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.

Women lie.  Let me repeat, women lie like every other human.  You do not believe me?

Ask the Duke LaCrosse players from 2006.

Crystal Mangum, a former stripper and convicted murderer, accused three former Duke University lacrosse players — Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans — of raping her at a party.  The Duke students were exonerated, but where do they go to get their reputations back?

Radical liberal Democrat, Mike Nifong was disbarred after serving as the Durham County District Attorney in North Carolina. He was removed from his position, disbarred, and briefly jailed following court findings concerning his conduct in the Duke lacrosse rape hoax. Among other wrongdoings, he was found to have conspired with the DNA lab director to withhold exculpatory DNA evidence that would have exonerated the defendants

As Democrats are wont to do, he used the racial dynamics of the case to win reelection as District Attorney before he was removed from office.  The stripper was Black and the lacrosse players where white.

Ask current Supreme Court Justice, Brett Kavanaugh.  During his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Kavanaugh faced allegations of sexual misconduct from Christine Blasey Ford. After an extensive investigation, no corroborating evidence was found, and Kavanaugh was confirmed.

She was also found to be lying.  Again, where does Kavanaugh go to get his reputation back?

Ask current Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas.  I was personally involved in helping him win senate confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991.  My connection to this case was multifaceted.

I am from St. Louis and my then long-time senator, John Danforth was Thomas’ sponsor for the Supreme Court nomination made by former President George H.W. Bush, whom I worked for.

Thomas’ nomination came as a result of the retirement of the first Black Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall.

I had known Sen. Danforth since my high school days at Soldan High School.

Thomas was accused by radical liberal activist Anita Hill of sexual harassment, without evidence.  I had known Anita Hill since our days at Oral Roberts University.  Suffice it to say that she would have never won the “Miss Virtuous Award” on campus!

The way the Democrats handled and mishandled the myriad allegations surrounding former Maine U.S. Senate candidate is simply a continuation of the radical liberal playbook when it comes to women and alleged sexual misconduct.

What do all of Graham Platner’s accusers have in common? They all lied!!  None of them have produced any evidence of rape or assault.

It is a binary choice.  Either you have evidence or you do not!!!

An accusation is not evidence.  None of these women filed police reports, so therefore there was no rape!

Republicans and conservatives should tread lightly on this faux righteous indignation about this Platner situation.

Women DO NOT have a right to be believed.

If I am hanging out with my boys in my mancave discussing Platner, he is guilty as hell; but in the court of law it is not what you know, it is what you can prove!!!

Women do not have a right to be believed.  They have a right to be judged by a jury of their peers.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.

This is not the nineteen fifties where women were routinely ignored and told to sit down and shut up.  The balance of justice has shifted from ignoring women to every woman should be believed.  We must get back to the rule of law, not the rule of feelings.

Platner should not have been forced to remove his name from the ballot last week.  There is no evidence of wrongdoing by him towards these opportunistic woman who were seeking their proverbial fifteen minutes of fame.

Another fascinating angle to the Platner story is how Democrat organization refused to ask these opportunistic women any probing questions.  Democrat organizations like CNN, MS NOW, NPR, Politico, The New York Times, 60 Minutes, etc., never explored why these women came forward after years of keeping quiet.

Accuser Jenny Racicot stated, “One of the reasons I didn’t come forward sooner was, the huge moral conflict that I had between supporting his politics, but not supporting him as a person…I just want the truth out there. I just want people to have a whole scope of who he is as a person.”

So, let I get this straight, if Platner had decided to remain a private citizen and not seek public office, she would have taken her made-up story to her grave?

Accuser Lyndsey Fifield stated that part of why she kept quiet is because she agrees with Platner’s politics.

Her own words.  You cannot make this up!!!

I have a thousand dollars to anyone who can offer up one shred of evidence provided by any of Platner accusers that is admissible in a court of law.

To all the women out there who are going to send me all sorts of unhinged emotional rants in disagreement to this column; please sit down and shut up.

If something bad happens to you and you do not file a police report, then it never happened.  So, do not wait for your fifteen minutes of fame opportunity and expect an outpouring of support from the public because it is not going to happen.

Stop letting the radical liberal Democrat Party and their media sycophants continue to use you for their political gain.

If you do not report your allegation to law enforcement in real time, please do not report them in the court of public opinion and expect to find a sympathetic ear.

You women should never be believed, but rather you should be given an opportunity to submit your evidence and let the legal process sort out your allegations.

You women claim you want fairness and equality.  Now you have it.

Staff Writer; Raynard Jackson

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

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

He said it plain opening night, and the line has been rattling around my skull ever since. The record that sold 43,000 copies its first week had just filled 45,000 seats, and culture always wins. Chew on that one. Reasonable Doubt did not kick the door down back in ’96. It seeped in slow, moved hand to hand, got quoted in the barbershop and studied like scripture by folks who understood what they were holding. Three decades later the same body of work sold out a ballpark. Nothing about that is luck. That is what a real songbook does once you give it a little time.

