Category: Essays And Commentaries

Long essays or op-ed length commentaries on the issues of the day or on topics of special interest.

Lincoln’s Thanksgiving proclamation

8:00 am

Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln

As I wrote in 2023 for Thanksgiving, just six weeks after the horrible murderous massacre of innocent people by Hamas on October 7, 2023:

The date was October 3, 1863. The Civil War was at its height, with no end in sight and no clear sign yet of victory for the Union. For all anyone knew, the great American experiment in self-government, freedom, and constitutional law was about to end in failure, with one half of the nation committed to the idea that it was okay to enslave other human beings, based on their race.

In such a moment, President Abraham Lincoln did what all past leaders in America had done, call for a day of prayer to God for the future while giving thanks for the blessings still abounding. For this purpose he set aside the last Thursday of November of that year.

Since then, Americans have never stopped celebrating Thanksgiving on that day.

Though as always the world is filled with evil people and evil acts, there always remains much more to be thankful for. America still is that shining city on the hill, a beacon for freedom and the rule of law. Though many elites and their minions in our own country are no longer committed to these ideals, and are working daily to destroy them, they cannot succeed. “Government of the people, by the people, for the people,” based on “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” shall always be honored by ordinary people.

As I noted last year, Thanksgiving remains an utterly American holiday.

No other nation has anything like it. And it lives on, because deep down, all ordinary Americans — from all walks of life and political persuasions — are still hopeful and determined to build a life for themselves and their loved ones, with joy and justice and freedom at its heart.

Thus, the words of Lincoln’s 1863 Thanksgiving proclamation still rings true to us all. Let us put aside our petty factional differences and, as Lincoln asked in his proclamation below, give thanks as “one heart and one voice by the whole American People.”

» Read more

6 comments

A Midnight Repost: Farewell to America

12:29 am

I wrote the essay below the day before the November 2024 election, when it remained very uncertain whether it would be Donald Trump or Kamala Harris as our next president.

The essay itself did not get picked up at very many news aggregates. Nor did it garner as much traffic as would be expected, based on the aggregates that did pick it up. I believe the reason was the depressing title.

No matter, the point I made then still holds. The fundamental American culture — based on freedom, family, and the Judeo-Christian values of Western Civilization — that made this the most prosperous place ever created by humankind in its entire history no longer exists.

What will come remains unknown. We might see a resurgence of that culture, especially based on the public’s response following the murder of Charlie Kirk. Then again, we might not. As I said in the very first line of my history, Leaving Earth, societies change.

I repost this essay now, during Thanksgiving week, because I strongly believe it essential that we understand exactly where we stand, in order to make it possible for us to move forward, in the right direction. The essay is also another example of my never-ending and too often successful effort to look farther into the future than others. I think a year later this essay stands up quite well in this sense.

———————————–
Farewell to America

The Liberty Bell
“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all
the inhabitants thereof.” Photo credit: William Zhang

Despite my headline, this essay is not intended to be entirely pessimistic. Instead it is my effort to accept a reality that I think few people, including myself, have generally been able to process: The country we shall see after tomorrow’s election will not be the America as founded in 1776 and continued to prosper for the next quarter millennium.

The country can certainly be made great again. Elon Musk’s SpaceX proves it, time after time. The talent and creativity of free Americans is truly endless, and if Donald Trump wins it is very likely that energy will be unleashed again, in ways that no one can predict.

The country can certainly become free again. There is no law that prevents the elimination of bureaucracy and regulation, no matter how immortal government agencies appear to be. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 proves this. Though Russia has sadly retreated back to its top-down government-ruling ways, the country did wipe out almost all its bureaucracy in 1991, resulting in an exuberant restart that even today is nowhere near as oppressive as Soviet rule.

Should Donald Trump win, we should have every expectation that he will do the largest house-cleaning of the federal government ever. The benefits will be immeasurable, and magnificent.

What however will not change, even if Donald Trump wins resoundingly tomorrow, is the modern culture and political ethics that now exist. That modern culture is fundamentally different than the America that existed during the country’ s first 200 years, and it guarantees that America can never be the country it once was.
» Read more

12 comments

Who was Cornelius Vanderbilt?

