“Is ‘Mikenificent’ too long for a nickname?” I asked. “How about ‘Mikey the Maniac?’”
“Too long,” Crunch replied semi-seriously. “They’ll just shorten it to ‘Maniac,’ and you’ll scare the hoes.”
“You’re right,” I conceded. “I don’t want to scare the hoes.”
“What hoes?” Crunch said, laughing. “You ain’t got no hoes. And you don’t get to choose your own nickname.”
I knew he was right. But by the time we were 12, our community had already bestowed “Crunch” on him (in our neighborhood, “crunching” was the act of pressing an opponent’s face in the dirt until they conceded the fight). More importantly, my childhood had already earned another honor that I longed to receive:
The story.
You all know the story. Everyone in African America who reaches adulthood has a variation of the same real-life parable. In some versions, a parent, older cousin or sibling discovers that you’re hiding from the neighborhood bully and forces you to face the menace. Others just get tired of running from their fears and decide to square up.
Growing up with older cousins who sported street names like “Big B,” “Dirty Black,” and “Crime Dog,” I had earned a wealth of experience in taking ass-kickings. But because my extended thug family also insulated me from external threats, at 12 years old, I was one of the rare children in African America who had not yet achieved glory by defeating my childhood oppressor. So at 12 years old, I cast Marcel Hawkins as the bully in my wimp-to-pimp story.
Marcel was a musclebound two-time eighth grader straight out of bully central casting. I was a skinny sixth-grade newcomer who wound up in his orbit after skipping a grade. He had a mustache and the beginnings of a beard. I was not even old enough for pimples. He had moved to my hometown from New York. I lived on a dirt road. And when Marcel snatched my prized four-color Bic and threatened to beat the Black off me during my first week at Hartsville Junior High School, I jumped at the opportunity to fulfill my destiny.
Always punctual, Crunch advised me to arrive early for my appointment with my prospective assailant. Marcel arrived wearing a sleeveless jean jacket, corduroy Toughskins and weathered boots that could only be described as “shitkickers.” As he parted the crowd, I could see my beloved multicolored ballpoint poking out of the pocket of his denim vestcoat.
“You have something that belongs to me,” I said, imitating the protagonists from my favorite afterschool specials. “If you wanna fight, we can. But ain’t finna be nobody’s…”
When the first blow grazed my lips, I knew it was go time. I checked to see if my lip was busted (it wasn’t), balled up my fists and prepared to unleash 89 pounds of fury. It might’ve been the adrenaline coursing through my veins, but I barely felt Marcel’s first hit. Maybe my cat-like reflexes were too quick, and his blow just glanced off my lip. Perhaps those 12 years of cousin-beatings had made my pain receptors impervious to middle-school punches…
Or maybe it was because Marcel just hit me in the lip with my pen.
“Here’s your pen, you Rickety Rocket-looking motherfucker!" Marcel yelled as his captive audience “oohed” and “daaaaang!”-ed.
Disappointed but also relieved, I picked up my pen and tried to think of an adequately disrespectful retort. Just before Hawk got out of earshot, I filled my prepubescent voice with all the bass I could muster and let him know what kind of nemesis I would be.
“Hey!” I yelled…
“Who is Ricky the Rocket?”
He doubled over laughing, and I had my second friend in junior high.
While my bloodless triumph over the forces of bullying makes for a terrible story, ultimately, I learned the same life lesson as my battle-bruised contemporaries. It is a precept that applies in any situation. My most combative cousins used it in the streets. It helped my friend Crunch become a star athlete and turned the attorney formerly known as “Hawk from New York” (which, in a Gullah Geechee accent, actually rhymes) into one of my best friends.
But apparently MSNOW, CNN and Politico never learned the first lesson of speaking truth to power:
Don’t be nobody’s bitch.
Let me tell you ‘bout the feelings I feel for you.
When I try, or make some sort of attempt…
I simp.
Damn, I wish I wasn’t such a wimp.—“Passin’ Me By,” The Pharcyde.
“The major television networks on Monday suspended their pooled coverage of President Trump,” the New York Times reports. “The move was an extraordinary escalation amid a showdown between the Trump administration and the White House press corps, which began last week when the president barred journalists at CNN, MS NOW and Politico from entering the White House grounds.”
While speakers of Caucasian American Vernacular English might call it “capitulation,” this “extraordinary” journalistic crisis is the direct result of the fealty that mainstream media has pledged—explicitly or implicitly—to Trump. This attack on the pillars of the free press is not even surprising. It was inevitable.
As an institution, the media has been handing Trump its lunch money for years.
