humanity and fractured generations. What is troubling is not the acknowledgment of slavery. It is the selective framing of it. When slavery is discussed solely as a Western sin, detached from the global systems and participants that enabled it, history becomes less about truth and more about narrative. When international bodies reduce a complex and tragic chapter of human history into a moral indictment aimed at modern Western nations, remembrance shifts into political leverage.

I grew up hearing that American Blacks lack legacy. That we do not know our history. This is the same song Mahama sang as he attempted to absolve Africa of its most wicked sin, suggesting that because of slavery we are a people without roots or without a name, as if God did not have the power to give us new names in new soil. I have spent my life watching the continent respond to that charge not by honest reckoning but by continual deflection. Africans on the continent have largely refused to look in the mirror. They speak of the slave trade as something that happened to Africa, not something that Africa participated in, profited from, and in many cases orchestrated. They pretend they did not know how bad it would be, as though the evidence of what slavery produced was somehow hidden from the people who initiated the transactions.

This declaration is not justice. It is theater. It is a document crafted not to honor the suffering of the enslaved but to position certain nations and certain grievances for financial and political extraction. Reparations. That is what sits underneath this resolution. Not healing. Not truth. Not accountability from every party that bears responsibility. Just a demand aimed at the nations that, whatever their crimes, also fought wars to end the practice of slavery. Nations where the descendants of the enslaved have survived, built, created, contributed, and refused to be erased. Now those leaders look at their own continent, at the devastation in the land and the plight of their children, and they compare them to those of us in the West and declare that the West must pay.

Here is what I will say plainly on the matter of reparations. America does owe a debt to the descendants of slavery on American soil. Not to Africans on the continent. Not to the Caribbean. Not to any diaspora group that did not suffer the specific and documented brutality of American chattel slavery. To the descendants of those who were enslaved here, who built this nation, who were denied the fruit of that labor across generations through law and violence and systemic exclusion. That debt is real and it is specific. But if we are holding the logic of reparations consistently, then that same logic reaches back across the Atlantic. The African kingdoms and rulers who raided, kidnapped, and sold human beings into the Western slave trade profited from those transactions. If America owes for its part in the system, then those who stocked the market owe for theirs. You do not get to claim moral injury from a transaction you initiated and profited from. President Mahama said we should not use historical complexity to escape accountability. I am applying his own principle back to him.

Look at us. Look at what the diaspora produced. We are not a begging people. We are not a broken people stretching our hands toward the continent for rescue or recognition. Despite the betrayal of African ancestors, we survived and built this nation with our bodies and our blood and our genius and our faith, and we are still here, still standing, still producing, still breathing without a yoke on our necks. God took what was meant to destroy a people and made them strong.  He turned poison into kryptonite when he planted a group of people in the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. Africa you sold your family into the hands of suffering and God made sure that suffering produced something you cannot purchase, cannot claim, and cannot take.

And now you want reparations. Now you want to arrive on the world stage and speak in our name, as though our history belongs to you, as though our survival is a resource you are entitled to harvest. You grin in dark rooms while the blood of your own people stains your hands, and you believe that because these things are done in darkness no one will name them in the light. God reveals all things. Every transaction made in secret. Every alliance built on the suffering of others. Every resolution drafted not for the healing of the wounded but for the enrichment of those who never bore the wound.

There is one more thing worth saying plainly. When the United Nations stands before the world and condemns the West, they speak as though the West is a white institution. They erase us from the very civilization we were forced to build and then chose to claim as our own. We are Western. Our roots were cut from the African continent and replanted in Western soil, and what grew from that replanting is Western in culture, in faith, in identity, and in contribution. We are Christian. We carry the values of a Western Christian civilization not because they were handed to us graciously but because we fought for our place inside them and inside them, we found God we had loss due to idolatry.   To condemn the West without acknowledging that American Blacks are among its most foundational contributors is not just historically dishonest. It is another erasure, dressed this time in the language of justice. We owe nothing to the continent of Africa and its leaders who grin at global podiums while their own people go without. Nothing.

We did not give you this permission. We did not ask you to speak for us. We do not share your belief, your greed, or your audacity. The nerve of standing on a global platform and framing our history as your cause while refusing to account for your own ancestors' role in creating that history in the first place is not advocacy. It is theft of a different kind. And we see it clearly.

The children of the diaspora are not your instrument. We are not your leverage. We are not your reparations claim. We are God's remnant, placed on this soil for a purpose that was decided long before any resolution, any declaration, any United Nations chamber ever existed. And we will not be moved by those who pretend to love us while counting what they believe they are owed.

The Old Story, Returning

“My conscience is captive to the Word of God.” — Martin Luther

Dear True Believers. To those who stand on the Word of God without apology and without revision.

Not you who pretend. Not you who scoff at the idea that Israel will stretch its borders and that Christ will return according to Ezekiel Chapter 40. Not you who pray in dark booths to sin-filled priests as though another man holds the key to your redemption. Not you who call sin salvation, who have constructed a lifestyle according to your own definition of good, and who believe Christ will grant you access on the basis of your sinfulness rather than His righteousness. And certainly not you who wage war consistently against truth, and when defeated by it, cry foul and rewrite the record.

Let us call a spade a spade. Scripture is the standard. Not tradition. Not culture. Not the algorithm. Not the crowd. And what I am about to show you is how a world running in chaos is frantically attempting to construct a narrative that aligns every belief, every ideology, and every ambition with the Word of God, while God Himself refuses to be mocked. History tells the story. It has always told the story. And that story ends the same way it was always going to end, with God reigning supreme over every kingdom that dared to believe otherwise. To those who wait on the Lord, you shall inherit the Kingdom of God. This is for you.

In the 1500s, when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany, it was not simply an act of protest. It was a declaration that truth had been buried beneath centuries of tradition. It was a refusal to accept that access to God could be mediated through men, through systems, or through rituals that Scripture itself never commanded. Luther challenged the worship of saints and Mary. He challenged the authority of a pope elevated above other men as though proximity to an institution could substitute for proximity to God. He challenged the act of sitting in a dark booth, whispering sins through a screen to another sinner who would then decide what penance you must perform before you could be made clean. He challenged the counting of rosary beads as though God responds to repetition rather than repentance. And he challenged the idea that the body of Jesus must be manifested again in the flesh each time believers eat the bread and drink the wine, as if His sacrifice had not already been completed once and for all. These are not practices supported by Scripture, and Luther knew it.

While the Church turned inward and consumed itself with arguments over authority and doctrine, something was rising beyond its walls. This too was not without precedent in Scripture. In Genesis 16, before Ishmael was even born, the angel of the Lord declared over him that he would be a wild and untameable force, that his hand would be against everyone and everyone's hand against him, and that he would live in hostility toward all his brothers. That prophecy did not expire. It described a spirit, a posture, a perpetual reach for conflict that would mark his descendants across generations. The Ottoman Empire was the fullest historical expression of that prophecy ascending to its peak, expanding, pressing into territories once held by Christian powers, reshaping the balance of influence across regions that would take generations to fully reckon with. The moment was not only theological. It was civilizational. It was geopolitical and spiritual simultaneously, the fulfillment of a word spoken over a child in the wilderness centuries before any of those empires existed. And yet the attention of the Church remained largely fixed on its own internal fractures, blind to what God had already announced was coming. That pattern is very much with us now.

