Citizen Writers Fighting Censorship by Helping Americans Understand Issues Affecting the Republic.
People learn quickly what happens when they bring the boss bad news. They notice when someone is interrupted, embarrassed, dismissed, or punished for disagreeing. They remember the meeting where the boss asked for opinions but became defensive the moment someone offered one.
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.
In 1844, the U.S. Army sent a West Point graduate and a couple companies of infantry to the very tip of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula to keep order during America’s first great copper rush. Captain Robert Emmet Clary and his soldiers arrived in the wilderness, built most of a fort in five months, and then watched history move somewhere else when war with Mexico began. But Clary’s story gets even better: his West Point classmate—and reportedly his wedding best man—was Jefferson Davis. Three decades later, Davis headed the Confederacy while Clary remained loyal to the Union and earned brevet promotion to brigadier general for his Civil War service. Fort Wilkins is a wonderfully obscure reminder that long before Gettysburg, some remarkably tough Americans were already busy building this amazing country.
The cavalry gets the glory. The infantry gets the dust. For thousands of years, warfare has invented faster horses, bigger guns, tanks, aircraft, drones, and now cyber warriors—but eventually somebody still has to walk onto the objective with a rifle and take the ground. Call them ground pounders, earth pigs, grunts, soldiers, or Marines: they are the infantry. Not everyone should be one, and thank God for that. But every army needs them, because wars may be shaped by technology, artillery, armor, and airpower—but ground is still won by the poor bastard standing on it.
I’m not expecting the GOP leadership to be perfect. But I don’t want them trying to pick state nominees and then supporting Democrats.
I’ve seen it happen more times than I can count.
Someone works hard, gets results, and finally receives the promotion they’ve been chasing. They get a new office, a new title, and maybe even a shiny new nameplate on the door.
And somewhere along the way, they make a dangerous assumption: Now I’m a leader.
Not necessarily.
The Army has a remarkable ability to take a perfectly functional warrior, promote him a few times, hand him three computer monitors, and turn him into a PowerPoint-slinging indoor cat. Thus begins the evolution of the FOBbit: that mysterious creature who once went outside the wire but now survives on RFIs, synchronization meetings, Green Beans coffee, and Baskin-Robbins. The real horror comes when you finally look down at your ice cream, look at your clean uniform, hit “Send” on another 1600 suspense, and realize the terrible truth: Oh, $h!tt! I’m the FOBbit.
Modern man says he doesn’t believe in miracles while standing on a wet rock hurtling through space, made of stardust, possessing consciousness nobody can fully explain, pondering a universe nobody can explain why exists. God? Ridiculous. Ancient aliens? Now you have his attention. Maybe we didn’t stop believing—we just changed the vocabulary and became selectively skeptical about which mysteries are socially acceptable. Watch for AFNN next week as we ask the uncomfortable question: “I Don’t Believe in Miracles,” Says the Miracle.
The Greatest Generation didn’t have Wi-Fi, DoorDash, FaceTime, scheduled port calls—or an expected return date. They had a war to win. Today’s sailors aren’t the problem; they’re products of a culture that has become extraordinarily good at eliminating discomfort. The question isn’t whether young Americans are “soft.” It’s whether America still teaches resilience before history demands it the hard way.
The Pacific Ocean doesn’t have an HR department, and the enemy doesn’t care about your deployment schedule.
Colonel Townsend Whelen spent a lifetime proving that only accurate rifles are interesting. But imagine handing him an iPhone and asking ChatGPT for a 6.5 Creedmoor load. After staring at it for thirty seconds, he’d probably ask, “What the hell is Wi-Fi?” Then he’d type, “Best accuracy load. 140 Berger. H4350. Go.” After 41 years behind a rifle, I did exactly that—and one of the best first-round load developments of my career popped out. Luck? Maybe. Or maybe AI just read a hundred years of load manuals, match reports, and internet arguments in about half a second. Either way, it didn’t pull the trigger. It just saved a little barrel life. And these days, that’s worth its weight in powder.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth upgraded the valor awards for U.S. service members who served at Abbey Gate.
Libertarians and limited government/free market-oriented conservatives should be thrilled about what is happening in Latin America generally and in Argentina in particular. The latter lit the fuse to the Revolution that is now engulfing the former. The Liberty Movement spearheaded by Javier Milei, by melding sound governance and politics, is defeating socialism and spreading freedom …
Technology has made us faster, smarter, and more capable than any generation that came before us. But somewhere along the way, we forgot an uncomfortable truth: every technological advantage eventually becomes a dependency. The Romans understood it. Napoleon understood it. The Army wrote it down more than a century ago. Use the calculator. Use the GPS. Use the ballistic computer. But never forget the skills that allow you to function when the batteries die. A truly advanced military isn’t the one that fights brilliantly when everything works. It’s the one that can still fight when nothing does.
Five years ago, the world watched one of the most devastating foreign policy failures in modern American history unfold in real time. The fall of Kabul in August 2021 was not merely the end of America’s longest war. It was a collapse of credibility, an abandonment of allies, and the start of a dangerous new era in global geopolitics.
A generation ago, feminists like myself fought so hard to give women more control & more choices over their own lives. And we accomplished so much! Yet, Liberal women would deny half of Trump’s voters the women, the right to make their own decisions? American women must only vote for Hillary Clinton! Really?
Federal, state, and local authorities failed to keep an animal away from the public. Tampon Tim wanted to insure he stays as a threat.
For more than 120 years, America’s military marksmanship teams have done far more than chase medals. Every summer at Camp Perry’s Small Arms Firing School, they pass generations of hard-earned knowledge to ordinary citizens—teaching safe firearms handling, precision marksmanship, and personal responsibility. It’s a quiet mission rooted in federal law since 1903, built on a simple idea: a nation is stronger when its citizens are capable, disciplined, and prepared. The trophies are impressive, but the real legacy is American readiness.
On July 17, 1980, Ronald Reagan accepted the Republican nomination for president. In his acceptance speech, he said, “For those who have abandoned hope, we’ll restore hope and we’ll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again!”
Lieutenant stories are like fish stories. They improve with age. But the fact that everyone believed it immediately should have been a clue. Because in the Army, reputation is reality.