Not Quite Communist

This week, I just want to say thank you.

Thank you to everyone who made the Evanston Nouveau Rotary Club’s Purple Pinkie fundraiser such a success.

To the incredible folks at Sketchbook Brewing Co., you have once again proven that you are more than a brewery. You are a force for good. You craft not only great beer but great community. You give us a space to come together with purpose, to raise a glass and raise awareness for something that truly matters. Your commitment to sparking change and being part of something larger than yourselves shows in everything you do.

And to the Chicago Stars FC, our city’s own professional women’s soccer team, thank you for bringing your energy, your smiles, and your time to help us kick off this important campaign. I’ll be honest, I wanted to take Supernova, your bright and bold mascot, home with me. The team’s enthusiasm lit up the room and made everyone believe in what we were doing even more.

We also want to thank our friends from the Evanston Rotary Club and the Evanston Lighthouse Rotary Club for joining us, for showing up with that signature Rotary spirit, and for buying a pint or two, or three, of Purple Pinkie. Clubs from across the region joined us as well, including those from Chicago, Arlington Heights, and other nearby communities. That kind of support shows what Rotary is all about. And a special thanks to Rotary International District Governor Marlene Frisbie, who joined me over a pint of our signature beer to talk business. That moment reminded me why Rotary matters.

Rotary International, headquartered right here in Evanston, has been pivotal in the almost total eradication of polio around the world. Think about that for a second. A volunteer organization of business leaders, teachers, clergy, and community builders, people like you and me, has helped wipe out one of the most devastating diseases in modern history.

Rotary’s commitment to ending polio has raised billions of dollars and vaccinated billions of children since its campaign began. It has done this not for fame or credit, but because it was the right thing to do.

And because of that commitment, Rotary earned something rare, a permanent seat at the United Nations. That is not something any other non-governmental organization has achieved in quite the same way. It is a testament to trust, to effectiveness, and to Rotary’s belief that service truly can change the world.

We are so close to closing that final gap, to reaching the moment when no child anywhere in the world will ever have to fear polio again. That is what we were drinking to when we raised our glasses of Purple Pinkie. That is what this fundraiser was about.

But it is not just about one disease. The science, logistics, and global cooperation that grew out of Rotary’s polio eradication campaign are now being used in other public health efforts, tracking and fighting everything from measles to malaria to Ebola. The same spirit of service and determination that guided Rotary’s End Polio Now campaign continues to guide the world in new and unexpected ways.

So, as we look back on our Purple Pinkie release events, from Evanston to Skokie, surrounded by friends, laughter, soccer players, and the hum of community, I want to say it again, thank you.

Thank you to Sketchbook Brewing Co. for brewing purpose into every pint.

Thank you to Chicago Stars FC for showing what teamwork really means.

Thank you to our fellow Rotarians across Evanston, Chicago, Arlington Heights, and beyond for being there, pint glasses raised high.

And thank you to everyone who believes in service above self.

Purple Pinkie is still available on tap and in four-pack cans at Sketchbook Brewing Co. through the fall until this small batch runs out. And even after that, keep drinking at Sketchbook, because every sip there supports a business that gives back to its community.

We may be just a small club in the Rotary world, but our hearts, like our cause, are global.

So here’s to the Purple Pinkie. Here’s to polio’s final defeat. And here’s to the power of people coming together to change the world, one pint at a time.

I had a quick powwow recently with my friend Randy Kim, host of the podcast Bánh Mì Bites, going over some names.

It got me thinking about why I’ve been posting more Asian American Pacific Islander content these few months. And the truth is, it’s not just content. It’s conviction. Because right now, we are under attack.

The growing wave of xenophobia in this country isn’t just about rhetoric anymore. It’s seeping into public policy, into the way people look at us, and into the kind of America some people want to bring back—an America where we are perpetual outsiders.

Recent studies show something deeply troubling. Americans now distrust Asians more than they did in recent years. This isn’t a random shift in opinion. It’s the direct result of how leaders talk about us.

