When the Violence Comes From Within

Reflections on a Bloody Week in the American Black Community

When I was growing up, we did not hear stories like the ones we are hearing now. There were no mass shootings inside our homes. There were no fathers walking through bedrooms killing children in their sleep. There were no headlines about former officials murdering their wives and then turning the gun on themselves. The neighborhoods were not perfect, but they were not graveyards either.

The older I got, the more violence began to invade our streets. It came in slowly at first, then all at once. The drugs arrived like weeds pushing through cracked concrete. Vials, needles, and broken glass scattered across sidewalks where children once played. Nobody could quite explain how it all got there. We were young, but we were not stupid. We knew the drugs did not grow in our neighborhoods. Somebody brought them in. Somebody profited. Somebody allowed it. The music shifted with the streets, and a generation that wanted out of the projects ended up celebrating the very things keeping them trapped.

That is the long backdrop. That is the soil. What grew out of it is what we are now forced to confront.

Here is what I have come to believe after watching this last week unfold. The deepest crisis in our community is no longer simply the violence done to us from the outside. It is the moral and spiritual violence we have learned to accept against ourselves. Until we name that honestly, no policy, no program, and no protest will save us.

A Week That Should Stop Us Cold

The middle of April 2026 was one of the bloodiest weeks the American Black community has seen in recent memory. A young woman traveled to an island for her birthday, met someone, and ended up dead. A Black podcaster went away with her white boyfriend to another island and never came home.

Then came the two stories that broke something inside me.

In Shreveport, Louisiana, a 31-year-old man named Shamar Elkins entered the homes of the two women who had borne his children and opened fire. When the morning was over, eight children were dead. Seven of them his own. The youngest was three. Most were shot in the head while they slept. He carjacked a vehicle, fled, and was killed in a confrontation with police a few miles away. In one act, he more than doubled the city's homicide count for the year.

That same week in Annandale, Virginia, former Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax shot and killed his wife, Dr. Cerina Fairfax, in their home. He then turned the gun on himself. Their teenage children were inside. Their oldest son made the 911 call. Court records released afterward described a man who had been ordered to leave the house by April 30, who had already lost custody of his children, who was drinking daily, and who had spent years obsessed with restoring a reputation damaged by a sexual assault scandal. He was, by every available measure, a man losing everything.

Two stories. Two households. Two communities forever marked. One carried out by a man the people around him describe as struggling with mental illness and untreated trauma. The other carried out by a man who once stood at the second-highest seat in Virginia government. Different worlds. Same outcome. Black families destroyed by the hands of Black men who were supposed to protect them.

I want to be careful here. I am not saying this kind of violence belongs only to us. It does not. White men, Latino men, Asian men, men of every background commit horrific acts of violence every day in this country. If you measured per capita, the picture would shift dramatically in places the cameras rarely visit. There are rural counties, suburban subdivisions, and quiet small towns where domestic violence is a way of life and nobody is reporting on it. The media zooms in on us because our urban centers are easy to map, easy to film, and easy to turn into a story. That is its own injustice, and I will not pretend otherwise.

Still, when the camera does find us, we have to look honestly at what it shows.

How I Knew Before I Knew

Before I saw a single face or read a single name in either case, something in the shape of those stories told me exactly what I was hearing. Not because Black men are more violent. They are not. The reason I knew was because of what the violence was aimed at. Not strangers. Not enemies. Not rivals. Their own. Their wives. Their children. Their households. That registered immediately. That sounded like us.

There is a particular pain when violence is directed inward. The Shreveport councilman said it plainly: more than thirty percent of homicides in his city are domestic in nature. That is not a statistic about strangers in the dark. That is families. Bedrooms. Kitchens. Front porches. People who shared a name and a meal and a child.

The Mental Illness Conversation

Whenever something like this happens, there is a rush to explain it away. Commentators like Roland Martin and others move quickly to mental illness, to systemic racism, to historical trauma. I do believe mental illness was part of what happened in Shreveport. The reporting confirms Elkins had been hospitalized for mental health treatment, had attempted suicide just two months earlier, and had told family members he was having dark thoughts. Something was wrong. Something was unaddressed. That is real.

Annandale feels different. That feels like a man who, faced with consequences he could not control, chose annihilation over accountability. He could not keep the marriage. He could not keep custody. He could not keep the house. He could not keep the reputation. So he took the only thing left he could control. That is not mental illness in the clinical sense. That is rage. That is pride. That is the refusal to be made small. That is what happens when a man decides that if he cannot have the life he wants, no one else gets to live either.

We must stop sanitizing every act of destruction by calling it mental illness. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes it is moral collapse. Sometimes it is generational sin finally walking into the open. We do ourselves no favors when we refuse to name what we are looking at.

What Our Children Are Being Taught To Want

Our community has become desensitized to self-destruction. We see it in domestic violence, in fathers abandoning children, in mothers suffocating under the weight of raising kids alone. We see it in drug culture, where poison is sold to people who look like us, live beside us, and trust us. We see it in the exploitation laid bare in the cases surrounding Sean Combs and R. Kelly, where countless American Black women and girls were used and discarded by men from inside the same community. We see it in how casually life itself is treated, as if children are disposable, as if family is optional, as if responsibility is a burden instead of a duty.

None of this stays inside our homes. It is being taught, hour by hour, to our children through the screens in their hands. Walk through any teenager's TikTok feed and tell me what you see. The rapper flashing a Draco at the camera while his toddler crawls across the floor. The athlete with three baby mamas, each one filming her side of the drama for content. The young woman explaining how she made fifty thousand dollars on OnlyFans last month and calling it entrepreneurship. The trapper teaching little boys how to count a stack and bag work in the kitchen, set to music, looped on a fifteen-second clip. The influencer who has never been in the streets pretending she was raised in them because that is what gets the views.

This is what our children are being taught to want. Not character. Not covenant. Not craft. Not calling. They are being taught to want clout, currency, and the appearance of power. They are being told that the fastest path there is to look dangerous, sound dangerous, and be desired by the dangerous. The boy who picks up a gun at fifteen did not invent that image. He saw it ten thousand times before he ever held one. The girl who sells her body at nineteen did not come up with that on her own. She was being marketed to since she was twelve.

The platforms know. The algorithms reward what destabilizes. Outrage, lust, violence, and humiliation move faster than virtue ever has. The companies count the money. The labels count the streams. The brands count the engagement. We count the funerals.

Why I Am Reading Nietzsche

If you want to understand why a culture that has discarded God ends in funerals, you have to sit with the philosopher who told us, more than a hundred years ago, that the discarding was about to begin. So I have been reading him.

I have been reading Friedrich Nietzsche lately. Will to Power, specifically. I will be honest. When I first picked it up, I was opposed to him. He writes from hindsight. He writes without God. He writes as a man who believes the entire moral structure of Christianity was a long lie told to keep the strong from being strong. He called Christian morality slave morality. He believed humanity could move beyond God and create its own values through will, power, and self-definition. He believed people could decide for themselves what was right and what was wrong without needing any higher authority to tell them.

Something shifted in me as I kept reading. I realized Nietzsche is not arguing against God. He is arguing as if there is no God and then asking what follows. That is the experiment. That is the world he is describing. A world where man is the measure. A world where the strongest will writes the rules. A world where good and evil are inventions of the weak. The more I read him, the more clearly I could see something he could not. He was not describing a future he hoped for. He was describing the world we are already living in. And that world is exactly what is killing us.

That is the bridge from those murders to that book. Every act of violence we just discussed is a small Nietzschean act. The will of the self, exercised over the life of another, with no higher authority to answer to. The father in Shreveport decided whose children lived. The husband in Annandale decided whose wife lived. The trapper on TikTok decides his neighbor is prey. The girl on the live decides her body is currency. Strip away God, and this is what is left. Strip away the moral order, and the strong consume the weak. Reading a man who wrote without God has done the opposite of what he intended in me. It has driven me deeper into God. Because I have seen, in real time, what the world looks like when his ideas are left to run.

I know what some will say. Plenty of professed Christians have abused their wives. Plenty of pastors have preyed on the children in their pews. Plenty of so-called believers have done exactly the kind of violence I am condemning. That is true. I am not naive about it. The argument is not that Christians do not sin. They do. The argument is about what holds when the moral foundation itself is removed. A Christian who sins still answers to a standard outside himself. A man who has made himself the standard answers to no one. The first is a hypocrite. The second is the architect of his own permission.

Nietzsche thought he was freeing humanity. Look at us. According to CDC data, the abortion rate among Black women is nearly three times that of white women, and we account for roughly thirty-eight percent of abortions in this country while being only about thirteen percent of the population. Look at the children being told they can transform into something they are not. Look at the institutions, even our historically Black colleges, drifting into moral confusion they once would have stood firmly against. This is what self-made morality builds. Not freedom. Not flourishing. Graveyards.

When you remove God from the center, something else always takes His place. Money. Sex. Pride. Violence. Status. Self-worship. Survival at any cost. None of those things can save us. None of those things have ever saved anyone.

What Returning To Christ Actually Looks Like

There is healing that needs to happen in our community. Real healing. Not the performative kind that shows up at vigils and disappears by the next news cycle. Not the political kind that turns every dead child into a talking point. Returning to Christ is not a slogan and it is not a feeling. It is a thousand specific decisions made by a thousand specific people on a thousand ordinary Tuesdays.

It looks like a father coming home and staying home. It looks like a husband loving his wife enough to walk away from the argument instead of reaching for the gun. It looks like a mother turning off the live and opening the Bible at the kitchen table with her babies before bed. It looks like the church mothers in the neighborhood being free to correct somebody else's child again without fear of being cursed out on the porch. It looks like a teenage boy being walked into manhood by men who actually know his name. It looks like a teenage girl being told by her father that her body is not currency and her worth is not measured in followers. It looks like a marriage covenant that means something even when it gets hard, especially when it gets hard.

It looks like the deacon who finally tells the truth about what he saw the pastor doing. It looks like the sister who calls her brother out instead of covering for him one more time. It looks like the artist who decides he is not going to glorify the trap anymore even if it costs him the deal. It looks like the influencer who deletes the page because she finally counted the cost of who she was teaching her cousins to become.

It looks like policy too. We need illegal guns off our streets. We need real investment in our young people. We need real schools, real mental health resources, real intervention in homes where children are being raised in danger. We need to stop pretending that the absence of fathers is acceptable. We need to stop pretending that aborting our future is liberation. We need to stop pretending that what we glorify on a screen is not training the next shooter, the next abuser, the next mother weeping over a coffin too small for any mother to ever carry.

Most of all, we need to come back to Christ. Not as a sentiment. As a structure. As a daily, governing, household, neighborhood, community-shaping reality. Because a community without God will eventually become a community without restraint, without purpose, and without truth. We are watching that play out in real time.

The Word We Have Been Avoiding

A week of funerals. A week of headlines. A week of explanations that do not explain anything.

The word we have been avoiding is repentance. Not for what was done to us. For what we have allowed to happen among us. Repentance for the music we let raise our children. Repentance for the lifestyles we glorified. Repentance for the abortions we framed as freedom. Repentance for the husbands we never held to account. Repentance for the wives we did not protect. Repentance for the institutions we let drift. Repentance for the silence in our pulpits and the noise in our feeds.

Nietzsche bet his life that man could become his own god. We are the proof of what that bet costs. The way back is not forward into more self. The way back is down. To our knees. To the only One who has ever been able to heal a people.

And that One is not us.

—

Jacqueline Session Ausby

DahTruth.com

Pawns On The Board

“A pawn that never questions the board will always be sacrificed for the game.” — Jacqueline Session Ausby

On Black Leadership, Borrowed Houses, And The Wages Of Loyalty

I came across a LinkedIn post this week from Wes Moore, the Governor of Maryland. The post opened the way they always open these days. It pointed at gas prices. It pointed at tariffs. It pointed at wars overseas. It pointed at Donald Trump. Once that throat-clearing was done, the post pivoted home and listed the wins. Lower electricity bills. New laws preventing grocery stores from gouging customers. More housing being built. Investments designed to help businesses build wealth. Protections around the right to be vaccinated.

It read like progress. It read like leadership. It read like a man who is doing the work.

Then I sat with it for a minute. I asked myself the only question that actually matters when a politician posts a list. Whose life looks different because of any of this? In Maryland, where the Governor is American Black, where the Mayor of Baltimore is American Black, where Black leadership is finally seated at the table the ancestors begged for, what has actually changed for the people those names are supposed to represent?

The honest answer is the answer nobody on a podium wants to give. Not nearly enough.

Here is what I have come to believe. We are not being led. We are being managed. The policies change packaging every four years. The faces delivering them get darker while those benefiting from them get lighter. The conditions in our neighborhoods stay the same. We are pawns on a board, moved two squares forward, two squares back, and sometimes pushed to the front line to be taken. Until we name that out loud, no vote and no victory speech is going to save us.

“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”

— Hosea 4:6

The House You Do Not Own

Start with housing, because housing is where wealth either takes root or never grows. In a state celebrated for its first American Black Governor, in cities run by American Black mayors, homeownership for our people is still out of reach for far too many families. Lending is harder. Credit thresholds are higher. Down payments are heavier. The doors that other communities walked through fifty years ago are still being negotiated for ours.

Meanwhile, the policy emphasis remains on rental support. Section 8 expands. Voucher programs are praised. Politicians cut ribbons in front of new apartment complexes and call it progress.

Section 8 is not stability. It is the appearance of stability. A family living in a house they do not own, on a voucher they did not earn equity from, one missed payment away from eviction, is not secure. They are housed. There is a difference. Stability is what you can fall back on when life turns. Equity is what you draw from when the job ends, when the diagnosis comes, when the child needs college, when the parent needs care. Renters do not have that. They have a roof and a deadline. The wealth that should be building underneath their feet is building somewhere else, in the bank account of the landlord, in the portfolio of the management company, in the property tax base of a city that does not return the favor.

Programs that keep our people renting forever are not neutral. They are extractive. Every month that voucher hits, somebody who is not American Black gets a little richer off our presence in a property we will never own. That is not a conspiracy. That is just how rent works. The question is why the most visible housing solution offered to our community is the one that builds wealth for everyone except us.

If American Black leadership in Maryland was going to do something historic, it would have been a pathway to ownership. Not a voucher. A door key. A deed. A stake in the ground that says my people are not passing through. My people are staying. That is not the legislation being passed. The voucher is the legislation being passed.

Cities Run By Us, Failing Us

Look at Baltimore. Look at Chicago. Look at Memphis. Look at Detroit. Look at every urban city in this country that has been under unbroken Democratic leadership for forty, fifty, sixty years. Look at the school systems. Look at the homicide rates. Look at the percentage of children reading on grade level by fourth grade. Look at the number of fatherless homes. Look at how long the bus takes to get to the grocery store that finally opened ten miles away.

The Mayors are American Black. The City Council members are American Black. The Police Commissioners, the school superintendents, the housing directors, the prosecutors are American Black. Representation has been achieved. Representation has been celebrated. Representation has not changed the outcomes.

In Baltimore, the school system continues to rank near the bottom nationally year after year. In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson stands at podiums talking about a city moving in the right direction while teenagers run circles around the police department and shoot each other in numbers most of America has chosen not to think about. In every one of these cities, the script is the same. Crime is down according to the press release. Crime feels different according to the grandmother who has not let her grandbabies play on the porch in three years.

If leadership, policy, and representation have all been pointed in the same direction for half a century, the outcomes are not an accident. They are a result. They are what the system was actually built to produce. We have to be honest about that, even if it costs us our comfort.

The Loyalty Industry

The next layer is the messaging machine that keeps us locked into the same vote no matter what the vote produces. Black political media has become an industry, and like every industry, it has shareholders to satisfy.

Roland Martin tells us how to vote. Joy Reid told us how to vote until her show ended and now she tells us from a podcast. Don Lemon, in his second act, tells us how to vote. Angela Rye tells us how to vote. Eddie Glaude Jr. tells us how to vote in the seminar voice that pretends it is just analysis. Jemele Hill tells us how to vote between sports takes. The Native Land Pod tells us how to vote in the cadence of friends who already know the answer before the question is asked.

None of these voices are wrong simply for having a position. The problem is that the position is non-negotiable. Disagreement is treated as defection. Independent thought is treated as betrayal. If you raise a question about a policy that has not delivered for our community in three generations, you are accused of carrying water for the other side. The conversation collapses before it begins.

Then there is the other flank. Briahna Joy Gray, Marc Lamont Hill, Sabrina Salvador, voices that present themselves as the more authentic alternative because they reject mainstream Democratic policy. Look at what they actually offer in its place. A more aggressive form of the same dependency. A socialism that requires even larger government. A pan-African or foundational frame that rejects American identity altogether and offers no functioning replacement, only grievance dressed in academic language. They are not a way out. They are the same trap with different paint.

All of these voices are paid. All of them have podcasts, speaking fees, brand deals, book contracts, university appointments. They are not suffering from the policies they recommend. They are profiting from the loyalty those policies require. Their bank accounts grow whether the boy on the corner of West Baltimore lives or dies. We carry the cost of the alignment they sell. They carry the receipts.

Why Is Israel Suddenly The Threat?

Now turn on any panel show, scroll any timeline, listen to any rally aimed at our community, and tell me what the loudest topic has been for the past two years. Israel. Gaza. Foreign policy. The map of a country most of us have never visited has somehow become the moral center of conversations about American Black freedom.

Foreign policy matters. Innocent life matters everywhere. None of that is in dispute. The question is why the energy spent on a war ten thousand miles away is not being spent on the war happening on our own blocks. Black boys are killing each other in our streets. Black girls are being trafficked through our cities. Black mothers are burying their children at rates that would shut down any other community in America. Black families are being priced out of neighborhoods their grandparents built. Black schools are graduating students who cannot read the diploma they are being handed.

None of those crises are trending on the panels. None of those crises are organizing the marches. None of those crises are setting the agenda for the next election.

It is easier to point outward than to look inward. It is easier to indict a foreign government than to indict the city council you voted for in eight straight elections. It is easier to grieve the children on a different continent than to grieve the children on the corner because the children on the corner require us to ask what we have allowed.

The outward gaze is not righteousness. It is avoidance. And the leaders directing our attention away from our own house know exactly what they are doing.

When The Pulpit Joins The Machine

Even the church has gotten in line. I listened to a sermon recently from Jamal Bryant. The text was Habakkuk 2:3, the vision tarrying but coming in its appointed time. The application was something else entirely. Write down what you want God to do for you. A new job. A house. Tuition paid. Healing. A breakthrough. Then plant a seed, by which he meant a financial offering, and watch every word on your list come to pass in God's perfect timing.

I am not naming Bryant because he is the only one. I am naming him because he is the latest example of a problem that has spread through American Black pulpits like rot through a beam. The problem is not faith. The problem is what faith has been reduced to. A vending machine. Insert seed. Receive desire. The vision is no longer about the kingdom of God advancing in a generation. The vision is about the individual believer's wish list.

Habakkuk was not writing a personal prosperity plan. Habakkuk was crying out about the violence and corruption of an entire nation, and God answered him with a vision about justice and the destruction of the proud. That is not the sermon being preached. The sermon being preached turns the prophet into a life coach and the offering plate into a coin slot.

Where is the pulpit calling our community to repentance for the children we have aborted, the marriages we have abandoned, the boys we have left to the streets, the girls we have surrendered to the screens? Where is the pulpit naming the conditions instead of monetizing the longing? Where is the pulpit telling us that the seed God actually requires is obedience, not currency, and that the harvest He promises is righteousness, not real estate?

When the church starts selling individual breakthrough while the community burns, the church has stopped being the church. It has become another podcast with stained glass.

There is one more thing about that sermon I cannot let pass. Bryant is a Baptist preacher. He preached the entire message and never once spoke the name of Jesus Christ. Not in the opening. Not in the application. Not in the close. He had time to walk the congregation through how to write a vision, how to plant a seed, and how to wait for the harvest. He had time, at the very end, to tell the congregation to get out and vote. He reminded that that early voting was beginning the very next day.  He did not have time for the name of the Savior whose blood the church he stands in was built on. A Baptist pulpit that finds room for the ballot but not for the name of Christ has chosen its kingdom. It is not the one in scripture.

The Wounds Nobody Will Touch

Underneath all of this is a layer of pain leadership has refused to address for decades. Mental health in our community is a quiet catastrophe. Our boys are growing up traumatized and untreated, which is one of the reasons they are picking up guns and using them on each other before they can legally drink. Our girls are growing up traumatized and untreated, which is one of the reasons they are turning their bodies into commodities by sixteen and calling it confidence. Our mothers are exhausted and untreated. Our fathers, when they are present, are stretched and untreated. Our elders are grieving and untreated.

National incarceration numbers may be dropping, but the boys our system sweeps up are still disproportionately ours, and the boys it spits back out are still being released into the same neighborhoods that broke them in the first place, with no policy of restoration, no real reentry, no pipeline back to school or work or family or faith. They went in damaged and untreated. They come home damaged and untreated and now also marked. We act surprised when the cycle continues.

Gang violence is treated as a news cycle, not a policy priority. A child dies, the Mayor holds a press conference, the candle vigil is filmed, the headlines move on by Tuesday, and the next Friday another child dies on the same block. Where is the legislation? Where is the long-term mental health investment? Where is the trauma-informed schooling? Where is the federal task force? Where is the national conversation that lasts longer than a hashtag?

There is none. Because the leaders who are supposed to address it know that the conversation, if held seriously, would lead to questions they cannot afford to answer. So the silence holds. And the children keep dying.

Pawns On The Board

This is what it feels like to be American Black in this country in 2026. We are voted on, voted with, voted at, and rarely voted for. We are placed on the board to make a play look balanced. We are sacrificed when a sacrifice is needed. We are paraded forward when a victory needs a face. We are pushed to the front line when the casualty count needs to come from somewhere that will not cost the party anything important.

Our pain is currency. Our stories are evidence. Our faces are the defense when the institution gets investigated. Our votes are guaranteed. Our outcomes are optional.

That is not leadership. That is not representation. That is not progress. That is positioning. And every American Black man and woman with a microphone who is paid to keep us in formation is part of how the positioning holds.

The way out is not another election. The way out is not another speech. The way out is not another sermon promising you a job if you sow a seed. The way out is the truth, told plainly, told repeatedly, told regardless of who it offends.

Our leaders are not delivering. Our media is not protecting us. Our pulpits are not preaching repentance. Our policies are not building wealth for our people. Our cities are not safer for our children. Our schools are not teaching our babies to read. Our boys are not coming home. Our girls are not being protected. And every four years we are asked to vote again as if any of that has changed.

It has not changed because it was not designed to change. It was designed to keep us exactly where we are, useful enough to stay, broken enough to need them, loyal enough not to ask.

I am asking.

—

Jacqueline Session Ausby

DahTruth.com

Whitewashed Tombs: A Three-Part Series on Christ, Nation, and Mendacity

✝️ “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness.” Matthew 23:27

Part One

When Christ Becomes a Tool

Resurrection Sunday and the Political Use of Jesus

April is the season when Christians around the world celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is the time when believers reflect on the truth that Christ was crucified, buried, and rose again on the third day. Because of this, Jesus Christ is recognized as King, and for over two thousand years the world has paused to remember His life, His sacrifice, and His victory over death.

When you consider it fully, it is remarkable that one man could have such transformative power across nations, cultures, and generations. That alone is awe-inspiring, and this season draws people together in recognition of Jesus Christ.

At the same time, something else is unfolding, and it must be named plainly.

Over the past month, there has been an increasing trend of individuals using Jesus Christ not as Savior, but as a tool to support ideological and political positions. This is happening across the political spectrum, from the far left to the far right, and it has become especially visible in conservative and nationalist circles.

Just this past week, imagery circulated of Donald Trump portrayed in a Christ-like manner. He stood over a man as though healing him, with light surrounding the scene, as if he were the savior of America. The image was astonishing and, quite frankly, blasphemous. It was criticized on both the left and the right and was eventually removed, which was the right decision. The fact that it was created at all points to something deeper.

What we are witnessing extends beyond political division and reaches into spiritual confusion. Everyone claims Christ. That claim now appears across political, cultural, and religious lines, each asserting moral authority while pointing to the same source. They cannot all be right.

Within that confusion, there is a strain of thought, increasingly visible in right-leaning circles, that aligns American identity with whiteness and presents that alignment as both natural and necessary. What is being advanced is not simply a political position, but a redefinition of belonging.

That redefinition carries consequences. It places American Blacks and Native Americans outside the very identity they helped form. It overlooks the presence of Native people who existed on this land before it was named America, and it dismisses the generational labor, sacrifice, and blood of Black Americans who helped build the nation that now claims to define itself without them.

It is presented as order and argued as preservation, defined as truth, when in reality it narrows the definition of belonging to fit a particular image and then uses that image as the standard by which others are measured and excluded.

When Christ is drawn into that framework, the distortion deepens. He is no longer presented as Savior over all, but as a figure used to affirm boundaries that were never His to establish.

“Mendacity: the act of presenting falsehood as truth, not only through direct lies, but through distortion, omission, and the manipulation of reality in a way that persuades others to accept what is untrue as though it were true.”

— Definition of Mendacity

Mendacity and the Claim to Possess God

What we are witnessing is mendacity. It is not limited to false statements. It takes shape in identity, in authority, and in claim, presenting what is false as truth and reinforcing it until it is accepted.

This pattern appears in both religious and political leadership.

The pope presents himself as a moral authority who claims proximity to divine truth while lacking the spiritual clarity such authority requires. He wears the garment and performs the role, yet what is revealed beneath that appearance reflects what Jesus warned about: a structure that looks righteous outwardly while concealing what is corrupted within.

The same danger appears in political leadership.

Donald Trump presents himself as a force for what is right in matters of war and conflict. I have more respect for Donald Trump than I do for Pope Leo, because Donald Trump recognizes that he is flawed. He knows he is capable of sin and capable of repentance. Pope Leo does not present himself that way. He does not recognize that he is a man. He is not God. He is not the holder of truth. No man is.

No man is the representative of Jesus Christ except Jesus Christ Himself.

Political leaders and religious leaders alike remain subject to that truth. The moment either begins to take on the imagery, authority, or symbolism of Christ, the line has already been crossed.

Jesus described such men as whitewashed tombs. Beautiful on the outside, but filled with dead men's bones.

Known by Their Fruit

Jesus said we will know them by their fruit. What a man professes and what a man protects will eventually reveal who he is. The concern here rests with the individual who believes he can define, contain, and speak for Christ as though God operates within the limits he has established.

Scripture has always addressed the question of who can claim proximity to God, and one of the clearest examples appears in the book of 2 Kings.

The account tells of Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army, a man of authority who suffered from leprosy. The path to his healing did not begin with his position, but with a young Israelite servant in his household, who pointed him toward the prophet Elisha.

Naaman approached the situation expecting a display that matched his rank. He anticipated a direct encounter, an invocation, an act that aligned with what he believed such authority required. Instead, the instruction came through a servant, directing him to wash in the Jordan. The simplicity of the command conflicted with his expectation, and he turned away from it. Only after setting aside that expectation and submitting to what had been spoken did the healing come.

His response afterward reveals something deeper. Naaman declared that he would worship no god but the God of Israel and asked for soil from the land to take with him. That act reflected allegiance. The God he encountered was not found within the structures he knew, nor in the power he carried, but in the authority of God's word.

Christ later pointed back to this moment, noting that while many in Israel suffered, it was Naaman the Syrian who was cleansed. The significance rests in where God chose to move. Proximity did not determine access. Identity did not determine outcome.

While certain voices speak with certainty about the side on which they believe God stands, they overlook the pattern Scripture reveals. God does not move according to expectation, status, or proximity. He moves according to His own authority.

When Christianity is fused with national identity and treated as something to be held and preserved within a particular image, the result is distortion. What begins as conviction shifts into possession, and what belongs to God is drawn into human structure and defined by human terms. That movement does not produce alignment with truth. It produces conflation.

Truth does not submit to identity, and it does not remain confined to the structures built around it. It stands on its own.

In Part Two, I will name what these men are actually arguing for, in their own words.

Part Two

The Argument They Are Making

On Joel Webbon, Dale Partridge, and Calvin Robinson

That same mendacity did not remain confined to political or traditional religious spaces. It surfaced this week on the far right in a conversation on NXR Studios, where Joel Webbon, joined by Dale Partridge and Calvin Robinson, framed Christianity and American identity in ways that tie faith to race, lineage, and national structure, raising serious questions about who belongs and who does not. All three men identify as Protestant. Two of them, Webbon and Partridge, are white. Calvin Robinson is of mixed English and Jamaican heritage. That detail matters, and I will return to it. What was presented carried the appearance of order and conviction, yet rested on a narrowing of truth that cannot sustain itself under Scripture.

Come with me as I walk through the major points being made, the arguments used to justify exclusion while denying its name, and the structure that allows it to stand.

