Before They Define Me, Let Me Tell You Who I Am

I already know what they’ll say before they say it.
That I’m too bold.
Too poetic.
Too angry.
Too queer.
Too Black.
Too young.
Too honest.
Too much.

To which I say: you’re absolutely right.
Because I wasn’t made to fit in, I was made to cut through.

I didn’t come here to play the game.
I came here to rewrite the rules and set fire to the parts of the script that never served us.

My name is Jacob Newsome.
I am the founder of Power of the Narrative.
I am the son of silence-breakers.
The echo of the ones who didn’t make it.
The grief-walker. The system agitator. The mirror nobody asked for but many desperately need.

I was raised inside systems that told me to stay quiet and grateful.
But I heard too many people crying in corners no one ever looked at.

So I built a platform out of story and called it truth.
I built a movement out of grief and called it love.
I built a future out of narrative and called it liberation.

Let me be clear:
I am not a Democrat talking head.
I am not a sanitized activist.
I am not here to chase a vote.
I am not here to speak to power, I’m here to speak from it.

I am a man who listens first.
Who moves slow on purpose.
Who holds a story like it's sacred.
Who shows up with the dead on his back and the next generation in his chest.

You might assume I’m progressive.
You’d be right.

But I don’t speak like the Left.
I speak like life, because that’s what’s missing in our discourse.

I don’t lead with statistics.
I lead with stories.

Because the boy whose brother was gunned down by a cop,
the undocumented mother afraid to send her kid to school,
the trans teen who dreams of becoming a therapist but can’t find a gender-affirming doctor

They’re not data points.
They’re the damn blueprint for a better country.

And if that makes me dangerous to your party line, maybe your party line was never designed to hold the weight of real people.

I remember the moment this became clear.

A classmate once burst into tears in my biology class. Her father had just been deported.
The teacher kept teaching. The lesson continued. The grief did not.

That day, I promised myself: I will never walk past somebody’s sorrow again.
I will stop the class. I will name the rupture. I will hold what others pretend isn’t there.

That’s what this movement is about.

Power of the Narrative is not a podcast. It’s not a nonprofit.
It’s a portal.

It’s a way of doing politics without losing your soul.
It’s a trauma-informed blueprint for community resurrection.
It’s what happens when a generation refuses to die quietly.

We work with schools. We hold space with survivors. We build platforms for the missing and the silenced.
We speak before we’re invited.
And we grieve in public because too many people are doing it in private.

This is legacy work.
And I’m not doing it alone.

I don’t carry this by myself.
There’s a whole damn choir behind me.
Artists. Elders. Educators. Students. Dreamers.
People who’ve been written off—now writing themselves back in.

We are decentralizing power so no one can ever kill the movement.
If you take me out, the fire still spreads.

And that, my friend, is how you become unkillable.

So before the media tries to frame me, let me say this now:

I am not a moment.
I am a memory returning.
I am not a politician.
I am a mirror—and I will reflect this country until it’s brave enough to see itself.

I am not running for office to win followers.
I am building altars for the forgotten.
And if that turns into a seat, so be it.

But let the record show:
We were already building the future before anyone gave us permission.

Because when the missiles fall in Tel Aviv, and children are bombed in Gaza
when the children disappear at the border,
when another trans teen dies unnamed,
we must ask ourselves:

What ancestors are we becoming?

I don’t want to be remembered for my title.
I want to be remembered for what I carried
and how many people I let share the load.

Let them talk. Let them guess. Let them try to box me in.

But by the time they figure me out,
we’ll already have taken the country back.