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WHATEVER TO KEEP THE UNION INTACT
Some scholars would call this American exceptionalism. I call it being lost in the sauce.
Do you care if your neighborhood is your neighborhood? Hold that question, because the whole thing is going to come back to it.
Y’all remember during the 2024 campaign how we were told about the illegals, how if they did it the right way then people would agree with their existence here in this country, how the whole thing was about the rule of law and how everybody in America is expected to not only abide by the law but hold everybody to the same standard of the law. Since then we now have a bunch of data that has come out and shown in more ways than some that a lot of the individuals being swept up in this mass deportation agenda have no criminal record. Not a record, not a charge, nothing. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse put the number at 70.6 percent of everybody sitting in ICE detention as of July 11, 2026 with no criminal conviction at all, and the growth in detention across this fiscal year came almost entirely from people with no conviction and no pending charge. Cato ran the same books and found about 5 percent of detainees with a violent conviction. Five. So the rule of law thing was the sales pitch, and the product was something else.
We also know that during 2024 we were told a lot about jobs, a lot about how immigrant people were taking jobs from Americans, and specifically we were told that Donald Trump cared about Black jobs, because he loved to weaponize and sensationalize how undocumented people were stealing Black jobs uniquely. Then I remember in the first five to six months he was in office that he uniquely went after Black people that had jobs, which quintessentially makes them Black jobs, right? The federal workforce that got gutted was the single most integrated employer in the country, Black folks were close to one in five federal workers against about one in eight of the civilian labor force, and that was the payroll they cut first. We also know there was a lot of anti trans, anti gay, anti drag queen, we got to get these men out of women’s sports, we see a lot of that happen as well.
So here go my question. When we are talking about salmonella or E. coli in your fruit, or you having glass in your IV, do you blame that on the immigrants or the trans people? Do you? I’m curious.
I’m currently in Dallas, Texas. They having some type of Republican National Convention, some type of, you know what I’m saying, something, the first midterm convention the party has ever thrown, two nights at the American Airlines Center, Trump on the mic both nights, and the city fronting close to two million dollars in security money out of a budget that was already thirty million short. I was invited here to Dallas, and since I’ve been here, I only got here last night, I’ve been able to have a lot of political conversations about things that’s going on, not only here in Dallas but in the great state of Texas, and the conservative contradictions that’s going to slap you in the face.
The amount of conservative contradictions is so baffling that sometimes we got to just slow down, take a step back, and really call out what is happening and call out what has been happening. You feel me? Because sometimes the news media goes so fast that we forget. Hey, they said they was doing this mass deportation shit because they wanted to preserve American jobs and they wanted to make sure everybody was abiding by the law. Now we have Epstein files, over three million pages dumped by the Justice Department on January 30, 2026, six weeks after the deadline Congress wrote into the Epstein Files Transparency Act, with roughly two and a half million more pages the Department admits it still holding back, and the Attorney General who sat on them fired in April. People in those files wasn’t abiding by the law. It wasn’t abiding by the law. Though they were not abiding by the law, though they were not abiding by the law, we still have ways for them to have authority over the policy process and over who gets to be in this country. Nobody named in that dump has been charged with anything new. Not one. Meanwhile a man with no record from Honduras sits in a Texas detention bed. That is the standard of the law, applied evenly, they told us.
The Grace Was Selective Before the Facts Came In
I’ve already been seeing the MAGA hats. I’ve already been seeing the memorials of Charlie Kirk, and the memorials bring me something crazy too, man, so let me be careful here because a courtroom is involved.
Charlie Kirk was shot on September 10, 2025, at Utah Valley University. The man charged, Tyler Robinson, was bound over for trial on September 1, 2026, pleaded not guilty to all seven counts, and the state is seeking death. Nobody has proven a motive in that courtroom yet. What the public record does say is that Robinson was raised in a conservative, Republican registered household, that he himself was registered unaffiliated, that the internet spent a week trying to make him a Groyper and CNN’s fact check found no evidence for it, and that the governor of Utah and the President spent that same week telling the country he was a radical leftist before a single filing had been made. Two things can be true. I don’t get to convict a man on a livestream, and they didn’t get to convict a movement on a press conference either.
