Right now she is one of the early frontrunners. As of August 18, Kalshi and Polymarket, the two big prediction markets, both had her out front for the Democratic nomination. A University of New Hampshire poll released in July put her at 22 percent, just ahead of Pete Buttigieg at 21 percent. And when reporters push her on whether she is running, she does not shut the door anymore. AOC calls the support humbling while insisting her focus for now is on the midterms. You have heard that dance before.

Here is the thing about being progressive and young and good on camera. None of it pays a light bill in Baltimore or fixes a school in Jackson. Those are vibes. Vibes are not policy. A whole generation of us learned that lesson watching politicians promise the moon every four years, snap the picture at the Black church, then vanish until the next cycle. Charles Barkley put it about as bluntly as anybody. He said Democrats only seem to care about Black people every four years, when they want the vote. He was not wrong to raise the question.

So before anybody fits AOC for a crown, let us look at the record with clear eyes.

Start with where she comes from. Her seat is New York’s 14th, running across the Bronx and a piece of Queens. Working class. Immigrant heavy. According to 2024 American Community Survey estimates, the district is about 53 percent Hispanic and 13 percent Black. That is not a knock on her. It is context. She built her career representing a heavily Latino and immigrant district, and by most accounts she has done right by the people who keep sending her back to Washington. But representing a district that is roughly one part in eight Black is a different thing from a career spent primarily answering to Black voters, and nobody should pretend otherwise.

Then there is the accent. This one stung a lot of people, and the criticism keeps resurfacing. Down in Memphis this summer she showed up to stump for a candidate and conservative critics accused her of slipping into a Southern, churchy cadence. Similar accusations followed her appearance at the National Action Network convention back in 2019, when critics said she had put on a drawl for a predominantly Black audience. Her answer back then was that she was born and raised in the Bronx, that she talks like it when she gets fired up, and that people who grow up navigating different linguistic environments understand what is happening. Maybe so. But when a Puerto Rican woman from New York sounds noticeably different in front of certain audiences, grown people are going to notice and make up their own minds about whether it feels natural or performed. And performance is exactly what Barkley was warning us about.

There was also the reparations business, and a BET commentary took her to task over it years ago. AOC waded into the question of who even counts as Black in America while answering a reparations question, tangling up the definition into something the writer argued erased the very folks the fight was supposed to be for. That is not a small thing to fumble. This past spring she said on Ilana Glazer’s podcast, while talking about the civil rights and voting rights movements, that Black Americans “really created democracy in this country.” Glazer agreed. I understand the sentiment behind it. Black Americans forced this nation to expand the meaning of democracy in ways its founders never intended. But history deserves precision. At the founding, slavery was embedded in American life, most Black people in the country were enslaved, and free Black communities also existed while being denied anything close to equal citizenship. What our people did across generations was force this country, through struggle and buried bodies, to live closer to words other men had written without us fully in mind. Getting that history soft and flattering does us no favors. It tells me she reached for the applause line when the fuller truth was stronger.

Now let me be fair, because fair is the whole point. To her credit she has backed reparations study. AOC is a cosponsor of H.R. 40, legislation that would establish a federal commission to examine the legacy of slavery and develop reparations proposals for descendants of enslaved African Americans. During the pandemic she also argued that COVID relief should be drafted through a lens of reparations because Black and brown communities were being hit disproportionately hard. On paper her platform lines up with plenty of what our community says it wants. I am not calling the woman an enemy. My point is that platform language comes cheap and specifics come dear, and the specifics are what I want.

We have been here before, and history ought to teach us something. Think about who actually moved the needle. Shirley Chisholm never asked anybody to trust a vibe. Unbought and Unbossed was the whole pitch, and she dared the party to catch up when she ran for president in 1972. Barbara Jordan? During Watergate that woman stood up in front of the entire country and made the Constitution ring like a bell, just her voice and her spine. Then Jesse Jackson ran twice, built the Rainbow Coalition, and used those campaigns to push the Democratic Party toward proportional delegate rules that gave insurgent candidates and Black voters more leverage. None of them inherited a thing. They earned the room by grinding for it, and not one of them got there just by being the loudest voice against the other side.

That is the standard. It is not charisma. A viral clip stomping on JD Vance does not cut it either, and neither does being the anti Trump the internet keeps asking for. The standard is a question. What specifically are you bringing to our table? Name the policy. Give the timeline. Tell us what you will spend your capital on when the honeymoon ends and the hard trading starts, because that is when you find out who a politician really is.

