▶️ VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: WERE THE 1945 BOMBS ‘DEMONIC?’
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VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: WERE THE 1945 BOMBS ‘DEMONIC?’
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very August, debate renews over both the wisdom and the morality of dropping the two American atomic bombs, 81 years ago, on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). This August has been no exception.
✪ Did Demons Create The First Atomic Bombs?
As ever, many critics have faulted the United States for the bombings: two gruesome blasts—aimed at dual-use military and industrial targets in both cities—which may have caused some 100,000–120,000 immediate deaths among combatants and civilians. And not all these critics are on the Left. Two years ago, podcaster Tucker Carlson blasted the Truman Administration’s decision, alleging the atomic bomb was not the result of decades of sophisticated nuclear physics research or the dividend of a two-billion-dollar Manhattan Project investment to rapidly develop an atomic weapon in a race to beat the Axis powers’ nuclear programs before they themselves developed such existential weapons.
Instead, Carlson claimed the atomic bombs were demonic, tools of innate evil, and thus apparently created through the supernatural intervention of dark powers. Unlikely—but perhaps Tucker was echoing themes from Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project. After the first successful test of the bomb on July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer quoted (and mistranslated) a famously chilling line from the great Hindu epic, the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
✪ Why Did The US Drop Two Atomic Bombs On Japan?
Indeed, from the moment the bombs were dropped, there has been an intense, 80-year debate, from which all sorts of conspiracy theories have since emerged.
No one denies the two bombs, dropped within three days, shocked the Imperial Japanese junta into conceding surrender on August 15—a decision ratified formally and officially on September 2, 1945, ending the Pacific War. Nonetheless, almost immediately, contemporary critics objected to their use on a variety of grounds.
Many claimed the bombs were unnecessary. They argued the previous devastation of Japan by the U.S. Army Air Forces and the U.S. Navy had made a quick surrender inevitable. Some declared racism had prompted their use against the Japanese alone.
Of course, all these arguments were only offered with the benefit of hindsight, and they often failed to consider the dire conditions U.S. military planners were confronted with at the time.
First, the bombs were originally envisioned to stop the Third Reich and end the costly conventional Allied bombing campaign over Germany (over 80,000 dead British and American airmen, along with some 15,000 bombers lost). But producing a deliverable bomb took far longer than anticipated and was realized only after Germany surrendered.
Second, the military, the Truman Administration, and the American public were still in a state of shock over the devastating losses suffered at Okinawa, declared secure just six weeks before Hiroshima. The invading U.S. land, sea, and air forces suffered 50,000 casualties, including 12,000 dead—in what had initially been expected to be the least costly of a half-dozen bloody American amphibious landings.
Before Okinawa, planners believed they had learned from the overconfidence that had nearly proved to be catastrophic at Iwo Jima, Peleliu, and Tarawa. Yet despite those lessons, a weakened Japanese military, and total U.S. air and naval supremacy, Okinawa became the deadliest island operation of the entire Pacific War. And because it was the last major land battle, stunned U.S. planners in summer 1945 shuddered about what might come from a planned invasion of the entire Japanese mainland. As a general rule, the closer the Americans got to the Japanese homeland, the more they died.
Okinawa had been defended by about 120,000 Japanese soldiers and Okinawan conscripts, most of whom fought to the death. The defenders had launched about 2,000 kamikaze suicide-attack aircraft—each a veritable cruise missile—sinking 26 ships and killing nearly 5,000 Navy personnel.
Given some 2.3 million Japanese troops on the home islands, fully mobilized for an American invasion and backed by 12,000 combat aircraft (including 9,000 kamikazes), as well as a militia of some 25 million combatants, American planners believed the invasion of the Japanese homeland would easily cost one million casualties—the equivalent of 20 Okinawas.
That fear of massive American casualties, combined with growing public weariness after four long years of Japanese diehard ferocity and atrocities—the Germans had surrendered three months earlier in May 1945—prompted the Pentagon to explore alternatives against an enemy that, despite being almost entirely defeated, still had no intention of surrendering unconditionally. We now forget that 1945—the last year of the war—was the deadliest to the U.S. military in the Pacific Theater of Operations.
Few now remember that, of all the belligerents in World War II, it was the Japanese military which achieved the highest kill-to-loss ratio. Japan suffered total fatalities of somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million combatants and civilians, but it caused the deaths of between 15 and 20 million Allied soldiers, Chinese, other Asians, and Pacific Islanders. By summer 1945, the Japanese military abroad was executing, killing, or starving 15,000 people a day. There was therefore an understandable desire to end the war as quickly as possible, by any means necessary, to save thousands of lives. Each day of war was literally a matter of life and death for thousands.
Other postwar critics claimed the bombs were dropped only as a gratuitous signal to shock and awe and deter Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union from further communist aggrandizement. But between Nagasaki (August 9, 1945) and the first Soviet atomic bomb test four years later (August 29, 1949)—when America alone had a viable atomic weapon—Stalin was certainly not deterred. By 1948, he had already broken his word and turned all of the Soviet-occupied nations of Eastern Europe, as well as North Korea, communist. And by summer 1949, it was clear that the USSR had helped ensure the impending communist takeover of China.
Moreover, U.S. intelligence and investigative agencies were already surmising by August 1945 Soviet spies were embedded within the Manhattan Project and the UK Government, along with captured German physicists sent back to Russia.
In other words, the Pentagon had already accepted dropping atomic bombs would likely not deter its then “ally,” Joseph Stalin, from acquiring his own nuclear weapons. The United States therefore expected soon to face a deadly nuclear rival—and one eager to retaliate in kind if America had used or threatened to use its nuclear monopoly to thwart Soviet agendas.
✪ Were The Bombs Really Necessary?
Still other critics claimed the U.S. Government should have frightened Japan into surrender by detonating one atomic bomb in Tokyo Bay. But earlier ideas to drop a demonstration bomb in an uninhabited area were scrapped over fears of what would ensue if the bomb proved to be a dud, leaving only a single bomb available for combat use. Would one atomic bombing of a Japanese target prompt total surrender? After the two available bombs, at most one additional atomic bomb was likely to be delivered to the Pacific before October or November.
Atomic bombs, in fact, did not simply emerge complete and intact from the head of Zeus—or Satan. Building and delivering still-experimental bombs to the front was not easy, safe, or assured. The tricky enriched-uranium Hiroshima bomb (“Little Boy”) had never been tested. It was so dangerous to handle that it was armed only in the air to prevent an atomic blast if the Enola Gay crashed on takeoff.
The later B-29 Bockscar which bombed Nagasaki almost ran out of gas because of a failed fuel-transfer pump, a 45-minute rendezvous delay, and the fact that the initial target was obscured by clouds. Nagasaki, the alternate but similarly cloud-obscured target, was a last-minute adjustment that almost ended in failure, if not total catastrophe.
The cruiser Indianapolis, which delivered components of the 9,000-pound “Little Boy” to the B-29 base on Tinian in late July, was blown up by a Japanese submarine just four days later on its journey back to the fleet—killing nearly 75 percent of the crew. Only luck had prevented the Japanese from sinking the Indianapolis days earlier, along with the atomic-bomb components on board.
