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.

The Drift: Demons, Nationalism, and the Erasure of a People

“Behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass by them.” Amos 7:8

I've been reading Demons. 

If you've followed this blog, you know Dostoevsky is someone I return to often. But something about this reading is hitting differently. The deeper I get into the novel, the more I recognize the presence of something darker at work. Subtle influences that pull people, slowly and consistently, away from God. What's unsettling is not that it exists, but how easily it goes unnoticed.

I don't think many people see it for what it is. But the more I engage with people, especially on social media, the more aware I've become of how real this spiritual undertow is. And nothing made that more visible to me this week than two things: a YouTube short that turned my stomach, and the State of the Union address.

Let me start with the video.

Three white individuals were asked a question that should never need asking: how are American Blacks American citizens? Two of them argued that more white Americans have fought in wars throughout this country's history than Black Americans, as if citizenship is a ledger and contribution is measured in body counts. The third, to their credit, pointed out that Black people have fought in every war since this nation's founding.

Here's what was visceral to me. Not one of the three, not a single one, mentioned the fact that we were brought to this country in chains. That we built this nation with our hands bound behind our backs and our feet shackled to keep us from running. That the blood of our ancestors is in the very fabric of the soil of this land.

That silence was not accidental. It was the point.

Those three individuals were not an anomaly. They are part of a much larger and more organized movement. We see it in the rise of voices like Nick Fuentes, who openly champions white identity politics. We see it in Joel Webbon and the growing strain of Christian nationalism that wraps racial hierarchy in scripture. We hear echoes of it in commentators like Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles, who frame Western civilization and its preservation in terms that conveniently exclude the people who built it with their bare hands. This is not ignorance. This is not algorithmic rage-bait. This is ideology, and it has a name.

This is what white nationalism does. It doesn't just elevate one story. It erases another. It rewrites the American narrative as a story belonging solely to one people, and in doing so, it forgets that God made man in His image. All of us. Including those of us who survived the Middle Passage. Including those who built this nation with whips on their backs and chains on their feet. Including every generation since that has contributed, bled, fought, and died for a country that still debates whether we belong. And our contribution didn't end with slavery. We contribute with our taxes like most other Americans. We contribute with our work, with what we put in every single day to keep this engine called America running. We show up. We build. We sustain. And still, our place at the table is treated as something that needs to be earned rather than something that was paid for long ago in blood and labor and centuries of sacrifice.

That impulse to erase, to claim the whole of America as a white inheritance, is a sickness. And it's the same sickness Dostoevsky was writing about.

In Demons, the forces that tear a society apart don't announce themselves with horns and fire. They come dressed in ideology. They come with conviction. They come with the absolute certainty that their vision is the right one, and that anyone who stands in the way must be moved, silenced, or forgotten.

That's what I saw playing out during the State of the Union.

On one side, collectivist or system-driven ideas. On the other, nationalism. We reduce these to left vs. right, Democrat vs. Republican, but that simplification hides something far deeper. What we witnessed at the State of the Union were two different sides of a very evil coin. And at the center of it all was a question that shouldn't require asking but demands an answer: who is American, and what does it mean to be American?

Now, many will make the point that what's happening in this country right now is about good vs. evil, not left or right. And there is truth in that. But there is also a kind of self-righteousness in that framing, because the very notion erases something essential. If there is only good and there is only evil, then there is no center. There is no standard by which we measure either one. And without that standard, both sides simply become mirrors of the other, each convinced they are righteous, each certain the other is the enemy.

There is a center. There is good. There is evil. And there is justice.

Jesus was justice. Jesus is Justice. He didn't come representing one side of a political argument. He came as the standard itself, the plumb line against which all things are measured. And when we lose sight of that, we lose more than the argument. We lose the ability to even recognize what justice looks like.


So we are left with the harder question: which ideology bends toward justice?

I don't believe every person is a white nationalist. I want to be clear about that. Scattered among those who cling to the pride of the color of their skin, there are those of us who understand that God created us in His image and in His likeness. There are people on every side of this divide who still carry that truth. But the question remains: which set of ideas, practices, and beliefs aligns more closely with how God has always dealt with His own?

Consider the idea that American citizens should be considered above all others. Many will recoil at that. But is it not justice? Let me be clear: I am not making an argument for ethnic supremacy. I am making an argument for ordered covenant responsibility, the same kind of responsibility God modeled with Israel. When God brought Israel out of Egypt, He didn't tell them to serve the nations around them. He set them on a path to destroy anything that threatened the theocracy. He led them as Commander-in-Chief of an army. He judged those who stood in the path of their progress. That was the line of the Messiah. God prioritized His people, not because He was exclusionary by nature, but because He was purposeful in His design. There was a covenant, and that covenant came with protection. A nation that does not prioritize its own people, that does not fulfill its responsibility to those within its covenant, is a nation that has abandoned the very model God established.

Now, we as Christians understand that God has opened the gate to allow in the Gentiles, those of us who believe that Jesus Christ came to save our souls. The covenant has expanded. The family has grown. But even in that expansion, there is order. There is structure. There is the expectation that we align ourselves with what God has established, not with what man has invented.


This is where the two sides reveal themselves for what they truly are.

On one side, there is a party that puts its faith in the system itself. It worships its own idea of what you are and condemns the Creator for His creation. But we are the clay, and He is the Potter. He shaped us. He formed us. And we don't get to ask questions about His design. Yet this side tells us it's acceptable to destroy life and call it something it is not, to rename what God has already named in order to justify an ideology. It tells us to look to man for healthcare, for food, for shelter, for clothing. It places the government where God should be: the provider, the protector, the source. And that is the very definition of worshipping the system as opposed to the Creator.

This is what kept Israel in bondage. The physical chains of Egypt, yes, but also the spiritual ones, the temptation to rely on systems rather than God. To trust in what you can see rather than in the One who sees all. That's what one side asks of us. Come to the system. Trust the system. Let the system define you, care for you, save you.

On the other side, there are those who attempt to keep God to themselves, as if He doesn't have the power to raise all that are dead to His glory. They wrap faith in the flag and confuse patriotism with piety. They build walls not just at the border but around the throne of God, as if His grace has limits, as if His image is only reflected in certain faces. They forget that the same God who led Israel also made covenant with Rahab the Canaanite, with Ruth the Moabite, with every outsider who turned toward Him and of course Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman.

It's between these two sides that we find ourselves, fighting for justice, fighting for truth, in a world where self-righteousness reigns supreme.


What always gets overlooked is who bears the cost. The ideologues at the center of the debate never pay it. The ordinary people caught in between do, the ones forced to live with the consequences of conflicts they didn't create. People like us. People like me. American Blacks whose citizenship is still questioned, whose history is still erased, whose blood is in the soil of a country that still can't decide if we belong.

The danger is in losing the center entirely. And the center I'm talking about is not political. It is spiritual.

When we replace God at the center, whether with nationalism or systems, with ideology or identity, we don't eliminate the struggle between good and evil. We simply redefine it in our own image. We become the authors of our own morality, and history has shown us, over and over again, how that ends.

Dostoevsky understood this. He wrote Demons as a warning about what happens to the human soul when it cuts itself off from the divine. When people stop seeing each other as made in the image of God, they stop seeing each other at all.

That's what I saw in that YouTube video. Three people standing in a country built on the backs of enslaved Africans, debating whether those people's descendants are truly American. If that's not a demon at work, quietly whispering that some of God's children are less than, I don't know what is.


I'll be honest with you.

There are some nights when I am alone, completely alone, and I cry out to God in tears. Real tears. Because it feels as though He isn't hearing my prayers. It feels as though the wicked and the evil have the strongest voice, as though their megaphone reaches further than my whisper ever could. Those are the nights when the weight of everything, the erasure, the arrogance, the lies dressed up as patriotism, presses down so hard that I can barely breathe.

In those moments, God scoops in. He reminds me that He is truth. He is justice. He tells me to focus on His Word and not on any man, because they are liars. Every one of them. He reminds me that even though an entire nation set out to keep a race of people in bondage, that their so-called superior thinking cast an entire people as inferior, He is far more superior than anything imaginable. He has guided us through some of the most inconceivable storms in human history, and He will guide us again. He always does.

That's the thing about God. He doesn't operate on our timeline or our volume level. The wicked may shout, but God moves. And when He moves, no system, no ideology, no nation built on lies can stand.


But let me show you what the other side of that coin looks like, what happens when God is removed from the equation entirely. Because everything I've described so far, the nationalism, the system worship, the drift from center, all of it creates a world where power answers to nothing. And if you want to see what that world produces when it reaches its highest levels, look no further than what is revealed in the Epstein letters.

In those letters, there is a reference to something called Bottle Girls. If you don't know what Bottle Girls are, let me paint the picture. These are young women whose job is to attract rich, powerful men into clubs and bars, luring them in with the promise of excess. They encourage them to order the most expensive drinks, to spend lavishly, to draw in the crowd. And in return, they are elevated. Taken up to the highest parts of the club, the VIP sections, the balconies, where they can look down over the people crowded below, swimming in drink and lust and greed.

From up there, they pick them out like fruit from a tree. They have their way. They sell their souls. They sacrifice their very beings.

Nobody sees it for what it is. Or maybe they do, and they just don't care.

That is the architecture of evil. It doesn't drag you down into the pit screaming. It lifts you up and gives you a view. It makes you feel chosen. And by the time you realize what you've traded for that elevation, it is already too late.

This is not a metaphor. This is what is happening in plain sight, at the highest levels of wealth and power and influence in this country. The same country that debates whether Black people are citizens. The same country that watches two political parties posture at the State of the Union while the rot beneath them grows deeper by the day.

Dostoevsky saw it. He wrote about it. The demons don't come for the people at the bottom. They come for the ones who think they are at the top.

We are drifting. Left and right, the pull is real. But the answer is in returning to the center, to the standard that no system, no ideology, and no nation can replace.

God makes man in His image. Every one of us. And any vision of America, or of justice, that forgets that is not just incomplete. It is dangerous.

It is exactly what Dostoevsky warns us about.

Yet, on those nights when I cry out and feel like no one is listening, He answers. Not always with thunder. Sometimes with a whisper. Sometimes just with the reminder that I am still here. That we are still here. That the people who survived the Middle Passage, who built this nation in chains, who endured every attempt at erasure, are still here.

That, in itself, is the evidence of God.

“Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons

Jacqueline Session is the founder and CEO of DAHTRUTH, LLC, a poet, and an urban fiction author. She writes on faith, culture, and identity at [DahTruth.com](https://dahtruth.com).
 

The Hijacking of Black History Month

“If there is no God, then I am God.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons

I'm tired. And I don't mean the kind of tired that sleep fixes. I mean the kind of tired that comes from opening your phone every morning and being assaulted by a new cycle of chaos, contradiction, and political theater dressed up as progress. This has been one of those weeks where social media feels less like a tool for connection and more like a weapon of mass distraction — and I say that as somebody who uses it daily to speak truth.

February is supposed to be American Black History Month. A time when this nation — however performatively — pauses to acknowledge the contributions, the suffering, the resilience, and the brilliance of American Descendants of Slavery. But this February? Black History Month got pushed to the back of the bus. Again.

If I must be honest I could take Black History Month or leave it.  But this year I am more focused because I can't help but wonder how stories of Black History is being overshowed by The Epstein files.  Our Leaders are more concerned about these files then they are about focusing on our past, current and future standing in this country.

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers…”

— Ephesians 6:12 (KJV)

The Epstein Circus and the Trump Smokescreen

I am not certain how much the Epstein files matter. I don't think sex trafficking is the greatest story told in these files. I think justice for those victims matters; however, the victims are not those women standing at the congressional hearings wearing T-shirts. Reading through some of the depositions from the young girls, I believe they were manipulated by Epstein and not necessarily forced. They wanted money and were willing to sacrifice themselves without understanding the long-term consequences. Epstein and Maxwell were the monsters who were consuming young people for personal pleasure. It's sick and disgusting, but true.

One of the depositions discussed the ways young girls were manipulated—how they came and went and how they collected cash with each 30-minute massage. How they lied to their parents and skipped school to give 30-minute massages, how they referred friends, and how Epstein referred them to friends. Old men with a great deal of cash who wanted massages. It was all a vicious cycle of young girls being manipulated by monsters in the name of cash.

Unfortunately, what has been revealed has targeted no individual. Those men getting massages are like ghosts or phantoms who appear in motel and hotel rooms and exit without sight or sound. Sex is being played out in the media this month, and there is no pursuit of justice for victims of sexual predators. These terms are being used as a political weapon, wielded with surgical precision simply to gaslight the American people.

They want us to focus on the sexual allegations, although they lack evidence. Creating a witch hunt against individuals who have been implicated simply because their name happened to appear in the file. There are no new convictions because they lack substantial evidence, and yet they continue to holler about pedophiles and sex trafficking.

The Department of Justice has acknowledged that the files contain what it described as unfounded and false allegations submitted to the FBI before the 2020 election. They steer us to the sexual allegations and keep the narrative machine spinning: Trump is guilty by association. Trump is a predator. Trump is the real story.

While we are focused on stories without any evidence, we ignore other stories that are told in that file. And Black History Month is drowned out. Our history, once again, was not the priority. Our stories got scrolled past while pundits debated whether a birthday card with Trump's name on it constitutes evidence of sexual misconduct. The exhaustion is real.

The Barking Dog, the Bone, and the Buried Truth

There's a narrative at work here. Think of it this way: they've got a barking dog in your ear and a hand over your eyes. The Epstein files are the barking dog the left has been using for months now to keep the noise going, to keep you distracted. For a little while, ICE was the bone that shut the dog up — the immigration raids, the deportation stories, the outrage machine had something else to chew on. But that bone got snatched away, and now the dog is barking again. Louder than ever.

Last week, Les Wexner — the 88-year-old billionaire founder of L Brands, the man behind Victoria's Secret — was deposed by members of the House Oversight Committee at his mansion in New Albany, Ohio. He sat there for nearly five hours under oath. And to his credit, he played the right card. He said he didn't know what Epstein was up to. He called himself naive, foolish, and gullible. He said he was duped by a world-class con man. He said he cut ties with Epstein nearly twenty years ago. He said no one from the FBI or any other law enforcement agency ever contacted him about allegations of sexual assault. He said he barely knew the man — and of course, we can figure out that's probably not the whole truth when you've given someone your power of attorney and billions of dollars in assets, including a million-dollar townhouse in Manhattan.

But here's the thing: even if Wexner's relationship with Epstein was deeper than he admits — and it almost certainly was — there is no evidence of pedophilia. That's a different question entirely. No indictment. No DNA. No victims naming him in criminal complaints. No charges. Nothing. What there is, is hearsay, speculation, and a congressional fishing expedition led entirely by Democrats.

And let me emphasize that point. Not a single Republican member of the House Oversight Committee showed up for the Wexner deposition. Not one. Chairman James Comer cited a medical procedure. But the optics tell the story: this was a Democratic witch trial from start to finish. Five Democrats flew to Ohio to grill an 88-year-old man in his home about his sex life, about Epstein's sex life, and — here's where it gets truly maddening — about Donald Trump's sex life.

Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett of Texas sat across from this man and asked him point blank: "Did Epstein ever share any information with you about Donald Trump's sexual activities?" Wexner said no. She asked if he ever saw or became aware of Trump having a sexual relationship with someone introduced to him by Epstein or Maxwell. Wexner said no. She pressed on whether Epstein had ever discussed Trump with him. No. Whether Trump had ever discussed Epstein. No. There was nothing there. Wexner said Trump used to show up at Victoria's Secret fashion shows and introduce himself, and that he found it odd because Trump had nothing to do with fashion. That's it. That's all they got. An implication not an allegation that provided a road to an investigation.

Yet Crockett told reporters afterward: "We're gonna be on his a--." Talking about the President of the United States. Based on what? Based on a man saying he doesn't remember and clearly not credible.  If this is what passes for investigation in America then our judicial system is in trouble.

To think that any person can be hauled before Congress, sat down under oath, and asked these kinds of intimate, degrading questions based solely on hearsay, without a single shred of physical evidence, goes against every democratic right you can imagine. Every citizen has the right to remain silent. Every citizen has the right to face their accusers. And those who want to prosecute have the burden of presenting a case. But there is no case here. No indictment. No allegations supported by facts — no DNA, no forensic evidence, nothing. Even in the case of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, she had proof. She had the blue dress. She had Clinton's DNA. That was a real case built on real evidence. Here we have Congress asking an 88-year-old man about another man's sexual proclivities and then pivoting to ask about the President's — all for the cameras, all for the narrative.