12:03 pm

The First Tycoon

I ask the question in my headline because I am quite sure it is a question most Americans can no longer answer, with any firm knowledge. I myself didn’t know who Vanderbilt really was until I read a wonderful biography of him, The First Tycoon: The epic life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles, about two months ago.

Beforehand, all I really knew about Vanderbilt was that he had been a big deal somehow in the 1800s, and as a result there was a statue of him on the south side of Grand Central Station in New York, visible only by drivers going past on the overpass that circles the station.

What I learned from Stiles book however was astonishing. Not only did Vanderbilt build Grand Central Station, it was part of a transportation empire he created that by the end of his life covered most of the eastern United States. For Americans in the 1800s, if you needed to get from one place to another, you almost certainly rode on a Vanderbilt steamship or railroad.

Even more interesting to me however were the remarkable similarities in style, approach, and success between the Cornelius Vanderbilt of the 1800s and the Elon Musk of the 2000s. Both focused on taking new technology and making it profitable. Both built their empires on transportation.

And most of all, both focused on the product they were building to make money, not on speculating its value to make a quick buck.
» Read more

12 comments

Bigoted academia upset that Trump won’t allow them to push the racist DEI agenda

12:53 pm

Lysenko with Stalin
Trofim Lysenko (on the left), preaching to Stalin as he destroyed
Soviet plant research by persecuting anyone who disagreed with him,
thus causing famines that killed millions. He is now the role model for
today’s entire science community.

Cue the world’s smallest violin! An article today in the journal Science proves once again that science has nothing to do with what that journal now publishes. The headline:

‘This is censorship.’ Conference requires abstracts to comply with Trump anti-DEI order

It seems scientists submitting abstracts to the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in Texas are upset because the Trump administration will not allow any papers to include any mention of diversity, equity, or inclusion (DEI) as a topic.

The Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC), hosted annually by the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) in Texas, last week announced a new requirement for the upcoming 2026 conference: All submitted abstracts must comply with executive orders from the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. His 20 January executive order called DEI “illegal and immoral discrimination programs” and terminated both federal DEI programs as well as grant funding for DEI initiatives. The conference policy follows moves earlier this year by LPI’s parent organization, the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), to scrub DEI-related content—including archived LPSC abstracts—from its websites.

Researchers are fuming, saying LPSC is doubling down on its previous decisions, and prioritizing avoiding trouble with the government over intellectual freedom. “This is censorship,” says planetary scientist Paul Byrne of Washington University in St. Louis. “Even if the percentage of people who would normally write a DEI abstract is small, a much larger percent are pissed off.”

In other words, the science community wants to support DEI racial discrimination, because it is designed to favor the racial and sexual groups they favor. To them it is more important to infuse these bigoted ideas into all science, rather than actually report real research about the solar system and planets.
» Read more

6 comments

The crippling effect of “woke” on historians

1:17 pm

As a historian who likes to read (from real books that I can pick up and feel, not digital versions that make true understanding and absorption difficult), I am routinely reading at least two histories about America’s past at any one time.

For example, I previously had read two great biographies of T.E. Lawrence (of Lawrence of Arabia fame) and Cornelius Vanderbilt (who dominated the American transportation industry in the first half of the 1800s). More about each in future essays, as I think I will start reviewing these books as I finish them.

An amazingly accurate rendering of the first Thanksgiving
Believe it or not, this is actually an amazingly
accurate rendering of the first Thanksgiving

Today’s essay however is about two books I finished yesterday, both about two very different periods in American history. Both however had the exact same flaws, typical of the early 2000s when they were written, despite being very detailed and accurate efforts. The books:

The first was published in 2006, and was an attempt to describe in detail the story behind the settlement of Pilgrims in New England in first half century after they arrived in 1620.

The second was published in 2003, and was an attempt to tell the story of the defeat of Japan in World War II, achieved mostly because of the advent of the airplane in reshaping warfare. While ground troops took island after island in the Pacific, in the end it was the air war against Japan itself that eventually forced its surrender. Bradley focuses on telling us the story of the pilots and crews in that air war.