Yet even after the moonscape at Hiroshima, the Japanese high command still argued over capitulation, with some generals convinced that the bluffing Americans might not have another bomb. And, in a way, they were right. After the second bombing at Nagasaki three days later, the tiny American nuclear arsenal was temporarily exhausted.
Nor had even the second atomic bomb convinced the Japanese military to surrender. Instead, on August 15, 1945, disgruntled dead-ender officers launched an attempted military coup to prevent Emperor Hirohito from addressing the nation about Japan’s intention to surrender unconditionally.
Some of Truman’s top generals and admirals later expressed criticisms of the bombings. But often their objections arose because they felt their own forces had already doomed the Japanese. A dramatic atomic end to the war had thus overshadowed the hard prior work of their conventional forces in defeating the Japanese military.
Pacific B-29 forces commander General Curtis LeMay, hardly a dissident, objected that his B-29 fleet had already destroyed half of Japan’s urban areas and much of its industry—and could easily and rapidly force a surrender through further conventional incendiary bombing.
Indeed, LeMay had planned to supplement his then-current force of 1,000 B-29 bombers stationed on the Mariana Islands, some 1,500–1,700 miles distant from most Japanese targets, with a huge new force of additional B-29s—at war’s end, some 5,000 were on order. Veteran bomber crews from the Eighth Air Force, reassigned from postwar Europe, were to augment this massive force.
After the German surrender, the British, in Operation “Tiger Force,” also planned to send over some 150 to 200 heavy Lancaster bombers to join the Americans at their new bomber bases on newly conquered Okinawa—a mere 1,000 miles from Tokyo.
With such a huge bomber armada and flight times cut nearly in half, LeMay assumed that he could have ended the war within weeks without the atomic bombs, albeit at a far higher cost to the Japanese people and his own air crews.
LeMay’s March 9–10 firebombing of Tokyo remains the deadliest single day of warfare in human history, likely accounting for more than 100,000 Japanese deaths; moreover, it was far more lethal than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Indeed, the incendiary bombing campaigns killed at least twice as many Japanese as died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
Chief of Naval Operations Ernest King also joined LeMay in regretting the use of atomic bombs. On similar personal grounds, he argued that his vast fleet of submarines, destroyers, cruisers, battleships, and carriers—by 1945 larger than all the navies of the world combined—had already blockaded all of Japan’s ports. They had mined its waters, sunk most of its merchant marine, and destroyed the Japanese navy. Thus, King believed his ships could starve the Japanese into surrender.
✪ Saving, Not Destroying, More Lives
Yet, despite these even more ruthless alternative proposals, the real reason the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the Truman Administration’s sincere belief the new weapon was the only way to shock the Japanese into ending the war as quickly as possible and thereby prevent—as it had announced at the time—the likely horrific invasion of Japan which otherwise would have been needed. Indeed, it is likely that the two bombs saved tens of thousands of Allied and millions of Japanese lives by averting a two-pronged, two-year invasion of the Japanese homeland.
All controversies about the atomic bomb’s initial creation aside, in the 81 years since the end of World War II and its 70 million deaths, there has not been, as feared and often predicted, a World War III. The Cold War was not hot because shared fears of mutually assured nuclear destruction deterred the first use of the massive Russian arsenal.
The current worry about nuclear proliferation is not so much an inherent terror of these horrific weapons themselves. None of the current nine nuclear nations have used any nuclear weapons since their inaugural appearance in 1945. The real fear is instead rogue states, autocracies, and dictatorships—without voter, media, or opposition oversight—will acquire or have already obtained them and are more likely to do something stupid by launching a preemptive nuclear strike.
In other words, the world does not actually believe the democratic United States, France, the United Kingdom, Israel, or India will start a nuclear war. It is more concerned that a nuclear-armed strongman in China, North Korea, Pakistan, or Russia—or a terrorist group that gains this unchecked power—will do the unthinkable. The problem, historically, has not always been the appearance of a new deadly weapon but rather the type of state or ruler who possesses it.
Still, despite all this, nuclear weapons are now seen as taboo and associated with national or even global annihilation. And so the world currently scorns even the mere talk of deploying them. However, what is truly frightening at the moment is not so much the eight-decade-old nuclear age as what might follow from it.
In our globally connected, post-biolab-spawned-pandemic era—full of Star Wars-like lasers, AI-controlled drone swarms, nearly 17,000 active satellites overhead, and sophisticated biological and chemical agents—terrorists, rogue nations, and delusional autocratic governments may well conclude that nuclear weapons are just one deployable asset in their multifarious arsenals of mass death: sometimes vulnerable to antimissile defenses and often not unique in their lethality.
In short, we may consider nuclear weapons, along with other weapons which are just as deadly, to be Satanic, but they certainly were not first created by the devil.
Rather, on balance, good people sometimes invented bad weapons to stop far worse people from killing innocents.✪
▶️ DITCHING NET ZERO
DITCHING NET ZERO
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hat a difference only a few years can make. Not so long ago, politicians said climate change was going to kill us, so we must move quickly to “net zero” emissions. This, they said, was theoretically possible. Because vegetation removes carbon, we could get to net zero by burning fewer fossil fuels. And governments everywhere pledged to do just that.
President Joe Biden and European leaders promised “net zero by 2050.” For a while, it seemed like it might happen. Spain invested billions into its solar power grid. Germany and Spain claimed to get most of their power from renewables. But now they realize they made a big mistake. European businesses closed as electricity costs rose; and last year, Spain’s electricity supply completely shut down for 16 hours. It was a wakeup call for the big green dream.
“The power outages are the starkest illustration of bad electricity policy,” says Alex Epstein, author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.” You can avoid power outages with these bad policies. What you can’t avoid is scarcity and rationing and poverty.
In addition, the net zero push also left people more vulnerable to climate extremes. There were 10,000 excess deaths during a heatwave in June, notes Reuters. “These places in Europe can’t keep cool in the summer,” marvels Epstein, “even though we’ve had this technology for a hundred years called air conditioning!”
A majority of Americans have air conditioning, but only about 20% of European homes have it. In Britain, some homeowners were even ordered to tear out air conditioners to comply with new climate laws.
“This is just the pure religious nature of the climate catastrophist movement,” says Epstein. “It has one commandment: ‘thou shalt not impact nature.’ They just think that everything good is a happy climate god and everything bad is a vengeful climate god.”
“Why aren’t wind and solar enough?” I ask. “The solar panels keep getting cheaper. Batteries last longer. Because the electricity grid has to be built around the worst day,” he replies. When there’s no wind or the sun doesn’t shine, countries need reliable, steady power to back up renewable power.
Now, countries like Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom are walking back on their net-zero push. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz now says rules must “better align climate targets, market realities, companies and jobs.” He also said, “It was quite simply a strategic mistake to phase out nuclear energy.” No kidding.
And here in America, I hear less climate fearmongering. The Washington Post reports, “analysis of lawmakers’ appearances and posts on social media show they are going quiet on climate.”