Hov did not throw a regular concert either. He built a trilogy. Friday belonged to Reasonable Doubt turning thirty. Saturday honored The Blueprint at twenty five. Then Sunday, billed as Extra Innings, turned loose a decades deep run through the whole discography. Think on the nerve that takes. Half the artists walking around today could not hold a crowd for one honest hour with material people actually want performed front to back. Brooklyn’s own gave entire evenings to single projects, and he could do it because those projects still stand up beat for beat, verse for verse, all these years down the line.

Now set that next to how the game runs today. It spins on the feed. A snippet catches a little fire on the app, fifteen seconds get looped a few million times, and for about a month some young fella is the hottest thing walking the planet. Then the trend rolls on and the numbers scatter like roaches when the kitchen light flips on. I am not knocking anybody’s come up. Go get your money. But ask yourself honest who in this new crop is making something a grown man will pay real dollars to hear performed live in the year 2056. That is a whole different question, and the honest answer thins the room out quick.

Saturday is where the argument got its loudest witness. That night belonged to The Blueprint, and you need the context to feel the weight of what happened. The entire record, front to back, carries exactly one guest feature. One. In a time when a rapper will cram eight features onto a project just to juice the streaming counts and borrow somebody else’s audience, Jigga built a stone classic and handed the microphone to precisely one outsider. That outsider was Eminem, on “Renegade,” and Saturday he walked back out to run it live for the first time in nearly sixteen years.

If you know the history, you know why the place nearly came apart. Slim Shady did not simply rap on that song. He produced it, wrote his two verses, and cut so sharp that Nas built a whole bar in “Ether” around the claim that Em had murdered Hov on his own record. People have been arguing that point in comment sections and cyphers for going on twenty five years now. So when the two of them stood up there together in the Bronx and ran it back, it was not some nostalgia routine. It was two grown legends leaning into a debate that never needed a winner, since both men already came out rich and revered. Em snatched the mic when they finished and hollered for the crowd to make noise for one of the greatest to ever touch a microphone, then wrapped Jay up in a hug. And he did not leave. He stayed out there and detonated “Lose Yourself,” the anthem that carried him out of a trailer and onto an Oscar stage. Two bodies of work colliding on one field. Neither one built for a fifteen second clip. Both built to outlive every soul still arguing about them.

That is the entire thesis in a single number. Blueprint had one feature. One. And that one feature still packs a stadium a quarter century on, because the album was made to be lived with, not skimmed past.

Sunday, the night they called Extra Innings, is where the case closed itself, and Rihanna was the exclamation mark. Rewind the tape a ways. Back in the mid 2000s, when Carter was running Def Jam as its president, a teenager from Barbados walked into that building, auditioned for him, and signed with the label after hours of negotiations. He heard it. The same ear that built his own catalog pointed itself at somebody else, and it grew into one of the largest careers this century has produced. So when she strolled out Sunday, it was not just a guest spot. It was the seed and the tree standing on the same stage.

And understand what it took to get her there. She does not do this anymore. She has been off building a beauty empire and raising her babies, and she had not given a public performance in this country since the 2023 Academy Awards. Rusty, she called herself, laughing about it. Then she slid onto the hook of “Run This Town” like not a single day had passed, ran clean through her own “Bitch Better Have My Money,” and told the crowd how bad she had missed it. The whole place lost its mind. You do not coax somebody that far out of hiding for a viral snippet. You do it for a man whose work laid part of the ground you are standing on.

That right there is the thing about a real catalog. It does not only fill seats. It builds people. It launches careers, cuts checks for decades, and pulls the folks it lifted back out of the shadows when it is time to stand up and be counted. The feed cannot do that. An algorithm never signed a teenager and turned her into Rihanna.

Even the smaller surprises spoke the same tongue. Slick Rick strolled out Saturday and gave them “Children’s Story,” and if you were paying attention you caught the thread he was pulling. Long before hooks got chopped down for the app, the Ruler was building whole films inside a single verse, beginning, middle, body count, and a moral at the end. Hov studied at that man’s feet, and a good half of what makes his best work stick to your ribs is that he can actually tell you a story, set a scene, make you see the block breathing. Standing Rick up there was Jigga nodding straight at the root of the tree.

