Nobody asked why Dorothy’s shoe color changed.

For decades, audiences accepted ruby slippers as though Baum had always written them that way, as though the most famous pair of shoes in American storytelling had always been red. They hadn’t. In L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel, the magic shoes are silver. Practical. Lunar. Quietly powerful in the way that modest things sometimes are.

Hollywood changed them. Because, of course it did. On purpose. A symbol.

The official explanation is Technicolor, the new three-strip process could render red with a vibrancy that would make audiences lean forward in their seats, and silver would have read as dull, maybe even gray. A production decision. A technical consideration. Perfectly reasonable. Right?

Right.

When you change a symbol, you change what it means. Silver carries the moon, restraint, hidden power, the kind that doesn’t announce itself. Red carries blood. Red carries desire. Red carries a history so old and so layered that the people making costume decisions in 1938 may not have fully understood what they were reaching for when they dyed those slippers. Or, maybe they did.

Symbols always know. They carry their histories whether we do or not. And symbolism will be their downfall.

The Cost of Red

Before red was a fashion choice, it was a conquest.

The ancient world wanted red desperately and could barely have it. The richest, most stable red dye came from kermes, tiny insects harvested from oak trees across the Mediterranean, crushed by the thousands to yield a color that faded slowly and ran deep into fiber. It took staggering quantities of the creatures to dye a single garment. The labor was backbreaking and the yield was small, but the color? The color was extraordinary.

And so red became the color of people who could afford to consume without restraint.

Tyrian purple gets most of the historical attention, but red was its close cousin in the economy of restricted color. Roman magistrates wore it. Warriors returning in triumph wore it. The Roman general given a triumph, that rare, nearly sacred honor, had his entire body painted red for the procession. Red was not decoration. Red was declaration.

Then the New World opened, and everything changed.

When Spanish conquistadors arrived in Mexico, they found the Aztecs producing a red so saturated, so luminous, so absolutely unlike anything Europe had ever seen that it would eventually upend the entire global textile market. The source was cochineal. A scale insect living on prickly pear cactus, harvested by indigenous hands, dried and crushed into a powder that produced a red of almost violent intensity.

Spain recognized immediately what they had. They classified cochineal as a state secret. The identity of the source, what creature, plant, and process, was suppressed for nearly two centuries. European dyers were working with something they couldn’t explain or replicate, dependent entirely on Spanish supply chains that ran through conquered land and broken people.

Red cloth dyed with cochineal became one of the most valuable commodities in the world.

Think about that the next time you see the color hanging casually on a rack.

The red that draped the powerful was red purchased with empire. With forced labor. With the systematic extraction of indigenous knowledge and indigenous bodies in service of a color that European aristocracy wanted on their backs. Every cardinal’s robe, every royal slipper, every flag that flew over a seat of power, that red had a price paid by people who never got to wear it.

Which brings us to the ones who did.

Shod in the Blood of Martyrs

For more than a thousand years, the Bishop of Rome wore red shoes.

Not as fashion nor as preference. As theology made visible.

The papal red shoe is one of the oldest continuous symbolic traditions in Catholicism, and its meaning was never ambiguous to the people who understood it. The red did not signify wealth, though wealth was certainly present. It didn’t signify power, though power was certainly implied. The red signified blood. Specifically, it was proposed to signify the blood of the martyrs, those first Christians ground under Roman heel, fed to lions, set aflame in Nero’s gardens. Those whose suffering was understood as the very foundation upon which the Church was built. That is the story.

Every pope who slipped his feet into red shoes was claiming to make a statement of theological succession: ‘I stand where they stood. I walk in what they shed. The Church was purchased at a price, and I carry that price on my body.’

The shoes appeared in papal dress as far back as the early medieval period, codified and ritualized over centuries into something inseparable from the office itself. They were part of the broader tradition of papal red: the mozzetta, the camauro, the saturno hat in earlier eras, a whole vocabulary of crimson that wrapped the pope in the color of sacrifice. Red was not merely what he wore. Red was what he represented.

When a new pope was elected, he was led to the Room of Tears, so named because of the weight of what had just happened to a man, and there, among the white cassock and the white zucchetto, were the red shoes. Waiting. A symbol that had outlasted dynasties and heresies and schisms and reformations and two world wars. A symbol that said: this office is older than you, heavier than you, and you will carry it now.

And then Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis.

And he left the red shoes in the room.

Francis walked out in plain black orthopedic shoes. The same ones he had worn as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. The gesture was so quiet and so pointed that it landed like a thunderclap in Vatican-watching circles. He wore black shoes throughout his pontificate. No red. No blood on his feet. No visual continuity with the thousand-year tradition he inherited.

The explanations offered on his behalf were characteristically humble. He was used to them. They were comfortable. He is a simple man. I am not Catholic and hold a long lens of suspicion, but, even I respected and understood that maybe, just maybe, Francis was different.

But symbols are never simple, and Francis knows this better than almost anyone alive. A man who chooses his words and his gestures with the precision he consistently demonstrates does not accidentally decline a thousand years of theological symbolism. He declines it on purpose, or he accepts it. There is no neutral.

What the refusal meant is something Catholics and observers have argued since 2013. Some read it as humility, a deliberate distancing from the imperial trappings that have accumulated around an office meant to represent a carpenter’s fisherman. Some read it as a rebuke of tradition, one in a series of gestures that have defined his papacy as one long argument with his predecessors. Some read it as something more unsettling: a severing, intentional or not, from the specific theology, biblical or otherwise, the red shoes carried. The weight of what was purchased.

You can disagree about what Francis meant. You cannot disagree that he knew exactly what he was doing.

When a symbol that has endured a thousand years is set aside, the setting aside is itself a symbol.

And red shoes, as we are about to see, have a way of meaning things whether their wearers intend it or not.

The Girl Who Could Not Stop

If you happen to be a literary fanatic like me, you know that fairy tales are not so sweet. In fact, they are almost always, without fail, telling the ugliest truth, wrapped up in a tale. That is how fairy tale writers tried to show the world the facts. Shakespeare did the same. It’s an age old tactic to inform the public. Fairy Tales are in truth the horrific acts of humanity, just in story form. Fairy tales are the stuff of nightmares.

Hans Christian Andersen was not writing a children’s story. A century and a half of being shelved in the nursery section has done serious damage to what The Red Shoes actually is. It’s a story about pride, coveting, and divine judgment so fierce that it would make a Puritan uncomfortable. Andersen dressed it in a little girl and a pair of dancing shoes, but the bones underneath are Calvinist, almost severe. A moral architecture that assumes God is watching, that vanity has consequences, and that some desires, left unchecked, will destroy you.

Here is what actually happens in the story, stripped of sentiment.

Karen is a poor child taken in by a wealthy old woman who is nearly blind. When it comes time for confirmation, that solemn moment of Catholic commitment, of standing before God and the congregation and declaring yourself, Karen fixates on a pair of red shoes. Not the white shoes appropriate to the occasion. Red shoes. The shoes of vanity and desire, the color of wanting what isn’t yours. She wears them to her confirmation. She is thinking about them during the ceremony, during the sacrament, when her attention should be entirely elsewhere.

Andersen makes the moment of transgression precise. She is not merely vain. She is vain before God, at the altar, at the exact moment consecrated for something other than herself.

And then the shoes begin to dance.

They dance at appropriate moments first, which is almost worse. They dance at a ball, where dancing is expected, but Karen cannot stop when she wishes to. The shoes have her. Then they dance at the graveside of the old woman who sheltered her. They dance past the church she cannot enter. They dance through night and weather and exhaustion until Karen, desperate, finds an executioner and asks him to cut off her feet.

He does.

The feet in the red shoes dance away without her. Karen is fitted with wooden feet and crutches and spends the rest of the story in penitent service until she is finally granted grace, but not restoration, not the return of what she lost, but grace. Forgiveness. Enough.

Andersen knew exactly what he was writing. He said so. The story was autobiographical in the way that fairy tales sometimes are, not in the literal details but in the spiritual ones. He was writing about desire that possesses rather than liberates. About reaching for symbols of a station you haven’t earned and don’t understand. About what happens when the thing you covet becomes the thing that controls you.

The red shoes in Andersen are not evil in themselves. They are dangerous because of what Karen brings to them: the hunger, the pride, the willingness to wear them before God at the moment most requiring humility. The shoes simply reveal what was already there.

This is theologically serious. The shoes don’t corrupt Karen. Karen corrupts herself, and the shoes make it visible and then inescapable.

There is an old idea, woven through Scripture and through the best of Christian moral theology, that our desires shape us. That what we reach for, we become. That coveting is not merely wanting. It is a reorientation of the self toward the wrong thing, and that reorientation, left unrepented, bends you permanently out of truth.

Andersen put that idea in red shoes and sent a little girl dancing to her own destruction.

He understood something about the color that the Aztec harvesters understood, that the Roman generals understood, that the medieval popes understood, and that Hollywood would deliberately choose in 1938.

Red is not a neutral color.

Red wants something from you.

The Shoes That Would Not Let Her Go

Michael Powell understood Andersen completely.

That is the only explanation for what he made in 1948 — a film so visually ravishing, so emotionally devastating, so theologically precise beneath its ballet-world glamour that it stands nearly eight decades later as one of the great works of British cinema. The Red Shoes is not an adaptation of Andersen’s fairy tale so much as it is a parallel translation. The same moral architecture, the same terrible logic, dressed now in tulle and ambition and the particular cruelty of the artistic world at its most demanding.

The setup is deceptively simple.

Victoria Page wants to dance more than she wants anything else on earth. Boris Lermontov wants dancers who want to dance more than they want anything else on earth. They find each other, and for a time it is perfect. She ascends, she is cast in the company’s new production of The Red Shoes, she becomes what she was always meant to become. Then she falls in love with Julian Craster, the young composer who scored the ballet, and Lermontov is forced to choose between them.

He chooses the dance. He always chooses the dance.

And here is where Powell is doing something more than telling a love story. Lermontov is not simply a jealous impresario or a cold-hearted villain. He is a man who has made a total consecration. Every human impulse subordinated to art, every relationship evaluated by what it produces or destroys in the work. He believes, with the fervor of a religious devotee, that great art requires this. That you cannot serve two masters. That the dancer who chooses love has chosen against dancing, and he will not pretend otherwise.

He is not entirely wrong. That is what makes him so disturbing.

Vicki cannot resolve the contradiction. She loves Julian. She loves the dance. She cannot cut one away cleanly, as Karen’s executioner cut away her feet, because both loves are genuine and both run all the way down to her foundation. Lermontov offers her the stage on the night Julian has come back for her. She puts on the red shoes.

And then Powell does something extraordinary.

He lets the shoes decide.

Vicki in the red shoes moves toward the stage, and then past it, and then to the balcony railing above the railway below, and she goes over. The shoes carry her to her death as surely as they carried Karen through the graveyard and past the church door. Julian reaches her in time only to hold her as she dies, the red shoes still on her feet, the performance beginning without her on the stage below. This was the ballerina ghost story that haunted all of us young ballerinas even at the (purely haunted) Springer Opera House in Georgia - the ballerina who fell into the pit and died.

Lermontov walks to the microphone and announces to the audience that Vicki will not be dancing tonight. His voice breaks, the only moment in the film where his devotion to art fails to hold him together. Then the ballet proceeds. The spotlight finds an empty space where she would have stood.

Powell is asking the same question Andersen asked, in a different register.

What happens to a person wholly possessed by a desire? What happens when the thing you were made to do becomes the thing that unmakes you? Is the desire itself the problem, or is the problem the world that cannot hold two great desires in one human life without destroying both?

Andersen answered with theology: pride and coveting bring judgment, and judgment is severe but grace is available to the penitent.

Powell answered with tragedy: some contradictions cannot be resolved, only survived or not.

Both answers live inside the red shoes. Both answers have lived there since before Andersen, since before the papal cobblers, since before the conquistadors watched cochineal dissolve into water and turn it the color of blood.

The shoes carry everything we have ever put into them.

And Then the World Democratized the Symbol

Christian Louboutin was twenty years old when he first sketched a shoe with a red sole. I have, unfortunately, not done my diligence as of this article into researching who and what Louboutin was connected to. As famous as his red bottomed footwear became among elites, I can speculate with almost certainty.

He has told the origin story many times, with the ease of a man who knows a good myth and has made peace with telling it. He saw an assistant painting her nails red. He grabbed the bottle and painted the sole of a prototype. He liked what he saw. The red sole became his signature, eventually his trademark; legally defended, culturally recognized, one of the most successful acts of personal branding in the history of fashion.

But Louboutin did not invent the meaning. He inherited it.

The red sole is the sumptuary law inverted. For centuries, red on the body was legally and economically restricted to those with the power to claim it. Royalty, clergy, the highest reaches of the aristocracy. Common people were forbidden the color not merely by price but by law. To wear red above your station was not a fashion mistake. It was a crime.

Louboutin’s genius was to take that thousand-year-old signal of restricted power and put a price tag on it. Now anyone can wear the red. Anyone with enough money, which is its own form of the old restriction — the barrier has shifted from bloodline to bank account, but the barrier remains. The red sole says what the cardinal’s shoes said, what the papal slippers said, what the conquistadors’ cochineal-dyed cloth said to every eye that saw it in the markets of Europe.

I have access to something you don’t.

The women who wear Louboutins are not loudly claiming publicly, for the most part, their footwear is about martyrs’ blood or Aztec insects or Andersen’s Karen dancing past the church she cannot enter. They are, for all public purposes, apparently thinking about the shoe. The height, the line, the particular confidence that comes from wearing something beautiful and expensive and recognized.

But the symbol thinks for itself. Symbolism will be the downfall.

It carries its history in the dye, in the leather, in the flash of red sole visible with every step. A signal so old that it works on people who have never heard of kermes beetles or papal tradition or a little girl who wanted what wasn’t hers to have.

Red has always done this.

It bypasses the mind and speaks directly to something older.

What the Symbol Knows

Symbols do not require understanding to function.

That is the thing worth sitting with at the end of all this history. The Roman general didn’t need to explain the theology of red to the crowds lining the triumphal route, the color worked on them anyway. The peasant who saw a cardinal’s scarlet robes didn’t need a lecture on martyrdom to feel the weight of what he was looking at. July Garland in 1939 didn’t need to know about cochineal or sumptuary law to experience the real and horrible weight of being cast to wear those ruby slippers.

The symbol carries its own meaning. It has been doing so for thousands of years.

And this is what I find myself returning to, sitting with the full sweep of this history laid out like a long red thread through the centuries.

Powerful people have always known this.

Those powerful people have always understood that symbols speak when you are not speaking. That the right symbol worn in the right room says something to the room that your words never could. And always counting on the public to never notice.

I think about this when I notice red shoes in places that feel deliberate. On people who have access to enough money and enough counsel and enough cultural fluency to know what they are reaching for. On people who collect symbols the way others collect art. Not randomly, not casually, but with the appetite of those who understand that symbols are a form of power. Symbolism will be their downfall.

I am not making an accusation, or maybe I am. But, moreover, I am asking a question that the history demands.

When someone who moves in circles of significant power reaches for one of the oldest symbols of blood and authority and transgression, do they know what they are holding?

And if they do know, what are they saying?

Andersen’s Karen wanted the red shoes because they were beautiful and because they marked a world above her own. She did not understand what she was reaching for. That was precisely her undoing.

The people I am thinking of are not Karen. They are not naive about symbols. They have staffs and advisors and the accumulated cultural knowledge that comes with generations of operating at the highest levels of power. They do not reach for things accidentally.

So I come back to the question.

The shoes are red. They have always been red. They were red when they were painted on the feet of Roman generals and red when they were placed in the Room of Tears for a new pope and red when a costume designer in Hollywood dipped them in dye without fully understanding why it felt so right.

What does it mean when the powerful wear them now?

I am supposed to say the acceptable thing, that I truly don’t know.

But I know that symbols accumulate meaning across centuries like rivers accumulate silt — quietly, steadily, until the weight of what has settled there is enormous. And I know that the people who understand that are never quite the same as the people who don’t.

The red shoes know what they mean.

They have always known.

The only question is whether the we can discern if the people wearing them do too.

By a tired momma a coffee

I have many personal opinions formed by researching the history of the powerful people behind the creation of the Fed and the chokehold on President Wilson. These opinions carry real weight with my opposition that the creation of the Fed violated our Constitution, however, my oath in this series is to always only publish the facts and so, that is what I have pulled together here. Let’s dive in.

In the autumn of 1907, the United States economy nearly collapsed. Not because of a war or a drought, because of a rumor.

A failed attempt to corner the copper market had spooked depositors, and word spread that the Knickerbocker Trust Company in New York was going under. Within hours, thousands of people were lined up on the sidewalk to pull their money out. The panic spread to other banks. Credit froze. The stock market lurched. The most industrially powerful nation on earth was hemorrhaging.

The federal government had no mechanism to stop it.

The man who stepped into that vacuum was not a senator or a treasury secretary. He was a private banker named J.P. Morgan. He convened the most powerful financiers in New York in his personal library on Madison Avenue, locked the doors, and refused to let anyone leave until they had agreed to pool enough money to stabilize the system. According to historical accounts, he kept them there through the night. By morning, they had a plan. The panic subsided.

Congress looked at that episode and asked an uncomfortable question: what happens next time, when J.P. Morgan is not there, or not willing?

The Problem the Fed Was Built to Solve

Before 1913, the United States had no central bank. The First Bank of the United States had been allowed to expire in 1811, and the Second Bank followed in 1836 after President Andrew Jackson declared war on it as a symbol of concentrated financial power. What remained was a banking system held together with good intentions and seasonal luck. It was, at its core, pure red white and blue American.

The core vulnerability was what economists called an inelastic currency. When farmers needed credit at harvest time, or when a factory town had a bad quarter, the money supply could not flex to meet the need. Reserves were concentrated in New York. When New York sneezed, the rest of the country caught pneumonia.

The panics came with grim regularity: 1873, 1884, 1893, 1896, and then the Panic of 1907 that finally forced the issue.