As I already noted, both books do excellent jobs detailing very accurately in vivid terms the events involved. For anyone who wishes to learn something about these significant events of our nation’s history, I recommend them highly.

However, that recommendation comes with one major caveat. In both cases, the authors were handicapped by certain modern academic paradigms that crippled their ability to see the larger context of events. Those paradigms demanded that both historians treat all the cultures involved as morally equivalent, and because of this both writers miss entirely the greater moral fundamentals that moved the Western side of both stories.

For example, let’s take Philbrick’s fascinating history of the Pilgrims.
» Read more

64 comments

Historical proof that today’s public schools are nothing but indoctrination mills poisoning minds

4:57 pm

A typical classroom in 1909
Click for original.

You want to know why today’s kids know nothing about America’s past, and in fact in many cases actually believe falsely that America invented slavery and has always been an evil oppressive nation founded on that even more evil concept of capitalism, you need only compare pictures of two typical public school classrooms, one from 1909 and one from 2025.

The picture to the right was taken in 1909, showing an elementary classroom in the Washington, DC area. Note the picture of President Teddy Roosevelt on the wall, surrounded by American flags. Note the blackboard that covers two entire walls, its entire face filled with detailed information these children were expected to learn. Note how there is nothing else. Very clearly the focus is on learning the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, with a lot of American history and science thrown in as well. As noted in the article of many such vintage classroom images from which this picture was drawn:

Students wear their best clothes for this formal photograph. The classroom features standard educational decor of the period—portraits of historical figures, maps, and instructional charts. Such photographs documented not just the students but the educational standards and resources of local communities.

As a child who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, I can say that the classrooms of my day were quite similar. There was almost always a portrait of George Washington and the Declaration of Independence on the wall, along with map of the world and the U.S. And above all, the focus was on learning basic facts and essential skills.

The next picture below was taken in 2025 by a parent of an 11-year-old boy while attending a parent orientation night. It is also typical of the classrooms one sees nowadays in the public schools, and the contrast is more than striking.
» Read more

25 comments

New Glenn successfully launches Escapade orbiters AND lands 1st stage

2:29 pm

New Glenn first stage after landing
New Glenn first stage after landing

Blue Origin today successfully placed two the NASA Escapade Mars orbiters into space, its New Glenn rocket launching for the second time from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

More significantly, the company successfully landed the rocket’s first stage on a barge in the Atlantic. New Glenn is now the second rocket company capable of vertically landing and recovering an orbital first stage, after SpaceX.

Several take-aways: First, this first stage recovery took place almost exactly a decade after Blue Origin successfully landed vertically its suborbital New Shepard rocket, and almost a decade after SpaceX successfully did it with its Falcon 9 orbital rocket. It is a shame that it took Blue Origin so long to get to this point. It is also magnificent that it has finally made it happen. The United States now has two reusable rockets, with two more (by Rocket Lab and Stoke Space) expected to launch by next year.

Blue Origin is not likely to reuse this particular first stage, but its recovery will make future reuses likely and soon.

Second, Blue Origin made one interesting broadcast choice that I like. It listed the rocket’s altitude and speed in feet/miles and miles per hour, not kilometers. The engineers might have been using metric, but the audience is American, so using the traditional Imperial numbers is smart. Good for Blue Origin.

Third, Blue Origin’s announcers were once again annoying, distracting, ignorant, and childishly emotional. And they simply would not shut up, preventing the audience from hearing critical reports from mission control. They also seemed oblivious to reality, bragging repeatedly about the ten year gap between the first New Shepard landing and this landing, as if this was somehow a good thing. It was embarrassing to listen to.

The company would do a far better job selling itself by hiring announcers who are more serious and professional. Sadly, I have noted this problem from Blue Origin’s announcers now for almost a decade, with little change.

Finally, this success is a very big deal, both for Blue Origin and the United States. The company is now primed to begin regular launches next year, including the 27 launches Amazon has purchased for its Kuiper constellation.

For the U.S., this finally gives us a solid competitor to SpaceX. And that competition is finally going to force launch prices to drop significantly. SpaceX dropped prices, but not as far as it could because there was no pressure to do so from anyone else. Now there is that pressure.

