Every election season, someone hands us a scorecard. Endorsements, polling averages, debate performance, gaffes cut into fifteen second clips. We are told this is how serious people decide. And most of it is noise, engineered to make us feel informed while telling us almost nothing about what we’re actually choosing.

I’ve settled on five questions. Not talking points. Not party lines. Questions that cut through the performance and get at what a vote actually is, a decision about who gets power and what they’ll do with it.

One. Are they competent and experienced?

I have a friend who spent decades in the Navy, organizing communication into the White House. He’s described the job to me in pieces, careful pieces, since most of it he still can’t talk about. If he told me everything, he jokes, he’d have to kill me.

But what he can describe is enough to sit with. A hub, somewhere in Washington, where hundreds of pieces of information are flooding in every single day from every corner of the world. How many people are in a hospital in one country. What conflict is turning critical in another. And every day, admirals and generals sit down and go through it, led by the one person we elected to make the calls.

It is immense beyond understanding. Beyond imagination, really, until someone who’s lived inside it tries to describe it to you. And the person at the center of that room does not get to be slow. Does not get to be distracted by the things they enjoy talking about instead of the things that actually need their attention. They have to be confident, quick, and decisive, because the world does not pause while someone finds their footing.

This sounds obvious until you watch how rarely it actually gets asked as a real question, not a formality. We are hiring someone to manage something, a city, a state, a country, systems with real consequences for real people. Competence is not charisma. It is not how well someone performs outrage on a stage. It is whether they understand how the machine works well enough to run it without breaking it, and whether they can sit in that room, with that flood of information, and make the call.

Experience matters here too, not as a credential to be recited, but because experience shapes judgment. The decisions someone has already made, under pressure, with real stakes, tell us more about how they’ll govern than anything they say in a thirty second ad. We would not hire a surgeon because we liked his podcast. We should not hire a governor, or a president, that way either.

Two. What is the world this candidate wants to create, and would I want to live in it?

Strip away the speeches and ask what happens if they get everything they want. Not the applause line version, the actual outcome. Who has more power in that world, and who has less? Whose kids grow up safer, and whose don’t? Whose healthcare gets easier to access, and whose gets harder?

This is the question that forces us out of the horse race and into consequence. We are not electing a personality. We are choosing an architect, and we are the ones who will live inside whatever they build.

Three. Is this candidate for something, or against something?

Here is a subtler test, and once you start applying it, you cannot stop seeing it everywhere. Some candidates run on a vision, a set of things they want to build, protect, expand. Others run almost entirely on opposition, defined by what they hate, who they blame, what they promise to tear down.

Opposition has its place. Sometimes the right thing to be against is genuinely dangerous, and saying so is courage, not deficiency. But when a candidacy is organized almost entirely around an enemy, when the pitch is “elect me to stop them” rather than “elect me to build this,” we should ask what happens after the enemy is defeated. What is left standing? What was the plan ever actually for?

Four. Does this candidate speak to my better angels, or to my fears?

Fear is the easiest emotion to manufacture and the most reliable to sell. It is fast, it is visceral, and it does not require evidence, only a target. Hope is slower. It asks more of us. It requires believing that something better is possible and that we might have to work for it.

Notice which one a candidate reaches for first. Notice which one they return to when the polls tighten. The answer tells us not just what kind of leader they intend to be, but what kind of relationship they intend to have with us, one built on partnership, or one built on dependency and dread.

Five. Is this candidate inclusive or exclusive? Do their positions grow the tent, or shrink it?

This might be the most revealing question of the five, because it is rarely asked directly. Some candidates build coalitions. They reach for common ground, even with people who didn’t start out agreeing with them. Others build walls, defining their base by who is kept out as much as by who is let in.

Watch the direction of the arc. Is this candidate’s rhetoric, over time, expanding who belongs, or narrowing it? Politics that only works by shrinking the circle of who counts is politics that eventually turns on everyone, including the people currently inside the circle. History has shown us that pattern more than once.

The turn

Here is the part I did not expect when I first wrote these questions down. I built them to evaluate candidates. What I discovered is that they evaluate us.

Which question do we linger on the longest? Which one makes us uncomfortable? Do we find ourselves drawn to the candidate who frightens us into agreement, or the one who asks something better of us? Do we want a leader who grows the tent, or, if we are honest, do we sometimes want one who keeps certain people out?

The ballot asks us to judge someone else. But the questions we bring into that booth say something about who we are, what we’re afraid of, and what kind of world we are actually asking for. Maybe that is the real work of citizenship, not just deciding who deserves power, but being honest about why.

When you’re deciding who to vote for, what’s the first thing you actually check? Tell me in the comments.

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For those new here: The Flow: Calm Waters is our Monday companion — reflective, a little slower, meant for wherever you drink your coffee. Good stuff for Monday, the week, and living well.

If this newsletter is useful to you, subscribing keeps it landing in your inbox every Monday. All paid subscription revenue, after platform costs, goes directly to Doctors Without Borders and World Central Kitchen — none of it comes to me.

Most mornings, I sit down at a computer. There’s a keyboard. There’s a screen. I type something, or I talk to it, and it talks back — words, sentences, something I can understand and use.

That’s the whole relationship, as far as I can see it. Keyboard, screen, conversation.

But that’s not remotely what’s happening inside the machine. Underneath that little exchange of words, there are billions of operations running in a language that has no words at all — just on and off, zero and one. Somehow all of that gets translated into something I can read on a screen and make sense of. The keyboard and the screen aren’t the computer. They’re the tiny visible sliver of it.

I think we’re built the same way.

Reflect

There’s a part of you that works in words — that talks, narrates, explains, argues, plans out loud or in your head. That’s the part you’re using right now, reading this sentence. It feels like all of you. It’s actually a small, and very loud, part of you.

Underneath it, there’s a much bigger operation running without words at all — reading tone of voice before you consciously register it, carrying old memories, holding feelings you haven’t named yet, making a thousand small judgments a minute about what’s safe and what isn’t. It doesn’t talk. It just runs.

Almost all of us build our sense of “self” entirely out of the keyboard-and-screen part. I am smart, but not pretty. I am funny, but not deep. Sentence after sentence, until eventually that self sets like concrete — and we forget it was only ever built from the small, verbal sliver of who we are, not the whole machine.

But the working side doesn’t stay completely silent. It sends up signals — a small antenna, quietly buzzing mid-sentence, mid-decision, mid-anything: something isn’t quite right here. Because the screen is so loud, we usually miss that buzz entirely, or talk right over it.

I was reminded of this recently at a meeting — actually in church. Someone stood up and, with real courage, said something like this: a lot of my harshness with people comes from a deep sense that I’m not good enough. The room went quiet for a second. That’s exactly the kind of recognition I mean. You can’t change what you haven’t let yourself see. And what struck me most is that it wasn’t really a confession of something shameful. It was an antenna, finally being listened to.

Here’s the good news buried inside that. Plenty of what you feel about yourself is accurate and helpful — that you’re capable, that you care, that you’re allowed to take up space. Leave those feelings alone. They’re not the problem, and they don’t need your attention.

But there’s another category. The feelings that drag you down. That get in the way of you enjoying your own life. Not good enough. Not lovable enough. Not allowed to rest. Those aren’t honest reports about who you are. And here’s the part worth sitting with: they’re not your fault, either. They’re programming — something the world handed you a long time ago, before you had any say in the matter.

So where did that wiring actually come from? Picture a river. Nobody sat down and chose its path. Water just ran downhill and hit whatever ground happened to be there — rock in one place, soft soil in another — and over years, that became the riverbed. It looks permanent. It looks like bedrock. It isn’t. It’s just where the water happened to go first.

Your wiring got laid down the same way, by whatever ground you happened to hit early — a parent’s harshness, a moment you decided you weren’t enough. It set like a riverbed, and now it feels like the only path the water could possibly take. But rivers change course. Not all at once. A flood here, a season of different pressure there, piece by piece — and years later, the water is running somewhere new. It isn’t fighting its nature to do that. It’s just still being a river.

Practice

This week, try turning it into a small game — not a task, not a fix, not evidence that something’s wrong with you. Just curiosity.

Notice when the antenna buzzes. That little flicker of “something’s off here” underneath whatever you’re saying or doing. When you catch it — just stop. For one second. That’s the whole move. Then ask, gently, like you’re checking in with an old friend: What is this about?

Sometimes what you’ll find is a feeling that’s already working fine — a quick check that you’re being honest, or kind. Nothing to do there. Let it pass.

But sometimes you’ll catch the other kind — an old, worn belief standing in for the truth. Not good enough. Too much. Behind again. When you find one of those, you don’t have to argue with it or fix it on the spot. Just notice it the way you’d notice a bend in a river: this is where the water has been going. It doesn’t mean it’s where the water has to keep going.

The self you’ve set in concrete was only ever built from the screen. The riverbed under it isn’t bedrock. It moved into place, piece by piece — which means, piece by piece, it can move again.

Something good is going to happen this week — quite possibly a small buzz you finally stop for, instead of talking over. And if you catch an old riverbed doing what it’s always done, that’s not proof of anything wrong with you. It’s just the water finding out, gently, that it has other places it could go.

I’m Bob Martin and this is The Flow: Calm Waters. See you Wednesday.

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I’ve spent decades in rooms most people never have to enter. Courtrooms where I prosecuted men who beat the women who loved them. Courtrooms where I defended those same kinds of men. Therapy rooms, later, as a clinical social worker, where I sat with the wreckage on both sides of that equation and tried to understand what I was actually looking at.

And for years I also watched something that seemed, at first, to have nothing to do with any of it. I watched people defend Donald Trump with a ferocity that defied ordinary explanation. Not just politically. Personally. Passionately. As though the facts didn’t matter, because for them, somehow, they didn’t.

I want to warn you up front. This piece is longer than what I usually send you, and more complicated. It pulls together courtroom experience, hard data, and some uncomfortable psychology, and it asks you to hold it all at once before the picture resolves. I thought about trimming it down. I decided not to, because the pattern only makes sense if you see the whole shape of it at once. Stay with me. I promise it lands somewhere worth arriving.

Here’s where it starts.

The Nursery

Picture a home where the rule is simple. Obey. Don’t question the parent. Don’t question the preacher. Don’t question the Bible. Don’t question God. Doubt is treated as disrespect, and disrespect gets punished, and punishment is how you learn what’s true.

Psychologists have studied this home for decades. Bob Altemeyer, who spent his career researching what he called right-wing authoritarianism, found something specific. The adult who submits automatically to authority, who trusts a strong leader over their own judgment, who needs the world sorted cleanly into loyal and disloyal, isn’t born that way. That posture gets built in childhood, out of exactly the kind of household I just described. Obedience training. Conventionalism. Punishment for stepping out of line. And Altemeyer noted something else worth sitting with. Certain kinds of religious upbringing are especially good at producing it.

That single household, it turns out, doesn’t just raise one kind of person. It raises two. And the two of them find each other.

The T-Shirt

There’s a concept from transactional analysis I think about constantly. Therapists call it a T-shirt message. Picture two people walking through the world wearing invisible shirts that announce, without either of them saying a word, exactly what they’re each looking for. One shirt reads I am abused. The other reads I am an abuser. They don’t meet by accident. They recognize each other.

Here’s how the shirt gets printed for the one who will be abused. A child grows up believing, at a level below language, that she is not worth protecting, not worth choosing, low enough on the ladder of belonging that nobody would fight for her. Then someone shows up who seems strong. Who offers care, attention, a little bit of protection. It feels like being rescued. She’ll take a pound of shit for a teaspoon of sugar, because the sugar is the first sweetness she’s ever been offered, and she doesn’t yet know it’s supposed to come without the rest.

The cycle has a shape, and it repeats with brutal consistency. First comes the sugar, the concern, the protection. Then, slowly, the strength that felt protective turns and starts pointing at her instead of at the world on her behalf. Then the abuse. Then the pulling away, the guilt, the promise to be better. And then it starts again.

The Courtroom

I’ve watched this play out in real courtrooms, on real families, more times than I can count. I spent years in domestic violence and dependency court, and if you sit in that room long enough, the pattern stops being theory and becomes something closer to weather.

I’ve seen women come through that courtroom with three children by three different fathers, and every one of those men hit her. Not because she has bad judgment. Because the nervous system that got wired in her childhood doesn’t know how to recognize any other kind of love; it recognizes the shirt. It walks toward the shirt every single time, even after everything, even after the restraining orders and the hospital visits and the promises to herself that this time will be different. That’s not a character flaw. That’s a wound repeating itself because nobody has ever helped her see it.

