There is a record I go back to when the news becomes a kind of weather. It was made over three days in August 1977 at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles: Bill Evans at the piano, Eddie Gomez on bass, Eliot Zigmund on drums. Warner Bros. sat on it. It did not come out until 1981, months after Evans died in New York on September 15, 1980, at the age of fifty-one. The people who first heard it were listening to a man who was already gone.

The album is called You Must Believe in Spring. Read the title again. It is not a wish. It is not “I hope it will be spring.” It is an instruction, delivered in the second person, with the full weight of an obligation. You must.

We are living inside a political order built around one man’s appetite. The cruelty is the policy. The grievance is the platform. The courts, the agencies, the cabinet, the masked men loading our neighbors into unmarked vans: all of it bends toward a single gravitational center, a personality that cannot tolerate a world in which it is not the subject. Even our resistance gets conscripted into that need, because outrage is still attention, and attention is what he…well, what he eats.

Readers of this publication know where I stand on hope. Hope, as most Americans practice it, is a feeling we outsource to the future so we do not have to act in the present.

So why write about a record whose title commands belief?

Because Evans is not talking about that kind of hope. And because this record does something else that matters now, something I did not fully see until I sat with it again this autumn. It feels. Openly, without apology, without armor. In a moment when feeling itself has been made suspect, that may be the most political thing about it.

Look at the track list and you are looking at a memorial.

The album opens with “B Minor Waltz (for Ellaine).” Ellaine Schultz had been Evans’s partner for roughly twelve years. In 1973, after he told her he was leaving her for another woman, she took her own life. Evans wrote her a waltz. Not a dirge, not a requiem: a waltz, the most social of forms, a dance for two people moving in three. He put her loss and his guilt into a shape that still turns.

The third track is “Gary’s Theme,” by the composer and vibraphonist Gary McFarland, who died in 1971 at thirty-eight after someone laced his drink in a Manhattan bar. The fourth is “We Will Meet Again (for Harry),” written for Evans’s older brother, a music teacher in Baton Rouge who had struggled for years with mental illness. When the trio recorded it, Harry was alive. By the time the public heard it, Harry had taken his own life in 1979, and Bill was dead too. A song of reunion addressed to a living brother became a letter mailed from one grave to another.

The record closes with Johnny Mandel’s theme from M*A*S*H, whose formal title is “Suicide Is Painless.” Gene Lees, who knew Evans well, called his long dependence on heroin and then cocaine “the longest suicide in history.”

You Must Believe in Spring was not made by a man who had escaped winter. It was made by a man standing in the middle of it, surrounded by the people it had taken, his own body failing. When someone in that position tells you that you must believe in spring, he has earned the imperative. He is reporting from the far side of despair that the seasons still turn.

From left: Bill Evans, Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane.

Evans was never a crowd-pleaser in the athletic sense. He did not dazzle. He did not cut other players in public. He hunched over the keyboard with his head nearly touching the keys, as if the music were a confidence he had to lean in to hear. Some critics heard all that inwardness and called it soft: too pretty, too romantic, too private for a music that was supposed to swing hard and announce itself. Miles Davis heard it differently. He said Bill had a quiet fire.

That phrase is the whole argument. Quiet fire. Feeling that does not need volume to be real.

Listen to what Evans does with emotion on this record. He lets a phrase hang past the beat, as if he cannot quite let go of it. He resolves a chord a half-second later than you expect, so that you feel the ache of waiting. He plays ballads at tempos so slow that the silence between notes becomes part of the melody. He does not hide grief behind technique. He uses technique to make grief audible.

But this is not indulgence, and the distinction matters. In the liner notes he wrote for Kind of Blue in 1959, Evans compared jazz improvisation to a Japanese discipline of painting on thin parchment with a brush, where any hesitation or correction tears the surface. There are no erasures. The artist trains for years so that, in the moment, feeling can pass directly into the line without being falsified.

That is what emotion looks like when it is taken seriously.

Not a flood, not a performance, not a tantrum. A trained openness. A willingness to be moved in public and to let other people see it, held inside a form strong enough to carry it.

And it is worth saying plainly where that language came from. Evans’s harmonic tenderness grew out of an American music that Black people built under conditions of terror, a music that has always known that to feel fully, in a society organized to deny your humanity, is an act of survival. The blues is not a complaint. It is a technology for staying human while the powerful insist you are not. Evans was an heir to that tradition, and on this record he honored it.

The US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth

The movement now in power has declared war on feeling. Not on all feeling: on yours.

Its most powerful financier said on a podcast in 2025 that empathy is the fundamental weakness of Western civilization. Its supporters sell mugs that boast of drinking liberal tears. Grief over a deported father is mocked as hysteria. Fear in a classroom is dismissed as a snowflake’s fragility. Compassion for a stranger at the border is treated as treason against the nation. Adam Serwer wrote years ago that the cruelty is the point. The corollary is that your pain is supposed to be the punchline.

There are at least four reasons this matters, and four reasons we have every right to refuse it.

First, feeling is evidence. Grief is how a human being measures harm. When a family weeps at a detention center, that weeping is data: it records what was done. A regime that wants to do harm without accountability needs the harm to go unmeasured. Mocking the mourners is a way of shredding the record. To feel fully, and to let it show, is to insist that the damage is real and that it counts. Second, the narcissist demands a monopoly on emotion. Look closely and you will see that this order is drowning in feeling. It is only that the feelings belong to one man. His grievance is policy. His wounded pride moves markets. His rage at a comedian or a judge becomes a federal matter. His hurt is the only hurt the state recognizes. Everyone else is expected to be stoic, compliant, and grateful. When you claim your own sorrow, your own fear, your own tenderness, you break that monopoly. You declare that his inner life is not the nation’s inner life. Third, numbness is the strategy. Steve Bannon named the method years ago: flood the zone. Make so much happen so fast that no one can feel any single thing long enough to act on it. The goal is not to make you angry. The goal is to make you tired, to exhaust feeling until it goes flat. Every person who keeps their capacity to be moved, who still weeps at the right things, is refusing the anesthetic. Fourth, and maybe most actionably, feeling is the root of solidarity. No one organizes on behalf of people they cannot feel for. The war on empathy is a war on coalition. It wants each of us sealed inside our own fear, unable to sense the person in the next van, the next ward, the next zip code. Tenderness is not weakness. It is the nervous system of a free people.

So when Bill Evans plays a waltz for a dead lover, slowly, without shame, he is modeling a right we are being told to surrender. The right to mourn. The right to be soft without being defeated. The right to let grief be seen.

But notice: he does not stop there. He shapes it. He makes it into something other people can use. That is the line between the feeling the regime fears and the feeling it can exploit. Unshaped feeling becomes exhaustion or panic, and the regime feeds on both. Shaped feeling, disciplined like the brush on parchment, becomes testimony, art, organization.

It becomes action.

Evans’s emotional openness had a structural counterpart, and it is what he did to the piano trio.

Before him, the standard jazz trio was a monarchy. The pianist was sovereign. The bass walked the time and the drums kept it. Starting with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian around 1959, Evans broke that arrangement. He wanted three voices in simultaneous conversation. The bass could lead. The drums could comment. The piano could drop out and listen. Authority moved around the bandstand according to what the music needed, not according to whose name was on the cover.

By 1977, Eddie Gomez had been in that conversation for more than a decade. Listen to him on the title track. He is not underneath Evans. He is beside him, answering, sometimes anticipating. Zigmund’s brushes do not command; they breathe. The record sounds like three people who trust each other enough to share when to be quiet.

This is emotional intelligence turned into a form of government. To play this way you have to feel what the others are feeling, in real time, and make room for it. Listening is empathy with a tempo.

Narcissism, at the level of the trio or at the level of the nation-state, is the inability to listen. It is the conviction that every other instrument exists to play your part. A cabinet secretary is a backup singer. A general is a prop. A judge is either a fan or an enemy. A citizen is an audience, and the only acceptable sound from an audience is applause.

The tyrant’s deepest lie is that his arrangement is natural, that the strong man is how things must be organized and that conversation is naive. Forty-nine years ago, three musicians in a Los Angeles studio proved otherwise, and you can still hear the proof.

The title song was written by Michel Legrand for Jacques Demy’s 1967 film Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, with English lyrics later added by Alan and Marilyn Bergman. In the film it is a love song. In Evans’s hands it becomes a vow.

He takes it slowly. He states the melody as if he is not sure he has the right to it, then lets the harmony open underneath, chord by chord, the way light comes back into a room at the end of February. Nothing is rushed. Nothing is forced to resolve before it is ready. The performance does not argue that spring will come. It behaves as though spring is real, and keeps playing.

Belief, in the sense Evans means, is not something you feel and then act on. It is something you do until it becomes true in you.

The Friends who were central in my educational formation as a boy had a phrase for this: way will open. It was never a promise that things would get easier. It was an instruction to keep showing up to the silence, to wait with attention, and to move when the leading came. The Buddhist traditions I read now say something similar: you do not sit because you are already calm; you sit, and the sitting is the calm. Across West Africa, farmers plant before the rains, because planting is how you take part in a season you cannot command.

Indeed, the hope I reject is the spectator’s hope, the belief that history is a weather report you consume, without action. The belief Evans commands is the farmer’s belief. It is a verb. It is the hand in the dirt in March, when the ground is still hard.

And it is not cold. That is what the war on feeling gets wrong about discipline. The farmer loves the field. The Friend who waits in silence is waiting with an open heart, not a closed one. Evans’s restraint was never the absence of emotion. It was emotion given a shape that could last.

Evans lived only to the age of 51.

Here is the fact about this album that undoes me every time. Bill Evans did not live to see it released. He made the recording, handed it over, and the world did not hear it for almost four years. By then the man who insisted that you must believe in spring had already had his last one.

We tend to measure hope by whether we will personally see the outcome. Will I live to see the end of this? Will my children grow up in a country that has recovered? Those are human questions, and I ask them too. But the record suggests a different measure. Evans planted something in 1977 that bloomed in 1981 for people he would never meet. He did not need to be present for the spring he believed in. He only needed to make the thing, feel it all the way through, and leave it where it could be found.

Dr. King said it plainly the night before he was killed: I may not get there with you. He said it without bitterness, because he understood that his job was the planting, not the harvest.

This is the work available to us now. Not the fantasy that the next election, or the next indictment, or the next viral clip will deliver us. The work is to make things that will still be true after this season ends. Keep the record. Document what was done, by whom, under what authority, to which families. Write down the names of the officials who signed the orders, and the names of the people who were taken. Let the grief show in that record, because the grief is part of the evidence. Build the organizations that will be standing when the regime is not.

Tyranny depends on the conviction that the present is permanent. The narcissist especially needs you to believe he is the end of history, because a man who cannot imagine a world without himself cannot allow you to imagine one either. Every archive, every school, every mutual aid network, every song recorded and shelved for later, is a quiet refusal of that claim.

Next Tuesday the country votes. Some of you will feel that it is everything, and some of you will feel that it is nothing. It is neither. It is one planting among many, and it an matter, or not, precisely as much as the work we do on the other 364 days.

So let me be concrete about what believing in spring looks like this week, in this country, under this man.

It looks like feeling it. All of it. Do not let anyone shame you out of your grief, your fear, your fury, or your tenderness. They are not signs that you are weak. They are signs that you are still awake. The regime wants you either numb or hysterical, because both are useless to the people who need you. Refuse both. Feel fully, then give the feeling a form.

It looks like listening the way Gomez listens: to the neighbor whose cousin was detained, to the coworker who is afraid to say what she has seen, to the young people who have never known a functioning government and are trying to imagine one anyway. The narcissist cannot listen. That is his weakness, and our discipline.

It looks like passing the lead. If the thing you are building only works when you are at the center of it, you are building a small throne.

It looks like grieving without stopping. Evans wrote a waltz for the woman he lost. We can mourn what has been destroyed, the institutions, the norms, the people, and still keep time.

And it looks like making things for a spring we may not see. Records. Dossiers. Schools. Songs. Organizations with bylaws and budgets and successors.

The album ends with “Suicide Is Painless.” Listen to how Evans plays it. Not as a surrender. He plays it light, almost buoyant, the melody walking forward on Gomez’s line as if the title were a rumor he has decided not to believe. That is the last word on a record full of the dead: a man who had felt every loss in his life all the way down, taking the bleakest title in his repertoire and swinging it gently toward the door.

Winter is real. This one is long and cruel and organized around a single, bottomless hateful need to be adored. But winter is a season, not a sentence. You are allowed to weep in it. You are required to plant in it.

You must believe in spring; not as a feeling alone, as a task the feeling makes possible.

You must believe in spring.

For most of American history a kid could walk to a field with a ball and play until the streetlights came on. Nobody invoiced their parents. That country is gone, and a forty billion dollar industry stands where it used to be.

We are building something to bring it back…a movement; and I hope you’ll stand with us.

Here is the thing: the families priced out first are the families whose children need play most. Inactive kids report worse mental health at nearly twice the rate of active kids, and every year the entry price climbs further out of reach. The cost of a season has risen forty-six percent since 2019. A child who cannot afford to play is a child we have decided, quietly and without a vote, to leave on the sidewalk.

This is not an accident. It is the predictable result of a governance vacuum. Monopoly certification handed out by federal statute. State associations without meaningful member democracy. A travel-sport market with every incentive to raise prices and no obligation to serve anyone.

Yet they grade our children constantly. Tryouts, rankings, cuts, showcases. Nobody has ever graded them, the bodies that run the whole thing. That asymmetry is the whole story. The people with the least power get measured the most, and the people with the most power answer to no one.

We are here to change that.

Free Play America does three things, and they reinforce each other:

We grade the system. The Scorecard is an annual public report that grades the bodies governing youth sport on cost, governance, transparency, and access. It is built entirely from public records. Four weighted dimensions, sixteen indicators, and a thirty-day response window before anything is published, so every graded organization gets the microphone to answer. The full dataset is released alongside every grade so anyone can check our math. No curve is applied. If every association earns an A, the Scorecard has succeeded, not failed. Sunlight, annually, on the record.

We prove the alternatives. Community free play means weekly free, open play at public sites across Maryland. No fees, no tryouts, no season commitment. A parent council over every site, and the full budget published to the dollar, so anyone can see what letting children play actually costs. We are not going to argue that a better model is possible. We are going to run it in the open and let the numbers speak.

We change the rules. Smart federal and state advocacy to restore play as something every community provides, the way it provides libraries and schools, until free play is not a program children are lucky to find but a promise every community keeps. That is the whole point of the name. Play is public infrastructure. We fund roads and water and libraries because a functioning society needs them. A child's right to move, to compete, to belong on a field, is no different.

I have spent my career on both sides of this. I worked inside the governance of world football as Head of Special Projects at CONCACAF and as a North American delegate to the 2002 FIFA World Cup. I have been in the rooms where these decisions get made. I spent the rest of my career serving the families who live with the consequences, running food banks, energy assistance, transitional housing, and youth services across Maryland. Free Play America is where both halves finally meet.

I wrote Saving Soccer because I believe the governance of sport can be named, measured, and reformed. Free Play America is that same conviction, brought home, aimed at the children in our own neighborhoods.

We are building this in the open. That is a choice, and it is the right one. Everything we publish, every dollar we spend, every grade we assign will be visible.

Here is what is coming. The launch. The first Scorecard. And the day we open our first field.

I want you there for all three. If you join the founding list, you will hear it first, and you will be part of the small group that got this off the ground before anyone else was paying attention. Every kid. Every field. No turnstiles.

The site is live now at freeplayamerica.org. Read the plan, see the sample Scorecard, and join the list. Free Play America will be a fiscally sponsored project of the Players Philanthropy Fund, a 501(c)(3) public charity, so your contribution will be tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

America put childhood behind a paywall. We are here to take that wall down.

Noren, winner for Outstanding Sports Program at the 32nd Annual American Women in Radio & Television Gracie Allen Awards (Photo by G. Gershoff/WireImage)

Nicole Noren gave ESPN twenty-four years. She won Emmys, Murrows and a Peabody on Outside the Lines, the unit that once investigated child sexual abuse allegations against the president of the AAU while…

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The Josiah Henson Museum of African-Canadian History, on Freedom Road in Dresden, Ontario, Canada.

Josiah Henson was born enslaved on June 15, 1789, near Port Tobacco in Charles County, Maryland. He learned early what the system did to families. His father, punished for standing up to an overseer, took a hundred lashes, had his right ear nailed to the whipping post and cut off, and was sold to Alabama. When the rest of the family went to auction, Henson’s mother begged her buyer, Isaac Riley of Montgomery County, to take her youngest child too. Riley answered with blows and kicks.

