“Now I guess it hits me that I’m not going to be in a uniform anymore—and that’s not a terrible feeling,” Jordan said afterward. “It’s something that I’ve come to grips with, and it’s time. This is the final retirement.”

Jordan was a phenomenal athlete with a thrilling combination of grace, speed, power, artistry, and competitive desire. Yet Father Time was the only opponent the then-40-year-old Jordan could never overcome. Some current players, like Jordan, remain competitive past their basketball prime, but physical skills will eventually decline, and all players will suffer the same fate: retirement. While a 40-year-old Jordan is considered old by professional sports standards, he would be regarded as relatively young as an elected politician.

But Father Time respects no one, and he ultimately catches up with all of us. Just as Jordan concluded it was time to “hang it up,” Utah Sen. Mitt Romney made the same decision when he announced that he will not seek a second term. Romney emphasized the need for a new generation of leadership. “At the end of another term, I’d be in my mid-80s,” Romney, 76, said in an interview. “Frankly, it’s time for a new generation of leaders. They’re the ones that need to make the decisions that will shape the world they will be living in.”

Michael Jordan and Mitt Romney are two public figures. Although one is an athlete and the other a politician, both are used to applause and cheers from fans and supporters. They are used to being leaders and the sense of control that comes with it. And yes, they have egos. Too often, the egos of athletes and politicians are calling the shots when it is time for humility to take over. Athletes and politicians are similar because when their physical and mental skills erode, it is not always easy for them to accept the reality that Father Time cannot be beat. Some even look foolish trying to win an unwinnable fight when the American people know better.

A true leader understands they cannot be held captive by their pride, ego, and thirst for power when an influential and productive career has run its natural course. Like Mitt Romney, they rightfully know when it is time to step aside graciously. Not all politicians can humble themselves in this way and step aside when their visible public performance becomes the evidence that something is medically wrong.

In total, this Congress is the third-oldest in U.S. history. Among Congress’s 24 Silent Generation members (defined as those born from 1928 to 1945, the average age is 83.8, with Sen. Chuck Grassley (92) being the oldest. This is the end of the Mitch McConnell era, who is another member of the Silent Generation. The 84-year-old senator from Kentucky is not running for reelection and has not been seen by the general public in more than two months.

The McConnell team has not been straightforward with the people of Kentucky and has released fewer than a handful of statements saying he had left the rehab center and was continuing his recovery at home while still working with staff. Democrat Charles Booker, who is running to fill McConnell’s seat, is not buying Republican claims. “In an age where every time we turn on the news, there’s lies, we’re in an age of politics where dishonesty is the norm, and the lack of transparency is to be expected,” Booker told The Daily Beast. “It’s why a lot of people don’t trust politics, so no, I do not believe them. Mitch McConnell has been known to lie to our people here in Kentucky and the country throughout his career,” he added.

We know Mitch McConnell has to be in control, even when his constituents in Kentucky have a right to know the truth about the medical status of their elected representative. Although he is nearing the end of his current term, it is safe to say McConnell would never have resigned in the past due to medical reasons. This suggests older members in office from both parties may be unable to serve adequately, yet they hide it from the public.

Following President Joe Biden’s poor June 2024 debate performance, Barack Obama privately told allies that Biden’s route to reelection had become much more difficult. It was true, and Obama stated what the rest of us saw. We saw a public servant with a long, proud career who was unwilling to accept that the American people need leaders who are medically capable of performing their duties in office. This applies to the current president and all elected officials who choose to cover up what Father Time will eventually expose.

Written by David W. Marshall

Official website; https://davidwmarshallauthor.com/

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

Understand me before you get heated. This is not about his heart. I have no window into what he prays about or what he tells his children at night. What I am watching is a role, the slot television keeps warm for a certain kind of brother. Credible enough to carry the conversation. Never dangerous to the people signing the checks.

Look at his lane since Clark turned pro. Caitlin Clark catches a shove, and he is quick to get online, stat lines ready, righteous. The league mishandled her. The players underrated her. The haters need to stop. He has played that part since her rookie year, quick to the keyboard whenever anybody questions her shine and ready to defend the young star against whatever criticism is circulating. A few of those takes landed as fair. Then turn the camera the other direction. When it came to Angel Reese, the whole temperature changed. He went out of his way to declare she hated Clark, dressed it up as basketball evidence, and kept returning to the claim even after it drew heavy criticism.

Then came the truly ugly episode. A racist edit floated around showing Reese as a monkey on a video game cover. Griffin reposted it, typed the correct words about hatred having no place anywhere, and could not stop there. In the same breath, he circled back to the feud, claimed folks in her “inner circle” phoned him to confirm she resents her rival. Reese’s mother came out swinging, said nobody close to her daughter ever made such a call. The player herself called it what it looked like. Clout.

Watch who lined up against him. Shaq, threatening to punch him in the face over it, telling him to leave the young woman be. Mark Henry, the wrestling legend, admitted the mess made him look at Griffin differently. Even his former ESPN colleague Ryan Clark pointed out the strange fixation. A grown quarterback with a platform, again and again, aiming his fire at a then 23 year old sister while buffing the halo of the woman across from her.

