Ten years ago, the Treasury Department announced that Harriet Tubman would replace Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill. After years of delays, the Trump administration has now put the Tubman redesign on ice. At the same time, Republican lawmakers and Trump administration officials are promoting a new $250 bill bearing Donald Trump’s likeness. Congress has not authorized the denomination, and current federal law permits only deceased people to appear on American currency.

The contrast could hardly be more offensive.

Harriet Tubman was born enslaved and escaped to freedom, then repeatedly risked her life to return south and lead others out of bondage. She served the Union as a nurse, scout and spy. In 1863, she helped lead the Combahee River Raid, which liberated hundreds of enslaved people. Later, she advocated for women’s suffrage. She gave her life to the proposition that freedom was worth fighting for, even when the fight brought her neither wealth nor comfort.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, is a billionaire president who has repeatedly blurred the line between public power and private enrichment. He has put his name on buildings, products and public institutions. Now his image is being proposed for a new denomination meant to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary.

This is more than vanity. It is the currency of oligarchy.

Oligarchy is what happens when wealth buys political power, political power protects and multiplies wealth, and public institutions are bent toward the glorification of people who already possess both. In a democracy, money is a public instrument. In an oligarchy, even public money becomes another surface on which the ruler may write his own name.

The Tubman $20 would tell a different story.

A $20 bill is not a rare commemorative object locked in a collector’s case. It is ordinary money. It passes across grocery counters and restaurant tables. It is slipped into church collection plates and handed to grandchildren. It pays for haircuts, prescriptions, school supplies and rides home. It is folded into a child’s birthday card by an auntie who wants the child to have “a little something.”

Imagine Harriet Tubman making those journeys.

Imagine a child opening that birthday card and asking who the woman on the bill is. Imagine generations of Americans encountering Tubman not only during Black History Month, but every day—at the ATM, the corner store and the kitchen table.

That is why representation on currency matters. It is history placed into circulation.

Andrew Jackson, whose portrait remains on the $20 bill, was an enslaver whose policies drove Native people from their lands. Tubman, who liberated enslaved people and served this nation, was supposed to take his place on the front. Earlier plans even retained Jackson on the reverse. Yet even that modest adjustment to our national memory has proved too much for those determined to preserve the old racial hierarchy.

Tubman was not merely an inspirational figure. She challenged an economic system. Enslavement was not only racial terrorism; it was coerced labor that created enormous wealth for white people while treating Black people as property. Each time Tubman led another person to freedom, she stole labor away from enslavers and disrupted the economics of bondage.

That makes her especially appropriate for American currency.

She also understood that freedom without economic power is fragile. After the Civil War, despite her service to the Union, she struggled for years to receive adequate compensation and a pension. The nation benefited from her courage more readily than it paid its debt to her.

That pattern is painfully familiar. Black people build, serve, sacrifice and create. The country applauds us symbolically while withholding material justice. Tubman is praised in speeches while being kept off the money. Meanwhile, a president who converts attention, office and access into personal advantage may receive a denomination designed around his image.

The issue is not merely whether one likes Donald Trump. It is a question of ownership. Does American currency belong to the American people? Does it reflect a shared history, including the people who expanded the boundaries of freedom? Or is it another possession of a president who treats public institutions as extensions of his personal brand?

Harriet Tubman belongs on the $20 bill because she represents the best of this nation—not the nation as it was, but the nation generations have struggled to make it become. She chose liberation over submission, collective freedom over personal safety and service over self-enrichment.

Donald Trump does not need another monument to himself. The man who lives in the house that enslaved people built has already had far too much access to the nation’s power, attention and money.

The last thing we need is his face on it.

Written by Julianne Malveaux

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

Somehow, this has yet to sink into the national consciousness.

The precise timing is a projection. The cuts are not. They’re activated automatically following the law: Once the trust fund is empty, Social Security can pay out only what it collects. And the zero hour keeps moving toward us. This year’s trustees report pulled the projection forward a full year. The program has promised to pay out roughly $30 trillion more than it will take in over the next 75 years.

Yet few candidates are talking about this in any serious way. It pays to say nothing. Evidently, lots of legislators believe that the political cost of telling voters the unhappy news today exceeds the cost of letting the cuts occur tomorrow. That’s how we ended up just one term from disaster.

When politicians do raise the issue, they make the fix sound easy. Sens. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) want you to believe that eliminating the cap on payroll taxes would fix the problem. That solution fails on its own terms.

Using data from the Social Security Administration’s own actuaries, my colleague Jack Salmon demonstrates that scrapping the taxable maximum closes only 58% of the gap. National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru noted last month that it would push the federal marginal rate on top wages to an untenable 49.4%, and overall rates would climb past 60% in high-tax states like California and New York.

The senators aren’t alone in wanting to tax our way out of this problem. In one recent survey, 89% percent of Americans aged 65 and older favored protecting current retirees’ benefits even if doing so requires higher taxes on younger workers.

That position is popular only because it rests on the image of retirees living off nothing but Social Security. That image, partly an artifact of bad data, fails to capture the situation.

In a March 2025 government survey, 24% of seniors reported that Social Security supplies 90% or more of their income. But when Census Bureau researchers matched responses with IRS filings and benefits records, they found that retirees frequently omitted their 401(k) and IRA withdrawals, making the real figure only about 14%. Meanwhile, 58% of retirees draw less than half their income from the program.

The remaining 42% are the retirees that Social Security reform of any kind should protect. They already receive a raw deal under the current formula, which does a much better job of protecting wealthier seniors.

As the Cato Institute’s Romina Boccia and Ivane Nachkebia documented last month, seniors aged 65 to 74 had a median net worth of $410,000 in 2022, compared with only $135,600 for those aged 35 to 44 (who pay a significant share of the taxes). Roughly 34% of Social Security dollars go to filers with adjusted gross incomes above $100,000. Too often, Social Security is less a need-based program than a transfer of wealth from the young and unpropertied to the old and comfortable.