Henson ended up on Riley’s farm anyway, in what is now North Bethesda, and grew into the most capable man on it. He became its superintendent and sold its produce in Washington. An overseer’s beating broke both of his shoulder blades and maimed him for life. In 1825, ruined and facing a lawsuit, Riley wept and begged him to walk eighteen enslaved people to his brother’s plantation in Kentucky. Henson delivered them. Along the Ohio River they passed free soil where every one of them could have stepped off and stayed. He kept his word to Riley. Hold on to that chapter; the stereotype grew from it.

Kentucky taught him what his word was worth to such men. He began preaching in 1828, saved $350, and returned to Maryland to buy himself, paying the cash and signing a note for the last $100. Riley added a zero. The note now read $1,000. Soon after, Henson learned he would be sold in New Orleans, away from his wife and four children. In New Orleans, the young Riley nephew sent to sell him came down with malaria. Henson nursed him and brought him back to Kentucky alive. Then he settled the question of his own life.

In September 1830 the family ran. His wife made a knapsack big enough for their two smallest children, and Henson carried them on the shoulders an overseer had broken. They walked by night and slept in the woods by day for six weeks. Native people fed them in Ohio. A schooner captain named Burnham carried them to Buffalo, and on the morning of October 28, 1830, they crossed into Canada, where Henson threw himself on the ground in joy. He had promised the captain he would use his freedom well.

He kept that promise too. Ordained a Methodist minister, he became an Underground Railroad conductor, going back into slave country until he had led 118 people north. His eldest son, Tom, went to school in Canada and taught his father to read. In 1841 Henson and his partners bought 200 acres near Dresden, Ontario, and built the Dawn Settlement around the British American Institute, one of Canada’s first vocational schools. Dawn exported black walnut lumber, and Henson exhibited its boards at London’s Great Exhibition. He captained a Black militia company during the Rebellion of 1837 and met Queen Victoria while raising money in Britain.

His 1849 memoir is believed to have helped shape the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Historians still argue about how much, but Stowe drew on Henson’s narrative in her 1853 Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the name followed him for the rest of his life. Keep this man in view. What the country remembered instead was a costume.

Henson.

Stowe never authorized a stage version, and the copyright law of the day could not stop anyone else, so the story belonged to whoever could rent a hall. When the abolitionist singer Asa Hutchinson asked her permission to mount an official production, she refused, and the field stayed open. By 1902, a quarter million performances - Tom Shows - had reportedly been staged in the United States, and far more Americans saw the story in a theater than ever read the book...perfectly American propaganda. The historian Eric Lott estimates at least three million people saw these plays. Some productions honored Stowe’s antislavery argument. Many if not most were blackface minstrel shows under a borrowed title, scored with Stephen Foster’s plantation songs, starring a Tom who fawned, danced, and grinned through his own bondage.

Strip off the costumes and a Tom Show has four working parts. The story is taken without the consent of the people it is about. The producers are someone else. The audience pays to have the story’s indictment lifted off its shoulders. And a cast, in burnt cork or in its own skin, performs the inversion. Du Bois named what that audience was buying: a “public and psychological wage,” the status white workers collected when their own pay came up short. David Roediger later showed how much of that wage minstrelsy paid out. The Tom show sold it by the ticket. A person could walk in indicted by a novel and walk out comforted by a song.

The slur was manufactured in those theaters. Stowe’s Tom dies because he will not tell Simon Legree where two runaway women are hiding. Whatever his limits as a literary creation, he chooses death over betrayal. The stage Tom chose nothing. “Uncle Tom,” the epithet we now throw at one another as the worst thing one Black person can call another, belongs to the minstrel’s character, not to Stowe’s and certainly not to Henson’s. Henson’s defining trait was fidelity. Slavery tried to bind it to the master. He turned it toward his people, kept his word to a schooner captain, and walked back into Kentucky for strangers.

So I will not use the word as an insult here, not even for the people who most deserve scrutiny. Calling a Black conservative an Uncle Tom recites a line the producers wrote. The better questions are structural. Who owns the story? Who rewrote it? Who is paying, and what do they get for the money?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth arrives for a briefing in the U.S. Capitol with Congressional leaders on military strikes against alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean, on Wednesday, November 5, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Put those questions to the last two years and the productions are not hard to find.

Begin at Arlington National Cemetery. In 1914, after a campaign by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the sculptor Moses Ezekiel, himself a Confederate veteran, installed a Confederate memorial there. Among the figures at its base are an enslaved woman cradling a white officer’s child and an enslaved man marching behind his owner to war. Arlington itself describes the monument as a mythologized, nostalgic picture of the Confederacy. It is the faithful-slave fantasy cast in bronze, the Tom show’s central lie made permanent: the enslaved as grateful partners in their own captivity. A congressionally mandated commission had it removed in December 2023. In August 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced its return, writing that “woke lemmings” never should have taken it down. The restoration will cost taxpayers about $10 million, with reinstallation planned by 2027.

The name game is subtler. In 2023 the Army renamed Virginia’s Fort Lee, christened for Robert E. Lee, as Fort Gregg-Adams. The new name honored Lt. Gen. Arthur Gregg, who entered a segregated Army and rose to become its top logistics officer, and Lt. Col. Charity Adams, who commanded the all-women 6888th battalion in World War II. In June 2025, Trump announced at Fort Bragg that the old name was returning. The Army then explained that the new Fort Lee honors Pvt. Fitz Lee, a Black Buffalo Soldier who rescued wounded comrades under fire in Cuba in 1898 and died blind and in pain the next year. Relatives of Gregg and Adams noted that the president had spoken of Robert E. Lee from the podium. The same maneuver had already restored Fort Bragg, through a different soldier who happened to share the Confederate general’s surname.

Fitz Lee earned a fort, and Buffalo Soldier heritage groups attended the July ceremony with real pride. Pride is not the problem. Sequence is. The objective was the old sign on the gate. Gregg and Adams lost the installation’s name, keeping street signs and gates, and a third Black soldier’s name became the instrument. That is the Tom Show’s formula: a Black face out front, so the audience can enjoy the old production with a clear conscience.

Other productions work on the text itself. In July 2023, Florida’s Board of Education approved African American history standards telling teachers to cover how enslaved people “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Josiah Henson developed skills. He ran Riley’s farm, sold Riley’s crops in Washington, and preached his way to $350. When he tried to apply those skills for his personal benefit, his owner added a zero.

In August 2025, a week after the White House ordered a review of Smithsonian exhibitions for tone and historical framing, Trump complained on Truth Social that the museums dwelled on “how bad Slavery was” and said nothing about success or brightness. In January 2026, National Park Service workers pried more than thirty panels off the President’s House site in Philadelphia, where George Washington held nine people in slavery while he governed the new nation. A federal judge ordered the exhibit restored. In June an appeals court reversed her and praised the administration’s replacements.

Read those replacements closely, because they are the most sophisticated Tom Show of the year. They still name the nine. They feature Frederick Douglass and the Underground Railroad. They also remind visitors that the Constitution never used the word slavery, credit Washington with private doubts about the institution, and drop the map of slave-trade routes, the slavery timeline, and the panel titled “The Dirty Business of Slavery.” The court found that the new panels acknowledge slavery’s evil, and the Interior Department calls them a fuller account. Both things can be true of a script. The enslaved remain on stage, alongside Douglass. What leaves is the indictment of the man who held them.

A Tom Show.

The calendar gets the same treatment. On January 31, 2025, the White House proclaimed Black History Month; the same day, the Defense Department issued guidance titled “Identity Months Dead at DoD.” Three weeks later the president hosted a reception in the East Room for Black allies, welcomed Tiger Woods, and marveled at the size of the crowd. Juneteenth, which Trump claimed in 2020 he had made “very famous,” passed in 2025 with no proclamation and a post complaining about too many non-working holidays. The celebration gets staged when there is an audience to play to. The policy is written for everyone else.

Colin Kaepernick #7 and Eric Reid #35 of the San Francisco 49ers kneel in protest during the national anthem prior to playing the Los Angeles Rams in their NFL game at Levi's Stadium on September 12, 2016 in Santa Clara, California. (Photo by Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images)

I spent years inside sport’s governing bodies. Nothing painted on a championship field is an accident. Sport is where this country most reliably pays to watch Black excellence, and where it most often asks Black performers to keep the message off the field.

The demand is old. When Colin Kaepernick knelt during the anthem in 2016, he was asking the producers to let a performer speak. Trump told a 2017 rally that owners should get “that son of a bitch off the field.” In 2018 Laura Ingraham told LeBron James to “shut up and dribble,” the plainest stage direction a Tom Show ever received.

In February 2025, Trump became the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl. For that game in New Orleans, the league replaced the “End Racism” stenciling it had painted in end zones since 2020 with “Choose Love” and “It Takes All of Us.” The NFL denied any connection to the president’s attendance and pointed to a run of national tragedies, and Commissioner Roger Goodell reaffirmed the league’s diversity policies that same week. Take the league at its word if you like. The players, most of them Black, performed the show either way, and the sentence about racism was the part that left the set. Feels like a Tom Show to me.

Then Kendrick Lamar staged the critique from inside the production. At halftime, Samuel L. Jackson, costumed as Uncle Sam, presented the show as a game Lamar had to play by the rules, scolded one number as “too loud, too reckless, too ghetto,” and applauded only when the songs went soft. Jackson once played Stephen, the plantation’s devoted house servant, in Django Unchained. Here he played the producer.

More people watched that halftime than watched the game.

Samuel Jackson and Kendrick Lamar are seen onstage during Apple Music Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show at Caesars Superdome on February 09, 2025 in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images)

Henson’s answer to the producers was never a counter-performance. It was work: get out, go back, and build something that outlasts you.

His heirs are easy to miss because they do not sell tickets.

When the Park Service stripped the President’s House in January, volunteers from a group called Old City Remembers started taking shifts at the bare brick wall, reading the missing panels aloud to tourists. When barricades went up, they kept reading from across the way. Someone posted a hand-lettered sign where a panel had hung: Slavery was real. The Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, which led the campaign for the original memorial, has vowed to keep fighting after this summer’s loss in court. A man whose son taught him to read would have understood those volunteers completely. When the government took the text down, they became the text.

The same pattern runs through people who will never make the news: the teacher in a state with a gag law who finds a lawful way to teach the whole story; the librarian who keeps the challenged book on the shelf; the first-generation graduate who goes home every summer to tutor the kids still on the block; the woman who got out of a violent house and now runs the shelter. I spent two decades in Maryland, New Jersey and New York City nonprofits working beside people like these, in food banks, prisions, soup kitchens, YMCAs, United Ways, and transitional housing. None of them waits for permission to tell the truth, and none of them has any interest in being somebody’s prop.

They go back for the others.

Inside the Josiah Henson Museum. Photo: Ontario Southwest/Chatham-Kent Tourism

In Dresden, Ontario, the museum that grew up around Henson’s last home was called Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic Site for decades. It now carries his name, and its address is Freedom Road, formerly Uncle Tom’s Road. An elementary school that opened in Pickering, Ontario, in September 2025 is named for him.

Canada has started taking the costume off him.

In 1877, an old man stood in a Glasgow pulpit before a crowd that had come because word had spread that Uncle Tom was coming. He told them he had never been Tom. “My name is Josiah Henson,” he said, “always was, and always will be.”

Even Henson could not refuse every stage. Later editions of his memoir carried Stowe’s character in their titles, and he spoke across Britain introduced as her creation, raising money for his community. What he refused was the script.

That is the standard for the rest of us:

Name the producers.

Stop paying for the wage.

Read the missing panels aloud.

Go back for the others.

Use your freedom well.

No more Tom Shows.

President Donald Trump appears to fall asleep next to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, DC. (Photo by Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

On September 11, at the Pentagon, the names of the dead were read aloud on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks. The broadcast also ca…

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Dad and Daughter, Stirling, Scotland UK, circa 2004

A sixteen-year-old girl slumps against the passenger door of her mother’s car and asks the question that has set the country on fire:

“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?”

The mother is Nikole Hannah-Jones. The essay is “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”, published in The New York Times Magazine on September 20. It is a ten-year sequel to the 2016 cover story in which she explained why she and her husband, Faraji, enrolled their daughter, Najya, in P.S. 307, a segregated, high-poverty school across from the Farragut Houses in Brooklyn. The sequel is an inventory of what happened next. A beloved principal retired. A lunchroom full of first graders sat with no food and no adult watching them. A fourth-grade teacher never ran the mandatory reading assessments and simply assumed the children could not read. Math homework came home ungraded, the wrong answers left standing, so a child who loved math believed she was good at it. Later came an honors middle school where she earned A’s in algebra and learned almost none of it, and then a selective, mostly white high school where she sat through racial slurs in the hallway and cried on her bedroom floor after failing tests she thought she had aced.

The essay ends with a phone call, an apology, and a sentence Hannah-Jones says she can barely type:

“And I had not chosen her.”

Within 24 hours it was on the lips of hosts at The View and among typified m-stream punditry like Megyn Kelly. Sunny Hostin praised it and described what her own children endured in a well-resourced, mostly white private school: pencils jabbed into a daughter’s Afro, boys calling a beautiful girl “butter face.” At National Review, itself so often discredited in my view, someone named Rich Lowry called the experiment “abysmal” and said the essay should “discredit everything about her worldview.” Katharine Birbalsingh, billed as Britain’s strictest headmistress, told her audience that Hannah-Jones “made those schools what they are.” Other commentators called her negligent, or brave, or both. In the group chats of Black mothers with graduate degrees, the sociologist Shayla Griffin wrote, “it was like a meteor had hit.”

Most of that reaction argues about one mother. I want to argue about the question underneath the mother, underneath the daughter, and underneath each and every one of us…the one Griffin rightly calls THE question, and the one the country has, in one way, spent 250 years refusing to answer out loud, and, in another, has answered pretty thoroughly.

Why educate?

The essay struck so hard because it is a mirror. Every parent who has ever toured a school, checked a rating site, bought or moved to a house for its district, or stayed up at night wondering whether their choice would be forgiven saw themselves in that car. I saw myself. And I have come to think that what Najya Hannah-Jones lived through was, maybe, not a failed experiment by one idealistic family.

Maybe it was the system working the way it was built to work.

Dad and Daugther celebrating her college graduation, summa cum laude, from an American higher education institution’s branch campus in Budpest, Hungary, circa 2026.

I have my own version of that car ride. It has been going on for years.

My daughter is mixed race. My wife and I raised her mostly in Carroll County, Maryland, and sent her to schools in that county that were highly rated and mostly white. When she looks back, her deepest complaint is often not about academics. It is that we raised her exclusively among white people (excepting her own dad), and that something of her Blackness was left…unbuilt, as a result.

I will be honest about how I receive that, because honesty is the only thing that makes an essay like this worth writing. Part of me hears it as fair. Part of me hears it as the complaint of an extended adolescence. My side of the family was always there; it’s still there. The door to it was - is - never locked. I cannot remember her ever walking through it with real curiosity, ever asking to be taken on that journey or snatching it for herself. So when the lament comes, I often hear a young adult turning her own unfinished work into a story about her parents’ choices. I feel that too often.

And then I read about Najya Hannah-Jones, and I have to hold something harder.

Her parents made the opposite choice. They picked the Black school, the Black community, the chestnut crayon for the self-portrait. Their daughter grew up certain that “one could be Black and smart,” and she still came home to say, you did not choose me. My daughter got the rated school and says, you did not give me all my people. Two families. Two opposite bets. Two daughters who feel they paid for their parents’ decisions.

When differing choices produce the same wound, the problem is probably neither the parents nor the children. It is the menu.

Griffin describes it precisely. Black families with relative means essentially get two options: academic rigor where their child may be “psychologically and emotionally unsafe,” or emotional safety at schools with “less rigorous academics and way fewer resources.” In most of the country, she writes, “there is nothing available in the center of the Venn diagram.”

But I, personally, know that center has existed, because I grew up in it, and I know exactly how much luck it took to produce it.

I was raised in Willingboro, New Jersey. It began in 1958 as Levittown, and Levitt and Sons would not sell to Black buyers until an Army officer from Fort Dix, W.R. James, sued and won at the New Jersey Supreme Court. The first Black family bought a house in 1960. By 1970, when my parents arrived, the town was about 11 percent Black. By 2000 it was about 65 percent. In the 1970s and 1980s I came of age at the exact moments when white flight and Black (and Hispanic and Asian) arrival crossed, when the flows had not yet settled into a new segregation. For a little while, my hometown and my high school were truly mixed. I did not arrange that. No one did. History happened to be passing through my neighborhood.