I’ve sat with that so many times that it stopped making me angry a long time ago. It just makes me sad. And it made me start seeing the same shape everywhere else I looked.

The Rally

Because it’s the same shirt at a Trump rally.

The Centers for Disease Control has tracked something called Adverse Childhood Experiences, ACEs, across the country for years. Nearly two out of every three American adults report at least one. Physical abuse. Emotional abuse. A parent lost to addiction. A home run on fear instead of love. One in six adults report four or more.

A child raised in that kind of home learns the same lesson the woman in dependency court learned. Find the strongest voice in the room. Attach to it. Don’t question it. Your safety depends on it. That lesson doesn’t stay a childhood lesson. It rides along into adulthood, and it’s still running the show when a loud, certain, dominating voice steps onto a stage and says I alone can fix this. I will protect you; everyone else is the enemy. For a nervous system built the way I just described, that isn’t a campaign speech. It’s relief. It’s the first sweetness. It’s a pound of suffering for a teaspoon of certainty, and by now they’ve had a lifetime of practice paying that price.

The Pulpit

Now look at the other shirt. The one that says I am an abuser, or more precisely, in the version that shows up in politics and in pulpits, I am the strong one, and you need me.

There’s research on a specific personality that thrives in exactly this role. Researcher Ekin Ok ran a series of studies on people who publicly display virtue and victimhood at the same time- the ones who provoke a fight and then hold up the reaction as proof they’re being persecuted. Across every study, the people who do this most score highest on narcissism, manipulation, and a lack of empathy. And it isn’t random. It’s a strategy for extracting things from other people. Attention. Loyalty. Money. Followers. Psychologists call it nonreciprocal resource transfer. The signaler takes. He never gives back.

Religion, it turns out, is a perfect tool for this kind of person, because claiming to speak for God comes with authority nobody can take from you. Researchers distinguish between people whose faith is genuinely internalized and people who use faith as an instrument, for status, for control, for an audience. A 2026 study found that every measured type of narcissism was linked to that instrumental version of religion. Not one type was linked to the genuine kind. There’s a specific flavor of this called communal narcissism: the person who brags not about wealth or power but about being the most caring, the most selfless, the most spiritually evolved person in the room, while researchers who actually measured their behavior found they were no more generous than anyone else. They just believed they were.

That’s the man behind the pulpit or the podium who was also raised in the nursery. He learned the same lesson the woman in dependency court learned, except he learned to wear the other shirt. Strength gets rewarded. Certainty gets rewarded. He never had to develop real empathy, because performing it worked just as well, and worked better, because nobody can call out a man who claims God is standing behind him without becoming, in his story, the persecutor.

The Dyad

Here’s the part that took me the longest to see. These aren’t two separate stories that happen to rhyme. They’re one transaction.

Researchers who study destructive leadership have found that authoritarian followers and unethical leaders don’t just tolerate each other. They pair up, and together they make worse decisions than either one would make alone. The follower’s need for a strong voice and the leader’s need for an audience aren’t a coincidence sitting next to each other. They’re a matched set, built for each other by two different households that were, underneath it all, teaching the exact same lesson. Obey. Don’t question. The strongest voice in the room is the only safe place to stand.

I want to be careful here, because I don’t want you walking away from this thinking every pairing where one person is strong and one person needs something is broken. It isn’t. Some of the most loving relationships I know are built on exactly that kind of difference: the detail-oriented partner and the big-picture dreamer, the one who plans and the one who imagines, each of them making the other more whole. That kind of complementary pairing causes its own friction, its own arguments about the small stuff and the big stuff, and it is still one of the most beautiful things two people can build together.

The difference isn’t whether someone is strong and someone else needs something. Every relationship has some version of that. The difference is whether the pairing runs on fear or runs on freedom. Whether you can leave the room and still be safe, or whether leaving the room is the most dangerous thing you could do. Whether questioning the person you love gets you closer to them, or gets you punished.

Where That Leaves Us

I don’t have a policy fix for any of this. There isn’t one. You can’t legislate someone out of a trauma response, and you can’t shame someone out of a nervous system that was built before they were old enough to choose anything.

But I do believe in the thing I learned in courtrooms and in therapy rooms, over and over, the hard way. People don’t change because you prove them wrong. They change because someone, gently enough, holds up a mirror they can stand to look into.

So if you’re the one who has driven five states to hear a voice that finally made you feel safe, I’m not writing this to shame you. I’m writing it because I think you deserve to know why that voice found you so easily, and what it might cost you to keep paying that price.

And if you’re the one who has watched someone you love return to the same kind of hurt, again and again, whether that hurt wears a wedding ring or a campaign hat, I want you to hear this too. Contempt has never once brought anyone home. The way back, if there is one, runs through understanding before it runs through argument.

We were all raised in some nursery or another. Some of us got taught that love and fear travel together. Some of us got lucky enough to learn they don’t have to.

Naming which one raised you is not weakness. It’s the only door out.

A Note from Bob

If this helped explain some of the chaos we are experiencing, please like, share, comment, and subscribe.

This one asks a lot of you, so I’ll ask something simple back. Where have you seen the T-shirt message play out, in your own life, in someone you love, in the news? You don’t have to name names. Just naming the pattern is enough.

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Calm Waters is the Monday companion to The Flow — a little more inward, a little more reflective. Same voice, gentler light.

If this lands for you — comment, share it with someone who needs it, subscribe for more.

All paid subscription revenue, after platform costs, goes to Doctors Without Borders and World Central Kitchen.

I have to start today with a confession. In spite of all the training I’ve had — meditation, social work, helping people move past what’s stuck — I still, at 76, have a lifelong, ongoing struggle with weight. Up, down, hold steady for a while, back up again.

Truth be told, this goes back to the beginning. When I was a toddler, everybody nicknamed me Bootsy, because my legs were as thick as boots. Genetics, mostly — I’m largely Magyar, descended from the Huns. My people were the guys playing field hockey with a lamb’s head. So you can imagine how a body built like that carries weight.

I’d gotten fairly sedentary lately and decided it was time to get back into it, so I hired a fitness coach — virtual, weekly check-ins, a good app that keeps me thinking about it daily and keeps me accountable through a running back-and-forth of texts. Last weekend he gave me a different way of thinking about eating, and it was useful enough that I wanted to bring it to you.

Reflect

He had me sit down privately — not to send him, not to be graded — and write out everything I’d eaten over the past few days. Then he had me draw four boxes on a page:

Healthy and tasty

Healthy but not tasty

Not healthy and tasty

Not healthy and not tasty.

And sort everything I’d eaten into them.

I learned a lot. Mostly, I learned how much I’d eaten that wasn’t healthy and that I didn’t even particularly enjoy — I liked the idea of it more than the thing itself. That kind of self-awareness doesn’t come cheap, and it doesn’t come from willpower. It comes from actually looking.

At our next meeting, I told him the hardest part was categorizing anything — a Philly cheesesteak, for instance. Bread, meat, cheese. Not exactly unhealthy, not exactly virtuous either. He said that was the right question, and it led us to a working definition: something is healthy when it moves you closer to optimal health, and unhealthy when it moves you further away. Under that definition, a slice of buttercream cake is the healthiest thing in the world to a starving person.

From there we stopped thinking in categories and started thinking in a continuum — healthy on one end, not healthy on the other, and almost everything living somewhere in between. A candy bar might sit closer to one end. Popcorn is a little closer to the healthy end. And an apple is even closer. Maybe today I choose the popcorn, and someday the apple. None of it is about never eating the candy bar. It’s about knowing, in the moment you’re choosing, roughly where on that line you’re standing — and choosing on purpose instead of on autopilot.

Practice

Take this into your week, food or otherwise: at the moment of choosing, ask yourself two questions. Is this the healthiest choice available to me right now? And am I actually enjoying this?

That’s it. Not a diet, not a rulebook — just a pause, right before the choice, instead of the usual pattern most of us fall into: numbness while we do the thing, followed by guilt afterward. The guilt is wasted energy. The awareness, even just once or twice a day, is not.

And if you’re the kind of person who does this with food, you might notice the same pause is available everywhere else — procrastination, a sharp word you’re about to say, whatever it is you reach for without quite deciding to. That’s probably a whole other Calm Waters. For now: just make the next choice the right one.

Something good is going to happen this week. It might even be as small as a bag of popcorn instead of a candy bar — or just noticing, for one honest second, which one you actually wanted.

You don’t have to get it right every time. None of us do, and I’m 76 years old and still figuring this out in real time. Just catch yourself once or twice at the moment of choosing, and let that be enough.

I’m Bob Martin, and this is The Flow: Calm Waters. See you Wednesday.

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I spent years in courtrooms watching how repetition works on a jury. Say a thing once, and it’s a claim. Say it three times, in three different ways, and it starts to feel like something the jury already knew. That’s not an accident of human psychology, it’s the whole architecture of persuasion, and the people running the biggest political ad campaigns in American history understand it better than almost anyone alive.

So let’s talk about what’s coming.

Elon Musk has reactivated America PAC, the operation that poured more than a quarter billion dollars into the 2024 race. This time, reporting puts the initial commitment at somewhere between one hundred million and one hundred twenty million dollars, aimed at Senate and House races in at least eight states, with more likely to follow. Add in the roughly three hundred million dollars sitting in Trump’s own MAGA Inc war chest, and the hundreds of millions already flowing from other billionaire donors, and we are looking at a fall campaign season funded at a scale this country has genuinely never seen in a midterm election.

Here’s the thing they’re not funding: a program.

Republicans do not have a policy package to run on. They don’t have a credible story about ending the long wars they promised to end. They don’t have an answer for the price of groceries. They don’t have the border solution, the healthcare fix, or the affordability plan that got them elected in 2024. And the polling backs this up in a way that should worry them more than it apparently does. Democratic voters are telling pollsters this election matters more to them than any midterm in a decade. Republican voters, by contrast, are showing the kind of enthusiasm gap that preceded the 2018 wave that cost them the House, maybe worse.

When a party doesn’t have a record to run on and can’t generate enthusiasm for what’s ahead, it has exactly one play left. It goes negative, and it goes personal. We should expect to see Democrats called jihadists. Called communists. Called socialists, the enemy within, the party of open borders and men in girls’ locker rooms. We should expect the old tropes, the ones dressed up as new outrage but built on the same racist and misogynist bones they’ve always had. We should expect all of it amplified through a spending machine with more money behind it than the treasuries of some small nations.

I want to be careful here, because precision matters more than heat. I don’t yet know exactly what these ads will say. Nobody does yet, not fully. But we know the pattern. We’ve seen this playbook run in cycle after cycle, and we know what desperation plus money plus no program produces. It produces volume where substance should be.

So here is my idea, and I want to say up front that it is a little brash, and I’m fine with that.

The mind does not evaluate every claim it hears. It absorbs. Advertising works because repetition builds familiarity, and familiarity gets mistaken for truth, whether or not the thing repeated is actually true. That is not a partisan insight, it’s just how attention and memory work. The other side has built their entire fall strategy on that mechanism. I think we should use the same mechanism against them, honestly and without needing to fabricate a single thing, because their own words will do the work.

The idea is simple. A recurring ad format, run everywhere their ads run. It shows a clip, a real one, of a Republican attack ad or a claim from a rally or a cable hit. A voice says: that was a lie. Then a beat. Then four words on screen and in the ear: it’s just another lie.

Run it enough times, next to enough of their actual ads, and something happens in the viewer’s mind that no amount of their spending can buy back. Every future ad they run starts to carry the residue of the last one we flagged. We are not inventing anything about them. We are just refusing to let the lie stand alone in the room. We are making them pay, in trust, for every dollar they spend in cash.

I don’t think this is cynical. I think it’s the opposite. It’s a bet that if you show people the truth often enough, next to the thing that isn’t true, they will start to notice the difference on their own. That’s not manipulation, that’s just refusing to let repetition be a weapon only one side gets to hold.

We are heading into an ugly autumn. The money says so, the polling says so, and honestly, history says so. But an ugly autumn doesn’t have to be a losing one, and it doesn’t have to be one where the loudest, best funded voice wins by default because nobody built a wall against it.

It’s just another lie. Say it enough times, and maybe, for once, the truth gets to be the thing that sticks.

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Calm Waters is the Monday companion to The Flow — a little more inward, a little more reflective. Same voice, gentler light.

If this lands for you — comment, share it with someone who needs it, subscribe for more.

All paid subscription revenue, after platform costs, goes to Doctors Without Borders and World Central Kitchen.

I once sat with a teacher named Master Ni. We asked him — half-joking, half-not — why everyone called him Master. He smiled, almost giggled, and said, “Because I’ve mastered life.”

