🚨 Trump turns on Marjorie Taylor Greene as she stands against Israel and demands the Epstein files be released. I applaud her courage. It's rare.

I know the majority of my readers may have seen her as your political enemy. I did for years. But she has changed. Gaza changed her. It changed me. It changed millions of us. Let me break it down...

Sisters and brothers - please read this entire post. It’s the most important thing I’ve written this month. Massive changes are underway and I want to explain them…

Family,

Quick personal note before we dive in.

I’m writing this from the hospital. My mother-in-law is in the ICU right now after a terrifying scare with blood clots. Alḥamdulillāh, she’s stable and recovering, but it’s been one of those weeks where your heart is in 3-4 places at once — by her bedside, and with the people you love and fight for every day. I’ll probably be writing a little less as I juggle hospital visits, family, and work over the next few days. I am traveling to speak soon too. Thank you for your prayers, your patience, and your love. It means more than you know.

Because of all of that, this won’t be a long, polished “big essay.” But I absolutely have to say what I’m about to say to you all today.

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Family, we have 3,147 members right now keeping this work alive. Every article I write on Gaza, on power, on this strange, dangerous moment we’re living through — it’s free for the world. People read these pieces in Gaza, in Sudan, in refugee camps, and in neighborhoods where a paywall might as well be a brick wall.

The only reason they can read this is because a small group of you step up and carry the cost for everyone else.

If you’re able, I’m asking you — in the middle of this piece — to stand in that gap with us. If you can, please click here to become a member. Or click here to join as a monthly, annual, or founding member. When you do that, you’re not just supporting me — you’re keeping this work open for people who simply could never afford it.

Now let me tell you something I never thought I would write.

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The split nobody is talking about

I’ve been saying this for a while now, but I don’t think the mainstream understands the break that’s happening inside the Republican Party.

It’s not just personality drama. It’s not just “Trump vs. the establishment.”

At the deepest level, it’s a fight between people who are Israel First and people who are America First. It’s a fight between people who want the Epstein files released and who want them concealed. You know it. And I know it.

And Donald Trump, whether he realizes how plainly he’s saying it or not, has basically admitted that he is Israel First. And Epstein first. Listen to his speeches. Watch who he attacks. Watch who he threatens. Over and over again, the litmus test is Israel and Epstein. Those are his red lines.

That’s not me putting words in his mouth. That’s him telling on himself.

At the same time, something else has been happening that would’ve sounded impossible to me a few years ago.

I’ve made new friends who call themselves America First conservatives — people I never would’ve engaged with before the genocide in Gaza. Some of them used to see me as their enemy. Some still disagree with me on almost everything else. But on Gaza? On Israel’s brutality? On our government’s blind, shameful loyalty to it? They are as angry as anybody on the left. More than most, honestly.

That is a political earthquake. And you’re not going to hear much about it on cable news, because it exposes too many people and too much money.

And that brings me to the person I want to talk about today.

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The unexpected courage of Marjorie Taylor Greene

If you had told me two years ago that I’d sit down and write a piece giving Marjorie Taylor Greene credit for courage, I would’ve laughed you out of the room.

For years, I considered her one of my primary political opponents. I strongly disagreed with her positions, her rhetoric, her alliances, her entire brand. I said so publicly and often.

But reality is reality. And right now, in this moment, I have to say something I never imagined saying:

Marjorie Taylor Greene has become one of the most sincere, consistent voices for Gaza in the entire United States Congress.

Has she been perfect? No. Neither have you. Is she suddenly my political twin on everything? Of course not. But if I’m judging people by what they are doing right now about the genocide in Gaza, she is showing a level of courage that most Democrats won’t even approach and that a lot of Republicans are running away from.

She has been calling out her own party. She has been calling out the blind, cult-like loyalty to Israel. She has been demanding the release of the Epstein files. She has been voting and speaking against the very machinery her base usually worships.

And the cost of that is showing up in real time.

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Trump turns on her — and unleashes the machine

In one of her posts this week, Marjorie Taylor Greene said something that stopped me in my tracks.

She explained that Donald Trump had just attacked her and lied about her — not privately, not as a disagreement between friends, but publicly, viciously. And she said the thing that “sent him over the edge” was her fight to release the Epstein files before an upcoming vote.

Read that again.

Not her opposition to Biden.
Not some personal slight.
Her demand to release the files on Jeffrey Epstein and his network — files that many of us suspect would implicate powerful people in both parties, including Trump himself.

She says Trump is fighting hard to stop those files from coming out. Harder, she points out, than he fights to help struggling Americans who can’t afford food, rent, or healthcare.

