If you have been following this column for any length of time, you already know that the news has a deeply personal vendetta against me. Last time, I was flat on my back with multiple sclerosis doing its usual thing and a post-surgery nervous system that still has not gotten the memo that the surgery was three years ago — and the first thing my timeline served me was ** Robert F. Kennedy Jr.**, the nation’s top public health official, staring into a camera like a man who has personally decided that peer review is a form of tyranny. I wrote that piece from my sick bed because the news did not care that I was sick, which is a pattern I am beginning to take personally.
Things have not improved. A new medication — prescribed with what I can only describe as misplaced optimism — spent the entire night introducing itself to my body by making me throw up. I am lying here running on electrolyte water, spite, and a level of irritation that should probably be medically monitored, and my timeline decided this was the appropriate moment to serve me a fresh batch of Black MAGA bullshit. No amount of electrolyte water addresses that particular nausea. That is a spiritual assault. The Pedialyte does not reach it.
But as I have said before, news does not stop because Professor Ealy is suffering. ** Roland Martin dropped a detailed breakdown** — no lies detected, by the way — covering Nick Cannon, Amber Rose, Chilli from TLC, and conservative YouTuber Anton Daniels. Roland told the truth. I am here to add the seasoning he left on the table. And then, because I apparently have no regard for my own recovery, I also watched
** Nick Cannon invited Amber Rose onto his Big Drive podcast** — a show where two people drive around in a convertible and say things that would not survive ten minutes of fact-checking — and opened by asking her about her support for Donald Trump. Rose explained that she used to be a liberal Democrat but had seen the light, and that Democrats don’t care about Black people while Republicans do. This is the political equivalent of announcing that you have just discovered the Earth is flat and would like credit for the research. Cannon agreed with her one hundred percent and then added — brace yourself — that people don’t know that the Democrats are the party of the KKK, and that the Republicans are the party that freed the slaves. He said this. Out loud. In a moving vehicle. In 2026.
Roland addressed this directly and Roland was correct, but allow me to add context, because this talking point has been laundered through Black conservative spaces so many times it has lost all its original texture. Yes, the Republican Party was founded by anti-slavery activists in 1854, and Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. These are facts. They are also facts about a party that has not existed in any recognizable form since the mid-twentieth century. And if you want to go further back than the Civil Rights era — because the ** realignment** did not begin in 1964, it began in the 1930s — Black voters had been loyally voting Republican since Lincoln, in direct honor of the Emancipation Proclamation, right up until FDR’s New Deal. By 1936, roughly seventy-five percent of Black voters had switched to the Democratic Party, not because they were tricked, but because Roosevelt’s economic programs were actually reaching them during the Great Depression while the Republican Party was doing nothing. Black voters made a rational political calculation based on material conditions. That is not propaganda. That is agency. Then the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 finished the job on the other side of the ledger — the Southern Democrats who had been the backbone of segregation didn’t vanish. They migrated. They became Republicans and brought every bit of their politics with them. The realignment ran in both directions over forty years, and it is fully documented. You cannot cite 1865 without acknowledging 1936 and 1965 unless your goal is not accuracy but performance.
Nick Cannon knows this, or at least he should, because he has a Criminology degree and an Africana Studies minor from Howard University — the Mecca. He sat in those classes. He chose that minor. And then he climbed into a beach cruiser with Amber Rose and delivered 1865 as though it were breaking news. This is textbook Dunning-Krueger: the sweet spot of knowing enough to be dangerous but not enough to be right. He mistakes the audacity to reject conventional wisdom for the depth to replace it.
I had the same frustration years ago with ** Ice Cube**, who I have since made peace with — I said everything I needed to say about that situation and I have moved on. But the parallel is impossible to ignore. Ice Cube at least came to the table with a thirteen-point document. He did the homework, even if the timing was reckless and the execution was politically naive. Nick Cannon is running the same contrarian-as-prophet routine without the document, without the policy framework, and without the receipts. Ice Cube brought homework. Cannon brought performance. That is a downgrade.
Now. Amber Rose.