It was all a circus.  Big tents telling us to look over here at the clowns.

The Questions Nobody's Asking

February. Black History month spectacle. Here's what really got to me this week. While Democrats were busy trying to connect Trump to Epstein through an old man's fading memory, nobody was asking the questions that actually matter. The real questions. The ones that, if answered, would shake the foundations of power in this country.

Like: Why wasn't any of this investigated in 1996? That's when the FBI first heard allegations about Epstein. A woman named Maria Farmer reported to the FBI that Epstein had stolen naked photos of her underage siblings. No investigation was conducted. For years. How does that happen unless someone wanted to bury the story.

Like: Where did Epstein get his money? This was a man who lived like a billionaire, owned islands and planes and mansions, and yet no one has fully accounted for the precise structure of his wealth. Leslie Wexner gave him enormous financial authority, yes, but even that does not explain the full scope of what Epstein controlled. He owned aircraft. He moved in circles of power. His lifestyle exceeded what many traditional financial managers accumulate.

In the 1980s, covert operations and drug trafficking scandals devastated Black communities. The Iran-Contra era revealed that powerful institutions were capable of moral compromise on a global scale. So when a figure like Epstein rises with unexplained wealth and extraordinary protection, the public has reason to ask hard questions. The issue is not proving a direct connection. The issue is transparency. In a country where entire neighborhoods were flooded with drugs and later blamed for their own collapse, secrecy at the highest levels does not inspire trust.

If the FBI, the CIA, and the DOJ are filled with the intellectuals they purport to be, then why, in thirty years, has there not been a single thorough investigation into how Epstein built his empire? I think it is because nobody wanted those graves dug up. Those graves do not just hold Epstein's secrets. They hold the secrets of the institutions that looked the other way. The same institutions that gave us the Covid crisis and forced it upon the world. The same institutions that have pushed transgenderism as settled science when the conversation is far from settled. The same institutions that talk about human trafficking in the abstract while wealthy men continue to bring women from around the world to increase their own sexual power and nothing is done. All of it gets buried under allegations that cannot be substantiated. Under congressional theater that leads nowhere. Under headlines designed to generate clicks and outrage but never justice.

Let's Be Honest About What We're Looking At

Another thing that struck me about the Epstein files was the bottle girls. The VIP clubs. The way sex is used as currency in certain circles. Young women selling themselves for cash and high-priced bottles, for access to powerful men, for the promise of a modeling career or a seat at the table. The files are full of this. And the media acts shocked. As if strip clubs are not real things. As if prostitution is not a real lifestyle that some women choose and some are forced into. As if there are not levels to this, from the street corner to the high-priced escort who does the same things in a penthouse instead of a motel. The only difference is the price tag and the zip code.

That is not a defense of Epstein. It is a reality check. The culture of sexual transaction that Epstein exploited did not start with him and it will not end with him. It exists because powerful men create the demand and vulnerable women, and sometimes girls, are positioned to meet it. And instead of dealing with that systemic reality, Congress wants to know if an eighty-eight-year-old man remembers whether Trump was at a fashion show twenty years ago.

The whole thing is maddening. And if it were not documented and on video, you would not believe it was true.

What's Actually in the Files That Nobody Wants to Talk About

Here is where I need everybody to pay close attention. Because while Congress is busy chasing Trump's name through these files, the truly dangerous revelations are being glossed over. The things that should terrify every Black person, every poor person, every person of faith in this country are the very things nobody on Capitol Hill wants to discuss.

The Epstein files reveal that this man was not just a sex trafficker. He was a eugenicist. A fake race scientist. A man who believed he could engineer a superior human race. And he had the money, the connections, and the intellectual infrastructure to try.

Epstein maintained a list of nearly thirty top scientists. He funded research at Harvard, MIT, the Santa Fe Institute, and other elite institutions to the tune of millions of dollars. He gave 6.5 million dollars to Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. He donated 800,000 dollars to MIT's Media Lab. He gave 120,000 dollars to the Worldwide Transhumanist Association, now called Humanity Plus, an organization dedicated to using genetic engineering and artificial intelligence to enhance the human race. He organized lavish science conferences, flew researchers to his private island, held dinners with Nobel laureates and Silicon Valley billionaires, and embedded himself so deeply in the scientific establishment that researchers were sharing pre-publication manuscripts with him and consulting him on their career crises.

Brilliant minds discussing funding over those expensive dinners with whores in the house.

Race science. The files contain email exchanges where Epstein and his scientific associates openly discussed the supposed cognitive inferiority of Black people. One AI researcher wrote to Epstein in 2016 that Black children have slower cognitive development. Another exchange entertained the idea that mass deaths of the elderly might be beneficial to humanity. Epstein himself told Steve Bannon on camera that if he were in the forest competing against an African, he would be the one getting eaten, because Black people have the physical intelligence to deal with their environment, implying they lack the higher intelligence he attributed to himself.

This is what was being discussed in the rooms that Epstein's money built. Not at Klan rallies. Not in anonymous chat rooms. At Harvard. At MIT. At private dinners with the men building the AI systems that will shape our future, influence healthcare decisions, guide genetic research, determine insurance algorithms, and structure the technologies that increasingly govern how we live and who receives care.

Let me connect another dot that the media conveniently ignores. Epstein was included in email conversations about pandemic preparedness and global health financing years before Covid-19 ever appeared. A 2017 email from Boris Nikolic — a science advisor with direct ties to Bill Gates — was addressed to both Epstein and Gates, discussing donor-advised fund strategies for key areas including pandemic response. Epstein was in the room where global health priorities were being financially structured. He had relationships with virologists. Stanford virologist Nathan Wolfe visited Epstein's homes in New York and Florida, pitching him on funding virus research. The files show Epstein positioned himself at the intersection of global health philanthropy, financial engineering, and pandemic risk modeling.

Now I'm not saying Epstein created Covid. But I am saying this: the same networks that looked the other way while he trafficked girls are the same networks that shaped the global pandemic response. The same institutions — the intelligence agencies, the scientific establishment, the philanthropic class — that protected Epstein for decades are the same ones that told us to shut up, stay home, take the shot, and don't ask questions. Now we're just supposed to believe that they're really pursuing justice.

And then there's the transhumanism pipeline into the gender ideology that has swept through our schools, our medical institutions, and our culture. Epstein funded organizations and thinkers who believe the human body is something to be transcended, modified, and redesigned. That biology is a limitation to be engineered away. That nature is a rough draft and technology is the editor. This is the same philosophical root that feeds the idea that a child can be born in the wrong body. That hormones and surgery can correct what God designed. Transhumanism and transgenderism share the same intellectual DNA — the belief that the human being as created is insufficient and must be improved upon by human hands.

Epstein's money flowed into the very academic and nonprofit networks that now promote these ideologies as settled science. The same circles that entertained his eugenics fantasies over cocktails and coffee klatches are the ones publishing the research, writing the policies, and training the doctors who are reshaping our children. And we're told to celebrate it. We're told it's progress. We're told that questioning it makes us bigots.

And let me say something that might make people uncomfortable, but it's the truth and somebody needs to say it. We call Epstein and Maxwell monsters — and they were — for manipulating young people, exploiting their vulnerability, consuming their innocence for personal gain. The whole country is united in outrage over that. But what do we call the organizations that tell a woman it's empowering to kill her unborn child? What do we call the doctors who put a confused twelve-year-old boy on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and sentence him to a lifetime of medication to chase a biological impossibility? What do we call the system that celebrates all of this as healthcare and progress?

Epstein and Maxwell were individual monsters. But what we're looking at now is a monstrous system — institutional, funded, protected by law, and cheered on by the very same progressive establishment that sat at Epstein's dinner table. We cry outrage with one hand and applaud with the other. We weep for the girls Epstein manipulated and then hand our own children over to ideologies that are no less destructive — just better branded.

And here's what nobody wants to acknowledge: sex, prostitution, even the exploitation that Epstein trafficked in — those evils are as old as civilization itself. Since the scattering of mankind, since Babel, men have bought and sold flesh. It is wicked, but it is ancient. Abortion on demand as a political right? Gender transition as mainstream medicine for children? Those are new. Those are modern inventions — ideas that didn't exist in any serious mainstream form until the last hundred years. They are not the natural order of anything. They are manufactured ideologies, packaged as liberation, and sold to the very communities least equipped to survive their consequences.

Meanwhile, the communities most affected by these ideologies are our communities, Black communities, poor communities. The ones that are least equipped to push back. We don't have the lobbying power. We don't have the media platforms. We don't have the institutional backing. What we have is our faith, our common sense, and the willingness to say out loud what everybody else is whispering: something is deeply wrong, and the people responsible for it are the same people who are now pointing fingers at everyone else.

At the root of it all is something that goes deeper than policy or politics. The left's ideology moves away from God. It has to. Because you cannot pursue the kind of project Epstein and his intellectual circle were funding — redesigning human beings, engineering a master race, deciding which lives are worth living and which aren't — unless you first remove God from the equation. You have to dethrone the Creator before you can sit in His seat.

That's what transhumanism is. That's what eugenics is. That's what the gender ideology is. It's man saying: I know better than God. I can improve on what He made. I can fix what He designed. And the people making that claim aren't preachers or prophets — they're scientists and billionaires and politicians who have appointed themselves the saviors of humanity. Bill Gates will save you from the pandemic. Harvard will save you from your own biology. The government will save you from your ignorance. Just trust them. Just comply. Just hand over your children and your faith and your common sense, and they will build a better world.

That is the zeitgeist of the age. It is the spirit that runs through every single institution that protected Jeffrey Epstein, that funded his eugenics fantasies, that entertained his race science over expensive dinners, and that is now telling you to look at Trump instead of looking at them.

Meanwhile, Blue States Are Bleeding Their Own

Now let me turn the lens where it really needs to go. To the Democratic-led states and cities that promised the working class and the poor a better life. Because while the left paints Trump as a white nationalist whose only concern is his base, their own policies are gutting the very communities they claim to champion. The receipts are right here.

Virginia: Taxing You for Walking the Dog

Governor Abigail Spanberger came into office in January on a platform of “affordability”. The ink wasn't dry on her inauguration speech before Virginia Democrats introduced over fifty new tax proposals. I wish I was making this up but her proposals include taxes on dog walking, gym memberships, dry cleaning, home repairs, food delivery, package deliveries, and electric leaf blowers.

Dog walking. They want to tax you for walking your dog.

This is a state that Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin left with a $572 million budget surplus and four consecutive years of surpluses totaling $10 billion. He cut taxes and attracted business. And the very first thing Democrats did was reach into every pocket they could find. Some proposals would push Virginia's top income tax rate to 13.8% — higher than California's — giving the Commonwealth the dubious distinction of being the most heavily taxed state in the nation. Virginians didn't vote for that. They voted for affordability. What they got was a tax on picking up their dry cleaning.

New York: The Double-Edged Sword of Mamdani's Math

New York City's new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is a self-described democratic socialist who rode into office on promises of rent freezes, free bus rides, city-owned grocery stores, and universal childcare. Beautiful promises. Campaign poetry. But now the prose of governing has arrived, and the numbers don't add up.

Mamdani inherited a $5.4 billion budget gap — a mess he blames on former Mayor Eric Adams and years of fiscal mismanagement. His preferred solution? Tax the wealthy. Raise income taxes by two percentage points on millionaires and hike corporate taxes. But Governor Kathy Hochul has flatly refused to support it. She has said repeatedly she will not raise taxes on the wealthy this year. So Mamdani responded with a threat: if Albany won't tax the rich, he'll raise property taxes on homeowners by 9.5%.

Let that sink in.  He is going to hold hostage the middle class and poor communities if he doesn't get funding for a socialist’s budget. 

The man who promised to freeze rents for four years on rent-stabilized apartments is now threatening to raise taxes on the property owners who provide those very apartments. How does that math work? If you freeze the income a landlord can collect from rent but increase the taxes they owe on the building, where does that money come from? It comes from deferred maintenance. It comes from buildings falling apart. It comes from landlords abandoning properties altogether. Who will be there standing in line to scoop up and save the abandoned properties, will it be the government.  Is this a government takeover. Socialism working at its best.  The New York Apartment Association warned that this combination would guarantee the physical destruction of tens of thousands of housing units. The Working-class, middle-class New Yorkers workers disproportionately Black families, lives in those units.

How about the free grocery stores? A Polymarket-funded pop-up in the West Village drew lines around the block — with shoppers being paired with staff who rushed them through the aisles. One woman on disability said she couldn't even get everything she needed before items ran out. Economists have called the city-owned grocery store plan a doomed experiment. Kansas City tried it. It failed. The grocery business runs on razor-thin margins, and government has never been known for efficiency. But Mamdani is charging ahead because the campaign slogan sounded good.

Your taxes will be used to fund the free grocery stores that will tell you what you will eat and what to put in your bag.

Chicago: Taxed to Death and Losing Its Team

Chicago. Another blue city. Another promise of progress. Another tax disaster.

Chicago homeowners were hit with record property tax increases.  These spikes are happening in the poorest neighborhoods, predominantly Black communities — because commercial property values in downtown areas have plummeted. Businesses have left. Now office towers sit empty and the tax burden shifted to the people who can least afford it.

Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas put it plainly: the high-rises downtown are unrented because businesses have left the city, and somebody has to pick up the tab. So the residences are picking it up. The homeowners. The working people. The very voters who were told that Democratic leadership would protect them.

Chicago's 2026 budget imposed $473 million in new taxes — on shopping bags, Uber rides, alcohol, online gaming, and even a first-in-the-nation social media tax. Mayor Brandon Johnson proposed a per-employee head tax on large firms that the City Council rejected, with aldermen warning it would drive even more businesses out.

Now the Chicago Bears — one of the NFL's founding franchises, over a century of football in Chicago — are on the verge of leaving the state entirely. Indiana lawmakers unanimously passed a bill this week to lure the team to Hammond, just across the state line. The Bears called it the most meaningful step forward in their stadium efforts to date. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker admitted that the team is unlikely to build within Chicago's city limits. Sources close to the situation called the move to Indiana an inevitability.

A hundred years of football history, walking out the door. Because Chicago's leadership couldn't get out of its own way. Because the taxes were too high. The bureaucracy was too thick. Indiana said: we're open for business — and Illinois said: we're open for new taxes.

The Narrative Machine Never Sleeps

Now let me be clear about something, because this is the thread that ties everything together. All of it, the Epstein circus, the tariff headlines, the culture wars, is being run through a narrative machine operated by the left. And the machine has one function: point everything at Donald Trump, MAGA, or racism and hope nobody looks behind the curtain.

They have a practice. They pick a direction, they drive the narrative relentlessly, and they count on us getting so caught up in the emotion, the outrage, the victimhood, the moral panic, that we lose sight of the fact that the left and left-leaning individuals are more implicated in the Epstein files than the right. The Clintons, the academic establishment, the philanthropic class, the media gatekeepers, these are overwhelmingly liberal institutions. And yet, the story we are being told is that no side is innocent, as if the guilt is evenly distributed. It is not. But that framing gives them cover to pivot from the files straight to Trump's name appearing in a contact list, as if proximity is the same as culpability. Meanwhile, the scientists who were discussing Black cognitive inferiority over Epstein-funded dinners at Harvard? Those are their people. The transhumanist organizations that got Epstein's checks? Those run in progressive intellectual circles. But somehow the camera always swings back to the same target.

They do this with everything. They put all white people in a racist box as if only white Republicans are capable of racism. As if a white progressive who funds eugenics research at MIT is somehow less dangerous than a MAGA voter in a red hat. The left has perfected the art of the redirect, and this past week gave us two textbook examples.

The Tariff Ruling: What They Told You vs. What Actually Happened

On Friday, February 20th, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that President Trump could not use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose tariffs. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion, joined by Gorsuch, Barrett, and the three liberal justices. The decision struck down the IEEPA tariffs, which had raised over 160 billion dollars, on the grounds that the 1977 law does not mention tariffs and no president had ever used it that way before.

Now here is what the media told you: Supreme Court strikes down Trump's tariffs in major blow to the president. That is the headline. That is what they want you to walk away with. Trump lost. The Court checked his power. Democracy wins.

Here is what actually happened. Within hours of the ruling, Trump signed a proclamation imposing a 10 percent tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a completely different legal authority. By the next morning, he had raised it to 15 percent, the maximum allowed under that statute. Section 232 tariffs on steel, aluminum, autos, and other goods remain untouched. Section 301 tariffs remain in place. The IEEPA avenue was closed, but the man still has multiple legal tools to impose tariffs, and he used them the same day.