Here go the contradiction I’m actually pointing at. Erika Kirk stood up at that memorial on September 21, 2025, in front of the President, and forgave the man charged with killing her husband. That is her right and I’m not here to take it from her. Four days later, September 25, the White House signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, a directive that told the whole federal apparatus to go hunt “domestic terrorism” and named the political left as the threat category, on the strength of an assassination the government had already decided was leftist before it decided anything else. So the individual shooter got grace. The people who had nothing to do with it got a federal targeting memo. That’s the pattern. Grace flows to the person in the room, punishment flows to the category. They never went back and told their followers, hey, we told y’all it was a Democrat, a liberal, a leftist, a Marxist, a socialist, and we don’t actually know that, we never did. They can’t go back, because the memo already signed.
All this is going to make sense in a minute.
Lost in the Sauce
I’m 35. I was born in 1990. I graduated in 2009. So I feel like the type of millennial I am, I grew up at a time where American imperialism worldwide was starting to become more and more evident to a lot of us as kids, and we were told, always, you better be lucky you’re not from, what is it, North Korea. I, as a young Black boy from Bryan, Texas, that has always been a little bit outspoken, that has always been skeptical of the things and ways they say things should work, was always chastised. If you think America so bad, you better be lucky you’re not in North Korea. You better be lucky you’re not in China. You better be lucky you’re not in a space and place that always wants to surveil you.
It’s 2026. That’s kind of crazy to think about, right?
A song came across my timeline, and I played it on the stream because the man might got a hit on his hands. The bit is simple. Describe North Korea. Cameras on every street that record and relay everything to a masked and unmarked state police. A dictator whose cabinet laughs when his jokes aren’t funny, who exploits his people and takes their money, who is real good buddies with Putin, whose friends party on yachts where the girls are underage, and where even a corroborated list of a thousand kids’ testimony would get blacked out, redacted, and waved off as a hoax while the press claps. Then the punchline. Thank God that stuff doesn’t happen here. When we describe the actions and the policies of America and we can put them on a different foreign country that we have been indoctrinated to view as being inherently backwards, corrupt and evil, we can condemn those actions. When the American government does them, we cop pleas. Some scholars would call this American exceptionalism. I call it being lost in the sauce.
Case in point. The CEO of Flock Safety, Garrett Langley, the company whose license plate readers are on the side of the road in your town whether you voted for them or not, went on Fox News in August and told Americans we have to compromise on privacy for safety. Then his own address got passed around online, and within days his house was blurred on Google Street View and scrubbed off the real estate sites. Newsweek wouldn’t print the address and I won’t either, because doxxing a man’s family is not the argument. The argument is this: he believes in the value of privacy when it comes to him and his property, and he does not believe in the value of privacy when it comes to everyday American citizens. Ron Wyden told Oregon towns in October 2025 to pull their Flock cameras because abuse was “inevitable,” and a Kentucky officer already got caught running his ex through the system a couple thousand times. The people at the top blur their house and lobby for your camera. If a corporation or some bullshit billionaire can bribe, loiter, what they call it, lobby a policymaker to get them to pass a law that’s anti you and pro them, how is that not what you describe when it comes to fascism, or all the things they say is bad about socialism and communism?
The Countdown
Now let me tell you what’s really finna happen in Dallas tonight, because Kay Faith in the chat said it first. Grindr is about to crash. If y’all know anything about when you get too many Republicans in one space and place, whatever gay app they got on, it’s finna crash. They finna have so much activity, so much pitching and catching and cheeks being clapped on their damn time, that it crashes.
This is not a joke I made up. In 2016 Grindr told Vice that traffic around the Cleveland convention hall jumped 66 percent, and 120 percent the night check in opened, while Times Square and South Beach sat flat. In 2024 more than a thousand people in Milwaukee filed outage reports the second afternoon of the convention, and a year later the Grindr CEO went on the record and confirmed a “significant spike” in Milwaukee during the RNC while insisting the servers never actually fell over. Two things can be true. Then Wednesday, September 9, 2026, the same day I’m streaming, outlets started reporting Grindr outages in Dallas during the midterm convention. Onyx said 45 minutes. Prince said by the end of the first night. Shidd, Prince won.
Here go the contradiction and I want to say it plain. This is the party that raises millions and billions of dollars to criminalize queer people. Here in Texas they passed Senate Bill 12 in 2023, a law aimed at “sexually oriented performances” in front of minors or on public property, written by Bryan Hughes with drag queens as the target, blocked by a federal judge in Houston for two years, revived by the Fifth Circuit in November 2025, in effect March 18, 2026, and struck again by the same Houston judge as to the performers still standing in August. The same people that applauded that policy is now in Dallas sneaking and geeking trying to find them a cowboy to do the dang with. Meanwhile my trans homegirls tend to make a whole bunch of money on a week like this, and we don’t talk enough about how a lot of people that will demonize and criminalize things in public will fantasize and fetishize them in private.
