Citizen Writers Fighting Censorship by Helping Americans Understand Issues Affecting the Republic.
Hitting the center of gravity for any opponent, something they depend on and cannot continue operations without, is often far more important than eliminating their soldiers and weapons. But It’s not always immediately apparent, and its often difficult to destroy.
Today the world’s largest radicalization engine runs twenty-four hours a day, recruiting globally with the efficiency of an Amazon warehouse. You don’t need a secret meeting. You don’t need a physical training camp. You need Wi-Fi and a keyboard. Congratulations — you now have access to what might be called the Lone Wolf Factory, where the raw materials are grievance, identity crisis, and algorithmic amplification.
In October of 1961 the Cold War was already a tense, paranoid chess match played with nuclear weapons instead of pawns. The United States and the Soviet Union were staring each other down across oceans, missile silos, and enough megatonnage to turn the planet into a glowing charcoal briquette. But Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev decided the world needed a reminder of just how big the Soviet hammer could be. So the Kremlin did what any superpower with a bruised ego might do. They built the largest nuclear bomb in human history and lit it off over the Arctic.
Cheap, abundant oil lubricates the economy. Gasoline and diesel is cheaper. Which means everything delivered in vehicles running on gasoline and diesel is cheaper. Which is pretty much everything.
Start with Clausewitz. His most famous line remains the most brutally accurate description of war ever written: war is the continuation of politics by other means. In other words, wars are not random explosions of violence. Nations fight because they want political outcomes—territory, influence, regime survival, deterrence, or control of strategic regions.
If you grew up on Austin Powers, you remember the joke. Dr. Evil didn’t want nukes. He didn’t want tanks. He wanted lasers. The audience laughed because lasers were cinematic nonsense. Fast forward to 2026 and Israel is fielding the Iron Beam, and the U.S. military has ship-mounted and vehicle-mounted high-energy laser systems actively burning small threats out of the sky. Turns out Dr. Evil was just early.
When Americans think about Iran, the story usually begins in 1979—angry crowds, burning flags, and a stern cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini taking control of the country. But that snapshot hides something important. Iran—historically Persia—is one of the world’s oldest civilizations. Its history stretches back thousands of years, and the country that emerged after 1979 is not the inevitable outcome of Persian history. In many ways, it was a political accident born from revolution, miscalculation, and a brutal consolidation of power.
If Theodore Roosevelt were transported into modern America and handed a microphone, the man wouldn’t survive a single news cycle. Not because he was shy, confused, or prone to carefully worded diplomatic statements. Quite the opposite. Roosevelt had a remarkable ability to say exactly what he thought about history, religion, and civilization without the slightest concern for whether it might offend a future diversity committee.
Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY 4th District) and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) are Republicans, but they are also two of the very few libertarians (not Libertarians) elected to Congress. Both have long opposed wars, and are definitely not neocons, and both sponsored concurrent resolutions to force President Trump to pull back military forces from any conflict …
Now let’s be clear about something. Veterans arguing about foreign policy is not the problem. In fact, it’s healthy. People who have worn the uniform should absolutely debate how American power is used. The military has always produced strong opinions—usually accompanied by horrible coffee and worse briefing slides. But what used to separate professional disagreement from internet drama was something the officer corps once valued deeply: discipline.
For many Americans, the story is simple. Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds in the 1980s—most infamously at Halabja. They suffered horribly. When the United States eventually removed Saddam from power in 2003, the Kurds were portrayed as natural allies: brave fighters, pro-Western, reliable partners in a messy region.
A side benefit of the Operation Epic Fury is testing the war materiel of the Russian and Red Chinese military. With little exception, they are failing again as they did in the extraction of Maduro from Venezuela
Patton’s most famous line, delivered to the Third Army in 1944, captured his philosophy better than any manual ever written: “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” That was not just colorful language. It was a direct rejection of the romantic nonsense that had gotten an entire generation slaughtered in World War I. Patton had seen that war. He had been wounded in it. He understood that modern industrial warfare was not a stage for heroic poetry. It was a contest of logistics, speed, firepower, and will. His job was not to produce martyrs. His job was to produce victory.
Let’s retire the fairy tales.
The U.S. dollar is not backed by gold. It’s not backed by “faith.” It’s not backed by vibes. It’s backed by power — specifically the kind of power that sails in carrier strike groups, negotiates trade deals, controls sea lanes, writes sanctions law, insures shipping, and can ruin your economy before your stock market even opens.
As I have previously noted, I was not in favor of the United States launching the attack on Iran; I most certainly wanted the clerical government to fall, and freedom to come to that country, but I wanted the people of Iran to do the job, not have is do so. That said, it is …
We are in a war in which our enemies use the veil of religion to seize power. Few understand this war in which past losses resulted in hundreds of millions of innocents being murdered, tortured, imprisoned or living for decades to centuries under tyranny. The use of religion to seize power is ancient in concept – and often uses one of two approaches. One is to attack or vilify a religion to advance tyranny. The other, to use the veil of religion to hide insidious efforts to advance tyranny. The genius (and danger) in using religion, in this perpetual cognitive war, is its subtlety. There are no tanks in the streets. Rather, memes, sermons, rhetoric, and false narratives and manufactured victims are employed using our cognitive biases (e.g., emotion, moral outrage) that erode shared reality over time.
We were promised glide paths into a frictionless era of war. Precision would replace mass. Networks would replace mud. Information dominance would compress decision cycles so tightly that victory would arrive before the coffee cooled. Instead, the war in Ukraine settled into trenches, minefields, artillery duels, and casualty math that feels uncomfortably familiar to anyone who’s ever read about 1916. The aesthetic is pure World War I, except now every trench has a charging cable.
No, I don’t think this will result in World War III, despite my headline and stock illustration, but wars do not always turn out quite the way you expect. Der Führer certainly didn’t expect Germany to have been virtually destroyed, Hideki Tojo did not expect Japan to be utterly defeated and bombed to smoking ruins, …
There is a quiet anxiety baked into much of modern American Christianity: if you don’t support Israel—always, loudly, and without qualification—God might notice. Entire churches treat Israeli foreign policy as a third sacrament. Question a settlement policy or a military response and someone will reach for Genesis 12 like it’s a theological panic button. This fear wears the costume of faith, but it isn’t biblical. It’s superstition with a study Bible.