Run the rest of the names and the message only swells. Nas, the old enemy, sharing a stage instead of trading rounds. Beyoncé and their girl Blue Ivy. Alicia Keys. Pharrell pulling Clipse out with him. Usher, Jeezy who reportedly scrapped a Vegas date to fly in, Swizz Beatz, Jermaine Dupri, Teyana Taylor, Fat Joe, Jadakiss. These were surprise guests, not announced opening acts. People rearranged their own livelihoods to stand beside the man for a verse or two. When your work commands that kind of respect three decades in, you are not a hitmaker anymore. You are an institution.

And the ugliest stretch of the weekend ended up making the cleanest point of all. Sunday’s show got shoved back the better part of four hours after hundreds of people with no tickets rushed the entrances and forced the venue into a full lockdown. Jay-Z later said roughly ten thousand people were still outside after the gates closed. Sit with what that means. Thousands of folks stood outside in the dark with no way in, just trying to breathe the same air as it. Nobody storms a gate over a trending snippet. They do that for songs that scored a first heartbreak, a first set of car keys, a grandmother’s repast. The app can rent you attention by the hour. Only the work earns you devotion cut that deep.

Down here where I was raised, we know this in the bone. The music that lasts in the South, the stuff still knocking out of trunks a decade on, screwed and slowed, spun at the cookout and the funeral both, is always something somebody built with real care. Never the flavor of a random Tuesday. A hit fades out like a station going out of range on the interstate. A great record becomes furniture in your actual life. You keep it. You hand it down to your children.

So here is what the man reminded everybody packed into that ballpark until three in the morning. Those numbers on the app are weather. They swing by the hour and not a soul remembers last week’s forecast. A real body of work is climate. It shapes a whole region for a generation and then the one coming up behind it. He proved a fella can go near silent for the better part of ten years and still shut down his own hometown off the pure strength of what he already made, because he made it to last. And with his wife buzzing his hair to open the weekend and Pharrell telling the crowd he had his helmet on and was heading back to work, it surely sounds like Jigga is about to stack another chapter on the pile.

The young cats out here manufacturing one viral flash after another would be wise to write this down somewhere they will not lose it. Flashes come cheap now. Anybody with a phone and a lucky week can grab one. What separates a legend from a trending topic is whether people are still paying good money to hear you long after the app that raised you is dead and buried and forgotten. Eminem did not fly in for a snippet. Rihanna did not come out of hiding for the feed. They showed up for a catalog. Culture always wins, Shawn Carter said it plain, then spent three nights in the Bronx showing every last person exactly what those words meant.

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.

My cousin, like Wells, allegedly died from drowning. His body was found near the Horn Island in Gulf Coast waters. Officials quickly ruled his death accidental. However, many of my family members weren’t convinced. He was known to be an excellent swimmer. But the greatest reason for doubt was that he had gone on his swimming outing with a group of whites he knew. None of them were injured. It wasn’t clear at the time just how promptly his associates had reported his death, or worse.

This certainly did not prove that my cousin was the victim of foul play. Nor that the perpetrators were his white companions. But it was more than enough to create doubt and suspicion about his death.

The controversy over Wells’s death is a near pitch perfect carbon copy of the same grim, and doubtful scenario that shadowed my cousin’s death. It’s also the same one that has fueled the controversy over the deaths of more than a few other young Blacks in recent years. All of them died under seemingly murky circumstances. Nearly a dozen of these deaths have drawn intense, but brief media and public attention—and questioning.

They had several things in common. They were young African Americans. They stirred intense speculation and anger that their deaths were anything but accidental. They put officials on the spot to prove that there was no foul play. In each case authorities ultimately ruled their deaths as either accidental or self-inflicted. Their parents and relatives had no choice but to accept the official ruling that the deaths were anything other than accidental.

It’s precisely because of these circumstances that many Blacks have loudly cried foul about Wells. They are convinced that officials are covering up a murder.

It’s hard to say how many more official probes it will take before the parents of Wells believe that their son’s death was a horrid accident. They have hired a prominent attorney to raise questions. Several notables including former NFL star Colin Kaepernick are bankrolling the independent autopsy the family authorized. A bevy of civil rights activists have demanded answers. Legions of Blacks and others have burned up social media outlets charging cover-up and foul play in his death. They will never buy the at least initial response from officials of “no evidence of foul play.”

Once the dust settles Well’s death may indeed prove to be accidental. But that still won’t alter the painful reasons many say it isn’t. I say painful because of three things that weigh heavily on me and can never be erased.

The first as mentioned is the drowning death of my cousin under still questionable circumstances. He did not have attorneys, civil rights activists, and thousands of Blacks demanding answers to the cause of his death. Officials quickly closed the case. It wasn’t said but, in that era, it was just routinely considered just another Black life gone and nothing special about it.

The second is the current Trump fueled polarized racial climate. The ongoing assault on DEI, racial profiling, continuing dubious police shootings of young Blacks and Hispanics, and the grotesque racial disparities in the prison and criminal justice system. Many Blacks are firmly convinced that they are under sustained, venomous racial assault.