A father and a mother, the year before they moved to Willingboro NJ to raise a son.

Before high school, I was at Infanta Montessori School and then Westfield Friends, a Quaker school, through eighth grade. I once asked my parents why I did not have a brother or sister. They asked me whether I liked my school. I said I did. They told me that with one more child close to my age, neither of us could have gone there. That was how narrow the margin was. My education, the one that formed my conscience and my curiosity, depended on both the Friends school staying within a universe of reasonableness with tuition costs, and upon being an only child.

That is not a system. That is a lottery. And a country where a good education depends on winning the lottery of zip code, timing, history and family size - and then tells you that it’s all about “choice” - has told you exactly what it believes about education, and what is prepared to do about education.

Tim Wise, Anti-racism educator, author and critical race theorist

In a talk to a room of California teachers’ union members, Tim Wise gives a maxim I have not been able to shake:

When we see unequal schools, we tend to assume something’s broken. Wise’s point is that nothing broke. “Systems look the way they look because they work for the people who count and have the power.”

Systems look the way they look…because they work. They work for the people who “count,” and who have power.

Then, in this particular talk, Wise goes back to the founders, starting with the one we still treat as a patron saint of American learning. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson proposed three years of free public schooling so that, in his words, “twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually.” Read that sentence slowly. The purpose of the public school, as the author of the Declaration imagined it, was sorting. Find the few. Leave the rest, the “rubbish,” to the labor they were born for. And in Jefferson’s Virginia, Black children were not rubbish to be sifted.

They were not in the pile at all.

A century later, Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton, told a room of New York high school teachers in 1909 that “we want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” That is Jefferson updated for the industrial age, and it was said openly, to educators, as policy.

Wise then recalls watching William Bennett, Reagan’s Secretary of Education, tell a Sunday talk show in the late 1990s that the biggest problem in American education was that “too many people are going to college.” He waited for the rest of the sentence. It never came. Wise calls it “the logic of the slaveholder”: if they all learn to read, who’s going to pick this cotton? Today: who will clean the hotel rooms, empty the bedpans, pick the produce?

This is where Wise draws the line that organizes everything that remains in his talk. There are, he says, only two choices. Education as job training “within an economic order that prioritizes the needs of the haves over the have-nots,” or education as liberation. He recalls that his Nashville high school is now a “health care industry career academy” three miles from the headquarters of the Hospital Corporation of America. Nothing is wrong with a good job. But that school is not preparing doctors and nurses. It is supplying billing clerks and insurance adjusters to a for-profit company.

Wise also reminds us that the tools we now use to measure schools came out of the same thinking. The early American intelligence testing movement grew up alongside eugenics. Carl Brigham, who designed the SAT, had earlier written A Study of American Intelligence (1923), which ranked Nordic Europeans above Alpine and Mediterranean immigrants and placed Black Americans at the bottom. We still call the results of that tradition “achievement.”

Against all this, Wise sets the older Black philosophy of schooling that the scholar Theresa Perry named: “freedom for literacy and literacy for freedom.” For people who could not assume a good job was waiting, learning was never mainly about a paycheck. It was about getting free, and bringing others with you. “When we integrated schools,” Wise says, “we didn’t integrate philosophies of schooling.” We integrated buildings, when we integrated anything at all after the burning and the busing and the screaming and the abandonment and the hate, and left Jefferson’s sorting machine running inside them.

Najya Hannah-Jones spent ten years inside that machine. It did what it was designed to do.

Daddy/Daughter Dinner

Here is my argument, stated plainly. The United States has never fully committed to excellent public education for everyone. Its commitment rises and falls, it ebbs and flows, and you can chart that rise and fall almost exactly against the rise and fall - expansion and violent contraction - of civil rights, of human rights. When the country moves toward authentic and actionable multiracial democracy, it builds public schools, and valuable systems of schooling. When it retreats into racial hierarchy, it starves them, splits them, or tries to hand them to the market. Public education is not a separate subject from race in America. It is one of the clearest measures we have of where the country stands on race.

We can quickly trace it across the USA’s 250 years:

Literacy as a crime. South Carolina’s Negro Act of 1740, passed after the Stono Rebellion, punished anyone who taught an enslaved person to write. After Nat Turner in 1831, Virginia and other states tightened their bans. The country’s first education policy for Black Americans was deep and abiding law against their learning. Meanwhile Horace Mann, in 1848, was calling the common school “the great equalizer of the conditions of men.” Both things were true at once. That split has never gone away.

The first flow: Reconstruction. The South had almost no public school system before the Civil War. Freedpeople built one. W.E.B. Du Bois put it flatly in Black Reconstruction: “Public education for all at public expense, was, in the South, a Negro idea.” Black legislators wrote public schooling into new state constitutions. Poor white children in the South got public schools because formerly enslaved people demanded them.

The first ebb: Redemption. When federal troops left in 1877, the white South took back its governments and cut what it called Black schools down to almost nothing. Plessy (1896) gave that separation constitutional cover. In Cumming v. Richmond County (1899), the Supreme Court let a Georgia county close its only Black high school while keeping the white one open. Black communities answered by taxing themselves twice. They paid for white schools through public taxes and then raised their own money and labor, with help from Julius Rosenwald (the long-time president and an owner of Sears, Roebuck and Company and the major individual donor for the historic Druid Hill YMCA I led from 2007-2013), to build nearly 5,000 schools between 1912 and 1932.

Brown, and the price of it. In 1954 the Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional. A year later, in Brown II, it said to proceed “with all deliberate speed,” and the South heard deliberate. The purest example of my thesis is Prince Edward County, Virginia. Rather than integrate, it closed its entire public school system from 1959 to 1964. White children went to a private academy supported by state tuition grants. Most Black children got no formal schooling at all for five years. A county decided it would rather have no public education than public education shared across the color line. The phrase the South used for its tuition grants and its token plans was freedom of choice.

Remember that phrase.

The second flow. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 tied federal money to desegregation. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 created Title I, the country’s first large federal investment in poor children’s schooling. Green (1968) and Swann (1971) finally forced real integration. And it worked. By 1988, 43 percent of Black students in the South attended majority-white schools, up from essentially zero in 1954. On the national long-term reading assessment, the gap between Black and white 17-year-olds shrank by more than half between 1971 and 1988. That was the closest this country has ever come to believing in public education for everyone, and the results showed up in the data.

The second ebb. It started almost at once. In San Antonio v. Rodriguez (1973), a 5 to 4 Court ruled that education is not a fundamental right under the federal Constitution and that funding schools through local property taxes, rich districts rich and poor districts poor, was constitutional. In Milliken v. Bradley (1974), another 5 to 4 decision, it walled off the white suburbs of Detroit from the city’s desegregation plan. California’s Proposition 13 (1978) capped the property taxes that paid for schools just as the state’s students were becoming majority nonwhite. Then A Nation at Risk (1983) retold the purpose of schooling as a contest for economic competitiveness…education as national job training. In Dowell (1991) the courts began releasing districts from their desegregation orders, and in Parents Involved (2007) the Court struck down even voluntary integration plans. Southern integration has fallen from its 1988 peak to 16 percent. The share of students in “intensely segregated” schools, those with 10 percent or fewer white students, has nearly tripled in 30 years, from 7.4 percent to 20 percent.

Now. In the past five years, state after state has passed laws restricting how teachers may discuss race and racism, the heir to Arizona’s 2010 law that killed Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program, the program Wise notes was sending its students to college at far higher rates than their peers. Eighteen states now offer private school choice programs open to every family. A federal tax-credit scholarship program begins in 2027. And the federal Department of Education, created in 1979, is being taken apart piece by piece. This month its Office for Civil Rights moved into the Justice Department. Title I, the $18.4 billion heart of the 1965 civil rights settlement, is now overseen by staff at the Department of Labor.

Read that last sentence again. Money for poor children’s schools, the fund the civil rights movement won, is now run by the department in charge of the workforce. Wise’s choice between job training and liberation has absolutely been settled on the organization chart.

This is the country Najya Hannah-Jones was born into in 2010, the year Tucson’s program was banned. She came of age at low tide.

So we must begin steeped in hateful racism. That IS the mechanism of action, historically, in any major endeavor of the United States of America, inlcuding educating its citizens. There can be no doubt about that.

Subsequently, and contextually, an essay that then asks for honesty from a mother has to be honest about its own evidence. So here are the numbers, including the ones Hannah-Jones’s critics are using against her.

On segregation, the facts are also not in dispute; indeed they spring from the previous, larger racial finding. The UCLA Civil Rights Project’s report for Brown’s 70th anniversary found that one in five American students now attends a school that is 10 percent white or less. Those schools average 78 percent low-income students. That is the P.S. 307 pattern at national scale. In New York, as Hannah-Jones quotes the same researchers, white and Asian students attend “middle-class, predominantly white and Asian schools” while Black and Latino students attend schools “where poverty is the norm.”

On achievement, the whole country is slipping, and the slide is uneven. On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, one third of eighth graders scored below even the Basic level in reading, the highest share ever recorded. That is, one out of every three eighth graders you might randomly come across lacks basic reading skills. One out of three. Furthermore, the distance between the highest and lowest performers is growing. Recovery from the pandemic has happened at the top, not the bottom, and not fully across the middle.

On money, the argument gets harder, and I want to take it seriously. Hannah-Jones cites EdBuild’s 2019 finding that predominantly nonwhite districts receive $23 billion less a year than predominantly white ones. Rich Lowry answered with a Brookings analysis showing that, once federal money is counted, high-poverty and predominantly nonwhite districts “have spent more per pupil than their lower-poverty counterparts for decades.” Both are true. EdBuild counted state and local money. Brookings counted everything. But the Brookings authors add two things that (of course) Lowry left out. Higher labor costs “offset much of this advantage for predominantly non-white districts.” And, in their words, “equal is not equitable”: high-poverty schools need more to do the same job. Title I, a core piece of the federal money behind that advantage, is the same money now run out of the Labor Department.

Lowry also says spending “just doesn’t determine outcomes.” The best research, and your own choices in educating your children, says otherwise. Studying school finance court orders across decades, the economists C. Kirabo Jackson, Rucker Johnson, and Claudia Persico found that a 10 percent increase in per-pupil spending sustained over all twelve school years gave low-income children about half a year more schooling, 9.6 percent higher adult wages, and a 6.1-point drop in adult poverty. For better-off children the effect was close to zero. My own children benefit from summer learning loss-countering spends on enrichment in the summer, tutoring, et cetera. Money matters most for exactly the children this country is least willing to spend it on.

But here is what the Hannah-Jones essay itself shows, and why it resists every easy reading.

The failures at P.S. 307 were not mainly about dollars. Hannah-Jones and her husband could write checks bigger than the whole PTA budget, and they did. What failed was adults, and their collective and individual daily choices to go to battle for each child, or not to do so, and just collect a check. An absent principal. A teacher who never assessed the children. A lunchroom where, in her words, the problem was “the callous disregard of the adults.” A middle school that dropped homework out of compassion and ended up, in its own principal’s words, not honoring the children’s “academic selves.” Emily Paige, that principal, said the sharpest sentence in the whole debate: “It’s racism under the guise of antiracism.” True. And its replete with active choices people made, who could have - should have - made other choices.

Conservatives read that line as a confession that progressive education failed. I read it as a description of what low expectations look like anywhere, but especially when a system has already decided, long before any teacher walks in, which children count. Money does not buy expectations. But a country that believed in these children would spend the money, send them its most experienced teachers instead of its newest ones, provide them the most forward-thinking environments to learn in, and refuse to accept ungraded homework as normal. It would do all at once. It does none of them. That is not a budget problem. It is a belief problem.

My daughter leading the family on its Colonial Williamsburg walking tour

If you want to see what a country looks like when it answers “why educate?” differently, look at the nations that do best by their people. Take three 2026 measures: the UN Human Development Index (health, education, income), the Social Progress Index (basic needs, rights, freedom, inclusion), and the World Happiness Report (how people rate their own lives). Average each OECD country’s rank across all three. The top five are Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Switzerland is sixth.

The United States just fell to 32nd on social progress. 17th on HDI. 22 countries beat us on happiness. Most of OECD nations see us as an example of past glory, and what NOT to do going forward, on education and everything else.

What these successful countries share is not a secret. We can see it. Now.

Free or nearly free university. Universal health care. Strong labor protections. High trust in public institutions. Low inequality. In Finland, the constitution states that “everyone has the right to basic education free of charge.” The country has served free school meals since the late 1940s. It built its comprehensive school system in the 1970s specifically to end the early sorting of children into academic and vocational tracks. Its teachers need a master’s degree and are chosen from a highly competitive pool. Hold that date next to ours. In the same decade Finland abolished tracking in the name of equality, our Supreme Court ruled in Rodriguez that American children have no fundamental federal right to an education at all.

In these countries, school is not a sorting machine or a job pipeline. It is one part of a whole public system built to help people live well. That is the third answer to “why educate?”, and the American debate barely mentions it.

Now I owe my readers the experience I had in correcting some of this. When I first pulled these rankings together, I initially added a caveat I have heard a hundred times: these are small, wealthy, historically uniform societies, and uniform populations are “easier” to deliver for. When I went back to the evidence for that assertion, guess what? It did not hold up.

The idea - that its easier to produce outcomes for nations where “everyone looks alike” does indeed have academic roots. Alesina, Baqir, and Easterly found that more ethnically divided American cities spent less on public goods. Robert Putnam reported in 2007 that people in diverse American communities trusted each other less. But a 2020 review of about 90 studies in the Annual Review of Political Science found the link between diversity and trust to be real but small, concentrated among neighbors, and highly dependent on context. When Abascal and Baldassarri reanalyzed Putnam’s data, the drop in trust tracked economic disadvantage and white residents’ attitudes toward nonwhite neighbors far more than diversity itself. And Alesina and Glaeser’s own conclusion, in their book comparing the American and European welfare states, was that American elites used racial division to defeat redistribution. That is not evidence that diversity makes good public systems impossible. It is evidence that racism can be used, politically, to wreck them.

The rankings themselves argue against the idea. Switzerland, sixth, has four national languages and about three in ten residents born abroad. Luxembourg, ninth on happiness, has close to half. Sweden, in the top six on all three measures, has a larger foreign-born share than the United States. The Nordic welfare states were not produced by sameness. They were won through hard class conflict and alliances between workers and farmers, and their own “homogeneity” was partly imposed on the Sámi, the Roma, and other minorities through forced assimilation.

So the honest version of my caveat is not “diversity makes it harder.” It is this: public systems thrive when the majority believes the people who use them belong to “us.” Where racism teaches any majority or any class with purchsing power that public schools are for “them,” the majority defunds them, leaves them, or sells them off. That is not a law of nature. It is a choice, and it is the choice my tide chart records all the way down the history of America.

The Nordic countries are not immune to it. In the early 1990s Sweden opened its schools to vouchers and for-profit operators. One study of 30 Swedish municipalities found significant school segregation in 28 of them, with children of well-educated Swedish-born parents clustering in the private schools and children of less-educated immigrant parents left in the municipal ones. Sweden’s PISA results fell through the 2000s. The country most similar to ours in adopting “school choice” got a result most similar to ours. The same pattern, in a different language. For Swedes seeing this, the politics have shifted; everyday Swedes shifted them. On September 13, the center-left bloc won 175 of 349 seats, and Magdalena Andersson is set to become prime minister again. Her Social Democrats have pledged, since 2022, to ban profit-making voucher systems at independent schools. They’ll now have the power, given to them by citizens, to do just that.

My daughter at a college function, Budapest, Hungary, circa 2025

Critical race theory has been turned into a campaign slogan, so let me say what it actually is. It is a body of legal scholarship, started by Derrick Bell and others, built on a few claims. First, that racism is ordinary, not unusual. Second, that it lives in systems more than in individual hearts. Third, that racial progress actually happens mostly when it serves white interests. And fourth, that the stories of the people harmed are evidence, not anecdote. Apply those claims to the Hannah-Jones essay and a number of things become clear. Things like what?

Well, let’s elevate the examinations of some of the theorists. In 1980 Bell argued in the Harvard Law Review that Brown came when it did because desegregation served white elite interests: it helped the Cold War propaganda fight and a South trying to industrialize. When those interests faded, so did the enforcement. That is my flow and ebb chart in one sentence. Public education for Black children rises when white interests align with it and falls when they part ways. Arizona’s lawmakers did not kill Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program because it failed. They killed it because it worked, and its success served no one in power.