Sedgwick argued that the closet is not just about sexuality, it’s a defining structure of modern Western thought, a tension between the secret and the known. Apply Sedgwick here. The closet is not a place these men go on convention week. The closet is the platform. The secret and the known is how they govern. Known: we protect the children. Secret: the AI files, the Epstein files, the summer meals. Known: rule of law. Secret: 70 percent with no record. Known: the trans threat. Secret: the app. Every accusation is a confession, and the confession runs on a countdown.
They Only Care About the Kids When the Kids Are Playing Sports
They told us they cared about the kids and they cared about the jobs. So let’s audit that.
On August 25, 2026, the Seventh Circuit, in United States v. Anderegg, ruled that the private possession of AI generated child sexual abuse imagery in your own home is protected by the First Amendment when no real child is depicted. Judge John Z. Lee wrote that he was bound by Stanley v. Georgia from 1969 and Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition from 2002 and that he had “concerns” about the lines those cases draw, and the panel asked the Supreme Court to reconsider. The production and distribution charges still stand, so be precise: this is possession, at home. Still. In America you have a court saying you may keep that in your house, and there is no court in this country that has ever said your kids have a right to clean water. Not one. The colonias outside El Paso and along the Rio Grande have been waiting on pipes since before I was born. Jackson, Mississippi, went days with nothing in the tap in 2022. Flint is still a case file. So they only care about the kids when it comes to sports equity, huh? When it comes to sports equity, all of a sudden we care about kids’ general welfare.
Then Greg Abbott denied those kids summer food. This one is not a metaphor. In June 2025 the Texas legislature, both chambers, with the Speaker and the Lieutenant Governor pushing it, put 60 million dollars in the budget for SUN Bucks, the federal summer EBT program, 120 dollars per child for groceries in June, July, and August when the school cafeteria closes. That 60 million would have pulled down about 450 million in federal money and fed about 3.8 million Texas children. Abbott line item vetoed it. Only that line. Texas has never participated since the program launched in 2024, the largest state on the refusal list, with the second highest food insecurity rate in the country, and the state missed the January 1, 2026 deadline again, so summer 2026 came and went with nothing. Like, I know y’all broke as hell, I know I don’t pay y’all good, I know I don’t get y’all parents no good job, I know a lot of y’all rural communities in Texas is living in a food apartheid, and I know y’all need the meals to get your kids from May to June to July to August. You need to eat these meals. Greg Abbott denied them.
The only way I would have had outrage in Texas about that is if I would have lied and told people the trans people in Texas created a policy that took away the food from kids’ mouths. Then all of a sudden everybody come out talking about transgenders and trans, and they going to get derogatory with it, a transformer or some shit. That is how the quote unquote culture wars are set up. They make it where people have selective moral obligations and selective moral outrage. There is no way you’re going to convince me you care about the kids being kids and you don’t care about the way Greg Abbott specifically, the way Republicans specifically, pass policies that are not good for children. You care more about potential made up threats to kids than the actual threats towards kids. As a parent I find that disgusting.
Pose it like this. Which one is more of a detriment to the kids, trans women in sports or the Epstein files? Which one has had more of a material impact on kids’ livelihoods, the Epstein files or the trans women that don’t exist in the WNBA? Jenkins in the chat put it better than me: if safe kids were important we’d have gun laws, free school lunch, free health care, free social spaces, and we’d be holding the Epstein class accountable.
They going to try to convince you they care about them kids when they say the drag queen coming to get them. When the guns come to get them, they tell you to pray it away. When they think the critical race theory books is trying to get their kids, they don’t pray that away. They don’t say, Dear Heavenly Father, I want to pray away the critical race theory. They pass policies. Uvalde was May 24, 2022, nineteen children and two teachers at Robb Elementary, 376 officers in the hallway for 77 minutes, and the response was thoughts, prayers, and a door audit. That same board that can’t get a meal into a kid’s hand in July just spent this exact week, September 1 through 4, 2026, rewriting the entire high school social studies curriculum, cutting sixth grade world cultures, telling Muslim parents no, and requiring that kids connect “biblical imagery” to Dr. King’s Dream speech. They don’t pray the curriculum away. They vote it. Eleven to four.