“It’s very surprising to many people,” says Epstein, “how unserious the climate catastrophists were about net zero, and the way you can see this is what’s happened with the rise of AI.”
Tech companies now report increases in emissions, even though “five years ago, they were all telling us: ‘climate change, existential crisis, got to go net zero!'” Epstein laughs. Microsoft’s CEO had promised, “By 2030, Microsoft will be carbon negative.” Since then, they have increased their emissions, without apology.
Google once said it would be “the first major company in the world to run on carbon free energy by 2030.” They’ve since removed that pledge from their website.
Bill Gates, who once wrote a book about “climate disaster,” now writes, “We should measure success by our impact on human welfare more than our impact on the global temperature.”
“The fact Gates has taken the new position publicly to me is a sign we’re now in a much better intellectual environment,” says Epstein.
“It would be nice for one of these tech executives to say, ‘You know what? I kind of lied and I advocated some policies that screwed over everyone, including myself, and I’m going to change,'” says Epstein. But nobody has done that. They just act like their past self didn’t exist. ✪
▶️ PESSIMISM LEADS TO DEFEAT
PESSIMISM LEADS TO DEFEAT
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f you have been paying attention to media reports, many politicians, including some Republicans and those often-wrong pollsters, believe the November election is a foregone conclusion. According to them, Democrats will win a House majority and possibly take over the Senate, too. History proves it, they say, because the party out of power almost always is victorious in midterms. Except when it’s not.
Two recent examples should give Republicans hope. In 1994, the year many people remember a “Republican Revolution,” headed by Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America, captured the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years. So-called “experts” predicted narrow losses for Bill Clinton and the Democrats. The key was Gingrich’s optimism and a detailed agenda which could fit on a postcard.
In the 2002 midterms, Republicans again bucked the historical trend, gaining seats in both chambers following the post-9/11 political climate.
What Republicans need to do this year, if they want to keep and even expand their congressional majorities, is to get inoculated with a heavy dose of optimism. In addition to attacking the radical ideas of people like Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (in a Fox News interview Monday night, El-Sayed equated Sharia law with Catholic Canon Law and circumcision with child sex changes), Republicans must learn to accentuate the positive.
Especially younger voters need to learn why capitalism is better than socialism and why promises of free stuff by the Left will come at a huge cost.
Republicans should feature in political ads and during live appearances people who have emerged from socialist and communist countries. They could testify about the virtues of the capitalist system. In Florida, a large Cuban community knows what communism was like under the Castro brothers and current leadership. Some might be taken on the road and featured in live appearances, or at least have their stories recorded and included in campaign ads. Havana is having trouble keeping the lights on and providing food for their people.
Most people have formed opinions about transgender athletes in women’s sports (which worked for Republicans in the last election), so minimize that issue and focus more on the power each of us possesses, a power — the power of individual initiative and persistence — that has sustained America for 250 years.
Because Democrats and socialists love to attack billionaires, do some campaign ads that feature some of them talking about how they began their careers with little and now have businesses that employ many people, who pay taxes and don’t rely on government welfare.
There are many African Americans who have similar stories to tell. The media mostly ignore them, but “rags to riches” testimonies have been the bedrock of America’s history.
Bring up the unnecessary and wasteful government programs that should be eliminated. Yes, it’s worth a “DOGE 2.0.” People hate waste, especially when it comes to their tax dollars. Promise a rebate to every taxpayer when the size and cost of government are reduced. Make a case for reforming Social Security and Medicare to preserve it for current and future generations.
News stories suggest Democrats are already plotting to investigate President Trump and his family should they win a congressional majority. Fine, but how would that help individual Americans get back on track after the inflation caused by the Biden Administration when gas and other prices were higher than they are now?
Pollsters, the modern equivalent of soothsayers, are increasingly wrong. Perhaps some voters will decide not to vote, believing the election is a fait accompli. Pessimism is a road which leads to defeat. Optimism can lead to victory. Republicans need to try the latter and reduce the negative. ✪
▶️ GET READY FOR A NEW SEASON OF DEMOCRAT BLOODLUST
GET READY FOR A NEW SEASON OF DEMOCRAT BLOODLUST
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n order for the Democrats to take complete control of the culture and ultimately the government, people have to die. It’s just a fact. As much as the Left likes to blame conservatives for killing people for not wearing masks, getting vaccinated, and for ignoring the lies of climate change and transgenderism, the only political movement which is fully reliant on violence and death is the Left, and more specifically the 2026 version of the Democrat Party.
In the coming weeks, you’re going to be treated to unapologetic displays from the Left, celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the radical Islamic attacks on America from 25 years ago on 9/11. For every sober and respectful commemoration event, it will feel like there are two or more disgusting displays from the Left which can only appeal to the savage instincts of its base.
This has already started. My colleague David Manney wrote about a recent Hasan Piker event, where he sang a song in celebration of the murder of Kirk, sparking the leftist crowd in attendance to cheer.
During a live performance of his Fear& podcast, Piker led a packed theater in a mocking rendition of ‘We Are Charlie Kirk,’ a tribute song which appeared after Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University last Sept. 10.
His co-hosts all laughed, the audience cheered and sang along, and Piker later posted a photo from the show with the caption, ‘Carried the flame in.’
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Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat nominee for the Michigan Senate race, is trying to create some separation from one of his best political friends, allies, and operatives, Hasan Piker, on the issue of 9/11. He’s not doing it because he had a change of heart. He’s doing it because his political advisors are telling him Americans still aren’t all that receptive to Piker’s and the Left’s views on 9/11. Piker has famously said that “America deserved 9/11.”
Still, in trying to distance himself from Piker’s comments, El-Sayed sent a neat and tidy dog whistle to his own base, which loves it some bloodlust.
Politico reported what El-Sayed had to say about those 9/11 comments:
“’Of course it was a dumb statement and of course I think Hasan himself would say that was a dumb statement,’ El-Sayed said. ‘He disavowed it. So yes, America didn’t deserve 9/11, but you know, to sit here and play gotcha politics with a dumb thing somebody said out of context that they disavowed themselves — to say, ‘oh well, what does that mean about what you think?’”
El-Sayed’s comments are a stark difference from his interview with POLITICO earlier this year in which he declined to denounce Piker’s views in what he called a ‘gotcha game.’ ‘I’m not here to disavow people’s views,’ El-Sayed said at the time.
For those of you in the back row checking your phones, the dog whistle in this case is where El-Sayed has gone on record saying, “I’m not here to disavow people’s views.”
Of course, the left is not limiting its enjoyment of bloodletting to the Kirk assassination and the 25th anniversary of 9/11. It has other more recent murderous events to celebrate, like its sickening displays of joy and satisfaction at the trial of Lindsay Clancy. You may know her as the woman who strangled all three of her children, killing them in her home’s basement. She then, apparently, tried to kill herself by cutting her wrists and jumping from the window of an upstairs bedroom.
This is Charles Manson stuff. As bad as the crime is, culturally what’s worse is that a significant segment of the left and others have come out in support of Clancy, the admitted killer:
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Sorry for repeated use of this word, but there is no other. You can see the bloodlust in their eyes, can’t you? These people are far more than political actors, but in the context of this political time of the year, you have to know that these are people of the Left. This is the Left.
