Prodigal The Podcast

Send us Fan Mail Episode 34: Lower Cognitive Ability Linked to Stronger Christian Nationalism A new peer-reviewed study is about to go viral with a headline that writes itself people who score lower on a cognitive ability test are significantly more likely to hold Christian nationalist beliefs. It's real research — from one of the most-cited sociologists studying Christian nationalism in the...

Send us Fan Mail Content note: this episode discusses a sitting president's public threats to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy the military against American citizens. It's handled factually, not sensationally, but it's heavy — listener discretion advised. Three things are true right now, all at once: the U.S. is six months into a war with Iran with no end in sight. The preside...

Send us Fan Mail Content note: this episode discusses documented child sexual abuse and institutional cover-up. It's handled factually, not graphically, but it's heavy — listener discretion advised. Nine days. That's all that separates two stories that look unrelated and aren't. On September 30th, the Massachusetts Attorney General released the state's first-ever clergy se...

Send us Fan Mail Today Tennessee executes a woman for the first time in roughly two hundred years. Her name is Christa Pike — eighteen when it happened, forty-eight now. She confessed. That's not in question. What Don Jackson and Daysha Voss spend this episode on is the question underneath it: what happened to her before that day, that made that day possible? Content note: this episode discus...

Send us Fan Mail  Mindful Source: Return to Stillness (Bonus Guided Meditation) This one's different. No Newsbeat, no breakdown of somebody else's headlines — just a short, guided meditation and a reminder of what was never actually lost. Put on headphones if you can. Sit still if you're able to. If you can't — if you're driving, if the day's already loud — that'...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 30: The Pulpit Protected Him A registered sex offender was one signature away from becoming a state overseer of a national Black church network. In this episode, Don Jackson and Daysha Voss don't ease into it — they identify the problem, notice the pattern, and lay out exactly what has to change, plainly and without softening it. Content note: this episode discusses a...

Send us Fan Mail Fertile Ground — A Guided Meditation We are overcomers. We create reality — it doesn't just happen to us. In this guided meditation, Don Jackson walks you onto the fertile ground inside all of us: the place where mind, heart, and coherence get planted on purpose, before they ever show up in your actual day and week. This one's longer than usual and built to be sat with,...

Send us Fan Mail  The Leash Reaches the Ballot Box Two episodes ago, Don and Daysha told you the national debt was the leash — an infrastructure of control built by people nobody voted in and nobody can vote out. They closed with one ask: vote, every time, all the way down the ballot. Six days later, the Supreme Court answered. This episode follows that same leash straight to the ballot box. The C...

Send us Fan Mail Open Hands — A Meditation on Letting Go of Control Most of us walk around gripping something all day — a schedule, an outcome, a person who hasn't texted back. It feels like responsibility. It's actually fear wearing a control costume. In this guided meditation, Don leads you through releasing the grip and choosing trust instead — the stronger move, not the weaker one. P...

Send us Fan Mail The Debt Is the Leash $38.9 trillion. That's the U.S. national debt right now, growing by roughly $7 billion a day — and Don and Daysha want you to sit with a hard truth before you get mad at whoever's in the Oval Office: the President didn't create that number and can't erase it. He's a tenant. The people actually holding that debt don't run for offi...

Send us Fan Mail At the Congressional Black Caucus's Annual Legislative Conference, civil rights attorney Lee Merritt and Reverend Dr. Jamal Bryant had to build a panel called "Stop The Lynchings" themselves — because it wasn't already on the agenda. Forensic pathologist Dr. Roger Mitchell told the room "forensic medicine is medicine like any other." He had to say it...

Send us Fan Mail No True Bill: The Nolan Wells Case and Mississippi's Oldest Verdict Eighteen years old. Went out on the water with his friends for the Fourth of July. Was the only one who didn't come home. On September 21st, a Jackson County, Mississippi grand jury returned a no true bill in the death of Nolan Wells — no charges, against anybody, for anything. The District Attorney went...

Send us Fan Mail Own Your Power: Texas's Grid Is Buckling Under Data Centers — Here's What Actually Works Right Now In January, the line of companies waiting to connect to the Texas power grid totaled 233 gigawatts. By August, it was 474 gigawatts — over 90 percent of it data centers, more than five times the entire state's peak demand. The governor just halted new hookups and order...