Four years earlier, Bell had warned in the Yale Law Journal that civil rights lawyers pursuing racial balance were sometimes ignoring what Black parents actually wanted, which was good schools. Hannah-Jones understood this. Integration, she writes, “wasn’t catalyzed by the desire to put Black students next to white students but by an effort to ensure that Black children received access to equal educational resources.” Du Bois said it in 1935: “the Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education.” Her daughter lived both halves of Bell’s warning. The Black school gave her identity without rigor. The white school gave her rigor with slurs in the hallway. When my daughter and I had to go to the School Board and the School Superintendent to finally get the hate speech that is the so-called “Confederate flag” out of schools and off school property, we experienced the same thing.

It is bought with a mortgage, protected by district lines that Milliken made nearly permanent, and defended through screens, tests, and PTA money. Hannah-Jones calls New York’s academic screens “a tawdry bargain to keep a dwindling number of white and wealthier parents from exiting the public school system.” The top school her daughter chose shares a building with three lower-income, mostly Black high schools. Same address, different property, increasingly differing outcomes, all on purpose. After two years there, Najya reached the conclusion Harris would recognize: the privileged kids “weren’t smarter or even necessarily better behaved... they just had more.”

Gloria Ladson-Billings, who with William Tate brought critical race theory into education research in 1995, later argued that the “achievement gap” is the wrong frame. What we face instead is better understood and revealed as an education debt: centuries of historical, economic, political, and moral underinvestment that has piled up with interest. P.S. 307 did not create Najya’s missing fractions. It inherited a debt no single family, or principal, to be fair, can pay off. Griffin makes the same point from the parents’ side. The tools involved parents have, like emails, PTA checks, and volunteering at lunch, “don’t touch the places that lead schools to fail kids.”

Finally, critical race theory values the counter-story, the account that breaks the official one. The official story says a Black family with every advantage walked into a bad school and got what it deserved. The counter-story, told by a mother willing to indict herself in front of the whole country, says that even every advantage cannot buy a child out of a system designed to sort.

So, why educate? There are three honest answers, and this country has to choose:

1. To liberate. Freedom for literacy and literacy for freedom. Teaching children how the world works so they can change it. This is the Black freedom school tradition, Tucson, and the math teacher in Wise’s talk who put the region’s wealth, incarceration, and policing data on the board and told his students, “This right here is evidence that someone is trying to kill you,” and watched them go from failing grades to A’s.

2. To train workers. Jefferson’s raking, Wilson’s two classes, Bennett’s “too many people are going to college,” A Nation at Risk, a career academy three miles from a hospital company’s headquarters, and now Title I run out of the Department of Labor.

3. To help people live well. Schooling as one part of a public life designed to make people healthy, secure, trusting, and free: the Nordic answer, and in many ways Griffin’s. Her three purposes are caring for children safely, preparing them to take care of themselves and their communities, and preparing them for a multiracial democracy.

If I am honest, America’s real answer is none of the three. Our actual answer is Jefferson’s: to sort. We want some children liberated, most children trained, and very few children allowed to simply live well, and we let the sorting follow race and property so reliably that we can pretend it is merit. That is why Najya Hannah-Jones’s decade was possible. It was not a mother’s mistake that let a fourth-grade teacher skip the reading assessments. It was a country that had already decided which children those assessments were for.

Nikole Hannah-Jones and her daughter, Najya Hannah-Jones

Hannah-Jones ends where I have to end: “As long as we continue to rescue our own children from the failing schools where we allow other people’s children to languish... there is no absolution here. Not for me. Not for you. Not for any of us.”

I believe her, and I want to push her sentence one step further. The fact that there is no absolution does not mean that individual parents are the right defendants. For ten years the country has put Nikole Hannah-Jones on trial as if the choice were hers alone. It was not. The choices were set by Jefferson, Wilson, the Rodriguez majority, the Milliken majority, Proposition 13, and every family, mine included, that moved into or bought into a “good” district and called it simply parenting. The system gives parents a rigged menu and then judges them by what they order.

But the system remains the damn problem.

Leona Tate, one of the first Black children to desegregate New Orleans schools in 1960, told Hannah-Jones she did not resent her parents: “Somebody had to do it.” But notice what happened at McDonogh 19 on Tate’s first day. By 3 p.m. every white parent had withdrawn their child. The system did not change because a six-year-old walked in. It changed, for about twenty years, because a movement forced the law, the money, and the courts to change with her. Then it changed back. Individual sacrifice without collective power is exactly what the tide chart predicts will be swept away.

So what would a real commitment look like? It is not a mystery. We watched a version of it work between 1965 and 1988.

• Fund children, not property. Pay for schools by what the students need, not by what their neighbors’ houses are worth, and write a right to education into law so no court can say again that there isn’t one. Jonathan Kozol has been saying this and writing this for over fifty years.

• Send the best to those who need them most. Pay experienced, excellent teachers well to teach in the highest-poverty schools, instead of staffing those schools with beginners and substitutes.

• Integrate on purpose. Draw district and school lines to include, not exclude, and end the academic screening of ten-year-olds.

• Restore the civil rights machinery. A functioning Office for Civil Rights and a Title I run by educators, not by an agency for workforce development.

• Teach the truth. Every child, white children especially, should learn the history that produced the schools they sit in. Wise is right that children already know when something is wrong. What they need is an adult who says so.

And for those of us raising children in the meantime, there is a smaller duty that is still ours. We have to tell our children why. Why we chose what we chose. How it benefitted them and, yes, what it cost them. What the country would not give them no matter what we chose, and the choices that we - that I and my wife - have to own. Hannah-Jones found that what her daughter wanted most was not a different school. It was her mother’s acknowledgment that she had paid a price.

I am learning that too.

I will offer my own daughter that acknowledgment. We chose schools that gave her rigor and most forms of safety and, yes, a mostly white childhood, and she is entitled to name the cost. But acknowledgment runs both ways. The part of her story that is still unfinished, her relationship to her Black family and her Black history, is not something a school could ever have given her. It was never on any school’s menu. It is a journey, and it is hers to begin. My parents, and cousins, and aunts are still there. The stories are still there. The door is still open.

That, finally, is my answer to the question. We educate so that a child can walk through that door. So she can know where she comes from, how the world she was born into was built, who built it and for whom, and what she means to do about it. Anything less is sorting.

The country has never fully believed that. It will not believe it until we make it believe.

Until we fully believe.

Sources

Nikole Hannah-Jones, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” The New York Times Magazine, Sept. 20, 2026

Tim Wise, “Education for Liberation,” talk to AFT educators (transcript)

Shayla R. Griffin, “The Reality of Choosing Schools Is Even More Complicated than Nikole Hannah-Jones Says”, Medium

Reactions: The View; Rich Lowry, National Review; Katharine Birbalsingh, Strictly Education

UCLA Civil Rights Project, school segregation 70 years after Brown

National Assessment Governing Board, 10 takeaways from the 2024 NAEP

Brookings, “School spending equity since 1976”

Jackson, Johnson and Persico, school spending and adult outcomes (Education Next)

NPR, “The Education Dept. hasn’t been dismantled. It’s become more inefficient, staff say” (Sept. 24, 2026)

Ballotpedia, states with universal school choice programs

W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, “Founding the Public School”

Willingboro Township history

World Happiness Report 2026 rankings; Social Progress Index 2026; Human Development Index

Social Europe, “A cautionary tale to be had from Swedish school reforms”

Derrick Bell, “Serving Two Masters” (Yale Law Journal, 1976) and “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma” (Harvard Law Review, 1980); Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property” (Harvard Law Review, 1993); Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate, “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education” (1995); Ladson-Billings, “From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt” (2006); Dinesen, Schäffer and Sønderskov, “Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust” (Annual Review of Political Science, 2020); Abascal and Baldassarri (2015); Alesina and Glaeser, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe (2004)

NFL Owners, courtesy of the Washington Post

Twenty-four human beings have ever traveled to the Moon. Twelve of them walked on its surface. That is the entire list, across the whole span of the species, and it is not going to grow much in our lifetimes. If you are looking for the rarest fraternity on Earth, that is it: the men who left bootprints in the regolith and came home.

The second rarest fraternity is easier to enter, but only barely.

Read more

The planes were of course grounded on September 12th, so I drove.

There was no other way home.

The airspace over the country had been sealed, the rental counters in Dallas were emptying of anything with four wheels and a full tank (once the Rental agencies figured out a one-way rental model…they had never done that before), and the only instrument I had for understanding what had happened to the place I lived was the AM radio bolted into a car that was not mine.

I said goodbye - and good luck - to my FIFA partners from around the world - Peter Prendergast, the world-class referee from Jamaica, our partners at Kearney and from Canada’s Burntsand tech services group - and forgot all the work we did on Monday (and dozens of days before) to build the e-FIFA referee development program.

I instead pointed my rental east and north, toward Texarkana, across the Mid-South, up through Virginia toward the Pentagon, and finally toward the two absences smoking at the bottom of Manhattan and the small house in Teaneck where my wife was holding our oldest - and at that time, only - child.

I expected the drive to be an ordeal of distance. It became, instead, an education in it.

Catastrophe of that scale does something to the architecture we spend our whole lives constructing, the walls and moats and drawbridges we raise around the tribe, the family, the self. It shakes us loose from all of it. In the hours and days after the towers came down, everyone in the region seemed suddenly, briefly, like family. The stranger on the corner was no longer a stranger. The distance between one life and another collapsed, and in the space where the distance had been there was something that felt, for a moment, like the truth of what we are to one another.

I believed that then and I believe it now. But the drive taught me the other half of the lesson, the half about distance, and the other half is the harder one.

Somewhere past Dallas, still in Texas, still a full country away from the wound, the radio was full of vengeance. It was the language of striking back, of leveling, of making them pay, and it had the particular confidence of people who had lost nothing and knew no one who had. It was loud and it was certain and it was, above all, contrived. The response was mediated, performed, assembled out of the same materials as a pep rally. The men on the AM dial in the Mid-South spoke of the dead as an abstraction, a flag to be waved, a debt owed to their own outrage, and the further I was from the actual possibility of knowing a single person who died, the more shit was talked about the clean and holy work of retaliation.

And then the geography began to change, and the radio changed with it.

As Virginia gave way and the Pentagon came up out of the landscape ahead of me, still scarred, still ringed with the machinery of emergency, the voices on the radio changed their questions. They stopped asking how hard we would hit and started asking why. Why had this happened. How could we understand it well enough that it would not happen again. Who was left, in the wreckage of it, that we could still take care of. The nearer I came to a place where death had actually touched down, the more the human questions surfaced, the ancient triad of every real reckoning with loss: why, how, and who is left to hold.

The closer you stand to the dead, the less interested you are in theater.

I watched it reverse itself in my rearview mirror. As the Pentagon receded behind me, so did the sentiment, degree by degree, mile by mile. The brashness returned. The certainty returned. The hate, which had never really been about the dead at all, came back to fill the space that grief had briefly cleared. And then, as I closed on New York, as the radius tightened around the largest concentration of loss in the country, the human questions swelled again, drowning out the hate a second time, the instinct to know better in order to do better, the instinct to care for the stranger, rising in direct proportion to the nearness of real death.

Twice on that drive the same thing revealed itself. Grief and wisdom live inside a radius. Outside it, there is mostly noise.

I got back to the city on the thirteenth. The rubble was still smoldering. The smell at the bottom of the island was the smell of death, and it did not lift, and everyone who was there knows exactly what I mean and no one who was not there needs it described. And there, in the same air, already, the “NEVER FORGET” t-shirts were for sale. The rubble had not stopped burning and the merchandise was out. Across the region, the fake Red Cross calls were working the phones, defrauding grieving and frightened people of millions of dollars, monetizing the exact opening in the human heart that catastrophe had pried apart, turning the lowered defenses into a mark.

That was the other economy of the trauma, running alongside the economy of vengeance, and it ran on the same fuel. The trauma instinct in those of us who lived and worked there was telling us, reasonably, that there was no reason to believe the people who did this did not have something planned for nine o’clock on the morning of the twelfth, and the thirteenth, and the day after that. People who had not lost anyone were waking for weeks expecting the next attack. Some people were mourning a specific and irreplaceable human being and bracing for the next attack at the same time, doing both at once, grief and dread braided together in a single exhausted body. That was the condition. That was what leadership had to meet.

And what did leadership say? The Mayor and the Governor, standing in front of the most concentrated grief and fear the city had known in living memory, did not tell people to look in on the most vulnerable among them, the elderly neighbor, the frightened child, the woman two floors down whose husband had not come home. They told people to shop. They told people to go to Broadway. The civic instruction issued from the top, in the presence of the smoldering dead, was to consume, as if the highest available expression of a wounded society were the receipt.

I saw the same failure up close, in miniature, at my own desk. I worked at 56th and 5th, at CONCACAF, for Chuck Blazer, who was the exact narcissism of Trump translated into the language of sport. When the towers fell, Chuck did not lead. He did not gather the staff, some of whom had family who worked in those buildings, and offer them connection, or community, or the simple decency of being asked how they were. He had lost no one. But he felt bad, and because he felt bad he required that the entire energy of the organization be arranged around his feeling. The faxes came in, and they did not ask after the people on staff whose loved ones had been in the towers. They asked after Chuck. In the middle of a mass death event, the machinery of an institution was redirected, without shame, toward the comfort of the man who had lost the least and needed the most attention. My oldest son stayed in my wife’s arms. That was where the actual work of care was being done, at home, in Teaneck, one child held by one parent, because the institutions that should have modeled it were busy comforting a narcissist and selling shirts.

Everyone reacts to trauma differently. Two people, two communities, two nations, two sides of the world can stand before the same wound and build entirely different things out of it. This is not a small observation. It is, in the end, the whole argument, and it is why the drive matters beyond my own memory of it, because the drive is only the small version of a question that history keeps asking every people that survives a catastrophe: what will you make of your dead?

When Europe emerged from the Second World War, it emerged from a trauma that dwarfs anything in the American experience: fifty million dead, the cities in ash, the moral and physical foundations of an entire civilization discredited and destroyed by its own hand. That is proximity to death at a scale no radio dial can convey. And out of that proximity, out of standing inside the radius of the largest mass grave the modern world had dug, the survivors did not reach first for vengeance and merchandise. They built. They built universal health care, on the principle that a society owes care to the vulnerable as a matter of right and not of charity. They built the EEC and then the European Union, on the principle that the tribes that had been slaughtering one another for a thousand years might be bound together by something stronger than the border. They built the United Nations. And in 1948 they wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a milestone document that set out, for the first time and for everyone, the fundamental rights that were to be universally protected, precisely because the authors had just watched what happens when they are not.

That is what a society can make of its dead. It can convert the lowered defenses of catastrophe, the sudden and terrible intimacy of shared loss, into permanent architecture, into institutions built to hold the stranger. Other societies get the t-shirt business up and running.

And here is the irony that should keep us up at night: the United States was not absent from that better tradition.

American hands helped charter the United Nations in San Francisco, American delegates sat in the rooms where the Universal Declaration was argued line by line, an American, Eleanor Roosevelt, chaired the commission that produced it. The country that reached for merchandise and vengeance in 2001 had, within living memory, helped build the very architecture that a wiser use of catastrophe demands. The capacity was not foreign to us. It was in our own history, close enough to touch, close enough that the failure to reach for it again was not a failure of imagination but a failure of will, a choice made at the top to feed the outrage and the appetite instead of the grief and the obligation. We knew how. We had done it. We simply decided, this time, that it was easier to sell the shirt.

I do not offer that comparison to flatter Europe or to condemn without qualification the country I drove across, because I met the better instinct on that drive too, twice, rising in the shadow of the Pentagon and again at the edge of New York, in the people asking why and how and who is left to hold. The instinct was there. The capacity was there. It lives inside the radius of real proximity to death, and it is real, and it is ours. What failed was not the human material. What failed was everything that stood above it, every institution and every leader whose job was to widen that radius until it reached the whole country, to take the fleeting family feeling of the days after and forge it into something that would outlast the smoke, and who chose instead to tell us to shop, to gather the faxes around themselves, to print the shirts before the fires were out, and to get to hating someone.

The drive from Dallas ended in Teaneck, in a house that smelled faintly of the city fifteen miles away, with a son in his mother’s arms. That is the smallest unit of the thing that mattered, and it turned out to be the only unit that held. Proximity to death gives us, for a moment, the truth of what we owe each other.

