For State Scoreboard August, I’ve pulled together a 50‑state dataset from public sources that tries to answer that question with numbers, not vibes. Today is Day 1, and we’re starting with the education map, a national scoreboard of which states are investing in learning, and which ones are falling behind.

How this education scoreboard works

The education ranking I’m using is based on WalletHub’s 2026 “Most & Least Educated States” study, which in turn relies heavily on Census American Community Survey data.

WalletHub groups its metrics into two big buckets:

• Educational attainment – the share of adults with high school, college, and advanced degrees.

• Quality of education/attainment gap – school performance measures like test scores, graduation rates, and AP/NAEP results, plus some policy indicators.

They weight those into a 0–100 score and rank all 50 states, with rank 1 = most educated, rank 50 = least educated. I’ve taken those ranks, cleaned them up to a 50‑state list, and then lined them up with each state’s current political control and other system outcomes for this series.

Is this perfect? No. Any composite index involves judgment calls about which metrics matter more. But it’s directional and transparent: you can follow each number back to a public source and see how your state stacks up.

The Top 10 most educated states

When you sort the national education rankings, a very particular pattern pops out. The Top 10 most educated states are small to mid‑sized, higher‑income states that have spent a long time building out their education systems.

Here’s the Top 10:

In the map graphic I’m using for this series, these states are highlighted by their current state‑government trifecta color: blue where Democrats hold the governorship and both chambers, red where Republicans do, and purple/gray for divided government.

This isn’t a “best state overall” list; it’s specifically about education. But it does tell you something important: if you grew up or are raising kids in one of these states, your education system is, statistically, giving you more tools to work with than many other places.

The Bottom 10 least educated states

Now for the harder part of the map.

At the bottom of the ranking, WalletHub finds a cluster of states with lower educational attainment and weaker school performance. In their 2026 list, the Bottom 10 (from 41–50) include a familiar group from the Deep South and Appalachia.

Here’s that Bottom 10 in the same format:

On the political map, many of these are states with long‑running one‑party control at the state level, often Republican trifectas that have been in place for most of the last two decades. A few are technically under divided government right now, but even those have years of single‑party legislative control behind them.

For people living there, this isn’t an abstract statistic. Lower education levels are tied to:

• lower earning power and wealth over a lifetime

• worse health outcomes

• lower civic participation and weaker ability to navigate complex systems

When leaders in these states talk about “excellent schools” while the state sits in the mid‑40s or lower nationally, that gap between rhetoric and reality is part of the story State Scoreboard August is meant to surface.

Why start with education?

I’m starting this series with education for a reason.

Education outcomes sit underneath almost everything else we’re going to talk about this month: the economy, healthcare, even happiness. States with higher education levels often also rank higher on economic strength and health‑system performance, not because education magically fixes everything, but because it builds the workforce and tax base that make better systems possible.

Education is also one of the easiest places for politicians to spin. A few test‑score gains, a shiny new building, or a culture‑war headline about curriculum can distract from long‑term underinvestment. A national scoreboard forces us to zoom out and ask: compared to 49 other states, are we actually doing well? Or just doing better than we used to?

Where we’re going next

For Day 2 of State Scoreboard August, I’m going to stack this education map next to the economy: which states manage to be strong on both education and economic performance, and which ones are stuck in a pattern of low education and weak economies at the same time.

Later in the month, we’ll line these education rankings up with:

• 20 years of party control in each state, who has actually been in charge of these systems.

• Healthcare, happiness, and even perceived “friendliness.”

• The federal balance of payments, who pays more into Washington than they get back, and who depends heavily on federal money.

The goal isn’t to dunk on particular voters or communities. It’s to tell the truth about systems and power, so you can walk into the midterms with a clearer picture of how your state is really doing.

Your turn: where does your state land?

If you’re comfortable sharing, drop your state in the comments.

All month, I’ll be using this data to do short, state‑specific breakdowns: “Here’s where your state sits on education, economy, healthcare, and here’s who has held power over those systems for most of the last 20 years.”

Ranked, not ranted. Every number has a link. And in State Scoreboard August, the map belongs to all of us, not just the people in charge of it.

The country did not suddenly wake up one morning and invent state cruelty, exclusion, racial hierarchy, or the policing of bodies and belonging. Those things have been threaded through American history for a long time; in slavery, in Jim Crow, in Japanese American incarceration, and in the many ways this country has always decided that some people deserve full freedom while others get surveillance, punishment, or conditional humanity.

What feels different now is not that these instincts are new. What feels different is how openly they are being gathered together, normalized, and defended from the top. The current authoritarian turn is less like a foreign ideology landing on American soil and more like old American habits finding each other, coordinating, and finally saying the quiet part out loud.

That is why it is too simple to talk about this moment like fascism just arrived here. America has always had its own homegrown traditions of domination dressed up as order, patriotism, morality, and “protecting the country.” The language changes. The targets shift. The branding gets updated. But the underlying logic is painfully familiar: decide who belongs, decide who threatens the nation, and then build power around controlling both groups.

Slavery was not just economic exploitation. It was a total system of human domination backed by law, theology, violence, and the state. Jim Crow was not just discrimination; it was an enforced social order designed to keep white supremacy intact through law, terror, segregation, and the denial of equal citizenship. Japanese American incarceration was not an unfortunate side note to World War II. It was the federal government removing more than 110,000 people, most of them citizens, from their homes because race and fear had already made that abuse politically possible.

None of that means the United States was identical to Nazi Germany, and forcing a one-to-one comparison actually weakens the point. The point is that authoritarian politics do not always enter a country from the outside wearing a dramatic uniform. Sometimes they grow out of the systems that country already built, the prejudices it already normalized, and the hierarchies it already taught people to defend.

And that brings us to Christian nationalism, because this is one of the clearest accelerants in the current moment. Christian nationalism is not the same thing as Christianity. It is a political ideology that says the United States is fundamentally a Christian nation, that the government should reflect and defend a particular brand of Christianity, and that being a “real American” is tied up with that identity. That is not a side argument. It is central to how the present authoritarian project tries to make itself sound righteous instead of coercive.

Christian nationalism gives authoritarianism a moral costume. It tells people that hierarchy is holy, that exclusion is faithfulness, that domination is order, and that taking power is really just “restoring” the country to its rightful identity. It turns pluralism into a threat, equality into rebellion, and dissent into a kind of moral contamination.

That is also why the Christian nationalist story about America matters so much. If people can be convinced that the country was founded as a Christian nation in some official, legal sense, then efforts to privilege one religion in public life can be sold as restoration instead of radical change. But the constitutional structure does not support that myth: there is no religious test for office, no established national church, and strong protections against government establishment of religion. The myth persists because it is politically useful, not because it is historically solid.

Once that myth is accepted, the rest gets easier. If America “belongs” to a particular kind of Christian, then immigrants become outsiders to be feared, religious minorities become suspect, queer people become threats to moral order, and dissenters become enemies of the nation rather than fellow citizens. That is where Christian nationalism and authoritarian politics lock arms: both require a shrinking definition of who counts, and both need power concentrated enough to enforce that shrinking definition.

This is why the current moment should not be read as some bizarre break from American history. It is more accurate, and more disturbing, to read it as a convergence. White supremacy, state violence, forced exclusion, executive overreach, and Christian nationalist mythology are not separate problems that just happen to be standing near each other. They are strands of the same political DNA, now being woven together more aggressively and more openly than many Americans are used to seeing.

So no, the danger is not simply that America has become “like Nazi Germany,” full stop. The danger is that America has its own authoritarian inheritance, and too many people still want to treat every new escalation as if it came out of nowhere. It didn’t. The cruelty was here. The hierarchy was here. The mythology was here. The appetite for control was here. What is rising now is not the existence of those impulses, but their confidence.

And that confidence is what should scare people. Because once a movement believes it has divine permission, historical permission, and political permission to dominate, it stops seeing pluralism as something to protect. It starts seeing pluralism as an obstacle to remove. That is the road Christian nationalism helps pave, and it is one reason this moment has to be named clearly for what it is: not an alien ideology invading a healthy system, but an old American hunger for domination becoming more explicit, more organized, and more willing to rule in public.

I’ve been off my normal rhythm for a bit, trying to keep up from a distance while also living actual life for a minute. But the political machine did not take a vacation, so here’s the short version of what mattered: the House moved a stack of bills wrapped in political traps, the Iran war keeps escalating with no clear end in sight, and Marco Rubio held a conference on “far-left extremism” that felt a lot more like performance than governance.

The House side was not any less messy. Lawmakers pushed a stock-trading bill and folded SAVE Act-style voter documentation language into it, turning what should have been a clean ethics measure into a partisan vehicle. They also moved the NDAA with Section 219 intact, a provision expanding U.S.-Israel military and technology cooperation, keeping that fight tucked inside a massive defense bill instead of forcing a cleaner standalone debate. They passed the stock trading ban with Dems voting against it because of the SAVE Act-style items wrapped inside.

That is the game, and it is not subtle. Wrap controversial priorities into must-pass legislation, pass it off as routine governance, and then use the backlash as a talking point later: Democrats are against funding the government, against banning congressional stock trading, against national security, take your pick. The point is not just passing policy. The point is building campaign ammo out of procedural cynicism.

The Iran war also keeps escalating, and at this point it is getting harder to pretend there is some clean endgame waiting on the other side of all this. The Minab girls’ school reporting is especially chilling because the site had been visible in satellite imagery for years and was reportedly treated as a school in intelligence records, yet it still ended up inside the machinery of war. That is what escalation looks like when there is no real exit ramp: civilians get caught in the middle, the cycle keeps feeding itself, and everyone in power keeps talking like there is still a controlled way out.

Recent reporting on the broader U.S.-Iran standoff points in the same direction. Fresh strikes, retaliation, collapsing ceasefire efforts, and expanding targets all suggest this is not winding down but deepening. At a certain point, it starts to feel less like strategy and more like a trap with a better press release.

And then there was Rubio. The State Department conference on “far-left terrorism” brought together representatives from 67 countries, with critics calling the whole thing politically loaded and partisan. At a moment when the country is dealing with actual governing issues and the world feels increasingly unstable, that kind of spectacle says a lot about where this administration wants public attention directed.

What stood out to me was not just the headlines themselves, but the pattern underneath them. Serious decisions keep getting wrapped in performance, controversial provisions keep getting folded into bills the public is told are routine, and the noise machine keeps churning right on schedule. That is usually where the real story is.

So tell me this: what’s something you all caught over the last few days that you want me to dig into next?

I was working on fixing my script and Substack for Houston when news broke of yet another ICE-involved killing, this time in Maine. Another operation, another claim of “officer safety,” another person dead in what was supposed to be a controlled enforcement action. The names and cities change. The pattern doesn’t.

This is the piece I was already writing, and I’m not going to pretend that this is about a single incident. It’s about the system that makes deaths like these predictable.

I’ve been on this story since before I had a Substack or a podcast. Back when Trump’s second-term immigration crackdowns first started, I was calling out the inhumane treatment on my personal Facebook page, the raids that felt more like paramilitary cosplay than “law and order,” the way people were being disappeared into detention, the way “toughness” was being used as a cover for cruelty.

I said then, and I’ll say again now: the ends do not justify the means when those means are deaths, shattered families, and human dignity treated as expendable. We don’t get to pretend that “safety” is achieved by killing people who weren’t even the target of the operation.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was a Mexican national who had lived in Houston for roughly 35 years. He was a business owner. He was a father. He had no criminal convictions. And he was shot and killed by an immigration officer during a raid where he wasn’t the person they were even supposed to be going after. That is not an accident; it’s the predictable outcome of an enforcement system that has been told, over and over, that the rules are optional and the courts are a nuisance.

In this piece, I want to stay with that reality: what it looks like when incompetence and cruelty are turned into policy, when court rulings are treated like threats instead of limits, and when “collateral damage” becomes a euphemism for killing people who were never supposed to be in the crosshairs.

A pattern I’ve seen coming

I want to be honest about why this hits so hard. It’s not just the horror of one man’s death; it’s the feeling of watching a train wreck you’ve been screaming about for a year.

When the immigration crackdowns started, we saw:

• Raids carried out by masked, heavily armed agents in neighborhoods that had never been treated like war zones.

• Citizens and long‑term residents detained or swept up because they “fit a profile.”

• Detention centers where people were dying of neglect, untreated medical conditions, and violence, while official statements called it “unfortunate” and moved on.

We saw courts step in: blocking birthright citizenship changes, pausing some enforcement overreach, ordering investigations, and providing better medical care. And instead of taking those rulings as guardrails, this administration treated them as annoyances, obstacles to work around. When you start treating the Constitution and the courts as optional, you don’t just get chaos in the abstract; you get chaos with names, faces, and funerals.

Lorenzo’s story in the pattern

I don’t want Lorenzo to be just another data point. He was a real person whose life held meaning far beyond a headline.

He’d built a life in Houston over three and a half decades. A family. A business. Roots. He wasn’t somebody hiding in the shadows; he was woven into his community. He wasn’t even the person ICE said they were going after that day.

We are told, after the fact, that he “weaponized his vehicle,” that officers “feared for their safety.” We’ve heard that script before. It’s the same script used any time an operation goes sideways, and someone ends up dead: the details are fuzzy, the justification is sharp.

When you put that next to the broader pattern, a growing number of deaths in detention, multiple fatal shootings during enforcement actions, a spike in injuries and killings since the crackdown ramped up, it becomes very hard to call this a series of isolated mistakes. This is what happens when you send a message from the top that more force is always justified, that more bodies in custody are a success metric, and that the courts telling you to slow down are just part of the opposition.

And then, as I’m writing about Houston, another person is killed in an ICE-involved shooting in Maine. Different place, same script. How many times are we supposed to call that a coincidence?