As we speak, history is being made as we watch a war campaign in Iran involving the United States and Israel. The conversations surrounding it are constant. Podcasters, politicians, and global leaders speak with certainty about strategy, strength, and who is gaining ground. I was listening to Triggernometry, where Mehdi Hasan appeared as a guest. For those unfamiliar, Hasan is a British American journalist and commentator who has been openly critical of American foreign policy and has consistently framed U.S. and Israeli military actions as aggression rather than defense. The giddiness with which he spoke on that episode was noticeable. There was a kind of delight in framing Donald Trump as ill-informed and outmaneuvered while positioning Iran's ability to absorb strikes and continue operations as proof that America is weakening and that Arab Muslim ideology is advancing on the world stage. Beneath that framing is something worth naming plainly. When survival becomes the definition of victory, it signals not just military confidence but ideological conviction, the belief that the West is unraveling and that patience will outlast it.

What is almost entirely absent from these conversations is any serious engagement with the spiritual dimension of what is unfolding. Throughout Scripture, Israel was not merely surrounded by hostile armies. It was consistently confronted with the reality that turning away from God always preceded its greatest moments of vulnerability. The external threat was real, but the internal condition was always the deeper crisis. That same dynamic is operating today, and very few voices are willing to name it.

When I look at what is happening with Israel, I do not see only conflict. In Genesis 15, God made a covenant with Abraham regarding land, borders, and descendants. As Israel presses into Lebanon, Syria, and now moves in relation to Iran, I see those promises in motion. I believe what is unfolding may be preparation, that this expansion of territory and influence may be part of something far larger than geopolitics alone. It may be pointing toward the return of Jesus Christ. To say that invites dismissal. It invites mockery. Even voices like Tucker Carlson, who claims belief in Christ and in Scripture, openly scoff at the idea that passages like Ezekiel 40 could carry present meaning. But what is laughed at today has a way of demanding recognition tomorrow.

Something else worth naming is the persistent denial of what Scripture already revealed and history has already confirmed. God spoke through His prophets that after the Messiah came, Israel would be destroyed and the Israelites would be scattered among the nations. That scattering was not the end of the story. It was part of it. The destruction of Jerusalem, the diaspora that followed, the centuries of displacement across continents, these things were spoken before they happened. God also promised that Israel as a nation would be restored and redeemed, and we have watched that unfold as well. After the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the events surrounding World War I, the Balfour Declaration opened the door for the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland. It was as though God whistled and called His people back. And even where there was hesitation, even where there was delay, His plan did not stall. There was suffering. There was destruction. A remnant returned nonetheless, just as He said one would. Now Israel stands again as a recognized nation, moving across the world stage in ways that continue to align with what was spoken long ago, and still humanity dismisses it. People see these realities with their own eyes and choose to call them coincidence, politics, or chance, anything except the possibility that God is conforming history to His Word. What is even more striking is that the rise and fall of kingdoms does not alter His larger design. Whether empires expand or collapse, whether power shifts east or west, salvation was never tied to any one nation's permanence. God's promise extends to both Jew and Gentile alike, and that promise has not changed regardless of what thrones have risen or fallen around it.

The fractures within America reflect the same pattern. On one side are those who believe themselves to be doing good, who speak the language of compassion and inclusion and social progress, and who also claim faith in God and in Jesus Christ. Yet in the same breath they affirm what Scripture calls sin, they celebrate and normalize it, they reshape identity itself and call that reshaping righteousness. The deception is thorough precisely because they do not see themselves as outside the will of God. They are fully convinced they are within it. On the other side are those who hold more firmly to Christian language and Scripture, yet even there the fracture persists. There are those who insist that righteousness flows through saints and Mary and priests and confession, through tradition as the authority over Scripture. And there are those who reject that entirely and say that worship belongs to God alone, that no institution stands between a believer and their Father. Within that space are also those who weave faith together with nationalism, defending culture and identity in ways not always examined against the Word they claim to uphold.

Layered over all of this is relentless noise. Figures like Jamal Bryant command wide audiences while offering a version of faith built on comfort and affirmation, a grace that requires no transformation. But Scripture teaches something different. When a person is genuinely filled with the Holy Spirit, there is a turning away. There is conviction that produces change. Salvation is not merely declared. It is evidenced in the life that follows it. A faith that leaves you exactly as it found you is not the faith described in the Bible.

At the same time, global institutions are attempting to write and rank history. The United Nations recently passed a resolution declaring the Western slave trade the most inhumane in history, without equal weight given to the Arab slave trade that devastated and displaced millions of Africans across centuries. Slavery is evil. Oppression in every form it has taken and in every era is evil. The history of those who were treated as cattle, severed from their people, their language, their land, that history is real and demands honest reckoning. But when that reckoning is issued without consistency, when the Arab slave trade is minimized or ignored entirely, the motive is not justice. It is leverage. It is agenda. And for ADOS, for those of us who are the descendants of Africans cut from the continent and replanted on American soil across generations of suffering and survival, our story deserves to be told in full and not used as a political instrument by those who did not share that experience. God had his hand even in that displacement. We are here. We are the progenitors of those who were re-rooted on this soil for a time such as this, and we look to the heavens for where our help comes from.

And that brings me to the deeper question underneath all of it. Not just who defines history, but who defines justice. Because what we are watching, in global institutions, in media narratives, in ideological movements, is man repeatedly appointing himself the final authority on what is right, what is fair, and what must be done to correct the past. Dostoevsky examined that impulse with surgical precision in Crime and Punishment. He gave us Raskolnikov, a man who convinced himself through elaborate intellectual reasoning that he had the right to take a life in service of a higher purpose. The logic was tight. The justification was philosophical. The conclusion was that some people are simply above the ordinary moral law and may act accordingly. And yet what followed was not liberation but torment, because the soul cannot escape what it has done by renaming it. Dostoevsky understood that when man appoints himself the author of justice, justice becomes whatever serves his ambition in the moment. He stretches it. He dresses wickedness in the language of righteousness and then expects the world to receive it as such.

We see this principle at work in every era of conquest and war, in every leader who frames destruction as liberation, in every ideology that promises freedom while demanding submission. Man is fallen. He will always reach for power. He will always construct a reason why this particular action, at this particular moment, is justified and necessary. That is not a reason for paralysis. It is a reason for discernment. It means we must be clear about the difference between the wickedness of unchecked human ambition and the genuine defense of truth.