Some folks will read this and say I am being too hard on a young woman who is on our side. I hear that. But going easy is how we got taken for granted in the first place. Loyalty that costs nothing to earn is loyalty nobody respects. If AOC wants one of the most dependable voting blocs the Democratic Party has long counted on, she can come get it the honest way, by making a case and keeping receipts.

2028 is a long way off. AOC may run for president. Or she may aim at Chuck Schumer’s Senate seat instead. She has publicly left both possibilities open. Either way, the smart move for Black voters is the same one my uncle preached on that porch. Keep your hand on your wallet, smile back, and say show me. Not because she is the enemy. Because that is how you make sure the person asking for your trust actually plans to earn it.

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

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

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

His murder came close on the heels of a spate of murders in Compton. And in the days in between several other murders were reported in South L.A. They all have one thing in common. The victims were Black and almost certainly their killers were other Blacks. This touched off yet another round of soul searching among many Blacks as to why murder continues to be a chronic plague in far too many Black communities.

The hand wringing over this deadly problem is even more troubling given that the overall murder rate for the nation has plunged in the past decade. L.A. is no exception. According to LAPD reports, the number of murders in 2025 dropped to near record level lows.

Yet that was not the case in South L.A. The murder rate there remains tops in the city. It’s a pattern that has remained stubbornly constant yearly.

The dangling question again is why so many young, and not so young, Black males such as Foreman, he was fifty-one, strap guns to their waists and wantonly kill or are killed by each other. Annual reports on murder violence show that the murder rate among Blacks is multiple times greater than among whites. Even more astounding if the Black murder rate was excised from the U.S. murder rate figures, the country’s murder rate would be comparable to the rock bottom murder rate in some European countries.

The hard fact is that plopping more police on the street, legions more prosecutors, the still pervasive three strikes and mandatory sentencing laws, the death penalty, and putting more than one million Blacks behind bars have done little to curb the Black-on-Black carnage. Nor will simplistic calls for tougher gun control curbs, though they should be made.  Los Angeles has one of the toughest gun control statutes on the books and it didn’t save Foreman or other victims.

Despite the pet theories of liberals and conservatives, Blacks aren’t killing each other because they are violent or crime-prone by nature, or solely because they are poor and oppressed. Or even because they are acting out the obscene and lewd violence they see and hear on TV, films and gangster rap lyrics.

The violence results from a combustible blend of cultural and racial baggage many Blacks carry.

In the past, crimes committed by Blacks against other Blacks were often ignored or lightly punished. Many studies have confirmed that the punishment Blacks receive when the victim is white is far more severe than if the victim is Black. The implicit message was that Black lives are expendable.  Though many police departments now make a much more diligent effort to apprehend suspects in Black killings, the pressure remains to put the same resources into arrests of suspects in these cases as happens when the victim is white.

Yet the perceived devaluation of Black lives encourages disrespect for the law and has forced many Blacks to internalize anger and displace aggression onto others. Many young Black males have become especially adept at acting out their frustrations at white society’s denial of their “manhood” by adopting an exaggerated “tough guy” role. They swagger, boast, curse, fight and commit violent, self-destructive acts. When many Black males indulge their murderous impulses on other black males, they are often taking out their pent-up frustrations on those whom they perceive as helpless and hapless. This is a twisted and warped response to racism and deprivation, blocked opportunities, powerlessness and alienation.

The other powerful ingredient in the deadly mix of Black-on-Black violence is the gang and drug plague. There was some speculation that the murder of Foreman may be connected to old gang beefs. There is no evidence that this is the case. Still, that possibility remains. Gang violence is still a serious problem in South L.A. and in other low income Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

In the wake of the Foreman slaying, the calls are heard again for quick arrests, tough prosecutions, and near draconian imprisonment. That’s understandable. However, it will still take a coordinated effort by educators, health professionals, drug counselors, violence prevention specialists, gang intervention activists, victims of violence and local community activists and leaders, and most importantly parents to stem the violence. They must devise and coordinate short- and long-term strategies and programs to provide jobs, training, better education, and boost the self-esteem of at-risk young blacks. Public officials must provide the political muscle and resources to implement these programs.

If young whites were killing other whites in the same high numbers as Blacks, the public and policy makers would declare a national crisis and rush to address it. The murder of Foreman and the dozens of others in Black communities demands the same response.

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).

Why do I keep underestimating the greediness of Trump Inc.? How many times will they have to prove that there are no limits?

On Monday, in an earnings call, Trump Media & Technology Group reported that it had signed up more than 10 customers in the week since the launch of this new product, Truth API, with customers, according to the Washington Post, paying “generally in the range” of $60,000 to $100,000 per month. “We recognize a modest amount of revenue from these agreements today,” interim CEO Kevin McGurn said in the earnings call, adding that it can “grow into a meaningful, durable” driver of growth.