We pushed back. That’s not an answer. What does it actually mean to master life?

He turned serious. “When you can accomplish the goal with the least amount of energy, you have begun to master life. Energy is precious”

I’ve been turning that over for years now.

Reflect

The teaching sounds simple. It isn’t.

Picture swimming to shore. When the tide is with you, you don’t need to thrash — a little effort goes a long way. When the tide is against you, thrashing doesn’t get you there faster; it just exhausts you before the tide turns. The people who make it to shore without collapsing are the ones who sense which kind of moment they’re in and match their effort to it. Sprint when it helps. Hold steady when it doesn’t. Never confuse effort with progress.

Most of us were trained to believe the opposite — that more force is always the answer, that tired means trying, that ease is suspicious. Master Ni was pointing at something almost countercultural: mastery isn’t the capacity to push harder. It’s the sensitivity to know when pushing is even useful.

Practice

Take one thing on your plate this week and ask it three questions: Do I actually need to do this at all? If yes, where am I spending more energy on it than the moment requires? And where, in this exact stretch of tide, would holding steady serve me better than pushing harder?

Then make it concrete. Unsubscribe from one or two things — a newsletter you skim out of guilt, a group chat that drains more than it gives, anything you keep meaning to “deal with later.”

And if there’s a small task you agreed to do and have been quietly dragging around — the favor, the volunteer shift, the thing you said yes to before you knew what your week would look like — call the person. Say, “I know I said I would do this, and I’m not going to be able to.” You don’t owe them an explanation.

Here’s the reframe: integrity isn’t only doing what you said you would do. It’s also being honest when you’re not going to. That’s not betrayal. That’s being human.

Something good is going to happen this week. It might even show up as something you feel ready to fight for. Before you do, check the tide. Sprint if it’s with you. Hold steady if it isn’t.

And if there’s a call you’ve been putting off — the one where you tell someone you can’t do the thing after all — go ahead and make it. I promise the world will not end. You’ll probably sleep better than you have in weeks.

I’m Bob Martin, and this is The Flow: Calm Waters. See you Wednesday.

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Hey everybody. Welcome back to The Flow. I’m Bob Martin, and I’m glad you’re here.

Today we’re talking about a word that gets thrown around a lot lately: RINO. Republican In Name Only. A friend of mine posted something on Facebook that got me thinking hard about what that word actually means, and more importantly, what the word conservative means anymore. So that’s where we’re headed.

Here’s what I want to know. When did keeping your principles become an act of disloyalty? Tell me about a time you felt pressured to pick the team over the truth. I read every comment. I mean that. Drop it below.

Quick reminder before we get into it. The Flow is independent. No network, no corporate sponsor, just me and the people who choose to support this. After production costs, every dollar of paid subscription revenue goes to Doctors Without Borders, World Central Kitchen, and Feeding America. If this show means something to you, consider subscribing. It directly funds people doing the hardest work there is. Alright. Let’s get into it.

A friend of mine posted something on Facebook the other day that took more courage than she probably realized. She wrote that she hadn’t posted anything political in a while, and then she asked a simple question. She said she knew what the initials RINO stood for, but she wanted to know what conservative actually meant anymore. She admitted she might regret asking.

She was right to be nervous. Within minutes, the comments arrived, and they were not really answers. They were loyalty tests. A conservative, one person wrote, is someone who has conservative values and beliefs, who puts God first, then family, then others. Another explained that a RINO is a fake Republican, someone pretending to be conservative to win a seat while secretly being something else. Nobody offered a definition you could actually test against a vote, a bill, or a budget. Everybody offered a feeling.

I spent a career in courtrooms, first as a prosecutor and later as a defense attorney, and if there’s one thing that career taught me, it’s this: when nobody can define a word, that word usually isn’t doing the work you think it’s doing. It’s doing a different job entirely.

So let’s do the work nobody in that comment section wanted to do. Let’s actually define our terms.

Republican is the name of a political party. It’s membership, endorsement, a lever pulled in a voting booth. Conservative is not a party. It’s a philosophy, a disposition toward change and government that has a real history and a real content. Traditionally, American conservatism has meant limited government, fiscal responsibility, constitutional checks and balances, decisions made close to home, personal responsibility, free enterprise, respect for institutions, and reverence for the rule of law. Those aren’t my definitions. They’re the ones conservatives have offered about themselves for generations.

Here’s the part that should unsettle everyone, on every side, comfortable with the label: voting with the Republican Party doesn’t automatically make a person conservative, and disagreeing with the party doesn’t make a person a RINO. Those are two separate questions wearing the same shirt.

In my years teaching law, I used to warn my students about a particular kind of intellectual trap. It happens when someone defines an issue to fit the conclusion they already wanted. You see it in bad legal arguments, and you see it constantly in politics. When conservative gets redefined as whoever the party currently endorses, the word stops describing a set of principles and starts describing a loyalty oath. And once a word becomes a loyalty oath, it stops protecting anything except the people currently in charge of defining it.

So let’s put the current Republican Party through its own test.

Does it govern like it believes in limited government? A party that opposes big government in one breath and then reaches for more control over personal medical decisions, school curricula, library shelves, private businesses, and who gets to fully participate in public life in the next breath is not shrinking government. It’s just deciding whose behavior it wants to police.

Does it govern like it believes in fiscal responsibility? The 2017 tax legislation, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, added somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.9 trillion dollars to projected deficits over a decade, and that’s before you get to 2025’s follow-up. The budget reconciliation package signed into law last year, what supporters called the One Big Beautiful Bill, was projected by the CBO to add another 3.4 trillion dollars to the debt through 2034, with some independent estimates running closer to 4 trillion once broader effects are included. That’s not one lapse. That’s a pattern, repeated eight years apart, by the same party, under the same banner.

Does it govern like it’s suspicious of concentrated power? Genuine conservatism has always distrusted concentrated power, especially executive power, regardless of who holds it. It defends constitutional limits, honest elections, an independent judiciary, and the freedom to criticize the people in charge. A movement that instead organizes itself around loyalty to one man, that treats disagreement with him as the definition of disloyalty to the cause, isn’t conserving anything. It’s building a monarchy with better branding.

And then there’s God, who gets invoked constantly in these conversations and rarely examined honestly. Christianity, as I understand it and as most serious theologians teach it, judges leaders by truthfulness, humility, mercy, justice, faithfulness, and concern for the vulnerable. It does not judge them by whether they hold up a Bible, oppose abortion, or promise power to Christians. Using God to acquire political control is not the same thing as governing with godly character, and treating those two things as interchangeable does a disservice to faith, not a favor to it.

None of this means the people asking my friend’s question, or leaving those comments, are foolish or dishonest. Most of them are doing exactly what most of us do, which is trusting the information ecosystem they were handed and trying to make sense of a party that keeps moving the furniture. The problem isn’t the people. It’s a system that has learned it can keep their loyalty by redefining the furniture instead of moving it back.

So maybe the better question isn’t, is this politician loyal enough to the party. Maybe it’s this: does this person conserve constitutional government, fiscal responsibility, truth, personal liberty, moral character, and equal justice under law? That’s a question you can actually answer with evidence. Loyalty to a person can’t be cross-examined. Loyalty to a principle can.

When RINO becomes the label for any Republican who thinks independently, keeps an oath, compromises to get something worthwhile done, or simply refuses to salute one man, the word has stopped protecting conservative principles. It’s protecting party conformity instead, and calling it courage.

A healthy political movement can survive disagreement. It can survive members who read the bill, do the math, and vote no. What it can’t survive, what no movement can survive indefinitely, is mistaking obedience for belief.

So here’s my honest question, for conservatives and for everyone else listening in: if loyalty to a party ever asks you to abandon loyalty to your own stated principles, which one is actually yours?

I’ll see you Monday for The Flow Calm Waters and next Wednesday for The Flow Weekly. Stay awake, stay aware, and stay engaged.

NOTE FROM BOB

A quick, personal aside before we move on. I’ve spent my whole adult life around arguments, in courtrooms, classrooms, and living rooms. I’ve learned that the healthiest arguments are the ones where both sides are still willing to change their mind if the evidence moves them. This RINO conversation worries me because it isn’t really an argument anymore. It’s a filter, and filters don’t ask questions, they just sort people into piles.

I wrote most of what’s above as a response to a friend’s Facebook post, someone brave enough to ask a real question in a space that usually punishes real questions. I’d rather be the person who answers honestly and takes some pushback than the person who stays quiet to keep the peace. I hope that’s obvious by now.

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Calm Waters is the Monday companion to The Flow — a little more inward, a little more reflective. Same voice, gentler light.

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I’ve been thinking about blessing lately — not the churchy kind, not something reserved for weddings and christenings and the end of a priest’s sentence. The plain, private, almost invisible kind. The kind you can do in a checkout line without anyone knowing.

Last spring I was on campus, tray in hand, looking for a table in the cafeteria, when I spotted four young men sitting together, heads bowed. Grace, I thought — look at that, four college kids taking a beat to be grateful before they eat. It was, honestly, a little moving. I started walking over, planning to say something nice to them once they’d finished.

As I got closer, I realized what they were actually bowed over: their phones.

Not a prayer in sight. I started laughing; they looked up, wondering what was so funny. I told them, and then they started laughing too. It was funny.

It was also a little sad, if I’m honest — because I remembered exactly what it felt like to see them like that, even for the ten seconds before I knew better. I hope they find their way to that moment for real sometime. I hope we all do.

Down here in the South, we’ve actually turned the word blessing into something else entirely. “Bless her heart” doesn’t mean what it sounds like.

It means she’s a little much, or she just did something exasperating, or — depending on tone — she’s about to get talked about the second she’s out of earshot. We’ve taken a word for pure goodwill and turned it into a velvet-gloved insult. I love it and I’m a little embarrassed by it in equal measure.

But there’s an older, straighter use of the word, and it’s the one I want to spend this Monday on.

There’s a small book called The Gentle Art of Blessing, written by a Swiss man named Pierre Pradervand, and it opens with an instruction so simple it almost slides past you: on waking, bless the day. On passing people in the street, on the bus, at work — bless them. Not for anything. Not because they earned it. Just because you passed them.

The truth is, I didn’t grow up saying grace — my own cosmology took a more circuitous path than that, a story for another day. But I always marveled at it when I saw others do it, felt something like admiration, and when I was a guest at someone else’s table I said it too, out of courtesy to my host.

As I got older I took the practice on for myself — not out of any particular doctrine, but as a loving opportunity to just stop, take a breath, and feel connected to whatever was in front of me.

I’d suggest to you it doesn’t much matter whether you call it a spiritual act or simply an act of humanity — you don’t need to belong to a particular faith to be grateful. You just need to pause long enough to notice you have something worth being grateful for.

A Few More Lines from Pradervand

Pradervand’s short essay is full of instructions and helpful thoughts leading to a happy life. I would like to share som of his thoughts and I urge you to go and read the full essay you can find it here;

https://gentleartofblessing.org/

He starts with this

On awakening, bless this day, for it is already full of unseen good which your blessings will call forth; for to bless is to acknowledge the unlimited good that is embedded in the very texture of the universe and awaiting each and all.

He reminds of our universality

On passing people in the street, on the bus, in places of work and play, bless them. The peace of your blessing will accompany them on their way and the aura of its gentle fragrance will be a light to their path.

He explains it

To bless means to wish, unconditionally, total, unrestricted good for others and events from the deepest wellspring in the innermost chamber of your heart: it means to hallow, to hold in reverence, to behold with utter awe that which is always a gift from the Creator. He who is hallowed by your blessing is set aside, consecrated, holy, whole. To bless is yet to invoke divine care upon, to think or speak gratefully for, to confer happiness upon – although we ourselves are never the bestower, but simply the joyful witnesses of Life’s abundance.

He urges us to be radical in our practice

When you pass a prison, mentally bless its inmates in their innocence and freedom, their gentleness, pure essence and unconditional forgiveness; for one can only be prisoner of one’s self-image, and a free man can walk unshackled in the courtyard of a jail, just as citizens of countries where freedom reigns can be prisoners when fear lurks in their thoughts.

He tells us why it is important

It is impossible to bless and to judge at the same time. So hold constantly as a deep, hallowed, intoned thought that desire to bless, for truly then shall you become a peacemaker, and one day you shall, everywhere, behold the very face of God.

----Pierre Pradervand

Here’s the part I want to be plainer about, because I don’t think I said it clearly enough last time: this isn’t just a nice habit. It’s transformative, and it works on the person doing the blessing at least as much as the person receiving it.