A March 2026 paper from the Committee for a Responsible Budget puts it plainly: Despite facing large deficits, Social Security now pays the wealthiest couples roughly $100,000 in annual benefits, more than five times the poverty threshold for a retired household. “In inflation-adjusted terms,” it adds, “the maximum couple’s benefit has doubled since 1990 and is projected to double again around 2070. By that point, the wealthiest couples will receive $200,000 in combined benefits.”

The best reform is one proposed by Boccia: Return Social Security to a mission of poverty prevention. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that giving new beneficiaries a flat benefit at 125% of the poverty level (roughly $1,660 a month) would erase the entire 75-year deficit while raising benefits for the lowest earners.

Next, index eligibility ages to longevity and allow workers to own compounding assets through personal accounts rather than relying on a political promise that the next generation must be conscripted to keep.

Many people will dislike reading this, I’m sure, and wonder why we can’t just borrow to pay for the benefits. The answer is that between Social Security, Medicare and interest payments, we’re short by $115 trillion over 30 years. The moment Congress commits to that much borrowing, the likelihood of a historic inflation burst increases. Even this painful hike in the price level would not manage to devalue enough debt to save us, since Social Security benefits are indexed to inflation. The obligation would survive; retirees’ bond portfolios and other assets would lose value.

The senators we elect this year will not be able to avoid these decisions. Don’t let them avoid the question, either.

Written by Veronique de Rugy

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

How could anyone sue an entity he controls and derive a benefit from the amicable resolution of such a lawsuit at the expense of others who are not parties to the lawsuit?

Here is the backstory.

During President Donald Trump’s first term in office, an IRS employee unlawfully released the tax returns of hundreds of thousands of taxpayers, among which was Trump’s. The employee pleaded guilty to this crime and served a lawfully appropriate portion of his five-year sentence.

Trump was furious at the revelation, as anyone would be who reasonably expected federal employees to comply with the laws they are sworn, and legally obliged, to uphold.

All those whose rights have been violated by the criminal acts of a government employee have a cause of action against the government seeking to compensate them for the demonstrable harm the government employee caused them.

Congress and the federal courts have insulated the federal government from liability for the consequences of its ordinary, rational, good-faith enforcement of federal laws — but not from the harm caused by the crimes committed by its employees.

Much of this immunity has unleashed extreme violence on its victims — the recent murders of fishermen on the high seas by the Department of Defense unlawfully purporting to engage in domestic law enforcement and the on-street murders of innocents by ICE agents in American cities purporting to enforce immigration laws come to mind.

The government killings of innocent persons are objectively criminal, but due to the Department of (Political) Justice dragging its feet on the revelations of its investigations and excluding state prosecutors and investigators, we await a judicial determination.

In the case of Trump suing the IRS — an entity that he controls, and which is represented by the DOJ that he also controls — we wait no longer.

Earlier this week, the U.S. District Court in Miami excoriated both Trump’s present personal lawyers and his former lawyers who now run the DOJ for engaging in a false cause of action.

What is a false cause of action?

State courts are courts of general jurisdiction. They can hear any matters that in which the litigants have minimum contacts with the state. Many state courts can hear claims under federal law, and all can hear claims under the U.S. Constitution. Some state courts can even render judicial opinions of legislative or executive behavior in the abstract — before and without any complainant alleging harm.

But federal courts are courts of limited jurisdiction. They can only hear cases that arise under the Constitution and federal laws, or where expressly authorized by Congress or where there is diversity of citizenship — meaning, a cause of action between citizens of different states where more than $75,000 is in dispute.

But the trigger for all cases in federal courts is the existence of a case or controversy. The Case or Controversy Clause of the Constitution was insisted upon by James Madison so as to limit the power of federal judges to the resolution of real, genuine disputes; prevent the courts from becoming a super legislature; and prohibit the use of federal courts for collusive litigation wherein both sides secretly seek the same result.

When both sides seek or purport to negotiate for the same result — here the liberty of the plaintiff Donald Trump to file any tax returns he wishes without fear of audit, and the defendant who works for the plaintiff agrees — there is no real case or controversy because there is no adversity, the lawyers involved acted in bad faith, and their agreement to resolve the case is a nullity.

To avoid the Constitution’s case or controversy requirements, Trumps’s lawyers – his personal lawyers who filed the lawsuit against the IRS and his former personal lawyers now running the DOJ — entered into a settlement agreement before the DOJ filed an answer to Trump’s complaint.

Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, if parties to federal litigation reach an amicable resolution — a settlement — before the defendant files any responsive pleadings, the court has no role to play, except in the case of a manifest injustice.

Trump’s complaint demanded $10 billion in damages from the IRS. His DOJ lawyers agreed to give his personal lawyers a fund of $1.776 billion from the federal Treasury to disburse to Trump’s supporters at Trump’s personal discretion; and his IRS lawyers agreed that neither Donald Trump personally nor his family or closely held corporations could ever be audited by the IRS.

The $1.776 billion was not expressly authorized by Congress. Theoretically, it came from a fund used by the DOJ to settle legitimate — not collusive — litigation in which bona fide, demonstrably provable claims were made or monetary judgments were judicially entered against the federal government.

According to the DOJ, none of the $1.776 billion has been spent and the fund is now dormant.

The federal court to which the case was nominally assigned would have none of this. In a blistering ruling, the court found that there was no case or controversy here because there was no true adversity between the parties. The DOJ lawyers and the IRS lawyers were all seeking to please their boss, who is the plaintiff in the case.

The court found that the lawyers involved in this subterfuge, the lawyers who handled this case and crafted its purported resolution, did not act in good faith. Thus, Trump’s present personal lawyers and his DOJ and IRS lawyers have been referred to their state licensing authorities for disciplinary proceedings.

