Returning to Rome: Redrawing My Map of God and the World

I am back in Rome — a city that once formed me more deeply than I knew at the time. This time Peggy and I will be here for three months visiting our diplomat son, his wife, and our three little granddaughters.

More than fifty years ago, as a young priest, I walked these same streets believing I stood near the center of the Christian world. Rome felt solid, ancient, authoritative. Theology here carried the weight of centuries. I absorbed its categories, its rhythms, its confidence. That was soon after Vatican II (1962-’65). I was only beginning to question the map I had inherited.

Now, decades later, I find myself returning not as a defender of that center nor as its adversary, but as someone who has been slowly reshaped by teachers, students, and experiences far from these stones. Being here again has stirred gratitude — and reflection. I see more clearly how much of my life has been an apprenticeship in learning to redraw the map I once took for granted.

Learning to Turn Things Over

To begin with, my teachers here in the Eternal City were dynamite in terms of creatively upsetting my theological and even political certainties. I think especially of Magnus Lohrer and Raphael Schulte at the Atheneum Anselmianum on Rome’s Aventine hill. That first year in Rome, lectures at the Anselmo were in Latin. Regardless, Lohrer and Schulte called all my categories into question. They had me seriously reading non-Catholic theological giants for the first time. I brought it all home to unending lunch and dinner debates with the fifteen or so young priests (who were also pursuing terminal degrees in Rome) at our Columban house on Corso Trieste 57.

But the deepest fissures in my theological and political certainties came after Rome – in Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba, and especially in Costa Rica, where Peggy and I became fellows at the Departamento Ecumenico de Investigaciones, a liberation theology think tank. The center of it all was Franz Hinkelammert who became not only my teacher, but colleague and friend. As an economist and theologian, he adopted critical thinking as his own central category.

I remember telling him, somewhat playfully, that I thought I had figured out the method behind his approach to the discipline: he seemed always to take what passed as “common sense” and quietly invert it with exquisite historical,  philosophical, and theological insight. Markets are described as free. Economic growth is described as necessary. Sacrifice of the vulnerable is described as realistic. He would simply ask: who benefits? who suffers? what “god” is being served?

He smiled when I said that — a smile that felt less like approval and more like invitation. He was not urging me toward cynicism. He was urging me toward attentiveness.

Under his influence, I began to recognize how easily societies sanctify their own arrangements. The market can become providence. National security can become destiny. Even theology can become a cloak for power. What I once called realism I learned to approach more cautiously.

That habit of questioning did not make me certain. It made me slower to accept easy answers.

Learning to Relocate the Center

Another teacher, Enrique Dussel, unsettled me in a different way. I first met him in Brazil during a seminar specifically on liberation theology. The cream of the crop – theologians I had been reading for years – were there.

I still see Dussel at a whiteboard, sketching a world map from memory. He did not begin in Athens, as my education had. He began in Egypt. He traced the movement of civilizations across Asia. He lingered over China’s long intellectual and cultural history before Europe entered the frame at all.

“Wherever I lecture,” he would say, “people repeat the same historical story: ancient, medieval, modern.” Then he would perceptively add, “That story is not universal. It is European.” Leonardo da Vinci’s futuristic drawings were lifted straight from Chinese engineers.

I felt enlarged listening to him. The world was older and more intricate than the timeline I had inherited. Europe’s achievements remained real, but they were no longer singular or central in the way I had assumed.

After his lectures, I found myself trying to reproduce his map — not because I wished to argue, but because I wanted to see as he saw. His point was not so much to diminish Europe, as to free history from provincial boundaries.

That lesson stayed with me. Once you realize that a “center” may simply be a perspective, you become cautious about every center — political, economic, even theological.

Encounters in the Global South

My years of teaching in the United States and traveling in Latin America and other parts of the Global South deepened that reorientation. Theology in Brazil, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Cuba, and Mexico was not an abstract discipline. It was bound up with hunger, repression, resilience, hope.

Through thinkers like Pablo Richard and Elsa Tamez, I saw how scripture could sound different when read from below rather than from established centers of power. Through Rosemary Ruether, I came to see how deeply gendered our language about God and authority has been. Helio Gallardo showed how The United States’ regime change policies prevented human development throughout the Global South. Vandana Shiva widened my awareness of how economic systems scar both land and people in the name of progress. And Dom Hélder Câmara reminded me, in his gentle way, that charity without justice leaves underlying structures intact. He famously said, “‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.’

None of these encounters destroyed my faith. They complicated it. They forced me to acknowledge that what I had once regarded as neutral theology was often shaped by social location and power.

Over time, I began to describe myself not simply as Catholic, bus as belonging to the Church’s “loyal opposition.” I still claim that designation. I did not wish to abandon the Church. I owed it too much. But I could not ignore its entanglements with empire or its silences in the face of suffering.

I learned that loyalty without critique can drift toward idolatry. But critique without love can harden into bitterness. Holding both has never been simple.

The God I Was Taught — and the God I Pray To

Returning to Rome has also stirred memories of the God-image that accompanied my early formation.

God was Creator, Lawgiver, Judge, Punisher (even Torturer!). Sin was pervasive. Conscience was vigilant. That framework gave me seriousness and discipline. It also sometimes fostered fear and self-scrutiny that felt heavier than grace.

Over the years, influenced by the teachers I have named and by the communities I have encountered, that image loosened. I began to see how easily our political imaginations shape our theology. A hierarchical society imagines a hierarchical heaven. An imperial culture imagines a commanding deity.

Genesis says something simpler and perhaps more daring: we are clay, animated by breath. Clay is not flawless. It is vulnerable, shaped by experience, capable of cracking and reforming. The problem in Eden is not embodiment but mistrust — the suggestion that God is withholding, that God is threatened by human growth.

Slowly, I found myself praying less to a divine Auditor and more to a Life-Giver. Paul’s contrast between Adam and Christ came to sound less like courtroom procedure and more like two ways of being human: hiding in shame or standing in trust.

That shift did not happen overnight. It came through study, mistakes, conversations, disappointments, and, occasionally, grace.

Sitting in Trastevere

Recently, sitting in Santa Maria in Trastevere, I felt the weight of all these strands all at once.

Trastevere was once a district of the marginal — dockworkers, Jews, early Christians. Yet the Church that took root among them eventually learned to speak the language of empire. The basilica’s golden mosaics shimmer above centuries of compromise and devotion alike.

The Church, I realized again, is both clay and gold.

So am I.

If my children sometimes experience my positions as strong or unsettling, I understand. They did not sit in those classrooms. They did not travel in those communities. They did not hear those lectures. My convictions were not born of sudden rebellion. They accumulated slowly, sometimes against my own initial resistance.

I do not claim to see perfectly now. If anything, these teachers made me more cautious about certainty. They taught me to ask whose voices are missing, whose suffering is hidden, which assumptions have gone unquestioned.

Returning to Rome does not feel like a triumph. It feels like a reminder. A reminder of where I began. A reminder of how much I was given. A reminder of how much I had to unlearn. And a reminder that any map — even the one I now hold — remains partial.

Clay, Breath, and Ongoing Revision

The longer I live, the less interested I am in appearing marble. Marble is impressive, but rigid. Clay is humbler, more exposed, more capable of change. Genesis names us clay. The Spirit breathes.

If there has been a “crime,” it was never Rome itself. It was the temptation to mistake any center — any institution, any system, any theology — for the whole.

The teachers who shaped me did not hand me a new dogma. They handed me a way of seeing: turn the claim over, redraw the map, listen to the margins, be wary of sanctified power, hold loyalty and critique together.

Rome, with all its beauty and ambiguity, is a fitting place to remember that.

I return not to condemn, nor to congratulate myself for having moved beyond something, but to give thanks for the long, unfinished work of being reshaped.

The map has been redrawn more than once in my life. It may yet need redrawing again.

For now, I remain grateful — for Rome, for the margins, for the teachers who widened my world, and for the breath that continues to animate clay.

The Commandments and the Epstein Revelations: Whom Does God’s Law Really Protect?

