The President’s allies on the Supreme Court have had to jump through some hoops to justify their decisions supporting his reckless and discriminatory policies. But Justice Samuel Alito’s claim not to see racism in the effort to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians defies belief.

As Justice Kagan noted in her dissent, even the President’s own lawyers avoided repeating his shocking slur against Haiti and other predominantly Black nations when he demanded, “Take them out.” But even more telling than the slur was the response in the room: ““Because if you do, it will be obvious why.”

“Obvious” to everyone but Trump’s allies on the Supreme Court, apparently.

The Trump administration did not decide to deport protected Haitian and Syrian immigrants because it determined those nations are safe. It arbitrarily determined they were “safe” so that it could deport those immigrants.  The Department of State maintains a strict “Level 4- Do Not Travel” advisory due to the risk of “crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, and limited health care” in Haiti and “terrorism, unrest, kidnapping, hostage taking, crime, and armed conflict” in Syria.

Haitian and Syrian TPS holders are now expected to do what Americans are explicitly warned against.

Just as troubling as the human consequences of the Court’s ruling is its reasoning. The public record is littered with examples of the President’s animus toward Haitians. He stunningly advanced a baseless – and widely debunked – claim that Haitian immigrants were “eating the pets” of residents in Ohio. At other times, he suggested Haitian immigrants were bringing disease into the United States and accused them of “destroying” a community’s way of life.

As Kagan noted, these statements “fairly shout” that race played a role in the decision. Justice Alito and his colleagues in the majority have turned a deaf ear.

The administration has made no secret of its intent to base immigration policy on race. It has turned our refugee program into a “Whites only” pathway to the United States – even planning a welcome bag” containing racist literature.  The President has invoked Nazi terminology to dehumanize immigrants from South America, Africa, and Asia.  He’s expressed a preference for immigrants from nice countries” like Denmark, Switzerland, Norway, whose populations are more than 90 percent White.

Just as it did with its egregious Callais decision, the Court has embraced the fiction that blatant racial bias can somehow be walled off from policymaking, as long as its not explicitly written into the law itself.

When leaders repeatedly vilify a particular group and then act in ways that strip that group of legal protections it is not unreasonable to ask whether those words and actions are connected. The Court’s majority, however, demands a level of proof so narrow that it is nearly impossible to meet. In doing so, it effectively immunizes decision-making from scrutiny, even when there is clear evidence of bias in the public sphere.

The consequences of the Court’s decision are not abstract. They will be measured in families torn apart, in lives upended, and in the erosion of a principle as old as the Constitution itself: that justice must be blind to race, not blind to racism. When the highest Court in the land refuses to confront discrimination so clearly etched into the public record, it does more than misinterpret the law—it signals that some forms of prejudice can be ignored, excused, or even sanctioned. And that is a precedent far more dangerous than any single decision.

Written by Marc Morial

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

A mood going around in 2026 troubles me. Some of our folks speak about Donald Trump as though heaven mailed him down to rescue the forgotten. Others talk like the man wakes each morning and schemes against every one of us before his coffee cools. Both notions are childish. Both hand him something he never earned, which is a seat inside your head where good sense used to live.

Understand where this comes from. My generation guarded the vote with our bodies while dogs and fire hoses answered back. Grown men wept the first time they slid a ballot in a box without fear of losing a job or a life. So nobody needs to teach me what this country has done to us. This much lives in my bones. Bitterness, though, left to run loose, makes a person easy to lead by the nose, and worship does the same work coming from the opposite direction.

Here is the maturity being asked for. Quit letting either party treat you like a wife who will never walk out no matter how she is done. The Democrats have leaned on our loyalty for sixty years, sometimes earning it, often just assuming it. The Republicans, for a long stretch, did not bother to ask. Now a few on the right are knocking, and some of us feel so flattered by the knock that we forget to ask what they brought to the door. A person should never be so starved for respect that he sells himself cheap to the first stranger who learns his name.

So set the savior tale down. Set the devil tale down beside it. Pick up something harder and worth more. A clear eye.

Take the measure of the man by what he does, not by how a crowd feels around him. Watch who he hands power to. An appointment tells you more than any speech, because a speech is wind while an appointment is a living person with authority over real lives. Who sits on the courts now, and how do their rulings land on a tired mother fighting to keep her apartment? Who runs the agencies that decide if your neighborhood drinks clean water or gets handed a poisoned river nobody downtown ever has to taste? Those names outlast the rally lights.

Now the money, and let us be honest about it. Donald Trump points to payroll employment and talks as though the country is roaring. In some raw numbers, work remains historically high. But step closer. Overall unemployment by the close of last year sat around the mid fours, while Black unemployment told a harder story. Across 2025, Black workers carried an average unemployment rate near seven percent, and late in the year that number pushed higher. Heading into 2026, the strain on Black households had not eased. Among young Black workers, especially teenagers, joblessness remained painfully high, often running near or above eighteen percent depending on the month. That is not a small detail. That is somebody’s son filling out applications and hearing nothing back.

Another clear share of the pain also came through the federal payroll, where better than a quarter million jobs disappeared in 2025. Our folks have leaned on government work as a road into the middle class for generations, so when that road gets torn up, we are the ones thrown off it first. Not every federal job belongs to a Black family, of course. But any honest person knows public work has long been one of the more stable doors into benefits, pensions, homeownership, and a life with some breathing room.

There was loud talk of tariffs bringing the factories home. The factories did not come roaring back. Manufacturing shed work after those tariffs landed, while tariff-related costs helped push prices higher on the shelf for households already trying to stretch a check. Set that against the corner of the economy that did grow, health services and private schooling, which added jobs even as wages in many of those places stayed too thin to cover what rent and groceries now demand. The full picture sits right there, and a grown person takes it in whole instead of grabbing one bright statistic and waving it like a flag.