Blessing someone is generosity — you’re giving them something, even if they never know it. It’s grace — you’re not asking whether they’ve earned it, you’re just offering it, same as it was offered on that hillside in the Sermon on the Mount, where the blessing lands on the mourners and the meek and the ones nobody else was blessing. And underneath both of those is gratitude — you can’t genuinely wish someone well without, for a second, noticing that you have something to wish from. Generosity, grace, gratitude — three sweet fruits growing on the same branch.

The Buddhists built an entire practice out of this same idea — loving-kindness meditation, where you silently offer a few lines to yourself, then someone you love, then a stranger, then, hardest of all, someone who’s given you a hard time. May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be free from suffering.

The more you practice those three — generosity, grace, gratitude — the happier you get. Not as a reward for good behavior. As a direct mechanical result, the way a muscle gets stronger from use. You’re not blessing them for your own benefit. But you get the benefit anyway.

Try this one, this week: develop the habit of blessing someone right before you have contact with them.

Before you tell them there’s a piece of toilet paper stuck to their shoe. Before you welcome someone into a meeting. Getting on the bus. Calling an old friend you haven’t talked to in months.

Just before, say to yourself, silently: May this person be happy. Or may this person be safe. Or may this person be free from suffering. Whatever phrase actually works for you — you don’t need the “correct” words, you need the ones that land.

Then go on with whatever you were about to do anyway.

You’ll forget. Probably a lot. Maybe for a week, maybe for a month, and then you’ll remember again out of nowhere. That’s fine — this isn’t a streak to protect. Just try it this week, and especially try it on the people you’d never think to bless — the difficult ones, the ones who cut you off or talk over you or have wronged you somehow. See what happens.

I’d love to hear how it goes. Drop a comment and tell me who you blessed, and what it did to your Tuesday.

Somewhere this week, something good is going to happen — possibly to someone whose shoe you were kind enough not to mention the toilet paper on. I hope you’re paying enough attention to catch it. I’m Bob Martin and this is The Flow: Calm Waters. See you Wednesday.

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Hello, good people, and thanks for joining us for The Flow, Calm Waters.

Glad you're here.

Now, for those that are new here, Calm Waters is the Monday companion to the flow. It's good stuff for Monday, for the week, and for living well.

And if this lands for you, we'd sure appreciate it if you comment, share it with someone who might enjoy it, and subscribe if you haven't. And that's how this grows.

Just one more thing. Every dollar paid from the paid subscriptions after covering the basic cost of running this goes to Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, and World Central Kitchen. Kind of my way of giving back.

So let's go to the good stuff.

I had a conversation recently with a 97 yearold woman, and I asked her like everybody asked her, how’d you live this long?

And her answer wasn’t diet, exercise, or good genes. Her answer wasn’t what I expected. She explained, I learned how to play. I learned how to play. Her childhood wasn’t happy. She told me that plainly. There wasn’t a lot of play in it the first time around. She said, I didn’t have a lot of social skills, at least not the kind that gets you friends.

I practiced a lot of scales on the piano and read a lot, that’s what she told me. So she decided late but on her own terms to go back and get it, and she gave me this, a quote from the poet T. S. Eliot:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

To know the place for the first time. That’s not nostalgia, that’s arrival.

Now, I want you to meet my friend Blair. He’s in his 50s, and every morning before the sun’s even up, he’s out there watching it rise like it’s the first one he’s ever seen. Every day for him is an adventure, and every morning he shares his delight. So I want to share it with you. Watch him for these 30 seconds and tell me you don’t feel something shift. I dare you not to smile.

It’s an idea that meditators talk about. It’s called beginner’s mind. It’s like seeing something like you’ve never seen it before, like for the very first time. I notice it most of the time in the quiet, not so much during meditation, because meditation’s actually kind of busy. But I mean in the moments I’m just looking at something beautiful: trees, kids on a playground, somebody on a bus bench. My mind kind of goes soft focus, not foggy with thoughts, kind of just the opposite. I stop producing and start receiving, just like I’m seeing something for the first time.

I wrote a line once in a poem: “Living in the silence between the sound of waves.” That’s the gap that I mean. It’s not the wave, it’s the space between the waves.

And when it happens, stop. Just stop. Whatever you’re doing, stop. Notice what you’re feeling. Take two breaths, just two. A little deeper than usual, and let the world in. Let it come in. Now, maybe that doesn’t make sense, and maybe you don’t understand exactly what I mean by that, but that’s okay. Just try it. You’ll get it. And stay with it a second longer than you normally would.

As you keep moving through your day, you might notice the lightness. You might even turn around and see the weight you just put down.

Something good is gonna happen this week. Let it take you back to something, a place, a person, a version of yourself, and find it anew. Let it sit not as nostalgia, but as arrival for the very first time.

I’m Bob Martin, and this is the Flow Calm Waters. I’ll see ya on Wednesday.

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I have spent my life moving between two worlds that both claim to speak truth to power.

In the courtroom, I learned to cross-examine. In the counseling room, I learned to listen. In church, I learned to sit with mystery. And somewhere along the way, like most people my age, I decided I already understood hip hop. Loud. Angry. Violent. Not for me.

I was wrong. And it took a conversation with Manny Faces to show me how wrong.

Manny is a journalist, cultural strategist, and author of “Hip Hop Can Save America,” a book endorsed by Cornel West and arriving at exactly the right moment. We connected recently as a prelude to a podcast we are recording together this summer, and I walked away from that conversation genuinely unsettled in the best possible way. Not because Manny challenged my politics. Because he challenged my assumptions.

Here is the first thing he told me that stopped me cold.

Hip hop is not a music genre. It is a culture. Rap is one expression of that culture, gangsta rap is a subset of that, and the two are no more interchangeable than Christianity and the Inquisition. The founding ethos of hip hop, traced back to Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation in the South Bronx in the early 1970s, is this: peace, love, unity, and safely having fun.

I sat with that for a moment.

Peace. Love. Unity. Safely having fun.

That is not so different from what Jesus was going for on the mount.

“They judge you once, judge you twice, but never lived your life.”

Nas

We have spent fifty years arguing about hip hop’s surface while completely missing what lives underneath it. The language, the volume, the explicit content, the videos, the posturing. We, meaning the church, the political class, the op-ed writers, the concerned parents, built our entire critique on the packaging and never looked inside the box.

Inside the box is something that both our politics and our religion desperately need and consistently fail to deliver: unfiltered truth-telling from people who cannot afford to lie.

The street does not theorize about poverty. It lives it. Hip hop did not invent suffering. It simply refused to dress suffering up in language that made comfortable people more comfortable. When Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2018, the literary establishment was surprised. They should not have been. Anyone paying attention knew that Kendrick had been writing moral theology in verse for years. Not the sanitized kind. The kind that makes you sit up and reckon.

That is what the best lyric does. Manny described it to me this way, and I want to get it right because it matters: a great hip hop line goes straight into your consciousness. You do not have to work to understand it. It arrives. It lands before your defenses go up.

As a lawyer, I know exactly what he means. The closing argument that wins is not the one that overwhelms the jury with information. It is the one that delivers a single, clean, undeniable truth at exactly the right moment. Hip hop has been doing that in four-four time for half a century.

The psalms do it too. So do the parables. Compressed truth, delivered with such precision that it bypasses the intellect and goes straight to the gut.

We have been too polite, or too scared, to notice that hip hop has been doing sacred work.

“Youngbloods can’t spell but they could rock you in PlayStation.”

Mos Def, “Mathematics”

There is a structure in hip hop culture called the cipher. It is a circle. Everyone faces the center. Everyone gets a turn. There is no moderator, no hierarchy, no microphone that only certain people are allowed to hold. The rules are unspoken but understood. You bring your best. You respect what came before you. You build, you don’t tear down.

Manny pointed out that this maps almost perfectly onto Social and Emotional Learning frameworks now used in progressive education. I would add that it maps even more perfectly onto what a democracy is supposed to look like, and what a congregation is supposed to feel like.

We have instead given ourselves congressional hearings that are not hearings at all, they are performance. We have given ourselves Sunday services that comfort the comfortable and rarely disturb anyone. We have given ourselves political language so drained of meaning that nobody trusts any of it anymore.

Meanwhile, for decades, on Friday nights from May to November, in Union Square in New York City, a cipher has been running. Outdoors. Free. No admission. People of every background standing in a circle, taking their turn, building something together. For over ten years without interruption.

Nobody covered that story either.

“Each one teach one, we’re all equal.”

KRS-One

In 1993, Manny told me, every single article about rap music in the New York Times focused on violence. Every one. That same year, A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah, and Public Enemy were in full flower. A golden age of conscious, politically alive, morally serious hip hop, and the paper of record saw only the threat.

This is what distortion looks like. Not lies, exactly. Just a sustained, systematic choice about what to see and what to ignore.

Our politics does the same thing. So does our religion, more often than we want to admit.

We have a long tradition of being frightened by truth when it arrives in unfamiliar clothing. We were frightened by the abolitionists. We were frightened by the suffragettes. We were frightened by the civil rights movement. Every generation produces prophets who make us uncomfortable, and every generation’s first instinct is to focus on the discomfort rather than the prophecy.

Hip hop is this generation’s uncomfortable prophet. And like most prophets, it has been judged almost entirely by people who never actually listened to what it was saying.

“Don’t believe the hype.”

Public Enemy

There is one more story from my conversation with Manny that I have not been able to put down.

Programs using hip hop cultural frameworks, the cipher model, the ethos of peace and unity, the each-one-teach-one philosophy, were successfully used to rehabilitate former neo-Nazis. Not to debate them out of their ideology. To draw them into a human circle where the ideology had nowhere to hide.

Those programs worked. And then they were defunded.

I am a prosecutor by training. I spent years trying to hold people accountable for harm. And I am telling you that the most powerful tool I have ever seen for changing a human being is not punishment. It is belonging. It is being pulled into a circle where you are expected to bring your best and where someone is genuinely listening.

Hip hop knew that. Long before the think tanks. Long before the policy papers. Long before the Sunday sermons on forgiveness.

“We didn’t come from the same place but we been through the same pain.”

Tupac

I am going to sit down with Manny Faces this summer for a real conversation, and I want you to be part of it. Watch for the podcast. I suspect it will be one of those conversations that arrives before your defenses go up.

In the meantime, I will leave you with this.

The founding ethos of hip hop is peace, love, unity, and safely having fun. The founding commandment of Christianity is to love God and love your neighbor. The founding promise of democracy is that every voice matters and every person belongs.

We have spent fifty years arguing about the wrong things.

Maybe it is time to step into the cipher.

Manny Faces is the author of “Hip Hop Can Save America! Inspiration for the Nation from a Culture of Innovation.” Find him at mannyfaces.com and on all major platforms.

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Hello good people.

This is a special edition of The Flow.

A student of mine wrote a sentence a few months ago that I haven’t been able to shake.

Democracy holds together only as long as people with the power to ignore the rule of law choose not to.

That’s not a professor talking. That’s not a pundit. That’s a 20-year-old, answering a homework question in my Survey of the Law class. And I think it’s one of the truest sentences anybody’s written about this country in a long time.

So let me tell you why this matters right now.

I’m down in Costa Rica right now — allegedly on vacation — when I find out that Trump has announced a big speech for Thursday, July 16th. He’s calling it a very big announcement, expected to touch on voting machines and foreign influence in our elections.

In the same breath, I hear that he’s fired the remaining commissioners of the EAC — the Election Assistance Commission. That’s the nonpartisan arm of government that helps states run full and fair elections.

Those two things, landing back to back, told me: we need to pay close attention to Thursday’s speech, and listen with an inquiring mind. So here’s what I want you to keep in mind going in.

If this is landing with you, hit like, drop a comment, and share it. And if you want to keep up with The Flow, go ahead and subscribe — it would mean a lot.

Every semester, I start this class the same way — with a 220-year-old Supreme Court case called Marbury v. Madison. If you took a civics class, you might remember it: it’s the case that gave the Supreme Court the power of judicial review — the power to strike down a law, or an action by the president, as unconstitutional.

That’s the textbook answer. It’s true. But it’s not why I teach it.

I teach it because of the fight happening underneath it. John Adams and his Federalists were in a power struggle with Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republicans — a fight over whether power should be concentrated, or distributed. And one of the battlegrounds was the judiciary.

Adams lost the election of 1800. In his last weeks in office, he rushed through dozens of Federalist judicial appointments — confirmed by a Federalist Congress on its way out the door. But his administration ran out of time to actually deliver the signed commissions. And without that paper, a judge couldn’t take the bench.

Jefferson walks in. Tells his Secretary of State: Don’t deliver them. No more Federalist judges. Message sent.