Congress passed the Aldrich-Vreeland Act in 1908, creating a National Monetary Commission to study how other countries handled this problem. Senators and bankers traveled to Europe and looked closely at institutions like the Bank of England. What they found was that most stable economies had a central authority capable of acting as a lender of last resort, a place banks could turn to for emergency liquidity rather than turning on each other.

The debate that followed was one of the genuinely great political arguments in American history.

The Fight Over What to Build

Nobody agreed on what the solution should look like, and that disagreement reflected something real about American political identity.

Bankers wanted a powerful central institution, privately managed, with the expertise to act quickly and the independence to act wisely. Critics, especially the Populist and Progressive voices of the era, were deeply suspicious of that vision. Senator Robert La Follette and others warned that putting monetary power in private hands was simply handing the economy over to Wall Street. William Jennings Bryan, who had spent decades fighting for farmers and workers against concentrated financial interests, refused to support any plan that looked like a bankers’ bank.

President Woodrow Wilson threaded the needle. The Federal Reserve Act, signed into law on December 23, 1913, created something that had no precise precedent: twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks scattered across the country, each serving its own district, overseen by a central Federal Reserve Board in Washington appointed by the president.

It was a deliberate compromise. The regional structure was a concession to those who feared centralized power. The federal oversight board was a concession to those who feared private control. Neither side got exactly what it wanted. The act passed anyway.

The original stated purposes were concrete and specific: furnish an elastic currency that could expand and contract with economic conditions; provide a place where banks could rediscount commercial paper in times of stress; establish more effective supervision of banking; and improve the flow of money and credit across the country.

What it was not, at its founding, was a tool for managing the broader economy. The dual mandate that Americans hear about today, requiring the Fed to pursue both maximum employment and stable prices, came much later, shaped by the Depression, the postwar economy, and legislative amendments in the 1970s.

The Constitutional Question

Whether the Federal Reserve is constitutional is a question that has generated serious legal scholarship for over a century. The honest answer, the one that holds up to scrutiny, is that courts have never struck it down, but the debate isn’t settled and the questions aren’t trivial.

The most frequently raised concerns cluster around a few constitutional provisions.

Article I gives Congress the power to coin money and regulate its value. Critics have long argued that delegating broad monetary authority to an independent body, one that sets interest rates and conducts open market operations largely outside direct congressional control, stretches that provision beyond its meaning. This is the non-delegation argument: that Congress cannot simply hand its constitutional responsibilities to another institution and walk away.

Courts have not agreed, at least not yet. Since the 1930s, the non-delegation doctrine has been nearly dormant. Congress can delegate broad authority as long as it provides what courts call an intelligible principle, some guiding standard for how the power is to be used. The Fed’s mandate qualifies, courts have concluded, and no challenge on these grounds has succeeded.

A second set of questions concerns the Appointments Clause of Article II, which governs how officers of the United States are selected. The Federal Open Market Committee, which sets monetary policy, includes the presidents of regional Federal Reserve Banks. Those presidents are not appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by the Senate. They are selected through a process that involves the boards of regional banks, boards that include representatives chosen by private member banks. Critics argue this is a constitutional problem: significant government power exercised by officers who were not appointed through the constitutional process.

This argument has reached the courts. In the 1980s, Senator John Melcher challenged the FOMC’s composition directly. The case was dismissed on procedural grounds and the Supreme Court declined to hear it. The constitutional merits were never resolved.

More recently, the Supreme Court has been actively rethinking the limits of for-cause removal protections for agency heads. In cases like Seila Law and Collins, the Court placed new limits on Congress’s ability to insulate executive officers from presidential removal. The Federal Reserve Board governors have such protections. Whether those protections survive the Court’s evolving doctrine is genuinely uncertain.

What is telling is how the Court has signaled it views the Fed’s unusual status. In 2025 procedural orders, the Court distinguished the Fed as a quasi-private entity with a unique historical pedigree, language that suggests the justices are aware that invalidating the Fed’s structure would carry consequences unlike striking down any other agency.

That awareness is quite important. When courts evaluate structural challenges to institutions, they do not operate in a vacuum. The Federal Reserve sits at the center of the global financial system. Whether that practical reality should shape constitutional interpretation is itself a contested question, one that goes to the heart of what judicial review is for.

The originalist side of the debate offers its own counterpoint. Supporters of the Fed’s constitutional legitimacy point to the Necessary and Proper Clause, which gives Congress latitude to create institutions needed to carry out its enumerated powers, and to early historical precedents like Hamilton’s Sinking Fund Commission, an independent body with monetary functions established by the very first Congress and approved by George Washington. If the founding generation created independent monetary mechanisms, the argument goes, the Constitution cannot be read to forbid them.

No court has ever found that the Federal Reserve or its actions violate the Constitution. That is the current state of the law. But no court has definitively resolved the structural questions either.

What This Means for a Republic

The Federal Reserve now controls the interest rate that determines what you pay for a mortgage, what your savings earn, and how much it costs businesses in your community to borrow money. It can purchase trillions of dollars in financial assets to stimulate a sluggish economy. It acts as the lender of last resort for the global banking system. It was created by statute, and it can be reformed or abolished by statute. Congress has amended the Federal Reserve Act before. It can do so again.

The founding question has never really gone away: in a self-governing republic, who should control the money supply?

The men who created the Fed in 1913 argued about it fiercely. What they ultimately built was a compromise, an institution designed to be expert enough to act effectively and independent enough to act without daily political interference, while remaining legally accountable to Congress and theoretically subject to democratic reform.

Whether that balance has held, whether it was ever the right balance to strike, and whether the institution that emerged from a single man’s library on a panicked autumn night remains fit for the republic it was built to serve: those are questions every citizen of this republic is entitled to ask.

Sources for this column include the Federal Reserve’s own historical archives, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and published legal scholarship on the constitutional structure of the Federal Reserve System.

Buy a tired Momma a coffee

2 Peter 3:16

There is a thread running through scripture that most people have been trained not to pull. It does not require conspiracy theories, nor contested history. It is sitting in plain sight, in the text itself, waiting for anyone willing to read it without flinching.

The thesis is simple: Biblical Judaism, the faith of Abraham, Moses, and the prophets, was infiltrated. Not once, not by accident, and not without warning. The warnings are preserved in the very canon that records the faith.

Start at the beginning of the corruption, which is also, not coincidentally, Babylon.

When Nebuchadnezzar II conquered the Kingdom of Judah in the 6th century BCE, he did not merely take captives. He transplanted the intellectual and priestly class of an entire people into the cultural center of the ancient world. For generations, the descendants of those exiles lived, studied, and were shaped by Babylonian civilization, one of the most sophisticated pagan systems ever constructed. They came home carrying more than memories.

Centuries later, when the rabbis of the diaspora began compiling what would become the foundational legal document of Rabbinic Judaism, they produced two versions. The Jerusalem Talmud was compiled in the land itself, in the 4th century. The Babylonian Talmud was compiled in Babylonia, completed around 500 CE. When the two Talmuds disagree, Jewish law follows the Babylonian Talmud. It is the more authoritative of the two. The one shaped in Babylon became the one that shaped everything after. That is not a conspiracy. That is the documented history of the texts.

The Babylonian Talmud served as the constitution and bylaws of Rabbinic Judaism. And Rabbinic Judaism is not the same thing as Biblical Judaism. That distinction matters enormously, and it is not an antisemitic claim. It is a theological and historical one that Jewish scholars themselves make.

Jesus made it too.

In Matthew 15 and Mark 7, the confrontation between Jesus and the Pharisees is not primarily about handwashing. It’s about something far more consequential. The Pharisees confronted Jesus not because his disciples disregarded the Torah but because they disregarded the tradition of the elders. Jesus’s response was direct and devastating. He told them, “You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.” He accused them of rendering the Law of God void, ineffective, replaced by their own oral traditions.

Jesus wasn’t speaking abstractly. He gave a specific example of how a man could invoke oral tradition to avoid caring for his elderly parents while appearing to honor God, effectively using religious law to nullify the actual commandment of God. The Pharisees had elevated their own laws to the level of the written Torah, revealing hearts that were, in Jesus’s own words, far from God.

This was not a minor dispute. Jesus called them blind guides. He called them plants that his Father had not planted, and he said they would be torn out.

And then there is Revelation.

In Revelation 2:9, Jesus speaks of those “who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan.” Scholars across traditions agree on what this means and what it does not mean. The synagogue of Satan refers to specific communities that were persecuting the church, not to the Jewish people as a whole. By rejecting the Jewish Messiah, they had renounced their status as true Jews. The distinction between ethnic Jews and faithful Jews is also preserved in Romans 9:6: “Not all who are descended from Israel are Israel.”

The phrase is not an ethnic slur. It is a theological category. It describes people who claimed the name of God’s covenant people while operating in direct opposition to God’s purposes. That category has always existed. The prophets named it repeatedly. Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel named it. The corruption of faithful religion by people who wear its robes is not a modern discovery.

What makes this thread significant is not that it proves any particular modern theory, rather that scripture itself told us infiltration was possible, that it had already happened, that the traditions of men had crowded out the commands of God, and that the true faith and its counterfeits could coexist inside the same institution, even wearing the same name.

Babylon kept showing up. In the exile. In the Talmud. In the imagery of Revelation 17, where the great prostitute sits on many waters and is named, plainly, “Babylon the Great.”

You don’t need conspiracy theories to believe that something holy can be corrupted from within. You just have to read what was already written down and take it seriously. (And maybe hug or apologize to the person you labeled as one of those “crazy conspiracy theorists… food for thought).

The text has always been telling us. The question is whether we are willing to hear it.

I wrote this piece on inspiration after stating I am a fierce defender of true, un-infiltrated Judaism, and was consequentially labeled as a fake. On the other hand, Zionist sympathizers will call me Anti-Semitic. I am neither. I stand on the Truth. May God’s Word always be my guide.

If you, like me, are interested in truth, I hope what I share resonates with you as a reader. If you’d like to subscribe, the link is below. I have never and will never require a paid subscription. If you’d like to buy a coffee for a Momma and a Mima who burns the midnight candle to learn ancient languages, research historical texts, and share only truth… the link is below as well.

Thank you for reading.

Love, Momma Jess

By a tired mama a coffee

Not all at once. That would have been easier to name. It happened the way summer comes in the Deep South: gradual in February, then suddenly all at once by official Spring. A word I couldn’t reach. A sentence I lost before it was finished. A conversation I’d drift out of mid-stream, like a boat with a cut rope, floating somewhere no one else could follow. Random long rants in texts or on social media, none of which made real good sense.

Two years ago, I was triple diagnosed. Lupus. Rheumatoid arthritis. Systemic sclerosis. Three diseases stacked like stones on a chest, and I’ve carried them while watching the image. I hurt all over, all time for so long, I stopped remembering what it felt like not to. Also holding on to keeping on keeping on. Because, you have to. People need you, people depend on you. So. You adapt. You grieve quietly. You keep going.

But this past year was different.

The forgetting got worse. I’d open my mouth to say an ordinary word, a word I’d used ten thousand times, and find nothing. Just white space where language used to live. My personality was changing in ways I could feel but not stop. I was there, and then I wasn’t. Present, and then somewhere dim and far away, even in rooms full of people I love. My eldest daughters began to worry about my ability to even hold a grandbaby.

My hands quit on me. I couldn’t grip a pencil. I, who have written my whole life, who have built something real and lasting out of words….I could not write my own name. Two weeks ago, I tried. I could not do it.

I hadn’t applied makeup in months. That sounds like vanity. It wasn’t. It was a signal. When a woman who has always cared for her appearance no longer has the motor control to brush lashes with mascara, something underneath has changed. I knew it. My husband knew it. We didn’t say it out loud.

I’ve seen a lot of doctors over the years. Good ones. Ones who genuinely tried. I am not writing this to indict the medical profession wholesale because that would be unfair, and I don’t deal in unfair. But I will say this simply: our medical system was not built to find what I was looking for. It was built to treat what it already knows how to treat, and to bill for the rest.

I had a gut feeling for at least two years that something else was going on. Something underneath the diagnoses, or hiding inside them. When I have a gut feeling, I have never once been wrong. I felt what was wrong was something no doctor had entertained in my questions and concerns. More MRIs and CT Scans than two hands can number. And nothing. I brought the question up again, because that is what my entire soul kept silently screaming. Parasites. I know how that sounds. I know the eye-roll it invites. I sat with that instinct for a long time before I trusted it, long enough to watch myself diminish, long enough to exhaust every other option that was offered to me.

When your doctors have done what they can do and you are still disappearing, you start listening to yourself differently.

I ordered human-dosed Ivermectin.

I want to be careful here, because I say this with absolute care for anyone reading this: I am not telling you to do what I did. I am not a doctor. I am not making a medical claim. I am not prescribing anything to anyone. What I am doing is telling you the truth about my own life, in my own words, because I was given a voice and I intend to use it honestly. Because I have been slowly and silently in a very loud manner, dying. Two weeks ago, I was ready to give up completely and recuse myself to a ward so my family didn’t have to bear the weight of fading away me. That is where I was as of two weeks ago. It was either try Ivermectin or die. That is how dire this has become for me.

Nine days ago, I took a compounded dose of Ivermectin.

Within eighteen hours of one dose, I was back.

Not better. Back.

There is a difference. Better implies progress along a continuum. What happened to me felt like a door opening, or rather, like walking back through a door I hadn’t realized had closed behind me.

My mind was clear. The words were there. I could follow a conversation from beginning to end and arrive somewhere with it. I could think. I could move my head from side to side, up and down. I could kiss my husband without crying out in agony for angling my neck a few degrees.

My husband looked at me across the church parking lot last Sunday, his eyes filled with tears. “You’re glowing,” he said. He said it the way a man says something when he’s been afraid to hope.

He’s lost me for so very long. I can’t even begin to imagine how hard this has been on him.

I hadn’t realized how far I’d gone until I came back. That’s the thing about this kind of slow disappearance; you don’t see it clearly until you’re standing on the other side of it, looking back at the shape of where you were.

I don’t know exactly what happened in my body. I have theories. I have that gut instinct, now confirmed in the way that felt confirmation does, not loud, just settled. I believe I had a parasitic load that was interacting with my existing conditions in ways no one was looking for, because no one was looking for it.

Parasitic infection is underdiagnosed in this country. That’s not conspiracy; it’s a gap in the system, partly because testing is inconsistent, partly because it doesn’t fit neatly into the autoimmune framework most rheumatologists work within, and partly because there is very little financial incentive to investigate it.

Follow the money. It won’t always lead you to the truth, but it will usually show you where the truth wasn’t followed.

I’m not asking you to follow my path. Every body is different. Every situation has variables I don’t know and can’t account for. What worked for me may mean nothing for you, and I would never want someone to make a dangerous decision based on my story alone.

What I am asking is that you trust yourself.

Not blindly. Not recklessly. Not in opposition to every doctor you’ve ever had. But as a co-investigator of your own life and health — someone with data that no chart captures, with a history that lives in your body, with instincts that have been trained by years of paying attention.

You know yourself. Doctors know medicine. Those are not the same thing, and the best outcomes happen when both kinds of knowing are in the room.

Two weeks ago I couldn’t write my name.

Today I wrote this.

I don’t take that lightly. I don’t share it casually. I treasure it. I share it because I spent two years half-absent from my own life, and if anything in this story gives someone else the courage to keep asking questions — to keep listening to the thing in themselves that says this isn’t everything, there’s something else — then telling it was worth every word.

I’m still here. I came back.

And if you’re in the middle of your own disappearing, I want you to know: so might you.

This essay reflects personal experience only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult a qualified healthcare provider before making any decisions about your health or treatment.

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872 Days

Many Americans cannot tell you what the Siege of Leningrad was. They cannot tell you when it happened, or how long it lasted, or what the word blokada means, or why it should matter to them at all. I can write this, because I have surveyed over a five hundred people, from different generations, and different parts of the United States. They went through twelve years of public school. They sat in history classes. They were given textbooks and timelines and documentaries and field trips, and somewhere in all of that, 872 days of deliberate mass starvation, more than a million civilians dead in a single city, simply did not make the cut. The curriculum moved on. The children moved on.

And an entire catastrophe, one of the worst inflicted on a civilian population in the history of modern warfare, became the kind of thing that mostly only historians know about, which is another way of saying it became the kind of thing the rest of us are permitted to forget.

This has plagued me for years, since I began learning the full extent of Stalin, The Seige, and about what actually happened inside that city. Not the politics, not the military maps, not the generals. What happened at the kitchen table. What happened in the hours between waking up and trying to sleep again. Because once you know, you cannot unknow it, and I think that is exactly the point. We were never supposed to know. Forgetting requires assistance. It doesn’t just happen on its own.

A five-year-old boy sat in front of a clock and watched it. Just watched it. His mother remembered this later, the specific quality of his stillness, the way he had learned to read the hands, the way he understood that the hands moving meant the next meal was getting closer, even though the next meal was almost nothing. He had turned time itself into food. He sat there quietly, not crying, just watching, because there was nothing else to do with the hunger except wait for it to become slightly less.

That is the image I cannot get out of my head. Not the numbers. Just a small boy and a clock, and a mother watching him from across the room, memorizing him, in case either did not wake for tomorrow.

The siege ran from September 1941 to January 1944. 872 days. By November of the first year, civilians who did not hold factory jobs received 125 grams of bread a day. One thin slice. The ration card for that allotment was nicknamed the smertnik, a word that shares its root with the Russian word for death. Someone in the bureaucracy named it that and kept using the name anyway, which tells you something about how clearly everyone understood what was happening.

The bread was not really bread. It was cellulose and sawdust and a small percentage of rye flour pressed into a shape that memory and desperation agreed to call bread, because the alternative was to admit there was no bread, and people were not ready to admit that yet. When the city ran out of malt flour, they used cotton-cake and finished cellulose. When those ran out, they boiled the mutton guts found in the seaport into a gray galantine and distributed that. When the meat was gone entirely, they boiled calf skins that survivors would describe, decades later, with the revulsion of a sensory memory that never fully left the body.

