I listened to several pundits who criticized Texas Representative Al Green’s outburst at Felon 47’s State of the Union address. They can argue all day long that Green’s behavior went against decorum. They can talk all day long about his behavior being a distraction from more pressing issues. Yet, Democrats miss one salient point which means they are not paying attention to their constituents.
Rep. Al Green did one thing that Democrats don’t seem to grasp—He took the spotlight off of Felon 47. Felon 47 and Republicans dominate news cycles and stick to a script that the Democrats have yet to master or counter.
All damned day long my cellphone is inundated with text messages containing Democratic surveys that all end with them begging for money. Who in their right mind is going to donate to a party that doesn’t seem to have too many members with spines? And who is going to donate money to a party that worries about decorum in the House chamber more than they worry about Americans losing their jobs, and struggling to pay for groceries?
What Representative Green did was shake up the room to the point where the press had no choice but to listen to what Green had to say. Few Democrats, save Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett, can grab a headline. And it is imperative that Democrats shift the narrative.
So here’s a suggestion. Call your representatives and tell them point blank that you cannot donate anything for two reasons: the cost of living has skyrocketed and your political party is failing the people it is supposed to represent.
I’m a historian. We rarely write about anything until some time has passed. What I have written below is speculation right now. I have some serious questions as these two events have played out (or rather, not played out much) in the media:
Do you remember when Felon 47 was at a rally back in July of 2024, and there was an attempt on his life by a 20-year old man named Thomas Matthew Crooks? Remember that?
Crooks shot and killed a supporter in the crowd, injured two people in the crowd, then hit Felon 47 on the ear. I don’t know about you, but the shot that grazed Felon 47’s ear seems suspicious. A bullet aimed at an ear is likely to lodge into the side of someone’s head. Then Crooks was killed. It is now 2025 and there is still no known motive.
Then remember Ryan Wesley Routh, a man in his late fifties, who tried to take a shot at Felon 47 while he was playing on a golf course at Tr*mp International Golf Club in September 2024? The Secret Service shot at least four rounds at Routh who was hiding in the shrubbery with an SKS-styled rifle. Routh survived and was charged with an assassination attempt.
Thomas Matthew Crooks (L); Ryan Wesley Routh (R).
The last actual assassination of a president occurred in November 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas allegedly by Lee Harvey Oswald. Later a nightclub owner named Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald as he was being transferred to the county jail. Oswald was shot and killed on live television.
Later in 1981 John Hinckly, Jr. tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan as he was waiving to supporters. Reagan was seriously injured, but he survived.
I bring these events up because killing presidents and presidential candidates has always been extremely difficult. Yet, Felon 47 had two would-be assassins before he ever took office. Were these attempts dress rehearsals? We don’t know.
Here’s the deal. Felon 47 and his puppeteer Elon stay front and center on the news. They remain topics for perpetual discussion and debate.
Right now Felon 47 is all bluster with his threats to invade sovereign nations and put tariffs on everything he can think of while we speculate about the sinister things Elon is doing to our democracy behind the scenes. It is what we don’t see that we need to worry about.
If someone were to actually assassinate Felon 47 who would take his place in the White House? The most logical answer is his Vice-President J. D. Vance.
But we already know that the Republican Party is completely illogical right now; and the Democratic Party is still trying to behave as if they don’t know that the old political play book has been destroyed.
Crooks and Routh could very well be two isolated haters of Felon 47. Yet, both of these men got within striking distance of potentially assassinating Felon 47. Given the excessively high security surrounding presidents and presidential candidates, the real questions are how did these two men get past security and why did they attempt to assassinate Felon 47; and is something else on the agenda?
The first time I heard of crucifixion outside of a biblical context I was watching the film Spartacus, released in 1960 that starred Kirk Douglas. I was in high school in the 1970s when I first saw the film on television.
Crucifixion was one of the most excruciating and barbaric of all forms of execution. The person on the cross, slowly and agonizingly, died from suffocation as their rib cage was forced upwards. They could not fully breathe and eventually they died.