Lawyers in litigation have a duty of zealous advocacy and unimpeachable loyalty to their clients. They cannot secretly or openly aid their client’s adversary. If they are morally or personally or legally conflicted, they must withdraw from the case.

What about Trump’s legally legitimate claim against the IRS for the criminal revelation of his personal tax returns? Had he sued as a private citizen and asked the court to shelve his case until he leaves office, he’d have had a real claim. Now, that claim is gone.

What a legal mess. Trump effectively sued himself and lost! And he grievously jeopardized the legal careers of those who sought to please him. No Trump pardon can help these lawyers. They are now at the not-so-tender mercies of the state entities that issued their licenses to practice law.

Written by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

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

The Baton Rouge rapper, whose legal name is Torrence Hatch, handed over six hundred thousand dollars to a couple of Washington operators who swore up and down they could carry a presidential pardon right to Donald Trump’s desk. The paper never showed up. Now Boosie is fighting to claw back half of what he spent, and according to text messages reviewed by NOTUS, the two men he trusted with that money claimed their firm was effectively bankrupt and could not give it back. Their firm disputes that it ever agreed to refund half of the fee.

Sit with that number a minute. Six hundred thousand. That is more than a whole lot of hardworking folks will see across ten years of honest sweat. He put it on the table because he was staring down a federal gun conviction and did not want to see the inside of a cell.

Here is how it went sideways, according to the reporting from NOTUS. Late last September, Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, running a shop called JM Burkman and Associates, pitched Boosie hard. He told reporters they talked like they had the president on speed dial. They dropped big names, waved around their so-called connections, and made the man believe a clean slate was practically already signed. On New Year’s Eve, one of them texted that Trump had it “in hand and is ready to sign.” A day later, on New Year’s Day, Boosie’s lawyer got a call saying the deed was done. Trump had supposedly signed the pardon. Time to celebrate.

Except it was not done. When his people checked with the court and the prosecutors, there was nothing. According to Boosie’s lawyer, a White House aide later said officials had not seen a pardon application for him at all. A White House official also told NOTUS that the clemency team had never heard from Wohl or Burkman and warned that their involvement could hurt an applicant’s chances. Boosie’s lawyer later filed a separate application directly with the White House, which acknowledged receiving it and said it was under review.

The kicker is that Boosie avoided additional prison time anyway. A federal judge sentenced him in January to 10 days of time served, three years of supervised release, 300 hours of community service and a $50,000 fine, no thanks to the men he paid. So all that money bought him disputed promises, a pardon that never appeared and a refund fight he is still trying to settle.

Now, before I go further, let me back up for the young folks who never had to think about any of this.

A pardon is an act of mercy from the president. When a man is convicted of a federal crime, the president has the power to forgive the offense, relieve federal punishment and remove certain legal disabilities caused by the conviction. It does not declare the person innocent or erase the conviction from his criminal record. That power sits right there in the Constitution, Article Two, Section Two. The framers borrowed the idea from old England, where kings called it the prerogative of mercy, a custom that goes back more than a thousand years to the seventh century. Alexander Hamilton is the one who argued for putting it in the hands of one man, the president, so somebody could soften the law when justice and cold rules pulled in different directions.

This is not new, and it is not small. George Washington himself used it in 1795 to pardon two men convicted of treason following the Whiskey Rebellion. Gerald Ford used it in 1974 on Richard Nixon, and that decision was so unpopular it may have helped cost Ford the next election. Jimmy Carter granted unconditional pardons to people who violated the Selective Service Act during the Vietnam era, though his action did not cover military deserters. Ronald Reagan forgave the Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Bill Clinton, on his very last day in the White House, forgave his own brother Roger along with a fugitive financier named Marc Rich, and folks are still arguing about that one to this day. And Barack Obama leaned on the power more than almost anybody, granting 1,715 commutations and 212 pardons. Many of those commutations went to ordinary people buried under harsh federal drug sentences who never had a famous name or a lobbyist working the phones for them. He also commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning, the soldier who leaked government files. Different presidents, different reasons, but every one of them shows the same thing.

So the office of mercy has a long, heavy history, some of it noble, plenty of it ugly. Presidents have used it to heal a divided nation and they have used it to take care of friends. That is the honest truth of it.

And yes, this president has handed out relief to famous men in the music world. Lil Wayne got a full pardon in Trump’s final days back in 2021. NBA YoungBoy got one in 2025 after federal firearms convictions. It is easy to see how Boosie might have looked at those cases and figured he was next in line if he just spent enough. That right there is where his thinking went crooked.

Because here is the part I want every rich and famous person reading this to burn into memory. Fame and money solve a certain kind of problem. When you have a hit record and a bank account, there is always a manager, a fixer, a lawyer, or an accountant who can make trouble disappear. You throw money at it, and it goes away. That is the world these stars live in, and it teaches them a dangerous lesson: that everything, including a man’s freedom, is for sale to whoever writes the biggest check.

Washington does not run on that arithmetic. Not the honest part of it, anyway. A grant of mercy from the president is not a product on a shelf. It is a personal decision by one man, filtered through a process that no lobbyist can force. You cannot buy it any more than you can buy the sunrise. What you can buy, if you are not careful, is a couple of slick talkers who noticed you were scared and cashed in on it.

And look at who Boosie handed his trust to. These two are not statesmen. They are political operators who pleaded guilty in Ohio over an illegal robocall campaign that targeted Black voters. They later agreed to pay up to $1.25 million in a New York settlement, while the Federal Communications Commission imposed a separate fine of more than $5 million. Let that sink in. A Black man from Louisiana paid six figures to the very same characters who had already been convicted over a scheme targeting Black folks at the ballot box. If that is not a warning wrapped inside a warning, I do not know what is.