Trauma is like that. The body keeps the score.

The gas shut off first, then the electricity, then the water pipes froze. People cooked their daily allotment over small stoves burning wood shavings and pieces of furniture. Hardly anyone bothered to go to the air raid shelters anymore, because they no longer had the energy to climb up and down the stairs.

The bombs were still falling.

They just couldn’t afford the calories it cost to be afraid of them.

The women of Leningrad made soup from the glue in spines of their books. They boiled leather belts until the leather softened enough to chew. They scraped wallpaper paste from the walls because the paste had been made with potato starch and there was something in it still, some faint ghost of nutrition the body might accept. A teenage girl named Lena Mukhina kept a diary through the worst of it, and she wrote about dreaming of fried potatoes, golden and sizzling from the pan, and salami thick enough to really sink your teeth into, and hot buttery blinis with jam. She wrote: Dear God, we’re going to eat so much we’ll frighten ourselves.

She wrote this during the months when her daily ration was one thin slice of sawdust bread, when her family had already eaten the cat.

The family’s cat was carefully divided, calculating carefully how many meals were left in him.

The large number of orphans left in the city after the siege tells you what you need to know about what the parents had been doing. The historians use the word ‘suggests’. Suggests that parents sacrificed their own health for their children. That is the word they use, because the dead cannot confirm it, and the living rarely spoke of it directly. What the record shows is this: children survived at higher rates than their parents and grandparents. The math of that is not complicated. Someone was not eating. Someone was handing the bread across the table and saying they weren’t hungry, saying they’d eaten already, saying take it, go on, take it, watching the child eat with a love only a parent, or grandparent, understands.

Mothers faced impossible choices about who got food. Some gave their rations to their children. Some gave to the working adults in the household, because the working adults brought in slightly larger rations and the larger ration kept more people alive one more day. The calculus of survival inside those apartments was real and unspoken and it was being done constantly, every day, by people who had been ordinary before the war, people who had worried about ordinary things.

The cold settled into the city at the same time as the hunger, and the two things together did something to the body that each thing alone could not do as quickly. Temperatures fell to minus forty degrees Celsius, freezing the pipes, cutting the power, ending the heat. One survivor, an artist named Ilya Glazunov who had been a child during the siege, remembered sleeping in his winter coat and hat and waking up still cold, the indoors no different from the outdoors, the walls no longer a boundary between shelter and exposure.

People carried their dead to the street because they did not have the strength to bury them. The bodies froze where they were left, and the streets became something the living walked past every morning on their way to stand in bread lines that sometimes stretched twelve hours and sometimes, at the front of the line, held nothing. Two thirds of the population received little more than 125 grams of bread a day, a fraction of the calories needed to sustain life. The other third were the factory workers, fed slightly more because the living required some minimum to keep working, and the working was the only thing keeping the ring from closing entirely.

During the first winter, the starvation epidemic claimed as many as 100,000 lives per month. One man wrote in his diary: Is this my body or did it get swapped for somebody else’s without me noticing? He wrote that down. He kept writing, because writing was one of the ways they stayed human, kept the thread from breaking entirely between who they had been and what they were becoming. The women of Leningrad wrote letters to husbands at the front who might already be dead. They kept their children’s school records. They wrote diaries in cold apartments by candlelight.

Lena Mukhina’s school stayed open. Lessons continued in a shelter during air raid warnings, and through December she was still handing in essays and scolding herself for poor marks in algebra tests. She was a teenager in a dying city studying algebra and writing in her diary about the boy she liked, because teenagers are teenagers even when everything else has been taken away, because the human self insists on being specific and ordinary even inside catastrophe.

Her grandmother died that winter. Her aunt died not long after. Lena survived partly because no one in her building reported the deaths right away, which meant Lena could continue collecting their ration cards, and the food those cards represented kept her alive another month. She understood this. She wrote it down. She didn’t dress it up.

That is what I mean when I say the siege lived in the body and in the kitchen and in the face of a child watching a clock. It was not an event that happened to a population in the abstract. It was something that happened at a specific table, in a specific apartment, between specific people who loved each other and were trying to figure out who would eat today and how much and whether there was enough left to make it to morning.

By early September of 1941, one Leningrader was already recording in her diary: We have returned to prehistoric times. Life has been reduced to one thing. The hunt for food.

872 days of that.

The boy watching the clock grew up. Some of the children survived. The city survived. And the women who had made soup from book glue and handed their bread across the table and quietly buried the ration cards of their dead went on living in the city afterward, carrying what they knew about what a person will do when pressed to the absolute edge of what the body can endure, and what love looks like when there is almost nothing left to give and a person gives it anyway.

We should know their names. We should know the boy’s name. I don’t. That’s part of it too.

I wrote this piece because the lack of information provided in schools surrounding this moment in history has grieved me for some time.

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There is a sound I keep hearing. Not literally or not exactly, but more the sense of something massive shifting. Like the way old machinery sounds when it has been still for a long time and something finally trips the mechanism. A groan. A lurch. Then a kind of settling, a lock, a stillness that lasts just long enough for you to wonder if you imagined it, until it starts again.

I have been sitting with this image for weeks now. Trying to figure out whether what I am observing is real, or whether I have simply been reading too much and sleeping too little and my pattern-seeking mind has started connecting things that have no business being connected. I have certainly done that before. It’s an occupational hazard of paying close attention. But I keep coming back. And the thing I keep coming back to does not go away when I look directly at it. That’s usually the difference.

There are writers I have followed for years, in the way you follow someone whose work you’ve tested against reality enough times to develop a kind of earned trust. I feel pretty confident that by now, I know their rhythms and writer’s voice. I also know they do their research, that’s why I follow them. Sometime in recent months, a handful of them began doing something odd.

Tucked neatly at the bottom of their articles — always circling the same territory — are passages framed as AI output. A prompt response embedded in the piece, the way you might quote a text message or reproduce an email. Except the language inside those passages did not sound like AI. It was too particular and too aware of what it was doing. It had the texture of a human thought that had put on a costume and was hoping you would not look too closely at the seams.

I noticed it once. Filed it. Noticed it again. Then again. The same framing. The same subject territory. That same quality of language that did not quite fit the container it was in.

Now, before you tin-foil hat me, I am aware of how this sounds. I know what it looks like when someone starts finding signals in everything. I have read enough to know that the human mind is a relentless meaning-maker, that it will construct a pattern out of noise if you give it enough material and enough anxiety. I believe God created us that way for a purpose, and set the dial uniquely in each person.

When the same particular strangeness appears across multiple independent writers, in the same framing, around the same subject, the most honest thing you can do is stop explaining it away.

The embedded language, when I sat with it long enough, seemed to be gesturing at something consistent, and a thing that can’t quite be said out loud.

I’ve also noticed something else (only, this one has been going on for decades. Probably centuries). Public figures who had pivoted. People who had turned, publicly and loudly, on something or someone they had long supported. All with similar messaging, all within just enough time apart so as to not be too obvious. The turn is clean enough to be believed, well-timed enough to be useful, and yet when you held it against everything that came before, something did not square.

I want to be fair about this too, because people do change. Genuine reversals happen. A person encounters new information, or sits with old information long enough to finally feel its weight, or simply gets tired of defending something they no longer believe. That kind of change is real and it deserves to be respected. I have done it myself, and I will do it again if trust is lost. It’s almost never graceful and almost always costs something.

What I am describing is different. The genuine reckoning tends to arrive reluctantly, messily, with visible evidence of the struggle. The performed pivot arrives polished. And it comes with the right vocabulary already in place, the right new alliances already forming, the right amplification already running. It rewards the person doing it with a larger platform and a freshly sympathetic audience.

The number of figures I have been watching move this way isn’t small, and I’m willing to bet, a whole lot of people have picked up on this, too. I have stopped being surprised when the count climbs. At a certain point, when you are counting in the hundreds, you’re no longer looking at a coincidence or even a cultural moment. You are looking at something that has been built, with a mechanism behind it and a purpose the mechanism is serving.

The gears groan. They shift. They lock. Then they wait for the next deployment.

Why does the signal have to be hidden at all? Why do the writers who seem to be seeing what I am seeing can’t simply say it?

The answer, I think, is straightforward and a little sobering. Most people are not looking for this. Not because they lack intelligence, but because the looking requires a sustained attention that our moment does not exactly encourage: the willingness to hold an uncomfortable possibility open long enough to examine it, without either dismissing it or running too far with it. A claim like this, dropped plainly into a news cycle, doesn’t get examined. It gets sorted. Accepted by the people already convinced, rejected by everyone else, and the thing being pointed at disappears inside the argument about whether the pointer is trustworthy.

So the signal is embedded instead.

So instead, the signal is embedded. Placed inside content that provides cover. The AI wrapper is, if I am reading this correctly, a very deliberate choice, because AI-adjacent text is already expected to read slightly off. It draws exactly the kind of attention it needs to draw: none from the reader who is skimming, and everything from the reader who is paying attention. Hiding in the place where hiding is easiest.

This is an old move. Older than the internet, broadcast media, and most of the systems we are inside right now. People who could not speak plainly have always found ways to speak sideways. The container changes, but the instinct doesn’t.

Discernment is probably the most important tool we have. It asks questions before it draws conclusions and stays open to being wrong even while it keeps looking. It is, I think, one of the harder spiritual disciplines precisely because it requires you to remain genuinely uncertain while also remaining genuinely alert. Most of us want to resolve the tension one way or another — either into easy trust or into easy cynicism. Discernment refuses both.

We are told, in the oldest language I know, to test everything and hold fast to what is good. And we are warned, in the same tradition, that the most dangerous deceptions don’t arrive looking dangerous.

The modern world has worked very hard to make watchfulness feel like a pathology and suggest that trusting the official account is maturity and questioning it is instability. I do not think that inversion is accidental. Credulity is not faith. And the person who looks at a pattern and says something here does not fit is not unwell. They may simply be doing the thing we were always supposed to be doing.

The best thing, I believe, is to pray and trust that no matter what, God works things out.

A while back, I was having a conversation with my daughter about someone (who someone is I definitely cannot remember, akin to how I can’t remember what I am doing while I am walking to do the thing, but I can detail a conversation from 1987), and I said “I think they might be on the spectrum”. To which my daughter informed me that apparently, this is a common assessment I generally make about many people. I just never did take the time to notice that maybe I fall into the same category. Which in my case means I spent forty-something years assuming everyone else was also doing all of the things that I obsessively do, and then one day I stumbled upon a high-masking autism with ADHD in women YouTube video, and felt very offended. I texted my husband the video without context. I think he felt a little nervous to respond. He finally did. “Um, this is you”. Yeah, it is. I don’t know if I felt vindicated or like never leaving the house again. Knowing me, probably both.

What I have spent the better part of four decades being is very, very good at seeming normal. So good, in fact, that I fooled everyone including myself. Or maybe everyone else caught on a long time ago and I finally caught up last year. Who knows. My entire personality, it turns out, is largely a sophisticated compensation system, a kind of internal customer service representative who intercepts my actual responses before they reach the public and replaces them with ones that won’t alarm anyone. She has been on shift since approximately 1983.

This self-recognition explained a great deal. The way I replay conversations from 2009 with the grim focus of a federal investigator. Not just what I said — though yes, I am still mortified, thank you — but what I should have said, what I could have said, what a normal person would have said, ranked and catalogued and occasionally rehearsed aloud in the shower in case the situation ever comes up again. Of course, while breaking out in Broadway fashion song.

This might explain the tree.

To an outside observer, a grown woman standing behind a large oak at my children’s homeschool co-op might appear to be having some kind of episode. I prefer to think of it as strategic positioning. The tree means I cannot be approached from behind. It also significantly reduces the angle from which I can be approached from the front, which means I have effectively reduced the probability of an unexpected social interaction by roughly sixty percent. Is this a perfect system? No. Is it better than standing in the open like some kind of social ambush victim? Absolutely yes.

I like people. I want friends. The kind of friend who has low expectations and doesn’t get offended if you forget her birthday for the umpteenth time and understands that if you don’t text back, it doesn’t mean I don’t love you. I have simply developed a nervous system that treats the approach of a friendly acquaintance with the same physiological urgency it reserves for, say, a car pulling out in front of me on the highway. The desire and the dread exist simultaneously, which means I spend a lot of time wanting connection very badly from a distance of approximately thirty feet, behind a tree, pretending to look at my phone. Kinda like when my husband says we have to go to an event and I changed outfits thirty times and say I am not going all the way up to the door, and then my real specialty kicks in: I morph into the social butterfly. Metamorphosis is apparently very exhausting. It takes me a week to recover.

Then there is the food situation, which is a whole situation.

For reasons I prefer not to examine too closely, I have to eat the same thing every day. Same meal, same time, same general arrangement on the plate. This is not a preference so much as a biological imperative. Variety is not the spice of life. Variety is a threat.

The system works beautifully until, somewhere around week six, my nervous system decides without warning that the food is now disgusting. Not merely unappealing. Disgusting. The smell. The texture. The very concept. I have looked a perfectly reasonable chicken breast in the eye and felt genuine betrayal. We had an arrangement. The audacity.

When this happens I switch to crackers and begin the process again.

I have, more than once, genuinely wished that someone would invent a complete daily nutrition capsule so that food as a category could simply be retired. One capsule. Full nutrition. No textures, no decision fatigue, no negotiation. This vision sustained me for several weeks until I remembered that I also cannot tolerate the sensation of swallowing capsules. I have googled, with complete sincerity, whether it is possible to survive without eating anything ever. The internet was not helpful. I have not forgiven it.

I should probably also mention the animals.

I cannot pass a stray without intervention. A dog loose on the side of the road is not someone else’s problem, it is a crisis requiring my immediate personal involvement and also probably a foster arrangement for the next six to eight weeks. I am aware this is a pattern. I have made my peace with it. What I have not made my peace with is the fact that I also genuinely, sincerely need a baby cow. I have needed one for some time. The case I have built for this is extensive and I feel it is largely airtight. My husband disagrees.

I also need chickens.

I do not particularly like chickens. They are, if I’m being honest, a little revolting — the feet, the jerky movements, the general air of barely-contained chaos. And yet. The need persists. This is, I recognize, not entirely rational. I have chosen to see it as evidence of a generous spirit rather than a consistency problem.

Speaking of patterns…

I see them everywhere. In the grain of a wooden table. In the structure of a conversation that doesn’t quite add up. In the organizational logic of a national scandal that everyone else seems to be treating as surprising. I am rarely surprised. I identified the shape of the thing a long time ago and have been waiting, with dwindling patience, for everyone else to catch up.

This extends to movies. I know the ending. I know the good guy is actually the bad guy. I know the twist, the betrayal, the reveal. I know it early, fifteen minutes in, sometimes less. And I spend the remaining hour and forty-five minutes watching everyone else process information I have already filed and cross-referenced. Movies are less “entertainment” for me and more “extended confirmation.” I do not say this to be insufferable. I say it because I spent decades assuming everyone else was seeing what I was seeing and simply being very polite about it.

Turns out, they weren’t seeing it. I find this quite disorienting.

Here is what I have come to understand, at forty-something, having spent most of my life performing normalcy with the commitment of a professional actress in a very long-running show: the quirks some call particular, a lot, or a whole thing — they are, most of them, just the human nervous system doing its best with varying degrees of factory calibration.

Some of us came with the sensitivity set higher. Some of us need the routine and the same lunch and the same socks and a tree with adequate coverage. Some of us are right now rehearsing a conversation from 2009 that we cannot let go of, because the nervous system filed it under unresolved and has not yet been persuaded to close the tab. Some of us have already solved the mystery, and we are sitting quietly in the theater, waiting for the credits, wondering why no one else seems to notice that it was obviously the business partner from the beginning.

We are simply running a slightly different operating system — one that comes with extraordinary features, a few significant known bugs, an urgent need for a baby cow, and chickens we didn’t ask for but apparently require.

I am doing just fine. Everything is fine.

The tree is very comfortable.

A Note Before We Begin

I am a follower of Jesus Christ. That sentence is not background noise—it is the most defining fact about who I am. My faith is not something I hold alongside my identity; it is the architecture of it. I say that plainly, and without apology.

I say it here, at the top, because what follows is not a devotional. It is not a sermon. It is not an appeal to your faith or an argument for mine.

What follows is a forensic examination of a piece of linen.

The evidence presented in this essay comes from scientists, most of them non-religious. It comes from physicists, chemists, blood analysts, imaging experts, archaeologists, and historians. It comes from peer-reviewed journals and court-compelled data releases. It comes, remarkably, from a Jewish photographer who walked into a dark room in 1978 expecting to expose a fraud, and walked out a changed man.

I am presenting this evidence not because I need it to sustain my faith—I don’t—but because the evidence is extraordinary, it is largely suppressed, and you deserve to encounter it with your own eyes and your own mind.

Wherever you land, I respect the journey. But I will not pretend the evidence is thin. It is not thin. It is, in the careful language of forensic science, inexplicable.

Draw your own conclusions. That’s the whole point.

What We’re Actually Talking About

Before we go anywhere, let’s be precise about the object at the center of this conversation.

The Shroud of Turin is a strip of herringbone-weave linen cloth, fourteen feet long and three and a half feet wide. It bears the front and back image of a man—a tall man, five feet ten inches, which was unusually large for that era. The man is unclothed. He has been beaten with what appear to be spiked instruments. His wrists and feet show wounds consistent with crucifixion nails. There is a wound in his side consistent with a spear entry. His face has been struck. His scalp bears wounds consistent with a crown of thorns pressed down all the way around, not just at the front the way painters typically depict it.

The blood on the cloth is real. It is human. It is a rare type: AB positive.

The image itself is not paint. It is not dye. It is not a scorch. It is not ink. No pigments of any kind have been identified on the image fibers. The discoloration that forms the image exists only on the outermost microfibrils of the linen threads—a depth so shallow it can barely be measured.

The image contains three-dimensional spatial information. In other words, if you feed the data into a computer, it renders as a topographically accurate sculpture. Normal photographs do not do this. Paintings do not do this.

