Today should become a national American holiday: Lemon Pound Cake Day.

An Ohio jury just delivered one of the clearest freedom verdicts in recent memory. It took less than a day to throw out all thirteen claims of defamation, invasion of privacy, the lot, that had been brought by seven Adams County sheriff’s deputies against rapper Afroman. The deputies claimed they should earn $3.9 million for causing him harm. They got nothing.

The facts are plain. Deputies raided Afroman’s home in Winchester, Ohio with long guns and pistols drawn, smashed his door down, and seized over $5,000 in cash in August 2022. They based the assault on a dubious warrant for drug trafficking and kidnapping. No charges were filed. He was in Chicago, not home. No drugs. No kidnapping. When the sheriff’s office returned the cash taken from him, $400 had been skimmed off. They told him they weren’t responsible for this loss or their property damage either.

Afroman had security cameras that captured the targeted abuse. He used the footage to make music videos, most notably the song “Lemon Pound Cake,” which has been viewed over 3 million times on YouTube. It features surveillance clips of white heavyset deputies breaking down the door, then pausing in the kitchen to eye a lemon cake. Afroman narrates the intrusions to a beat. It is a masterpiece, easily one of the best American protest songs in history.

The deputies, invoking historic white supremacist cancel culture, sued to suppress Black speech. They filed claims of emotional distress, humiliation, and death threats, surprised they would be held accountable for their actions. Deputy Lisa Phillips wanted $1.5 million. Sgt. Randy Walters wanted $1 million and told jurors he was humiliated when his daughter came home from school crying because classmates said her mother was making love to Afroman, a reference to lyrics in a song called “Randy Walters is a Son of a Bitch.”

Afroman, as a true patriot, showed up to court every day in an American flag. His testimony was the whole case in miniature:

“I got freedom of speech. After they run around my house with guns, kicked down my door, I got the right to kick a can in my backyard, use my freedom of speech, turn my bad times into a good time.”

“I don’t go to their house, kick down their doors, flip them off on their surveillance cameras, then try to play the victim and sue them.”

“All of this is their fault. If they hadn’t wrongly raided my house, there would be no lawsuit, I would not know their names, they wouldn’t be on my home surveillance system, and there would be no songs.”

He also explained why he brought a local TV crew along when he went to collect his money from the sheriff’s station:

I didn’t wanna get beat up or Epstein’d at the sheriff’s station after I seen them running around my house with AR15s.

God damn American hero, right there.

His defense attorney, David Osborne Jr., put the legal framework to work for everyone to see: the deputies are public officials held to a higher standard, and social commentary on their outrageously unjust conduct is protected speech.

No reasonable person would expect a police officer not to be criticized.

Meanwhile, Afroman’s own countersuit for the property damage the deputies caused during the raid had already been dismissed by Judge Jonathan Hein without a hearing. A victim of police assault had legitimately suffered damages from unwarranted acts. Click of a button, some little office somewhere, Afroman’s words. The institution protects its own until a jury got in the room and called out the imbalance.

Trump Talk Time

To nobody’s surprise, aggressive acts of white supremacists require invisibility to remain legitimate. America First literally calls itself the invisible empire and walks around with white hoods over their head, ever since Woodrow Wilson screened the white sheets vigilante thriller in the White House in 1915.

These radical racists abusing their power in America see the documentation of them as the actual threat.

Lynching, including public torture, worked in America as social and political control affecting law enforcement because it was public but unrecorded, witnessed by the community as spectacle, but not captured in a form that could travel beyond it and reframe it as what it was. The moment reporters and eventually cameras showed up, the political cost of America First changed. Emmett Till’s mother understood this perfectly.

Open the casket, force people to see.

That’s the mechanism Trump is naming out loud today and whining he will shut down.

The American press has been called liars by him because that campaign worked so well for Hitler, but now Trump is elevating his accusations to treason like it’s 1837 in America again. It’s being called treasonous because it reveals the crimes.

On March 15, Trump posted on Truth Social:

media outlets reporting on the Iran war should “be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information.”

Not a joke. Reporting on a war, as this blog certainly does, is described by Trump as treason. The maximum penalty for treason?

Open the casket, force people to see.

FCC Chair Brendan Carr followed up by threatening to revoke broadcast licenses. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth whined from the Pentagon podium that networks were running chyrons reading “Mideast War Intensifies” when they should instead fluff and puff about “Iran Increasingly Desperate.”

The footage, the documentation, the record all breaks the framework. Power needs the act and the narrative about the act to be the same thing. An independent record creates a gap between what happened and what was supposed to have happened, and that gap is where accountability lives.

Afroman used a beat and security camera footage to speak the truth to power. The deputies’ lawyer literally argued in court that a victim giving the public a report about a raid was the harm. Not the raid. The reporting that showed evidence. The reframing, with evidence. An American Black man shining a bright light through the sheets of injustice, instead of cowering to the system of false authority.

CNN’s Daniel Dale documented that when the White House provided examples of outlets spreading the fake carrier video Trump raged about, not a single one was American. There was one Israeli, one Saudi, one Turkish. The treason accusation he cooked up was aimed at an American press corps, even as they hadn’t done what Trump accused them of doing. He wanted to punish Americans for the crime of foreign coverage itself.

Trump’s world is violence against non-whites as hidden policy, while American documentation of the truth is the treason.

After the verdict, Afroman with tears of joy on his face, American flag suit, courthouse steps, corrected the framing one more time:

I didn’t win. America won. America still has freedom of speech. It’s still for the people by the people.

He trumped the Trump.

The jury agreed in under a day.

The question is whether the rest of the world does or Hegseth will prove exactly why he’s covered himself in white supremacist tattoos and was appointed for being the guy who loses his grip. Here’s the video predicting three F-15E would be shot down by friendly fire in one night.

Afroman said he didn’t want to be Epstein’d. He won in court. Nearly 200 Iranian little girls are dead from Hegseth’s unpopular war crimes, among the many others killed from his expanding mistakes. When will their day in court come? Or the Epstein victims?