As this was only the second launch by Blue Origin in 2025, the leader board for the 2025 launch race remains unchanged:

147 SpaceX
70 China
14 Rocket Lab
13 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 147 to 116. Note that ULA hopes to launch its Atlas-5 rocket tonight.

40 comments

The leftist protest at Berkeley this week: Feel the hate!

12:45 pm

All this guy wanted to do was selling
All this guy wanted to do was sell
“Freedom” t-shirts. Click for video.

While a lot of reports have done good work documenting the Antifa and leftist protests that attempted to shut down a Turning Point USA event on the campus of UCLA at Berkeley earlier this week (here, here, and here), I want to highlight one fundamental and truly ugly aspect of these protests that I think we no longer see because it has become so common.

While it is clear these leftist protesters have nothing positive to propose, it is their hate and anger that stands out above all. All they can do is vent hate, pure and simple.

The screen capture to the right is a typical result of this hate. It comes from video whereby this guy had set up a table outside the event, attempting to sell a variation of the “Freedom” t-shirt that Charlie Kirk was wearing when he was assassinated. A crowd of leftist mask-wearing protesters soon surrounded him, shouting obscenities and threatening him. Finally, one protester named Jihad Dphrepaulezz grabbed the t-shirts as well as a chain necklace from the man and ran. The man chased him and they got into a fight, resulting in this man’s bloodied face.

Dphrepaulezz has now been charged with assault and robbery. The t-shirt seller, who remains unidentified, was initially arrested but then released when the police determined he was the victim.

This violence however is typical now of the left at these protests, so typical we are no longer even shocked by it. It stems from blind angry emotions, driven further by an utter ignorance that embarrasses them if challenged in any way. If you were to ask them to give any examples proving that Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA supported bigotry or “fascism”, their response would be incoherent or confused, because they clearly have never listened to even one nanosecond of any Turning Point USA event, with or without Charlie Kirk. I have, and I can say unequivocally that Kirk or his organization were and are the exact opposite of these false slanders. Kirk and his organization have always stood for individual rights, freedom, and open debate. They also stand for an end to bigotry, for not ranking people by their skin color or religion but solely based on their character and actions.

And above all, Kirk and his organization have always stood for bringing the two sides of the political debate together to talk as civilized rational human beings about the issues everyone so passionately cares about.

The left however can no longer debate anyone rationally. Instead, we have these protests, designed to silence debate. And to do so they scream obscenities and insults, chanting “Fascists out of Berkeley!” repeatedly as if that means anything. And if that doesn’t work, they next turn to violence, as happened above to this t-shirt vendor.

This tactic — of screaming and disrupting events to silence them — isn’t news, as this kind of violent protest behavior has been standard leftist tactic to silence speech now for more a decade. At Berkeley in 2017 it prevented then-Breibart editor Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking there. Since then it has been used in numerous campuses nationwide to shut down conservative events.

What is different now is the level of emotional hate exuded by these protesters. They are literally so filled with this venom that they now almost routinely lose control of themselves, resulting in violence and vandalism of the sort seen above, that even a decade ago was rare.

Below are two more clips. All I see is hate. Hate for the right. Hate for debate. Hate pure and simple.
» Read more

4 comments

More Washington shenanigans over who will be NASA’s next administrator

12:17 pm

Two news outlets in the past day (Politico and Ars Technica) have posted stories about a 62-page plan — supposedly written by Jared Isaacman while he was still the nominee to become NASA administrator — that was recently leaked to them as well as others inside and outside NASA.

The plan itself, dubbed “Project Athena”, has not been made available, though the descriptions at both sources suggest it matches closely with the overall Trump effort to cancel SLS and Orion and shift space operations out of NASA and more into the private sector.

The nature of this plan of course threatens NASA’s established work force and the big space contractors who have worked hand-in-glove with NASA for decades, producing little but distributing a lot of money and jobs to these groups. Not surprisingly, both news sources quote extensively from anonymous sources within that NASA work force and those big space contractors, lambasting the plan and blasting Isaacman for proposing it. From the Politic article:

Sean Duffy
Sean Duffy: “Pick me! Pick me!”