Cruelty plus incompetence as policy

Immigration enforcement is supposed to be about law: clear statutes, due process, checks and balances. What we’re watching instead is a culture that treats cruelty and incompetence as acceptable costs, or worse, as proof of “toughness.”

You see it when officers are deployed in ways that maximize fear instead of safety. You see it when detention centers are packed beyond capacity, and basic medical care is treated as a luxury. You see it when the administration frames rising death counts as unfortunate collateral damage rather than as proof that the system is failing.

And you see it in the gap between what courts say and what the executive actually does. Judges can block an executive order; they can issue injunctions; they can demand investigations. But if the people carrying out the policy treat those rulings as suggestions, the harm continues, just a little more quietly, a little more deniably.

That’s the core of what I want you to feel here: this isn’t just cruelty. It’s cruelty plus incompetence, handed a badge, a gun, and political cover. That combination is lethal.
What this says about who is seen as expendable

There’s a brutal hierarchy at work in how these policies land.

People with certain passports, certain skin tones, certain accents, certain zip codes are treated as expendable. Their deaths are framed as unfortunate but understandable. Their communities are expected to mourn quietly and move on.

The same administration that screams about “law and order” has presided over record deaths in immigration custody and a surge in shootings tied to enforcement actions. The same people who insist they’re defending the Constitution cheer when due process is shaved down and when “suspected” becomes enough to justify lethal force.

If you say you’re one of the ones out here screaming we are a “Christian nation,” if you claim to care about family, community, and the sanctity of life, then people like Lorenzo should matter. A father killed, a business owner shot during an enforcement operation that wasn’t even supposed to involve him, a neighbor whose absence leaves a hole, that should break your heart and raise your voice. And let’s not forget, this isn’t the first instance where ICE agents have targeted the wrong person, or even murdered someone in the streets. There’s a clear pattern.

Why I’m staying on this, and why you should too

I’m going to keep coming back to these stories because they tell us more about our politics than any slogan ever will.

You can’t say you care about safety if your policies leave more people dead, more families destroyed, and more communities living in fear of a knock on the door. You can’t say you care about the law if you treat court rulings as optional and build enforcement strategies that routinely trample rights.

And you can’t say you’re fixing the system if your fixes are just making it more chaotic, more violent, and more detached from basic human dignity.

I know it’s exhausting. I know it’s tempting to look away. But every time we normalize “collateral damage,” every time we shrug and say “well, that’s what happens,” we give this model more room to grow. We tell future presidents and future agencies that they can keep pushing the line and that most of us will stay quiet.

What you can do, even if you’re not in Houston

You may not live in Houston. You may not know anyone personally who’s been detained or raided. But you’re still part of the public this system claims to serve.

A few places where your voice matters:

• Local and state oversight: support efforts to demand independent investigations when people are killed in raids or detention. Don’t accept internal reviews as the last word.

• Ask your representatives, plainly:

  • “How many people have died in immigration custody or enforcement actions on your watch?”

  • “What are you doing to make sure rulings are actually being followed, not just fought?”

  • “Do you believe deaths like Lorenzo’s are acceptable collateral damage?”

• Pay attention to how immigration is talked about in your circles. When people reduce lives to labels, “illegal,” “invader,” “problem”, “those people”, push back. Bring it back to names, families, and the reality that policy choices have bodies attached to them.

You don’t have to have all the answers. You don’t have to be an expert. But you can refuse to let this kind of death fade into the background noise.

Lorenzo should still be alive. That’s the sentence I can’t get away from.

He wasn’t the target of the operation. He wasn’t a violent threat. He was a man who’d built a life in Houston over decades, killed during a crackdown that has turned “enforcement” into a blunt instrument with far too many innocent people caught underneath it.

And somewhere in Maine, another family is now planning a funeral for someone killed in the name of the same “law and order.”

If we let that slide, we’re not just failing them; we’re telling every future administration that this level of harm is acceptable, as long as they say the right words about safety and toughness.

I’m Patty. If this raised questions for you, sit with them. Talk about them. Ask the people who represent you what they’re doing to stop this from happening again. And as always: take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and I’ll talk to you in the next one, when I’m ready to speak this out loud.

From my little corner of Nevada, that sounded like the most honest way to show my neighbors what I actually believe: no yard signs, no donor calls, no consultant class, just, “If you want someone like me, you know where to find my name.”

Then I learned there are deadlines for write‑in candidates.

In a system that tells you, “You can vote in whoever you want,” you actually have to be pre‑approved to be someone voters are allowed to write in. There are filing windows and declarations and paperwork months before anyone walks into a polling place.

On paper, that’s just administrative housekeeping. In reality, it’s a metaphor for how much of our “choice” in this country is managed before we ever see a ballot.

Why I’m writing a platform anyway

I’m not a politician. I don’t have a war chest or a team of staffers, and I’m not auditioning for cable news. What I do have is a voice, and like every citizen, it matters.

Over the last year and a half both on my personal Facebook page and here on Politically POMP, I’ve been pulling on a few threads: how gerrymandering rigs representation upstream, how defense bills quietly fuse our military to others without our consent, how Pride gets turned into corporate rainbow merch while queer and trans people are still policed and criminalized, how national debt and economic precarity become tools to keep ordinary people anxious and small.

If I were running for office, my platform wouldn’t start with slogans. It would start with one simple, unfashionable idea: Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights.

The platform I buy: FDR’s Second Bill of Rights

In January 1944, with World War II still raging, FDR went to Congress and said something politicians almost never say out loud: our original Bill of Rights protects political freedoms, but those freedoms are paper‑thin if people are economically insecure.

He laid out a “Second Bill of Rights”, not as charity, but as the conditions under which political freedom can actually exist. The list is remarkably straightforward:

• The right to a useful, reasonably paid job.

• The right to earn enough for adequate food, clothing, and recreation.

• The right of farmers to a decent living from their work.

• The right of businesses, large and small, to operate free from monopoly domination and unfair competition.

• The right of every family to a decent home.

• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to enjoy good health.

• The right to protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.

• The right to a good education.

That’s the economic platform I buy. If I were on a ballot, I wouldn’t pretend to have invented anything more clever. I’d be the candidate who says, “Let’s start where FDR left off and be honest about how far short we’re falling.”

Right by right, what’s broken now

You can take each of those rights and hold it up against the 2026 United States, and the gap between promise and reality is the story of our politics.

A useful, reasonably paid job.
Precarious gig work, union‑busting, and stagnant wages mean millions of people are technically “employed” but one missed paycheck away from disaster. Economic fear isn’t a bug; it’s a feature that keeps people from organizing, striking, or running for office themselves.

Enough for food, clothing, and recreation.
We normalize second jobs, side hustles, and constant anxiety as “hustle culture,” while rents, groceries, and medical bills outpace paychecks. Recreation becomes a luxury, not part of a human life.

Farmers and small businesses free from monopoly.
Consolidated agribusiness and mega‑retailers squeeze farmers, while monopoly tech and corporate giants make it nearly impossible for small businesses to compete on fair terms.

Decent homes.
Housing is treated like a speculative asset class more than a basic human need. Evictions, institutional landlords, and the disappearance of truly affordable options are policy choices, not acts of God.

Adequate medical care and protection from economic fears.
We still tie healthcare to employment and treat medical debt as a normal part of life. Our safety nets around disability, unemployment, and old age are porous by design.

Good education.
School quality tracks ZIP code and wealth, while student debt hangs around people’s necks for decades. We talk about “opportunity” but legislate scarcity.

If I were running, my platform wouldn’t be, “I alone can fix it.” It would be, “None of this is inevitable, and the people benefiting from the gap between FDR’s rights and our reality have names, addresses, and lobbyists.”

The 2026 add‑ons: the rights FDR couldn’t see

FDR couldn’t have seen our current internet, our climate crisis, or the way digital tools would reshape politics. So if I were being honest about running in 2026, I would have to name three more rights.

The right to digital privacy and autonomy

You should have the right not to be constantly tracked, profiled, and manipulated by governments or corporations.

That means warrant‑required surveillance, real limits on data collection, and algorithms that aren’t black boxes quietly sorting us into categories that determine what we see, what we’re offered, and even whether we’re considered “high risk” by law enforcement or insurers.

It means confronting how “national security” is used to justify ever‑expanding data fusion between militaries and intelligence agencies, and how easy it is to slide from “security” into a permanent, invisible dragnet.

The right to climate security

You should have the right to a livable environment, not just personally, but generationally.

Climate security means we stop treating the planet like a casino where a few companies cash out while everyone else lives with fires, floods, and toxic air. It’s not just emissions targets; it’s infrastructure that protects vulnerable communities instead of sacrificing them, and a just transition so fossil‑fuel workers aren’t thrown away when their industries change.

The right to a digital democracy

You should have the right to participate in public decisions through accessible, transparent digital tools, not just show up every few years to fill in bubbles on a piece of paper.

In practice, that means public, open‑source systems for things like commenting on legislation, tracking votes, drawing maps, and participating in budgeting and local planning. It means de‑weaponizing boring words like “redistricting” and “voice votes,” because as we’ve seen with gerrymandering and defense bills, the most consequential decisions get made where nobody is watching.

If I ran for office, my “modern rights” plank would be: no one should have to trade their privacy for participation, their climate for someone else’s profit, or their voice for someone else’s convenience.

How this ties back to what we’ve been talking about

These rights aren’t abstract. They’re the through‑line of everything we’ve been talking about together.

When I wrote about gerrymandering in Louisiana, I was really writing about whether democracy is a ritual or a relationship. A digital democracy would make those “public hearings” something more than technical theater.

When I dug into that NDAA provision about integrating our military with another country’s, I was talking about consent of the governed in an age of AI, cyber defense, and data fusion. Digital privacy rights are the firewall between “security” and totalizing surveillance.

When I started Pride month with a riot instead of a rainbow, it was a reminder that rights are won through organized dissent, not corporate branding. Climate security and digital democracy are about keeping space for that dissent, online and offline, against both state and corporate control.

When I’ve talked about debt and economic anxiety, it’s because those things are tools to keep people from feeling like they have the bandwidth to care about any of this. FDR’s Second Bill of Rights is one way of saying, “You shouldn’t have to be economically comfortable to be politically free.”

My “platform” is just those threads pulled together into one fabric.

Why the write‑in rules matter

So why start with the write‑in story? Because it’s a tiny example of the biggest problem: how the system quietly decides who is “allowed” to be a choice before any of us get to weigh in.

Deadlines and filing windows matter; they keep elections from being chaos. But when the rules are set up so that even your protest vote has to be pre‑registered months in advance, we should at least admit how curated our democracy really is.

If I were running as a write‑in, I wouldn’t just be asking you to write my name. I’d be asking you to look at the walls around the ballot and ask who built them, who benefits from them, and what it would mean to tear some of them down.

If this were an actual campaign…

If this were an actual campaign, here’s what I’d promise:

I’d measure every policy against FDR’s economic rights and our modern ones: does it move us toward jobs with dignity, healthcare, housing, education, privacy, climate security, and meaningful participation, or away from them?

I’d refuse to hide behind process jargon like “chairman’s mark” or “voice vote.” If something is important enough to fuse our military with another country’s, or redraw your district, it’s important enough for a recorded vote you can see.

I’d treat digital tools as public infrastructure, not private toys. That means pushing for open systems where you can watch, comment, and shape what’s happening, not just doomscroll after the fact.

I’m not on your ballot, and realistically, I probably won’t ever be. But the point of writing this out is not to audition; it’s to give you a lens.

If any candidate, local, state, or national, wants your vote, you have every right to ask them how close their platform comes to these rights, and who pays the price when they fall short.

This is not the America 250 we were supposed to have.

What America 250 Was Actually Meant to Be

A decade ago, before any of us knew we’d be talking about UFC on the White House lawn and dueling anniversary logos, Congress did something unusually straightforward: it created a bipartisan United States Semiquincentennial Commission to plan the country’s 250th birthday. The mandate was simple and, frankly, kind of hopeful: to coordinate “all fitting and proper activities” to mark the anniversary, develop educational resources, and support infrastructure and programming that would help ordinary people engage with the history of the place they live.

Out of that came America250, the official commission and foundation meant to be the umbrella for nationwide commemorations. The idea wasn’t a single mega‑event in Washington; it was a multi‑year project that would:

• Elevate stories from all over the country, not just from the Capitol steps.

• Invest in civic education tools for classrooms and communities.

• Encourage volunteerism, local history projects, and “from the ground up” participation in telling the national story.

In other words, the 250th was supposed to be plural, distributed, and reflective. Not a presidential rally. Not a personality cult. Not a pay‑to‑play branding exercise in front of the White House.

Note: There were problems even inside that original vision, lawsuits over toxic workplace culture, allegations of cronyism and mismanagement in the America 250 Foundation, but the basic premise was still there: this anniversary belongs to the whole country, not to one man and his donors.

Enter Freedom 250: Bread and Circuses for the Emperor

Then Donald Trump came back to the presidency and, predictably, decided America’s 250th shouldn’t just be a national moment; it should also be a Trump moment. The White House launched Freedom 250, a public‑private partnership nestled inside the National Park Foundation, with Trump’s picture and signature all over the branding.

Freedom 250’s job, in theory, is to handle Washington‑area celebrations while America250 coordinates the rest of the country. In practice, the Trump‑backed group has muscled its way into the spotlight, soaking up public dollars and private sponsorships to stage:

• A Great American State Fair on the National Mall, marketed as the centerpiece of the country’s birthday party. (currently ongoing and marred by cancellations, low attendance, and partisan branding)

• A UFC “Freedom 250” card on the White House lawn, literally turning the People’s House into a cage‑fight venue on the president’s 80th birthday. (This is now marked by damaged grounds and a pretty unpopular reception of the event itself.)

