Analysis after analysis shows that the Trump administration’s voter suppression legislation will keep millions of Americans from voting.

But pointing out that the bill will disenfranchise huge swaths of the electorate will not deter its proponents—because mass disenfranchisement is the goal.

The President has repeatedly acknowledged that broad participation in elections would disadvantage his party. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah even circulated polling showing his party poised to lose its Senate majority, arguing the bill could “turn this around.” Earlier this month, the President privately assured allies the bill would “guarantee” victories not only this year, but for “every election for a long time.” He is so committed to restricting the electorate—especially Black Americans—that he scuttled a bipartisan deal to stabilize the nation’s airports, holding TSA funding hostage to force passage of the bill.

If enacted, the bill now before the Senate would prevent more eligible citizens from registering to vote than any legislation in American history. Its impact would fall hardest, as always, on Black Americans.

At the core of the bill is the myth of widespread voter fraud—a myth built on racist tropes that have endured since Reconstruction. After the Civil War, white supremacists claimed newly enfranchised Black citizens were inherently suspect voters: “unfit,” “illegitimate,” or easily bribed or manipulated. These lies justified poll taxes, literacy tests, and arbitrary “character” assessments for generations. Today’s fearmongering about “illegal voting” is simply the modern version of those same racist narratives.

The SAVE America Act revives these tactics by requiring specific proof of citizenship—either a U.S. passport or a certified birth certificate and government issued photo ID. More than 21 million Americans lack easy access to those documents, and Black Americans disproportionately face the bureaucratic and financial hurdles required to secure them. Many Black citizens born in segregated hospitals hold older or non standardized documents that may not meet the bill’s strict criteria. Black women, who change their legal names at higher rates, face additional burdens because name matching requirements often force them to track down decades old marriage or divorce paperwork.

And even those already registered are at risk. The bill requires voter roll purges every 30 days—reinstating a tactic that southern officials once used to erase Black voters with bureaucratic precision. Purged voters will not know they’ve been removed until they show up at their polling place. They will have no fallback: the bill bans universal mail voting, even in states that already conduct secure all mail elections. Black voters, who tend to face longer lines, fewer polling locations, inflexible work schedules, and transportation barriers, will be disproportionately harmed.

For nearly two centuries, voter fraud accusations have been a political weapon—but never a factual one. In 18 years, Sedgwick County, Kansas, identified just 18 non citizens on its voter rolls—none proven to have knowingly registered, and only five ever cast a ballot. Kris Kobach, who defended the Kansas law, likewise failed to uncover fraud as vice chair of the Trump administration’s 2017 “Election Integrity” commission, which ended in embarrassment and without evidence.

False claims of voter fraud fueled the fake elector plot and the January 6 attack, but more than 60 post election lawsuits yielded no evidence of widespread wrongdoing—let alone the kind alleged to justify this legislation.

The rhetoric promoting the SAVE America Act is steeped in the white?nationalist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory—the idea that expanding multiracial participation threatens white political dominance. As Washington Post analyst Philip Bump observed, the bill effectively turns that racist conspiracy into law.

The bill’s financial burdens, documentation requirements, and bureaucratic traps are nothing less than a 21st?century resurrection of the poll taxes and literacy tests that defined Jim Crow. Its design mirrors the logic of Plessy v. Ferguson: create barriers that disproportionately harm Black citizens, then insist the rules are “neutral.”

America has seen this strategy before. We know who it targets. We know what it’s meant to prevent. And we know that the myth of voter fraud—rooted in racist lies about Black political participation—has always been a tool to silence Black voters.

The SAVE America Act is simply the latest incarnation of that long, shameful tradition. And like every discriminatory scheme before it, it belongs on the scrap heap of history.

Written by Marc Morial

Official website; http://twitter.com/MARCMORIAL

They are revealing the degree to which they are willing to accept dishonest tactics that are developed to hold back women and people of color. The anti-DEI initiative has proven to be an effective offense ploy waged in the culture war against the Black community. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who serves as the principal defense policy advisor to the President, knows he sits in a perfect position to dismantle all racial fairness throughout the military ranks. Before his appointment by the Trump administration, Hegseth wrote books critical of the U.S. military as “woke” while suggesting that diversity throughout the ranks had weakened the force.

Having such a person, lacking character and integrity, in a high-ranking position of power is dangerous. As a result of the policy influence given to Hegseth and others like him, the culture war has become a war without end. It is an everlasting conflict meant to reshape societal norms in ways that will negatively impact the careers of future service men and women. Hegseth has said repeatedly that he is determined to change a culture corrupted by “foolish,” “reckless,” and “woke” leaders from previous administrations. We are constantly told that the Department of Defense, sometimes referred to as the Department of War, is now controlled by meritocracy. While meritocracy is a system in which power and positions are assigned based on individual ability, talent, and achievement rather than social background, wealth, or nepotism, it still requires a fair promotion system. Meritocracy, in the true sense, still means that everyone has an equal chance to succeed regardless of background, race, and gender. Today, about 43% of the 1.3 million troops on active duty are people of color. But those leading the military are overwhelmingly white and male.