Readings for the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time: Sirach 15:15-20; Psalm 119; 1 Corinthians 2:6-10; Matthew 5:17-37

Let me say it straight out: the Epstein affair is not primarily about sex. It is about law. It is about whether the commandments — and the legal systems supposedly derived from them — apply equally to everyone.

For decades, Jeffrey Epstein moved among billionaires, politicians, royalty, financiers, academics, and cultural elites. His crimes were known. Complaints were made. Investigations occurred. Yet he received an extraordinary plea deal. Associates remain shielded. Documents remain sealed. Networks remain largely untouched.

Meanwhile, poor defendants fill prisons for far lesser crimes – and in the case of immigrants and asylum seekers, for no crimes at all. Petty theft, drug possession, probation violations, and “illegal” border crossings — these are prosecuted with relentless enforcement of law.

If you want a relevant commentary on such two-tiered systems of “justice,” look no further than today’s liturgical readings. They are explosive in their contemporary application.

Sirach: God Commands No Injustice

 Start with Sirach 15: 15-20. There the book’s author says: “If you choose, you can keep the commandments… He has set before you fire and water… life and death.”

At first glance, that sounds like individual moral exhortation. Choose good. Avoid evil. But Sirach adds something devastating: “No one does he command to act unjustly; to none does he give license to sin.”

That line destroys every attempt to sanctify unjust systems like ours. I mean in the United States, injustice is routinely protected by law. After all, Epstein’s plea deal in 2008 was legal. The shielding of his powerful associates has been legal. Non-disclosure agreements are legal. Sealed records are legal.

But Sirach says God commands no injustice.

If the law functions to shield predators when they are rich and well-connected while punishing the poor with mechanical severity, then the issue is not simply moral failure. It is structural perversion.

Liberation theology (i.e. non-literalist biblical interpretation supported by modern scripture scholarship) reminds us that “choice” is structured. The poor do not choose within the same field of protection as billionaires. There, fire and water are not distributed evenly. Life and death are not equally accessible.

The commandment is not merely “Don’t sin.” The deeper question is: Does the legal order reflect God’s refusal to legalize injustice?

Psalm 119: Blessed Are Those Who Follow the Law

Now look at today’s responsorial psalm. It’s refrain proclaims: “Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord.”

But what is the law for?

As José Porfirio Miranda and Norman Gottwald argue, the Decalogue emerged not as abstract piety but as social protection. It arose among people resisting royal systems that accumulated land, wealth, and power in elite hands.

Both theologians remind us that biblical law was a shield for subsistence households. “You shall not steal” originally meant: the powerful may not confiscate the livelihood of the vulnerable. “You shall not covet” meant desire backed by power must be restrained.

In that light, now ask the uncomfortable question: when billionaires operate in networks of mutual protection and the law seems reluctant to expose them fully, is that still Torah? Or is it what the prophets called “corruption at the gate?”

Psalm 119 blesses those who follow God’s law — not those who manipulate civil law to protect privilege.

Paul: The Wisdom of the Rulers

In the same spirit of Sirach and Psalm 119, Paul speaks of “a wisdom not of this age, nor of the rulers of this age… who are passing away.” He also adds something chilling: “None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”

The cross was a legal execution. It was state-sanctioned. It was justified under Roman law and enabled by religious authority.

That’s Paul’s point.

The rulers always believe their system is rational and necessary. Franz Hinkelammert reminds us that ruling ideologies present themselves as inevitable. Markets are inevitable. Elite networks are inevitable. Certain people are untouchable.

When the Epstein affair reveals how proximity to wealth and power appears to blunt accountability, we are witnessing what Paul calls “the wisdom of this age.” A wisdom that protects itself.

The rulers crucified Jesus legally. Legality is not the same as justice.

Jesus: Fulfilling the Law by Protecting the Vulnerable

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus declares:
“I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it.”

Then he radicalizes it. “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not kill.’ But I say to you, whoever humiliates…”

Jesus’ point is that dehumanization precedes violence. When victims are dismissed because they lack status, when their testimony is doubted because they are young, poor, or socially marginal, contempt is already at work.

“You have heard it said… You shall not commit adultery. But I say to you, whoever looks with lust…”

Could these words be more pertinent to the Epstein Affair? In a world where wealthy men are allowed to treat vulnerable underage girls and women as property, lust backed by power means coercion. Jesus targets the interior logic of such domination.

His teaching on divorce does the same thing. It sides with the economically vulnerable spouse. Legal permission did not equal justice.

Notice the pattern: every intensification of the commandment in today’s readings closes loopholes that allow the powerful to exploit the weak.

That is fulfillment of the law. If a legal system permits exploitation through influence, money, and secrecy, it has not fulfilled the law. It has hollowed it out.

Two Systems

The Epstein affair is not an anomaly. It is a revelation.

It reveals what liberation theology has long argued: sin is social as well as personal. Structures can be sinful. Systems can crucify.

When poor defendants encounter swift prosecution while elite networks encounter delay, protection, and opacity, we are not witnessing isolated moral failure. We are witnessing two systems.

Sirach sets before us life and death. The death-dealing system is one where law bends upward. The life-giving system is one where law protects the vulnerable first:

  • “Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord.”
  • Blessed are those who refuse to equate legality with justice.
  • Blessed are those who demand that commandments function as protection for the powerless.
  • Blessed are those who see through the “wisdom” of powerful elites

Jesus did not abolish the commandments. He sharpened them until they pierced hypocrisy.

Before us remain fire and water. The question is not whether we personally avoid wrongdoing.

The question is whether we will accept a system where justice is negotiated by wealth — or insist that the law once again become what it was meant to be: protection and good news for the poor.

AI, Environmental Justice, and Who Pays the Bill

I recently wrote an essay suggesting that artificial intelligence might serve as a kind of moral companion in our political and spiritual confusion. Not a burning bush. Not divine revelation. Just a disciplined interlocutor — one that helps clarify arguments, test assumptions, and deepen moral imagination.

I’ve experienced that personally while writing Against All Odds. AI has helped me structure ideas, sharpen analysis, and think more clearly. That led me to wonder: might this technology assist moral discernment in a fractured age?

A former student of mine at Berea College answered with a bracing reality check.

He wasn’t interested in metaphors. He was interested in data centers.

He described attending a town hall meeting after a hyperscale data center opened in a predominantly Black and poor community near him. Residents were worried about air quality, water consumption, constant noise, diesel backup generators, and long-term health effects. Wealthier neighborhoods had blocked similar facilities. This one could not.

His point was simple and unsettling:

How can you call AI morally promising when its infrastructure burdens marginalized communities?

He added that AI consumes far more energy than a standard web search. It requires massive computational power. It uses water for cooling. It relies on an electrical grid still heavily dependent on fossil fuels. And these facilities are rarely built in affluent suburbs.

In short: Who pays for your moral imagination?

That is not a frivolous question. It is a liberation theology question.

And he’s right to ask it.

If we celebrate the benefits of AI without naming its environmental footprint, we risk drifting into technological romanticism. It is easy to praise illumination while ignoring cooling towers and diesel generators.

But here’s where the conversation deepens.

AI did not invent the data center economy. Streaming services, cloud storage, cryptocurrency, social media, Zoom calls, online shopping — all of these already depend on massive server farms. Most of us participate in that system daily.

AI increases demand. It accelerates the curve. But it sits inside a digital infrastructure we were already using without much moral scrutiny.

So the real issue isn’t “AI versus no AI.”

The issue is how the digital economy externalizes its costs onto communities with the least political power.

That’s the environmental justice problem.

And it doesn’t disappear if we stop using chatbots while continuing to stream movies and store photos in the cloud.

The AI system I consulted about my student’s critique did something interesting. It didn’t defend itself. It acknowledged the material burden — and then widened the frame.

The core problem isn’t whether AI can clarify moral thought.

The core problem is governance.

Who regulates data centers?
Who decides where they are built?
Who enforces environmental protections?
Who ensures the transition to renewable energy?
Who protects poor communities from becoming sacrifice zones?