Look too at where the relief went. A tax bill passed last year, and much of its sweetness flowed upward, while fresh work rules tied to Medicaid are set to press hardest on low-income people who can least afford to lose their coverage. Closer to home, Howard University had to push back against proposed budget reductions and ask that its federal support be sustained at least at the prior year’s level. That matters, because photographs with Black students and kind words about Black colleges do not mean much if the budget tells a different story. An order signed in one room and a funding decision made in another can wear very different faces.

The old wound has not healed either. As 2026 opened, Black homeownership still sat around forty-four percent, while non-Hispanic white homeownership ran around seventy-five percent. That gap was not born yesterday, and no one president created it by himself. But nothing in the current playbook seems built with the force needed to close it. A people cannot build lasting power on applause alone. We need land, equity, access to credit, fair appraisals, decent wages, and neighborhoods where our children are not priced out of the very blocks their grandparents held together.

Turn to the vote, the matter I hold closest. Anything making it harder for an old woman with no car to cast a ballot earns a cold, hard stare, no matter which party dreamed it up. Lines stretching for hours in our precincts while they melt away in the suburbs are no accident. Watch what gets signed and what gets gutted by people in robes who will never once face a voter. This is not cheering for a team. The point is keeping the single tool our grandparents bled to put in our hands.

On crime Donald Trump claims a historic drop in killings and points to his law-and-order push as proof. He is right that last year brought a major fall in murders. But honesty demands the rest of it. Those numbers were already tumbling before his current term became the headline, climbing down from the pandemic spike, and the experts who study this for a living do not all agree that federal pressure deserves the credit he wants to take. Both can be true at once. A safer street is a blessing wherever it springs from. A leader taking credit for a tide already turning before he showed up is just politics in a good suit. Maturity means carrying two thoughts without dropping one to feel better.

Here is the part no campaign wants you dwelling on. Most of what shapes your day never crosses that desk in Washington at all. Your child learning to read by third grade rests with a school board you probably cannot name. The officer on your corner sees a neighbor or sees a suspect, and the call comes down to a chief, a mayor, a union contract. Does the store on the avenue sell fresh food or only liquor and scratch tickets? A zoning meeting decides it on a Tuesday night when you were too worn out to show up. We pour all our heat into the top of the ticket and sleep clean through the elections touching the ground under our feet. All backward, and it costs us dearly.

Nobody here is telling you how to mark your ballot. Such talk would insult you. The ask is simpler. Walk in there owning yourself. When a politician courts you, make him show his work on the block where you actually live, not the block in the commercial. When someone swears one figure is your ruin or your rescue, hold it up against your own kitchen table before you believe a word of it. Feelings are real, yet they make a sorry compass in a voting booth.

Our strength was never meant to be a present we sign over to one personality. Strength is leverage, and leverage only bites when the other side believes we might truly walk. The day both parties have to compete for us in earnest, instead of taking us for granted or writing us off, is the day we start drawing real value out of this democracy. Such a day is not born of worship, nor of fear. It rises from a people too clear to be flattered and too proud to be scared.

So no, we owe Donald Trump no bowing. He stands there a politician of flesh and bone, packed with the same vanity and arithmetic as all the rest. We owe him no cowering either, no jumping at shadows, no letting dread think on our behalf. He is one figure in a long line of them, and like all the others he will pass on. What stays is us. Our families. Our blocks. Our long memory and the longer road still in front of us.

Size up the policy. Study the result. Count the people he lifts and the people he steps on. Then carry that reckoning into every election, the 2026 midterms and the small local ones most of all, with your back straight and your mind your own.

This is not loyalty to a party, nor love for a man. It is simply what growing up politically looks like, and the good Lord knows we are long overdue for it.

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.

One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.

Which is why watching the rest of this country finally wake up feels a little surreal. The sport isn’t coming here anymore. It already arrived, and the World Cup just made it impossible to ignore. The whole thing is unfolding right here as I write this, spread across the United States, Mexico, and Canada, the first World Cup shared by three host nations. Sixteen cities are carrying the tournament, including eleven in the United States, with stadiums filling up with people who painted their faces and learned chants in languages they don’t speak. And credit where it’s owed, the host nation has shown out. Fan zones packed shoulder to shoulder, strangers from forty different countries swapping jerseys outside the gates, volunteers walking lost visitors to the right train without breaking a sweat. We don’t always nail the big stuff, but we know how to throw a party, and the planet is finding that out in real time.

My neighbor, a man who spent twenty years swearing the beautiful game was boring, texted me at midnight after Türkiye dropped three on the United States. “Bro I’m hooked.” Three to two, last second drama, and suddenly he gets it. That is the part nobody warns you about. You don’t choose this thing. It chooses you, usually when you weren’t even looking.

Folks overseas have known forever. Walk through any neighborhood in São Paulo, Lagos, Naples, or Manchester and you’ll find children using two backpacks as a goal, dreaming the exact same dream. For them this was never a question. The planet stops for a month every four years, schools empty out, grown men weep in the street. America was the last big holdout, the cousin at the cookout who swore he didn’t like the music until the right song finally dropped.

And here’s the bit that still cracks me up. The entire world calls it football. Makes perfect sense, seeing as you play it with your feet. Then we came along, looked at a sport where a fella cradles a ball shaped like an egg in his arms and sprints, and decided that was football. The audacity. We took the one word that already had a job and handed it to a contest built on throwing and tackling. Beautiful country, terrible naming committee.

Respect has to be paid where it’s owed, though, and the names alone tell you why the rest of the globe never doubted. Pelé turned this into art before color television could keep up. Maradona carried an entire nation on one fierce, brilliant left foot. The Brazilian Ronaldo, the original, moved like a man who knew gravity was optional. Zidane had violence and grace living in the same body. Ronaldinho grinned so wide you forgot he was embarrassing grown professionals on national TV.