What we do with that moment is the only question. There is no hope waiting to save us from the answer. There is only action, taken or refused, in the narrow window when the walls of our towers are down.

My father-in-law with the family dog, Rocco.

Meet Rocco. He is not my dog. He is 100% my dog.

I was still grieving the loss of our German Shepherd Dog, Isis, when the rest of my family (all of us a year out from Isis’ death) let me know they were ready for another puppy in their lives. Enter my in-laws, and their foster affiliation with Double Dog Dare Rescue; through their affiliation with DDR, they became aware of two puppies resecued off a cold West Virginia mountaintop…Rocco, and his brother, Rex. Both subsequently became members of the wider family.

Rocco does not know what a border is; what he does know, he doesn’t like.

He knows the fence line at the back and sides of the property, and he has conversations with the other neighborhood dogs at length across those lines, and he always knows that the squirrels are a personal affront.

But borders, the drawn kind, the kind we defend with paperwork and grievance, are outside his understanding. He wakes, he eats, he goes out the dog door, he wants to embrace the morning. He treats the land we live on as a single continuous fact, and he treats every living thing that crosses it as either kin, threat, or invitation. Watching him - listening to him, his brother, and his older “uncle” Jack - work that out, morning after morning, I have started to think he is closer to something true than most of the adults I know.

I want to write about growing up.

Not the growing up we mean when we talk about a child learning to tie their shoes, but the other kind, the kind a species does, or fails to do. The kind that is available to us, right now, and that most of our public life is organized to prevent. And let me start with a word that has done more damage than almost any other, and that we cannot live without: tribe.

Tribe is a technology.

It is one of the oldest we have, older than the wheel, older than fire in any controlled sense. It is the mental machinery that lets a person decide, in a fraction of a second, who is inside the circle of safety, of obligation, and who is outside it. Who I will feed. Who I will fight for. Whose pain registers in my body as though it were my own, and whose pain is simply weather, a cloud happening to someone else. For most of the time our kind has existed, the technology worked because the circle was small and the world was large. You could know, by face and name and smell, everyone whose survival was bound to yours. The circle was the band, the village, the people you were born beside and would actually die beside.

Our first day with Isis, the family bringing her home.

The trouble is that the technology has not upgraded at the speed of everything else.

We built cities, then nations, then a single atmosphere shared by eight billion lungs and uncountable other kinds of breath, and we are still running the small-circle software. We still feel, in the fast and honest part of ourselves, that obligation stops at a line we can see. Everything past the line is abstraction. And abstraction does not appear to bleed.

It bleeds..no doubt. But we continue to miss it.

I have spent a long time standing at the places where the line gets drawn. I am not going to give you the itemized version, the list of rooms and titles and years, because a list like that becomes a wall a man hides behind, and because I have learned to distrust the impulse to prove myself by inventory. I will say only this, as plainly as I can. For more than three decades I have made my working life out of standing next to people who had been placed on the far side, the outside, of somebody’s circle. People whose hunger was treated as their own private failure. People whose homes went dark because a bill arrived that the month could not hold. Young people whom an entire system had already decided to write off, quietly, before they were old enough to know it had happened. People made small and afraid inside institutions built to make them small and afraid. And, at the other end of the same human spectrum, rooms at the very top of the globe, rooms where a handful of people decide things that reshape the lives of millions who will never be allowed inside. I have been in the food line and I have been at the summit. I have watched both. Indeed, I have been both. That is the thing I am trying to tell you, and I am trying to tell you without bragging, which is difficult, because the truth of it does not sound humble. The truth is that the range is the point.

I should say something here that I would rather not have to say, because it is tiresome and because it is true. I am a Black man in America, and I know how a certain kind of listener processes a Black man who claims range. The reflex is to look for the gap, the area where he must be thin, the subject on which he can finally be dismissed. I have felt that reflex aimed at me in more rooms than I can count, and I have watched it operate on people I love. I am not writing this to answer it. I have stopped writing things to answer it. I am writing this because the range I am describing is not a credential I am asking you to admire. It is an instrument I have been given, and an instrument is only worth anything for what it lets you do. What thirty years of standing at the line lets me do is see the line itself. See it as a made thing. See that it moves. See that the people on the far side of it are not a different order of being, only people the software has not yet been taught to count.

And here is what I have come to, late, and with the help of a dog.

The line does not stop at the edge of our own species.

2003 - My daughter and the bed upon which she was born, alongside her first canine companion, our first family dog, Duke.

For most of my life the circle of my serious moral attention was human. Wide, I would have told you, wider than most, and I would have meant it. Family first, always. Friends. Then the concentric rings out from there, the neighborhood, the city, the vulnerable stranger whose face I would never see. That felt like a large circle, and by the ordinary measure it was. But it had a hard outer wall, and the wall was our kind. Everything that was not human was scenery. Resource. Backdrop against which the human drama played out. I did not think of it as a wall. I did not think of it at all. That is how walls work best.

Then I brought a dog into life: our first dog, Duke. And the tribe forever changed.

Tomorrow I begin a new chapter of my working life in the direct service of animals, in a shelter whose whole purpose is to refuse the idea that a life is disposable because it cannot speak for itself in our language. Dogs. Cats. Occasionally Birds, or Rabbits. And the children (and adults) who love them, because you cannot serve the one without serving the other, and because the tenderness a child learns toward a frightened animal is the same tenderness that will, one day, decide whether that child treats a frightened human being (or a dog, or a cat) as kin or as scenery. Dogs, cats, kids. It is not sloganeering. It is a curriculum. It is the whole education of the moral imagination, compressed into three words and a leash.

I did not arrive at this by argument. I arrived at it by proximity. By living on a piece of land and slowly understanding that I share it. Not in the legal sense, the deed and the property tax, but in the actual sense, the sense a body knows before the mind agrees. There are beings on this land whose lives are bound up with mine whether I acknowledge them or not. The birds I have stopped noticing because they are always there, which is precisely the condition of the most important things. The soil, which is not a substance but a population. And there is other land, older to me, the ground in my hometown that made the people who made me, land I return to and that holds a version of me I cannot get anywhere else. I have started to feel these places not as property I hold but as company I keep. That shift, from holding to keeping company, is small enough to fit in a sentence and large enough to reorganize a life.

All the children - including our beloved Isis.

This is what I mean by biosphere consciousness.

It is the upgrade to that old technology. It is the expansion of the circle of obligation past the wall of our own species, out to the living whole that actually sustains us, the whole we have been treating as scenery while it quietly does the work of keeping us alive. It is not sentimentality. I am not asking anyone to weep over a sparrow. I am describing a correction to a map that has been wrong for a very long time, a map on which we drew ourselves as the figure and everything else as the ground, when the truth is that we are one figure among a vast and intricate company, and that our fate and theirs were never actually separable. We only pretended they were, because pretending was cheaper. Our maps; my god, we couldn’t encompass the totality of Africa and we have not yet encompasses our response-ability to ourselves, yes, but also our fellow creatures on this planet. And when we see that aforementioned sparrow, lost, in that consciousness, we weep…naturally.

To live inside biosphere consciousness is, in the end, simply to grow up.

That is the whole of it. A child believes the world is arranged around the child. This is not a flaw in the child. It is the correct belief for a being who cannot yet survive on its own, and whose first and only job is to command the attention of the adults who keep it alive. But a person who carries that belief into adulthood is not innocent. They become dangerous. They are a large body with a small circle, and they will burn down a great deal to keep the world arranged around themselves. We all know such a person. Some of us are related to such a person. And right now, as I write this, the most powerful office on earth is occupied by the purest expression of that arrested condition that our public life has produced in my lifetime.

I am not going to pretend to a neutrality I do not feel, and I am also not going to hand you a caricature, because a caricature lets the real thing off the hook. Here is what I see. I see a head of state who uses the largest megaphone ever assembled by a single human being to taunt the leaders of a friendly neighbor, to nurse grievances the size of a schoolyard, and to cast himself, in cartoon after cartoon, as a superhero, a ring-bearer of pure will, a Green Lantern whose only limit is his own imagination. I want to be careful and precise about why this matters, because the easy read is that it is merely embarrassing, and embarrassment is not the point.

The point is that it is a public, daily, broadcast demonstration of the small-circle software running with the safeties off. It is the toddler’s cosmology, the world arranged around a single self, wearing the costume of the most consequential adult on the planet. The superhero fantasy is the tell. The superhero is the figure who saves the world alone, who needs no one, who is the exception to every rule that binds ordinary people to one another. It is the exact opposite of what a grown person understands, which is that no one saves anything alone, that the ring must be refused rather than wielded, and that the real work is never the heroic gesture but the patient, unglamorous keeping of company with others across a widening circle.

[Trump’s] superhero fantasy is the tell. The superhero is the figure who saves the world alone, who needs no one, who is the exception to every rule that binds ordinary people to one another. It is the exact opposite of what a grown person understands, which is that no one saves anything alone…

I have written before about the truth that the story does not turn on the one with the ring but on the one who carries the one with the ring, who says I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you. That is the adult posture. That is biosphere consciousness in miniature. Not I am the hero, but I am one of the company, and the company is larger than I knew, and it does not end at the edge of my species, and my job is to carry and be carried. A society organized around typical takes on the Green Lantern will always be a society of arrested children fighting over the ring. A society organized around the humble and enormous act of carrying one another, is a society that has grown up.

So what would it change, day to day, to live as though the circle were that wide?

It would change what we count as a cost. When we decide whether a thing is worth doing, we would count the lives it spends, all of them, not just the human ones and not just the ones near enough to regularly vote. It would change what we call efficiency, a word that currently means we have moved the damage somewhere we cannot see it. It would change how a child is raised, because a child raised to notice the frightened dog is a child who will grow up unable to un-notice the frightened neighbor. It would change what we build and where, and whether the land we build on is treated as company or as inventory. It would change, and this is the one I care about most, what we do with the young. A young person written off is the biosphere’s version of a clear-cut forest, a living thing declared worthless by people who could not be bothered to learn what it was for. To grow up as a society is, before anything else, to stop doing that. To treat no life as scenery.

None of this is soft. I want to insist upon that, because the language of interconnection has been so thoroughly captured by the greeting card that it is easy to hear all of this as a warm feeling and nothing more. It is not a feeling. It is a discipline, and a hard one, harder than the small-circle life, because the small circle is the path of least resistance and biosphere consciousness is the deliberate, daily refusal of that path. It asks you to feel the weight of lives you meet, yes, but importantly those whom you will never meet, human and otherwise, and to let that weight actually change what you do. That is not comfortable. Growing up never is. The comfort is all on the side of the toddler’s cosmology, which is exactly why so many powerful people never leave it.

I have spent my life at the line where the circle gets drawn, and I am telling you what I have learned there. The line is not real. It’s arbitrary. We made it, we can move it, and the whole of the moral history of our kind is the story of moving it outward, slowly, against enormous resistance; from the band, to the village, to the religious brother/sister, the nation to, if we are brave, the species, and now, if we are willing to grow all the way up, to the living whole. That is the next expansion. It is available now. It is not a utopia I am promising for some distant year; utopias require no costs, no payment. It is a hard consciousness we could choose to inhabit starting this morning, the way Rocco inhabits it, without theory, at the door, wanting the day, treating the land as one continuous fact and every creature on it as kin until proven otherwise.

We are being asked, right now, by the loudest voices in our common life, to shrink. To pull the circle in tight, to a nation, to a tribe, to a party, to a single self in a superhero cape. I am asking for the opposite, and I am asking for it not as an idealist but as a man who has seen, up close and for a long time, what the small circle costs the people left outside it.

We can grow up. We can widen the circle until it holds the whole company we actually belong to. Dogs, cats, kids. The deer at the fence. The soil that is a nation of its own. The stranger, the neighbor, the leader we disagree with, the land in Westminster and the land in Willingboro and every ground that made someone into someone.

Rocco, seemingly happy with my wife out on the water.

There is only a light hope in this that I am offering. Hope is a posture of waiting, and I have less and less use for it. There is mainly action, the daily and unheroic work of widening what you are willing to count as kin. The Shelter community I join tomorrow knows, and does, that daily work. You can too. Start where you are. Start at the door, with the creature who is glad you woke up.

Let us grow all the way up.

Someone called 911 about a man in a ski mask, a mask he wore because a blood condition left him cold. He had bought iced tea.

He was twenty-three.

Here is some of what he said while three officers held him down and two paramedics prepared a syringe:

Read more

On Saturday, in a meeting room in Dallas, the members of the U.S. Youth Soccer Association will vote to hand their organization to the U.S. Soccer Federation.

The bylaw amendment makes the Federation the sole voting member of a fifty-two-year-old institution that registers 2.5 million children and coordinates soccer through fifty-four state associations. By 2028, USYS dissolves into the body that governs the sport. Everyone close to the matter expects it to pass comfortably. One state director put the mood plainly: the Federation is the train, and it is leaving the station, and you are either on it…or you are left standing on the platform.

I have spent a working life inside structures like this one, at CONCACAF and at FIFA, close enough to watch how a governing body behaves when it decides to gather power to itself. So let me say the thing that the train metaphor is designed to keep you from saying. A train is easy to board and very difficult to steer once you are aboard.

Begin with what the Federation gets right. The landscape it inherited is genuinely fractured. Families are confused, costs compound, and the fragmentation the Federation ignored for most of its history is real damage that someone finally proposes to try to repair. The ecosystem review named the problems with unusual honesty: pay-to-play, inefficiency, state associations dragged into registration wars instead of building fields in the neighborhoods that have none. Naming a problem correctly is a form of respect, and the Federation has earned some for doing it.

Now read the same reporting one paragraph further. The takeover, its own architects concede, will not make the game meaningfully more affordable at the ages where the cost turns prohibitive, the pre-teen and teenage years when the bills reach the thousands and the travel reaches the thousands again. The Federation has also not published the vision the vote is meant to serve. The people voting on Saturday, by the account of those in the room, do not fully know what they are voting for. The map that would tell a family what their child’s soccer looks like in 2028 is promised for “the fall.”

Hold those two facts together. A governing body is asking 2.5 million families to trust it with the entire youth game while withholding the document that would let anyone judge the bargain.

When the executive director of a state association tells a reporter that this is about “putting trust in U.S. Soccer to do what’s right,” he is describing faith, and faith? Well it’s a fine thing to bring to a church. It is the wrong thing to bring to an institution that will soon control player registration, competition, and the pipeline for every child who wants to play.

Trust is not accountability.

Trust is what you extend before the fact. Accountability is what holds after the fact, whether or not the trust was warranted. The question the Dallas vote does not answer, cannot answer, and was not designed to answer is the oldest question in governance:

Who governs the governor?

Who measures the body that is about to become the sole voting member of everything?

When power consolidates and the promises stay verbal and the vision stays unpublished, the missing institution is not another league or another acronym. It is an independent instrument that scores the promises against the outcomes, in public, on a schedule the powerful do not control.

That instrument is the work in front of us. Not a competitor to the Federation and not a cheerleader for it. A measure. Affordability, access, transparency, and the fields that get built in the places that were skipped, tracked year over year and reported whether the news is good or bad. The Federation should welcome it, because a body confident in its own reform has nothing to fear from being counted.

So I will not wait for the fall to tell me what to hope for. WHen it comes to these institutions - in the way they are built and their historic failures - there can be no hope, only action. Let the train leave Dallas. Someone has to stand where it arrives, with a clock and a ledger, and ask what it actually carried.

More on that coming soon.

There is a particular kind of story football keeps producing, and we keep failing to understand. The story of Valdas Dambrauskas and Sabah FC - a Lithuanian who bankrolled his coaching education with a television quiz-show prize and, a quarter-century later, walked a nine-year-old Azerbaijani club into the Champions League - is being consumed as a *feel-good* item right now: shared, liked, captioned the beautiful game, discarded.

But underneath the confetti is a claim worth making seriously: sport is one of the few arenas where we can actually watch becoming happen; not achievement, but the slower thing that produces it. The two are not the same.

Around 2002, a Lithuanian student in his mid-twenties who had never played professional football went on his local edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? He did not win a fortune. He won roughly four thousand litas - a couple thousand dollars - and he lost, tripped up by a question about which country publishes the most daily newspapers. The answer, for the record, was Japan. That modest, imperfect winning, however, was enough. He and his wife moved to England. He enrolled at London Metropolitan University to study sport science and coaching, and picked up academy experience in the orbit of Fulham, Manchester United, and Brentford; youth setups, not first teams, a distinction the viral version blurs.