The image is a photographic negative. The lights and darks are reversed. The way we see the man with any clarity at all is by looking at the photographic negative of the cloth—which produces a stunning positive image.

Photography was not invented until 1839.

The cloth itself has been dated, by multiple independent methods, to approximately two thousand years ago.

No one—not one scientist, artist, or institution anywhere in the world—has been able to reproduce it using any materials or methods from any era.

That is what we’re talking about.

A Cloth That Survived Everything

The first documented Western appearance of the Shroud is in France in the 1350s, when a Knight Templar named Geoffroi de Charny presented it to the church at Lirey. De Charny was a man of genuine reputation—a decorated soldier, an author of treatises on chivalry, not a known forger or con man. He offered no explanation for where it came from.

Before that, its trail goes cold in the written record—but not in the forensic one. Pollen analysis of the cloth identifies species indigenous to the region around Jerusalem and to Constantinople (modern Istanbul), perfectly matching the oral history that the cloth traveled from Jerusalem northward through what is now Turkey before eventually arriving in Europe. The weave pattern itself is consistent with textile production in first-century Egypt and Judea, not medieval Europe.

In 1532, a fire broke out in the chapel at Chambéry, France where the cloth was being kept. Molten silver from the container dripped onto the folded linen and burned through the cloth in a pattern still visible today. Nuns patched the damaged sections. The Shroud survived.

In 1578, it was transferred to the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, Italy, where it has remained—except for a period during World War II when it was relocated to protect it from Allied bombing campaigns. The Shroud survived that too.

In 1997, the Turin chapel caught fire under circumstances that remain officially unexplained. A firefighter named Mario Trematore smashed through eight layers of bulletproof glass with a sledgehammer, bleeding through the effort, and carried the container out on his shoulders. The Shroud survived.

There is something almost stubborn about the way this piece of linen has refused to be destroyed.

The Night in the Darkroom

In 1898, the city of Turin organized a celebration marking the four hundredth anniversary of the cathedral. As part of the event, a lawyer and amateur photographer named Secondo Pia was granted permission to do something no one had ever done before: photograph the Shroud.

He set up his equipment—one of the first times electric lighting was used for photography—and made his exposures. He went to his darkroom. And then something happened that he spent the rest of his life trying to describe accurately.

When the photographic plate developed, the negative—which should have shown a dark, reversed, hard-to-read image—revealed instead a face of extraordinary clarity. Lifelike. Detailed. Perfectly proportioned. Shadows and highlights falling exactly as they would in a real photograph of a real face.

The cloth’s image was itself a negative. So Pia’s photographic negative of it produced a positive. A negative of a negative equals a positive.

He later wrote: “No human being could have painted this negative that lies hidden in the stains.”

He was accused of fraud. Thirty-three years later, in 1931, a professional photographer named Giuseppe Enrie was given access to the Shroud with superior equipment and photographed it again. His results were identical to Pia’s. Pia, then in his seventies, was present at the exhibition of Enrie’s photographs. He wept.

The question that followed both photographers home was the same one that has never been answered: if a medieval forger painted this image, how did he paint it in negative? How did he work in reverse, at microscopic precision, producing a result he could never have seen, using materials we cannot identify, to create something photography would not be invented to reveal for another five centuries?

The Scientists Who Went to Debunk It

By the 1970s, there was enough scientific interest in the Shroud that a formal investigation was organized. In 1977, more than thirty specialists—physicists, chemists, biophysicists, blood analysts, archaeologists, imaging experts—formed the Shroud of Turin Research Project, known as STURP.

Almost none of them were religious. Several were openly skeptical. The team’s unofficial consensus going in was that they would identify the method of forgery and explain it to the world.

In October of 1978, STURP was granted five days and five nights of direct, unimpeded access to the Shroud. They brought seventy-two cases of the most sophisticated imaging and analytical equipment available. They worked in shifts around the clock.

Here is what they found.

The image is not paint. Not ink. Not dye. Not a scorch. X-ray fluorescence confirmed the absence of any foreign materials on the image fibers. Ultraviolet reflectance confirmed it. Infrared analysis confirmed it. Thirty-two adhesive tape samples, analyzed under microscope, confirmed it.

The image resides only on the uppermost fibers of the cloth—a depth of roughly two hundred nanometers, a fraction of a human hair’s thickness. No known artistic or chemical process produces coloration this shallow.

The image was not drawn by brushstroke, stippling, rubbing, or any other technique of application. There is no directionality to the coloration. It appears to have formed all at once, or as if by radiation.

The bloodstains are real human blood. Type AB positive. The blood contains bilirubin, a chemical released by the liver under extreme physical trauma—consistent with severe torture. Some of the blood had flowed while the man was still alive; some had oozed after death. The blood stained the cloth before the image formed—there is no body-image beneath the bloodstains. Whatever created the image, it worked around the blood.

The blood pattern is consistent with a man crowned with a ring of thorns all the way around the skull, flogged with a two-pronged instrument by two men of different heights, forced to carry a heavy object causing falls on the face, crucified through the wrists and feet (not the palms, as artists usually depicted it), and pierced in the side with a pointed instrument.

This matches the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth with a precision that is, by any statistical measure, extraordinary.

The STURP team published their final conclusions in 1981. Biophysicist Dr. John Heller delivered the summary at a press conference:

“The Shroud image is that of a real human form of a scourged, crucified man. It is not the product of an artist. The image is an ongoing mystery and, until further chemical studies are made, the problem remains unsolved.”

— Dr. John Heller, STURP Final Report, 1981

The team that went to explain the trick came home without one.

STURP member Barrie Schwortz, the team’s documenting photographer, was an Orthodox Jew who had needed to be talked into joining the project at all. He later said he joined largely because it was a free trip to Italy, and he expected to spot the paint within minutes. He spent the next forty-six years of his life as the world’s most knowledgeable and passionate advocate for the Shroud’s authenticity—still from a scientific standpoint, still citing data, never converting to Christianity. He maintained his Jewish faith. He simply could not argue with what he had seen.

He died in June of 2024 at age seventy-seven. His website, Shroud.com, remains the most comprehensive archive of Shroud research in existence.

The Debunking That Got Debunked

In 1988, the story appeared to end.

Scientists from the University of Oxford, the University of Arizona, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology conducted carbon-14 dating on samples from the Shroud. Their results, released with considerable fanfare, placed the cloth’s origin between AD 1260 and 1390—squarely in the medieval period. The New York Times ran the headline. The Church accepted the findings. The Shroud, the world was told, was a medieval forgery.

There were problems with this conclusion from the start, but they took years to surface.

In 2000, independent researchers Joseph Marino and Sue Benford presented a paper arguing that the corner of the Shroud from which the samples had been taken was a repaired section—almost certainly patched after the 1532 fire. If so, the tested material would be medieval linen woven into a first-century cloth, and the carbon date would reflect a blend of the two—which is exactly what the numbers suggested.

STURP chemist Ray Rogers heard about their theory and was dismissive. He had his own samples from the 1978 examination locked in a safe. He decided to look at them and prove Marino and Benford wrong in five minutes.

He called back several hours later. He said, simply: “I can’t believe it, but I think they’re right.”

Rogers’ microscopic examination found cotton interwoven with the linen in the sample area—not present in the rest of the cloth. He found evidence of a gum and dye applied to the surface of the repaired threads, apparently to match the color of the surrounding material. A second independent scientist confirmed all of his findings.

Then came the question of the raw data from the 1988 tests. The British Museum, which had overseen the carbon dating, refused to release it. That refusal stood for nearly three decades, until a French researcher filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit and a British court ordered the data released in 2019.

What the released data revealed was damning: the “three independent samples” tested by three separate labs were not, in fact, three independent samples. They were a single sample, cut from the repaired corner, then divided into thirds. The statistical independence the study claimed was an illusion.

A team of Oxford scientists reviewed the released data and formally ruled out the 1988 findings. Dr. Giulio Fanti, using spectroscopic analysis, subsequently dated the cloth to a midpoint of approximately AD 50, with a 96 percent confidence level.

The debunking had been debunked. But the correction never made the front page.

What the Evidence Keeps Saying

The carbon dating controversy is the most famous chapter of this story, but it is far from the only forensic thread worth following.

Pollen

Pollen grains extracted from the Shroud include species indigenous to the region around Jerusalem and species found in Constantinople. This matches the oral history of the cloth’s journey almost exactly. Pollen does not travel by chance across continents or centuries. It settles where it finds itself.

Roman Coins

Using imaging analysis, physicists John Jackson and Eric Jumper identified impressions on the Shroud consistent with coins placed over the eyelids—a documented burial practice of the era. Coin experts subsequently identified the specific type: lepton coins minted under Pontius Pilate, governor of Judea, circa AD 29.

Limestone

Spectrometric analysis identified calcium carbonate dust on the nose, knee, and heel of the image—consistent with a man who fell face-first while carrying a heavy object. The limestone matches the specific geological composition of stone found in and around Jerusalem to this day.

The Sudarium of Oviedo

In the Cathedral of San Salvador in Oviedo, Spain, there is a separate relic: the Sudarium, a face cloth documented in church records as far back as AD 570, kept in a locked chest since the ninth century and moved repeatedly ahead of conquering armies to prevent its destruction.

The Sudarium does not carry an image. But it carries blood—type AB positive, matching the Shroud—and pollen indigenous to Palestine. The wound patterns on the Sudarium align precisely with the facial wounds visible on the Shroud. Independent scholars calculate the probability of the same rare blood type appearing on two unrelated cloths, bearing the same wound patterns, carrying the same regional pollen, at roughly one in a thousand.

Unless they came from the same man.

The Weave

The herringbone weave pattern of the Shroud is consistent with textile production in first-century Judea and Egypt. It was not a weaving style used in medieval Europe. A forger working in fourteenth-century France would have been working with locally available cloth—and this cloth is not that.

The Skeptic’s Particular Power

There is a specific kind of testimony that carries more weight than devotion: the testimony of someone who came looking for the exit.

Lee Strobel was a journalist and legal editor at the Chicago Tribune, and a committed atheist. When his wife converted to Christianity in 1979, he decided to use his investigative skills to do her a favor and dismantle the intellectual foundation of the faith she’d adopted. He spent nearly two years interviewing thirteen leading scholars—historians, scientists, archaeologists, philosophers, medical doctors—asking every hard question he could construct. He wanted to prove that the Resurrection was a legend, a myth, or an outright lie.

He could not do it. The weight of the historical and forensic evidence—including the evidence surrounding the burial cloth—moved him from contempt to investigation to faith. He became a Christian in 1981 and subsequently wrote The Case for Christ, which became one of the bestselling works of Christian apologetics ever published, later adapted into a film. It remains required reading for anyone who wants to engage seriously with the historical claims of Christianity rather than dismiss them by assumption.

Strobel said later: “I didn’t want to believe. Belief was the last thing I wanted. But I’m a journalist. I follow evidence. And the evidence wasn’t cooperating with my conclusions.”

Barrie Schwortz said something similar. So did Ray Rogers. So did David Rolfe, the British filmmaker who began his research as an atheist trying to prove the Shroud was a hoax and ended up converting to Christianity. In 2022, Rolfe offered the British Museum one million dollars to duplicate the Shroud using only materials and methods available in the medieval period. The Museum did not accept the challenge. The money remains unclaimed.

This is the pattern. The skeptics go in skeptical and come out… different. Not all of them convert. Schwortz never did. But they stop being dismissive. The evidence won’t allow it.

What Could Have Made This

After nearly fifty years of study by some of the best analytical minds available to science, there is still no agreed-upon natural explanation for how the image was formed.

The leading scientific theory—developed by STURP physicist John Jackson and subsequently tested by Paolo DiLazzaro at the Frascati Research Centre in Rome—proposes a burst of vacuum ultraviolet radiation. Under this model, a body would have to emit an extraordinarily intense flash of UV light, measured in billions of watts, in a fraction of a second—enough to discolor the outermost fibers of the cloth without generating sufficient heat to scorch or destroy it.

DiLazzaro’s team was able to produce some of the Shroud’s image characteristics using an excimer laser, but only by applying the laser one tiny fiber at a time, in a process that would have required years and technology that does not yet fully exist. Even then, they could not reproduce the three-dimensional encoding.

Father Robert Spitzer, a physicist and former president of Gonzaga University who has studied the Shroud extensively, frames the implication plainly: there is no known physical process by which a decaying human body emits such radiation. The known laws of physics do not permit it. If the image was produced by radiation, something outside the known laws of physics was responsible.

There is one event in the Gospel accounts that would fit that description.

Whether you believe that event occurred is, of course, a matter of faith. But notice what the science is and is not saying. It is not saying the resurrection explanation is credible because we want it to be. It is saying that the only known explanation for the image’s properties requires an energy event with no natural cause. The faith conclusion and the forensic conclusion have arrived, from opposite directions, at the same door.

Why You Probably Haven’t Heard Any of This

This is the part I find most interesting, from a purely journalistic standpoint.

The 1988 carbon dating result was front-page news in every major Western newspaper. The correction—when the raw data was finally forced out of the British Museum in 2019, when Oxford scientists formally invalidated the original study, when Dr. Fanti’s spectroscopic dating placed the cloth in the first century—was barely covered at all.

The STURP findings, representing years of work by more than thirty credentialed scientists, were published in peer-reviewed journals and acknowledged that no artistic explanation for the image was possible. This information exists. It is accessible. It is cited in scientific literature. Most people have never encountered it.

In 1988, the scientists who conducted the carbon dating refused to release their raw data for twenty-seven years. When a French researcher finally obtained it through legal compulsion, it revealed methodological problems significant enough to invalidate the study’s core claims. The question of why the data was withheld has never been satisfactorily answered.

David Rolfe has offered a million dollars to anyone who can duplicate the Shroud. The offer has stood since 2022. No institution, no artist, no scientist has attempted it.

I am not in the business of constructing conspiracies where incompetence will serve as an explanation. But I am in the business of noticing when information that should be widely known is not widely known, and asking why. When the evidence for a thing runs consistently in one direction and the cultural narrative runs consistently in the other, that asymmetry is worth examining.

The Shroud has survived fire, fraud, suppression, and centuries. It is still here. The questions it raises are still unanswered. That, in itself, seems worth paying attention to.

Where This Leaves Us

Let me say clearly what this essay is not arguing.

It is not arguing that you must believe the Shroud is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. It is not arguing that forensic evidence can compel faith, or that it should. Faith is not a conclusion you reach at the end of an evidentiary chain. It is something else entirely.

What this essay is arguing is simpler: the evidence deserves honest engagement.

We have a piece of cloth that no one can explain. Its image was formed by a process no one has been able to replicate. Its blood is real and human and rare. Its pollen and limestone and coin impressions track a journey from first-century Jerusalem. Its photographic properties were invisible until photography was invented to reveal them. Every scientific analysis has excluded artistic forgery. The dating study that appeared to settle the question was conducted on a repaired corner of the cloth, used a single sample divided into thirds, and withheld its raw data for nearly three decades.

Two thousand years ago, in a province of the Roman Empire, a man was executed in a manner precisely consistent with what is recorded on this cloth. The Gospel accounts of that execution have been confirmed as historically grounded by Roman and Jewish historians who had no stake in Christian theology. The moral framework that man left behind—love your neighbor, forgive those who wrong you, treat others as you wish to be treated—is the most revolutionary ethical proposal in recorded history.

Whether the Shroud is a divine artifact or the world’s most inexplicable unsolved forgery, you are standing in front of something that matters. You are looking at a question that serious people—scientists, historians, skeptics, atheists, and believers alike—have found themselves unable to walk away from.

I couldn’t either.

Make of that what you will.

Sources & Further Reading

Primary Scientific Research

Heller, John H. Report on the Shroud of Turin. Houghton Mifflin, 1983. The definitive account of STURP’s findings by one of the team’s biophysicists.

Rogers, Raymond N. “A Chemist’s Perspective on the Shroud of Turin.” Thermochimica Acta, Vol. 425, January 2005. Rogers’ peer-reviewed paper documenting evidence of medieval repair in the carbon-dated corner.

Fanti, Giulio, and Saverio Gaeta. Il Mistero della Sindone. Rizzoli, 2013. Documents spectroscopic dating placing the cloth in the first century.

DiLazzaro, Paolo, et al. “Sub-superficial Coloration in the Shroud of Turin.” Paper presented at the International Workshop on the Scientific Approach to the Acheiropoietos Images, ENEA Research Centre, Frascati, Italy, 2010.

Marino, Joseph G. The 1988 C-14 Dating of the Shroud of Turin: A Stunning Exposé. Independently published, 2020. An exhaustive examination of procedural errors and data suppression surrounding the carbon dating.

Historical & Archaeological

Danin, Avinoam, Alan Whanger, Uri Baruch, and Mary Whanger. Flora of the Shroud of Turin. Missouri Botanical Garden Press, 1999. Pollen analysis confirming plant species indigenous to Jerusalem and Turkey.

Adler, Alan D. The Orphaned Manuscript: A Gathering of Publications on the Shroud of Turin. Effatà Editrice, 2002. The definitive collection of blood chemistry analysis findings.

Guscin, Mark. The Oviedo Cloth. Lutterworth Press, 1998. The most thorough English-language study of the Sudarium of Oviedo and its relationship to the Shroud.

Accessible Starting Points

Strobel, Lee. The Case for Christ. Zondervan, 1998. A journalist’s investigation into the historical evidence for Jesus, including burial and resurrection accounts.

Shroud.com. The website maintained by the late Barrie Schwortz, official documenting photographer for STURP. The most comprehensive free archive of Shroud research in existence, now maintained by Joseph Marino.

Rolfe, David (director). The Silent Witness. 1978. The documentary that brought the Shroud to widespread public attention and launched Rolfe’s decades-long investigation.

Rolfe, David (director). Who Can He Be? 2022. Updated documentary presenting new evidence challenging the 1988 carbon dating, accompanied by Rolfe’s public £1 million challenge to any institution that can duplicate the Shroud.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Benford, M. Sue, and Joseph G. Marino. “Discrepancies in the Radiocarbon Dating Area of the Turin Shroud.” Chemistry Today, Vol. 26, May/June 2008.

