This document examines each claim in the catechism against the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the recorded words of Jesus. The catechism was a real genre of instruction used to teach enslaved people to accept their bondage as divinely ordained. Brown includes it in Clotel to expose its theological corruption.

The catechism reproduced in Clotel belongs to a tradition of “slave catechisms” produced in the antebellum American South. These documents selectively cited, distorted, and invented scripture to construct a theology of racial slavery. What follows examines each major claim against the full witness of the biblical text.

The catechism’s defining move is this: it imposes obligations downward and removes them upward. It quotes every passage that can be made to require submission from the enslaved, and suppresses every passage that imposes corresponding obligations on the enslaver. That asymmetry is not a reading of scripture — it is a system imposed on it.

There’s a debate happening in writing communities about AI-generated prose, and it keeps talking past itself. That’s because it’s actually two different conversations at once — and the people having them have fundamentally different relationships to language.

One group are writers. For them, the struggle to find the right word is the point. The craft is inseparable from the meaning. The sentence is the thing. That’s a legitimate and serious relationship to language — and it produces work that couldn’t exist any other way.

The other group are storytellers — people who have something to say and need language to carry it. For them, the sentence is a vehicle. Clarity is the destination.

There’s a TikTok video making the rounds. A woman is talking about her birthday. She wanted a birthday cake with candles — that was her prompt to her husband. Simple. Festive. Exactly the kind of low-stakes creative latitude that should be a gift to receive.

He got her an alligator cake. Because their daughter likes alligators.

The comment that cut through all the noise in the replies:

There’s a video making the rounds on TikTok that you’ve probably seen by now. A girl finds out her boyfriend booked her on Spirit Airlines — didn’t tell her, just sent a confirmation number — and she’s giving the camera a look that could curdle milk. Side-eyeing him into next Tuesday. And then, like clockwork, another creator stitches in with the hot take: “But he’s flying you out. That’s amazing.”

It is not amazing. We need to talk about this.

First, let’s acknowledge what the “be grateful” crowd is actually saying. They’re saying that the gesture — the act of booking travel, the logistical effort of producing a confirmation number — is what matters. The thought counts. He thought of her. He wanted her there. Isn’t that enough?

AI isn’t replacing people in the abstract. It’s replacing specific people, in specific industries, right now. And if you look at which industries those are — commercial illustration, editorial art, character design, book cover painting, fan art — you’ll notice something. They skew heavily female. This piece is about that.

If you’re waiting for the piece about men, it may be coming. But we’re talking about women right now, because the women are the ones losing the work right now, and most of the people replacing them with AI tools know it and are doing it anyway.

To be clear about what this piece is not: it’s not an argument against people making a living. It’s not an argument against cottage industries, against self-published authors, against small creators using every tool available to survive in an economy that has never been particularly interested in their survival. People making a living is never the problem. Hoarded wealth is the problem. Indifference is the problem. Those are the things worth getting angry about — and they’re what this piece is actually about.

There is a kind of parent who does not think of themselves as withholding.

They think of themselves as fair. Consistent. Clear about expectations. They have a system, and the system works, and the fact that their child is sometimes upset by the system is not an indictment of the system — it is evidence that the child does not yet understand how the world operates. The parent is, in their own accounting, preparing the child for that world. Preparing them well. Getting nothing but grief for it.

This is the parent who operates on what we might call tit for tat logic: affection in exchange for compliance, attention in exchange for performance, validation in exchange for emotional regulation. The child learns quickly. They learn that the relationship has an exchange rate. And once you understand that a relationship has an exchange rate, you stop bringing it the things that can’t be priced.

Management didn’t suppress worker judgment by accident. It was incentivized to. Now the bill is coming due — and the workers who kept your organization running in spite of you are the only ones who can pay it.

“Your boss loves it when you treat him as your peer.”

— common workplace wisdom, with apologies to Galatians 3:28

You’ve probably seen the diagram. A wing cross-section, with neat horizontal lines flowing over and under it. The lines on top bend upward, taking a longer path. The explanation follows: air on top has farther to travel, so it speeds up to “meet” the air on the bottom at the trailing edge. Faster air means lower pressure. Lower pressure means lift. Simple.

