I Only Believe What I Can Experience Through My Senses

 https://echabot.substack.com/p/but-i-only-believe-in-things-i-can"

"

1. If we cannot see God, then God does not exist.

2. We cannot see God.

3. Therefore, God does not exist.

What is wrong with this argument?

First, many people assume it is irrational to believe in God unless God’s existence can be verified through the empirical method. In other words, many skeptics reject God because they cannot verify His existence by utilizing their five senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching). For them, something is real only if it is visible or empirically detectable.

This idea is related to the “principle of empirical verifiability,” which was championed by philosopher A.J. Ayer and became influential in many philosophy departments during the twentieth century. However, this view suffers from a serious problem: it is self-refuting.

Consider the statement, “A belief is only true if it can be tested by the five senses.” Can that statement itself be tested by the five senses? No, it cannot. The principle fails its own test. Therefore, if someone says, “I only believe what I can see,” he or she would be unable to justify that belief, since the belief itself is not visible and cannot be observed through the senses.

Second, the objection commits what philosophers call a category mistake. A category mistake occurs when we assign something a property that applies only to objects belonging to a different category. In this case, people confuse the categories of the created and the uncreated, the material and the immaterial.

To assume that there are no immaterial realities is clearly false. Many things we accept as real are not material objects. From the perspective of historic Christianity, God is not a created being and therefore does not possess physical composition as created things do. Scripture teaches that God is spirit (John 4:24). He has no physical parts and is not composed of matter. Likewise, the Bible warns against making physical images of God (Exodus 20:4).

The Hebrew word echad (”one”) leaves room for a plurality within a unity of essence, but it does not imply a plurality of beings or physical parts within God. Therefore, expecting God to be visible in the same way as a material object is a category mistake. The God of the Bible is uncreated, immaterial, and transcendent.

Third, there are many realities that we cannot see directly, yet we readily accept their existence. Consider the following examples:

1. Electrons

2. Protons

3. Neutrons

4. Individual atoms

5. Electric fields

6. Magnetic fields

7. Gravitational fields

8. Justice

9. The consciousness of other human beings

10. The wind

None of these things are directly visible to us. Yet we believe they exist.

Some may object by saying, “We can infer the existence of electrons by observing the behavior of charged particles,” or “We can infer the existence of electric and magnetic fields from their effects.” Likewise, someone may say, “I know the wind exists because I can see tree branches moving.”

Exactly.

We accept the existence of many things because we observe their effects and infer their existence. We do not see the thing directly, but we recognize that it is the best explanation for the evidence before us.

Christians argue that we can similarly infer the existence of God from His effects in the world. The universe, the fine-tuning of nature, the existence of objective moral values, consciousness, rationality, and historical evidence for Jesus all serve as data points that point beyond themselves. Inferential reasoning is an essential part of how we come to know truth.

An inference is a conclusion drawn from evidence and reasoning. Much of what we know about the world comes through inference rather than direct observation.

Of course, if someone is committed to philosophical naturalism—the belief that nothing exists beyond the material universe—he or she will tend to interpret every piece of evidence in a way that confirms that worldview. Presuppositions matter. People often arrive at different conclusions not because they possess different evidence, but because they interpret the same evidence through different philosophical lenses.

The point is simple: the inability to see God is not evidence that God does not exist. We routinely believe in realities that cannot be directly observed because we can infer their existence from their effects. The question, therefore, is not whether God can be seen, but whether the evidence we observe is best explained by God’s existence.

Many of these points are discussed in the book God and Atheist Objections: An Ex-Atheist Scientist Responds to 130+ Objections, which provides helpful responses to common challenges raised against belief in God."

Thank Goodness

 Well, we can all calm down now.  Elon is no longer a trillionaire, so we can stop all of the idiocy and ignorance about wealth and how it works.  