The third reason is the savage racial history of Mississippi toward Blacks. It was the runaway leader for decades in lynchings, assaults, bombings, and imprisoning of Blacks, especially young Black males. In nearly all cases, officials either turned a blind eye toward the violence or gave it the most cursory look and then a shrug off. That tortured history is still fresh in the minds of many Blacks.

The parents of Wells demand and deserve a thorough, impartial and most importantly honest investigation into his death. Unlike him, my cousin never had that luxury. That’s why to this day my family members remain unconvinced about the cause of his death. The clamor over Wells death shows that other Blacks will always have the same feeling that something just wasn’t right about how their loved ones died.

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).

Let me tell you what got me thinking about it again. I was in the break room at work a few weeks back, standing there waiting on the microwave, and a younger brother at the table hadn’t looked up from his phone since he sat down. Thumb moving. Thumb moving. Every few seconds his face changed a little. Something funny, then something that irritated him, then something that got him hyped, then a clip of some guy in a podcast studio explaining what women want, what the government is hiding, and why the market is going to crash by Friday. Whole lunch hour, gone like that. When he finally opened his mouth, he told the room exactly what was wrong with the economy, and he said it the way a man says something he’s studied. He hadn’t studied a thing. He’d been fed.

Now I’m not about to sit here acting holy, because I’ve been him. I’ve killed entire evenings on my phone while a stack of hardcovers sat on the nightstand collecting dust and quiet judgment. That’s the trap right there. It doesn’t feel like laziness. It feels like being plugged in. You close the app convinced you learned something, when really you just swallowed a hundred pieces of other men’s conclusions without ever seeing how they got there.

Here’s the difference nobody bothers to explain to us. Your feed will tell you what happened. Tells you fast, tells you loud, wraps it in music and a stitched reaction and big bold letters across the screen. What it almost never gives you is why. Nobody in your timeline sits you down and explains how the neighborhood your granddaddy bought into is suddenly worth four times what he paid, while his grandson can’t get approved two streets over. Nobody walks you through how the same policy comes back around under a new name every twenty years, or how a man works steady for thirty of them and still retires with nothing. That kind of answer doesn’t fit in fifteen seconds. It lives in chapters. It lives in the long boring middle that makes you set the thing down and stare at the ceiling awhile.

The staring at the ceiling is the whole point.

Attention works a lot like a muscle, and most of us haven’t trained ours since high school. I know brothers who can bench two twenty five and can’t sit with one argument for thirty straight minutes. We’re strong everywhere except the one place somebody’s actively working to take advantage of us.

Because that’s what this really comes down to. Not culture. Not being fancy or respectable. Money, power, and who gets to tell you what’s real.

Ask yourself who profits when you can’t concentrate. The predatory lender does. So does the finance office at the dealership, every time a man signs paperwork he only skimmed. That crypto boy in your DMs with the rented Lambo is counting on it. So is the politician who needs your anger this season and your silence the next. Throw in the influencer selling a mindset course while you’re at it. Every last one of them wants the same thing out of you, which is a reaction instead of an examination. A man who’s used to sitting with hard text gets a lot harder to work. He starts catching it when an argument’s got nothing underneath it, and after a while he can hear the difference between somebody who knows a thing and somebody who’s just performing knowing. That doesn’t come from watching more clips. It comes from pages.

Now let me say the part that stops most brothers before they ever start.

Nobody’s asking you to knock out fifty books this year. All that challenge talk is fine for folks who already love the habit, but for a working man with kids, a commute, a side hustle, and a body that hurts in three new places, a goal that big is just failure with a calendar attached. I’ve watched grown men buy a beautiful hardcover, get eleven pages in, feel guilty about it for two months, then start avoiding the whole subject like it owed them money.

So make the bar low enough that quitting would embarrass you.

Ten pages a day. That’s it. Ten while the coffee brews, or in the truck before you clock in, or in the fifteen quiet minutes after the house finally settles. Ten a day adds up to 3,650 pages a year, which could land you somewhere between ten and seventeen books depending on what you choose, without ever once feeling heroic about it.

Can’t sit still? Run audio. Some brothers turn their nose up at that and I think they’re being silly. Your commute is dead time. So’s the treadmill, so’s cutting the grass. Fill it. I’ve gotten through more history in traffic than I ever did in a recliner, and nobody’s grading you on posture.

And if even that’s too much where you are right now, then give yourself one every two months. Six a year. Six ain’t nothing. Six good ones, picked on purpose, will carry a man further than three hundred hours of scrolling ever could.

Now, what to pick, and this is where we overthink it worse than anywhere else.