The current crop is no joke either. Messi spends his weekends in Miami now, suiting up in MLS of all places, which still feels like a typo whenever I say it out loud. The little maestro chose to live among us, and casual viewers are only beginning to grasp what they ignored for so long. Cristiano Ronaldo built himself into a machine through nothing but stubborn will, still banging them in deep into his forties like the calendar owes him money. Kylian Mbappé, a forward for La Liga club Real Madrid and the France national team, runs like a sports car with a conscience. Vinícius makes defenders look stuck in wet concrete. Haaland, a striker for Premier League club Manchester City and the Norway national team, scores the way the rest of us breathe. Lamine Yamal, a right winger for Barcelona and Spain, is barely old enough to vote and already bending matches to his will. Jude Bellingham, a midfielder for Real Madrid and England, struts around like he owns whatever pitch he stands on, and most nights he does.

We’ve grown our own too, which the doubters love to forget. Clint Dempsey competed with a chip on his shoulder the size of Texas. Landon Donovan gave us that goal against Algeria, the one that had office workers losing their minds on a Wednesday afternoon. Tim Howard once made sixteen saves in a single match and briefly turned into a folk hero. Now Christian Pulisic carries the badge, a kid from Pennsylvania holding his own among Europe’s finest, proof this place can produce more than skeptics.

What changed? The young changed it. A whole generation came up with the Premier League on Saturday mornings, La Liga and Serie A a click away by lunch, the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 humming in the background, with video games that taught them who plays where, with phone clips of impossible finishes looping past midnight. Major League Soccer grew up right in their backyard while the old heads weren’t paying attention. They never needed convincing. They walked in already fluent. Grandparents griped, parents shrugged, and the youngest among us quietly built a culture while everybody else argued about whether a draw was somehow un-American.

I think about my old high school squad sometimes. We were a mix of everybody, kids whose families came from Mexico, Ghana, El Salvador, and a few like me whose roots ran straight through the American South. On that field none of it mattered. You either passed the ball or you didn’t. This sport has always done that, flattened the differences, handed a common language to people who couldn’t otherwise order lunch together. That’s the secret the rest of the globe figured out generations back, and it’s the lesson landing in living rooms here right now whether folks asked for it or not.

The skeptics will hold out a while longer. Some of them always will, and that’s fine. But the tide already turned. You can feel it in the bars going dead silent before a penalty, in the office betting pools, in the way my once-stubborn neighbor now sends me tactical theories at two in the morning like he personally invented the back three. Conversion looks like that. Loud, sudden, slightly embarrassing.

So welcome, late as usual, but you made it. Pour into the seats, butcher the chants, fall hard for some defender on the other side of the planet you’ll be defending in arguments by August. The rest of us, the ones who loved this through every lean year, we’ll save you a spot. Just do me one small favor while you’re here.

Try, at least once, calling it football. The whole world is waiting on you.

Staff Writer; J.G. Lacour

Covering the NBA, NFL, college basketball, college football, and Major League Baseball from a Black man’s perspective. He loves the full world of sports, but the NFL remains his favorite.

Need to contact this bro, feel free to use this email address; JGLacour@ThyBlackMan.com.

It is important to note that when we talk here of the beauty, music, magic and miracle of Blackness, we are using a synonym for our Africanness. For Black is a colloquial term for the color, culture and consciousness that speaks to our being African. And being African is actively appreciating and honoring our unique and equally valid and valuable way of being human in the world. It is the self-defining and particular cultural way we live our lives and open ourselves up to love; dance and do music; practice our faith traditions; cherish and challenge our children; fiercely fight for freedom; constantly seek justice; delight in doing good and walk gently in peace, but with dignified defiance in the practice of resistance.

For Blackness is not only an identity, but also a duty defined by that identity. Indeed, we are a soul people in radically evil oppression and righteous and relentless struggle to end it. Our identity, then, is also one born in struggle, a dignity-affirming, live-enhancing, world-preserving liberation struggle. Therefore, in the 1960s, we raised up the reaffirmation of the beauty of our humanity and Africanness in the declarations “Black is Beautiful” and “I’m Black and I’m Proud.” And we defiantly put forth the prophecy and pursued the promise and practice of freedom with the battlecry “Liberation Is Coming From A Black Thing.”

At the heart and center of the music, magic and miracle of our Blackness is this rich and generative notion and reality of soul. And we use the term in at least five basic ways: as a spiritual concept; a defining Black character trait and spirit; a category of cultural distinctiveness; an expression of the beauty and depthfulness of our being and becoming; and a measure and standard of African excellence. In the Sixties, I defined soul as an inner sense of ourselves defined by creativity, sensitivity and impulse. This speaks to our capacity to conceive and create magic and miracle, beauty and meaning in the midst of ugliness and meaninglessness, and to develop and defend free space in the midst of unfreedom. It speaks also to our depth of feeling, a sensitivity to others, to beauty and good, but also to human suffering and a will to end it. And the notion of soul speaks also to a creative and sensitive impulse also called improvisation. But I want to keep the word impulse which suggests a spontaneous urge and natural inclination to act in beautiful, creative and sensitive ways in art, love and life in general.

In other words, soul is an internal creative capacity, a centering and sustaining spirit and inner strength that undergirds our resilience and resourcefulness, our adaptive vitality and human durability in the face of the most radical evil, injustice and oppression. It is in this context that we recognize the Divine presence in and with us as our ancestors taught. And in the depth of our appreciation of the unbreakable spirit within us, we give it a spiritual interpretation. Thus, when we look back over all we encountered and overcame and rejoiced in it, we are amazed at the miracles and magic we’ve made and yet giving due honor to the Divine in us and with us, as the ancestors taught. This is the message and meaning of Sis. Clara Ward’s instructive sacred praise song, called gospel, “How I Got Over.” She says and sings, and we wonder with her: “My soul looks back and wonders how I got over.” And she thinks and thanks the Divine.