That direction is the whole point.

The word I keep reaching for is “safe.” Not safe as an insult about his soul. Safe as a plain description of a job. Sports television loves a brother who will scold other Black folks on cue, because it lets a mostly mainstream room nod along without ever feeling accused of anything. He hands the segment its stamp of authenticity. He also hands everybody permission to stay cozy. You cannot call the take bigoted, look, a Black man said it. That is the trick, and it is old as dirt.

Here is where memory gets interesting. Back in 2012 an analyst named Rob Parker went on morning television and questioned whether Griffin was really “one of us,” floating his white fiancée and his rumored politics as proof. Cornball brother, Parker sneered. It was reductive and mean. ESPN suspended him and later declined to renew his contract, citing those RG3 remarks among its reasons. I am not resurrecting that garbage to co sign it. I raise it because the same industry that once tried to read this quarterback out of the family later found a use for that exact posture, only pointed outward instead of at him. What got Parker pushed out became, years on, a marketable stance.

None of this bought him protection. ESPN let him go in 2024. Two years still on the deal, cut loose anyway. Then came the Jackie Robinson business. Griffin argued that Robinson breaking baseball’s color line was not itself a political act, and Stephen A. Smith was not having it. Carved him up publicly. Called the routine passive aggressive. Reminded everybody that this exact tap dance was why folks at the network had soured on him ages ago. So the reward runs thin. You keep the crowd cozy, and the shop can still show you the door when the numbers or the relationships change.

I keep circling back to the women in all this, because that is the tell. Critiquing a player is ordinary. Every analyst does it. But notice how often his sharpest energy lands on Reese, on the league, on sisters who dared to be loud in their own lane, while his softest instincts get saved for the phenom the mainstream already adores. He frames the whole thing as colorblind. Right and wrong has no color, he likes to say. Sounds noble. Works out differently. In practice the scolding pours toward a single bench, and the cover flows steadily to whoever the mainstream already loves.

Somebody reading this will decide I am too hard on him, that a man is entitled to his opinions, that both athletes are grown professionals who can absorb a little heat. All true. I am not asking him to like anybody. Rivalries are real. Ballers talk trash, hold grudges, want to bury the opponent on the scoreboard. That is sports, and pretending it ought to be all hugs is silly. My problem sits somewhere else. When a highly visible Black sports commentator keeps volunteering to referee young Black women for the benefit of viewers who were never going to root for those women anyway, something is being sold, and it is not merely a basketball opinion.

And that seat costs something real. The old heads could tell you. Build your whole name on being the reasonable one, the guy who checks his own people so the set stays calm, and you learn a hard truth soon enough. They are renting you. Nobody at the network is adopting you. No chair with your name carved into it. Just a chair you borrow while you stay useful. Griffin is living that lesson right now, a layoff here, a Stephen A. monologue back yonder, the welcome always on a lease.

Nobody needs him to be a militant. I would happily settle for plain consistency. Defend the young star, by all means, but pump the brakes when your outrage on behalf of a favored competitor somehow always shows up carrying a lecture aimed at the sister across the way. People clock what you protect. And plenty of us clock exactly what you are willing to spend to stay welcome in that room.

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.

Kick, mostly. That world came to him through Deen The Great, and before long the partnership turned the chaos surrounding them into a brand. They called themselves the Krash Out Boyz. Sit with that name a second. They put the meltdown right there in the title, sold it as content, and folks lined up to watch.

Here is what troubles me. Every slurred word, every argument, every time the former champ looked lost on camera, somebody clipped it. Chopped it into fifteen seconds, slapped a caption on top, pushed it into the feed. Millions watched. Folks laughed, shared, then waited for the next one like it was a sitcom with a fresh episode every night.

We have a phrase for all this now. Crashing out. The slang grew out of Black communities, with Louisiana playing an important part in its rise, and rappers helped carry it into the wider culture before social media wrung every last drop out of it. Now everybody says it, and far too often they say it about us.

That is the part few people want to touch. The internet has developed a real appetite for watching Black men fall apart in public. Not just Adrien. Think about how many viral moments feature a brother at his lowest, and how quickly the comments fill with laughing faces and popcorn. The unraveling becomes its own genre. Pain turns into product.

I am not naive about his role here. This is no child. Nobody forced him to sit in front of that camera. The drinking, the loud mouth, the public messes, all of it went out on film, and some of it became profitable. There have been financial troubles, a civil lawsuit containing serious allegations, and feuds spilling from livestreams into real life. In early July, he and Deen even had to be separated during a heated confrontation while wearing matching pink hoodies. You cannot excuse everything a person does just because he is struggling.

But the struggle is not speculation. Broner has publicly discussed problems with alcohol, gambling and his mental health. Back in 2016, friends became so concerned by alarming posts on his social media accounts that police were contacted. Years later, in 2022, he withdrew from a scheduled fight with Omar Figueroa Jr. and openly said he needed to take care of his mental health. That is not internet gossip. That is a man telling the world that something inside him needed attention.