Then there is the case of Luigi Mangione, who has pleaded guilty to the cold-blooded assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. In committing the premeditated murder, the privileged rich kid established himself as an almost mythical hero to leftists everywhere.
CNN reported on June 5, 2025:
“In the months since the fatal shooting of Thompson, Mangione has become a cult-like figure. There has been a massive outpouring of support on social media and at his court appearances from people with deep frustration and anger at the American for-profit health care system. They see the American health insurance industry as broken, overly expensive and quick to deny coverage.”
The one thing the woke cable network’s article left out was that Mangione only became a “cult-like figure” to Democrats and leftists, not simply “people with deep frustration.”
If you’re wondering whether those of us on the Right are working too hard to connect the dots, Hasan Piker will put those wonders to rest. As Piker goes, so goes the Left, and in the process so goes the Democrat Party. This is Piker providing some continuity to the left’s now predictable support for murder as a political tactic, along with some New York Times operatives nodding in approval. In the Democrats’ world, the killer is the victim:
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Add to these high-profile cases the recent spate of mass murder events committed by one of the Democrats’ most important protected classes – transgender individuals.
It must be noted that alleged Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson had some obvious transgender influences in his life. Before that, in 2025, a gender-confused male who changed his name from Robert to Robin Westman shot up the Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis. In the process, he killed two children and seriously wounded others, including children.
My colleague Eric Florack dug deeper into the whole relationship between transgenderism and mass shootings, and his findings are disturbing.
Then, of course, there is the Democrats’ bread-and-butter issue that not only centers on death, but it uses the killing of innocents as one of the left’s sacred sacrifices – abortion.
Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey recently signed into law nearly total unrestricted ability to murder babies in the womb right up until birth, long after the baby has become viable and capable of living and breathing outside the womb among us. All the mother needs is to determine she doesn’t want the baby and an abortionist with a medical license who will consent to snuff the baby’s life out.
For the Democrats, this era may best be described as its killing season – a time when the mask has come off, and it’s now okay to unapologetically and publicly embrace their savage, barbaric, and most vile instincts. As they seek to feed their thirst for blood, the addiction will only grow more voracious. As if in some horror movie, the Democrats’ cravings will only grow stronger, and they will seek new victims. Only this is not a movie; it’s not a dream or a nightmare. It’s not fiction. It’s real.
Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program will likely be a model for new movements to kill off America’s elderly and “non-essential” people. And it won’t stop there.
As we’ve seen, once the Left gets a taste of blood, it only wants more. That’s where we are right now. Those are the forces the Republicans are up against, and they are legion. Regardless of how you feel about the price of gas or groceries, we are in a battle between good and evil. The very least you can do is make sure these people lose on Election Day and lose big. ✪
▶️ WHY ARE WHITE LIBERAL WOMEN SO ANGRY?
WHY ARE WHITE LIBERAL WOMEN SO ANGRY?
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hen the Left told white, liberal women only anger against perceived injustices creates meaning and happiness, they began moving to destroy everything in their paths to achieve those goals.
Recently, Peachy Keenan, the pseudonym of a well-known cultural commentator, writer, and critic of modern feminism, asked a question on her X account which succinctly summarizes the state of American feminism and the white liberal woman:
Why are so many women sooo angry? They won. They got everything they wanted. Men have never been doing this badly, and women have never been doing this well. They make more, they have the majority of jobs, they are the majority of college graduates, (UCLA undergrad is 60% female), they make more money, have much lower rates of suicide, addiction, and alcoholism, and live longer. They won: they took over all men-only spaces, they took over the Boy Scouts, they ended men’s bathrooms, they can fly fighter planes and be in combat. Marriage is optional, divorce is no-fault, they win 99% of the custody battles, they can control fertility at will, and they can’t get drafted. We are all living in the female future they promised.
Yes, they won, but that hasn’t changed the victim (women) and oppressor (white men) mindset that still permeates this irrational subculture. They will remain angry because they will never succeed in their quixotic quest for “meaning in their lives” based on their belief happiness lies in “making a difference” by defeating societal demons such as “the patriarchy” or “White Supremacy.” In their addled thought process, there is no such thing as winning, only identifying new causes to keep this charade alive in perpetuity.
A case in point. About a year ago, out of curiosity, I watched a panel discussion with several feminist professors at a prestigious university. These academics were regaling a naïve and worshipful audience of mostly white women, plus a smattering of black women. The panel insisted that the new “civil rights movement” necessarily encompasses Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), the LGBTQ movement, the plight of immigrants in the United States, the genocide in Gaza, undying support for the Palestinians, and Third Wave Feminism.
They had nothing to say about what had been accomplished over the decades. Instead, they incessantly portrayed the United States as an irredeemable racist and oppressive nation founded on white patriarchy. These leftists claimed, to raucous applause, that white privilege and resultant oppression required speeding the process to transform American culture and society, all while failing to acknowledge the transformations their movement had already precipitated.
The adoring and reverential expressions on the faces of the young women in the audience were priceless. It was as if they had suddenly discovered meaning and purpose in their apparently guilt-ridden, or cosseted, or rage-filled lives.
They no doubt thought the prospect of being swept up in a grand crusade of promoting all manner of “civil rights” in a heartless, capitalistic society would bring relevance to their lives. What they did not fathom was that they were being manipulated by playing on their emotions and the nation’s history of civil rights movements solely to bring about a socialist one-party oligarchy.
Over the past five decades, participation in protests and demonstrations advocating policies that destroy America’s culture and society has evolved into a full-time white liberal female occupation. Most of these protestors are 50+-year-old white women augmented by a vast number of vacuous, college-educated white women of all age groups who, together with their race-obsessed, college-educated black female counterparts, are mindlessly and, for many, unknowingly destroying American civilization.
Thanks to the Judeo-Christian values underpinning our nation’s founding, every generation of American society from the nation’s founding through the 1960s was swept up in one of three national movements—slavery’s abolition, women’s suffrage, and eliminating government-mandated racial segregation. The ultimate success of these movements also rested on Christian dogma and practice.
Because of the 195 years it took to achieve overall success, national civil rights crusades have become embedded in the nation’s DNA. By 1970, and for the first time in American history, there were no outstanding national civil rights issues to rectify. This potentially left the evolving agnostic narcissists in the Baby Boom Generation without an overriding national cause to rally around.
A significant segment of women in the Baby Boom and succeeding generations, wallowing in unprecedented peace and prosperity and self-divorced from Judeo-Christian teachings, developed the collective mindset that their lives would have meaning and purpose only if they, too, had national crusades to embrace and promote.
However, because they did not understand the Judeo-Christian basis of previous movements, many white liberal women obliviously fell prey to either wallowing in guilt over the nation’s past or espousing new and hitherto unheard-of “rights” as substitute religions. However, the radical left created virtually all of these “rights,” for they were determined not to let an opportunity to exploit female emotion and gullibility go to waste. The only question was: what could they successfully frame as national crusades?