But that is not the story, is it? The story is Trump lost. The story is the Court reined him in. They do not want you to see that tariff authority still exists through multiple congressional statutes. They do not want you to understand that the Constitution gives Congress the power to tax imports, and Congress has already delegated significant portions of that power to the president through other laws. They want you to feel good about a headline and move on. Because if you actually read the ruling and the response, the picture is far more complicated than they want you to see.

The Texas Senate Split: Crockett, Talarico, and the Media's Invisible Hand

We can’t leave out the quieter story that are just as revealing. Down in Texas, the Democratic Senate primary between Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett and state Rep. James Talarico has turned into a case study in narrative manipulation.

Talarico sat for an interview with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show. But on Monday night, Colbert announced on air that CBS lawyers had pulled the interview, citing potential FCC violations related to equal time rules for political candidates. Both Colbert and Talarico framed it as CBS bowing to pressure from the Trump administration. The media ran with that angle. Poor Talarico, silenced by Trump's regulatory intimidation.

But hold on. Think about what actually happened. Talarico — the candidate the Democratic establishment clearly prefers — got the Colbert interview in the first place. Not Crockett. Crockett, a sitting U.S. Congresswoman who had previously been on Colbert's show, was not invited this time. And when the interview was pulled, Talarico's campaign raised $2.5 million in 24 hours off the controversy. Crockett herself acknowledged it gave him the boost he was looking for. That is not what you is called suppression. This was a fundraising strategy wrapped in a censorship narrative.

By the end of the week, Talarico’s team doubled down on this strategy. Where did Talarico show up? On Bill Maher’s show, Friday, February 20th. Right there on the panel on HBO with Lauren Boebert, debating faith and politics before a national audience. No Jasmine Crockett. Talarico. Again.

The Democrats clearly do not want Crockett on that ticket. They are pouring their support behind Talarico because they believe he has the better shot at winning a state that hasn't elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988. Talarico is the one getting the national media platforms, the viral moments, the fundraising boosts. Crockett is being treated like an afterthought.  The party establishment is working behind the scenes to lift one candidate and let the other dangle in the wind. But they'll never say that out loud. Instead, they blame Trump for the Colbert interview being pulled and pretend both candidates have equal footing.

As I write this I am biting my tongue until it bleeds. Because stranger things have happened in politics and Crockett just might pull it off. But on the Republican side, the candidate I believe is the overall best person for that seat — Wesley Hunt — is in a tough spot, running third behind Paxton at 38% and Cornyn at 31% in the latest Hobby School poll. Hunt is polling at 17%, with the lowest unfavorable rating of any candidate in the race and the highest net favorability after Talarico. He's 44 years old, a West Point graduate, a combat veteran, and an America First conservative who entered Congress under the Trump movement. He is the future of the Republican Party in Texas.

But Cornyn has $60 million in ad support. Paxton has the MAGA base. And Hunt is stuck between the establishment and the populists. If Democrats in Texas were truly strategic — if they actually cared about governance over party loyalty — they would look at Wesley Hunt and recognize that he is the best overall candidate in either primary. Not Crockett. Not Talarico. Hunt. He's the one who could win a general election, govern competently, and represent the full spectrum of Texans. But partisan blinders will keep everyone in their lane, and Texas will be worse for it.

The Pattern Is the Point

Virginia. New York. Chicago. The Epstein files. The tariff headlines. The Texas primary games. It is all one big, ugly manipulation tactic, strategically implemented through social media narratives and pandered by those with the biggest pocketbooks.

They promised tax relief and delivered tax hikes. They promised to protect the poor and shifted the burden onto them. They promised economic vitality and watched businesses pack their bags. They promised to be the antidote to Trump and his supposed white nationalism, and yet the communities being devastated by their policies are overwhelmingly Black and working-class communities. And this is February, Black History Month. For real?

This is not the Republican Party doing this. These are Democrats. These are progressives. These are the people who hold up Black History Month banners in February and then spend the other eleven months crafting policies that hollow out Black communities from the inside. These are the people whose intellectual darlings were discussing eugenics and race science at Epstein-funded dinners while simultaneously lecturing us about systemic racism.

And while they do all of this, they point at Trump. Look over there. Epstein files, but only the pages with Trump's name. Tariff ruling, but only the headline that says he lost. Texas Senate race, but only the story about censorship, not the story about which candidate the party machine is actually backing. Whatever the distraction of the week is, it serves the same purpose. If you are watching Trump, you are not watching your property tax bill double. You are not watching your city lose its football team. You are not watching your governor propose a tax on walking your dog. You are not reading what the scientists at Harvard were actually saying about your Black children.

I am scrolled out. I am taxed out. And I am tired of being sold out by the very people who claim to be on our side.

This February, Black History Month did not get overshadowed by accident. It got overshadowed by design. Because the last thing certain people want is for Black Americans to stop and think about our history. They do not want us to look around at our present circumstances and start asking who is really working for us.

Here is the deepest truth I can offer you. Every ideology that is destroying our communities, the eugenics repackaged as science, the transgenderism sold as compassion, the socialism dressed up as justice, the taxes marketed as progress, all of it flows from the same poisoned well. It all begins with the rejection of God and the elevation of man. When you remove the Creator from the conversation, you do not get freedom. You get a new set of gods, smaller, weaker, more corrupt gods who happen to have Harvard degrees and billion-dollar foundations. Gods who funded a pedophile's race science. Gods who told you to lock down your church but keep the liquor stores open. Gods who will redesign your child's body and call it healthcare.

The left does not just lean away from God. It runs. Because everything they want to build requires that He not be in the room. You cannot play God if God is already there.

He is there. And we know it. That is why they cannot silence us, no matter how loud the barking dog gets. That is why Black Americans who hold to their faith, their families, and their common sense are the most dangerous people in this political equation. Because we see through it. We have always seen through it. We survived slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, crack, and mass incarceration, not because the government saved us, but because God carried us. And no amount of Epstein-funded science or Democrat-promised socialism is going to replace that.

The answer, more and more, is becoming painfully clear.

We are working for ourselves. And we are working with God. Because nobody else is.

---

© 2026 Jacqueline Session Ausby. All rights reserved. This work is the original and express intellectual property of Jacqueline Session Ausby and DAHTRUTH, LLC. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author.

Outside The Frame

“Test everything; hold fast to what is good.” — 1 Thessalonians 5:21

On the Epstein Letters, ICE, and Who Really Pays the Price

It’s February—the month we set aside to celebrate love. But this week, love didn’t show up the way the greeting cards promised. Instead, love revealed something far less romantic: the consequences of men unchecked and women willing to sacrifice everything for money, for survival, for proximity to power. What we witnessed this week was not a love story. It was a power story—dressed in the language of desire, wrapped in the politics of control, and played out across every screen in America. If love is supposed to teach us something in February, then this week it taught us what happens when power replaces intimacy, when exploitation masquerades as opportunity, and when the people who are supposed to protect us are too busy protecting themselves.

This week pulled back the curtain on something we already knew but keep pretending we don’t: power in America does not answer to the same rules as survival. What played out across our screens—from Capitol Hill testimony to cable news chyrons—was a collision of worlds that are usually kept carefully separated. The world of elite exploitation and the world of political theatre dressed up as moral conviction. The Epstein letters. ICE agents in Minneapolis. Pam Bondi before the House. These stories don’t just share a news cycle. They share a root system.

And the rest of us—the ones who are neither elite nor protected, the ones whose communities bear the real cost of broken borders and unchecked power—we sit outside the frame, watching both sides play chess with our reality.

— • —

I. The Epstein Letters: Power Without Consequence

Let’s call it what it is. The Epstein case was never just about one man. It was about a network—an architecture of access that allowed the wealthy and powerful to exploit young women while the institutions designed to protect them looked the other way. The “letters” that resurfaced this week are not merely correspondence. They are receipts. They are evidence of a world where influence shields harm and where transactional intimacy is not a scandal but a currency.

What we see in the Epstein saga is exploitation operating as a system, not an accident. Wealth doesn’t just insulate these men from consequence; it rewrites the moral framework entirely. When a billionaire’s name appears on a flight log, it’s a “connection.” When a teenage girl appears in the same record, she’s a “consenting participant.” The language of power always finds a way to sanitize itself.

And there is a gendered dimension here that we cannot ignore. Some of these young women recognized what their bodies could buy them in rooms where power was the only real currency. That is not empowerment. That is survival economics in a system that was rigged before they ever walked through the door. Meanwhile, the men at the center of these networks used sexual dominance as a means of reinforcing their authority—leveraging access to bodies as proof of status, as a perk of position, as the price others had to pay to be near power.

The public is fascinated by these revelations. We devour every headline. But fascination is not justice. Outrage without structural reform is just entertainment. And that is exactly what those at the top are counting on—that our attention span is shorter than their legal team’s retainer.

— • —

II. ICE, Minnesota, and the Rule of Law

For weeks before the Epstein story resurfaced, the national conversation was consumed by a different spectacle: ICE agents in Minneapolis, federal enforcement in the streets, and a media frenzy designed to make you feel something other than what the law actually says. And what the law says is clear: if you entered this country illegally, you are subject to deportation. Period. Whether or not you have committed a separate crime is beside the point. The act of illegal entry is itself a violation. That is the law. And the law must be enforced.

I say this not with malice but with clarity. There is a legal process for immigration. There are pathways to citizenship, to asylum, to lawful entry. Those who bypassed that process—regardless of their circumstances—made a choice that placed them outside the protection of the law they chose not to follow. Compassion does not require us to abandon the rule of law. In fact, abandoning the rule of law is itself the most uncompassionate thing we can do—because it is the communities where illegal immigrants settle, often our communities, that bear the burden. Overcrowded schools. Strained resources. Neighborhoods that change overnight without a single vote being cast.

And let us talk about Temporary Protected Status. TPS was designed for a specific purpose: to provide temporary refuge to people from countries experiencing war, natural disasters, or extraordinary conditions. The key word is temporary. When those conditions no longer exist—when the war has ended, when the disaster has passed, when the country has stabilized—then the status must be revoked and those individuals must return home. That is our law. That is the agreement. To extend TPS indefinitely is to turn a temporary measure into a permanent backdoor to residency, and that is not what the American people signed up for.

Minneapolis became a media battleground, but when the Trump administration began to wind things down—withdrawing ICE and Border Patrol from the streets—the cameras pivoted. Almost overnight, the Epstein letters re-entered the news cycle. Immigration coverage faded. Elite corruption returned. The choreography was seamless. In American media, stories don’t just appear and disappear organically. They are managed. They are timed. And when one story becomes inconvenient for those in power, another one is waiting in the wings.

— • —

III. Capitol Hill: Two Positions, No Innocence

Last week on Capitol Hill, these two worlds collided in a way that made the political theatre almost unbearable to watch. In one hearing room, ICE agents testified before Congress about the necessity of enforcement operations. In another, Pam Bondi appeared before the House of Representatives. And threading through all of it were the renewed questions about the Epstein files and what they reveal about the people who govern us.

Let me be direct: neither side is innocent, but one side makes more sense than the other.

On one side of the aisle, we heard the predictable cries. The cry of illegal immigrants being treated unjustly. The supposed destruction of voting rights because of the SAVE Act—a piece of legislation designed to ensure that only American citizens vote in American elections, which should not be controversial in a functioning democracy. And then there were the cries about exploited women—women connected to the Epstein case who have changed their names, whose identities are being weaponized for political points rather than pursued for justice. The left is not interested in protecting these women. They are interested in using them.

On the other side is a fight for American values—the sovereignty of our borders, the integrity of our elections, and the accountability of our leaders. But that fight has been misinterpreted and misaligned by those who are more concerned with power than with the principles they claim to defend. Officials maneuvering. Politicians posturing. Networks of influence where some only want to protect their own. The right has the better argument, but they are stumbling over their own execution, and that is a problem we need to talk about.

Congressional hearings have become performance art. Both sides know it. The questions are written for the clip, not for the record. Senators and representatives grandstand for their base, craft their fifteen-second moments for social media, and leave the hearing having advanced nothing but their own brand. The substance—the actual policy, the actual human impact—drowns beneath the theatre.

— • —

IV. Media Warfare: The Left Lights the Match, the Right Fans the Flames

This is where it gets personal for me. Because I have watched—for years now—how the media on both sides uses these stories not to inform us, but to arm themselves. Every headline is ammunition. Every revelation is a weapon aimed at the other side. And the people who are actually impacted by these events? We are collateral damage in a war that was never about us.

Let me start with the left, because right now, the left is the one lighting matches. It is the left that is using the immigration crisis to call out protesters to the streets. In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill is actively rallying her district to protest immigration enforcement. Over the last few days, we have seen demonstrations pop up across the state, and there are reports of children running from ICE agents at bus stops—stories designed to pull at heartstrings and override common sense. The left wants bodies in the street. They want chaos on camera. They want footage that makes enforcement look like oppression.

But here is the reality on the ground that the cameras don’t show you: far too many people aren’t truly that sympathetic. Not because they lack compassion, but because they live in the communities that have been impacted. They see the neighborhoods that have changed. They see the resources that have been stretched thin. They know what unchecked illegal immigration looks like up close, not from a cable news desk. And it is my sincere hope that the crowds that flooded Minneapolis—many of them paid protesters, bused in to manufacture outrage—do not descend on our streets here in New Jersey. Because the reality is that there are neighborhoods where illegal immigrants have clearly overwhelmed communities, and we need to let ICE do their job and remove those who are here illegally.

Now let me turn to the right, because they are not blameless in this either. The right is poorly managing this immigration crisis. They are walking directly into the hands of the paid protesters, unable to manage crowds, unable to de-escalate. And the consequences have been deadly. We have seen agents who, rather than withdrawing from a volatile situation and coming back another day, choose to force the issue. They lie. They escalate. And American citizens—aggressive or not—end up shot and killed. That is unacceptable. When the enforcement of immigration law results in the death of an American citizen, something has gone catastrophically wrong. You leave the scene. You come back another day. You do not turn a deportation operation into a battlefield. Every death is a failure of leadership, and the right needs to own that.

Both sides control the language, and both sides use it as a weapon. On the right, it’s “illegal immigrants.” On the left, it’s “undocumented workers.” On the right, Epstein’s victims were “runaway girls.” On the left, they are “sex trafficking survivors”—but only when the accused is a Republican. Language is not neutral. Language is moral framing, and both sides wield it like a blade.

And underneath all of it is the economy of outrage. Outrage drives clicks. Clicks drive revenue. Revenue drives editorial priorities. The stories that survive the news cycle are not the ones that matter most—they are the ones that generate the most engagement. Our anger is being monetized. Our grief is content. Our trauma is a commodity.

— • —

V. The Ones Outside the Frame

So where does that leave us? The ones who are not running cable news networks or sitting on congressional committees or flying on private jets?

Let me be clear about something: I love this country. America is the land of the free. There is opportunity here for anyone willing to pursue it through the proper channels. That has always been the promise, and it is a promise worth protecting. But the focus of this nation must be on its citizens first. Not because we lack compassion, but because a country that cannot care for its own people has no business extending itself to those who are here outside the law—people who, let’s be honest, are often wanted not for their well-being but for their votes and their ability to justify the expansion of government resources and political power.

The media wants you to wonder about the immigrant mother. I wonder about the American mother. The one whose child’s classroom has doubled in size because her local school district was never funded to absorb the influx. The one whose wait at the emergency room has tripled. The one who watched her son get passed over for a job because someone will do it for half the wage under the table. The one who buried a child killed by someone who should never have been in this country in the first place. These are not hypotheticals. These are American families whose reality has been reshaped by a system that prioritizes political optics over their daily lives.

And then there are our veterans. Men and women who served this nation, who came home broken and were told there was nothing left for them. They sleep on our streets. They die in the cold. In New York City this winter, eighteen homeless people froze to death—American citizens, exposed to the elements—while the city spends billions housing illegal immigrants in hotels. In Chicago, homeless Americans ride trains through the night to stay warm while the city provides shelter, food stamps, and healthcare to people who have no legal right to be here. A nation that houses those who broke its laws while its own veterans die on the sidewalk has lost its moral compass. That is not compassion. That is a set of misplaced priorities that should trouble every citizen regardless of party.