So what does the audience do with that? Mostly nothing. Knowing he has struggled does not slow the clip machine down even a little. If anything, it can make the footage more valuable. Famous and coming undone reads as comedy to some people. Famous, broke and coming undone is an even bigger jackpot. Millions earned across a boxing career eventually gave way to very public financial trouble, and too many people treated the empty pockets like a punchline instead of a warning.

Deen deserves a word too. Give the brother his credit for helping pull Broner into a lane that generated income at a time when the big boxing checks were no longer arriving the way they once did. For a while, streaming looked like one of the smartest moves Adrien had made in years. Somebody handed him another way to stay visible, make money and build something outside the ring.

Trouble is, the same setup that gave Broner another income stream also kept cameras rolling through some of his lowest moments, and those moments repeatedly became the clips that traveled farthest. When the relationship between the two men became strained, Deen arranged for another cameraman so Broner could run his own broadcasts. The partnership split publicly. More clips followed. Even the breakup became part of the show.

I keep circling one thing. Underneath the meme is a person. A human being with a mama, with children, with a body that has absorbed thousands of punches and a mind he has openly admitted has struggled. We know this. The receipts have been sitting in front of us for years. We watch anyway, because watching is easy and caring costs something.

Ryan Garcia, of all people, publicly reached out earlier this year and encouraged Broner to stop drinking and get himself together. Fans typed the same thing underneath video after video. Please stop drinking. Get some help. Some meant it. Plenty of those same people turned around and reposted the newest breakdown because the engagement was too good to leave alone. That contradiction lives in everybody who consumes this kind of content. We say we care while our thumbs hit share.

I came up in a time when a brother falling apart got handled quietly. Family stepped in. The church folks came by. Somebody sat with you. It was not entertainment, and it sure was not a revenue stream. I am not romanticizing those days, because plenty of hurt got buried that should have been spoken about openly. But we have swung so far in the other direction that a person’s collapse can now play out before an audience of strangers who treat every ugly moment like another episode.

And here is where the story gets more interesting. Broner is trying to change the ending. This summer he and Deen launched a 45 day streaming challenge built around sobriety, training, losing weight and preparing for another possible boxing run. Broner has been talking about staying sober, getting his body back and returning to the ring. People inside boxing, including Claressa Shields, have encouraged the effort. Maybe the real test for the audience is what happens now. We were willing to watch every stumble. Are we willing to pay the same attention when the man is trying to stand back up?

Maybe the honest question is no longer simply what is wrong with Adrien. We know a good deal about what has troubled him because he has told us himself. The harder question aims at the rest of us, the ones scrolling, laughing and waiting for tomorrow’s clip. What does it say about us if a Black man’s breakdown earns more attention than his attempt to rebuild?

There is no clean answer here. Broner still has responsibility for what he says, what he does and what he puts in front of a camera. Grace does not mean pretending bad decisions never happened. But accountability and compassion are not enemies. A man can answer for his choices without becoming public property at his lowest moment.

The better story now is not whether Adrien Broner can give the internet another crash out clip. It is whether he can stay sober, keep training, regain some discipline and build something healthier than the spectacle that surrounded him. Maybe he fights again. Maybe boxing never looks the way it once did. Either way, the man was never a punchline.

Give him some grace. Or at least give his recovery as much attention as you gave his collapse. That much ought to be fair.

Staff Writer; Lee Walker

This brother is a fitness trainer with 12 years of experience, focused on building strength, clarity, and real health within the Black community. Through his writing, Mr. Walker hopes to uplift younger Black men and men in general through honest conversations about fitness, financial pressure, fatherhood, discipline, mental wellness, and the importance of brotherhood.

Have questions? Reach me at LeeW@ThyBlackMan.com.

I’ve been watching politicians talk about us for a long time now. Long enough to know the difference between a man who studies the numbers and a man who found a phrase that plays well at a rally. That “Black jobs” line was the second kind. It was built to make a certain crowd nod along, and it was built to make some of our own brothers think somebody finally noticed them. Neither of those things is the same as noticing.

So let me do the thing he never did. Let me put the numbers on the table.

Take the freshest report, the one that dropped this month. On paper it reads like relief. Black joblessness came in at 6.3 percent for July, down from 7.2 percent a year before, nearly a full percentage point lower. You could almost believe somebody fixed something. Then you look underneath the headline. The economy shed 23,000 payroll positions that month, while a separate government survey showed the Black labor force shrinking by roughly 204,000 people. Black employment itself fell by about 123,000, and our labor force participation rate slipped to 61.3 percent. Fewer of us landed in the jobless column partly because fewer of us were participating in the labor market at all. That is not the kind of recovery anybody ought to celebrate without reading the fine print.

Here is the part that ought to keep a grown man up at night. Break the thing out by the men and it gets uglier. Brothers sat at 6.2 percent unemployment in July, but that headline does not tell the whole story either. Nearly half a million fewer Black men over the age of twenty were employed in July than in December of last year. Our slice of who actually has a job has been sliding while the broader picture looks steadier for plenty of other Americans. A couple points here, a half point there. Sounds like nothing until you remember each little tick is somebody’s father, somebody who used to punch a clock and now sits at the kitchen table trying to figure out how to tell his people he got cut.