Race, as it has functioned in America, is not a fixed biological reality but a social construct shaped by law, history, and power. It was used not only to organize and separate, but to assign belonging to whites and exclusion to Blacks in particular. That structure did not emerge by accident. It was built into the system itself, often enforced through measures as rigid as the one-drop rule, where the presence of any African ancestry placed a person outside of whiteness.

At the same time, the reality remains that all people share a common humanity that cannot be reduced to these categories. The tension between what is constructed and what is real has shaped the American experience from its beginning.

It is within that tension that this conversation must be understood. In their discussion, Webbon, Partridge, and Robinson take the language of race, nation, and identity and move it in a specific direction. They frame American identity and Christianity in ways that align with a particular vision of nationhood, one that narrows belonging and places American Blacks and Jews outside of it, while presenting that framework as consistent with Scripture.

That distinction requires clarity. The Jewish faith, as it is practiced today, does not affirm Jesus Christ as the Messiah or as divine. Christianity rests on the belief that Christ has already come, that He is the Son of God, and that salvation is found through Him alone. Judaism continues to await the Messiah and does not accept that claim.

This difference matters, and it should be stated plainly. Disagreement with Jewish theology does not translate into agreement with the arguments being made here, nor does it justify broad or disparaging claims directed toward Jewish people and American Blacks as a whole.

The same standard must apply across the board. Entire groups cannot be judged collectively while the historical record of others is minimized or ignored. The history of European expansion, conquest, chattel slavery, and the formation of this nation carries its own weight and cannot be set aside when defining who belongs.

Their position unfolds as a layered framework. A nation, in their view, is not simply a political structure but a combination of land, lineage, language, laws, loves, liturgy, and faith, with race and ethnicity treated as essential components rather than incidental features.

From that foundation, they move toward a vision of stability that depends on uniformity. A nation must remain unified in its composition in order to endure. That unity is not limited to culture alone, but extends toward a preference for a mono-ethnic, mono-cultural, and at times mono-religious society, where difference is treated as a source of disorder rather than strength.

From there, they move to a reading of American history that frames the nation as fundamentally European and Christian in origin. Immigration and demographic change are then positioned as threats to cultural continuity. That concern is not without historical context. The issue arises in how it is applied and who is included within the definition of the nation itself.

American identity is not reserved for European descendants. It is inseparable from American Blacks, descendants of those who built this nation through forced labor, and from Native Americans, whose presence on this land predates its naming.

Within their framework, stability requires sameness. Diversity becomes fragmentation, and change becomes decline. Immigration is then framed as a moral violation, at times described as theft, shifting the language from governance to judgment.

At the same time, Christianity is positioned as the force that should shape national identity, binding faith to governance, culture, and law. The church is called upon to develop a theology of nationhood that aligns belief with race and lineage.

The conclusion becomes clear. A nation defined in this way cannot remain multi-ethnic without losing what they believe it was meant to be. What is presented as preservation becomes a narrowing of identity.

The Slavery Problem They Will Not Solve

There is a tension at the center of this argument that remains unresolved. Immigration is described as theft, yet slavery is not addressed with the same clarity.

If crossing a border unlawfully is framed as taking what does not belong to you, then the forced removal of human beings, the stripping of identity, the separation of families, and the exploitation of generations must be understood for what it was.

It was theft in its most complete form. It was theft of body, of name, of language, of land, of lineage, of faith, and of future. The very elements they use to define a nation were taken from my ancestors.

That reality does not sit comfortably within their framework, and it is often avoided. The argument begins to resemble a desire to return to an earlier order while denying the full truth of how that order was established. The claim that the nation belongs to those who built it cannot stand without acknowledging who labored, who was forced, and who paid the cost.

An argument that treats immigration as a moral violation while softening the reality of slavery does not hold. It applies judgment selectively. It names one form of taking while minimizing another that was far more expansive and far more destructive.

That is not a theology of nationhood grounded in truth. It is a framework built on selective memory.

A Man Arguing Against His Own Existence

There is one more thing worth saying before moving to the answer. Calvin Robinson, sitting at that table, is himself of mixed English and Jamaican heritage. By the standard the three men are arguing for, he would not be considered fully English under their own framework. Race is biology, they said. Blood and lineage define a nation, they said. A man of partial Caribbean descent does not fit that picture cleanly. The fact that Robinson sits comfortably defending an argument that, taken to its logical end, would exclude him, is one of the strangest features of the whole conversation. It is also a reminder that ideology has a way of asking people to argue against their own existence.

In Part Three, I will answer them. Not with abstraction, but with my own lineage, and with the witness of Scripture itself.

Part Three

Land, Lineage, and the God Who Will Not Be Owned

An American Black Answer to Mendacity

There is a point where argument must give way to clarity.

The framework these men advanced attempts to define belonging through lineage, to anchor identity in ancestry, and to align nationhood with a particular vision of race and faith. It presents order as something that must be preserved through sameness and suggests that deviation from that sameness leads to decline.

That framework does not account for my existence.

I am an American Black woman. My lineage is not a matter of abstraction. It is tied to this land through generations of labor, displacement, survival, and faith. My ancestors did not arrive here by choice, yet their hands helped build what is now called America. Their presence is not incidental to this nation. It is foundational.

Land

My great-great-great grandfather married a Cherokee woman. That woman was not an immigrant. She was not a settler. She was born of the soil this nation now occupies. Her people walked this land before there was an America to call it America. That ancestry ties me to this place in a way no European descent can match. The Cherokee were here. They are part of who I am.

The men who argue that America belongs to them by lineage came here from somewhere else. England. Scotland. Ireland. Germany. The Netherlands. They came across an ocean to a land already inhabited, already named, already known by the people who had walked it for generations. By their own logic, the original claim belongs to those who were already here. By blood, I am also one of those people.

Lineage

My African ancestors did not come to this country. They were brought here. The first documented Africans arrived in the Virginia Colony in 1619. That is more than one hundred years before most European immigrant families set foot in America. Our roots and our ties were cut, just as the white man's roots and ties were cut when he left Europe. We became loyal to this land because this land became the only land we had. Africa was severed from us. America became us.

I can trace my legacy to a family that came out of slavery and built a community in Nacogdoches, Texas. That community exists today. I do not have to look at a photograph to prove it. I can go and stand on the ground where my people built. They did not migrate here. They were forced here, and then they built. That is American lineage. That is generational presence. That is the very thing these men say defines a nation, and I have it in two directions, by Native ancestry and by African ancestry, both rooted in this soil.

Labor

They want to talk about who built America. We should talk about it. The American Constitution was written by European men. The American economy was built on the backs of African slaves. Both things are true. Cotton became the largest export of the United States in the nineteenth century. That cotton was picked by the hands of slaves. The wealth that funded northern banks, southern plantations, and the broader American economy passed through the labor of people who received nothing for it. Parts of the United States Capitol and the White House were built using slave labor. That is a documented fact, not an opinion.

Black Americans have served in every major American war. The Revolutionary War. The War of 1812. The Civil War. The First World War. The Second World War. Korea. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. We have shed blood for a country that has not always been willing to shed its prejudice for us. That is loyalty by any measure these men claim to honor.

The God Who Will Not Be Owned

Christ does not belong to a nation. He does not belong to a race. He does not belong to a structure built by men. He is not preserved through lineage, nor is He confined to a people who claim proximity to Him.

He reveals Himself according to His own authority.

Scripture makes this plain. He spoke to those who were not expected to receive Him. He moved among those who were considered outside. He established a kingdom that did not follow the lines men had drawn.

Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well. Jews and Samaritans did not associate with one another. He crossed that boundary on purpose. He told her that God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth.

"God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth."

— John 4:24

Rahab was a prostitute, and she is in the lineage of Christ. Ruth was a Moabite, and she is in the lineage of Christ. The Roman centurion was an outsider, and Jesus said He had not found such great faith in all of Israel. The Ethiopian eunuch was the first recorded African convert in the book of Acts, baptized on a road in the desert by a Spirit-led evangelist. Naaman the Syrian was healed when the lepers of Israel were not. This is not a modern invention. This is the original pattern.

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

— Galatians 3:28

Paul wrote that in the first century. He was not a liberal theologian. He was a former Pharisee writing under inspiration to a young church trying to figure out whether Gentiles needed to become Jewish in order to be Christian. His answer was no. His answer remains no. Ethnicity does not determine standing before God. Status does not determine standing before God. National identity does not determine standing before God. Faith does.

"After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb."

— Revelation 7:9

That is the final vision. Every nation. Every tribe. Every people. Every language. Not one race elevated above the others. Not one ethnic group designated as the true heirs. The throne room of God is the most diverse gathering in all of Scripture. Anyone who tells you that Christianity requires racial uniformity has not read the last chapter of the book they claim to follow.

The Retraction

The attempt to bind Christ to national identity reverses the pattern Scripture establishes. It takes what is not owned and presents it as possession. It takes what is given and reshapes it into something to be defended. It replaces revelation with structure and substitutes identity for truth.

That movement is not preservation. It is distortion.

What we are witnessing in this country is a retraction. There were ancestors, men and women, who thought they were better. They killed. They robbed. They raped. They stoned. They lied. For centuries, they pretended to be something they were not. Now that some of that has been corrected, even partially, there is a movement to go back. They want to relive a time when they were foul and called it good, because in their minds they hold an image that is a lie. It is a false image. It is mendacity.

Mendacity does not always appear as an obvious falsehood. It often presents itself as conviction, as order, as clarity. It speaks with confidence and appeals to history, to tradition, and to authority. Over time, it becomes familiar enough to be accepted.

But it does not stand when examined.

Truth does not depend on who claims it. It does not shift with identity, and it does not remain confined to the structures built around it. It stands on its own.

They claim Christ. They cannot have Him on those terms. Christ belongs to Himself, and through His own choosing, He gives Himself to all who come in spirit and in truth. The Samaritan woman knew it. Ruth knew it. Rahab knew it. The Ethiopian on the desert road knew it. My ancestors, who took a faith that was used against them and reshaped it into a faith that set them free, knew it.

I know it too.

No man is the representative of Jesus Christ except Jesus Christ Himself. No nation is the inheritor of Jesus Christ except every nation, together, before the throne. No race is the bearer of Jesus Christ except the human race, made in His image, redeemed by His blood.

The whitewashed tomb is beautiful on the outside. Inside, it is full of dead men's bones. We have seen the outside long enough. It is time to call what is inside by its name.

Mendacity.

Jacqueline Session Ausby

DahTruth.com  |  DAHTRUTH, LLC

The Shed and the Line: What Justice Jackson Sees in One Place and Refuses to See in Another

📖 “And it came to pass, when Jezebel heard that Naboth was stoned, and was dead, that Jezebel said to Ahab, Arise, take possession of the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite… So Ahab arose to go down to the vineyard of Naboth… to take possession of it.” 1 Kings 21:15–16

The Supreme Court of the United States has been more publicly active in the last few years than at any point I can remember in my lifetime. Live-streamed oral arguments have pulled the Court into the daily life of ordinary Americans in ways that used to be reserved for lawyers and law students. The justices themselves have stepped out from behind the bench. Over the last few years, Justice Samuel Alito sat for an extended interview on the Hoover Institution's Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson. Justice Amy Coney Barrett sat for her own episode of the same program to discuss her new book. Last week, she participated in a Q&A at her alma mater, Rhodes College. Justice Sonia Sotomayor made remarks at the University of Kansas School of Law about a colleague's immigration concurrence, then this week issued a rare public apology for those remarks. Justice Brett Kavanaugh has appeared on joint panels with other judges. Justice Clarence Thomas has been on the speaking circuit. This past week, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson delivered the James A. Thomas Lecture at Yale Law School.

It was notable that the two American Black justices on the Court both stepped before the American public in recent weeks to address the issues facing this country. Justice Thomas offered a broad view of how ideology shapes American identity. Progressivism has infiltrated the American Black community, and its impact is obviously devastating. It does not represent American values. It threatens the very system on which American life is built.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson used her platform to speak on process. The process of the shadow docket, the unfairness it creates for those waiting in line to be heard by the Supreme Court, the pressure it places on the schedules of the justices themselves, and the way it strips power from the lower courts.

“The concern is that emergency relief can be granted without a true showing of urgency and without the careful balancing that equity requires, allowing courts to effectively decide outcomes before full consideration of the merits.”

— ⚖️ Ketanji Brown Jackson (Yale Framing)

Her lecture was titled "Equity and Exigency: A First-Principles Solution for the Supreme Court's Emergency Docket." That title carries the whole argument inside it. Equity is the old common-law principle that fairness, not just rigid rule-following, must guide a court when extraordinary relief is requested. Exigency is the requirement that something genuinely urgent must be at stake before a court bypasses its ordinary process. Jackson's claim is that the modern Supreme Court has lost its grip on both. It grants emergency relief without showing real urgency, and it does so without the equitable balancing that has historically constrained such relief. To make the case, she walked her audience through a scenario she called the shed.

Two neighbors dispute ownership of a backyard shed. Neighbor A wants to tear it down. He says it does not belong on his property. Neighbor B disagrees and goes to court asking for a preliminary injunction to keep the shed standing while the question of ownership is decided. The lower court grants the injunction. Neighbor A is impatient. He runs to the appeals court asking for a stay so the demolition can proceed right now, before the merits are ever heard.

Jackson's point is simple. If the appeals court grants that stay, the shed comes down. The case becomes meaningless. Whoever actually owned it loses, because the thing in dispute no longer exists. Emergency procedure has been used to lock in a permanent outcome before anyone decided who was right. There was no true exigency. There was no equitable balancing. There was only the appearance of urgency and the reality of finality.

She told the Yale audience that this is what the shadow docket has become. Savvy parties know how to skip the line, get to the Supreme Court fast, and walk out with a result before a case is ever fully heard. Average people stuck in normal court proceedings cannot do this. The line, she said, is no longer fair.

She is right about that to a certain extent. It is my belief that certain dockets should proceed when the President of the United States deems a matter urgent, or in capital cases where a person's life hangs in the balance. With that said, I wonder whether she has sat with her own argument long enough to see where else it applies.

*

Let me say plainly what this is not. I am not making an apples to apples argument. In her argument, two neighbors are arguing over a shed, and the dispute is about ownership of a thing. The same argument, however, can be applied to the birthright citizenship case Trump v. Barbara, in which Jackson took the opposite position. An American citizen and an illegal immigrant are not arguing over the same thing. The citizen already holds citizenship. The immigrant is not claiming the citizen's status. The shed analogy, on its own terms, does not map onto the border.

What it does do, if we are honest, is point us toward the deeper mechanism Jackson refuses to name. Her concern is that emergency procedure can lock in permanent outcomes before the merits are reached. That concern, taken seriously, applies with even greater force to what birthright citizenship has become at the southern border.

Here is the truer picture. A person enters the United States without legal authorization. They have a child on American soil. That child, under the current reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, becomes an American citizen at the moment of first breath. The child cannot be removed. The parents become very difficult to remove, because removing them now means separating an American citizen from their family. The unlawful entry, which should have been a question for the courts, has produced a fact that no court can undo. The merits never had to be reached. Biology beat procedure to the finish line.

This is not Neighbor A asking to tear down a shed. This is Neighbor A planting a tree whose roots grow under Neighbor B's foundation, so that even if a future court rules Neighbor A had no right to be on the property, the tree cannot be removed without taking the house down with it. The tether is permanent. That is the design.

*

The cost of that tether falls on American citizens, and it is not abstract. It is structural and it is daily.

American citizens pay the taxes that fund the schools, hospitals, emergency rooms, and public services that absorb the cost of the tether. American citizens wait in immigration lines behind families who used the tether to leapfrog the legal process. American citizens watch their wages stagnate in the trades and service industries most exposed to a labor pool that arrived outside the law. American Black citizens, in particular, sit at the bottom of every economic indicator that immigration policy is supposed to consider, and they are routinely told their concerns matter less than the concerns of those who came illegally. The vote of an American citizen is gradually diluted in districts whose population was never legally adjudicated. None of this is the citizen claiming ownership of someone else's child. It is the citizen pointing out that a permanent change to the body politic is happening through a procedural shortcut that nobody is allowed to question without being called cruel.

This is the exact mechanism Jackson denounced at Yale, and the same vocabulary applies. Where is the exigency? There was no genuine emergency that required the unlawful entry to happen before the legal process. Where is the equity? The balance of harms falls heavily on the citizen who follows the rules and lightly on the one who does not. Procedural delay, used by parties who know how the system works, locks in an outcome before the merits are heard. She called it corrosive when the federal government does it through the Supreme Court. She does not call it anything when individuals do it through unlawful entry plus a child born on American soil. The mechanism is the same. The line-jumping is the same. The displacement of average people who tried to follow the rules is the same. The only difference is who pays the price, and who Jackson is willing to see paying it.

*

Although in the United States there is a separation of church and state, the principle at issue here is not foreign to Scripture. The idea that an outcome can be secured before the merits are fully heard appears in the book of 1 Kings.

Naboth owned a vineyard that King Ahab coveted. Naboth refused to give up what belonged to him. Instead of allowing the matter to rest or be resolved through a just process, Queen Jezebel arranged a proceeding that carried the appearance of law but lacked truth at its core. False witnesses were brought forward. Accusations were made. Judgment was carried out with urgency. Naboth was put to death, and only then did Ahab take possession of the vineyard.

The outcome was secured before truth was allowed to speak. By the time the matter could have been examined, it no longer mattered. The vineyard had already changed hands. The process had produced a permanent result before the merits were ever established.

Underneath every proceeding that produces an outcome before the merits are heard, there is a covetousness that cannot wait for a lawful answer.

This same principle carries forward into the present. The focus here is on unlawful entry that takes place outside the legal framework and produces a lasting outcome before the courts can fully address the underlying questions. When entry occurs outside the process and a permanent condition takes hold before full adjudication, the sequence is reversed. What should follow the judgment begins to precede it.

In many cases, entry into the United States outside the legal process is not incidental. Some cross through organized smuggling networks and cartels that exist precisely to move people across the border outside the law. Others enter lawfully on a visa and simply remain after it expires, turning legal entry into unlawful presence by the passage of time. Still others present themselves at the border and file a claim designed to secure a foothold inside the country while adjudication drags on for years. The pathways differ. The mechanism is the same. When entry, status, or presence is established outside the legal framework, and a permanent outcome follows before the courts ever reach the merits, the process has already been overtaken. The result begins to precede the judgment.

*

Jackson made a second point at Yale that deserves attention. She said the legitimacy of any process depends on equal access to it. She worried that the Supreme Court's modern emergency docket creates a two-track system where well-positioned parties get faster relief while ordinary litigants wait. That is a fairness argument, and it is a serious one.

Apply it honestly. The person who waits in their home country for a legal visa, fills out the forms, pays the fees, and stands in a line that can stretch for a decade or longer is the ordinary litigant. The person who crosses unlawfully and files a claim from inside the country is the savvy party who knows the system. One is following the rules. The other is using the gaps in the rules to get a faster, better outcome. By Jackson's own Yale framework, that is precisely the kind of unequal access that erodes public trust in the law.

She cannot see this. Or she will not.

*

The shadow docket itself is not new. It has existed as procedural infrastructure for as long as the modern Court has existed. Every administration in living memory has used it. Bush used it sparingly. Obama used it sparingly. Biden used it more. The current administration uses it the most by a wide margin. What is also true is that the Trump administration has faced more resistance from lower courts than any administration in recent memory, because its policies do not align with the left-leaning ideology that has long dominated elite institutions, academia, and large portions of the federal bench. Trump's policies often run against that ideological majority and in favor of ordinary Americans whose concerns have been treated as minority concerns for decades. That last fact is what changed Jackson's tone. The procedure did not change. The political direction of the rulings changed. She had little to say about the shadow docket when its outcomes ran her way. She has a great deal to say about it now.

That is the part worth naming plainly. This is presented as a structural critique of process. It functions as a political argument about outcomes. A truly principled fairness argument would apply itself wherever the same mechanism appears. It would not stop at the courthouse door of one issue and refuse to walk across the street to another.

If the shed cannot be torn down before the court rules, then the tree cannot be planted before the court rules either. Either the line matters or it does not. Either ordinary citizens deserve protection from those who know how to skip ahead, or they do not. The principle does not get to be selective.

Justice Jackson's shed is a good story. It deserves to be told all the way through, including the part where the roots reach the foundation, and including the part where Naboth's vineyard was taken before truth was ever allowed to speak.

Jacqueline Session Ausby

DahTruth.com  |  DAHTRUTH, LLC

Please Don't Shoot the Messenger

“I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” — Genesis 3:16 (KJV)

I want to begin with an apology. What I am about to say will offend some people, and I am genuinely sorry for that. I am not speaking about all women. I am not dismissing the very real pain of those who have been truly victimized. Sexual violence is real and it is serious and those who have suffered it deserve justice and compassion without question.

What I cannot do is sit quietly and accept every media narrative without applying the same scrutiny I apply to everything else. I have never been able to do that. DahTruth was built on the conviction that truth matters even when it is uncomfortable, and this week the truth is very uncomfortable indeed. So please do not shoot the messenger. Just hear what I have to say.

What I also believe, and what I have watched play out repeatedly, is that the media is not simply reacting to pressure. It is often making deliberate choices about which stories to elevate and when to elevate them. There is a selectiveness to what is amplified and what is ignored. There are moments when a public figure is no longer protected, when the culture has decided they are no longer worthy of defense, and that is when the full weight of exposure is allowed to fall. That does not mean every accusation is false. But it does mean we have to question whether the timing, the attention, and the narrative are being driven by truth, or by a decision that it is time for that person to fall.

Before I go any further I want to tell you where I am standing when I say what I am about to say.

I am an American Black woman. And I have spent my entire life watching American Black men be accused, convicted, and destroyed by allegations that the broader culture accepted without question and the legal system processed without mercy. That history lives in me the way it lives in anyone who grew up knowing the names and knowing what those names cost.

Emmett Till was fourteen years old. A child. Murdered in Mississippi in 1955 over an alleged interaction with a white woman that decades later she admitted she had fabricated. He did not live long enough to defend himself. There was no trial that mattered. There was only a casket and a mother who insisted the world see what had been done to her son. Mamie Till made sure we looked. We should never stop looking.

Harper Lee gave us To Kill a Mockingbird as fiction but the story it told was not fictional to anyone in the American Black community. Tom Robinson was a composite of every Black man who had ever been accused by a white woman and handed to a system that had already decided the outcome before the first word of testimony was spoken. The accusation was the conviction. That was not literature. That was life.

In my own generation I watched it continue in different forms. Tupac Shakur faced rape charges that were later dropped and yet he was convicted of sexual assault and served time. Mike Tyson was convicted of rape and most people in my community did not believe those accusations reflected the full truth of what happened. Bill Cosby spent years as America's beloved father figure before allegations surfaced, accumulated, and ultimately resulted in a conviction tied to a relationship that by any honest account had elements of consent woven through it. Jay Z has faced allegations in recent years that have not held up. Shannon Sharpe has faced accusations that the facts have not supported.

I am not saying powerful American Black men are incapable of wrongdoing. They are not. R. Kelly is a man whose crimes against young women, many of them American Black girls, were known and tolerated by an industry that chose profit over protection for decades. He is guilty and the record bears that out. Diddy is a more complicated figure in my mind. I see him less as a predator in the traditional sense and more as a man who built and fed an entire culture of excess and illicit behavior, the way Hugh Hefner did, where the line between willing participation and exploitation was deliberately kept invisible. That culture consumed people. Whether it consumed them with or without their consent is a question the courts will have to sort through. What is not a question is that he curated it and called it a lifestyle.

What I am saying is that I have watched this weapon used against American Black men my entire life with a precision and a cultural willingness that left no room for doubt or scrutiny. The accusation arrived and the verdict followed. That history made me a skeptic. Not a blind one. A historically informed one.

Now I look at the current moment and I see more white men facing these allegations publicly than at any point in my lifetime. Part of me understands the cynical reading of that. That finally the machinery is turning in a direction it avoided for centuries. That powerful white men are being held to a standard that American Black men never had the protection to hide behind.

But I do not think that is the whole truth either.

Because the pattern I am describing, the willing transaction rewritten as victimhood, the accusation deployed when the arrangement stops serving one party, the media narrative that accepts one version of events without asking the obvious questions, that pattern does not belong to any race. It belongs to human nature. It has always been there. It was just aimed more precisely at some people than others for most of American history.

What I want is the same standard applied in every room and in every direction. The same scrutiny. The same questions. The same insistence that the whole truth be told regardless of who is telling it and who it is being told about. That is not cynicism. That is just honesty. And honesty is the only place I know how to start.

It started in a garden.

The serpent did not force Eve. He enticed her. He offered her something she wanted, knowledge, elevation, the ability to know what God knows, and she looked at it, desired it, and reached out and took it. Adam ate too. Both were accountable. But the transaction began with a desire and a deliberate choice. Nobody dragged Eve to that tree. She went because she wanted what was on it.

And God did not look the other way. He held Adam to a higher standard because Adam carried a higher charge. The ground that had never needed to be tilled before now required his labor for the rest of his life. The consequence was real and it was lasting. That is the standard men in positions of power and trust are still meant to be held to. When you carry authority you carry accountability. There is no separating the two.

That dynamic did not end in the garden. It has followed humanity through every generation, through every palace and every political chamber and every back room where power and desire have found each other. There is a particular kind of woman, and I want to be clear that I am speaking about a particular kind and not all women, who understands what she has and uses it deliberately to get what she cannot obtain through skill or merit alone. She makes the transaction with open eyes. She takes what is offered. And history is full of her.

The problem we are living with today is not that this woman exists. She has always existed. The problem is that she has discovered she can rewrite the terms of the transaction after the fact. And a media culture desperate for a particular narrative will help her do it.

Let us go back to Warren G. Harding.

Harding, America’s 29th President and former US Senator.  He was a weak and scandalous man who spent much of his political life entangled with women who were not his wife. Two of those women deserve particular attention here because their stories illuminate something the current moment refuses to see clearly.

Carrie Fulton Phillips was a close family friend of Harding family.  From their hometown of Marion, Ohio. She and Harding carried on an intense affair for years, exchanging letters that left no question about the nature of their relationship. But Carrie was not simply a woman swept up in a powerful man's orbit. She was calculating. When Harding was moving toward a Senate vote on declaring war against Germany, Carrie threatened to expose the affair unless he voted no. She attempted to use her intimate access to a United States Senator to influence American foreign policy. That is not a woman who did not know what she was doing. That is a woman who understood exactly what she had and exactly how far she was willing to take it.

The Republican Party's response tells you everything you need to know about how power protects itself. They did not expose her. They paid her. They arranged for Carrie and her husband to be sent to Japan so the whole matter could be buried before it reached the public. The cover ran all the way to the party level.

Nan Britton, another family friend came next.  She was younger and perhaps more sympathetic in the way that lovesick people often are. She was an admirer from Marion who became deeply entangled with Harding in a relationship that produced a child. What began in cheap motels eventually moved to the White House itself, where Harding would spend stolen time with Nan, not in a bedroom but in a closet.  A black space reserved for coats and shoes became the place they carried out an affair. Nan went inside that closet willingly. She accepted monthly support payments for years. When Harding died in 1923 and the payments stopped, she told the story publicly in her 1927 book, The President's Daughter. DNA testing in 2015 confirmed that Harding was indeed the father of her daughter Elizabeth Ann.

Here is what Nan Britton did not do. She did not walk out of that closet and claim she had no idea what she was walking into. She told her story honestly, including her own role in it. Whatever her motivations, she did not reframe herself as an innocent victim of a predator. She told the truth about a willing relationship between two people who both knew what they were doing.

Harding died in August of 1923 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The circumstances of his death have never been fully resolved. Florence moved quickly. She dismissed the doctors, relied on a single physician, and had his body embalmed immediately after his passing. She refused an autopsy. There are those who have suggested she may have played a role in his death, that a woman who had spent years burning letters and protecting a man who never protected her may have finally reached the end of what she was willing to endure. We will never know. Florence made sure of that.

Florence Harding made no transaction. She played no game. She simply loved a man who was not worthy of it and paid a price she never earned. She attempted to burn all his letters and bury his secrets, giving everything she had to preserving the image of a man who had never once deserved her loyalty. She is the one in that story whose suffering was real and undeserved and whose name history has largely overlooked in favor of the scandals that surrounded her. She is Florence Harding in every generation. And there is one in every story.

Now let us come forward to today.

Allegations have surfaced against Eric Swalwell, the California congressman currently running for governor. Women have come forward with accounts of sexual misconduct. I want to be careful here because allegations are allegations and legal determinations have not been made. I am not saying what happened or did not happen in those rooms.

What I am saying is that the details being reported publicly raise questions that honest people are allowed to ask. Accounts describing voluntary contact on more than one occasion, text messages running in both directions, and no contemporaneous report of assault deserve scrutiny. Going to a hotel room does not mean a woman consented to sex. That is true and it matters. What is equally true is that returning voluntarily to the same situation a second time, maintaining ongoing contact, and only raising the alarm when the story becomes public, at a particular time, raises legitimate questions about the narrative being presented.

