We shall overcome

Today, I hope you will read to the end because it is at the end that you may find something that might gird your faith in a bleak time.

It has mine.

Among the great blessings of my life over the last year has been my association — through the The Save America Movement — with William J. Barber, II and Pastor Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, whose calm certitude and grace have tempered my rage. They have helped me channel righteous anger into certitude about something that we must all believe.

WE SHALL OVERCOME.

Faith does not come easily for me, but my faith in America has never been stronger — even in an hour where my heart has never felt more broken.

The American republic is dying. Though I know it will not perish, the vandalism and destruction has appalled me in ways that are visceral, and at some level, physically painful.

There have been moments when I have felt drowned by the lies assaulting me. I know I am not alone.

Know that you are not alone.

Donald Trump is an evil man, and evil must be named before it can be faced and defeated.

The road to our current misery has been long, with many exits not taken.

Selfishness compounded over and over again, while Trump and his conspirators plotted ruination for the country and the destruction of the American republic.

Today, we are in the beginning hours of a prolonged national emergency and constitutional crisis that is much nearer its beginning than end, though it has been 11 years in the making.

What should not be has come to be because what was believed could not happen is happening.

Fascism has come to America wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

Tyranny is descending over the United States, and there is no compromise possible with the fascists, their fellow travelers, useful idiots and apologists.

There is no dialogue to be had with hate, and no possibility of peace with Nazis.

The American people must unite as Americans and lift up our voices to reclaim our ideals from the vandals who seek to destroy them. We must renew our faith — not abandon it.

We must forgive each other our trespasses and differences, and embrace a new tolerance for disagreement that leads to a new season of understanding.

John Lewis is an American founding father, and he put it this way:

We may have come here on different ships, but we are all in the same boat now.

There is no question that is more acute or urgent in America than this: what is happening?

Let’s examine MAGA through a telescope, by looking backward to see the forces that created it and are linked by historic DNA.

Let us investigate the murder of Renee Nicole Good by using a type of DNA to understand the motive.

F*CKING BITCH!

Those were the words that rang from the lips of ICE murderer Jonathan Ross as Renee Good’s brains and blood dripped from the front seat of her minivan with a dog in the back seat and children’s toys on the seat.

When MAGA mobs attacked the Capitol they paraded the Confederate flag through the rotunda.

It was not accidental.

Rather, it was an achievement 165 years in the making.

Let’s examine what is happening in 2025 America by applying a contemporary filter to the pen of a The Times of London writer in 1861, trying to explain the breakup of the United States 85 years after the Declaration of Independence to their British readers.

What is democracy?

It is not the same as liberty.

One of the prevalent delusions of the age in which we live is to regard democracy as equivalent to liberty, and the attribution of power to the poorest and worst educated citizens of the State as a certain way to promote the purest liberality of thought and the most beneficial course of action.

Let those who hold this opinion examine the quarrel at present raging in the United States, and they will be aware that Democracy, like other forms of Government, may coexist with any course of action or any set of principles.

Between North and South there is at this moment raging a controversy which goes as deep as any controversy can into the elementary principles of human nature, and the sympathies and antipathies which in so many men supply the place of reason and reflection.

The North is for freedom, the South is for Slavery.

The North is for freedom of discussion, the South represses freedom of discussion with the tar-brush and the pine fagot.

Yet North and South are both Democracies -- nay, possess almost exactly similar institutions, with this enormous divergence in theory and practice.

It is not Democracy that has made the North the advocate of freedom, or the South the advocate of Slavery.

Democracy is a quantity which appears on both sides, and may therefore be rejected, as having no influence over the result.

From the sketch of the history of Slavery which was furnished us by our correspondent from New York last week, we learn that at the time of the American Revolution Slavery existed in every State of the Union, except in Massachusetts; but we also learn that the great men who directed that Revolution -- WASHINGTON, JEFFERSON, MADISON, PATRICK HENRY and HAMILTON, were unanimous in execrating the practice of Slavery, and looked forward to the time when it would cease to contaminate the soil of free America.