Then they say the immigrants taking the jobs. If the immigrants taking the jobs is one of your concerns, how come you don’t have any beef with the data centers taking the jobs? You are onboarding data centers that’s wiping out complete industries and complete positions that no longer exist because you’ve been automated, and you ain’t worried about those jobs. Let me correct myself on air, because Research over MeSearch. I said Abbott signed a 20 million dollar deal. It’s not a deal, it’s a tax exemption, and it’s bigger than that. The comptroller’s office told the legislature in July that 138 data centers qualify for Texas’s data center sales tax exemption and 59 of them got certified this year alone. Abbott called Texas the “epicenter of AI development” in November 2025. By June 30, 2026 he was in Bullard calling for a ban on data centers in rural neighborhoods, and by August 23 he was on ABC saying the industry “dug their own grave” and deserved the backlash, with Trump calling his retreat an economic “mistake.” That’s how bad it is down here. The man damn near campaigned against himself.
Texas Is Purple, It’s Manufactured Red
In Texas, Republicans have been in power for damn near my whole life. I’m 35. I seen Ted Cruz, Canadian Cuban Cruz, on national TV talking about how Texas Republicans are in jeopardy of losing a Senate seat they’ve held down for 38 years. He right about the number. The last Democrat to win a Senate race in Texas was Lloyd Bentsen in 1988. That’s 38 years. Now James Talarico, who beat Jasmine Crockett in the March primary, is tied with Ken Paxton, who beat John Cornyn in the May runoff, and every nonpartisan poll from Emerson to Overton has it inside the margin, 47 to 46, 50 to 50, dead heat, with voters under 50 breaking for Talarico by fifteen. I’ve been seeing so many Republicans, from Donald Trump to Greg Abbott to Ted Cruz, talking about James Talarico uniquely, and I think they know they fucked up. They scrambling and scraping. They trying to figure out how to fix this self imposed gunshot wound to their own foot.
Here go the other thing for the people that don’t live here. It’s a reason why Donald Trump called down to Texas in the summer of 2025 and said, I need y’all to give me five seats, I don’t care how y’all do it. Texas has already mastered how to gerrymander and cheat maps. So when y’all say, hey, y’all in Texas got what y’all voted for, no. They cheated and did this shit right here. Abbott bragged in August 2024 that the state had wiped over a million people off the voter rolls since 2021. They disincentivize voters. They suppress. They close polling sites. They do different shit here in Texas to ensure it stays red.
Then a lot of y’all get on social media or hop on TV and say Texas got what it wanted, Texas got what it deserved. None of my Black family members, none of my family members at all actually, wanted this. Some of my family members just a bitch ass and stuff, I ain’t going to lie. You from Texas, whether you white, Mexican, Black, Asian, everybody in Texas got some wannabe redneck in the family that thinks if I chuck and jive with white supremacy enough they will accept me and my humanity. We all got them. Majority of my family did not vote for Donald Trump. Majority of my community don’t agree with Donald Trump. So when y’all say Texas got what they voted for, keep that in mind, and understand that some folks right now in Europe and Asia saying them Americans got what they voted for, assuming we all wanted Trump, when a big portion of America don’t want Trump at all. Let me correct myself here too, because I said on air that Trump lost the popular vote again. He didn’t in 2024. He won it, barely, under 50 percent, a plurality. He lost it in 2016 and 2020. The point holds harder with the right number: a man who never once got half the country to vote for him has governed all three times like he got ninety.
Texas is purple. It’s manufactured red. Do not look at the political representation of Texas through the electoral college map. These people down here ain’t red or blue. Just keep that in mind.
In Perpetuity: The Compromise They Still Honoring
Now I got a theory, and I’d be willing to debate it. Let me get it right, because on stream I said Rutherford P. and it’s Rutherford B. Hayes.
The presidential election of 1876 between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden was deadlocked. Tilden won the popular vote and sat at 184 electoral votes, one short. Hayes had 165. Twenty electoral votes were disputed, in three Southern states, Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, plus one elector in Oregon, and in those three states both parties were sending in their own returns. Congress created a fifteen member Electoral Commission in January 1877, eight Republicans and seven Democrats, and it voted eight to seven, every single disputed vote, to Hayes. Southern Democrats could have filibustered the count and thrown the country into a second civil war twelve years after the first one. They didn’t. On February 26, 1877, at Wormley’s Hotel in Washington, a hotel owned by a Black man, James Wormley, Hayes’s people and the Southern Democrats made a deal. Southern Democrats agreed to stop blocking the count. Republicans agreed to remove the last federal troops from the South. Hayes took the oath March 3 in private and March 5 in public. The troops left the South Carolina statehouse on April 10 and the Louisiana statehouse on April 24. That was the end of Reconstruction. C. Vann Woodward wrote the standard account of it in 1951, Reunion and Reaction, and part of what he found in the paper trail was a promise of federal subsidy for the Texas and Pacific Railroad, so Texas was literally a line item in the bargain. Eric Foner thinks Woodward overweighted the railroad, and both of them agree on the part that matters: the North got the White House, the South got the Negroes.