The New York Times reported that Defense Secretary Hegseth blocked the promotion of two Black men and two female Army officers who were on track to become one-star generals. According to the Times article, Hegseth pressed senior Army leaders, including Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, to remove the four names from the list of about three dozen officers, most of whom are white men. Driscoll refused, citing the officers’ decades-long records of exemplary service. It is customary that after a service board approves a list of colonels to be promoted to general, the defense secretary is not supposed to intervene, military officials say. Despite standard procedures, Hegseth removed the four names from the list and announced that President Trump had approved his new list of 29 Army colonels for promotion.

“If these reports are accurate, Secretary Hegseth’s decision to remove four decorated officers from a promotion list after having been selected by their peers for their merit and performance is not only outrageous, it would be illegal,” Sen. Jack Reed said in a statement. What message does this send to the public about the military’s ability to remain apolitical and free from society’s cultural wars? What message does this send to minorities and women currently in the military who have hopes of moving up the career ladder based on merit? And will there ever be another Gen. Colin Powell or Gen. Charles Q. Brown? Both were Black officers appointed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking military officer in the U.S. Armed Forces. Gen. Brown was abruptly fired from that role by Hegseth without explanation.

Brown Jr. is an example of Black excellence. He is now a retired U.S. Air Force general who served as the 21^st chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, prior to that appointment, served as the 22^nd chief of staff of the Air Force. Like so many other Black service men and women, Brown came from a proud military family. His father, Charles Sr., served for 30 years in the Army, rising to the rank of colonel. His paternal grandfather, Robert E. Brown, was drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II and served in the Pacific Theater, including Hawaii and Saipan. For many Black households, the military was not just a job but a family tradition handed down from one generation to the next. It also served as a pathway to Black prosperity and the middle class.

When Hegseth denied four officers their rightful promotion, it was a painful and personal reminder to the two Black men and two women that discrimination within ranks and the Pentagon is still alive. It also serves as an unwelcome message to young Blacks from JROTC students to college graduates who believed the military glass ceiling was already broken. It is clear with this current administration that promotion to the highest ranks will never be about merit or fairness. It’s all about white males.

Written by David W. Marshall

Official website; https://davidwmarshallauthor.com/

One may purchase his book, which is titled; God Bless Our Divided America: Unity, Politics and History from a Biblical Perspective.

This country does not have kings.

At first glance, the slogan sounds almost quaint, something lifted from a civics textbook. The United States fought a revolution to rid itself of monarchy, and the idea that one person should stand above the law is supposed to be foreign to the American political tradition.

But the people who gathered last Saturday were not simply protesting a personality or even a presidency. What they expressed was something deeper—a growing sense that the political system increasingly serves the powerful while ordinary Americans are told there is nothing left for them.

That contradiction is visible almost everywhere.

Congress can assemble $200 billion for war with remarkable speed, even as American troops once again find themselves with boots on the ground in an undeclared conflict, yet student borrowers are told that meaningful relief is unrealistic or unaffordable. Housing costs continue their relentless rise while wages struggle to keep pace. Millions of Americans carry student debt that will shape their financial futures for decades.

Even the people who keep the country’s basic systems operating often live with the greatest economic insecurity. Transportation Security Administration workers, the people who check our bags and scan our boarding passes, offer a telling example. During government shutdowns or political standoffs, these workers are often required to keep showing up for work even when their paychecks are delayed.

Eventually they receive their back pay. But back pay does not erase the damage done in the meantime.

Rent is still due on the first of the month. Credit card bills arrive on schedule. Utility companies expect payment whether Congress is functioning or not. When paychecks stop, many TSA workers must borrow from family, miss payments, or fall behind on bills. Late fees accumulate. Credit scores drop. The government may eventually restore their wages, but it cannot restore the late fees, damaged credit, or weeks of financial anxiety.

Seen in that light, the chant of “No Kings” carries meaning beyond constitutional symbolism. It reflects a concern that power in a democracy is supposed to flow upward from the people rather than downward from those who wield it.

One striking feature of last Saturday’s demonstrations was not just their size but their geography. Protests appeared not only in traditional centers of activism but also in smaller communities that rarely host large demonstrations. Residents assembled in Casper, Wyoming, a city in one of the nation’s most reliably Republican states. Demonstrators gathered in Midland, Michigan, a community where presidential elections often tilt conservative. In Oregon towns like McMinnville and Tillamook, people rallied far from Portland’s familiar protest culture.

That matters. When demonstrations appear in smaller towns and politically mixed communities, they often signal something larger than partisan disagreement. They suggest that frustration with the direction of the political system is spreading beyond the usual activist circles.