But soul is also and above all in its most definitive, distinctive and inclusive sense a cultural concept. It speaks not only to the depth of our spirituality, but is a defining Black character trait and spirit which undergirds, infuses and informs our being and constant becoming. We are again a soul people, soul men and women, soul sisters and brothers. We call our food – soul food, our music – soul music, our Sunday forums on life and struggle – Soul Sessions, and we designate as soulful our preaching, teaching and talking good. And Curtis Mayfield assures us that no matter what happens “We got soul and everybody knows, it’s all right.”

Thus, we see soul not only as defining us, our music and way of life, but as a distinctiveness of peoplehood and personhood. It is one of the characteristics that makes us distinct without needing to claim superiority. It is this special distinction of peoplehood and culture that we treasure greatly and defend against the imitations of our lives and the appropriations of our culture by others in exploitative and insensitive ways.

The notion and expression of soul in our music or our lives in general also speaks of the depthfulness and beauty of our Blackness as both being and becoming, ever striving to come into the constantly expanding fullness of ourselves. I speak here of a centering and sustaining soulfulness as expressive beauty, a meaningful and moving beauty, revealing and reaffirming, eloquent, artistic and evocative, sensitive and suggestive of the good. And this soulful expressiveness can be shared with or without words or sounds or even symbols. It can reveal itself in the music we make in loving close or simply be naturally embodied in the goodness and sacredness of ourselves, as sites of witness and wonder.

When I talk of the centering and sustaining beauty of soul, it is to speak not only of what is aesthetically pleasing to our senses, but also what is ethically pleasing to our sense of the good. And thus, the beauty and Blackness of our soul and ultimately ourselves must always be demonstrated and reaffirmed in the goodness we do, share in righteous and relentless struggle for and achieve in the world. In this sense, soul is also ultimately a standard and measure of our excellence in every sense of the word.

Written by Dr. Maulana Karenga

Official website; https://www.maulanakarenga.org/

It’s not like Espaillat’s district was dominated by the young professionals who flocked to Mamdani. His electorate is 52% Hispanic and includes such non-hipster neighborhoods as Harlem, Washington Heights and parts of the Bronx.

Nonetheless, Mamdani may have seriously misread the national mood when he said right before the primaries: “When does the race for 2028 begin? It starts now.” That was an awesome display of grandiosity for a guy who didn’t get even 50% of the vote even though he was the official Democratic candidate in a very Democratic city.

The New York primaries may indeed be kicking off the presidential contest in 2028, but not in a way Democrats would like. Look at recent history. Backlash against Donald Trump’s erratic governing style returned control of the House to the Democrats in 2018. Similar forces helped Joe Biden to take the presidency from Trump two years later.

The Democratic left sold these results as a thumbs-up for its radical agenda. But those same views — things like defunding police and obsession with transgender issues — turned off the middle America voters who gave Biden his win in 2020.

Two years later, Republicans retook the House majority by weaponizing the dumbest things left-wingers had said. Similar dynamics powered Trump’s return to the presidency in the 2024 election. It is dangerous to assume that disgust with Trump translates into a desire to stop immigration enforcement.

The recently elected Mamdani, meanwhile, is enjoying an overly long honeymoon. The reality is sure to overtake the massive publicity he attaches to the smallest of achievements. New Yorkers are noticing that there are still no free buses, as promised. The rents are not frozen. And universal childcare has not happened. Mamdani has also antagonized the financial business leaders, jeopardizing the prospects of the young grads seeking white-collar jobs, that is, much of his base.

Democrats seeking victories in the heartland should fear having the excesses of coastal socialists hanging around their neck. The veteran New York political analyst Errol Louis described the dangers New York’s far left pose to the Democrats’ future. As an anchor at Spectrum News NY1, he has interviewed them all.

“They’ve got some ideas that will not sell in Des Moines or in, you know, Cleveland,” Louis said. Their strategists tell him that they’re “gonna fight, fight, fight … get themselves arrested, introduce legislation, whether or not it has a chance of getting a hearing or ever becoming law.”

Barack Obama understands well the radicals’ lack of appeal outside choice urban corridors. He’s called out affluent progressives who think they earn halos by pushing polices deemed to help the less fortunate but end up costing Democrats at the polls. They can embrace left-liberal politics without personally paying a price, Obama said last year. “You could still make a lot of money. You could still hang out in Aspen and Milan and travel and have a house in the Hamptons and still think of yourself as a progressive.”

Democrats have fine hopes that this year’s midterms will deliver at least a House majority. The growing dislike of Trump puts wind in their sails.

Come the 2028 presidential contest, however, Trump will presumably not be running. But the Democrats’ aggravating radicals will still be at it. If the race for 2028 starts now, Democrats should be concerned.

Written by Froma Harrop

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

Understand this is no tribute. Both of these women ran campaigns with real holes in them. Both made decisions you could argue with until the sun came up. I am not here to sand the edges off either one. I am here to talk about what their careers revealed, because what they revealed is bigger than the two of them put together.

Start with the resumes, since folks love to pretend these women just floated up out of nowhere. Hillary sat in the United States Senate representing New York. She ran the State Department as the nation’s top diplomat, shaking hands with kings and warlords on the country’s behalf. Before that came eight years inside the White House, and decades in public life stacked on top of those. In 2016 she won the popular vote by nearly three million ballots. Won it outright. Then watched the keys to the building get handed to a man who had never held any office of any kind, ever. Sit with that arithmetic for a second.

Now bring up Kamala. District attorney in San Francisco. Attorney general of the most populous state in the union, running an entire justice apparatus. United States senator. Then vice president, the first woman ever to hold that office, the first Black woman, the first daughter of immigrants from that part of the world to climb anywhere near so high. When the sitting president stepped aside in the summer of 2024, she picked up a national campaign with a little more than a hundred days left on the clock and made it far more competitive than many expected.