Jackson, John P., Eric J. Jumper, and William R. Mottern. “Mapping the 3-D Surface by Reflection Spectrophotometry.” Proceedings of the 1977 United States Conference of Research on the Shroud of Turin. Holy Shroud Guild, 1977.

Flury-Lemberg, Mechthild. Sindone 2002. Fondazione 3M, 2003. Documentation of the 2002 conservation effort and analysis of the cloth’s unique weave.

Oxley, Mark. The Challenge of the Shroud. AuthorHouse, 2010. A survey of scientific findings and unresolved questions from a non-religious standpoint.

Shroud.com remains the single best starting point for anyone who wants to go further. The library there is vast, the science is cited, and nothing is behind a paywall. Barrie Schwortz, an Orthodox Jew, never converted, built it that way on purpose.

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Buy a Momma a Coffee

I have stood in front of the Biltmore Estate exactly once, and I remember thinking two things: this is more unnerving than beautiful, and this man had a problem.

Not a bad problem, exactly. More the kind of problem that happens when someone with extraordinary taste, extraordinary resources, and zero one telling him no decides to build a summer home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. The result is 175,000 square feet of French Renaissance château, 250 rooms, 65 fireplaces, a bowling alley, and an indoor swimming pool that holds 70,000 gallons of water.

For a summer house.

If you’ve been to Biltmore, or if you’ve always meant to go, here’s a few details they don’t put on the standard brochure.

The name is a combination of two words George made up.

George Washington Vanderbilt II was the youngest son of William Henry Vanderbilt, which meant he grew up wealthy, cultured, and largely left alone to read books and travel the world. When he and his mother started taking trips to the Asheville area, he fell in love with the mountains and decided to build there. He named his estate “Biltmore” by stitching together “De Bilt” — the ancestral land his Dutch family came from in the Netherlands — and “more,” meaning open, rolling land. So the name is half Old World roots and half Southern landscape, which is honestly a more poetic origin story than most houses get.

It took its own railroad to build it.

Construction started in 1889 and wrapped up in 1895. Given the scale of the project, it required a dedicated brick kiln, a woodworking factory, and a private railroad to haul in materials. The total cost came to five million dollars, which works out to somewhere around $164 million today, and that’s before a single piece of furniture went through the door.

The finished house has 35 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms, and 250 rooms total. The fireplaces alone, all 65 of them, could heat a small village.

The estate used to be the size of a small country.

Today, Biltmore sits on about 8,000 acres, which is already a staggering amount of land. But at the turn of the twentieth century, the estate covered close to 125,000 acres — larger than 17 recognized countries.

George eventually began selling land to the federal government before he died, with the stipulation that it stay wild and undeveloped. That land became the Pisgah National Forest. So the next time you’re hiking through Pisgah, you’re essentially on what used to be somebody’s backyard.

George Vanderbilt was basically an early sustainability advocate.

This is the one that surprises people. The Gilded Age is not exactly known for its environmental conscience, but George enlisted Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect behind Central Park, to design the grounds with long-term sustainability in mind. They brought in livestock, farmed the river bottoms, and engineered natural transitions between the formal gardens and the surrounding forest.

He also hired a professional forester named Gifford Pinchot to manage the land, and later a German forester named Carl Schenck, who established the Biltmore Forest School — the first school of forestry in North America. George Vanderbilt was either truly worried about the land long before it was fashionable to be or preparing for nuclear fallout. Take your pick.

The winery used to be the cow tunnel.

The Biltmore Winery opened in 1985, started by George’s grandson William Cecil, who converted what had been the dairy barn into one of the most-visited wineries in the country. They now produce around 150,000 cases of wine a year and ship to 40 states.

The charming, sparkling walkway that leads visitors to the winery today? It used to be the tunnel the staff used to move cow manure. You’re welcome.

The Vanderbilt name kept making headlines long after George was gone.

William Cecil wasn’t the only grandchild carrying the family name into the twentieth century. There was also Gloria Vanderbilt — George’s granddaughter, heiress, socialite, artist, fashion designer, and mother of CNN anchor Anderson Cooper. Gloria became famous in her own right, and then famous again, and then again after that, in the way that very wealthy people with very complicated lives tend to do.

She is perhaps best known to a certain generation for her designer jeans or penchant for strange decor. To another generation, for the custody battle she was at the center of as a small child — fought over by her mother and her aunt in a very public court case that the tabloids dubbed the “trial of the century,” leaving a little girl to be passed between adults who each wanted her money more than they wanted her. The press called her “the poor little rich girl,” which managed to be both accurate and completely useless at the same time.

She had four husbands, three sons, a career in fashion, and a memoir. She died in 2019 at 95, having outlasted most of the drama written about her — which is one way to win.

[Photo: Gloria Vanderbilt with Anderson Cooper and his brother Carter, circa 1972.

Jack Robinson/Getty Images]

George kept a reading journal from age 12 until he died.

The library at Biltmore House is two stories tall and holds over 24,000 books. George read more than 80 of them every year. He tracked every book he’d ever read in a personal journal he started at age twelve. It is, essentially, a pre-internet Goodreads account kept entirely by hand.

If you love books, this one rivals the Beast’s gift to Belle. Just darker.

The house has secret passageways. Everywhere.

Not because George Vanderbilt was running some kind of aristocratic spy operation — the hidden doors were for the serving staff, so they could move through the house and deliver meals without being conspicuous. There are concealed doorways in the library and the breakfast room. There’s also a marble-covered trap door in the Winter Garden with a ladder underneath it.

Where does the ladder go? Nobody who works there seems to be in a hurry to tell you. If you find out, let me know. Or…on second thought, maybe keep it to yourself.

It was the first home in Asheville to have an elevator.

George had electricity wired in from the beginning. He was friends with Thomas Edison, who gets credit for the initial installation, though the inferior DC current was eventually upgraded to AC. The elevator is still running today.

He also put in the first private bowling alley and that now-legendary 70,000-gallon swimming pool, complete with ropes along the side for emergency use. And apparently a hot spot for the tin-foil hats. No judgement here!

The oak leaves and acorns are everywhere, and they mean something.

The Vanderbilt family crest features oak leaves and acorns as symbols of strength, growth, and longevity. Once you know that, you’ll start noticing them woven into stonework, copper flashing, and decorative metalwork all over the estate. George’s initials show up throughout as well. The whole house is, in a sense, a monogram of the man who built it.

It might be haunted. Probably. Possibly.

Visitors standing near the main marble fireplace have reported hearing a woman’s voice calling out — thought to be Edith Vanderbilt, calling for George. Down in the underground swimming pool, people have claimed to hear maniacal laughter coming from the drain and felt cold water on their skin when there was none.

Whether you believe any of that or not, a 250-room mansion built in the 1890s with secret passageways and a ladder into unknown darkness has earned the right to a few ghost stories. The gargoyles add to the charm, of course.

It has been in more movies than you probably realize.

Forrest Gump. Patch Adams. The Last of the Mohicans. Hannibal. The Odd Life of Timothy Green. The estate’s grounds and interiors have stood in for everything from Southern estates to European palaces. If you’ve ever watched a movie and thought that house looks familiar, there’s a decent chance it was Biltmore.

If you are planning a visit, the home’s dedicated website is the best place to ensure dates of closure. Although the house remains open 365 days a year, it does close during film-making (and of course, for repairs and such).

There is something about the Biltmore Estate that refuses to stay in the past. It’s still a working winery, a hotel, a trail system, a living landscape managed the same way Olmsted and Pinchot laid it out over a century ago. A set for movies. A plot for books. And one of the most enduring places in the American South.

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I know a lot of you are angry. I know a lot of you have been angry for a long time about the Epstein case — about what happened, about who was protected, about how thoroughly the whole thing seemed to disappear from official consequence. And I know that anger can curdle into helplessness when there’s no obvious outlet for it.

So I did the homework.

Below are four formal demand letters — addressed to the Attorney General, the DOJ Office of Inspector General, your U.S. Representative or Senator, and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Each one is ready to send. You fill in your name and address, sign it, and mail it or simply send in email format, or submit it through the appropriate contact form. That’s it.

This is what responsible citizenry looks like in practice: not just fury in a comment section, but a name on a piece of paper going to the people who are supposed to answer to us.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act was signed into law in November 2025. The legal framework for demanding these records exists. What it needs now is the weight of ordinary people using it. Your letter matters. A thousand letters matter more.

Send one. Ask someone else to send one.

The victims of these crimes have been waiting for decades. We can spend ten minutes.

Please share this article.

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Formal Demands for Federal Investigation

Jeffrey Epstein Case — Full Disclosure, Accountability, and Prosecution

May 12, 2026

Below are four formal letters to copy/paste:

• 1. U.S. Department of Justice (Attorney General)

• 2. DOJ Office of Inspector General

• 3. U.S. Representative / Senator (Congressional Oversight)

• 4. U.S. Attorney, Southern District of New York

Fill in your name, address, and contact information where indicated in brackets before sending. Each letter is self-contained and may be submitted independently.

May 12, 2026

Attorney General of the United States

U.S. Department of Justice

950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, D.C. 20530-0001

Re: Formal Demand for Full Disclosure and Federal Investigation — Jeffrey Epstein and Associated Individuals

Dear Attorney General,

I write as a citizen of the United States to formally demand that the Department of Justice fulfill its obligations to the American people — and, most urgently, to the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse — by taking immediate, comprehensive, and transparent action in the following respects.

Demands:

• 1. Release every page, every email, every flight log, every financial record, and every video associated with the Jeffrey Epstein case and all related investigations — in full, without delay.

• 2. Strip all redactions that exist to protect the alleged perpetrators rather than the victims. Redactions that shield the names and activities of those who exploited children are not a legitimate exercise of government authority.

• 3. Identify every person, foreign or domestic, whose name appears in connection with the abuse of a child — and make that identification public.

• 4. Prosecute every individual for whom evidence supports criminal charges, regardless of station, political affiliation, citizenship, or wealth. No one is above the law.

• 5. Reopen a full federal inquiry into the circumstances of Jeffrey Epstein’s death in federal custody, including the complete failure of the Metropolitan Correctional Center’s protocols and any potential involvement by third parties.

• 6. Conduct a thorough, independent audit of the FBI, the Department of Justice, and every federal agency that touched this case over the past twenty years — examining how investigations were slowed, narrowed, or abandoned, and why.

These demands are consistent with and reinforced by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law in November 2025, which requires the Department of Justice to publish all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials related to Jeffrey Epstein. I further urge the Office of Inspector General to exercise its announced intention to explore DOJ compliance with that Act and to report its findings publicly and without redaction.

The continued suppression of this evidence is not a matter of bureaucratic process. It is a moral failure. Every day that passes without full disclosure is another day during which those who harmed children may remain unidentified, unprosecuted, and free.

I expect a written response confirming receipt of this request and the specific actions the Department will take in response.

Respectfully submitted,

[Your Full Name]

[Your Address]

[Your City, State, ZIP]

[Your Email Address]

[Your Phone Number]

May 12, 2026

Inspector General

U.S. Department of Justice Office of Inspector General

950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Suite 4706

Washington, D.C. 20530-0001

Re: Formal Complaint and Request for Investigation — DOJ Handling of Epstein Case Files

Dear Inspector General,

I am submitting this formal complaint requesting that the Office of Inspector General exercise its announced authority to investigate the Department of Justice’s compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act and to examine the full history of the Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case.

Specifically, I request that your office investigate:

• Whether DOJ agencies complied fully with the Epstein Files Transparency Act’s disclosure requirements, including the release of all unclassified records.

• Whether any redactions within released documents were applied improperly to protect alleged perpetrators rather than legitimate law enforcement or victim-protection interests.

• Whether there is evidence of improper interference, political pressure, or deliberate obstruction in the prosecution and investigation of Jeffrey Epstein and his associates.

• The circumstances surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s death in federal custody, including the adequacy of prior investigations into that death and whether any evidence remains unexamined.

The American people are entitled to a full accounting. The victims of these crimes, who have waited for justice for decades, deserve nothing less. I urge your office to conduct this investigation independently, thoroughly, and in the public interest.

Respectfully submitted,

[Your Full Name]

[Your Address]

[Your City, State, ZIP]

[Your Email Address]

[Your Phone Number]

May 12, 2026

[Representative’s Full Name]

U.S. House of Representatives / U.S. Senate

[Office Address]

[Washington, D.C. / District Office Address]

Re: Urgent Request for Congressional Oversight — Jeffrey Epstein Investigation and Full Disclosure

Dear [Representative/Senator Last Name],

I am your constituent, writing to urge you to take immediate and decisive action to ensure full transparency, accountability, and justice in the federal investigation of Jeffrey Epstein and his associates. This is not a partisan issue. It is a matter of law, of justice for victims, and of the basic integrity of our federal institutions.

I am calling on you to:

• Demand full implementation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law in November 2025, which requires the release of all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials related to Epstein.

• Support and initiate congressional investigations into the DOJ’s, FBI’s, and all relevant agencies’ handling of this case over the past twenty years — including any efforts to suppress, delay, or narrow investigations.

• Demand the removal of all redactions applied to protect alleged abusers rather than legitimate law enforcement or victim-protection interests.

• Push for the identification and prosecution of every individual, domestic or foreign, for whom evidence supports criminal charges — regardless of political affiliation, wealth, or social standing.

• Support a full, independent inquiry into the death of Jeffrey Epstein in federal custody in August 2019.

• Request a Government Accountability Office audit of every federal agency that has touched this investigation.

I am aware that the Government Accountability Office has already launched an investigation into the Justice Department’s handling of Epstein files. I urge you to support that investigation fully and to use your oversight authority to ensure it is completed without interference.

The survivors of Epstein’s abuse have waited long enough. I respectfully but urgently request that you act — not with words, but with the full force of your office and your vote.

I look forward to your written response.

Respectfully,

[Your Full Name]

[Your Address]

[Your City, State, ZIP]

[Your Email Address]

[Your Phone Number]

May 12, 2026

United States Attorney

Southern District of New York

One Saint Andrew’s Plaza

New York, NY 10007

Re: Formal Complaint and Request for Investigation — Jeffrey Epstein Co-Conspirators

Dear United States Attorney,

I am writing to urge your office to take immediate, aggressive, and fully transparent action regarding the individuals identified in the Southern District of New York’s investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators, including those referenced in the 86-page prosecutorial memo titled “Investigation into Potential Co-Conspirators of Jeffrey Epstein.”

Specifically, I request:

• That your office review all available evidence pertaining to individuals identified as potential co-conspirators and assess whether current evidence supports the initiation or continuation of criminal proceedings.

• That any individuals against whom charges were declined due to political, social, or improper institutional pressure be reconsidered under an objective, evidence-based standard.

• That your office coordinate with the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office to ensure no investigative materials have been improperly withheld, redacted, or destroyed.

• That victims of Epstein’s abuse be given every procedural and legal protection available, including updated notice of any proceedings in which their testimony or accounts may be relevant.

The SDNY has historically been a bulwark of independent federal prosecution. I urge you to honor that tradition in this matter. The survivors of these crimes — and the American public — are watching.

Respectfully submitted,

[Your Full Name]

[Your Address]

[Your City, State, ZIP]

[Your Email Address]

[Your Phone Number]

Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves. Proverbs 31:8

My mom called me in the early weeks of 2020, her voice tight with the particular panic that only mothers can produce.

“Have you heard about this weird China virus?”

“Yes,” I told her.

“Oh my God, I am so scared. Are you scared?”

“No,” I said. “I am scared at how they are going to play us. And how the public is going to react.”

I was not being brave. I was not being a contrarian. I was being a student of human nature and institutional behavior, and what I felt in my gut that day was not fear of a virus. It was dread. The specific, cold dread of watching something enormous click into place.

I was right to be afraid. Just not of what they told me to be afraid of.

Now they’re whispering about Hantavirus. <insert eyeroll>

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Ooooo. Shake in your boots.

I’m not shaking. But I am paying attention. And so should you — not to the virus, but to the playbook.

They Sent the Sick to the Most Vulnerable and Called It Policy

Let’s start with the thing that should have ended careers, triggered federal prosecutions, and dominated every front page for a year. Instead, it got buried under an avalanche of “follow the science.”

On March 25, 2020, the New York Department of Health issued a directive: nursing homes could not deny re-admission to residents based on a confirmed or suspected COVID-19 diagnosis. No negative test required. Medically “stable” COVID patients from hospitals were to be sent directly into facilities housing the most immunocompromised, most fragile people in the state.

Governor Andrew Cuomo signed off on it. Thousands of nursing home residents died in the weeks that followed.

New York was not alone. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and California enacted similar policies. The U.S. Department of Justice was concerned enough to formally request data from four of those states in August 2020, investigating whether these orders “may have resulted in deaths of elderly nursing home residents.”

These were not mistakes born of ignorance. By late March 2020, it was well-established that the elderly were the primary high-risk population. The directive was issued anyway. The policy was rescinded in May — quietly — after the damage was done.

We were told to stay home to protect the vulnerable. Turns out the vulnerable needed protection from their own government.

The Ships Were a Photo Op

Remember the Navy hospital ships? The USNS Comfort steaming into New York Harbor, gleaming white, 1,000 beds, a symbol of national resolve? The images were everywhere. It felt like something was being done.

The Comfort treated 182 patients total over roughly three and a half weeks. At some points, as few as 20 patients occupied those 1,000 beds. The USNS Mercy, sent to Los Angeles, fared similarly.

To be clear: the ships were deployed initially as overflow for non-COVID patients, to relieve pressure on hospitals. That’s a reasonable idea in theory. In practice, bureaucratic admission criteria, infection control protocols, and the shifting nature of the surge meant they sat mostly empty while we applauded. My level of Momma Bear anger is on a chart that cannot be measured, currently.

The Javits Center field hospital in New York told a similar story. Grand. Expensive. Largely unused. But it photographed beautifully.