• A fleet of branded “history trucks” touring the country with exhibits developed alongside conservative institutions and media outfits. (ie. PragerU)

If this sounds less like a sober national commemoration and more like gladiator games for a self‑styled emperor, that’s because it is. I’ve already written about this dynamic over in “Gladiator Games for the Emperor” piece: a failing presidency cosplaying as a collapsing empire, replacing policy with spectacle and accountability with bloodsport.

Freedom 250 is not just louder than America250; it’s richer. Congress appropriated a large pot of money for the anniversary, and reporting suggests the Freedom 250 side has been far more successful at tapping public funds and private sponsors than the official commission. On top of that, Freedom 250 is pulling in major corporate sponsors and, according to ethics and oversight groups, offering access perks in return.

This is the 250th as pay‑for‑play: donate to the president’s pet project, get your backstage passes, your speaking slots, your proximity to power, while the “national” part of the national anniversary fades into the background.

Whose Story Is This, Anyway?

Underneath the logos and fireworks, the fight over America 250 is really a fight over who gets to tell the story of the United States.

On one side, you have America250, created by Congress with bipartisan leadership and at least an explicit commitment to plural narratives: acknowledging that 250 years includes Indigenous dispossession, slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, immigration, resistance, and multiple movements for civil rights. On the other hand, you have Freedom 250, a Trump‑aligned entity accused of sanitizing exhibits, downplaying slavery and structural injustice, and pushing a patriotic myth that conflates loyalty to country with loyalty to one man’s version of history.

Critics of Freedom 250 have accused it of:

• Hijacking public funds originally intended for America250 and commingling them with opaque private donations.

• Trading access to Trump; receptions, speaking slots, prime placement at events, in exchange for contributions, in ways that skirt ethics rules and normal transparency.

• Using a nonprofit shell to keep donors anonymous and launder partisan messaging as neutral “heritage” content.

Even some conservatives have expressed discomfort, warning that tying the anniversary so tightly to Trump risks politicizing what should be a broad civic celebration. When artists pull out of the Great American State Fair because they suddenly discover they’re booked for a Trump‑branded show instead of a nonpartisan national event, that’s a tell.

This isn’t just about one year’s party planning. It’s about a familiar pattern: the same push to downplay slavery and structural injustice that historians have traced back to earlier milestones like the 1932 Washington Bicentennial, now rehearsed at a grander scale for the 250th. Trump’s Freedom 250 fits neatly into his broader war on history, bulldozing nuance, flattening complexity, and insisting that patriotism requires forgetting the people the last 250 years relegated to the margins.

The Missed Chance for Real Civic Work

Here’s the part that hits hardest, especially if you care about systems: milestones matter. They are invitations.

At a personal level, birthdays and anniversaries are moments when we decide whether we’re going to do shadow work; own our mistakes, repair relationships, and change patterns, or whether we’re going to distract ourselves with a party and call that growth. Nations have the same choice.

Right now, confidence in American democracy is wobbly heading into this anniversary. Surveys and analyses show rising distrust in institutions across both parties, a sense of political homelessness, and a growing estrangement between the public and those who claim to represent us. I’ve written about this before that our crisis isn’t just partisan; it’s structural, too little real participation, too much spectacle, and a system that treats people like an audience instead of decision‑makers.

The 250th could have been a year‑long civic teach‑in. It could have been:

• A push for universal, plain‑language civic education in schools and adult spaces.

• A serious conversation about voting access, gerrymandering, and representation, instead of more creative ways to rig maps and suppress turnout.

• Investments in public infrastructure, such as parks, libraries, and local media, that help people feel connected to their communities and to each other.

• Structured truth‑telling processes about Indigenous land theft, racial terror, and the ways law and policy have been used as tools of domination.

Instead, the loudest thing about America 250 right now was a UFC cage on the front lawn and a Great American State Fair haunted by donor questions and partisan branding. That is, quite literally, bread and circuses at the moment we most needed sober storytelling, institutional repair, and a collective check‑in about whether this experiment is still working.

From a psychological lens, it’s hard not to read this as avoidance: an empire that can’t bear to look directly at its own trauma choosing spectacle instead of healing.

The America 250 We Were Supposed to Have

So what does “the America 250 we were supposed to have” look like?

Not perfection. Not self‑flagellation. Just a grown‑up anniversary, one that treats the last 250 years as something to be understood and learned from, not just marketed.

It would look like:

• Truth‑telling as patriotism: National programming where the founding ideals and the country’s failures share the same stage, Indigenous dispossession, slavery, labor exploitation, civil rights victories, and backlash all told together.

• Distributed storytelling: Grants and support flowing to tribal nations, Black communities, immigrant groups, rural towns, and working‑class neighborhoods to tell their own histories, not just amplify what’s already in textbooks.

• Democracy work, not just democracy talk: Concrete reforms and experiments to expand participation, independent redistricting commissions, easier voting, more transparent lawmaking, announced as part of the 250th, not shoved off to some future, hypothetical “reform moment.”

• Institutional humility: Museums, parks, and federal agencies using the anniversary to admit where they’ve been complicit and how they plan to do better, instead of sanitizing exhibits to avoid making powerful donors uncomfortable.

We were supposed to get a mirror and a set of tools. We got a stage and a branded step‑and‑repeat backdrop.

Reclaiming 250 from the Ground Up

The good news, if there is any, is that Trump doesn’t actually own the anniversary, even if he’s trying to plaster his name across as much of it as possible. America250 may be underfunded, Freedom 250 may be opaque, but the date itself belongs to everyone who calls this place home.

If the official version of America 250 is going to be distorted, we still have options:

• Local libraries can host “250 years of our town” nights, telling stories that never make national headlines.

• Schools and community groups can organize teach‑ins on everything from Reconstruction to redlining to present‑day voting fights.

• Faith communities can take the theological questions about power, empire, and neighbor‑love that anniversaries like this raise seriously.

• Ordinary people, like you, like me, can choose to spend this July 4 not just watching fireworks, but having one uncomfortable, honest conversation about what “freedom” has meant in practice for different people over 250 years.

Trump can throw his rally on the Mall and his cage fight on the lawn. He can pass out VIP lanyards to donors and call it patriotism. But he does not get to define what this milestone means in our homes, our small towns, our classrooms, our faith communities, and our relationships.

The America 250 we were supposed to have is still possible, just not as a single televised event. It looks like millions of smaller, quieter acts of memory, accountability, and repair.

The people who benefit from distortion are counting on us to tune out, doomscroll, and shrug. My bias is simple: I’d rather we pick up the uncomfortable storylines, sit with them, and decide what the next chapter should be, before somebody else writes it for us, again.

That line is not just wrong. It’s doing political work.

It’s how Christian nationalists launder a modern power grab through a hazy, feel‑good story about “our roots” so you don’t notice what they’re actually trying to change right now.

What the founders actually wrote down

If the United States were founded as a Christian nation in any legal sense, you’d expect at least a few basics:

• An explicit reference to Christianity in the Constitution.

• Some requirement that officeholders be Christian.

• Language tying the government’s legitimacy to a specific faith.

You get none of that.

Instead, you get this:

• Article VI: “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” That’s a direct ban on “Christians only” government.

• First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” No state religion, no punishing people for their beliefs (or lack of them).

You don’t write those clauses if your project is a Christian state. You write them if your project is a government that tries very hard not to be a church.

Were many early Americans Christian? Of course. Did faith shape parts of the culture? Obviously. But there’s a massive difference between “a lot of the people were Christians” and “the government itself is Christian and should privilege Christians in law.”

That second thing is what Christian nationalists are selling. The Constitution doesn’t back them up.

The line they really don’t want you to remember

Then there’s the part of the record that makes these guys sweat: the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli.

Buried in Article 11 is this sentence:

“The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”

Was that line partly diplomatic, aimed at reassuring a Muslim power? Yes. Is there debate over the Arabic version of the treaty? Also yes.

But the Senate still approved that language, and President John Adams still signed it. The early American government was willing to describe itself that way in an official document without clutching its pearls.

That alone should make anyone pause before parroting “Christian‑based nation” as if it’s just neutral history.

So where did the “Christian nation” story come from?

Most of what people point to when they make this claim isn’t from 1776 at all:

• “In God We Trust” became the national motto in the 1950s.

• “Under God” was added to the Pledge during the Cold War.

• Ten Commandments monuments and “biblical heritage” language exploded much later, often as reactions to civil rights and culture‑war fights.

In other words, the “Christian founding” story we get fed is stitched together backwards. We take twentieth‑century additions, paste them onto eighteenth‑century documents, and pretend it’s all one seamless, sacred origin story.

Why? Because the myth is useful.

If you can convince people America “belongs” to Christians by design, then any move to privilege one religion in law suddenly looks like “restoring” something, instead of what it actually is: changing the rules of the game.

This isn’t about your personal faith

I’m not coming for anyone’s belief in Jesus.

Christian nationalism is not Christianity. It’s a political ideology that wants:

• government + one particular flavor of Christianity tightly fused

• Christians treated as the default “real Americans”

• everyone else tolerated at best, suspect at worst

Plenty of Christians reject that. They know that once the state starts playing church, it corrupts both.

You can be devout and still say, “No, I don’t want my government enforcing my theology on my neighbors.” In fact, that’s a deeply Christian stance if you actually care about free conscience and genuine faith rather than forced performance.

What real American freedom looks like

Here’s the thing: the boring, lawyerly text is actually the more radical vision.

A government with:

• No religious test for office.

• No established church.

• Protection for everyone’s free exercise, including people who believe differently or not at all.

That’s a state that doesn’t belong to any one religion. It belongs to the people, messy, diverse, often disagreeing, always arguing about what is right.

That setup protects the Baptist from a Catholic establishment, the Catholic from a Protestant establishment, the Muslim from both, and the atheist from all of the above.

That’s not anti‑faith. It’s how faith stays free.

What to hear when they say “Christian‑based nation”

So the next time you hear a politician insist that America was founded as a Christian nation, don’t treat it like harmless nostalgia.

Hear it as a tell.

It usually means they’re interested in:

• blurring the line between church and state

• rewriting the founding to sanctify their own agenda

• making equal citizenship feel conditional on the “right” religion

They’re not rescuing forgotten history. They’re revising it.

No, America was not founded as a Christian nation.

It was founded as a constitutional republic that deliberately refused to make Christianity the government’s official identity. The fact that they keep trying to change that now isn’t proof of what the founders did.

It’s proof of what they want to do, and how badly they need you to stop reading the actual receipts.

Two Parties, One Status Quo

If you’ve been following my work, you know I don’t buy the story that our politics is a clash of bold, competing visions. Most people I talk to feel politically trapped. They might lean one way or another, but they don’t feel genuinely represented. They’re voting to manage harm, not because they believe the system is working for them.

On paper, Democrats and Republicans scream at each other all day. In practice, both parties have quietly agreed that the basic economic order stays the same. Corporations remain in the driver’s seat. Wealth concentrates at the top. Public goods are treated as handouts instead of rights. The arguments are about how fast to do that and how loudly to say it out loud, not whether the underlying model is acceptable.

That is why so many voters end up in that “lesser of two evils” headspace by the time they get to the ballot box. The choice isn’t between a real social contract and corporate capture. It’s between different managers of the same rigged game.

How Democratic Leaders Keep Their Own Left on a Leash

Inside the Democratic Party, the loudest panic doesn’t always come when a Republican wins. It comes when a democratic socialist starts polling well.

Look at the DC mayor’s race, where a DSA‑backed candidate is gaining real momentum on a platform centered on housing, public safety, and actually taking care of ordinary people instead of developers and donors. Trump was even recorded floating the idea that maybe the federal government should “take D.C. back under federal control” if she wins, adding, “we won’t let that happen.” That reaction is telling. Both parties heard the same thing in her rise: the people are not staying in their assigned lanes.

Democratic leadership’s response hasn’t exactly been “let the voters decide.” Time and again, party leaders either refuse to endorse DSA and progressive candidates who actually win their primaries, or they downplay those races as little flukes instead of a signal about what their base wants. The big money follows suit: large PACs and donor networks pour money into corporate‑friendly Democrats, warning voters not to “risk the seat” by backing someone who talks too openly about health care, housing, or taxing the very rich.

The message is clear: challenge Republicans all you want; just don’t challenge the business model.

As a democratic socialist watching all this, it’s hard not to notice where the real red lines are. Democrats will put out a fundraising email about “protecting democracy” in the morning and then spend the afternoon trying to starve their own left flank of endorsements and cash. The problem, in their eyes, isn’t just Trump. It’s anyone inside their own tent who asks why the richest country on earth still treats basic dignity like a luxury upgrade.

Are Democratic Socialists Really the “Radicals”?

If you listen to a lot of party insiders and media voices, you’d think democratic socialists are asking for the moon. The word “radical” gets thrown around like confetti. But when you strip away the labels and just describe the policies, a lot of people, even self‑identified moderates and conservatives, say, “Wait, that sounds reasonable.”

Democratic socialism, as people like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani describe it, isn’t about the government owning your toothbrush. It’s about using democratic power to guarantee the basics, health care, housing, education, transit, a living wage, and to rein in corporate domination over every corner of life. It’s about saying the economy should serve people, not the other way around.

Polling backs this up more than Democratic leadership likes to admit. A growing share of Democratic voters view “socialism” more favorably than “capitalism,” and support economic populist ideas like higher taxes on millionaires, aggressive anti‑corruption laws, and stronger worker protections. Across party lines, people are exhausted by low wages, high costs, and a sense that the game is rigged.