Good Question

 https://x.com/bskimike22802/status/2069034754067075496?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

 

"Dear Democratic Party, I have a question, and given how confidently you have answered it two completely different ways over the past several months, maybe one of you can finally settle it for the rest of us. Is President Trump a criminal mastermind, brilliant enough to systematically dismantle American democracy, suspend elections, and refuse to ever leave the White House? Or is he a man so cognitively diminished that several of you are now formally pushing the 25th Amendment over what you are calling "frontal lobe" decline? I teach Anatomy and Physiology for a living. I can tell you with confidence: those are not the same brain. This is what logicians call a contradictio in terminis, a contradiction in terms, where two claims cancel each other out the moment they leave your mouth in the same news cycle. You cannot argue that a man is sharp enough to outmaneuver the courts, the press, the intelligence community, and his own party to seize unprecedented dictatorial power, while also arguing he cannot remember what he had for lunch. Pick one. The Constitution does not have a clause for "dangerously brilliant and also legally incompetent." Several of your colleagues, Representative Schiff chief among them, have built entire careers warning the country that this man is plotting to never leave office, suspend the next election, and install himself as a permanent ruler. Impressive long-range strategic planning for a man you simultaneously insist cannot finish a sentence. What's next, claiming he is secretly cloning himself to personally rig fifty state elections while too senile to work the White House remote? ...oh wait. You already do both. Sometimes in the same press conference. Jim Quinn's Second Law of Liberalism covers this perfectly: if you want to know what liberals are up to, pay attention to what they accuse conservatives of doing. You shriek "dictator" and "threat to democracy" while quietly building a case to remove a duly elected president without an election, based on a diagnosis none of you are medically licensed to make. Section 4 of the 25th Amendment requires the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to formally declare a president unable to discharge his duties. It does not require Adam Schiff's vibes, a cable news chyron, or a trending hashtag. That is not protecting democracy. That is the very power grab you claim to be fighting, wearing a slightly different mask. I have met some confused students in eighteen years of teaching. None of them have ever managed to be more confused than a chameleon dropped in a bag of Skittles quite like this argument manages to be. But what do I know, I am only a science teacher who insists two contradictory premises cannot both be true in the same argument. We cover that before lunch."

Private Property

 https://x.com/babygravy9/status/2069355690376712501?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

" I still laugh from time to time about a seminar I attended at Cambridge where anthropologists and moral philosophers were talking about morality in cross-cultural perspective and the subject of private property came up. After various know-it-alls suggested there was no deep basis for private property ("cultural construction"), an ethologist piped up, "Have you ever tried to take a banana from a gorilla?" and there was just dead silence for about a minute and then everyone pretended nothing had happened and just continued as they had been."

BVMLTT/Juneteenth Celebration

 https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZ_RCUbqwJn/?igsh=cmIzOGxhenUzcGw2

Beware of language.  

 https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/2069220620710072491?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

" Juneteenth weekend in Chicago: -40 people shot -8 people dead -1 mass shooting with 13 shot including children Everyone involved was black, no police were involved. No protests from BLM, no outrage from Democrat Politicians, and no wall to wall media coverage. Total silence."

Who Knows

 Apparently Dan has his panties in a wad about some alleged attacks on people with disabilities.   I could be wrong, but it seems like the billions of dollars defrauded from the government by those lying about helping the disabled might have something to do with whatever has his panties wadded.  

P-BO Library

 https://x.com/bskimike22802/status/2069397281699180790?s=46&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

"

OBAMA: THE MOST RACIST PRESIDENT SINCE LBJ. PROVE ME WRONG. A Juneteenth Story Nobody in the Media Wants to Tell You.

— THE SETUP —

June 19, 2026. Juneteenth. The federal holiday marking the day in 1865 when word finally reached enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, that they were free — two and a half years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had already said so on paper.

The first Black president of the United States chose THIS day to open his $850 million monument to himself on Chicago's South Side.

In a historically Black neighborhood.

Where the Black families who BUILT that neighborhood's identity are being priced out by the very legacy project supposedly built to honor them.

I want you to sit with that for a second before I start dumping data on you.

I am going to make a claim that a lot of people reflexively dismiss without engaging a single piece of evidence. My claim is this: Barack Obama is the most racist president the United States has had since Lyndon Baines Johnson. Not in terms of personal animus. In terms of DOCUMENTED OUTCOMES for Black Americans under his leadership, his policies, and now his legacy project.

That is a falsifiable claim. So here are the numbers. Respond with data or do not respond at all. I have had enough of the alternative.

— THE MONUMENT AND THE FAMILIES IT DESTROYED —

Original budget: $300 million. What it actually cost: $850 million. And climbing. The Obama Foundation told the city of Chicago it would maintain a $470 million endowment to keep the thing financially self-sufficient without a taxpayer bailout. The most recent publicly available filings show exactly $1 million deposited into that fund. One million out of four hundred and seventy million.