None of this guarantees policy change. Protest movements rarely produce legislative victories overnight. What they do reveal, however, is the mood of the country.

And the mood right now is uneasy.

Americans are watching enormous sums flow toward military conflict even as economic pressures mount at home. Housing prices strain household budgets, student debt continues to shadow younger generations, and workers performing essential public roles—from airport security to public transit—often live paycheck to paycheck while keeping critical systems running.

Under those circumstances, people inevitably begin to ask whom the system ultimately serves. When government appears able to mobilize vast resources for some priorities while struggling to address the economic burdens facing ordinary citizens, the distance between democratic ideals and everyday experience becomes difficult to ignore.

The United States rejected monarchy in 1776.

Last Saturday, in thousands of towns and cities across the country, Americans gathered to remind the nation of a principle that still defines democracy.

The people are not subjects.

Written by Julianne Malveaux

Official website; https://www.juliannemalveaux.com

We face a myriad of problems in the U.S. and within the Black community.

One of the biggest problems facing America is that we have been “misdiagnosed” not only by our political leaders, but also by our governing institutions.

If you are misdiagnosed, you will be given the wrong prescription to cure the said problem.

Herein lies the problem in America and most pronounced within the Black community.

Allow me to go back to my Oral Roberts University roots to properly diagnose our illness.

I am reminded of my good buddy Daniel and our many conversations over the millennia.

In the fifth chapter of the book of Daniel it tells the story of the King of Babylon, Belshazzar and the hand writing on the wall.  Daniel was considered the wise man of the Kingdom who had the blessing of God upon his life.

No one was able to interpret the handwriting on the wall until the King summoned Daniel.

The king promised Daniel he would be third in line to the kingdom if he were able to interpret the handwriting on the wall.

In Daniel 5:25-27, “And this is the writing that was written, Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin…This is the interpretation of the thing: Mene; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it…Tekel; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.”

In a similar manner, liberalism has been on trial for the past fifty years in America and more specifically in the Black community.

Liberalism of the past fifty years has damaged America and has devastated the Black community!

Paraphrasing Daniel, liberalism has been tried and is finished.  It has been weighed in the balances and has been found wanting. And now the unfettered support of the Democrat Party by Blacks is slowly being stripped away from the radical liberal racist whites of America.

These radical liberal white racist have injected feminism into our Black women, homosexuality into our Black churches, and turned unfettered abortion into a perverse form of birth control.

Liberalism has further destroyed the Black community with non-performing schools, out of wedlock childbirth, and the total decimation of the entrepreneurial class with more government regulations, increased minimum wage, and out of control tax rates.

Democrats, like King Belshazzar, are incapable of reading the handwriting on the wall.

Democrats have had several recent versions of Daniel, ones who could properly interpret the handwriting on the wall for the party, but they have shunned them.

Pennsylvania senator, John Fetterman and political strategist James Carville have both been very critical of the Democrat Party being high jacked by the far left of their party.

During a recent hit on Fox News, Fetterman discussed why he voted to confirm new Homeland Security Secretary, Markwayne Mullin.  “I believe in a very secure border…We also agreed that we should deport all of the criminals. My friend Markwayne and I, we agree on that…The Democrat Party is motivated by Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS).”

Carville’s diagnosis of the Democrat Party is, “Constipated. Leaderless. Confused. A cracked-out clown car. Divided. These are the words I hear my fellow Democrats using to describe our party as of late. The truth is they’re not wrong: The Democratic Party is in shambles.”

Fetterman and Carville have both sounded the alarm to any and everyone in the Democrat Party who will listen.

They have rightly given the Democrat Party the right interpretation of the handwriting on the wall, to no avail!

Each have blown the horn on the radical leftward drift of their party.  According to them, Democrats continue to support radical open borders, radical homosexual and transexual policies, higher taxes, etc.

Radical liberal Black Democrats and their weak organizations are still bringing an analogue mentality to a digital political world.

Marching and singing We Shall Overcome was good for the sixties and seventies; but in the twenty first century, they are tired and worn out.

Calling white folks racists has lost its mojo.  Blaming the legacy of slavery and systemic racism no longer resonates with the American people.   Dying on the hill of DEI is no longer productive.

Slavery was and will always be America’s original sin; but no one alive today owned any slaves and whites are rightfully tired of being beaten across the head over something they had nothing to do with.

If you have a disagreement with those who support the elimination of DEI, calling them a racist is not going to make them open to hearing your point of view.

The reason I have been able to successfully navigate being in the Republican Party is that I have come to understand the Powell doctrine.

Former secretary of state, Colin Powell advocated and promoted the principle of constructive engagement.  He applied this principle not only to foreign policy, but also his approach to life.

Constructive engagement meant talking and building relationships with those you oppose and disagree with.