American workers, too, are feeling the weight. Industries like construction, landscaping, and food service have been undercut by the availability of cheap, illegal labor. Employers exploit it because they can. And the American worker—the one who needs a living wage, benefits, and safe conditions—cannot compete. The American family’s standard of living erodes quietly while politicians on both sides look the other way because cheap labor is profitable for their donors.

And we cannot forget the Americans who have lost their lives at the hands of individuals who were in this country illegally. Every one of those deaths was preventable. If the law had been enforced—if the border had been secured, if sanctuary cities had cooperated with ICE, if deportation orders had been carried out—those Americans would still be here. Their names deserve more than a news cycle.

It leaves us exactly where power wants us: outside the frame.

The psychological toll is real. The story shifts week to week, but the weight on American communities remains constant. The cynicism deepens. The trust in institutions erodes. And ordinary citizens whose lives have been quietly disrupted by illegal immigration are told to be patient, to be compassionate—while their own country treats them as an afterthought.

Here is the truth that neither the left nor the right wants to say out loud: the powerful do not absorb the consequences of their own decisions. The left-wing politicians who advocate for open borders don’t live in the neighborhoods that absorb the impact. Their children don’t attend the overcrowded schools. They don’t wait in the overwhelmed emergency rooms. And the right-wing officials who militarize enforcement don’t suffer when their agents kill an American citizen. The consequences always flow downhill. It is the ordinary people—the ones whose lives become headlines without ever becoming priorities—who carry the weight.

I believe in the rule of law. I believe that illegal entry demands legal consequence. I believe that TPS must be enforced as written—temporary means temporary. I believe that ICE should be allowed to do its job. I believe our veterans deserve shelter before anyone who broke the law to be here. I believe American workers deserve protection in their own labor market. I believe the families who have lost loved ones to preventable violence deserve more than a moment of silence. And I believe that enforcement must be conducted with discipline, with strategy, and without the loss of American life. These positions are not contradictory. They are not extreme. They are the common sense of a citizen who loves her country enough to expect it to put its own people first.

— • —

The Reckoning That Never Comes

I write this not as a journalist and not as a pundit. I write this as a Black woman in America who has watched these cycles repeat for decades. I write this as someone who has seen her community’s pain become a talking point and then a footnote and then nothing at all. I write this because the truth—dah truth—is that none of this will change until we stop accepting the narrative we’re given and start demanding the one we deserve.

The Epstein letters will generate outrage for a few more weeks. The immigration debate will surge again when it’s politically useful. Capitol Hill will hold more hearings that produce more sound bites and less justice. And the media—left and right—will continue to feed us the version of reality that keeps their lights on.

But we don’t have to consume it uncritically. We don’t have to let them tell us which story matters and when. We can hold all of it at once—the exploitation, the enforcement, the theatre, the manipulation—and refuse to let any of it slide.

Because the ones outside the frame? We’re the only ones keeping score.

A House Divided in Winter

“Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every house divided against itself shall not stand.” Matthew 12:25

False Unity, Moral Substitution, and the Illusion of Agreement

This week was brutal.

A deep, frigid cold settled over much of the northern United States, followed by a snowstorm that buried streets, sidewalks, and cars. Many of us woke up to frozen mornings, shoveling ourselves out just to begin the day. Wind burned our faces. Roads narrowed. Progress slowed. February arrived not gently, but harshly.

Groundhog Day came and went, and as tradition would have it, there was no promise of early relief. Only more winter. More cold. More endurance.

There was something revealing about those mornings. Neighborhoods were divided by snowbanks. Streets were reduced to narrow, passable lanes. People stood alone on street corners and at bus stops, bracing themselves against the wind. Order required effort, coordination, and shared rules. Without them, nothing moved.

It felt like living inside one of those bleak winter stories where the cold is more than weather. It is atmosphere. A kind of moral frost that exposes what is fragile, what is fractured, and what cannot hold together under pressure.

And as we shoveled our driveways and listened to the news, something became painfully clear: the cold was not only outside.

A House Divided

Jesus takes that question further and issues a warning: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation,

and every house divided against itself shall not stand.” — Matthew 12:25

What we are witnessing today is not healthy disagreement. It is something more dangerous: the illusion of unity. People stand side by side, speaking the same language of outrage, while remaining fundamentally divided on truth, authority, and allegiance.

A divided house can stand for a time, just as a roof heavy with snow can hold for a season, but eventually the weight becomes too much.

False Unity on Display

Recently, I listened to a conversation between Candace Owens and Bassem Youssef. On the surface, it appeared to be a thoughtful exchange between two people from very different backgrounds. One claims Catholic Christianity. The other is openly Muslim. But beneath the politeness was something more revealing.

At one point, Candace referenced “God,” and Bassem asked plainly, “Which God?” It was a moment that should have stopped the conversation cold. From a Christian perspective, a God not named as Jesus Christ is not the same God. That difference is not semantic. It is foundational.

Yet the moment passed quickly, unexamined.

Why? Because agreement had already been found elsewhere. That agreement was not rooted in shared theology, shared moral vision, or shared allegiance. It was rooted in shared hostility, particularly toward Israel, and in Candace’s case, toward Jews more broadly. Profound differences were glossed over because a common resentment provided the glue.

This is not walking together in truth. This is walking together in grievance.

Conflation and Convenience

There is a critical distinction between criticizing a government and condemning a people. Governments deserve scrutiny. Peoples do not deserve collective guilt.

When claims are made that Jews were responsible for the American slave trade, despite Israel not existing as a modern state during that period, and those claims are later defended as merely “criticism of the Israeli government,” the logic collapses. Language becomes a shield rather than a clarification.

If Israel did not exist as a nation between 1619, when the first enslaved Africans arrived on American soil, and 1865, when the Civil War ended slavery, then the accusation cannot be about Israeli policy. It is about Jewish people. That is not government critique. That is antisemitism dressed in political language.

Selective phrasing allows animosity to hide behind critique. Hatred conceals itself best when it borrows respectable vocabulary.

And when resentment becomes the common ground, people who are otherwise deeply divided can appear united, at least temporarily.

A Fractured Right

This tension reflects a broader fracture within the Republican Party itself, and the fault line runs deeper than policy disagreements. It is a moral and theological divide that the party has not yet been willing to confront openly.

On one side are figures like Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and for a time Charlie Kirk, who have affirmed Israel’s right to exist as a nation. They distinguish between the actions of a government and the identity of a people. They may not support every decision the Israeli government makes, but they hold that Jewish people have a right to nationhood, that Israel is an ally of the United States, and that the destruction of Israel is not a legitimate political position. Their argument is grounded in what they see as a Judeo-Christian moral inheritance that recognizes Israel’s place in both Scripture and Western civilization.

On the other side are voices like Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and increasingly Candace Owens, who have moved beyond policy criticism into something more corrosive. Fuentes has been open in his hostility toward Jewish people, barely disguising it behind irony and provocation. Carlson has platformed figures and narratives that blur the line between legitimate skepticism and conspiratorial thinking. Owens has publicly claimed Jewish involvement in the American slave trade and has framed her opposition to Israel in terms that repeatedly slide from government critique into ethnic resentment.

What unites this second group is not a shared theology or a shared political philosophy. It is a shared antagonism. They may disagree on nearly everything else, but their disdain for Israel, and in many cases for Jewish people themselves, functions as a binding agent. They use the distinction between “Zionism” and “Judaism” as rhetorical cover, but the pattern of their language tells a different story.

These two factions occupy the same party, appear on the same media platforms, and appeal to overlapping audiences. But they are not agreed. They are not walking together. They are marching under the same banner while heading in opposite moral directions. And Jesus already told us what happens to a house in that condition.

A Dostoyevskian America

As I recently began reading Dostoyevsky’s Demons, the parallels became impossible to ignore.

The narrator introduces Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, a celebrated intellectual who produces no substantial work, carries no moral responsibility, and fails even within his own household. He is a negligent father, more invested in his social reputation than in the formation of his own son. His influence is social, not substantive. His authority is assumed, not earned.

And it is his son, Pyotr Verkhovensky, who becomes the more dangerous figure. Pyotr returns to the town not as a thinker but as an organizer. He gathers a small circle of radicals, each holding different grievances and different ideologies, and binds them together not through shared conviction but through shared destruction. They do not agree on what to build. They agree on what to tear down. Pyotr manipulates their differences, glosses over their contradictions, and directs their collective energy toward chaos. The group believes it is unified. In truth, it is merely useful to one manipulator’s agenda.

This is the pattern Dostoyevsky warns about: people who are fundamentally divided being organized around destruction rather than truth. Their unity is not real. It is manufactured. And it serves not the group but the agenda of whoever holds the strings.

Dostoyevsky is not attacking education or progress. He is exposing intellectualism without moral grounding. Ideas divorced from consequence. Influence without accountability. A generation inheriting language but not the values that gave that language meaning.

That is what increasingly defines our public life. We invoke God without theology, justice without law, compassion without consequence, and America without allegiance. Like the characters in Demons, we repeat moral language while hollowing out its meaning. We borrow fragments of belief systems while rejecting the discipline and structure that give those beliefs coherence.

From Fiction to Evidence

Demons was a fictional account of what Dostoyevsky saw happening in his own society: a culture drifting away from its foundations, seduced by ideas that sounded liberating but carried no moral weight. He wrote it as a warning. We do not need novels to see that warning fulfilled. We have current history.

Consider Iran. For decades, an Islamic theocracy imposed its values on a population through force, surveillance, and fear. Women were beaten for showing their hair. Dissent was met with imprisonment or death. The moral framework of the state was not chosen by the people; it was enforced upon them. And now we are witnessing a cultural uprising. Iranian citizens, particularly women and young people, are pushing back against the very values that have oppressed them for a generation. In this case, the divide is righteous. A people are rejecting a system that suffocated them.

But what is happening in response to Gaza is the opposite. We are watching individuals in the West voluntarily align themselves with the same ideological framework that has oppressed Iran.

Christian Smalls, the labor organizer and activist who co-founded the Amazon Labor Union and led the first successful unionization of an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, has extended his activism into vocal solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Sabrina Salvati, the journalist and political commentator known as Sabby Sabs, has used her Boston-based podcast to frame the conflict in ways that go well beyond humanitarian concern and into ideological alignment. College students occupy campus buildings. Professors sign open letters. Activists chant slogans rooted in a worldview they have never lived under and do not fully understand.

This is the profound contradiction. In Iran, people are dying to escape the consequences of a belief system. In America, people are marching to embrace it, without recognizing the historical evidence of what that system produces when it governs. The oppression of women, the persecution of religious minorities, the suppression of free expression: none of this is hidden. It is documented, visible, and ongoing.

And yet the alignment continues. Youth and academics adopt the language of liberation while defending structures that have historically denied it. This is not solidarity. It is incoherence. And it is precisely the kind of moral confusion Dostoyevsky depicted in fiction, now playing out in real time. Pyotr’s circle believed they were revolutionaries. They were, in fact, instruments of someone else’s chaos. The same pattern repeats when Americans adopt causes whose full consequences they have never been asked to live with.

This too creates division. Not the productive kind that comes from honest disagreement, but the corrosive kind that comes from abandoning one’s own foundational values in favor of borrowed grievances. It is, in every sense, hypocritical. And hypocrisy, left unchecked, fractures a house from within.

Moral Substitution and Immigration Rhetoric

This pattern of borrowed moral authority surfaced again this week when New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani addressed a crowd and framed illegal immigration through the story of Muhammad’s migration to Medina, urging Americans to model their response after it.

What was striking was not the religious reference itself, but the assumption beneath it: that Islamic historical narrative should serve as moral authority over American law.

The United States is not built on Islamic theology. Its legal and moral framework emerged from Christian assumptions about human dignity, ordered liberty, and national sovereignty. To invoke a religious narrative foreign to that framework, while condemning American institutions like ICE for enforcing American law, is not moral persuasion. It is moral substitution.

The migration of Muhammad was not a neutral act of refuge. It marked the beginning of a political and religious order enforced through power. To present it as a simple parable of compassion, stripped of its historical and theological context, is the very kind of selective storytelling that hollowed-out ideologies rely on.

This is not an argument about the worth of individual immigrants. It is a question of authority and allegiance. A nation cannot be governed by moral frameworks it did not consent to, nor can it survive if its own foundations are treated as illegitimate.

America and Allegiance

At its core, America is not merely land. It is a constitutional order. Citizenship is not just presence; it is allegiance.

Yet we are increasingly divided over what America even is. Some still affirm it as a flawed but legitimate republic grounded in law, liberty, and responsibility. Others describe it as inherently illegitimate, stolen land, oppressive by design, unworthy of loyalty, while simultaneously demanding the benefits of belonging. Still others imagine America as an ethnic possession, a nation that was and should remain exclusively white.

What all three of these visions share, despite their differences, is a troubling tendency to erase American Blacks (ADOS) from the story.

American Blacks (ADOS) have been present on this soil since 1619, when the first enslaved Africans were brought to the Virginia colony. That is before the Mayflower. Before the Constitution. Before the Republic itself had a name. For nearly two and a half centuries, Black labor built the infrastructure, agriculture, and economy that made this nation possible. Black soldiers fought in every American war. Black thinkers shaped its moral conscience. Black families endured what no other group in this nation’s history has been asked to endure, and they did so not as guests or outsiders, but as Americans in the fullest and most costly sense of the word.

And yet, in conversation after conversation, commentary after commentary, American Blacks (ADOS) are written out. The progressive vision speaks of “immigrant contributions” as though the nation was built by those who chose to come, ignoring those who were brought here in chains and whose labor preceded nearly every wave of voluntary immigration. The white nationalist vision claims America as its own creation, as though the fields plowed themselves and the railroads laid their own tracks. Even mainstream conservative voices, like Michael Knowles, have spoken of American identity in terms that center whiteness so thoroughly that the American Black experience becomes invisible.

The Irish arrived in the 1850s. Germans, Italians, and Eastern Europeans followed in successive waves. Each group contributed to the American story. But none of them arrived to find an empty land. They arrived to find a nation already built in significant part by the hands of people who had been here for over two hundred years and had never been given the liberty to leave.

To exclude American Blacks (ADOS) from the founding narrative of this country is not merely an oversight. It is a distortion. And a nation that cannot tell its own story honestly cannot walk together in truth.

Agreement Matters

Amos was right. Jesus was right. Dostoyevsky saw it coming.

A society can temporarily unite around shared outrage. But outrage is not a foundation. Hatred is not agreement. And unity built on resentment cannot bear weight forever.

If we are no longer walking together, the question is not simply who disagrees with us, but what we have agreed to replace truth with.

Somewhere a podcast host glosses over the name of Jesus to keep a conversation comfortable. Somewhere a politician invokes a prophet foreign to this nation’s moral framework to shame its laws. Somewhere a student chants for liberation under a banner whose history would deny her the right to speak at all. And somewhere a woman in Tehran removes her hijab knowing it may cost her everything.

A house divided may endure a winter. But it will not survive the thaw.

This Is Not Selma

“The disfranchisement of the Negro is unjust to him, harmful to the white man, and a danger to the State. No man can be permanently wronged without the wrong reacting in some way upon himself.” — Booker T. Washington, circa 1900

The Exploitation of Black American History for a Different Fight

I am sick and tired of the lies being spread by many Democrats today, including American Blacks who claim to speak for our community but refuse to tell the honest truth. Lately, I have been reading Before the Mayflower, and the difference between that small book, which captures American Black history succinctly, and The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones is immediately noticeable. Once you understand our history, the distortion becomes clear.

The distortion is nuanced. It is embedded in how the story is told. The 1619 Project presents history from a perspective that implies the racists of the Jim Crow South are somehow the same lineage or moral legacy as the Republicans of today. That implication is false. The historical record is clear: the violent suppression of Black Americans during Reconstruction and Jim Crow was carried out under a one-party Democratic system that controlled law enforcement, courts, and local government throughout the South. Hannah-Jones conflates history and omits this critical political context, and this approach is now used across modern media to twist the past into a narrative that does not align with the documented record.

The Minnesota Situation

This is why I decided to write this week's blog, prompted in part by the Don Lemon and Georgia Fort situation, which was quickly framed as a civil rights controversy. To me, it felt less like a genuine civil rights issue and more like a carefully constructed distraction from what is actually happening on the ground in Minnesota.

The protests themselves are not organic, and the viral clips circulating online are designed to be short, fast, and emotionally charged—just enough to rile people up around a distorted or incomplete story. This is exploitation in its purest form. The goal is not understanding, truth, or resolution, but agitation. Manufactured outrage keeps people distracted from the real issues affecting our communities.