That is not a rounding error. That is a promise nobody kept. And if this thing goes under? The taxpayers of Illinois pick up the check. Again. As always.

The Obama Center sits on 19.3 acres of public parkland that the city handed over on a 99-year lease. Cost to the Obama Foundation for that century of prime Chicago real estate: TEN DOLLARS. You read that correctly. A $10 payment for 99 years on publicly owned land in Jackson Park.

Meanwhile, the African American Contractors Association president Omar Shareef told Fox News that SEVEN TO TEN Black-owned subcontractors came to him in the months before the opening with the same story. Unpaid invoices. Ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars to tens of millions. Some of these men and women put up their HOMES as collateral to take on this project. At least two minority-owned firms — Vision Painting and Decorating Services and Glass Management Services — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2024 and listed the Obama Center contract in their filings.

One African American contractor told Fox News, quote, "I haven't had eight hours or six hours sleep in over a year. I'm cooked emotionally. I feel like an aluminum can thrown in front of a steamroller. We're crushed."

The Obama Foundation pointed the finger at Lakeside Alliance, the primary contractor. Lakeside said projects of this size take time to close out. Nobody cut the check. And now Adamson Plumbing's president, Mike Owen, who showed reporters his spreadsheets outside the center, says his company is nearly FOUR MILLION DOLLARS in the red. He watched the star-studded celebration from the outside. Bruce Springsteen performed. Stevie Wonder performed. John Legend performed.

Mike Owen's company may not survive to see next year.

"If they would have known it was a Trojan horse or a Pandora's box," Omar Shareef said, "I don't know if they would have raced as much as they did to be a part of it."

A monument built by Black hands, ON Black land, IN a Black neighborhood, DISPLACING Black families, WITH unpaid Black contractors, opened ON Juneteenth.

Quinn's First Law of Liberalism: Liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You do not need a laboratory. You need a calendar.

— THE OPENING DAY. ALL OF IT. —

Let me describe the opening, because it is too ridiculous to summarize.

While President Trump was at the White House hosting a Medal of Honor ceremony honoring the actual bravery of American service members, Barack Obama opened his library. A library, by the way, that is not technically a library. It has no presidential documents. Those are at the National Archives. What it has is an NBA-sized basketball court, a vegetable garden, a Chicago Public Library branch, and a building one architecture critic described as having "an ominous presence, its mostly windowless heft recalling a menacing sci-fi headquarters." Another writer compared it to a trash bin. A very expensive trash bin.

Valerie Jarrett opened the ceremony with a land acknowledgment. She named the original Indigenous inhabitants of the land upon which they were gathered and expressed respect for those peoples. Which is fine. I have no objection to acknowledging history.

But here is my question. If the land is stolen, and you feel the need to acknowledge that publicly at the ribbon cutting, and you are standing in front of an $850 million building erected on a 99-year lease for $10... who is doing the stealing NOW?

Joe Biden wandered around on stage. I am not being unkind. The man was literally standing there after everyone else had departed, waving at nobody. He had done this when he was PRESIDENT — stood on stages after the moment passed, looking uncertain which direction to walk. At his own vice president's library opening, he was described by commentators as wandering "like a Roomba." That someone with this level of cognitive confusion was running the most powerful country on earth for four years is a different article. But it is worth noting who likely filled that void. And we will get there.

Michelle Obama was asked to describe her next chapter in one word. Her answer? "Me."

That was it. "Me." Her former boss just opened his legacy center and she responded to what the next phase of her life holds with the word "me." I am not analyzing the marriage. I am noting that the woman who has given speech after speech about empathy, community, and service answered a question about the future with the word "me," without a trace of irony, and then called it dropping the mic.

Gavin Newsom was so moved by the occasion that he ACTUALLY TEARED UP. He said he was crying because he missed Barack Obama so much. The governor of California, whose state has the highest poverty rate in the country, adjusted for cost of living, whose homeless crisis is visible from space, whose energy policies have driven some of the highest electricity rates in the nation, who once said Greg Abbott "doesn't have the backbone" — you know, the governor who is IN A WHEELCHAIR due to a SEVERED SPINE — stood at the Obama Center and wept. Because he missed Barack Obama.