By any measuring stick this country claims to respect, these were serious people. Credentialed, tested, steeped in the work, the kind of preparation we say we want. And here is the part that ought to keep you up at night. None of it protected them. In certain rooms, the preparation itself seemed to count against them.

You heard it with Hillary in that one little word everybody reached for and nobody could ever quite define. Trust. Folks did not trust her. Ask them why and watch the sentence fall apart in their mouths. There was always a feeling, a vibe, a sense that she wanted it too much, that she had been planning too long, that her drive had a smell to it. Funny thing about that. We have never once held a man’s hunger against him the same way. A fellow who spends thirty years angling for the top job gets called determined. A woman who does the identical thing gets called calculating, cold, somehow not to be trusted for the sin of wanting what she wanted.

And before anybody points the finger only at the other side of the aisle, hold on right there. Some of the loudest doubt came from people who would swear on a stack of Bibles they believe in equality. Young folks on the left who decided she was the lesser of two evils and said it with a curl in the lip. Self-styled progressives who found her insufficiently pure, who could forgive a flawed man his sins in the name of the larger cause but could not extend that same mercy to her. The enthusiasm just was not there, they kept saying, as if enthusiasm falls out of the sky and not out of the way you choose to talk about somebody for a year and a half.

Then comes Kamala, a whole different person, younger, a prosecutor by trade, Black and Indian and Californian, and you would think a fresh face might get a fresh hearing. She did not get one. That song changed key but the melody held. What has she even done, people asked, about a person who had run a giant state’s legal machinery and sat one heartbeat from the Oval Office for four straight years. They mocked her laugh. Her sentences got clipped and labeled word salad. And somehow she had not earned the nomination, never mind the long climb behind her. The standard kept sliding away from her, the way it always does, just far enough out ahead that her fingers could never quite close around it.

Now I promised you honesty, so here it comes. Hillary made mistakes that were hers and nobody else’s. She took the industrial Midwest for granted and it cost her the whole thing. The business with the private email server was a wound she handed herself, and her response to it never once landed clean. Clinton could be guarded in a way that read as evasive even when she had nothing in the world to hide. Those are fair criticisms and I will not pretend otherwise.

Kamala carried her own weight too. Her first try at the presidency back in 2019 collapsed before a single vote got cast, and that was a failure of message and money and machinery all at once. As vice president she got handed thankless assignments and did not always rise above them in the public eye. The 2024 campaign was strapped to an administration the country had soured on, and a little more than a hundred days is simply not enough time to outrun four years of grocery prices and grievance. All true. All fair game on the table.

But here is where the honest man has to keep walking instead of stopping at the convenient spot. You can grant every one of those criticisms, every single solitary one, and you still cannot account for the whole picture with them. Because when you line up two of the most prepared candidates either party has offered this century against the welcome they actually received, the gap does not close. Something is left over. Something that has no name inside any one race but becomes impossible to ignore once you have watched it play out twice in your own lifetime.

I will tell you what that leftover thing is, since I have lived long enough to know it on sight. It is the unease this country still carries about a woman holding genuine command over it. Forget the symbolic sort. Forget the first lady sort, the supportive sort, the standing graceful beside her husband sort. The other sort. The sort where she is the one giving the orders, the one whose finger rests near the button, the one the generals salute. America says it is ready for that. America has been saying it is ready for a good while now. Its conduct keeps telling a different story than its mouth.

And I will be straight about why I read it so quick. Black folks have been measuring the distance between what this country promises and what this country delivers since long before I drew breath. We know this dance by heart. Not this one. Not now. Not yet. There is always a reason, and the reason always sounds reasonable in the moment, and the goalpost is always somewhere just over yonder, a step or two past your reach. You hear that same sliding standard laid on a candidate because she is female and the hair stands up on your neck, because you have heard the tune before, in a different room, aimed at a different soul.

What makes it sting worse, and I do mean worse, is how much of the resistance dressed itself up as friendship. The right was at least honest about its hostility. You knew exactly where you stood with it. Harder to swallow was the squeamishness rolling off the people waving the progress banner, the ones who wanted a lady in the office in the abstract but flinched from the actual flesh and blood candidates who showed up to claim it. They wanted somebody who would win without seeming to want it, who would lead without appearing to reach, who would be tough but never threatening and warm but never soft and ready but never eager. No such creature has ever existed. What they craved was a ghost.

So here we sit, two campaigns and eight years apart, and the verdict rhymes. A nation that swears up and down it has no trouble with a lady in charge has now twice declined to put one there, reaching past stacked credentials to do it both times. I am not claiming gender was the only thing standing in those rooms. Plenty was standing in those rooms. What I am saying is that it was in there too, and the people most invested in pretending it was not are the very ones who most need to look at it dead in the eye.

The denial is the tell. A country truly at ease with female authority would feel no need to keep announcing how at ease it is. It would just elect her and go on about its business. That has not happened, and the reason it has not happened is the precise thing the country keeps swearing up and down is not present. Hillary found it. Kamala found it after her. Both learned the lesson the hardest way there is, in front of everybody, on the biggest stage we have got.

The rest of us got to stand there and watch. What still hangs in the air is whether we took anything from it, or whether we are simply waiting on the next more than qualified woman to come along and teach us the same old lesson one more sorry time.

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.

One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.

What caught me off guard was how she chose to answer. Not with the kind of fire I might have wanted in my younger days, the kind that feels good for one night and costs you for years. Her answer came steadier than that. Took me a while to appreciate it, and longer still to understand it was the harder road, not the easy one.

Let me be plain about what that woman walked into. The first Black First Lady of the United States got picked apart in ways no previous First Lady had faced quite the same way. They went after her arms, of all things, like a sleeveless dress was a national emergency. They went after her face, casting her as angry before many Americans had even heard her story, painting a Princeton and Harvard educated lawyer as some kind of scowling threat. Remember that ugly business with a television network running words on the screen that turned a wife and mother into a punchline. Then came the cartoons and the comments from the lowest corners, the ones comparing her to an animal, the same old poison this country has been mixing for four hundred years, just poured into a fresh glass.