If AI use is not accompanied by advocacy for sustainable energy, fair siting practices, and strong environmental regulation, then my student’s critique stands.

But here’s the tension we cannot ignore.

AI is also uniquely capable of analyzing environmental injustice. It can process zoning data, identify discriminatory siting patterns, correlate health outcomes, expose regulatory capture, and help activists build evidence-based arguments.

The same technology that depends on infrastructure can help scrutinize that infrastructure.

That is not hypocrisy. It is the modern condition.

Every industrial system carries costs. The question is not whether costs exist. The question is whether we are honest about them — and whether we organize politically to reduce them.

My student was not telling me to stop thinking. He was telling me to widen the moral frame.

He was right.

If I speak about AI as morally useful, I must also speak about its environmental footprint. I must name who bears the burden. I must advocate regulation, renewable transitions, and community protections.

Hope without cost-accounting is naïve.

But cost-accounting without imagination is sterile.

The real challenge is integration.

AI is not a miracle descending from heaven. It is an industrial artifact embedded in an unequal economy. Any moral use of it must include political responsibility.

At the same time, dismissing AI as irredeemably immoral risks abandoning a tool that can assist critical thought and even environmental justice itself.

So where does that leave me?

More cautious.
More grounded.
But not retreating.

The exchange clarified something important.

The moral question is not: “Is AI good or bad?”

The moral question is: “Who benefits? Who pays? And what are we willing to change?”

If this technology is to be morally serious, it must be paired with environmental reform. If we use it, we must demand cleaner energy, tighter regulation, and just siting practices.

Otherwise, we are merely consuming another invisible convenience while someone else breathes the exhaust.

That is the debate.

And it is one worth having — not to score points, but to raise the standard of our moral speech.

Because in the end, the most important thing AI did in this exchange was not generate prose.

It forced a deeper conversation about justice.

And that conversation — not the code — is where moral progress begins.

Why Isaiah and Jesus Sound Like Marx (Again)

Readings for the 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Isaiah 58:7-10; Psalm112:4-9; 1 Corinthians 2:1-5; Matthew 5:13-16.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been saying (here and here) something that makes some people nervous: that the teachings of Jesus and the practice of the earliest Christian communities contain themes that can only be described as Marxist, socialist, even communist. Not in the caricatured sense tossed around on talk shows. Not in the Cold War sense. But in the deeply biblical sense—rooted in shared bread, structural justice, and God’s bias toward the poor.

Today’s readings don’t retreat from that claim. They double down.

Let’s start with the prophet and then move on to the Psalms, Paul, and Jesus.

Isaiah 58: God’s Politics of Bread

In Book of Isaiah 58, God is not interested in private piety detached from public justice. Isaiah says: Share your bread with the hungry. Shelter the oppressed and the homeless. Clothe the naked. Remove oppression from your midst.

This is not charity as a hobby. This is social reorganization. The prophet does not say, “Pray more and the hungry will be spiritually nourished.” He says: share your bread. Bread is economic. Bread is material. Bread is about who owns what and who eats.

The prophet assumes something structural: hunger is not accidental. Homelessness is not random. Oppression is not an individual moral failure; it is embedded in systems. And the remedy is not spiritualization—it is redistribution.

Psalm112:4-9

The Responsorial Psalm is often read as describing personal virtue. But listen carefully.

“Lavishly he gives to the poor.”
“He conducts his affairs with justice.”

The psalmist describes someone whose economic behavior is transformed. The just person lends without exploitation. He is not shaken by “evil report.” He is steadfast in justice.

This is not the portrait of a nationalist strongman obsessed with dominance. It is not the image of someone defending borders, hoarding wealth, or equating divine favor with market success. It is the image of someone who destabilizes unjust systems by generosity.

Franz Hinkelammert, the German-Latin American economist and theologian, warned that modern capitalism turns the market into an idol—demanding sacrifice of human lives in the name of “efficiency.” Hinkelammert argued that when profit becomes sacred, people become expendable.

Psalm 112 offers a different sacred center: the poor.

The just person’s heart is firm not because he has secured his investments—but because he trusts in the Lord while giving away resources.

That is profoundly anti-idolatrous. And therefore, profoundly political.

Paul in Corinth: Power in Weakness

In First Epistle to the Corinthians 2, Paul says something revolutionary:

“I did not come with sublimity of words or wisdom… but with Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”

The crucified one is not a nationalist hero. He is an executed victim of empire. (Crucifixion was the form of capital punishment reserved for insurrectionists.) Paul refuses rhetorical domination. He refuses identification with the elite. He centers the cross—an instrument of state terror.

Liberation theology has always emphasized this: the cross reveals God’s identification with victims. God is not neutral between oppressor and oppressed. God is found among those crucified by history.

Paul’s refusal of “persuasive words of wisdom” is also a critique of ideological manipulation. Faith must not rest on elite rhetoric, but on divine power manifest in solidarity with those empire hates and kills.

That is why Christian nationalism feels threatened by the cross.

Christian nationalism prefers triumph. It prefers cultural dominance. It prefers flags draped over crosses.

But Paul gives us a broken body instead.

Jesus: Salt and Light

Now the Gospel.

In Gospel of Matthew 5, Jesus says: “You are the salt of the earth.” “You are the light of the world.”

Salt preserves from decay. Light exposes what is hidden.

This is not a call to privatized spirituality. It is a call to public transformation.

Notice: your light must shine so that others see your good deeds.

What deeds?

Isaiah has already told us: feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, dismantling oppression.

Jesus is not inventing a new ethic here. He is intensifying Isaiah’s.

A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden. This is a communal image. It evokes not isolated believers but a visible alternative society.

The earliest Christian communities took this seriously. They held goods in common. They redistributed resources so that “there was not a needy person among them.” That sounds dangerously close to socialism—because it is.

And here is where we must address the tension with voices like Charlie Kirk‘s, which argue that Christianity is fundamentally about individual salvation, private morality, and national strength.

In that framework, the market is sacred, property rights are absolute, and any talk of structural redistribution is labeled “Marxist” as if that ends the conversation.

But here’s the irony: Isaiah sounds more Marxist than the commentators who condemn Marx. Jesus sounds more socialist than the pundits who wave Bibles at rallies.

When Christians share bread, dismantle oppression, and organize communal life around the needs of the poor, they are not betraying the Gospel. They are embodying it.

Why This Theology Was Targeted

This is why liberation theology (i.e. authentic biblical theology informed by modern scripture scholarship) was perceived as dangerous.

In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration and policy strategists behind what became known as the Santa Fe Document explicitly identified liberation theology as a threat in Latin America. It aligned peasants and workers with biblical faith. It exposed structural injustice. It challenged U.S.-backed regimes.

So, it had to be neutralized.

The strategy was twofold: (1) Portray liberation theology as “Marxist infiltration,” and (2) Promote a privatized, depoliticized Christianity compatible with neoliberal economics.

    The result?

    • U.S.-sponsored death squads.
    • Assassinations of priests, nuns, and catechists. (Recall the slogan in El Salvador, “Be a patriot; kill a priest.”)  
    • A generation of Christians taught to fear the word “justice” if it implied systemic change.
    • A generation trained to equate patriotism with piety.
    • A generation suspicious of any theology that speaks of class.

    And so, the Left weakened—because it surrendered theological imagination — and often faith itself. Meanwhile, the Right grew strong—because it wrapped market ideology in biblical language.

    But Isaiah is still there.

    Paul is still there.

    Jesus is still there.

    And they continue to say: share your bread. Remove oppression. Shine with good deeds.

    The Conflict Today

    The conflict is not between Christianity and atheism. It is between two versions of Christianity. One blesses empire. The other stands with the crucified. One Christianity defends borders above human beings. The other remembers that Jesus himself was a refugee. One Christianity fears the language of class. The other recognizes that the Bible is saturated with it—rich and poor, debtor and creditor, slave and free.

    Christian nationalism proclaims, “Make the nation great again.” Biblical theology proclaims, “Make the poor visible again.”