I am not saying that America and Israel are beyond critique in all things. But I am saying that in this present moment there is a real effort to hold ground against forces that are not neutral, against ideologies that do not lead where they claim to lead. That matters. It is worth saying plainly and without apology.

What steadies me through all of it is this. God is in control. He moves whether or not He is acknowledged. He orders events whether or not the people living through them can see it. The call for those who believe is not to be consumed by every argument or to unravel with every headline. In the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus stood before the crowds and spoke, many were near Him physically but only a few truly heard Him. The difference was not distance. It was focus. Some watched the crowd. Others watched Jesus. That is the same choice before every believer right now. Everything around us is fighting for attention, for loyalty, for alignment. The question is whether we will be pulled into the noise or remain anchored in what we know to be true.

And that brings me back to where we began. Back to Luther. Back to Wittenberg. Back to the door.

Martin Luther did not nail those 95 theses to start a conversation. He nailed them because he had read the Scripture and could no longer pretend that what the Roman Catholic Church was selling bore any resemblance to what the Word of God actually said. He drew a line. He named the lie. And the world has never fully recovered from that confrontation because the confrontation was necessary and the lie was enormous.

Here is what is worth watching now. Catholic ideology is not retreating. It is growing. The Catholic Church is expanding in influence, in reach, in cultural presence, at the very moment when much of Protestant Christianity is either fracturing, softening, or quietly stepping aside. And we are beginning to see the voices of prominent Protestants being co-opted and repositioned in ways that deserve direct examination. Charlie Kirk is worth naming here, and I want to be precise. Kirk is a Protestant. He has been openly so. He has also been a vocal supporter of Israel at a time when that position carries real cost in certain circles. He has not converted to Catholicism. But here is what is happening around him. There are podcasters and commentators with Catholic ideological leanings who are actively working to reframe his voice, to retell his story in ways that smooth over his Protestant convictions and absorb his audience into a different theological household entirely. The co-opting is not coming from Kirk himself. It is being done around him and to him, and the audience that trusts his name is being slowly repositioned without ever being told plainly what is taking place. That is not a conversion. It is something more subtle and in some ways more dangerous, because it operates below the level of open declaration.

So I ask the question directly. Is this about conviction? Is this a man who genuinely studied Scripture, wrestled with the Word, and arrived somewhere new after honest reckoning? Or is something else operating here? Because when a public figure shifts theology and the media apparatus around that figure immediately works to make the shift palatable, to reframe the narrative, to make sure the audience stays engaged and the brand survives the transition, you have to ask what spirit is actually being served. You have to ask whether the altar being approached is the altar of God or the altar of the algorithm. Likes. Comments. Reach. Engagement. The metrics that reward whoever can gather the largest crowd, regardless of what truth had to be softened or set aside to gather it.

Luther understood that the crowd is not the measure of correctness. He stood before an empire that had the full weight of tradition, institution, and political power behind it, and he refused. He refused because Scripture was clear and his conscience was bound to it. That kind of refusal is increasingly rare. In a world where algorithms reward what is popular and punish what is divisive, where the definition of divisive has somehow come to include standing firmly on what the Bible says, the pressure to soften, to shift, to make room, is constant and it is heavy.

The old story is not just circling back in war and geopolitics. It is circling back inside the Church. The same argument Luther fought in the 1500s, whether truth is located in Scripture alone or whether it can be mediated through tradition, through institution, through men who claim authority over access to God, that argument is alive and being contested right now, on platforms, in conversions, in reframings, in the quiet abandonment of convictions that once defined a public voice.

Justice does not ultimately belong to man, no matter how confidently he claims it. It does not belong to the algorithm, no matter how many people it reaches. It does not belong to the institution, no matter how ancient or how large. It belongs to God. His Word has not changed. His promises have not failed. His plan for both Jew and Gentile has not shifted because an empire fell or a podcaster converted or a platform rewarded something other than truth. That reality stood in Wittenberg. It stood through the Ottoman Empire. It stood through the scattering and the return of Israel. It stands today. And it will stand when every kingdom that has ever demanded our loyalty has turned to dust.

The Frontman Sent to Quiet the Storm

“So Ehud came to him while he was sitting alone in his cool upper room. And Ehud said, I have a message from God for you.” Judges 3:20

Dear blind and willfully deceived, those who claim to see yet walk in blindness,

Hear me as I strip away the salve that blinds you and open your eyes, as though you have just washed them in the Jordan River.

For you have made yourselves like Eglon, seated in comfort while oppression grows at your own table. You have grown fat on what was never meant to sustain you, entertained by the very systems that bind you, convinced that peace exists simply because judgment has not yet arrived.

And like Ehud standing at the door, truth does not announce itself the way you expect. It comes quietly, without spectacle, carrying a message you are not prepared to receive.

What you have mistaken for stability is nothing more than a moment of mercy. And mercy, when ignored, does not remain forever.

The Fronter

In street lingo, he who fronts is cap.   The fronter is an individual who presents themselves as something other than what they really are. The closest image most people reach for is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But the opposite is also possible.  I am speaking of a sheep wearing a wolf suit. Now who would want to be a sheep pretending to be a wolf is beyond reasonable thinking, because in this world the wolf eats the sheep every time. Fronting as prey does not serve you.

But this past week, in the middle of a global war and a fractured national narrative, I watched a sheep put on a wolf suit and walk straight onto the world stage. The media received him like a hero. Most people never asked what was underneath the costume.

Two Narratives. One Week. One War.

This all came after an entire week saturated with questions about the war in Iran. Questions about whether America was winning or losing. A persistent narrative on the left insisting the United States was faltering, that the strikes were reckless, that the administration had been manipulated into a conflict it could not control. That the Trump administration was deceived into believing we would win a quick and decisive war and did not even consider the Strait of Hormuz or its economic impact. That Trump ignored all the warnings. Fear became the product being sold, and it was moving.

Then, on March 20, Benjamin Netanyahu appeared publicly. This matters because in the days leading up to that appearance, claims began circulating that Netanyahu was dead. That he and members of his circle had been killed in Iranian strikes. Voices of those who are anti-Israel began to emerge, Candace Owens among them, suggesting that Netanyahu’s appearances on social media were not real. That what the world was seeing was artificial intelligence. That somehow a digital version of him had been generated to deceive the public into believing he was still alive and operational.

Let that sit for a moment. Because while that narrative was being pushed about Netanyahu, questions also began to surface concerning Iran’s own leadership.  Questions about the supreme leader was the one whose status was genuinely in question. Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen in any verifiable public setting. What this suggests to some observers is that his condition may not be as stable as presented. And There is credible reporting that he is either deceased or seriously incapacitated preventing him from govern.  At least in the present.  Yet the narrative being presented is that he is alive, well, and leading. The very deception being falsely assigned to Israel just may be the condition of Iran’s own leadership. The accusation is a mirror. The lie is being projected outward to cover what is true inward.

Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and podcast platforms like Breaking Points are willing vessels in this moment. Conspirators with intent. Vessels willing to receive and transmit a narrative because it confirms what they want to believe. These are the most dangerous kinds of fronters — those whose desire has made them available vessels willing to cast any lie.

It was on that same day, March 20, that Netanyahu said something that caught my attention and unsettled me at the same time. He repeated an old quote from historian Will Durant, “unfortunately and unhappily, history proves that Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan — that evil triumphs over good.” Netanyahu used the reference to make a political argument about the necessity of strength in wartime. But his framing did something that cannot simply be dismissed as rhetorical context. He spoke of Jesus as a moral figure without power. He measured the Lord of Lords against a warlord and called the comparison historically instructive.

As Christians, we reject that frame entirely. Jesus Christ is not merely a moral teacher who lost to human cruelty. He is God incarnate, who entered death willingly and came out of it victoriously. His resurrection is not a footnote. It is the entire argument. If we only report on the crucifixion and stop there, yes — evil appears to win. But Jesus did not stop there. We know what happened on the third day. We know that death itself was defeated.

And if we want to apply Netanyahu’s own logic, consider this: the very week the world was declaring him dead, he walked out alive. Evil tried to write his ending. It failed. By his own framework, good triumphed over the narrative of evil. He proved his own statement wrong.

What this reveals is nothing new.  Scripture has already show un this pattern, long before we had language to name it.

The Quiet Storm

There is a story tucked inside the book of Judges that most people rush past on their way to the dramatic and the extraordinary. They hurry to Deborah, the feminine hero. To Samson, supposedly redeemed while still in sin. To Gideon, the one who doubted and received the greatest return on his prayers. These are the stories that fill sermons because they are large and legible and easy to map onto individual triumph. They overlook the quieter, sharper thing that happened in chapter three. They miss Eglon. They miss Ehud. They miss the lesson that has been sitting there for three thousand years, waiting for a moment exactly like this one.

Eglon, king of Moab, had dominated Israel for eighteen years. Eighteen years of tribute. Eighteen years of submission. Eighteen years of a nation bowing to a foreign power and calling it normal. The machine ran smoothly. Nobody was causing visible trouble. The storm was quiet because the storm was winning. That is what a quiet storm looks like. Not chaos. Not noise. Efficiency. Control. The slow, deliberate consolidation of power that does not need to announce itself because it is already working.

We are watching a quiet storm right now. The real moves are not happening on camera. They are not happening in the press briefings or the televised hearings. What you are seeing on the surface is managed. What is actually happening is happening in the rooms we are not invited into, in the decisions being made before they are ever announced, in the policies being written while the nation is focused on the spectacle being performed for its benefit. I will venture further to say that what is happening is also happening in heavenly places, behind heavenly doors, dispatched on angels’ wings to those positioned around the world.

We are in the eye of the storm. A quiet storm does not need to be loud. It does not need to explain itself. It only needs enough noise elsewhere to keep the people from looking in the right direction. That is precisely where the fronter comes in.

The Fronter

Ehud came to Eglon carrying what looked like a gift. A tribute. An offering of peace. He presented himself as someone coming in good faith, and Eglon let him in because the presentation was convincing. That is the architecture of fronting. The surface story is believable. The credential looks real. The grievance sounds legitimate. What is tucked underneath, hidden on the left side where no one thinks to look, tells a very different story entirely.

The Trump administration understood that the week’s narrative was breaking badly. The stream of negative imagery, the questions about American strength, the fear being amplified by the left — it needed to be countered. So they did not send a press secretary. They did not send a talking head. They put a hero on the stage.

Joe Kent, Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, is a decorated military veteran, a widower, and a man known for moral clarity and community respect. He resigned. He sent a letter to Donald Trump explaining that he could not ethically support the war in Iran. He stated that he believed the President had been coerced into the conflict by Israel. He said his conscience would not allow him to remain.

Every platform scrambled. Within 48 hours, Joe Kent had appeared on Tucker Carlson. He had appeared on Breaking Points. He appeared on Zoom with Megyn Kelly. He was mentioned on countless other outlets. He was framed on every one of them as a symbol of moral integrity, a righteous man who could not in good conscience serve a warmongering administration. The anti-war, anti-Trump crowd crowned him a hero before they ever asked him a single hard question. They did so before considering his political stance regarding Iran, when just a few years back he was of the opinion that Iran should not obtain a nuclear weapon and should be stopped from doing so. Yet now he has completely flipped, at least in posture. And his stated reason for resigning only raises more questions when placed alongside his prior position on Iran and Israel.

His drastic flip was never questioned. The rollout does not happen organically. Forty-eight hours. Three major platforms. Universal framing as a moral authority. That is a strategy. That is a coordinated release of a message through a vessel whose credibility the audience would not question. But during a few of his interviews, it became painfully apparent that he is no rebel. He is a carrier. He is fronting courage while running an operation. While presenting himself as opposed to the war, he is still defending Trump and the conflict, only now in a more measured, more nuanced, and harder-to-challenge way. The podcasts give him credibility. The credibility shapes the narrative. The narrative reshapes how the public understands the war, not away from the subject, but toward a particular interpretation of it.

That is what fronting at the highest level looks like. It does not come off like lying. It feels curated. It feels purposeful. The performance is good enough that most people never pause to ask who benefits from this particular truth being told in this particular way at this particular moment.

The Distinction That Matters

Here is where Ehud and the modern fronter part ways. Ehud was sent by God. His mission was liberation. When he delivered his message, it cost him everything it would have cost a man operating without cover, without backup, and without guarantee. He was carrying a blade, not a talking point. His act broke the machine. It did not service it. Ehud came to tear down the establishment.

The modern fronter is not breaking anything. He is stabilizing it. Every podcast appearance that generates sympathy for Kent’s position is another day the real questions about the war, about the policy, about the decision-making chain do not get asked with the urgency they deserve. He is delivering spin. He is delivering Israel. He is delivering Trump. The difference is everything.

This is not a red herring. A red herring pulls you away from the subject entirely. What is happening here is more sophisticated than distraction. The subject stays the same. The war stays the war. The fronter simply reshapes how you see it, what questions you think to ask, and which version of events settles in your mind as the most credible one. You are not being distracted. You are being guided. That is harder to detect and more dangerous when you miss it.

This Is Not Politics. This Is Principalities.

Let me be plain about what this actually is. We are not simply watching politics. We are not watching media games or Washington chess moves. What we are watching is the visible surface of an invisible war. Paul told us in Ephesians 6 that we do not wrestle against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age. Joe Kent is not the principality. The podcasters are not the principality. They are instruments. What moves behind them, through them, and around them is something this nation does not have the spiritual vocabulary to name because we have spent the last several decades trading our discernment for entertainment.