And a lot of the pressure on those jobs didn’t come from any immigrant. Some of it came from the government he runs.

That’s the piece nobody at those rallies wants to sit with. For generations, federal work was one of the few honest ladders a Black family could climb without somebody kicking it out from under them. The post office. The agencies. Steady wages, a pension, a way into the middle class that didn’t depend on some manager liking the way you talked. Our people built lives on that. Then the new administration came in swinging at the federal workforce, and Black workers had plenty at stake because we have long been represented in federal employment at levels above our share of the civilian labor force. Washington has been cutting federal employment since early 2025, removing positions from one of the sectors our families historically used as a path toward stability. That is not immigration. That is a policy decision made at a desk by the same administration telling us to keep our eyes fixed on the border.

I want to be fair here, because fairness is how you keep your credibility. The trouble facing Black men and work did not start with this president, and any writer who tells you it did is selling you comfort instead of truth. Prime-age Black men have run about eleven percentage points below prime-age white men in employment going back a quarter century, through Democrats and Republicans both. Some quarters, the median full-time Black male worker brought home a little over a thousand dollars a week while the median for white men ran three to four hundred dollars higher. This is old. This is structural. This was here before him and it’ll take more than one election to move it.

But naming an old problem doesn’t excuse a man for making choices that can deepen it and then pointing at strangers.

That’s really the sleight of hand, isn’t it. You take a wound that’s been there for decades, you press your thumb into it, and while we’re wincing you tell us the man responsible is climbing over a fence with a work permit in his hand. Meanwhile some real jobs, the kind with benefits and a future, are being eliminated by the very government you handed him. He counts on us hurting too much to check the receipts.

So check them.

When somebody stands in front of you and says immigrants are taking your work, ask him a simple question. Which job. Name it. Point to the plant, the office, the agency where a brother got walked out and a migrant sat down in his chair the next morning. Research does not support such a simple one-for-one story across the American labor market. Immigration can put pressure on some workers, especially where skills and occupations overlap, and economists still debate how large those effects are. But that is a far more complicated reality than saying immigrants simply came here and took “Black jobs.” What the government’s own numbers clearly show right now is weakening employment and labor force participation among Black workers. That deserves more than a slogan about who supposedly replaced whom.

That’s the real crisis, and it doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker.

This isn’t about telling you how to vote. Grown men make up their own minds, and I’ve got more respect for you than to herd you anywhere. My point is simpler than that. I’m tired of watching us get used as a prop. Tired of a phrase like “Black jobs” getting tossed around by a man who couldn’t give the phrase much meaning when a room full of us asked him to his face. We deserve better than to be somebody’s applause line.

So the next time you hear him say it, don’t just nod. Ask the question that actually matters. If these are our jobs, where did they go. Who cut them. Who profited. And why is the man doing some of the cutting the same one telling us to blame the fellow at the bus stop who looks a little different than we do.

Answer those honestly and you’ll know exactly where you stand. That’s worth more than any speech.

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.

Most of what gets published about brothers my age could pass for a case file. Statistics. Warnings. The weight of the world folded into a paragraph and handed to us at breakfast. I have read those pieces. Written a few myself, if I am being honest. There is truth in them, and I will not pretend otherwise. But I am 51 years old now, and I have started to notice how rarely anybody stops to ask whether we are having any fun.

Fun. Plain, ordinary, unearned fun. Let me sit with that instead.

Saturday mornings in my house belong to the record player. A phone would sound fine, cleaner even, and none of that matters to me. The needle coming down is the reason, that small ceremony ahead of the day asking things of me. Coffee first. Then I flip through the crates like a man deciding an important matter, which I suppose I am. Maze featuring Frankie Beverly usually wins. “Golden Time of Day” comes on and the whole room loosens its shoulders. My wife pretends she is annoyed. She is not. By the 2nd track she is humming, and before long she has forgotten whatever she was folding. For a little while after, the whole house runs on rhythm instead of worry, and that is about the closest thing to prayer I reach before noon.

Nobody sold me on this when I was younger. No one told me gladness could be a practice. I thought it arrived, or it did not. Chase money and respect long enough, I figured, and one day both would drop happiness on the porch like a package. What actually came was smaller and better. I learned to reach for the good feeling. On purpose. Before the hours had done anything to earn it.

Take the car. Some of my worst singing happens behind the wheel, and I mean that with pride. Anita Baker asks for a range I do not have and never will, yet I go for those notes anyway, red light after red light, sunroof cracked, grown fellas in the next lane pretending not to watch. Let them watch. What is the alternative? Sitting there stone faced as if a good time costs money I am unwilling to spend?

My father did none of this. I loved him, but the man wore his shoulders high and tight, braced for a wind that apparently would not let up. He worked. Then he worked some more. Whatever needed handling, he handled without a word about it. His laugh, on the rare day it surfaced, caught you off guard, because his face mostly stayed locked in that ready position, waiting on the next thing to go wrong.