    Christian nationalism identifies God with power. Biblical theology identifies God with victims.

    And today’s readings make clear which side the biblical text leans toward.

    Salt That Has Not Lost Its Taste

    Jesus warns: salt can lose its taste.

    What does that mean? It means faith can lose its transformative power. It can become bland, domesticated, harmless. When Christianity ceases to confront structural injustice, it becomes tasteless. When the Church fears being called “socialist” more than it fears ignoring the hungry, it has lost its saltiness. When Christians defend systems that produce homelessness while quoting Scripture about personal morality, the light dims.

    But when bread is shared, light breaks forth like dawn. When oppression is removed, darkness becomes midday. When communities embody economic justice—God says, “Here I am.”

    That is the promise of Isaiah.

    That is the power of the cross.

    That is the calling of salt and light.

    Conclusion

    For the past two weeks, I’ve suggested that Marx did not invent concern for the poor. The prophets did. Jesus did. The earliest Christians did.

    Marx analyzed exploitation. Isaiah condemned it. Jesus embodied resistance to it.

    To acknowledge this is not to baptize every socialist experiment in history. It is not to deny the complexities of economics. It is simply to be honest about the text.

    The Bible does not defend hoarding. It does not sanctify inequality. It does not idolize the nation-state. It calls for justice. And justice, in Scripture, is not abstract. It is bread, shelter, clothing, and dignity.

    So, if someone says that such preaching is “Marxist,” perhaps the better question is: why does Marx sound like Isaiah?

    If someone claims that Christian faith is about national power, perhaps we should ask: what do we do with the crucified Messiah?

    If someone insists that the Church should avoid politics, perhaps we should re-read Isaiah 58.

    The readings today are not subtle. They do not whisper. They’re about salt and light, bread and justice, capital punishment and resurrection.

    They do not endorse empire, domination or nationalism disguised as faith. Instead, they announce that authentic worship is inseparable from economic justice.

    And when that justice begins to take shape—when bread is shared, when the afflicted are satisfied—then, Isaiah promises, “your light shall rise in the darkness.”

    May we have the courage to let it shine.

    When Even Liberals Deny The Communism Present in the Bible

    Readings for Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time: Zephaniah 2:3; 3:12-13; Psalm 146:6-7, 8-9-10; 1 Corinthians 1:26-31; Matthew 5:12a

    Not long ago, Bill Maher dismissed Zohran Mamdani by calling him a “straight-up communist,” as if that were the end of the conversation. No serious engagement with ideas. No discussion of wages, housing, healthcare, or workers’ rights. Just the word — used the way it has been used in this country for a century: to make people afraid and to shut down debate.

    What’s striking is that this kind of reaction no longer comes only from the political right. It now comes from a whole class of well-off “liberals” who pride themselves on being socially progressive while remaining fiercely protective of the economic arrangements that benefit them.

    They’ll support diversity. They’ll support tolerance. They’ll support every cultural reform that does not threaten concentrated wealth.

    But the moment someone starts talking seriously about class, about exploitation, about systems that generate poverty in the middle of abundance, suddenly the conversation becomes “dangerous,” “extreme,” or “un-American.”

    And that tells us something important: even liberal politics in this country has very strict limits when it comes to challenging economic power.

    Which makes today’s readings deeply inconvenient — not only for conservatives, but for comfortable liberals as well.

    Because Scripture is not neutral. And it is not polite.

    In today’s first reading, Zephaniah tells us that God’s future is not secured by elites, but by: “a people humble and lowly… who shall take refuge in the name of the Lord.” The future belongs not to those the world considers “winners,” but to a remnant of impoverished survivors.

    And the responsorial Psalm leaves no ambiguity about divine priorities:

    The Lord secures justice for the oppressed, gives food to the hungry, sets captives free, protects strangers (immigrants and refugees), sustains widows and orphans, and thwarts the way of the wicked.

    That is not cultural progressivism. That is economic and social judgment.

    Then Paul says something that should make every “meritocracy” uncomfortable: Not many of you were wise by human standards. Not many were powerful. Not many were of noble birth.

    In other words, the Church did not begin among the educated, affluent, and influential — and it was never meant to become their chaplain.

    God, Paul says, deliberately chooses the weak and the lowly in order to expose how hollow our usual standards of success really are.

    That is not a message designed to reassure people who are already doing quite well.

    Then Jesus goes up the mountain and does something extraordinary: He does not bless hard work. He does not bless ambition. He does not bless entrepreneurship.

    He blesses: the poor, the grieving, the meek (humble, gentle, non-violent) and those who hunger and thirst for justice.

    And Luke strips away any remaining ambiguity: He has Jesus say directly “Blessed are you who are poor.” Not “poor in spirit” (Matthew’s version). Not “poor but virtuous.” Not “poor but patient.” Just poor.

    This is not charity language. This is political language.

    Jesus is announcing that God’s future does not belong to those who win under present arrangements. It belongs to those who have been pushed aside by them.

    “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land.” Not the landlords. Not the corporations. The meek (humble, gentle, non-violent).

    Which raises an obvious question: inherit it from whom?

    From those who currently control it.

    That is not spiritualized poetry. That is social reversal.

    And then Jesus adds: Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you because of me.

    In other words, if you stand with the poor and challenge systems that benefit the powerful, do not expect bipartisan approval. Expect mockery — including from people who otherwise think of themselves as progressive (like Bill Maher).

    Because nothing makes respectable liberals more uncomfortable than the suggestion that their comfort may depend on someone else’s suffering.

    Now let’s talk again about that word: “communist.”

    Karl Marx was not writing self-help books for the wealthy. He was analyzing why workers who produce society’s wealth often cannot afford to live securely in it. He was naming class as a structural reality, not a personality flaw.

    And the society he imagined was one marked, at least in theory, by: shared abundance, no permanent classes, and no state serving as guardian of elite interests.

    Now again, Jesus is not Marx. But when Jesus speaks about the Kingdom of God, what he describes is a world where: no one hoards while others starve, no one is reduced to a disposable labor unit, no one’s worth is determined by productivity or profit.

    And that is not just talk.

    Acts tells us that the first Christians: held all things in common and distributed to each as any had need.

    That is not symbolic. That is economic practice.

    And yet, in modern American Christianity, we are told again and again that faith has nothing to say about economic structures, only about personal morality.

    Which is very convenient — for those who benefit from those structures.

    Now add one more truth we cannot afford to forget. Jesus was not only poor. He was not only from a peasant class. He was also a refugee.

    Like so many at our borders today, his family fled across state lines to escape political violence. His survival depended on being welcomed as a stranger in a foreign land.

    Which means that when today’s political debates treat migrants as threats, burdens, or criminals, they are not simply ignoring Jesus’ teachings — they are contradicting Jesus’ life.

    Borders were not sacred and inviolable for Jesus and his family. Saving their own lives was.

    And that should matter a great deal when Christians start speaking as though national security is more sacred than human dignity.

    So, when I hear wealthy comedians and pundits sneer at movements for economic justice and immigrant dignity as “communist,” what I really hear is anxiety — not about ideology, but about the possibility that the moral center of society might shift away from protecting privilege.

    Because let’s be honest: the Beatitudes are far more dangerous to entrenched wealth than Marx ever was.

    They do not simply criticize exploitation. They declare that God’s future belongs to those who suffer under it.

    And that is precisely why even “liberal” societies work so hard to tame Jesus, spiritualize his words, and turn Christianity into a religion of personal decency rather than structural transformation.

    But Scripture refuses to cooperate. From the prophets to Paul to Jesus himself, the message is consistent: God sides with the poor. God challenges the powerful. God imagines a world beyond class domination and enforced scarcity.

    And if that vision makes polite society nervous — if it earns ridicule from television studios and think tanks — then perhaps it is doing exactly what it is supposed to do.

    Because Jesus said: Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you
    and speak evil against you falsely because of me.

    And this not because suffering is good, but because standing with the poor has always been the place where God’s kingdom collides with human empires — including empires that call themselves liberal, enlightened, and even Christian.