It doesn’t have to be heavy. Nobody said your first one in fifteen years has to be political theory. Start where your interest already lives. If music’s your thing, there are whole volumes about the men who built the sound you came up on and the money that got taken from them. If it’s ball, read about the leagues before the leagues, or the front office moves that shaped the team you’ve been hollering at since you were twelve. Cars, war, cooking, boxing, the church, science fiction, whatever it is. Somebody wrote a serious one about the thing you already talk about for hours.

The subject isn’t the point at first. The stamina is. You’re proving to yourself that you can hold a long thought without your hand crawling toward your pocket, and any decent title will teach you that much.

Once you’ve got the habit though, here are four I’d hand my own son, my nephews, and about half the men I came up with.

Start with The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley. Everybody thinks they know this one because they’ve seen the poster and heard the quotes. Very few have actually sat with it. What’s inside isn’t a slogan. It’s a man remaking himself over and over, teaching himself to think in a prison library with a dictionary, and then finding the nerve to change his mind out loud at the exact moment it cost him the most. That last part is the lesson. Certainty is cheap. Revision takes spine.

Next, Black Boy by Richard Wright. Hard reading, in the best way. Wright shows you what it does to a young man’s insides when the world keeps insisting he stay small, and what it costs him to refuse. There’s a hunger in that memoir that goes way past food. I came to it late, in my thirties, and I was angry for a week after. Good. Some anger clarifies things.

Both of those, by the way, appear on the Schomburg Center’s 2026 100 Black Voices Centennial Reading List, sitting alongside fiction, memoirs, poetry, political history, and other work about Black life. That matters. It tells you these aren’t sentimental picks. They’re load bearing.

From there, get your history straight with Black AF History: The Un Whitewashed Story of America by Michael Harriot. Funny, sharp, and thoroughly researched, which is a rare combination. He tells the American story the way the receipts tell it. You’ll laugh, and two paragraphs later you’ll stop laughing, and that whiplash is what learning the truth actually feels like.

Then handle the money, because the money is where they get us. The Black Tax: The Cost of Being Black in America by Shawn D. Rochester lays out in plain numbers what discrimination has cost us over generations and what it’s meant for our ability to build anything and keep it. It isn’t a hype book. It’s arithmetic. Sit with the arithmetic.

Four titles. Two on what pressure does to a man, one on the record nobody taught you, one on the money. Add whatever you actually enjoy and you’ve got yourself a year of real education for often less than a weekend out costs.

I’m not telling you to delete your apps. I still laugh at the same foolishness you laugh at. But there’s a difference between eating and being fed, and a grown man ought to know which one he’s doing.

The goal was never to become the brother quoting books at the cookout. It’s to be harder to fool. Harder to sell. Harder to steer. To sit across from a man who wants something from you and hear the hollow spot in what he’s saying.

Put ten pages between you and the algorithm today. Do it again tomorrow.

Staff Writer; Mark Brooks

This brother writes about faith, money, brotherhood, and the real work of being a man from one day to the next… He keeps it plain, with his attention on home, community, and helping brothers do a little better…

Contact him at MarkB@ThyBlackMan.com.

The trouble is not treatment alone. Access matters. Insurance matters. The distance between a man and a good hospital matters. Delayed treatment and unequal care matter. So does the calendar we have quietly agreed to use, because that calendar was not necessarily drawn with us in mind.

Ask a healthy man in his forties about prostate cancer screening and you will usually get a wave of the hand. No symptoms, no problem. Blood pressure might be a little high, sure, but nothing worth making an appointment over. That prostate business belongs to older men. Retirement stuff. Something to think about after the grandkids come.

That belief is costing us.

For decades, the number fifty floated around as the unofficial starting line. It stuck because it was simple and because much of the major trial evidence involved men who were fifty or older and considered at average risk. Those studies gave doctors useful information. PSA screening can help detect cancer before it spreads and can produce a modest reduction in deaths from the disease over time. Useful information, certainly. It just was not built around the timeline Black men face.

Here is what newer evidence says, and it is worth sitting with. Research reviewed by the Prostate Cancer Foundation suggests the disease develops in Black men three to nine years earlier than it does in non Black men. Read that again. Three to nine years. Waiting until fifty simply because that is the age we have heard most often may not be arriving on time, and for some brothers it could mean arriving after the tumor received a head start nobody agreed to give it.

In 2024, the Prostate Cancer Foundation brought together primary care doctors, urologists, oncologists, researchers, specialists in health disparities, and Black patient advocates. The group reviewed nearly two thousand publications before narrowing the evidence to the studies most relevant to screening Black men. Their recommendation was clear. Black men who choose screening should consider receiving a baseline PSA test between the ages of forty and forty five, and depending on that first result and the man’s overall health, annual testing should be seriously considered.