That alone is a scandal.

But then she goes further. In another post, she writes that private security firms are reaching out to her, warning her that threats against her are spiking — and that those threats are being fueled and egged on by “the most powerful man in the world.”

The man she supported. The man she helped get elected. The man she defended when almost every other Republican was running from him.

Now, she says, her phone is blowing up with warnings. She talks about past death threats against her, and against others, and how this rhetoric has already led to people being radicalized to commit violence.

And then she says the quiet part out loud:
This time, the threats are being fueled by the President of the United States.

Family, I need you to hear me:
When a head of state puts someone in his own movement in the crosshairs, for daring to stand up to him on Israel and Epstein — that is not normal politics. That is authoritarian behavior. That is cult behavior.

And she knows it. She says plainly: as a woman, she takes threats from men seriously. She says she now has a small understanding of the fear and pressure Epstein’s victims must have felt.

Think about how big of a shift that is for her. The woman who used to be the loudest megaphone for that movement is now saying, “I feel some of what the victims feel, and I take this seriously.”

That is not nothing.

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We don’t have to agree on everything to tell the truth about this

Let me be clear so nobody twists my words.

I am not writing this as a blanket endorsement of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s politics. I still disagree with her on many issues that matter deeply to me. I am not telling you to become a fan, or to forget the harmful things she’s said in the past.

What I am saying is this:

• When someone shows real courage, especially when it costs them everything, we should be able to say so.

• When someone chooses truth over a cult leader, we should be able to name that as a good thing.

• When someone crosses a line from “party before everything” to “country and conscience first,” that matters.

Politics in America has been poisoned by a sick idea: that if someone is your “enemy,” nothing they ever do is good, and if someone is your “hero,” nothing they ever do is bad.

That’s how genocides are justified. That’s how cults work. That’s how leaders become untouchable.

But I refuse to play that game.

In this moment, on this issue, Marjorie Taylor Greene is right, and she is paying a very high price for it. She is losing her chief ally. She is being targeted by her own base. She is receiving serious threats. And still, she is not backing down on Gaza, on Israel’s brutality, or on the Epstein files.

I don’t have to share her politics to respect that courage.

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Israel First vs. America First — and Gaza as the line in the sand

What all of this reveals is bigger than one congresswoman.

It reveals the true priority stack inside much of the American right:

Israel first.
Trump second.
The donor class third.
America and everybody else somewhere way down the list.

If you’re doubting that, look at who gets attacked hardest. Is it Democrats who quietly sign off on aid packages to Israel? Not really. It’s Republicans who dare to say, “Maybe our loyalty should be to the American people first. Maybe we shouldn’t bankroll a genocide. Maybe the Epstein files should be released.”

That’s the divide I was talking about in my earlier posts.

On one side, you have people who will sacrifice anything — their values, their integrity, their safety — to keep the money and weapons flowing to Israel and the secrets around Epstein locked away.

On the other side, you have people saying, “No. America first. Truth first. Our conscience first. End the genocide.”

And in that second group, strange alliances are forming — Muslims, Christians, leftists, conservatives, Black folks, white folks, people who never thought they’d stand in the same room, now finding themselves shoulder to shoulder because they cannot stomach what is being done to Palestinians in their name.

That matters more than we know.

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What this demands from the rest of us

If a woman like Marjorie Taylor Greene — who spent years building her brand inside a Trump-worshipping, Israel-defending movement — can find the courage to break ranks on Gaza and on Epstein, at huge personal risk… what excuse do the rest of us have to be silent?

What excuse do Democratic members of Congress have, with safe seats and glowing press, to say and do less than she is doing right now?

What excuse do pastors, imams, rabbis, and community leaders have to bite their tongues while bombs are dropped on children and journalists, while men and women are raped and tortured in detention camps, while the most powerful government on earth funds it all?

They don’t have one. And neither do we.

Courage is contagious. So is cowardice. We are watching both play out in real time.

My hope, my prayer, is that stories like this push more people to choose courage — even if it means breaking with their own side, their own leader, their own comfort.

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Family, if you believe in this kind of journalism — the kind that refuses to flatten people into heroes and villains, that tells the complicated, uncomfortable truth, that names genocide when it sees it and courage where it shows up — I’m asking you again to help us keep it free for the world.

If you can, please click here to become a member. Or click here to join as a monthly, annual, or founding member. When you join, you’re not just funding articles — you’re funding a voice that will tell the truth about Gaza, about Washington, and about this strange new realignment that’s just beginning.

Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun

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