Most of that is real. Bernoulli’s principle is real. The velocity difference is real. The pressure difference is real.

What’s wrong is the story about why. The popular explanation gets cause and effect backward — and that single confusion has obscured something much more satisfying hiding underneath.

He is standing in the kitchen three days after the funeral and he cannot find the coffee filters.

He has lived in this house for thirty-one years. He knows where the circuit breaker is, where the spare keys are kept, which neighbor has a snowblower he can borrow. He managed a department of fourteen people for two decades. He is not a helpless man.

But he does not know where the coffee filters are. He does not know which pediatrician the grandchildren see, or which of his adult children is currently not speaking to which other one, or what he is supposed to bring to Thanksgiving, or who he should call when he feels the way he is feeling right now.

Every man you know has refused to ask for directions.

It is a joke so old it barely registers anymore — the man driving in circles, certain he’ll figure it out, while everyone in the car quietly suffers. We laugh because we recognize it. We recognize it because it is everywhere: the man who won’t call the doctor, won’t ask the question, won’t admit he’s lost. Needing help feels like defeat. Asking for it feels like failure.

Here is what makes this worth more than a joke: a central reason Eve exists is to help him.

Justice Clarence Thomas recently delivered a remarkable address at the University of Texas at Austin. It was not a ceremonial speech. It was a philosophical argument — serious, historically grounded, and centered on a single urgent claim: that the principles of the Declaration of Independence require not just intellectual assent but personal courage to defend.

He is right about that. And that is precisely why the speech opens a door worth walking through — because his own framework, applied with the consistency he demands, leads to questions he did not pose.

Thomas’s central claim is that the Declaration’s self-evident truths — that all people are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — are not academic abstractions. He encountered them as a child in segregated Georgia as articles of faith, impervious to the bigotry around him. His grandfather, a man without formal education, understood that rights come from God, not from the architects of oppression. The power to treat people unequally, Thomas argues, does not confer the power to make them actually unequal.

The previous piece in this series used the phrase “educated vagina.” It was deliberate. It was also, let’s be clear, a provocation — not merely a neutral description.

If that phrase made you uncomfortable, I want to talk to you specifically. Not to apologize. Not to rephrase. To ask you one question first:

Has anyone ever written a WSJ opinion piece arguing that educated penises are causing a class divide?

The Wall Street Journal published a piece about how educated households are pulling away from everyone else. It costs $38 a month to read. You’ll need a degree to parse the methodology. The irony is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

The Wall Street Journal recently published an opinion piece arguing that women getting educated and earning good salaries is causing a “class divide.” The argument, stripped of its Gini coefficients and footnotes, runs like this: when educated women enter the workforce and marry educated men, the resulting dual-income household pulls away from everyone else — and this gap is the defining inequality story of our era.

Having a degree and a vagina is not a problem to be solved. It is the system working exactly as advertised. The intended consequence of education policy — that the more you learn, the more you earn, regardless of sex — is here being reframed as a social pathology. That reframing deserves scrutiny.

There is a question no one teaches women to ask.

They are coached to ask: Is he kind? Does he provide? Does he go to church? They are handed books about love languages, walked through premarital counseling, and assured that a good man’s protection is the greatest gift a woman can receive. They are told that submission is sacred. That yielding is worship. That the covering of a husband is the safest place on earth.

No one hands them the question that would test all of it:

Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion, published a piece this week at American Greatness that deserves more scrutiny than it will probably receive. Not because it’s unusual — it isn’t — but because it crystallizes a logical problem at the heart of how a certain kind of commentary has chosen to defend the current administration’s conduct in the Persian Gulf.