When the President of the United States makes offhand remarks that reduce whole communities into caricatures or threats, it shapes the national mood. When conservative media figures echo that same hostility, it hardens into policy. Suddenly, immigration laws are rewritten to “protect American jobs,” university admissions debates become proxy wars against “Asian overrepresentation,” and our loyalty is questioned every time foreign policy turns to the Pacific.

It’s not new. This country has a long history of doing this.

We’ve seen Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment, Pacific nuclear testing, and Filipino veterans denied their due. What’s new is that the mask has slipped again. The old fears are repackaged in modern language: “national security risk,” “unfair advantage,” “foreign influence.”

The faces of suspicion just look more like mine now: Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Samoan, Micronesian, Hawaiian.

That’s why I’m doubling down on my posts. Because silence makes space for lies to grow. Because every time someone tries to make us invisible, the antidote is visibility. Every photo I share, every story I tell, every reminder of our history—those are acts of resistance.

We built railroads. We served in wars. We fought for civil rights alongside Black and Brown brothers and sisters. We were there in every chapter of America’s story, even when America didn’t want to admit it. And we’re still here, organizing, creating, writing, feeding our communities, healing others, and reminding this country of the truth it keeps forgetting: that we belong.

So no, I’m not pulling back. I’m leaning in harder. Because to be Asian American or Pacific Islander today means knowing that your voice matters in a time when others want to silence it. It means standing tall in the storm, refusing to apologize for existing.

I’ll keep posting. I’ll keep speaking. Because if we don’t tell our stories, someone else will, and they’ll tell them wrong.

Eric Trump claimed his father is “Saving God.” Photo: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

When Eric Trump said on a podcast that his father’s administration was “saving God,” I froze for a moment. Because as absurd as it sounds, there are millions of Americans who truly believe that. They believe that one man—angry, vengeful, vulgar, and power-hungry—is somehow the savior of the Almighty.

Let’s pause on the phrase “saving God.” The idea flips the entire foundation of faith on its head. Since when did the Creator of the universe need saving by the creature? Since when did divine authority become a campaign slogan? This is the kind of hubris that ancient prophets warned against—the golden calf dressed up in red, white, and blue.

What frustrates me most isn’t Eric Trump’s words. It’s that millions of Americans nod in agreement, whispering “Amen” as if that blasphemy were gospel truth. Somewhere along the way, faith in God was replaced by faith in power. They’ve built an idol out of political grievance and wrapped it in the language of revival.

It’s a dangerous reversal. When you claim to be “saving God,” what you’re really saying is that God serves you. That God bends to your will, justifies your cruelty, and sanctifies your politics. And that’s not faith—that’s manipulation. That’s empire dressed as religion.

And yet, it’s effective. It gives people a sense of mission, a holy war to fight. They are convinced that secular government, liberal policies, queer lives, immigrants, books, and classrooms are enemies of God. They mistake control for righteousness. They think the Kingdom of Heaven can be voted into office.

But here’s the truth: God doesn’t need saving. People do. Our democracy does. Our compassion does. The moment you think God needs your protection, you’ve lost sight of what it means to worship. You’ve turned reverence into self-righteousness.

In the end, “We’re saving God” is not just a quote. It’s a mirror. It reflects a distorted Christianity that has merged nationalism with theology, where Jesus isn’t the Prince of Peace but a mascot for political dominance.

And if we remain silent while that kind of faith takes root, we may wake up one day to find that the God they claim to be saving no longer looks like the God of love, mercy, and justice—but the God of conquest, control, and cruelty.

That’s why this matters. Because this isn’t just about Eric Trump. It’s about who we let define God in the public square—and whether we’ll have the courage to say, “No, you don’t get to save God. God saves us.”

Chicago Public School lunchroom workers are struggling to pay for the most basic necessities, even as they fight tooth and nail for better wages, fully staffed kitchens, and something as simple as respect and dignity on the job. Let that sink in—this is Chicago, the birthplace of the labor movement, the home of the eight-hour workday, the city that built the modern union. And yet, in 2025, the very people feeding our children can’t afford to feed their own.