    And that collision is not behind us.

    It is very much still unfolding.

    A Failure Already? Bill Maher Declares Zohran Mamdani “A Straight Up Communist”

    How respectable liberalism helps defend systems it claims to oppose.

    One of the earliest dynamics I imagined in my recent novella (Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President & Changed America Forever) was not triumph, but backlash. The story assumes that the moment entrenched systems are seriously challenged, the response will not be curiosity or patience, but immediate verdicts of failure — long before structural change has even had time to begin. That reflex is not accidental. It is part of how power protects itself.

    Which is why the speed with which Zohran Mamdani has been declared a disappointment is not surprising at all. Three weeks into office and New York’s housing crisis remains. Imagine that — after three whole weeks!! Rents are still unaffordable. Shelters are still crowded. Families are still doubling up, and young people are still leaving the city they love because they cannot imagine building a stable future there.

    But what has been just as revealing as the impatience is the source of much of the outrage. Some of the loudest denunciations of Mamdani have come not only from the right, but from television personalities who still market themselves as liberals — most notably Bill Maher — who appear genuinely appalled that a major American city might elect someone who does not instinctively genuflect before market solutions.

    Forgetting about our nation’s history of racially segregated neighborhoods and ghettoes, ignoring real estate and banking redlining, gated communities, white flight, and the exclusionary practices of the Trump family itself, Maher ridicules the obvious fact that home ownership in the U.S. has been and remains racist and an instrument of white supremacy. Think about it. Think about the racial impact of using property taxes to determine the quality of public schools. Yes, Mr. Maher, home ownership in America is racist.

    However, by the standards of contemporary political commentary, such amnesia and willful ignorance has apparently provided enough time to declare defeat.

    What is more striking still however is how little these attacks have to do with actual housing policy. They are not debates about zoning law, construction finance, or tenant protections. They are ideological rituals. Mamdani is denounced not only as a “socialist,” but as (in Maher’s words) “a straight-up communist,” as if these were self-explanatory epithets rather than political terms with long and very specific histories.

    Red-baiting, once a reliable weapon of the right, has now become comfortable entertainment for liberal audiences.

    One might reasonably expect professional commentators to understand the vocabulary they deploy so confidently. However, they evidently do not. Instead, we are offered ideological pantomime: capitalism good, socialism bad; privatization efficient, public ownership corrupt; taxes theft, regardless of what they fund or whom they protect. These slogans are not arguments. They are incantations — repeated not to clarify reality, but to prevent serious discussion of alternatives that might threaten existing concentrations of wealth and power.

    Yet after just a few dinner-table conversations, even my own middle school grandchildren could explain what Maher and others seem either not to know or not to care to acknowledge. My grandkids knew that socialism refers to public ownership of the means of production, the use of regulated markets, and limits on extreme wealth through progressive taxation. They knew that communism, in classical political theory, is not a description of any society that exists or has ever existed, but a hopeful vision of a future. It’s a North Star goal in which abundance is shared, class divisions disappear, and even the state itself — always a structure used to enforce class hierarchy — withers away.

    My little grandchildren also knew what most economists acknowledge without controversy: that every functioning economy in the world today is a mixed economy. They all combine public and private ownership, regulated and freer markets, and redistribution through taxation. To repeat, they are “mixed economies” — every one of them. The question is however, in whose favor are they mixed — in favor of the rich or of the poor? In the U.S., it’s the rich. In China, it’s the working class.

    Moreover, what Maher and others call “communism” has already proven to work in the United States. They called it the New Deal. They called it Keynesianism, and it gave us workers Social Security, minimum wage laws, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation for injury on the job, and a 40 hour work week. It made unions legal and provided jobs, income, and socially valuable work for millions of impoverished Americans when the government stepped in as employer of last resort. Its creation of the national park system made the U.S. government the country’s biggest land owner — the master of the planet’s most important “means of production.”

    None of this is radical. It is introductory political economy.

    What is radical, apparently, is saying any of this out loud on American television without first wrapping it in nervous apologies.

    Housing policy then becomes not a question of long-term public investment and institutional redesign, but a morality play in which reformers are expected to perform miracles on cue — and are mocked when they cannot.

    Yet the truly unrealistic position is believing that deregulated housing markets will somehow, after decades of failure, suddenly begin producing widespread affordability. The evidence is overwhelming that they will not. Left to themselves, housing markets maximize return on investment, not human stability. Luxury construction thrives; low-income units stagnate. Rent rises faster than wages. Speculation accelerates displacement. Public housing deteriorates under chronic underfunding while private capital flows freely into high-yield developments.

    To call this “natural” is to mistake policy choices for inevitability.

    If anything, the realistic position is the one Mamdani actually represents: that reversing these dynamics will take sustained political will, public investment, and institutional rebuilding — none of which can be accomplished by executive decree or cable-news bravado.

    This is why ideological labels matter less than practical institutional policies. Passing tenant protections may not make headlines, but it changes lives. Securing funding streams for public housing repair may not trend on social media, but it prevents future crises. Rewriting zoning laws to allow denser, community-controlled development may not satisfy the appetite for spectacle, but it reshapes what becomes possible over time.

    In other words, housing reform requires democracy — not performance.

    In Against All Odds, accountability is not about scapegoats. It is about public reckoning with systems that were allowed to persist because they benefited the powerful and numbed the rest of us into acceptance. That kind of reckoning, whether in fiction or in real cities, cannot happen instantly. It unfolds through institutions slowly being repurposed for the common good rather than private extraction.

    What Mamdani’s first weeks in office really reveal is not failure, but the size of the inheritance: decades of bipartisan accommodation to a housing system that treats insecurity as an acceptable cost of growth.

    If we are honest, the scandal is not that housing has not been fixed in three weeks. The scandal is that it was allowed to deteriorate for thirty years while political leadership congratulated itself on “vibrant markets” and “urban renewal.”

    Progressive politics, if it is to mean anything beyond branding, must be judged not by speed alone but by direction: by whether public institutions are being rebuilt rather than hollowed out, by whether power is shifting toward those who have long been excluded from shaping their own living conditions, and by whether economic life is being reorganized around human needs rather than speculative return.

    Those metrics take time to register.

    The Arc of Justice Alliance grew out of this same realization: that without new public imagination — and new public institutions to match it — we will remain trapped in systems that treat structural injustice as unfortunate but inevitable. Stories, movements, and policies must reinforce one another if democratic repair is to be more than a slogan.

    That is why I write fiction alongside essays like this one. Not because stories replace politics, but because they can help us picture futures that our current institutions make difficult to imagine — and therefore difficult to fight for.

    Three weeks is not a verdict. It is barely the opening scene.

    The real question is not whether Zohran Mamdani has solved housing yet, but whether liberal America is willing to stop mistaking ideological comfort for political realism — and to admit that serious reform will always look dangerous to those who have grown accustomed to a system that works, more or less, for them.

    A Second Excerpt From “Against All Odds”— Chapter Seven, “The Sovereign Ledger”

    Editor’s Note / Author’s Introduction

    I recently shared here and at OpEdNews the opening chapter of my novella Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President & Changed America Forever. I published the novella in the belief that narrative can sometimes open moral and political reflection in ways that formal analysis does not.

    Rather than continuing sequentially, I’m offering today a later, stand-alone chapter — Chapter Seven, “The Sovereign Ledger.” I chose this chapter because of its real-life echoes of The Epstein Files. Like the latter, this chapter confronts a question that democratic societies routinely avoid: how do nations acknowledge wrongdoing, make accountability public, and prevent political reconciliation from becoming mere collective amnesia?

    Although this chapter occurs well into the story, it does not depend on detailed knowledge of earlier events. It represents a turning point where personal courage gives way to institutional reckoning — and where justice becomes a matter of public structure rather than private virtue.

    I offer it in the hope that it may prompt reflection not only about the future imagined in this story, but about the present we are still struggling to shape.

    Chapter Seven: The Sovereign Ledger

    “There are moments when a nation learns that its worst suspicions were not paranoid enough.”
    — Arc of Justice Alliance, Internal Briefing, March 2026

    The first sign was not outrage. It was nausea.