Even one of Trump’s own loud supporters, Laura Loomer, told him plain when he tagged her online. She said you cannot pay for this, and she asked who told him that is how it works. Boosie, to his credit, thanked her for the honesty. But by then the money was already gone.

I do not write this to laugh at the man. I have some sympathy for anybody scared of losing his freedom, reaching for any hand that promises to pull him out. That fear is real, and men with money are targets precisely because they can pay. The predators know a frightened rich man is the easiest mark alive.

The lesson is bigger than one rapper and one bad contract. It is this. When you step out of the recording booth and into the halls of government, the rules you grew up with do not apply anymore. The people who whisper that they have the president’s ear are usually selling you a door that does not open. Real access is not something a stranger can hand you for a fee, and any grown man who tells you otherwise is measuring you for a con.

Boosie may survive this pardon mess, but his legal troubles are not finished. He avoided additional prison time in January and returned to performing, but federal authorities are now seeking to revoke his supervised release over allegations that he violated its conditions in May. That matter has not been resolved. Whatever happens next, six hundred thousand dollars remains a hard way to learn that some doors in this country do not have a price tag. They have a lock, and the key is not for sale.

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.

Now I have watched a good many presidents come and go. Some I admired. Some I could barely stomach. A few I simply outlasted. You reach a certain age and you stop keeping score by party. You start measuring a man by what he leaves standing after the movers come for his boxes.

So consider what the sitting president of the United States did as that building’s opening approached. No invitation came his way, which surprised nobody. The reply arrived anyway, a picture cooked up by a machine showing the center with a giant garbage bag sitting on its roof.

There it is. The whole decade in one image. A man raises a building. Another man draws a cartoon of trash on it.

I am not here to canonize the 44th president. He made his share of choices I would argue with over a long dinner. But I lived long enough to see a Black family walk into that big white house not as the help but as the first family, and I will not pretend that meant nothing to a man like me. It meant a great deal. And it seems to have meant a great deal to Mr. Trump too, though for reasons pointed in the opposite direction.

Think about where his modern political rise truly gathered force. Not with a plan for the country. It gathered force through a lie about a birth certificate. Before the rallies, before the red hats, there was a wealthy fellow on television insisting the sitting president did not belong, was not truly one of us, had slipped into the highest office through a side door. That was the launchpad. Everything after got poured on top of that original suspicion.

Look at where we sit in the summer of 2026. This past February the White House announced the full revocation of the endangerment finding, the 2009 determination that gave the government its footing on greenhouse gases, and billed it as the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the republic. Read the celebration statements. Count how many times a certain name appears. The finding was not simply wrong in their telling. It was his. That was the selling point.

Then came the plan released just days ago. More than seven hundred rules lined up for the chopping block, with a trillion and a half dollars in projected savings claimed by the administration, a good portion aimed backward at what one predecessor wrote and what the next one wrote after him.

I want to be fair, because fairness is the only thing that earns a writer the right to be believed. A president is allowed to disagree with the man before him. That is ordinary. Reagan undid Carter. Obama walked back plenty of Bush. Reversal is part of the job, and the president’s people will tell you, with some justice, that he has done more than knock things over. There is the big tax and spending law. There is the Laken Riley Act. There are the judges. There is a hard turn at the southern border. There is the Gaza ceasefire he helped push across the line in the fall of 2025, which surprised a number of doubters, myself among them.

So no, the ledger is not empty. I grant the man his entries. But sit with the shape of it, and notice how many of even those wins get sold as corrections. Again and again the pitch is not, here is what I am creating for you. The pitch is, here is what I am erasing. And a man who defines himself by the erasing has quietly handed somebody else the pen.

It has traveled well past policy now, and this is where my stomach turns. Last summer the president stood in the Oval Office and accused his predecessor of treason. Not corruption. Not bad judgment. Treason, a word that in this country still carries the shadow of a rope. It came out flat, the former president named as ringleader, without public evidence presented to substantiate the charge. The response from Chicago called it what it looked like, a weak attempt at distraction. Then Trump reposted a fabricated video of the man being handcuffed.

This past February, a video depicting the former president and his wife as apes appeared on Trump’s Truth Social account. The White House blamed a staff member, but the image had already gone out beneath the name of the president of the United States. I am an old man. I know exactly what that picture is. My grandmother knew what it was. There is no cleverness in it and no politics in it. It is the oldest insult this country ever manufactured, passed along like a joke among friends.

Joe Biden gets his own version of the treatment. The autopen business has swallowed enormous energy, the claim that the signature was mechanical and the mind was gone and the orders were therefore hollow. Trump said last fall he was canceling executive actions signed that way. The House ran its investigation and produced its report. Then federal prosecutors looked hard at the thing and walked away without a viable crime to charge. Biden answered plainly enough, saying he made the decisions during his presidency. Yet in May the president was still posting cartoons of a sleeping Biden with Obama standing over him holding the autopen box.

Meanwhile the country he actually governs has its troubles. Prices have not behaved. Consumer sentiment hit a record low this spring. His approval has fallen into the mid thirties, matching the lowest levels of his second term and approaching the worst numbers of his first. And when the numbers sour, the reflex is not to reach for a fresh idea. The reflex is to reach for the old enemy.

That is the part that ought to trouble even his admirers. When your identity gets stitched so tightly to opposing one man, you have handed him a strange authority over you. You have made him your compass. The man is out of office, writing his books, raising his daughters into grown women, and still that name floats up at the podium, still the ghost the crowd gets asked to boo. A free man does not keep returning to the cell he swears he escaped from.

I have known this type in ordinary life, not only in politics. The fellow who cannot stop talking about the brother with the bigger house. The uncle still fighting an argument from a Thanksgiving twenty years gone. There is a hunger in that habit that never fills, because what they are truly after is not victory over the other person. It is the quieting of something inside themselves, and no amount of knocking down another man’s work will ever hush that particular noise.

