Education is Elevation

The Conscious Lee
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Education is Elevation. Stats. Facts. History. theconsciouslee.substack.com

  1. 1d ago

    Democrats Used the People to Win, Then Told the People to Shut Up

    Thank you Nancy A. Thomas, Ami, FREEFREEPALESTINE🇵🇸, Darnell Martin, Suzie’s World, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. SORRY FOR THE LIVESTREAM ABRUBT ENDING... LAPTOP WENT DEAD. Apologies again. November 11th, a week and a day after the election, and I thought I was going to be giving y’all a nice little reflection on the time I spent in Detroit, the time I spent in Birmingham, the time I spent in New Hampshire, and the time I spent in Mississippi multiple times, walking from Forest to Meridian doing voter education and voter registration, then something more important came up. Right now there is a bunch of dialogue going around Democratic Party leadership, around Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, and I believe there is a lot of gaslighting happening, so today I am using my portable skills as a former professor and a Hall of Fame debater, and I am speaking mainly to adults, especially the adults that are purposely being obtuse in this moment. Here is the resolution, kinfolks. The same very people that taught us for two years that we should be defending democracy, that we should be protecting democracy, and that the fuel of the people was how we would get it done, are now looking at the people and saying, iMa bE hOnEsT wItH yOu, I don’t care about what the people want, I only care about bureaucratic procedure, I only care about what the caucus is going to do. Asked this week about the voters who don’t want him holding the gavel, Jeffries said the matter is “in the hands of the caucus right now.” Just admit that sentence is the whole defense. This means everybody telling us to get over it is wrong, not because the procedure is fake, the procedure is real, I’m going to walk you through it, they are wrong because the procedure was never the question. The question is desirability, and you cannot answer a desirability argument by reading me the rulebook. My homeboy Stacy G told me to be a person of principle, not a person of pressure, so let’s start with the principle. In most classrooms throughout this country, when high school students go through civics and government, we teach them three cornerstones of democracy, popular sovereignty, checks and balances, and separation of powers. Popular sovereignty is the political principle that the authority, the legitimacy, and the moral right of a government are created and sustained by the consent of its people, who are the ultimate source of all political power. The Declaration puts it in one clause, governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and nowhere in that clause do you see the words consent of the caucus. Class, what is popular sovereignty? How I aced them tests in high school was remembering it like a popularity contest, popular, what do the people want. Then look at what the people said. Democrats hold 254 House seats with races still out, they hold 54 Senate seats after seven flips with Mississippi and Alaska still waiting on a call, and one week before that wave the Economist and YouGov poll had 54% of Americans disapproving of the job Schumer is doing with 24% approving, and 47% disapproving of Jeffries with 26% approving. Schumer was the only one of the four congressional leaders underwater with his own party’s voters. A petition asking House Democrats to pick somebody else has passed a million signatures. The people consented to the majority, the people did not consent to the managers, and the managers are answering with a procedural objection. They Been Telling the People to Wait in the Hallway Crazy how none of this is new, and I need y’all to have the history before we touch one more poll, because when somebody tells you “that is just how the caucus works” they are counting on you not knowing that how the caucus works has been rewritten every single time people refused to accept it. Atlantic City, August 1964. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, built that spring in Jackson by sharecroppers, domestics, and SNCC organizers who had been locked out of the regular all white state party, sent 68 delegates to the Democratic National Convention and asked to be seated as the real Democrats of Mississippi. On August 22nd Fannie Lou Hamer sat in front of the Credentials Committee and told the country what was done to her in the Winona jail for trying to register, and the President of the United States called a press conference for no reason except to pull the cameras off of her. Then came the procedure. The offer was two at large seats, and the party, not the delegation, would pick who sat in them. Historian John Dittmer documents how committee members who backed the challenge got phone calls about jobs and appointments they could lose. Respected leaders told the delegation to take the deal and be grateful. Mrs. Hamer’s answer was that they did not come all that way for no two seats, and the delegation voted the compromise down. Most of the folks telling us to get over it would have told Mrs. Hamer to take the two seats. Then watch what happened next, because this is the part they leave off the whiteboard. By 1968 the convention seated an integrated Mississippi delegation, and the party rewrote its delegate rules through the McGovern Fraser reforms. The procedure that was immovable in 1964 moved in four years, and what moved it was people who refused the two seats. Ahh, but the party learned too. In 1982 the Hunt Commission created superdelegates, unpledged party insiders with convention votes, as a check on what primary voters might do, and it took another fight after 2016 before the DNC voted in August 2018 to strip their first ballot votes. Procedure is not a law of nature, procedure is a record of who had leverage the last time somebody pushed. The speaker’s gavel has the same history. In March 1910, insurgent Republicans led by George Norris joined with Democrats and voted 191 to 156 to strip Speaker Joe Cannon of his grip on the Rules Committee. In December 1923, progressive Republicans held out for nine ballots and walked away with rules changes. In December 2018, Nancy Pelosi accepted a term limit on her own speakership to win over holdouts inside her own caucus. In January 2023, Kevin McCarthy needed 15 ballots across four days. Withholding a vote is not chaos, withholding a vote is the oldest procedure in the building. Even the enslaving, colonizing architects of this system left a note about it, Jefferson wrote to Madison in September 1789 that the earth belongs to the living, that the dead have no business governing them, and here we are in 2026 with people telling the living to shut up and honor a caucus custom. Research Over MeSearch: What the People Asked For and What Came Back Listen, you can disagree with what I’m saying, when you step to me and try to say I’m wrong, present the data, because nothing in here is substantiated by passion. Health care. KFF’s September 2026 tracking poll found that 66% of Americans favor a national Medicare for All plan, the largest share since KFF began asking, including 84% of Democrats and 72% of independents. Jeffries put his name on that bill as a rank and file member through 2021, stopped once his colleagues made him leader, and on August 16th told Meet the Press it is not legislation he supports. Schumer is not on the bill either. Two things can be true, the same KFF poll shows support dropping when people hear the tax argument, and that is a debate you win on the floor in front of the public, not a reason to keep the floor closed. Then listen to the substitute they offer, “affordability.” If you are in poverty and you are barely able to feed yourself, what health care can you afford? I’m having this conversation with y’all from Houston, Texas, and it’s folks in Third Ward, in Fifth Ward, in Acres Homes, in South Park, that cannot afford, so the word affordability is linguistic finessing that lets a politician say health care without ever saying poor people. Money. An Issue One and YouGov survey found 79% of Americans say big spending by wealthy donors and corporations leads to corruption or the look of it, 7… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe

  2. 3d ago

    Chuck Schumer Gotta Go: $150 Million for Ohio, $0 for Angie Nixon

    If Chuck Schumer hadn’t let his arrogance, incompetence, and racism lead, and had actually supported Black candidates, we would have elected Angie Nixon in Florida, Jamie Davis in Louisiana, and even Everett Wess in Alabama, all three of whom lost by single digits. Those aren’t my words first. Qasim Rashid wrote them in his Substack piece “Why Chuck Schumer Must Not Be Senate Majority Leader,” I read them out loud on camera, and I’m gonna credit him and say them again here because the receipts back him up. Rashid’s next lines hit just as hard: if Scott Colom had another $1 million, we wouldn’t be ballot curing right now, and we could have locked in four new Black senators and flipped four red seats, from the Gulf to the Delta, in one night. What I’m adding is the ledger, the history, and the view from the passenger seat. Instead I’m in a car with AB and Valencia Robinson, driving to DeSoto County, Mississippi, making sure we cure some of them ballots before the Tuesday deadline, because the people with the money decided a long time ago that this part of the map was a charity case and not an investment. So let me say it plain for the folks in the back. In politics, spending equals values. A party can tweet whatever it wants about Black voters being the backbone, it can put Fannie Lou Hamer on a graphic in February, it can say “Mississippi matters” at a fundraiser, but the budget is the only document that don’t lie. Most of what follows is just reading the budget. The Ledger Don’t Lie Start with the money that did move. Senate Majority PAC, the super PAC aligned with Schumer, spent $150 million in Ohio, $67 million each in Iowa and Michigan, $65 million in Maine, $40 million in Texas, and $14 million in Kansas, and Democrats won all six. Nobody is mad that they won Ohio. Crazy how the same operation found $150 million for one state and found zero dollars, not a discount, zero, for Florida and zero for Louisiana. Angie Nixon, a Jacksonville state representative and union organizer, upset Alexander Vindman in the Florida primary and then got outspent on television by roughly $28.7 million to $7.9 million, according to AdImpact figures reported by Drop Site. Neither Senate Majority PAC nor the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spent a dollar on her race through Election Day. When she asked Schumer for help, she says his answer was two words: “We’ll see.” She lost to Ashley Moody by less than three points in a state where Republicans hold a 1.5 million voter registration edge. Jamie Davis, a Tensas Parish farmer and former police juror, ran for Bill Cassidy’s open seat in Louisiana and lost to Julia Letlow 745,963 to 720,106. That is a margin of 25,857 votes, 50.9 to 49.1, in a state Trump carried by 22 points two years ago. The American Prospect says it ran the only national magazine piece on his campaign, which tells you how far off the radar the party kept him. Letlow raised about $7 million to his $5 million, and the Democratic Senate machine added nothing on top. Everett Wess lost Alabama to Barry Moore 54.7 to 45.2, about 159,000 votes, in a state Trump won by more than 30. That is still single digits, and Rashid is right to include him, because a 21 point swing toward a Black Democrat in Alabama is not a fluke, it’s a signal somebody declined to fund. Then Mississippi. Schumer recruited Scott Colom and held a fundraiser for him, then the DSCC left Mississippi out of a $40 million investment across ten battleground states. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the only Democrat Mississippi sends to Washington, called it a missed golden opportunity in September. Senate Majority PAC did not run its first ad until Oct. 20, a $1.2 million buy two weeks before Election Day, and by Drop Site’s final count the PAC put about $2.2 million into the race and the DSCC roughly $500,000. Hyde Smith’s own campaign manager mocked it, saying it took Schumer thirteen months to run a single ad. As of Monday, Nov. 9, the race is still uncalled: Colom leads 467,930 to 465,356, a 2,574 vote margin, affidavit voters have until Tuesday, Nov. 10 to bring their ID to the circuit clerk, and counties must certify by Nov. 13. Hyde Smith has posted that she will represent Mississippi for the next six years. The count will decide that, not her timeline. Whitey on the Moon, y’all. $150 million to Ohio for one seat, $0 to the two states where a Black candidate lost by under three points. That’s the ledger. You don’t need to read a man’s heart when you can read his spreadsheet. So let me be precise about the word racism, since Rashid used it and so did I. I’m not claiming to know what Chuck Schumer feels about Black people. I’m making the same argument civil rights lawyers make in a disparate impact case: when a decision maker’s choices fall on one racial group again and again, the pattern is the evidence, and intent is the defendant’s favorite hiding place. Four Black nominees in four red Southern states, two funded at zero, one funded late, one funded at a fraction of what his white predecessor got. Call it racism, call it capture, call it risk aversion, the impact lands on the same people every cycle, and Democrats who spent years fighting the intent standard in court don’t get to hide behind it when the defendant is their own leader. Revels Sat Down in February Here is the part they gonna celebrate in about ninety days. Hiram Revels was sworn in as the first Black United States senator on Feb. 25, 1870, representing Mississippi. Blanche K. Bruce followed him from Mississippi and served a full term from 1875 to 1881. That’s it. That is the entire list of Black senators the Magnolia State has ever sent, and Bruce walked out in March 1881. If Colom holds, he is the first Black senator from Mississippi in 145 years. Louisiana is worse, because Louisiana actually elected a Black man and the Senate refused to seat him. P.B.S. Pinchback was chosen by the Louisiana legislature in 1873, and after three years of argument the Senate voted in March 1876 not to let him sit down. Florida has never sent a Black senator. Alabama has never sent one. Kentucky has never sent one. So when Rashid says four new Black senators, understand what that means in Southern time. Nixon would have been Florida’s first. Davis would have been Louisiana’s first seated. Wess would have been Alabama’s first. Colom would be the first from Mississippi since Reconstruction. Then ask why the list is that short, and the answer is not vibes, it’s paperwork. Mississippi rewrote its constitution in 1890 with a poll tax and an “understanding” clause that let a white registrar decide whether a Black man understood the constitution well enough to vote, and the Supreme Court blessed the scheme in Williams v. Mississippi in 1898. Louisiana followed in 1898 with its grandfather clause, and Black registration there fell from 130,334 in 1896 to 1,342 by 1904. That was the Mississippi Plan going regional, and it held for most of a century. The Democratic Party knows this history intimately, because for most of that century it was the party running the registrar’s office. Then in August 1964 the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party showed up in Atlantic City with a delegation chosen by the people the regulars had locked out, and Fannie Lou Hamer testified on live television about being beaten in a Winona jail for trying to register. Lyndon Johnson called a press conference to pull the cameras off her. The party’s offer was two at large seats, take it or leave it, and Hamer answered that they didn’t come all this way for no two seats. Sixty two years later the offer is a $1.2 million ad buy in the last two weeks. Same playbook, new toilet. Apply Frymer Here: Captured, Not Courted Paul Frymer’s Uneasy Alliances names the thing we keep describing in street language. Frymer argues that in a two party system built to win the median white voter, Black voters become a captured group. One party writes them off, the other assumes they have nowhere else to go, and s… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe

  3. Nov 1

    "Too Many Natives, Not Enough Negroes"

    Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. I’m leaving Portsmouth, New Hampshire right now, second time in the state, and the first time don’t really count because I was at the Dartmouth Round Robin back in like 2018, 2019, sleeping in Vermont and driving back and forth, so I never got the experience, I just got the tournament. This time I came on purpose, I walked the Black Heritage Trail, I stood on top of a burying ground, and I’m riding down the highway with every color God ever made sitting in the trees, a little yellow, a little green, a little orange, a little red, and I can’t escape my thoughts, kinfolks. Here’s the thought. I think we let the North get away with a lot of North versus South shenanigans, and they get to kind of discursively write away slavery, write away racial violence, write away everything that would make them look like the South they love to point at. You come to New England and every town is gonna let you know this is the birthplace of America, they’re gonna let you know that s**t, you feel me. Like a gang member on the block, this is the red, white, and blue over here, I don’t know what they doing over there, goddammit, but it’s red, white, and blue over here, gang gang. The state motto on every license plate up here is Live Free or Die. Shidd. Most of the people who lived in the Piscataqua region in the 1700s did not get that choice, and the ones who were Native to this land were not given the freedom part or the dying part on their own terms either. So this essay is about a motto with a footnote, a port with two doors, and a region that wrote its own alibi so well that the rest of the country started reading it in school. The Customs House Had a Loophole Historical context first, then present day, because that’s how we do. The first documented enslaved African in New Hampshire was purchased at Piscataqua in 1645, which means slavery is older in this colony than most of the white families who later bragged about building it. By 1707 the colony counted about 70 Black people, small numbers, yes, but numbers concentrated in Portsmouth in the households of the merchant families whose names are still on the buildings, and New Hampshire, following the Virginia logic, made a child’s status as slave or free follow the status of the mother, which is partus sequitur ventrem in a Puritan hat. Now here go the part I said on the live, and let me tighten it up because the receipts are better than how I said it. I said folks brought their enslaved people to New Hampshire to get around paying taxes and then moved them to Massachusetts, and I called it the antebellum days. The era was wrong, it was colonial, the first half of the 1700s, and the tax was not a sales tax, it was an import duty. Massachusetts put a duty of four pounds on every enslaved African brought into the colony in 1705 and 1706, Rhode Island taxed imports too, and New Hampshire did not. So historians of the colony describe slave traders entering the port of Portsmouth in greater numbers to dodge those duties, landing human beings in the colony with no tariff and moving them to Massachusetts buyers. Read that again. The famous New Hampshire hustle, come up here because we don’t tax you, is older than the gas stations on the border selling liquor to folks from Massachusetts. The first thing New Hampshire was a tax haven for was the slave trade. Just admit it, the Live Free state was a duty free port for unfree people. By 1773 New Hampshire counted 674 enslaved people. In 1779, twenty enslaved men in Portsmouth, all born in Africa and stolen “when but children,” petitioned the legislature for their freedom using the exact language the colonists were using against the king, and one of them, Prince Whipple, had marched to Saratoga with William Whipple, who signed the Declaration of Independence. The legislature did not act on it. In 1789 the state took enslaved people off the list of taxable property, which a lot of folks read as abolition, but it was a tax change, not an emancipation. The census still counted one enslaved person in New Hampshire in 1840, and the state did not pass a law against slavery until 1857, four years before the Civil War. Two hundred and thirty four years after the petition, in 2013, the legislature voted to posthumously free those twenty men, which is a beautiful gesture and also the most New England thing I ever heard, granting freedom to the dead because the living ain’t vote. Same Port, Two Directions This is the part I was telling TJ about in the car. After King Philip’s War, the bloodiest war per capita in colonial American history, a lot of Native people from southern New England fled north into New Hampshire, and by September 1676 around 400 Native people were gathered at Cochecho, what we now call Dover, half of them refugees and half of them Wonalancet’s Pennacook people, who had stayed out of the fighting. Major Richard Waldron ran Cochecho, he ran the trading post, he ran the mills on the river, and he had just signed a peace treaty with Wonalancet. Massachusetts sent soldiers up with orders to capture the refugees. So Waldron came up with what a lot of the local histories still call clever: he proposed a training day, a “sham fight” after the English mode, invited the Native men to fire their guns in a mock battle, and when their guns were empty his militia surrounded them. The local Pennacook were sorted out and let go. About 200 others were marched to Boston, seven or eight were hanged, and the rest were sold into slavery in “foreign parts,” which the sources mostly name as Barbados and the West Indies. So when I said on the live that there was a compromise, a peace talk, and the secret was to push these Native people out and send them to the Caribbean as slaves, that’s the story. A peace treaty used as a trap, a war game used as a cage, and a ship used as a deportation. Then I said the line I want to sit with: New Hampshire had too many Natives and not enough Negroes. That’s my framing, not something Waldron wrote down. What the record does show is the trade logic. The Caribbean sugar islands were where enslaved Africans were being worked to death, and New England sent food, lumber, fish, and sometimes Native captives south, then brought sugar, molasses, rum, and sometimes enslaved Africans back north. The same Atlantic route, the same merchant class, the same harbors of the same seacoast, moving one people in and another people out. Wendy Warren’s New England Bound takes apart the idea that New England was a place where slavery was small and incidental. Her argument is that colonization and slavery in New England were not two stories, they were one economy, the colonists needed land cleared of its people and labor brought in from somewhere else, and the ships solved both problems in a single round trip. A Native captive sold to Barbados and an African captive sold in Portsmouth were not opposites, they were the same transaction viewed from two ends of the voyage. This means the boat is the argument. The same boat and the same port that’ll bring an African in here so they can do what they want to do is the same port that’ll take a Native American person from their homeland and send them to a Caribbean island. Like, settler colonialism and antiblackness ain’t two separate theories you pick between in a seminar. In New Hampshire they shared a dock. Lastly on Waldron, history did not let him keep his cleverness. Thirteen years later, in June 1689, Pennacook and Wabanaki warriors came back to Cochecho, got into the garrison houses, and killed Waldron, then 74 years old. The local legend says they cut him across the chest and asked him if that settled his accounts, because he was known for cheating on trade weights. The town history calls it the Cochecho Massacre. Most of the plaques do not lead with the sham fight that came first, which tells you whose violence gets a proper noun. Refuge and Captiv… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe

    "Too Many Natives, Not Enough Negroes"

  4. Oct 30

    They Turned the Library Into Detention and Called It a Team Center: Abbott, HISD and the Voucher Coupon

    Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. What the chair of the Harris County Democratic Party taught me about the arrest as a civics class, the library as a holding room, and why the people who say your vote don’t matter keep spending nine figures to stop it Do you care if your neighbor good? Is your neighbor good? Another beautiful day in the neighborhood, Houston, Texas, Wednesday, October 28th, and I had Traci Gibson pull up, the chair of the Harris County Democratic Party, the largest county in the state, a lawyer, somebody I first met back home in Bryan College Station, and the first Black woman to hold that seat, as she told it on air. I brought her on because there’s been a lot of talk about the vote numbers, and I wanted somebody who actually has to move those numbers to tell us what they mean, what they don’t mean, and what the folks who want us home are counting on us not to know. The numbers are real. On Monday, October 19, the first day of early voting, 104,659 people checked in to vote in person in Harris County, blowing past the old first day midterm record of 63,188 set in 2018, an increase of about 66 percent, and by Wednesday the county had 327,691 people who had voted early or had a mail ballot received. That’s a crowd. That’s a movement if we let it be one. Then I gotta be honest with y’all, because I watch KBTX, shout out to Rusty, we don’t agree on everything but it’s love, and KBTX made the point that we had record breaking numbers in 2018 and again in 2022, and Republicans still won statewide. Two things can be true. Turnout is power, and turnout by itself has never been a strategy. Traci’s answer was the right one: do not get comfortable, keep your foot on the gas, because the most dangerous sentence in a midterm is “oh, they got it.” What I want to do in this piece is connect some dots that the conversation kept circling. Most of the receipts we talked about (the THC ban, the smuggling law, the jail polling place, my daddy being on papers ten years and not knowing he could vote, the state reaching down to snatch money from HPD, the libraries in HISD turned into discipline rooms) look like separate issues. They are not separate. They are one lesson, taught over and over, by the state, to the exact people the campaigns say “don’t vote.” The lesson is: government is something that happens to you. Do not come back. Before the Ballot, the Booking History first, because Texas did not stumble into this. Texas is the state that wrote the word “white” into its Democratic primary law in 1923, the law the Supreme Court struck in Nixon v. Herndon in 1927, and then the state and the party kept finding new doors until Smith v. Allwright closed the white primary in 1944. Texas kept a poll tax on state elections until a federal court killed it in 1966. Texas has disenfranchised people convicted of felonies since 1845, and the way it stopped doing that permanently is the part our families were never told. In 1983 the Legislature passed House Bill 718, which ended lifetime felony disenfranchisement but made you wait five years after you discharged your sentence. Lawmakers shaved that waiting period down over the next decade, from five, to two, and then in 1997 Rep. Harold Dutton’s House Bill 1001, signed by then Governor George W. Bush and effective September 1, 1997, eliminated the waiting period entirely. Researchers estimated that one change alone restored the vote to roughly 317,000 Texans by 2000. So here’s the law, plain: if you are off papers, meaning you have fully discharged your sentence, including parole, probation or supervision, you can vote in Texas. If you are in the county jail on a misdemeanor, you can vote. If you are in the county jail on a felony charge and you have not been convicted, you can vote. Traci pointed out that it says so on the voter registration card, and that you don’t need a Texas ID to register. I found this out on a Sunday, y’all. My daddy was on parole for ten years. He posted a picture after he went and voted with his wife, and I’m like, how the hell you voted, you a felon. He said, nah, little boy, I’m off papers. I had to sit with that. A whole grown man with graduate degrees, a former national champion debater, a professor, and I did not know a law that has been on the books since before I could read. The people I grew up around, the ones locked up around me, did not know it either. Traci said the same thing happened at her “Party with the Party” events: a brother told her, oh no, I’ve been in jail, and she said, are you off papers, he said yes, and they registered him on the spot. That ignorance is not an accident. That ignorance is a product. The Sentencing Project estimates roughly 479,000 Texans still cannot vote because of a felony conviction, most of them living in our neighborhoods on probation or parole, and voting eligible Black Texans are about two and a half times as likely as non Black Texans to be shut out. Harris County opened a polling place inside its jail in 2021 after years of organizing. Dallas County followed in May 2023. As of the last reporting, those were the only two jails in Texas with a polling place inside. Every other county jail makes eligible people rely on a mail ballot that most of them were booked too late to request. Now apply Lerman and Weaver here. Amy Lerman and Vesla Weaver, in Arresting Citizenship, studied what happens to people’s relationship with government after contact with police, courts and jails, and the finding is brutal in its simplicity. Contact with the criminal legal system, even a stop, even an arrest with no conviction, teaches people that the state is something that watches, punishes and processes them, and those people participate less afterward. Lerman and Weaver call this custodial citizenship: a whole class of Americans whose main experience of their government is custody. They are not describing a few bad apples. They are describing a curriculum. This means the question is not only “who gets to vote.” The question is who the state has already taught not to bother. When my people say “voting don’t matter,” that is not apathy falling from the sky. That is a lesson somebody paid to teach. The Lieutenant Governor’s Dare Now watch how the curriculum gets new lessons. In June 2025, after Governor Abbott vetoed Senate Bill 3, the full THC ban, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick stood at a press conference and said, in substance, that he was not going to legalize marijuana in Texas, and that if people wanted to vote him out of office for that, so be it. Traci said it best: just like Trump said vote like he on the ballot, that’s exactly what we’re gonna do. Vote like they on the ballot, man. Here is what happened after the dare. On May 1, 2026, the Texas Supreme Court sided with the Department of State Health Services in the Sky Marketing case. The mandate issued June 5. DSHS put a notice in the Texas Register on July 10. On July 31, 2026, delta 8, delta 10, THCP and other hemp derived THC variants became Schedule I controlled substances in Texas, the same schedule as heroin. Possession now starts as a state jail felony, 180 days to two years and a fine up to $10,000. The Legislature tried to pass a ban and failed, so an agency and a court did it instead. I need to be precise here, because precision is how we don’t get finessed. Marijuana itself was never legal in Texas. Possession under four ounces has been a Class A or B misdemeanor for years, and what changed in Harris County over the last decade was prosecutorial discretion, diversion and police priority, not the law. What changed on July 31 is that a whole legal hemp market, the gas station gummies, the vapes, the THCA flower, flipped overnight into felony territory. Traci’s framing that “tomorrow you can no longer have weed” is how it landed on the street. The legal mechanism is the reclassification, and it is worse than a misdemeanor crackdown, because it manufac… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe

  5. Oct 28

    Why ADHD Makes You Impatient AND Over Explain Everything (It's Not a Contradiction)

    ADHD is getting annoyed when people don’t get right to the point. ADHD is also over explaining to avoid misunderstandings. Now I know some of y’all looking at those two sentences like they can’t live in the same body, like a person can’t be the one tapping their foot while you tell a story AND the one who needs eleven minutes to tell you why they was late, but I’m here to tell you how it ain’t a contradiction, it’s a receipt. Impatience and over explaining ain’t opposite traits. They’re two responses from the same brain that’s trying to manage time, memory, and the fear of being misread. This essay does three things. First, it walks through the science of why one brain can hold both alarms. Second, it shows how the medical and school systems taught a whole lot of us to over explain, by calling neurological difference a character flaw for over two hundred years. Third, it follows that pattern into the classroom, into the courtroom, and into the life of a Black girl whose ADHD got written down as attitude. Then I’mma tell you to go get evaluated, because I’m an educator, not a psychiatrist, and this right here is Research over MeSearch, not a diagnosis. The Waiting Room Got a Price Tag Start with psychologist Edmund Sonuga Barke. His dual pathway model, published in the early 2000s, argues that ADHD ain’t only an attention problem, it’s also about delay aversion. Meaning, for a lot of ADHD brains, waiting in itself costs us a real emotion, you feel me? It is not that we can’t wait, it’s that the wait charges a fee, and the fee comes out of the emotional account. So when you take the scenic route to your point, my brain is literally paying rent on every minute you spend getting there. Then add clinical psychologist Russell Barkley, who framed ADHD as a disorder of executive function, especially when it comes to working memory, that mental notepad that holds information while you use it. Barkley’s whole argument is that ADHD is a problem of doing what you know, not knowing what to do, which is crazy how that one sentence clears up decades of teachers calling us lazy. While y’all processing your story, we trying to take down notes, and every detail of that notepad is getting put on the page. When you don’t get to a point, the page fills up, the notepad starts sliding off the desk, I start getting overstimulated, and I start putting down my pen, putting down the pad, and probably just zoning out. That’s when the inattentiveness come in on my neuro spicy. Now flip it. Psychiatrist William Dodson popularized the term rejection sensitive dysphoria to describe the intense pain a lot of ADHD folks feel around criticism, rejection, or even the possibility of being judged. It ain’t a formal DSM diagnosis, and I want y’all to hear that clearly, but clinicians report the pattern consistently enough that it became shorthand. So over explaining becomes protection. My mind be like, if I give you every single detail, you can’t misunderstand me, and if you can’t misunderstand me, I can’t get punished for being misunderstood. Matter of fact, you can ask me a question, I’mma explain it to you so thoroughly your face turn blue, because ain’t no room left for the misunderstanding. So here go the two roles. What the impatience says is “get to the point.” What the impatience structurally does is protect a working memory that is already full. What the over explaining says is “let me give you context.” What the over explaining structurally does is protect a nervous system that has been misread so many times it started building legal briefs for every conversation. Same brain. Two alarms. One is guarding the clock, the other is guarding the record. Where the Insecurity Comes From (And Why It Ain’t Yours to Carry) Here is the paragraph I really want somebody to sit with. When you grow up with ADHD, especially undiagnosed, you grow up being corrected, interrupted, misread, and told you are careless and lazy for an issue that was never an effort problem. Every forgotten assignment became a speech about responsibility, every interruption became a speech about respect, every lost key became evidence that something was wrong with you as a person rather than with the way your brain files information. Over time, that does something to how you see yourself. It plants an insecurity that sounds like “I’m too much,” “I’m not enough,” “I always mess it up,” and “if I don’t explain everything, they’ll think the worst.” Some of us became perfectionists to stay ahead of the correction, some of us became people pleasers to stay ahead of the rejection, some of us became the class clown so the laugh would land before the criticism did, and some of us just got quiet, because if you never speak you can never be misunderstood. That insecurity is real, but hear me clearly: it is a learned response to how people treated your symptoms, not proof of who you are. You was not a bad kid. You was an unsupported kid. The over explaining is not your personality, it is your armor, and armor makes sense when you been hit enough times. Ain’t nothing wrong with you for building it. The goal now is to find out what’s actually going on so you can decide which pieces of that armor you still need. Maybe it’s a trauma response. Maybe. Experts, let me know in the comment section. Two Hundred Years of Calling It Character Historical context first, then the present day, because the people who say ADHD is some new TikTok invention need to meet the archive. In 1798, Scottish physician Sir Alexander Crichton described a mental restlessness he called an incapacity of attending with a necessary degree of constancy to any one object. That’s ADHD, inattentive presentation, described while John Adams was president. In 1902, British pediatrician George Still gave a set of lectures to the Royal College of Physicians on dozens of children who could not sustain attention. Here go the receipt that matters: Still called what he saw an abnormal defect of moral control. Read that again. The first major clinical description of these kids filed a neurological difference under morality. That is the origin story of “careless and lazy.” The first doctor in the room already wrote it down as character. Now put that next to what was happening to Black people in that same century. In 1851, Louisiana physician Samuel Cartwright invented drapetomania, a so called disease that made enslaved people want to run away, and dysaesthesia aethiopica, a so called disease that made them careless and work slowly. So medicine invented a disease to explain Black resistance to slavery, while a few decades later it would describe white children’s inattention as a defect of moral control. Every accusation is a confession, y’all. The pathology always pointed wherever control was needed. Follow it forward. In 1937, Charles Bradley gave Benzedrine to children at a Rhode Island hospital home and saw their schoolwork improve. In 1968, the DSM II formally named the hyperkinetic reaction of childhood. In 1980, DSM III renamed it attention deficit disorder, with or without hyperactivity. The ADHD name we use now came later, in 1987, with DSM III R. In 1994, DSM IV split it into subtypes, and in 2013, DSM 5 called them presentations and finally made it easier for adults to be diagnosed. So when somebody tell you ADHD is new, tell them it’s older than the Emancipation Proclamation. The only thing new is that people finally started listening. Then most of y’all know about Jonathan Metzl’s The Protest Psychosis, which showed how in the 1960s and 1970s psychiatric records started describing schizophrenia as a hostile, aggressive, Black male protest condition. That same era is when ADHD entered the manual. So ask yourself which kids got read as hyperkinetic and which kids got read as dangerous. Same behavior. Different file. That is the hinge this whole essay turns on. Seeing It as a Personal Failing Is the Ableism One of the reasons people don’t recognize ADHD as a disability is that they se… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe

  6. Oct 18

    Why ADHD Grabs the $5 Every Single Time

    I got 4,000 screenshots in my camera roll right now, and I’m being honest too, because I’m not about to stand up here during ADHD Awareness Month talking about brain science like I’m outside the problem. Receipts, book recommendations, tweets that changed my whole life, a video I swore I was gonna make, a thread I promised myself I’d come back to.. I ain’t came back to it at all. Most of y’all reading this got the same graveyard in your pocket, a whole cemetery of good ideas with no headstones, and every time you scroll past it you feel that little drop in your stomach that says you the kind of person who never finishes nothing. Then you got to sit with this part: if you got ADHD, this is not a character flaw. It’s brain science. Research over MeSearch. Now some of y’all might be asking yourself, but why? Why would a brain that is terrified of losing ideas build a system that guarantees it loses them? Why does the tool that’s supposed to save the idea end up erasing it? The answer runs through five research programs, a 1927 lab in Berlin, a museum in Connecticut, a hoarding clinic in Hartford, and a school system that decides which restless child gets called ADHD and which restless child gets called a problem. Let’s talk about the spice. The Desk With No Edges Let’s start with Dr. Russell Barkley, a clinical psychologist who spent over four decades researching everything ADHD and one of the most cited voices in the field. Barkley teaches us that ADHD ain’t really about attention. It’s a disorder of executive function, of self regulation, of the machinery that lets you hold a goal in your head long enough to act on it. Barkley’s famous line is that ADHD is not a problem of knowing what to do, it is a problem of doing what you know, which means the issue is not intelligence and it is not information, it is the gap between the moment you learn something and the moment you need to use it. Think about it through this analogy. Working memory is the desk where you hold an idea while you use it. For us, the desk got no edges. The ideas slide right off. Sometimes my desk so slick I put a thought down to grab my keys and by the time I turn around the thought is on the floor under the couch with the remote and a sock I been looking for since July. So we fear losing them, and that fear is earned. That’s the part people miss when they call it laziness. The ADHD brain has a long history of watching good ideas evaporate, of walking into a room and forgetting why, of promising somebody something with full sincerity and then having the promise fall off the desk before the end of the day. A brain with that track record learns to grab. The screenshot is the grab. It’s not vanity and it’s not hoarding for fun, it’s a nervous system that has been burned enough times to stop trusting itself with storage. Ahh, but here’s the problem. Grabbing the idea and holding the idea are two different jobs, and the phone can only do one of them. The Waiter, the Check, and the Legend Now, ADHD gang, I’m going to tell y’all something that might mess y’all head a little bit. In the 1920s a young psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik, born in Lithuania and later one of the founders of Soviet clinical psychology, was working in Berlin under Kurt Lewin, and the story goes that the whole lab noticed something at a restaurant: the waiters remembered every unpaid order perfectly, then forgot it the second the check got paid. Zeigarnik took that observation into the lab in 1927, interrupted people in the middle of simple tasks, and reported that they recalled the unfinished tasks better than the finished ones. That’s where my anxiety comes from sometimes. Unfinished tasks create tension in the mind. Hitting a screenshot feels like paying the check. The tension drops, so our brain files it as done, even though you ain’t did nothing with it. Then I got to be honest with y’all, because Research over MeSearch means I correct myself before anybody else gets the chance. A 2025 meta analysis by Romain Ghibellini and Beat Meier pulled together nearly a century of attempts to replicate Zeigarnik and found no reliable memory advantage for unfinished tasks once you set her original data aside. The waiter who remembers everything perfectly is closer to legend than law. What did hold up, across study after study, was something her colleague Maria Ovsiankina described: people have a strong, general urge to go back and resume what got interrupted. Two things can be true. The memory part got oversold, and the pull is real. That unfinished video don’t sit in your brain like a perfect file, it sits there like a hand on your shoulder, tugging, and that’s worse in a way, because a file you can open and a tug you can only feel. This is where the research gets good for us. In 2011, E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister published a set of studies with a title that sounds like something your auntie would say: “Consider It Done!” They activated unfinished goals in people and watched those goals cause intrusive thoughts, hog mental resources, and drag down performance on unrelated tasks. Then they let some participants write a specific plan for when and how they would finish the goal. The plan alone, before any of the work got done, eliminated the interference. Sit with that, because it flips the whole camera roll. The screenshot fakes paying the check. A plan actually pays it. The screenshot tells your brain “it’s saved” so the tension drops for the wrong reason, the tug comes back later as guilt, and the idea stays undone. A real plan tells your brain “Friday at ten, I’m drafting the intro,” and the research says your mind can genuinely let it go until Friday at ten. One is a receipt you printed yourself. The other is the bank confirming the transfer. Five Dollars Now Through researching ADHD, I learned about something called delay aversion, and this is where we get a little heavy. A dude named Edmund Sonuga Barke, a developmental psychologist who now teaches at King’s College London, built what he calls the dual pathway model of ADHD back in 2002. One pathway is executive function. That’s Barkley’s lane, the desk with no edges. The other pathway is motivation, and that’s where delay aversion lives. Sonuga Barke’s argument was that these are two separate roads to the same diagnosis, which is why two people with ADHD can struggle in completely different ways. Delay aversion means waiting itself feels bad, not boring bad, but like an intellectual and emotional cost. Offer most folks $5 now or $10 tomorrow and they’ll wait. A delay averse brain grabs the five, not because it can’t do the math, but because the wait hurts more than the extra five is worth. Then when the brain can’t escape the wait, it creates stimulation to fill it: scrolling, switching tabs, starting something new. On my pawpaw grave, if I had a fourth of the projects I’ve started done, I’d be in a different place in life and a different place in my career. Now let me correct something I said on camera, because the dopamine story matters. ADHD is not about having an extreme level of dopamine. The evidence points the other way. In a 2009 study in JAMA, Nora Volkow and her team scanned 53 adults with ADHD who had never been medicated and found lower levels of dopamine receptors and transporters in the brain’s reward pathway than in people without ADHD, and those lower levels tracked with inattention. Later work from the same team tied those differences to lower motivation scores. So it’s not too much dopamine. It’s a reward signal that comes in quiet, which means ordinary rewards don’t register loud enough to pull you through a boring middle, and the brain goes hunting for something louder. Now apply that to your camera roll. Actually processing the idea is a delayed reward. It pays off days later. The screenshot pays off right now. Delay aversion will choose right now every single time. I think about it like instant gratification versus delayed happiness. Being ADHD has given me… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe

    Why ADHD Grabs the $5 Every Single Time

  7. Oct 13

    Anywhere There Was Slavery Is East Texas: The Freedom Colonies They Erased From Your Map

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Freedom Colonies, the Other Million, and the State That Keeps Telling Us What We Saw Education Is Elevation, y’all. This conversation went live on October 7, 2026, and I was not about to sit in front of a camera on October 7 and act like I didn’t know what day it was, so before Stacey Allen and I got into Texas freedom colonies, we started where the day told us to start. Three years ago the world changed, and the people in power, a lot of them with deep Zionist and Israeli ties, have been dictating the narrative of who gets to be the victim and who gets cast as the perpetrator for a very long time, going all the way back to Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, an atheist, deciding in the late 1800s that he wanted a homeland for the Jewish people. You cannot go back to Bible times talking about a project that started in the late 1800s. Most of y’all have been trained to watch that region through one lens. Muslim Arabs, in the American imagination, are either crazy poor terrorists or rich oil tycoons sitting on gold, and terrorism over there always comes with a justification attached. Crazy how the year 2023 was already, before October 7 ever happened, the deadliest year on record for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, so declared by the United Nations by that August, when the count had already passed the entire previous year’s toll. Then October 7 happened and the story got rewritten so that everything before it disappeared, and Israel became, again, the habitual victim, and everything after it became justified. Here is the part I need y’all to sit with, because it’s the thread that ties this whole essay together. When a Black person gets murdered on camera, they tell us we are not competent enough to understand what we have seen. We saw Mike Brown. We saw it. in 4k, we saw it. They still tell us, “hey, we’re going to do an investigation and tell you what you saw.” That same insult to my intelligence is what I watched the Western world do for three years: you saw thirteen year olds and five year olds blown up, but you didn’t really see it, so we’re going to do an investigation and tell you there was a tunnel under them tents, a tunnel under that hospital. I seen footage of an IDF soldier handing his phone to another soldier, saying watch this, during prayer time, and throwing a grenade into a mosque. You hear them chanting, then you hear the bomb, then you don’t hear the chanting no more. That ain’t theory. I ain’t got to read about that. I seen it in 4K. I remember being thirteen, fourteen, fifteen in the hood and police officers not seeing me as a thirteen year old, and if they did, they saw a super predator, somebody the gangs and the drugs had already claimed. Hillary Clinton gave that gaze a name. So when I watch Palestinian children get treated as future combatants, it resonates in my body before it resonates in my books. Huey P. Newton told us to think globally. October 7 took my theoretical understanding of the global world and made it physical. Stacey brought the receipts from the other direction. She read Ta Nehisi Coates’ The Message, where he ties what he saw in Palestine back to the American South, and she named what too many of us skip: people across the world learned how to do apartheid by studying the South. Then the historian James Q. Whitman spelled it out in Hitler’s American Model, documenting how Nazi lawyers studied American race law, Jim Crow included, while drafting their own. We give too much credit to Hitler as the architect. America was the textbook. America just keeps casting itself as the benevolent, neutral, objective actor who had some bad things happen in the past and should only be judged by how it aspires to be. That is the October 7 lesson, and it is also the Texas lesson. Somebody with power keeps doing an investigation and telling us what we saw. In Gaza it is a tunnel. In Texas it is a map. Is Texas Even the South? Somebody is always going to come in the comments and say Texas ain’t the South. Texas is cowboys. Texas is the West. Texas is cattle drives and Lubbock and El Paso. Stacey answered it better than I could have, so let me hand it to her: in her opinion, anywhere there was slavery in Texas is East Texas. Just admit that line does more work than a whole semester of seventh grade Texas history. Then go to Imani Perry, because her book South to America is built on one stubborn claim, that the South is not the nation’s embarrassing exception but the place where the nation’s real character is stored, and that the rest of the country has a habit of pretending the South is somewhere else so it doesn’t have to look at itself. Apply Perry here. Texas does to its own East exactly what America does to the South. It sells the Wild West on the postcard so it doesn’t have to print the plantation. This means everybody who insists Texas ain’t Southern is not making a geography claim. They are making an alibi. If you acknowledge that Juneteenth is home in Texas, you have to acknowledge why. General Gordon Granger of the Union chose the Southern stronghold of Texas to announce, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, that the enslaved were free. You don’t send the Union Army to Galveston to read emancipation out loud to cowboys. You send it to a slave state that held on longest. Texas is the South meeting the Wild West meeting the Plains meeting the Bayou. I’m with that. Then look at what the “Remember the Alamo” story is built to hide. In 1829 Mexico abolished slavery under President Vicente Guerrero, and Anglo settlers in Texas got an exemption and kept calling the people they enslaved “servants.” As long as y’all kept y’all slaves in the East, Mexico let it slide. Then the settlers started pushing further west toward Austin and San Antonio with a complete disregard for Mexican law, and that is where the conflict comes from. Here is the receipt the textbook never prints. In August 1831, Juan Davis Bradburn, the commander of the Mexican garrison at Anahuac on Galveston Bay, gave asylum to men who had escaped slavery in Louisiana and refused to return them, because under Mexican law they had reached free soil. The enslaver hired a young lawyer named William Barret Travis to get them back. Travis sent a hoax warning that a hundred armed men were coming from Louisiana to take the runaways by force. Bradburn arrested him. Settlers marched on Anahuac to free Travis. That same Travis is the man they put on the wall at the Alamo. Historians argue over whether Anahuac counts as the start of the Revolution, but nobody can argue it away: one of the earliest armed confrontations between Anglo Texans and the Mexican state was about a Mexican officer refusing to send Black people back into slavery. I would have seen Stephen F. Austin, the so called Father of Texas, in a completely different light in seventh grade if somebody had told me that. The same Mexican government he thought was cool when it was handing out land and incentives became tyranny the second it said, hey, you’re doing too much and you’re bastardizing our law. Austin’s Old 300 came with their property, and property meant people. Stacey shared her own family’s story on air, from the Gibson side: some of her ancestors were among the enslaved people brought to Texas in that era, made to walk from Mississippi to Texas in neck chains. They made sure that story got passed down. We see those images in textbooks and can’t contextualize them into real people. Stacey’s family can. So when they teach your child that the Texas Revolution was about freedom, ask the question Part 1 asked: freedom from what, and from whom. The Republic of Texas wrote slavery into its 1836 Constitution. Every accusation is a confession. 557 Ways to Say We Can Work Together Let me give y’all the working definition, the clean version I fumbled live. Fr… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe

  8. Oct 7

    Oct. 7th, Friday Night Lights, Oil Field Money, and the Bombs Over Gaza: It Was Always One Ledger

    How much money do you need to blow up a 12 year old in Gaza? How much funding do you need to blow up a pregnant woman in the West Bank? How much? How much do you need? Today is October 7th, 2026, the third anniversary of the attack on Israel, and I know a bunch of Zionists are pissed off when they hear folks like me talk about this day, because we don’t center Israeli victimization as the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story. Let me be precise, because precision is the whole point of this work. On October 7th, 2023, roughly 1,200 people were killed in Israel and about 250 were taken captive, and those were human beings with names and mothers and futures, and I will never be the kind of scholar who has to pretend otherwise in order to tell the truth about everything else. Two things can be true. The killing of civilians is a crime no matter whose passport they hold, and October 7th did not fall out of a coconut tree, it is part of an ongoing structure of dispossession that has been happening in Palestine since before 1948. Shout out to the Balfour Declaration, shout out to the partition of Palestine, shout out to all the various congresses that Theodor Herzl and the founders of political Zionism convened to decide whose land was available. Three years later, the Gaza Health Ministry counts more than 73,600 Palestinians killed as of September 2026, a number that has kept climbing even after the October 2025 ceasefire, with well over 1,000 killed in so called ceasefire violations alone. Three years later, I still have not heard one elected official in Texas tell me how much a 12 year old costs. My psyche, the chemistry of my heart and how it connects to my brain, how I view the world, will forever be changed, because seeing a parent pick up the limbs of their child and put them in a bag will never let you see the world the same again. Most of y’all saw that footage too. Most of y’all scrolled past it because the algorithm put a dance challenge right underneath it, and that is its own kind of violence, the violence of being trained to keep it moving. October 7th, 2023 changed the geopolitics forever because it forced into the open the people who have always been able to dictate the narrative of being seen as the benevolent good people, the ones who deserve to exist and deserve to defend themselves, and it showed us how they deploy that narrative while blowing up Muhammad and blowing up Miriam in Gaza and in the West Bank. We never hear anybody on cable news ask whether Palestine can exist, or should exist, or whether Palestinians have a right to defend themselves. That question is not even allowed in the room. Today is about me reflecting on how much I have learned about Palestinians, how much I have learned about the Middle East, how much I have learned about American imperialism, and how much it solidified what young George Lee already suspected. Young little George in Bryan, Texas, sitting in a high school classroom, thought the world was so evil. I was right. The people in power who got me to think about Muslims as inherently criminal and inherently terroristic were the very people who had figured out how to manufacture terrorism in a way that got seen as legitimate. We even had headlines warning that 2023 was on pace to be the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank, and those headlines ran before October 7th, not after it. The bodies were already stacking up while the world was looking the other way. That is what we mean by unmitigated, gratuitous violence, violence justified by Israel and America and the French and the English, all of them saying that Muslims and Palestinians are who we ought to worry about. They have manufactured so much terror that they have convinced the rest of the world that opposing colonial order is terrorism, and that colonial terrorism is just foreign policy. Research over MeSearch. Let’s get into the archive. Herzl Had a Shopping List: Uganda, Argentina, and the Colony That Called Itself a Homeland October 7th forced me to go back through the archive, and the archive does not stutter. In 1896, Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat, and in it he weighed two candidate sites for a Jewish state, Palestine or Argentina, like a man comparing listings on Zillow. In 1897, he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel. In 1902, he wrote to Cecil Rhodes, the same Cecil Rhodes whose name is literally stamped on the colony of Rhodesia, asking for his support and describing his plan as something colonial, which is why he thought Rhodes would understand it. In 1903, the British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain offered land in East Africa, the so called Uganda Scheme, which actually sat in what is now Kenya, and the Zionist movement debated it until the Seventh Congress rejected it in 1905. Sit with that. Israel could have been in Argentina. Israel could have been in East Africa. The founders held conference after conference to figure out where this Jewish homeland should go, and they landed on Palestine because the religious ties to Judaism could generate global sympathy and a story the West already knew how to tell. Crazy how the land was never the starting point. The project was the starting point, and the land was chosen to fit the project. Herzl even confided to his own diary in June 1895 that the penniless local population would need to be spirited across the border. Then in 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote “The Iron Wall,” and he said the quiet part as loud as anyone ever has: no native people in history has ever voluntarily accepted colonization, so the settlers would need a wall of force the natives could not break. On my livestream I credited that line to Herzl, and I want to correct the record, because receipts matter. It was Jabotinsky. Herzl wrote the business plan. Jabotinsky wrote the security memo. Same company. Apply Sayegh here. In 1965, the Palestinian scholar and diplomat Fayez Sayegh published Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, and his argument was that Zionism was not an exception to European colonialism, it was one of its last and most efficient expressions, a settler project designed not to rule the native population but to replace it. That is the difference between Britain in India and Britain in Australia. One colony wants your labor. The other colony wants your absence. Wolfe would later call this the logic of elimination, but Sayegh had already written it down while Jim Crow was still the law in Bryan, Texas. Then came the paperwork that made the colony official. On November 2nd, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour promised a national home for the Jewish people in a land Britain did not own, inhabited by people Britain did not ask. On November 29th, 1947, United Nations Resolution 181 recommended partition, handing roughly 56 percent of Mandate Palestine to a Jewish population that made up about a third of its residents and owned a small fraction of its land. Then in 1947 and 1948 came the Nakba, the catastrophe, when roughly 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled and hundreds of villages were emptied and erased. On December 11th, 1948, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194, affirming that refugees wishing to return to their homes should be permitted to do so. Nearly 78 years later, that return has never been honored. Preventing civilians from returning home is a violation of international humanitarian law. You cannot justify the Nakba. You cannot justify forcing hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes and never letting them come back. Now do the root cause analysis. Hamas was founded in December 1987, at the start of the First Intifada, growing out of an Islamist charity network that Israeli authorities had tolerated through the 1970s and 1980s as a counterweight to the secular PLO. On air I said 1984, and the accurate date is 1987, but the point lands even harder with the correct date: the Israelis were murdering, obliterating, and stealing Palestinian land fo… This is a public episode. 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  • Creator
    The Conscious Lee
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    155
  • Rating
    Explicit
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    © The Conscious Lee
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    Education is Elevation

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