In 2007 he took over Kingsbury London Tigers in the ninth tier of English football and steered them to the best results in their history, earning a local Westminster award for it. From there: Lithuania, Latvia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, Hungary. A dozen jobs, real triumphs, real firings. Then Sabah, the Azerbaijani league and cup double in 2025–26 ahead of the far richer Qarabağ, and finally a wild extra-time comeback against Hapoel Be’er Sheva to reach the Champions League league phase for the first time in the club’s existence.

That is the true story. It is remarkable enough without the embellishments.

We misread stories like this because we are trained to look at the trophy, and the trophy is a photograph: a single frame, a result, a noun. It tells you what happened and nothing about how a person or a group changed shape to make it possible. Becoming is an independent film: it runs in real time, it has no guaranteed ending, and most of it is decidedly unglamorous.

Dambrauskas did not decide to be a Champions League coach and then became one. He answered a trivia question wrong, kept a small pot of money, and made a decision about who he was willing to try to be. Everything after - the coursework, the ninth tier, the twelve jobs, the firings - is the film. The Champions League night is just the last frame; the one someone finally chose to print.

Sabah FK are into the Champions League after being founded in 2017. Getty

Sport is unusually honest about this.

In most of life the process of becoming is hidden: we see the promotion but not the years, the finished book but not the drafts. Sport externalizes the process; it makes you play your qualifying rounds in public. Sabah did not skip to the league phase. They beat The New Saints, then KuPS, then had to overturn a deficit against Hapoel in the 94th minute. You could watch the becoming happen, week by week, in the standings, which is exactly what a scoreboard is for. It is a machine for making change visible.

The specific form of the sport matters here, because different forms reveal different kinds of change. This story isn't possible in MLS: Dambrauskas came up through the ninth tier, the part of the pyramid with no cameras, no money, no safety net, and therefore no illusions. Lower-league football is where becoming is least disguised, because nothing else is there to distract you. You are not managing stars; you are managing a group of people trying to be slightly better than they were last Saturday. It is pure process. The London Tigers taught him something the Champions League never could: how to build an identity out of scarcity. When he later assembled a squad at Sabah with more resources but no history to lean on, he was doing the same job at a different altitude.

Sabah as a group shows the collective version of the same thing. A club founded in 2017 is, in institutional football terms, a child. It has no century of tradition, no inherited sense of itself. Everything about who Sabah is has had to be invented in real time: a squad stitched from Rwandan, Serbian, Nigerian, and local players, a style, a belief that they could finish above Qarabağ. That is collective becoming: not a fixed identity being expressed, but an identity being assembled under pressure. The qualification isn’t the reward for Sabah’s identity. It is Sabah’s identity, crystallizing at the moment it was tested hardest. Individual sport shows you the self, negotiating with its own limits; team sport shows you the self negotiating with other selves, the private business of how a group becomes a we. Elite sport adds the distortion of money and attention, which is why the elite version of a becoming story is the easiest to, too often, misread; the spectacle drowns out the process.

Dambrauskas is legible because his career contains both ends of the pyramid, the ninth tier and the Champions League, and you can see the same man doing the same work in both.

The game show, then, belongs in the story, and not as a novelty…it’s the thesis.

A quiz show is a form of contest too: structured competition, rules, pressure, an audience, a moment of truth. Dambrauskas lost it. He answered wrong. The losing is the point, because the small prize he kept became capital he chose to convert into a wholly different game, one he might be good at over decades rather than minutes. That is the most human mechanic of becoming: it rarely proceeds through victories. It proceeds through conversions, through transformation; taking whatever a losing contest hands you and reinvesting it in a longer one. The litas from a wrong answer became coaching courses. The ninth tier became a résumé. The firings became range. None of it was a straight line and none of it was designed.

He simply kept converting. Transforming.

Becoming.

Most of us are also converting small, imperfect winnings into longer games whose outcomes we can’t see; we just don’t get standings and an anthem to mark the frames. Sport lends us its clock and its scoreboard so that, for once, we can watch a becoming resolve into a moment and name it. When the caption under a socially-mediated version of this tale says football really is the beautiful game, it’s almost right. What’s beautiful isn’t the trophy. It’s that sport, in all its forms, is willing to show us the film and not just a photograph; the process by which a Lithuanian student and a nine-year-old club both, separately and together, became something they had no right to assume they’d be.

Achievement is what we applaud.

Becoming is what we should be watching.

Ten and a half weeks ago, one of the most powerful men in Washington walked into a hospital and, in every way that matters to the public that employs him, has not walked back out. A fall at his Washington home. Then pneumonia. [CNBC](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/06/mitch-mcconnell-health-update-senate-gop.html) Then silence, out of the Senate and out of…

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Infantino glad-handing at the CFU Congress this week (his Instagram)

There is a particular kind of political theatre that only works if you show up in person, and Gianni Infantino has always understood that.

This past weekend, the FIFA president boarded a flight to Punta Cana, on the eastern tip of the Dominican Republic, to appear at a Caribbean Football Union under-14 tournament; a technical youth event, the sort of gathering a man overseeing a global federation of 211 members would normally never trouble himself to attend. What made the trip remarkable was not that he went. It was that he had been asked, in writing, not to.

The request came from Victor Montagliani, the president of CONCACAF and one of FIFA’s own vice presidents. In a letter dated the day before the event, Montagliani urged Infantino to reconsider, arguing that the president’s presence would swamp a children’s tournament with coverage of an entirely different story. “I believe that considering the governance crisis surrounding FIFA as a result of your controversial FIFA Forward Enterprise proposal,” he wrote, “the media will focus on this situation.” It was a polite way of saying something blunt: you are radioactive right now, and you will contaminate a room full of fourteen-year-olds.

Infantino went anyway.

He posted the photographs to Instagram; handshakes with Dominican football officials, smiles alongside local politicians, the president of world football beaming in the Caribbean sun. The message was not subtle, and it was not meant to be.

To read the defiance correctly, you need the backdrop. Over the summer, Infantino floated a proposal known internally as FIFA Forward Enterprise: a plan to spin off FIFA’s multibillion-dollar commercial operations - the broadcasting deals, the sponsorships, the machinery that turns the World Cup into a golden river of cash - into a subsidiary in which outside investors would hold a roughly twenty percent stake. Among the names attached to the investor group was Joshua Kushner, the venture capitalist and brother of Jared Kushner.

The reaction was ferocious. To FIFA’s critics, the plan looked like the partial privatisation of football’s crown jewels, handing private financiers a slice of an institution that is, at least nominally, a non-profit guardian of the global game. Three of Infantino’s own vice presidents (Montagliani at CONCACAF, Aleksander Ceferin at UEFA, and Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa at the AFC) went public with accusations of “deception,” and began openly discussing how to bring an end to Infantino’s eleven-year presidency. Under the pressure, Infantino withdrew the proposal on the first of August. His chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour, who had reportedly criticised the plan internally, was fired shortly afterward.

That is the “governance crisis” Montagliani referred to. And it reframes the Punta Cana trip entirely. Infantino did not stumble into a youth tournament during a quiet week. He walked into a Caribbean gathering at the precise moment three of his most senior lieutenants were trying to unseat him, and he did it over the explicit objection of one of them. This was not a scheduling accident. It was a demonstration of where he believes his power actually lives.

Members of the CFU (orange), members of the CONCACAF (orange and camel). From Wikipedia

Here is the detail that turns a puzzling trip into a legible one. In FIFA’s electoral system, the Caribbean is not small.

It is enormous.

FIFA runs on one principle that shapes everything else: one nation, one vote. The football federation of Montserrat, population under five thousand, casts the same single ballot as Germany or Brazil. CONCACAF, the confederation covering North and Central America and the Caribbean, contains a dense cluster of tiny island associations, and the Caribbean Football Union alone accounts for a remarkable share of the global electorate. In a contested FIFA presidential vote, those federations are not spectators. They are the swing bloc. Win the Caribbean and you have banked a double-digit chunk of the votes you need, gathered from places most fans could not find on a map.

Infantino knows this arithmetic intimately, because it is the arithmetic that made him. It is also the arithmetic that has repeatedly made the Caribbean the most compromised electoral terrain in the sport.

You cannot write honestly about a FIFA president courting Caribbean officials without invoking the ghost that hangs over every such visit. In 2011, at a Caribbean Football Union meeting in Trinidad, officials were handed envelopes stuffed with cash (reportedly forty thousand US dollars apiece) in what became one of the most notorious episodes in football’s long history of graft. The money was widely understood as an inducement to support Mohamed bin Hammam’s challenge to Sepp Blatter for the FIFA presidency, and it was distributed through the machinery built by Jack Warner, the Trinidadian power broker who ran Caribbean football as a personal fiefdom for decades. FIFA banned officials over the affair. Warner was later banned from football for life. The scandal became a case study, taught in ethics seminars and cited in indictments, of exactly how the one-nation-one-vote system turns small federations into a failed and crippling marketplace.

That is the history Infantino flew into. Nobody is alleging that envelopes changed hands in Punta Cana this weekend. But the shape of the visit rhymes uncomfortably with the past. A FIFA president under electoral threat travels to the confederation that holds the swing votes, is photographed embracing its officials, and lets the images do the talking. The currency may have changed (attention, patronage, presence, the implicit promise of continued FIFA Forward development money) but the logic is the one Warner understood perfectly. Power in football is not held at headquarters in Zurich. It is held in the aggregate of small rooms.

Infantino. (Photo by Teresa SUAREZ / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)

This is where the concepts of power, influence, and corruption stop being separate ideas and collapse into a single move.

Infantino’s genius - and it is a form of genius, whatever one thinks of him in his infamy - has been to grasp that in a one-nation-one-vote democracy, the most valuable thing a president can distribute is himself. He does not need to hand anyone cash. He needs to make the president of a five-thousand-person federation feel seen, important, courted, photographed beside the most powerful man in the sport. FIFA under Infantino has vastly expanded its development grants to member associations, money that flows most consequentially to exactly the small federations that also happen to hold outsized voting power. When the man who controls that spigot personally appears at your youth tournament, the tournament is not really the point. The relationship is the point.

The debt is the point.

Montagliani’s letter, read this way, was not squeamishness about press coverage. It was an attempt to deny Infantino a stage at the very moment the vice presidents were trying to isolate him. Infantino refused to be isolated. He went to the constituency that has always been most loyal, most electorally decisive, and most susceptible to the warm glow of presidential attention, and he reminded them who shows up.

So yes, there is a reading of this weekend in which Infantino simply attended a children’s football tournament and his “enemies” made too much of it. He would surely offer it himself: he was there for the kids, for the development of the game in a region that loves it, and the cynics see conspiracy in every one of his handshakes.

But institutions reveal themselves in moments of stress, and this was a moment of stress.

A leader accused of deception by his own deputies, forced to withdraw a signature proposal (that would have paid him perpetual millions), with a faction openly plotting his removal, chose to spend a weekend not rebuilding bridges in Zurich but cultivating the smallest and most pliable corner of his electorate…and chose to do so in open defiance of the deputy over the region, one who asked him to stay home.

That is not the behaviour of a man who believes his mandate rests on the merits of his governance. It is the behaviour of a man who knows exactly where the votes are and intends to hold them.

The tragedy, if that is the word, remains structural. As long as football distributes ultimate authority through a system in which the tiniest federations are worth courting far beyond their footballing weight, the incentive to court them - with money, with development grants, with the intoxicating currency of presidential presence - will never disappear. Jack Warner, my former boss, understood it with envelopes. Infantino understands it with Instagram posts from Punta Cana:

The game has grown more sophisticated. The underlying trade has not changed at all.

He was asked not to go. He went. And in going, he told us more about how power in world football actually works than a hundred press releases from Zurich ever could.

Now what are we going to do about it?

The administrator, in their first week on the job, did what seemed obvious. They went up the chain. They knocked on the door of the Vice President of Housing. They asked about the empty dorm rooms, the ones sitting dark, locked, institutionally inert, and whether something could be worked out.

What came back was not a solution. It was a list. A county shelter list. Sent at 4:30 on a Friday.

The subtext was clear, even if it was never spoken aloud: We are not social workers.

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Frodo, small and exhausted and honest to the point of self-endangerment, holds out the One Ring to Galadriel and offers it to her freely. He is not being tempted, or tempting her. He is doing the opposite of tempting. He is trying to give away the thing that is killing him to someone he believes is strong enough to carry it and wise enough to wield it well.

And for a moment she wants it.

Tolkien does not flinch from this. He lets her want it fully, out loud, in language that gets more beautiful the more terrible it becomes. In place of the Dark Lord she will set up a Queen. She will not be dark but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night. All shall love her and despair.

Then the light fades.

She laughs. She shrinks back down into a slender elf-woman in simple white with a voice that is soft and sad, and she says the line that I want to build an entire theory of American politics around:

I have been asking myself a question for months now, and I am going to ask it to you: in the last fifty years of American public life, how many politicians passed the test?

How many, offered the Ring, refused it? How many looked at what they could become if they simply gave the money what it wanted, gave the base what it wanted, gave the algorithm what it wanted, and said no? How many chose to diminish and go “into the West” and remain themselves, rather than distort themselves into whatever shape power required and lose themselves utterly in the bargain?

I wanted a number. I went looking for the number. I want to tell you the truth about what I found.

Theoden King and Grima Wormton-I mean, former California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a staffer, amid concerns at the time that Feinstein was mentally unfit to serve (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The first thing I had to correct in my own thinking was the timeframe.

We tell a comforting story in this country about term limits and peaceful transfers and the graceful exit. We like the image of the statesman riding off into private life, Cincinnatus returning to his plow. We hand out that story like a participation trophy to anyone who leaves office breathing.

But the Ring in Tolkien is not analogous to a two-term limit. The Ring is not mimicking a retirement package.

The Ring is eternal power.

Its power too often ensures that you do not leave in any reasonable timeframe, in any reasonable way, before reasonable people are able to look at you and see that you have been substantially and permanently distorted.

That is the whole horror of it. The distortion arrives first. The recognition arrives late.

By the time the commons can see clearly what the power has made of you, the power has already made it, and you have been wearing that new face so long that you have forgotten you are wearing it. You do not experience your own corruption as corruption. You experience it as maturity. As pragmatism. As “how things actually work.” As “you have to win before you can do any good.”

So retirement is not the test. Losing an election and calling it a choice is not the test. Leaving one office to reach for a larger one is not the test at all, it is the opposite of the test, it is putting the Ring on with both hands. Getting old and tired and going home to be near the grandchildren is not renunciation, it is biology.

The test is only the test if you had the power, if the power was still yours to keep and to grow, if keeping it required only that you agree to become someone else, and you looked at that trade and you refused it while you still had a choice.

Measured that way, the number is not small. The number is almost nothing.

And I do not think that is because almost everyone who enters American politics is a bad person. I think it is because the test, as Tolkien built it, is nearly impossible to pass alone.

Denethor, Steward of Gondo- I mean, Senator Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who had been making his opening remarks about an annual defense policy bill when he stopped talking. He was silent for 19 seconds. McConnell has served in the Senate since 1985. (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

Here is the part of the Lothlórien scene we skip when we quote it, and skipping it is the whole mistake.

Galadriel does not pass the test in a vacuum. She passes it because a small, frightened, incorruptibly honest person is standing in front of her holding the thing out and, by the simple fact of his goodness, reminding her of who she is. Frodo is not a bystander to her test. Frodo is the test. His presence, his trust, his refusal to keep the thing for himself, is the mirror in which she sees both what she could become and what she would lose to become it.

She passes because someone was in the room who loved the right things.

We have built a national mythology around the lone incorruptible individual. The person of pure conscience who stands alone against the machine, unmoved, self-sufficient, needing no one. It is a beautiful story and it is a lie, and it is a specifically dangerous lie, because it tells us, the citizenry, the commons, that our job is to find or to be such people, elect them (or get elected), and then leave them alone (or be alone) to be strong on our behalf. That is backwards. That is how we lose every single one of them.

Nobody is strong enough to hold eternal power alone and stay themselves.

Not Galadriel, who needed Frodo in the room. Certainly not a human being with a mortgage, a primary challenger, a donor class, a media ecosystem engineered to reward the worst version of them in real time, and a thousand small daily invitations to become someone slightly more electable and slightly less themselves.

The individual cannot resist the corruption of the Ring by individual virtue. That was never how it worked. The resistance is communal, interdependent, or it does not happen.