The abolition of the Slave-trade, which subsequently followed, was regarded by its warmest advocates as not only beneficial in itself, but as a long step towards the extinction of Slavery altogether.

It was not foreseen that certain free and democratic communities would arise which would apply themselves to the honorable office of breeding slaves, to be consumed on the free and democratic plantations of the South, and of thus replacing the African Slave Trade by an internal traffic in human flesh, carried on under circumstances of almost equal atrocity through the heart of a free and democratic nation.

Democracy has verily a strong digestion, and one not to be interfered with by trifles.

Biden Democrats talked about democracy incessantly, but they did so without mentioning liberty very often.

Democracy alone is not liberty or freedom.

It can be the gateway to despotism.

This American moment demands an opposition party and leaders who can speak about the concepts of liberty, freedom and democracy with fluency and ease, conviction and respect, certitude and awe — all together, all at once.

Most of the hapless congressional Democratic leadership cannot do this, though younger Democrats like Jason Crow, Jake Auchincloss and Elissa Slotkin, to name a few, can.

The Schumercrats cannot seem to find their way to embrace this country’s ideals and values in a way that connects to the American people.

The Times writer makes the point that democracy in the South was the engine of slavery, while democracy in the North was the engine of liberty.

But the most melancholy part of the matter is that, during the 70 years for which the American Confederacy has existed, the whole tone of sentiment with regard to slavery has, in the southern states at least, undergone a remarkable change.

Slavery used to be treated as a thoroughly exceptional institution — as the evil legacy of evil times — as a disgrace to a Constitution founded on the natural freedom and independence of mankind.

There was hardly a political leader of any note who had not some plan for its abolition.

Jefferson himself, the greatest chief of the democracy, had in the early part of this century, speculated deeply on this subject, but the United States became possessed of Louisiana and Florida, they have conquered Texas, they have made Arkansas and Missouri into States, and these successive acquisitions have altered entirely the view with which Slavery is regarded.

Removing the word “slavery” from the above and replacing it with “Trump/MAGA,” and applying the devolution of moral opposition to an obvious moral issue provides an opportunity for comparison between the moral corruption that supported slavery.

It is driven by the same incentives that appeased MAGA.

What was accepted as obscene and understood as malevolent became accepted as necessary, and recast as noble because of self-interest, greed and ambition for power.

Here is how the writer put it then:

Perhaps as much as anything, from the long license enjoyed by the editors of the South of writing what they pleased in favor of Slavery, with the absolute certainty that no one would be found bold enough to write anything on the other side, and thus make himself a mark for popular vengeance, the subject has come to be written on in a tone of ferocious and cynical extravagance which is to an European eye absolutely appalling.

The South has become enamored of her shame.

Kristi Noem has become enamored of her shame.

Megyn Kelly has become enamored of her shame

Karoline Leavitt has become enamored of her shame.

Stephen Miller has become enamored of his shame.

JD Vance has become enamored of his shame.

They all have.

The road ahead will be brutal. The simple truth is that the era of American greatness that defined an 80-year epoch is over. It has come to an end with an act of national suicide.

MAGA was the poison.

Trump was the weapon.

Indifference was the gun.

What comes next is not restoration, but rather reconstruction. The work will be arduous.

I do not see a way through the trouble without faith.

Eight-two years ago, in a most uncertain hour, the American people did not know what would happen next.

Neither did their president.

There are moments when events seem beyond control. It is in those moments that humility can fortify courage.

The words below are an excerpt of a prayer written and delivered to the American people by President Franklin Roosevelt, who would have understood that Donald Trump’s assertion that his power is limited only by his “own morality” are the words of a Nazi preening at the edge of horror.

The prayer was broadcast on D-Day as the western Atlantic Ocean off of a sliver of French coast was turned red with American blood at the hour Lafayette’s prophetic vision was made true.

Let us pray for our country this Sunday as our fellow Americans have before.

And, O Lord, give us Faith. Give us Faith in Thee; Faith in our sons; Faith in each other; Faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled.

Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.

With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies.

Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men.

And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.

Thy will be done, Almighty God.

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