The modeling behind the recommendation was not a shrug either. Lowering the age of the baseline PSA test from fifty or fifty five to somewhere between forty and forty five, followed by risk based screening through about age seventy, could reduce prostate cancer deaths among Black men by roughly thirty percent in relative terms without substantially increasing unnecessary diagnoses. Thirty percent. That is somebody’s father still sitting in the recliner on Thanksgiving.

That position has since received broader support. The American Urological Association’s 2026 guideline says clinicians should offer prostate cancer screening beginning between forty and forty five for people at increased risk, including men with Black ancestry, a strong family history, or certain inherited genetic variants. Not every medical organization draws the line at the exact same age. The American Cancer Society currently recommends that Black men begin the screening conversation at forty five, while the Prostate Cancer Foundation and the American Urological Association support beginning between forty and forty five. That difference should not become another excuse to wait until fifty without saying a word, because the central message is the same. Black men should be having the conversation earlier than average risk men.

Understand what this guidance actually asks of you, because the rumor mill will twist it into something scarier than it is. Nobody is saying every brother who turns forty must rush to a clinic and submit to a needle. The recommendation is built around shared decision making, which is a formal way of saying you learn what the test can and cannot tell you, talk it through with somebody who understands medicine, and then make a choice. The PSA test is a blood test and is considered the first line of screening. Some doctors may offer a digital rectal examination as an additional tool, but the physical examination is not the whole screening process and does not automatically come first. A conversation is not a procedure. It asks for a little time and perhaps a little pride.

Pride is part of what we are fighting here, if we are being honest with one another. Ask around and you will hear the same jokes in every barbershop, locker room, family cookout, and group chat. Men laughing about the glove. Men acting as though getting a blood test somehow threatens their manhood. Brothers who will let a toothache rot for a year rather than admit something feels wrong. Under the humor sits real fear, and beneath that fear sits real history.

Nobody has to explain why a Black man might look sideways at a hospital or question whether a doctor is listening to him. That distrust was earned honestly. The United States Public Health Service study in Macon County, Alabama, ran from 1932 until 1972. The Black men involved were not given informed consent, and researchers failed to offer treatment even after effective treatment became widely available. We did not imagine that history, and our families did not invent it.

Still, there is a cruel irony in allowing that memory to keep us out of the examination room now. The thing placing brothers in danger today is not a secret experiment. It is silence. It is delayed care. It is the man who never had his PSA number checked, walking around with a tumor that might have been found while it was still small, quiet, and treatable.

Look at where we stand. Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among Black men in the United States, accounting for about forty four percent of expected cancer diagnoses among us, and approximately one in six Black men will receive the diagnosis during his lifetime. Our incidence rate is about sixty seven percent higher than the rate among White men, and we die from the disease at more than twice their rate.

Those numbers are not the product of biology alone. Access to screening, insurance coverage, delayed treatment, environmental conditions, trust, communication, the quality of the hospital, and whether a doctor takes a man’s concerns seriously can all influence what happens. Black men have shown comparable and sometimes better prostate cancer survival when receiving care within equal access health systems, yet research has also found that we can be less likely to receive definitive treatment. That tells us something important. The disparity is not destiny. Care matters. Timing matters. Treatment matters.

There is another trend worth naming. Advanced cases are climbing again. Nationally, diagnoses of prostate cancer that has already spread beyond the gland have been increasing across every age group, and among men younger than fifty five, distant stage diagnoses have been rising by nearly three percent per year. Younger than fifty five. The disease is not politely waiting for retirement parties. Meanwhile, the decline in prostate cancer deaths that the country celebrated during the nineteen nineties and two thousands has slowed from about three or four percent per year to roughly six tenths of one percent annually over the past decade, and researchers believe the increase in advanced diagnoses is partly connected to years when routine screening was discouraged and fewer men were tested.

What actually happens when you begin the conversation? Usually, it starts with a vial of blood. The test measures prostate specific antigen, a protein produced by the prostate, and a PSA result cannot diagnose cancer by itself. The number can rise because of cancer, but it may also increase because of an enlarged prostate, inflammation, infection, certain medical procedures, recent ejaculation, or even vigorous cycling. There is no single number that separates every healthy prostate from every cancerous one.

A baseline test between forty and forty five can do two things. It can identify an unusual result that deserves attention, and it can give your doctor an early reference point for future testing. The timing of the next test depends on your PSA level, age, family history, overall health, personal preferences, and the screening plan you develop with your doctor. It should not be reduced to one schedule for every man.

If the first PSA result comes back elevated, that still does not mean cancer. A doctor may recommend repeating the blood test after several weeks or months to confirm the result, depending on the PSA level and whether an infection, recent procedure, or another temporary factor could have affected it. If the level remains high or continues climbing, the next step might include another blood or urine test, a physical examination, an MRI, continued observation, or a biopsy. An elevated PSA does not automatically send you to an operating table, and even a prostate cancer diagnosis does not automatically mean surgery or radiation.

