By Stacy M. Brown, Senior National Correspondent, Black Press of America
Russell Vought wakes each morning with the cold precision of a man who has learned to confuse faith with power. His pen is a weapon, and his calculations are not about progress or prosperity. They are about punishment. He has taken the language of government and turned it into a vocabulary of cruelty. Each budget cut is an act of vengeance. Each withheld dollar is a message to the poor, to the vulnerable, to the people who dare to believe that America still belongs to them. Long before his name became a headline, Vought said that federal workers should be “traumatically affected.” He said he wanted them to wake up, dreading their jobs because he saw public service as an enemy of his mission. That mission has now become law. Through his control of the Office of Management and Budget, Vought has used the machinery of government to dismantle everything that serves the public good.
In cities like New York, Baltimore, Boston, and San Francisco, billions of dollars in Army Corps of Engineers projects have been frozen or canceled. He called it efficiency. Others called it sabotage. The agency’s own records show that nearly all its employees were funded through resources that did not expire when the government shut down. Yet Vought ordered them to stop work, punishing communities that did not vote for his president. “The Democrat shutdown has drained the Army Corps of Engineers’ ability to manage billions of dollars in projects,” he wrote online. That was not true. The shutdown did not drain anything. It was a political hit job on Democratic-led cities, a financial assault dressed up as fiscal restraint. Representative Rosa DeLauro said that what Vought is doing is “illegally stealing taxpayer funding in a unilateral, partisan act.” Her statement is not hyperbole. Congressional investigators and federal courts have already found that Vought has tried to impound or cancel money that Congress legally appropriated. He has blocked research funding for disease prevention, canceled grants for public transit, and withheld small business aid meant to keep communities alive. His so-called “pocket rescissions” have defunded law enforcement programs and cut food assistance for families already hanging by a thread.
In Chicago, $2.1 billion in public transit funds were terminated. In New York, $18 billion for rail modernization vanished without warning. These were not economic decisions. They were political punishments. DeLauro said, “It seems each morning, Russ Vought wakes up determined to abuse his authority to the detriment of working-class families, middle-class families, and vulnerable Americans.” Her words describe a man who believes compassion is weakness and that cruelty is proof of strength. Inside Washington, his reach extends far beyond the budget office. Russell Vought is the silent architect of this government. He has fired or forced out more than 200,000 civil servants under the pretext of so-called reductions in force. A court was forced to step in to block his latest round of firings after evidence showed he was using the Trump shutdown as cover for an illegal purge of federal employees. Congressman Joe Neguse called him “the Grim Reaper.” It is a name that fits. For every program that dies under his orders, another piece of the American safety net disappears. These are not faceless numbers. They are people who tested drinking water for toxins, monitored public health during disease outbreaks, and ensured that disaster recovery funds reached those in need. Their dismissal is not the byproduct of bureaucracy. It is the plan. The fewer people protecting the public, the easier it becomes to destroy what remains of democracy.
Vought calls himself a Christian nationalist. He says America was meant to be a Christian nation. But the Christianity he invokes is not about mercy or justice. It is a creed of domination. When he ordered the cancellation of federal diversity training and removed references to systemic racism from government documents, he was not correcting waste. He was rewriting the story of this country. He was erasing the blood, the struggle, and the truth that built the modern American promise. For Black America, his policies are not abstract. They are a direct blow. His freezes and cancellations have wiped out funding for housing, education, and medical research. Over $400 billion in programs that once served as lifelines to low-income and minority communities are now gone. The cuts have dismantled the very protections that generations fought and died to achieve. This is not the government. It is punishment disguised as policy. Vought’s cruelty is not a side effect. It is the design. Even inside Trump’s inner circle, some quietly admit that it is Vought who holds the real power. He writes the orders, drafts the memos, and decides which programs live or die. What the president says in anger, Vought turns into law. What began as a movement to “shrink government” has become a crusade to starve it, to leave nothing but power in the hands of men who look and think like him.