Boromir, of Minas Tiri-I mean, former U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, seen speaking at the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 23, 2024, in Chicago, is a Republican who has been a vocal critic of his party and former President Donald Trump. Jasper Colt/USA TODAY via REUTERS

Adam Kinzinger is the name that comes up when people go looking for an American who passed “the test.” Republican congressman, decorated pilot, voted to impeach a president of his own party, sat on the January 6th committee, was censured by his own party organization, watched his district drawn out from under him, and walked away rather than crawl back on terms that would have required him to unsay what he had said and un-be who he had become.

I admire it. I want to be clear that I admire it. But I do not think it is Galadriel’s test, and pretending it is actually cheapens what it was.

Galadriel had the Ring in front of her, freely offered, hers to take. Kinzinger did not renounce eternal power. He reached for the ordinary kind, the seat, the career, the future in the party, and the party took it from him because he had a conscience it could not use. He is not the elf-queen refusing the crown. He is closer to Boromir, the man who reaches, who is inside the corrupted fellowship, who fails in the ordinary way that ambitious people fail, and who then, at the cost of everything, turns and dies defending the thing he had betrayed.

Boromir’s redemption is not lesser than Galadriel’s test. In some ways it is the more human and the more useful model, because almost none of us are elf-queens and almost all of us are Boromir on a good day. But we should not confuse the two, because the confusion lets us keep believing in the lone hero. Kinzinger did not save himself by being strong alone. He was expelled. The machine spat him out and a handful of us clapped from the sidewalk as it did.

And that brings me to the tension at the very center of what I want to say, the one I will not paper over.

I have been building toward an argument that goes like this: we, the citizenry, must far more occasionally love our people enough to send them home. That the way to keep a good person good is to help them diminish, to receive them back into the commons before the Ring finishes its work, to make “going into the West” an honored destination and not a defeat.

I believe that. I am going to end on it. But I owe you the objection first, because an argument that hides from its own weakest point is just a feeling wearing a suit.

Here is the objection. “Sending them home” is also exactly how a corrupt system disposes of its conscience.

The machine did not lovingly retire Adam Kinzinger. It exiled him. It found the member who would not distort himself and it removed him, efficiently, and it kept everyone who would. If I am not careful, my beautiful language about diminishing and going into the West becomes indistinguishable from the eulogy the system delivers over everyone it purges for the crime of integrity. “We loved you, so we sent you home” can be a blessing. It can also be what the powerful say over the body of the one who would not play along. The sentiment and the disposal can wear the same white robe.

So the loving-kindness I am about to call for cannot be soft. It cannot be the warm feeling we have about the good ones on our way to abandoning them. If “send them home” only means we admire them quietly while the machine removes them, then I have not written an argument, I have written a nicer word for surrender.

The love has to be operational or it is nothing.

Which is why the Tolkein character I actually mean to leave you with is not Galadriel and not Boromir. It is Samwise Gamgee.

We remember Sam as sweetness, as the loyal gardener, as the emotional relief in a grim story. We are wrong about him the same way we are wrong about the Lothlórien scene. Sam is not sentiment. Sam is the single most consequential political actor in the entire book, because Sam is the answer to the problem the Ring poses.

The Ring cannot be resisted alone.

Frodo, the best of them, the one chosen precisely because he is humble and good, fails at the last. He stands at the Crack of Doom and claims the Ring for himself. The lone incorruptible individual, in the end, is corrupted. That is Tolkien telling us the truth we do not want: even the best person, alone, loses.

The quest succeeds anyway. It succeeds because Sam is there. It succeeds because when Frodo can no longer carry the weight, Sam says I cannot carry it for you but I can carry you, and he picks his friend up bodily and hauls him up the side of the mountain. It succeeds because Sam followed when he was told to go home, refused the Ring when it was briefly his, kept Frodo fed and moving and himself across the entire ruined country, and then, crucially, brought him home afterward and would not let him disappear into the damage.

That is what loving a good person through power actually looks like, and none of it is soft. Sam does the labor. Sam takes the risk. Sam stays in the room. Sam is the commons doing its actual job, which is not to find a hero and worship him from a distance until he falls, but to accompany the person we have asked to carry the weight, to be near enough to remind them who they are, to carry them when they cannot carry themselves, and to bring them home before the weight finishes them, and to make home a place worth returning to.

Black women in particular have been masters of this across the history of the United States. I do not say this as a decoration on the argument. I say it because if we are going to talk about who has actually done the work of Sam, at scale, for centuries, under conditions that would have broken anyone else, then the honest answer is not the lone white hero of the civic imagination. It is the Black women who have carried this country’s movements up the mountain and refused to let them claim credit for themselves.

Consider what the labor actually was. It was Ella Baker building the infrastructure beneath the men whose names we memorized, insisting on the unglamorous truth that strong people do not need strong leaders, that the movement had to be the many and not the one, and then doing the patient organizing that made the many possible while the cameras pointed elsewhere. It was Fannie Lou Hamer, who had every reason to be broken and was not, standing at Atlantic City and telling the truth on the record so plainly that a president had to call a press conference to keep the country from hearing her. It was the women of the Montgomery Improvement Association and the Women’s Political Council, who had the boycott planned and mimeographed before the men had finished deciding whether to hold one. It was Septima Clark’s citizenship schools teaching people to read well enough to register, the slow foundational work that makes everything visible later possible. It was Diane Nash refusing to let the Freedom Rides stop when the leadership wanted them stopped, because she understood that abandoning the road was its own kind of corruption.

None of these women were reaching for the Ring. That is the point. They did the Sam labor precisely because they were not trying to become the hero, and so they could see clearly what the power was doing to the people who were. They carried, they fed, they organized, they stayed in the room, they told the truth that reminded everyone who they were supposed to be, and then, again and again, they watched the credit and the crown and the Ring go to the men they had carried, and they kept doing the work anyway. That is not sweetness. That is not the emotional relief in a grim story. That is the single most consequential political labor in the American record, and we have made the same mistake about it that we make about Sam. We have called it support when it was the actual engine.

If we want to learn how to be the citizenry that accompanies its people up the mountain and brings them home before the weight finishes them, we do not have to invent the practice. It exists. It has a lineage. The people who have done it best and longest and at the greatest cost have been telling us how the whole time, mostly while we credited someone else.

Our problem? We have been trying to run a republic on Frodos. Solitary good people, sent up the mountain alone, whom we then blame when they fail or canonize when they are destroyed. We do not need better Frodos. We have plenty of decent people willing to go up the mountain. We are missing more Sams. We are missing a citizenry that understands its own role is not spectatorship but accompaniment.

Samwise Gamgee-I mean, Ella Baker (1903–1986), the organizer behind SNCC, the SCLC, and the NAACP, who built the movement's foundations while insisting that "strong people don't need strong leaders."

So what does it mean, concretely, to be Sam to the people we send up the mountain?

It means being in “the room.” Galadriel passed because Frodo was standing there. The single greatest protection against the corruption of power is proximity to people who love the right things and are unafraid to be seen loving them. A politician surrounded only by donors, consultants, and the professionally ambitious has no Frodo in the room. We have to be in the room. Town halls that are not theater. Relationships that predate the campaign and outlast the loss. Presence.

It means making “the West” a real place. Right now, in our politics, leaving power is death. There is no honored West to go into. There is only the humiliation of the primary loss, the exile of the purged, the pundit purgatory, the sense that a life in public service ends in erasure. If diminishing means annihilation, no one will choose it, and everyone will cling to the Ring until it finishes them. We, the commons, decide whether there is a dignified home to return to. We decide whether the ones who kept their conscience are received as elders or discarded as losers. That is our choice, not theirs.

It means loving them enough to send them home before the mirror shows the distortion, not after. By the time we can all see what the power has made of someone, it is too late for them and nearly too late for us. Accompaniment means paying close enough attention, early enough, caringly enough, to say to a person we love: come home now, while you are still yourself, and we will make sure home is worth it.

And it means holding the tension I refused to hide. We must distinguish, every single time, between sending someone home in love and letting the machine dispose of them and calling it love. The difference is entirely in what we do next. If we send them home and then abandon them, we were the machine. If we send them home and then keep faith with them, honor them, employ their wisdom, keep them in the commons as elders rather than as cautionary tales, then it was love, and it will teach the next good person that the West is a place they can survive.

Let me continue to make it plain:

We cannot ask singular individuals to be strong enough, alone, to resist a power built specifically to distort them. That is not a moral failing in them. It is a category error in us. The Ring wins against the lone hero every time, even the best one, even Frodo at the last inch of the road.

The only thing that has ever beaten it is company. A fellowship. Neighbors. A friend who says I can’t carry it but I can carry you. A citizenry that understands the good ones are not statues to admire but neighbors to accompany, up the mountain and back down again, and home.

So no, I do not have a number of Galadriels for you. I think the honest count is close to zero, and I think that is not because we lack good people but because we keep sending them up alone and then acting surprised when the mountain takes them.

There are no Galadriels. There were never going to be Galadriels. There was only ever supposed to be us, reaching for one another in loving-kindness, beloved community member for beloved community member, refusing to let the ones we send up the mountain go up alone, and refusing to let the ones who come back down be thrown away.

That is the whole of it. We do not need to find someone strong enough to save us. We need to become the friend who carries the one who is trying.

Kevin Lamour, now former #2 at FIFA (PIOTR KUCZA / FOTOPYK)

There once was a fax machine.

It sat on the seventeenth floor of Trump Tower, and everything wrong with world football passed through it. This was 2001, 2002, 2003; my time as Head of Special Projects for CONCACAF, as North American liaison for the e-FIFA project for FIFA.

Official communications from FIFA as an institution, from FIFA executives and officials, to the men who ran CONCACAF, arrived by fax. They arrived addressed to Chuck Blazer, who was both the general secretary of CONCACAF and a FIFA executive committee member, which meant he was the funnel through which the confederation received the will of Zurich. But the bureaucracy at CONCACAF could never be certain who would see Chuck on any given day, or whether anyone would see him at all. His attendance was, to put it gently, a matter of chance.

So the staff developed a workaround. Every fax that came through for Chuck was copied.

To all of us.

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FIFA President Gianni Infantino talks with President of the Mexican Football Federation Mikel Arriola next to CONCACAF President Victor Montagliani, ahead of the 2026 World Cup round of 32 football match between Mexico and Ecuador at the Mexico City Stadium in Mexico City on June 30, 2026. (Photo by CARL DE SOUZA / AFP via Getty Images)

Language.

There is a particular register of language that powerful institutions reach for when they have been caught doing something they cannot defend and cannot quite bring themselves to admit. It is a dialect of English that sounds like accountability while carefully containing none of it. It nods in the direction of contrition without ever setting foot there. It admits that “mistakes were made,” a construction so beautifully bloodless that the mistakes seem to have made themselves, wandering into existence unbidden, orphaned of any parent, any hand, any decision.

Read FIFA’s statement of 8 August closely: the one issued, in the grand tradition of institutions that will not put a name to their words, “attributable to a FIFA spokesperson,” and you are reading a masterclass in this dialect.

So let me propose to what was FIFA a modest rebranding. Drop “Football.” This governing body is no longer, in any meaningful sense, a federation of football. It is a Fédération Internationale de Word-Association. FIWA. A body whose primary competitive discipline is no longer the beautiful game but the endless, artful, exhausting game played with language; the substitution of vocabulary for accountability, of definitions for facts, of the grammar of grievance for the substance of governance.

Let us go to the tape.

The tell in the first sentence

FIFA - I mean FIWA’s - statement opens by telling us it is “echoing the recent statements of CONMEBOL and CAF, as well as discussions with FIFA Member Associations and Confederations from around the world.” Notice the work being done here before we have reached the verb. This is not a defence; it is a headcount. It is a man surrounded on three sides insisting, loudly, that he has friends. The whole rhetorical architecture of the statement is being poured before our eyes, and its foundation is a claim about who is standing where, because the one thing this statement will never do - what it cannot afford to do - is engage with what was actually done.

Then comes the sentence that tells you everything. FIFA “will not support, facilitate or tolerate any process concerning the election of the FIFA President that is inconsistent with FIFA’s Statutes, democratic procedures and established governance framework.”

Word-association in its purest form.

You did not question the man; you questioned the sacred process by which the man was chosen. To criticise him is to be against elections, against the 211, against democracy. It is the oldest move in the authoritarian phrasebook: l’état, c’est moi, rewritten for the age of the compliance memo. The state is me. The democracy is me. Undermine me and you undermine the mandate, the members, the mission, the game.

The confederations who replied (UEFA, CONCACAF and the AFC) saw the swap and named it with a precision that must have stung. “Leadership in football,” they wrote, “is not a possession. It is not about holding - or demanding - power to be held. It is a duty of service.” And then the sentence that punctures the entire FIWA edifice: “When an individual places himself above the collective that entrusted him with authority, that duty has been abandoned.” They refused the word-association. They declined to accept that the man and the mandate are the same noun.

Here is the beating heart of the matter, and here is where FIWA’s linguistic engineering is most exquisite.

According to the confederations, FIFA’s own letter to its Vice-Presidents and 211 members “acknowledges that mistakes were made in the process.” Stop and admire that phrasing. Mistakes were made. Passive voice; the passive voice being, as any student of institutional evasion knows, the grammatical equivalent of a getaway car with the plates removed. In the process…locating the fault not in a person, not in a judgement, not in an intention, but in a process, that faceless bureaucratic weather system that apparently, and most absent of intent, rains errors on the innocent from time to time.

And then the second sleight, which the confederations caught cleanly: FIFA “treats this as a failure of communication, when what football witnessed was a failure of judgement.”

If the problem was communication, then the fix is a better press release, a clearer memo, a warmer tone; a vocabulary problem, solvable by, well, more words. If the problem was judgement, then the fix is a person, and persons can - must - be replaced. FIWA needs it to be a communication problem, because FIWA is a word-association federation and words are the one currency it still prints freely. It cannot afford it to be a judgement problem, because judgement lives in a human being, and that human being has a name he will not sign to a statement.

The confederations went further, and this is the passage FIFA’s drafters will least enjoy: the compressed timeline, the absence of meaningful consultation, the deadline pushed before members could review the terms: these, they wrote, are “not the product of an oversight - it is the product of a design intended to limit scrutiny.” An oversight is a mistake. A design is a decision. You cannot passive-voice a design.

Someone drew it.

Infantino. Carl Recine/Getty Images

Notice what the FIWA statement never says. Read it three times. Nowhere in that lofty prose about mandates and missions and thirty years of professional life does it mention the actual thing that started the fire.

You would not know, from FIFA’s own words, that anything specific had happened at all.

Indeed, to FIWA, there is only “unsubstantiated assertions,” “demonstrably false claims,” “insinuation,” “misinformation”… the fog machine turned to maximum, obscuring the fact that there is a subject being fogged.

The confederations, mercifully, restore the noun to the sentence. “There remains no recognition,” they wrote, “that attempting to sell an interest in the FIFA World Cup was a profound failure of judgement - not just a procedural misstep, but a fundamental breach of trust.”

Attempting to sell an interest in the FIFA World Cup. There it is. The thing. The event the entire FIWA statement was constructed to avoid naming.

And once you have the noun in your hand, the whole word-association exercise collapses, because you can finally see what all those abstractions were built to hide. The “concerted and ongoing effort by some to undermine FIFA” turns out to be, on inspection, people objecting to the tournament being treated as an asset to be part-privatised. The “misinformation” turns out to be reporting. The “distortion of facts” turns out to be the facts.

This is the essential mechanism of the former FIFA-turned-Fédération Internationale de Word-Association.

You never argue against the specific charge. You argue against a category you have invented to hold the charge: “misinformation,” “distraction,” “manufactured narrative,” and then you dispute the category with great vigour while leaving the actual event untouched, un-named, and therefore, in the institution’s preferred fiction, unreal.

If it has no name, it did not happen.

Repetition, FIFA helpfully lectures us, “does not make an allegation true.” Quite so. But nor does repetitive non-naming make an event false.

Gianni Infantino (L) speaks with UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin after addressing the 50th UEFA Ordinary Congress in Brussels on February 12, 2026. (Photo by Pau BARRENA / AFP via Getty Images)

Language is not decoration in a crisis like this. Language is the crisis, or at least the instrument by which an institution attempts to survive one without changing. The whole of FIFA’s 8 August statement is an argument that the problem is how things have been said; the misinformation, the insinuation, the reporting to be challenged “directly and vigorously.” The whole of the confederations’ reply is an argument that the problem is what was done, and that no rearrangement of vocabulary will convert a failure of judgement into a failure of communication.