Follow the Money

Here is where I need you to read carefully, because this section will be twisted by bad-faith actors on both sides. I’m going to tell you exactly what happened, and exactly what it means.

Because I care. And long ago, my pockets became empty of anexpletive starting with the letter F to give. Zero are left.

Under the CARES Act (Section 3710), Medicare added a 20% bonus to standard hospital reimbursements for patients with a confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis. This was not a flat “per death” payment. It was a percentage increase on top of existing Diagnosis-Related Group (DRG) reimbursements, which already varied by severity.

What did that look like in practice? A respiratory hospitalization without a ventilator: roughly $13,000–14,000 with the add-on. With a ventilator running more than 96 hours: $35,000–42,000 or more. Those are not small numbers. And the 20% bonus applied specifically to confirmed COVID cases.

Now. Was this a deliberate incentive to over-diagnose COVID deaths? The ‘official ‘ answer is no. Confirmed cases required lab documentation, and coding had to follow guidelines. Hospitals also faced catastrophic losses from canceled elective procedures — the financial picture was genuinely complicated.

But here is what I will not pretend: it is never a good idea to create financial incentives tied to a specific diagnosis during a public health emergency when accurate data is the single most critical thing you need. Whether hospitals exploited these incentives systematically is debatable. That those incentives existed and created at least the conditions for perverse outcomes is not.

The broader Provider Relief Fund distributed approximately $175 billion to hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, and physicians. Some of it was desperately needed. Some of it went to facilities that saw relatively few COVID patients. The full accounting is still not clean.

So What Do We Do Now?

Americans are wiser now. I believe that. I have to believe that, because the alternative — that we learned nothing — is genuinely terrifying.

The Hantavirus headlines are beginning to circulate. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s something. I am not here to tell you that no virus can ever pose a real threat. I am here to tell you that the machinery of institutional panic — the press releases, the breathless coverage, the appeals to authority, the emergency authorizations — is not the same thing as truth. It never was.

Ask the questions they don’t want you to ask. Who benefits? What does the data actually say, and who collected it? What is being decided right now that we’ll find out about in two years?

My mother called me scared. I was scared too — of exactly what happened next.

Don’t be the person who only gets scared of the right thing in hindsight. Be the person who asks, right now: “How are they going to play us this time?”

Sources: NY Department of Health Advisory (March 25, 2020); U.S. DOJ statement (August 2020); CMS Special Edition article SE20015; HHS Provider Relief Fund reports; U.S. Navy / DoD deployment records.

If you are a truther, like me, and you have seen behind the curtain of severe corruption, please consider subscribing. Or, even better share this with a friend. Thank you for reading my work. It means a great deal.

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There’s a question I’ve never been able to shake, one that started forming somewhere between my own childhood at a kitchen table with my mother and the morning I watched my first child sit across from me doing the same: Who decided that a number on a scan sheet tells you anything true about a child?

Not a teacher. I’ve never met one — not a single one worth her salt — who believes that. Ask any classroom teacher, off the record, away from the administration, and she’ll tell you: standardized testing doesn’t measure intelligence. It doesn’t measure curiosity, or grit, or the way a kid’s face changes when something finally clicks. It measures how well a child performs on a standardized test. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

So if teachers hate it, and parents are increasingly skeptical of it, and study after study shows it doesn’t reliably predict meaningful outcomes — then why does it persist? Why does it grow?

Follow the money.

A Company You’ve Never Voted For Is Running Your Child’s Education

Pearson PLC is a British education conglomerate that most American parents couldn’t pick out of a lineup. That’s by design. You don’t need to know the name of the company to take the test. You just need to show up and fill in the bubbles.

But Pearson has been quietly, methodically positioning itself as the infrastructure of American public education for decades. Between 2010 and 2014 alone, Pearson received 27 out of 128 state education contracts — more than any other company in the industry. In Tennessee, state funds flowing to Pearson nearly tripled, climbing from roughly $7 million to $22 million in just four years.

This isn’t organic growth. This is the result of policy — specifically, a federal initiative called Race to the Top, which used grant money to incentivize states to adopt Common Core standards. And who was perfectly positioned to supply the Common Core-aligned testing materials, textbooks, and digital curriculum those states now needed?

Pearson.

The Race to the Top program didn’t just set educational standards. It created a captive market. States that wanted federal dollars had to play ball, and playing ball meant buying from the handful of companies already at the table. Pearson was the biggest one sitting there.

What Common Core Actually Did

Let me be clear about something: the debate over Common Core isn’t a left-right issue, no matter how it gets packaged. The opposition came from homeschoolers and teachers’ unions alike, from conservative parents and progressive educators. What they all recognized — from different angles — was the same thing: Common Core was less an educational philosophy than a standardization mechanism.

Standardization is great for manufacturing. It is corrosive in education.

When you standardize outcomes, you necessarily standardize inputs. You teach to the test. Not because teachers want to — trust me, they don’t — but because jobs, school funding, and district reputations are now tied to those scores. The teacher who would rather spend an afternoon on a rabbit trail about the American Revolution because one kid asked a great question? She can’t afford to. That rabbit trail doesn’t show up on the assessment rubric.

The child sitting in that classroom — the one whose brain lights up for history but goes dim for math — gets a number. The number follows her. And somewhere, a company invoices a school district for the privilege of generating it.

The Conflict Nobody Wanted to Name

Here’s where the story gets uncomfortable, and where I want to be precise — because precision is how you stay credible.

The Obama administration was the primary engine behind Race to the Top and the federal push for Common Core adoption. The Department of Education under Arne Duncan spent years cajoling, incentivizing, and pressuring states to standardize. And the contracts flowed accordingly — to Pearson most of all.

Now. After leaving office, Barack and Michelle Obama signed a joint book deal with Penguin Random House reported to be worth $65 million — a figure that shattered previous records for political memoirs.

Penguin Random House was formed in 2013 through a merger of Random House and Penguin Group. At the time of that merger, Pearson owned 47% of the new combined entity. Pearson was a near-equal co-owner of the publisher that would later write the Obamas a nine-figure check.

Critics called it a quid pro quo. That’s a strong charge, and I’m not going to make it as a statement of fact — there’s no smoking-gun evidence of a direct arrangement. What I will say is this: the corporate relationships were real, the timeline is what it is, and the people who benefited from the policy are the same people who made the policy. That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s a description of how influence works in America.

What’s also true: Pearson reportedly lost money on the Common Core curriculum because public backlash caused states to retreat from the program. The arrangement, if it was one, didn’t go the way anyone planned. Which is sometimes how these things go.

But here’s what doesn’t get walked back: the structural problem. The fact that a private corporation can simultaneously supply the tests, write the curriculum, publish the textbooks, and hold equity stakes in major publishing houses — while lobbying the federal government and receiving billions in public education contracts — is a problem whether or not any single deal was corrupt.

What Your Child’s Test Score Is Actually Paying For

Let me put some texture on this.

Every time a state administers a standardized test, money moves. It moves from state budgets — funded by your property taxes — to testing companies. Pearson. College Board. ETS. The big three of American educational assessment have collectively built an empire on the premise that children must be measured, ranked, and sorted on a regular basis by instruments that the people closest to those children — their teachers — largely believe are invalid.

College Board alone reported revenues of over a billion dollars in recent years, largely from the SAT and AP exam programs. These are nonprofit revenues, mind you — College Board holds nonprofit status while paying its executives salaries that would make a Fortune 500 CEO comfortable.

And who sits on the boards of these organizations? Who consults for them, writes policy papers that feed into federal education guidelines, and then cycles back into government positions? The same relatively small ecosystem of people. Education reform, as an industry, has produced its own version of the revolving door.

The teacher in the classroom — the one who knows your child’s name, who noticed she struggled in October and thrived in March, who can tell you exactly what kind of learner she is — has no seat at that table.

Why I Pulled My Children Out

I want to bring this home, because data without stakes is just noise.

My children are homeschooled. The journey began 14 years ago with my second born deciding she was not going to waste her time in a desk, under florescent lights being talked at, and then bubbling a Scantron sheet. That choice wasn’t made in opposition to learning — it was made in pursuit of it. Because I knew, from experience, what an education looks like when it isn’t shaped by the demands of a test someone else designed to generate someone else’s revenue.

It looks like rabbit trails. It looks like a morning spent on one question because the question was worth it. It looks like a child who reads voraciously not because she’s been leveled and assessed but because no one ever told her books were supposed to be hard.

Standardized testing has never been able to capture that. It was never designed to. It was designed to produce a number that a bureaucrat can point to, that a politician can campaign on, and that a corporation can invoice.

The teachers know this. They’ve known it for years. The ones leaving the profession in record numbers — the ones citing “teaching to the test” as a primary reason — they’re not wrong. They’re exhausted from being instrumentalized in a system that was never really about the children.

What Questions You Should Be Asking

I’m not here to hand you conclusions. I’m here to hand you questions. The road to wisdom is questioning, not only the status quo, but every piece of information you receive. Don’t take my word on anything; seek out truth and arrive at a conclusion you can live with.

Who benefits when your child’s school is evaluated primarily on test scores? Who profits from the tests themselves? Who writes the curriculum materials, and who owns equity in the companies that do? When federal money flows to states with strings attached — adopt this standard, use this assessment — who is sitting at the table when those standards are written?

The answers aren’t hidden. They’re just not on the front page. They’re in contract databases, merger filings, nonprofit tax returns, and the board rosters of organizations most people have never heard of.

Your child isn’t a data point. The machine that wants to treat her like one has names, addresses, and annual reports.

Go find them.

Love,

Momma Jess

If this piece made you think, share it with someone who’s still inside the system — a teacher, a school board member, a parent who’s been told the test is just how things are. It isn’t. It’s how things were decided. Those are different.

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Ever feel like the federal government is stuck, broken, or just not listening to the people? The Founders felt that way, too. And they hadn’t even finished building the thing yet.

So they did something remarkable: they wrote a failsafe into the Constitution itself. Not a petition. Not a protest. A legally binding, constitutionally guaranteed mechanism that allows the states — not Congress, not the President — to propose amendments directly. It is a power so immense, so carefully constructed, that it has never once been used in nearly 250 years of American history. But it is as real today as it was in Philadelphia in 1787.

“They built an emergency brake into the Constitution — a way for the states to propose amendments without any permission from Congress or the President.”

Article V: Two Paths to Change

Most people, if they think about constitutional amendments at all, picture the process that produced all 27 of them: Congress proposes, the states ratify. Here is how that works in practice:

Two-thirds of both the House and the Senate must vote to propose an amendment. That proposal then goes to the states, where three-quarters of state legislatures — currently 38 out of 50 — must ratify it for it to become part of the Constitution. This is the familiar path. It is also the only path that has ever been used.

But Article V contains a second path, and it is worth reading the relevant language directly. The Constitution says that Congress “shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments” when two-thirds of state legislatures apply for one. No presidential signature required. No congressional approval required. The states, acting together, possess the authority to convene and propose changes to the foundational law of the land.

That is 34 states, if you are counting. And Congress, under this mechanism, is not a gatekeeper. It is, constitutionally speaking, a scheduling secretary.

The Most Important Distinction You May Never Have Heard

Here is where a great deal of confusion enters the conversation, often deliberately.

Critics of this process warn of a “runaway convention” — a gathering that could, in theory, tear up the entire Constitution and start fresh. The fear is understandable. The Philadelphia Convention of 1787, after all, was called to revise the Articles of Confederation and ended up replacing them entirely.

But that concern rests on a fundamental misreading of Article V, and the distinction matters enormously.

What Article V authorizes is a Convention for Proposing Amendments — not a constitutional convention. The body convened under this provision does not have the power to ratify anything. It has the power only to propose. Any amendment that emerges from such a convention faces the same gauntlet as any amendment proposed by Congress: it must be ratified by three-quarters of the states.

Think about what that means in practice. Even if a convention produced something genuinely radical — something that 49 of the 50 state delegations in attendance found objectionable — it could not become law without the affirmative approval of 38 state legislatures. There is no runaway train here. There is a proposal, followed by an extraordinarily high bar for adoption.

“Any proposed amendment still must be ratified by three-quarters of the states. It’s an incredibly high bar that ensures only ideas with broad, nationwide support succeed.”

Why the Founders Built This In

James Madison, the man most responsible for the structure of the Constitution, was unambiguous about why this provision existed. He worried — presciently, one might argue — about what would happen if the federal government became, in his words, “the exclusive and final judge of the extent of its own powers.”

The founders did not trust any single branch of government. They built the entire constitutional architecture on that suspicion: separation of powers, bicameralism, the veto, judicial review. The Article V convention mechanism was the capstone of that design — a direct path for the states to correct federal overreach when Congress and the courts would not, or could not.

Put plainly: the Founders anticipated the possibility that Washington might one day stop listening. And they left the people a remedy that does not require Washington’s permission.

Where Things Stand Today

This is not merely a civics lesson. The movement to use Article V’s convention mechanism is active, organized, and gaining ground.

The Convention of States (COS) project has worked for years to gather the requisite applications from state legislatures. As of this writing, it has secured passage in a substantial number of states, with applications calling a convention for three specific and limited purposes:

• Imposing fiscal restraints on the federal government

• Limiting the power and jurisdiction of the federal bureaucracy

• Establishing term limits for federal officials, including members of Congress and Supreme Court Justices

These are not fringe proposals. They command significant popular support across party lines and have been endorsed by a broad coalition of state legislators, constitutional scholars, and policy organizations.

Whether COS reaches the 34-state threshold — and whether any resulting convention would produce amendments that clear the 38-state ratification bar — remains to be seen. But the process itself is real, and the conversations happening in state capitols across the country are consequential.

The Civic Takeaway

This is not a historical footnote. It is a living, breathing part of the Constitution, waiting in reserve like a tool no one has yet needed badly enough to reach for.

It is the ultimate expression of federalism — the idea that power does not originate in Washington and flow downward to the people, but originates with the people and flows upward to the government, only as far as the people permit.

Whether you support the Convention of States movement, oppose it, or are still making up your mind, understanding Article V is essential to understanding the actual structure of American self-governance. The ultimate authority in this system does not reside in the Capitol or the White House or the Supreme Court building. It resides with you, in your state capital, and in the constitutional power of the states to act as a final check on the federal government when all other checks have failed.

The Founders gave us this. It would be worth knowing it exists.

One of my favorite out of the mouths of babes moments was when my second to last born child interrupted my night-time Bible story to ask, “Does God have a penis?”

My overthinking mind was glitching over how to explain to a two year old the omnipresence of God, while my husband conveniently and silently laughed himself into tears while I tried to answer the following lambast of questions, as he captured it all on video.

Dear husband, I haven’t yet forgiven you for leaving me stranded.

Guiding a child through sounds to words, words into sentences, sentences to reading a book is a magical journey. Now, they have their first tool. A key to opening the door of reason and logic, reminding them a question well-asked is worth more than an answer given too easily. I believed, and still believe that education, at its root, is an act of love. You teach someone how to use a tool they’ll carry their whole life. You step back. You watch them use it.

And your heart soars seeing a child’s mind take flight.

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So when I tell you that it burdened me to restrict myself, and see other tenders to the garden of a child’s mind, weighted down in bureaucratic standards, I’m not speaking from the outside. I was in the room. In the halls. In the meetings. And I often thought about how my kindergarten classroom had a wooden kitchen. A dress up station. A block and vehicle station. Story time with the lights off, snuggled up on a kinder mat. Mine was red.

And I wondered what happened. So, of course, I had to research. That is when I realized the fight to change the future began with the plan to take over what “the future” (children) were fed.

A Slow Cog With a Mission

A slowly turning cog typically signifies a high-torque, low-speed gear mechanism, or in metaphorical terms, deep thought and methodical processing. Technically, a larger gear driving a smaller one reduces speed but increases power. It can also represent a small, crucial part of a large, complex system.

That’s the first thing to understand. Revolutions, especially in institutions, require determined articulate planning and a well-oiled machine slowly running behind a curtain.

The story usually gets told with the 1960s as a starting point, and that’s not wrong — but it’s incomplete. The roots go deeper, and so do the intentions.

After World War II, the United States found itself in a peculiar position: militarily triumphant, industrially dominant, and suddenly very interested in producing a particular kind of citizen. The National Defense Education Act of 1958, passed in direct response to Sputnik, poured federal money into schools for the first time in any meaningful way. The goal was explicit — more scientists, more engineers, more bodies capable of sustaining the Cold War apparatus.

Education, in that framing, was not about the formation of a person. It was about the production of a resource.

That’s not a conspiracy. It’s just history. Rockefeller (Sr.) is long known for his statements on this specific topic. Which is a puzzle in itself. Rockefeller was in oil. Why not leave the educating to the educators? I guess he did, at least contribute though, by founding two universities. But it matters, because once you accept that the purpose of school is to produce outputs for political priorities, you’ve already made a philosophical concession that will be very hard to walk back — no matter who controls the state.

As the World Turns

In the 1960s, a different set of thinkers decided they agreed with that framing more than they disagreed with it. They just wanted different outputs.

A generation of academics, many of them shaped by European critical theory — thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and the broader circle associated with the Frankfurt School of social research — had immigrated to American universities before and during the war. Their project, broadly speaking, was to understand why liberal societies had failed to implement socialism, and what cultural and institutional forces would need to change in order to implement the goal.

The consequence has shaped an entire thought process.

Marcuse, in particular, became enormously influential with the American student left. His argument — laid out in works like Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man — was that Western institutions, including schools, were mechanisms of repression. That they produced “false consciousness.” That liberation required dismantling the cultural infrastructure from the inside.

His most famous American lecture hall followers took that seriously. By the late 1960s, student activist organizations on campuses across the country were openly working to transform universities — and, through the teaching pipeline, eventually the schools below them — into instruments of a different kind of formation entirely.

The Long March

There’s a phrase attributed to the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, later popularized by the German activist Rudi Dutschke: “the long march through the institutions.” The idea was straightforward — if you want to change a culture, you don’t do it through frontal assault. You do it by putting your people in the places where culture is made: universities, publishing houses, seminaries, schools of education.