Meanwhile, outside on the streets of Woodlawn, the neighborhood surrounding the center, longtime residents are being offered $2,000 by investment firms to vacate apartments their families have lived in for decades.

Those residents did not make the program.

— THE UNIFIER WHO DIVIDED, AND THE CASE HE BUILT AGAINST HIMSELF —

Barack Obama stood at that podium on Juneteenth and told the crowd he believes in American values that transcend party. He invoked John McCain. He invoked Mitt Romney. He talked about turning toward each other instead of away.

I want to tell you what his campaigns actually did to John McCain and Mitt Romney, because this is what I mean when I call him subtle.

His 2008 campaign cast McCain as George W. Bush Part Three. His 2012 campaign ran a super PAC ad implying Mitt Romney was responsible for a woman dying of cancer — linking her death to Romney's private equity career with zero causal connection. His vice president, Joe Biden, told a crowd that Romney wanted to "put y'all back in chains." His campaign spread a story that Romney had forcibly cut the hair of a gay classmate in prep school. They strapped a dog to the top of a car story into the rotation. They treated a decent man like a monster.

And then he stood at his library opening and praised the values he shared with Mitt Romney.

That is not complexity. That is OJ Simpson's book, If I Did It, telling you that you did it. A 2016 CNN poll found 54% of Americans believed race relations had gotten WORSE under Obama — including 57% of white respondents and 40% of Black respondents. The man who built his entire 2008 campaign on racial healing left office with the country more divided, and a plurality of his own community saying conditions had deteriorated on his watch.

— THE WEALTH HE LEFT BEHIND: THE RECEIPTS —

This section contains no Fox News. No conservative websites. These numbers come from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, from

Inequality.org

, and from the Urban Institute.

Black household median wealth stood at roughly $10,700 in 2007, before the recession. By 2010, two years into Obama's first term, it had fallen 36% to $6,900. Then it kept going. By 2013, Black median household wealth had collapsed to approximately $1,700 — while white household wealth had already begun its recovery and was climbing to $120,000.

Let me restate that. By the midpoint of the Obama presidency, the median Black household in America had seventeen hundred dollars in wealth. White households had one hundred and twenty thousand.

That racial wealth gap, by the latter half of Obama's presidency, was the LARGEST IT HAD BEEN IN THIRTY YEARS. Comparable, in the findings of multiple economic research organizations, to wealth gaps that existed in the 1950s and 1960s. During Jim Crow.

The first Black president oversaw the largest racial wealth gap in a generation. You may want to read that sentence twice too.

Black homeownership fell from 49% to 44% on his watch. Black homeowners with NEGATIVE equity exploded by twenty-fold during the crisis — from 0.7% to 14.2%. And unlike white families, Black homeowners did not reach their foreclosure peak until 2013, well into the Obama years. Average white home equity in 2016 was 3.5 TIMES greater than average Black home equity. And white equity had recovered 84% of its pre-crash value. Black equity had recovered only 73%.

These are not my calculations. They are from researchers who were actively trying to make the case for more intervention. They found the exact opposite.

The researchers at Jacobin — not exactly a right-wing outlet — published an analysis titled "How Obama Destroyed Black Wealth." Their conclusion: Obama had the legal tools, the legislative leverage, and the Treasury mechanisms to sharply blunt the foreclosure crisis and protect Black homeownership. He chose not to use them. Wall Street banks received trillions in rescue funds and discount loans through TARP and Federal Reserve programs. Black families got HAMP — the Home Affordable Modification Program — which set ambitious targets, fell catastrophically short, and left many borrowers in worse shape than if they had simply defaulted and started over.

The banks got made whole. The neighborhood got a $10 lease.

— SIX POLICIES THAT HURT BLACK AMERICANS. ON PURPOSE OR NOT, THE OUTCOMES ARE THE OUTCOMES. —

Thomas Sowell, one of the most respected economists in American history, spent a career making one point: good intentions are NOT a data point. Results are. You judge a policy by what it produces, not by what the press release said it would produce. Here is what the policy produced.

ONE. THE CASH FOR CLUNKERS CATASTROPHE.