I am not always able to get Republicans to change their view on policies that I disagree with them on; but I have on many occasions been able to get them to moderate their views on some issues.  In many instances, getting someone to moderate on certain positions is just as good as a victory.

I challenge my readers, especially my Democrat readers to name me one issue Democrats have ever moderated on to bring Republicans towards their side.

To Democrats, you must move to their side or be called a racist; you must give up your moral values to prove that you are not a right-wing nut—like abortion; you must support homosexuality to prove you are inclusive.

You can not philosophically disagree with radical Black liberals and still be a good person.  You must give up your value system to prove you are a person of goodwill.

Liberalism has failed by any and all objective measures, so why Blacks continue fighting for more of the same is crazy to me.

Continuing to use a dial-up modem to access digital content is like asking Americans to give up their cars and go back to the horse and buggy days.  Not going to happen.

Blacks have not changed their approach to advocacy since the civil rights days.

We are living in a digital world with Black folks trying to solve problems with analogue solutions.

Staff Writer; Raynard Jackson

This talented brother is a Pulitzer Award nominated columnist and founder and chairman of Black Americans for a Better Future (BAFBF), a federally registered 527 Super PAC established to get more Blacks involved in the Republican Party. BAFBF focuses on the Black entrepreneur. For more information about BAFBF, visit www.bafbf.org. You can follow Raynard on Twitter; RealRaynardJ; on Gettr: RaynardJackson.

Can also drop him an email at; RaynardJ@ThyBlackMan.com.

The warrant was granted in order to find evidence of marijuana, drug paraphernalia, drug trafficking, and even kidnapping. The officers found no such evidence and no charges were ever filed against Afroman.

In 99% of such cases, that would have been the end of the story. But this particular case involves an artist who possesses a sharp and sardonic wit. Thus, while the search was routine, its aftermath was anything but.

Afroman, who was born Joseph Edgar Foreman, is best known for his song “Because I Got High”. (2026 marks the song’s 25^th anniversary.) As one might expect from a rapper who is known to be eccentric, Afroman turned the raid into an ever-increasing series of hilarious music videos.

Specifically, the videos poke fun at the officers who were involved in the incident. To date, they have been viewed as many as 20 million times on social media. One video, “Will You Help Me Repair My Door?”, features deputies violently taking down Afroman’s door. The officers then search his shoes and even his suit pockets.

The latter action inspired the artist to wonder, in a rhyme that could have come from Dr. Seuss:

“Are there any kidnapping victims inside my suit pocket? You crooked cops need to stop it. There are no kidnapping victims in my suit pocket.”

Perhaps the most famous scene in any of the videos features an officer longingly eyeing a cake on a kitchen table. In the appropriately-titled “Lemon Pound Cake” (which Afroman sings to the tune of The Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk”), he intones:

“The Adams County Sheriff kicked down my door/Then I heard the glass break/They found no kidnapping victims/Just some lemon pound cake…Mama’s lemon pound cake/It tastes so nice/It made the sheriff wanna put down his gun/And cut him a slice (of what? Of what?).”

Amidst the playfulness, however, Afroman makes some serious allegations. One is that the officers disconnected his security cameras – and gave him the middle finger while doing so. Afroman also alleges that the officers stole $400 from his home during the raid. (The Sherriff’s Department said that there was a “miscount” but never returned the money.)

In response to the videos, the seven officers who executed the warrant – four deputies, two sergeants, and a detective – sued Afroman for defamation in 2023. They argued that the videos humiliated them and their families, caused them reputational harm and inflicted emotional distress. They sought $3.9 million in restitution.

The case calls to mind the free speech trials of other public figures (e.g., Larry Flynt, Luther “Luke” Campbell, Howard Stern), in that it raises questions of free speech – in this instance versus officers’ right to privacy while performing official actions.

During the three-day trial, Afroman was famously clad in a suit that was comprised entirely of images of the U.S. flag, bringing new notoriety to “Old Glory”. (Notably, he also wore sunglasses with the same pattern.) In his testimony, Afroman said he had the right to tell his friends and fans what police had done. He also testified that the raid traumatized his children, who were 10 and 12 at the time.

The jury ruled in favor of Foreman.

They agreed that Afroman’s use of his security footage in the videos is protected parody and social commentary. Thus, he may continue making videos – and making fun of the officers.

Following the verdict, Afroman said, “Police officers shouldn’t be stealing civilians’ money. This whole thing is an outrage.” It is strange indeed that the officers seem to be more concerned about being ridiculed than they are about being accused of theft.

Afroman fought authority. Authority didn’t win. There is poetic symmetry between the officers breaking down his door and his trial breaking down barriers to the First Amendment. And if anything is more sacred to America than free speech, it is capitalism. Afroman employed his creativity to poke fun at what he admitted was a traumatic experience – and made money in the process.

If passed, it would:

Require a passport or birth certificate just to register or update your information.