This isn’t just a statistic—it’s a moral failure. These are mostly immigrant women—Black, Brown, and working-class—who wake up before dawn, ride two or three buses across the city, and step into kitchens where the heat and the noise never stop. They lift crates of milk, drag garbage bags heavier than some of the students they serve, scrub trays until their hands ache, and clean floors slick with spills and grease. They make sure hundreds, sometimes thousands, of students get fed every single day. Their labor is physical, grueling, and relentless. And when the last bell rings, they keep cleaning, sanitizing, and resetting so the cycle can start again the next morning.

I know this world. I grew up in it. I’m a child of UNITE HERE union members—but not here in Chicago. My parents were UNITE HERE workers in Honolulu. They were part of that long fight for livable wages, job security, and the belief that service work deserves respect. I remember the union meetings, the picket signs, the smell of the ink on the flyers. They fought for healthcare and dignity because they knew that without it, their work would always be treated as disposable.

And now, decades later, in a city that calls itself “union strong,” the same fight continues. These CPS lunchroom workers—many of them immigrants from Mexico, Central America, the Philippines, and West Africa—are still being told that their labor doesn’t count for much. That their love for the children they serve somehow makes up for the low pay, the broken equipment, the understaffed kitchens. That they should be grateful just to have the job. The message we’re sending is disgraceful: We’ll take your labor, but not your humanity. We’ll take your sweat, but not your voice.

But they’re not staying silent. They’re organizing, speaking out, and demanding that Chicago live up to its own legacy. They’re not asking for handouts—they’re asking for fairness. For the pay that matches the backbreaking work they do. For safe staffing levels so they can do their jobs without burning out. For the simple acknowledgment that feeding a city’s children is sacred work.

Go read their report at www.unitehere1.org/CPSLunchroomReport. But don’t just read it—act on it. Share it. Talk about it. Show up at school board meetings and city halls. Because when we let workers like them struggle in silence, we betray the very foundation of this city’s working-class soul.

The fight for the CPS lunchroom workers is not just about paychecks—it’s about justice. It’s about honoring the tough, invisible labor that keeps our schools running and our children nourished. It’s about saying that no worker, in Chicago or anywhere, should have to choose between serving food and being able to afford it.

The fight for dignity in the kitchen is the fight for dignity everywhere. And if we forget that, then we’ve forgotten what solidarity really means.

Today’s raids in Edgewater, Andersonville, Uptown, Rogers Park, and the City of Evanston have shaken the core of our communities. These are not just neighborhoods on a map.

These are places where families work, where children walk to school, where small restaurants serve breakfast before the morning rush. And now, these places have become scenes of fear and violation.

ICE and CBP vehicles have been prowling our streets like predators, with helicopters buzzing over us all day, taking people away while they work, wait for rides, or step outside for a breath of fresh air.

These are not faceless statistics. They are our neighbors.

What unfolded with Illinois state Rep. Hoan Huyn is both enraging and terrifying. A state lawmaker, exercising his right to monitor federal agents operating in his district, found himself targeted and harassed by those very agents.

The footage is infuriating: the intimidation, the stop and circling his vehicle, and what appears to be, from my point of view, a firearm briefly brandished at him. A gun. Brandished at an elected representative of the people of Illinois.

That’s not law enforcement.

That’s terrorizing a public servant who dared to stand between his constituents and an agency acting with impunity.

Hoan Huyn’s courage represents the kind of leadership we desperately need. He did what a representative should do: protect his community and demand transparency from those who claim to serve public safety.

In reality, CBP and ICE are serving cruelty. They are carrying out the will of an Administration that has abandoned accountability. An Administration that hides behind “law and order” while breaking the moral order of the nation.

In Chicago, we’ve always said we’re a city of immigrants. We’ve always taken pride in our diversity, in the idea that every corner of our city tells the story of someone’s journey to belong.

But when federal agents abduct workers from front sidewalks, bus stops, and loading docks, that message becomes hypocrisy. It says: we want your labor, your sweat, your service, but not your humanity.

We cannot look away.

Every neighborhood from the lakefront to the far edges of the city is now part of this crisis.

Our legislators are being threatened.

Our neighbors are being detained.

And our city is being tested.

Will we stand with the people who make Chicago what it is? Or will we cower while those in power try to break us apart?

I stand with Rep. Hoan Huyn.