Obama's 2009 stimulus included a program that gave rebates of up to $4,500 to trade in older vehicles for new ones. It scrapped approximately 700,000 perfectly functional used cars. Removed them from the market permanently. Literally crushed them.

Who shops for used cars? People who cannot afford new ones. What demographic is significantly overrepresented in that population? You already know the answer. Cash for Clunkers destroyed the affordable used vehicle supply just as the Black community was losing wealth and income at the steepest rate in a generation. You needed a car to get to work. You could no longer afford a car because the supply had been crushed to subsidize new car purchases for people with better credit scores.

The government took a functional economic resource OUT of the hands of the people who most needed it. Then called it a stimulus.

TWO. THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT AND THE LABOR TRAP.

The ACA expanded Medicaid coverage and that coverage gain was real. Millions of Black Americans who had no insurance got insurance. I am not going to pretend that did not happen.

What also happened: The employer mandate on businesses with 50 or more employees was tied to a 30-hour weekly threshold. Businesses in low-wage sectors — retail, food service, hospitality — responded by converting full-time positions to part-time below the threshold. Low-wage sectors where Black workers are significantly overrepresented. The mandate to provide health coverage created a structural incentive to make sure nobody hit 30 hours.

And the states with the LARGEST Black populations — Southern states — mostly refused Medicaid expansion, creating the coverage gap. The people who most needed the coverage, in the states with the least prior safety net, got left out of the program that was supposed to help them. Not because Republicans were blocking it from Washington. Because state legislatures exercised exactly the authority the framers gave them.

Also: since the ACA's full rollout in 2014, the seven largest health insurance companies TRIPLED their revenues, from $511 billion to $1.5 trillion. The Democrats spent fifteen years screaming about corporate healthcare greed. Then wrote the law that turbocharged it. That is not an accusation. That is a spreadsheet. Look it up.

THREE. MINIMUM WAGE ADVOCACY AND THE ENTRY-LEVEL TRAP.

Obama pushed hard for federal minimum wage increases, from $7.25 toward $10.10 and beyond. The federal floor never moved — Congress blocked it — but the rhetoric drove state and local action across the country.

Walter Williams spent his career documenting what happens to Black teenagers when the minimum wage rises. Unemployment increases first and fastest for the least experienced workers. Because here is the economic reality: when you mandate that a business pay $12 an hour for every hire, the business starts asking whether a 17-year-old with zero work experience is worth $12 an hour on day one. The math often does not work. So the 17-year-old does not get hired.

Pre-federal minimum wage expansions, Black teen unemployment was often comparable to white teen unemployment. After major hikes, the gap widened dramatically. Williams made this argument with historical data for DECADES. It was not controversial among economists. It was inconvenient politically. So it was ignored.

The person who most needs that first job to build a resume, develop work habits, and create a reference — who often happens to be a young Black man in an urban area — gets priced out of entry-level employment by the very policy designed to help workers. Quinn's First Law. Every time.

FOUR. THE SCHOOL DISCIPLINE DISASTER.

In 2014, Obama's Departments of Education and Justice sent what is known as the "Dear Colleague" letter to school districts nationwide. The thrust: if your suspension and expulsion rates are statistically higher for Black students than for white students, you may face a federal disparate impact investigation — even without any evidence of intentional discrimination. Just the numbers alone could trigger federal scrutiny.

School districts responded by lowering suspensions. By adopting informal quotas on discipline by race. By telling teachers they could not apply consistent standards because the outcomes would look unequal.

You know who suffered most from that policy? The well-behaved Black students in those schools. The ones who came to learn. The ones who needed a functional classroom to have any shot. The ones who sat through chaos, disruption, and reduced instructional time because the school was prohibited from removing persistently disruptive students when the numbers said they had removed too many already.

Thomas Sowell called this the mismatch problem applied to K-12. You cannot engineer statistical parity without sacrificing standards. And when you sacrifice standards, the students with the fewest outside resources to compensate — tutors, private schools, family support — pay the highest price.

The policy meant to protect Black students from unfair discipline made classrooms MORE chaotic for the Black students who were behaving. It is almost elegant in how completely backwards it went.

FIVE. DODD-FRANK AND THE DEATH OF COMMUNITY BANKING.

Dodd-Frank imposed sweeping new regulations on financial institutions following the 2008 crisis. Some of the regulations addressed real abuses. Fine. Nobody is arguing the subprime market was clean.