I want you to sit with that a second. Here was a woman raised on the South Side of Chicago, daughter of a city worker who went to his job with multiple sclerosis and never once complained. A woman who climbed every ladder this nation swore she was allowed to climb. And still grown men with microphones decided her only crime was existing in that house while Black.

Now here is the part the young folks need to hear. By every rule of fairness, the lady had earned the right to come out swinging. Nobody on this earth would have blamed her. Had she stood at a podium and read those people their own history, chapter and verse, I would have leapt out of my chair clapping. But something about the position got understood in her bones that most of her critics never bothered to learn. When you are the first, you stop being only yourself. You become the answer to a question a whole lot of people are asking in bad faith. They wanted rage. They were practically begging for it, leaving the bait out fresh every single morning. An angry Black woman fit the story they had already written in their heads. Give them one bad day and they would have framed it, hung it on the wall, and called it proof.

So that role they cast for her got refused, flat out. From the outside the refusal looked easy. Believe me, it was not. Anybody who has had to smile through an insult to keep a job, to keep a seat at the table, to hold a door open for the ones coming up behind them, knows down to the bone what that smile costs. It is not weakness. Call it discipline. The most demanding kind of strength there is, the sort that asks you to carry a heavy thing and never let your face show the strain.

Her own words said it best, and you have heard the line a thousand times, so hear it fresh. When they go low, we go high. People treat that now like a sweet greeting card, something you stitch on a pillow. There is nothing sweet about it. It is a strategy, and a brutal one to live by. Going high means you swallow the insult whole. You feel every bit of it and decline to hand it back, not because the other person earned your mercy, but because your dignity was never theirs to take. The camera, she knew, never stopped rolling. Two little girls were watching their mother get torn at, learning in real time how a woman of substance carries herself when the world forgets its manners. And the only lesson that lasts is the one you live out loud, so out loud it got lived.

There is a difference between being silent and being still. Silent, she never was. Up went her voice for children eating better at school, for military families holding the home front together, for young women who never figured a place like the White House kept a chair near their name. Some critics mocked her vegetable garden. Some mocked a grown woman for wanting kids to move their bodies, eat better, and cut back on junk food and sugary drinks. Imagine catching heat for that. Yet the work kept rolling, season after season, until the noise had to go find something else to chew on, because the meal it came hungry for never got served.

I have covered a mountain of public figures in my time. Most of them, once the heat arrives, you find out real quick what sits underneath the tailored suit. The bluster falls away and there stands a small frightened thing swinging at shadows. With her it ran the other direction. The harder the push, the clearer she got. Take that 2008 business about being proud of her country, where one honest sentence got snatched and twisted into something it was never meant to be. A weaker soul would have curdled into bitterness for the rest of their public life. Instead the blow passed clean through and left her shape intact. Rare, that. I do not say so lightly. Senators and presidents have come apart in front of me over far less.

Here sits the lesson she is still teaching, the one this country has not finished learning. We have built ourselves a culture where the loudest, meanest voice in the room gets treated like the strongest. We reward the clap back. We hand attention to whoever swings first and hardest, and somehow a whole generation got talked into believing composure is the same as having no spine. The truth runs opposite, and there she stands as living proof. Whoever can absorb a blow and still pick decency is not the weak party in the room. That person is the only one fully in command of themselves, and self command, brothers and sisters, is the rarest power going.

Those critics never did get their minds changed. Let me be honest about it, because I am too old to sell anybody a fairy tale. The ones who hated her for her skin hated her clear through to her last day in that house. Poise does not melt every cold heart. What it does is quieter and far more lasting. It sets the record straight for history. Years from now, when people look back and ask who carried herself with the most class through the ugliest weather, no dispute will follow the answer. The insults will have rotted away, the way insults always do, and her bearing will still be standing, plain as a monument.

That is why I keep saying the teaching never stopped. Not on account of any lecturing, since lecturing was never her habit. There is a whole stretch of young people, my own granddaughters among them, who watched a woman get treated worse than she ever deserved and never once let it shrink her into something small. They learned a body can be wounded and still be regal. You can be the target and still be the bigger person in the room without it turning you into a fool or a doormat. No classroom teaches a thing like that. You have to see it done by somebody real, under real fire, with everything on the line.

So I will say to her what an old man says to a young woman who made him proud. Thank you for not handing them the satisfaction. Thank you for showing my grandbabies what standing tall looks like when the ground will not stop shaking. This country did not always deserve the example set before it. But it needed every bit of it. It needs it yet. And whether it ever admits as much or not, it is learning from you still.

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.

One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.

He faced the usual Trump Derangement Syndrome from his political opponents. He faced resistance from those who oppose almost any military action abroad. He faced public frustration over rising gas prices — even though gasoline was higher under Biden and, adjusted for inflation, higher under Obama. He faced weak poll numbers and the possibility that Republicans could lose the House and perhaps even the Senate in the midterms.

Yet Trump acted.

He ordered military strikes against Iran. He attacked a regime that for decades has funded terrorism, threatened America’s allies and repeatedly vowed the destruction of Israel, America and Western civilization.

Critics insist the threat was exaggerated. Iran has long denied it was building a nuclear weapon. It claimed it needs nuclear capacity for civilian purposes.

But the evidence points in the opposite direction.

In February 2025, a confidential report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, obtained by the Associated Press, found that Iran had accumulated 274.8 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity — a level the IAEA described as only a short technical step away from weapons-grade material. The report also found that Iran’s stockpile had grown dramatically in just a few months.

Seven months later came another warning. In September 2025, the Associated Press reported on yet another confidential IAEA assessment. According to that report, Iran had increased its stockpile of uranium enriched to near weapons-grade levels to more than 440 kilograms before Israel launched military operations against its nuclear facilities.