Meanwhile, when right‑wing media shares clips of democratic socialists talking about free public transit, rent control, universal childcare, or paid family leave, their own comment sections are full of people saying, “I don’t like the label, but this seems pretty normal,” or “Why don’t we have this here?” The disconnect isn’t between voters and these policies. It’s between voters and the political class that feels threatened by them.

What “Non‑Negotiable” Looks Like for Me

For me, democratic socialism isn’t an abstract manifesto. It comes down to a few non‑negotiables that should not be controversial in a country as wealthy as this one: health care, housing, and a living wage.

Every human being should be able to see a doctor, keep a roof over their head, and earn enough from their work to live with dignity, without having to win the birth lottery or the corporate lottery. That is the floor, not the ceiling.

That is what I mean when I say I’m a democratic socialist. I’m talking about using our tax dollars to guarantee those basics, and about reining in a system that treats billionaires and now a trillionaire as inevitable, while millions of children rely on food assistance to eat. I don’t think that’s “radical.” I think it’s the bare minimum for a functioning, humane society.

And just to be clear: I still vote for the Democratic candidate most of the time, especially when the alternative is an open authoritarian or a hard‑right Republican. I understand harm reduction, and I practice it. But I’m not going to pretend Democrats are our saviors. When they win back the majority, they have a lot of work to do, and that starts with listening to the people in their own base who are demanding more than the same old corporate status quo.

I’m registered as an independent on purpose, even though my values are on the democratic socialist side. Democratic leadership refuses to admit that their own policies fail people too, and they work just as hard as Republicans to silence or sideline anyone who challenges them from the left, even inside their own circles. If the price of admission to the party is pretending the status quo is fine, I’m not paying it.

Why DSA Wins Matter to Me

As a voter, a creator, and just as a human being, I love seeing DSA candidates win or even gain real steam. Not because I think any one politician is going to save us, but because every one of those wins is proof that more people are waking up to the idea that we can do better for each other than this.

A DSA victory means a community looked at the standard menu, tax cuts for the top, austerity for everyone else, and said, “No thanks, bring us something real.” It means people are willing to say out loud that in the richest country on earth, it is not acceptable for kids to be hungry while the ultra‑rich climb their way to trillionaire status.

When a democratic socialist breaks through, both parties scramble. Republicans scream “socialism” and try to turn the race into a culture war. Corporate Democrats smile politely and then rush to reassure donors that nothing too fundamental will change. Underneath all of that noise is a simple fear: if people see that health care, housing, and living wages are politically possible, the old excuses stop working.

Those moments are hopeful to me, not because I expect a straight line to utopia, but because they crack the story both parties have been selling for years, that the best we can hope for is managing decline a little more “responsibly” than the other side. Democratic socialist wins are small proof points that people haven’t given up on each other yet.

Vote, But Don’t Lower Your Standards

I will never tell anyone not to vote, or not to vote for a Democrat. If you are choosing between a corporate Democrat and a full‑blown authoritarian, I fully understand why you pull the lever for damage control. That is a rational choice in a very bad set of options.

But we have to be honest about what that choice is: harm reduction, not a long‑term solution.

In a country this rich, with the world’s first trillionaire on one side and millions of children on food benefits on the other, “lesser evil” can’t be where our imagination stops. Again, voting is the floor, not the ceiling. The next step is refusing to let either party treat us like hostages, pushing for candidates and policies that put public money to work for public needs, and refusing to shut up just because a blue jersey is on the ballot.

That’s why I get so excited when democratic socialists and unapologetically progressive candidates gain ground. Their rise is not a threat to democracy. It is a sign that people are starting to demand that democracy actually deliver something.

The Allegations in Plain English

Raskin says committee Democrats have obtained internal information showing that Patel’s office directed more than a million dollars in extra payments to a small group of agents on his Director’s Advisory Team and members of his personal security detail. The allegation is that these were not routine performance bonuses spread across the Bureau, but a special stream of money reserved for Patel’s inner circle, agents he allegedly relies on to carry out personal and partisan orders inside an institution that is supposed to be politically neutral.

The letter does not prove a crime on its own, but it does something important: it puts a very specific accusation on the record. It alleges that the FBI Director may have used taxpayer money in ways that blow past normal pay caps, potentially violate federal law, and reward personal loyalty over merit. That is the floor of this story before even getting to the exact dollar amounts.

How the Money Allegedly Worked

According to Raskin’s letter and the information House Judiciary Democrats say they have obtained, this was not a one-off bonus but a pattern. Raskin says Patel’s office approved over 1 million dollars in “awards” for a narrow group of agents on his Director’s Advisory Team and members of his personal security detail, rather than across the Bureau.

Reports based on the letter say some agents received special bonus payments of nearly $ 8,000 every two weeks, stacked on top of salaries already at or near the federal pay cap. Raskin describes at least several “loyalist employees” receiving five consecutive payments in back-to-back pay periods, adding up to nearly $40,000 per person in a very short window. The letter alleges that these side payments pushed total compensation beyond statutory limits and may have violated federal rules governing how and when such awards can be granted.

Raskin also claims the payments were made at such an extreme pace that the accounts funding them were depleted, and some bonus payments bounced because the money was not there. In plain language, Democrats are accusing Patel of running a taxpayer-funded loyalty program inside the FBI, where a small inner circle allegedly got rapid-fire cash for staying close to the Director.

The Kash Patel Backstory

These bonus allegations are not dropping into a vacuum. Patel has already been at the center of a series of questions about his fitness to lead the FBI, including accusations about drinking on the job, erratic absences, and a politicized approach to the Bureau’s work. During a recent oversight and budget hearing, Senate Democrats pressed him directly on reports that he had appeared intoxicated and missed key meetings, and Patel forcefully denied those claims.

At the same time, Patel has gone on offense against the press, filing a 250-million-dollar defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic over reporting that described anonymous accounts of excessive drinking and mismanagement under his watch. His message has been consistent: the stories about his conduct are politically motivated smears, not reality.

That is the backdrop for Raskin’s slush-fund letter. The FBI Director was already facing allegations about his professionalism and judgment, and now he is facing a formal claim from the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee that he used FBI funds as a personal loyalty fund for his inner circle. Whether one believes Patel, his critics, or neither side entirely, the same themes keep surfacing: politicization, loyalty, and questions about who the FBI is really being run for.

What This Says About a Rotten, Unaccountable System

If you zoom out from the headline, this reads like a case study in institutional rot. You have an FBI Director already facing questions about his conduct and politicization of the Bureau, now accused in writing of using more than a million dollars in public money to flood a hand-picked inner circle with loyalty bonuses. You have agents allegedly getting five straight 8-thousand-dollar payments on top of already maxed-out salaries, even as the account funding those bonuses reportedly runs dry. That is what it looks like when an institution stops running on clear rules and starts running on personal favor.

In a healthy system, allegations like this would trigger serious bipartisan oversight pressure: subpoenas, sworn testimony, document production, and real consequences if the facts hold up. Instead, Democrats are in the minority, which means Raskin can demand answers and generate public pressure but cannot fully force accountability on his own. And with very few Republicans showing any appetite to break from Donald Trump’s administration or challenge Trump’s hand-picked FBI Director, the odds of meaningful action in the current Congress look slim.

That is the deeper rot here. It is not only the allegation that a powerful official may be abusing his position, but the reality that the normal mechanisms of oversight appear politically jammed. As long as Republicans close ranks and Democrats remain limited to minority-party oversight tools, it is hard to imagine real accountability arriving before the balance of power changes.

What We Still Don’t Know

There are still real gaps in the public record. There has not yet been a full public accounting from the FBI of every bonus Patel’s office approved, which agents received them, and what official justification was attached to each award. There are no publicly released internal emails here laying out who proposed the bonus structure, who signed off on it, or whether anyone inside the Bureau objected.

There is also no detailed, point-by-point public rebuttal from Patel to Raskin’s slush-fund claims. What exists right now is a formal allegation from House Democrats and Patel’s broader insistence that criticism of his leadership is politically motivated. At some point, that should give way to something more concrete: an inspector general review, documentary evidence that explains the payments, or sworn testimony that either confirms or undercuts the allegations.

The responsible position right now is to take the allegations seriously without pretending the case is already closed. The numbers matter, the pattern matters, and the institutional implications matter. But the final test is whether any meaningful oversight follows, or whether this becomes one more example of a major public institution bending around loyalty while accountability waits on the next election.

That is what makes this more than just another scandal cycle. The core question is not only whether Kash Patel improperly directed bonus money to loyalists, but whether the system around him is still capable of correcting that kind of abuse in real time. Right now, the answer to that second question looks a lot shakier than it should.

Because the Trump administration is quietly moving toward its own Iran agreement, floating eye‑popping numbers, hiding key details, and telling you it’s all “fake news” at the same time.

And once you actually line it up next to the JCPOA under Obama, the story is a lot less “new, tough deal” and a lot more “same structure, less transparency.”

What Obama’s Iran deal actually did

Let’s rewind for a second, because a lot of people only ever heard the bumper‑sticker version of the JCPOA.

The 2015 deal between the U.S., Iran, and other world powers put hard limits on Iran’s nuclear program: caps on uranium enrichment, reductions in centrifuges, strict inspections, and a longer pathway to any potential weapon. In exchange, Iran got relief from some sanctions and access to its own frozen assets overseas, under a set of very specific conditions.

You don’t have to love that framework to describe it honestly. It wasn’t a giant bag of U.S. taxpayer cash dropped in Tehran. It was: “You scale back and open up your nuclear program to inspectors, and we unfreeze some of your money and ease some sanctions.”

That’s what a lot of modern diplomacy looks like: leverage through sanctions and access to money, not just bombs and speeches.

What Trump is signing now

Fast‑forward to 2026. Trump is back in the White House, and his team has electronically signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran that kicks off a 60‑day window of “real technical discussions” on the nuclear details.

It’s not a full treaty yet. It’s a framework: talks about suspending some sanctions, letting Iran access more oil revenue and frozen assets, and even creating a massive reconstruction fund if Iran “behaves.”

Here’s the catch: the administration has refused so far to release the full text of what was signed, and a lot of the specific numbers we’re arguing about are coming from leaks, briefings, and Trump’s own shifting public comments, not from a transparent, published document.

The “$300 billion” argument

That brings us to the number set off like a grenade in the discourse: three hundred billion dollars.

Senior officials and allies have been talking about a potential reconstruction and investment mechanism worth up to $300 billion over time, money that would be unlocked if Iran meets certain conditions and heavily supported by regional players, not just the U.S. Treasury writing a single giant check.

On the other side, Trump is online insisting that the claim the U.S. will “give Iran $300 billion” is “fake news,” even as his own team describes a huge fund concept tied to Iran’s compliance. The number is being walked backward in public while being dangled forward in diplomatic conversations.

So is it fake, or is it leverage? The answer seems to depend on whether you’re watching the rally or reading the footnotes.

Structurally, this looks a lot like JCPOA

If you strip away the partisan jerseys and just look at the mechanics, Trump’s emerging deal looks a lot like JCPOA, but with one devastating added layer: the United States spent years escalating confrontation with Iran in between, burning tax dollars, costing American lives, and contributing to the deaths of innocent Iranian civilians.

In both cases, Iran is asked to limit and open up its nuclear program. In both cases, the incentive is money and sanctions relief: access to frozen assets, oil revenue, and possibly larger pools of investment if they play by the rules.

So the difference is not that one deal “gave Iran money” and the other doesn’t. The difference is that Trump tore up the earlier framework, helped drive a more violent and costly path, and now appears to be circling back to a deal that still relies on the same basic formula: nuclear constraints in exchange for economic benefit.

Obama’s version was framed as “the worst deal ever” and “billions to terrorists.” Trump’s version is being marketed as “historic” and “tough on Iran,” even though the underlying structure still rhymes in all the ways that matter.

And that’s what makes the double standard so glaring: if this structure was unforgivable in 2015, why is it suddenly wise and strong in 2026, after all the blood, tax dollars, and destruction poured into doing the opposite?

Meanwhile, look at where else the money goes

And while we’re talking about numbers that start with a “3,” let’s glance back home for a second.

Trump’s White House ballroom project has its own ballooning price tag: estimates that started in the hundreds of millions and climbed higher, with the White House boasting about hundreds of millions raised from private donors and corporations. The funding contract only became public after outside pressure pried it loose.

We’re also watching Republicans in Congress try to tuck a big pot of money into a funding package for “security upgrades” tied to the ballroom, taxpayer money that can’t legally be spent on the ballroom’s chandeliers, but absolutely exists because the ballroom exists. Meanwhile, ethics watchdogs are warning that many of the corporations secretly funding the ballroom are also big federal contractors poised to benefit from AI and other policy agendas shaped by this same White House.

So when you’re told “we just can’t afford” student debt relief, child tax credits, or basic social infrastructure, remember: we always seem to find hundreds of millions for a palace and billions for enforcement and foreign leverage.

The algae on the surface

Even the visuals in D.C. are giving the game away. The Reflecting Pool just went through a multimillion‑dollar rehab, and here we are again: algae turning it green, workers scrambling with fancy new systems and chemical treatments to kill and vacuum out the mess.

People on the ground are watching staff dump hydrogen peroxide into the water trying to get rid of the bloom, a literal attempt to bleach away the visible symptoms without addressing the deeper structural issues in the system. It’s hard not to see it as a metaphor: our political class keeps pouring quick‑fix chemicals on a pool that was never designed for the climate, while the real problems grow underneath.

New ballrooms, old algae. New Iran deal, old habits. It’s always a surface‑level facelift on top of the same power dynamics.

My question for you

I’m not writing this because I think you have to love any Iran deal, or because I think the JCPOA was perfect. I’m writing it because I think Americans deserve to see the pattern.