Unsurprisingly, the first post-civil rights crusade was Second Wave Feminism, a movement that began in the mid-1960s and continued throughout the 1970s. It triggered religiously passionate mindsets and achieved fleeting “meaning in their lives” moments for a vast number of white women. It set the stage for overwhelming leftist women to dominate all the so-called “civil rights” movements since the 1980s and triggered the lunacy that engulfs the country today.
Thus, this movement can never win or declare victory. The never-ending search for meaning in their lives requires not only retaining the same villain—white men—but keeping the movement alive by continuously finding increasingly ludicrous policies to promote and espouse. These include their arguments regarding the following issues:
So-called transgenderism: What for centuries was considered to be a treatable mental illness (gender dysphoria) must now be cast as not only normal behavior, but a government-protected civil right safeguarded by law, which also includes, without parental consent, the unfettered access of impressionable and confused adolescents to permanent and irreversible mutilation.
Abortion: A baby in the womb does not become a human being until it fully exits the birth canal. Therefore, it can be aborted at any time prior to and including its exit from the birth canal.
Infanticide: As a corollary to and obvious extension of abortion, if a mother claims postpartum depression many months after giving birth, is on drugs, or finds a psychiatrist to confirm her mental state, it is permissible to premeditatively murder infants in cold blood.
Antisemitism dressed up as “anti-Zionism” The Palestinians are the modern-day oppressed peoples that must be rescued and freed, as their oppressors are the Israelis and like-minded Americans. Because of the Jews and the oppressive governments of the United States and the West, Islamism and its disciples must be tolerated, accepted, and welcomed in Western society.
Illegal immigration: All illegal immigrants (also oppressed people) are welcome to come to America and, once here, including those who commit violent crimes, cannot be deported except under extraordinarily limited circumstances. Further, they are all eligible for never-ending economic assistance and eventual citizenship.
Hate speech: Government must be empowered to declare and censor what is “hateful and/or fallacious speech” by those with the “wrong” political leanings and to utilize the justice system to imprison or banish these seditionists.
Attacks on the criminal justice system: Crime is a byproduct of America’s past and a creation of an unjust society; therefore, crime must be tolerated and excused, and its perpetrators allowed endless second chances. Any undue effort to enforce criminal statutes is therefore a violation of human rights.
Because the United States is living in the feminist future these witless, self-indulgent, agnostic, supposedly well-educated, and miserable women promoted, there is an ongoing calamitous erosion of a unique American civilization. ✪
▶️ THE BRITISH NANNY STATE: NO GUNS ALLOWED
THE BRITISH NANNY STATE: NO GUNS ALLOWED
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study in Disarmament: “Have you any arms?” “I have my old service revolver and a few cartridges.”“You had better clean it and load it. He will be a desperate man, and though I shall take him unawares, it is as well to be ready for anything.”
I went to my bedroom and followed his advice. When I returned with the pistol, the table had been cleared, and Holmes was engaged in his favorite occupation of scraping upon his violin.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1887)
It is difficult to imagine a scene more alien to the modern British nanny state. Not because Arthur Conan Doyle’s London was safer than ours, but because Watson’s possession of a service revolver is treated as entirely unremarkable.
Sherlock Holmes asks whether he has arms. Watson replies that he does. Faced with a desperate and potentially dangerous man, he is told to clean the revolver, load it, and bring it with him.
However, since the Dunblane Massacre in 1996, the UK Parliament has passed extraordinarily restrictive Firearms Acts which have effectively banned private handgun ownership across Great Britain.
▶️ 2 Hours 3 Minutes 5 Seconds
Speaking on The Joe Rogan Experience, Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe MP argued, “they don’t want the public to have guns… we now have a society that needs radical change and we need to release the individual.” Cue much shock and horror from the chattering classes and mainstream media.
Yet, aside from joining the Armed Forces or police, ordinary Britons are completely disarmed, and public weapons training is all but strangled by government mandate.
Granted, a privileged few are allowed weapons: landed gentry boasting Shotgun Certificates, gamekeepers begging police for Firearm Certificates, and some target shooters at clubs.
However, past the wall of red tape lies a clear rejection of liberty. The UK’s laws treat the ideal a free citizen has the right to arm himself and his family against danger as completely illegitimate.
Laughably, enthusiasm for armed policing has collapsed within the force itself: a direct result of putting a police marksman on trial for murder after he stopped a black gang member, Chris Kaba, who was using an SUV as a weapon against police. Color me shocked.
For context, it was a getaway car tied to escalating violence: masked men fired a shotgun outside a primary school the night before and, earlier, Kaba had shot a man in both legs at a nightclub.
A good thing Sherlock wasn’t on the case, then, for if A Study in Scarlet were set in modern Britain, Holmes’s famous line wouldn’t be “You had better clean it and load it,” but “You had better hide it, Watson, or the Armed Crime Unit will be raiding 221B before we even catch the cab!”
✪ Firearms, Foreigners, & The Channel Fantasy
As a boy I fired a 20-gauge double-barreled shotgun in Devonshire, and I’ve had plenty of trigger time on the British Army Reserve’s SA80 L85A2/A3, and it’s a bloody fun rifle. Low recoil, built like a brick, and easy enough to strip, clean, and zero, these rifles all happily take a beating and still perform well during Annual Combat Marksmanship Tests.
I’ve played with the semi-automatic L98A2 variant, too, though Heckler & Koch only ironed out the mechanical gremlins in the big boy’s version, I believe.
Escaping the UK’s suffocating gun laws, in any case, I’ve also managed to have a blast with the Glock 17 and a CZ 452-2E ZKM, bolt-action rimfire rifle out in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand.
However, from 5.56mm NATO to 9mm rounds, even down to humble .22 rimfire, the authorities in London regard such pursuits with disdain when undertaken by white Britons.
The irony is deafening. Europe is being flooded daily with military-aged male illegals from the Middle East, Africa, and parts of South Asia, while Anglo-Saxons have no Second Amendment rights.
Men who revel in sexual violence towards non-Muslim women, as exemplified by Pakistani rape gangs, or carry out deadly terror attacks across Europe in defence of their “holy” Qur’an.
Moreover, until recently, such men, if granted protection, could even bring pre-existing spouses and children to the country without meeting the salary requirements or paying any visa fees. They never even applied for an entry visa but are still provided free room and board in hotels.
British citizens who marry foreign nationals, by contrast, must generally meet that £29,000 minimum income requirement and pay substantial visa fees. Naturally.
Genuine refugees, whether Afghan schoolgirls, Christian Karenni in Burma, or South African Boer families fleeing persecution, are completely crowded out by this predatory invasion.
Perhaps it’s no surprise the UK Government doesn’t want an armed populace then. After all, community militias equipped with SA80s could deliver effective section fire up to 400 metres from recreational speedboats and defend the Channel, leaving politicians red-faced. Deliberate fire at 10 rounds per minute would easily suppress and halt enemy people smugglers.
Then again, under such a fantasy scenario, rules of engagement would likely compel Border Force, Port and Maritime Regiments, and the Royal Navy to prevent such community action.