Putting all of these plans into writing is a “rookie move,” and “presumptuous,” said an industry insider who has seen the document and thought it would stoke congressional skepticism around his nomination. Many of these ideas would need congressional approval to enact, and Congress could always block them.

The Ars Techica article speculates that interim NASA administrator Sean Duffy was the source of the leak, in his effort to become NASA’s official administrator. If the plan is Isaacman’s, it generates opposition to renewing Isaacman’s nomination as NASA administrator while garnering support for Duffy from NASA’s workforce and those big space contractors.

All of this is pure Washington swamp, however, which really matters little in the long run. First of all, none of this is real. We are talking about an unreleased plan that no one has seen publicly, and the reactions of anonymous sources criticizing that unseen plan. It is all the stuff of ghosts and fantasy. For we know, it is all made up, just like the Russian collusion hoax was manufactured against Trump.

Second, and more important, who runs NASA next is becoming increasingly unimportant. » Read more

16 comments

The November fund-raising campaign for Behind the Black

8:13 pm

Scroll down for the most recent posts.

It is unfortunately time for another November fund-raising campaign to support my work here at Behind the Black. I really dislike doing these, but 2025 is so far turning out to be a very poor year for donations and subscriptions, the worst since 2020. I very much need your support for this webpage to survive.

And I think I provide real value. Fifteen years ago I said NASA’s SLS rocket was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said its Orion capsule was a lie and a bad idea. As early as 1998, long before almost anyone else, I predicted in my first book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, that private enterprise and freedom would conquer the solar system, not government. Very early in the COVID panic and continuing throughout I noted that every policy put forth by the government (masks, social distancing, lockdowns, jab mandates) was wrong, misguided, and did more harm than good. In planetary science, while everyone else in the media still thinks Mars has no water, I have been reporting the real results from the orbiters now for more than five years, that Mars is in fact a planet largely covered with ice.

I could continue with numerous other examples. If you want to know what others will discover a decade hence, read what I write here at Behind the Black. And if you read my most recent book, Conscious Choice, you will find out what is going to happen in space in the next century.

This last claim might sound like hubris on my part, but I base it on my overall track record.

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. I could really use the support at this time. There are five ways of doing so:

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation. Takes about a 10% cut.

3. A Paypal Donation or subscription, which takes about a 15% cut:

4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman. What you give is what I get. Mail checks to:

Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652

5. Finally, you can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.

This post will remain at the top of the page until the end of the month.

6 comments

SpaceX: Starship will be going to the Moon, with or without NASA

12:27 pm

Artist's rending of Starships on the Moon
SpaceX’s artist’s rending of Starships on the Moon.
Click for original.

In what appears to be a direct response to the claim by NASA’s interim administrator Sean Duffy that SpaceX is “behind” in developing a manned lunar lander version of Starship, SpaceX today posted a detailed update of the status that project, noting pointedly the following in the update’s conclusion:

NASA selected Starship in 2021 to serve as the lander for the Artemis III mission and return humans to the Moon for the first time since Apollo. That selection was made through fair and open competition which determined that SpaceX’s bid utilizing Starship had the highest technical and management ratings while being the lowest cost by a wide margin. This was followed by a second selection [Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander] to serve as the lander for Artemis IV, moving beyond initial demonstrations to lay the groundwork that will ensure that humanity’s return to the Moon is permanent.

Starship continues to simultaneously be the fastest path to returning humans to the surface of the Moon and a core enabler of the Artemis program’s goal to establish a permanent, sustainable presence on the lunar surface. SpaceX shares the goal of returning to the Moon as expeditiously as possible, approaching the mission with the same alacrity and commitment that returned human spaceflight capability to America under NASA’s Commercial Crew program.

The update then provides a list of the testing and engineering work that SpaceX has been doing on the Starship lunar lander, including full scale drop tests simulating lunar gravity, qualification of the docking ports, and the construction of a full scale mock-up of the Starship cabin to test its systems.