Here is what my years have taught me about legacy, and I use the word carefully because it gets tossed around too cheap these days. You do not earn a good name by proving somebody else deserved a worse one. You earn it by building. A school. A road. A law. A place where a grandfather from Texas can bring his granddaughters and show them what he witnessed with his own eyes. Roosevelt built. Johnson, for all his sins, gave us the civil rights and voting rights laws that reached down and changed my own life in ways I can still feel in my hands.

So what has Mr. Trump raised that will still be standing, still throwing shade, when the noise finally dies down? That is not a rhetorical trap. It is an honest question, and I would welcome one of his people across the table to answer it without once reaching for the name of a predecessor. I suspect they would struggle. And I suspect the struggle tells the story better than I ever could.

There is a real sadness in it, once you let yourself feel the thing. Here was a man handed enormous power twice. The podium, the pen, the party, all of it in his grip. Any road was open to him, including the one where you get remembered for something entirely your own. The grudge won out. So did the wrecking crew, swinging away at another man’s house instead of laying the first brick of your own.

The final verdict is not written, and I am old enough to know better than to pretend otherwise. History has a way of embarrassing men who were dead certain they had it figured. Maybe something he set in motion will grow into a thing worth remembering on its own terms.

But I would not lay my money there. Because the picture I cannot shake is from that Friday in Jackson Park. A building full of light and children on one side of the country. On the other, a man alone with a screen, drawing garbage onto somebody else’s roof.

A shadow is not a legacy. And a man who spends his one life fighting one has told you, without meaning to, exactly whose light he has been standing in the whole 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.

Let me tell you something folks love to get wrong. When they line up the usual suspects, it is always the rivals and the suits, the label counting numbers in a back room, the programmers deciding what got spun on a Friday night. All of that was real. None of it was the thing that kept him up at three in the morning. The man he could never beat was already standing in the mirror. It was him, a younger version, grinning back from a record he’d already made.

Think about the position that puts a person in. Most artists chase somebody ahead of them. They see a mountain and they climb. Michael had no mountain out in front of him after a certain point. He had a canyon behind him full of his own footprints, and every new album meant he had to leap further out than the last leap or the whole world would say he’d slipped. That is a lonely kind of pressure. You are not fighting a competitor. You are fighting the memory of your own best day.

Start with Off the Wall in 1979. Quincy Jones in the chair, that grown, glossy sound, disco melting into something warmer and stranger. He was barely into his twenties and he made a record so alive it still feels like a first date. Four singles went top ten. Grown folks danced to it, kids danced to it, and it announced that the little boy from Gary had become a serious artist on his own terms. Beautiful thing. Except now that record existed. Now it sat on shelves in millions of homes, and it did not go away just because he wanted to make something new. It became the floor he had to stand above. The kid who cut that album had quietly become his own biggest problem.

So he goes into Thriller. And you can hear him wrestling with what came before, trying to answer it and swallow it whole at the same time. A good follow up was never the goal. What he wanted was to erase the ceiling entirely. What happened next you already know because it warped the whole culture. The record broke every mark anyone had set, sold in numbers that stopped sounding like sales and started sounding like folklore, and put a Black man into heavy rotation on a television network that had rarely given Black artists that kind of exposure. Seven hit singles off one project. Moonwalk on that Motown special and the planet lost its mind. He beat Off the Wall, truly beat it. But look what he did to himself in the process.

Because now Thriller existed. And Thriller was not a floor anymore, baby, it was the sky. How do you follow the biggest thing that ever happened in your field? You cannot. It is a trap dressed up like a triumph. Every soul who cut a check to him, every writer with a deadline, every fan in the checkout line was already asking the impossible question before the sessions even started. What’s next after the most, and the answer to most is nothing, there is no more than most. He had to walk into a studio knowing the version of himself from the last go round had set a bar that maybe no human would clear again, and that included the human trying.

That is the whole tragedy folded into a sentence. He was not being measured against Prince or anybody breathing. The yardstick was a ghost of himself who had already done the miracle.

Bad comes in 1987 and I want people to be honest about that album, because it got graded on a curse that no other artist ever carried. Five number one singles. Five. No album has ever produced more, though Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream would later tie the mark. In any fair universe you throw a parade. But it followed Thriller, so the story became a story about falling short, about not quite reaching the last high. Nobody sells more than the most sold thing ever, and everybody knew it, and he knew it hardest of all. You can hear the strain of it in the toughness, in the harder edges, in that need to prove he still had teeth. He was arguing with a younger man who wasn’t in the room and never would be again.

Then Dangerous in 1991, and now he does something people slept on. He lets go of Quincy, brings in Teddy Riley, and reaches for new jack swing, for a rhythm that belonged to the streets in that moment and not to 1982. That was a grown decision. A man trying to stop racing his old self and start living in the present instead. There is real courage in it. Remember the Time already showed he could sit in that pocket, and now he built a whole world around it. Yet the shadow followed him into the nineties anyway, because the questions never changed. Is it as big. Is it as important. Is it as much of a moment as the one before. The comparison had become a permanent weather system hanging over everything he touched.

And then he did the most telling thing of his whole run. In 1995 he put out HIStory, and the package literally bundled a disc of his old smashes right next to a disc of brand new songs. Sit with that a second. He physically sequenced the young champion beside the grown one and dared you to pick. The fresh half was no joke either. You Are Not Alone walked straight in at the top of the chart, becoming the first song ever to debut at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Scream paired him with Janet and cost a fortune to film. Earth Song showed a heavier, more sorrowful man reaching for something bigger than a hook, and Stranger in Moscow and They Don’t Care About Us carried a bruised honesty he had not let us hear before. It was rich, it was ambitious, and still the same old measuring stick came out, because the other disc in the very same case was the very thing nobody could beat.