One of those appointees — a man named William Marbury — finds out he’d been confirmed, and goes straight to the Supreme Court, asking it to order Jefferson’s administration to hand over his commission. The Court — led by Chief Justice John Marshall, a Federalist himself — wanted to rule for Marbury.

But Marshall knew exactly what would happen if he ordered Jefferson to comply. Jefferson would simply refuse. This wasn’t a guess — Jefferson had already shown his hand. Congress, at his direction, canceled the Supreme Court’s entire term for over a year, effectively suspending the Court, just to keep this case from being heard on its terms.

Sit with that for a second. The President of the United States, shutting down the Supreme Court.

So Marshall does something cleverer than a direct order. He writes that Marbury absolutely had a right to his commission, and a right to seek relief for the wrong done to him. But — here’s the maneuver — the law Marbury relied on to bring his case straight to the Supreme Court? Marshall ruled that law itself was unconstitutional. So the Court couldn’t grant the writ.

Jefferson got his win. Marbury never got his commission. But Marshall walked out of that case having built something far bigger than either man’s grudge: the Supreme Court’s authority to declare acts of the other two branches unconstitutional. Judicial review — built out of a case he technically lost.

I assign it because I want my students to sit in the room with the fact that democracy is not built on granite. It’s not a stable slab we inherited and stand on.

It’s fragile.

It was fragile in 1803, and — as that student’s sentence keeps reminding me — it still is.

So when we discuss the case, I ask my class one question: what happens if the Supreme Court orders a president to do something, and he simply refuses?

Thirty-five faces. Silence. I call on people anyway.

Well, he has to do it, someone offers — as if compliance were physics, not choice.

He has to keep appealing, says another — forgetting the Supreme Court is the last stop on the line.

Someone, usually, just says: I don’t know.

That’s the only fully correct answer. Because nobody actually knows. And we are watching the answer get written in real time, in the running tally of court rulings this administration has narrowed, delayed, or simply not complied with.

We’re watching it now with something more specific than a hypothetical — and it’s exactly the kind of one-two punch worth naming out loud.

On July 9th, the White House fired all three sitting commissioners of the Election Assistance Commission. Democrats Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, notified by email. Republican Christy McCormick, asked to resign by phone.

The EAC is deliberately bipartisan by design, and deliberately narrow in its power. It doesn’t run elections — it helps states secure them. Certifies voting equipment. Distributes security funding. With all three commissioners gone, the agency has no quorum. It can’t certify machines. Can’t set policy. Can’t function as the independent referee it was built to be. The administration justified the move by citing the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump versus Slaughter, which expanded presidential authority to remove officials at independent agencies.

Now put that next to Thursday. A president stands up in primetime to warn the country about the integrity of its voting machines and the danger of foreign interference — one week after firing the only federal body whose job is to independently verify exactly those claims.

That’s not a coincidence of timing. That’s a sequence.

First you remove the referee. Then you get to make whatever call you want — because there’s no one left on the field who can blow the whistle.

And this isn’t a one-off. It’s a pattern, and it’s worth laying out end to end — because individually, these moments get treated as passing news cycles. Together, they’re a strategy.

He’s called the free press fake news, or dismissed specific outlets and reporting as fake, close to fifteen hundred times over the past decade — and called journalists the enemy of the people in roughly seventy separate posts. In this term, that rhetoric became policy: the Associated Press banned indefinitely from the press pool for declining to use the administration’s preferred name for the Gulf of Mexico. Unfavorable outlets losing their Pentagon office space to friendlier ones. And in April, after a leak involving a rescue operation in Iran, he threatened a media company directly with prison — over national security.

He’s called federal judges who rule against him radical left lunatics, communists, and monsters. Called for the impeachment of judges whose rulings he doesn’t like. And after a Supreme Court loss, turned on his own appointees — calling Justices Gorsuch and Barrett very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution and an embarrassment to their families. CNN counted seventy-seven separate rulings in this term alone where judges — more than a third of them Republican appointees, several his own — sharply criticized this administration’s conduct.

He told the country, standing at a press conference in Helsinki beside Vladimir Putin, that he believed Putin’s denial of election interference over the unanimous conclusion of all seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies. Years later, unprompted, he went back and called those same intelligence officials lowlifes.

And he’s spent years promising to demolish the deep state — by one count, invoking that phrase more than fifty times — while, in office, his own Justice Department fired the prosecutors who investigated him and turned scrutiny on the FBI agents who investigated January 6th.

None of this is a policy disagreement. A policy disagreement is arguable on the merits. This is something else: a sustained effort to convince the public that the referees — the press, the courts, the intelligence community, the Justice Department — cannot be trusted at all. And once people believe every referee is corrupt, the only voice left standing is the one telling them so.

The founders put elections in the hands of the states on purpose. They didn’t trust concentrated power, federal or otherwise, and they built the system to make it hard for any single office to seize control of how Americans choose their government.

A federal government determined to expand its reach into that system doesn’t need to storm the polling place. It only needs to convince people the polling place can’t be trusted. Erode the confidence — the control follows on its own.

Which brings me back to the quote. Democracy runs on trust — trust that when an institution rules, the ruling means something, because we believe in the checks that stand behind it. That belief is what lets us feel we still have a voice — that this is still a government of the people — even when we lose an argument inside it.

Take the trust away, piece by piece, cut by cut, and what’s left isn’t stability. It’s a vacuum. And vacuums get filled by whoever’s willing to act instead of ask.

The Supreme Court has no army. It has no wallet. When it issues a ruling, it’s relying entirely on the goodwill of everyone bound by it — legislature, president, and citizen alike — to say: yes, we accept this, because that’s what a nation of laws does. Even the marshals who might theoretically enforce a court order answer, ultimately, to the executive branch — not the judiciary. There’s no bailiff marching to the White House.

Chief Justice Marshall found a way to assert the Court’s authority without daring Jefferson to ignore it outright — because he understood exactly how thin the ice was.

Two hundred and twenty years later, we’re finding out, ruling by ruling, just how thin it still is — and whether enough people with the power to ignore the rule of law will keep choosing not to.

The one thing that can stop this race to chaos — the one thing that can restore a balance of power, that can answer the call to hold our leaders to the rule of law, that can rescue the credibility of our democratic republic — is a full and fair election in November.

And that is the one thing this administration cannot allow.

The polls tell us so.

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Hey, welcome back to The Flow. I’m Bob Martin.

If you’re just joining us, The Flow is where we slow down long enough to actually think about what’s happening in politics, culture, and in our lives as citizens. Not to score points. Not to stay outraged. But to actually understand.

Because in order to go with the flow, you first have to understand the flow.

Last week we built the indictment. We traced how Fox News was constructed as a political instrument, how the Dominion lawsuit exposed what the hosts knew and what they broadcast anyway, and how the collapse of local news left a vacuum that the whole right-wing ecosystem rushed in to fill.

This week is the harder conversation.

We’re going to name ideological media on the left honestly. We’re going to explain why the false equivalence argument doesn’t hold, and why that matters. I’m going to tell you what I actually witnessed inside real newsrooms over the course of a career. And then I’m going to hand you something practical, a tool from the courtroom and the classroom that I think makes any of us a harder person to manipulate.

This is Part Two. Let’s finish what we started.

Before we get into it, this week’s community prompt.

Here is a practice question I want you to carry with you. The next time you read a news story or watch a segment, ask yourself: what issue is this piece actually examining? And who defined it that way? Could it have been framed differently? And what would a different framing reveal?

Try it out this week and drop what you find in the comments. I read every one. I mean that.

One more thing before we dive in. The Flow is my way of giving back. After production expenses, every dollar from paid subscriptions goes directly to Doctors Without Borders, World Central Kitchen, and Feeding America.

When you subscribe, you’re not just joining a conversation. You’re helping feed someone, heal someone, keep someone from going to bed hungry tonight. Link is in the description.

Alright. Let’s finish this.

Last week we built the indictment. This week we owe you the harder conversation.

Because if you walked away from Part One thinking the answer is simply to watch CNN instead of Fox, we need to talk. And if you walked away thinking that anyone who watches Fox is beyond reach, we need to talk about that too.

Let’s start with the honest concession. Because it matters.

Ideological media exists on the left. Let’s name it.

MSNBC is the most obvious example, and it is heavily biased in its selection and framing. The Young Turks. Pod Save America. Democracy Now. Mother Jones. The Nation. These outlets exist, they have points of view, and pretending otherwise would be exactly the kind of issue manipulation I’m going to talk about in a few minutes.

The question isn’t whether left-leaning ideological media exists. It does. The question is whether the ecosystems are equivalent.

And here is where we have to be precise. Because the answer is no, and the reasons matter more than the conclusion.

Scale is not equivalent. The right-wing ecosystem is vastly larger, more financially resourced, and more deliberately coordinated than anything on the left. MSNBC does not tell its viewers that all other sources are enemies of truth. That asymmetry is structural, not political.

The Dominion test is the clearest measure we have. The lawsuit revealed hosts who privately knew what they were broadcasting was false and broadcast it anyway. There is no equivalent moment on the left. No discovery that showed MSNBC anchors texting each other their private disbelief while amplifying a lie on air.

Bias in selection and framing is a real problem. Knowingly broadcasting disinformation is a different category of problem entirely.

Now here’s something I want to tell you from the inside.

I’ve been lucky in ways that are directly relevant to this conversation.

I have friends who are working journalists. I have sat in morning budget meetings at the Miami Herald, one of the great American newspapers, and watched how the work actually gets done. I’ve been on the faculty at Elon University, where we have a serious journalism program. I know the faculty. I know what they teach. I know how they think about their obligation to the public.

And I was a columnist at the Burlington Times-News, with editors, a chain of command, and people whose job it was to push back when I got something wrong.

Here is what I witnessed across all of those experiences.

Bias in mainstream journalism is real. It shows up most clearly in selection and placement. What gets the front page. What goes above the fold. What gets assigned in the first place. Honest journalists acknowledge this.

But once a story is assigned and reported, it goes through a curation process with real professional standards attached. Editors. Fact-checkers. Correction policies. People whose job is to catch errors before publication. The mechanism for accountability exists, even when it works imperfectly.

That is not what we saw in the Dominion discovery. That is not what I watched on my television when Sandra Smith described lotta energy on a mostly empty National Mall.

The difference between imperfect journalism and a closed epistemic loop is not a difference of degree. It is a difference of kind.

Now I want to give you something you can actually use.

In teaching critical thinking to my law students, I always start in the same place: define the issue. Because if you can control how an issue is defined, you can control the argument.

That principle, which I learned in the courtroom and teach in the classroom, is one of the most powerful tools we have for navigating a media landscape designed to confuse us.

Here is what I mean.

Defining the issue to fit the conclusion is not journalism. It is propaganda. A real journalistic question follows the evidence wherever it leads. A propagandistic question is engineered to arrive at a predetermined destination. It looks like inquiry. The answer was already written.

Pivoting the issue is almost always a signal that the original issue couldn’t hold water. When a host or commentator stops answering the question that was asked and starts answering a different one, that pivot is telling you something. It is telling you that the original question had an answer they couldn’t afford to give.

Issues should be simple and direct. Not compound. Not wrapped in assumptions. When an issue is deliberately complicated, ask why. Complexity usually serves someone’s interest in not being pinned down.

And issues should not be ambiguous.

Senator Lindsey Graham passed away this week. The question, was he a good senator, sounds like one question. It is actually four or five different questions depending on how you define the word good. Effective? Efficient? Morally consistent? Faithful to his stated principles? Each of those questions has a different answer. A commentator can choose whichever definition produces the conclusion they already want. Watch for that move. It is made constantly.

Now consider two versions of the same policy question.

What effect has considering race as a factor in college admissions had on the racial makeup of college populations?

How has considering race in college admissions reduced opportunities for white applicants?

These look like questions about the same subject. They are not the same question. The first follows the evidence wherever it leads. The second has already decided that an injury occurred and is asking only how large it is. Same policy. Same facts. Completely different moral and legal terrain.

A reader who can see that distinction is a fundamentally harder person to manipulate.

So here is where we land.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

News is not the enemy. Real journalism is one of the essential mechanisms by which a self-governing people hold power accountable. Without it, Burlington lost its eyes and ears on the commissioners and the school board. Without it, we don’t know what happened in the Dominion lawsuit. Without it, the $787 million confession stays a private conversation between lawyers.

The problem is not news. The problem is learning to tell the difference between journalism that is trying, imperfectly, to find the truth, and a closed system that has decided what the truth is and is working backward.