What also happened: the compliance cost was enormous and fell disproportionately on smaller community banks. Community banks that could not afford teams of compliance lawyers started consolidating, merging, or closing. The number of Black-owned and minority depository institutions declined sharply. These were the banks that served the neighborhoods the big banks historically avoided. They approved higher percentages of loans to Black applicants. They made relationship-based lending decisions that factored in the local knowledge a Citigroup risk model cannot capture.

Dodd-Frank made the big banks more compliant and smaller banks less viable. And the people who most relied on those smaller banks — Black entrepreneurs and home buyers in underserved communities — lost access to credit at the moment they most needed it to rebuild from the recession.

SIX. IMMIGRATION AND THE INVISIBLE COMPETITION.

Obama deported 2.7 million people over eight years. His own immigration advocates called him the "Deporter in Chief." He set deportation records. I give him that, because it is true and it drives the left insane.

But here is what is also true. Overall low-skilled immigration inflows remained high throughout his administration. And the economic research — not my opinion, peer-reviewed economic research, including work associated with the National Bureau of Economic Research — documents that a 10% increase in immigrant labor supply in a given skill category correlates with roughly a 3.5 to 4% wage decline and a 3.5 percentage point employment rate drop for competing native-born workers.

Who competes most directly with low-skilled immigrant labor? Workers with high school diplomas or less. What demographic is significantly overrepresented in that category? The United States Commission on Civil Rights published findings acknowledging this exact dynamic — that unauthorized immigration tends to depress wages and employment for low-skilled American citizens, and that Black men are disproportionately represented in those affected groups.

You cannot simultaneously demand living wages for American workers AND maintain open-border-adjacent immigration policies that flood the low-wage labor market. One of those things cancels the other out. The left has spent a decade pretending this is not a basic supply-and-demand question.

— THE THIRD TERM NOBODY ELECTED —

Here is where it gets interesting. And uncomfortable for people who have convinced themselves that the Biden years were separate from the Obama years.

They were not.

Obama lives ten minutes from the White House. Not ten miles. Ten minutes. During the Biden years, he spoke to Biden by phone infrequently, according to people close to both men. But when he showed up — at the White House in April 2022, for the ACA anniversary event — the room treated him like a conquering hero. Staffers mobbed him in the hallways. Democrats who served under him were visibly more excited to see him than to see the sitting president. The Heritage Foundation noted that Biden "cut a lonely and forlorn figure" as Obama was swarmed.

Obama quietly advised the Biden White House for five months on artificial intelligence policy, holding Zoom calls with top West Wing aides, before Biden's October 2023 executive order on AI was signed. NBC News reported this. Not Fox. NBC. Biden's chief of staff Jeff Zients confirmed it. It was the first time Biden had formally tapped his former boss to shape a key policy initiative. But only the first time that was publicly documented.

The Biden White House was staffed heavily with Obama-era personnel. Susan Rice returned as Domestic Policy Advisor. Ron Klain, who served under Obama, was Biden's first Chief of Staff. The policy priorities of the Biden years — ACA expansion, climate regulation, administrative agency activism — were continuous with, and in many cases extensions of, Obama-era groundwork.

I am not saying this was a shadow government. I am saying the separation between Obama's two terms and Biden's term is largely cosmetic. The personnel overlapped. The policy agenda overlapped. The Overton window had been established. And the man who established it was ten minutes away, available on Zoom, and walking into his former home to be received like a returning pharaoh while the man nominally in charge wandered around a stage not knowing which direction to exit.

I want you to think about what that means for the policies we spent the last several sections discussing. The ACA expansions that Democrats voted to make temporary and then screamed were being taken away. The immigration enforcement theater. The regulatory framework that choked small businesses and community banks. The school discipline guidance still rippling through urban school districts. All of that continued, expanded, or found new expression in the Biden years. Under the supervision of a man who was, by multiple credible accounts, actively involved in shaping that administration's direction.

And that same man just opened a monument to himself. On land taken for ten dollars. On Juneteenth. In a neighborhood his monument is pricing out of existence. While Black contractors who built the thing are filing for bankruptcy.