Invincible arrived in 2001 as his final studio album released during his lifetime, and I have a soft spot for it that a lot of people are only now catching up to. You Rock My World glided. Butterflies was tender in a way grown love actually feels, and Cry aimed for the heavens the way he always did when the world sat heavy on him. It was a fine, at moments gorgeous body of work. But you know how the tale went by then. Compared to the ghost, it got filed under disappointment, and that word tells you everything about the sentence he was serving. A record most artists would kill to have made got shrugged off, because the man who made it had already made Thriller, and Thriller was still sitting there, undefeated, refusing to lose.

And this is the part that hurts if you sit with it long enough. A gift that large turns into a sentence. Ordinary success you can outgrow. You do a thing, you learn, you do a better thing, you move on lighter. Legend does not work that way. Legend calcifies. It hardens around you like amber and then it starts demanding tribute. Michael was not allowed to simply make music. He was required to top the untoppable, over and over, on a schedule, while cameras rolled and the culture waited to write either a coronation or an obituary. There was no third door.

I think about the loneliness in that a lot. We hand our giants a strange kind of prison. We ask the person who flew highest to fly higher next time, and when they land at merely extraordinary we call it a fall. He gave us Off the Wall, then he had to defeat it. He gave us Thriller, then he had to survive it. Bad and Dangerous were not weak. They were the sound of a genius boxing his own reflection and being told the reflection kept winning.

Prince pushed him, sure. That rivalry was real and it made both of them sharper, and I love it for what it was. But Prince could only chase the current Michael. Prince could not chase the one from three years back who had already broken the game, because that one was untouchable, frozen in triumph, immune to being outdone by anybody including his own creator. The most dangerous opponent Michael ever faced never aged, never got tired, never had a bad night in the booth. He was preserved forever at his absolute peak on a record that already sold to the whole world.

So when you go back and play these albums this weekend, and I hope you do, hear them a little different. Do not stack them against each other like a bracket. Hear a man in conversation with the people he used to be, trying to make peace with them and beat them at the same time, and never quite managing both. The King of Pop had no equal walking the earth. That was exactly the problem. His only true rival lived on vinyl, in the grooves of what he had already done, smiling and undefeated. He spent a whole career chasing a version of himself that had already finished the race. And the wild, aching, beautiful part is how close he came, again and again, to catching him.

Staff Writer; Jamar Jackson

This brother loves poetry, music, and the culture that raised him… His words come from somewhere honest, and they speak to everyday Black folks just living their lives… Reach him at JJackson@ThyBlackMan.com.

Sanders had been waving off concerns about the guy. Then suddenly, he called on Platner to leave the campaign.

Two problems with Bernie’s new directive: One, Sanders is why Democrats got saddled with Platner to begin with. Two, the new revelations come on top of previous revelations about his piggish behavior.

Sanders evidently thought he could ignore all this until more startling charges came to light. The dam holding back Democratic demands to replace Platner finally gave way. If Sanders didn’t jump in and pretend to have problems with the candidate he pushed onto the party, he wouldn’t be in a strong position to choose his own left-fringe replacement with a colorful story.

The road to socialist victories, Sanders knows, runs through infiltrating the Democratic Party, of which he’s not a member. His objective is not to help Democrats take over Congress but for his socialists to take over the Democratic Party.

Sanders, the “Independent ” senator from Vermont, is not a Mainer. He’s not much of a Vermonter, either. He’s a New Yorker, spending large amounts of time back home in hardcore Democratic districts trying — and succeeding — to get his followers to knock off liberal Democrat incumbents in primaries. One of his winning primary offers called former President Joe Biden “a rapist.”

Thing is, the Democratic Socialists of America are heavily represented by college-educated voters who don’t have to worry about losing their health coverage. They don’t like the rents they have to pay to live in the neighborhoods they’re busy gentrifying. They think socialists can fix that.

Now listen to a Platner defender back in Maine. Joanie Monteith told AP, “I’m heartbroken for him and his wife.” Rest assured that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, is well practiced in the art of handling humiliation, with the world knowing her husband sent raunchy texts to assorted women before the couple reached their second anniversary.

If finding plausible Democrats to represent the party requires a Democratic rumble, let’s have it. So far, few prominent Democrats have spoken forcefully about the far-left’s boutique nominees. The exception is Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman. He let loose, calling Platner a “predator” and “Bona fide dirtbag,” and referring to him as “P-Hustle,” his old Reddit handle.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, more gentle in his rebuke, joins Fetterman as a Democrat who won office in a state that’s been turning Republican. Democrats shouldn’t need a lot of magic to get one of their own elected in Blue New England, and in a year favoring their party.

Sanders, age 84, might consider retirement. But another leftist string-puller at the other end of the age spectrum, 27-year-old campaign adviser Morris Katz, should also look for another line of work. Katz won some fame as the mind behind New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s adorable internet storytelling campaign.

Looking to repeat his act in Maine, Katz pushed the utterly unqualified Platner over the primary win line, despite Platner’s “imperfections” being widely known. Katz then made the dumb mistake of personally threatening a woman who left the Platner campaign, demanding she refute the things she knew about his abuse of women.

Democrats need to replace the internet-savvy fringe operatives with internet-savvy mainstream operatives of their own. Above all, they need to take the car keys away from Bernie Sanders.

Written by Froma Harrop

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

But it’s really the second reason Glover’s public disclosure hit like a sledgehammer, and I rejoiced. He is one of the more than one in five African Americans who are either at risk or likely to be afflicted with Alzheimer’s. A 2007 study by Boston University researchers focused specifically on African Americans and the higher incidence of Alzheimer’s They confirmed the alarming disparity.