The spirit of deception does not announce itself. It does not walk in dressed in darkness. It walks in dressed in credibility, in grievance, in righteous-sounding language that scratches exactly the right itch at exactly the right moment. That is how principalities operate in the natural realm. They find a willing vessel. They hand that vessel a message. The vessel delivers it and calls it conviction.

When you understand that, the whole architecture becomes visible. The war is real. The suffering is real. But the narrative being built around the war is being constructed in heavenly places before it ever reaches your television screen.

The Other Side Is Running Fronters Too

But let us be careful not to assign all of this to coordinated strategy, because that would be too generous. Strategy requires self-awareness. What we are watching on the other side of this narrative is something more spiritually dangerous than a plan. It is a people who have so deeply wanted a particular truth to be real that they have made themselves available to any lie that confirms it.

The media outlets feigning moral outrage over the war, amplifying Iranian narratives, platforming voices that paint America and Israel as the aggressors — many of them are not running a calculated operation. They are running on desire. They want Trump to be wrong. They want Israel to be guilty. They want the war to be unjust. Because they want it badly enough, they will receive any information that feeds that hunger without testing it, without questioning the source. 

Scripture has a name for that condition. Second Thessalonians calls it a strong delusion — sent to those who did not love the truth, so that they believed the lie. The principality does not always need a willing conspirator. Sometimes all it needs is a willing heart that has already decided what it wants to find. That is Candace Owens amplifying the AI narrative about Netanyahu without verifying it. That is every anchor who ran the story of his death without a credible source. That is every outlet that crowned Joe Kent a moral hero in 48 hours without asking him a single difficult question.

Two fronters. Two directions. One war. One public being guided from both sides simultaneously and calling it information.

What Discernment Demands

Scripture does not tell us to be suspicious of every messenger. It tells us to test the spirit behind every message. There is a difference. Testing is not cynicism. It is the practice of a people who have been misled enough times to know that the costume of truth is available to anyone willing to wear it.

When you watch the resigning official sitting across from a host who never asks the hardest question, ask yourself why. When the message delivered by someone who claims to have walked away still lands in the exact place it would need to land to protect the narrative of those he left, ask yourself why and who benefits.

When Kent sat across from Megyn Kelly and was asked about the Epstein files, his answer was telling. He said that if there were anything in those files implicating Donald Trump, Biden would have released it — implying there is nothing credible there. When asked about the death of Charlie Kirk, he said there were leads that could have been explored but were not, that maybe they involved Israel and maybe they involved another nation. He would not say more. What he did in that moment was not caution. It was placement. He handed Megyn Kelly a motive and called it restraint. He implied Israel without lighting the fire himself. That is fronting at its most precise.

Eglon sat in his cool upper chamber, comfortable and unguarded, because eighteen years of tribute had told him he was safe. Comfort is what makes power vulnerable to the thing it never saw coming. The quiet storm operates best when the people watching are not asking the right questions about the one carrying the gift.

Stay sharp. Test the message. Know the difference between the one sent to free you and the one sent to manage you. They do not always look different from the outside. That is precisely the point—sometimes they look and sound just like you.

You were warned at the door.

The message came quietly, without spectacle, just as it always does. You had the Jordan before you. You had the chance to wash your eyes and see clearly. The question was never whether truth would arrive. The question was always whether you would receive it.

Eglon sat in comfort until the moment he did not. Eighteen years of tribute convinced him that stillness meant safety. It did not. It meant the storm was still gathering.

What you have mistaken for stability is nothing more than a moment of mercy.

And mercy, when ignored, does not remain forever.

A Week of Lies: When Everything Around You Speaks in Deception

We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans--born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage--and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. -John F. Kennedy

The best way to describe this week is worrisome, confusing, and yet clarifying. It was one of those weeks that strips away comfort and forces you to confront a reality that has been quietly building for some time: we are being lied to. Not occasionally. Not selectively. Comprehensively. And the lies are coming from every direction at once.

The week started in warmth and light. Spring came early and arrived confidently. Families filled the parks. Children played basketball. People who had been cooped up all winter finally stepped outside to breathe again. There was a feeling of ease, almost of hope.

By the end of the week, it was snowing.

It sounds like a small thing. Weather changes. Seasons are unpredictable. But in the context of everything else that happened this week, even the sky felt dishonest. The warmth was a promise that did not hold. It felt like a fitting metaphor for the times we are living in.

The War That Is Not Called a War

All week the news was saturated with coverage of the conflict with Iran. Anchors and analysts used the word 'war' so freely you might forget that in the United States, only Congress has the constitutional authority to declare one. The president, however, holds executive powers that permit military strikes and troop deployments without congressional approval for a defined window of time. This legal gray area does not stop the media from packaging everything as war, and it does not stop the public from absorbing that framing without question.

There were also conflicting reports about Iran's leadership. Rumors had been confirmed that the supreme leader had been killed. Others suggested his son had assumed power but was too injured to make any public appearance. Statements were released, letters were presented, yet the man himself was nowhere to be seen. When a government releases words without a face behind them, it invites the public to fill in the blanks with whatever narrative serves the moment. That is exactly what happened this week, on all sides.

The most disturbing report of the week involved a missile strike that struck a school in Iran. The school was reportedly full of children, mostly young girls. Many people genuinely struggle to believe the United States would deliberately target a civilian school. Most of us would like to hold onto that belief. But the response from American leadership did nothing to reassure anyone. Instead of acknowledging an error, the answer was a vague reference to an ongoing investigation. No accountability. No clarity. No honesty.

The cover-up is always worse than the mistake. A nation that owns its failures, investigates transparently, and holds itself to account is a nation that earns trust even in painful moments. A nation that deflects is a nation that has decided the public cannot handle the truth. That decision dishonors not only the children lost, but everyone who is watching and trying to make sense of what is happening.

The Influence We See and the Influence We Miss

Alongside the military developments, a familiar debate was circulating in political commentary: the question of foreign influence on American policy. Much of that conversation focused on well-known lobbying organizations connected to Israel, particularly around arguments that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pressured Donald Trump to attack Iran. Whether or not that narrative is accurate in its specifics, it reflects a genuine anxiety about how decisions get made and whose interests actually drive them.

It is worth taking that anxiety seriously. It is also worth noting what the conversation consistently leaves out.

The lobbying space in American politics is not occupied by one actor. Countries and regions across the world attempt to shape American policy through a range of channels: economic investment, academic partnerships, cultural programming, diplomatic engagement, and direct political spending. Some of this influence is fully visible, openly reported, and regulated. Much of it is not. And when the public focuses exclusively on one visible target, it often misses the quieter, more patient work being done elsewhere.

There is a meaningful difference between a lobbying organization advocating for specific legislation and a long-term ideological effort to reshape how people think, what they are taught, and what values they consider worth defending. The first is a transaction. The second is a transformation. Transactions are traceable. Transformations are often invisible until the shift is already complete.