He once said he wanted bureaucrats to wake up in pain. And that pain has spread far beyond the walls of Washington. It reaches into classrooms without textbooks, into homes without heat, and into clinics where the doors have closed for good. This is what happens when one man’s ideology becomes national policy. It is what happens when faith is twisted into a weapon. Russell Vought has taken the name of God and written it across a ledger of suffering. He has mistaken cruelty for conviction. But America has seen this kind of righteousness before. The men who built segregation, the men who burned crosses, and the men who called their hate holy all believed they were saving the nation. They were not. They were destroying it. History does not forget men like this. It writes their names in shame. As one congressional staffer said, “Russell Vought doesn’t just cut budgets. He cuts people out of democracy.” And that is the truest line ever written about him.
WHEELING — Grace Tamburin and Owen Dobrzynski Hines, both seniors at Wheeling Park High School, have won the Wheeling Elks Scholarships for 2025-26.
Each will receive $1,000 from Wheeling Lodge No. 28, according to Elks Youth Activities Chairman Joe Marchlenski. Both are eligible for further state and national Elks’ scholarships.
“We believe it is important to recognize outstanding leadership and scholarship qualities in the youth of our area,” said Elks Exalted Ruler Ruby Haynes. “We are proud that more than $4 million in scholarships is awarded nationally by the Elks each year.”
Tamburin currently carries a GPA of 4.32. She is the captain and four-year member of both the girls’ volleyball and softball teams, and was recently named to the OVAC All-Star Volleyball team for West Virginia.
She is a member of both the National Honor Society and the National Spanish Honor Society. In her spare time, she volunteers with A Night to Shine, assisting adults with special needs. She plans to attend Shepherd University in Shepherdstown.
Dobrzynski Hines currently carries a GPA of 4.1. He is a captain and four-year member of both the football and track and field teams.
He volunteers dozens of hours each year with multiple Ohio Valley agencies, and describes his most influential community service project as volunteering with the flood relief efforts following the devastating flooding that occurred in this area in June.
He is a member of the Drug Free Club of America, the Freshmen Mentor Program, and the National Honor Society. He plans to attend Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and major in social work and social services.
News file photo Representatives from area schools and the Foster Closet are seen picking up hygiene items for youth that were collected during the 2nd Annual Dignity Drive in 2025.
Laurel Nowak invites the community to participate in the third annual Dignity Drive from Monday to March 6.
Donations can be dropped off at Star Staffing located in Alpena from Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The Dignity Drive asks community members to donate personal hygiene products for the youth in Northeast Michigan. Nowak said last year, the drive collected $10,000 worth of hygiene products which were provided to the School Success Program at Thunder Bay Jr. High School and Alpena High School. Products were also donated to the Foster Care Closet of Northern Michigan.
Nowak said that all partners were “grateful for the commitment of our community to children in need.”
“We were also able to provide a box to all of the area elementary schools,” she added.
“Personal hygiene is a basic human need,” Nowak said. “Many homeless and low-income children do not have the hygiene products they need for self-care. This causes many problems such as social rejection, illnesses and missed days of school.”
Items for both boys and girls are accepted, though Nowak asks community members to avoid donations of razors.
Below are a list of accepted donations:
— Feminine hygiene products
— Deodorant
— Body spray
— String bags or ditty bags
— Body or hand lotion
— Lip balm
— Soap
— Shampoo and conditioner
— Toothpaste
— Toothbrushes
If you are looking for additional information you can contact Nowak at 989-464-5968.
A player looks on from the dugout during a baseball game at Kentlake High School in Kent, Wash., on May 4, 2025. According to a survey by the Aspen Institute, 11.4% of parents believe their children can play professionally. (Grant Hindsley/The New York Times)
Like many mothers in Southern California, Paula Gartin put her twin son and daughter, Mikey and Maddy, into youth sports leagues as soon as they were old enough. For years, they loved playing soccer, baseball and other sports, getting exercise and making friends.
But by their early teens, the competition got stiffer, the coaches became more demanding, injuries intervened and their travel teams demanded that they focus on only one sport. Shuttling to weekend tournaments in Escondido and elsewhere turned into a chore. Sports became less enjoyable.
Maddy dropped soccer because she didn’t like the coach and took up volleyball. Mikey played club soccer and baseball as a youngster, then chose baseball before he suffered a knee injury in his first football practice during the baseball offseason. By 15, he had stopped playing team sports. Both are now in college and more focused on academics.