Within a single week, the public was asked to absorb several emotionally charged events. Don Lemon was arrested after entering a church with protesters. Georgia Fort, an independent Minnesota journalist, was arrested in connection with the same incident. Around the same time, Representative Ilhan Omar claimed she was sprayed with apple cider vinegar during a public encounter. I watched the footage and reviewed her remarks without relying on outside commentary. Given the pattern of emotionally charged incidents emerging from Minnesota in rapid succession—each one perfectly calibrated to generate outrage against Republicans and immigration enforcement—skepticism is warranted. I am not claiming proof. I am noting a pattern that demands scrutiny rather than reflexive acceptance.

At the same time, a Native Land Podcast town hall was held in Minnesota, where speakers framed current immigration enforcement as morally comparable to the Civil Rights era.

That comparison is what I find most disturbing.

The Justice You Won't Hear About

We are programmed to hear stories of injustice in our communities. That is what drives engagement. That is what generates outrage. But last week, something else happened that received almost no attention: Sean Grayson, the former Illinois sheriff's deputy who shot and killed Sonya Massey in her home, was sentenced to 20 years in prison—the maximum sentence allowed under Illinois law.

When Sonya Massey was killed in July 2024, the story stoked the flames of racism and police brutality. She was a 36-year-old Black woman who called 911 to report a prowler. A white deputy shot her in the face in her own kitchen. The body camera footage was harrowing. Protests erupted. The case became national news.

And then? The system worked.

Grayson was fired, arrested, and charged. A jury convicted him of second-degree murder. A judge gave him the maximum sentence. The sheriff who hired him was forced to retire. Sangamon County agreed to implement more de-escalation training. Illinois changed its law to require fuller background checks on law enforcement candidates. And Sonya Massey's family—including her two teenage children—received a $10 million settlement, negotiated by civil rights attorney Ben Crump.

Justice was served.

But you don't hear much about that, do you? Because justice doesn't fit the narrative. The media wants to focus on injustice—on the outrage, the wound, the grievance. When the system actually holds a killer accountable, that story fades. It doesn't generate clicks. It doesn't keep people angry.

This is the difference between 1964 and today. In 1964, the men who murdered James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner walked free for years. The state of Mississippi refused to prosecute. The system protected the killers. That was Jim Crow.

Today, a white deputy who killed a Black woman in her own home received the maximum sentence. Her children will receive restitution. Her name changed Illinois law. That is not Jim Crow. That is accountability. And pretending otherwise insults the people who actually lived—and died—under a system that offered no justice at all.

The False Equivalence

Black American history, particularly the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras, is being used to make modern immigration enforcement feel morally equivalent to the violent suppression of Black Americans. The implication is that what happened to us is now happening to them. That comparison is emotionally powerful, but it is historically false.

The most glaring example is the repeated invocation of the 1964 murders in Mississippi, when James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were killed for helping Black American citizens register to vote. Those men were targeted because they were assisting citizens who were being denied a constitutional right by a one-party Democratic system.

What is happening in Minnesota does not align with that history. The killing of Alex Pretti, while tragic and rightly under investigation, occurred during a federal immigration enforcement operation. It was not a voter registration drive. Pretti was not targeted for advancing the civil rights of American citizens. These are fundamentally different legal and historical contexts, and collapsing them into a single narrative distorts both.

Civil rights were fought to secure citizenship and constitutional protection for Black Americans who were denied both by law. Using that history to guilt Americans into accepting disorder, selective enforcement narratives, or the erosion of the distinction between citizens and non-citizens does not advance justice. It distorts it.

The Church Incident and Due Process

Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were charged with conspiracy against rights of religious freedom and attempting to injure while exercising religious freedom. These are not charges against journalism. These are charges alleging that the civil rights of American citizens—the worshippers at Cities Church—were violated.

The protesters entered Cities Church in St. Paul to confront a man believed to be employed by ICE. That man is an American citizen, legally employed by the federal government, and legally entitled to worship without being confronted or harassed during a religious service. Whatever one thinks of ICE as an institution, entering a church to confront a private citizen during worship raises serious questions about the rights of worshippers and the limits of protest.

Yes, two judges initially rejected charges against Lemon, citing insufficient evidence of criminal behavior. But that does not establish innocence—it means the threshold was not met at that preliminary stage. What concerns me is what the footage shows: Lemon's presence with protesters before they entered the church, his coordination with them, the role he played in the lead-up to the disruption. Intent matters. The question is not whether Lemon held a camera, but whether he was a journalist documenting an event or a participant who used the journalist label as cover.

That is a question for the courts to decide. Lemon deserves due process, and he should have his day in court so that the facts can be examined and judged accordingly. But the rush to frame this as an attack on Black journalism—as though he was charged simply for being Black—obscures the actual legal question at issue.

Many Black journalists do not engage in this behavior. Black reporters across mainstream and independent media outlets manage to cover immigration and protest movements without entering churches or following protesters into worship services. Lemon and Fort's choices were their own, and they do not represent journalism as a whole or Black journalism specifically.

There is also an uncomfortable irony here. Historically, Black churches were surveilled, disrupted, and attacked by white mobs—often under Democratic control—seeking to prevent Black Americans from worshiping freely. In this case, protesters entered a predominantly white church to confront a worshipper over his employment. While the scale and violence are not comparable, the underlying logic is troubling: political intimidation was brought into a religious space, and the racial framing was later reversed to obscure that reality.

The Historical Lie

Left-leaning commentators increasingly frame these events as a struggle between Democrats and Republicans, or between whites and Blacks. That framing does not hold up under historical scrutiny. There are white Democrats and Black Americans who oppose current immigration policies. To maintain the narrative, the language expands to "Black and brown," folding immigrants into the Black American story despite vastly different histories, legal statuses, and relationships to the state.

This is not fundamentally about race. It is not fundamentally about party. It is about law.

Either we are a nation governed by laws, including borders, or we are not. To make federal enforcement appear inherently immoral, a familiar image must be resurrected. The violent white oppressor of Jim Crow memory carries emotional weight in Black communities, and that is precisely why it is invoked. Yet the historical oppressors people are being asked to imagine were not Republicans. They were Democrats operating within a one-party Southern system. By reviving that image and attaching it to modern immigration enforcement, commentators create a villain that does not exist in this context.

Civil Rights Funding vs. Modern Protest Funding

Some will point out that the Civil Rights Movement also had significant organizational funding and coordination. That is true. The NAACP received substantial donations. The Urban League was well-funded. CORE operated with donor support. Corporations like IBM, Coca-Cola, Ford, and General Motors contributed. Government funding supported the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.

But the existence of funding is not what distinguishes legitimate movements from manufactured ones. What matters is what the money was used for, who it served, and the legal context in which it operated.

Civil Rights–era funding supported the enforcement of existing constitutional rights. Money paid for court cases, attorneys, bail for unjust arrests, voter registration infrastructure, and protection against unconstitutional laws. The goal was access to the law, not pressure against it. These organizations supported American citizens who were denied the vote, denied equal protection, and denied access to public institutions. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 were responses to documented constitutional violations by state governments. That is why federal funding was justified—the federal government was enforcing its own Constitution against rogue states.

Most importantly, the Civil Rights Movement made specific, finite demands: end segregation, secure the vote, enforce equal protection. Once achieved, protests subsided because the legal objective was met. There was no demand to erase borders, suspend law enforcement, or collapse the distinction between citizen and non-citizen.

Modern protest funding operates under a fundamentally different logic. It often sustains continuous protest cycles, media amplification, legal defense for civil disobedience, and disruption as a permanent strategy. There is frequently no clear endpoint, because outrage itself becomes the product. Unlike the Civil Rights era, modern protest movements often treat law enforcement itself as illegitimate, blur the distinction between enforcement and abuse, and frame citizenship boundaries as immoral. This is a reversal of the Civil Rights framework, which demanded that the law finally apply to Black Americans.

Civil Rights funding fought for Black Americans inside the polity. Modern protest funding often advances causes involving non-citizens, transnational political goals, and ideological commitments unrelated to constitutional rights. That is not an extension of Civil Rights. It is a different project entirely.

Those perfectly crafted signs do not appear out of basements, bedrooms, or garages of the oppressed. They are printed, laminated, and carefully mounted on wooden sticks. That level of preparation suggests coordination. But coordination alone is not the issue—the Civil Rights Movement was coordinated too. The issue is what the coordination serves: finite goals for American citizens, or sustained agitation with no clear endpoint that conflates citizen and non-citizen interests.

This Is Not Selma

American Black media is feeding our community a lie: that illegal immigration enforcement is the same as Jim Crow oppression, that the Republicans of today are the Democrats of 1964, and that journalists who coordinate with protesters to disrupt church services are victims rather than participants who deserve their day in court.

The 1619 Project began this work of historical distortion by conflating timelines and omitting political context. Now that same approach is being used to exploit the Black American struggle for a completely different fight—one involving non-citizens whose relationship to the American legal system is fundamentally different from that of Black Americans who were born here, whose ancestors built this country, and who were denied rights they were owed under the Constitution.

Civil Rights–era funding enforced constitutional rights for American citizens who were denied them by law. Modern protest funding often supports sustained political agitation that challenges the legitimacy of law itself and blurs the distinction between citizens and non-citizens. Treating these two as morally or historically equivalent is not just inaccurate. It is an insult to the men and women who bled for our freedom.

When Sean Grayson received the maximum sentence for killing Sonya Massey, the silence from the same media that stoked outrage over her death was deafening. Because justice doesn't fit the narrative. Grievance does.

That is why this moment deserves scrutiny rather than slogans.

© 2026 Jacqueline Session Ausby. All rights reserved. This post and all original content published under DahTruth are the intellectual property of Jacqueline Session Ausby. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author.

The Baby We Keep Being Asked to Surrender

“Citizenship is not conferred by birth alone, but by fidelity to the principles of freedom and justice.” Frederick Douglass

There is a story in the Bible about Solomon, the son of David, who became king of Israel after David’s death. He was the son of Bathsheba. Two women once brought a baby before Solomon, each claiming to be the mother. One woman said the other had rolled over her child during the night, killed it, and secretly took the living baby. Solomon could not know the truth, so he proposed a test. “Let’s cut the baby in half.”

The true mother immediately cried out, “No. Give her the baby. Let her have it.”

Solomon knew then who the real mother was, because she was willing to sacrifice her own love in order to save the child.

I reference this story because it mirrors something Frederick Douglass experienced. After the Dred Scott decision, when the Supreme Court ruled that African Americans, descendants of enslaved Africans, could never be citizens, Douglass became disheartened. Black Americans had built the nation, fought in its wars, and sacrificed for it, yet were told they did not belong. He even considered leaving the United States, exploring places like Haiti as a potential homeland. In a sense, he was willing to give up the baby, to give up America, so that the people might survive.

Then came the firing on Fort Sumter and the beginning of the Civil War. At that moment, Douglass changed course. African Americans would fight for the nation they had built. They would defend it. They would claim it. They would not abandon the land their ancestors had watered with sweat, blood, and tears.

“When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.”

— Proverbs 29:2 KJV

That choice, to stay, to fight, to build, defines our history.

When we think about the history of African Americans, the sacrifices are undeniable. We have given this nation blood, sweat, and tears. We have been enslaved, raped, lynched, murdered, incarcerated, discriminated against, and systematically excluded, yet we still love this land. We claim it as our own even when others insist we do not belong. Our roots are here. We have nowhere else to go.

And yet today, some try to tell us our story is the same as the immigrant story. It is not.

Frederick Douglass was willing to give up the baby rather than destroy what belonged to others. Today, what we see is different. Illegal immigrants, and in some cases legal immigrants, arrive with a philosophy that openly despises the West, refuses to assimilate, and disparages America’s institutions. They do not love this nation, yet we are constantly told to center their plight as if it mirrors ours.

Illegal immigrants step over those waiting in line for legal citizenship, enter communities already struggling, and draw heavily from housing, education, and healthcare, resources built through generations of Black labor and sacrifice. Some members of Congress even claim that immigrants built this nation, effectively erasing the foundational role of African American slaves.

The same pattern appears in the workforce. Immigrants are favored for certain jobs while Black men are incarcerated, overlooked, or displaced. In exchange for political power and votes, Black Americans are pushed aside, all while politicians demand the Black vote and act as if they are doing us a favor.

What is being presented as solidarity is, in reality, the erasure of Black Americans from their own history and struggle.

Now today, I am in Minnesota again. Another man, a white man, lost his life during a confrontation with ICE agents. From the videos available, it does not appear that he was reaching for a weapon. His hands were raised, as if to signal that he was not interested in violence. However, it appears he may have pushed one of the officers during the confrontation. That action escalated the situation, and tragically, he lost his life.

I feel genuine sorrow for this man. This did not have to happen.

I do not believe Border Patrol or ICE agents are without fault, and I am not convinced their response was appropriate. At the very least, these officers should be reprimanded. But I place much of the blame on those who continually stoke these flames, those who encourage confrontation without responsibility.

Protesters are increasingly putting themselves in volatile situations where they jeopardize their own lives. The state bears responsibility here as well. There should have been clear boundaries to ensure protesters did not impede officers or approach them in ways that invite escalation. Instead, disorder was allowed to grow unchecked.

Then there are the scams.

A Black family claimed they were returning from a basketball game with their children when ICE agents allegedly deployed gas beneath their car, causing the vehicle to fill with gas and nearly killing their infant child. The mother appeared on CNN and other platforms, describing how she promised her child that she would breathe for him to save his life. The family received nearly two hundred thousand dollars through GoFundMe.

It later emerged that this story was not true.

The parents were not coming from a basketball game. They were protesters who had taken their children to a protest rally. When things escalated and federal agents deployed gas, their vehicle happened to be in the path of that deployment. Videos later surfaced showing both parents actively participating in the protest. They had lied about their circumstances and used the situation to gain media attention and financial support.

Why would parents bring their children into a volatile protest environment? Why would they use their own children to draw sympathy and attention? It is sickening how people exploit situations for notoriety and money, even at the expense of their own children’s safety.

Another difference between today’s protesters and those of the civil rights era is that many of today’s protesters are paid. During the civil rights movement, protesters were not paid, and the causes were fundamentally different. We were defending the rights of American citizens who were being mistreated, oppressed, marginalized, and dehumanized.

Many African Americans were trying to escape the United States, fleeing slavery, violence, and Jim Crow, going to places like Canada. Immigrants today are coming here voluntarily. They want to be here. They want access to the system.

By the 1950s, under Jim Crow, Black Americans were trying to survive in a country filled with people angry about losing the Civil War and resentful of Black progress. On every side, we defended ourselves against violence and attacks. Many of those attacks came from white Democrats. Every major law passed in favor of African Americans was backed by Republicans, not Democrats.

Today, protesters aligned with Democrat policies attack ICE agents and federal officers while believing they are above the law. This is largely white on white protest activity. Black participation is minimal, with few exceptions. The contrast is stark. Black protesters face swift consequences, while some white protesters openly act out with little accountability, even inside churches, spreading hateful messages.

Another actor in all of this is the media. They sit back waiting for chaos, hungry for spectacle. Networks benefit from unrest because it produces content. Without chaos, what would they cover? Without the visceral hatred of Donald Trump, what would dominate their headlines? Disorder keeps the cameras rolling.

This week, I took my grandchildren to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. I wanted them to see where we started, from slavery to the Civil War, from secret churches to the Civil Rights Movement, from surviving drugs and violence meant to destroy our communities. I wanted them to understand that we are a strong, proud people who do not live off anyone. We work. We build. We survive. We thrive. We are Americans.

I wanted them to see how much we have given this nation and how our story is now being hidden, overtaken, and misused by people who do not love this country, do not know our history, and cannot speak for us. Resources flow to immigrant communities while our own struggle. Politicians posture while African American owned businesses receive little support. We see protests for illegal immigrants, even for people who have committed serious crimes, while the act of crossing the border illegally is reframed as not being criminal at all.

This framing distorts the truth and obscures history. American Blacks built this nation through sacrifice that cannot be equated or reassigned, and it is our responsibility to remember that legacy, preserve it, and teach it to the next generation.

© 2026 Jacqueline Session Ausby. All rights reserved. This post and all original content published under DahTruth are the intellectual property of Jacqueline Session Ausby. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author.

1984 in Real Time

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” 1984. George Orwell

A Week of Distortions

“In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”

— Judges 21:25 (KJV)

This is about a week of distortions.