When billions of dollars move through universities, media partnerships, and cultural institutions over decades, the effects are not always obvious in the short term. By the time a generation of young Americans has been educated in a particular framework, the work of shaping that generation is already done. The narrative has been moved. The conversation has changed. The money that funded that change is rarely part of the headline.

Pointing this out is not the same as claiming a conspiracy. It is simply recognizing that power rarely announces itself. It works through patience, through positioning, through the stories that get told and the ones that do not.

When the Signaling Is Hidden in Plain Sight

This week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani hosted an Iftar dinner at Gracie Mansion to mark the end of Ramadan. On the surface, this is a civic gesture. A mayor welcoming a religious community into the official residence of New York City's leadership. Many would call it inclusion. Many did.

But footage that circulated from inside the mansion gave me pause. Several guests were captured on video reciting 'Allahu Akbar' during the event. Others were filmed displaying the single raised index finger — a gesture that, in certain contexts, carries a specific ideological meaning. That gesture, used openly by groups including Hezbollah and ISIS, is a declaration of tawhid, the oneness of Allah. It is not simply a religious expression. In the context of militant Islamist movements, it is a recognized symbol of allegiance to that cause. Whether everyone displaying it in that room intended it that way, I cannot say with certainty. What I can say is that the symbolism was present, it was visible, and no one seemed troubled by it.

What makes that image harder to dismiss is what happened just outside. In the days surrounding the event, two young men from Pennsylvania were arrested after throwing explosive devices at protesters near Gracie Mansion. When taken into custody, they did not hide what they stood for. They declared their allegiance to ISIS — not to the United States, not to any principle of democratic life, but to a terrorist organization responsible for mass murder across the world. One of them was photographed displaying that same single raised index finger. The same gesture. The same signal. One inside the mansion at a mayoral event, one outside in handcuffs after an act of violence. The proximity of those two images in the same week, at the same location, is not something I am willing to write off as coincidence.

The First Amendment protects religious expression. That principle is not in question here. What is in question is the appropriate boundary between religious practice and the exercise of state power. Gracie Mansion is not a mosque, a church, or a community center. It is the official residence of the mayor of the most diverse city in the United States. When a government official uses that space to host a religious celebration, and when footage from that event shows guests engaging in religiously charged political signaling without any public examination or accountability from the mainstream press, that is a story. It is simply not being told.

This is not the first signal worth examining from this particular figure. One example that has stayed with me since he took office involves the inaugural address he delivered upon becoming mayor. In that speech, he referenced the story of the Prophet Muhammad entering Medina. He described how Muhammad arrived as a foreigner and, over time, became the dominant force shaping that city and its people.

Many in the audience likely heard a story of perseverance and community building. That is one valid reading of the historical narrative. But it is not the complete one.

The historical record of what happened in Medina also includes the expulsion and killing of Jewish tribes who had been living there before Muhammad's arrival. What began as coexistence ended as conquest. Telling that story in a city that holds one of the largest Jewish populations in the United States, without acknowledging its full weight, is not simply a matter of historical interpretation. It is a signal sent to some listeners and hidden from others.

Taken together — the inaugural address, the Gracie Mansion Iftar, the footage of guests inside — a picture begins to form. It may not be complete. It may not be what I think it is. But as a person committed to paying attention, I am not willing to dismiss what I see simply because the mainstream media has chosen not to look at it.

This is how the most consequential communication works. It does not announce itself. It speaks to those who recognize it and passes invisibly over those who do not. By the time the majority understands what was being said, the actions that follow have already begun.

What This Week Demanded of Us

Awareness is not comfortable. It is not a state of ease or certainty. It is the willingness to sit with discomfort, to hold competing possibilities at once, and to refuse the temptation of the simple explanation.

The weather lied. The media constructed narratives that did not hold up under scrutiny. Leadership in more than one country withheld the truth from the people they govern. Influence operated quietly while public debate focused on the loudest and most visible targets. Children died, and powerful institutions did not have the courage to tell us what they knew. In our own cities, signals were sent in plain sight that most people were too polite, too distracted, or too naive to read.

We are a nation that wants to believe the best about everyone who arrives at our shores. That generosity of spirit is one of the things worth protecting about American life. But generosity without discernment is not virtue. It is vulnerability. There are groups, movements, and ideological forces that are deeply systematic about the long work of dismantling Western values — not through open warfare, but through patience, positioning, and the slow erosion of a nation's willingness to define and defend itself. When we dismiss every warning sign in the name of inclusion, we do not become more welcoming. We become easier to reshape without our consent.

Faith Over Fear

In the middle of all of this, my mind turned to the Old Testament. When God instructed Israel to go to war, He did not leave the decision to political calculation or public opinion. He gave specific direction. He set the terms. Sometimes those terms were severe. Sometimes they required sacrifice that was difficult to bear. But the people of Israel were not sent into battle blind or alone. They were sent with purpose, under the authority of the God who had already seen the outcome.

God never promised His people they would not die. He promised something far greater than survival. To lay down your life in defense of what is righteous, in answer to a genuine call from the Lord, is not a tragedy. For those who believe, it is an honor that belongs to eternity.

My prayer is that President Trump and the leaders of the United States military sought the Lord before initiating this campaign against Iran. My prayer is that those decisions were made with more than strategy in mind. Our responsibility as citizens in this moment is not to panic, not to be swept up in the fear the media is so eager to sell us. Our responsibility is to pray. Pray for the safety of our troops. Pray for the protection of American soil. Pray for wisdom in leadership that has the weight of countless lives in its hands.

The media wants us to measure this moment against Iraq. Against Afghanistan. Against Libya. Against every military engagement that ended in grief and confusion and unanswered questions. Those histories matter and they deserve to be studied honestly. But a nation that can only look backward will always be paralyzed at the threshold of necessary action. History is a teacher. It is not a god. We already have one of those.

The disconnect at the center of this week, at the center of this nation's anxiety, is not a lack of information. It is a lack of faith. We have been taught to trust polling numbers and pundit analysis and the shifting consensus of people who are no wiser than we are. We have forgotten how to stand on something that does not move.

So this is where I land at the end of a week full of lies. Not in despair. Not in fear. In a posture of prayer and watchfulness. We should protect our values. We should protect our way of life. We should protect the right to worship the God of the Bible, Yahweh, freely and without apology on the soil our ancestors built and bled for. If we believe, then we trust His will — whatever it costs, wherever it leads. That is not weakness. That is the only kind of courage that outlasts the news cycle.

“I will send my fear before thee, and will destroy all the people to whom thou shalt come, and I will make all thine enemies turn their backs unto thee.” Exodus 23:27

---

Jacqueline Session Ausby

Founder, DahTruth.com

They Have Eyes and Will Not See

Section One: The Old Book and the New World Order

March entered this year with a loud bang. Snowstorms. Chaos. And then right on time, as if Heaven itself had set the calendar, America and Israel launched strikes on Iran. Right in time for Purim. Let that sit for a moment.