So I dance. Badly. My knees file their complaints. The children find it deeply embarrassing, which is honestly a bonus. There is a specific move I do to Cameo that my daughter has begged me to retire, and her begging only makes me commit harder. That part comes with time. 40 years old in her own kitchen, some ancient record will find her. Her body will move before her mind grants permission. She will finally understand why the embarrassing dad had a point.

We discuss healing a lot now, and I am glad we do. Therapy, boundaries, rest, all of it. Good. Necessary. Yet somewhere in the seriousness of getting well, I worry we forgot that delight is medicine too. Not the deep sort that fixes the root. A shallower version. The kind that carries you through a rough Tuesday. A good bassline can hold a brother up on a bad afternoon. Cheaper than most remedies, and it has not once judged me for how I looked while receiving it.

Here is what I have come to believe. A brother who protects his peace also has to protect his pleasure, and those are not the same job. Peace is a quiet thing. Pleasure arrives loud. One is the deep breath at the end of a long shift. The other is Earth, Wind & Fire coming on at a cookout while 40 people who planned nothing suddenly move in the same direction. You need both. The world hands out endless reasons to sit still and stay guarded. It rarely offers you a reason to get up and shake something loose. That part you supply yourself, or it does not get supplied.

I keep a short list of songs for the hard days. The whole thing stays private, but I will tell you the opener belongs to The Isleys, and it has never failed me. Not once. Grief could not stop it. No layoff has managed to. Even a rough phone call from a doctor lost that fight. I press play, and for 4 minutes I am a person again instead of a problem being managed.

Maybe that sounds small to you. Perhaps you expected weightier material, given who is writing and what folks my age usually put on the page. Yet I have decided our lightness deserves defending as fiercely as anything else we claim. Give us mornings that open with a song instead of dread. We should get to sound terrible in traffic and feel wonderful doing it. Every brother alive has a claim on being caught mid step by the people who love him, then on keeping right along without apology.

So play the old album. Play it loud. Spin it on a random weekend for no reason a professional would ever sign off on. Let the speakers do what they were built to do, which is remind a tired brother that he is present, still moving, still, underneath everything the world stacks on his back, wide open to a little happiness.

That is no distraction from the struggle. It is the reward for surviving it.

Staff Writer; Lee Walker

This brother is a fitness trainer with 12 years of experience, focused on building strength, clarity, and real health within the Black community. Through his writing, Mr. Walker hopes to uplift younger Black men and men in general through honest conversations about fitness, financial pressure, fatherhood, discipline, mental wellness, and the importance of brotherhood.

Have questions? Reach me at LeeW@ThyBlackMan.com.

I have lived long enough to watch good men get sorted into piles by folks who never sat at their table. Some clerk in a campaign office, a strategist with a spreadsheet, decides that the fellow across the street belongs to the other tribe now, and just like that a friendship of thirty years is supposed to cool. I refuse it. You should too.

Let me tell you what nobody running for office will admit out loud. They need us divided. A united bloc of Black voters who talk to one another, who share resources across the aisle, who compare notes at the barbershop instead of shouting past each other on the internet, that is a nightmare for any campaign built on fear. Fear is the product. They sell it wholesale every October and hope we buy retail. Watch 2026 run that worn script one more time, the money landing early, the warnings turning shrill about how those people are coming for everything you hold dear.

Back when I was coming up, my father worked beside a man he disagreed with on nearly everything. Politics, church doctrine, how to raise a boy, they argued about all of it on the porch. But when my father’s car died in the middle of a January freeze, that same fellow drove twenty miles before sunrise to jump the battery. Nobody asked how he voted. That is what kinship looked like where I come from. The bond was never a poll. It was a promise.

Now watch how the game runs today. A young brother posts something you find foolish, and before you even finish reading it you have filed him under enemy. You have never met his mother. He might be pulling two jobs. On Saturdays he coaches a Pop Warner squad full of boys who are not even his, then drives home and reads his own girl to sleep. All you really have is a tag some stranger pinned on him, and you have worn it for him ever since, no questions asked.

Here is the hard part, and I say it with love. Both crews are guilty of the same trick. The blue side tells you that any Black man who leans right has lost his soul. Meanwhile the red side whispers that the ones who lean left are sheep who cannot think for themselves. Neither crowd wants you to notice that they are running the identical play from opposite sidelines. Keep him angry at his own reflection and he will never ask why his neighborhood still looks the way it does after 50 years of promises from both.

Some bonds outlast every argument, and you never know it until the day it counts. I learned that at a funeral, of all places. Two men who had not traded a word in ten years ended up in the same pew, close enough to touch, both of them wrecked, because the one in the box had loved the pair of them and never made either choose. Whatever they had been fighting about did not survive the room. Death does not check registration.

So let me be plain about what I am asking. When a fellow needs a job and you have the power to hire, hire him if he can do the work, and let the ballot he cast stay his own business. A boy on your block with no father steering him deserves a mentor, and you can be that even if his uncle wears a hat you cannot stand. Somebody stumbles in front of you, reach down and help him up. Argue with him later, once he is back on his feet, if there is any argument left worth having.