On last week’s episode of Blacksplained, former MSNBC host Joy Reid revealed why she believes the supposedly left-leaning network fired her.
“Trump says he got me fired,” Reid explained. “If you just go by my HR file, it had to do with white Christian men who objected to things I was saying about Christianity…I have a whole HR file and had to do multiple meetings about my coverage of the [Palestinian] genocide. So if I’m doing Occam’s razor, it was that.”
Even before the network dismissed Reid, MSNBCNOWTHATSWHATICALLNEWS exercised its right to remain silent for five years as Trump attacked the first Black woman to host a primetime cable news show. The fact that Reid was fired a little over a week after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr opened an investigation into MSNBC’s parent company for “promoting invidious forms of DEI” was probably a coincidence; MSNBC’s silence was not.
Hiring former White House Correspondents’ Association President Eugene Daniels was probably not a coincidence either. Daniels announced that he would join MS NOW one week after Reid’s exit and three weeks before he uninvited comedian Amber Ruffin from hosting the WHCA dinner "to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division."
Before kicking Ruffin to the curb, Daniels made a name for himself at Politico, where you could read corporate propaganda and white-centric discourse from thought leaders like Ben Shapiro. Then again, CNN said nothing when Trump attacked Don Lemon on social media and from the White House. Three days after the 2025 inauguration, the network announced it was moving Trump nemesis Jim Acosta’s primetime show to midnight as “part of a broader shift in tone.”
These networks are not outliers. ABC temporarily suspended Jimmy Kimmel for angering MAGA world and ABC News forked over $15 million to Trump for a lawsuit it probably could’ve won. Not to be outdone, Paramount, which owns CBS, spent $16 million more on its fealty package before hiring Bari Weiss to oversee the network’s unrepentant pro-Trump shift. To NBC’s credit, the network said it would “stand by” Meet the Press host Kristen Welker when Trump threatened to “punish” her for telling the truth.
I know that’s pretty lame. but what else would you expect? We already know what they are.
Actually, maybe you don’t.
Marks, Simps or Suckers?
While Trump’s staunchest supporters have alternately been labeled as “marks,” “simps” and suckers, in the Black cinematic universe (which is often conflated with “hip-hop culture” or “Gen X”), these terms define different levels of capitulation.
A “mark” is someone people with nefarious intentions can trick into doing something they wouldn’t otherwise do. Contrary to popular belief, extremely naive people don’t make the best marks. In fact, the easiest marks are so overconfident, they believe they're too smart to fall for a scam, which is how they become victims of “confidence men.”
Disney, parent company of ABC, is a perfect example of this concept.
According to an anonymous ABC executive, the network handed Trump a trunkful of corporate dollars because “the problem needed to go away.” That capitalist-fueled confidence is exactly why Disney is now suing the Trump administration for violating the corporation’s right to free speech. Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows what happens to the kid who just hands their lunch money to the bully on the first day of school. ABC didn’t make the problem go away; it made the entire network a target of Trump’s extortion scheme. Disney, ABC are MAGA marks.
And it only cost them $15 million.
CBS, on the other hand, is a simp.
Before white people started using it, the term referred to someone—male or female—who had no “game.” But, unlike marks, simps don’t have to be tricked; these “simpletons” trick themselves. They willingly engage in unacceptable behavior because they desperately hope to attract the attention of someone they already know isn’t interested in them. If a pimp is someone who has successfully mastered “the game,” then a simp is the opposite.
Trump didn’t even have to shake down Paramount or try to destroy 60 Minutes, perhaps the most revered name in network TV journalism. The Tiffany Network talked itself into hiring unqualified, inexperienced Bari Weiss to oversee the Trumpian overhaul. Weiss and CBS chose MAGA-coded hairpiece Tony Dokoupil, apparently hoping the Joe Rogan of Karens would appeal to the equally uniformed white dunderheads. They were wrong. To be fair, after paying Trump to reportedly edit an interview with Kamala Harris, CBS won the opportunity to interview Donald Trump.
Unfortunately, the simps at CBS had to heavily edit the interview.
Suckers are the least sophisticated of the three. Because they either lack critical-thinking skills or real-world experience, these guileless innocents are the easiest fish. Even the worst fishermen know a sucker will bite any bait that crosses its path.
Only a sucker would think they could replace a beloved Black woman journalist by just throwing some random Black faces behind a desk. While MS NOW’s new podcast show Clock It sounds like it was devised by six white women on their way to Pilates class, I genuinely want the hosts to succeed. But after “clocking” that Hasan Piker trainwreck and the reactions to it, it’s possible that the network and the non-journalists genuinely don’t understand how suckeriffic it was.