No moment in the film Spartacus brought me more tears than the fight scene when the slaves “Spartacus” (Douglas) and “Antoninus” (played by Tony Curtis) were forced by Roman authorities to fight each other to the death.
Spartacus and Antoninus, who loved each other like brothers, were determined to kill one another in order to spare the other the agony of crucifixion. Spartacus eventually kills Antoninus. In grief, Spartacus yells at his tormentors, “He’ll come back. He’ll come back; and he’ll be millions.”
That scene gave me the sense that when the best people die, they will somehow be reincarnated and other people of goodwill will join them. That belief, however, has never brought me much comfort.
MAGA supporters are not likely to understand my interpretation of the themes in the film Spartacus. They follow orders, not facts. They don’t think of people on the Left, or people of peace as anything other than unrealistic and subhuman. They don’t think compromise with people with whom they disagree is anything other than a show of weakness.
MAGA adherents of all races and ethnicities believe in White male supremacy in a world that gets browner by the day. While U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers round up every undocumented brown worker they can find, Felon 47 wants to annex countries inhabited primarily by people classifiable as white.
White male supremacy only functions when people believe in the stereotype of the “Great White Father” who is considered the only one fit to lead and to appoint others to important positions. This is part of the reason why a lot of voters voted against their own interests and against their own people.
Felon 47 supporters always claim to be Christians. I do not entirely trust the Christianity formulated in the Western World because the people who formulated it cannot even so much as admit that there is virtually no such thing as a person classifiable as “white” that was/is native to any location in the Middle East or North and Eastern Africa.
A sandy blond-haired, white-complexioned, blue-eyed Yeshu’a has always been a lie. So, when you engage with MAGA supporters (and many anti-MAGA folks) you are engaging with people where generations of their families have prescribed to the lie for centuries. Felon 47 stepped into a centuries old illusion, proclaimed himself to be sent by God, then went around autographing Bibles.
I can count on one hand the Christian ministers I respect; most of them are women. They inspire. They pray. They analyze. They talk about justice. They talk to you like you have a brain; and they do so without the big egos and the expectance of deference I have encountered from a few too many clergymen.
At the end of all discussions and analyses, Yeshu’a’s life still ends the same way. No matter how good he was, he was still executed by crucifixion which was the Roman Empire’s method of execution for paupers and other petty criminals.
No matter how popular an itinerant preacher Yeshu’a was, church fathers and the Roman government considered him a threat to their power; and they used every lie, every smear campaign against him until many of his own followers turned against him and called for him to be put to death.
I do wonder when we, particularly those of us in the Western World, will get sick of that perpetual narrative where someone has to die in order to free us?
Must the good man or the good woman always be the sacrifice? Or, have we absorbed a skewed Western Christian Worldview for so long that we cannot even imagine any form of salvation, deliverance or peace without someone being killed?
Is some form of crucifixion inevitable or merely a twisted human habit where we refuse to think our way out and fight our way out of problems we cannot completely face so that we require a martyr to prove we were, at least, thinking in the right manner? That kind of thinking should not ease our consciences.
Maybe I’m a fool, but I still think that if we learned anything—even from an edited and modified form of Christianity—it ought to be that goodness and mercy and fair play may get someone jailed or killed, but it should not have to be that way.
Church services are often filled with sermons that make Yeshu’a seem more like a spirit than a flesh and blood man who once walked the earth. And if it is true that he died for our sins, exactly when do we accept that the point of his crucifixion was for us to do more than just acknowledge the awful habits of human history where we persecute or allow good men and women to continue to be persecuted?
Felon 47 and his underlings corrupt every precedent set by Yeshu’a. They resemble the Roman government and its sycophants while they embrace the Nihilistic principles of a 19th century Russian Party that used terrorism and assassination as part of their reform.
MAGA supporters and Felon 47 let people be detained or die in order to stave off the inevitability of the collapse of the White Western World. But will we, who know Felon 47 is wrong, fight to stop the deaths, persecutions, and detentions of people who only want to work and feed their families?