I stand with every elected official, every pastor, every teacher, every neighbor who steps outside and says, “Not here. Not in our city. Not in our state.”

Because the moral line is clear.

When our leaders are being threatened for defending their people, it’s no longer just about policy. It’s about who we are.

Silence? It’s not an option.

Photo: Screengrab from Ill. state Rep. Hoan Huyn footage.

Bay Area Native American Two-Spirits in 2022 San Francisco Pride Parade. Photo: Gabriel Classon via Wikimedia Commons.

When Donald Trump issued NSPM-7 in late September 2025, he called it a measure to fight domestic terrorism and organized political violence. On paper, it sounded like a national security document, something to prevent violent extremism. But buried in the language was a dangerous shift. It named “extremism on migration, race, and gender” as targets, and it spoke about defending “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” Those words opened a wide door to surveillance and punishment that go far beyond actual acts of violence. They create a framework where ideology, identity, and culture can be treated as threats to the state.

The memo directs the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Treasury to trace, prosecute, and disrupt individuals, groups, and even tax-exempt organizations that fall under its definition of “domestic terrorism.” It allows the government to revoke nonprofit status and cut off funding if officials believe an organization is “aiding or abetting” political violence. Legal experts are warning that this language is dangerously vague. It does not define what “extremism on gender” even means. It simply assumes that gender can be a site of radicalization, and that defending nontraditional identities could be cast as extremism.

That is why Indigenous and Two-Spirit communities are alarmed. Across Native nations, gender diversity is not a political position or a social experiment. It is sacred. The identity of Two-Spirit people, those who carry both masculine and feminine spirits, is woven through ceremony, storytelling, and the spiritual life of tribes. These identities predate the existence of the United States. Yet under NSPM-7, a government investigator could look at those traditions and see something that challenges “traditional American views on family.” The memo’s words invite interpretation through a narrow, Christian-nationalist lens, and that lens can easily cast Indigenous spirituality as a threat.

Imagine a Two-Spirit gathering organized by a tribal nonprofit. The event includes teaching about gender balance and sacred roles. Now imagine a federal agent or political actor looking at that event and calling it “gender extremism.” If that group receives a grant, the Treasury could trace its funds or question whether it “aids” movements that challenge traditional morality. It sounds absurd, but it only takes one official reading the memo literally to open an investigation. History shows how easily Indigenous expression has been policed. The boarding school era, the ban on the Sun Dance, and the surveillance of Native activists all followed the same pattern. What is different now is that gender itself could be treated as a potential crime scene.

Indigenous sovereignty does not guarantee protection here. NSPM-7 empowers federal agencies to act under the logic of counterterrorism, which means they can bypass the cultural and legal autonomy of tribes in the name of national security. The moment the government ties ideology to violence, sovereignty becomes fragile. The memo’s phrase about defending “traditional American morality” is a political statement, not a legal definition. For Native people, whose traditions differ fundamentally from Euro-American ones, that phrase can be used to disqualify their beliefs from protection.

The risks go beyond surveillance. The memo explicitly mentions financial tracking and nonprofit accountability. Many tribal and Two-Spirit organizations depend on charitable funding. If an agency decides that an advocacy program promoting gender-diverse spirituality is politically radical, it could threaten their funding or revoke their nonprofit status. This creates a chilling effect where Indigenous groups may self-censor or avoid certain cultural expressions out of fear of being branded extremist. Even without prosecutions, the fear of investigation is enough to silence.

There is also a deeper moral danger. NSPM-7 presents itself as a security document, but it carries the seeds of cultural control. It defines “traditional America” in a way that excludes Indigenous and gender-diverse experiences. It rewrites who counts as truly American. The Indigenous understanding of balance, community, and identity becomes suspect because it does not conform to a nationalist ideal. In that sense, this is not only about policy but about erasure.

The story of Indigenous people in America has always included state attempts to discipline bodies, beliefs, and ceremonies. What makes this moment different is that the label of “terrorism” can now be placed on gender identity itself. If gender can be named as a form of extremism, then anyone living outside the binary could be treated as a potential threat. That is not just a legal problem but a spiritual crisis. It is a return to the colonial project that sought to erase Indigenous identities and call it civilization.