So here go my theory. The Northern liberals, they Democrats now, they used to be Republicans, the Southern strategy did a little boom boom boom, sold Black people and people of color down south to the Southern conservatives. They made an ironclad deal and they honored it. When they ended Reconstruction, the up north folks said, we’ll let y’all do whatever y’all wanna do with y’all niggas down there, whatever y’all want to do with y’all Indians, whatever y’all want to do with y’all Mexicans, we will mind our business, as long as we keep the union intact. Y’all leave us alone up here. In perpetuity. Ever since, ever since, ever since.
The archive backs me. The same summer those troops left the Southern statehouses, July 1877, the Great Railroad Strike hit, and Hayes sent federal troops against the workers in Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Chicago. So the army didn’t go home. It got reassigned. The same decade, the Texas Rangers and the U.S. Army finished the wars on the Comanche and the Apache, and by the 1880s Texas courts were sorting Mexicans into “white” for citizenship and “Mexican” for everything else. Apply Somerville here. She showed that the color line and the hetero/homo line were drawn in the same twenty years by the same scientists and the same courts, Plessy in 1896 on one hand, the invention of “the homosexual” as a classifiable person on the other. The deal of 1877 wasn’t just about Black folks. It was permission for the South to build a whole sorting machine, and the North agreed not to look.
Then it’s a reason so many Democrats only care about Black folks down south when it’s time to talk about the civil rights movement, when it’s Black History Month, when it’s Martin Luther King Day, when they want to talk about Ruby Bridges. Other than that they don’t engage Black folks down south. They only care about Black folks down south when they engage in the archive and it’s a relic of the past. Right now Scott Colom is running for Senate in Mississippi. Seventh generation Mississippian, district attorney, the same man Cindy Hyde Smith blocked from a federal judgeship in 2023 over a Soros donation that never even touched his campaign. If he wins he’d be Mississippi’s first Black senator since Reconstruction, and the last one, Blanche K. Bruce, walked out of that chamber in March 1881, four years after the deal, and nobody Black has walked back in from Mississippi since. You only got 100 Senate seats. When we talk about Trump being impeached, the reason he was never removed is the Senate was a Republican majority. A Democratic majority in this time of day means something. The DSCC put 40 million dollars on the table for Senate races this fall and gave Mississippi zero. Not a dollar. That’s the compromise. That’s what honoring it looks like on a budget sheet. One of the biggest exports out of America is Black culture, and the same sentence where folks acknowledge that the majority of the Black population in this country is down south is the same sentence they say y’all got what y’all voted for down there. The descendants of Massa, Massa’s great grandma, Massa’s great grandchildren, they can do what they want to do with y’all. In perpetuity.
If Abe Lincoln was on this “anything to keep the union intact,” and he was, August 22, 1862, in the letter to Horace Greeley, my paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or to destroy slavery, then guarantee that’s what was still being repeated by the men that survived him. That is the nature of America. Whatever to keep the union intact. If I got to deport all the Mexicans and all the Venezuelans, if I got to keep some here and keep some out, whatever to keep the union intact. Being real, the union intact just means the people at the top keep making their money and the social order stays as it is. When they say social order, I see a hierarchy. White over Black, white over dark, men over women, straight over gay. That’s the hierarchy. That’s the social order. That’s what we’re on.
Thomas Sowell Is Clever, Not Smart
Y’all pulled up for this, so let me give it to you. This Black conservative economist is probably one of the most quoted people in the movement, and so many conservatives believe Thomas Sowell is smart. I think Thomas Sowell is clever. His economic analysis, especially around slavery and the state of Black culture, I don’t think is smart. The clip going around has him say it plain: as of 1960, almost a hundred years after slavery, the majority of Black kids were being raised in two married households, within one generation of the welfare state that dropped to a minority, so centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow did not destroy the Black family but one generation of the welfare state did. Officer Tatum runs the same play on TikTok.