Ban most online and mail voter registration.

Purge voters from the rolls without notice.

Disenfranchise married women voters.

Every couple of years, it becomes apparent that another U.S. election is headed to a runoff. Most people have no idea who comes up with these rules. Even fewer understand why they were put in place. This is the story of Denmark Groover and the election law that was never about ensuring that the voting process was equitable.

In 1958, a Georgia politician named Denmark Groover was upset that he was defeated in his bid for re-election to the state House of Representatives. He had no criticisms of the way he ran his campaign or the positions he took. He was simply outraged that so many black voters chose to support his opponent.

He claimed that he lost because of a growing Negro voting bloc. Black voters in Georgia voted as a group and helped defeat him. To Groover, that was an issue that needed to be addressed, and he spent the next five years trying to address it.

The System That Came Before

Eventually, we’ll get to Groover’s fix, but it’s helpful to have a general understanding of the voting system in Georgia prior to 1963.

For decades, Georgia had used the county unit system. It’s a bit like the Electoral College, but different. Each of the 159 counties in Georgia got a certain number of “unit votes” based on their population. Small rural counties were given the same number of votes as large cities like Atlanta. This means that a vote in a small rural county had significantly greater impact than a vote in Atlanta.

It was a way to preserve power in the countryside for white voters. It worked exactly as it was intended until the U.S. Supreme Court in 1963 ruled it unconstitutional on grounds of “one person, one vote,” that votes must count equally for all citizens.

For Groover and his fellow segregationists, the losses were devastating. The old shield had fallen. Now they needed to acquire a new one in a hurry.

Groover’s Plan

After being ousted as the House Speaker, Groover reappeared in the legislature in 1962. His mission was to curb the growing voting strength of African Americans. During a speech in the House of Georgia, he alerted fellow legislators to an impending danger in elections, arguing that unless there was a change in voting procedures, blacks would soon gain electoral control, and that was a threat. To counter this perceived threat, Groover urged his colleagues to implement voter registration requirements that would make it more difficult for minorities to vote.

Under the old plurality system, whoever gets the most votes wins, it’s pretty cut and dry. Groover’s idea was to change the threshold of votes to more than 50% to be deemed the victor. If no one is able to reach that benchmark, then the person with the most and second-most votes would advance to a runoff election.

In most elections in Georgia, several white candidates would run, and the white voters would fragment their votes over several candidates. This fragmentation allowed the Black-supported candidate to win the election, though black voters were fewer in number, but could unite behind a single candidate and push them to victory under the plurality system.

Groover’s runoff eliminated that possibility. If a black-supported candidate would have made it to the runoff, the strategy was to have white voters from each side of the partisan unite to vote for the white candidate. The odds were always with the majority. Groover himself articulated his purpose. He promoted his measure as a means to “prevent the Negro bloc vote from controlling the elections.”

It Became Law

In 1964, Georgia’s General Assembly passed a bill called the Groover runoff bill and it got signed into law by the governor. Tucked away in the bill as a preamble to the voting changes was a section calling for a literacy test. A test that had long been a device to keep Black people from being allowed to vote in the first place.

The runoff was introduced in primary elections. It was adopted for general elections following the contentious 1966 contest for governor. By then, Georgia had one of the more stringent majority vote requirements in the nation. It was the only state to require a runoff in every general election in which no candidate obtained a majority of more than 50 percent of the vote.

Louisiana would later implement a comparable system. But Georgia’s system is unique because the paper trail leads back to a man who, two decades after this compact was signed, would admit to what he had done.

His Own Words

Years after the fact, Groover would candidly testify in a legal deposition about his actions on election day. “I was a segregationist,” he said. “I was a county unit man. But if you want to find out whether I was racially prejudiced, I was. If you want to find out that some of my political activity was racially motivated, it was.”

That’s rare in the history of American politics. While most architects of voter suppression have never acknowledged the racial motivations behind their efforts, Groover did. And to his credit, he later changed his views on this issue too. Before he died in 2001, he came out in favor of revising the official state flag of Georgia, which has at its center the Confederate battle emblem — another symbol he came to regret promoting. At the age of seventy-eight, while in poor health, he went to the statehouse to ask the legislature to retire it.

But later changing your mind won’t change what the law did, nor does it change what the law is still doing today.

The Legacy Lives On

If it sounds like an old story, that is because it is an old story. However, what makes it new is the fact that a regulation created by Groover, concerning runoff election rules in Georgia, is still active and used in every state election when a candidate does not receive over 50% of the vote. It’s been noted by historians and political scientists that modern-era minorities are also impacted by the rules Groover set in motion — despite there being no written intent today, the negative effect of the rules remain present.

Turnout typically drops in runoff elections. Fewer people vote the second time around. And the voters who tend to sit out second rounds are often those who face the most barriers: people without easy access to transportation, people working two jobs, people with less of a tradition of voting because, for generations, they were actively kept from doing so.