“I feel like there is so much judgment around youth sports. If you’re not participating in sports, you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing as a kid,” Gartin said. “There’s this expectation you should be involved, that it’s something you should be doing. You feel you have to push your kids. There’s pressure on them.”
Youth sports can have a positive effect on children’s self-esteem and confidence and teach them discipline and social skills. But a growing body of recent research has shown how coaches and parents can heap pressure on children, how heavy workloads can lead to burnout and fractured relationships with family members and friends, and how overuse injuries can stem from playing single sports.
A report published by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2024 showed how overuse injuries and overtraining can lead to burnout in young athletes. The report cited pressure by parents and coaches as additional risk factors. Another study, in the Journal of Sport & Social Issues, highlighted how giving priority to a win-at-all-costs culture can stunt a young athlete’s personal development and well-being. Researchers at the University of Hawaii found that abusive and intrusive behavior by parents can add to stress on athletes.
Mental health is a vast topic, from clinical issues like depression and suicidal thoughts to anxiety and psychological abuse. There is now a broad movement to increase training for coaches so they can identify signs and symptoms of mental health conditions, said Vince Minjares, a program manager in the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program. Since 2020, seven states have begun requiring coaches to receive mental health training, he said.
Domineering coaches and parents have been around for generations. But their pressure has been amplified by the professionalization of youth sports. A growing number of sports leagues are being run as profit-driven businesses to meet demand from parents who urge their children to play at earlier ages to try to improve their chances of playing college or pro sports. According to a survey by the Aspen Institute, 11.4% of parents believe that their children can play professionally.
“There’s this push to specialize earlier and earlier,” said Meredith Whitley, a professor at Adelphi University who studies youth sports. “But at what cost? For those young people, you’re seeing burnout happen earlier because of injuries, overuse and mental fatigue.”
The additional stress is one reason more children are dropping out. The share of school-age children playing sports fell to 53.8% in 2022, from 58.4% in 2017, according to the National Survey of Children’s Health. While more than 60 million adolescents play sports, up to 70% of them drop out by age 13.
While groups like the Aspen Institute focus on long-standing issues of access and cost in youth sports, combating mental health problems in young athletes is an emerging area. In recent years, professional athletes like Naomi Osaka and Michael Phelps have shined a light on the issue. But parents who want to teach their children the positive parts of playing sports are finding that some of the worst aspects of being a young athlete are hard to avoid.
That was apparent to the parents who took their sons to hear Travis Snider speak at Driveline Academy in Kent, Washington, one Sunday last spring. Snider was a baseball phenom growing up near Seattle and was taken by the Toronto Blue Jays in the first round of the 2006 MLB draft.
But he finished eight unremarkable seasons as an outfielder and played his last major league game at 27. While attempting a comeback in the minor leagues, he worked with a life coach to help him make sense of why his early promise fizzled. He unearthed childhood traumas and unrealistic expectations on the field.
In a playoff game as an 11-year-old, he had had a panic attack on the mound and was removed from the game.
Though he reached the highest level of his sport, Snider felt as if distorted priorities turned baseball into a burden, something he wanted to help others avoid.
Last year, he started a company, 3A Athletics, to help children, parents and coaches develop healthier approaches to sports that include separating professional aspirations from the reality that most young athletes just want to get some exercise and make friends.
“We as a culture really blended the two into the same experience, which is really toxic for kids as they’re going through the early stages of identity formation,” Snider said. “You have a lot of parents who are sports fans that want to watch youth sports the same way they watch pro sports without recognizing, ‘Hey, the thing I love the most is out there running around on the field.’”
He added, “We’ve got to take a step back and detach from what has become normalized and what kind of vortex we get sucked into.”
Driveline Academy, an elite training facility filled with batting cages, speed guns, sensors and framed jerseys of pro players, might be the kind of vortex Snider would want people to avoid. But Deven Morgan, director of youth baseball at Driveline, hired 3A Athletics to help parents and young athletes put their sport in context.
“It’s part of a stack of tools we can deploy to our families and kids to help them understand that there is a structural way that you can understand this stuff and relate to your kid,” he said.
“We are going to get more out of this entire endeavor if we approach this thing from a lens of positivity.”
During his one-hour seminar, Snider and his partner, Seth Taylor, told the six sets of parents and sons how to navigate the mental roadblocks that come from competitive sports. Snider showed the group a journal he kept during the 2014 season that helped him overcome some of his fears, and encouraged the ballplayers to do the same.