Many men with slow growing, low risk disease are managed through active surveillance, meaning the cancer is monitored carefully with PSA tests, examinations, imaging, and sometimes repeat biopsies, with treatment beginning if testing shows the disease is changing. Active surveillance is not ignoring cancer. It is a medical plan designed to protect a man from unnecessary treatment and its possible urinary, bowel, and sexual side effects while still watching the disease closely. Knowledge does not obligate you to choose one treatment. It removes the blindfold and gives you choices.

Family history sharpens every part of this discussion. If your father, brother, or son had prostate cancer, especially at a younger age, your own risk may be higher, and certain inherited genetic variants, including changes involving BRCA1, BRCA2, and genes connected to Lynch syndrome, can also raise concern. The Prostate Cancer Foundation says Black men with a strong family history or known high risk genetic variants should consider annual PSA screening as early as forty.

That means the first step may not happen in a clinic. It might begin with calling your uncle. Ask your mother what her brothers were diagnosed with. Ask why your grandfather kept going back and forth to the hospital. Ask whether the relative everybody said died of old age had cancer nobody wanted to name. A lot of us grew up in homes where sickness was handled behind a closed bedroom door. Adults lowered their voices. Children were told not to worry. Nobody said the diagnosis out loud, and now some grown men are walking around without half of their own medical history. Go get it. Write it down. Bring it to your next appointment.

Let us also be plain about the message, because it can be distorted in either direction. This is not a warning that every Black man at forty is a ticking clock. Most men in their early forties do not have prostate cancer. Fear does not save lives, and it often makes people avoid doctors even harder. The evidence says something quieter and more practical. Our risk can arrive earlier, so our questions should arrive earlier too. The conversation belongs somewhere between forty and forty five, not after symptoms appear, and it belongs in the same discussion as blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, colon health, and everything else a grown man has to manage.

Bring it up at the next physical. Bring it up with your barber, your pastor, your line brothers, your coworkers, and the men in your fantasy league. Say the words prostate cancer out loud at the dinner table so your sons hear them and grow up understanding that taking care of their bodies is not embarrassing. It is simply part of being an adult. The people who love you would rather sit through an awkward five minute conversation now than sit through a funeral later, and they mean it.

Forty is not too young for the conversation. It might be exactly on time.

Staff Writer; Mark Brooks

This brother writes about faith, money, brotherhood, and the real work of being a man from one day to the next… He keeps it plain, with his attention on home, community, and helping brothers do a little better…

Contact him at MarkB@ThyBlackMan.com.

My cousin Reggie turned forty eight in March. He came to his own party in a basketball jersey with another man’s name across the back, pulled over an extra large Ralph Lauren polo on a body that has been a medium since Clinton was in office. Not vintage. Not ironic. Bought brand new, both pieces. The fitted cap sat stiff as cardboard, brim flat, the sticker still shining on the side, never once peeled. His wife smiled the way a woman smiles when she surrendered that argument a decade ago.

I didn’t say a word. I ate, laughed at the stories we always tell, and drove home. But the whole ride down 85 I kept thinking about how many of us are walking around dressed as a photograph of somebody we used to be.

You know the look. Maybe you are the look. Jeans pooling at the ankle because they were bought for a silhouette that stopped making sense fifteen years ago. A hoodie big enough to smuggle groceries. Nike Air Force 1s so white they announce you before your voice does. Underneath all that fabric is a grown man with a mortgage, a bad knee, a daughter in her second year at NC A&T (HBCU pride), and a job where people call him sir.

Before you get hot, understand this is not an argument for khakis. I am not asking you to go quietly into some beige retirement of the spirit. But the clothes you keep reaching for are not neutral. They are a message, and the one a lot of us are sending, without ever meaning to, is that we are still negotiating with a man who left the building a long time ago.

The oversized fit was never only about fashion. For some of us, it also felt like protection. Baggy meant you couldn’t be read too easily. Baggy meant your body stayed your own business. It meant hand me downs, or a mama buying two sizes up so you could grow into them whether you wanted to or not. There was love in that, and survival too. But the armor never came off, and now brothers in their fifties are dressed for a fight nobody is trying to have with them.

We get permission to stay stuck, too, from the men modeling manhood on our screens. Many of the rappers we came up on are pushing fifty, well into their fifties, or closing in on sixty, still wearing versions of the same uniform they wore when we were in high school. Grandfathers in skinny jeans. Men with grown children hopping around a stage in shorts and a chain heavy enough to require a chiropractor.