After all, nothing offends the modern British state quite like self-defense, especially pre-emptive; when human rights lawyers like Lord Hermer rule the roost, self-preservation becomes the real crime.
✪ American Freedom
In America, the Founding Fathers understood what London’s political class forever refuses to admit: a disarmed populace is not a peaceful society, but a conquered one. A dying democracy.
The Second Amendment isn’t really about clay pigeons; it is the ultimate check on state overreach and a declaration of individual liberty. Here in the UK, we have lost that freedom.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a policeman, teacher, clergyman, doctor, or serve in His Majesty’s Armed Forces. Law-abiding citizens in the UK face strict restrictions on weapons. Meanwhile, foreign criminals in South London and Islamists can still acquire illegal firearms.
Full Second Amendment rights might go too far for Britain, in my opinion, but granting them to emotionally mature, active community members would be a net positive.
Considering our demographic changes and the nature of recent attacks, this should certainly extend to all native-born women.
One need only consider the case of the Sudanese migrant, Hadi Alodid, to understand why; the sub-human attempted to behead a man with a kitchen knife in Belfast and gouged out his eyes.
This is one of countless horrors, and by disarming Anglo-Saxons (while abandoning border control), London is forfeiting its legitimacy, little by little. The people have had enough.
Some Americans don’t know how precious their Bill of Rights really is. It provides the right to keep and bear arms. ✪
▶️ REMEMBER THE HEROES OF ABBEY GATE
REMEMBER THE HEROES OF ABBEY GATE
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ednesday marked five years since thirteen American service members were killed at Abbey Gate in Kabul, Afghanistan. The highly pressurized, reckless, and irresponsible demands and policy decisions made by the Biden Administration, which forced a relaxed level of security to be sacrificed for speed in meeting Biden’s artificial deadlines, contributed directly, without a doubt, to their deaths.
Biden announced a full withdrawal by September 11, 2021. He later moved the date up to August 31, compressing the timeline even further. That artificial deadline forced commanders to sacrifice troop safety and force protection for the sake of speed.
In July of 2021, the U.S. had already quietly abandoned Bagram Air Base, a foolish geo-strategic decision which could have been easily defended, much like Guantanamo Bay. Bagram would have given the U.S. a permanent forward deployed deterrent and strike capability deep into Central Asia and against communist China.
But Biden wasn’t interested in keeping the spoils of war after victory. Instead, he focused on abandonment.
The foolishness of abandoning Bagram aside, from a safety standpoint, with the evacuation of Afghanistan not nearly complete, America surrendered the main, more defensible hub, which could have been used for an evacuation, forcing the final evacuation through the far more vulnerable Kabul airport under Taliban control of the surrounding area.
It was the equivalent of abandoning Fort Bragg and trying to evacuate everyone through Raleigh-Durham Airport instead. With Biden’s obsession with withdrawal deadlines, foolishness piled upon foolishness, and danger stacked upon more danger.
Meanwhile, intelligence reports surfaced ISIS had returned with plans to launch an attack against United States forces as the coup de grâce before Biden’s cowardly withdrawal. If anything, American troop security should have been beefed up. But the Democrat-controlled Pentagon did just the opposite.
These young Marines and their Navy and Army compatriots, sent to the perimeter of the civilian Kabul airport, were instructed to interact with the throng desperately seeking to escape Afghanistan. The ability to vet or check for safety the hundreds of desperate Afghans pleading to cross into the airport perimeter and jump on an American military plane to leave collapsed. The situation created by Biden, and his cronies, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, was essentially the death warrant of the service members who would give their lives for their country.
On August 26, 2021, an ISIS-K suicide bomber detonated in a dense crowd outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. The blast killed eleven Marines, one Navy corpsman, and one Army soldier. It remains the second-deadliest single day for U.S. forces in the entire Afghanistan war — surpassed only by the shoot-down of Extortion 17 a decade earlier.
These were young Americans with names, faces, families, and futures that ended in a sewage canal while they tried to help strangers escape.
Sgt. Nicole Gee was 23. Days before the attack, she was photographed holding an Afghan infant, the caption simply reading, “I love my job.” That image captured the humanity these Marines showed even in chaos. She was killed doing the same work — processing desperate people, searching them, and trying to bring order to an impossible situation.
At twenty years old, Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum had recently married. His wife was pregnant with their first child. Rylee never got to meet his daughter.
One of the more senior Marines at the gate, Staff Sgt. Darin “Taylor” Hoover, 31, became a steady presence to his younger comrades. Darin’s parents have spent the years since seeking answers and accountability so that no other family has to endure what they have.
Cpl. Hunter Lopez was 22. Lance Cpl. Dylan Merola was 20. Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui was 20. Several others were the same age. Five of the thirteen were only twenty years old. Most of the rest were barely older. They were still kids in many ways — sons and daughters who had volunteered to serve — and they were the ones ordered to stand in the open, shoulder to shoulder with a raucous, largely unvetted crowd, conducting hands-on searches under known terrorist threat.
These young men and women did not fail at the gate. They executed the mission they were given under constraints imposed from far above them. Their deaths stand as a stark example of civilian control of the military, exercised without sufficient regard for the realities on the ground. In the long history of the republic, it is difficult to find a clearer case of a fixed political deadline overriding military judgment and basic force protection.
The official investigations concluded the attack was not preventable at the tactical level without changing the mission itself. That finding only underscores the larger point: The mission parameters and the timeline created them were set by political leadership. The troops paid the price.
Five years later, the Gold Star families still carry the weight every day. They buried their children who should still be alive. Some never got to watch their sons become fathers. Others lost a daughter who had already shown the world, in a simple photograph, how much she cared about the people she was trying to help.
We should always remember their names. We should always remember how young they were. We should always remember what they were asked to do in the final chaotic days of a twenty-year war. And we should pray for the families they left behind — the parents, the spouses, the children who will grow up without them.
Pause for a moment to honor their service and the fact they stood on their post until the end.
I have often quoted General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing in remembering the lost Americans who died on Extortion 17 ten years earlier, as he said of American service members who fell in an earlier war: “Time will not diminish the glory of their deeds.” So it is and will be with the heroes of Abbey Gate.
Their glory & sacrifice will remain And the questions about the decisions which put them in that position will remain as well. Remember them, always. ✪
▶️ HONG KONG: HOW A FREE SOCIETY BECOMES A DICTATORSHIP
HONG KONG: HOW A FREE SOCIETY BECOMES A DICTATORSHIP
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an communism come to America? Until recently, most Americans would have dismissed the question as alarmist, even absurd. The United States has enjoyed constitutional government for nearly 250 years. Its citizens are accustomed to elections, private property, free speech, independent courts, and a press that openly challenges those in power. Surely, many assume, a people raised in freedom would never accept or tolerate dictatorship.
The rapid rise of Democratic Socialism has made the question less theoretical. The movement draws strength from the same seductive promise that has accompanied every socialist and communist experiment: government can eliminate inequality by taking greater control over economic life and redistributing wealth more justly.