I was glancing back at The 1619 Project and rereading the editor’s note at the very beginning of the book in which it discussed the use of the term enslaved as opposed to slave. It argued that the term slave strips individuals of humanity and enslaved does not. So they preferred to reference individuals as “enslaved persons.” It felt to me like they were taking a word and redefining its meaning to fit a cultural narrative.

They went further and stated they did not use terms like plantation or master because those terms are often used euphemistically when conveying certain conditions of slavery. It was distortion, a small twisting of words to fit narratives in ways that convict some and ease the pain of others according to their own ideas and beliefs.

It reminded me of 1984, the way Winston was instructed to make small changes to language to support new narratives so people could forget. In 1984, the changing of words, language, and meaning were mechanical tools used to keep culture in check and align thought with the masses. It was distortion.

Last week, a case went before the Supreme Court of the United States, Little v. Hecox, a case that three teenage girls brought forward after arguing in lower courts that their Title IX rights were violated when the state allowed a boy to participate on the women’s track and field team. This case had gone before lower courts, had been dismissed, and was now before the Supreme Court.

I was initially surprised that the Supreme Court was taking on this case, as I believed the idea that a boy can become a woman or a woman can become a man, or this idea of “trans,” is a lie. But then I understood that this was about the use of a term. The term being gender identity, as if this word trumps biological sex. As if a person could decide they are no longer male or female and consider themselves the opposite sex based on their own gender identity and then argue they are being discriminated against under a law that never considered identity.

What also fascinated me was how the entire court fed into this language and referred to the individual as “she” instead of “he.” That is giving credibility to a lie. This is what Satan did in the garden with Adam and Eve by introducing doubt into the mind. The lie does not begin as force. It begins as suggestion. It begins with language.

This is exactly what 1984 warned about. Language is changed first. Meaning follows. Memory erodes.

Another distortion did not happen last week but was in the news nonetheless. That was the case of Renee Good, the woman who was shot and killed by an U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.

This is where the law has to play out not totally on facts but on motive.

Renee Good was in her car protesting, blocking traffic, and impeding ICE agents from doing their job. This was a situation that did not have to go to the extreme of Renee Good being shot. Clearly from the video, Renee Good and her wife were impeding ICE’s progress and taunting the officer.

When the officer who was recording the event walked by Renee Good, she said, “I am not mad at you.” Others argue she was being respectful. But showing respect and being respectful are not the same. Her wife, who was also recording, was calling the ICE agent names and antagonizing him, while the officer had not said a single word.

Then two other ICE agents approached Renee’s car, which was parked perpendicular in the road blocking traffic, and they told her to get the “fuck” out of the car. At that point, Renee’s wife attempted to open the door. The officer who was still recording had made his way around to the front of the vehicle.

As the wife grabbed the door attempting to get into the car, Renee backed up. The wife then screamed, “Drive.” At that point, Renee moved forward and struck the officer. We then hear gunshots and a crash as Renee Good’s car hit another vehicle head on.

This was one of the most horrific situations I have ever witnessed.

I do not believe for one second that Renee Good intended to hit the officer. But it does not change the fact that she intended to flee the scene and in that moment rushed and followed her wife’s command. She drove forward and struck the officer. In those seconds, he responded with gunfire. I do not believe he intended to kill her. He believed he was about to be hit by a vehicle and responded accordingly.

This is where distortion enters.

Many Democrats want to believe the officer was violent, aggressive, irrational, and angry and that he shot Renee Good in cold blood. But the video shows a different sequence of events. The aggressive behavior, sarcasm, taunting, and escalation came from Renee Good and her wife. Motive was rewritten after the fact to fit an approved story.

This is where 1984 becomes relevant again.

In 1984, Orwell describes the Two Minutes Hate, a daily ritual where citizens are allowed and expected to act in the most emotional, irrational, and vicious ways. People scream, curse, threaten violence, and lose control. Their hatred is directed toward a designated enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein. The rage is not spontaneous. It is sanctioned. It is encouraged. Afterward, that rage becomes evidence that the Party’s narrative is true.

This is what we see in these protests. ICE agents become the Emmanuel Goldstein figure. Protestors are allowed to act aggressively, viciously, and irrationally toward them. The hatred is projected onto ICE as the embodiment of cruelty and injustice. Then when something tragic happens, the interpretation of events is reshaped to align with the approved narrative. The agent becomes the irrational one. The agent becomes the aggressor. The agent becomes the villain.

Facts come second. Alignment comes first.

This distortion spilled into another narrative about rewriting history, attempted by Pramila Jayapal. Last week she claimed America was built by immigrants and listed India, Mexico, Venezuela, and Africa, while leaving out Descendants of Slaves and Europeans.

Descendants of Slaves were not immigrants. We did not come here by choice. We were brought here as slaves through force and ownership. Our labor built this country. We are not what she is and we do not share the same history.

At the same time, Matt Walsh responded by claiming America was built by Europeans. He also introduced a series titled American History, where he is going to make the case that Americans have been lied to. Part of his argument is to remind people that slavery was not first practiced in America, as if we do not already know and understand that slavery has existed in nearly every society nearly since the beginning of time. And that the institution was eliminated in Europe first and later followed by America.

He is also going to make sure we understand that Europeans were not going to the Ivory Coast kidnapping Africans, but that Africans were sold by their own brothers and sisters. We have acknowledged that fact. We know that history. We also know that Arab slavery was far worse than American slavery, where Black men were emasculated and castrated, particularly those who did not convert to Islam. None of this history is new to us, nor does it absolve what was done in America.

More important Walsh wants to make it clear that European whites weren’t the only enslavers. As if not a single Black person has ever read Edward P. Jones. We know there were Black slave owners, but the reality is they were few and far between. Many Black slave owners purchased family members so they would not be sold into slavery. Large Black plantation owners were anomalies, not the norm, and most lost everything after the Civil War.

It does not deny that the system itself was built and maintained by Europeans. Nor does it erase the 100 years of Jim Crow. The laws, the economy, and the ownership of land and bodies were European controlled.

What Jayapal is doing is lying. What Walsh is doing is whitewashing history to remove a stain of guilt that hovers over white America. In doing so, he wants to argue that our plight was not that bad. Or could have been much worse.

Distort the truth. Rewrite history. That is another warning in 1984. If you can erase memory, tell another story, and repeat it long enough, people will forget what actually happened.

By the end of last week, I was worried. Convinced that America is traveling down paths that are leading to its destruction. In 1984, Orwell warned that the greatest danger to a society is not an external enemy but the slow corruption of truth from within. People blame global events for all our troubles without recognizing the danger that comes from inside our own institutions, our language, and our willingness to accept distortion. We lie about life, sex, love, history, justice, and truth, then pretend we are the arbiters of reality. In truth, many of us are more like the citizens Orwell described, programmed to repeat approved narratives from the left or the right.

Yet there are still some who can see. Those who recognize distortion for what it is and refuse to surrender memory. We are the watchers in the room. We understand both perspectives, but we are not captive to either. We stand on history, memory, and the Word of God, and we name the lie when we see it. That is how alignment remains balanced. That is how truth survives.

That is justice, not distortion.

Crossing the Red Sea: Why Black America Must Leave the Democratic Party (Copy)

“And the Lord said unto Moses, Wherefore criest thou unto me? speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward: But lift thou up thy rod, and stretch out thine hand over the sea, and divide it: and the children of Israel shall go on dry ground through the midst of the sea.” Exodus 14:15–16 (KJV)

This was a disturbing week of the year—and I don’t suppose that’s saying much, considering this is only the second week of the year. Still, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the killing in Minnesota of a woman who, after being ordered to get out of her car, drove forward into an officer and was then shot and killed by that officer.

It is a tragic situation that a woman lost her life, but just as troubling is the fact that there are people who send others out to protest while offering no real protection, responsibility, or accountability when those situations turn deadly.

For weeks now, we have been witnessing rising protests against ICE agents in several Democratic-led states. In many of these protests, demonstrators have openly antagonized federal officers who are tasked with enforcing federal law. Somehow, illegal aliens appear to receive more sympathy and protection than the federal officers themselves.

“You can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail the revolution. You can kill a freedom fighter, but you can’t kill freedom.”

— Fred Hampton

The officers have become the villains, while illegal aliens—regardless of their history or manner of entry—are defended by left-leaning Democrats. Civil-rights language is repeatedly used to suggest that what is happening today mirrors the civil-rights movement of the past. But this is not a civil-rights issue.

The reality is that these are individuals who crossed the border illegally, who did not build this country, who have no historical stake in this nation, and who have not contributed to it—yet they are making demands. Democrats argue as if these individuals are entitled to rights that belong to American citizens.

Even more troubling is the misuse of the ADOS story as justification. Our history is not the same. Our struggles are not interchangeable. They are not interconnected or entwined. The protests of today are nothing like the protests of the 1960s, which were largely peaceful. American Blacks did not spit on officers, hurl insults, impede their progress, disrupt communities, or place officers in situations where they were forced to defend themselves.

In fact, it was white mobs—often led or protected by Southern Democrats—who reacted violently to American Blacks for simply riding a bus, sitting at a lunch counter, walking down the street, or drinking from a water fountain. It is those who held that same ideology—who treated American Blacks as less than human and sought to keep them enslaved—who now claim moral authority while fighting to keep illegal aliens in this country to labor, serve tables, and fill roles they do not want for themselves.

More disturbingly, they now want American Blacks to join them in this effort.

That is one of the core issues: we are being asked to fight a cause for a group of individuals whose primary impact has been taking from our communities in the name of their own salvation. We are expected to move over and make room—for housing, healthcare, education, and jobs—while white employers hire them, pay them lower wages, and then force them to rely on social systems to sustain their lifestyles.

Meanwhile, Black men remain imprisoned, and Black women are still living in projects and Section 8 housing.

Individuals like Summer Lee, Jasmine Crockett, Ayanna Pressley, Roland Martin, Don Lemon, Abby Phillip, and Whoopi Goldberg guilt American Blacks into believing we are advancing a righteous cause—one that ultimately steps over our own community. Many within the Democratic Party listen to this rhetoric and calmly repeat the lie.

If there is one group whose best interests are not at heart in this movement, it is American Blacks.

We are also asked to follow Democratic leadership while individuals like Tim Walz and Jacob Frey send out dog whistles suggesting that what happened in Minnesota with this woman’s death is equivalent to what happened to George Floyd—and that we should respond in the same way. We are encouraged to riot, to burn, and to react, rather than to think critically.

At the same time, we are expected to forget about the fraud that has occurred in Minnesota—fraud involving resources intended for children, the elderly, and the disabled. While not every individual is responsible, the fraud happened, and it was exposed. It revealed another situation in which immigrants—some legal, others not—have come into this country and extracted resources from lower-class communities already struggling to survive.

We are asked to believe in the policies of an unknown leader—one who operates in the shadows and creates chaos from behind a curtain.

Meanwhile, those of us who support Donald Trump are ridiculed, labeled, and publicly shamed for that support. More importantly, we are expected to view everything Trump does as inherently wrong, without honest discussion or evaluation of outcomes.

I must address what Trump did regarding Maduro in Venezuela. We are expected to see these actions as un-American or as violations of international law, even though pressure on Venezuela was already in motion under the Biden administration. We are told to ignore the reality of what Venezuelan socialism has produced—and how it has driven millions from that nation into the United States.

There is little doubt that meaningful pressure on Venezuela could slow the flow of migrants from that region and disrupt drug-trafficking routes that use that country as a bridge into the United States. Yet we are instructed to believe that such actions somehow harm us.

Any policy—no matter how small—that could benefit our communities is rejected outright if it is associated with Trump. Results no longer matter. Outcomes no longer matter. If Trump is connected to the action, it is opposed on principle alone.

So the real question becomes: what is next, and what should be done?

I believe the answer is clear. There must be a mass exodus of Black Americans from the Democratic Party. We must remove ourselves from systems that hold us down, keep us dependent, or maintain us in a state of political bondage.

It is time to cross the Red Sea and never look back, lest we be lost to the rising waters of blue-state policies and special interests that threaten to drown our communities.

An Awakening of Allegiance: Fraud, Culture, and the Question of Who America Is

“One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you.” Exodus 12:49 (KJV)

We went to the moon. I believe we went to the moon. Fraud is fraud is fraud. And as we enter 2026, fraud (real, alleged, denied, and obscured) has become one of the defining issues dominating the national conversation.

Since just before Christmas, American media feeds have been saturated with allegations of widespread fraud tied to publicly funded programs. Much of this attention has been driven by Nick Shirley, a YouTube podcaster who traveled to Minnesota and publicly documented what he claims is systemic abuse of taxpayer-funded services within certain Somali American–run organizations.

Many Somali refugees arrived in the U.S. after the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, when a failed U.S. mission and subsequent withdrawal left Somalia in prolonged instability, prompting large-scale displacement. They were afforded opportunity here, as they should have been. However, for years, allegations have persisted regarding fraud in sectors such as childcare services, transportation programs, and non-emergency healthcare, particularly programs intended to serve the elderly, the disabled, and autistic children. Past investigations have uncovered misconduct in some cases, yet critics argue that oversight failures remain unresolved.

What troubles many Americans is not simply the existence of allegations, but the perception that accountability has been uneven. Questions have been raised about political leadership in Minnesota and whether elected officials have sufficiently addressed these concerns. That unease intensified during the last presidential election cycle, when Minnesota's governor rose to national prominence as a vice-presidential running mate. The idea that unresolved questions surrounding the use of public funds could coexist with national political ambition unsettled many people.

Additional scrutiny has also been directed toward other prominent Minnesota political figures. The perception of corruption alone has deepened public distrust.

This forces a broader question: what has been the real impact of immigration policy in America, not in theory, but in practice? What does it mean for citizens who are expected to follow the rules while watching enforcement appear selective?

For me, this isn't abstract. It's personal. It's about what this country owes its people, particularly ADOS, and whether justice, accountability, and fairness still matter.

I hear what many Americans are feeling right now: fear, confusion, and a growing sense that national identity and civic norms are being challenged while ordinary citizens are told they are not allowed to question it. That is a legitimate civic concern, even when it is dismissed as something darker.

The Flag in Boston

What's happening right now is unsettling.

In Boston, one of the birthplaces of the American Revolution, there were reports of a Somali flag being raised in a public space where the American flag had traditionally flown. Whether symbolic or temporary, the image itself is jarring. Nations are built on shared symbols, and flags matter. They represent sovereignty, unity, and allegiance.

America understands the language of liberation. We fought a revolution to free ourselves from colonial rule. We recognize the right of peoples to self-determination. But that struggle happened here, on this land, under this Constitution. When a foreign national flag is elevated in an American city, it raises an unavoidable question: what exactly is being claimed?

Is it cultural pride? Political protest? Or something closer to territorial symbolism?

That uncertainty is what alarms people.

Criticism of these moments is often shut down immediately, labeled racist or xenophobic, rather than debated on civic grounds. Yet asking whether public institutions and public spaces should prioritize American national identity is not racism. It is a basic question of citizenship and allegiance.

The same dynamic appears in Minnesota. When outsiders raise questions about accountability, they are often dismissed rather than engaged on the merits of evidence. That response has only deepened mistrust.

What makes this moment volatile is the perception that standards are not applied equally. Americans are told that emphasizing national identity is dangerous, while expressions of foreign nationalism inside U.S. borders are defended as cultural expression. That contradiction fuels division.

This is not about denying anyone dignity or opportunity. Refugees came here fleeing instability, and America opened its doors. But citizenship is not only about what a country gives. It is also about loyalty, responsibility, and shared civic norms.

At what point does tolerance become the erosion of national cohesion?

And why are citizens made to feel un-American for defending American symbols, laws, and accountability?

The ADOS Perspective

This concern intersects with something deeper for me as an ADOS American.

I recently began reading about the Iran-Contra scandal and its downstream effects on Black communities, particularly in California. What struck me was not just the policy failure itself, but how deeply it shaped our lives without our understanding it at the time.

Growing up during the crack cocaine era, we were living inside a crisis engineered far beyond our neighborhoods. Looking back, I can't help but wonder how different our communities might be today if those drugs had not been allowed to flood them so deliberately.

Culture played a role in normalizing the damage. The music and movies many of us grew up on, particularly the rise of gangsta rap, did not merely reflect reality; they reinforced it. Decades later, the same themes persist. Violence, drug dealing, and criminality are still glorified, and young Black boys continue to absorb these messages as identity rather than warning. The YSL trial in Atlanta is a modern example of how culture, drugs, and real-world consequences collide, often devastatingly.

