Citizen Writers Fighting Censorship by Helping Americans Understand Issues Affecting the Republic.
David T. Cloft 
Kosovo in 1999 we ended up creating what we called the Joint Visitors Bureau (JVB). I was a 1LT serving as aide-de-camp to the commander, and one of the first things you learn in that job is that warfighting sometimes takes a back seat to something far more dangerous: VIP visits.
Modern war has acquired an odd new feature. It now comes with graphics, dramatic music, and a nightly highlight reel. Precision bombs streak across the screen. Drones glide in cinematic slow motion. Social media fills with grainy infrared footage of things exploding in the desert while commentators nod gravely and say phrases like “escalation dynamics” and “rules-based order.”
For most of history, lies moved slowly. A king issued a proclamation. A priest told a story. A rumor drifted across a village. Today, narratives move at the speed of fiber optics, algorithmically amplified and psychologically engineered. What once required an empire now requires a social media campaign.
The basic idea of unmanned warfare actually dates back more than a century. During World War I, armies experimented with remotely controlled aircraft and explosive “aerial torpedoes.” They were crude and unreliable, but the concept was already there: send a machine instead of a pilot into harm’s way. Through the Cold War the idea matured into reconnaissance drones used primarily for surveillance. The United States began using early UAVs over Vietnam and later refined the concept in the 1990s and early 2000s.
A couple years ago, when ChatGPT first exploded onto the scene, I was teaching at a Christian school. My philosophy with technology has always been simple: learn it before you fear it. Every major technological shift in history has followed the same pattern—first confusion, then panic, then acceptance once people realize it’s not going away. So I did what teachers are supposed to do. I explained the technology to my students.
Republics rarely collapse because one ambitious man wakes up one morning and decides to crown himself king. They collapse because the public becomes exhausted, angry, and convinced that the system no longer works.
Politicians understand something about human nature that civics textbooks politely ignore: most voters do not follow policy, read legislation, or track long-term economic trends. They respond to a handful of very simple signals. Think of it as the national political dashboard. There are four blinking lights that determine whether the public is happy or furious.
Today’s extinction event probably doesn’t arrive in a missile silo. It arrives in a mislabeled vial, a shipping manifest error, a warehouse with 1,000 genetically modified mice, or a “harmless research sample” that accidentally skipped customs paperwork.
Two and a half centuries ago, the American founders attempted something radical. They built a government specifically designed not to accumulate too much power. It was intentionally slow, limited, and divided against itself. The idea was simple: if ambition countered ambition, tyranny would have a hard time getting traction.
Since the dawn of recorded time, cultures from every corner of the earth have told tales of serpents, dragons, and lizard-like beings. They coil around our myths, slither through our sacred texts, and hiss in our collective memory. But why does the serpent show up so often—and so ominously?
The modern world likes to believe it has outgrown geography. Satellites circle the planet, data moves at the speed of light, and weapons can strike targets from continents away. Military theorists speak confidently about cyber war, artificial intelligence, and fifth-generation conflict conducted across digital networks and orbital platforms. Yet despite all this technological sophistication, the global economy still depends on an astonishingly simple fact of physical geography: about twenty-one miles of ocean between Iran and Oman control roughly a quarter of the world’s oil and enormous quantities of energy-related commodities such as petrochemical feedstocks and fertilizer inputs.
In an era where retired officials rush to cable news studios, write tell-all books, and lob political grenades at their former colleagues, James Mattis has done something unusual: he has mostly stayed quiet.
Today the world’s largest radicalization engine runs twenty-four hours a day, recruiting globally with the efficiency of an Amazon warehouse. You don’t need a secret meeting. You don’t need a physical training camp. You need Wi-Fi and a keyboard. Congratulations — you now have access to what might be called the Lone Wolf Factory, where the raw materials are grievance, identity crisis, and algorithmic amplification.
The Founders built a system based on an assumption that now sounds almost quaint: government power would be limited by reality. Communication was slow. Information was scarce. The federal government had trouble collecting taxes, let alone tracking the daily movements of its citizens. If the government wanted to watch someone in 1790, it needed a horse, a spy, and probably a tavern receipt.
There was a time in America when you could punch your Army captain, skip town, grow a beard, head west, and become “Samuel Whitaker, cattleman and church deacon.” Today? You can’t change your Instagram handle without a two-factor authentication code, three archived screenshots, and your ex forwarding it to your employer.
In October of 1961 the Cold War was already a tense, paranoid chess match played with nuclear weapons instead of pawns. The United States and the Soviet Union were staring each other down across oceans, missile silos, and enough megatonnage to turn the planet into a glowing charcoal briquette. But Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev decided the world needed a reminder of just how big the Soviet hammer could be. So the Kremlin did what any superpower with a bruised ego might do. They built the largest nuclear bomb in human history and lit it off over the Arctic.
These phrases are the verbal equivalent of pulling the fire alarm in an argument. Once someone says them, anyone who disagrees immediately looks like a monster. After all, who wants to be the guy standing up and saying, “Actually, I prefer freedom even if it’s risky”? That’s not exactly a great campaign slogan. But history shows that these exact phrases — the language of safety, fairness, and collective good — are often the first step in breaking down systems built on individual responsibility and replacing them with systems built on control.
In recent election cycles, public trust in the electoral process has measurably declined. Surveys from multiple institutions show that large portions of the electorate—across party lines—harbor doubts about integrity, administration, or transparency. That reality, by itself, is destabilizing. It does not require proof of systemic fraud to create risk. It only requires sustained disbelief.
Start with Clausewitz. His most famous line remains the most brutally accurate description of war ever written: war is the continuation of politics by other means. In other words, wars are not random explosions of violence. Nations fight because they want political outcomes—territory, influence, regime survival, deterrence, or control of strategic regions.
If you grew up on Austin Powers, you remember the joke. Dr. Evil didn’t want nukes. He didn’t want tanks. He wanted lasers. The audience laughed because lasers were cinematic nonsense. Fast forward to 2026 and Israel is fielding the Iron Beam, and the U.S. military has ship-mounted and vehicle-mounted high-energy laser systems actively burning small threats out of the sky. Turns out Dr. Evil was just early.