Plenty of Black people would want to be head of the WHCA. But only a sucker would remain in that position while their colleagues shitted a Black woman out of its yellow-bellied bowels. What the fuck is the purpose of having a seat at the table if you are just gonna do the same sucker shit that white folks do?
And Trump still didn’t go to the dinner where Amber Ruffin was supposed to perform.
Because, who wants to eat with a roomful of suckers?
In all fairness, corporate media is not the only institutions who are outbidding each other for exclusive rights to be the sole distributor of Trump’s snake oil. Columbia University, Cornell, Brown and some of America’s top colleges have agreed to pay hundreds of millions combined to stop Trump’s extortion plot. Yale is in the process of capitulating.
I’m sure the attacks on the suckers in higher ed will be over soon.
Not only didn’t Jeff Bezos’ act of preemptive simping stop the Washington Post from losing subscribers, but it also didn’t stop Trump from attacking the great journalists who work there. The wimps are not all conservatives either. The attorney generals who capitulated on the Paramount merger got played. Hakeem Jeffries is such a sucker, he’s holding “affordability” meetings with random MAGAs who hold no legislative, judicial or executive power.
Or maybe we’re Jeffries’ marks.
It’s not so bad. Joe Rogan was a mark. Marjorie Taylor Greene was a simp. White farmers are suckers. So are the crypto bros and the Latinos for Trump and the people who believed in “No foreign wars” and the “America First” simps and “Stop the Steal” suckers and the mark-ass MAGA voters who are whining about their nephew-in-law being kidnapped to an African concentration camp. And as harsh as it may sound, if you are one of the people who are still unironically screaming “release the Epstein files,” you are as delusional as any fool who ever lived.
To be fair, Trump’s ability to con so many American into joining his stable has nothing to do with his charisma, street smarts or an abundance of “game.” He is successful because he chose the easiest marks and the stupidest suckers.
In all fairness, America is a nation of suckers. America-loving simps like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson truly thought white people would gradually come to their senses and free their human property without bloodshed. Postwar Republicans suckers believed that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments would eliminate racial violence and discrimination. We live in a country filled with slack-jawed yokels who have been bamboozled into believing in their genetic and intellectual superiority, but somehow still believe that DEI, CRT and BLM pose an existential threat to their supremacy. We get our news from the platforms owned by the same billionaires who are paying millions to their pimp, Trump Daddy. Why would we expect Trump to respect institutions that have pitched its own members under the MAGA bus?
We are not collectively kicking and screaming. Most of us aren’t even ready to fight. Most of us are still operating under the assumption that laws work and the Constitution still applies.
They don’t. It doesn’t. The White House security, the U.S. military and every non-stupid person in America know that Trump’s ban on journalists is illegal.This is the purest example of someone “abridging the freedom of speech.”
JOURNALISTS. CANNOT. ENTER. THE. WHITE HOUSE.
And I truly understand why some people object to profane use of terms like “bitches” and “hoes.” But if you’re main concern is acceptable language and upholding decorum…
That’s also my point.
This is how Donald Trump made America his bitch.
I was surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews this past weekend when, for some reason, everyone began telling their individual bullying stories. My cousin Nikki said she beat up a simp’s sister. My cousin Metia’s bully beatdown story ends with going upside her persecutor’s head with a pair of plastic Jellies. My Uncle Rob rolled a joint as he swore that he knows karate.
After everyone finished their heroic origin stories, one of my cousins asked:
“Hey Mikey, why do all your friends you grew up with call you ‘Rickety?’”
My nieces and nephews were too young to remember the Rickety Rocket. My aunts and uncles were too old to watch Saturday cartoons. And here’s the thing:
Rickety Rocket never aired in my hometown.
I was a senior in high school before I realized my childhood nickname was essentially a big lip joke. My childhood friends were literally laughing at the wisecrack because Hawk from New York was “cool.” Now, I could’ve told my cousin that I grew up surrounded by simps and suckers for NY accents. I could’ve asked them to Google the name or even recounted the lackluster tale of how I overcame my middle school tormentor. Instead, I gave them a detailed explanation of why everyone who grew up in my neighborhood calls me Rickety.
“Because I ain’t nobody’s bitch.”
America is, though.
No lies told. These clowns treated this shit like a circus from the moment the orange pedophile came down the escalator to the moment they were all kee-keeing with him at that pathetic dinner. You knew he was a menace but you cared more about access, ratings, and money. Don't act all shocked now, assholes; you asked for this. Enjoy.