Will we ever admit that the story of Yeshu’a’s crucifixion means that we are charged with ending the blood-letting, the needless assaults, the threats? Will we ever be brave enough to end needless persecutions; or will we watch these modern-day crucifixions as if we were watching the fight between Spartacus and Antoninus thinking that it is only a movie. So, no one actually died.
I remember the first time I heard someone say, “If you want to hide something, hide it in a book.” The comment depressed me.
When you are a historian, you have books everywhere. You have to read all the time. I have not seen the top of my dining room table in nearly 15 years as it is covered with stacks of books. Books occupy every nook and cranny of my home.
With the United States ranking 36th in the world for literacy, with a 79% literacy rate, with only 25% of literate adults reading above the 6th grade level, we are already dumb. We can expect to see more decline in literacy with Felon 47 living on Pennsylvania Avenue.
So, I have a proposal. It might not change anything, but it is worth a try. Walk out of your door with a book in your hand or tucked under your arm everyday for at least a month.
Let kids and other adults see you walk with that book. And don’t say you can’t do this. You have carried books before when you were in grade school.
Make your book/s visible at your job, on a trip to a store. Hell, go for a walk with your book until someone asks you why you always have a book in your hand or under your arm. And then have the audacity to tell them why.
We historians often find data in some file in an obscure archive, in letters written by someone’s grandmother, in photos, newspaper clippings, legal records. Our discipline demands that we dig, analyze, rethink and revise, constantly. I liken our work to studying the function of each piece in a Chess game. We get different perspectives about the same set of circumstances depending on which Chess piece we examine.
I was a mediocre Chess player. I had a few friends who played like champions. So, I often just watched them play. I remain, however, fascinated by the game’s objectives and, specifically, the roles of Pawns and Queens.
Pawns are the most numerous pieces in Chess; they are the foot soldiers. Each player has eight Pawns. A Pawn can move one or two squares forward if that move is its first move. After the first move, a Pawn can only move one square forward unless the square is blocked by some other piece. A Pawn can capture or attack another piece, however, by moving diagonally to the left or right.
The Pawn is the only piece in a Chess game that can change ranks. Depending on the skill of a Chess player, a Pawn can become a Bishop, a Rook or a Queen. In spite of a Pawn’s ability to advance to a higher rank, it is still considered the lowest ranking piece in the game. It is only worth one point.
The objective of the game is to capture your opponent’s King where that King has no way out, which means Checkmate. While the King is considered the most important piece in the game, it is the Queen that is considered the most powerful piece.
Queens are the only pieces that can move across the board in any manner as long as they are not successfully blocked by other pieces. If you lose, it is highly likely that you lost because your opponent’s Queen checkmated your King. Chess players feel much more confident when they have successfully captured or blocked her.
You can still win the game without capturing the Queen, but you have to be extremely strategic and precise to do so. You can also win without making good moves with your Pawns, but it is highly unlikely.
Chess is now over 1,500 years old. While there is some skepticism about its precise origins, many Chess historians believe that the Indian board game called “Chaturanga” was the earliest predecessor of Chess. There were many other versions that followed, but are too numerous to mention here.
In early versions of Chess, there was a piece called “Vizier” or “Advisor” for centuries. In the 1500s, in the era of great and powerful Queens in Europe, like Spain’s Isabella and England’s Elizabeth, “Viziers” or “Advisors” were redesigned and renamed “Queens.” You can learn an awful lot of world history just by examining Chess.
So here’s the deal: There is no such thing as a Chess game where Queens/Women Heads of State/Women in general are not powerful and flexible while the Kings/Men Heads of State/Men in general are highly important but who have or exercise fewer tactical moves.
There is also no such thing as a Chess game where Pawns/Foot Soldiers/Laborers are not essential to success, even while they are considered less important.
Apply any and all of the above to what you see happening in the United States and the world right now. I refuse to tell you how to analyze and interpret this history because there are so many interpretations and analogies that can be extrapolated from this board game.
All I will say is that nothing is going to change or be corrected without the skill of devoted Pawns, and the power and daring of Queens.
Leslye Joy Allen 