The trend line was unmistakable. Iran’s negotiators reportedly told Trump’s negotiators the regime possessed enough enriched uranium to make 11 nuclear bombs. Iran was not moving away from nuclear-weapons capability. It was moving steadily toward it.

Supporters of President Barack Obama’s Iran deal often forget two important facts.

First, the agreement contained sunset provisions. Key restrictions were scheduled to expire. Even if Iran had complied fully with the deal, many of the most important limitations would by now have been approaching expiration or already gone. Second, Iran was not complying fully. For years, the IAEA raised questions about undeclared nuclear material, restricted inspections and unresolved safeguards issues. The agency repeatedly complained about a lack of cooperation from Tehran and warned about the unprecedented size of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium.

Peaceful nuclear programs do not require massive quantities of uranium enriched to levels that are a short technical step from weapons-grade material. Nor do peaceful programs generate confidential reports expressing grave international concern over undeclared activities and unanswered questions.

How much longer could the United States ignore the top state sponsor of terror as it marches steadily toward building nuclear bombs while its leaders chant, “Death to America”? Critics call Trump’s action “a war of choice.” It was. He had the choice to push this existential threat onto the desk of his successor, as did other presidents.

Asked if he would give Trump credit if the not-yet-released memorandum of understanding achieved Trump’s objectives, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the leading Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, responded by defending Obama’s Iran Deal.

Iran is significantly weaker than it was three months ago. Its military prestige is in shambles. Its ability to support terror proxies is diminished. Its nuclear infrastructure sustained serious damage. Now comes the next phase. The deal’s details remain unsettled. But one thing seems certain.

Iran will cheat.

The only questions are when and to what degree. That leads to the real issue: What will Trump do when this happens?

He has demonstrated a willingness to use force. He has demonstrated a willingness to ignore popular opinion when he believes American vital interests are at stake.

If Iran violates the agreement, Trump will likely intensify pressure, military and economic, and continue squeezing its leadership until it either changes course, pays a much higher price, or until the unpopular regime collapses.

Three months ago, Iran’s nuclear ambitions appeared stronger than ever. That is clearly no longer the case. Our military remains in the region with a gun pointed at the heads of the Iranian leaders. For all the outrage and hand-wringing from much of the country and the “international community,” America and the world are better off than they were before Trump acted.

History may ultimately judge that the greatest risk was not acting. It was waiting too long.

Columnist; Larry Elder

Official website; http://www.larryelder.com

First, we have the foreigners visiting the U.S. to cheer on their teams in this year’s World Cup soccer championship. As I wrote last week, it’s been heartwarming to see how much these people love America, and how surprised they’ve been to find that Americans are warm, welcoming, generous and kind people.

Another aspect of America that has astonished our guests is the number, size and variety of our businesses: restaurants of every type, small boutiques, “big box” supermarkets and corner grocers, food trucks, outdoor equipment and hunting stores (with their ubiquitous guns and ammo), mom-and-pop shops, little kids’ lemonade stands, delicatessens — you name it. Social media is filled with posts and videos in which visitors express their amazement at the quality of the food (and portion size!), “free” appetizers and soda refills, and the uncountable options and choices among America’s products and services.

That, my friends, is a consequence of America’s culture of entrepreneurship — a fact that some of the foreigners here have recognized and remarked upon with envy. One Canadian described us as “the most opportunity-dense country ever.”

He’s right.

So I was disappointed (though not surprised) when Pope Leo XIV posted on X a few days ago that food, water and health care shouldn’t be “commodities” that are subject to “market considerations.” In his follow-up post, he “appealed to governments” to “increase the resources dedicated to combating hunger and its root causes.”

Seriously? Governments are the chief “root causes” of hunger.

The key to adequate food production is not government but small business. Sorry, Holy Father, but food, water and health care are “commodities,” because their provision, for the most part, depends upon the work of other human beings. I would love to hear the pope praise and promote the market, individual initiative and entrepreneurial capitalism as the tickets to human flourishing that they are, instead of treating them as tawdry institutions to be tolerated at best, while government is hailed as the answer to every human problem.

Entrepreneurship meets human needs far better than governments ever have or ever will. This is true even in the world’s poorest nations. There, like everywhere else, people can start little businesses. But officials, regulations, laws, paperwork, permits, fees and taxes — all of which benefit the rich and promote corruption and fraud — stymie the growth of those businesses. When poor people are permitted to grow their businesses, they don’t stay poor.

That only happens when government gets out of the way.

As an American, Pope Leo should know better. But he apparently has a lot of company, even here in the States. In this week’s Democrat primaries in New York City, not one but three socialist candidates won their races.

Aber Kawas, a Muslim Palestinian activist and member of Democratic Socialists of America who has stated that the U.S. deserved 9/11 because of “white supremacy” and “Islamophobia,” won her primary for a New York state Senate race. Self-professed communist Darializa Chevalier defeated incumbent Adriano Espaillat to win the primary for the congressional seat in New York’s 13th district. Chevalier is a convert to Islam and a founder of Columbia University (why am I not surprised?) Apartheid Divest, which calls for an “international intifada” and the “eradication of western civilization,” the abolition of the police and immediate citizenship for all illegal aliens. And socialist Brad Lander defeated incumbent Dan Goldman for New York’s 10th district congressional seat. Lander, too, wants to abolish immigration enforcement, as well as pack the U.S. Supreme Court and pass $2 trillion in student loan debt onto the American taxpayers.

The DSA claims it’s only targeting “millionaires and billionaires” (and the world’s only trillionaire — at least on paper). If you believe that, your head is firmly wedged in your nethermost orifice. Time to read some real history — not the propaganda Western Leftists can get away with only because private enterprise insulates them and the societies they infect from the worst consequences of their ideologies.

Here’s the truth: Socialists and communists neither know how to make anything nor how to build an organization that provides goods or services people are willing to pay for. (Nope, a campaign isn’t the same thing.)