If “giving Iran money” was unforgivable under Obama, and totally fine under Trump, then maybe the problem for a lot of people was never the structure of the deal. Maybe the problem was which party’s name was on the paperwork.

So here’s my question for you:

When did we decide that the price tag of peace is a scandal only when the other team is paying it?

I’m genuinely curious how you see this: if you supported Trump tearing up JCPOA, are you comfortable with this new deal and the money potentially on the table now? Why, or why not?

In honor of our wannabe emperor who needs his name on every flat surface, building, and bill, I thought we’d celebrate his 80th birthday the only way that makes sense: by cataloging what he’s really “accomplished” in the last year and a half of his second term.

Spoiler: if you were hoping for “infrastructure” or “stability,” you’re gonna be disappointed. If you were hoping for “late‑stage empire collapse, but make it reality TV,” you’re in luck.

The Immigration “Crackdown” That Turned Into State Terror

Let’s start with his favorite topic: cruelty at the border.

Under the banner of “getting tough,” we’ve watched an immigration crackdown so chaotic and vicious it stopped bothering to pretend it was about safety.

• Citizens detained, deported, or simply disappeared in the gears of a system that no longer cares whether it’s got the right person, as long as it’s got a body to show off.

• Neighborhoods terrorized by masked, armed men showing up in unmarked vehicles, with no warrants and no accountability, because nothing says “land of the free” like paramilitary cosplay on residential streets.

• Families living in constant fear of a knock on the door—not from a judge with a lawful order, but from some deputized goon squad chasing vibes, not facts.

But sure, tell me more about “law and order.”

The Economy He Swears Is “The Greatest Ever”

On paper, he still screams about “the greatest economy in the history of the world.” In reality, we’re watching it buckle under the weight of his vanity projects and half-baked economic cosplay.

• Markets wobbling and credit tightening as investors try to price in a White House that governs by tantrum and late-night post.

• A war in Iran that led to the Strait of Hormuz shutting down and gas prices spiking, because apparently foreign policy is just “own the libs, start a conflict, then act shocked when global shipping lanes notice.”

• An illegal tariff scheme slapped on anything that moves, sending household goods through the roof and hitting regular people at Target and Walmart while the ultra-rich move their money out of reach and out of consequence.

He breaks the supply chains, then points at the rubble and calls it someone else’s fault. Emperor energy, but make it cowardly.

Branding the Republic

The man cannot see a public institution without asking, “But what if it had my name on it?”

We’ve watched him:

• Slap his brand on things he didn’t build, didn’t pay for, and doesn’t understand, like cultural institutions and historic sites, all because he wants future tour guides to say his name.

• Treat the government like a merch table, renaming, re-logoing, and re-signing anything he can get his hands on, as if a country is just one big golf course waiting for a tacky gold sign.

He doesn’t serve the office. He tries to turn the office into a franchise.

Rule by Loyalty Test and Tantrum

This is not a functioning administration; it’s a court.

• People with expertise fired or sidelined because they weren’t “personally loyal” enough, as if their job were to protect his ego, not the country.

• Agencies gutted at the direction of tech bros and crypto kings who got the keys to the kingdom and started swinging an axe around with no idea what anything actually does.

• Life-and-death programs cut because some billionaire saw a line item in a spreadsheet and thought, “We don’t need that,” while never having met the people whose lives depended on it.

We have unelected rich guys running their personal experiment on the federal government, and the experiment is: “What if we just… stopped doing things that save lives?”

Cuts That Kill

This is where the “small government” cosplay stops being abstract and starts being body count.

• USAID gutted, because why would we want to prevent crises, reduce disease, or stabilize regions before they explode? Just let it all burn and then act shocked at the refugee flows and pandemics springing up.

• Public health and research programs slashed because some conspiracy‑addled appointee decided science was optional, including research on things like screwworm that we had under control for decades. Now we’re seeing outbreaks in American cattle that hadn’t happened since the mid‑20th century, all because someone wanted to look “tough” on “wasteful spending.”

• A Health and Human Services department run by an anti‑vaccine crusader, turning the nation’s health infrastructure into a platform for paranoia instead of protection, undoing decades of work to keep preventable diseases at bay.

They call it “freedom.” The rest of us call it “avoidable funerals.”

The President Who Can’t Stay Awake but Can Always Rage-Post

The image is almost too on-the-nose:

• Nodding off in meetings he doesn’t understand and doesn’t care to.

• Waking up just in time to rage-post on his favorite social platform, endlessly broadcasting grievances, fantasies, and threats.

• Governing by post instead of by policy, while staffers and agencies scramble behind the scenes to turn his emotional outbursts into something that fits inside the law, or at least looks like it might.

This isn’t leadership. It’s a comment section with nuclear codes.

The Empire and Its Cover-Ups

And hanging over all of it: the rot.

• The long, ugly shadow of his relationships with men like Epstein, wrapped in layers of legal threats, sealed documents, missing logs, and “it’s a Democrat hoax”.

• A whole ecosystem of enablers, fixers, and power-chasers working overtime to make sure the worst of it never sees daylight, while telling the rest of us to “move on” and “focus on the future.”

They demand limitless transparency from their enemies and zero from themselves.

Gladiator Games on the South Lawn

So here we are, on his 80th birthday: the wannabe emperor presiding over a country he’s weakened, humiliated, and hollowed out; economically, institutionally, morally.

To celebrate?
We get gladiator games on the front lawn.

A UFC cage where a functioning democracy once stood.
Spectacle where accountability should be.
Bloodsport where policy once mattered.

Nero had his fires. Our emperor has his cage fights, his branded buildings, his curated enemies, and his ever‑shrinking circle of loyalists.

If this is what “greatness” looks like, maybe it’s time we stop playing along with the empire cosplay and remember we were never supposed to have emperors in the first place.

If this breakdown helped you put words to the “something is really wrong here” feeling, share it, drop a comment, and subscribe to Politically POMP so more people see what’s happening behind the spectacle.

And the more you look at the details, the smaller the circle of people this version of “freedom” is really for.

Who’s actually running the birthday party?

Congress originally created an independent, bipartisan commission, America250, to plan the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The idea was that something this big should belong to the whole country, not one president or one party.

Then Trump created his own White House task force, branded it Freedom 250, and made it the primary engine and funding arm for the celebration. Federal agencies have been told to use the Freedom 250 branding and treat the old America250 commission as a co‑logo, not the driver.

In other words: what was supposed to be a shared national project has been pulled into the president’s orbit and rebranded under his preferred version of “freedom.”

Spectacle on sacred ground

A big chunk of the Freedom 250 plan is pure spectacle: concerts, a “Salute to America 250” fireworks blowout on the National Mall, racing events, and a major combat‑sports spectacle tied into the festivities. There are plans for weigh‑ins or promotional events at the Lincoln Memorial and a Grand Prix‑style race right in the capital’s core.

On its own, you could argue that’s just modern event planning. But layer in this: Trump holds stock in Zuffa, the parent company of the UFC, even as UFC‑connected events are woven into the official Freedom 250 program on some of the most symbolically important public spaces we have.

That’s not just “celebration.” That’s a sitting president’s business interests turning national memorials and the National Mall into branded backdrops. Public land, public money, and public symbols, wrapped around private profit and political image.

The independent planners who got sidelined

The original America250 commission was supposed to be broad and bipartisan, with historians, civic leaders, and people from across the spectrum shaping how we tell the story of the last 250 years. Over time, those independent voices were pushed out or sidelined, and Freedom 250, with leadership chosen by the White House, took over the central stage.

That’s a pattern: take something that was meant to represent the country as a whole, then quietly swap in loyalists and a new logo. Our collective memory becomes one more asset managed by the executive branch, instead of something we steward together.

Freedom for whom?

All of this is happening against a very specific backdrop.

As we gear up for the 250th and the World Cup at roughly the same time, the administration has ramped up immigration crackdowns and street‑level enforcement by ICE, and imposed stricter, more complex rules on who gets to come here and who gets turned away at the border or the airport.

So while we market ourselves as the land of freedom and throw a giant birthday party, we’re also sending a very different message in practice: this celebration isn’t for everyone. Certain people will be detained, deported, or denied entry in the shadow of those fireworks and flyovers.

“Freedom 250” starts to sound a lot less like an invitation and a lot more like a filter: some people get the show, other people get the checkpoints.

Who still gets a microphone

There’s another layer to this: who gets to speak in the moral language around all of this.

Some of the loudest religious voices cheering on this administration and its version of “freedom” come from the same circles that just helped the Southern Baptist Convention tighten its ban on women pastors and preachers. These are networks that want women like me, former SBC girl, loud about politics and abuse, to sit down and be quiet.

At the same time, those same religious and political networks are deeply intertwined with the political base that’s shaping how Freedom 250 is framed. They get to offer the prayers, write the talking points about “God and country,” and appear as honored guests. Women who survived those systems, or who refuse to stay in the “approved” roles, are not the ones invited to the podium.

So we have a 250th anniversary branded around “freedom” being planned and blessed in part by people who are actively working to shrink which Americans are allowed a public voice.

Why this feels so heavy

A 250th birthday should be a moment of honest joy: acknowledge the horrors and the failures, yes, but also celebrate the real progress and the people who pushed this country closer to its stated ideals.

Instead, it feels like we’re watching:

• a president’s brand take over a national milestone,

• corporate and personal interests wrap themselves in the flag on public land,

• an immigration and enforcement machine decide who even gets near the party, and

• a religious‑political coalition that wants women like me silent help define what “freedom” is supposed to sound like.

I love this country enough to want better for its 250th.

A real celebration of American freedom would tell the truth about who we’ve been, fight like hell for the people we still shut out, and make room for the voices we’ve spent generations trying to silence. If the loudest voice at America’s birthday party is the president’s brand, we’ve lost the plot of the whole experiment.

We have watched lawmakers treat the Epstein Files Transparency Act like some big moral stand, while taking recess after recess, doing TV hits, and barely lifting a finger to check anything else the executive branch is doing. The whole reason Congress exists in our system is to make laws, control the purse, and put real limits on the president. When you strip away the flags and the speeches, their actual job is pretty simple: write the rules, guard the money, and say no when power runs off the rails.

Instead, we get “breaks” stacked on top of “district work periods,” show hearings designed for viral clips, and almost no sustained pushback when the White House treats the government like a personal legal shield. They’ll show up for culture‑war sound bites, but when it’s time to do boring, grown‑up oversight, subpoenas, documents, legislation with teeth, it suddenly gets very quiet.

I’m tired of the amnesia about what they swore an oath to do. Article I doesn’t say, “Congress shall vibe, fundraise, and tweet.” It says Congress makes the laws. It gives them the power of the purse. It gives them the authority to oversee the other branches, investigate abuses, and, if necessary, impeach and remove. That’s not “being mean.” That’s the job.

So when the executive branch is using the Situation Room to manage political damage instead of national security, or when any president, red or blue, acts like courts and watchdogs are just annoying obstacles, I don’t only look at the Oval Office. I look straight at the House and Senate leadership and ask:

Where are the emergency hearings?
Where are the subpoenas and deadlines that actually have consequences?
Where are the funding fights that say, “If you abuse this power, you don’t get a blank check next year”?

If you’re in Congress and you’re not willing to claw back power from the presidency, defend the independence of the courts, and write real ethics and transparency laws that apply to yourself as well as your enemies, what exactly are we paying you for ?

We don’t need more speeches about “our sacred constitutional duty.” We need members who will actually use the powers the Constitution already gave them. Subpoena power. Budget power. Impeachment power. Lawmaking power.

In a system built on checks and balances, refusing to check anything is not neutrality. It’s complicity.

If you’ve been feeling that gap between what we were taught in civics and how D.C. actually behaves, this is me walking through it in plain language: what Congress is supposed to do, what it’s actually doing, and how the Epstein transparency mess fits into that bigger pattern.

Watch, share with your “yell at the news” friend, and if you want more of this kind of breakdown, make sure you’re subscribed. This project is entirely reader‑supported.

The Southern Baptist Convention just voted to formally ban churches with women pastors. They moved fast and decisively when the “threat” was women preaching.

Where was that urgency when the crisis was men abusing?

For years, survivors and reporters have documented widespread sexual abuse inside SBC churches and a leadership culture that protected the institution instead of the vulnerable. Hundreds of cases, decades of warnings, and only when the topic is women in the pulpit do we suddenly see this kind of clarity and enforcement.

That’s the tell.

When an institution is more determined to police women’s authority than men’s violence, it is not defending holiness. It is defending hierarchy. It is saying, out loud through its actions, that the greatest danger it can imagine is not predators in positions of power, but women sharing that power at all.

You can call that “biblical” if you want. But let’s tell the truth about what’s really being protected there: not safety, not justice, not the vulnerable. What’s being protected is a world where certain men stay on top, no matter what they’ve done.

That isn’t faithfulness. That’s a cover story.

There’s a particular photo that lives in my brain when I think about the Situation Room.

You probably have it too: Obama and his team, eyes locked on a screen, watching the raid on Bin Laden’s compound. Whatever else you think about that chapter of history, the image is clear: this is where we deal with the worst‑case scenarios. This is where adults make decisions about life and death.

So imagine opening the New York Times and learning that under Donald Trump, that same room has been used as a crisis‑communications bunker because the president’s name keeps showing up in the Epstein files.

Not to figure out how to protect kids.
Not to figure out how to dismantle the network that enabled one of the most notorious sex traffickers of our time.
But to figure out how to protect him.

Because their boss is in the files, and they know the allegations attached to his name are not “oops, we sat at the same charity dinner once.” They are ugly. They are specific. They’re the kind of accusations that, if they were aimed at anyone else, we would not hesitate to call predatory.

And instead of asking, “What does this mean for the safety of the people he holds power over?” the question in the Situation Room became: “How do we make sure this doesn’t hurt him with the base?”