On Wednesday, two media organizations sued Trump, claiming that the API service is unconstitutional because it gives paying customers privileged access to public, market-moving announcements.

“A president selling priority access to news he himself generates for the benefit of a private company he controls is so blatantly corrupt and unconstitutional that it would have been hard to even fathom just a few years ago,” Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, one of the organizations that brought suit, said in a statement.

It is definitely blatantly corrupt. I’m not sure how you turn that into a constitutional violation. It is, at best, a novel legal theory of the First Amendment. The argument that moving markets this way is a securities violation seems to be the stronger one, but no one expects the Trump SEC to investigate Trump, even though multiple Democratic legislators have asked them to. And isn’t that just how corruption works?

Trump uses Truth Social as his primary means of communicating with the world. He moves markets, makes announcements about the war, the economy, the budget and politics. Some days, he posts as often as a hundred times. Early access to those posts has value, or people wouldn’t pay for it.

And who makes money from all this? Trump’s family is the primary shareholder in Trump Media & Technology Group. The president’s stake in the company is worth nearly $1 billion, held in a revocable trust managed by his son Donald Trump Jr.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) launched his own investigation into the product, demanding that Trump Media produce records of communication between company executives and government officials related to the plan; information on the Truth Social accounts available through the API and any customers; and revenue projections, pricing, marketing materials and more.

“This White House-Wall Street-Trump Business feedback loop represents the depraved essence of insider trading,” he wrote to interim CEO McGurn, who defends his product as business-as-usual. Maybe so for businesses; not for presidents.

There should be a law against this. Arguably, there is. The aptly named Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act is a 2012 law that prohibits the president, vice president and members of Congress from using nonpublic information learned through their offices for financial gain. But will anyone at the SEC or the Trump Justice Department ever pursue such a case? Of course not. And they will certainly argue against any private right of action.

The rich are different — and Donald Trump more so than anyone. In Yiddish, we call it chutzpah. In English, it’s just plain greed.

Written by Susan Estrich

By the time you read this, the coverage will have already picked its frame. Word came Sunday that Panettiere had passed at 36, found unresponsive at a residence in South Carolina, and the machinery of celebrity news started spinning before her family could catch a breath. Authorities have not yet determined an official cause of death. You know how this tends to go. The addiction gets top billing. Rough relationships come next. The custody decision, the confessions in her memoir, that whole painful ledger she carried gets stacked up and served as if the pile were the sum total of who she was.

I want no part of that.

Let me tell you who I remember instead.

There was a little girl standing on a football field in Remember the Titans, playing Sheryl Yoast, a coach’s daughter who loved the game harder than most grown men up in the stands. She held her own beside Will Patton and Denzel, just 10 years old at the time. That takes something rare in a child, a poise you cannot teach. Later the actress told an interviewer it stayed the favorite role she had ever taken, the single place she would rush back to if handed one wish. Purity like that deserves protecting.

Then Heroes arrived, and for a stretch you could not turn on a television without finding her. Claire Bennet was the cheerleader whose body healed from anything the show could throw at it. That old tagline about saving the cheerleader ran through the culture for a couple of years straight. Millions of us parked in front of the set every week. My own kids knew the face before I did. Fame that size can crush a young person, and yet Panettiere wore it with more poise than a lot of folks twice her age.

Nashville is where she truly stretched. Her Juliette Barnes was a country singer scratching through fame and heartbreak. Hayden did the real vocals on that show. A handful of those tracks even landed on the charts. What earned her the praise was how far down the part pulled her, so deep that the wall between performer and character wore thin, a thing she copped to later on. The best ones tend to hand over everything they have, and now and then a role takes more than it gives back.

Horror crowds, meanwhile, will forever love her Kirby Reed, the film obsessed survivor who refused to die when the script wanted her gone. Fans never stopped wondering whether Kirby had survived, and Panettiere eventually returned as the fan favorite in Scream VI, still sharp, still standing tall among a fresh generation of screamers.

Long before any of it, a baby version of Hayden turned up in a toy commercial, then voiced Dot in A Bug’s Life. Whole generations grew up on that voice without ever matching a face to it. A resume like hers is what working actors chase for decades, and she had it locked while other kids were still learning to ride bikes.

So no. Nobody gets to shrink this woman into a warning label while I have a keyboard in front of me.