The researchers sought an answer to why that was. The researchers zeroed in on genetic causes. However, they found no conclusive evidence of differing genetic malfunctions in the brain between Blacks and whites.

A more recent study also examined differences in dementia by race. It tracked a broad sample of nearly forty thousand persons nationally drawn from nearly forty different Alzheimer’s research centers across the U.S. A substantial number of participants had dementia. The study found a smaller percentage of Blacks than whites with a dementia diagnosis. However, the gaping flaw was that Blacks were far less likely than whites to be tested specifically for dementia in follow-up visits to a doctor.

Both the earlier Boston University study and the more recent study fell back on the standard explanation for the gaping racial disparity in Alzheimer’s between Blacks and whites. That is unequal access to healthcare, lower quality education, and higher rates of other health problems such as heart disease and diabetes. It’s the unequal access to health care, though, that ultimately determines who and what kind of treatment an individual suffering from a catastrophic disease such as Alzheimer’s receives. The picture here isn’t pretty.

A major university research study in 2000 on the impact of racial bias on mental health diagnosis and treatment, Racism and Mental Health: the African American Experience, noted, “The stigma of racial inferiority may also adversely affect the treatment of black patients in the mental health system. Black clinicians have long argued that popular misconceptions, inaccuracies, and stereotypes of the psychology of African Americans could lead to the misdiagnosis of Black patients.”

The study went further and observed that African Americans were more likely to be misdiagnosed. It specifically cited schizophrenia. Blacks were more likely to be diagnosed with the malady of paranoid schizophrenia. And at the same underdiagnosed with other affective disorders. The researchers chalked this up to “conscious or unconscious acceptance of negative stereotypes of Blacks.” The inaccurate diagnosis clinicians seemingly routinely made over time of many Blacks with a mental health affliction had serious consequences in terms of tailoring the correct and most effective treatment to the patient. More recent studies on racial health disparities confirm the pattern is still widespread.

That certainly applies to Alzheimer’s diagnosis and treatment. A 2019 study that looked at nearly three thousand people with Alzheimer’s that spanned twenty years confirmed that. It also found that the prevalence of Alzheimer’s in Blacks was about twice that of whites. But it also found in addition that they had worse symptoms. They included delusions, hallucinations, agitation, aggression, anxiety, mobility, poor sleep, and eating. They pointed to the lack of a timely diagnosis of Alzheimer’s that Blacks get as the major cause. That ensures the symptoms worsen.

Glover has drawn massive media and public attention to his battle with Alzheimer’s precisely because he is a famed and highly acclaimed actor, and activist. The same can’t be said for the huge number of Blacks who are at heightened risk from the disease. They largely fall through the media and public looking glass crack.

This compounds the tragedy. Alzheimer is a dread disease with yet no cure. I can testify to that from watching in almost helpless agony the many behavior, personality, and physical changes that my family member goes through. It is not named the long goodbye for nothing. It is long, persistent, debilitating, and takes a toll on other family members and those tasked with caregiving.

Glover is fortunate in many ways. He has a warm, supportive family, and legions of concerned admirers. He has the resources to ensure he receives top quality treatment and caregiving.

Unfortunately, many others who suffer from the disease do not have that advantage. That certainly includes many African American sufferers and their families.

Fortunately, Glover, and my afflicted family member, are receiving the best medical attention available. And even more importantly, the love and support of family members. Hopefully Glover’s public coming out about this condition will ensure that others in need get the same support and attention.

Written By Earl Ofari Hutchinson

One can find more info about Mr. Hutchinson over at the following site; TheHutchinson Report.

Also feel free to connect with him through twitter; http://twitter.com/earlhutchins

He is also an associate editor of New America Media. His forthcoming book is From King to Obama: Witness to a Turbulent History (Middle Passage Press).

The fireworks have dimmed, and the Fourth-of-You-Lie sales are waning. In this country, we commemorate through commerce and celebrate through retail activity, so even though we are just a few days into July, back-to-school signs are already shouting from store windows and websites.

Who is going back to school, and under what circumstances?

As with every milestone in this country, inequality roars. Some students will return to school with new laptops, quiet rooms, family-paid tuition, and networks that cushion every stumble. Others will return carrying debt, doubt, family obligations, food insecurity, transportation challenges, and the accumulated disadvantages of underfunded schools and under-resourced communities.

The back-to-school season is marketed as a fresh start. For too many students, it is also a reminder that opportunity in America has always been rationed.

That is why Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) still matter. Indeed, that is why HBCUs remain the vanguard.

The vanguard is not always the largest part of the army. It is the front edge. It moves first. It absorbs blows. It clears the path. By that definition, HBCUs have always been the vanguard. They were built because this country’s higher education system excluded Black people by law, custom, violence, and contempt. Their founding question was not, “How do we reproduce privilege?” Their founding question was, “How do we cultivate genius where America has refused to see it?”

That question remains urgent.

HBCUs enroll only a fraction of Black college students, but their impact is outsized. In 2022, HBCUs enrolled about 9 percent of Black college students, yet they produced 16 percent of the bachelor’s degrees earned by Black students in 2021–22. UNCF reports that HBCUs generate $16.5 billion in annual economic impact, support more than 136,000 jobs, and that the 2021 HBCU graduating class is projected to earn $146 billion over their lifetimes.

These are not sentimental institutions. They are economic engines, leadership factories, and community anchors.

Still, HBCUs are too often asked to do transformative work with transactional support.

That contradiction is especially sharp now, as federal student loan policy shifts under the feet of students and families. The Biden-era SAVE plan — Saving on a Valuable Education — was designed to make repayment less punishing by tying payments to income and family size, reducing monthly payments for many borrowers, limiting runaway interest, and creating a shorter forgiveness path for some small-balance borrowers. Now SAVE has ended, and millions of borrowers have been told to move into other repayment plans.