A president in the files

Let’s just say the quiet part out loud: Trump’s fingerprints are all over the Epstein story.

His name surfaces again and again in documents and testimony tied to a man whose entire business model was the sexual exploitation of girls. You don’t have to embellish anything; the public record already tells us he partied with Epstein, praised him as a “terrific guy,” and has been accused in sworn statements of conduct we’d never excuse from a teacher, a coach, or the guy who bags your groceries.

We are not talking about some random donor whose name slipped into a spreadsheet once. We are talking about the sitting president of the United States being threaded through the case files of a serial sex offender.

If that sentence doesn’t take your breath away, you’ve been desensitized on purpose.

Because here’s the thing: even if every single allegation against Trump somehow fails a criminal standard, no indictment, no conviction, the ethical bar is much lower than “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The question is not “can a jury be convinced?” The question is, “Is this someone we trust with enormous power over other people’s lives?”

And instead of trusting us with the full picture, his administration locked themselves in the Situation Room to make sure we didn’t see it.

The Situation Room as reputation shield

According to the reporting, Trump was furious about the Epstein files, but not in the way you might hope. He wasn’t angry that the justice system had failed survivors for decades. He wasn’t demanding that every last page be released so Americans could see exactly who did what.

He was angry that the files existed at all and that his name appeared in them.

So his top advisers did what they do best: they turned a moral crisis into a messaging problem. They gathered in repeated Situation Room meetings, without him, because even they understood his presence would make everything worse, and workshopped how to contain the damage.

Think about the symbolism here.

The room designed for nuclear crises, terrorist attacks, and real national emergencies was used as a staging area for helping a president manage the optics of being associated with a convicted sex trafficker.

They didn’t ask, “How fast can we release these documents so the public knows what we know?”
They asked, “How do we release just enough that we can claim transparency, without giving his critics ammunition or confirming his base’s worst suspicions?”

The priorities are crystal clear: protect the man, not the public.

Withholding the evidence from the people who hired him

Let’s talk about those files.

We know the Justice Department is sitting on millions of pages of Epstein‑related documents. We know they have been releasing them in carefully managed batches, heavily redacted, with timing and framing that seem designed to get ahead of public outrage rather than answer it.

Some of those documents include references to Donald Trump. Others involve powerful figures across government, finance, and media. The pattern is depressingly familiar: slow‑walk the releases, black out names, insist there’s “nothing to see here,” and hope we move on.

But in a democracy, that’s not their call.

If the person at the top of the executive branch appears in records tied to an industrial‑scale operation of sexual exploitation, that is no longer “internal DOJ business.” That is an urgent question for the electorate. We’re the boss. We’re the ones who are supposed to decide if we’re comfortable with a man in those files keeping his hands on the levers of power.

Instead, we’re being treated like children who can’t handle the truth.
Instead, the people whose reputations are on the line get meetings in the most secure room in the country, and we get press releases.

I don’t know how else to say this: if the evidence exonerates him, show us. If it doesn’t, why on earth should he remain president?

Normalizing the grotesque

One of the most effective tools of authoritarian politics is fatigue.

If you flood people with scandal after scandal, eventually they lose the ability to distinguish between “garden‑variety corruption” and “this should end careers.” Everything blurs into “oh, that’s just Trump being Trump.” The goal is to get you to a place where even the words “president” and “Epstein files” in the same sentence barely register.

But we cannot afford to normalize this.

We are talking about:

• A president repeatedly named in sex‑crime files.

• Survivors whose experiences are being redacted out of public view to protect the powerful.

• A political operation that uses the Situation Room not to defend the vulnerable, but to defend the boss from accountability.

If we shrug and move on, we are saying, out loud, that this is an acceptable standard for the highest office in the land. We are saying that proximity to a serial abuser of girls is not disqualifying, as long as you have the right lawyers, the right spin, and the right allies inside the national security apparatus.

That should haunt us.

What we do with this

Here’s where I land, and you can decide if you’re with me.

I don’t want another heavily redacted PDF. I don’t want another solemn DOJ statement telling me “this has all been looked at.” I want full, unvarnished disclosure of every Epstein‑related file that mentions Donald Trump or any other senior official, with redactions limited to what’s absolutely necessary to protect survivors’ identities—not reputations in power suits.

I want Congress using its oversight power like it means something, not treating this as radioactive because it might upset the base. I want journalists and watchdogs to stop letting the administration set the pace of disclosure.

Most of all, I want us to stop gaslighting ourselves into thinking this is just how politics works now.

If the Situation Room has to be used, it should be used to protect children and democracy, not to protect a president from the truth about who he kept company with.

And if we look at the full record and decide we’re somehow still okay with that man in the Oval Office?

At least then it will be our decision.

Not the decision of the people hiding in the Situation Room.

While you were trying to live your life and maybe not doomscroll 24/7, Washington pulled one of those moves that makes you question whether “consent of the governed” is still anything more than a slogan on a civics worksheet.

In the span of a few days, two stories broke that should not exist in the same reality, let alone the same defense bill:

1. The Pentagon quietly raised its assessment of Israeli spying on the United States to the highest threat level.

2. A House committee quietly advanced a plan to more deeply integrate the U.S. and Israeli militaries, without a recorded vote and without a single citizen getting any say at all.

If that makes your head spin, good. It should.

The Ally We Call a Spy

Let’s start with the headline almost no one will see on the evening news.

In recent weeks, U.S. defense officials raised the counterintelligence threat level for Israeli espionage on U.S. soil to “critical,” the highest category in the system used by the Pentagon and intelligence agencies to track how aggressively other states are trying to spy on us. “Critical” is not for friendly misunderstandings. It’s the label you put on governments you believe are actively and aggressively trying to penetrate your most sensitive conversations.

Why the upgrade? Reporting says there are growing concerns that Israeli intelligence has ramped up efforts to spy on senior U.S. officials and to get inside internal U.S. deliberations, especially around the wars and crises roiling the Middle East right now. In plain English: while our government debates what to do, one of our closest allies is being treated by our own security apparatus as a serious spy threat trying to listen in.

Publicly, of course, it’s all smiles and statements about “unbreakable bonds.” Israeli and U.S. officials are denying the allegations or brushing them off as overblown. Privately, the people tasked with keeping our secrets safe are telling each other something very different.

This is the backdrop. Now look at what Congress just did.

The Provision You Never Got to Vote On

Every year, Congress passes a colossal bill called the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). It’s hundreds or thousands of pages, sets defense policy, and authorizes an eye‑watering amount of money. It’s also treated in Washington as basically “too big to fail”, which makes it the perfect place to hide things you don’t want the public to notice.

This year’s House version of the NDAA includes a little section with a very boring name:

Section 224 – United States–Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.

Sounds harmless, right? “Cooperation,” “technology,” “initiative.” Bureaucratic chamomile tea.

But read what it actually does.

Section 224 orders the Secretary of Defense to designate a single “executive agent” to oversee U.S.–Israel defense cooperation. That person’s job is to knit together the two militaries by coordinating:

• Joint research and development

• Co‑production of weapons systems and components

• Industrial collaboration across the defense sector

• “Network integration” and “data fusion” between U.S. and Israeli systems, especially in areas like AI, drones, missile defense, cyber, quantum, and advanced surveillance technologies

Strip away the jargon, and it’s this: Section 224 builds the plumbing to wire our military’s tech stack, weapons supply chains, and data streams more deeply into Israel’s, at exactly the moment our own Pentagon is treating Israel as a top‑level spying threat.

If you were designing a system to make sure another government could get close to your most sensitive capabilities and communications, this is one way you’d do it.

How They Did It Without You

Now comes my favorite part (and by “favorite,” I mean the part that makes my blood pressure spike): how this moved.

You did not get a vote on Section 224. You didn’t even get to see your representative’s vote.

Here’s why:

• Section 224 wasn’t a stand‑alone bill. It was dropped into the chairman’s mark—the base text of the NDAA drafted by House Armed Services Committee leadership before the public ever gets a look.

• During the committee’s markup, Congressman Ro Khanna offered an amendment to strike Section 224 because of exactly what we’re talking about: the deep, structural integration with Israel’s military at a moment of massive public concern and opposition.

• That amendment did not get a recorded roll‑call vote. Instead, the committee handled it with a voice vote: members say “aye” or “no,” the chair decides which side sounds louder, bang goes the gavel. No list of who voted which way. No paper trail. No accountability.

So when Section 224 survived, it survived without producing a single line that says, “Here is how your representative voted on fusing U.S. and Israeli defense technology.” You can’t hold them accountable for a vote you’re not allowed to see.

This is not an accident. It’s a feature. This is how you move controversial, far‑reaching decisions in a town that still wants to pretend it believes in democracy while doing as much as possible in the shadows.

“Cooperation” in the Age of Critical Threat

Let’s pause and appreciate the absurdity here.

On one side of the house, the security state is quietly saying:

Treat this government as a critical spying threat. Protect our internal deliberations. Be careful what you say and where you say it.

On the other side, the legislature is quietly saying:

Let’s create an office whose job is to integrate our weapons, our industrial base, and our data networks with that same government, and let’s do it without public debate or a recorded vote.

Imagine your bank sending you an alert that your neighbor is a “critical burglary threat” and then, the same week, announcing a program to give that neighbor a spare key to your house and access to your security system because “we’re working together more closely now.” That’s the basic logic of what’s happening here.

And remember: this is on top of everything else about U.S.–Israel relations, the blank‑check rhetoric, the weapons transfers, the diplomatic cover, happening while public support for unconditional backing of Israel’s current government is eroding. When people are in the streets, the instinct in Washington hasn’t been to listen. It’s been to lock the policy in deeper.

The Process Is the Point

You’ve heard me say this before on Politically POMP: democracies rarely die with one dramatic coup. They die by a thousand “procedural” cuts.

Section 224 is one of those cuts.

• It hides a big, values‑loaded decision, how deeply to fuse our military with another state’s, inside a giant, must‑pass bill.

• It shields members from having to go on the record by using a voice vote instead of a roll‑call.

• It assumes you won’t have the time or energy to dig through section numbers and acronyms to figure out what just happened.

Same story with that Pentagon move on religious affiliation codes: shaving the list from over 200 down to 31 in a way that heavily favors Christian denominations and erases a huge number of minority and non‑theistic identities into “Other” or “No Religion,” all under the soothing label of “streamlining.”

In each case, we are told this is just about efficiency, modernization, cooperation. In each case, the effect is to narrow who counts and deepen the power of institutions that answer to each other more than they answer to us.

The pattern is the story.

“But We’re Allies”

Some people will read this and shrug: “We already share intel. We already coordinate. What’s the big deal?”

Here’s the big deal:

• Integration is not the same thing as cooperation. You can cooperate with another military and still maintain meaningful lines, controls, and safeguards. Full “network integration” and “data fusion” are something else entirely; they’re about building systems in which disentangling later becomes nearly impossible without massive disruption.

• Threat assessment matters. If your own counterintelligence professionals are saying this country is behaving like a top‑tier spy risk, the minimum standard for democratic sanity is that any plan to wire your systems together with theirs gets a loud, public, fully recorded debate. Instead, we got a voice vote in committee.

• Public consent is not optional in a democracy. You cannot keep telling citizens “we’re a government of, by, and for the people” while moving decisions of this scale in a way that deliberately avoids letting those people see who chose what.

If our leaders truly believe that Section 224 is the right thing to do, they should have no problem arguing for it openly and putting their names next to their votes. The fact that they didn’t tells you everything you need to know.

What We Can Still Do

Here’s the good news: this story isn’t over yet. The NDAA still has to go through the full House, the Senate, and then a reconciliation process before a final version lands on the president’s desk. Section 224 is in play now, which means this is the moment to raise hell, not six months from now when it’s baked into law and everyone shrugs and says, “Well, that’s already done.”

If you’re reading this and feeling the same mix of anger and exhaustion I am, here are some concrete things you can do:

• Call and email your House member and both Senators. Ask one specific question:

“Will you commit to opposing Section 224 of the NDAA and supporting efforts to strip it from the final bill?”
If they don’t know what it is, send them this piece. Make them learn.

• Demand a recorded vote. Tell their offices that voice votes on something this consequential are unacceptable. You have a right to know where your representative stands.

• Talk about it publicly. Share this, write your own post, bring it up at local meetings, call into radio shows. The only reason this kind of thing works is because most people never hear about it.

• Support watchdogs and organizers. There are groups tracking U.S.–Israel policy, civil liberties, and militarization who are already sounding the alarm about Section 224. Follow them, amplify them, help them do the nerdy, unglamorous work of reading every line of these bills.

Washington banks on our fatigue. It banks on us seeing “Section 224 of the NDAA” and hearing white noise. It banks on us believing the story is too complicated, too foreign‑policy‑ish, too far away from our daily lives to bother with.

But here’s the truth: when your government can quietly deepen military integration with a state it is simultaneously labeling a critical spy threat, without your consent, without your knowledge, and without even recording who voted yes, that’s not a foreign policy footnote. That’s a stress test of whether we still live in a functioning democracy.

We didn’t get a vote on any of this.

So the least we can do is refuse to be quiet about it.

The First Pride Was a Riot. That Still Matters.

Every June, my feeds fill up with rainbow logos, limited‑edition Pride merch, and politicians who remember queer people exist… for about thirty days. Meanwhile, a lot of those same institutions are backing policies that make queer and trans life smaller, scarier, and more policed.

So before we dive into a month of corporate‑washed “love is love” posts, I want to start somewhere less comfortable and more honest: Pride began as a riot against police brutality and criminalization. It was led by people who were tired of being arrested, beaten, and humiliated for existing in public.

