-THE TAKE-

Today I want to talk about the Karmelo Anthony case. And honestly — when we're intellectually honest with ourselves — the case itself is pretty straightforward. It's not the kind of thing you have to squint at. It's not a riddle. The facts came out, a jury sat with them for a few hours, and they reached a conclusion that most reasonable people, looking at the same evidence, would reach too.

So the case isn't really what's bothering me. The bigger issue to me is the public. The PEOPLE. The lack of understanding. The way so many folks are FIGHTING the truth with everything in them — STANDING on the wrong position no matter how much evidence gets put in their face, no matter how much plain common sense is sitting right there in front of them. At some point that stops being disagreement and starts being something I can only call delusion. And I want to talk about where delusion like that even comes from, because it didn't fall out of the sky.

And here's the trap inside the trap: the moment you defend common sense and objective analysis on something like this, you get labeled. Now you're "defending white supremacy," or you're carrying water for some narrative or another. And narrative — understanding what a narrative actually IS, and how it quietly does your thinking for you before you even open your mouth — is one of the main things I'm always trying to point out in this writing. Hold onto that word. We're going to come back to it.

But first — let me be clear about something. I don't like anything about this case. Anything. I hate that a 17-year-old kid lost his life. I hate that another young man is now sentenced to 35 years. I hate that every single person connected to either of them — mothers, fathers, brothers, friends — is going to carry this for the rest of their lives. There are no winners here. Nobody walks away from this whole. So please don't mistake what I'm about to say for celebration. It's not. It's grief with the lights on.

Now let's get straight to the point. Because underneath all the noise, this is about RIGHT vs. WRONG. It's about cultural shortcomings. And it's about a lack of young male development — which is a conversation we keep refusing to have. Strip away everything else and here's what you've got: one young man brought a knife to a school track meet. He used that knife on another person. And it ended that person's life. That's the event. Everything else is commentary.

Now — anybody who's followed me knows I'm a 2A guy. I'm a self-defense guy. If somebody puts your life in real danger, with a weapon or with serious bodily harm, I believe self-defense is right and just. Period. Call me old school. I don't care. But here's the part people who talk about self-defense love to skip: that school of thought comes with a responsibility attached to it. Situational awareness. Wisdom. I have firearms. And owning them taught me the opposite of what people assume — it taught me restraint. I can't shoot a man because he pushed me. I can't shoot a man because he wants to fight me. The whole weight of being armed is the weight of knowing when you're not allowed to use it. And that exact same logic applies to a knife, or a bat, or anything else that can be turned into a weapon in somebody's hand.

And THAT'S where this case falls apart for me. Because reasonable retaliation was never on the table here. From what we know, there was a scuffle — Karmelo was up under a tent that belonged to the other kid's team, it was raining, and he was asked to leave. Words got exchanged. Things escalated. But here's the detail that does it for me: before anybody put hands on him, he reached into his bag and said "touch me and see what happens." Then the shove came. And he answered a shove with a blade to the chest.

Sit with that for a second. He told everybody around him he was armed and ready to use it before the contact ever happened. A man genuinely fearing for his life doesn't announce the weapon first. What he did was walk lethal force into a shoving match he was already half-responsible for starting. The prosecutor said it cleaner than I could: you don't get to meet a shove with a stab — especially if you provoked the shove.

And I keep coming back to this — Karmelo had ample opportunity to avoid the ENTIRE thing. He could've left the tent. He could've walked away from the words. There were a dozen exits before it ever got to a knife. He took none of them. So call me old school again, but if you take a man's life over a common, man-to-man disagreement — two young men with hot heads and no weapons but the one you chose to bring — then yes, you should be imprisoned. There's nothing cruel about saying so. It's the floor — the bare minimum a society has to stand on to call itself one.

So back to my delusion hypothesis — because here's how it actually moved, in stages, in real time:

When the situation first happened — "he had a right to do it." When he got charged — "still justified, leave that boy alone." When the case was tried, in open court, with witnesses and evidence — still defending it. And then the sentencing came down, and that's where the full delusion finally kicked in. Suddenly the jury was racist. Suddenly everybody lied in their testimonies. The judge was racist and probably knew the victim's dad. Collin County was racist. The whole STATE of Texas was racist. There was no way he could've ever gotten a fair trial — in a country, in a year, with this much scrutiny on it.

Couldn't possibly be the simplest explanation, right? Couldn't possibly be that the evidence showed the original narratives were lies. That the fight leading up to it didn't come close to warranting a knifing. That Karmelo simply went too far, and a person died because of it. And here's the receipt that should end the conversation but won't: the jury was handed a lesser standard — "sudden passion" — that would've capped this whole thing at 20 years. They had the door right there. They looked at it, looked back at the evidence, and chose 35 instead. Does that sound like a mob to you? Twelve people got handed the lighter road and decided the evidence hadn't earned it.

So where does the delusion actually come from? I think — and this is me thinking out loud — it comes from people just wanting a Black man to get off. Whatever the reason. For some it's historical injustice, and I GET that one, I do — there's a real history there that earned real distrust. For some it's “racialism” — and that's a term I'm going to fully unpack another day, because it's not the same thing as “racism” and the difference matters more than people realize. And for some it's just plain emotion blocking logic. The heart got there first and dragged the brain along behind it.

But none of those reasons — not one — changes what happened under that tent.

And that's the culture piece AND the delusion piece all tangled together, which is why I can't let it go. So let me just ask it plain:

HOW DO WE GET TO A POINT WHERE SO MANY PEOPLE WILL DEFEND AN IRRATIONAL RESPONSE TO A MINOR DISAGREEMENT? HOW DO WE GET TO A PLACE WHERE WE'LL DEFEND A PERSON SOLELY BASED ON SKIN COLOR INSTEAD OF PRINCIPLE?

I sit with those questions a lot, and I'm not gonna pretend I've got them all the way figured out. But here's where I keep landing.

The video's out now — judge released it Friday. So don't take my word for it. Don't take their word for it either. Just go watch it for yourself. That's the whole reason I do this in the first place.

But after you watch it, be real with yourself about the part that was never really about Karmelo. Because if we're gonna defend a man over what he looks like instead of what he actually did, then we're not standing up for justice — we're just picking a side and slapping the word on it. And those two things were never the same, no matter how bad we want them to be.

Maybe that rubs some folks the wrong way. That's alright. Ya'll know me by now — I'm gonna stay cool about it either way. I'm just not gonna sit here and pretend I didn't see what I saw.

-THE CLOSE-

That's the minute. You paused, you looked closer — that's the whole point. If this made you think, do two things: forward it to one person who needs to slow down too, and if somebody sent you here, get on the list so you don't miss the next one. See clearly. Think deeply. Respond wisely. — WAYTAMINUTE