A close list of the work done is actually not that impressive, but at the same time this is not surprising. SpaceX is now mostly focused on getting Starship into orbit, proving it can be refueled there, and proving it can fly for long enough to get to the Moon. This part of the update was most exciting, as it confirms what I have suspected for next year’s flight program:
» Read more

52 comments

The base of the Democratic Party has truly become nightmare to behold

12:25 pm

They aren't just mindless, they are driven by hate
They aren’t just mindless, they are driven by hate

I always say it is the audience that counts. No matter what idiocy the leaders on both sides of the political spectrum might propose, the real future is determined by what their base wants.

It is now very clear that the base of the Democratic Party is driven entirely by hate, envy, and a lust for power, based on an ignorance of history that is appalling. And my saying this not simply an opinion. It is founded on what that base itself has said repeatedly in the past year. First that base has increasingly thrown its support behind Hamas and its anti-Semitic hate of Israel and Jews. Next, it mourned the failed assassination attempts against Donald Trump, then celebrated the murder of Charlie Kirk, a man whose primary goal was to foster free debate.

In this election season now that base is supporting a candidate in Maine, Graham Platner, who got a Nazi tattoo placed on his chest, and has made numerous hateful posts online over the years against anyone who disagreed with him.
In Virginia that base is excited to support a candidate for attorney general, Jay Jones, who enthusiastically called for the murder of his political opponents as well as the death of their kids.

And finally, in New York that base is rallying with great joy around an anti-Semitic Muslim, Zohran Mamdani, who hates the police and wishes to impose communism on that city. And the base showed its envy of the success of others at a big Mandani rally this past weekend, chanting without prompting over and over again that Mandani and New York’s Democratic Party governor Kathy Hochul should “Tax the rich!”

It was very clear that they weren’t chanting this to simply to re-distribute wealth, or to improve New York. No, it was very clear they wished to tax the rich because they wanted to destroy the rich. How dare such people have success when I don’t!
» Read more

11 comments

What bad news is NASA hiding about the heat shield it will use on the next Orion/SLS manned mission around the Moon?

3:59 pm

Orion's damage heat shield
Damage to Orion heat shield caused during re-entry in 2022,
including “cavities resulting from the loss of large chunks”

Even as our uneducated media goes bonkers over another Musk kerfuffle, this time with interim NASA administration Sean Duffy, it is ignoring what now appears to be a strong effort by NASA to cover up some serious issues with the Orion capsule’s heat shield, issues that might be far more serious than outlined in a May 2024 inspector general (IG) report.

That IG report [pdf] found the following:

Specifically, portions of the char layer wore away differently than NASA engineers predicted, cracking and breaking off the spacecraft in fragments that created a trail of debris rather than melting away as designed (see Figure 3 [shown to the right]). The unexpected behavior of the Avcoat creates a risk that the heat shield may not sufficiently protect the capsule’s systems and crew from the extreme heat of reentry on future missions. Moreover, while there was no evidence of impact with the Crew Module, the quantity and size of the debris could have caused enough structural damage to cause one of Orion’s parachutes to fail. Should the same issue occur on future Artemis missions, it could lead to the loss of the vehicle or crew.

In our judgment, the unexpected behavior of the heat shield poses a significant risk to the safety of
future crewed missions. [emphasis mine]

NASA spent the next few months reviewing the situation, and decided in December 2024 that it did not have the time or funding to redesign and replace the heat shield before the next flight. Instead, it chose to fly the next manned Orion mission — dubbed Artemis-2 and scheduled for the spring of 2026 carrying four astronauts around the Moon — using this same heat shield design but change the flight path during reentry to reduce stress on the shield.

NASA also admitted then that this heat shield design is defective, and that it will replace it beginning with the next mission, Artemis-3, the one that the agency hopes will land people back on the Moon.

The decision to fly humans in a capsule with such a known untrustworthy heat shield design is bad enough. Any rational person would not do this (as the inspector general above concluded). Yet NASA is going ahead, because it has determined that meeting its schedule, getting Americans back to the lunar surface ahead of China and during Trump’s present term of office, is more important than rational engineering and testing.