Here comes the harder truth, though, the one I cannot walk past. She wrestled, openly and painfully, with demons plenty of us know from the inside. Postpartum depression hit hard after a birth that nearly killed her, the kind of delivery that took 7 transfusions and hours on an operating table. To quiet what she had no words for, Hayden turned to bottles and pills. A doctor eventually put it to her plain, said the drinking would bury her inside 5 years if the habit held. Then 2023 arrived and took her baby brother Jansen. Loss like that leaves a residue nobody who has buried family needs explained to them. Panettiere reached for the word warrior in one of her last interviews, and by then it was earned, dragged out of her by more pain than most of us ever get handed.

She was reaching. Reaching for solid ground the entire way.

That reaching is the part I need you to sit with. Because somebody scrolling past this right now is doing the very same thing. Someone you love may be sending up smoke you have not yet learned to read. The late text that lands a little off. A friend who suddenly goes quiet on the group chat. The relative who laughs a beat too hard at nothing at all. Those are cries for help wearing the costume of an ordinary afternoon.

Pick up the phone. Drive over there. Say the awkward thing out loud.

Plenty of decent folks convince themselves that a stiff drink or a pill will patch whatever is chewing them up on the inside. That lie never pays off. The high fades fast. Sooner or later that glass runs dry and the hurt you tried to drown comes clawing back up, meaner for having waited. A wound you numb at midnight is a wound again at sunrise. Whatever chased you into that bottle stayed put the entire time.

If that describes you, hear me plain. You are not a burden to anybody worth keeping around. The folks who love you would rather sit through the ugliness with you than plan your service. No shame lives in saying the sentence aloud. I need help. Three words that have started more recoveries than we will ever know.

And should you be the one watching somebody slip beneath the surface, do not wait around for a flawless moment. It never shows up. Reach out while they can still feel that hand landing on their shoulder.

Hayden Panettiere gave us 36 years, and most of them played out on screens inside our homes. Joy poured out to strangers who rarely poured much back. That math sits heavy on my chest tonight. A single bad headline does not get the final word here. Think about everything she was carrying at the same time. A daughter. A mother to young Kaya. A sister who grieved out in the open and refused to fake being fine. And a person who lent her name to whales and to voting rights when self pity would have been the easy road. She could be funny when the mood hit her. Hardheaded too, past the point of reason. And a good deal braver than the public ever got to witness.

Tell your kids about her the way you would any serious artist who left work behind worth sitting with. Let the postpartum honesty and the recovery she chased become part of the record too, not as gossip but as courage, because plenty of women sat a little less alone thanks to her willingness to speak. That is a legacy money cannot buy.

The battles found her. They never got to define her.

Rest easy, young lady. You did plenty. May she rest in peace.

Staff Writer; Jamar Jackson

This brother writes with a love for poetry, music, and real conversations that reflect everyday life in the Black community… Much of his inspiration comes from old records, spoken word, and the kind of stories people carry with them for years… One may contact him at; JJackson@ThyBlackMan.com.

I caught Mo’ Better Blues in a nearly empty auditorium back in 1990, still in my twenties, with no notion I was sitting through the opening chapter of a saga. Denzel played Bleek Gilliam, a trumpet man so wrapped up in his own horn that he let two women and one loyal partner slip clean through his fingers. Spike cast himself as Giant, the gambling addicted manager whose debts eventually get him stomped in an alley. That jazz drama pulled only about sixteen million dollars, modest even for its moment, but you could feel both talents circling, testing what the other could do. Watching it now, you catch a young auteur already reaching past the humble scale, already convinced this leading man could carry weight most scripts never dared hand him.

Then came the earthquake.

Malcolm X arrived November 18, 1992, and nothing about it played small. Three hours and twenty two minutes long, the picture opens with Malcolm’s voice, footage of the Rodney King beating, and an American flag burning down into the shape of an X before taking us into the fire red zoot suit years of his youth. From there, the film asks us to sit with a complicated soul across every phase of his becoming. Warner Bros. and the completion bond company eventually dug in over the ballooning budget and running time, bringing post production to a halt. Spike refused to let the movie be cut down into something smaller than his vision, so he worked the phones and leaned on people who had it to give. Oprah, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Prince, Bill Cosby and others contributed money that helped push the production across the line. Angela Bassett is quietly ferocious as Betty Shabazz. When the nominations landed, Washington sat in the Best Actor field, and everybody I ran with assumed the award was already his. Al Pacino took it instead for Scent of a Woman. Spike has never hidden his belief that Denzel deserved that Oscar, and plenty of us still agree. What his star accomplished there, aging beside the icon, shifting cadence and spirit reel by reel, ranks among the towering feats in American acting.

Six years slid by before their third outing.