The truth is that NSPM-7 will not make the country safer. It will make it smaller. It will shrink the space for difference, creativity, and sacred identity. For Indigenous and Two-Spirit people, who have survived centuries of suppression, this memo feels like a familiar echo of past violence, now dressed in the language of security. If the state defines morality narrowly enough, it can turn diversity itself into a crime. That is why the fight against this policy is not only political but moral. It is about protecting the right of every culture to define its own sacred balance and to live without being called a terrorist for doing so.

I’ve been staring at Otto Dix’s Mother and Child. It is a haunting thing to look at. The longer you stare, the more it stares back. What we expect from a painting with that title—something tender, something holy—is stripped away. There are no soft halos here, no warm golds or signs of divine promise. Just a mother, hollowed by hunger. A child, limp and gray against her chest. Their faces are drawn tight with the thinness of survival. This is not the Madonna and Child of the Renaissance. This is Europe after the First World War, starved, exhausted, disillusioned.

And yet, in my head, I can’t shake the image of the Pietà. Mary holding the broken body of her son. That eternal posture of grief. Because this, too, is a Pietà moment. The mother’s arms curve around the child the same way, as if trying to cradle death itself back to life. But where Michelangelo carved smooth marble perfection, Otto Dix gives us decay and despair. He gives us what happens when the sacred becomes human again—fragile, trembling, afraid.

Dix saw war. He carried its stench, its noise, its ghosts. And in this painting, he shows us what war does after it’s supposedly over. When the guns fall silent and the soldiers come home, there are still bodies. There is still hunger. There is still a mother’s cry muffled into the chest of a dying child. The aftermath of war is not peace. It is absence. And absence is what Dix paints so vividly here.

But the horror of this image is not confined to history. Because if you look at Mother and Child long enough, the faces start to change. They shift. They become the faces in the photographs we see today—mothers clutching skeletal children amid the dust and rubble of Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine. The geography changes. The uniforms change. The cruelty doesn’t.

In every generation, it seems, the world demands another Pietà. Another mother to weep over another child, another pair of eyes staring into a world that has forgotten mercy. These are not accidental tragedies. They are the recurring script of human violence and human indifference. Dix painted it a century ago, but he might as well have painted it yesterday.

What makes Mother and Child unbearable—and unforgettable—is that it refuses to let us look away. It traps us in the moment between love and loss, between hunger and death, between sacredness and ruin. It reminds us that in war, holiness does not vanish—it suffers. It bleeds. It starves. The mother becomes Mary again, holding the body of her child, praying for resurrection that never comes.

And maybe that’s the most haunting thing about Otto Dix’s Mother and Child. It’s not just a painting. It’s a mirror. It shows us the cost of our silence, the consequence of turning compassion into politics. And as we keep watching new Pietàs unfold before our eyes, in real time, on our screens, we realize this is not the past. This is the present, still weeping.

Edgewater Mutual Aid volunteers packing food before distribution to people in need. Photo: Gerald Farinas.

I’m furious. The United States Department of Agriculture has warned that SNAP benefits—what most people know as food stamps—will run down if the government shutdown continues. But here’s what they’re not saying: this didn’t just happen overnight. The food assistance program has been under siege for years, slowly starved by political cruelty disguised as fiscal responsibility. This Administration didn’t stumble into this crisis. They built it. They’ve chipped away at SNAP under the guise of “reform,” placing impossible work requirements, cutting eligibility, and letting inflation quietly erase the power of those benefits. And now, when their own shutdown threatens to grind the system to a halt, they have the gall to point their finger at the Democrats and say, “See? They’re the reason you’re hungry.”

It’s cynical. It’s manipulative. And it’s evil.

Let’s call this what it is: using the food insecure as pawns in a political stunt. Millions of Americans—children, seniors, people with disabilities, veterans—depend on SNAP to eat. For many, this is the only thing standing between them and starvation. But the Administration doesn’t care about that. They only care about optics, about blame, about finding someone else to take the hit when their own cruelty becomes too obvious to hide. They’re willing to let the poorest Americans suffer just to score points in the next election cycle.