Understand the business they are in, though. Those men are selling a memory. Their livelihood depends on you and me staring up there and feeling nineteen again, because nineteen is what we bought the ticket for. It is a costume with a payroll behind it, propped up by a trainer, a surgeon, and a lighting man who knows where to stand. Nobody is paying you to stay frozen. No tour, no camera, no crowd chanting for the man you were in 1998. What you have is a whole life you built, and it deserves to be dressed like it happened.

The hair tells on us worse than the clothes. Too many good men sit in that chair and ask the barber to draw a line where the hairline used to live. Half an inch of another man’s youth sharpied on, sitting up there like a fence around an empty lot. Everybody sees it. The barber takes your money on account of his light bill. Coworkers say nothing because they are polite. Your kids see it too, and they are cracking up in the group chat.

Same with the dye. A flat black beard against a face that has clearly done some living never once read as young to anybody. It reads as anxious. No woman alive ever saw a shoe polish beard and thought, my goodness, look at that vitality.

The gray is not your enemy. The gray is the receipt. Two recessions, a divorce maybe, a parent you buried, a child you raised, a pile of mornings when you got up and went anyway. And you want to cover that? Man, wear it. Let it come in silver at the temples and watch how rooms respond to you.

Now the practical part, where most of us are losing without knowing we’re in a game. Fit is not size. Size is a number printed inside a collar by a company that has never met you. Fit is how cloth relates to your actual shoulders, your actual chest, that stomach you have been meaning to address since 2019. A man in a thirty dollar shirt that fits beats a man in a two hundred dollar shirt that doesn’t, in every room, on every day of the week.

The tailor is the cheat code and hardly anybody in our circle uses him. Depending on the garment and where you live, a basic hem might cost twenty or thirty dollars. Taking in a waist may cost a little more, but either alteration can completely change how the clothes sit on your body. I have watched brothers keep a fresh pair of Air Force 1s coming every couple of months, box after box, toothbrush and cleaner on the kitchen counter, then refuse to spend a little money getting a blazer to close over their chest.

And listen, I understand the pull. There is grief in that closet. Those clothes are evidence that you were twenty six once, that your knees worked, that women watched you cross a room in a way you have not felt in years. Bagging it up for Goodwill feels like admitting something.

But you are not admitting defeat. You are admitting arrival. The difference between those two is enormous.

Think about the men we came up under. My granddaddy worked a loading dock and owned two suits, a gray and a navy, both pressed, both fitting him like the fabric had been grown on his body. He put on a hat to go to the store. Not a cap. A hat. He was not rich, not educated, not what anybody would call handsome. But when that man walked into a room, people rearranged themselves around him. Looking young never crossed his mind. He was trying to look like a man who had somewhere to be and somebody depending on him, which is exactly what he was.

That is what we lost. Not style, we have plenty of that. What went missing was the idea that growing older is itself a look, carrying its own authority. Somewhere we decided the only options after thirty five were to freeze the clock or disappear into a polo shirt, and neither one is living.

So start with clothes that admit you have a body instead of pretending otherwise. Cut close enough to show a shape, easy enough to breathe in. Own fewer things and let them be better made. Three pairs of pants you love will beat nine you tolerate. Learn what certain colors do against your skin. Buy a real coat. Shine your shoes, or pay a man to do it while you read the paper at your leisure.

None of this requires erasing where you came from. Keep a piece or two from the old days. The jersey your uncle gave you can stay in the rotation. Wear it to the cookout. Just not to your daughter’s graduation, and never because you are scared of what’s standing underneath it.

Here is the part nobody told us growing up, so let me say it plainly. It is okay to want to look good. A man is allowed to enjoy the sight of himself in a mirror. Somewhere in the water we drank, vanity got confused with softness, and brothers started treating pride in their appearance as something to apologize for or hide behind a joke.

Ask yourself who benefits from that.

Take the extra ten minutes. Iron the shirt. Buy the cologne you keep smelling on other men and putting back on the shelf. Catch your reflection in a storefront window and think, alright now. That is not arrogance. That is a man on good terms with himself, and it shows up in how you walk into a meeting, how you greet your neighbor, how your wife looks at you across a table she assumed would be an ordinary Tuesday. Your children read it too. They learn what a grown man thinks he is worth by watching what he puts on his back.

Consider what you came through. Rooms full of people who underestimated you. Years that would have folded a lesser man. All of it lives in your face now, in your walk, in a way of speaking that took thirty years to earn. Put on something that agrees with that.

The young man you were is not gone. He is just done leading. Let him ride in the passenger seat where he belongs, and get behind the wheel looking like the man you actually became.

Staff Writer; Mark Brooks

This brother writes about faith, money, brotherhood, and the real work of being a man from one day to the next… He keeps it plain, with his attention on home, community, and helping brothers do a little better…

Contact him at MarkB@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.