That origin story matters for how we think about Pride in 2026, especially if we say we care about justice, faith, and how power actually works.

Before the Parades: Queer Resistance Didn’t Start in 1969

Stonewall is often framed as the “beginning” of queer resistance, but people were organizing long before a brick ever flew in New York.

In the 1950s and 60s, homophile organizations like the Mattachine Society and others were quietly challenging police harassment and discriminatory laws. Activists held “Reminder Day” pickets every July 4 outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia, dressed in suits and dresses, asking the most basic question: does “liberty and justice for all” apply to us too?

If you zoom out even further, you find people like William Dorsey Swann, a formerly enslaved Black man who, in the 1880s and 1890s, organized drag balls in Washington, D.C., resisted police raids, and called himself a “queen of drag” while fighting for the right to gather and dress as they chose. Swann and his community were raided, arrested, surveilled, and they pushed back anyway.

Queer and trans people have been negotiating with, hiding from, and resisting state power for a very long time. Stonewall was a flashpoint in a much older story.

Stonewall: When People Finally Fought Back

On June 28, 1969, just after midnight, New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, using “masquerade” and cross‑dressing laws as justification. These laws said your clothing had to match the gender on your ID, a convenient excuse to target trans and gender‑nonconforming people.

That night, something was different. Instead of quietly submitting to another humiliating raid, patrons and bystanders resisted. The confrontation turned into several nights of uprising in and around Christopher Street, with queer and trans people, many of them homeless, poor, and people of color, fighting back against police violence.

Those six days didn’t come out of nowhere; they came out of years of harassment and organizing. But they did something new: they made queer resistance visible, loud, and unignorable in a way the country hadn’t seen.

From Riot to March to Month

A year later, on June 28, 1970, activists didn’t just hold a memorial service and go home. They organized the Christopher Street Liberation Day March in New York City, alongside similar marches in Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities, to mark the anniversary of Stonewall. Thousands of people marched, chanted, and claimed space, not in suits and pearls, but in a much less “respectable,” much more liberated way.

A bisexual activist named Brenda Howard was central in turning that one‑year remembrance into something bigger. She helped coordinate the first Pride march and came up with the idea of a whole week of events around it, what would eventually become the Pride celebrations we know today. Howard, along with other activists such as Robert A. Martin and L. Craig Schoonmaker, helped popularize the word “Pride” for these gatherings, insisting on a shift from shame to dignity.

Fast‑forward a few decades: these marches spread around the world, becoming annual fixtures in city calendars. In the U.S., June was first officially recognized as “Gay and Lesbian Pride Month” by President Bill Clinton in 1999 and 2000, and later as LGBT Pride Month under President Barack Obama. That arc, from illegal bar raid to presidential proclamation, is not just cultural. It’s legal and political.

Pride Has Always Been About Law and Power

Because we’re not just talking about parades here. We’re talking about who the law protects, who it punishes, and who it pretends not to see.

Take Harvey Milk. In 1977, he became one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He helped pass a local ordinance banning anti‑gay discrimination in housing and employment, proof that when queer people gain access to office, they can write protections into law, not just plead for mercy from the outside.

Milk also helped defeat California’s Proposition 6, which would have banned gay and lesbian people from teaching in public schools and required firing anyone who supported them. That’s Pride in action: not just marching, but blocking legislation designed to erase queer people from public life.

Fast‑forward again and you see openly LGBTQ+ leaders occupying statewide and national power: governors like Maura Healey in Massachusetts, Tina Kotek in Oregon, and Jared Polis in Colorado are part of a generation of officials who don’t just lobby from the sidelines; they sign bills, veto attacks, and shape budgets. Representation is not a magic spell, but it absolutely changes the conversations happening inside statehouses and governor’s mansions.

In the courts, the story continues. Over the last few decades we’ve seen:

• Decisions striking down parts of the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor (2013).

• Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), where the Supreme Court recognized same‑sex marriage nationwide.

• Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), where the Court held that firing someone for being gay or transgender is a form of sex discrimination under federal employment law.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was part of the majority in key cases that extended constitutional protections against gender and sexuality‑based discrimination, continuing her lifelong project of expanding who “equal protection” actually covers. These are not abstract wins; they change who can be jailed, who can be fired, who can marry, and who is treated as fully human on paper.

Pride, in other words, is not separate from policy. It is one front in a long struggle over law.

2026: Pride in a Backlash Year

All of this brings us to now. Pride has never existed without backlash. The raids didn’t stop when the first parade was held. The AIDS crisis brought a tidal wave of stigma and neglect. Moral panics have cycled through “groomers,” bathrooms, books, pronouns, and sports, often with Christian language wrapped around them for legitimacy.

Today, queer and especially trans people are facing a fresh wave of bills around the country targeting health care, school curricula, bathroom access, drag performances, and basic public participation. Many of the loudest champions of these laws claim to be “protecting children” or “defending religious freedom,” even as the policies themselves increase vulnerability, isolation, and state control over people’s bodies and families.

Which is why I keep coming back to this: the first Pride was not a corporate campaign. It was an uprising against police and legal systems that made queer life a crime. It was poor, working‑class, Black and brown, trans and gender‑nonconforming people saying, “enough.”

If we want to honor that history in 2026, we can’t stop at rainbows in June and silence when the legislative session comes back into swing.

What I’m Doing Here This Month

On this Substack, my lane is pulling the camera back: looking at systems, power, and the human beings caught in between. So for Pride Month, here’s what you can expect from me:

• Short dives into key moments in queer and trans history that still shape our politics.

• Breakdowns of current legislation and court cases—what they actually say, who wrote them, and who they harm or protect.

• Reflections on faith, deconstruction, and what it means to show up for queer and trans neighbors in a time when “religious liberty” is often weaponized against them.

If you’ve ever asked, “Why do we still need Pride?” or “Isn’t this just a party now?”, this series is for you. My hope is that by the end of this month, Pride will look less like a seasonal aesthetic and more like what it has always been at its core: a demand for safety, dignity, and power for people who have been told, over and over again, to disappear.

And if you’re queer or trans and reading this: you’re not an “issue.” You’re not a debate topic. You are the reason any of this exists at all.

I’m glad you’re here.

Anytime I hear a politician say they are “pro‑life,” my whole body tenses. I already know what’s coming next. They’re about to tell me they’re against abortion, and for them, that’s where the conversation about life starts and ends. Not once do they follow it up with, “and that’s why I’m fighting for healthcare, or a living wage, or paid time to recover from birth.” It’s always the same narrow script: control the pregnancy, control the body, full stop.

What makes me craziest is how casually we’ve all learned to accept that. “Pro‑life” has become this magic label people can slap on themselves to sound moral and compassionate, even as they back policies that make actual living harder and more dangerous. We’ve let a marketing slogan stand in for a serious moral position, and we’ve let people hide inside that slogan while they vote, over and over again, against the things that keep families and kids alive.

That’s the gap I want to sit with for a minute, the gap between the PR version of “pro‑life” and the actual policies that come attached to it. Because once you start lining those up side by side, it gets very hard to pretend this is about cherishing life at all.

This isn’t pro‑life. It’s pro‑control.

If this were actually about life, you’d see it in every other policy they back. You wouldn’t watch the same people who brag about being pro‑life turn around and vote to defund healthcare, slash food assistance, and starve housing programs that literally keep families alive. You wouldn’t see them block increases to the minimum wage, shrug at the cost of childcare, and ignore postpartum support like it’s some kind of luxury instead of basic survival. You wouldn’t see a movement that screams about babies in the womb and then fights against paid parental leave, or even meaningful unpaid leave, once those babies are here and need care. That’s not a culture of life. That’s a culture of forced birth, and then you’re on your own.

What really drives this home for me are the people who say, “I won’t vote for a politician if they aren’t pro‑life,” and every single time, what they mean is: anti‑abortion. They rarely, if ever, mean, “I won’t vote for someone who opposes food assistance, or who wants to cut healthcare, or who doesn’t care if mothers are pushed back to work two weeks after a C‑section.” Their moral test begins and ends with whether a politician will use the power of the state to control pregnant bodies. That’s the axis everything spins on. And I’m tired of pretending this is about some noble love of life when the actual record is a long list of ways to make living harder, sicker, poorer, and more precarious for the people they claim to protect.

What a truly pro‑life agenda would actually look like

If you really care about life, your politics has to stretch further than the inside of a uterus. A genuinely pro‑life agenda would start with the basics: making sure people can see a doctor, afford to eat, safely give birth, and not be forced into medical decisions by politicians who have never once sat in that exam room. It would care about the pregnant person, the baby, and the family long after the campaign ad is over.

For me, that starts with universal healthcare. Call it Medicare for All, call it single‑payer, call it whatever you want, but if you are willing to let people avoid the doctor because they’re afraid of a bill, you are not pro‑life. Universal healthcare means prenatal care that catches complications early. It means mental health support when pregnancy or birth cracks someone open. It means not having to choose between seeing an OB and keeping the lights on. If your “pro‑life” worldview accepts medical bankruptcy as the cost of having a child, it’s not about life. It’s about maintaining a system where suffering is a feature, not a bug.

A pro‑life agenda would also insist on a livable wage. It’s not pro‑life to demand people bring children into a world where working full‑time still leaves you standing in line at the food bank. If parents are stuck in impossible math: rent or groceries, childcare or car payment, that is not a culture that honors life; it’s a culture that grinds people down and then blames them for being tired. A livable wage doesn’t just “help the poor.” It actually eases the pressure on programs like SNAP and welfare by giving families enough breathing room instead of constantly drowning. If you won’t fight for wages people can live on, don’t lecture them about being not being “open to life.”

Then there’s postpartum care, which our system treats like an optional add‑on, if it thinks of it at all. A truly pro‑life country would not send someone home with a newborn and a stitched‑up body and then disappear. It would guarantee follow‑up care, pelvic floor therapy, depression and anxiety screening, paid time to heal and bond, and real support for non‑birthing parents too. It wouldn’t expect someone to be back at work in two weeks, bleeding through their clothes and pretending they’re fine because their boss doesn’t believe in “special treatment.”

And yes, a truly pro‑life agenda would include safe, legal abortion access. Because if we agree there is an ethics to medical care, then we should be able to agree that no ethical doctor performs procedures that harm their patients. Decisions about whether to continue a pregnancy, especially when there are complications, violence, or sheer exhaustion in the background, belong between a patient and their doctor, not on the floor of a state legislature. Protecting that space is pro‑life, because it says: your life, your health, your future, your trauma story all matter more than a politician’s need to feel righteous.

So, when I hear someone say “pro‑life,” this is what I think of. I think of the woman who skips prenatal appointments because the copay is too high. I think of the teenager forced to carry the pregnancy of her abuser. I think of the parent working two jobs and still choosing between formula and rent. I think of the person in the recovery room after an abortion or a miscarriage, wondering if they’re going to be judged more harshly by their church than by their doctor. A politics that is truly pro‑life would be built to catch all of them. Anything less is just pro‑control dressed up in Sunday language.

Where I’m going next

The thing is, none of this language exists in a vacuum. “Pro‑life” didn’t just appear out of thin air; it was built, polished, and preached until it felt holier than it actually is. Politicians didn’t come up with this branding on their own. They had a lot of help from pastors, media personalities, and entire church cultures that taught people to reduce a whole moral universe down to a single checkbox on abortion.

This is where I want to go next. Because if we’re going to stop letting “pro‑life” be a free pass for pro‑control politics, we also have to talk honestly about the pulpits, Bible studies, and Christian talking points that keep this hypocrisy alive. In my next piece, I want to look at how those messages were shaped, how they’ve been used to keep people in line, and what it might look like to finally say: I’m done calling this faith, and I’m done calling this pro‑life.

Let this be said as plainly as possible: it is not antisemitic to criticize the policies of the modern State of Israel, to object to the mass suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, to question why U.S. politicians take money from AIPAC, or to refuse the idea that Christian faith requires blind loyalty to a nation-state. Antisemitism is hostility, prejudice, discrimination, or violence directed at Jews as Jews; that is categorically different from opposing the actions of a government, its military campaign, or the political machinery that protects it.

That distinction matters because it has been deliberately blurred. In American political discourse, and especially in large parts of white evangelical culture, criticism of Israeli state violence is often recast as hatred of Jewish people. That rhetorical move does two things at once: it shields power from accountability, and it pressures Christians into treating modern Israel as if it were beyond moral scrutiny.

This essay argues for a more honest framework. Jewish people and Judaism are not the same thing as the modern Israeli government. Biblical Israel is not the same thing as the contemporary nation-state. And Christian faithfulness does not require underwriting war, occupation, or civilian suffering simply because powerful pastors, lobbyists, and politicians say it does.

What antisemitism is, and is not

The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism defines antisemitism as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).”​ That baseline is important because it keeps the focus where it belongs: on real anti-Jewish hatred, not on whether someone supports the current policies of the Israeli state.

The declaration also exists because public debate has repeatedly collapsed distinct issues into one category. Criticism of Israel, opposition to Zionism, advocacy for Palestinian rights, and objections to military occupation have all been treated in some spaces as presumptively antisemitic, even when the argument being made is about state policy, international law, or human rights. Palestinian civil society critiques of these frameworks have argued that this conflation narrows political speech and suppresses advocacy for Palestinian liberation while doing little to clarify or combat genuine antisemitism.​

That does not mean every criticism of Israel is automatically clean, fair, or free of bias. It does mean a basic moral and intellectual distinction has to be preserved: saying “Jews are evil” is antisemitism; saying “a government is committing atrocities and should be opposed” is political and ethical criticism. If that distinction is lost, then the term antisemitism stops functioning as a tool against hatred and starts functioning as a shield for power.

