Choosing My Lane
AI isn’t going anywhere, even if some people are still in denial about that. I don’t feel guilty learning how to use it thoughtfully, and I don’t feel obligated to...
Culture & Current
Culture & Current Posts
When the Mask Slips from American Exceptionalism
This piece is a letter to international allies written from a place the United States has long ignored: lived experience with American power when it stops pretending to be benevolent....
I’m Not Surprised, Are You?
Surprise ran out a while ago. What’s left is documentation, memory, and the decision to stop performing concern for systems committed to harm.
From Inside the Belly of the Beast
Writing from inside the United States, this essay traces what many of us recognized early: power doesn’t arrive as chaos. It consolidates through law, force, and permission. What’s unfolding now...
TEXAS, October 6 Is It — Register Now or Be Silenced
For Texas October 6 is the last day to register for the November 4 Texas General Election. For those of us who have been told to stay quiet, this is...
Texas General Election Nov 4th: 17 Constitutional Amendment (pt 2)
This year, the ballot carries 17 constitutional amendments. On paper, they look like legal language and fine print. In real life, they touch our homes, our water, our taxes, our...
The Gospel of Greed
From the Crusades to Jim Crow to today’s Christian Nationalist rallies, belief has been less about God than about power. Faith is invoked to sanctify wars, justify slavery, and sell...
The Age of Fascism in America
America has crossed a line. What we are living through is not just incompetence, but the steady march of fascism disguised as faith and patriotism. From Trump’s own admission that...
A Country Afraid of Its Own Majority
It was never foreign enemies this country feared most. It was the majority itself — women demanding rights, workers demanding wages, communities demanding a voice. The tools of control have...
When Texas Shows Up: What These Texas Women Teach Us About Our Duty Right Now (pt 1)
Voting is more than a duty. It’s the promise that our stories, our voices, our communities matter. Barbara Jordan taught us that inclusion is justice. Ann Richards reminded us that...
When Losing Becomes Treason and Winning Becomes Revenge
America is staring at an inversion of its own history. After the Civil War, the Union stopped short of annihilating the South and chose fragile reconciliation instead of total victory....
When the World Turns on Its Neighbors
Nationalism is rising not just in America but across the globe, feeding on fear, purity myths, and selective outrage. From Britain to Japan, Australia to Spain, entire movements are turning...
Existence as Dissent
Existing in today’s America is itself an act of dissent. To live with truth, without agenda, is to resist ideologies that glorify harm or dehumanization. This essay explores how survival,...
The Disclaimer Nation
America has become the land of disclaimers. Don’t eat the pods. Don’t inject bleach. Don’t confuse Bath & Body Works lotion with lube. What should be obvious now needs a...
America’s Gaza Riviera: Erasure Disguised as Redevelopment
America is dangling $5,000 and a food voucher to push Palestinians off their land so it can be rebuilt into “smart cities” and luxury resorts. That isn’t peace, it’s profit...
Evidence of the Absurd: Kafka Would Have a Field Day
When a country starts acting like a bad satire, the punchline is survival. Evidence of the Absurd is a darkly funny, razor-edged look at the digitized circus we’re all trapped...
The Cost of Power Is Everything Human
This is not the unraveling of a nation. This is the afterparty of an empire that sold the house, burned the deed, and gave the keys to its creditors. What...
The Gospel of Disconnection
This isn’t just about politics or religion. It’s about a country so emotionally disconnected it can no longer tell the difference between conviction and cruelty. From the erasure of Black...
What We Choose Not to See
We are not watching history repeat, we are living inside its redesign. In this raw, urgent dispatch from the soul of a fractured nation, Tasha Monroe exposes the quiet violence...
Malcolm-Jamal Warner Tribute
A poetic dedication to the life and artistic legacy of Malcolm-Jamal Warner—from the lens of a fellow poet. This op-ed reflects on Warner’s lesser-known love for poetry, his quiet strength,...
Greed Is the Most Dangerous Thing on Earth
What happens when a nation sells off everything meant to hold it together? From privatized schools to collapsing public trust, this piece traces how greed poisons the well, not just...
Where Do You Go When the Whole Map Is Burning?
The country’s unraveling in real time. Again. Rights gone. Books banned. Bodies hunted. And they ask why we don’t leave. Truth is, we were built for this. We had no...
A Letter on the Choice Before Us
Why I still believe in us, even when the world doesn’t make it easy—and what it means to choose each other when the powerful choose otherwise. I’ve been sitting...
They Don’t Care If They Burn
They said it wouldn’t happen. That American “checks and balances” were too strong. But this week, the regime legalized the storm. The truth is: we weren’t all fooled. Many were...
Too Black, Too Loud, Too True: Why Democratic Leadership Fear Rep. Jasmine Crockett
They don’t fear her voice because it’s too loud. They fear it because it cuts through the performance. Because it names the things they’ve agreed never to say aloud. Rep....
Built to Erase: The Quiet Bias Hiding in Plain Sight
They say the algorithm doesn’t see race—but we’ve lived the shadowban. We’ve watched our words, faces, and voices drift quietly into the void while the loudest, safest whiteness gets magnified....
A Week of Whirlwind: From G7 Spotlight to Middle East Brinksmanship—and What It Signals at Home
The World Is Teetering. He Brought the Drama.G7, Iran, CDC firings—and the quiet collapse creeping into your morning routine. Trump crashed the G7 like it was a campaign stop. Iran...
We Were Never Meant to Be the Afterthought
If You’re Reading This, You’re Part of the Story. We weren’t made to be the afterthought. We are the After. Bold. Built different. Still rising. This isn’t about commemoration. It’s...
No One’s Coming. So We Started Talking.
Why Independent Media Is Exploding in America... People got tired of yelling at their TVs and getting gaslit in return. So they picked up a mic. Independent media isn’t cute...
Culture Dispatch | Living While DEI
In 2025, simply celebrating Cinco de Mayo feels less like a cultural holiday and more like quiet defiance. With DEI under attack and difference framed as danger, public celebration of...
The Dangerous Illusion of "Country First": A Humanitarian Case Against Nationalist Myopia
“Country first.” It sounds noble. Almost tender. As if love of place were synonymous with love of people. But behind the slogan is a lie dressed in patriotism’s costume—a lie...
Margins of Power: When the System Shows Its Teeth, We Show Our Receipts
By Tasha Monroe for The Commons Dispatch Somewhere between the checkout screen and the cold brew aisle, Amazon made a quiet little move that hit like a plot twist....
Culture Dispatch | Sinners: Built from Love, Written in Blood
Sometimes the real ones don’t rise because of the system — they rise in spite of it. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a reminder that we’re still here, still building, and still...