Professor Morgan Kousser of the California Institute of Technology put it simply: when voting is racially polarized, majority-vote rules discriminate against whoever is in the minority.

A law or policy does not have to mention the word “race” in order to have a disparate impact on racial groups. That is what Denmark Groover sought to avoid. Now you will think of Denmark Groover every time you hear the term “runoff” — and the reason it exists.

Associate Editor; Stanley G. Buford

Feel free to connect with this brother via Twitter; Stanley G. and also facebook; http://www.facebook.com/sgbuford.

Also his email addy is; StanleyG@ThyBlackMan.com.

Empires do not collapse because of a single moment of weakness. They erode from within, slowly hollowed out by overreach, moral ambiguity and the false belief that their power exempts them from consequence. The question before us is not whether America is strong. It is whether we are wise enough to endure the burden that comes with being the world’s lone superpower.

Scores of empires have come before us. Each one believed itself indispensable. Each one believed its reach was justified. And each one eventually fell, often not at the hands of foreign enemies but by the cumulative weight of unsustainable wars and internal contradictions.

World War I alone shattered the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Chinese empires, while accelerating the decline of the British and French. The so-called thousand-year German Reich lasted barely more than a decade. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 under the pressure of its own excesses. Even Rome, arguably the greatest empire in history, could not escape the trap of perpetual conflict.

Economist Joseph Schumpeter described Rome’s fatal flaw with chilling clarity: Threats were constantly manufactured, interests endlessly expanded, and wars justified under the banner of necessity and honor. When no clear enemy existed, one would be invented. The result was a state perpetually at war, convinced it was always acting in self-defense.

We would be foolish to believe we are immune from that pattern.

The United States is still young by historical standards — just 250 years old. In its early years, our conflicts were limited and often defensive. The War of 1812 was fought to protect sovereignty. But as our power grew, so did our ambitions.

The Mexican-American War marked a turning point. Even then, voices of conscience emerged. Ulysses S. Grant would later call it “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” That moral clarity should not be lost on us today.

From there, expansion accelerated, with Hawaii annexed, territories seized after the Spanish-American War, and influence asserted across Latin America. By the 20th century, the United States had begun to resemble the very empires it once rejected.

After World War II, our global role solidified. With it came a new reality: the responsibility and the temptation of unmatched power. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and ongoing conflicts across multiple regions have defined decades of American foreign policy. Each engagement carried its own rationale. Each was framed as necessary.

But taken together, they reveal a pattern that demands scrutiny.

Today, the United States maintains hundreds of military installations around the world and spends more on national security than the next several nations combined. We are engaged directly or indirectly in conflicts that span continents. At the same time, our national debt approaches historic levels, with interest payments alone rivaling core government expenditures.

This is not merely a question of strategy. It is a question of sustainability and of morality.

Because while we project strength abroad, we must also ask: What is happening at home?

A nation cannot indefinitely bear the cost of external commitments while internal fractures widen. The burden of being the world’s lone superpower is not just financial, it is moral. It requires restraint where excess is tempting, clarity where narratives are convenient, and accountability when decisions carry consequences measured not in headlines but in lives.

And today, the rhetoric itself reflects the danger of that imbalance.

President Donald Trump has issued stark warnings of overwhelming force, signaling a willingness to escalate if adversaries do not yield. Iran, in turn, has responded with its own uncompromising threats, vowing retaliation not just regionally but against broader U.S. and allied interests. This is the language of brinkmanship, where words are no longer simply signals but accelerants.

At the same time, renewed instability surrounding Cuba, long a geopolitical flashpoint and just 90 miles from American shores, serves as a reminder that pressure points are not confined to one region. When tensions rise simultaneously across theaters, the risk is not isolated conflict but convergence.

War is never abstract. It is paid for in the blood of the young, the grief of families, and the long shadow it casts over generations. It is easy to speak of strategy in distant capitals. It is harder to confront the quiet return of flag-draped coffins and the unanswered question of what, ultimately, was gained.

We must also be honest about the danger of normalization. When a nation becomes accustomed to constant conflict, when war becomes background noise rather than a last resort, we risk losing not only our resources but our moral compass.

And that is where decline truly begins.

Empires rarely recognize their own unraveling. The British once declared that the sun would never set on their dominion. Rome believed its reach was eternal. History proved otherwise.

America stands at a crossroads. Not of immediate collapse but of cumulative consequence.

We can continue down a path of expansive commitments, rising debt and strategic ambiguity, trusting that our power will carry us indefinitely. Or we can pause, reflect and ask the harder questions:

What are we defending?

What are we sustaining?

And at what cost?

This is not an argument for isolation. The world remains interconnected, and American leadership still matters. But leadership without discipline becomes overreach. Power without restraint becomes peril.

The burden of being a superpower is not simply to act but to know when not to.