“It’s not just about writing the bad stuff,” he said. “The whole goal is to start to open up about this stuff.”
Taylor took the group through a series of mental exercises, including visualization and relaxation techniques, to help players confront their fears and parents to understand their role as a support system.
His message seemed to get through to Amy Worrell-Kneller, who had brought her 14-year-old son, Wyatt, to the session.
“Generally, there’s always a few parents who are the ones who seem to be hanging on too tight, and the kids take that on,” she said. “At this age, they’re social creatures, but it starts with the parents.”
Coaches play a role, too. The Catholic Youth Organization in the Diocese of Cleveland has been trying to ratchet down the pressure on young athletes. At a training session in August, about 120 football, soccer, volleyball and cross-country coaches met for three hours to learn how to create “safe spaces” for children.
“Kids start to drop out by 12, 13 because it’s not fun and parents can make it not fun,” said Drew Vilinsky, the trainer. “Kids are tired and distracted before they get to practice, and have a limited amount of time, so don’t let it get stale.”
Coaches were told, among other things, to let children lead stretches and other tasks to promote confidence. Track coaches should use whistles, not starting guns, and withhold times from young runners during races.
“We’re trying not to overwhelm a kid with anxiety,” said Lisa Ryder, a track and cross-country coach for runners through eighth grade. “CYO is not going to get your kid to be LeBron.”
Basketball players Thiago DeJesus (first photo), Riley Severson (second photo) and Talon Stockdale (third photo) compete recently in the Fuller Hall Youth Basketball 5th and 6th grade boys league at Jefferson Gym in Webster City.
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NEW YORK — Two rookies made their first career starts for the Nets and Cam Thomas provided a scoring lift off the bench with an efficient 21 points, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the absence of key starters in a 120-96 loss to the Houston Rockets on Thursday night at Barclays Center.
Brooklyn opened 2026 with a second straight loss and fell to 10-21, undone by a sluggish start, uneven offense and a Rockets team that continued to pour it on as the night wore on.
That tone was set early.
With three starters out, the Nets leaned further into their youth experiment, starting rookies Drake Powell and Danny Wolf and asking Wolf to set the table. Brooklyn’s start was anything but steady with Kevin Durant back in the building. The Rockets raced out to a 12-2 lead by the 9:14 mark as the Nets’ offense stalled and defensive breakdowns piled up, prompting an early timeout from head coach Jordi Fernández after Houston opened 6-for-6 from the field on a parade of layups.
Brooklyn steadied itself for a bit, ripping off a 16-8 run and flipping the momentum when Alperen Sengun went to the bench. But the response didn’t last long. Rockets head coach Ime Udoka quickly put Sengun back in, and he continued to be a problem. By the end of the first quarter, the Nets trailed 26-20, with Ziaire Williams scoring six points and grabbing two steals and Sengun leading all scorers with 10.
The second quarter is where it started to slip. Brooklyn hung around early, with Day’Ron Sharpe’s interior work briefly cutting the deficit to four, but the Rockets answered every push. Durant settled the game with shot-making, Reed Sheppard buried back-to-back 3s and the Nets’ offense stalled into turnovers and empty trips. Houston closed the half in control, taking a 53-42 lead into the break.
The third quarter is where Houston turned control into separation. It got ugly quickly. While Brooklyn committed just two turnovers in the period, the lack of offensive firepower showed as the Rockets shot 63.6% and saw Jabari Smith Jr., Tari Eason and Amen Thompson all reach double figures in the quarter. Thomas and Nic Claxton tried to keep the Nets within reach, but it wasn’t enough, as Brooklyn fell behind by as many as 26 and went into the fourth trailing 90-67.
It was never closer than 16 points down the stretch.
Rookies Powell, Wolf and Nolan Traore played 25, 29 and 26 minutes, respectively, shooting a combined 8-for-27 from the field. Thompson led six Rockets in double figures with 23 points, four rebounds, three assists, two steals and a block.
Sharpe finished with a career-high seven assists with eight points, eight rebounds and two steals.
The Nets return to action Friday night on the second night of a back-to-back against the Washington Wizards at Capital One Arena.