And what’s even worse is that they’re doing it with a straight face, as if their hands are clean. They say it’s the Democrats’ fault that SNAP is running out of money, even though they’ve gutted it at every turn. It’s like lighting a house on fire, then blaming the firefighters for not getting there fast enough. It’s gaslighting on a national scale.

The truth is, there’s no “both sides” to this. This is deliberate sabotage of a social safety net that was already stretched to the breaking point. SNAP doesn’t just feed people—it feeds local economies, small grocers, farmers’ markets, and rural communities. Every dollar in SNAP generates more than a dollar and a half in economic activity. So when you kill SNAP, you’re not just starving people—you’re starving neighborhoods, you’re starving main streets, you’re starving hope.

Meanwhile, the people in power continue to dine well. They’ll tell you it’s about “fiscal restraint” while signing off on bloated defense budgets and corporate tax breaks that could feed every hungry child in America ten times over. They’ll tell you that people should just “get a job,” as if hunger is a moral failure instead of a policy choice.

This isn’t just about food. It’s about dignity. It’s about the kind of country we are, and the kind of people we’re becoming when we let our leaders turn hunger into a weapon.

So yeah, I’m angry. I’m angry because we live in a nation that has the means to feed every single person within its borders but chooses not to—because cruelty makes for better politics.

And I’ll say it plain: if your idea of governing means letting people go hungry just to make your opponents look bad, you’re not a leader. You’re a bully. You’re a coward. And you’re the reason so many of us are done believing that “America cares.” Because clearly, it doesn’t.

The United States has carried out yet another strike in the Caribbean, killing six people aboard a boat accused of carrying drugs near Venezuela. President Trump has touted this as part of his so-called campaign against “narcoterrorists.” But let’s be clear about what this really is—an extrajudicial killing. This latest strike marks at least the twenty-seventh such attack in the region since his administration began ramping up its operations under the guise of fighting transnational crime. It’s not just a policy of militarization; it’s an assertion of unchecked power, and another signpost that America has slid deep into authoritarianism.

These operations aren’t happening in secret. They’re being announced publicly, often glorified as decisive acts of leadership. But when a head of state blurs the lines between military engagement and law enforcement, it sets a dangerous precedent. In this case, the victims were not given due process. They were targeted and killed based on intelligence that may or may not have been verified. That’s not justice. That’s execution without trial.

The justification for these attacks—“fighting narcoterrorism”—is a convenient one. It packages violence in the language of national security, allowing it to pass as legitimate defense. But when you strip away the rhetoric, what remains is an erosion of the rule of law and the international norms that are meant to hold nations accountable. The United States, long a critic of extrajudicial killings by authoritarian regimes, now commits them openly in a region it has historically dominated.

There is also the very real danger that these actions could spark a larger conflict. Each missile, each drone, each naval strike carries the risk of retaliation. Venezuela’s government is already accusing the U.S. of violating its sovereignty. What happens when one of these strikes kills citizens from another nation, or sinks a vessel carrying nationals from multiple countries? We could find ourselves dragged into a war we are not prepared to fight, a war built on unilateral actions without international support or moral justification.

It’s not difficult to imagine how this could spiral. We’ve seen it before. The language of fighting “evil” abroad, of stopping “threats before they reach our shores,” has been used to justify disastrous interventions. Think of Vietnam. What began as limited engagement, framed as containment, devolved into a quagmire that cost tens of thousands of American lives and shattered the nation’s trust in its own leaders. A war built on bad intelligence and ideological arrogance, where we sacrificed soldiers not for freedom, but for the illusion of control.

If these strikes continue, they could lay the groundwork for another such nightmare. Each unauthorized military action builds tension, erodes diplomacy, and invites escalation. One mistaken target, one misinterpreted radar signal, could ignite a chain reaction that pulls us into direct confrontation with nations already on edge. And this time, it wouldn’t be a fight for hearts and minds—it would be a fight for survival in a hemisphere where our influence is no longer absolute.

Meanwhile, these actions weaken our partnerships. The U.S. relies on intelligence sharing with Central and South American allies. Those relationships depend on mutual trust. When other governments begin to suspect that the information they provide might be turned into drone coordinates for American missiles, that trust evaporates. Cooperation falters. Intelligence dries up. What’s left is a self-fulfilling cycle of fear, suspicion, and isolation.