If we fail to learn that distinction, history suggests a sobering outcome: not sudden collapse but gradual decline. Not a single decisive moment, but a series of choices that lead us away from the very principles that once defined us.

Only humility, restraint and moral clarity can alter that course.

The warning signs are there.

The question is whether we are willing to see them.

Written by Armstrong Williams

Official website; http://twitter.com/Arightside

Most Americans now live at the same address: “We live where there used to be a factory. And when it shut down, what shot up was joblessness, hopelessness, meth, opioids, homicide and suicide.”

That is not just the story of one town. It is the story of a wounded nation.

Factories were never just factories. They gave whole towns their rhythm. They filled lunch pails and church pews. They paid the mortgage. They kept the corner store open. They let a mother or father look a child in the eye and say, “You can make it here.”

Then the factory closed. The people did not disappear.

They stayed. They stayed by the same schools, the same porches, the same churches, the same graves of the people who raised them. They stayed and watched storefronts empty, tax bases shrink and hope grow thin. Families are burying their too-young dead again and again. Meanwhile, the pundits who get rich dividing the nation keep working overtime.

The suffering caused by deindustrialization does not stop at racial lines, state lines or the old border between North and South. It reaches across most of the lines that people on television and social media work so hard to inflame. This one stokes racial resentment. That one blames immigrants. Another turns rural against urban, white against Black, native-born against newcomer. And most Americans suffer for it.

Divide and conquer has always been the surest way to blunt the ability of working families to rise together. It keeps our votes divided and canceling one another out.

Since NAFTA took effect in 1994, the United States has lost well over 65,000 manufacturing plants and factories. NAFTA was not the only reason. Automation mattered. China mattered. Corporate consolidation mattered. But NAFTA still stands as a warning bell in our history. It reminds us what happens when we confuse what is good for corporate profits with what is good for the country.

Communities lose. The nation suffers.

Most Americans now live at the same address. They live in the places the economy left behind. They live where the factory closed, the jobs vanished and the pain stayed.

But there is a road to a better day.

We became a great nation because we planned. We looked ahead. We decided what we needed to build, what we needed to make, what kind of work would support families and what kind of country we wanted to become. Then we trained our people, built our strength and did the work.

We need that spirit again.

We need an industrial plan county by county, state by state and for the nation as a whole. We need to know what jobs will be needed 10 and 20 years from now, where they should be and how we will prepare our people to do them. Our schools are still too often preparing young people for an economy that is already gone. They need to do a better job preparing them for the jobs of the future. And as artificial intelligence starts doing more of the work people once thought would always need a person, we need to be ready to rethink the future for every worker and every community.

A nation is not a stock chart. A nation is not a quarterly report.

A nation is built on belief — belief in each other and belief in our future. And in America, we believe that if life has knocked you down, you deserve a chance to rise again.

Most Americans now live at the same address: “We live where there used to be a factory. And when it shut down, what shot up was joblessness, hopelessness, meth, opioids, homicide and suicide.”

The question is whether we will keep accepting that as normal.

Or whether we will choose to love this country, our children and each other enough to make sure we all rise again.

Written by Ben Jealous

Official website; https://twitter.com/BenJealous

But Republicans play an especially outrageous game in portraying the Internal Revenue Service as the working stiff’s enemy. For salaried workers, taxes come straight out of paychecks, meaning most are already paying what they owe. Owners of small businesses have more deductions at their disposal, but the neighborhood bakery that tries to follow the rules doesn’t have much to fear.

When Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act funded the hiring of about 15,000 IRS employees, however, Republicans played the public for boobs. “Are they (the IRS) going to have a strike force that goes in with AK-15s already loaded, ready to shoot some small-business person in Iowa?” Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican, asked on Fox News.

In reality, criminal investigation special agents go only after serious tax cheats, and just 2,000 of them are armed. These cases involve destroying records, double-bookkeeping and the like. They aren’t persecuting taxpayers whose math was innocently off or were even negligent.

And so to address Grassley’s complaint: If some small business person in Iowa is engaged in money laundering, narcotics trafficking or major league fraud, then yes, armed IRS agents may come to visit.

The IRS employed about 102,000 people at the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term. Staffing has been cut down to about 74,000. Not only are there fewer agents going after tax dodgers, but there are also fewer customer support workers able to answer ordinary people’s tax questions.

The chief beneficiaries of lax tax enforcement are the rich who employ squads of accountants to hide income or manufacture unlawful deductions. The tax code already favors them. For example, capital-gains taxes — which are paid after selling stock or other assets — can pay taxes at a lower rate than wages. That’s why Meta magnate Mark Zuckerberg has himself paid a salary of only a dollar a year. He is lavishly compensated through a cargo-ship-sized pile of securities and other assets taxed at the lower capital-gains rate.

There are reasons for treating capital gains differently from earned income, but must the tax advantage for the former be so big?