Imagine if Nan Britton had walked out of that White House closet and said she had no idea what she was going in there for. Nobody would have believed her. Because context matters. Choices matter. And the whole truth matters, not just the part that serves the story being told.

There is an irony in the Swalwell situation that should not go unnoticed. This is a man who called loudly and publicly for the release of the Epstein files. He positioned himself as someone who believed in exposure and accountability and the public's right to know what powerful men had done in private rooms. The chickens have now come home to roost. The same standard he applied to others is being applied to him. He cannot play hide the ball with his own record while demanding transparency from everyone else. That is not how accountability works. That is not how truth works.

He has been called to resign his seat in the House and to step back from his run for governor. As of this writing he has admitted nothing and resigned nothing. He is carrying his cross publicly, insisting on his innocence while the weight of the allegations presses down on his political future. Whether he survives it remains to be seen. But Adam did not escape the garden simply by denying he had eaten the apple. The juices were dripping his lips.

The ones I think about most in all these stories are the wives. The women at home who made no transaction, sent no texts, walked into no hotel rooms, and woke up one morning to find their lives altered by choices they never made. They are not in the headlines. They are not telling their stories on camera. They are simply living with the wreckage.  Florence Harding on repeat.  Faithful to a fault. And paying the highest price of anyone involved.

The serpent is still in the garden.

Lucifer has just learned to dress differently depending on the decade. The offer is the same. The desire is the same. The choice is the same. And the aftermath, the cover, the spin, the selective outrage, the media performance, the wife sitting quietly at home, that is the same too.

Men in power are still called to a higher standard. That part has never changed. What has changed is that we have lost the willingness to tell the whole truth. We pick the parts that serve us and call it justice. We rewrite our own choices and call it survival. We silence the questions that do not fit the story and call it compassion.

But truth does not disappear because we stop looking at it. It waits. And eventually, the way it always has, it finds its way into the light.

Please don't shoot the messenger.

The Rise of Lazarus

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.” Dostoevsky, From Crime and Punishment

We are living in a world that has lost its grip on truth. Not because truth has disappeared, but because we have decided we no longer need it the way we once did. What has replaced it is performance. What people present and construct for the eyes of others has become the new currency of reality. And beneath all of that performance is deception, sometimes deliberate, sometimes so deeply practiced that the person performing it can no longer tell the difference between what is real and what they have built.

We rely on one another's version of truth as though opinion were the same as fact and feeling were the same as foundation. Truth has been stretched and bent and reshaped so many times that it no longer carries the weight it was meant to carry. It has become something people claim rather than something people discover.

But what I have come to understand is that real truth does not disappear simply because we ignore it. It waits. And it waits. It sits beneath the noise and the performance and the carefully constructed versions of reality that we present to the world and to ourselves. And then it breaks through. When it does, there is no argument. There is no debate. It rises. It reverberates. It resonates at a level that goes deeper than anything that can be reasoned away. You do not decide to receive it. You recognize it. Something in you that was already awake to it finally has the language it has been waiting for.

That is what happened to me reading Crime and Punishment.

Crime and Punishment is a novel about a murder. But it is really a novel about a man who decided he could define truth for himself and live inside that definition without consequence.

Raskolnikov is the son of a deceased father, raised by a poor mother with a beautiful and devoted sister named Dunya. He leaves home to attend university but by the time we meet him he has already withdrawn. He has dropped out and is living in near isolation, cut off from society and from any real sense of purpose or direction. There is a heaviness to him, a quiet despair that sits beneath everything.

What stirs him is not ambition but desperation. He learns that his sister Dunya is preparing to marry a man nearly twice her age. It is not a marriage built on love. It is a sacrifice. She is willing to give herself over to a life she does not want in order to relieve the burden on her mother and her brother. Raskolnikov understands exactly what she is doing. And that knowledge does not humble him. It pushes him toward a darker kind of thinking.

He turns his attention to an old pawnbroker in the city, a woman who lends money to the poor at high interest, keeps what is given to her when people cannot repay, and hoards everything she collects. Raskolnikov convinces himself that her life holds little value. That her death would go unnoticed. That removing her from the world could even be justified as a kind of service.

He builds that reasoning piece by piece until it feels undeniable to him. By the time he is finished the act no longer appears as murder. It appears as something almost necessary. And that is the most dangerous place a human mind can arrive at, the place where sin has been reasoned into righteousness.

I will not walk through every detail of what happens after Raskolnikov commits the murder. What I will say is that the weight of what he has done does not leave him. It presses in. It follows him. And in the middle of his unraveling he finds his way to a young woman named Sonya.

Where Raskolnikov is divided, Sonya is grounded. Where he has built his life on reasoning and pride, she has built hers on faith. Sonya is a believer in the Word of God despite the life she has been forced into. She is a young woman who has sold her body to support her family, reduced to the lowest place that society could put her. And yet she is the one who carries truth. Not because she is powerful, educated, or recognized by the world. But because she knows what it means to suffer and remain faithful anyway.

Together they are brought face to face with what they have each done and what they have each endured. And in one of the most powerful moments in all of literature, Raskolnikov asks Sonya to read to him. He asks her to read the story of Lazarus.

She reads of a man who had been dead. Not sick. Not weakened. Dead. And Christ called him out of that death by name. He did not argue Lazarus back to life. He did not reason with him. He called him and the dead man rose.

“Lazarus, come forth.”

— John 11:43

That moment in the novel is not just a scene. It is the entire point. Because both Raskolnikov and Sonya are sitting in their own kind of death. He in his guilt and his constructed truth. She in her suffering and her sacrifice. And the story of Lazarus holds up a mirror to both of them that neither can look away from.

Truth had been waiting. And in that room it finally broke through.

Sonya does not excuse what Raskolnikov has done. She does not soften it or help him manage it. She tells him plainly that he must confess. That he must bear the weight of what he has done. That carrying his cross is not punishment alone but the road back to life.

And so they suffer.

Raskolnikov is sentenced to Siberia. Sonya follows him into that exile. She does not abandon him in his guilt. And in the midst of punishment and shame and the long road of consequence, something neither of them could have manufactured on their own begins to take place. Redemption moves in quietly the way it always does, not announced, not performed, but real.

By the end of Crime and Punishment we do not simply witness justice. We witness resurrection. Two souls bound together not by comfort or ease but by suffering. And standing in the middle of that suffering is Christ himself. Not distant. Not abstract. Present and active, calling two dead people back into life the same way he called Lazarus from the grave.

This is what the world has forgotten.

We have been told that the road to life runs through wealth and prosperity and recognition and power. That happiness is the destination and comfort is the sign that you have arrived. But Crime and Punishment tells a different story. And so does the Gospel.

The road to truth is narrow. It often runs directly through suffering. It requires that everything you have constructed about yourself and about reality be stripped away until what remains is only what is real. That process is not comfortable. It is not celebrated by the world. But it is the only road that leads anywhere worth going.

Raskolnikov had to lose everything he believed about himself before truth could reach him. Sonya had already lost everything the world valued and found that truth was still standing when everything else was gone.

That is the hope.

Not that suffering will be avoided. But that suffering is not the end. That Christ still calls. That no matter how deep the grave clothes have wrapped themselves around you, the voice that called Lazarus is still speaking. And when it reaches you, and it will reach you, there is no argument. It rises and settles in a way that cannot be reasoned away.

And you will know it is true.

A Revelation on Resurrection Sunday: Take up your bed and follow Christ

“If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.” Luke 9:23

My Dear Fellow Preachers, Teachers, and Fellow Worshippers,

It is Resurrection Sunday morning and it is raining here in New Jersey. The kind of soft, quiet rain that does not demand your attention but simply surrounds you. Outside my window I can see yellow marigolds, that stubborn, faithful yellow that blooms even when the sky is grey. And somewhere in the air is the fragrance of bell flowers, that clean and tender scent that arrives with spring as if it were its own announcement.

It is, without question, the season of resurrection. But I want us to sit with that word today and ask ourselves honestly: whose resurrection are we actually preaching? Because from where I am sitting, and from what I have been hearing, there are many resurrections on offer this spring. The resurrection of your finances. The resurrection of your career. The resurrection of your breakthrough season. And all of them, without exception, carry a price tag. On this morning when we ought to be standing in awe of an empty tomb, too many pulpits are occupied with a far more profitable miracle. And too many of us, preachers, teachers, and worshippers alike, have grown so accustomed to it that we no longer hear the difference.

The Season of the Refund

It is no secret that February and March have become the months of the federal tax refund. And it has become tradition in our community for ministers to know exactly when those deposits land. There is no greater season for what I will call spiritual financial manipulation than this one right here. Give a thousand and expect it returned threefold. Sow your seed in this ministry and watch your harvest come. Give your last and God will make a way. Some have even specified amounts. Some have promised triplets, three blessings for one offering. And the faithful, the struggling, the genuinely believing, reach into wallets already stretched thin and give because a man standing behind a pulpit told them God said so.

No man of God has the authority to make that promise. None. What is being sold in these spaces is not faith. It is fear dressed up as generosity, and it is keeping our people in bondage.

Fiddler on the Roof: A Story About God's Faithfulness When Everything Is Taken

One of my favorite films of all time is Fiddler on the Roof. Most people speak of it as a story about tradition, and it is. But before we get to Tevye's daughters, I want us to understand the full weight of the world in which this family lived. These were Jews living beyond the Pale of Settlement in Tsarist Russia, a people who had been tolerated just barely, confined to the margins of a society that did not want them, governed by a power that could revoke their existence at any moment. They were not simply people of faith living in difficult times. They were a people perpetually at the mercy of a government that viewed them as a problem to be managed. And in the end, the Russian government forced them out. Out of their homes. Out of their village. Out of everything they had ever known.

What Fiddler on the Roof shows us, underneath all of the singing and the tradition and Tevye's conversations with God, is a portrait of a people carrying their faith into displacement. And when the order finally came to leave Anatevka, Tevye's family did exactly what the gospel of Christ calls every one of us to do. They took up their beds. And they followed. They did not know where they were going with certainty. They did not know if they would ever see one another again. But in that moment, standing at the edge of everything familiar, they picked up what little they had and walked into the unknown. That is not just the story of a musical. That is the story of faith.

Take up your bed and follow Me. Jesus did not promise comfort. He did not promise that the road ahead would look familiar. He promised presence. He promised that the One calling you into the unknown would be with you in it. The tradition in Fiddler on the Roof was never the point. It was the container. The real story is whether the God inside the container is still being trusted when the container breaks.

The Daughters: One Degree at a Time

Now let us talk about Tzeitel, Hodel, and Chava, Tevye's three eldest daughters, and what each of them reveals about the nature of drift.

Tzeitel, the eldest, refuses the match her father arranged with the well-off butcher Lazar Wolf. She has already made a pledge to her childhood friend Motel, a poor tailor, and she pleads her own case before her father. Tevye wrestles with it, argues with himself, argues with God, and ultimately bends. He gives his blessing to a marriage born of love rather than arrangement. One degree from tradition.

Hodel falls in love with Perchik, a radical young man who wants to challenge the Russian government. He is eventually arrested and sent to Siberia. And Hodel, rather than accepting a safe arrangement at home, chooses to follow the man she loves into exile. On a snowtorn morning, when the wind was at its most fierce, she says goodbye to her father at a train station, not knowing when or whether she will see him again. Tevye bends again, though it costs him something. Another degree from tradition.

Then comes Chava, the third daughter, and this time Tevye cannot bend. Chava falls in love with Fyedka, a young Russian man, and chooses to marry him outside the faith entirely. Tevye disowns her. The tradition breaks. The family fractures. What restores them in the end is not the tradition returning to its original form but grace arriving through the most unlikely person. Fyedka, Chava's Russian husband, leaves Russia in protest over the government's persecution of the Jews, and through that act of conscience the family finds a way back to one another. But the tradition is permanently altered.

Each daughter pulled away from where they started by just one degree. Each step seemed reasonable in the moment. Each felt like love. And yet the cumulative distance from where Tevye began became impossible to ignore. As I watched Tevye and his daughters, I thought about my own youngest son and his struggle in this life. I understand his plight in a way that only a mother can. My prayer on this Resurrection Sunday morning is that God raises his faith and keeps him strong, and that He gives my son the opportunity to see clearly the difference between tradition and the love of God. Because tradition can shift and crack and fall away entirely. But the love of God does not move. This is the story of the American Black Church, and it is the story of every family that has ever watched someone they love drift one degree at a time from the truth that was meant to hold them.

How the Black Church Lost Its Way

When I grew up, fornication was addressed from the pulpit. Pregnancy outside of marriage was addressed. Living together without the covenant of marriage was addressed. Not because the church was cruel, but because the church understood what was at stake. That standard held the community together even in its imperfection, because we knew the difference between what God called holy and what the culture called convenient.

Then drugs entered our community. Then AIDS. Then mass incarceration. And under the crushing weight of that devastation, the conversations quietly shifted. One degree at a time. The preaching on holiness became labeled as judgmental. The call to repentance was reframed as harmful. The naming of sin became something to be avoided in the interest of being welcoming. And slowly, not all at once, not in a single dramatic break, but one small surrender at a time, the Black Church stopped having those conversations.

The trouble is that we still believe we are holding tradition. We still believe we are preaching the same gospel. We still believe we are the pillar and ground of truth. But the truth is demonstrating itself right in front of us, and too many of us are laughing at what we see rather than confronting it.

We Are Laughing at Our Own Chains

I recently watched a self-proclaimed minister on social media explain his approach to ministry. He stated openly that he does not discuss sin. He said he talks about love and doing no harm because addressing sin might cause harm, and it simply does not resonate with him. As I listened, I recognized something in that voice. Not just theological error. Something older and more dangerous than that. It was the quiet deception that has kept the Black Church in spiritual bondage for generations, the idea that love and truth can be separated, that you can genuinely care for someone while refusing to tell them the truth about where they are headed.

You cannot. A physician who will not diagnose disease because the diagnosis is painful is not compassionate. He is negligent. A minister who will not address sin because the congregation might leave is not feeding the sheep. He is leaving them to wander without a shepherd.

The gospel begins with repentance. John the Baptist understood this at the cost of his life. He stood before the most powerful people of his day and called out sin by name. He named the corruption of Herod Antipas directly, declared openly that it was not lawful for him to have his brother's wife, and he did not lower his voice to make the powerful more comfortable. He was imprisoned for it. And then, at the whim of a dancing girl and a foolish oath made at a birthday party, John the Baptist was beheaded. His head was brought on a platter to a woman who wanted him silenced. That is what preaching truth into the halls of power cost him. John did not preach a comfortable gospel. Jesus did not preach a comfortable gospel. The apostles did not preach a comfortable gospel. They preached repentance. They preached holiness. They preached the cost of sin and the grace of God, and many of them paid for that preaching with their lives.

Many of today's generation of American Black preachers will not lose their heads for naming sin from the pulpit. They will not be imprisoned. They will not be exiled to Siberia. They may lose followers on social media. They may see their attendance drop. Someone may post a negative comment. And yet the message has been so thoroughly softened, so carefully managed, so relentlessly shaped around what the audience wants to hear, that we have ended up with ministers who cannot even say the word sin without apologizing for it. John the Baptist went to his grave before he would compromise the truth. What is our excuse?

When comedians create skits mocking the Black Church and we laugh, that laughter is a confession. It means the satire resonates. It means somewhere inside us we already know the truth about what has happened to us. We laugh at the prosperity preacher, at the performative worship, at the minister who sounds more like a motivational speaker than a servant of Christ. We laugh and then we go back to the same pew the following Sunday. That laughter is not freedom. That is what resignation sounds like.

The Resurrection Christ Actually Promised

Here is what I want us to remember on this rainy Sunday morning, with the marigolds outside and the fragrance of bell flowers in the air. The resurrection of Jesus Christ was not the beginning of a comfortable life for those who loved Him. The disciples were still hiding behind locked doors when the risen Christ appeared. The road to Emmaus was walked by two men whose hope had shattered. Mary Magdalene wept at an empty tomb before she understood what the emptiness meant. The resurrection did not remove suffering from the picture. It redeemed it.

Christ never once told His followers that life would be easy. He told them that in this world they would have tribulation. He told them to take up their cross daily. He told them that the servant is not greater than the master, and that if the world hated Him, it would hate them also. He told them that the path was narrow and that few would find it. These are not the words of a gospel that promises comfort in all things. These are the words of a Savior who walked through suffering Himself, who had no place to lay His own head, who sweat blood in a garden before facing the cross, and who rose on the third day not to hand out financial blessings but to conquer death itself.

Our tradition has slowly replaced that risen Christ with a more convenient one. A Christ who wants you to prosper financially. A Christ who asks very little of you. A Christ whose primary concern is that you are comfortable and affirmed. And in building that version of Christ, we have robbed our people of the very hope that carried a displaced Jewish family out of Anatevka and across the world. We have robbed them of the hope that held John the Baptist steady in a prison cell. We have robbed them of the anchor that scripture says is sure and steadfast, entering into the presence of God Himself behind the veil.

Sometimes your bed is not made in this life. Sometimes the bed God has prepared for you is made in heaven. And there is nothing weak or defeated about trusting that. It is the most radical act of faith a believer can demonstrate in a world that is constantly trying to sell you a cheaper substitute. The hope we carry is not the hope of a tax refund multiplied. It is the hope of a resurrection that changes everything, not just for a season, but for eternity.

Stay Close to His Word

Traditions will shift. They always have. Tzeitel, Hodel, and Chava each pulled away from what Tevye had built, one degree at a time, and the world that shaped their lives kept moving whether the family was ready or not. The Black Church has been doing the same thing, one small compromise at a time, while believing all along that it was standing firm.

But the Word of God does not shift. The gospel of Jesus Christ does not renegotiate its terms based on the cultural moment. What was sin in the days of John the Baptist is sin today. What holiness required of the early church it requires of us. And what resurrection meant on that first Sunday morning, when the stone was rolled away and death itself was defeated, it still means right now, on this rainy Resurrection Sunday in New Jersey, with the marigolds standing in the rain outside my window and the fragrance of bell flowers somewhere in the air.

My prayer this morning is for my son, that God raises his faith and keeps him strong and gives him eyes to see the difference between the shifting traditions of men and the unchanging love of God. But my prayer is also for the church. That we would stop performing and start repenting. That we would stop selling and start preaching. That we would stop laughing at our own decay and start returning to the gospel that was never ours to edit in the first place.

Tevye's family took up their beds and followed into the unknown, and God was faithful to them in the wilderness of displacement. Christ rose from the dead and walked among His grieving disciples, and God was faithful to them in the wilderness of fear. We are called to do the same. To take up what God has given us, to follow where He leads regardless of the comfort of the road, to stay close to His words even when every tradition around us is shifting, and to trust that the bed He has prepared for those who love Him is far greater than anything this season, or this culture, or this generation of prosperity preachers could ever offer.

He is risen. That still means everything.

Truth spoken in love may wound for a season.

But silence in the face of sin wounds for a lifetime.

And the hope of the resurrection was never meant to be sold.

It was meant to be lived.

“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.”

— Matthew 24:35

Jacqueline Session Ausby

Founder, DAHTRUTH, LLC  |  DahTruth.com

Rising Like Dracula, Afraid of the Cross

“I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid.” — Romans 11:1 (KJV)

On the Catholic Co-opting of Charlie Kirk, the Weaponizing of a Widow, and What Christ Is King Actually Means

To Catholic Worshippers and to Those Who Believe They Are Doing God's Work by Tearing Down the Dead,

I speak as a Bible-believing Protestant Christian who is paying attention. And what I am watching deserves to be named plainly.

Charlie Kirk was a Protestant. That is not a detail, it is the foundation of everything that follows. He was not a Catholic. He did not embrace the worship of Mary, the authority of priests as mediators between man and God, confession in a booth as the pathway to redemption, or any of the rituals that define Roman Catholic practice. He said so. He demonstrated it through the theology he defended publicly and through the ministry he supported. The fact that photographs exist of him attending Catholic services is not evidence of conversion or spiritual sympathy with Catholic doctrine. It is evidence that his wife, Erika Kirk, was raised Catholic. A husband attending a service with his wife is not a theological statement. It is what married people do.

Charlie Kirk is dead. He was shot and killed, and a man named Tyler Robinson is facing trial for that death. There is substantial evidence in that case. A weapon with fingerprints. Camera footage placing Robinson near the scene. A prosecution building its argument on documented facts. A jury will decide the outcome. That is how justice is supposed to work. You present evidence. You make your case. You let the facts lead.

And yet here we are watching something entirely different operate in the media space around his death. What we are watching is the use of a dead man's name and a grieving widow's image to build audiences, drive engagement, and advance a religious narrative that Charlie Kirk himself did not endorse while he was alive.

Figures like Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and others operating in their orbit have used the circumstances of Kirk's death as fuel. They have circulated speculation that Erika Kirk had involvement in her husband's death. There is no evidence for this. She was not present. There is no communication tying her to the act. There is no motive established. There is a man on trial for the crime with physical evidence attached to his name, and still the speculation about Erika Kirk continues because speculation generates clicks, clicks generate followers, followers generate income, and income is the actual god being served in these conversations. You also have figures like Druski putting content out there that disparages Erika Kirk directly, using her grief and her name as material, as though a widow navigating the death of her husband and the future of his organization is content to be consumed. George Farmer, Candace Owens' husband, has been particularly active in shaping this environment, positioning his wife as an investigator of Kirk's story when what she is actually doing is harvesting the grief of a widow to grow a platform. That is worth saying directly.

There is a religious divide running underneath all of this that also deserves to be named. The loudest voices casting suspicion on Erika Kirk tend to come from the Catholic ideological camp, while figures like Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles, who are also Catholic, have been less willing to make that leap without evidence. What Owens and Fuentes represent is not Catholicism at its most honest. It is Catholicism weaponized for audience capture, dressed in the language of truth-seeking while operating entirely on the logic of the algorithm. And the algorithm rewards outrage. It rewards accusation. It rewards the kind of content that makes people feel they are witnessing something being exposed when what they are actually witnessing is someone's grief being monetized.

This is the modern echo of what Martin Luther confronted in Wittenberg. Not the theology alone, though the theology matters enormously. It is the institution's willingness to dress greed in the robes of righteousness. Luther saw a Church selling indulgences, selling access, selling the idea that redemption could be purchased through a system designed to enrich itself. What we are watching now is that same spirit operating through a different medium. Instead of indulgences, it is impressions. Instead of confession booths, it is comment sections. Instead of a priest deciding your penance, it is an algorithm deciding your reach. The commodity being sold is outrage, and the currency being collected is attention. Charlie Kirk's name is the product. Erika Kirk's grief is the inventory. And the consumers are the followers who believe they are receiving truth when they are being fed a narrative engineered for engagement.

Now I want to address something specific that has emerged from this space, and it requires a direct confrontation with Scripture. The phrase Christ is King has been used by figures in this orbit, particularly by those with documented hostility toward Jewish people, as a slogan. As a weapon. As a way to signal contempt for Israel and for Jewish identity while wearing the costume of Christian devotion. Candace Owens has posted Christ is King publicly while her disdain for Jewish people has been equally public and documented. Nick Fuentes has used that same language in spaces that are openly antisemitic. These are not theological declarations. They are slurs with a cross attached to them.

But here is what Scripture actually says. In Romans chapter 11, the Apostle Paul addresses the question of Israel directly and without ambiguity. He asks whether God has rejected His people and answers his own question immediately. He has not. Paul describes Israel's partial hardening as something that has come in order that the fullness of the Gentiles might come in, and then he states plainly that all Israel will be saved. This is not a peripheral verse. It is a doctrinal cornerstone about the faithfulness of God to His covenant people. Paul himself was a Jew. The disciples were Jews. Jesus Christ, whose name these individuals invoke while spreading contempt for His own people, was born of the tribe of Judah. He came first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. He wept over Jerusalem. He came to save sinners, and Jewish people are among the sinners He came to save. To take His name and weaponize it against the very people He mourned over is not Christianity. It is a counterfeit wearing Christianity's face.

And here is where the poison inside this particular use of Christ is King becomes fully visible. The narrative being pushed in certain Catholic media spaces carries an undertone that goes beyond theology into something far darker. It suggests, not always openly but consistently enough to be felt, that Christ came to save the world with a silent exception. That somehow the Jewish people stand outside the reach of His redemption because of the crucifixion. That the Jews killed Christ and therefore Christ is King is a declaration against them rather than an open door for them. That is the venom dressed in the slogan.

But consider what that argument destroys the moment you apply it to Scripture. If the Jews who participated in the crucifixion are permanently condemned by that act, then what do you do with the Jews Christ personally chose to build His Church on? Peter, who preached the first sermon at Pentecost and saw three thousand souls added to the Church in a single day, was Jewish. John, the beloved disciple who stood at the foot of the cross and received the mother of Jesus into his own home, was Jewish. Paul, who wrote the letters that form the theological backbone of Christian doctrine and who carried the gospel to the Gentile world at the cost of his own life, declared himself a Hebrew of Hebrews. The Church did not begin among Gentiles and reach outward toward Jews. It began among Jews and through them reached outward toward every nation under heaven. You cannot condemn the branch while standing in the fruit it produced. You cannot declare Christ is King as a weapon against the very people He used to establish His kingdom.

The crucifixion itself does not support this narrative either. The theological weight of the cross is not that a group of people committed a crime for which their descendants bear permanent guilt. It is that the death of Jesus Christ was the willing sacrifice that opened the door of salvation for the entire world, for Jews and Gentiles alike, for every person who has ever lived and will ever live who comes to Him in faith. If the cross is the price paid for sin, and if the resurrection is the proof that death did not win, then the cross is not a weapon to be handed to one group to use against another. It is the door. And Christ is King means He is King over everyone who walks through it, not a selected few who have decided they hold the guest list.

This is how you discern the spirit behind what you are watching. Not by the size of the following. Not by the boldness of the declaration. Not by how many times someone posts Christ is King or how forcefully they claim to love truth. You discern it by the fruit. Jesus said you will know them by their fruit. A tree that produces antisemitism, that mocks a grieving widow, that builds its platform on the suffering of a dead man's family, that calls Protestants demons while practicing a form of Catholicism that Luther himself identified as idolatry, that tree is not bearing good fruit. It does not matter how large it grows.

The largest crowd is not always the right crowd. Scripture is full of moments where the majority was wrong, where the popular position was the corrupt one, where the voice with the most followers was the voice leading people away from God rather than toward Him. Elijah stood alone against the prophets of Baal. Noah built an ark while the world mocked the forecast. The road that leads to life is narrow, and the road that leads elsewhere is wide and well-traveled and very loud.

So when you see a widow with children being attacked without evidence by people who proclaim Christ as their king, when you see a dead Protestant man's name being harvested for Catholic algorithmic gain, when you see the phrase Christ is King deployed as a weapon against the Jewish people that Paul explicitly says God has not abandoned, you are not watching a revival. You are watching a counterfeit. And the way you stay on the right side of it is the same way it has always been. You go back to the Word. You test what you hear against what is written. And you refuse to follow noise into the place where truth used to be.

Charlie Kirk was a Protestant who supported Israel and defended Scripture as the authority over tradition. His name deserves to rest in the hands of those who honor what he actually believed, not in the mouths of those who are using his death to build what he spent his life pushing back against.

Africa, You Do Not Speak For Us

“For I will set mine eyes upon them for good, and I will bring them again to this land: and I will build them, and not pull them down; and I will plant them, and not pluck them up. And I will give them an heart to know me, that I am the LORD…”Jeremiah 24:6-7

You Do Not Speak For Us

A Response to the United Nations Resolution on the Western Slave Trade

My Dear Brothers and Sisters, and Members of the United Nations,

I speak as a child of God, an American Black woman, and a descendant of slavery. I speak without apology and without permission from anyone who believes they hold authority over my story.

Last week, the world watched as the United Nations issued a formal condemnation of Western nations for their role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. During the General Assembly's commemoration of the International Day to Remember the Victims of Slavery, Assembly President Annalena Baerbock declared that the slave trade and slavery stand among the gravest violations of human rights in human history. She went further, describing the transatlantic slave trade as mass resource extraction, arguing that African nations were hollowed out after losing generations of people who could have helped their countries prosper.

Even the language used is striking. Mass resource extraction. Because today they are describing slavery this way, speaking of human beings, our ancestors, in the same cold economic terms that once justified their exploitation. The very people who were kidnapped, chained, and sold as property are now being described as resources extracted from a region, as though generations of lives can be summarized as the removal of raw materials. Our ancestors were not resources. They were fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, innovators, leaders, and builders whose lives were violently interrupted. To reduce them to an economic category now, in the name of justice, is its own form of dehumanization.

Ghana's President, John Dramani Mahama, echoed similar sentiments, reinforcing the narrative that the Western slave trade stood apart as uniquely inhumane. He argued that racialized chattel enslavement made the Western trade distinctly more grave than other forms of slavery throughout history. He was specific. He named 1619, the year the first enslaved Africans arrived on American soil. He named the Virginia law of 1662, Partus Sequitur Ventrem, that which is born follows the womb, the law that declared a child born of a slave mother is also a slave, binding generations into bondage by legal design. He named Texas. He referenced Prager U. He built a careful, detailed case aimed directly at America.

