Hicks is the founder and president of the AfricaLogical Institute and alumnus of Bridge Alliance's Master Mind Cohort.
The AfricaLogical Institute is a group of researchers and scholar-activists who provide thought partnership opportunites to individuals and organizations seeking positive change. We are social scientists – ethnographers by training – who perform the function of educated and experienced “people watchers.” One project our firm is currently leading is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-commissioned Health Equity Study. This action-oriented, community-based research initiative exists to ameliorate racial health disparities.
As a part of Team Indiana, we are working in urban areas throughout five cities in the Hoosier State. Our action-oriented research seeks to learn from and alert for better health awareness and create an advocacy network to provide appropriate diverse perspectives to the Indiana General Assembly and the state Family and Social Services Administration to develop and/or change laws. In a study published in 2019, we made 11 recommendations to them and others for improving a leading provider of Indiana Medicaid, HIP - The Healthy Indiana Plan.
We believe the recommendations deriving from our 2019 “HIP Study” were impactful, as they were foundational for the more prodigious Health Equity Study we are conducting now. Accordingly, the current Robert Wood Johnson Foundation study includes conducting semi-structured interviews with community members and creating a network across Indiana that united on the need to change laws, policies and procedures to improve community quality of life and health outcomes.
In developing the application for the foundation, I began promoting the term "community valued research." This approach to research does not simply seek to siphon input and data out of the community. It seeks to prevail as a primary methodological aim and study goal, placing resources, funded programming and investment dollars in the community.
Here, the community serves as the expert, and the Community Leadership Board is a diverse group of “co-conspirators” who work to make data-driven demands in the 2024 legislative session for specific changes to improve community health. Our Community Leadership Board has walked in step with us in developing and implementing this study that seeks to identify and make recommendations for eliminating racial and structural barriers that hinder proportionate quality of life in Indiana.
Precisely defined, a community-valued approach:
- Is signified by honoring community members as the experts. Our recommendations were based on community input and intentionally challenging the Flint, Mich., community to work on “clarion goals” that address their expressed community needs. We also clearly challenging elected and natural community leadership to lead.
- Insists that natural resources investments, funding for programming and other clearly defined avenues for money to get to the community are imaginable and clear and articulable study goals. Scholar activism, the backbone of AfricaLogical Institute Research, as defined internally, is only as valuable as it is actionable, feasible, and easily usable in our community for progress.
One of the best ways to account for change is by observing and measuring the impact as policy, law, procedures, rules and regulations are created or revised. In other words, it’s real when it’s written. Our macro-recommendation for the Flint community was to be intentional and unified in their pursuit of public policy change. We were careful, however, to insist that not even changing laws “sticks” in the politics of our day. We must ensure that laws are passed and that budget dollars are attached to revised regulations.
Gwendolyn Kelley, senior vice president for research design and development at the AfricaLogical Institute, shares: “There are too many laws that are good ideas that would help those who need help most, if only there were dollars attached to these potentially impactful laws that are passed with good intent.”
Finally, briefly, a third tenet of community valued research, as we observe it in its embryonic stage, should insist on evaluating existing and producing reformative, imaginative, intentional, and honest budgets. Community research in general, and certainly community valued research, should have a grand justification if budgets are not proportionate. We suggest starting at 50/50 and working the numbers from there. Community researchers working with institutions should insist that negotiated budgets reflect the community's contribution to the data outcomes needed and anticipated – especially in a community-oriented research project.
Another overwhelming tenet of community valued research could be the clear imperative that through methodological intent and resolve, research is designed and conducted to, in some empirical way, disrupt dysfunction.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.