Citizen Writers Fighting Censorship by Helping Americans Understand Issues Affecting the Republic.
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.
The Transportation Security Administration was born in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks—a moment of national trauma where speed mattered more than strategy, and action mattered more than accuracy. That’s understandable. What’s not understandable is why we’re still running the same playbook a quarter century later like nothing has changed.
We walked into a packed Waffle House. All booths taken. Two cooks and two waitresses running offense. “Let’s sit at the bar,” said Morgan.
The year was 1939. The month was September. Only days after World War II broke out. The woman was so moved to tears when she read the headlines of war in the papers. Her first thought was, “Another war?”
With everything going on in the world, with all the wars, international conflicts, and high-stakes political maneuvers, I’m sure you’re all anxious to hear about what’s going on with the problem of legalized raccoon ownership in Tennessee.
I have a thing for Norman Rockwell. When I was a kid, I collected Rockwell memorabilia in the form of calendars, picture books, and posters. I clipped illustrations from books and plastered them upon my bedroom walls.
I’m in a hotel lobby. It’s breakfast. We are waiting in line for our gruel. Guests congregate around the coffee urn like puppies at the teat until they drain the urn and leave nothing but dregs for us tired, huddled masses.
There were tattoos on his forearms. Not the new kind of fancy tats, multi-colored and expensive. These were a few grades below battleship tattoos. Crudely done. Almost like the inkwork inmates give themselves with guitar wire and BIC pens.
I was blue. I had just watched the news. Wars were raging. Bombs were dropping. People dying. All God’s children were bickering over the price of rice in China in the rain.
“My son, Jason, is getting married on Friday, and I am responsible for his wedding toast. I’d like some wisdom to pass on, the only problem is, I don’t have any.”
Sometimes, as a writer you will find yourself as a guest on TV shows promoting stuff. You’ll be seated on a television set that is an exact duplication of a family room. Except, of course, this family room has nuclear studio lights that cause third-degree sunburns.