This is one of the most intellectually lazy arguments in the country, and it blows my mind that it measures the success of the Black community off a nebulous idea around marriage rates. Back then, under Jim Crow, a white person could walk into a Black person’s house and, regardless of whether you had three parents in a household or one, drag your Black ass out of there and hang you on a tree and get away with it. Ain’t no marriage rate in the world that protected Mary Turner in 1918. The institutions they’re romanticizing didn’t even recognize the legitimacy of Black love or Black marriage. Enslaved people could not legally marry in a single Southern state. The marriages Herbert Gutman found in the 1880 census, and his number is real, most Black households in the South were two parent households then, were marriages the Freedmen’s Bureau had to go around registering after 1865 because the law had never counted them. So the fact that they still trying to romanticize Jim Crow off of a marriage rate tells you everything about what they think a family is for. Sowell’s 1960 number is roughly right, about two thirds of Black kids in two parent homes. His cause is wrong.
Because think about what “the welfare state” was for a Black family. Roosevelt’s Social Security Act of 1935 excluded agricultural and domestic workers, which Ira Katznelson counts at about 65 percent of Black workers at the time. The states administered Aid to Dependent Children, and Southern states wrote “suitable home” rules and “man in the house” rules, meaning if a caseworker found a man in your house, your kids lost their benefits. The Supreme Court didn’t strike that down until King v. Smith in 1968. So the one welfare program a Black mother could touch literally paid her to have no man in the house, by design, in states that had just spent ninety years refusing to recognize her marriage at all. Rico in the chat said it in one line: the fed provides the programs, lets the states administer them, and the Southern states use that. Yealp. The New Deal was FDR figuring out a way to commodify and borrow from socialist programs because the labor unions were on the American corporations’ ass, and technically socialism was about to roll through America, and he made it where the benefits was only available to white folks. FDR has benefited a lot from the rewriting of history. Not negating he was a good president for his time, but his politics and his ethics on this specifically, it wasn’t like that.
Now here go the part where the argument eats itself. Sowell is an economist. He knows this. So when you say the welfare state is the biggest detriment to the Black community, and in the same breath y’all say there’s no such thing as systemic racism, what are you saying? The welfare state was institutionalized by the government, through policy, and you are conceding that it had a disproportionate impact on the Black community. That is the definition of systemic racism. You just described it. Why aren’t you conceding it exists? It becomes circular. Welfare program bad, welfare program is the legacy of slavery, we don’t get to the welfare program without the institution of slavery, without Reconstruction, without the way the American government let J.P. Morgan and Vanderbilt and Rockefeller run rampant and then break the unions when the unions got too integrated. Hosom’s granddaddy integrated a union and brought his sons and uncles on. That’s when they started cracking them. So the white aristocrats that’s been running this country since the plantation days got to lobby, or bribe, and that’s how we got here. Every road runs through the deal.
Apply Cohen here, because this is where the whole pack ties. Cathy Cohen argued in 1997 that heteronormativity is not a feeling, it is a regulatory system run by the state, and that Black people were never handed full membership in it no matter who they married. The welfare queen, the punk, and the bulldagger are policed by the same hand. Sowell’s marriage rate is that hand with a calculator. He’s not measuring Black families. He’s measuring how well Black people performed a straightness the state never let them fully hold, and then blaming them when the state’s own program was written to break it.
Friday Night Lights, Monday Morning Dark
In Texas we care a lot about football. A lot of that football is dominated by Black bodies, and the only time they care about Black bodies usually is when they on the football field. That’s the reality of Texas. University of Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, University of Houston, they got a big football culture around it, and you have all these Texas citizens paying taxes that don’t care how they treat your Negroes when they not on the field. You only care how we can academically compete when it comes to college football. Let me correct my number, because I said 42 or 43 on air and the rankings that came out this summer put Texas 29th in U.S. News and 32nd in WalletHub for K through 12. That’s still bottom half in a state that says it’s the best at everything. If we was ranked 29th in football they’d fire the coach, they’d have a special session, they’d talk about so much investment in infrastructure and coaching and resources that it would be fixed by fall. In school, 29th is a Tuesday.
Apply Hawkins here. Billy Hawkins called the arrangement the new plantation, and he was not being cute. The predominantly white university extracts the Black body’s labor on Saturday, sells it to boosters and networks, and graduates the same young man at a rate below the general student body, in a state that put a line item veto on his little brother’s July groceries. Same body, two ledgers. On Saturday the body is an asset. Monday through Friday the body is a cost.