Amber Rose is one of the dumbest people I have ever watched attempt political commentary, and the frustrating part is that the evidence is not hidden — it is public, repeated, and entirely self-inflicted. This is not an insult. This is a finding. If you have been following my work, you know that I have written at length about whiteness as a rank rather than a race — the argument being that whiteness is not a culture or a blood type. It is a status category. A membership card expanded and enforced over time to maintain hierarchy. What matters is not the biology. It is the rank, and who gets access to it.
Amber Rose has spent the better part of a decade demonstrating that she understands this instinctively, even if she would never use that language. In a ** 2015 Hot 97 interview**, she stated plainly that she does not consider herself a Black woman — absolutely not — and that she checks ‘other’ on racial identification forms. Then she showed up at the
This is not confusion and it is not ideological evolution. Amber Rose knows exactly what the rank of whiteness is worth. She has Cape Verdean and Irish-Italian heritage, which means she has one foot in each world, and she has spent years deciding which foot to put her weight on depending on the room. On a Monday she is Black. On a Wednesday she does not identify as a Black woman. At the RNC she is everyone’s proof of concept. The only constant is that she consistently gravitates toward the rank whenever it offers a better return. This is not a woman struggling with her identity. This is a woman who has done the math.
I do not identify her as Black or white or biracial. I identify her as a dumb ass — and I have the receipts.
Now let us talk about Chilli from TLC
Roland brought her up and the receipts are almost too many to name in a single sitting. I will give Chilli this much: she came out quickly with her ** apology video** and appeared to feel some level of genuine shame about being exposed. That impulse toward accountability, however brief, is worth acknowledging. It is also worth noting that TLC announced a 32-city co-headlining tour with Salt-N-Pepa and En Vogue on March 23rd, tickets went on sale March 26th, and the MAGA donation story broke March 28th. I am not saying the speed of Chilli’s apology was tour-related. I am saying the timing is what it is, and I will let you do the math. Unfortunately for Chilli, the receipts predate the apology by years, which means the shame arrived very, very late — and the tour was already on sale.
Federal Election Commission records show three separate documented donations in 2024: $210.60 to WinRed — the Republican Party’s primary donation processor — $340.60 to the Trump National Committee JFC, and $486.54 to Never Surrender Inc., a Trump-linked fundraising operation. Her explanation was that she did not read the fine print and thought she was donating to veterans organizations. She wants us to believe that she confused WinRed and the Trump National Committee with veterans charities. She did not explain how she got from I want to help veterans to I will make seventeen separate donations to Trump PACs over eight months, but apparently that is the journey she took.
The donations are not the whole story. On social media, Chilli follows Donald Trump Jr., Tomi Lahren, Newsmax, MAGA influencer Terrance K. Williams, and Florida Representative Byron Donalds. She reposted a debunked conspiracy theory claiming that Michelle Obama is transgender — a post she says she hit by accident while scrolling. And back in 2017, she told an interviewer that ** “all lives matter,”** later clarifying that she meant to be inclusive. That was 2017. The follows are ongoing. The donations were 2024. At what point does the pattern become the story?
Here is something Roland did not mention but that I found in my own research, and it is too good to leave on the table: ** T-Boz, in a resurfaced audio clip**, said of her bandmate — I am quoting directly — ‘my group member voted for him.’ TLC has three members. One of them, the legendary Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes, passed away in 2002. So unless Left Eye has been casting ballots from the afterlife — which, given everything else that has happened in this country recently, I am not entirely ruling out — T-Boz was talking about Chilli. The math is not complicated. And T-Boz, who has sickle cell disease and has spent years fighting to protect healthcare access, knows exactly what it means that her bandmate was quietly funding the people trying to dismantle that coverage. That is not a political difference of opinion. That is personal.
Some people online have been blaming Chilli’s boyfriend, actor Matthew Lawrence, suggesting she has been influenced by her white partner. I looked into this carefully, because I am not in the business of manufacturing receipts that do not exist. I found pro-Black Lives Matter content on his Instagram and nothing tying him to Trump or MAGA politics. Matthew Lawrence gets a pass, because the evidence supports it. His older brother Joey Lawrence, however — the one famous for saying ‘Whoa’ on Blossom — ** endorsed Donald Trump back in 2011**, while Trump was deep in the birther conspiracy against Barack Obama, which Joey either did not know about or did not care about. The Lawrence family tree has at least one known MAGA branch, and it is not the one dating Chilli. Whatever is happening with Chilli, she got there entirely on her own.