Send us Fan Mail The Nerd Reich: The Book, the Blueprint, and the Billionaires Building an Exit From Democracy Before he left office, a sitting president warned that Silicon Valley's "tech-industrial complex" had become radicalized. Journalist Gil Duran — a former newsroom editor and communications director for Kamala Harris, Governor Jerry Brown, and Senator Dianne Feinstein — spen...

Send us Fan Mail The Machine That Outlives Him: Fifty Years of Oligarchy, a Congress on the Take, and the War That Proves the Point DESCRIPTION: Trump is not the disease. He's what fifty years of a project finally looks like once it stops hiding. Don and Daysha make the case plainly: even if Trump leaves office, the oligarchy underneath him doesn't go anywhere. The ten richest billionair...

Send us Fan Mail Not So Secret: The Ballot Flaw AI Just Made Easy, the Fake Threat Getting More Airtime, and the Map Rewritten Before You Voted Somebody can find out exactly how you voted. Not guess — find out. Georgia's voting system stores your ballot in the same order voters checked in, and a researcher just proved AI tools have made that exploit trivial for anyone to pull off. Georgia&apo...

Send us Fan Mail This week, Trump posted that the only AI guardrail this country needs is him — "a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT" — then called AI safety concerns a "SICK conspiracy." Days earlier, Obama privately told Hakeem Jeffries that AI power sitting in "private hands" could be dangerous, and floated a "framework for a very public conversation"...

Send us Fan Mail Sainted: Trump's 9/11 Story, Charlie Kirk Day, and the Machine That Makes Saints Four days before this episode, standing in front of actual 9/11 responders on the twenty-fifth anniversary, the President told a room that firefighters carried him out of Ground Zero. PolitiFact can't find him there. FDNY can't confirm it happened. Forty-eight hours earlier, Utah's...

Send us Fan Mail Wednesday night in Dallas, at the GOP's "Trump-a-Palooza" midterm convention, Senator Tim Scott screamed his way through a speech that split the room exactly the way it was built to — a standing ovation from delegates, "meltdown" from liberal commentators, "proof of bigotry" from conservative ones. Almost nobody named what was actually happening:...

Send us Fan Mail They edited the Bible. In 1807, a version of the Bible was printed specifically to hand to enslaved people — with the Exodus story cut out and "slaves, obey your masters" left in. That wasn't an accident. It was engineering. In this episode, Don and Daysha trace the documented history of how a controlled version of Christianity was built to produce obedience — and h...

Send us Fan Mail There's a claim moving through every timeline right now: everything you were taught about Jesus is only the surface, and underneath the religion is a hidden teaching about consciousness itself. Don and Daysha go in on it — the Prodigal way: gut-punching AND factual, because a real idea doesn't need a fake history to back it up. In this episode: What's actually real...

Send us Fan Mail You woke up already defeated today — same tightness in your chest, same bill you haven't opened. That's not reality. That's old weather. And somebody figured out how to sell that feeling right back to you for $27.99 a month. This episode, Don and Daysha go deep into the manifestation and "law of assumption" content flooding your feed right now — Neville Go...

Send us Fan Mail The Black church built the biggest, most consistent gathering of people in this country's history — tens of thousands of congregations, tens of millions of members, over a hundred years of Sundays. So why hasn't that turned into a think tank, a school network, a bank, a legal defense fund that's still standing generations later? On this episode of Prodigal, Don and...

Send us Fan Mail They tell you there's a crisis. They tell you they're the only ones who can fix it. Then they tell you what it costs to be one of the ones they actually fix it for. In this episode, Don and Daysha trace a pattern that runs from an 1894 company town in Pullman, Illinois straight through to 2025 and 2026 — five sectors, one mechanism: pressure applied broadly, relief hande...

Send us Fan Mail 📩 GET THE FULL BREAKDOWN → https://prodigalthepodcast.substack.com A papal decree gives European Christian nations the "right" to claim any land held by non-Christians. That single document gets cited in U.S. Supreme Court cases for two hundred years. Columbus didn't discover anything — people were already here, with their own nations, languages, and governments, a...