And the damage doesn’t stop there. These strikes embolden other authoritarian leaders who point to Washington’s behavior as validation for their own acts of violence. If the United States can claim self-defense to eliminate enemies without oversight, why can’t they? The message to the world is clear: power excuses everything. International law becomes a suggestion, not a standard.

At home, the normalization of state violence feeds into our collective numbness. Each strike becomes a political talking point, another tally in a campaign to look “strong.” Every time we accept it without question, we give up a piece of our democracy. Authoritarianism doesn’t arrive overnight—it comes slowly, disguised as protection, until justice itself becomes just another casualty.

The killing of six people on that boat may not make headlines for long, but it should. Because it’s not just about the dead—it’s about what their deaths mean. They are a warning that our government is crossing lines that can’t easily be uncrossed. That we may soon face the terrible choice between walking back from the brink or marching into another war we don’t fully understand. And if history has taught us anything, it’s that those wars don’t just destroy lives abroad—they destroy something essential within us at home.

I don’t even know if it’s fair to call it an undercurrent anymore. What’s happening inside the Republican Party—the racism, the homophobia, the transphobia, the open embrace of white supremacy—isn’t hiding beneath the surface. It’s a towering tsunami. And it just crashed through Kansas this week.

The Kansas Young Republicans, an official arm of the state GOP, has been declared inactive after leaked messages revealed leaders spewing racist and anti-Semitic remarks. Thousands of pages of group chats, obtained by Politico, show their leaders using slurs against Black and gay people, laughing at pro-Nazi comments, and even referencing “1488,” a white-supremacist code that means “Heil Hitler.” That’s not a mistake. That’s ideology. And it’s the ideology they’ve been comfortable expressing behind closed doors.

Let’s pause there. These aren’t random internet trolls. These are recognized leaders of a Republican youth organization, future candidates, future campaign staffers, future policy shapers. They didn’t stumble into this language. They were raised in it, nurtured by a political culture that rewards cruelty, mockery, and hate. They’ve grown up seeing racism and bigotry not as moral failings but as bonding rituals of power.

When the story broke, the Kansas GOP chair, Danedri Herbert, who happens to be Black, said she was “disgusted.” But disgust is not enough. Disgust doesn’t cleanse a party that for decades has traded moral leadership for populist rage. Every time Republican leaders wink at conspiracy theories, every time they shrug off violent rhetoric, every time they tolerate those who mock the marginalized, they give permission for this kind of rot to thrive.

And let’s be clear, this is not an isolated Kansas problem. This is what the GOP looks like when the mask slips. It’s in the chat rooms, the campaign rallies, the school board meetings where people snarl about “groomers” and “illegals.” It’s in statehouses passing laws that strip rights from queer people and immigrants. It’s in the smug silence of those who know better but say nothing because it’s easier to stay in power.

I am angry. Deeply angry. Because this is what happens when a party that once claimed to stand for “family values” becomes obsessed with cruelty as a brand. When racism, homophobia, and xenophobia stop being embarrassments and start being applause lines. When young Republicans trade decency for internet notoriety, convinced that “1488” is just edgy humor.

And I can’t help but openly wonder what we’re not seeing in other state chapters like the Illinois Young Republicans, or even the Log Cabin Republicans who claim to stand for inclusion. If this kind of rot has surfaced in Kansas, what’s festering under the surface elsewhere? We’re just scratching it. The disease runs deep, and the infection is spreading faster than anyone wants to admit.

No one should be surprised that this came to light. What should shock us is how normalized it’s become. How comfortable people have grown in their hate. The fact that national leaders had to call for mass resignations from a youth organization for racist group chats tells you how far we’ve fallen.

We are watching the moral corrosion of a major American political party in real time. The question is whether the rest of us—citizens, people of faith, decent conservatives, and liberals alike—will simply stand by as the tide rises. Because this isn’t an undercurrent anymore. It’s a flood. And unless we name it for what it is and refuse to tolerate it, it will drown the very idea of who we are supposed to be as a nation.

Screenshot: Politico website.