It worked.

It worked the way most cultural change works: through incentives, through prestige, through the slow accumulation of what gets published in journals, what gets taught in teacher preparation programs, what gets rewarded in hiring committees.

By the 1970s and 80s, the education schools that trained America’s teachers were increasingly shaped by what came to be called critical pedagogy — a framework rooted in the work of Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed became perhaps the most assigned text in American teacher preparation programs. Freire’s argument was that traditional education was inherently an act of domination — what he called the “banking” model, in which teachers “deposit” knowledge into passive students. Real education, he argued, was consciousness-raising. It was teaching students to see themselves as members of oppressed groups, and to understand their role as one of resistance.

Again, not a secret. This was written down. It was published. It was taught openly in the institutions that produced America’s teachers. And, it’s why I struggled on my long road to earning my degree in education. I needed the degree to teach. I simply disagreed with everything I was made to learn.

What I Saw in the Classroom

I want to be careful here, because I’m not interested in constructing a villain. I have never served alongside an educator who didn’t answer the call to give their very best to children. Good people who loved their students and worked themselves to exhaustion in underfunded buildings.

But I watched something happen to the purpose of school.

When I began my pursuit in education, the goal was the love of being a part of the journey of a child as they learn wisdom. To me, it was being a part of the incredible experience in nurturing the minds of our future. A body of knowledge, a set of skills, a way of reasoning, a tradition of which these children were heirs. It wasn’t perfect. It had gaps, sometimes serious ones. But it had a shape, at least. Maybe I could be part of a change. I was quite naive all those years ago.

Great impassioned teachers gave way to burden. Exposure to ideas gave way to process. Knowledge gave way to a false premise of “critical thinking”. I am a fierce advocate for critical thinking. I believe it is the greatest part of our minds. The heartbreaking truth is, that by the time this false critical thinking filtered into curriculum guides, it often meant the critical examination of received knowledge rather than the acquisition of any. History became less about what happened and more about who was harmed by what happened. Literature became less about beauty and craft and moral imagination and more about power and representation and whose voices took center stage.

And the children were increasingly not understood as students to be educated but as subjects to be conscientized. To be made aware. To be, in Freire’s language, liberated.

Liberated from what, exactly, was never quite specified. But often, when you traced the argument, it was liberated from their families. From their traditions. From the faith and the culture and the particular, irreplaceable world that had formed them before they ever set foot in a classroom.

Controlled Inputs, Desired Outcomes

Here is the question I kept coming back to, and still do.

Education is always formation. There is no neutral version. Every curriculum encodes a vision of what a human being is for, what a good life looks like, what a society ought to value. The question is never whether a school will form students — it’s toward what and by whose authority.

The military-industrial model said: toward productivity and national utility, by the authority of the state’s strategic interests.

The critical pedagogical model said: toward liberation and political consciousness, by the authority of the theorists who had determined what liberation meant.

Both of them, in the end, agreed on the same thing: that the policymakers know what’s best for the child and what the child needs to become.

I don’t think that’s true. I never thought it was true.

The fracture I saw wasn’t partisan, not really. It was engineered philosophy. It was the moment when education stopped being about handing something down and started being about replacing what had been handed down with something the institution preferred.

The perfect machine to control the narrative.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell

— Written with love for the children who inherit the future.

Momma Jess

If this resonated with you, consider sharing it. And if you’re doing the work of handing something to the future — in whatever form that takes — I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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There is a specific condescension that is, and has been for decades, delivered in the language of advocacy. It speaks of equity and protection, of standing up for the marginalized, of fighting on behalf of those who (implied) cannot quite fight for themselves without the intervention of the Democratic party. It is, on its face, presented as well-intentioned. It is, at its core, an insult.

I am speaking of the rhetoric that has emerged from certain quarters of the political left regarding Black and Brown American citizens — specifically, the suggestion that these Americans require special accommodation, lowered standards, and government-drawn corrals in order to participate in the basic functions of civic life. The rhetoric that says a voter ID is a barrier too high to clear. That a congressional district must be racially segregated in order for a minority citizen to have a voice. That Southern states are engaged in systematic suppression, while California and New York receive no such scrutiny.

I will take each of these claims in turn. But first, a word about language — because sometimes the most damning evidence is the evidence a speaker offers against herself.

I. The Hierarchy in Her Own Grammar

This article is my expanded response directly to Kamala Harris in her public statement on April 29, 2026 following the SCOTUS ruling (Louisiana v. Callais). However, this response applies to all in the Democratic party who are parroting the same message. Which is quite baffling, considering these exact representatives overwhelmingly encouraged Virginians to vote yes to racial gerrymandering last week.

Let me begin with something small, because small things often reveal large truths.

In her public statement, Harris took deliberate care to capitalize Black. She did not extend the same courtesy to brown.

This was not a typographical accident. In matters of written language, capitalization is a declaration of value. The Associated Press Stylebook codified the capitalization of Black in 2020 precisely to confer cultural dignity — to acknowledge a shared identity and lived experience that deserves the weight of a proper designation. To capitalize one group and leave the other in lowercase is to rank them. It is to say, in the grammar of her own argument, that one community merits recognition and the other merely modifies a noun.

If the foundation of her argument is solidarity with Black and Brown Americans, she might consider extending that solidarity as far as the shift key.

II. On the Matter of Voter Identification

It is, frankly, an intellectual and moral embarrassment to suggest that Black and Brown Americans lack the cognitive wherewithal or civic agency to obtain a government-issued identification — a document routinely acquired to drive an automobile, open a bank account, board a commercial aircraft, or purchase cold medicine.

To advance such a claim is not advocacy. It is condescending, disrespectful language under the guise of compassion, and it ought to be recognized for what it is: a soft bigotry that demeans the very people it purports to defend. The implicit message is not “we want to make voting easier.” The implicit message is “we do not believe these citizens are capable.” That is a remarkable thing to say out loud. It is more remarkable still that it is said, repeatedly, by people who present themselves as champions of those communities.

Furthermore, the comparison to other states rather undermines the argument. The state of California — from which Harris hails — requires identification for first-time voters and has faced its own legal challenges over the integrity of its voter rolls. In 2019, a settlement with Judicial Watch revealed that Los Angeles County alone had more registered voters than adult citizens in the county. One wonders why that particular irregularity did not generate the same volume of righteous indignation.

Selective outrage is not principle. It is performance.

III. On Voter Suppression and the Southern States

The claim that Southern states — Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana — are engaged in systematic voter suppression deserves the scrutiny of actual evidence, not the luxury of repetition until the people finally accept it as fact.

Georgia is most frequently cast as the villain in this particular narrative. Following the passage of S.B. 202 in 2021 — the law President Biden called “an atrocity” and Stacey Abrams branded “Jim Crow 2.0” — Georgia posted record voter turnout in 2022, including record turnout among Black voters. According to the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, over 3.9 million Georgians voted in the 2022 midterm primaries, shattering all previous records. One is compelled to ask: what manner of suppression produces the highest turnout in a state’s recorded history?

The provisions that critics decry — voter ID requirements, standardized drop box regulations, restrictions on partisan operatives distributing food and drink to voters standing in line — are not radical inventions of the American South. Virtually identical provisions exist in states governed entirely by Democrats. The singling out of Southern states for practices that are unremarkable elsewhere is not analysis. It is geography-based prejudice wearing the costume of civil rights advocacy.

IV. On Racial Gerrymandering and the Soft Segregation of the Ballot Box

The Supreme Court of the United States handed down a landmark ruling on April 29, 2026 — Louisiana v. Callais — that the left has met with predictable fury. In a 6-3 decision, the Court struck down Louisiana’s congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, holding that the Constitution’s equal protection clause prohibits the government from sorting citizens into electoral districts based predominantly on the color of their skin. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, held that “the Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race.”

The left calls this suppression. I call it the Fourteenth Amendment doing exactly what it was written to do: limit the power of State and Federal Government over the people’s election process.

Consider the premise embedded in race-based redistricting: that Black and Brown Americans must be corralled into specially constructed, racially designated districts in order to have their voices heard. That without the benevolent architectural intervention of the Democratic Party, minority voters are somehow incapable of organizing, persuading, coalition-building, or winning on the merits of their ideas in a district that includes people who do not share their complexion.

If a Southern politician had said that in 1965, we would have called it what it was. I am calling it what it is now.

The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 with singular moral clarity: no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Not equal protection for your racial category. Not equal protection administered through a racially sorted precinct. Equal protection — full stop. To argue that Black and Brown Americans require a specially drawn, legislative container in order to participate as full citizens is segregation of the ballot box, and it ought to be named accordingly.

The Supreme Court agreed. The left is losing its mind. We are not surprised. The historical record stands witness.

V. A Brief Word on the Historical Record

For those willing to consult it, the historical record is not ambiguous.

It was the Democratic Party that provided the overwhelming legislative resistance to the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in 1865. It was Democratic leadership in the post-Reconstruction South that instituted the Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, and literacy tests that systematically disenfranchised Black Americans for nearly a century. The Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, operated as an arm of Democratic political terror — a fact documented exhaustively by historians including Dr. Eric Foner of Columbia University.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of what became Planned Parenthood, was an avowed eugenicist who wrote explicitly of her desire to limit the reproduction of those she deemed unfit — a category that, by her own correspondence, included Black Americans. Her 1939 “Negro Project” sought to enlist Black ministers to promote birth control in Southern communities, a strategy she outlined in her own letters with chilling clarity.

These are not talking points. They are primary sources. They are a stain on the south. And they have caused great pain.

So when a Black woman in a position of public influence implies that her own people cannot manage the basic task of acquiring an identification — or that they require a racially segregated district to exercise the franchise — one must ask, with full sincerity: whose interests, precisely, is she serving? Because it is not the interests of the Black and Brown Americans she claims to champion. It is the interests of a political apparatus that has, for over a century, depended upon keeping those communities in a posture of dependency rather than dignity.

VI. We Are Ready

And so, to Harris’ declaration that the left is ready for battle — I receive that with the full composure of a woman who knows her history.

We are ready as well.

But our battle is not the idea Harris or the left imagines. We are not fighting against our Black and Brown neighbors. We are not fighting against our White, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American neighbors. We are fighting for all of us — against the singular most powerful weapon the political left has wielded for generations: division.

Understand the architecture of that strategy. A united American citizenry — one that thinks critically, votes its conscience, builds generational wealth, and refuses to be sorted into grievance groups — is the single greatest threat to a political machine that runs on manufactured outrage.

Division is not a byproduct of leftist policy. It is the product. It is the inventory. It is what is being sold.

They have told Black Americans for sixty years that they cannot succeed without the Democratic Party’s intervention. They have told Brown Americans their labor is welcome but their sovereignty is not. They have told all of us who we should fear, who we should blame, and who we should vote for — without question, without examination, without the basic dignity of being treated as thinking adults.

We see it now. And we are done being managed.

So yes — we are ready for this battle. As Americans. United not by the color of our skin or the party printed on our voter registration card, but by the shared and radical conviction that every single one of us deserves to be spoken to as a capable, dignified, sovereign human being — not as a demographic to be harvested every four years and forgotten by November 10th.

The left built its coalition on keeping us at each other’s throats. We are choosing, deliberately and defiantly, to look each other in the eye instead.

That is the battle. And honey — we have only just begun.

— Written with love for every American who deserves better than this.

Jess

A small portion of my thousands and thousands of pages…researching.

I am not going to write with bravado, or a hook. Not today. I am writing from my heart. Because I love this country. I love her Patriots. 

My whole life, I have questioned and examined until I am satisfied that what I put my trust in, is true. My trust has to be earned. When something feels off, I find out why. I have joked that my real degree is findoutology.

But right now isn’t for joking.

A storm has arrived. You already know. You feel it. We all feel it. 

Forget right and left. Forget party lines. That's not what we are up against. I want people to understand the divide is not political.

This division is so much deeper. This is a battle between good and evil.

And the battle belongs to God. Do not be afraid. 

I finally found peace, over years of file-saving, screen shots, notes taken, and then checking it against God’s Word. Fact checking and comparing. And my heart broke over and over. My mind felt as though it would break.

And, I know, once people finally have the opportunity to lock each piece of this puzzle together, the world will break, too. Not fracture, not break down. Break open. Break free. 

Each piece is showing up. Each piece is part of the most horrific crime against not just America, against humanity. And once everyone has the chance to see the truth, there is no other option than laying down any argument and finding yourself at the feet of Jesus. 

The evil from the prince of darkness and the atrocities committed by global elites for generations will be exposed. 

Do not be afraid. 

When you see proof of people who have been in power committing the most horrific, vile acts against the most innocent and defenseless among us, do not be afraid. 

When you see proof of the highest levels of treason, do not be afraid. 

When you understand how deeply we have been betrayed and manipulated, do not be afraid. 

When you have proof of all this  corruption. And you think about the families and communities broken. The trauma we have endured. Our soldiers pawns. 

That is when the righteous anger of the Lord becomes your strength. This is when you check your armor. You hold fast to Truth. And you never give up. 

So many have died in the hands of evil. So many have given their lives to see through to let what has been done in the darkness, is brought to light. 

This battle belongs to the Lord God Almighty. 

Do not be afraid. Be strong. Pray. Cling to His Word. For such a time as this. 

Love, Momma Jess

In honor of my husband, who serves this country still. 

And for all of the innocent names we will never know who were sacrificed in the name of evil. They are in heaven. 

I didn’t, anyway.

.Me, two weeks post-partum c-section, wearing baby girl, and high heels, to deliver a sermon. Because, if not me, then who? The answer: Literally anyone else.
I just didn’t know how to…not.

It came in slow pieces, like most things that take root deep. It came in the way I learned to read a room before I could read a book. In the way I watched moods shift like weather rolling over the ridge, learned when to speak and when to stay still, learned how to smooth things over before they broke.

People called it backbone. Grit. Dependable.

And it is those things.

But it can also turn into something else.

I met with a counselor the other day. I loved her immediately. And, she picked it up in this first session. Didn’t take her long. I hadn’t even finished explaining myself when she said it plain: you try to fix everything for everyone.

Yeah, I do. and it’s really, really exhausting.

I thought I knew what that meant. I thought co-dependency was my momma not being able to make a decision without my advice. I thought it was other people’s problem.

She handed me a book. Too Much by Terri Cole. I read the introduction and had to put it down.

It was my biography.

Not a metaphor. My actual life, laid out in someone else’s words, on someone else’s pages, in a book I’d never heard of until forty-eight hours ago.

I am tired in a way that doesn’t show. Because I’ve been, well, I don’t really know how to put it in the right words… I’ve just been “there”. For so many people. Like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dam. I also learned a new term: High-functioning co-dependency. Ew. I don’t like labels, and that didn’t feel too good to learn about and see myself right in those words. It doesn’t look like falling apart. It looks like holding everything together so well that nobody thinks to ask what it’s costing me. It looks like being the steady one. The faithful one. The one who shows up, even though it’s not convenient for me.

It looks like me being the mediator of the family at five. Me, co-signing on loans while still trying to wake from post-surgery anesthesia. Me, being a school assistant and staying until 8 p.m. to print out and verify the report cards, because the assistant principal (whose job it was to do), had a church deacon meeting to get to…meanwhile, I hired childcare I couldn’t even afford, so I could prove I was faithful. Me, in active labor, and too worried about the church service I was in charge of to acknowledge I needed to be at the hospital (and almost gave birth in a car).

It looks like me turning my own writing into a workshop for the world’s problems.

I didn’t even realize it until the other day… when I stopped mid-article and thought, what the heck am I doing?

What started as a front porch — a place to sit with my own thoughts and watch the world go by — turned into something else entirely. I have been lining up arguments like fence posts, hammering them in straight and true, hoping someone would finally see what I see. Hoping they’d wake up.

And when I realized that’s what I have been doing, I felt it like a dull ache. And wanted to delete everything. Shut it down.

Somewhere along the way, I had tied my sense of purpose to whether anyone reading my articles got it.

Folks can feel that. They’ll sit with you when you’re telling a story. They’ll lean in when you’re speaking from your own lived ground. But the moment it feels like they’re being talked at, they back up.

Nobody wants to be handled. Least of all me. I’ve got a stubborn streak that’ll make a two year old look as sweet as a slice of lemon pound cake.

I’m not going to stop telling the truth. I’m not trading my backbone for silence.

But I’m laying down the need to carry it for everyone else.

I’m letting my words be an offering instead of a tool. Telling the story as it is, rooted in my own soil, and leaving space for folks to come to it or walk on by.

I’m sitting down on the porch instead of standing at the gate.

Pouring sweet tea.

Speaking plain.

Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, that’s enough.

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I have taught more than one child how to read.

That sounds peaceful. Like I’m sitting in a sunlit corner with a stack of books and a mug of coffee, raising little scholars.

No.

It looks more like sitting across from a five-year-old who is doing exactly what you told them to do… and watching their face fall when it doesn’t work.

Here’s the truth some of us say out loud, and some are afraid to address:

The English language does not play fair.

Ah, but children…a root in wisdom often discarded. Children see it immediately. You probably did, too, once upon a time.

Every single one of my babies and students has asked some version of the same question:

“Why is it like this?”

Not whining or complaining. Just asking an honest question. And also sometimes asking “did you notice if you say the word ‘bear’ over and over, it starts to feel weird?!”

And I’ve sat there, fully grown adult, responsible for their education, and had no honest answer that didn’t sound ridiculous when spoken out loud.

Because they’re right. It doesn’t make sense.

The other day, my son asked me a simple question:

“What’s a bill?”

And I opened my mouth… and immediately regretted it.

“Well… it depends.”

There’s a dollar bill. A duck bill. The bill of a hat. The bill that shows up in the mail that Momma and Daddy have to pay. And then there are bills that turn into laws. Sometimes.

I just sat there for a second after I said it. Because what kind of answer is that?

A child asks for meaning, and I hand him a pile of unrelated definitions and call it language.

We tell them:

“Learn your sounds. Sound it out. You can do this.”