I am not telling you to abandon your convictions. Lord knows I have mine, and I will argue them until my last breath. Conviction is good. A man without a spine is no use to anybody. What I am warning against is letting a political machine monetize your idea of who deserves your loyalty. Campaigns, parties, and their allies will spend billions trying to convince you that your cousin is the threat. Meanwhile, plenty of the people writing those checks move in the same elite circles regardless of party. The division is for us. Not for them.

Think about the elders who built the road we walk. Did they screen the marchers by ideology before locking arms on that bridge? They came from churches, neighborhoods, activist groups, and every walk of life. They did not agree about everything, but they still marched together because the goal towered over any single opinion. We inherited that road. Now we hand a quick television ad the power to decide we cannot share a sidewalk.

There is a cost to all this sorting, and our sons are paying it. A boy watches his father cut off an old friend over a yard sign, and he learns that people are disposable. He learns that belonging is conditional, that love comes with a questionnaire. Then we wonder why the young ones feel so alone, why they trust nobody, why they build walls before they build anything worth keeping. We taught them that. And we can teach them something better.

I want you to try something this week. Call up somebody you have written off. Not to argue, not to win, just to check on him. Ask about his knees, his mama, his job. You will remember, somewhere in that conversation, that he is not a party. He is a person you once knew, made of the same clay, carrying the same weight in a country that never made any of it easy for either of you.

The powerful stay powerful by keeping the rest of us fighting over scraps and symbols. That is the oldest arrangement there is. Our answer cannot be to sort harder. It has to be refusal. We hold the line on who belongs to us, no matter how loud the noise gets in the season when they need our anger most.

Nobody in Washington gets to hand out your kinfolk like campaign buttons. You decide who your people are. That was always your call. Do not let a stranger with a fundraising quota tell you otherwise.

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.

Hong lost the Democratic primary but left behind some sobering thoughts. She finished second by only a hair and against a sterling Democrat with relevant experience. The winner, David Crowley, is the Milwaukee County executive and an African American born into poverty.

Crowley will face off against Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany, a MAGA right-winger who voted against certifying the 2020 election. GOP-aligned groups spent heavily to promote Hong’s candidacy for obvious reasons.

You know who put Crowley over the top? Rural Wisconsin voters.

Over in Michigan, the wily Abdul El-Sayed, endorsed by the fringe-left leaders, beat Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens by a similar tiny margin. She did extraordinarily well in working-class areas in and around Detroit. El-Sayed flew to victory on the wings of college towns.

Could normal Democrats build an alliance between the urban working class and rural voters? That might become a more pressing requirement if El-Sayed loses to Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, which will probably happen. El-Sayed has burned bridges with many Jewish voters, a constituency Democrats have traditionally relied upon. He also has his inflammatory influencer friend, Hasan Piker — who said America deserved 9/11 — hanging around his neck.

Rogers is an establishment Republican who defended the 2020 election results that made Joe Biden president. He has since veered more toward MAGA and won Donald Trump’s endorsement in the Republican Party.

But Trump undoubtedly figured that Rogers would have a better chance of victory in this swing state than a fire-breathing right-winger. And a Rogers win in November could keep majority control of the Senate in Republican hands.

Are we done with polls yet? Polls issued right before these primaries showed both Hong and El-Sayed beating their opponents by double digits. The photo-finish results suggest the pollsters know nothing. But belief in their “findings” can alter election outcomes.

A Marquette poll from March showed Crowley supported by only 3% of Democratic primary voters. He left the race believing that Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez would be the stronger Democrat. He also didn’t want to split the mainstream Democrats’ votes. When Rodriguez later dropped out due to finance accounting problems, Crowley jumped back in.

Looking forward to 2028, the Democratic National Committee has chosen South Carolina as the site of its first presidential primary. That makes some Democratic Socialists uncomfortable. In 2020, South Carolina played a major role in making Joe Biden the Democratic nominee over Bernie Sanders. In earlier contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, the generally white and college-educated electorate had sent Sanders toward the head of the pack.

Come South Carolina and the other Southern Democratic primaries with their huge African American voting bloc, Biden shot ahead. It wasn’t because the voters were “conservative,” as Sanders grumbled. It’s because they cared more about health coverage, racial fairness and income inequality than the left’s boutique issues: defunding police, transgender rights and the obsession with identity politics. What did Latinx mean?

Mostly, it was the belief, a correct belief, that Biden could beat Trump, and Sanders could not. Black voters favored Biden over Sanders by 4 to 1.

Moderate Democrats may be finally putting up effective resistance to the highly organized fringe left. Step one is reorganizing primaries to better reflect the preferences of the Democratic mainstream. Step two is getting Democratic normies out to vote. Step three is to build on issues regular people care about. They can do it.

Written by Froma Harrop

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

The statute is the Jones Act, passed in 1920 to rebuild and protect the U.S. merchant marine fleet after World War I disrupted American shipping capabilities. It requires that any vessel moving cargo between two American ports must be built in an American shipyard, be American-owned and be at least three-quarters American-crewed. Miss any one of these marks and the shipper is barred from carrying a single barrel of fuel from Houston to Honolulu.