The piece concerns what Kimball frames as Trump’s masterstroke against Iran: a campaign of military strikes, aggressive rhetoric, and ultimately a ceasefire that Kimball presents as a historic victory. The rhetorical centerpiece of that campaign was a Truth Social post in which the President wrote, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Kimball’s argument is essentially that critics who found this alarming were performing hysteria, and that the Babylon Bee had it right: Trump was simply taking “a seemingly extreme position to negotiate the best possible deal.”

It sounds plausible until you follow the logic one step further — and then the entire argument collapses.

Before we talk about Fox News, before we talk about political double standards and broken-glass graphics and the machinery of partisan media, we need to start where this story actually starts: with the women.

Five women came forward. One of them — a former staffer who began interning for Eric Swalwell in 2019 when she was 20 years old — told CNN that he raped her in 2024, that she was heavily intoxicated, that she told him to stop, that he didn’t, and that she was left bruised and bleeding. She described living in fear every single day since. “I always felt like if I came forward, I was going to suffer the consequences because he was so powerful,” she said.

A second woman described waking up naked in a hotel room with Swalwell after a night of heavy drinking with no memory of what had occurred. Two others described receiving unsolicited explicit photos and sexual messages. A fifth described being kissed and groped without consent at a bar.

There is a document circulating in conservative policy circles right now called the Mass Deportation Coalition Playbook. It proposes removing over one million people from the United States in a single calendar year. It recommends worksite raids, bank account freezes, and what it calls a “whole-of-government approach” to locate, detain, and expel people who entered the country without authorization or overstayed their visas.

It is a serious document, in the sense that serious people wrote it with serious intent. And it ends with a flourish that deserves serious attention: a call, as America approaches its 250th birthday, for citizens to ask themselves whether they want to “preserve America for Americans.”

I would like to apply that principle consistently. Let’s follow it where it actually leads.

On Sunday night, the President of the United States posted an AI-generated image of himself to Truth Social. White robes. Red sash. One hand radiating divine light, the other laid healing on a sick man. Bald eagles. The Lincoln Memorial. Orthodox Easter.

Within hours the revolt came — not from the left, not from comedians, but from inside the house. Marjorie Taylor Greene called it “an Antichrist spirit.” A conservative commentator said he couldn’t imagine the narcissism. Far-right influencer Milo Yiannopoulos, who has defended this man through nearly everything, drew a line: “We tolerated this kind of meme against our better judgment.” His own Truth Social followers told him he would burn in hell.

A picture. An AI picture. That’s what broke the spell.

The final score was 34–17. Someone spiked the ball. The crowd went home. By Wednesday nobody could tell you who scored in the third quarter, and by the following Sunday the whole thing had been replaced by a new game with new stakes and a new reason to care for exactly three hours.

This is not a criticism of football. It is a description of what football is for. The game is engineered for maximum present-tense engagement. The drama is real, the stakes feel enormous, and then the clock hits zero and the whole apparatus resets. Designed obsolescence is not a flaw in the product. It is the product.

Contemporary Christian music has accidentally adopted the same production philosophy — and unlike football, it has no idea that’s what it’s doing.

The "millionaire exodus" is built on data produced by a firm that profits from wealthy migration. The capital flight threat is mostly overstated. And the real crisis — the one actually crushing wages, suppressing mobility, and hollowing out economic participation — isn't about tax rates at all. It's about rent. Adam Smith knew this in 1776. We keep forgetting it.

The image circulates with clockwork regularity: a stern-faced politician, a plummeting stock chart, bold letters screaming EXCLUSIVE. “16,500 millionaires left the UK in 2025,” the caption declares, followed by the inevitable sneer — Tax the rich, they said. Hmmm. It is designed to end a conversation before it begins. And it gets traction, partly because the number sounds authoritative. As we’ll show, it largely isn’t. But more importantly, it’s misdirection — a proxy war about tax rates that distracts from a more fundamental question the original thinkers of capitalism already answered.

That question isn’t whether wealthy people leave when you tax them. It’s whether the wealth being extracted from ordinary people is productive at all — or whether a large chunk of it is simply rent, a toll extracted for access to things nobody built. On that question, the evidence is clear, the economics are settled, and the politics are where we keep getting stuck.