Citizen Writers Fighting Censorship by Helping Americans Understand Issues Affecting the Republic.
Maybe hell isn’t fire and brimstone. Maybe it’s something far worse: wanting forever and never being satisfied. Our modern culture may already give us a small taste—more money, more stuff, more attention, more pleasure, yet somehow never enough. C.S. Lewis suggested our deepest longings may point beyond this world. Perhaps the question isn’t how to get more, but why nothing we get ever seems to fill the hole.
I saw a shooting star. A big one. I was exiting Walmart. Pushing my buggy. It was dusk. The sky was pink. I looked into a cloudless sky and there it was.
Amid the noise of judging yesterday on today’s morals, a far more pervasive and intellectually dishonest form of censorship is being overlooked: the ongoing sanitization of historical fiction and classic literature.
“A lot of people might think the world is falling apart,” he wrote to me. “But they’re wrong. I’ve been on the other side. There’s lots of good people out there.”
Politicians and other oxygen thieves have no desire to advance us, and are not capable of improvement. They just hold on to the status que, as long as they are on top.
People in Lebanon, Tennessee, are funny about their town name.
“If you gon’ say it,” the bartender explains, “say it right. It’s pronounced ‘Leb’nun.'”
I order a beer, attempt to say the name, and perfectly butcher it.
“Keep practicing,” the bartender says.
Jack O’Connor died in 1978, nearly 30 years before the 6.5 Creedmoor appeared, but judged by the standards he championed in The Hunting Rifle and decades of Outdoor Life writing, he probably would have loved it—even if it never displaced his beloved .270 Winchester. O’Connor valued accuracy, moderate recoil, flat-enough trajectory, high sectional density, efficient bullets, penetration, and above all the hunter’s ability to put a bullet precisely where it belonged. The Creedmoor checks virtually every box: a 140-grain 6.5mm bullet has excellent sectional density, modern high-BC bullets retain velocity remarkably well, recoil is lighter than the .270, and the cartridge is famously easy to shoot accurately. Where O’Connor would still favor the .270 is raw velocity and its flatter trajectory at ordinary hunting distances—especially important in his era, when hunters estimated range rather than pushing a button on a laser rangefinder. Ironically, O’Connor also admired cartridges such as the mild-mannered 7×57 Mauser and repeatedly argued that shot placement mattered more than horsepower. The funniest conclusion, then, is that the old-school hunters who dismiss the 6.5 Creedmoor as some newfangled fad might be surprised by their own patron saint: the Creedmoor is essentially an O’Connor hunting cartridge designed 30 years too late—accurate, efficient, mild to shoot, and powerful enough to kill what you’re hunting if you quit arguing about caliber and put the damned bullet where it belongs.
My sister and I sit cross-legged on the front porch, playing cards. I am losing. Not that this matters.
We are really into the game right now, slapping cards on the porch floor.
Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The windchill is negative four and I can no longer feel my unmentionables. I’m about to play my fiddle and tell funny stories to a room of people at the community center.
I am playing the fiddle near the swimming pool at my hotel in Dothan. I always play in the mornings. Routine. I’ve been on the road for 14 days, playing music and performing my one-man spasm in different states.
MOA vs. mils: no, mils aren’t “more accurate.” Math is math. They’re just beautifully idiot-resistant.
Tell Private Snuffy to add ½ and ¼ and you can smell the electrical fire. Tell him to add .3 and .5 and he can probably do it on his fingers. Suddenly the military’s love affair with mils makes perfect sense.
PRS speaks decimals. Traditional American riflemen speak fractions. Different dialects, same X-ring.
The kid was filling a shopping buggy. He was reaching for a bag of tortilla chips on the top shelf. I saw one of the older ladies in our aisle reach upward and remove a bag of Tostitos for him.
Idiots complain. And I’m not a complete idiot. Idiocy is all about percentages. I’m only 40 percent idiot, the other 75 percent of me is bad at math.
My granddaddy said you can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat a dog. Someone who treats a dog badly, is a bad person. A person who treats a dog with regard and deference is a good egg.
The press has a technique – identifying the issues on the voters’ minds, naming the candidates with the right solutions, and proving their choices with selective polling. But how much of such press reporting is correct, and how much of it is just the press’ own agenda?
I came into town driving on Highway 331. The sun was setting. The sky was pink. The first thing I saw was the bay of my youth, and I almost started to cry tears of nostalgia.
Whereupon a motorist in a Range Rover traveling upwards of 190 mph tried to run me off the bridge and into the bay water.
Welcome home.
During my career with the Chicago Tribune, I covered my share of criminal and civil trials. One thing I learned early on was to watch the jury for telltale reactions that might indicate how jurors were processing the evidence.
You don’t have to invade a nation to defeat it. You may only have to convince its citizens that their elections are rigged, their courts are corrupt, their institutions are illegitimate, and their neighbors are the enemy. As early as 2012, the U.S. military was wrestling with the Human Dimension and emerging ideas about the Human Domain—the recognition that wars ultimately turn on human behavior and human will. Add smartphones, algorithms, information warfare, color-revolution dynamics, and fifth-generation warfare, and the battlefield starts looking considerably different. The Capitol can still be standing, the flag can still be flying, and elections can still happen right on schedule. But if nobody believes any of it anymore, an enemy may never have to conquer us. We may eventually do the job ourselves.
What if the greatest victories of evil don’t involve possession, spinning heads, or levitating furniture? What if they’re much simpler—pride, lust, greed, deception, hatred, and division? Ephesians 6 reminds Christians that our struggle is not ultimately against flesh and blood. Maybe we’ve become so busy identifying the enemy in everyone else that we’ve forgotten where the real battlefield is—and which weapons Paul actually told us to carry.
Hodgenville, Kentucky, looks like your all-American postcard town. Brick storefronts. Flawless Colonial houses. No flamingos in the yards. The kind of place where you’d expect to find Jimmy Stewart working at the drugstore soda fountain, and kids playing hopscotch on the sidewalk.