What now makes this decision even more worrisome is that it appears NASA is covering up the findings of its own engineers, completed in August 2024 but not made public until now.
» Read more

43 comments

Duffy’s shiny object worked

9:21 am

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

As expected, Elon Musk responded yesterday with anger and insults to the announcement by interim NASA administrator Sean Duffy that he will consider other manned lunar landers besides Starship for the first Artemis landing on the Moon.

And as expected, our brainless and generally uneducated propaganda press grabbed the shiny object that Duffy had put out with this announcement to focus entirely on the public spat. Here is just a sampling of the typical reports:

Not one of these articles reported the fact that Duffy’s announcement also included an admission that NASA is now delaying this manned Moon mission until 2028. Not one went into any depth as to why this program is delayed, if they discussed it at all. And any articles that did discuss the program’s overall slow pace, the focus was always entirely on SpaceX, as if its Starship program was the sole cause of all the problems. Essentially, they picked up Duffy’s talking points and ran with them, blindly. In fact, for almost all of these articles, it appeared as if the reporter was writing about NASA’s Artemis program for the first time, and really knew nothing about it.

Only the Ars Technica story attempted some thoughtful analysis, but it focused on the office politics of choosing NASA’s next administrator, missing entirely the fundamentals of this story, that the Artemis program is and has always been a mess, and that Duffy’s decision will do nothing to fix the problem.

Musk of course foolishly played into Duffy’s hands by reacting so violently, with insults, helping Duffy distract from the real issues. At the same time, Musk also spoke truth with this one tweet:
» Read more

25 comments

Fake blather from NASA administrator Sean Duffy to hide more Artemis delays

9:47 am

Sean Duffy
Sean Duffy: “Look at the shiny object!”

During a press interview yesterday, interim NASA administrator Sean Duffy revealed almost as an aside that NASA’s mid-2027 launch for the first Artemis manned lunar landing is no longer realistic, and that NASA is now targeting a 2028 launch date instead.

Duffy managed to hide this revelation by also announcing that he is re-opening the bidding for the manned lunar lander NASA will use on that third Artemis mission. To quote Duffy:

Now, SpaceX had the contract for Artemis III. By the way, I love SpaceX and it’s an amazing company, but the problem is, they are behind. They pushed their timelines out and we are in a race against China. The president and I want to get to the moon in this president’s term. So, I’m going to open up the contract and I’m going let other space companies compete with SpaceX, like Blue Origin. Whatever one gets us there first to the moon, we are going to take. If SpaceX is behind and Blue Origin can do it before them, good on Blue Origin.

By the way we might have two companies that can get us back to the Moon in 2028.

The propaganda press of course is going wild about this SpaceX announcement, making believe it signifies something of importance. “SpaceX is behind! Elon Musk can’t do it! Duffy is giving Jeff Bezos the job!” And as I think Duffy intended, everyone is ignoring the fact that NASA has now admitted it won’t meet that 2027 launch target.

The irony is that Duffy’s decision to re-open bidding on that manned mission is utterly meaningless. » Read more

34 comments

The “No Kings” demonstrations this past weekend showed the future belongs to the right

11:25 am

Contrasting the protesters from the left and the right
Click here and here for sources.

This past weekend hundreds of thousands of leftist protesters gathered in numerous cities nationwide to protest Donald Trump under the strange banner of “No Kings” that somehow portrayed Trump as a new king attempting to subvert democracy. Numerous commenters on the webpage have documented the protest’s emptiness, noting that it offered no real policy options except a desire to have Donald Trump removed from office (violently in many cases), even though he was properly elected by law.

Many others, including an NBC anchor, also could not help noticing the aged nature of the protesters.

So from what we can see from our viewpoint here in the studio and talking to our crew on the ground and some people I know who are there, this is an older crowd. There’s not a lot of folks, and granted, it’s a big crowd here, I’m not good at estimating, but it’s definitely over 2000, maybe close to 3000. We can’t see everyone, but it’s an older crowd, a lot of white hair you see out there, Q-tips, as we used to call them in the business. They are out protesting, and not a lot of young people.