“King Gezo said in the 1840’s he would do anything the British wanted him to do apart from giving up slave trade:

”The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth…the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery…””

— BBC News

And then, in the same speech, President Mahama said something that he intended as a defense but that I intend to hold up as an indictment. He acknowledged that some believe it is not acceptable to judge the social norms of the past by the standards of today, and he said that people use that argument loudly and proudly to escape accountability for the harm perpetuated by others. He is right about that. I agree with him completely. You cannot build a monument to selective memory and call it justice.

But President Mahama, that principle does not belong only to the West. If we are holding the past accountable by the moral standards of today, then that accountability must run in every direction without exception. He called to remembrance 1619, the year the White Lion arrived in the United States. I will name the slave forts. The barracoons. The castles. The factories. The dungeons along the West African coast where African men and women were held before being auctioned and shipped. Those forts may have been built by the British, the Dutch, the French, and the Danish, but the market was stocked by Africans. African rulers raided neighboring communities. African traders kidnapped and sold their own people for gold and ducats. African kingdoms profited from the transaction and used those profits to expand their own power. If we are judging by today's standards, that too must be named. You cannot invoke the moral clarity of the present when it serves your argument and then retreat behind the complexity of historical context when it does not.

And it was not only the Western slave trade. The Arab slave trade ran for more than thirteen hundred years, devastating populations across East Africa and the Sahel, stripping men, women, and children from their communities and selling them into bondage across the Arab world. Mauritania did not officially abolish slavery until 1981, and the practice continued into 2007.

Morocco also stood among those nations voting to declare the Western slave trade the most inhumane in history. Yet today, within its own borders, there are well-documented issues of anti-Black racism that remain largely unaddressed by its government. This is a nation on the African continent, not outside of it, and not removed from the history it now attempts to distance itself from. To stand on a global platform and condemn one form of inhumanity while ignoring the realities within your own society is not moral clarity. It is selective accountability.

Arab nations systematically trafficked and emasculated African men and boys, a practice that constitutes nothing less than genocide, and yet twenty-two Arab nations stood at that United Nations podium and voted to call the Western slave trade the most inhumane in history without a single word about their own nations' treatment of Africans.

China voted yes while actively repressing and exploiting the Uyghur people in Xinjiang.

The hypocrisy is structural. It is a deliberate attempt to condemn the West while refusing to pull the beam from their own eyes.

The horrors of slavery do not need to be introduced to us by international leaders’ centuries removed from the lived consequences. We carry that history in our families, in our communities, and in the very foundations of this country. We know slavery was evil. We know it was brutal. We know it stripped people of their humanity and fractured generations. What is troubling is not the acknowledgment of slavery. It is the selective framing of it. When slavery is discussed solely as a Western sin, detached from the global systems and participants that enabled it, history becomes less about truth and more about narrative. When international bodies reduce a complex and tragic chapter of human history into a moral indictment aimed at modern Western nations, remembrance shifts into political leverage.

I grew up hearing that American Blacks lack legacy. That we do not know our history. This is the same song Mahama sang as he attempted to absolve Africa of its most wicked sin, suggesting that because of slavery we are a people without roots or without a name, as if God did not have the power to give us new names in new soil. I have spent my life watching the continent respond to that charge not by honest reckoning but by continual deflection. Africans on the continent have largely refused to look in the mirror. They speak of the slave trade as something that happened to Africa, not something that Africa participated in, profited from, and in many cases orchestrated. They pretend they did not know how bad it would be, as though the evidence of what slavery produced was somehow hidden from the people who initiated the transactions.

This declaration is not justice. It is theater. It is a document crafted not to honor the suffering of the enslaved but to position certain nations and certain grievances for financial and political extraction. Reparations. That is what sits underneath this resolution. Not healing. Not truth. Not accountability from every party that bears responsibility. Just a demand aimed at the nations that, whatever their crimes, also fought wars to end the practice of slavery. Nations where the descendants of the enslaved have survived, built, created, contributed, and refused to be erased. Now those leaders look at their own continent, at the devastation in the land and the plight of their children, and they compare them to those of us in the West and declare that the West must pay.

Here is what I will say plainly on the matter of reparations. America does owe a debt to the descendants of slavery on American soil. Not to Africans on the continent. Not to the Caribbean. Not to any diaspora group that did not suffer the specific and documented brutality of American chattel slavery. To the descendants of those who were enslaved here, who built this nation, who were denied the fruit of that labor across generations through law and violence and systemic exclusion. That debt is real and it is specific. But if we are holding the logic of reparations consistently, then that same logic reaches back across the Atlantic. The African kingdoms and rulers who raided, kidnapped, and sold human beings into the Western slave trade profited from those transactions. If America owes for its part in the system, then those who stocked the market owe for theirs. You do not get to claim moral injury from a transaction you initiated and profited from. President Mahama said we should not use historical complexity to escape accountability. I am applying his own principle back to him.

Look at us. Look at what the diaspora produced. We are not a begging people. We are not a broken people stretching our hands toward the continent for rescue or recognition. Despite the betrayal of African ancestors, we survived and built this nation with our bodies and our blood and our genius and our faith, and we are still here, still standing, still producing, still breathing without a yoke on our necks. God took what was meant to destroy a people and made them strong.  He turned poison into kryptonite when he planted a group of people in the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. Africa you sold your family into the hands of suffering and God made sure that suffering produced something you cannot purchase, cannot claim, and cannot take.

And now you want reparations. Now you want to arrive on the world stage and speak in our name, as though our history belongs to you, as though our survival is a resource you are entitled to harvest. You grin in dark rooms while the blood of your own people stains your hands, and you believe that because these things are done in darkness no one will name them in the light. God reveals all things. Every transaction made in secret. Every alliance built on the suffering of others. Every resolution drafted not for the healing of the wounded but for the enrichment of those who never bore the wound.

There is one more thing worth saying plainly. When the United Nations stands before the world and condemns the West, they speak as though the West is a white institution. They erase us from the very civilization we were forced to build and then chose to claim as our own. We are Western. Our roots were cut from the African continent and replanted in Western soil, and what grew from that replanting is Western in culture, in faith, in identity, and in contribution. We are Christian. We carry the values of a Western Christian civilization not because they were handed to us graciously but because we fought for our place inside them and inside them, we found God we had loss due to idolatry.   To condemn the West without acknowledging that American Blacks are among its most foundational contributors is not just historically dishonest. It is another erasure, dressed this time in the language of justice. We owe nothing to the continent of Africa and its leaders who grin at global podiums while their own people go without. Nothing.

We did not give you this permission. We did not ask you to speak for us. We do not share your belief, your greed, or your audacity. The nerve of standing on a global platform and framing our history as your cause while refusing to account for your own ancestors' role in creating that history in the first place is not advocacy. It is theft of a different kind. And we see it clearly.

The children of the diaspora are not your instrument. We are not your leverage. We are not your reparations claim. We are God's remnant, placed on this soil for a purpose that was decided long before any resolution, any declaration, any United Nations chamber ever existed. And we will not be moved by those who pretend to love us while counting what they believe they are owed.

The Old Story, Returning

“My conscience is captive to the Word of God.” — Martin Luther

Dear True Believers. To those who stand on the Word of God without apology and without revision.

Not you who pretend. Not you who scoff at the idea that Israel will stretch its borders and that Christ will return according to Ezekiel Chapter 40. Not you who pray in dark booths to sin-filled priests as though another man holds the key to your redemption. Not you who call sin salvation, who have constructed a lifestyle according to your own definition of good, and who believe Christ will grant you access on the basis of your sinfulness rather than His righteousness. And certainly not you who wage war consistently against truth, and when defeated by it, cry foul and rewrite the record.

Let us call a spade a spade. Scripture is the standard. Not tradition. Not culture. Not the algorithm. Not the crowd. And what I am about to show you is how a world running in chaos is frantically attempting to construct a narrative that aligns every belief, every ideology, and every ambition with the Word of God, while God Himself refuses to be mocked. History tells the story. It has always told the story. And that story ends the same way it was always going to end, with God reigning supreme over every kingdom that dared to believe otherwise. To those who wait on the Lord, you shall inherit the Kingdom of God. This is for you.

In the 1500s, when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany, it was not simply an act of protest. It was a declaration that truth had been buried beneath centuries of tradition. It was a refusal to accept that access to God could be mediated through men, through systems, or through rituals that Scripture itself never commanded. Luther challenged the worship of saints and Mary. He challenged the authority of a pope elevated above other men as though proximity to an institution could substitute for proximity to God. He challenged the act of sitting in a dark booth, whispering sins through a screen to another sinner who would then decide what penance you must perform before you could be made clean. He challenged the counting of rosary beads as though God responds to repetition rather than repentance. And he challenged the idea that the body of Jesus must be manifested again in the flesh each time believers eat the bread and drink the wine, as if His sacrifice had not already been completed once and for all. These are not practices supported by Scripture, and Luther knew it.

While the Church turned inward and consumed itself with arguments over authority and doctrine, something was rising beyond its walls. This too was not without precedent in Scripture. In Genesis 16, before Ishmael was even born, the angel of the Lord declared over him that he would be a wild and untameable force, that his hand would be against everyone and everyone's hand against him, and that he would live in hostility toward all his brothers. That prophecy did not expire. It described a spirit, a posture, a perpetual reach for conflict that would mark his descendants across generations. The Ottoman Empire was the fullest historical expression of that prophecy ascending to its peak, expanding, pressing into territories once held by Christian powers, reshaping the balance of influence across regions that would take generations to fully reckon with. The moment was not only theological. It was civilizational. It was geopolitical and spiritual simultaneously, the fulfillment of a word spoken over a child in the wilderness centuries before any of those empires existed. And yet the attention of the Church remained largely fixed on its own internal fractures, blind to what God had already announced was coming. That pattern is very much with us now.

As we speak, history is being made as we watch a war campaign in Iran involving the United States and Israel. The conversations surrounding it are constant. Podcasters, politicians, and global leaders speak with certainty about strategy, strength, and who is gaining ground. I was listening to Triggernometry, where Mehdi Hasan appeared as a guest. For those unfamiliar, Hasan is a British American journalist and commentator who has been openly critical of American foreign policy and has consistently framed U.S. and Israeli military actions as aggression rather than defense. The giddiness with which he spoke on that episode was noticeable. There was a kind of delight in framing Donald Trump as ill-informed and outmaneuvered while positioning Iran's ability to absorb strikes and continue operations as proof that America is weakening and that Arab Muslim ideology is advancing on the world stage. Beneath that framing is something worth naming plainly. When survival becomes the definition of victory, it signals not just military confidence but ideological conviction, the belief that the West is unraveling and that patience will outlast it.

What is almost entirely absent from these conversations is any serious engagement with the spiritual dimension of what is unfolding. Throughout Scripture, Israel was not merely surrounded by hostile armies. It was consistently confronted with the reality that turning away from God always preceded its greatest moments of vulnerability. The external threat was real, but the internal condition was always the deeper crisis. That same dynamic is operating today, and very few voices are willing to name it.

When I look at what is happening with Israel, I do not see only conflict. In Genesis 15, God made a covenant with Abraham regarding land, borders, and descendants. As Israel presses into Lebanon, Syria, and now moves in relation to Iran, I see those promises in motion. I believe what is unfolding may be preparation, that this expansion of territory and influence may be part of something far larger than geopolitics alone. It may be pointing toward the return of Jesus Christ. To say that invites dismissal. It invites mockery. Even voices like Tucker Carlson, who claims belief in Christ and in Scripture, openly scoff at the idea that passages like Ezekiel 40 could carry present meaning. But what is laughed at today has a way of demanding recognition tomorrow.

Something else worth naming is the persistent denial of what Scripture already revealed and history has already confirmed. God spoke through His prophets that after the Messiah came, Israel would be destroyed and the Israelites would be scattered among the nations. That scattering was not the end of the story. It was part of it. The destruction of Jerusalem, the diaspora that followed, the centuries of displacement across continents, these things were spoken before they happened. God also promised that Israel as a nation would be restored and redeemed, and we have watched that unfold as well. After the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the events surrounding World War I, the Balfour Declaration opened the door for the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland. It was as though God whistled and called His people back. And even where there was hesitation, even where there was delay, His plan did not stall. There was suffering. There was destruction. A remnant returned nonetheless, just as He said one would. Now Israel stands again as a recognized nation, moving across the world stage in ways that continue to align with what was spoken long ago, and still humanity dismisses it. People see these realities with their own eyes and choose to call them coincidence, politics, or chance, anything except the possibility that God is conforming history to His Word. What is even more striking is that the rise and fall of kingdoms does not alter His larger design. Whether empires expand or collapse, whether power shifts east or west, salvation was never tied to any one nation's permanence. God's promise extends to both Jew and Gentile alike, and that promise has not changed regardless of what thrones have risen or fallen around it.

The fractures within America reflect the same pattern. On one side are those who believe themselves to be doing good, who speak the language of compassion and inclusion and social progress, and who also claim faith in God and in Jesus Christ. Yet in the same breath they affirm what Scripture calls sin, they celebrate and normalize it, they reshape identity itself and call that reshaping righteousness. The deception is thorough precisely because they do not see themselves as outside the will of God. They are fully convinced they are within it. On the other side are those who hold more firmly to Christian language and Scripture, yet even there the fracture persists. There are those who insist that righteousness flows through saints and Mary and priests and confession, through tradition as the authority over Scripture. And there are those who reject that entirely and say that worship belongs to God alone, that no institution stands between a believer and their Father. Within that space are also those who weave faith together with nationalism, defending culture and identity in ways not always examined against the Word they claim to uphold.

Layered over all of this is relentless noise. Figures like Jamal Bryant command wide audiences while offering a version of faith built on comfort and affirmation, a grace that requires no transformation. But Scripture teaches something different. When a person is genuinely filled with the Holy Spirit, there is a turning away. There is conviction that produces change. Salvation is not merely declared. It is evidenced in the life that follows it. A faith that leaves you exactly as it found you is not the faith described in the Bible.

At the same time, global institutions are attempting to write and rank history. The United Nations recently passed a resolution declaring the Western slave trade the most inhumane in history, without equal weight given to the Arab slave trade that devastated and displaced millions of Africans across centuries. Slavery is evil. Oppression in every form it has taken and in every era is evil. The history of those who were treated as cattle, severed from their people, their language, their land, that history is real and demands honest reckoning. But when that reckoning is issued without consistency, when the Arab slave trade is minimized or ignored entirely, the motive is not justice. It is leverage. It is agenda. And for ADOS, for those of us who are the descendants of Africans cut from the continent and replanted on American soil across generations of suffering and survival, our story deserves to be told in full and not used as a political instrument by those who did not share that experience. God had his hand even in that displacement. We are here. We are the progenitors of those who were re-rooted on this soil for a time such as this, and we look to the heavens for where our help comes from.

And that brings me to the deeper question underneath all of it. Not just who defines history, but who defines justice. Because what we are watching, in global institutions, in media narratives, in ideological movements, is man repeatedly appointing himself the final authority on what is right, what is fair, and what must be done to correct the past. Dostoevsky examined that impulse with surgical precision in Crime and Punishment. He gave us Raskolnikov, a man who convinced himself through elaborate intellectual reasoning that he had the right to take a life in service of a higher purpose. The logic was tight. The justification was philosophical. The conclusion was that some people are simply above the ordinary moral law and may act accordingly. And yet what followed was not liberation but torment, because the soul cannot escape what it has done by renaming it. Dostoevsky understood that when man appoints himself the author of justice, justice becomes whatever serves his ambition in the moment. He stretches it. He dresses wickedness in the language of righteousness and then expects the world to receive it as such.

We see this principle at work in every era of conquest and war, in every leader who frames destruction as liberation, in every ideology that promises freedom while demanding submission. Man is fallen. He will always reach for power. He will always construct a reason why this particular action, at this particular moment, is justified and necessary. That is not a reason for paralysis. It is a reason for discernment. It means we must be clear about the difference between the wickedness of unchecked human ambition and the genuine defense of truth.

I am not saying that America and Israel are beyond critique in all things. But I am saying that in this present moment there is a real effort to hold ground against forces that are not neutral, against ideologies that do not lead where they claim to lead. That matters. It is worth saying plainly and without apology.

What steadies me through all of it is this. God is in control. He moves whether or not He is acknowledged. He orders events whether or not the people living through them can see it. The call for those who believe is not to be consumed by every argument or to unravel with every headline. In the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus stood before the crowds and spoke, many were near Him physically but only a few truly heard Him. The difference was not distance. It was focus. Some watched the crowd. Others watched Jesus. That is the same choice before every believer right now. Everything around us is fighting for attention, for loyalty, for alignment. The question is whether we will be pulled into the noise or remain anchored in what we know to be true.

And that brings me back to where we began. Back to Luther. Back to Wittenberg. Back to the door.

Martin Luther did not nail those 95 theses to start a conversation. He nailed them because he had read the Scripture and could no longer pretend that what the Roman Catholic Church was selling bore any resemblance to what the Word of God actually said. He drew a line. He named the lie. And the world has never fully recovered from that confrontation because the confrontation was necessary and the lie was enormous.

Here is what is worth watching now. Catholic ideology is not retreating. It is growing. The Catholic Church is expanding in influence, in reach, in cultural presence, at the very moment when much of Protestant Christianity is either fracturing, softening, or quietly stepping aside. And we are beginning to see the voices of prominent Protestants being co-opted and repositioned in ways that deserve direct examination. Charlie Kirk is worth naming here, and I want to be precise. Kirk is a Protestant. He has been openly so. He has also been a vocal supporter of Israel at a time when that position carries real cost in certain circles. He has not converted to Catholicism. But here is what is happening around him. There are podcasters and commentators with Catholic ideological leanings who are actively working to reframe his voice, to retell his story in ways that smooth over his Protestant convictions and absorb his audience into a different theological household entirely. The co-opting is not coming from Kirk himself. It is being done around him and to him, and the audience that trusts his name is being slowly repositioned without ever being told plainly what is taking place. That is not a conversion. It is something more subtle and in some ways more dangerous, because it operates below the level of open declaration.

So I ask the question directly. Is this about conviction? Is this a man who genuinely studied Scripture, wrestled with the Word, and arrived somewhere new after honest reckoning? Or is something else operating here? Because when a public figure shifts theology and the media apparatus around that figure immediately works to make the shift palatable, to reframe the narrative, to make sure the audience stays engaged and the brand survives the transition, you have to ask what spirit is actually being served. You have to ask whether the altar being approached is the altar of God or the altar of the algorithm. Likes. Comments. Reach. Engagement. The metrics that reward whoever can gather the largest crowd, regardless of what truth had to be softened or set aside to gather it.

Luther understood that the crowd is not the measure of correctness. He stood before an empire that had the full weight of tradition, institution, and political power behind it, and he refused. He refused because Scripture was clear and his conscience was bound to it. That kind of refusal is increasingly rare. In a world where algorithms reward what is popular and punish what is divisive, where the definition of divisive has somehow come to include standing firmly on what the Bible says, the pressure to soften, to shift, to make room, is constant and it is heavy.

The old story is not just circling back in war and geopolitics. It is circling back inside the Church. The same argument Luther fought in the 1500s, whether truth is located in Scripture alone or whether it can be mediated through tradition, through institution, through men who claim authority over access to God, that argument is alive and being contested right now, on platforms, in conversions, in reframings, in the quiet abandonment of convictions that once defined a public voice.

Justice does not ultimately belong to man, no matter how confidently he claims it. It does not belong to the algorithm, no matter how many people it reaches. It does not belong to the institution, no matter how ancient or how large. It belongs to God. His Word has not changed. His promises have not failed. His plan for both Jew and Gentile has not shifted because an empire fell or a podcaster converted or a platform rewarded something other than truth. That reality stood in Wittenberg. It stood through the Ottoman Empire. It stood through the scattering and the return of Israel. It stands today. And it will stand when every kingdom that has ever demanded our loyalty has turned to dust.

The Frontman Sent to Quiet the Storm

“So Ehud came to him while he was sitting alone in his cool upper room. And Ehud said, I have a message from God for you.” Judges 3:20

Dear blind and willfully deceived, those who claim to see yet walk in blindness,

Hear me as I strip away the salve that blinds you and open your eyes, as though you have just washed them in the Jordan River.

For you have made yourselves like Eglon, seated in comfort while oppression grows at your own table. You have grown fat on what was never meant to sustain you, entertained by the very systems that bind you, convinced that peace exists simply because judgment has not yet arrived.

And like Ehud standing at the door, truth does not announce itself the way you expect. It comes quietly, without spectacle, carrying a message you are not prepared to receive.

What you have mistaken for stability is nothing more than a moment of mercy. And mercy, when ignored, does not remain forever.

The Fronter

In street lingo, he who fronts is cap.   The fronter is an individual who presents themselves as something other than what they really are. The closest image most people reach for is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But the opposite is also possible.  I am speaking of a sheep wearing a wolf suit. Now who would want to be a sheep pretending to be a wolf is beyond reasonable thinking, because in this world the wolf eats the sheep every time. Fronting as prey does not serve you.

But this past week, in the middle of a global war and a fractured national narrative, I watched a sheep put on a wolf suit and walk straight onto the world stage. The media received him like a hero. Most people never asked what was underneath the costume.

Two Narratives. One Week. One War.

This all came after an entire week saturated with questions about the war in Iran. Questions about whether America was winning or losing. A persistent narrative on the left insisting the United States was faltering, that the strikes were reckless, that the administration had been manipulated into a conflict it could not control. That the Trump administration was deceived into believing we would win a quick and decisive war and did not even consider the Strait of Hormuz or its economic impact. That Trump ignored all the warnings. Fear became the product being sold, and it was moving.

Then, on March 20, Benjamin Netanyahu appeared publicly. This matters because in the days leading up to that appearance, claims began circulating that Netanyahu was dead. That he and members of his circle had been killed in Iranian strikes. Voices of those who are anti-Israel began to emerge, Candace Owens among them, suggesting that Netanyahu’s appearances on social media were not real. That what the world was seeing was artificial intelligence. That somehow a digital version of him had been generated to deceive the public into believing he was still alive and operational.

Let that sit for a moment. Because while that narrative was being pushed about Netanyahu, questions also began to surface concerning Iran’s own leadership.  Questions about the supreme leader was the one whose status was genuinely in question. Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen in any verifiable public setting. What this suggests to some observers is that his condition may not be as stable as presented. And There is credible reporting that he is either deceased or seriously incapacitated preventing him from govern.  At least in the present.  Yet the narrative being presented is that he is alive, well, and leading. The very deception being falsely assigned to Israel just may be the condition of Iran’s own leadership. The accusation is a mirror. The lie is being projected outward to cover what is true inward.

Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and podcast platforms like Breaking Points are willing vessels in this moment. Conspirators with intent. Vessels willing to receive and transmit a narrative because it confirms what they want to believe. These are the most dangerous kinds of fronters — those whose desire has made them available vessels willing to cast any lie.

It was on that same day, March 20, that Netanyahu said something that caught my attention and unsettled me at the same time. He repeated an old quote from historian Will Durant, “unfortunately and unhappily, history proves that Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan — that evil triumphs over good.” Netanyahu used the reference to make a political argument about the necessity of strength in wartime. But his framing did something that cannot simply be dismissed as rhetorical context. He spoke of Jesus as a moral figure without power. He measured the Lord of Lords against a warlord and called the comparison historically instructive.

As Christians, we reject that frame entirely. Jesus Christ is not merely a moral teacher who lost to human cruelty. He is God incarnate, who entered death willingly and came out of it victoriously. His resurrection is not a footnote. It is the entire argument. If we only report on the crucifixion and stop there, yes — evil appears to win. But Jesus did not stop there. We know what happened on the third day. We know that death itself was defeated.

And if we want to apply Netanyahu’s own logic, consider this: the very week the world was declaring him dead, he walked out alive. Evil tried to write his ending. It failed. By his own framework, good triumphed over the narrative of evil. He proved his own statement wrong.

What this reveals is nothing new.  Scripture has already show un this pattern, long before we had language to name it.

The Quiet Storm

There is a story tucked inside the book of Judges that most people rush past on their way to the dramatic and the extraordinary. They hurry to Deborah, the feminine hero. To Samson, supposedly redeemed while still in sin. To Gideon, the one who doubted and received the greatest return on his prayers. These are the stories that fill sermons because they are large and legible and easy to map onto individual triumph. They overlook the quieter, sharper thing that happened in chapter three. They miss Eglon. They miss Ehud. They miss the lesson that has been sitting there for three thousand years, waiting for a moment exactly like this one.

Eglon, king of Moab, had dominated Israel for eighteen years. Eighteen years of tribute. Eighteen years of submission. Eighteen years of a nation bowing to a foreign power and calling it normal. The machine ran smoothly. Nobody was causing visible trouble. The storm was quiet because the storm was winning. That is what a quiet storm looks like. Not chaos. Not noise. Efficiency. Control. The slow, deliberate consolidation of power that does not need to announce itself because it is already working.

We are watching a quiet storm right now. The real moves are not happening on camera. They are not happening in the press briefings or the televised hearings. What you are seeing on the surface is managed. What is actually happening is happening in the rooms we are not invited into, in the decisions being made before they are ever announced, in the policies being written while the nation is focused on the spectacle being performed for its benefit. I will venture further to say that what is happening is also happening in heavenly places, behind heavenly doors, dispatched on angels’ wings to those positioned around the world.

We are in the eye of the storm. A quiet storm does not need to be loud. It does not need to explain itself. It only needs enough noise elsewhere to keep the people from looking in the right direction. That is precisely where the fronter comes in.

The Fronter

Ehud came to Eglon carrying what looked like a gift. A tribute. An offering of peace. He presented himself as someone coming in good faith, and Eglon let him in because the presentation was convincing. That is the architecture of fronting. The surface story is believable. The credential looks real. The grievance sounds legitimate. What is tucked underneath, hidden on the left side where no one thinks to look, tells a very different story entirely.

The Trump administration understood that the week’s narrative was breaking badly. The stream of negative imagery, the questions about American strength, the fear being amplified by the left — it needed to be countered. So they did not send a press secretary. They did not send a talking head. They put a hero on the stage.

Joe Kent, Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, is a decorated military veteran, a widower, and a man known for moral clarity and community respect. He resigned. He sent a letter to Donald Trump explaining that he could not ethically support the war in Iran. He stated that he believed the President had been coerced into the conflict by Israel. He said his conscience would not allow him to remain.

Every platform scrambled. Within 48 hours, Joe Kent had appeared on Tucker Carlson. He had appeared on Breaking Points. He appeared on Zoom with Megyn Kelly. He was mentioned on countless other outlets. He was framed on every one of them as a symbol of moral integrity, a righteous man who could not in good conscience serve a warmongering administration. The anti-war, anti-Trump crowd crowned him a hero before they ever asked him a single hard question. They did so before considering his political stance regarding Iran, when just a few years back he was of the opinion that Iran should not obtain a nuclear weapon and should be stopped from doing so. Yet now he has completely flipped, at least in posture. And his stated reason for resigning only raises more questions when placed alongside his prior position on Iran and Israel.

His drastic flip was never questioned. The rollout does not happen organically. Forty-eight hours. Three major platforms. Universal framing as a moral authority. That is a strategy. That is a coordinated release of a message through a vessel whose credibility the audience would not question. But during a few of his interviews, it became painfully apparent that he is no rebel. He is a carrier. He is fronting courage while running an operation. While presenting himself as opposed to the war, he is still defending Trump and the conflict, only now in a more measured, more nuanced, and harder-to-challenge way. The podcasts give him credibility. The credibility shapes the narrative. The narrative reshapes how the public understands the war, not away from the subject, but toward a particular interpretation of it.

That is what fronting at the highest level looks like. It does not come off like lying. It feels curated. It feels purposeful. The performance is good enough that most people never pause to ask who benefits from this particular truth being told in this particular way at this particular moment.

The Distinction That Matters

Here is where Ehud and the modern fronter part ways. Ehud was sent by God. His mission was liberation. When he delivered his message, it cost him everything it would have cost a man operating without cover, without backup, and without guarantee. He was carrying a blade, not a talking point. His act broke the machine. It did not service it. Ehud came to tear down the establishment.

The modern fronter is not breaking anything. He is stabilizing it. Every podcast appearance that generates sympathy for Kent’s position is another day the real questions about the war, about the policy, about the decision-making chain do not get asked with the urgency they deserve. He is delivering spin. He is delivering Israel. He is delivering Trump. The difference is everything.

This is not a red herring. A red herring pulls you away from the subject entirely. What is happening here is more sophisticated than distraction. The subject stays the same. The war stays the war. The fronter simply reshapes how you see it, what questions you think to ask, and which version of events settles in your mind as the most credible one. You are not being distracted. You are being guided. That is harder to detect and more dangerous when you miss it.

This Is Not Politics. This Is Principalities.