There is a difference between what you don’t know and what you don’t know you don’t know. Two weeks ago, a lot of us were in the second category. Swimming in a system we hadn’t fully examined.

Now you’ve examined it. And that changes what is possible.

You have more choices than you think. Most of us just haven’t been given the tools to exercise them.

Now you have a few more.

I’ll see you Monday for The Flow Calm Waters and next Wednesday for The Flow Weekly.

Stay awake, stay aware, and stay engaged.

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Hello, good people, and welcome back to The Flow Calm Waters. And this is where every Monday we try to leave you with something helpful to bring into the week. Something that will steal you. And we need it because it’s been hot. The kind of hot where the back of your neck gets dirty and gritty, just walk into the train, where the sidewalk is nothing back, and where by 3 p.m. the whole week already feels like it’s a rerun.

John Sebastian of The Love and Spoonfalls wrote it plainly in 1966, and you know, it hasn’t stopped being true. Hot town, summer in the city, back of my neck getting dirt and gritty. Isn’t it a pity? There doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city. No shade, no relief, no drama, just the flat, gritty middle of things. It’s not a complaint. It’s just what this week is.

So let me take you back to 1966. Those were the pre-hippie days, and if it’s before your time, you’ll get a kick out of the hair and what we used to call the youth movement back then. So here is The Loving Spoonful, Summer in the City. Now listen for the turn. play it for the words that everybody knows: the grit, the pity, the shadowless streets. That notice what the song does next because that’s that’s the whole point.

Yeah, that’s when the song takes the turn. But at night it’s a different world. Go out and find a girl. Come on, come on. Let’s be all right and dance all night.

Now nothing about the city changes between two o’clock and nine o’clock. The heat’s still there, but what changes is where you stand in it. So here’s the thing, the song got right. we leaf in a city is never really about the temperature. It’s about finding a place that’s cool. Inside the same hot town, not escaping it or waiting for it to end, just just locating where the shade was there all the whole time. You don’t beat a heat wave by demanding a shadow will appear where there isn’t one. You find a cool spot, the stoop with the breeze, the hour before the sun’s fully up, or the friend who makes an unbearable day funny instead of just unbearable. And you stand there for a minute. Yeah, summer’s here, along with the doldrums, you know, and it also happens to be what this stretch of the calendar is for. Right now the church calls this ordinary time. There’s no feast day, nothing to build towards, just the long flat weeks in between the big ones.

You know, it kind of sounds like a letdown, but when you realize that most of your life is just ordinary times, we need to learn just how to wait for the next big feast, and that’s by looking for the cool place.

So here’s what I’m gonna ask. Once today, when you feel the heat, either literally or otherwise, you know, resist the urge to just name it pity and stop there. Ask instead, where is the cool place right now?

Where might there be an actual place of shade or five minutes with my phone face down? Or maybe just sending an honest text to another friend that is also hot and irritable, just saying, damn, it’s hot. And maybe you could change, you know, how miserable I am to misery loves company.

You know, there’s an old Chinese painting called the Vinegar Tasters.

It shows Confucianists and a Buddhist and a Taoist all tasting the vinegar from a vat. the Confucianists, you know, they kind of deal say we gotta deal with bitterness according to, you know, proper courtesy and etiquette and the like, and they got their face all scrunched up saying, How are we gonna deal with this this vinegar, this bitter stuff? And the Buddhist, you know, they well, life is full of suffering and we have to learn how to overcome it. So he’s tasting the vinegar and say, Yeah, this is the bitterness, and we have to learn how to overcome it. But the third guy over there, the Taoist, he’s got this big grin on his face. And you know, you wonder, what is this guy thinking? So what he’s thinking is, and I just have to stop and say, the Taoism was kind of like the hippie leg of Eastern philosophies and they were just kind of, man, it is what it is and go with the flow. And so the Taoist sitting there with his finger in his mouth and this big grin because he’s thinking, Wow, man, this stuff is bitter. If you want to know what bitterness is, this is it. This defines bitterness. Wow, man. Just like sink into the bitterness.

So I know that this metaphor isn’t the best metaphor for dealing with a heat dome, but you know, maybe if we’re just a little bit more like a Taoist, maybe a little bit more open-minded, we might just be able to find just a little bit of amazement, even in a heat dome.

So if this speaks to you today, if calm water speaks to you today, before you go. Maybe pass it along to someone else. You can just forward the email on to someone, somebody who might need it, you know, a friend who’s struggling, somebody who’s just having some difficulty with the heat. And maybe somebody who just needs to feel a Monday that feels a little different from every other Monday.

Drop me a comment. I’d love to hear from you. I read every comment and I’m wondering like, how do you deal with with the heat. How do you beat the heat?

And if you find it in yourself to subscribe and let me know, we’ll make sure that the email lands in your inbox every Monday. And if you feel like a like or a comment and that finds its way from you to me, I would be eternally grateful. So no pressure. Just thanks for being here and I’m gonna tell you, this week

Something good is gonna happen. Something good is gonna happen. Be on the lookout for it.

I’m Bob Martin, and this is the Flow Calm Waters.

We’ll see you next Wednesday for the flow, and then next Monday for the next episode of Calm Waters.

Be good, be well.

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Let’s start with what actually happened.

Before we get into it, I want to ask you something. And I I genuinely want to hear your answers in the comments. So where do you get your news? And when did you last stop to ask yourself why? And if your local newspaper has changed, shrunk, or disappeared in your lifetime, tell me what you remember about it. What did your community lose when it went?

I read every comment. I mean that. So drop it below. And one more thing before we dive in. the flow is my way of giving back. You know, I’ve been lucky in my life, lucky in my work, lucky in the people who shape me. And I have things I still want to say. So if you subscribe on the flow, every dollar after production expenses goes directly to Doctors Without Borders.

World Central Kitchen and Feeding America. You’re not just joining a conversation. You’re helping feed someone, heal someone, keep someone from going to bed hungry. So I hope that you can help support this ecosystem of independent reporting. I hope you’ll consider it. All right, let’s get into it.

Let me tell you about two things I watched with my own eyes recently.

The first was at the dog park. I was half listening to a conversation between two people nearby. One of them was explaining why they had stopped watching Fox News. Not because Fox had gotten too extreme, because Fox had gotten too soft. They had switched to something further right. I stored that away.

The second was on my television just this past week. Trump’s great American State Fair was running on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and Fox News was covering it live. A host was describing the energy and enthusiasm on the grounds, and right there on the screen behind her was the National Mall itself mostly empty, a handful of people scattered in the distance. The words were

And the picture were not telling the same story. I sat there and I thought, am I really watching this in real time? That’s what this piece is about. Not Fox News as a punchline, not right-wing media as a boogeyman, but the actual architecture of how millions of Americans are receiving, filtering, and processing information and what we lost.

That lets something like this fill the silence. Look, in 2020, researchers at Berkeley and Yale ran a quiet experiment. They recruited 763 regular Fox News viewers and paid a randomly selected group fifteen dollars an hour to watch CNN instead of Fox during prime time for four weeks. Opinions shifted on COVID, on voting by mail, on Trump, on Biden.

Modest changes, but real ones. And then the study ended and people went back to Fox and the changes faded.

Four weeks of different information mostly erased. Now sit with that one detail. That detail tells us everything about what we’re actually dealing with. We tend to talk about Fox News as a channel with bias. I want to suggest that framing is too small.

Fox News is a habitat. A habitat doesn’t just provide a shelter. It creates a complete environment with its own logic, its own language, and its own immune system against outside intrusion. Spend enough time inside any habitat and it stops feeling like a choice. It starts feeling like home. That’s what Fox built, and it was built deliberately.

Roger Ailes didn’t come from journalism. He came from politics. He ran media strategy for Nixon, for Reagan, for the first president Bush. He understood that television wasn’t primarily an information medium, it was an emotional one. It shaped identity, it built loyalty, it created belonging. What he built in 1996 was not a news network with a conservative lean. It was a political instrument wearing the clothes of journalism.

Now here’s where I want to be precise because this matters.

The problem isn’t bias. Every news organization has bias. The problem is something more specific. The business model at Fox is fear and outrage, not as a side effect as the product. An audience that feels perpetually threatened and aggrieved is an audience that keeps watching, that drives ratings, that drives revenue.

The disinformation isn’t incidental to the business, it is the business. And we know this not just from the critics, we know it from Fox’s own people.

When the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit forced Fox into discovery, what came out wasn’t a picture of a biased newsroom. It was a picture of hosts who privately knew the stolen election claims were false, and broadcast them anyway. Tucker Carlson. Laura Ingraham. Sean Hannity. Texting each other their private disbelief while publicly amplifying the lie.

Fox settled for $787 million rather than let discovery continue.

Seven hundred and eighty-seven million dollars. That’s not a fine. That’s a confession.

And if you think that pattern belongs to 20, let me tell you what I watched on my television last week.

Fox News host Sandra Smith told viewers there was a lot of energy at the state fair. Their camera behind her showed a mostly empty national mall. On stage, Dr. Mehmet Oz described tons of people in attendance. A camera swiveled to show about 20 people watching.

The Dominion lawsuit showed us what Fox does in private. The state fair showed us what Fox does in public live on camera.

In the summer of twenty six, this pattern never stopped. It just kept running. But here’s where it gets more alarming. Fox is no longer the end of the road. It’s the beginning.

Remember the person at the dog park who switched because Fox had gone soft? Well, where do you go when Fox isn’t enough? Newsmax, which built its whole identity, a never betraying the cause the way Fox did. OAN, further right, fewer guardrails, Breitbart, The Daily Wire, slickly produced, enormous reach with younger conservative men, the Epoch Times, funded by a religious movement most Americans have never heard of, and one of the biggest pro-Trump political advertisers on Facebook in 2020.

Real America’s Voice, the home of Steve Bannon’s War Room, and at the very far end of the road, InfoWars, where Alex Jones spent years telling grieving parents that their murdered children never existed. The production quality drops as you move down that list. The claims get wilder, the accountability disappears entirely, but the audience doesn’t experience a drop in quality.

They experience an increase in honesty. But none of this happened in a vacuum. And I mean that literally. Now look, I was a columnist for the Burlington Times News, our local paper here in North Carolina. I had editors, I had people who pushed back when I got something wrong. I know from the inside what a real newsroom looks like, and I watched what happened to that paper.

First, bought by a regional change, then a national one. Each acquisition stripped something away. We went from a newsroom that covered the courts, the commissioners, the school board, the actual daily machinery of local democracy to lifestyle content, then to one reporter without an office, then wire copy from somewhere else about somewhere else, then almost nothing. Burlington lost its eyes and ears.

Nobody watching the commissioners, nobody in the courtroom, nobody at the school board meeting. And Burlington, unfortunately, is not unusual.

America has lost roughly 2,500 local newspapers since 05, 2,500 communities now flying blind on the decisions that affect their daily lives most directly, and in that silence. Something moved.

People didn’t stop needing to be informed. They didn’t stop needing to feel like they understood what was happening. They just lost the source that had been doing that work, maybe imperfectly, but genuinely. And Fox was waiting. The whole ecosystem was waiting with a clear signal, a warm community, and a complete explanation.

For everything frightening in the world, we didn’t just lose our newspapers. We lost something quietly essential to self government, and we didn’t notice it until it was gone and something much louder had already moved in. So next week we’re gonna ask some harder questions.

Is mainstream media actually better?

What is journalism look like from the inside?

And what can any of us actually do about any of this?

But here’s what I want you to hold on to until then. There is a way through this, but you can only find it once you understand the terrain you’re walking in.

I’ll see you Monday for the Flow Calm Waters and next Wednesday for part two. In the meantime, stay awake, stay aware, and stay engaged.

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Hello, good people.

Welcome to The Flow Calm Waters. Good stuff for Monday, the week and living well.

Now, for those of you that are new here, let me tell you about the Flow Calm Waters. It’s published every Monday. If you subscribe, it’ll land in your inbox. We’re talking about brief, human, and built for the week ahead. No noise, just something worth sitting with. You know.

There’s a word that doesn’t get enough attention. It’s not happiness, it’s not calm. It’s it’s bigger than both. The word is awe. Awe is what happens when something is so vast, so unexpected, so beyond the ordinary frame of your life that your mind has to stretch to take it in. A canyon, it’s sunrise.

A piece of music that finds the exact wound inside you. A stranger’s act of courage, the first look at your newborn, the night sky far from the city lights. These are not decorative moments. Science is telling us that they may be among the most important experience a human being can have.

So this week we go there. Jason Silva is a filmmaker and a philosopher known for his shots of awe, short electric films that treat ideas the way a great musician treats a riff, you know, briefly, fully, unforgettably. This one is about awe itself. Two minutes and forty seconds. Please watch it all the way through. You’re going to enjoy this.