Here go the education implication in one week’s worth of Texas receipts. The State Board of Education, eleven Republicans to four Democrats after Abbott swapped in an appointee, finished the high school social studies rewrite on September 4, 2026. They deleted the sixth grade world cultures course. They wrote Islam into the standards through its military campaigns and waved off the Muslim parents who testified. They tied Dr. King’s Dream to “biblical imagery” as a required connection. That curriculum rolls out in the 2030 to 31 school year to kids who did not eat in the summer of 2025 or the summer of 2026 because the same state government couldn’t find 60 million dollars against 450 million in federal money, while the comptroller certified 59 data center tax exemptions this year alone. Whitey on the Moon. Rat done bit my sister Nell, and Nell can’t get SUN Bucks, but the server farm got a sales tax holiday.
Then you go one state east, and this is why I brought Mississippi up. My first time in Mississippi was a few weeks ago, Meridian, Jackson, two little towns I can’t name right now, and I have never seen so many vacant schools in my life. Shut down schools, boarded up schools, schools with the name still on the brick. These communities were deliberately left behind in development and infrastructure. That’s not neglect, that’s honoring the deal. Mississippi is also on the SUN Bucks refusal list this summer. Same compromise, different governor.
The dumbest part is that the kid on the field and the kid in the vacant school is the same kid. Texas doesn’t have two Black children, one for Saturday and one for Monday. It has one, and it made a decision about which day he counts.
Nobody Is Supposed to Know, Everybody Is on the App
Kay Faith joked, and I joked back, and then I sat with it, because a joke about who on Grindr in Dallas has a race in it whether we say so or not.
A man on stream put up a shirt that said Republicans, racist but secretly gay. Democrats, gay but secretly racist. I thought it was clever at first. Then I realized it’s embedded in a couple of fallacies. It flattens difference so that nobody has real politics and everybody’s performing, it posits that authenticity is unattainable, that you can’t really be against racism or really be racist, and it says nothing about class. The unspokenness of it is that they all get paid by the same donors. Apply Duggan here. Lisa Duggan showed twenty years ago that the culture war is the stage show and the redistribution upward is the business, and that a certain kind of gay politics got itself a seat at the table by agreeing to that arrangement. The meme is genius funny and it’s a little projection. I’m still going to rap with it.
Apply Snorton here, because here go the race in the joke. In 2003 the New York Times ran a magazine cover on “Double Lives on the Down Low,” and in 2004 J.L. King sat on Oprah’s couch, and for the rest of that decade the country decided that Black men specifically had a secret, and that the secret was killing Black women. C. Riley Snorton wrote the book on it, and his finding was that the down low was never really a description of behavior. It was a glass closet, a way of building Black sexuality as always already suspect, always already hiding something, so that the same secrecy that’s a punchline in a Dallas hotel this week was a public health emergency when it wore a Black face. White Republicans get to have a funny closet. Black men got a moral panic and a CDC category. Same behavior. Different ledger. That’s intersectionality, that’s not a vibe, that’s a receipt.
Now put my trans homegirls in the frame, because they the ones in the room this week and they the ones in the crosshairs the other fifty one weeks. Texas signed a law in 2025 defining sex for every state record by what’s on a birth certificate. The Human Rights Campaign has tracked fatal violence against trans people for a decade and the majority of the dead, year after year, are Black trans women. So when the straight agenda, and I mean that phrase literally, gets to work, it does not land evenly. It lands on the Black woman whose womanhood the state has unrecognized on paper, in a state that would not recognize her great great grandmother’s marriage either. Same clerk. Same pen. Different century.
The straight agenda is what pushes people into closets. The straight agenda is what gets people put out of their families. The straight agenda is what denies lovely partnerships health care and safety. You’ve heard about the gay agenda, the one trying to turn your mama and daddy gay, the one targeting your children. I think the straight agenda is much more pervasive and much more violent and much more problematic. There ain’t too many institutions or organizations or buildings that say in order for you to get in here you must be gay. Even gay clubs are open to everybody. There are plenty of heterosexual, heteronormative things that say in order to meet the criteria for entry you got to be straight. That is a straight agenda. No euphemism, no metaphor, no analogy. This is literally what’s happening.