The stated justification for the act is national security. We need American ships and American sailors to fight wars. But 100 years in, it’s hard to repeat this justification with a straight face.

An American-built cargo ship costs $190 million to $250 million to build; the same vessel costs about $30 million from a foreign shipyard. U.S. shipyards now build less than 1% of what China and South Korea do, and roughly 300 U.S. shipyards have closed since the early 1980s. Legislation meant to sustain a merchant fleet has presided over its collapse.

Fewer than 100 oceangoing ships qualify under the Jones Act today, and the American tanker fleet is so thin that moving oil from Texas to the Northeast costs about three times what it would to ship it from Africa. Michael Bloomberg recently called the act “a national sales tax” — except that Washington never sees a dime. Instead, the premium is captured by a few U.S. shipyards and carriers operating relatively free of competition. Economist Thomas Grennes found that consumers lose more than what the statute hands to sailors, shipbuilders and carriers.

In March, the Trump administration suspended the Jones Act for energy and fertilizer shipments. It’s not the first waiver of its kind, but it is the longest in recent history. With the waiver’s expiration looming, the administration just announced a 90-day extension along with stricter terms.

The numbers speak for themselves. The Cato Institute’s Colin Grabow documented that in under five months, Puerto Rico took in more mainland fuel than in any full year since 2015. Shipments to the West Coast, Alaska and Hawaii hit nearly 14 million barrels, about 170% of the recent annual average. Whole trade routes quickly appeared: Gulf Coast fuel to Hawaii, New Jersey jet fuel to California, propane to Puerto Rico.

America’s government-protected fleet seldom served these locales. Remove a prohibition and the market pours resources where they are needed. As Grabow noted, “That’s strong evidence for the longstanding critique that the Jones Act suppresses domestic commerce by preventing economically viable trade between Americans.”

The question then becomes: Why won’t the Jones Act die? The answer, as the oldest story in political economy tells us, is that it benefits a few special interests at the cost of all the rest of us.

The handful of shipyards, carriers and labor unions that profit from the Jones Act defend it vigorously. The average person pays just a few cents more at the pump or the register. It adds up, but not many people trace it to a statute they’re mostly unaware of. One side is lobbying. The other is you, and you’re busy.

The lobby mobilized against a limited waiver as if the republic were under siege. Grabow described a national ad campaign drawing millions of views from an account with just a few hundred subscribers, a 10-state media blitz, a form-letter-writing machine and roughly one op-ed or letter per week, mostly written by people on the industry payroll.

Two influencers who had never mentioned shipping policy, Kaya Jones and Olivia Krolczyk, posted identical lines about “protecting 650,000 Americans” a day apart, and one disclosed a paid partnership. A commissioned study for the Transportation Institute warned, with gross exaggeration, that 100,000 jobs were “at risk.” Fifty-two House Republicans, the speaker among them, bought into the economic illiteracy and urged the White House to let the waiver die.

Such machinery does not stop at persuasion. A few years ago, documents pried from the Maritime Administration revealed that an advisory committee meeting participant suggested, probably half in jest, that every past and present Cato Institute and Mercatus Center scholar (presumably including me) be charged with treason for criticizing the Jones Act. As economist Art Carden observed, that dragnet would have to be enormous, since the critics run from free-market economists to the far-left Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz.

Unfortunately, the Jones Act is representative of much American legislation: a narrow group harvesting a fortune while the costs are spread across hundreds of millions of us. By design, those costs are all but invisible. Whether it’s protectionist sugar quotas, occupational licensing laws or bespoke tariffs for connected companies, you, dear taxpayer and consumer, fund them all.

Ask yourself how many statutes you are paying for right now. It’s more than you think.

Written by Veronique de Rugy

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

The rapid spread of public surveillance cameras represents something far more consequential than a new piece of police technology. It represents a fundamental change in the relationship between the individual and the state.

These cameras allow government agents to record, identify, catalog and retroactively track the movements of people who have committed no crime, are suspected of no wrongdoing and have done nothing to invite government scrutiny. That’s not public safety. It’s an assault upon individual privacy.

Privacy is not a privilege granted by government. It is an aspect of personal liberty that government exists to protect. It is a natural human right protected from the government in the Bill of Rights. The fact that a person leaves his home and travels upon a public road does not mean that he has surrendered that right.

There is an enormous moral and constitutional difference between a police officer who happens to observe a person in public and government surveillance that automatically and systematically records that person’s vehicle, location and movements; and stores that information for future use.

A free society doesn’t just protect people from crime; it protects them from arbitrary government. The presumption is liberty. Government is the negation of liberty. A person should not have to establish his innocence before the government leaves him alone. The burden always belongs to the government to justify all intrusions into personal liberty. Police cameras reverse that principle. They collect information about everyone the camera views and leave it to individuals to challenge the collections afterward.

The Constitution requires articulable suspicion connecting the person being surveilled to a legitimate law-enforcement objective to justify public surveillance. A vague assertion that the technology might someday help solve a crime or enhance public safety does not meet that standard.

The view that personal privacy and public safety are in equipoise — that they are merely two competing interests of equal moral and legal weight from which government officials are entitled to choose subjectively their preferred balance — is the core of authoritarianism.