— THE LBJ FLOOR AND WHY OBAMA IS BELOW IT —

I set Lyndon Johnson as the floor deliberately. LBJ is documented — on his own White House tapes, confirmed by serious historians — using racial slurs in private with regularity. He referred to Black staffers as "furniture." He continued the Kennedy administration's wiretapping of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was a product of the segregationist South who made the most cynical calculations about what political loyalty was worth.

He also signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Whatever his private ugliness, those two laws dismantled Jim Crow by statute. That legacy is real.

What is Obama's equivalent? What law, signed by his hand, materially and durably improved Black economic outcomes? The ACA expanded coverage and helped insurance companies triple their revenues. The stimulus saved the banks and let Black homeownership fall five percentage points. The school discipline guidance made urban classrooms more chaotic. The minimum wage advocacy contributed to entry-level job scarcity for young Black men. The foreclosure crisis response left white equity recovery at 84% and Black equity recovery at 73%.

LBJ was a racist who did something transformative for Black Americans despite his personal ugliness. Obama was celebrated as a racial healer who presided over the largest racial wealth gap in thirty years while delivering policies that, on the evidence, made Black economic outcomes measurably worse.

I know which one I can hold in more complicated regard. And it is not the one who opened a monument on Juneteenth while Black contractors called his project a Pandora's box.

— THE COMMUNIST GOALS MOMENT —

On January 10, 1963, Representative A.S. Herlong Jr. read into the Congressional Record a list of 45 Communist Goals for America, drawn from Cleon Skousen's "The Naked Communist." I want to flag exactly two.

Goal Number 40: Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity.

In the 1950s, Black American families had intact two-parent households at a rate of roughly 80 to 85 percent. After decades of welfare expansion — which accelerated through the Obama years — the rate of Black children living in two-parent homes fell below 30%. Sowell documented this correlation extensively. Williams called it the destruction welfare accomplished that slavery could not. The Obama years added benefits, expanded the safety net, and the structural incentives that penalize marriage and work in low-income families continued producing their predictable outcomes without anyone being required to acknowledge the mechanism.

Goal Number 17: Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda.

The Dear Colleague letter on school discipline. The federal influence on curriculum standards. The expansion of Department of Education reach into classrooms that the Constitution designates as state and local responsibilities. All accelerated under this administration. The students in the schools most affected — urban schools serving predominantly Black populations — got disrupted classrooms and federal ideology in exchange for declining educational outcomes.

I am not saying anyone read this list and followed it. I am saying the outcomes match the list regardless of intent. Trees are judged by their fruit.

— THE MOMENT OF CLARITY —

Let me bring it back to June 19, 2026.

An $850 million building opened. Tripled over budget. On land that cost ten dollars. With a promised $470 million endowment that has $1 million in it. With an architecture critic describing it as a sci-fi menacing headquarters. With the African American Contractors Association president saying seven to ten Black-owned firms came to him financially ruined for having worked on it. With Black families in the surrounding neighborhood receiving $2,000 offers to vacate homes they have lived in for decades. With home prices in the area up 4.6 times since the project was announced.

A Nobel Peace Prize winner was applauded. A Roomba wandered the stage. A governor from California cried. A former first lady said "me." The local residents who have been fighting this project for a decade were not on stage.

They were outside. Wondering where they are going to live now.

Quinn's Second Law: If you want to know what liberals are up to, pay attention to what they accuse conservatives of doing.

They told you Trump was the one who did not care about Black America. They told you conservatives wanted to keep Black communities poor and dependent. They told you the man who built his career on images of unity and hope was the answer to structural racism.

The structural racism is still here. The wealth gap is still here. The neighborhood is changing in exactly the direction the residents feared. The contractors are still unpaid. And the man with the Nobel Prize is taking a bow on Juneteenth.

I want you to tell me where I am wrong. Actually wrong. With data.

The comments are open. I will be here.

But what do I know. I am only a medically retired Army combat medic who spent twenty-three years watching outcomes matter more than intentions, a science teacher who grades by results and not effort grades, and apparently the one person still willing to say that a Juneteenth ribbon cutting does not absolve you of the seventeen hundred dollars.

IF THIS ARTICLE MADE YOU THINK: LIKE this article so the algorithm shows it to people who need to read it. SHARE this -- every share really helps get the word out. Use it. COMMENT below with your take. Where am I factually wrong? Bring specific data. Tell me."