Democrats crusading for more tax “fairness” have this foolish habit of targeting their own rich residents. The proposal in Democratic-controlled California to slap a one-time 5% tax on everything a billionaire owns is nuts. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom wisely opposes this utterly complicated scheme, which it seems would force some Californians to add up the value of their vintage watches, boats and paintings for tax purposes. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, meanwhile, weaves myriad proposals for raising taxes in ways that would seep deep into the middle class.

What the California and New York tax proposals have in common is providing an incentive for the rich to move elsewhere. It’s not like these places don’t already tax the top incomes. Many very rich people have continued to live in these jurisdictions for their economic vitality, schools, cultural institutions and other amenities. And they pay almost all the income taxes.

But they have limits. It’s one thing to tax them. It’s another to portray taxing them as a means of punishment. Tax reform that closes loopholes and special deals benefiting the super-rich much be done at the national level.

The IRS doesn’t make tax laws. It is federal agency that collects taxes and enforces the laws. Middle-income and “merely affluent” Americans should recognize this: The taxes that the richest among us don’t pay are taxes that they pay.

Written by Froma Harrop

Official website; https://twitter.com/FromaHarrop

The layoffs are part of a broader AI driven economic shift that is already reshaping who works, who advances, and who is left behind. And by every measurable indicator, African American workers are among the most exposed.

Bureau of Labor Statistics data show Black workers account for nearly 20% of clerical and administrative support roles despite being just 13% of the workforce. This matters because African Americans remain overrepresented in the exact job categories AI is replacing. Amazon diversity reports show Black employees make up a large share of fulfillment and support roles but less than 8% of technical positions.

Across many of Amazon’s core business units including warehousing, logistics, and transportation, Black workers are overrepresented by as much as 30–40% in certain metro areas, while remaining significantly underrepresented in software, data science, and AI engineering roles.

The economic consequences of such disparities are severe. The median Black household has $44,900 in wealth, compared to $285,000 for white households, according to the Federal Reserve’s latest Survey of Consumer Finances. And Black workers who experience layoffs take longer to find new jobs and face larger post-layoff wage penalties than white workers with similar credentials.

AI-driven displacement threatens to widen these gaps. A 2024 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research found workers displaced by automation experience earnings losses of 20–30% lasting more than a decade, with the steepest losses concentrated among Black workers without access to retraining or internal mobility.

Meanwhile, corporate investment in reskilling lags far behind automation spending. The World Economic Forum reports that while 60% of companies expect AI to eliminate roles, fewer than 25% have retraining pipelines tied to guaranteed job placement. Amazon’s own upskilling programs reach only a fraction of the workers most at risk.

Lawmakers should respond aggressively to reduce harm to Black workers. Maryland Governor Wes Moore, currently the nation’s only Black governor understands the threats AI can pose for African American workers.

In his recent State of the State address, Governor Moore pointed directly to artificial intelligence as one of the defining forces reshaping the economy, arguing that AI will determine who has access to opportunity in the next generation and who is left behind. Moore framed AI not simply as a technological breakthrough, but as a workforce challenge that demands intentional public investment, emphasizing that states must prepare workers for AI-driven change rather than react after jobs disappear. He stressed that innovation without inclusion will deepen inequality, and that the government has a responsibility to ensure emerging technologies expand opportunity rather than concentrate it.

Moore’s remarks underscore the stakes for Black America. If AI policy focuses only on productivity gains while ignoring who occupies the jobs being automated, displacement will fall hardest on Black communities already facing structural barriers to wealth and mobility. His call to align education, workforce development, and economic growth around emerging technologies underscores the need for targeted investment in institutions that serve Black workers at scale, particularly HBCUs.

HBCUs produce nearly 25% of Black STEM graduates despite receiving a fraction of the funding of predominantly white institutions, and they already serve as trusted on-ramps for first-generation and working-class students into high-demand fields. With targeted investment, HBCUs can rapidly expand programs in data analytics, machine learning, cybersecurity, cloud engineering, and applied AI.

HBCU partnerships can build paid apprenticeships, AI co-ops, and credential pathways that move Black workers from declining roles into growing ones, rather than leaving them to compete in an unequal labor market after displacement.

Every dollar invested in AI labs, faculty, research partnerships, and employer-linked training at HBCUs reduces the risk that Black workers will be permanently locked out of the next economy.

And we must remember that Black representation matters in AI. Currently, less than 5% of American AI professionals are Black. This lack of representation shapes which jobs are automated and which are protected. If African Americans are excluded from AI design, they will be disproportionately left out of its benefits.

Amazon’s layoffs are already history. The question now is whether our policy response moves as fast as the technology did or whether Black workers are still waiting for help when the next round of cuts comes.

Written by Kevin Harris & Richard McDaniel

Official website; https://x.com/MrRichMcDaniel