He Got Game landed in 1998, and this one cut close for anybody raised on playground hoops and father wounds. Denzel became Jake Shuttlesworth, a convict offered a shortened sentence if he can nudge his estranged boy, blue chip recruit Jesus, toward the governor’s alma mater. Ray Allen, an actual NBA marksman, held his own opposite a heavyweight, which tells you plenty about the calm his scene partner radiates. Copland’s swelling Americana laced against Public Enemy’s fury, a strange and gorgeous marriage only Lee would dare. A modest haul at the register, though the receipts were never the point.

Their fourth pairing flipped the whole script.

Inside Man opened March 24, 2006, four days after premiering in New York on the director’s forty ninth birthday, and it caught everybody flatfooted by being a slick, crowd pleasing genre ride. Washington slid into Detective Keith Frazier, a hostage negotiator matching wits with Clive Owen’s cerebral robber while Jodie Foster’s fixer worked her own agenda. Nobody expected the Brooklyn provocateur to hand us a taut Wall Street thriller, yet the thing debuted at number one with nearly twenty nine million dollars, then rode word of mouth to roughly one hundred eighty four million worldwide. It still stands as the auteur’s biggest earner. Look closer and the fingerprints show, the melting pot of hostages, the sly commentary tucked inside the popcorn. He proved a point that season, that an artist known for provocation could also just entertain a full house without dumbing a single thing down.

Nineteen years passed. A long quiet for two men who summon this much from one another.

That takes us to the summer of 2025 and Highest 2 Lowest. The film premiered at Cannes back in May. By August 15 it had reached theaters, and Apple TV+ added it for streaming on September 5. Lee took Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 masterwork High and Low and moved its central moral bind into the New York he has loved his whole life, a long way from the postwar Japan where the story began. Denzel, seventy now and still wound tight with nervous energy, is David King, a music mogul with echoes of Quincy Jones who runs Stackin’ Hits Records while a fight over the ownership and future of the company consumes his attention. One phone call shatters the calm. A boy has been snatched, and the ransom demand of seventeen and a half million dollars lands with a cruel twist, since the abducted child turns out not to be his own but Kyle, the son of his longtime friend, confidant and driver Paul Christopher, and David’s godson. What does a wealthy man owe the son of the friend who has stood beside him for years? That is the knot Kurosawa tied, and it still bites.

A$AP Rocky turns up as the antagonist Yung Felon, Jeffrey Wright anchors the emotional stakes, and familiar faces from past joints, Rosie Perez, Wendell Pierce, Rick Fox, drop by like relatives at a cookout. Our seventy year old star moves through New York in a Yankees cap with that black Air Jordan backpack slung over him, carrying himself with the same restless energy that has followed him across decades. Critics picked up on a softer touch this time out. Where a lot of Lee’s joints end bleak, this one reaches for hope, and it wraps with a music number that lands like a blessing instead of a gut punch.

So here is the thing that really grabs me about this pairing, the thing I keep chewing on.

Something specific happens whenever they share a room. Spike quits showboating just enough to serve the performance, and his lead loosens the movie star armor just enough to vanish into a soul. Neither one coasts. The director trusts his actor to carry silence, to let a beat breathe, and each one trusts the other to build a world worth inhabiting. That mutual faith, which the Brooklyn filmmaker has described in terms of trust and love, reads as no marketing line. Their families are close, and both men have spoken openly about the bond underneath the work. You cannot fake the ease you see on screen when two people have known one another, professionally and personally, across this many decades.

Stack the resume against any duo you fancy. Scorsese and De Niro own sheer volume and a couple of undisputed classics. John Ford leaned on John Wayne for a whole mythology of the frontier. Tim Burton keeps ringing Johnny Depp. Formidable, all of them. None of those unions, though, carried the added freight of speaking for a people long shoved to the margins of the frame. Each time this Brooklyn and Mount Vernon pairing teams up, they are also arguing, softly or loudly, for the fullness of Black interior life, for hornmen and prophets and fathers and moguls drawn with total humanity.

The younger set feels it too. Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan are building their own gorgeous streak, and the elder statesman, gracious as ever, raved about Coogler’s Sinners as his favorite film of 2025. Yet those young lions stand on ground this pair helped clear. Sidney Poitier pried the door open. Lee and Denzel strolled through it five times and left it swinging wide behind them.

Five features across thirty five years, from a scrappy jazz drama to a Kurosawa reinvention, every entry deepening what the last began. That is no accident. Call it a friendship doing the labor most creative marriages only fantasize about.

Long may they run.

Staff Writer; Jamar Jackson

This brother writes with a love for poetry, music, and real conversations that reflect everyday life in the Black community… Much of his inspiration comes from old records, spoken word, and the kind of stories people carry with them for years… One may contact him at; JJackson@ThyBlackMan.com.

“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.