Let me be plain about what this actually is. We are not simply watching politics. We are not watching media games or Washington chess moves. What we are watching is the visible surface of an invisible war. Paul told us in Ephesians 6 that we do not wrestle against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age. Joe Kent is not the principality. The podcasters are not the principality. They are instruments. What moves behind them, through them, and around them is something this nation does not have the spiritual vocabulary to name because we have spent the last several decades trading our discernment for entertainment.

The spirit of deception does not announce itself. It does not walk in dressed in darkness. It walks in dressed in credibility, in grievance, in righteous-sounding language that scratches exactly the right itch at exactly the right moment. That is how principalities operate in the natural realm. They find a willing vessel. They hand that vessel a message. The vessel delivers it and calls it conviction.

When you understand that, the whole architecture becomes visible. The war is real. The suffering is real. But the narrative being built around the war is being constructed in heavenly places before it ever reaches your television screen.

The Other Side Is Running Fronters Too

But let us be careful not to assign all of this to coordinated strategy, because that would be too generous. Strategy requires self-awareness. What we are watching on the other side of this narrative is something more spiritually dangerous than a plan. It is a people who have so deeply wanted a particular truth to be real that they have made themselves available to any lie that confirms it.

The media outlets feigning moral outrage over the war, amplifying Iranian narratives, platforming voices that paint America and Israel as the aggressors — many of them are not running a calculated operation. They are running on desire. They want Trump to be wrong. They want Israel to be guilty. They want the war to be unjust. Because they want it badly enough, they will receive any information that feeds that hunger without testing it, without questioning the source. 

Scripture has a name for that condition. Second Thessalonians calls it a strong delusion — sent to those who did not love the truth, so that they believed the lie. The principality does not always need a willing conspirator. Sometimes all it needs is a willing heart that has already decided what it wants to find. That is Candace Owens amplifying the AI narrative about Netanyahu without verifying it. That is every anchor who ran the story of his death without a credible source. That is every outlet that crowned Joe Kent a moral hero in 48 hours without asking him a single difficult question.

Two fronters. Two directions. One war. One public being guided from both sides simultaneously and calling it information.

What Discernment Demands

Scripture does not tell us to be suspicious of every messenger. It tells us to test the spirit behind every message. There is a difference. Testing is not cynicism. It is the practice of a people who have been misled enough times to know that the costume of truth is available to anyone willing to wear it.

When you watch the resigning official sitting across from a host who never asks the hardest question, ask yourself why. When the message delivered by someone who claims to have walked away still lands in the exact place it would need to land to protect the narrative of those he left, ask yourself why and who benefits.

When Kent sat across from Megyn Kelly and was asked about the Epstein files, his answer was telling. He said that if there were anything in those files implicating Donald Trump, Biden would have released it — implying there is nothing credible there. When asked about the death of Charlie Kirk, he said there were leads that could have been explored but were not, that maybe they involved Israel and maybe they involved another nation. He would not say more. What he did in that moment was not caution. It was placement. He handed Megyn Kelly a motive and called it restraint. He implied Israel without lighting the fire himself. That is fronting at its most precise.

Eglon sat in his cool upper chamber, comfortable and unguarded, because eighteen years of tribute had told him he was safe. Comfort is what makes power vulnerable to the thing it never saw coming. The quiet storm operates best when the people watching are not asking the right questions about the one carrying the gift.

Stay sharp. Test the message. Know the difference between the one sent to free you and the one sent to manage you. They do not always look different from the outside. That is precisely the point—sometimes they look and sound just like you.

You were warned at the door.

The message came quietly, without spectacle, just as it always does. You had the Jordan before you. You had the chance to wash your eyes and see clearly. The question was never whether truth would arrive. The question was always whether you would receive it.

Eglon sat in comfort until the moment he did not. Eighteen years of tribute convinced him that stillness meant safety. It did not. It meant the storm was still gathering.

What you have mistaken for stability is nothing more than a moment of mercy.

And mercy, when ignored, does not remain forever.

A Week of Lies: When Everything Around You Speaks in Deception

We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans--born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage--and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. -John F. Kennedy

The best way to describe this week is worrisome, confusing, and yet clarifying. It was one of those weeks that strips away comfort and forces you to confront a reality that has been quietly building for some time: we are being lied to. Not occasionally. Not selectively. Comprehensively. And the lies are coming from every direction at once.

The week started in warmth and light. Spring came early and arrived confidently. Families filled the parks. Children played basketball. People who had been cooped up all winter finally stepped outside to breathe again. There was a feeling of ease, almost of hope.

By the end of the week, it was snowing.

It sounds like a small thing. Weather changes. Seasons are unpredictable. But in the context of everything else that happened this week, even the sky felt dishonest. The warmth was a promise that did not hold. It felt like a fitting metaphor for the times we are living in.

The War That Is Not Called a War

All week the news was saturated with coverage of the conflict with Iran. Anchors and analysts used the word 'war' so freely you might forget that in the United States, only Congress has the constitutional authority to declare one. The president, however, holds executive powers that permit military strikes and troop deployments without congressional approval for a defined window of time. This legal gray area does not stop the media from packaging everything as war, and it does not stop the public from absorbing that framing without question.

There were also conflicting reports about Iran's leadership. Rumors had been confirmed that the supreme leader had been killed. Others suggested his son had assumed power but was too injured to make any public appearance. Statements were released, letters were presented, yet the man himself was nowhere to be seen. When a government releases words without a face behind them, it invites the public to fill in the blanks with whatever narrative serves the moment. That is exactly what happened this week, on all sides.

The most disturbing report of the week involved a missile strike that struck a school in Iran. The school was reportedly full of children, mostly young girls. Many people genuinely struggle to believe the United States would deliberately target a civilian school. Most of us would like to hold onto that belief. But the response from American leadership did nothing to reassure anyone. Instead of acknowledging an error, the answer was a vague reference to an ongoing investigation. No accountability. No clarity. No honesty.

The cover-up is always worse than the mistake. A nation that owns its failures, investigates transparently, and holds itself to account is a nation that earns trust even in painful moments. A nation that deflects is a nation that has decided the public cannot handle the truth. That decision dishonors not only the children lost, but everyone who is watching and trying to make sense of what is happening.

The Influence We See and the Influence We Miss

Alongside the military developments, a familiar debate was circulating in political commentary: the question of foreign influence on American policy. Much of that conversation focused on well-known lobbying organizations connected to Israel, particularly around arguments that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pressured Donald Trump to attack Iran. Whether or not that narrative is accurate in its specifics, it reflects a genuine anxiety about how decisions get made and whose interests actually drive them.

It is worth taking that anxiety seriously. It is also worth noting what the conversation consistently leaves out.

The lobbying space in American politics is not occupied by one actor. Countries and regions across the world attempt to shape American policy through a range of channels: economic investment, academic partnerships, cultural programming, diplomatic engagement, and direct political spending. Some of this influence is fully visible, openly reported, and regulated. Much of it is not. And when the public focuses exclusively on one visible target, it often misses the quieter, more patient work being done elsewhere.

There is a meaningful difference between a lobbying organization advocating for specific legislation and a long-term ideological effort to reshape how people think, what they are taught, and what values they consider worth defending. The first is a transaction. The second is a transformation. Transactions are traceable. Transformations are often invisible until the shift is already complete.

When billions of dollars move through universities, media partnerships, and cultural institutions over decades, the effects are not always obvious in the short term. By the time a generation of young Americans has been educated in a particular framework, the work of shaping that generation is already done. The narrative has been moved. The conversation has changed. The money that funded that change is rarely part of the headline.

Pointing this out is not the same as claiming a conspiracy. It is simply recognizing that power rarely announces itself. It works through patience, through positioning, through the stories that get told and the ones that do not.

When the Signaling Is Hidden in Plain Sight

This week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani hosted an Iftar dinner at Gracie Mansion to mark the end of Ramadan. On the surface, this is a civic gesture. A mayor welcoming a religious community into the official residence of New York City's leadership. Many would call it inclusion. Many did.

But footage that circulated from inside the mansion gave me pause. Several guests were captured on video reciting 'Allahu Akbar' during the event. Others were filmed displaying the single raised index finger — a gesture that, in certain contexts, carries a specific ideological meaning. That gesture, used openly by groups including Hezbollah and ISIS, is a declaration of tawhid, the oneness of Allah. It is not simply a religious expression. In the context of militant Islamist movements, it is a recognized symbol of allegiance to that cause. Whether everyone displaying it in that room intended it that way, I cannot say with certainty. What I can say is that the symbolism was present, it was visible, and no one seemed troubled by it.

What makes that image harder to dismiss is what happened just outside. In the days surrounding the event, two young men from Pennsylvania were arrested after throwing explosive devices at protesters near Gracie Mansion. When taken into custody, they did not hide what they stood for. They declared their allegiance to ISIS — not to the United States, not to any principle of democratic life, but to a terrorist organization responsible for mass murder across the world. One of them was photographed displaying that same single raised index finger. The same gesture. The same signal. One inside the mansion at a mayoral event, one outside in handcuffs after an act of violence. The proximity of those two images in the same week, at the same location, is not something I am willing to write off as coincidence.

The First Amendment protects religious expression. That principle is not in question here. What is in question is the appropriate boundary between religious practice and the exercise of state power. Gracie Mansion is not a mosque, a church, or a community center. It is the official residence of the mayor of the most diverse city in the United States. When a government official uses that space to host a religious celebration, and when footage from that event shows guests engaging in religiously charged political signaling without any public examination or accountability from the mainstream press, that is a story. It is simply not being told.

This is not the first signal worth examining from this particular figure. One example that has stayed with me since he took office involves the inaugural address he delivered upon becoming mayor. In that speech, he referenced the story of the Prophet Muhammad entering Medina. He described how Muhammad arrived as a foreigner and, over time, became the dominant force shaping that city and its people.

Many in the audience likely heard a story of perseverance and community building. That is one valid reading of the historical narrative. But it is not the complete one.

The historical record of what happened in Medina also includes the expulsion and killing of Jewish tribes who had been living there before Muhammad's arrival. What began as coexistence ended as conquest. Telling that story in a city that holds one of the largest Jewish populations in the United States, without acknowledging its full weight, is not simply a matter of historical interpretation. It is a signal sent to some listeners and hidden from others.

Taken together — the inaugural address, the Gracie Mansion Iftar, the footage of guests inside — a picture begins to form. It may not be complete. It may not be what I think it is. But as a person committed to paying attention, I am not willing to dismiss what I see simply because the mainstream media has chosen not to look at it.

This is how the most consequential communication works. It does not announce itself. It speaks to those who recognize it and passes invisibly over those who do not. By the time the majority understands what was being said, the actions that follow have already begun.

What This Week Demanded of Us

Awareness is not comfortable. It is not a state of ease or certainty. It is the willingness to sit with discomfort, to hold competing possibilities at once, and to refuse the temptation of the simple explanation.

The weather lied. The media constructed narratives that did not hold up under scrutiny. Leadership in more than one country withheld the truth from the people they govern. Influence operated quietly while public debate focused on the loudest and most visible targets. Children died, and powerful institutions did not have the courage to tell us what they knew. In our own cities, signals were sent in plain sight that most people were too polite, too distracted, or too naive to read.

We are a nation that wants to believe the best about everyone who arrives at our shores. That generosity of spirit is one of the things worth protecting about American life. But generosity without discernment is not virtue. It is vulnerability. There are groups, movements, and ideological forces that are deeply systematic about the long work of dismantling Western values — not through open warfare, but through patience, positioning, and the slow erosion of a nation's willingness to define and defend itself. When we dismiss every warning sign in the name of inclusion, we do not become more welcoming. We become easier to reshape without our consent.

Faith Over Fear

In the middle of all of this, my mind turned to the Old Testament. When God instructed Israel to go to war, He did not leave the decision to political calculation or public opinion. He gave specific direction. He set the terms. Sometimes those terms were severe. Sometimes they required sacrifice that was difficult to bear. But the people of Israel were not sent into battle blind or alone. They were sent with purpose, under the authority of the God who had already seen the outcome.

God never promised His people they would not die. He promised something far greater than survival. To lay down your life in defense of what is righteous, in answer to a genuine call from the Lord, is not a tragedy. For those who believe, it is an honor that belongs to eternity.

My prayer is that President Trump and the leaders of the United States military sought the Lord before initiating this campaign against Iran. My prayer is that those decisions were made with more than strategy in mind. Our responsibility as citizens in this moment is not to panic, not to be swept up in the fear the media is so eager to sell us. Our responsibility is to pray. Pray for the safety of our troops. Pray for the protection of American soil. Pray for wisdom in leadership that has the weight of countless lives in its hands.

The media wants us to measure this moment against Iraq. Against Afghanistan. Against Libya. Against every military engagement that ended in grief and confusion and unanswered questions. Those histories matter and they deserve to be studied honestly. But a nation that can only look backward will always be paralyzed at the threshold of necessary action. History is a teacher. It is not a god. We already have one of those.

The disconnect at the center of this week, at the center of this nation's anxiety, is not a lack of information. It is a lack of faith. We have been taught to trust polling numbers and pundit analysis and the shifting consensus of people who are no wiser than we are. We have forgotten how to stand on something that does not move.

So this is where I land at the end of a week full of lies. Not in despair. Not in fear. In a posture of prayer and watchfulness. We should protect our values. We should protect our way of life. We should protect the right to worship the God of the Bible, Yahweh, freely and without apology on the soil our ancestors built and bled for. If we believe, then we trust His will — whatever it costs, wherever it leads. That is not weakness. That is the only kind of courage that outlasts the news cycle.

“I will send my fear before thee, and will destroy all the people to whom thou shalt come, and I will make all thine enemies turn their backs unto thee.” Exodus 23:27

---

Jacqueline Session Ausby

Founder, DahTruth.com

They Have Eyes and Will Not See

Section One: The Old Book and the New World Order

March entered this year with a loud bang. Snowstorms. Chaos. And then right on time, as if Heaven itself had set the calendar, America and Israel launched strikes on Iran. Right in time for Purim. Let that sit for a moment.

Now I want to say something before I go any further. It is something to behold, truly something to witness, watching mainstream media and your favorite podcasters tie themselves into knots trying to explain what is unfolding in the Middle East without once, not one single time, reaching for the Word that has already explained it. They will talk geopolitics. They will talk oil. They will talk alliances and power moves and the military industrial complex. They will even talk about religion and the religious aspects of this war in Iran. What they will not do is open that Book. Because that old Book, as far as they are concerned, couldn't possibly be real. The people who believe it are confused. Deluded. Duped by theology. Out of their minds.

Here we are. Watching.

Individuals like Tucker Carlson and podcast platforms like Breaking Points are attempting to align current events with religion. Breaking Points views these parallels as coincidences, for example claims that Israel's actions correspond to biblical prophecy. Tucker Carlson, by contrast, acknowledges the religious dimension of this war but rejects any connection to biblical fulfillment; he insists it does not align with Christianity.

Breaking Points is a far-left, liberal podcast platform hosted by Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, two narrow-minded, left-leaning intellectuals who put more faith in their own knowledge than in any religion. Tucker Carlson is a far-right conservative who professes to be a Christian and is highly critical of Israel. He claims his viewpoint is not about Jews, yet portrays the nation of Israel as fundamentally in the wrong, while casting Muslim states like Iran differently.

Iran is now dealing with the death of Ayatollah Khamenei, the long-time Supreme Leader of a theocratic state who oppressed many for decades. Carlson recognizes the religious dimension at the center of this conflict, but he refuses to take the next step and connect these events to prophecy. He can see the religion; he cannot see the fulfillment. In the same breath he quoted Jesus, "having eyes, they do not see," without appearing to realize he was describing himself. Jesus spoke of people who stood in the presence of truth and still refused to receive it. Carlson quoted those words about us, not knowing that, as it were, Heaven was laughing.

There is something else worth saying. Tucker Carlson has gone on record questioning how any Christian could possibly align themselves with the belief that a Third Temple will be built in Jerusalem. His argument sounds reasonable on the surface and even sounds scriptural. We are the temple, he says. Through Jesus Christ we now have direct access to God. The veil was torn. We don't need a physical temple. He is not wrong. That is true.

It is a half truth. A half truth in the hands of a man who believes he is righteous is one of the most dangerous things in the world.

Because Tucker apparently has never sat with the book of Ezekiel. Chapters 40 through 48. A vision so detailed, so architectural, so specific, with measurements of gates and dimensions of chambers and the return of the glory of God to a physical house, that you cannot spiritualize it away without doing violence to the text. Ezekiel was not writing poetry. He was writing what he saw. And what he saw was a Temple. In the Last Days. In Jerusalem.

Tucker cannot get there. The reason Tucker cannot get there is the same reason he can stand in solidarity with an 86 year old man who worships a false god, defending him, platforming him, treating his cause as righteous, while simultaneously questioning the Biblical faith of Christians who believe what the prophets actually wrote. That is not discernment. That is a Pharisee. That is the spirit of a man who has decided that he is the one who rightly divides the Word, that he is the measure of what is reasonable, that he gets to determine which parts of your Bible count.

The Pharisees were not godless men. That is what made them dangerous. They knew the scripture. They were devoted. They were respected. And they stood in the presence of the fulfillment of everything they claimed to believe and called it a lie because it didn't look the way they expected and because it didn't fit the theology they had already built.

Tucker does not see himself as a Pharisee. He sees himself as the righteous one. The thinking Christian. The one brave enough to say what others won't. But a man who will defend a Muslim theocrat and mock the prophetic faith of Bible-believing Christians has told you everything you need to know about where his heart actually is, whether he has the eyes to see it or not.

Because here is the thing about Tucker Carlson and the scores of people just like him who call themselves Christians but cannot bring themselves to connect what is happening in Israel and Iran to prophecy. The reason isn't ignorance. The reason is that in their hearts they have already decided that the people in Israel are evil. That they are unrighteous. And so surely God cannot be doing anything through them. Surely this doesn't count. Surely the Book doesn't apply here.

Prophecy does not ask for your comfort. It does not wait for your approval. The Last Days are not a referendum. The signs are not interested in whether Tucker Carlson or CNN or Breaking Points or any podcaster with a ring light and a microphone is ready to call them what they are.

We are watching the world shift. In real time. And the ones called crazy are the ones who can see it.

Section Two: The Distraction

While America and Israel were raining fire down on Iran, dismantling the Islamic Shia regime that has terrorized a nation and threatened the world for nearly half a century, America found something else to look at. We always do.

We looked at a Senate race in Texas.

The race between Jasmine Crockett and James Telarico captured the attention of this country, specifically the attention of Black America, in a way that reveals exactly where our eyes are fixed and exactly what we are missing. Because while prophecy is unfolding on one side of the world, we are over here arguing about a primary. And not even the general election. A primary.

Now let me be clear about what actually happened here because Jasmine Crockett went on television and blamed Republicans for her loss. She cried foul. She talked about being cheated. What she did not say, what she could not bring herself to admit as loud, is that her own party sat her down. She was sidelined by her own party. The Democrats who have spent years screaming DEI looked at a Black woman with a law degree from Rhodes College, with federal experience, with alliances already built, with the kind of credibility that takes years to earn, and they handed the nomination to James Talarico. A white man. A soon-to-be so-called pastor. A Harvard graduate. A man who had the look and the disposition they believed could be a useful instrument.

Talarico represented everything Crockett was not in their eyes, which is to say he was palatable. Controllable. He would not go off script. He would not be a loud mouth. He would not be a distraction. Crockett was too real, too raw, too much, and in the Democratic Party, too much of a Black woman has always been exactly one thing: a liability.

What this race actually is, when you pull back the lens, is not just about race. This is about a party that is singular in its obsession and that obsession is Donald Trump. Unseating him. Impeaching him. Dismantling everything he represents. Talarico was selected not because he was the best candidate for Texas. He was selected because they believe he has the best shot at flipping a Texas Senate seat, and a flipped Texas Senate seat gets them one step closer to the votes they need to bring down the man who just ordered the strike that killed Khamenei.

Think about that. The man they are trying to impeach is the same man who just shook the entire prophetic landscape of the Middle East. And impeaching Donald Trump may do more than remove a president. It may impede Israel's attempts to build the Third Temple and bring the world one step further from what the prophets said would come.

This race, as significant as it may become come November when one of them faces either John Cornyn or Ken Paxton, only drew two million votes in the primary. Two million. In 2018 when Ted Cruz faced Beto O'Rourke, the primary drew six million combined votes between Democrats and Republicans. The general pulled eight million. The engagement was historic. People were fired up. Now, with the world on fire, with Israel and Iran at war, with the architecture of the Last Days being assembled in real time, two million people showed up and half of them were arguing about whether racism cost Jasmine Crockett a Senate seat.

Racism was real in this race. Let's not pretend it wasn't. It was not the only thing at work though. The Democratic Party's own hand was in it. They gave the DEI to the less qualified candidate because they believed he was the better weapon. They used the language of inclusion to exclude the one person who had actually earned it. They showed their hand. Again.

What grieves me most about all of this is the people consuming this story, the ones who spent this week outraged about Crockett and Talarico, posting and arguing and demanding accountability, most of them have no idea what is happening in Iran. Most of them could not tell you why Purim matters or who Esther was. Most of them have never opened Ezekiel or even understand anything about a Third Temple. They are consumed by the small theater of American race politics while the curtain is rising on something none of us have ever seen before.

They are the lost crowd. The ones who do not recognize the season. The ones who cannot feel that the ground is shifting underneath their feet, not because of an election or a Senate race in Texas, but because the King is coming. And when He comes, the color of your skin will not be a factor. Your party affiliation will not be a factor. Your podcast following will not be a factor. The only thing that will matter is what you believed and whether you had eyes to see it while there was still time.

Section Three: The Idol and the Idolatry

There is Candace Owens.

I cannot talk about distraction and blindness in this hour without addressing what is happening in the world of podcasting and more specifically what Candace Owens has become. Because there is a level of hate for Israel that rises in her commentary that is visceral. Raw. Personal. And it is being fed to millions of people who believe they are receiving truth.

Candace Owens is like a record with a scratch in it. Since last September she has been stuck. Repeating the same story. The same obsession. The same loop. And that loop has a name, Charlie Kirk. He has become her idol. He has become the saint she believes will deliver her from her sins if she can just solve the mystery of who took him. Finding the answer to that question has consumed her entirely and millions of her followers are walking right behind her into that idolatry without the first clue that is what it is.

Her series, The Bride of Charlie, is playing out on a podcast near you and me. And in it she has taken it upon herself to destroy Erika Kirk, Charlie's wife, because in Candace's mind Erika and her family are connected to the Jews. Connected to Israel. And Israel, in Candace Owens' world, is the root of all evil. She digs through the most wicked crevices she can find, searching for the thread that ties this grieving woman back to the people she has decided are the enemy. Every Jewish connection is evidence. Every association is suspicious. Every link to Israel is confirmation of what she already believes.

She will tell you she is not against Jews. She is against Israel. She will draw that line carefully and deliberately. But then watch how Jews become a central feature of her coverage. Watch how the word lands in her commentary. Watch how her audience receives it. The distinction she draws in her mouth disappears entirely by the time it reaches the ears of the people listening.

Israel is committing genocide, she says. They started in Gaza and now they are attempting it in Iran. Killing the Muslim leader was wicked and unjust. And there are people, far more than you would expect, who have received that message and made it their own. People who two years ago could not have told you the difference between Sunni and Shia, who now have strong theological opinions about why the God of Israel is the villain of this story.

That is not journalism. That is not investigation. That is not even good podcasting. That is Satan using every tool available to keep us blind, to cover our eyes with just enough truth mixed with just enough poison that we cannot tell the difference, to keep us digging in the dirt so that we come up dirty. So that when the real thing is happening, when the prophetic clock is moving and the nations are aligning and the signs are stacking up, we are too busy watching a podcast about a dead man's wife to lift our eyes and see what God is actually doing.

Candace Owens is not the disease. She is a symptom. A symptom of a people so desperate for someone to tell them the truth that they will follow anyone who sounds certain, even when that certainty is leading them directly away from the light.

Closing: Beyond the Pale

Candace Owens said something recently that I have not been able to shake. Not because it caught me off guard but because of what it revealed about the spirit behind everything she has been building.

She invoked the phrase Beyond the Pale.

And let me be clear. Candace Owens knows exactly what that phrase means. This was not a casual slip. This was not a woman who stumbled onto a historical reference without understanding its weight. She knows the Pale. She knows the Pale of Settlement. The defined boundary inside Imperial Russia beyond which Jewish people were not permitted to live. Contained. Controlled. Pushed to the outskirts of society and told they did not belong among civilized people. If you have ever watched Fiddler on the Roof, if you have ever seen that fictional village of Anatevka, those families clinging to their traditions and their dignity in the margins of a world that despised them, then you have seen the Pale. You know what it cost to live beyond it.

Candace knows this history. And she used it anyway. She reached for it deliberately to justify the treatment of Jews. To frame their suffering not as an injustice but as a consequence. As something earned. And then she went further, lifting up the execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena, dragged out on Christmas Day and shot, as some kind of reference point. A moment in history she wanted her audience sitting with while thinking about Israel and Jewish leadership.

That is not commentary. That is not provocation. That is a person who went digging in the darkest corners of history, found the most blood-soaked examples she could locate, and laid them at the feet of the Jewish people as justification for what she believes they deserve.

This is the same woman millions of people are following right now. The same voice they trust to tell them what the media won't. The same platform they call truth.

This is where all of it converges into one sobering reality. Iran spent 47 years building a regime around the annihilation of Israel. The Democratic Party is spending its political capital trying to bring down the president who just dismantled that regime. Candace Owens is spending her platform poisoning the minds of everyday Americans against the Jewish people, using the language of history as a weapon rather than a lesson. These are not three unrelated things. They are different instruments playing the same note. That note is as old as the book of Esther.

Because the Pale did not end with Russia. War after war and nation after nation, Spain, France, England, Poland, Germany, the Jewish people were expelled, persecuted, nearly exterminated. And after all of it, after every attempt to erase them from the earth, they found themselves back in Jerusalem. In 1948 a nation was born in a day. Isaiah 66 fulfilled before a watching world that immediately began debating whether it counted.

Candace knows this history too. She just draws different conclusions from it.

What she cannot account for, what no podcaster, no political strategist, no ancient Persian empire and no modern Islamic theocracy has ever been able to account for, is this. The God of Israel is not moved by human consensus. He does not check the ratings. He does not wait for Tucker Carlson to find it theologically reasonable or for Candace Owens to find it historically fair. He set a plan in motion before the foundations of the world and He has been walking it out in full view of anyone with eyes to see it, through every expulsion and every Pale and every pogrom and every gas chamber and every October 7th, and yes, every airstrike on Persian soil during the feast of Purim.

This is not coincidence. None of it is coincidence. Not a single step of that long journey from the outskirts of Russia back to the Promised Land happened outside the sovereign hand of God.

The ones who see it are not crazy and we are not confused or duped by theology. We are the ones who remember what the Book said and recognize the season we are living in. While America argues about Senate races and podcasters dig through the most wicked crevices of history to justify hatred dressed up as journalism, the stage is being set. The pieces are moving. The clock is running.

Beyond the Pale was once the place where the unwanted were sent to disappear. God turned it into a road that led them home.

The same God who brought a scattered people back to their land after two thousand years of exile is now setting the stage for what no eye has fully seen and no mind has fully comprehended.

Soon and very soon.

We are going to see the King.

The Drift: Demons, Nationalism, and the Erasure of a People

“Behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass by them.” Amos 7:8

I've been reading Demons. 

If you've followed this blog, you know Dostoevsky is someone I return to often. But something about this reading is hitting differently. The deeper I get into the novel, the more I recognize the presence of something darker at work. Subtle influences that pull people, slowly and consistently, away from God. What's unsettling is not that it exists, but how easily it goes unnoticed.

I don't think many people see it for what it is. But the more I engage with people, especially on social media, the more aware I've become of how real this spiritual undertow is. And nothing made that more visible to me this week than two things: a YouTube short that turned my stomach, and the State of the Union address.

Let me start with the video.

Three white individuals were asked a question that should never need asking: how are American Blacks American citizens? Two of them argued that more white Americans have fought in wars throughout this country's history than Black Americans, as if citizenship is a ledger and contribution is measured in body counts. The third, to their credit, pointed out that Black people have fought in every war since this nation's founding.

Here's what was visceral to me. Not one of the three, not a single one, mentioned the fact that we were brought to this country in chains. That we built this nation with our hands bound behind our backs and our feet shackled to keep us from running. That the blood of our ancestors is in the very fabric of the soil of this land.

That silence was not accidental. It was the point.

Those three individuals were not an anomaly. They are part of a much larger and more organized movement. We see it in the rise of voices like Nick Fuentes, who openly champions white identity politics. We see it in Joel Webbon and the growing strain of Christian nationalism that wraps racial hierarchy in scripture. We hear echoes of it in commentators like Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles, who frame Western civilization and its preservation in terms that conveniently exclude the people who built it with their bare hands. This is not ignorance. This is not algorithmic rage-bait. This is ideology, and it has a name.