The three things that keep getting confused

One of the clearest ways to cut through the noise is to name three separate categories that are constantly collapsed into each other.

First, there are Jewish people and Judaism: a people and a religious tradition with immense internal diversity, including a wide range of political views on Israel and Palestine. Second, there is biblical Israel, the Israel of Scripture and ancient history, which is often invoked in evangelical teaching as though it maps directly onto modern geopolitics. Third, there is the modern State of Israel, a contemporary nation-state with borders, military institutions, elected officials, alliances, and policies that can be evaluated like those of any other government.

These categories are not interchangeable. To defend Jewish neighbors from antisemitism is not the same thing as endorsing every action of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. To care about the Hebrew Bible is not the same thing as turning a modern military state into a sacramental object. And to reject the bombing, siege, and displacement of Palestinians is not to reject Jewish existence or Jewish safety.

That distinction is exactly what much of American discourse tries to erase. When someone says “Israel” and means a present-day government, critics are often answered as though they had condemned an entire people or faith. That confusion is politically useful, but it is morally corrosive.

AIPAC and the machinery of political capture

AIPAC exists to strengthen U.S.-Israel relations and to keep American political support for Israel durable and bipartisan. Whatever language is used around friendship, shared values, or strategic alliance, the practical effect is straightforward: politicians are rewarded for aligning with pro-Israel priorities, and critics of unconditional support face organized political pressure.​

That is why it is entirely legitimate to ask what happens when elected officials take money from AIPAC-aligned networks and then consistently support military aid, diplomatic cover, and political narratives that protect Israeli state violence from consequence.​​ Asking that question is not ethnic hostility. It is the ordinary work of democratic accountability.

The same standard is applied to every other power center in Washington. Citizens track fossil-fuel money when lawmakers weaken climate policy, pharmaceutical money when lawmakers protect drug pricing, and gun-lobby money when lawmakers block reform. AIPAC should not be granted a sacred exemption from the same scrutiny simply because accusations of antisemitism can be deployed as a deterrent.​​

None of this requires conspiracy language or collective blame. It requires clarity. A lobby is a lobby. Campaign pressure is campaign pressure. If U.S. tax dollars are being routed toward policies that deepen war and civilian suffering, then voters have every right to object to the political organizations helping sustain that outcome.

Gaza, Netanyahu, and the language of war crimes

The charge that Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal is not merely rhetorical outrage. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity connected to the situation in Gaza. The allegations referenced by the court include starvation as a method of warfare and other inhumane acts directed against civilians.

That matters because it places the debate in the realm of international law rather than partisan branding. Calling Netanyahu a war criminal is not a slur against Jewish people; it is a description grounded in the actions of an international legal body examining the conduct of state leaders. People may debate the court, its jurisdiction, or the political implications of its decisions, but they cannot honestly say that the language came from nowhere.

For U.S. Christians and taxpayers, this creates a direct moral question. If an allied government is credibly accused of starvation, collective punishment, or crimes against humanity, what does loyalty require? Silence is not moral seriousness. Unconditional support is not peacemaking. Refusing to subsidize or spiritually sanitize those acts is not antisemitism; it is an insistence that no state should be beyond ethical judgment.

How evangelical theology got hijacked

The American evangelical attachment to Israel did not emerge in a vacuum. Christian Zionism has long taught that the modern State of Israel plays a unique role in biblical prophecy and that Christians therefore have a special obligation to support it. In many churches, this teaching is linked to Genesis 12:3 and end-times frameworks that interpret modern geopolitics through prophetic charts, dispensational assumptions, and national-blessing formulas.

The result is a theology in which criticism of Israel is treated as rebellion against God. To question military aid becomes “cursing Israel.” To grieve Palestinian death becomes evidence of deception or weak faith. To ask whether a state should be judged by the same moral standards as everyone else becomes, somehow, a sign that biblical truth is under attack.​

This is where theology stops being discipleship and starts functioning as ideological enforcement. Large segments of white evangelical culture have effectively baptized a foreign-policy agenda, discipling believers to think of modern Israel as morally untouchable and politically exempt from the standards they would apply to any other nation.​ That framework has trained Christians to confuse fidelity to Jesus with fidelity to a flag.

But Christian faith does not require the worship of state power. It does not demand indifference to Palestinian suffering. It does not teach that bombs become righteous when the right nation drops them. When evangelical theology is used to anesthetize conscience and suspend moral judgment, something deeper than foreign policy has gone wrong.

Blessing people is not the same as blessing policy

A central problem in this discourse is the way the phrase “bless Israel” has been flattened. In many evangelical spaces, that phrase is treated as a permanent command to support the policies of the modern Israeli state, no matter what those policies are. But blessing a people is not the same as endorsing a government’s military choices, settlement expansion, siege tactics, or treatment of civilians.

The moral absurdity becomes obvious when stated plainly. No Christian would say loving Americans requires approving every drone strike, every prison abuse scandal, or every unjust war the U.S. has waged. No serious theology should claim that blessing Jewish people requires silence about starvation, displacement, or mass death in Gaza.

To support Jewish safety is good. To oppose antisemitism is necessary. To insist that Jewish life has dignity and worth is nonnegotiable. But none of those commitments obligate anyone to excuse state violence, nor do they require believers to funnel their theology into the service of militarism.

Holding the tension honestly

A morally serious position has room for more than one truth at a time. Antisemitism is real and dangerous, and Jewish communities have endured centuries of persecution, expulsion, exclusion, and violence. That history must never be minimized, denied, or weaponized against Jewish people in the present.​

It is also true that Palestinians are living under extraordinary levels of violence, dispossession, and political erasure, and that efforts to name this reality are often met with deliberate bad-faith accusations. It is possible to reject antisemitic tropes, synagogue attacks, and anti-Jewish hatred while also condemning occupation, siege, apartheid-like structures, and collective punishment.

That is the tension many people are trying to hold right now, especially Christians emerging from systems that taught them a shallow and politicized theology of Israel. The false binary says there are only two options: bless whatever Israel does, or reveal oneself as an antisemite. That binary is intellectually bankrupt and spiritually manipulative.

A different Christian witness

A healthier Christian witness would begin with a refusal to confuse God with any state. It would refuse to collapse Jewish identity into a government, refuse to turn prophecy into propaganda, and refuse to let lobbying groups dictate the moral imagination of the church. It would care about Jewish safety and Palestinian freedom at the same time because the image of God is not partitioned by ethnicity, nationality, or military alliance.

That witness would also insist that U.S. Christians have a civic responsibility to examine where tax dollars go and whose interests shape policy. If American money helps sustain war, blockade, starvation, or impunity, then Christians do not become faithful by looking away. They become complicit by baptizing it.

The task, then, is not blind support. It is moral clarity. It is the courage to say that antisemitism is evil, that Jewish people must be protected, that Palestinians are fully human, and that no government should be shielded from criticism by wrapping itself in sacred language.

Closing

The pressure to choose between opposing antisemitism and opposing Israeli state violence is a manufactured pressure. That false choice serves political power, not truth. Criticizing AIPAC, condemning the devastation of Gaza, naming Netanyahu’s alleged crimes, and rejecting the evangelical demand for blind loyalty to Israel are not acts of anti-Jewish hatred. They are acts of political, moral, and theological discernment.

What deserves rejection is the theology that tells Christians to suspend conscience, the politics that equate money with righteousness, and the discourse that treats Palestinian suffering as invisible whenever it becomes inconvenient. A faith worth keeping must be able to tell the difference between loving a people and excusing a state. It must be able to resist antisemitism without sanctifying militarism. And it must be able to say, clearly and without apology, that no one gets to hijack the gospel in defense of war.

A lot of us wake up on Memorial Day thinking about plans.
The extra day off. The drive to the lake. The grill that’s finally coming out of hibernation. The inbox quietly filling with “Memorial Day Sale!” in all caps.

What most of us don’t wake up thinking about is a dusty racetrack in Charleston, South Carolina, in the spring of 1865, just weeks after the Civil War ended, where newly freed Black people were digging into the earth to pull strangers out of a mass grave.

I keep coming back to that image this morning.

A racetrack turned graveyard

The Washington Race Course used to be a playground for the wealthy, an elite track where Charleston’s planter class came to watch horses run and bet on whose animal would bring in the most glory. During the war, Confederate forces turned that same space into an open‑air prison for captured Union soldiers.

Some of those men never made it home.
They died inside that racetrack, and their bodies were shoveled into a trench, a mass grave dug not out of reverence, but out of convenience.

When the war ended and the Confederates fled, they left that trench behind.
What they did not expect was that the people they had once enslaved would decide that those anonymous Union dead deserved names, dignity, and flowers.

Freed people, sacred work

On May 1, 1865, formerly enslaved Black Charlestonians walked back onto that racetrack with a different mission. They were no longer property. They were no longer legally owned. And they chose to spend their new freedom digging.

They exhumed the bodies from the mass grave.
They reburied about 257 Union soldiers in individual graves, each one given its own place in the earth. They built a simple fence around the new cemetery, a fragile wooden boundary that said, “This ground is holy now.”

Above the entrance, they hung a sign with a phrase that still hits like a drumbeat:
“Martyrs of the Race Course.”

I imagine the care in those hands.
Hands that had tied rope, picked cotton, scrubbed floors. Hands that now nailed boards into a fence that was not for their masters’ horses, but for their own dead and for the dead of the army that had helped crack slavery open.

A procession of ten thousand

And then they did something even more radical: they filled that space with song.

On that new cemetery ground, an estimated 10,000 people, mostly Black Charlestonians, gathered. About 3,000 schoolchildren carried flowers and walked in a procession around the track, singing and scattering petals over the graves.

Think about that:
Children who might have been born into bondage now walking freely, arms full of blossoms, honoring soldiers they never met.
Women and men who had been whipped, sold, and starved now standing in the open air, listening to speeches and prayers, claiming the right to mourn publicly.

They held a full ceremony, sermons, prayers, hymns, and a picnic afterward. They did what Black communities have always done: turned grief into ritual, into gathering, into a declaration that these lives, these bodies, these stories matter.

They decorated the graves with flowers.

Decoration Day.

The version we were handed

If you grew up, like I did, learning that Memorial Day began in 1868 when a Union general named John A. Logan called for a national day to decorate soldiers’ graves, that story isn’t entirely wrong. But it is incomplete.

Logan’s order standardized a date, May 30, and gave white America a formal, national ritual they were ready to acknowledge. In the years that followed, different towns competed to claim the title “birthplace of Memorial Day,” each telling its own version of where the holiday truly began.

Somewhere in that contest, Charleston’s Black freedpeople, those who turned a Confederate racetrack into a cemetery and staged a ten‑thousand‑person ceremony, fell out of the official story. Their Decoration Day became a footnote, then an omission.

It took historians, digging through archives and diaries more than a century later, to bring the story back into the light.

What it means to remember

I keep thinking about the difference between memory that’s convenient and memory that’s true.

Convenient memory lets us skip straight to the barbecue.
It gives us a long weekend, a flag, a vague sense that “people died for our freedom,” and not much else.
True memory is messier. It requires us to admit that the people who did the earliest work of honoring the Union dead were Black, formerly enslaved, and very aware of what that sacrifice meant for their own lives.

On that first Decoration Day in Charleston, the line between “we are free” and “we remember” was not abstract.
They were honoring those who had fought and died in a war that cracked open the possibility of their own freedom.
They were also asserting something more: that they had the right to define sacred space, to name martyrs, to claim public rituals in a country that had just finished waging war over whether they were fully human.

That’s a different kind of patriotism than the one that shows up in commercials.
It’s not cheap. It’s not tidy.

From Charleston to every cemetery

Over the decades, Decoration Day widened. What began with Civil War dead grew to include Americans lost in World War I and II, Korea, Vietnam, and every conflict since. The name shifted from Decoration Day to Memorial Day, and the date eventually moved to the last Monday in May. But the core ritual, the act of going to a grave, saying a name, leaving a flower, never really changed.

Today, families stand on hot grass at national cemeteries and small-town plots alike, reading names etched into white stone. Some carry folded flags home, or sit in traffic trying to get to the one place their loved one’s name is carved in granite. Others light candles at kitchen tables because there’s no headstone nearby. For them, this is not just a “three‑day weekend”; it’s the day their loss is finally centered.

When I think about those Black Charlestonians at the racetrack, I don’t see their story as separate from these families; I see it as the root system. They were some of the first to say, in public, that the dead of war deserve remembrance, dignity, and ritual. Every wreath laid at Arlington, every flag planted on a grave, every quiet moment at 3 p.m. during the National Moment of Remembrance carries a little echo of that first insistence: these lives will not vanish into a trench.

Before and beside the barbecue

So as I sit here on Memorial Day, scrolling past photos of coolers and boat launches, my mind is in two places at once.
It’s on that racetrack in Charleston, where freed people dug into the earth to pull strangers out of a mass grave and renamed the ground itself. And it’s on every fresh headstone at Arlington, every older marker in a rural cemetery, every set of initials on a wall that someone will trace with their fingers today.

Before the barbecue, before the traffic, before the sales, there was a Decoration Day made by Black hands. And beside the barbecue, in the middle of the traffic, underneath the sales, there are still people whose hearts live at a gravesite on this Monday in May.

If Memorial Day is going to mean anything worth keeping, maybe it has to hold both truths at once: that Black Charlestonians helped teach this country how to honor its war dead, and that every generation since has added its own names, its own losses, its own flowers to the field.

Today, if you can, make a little space for all of them, the soldiers in that Charleston trench, the ones who fell in later wars, and the families who still carry their absence. Learn a story you weren’t taught. Say a name you do know. Let the day be more than a sale, more than a burger, more even than a flag. Let it be a memory that reaches all the way back to that racetrack, and all the way forward to the people standing at graves right now.

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