    People would later remember where they were when the Ledger surfaced, but few would remember what they felt in those first minutes.

    Not anger. Not disbelief. Something colder. Something intimate. As if a locked room inside the American psyche had been opened, and the air that escaped was foul beyond imagination.

    The file appeared without announcement.
    No whistleblower stepped forward.
    No press conference was called.
    No government agency took credit or responsibility.

    At 2:14 a.m. Eastern Time, mirrored across thousands of servers worldwide, a compressed archive appeared under a single title:

    THE SOVEREIGN LEDGER
    Internal Records of Federal Continuity, 1998–2028

    Within minutes, links propagated across independent newsrooms, encrypted forums, municipal networks, and university servers. By sunrise, attempts to suppress it had already failed. The file had been copied too many times, by too many hands, in too many jurisdictions.

    It was not a leak. It was an exhumation.

    The Ledger was not one scandal. It was a system. Thousands of pages documented how power in the United States had long operated through a shadow economy of indulgence, coercion, and silence.

    What the public had been encouraged to understand as “isolated incidents” appeared instead as recurring patterns—engineered, financed, and protected.

    There were private air manifests tied to shell corporations. There were sealed settlements paid with public funds.
    There were non-prosecution agreements signed by federal prosecutors who later received corporate board appointments.

    And there were the names.

    Lawmakers.
    Judges.
    Intelligence officials.
    Media executives.
    Foreign dignitaries.

    Some appeared once. Others appeared again and again.

    The most disturbing files concerned what the Ledger referred to—with chilling bureaucratic neutrality—as “leverage assets.” Young women. Underage girls.
    Migrants without documentation.
    Runaways pulled from foster systems.

    They were trafficked not primarily for profit, but for control. Sex was the currency. Shame was the collateral.

    The Ledger documented how parties, retreats, “philanthropic conferences,” and private residences were used to compromise powerful individuals—and how those compromises were then archived, categorized, and deployed when obedience was required.

    One internal memo summarized the logic plainly: “Exposure risk ensures policy compliance across administrations.”

    What shocked readers most was not the existence of depravity—Americans had learned to expect that—but the scale of institutional cooperation required to keep it hidden.

    FBI investigations were quietly reassigned. Victims were pressured into silence through civil settlements.
    Journalists were warned off stories by editors citing “national stability.” Judges were persuaded to seal records indefinitely. Even deaths the public had been told were suicides appeared in the Ledger as “containment events.”

    One line, buried deep in a Justice Department review, froze the nation:

    “Subject’s death neutralized further reputational cascade.”

    The Ledger did not accuse. It docu-mented. Emails. Bank transfers.
    Flight logs. Surveillance transcripts.

    It showed that the system had not merely tolerated abuse—it had absorbed it, metabolized it, and used it as governance.

    By midmorning, the country had stopped pretending. Trading halted on multiple exchanges. Congressional offices closed without explanation. Cable news anchors struggled to read prepared statements with steady voices. Parents read the Ledger and felt ill. Survivors read it and wept. And millions who had never trusted Washington finally understood why.

    It wasn’t incompetence. It wasn’t polar-ization. It wasn’t gridlock. It was rot.

    Trust did not collapse slowly. It vanished.

    Zohran Mamdani read the Ledger alone.

    He sat in the Blue Room at City Hall long after staff had gone home, the city glowing beneath the windows like a living organism unaware of its diagnosis. He read until his eyes burned.

    What struck him was not outrage—that came later—but grief. The Ledger did not describe monsters hiding in shadows. It described men in suits, speaking softly, shaking hands, protecting one another. It described a republic that had confused continuity with morality.

    When he reached the annex detailing municipal pressure programs—how cities like New York were financially squeezed into compliance, how mayors were surveilled, how reform efforts were quietly strangled—he closed the laptop.

    “So,” he said aloud, “this is why nothing ever changes.”

    Naomi entered without knocking. Her eyes were red.


    “They’ll deny it,” she said.

    “They already are,” he replied. “They’ll say it’s foreign disinformation.”

    “Too many fingerprints,” she said.

    “They’ll say it doesn’t matter.”

    “It matters,” Zohran said, “because people believed them once.”

    She hesitated. “Do you know what this means?”

    He nodded slowly. “It means the country is going to look for someone who isn’t in that file.”

    The Ledger did what no election, protest, or ideology had managed to do. It made the old system unbelievable. Not unjust—unbelievable.

    People stopped asking which party was responsible and began asking whether the system itself deserved to survive.

    Governors issued contradictory statements. Federal agencies fell silent. Courts postponed hearings without explanation. And in living rooms, kitchens, union halls, and classrooms across the country, the same realization settled in: We were governed by people who could not govern themselves.

    When authority evaporates, something always rushes in to replace it. In New York, the Arc of Justice Alliance released a single statement:

    “Legitimacy is not inherited. It is earned—and it can be lost.”

    Zohran said nothing publicly for three days. When he finally spoke, he did not attack Washington. He did not cite the Ledger. He did not accuse. He said only this: “Power that survives by hiding crimes forfeits the right to rule.”

    The silence afterward was absolute.

    Somewhere between that moment and the next sunrise, the republic crossed a line it could not uncross. The Sovereign Ledger had not merely exposed corruption. It had revealed that the American government no longer governed by consent—but by concealment.

    And once concealment failed, nothing remained.

    Concluding Reminder

    Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President & Changed America Forever, explores questions of political accountability, public trust, and democratic repair through narrative rather than policy argument.

    Readers interested in the complete story can find information about the book by clicking here. All proceeds from the novella’s sales go to the Arc of Justice Alliance which is applying for tax-exempt status.

    How Even the American Left Keeps Falling for Regime-Change Narratives

    Just when public attention is turning—once again—to unanswered questions about Jeffrey Epstein, his powerful associates, and the long history of elite impunity in the United States, we are suddenly confronted with a new foreign-policy emergency. Once again, we are told that events abroad demand our immediate moral outrage, our emotional investment, and our political alignment with the very leaders who are most eager to change the subject at home.

    This is not coincidence. It is political deflection.

    The Trump administration has every incentive to flood the media with international crisis narratives that redirect attention away from institutional corruption, judicial failures, and the uncomfortable truth that powerful men rarely face consequences in this country. And nothing serves that purpose more reliably than the familiar spectacle of righteous outrage against a designated foreign villain.

    So here we go again.

    We are being told—urgently and with manufactured moral certainty—that we must side with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel and Donald Trump’s America in condemning alleged mass killings by Iranian security forces. We are invited to clutch our pearls over reports that “thousands” may have died in Iran in the past week alone, while the credibility of those numbers goes largely unquestioned and the geopolitical context goes mostly unmentioned.

    The timing is convenient. The narrative is familiar. And the political utility is obvious.

    It all ignores the fact that for more than two years, Israel, with full political and military backing from the United States, has devastated Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians—mostly women and children—have been killed. Hospitals, schools, and water systems have been systematically destroyed. Starvation has been used as a weapon. Yet U.S. officials have either remained silent or have actively shielded Israel from accountability in international forums.

    Now those same officials present themselves as guardians of human rights, suddenly appalled by civilian deaths.

    Fortunately however, moral authority is not something that can be turned on and off like that at political convenience. By enabling mass slaughter in Gaza, Israel and the United States have forfeited any claim to be neutral or trustworthy narrators of human rights abuses elsewhere. When they point the finger at Iran, they do so with blood soaked hands.

    What is most troubling, however, is that much of what passes for the American “left” appears ready—once again—to follow their lead.

    Even progressive outlets that have long criticized U.S. imperialism are amplifying claims about Iran with little scrutiny, as if we have learned nothing from Iraq, Libya, or Syria. The familiar script is rolled out: heroic protesters, savage security forces, and a population yearning for Western-style liberation.

    But we have seen this movie before. And we know how it ends.