That was pretty amazing, huh?

You know, Brother David Steindl-Rast says the mystic is not a special human being. Every human being is a special kind of mystic. And what Silva calls awe, Brother David Steindl-Rast calls the mystic experience. It’s that moment when something is so present, so large that the usual noise inside your head goes quiet, not because

You’ve been silenced, but because you’ve been filled.

So here’s what I find remarkable about the science of awe. We know a great deal about trauma, about how a sudden overwhelming experience can physically rewire the brain. Sometimes in an instant, trauma floods the amygdala, disrupts the hippocampus, and can leave marks that last a lifetime. And we have a name for that PTSD.

Researchers are now beginning to see awe as something like trauma’s positive counterpart. Both involve an experience so powerful it exceeds your current capacity to process it. Both can change the brain rapidly, not over months of therapy but in moments. The neuroscientist doctor Keltner

at UC Berkeley, who has spent his career studying awe, describes it this way When you feel awe, the default mode network in your brain, the part responsible for self referential chatter, the endless loop of me and my problems goes quiet. The physiology moves in the opposite direction from fight or flight. Something opens.

But here’s the important caveat, and I think it’s worth sitting with. Our survival instinct is ancient and powerful. Trauma can rewire the brain faster and deeper because the brain is built to protect us from danger above all else. All works differently. It doesn’t ambush you the way fear does. It requires something from you.

It asks you to seek it out, to allow it in, and to reflect on it afterwards. That’s not a weakness in awe, it’s an invitation. It means that wonder, unlike dread, is something we can practice. We can cultivate it. We can go looking for it.

When was the last time something stopped you? When was the last time you felt small and it felt like a gift? Over at the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, they have developed something that they simply call the awe outing. And I love it for its radical simplicity. Just go outside, walk, but walk differently.

With what the researchers call fresh eyes, as if you’re experiencing what’s around you for the very, very, very first time. Leave your phone behind. Not only if you can, but leave it behind. You’re going out to notice, not to document. The practice is simple. Here it is. One, breathe in for six counts and out for seven. Feel the air.

hear your own breath. Two. Feel the ground under your feet, the air on your skin. And what do you smell? three. Open your awareness to what is vast, complex, unexpected, or unexplainable around you. Four. Let your attention travel from the wide view down to the small, a pattern of light, a leaf, a face,

Five. Ask yourself what is new, unknown, or unexplored in what surrounds me right now.

Awe is most likely to show up in places with two qualities physical vastness and novelty. A trail through tall trees, a waterfront, a part of your neighborhood you’ve never walked. A clear night sky. But don’t make the mistake of thinking it requires some special destination.

The Berkeley researchers note that opportunities for awe are practically infinite.

Fifteen minutes once a week? The science says it will make you happier, kinder, and less tangled up in yourself. Not a bad return on a walk.

Then, and this is the part that really matters. When you return, sit with what you noticed. Don’t scroll, don’t check in. Just let what you felt land. That reflection is where the rewiring happens. Down below, there’s some links to the full awe outing practice from the Greater Goods Science Center, as well as a link to Jason Silver’s video.

So until next Monday, remember, trauma reminds us how quickly the brain can be changed by what we experience, or reminds us that not all of those changes have to come from pain.

Go find something that stops you this week, something vast, something that makes you feel just for a moment like you’re part of something larger than your own story.

Then sit with it. Let it work. Hey, something good is gonna happen this week. Be on the lookout for it. I’ll see you on Wednesday for the flow.

I’m always here with you. I’m Bob Martin, and this is the Flow Calm Waters.

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I was driving this week, and Simon and Garfunkel came on the radio.

Bridge Over Troubled Water.

I remembered the first time I heard it. I was young, and it brought me to tears.

Because there is something in all of us that aches either to have a bridge over troubled water or to be one.

To be held up when we are weary.

Or to hold someone else.

The simple answer, and the hard one, is just to be a friend.

Show up. Tell the truth. Stay in the room.

That’s what I’m trying to do here.

Not to add to the noise.

Just to be a friend who shows up with something worth your time.

And sometimes that means saying: this is complicated, stick with me,

because you can’t see the big picture without most of the pieces.

This week has a lot of pieces. But they fit together.

And what they add up to is something every person who cares about this country needs to understand before November.

I’ll do the diving. I’ll do the research.

I’ll go beneath the surface and bring it back up in a form that might actually be useful.

Because The Flow isn’t about the flow of events.

It’s about the flow under the news. It’s about the why under the what.

The currents that are actually moving things.

The knowledge that leads to wiser decisions, not just stronger opinions.

Before we go there, I want to hear from you.

What are you seeing in your state, your community, your conversations about the Senate races?

Are people paying attention?

Is there a Republican senator you would actually trust to hold the line on a Supreme Court nomination?

Name them if you can.

Tell me in the comments. I read every comment.

THE SHORT VERSION

Two aging Supreme Court justices are likely to step down in the next few years.

Their replacements could reshape American law until 2055.

The President picks them.

The Senate confirms them with 51 votes.

No law degree required.

Winning the House changes none of that.

The Senate is the ballgame.

Let’s talk about why.

THE PRIZE

Justices Alito and Thomas are 76 and 77 years old. Conservative legal circles have been openly predicting their retirement. When they go, Trump nominates their replacements. People who could decide cases about your rights, your children’s rights, the limits of presidential power, the meaning of the Constitution, for the next thirty years. Unelected. Unaccountable. Unchallengeable. That is what is at stake.

THE KEY

Here is what most people don’t fully grasp. In 2017, Mitch McConnell eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations. It used to take 60 votes to confirm a justice. Now it takes 51. And the Constitution, I want you to hear this, the Constitution imposes zero qualifications on who can be nominated. No law degree required. The Supreme Court’s own website says so plainly. Fifty-one senators and the right loyalty to the President, and you are on the Court for life. That means Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Donald Jr., or even Melania could be nominated and confirmed as Supreme Court Justices. The only thing that makes it unbelievable is a failure of imagination.

NOT CONSERVATIVE

I want to stop here and be precise about something. The justices we are talking about are not conservatives in any traditional sense. Classical conservatism honors precedent. Institutional stability. The accumulated wisdom of the law. What this Court has done is the opposite.

Dobbs reversed Roe and fifty years of settled law. The Trump immunity decision handed a president something close to absolute immunity from criminal accountability. Hamilton built this republic because he feared unchecked executive power. These justices handed it out like a gift.

And the ethics scandals, the undisclosed gifts, the refusals to recuse. They are not conserving the Court. They are strip-mining it. This is ideology wearing conservatism’s clothing. And that matters when you think about who comes next.

THE PROOF

You don’t have to imagine what this looks like. You have already seen the audition.

Pam Bondi was confirmed as Attorney General and then fired for insufficient loyalty. She was replaced by Todd Blanche, Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney, the man who defended him through a trial that ended in 34 felony convictions. Blanche took over, announced a nearly 1.8 billion dollar fund that critics called a payout to January 6 rioters and Trump allies, killed it when Senate Republicans objected, and was then nominated for permanent Attorney General anyway.

That is the standard. Not legal brilliance. Not institutional integrity. Loyalty. And those same 51 Senate votes will confirm the next Supreme Court justice.

And if you think a moderate Republican senator will save you, I have two words for you. Susan Collins. She guaranteed that Kavanaugh would not overturn Roe. He told her it was settled law. She voted yes. Roe fell. The promise of a moderate Republican senator is not a safeguard. It is a permission slip.

Flip the House.

Please.

Do it.

But understand what you have and have not done.

The Supreme Court does not answer to the House. It does not answer to elections or opinion polls or the news cycle. Once confirmed, a justice serves for life. Two of those lifetime seats are in play. The President has shown us exactly what his nominees look like. The nuclear option is loaded. And the Constitution asks zero questions.

The Senate is where the next thirty years get decided.

The Senate is the ballgame.

I’m Bob Martin. This is The Flow. In order to go with the flow, you have to understand the flow.

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Hello Good People.

Welcome back.

WHY CALM WATERS

Human beings are wired for two things above all others. One is protection, the survival instinct that scans for danger, sounds the alarm, keeps us alive. We talk about that one all the time, and rightly so.

But it has a less celebrated sister: the instinct to connect, to bond, to love, to enjoy, to find beauty and meaning in being alive together. That instinct is just as essential to our survival. Without it, the protection instinct becomes all noise and no music.

Calm Waters is where that other instinct gets to breathe.

WHAT TO EXPECT EVERY MONDAY

Some weeks this will be a personal reflection, something I have learned or unlearned along the way. Some weeks it will be a hero worth knowing, a practice worth trying, a piece of wisdom from someone wiser than me. What I can promise you is this. Every Monday, something will be here worth carrying into your week. Something that does not ask you to be outraged. Something that asks you, instead, to remember.

THIS WEEK

I lived in New York City. I grew up in New York City. At heart, I am a New Yorker. I have heard a lot of speeches in this city. I forget most of them by the time I get home. This one I have watched four times.

You know the story by now. The Knicks won. Fifty-three years of waiting, over. But what stopped me was not the score. It was what our mayor said, standing on the steps of City Hall, in front of a city that finally got to feel something good for no complicated reason at all.

He talked about a single number. With nine minutes left in Game 4, down twenty, the odds gave the Knicks a 0.4 percent chance of winning. Four tenths of one percent. And then he said the thing I cannot stop turning over in my mind.

It is in that 0.4 percent that we go to work.

In a way, the mayor was not just talking about New York. He was talking about America. He was talking about every single one of us, and the best of us. The part that does not check the odds before deciding whether to show up.

When The Flow gets heavy, when the weight of what is broken and what is at stake settles onto your shoulders and will not lift, it is easy to start believing the odds the world hands you. The pundits, the analysts, the people who watch from far away and calculate your chances for you. They are not always wrong about the numbers. But they are wrong about what the numbers mean. The odds are not the whole story. They are just the part before the story gets interesting.

Listen to how he opens it, the fifty three years of watching and waiting that came before this win ever felt possible.

And then listen to what he says about that 0.4 percent, and about what this city is when its back is against the wall.

I do not know what your 0.4 percent looks like this week. Maybe it is a job, a diagnosis, a relationship, a hope you have been quietly talking yourself out of because the odds do not look good. I only know this. The odds are not asking you to agree with them. They are just numbers. What you do with the time that is left is still yours.

BEFORE YOU GO

If Calm Waters speaks to you today, pass it along to someone who might need it. A friend who is tired. A neighbor who is struggling. Someone who needs a Monday that feels a little different.

If you would like it to find you every week, subscribe and make sure it lands in your inbox. And if a like or a comment finds its way from you to me, I will be grateful.

No pressure. Just gratitude if you do.

Somewhere this week, something good is going to happen. I hope you are paying enough attention to catch it.

I’m Bob Martin and this is The Flow: Calm Waters. See you Wednesday.

EXTRA CREDIT

Maybe I have already asked for enough of your time today. But I cannot resist throwing this in.

I wrote this poem in the days just after September 11th. I called it “I Am a New Yorker.” It feels like it belongs here, this week of all weeks.

I Am a New Yorker
Written October 11, 2001, one month after the Twin Towers came down

I am a New Yorker.
I do not live in the five boroughs or on the Island or Upstate.
I may live hundreds or thousands of miles away,
or I may live just over the GW Bridge.
But I am a New Yorker.

Whatever took me out of New York,
business, family, or hating the cold,
did not take New York out of me.
My accent may have faded, and my pace may have slowed.
But I am a New Yorker.

I was raised on Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
and Rockefeller Plaza, the Yankees or the Mets, the Jets, Rangers, and the Knicks,
Jones Beach, Coney Island, Rockaway Beach, or a beach on the Sound.
I know that “the end” means Montauk.
Because I am a New Yorker.

When I go on vacation, I never look up.
Skyscrapers are something I take for granted.
The Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty are part of me.
Taxis, noise, subways, and “get outa heah” don't rattle me.
Because I am a New Yorker.

I was raised on cultural diversity before it was politically correct.
I eat Greek food and Italian food, Jewish and Middle Eastern food,
Chinese and Japanese food.
Because they are all American food to me.
I don't get mad when people speak other languages in my presence
because my relatives got to this country through Ellis Island.
And chose to stay.
They were New Yorkers.

People who have never been to New York have misunderstood me.
My friends and family work in industries, professions, and businesses
that benefit all Americans.
My firefighters died trying to save New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers.
They died trying to save Americans and non-Americans.
Because they were New Yorkers.