Now I want to say something before I go any further. It is something to behold, truly something to witness, watching mainstream media and your favorite podcasters tie themselves into knots trying to explain what is unfolding in the Middle East without once, not one single time, reaching for the Word that has already explained it. They will talk geopolitics. They will talk oil. They will talk alliances and power moves and the military industrial complex. They will even talk about religion and the religious aspects of this war in Iran. What they will not do is open that Book. Because that old Book, as far as they are concerned, couldn't possibly be real. The people who believe it are confused. Deluded. Duped by theology. Out of their minds.

Here we are. Watching.

Individuals like Tucker Carlson and podcast platforms like Breaking Points are attempting to align current events with religion. Breaking Points views these parallels as coincidences, for example claims that Israel's actions correspond to biblical prophecy. Tucker Carlson, by contrast, acknowledges the religious dimension of this war but rejects any connection to biblical fulfillment; he insists it does not align with Christianity.

Breaking Points is a far-left, liberal podcast platform hosted by Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, two narrow-minded, left-leaning intellectuals who put more faith in their own knowledge than in any religion. Tucker Carlson is a far-right conservative who professes to be a Christian and is highly critical of Israel. He claims his viewpoint is not about Jews, yet portrays the nation of Israel as fundamentally in the wrong, while casting Muslim states like Iran differently.

Iran is now dealing with the death of Ayatollah Khamenei, the long-time Supreme Leader of a theocratic state who oppressed many for decades. Carlson recognizes the religious dimension at the center of this conflict, but he refuses to take the next step and connect these events to prophecy. He can see the religion; he cannot see the fulfillment. In the same breath he quoted Jesus, "having eyes, they do not see," without appearing to realize he was describing himself. Jesus spoke of people who stood in the presence of truth and still refused to receive it. Carlson quoted those words about us, not knowing that, as it were, Heaven was laughing.

There is something else worth saying. Tucker Carlson has gone on record questioning how any Christian could possibly align themselves with the belief that a Third Temple will be built in Jerusalem. His argument sounds reasonable on the surface and even sounds scriptural. We are the temple, he says. Through Jesus Christ we now have direct access to God. The veil was torn. We don't need a physical temple. He is not wrong. That is true.

It is a half truth. A half truth in the hands of a man who believes he is righteous is one of the most dangerous things in the world.

Because Tucker apparently has never sat with the book of Ezekiel. Chapters 40 through 48. A vision so detailed, so architectural, so specific, with measurements of gates and dimensions of chambers and the return of the glory of God to a physical house, that you cannot spiritualize it away without doing violence to the text. Ezekiel was not writing poetry. He was writing what he saw. And what he saw was a Temple. In the Last Days. In Jerusalem.

Tucker cannot get there. The reason Tucker cannot get there is the same reason he can stand in solidarity with an 86 year old man who worships a false god, defending him, platforming him, treating his cause as righteous, while simultaneously questioning the Biblical faith of Christians who believe what the prophets actually wrote. That is not discernment. That is a Pharisee. That is the spirit of a man who has decided that he is the one who rightly divides the Word, that he is the measure of what is reasonable, that he gets to determine which parts of your Bible count.

The Pharisees were not godless men. That is what made them dangerous. They knew the scripture. They were devoted. They were respected. And they stood in the presence of the fulfillment of everything they claimed to believe and called it a lie because it didn't look the way they expected and because it didn't fit the theology they had already built.

Tucker does not see himself as a Pharisee. He sees himself as the righteous one. The thinking Christian. The one brave enough to say what others won't. But a man who will defend a Muslim theocrat and mock the prophetic faith of Bible-believing Christians has told you everything you need to know about where his heart actually is, whether he has the eyes to see it or not.

Because here is the thing about Tucker Carlson and the scores of people just like him who call themselves Christians but cannot bring themselves to connect what is happening in Israel and Iran to prophecy. The reason isn't ignorance. The reason is that in their hearts they have already decided that the people in Israel are evil. That they are unrighteous. And so surely God cannot be doing anything through them. Surely this doesn't count. Surely the Book doesn't apply here.

Prophecy does not ask for your comfort. It does not wait for your approval. The Last Days are not a referendum. The signs are not interested in whether Tucker Carlson or CNN or Breaking Points or any podcaster with a ring light and a microphone is ready to call them what they are.

We are watching the world shift. In real time. And the ones called crazy are the ones who can see it.

Section Two: The Distraction

While America and Israel were raining fire down on Iran, dismantling the Islamic Shia regime that has terrorized a nation and threatened the world for nearly half a century, America found something else to look at. We always do.

We looked at a Senate race in Texas.

The race between Jasmine Crockett and James Telarico captured the attention of this country, specifically the attention of Black America, in a way that reveals exactly where our eyes are fixed and exactly what we are missing. Because while prophecy is unfolding on one side of the world, we are over here arguing about a primary. And not even the general election. A primary.

Now let me be clear about what actually happened here because Jasmine Crockett went on television and blamed Republicans for her loss. She cried foul. She talked about being cheated. What she did not say, what she could not bring herself to admit as loud, is that her own party sat her down. She was sidelined by her own party. The Democrats who have spent years screaming DEI looked at a Black woman with a law degree from Rhodes College, with federal experience, with alliances already built, with the kind of credibility that takes years to earn, and they handed the nomination to James Talarico. A white man. A soon-to-be so-called pastor. A Harvard graduate. A man who had the look and the disposition they believed could be a useful instrument.

Talarico represented everything Crockett was not in their eyes, which is to say he was palatable. Controllable. He would not go off script. He would not be a loud mouth. He would not be a distraction. Crockett was too real, too raw, too much, and in the Democratic Party, too much of a Black woman has always been exactly one thing: a liability.

What this race actually is, when you pull back the lens, is not just about race. This is about a party that is singular in its obsession and that obsession is Donald Trump. Unseating him. Impeaching him. Dismantling everything he represents. Talarico was selected not because he was the best candidate for Texas. He was selected because they believe he has the best shot at flipping a Texas Senate seat, and a flipped Texas Senate seat gets them one step closer to the votes they need to bring down the man who just ordered the strike that killed Khamenei.

Think about that. The man they are trying to impeach is the same man who just shook the entire prophetic landscape of the Middle East. And impeaching Donald Trump may do more than remove a president. It may impede Israel's attempts to build the Third Temple and bring the world one step further from what the prophets said would come.

This race, as significant as it may become come November when one of them faces either John Cornyn or Ken Paxton, only drew two million votes in the primary. Two million. In 2018 when Ted Cruz faced Beto O'Rourke, the primary drew six million combined votes between Democrats and Republicans. The general pulled eight million. The engagement was historic. People were fired up. Now, with the world on fire, with Israel and Iran at war, with the architecture of the Last Days being assembled in real time, two million people showed up and half of them were arguing about whether racism cost Jasmine Crockett a Senate seat.