This is what white nationalism does. It doesn't just elevate one story. It erases another. It rewrites the American narrative as a story belonging solely to one people, and in doing so, it forgets that God made man in His image. All of us. Including those of us who survived the Middle Passage. Including those who built this nation with whips on their backs and chains on their feet. Including every generation since that has contributed, bled, fought, and died for a country that still debates whether we belong. And our contribution didn't end with slavery. We contribute with our taxes like most other Americans. We contribute with our work, with what we put in every single day to keep this engine called America running. We show up. We build. We sustain. And still, our place at the table is treated as something that needs to be earned rather than something that was paid for long ago in blood and labor and centuries of sacrifice.

That impulse to erase, to claim the whole of America as a white inheritance, is a sickness. And it's the same sickness Dostoevsky was writing about.

In Demons, the forces that tear a society apart don't announce themselves with horns and fire. They come dressed in ideology. They come with conviction. They come with the absolute certainty that their vision is the right one, and that anyone who stands in the way must be moved, silenced, or forgotten.

That's what I saw playing out during the State of the Union.

On one side, collectivist or system-driven ideas. On the other, nationalism. We reduce these to left vs. right, Democrat vs. Republican, but that simplification hides something far deeper. What we witnessed at the State of the Union were two different sides of a very evil coin. And at the center of it all was a question that shouldn't require asking but demands an answer: who is American, and what does it mean to be American?

Now, many will make the point that what's happening in this country right now is about good vs. evil, not left or right. And there is truth in that. But there is also a kind of self-righteousness in that framing, because the very notion erases something essential. If there is only good and there is only evil, then there is no center. There is no standard by which we measure either one. And without that standard, both sides simply become mirrors of the other, each convinced they are righteous, each certain the other is the enemy.

There is a center. There is good. There is evil. And there is justice.

Jesus was justice. Jesus is Justice. He didn't come representing one side of a political argument. He came as the standard itself, the plumb line against which all things are measured. And when we lose sight of that, we lose more than the argument. We lose the ability to even recognize what justice looks like.


So we are left with the harder question: which ideology bends toward justice?

I don't believe every person is a white nationalist. I want to be clear about that. Scattered among those who cling to the pride of the color of their skin, there are those of us who understand that God created us in His image and in His likeness. There are people on every side of this divide who still carry that truth. But the question remains: which set of ideas, practices, and beliefs aligns more closely with how God has always dealt with His own?

Consider the idea that American citizens should be considered above all others. Many will recoil at that. But is it not justice? Let me be clear: I am not making an argument for ethnic supremacy. I am making an argument for ordered covenant responsibility, the same kind of responsibility God modeled with Israel. When God brought Israel out of Egypt, He didn't tell them to serve the nations around them. He set them on a path to destroy anything that threatened the theocracy. He led them as Commander-in-Chief of an army. He judged those who stood in the path of their progress. That was the line of the Messiah. God prioritized His people, not because He was exclusionary by nature, but because He was purposeful in His design. There was a covenant, and that covenant came with protection. A nation that does not prioritize its own people, that does not fulfill its responsibility to those within its covenant, is a nation that has abandoned the very model God established.

Now, we as Christians understand that God has opened the gate to allow in the Gentiles, those of us who believe that Jesus Christ came to save our souls. The covenant has expanded. The family has grown. But even in that expansion, there is order. There is structure. There is the expectation that we align ourselves with what God has established, not with what man has invented.


This is where the two sides reveal themselves for what they truly are.

On one side, there is a party that puts its faith in the system itself. It worships its own idea of what you are and condemns the Creator for His creation. But we are the clay, and He is the Potter. He shaped us. He formed us. And we don't get to ask questions about His design. Yet this side tells us it's acceptable to destroy life and call it something it is not, to rename what God has already named in order to justify an ideology. It tells us to look to man for healthcare, for food, for shelter, for clothing. It places the government where God should be: the provider, the protector, the source. And that is the very definition of worshipping the system as opposed to the Creator.

This is what kept Israel in bondage. The physical chains of Egypt, yes, but also the spiritual ones, the temptation to rely on systems rather than God. To trust in what you can see rather than in the One who sees all. That's what one side asks of us. Come to the system. Trust the system. Let the system define you, care for you, save you.

On the other side, there are those who attempt to keep God to themselves, as if He doesn't have the power to raise all that are dead to His glory. They wrap faith in the flag and confuse patriotism with piety. They build walls not just at the border but around the throne of God, as if His grace has limits, as if His image is only reflected in certain faces. They forget that the same God who led Israel also made covenant with Rahab the Canaanite, with Ruth the Moabite, with every outsider who turned toward Him and of course Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman.

It's between these two sides that we find ourselves, fighting for justice, fighting for truth, in a world where self-righteousness reigns supreme.


What always gets overlooked is who bears the cost. The ideologues at the center of the debate never pay it. The ordinary people caught in between do, the ones forced to live with the consequences of conflicts they didn't create. People like us. People like me. American Blacks whose citizenship is still questioned, whose history is still erased, whose blood is in the soil of a country that still can't decide if we belong.

The danger is in losing the center entirely. And the center I'm talking about is not political. It is spiritual.

When we replace God at the center, whether with nationalism or systems, with ideology or identity, we don't eliminate the struggle between good and evil. We simply redefine it in our own image. We become the authors of our own morality, and history has shown us, over and over again, how that ends.

Dostoevsky understood this. He wrote Demons as a warning about what happens to the human soul when it cuts itself off from the divine. When people stop seeing each other as made in the image of God, they stop seeing each other at all.

That's what I saw in that YouTube video. Three people standing in a country built on the backs of enslaved Africans, debating whether those people's descendants are truly American. If that's not a demon at work, quietly whispering that some of God's children are less than, I don't know what is.


I'll be honest with you.

There are some nights when I am alone, completely alone, and I cry out to God in tears. Real tears. Because it feels as though He isn't hearing my prayers. It feels as though the wicked and the evil have the strongest voice, as though their megaphone reaches further than my whisper ever could. Those are the nights when the weight of everything, the erasure, the arrogance, the lies dressed up as patriotism, presses down so hard that I can barely breathe.

In those moments, God scoops in. He reminds me that He is truth. He is justice. He tells me to focus on His Word and not on any man, because they are liars. Every one of them. He reminds me that even though an entire nation set out to keep a race of people in bondage, that their so-called superior thinking cast an entire people as inferior, He is far more superior than anything imaginable. He has guided us through some of the most inconceivable storms in human history, and He will guide us again. He always does.

That's the thing about God. He doesn't operate on our timeline or our volume level. The wicked may shout, but God moves. And when He moves, no system, no ideology, no nation built on lies can stand.


But let me show you what the other side of that coin looks like, what happens when God is removed from the equation entirely. Because everything I've described so far, the nationalism, the system worship, the drift from center, all of it creates a world where power answers to nothing. And if you want to see what that world produces when it reaches its highest levels, look no further than what is revealed in the Epstein letters.

In those letters, there is a reference to something called Bottle Girls. If you don't know what Bottle Girls are, let me paint the picture. These are young women whose job is to attract rich, powerful men into clubs and bars, luring them in with the promise of excess. They encourage them to order the most expensive drinks, to spend lavishly, to draw in the crowd. And in return, they are elevated. Taken up to the highest parts of the club, the VIP sections, the balconies, where they can look down over the people crowded below, swimming in drink and lust and greed.

From up there, they pick them out like fruit from a tree. They have their way. They sell their souls. They sacrifice their very beings.

Nobody sees it for what it is. Or maybe they do, and they just don't care.

That is the architecture of evil. It doesn't drag you down into the pit screaming. It lifts you up and gives you a view. It makes you feel chosen. And by the time you realize what you've traded for that elevation, it is already too late.

This is not a metaphor. This is what is happening in plain sight, at the highest levels of wealth and power and influence in this country. The same country that debates whether Black people are citizens. The same country that watches two political parties posture at the State of the Union while the rot beneath them grows deeper by the day.

Dostoevsky saw it. He wrote about it. The demons don't come for the people at the bottom. They come for the ones who think they are at the top.

We are drifting. Left and right, the pull is real. But the answer is in returning to the center, to the standard that no system, no ideology, and no nation can replace.

God makes man in His image. Every one of us. And any vision of America, or of justice, that forgets that is not just incomplete. It is dangerous.

It is exactly what Dostoevsky warns us about.

Yet, on those nights when I cry out and feel like no one is listening, He answers. Not always with thunder. Sometimes with a whisper. Sometimes just with the reminder that I am still here. That we are still here. That the people who survived the Middle Passage, who built this nation in chains, who endured every attempt at erasure, are still here.

That, in itself, is the evidence of God.

“Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons

Jacqueline Session is the founder and CEO of DAHTRUTH, LLC, a poet, and an urban fiction author. She writes on faith, culture, and identity at [DahTruth.com](https://dahtruth.com).
 

The Hijacking of Black History Month

“If there is no God, then I am God.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons

I'm tired. And I don't mean the kind of tired that sleep fixes. I mean the kind of tired that comes from opening your phone every morning and being assaulted by a new cycle of chaos, contradiction, and political theater dressed up as progress. This has been one of those weeks where social media feels less like a tool for connection and more like a weapon of mass distraction — and I say that as somebody who uses it daily to speak truth.

February is supposed to be American Black History Month. A time when this nation — however performatively — pauses to acknowledge the contributions, the suffering, the resilience, and the brilliance of American Descendants of Slavery. But this February? Black History Month got pushed to the back of the bus. Again.

If I must be honest I could take Black History Month or leave it.  But this year I am more focused because I can't help but wonder how stories of Black History is being overshowed by The Epstein files.  Our Leaders are more concerned about these files then they are about focusing on our past, current and future standing in this country.

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers…”

— Ephesians 6:12 (KJV)

The Epstein Circus and the Trump Smokescreen

I am not certain how much the Epstein files matter. I don't think sex trafficking is the greatest story told in these files. I think justice for those victims matters; however, the victims are not those women standing at the congressional hearings wearing T-shirts. Reading through some of the depositions from the young girls, I believe they were manipulated by Epstein and not necessarily forced. They wanted money and were willing to sacrifice themselves without understanding the long-term consequences. Epstein and Maxwell were the monsters who were consuming young people for personal pleasure. It's sick and disgusting, but true.

One of the depositions discussed the ways young girls were manipulated—how they came and went and how they collected cash with each 30-minute massage. How they lied to their parents and skipped school to give 30-minute massages, how they referred friends, and how Epstein referred them to friends. Old men with a great deal of cash who wanted massages. It was all a vicious cycle of young girls being manipulated by monsters in the name of cash.

Unfortunately, what has been revealed has targeted no individual. Those men getting massages are like ghosts or phantoms who appear in motel and hotel rooms and exit without sight or sound. Sex is being played out in the media this month, and there is no pursuit of justice for victims of sexual predators. These terms are being used as a political weapon, wielded with surgical precision simply to gaslight the American people.

They want us to focus on the sexual allegations, although they lack evidence. Creating a witch hunt against individuals who have been implicated simply because their name happened to appear in the file. There are no new convictions because they lack substantial evidence, and yet they continue to holler about pedophiles and sex trafficking.

The Department of Justice has acknowledged that the files contain what it described as unfounded and false allegations submitted to the FBI before the 2020 election. They steer us to the sexual allegations and keep the narrative machine spinning: Trump is guilty by association. Trump is a predator. Trump is the real story.

While we are focused on stories without any evidence, we ignore other stories that are told in that file. And Black History Month is drowned out. Our history, once again, was not the priority. Our stories got scrolled past while pundits debated whether a birthday card with Trump's name on it constitutes evidence of sexual misconduct. The exhaustion is real.

The Barking Dog, the Bone, and the Buried Truth

There's a narrative at work here. Think of it this way: they've got a barking dog in your ear and a hand over your eyes. The Epstein files are the barking dog the left has been using for months now to keep the noise going, to keep you distracted. For a little while, ICE was the bone that shut the dog up — the immigration raids, the deportation stories, the outrage machine had something else to chew on. But that bone got snatched away, and now the dog is barking again. Louder than ever.

Last week, Les Wexner — the 88-year-old billionaire founder of L Brands, the man behind Victoria's Secret — was deposed by members of the House Oversight Committee at his mansion in New Albany, Ohio. He sat there for nearly five hours under oath. And to his credit, he played the right card. He said he didn't know what Epstein was up to. He called himself naive, foolish, and gullible. He said he was duped by a world-class con man. He said he cut ties with Epstein nearly twenty years ago. He said no one from the FBI or any other law enforcement agency ever contacted him about allegations of sexual assault. He said he barely knew the man — and of course, we can figure out that's probably not the whole truth when you've given someone your power of attorney and billions of dollars in assets, including a million-dollar townhouse in Manhattan.

But here's the thing: even if Wexner's relationship with Epstein was deeper than he admits — and it almost certainly was — there is no evidence of pedophilia. That's a different question entirely. No indictment. No DNA. No victims naming him in criminal complaints. No charges. Nothing. What there is, is hearsay, speculation, and a congressional fishing expedition led entirely by Democrats.

And let me emphasize that point. Not a single Republican member of the House Oversight Committee showed up for the Wexner deposition. Not one. Chairman James Comer cited a medical procedure. But the optics tell the story: this was a Democratic witch trial from start to finish. Five Democrats flew to Ohio to grill an 88-year-old man in his home about his sex life, about Epstein's sex life, and — here's where it gets truly maddening — about Donald Trump's sex life.

Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett of Texas sat across from this man and asked him point blank: "Did Epstein ever share any information with you about Donald Trump's sexual activities?" Wexner said no. She asked if he ever saw or became aware of Trump having a sexual relationship with someone introduced to him by Epstein or Maxwell. Wexner said no. She pressed on whether Epstein had ever discussed Trump with him. No. Whether Trump had ever discussed Epstein. No. There was nothing there. Wexner said Trump used to show up at Victoria's Secret fashion shows and introduce himself, and that he found it odd because Trump had nothing to do with fashion. That's it. That's all they got. An implication not an allegation that provided a road to an investigation.

Yet Crockett told reporters afterward: "We're gonna be on his a--." Talking about the President of the United States. Based on what? Based on a man saying he doesn't remember and clearly not credible.  If this is what passes for investigation in America then our judicial system is in trouble.

To think that any person can be hauled before Congress, sat down under oath, and asked these kinds of intimate, degrading questions based solely on hearsay, without a single shred of physical evidence, goes against every democratic right you can imagine. Every citizen has the right to remain silent. Every citizen has the right to face their accusers. And those who want to prosecute have the burden of presenting a case. But there is no case here. No indictment. No allegations supported by facts — no DNA, no forensic evidence, nothing. Even in the case of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, she had proof. She had the blue dress. She had Clinton's DNA. That was a real case built on real evidence. Here we have Congress asking an 88-year-old man about another man's sexual proclivities and then pivoting to ask about the President's — all for the cameras, all for the narrative.

It was all a circus.  Big tents telling us to look over here at the clowns.

The Questions Nobody's Asking

February. Black History month spectacle. Here's what really got to me this week. While Democrats were busy trying to connect Trump to Epstein through an old man's fading memory, nobody was asking the questions that actually matter. The real questions. The ones that, if answered, would shake the foundations of power in this country.

Like: Why wasn't any of this investigated in 1996? That's when the FBI first heard allegations about Epstein. A woman named Maria Farmer reported to the FBI that Epstein had stolen naked photos of her underage siblings. No investigation was conducted. For years. How does that happen unless someone wanted to bury the story.

Like: Where did Epstein get his money? This was a man who lived like a billionaire, owned islands and planes and mansions, and yet no one has fully accounted for the precise structure of his wealth. Leslie Wexner gave him enormous financial authority, yes, but even that does not explain the full scope of what Epstein controlled. He owned aircraft. He moved in circles of power. His lifestyle exceeded what many traditional financial managers accumulate.

In the 1980s, covert operations and drug trafficking scandals devastated Black communities. The Iran-Contra era revealed that powerful institutions were capable of moral compromise on a global scale. So when a figure like Epstein rises with unexplained wealth and extraordinary protection, the public has reason to ask hard questions. The issue is not proving a direct connection. The issue is transparency. In a country where entire neighborhoods were flooded with drugs and later blamed for their own collapse, secrecy at the highest levels does not inspire trust.

If the FBI, the CIA, and the DOJ are filled with the intellectuals they purport to be, then why, in thirty years, has there not been a single thorough investigation into how Epstein built his empire? I think it is because nobody wanted those graves dug up. Those graves do not just hold Epstein's secrets. They hold the secrets of the institutions that looked the other way. The same institutions that gave us the Covid crisis and forced it upon the world. The same institutions that have pushed transgenderism as settled science when the conversation is far from settled. The same institutions that talk about human trafficking in the abstract while wealthy men continue to bring women from around the world to increase their own sexual power and nothing is done. All of it gets buried under allegations that cannot be substantiated. Under congressional theater that leads nowhere. Under headlines designed to generate clicks and outrage but never justice.

Let's Be Honest About What We're Looking At

Another thing that struck me about the Epstein files was the bottle girls. The VIP clubs. The way sex is used as currency in certain circles. Young women selling themselves for cash and high-priced bottles, for access to powerful men, for the promise of a modeling career or a seat at the table. The files are full of this. And the media acts shocked. As if strip clubs are not real things. As if prostitution is not a real lifestyle that some women choose and some are forced into. As if there are not levels to this, from the street corner to the high-priced escort who does the same things in a penthouse instead of a motel. The only difference is the price tag and the zip code.

That is not a defense of Epstein. It is a reality check. The culture of sexual transaction that Epstein exploited did not start with him and it will not end with him. It exists because powerful men create the demand and vulnerable women, and sometimes girls, are positioned to meet it. And instead of dealing with that systemic reality, Congress wants to know if an eighty-eight-year-old man remembers whether Trump was at a fashion show twenty years ago.

The whole thing is maddening. And if it were not documented and on video, you would not believe it was true.

What's Actually in the Files That Nobody Wants to Talk About

Here is where I need everybody to pay close attention. Because while Congress is busy chasing Trump's name through these files, the truly dangerous revelations are being glossed over. The things that should terrify every Black person, every poor person, every person of faith in this country are the very things nobody on Capitol Hill wants to discuss.

The Epstein files reveal that this man was not just a sex trafficker. He was a eugenicist. A fake race scientist. A man who believed he could engineer a superior human race. And he had the money, the connections, and the intellectual infrastructure to try.

Epstein maintained a list of nearly thirty top scientists. He funded research at Harvard, MIT, the Santa Fe Institute, and other elite institutions to the tune of millions of dollars. He gave 6.5 million dollars to Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. He donated 800,000 dollars to MIT's Media Lab. He gave 120,000 dollars to the Worldwide Transhumanist Association, now called Humanity Plus, an organization dedicated to using genetic engineering and artificial intelligence to enhance the human race. He organized lavish science conferences, flew researchers to his private island, held dinners with Nobel laureates and Silicon Valley billionaires, and embedded himself so deeply in the scientific establishment that researchers were sharing pre-publication manuscripts with him and consulting him on their career crises.

Brilliant minds discussing funding over those expensive dinners with whores in the house.

Race science. The files contain email exchanges where Epstein and his scientific associates openly discussed the supposed cognitive inferiority of Black people. One AI researcher wrote to Epstein in 2016 that Black children have slower cognitive development. Another exchange entertained the idea that mass deaths of the elderly might be beneficial to humanity. Epstein himself told Steve Bannon on camera that if he were in the forest competing against an African, he would be the one getting eaten, because Black people have the physical intelligence to deal with their environment, implying they lack the higher intelligence he attributed to himself.

This is what was being discussed in the rooms that Epstein's money built. Not at Klan rallies. Not in anonymous chat rooms. At Harvard. At MIT. At private dinners with the men building the AI systems that will shape our future, influence healthcare decisions, guide genetic research, determine insurance algorithms, and structure the technologies that increasingly govern how we live and who receives care.

Let me connect another dot that the media conveniently ignores. Epstein was included in email conversations about pandemic preparedness and global health financing years before Covid-19 ever appeared. A 2017 email from Boris Nikolic — a science advisor with direct ties to Bill Gates — was addressed to both Epstein and Gates, discussing donor-advised fund strategies for key areas including pandemic response. Epstein was in the room where global health priorities were being financially structured. He had relationships with virologists. Stanford virologist Nathan Wolfe visited Epstein's homes in New York and Florida, pitching him on funding virus research. The files show Epstein positioned himself at the intersection of global health philanthropy, financial engineering, and pandemic risk modeling.

Now I'm not saying Epstein created Covid. But I am saying this: the same networks that looked the other way while he trafficked girls are the same networks that shaped the global pandemic response. The same institutions — the intelligence agencies, the scientific establishment, the philanthropic class — that protected Epstein for decades are the same ones that told us to shut up, stay home, take the shot, and don't ask questions. Now we're just supposed to believe that they're really pursuing justice.

And then there's the transhumanism pipeline into the gender ideology that has swept through our schools, our medical institutions, and our culture. Epstein funded organizations and thinkers who believe the human body is something to be transcended, modified, and redesigned. That biology is a limitation to be engineered away. That nature is a rough draft and technology is the editor. This is the same philosophical root that feeds the idea that a child can be born in the wrong body. That hormones and surgery can correct what God designed. Transhumanism and transgenderism share the same intellectual DNA — the belief that the human being as created is insufficient and must be improved upon by human hands.

Epstein's money flowed into the very academic and nonprofit networks that now promote these ideologies as settled science. The same circles that entertained his eugenics fantasies over cocktails and coffee klatches are the ones publishing the research, writing the policies, and training the doctors who are reshaping our children. And we're told to celebrate it. We're told it's progress. We're told that questioning it makes us bigots.

And let me say something that might make people uncomfortable, but it's the truth and somebody needs to say it. We call Epstein and Maxwell monsters — and they were — for manipulating young people, exploiting their vulnerability, consuming their innocence for personal gain. The whole country is united in outrage over that. But what do we call the organizations that tell a woman it's empowering to kill her unborn child? What do we call the doctors who put a confused twelve-year-old boy on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and sentence him to a lifetime of medication to chase a biological impossibility? What do we call the system that celebrates all of this as healthcare and progress?

Epstein and Maxwell were individual monsters. But what we're looking at now is a monstrous system — institutional, funded, protected by law, and cheered on by the very same progressive establishment that sat at Epstein's dinner table. We cry outrage with one hand and applaud with the other. We weep for the girls Epstein manipulated and then hand our own children over to ideologies that are no less destructive — just better branded.

And here's what nobody wants to acknowledge: sex, prostitution, even the exploitation that Epstein trafficked in — those evils are as old as civilization itself. Since the scattering of mankind, since Babel, men have bought and sold flesh. It is wicked, but it is ancient. Abortion on demand as a political right? Gender transition as mainstream medicine for children? Those are new. Those are modern inventions — ideas that didn't exist in any serious mainstream form until the last hundred years. They are not the natural order of anything. They are manufactured ideologies, packaged as liberation, and sold to the very communities least equipped to survive their consequences.

Meanwhile, the communities most affected by these ideologies are our communities, Black communities, poor communities. The ones that are least equipped to push back. We don't have the lobbying power. We don't have the media platforms. We don't have the institutional backing. What we have is our faith, our common sense, and the willingness to say out loud what everybody else is whispering: something is deeply wrong, and the people responsible for it are the same people who are now pointing fingers at everyone else.

At the root of it all is something that goes deeper than policy or politics. The left's ideology moves away from God. It has to. Because you cannot pursue the kind of project Epstein and his intellectual circle were funding — redesigning human beings, engineering a master race, deciding which lives are worth living and which aren't — unless you first remove God from the equation. You have to dethrone the Creator before you can sit in His seat.

That's what transhumanism is. That's what eugenics is. That's what the gender ideology is. It's man saying: I know better than God. I can improve on what He made. I can fix what He designed. And the people making that claim aren't preachers or prophets — they're scientists and billionaires and politicians who have appointed themselves the saviors of humanity. Bill Gates will save you from the pandemic. Harvard will save you from your own biology. The government will save you from your ignorance. Just trust them. Just comply. Just hand over your children and your faith and your common sense, and they will build a better world.

That is the zeitgeist of the age. It is the spirit that runs through every single institution that protected Jeffrey Epstein, that funded his eugenics fantasies, that entertained his race science over expensive dinners, and that is now telling you to look at Trump instead of looking at them.

Meanwhile, Blue States Are Bleeding Their Own

Now let me turn the lens where it really needs to go. To the Democratic-led states and cities that promised the working class and the poor a better life. Because while the left paints Trump as a white nationalist whose only concern is his base, their own policies are gutting the very communities they claim to champion. The receipts are right here.

Virginia: Taxing You for Walking the Dog

Governor Abigail Spanberger came into office in January on a platform of “affordability”. The ink wasn't dry on her inauguration speech before Virginia Democrats introduced over fifty new tax proposals. I wish I was making this up but her proposals include taxes on dog walking, gym memberships, dry cleaning, home repairs, food delivery, package deliveries, and electric leaf blowers.

Dog walking. They want to tax you for walking your dog.

This is a state that Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin left with a $572 million budget surplus and four consecutive years of surpluses totaling $10 billion. He cut taxes and attracted business. And the very first thing Democrats did was reach into every pocket they could find. Some proposals would push Virginia's top income tax rate to 13.8% — higher than California's — giving the Commonwealth the dubious distinction of being the most heavily taxed state in the nation. Virginians didn't vote for that. They voted for affordability. What they got was a tax on picking up their dry cleaning.

New York: The Double-Edged Sword of Mamdani's Math

New York City's new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is a self-described democratic socialist who rode into office on promises of rent freezes, free bus rides, city-owned grocery stores, and universal childcare. Beautiful promises. Campaign poetry. But now the prose of governing has arrived, and the numbers don't add up.

Mamdani inherited a $5.4 billion budget gap — a mess he blames on former Mayor Eric Adams and years of fiscal mismanagement. His preferred solution? Tax the wealthy. Raise income taxes by two percentage points on millionaires and hike corporate taxes. But Governor Kathy Hochul has flatly refused to support it. She has said repeatedly she will not raise taxes on the wealthy this year. So Mamdani responded with a threat: if Albany won't tax the rich, he'll raise property taxes on homeowners by 9.5%.

Let that sink in.  He is going to hold hostage the middle class and poor communities if he doesn't get funding for a socialist’s budget. 

The man who promised to freeze rents for four years on rent-stabilized apartments is now threatening to raise taxes on the property owners who provide those very apartments. How does that math work? If you freeze the income a landlord can collect from rent but increase the taxes they owe on the building, where does that money come from? It comes from deferred maintenance. It comes from buildings falling apart. It comes from landlords abandoning properties altogether. Who will be there standing in line to scoop up and save the abandoned properties, will it be the government.  Is this a government takeover. Socialism working at its best.  The New York Apartment Association warned that this combination would guarantee the physical destruction of tens of thousands of housing units. The Working-class, middle-class New Yorkers workers disproportionately Black families, lives in those units.

How about the free grocery stores? A Polymarket-funded pop-up in the West Village drew lines around the block — with shoppers being paired with staff who rushed them through the aisles. One woman on disability said she couldn't even get everything she needed before items ran out. Economists have called the city-owned grocery store plan a doomed experiment. Kansas City tried it. It failed. The grocery business runs on razor-thin margins, and government has never been known for efficiency. But Mamdani is charging ahead because the campaign slogan sounded good.

Your taxes will be used to fund the free grocery stores that will tell you what you will eat and what to put in your bag.

Chicago: Taxed to Death and Losing Its Team

Chicago. Another blue city. Another promise of progress. Another tax disaster.

Chicago homeowners were hit with record property tax increases.  These spikes are happening in the poorest neighborhoods, predominantly Black communities — because commercial property values in downtown areas have plummeted. Businesses have left. Now office towers sit empty and the tax burden shifted to the people who can least afford it.

Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas put it plainly: the high-rises downtown are unrented because businesses have left the city, and somebody has to pick up the tab. So the residences are picking it up. The homeowners. The working people. The very voters who were told that Democratic leadership would protect them.

Chicago's 2026 budget imposed $473 million in new taxes — on shopping bags, Uber rides, alcohol, online gaming, and even a first-in-the-nation social media tax. Mayor Brandon Johnson proposed a per-employee head tax on large firms that the City Council rejected, with aldermen warning it would drive even more businesses out.

Now the Chicago Bears — one of the NFL's founding franchises, over a century of football in Chicago — are on the verge of leaving the state entirely. Indiana lawmakers unanimously passed a bill this week to lure the team to Hammond, just across the state line. The Bears called it the most meaningful step forward in their stadium efforts to date. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker admitted that the team is unlikely to build within Chicago's city limits. Sources close to the situation called the move to Indiana an inevitability.

A hundred years of football history, walking out the door. Because Chicago's leadership couldn't get out of its own way. Because the taxes were too high. The bureaucracy was too thick. Indiana said: we're open for business — and Illinois said: we're open for new taxes.