At the same time, other immigrant groups entered this country and, in many cases, leveraged Black American struggle, imagery, and history to advance socially and politically while foundational Black Americans remained marginalized. Our story is often used. Our needs are often ignored.

As 2026 begins, allegations of fraud involving publicly funded programs in immigrant-dense communities across multiple states have dominated headlines. These stories reinforce a perception among many ADOS Americans: accountability appears flexible when political power and voting blocs are involved.

There is a growing sense that Black Americans are treated as a guaranteed constituency, assumed loyalty with no obligation to deliver results, while newer communities are actively courted, protected, and symbolically elevated. That imbalance breeds resentment not because of race, but because of unequal political valuation.

For ADOS communities, this feels familiar. We endured generations of surveillance, over-policing, under-investment, and cultural degradation. Our institutions were dismantled. Our neighborhoods were flooded with drugs. Our families were destabilized, with little urgency for repair.

Against that backdrop, symbolic gestures like raising foreign flags in historic American cities feel less like inclusion and more like erasure. Not because immigrants should not express pride, but because foundational Black Americans rarely receive equal public recognition for our sacrifices.

Boston does not owe its existence to any single modern immigrant group. To suggest otherwise feeds the sense that ADOS contributions are being overwritten while we are told to remain silent.

The Awakening America Needs

America is not just an idea. It is a nation built through struggle, labor, conflict, and time. There are Americans, Black and White, whose lineage stretches back centuries on this soil. For ADOS Americans, that lineage begins in 1619 and runs through enslavement, segregation, and survival. For long-established White Americans, it runs through settlement, revolution, and nation-building. Different histories. Same land. Same inheritance.

History is tragic and final. Native Americans were displaced. Borders were drawn through power, as they have been everywhere on earth. No one alive today bears personal guilt for centuries-old events, but everyone alive today bears responsibility for the present.

Foundational Americans, ADOS and long-established White Americans, have more in common than they are encouraged to admit. They are divided while power quietly shifts away from both.

This awakening is not about hatred. It is about civic allegiance. American civic identity must come before foreign nationalism. Public institutions should reflect loyalty to America first.

But unity requires honesty.

White Americans must abandon racism, not symbolically, but genuinely. Racism corrodes trust and weakens the nation.

Black Americans must confront internal destruction. We cannot destroy our own communities, glorify dysfunction, and still expect power. Rights without responsibility produce dependence, not sovereignty.

Power comes from cohesion, ownership, discipline, and self-respect.

A nation that refuses to define itself will be defined by others.

A people that refuses to awaken will lose its future, not through invasion, but through neglect.

It is time to open our eyes.

It is time to wake up.

Following the Piper: The Fall of the People’s Party

The Story That Stayed With Me

I remember the first time I heard the story of the Pied Piper. I was in the third grade, sitting in Mrs. Ford’s class after being bused from my school in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to a brick school in the white suburbs. We didn’t get stories like that back in my neighborhood schools.

I was terrified, not only by the Piper himself but by how easily the children followed him. Their parents were too distracted with their own affairs to notice until it was too late. The children were gone, and the town went on, oblivious.

That is what America feels like now.

The Party Becomes the Piper

When I think about the Pied Piper, I can’t help but think about the Democratic Party and the divide within it. On one side are the centrists, still focused on politics, policy, and the mechanics of governing. On the other side are the idealists and activists who see America itself as the cause of hostilities around the world.

Their song of socialism and populism keeps followers marching in rhythm even as the tune leads them toward the edge. With every verse, American values bend a little more. A party that was once merely fractured is now deeply divided.

Protests on every front—from Palestine to immigration enforcement—turn confrontational. The guarantees of due process and equal protection are dismissed as relics of a flawed system. The movement that once called for unity now uses disorder as a political tool. And through it all, Donald Trump remains the convenient scapegoat, blamed for the very division this movement continues to deepen.

Out of that confusion rises a new kind of leader. Figures such as Zohran Mamdani have learned how to turn unrest into opportunity, preaching fairness while exploiting frustration. His alignment with the Democratic Socialists of America tells the rest of the story. The DSA has circulated demands for New York’s incoming administration: city-funded boycotts of companies that do business with Israel, municipal divestment from so-called “imperialist” industries, and vast expansions of taxpayer-subsidized programs. These are not practical solutions; they are ideological tests.

It seems as if chaos itself has become the strategy. The louder the crisis, the easier it is to sell control as compassion. While citizens argue over headlines, those playing the tune quietly gather more power.

Even the story of 9/11 is being reframed—less a day of shared American loss and more a lesson filtered through global politics. The focus shifts from unity to identity, from remembrance to revision. America is being rewritten, not through laws but through persuasion.

Meanwhile, the Republicans—like the parents in that old story—are busy keeping the machinery of daily life turning. They argue over budgets and procedure, certain they are protecting normalcy, unaware that a generation is already following another melody toward a drowning river.

The Rift in the Democratic Party

The Democratic Party of yesterday once stood for working families, faith, and opportunity. That party no longer exists. It has been overtaken by a populist movement dressed in progressive slogans.

But still, the dividing line in the party is not about politics or economics. It is Israel. The far-left flank has made its stance on Israel the new purity test. Those who support Israel’s right to exist, or who simply refuse to demonize it, are being pushed aside. Leaders such as Hakeem Jeffries and Jeffrey Torres are being challenged not for corruption but for conscience.

Loyalty to ideology now outweighs loyalty to truth. The hostility toward Israel reveals something deeper: a willingness to rewrite moral order in favor of political fashion. The Democratic Socialists of America’s calls for divestment from Israel-linked businesses and for citywide boycotts are not local policies; they are ideological weapons disguised as compassion.

And now it is young, college-educated women who are leading this charge under the guise of being “smart.” I never imagined that a college education could become such a tainted privilege. What was once a mark of discipline and achievement has turned into a badge of indoctrination. To hold an advanced degree today often means being shaped by elite professors who preach righteousness while teaching that evil can be educated away.

The irony is that this new intellectual class believes it is liberating others, when in truth it is binding them to ideas that promise freedom but demand conformity.

The Manufactured Blue Wave

After November 7, Democrats feigning unity described the election as a Blue Wave. Yet it was not a wave of renewal; it was a flood of confusion. The illusion of unity hides behind a machinery of manipulation.

Victories in places like Virginia, California, New York, and Detroit were celebrated as moral triumphs, but they were driven by redistricting, media influence, and emotional engineering. Younger voters were guided by slogans, while older and more pragmatic communities—especially Black Americans—were left feeling ignored or replaced.

In New York, that manipulation has been perfected. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign targeted youth, immigrants, and progressives with language that sounded inclusive but quietly worked to erase a shared American identity. His rise mirrors a larger trend: populists using the language of equity to advance division.

Media voices amplify the same tune. Podcasters such as Sabby Sabs, Native Land Podcast, Roland Martin, and Don Lemon repackage socialism in moral and racial tones designed to resonate with Black listeners. They frame dependency as justice and cultural erasure as progress. They spotlight groups that specifically target Black communities—organizations such as the Working Families Party, which use ADOS narratives to push multiculturalism that dilutes our own history and aligns our struggle with that of the Palestinians.

It is not liberation. It is deception. And many are following the song.

The Shutdown of Trust

The Democratic Party that once stood for the people is now playing mind games with them. Emotional manipulation has replaced honest leadership. Instead of admitting their failure to negotiate affordable premiums under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), they use distraction and outrage to justify their inaction.

The recent government shutdown is another symptom of the same disease. It was not caused by Republican obstruction but by Democratic division. Moderate Democrats are being drowned out by activists who prefer chaos to compromise. The party that once called itself the voice of the people has become a movement obsessed with purity and control. The far left no longer seeks to govern; it seeks to disrupt.

The result is fear—fear of losing everything: food stamps, jobs, Medicaid, and order. Fear has become the Democrats’ most powerful tool, an emotional currency traded for loyalty. Beneath that fear lies another motive. It is not fear of injustice but fear of losing control, of losing identity and influence. Rising in its place is a socialist ideology wrapped in moral language and a growing tolerance for antisemitism disguised as freedom.

The Shift in Values

This week I listened to Marc Lamont Hill and Briahna Joy Gray, two left-leaning African-American podcasters, discuss the future of the Democratic Party, and it became clear that values are shifting. America’s old rejection of communism is being replaced by a fascination with socialism, fueled by resentment toward capitalism.

To be clear, neither of these commentators aligns fully with the Democratic Party. Their politics lean closer to the Green Party or independent socialism, yet they hold significant influence within segments of the Black community. They present themselves as intellectual leaders, voices for the unheard, guiding younger listeners who trust their opinions more than they trust institutions.

Their ideology is not compassion; it is control. Where Zohran Mamdani’s agenda may be more deceptive, Hill and Gray’s belief is sincere but equally dangerous. They champion promises of universal healthcare, free housing, government-owned property, free grocery stores and buses, and open borders for anyone who enters, regardless of loyalty or belief. The message is simple: citizenship no longer matters. Anyone can claim the same privileges as those who have sacrificed to sustain this nation. That is not justice; it is erasure.

Even more troubling is their alignment with the Palestinian struggle, which they elevate as a moral mirror for Black America. In doing so, they blur the lines between empathy and ideology, turning global politics into another test of loyalty inside our own communities.

The Weight of It All

When I heard the smooth acceptance speech of Zohran Mamdani, proclaiming that “immigrants built New York,” I felt the weight of it. Not because of his faith—it is his right—but because of how easily the message was packaged and sold. It was another performance in a season of performances.

Each time the media repeats its chorus that the poor will lose food stamps or the elderly will lose healthcare, the exhaustion deepens. Democrats have built a narrative of endless crisis while Republicans try to reopen the government and restore stability. Yet every headline still finds a way to blame them.

If “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is real, it has consumed the Democratic Party. There is frantic scrambling now, a desperate grasp for control, as figures like Bernie Sanders attempt another climb to the top and Mamdani boasts about his rise to power, already raising money for his mayoral transition. It is the same hypocrisy as before: condemning wealth while collecting it.

The wolf is no longer at the door. He is in the house, dressed as hope, asking for trust and for votes.

A Final Word

After the chaos of last week, I realized the importance of not losing sight of the Pied Piper, of not falling victim to that song. Fear is a liar. While America dances to the Piper’s tune, someone must name the melody for what it is: a song meant to seduce, not to save.

The Democratic Party of today is no longer the party of working families or shared faith. It is a movement torn between empathy and extremism. If we are not careful, that song could lead us all straight to the river—but some of us refuse to follow along and take the plunge.

“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” — 2 Timothy 1:7

Candace Owens Isn’t Telling the Truth

Candace Owens: Hypocrisy in Faith, Journalism, and Politics

I don’t usually write about Candace Owens, because to me she isn’t that relevant. But when she started mocking Protestant Christianity, calling us “Judeo-Christians” in a way that was meant as an insult, I couldn’t stay quiet.

Judeo-Christian doesn’t mean “less than” or “stupid.” It means the uniting of the Old Testament and the New Testament — the foundation of our faith. Protestants hold to that. Catholics hold to that. The difference is that Catholicism strays when it adds practices that aren’t in the Bible. Scripture is clear: if anyone preaches another gospel — whether it’s praying to Mary, running rosary beads, or confessing sins to a priest — let that man be accursed. For Candace to use “Judeo-Christian” as a slur against Protestants not only misrepresents us, it undercuts Catholicism too.

Her “Conversion” and Religious Hypocrisy

Candace used to claim she was a Protestant. Then she married her Catholic husband, who goes to Mass every day, and suddenly she was Catholic too. I grew up watching women switch religions depending on who they were dating — most of the time, it didn’t stick. With Candace, there’s no sign of a real conversion. No repentance. No encounter with Jesus Christ. No transformation of the heart. Just ritual, tradition, and aesthetics.

If you truly know Jesus Christ, you don’t one day stop praying to Him so you can confess your sins to another sinner. That’s not the gospel. That’s empty religion. Candace may call Protestants “brainwashed,” but my experience proves otherwise. I wasn’t raised in a Christian household — my mother didn’t go to church. Yet I came to faith in Christ. Nobody “brainwashed” me. To claim otherwise is dishonest.

Her Pattern of Fake Investigations

This same inconsistency shows up in her so-called “journalism.” Candace presents herself as an investigator, but every major topic she’s taken on has followed the same cycle: pick a hot-button issue, recycle what’s already known, add sensational commentary, and call it groundbreaking.

• Trayvon Martin. She sided against him and built her early following.

• George Floyd. She exposed his criminal past, as if people didn’t already know.

• Kamala Harris. She tried to prove Harris wasn’t Black, even though her father had already confirmed their family’s Irish ancestry.

• Brigitte Macron. She spent months pushing the rumor that Macron’s wife is a man — without evidence.

• Charlie Kirk. She now exploits his death with wild claims she cannot prove.

The pattern is always the same: hype, outrage, conspiracy, and no real investigation. She doesn’t gather facts — she waits for the public to send her rumors and then repeats them. That’s not journalism. That’s theater.

Her Obsession With Israel

Nowhere is her hypocrisy more dangerous than in her attacks on Israel. Candace blames Israel for everything. Gaza? Israel’s fault. Middle East conflicts? Israel’s fault. She even suggested Israel was behind Charlie Kirk’s death — as if Benjamin Netanyahu, fighting wars on multiple fronts, would stop everything to target Charlie Kirk.

She ignores Hamas. She ignores Gaza’s leaders living in luxury in Qatar. She ignores the fact that Israel is a tiny nation surrounded by enemies who openly vow to wipe it off the map. Instead, she paints Palestinians as innocent victims while vilifying Israel at every turn.

And she never confronts Catholicism’s own sins: the crusades, the priests who molested boys, the idolatry of saints and statues. She spares Catholicism but hammers Israel relentlessly.

Her rhetoric even slips into antisemitism. She has said things like, “They made us hate Hitler.” Nobody “made” me hate Hitler. I studied history. I watched documentaries. I read about his life. I concluded for myself that Hitler was an evil man who slaughtered millions of innocent people. For Candace to suggest otherwise is dangerous and disgraceful. She blames Jews for everything, echoing the same hatred that fueled the Holocaust.

But the Bible is clear: God has promised to protect Israel. Not because of who they are, but because of who He is. He said He will always preserve a remnant of His people until the return of Christ. God is not a man that He should lie. So while Muslim nations rise up and conspire against Israel, while Hamas and Hezbollah and others wage war, Israel will not be destroyed. Not until Christ returns. That’s the Word of God.

When Candace sides with Israel’s enemies, when she excuses Gaza and blames the Jews, she isn’t just contradicting conservatives or Protestants — she’s standing against the Bible itself.

Conclusion

Candace Owens wraps herself in the language of faith, but what she promotes is hypocrisy. She adopted Catholicism out of convenience, not conviction. She calls recycled gossip “investigations.” And she obsesses over Israel as the villain of every story while ignoring Hamas, Catholic corruption, and her own contradictions.

Candace Owens does not represent truth. She represents hypocrisy — in religion, in journalism, and in politics.

False Prophets on the Mountain

Church in the 1970s and 80s was a staple in the Black community. My grandmother lived on Comstock Street in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and nearly every house on that block was a two-parent home. Almost every family went to church. My grandmother attended First Baptist Church in Somerset, and that was her foundation.

““Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.””

— Job 38:4

But my mother’s generation was different. They did not go. They seemed to develop a disdain for church, perhaps because of the control they associated with Christianity. Anything that forces you to sacrifice something can feel like control, whether it is belief in God, the lure of getting high and partying, or the illusion of being grown and independent. Their parents forced them into church, and they rebelled.

By the 1970s, church itself had changed. It began to look more like business. Success was measured by who could preach the most stirring sermon, who could pray the loudest prayer, or who could raise the most money. Black churches began to mirror white churches, and tithes and collections became central. As our community grew more educated and more prosperous, pastors learned to exploit our emotions.

This idea that Black people were finally free created a kind of rebellion. Many in my mother’s generation chose sex, drugs, and a false sense of freedom over church. I remember one particular birthday party at my grandmother’s house. My grandmother’s home was always the family gathering place for holidays, weekends, and every summer day. But on that night, things ended in chaos. A lemon meringue cake went flying across the room during a fight. It was my aunt’s sixteenth birthday. I can still see her, standing near the radiator, blowing out candles while holding a can of Budweiser, a gift for turning sixteen. That moment said everything about where my family was headed.

My aunt went on to live a hard life of drugs, alcohol, prostitution, and brokenness. And she was not alone. Nearly all of her siblings struggled with addiction, abuse, and poverty. Many of them died from drugs. That whole generation had turned away from church, and devastation followed. Drugs infiltrated our communities, creating what the world later called crack addicts, alcoholics, and junkies.

