Life

  The Regime Change Trap: Why the "Old Playbook" is Failing in Iran We need to have a serious conversation. And by serious, I mean the truest sense of the word: not sensational, not partisan, and definitely not designed to make you feel "good" about one side or the other. To understand the current friction with Iran, we have to look past the headlines and grapple with what is actually happening geostrategyically. If we look at the historical record, it tells a very different story than the one usually presented in 30-second news clips. The Ghost of 1953 The "regime change" strategy is one of the most documented failures in modern American history. But before we can critique the present, we have to be honest about the past. In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence orchestrated the overthrow of Muhammad Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister. His "crime"? Nationalizing Iranian oil and threatening Western financial interests. The I...

  The Decay of an Institution: A Critique of the Modern Black Church The recent egregious behavior of certain religious leaders, such as the public shaming of a congregant for her donation, serves as a stark illustration of a deeper, systemic issue: the decay of institutions . This decline, particularly within the Black church, is argued to be the critical reason the powerful ideals of the Civil Rights Movement failed to translate into established, lasting power for the Black community. Ideas Versus Institutions A revolution's true impact is determined not by its initial powerful ideas, but by the institutions that carry them forward. As was the case with the American Revolution, where existing governmental and economic structures (Congress, business leaders, plantation owners) were in place to take over, institutions are the scaffolding of lasting power. The Civil Rights Movement, however, lacked robust, transferable, secular institutions. The one institution that was over...

  The Decay of Institutions: The Black Church and the Crisis of Spiritual Legitimacy A recent viral video has sparked widespread commentary, not just because of one pastor’s egregious behavior, but because it points to a much deeper problem—the decay of institutions, particularly within the Black community. The controversy surrounding Bishop Marvin Winans and his congregation is not an isolated event. It is a symptom of institutional rot, a decay that began long before this particular scandal. To understand how we arrived here, we must look at how institutions either sustain or collapse after moments of revolution and transformation. The Civil Rights Movement was undoubtedly a revolution—a struggle filled with profound moral and intellectual energy. But, as historian Steven Kotkin observed, after a revolution, it is not the ideas that survive; it is the institutions. This was true in both the American and French Revolutions. In the American colonies, political and economic stru...