Molineaux is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and president/CEO of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Over 60 years ago, the civil rights movement was only a dream. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. continues to remind us our dream of America is unfulfilled and our work is unfinished. Today is for celebration and remembrance. It’s also a day of action, as we continue advocating for civil rights.
What civil rights are not yet assured?
- Full access to voting for all citizens.
- Equitable wages and worker protections.
- Equal access to resources like health care, financial services.
- Mutual respect and safety in community.
He spoke with a passion about the hypocrisy of our society and opened our eyes and our minds to see it for what it was: a failed dream of our founders. It wasn’t his fault that we had not lived up to the founding ideals. King accepted his turn in the story of America. And he continues to inspire us to take action and live into what we can become.
King was a man of great courage but he never gave in. He was jailed 29 times for acts of civil disobedience, most often on trumped-up charges, but he was not deterred. It took 13 years to build a movement, which resulted in the historic Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
He was a remarkable man indeed. In 1964, at the age of 35, he became the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize for peace.
It’s our turn now. What will we commit to do? What risks will we take?
As we lose the giants of the civil rights movement, like John Lewis, CT Vivian, Daisy Bates and others, we must accept the mantle of responsibility. It is my hope we do so with the same deep commitment to nonviolence as we live into the ideals of our (amended) founding documents.
Today, we have similar and dissimilar obstacles to the early civil rights activists. Similar and dissimilar biases. Similar and dissimilar motivations.
Our similarities are the embedded nature of white supremacy ideology, of defaulting to the human hierarchy that advantages one set of people over another and is often motivated by a desire for power. Another similarity is the discomfort we feel as Americans. It’s our turn to be uncomfortable with the status quo.
King referenced this discomfort specifically when he said, “the white moderate is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” If we are indifferent, if we remain on the sidelines, justice will never be achieved. Inaction supports the status quo. Yet America remains an unfinished story, and we are always evolving.
Today is dissimilar to the early civil rights era, as our challenges are exacerbated by rapidly changing technology. Social media allows disinformation to spread faster than wildfire. Friends and family have or can become radicalized, seemingly overnight. The challenges of today are fueled by conflict entrepreneurs, who have discarded truth as an inconvenience; their goals are to make money and gain power or influence. They serve only themselves at the expense of our nation.
On this day of celebration, remembrance and action inspired by MLK, let us take our turn. I extend this prayer and invitation to you and our nation.
We are connected, you and I. We welcome you to the beloved community. Will you grant yourself safe passage?
It’s not our fault that we live in these times. But it is our turn to pick up the mantle and live into a better and just America.
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.