The Narrative Machine Never Sleeps

Now let me be clear about something, because this is the thread that ties everything together. All of it, the Epstein circus, the tariff headlines, the culture wars, is being run through a narrative machine operated by the left. And the machine has one function: point everything at Donald Trump, MAGA, or racism and hope nobody looks behind the curtain.

They have a practice. They pick a direction, they drive the narrative relentlessly, and they count on us getting so caught up in the emotion, the outrage, the victimhood, the moral panic, that we lose sight of the fact that the left and left-leaning individuals are more implicated in the Epstein files than the right. The Clintons, the academic establishment, the philanthropic class, the media gatekeepers, these are overwhelmingly liberal institutions. And yet, the story we are being told is that no side is innocent, as if the guilt is evenly distributed. It is not. But that framing gives them cover to pivot from the files straight to Trump's name appearing in a contact list, as if proximity is the same as culpability. Meanwhile, the scientists who were discussing Black cognitive inferiority over Epstein-funded dinners at Harvard? Those are their people. The transhumanist organizations that got Epstein's checks? Those run in progressive intellectual circles. But somehow the camera always swings back to the same target.

They do this with everything. They put all white people in a racist box as if only white Republicans are capable of racism. As if a white progressive who funds eugenics research at MIT is somehow less dangerous than a MAGA voter in a red hat. The left has perfected the art of the redirect, and this past week gave us two textbook examples.

The Tariff Ruling: What They Told You vs. What Actually Happened

On Friday, February 20th, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that President Trump could not use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose tariffs. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion, joined by Gorsuch, Barrett, and the three liberal justices. The decision struck down the IEEPA tariffs, which had raised over 160 billion dollars, on the grounds that the 1977 law does not mention tariffs and no president had ever used it that way before.

Now here is what the media told you: Supreme Court strikes down Trump's tariffs in major blow to the president. That is the headline. That is what they want you to walk away with. Trump lost. The Court checked his power. Democracy wins.

Here is what actually happened. Within hours of the ruling, Trump signed a proclamation imposing a 10 percent tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a completely different legal authority. By the next morning, he had raised it to 15 percent, the maximum allowed under that statute. Section 232 tariffs on steel, aluminum, autos, and other goods remain untouched. Section 301 tariffs remain in place. The IEEPA avenue was closed, but the man still has multiple legal tools to impose tariffs, and he used them the same day.

But that is not the story, is it? The story is Trump lost. The story is the Court reined him in. They do not want you to see that tariff authority still exists through multiple congressional statutes. They do not want you to understand that the Constitution gives Congress the power to tax imports, and Congress has already delegated significant portions of that power to the president through other laws. They want you to feel good about a headline and move on. Because if you actually read the ruling and the response, the picture is far more complicated than they want you to see.

The Texas Senate Split: Crockett, Talarico, and the Media's Invisible Hand

We can’t leave out the quieter story that are just as revealing. Down in Texas, the Democratic Senate primary between Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett and state Rep. James Talarico has turned into a case study in narrative manipulation.

Talarico sat for an interview with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show. But on Monday night, Colbert announced on air that CBS lawyers had pulled the interview, citing potential FCC violations related to equal time rules for political candidates. Both Colbert and Talarico framed it as CBS bowing to pressure from the Trump administration. The media ran with that angle. Poor Talarico, silenced by Trump's regulatory intimidation.

But hold on. Think about what actually happened. Talarico — the candidate the Democratic establishment clearly prefers — got the Colbert interview in the first place. Not Crockett. Crockett, a sitting U.S. Congresswoman who had previously been on Colbert's show, was not invited this time. And when the interview was pulled, Talarico's campaign raised $2.5 million in 24 hours off the controversy. Crockett herself acknowledged it gave him the boost he was looking for. That is not what you is called suppression. This was a fundraising strategy wrapped in a censorship narrative.

By the end of the week, Talarico’s team doubled down on this strategy. Where did Talarico show up? On Bill Maher’s show, Friday, February 20th. Right there on the panel on HBO with Lauren Boebert, debating faith and politics before a national audience. No Jasmine Crockett. Talarico. Again.

The Democrats clearly do not want Crockett on that ticket. They are pouring their support behind Talarico because they believe he has the better shot at winning a state that hasn't elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988. Talarico is the one getting the national media platforms, the viral moments, the fundraising boosts. Crockett is being treated like an afterthought.  The party establishment is working behind the scenes to lift one candidate and let the other dangle in the wind. But they'll never say that out loud. Instead, they blame Trump for the Colbert interview being pulled and pretend both candidates have equal footing.

As I write this I am biting my tongue until it bleeds. Because stranger things have happened in politics and Crockett just might pull it off. But on the Republican side, the candidate I believe is the overall best person for that seat — Wesley Hunt — is in a tough spot, running third behind Paxton at 38% and Cornyn at 31% in the latest Hobby School poll. Hunt is polling at 17%, with the lowest unfavorable rating of any candidate in the race and the highest net favorability after Talarico. He's 44 years old, a West Point graduate, a combat veteran, and an America First conservative who entered Congress under the Trump movement. He is the future of the Republican Party in Texas.

But Cornyn has $60 million in ad support. Paxton has the MAGA base. And Hunt is stuck between the establishment and the populists. If Democrats in Texas were truly strategic — if they actually cared about governance over party loyalty — they would look at Wesley Hunt and recognize that he is the best overall candidate in either primary. Not Crockett. Not Talarico. Hunt. He's the one who could win a general election, govern competently, and represent the full spectrum of Texans. But partisan blinders will keep everyone in their lane, and Texas will be worse for it.

The Pattern Is the Point

Virginia. New York. Chicago. The Epstein files. The tariff headlines. The Texas primary games. It is all one big, ugly manipulation tactic, strategically implemented through social media narratives and pandered by those with the biggest pocketbooks.

They promised tax relief and delivered tax hikes. They promised to protect the poor and shifted the burden onto them. They promised economic vitality and watched businesses pack their bags. They promised to be the antidote to Trump and his supposed white nationalism, and yet the communities being devastated by their policies are overwhelmingly Black and working-class communities. And this is February, Black History Month. For real?

This is not the Republican Party doing this. These are Democrats. These are progressives. These are the people who hold up Black History Month banners in February and then spend the other eleven months crafting policies that hollow out Black communities from the inside. These are the people whose intellectual darlings were discussing eugenics and race science at Epstein-funded dinners while simultaneously lecturing us about systemic racism.

And while they do all of this, they point at Trump. Look over there. Epstein files, but only the pages with Trump's name. Tariff ruling, but only the headline that says he lost. Texas Senate race, but only the story about censorship, not the story about which candidate the party machine is actually backing. Whatever the distraction of the week is, it serves the same purpose. If you are watching Trump, you are not watching your property tax bill double. You are not watching your city lose its football team. You are not watching your governor propose a tax on walking your dog. You are not reading what the scientists at Harvard were actually saying about your Black children.

I am scrolled out. I am taxed out. And I am tired of being sold out by the very people who claim to be on our side.

This February, Black History Month did not get overshadowed by accident. It got overshadowed by design. Because the last thing certain people want is for Black Americans to stop and think about our history. They do not want us to look around at our present circumstances and start asking who is really working for us.

Here is the deepest truth I can offer you. Every ideology that is destroying our communities, the eugenics repackaged as science, the transgenderism sold as compassion, the socialism dressed up as justice, the taxes marketed as progress, all of it flows from the same poisoned well. It all begins with the rejection of God and the elevation of man. When you remove the Creator from the conversation, you do not get freedom. You get a new set of gods, smaller, weaker, more corrupt gods who happen to have Harvard degrees and billion-dollar foundations. Gods who funded a pedophile's race science. Gods who told you to lock down your church but keep the liquor stores open. Gods who will redesign your child's body and call it healthcare.

The left does not just lean away from God. It runs. Because everything they want to build requires that He not be in the room. You cannot play God if God is already there.

He is there. And we know it. That is why they cannot silence us, no matter how loud the barking dog gets. That is why Black Americans who hold to their faith, their families, and their common sense are the most dangerous people in this political equation. Because we see through it. We have always seen through it. We survived slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, crack, and mass incarceration, not because the government saved us, but because God carried us. And no amount of Epstein-funded science or Democrat-promised socialism is going to replace that.

The answer, more and more, is becoming painfully clear.

We are working for ourselves. And we are working with God. Because nobody else is.

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© 2026 Jacqueline Session Ausby. All rights reserved. This work is the original and express intellectual property of Jacqueline Session Ausby and DAHTRUTH, LLC. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author.

Outside The Frame

“Test everything; hold fast to what is good.” — 1 Thessalonians 5:21

On the Epstein Letters, ICE, and Who Really Pays the Price

It’s February—the month we set aside to celebrate love. But this week, love didn’t show up the way the greeting cards promised. Instead, love revealed something far less romantic: the consequences of men unchecked and women willing to sacrifice everything for money, for survival, for proximity to power. What we witnessed this week was not a love story. It was a power story—dressed in the language of desire, wrapped in the politics of control, and played out across every screen in America. If love is supposed to teach us something in February, then this week it taught us what happens when power replaces intimacy, when exploitation masquerades as opportunity, and when the people who are supposed to protect us are too busy protecting themselves.

This week pulled back the curtain on something we already knew but keep pretending we don’t: power in America does not answer to the same rules as survival. What played out across our screens—from Capitol Hill testimony to cable news chyrons—was a collision of worlds that are usually kept carefully separated. The world of elite exploitation and the world of political theatre dressed up as moral conviction. The Epstein letters. ICE agents in Minneapolis. Pam Bondi before the House. These stories don’t just share a news cycle. They share a root system.

And the rest of us—the ones who are neither elite nor protected, the ones whose communities bear the real cost of broken borders and unchecked power—we sit outside the frame, watching both sides play chess with our reality.

— • —

I. The Epstein Letters: Power Without Consequence

Let’s call it what it is. The Epstein case was never just about one man. It was about a network—an architecture of access that allowed the wealthy and powerful to exploit young women while the institutions designed to protect them looked the other way. The “letters” that resurfaced this week are not merely correspondence. They are receipts. They are evidence of a world where influence shields harm and where transactional intimacy is not a scandal but a currency.

What we see in the Epstein saga is exploitation operating as a system, not an accident. Wealth doesn’t just insulate these men from consequence; it rewrites the moral framework entirely. When a billionaire’s name appears on a flight log, it’s a “connection.” When a teenage girl appears in the same record, she’s a “consenting participant.” The language of power always finds a way to sanitize itself.

And there is a gendered dimension here that we cannot ignore. Some of these young women recognized what their bodies could buy them in rooms where power was the only real currency. That is not empowerment. That is survival economics in a system that was rigged before they ever walked through the door. Meanwhile, the men at the center of these networks used sexual dominance as a means of reinforcing their authority—leveraging access to bodies as proof of status, as a perk of position, as the price others had to pay to be near power.

The public is fascinated by these revelations. We devour every headline. But fascination is not justice. Outrage without structural reform is just entertainment. And that is exactly what those at the top are counting on—that our attention span is shorter than their legal team’s retainer.

— • —

II. ICE, Minnesota, and the Rule of Law

For weeks before the Epstein story resurfaced, the national conversation was consumed by a different spectacle: ICE agents in Minneapolis, federal enforcement in the streets, and a media frenzy designed to make you feel something other than what the law actually says. And what the law says is clear: if you entered this country illegally, you are subject to deportation. Period. Whether or not you have committed a separate crime is beside the point. The act of illegal entry is itself a violation. That is the law. And the law must be enforced.

I say this not with malice but with clarity. There is a legal process for immigration. There are pathways to citizenship, to asylum, to lawful entry. Those who bypassed that process—regardless of their circumstances—made a choice that placed them outside the protection of the law they chose not to follow. Compassion does not require us to abandon the rule of law. In fact, abandoning the rule of law is itself the most uncompassionate thing we can do—because it is the communities where illegal immigrants settle, often our communities, that bear the burden. Overcrowded schools. Strained resources. Neighborhoods that change overnight without a single vote being cast.

And let us talk about Temporary Protected Status. TPS was designed for a specific purpose: to provide temporary refuge to people from countries experiencing war, natural disasters, or extraordinary conditions. The key word is temporary. When those conditions no longer exist—when the war has ended, when the disaster has passed, when the country has stabilized—then the status must be revoked and those individuals must return home. That is our law. That is the agreement. To extend TPS indefinitely is to turn a temporary measure into a permanent backdoor to residency, and that is not what the American people signed up for.

Minneapolis became a media battleground, but when the Trump administration began to wind things down—withdrawing ICE and Border Patrol from the streets—the cameras pivoted. Almost overnight, the Epstein letters re-entered the news cycle. Immigration coverage faded. Elite corruption returned. The choreography was seamless. In American media, stories don’t just appear and disappear organically. They are managed. They are timed. And when one story becomes inconvenient for those in power, another one is waiting in the wings.

— • —

III. Capitol Hill: Two Positions, No Innocence

Last week on Capitol Hill, these two worlds collided in a way that made the political theatre almost unbearable to watch. In one hearing room, ICE agents testified before Congress about the necessity of enforcement operations. In another, Pam Bondi appeared before the House of Representatives. And threading through all of it were the renewed questions about the Epstein files and what they reveal about the people who govern us.

Let me be direct: neither side is innocent, but one side makes more sense than the other.

On one side of the aisle, we heard the predictable cries. The cry of illegal immigrants being treated unjustly. The supposed destruction of voting rights because of the SAVE Act—a piece of legislation designed to ensure that only American citizens vote in American elections, which should not be controversial in a functioning democracy. And then there were the cries about exploited women—women connected to the Epstein case who have changed their names, whose identities are being weaponized for political points rather than pursued for justice. The left is not interested in protecting these women. They are interested in using them.

On the other side is a fight for American values—the sovereignty of our borders, the integrity of our elections, and the accountability of our leaders. But that fight has been misinterpreted and misaligned by those who are more concerned with power than with the principles they claim to defend. Officials maneuvering. Politicians posturing. Networks of influence where some only want to protect their own. The right has the better argument, but they are stumbling over their own execution, and that is a problem we need to talk about.

Congressional hearings have become performance art. Both sides know it. The questions are written for the clip, not for the record. Senators and representatives grandstand for their base, craft their fifteen-second moments for social media, and leave the hearing having advanced nothing but their own brand. The substance—the actual policy, the actual human impact—drowns beneath the theatre.

— • —

IV. Media Warfare: The Left Lights the Match, the Right Fans the Flames

This is where it gets personal for me. Because I have watched—for years now—how the media on both sides uses these stories not to inform us, but to arm themselves. Every headline is ammunition. Every revelation is a weapon aimed at the other side. And the people who are actually impacted by these events? We are collateral damage in a war that was never about us.

Let me start with the left, because right now, the left is the one lighting matches. It is the left that is using the immigration crisis to call out protesters to the streets. In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill is actively rallying her district to protest immigration enforcement. Over the last few days, we have seen demonstrations pop up across the state, and there are reports of children running from ICE agents at bus stops—stories designed to pull at heartstrings and override common sense. The left wants bodies in the street. They want chaos on camera. They want footage that makes enforcement look like oppression.

But here is the reality on the ground that the cameras don’t show you: far too many people aren’t truly that sympathetic. Not because they lack compassion, but because they live in the communities that have been impacted. They see the neighborhoods that have changed. They see the resources that have been stretched thin. They know what unchecked illegal immigration looks like up close, not from a cable news desk. And it is my sincere hope that the crowds that flooded Minneapolis—many of them paid protesters, bused in to manufacture outrage—do not descend on our streets here in New Jersey. Because the reality is that there are neighborhoods where illegal immigrants have clearly overwhelmed communities, and we need to let ICE do their job and remove those who are here illegally.

Now let me turn to the right, because they are not blameless in this either. The right is poorly managing this immigration crisis. They are walking directly into the hands of the paid protesters, unable to manage crowds, unable to de-escalate. And the consequences have been deadly. We have seen agents who, rather than withdrawing from a volatile situation and coming back another day, choose to force the issue. They lie. They escalate. And American citizens—aggressive or not—end up shot and killed. That is unacceptable. When the enforcement of immigration law results in the death of an American citizen, something has gone catastrophically wrong. You leave the scene. You come back another day. You do not turn a deportation operation into a battlefield. Every death is a failure of leadership, and the right needs to own that.

Both sides control the language, and both sides use it as a weapon. On the right, it’s “illegal immigrants.” On the left, it’s “undocumented workers.” On the right, Epstein’s victims were “runaway girls.” On the left, they are “sex trafficking survivors”—but only when the accused is a Republican. Language is not neutral. Language is moral framing, and both sides wield it like a blade.

And underneath all of it is the economy of outrage. Outrage drives clicks. Clicks drive revenue. Revenue drives editorial priorities. The stories that survive the news cycle are not the ones that matter most—they are the ones that generate the most engagement. Our anger is being monetized. Our grief is content. Our trauma is a commodity.

— • —

V. The Ones Outside the Frame

So where does that leave us? The ones who are not running cable news networks or sitting on congressional committees or flying on private jets?

Let me be clear about something: I love this country. America is the land of the free. There is opportunity here for anyone willing to pursue it through the proper channels. That has always been the promise, and it is a promise worth protecting. But the focus of this nation must be on its citizens first. Not because we lack compassion, but because a country that cannot care for its own people has no business extending itself to those who are here outside the law—people who, let’s be honest, are often wanted not for their well-being but for their votes and their ability to justify the expansion of government resources and political power.

The media wants you to wonder about the immigrant mother. I wonder about the American mother. The one whose child’s classroom has doubled in size because her local school district was never funded to absorb the influx. The one whose wait at the emergency room has tripled. The one who watched her son get passed over for a job because someone will do it for half the wage under the table. The one who buried a child killed by someone who should never have been in this country in the first place. These are not hypotheticals. These are American families whose reality has been reshaped by a system that prioritizes political optics over their daily lives.

And then there are our veterans. Men and women who served this nation, who came home broken and were told there was nothing left for them. They sleep on our streets. They die in the cold. In New York City this winter, eighteen homeless people froze to death—American citizens, exposed to the elements—while the city spends billions housing illegal immigrants in hotels. In Chicago, homeless Americans ride trains through the night to stay warm while the city provides shelter, food stamps, and healthcare to people who have no legal right to be here. A nation that houses those who broke its laws while its own veterans die on the sidewalk has lost its moral compass. That is not compassion. That is a set of misplaced priorities that should trouble every citizen regardless of party.

American workers, too, are feeling the weight. Industries like construction, landscaping, and food service have been undercut by the availability of cheap, illegal labor. Employers exploit it because they can. And the American worker—the one who needs a living wage, benefits, and safe conditions—cannot compete. The American family’s standard of living erodes quietly while politicians on both sides look the other way because cheap labor is profitable for their donors.

And we cannot forget the Americans who have lost their lives at the hands of individuals who were in this country illegally. Every one of those deaths was preventable. If the law had been enforced—if the border had been secured, if sanctuary cities had cooperated with ICE, if deportation orders had been carried out—those Americans would still be here. Their names deserve more than a news cycle.

It leaves us exactly where power wants us: outside the frame.

The psychological toll is real. The story shifts week to week, but the weight on American communities remains constant. The cynicism deepens. The trust in institutions erodes. And ordinary citizens whose lives have been quietly disrupted by illegal immigration are told to be patient, to be compassionate—while their own country treats them as an afterthought.

Here is the truth that neither the left nor the right wants to say out loud: the powerful do not absorb the consequences of their own decisions. The left-wing politicians who advocate for open borders don’t live in the neighborhoods that absorb the impact. Their children don’t attend the overcrowded schools. They don’t wait in the overwhelmed emergency rooms. And the right-wing officials who militarize enforcement don’t suffer when their agents kill an American citizen. The consequences always flow downhill. It is the ordinary people—the ones whose lives become headlines without ever becoming priorities—who carry the weight.

I believe in the rule of law. I believe that illegal entry demands legal consequence. I believe that TPS must be enforced as written—temporary means temporary. I believe that ICE should be allowed to do its job. I believe our veterans deserve shelter before anyone who broke the law to be here. I believe American workers deserve protection in their own labor market. I believe the families who have lost loved ones to preventable violence deserve more than a moment of silence. And I believe that enforcement must be conducted with discipline, with strategy, and without the loss of American life. These positions are not contradictory. They are not extreme. They are the common sense of a citizen who loves her country enough to expect it to put its own people first.

— • —

The Reckoning That Never Comes

I write this not as a journalist and not as a pundit. I write this as a Black woman in America who has watched these cycles repeat for decades. I write this as someone who has seen her community’s pain become a talking point and then a footnote and then nothing at all. I write this because the truth—dah truth—is that none of this will change until we stop accepting the narrative we’re given and start demanding the one we deserve.

The Epstein letters will generate outrage for a few more weeks. The immigration debate will surge again when it’s politically useful. Capitol Hill will hold more hearings that produce more sound bites and less justice. And the media—left and right—will continue to feed us the version of reality that keeps their lights on.

But we don’t have to consume it uncritically. We don’t have to let them tell us which story matters and when. We can hold all of it at once—the exploitation, the enforcement, the theatre, the manipulation—and refuse to let any of it slide.

Because the ones outside the frame? We’re the only ones keeping score.

A House Divided in Winter

“Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every house divided against itself shall not stand.” Matthew 12:25

False Unity, Moral Substitution, and the Illusion of Agreement

This week was brutal.

A deep, frigid cold settled over much of the northern United States, followed by a snowstorm that buried streets, sidewalks, and cars. Many of us woke up to frozen mornings, shoveling ourselves out just to begin the day. Wind burned our faces. Roads narrowed. Progress slowed. February arrived not gently, but harshly.

Groundhog Day came and went, and as tradition would have it, there was no promise of early relief. Only more winter. More cold. More endurance.

There was something revealing about those mornings. Neighborhoods were divided by snowbanks. Streets were reduced to narrow, passable lanes. People stood alone on street corners and at bus stops, bracing themselves against the wind. Order required effort, coordination, and shared rules. Without them, nothing moved.

It felt like living inside one of those bleak winter stories where the cold is more than weather. It is atmosphere. A kind of moral frost that exposes what is fragile, what is fractured, and what cannot hold together under pressure.

And as we shoveled our driveways and listened to the news, something became painfully clear: the cold was not only outside.

A House Divided

Jesus takes that question further and issues a warning: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation,

and every house divided against itself shall not stand.” — Matthew 12:25

What we are witnessing today is not healthy disagreement. It is something more dangerous: the illusion of unity. People stand side by side, speaking the same language of outrage, while remaining fundamentally divided on truth, authority, and allegiance.

A divided house can stand for a time, just as a roof heavy with snow can hold for a season, but eventually the weight becomes too much.

False Unity on Display

Recently, I listened to a conversation between Candace Owens and Bassem Youssef. On the surface, it appeared to be a thoughtful exchange between two people from very different backgrounds. One claims Catholic Christianity. The other is openly Muslim. But beneath the politeness was something more revealing.

At one point, Candace referenced “God,” and Bassem asked plainly, “Which God?” It was a moment that should have stopped the conversation cold. From a Christian perspective, a God not named as Jesus Christ is not the same God. That difference is not semantic. It is foundational.

Yet the moment passed quickly, unexamined.

Why? Because agreement had already been found elsewhere. That agreement was not rooted in shared theology, shared moral vision, or shared allegiance. It was rooted in shared hostility, particularly toward Israel, and in Candace’s case, toward Jews more broadly. Profound differences were glossed over because a common resentment provided the glue.

This is not walking together in truth. This is walking together in grievance.

Conflation and Convenience

There is a critical distinction between criticizing a government and condemning a people. Governments deserve scrutiny. Peoples do not deserve collective guilt.

When claims are made that Jews were responsible for the American slave trade, despite Israel not existing as a modern state during that period, and those claims are later defended as merely “criticism of the Israeli government,” the logic collapses. Language becomes a shield rather than a clarification.

If Israel did not exist as a nation between 1619, when the first enslaved Africans arrived on American soil, and 1865, when the Civil War ended slavery, then the accusation cannot be about Israeli policy. It is about Jewish people. That is not government critique. That is antisemitism dressed in political language.

Selective phrasing allows animosity to hide behind critique. Hatred conceals itself best when it borrows respectable vocabulary.

And when resentment becomes the common ground, people who are otherwise deeply divided can appear united, at least temporarily.

A Fractured Right

This tension reflects a broader fracture within the Republican Party itself, and the fault line runs deeper than policy disagreements. It is a moral and theological divide that the party has not yet been willing to confront openly.

On one side are figures like Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and for a time Charlie Kirk, who have affirmed Israel’s right to exist as a nation. They distinguish between the actions of a government and the identity of a people. They may not support every decision the Israeli government makes, but they hold that Jewish people have a right to nationhood, that Israel is an ally of the United States, and that the destruction of Israel is not a legitimate political position. Their argument is grounded in what they see as a Judeo-Christian moral inheritance that recognizes Israel’s place in both Scripture and Western civilization.

On the other side are voices like Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and increasingly Candace Owens, who have moved beyond policy criticism into something more corrosive. Fuentes has been open in his hostility toward Jewish people, barely disguising it behind irony and provocation. Carlson has platformed figures and narratives that blur the line between legitimate skepticism and conspiratorial thinking. Owens has publicly claimed Jewish involvement in the American slave trade and has framed her opposition to Israel in terms that repeatedly slide from government critique into ethnic resentment.

What unites this second group is not a shared theology or a shared political philosophy. It is a shared antagonism. They may disagree on nearly everything else, but their disdain for Israel, and in many cases for Jewish people themselves, functions as a binding agent. They use the distinction between “Zionism” and “Judaism” as rhetorical cover, but the pattern of their language tells a different story.

These two factions occupy the same party, appear on the same media platforms, and appeal to overlapping audiences. But they are not agreed. They are not walking together. They are marching under the same banner while heading in opposite moral directions. And Jesus already told us what happens to a house in that condition.

A Dostoyevskian America

As I recently began reading Dostoyevsky’s Demons, the parallels became impossible to ignore.

The narrator introduces Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, a celebrated intellectual who produces no substantial work, carries no moral responsibility, and fails even within his own household. He is a negligent father, more invested in his social reputation than in the formation of his own son. His influence is social, not substantive. His authority is assumed, not earned.

And it is his son, Pyotr Verkhovensky, who becomes the more dangerous figure. Pyotr returns to the town not as a thinker but as an organizer. He gathers a small circle of radicals, each holding different grievances and different ideologies, and binds them together not through shared conviction but through shared destruction. They do not agree on what to build. They agree on what to tear down. Pyotr manipulates their differences, glosses over their contradictions, and directs their collective energy toward chaos. The group believes it is unified. In truth, it is merely useful to one manipulator’s agenda.

This is the pattern Dostoyevsky warns about: people who are fundamentally divided being organized around destruction rather than truth. Their unity is not real. It is manufactured. And it serves not the group but the agenda of whoever holds the strings.

Dostoyevsky is not attacking education or progress. He is exposing intellectualism without moral grounding. Ideas divorced from consequence. Influence without accountability. A generation inheriting language but not the values that gave that language meaning.

That is what increasingly defines our public life. We invoke God without theology, justice without law, compassion without consequence, and America without allegiance. Like the characters in Demons, we repeat moral language while hollowing out its meaning. We borrow fragments of belief systems while rejecting the discipline and structure that give those beliefs coherence.

From Fiction to Evidence

Demons was a fictional account of what Dostoyevsky saw happening in his own society: a culture drifting away from its foundations, seduced by ideas that sounded liberating but carried no moral weight. He wrote it as a warning. We do not need novels to see that warning fulfilled. We have current history.

Consider Iran. For decades, an Islamic theocracy imposed its values on a population through force, surveillance, and fear. Women were beaten for showing their hair. Dissent was met with imprisonment or death. The moral framework of the state was not chosen by the people; it was enforced upon them. And now we are witnessing a cultural uprising. Iranian citizens, particularly women and young people, are pushing back against the very values that have oppressed them for a generation. In this case, the divide is righteous. A people are rejecting a system that suffocated them.

But what is happening in response to Gaza is the opposite. We are watching individuals in the West voluntarily align themselves with the same ideological framework that has oppressed Iran.

Christian Smalls, the labor organizer and activist who co-founded the Amazon Labor Union and led the first successful unionization of an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, has extended his activism into vocal solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Sabrina Salvati, the journalist and political commentator known as Sabby Sabs, has used her Boston-based podcast to frame the conflict in ways that go well beyond humanitarian concern and into ideological alignment. College students occupy campus buildings. Professors sign open letters. Activists chant slogans rooted in a worldview they have never lived under and do not fully understand.

This is the profound contradiction. In Iran, people are dying to escape the consequences of a belief system. In America, people are marching to embrace it, without recognizing the historical evidence of what that system produces when it governs. The oppression of women, the persecution of religious minorities, the suppression of free expression: none of this is hidden. It is documented, visible, and ongoing.

And yet the alignment continues. Youth and academics adopt the language of liberation while defending structures that have historically denied it. This is not solidarity. It is incoherence. And it is precisely the kind of moral confusion Dostoyevsky depicted in fiction, now playing out in real time. Pyotr’s circle believed they were revolutionaries. They were, in fact, instruments of someone else’s chaos. The same pattern repeats when Americans adopt causes whose full consequences they have never been asked to live with.

