“Stardom is not what’s inherently threatening. Combining it with competence is.” - Astead W. Herndon 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

Presenting these amendments as if they arose in a vacuum or had no connection to race, slavery, or white supremacy is an act of historical distortion that sustains misunderstandings and protects the interests of those resistant to confronting the truth.

Here are the little darlings they’ve created. Horrifying.

www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

Remember when you tried to tell us “the younger generations don’t think that way.” And “the young people will save us.” There are a lot of great, humane, decent, bright young people out there. But there are also a lot of these young people. And they’re not going anywhere.

They are who you thought they are, racist shitposters: www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

EXCLUSIVE: Thousands of leaked messages show leaders of Young Republican groups joking about gas chambers, slavery and rape in a private Telegram chat.

Inside rising GOP leaders’ racist chats — obtained by POLITICO and spanning more than 7 months👇

"Courage is resistance to fear."

Me too!

Black folks consistently overperform in political analysis — not because we have access to better data, but because we’ve had more at stake. Project 2025 was OBVIOUS to us because it’s part of a long lineage: COINTELPRO, Reaganomics, the 1994 Crime Bill, voter suppression — we’ve seen this before! 😒

Taraji used a platform where Black voices aren’t filtered & said it plain: Project 2025 is real! That wasn’t a celebrity moment. That was an act of cultural organizing. And it was dismissed by y’all. That’s the cycle: We ring the bell. Folks ignore the fire. Then act surprised when the house burns.

Black folks consistently overperform in political analysis — not because we have access to better data, but because we’ve had more at stake. Project 2025 was OBVIOUS to us because it’s part of a long lineage: COINTELPRO, Reaganomics, the 1994 Crime Bill, voter suppression — we’ve seen this before! 😒

"But was silence not an option?"

“As medical care evaporates, it is moms who die in childbirth. As food disappears and babies cry from hunger, husbands abandon their wives and children. As social order unravels, it is mostly girls who are raped — and when times are desperate, it is girls who are married off against their will.”

Ezra Klein has been rewarded his whole career for this shallow depth, treated as an intellectual heavyweight. 😒 In this moment, we don’t need centrist “what plays well.” —we need voices who understand survival as political, struggle as inherited, and clarity, born of history, as the compass forward.

☝🏾

The contrast exposes how hollow technocratic analysis feels without history, lineage, or the weight of truth. When you’re descended from people whose very survival was political, you don’t have the luxury of detaching values from the conversation.

💯. Ezra Klein treats politics like box scores—tracking “strategy@. What’s missing is moral clarity & lived truth. That’s why he falters next to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who isn’t gaming numbers but carrying ancestral memory & historical struggle. One dissects power from a distance; the other embodies it.

💯. Ezra Klein’s lane is policy mechanics, systems analysis, technocratic breakdowns. Ta-Nehisi Coates operates from a deeper register: ancestral memory, historical lineage, moral clarity.
Flattening those two into the same intellectual plane is embarrassing - they’re not doing the same kind of work.

Ezra frames “going into hostile spaces” as a noble democratic exercise. For Black folks, that’s not just uncomfortable—it’s dangerous. History gives examples of Black ppl beaten, jailed, or killed for existing in “unfriendly” spaces, let alone debating outside a white evangelical church in Alabama.

When Ta-Nehisi says he will make his contribution, he’s standing in a long line of struggle & legacy. He is not alone. Our work is connected to what came before & what will come after. That doesn’t need to be explained or translated. It just needs to be recognized for what it is: ancestral clarity.

A Black Congresswoman was slurred with racist language and there was no consequence. Institutions & leaders who know better are normalizing this climate. We haven’t seen explicit bigotry embraced at this scale since the civil rights era. When racism is rewarded, democracy itself is endangered.

This! 👇🏾

I asked, “Aren’t there risks in presenting these events—so often twisted to downplay or absolve European & American culpability in the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade—right now?”

He said, “Only if I was telling a lie.”

“Black people see things as they are, not as we wish them to be.“

Chef Bailey cooks from the traditions of the Black South, but always through the lens of movement—of crossing borders, of transience, of arrival. The question now: will her intimate, deeply personal expression of Southern Black cuisine speak to Parisians the same way it has spoken to Americans? /n