My father’s side was not much different. His mother had thirteen children, one of whom was among the first AIDS cases in New Brunswick. My father himself was an addict, though I do not know if he would ever admit it. He had a dysfunctional relationship with alcohol. Though he eventually recovered, he was never really present in our lives. For years, he lived under a bridge. Even after getting clean, he disappeared and never looked back for his daughters. I never held it against him, because I always understood his struggle was not just personal. It was tied to systems that oppressed so many Black communities.

The single common denominator with most of my family was this: none of them were saved. Church was not a consistent part of their lives. My mother did send us to church on Easter, though. She would buy us new outfits every year and send us off, even if she stayed home.

Not all families were like mine. For many, church remained central to Black life, even in the midst of drugs, addiction, and public housing. But when the crack epidemic came, it devastated communities, taking lives and filling prisons with young Black men. For many, church became an afterthought.

When I turned sixteen or seventeen, something in me wanted to go to church. Faith became my anchor. I did not always stay the course, but somehow God kept pulling me back. I remember one turning point clearly. I was a single parent, broke and struggling, working a temporary job when a friend invited me to a prayer service. As people prayed, I began to weep. An older woman came up to me and said, “God told me to tell you, He’s sick of you.” Those words shook me, because that was my own private language. Whenever I sinned, I would think to myself, God is going to get sick of me. She could not have known that. But God did. And in that moment, I knew He was speaking directly to me. It changed my life forever.

Glancing Back at the 70s

When I look back at the 70s and 80s, I see how the church was already losing its hold on people my mother’s age. They turned away, but part of what fueled that turning was the way books and television were shaping new narratives. Art and media told us that the church was not the answer but the problem.

James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain was one of those works. It captured the hypocrisy of Christians, especially through the figure of Gabriel, and showed the church as a place of judgment and oppression. Baldwin’s brilliance was in telling the truth about how painful church life could be, but the danger was that his story aligned with the idea that Christianity itself was corrupt. Faith was portrayed as a mask for human weakness, not the cure for it.

Compare that with Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky also wrote about greed, corruption, and hypocrisy in the church. But he never abandoned God. He showed that all men are flawed and in need of redemption, but his answer was not to walk away from faith. His answer was that belief in God is the only solution to mankind’s flaws.

I love Baldwin’s books, but there is always something judgmental in the way he writes about God. It is as if his own struggle with sexual identity bled onto the page, and often his words disparaged the church. That struggle was not his alone. It reflected the spirit of the time, the zeitgeist of the Black community. The struggles of this world were so overwhelming that many turned away from the church. They saw churches that wanted their talents, their service, their compliance. So they turned to the world instead, without realizing the world demanded something greater in return: their soul. Many gave it away freely.

Even Baldwin’s John embodies this tension. His confusion, questions, and ambiguous “conversion” mirror the author’s own wrestling with God, faith, and identity.

The Church Today

Today, many American Blacks have returned to the four walls of the church. We have overcome in many ways, and though we still struggle, church is always there. Unfortunately, what we find now is a different problem. Too many pastors teach lies. The prayer warriors that once stood at the altar are missing.

We have a large population of successful African Americans in this country, yet we are also among the most exploited. Too many pastors promise blessings if we give, prosperity if we tithe, breakthrough if we believe hard enough. It reminds me of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and how easily people can be manipulated if you dangle the hope of salvation before them. It also reminds me of Job, when he lost everything and his friends assumed he must be the problem. Is that not what society teaches us now? Either you are prospering, or you are the problem.

There is still a remnant. I believe that to be true. But too many pastors with large congregations are like feigns.

False Prophets

I listened recently to a sermon by T.D. Jakes. His message has always been about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps while reminding people of their responsibility to give to the church. Today, his preaching feels weaker, almost like a snake slithering slowly. After preaching about the ram in the bush, not as a foreshadowing of Christ but as a personal promise that God has a “ram” for each of us, he asked for $220, tied to Genesis 20. He justified it by saying most people spend more than that on fake hair. It was a sad moment.

This is not about T.D. Jakes. I pray for him. I pray he wakes up to repentance. This is about Jamal Bryant.

After listening to Jamal Bryant, I had a visceral reaction, almost a sick feeling. That Sunday he preached from Exodus, the story of God delivering the Israelites out of Egypt. That passage reveals God’s majesty. It is about His power to free His people from slavery, to open the Red Sea, and to lead them safely across on dry ground. It points to salvation, to baptism, to God’s faithfulness through history.

But Jamal Bryant did not speak about any of that. As he stood on his large stage, the backdrop behind him was a giant dollar bill. Instead of focusing on God’s deliverance, he twisted the story into a message about money. His words were: “God had to divide the debt so Israel could come across.” He was not talking about the sea at all. He turned it into a metaphor about financial debt.

To take one of the most powerful demonstrations of God’s hand in history and reduce it to a shallow prosperity metaphor was not only empty. It was idolatrous. The dollar bill looming behind him said it all.

After that sermon, I turned to Philip Anthony Mitchell of 2819 Church. That Sunday he preached from Matthew 28 about Jesus Christ, His return, the coming war when He establishes His kingdom on earth, and the hope of the church to be resurrected. He spoke about Jesus. And that alone made all the difference.

I have also been listening to podcasts like Trackstarz, where one episode discussed 2819 Church. They shared how a false prophet once walked in accusing the congregation of idolatry. And yes, idolatry can happen anywhere, even in a church where sound doctrine is preached. People can idolize a pastor, and that is a danger. But what struck me is that Philip Anthony Mitchell is clearly preaching Christ. Christ crucified. Christ resurrected. Christ returning. His message is consistent: evangelism, discipleship, Jesus at the center.

And it made me ask: what is the alternative? In Atlanta, you can put Jamal Bryant next to Philip Anthony Mitchell. One preaches heresy. The other preaches the Word. The difference is undeniable.

This tension reminded me again of The Brothers Karamazov and the “Grand Inquisitor” parable. Written in 1879, it describes how the church can become an institution that robs people of true faith, offering false hope while exploiting their trust. And here we are in 2025, watching the same thing play out. Jamal Bryant uses God’s Word as a hook, but he feeds people empty promises.

If you do not own a home, how thrilling it must sound when he declares that if you tithe faithfully, God will give you a house. People’s hearts leap. Their ears tingle. But what they are being fed is a lie. And this is not an isolated slip. It is a pattern:

• He cheated on his wife, fathered a child during the affair, and still leads from the pulpit.

• He has publicly supported abortion, even calling it “good for Black women,” while holding a baby dedication on the same day.

• He once claimed Jesus Christ was “out of order” 85% of the time, reducing our Lord to nothing more than a flawed man.

• He openly affirms LGBTQ lifestyles, twisting Scripture to justify it, while dismissing biblical convictions as merely “self-righteous.”

This is hypocrisy. And it is dangerous. Because when a pastor preaches lies from the pulpit, he does not just corrupt the message. He corrupts the faith of those who follow him.

This is what I mean by a pastor turning himself into the god and money into the redeemer. The stage becomes a brand. The sermon becomes a slogan. The people become customers. And the backdrop tells you what you are really supposed to worship: a dollar bill. Not the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Not the Lord who parts seas and brings His people out of bondage. A dollar.

Place that beside Philip Anthony Mitchell preaching Christ from Matthew 28, calling people to repentance, evangelism, and the hope of the resurrection. One points you to Jesus. The other points you to your wallet. The first feeds faith. The second feeds appetite.

This is how churches keep the machine running. Tithes from the hopeful. Programs funded by the state. Groceries in a bag to keep bodies in seats. Then another Sunday sermon about breakthrough if you give, overflow if you sow, and increase if you believe hard enough. None of that is the Gospel. The Gospel is Christ crucified, buried, and raised. The Gospel is deliverance from sin, not a down payment on a house.

Final Word

The Black church was once the bedrock of our families, the place our grandparents turned for strength and stability. But somewhere along the way, we let wolves climb into the pulpit. They preach money, politics, and empty promises while souls go hungry for the Word of God.

We cannot keep pretending that these men are shepherds when they are nothing but hirelings. Jamal Bryant is not the exception. He is the example. He is what happens when we trade holiness for hype, truth for applause, Christ for cash.

If we continue to follow false prophets, then we will have no one to blame but ourselves when the next generation grows up rootless and lost. The time for compromise is over. The time for discernment is now.

But there is still hope. There is still a remnant. There are still pastors lifting up Christ, still churches teaching the Word, still saints on their knees praying for revival. And there is still the Gospel. It has never changed.

Jesus Christ is not a marketing plan. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He is our deliverer, our redeemer, our only hope. My prayer is that we stop chasing personalities and turn back to Him.

Black Women, It’s Time to Move Differently

Empowering Black Women: From Corporate Survival to Entrepreneurial Freedom

As a Black woman who’s navigated the workforce for decades, I’ve seen firsthand the unique challenges we face. From entry-level jobs in bank basements to corporate offices, our stories are woven with resilience, fear, and unyielding determination. But lately, amid economic shifts, political changes, and personal reflections, I’ve come to believe it’s time for us to redefine our paths. This post is a call to action. It draws from my experiences and conversations with other Black women. It is a call to break free from dependency on systems that weren’t built for us and step into our power through faith, risk-taking, and entrepreneurship.

My Journey in the Workforce: Lessons from the Basement to the Boardroom

I’ve been working since I was 18 years old. My first job was at First Fidelity Bank, later bought out by PNC Bank. I remember it vividly. Most of the employees were women, and the majority were Black women. We worked in the basement, manually processing checks. My manager was a petite Black woman. She was militant, sharp, and sometimes rude, but she ensured the job got done. I appreciated her because she always gave me accolades for how quickly I could count and organize those piles of checks. Back then, everything was done by hand. We sorted incoming checks, placed them into slips, and filed them into folders. Fresh out of high school, I realized that this is what work means.

From that experience, I learned the importance of diligence in every task. I have carried that lesson through every job since, always striving to do my best while maintaining ethical and moral balance.

As I advanced in my career, I began to notice patterns in corporate America. I worked everywhere from small engineering firms to one of the largest consulting companies in the world. One consistent observation stood out. There were usually very few Black people, and even fewer Black men. At my last job, it became clear that Black men often face significant challenges in corporate environments. Many choose entrepreneurship instead, and I don’t see anything wrong with that. It is a powerful path.

For Black women, it is different. We often pursue corporate roles, even if it means starting or staying as administrative assistants. That is what I have done with pride for the last 20 to 30 years. It has allowed me to own my home, buy cars, and earn both a college and a master’s degree. I did all of that while holding down the same type of job. But lately, with everything happening in the United States, including Trump back in office and massive layoffs, I have been reflecting deeply on our role in the workforce.

Three hundred thousand black women have lost their jobs since the beginning of the year is frightening, especially when you consider the disproportionate impact this will have on Black communities. Most of those positions were federal government roles. For decades, these roles have been anchor jobs for many of us. Now, they have been stripped away. I don’t blame Donald Trump for making cuts, and I don’t see this as simply an unfortunate circumstance for Black women. If you’re younger, the world is full of opportunities waiting to be seized. If you’re older, this moment is a chance to hone in on your own skills and reshape your trajectory based on your capabilities. For many of us, the plan was to hold steady until retirement and collect a pension. Now, it seems we have the freedom to move differently. I know this might sound naïve. Even as I write this, it feels almost like a dream—something that could only happen if the stars align. But I believe—even in the impossible.

The Deep-Rooted Fears: Job Security and the Legacy of Struggle

Lately, I’ve been talking to a lot of Black women about job security, our circumstances in America, and the constant challenges of making ends meet. A deep-seated fear runs through so many of us. That fear is that we will not be able to provide for our families. This fear is instilled early. Growing up, we witnessed the struggles of our parents, especially in single-parent homes. My mother was a single parent. While she had a partner, he was often out of work and contributed little financially, even if he was there emotionally. She was always juggling employment, childcare, and her own mental health.

I remember the constant worry. How are we going to pay the rent? How will we keep food on the table? We relied on social programs, including Section 8 housing, food stamps, welfare, and Medicaid. As a child, I thought, I don’t want to live like this. I don’t want to rely on the system. But those experiences planted a seed of fear. They taught us to hustle. Get a job, keep working, and never stop, because survival depended on it. Once we entered the workforce, the wages weren’t enough, so we worked twice as hard just to get by, especially after having children of our own. Life became a relentless struggle around one question. How do we keep a roof over our heads and food on the table without becoming part of the system.

Talking to others, it is the same story. We do not have a real safety net beyond those programs. Even now, there is that anxiety. If we lose our jobs, we could lose everything, including our homes, our medical care, and our security. For many of us, myself included, we are determined not to depend solely on the system. But as we get older, we also recognize what we have already survived. That survival includes single parenting, raising children, maintaining homes and cars, and supporting grandchildren while still helping our adult kids.

We are in a different place now, but the fear lingers. One job loss could bring it all crashing down. Yet I want to think differently, and I hear the same from the women I talk to. We do not want to feel trapped in low-paying jobs, stuck in discriminatory spaces, or in roles beneath our capabilities. We are recognizing our resilience. We have survived the hardest parts. It is time to shift from fear to empowerment and build paths that honor our strength.

Breaking Free: Faith, Risks, and the Power of Our Own Spaces

I have come to realize that if you want to thrive, grow, and break out of the world’s boxes, you have to take risks. For Black women, that means escaping the stereotypes that paint us as uneducated or as token beneficiaries of DEI programs. These programs rarely serve us in meaningful ways. To wipe away those false narratives, we must step boldly into new territory.

AI is one of those new territories. It can feel intimidating, but it also offers incredible opportunities. To use it wisely, we first need faith in God, trusting that He opens new paths. With discernment, we can treat AI as a tool to expand the skills we have built through years of hard work.

For women like me, who may be older and without large savings but still have something to build on, AI can level the playing field. It can help us create businesses, manage tasks, and reach customers in ways that once felt impossible.

My prayer is that Black women will seize these opportunities. That could mean starting a cleaning service, launching a catering business, providing childcare, or even creating new educational spaces. By relying on our own talents, and using technology to support them, we free ourselves from waiting for a seat at someone else’s table.

Reflecting on history, I believe integration has, in some ways, shifted our mindset from building our own institutions to trying to “make it” in theirs. But if we think differently, trust God to guide us, and use the tools at our fingertips, we can change things. Yes, it is overwhelming at times. Trademarks, LLC filings, the countless fees, and all the little details can feel heavy. But I have learned that if you take the first step, God will lead you through the rest.

Leadership, Representation, and Truth

When I think about women like Karen Bass or Jasmine Crockett, who often offer little more than rhetoric, I feel disappointed. These are women considered the “best and the brightest” within our communities, yet they too often lack real knowledge and intellect. Then there are stories like Fani Willis, who showed no shame in taking from a Black rapper’s hard-earned money. Or Letitia James, who reportedly claimed her father as her spouse to collect benefits. Or Lisa Cook, whose credentials have been questioned and who may not have been qualified for the roles she was given. These examples are disheartening.

Even when I consider Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Supreme Court justice, I feel the same disappointment. When asked to define what a woman is, she refused, even though she has lived as one her entire life. Instead of standing on truth, she chose to appease a small group of individuals. If the Constitution is settled law, then the framers’ understanding of the word “woman,” especially in the 19th Amendment, was grounded in biological reality. The question of what is a man and what is a woman has been settled since the beginning of time. It should not be redefined simply because a man puts on a dress and decides to pretend to be something he will never be. The same goes the other way. When a woman straps on a prosthetic and claims she is now a man, we all know the truth. At best, this is science used as an illusion. At worst, it is junk science that denies reality.

But we should not allow individuals like this to define us or discourage us. Their shortcomings should not hold us back from leaping forward. We cannot measure our own possibilities by the failures of others.

Moving Forward in Faith

I hope others reading this will ask themselves: How can I get out? The first step is trusting God. He will open every door. There are opportunities out there, and I wrote this post to encourage people. Do not let fear paralyze you. Even in uncertain political times, when harassment, instability, or sudden changes feel threatening, we can still move forward. I do not know what the future holds. But I do know faith and action will guide us through.

In sharing these reflections, my goal is to inspire Black women everywhere to embrace our resilience and chart new courses. We have survived the storms. Now let’s build our own empires. If you are ready to take that leap, start with faith, a small step, and the tools already in your hands. The box is breaking. Our freedom awaits.