    Consider a striking example from just this week. On Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviewed the acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. During the interview, Panahi acknowledged something crucial: because of internet shutdowns and information blackouts, he said, “I do not have any trustworthy news from inside Iran. I don’t know what is happening. I don’t know where my colleagues are, where my family is. It is only the bits and pieces that you hear.”

    And yet moments later, he spoke confidently of thousands—perhaps 2,000, perhaps even 20,000—killed by Iranian security forces. The interviewer did not challenge the figures, ask for sourcing, or remind viewers that casualty estimates in politicized conflicts are often wildly inflated during the early stages of unrest.

    This is not serious journalism. It is narrative reinforcement.

    None of this is to deny that Iran represses dissent or that many Iranians have legitimate grievances. It is simply to insist that repression alone does not explain why certain countries suddenly dominate Western headlines, while others—such as Israel—are insulated from scrutiny even when their actions are far more destructive.

    The difference is not morality. It’s the way imperialism works.

    Recall that immediately after 9/11, General Wesley Clark publicly revealed that the Pentagon had drawn up plans for regime change in seven countries: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, and Iran. While the timeline shifted, the strategic objective did not. Iran has remained a top target of U.S. and Israeli policy for decades, regardless of which party occupies the White House.

    Political scientists such as John Mearsheimer have described how these operations tend to follow a consistent pattern:
    First, economic sanctions that cripple daily life and undermine public confidence in the government;
    Second, support for opposition movements, often including covert funding and the use of provocateurs to escalate unrest;
    Third, aggressive information warfare, in which unverified or exaggerated claims are circulated internationally to delegitimize the targeted regime;
    Fourth, threats of military intervention—or actual intervention—once instability has been sufficiently inflamed.

    This is not speculation. It is documented policy history. Libya followed this script. Syria followed this script. Iraq followed this script with catastrophic results.

    Sanctions, in particular, deserve far more attention than they receive in Western reporting. They are not “smart” tools that surgically target political elites. They are blunt-force attacks on entire populations, restricting access to medicine, banking systems, and basic imports. They produce precisely the social desperation that then gets cited as proof of governmental illegitimacy.

    In effect, we help create the crisis, then point to the crisis as justification for further intervention.

    And after Gaza, skepticism about Western moral posturing is not cynicism. It is responsibility.

    What is perhaps most disheartening is how easily even progressive voices are drawn into amplifying the early stages of these campaigns. Figures who would never have accepted Pentagon talking points about Latin America or Vietnam routinely accept them uncritically when the target is Iran. Good intentions do not prevent anyone from becoming useful to empire.

    True solidarity with the Iranian people would start by opposing both domestic repression and foreign destabilization. It would recognize that sanctions are not neutral policy tools but instruments of social punishment, designed to fracture societies and manufacture crisis. And it would reject the deadly illusion that U.S.-backed regime change delivers democracy rather than collapsed states and endless violence.

    We know this because we have already seen it—in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria. These were not humanitarian successes. They were geopolitical experiments whose costs were paid by ordinary people.

    The lesson should be obvious by now: when governments that have just enabled mass civilian slaughter suddenly rediscover their concern for human rights, we should ask what strategic objective that concern is meant to serve.

    After Gaza, Western outrage over Iran cannot be separated from Western impunity in Israel. One exposes the hypocrisy of the other. The crucial fact is simple: the U.S. does not fund uprisings, enforce sanctions, and manipulate media narratives out of compassion.

    It does so to maintain empire. To keep its hegemony.

    Those who truly care about the future of Iran should resist becoming foot soldiers in yet another regime-change campaign. They should demand diplomacy, economic normalization, and international accountability that applies to allies as well as adversaries.

    Above all, they should remember that justice does not arrive on the wings of bombers or through the quiet work of covert operations.

    It never has.

    And if the past quarter-century has taught us anything, it is this: the loudest voices claiming to defend human rights are too often the ones preparing the ground for the next war.

    Author’s Note

    This essay connects to themes explored in the author’s recent ChatGPT-assisted political novella, Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President and Changed America Forever, which uses storytelling to examine how media narratives, economic coercion, and permanent war distort democracy at home and abroad. Both the novella and the Arc of Justice Alliance / Project 2029 project argue that real security comes not from regime change or military dominance, but from building a “Republic of Care” grounded in democratic accountability and human dignity.

    How Zohran Mamdani Can Become President: (An Excerpt from My “Arc of Justice Alliance” Novella)

    Most people do not read policy papers; they’d rather read stories That is not a failure of intelligence; it simply a description of how human beings learn, imagine, and change.

    My novella, Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President and Changed America Forever was written to complement the policy statements of the emerging Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA). The book is not a prediction, nor a legislative blueprint. It is a story — a civic fable — meant to explore how democratic renewal might feel, sound, and unfold if ordinary people followed the lead of politicians such as Zohran Mamdani.

    The book grew out of decades of political reflection, organizing experience, and moral concern, and was developed in conversation with AI. That collaboration does not replace human judgment; it sharpens it, forcing questions of coherence, plausibility, and ethical consistency that policy language often evades.

    What follows is the book’s opening chapter. It is offered here not as entertainment, but as an invitation: to introduce the book’s exploration of how power operates, how legitimacy erodes, and how moral imagination may be a prerequisite for democratic repair.

    Excerpt from Against All Odds

    Chapter One – The Bronx Spring

    “Every revolution begins as a local rumor — until someone believes it might be true.”
    — AJA Field Notes, 2025

    The winter had been long in Queens. Gray salt crusted the curbs. Trains screamed overhead like mechanical prayers. And yet, beneath the cold concrete, some-thing was stirring — quiet, electric, alive.

    They called it the Bronx Spring.

    It began with a tenants’ strike in a decaying building off 31st Avenue — the kind of place where the rent doubled every two years while the heat failed every January. Young organizers — Somali, Bangladeshi, Dominican — went door to door with clipboards and conviction. And at the center of it all stood Zohran Mamdani, a man whose voice carried both the warmth of Queens and the cadence of Kampala, equal parts poetry and fire.

    He wasn’t a mayor yet, or even thinking that far ahead. He was a state assembly-man still riding the E train to Albany twice a week, still sending midnight texts that began, “Comrades, one more thing…” But something in him — and around him — had shifted.

    The city was tired of promises. And the Bronx, like the chorus of an old labor hymn, began to hum again. The night it truly began, the wind sliced through the corridors of the Queensbridge Houses.

    Zohran was there, coat collar turned up, hands full of coffee and flyers. A woman named Amina opened her door just wide enough to see his face. Behind her, a child slept under a mural of the Virgin and Malcolm X.

    “Another politician?” she asked.

    “Not exactly,” he said. “I’m your neighbor.”

    It wasn’t a line; it was true. He lived two blocks away.

    That night, fifty tenants gathered in the laundry room to write what they called The People’s Demands: rent rollbacks, energy audits, legal aid for evictions. No one expected much. Not in a city where real estate and police unions ran the show. But when Zohran spoke, he didn’t sound like a candidate. He sounded like a possibility.

    “Power,” he said, “isn’t what they hold in City Hall. It’s what we hold when we stop believing we’re alone.”

    Days later, things began to move. Heat returned to the buildings. Landlords called emergency meetings. A city inspector — one who’d ignored complaints for years — appeared, clipboard trembling.

    Something had changed.

    Zohran’s small Astoria office became a nerve center — whiteboards, coffee cups, volunteers working until dawn. They mapped block-by-block networks of resistance.

    They called it Reclaim the City. But within the movement, a quieter name began to circulate — The Arc of Justice Alliance.

    It meant different things to different people: a moral trajectory, a bridge to something better, a plan for what democracy might still become. Late at night, Zoran wrote in his notebook: “If we can build one just block, we can build one just city. If we can build one just city, we can build one just nation.”

    Power, even moral power, never goes unnoticed. In City Hall, consultants scoffed. The Post ran a headline: “Socialist Slum Preacher.” Developers whispered to their lobbyists. And in Washington, analysts began filing quiet memos about a charismatic legislator organizing “urban solidarity experiments” in Queens.