Racism was real in this race. Let's not pretend it wasn't. It was not the only thing at work though. The Democratic Party's own hand was in it. They gave the DEI to the less qualified candidate because they believed he was the better weapon. They used the language of inclusion to exclude the one person who had actually earned it. They showed their hand. Again.

What grieves me most about all of this is the people consuming this story, the ones who spent this week outraged about Crockett and Talarico, posting and arguing and demanding accountability, most of them have no idea what is happening in Iran. Most of them could not tell you why Purim matters or who Esther was. Most of them have never opened Ezekiel or even understand anything about a Third Temple. They are consumed by the small theater of American race politics while the curtain is rising on something none of us have ever seen before.

They are the lost crowd. The ones who do not recognize the season. The ones who cannot feel that the ground is shifting underneath their feet, not because of an election or a Senate race in Texas, but because the King is coming. And when He comes, the color of your skin will not be a factor. Your party affiliation will not be a factor. Your podcast following will not be a factor. The only thing that will matter is what you believed and whether you had eyes to see it while there was still time.

Section Three: The Idol and the Idolatry

There is Candace Owens.

I cannot talk about distraction and blindness in this hour without addressing what is happening in the world of podcasting and more specifically what Candace Owens has become. Because there is a level of hate for Israel that rises in her commentary that is visceral. Raw. Personal. And it is being fed to millions of people who believe they are receiving truth.

Candace Owens is like a record with a scratch in it. Since last September she has been stuck. Repeating the same story. The same obsession. The same loop. And that loop has a name, Charlie Kirk. He has become her idol. He has become the saint she believes will deliver her from her sins if she can just solve the mystery of who took him. Finding the answer to that question has consumed her entirely and millions of her followers are walking right behind her into that idolatry without the first clue that is what it is.

Her series, The Bride of Charlie, is playing out on a podcast near you and me. And in it she has taken it upon herself to destroy Erika Kirk, Charlie's wife, because in Candace's mind Erika and her family are connected to the Jews. Connected to Israel. And Israel, in Candace Owens' world, is the root of all evil. She digs through the most wicked crevices she can find, searching for the thread that ties this grieving woman back to the people she has decided are the enemy. Every Jewish connection is evidence. Every association is suspicious. Every link to Israel is confirmation of what she already believes.

She will tell you she is not against Jews. She is against Israel. She will draw that line carefully and deliberately. But then watch how Jews become a central feature of her coverage. Watch how the word lands in her commentary. Watch how her audience receives it. The distinction she draws in her mouth disappears entirely by the time it reaches the ears of the people listening.

Israel is committing genocide, she says. They started in Gaza and now they are attempting it in Iran. Killing the Muslim leader was wicked and unjust. And there are people, far more than you would expect, who have received that message and made it their own. People who two years ago could not have told you the difference between Sunni and Shia, who now have strong theological opinions about why the God of Israel is the villain of this story.

That is not journalism. That is not investigation. That is not even good podcasting. That is Satan using every tool available to keep us blind, to cover our eyes with just enough truth mixed with just enough poison that we cannot tell the difference, to keep us digging in the dirt so that we come up dirty. So that when the real thing is happening, when the prophetic clock is moving and the nations are aligning and the signs are stacking up, we are too busy watching a podcast about a dead man's wife to lift our eyes and see what God is actually doing.

Candace Owens is not the disease. She is a symptom. A symptom of a people so desperate for someone to tell them the truth that they will follow anyone who sounds certain, even when that certainty is leading them directly away from the light.

Closing: Beyond the Pale

Candace Owens said something recently that I have not been able to shake. Not because it caught me off guard but because of what it revealed about the spirit behind everything she has been building.

She invoked the phrase Beyond the Pale.

And let me be clear. Candace Owens knows exactly what that phrase means. This was not a casual slip. This was not a woman who stumbled onto a historical reference without understanding its weight. She knows the Pale. She knows the Pale of Settlement. The defined boundary inside Imperial Russia beyond which Jewish people were not permitted to live. Contained. Controlled. Pushed to the outskirts of society and told they did not belong among civilized people. If you have ever watched Fiddler on the Roof, if you have ever seen that fictional village of Anatevka, those families clinging to their traditions and their dignity in the margins of a world that despised them, then you have seen the Pale. You know what it cost to live beyond it.

Candace knows this history. And she used it anyway. She reached for it deliberately to justify the treatment of Jews. To frame their suffering not as an injustice but as a consequence. As something earned. And then she went further, lifting up the execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena, dragged out on Christmas Day and shot, as some kind of reference point. A moment in history she wanted her audience sitting with while thinking about Israel and Jewish leadership.

That is not commentary. That is not provocation. That is a person who went digging in the darkest corners of history, found the most blood-soaked examples she could locate, and laid them at the feet of the Jewish people as justification for what she believes they deserve.

This is the same woman millions of people are following right now. The same voice they trust to tell them what the media won't. The same platform they call truth.

This is where all of it converges into one sobering reality. Iran spent 47 years building a regime around the annihilation of Israel. The Democratic Party is spending its political capital trying to bring down the president who just dismantled that regime. Candace Owens is spending her platform poisoning the minds of everyday Americans against the Jewish people, using the language of history as a weapon rather than a lesson. These are not three unrelated things. They are different instruments playing the same note. That note is as old as the book of Esther.

Because the Pale did not end with Russia. War after war and nation after nation, Spain, France, England, Poland, Germany, the Jewish people were expelled, persecuted, nearly exterminated. And after all of it, after every attempt to erase them from the earth, they found themselves back in Jerusalem. In 1948 a nation was born in a day. Isaiah 66 fulfilled before a watching world that immediately began debating whether it counted.

Candace knows this history too. She just draws different conclusions from it.

What she cannot account for, what no podcaster, no political strategist, no ancient Persian empire and no modern Islamic theocracy has ever been able to account for, is this. The God of Israel is not moved by human consensus. He does not check the ratings. He does not wait for Tucker Carlson to find it theologically reasonable or for Candace Owens to find it historically fair. He set a plan in motion before the foundations of the world and He has been walking it out in full view of anyone with eyes to see it, through every expulsion and every Pale and every pogrom and every gas chamber and every October 7th, and yes, every airstrike on Persian soil during the feast of Purim.

This is not coincidence. None of it is coincidence. Not a single step of that long journey from the outskirts of Russia back to the Promised Land happened outside the sovereign hand of God.

The ones who see it are not crazy and we are not confused or duped by theology. We are the ones who remember what the Book said and recognize the season we are living in. While America argues about Senate races and podcasters dig through the most wicked crevices of history to justify hatred dressed up as journalism, the stage is being set. The pieces are moving. The clock is running.

Beyond the Pale was once the place where the unwanted were sent to disappear. God turned it into a road that led them home.

The same God who brought a scattered people back to their land after two thousand years of exile is now setting the stage for what no eye has fully seen and no mind has fully comprehended.

Soon and very soon.

We are going to see the King.