What they do instead is traffic in grievances for their personal aggrandizement.

They exploit ignorance and foster resentment, telling their followers that the only reason they have less is because others have more, and that it’s been stolen or gotten through greed and exploitation. In that vein, they love to focus on major multinational corporations and their extremely wealthy owners and CEOs, even though the backbone of American business is family-owned and small — the vast majority (80%-plus) of companies with employees have fewer than 20.

They preach that wealth is a zero sum game and a limited pie, and refuse to acknowledge that enterprise creates wealth that didn’t exist before, even though the evidence is everywhere. (Did we have the automotive industry 150 years ago? The personal computer industry 100 years ago? The smartphone industry 50 years ago?)

Socialists promise what they can never deliver: an unlimited supply of high-quality goods and services that are cheap or free. And they drive up costs for producers with restrictive regulations and taxes while demanding that prices cannot rise to keep up with those increasing costs.

The result is that businesses are forced to leave or close. Not the big corporations — at least, not at first — but the small ones that house, feed, employ and create the middle class. Then they raise taxes and costs even higher to make up the difference.

Sometimes they take over the businesses. Or even entire industries. That’s the beginning of a precipitous decline.

They don’t understand production, inventory management or balance sheets. With no competition, there’s no need for quality or customer service. So the production declines, the quality declines, the management declines and the rationing starts.

Complainers are smeared as greedy individualists or capitalist throwbacks who don’t want everyone to be “equal” and don’t understand that sacrifices have to be made for “progress.”

No one should be fooled by the presence of the erudite “intellectuals” leading these movements at the beginning. Those self-loathing, upper-class graduates of the best schools don’t last long, because unhappy masses can’t be kept in line (bread or otherwise) by pious platitudes.

No, that takes force. And that’s when the thugs take over.

This is what’s meant when pundits say, “You can vote yourself into socialism or communism, but you have to shoot your way out.”

The America that our World Cup visitors are marveling at was built by freedom-loving entrepreneurs operating within the reasonable structures of a limited government — people of every background who were willing to sacrifice much to build their American dream. We are all the beneficiaries of their hard work.

But what took 250 years to build can be destroyed by socialists within a very short time.

Written by Laura Hollis

Official website; http://law.nd.edu/directory/laura-hollis/

It also taxes a slice of a player’s global endorsement income, prorated by how many days of the year they happen to spend in the UK. Fail to advance far enough in the tournament, and the tax bill on your sponsorship deals can exceed your payout. So, the players who get to choose where they compete are now choosing somewhere else.

“(I)t’s not about the money for playing,” retired superstar Rafael Nadal once explained. “They take from the sponsors. … This is very difficult. I am playing in the UK and losing money.”

File this story under “how people dodge taxes by leaving.” Evidence for the phenomenon was piling up long before California billionaires began their high-profile relocations to Nevada and Florida ahead of a proposed wealth tax on the ballot this November. And it’s not the only reason these taxes disappoint.

When Norway raised its top wealth-tax rate by just one percentage point in 2022, economist Christine Blandhol documented a wave of business owners leaving for Switzerland, helped by a treaty between the two countries that precluded being double-taxed during the move. Norway lost tax revenue while the firms that business owners left behind, now run from a distance, saw their outputs decline.

Switzerland’s own cantons — 26 subdivisions that have taxed wealth since the 1800s at rates from about 0.1% to 0.9% — give researchers a natural experiment. The wealthy move steadily from high-rate Bern to low-rate Lucerne.

The people pushing California’s wealth tax know this. Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley — a frequent coauthor with fellow French economist Emmanuel Saez, whose revenue estimates underpin the campaign — has spent the past couple of years engineering around it.

Zucman wants a coordinated global minimum tax on billionaire wealth, designed explicitly so that there’s nowhere left for the superrich to move. He admits frankly that the whole point of his international coordination plan is to defeat the mobility problem. If wealth taxes are global, the thinking goes, they finally work as intended.

Not so fast. It’s easy to count up lost tax revenue after taxpayers move away. There is also a less visible, but no less real, behavior change from people who stay home (by choice or because there’s no better option).

The effect showed up in Denmark, where decades of tax records — covering people who by and large stayed put during its wealth-tax era — show dwindling levels of wealth accumulation when more of it is taxed away. Nobody had to leave the country for the effect to show up; the incentive to save and build wealth in the first place had simply shrunk.

Inside the businesses of the wealthy, there’s an avoidance channel that requires no moving van. When a wealth-tax bill comes due, the owner of a closely held company will often pull out a larger dividend to cover it. Once that money has left the company, it doesn’t go back into payroll or business expansion.

Make no mistake, the non-wealthy will suffer from this tax too. As wealth taxes diminish saving and reinvestment, the capital stock that workers depend on for tools, equipment and business expansion stops growing as quickly as it should. Wages rise when there’s more capital for each worker to use, so the slower buildup eventually means smaller paychecks for people who would never pay a wealth tax. This effect compounds for decades, so a modest annual drag turns into a substantial gap by the time anyone notices it in the data.

The same dynamic can show up even without a wealth tax. We saw it with another aggressive California levy. When the state raised its top income-tax rate by three points in 2012, Stanford economist Joshua Rauh went looking for the revenue. He found that the people who stayed and bore the tax increase deferred bonuses, retimed asset sales and restructured how they got paid, shifting income away from the year the higher rate applied. Within two years, those reporting changes had erased most of the revenue gain the tax increase was supposed to deliver.

Income and wealth are taxed differently, but the lesson is the same: Raise the price of an activity and people do less of it, restructure how they report it, or, if they can, leave the jurisdiction entirely.

These are the responses that even a global wealth tax can’t reach, because mobility was never the sole problem. The result is less tax revenue than pro-tax advocates project, and less economic activity too. Ultimately, everyone, not just the rich, will be poorer for it.

Written by Veronique de Rugy

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