Americana

The Human Benchrest: The Enduring Legacy of MAJ Ernie Vande Zande

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Ernie Vande Zande was more than a national champion and record-setter; he was the rare competitor who made everyone around him better. Known as “the Human Benchrest,” the Army major and Camp Perry champion combined world-class precision with a quiet willingness to help any shooter who genuinely wanted to improve. His classic article Sights, Wind and Mirage still teaches competitors how to read conditions decades after it was written. Smallbore lost more than a legend when Ernie passed in 2018—it lost a mentor, a gentleman, and one of the finest ambassadors the sport has ever known.

The American Awakening

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My grandfather fought in World War II. My father served in Vietnam. My wife and I both deployed to Iraq. Three generations answered the nation’s call, each believing that sacrifice served a greater purpose. But after Vietnam, 9/11, Iraq, Wall Street, and COVID, millions of Americans are asking a question more dangerous than any enemy abroad: Have we been lied to? That question marks the beginning of the American Awakening—a rediscovery that we are more than consumers and collections of atoms. We are moral and spiritual beings, and once a people remember that truth matters and rights come from God rather than government, they become very difficult to manipulate.

Empire in Denial: How the United States Is Quietly Losing Its Strategic Edge

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Empires don’t collapse in a blaze of cinematic glory—they erode, quietly, while insisting everything is fine. The United States still fields the most powerful military on Earth, still prints the world’s reserve currency, still lectures the planet on order and stability. But beneath the polished surface, the math is getting ugly, the cohesion is cracking, and the strategic margin is shrinking. This is what decline actually looks like—not defeat, but drift. Not surrender, but overextension wrapped in denial. The dangerous part isn’t that America is weakening; it’s that it hasn’t fully realized it yet.

American Is a Creed++

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Define American. Is it any person on planet Earth resides in the U.S. who simply shares a set of ideas – an American Creed? Or, is based on “blood and soil” connections by birth and ancestry? It definitely isn’t the Ethno-nationalism of a “Whites Only” America, because our America became multi-racial in 1619 when English …

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Michigan Needs a Mushroom License — And Deep Down, You Know It

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Every spring in Michigan, the forests erupt into a full-scale fungal gold rush. Pickup trucks jam two-tracks. Facebook groups trade morel coordinates like cartel smugglers swapping contraband routes. Grown adults crawl through the woods in camouflage carrying mesh bags full of mushrooms worth more per pound than some cuts of steak. And through all of it, the State of Michigan collects exactly zero dollars from one of the largest seasonal harvest activities on public land.

Is Diversity Our Strength, or Our Weakness?

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Hyphenated America

I have never believed the leftist maxim that insists diversity is “our strength.” Instead, I see it as divisive, with our nation being split into cultural, ethnic, racial, religious, and political tribes who are essentially at war with one another.

Velvet Chains, Filtered Reality: Freedom with Guardrails

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Elections still happen. Parties still act like it’s a steel-cage match. But on the fundamentals—the wiring of the economy, the growth of the administrative state, the handshake between government and corporate power—the menu is pre-selected. You’re not choosing dinner; you’re choosing the garnish. The work of Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (2014) didn’t need conspiracy theories to make the point: policy outcomes tend to track the preferences of economic elites far more than average voters. Translation: your vote counts; your leverage doesn’t.

Gold Medal, Mystery Saboteur: The Matthew Emmons Story That Still Doesn’t Add Up

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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.

Trusted There. Restricted Here; Restoring Trust and Rights

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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.