Citizen Writers Fighting Censorship by Helping Americans Understand Issues Affecting the Republic.
She helped people die. Or maybe you’d say she helped them transition to the other side—whatever that means. She’s not a big believer in “the other side.”
Either way, she’s been helping people pass away for a long time. She has seen more death than most.
March Madness is done. Monday night, the Michigan Wolverines held off the UConn Huskies for the NCAA basketball title, and college free agency, otherwise known as “The Transfer Portal,” is now open and active.
There are Olympic stories about grit, discipline, and the triumph of the human spirit—and then there’s the one about Matthew Emmons, whose rifle got mysteriously vandalized right before the biggest competition of his life. Not misplaced. Not dropped. Not “oops, I leaned it against the rack wrong.” We’re talking deliberate, tool-in-hand, someone-wanted-this-gun-dead sabotage at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. In a sport where competitors track wind shifts measured in whispers and bullet holes measured in decimals, somebody decided to go full blunt-force caveman on precision equipment. And just like that, Olympic-level marksmanship briefly turned into a low-budget whodunit.
If we trust a service member overseas with a loaded rifle, real rules of engagement, and life-and-death decisions in a combat zone, it makes no sense to suddenly treat that same disciplined professional like a liability the moment they step onto a stateside installation; this policy correction acknowledges a simple truth long overdue—responsibility doesn’t evaporate at the gate. The men and women we entrust to defend the nation are trained, vetted, and held to standards far above the civilian baseline, and if we truly believe in that system, then extending reasonable trust for personal defense at home isn’t radical, it’s consistent. And if someone genuinely cannot be trusted with a firearm under controlled conditions on base, then the harder question isn’t about policy—it’s about why they’re in uniform in the first place.
“Yeah, I got a story for you,” said the old woman in the nursing home.
She had midnight skin, dandelion-fuzz hair, and she smoked Newports. Each day she liked to park her wheelchair in the parking lot where she could face the supermarket, and watch all the happy customers walk in and out of Publix.
If you want a glimpse of how modern pressure can scale fast, look north to the winter of 2022 and the protests known as the Freedom Convoy. What began as a cross-country movement of truckers opposing cross-border vaccine requirements turned into a broader protest against mandates and restrictions. The response from the Canadian government under Justin Trudeau was decisive: emergency powers were invoked, certain financial accounts connected to the protests were frozen, and law enforcement moved to clear blockades. Supporters called it necessary to restore order; critics saw it as a warning shot—how quickly financial access and mobility can be restricted in a modern, digitally connected system.
The year was 1875, and long before ESPN, endorsement deals, or even organized leagues as we know them, one of the most electric sporting events on earth unfolded on a windswept stretch of Irish coastline at Dollymount, just outside Dublin. This was the Great International Rifle Match—a transatlantic clash that, for a brief window in history, made precision rifle shooting a premier spectator sport.
How I dropped my phone into the depths of Lake Martin is still a great and confusing mystery which evidently involves beer.
The roots go back to the late 19th century, when American labor was less “9 to 5” and more “sunup to collapse.” The rallying cry was simple: eight hours for work, eight for rest, eight for life. In 1886, that demand erupted into nationwide strikes, culminating in the infamous Haymarket Affair in Chicago. A bomb, gunfire, dead police, dead civilians, and a trial that still sparks debate today. It was messy, chaotic, and deeply human—exactly the kind of event that leaves a permanent scar on history.
I had a toy rocket when I was a kid. It was made of plastic. The word NASA was printed on it. It was a Saturn V rocket, king daddy of all rockets. The same one that took men to the moon. My GI Joe doll could ride it like a horsey.
I thought I had seen the last of traitorous Americans cursing our soldiers or calling for them to be killed when the last American combat troops were pulled out of Vietnam following the 1973 Paris Peace Treaty. After the disgusting display by anti-American, pro-Iran thugs in Philadelphia and the perfidious “No Kings” protestors last weekend, it appears I was wrong.
Coffee is ready. Pour said coffee. Check my phone. Look at emails. The first subject line attracts my attention. “YOU ARE NOT A TRUE AMERICAN IF YOU DON’T READ THIS!!!”
I want to be a true American, but for the next few minutes I’ll have to settle for being a fallacious one. Namely, because it’s a little early to be reading anything in all caps.
We crossed the Indiana state line at noon. It was sunny. Cloudless. The springtime air was dry and pleasant, smelling of apples, IndyCar, and Hoosiers.
Under a Chinese-led global order, you wouldn’t necessarily feel “ruled” by China in a direct sense. You would feel aligned to it. Your country’s economy would be plugged into Chinese supply chains. Your infrastructure might be financed, built, or maintained through Chinese-linked systems. Your technology stack—networks, platforms, standards—would quietly converge with theirs because it’s cheaper, faster, and already widely adopted.
This morning I started thinking about you. Mainly, I was thinking about what you’re going through right now. Whoever you are. I don’t know you. I don’t know anything about you. But in a way we know each other because you and I aren’t that different.
My mother always told me to smile. Especially when I didn’t want to. She often told me to smile when I was sad, when trying on school clothes, or whenever I was forced to eat beef liver at gunpoint.
At distances out to 100 yards, the differences between rimfire and centerfire aren’t subtle—they are foundational. A .22 LR match round leaves the muzzle at roughly 1050 feet per second, already flirting with the sound barrier and quickly settling into subsonic flight. Compare that to a typical centerfire round—say a .308—moving at nearly three times that speed, carrying significantly higher ballistic efficiency, and backed by a rigid, jacketed bullet designed to punch through the air rather than cooperate with it.
There is hope for women’s sports—at last. The IOC just announced a new policy that excludes transgender men (biological males) from the female category at the Olympic Games.
There’s a quiet absurdity baked into modern America, and like most absurdities, we’ve lived with it so long we stopped questioning it. Every day, the federal government spends billions protecting people who fly occasionally—while leaving tens of millions of children sitting in classrooms with wildly inconsistent security. Let that sink in. We’ve normalized a system where you can’t bring a bottle of water through an airport without federal scrutiny, but your kid can walk into a school where security depends entirely on the zip code.
I like you. I like everything about you. I like your smile. Your teeth, no matter how crooked. Your physical shape, no matter which shape that is.