This too creates division. Not the productive kind that comes from honest disagreement, but the corrosive kind that comes from abandoning one’s own foundational values in favor of borrowed grievances. It is, in every sense, hypocritical. And hypocrisy, left unchecked, fractures a house from within.

Moral Substitution and Immigration Rhetoric

This pattern of borrowed moral authority surfaced again this week when New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani addressed a crowd and framed illegal immigration through the story of Muhammad’s migration to Medina, urging Americans to model their response after it.

What was striking was not the religious reference itself, but the assumption beneath it: that Islamic historical narrative should serve as moral authority over American law.

The United States is not built on Islamic theology. Its legal and moral framework emerged from Christian assumptions about human dignity, ordered liberty, and national sovereignty. To invoke a religious narrative foreign to that framework, while condemning American institutions like ICE for enforcing American law, is not moral persuasion. It is moral substitution.

The migration of Muhammad was not a neutral act of refuge. It marked the beginning of a political and religious order enforced through power. To present it as a simple parable of compassion, stripped of its historical and theological context, is the very kind of selective storytelling that hollowed-out ideologies rely on.

This is not an argument about the worth of individual immigrants. It is a question of authority and allegiance. A nation cannot be governed by moral frameworks it did not consent to, nor can it survive if its own foundations are treated as illegitimate.

America and Allegiance

At its core, America is not merely land. It is a constitutional order. Citizenship is not just presence; it is allegiance.

Yet we are increasingly divided over what America even is. Some still affirm it as a flawed but legitimate republic grounded in law, liberty, and responsibility. Others describe it as inherently illegitimate, stolen land, oppressive by design, unworthy of loyalty, while simultaneously demanding the benefits of belonging. Still others imagine America as an ethnic possession, a nation that was and should remain exclusively white.

What all three of these visions share, despite their differences, is a troubling tendency to erase American Blacks (ADOS) from the story.

American Blacks (ADOS) have been present on this soil since 1619, when the first enslaved Africans were brought to the Virginia colony. That is before the Mayflower. Before the Constitution. Before the Republic itself had a name. For nearly two and a half centuries, Black labor built the infrastructure, agriculture, and economy that made this nation possible. Black soldiers fought in every American war. Black thinkers shaped its moral conscience. Black families endured what no other group in this nation’s history has been asked to endure, and they did so not as guests or outsiders, but as Americans in the fullest and most costly sense of the word.

And yet, in conversation after conversation, commentary after commentary, American Blacks (ADOS) are written out. The progressive vision speaks of “immigrant contributions” as though the nation was built by those who chose to come, ignoring those who were brought here in chains and whose labor preceded nearly every wave of voluntary immigration. The white nationalist vision claims America as its own creation, as though the fields plowed themselves and the railroads laid their own tracks. Even mainstream conservative voices, like Michael Knowles, have spoken of American identity in terms that center whiteness so thoroughly that the American Black experience becomes invisible.

The Irish arrived in the 1850s. Germans, Italians, and Eastern Europeans followed in successive waves. Each group contributed to the American story. But none of them arrived to find an empty land. They arrived to find a nation already built in significant part by the hands of people who had been here for over two hundred years and had never been given the liberty to leave.

To exclude American Blacks (ADOS) from the founding narrative of this country is not merely an oversight. It is a distortion. And a nation that cannot tell its own story honestly cannot walk together in truth.

Agreement Matters

Amos was right. Jesus was right. Dostoyevsky saw it coming.

A society can temporarily unite around shared outrage. But outrage is not a foundation. Hatred is not agreement. And unity built on resentment cannot bear weight forever.

If we are no longer walking together, the question is not simply who disagrees with us, but what we have agreed to replace truth with.

Somewhere a podcast host glosses over the name of Jesus to keep a conversation comfortable. Somewhere a politician invokes a prophet foreign to this nation’s moral framework to shame its laws. Somewhere a student chants for liberation under a banner whose history would deny her the right to speak at all. And somewhere a woman in Tehran removes her hijab knowing it may cost her everything.

A house divided may endure a winter. But it will not survive the thaw.

This Is Not Selma

“The disfranchisement of the Negro is unjust to him, harmful to the white man, and a danger to the State. No man can be permanently wronged without the wrong reacting in some way upon himself.” — Booker T. Washington, circa 1900

The Exploitation of Black American History for a Different Fight

I am sick and tired of the lies being spread by many Democrats today, including American Blacks who claim to speak for our community but refuse to tell the honest truth. Lately, I have been reading Before the Mayflower, and the difference between that small book, which captures American Black history succinctly, and The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones is immediately noticeable. Once you understand our history, the distortion becomes clear.

The distortion is nuanced. It is embedded in how the story is told. The 1619 Project presents history from a perspective that implies the racists of the Jim Crow South are somehow the same lineage or moral legacy as the Republicans of today. That implication is false. The historical record is clear: the violent suppression of Black Americans during Reconstruction and Jim Crow was carried out under a one-party Democratic system that controlled law enforcement, courts, and local government throughout the South. Hannah-Jones conflates history and omits this critical political context, and this approach is now used across modern media to twist the past into a narrative that does not align with the documented record.

The Minnesota Situation

This is why I decided to write this week's blog, prompted in part by the Don Lemon and Georgia Fort situation, which was quickly framed as a civil rights controversy. To me, it felt less like a genuine civil rights issue and more like a carefully constructed distraction from what is actually happening on the ground in Minnesota.

The protests themselves are not organic, and the viral clips circulating online are designed to be short, fast, and emotionally charged—just enough to rile people up around a distorted or incomplete story. This is exploitation in its purest form. The goal is not understanding, truth, or resolution, but agitation. Manufactured outrage keeps people distracted from the real issues affecting our communities.

Within a single week, the public was asked to absorb several emotionally charged events. Don Lemon was arrested after entering a church with protesters. Georgia Fort, an independent Minnesota journalist, was arrested in connection with the same incident. Around the same time, Representative Ilhan Omar claimed she was sprayed with apple cider vinegar during a public encounter. I watched the footage and reviewed her remarks without relying on outside commentary. Given the pattern of emotionally charged incidents emerging from Minnesota in rapid succession—each one perfectly calibrated to generate outrage against Republicans and immigration enforcement—skepticism is warranted. I am not claiming proof. I am noting a pattern that demands scrutiny rather than reflexive acceptance.

At the same time, a Native Land Podcast town hall was held in Minnesota, where speakers framed current immigration enforcement as morally comparable to the Civil Rights era.

That comparison is what I find most disturbing.

The Justice You Won't Hear About

We are programmed to hear stories of injustice in our communities. That is what drives engagement. That is what generates outrage. But last week, something else happened that received almost no attention: Sean Grayson, the former Illinois sheriff's deputy who shot and killed Sonya Massey in her home, was sentenced to 20 years in prison—the maximum sentence allowed under Illinois law.

When Sonya Massey was killed in July 2024, the story stoked the flames of racism and police brutality. She was a 36-year-old Black woman who called 911 to report a prowler. A white deputy shot her in the face in her own kitchen. The body camera footage was harrowing. Protests erupted. The case became national news.

And then? The system worked.

Grayson was fired, arrested, and charged. A jury convicted him of second-degree murder. A judge gave him the maximum sentence. The sheriff who hired him was forced to retire. Sangamon County agreed to implement more de-escalation training. Illinois changed its law to require fuller background checks on law enforcement candidates. And Sonya Massey's family—including her two teenage children—received a $10 million settlement, negotiated by civil rights attorney Ben Crump.

Justice was served.

But you don't hear much about that, do you? Because justice doesn't fit the narrative. The media wants to focus on injustice—on the outrage, the wound, the grievance. When the system actually holds a killer accountable, that story fades. It doesn't generate clicks. It doesn't keep people angry.

This is the difference between 1964 and today. In 1964, the men who murdered James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner walked free for years. The state of Mississippi refused to prosecute. The system protected the killers. That was Jim Crow.

Today, a white deputy who killed a Black woman in her own home received the maximum sentence. Her children will receive restitution. Her name changed Illinois law. That is not Jim Crow. That is accountability. And pretending otherwise insults the people who actually lived—and died—under a system that offered no justice at all.

The False Equivalence

Black American history, particularly the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras, is being used to make modern immigration enforcement feel morally equivalent to the violent suppression of Black Americans. The implication is that what happened to us is now happening to them. That comparison is emotionally powerful, but it is historically false.

The most glaring example is the repeated invocation of the 1964 murders in Mississippi, when James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were killed for helping Black American citizens register to vote. Those men were targeted because they were assisting citizens who were being denied a constitutional right by a one-party Democratic system.

What is happening in Minnesota does not align with that history. The killing of Alex Pretti, while tragic and rightly under investigation, occurred during a federal immigration enforcement operation. It was not a voter registration drive. Pretti was not targeted for advancing the civil rights of American citizens. These are fundamentally different legal and historical contexts, and collapsing them into a single narrative distorts both.

Civil rights were fought to secure citizenship and constitutional protection for Black Americans who were denied both by law. Using that history to guilt Americans into accepting disorder, selective enforcement narratives, or the erosion of the distinction between citizens and non-citizens does not advance justice. It distorts it.

The Church Incident and Due Process

Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were charged with conspiracy against rights of religious freedom and attempting to injure while exercising religious freedom. These are not charges against journalism. These are charges alleging that the civil rights of American citizens—the worshippers at Cities Church—were violated.

The protesters entered Cities Church in St. Paul to confront a man believed to be employed by ICE. That man is an American citizen, legally employed by the federal government, and legally entitled to worship without being confronted or harassed during a religious service. Whatever one thinks of ICE as an institution, entering a church to confront a private citizen during worship raises serious questions about the rights of worshippers and the limits of protest.

Yes, two judges initially rejected charges against Lemon, citing insufficient evidence of criminal behavior. But that does not establish innocence—it means the threshold was not met at that preliminary stage. What concerns me is what the footage shows: Lemon's presence with protesters before they entered the church, his coordination with them, the role he played in the lead-up to the disruption. Intent matters. The question is not whether Lemon held a camera, but whether he was a journalist documenting an event or a participant who used the journalist label as cover.

That is a question for the courts to decide. Lemon deserves due process, and he should have his day in court so that the facts can be examined and judged accordingly. But the rush to frame this as an attack on Black journalism—as though he was charged simply for being Black—obscures the actual legal question at issue.

Many Black journalists do not engage in this behavior. Black reporters across mainstream and independent media outlets manage to cover immigration and protest movements without entering churches or following protesters into worship services. Lemon and Fort's choices were their own, and they do not represent journalism as a whole or Black journalism specifically.

There is also an uncomfortable irony here. Historically, Black churches were surveilled, disrupted, and attacked by white mobs—often under Democratic control—seeking to prevent Black Americans from worshiping freely. In this case, protesters entered a predominantly white church to confront a worshipper over his employment. While the scale and violence are not comparable, the underlying logic is troubling: political intimidation was brought into a religious space, and the racial framing was later reversed to obscure that reality.

The Historical Lie

Left-leaning commentators increasingly frame these events as a struggle between Democrats and Republicans, or between whites and Blacks. That framing does not hold up under historical scrutiny. There are white Democrats and Black Americans who oppose current immigration policies. To maintain the narrative, the language expands to "Black and brown," folding immigrants into the Black American story despite vastly different histories, legal statuses, and relationships to the state.

This is not fundamentally about race. It is not fundamentally about party. It is about law.

Either we are a nation governed by laws, including borders, or we are not. To make federal enforcement appear inherently immoral, a familiar image must be resurrected. The violent white oppressor of Jim Crow memory carries emotional weight in Black communities, and that is precisely why it is invoked. Yet the historical oppressors people are being asked to imagine were not Republicans. They were Democrats operating within a one-party Southern system. By reviving that image and attaching it to modern immigration enforcement, commentators create a villain that does not exist in this context.

Civil Rights Funding vs. Modern Protest Funding

Some will point out that the Civil Rights Movement also had significant organizational funding and coordination. That is true. The NAACP received substantial donations. The Urban League was well-funded. CORE operated with donor support. Corporations like IBM, Coca-Cola, Ford, and General Motors contributed. Government funding supported the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.

But the existence of funding is not what distinguishes legitimate movements from manufactured ones. What matters is what the money was used for, who it served, and the legal context in which it operated.

Civil Rights–era funding supported the enforcement of existing constitutional rights. Money paid for court cases, attorneys, bail for unjust arrests, voter registration infrastructure, and protection against unconstitutional laws. The goal was access to the law, not pressure against it. These organizations supported American citizens who were denied the vote, denied equal protection, and denied access to public institutions. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 were responses to documented constitutional violations by state governments. That is why federal funding was justified—the federal government was enforcing its own Constitution against rogue states.

Most importantly, the Civil Rights Movement made specific, finite demands: end segregation, secure the vote, enforce equal protection. Once achieved, protests subsided because the legal objective was met. There was no demand to erase borders, suspend law enforcement, or collapse the distinction between citizen and non-citizen.

Modern protest funding operates under a fundamentally different logic. It often sustains continuous protest cycles, media amplification, legal defense for civil disobedience, and disruption as a permanent strategy. There is frequently no clear endpoint, because outrage itself becomes the product. Unlike the Civil Rights era, modern protest movements often treat law enforcement itself as illegitimate, blur the distinction between enforcement and abuse, and frame citizenship boundaries as immoral. This is a reversal of the Civil Rights framework, which demanded that the law finally apply to Black Americans.

Civil Rights funding fought for Black Americans inside the polity. Modern protest funding often advances causes involving non-citizens, transnational political goals, and ideological commitments unrelated to constitutional rights. That is not an extension of Civil Rights. It is a different project entirely.

Those perfectly crafted signs do not appear out of basements, bedrooms, or garages of the oppressed. They are printed, laminated, and carefully mounted on wooden sticks. That level of preparation suggests coordination. But coordination alone is not the issue—the Civil Rights Movement was coordinated too. The issue is what the coordination serves: finite goals for American citizens, or sustained agitation with no clear endpoint that conflates citizen and non-citizen interests.

This Is Not Selma

American Black media is feeding our community a lie: that illegal immigration enforcement is the same as Jim Crow oppression, that the Republicans of today are the Democrats of 1964, and that journalists who coordinate with protesters to disrupt church services are victims rather than participants who deserve their day in court.

The 1619 Project began this work of historical distortion by conflating timelines and omitting political context. Now that same approach is being used to exploit the Black American struggle for a completely different fight—one involving non-citizens whose relationship to the American legal system is fundamentally different from that of Black Americans who were born here, whose ancestors built this country, and who were denied rights they were owed under the Constitution.

Civil Rights–era funding enforced constitutional rights for American citizens who were denied them by law. Modern protest funding often supports sustained political agitation that challenges the legitimacy of law itself and blurs the distinction between citizens and non-citizens. Treating these two as morally or historically equivalent is not just inaccurate. It is an insult to the men and women who bled for our freedom.

When Sean Grayson received the maximum sentence for killing Sonya Massey, the silence from the same media that stoked outrage over her death was deafening. Because justice doesn't fit the narrative. Grievance does.

That is why this moment deserves scrutiny rather than slogans.

© 2026 Jacqueline Session Ausby. All rights reserved. This post and all original content published under DahTruth are the intellectual property of Jacqueline Session Ausby. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author.

The Baby We Keep Being Asked to Surrender

“Citizenship is not conferred by birth alone, but by fidelity to the principles of freedom and justice.” Frederick Douglass

There is a story in the Bible about Solomon, the son of David, who became king of Israel after David’s death. He was the son of Bathsheba. Two women once brought a baby before Solomon, each claiming to be the mother. One woman said the other had rolled over her child during the night, killed it, and secretly took the living baby. Solomon could not know the truth, so he proposed a test. “Let’s cut the baby in half.”

The true mother immediately cried out, “No. Give her the baby. Let her have it.”

Solomon knew then who the real mother was, because she was willing to sacrifice her own love in order to save the child.

I reference this story because it mirrors something Frederick Douglass experienced. After the Dred Scott decision, when the Supreme Court ruled that African Americans, descendants of enslaved Africans, could never be citizens, Douglass became disheartened. Black Americans had built the nation, fought in its wars, and sacrificed for it, yet were told they did not belong. He even considered leaving the United States, exploring places like Haiti as a potential homeland. In a sense, he was willing to give up the baby, to give up America, so that the people might survive.

Then came the firing on Fort Sumter and the beginning of the Civil War. At that moment, Douglass changed course. African Americans would fight for the nation they had built. They would defend it. They would claim it. They would not abandon the land their ancestors had watered with sweat, blood, and tears.

“When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.”

— Proverbs 29:2 KJV

That choice, to stay, to fight, to build, defines our history.

When we think about the history of African Americans, the sacrifices are undeniable. We have given this nation blood, sweat, and tears. We have been enslaved, raped, lynched, murdered, incarcerated, discriminated against, and systematically excluded, yet we still love this land. We claim it as our own even when others insist we do not belong. Our roots are here. We have nowhere else to go.

And yet today, some try to tell us our story is the same as the immigrant story. It is not.

Frederick Douglass was willing to give up the baby rather than destroy what belonged to others. Today, what we see is different. Illegal immigrants, and in some cases legal immigrants, arrive with a philosophy that openly despises the West, refuses to assimilate, and disparages America’s institutions. They do not love this nation, yet we are constantly told to center their plight as if it mirrors ours.

Illegal immigrants step over those waiting in line for legal citizenship, enter communities already struggling, and draw heavily from housing, education, and healthcare, resources built through generations of Black labor and sacrifice. Some members of Congress even claim that immigrants built this nation, effectively erasing the foundational role of African American slaves.

The same pattern appears in the workforce. Immigrants are favored for certain jobs while Black men are incarcerated, overlooked, or displaced. In exchange for political power and votes, Black Americans are pushed aside, all while politicians demand the Black vote and act as if they are doing us a favor.

What is being presented as solidarity is, in reality, the erasure of Black Americans from their own history and struggle.

Now today, I am in Minnesota again. Another man, a white man, lost his life during a confrontation with ICE agents. From the videos available, it does not appear that he was reaching for a weapon. His hands were raised, as if to signal that he was not interested in violence. However, it appears he may have pushed one of the officers during the confrontation. That action escalated the situation, and tragically, he lost his life.

I feel genuine sorrow for this man. This did not have to happen.

I do not believe Border Patrol or ICE agents are without fault, and I am not convinced their response was appropriate. At the very least, these officers should be reprimanded. But I place much of the blame on those who continually stoke these flames, those who encourage confrontation without responsibility.

Protesters are increasingly putting themselves in volatile situations where they jeopardize their own lives. The state bears responsibility here as well. There should have been clear boundaries to ensure protesters did not impede officers or approach them in ways that invite escalation. Instead, disorder was allowed to grow unchecked.

Then there are the scams.

A Black family claimed they were returning from a basketball game with their children when ICE agents allegedly deployed gas beneath their car, causing the vehicle to fill with gas and nearly killing their infant child. The mother appeared on CNN and other platforms, describing how she promised her child that she would breathe for him to save his life. The family received nearly two hundred thousand dollars through GoFundMe.

It later emerged that this story was not true.

The parents were not coming from a basketball game. They were protesters who had taken their children to a protest rally. When things escalated and federal agents deployed gas, their vehicle happened to be in the path of that deployment. Videos later surfaced showing both parents actively participating in the protest. They had lied about their circumstances and used the situation to gain media attention and financial support.

Why would parents bring their children into a volatile protest environment? Why would they use their own children to draw sympathy and attention? It is sickening how people exploit situations for notoriety and money, even at the expense of their own children’s safety.

Another difference between today’s protesters and those of the civil rights era is that many of today’s protesters are paid. During the civil rights movement, protesters were not paid, and the causes were fundamentally different. We were defending the rights of American citizens who were being mistreated, oppressed, marginalized, and dehumanized.

Many African Americans were trying to escape the United States, fleeing slavery, violence, and Jim Crow, going to places like Canada. Immigrants today are coming here voluntarily. They want to be here. They want access to the system.

By the 1950s, under Jim Crow, Black Americans were trying to survive in a country filled with people angry about losing the Civil War and resentful of Black progress. On every side, we defended ourselves against violence and attacks. Many of those attacks came from white Democrats. Every major law passed in favor of African Americans was backed by Republicans, not Democrats.

Today, protesters aligned with Democrat policies attack ICE agents and federal officers while believing they are above the law. This is largely white on white protest activity. Black participation is minimal, with few exceptions. The contrast is stark. Black protesters face swift consequences, while some white protesters openly act out with little accountability, even inside churches, spreading hateful messages.

Another actor in all of this is the media. They sit back waiting for chaos, hungry for spectacle. Networks benefit from unrest because it produces content. Without chaos, what would they cover? Without the visceral hatred of Donald Trump, what would dominate their headlines? Disorder keeps the cameras rolling.

This week, I took my grandchildren to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. I wanted them to see where we started, from slavery to the Civil War, from secret churches to the Civil Rights Movement, from surviving drugs and violence meant to destroy our communities. I wanted them to understand that we are a strong, proud people who do not live off anyone. We work. We build. We survive. We thrive. We are Americans.

I wanted them to see how much we have given this nation and how our story is now being hidden, overtaken, and misused by people who do not love this country, do not know our history, and cannot speak for us. Resources flow to immigrant communities while our own struggle. Politicians posture while African American owned businesses receive little support. We see protests for illegal immigrants, even for people who have committed serious crimes, while the act of crossing the border illegally is reframed as not being criminal at all.

This framing distorts the truth and obscures history. American Blacks built this nation through sacrifice that cannot be equated or reassigned, and it is our responsibility to remember that legacy, preserve it, and teach it to the next generation.

© 2026 Jacqueline Session Ausby. All rights reserved. This post and all original content published under DahTruth are the intellectual property of Jacqueline Session Ausby. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author.

1984 in Real Time

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” 1984. George Orwell

A Week of Distortions

“In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”

— Judges 21:25 (KJV)

This is about a week of distortions.

I was glancing back at The 1619 Project and rereading the editor’s note at the very beginning of the book in which it discussed the use of the term enslaved as opposed to slave. It argued that the term slave strips individuals of humanity and enslaved does not. So they preferred to reference individuals as “enslaved persons.” It felt to me like they were taking a word and redefining its meaning to fit a cultural narrative.

They went further and stated they did not use terms like plantation or master because those terms are often used euphemistically when conveying certain conditions of slavery. It was distortion, a small twisting of words to fit narratives in ways that convict some and ease the pain of others according to their own ideas and beliefs.

It reminded me of 1984, the way Winston was instructed to make small changes to language to support new narratives so people could forget. In 1984, the changing of words, language, and meaning were mechanical tools used to keep culture in check and align thought with the masses. It was distortion.

Last week, a case went before the Supreme Court of the United States, Little v. Hecox, a case that three teenage girls brought forward after arguing in lower courts that their Title IX rights were violated when the state allowed a boy to participate on the women’s track and field team. This case had gone before lower courts, had been dismissed, and was now before the Supreme Court.

I was initially surprised that the Supreme Court was taking on this case, as I believed the idea that a boy can become a woman or a woman can become a man, or this idea of “trans,” is a lie. But then I understood that this was about the use of a term. The term being gender identity, as if this word trumps biological sex. As if a person could decide they are no longer male or female and consider themselves the opposite sex based on their own gender identity and then argue they are being discriminated against under a law that never considered identity.

What also fascinated me was how the entire court fed into this language and referred to the individual as “she” instead of “he.” That is giving credibility to a lie. This is what Satan did in the garden with Adam and Eve by introducing doubt into the mind. The lie does not begin as force. It begins as suggestion. It begins with language.

This is exactly what 1984 warned about. Language is changed first. Meaning follows. Memory erodes.

Another distortion did not happen last week but was in the news nonetheless. That was the case of Renee Good, the woman who was shot and killed by an U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.

This is where the law has to play out not totally on facts but on motive.

Renee Good was in her car protesting, blocking traffic, and impeding ICE agents from doing their job. This was a situation that did not have to go to the extreme of Renee Good being shot. Clearly from the video, Renee Good and her wife were impeding ICE’s progress and taunting the officer.

When the officer who was recording the event walked by Renee Good, she said, “I am not mad at you.” Others argue she was being respectful. But showing respect and being respectful are not the same. Her wife, who was also recording, was calling the ICE agent names and antagonizing him, while the officer had not said a single word.

Then two other ICE agents approached Renee’s car, which was parked perpendicular in the road blocking traffic, and they told her to get the “fuck” out of the car. At that point, Renee’s wife attempted to open the door. The officer who was still recording had made his way around to the front of the vehicle.

As the wife grabbed the door attempting to get into the car, Renee backed up. The wife then screamed, “Drive.” At that point, Renee moved forward and struck the officer. We then hear gunshots and a crash as Renee Good’s car hit another vehicle head on.

This was one of the most horrific situations I have ever witnessed.

I do not believe for one second that Renee Good intended to hit the officer. But it does not change the fact that she intended to flee the scene and in that moment rushed and followed her wife’s command. She drove forward and struck the officer. In those seconds, he responded with gunfire. I do not believe he intended to kill her. He believed he was about to be hit by a vehicle and responded accordingly.

This is where distortion enters.

Many Democrats want to believe the officer was violent, aggressive, irrational, and angry and that he shot Renee Good in cold blood. But the video shows a different sequence of events. The aggressive behavior, sarcasm, taunting, and escalation came from Renee Good and her wife. Motive was rewritten after the fact to fit an approved story.

This is where 1984 becomes relevant again.

In 1984, Orwell describes the Two Minutes Hate, a daily ritual where citizens are allowed and expected to act in the most emotional, irrational, and vicious ways. People scream, curse, threaten violence, and lose control. Their hatred is directed toward a designated enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein. The rage is not spontaneous. It is sanctioned. It is encouraged. Afterward, that rage becomes evidence that the Party’s narrative is true.

This is what we see in these protests. ICE agents become the Emmanuel Goldstein figure. Protestors are allowed to act aggressively, viciously, and irrationally toward them. The hatred is projected onto ICE as the embodiment of cruelty and injustice. Then when something tragic happens, the interpretation of events is reshaped to align with the approved narrative. The agent becomes the irrational one. The agent becomes the aggressor. The agent becomes the villain.

Facts come second. Alignment comes first.

This distortion spilled into another narrative about rewriting history, attempted by Pramila Jayapal. Last week she claimed America was built by immigrants and listed India, Mexico, Venezuela, and Africa, while leaving out Descendants of Slaves and Europeans.

Descendants of Slaves were not immigrants. We did not come here by choice. We were brought here as slaves through force and ownership. Our labor built this country. We are not what she is and we do not share the same history.

At the same time, Matt Walsh responded by claiming America was built by Europeans. He also introduced a series titled American History, where he is going to make the case that Americans have been lied to. Part of his argument is to remind people that slavery was not first practiced in America, as if we do not already know and understand that slavery has existed in nearly every society nearly since the beginning of time. And that the institution was eliminated in Europe first and later followed by America.

He is also going to make sure we understand that Europeans were not going to the Ivory Coast kidnapping Africans, but that Africans were sold by their own brothers and sisters. We have acknowledged that fact. We know that history. We also know that Arab slavery was far worse than American slavery, where Black men were emasculated and castrated, particularly those who did not convert to Islam. None of this history is new to us, nor does it absolve what was done in America.

More important Walsh wants to make it clear that European whites weren’t the only enslavers. As if not a single Black person has ever read Edward P. Jones. We know there were Black slave owners, but the reality is they were few and far between. Many Black slave owners purchased family members so they would not be sold into slavery. Large Black plantation owners were anomalies, not the norm, and most lost everything after the Civil War.

It does not deny that the system itself was built and maintained by Europeans. Nor does it erase the 100 years of Jim Crow. The laws, the economy, and the ownership of land and bodies were European controlled.

What Jayapal is doing is lying. What Walsh is doing is whitewashing history to remove a stain of guilt that hovers over white America. In doing so, he wants to argue that our plight was not that bad. Or could have been much worse.

Distort the truth. Rewrite history. That is another warning in 1984. If you can erase memory, tell another story, and repeat it long enough, people will forget what actually happened.

By the end of last week, I was worried. Convinced that America is traveling down paths that are leading to its destruction. In 1984, Orwell warned that the greatest danger to a society is not an external enemy but the slow corruption of truth from within. People blame global events for all our troubles without recognizing the danger that comes from inside our own institutions, our language, and our willingness to accept distortion. We lie about life, sex, love, history, justice, and truth, then pretend we are the arbiters of reality. In truth, many of us are more like the citizens Orwell described, programmed to repeat approved narratives from the left or the right.

Yet there are still some who can see. Those who recognize distortion for what it is and refuse to surrender memory. We are the watchers in the room. We understand both perspectives, but we are not captive to either. We stand on history, memory, and the Word of God, and we name the lie when we see it. That is how alignment remains balanced. That is how truth survives.

That is justice, not distortion.