I feel the pain of my fellow New Yorkers.
I mourn the loss of my beautiful city.
I feel and dread that New York will never be the same.
But then I remember.
I am a New Yorker.

And New Yorkers have:
Tenacity, strength, and courage way above the norm.
Compassion and caring for our fellow citizens.
Love and pride in our city, state, and country.
Intelligence, experience, and education par excellence.
Ability, dedication, and energy above and beyond.
Faith, no matter what religion we practice.

Terrorists hit America in its heart.
But America's heart still beats strong.
Demolish the steel in our buildings,
but it doesn't touch the steel in our souls.
Hit us in the pocketbook,
but we'll parlay what we have left into a fortune.
End innocent lives, leaving widows and orphans,
but we'll take care of them.
Because they are New Yorkers.

Wherever we live,
whatever we do,
whoever we are,
there are New Yorkers in every state and every city of this nation.
We will not abandon our city.
We will not abandon our brothers and sisters.
We will not abandon the beauty, creativity, and diversity that New York represents.

Because we are New Yorkers.

Bob Martin

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Hello, good people.

I want to start with a confession. I wrote the first draft of this piece while I was angry. I mean, really angry, because today is Donald Trump’s 80th birthday, and in three weeks it will be America’s 250th.

And right now, as I’m recording this, there is a UFC cage fight happening on the South Lawn of the White House built for the president’s birthday, three weeks before the countries. Not a ceremony honoring teachers, not a vigil for the half million Americans killed by the opioid crisis, not a single gesture towards the 42 million people who need food stamps to eat, a cage fight. And I was ready to stop there. But I can’t, because that would only be half the story and the half I’d be leaving out is the one that actually matters.

But before I go further, I want to ask you something. You know, we try to do this every week at the flow. We don’t just want to talk at you, we want to hear from you. So this week I’ve got two questions. You can answer one or both of them down in the comments.

Here they are.

What are you angry about right now?

And if you’re up to it, what are you proud of about America right now?

I mean that seriously. Both questions matter. Drop your answers below. We read every one. And one more thing before we get into it.

If you’re watching this on YouTube, please subscribe and hit the bell. It costs you nothing, and it helps us reach people who need to hear a different kind of conversation.

If you’re reading this on Substack, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Here’s why that matters.

Every dollar of paid subscription revenue from the flow after the platform expenses goes directly to Doctors Without Borders, World Central Kitchen, and Feeding America. You’re not just supporting this work. You’re feeding someone, you’re healing someone, and you’re helping keep honest, independent commentary alive at a moment when we need it most. The link’s in the description. So let’s get into it.

Two hundred and fifty years.

The most powerful nation in human history, and here is what we have built. Forty two million people on food stamps, twenty-seven million without health insurance, the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, the highest incarceration rate of any democracy on earth, an opioid epidemic that has killed more than half a million people and is still counting.

A working class that has watched wages stagnate for a generation while the people at the top collected everything that wasn’t nailed down. And to mark the occasion, we built a UFC octagon on the White House lawn. Now I want to be fair. This is not a departure from American values. In too many ways, it is their fullest expression. I mean, we chose the bomber over the teacher, the tank over the clinic. The spectacle over the substance, the aesthetics of greatness over the actual thing.

Look, Rome had bread and circuses. We have food stamps in a cage fight on the White House lawn. But here’s where I have to stop. Because America is and always has been a split screen. It is the cage on the South Lawn, but it’s also the men who waited onto the beaches of Normandy, not for oil or empire, but because something in the American conscience said this is wrong and it has to stop.

It is the first responders who drove into Asheville after Hurricane Helene turned it into an island, who brought supplies of roads that weren’t roads anymore, who didn’t wait to be asked. It’s every food bank volunteer who shows up on a Saturday morning not because anyone made them. But because they decided their neighbor being hungry was their problem too.

The crass and the decent have always lived in us simultaneously, and that’s not an excuse, but it is a diagnosis, and a diagnosis, unlike a verdict, leaves room for treatment. I want to tell you what I’ve seen lately because I think it matters more than anything I could read to you from a report.

I have seen millions of ordinary people, people who used to say they didn’t do politics filling the street at no king’s rallies across this country, not organized by any party, just people who looked up and decided they had something to say. The number of them was more than I expected.

I seen something shift in my classrooms. Students who used to come in checked out, now come in with questions, real ones, sharp ones. They are angry, some of them, and anger in a young person who’s paying attention is not a problem. It’s a beginning. And I’ve watched the pews in my church fill back up. Not with people who found religion exactly, but with people who found each other.

People who needed a place to sit alongside other people who were also trying to figure out how to live decently in a moment that doesn’t make decency easy. The streets, the classrooms, the pews, all filling up. two hundred and fifty years, and we’ve wasted enormous amounts of it. We have failed people we should have protected.

We put a UFC cage on the White House lawn and called it a birthday party. But we have also always eventually remembered what we were supposed to be, not what we claimed to be, what we were actually reaching for. Now I don’t know if this is one of those moments. I’m not a prophet and I’ve been wrong before. But the streets are full, the classrooms are awake, the pews are filling up.

Happy birthday, America.

Some of us are still in the argument. If this conversation mattered to you, share it with one person who needs to hear it today. And don’t forget, answer this week’s community prompt in the comments below.

What are you angry about right now?

And what are you proud of about America right now?

The full essay is on Substack, at the FlowMedia.com.

The link is in the description. I’m Bob Martin and this is the flow. In order to go with the flow, you have to understand the flow.

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Hello Good People.

Welcome to something new.

After so many essays and videos about what is broken, what is dangerous, what needs to be fixed, I found myself sitting with a question I could not ignore: what are we doing to remember why any of it matters?

Because here is the truth. Life is not only dark and difficult. Life is also beautiful. Uplifting. Full of grace and ordinary wonder and people doing quietly extraordinary things. And if we only pay attention to what is wrong, we lose sight of what we are fighting for.

So starting today, every Monday, this is where we come to remember.

WHY CALM WATERS

Human beings are wired for two things above all others. One is protection, the survival instinct that scans for danger, sounds the alarm, and keeps us alive. We talk about that one all the time, and rightly so.

But it has a less celebrated brother and sister: the instinct to connect, to bond, to love, to enjoy, to find beauty and meaning in being alive together. That instinct is just as essential to our survival. Without it, the protection instinct becomes all noise and no music.

Calm Waters is where that other instinct gets to breathe.

WHAT TO EXPECT EVERY MONDAY

I cannot tell you exactly what each Monday will bring. That is part of the point. Some weeks it will be a personal reflection, something I have learned or unlearned along the way. Some weeks it will be a hero worth knowing, a practice worth trying, a piece of wisdom from someone wiser than me. Sometimes it will be a video that stopped me cold. Sometimes it will be something to read, or simply something to sit with.

What I can promise you is this: every Monday, something will be here worth carrying into your week. Something that does not ask you to be outraged. Something that asks you, instead, to remember.

THIS WEEK

Today I want to share a video that has been in my library for years. I show it to every class I teach. I come back to it myself, again and again, because it does something I have rarely seen anything else do as well.

It is Brother David Steindl-Rast speaking about gratitude. Not gratitude as a pleasant sentiment or a social obligation. Gratitude as a practice. As a way of moving through the world. As, perhaps, the most radical act available to any of us.

I am not going to say more than that. It does not need my introduction. It needs your full attention for a few minutes.

Please sit back. Press play. Let it land.

BEFORE YOU GO

If Calm Waters speaks to you today, pass it along to someone who might need it. A friend who is tired. A neighbor who is struggling. Someone who needs a Monday that feels a little different.

If you would like it to find you every week, subscribe and make sure it lands in your inbox. And if a like or a comment finds its way from you to me, I will be grateful, which feels like exactly the right note to end on today.

No pressure. Just gratitude if you do.

Somewhere this week, something good is going to happen. I hope you are paying enough attention to catch it.

I’m Bob Martin and this is The Flow: Calm Waters. See you Wednesday.

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Hi, I’m Bob Martin, and this is The Flow.

I want to talk to you today about two political ideas that have been sold to ordinary Americans for decades.

They come with different names, different slogans, different salespeople.

But I want to argue that underneath the packaging, they are the exact same product.

And it is a product that has never, not once, delivered what it promised.

Let’s start in Texas and school vouchers.

Now, Governor Greg Abbott is pushing a school voucher program.

He’s not the only one.

It’s all over the country.

He’s calling it school choice.

Sounds great, right?

Who doesn’t want choices for their kids?

But a Texas state representative named James Tallarico, who is now running for the U.S. Senate, said something recently that grabbed my attention.

He said,

It’s not school choice.

It’s the school’s choice.

Now think about what that means.

Private schools can reject any child for any reason at any time.

No explanation required.

So if your kid has a learning disability,

if she doesn’t share the school’s religion,

if your family doesn’t check the right boxes,

the school can say no.

and there’s nothing you can do about it.

You know, a majority of counties in Texas don’t have a single private school in them.

Not one.

So for millions of families, the choice the governor is talking about simply does not exist.

It’s a choice the way a menu is a choice when the kitchen is closed.

Private schools don’t have to provide transportation.

If you can’t drive your kid there, they don’t go.

Private schools don’t have to provide special education services.

If your child has special needs, the door may already be closed before you even knock.

And the vouchers.

In Texas,

those vouchers are worth about $10,000 And that sounds like real money But most private schools cost a lot more than that. Some cost twice that. So if you’re a working family and you get a $10,000 voucher For a $20,000 school, you still can’t afford it. What you have is a coupon that doesn’t cover the bill

But here’s the part that should make you genuinely angry.

The wealthy family that was already sending their kids to that $20,000 school

Well, they just got a $10,000 discount on you Courtesy of the Texas taxpayers and this doesn’t go just for Texas, The same is true from Alabama to New York, From Seattle to Miami

Tallarico called it welfare for the wealthy and then he said this and I want you to really hear it he said there are a lot of self-proclaimed Christians pushing these vouchers and I can’t think of anything more unchristian than stealing from the poor to give to the rich

What vouchers actually do is take money out of public schools, the schools that take every child no matter what and redirect it to private institutions and families who were already fine.

It is a transfer of wealth, socialism so to speak, from the bottom to the top dressed up as opportunity.

Now hold on to that image because

We have seen this before.

We have seen this before.

For about 40 years,

a chunk of American economic policy has rested on something called supply side economics.

You might know it as trickle down.

And here’s the pitch.

Give the tax breaks to the wealthy people and corporations,

the job creators,

and they’ll invest that money,

expand their businesses,

hire more workers,

and the benefits will flow down to everyone else.

So let me give you a simple picture of why that does not work.

Say someone owns a factory and it makes a thousand widgets a day.

It can make a thousand widgets a day.

That’s the capacity.

But right now, the demand is 900 widgets a day.

Things are going fine.

Now, the government gives the factory owner a big tax cut and says, go create some jobs.

But why would she build a second factory?

To make more widgets that nobody is ordering?

Well, that’s not an investment.

That’s just waste.

Business owners don’t expand business because they have extra cash.

They expand because they have more customers.

so the tax money goes somewhere else, stock buybacks executive bonuses, financial instruments, maybe a bigger yacht, none of that creates a job, none of it raises a wage but now flip it, what if instead you put that money in the hands of working families.

hmm

People who actually need it and will spend it,

will spend it on groceries,

car repairs,

maybe even some widgets.

And when the widget demand goes from $900 to $1,200 a day,

guess what the factory owner is going to do?

She bills a second factory.

Not because she got a tax break.

Nope, because she has customers.

Demand creates jobs.

That’s the whole ballgame.

Now here’s the proof.

During the Eisenhower administration, the top marginal tax rate was above 90%.

And the economy boomed.

We built the interstate highway system.

We created housing for veterans. We grew the largest middle class in American history. Nobody was crying about job creators being overtaxed.

But since Reagan, every major tax cut has come with the same promise.

Growth,

jobs,

shared prosperity,

and every time the documented outcome has been stock buybacks,

soaring executive pay,

and a growing national deficit that somehow becomes your problem,

not theirs.

Now let’s take a look at these two things together.

The School Choice Supply Side Economics

One promises your kids a better future,

the other promises you a better economy.

Both are sold as benefits for regular people.

Both are engineered to deliver for people who are already doing great.

The voucher program takes money from public schools and sends it upward.

Trickle Down takes money from the public treasury and sends it upward.

Different packaging,

same direction,

and both are wrapped in language that makes you feel like you’re the winner when you’re actually the one paying.

School choice, job creators, freedom, opportunity.

Those aren’t descriptions, their costumes.

Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice, hey, that’s on us.

In order to go with the flow, you have to understand the flow.

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