And they believe us. Of course they do. Children still trust that the world is built on something solid. They trust us and every single thing we say to them.

Then they meet words like:

Tough. Though. Through. Cough.

Same letters.

Four completely different outcomes.

And suddenly you’re explaining to a child who just learned phonics that the rules they worked so hard to understand… don’t actually apply when it matters. So, then we go into dialogue about “some words just don’t play by the rules”…. and know they’ll just have to memorize the rule breakers.

Because i before e, except after c…. but, in this case, it doesn’t follow the rule… and sometimes sneaky e isn’t sneaky…and sometimes two vowels don’t actually walk together…

Sigh.

You can see the moment it hits them.

Not confusion. Betrayal.

Then come the silent letters.

“Knight.” “Write.” “Island.” And at some point, you hear yourself say: “That letter is just… there.” Just there. Not working. Not helping. Not even pretending to contribute. Just sitting in the word like it pays rent.

But, you explain it in a weird house of mirrors type of way, because you learned in a house of mirrors that English language rules are sometimes… rules. And sometimes not.

And you catch yourself mid-sentence thinking, this is absurd.

Because it is.

So we pivot.

We stop saying “sound it out,” and we start saying:

“Just remember it.”

Sight words. Memorize it. Recognize it. Don’t question it.

Which is a strange thing to call reading.

Because that’s not decoding.

That’s coping.

Meanwhile, my kids who are learning other languages look at me like I’ve lost my mind.

Because in these other languages, once you learn the sounds… you can read.

No tricks. No ambush. No guessing games dressed up as literacy. Just…consistency.

Imagine handing a child a system that keeps its word. I have to leave that sentence alone, or less I will off on a whole ‘nother tangent.

The deeper I got into this, the clearer it became: English isn’t one language. It’s a pile. Quite literally.

Layers of history stacked on top of each other with very little concern for the poor soul who would eventually have to learn it. (Just ask any ESOL teacher… God, be with them.)

Germanic roots. French influence. Latin trying to clean things up after the fact. Scholars adding letters because they thought words should look more “educated.”

And here’s the thing about Latin — it actually plays by the rules. It’s consistent. Phonetically predictable. The language that English supposedly borrowed from for respectability turned out to have far more integrity than English ever gave it credit for.

Which is part of why, when I looked at the chaos of English and started asking why, I didn’t decide to avoid Latin until middle school.

I decided to run straight toward it.

If my children were going to understand why English is the way it is — why the spelling is frozen in one century while the pronunciation kept moving, why half our vocabulary looks one way and sounds another — they needed to see the foundation. Not as an abstraction. As a living thing.

Latin isn’t a detour. It’s an explanation. Thank you, Sweet Jesus.

And before anyone comforts themselves with, “Well, maybe some kids just struggle…”

No.

I have watched bright, intuitive, pattern-seeking children slam straight into this wall.

Children who can reason, build, question, and connect ideas faster than most adults.

And they still hit words like:

“Queue.” “Colonel.” “Definitely.”

And fail.

Not because they’re incapable. Because the English language system is grossly inconsistent.

Then, just when you think you’ve survived spelling, English quietly introduces another level:

Phrasal verbs.

Look up. Look into. Look over.

Same words. Completely different meanings. No clear logic. No reliable pattern. Just exposure and repetition until it sticks… or it doesn’t.

So here’s where I’ve landed after walking multiple children through this: English is not difficult because children struggle.

Children struggle because English is difficult.

There’s a difference.

Here’s the part that stops me, in order to marvel at the beautiful human brain and it’s plasticity. Because despite all of it… they learn. They wrestle with it. They question it. They get frustrated, and then they try again.

And somewhere in the middle of all that mess, something clicks.

Not because the system suddenly becomes clean. But because they adapt. Their brains build pathways where none were clearly given. They do the work anyway.

I’ve watched one of my children spend twenty minutes on a single word — tracing it back, asking questions, refusing to just accept “that’s how it is.” And eventually, something in her face shifted. Not relief. Something more like recognition. Like she’d caught the language doing something it thought she wouldn’t notice. But, she noticed.

So if your child is sitting there, staring at a word that refuses to behave (and deserves detention or suspension)… and asking questions you don’t have neat answers for…

Good.

Let them ask.

Let them push back.

Let them notice the cracks.

Because we don’t need to train children blind mastery of a broken system.

The goal, simply, is this: To raise a child who can look at something that doesn’t make sense… and have the courage to say so.

And then decide what to do with it anyway.

I write through the lens of a home educating mother. But, I once was part of the public, then the private education system. There’s not much different in private or public.. it’s the same system but takes thousands from your pocket, to make you feel better about your child’s surroundings. And that is usually, largely, false. I do not write to make an attack on teachers… the ones who truly give their life in service to educating children live a life akin to a mother of a newborn. Late hours. Sleepless nights. And no, teachers, in fact, do not receive a summer “break”. I have hurt and alienated former colleagues by what I write. These are the ones in the trenches, the greatest of educators who lose sleep over your child, trapped within a system that is utterly and grossly broken. They are my heroes. They, and your child, deserve more than the absurd box of public education. This is why I write.

Share this with a teacher, or a homeschooling parent you love, please. It is not easy, but it is a journey of pure love.

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American’s chatter online with supreme confidence, and half the time, I get the feeling no one really knows what they’re arguing.

It sounds like this:

“They just passed a bill. This is ridiculous. Impeach!”

Sometimes this statement is correct, and sometimes it isn’t. And sometimes the “bill” in question is not even a law.

Which brings us to a useful starting point:

A bill is not a law.

Not yet.

So… What Is a Bill?

A bill is simply a proposal for a new law or a change to an existing one. That’s it.

It is an idea written down in legal language and introduced in Congress. It has no power. It enforces nothing. It changes nothing. Until it survives the process. And the process is where things start looking like an episode of Jerry Springer.

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Step 1: Someone Writes the Thing

Every bill starts with a member of Congress. Before we move on, let’s make sure we all know a few terms: In the House: a Representative; In the Senate: a Senator

They (and, more realistically, their staff, lawyers, and policy teams) draft the bill. This is where the idea gets turned into actual language. Not slogans or campaign promises. Real, enforceable text.

Then the bill is introduced.

It gets a name, a number (like H.R. 4393), and is officially entered into the system.

At this point, it is still just paper with ambition. And typically tied to a load of catchy (or corny) acronyms.

Step 2: Committee (Where Bills Go to… Reflect on Their Lives)

Once introduced, the bill is sent to a committee. Committees are smaller groups of lawmakers who specialize in certain areas:

• Judiciary

• Finance

• Agriculture

• Homeland Security
  …and so on

This is where the real filtering happens.

Committees review the bill, hold hearings, debate its details, and make changes (called “markups”).

Well, most of the time. Sometimes they just ignore it.

Most bills never leave committee. They don’t get voted on. They don’t get debated on the floor. They simply… stop existing in any meaningful way.

If you’ve ever heard someone say, “Congress isn’t doing anything,” it’s often because thousands of bills met their lonely death right here.

Step 3: The Floor Vote

If a bill survives committee, it goes to the floor of its chamber.

That means:

• The House of Representatives votes on House bills

• The Senate votes on Senate bills

(See how those terms I mentioned earlier are important to know?)

Lawmakers debate the bill (usually accompanied by great theatrics), propose amendments, and then vote.

If it passes:

• It moves to the other chamber (House → Senate or Senate → House)

If it fails:

• It’s done. Finished. Over.

No dramatic music. Just a vote and silence.

Step 4: The Other Chamber (Yes, Again)

The second chamber repeats the process:

• committee review

• possible changes

• debate

• vote

And here’s where things get messy. The House and Senate often pass different versions of the same bill.

Which means…

Step 5: Reconciling the Differences

If both chambers pass different versions, they have to agree on a single, identical text.

This usually happens in a conference committee, where members from both chambers work out the differences. Once they agree, both the House and Senate must vote again on the final version.

No shortcuts. No “close enough.” Exact same wording, or it doesn’t count.

Step 6: The President

Once both chambers pass the same bill, it goes to the President.

The President has three main options:

1. Sign it → it becomes law

2. Veto it → it goes back to Congress

3. Do nothing

That third one has a twist:

• If Congress is in session and the President does nothing for 10 days → it becomes law

• If Congress adjourns during that time → it dies (this is called a pocket veto)

If the President vetoes the bill, Congress can override it, but only with a two-thirds majority in both chambers.

Which is difficult. On purpose.

Why This Takes Forever

At this point you may be thinking: “This is wildly inefficient.”

Correct.

It is not designed for speed. It is designed for deliberation.

Every step is a checkpoint:

• committees slow things down

• two chambers must agree

• the President must approve

Because the system assumes something very simple: If a law is going to affect millions of people, it should be difficult to pass.

What This Means for the Rest of Us

When you hear: “They passed a bill”.

A useful follow-up question is: “Where is it in the process?”

Because a bill can be:

• introduced

• sitting in committee

• passed in one chamber

• being negotiated

• vetoed

• or actually signed into law

Those are very different realities.

And yet, in everyday conversation, they are often treated as the same.

A Final Thought

Those of us old enough to remember Schoolhouse Rock, there is an episode where a cartoon bill sits on the steps of the Capitol explaining how hard it is to become a law. (“I’m just a bill, up on capitol hill….” you’re welcome.)

It turns out that cartoon was not exaggerating. The system is slow. It is layered. It is pretty frustrating to watch. But it is built that way for a reason. Because in a country where laws carry real power, the process of creating them is supposed to require time, agreement, and more than a little persistence.

If nothing else, remember this:

A bill is just an idea.

Becoming a law is the hard part.

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As I am packing away our Easter decorations and baskets until next year, I was thinking about the tradition my Momma handed to me, and I to my oldest daughter’s who are momma’s now.

My Momma did not buy Easter baskets. She built them.

Every year, the same hand basket reappeared—the one that had always been mine—transformed. She filled it herself, deliberately, with trinkets and treats chosen specifically for me: a small jewelry box, a hair ribbon, a tiny perfume, a Cadbury Crème Egg tucked just so. Then she wrapped the whole thing in iridescent cellophane and tied it at the top of the handle with a wide grosgrain ribbon, the kind that holds a bow with authority.

It was so perfectly assembled that I couldn’t bring myself to open it.

While my sister tore through hers—chocolates scattered, Easter grass shed across the carpet, toys liberated immediately—I would sit beside mine and simply look at it. If I found a small gap in the cellophane, I would ease my hand in carefully, take one thing, and leave everything else exactly as she had arranged it.

That basket was not a container. It was a statement.

A statement of care that is visible. That someone who loves you so completely, notices what you love. And curates an Easter basket just for you.

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The Other Handbasket

There is another kind of handbasket.

“Going to hell in a handbasket.”

By the late 1800s, the phrase had settled into something familiar: things moving in the wrong direction, and quickly. PDQ, as my fourth-grade teacher used to say. “Pretty Daaaarn Quick,” she’d answer, just barely holding back what she really meant.

I am looking around at the world and feeling it’s going straight to hell in a handbasket PDQ with a lot of know-it-alls trying to play God.

Of course, people have attempted to play or outplay God since…forever. It’s just a bit on the nose these days.

Nope, I’m not talking about war. Or protests. Or the lying media. I am talking about the unadulterated attempt at interfering with things that do not belong to us.

We are editing the genome. Engineering the weather. Designing consciousness. Negotiating death.

And doing it all with a confidence that would have looked, to any generation before us, either magnificent… or insane. I’m going with insane.

We have developed extraordinary power over life. And almost no shared understanding of what a life is actually worth.

Who Gets to Measure What a Life Is Worth

I don’t have to answer that question in theory.

I live it.

My husband and I have eight children. It’s the lens through which I see everything.

Some are gifted. Some struggle. Some are quiet, observant, and reserved. Some are bold, loud, natural leaders (we are honing our bossiness into leadership over here; some days are harder than others). Every one of them is different.

Every one of them is whole. Beautiful. A creation.

And every one of them matters, not because they are perfect, but because they are not.

I have anxiety. Depression. I am a trauma and abuse survivor. And I know, without a doubt, that I love deeper because of what I’ve walked through. People say that I have helped them, by sharing my story.

My husband carries a truckload full of trauma-filled rucksacks from war. And still—he doesn’t hate the world. He loves it more. His stories of cultures I once might have shunned as much as tossing the baby with the bathwater, those stories have taught me the beauty of a people on the other side of the world.

These are not defects. These are the places where depth is formed.

History agrees with me by the way.

Einstein struggled in school. I’m pretty sure I read where he was dyslexic. It has been quoted somewhere that he was a difficult student. Einstein didn’t simply tweak physics. He basically told humanity, “Your common sense? Cute. Completely wrong.” Then he gave us the unsettling realization that reality isn’t fixed or intuitive, but flexible, relative, and far stranger than our instincts can handle.

Beethoven lost his hearing. That paired with his intense personality and falling hard for the wrong woman, he gave us proof that human suffering can be dragged, kicking and screaming, into something so beautiful it outlives us all.

Helen Keller lived in a world without sight or sound. In her day, it would have been termed “deaf, dumb, blind, and mute”. She gave us proof that a human mind and spirit can break through almost unimaginable isolation and still reshape the world with clarity, conviction, and stubborn, defiant hope.

They were not mistakes.

They were human beings whose lives carried weight and meaning—not because they were optimized, but because they weren’t.

So when I hear talk about improving the human blueprint, I don’t hear progress.

I hear a quiet question underneath it all:

Which lives are worth keeping? And who the hell thinks they have the authority to decide?

Three “Playing God” Arenas

Before Life Begins

We are already answering that question.

Through IVF, genetic screening, and emerging gene editing technologies, we are selecting between possible lives, deciding which embryos are given the chance to continue, and which are not.

It is framed as “compassionate”. Preventative and responsible care. Give me a KitKat, please. I need a break.

Let’s be honest, it introduces something you should probably pay attention to:

Hierarchy.

We begin selecting for health. Ability. Intelligence. Preference. And filtering out anything that doesn’t meet the standard.

We are not fully designing human life yet, but we’re sure closer than we have ever been. And we are already deciding which lives are allowed to begin.

At the Beginning of Life

The question of abortion sits here—not as an isolated issue, but as part of the same continuum.

It is framed as freedom. Autonomy. “My body, my choice!”

If you’re offended by this point, perfect. Keep reading. Grab a support stuffy if needed.

At what point does our autonomy extend to deciding whether another human life continues?

I have conceived.

I have carried children who are here, living and breathing and filling my home with noise and life. My body has brought them into this world sometimes peacefully, sometimes urgently, and in one instance, a full code-blue and unmedicated c-section.

And…I have babies waiting for me in heaven. Grace. Micah.

There are nights I still lie awake, quiet tears falling, thinking about them. Wondering what they would look like. Who they would be. And thinking about how I want them to be the second heavenly beings my arms wrap tightly around. After I have jumped into Jesus’ arms and see my Savior face to face.

When ending a life shifts from something unthinkable, to something normal, everything changes. It stops being about crisis and becomes a framework where life itself is conditional.

It’s not the right time. But.. this will ruin my goals. I didn’t expect this. The details vary but the logic does not.

It wasn’t logical to me when I woke up one fall morning at 16 years old so nauseous I couldn’t think… and adults in my life suggested “don’t throw your life away”. Excuse me? No. Actually, get away from me. I am having a baby. And I will still become.

It turned out to be the best surprise gift in the world, against all odds.

She’s now 26, recently stepped away from a successful marketing career, and in the throes of sleepless nights with baby number two.

And She’s the answer to a prayer I was repeating … God, how could you love me? So, he showed me what it felt like to love a child.

At the End of Life

And then, at the other end of the same line, we have Medical Aid in Dying. It is spoken about as compassion. I am an empath to the point it can be self-destructive. But empathy and compassion do not give us authority over life and death.

I understand the desire to ease suffering. I truly do. But there is a line here that cannot be softened by language. We were never meant to decide when a life should end. That’s why we arrest murderers.

But, we are already watching the assisted suicide line move. It’s happening in Canada like ordering a Starbucks skinny latte. But, it’s happening in the U.S., too.

In Canada, it began as something very limited, in only specific circumstances. And, as things tend to do, it has expanded—beyond what many people were originally told it would be.

And alongside that expansion, there are real conversations happening—openly questioning whether long-held boundaries, like the requirement that a person be fully dead before organ donation, should remain.

Not hidden conversations, discussed on open platforms. As if the person speaking has any authority. Again, playing God. Even if those ideas are not widely practiced, the fact that they are being seriously considered is a big red flag.And we wonder why we don’t have more organ donors.

The boundary, the no-go zone, the trust in medical ethics, is no longer a fixed point.

The Scale Problem

What happens at the level of an individual life does not stay in a frozen state discarded to be used for who knows what. Or the plastic bucket under an anesthetized woman in stirrups. Or in a tidy cremation box. The logic begins to scale.

If life can be evaluated, ranked, selected, managed, it doesn’t stop at the embryo.

It moves outward. Population becomes something to regulate. Birth rates become something to influence. And children, our most precious and priceless gift, children become variables.

We see it in the propaganda. Children are framed as burdens, costs, obstacles.

We see it in systems. Weather manipulated, environments engineered, data and algorithms used to predict and shape behavior.

Control.

And eventually, nothing is specific anymore. No one is being held as a beautiful creation, no one is being known. Everything becomes abstract, optimized, and managed.

What Remains Real

And then—Easter arrives. The same way it always has. Uninvited. Unmoved. Unconcerned with our ambitions. A quiet reminder that authority over life and death was never ours to begin with.

I spent mine the way I always do. Surrounded by my children. Filling baskets. Cellophane. Grosgrain ribbon. Care. Each handbasket specific. Each one chosen for the person who will receive it.

Because that is the most honest argument I know how to make. Not in theory or policy. But in practice, in the living of life created by God, not a lab or a code.

The world may be going to hell in a handbasket.

But mine will be lined with iridescent cellophane, tied with a proper bow, and filled to the brim with things chosen for the specific, irreplaceable, unoptimizable person who will receive it.

Because that is what’s real.

And it always will be.

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