    The movement was becoming visible. And visibility, in America, is a dangerous form of faith.

    Spring came late that year. The cherry trees bloomed unevenly along Roosevelt Avenue, the air thick with rain and ambition. At a rally in Bryant Park, Mamdani stood beside bus drivers, sanitation workers, and students. The crowd wasn’t large, but it was awake — eyes bright, faces lifted toward something unseen but undeniable.

    “Every generation,” he said, “faces a choice between cynicism and renewal. We stand tonight at the threshold of both.”

    The words landed like prophecy.

    By summer, the rumor would become a movement, the movement a campaign, and the campaign a city reborn in defiance of empire. But for now — on that cold evening in Queens, with the wind off the East River and the trains moaning overhead — it was still only a whisper, shared among the hopeful.

    The Bronx Spring had begun.

    Yet, even then, before anyone could name it, an odd tremor ran beneath the surface of public life — small bureaucratic stumbles, missing records, a strange silence from federal monitors who normally hovered over tenant disputes. It was as if the machinery of the old republic were developing hairline fractures no one yet saw.

    Reflection

    Stories do not replace policy.
    But they often make policy thinkable.

    If this excerpt resonates, it may be because it names something many people already sense: that power rests in an awakened electorate and that politicians like Zohran Mamdani can represent the future of our nation as the “Republic of Care” proposed by the Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA).

    As noted above, Against All Odds is part of the broader work of the AJA, an effort dedicated to imagining and building democratic institutions rooted in care, accountability, and human dignity.

    If you find value in this work, you are invited — never pressured — to support that effort. Purchasing the full book or donating helps sustain writing, organizing, and public education aimed at turning moral imagination into lived reality.

    Why China Governs—and America Can’t


    Democracy isn’t about elections every four years. It’s about serving the majority—and by that standard, the U.S. is failing while China succeeds.

    The ongoing dismantling of the American state under the Trump regime and the Republican blueprint known as Project 2025 does not represent an aberration or a temporary descent into madness. It represents the logical fruition of a political system structurally incapable of governing itself for the long term.

    Trump merely makes visible what has long been true: the United States lacks the institutional continuity, political discipline, and moral orientation required to compete with societies capable of sustained planning. In that sense, America is not “falling behind.” It is revealing its nature and vulnerabilities . And that identity increasingly resembles what we once condescendingly labeled the Third World.

    To grasp why, we must abandon the illusion that the United States is governed by a coherent state. It is not. It is governed by a revolving door of factions, donors, ideologues, lobbyists, and media spectacles that swing wildly every four to eight years, undoing whatever fragile policy coherence preceded them. Distrust of government is elevated to a civic virtue; sabotage is rebranded as freedom; long-term planning is treated as a threat rather than a necessity.

    China operates on the opposite principle. It is governed by a permanent coordinating institution—the Chinese Communist Party—that does not dissolve after elections or permit private plutocrats to hollow out the state when their profits are threatened. One may object to its ideology or criticize its methods, but one cannot deny its structural advantage: it governs continuously. It plans in ten-, fifteen-, and twenty-five-year increments. It treats infrastructure, education, energy, and industrial policy as matters of national survival, not ideological fashion.

    That single fact—the presence or absence of a permanent governing authority capable of subordinating private wealth to public purpose—explains nearly everything that follows.

    Project 2025 throws the American contrast into stark relief. Its animating impulse is not reform but eradication. Get rid of government. Gut regulatory agencies. Purge the civil service. Replace professional competence with ideological loyalty. Distrust science. Abandon climate research. Defund education and public health. Criminalize critical thought—especially Black, feminist, Indigenous, or Hispanic history—on the grounds that such inquiry undermines patriotism. Schools, in this vision, are meant to produce obedience, not understanding.

    Energy policy under this regime borders on parody. Halt solar and wind development. Dismiss climate science as a hoax. Revive “beautiful clean coal,” as if atmospheric chemistry were a branding exercise. Withdraw from international climate agreements.

    Meanwhile, China dominates global solar manufacturing, battery technology, rare-earth processing, and electric transportation—not because it is morally superior, but because it decided decades ago that energy transition was inevitable and acted accordingly.

    The same pattern appears elsewhere. Arms-control treaties painstakingly negotiated over generations are abandoned on impulse. Nuclear safeguards are weakened. Diplomacy gives way to bullying. Alliances are treated as protection rackets. Institutions created after World War II to stabilize a fragile global order are mocked, hollowed out, or discarded.

    Then the pendulum swings. Democrats return to power and timidly attempt to repair the damage. Agencies are restaffed. Climate policy is resurrected. Treaties are reentered. Education funding is restored.

    But everyone knows the clock is already ticking. In four or eight years, the reversal will be reversed again. Businesses hesitate. Allies hedge. Long-term investment stalls. Why plan for a future that may be ideologically illegal after the next election?

    This is paralysis disguised as democracy.

    The only policies that survive these oscillations are those serving the rich and powerful: permanent war, regime change abroad, an ever-expanding military budget, corporate bailouts, and surveillance systems untouched by austerity. On these matters there is bipartisan consensus, because these are the interests of the class that actually governs the United States.

    China, meanwhile, continues to move forward—not because it is benevolent, but because it is coherent. High-speed rail networks span the country. Ports, airports, and logistics hubs are built in record time. Universities expand. Technical education is prioritized. Poverty is treated as a social problem to be solved, not a moral failing to be punished.

    The results are not theoretical. China has earned repeated recognition from the United Nations for lifting roughly 800 million people out of extreme poverty since the late 1970s—an achievement without historical precedent. This figure appears consistently in UN Development Programme and World Bank assessments. No amount of ideological hostility can erase that record.

    Equally striking is the question of legitimacy. Contrary to Western assumptions, governance in China does not rely solely on repression. Long-running surveys conducted by Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance—tracking Chinese public opinion over more than a decade—show consistently high and rising levels of public satisfaction with the national government, often exceeding 90 percent approval.

    Compare this with the United States. Pew Research Center and Gallup polling over the past two decades reveal historic lows in trust toward the federal government, with confidence often hovering below 25 percent. Majorities of Americans report believing that elected officials do not care what people like them think, that government serves special interests, and that the political system is fundamentally broken. Decreasing numbers of Americans vote regularly, yet feel powerless. Chinese citizens vote for local officials and report that the permanent national system works.

    This forces an uncomfortable question: what do we actually mean by democracy?

    If democracy is reduced to the ritual of elections every two to four years—elections dominated by money, media manipulation, and structural exclusion—then the United States qualifies. But if democracy is understood more substantively, as governance that serves the material needs and long-term well-being of the majority, then the American claim collapses. By the testimony of citizens themselves—the people most closely involved—the United States fails at this task. China, by the same measure, succeeds.

    This does not mean China is socialist in any classical sense. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” might more accurately be described as capitalism with Chinese characteristics: a hybrid system that tolerates markets while refusing to surrender political authority to them. The crucial word is authority. The Chinese state asserts the right to govern. The American state apologizes for its existence.

    Ironically, the United States would need something like its own version of “socialism with American characteristics” to survive: a system that subordinates finance to production, treats health care and education as public goods, plans energy transitions over decades, and insulates core institutions from electoral whiplash. But such a transformation would require exactly what the American system cannot produce: permanent and irreversible investments in national health care, education, climate measures, nuclear disarmament, rent control, day care, labor unions, and wages that keep up with inflation.

    Project 2025 is not the cause of American decline. It is the confession. It openly declares that the American right no longer believes in governing—only in dismantling. And because the system permits such nihilism to recur endlessly, because it contains no mechanism for enforcing continuity in the public interest, decline is not merely possible. It is inevitable.

    The tragedy is not that China may surpass the United States. Civilizations rise and fall. That is history. The tragedy is that America is choosing decline in the name of freedom while hollowing out the very capacities that make freedom meaningful. A society that cannot plan, cannot remember, and cannot serve its people is not free.

    It is merely ungoverned.

    And ungoverned societies, no matter how wealthy they once were, eventually come to resemble the Third World they once presumed to lecture.