“There is silence,” the three confederations wrote, “where there should be accountability, distance where there should be openness.” I would add only this: there are also words - a great, swelling tide of them - where there should be a single, simple, signed sentence admitting the one thing FIFA will not admit. Until that sentence arrives, we are entitled to call the organisation by the name its conduct has earned.

Fédération Internationale de Word-Association. FIWA. Where the game within the game is played entirely in the dictionary, and where, so far, only one side has agreed to use the words as they are actually defined.

Instagram - Gianni Infantino

There is a particular species of laughter that arrives only when the joke is being told by the person who broke your leg.

It is not joy.

It is the involuntary bark of a mind confronting an absurdity so total that the ordinary machinery of outrage seizes up and reboots as comedy. That is the laughter I offer FIFA today. Not the courtesy chuckle of a diplomat. The howling, disbelieving laughter of a man who has read a two-page letter and understood that its authors believe he cannot read.

—

The document in question is dated Zurich, 5 August 2026, and it is signed by Gianni Infantino, FIFA President, and Mattias Grafström, FIFA Secretary General. It is styled as an update to the Vice-Presidents and the Members of the FIFA Council following a meeting in Rabat, Morocco. It concerns the collapse of a scheme called FIFA Forward Enterprise, a proposed vehicle whose particulars had leaked to the media, generated an uproar, and forced a retreat. And it is, from its first sentence to its final flourish of "Yours in football," one of the most instructive documents the organization has ever produced. Instructive not because it reveals anything new about FIFA's character, but because it confirms, in FIFA's own hand, that the character is beyond amendment.

The Anatomy of an Apology That Apologizes for Nothing

Read the sequence. First, an acknowledgment that "mistakes were made in the process." Note the grammar. Not "we made mistakes." Mistakes were made. The passive voice is the native tongue of power evading its own reflection. Mistakes, in this telling, are weather. They occur. They condense out of the institutional air and fall upon the innocent like rain, authorless and uncaused. No hand made them. No name attaches to them. They were simply, regrettably, made.

Then comes the substance of the alleged contrition. The Council and the Member Associations should not have been made "to feel excluded." Sit with that construction. The offense is not that they were excluded. The offense is that they were made to feel excluded, as though the exclusion were a subjective misperception, a hurt sensitivity, a failure of the excluded to correctly interpret a process that was, we are assured, entirely proper. The 211 Member Associations are not being told they were wronged. They are being told their feelings got the better of them, and that FIFA regrets the inconvenience of their emotionality.

And then, in the same breath, the acknowledgment that "errors were also made after the proposal was leaked to media." Read this carefully, because it is the tell. The error being confessed here is not the scheme. The error is the leak. The problem, in FIFA's cosmology, was never the establishment of FIFA Forward Enterprise. The problem was that people found out about it. The contrition is not for the deed. The contrition is for the exposure of the deed. FIFA is not sorry it built the thing. FIFA is sorry you ever saw it building.

This is the moral architecture of a burglar apologizing that the homeowner woke up.

The Sentence That Should End the Careers of Everyone Who Signed It

Now we reach the passage that turns this letter from ordinary corporate mendacity into something genuinely radioactive. The second page, having withdrawn the project, states that "with the project withdrawn, FIFA will no longer tolerate any attacks on its integrity, good governance and due process and will take all necessary measures to protect and safeguard its name and reputation."

Read it again. I will wait, because you will not believe it the first time.

FIFA. Will no longer tolerate. Attacks. On its integrity, good governance, and due process.

I want to hold this sentence up to the light the way a jeweler holds a stone, and turn it slowly, so you can see every fracture.

Begin with the object of the sentence. FIFA proposes to defend its "integrity, good governance and due process" from "attacks." But we have just been told, in the preceding paragraphs and by the very existence of this letter, that FIFA's governance failed. That its process was so defective the Council felt excluded. That mistakes were made, errors were made, and a whole enterprise had to be yanked off the table under public pressure. The letter is a confession of a governance failure of galactic proportions that concludes by threatening anyone who mentions the governance failure. It is the arsonist announcing that he will no longer tolerate attacks on his commitment to fire safety.

The word doing the heaviest lifting is "tolerate." Tolerance is the posture of the strong toward the weak, the permission granted by the powerful to the powerless. A referee does not "tolerate" the players. The rules do. When FIFA says it will no longer tolerate criticism of its integrity, it is telling you precisely how it understands the relationship between itself and every journalist, whistleblower, member association, and ordinary supporter on earth. It regards scrutiny not as its accountability but as its indulgence. It has, until now, generously permitted you to notice its failures. That permission is hereby revoked.

AFP

And then the phrase that should be laminated and hung in every press box on the planet: "attacks on its integrity." Here is the sleight of hand, and it is old, and it is filthy, and it works only on people who agree to be fooled. FIFA has fused two entirely different things into a single defended object. There is the integrity of an institution, meaning its actual honesty and soundness, and there is the reputation of an institution, meaning what people believe about it. These are opposites in a case like this one. When an institution's real integrity has been breached, the thing that protects it is exactly the criticism, the reporting, the exposure. The attack on the reputation is the defense of the integrity.

FIFA has collapsed the two so that it can present the defense of the truth as an assault upon it.

To report FIFA's failures accurately is now, by definition, an "attack on its integrity." The truth-teller and the saboteur have been made into the same person. That is not an accident of drafting.

That is the entire purpose of the sentence.

Consider what "all necessary measures" means from an organization of this scale, this wealth, and this documented willingness to litigate. It means lawyers. It means the chilling letter to the small outlet that cannot afford to fight. It means the threat that hangs over the freelance reporter, the researcher, the member-association official who might otherwise speak. FIFA has more money than most of the nations that belong to it. "All necessary measures to protect its name" is not a statement of principle. It is a budget line. It is a promise to convert a portion of the game's wealth into the machinery of silence.

Not everyone is as bullheaded as I am; many outlets will hear that and beg off FIFA coverage or any actual investigations, out of fear. I decided to walk around with the Willingness to do Five Things years ago; how many outlets have made that decisive a commitment to justice and truth over privilege and power? Not many.

There is one more sentence I cannot let pass, because it is the keystone of the whole grotesque arch. The first page insists that "although mistakes were made, everything that was done, was done in full compliance with the FIFA regulatory framework."

Here is the confession dressed as an exoneration.

Everything was done in full compliance with the FIFA regulatory framework. I believe them.

That is the horror.

If FIFA can attempt to establish a commercial enterprise of this magnitude, exclude its own Council and its 211 members from meaningful oversight, proceed until the press stopped it, and then truthfully claim the entire process was *compliant with its own rules*, then the indictment is not of a rogue actor inside FIFA. The indictment is of FIFA's rules. The framework is not a guardrail that was breached. The framework is the getaway car. When the referee, the rulebook, and the accused are the same body, "full compliance" is not a defense.

It is the crime scene photograph.

You cannot police yourself and then cite your own permission as proof of your innocence. A body that writes the rules, breaks the spirit of them, complies with the letter of them, and then presents that compliance as vindication has told you, with perfect clarity, that its rules exist to launder its conduct rather than to constrain it.

Now to the consequence.

Because a letter like this is only as powerful as the willingness of its recipients to pretend it is serious.

If the Vice-Presidents and the Council accept this document, they accept their own irrelevance in writing. They accept a governance model in which they are informed of decisions after the press forces a reversal, thanked for their patience, reassured that everything was compliant, and warned that further "attacks" will not be tolerated. To accept it is to sign your own demotion from governor to spectator. Any Council member who reads "FIFA will no longer tolerate any attacks on its integrity" and does not understand that he is among the people being told to be quiet has not been reading carefully.

If the media accepts it, the media accepts the terms of its own muzzling. The reporting that surfaced FIFA Forward Enterprise is, under the plain language of this letter, exactly the kind of "attack on integrity" that FIFA now promises to meet with "all necessary measures." To treat this letter as a normal piece of corporate communication, to summarize it neutrally, to move on, is to accept the redefinition of accountability journalism as aggression. The correct response of the press to a sentence threatening the press is not stenography. It is contempt, and more reporting.

If the sponsors, the confederations, the governments, and the supporters accept it, they accept the whole architecture: the passive voice, the feelings-not-facts apology, the leak-as-crime, the compliance-as-innocence, and the criticism-as-attack. Acceptance is not neutral. Acceptance is participation. The letter works only if we agree to be its audience rather than its jury.

And here is where the comedy turns exquisite, because one confederation has already refused, and it is mine. My former employer, CONCACAF, and its 41 member associations issued their own statement welcoming the withdrawal, and they did something the Rabat letter would classify as a hostile act. They thanked the press. They commended the media, in writing, for bringing the FFE scheme "out of the shadows and into the light."

So on one side, FIFA, promising to take all necessary measures against attacks on its integrity. On the other, forty-one of FIFA's own member associations, publicly praising the exact journalism FIFA has just sought to quasi-criminalize. The confederation I served from the inside, the one whose governance I know in my bones, went on the record celebrating the light while the parent body drafted a letter in the dark threatening anyone who switches it on.

That is not a difference of opinion.

That is two irreconcilable theories of what football is. In one, scrutiny is the immune system. In the other, scrutiny is the disease. FIFA has told you which theory it holds, and CONCACAF, God help me, told you the opposite (intentionally or unintentionally) in the same news cycle. You cannot reform an institution into agreeing with its own members about whether the truth is an attack. You can only decide which of the two documents you are going to live by.

For years the honest reformers, and I have been among them, have operated on a hopeful premise: that FIFA could be improved from within, that better rules and braver officials and sharper oversight could bend the institution toward decency.

I no longer believe it, and this letter is why.

Reform assumes the existence of a mechanism that can hold the institution to account. This letter is FIFA announcing, in writing, over its two most important signatures, that it recognizes no such mechanism and will attack anyone who tries to be one. It confesses a governance failure and criminalizes the reporting of it in the same breath. It defines its own rulebook as the ceiling of its accountability and its own reputation as a thing to be defended against the truth. There is no internal lever left to pull, because the letter is a public notice that the levers have been welded shut and the people reaching for them will be sued.

Reform is not merely difficult here. It is a less than zero proposition.

Every hour, every dollar, every ounce of moral energy poured into reforming FIFA is not neutral, it is negative, because it lends the institution the legitimacy of a body that might yet be fixed, or one that works, and that borrowed legitimacy is precisely what the letter is trying to reclaim. To fight for reform is to concede that FIFA is the only possible custodian of the game.

It is not.

It is merely the current one, and it has just told us, laughing, that it intends to remain so by force of "all necessary measures."

So the task is not reform. The task is construction; to build the organization, correctly, for the very first time.

The game does not belong to FIFA. It belongs to the players and the coaches and the parents and the small clubs and the leagues and the hundreds of millions who love it, and every one of those constituencies existed before FIFA and would survive its collapse. The question that should occupy us is not how to make FIFA better. FIFA has answered that question for us, in Zurich, on the fifth of August, in the year 2026. The question is what we build instead, and how fast, and who we invite to help.

A body that threatens the people who tell the truth about it has forfeited the right to be reformed.

It has only earned the right to be replaced.

Laugh, then. Don't cry; laugh…out loud. Laugh at the galactic comedy of FIFA policing FIFA, of the burglar issuing the alarm codes, of the arsonist promising he will not tolerate any further attacks on his integrity. Laugh loud enough that they hear it in Zurich.

And then get to work on the thing that comes after them.

---

## Notes on the Record

The 5 August letter analyzed above is authentic to the wider episode, and every characterization in this piece is anchored to the public record of what happened between late July and early August 2026.

What FFE actually was. FIFA Forward Enterprise was a proposed commercial subsidiary that would have consolidated the sale of FIFA's commercial rights and the operational delivery of its tournaments, including the men's and women's World Cups and the Club World Cup. FIFA planned to raise up to roughly 4.2 billion dollars by selling a minority stake of around 20 percent in the entity, which valued the business at approximately 20 billion dollars. Reporting linked a New York investment firm connected to Joshua Kushner, younger brother of Jared Kushner, as the anchor investor. The Statesman (4 Aug 2026): https://www.thestatesman.com/sports/gianni-infantino-drops-controversial-fifa-forward-enterprise-project-after-backlash-from-football-bodies-1503623167.html · IBTimes: https://www.ibtimes.com/fifa-forward-enterprise-abandoned-infantino-withdraws-20-billion-proposal-after-widespread-3805971 · Al Jazeera (31 Jul 2026): https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2026/7/31/infantinos-senior-adviser-cordeiro-resigns-over-fifa-world-cup-plan

The anchor investor. Al Jazeera identified the intended anchor investor as Thrive Eternal, the firm launched by Joshua Kushner, and noted the structural absurdity at the heart of the deal: FIFA's 211 member federations are already, effectively, the owners of the governing body as a nonprofit association under Swiss law, and were being offered 20 million dollars each to accept a scheme that would sell a stake in what they collectively own. Al Jazeera (1 Aug 2026): https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2026/8/1/why-has-infantino-scrapped-fifas-world-cup-investment-plan-what-to-know

The timeline. The proposal surfaced through media reporting on Tuesday of that week. FIFA responded with a clarification statement insisting "nobody is selling football" and blaming "incorrect media reports" for disrupting its consultation, which is the leak-as-crime framing that recurs in the later apology. By Thursday, UEFA and its 55 national associations had met and agreed to boycott all FIFA events and competitions while the proposal remained active. By early Saturday, Infantino had withdrawn it. CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/03/sport/uefa-warns-fifa-legal-action-world-cup · Sky Sports: https://www.skysports.com/football/news/12098/13568656/fifa-insists-nobody-is-selling-football-after-uefa-threatens-to-boycott-tournaments-if-plans-to-sell-off-stake-in-world-cup-go-ahead

Internal fracture. Carlos Cordeiro, senior adviser to Infantino, former US Soccer president, former Goldman Sachs banker, and FIFA's representative on the White House World Cup Task Force, resigned in protest, calling FFE "a bad deal for football" and stating he had no involvement in the proposal and opposed it "unequivocally." FIFA COO Kevin Lamour went further, describing the scheme as "the project of one person," saying staff had been "deceived," and telling the Associated Press that staff "deserve better than contempt and intimidation." NBC News: https://www.nbcnews.com/sports/soccer/fifa-president-gianni-infantino-faces-boycott-20b-world-cup-private-eq-rcna590207 · Variety: https://variety.com/2026/biz/global/fifa-gianni-infantino-ditches-private-investment-plan-1236825512/ · Al Jazeera: https://www.aljazeera.com/sports/2026/7/31/infantinos-senior-adviser-cordeiro-resigns-over-fifa-world-cup-plan

UEFA's verdict, and the legal threat. UEFA did not treat the withdrawal as a resolution. It declared that Infantino had lost its confidence and that of "many other members of the football family," condemning "secret schemes on fast-track timescales, cooked up by faceless individuals." Its lawyers at Dechert then informed FIFA it was actively considering legal action, arbitration, and regulatory complaints arising out of the FFE plan, and named 18 FIFA executives who should preserve documents and messages as potential evidence. This is the context in which FIFA's threat to punish "attacks on its integrity" should be read: an institution facing a live evidence-preservation demand, announcing it will defend its reputation by all necessary measures. ESPN: https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/49503505/gianni-infantino-lost-uefa-confidence-world-cup-investment-plan-fails · CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/03/sport/uefa-warns-fifa-legal-action-world-cup

The confederation response, and a central irony. CONCACAF and its 41 member associations welcomed the withdrawal, cited concerns over "the lack of due process," and, in the passage that anchors this essay, explicitly commended the media "for bringing this issue out of the shadows and into the light." That statement, from forty-one of FIFA's own members, praises exactly the journalism FIFA's Rabat letter reframes as an intolerable attack. CONCACAF: https://www.concacaf.com/news/concacaf-and-its-41-member-associations-welcome-the-withdrawal-of-the-proposed-fifa-forward-enterprise

The Rabat letter itself. The 5 August update from Rabat, Morocco, acknowledged "mistakes were made," that it was not the intention for the Council and Member Associations "to feel excluded," and that "errors were also made after the proposal was leaked to media." It confirmed a separate apology letter to the Council and all 211 Member Associations, a review to be reported to the next FIFA Council meeting, reaffirmed support for Infantino, and contained the pledge that FIFA "will no longer tolerate any attacks on its integrity, good governance and due process." The Tribune (ANI wire, 6 Aug 2026), which reproduces that language: https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/ffe-proposal/fifa-apologises-to-its-member-association