I did not want to include Anton Daniels in this piece.
He is a known grifter, and giving him column space feels like oxygen journalism — platforming bad-faith arguments, even critically, gives them a legitimacy they have not earned. But Roland brought him up, and Anton went on ** Stephen A. Smith’s Straight Shooter** and told enough lies that I watched the whole thing so you don’t have to. I know I already said that once. I meant it both times.
The funny thing about Anton Daniels — and I mean funny in the saddest possible way — is that he did not even try for anything original. Every claim he made is a standard-issue Black MAGA talking point, delivered in the same order, with the same confidence, and with the same absence of evidence that they always come packaged with. The 2020 election was stolen. There are no structural barriers for Black people in 2026. Trump did more for Black people than any president in his lifetime. HBCU funding. Opportunity Zones. He ran through the whole playlist without improvising a single note. And Stephen A. Smith — who is smart enough to know better, which makes his failure to push back considerably worse than ignorance — nodded along, called him a legend, and let every claim land without a single fact-check. Roland had no trouble calling out the ** lies regarding HBCU funding**. Stephen A. had lunch with them.
The 2020 election was not stolen. This is not opinion. Over sixty lawsuits were filed and failed — including before judges Trump himself appointed. A group of eight prominent conservatives, including former federal judges and Republican senators, reviewed every single case and concluded there was ‘absolutely no evidence of fraud on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole.’ Anton Daniels citing the size of Biden’s vote total as suspicious is not an argument. It is a question dressed up as evidence, and it does not survive contact with the actual record.
The claim that there are no structural barriers for Black people in 2026 is the most dangerous one, because it sounds like empowerment while functioning as denial. The New England Journal of Medicine, the Urban Institute, peer-reviewed journals across multiple disciplines — the entire body of contemporary social science research disagrees with Anton Daniels. College-educated Black Americans are less likely to own homes than white Americans who never finished high school. The ** Black-white wealth gap** has held between eighty and eighty-five percent for decades. These are not self-inflicted wounds. These are documented, measurable, persistent outcomes that exist after controlling for education, income, and geography. Saying structural racism does not exist in 2026 is not brave or contrarian. It is factually wrong, and it is wrong in a way that has been proven wrong repeatedly by people with actual credentials in the relevant fields.
Which brings me to Anton Daniels’ credentials. Nick Cannon has a Criminology degree and an Africana Studies minor from Howard — the wrong credential for the argument he is making, but at least it is in the neighborhood. Anton Daniels attended one semester at the University of Detroit Mercy, dropped out, later got an Information Technology degree from Oakland University, and pivoted to YouTube. He has a software background and a ring light. That is the credentialed charlatan ladder in descending order: RFK Jr. has a Harvard law degree and is running public health. Nick Cannon has an Africana Studies minor from the Mecca and is botching Black political history on a beach cruiser. Anton Daniels has an IT degree from Oakland and is telling Stephen A. Smith there are no barriers for Black people in America. The credential gets cheaper at every rung. The confidence stays exactly the same.
And then there is the part where Daniels essentially accused his own family of feeding him propaganda as a child — framing his political shift as a liberation from indoctrination. This is the contrarian-as-deep-thinker move in its purest form, and it is the same move Nick Cannon makes, and the same move the entire Black MAGA ecosystem runs on. The rejection of what you were taught becomes the substitute for actual investigation. You did not research your way to a new position. You flipped, and then you called the flip enlightenment. Flipping is not analysis. It is a reflex with better branding.
Roland Martin told no lies. Everything he said was accurate, documented, and delivered with the receipts in hand. I have simply added the context that a man working from a fully functional body and a complete night’s sleep might have included.
Before I go, I want to address something I know is coming, because it always does. Some of you are going to read this and call me a Democratic shill. That is a lazy read, but I understand where it comes from, so let me be precise. I started using the term myself — not as a slur but as a line of demarcation, a way of saying clearly that I am not MAGA, because in the current landscape that distinction matters. But make no mistake: I do not have a party. I have values. The Democratic Party is, at this particular moment in history, the more progressive of the two options available, and so that is where my vote goes. When Democrats get it wrong — and they do — I say so, in print,…