Anyone with even limited knowledge of communist history knows what follows. Equality is promised, but scarcity is delivered. The old upper class is denounced, but a new political class emerges with privileges unavailable to ordinary citizens. Economic control requires political control because people must be prevented from resisting confiscation, rationing, and bureaucratic direction. Institutions intended to be temporary become permanent. Opposition becomes “sabotage,” and criticism becomes “disinformation.” Before long, dissenters become enemies of the people, and the FBI begins to resemble the KGB.
Yet can an already free society really travel backward? Can people who have known liberty be persuaded, intimidated, or exhausted into surrendering it? We do not have to speculate. The answer can be found in Hong Kong.
For decades under British rule, Hong Kong was one of the freest societies in Asia. The Heritage Foundation consistently ranked it at or near the top of its Index of Economic Freedom. It had independent newspapers, outspoken political magazines, vigorous labor unions, public demonstrations, and courts widely respected for their professionalism. In a territory of only several million people, an extraordinary variety of Chinese-language publications competed for readers. Hongkongers could criticize their government, denounce the Chinese Communist Party, and commemorate events Beijing had erased from public memory.
The most important of those commemorations was the annual candlelight vigil for the victims of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square massacre. For more than three decades, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China organized the gathering. Tens of thousands of people assembled peacefully in Victoria Park, holding candles and insisting the dead would not be forgotten.
On August 21, Hong Kong’s High Court convicted the now-disbanded Alliance and its former leaders Lee Cheuk-yan, Chow Hang-tung, and Albert Ho of “inciting subversion of state power.” Lee and Chow contested the charge; Ho pleaded guilty before the trial. Their mitigation hearing is scheduled for August 28, and under the National Security Law, they could receive prison terms of up to ten years. Two of the defendants are my personal friends. I have known them for decades.
They are not terrorists or insurrectionists. Lee is one of Hong Kong’s best-known labor leaders; Chow and Ho are lawyers. Their alleged offense arose from their work with an organization that defended democratic principles and preserved the memory of Tiananmen. The court’s judgment acknowledged that the Alliance had neither used nor advocated violence. Yet its demand for an end to one-party dictatorship was treated as an attack on the state itself—and, in today’s Hong Kong, as an act of treason.
This transformation did not occur in a single day. After Britain transferred sovereignty over Hong Kong to China in 1997, Beijing promised the territory a “high degree of autonomy” under the formula of “one country, two systems.” Hongkongers were told their freedoms, legal system, and way of life would remain unchanged for 50 years.
That promise was gradually hollowed out. Beijing tightened its control over elections and political institutions. In 2019, enormous demonstrations erupted, including a march estimated to have drawn two million people. Instead of addressing Hongkongers’ demands for accountable government, Beijing imposed the National Security Law in 2020. The law criminalized broadly defined acts of secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces. Independent newspapers closed, opposition organizations dissolved, activists fled abroad, and thousands of people were arrested.
The Alliance itself disbanded in September 2021, ending its 32-year history after its leaders were arrested and charged. The June 4 vigil had already been prohibited in 2020, officially because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It never returned.
I recognize this process because I lived under Chinese communism. In 1974, while still in China, I joined an underground pro-democracy group in Guangzhou. We circulated samizdat-style writings calling for political reform. Some of our articles were smuggled into Hong Kong, where sympathetic students supported us. I was eventually imprisoned and spent a year in solitary confinement. After my release, Hongkongers reached out to us with material assistance and solidarity.
I came to the United States as a student in 1987 and became an American citizen in 2001. I have never been a Hong Kong resident. Yet in July, Hong Kong authorities placed a bounty of 200,000 Hong Kong dollars on my head, accusing me of participating in activities intended to overthrow the government.
My supposed crime was exercising my rights as an American on American soil. Since 2020, I have appeared on Cantonese-language online programs. As a native Cantonese speaker, I have explained the American constitutional system—checks and balances, representative government, free elections, and the principle that legitimate authority comes from the consent of the governed. I have criticized Britain for denying Hong Kong full democracy and Beijing for destroying its rule of law. For this, a foreign authoritarian regime claims jurisdiction over me.
That is the final lesson Americans must learn from Hong Kong. Dictatorship does not always arrive with tanks in the streets. It can advance through legal language, institutional pressure, and the redefinition of ordinary political activity as a threat to “national security.” Courts may continue to operate, newspapers may continue to publish, and elections may still be held—but each gradually loses its independence and meaning.
Freedom is not self-sustaining. A society can possess it for generations and still lose it within a few years. Hong Kong’s people did not suddenly stop valuing liberty. They were deprived of the institutions through which their liberty could be defended.
Americans should therefore scrutinize every political movement—left or right—that concentrates power, treats opponents as enemies, suppresses speech in the name of safety, or promises equality at the price of individual independence. Hong Kong’s tragedy is not merely a distant human rights story. It is a warning.
Yes, a free society can become a dictatorship. I know because I have lived under one—and because I have watched another being built where freedom once flourished. ✪
▶️ OP-ED: THE BELL TOLLS FOR THE US DOLLAR
OP-ED: THE BELL TOLLS FOR THE US DOLLAR
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ast Tuesday, total U.S. debt passed the $40 trillion mark. Washington D.C. enjoys ignoring the debt almost as much as it loves piling it up. But that grim mile marker forced some of D.C’.s denizens to extrude some fake concern.
The tenor of which was almost entirely that of innocent bystanders; rather than that of the malevolent participants they all are:
“Lawmakers are sounding the alarm over the nation’s $40 trillion debt, lamenting Congress’s inability to meaningfully confront a problem that has grown increasingly difficult to ignore. Both parties have spent years trying to tackle the rising debt.”
No: Both parties have NOT spent years trying to tackle the rising debt. The last Joe Biden-Democrat budget had a Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 deficit of of $1.78 trillion. The Donald Trump-Republican Big Broke Bill has a FY 2026 deficit of $1.9 trillion. As in larger than the allegedly more profligate Democrats.
The U.S. is adding $1 trillion to the debt — every 92 days. And in FY 2025, the U.S. started paying over $1 trillion per year — just in interest on the debt.
To try to pay for all of DC’s excess spending? The Treasury Department issues bonds — and then sells them at market auction. The bonds’ terms are from less than one year — all the way up to thirty years.
Say you buy a $100 bond. You get an interest payment every month for the life of the bond — and then at the end get back your $100.
Allegedly. The bond markets only work — if the planet’s prospective buyers think buying them is a good idea. As in: They think the U.S. will still be around at the end of the bond’s term — so as to get paid all the way back.
Increasingly, the rest of the planet doesn’t think so. Which makes them less and less likely to buy our new bonds. Which forces the U.S. to pay higher and higher interest rates — to rekindle the globe’s interest.
And what happens when the planet really doesn’t think so? They start selling the bonds they already have. Which makes the auctions for the new bonds even less attractive. Because that lack of confidence can spread like wildfire.
The less confidence there is in U.S. bonds? The higher the interest rates the U.S. has to pay. Which precipitates the greatest of all problems:
Paying more interest — increases our debt even more. Which increases skepticism of the U.S. Which forces us to pay even higher interest rates to sell our debt. Which increases our debt. Which increases skepticism of the U.S. Which forces us to pay even higher interest rates to sell our debt. You get the picture… This is the death spiral about which many (including me) have long warned.