Safety is one of the legitimate purposes for which government exists. Privacy is among the personal liberties that government exists to protect. It cannot be taken away without judicial approval. Government cannot justify violating a natural right merely by asserting that doing so might make people safer. If that were so, there would be no meaningful boundary on any governmental power.

There is a profound difference between investigating a specific crime through constitutionally authorized surveillance and constructing a permanent infrastructure of suspicionless surveillance. The former begins with evidence and seeks information relevant to a particular governmental purpose. The latter begins with everyone and waits for the evidence.

When 7,000 American police departments have these systems with no legislative approvals, we have the police making policy judgments. They are deciding that the government should possess a new capacity to observe innocent people, what information should be collected, how long it should be retained, who should have access to it and what purposes may justify searches; all this irrespective of the Constitution.

Those are not merely administrative questions. They are questions about personal liberty.

If elected legislators believe that such surveillance is necessary, they should publicly debate it, enact specific legislation mandating warrants, establish meaningful limitations and accept responsibility before the voters. The decision should not be buried in a police procurement process or treated as an ordinary equipment purchase.

Liberty cannot depend upon the benevolence, restraint or good intentions of government employees. The premise of the Constitution is that government power must be limited, checked and divided because government officials are human beings who possess power and will inevitably have incentives to abuse it.

The answer is not better government surveillance. The answer is what the Fourth Amendment requires: No government surveillance without search warrants.

The constitutional question cannot be reduced to whether someone was physically standing in a public place. A police officer seeing a car pass by is one thing. A government database capable of reconstructing months of a person’s movements is something fundamentally different.

The difference is the difference between observation and surveillance.

A free people should be profoundly suspicious of any governmental system that makes surveillance the default position. No person should have to fear that every trip down the street is being permanently recorded, whether his movements can later be reconstructed or whether a government official can search his history without individualized suspicion.

The Constitution mandates that government leave people alone unless it has a legitimate, articulable reason to interfere with their liberty. That principle is not an obstacle to public safety. It is one of the defining characteristics of a free society.

Police cameras embody the opposite philosophy: Collect first, investigate later; monitor everyone, suspect someone later; expand governmental capacity and trust officials to exercise restraint afterward. That’s not the philosophy of a constitutional republic. It’s the philosophy of a surveillance state.

The constitutional objection is not that fighting crime is unimportant. It is that government must fight crime chained down by the Constitution, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson. Safety cannot become the magic word that dissolves every constitutional limitation. Privacy cannot be treated as a luxury available only when government determines that it is convenient. And police departments cannot be permitted to acquire, deploy and normalize technologies that fundamentally alter the balance of power between individuals and the state.

If the police could track all movements, stop anyone on a whim, search and photo as they pleased, would we have less crime? Perhaps. But who would protect us from the criminals in uniform? And who would want to live in such an authoritarian state?

Written by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

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

All of this was done to protect the president. The threat to him, and to Air Force One, was sufficiently serious to pull off this extraordinary scheme. It sounds like a Hollywood pitch. But not. The New York Times actually spoke to the screenwriter of the film “Air Force One,” in which President Harrison Ford’s plane is hijacked. Andrew Marlowe had this to say: “Now real life isn’t a movie, but given the circumstances, I’m not sure I could ever script a moment like that for a heroic main character. If the threat were that great, it’s hard to imagine the audience rooting for any character who would trade his own safety by treating the remaining civilians onboard as potential sacrificial lambs, especially without their informed consent.”

That’s what’s been bothering me. If the threat to Air Force One was too great for the president, why wasn’t it too great for the senior officials and members of the news media who boarded the plane with him? Trump used them as decoys to protect himself. Yes, the Secret Service came up with the scheme, but the buck doesn’t stop there. It stops with the man who approved it and got on the catering truck, leaving the rest behind.

And then, when the danger had passed, they didn’t tell. When the need for secrecy has passed, why keep it a secret? Isn’t it relevant in evaluating this war that Trump has managed to get us into? Isn’t it relevant in evaluating Trump’s character? And put aside that he was on the old Air Force One, or at least he was supposed to be, not the new Qatari gift, because it will take time and money to bring it up to the old plane’s defensive capabilities. (But I’m sure it has more gold inside).

It was in the Kennedy campaign in 1980 that I first came across the concept of the “death watch” — which meant that the press “pool,” select representatives of the press corps, had to be with the senator even at closed events — just in case. That’s how the rotating pool works. Still does. The public has a right to know. At least it’s supposed to. As I understand it, no reporters traveled with the president.

When the news did break, the White House initially did not respond to the media’s requests for comment. On Tuesday night, Trump told reporters that he followed the advice of the Secret Service and rejected the notion that others were put in more danger than him.

“I think actually the plane that I flew on was at greater risk because that would be the plane I think that they would be more likely to go for.”

That makes no sense. The whole plan was premised on Air Force One being the target. Didn’t Trump understand whose lives he was risking? How could he not? That’s the problem with the movie version of this. You can’t have Harrison Ford playing a coward. What about Donald Trump?

Written by Susan Estrich