The change lands first on borrowers already in repayment, but current students are not untouched. Undergraduates will face a narrower repayment landscape when they leave school. Families will confront new Parent PLUS limits. Graduate and professional students will face new borrowing caps just as advanced credentials remain expensive and often necessary. Graduate PLUS loans, which previously allowed many graduate students to borrow up to the cost of attendance, are being phased out for new borrowers. Grad PLUS was the backstop many students used when tuition and living costs exceeded unsubsidized loan limits.

These numbers are not abstractions. They determine who can become a nurse practitioner, a physical therapist, a psychologist, a professor, a public health leader, a lawyer, a dentist, a physician, or a minister. They determine who can move from the first degree to the next rung. They determine whether talent is nurtured or stranded.

For Black students, the stakes are higher because the debt burden is heavier. Black students are more likely to borrow for college, more likely to borrow more, and more likely to struggle in repayment because the racial wealth gap follows them from home to campus and from campus to workplace. A loan policy that may look race-neutral on paper can still deepen racial inequality in practice.

That is the context in which HBCUs do their work. They educate students through inequality, against inequality, and beyond inequality. They do not merely polish privilege. They cultivate possibility. They take seriously the students America too often treats as afterthoughts, and they turn potential into leadership.

Having led an HBCU, I know both the miracle, the math, and the myth. At Bennett College, I saw daily what HBCUs do with too little: stretch dollars, nurture brilliance, hold students close, and insist that Black women’s futures were worth fighting for. I know the devotion of faculty, the exhaustion of administrators, the anxiety of families, and the constant scramble for resources. I also know this: HBCUs cannot be praised in February and underfunded in July. They cannot be applauded at commencements and ignored in appropriations. They cannot be celebrated as cultural treasures while their students are left to navigate a debt system that punishes aspiration.

The country loves the symbolism of back-to-school season. New backpacks. New notebooks. New slogans. But the real question is not what is on sale, it’s what is at stake.

If HBCUs are the vanguard, then the question is not whether they have earned our admiration. They have. The question is whether they will receive the investment, protection, and respect that their record demands.

Back to school should not mean back to debt, back to rationed opportunity, or back to the same old inequalities dressed up in fresh retail packaging. It should mean back to possibility. Back to purpose. Back to institutions that have carried us when the broader society would not.

HBCUs are still carrying us. The question is whether public policy will finally carry its share.

On one side stands the Democratic Socialists of America, whose influence within the Democratic Party has grown dramatically. This is no longer simply a debate over tax rates or entitlement programs. The party’s activist wing has become increasingly hostile to the ideas that have undergirded the country for 250 years: freedom of speech, religious liberty, private property, free markets and the belief that America is an exceptional nation worth preserving.

The political consequences are no longer hypothetical. Democrats have a realistic chance to regain control of Congress in the 2026 midterm elections. Competitive Senate races across North Carolina, Ohio, Maine, Texas, Alaska and Iowa underscore how narrow the margins have become. If Democrats were to reclaim both the House and Senate, the ramifications would extend far beyond the next two years.

The federal judiciary is the clearest example.

Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are both in their late 70s. Should vacancies arise while Democrats control the Senate, the ideological balance of the court could shift for a generation. A new liberal majority would influence constitutional interpretation on everything from executive authority and religious liberty to economic regulation and the administrative state. At the same time, Democrats would accelerate confirmations throughout the federal judiciary, leaving an imprint that would outlast any single administration.

Those stakes make recent developments on the right especially consequential.

Tucker Carlson has spent recent weeks floating the idea of launching a third political party, arguing that Republicans and Democrats are effectively indistinguishable on issues of war, spending and finance. He portrays America’s two-party system as little more than a single political establishment masquerading as democracy.

That argument ignores the most significant policy differences in American politics. Republicans and Democrats remain sharply divided over taxation, judicial appointments, regulation, free markets, energy policy and the proper role of government. Pretending those distinctions no longer exist requires overlooking the very issues that define modern elections.

Carlson’s broader political philosophy has also drifted away from traditional conservatism. Over the past several years, he has increasingly criticized free-market capitalism, questioned longstanding American foreign policy, and adopted a form of economic nationalism that bears little resemblance to the conservative movement’s traditional commitment to limited government and free enterprise.

More than likely, Carlson is not seriously preparing to build a viable third party. American political history offers little reason to believe such an effort would succeed. Ross Perot’s independent 1992 campaign remains one of the strongest third-party performances in modern history, yet his Reform Party, launched in 1995, quickly collapsed. The structural realities of American elections overwhelmingly favor two major parties with established fundraising networks, ballot access and national organizations.

Rather than constructing an alternative party, Carlson appears to be positioning himself for the aftermath of the 2026 elections. If Republicans lose seats — as the president’s party often does during midterm elections — he can argue that the defeats occurred because Republicans ignored his vision for the party. Electoral losses then become evidence that the GOP should move in his ideological direction.

That makes his current rhetoric politically significant even if no third party ever appears on the ballot. Republicans already face the historical disadvantages of defending Congress during a president’s midterm. Voices on the right openly rooting for Republican defeats only increase the likelihood that Democrats, increasingly influenced by their progressive wing, will gain power.

Following the nation’s semiquincentennial, the debate should return to first principles rather than political personalities.

For 250 years, America’s strength has rested on enduring ideas: constitutional government, individual liberty, private property, free enterprise, religious freedom and peace through strength. Those principles have survived wars, economic crises and political upheaval because each generation chose to defend them rather than discard them.

The greatest challenge facing the country may not come from a single ideological movement but from competing factions that, despite their differences, are increasingly willing to abandon those foundational principles. If the United States is to thrive to its 300th anniversary, its 500th and beyond, it will depend not on charismatic personalities or political factions but on whether Americans remain committed to the ideals that made the republic possible.

Written by Ben Shapiro

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