Japan is the largest outside holder of our debt — at about $1.2 trillion. To shore up their currency, Japan has been selling their US bonds.
Recently — to hide that fact — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent began buying back billions of dollars’ worth of our debt from Japan.
Buying your own debt is an exceedingly bad look. Not very confidence inspiring. It means Japan is selling and we don’t think anyone besides us is buying. That’s converting an IOU — into an IOI.
Which reminds of something I noticed in March…. 40% of All New US Debt Purchased Since 2022? Has Been in the Cayman Islands:
What if The Fed is setting up a whole bunch of Cayman corporations? Behind the corporate veil – that we can not penetrate. And then using them to mass-purchase bonds. To soak up the new bonds. And the existing ones everyone else is fire-selling.
Again: 40% of ALL new debt purchase since 2022 – has been in the Caymans. That’s TRILLIONS of dollars.
If The Fed is doing this? It is postponing – oops, and massively intensifying – the coming collapse. Just a thought. Just a thought….
And speaking of IOIs? The U.S. overtly owes itself $7.2 trillion of our debt. Which makes the far-and-away largest holder of US debt — even if my Cayman hypothetical is inaccurate? The US.
In a scam they call “intragovernmental holdings,” the U.S. uses money from programs like Social Security and Medicare to buy and hold U.S. debt.
Which shouldn’t complicate things. Given that Social Security and Medicare are a combined $175+ trillion short.
So we have all of this debt. And all of the continued, unchecked spending. And we see all of the … shenanigans in which the government engages to prop up the un-propable.
All of that — raises another question: What happens to the U.S. dollar? Hint: It ain’t great. And we’re already dealing with a lot it. It’s inflation. As bad as it already is? You ain’t seen nothing yet.
Behold currency debasement: “Currency debasement occurs when the value of a currency is intentionally reduced, often through increasing the money supply, leading to decreased purchasing power.”
The only possible option left to the U.S.? Such as it is? Is to inflate away the debt. If you owe $40 trillion? Make each dollar you owe worth less. (Ask retirees who saved 1960s dollars for a 2020s retirement how inflation debasement works.)
Except the US still has to sell its ever-accumulating debt. And its prospective bond buyers? Can very easily see us debasing our money. Which means they’ll demand ever higher interest rates. That is, if they haven’t lost all interest in buying.
We’ll owe more and more money. With fewer and fewer interested bond buyers. In a currency worth less and less…. Death spiral, anyone? ✪
▶️ HOW DOLLY PARTON CONQUERED AMERICA
HOW DOLLY PARTON CONQUERED AMERICA
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here’s a reason every Dolly Parton song feels like it finds a home in the deepest part of your soul. Writing from her heart, she set out to make a career in music. Instead, she changed the world, and she did it by always being herself.
“I never do anything that I don’t pray about,” Dolly said. “I always ask God to … guide me to do things that would glorify him and to uplift mankind. That’s my mission.”
Whether she was playing the sassy Doralee Rhodes in “9 to 5” and threatening to turn a coworker “from a rooster to a hen with one shot,” dishing the recipe on her cuppa cuppa cake in “Steel Magnolias,” belting out “I Will Always Love You,” or crooning over that woman “Jolene,” Dolly felt like one of us. Because she was.
The fact she could look like she did — and still relate to anyone — is the key to her magic. “My boobs are fake, my hair’s fake but what is real is my voice and my heart,” she famously said. She was so wholesomely over-the-top, we couldn’t resist falling in love.
Dolly wrote more than 3,000 songs during her lifetime; if anyone was counting. “I started playing guitar when I was seven years old, and I’ve been writing serious songs ever since,” she said. “I’ve got songs stuck everywhere. I pull out a drawer to get some panties … I’ll find a song in there.”
There’s no way to know whether she recorded them all. But from the sound of it, maybe Dolly’s run isn’t entirely over. Even her upcoming Broadway show “DOLLY: A True Original Musical” will feature new songs. Now, it looks like opening night will have to honor what would have been her 81st birthday on January 19, 2027.
You can be sure Dolly fans are gonna get through this; we have Dolly to sing all the sad songs with us.
Along with the legendary music catalog that earned her 11 Grammys, 10 Country Music Awards, four American Music Awards, and induction into the Country Music, Rock and Roll, and Songwriters halls of fame, Dolly graced the silver screen in over 12 theatrical releases, starring alongside Sylvester Stallone, Burt Reynolds, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Fonda — in addition to her countless made-for-TV heart-warmers.
Dolly also left her footprint behind the scenes, elevating scores of other artists’ careers. Whitney Houston leveraged Dolly’s timeless songwriting for her version of “I Will Always Love You” for the film “The Bodyguard.” And as godmother to Miley Cyrus, Dolly championed the up-and-comer by appearing in “Hannah Montana” and supporting her entry into music.
There will never be another queen of country music. After rising from poverty to stardom living a real-life American dream, Dolly cemented her legacy over her 70-year career by paying it back to everyone she met.
Once Dolly bought Silver Dollar City in the late 1980s, the grounds were officially reopened as Dollywood. Dotted with Dolly’s signature butterflies — and regularly beating out other parks such as Disney, Universal, and Legoland as a crowd favorite — the theme park continues to delight families by celebrating the bluegrass and Southern food of the Appalachians.
This was the stuff Dolly knew best. Her earliest years were spent in a one-bedroom rural Tennessee cabin in the 1940s, as the fourth-eldest of 12 children. At age six she was singing in church, and by the time she turned 13, she had co-written her first song and was introduced by Johnny Cash to perform on stage at the Grand Ole Opry. She got three encores.
“As I heard the band play my introduction, I lifted my head and looked up toward the lights,” Dolly remembered. “I smiled at the people in the balcony and then let ‘er rip.”
After building an extraordinarily successful career, Dolly funneled a large part of her wealth back into the community, aiming to empower education through her Dollywood Foundation. Her Buddy Program initiative slashed school dropout rates in her hometown of Sevier County, Tennessee, by giving “$500 to every seventh and eighth-grader who finished high school.” The buddy part involved two students pledging to get each other across the line.
Dolly understood the power of bringing people together, whether they liked it or not. She largely flew above political discourse, preferring to stay out of the fray. All three times she was offered the greatest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (twice from President Donald Trump, once from President Joe Biden), she declined in case it was perceived as a political choice.
“I don’t work for those awards. It’d be nice, but I’m not sure that I even deserve it. But that’s a nice compliment for people to think that I might deserve it,” she said.
As the nation lowered its flags to half-staff in honor of the legendary star, loved ones shared Dolly’s final wish to “rest in a beautiful bed of plush cotton because after a life wearing heavy rhinestones, she finally deserves to be comfortable.” It was one last playful quip from the woman famous for joking, “It takes a lot of time and money to look this cheap, honey.”
She was light, she was love, she was country music. We’ll miss you, Dolly. “Always, Always.” ✪
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