I was watching a movie with my kids and my nieces and nephews, and there was a romantic scene, opposite sex, liking each other, kissing, and I thought about how heteronormative hypocrisy says I don’t have no issue with the gays but let the kids be kids, I don’t think we should put sexuality on kids at all, and then has no issue with Kristoff and Anna kissing in Frozen, no issue with Nala and Simba. That’s a lie. You have no problem when it’s heteronormative because you believe it’s the default and natural, therefore it can’t be forced on nobody, and the other thing you believe is deviant and unnatural, therefore the mere existence of it means it’s being pushed on somebody. If it’s true that being around gay people will make you gay, where do the gays come from? Cutty Fuzz in the chat said it: I was queer and didn’t even know any queer people. One time I asked one of the homies, the first time your thing got hard, did you get to choose what made it hard? He said no. So if a gay man gets his thing hard from viewing this, you blame him for that? Man, Conscious, I never thought about it that way. Then the next thing out his mouth was people choose to be gay. If you believe you choose to be gay, you’re telling me you chose to be straight, and that you could choose to be gay. The chat got there before I did: the “it’s a choice” crowd is projecting their repression, it’s something they want to express and choose not to, so they feel like everybody should be able to choose not to. That’s the whole mechanism of the closet, and it’s the same mechanism as the party.
The Counter Agenda Is Loving Each Other Out Loud
Here go the counterweight, because I don’t leave y’all in the closet.
Joseph Beam wrote in 1986, in the first anthology of Black gay men’s writing ever published, that Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act. Marlon Riggs put it on film in Tongues Untied in 1989 and PBS stations across the South refused to air it. Understand what Beam meant. He wasn’t talking about sex. He was talking about the neighbor. He was talking about a Black man looking at another Black man, in a country that has been sorting them since 1877 into fit for the field and unfit for the family, and refusing the sorting. That’s the counter agenda. The straight agenda sorts. The counter agenda claims.
See, Cohen reminds us that the state never handed us the straightness it now grades us on, and Snorton teaches us that our secrets get a different price than theirs. Hawkins showed us the two ledgers, and Beam showed us how to close the book. The energy to rework one’s belief is expensive, Backhand said that in the chat and he right. Homework is good, man. I’ll see y’all next Wednesday. Education Is Elevation. Stay sucker free in the land of lollipops. You know what I mean? Is your neighbor good? You care about your neighbor. You know what I’m saying? Are you a good neighbor or are you a bad neighbor?
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5 KEY TAKEAWAYS
The culture war is a sorting machine for outrage, not a set of beliefs. The same voters told to fear drag queens were told to pray away Uvalde, and the same governor who vetoed 450 million federal dollars in summer groceries campaigns as the children’s protector. Selective outrage is the product, and Cohen shows the state has been running that machine on Black families since before there was a welfare state to blame.
“Rule of law” was a pitch, not a policy. TRAC’s July 11, 2026 count puts 70.6 percent of ICE detainees at no criminal conviction, 92 percent of this year’s detention growth came from people with no charge at all, while the Justice Department released three million Epstein pages, withheld two and a half million more, and charged nobody.
The Compromise of 1877 is a living budget line. Tilden won the popular vote, an 8 to 7 commission gave it to Hayes, the troops left the Southern statehouses in April 1877 and got redeployed against railroad strikers by July, and in 2026 the DSCC’s 40 million dollar Senate map gave Mississippi, the Blackest state in the union, zero dollars.
Sowell’s number is roughly right and his cause is wrong. About two thirds of Black kids lived in two parent homes in 1960. The “welfare state” a Black mother could actually touch was administered by Southern states under “man in the house” rules that paid her to have no husband until King v. Smith struck them in 1968. If a government program had a disproportionate impact on Black families by policy design, that is systemic racism by definition, and Sowell’s argument concedes it.
The closet is not where these men go on convention week, it’s the platform. Sedgwick’s secret and the known governs everything: known, protect the kids; secret, the meals and the files. Snorton shows the same secrecy that is a punchline in a Dallas hotel was a moral panic and a CDC category when it was pinned on Black men.
RELATED READINGS / BIBLIOGRAPHY
Central and theoretical
Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ 3, no. 4 (1997).
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press, 1990.
Somerville, Siobhan B. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Duke University Press, 2000.
Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Beacon Press, 2003.
Snorton, C. Riley. Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low. University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Hawkins, Billy. The New Plantation: Black Athletes, College Sports, and Predominantly White NCAA Institutions. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Edwards, Harry. The Revolt of the Black Athlete. Free Press, 1969.
Beam, Joseph, ed. In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology. Alyson, 1986.
Riggs, Marlon, dir. Tongues Untied. 1989.