None of this is a surprise. The strongest base of the Democratic Party is the 1960s baby boom crowd that protested the Vietnam War in the 1960s, celebrated sex, drugs, and rock & roll, and has never found a Democrat they did not love blindly. For the past decade this aging Baby Boom generation has been repeatedly told to hate Trump, and this past weekend’s demonstration allowed these old hippies the chance to show off how well they have been indoctrinated by the left.

What was far more striking about this event to me however was the contrast between the old, white-haired “No Kings” protesters and the very youthful attendees at every single conservative demonstration or event. » Read more

21 comments

Eleventh Starship/Superheavy a complete success

6:18 pm

Starship and Superheavy during ascent
Starship and Superheavy during ascent today.

On the eleventh orbital test flight today of Starship/Superheavy, SpaceX basically achieved all its engineering goals, with both Superheavy and Starship completing their flights as planned, with Superheavy doing a soft vertical splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, and Starship doing a soft vertical splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

The Superheavy flown was on its second flight, having flown on test flight #8. Of its 33 Raptor engines, 24 had flown previously. In returning, it successfully used a new configuration of engine burns, first firing thirteen engines, then six, then three.

More significant was Starship’s flight. The engineers had purposely left tiles off in some locations that would experience the greatest heat during re-entry, to find out if the ship could survive a loss of those tiles. It did, and did so in a truly remarkable manner, always flying in a controlled manner, even as it attempted a radical and previously untried banking maneuver as it approached the ocean in order to simulate a return to the launch tower chopsticks at Boca Chica.

Prior to splashdown and during its coast phase, Starship once again successfully tested the deployment of eight dummy Starlink satellites, as well as a relight of one of its Raptor engines to demonstrate it will be able to do a planned de-orbit burn once it enters a full orbit on future test flights.

Once again, the word to describe this flight is remarkable. While no else has yet been able to recover a first stage and reuse it, SpaceX has been doing it with its Falcon 9 for almost a decade, and doing it hundreds of times.

And now it has twice reused a Superheavy booster, out of only eleven test launches. Based on this and the last test flight, the company will almost certainly begin reusing Starship prototypes during next year’s orbital test flights, when it will begin flying full orbits using its third version of Starship, including returns to Boca Chica for chopstick tower catches. Furthermore, expect the deployment of real Starlink satellites on those missions.

The next mission should likely take place close to the end of this year, and it should likely be followed by additional flights about every two months.

The Liberty Bell
“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all
the inhabitants thereof.” Photo credit: William Zhang

While politicians and media swamp creatures focus on the relatively inconsequential race to do an Apollo-like manned landing on the Moon, the real American space program is being run privately by SpaceX, and its goal is to not only go to Mars, but to do so in a manner that will quickly establish a human colony. Along the way the company will help facilitate that government space program, but only as it helps SpaceX learn better how to get humans to Mars.

Most significantly, SpaceX is doing its space program entirely on its own dime. It is being financed by the revenues coming in to the company from the now more than seven million subscribers to Starlink. And those numbers will only rise with time, as Starship begins launching the next generation of satellites with capabilities that will dwarf all of SpaceX’s competitors.

Once again, freedom, private enterprise, and the American dream wins. May all humans someday live under rules that will allow them the same possibilities.

41 comments

The left only has a short window remaining to stop its violence before the hammer strikes it hard

5:20 pm

Cry havoc!

So there is no confusion, my headline is not something I advocate. It is merely what seems inevitable when a law abiding society — America — has within it a subculture (the modern left led by the very corrupt and power-hungry Democratic Party) that thinks it is not only above the law, but its ideology justifies all kinds of violence. To wit, there’s this post today by Guy Benson, nicely summarizing only a small selection of recent leftist violence. I quote it in full, because this is necessary to get the feel of reality:

I’d like to ask my non-conservative followers to pay attention here for a moment. I don’t need a response or a rebuttal or a ‘whatabout.’ Just read on and consider what I’m saying. Please.

We are only a few weeks removed from a leading conservative figure being shot in the throat and killed by a leftist, for and during his speech, at a public speaking event. Stunning, jarring numbers of leftist Americans justified or celebrated this assassination, aligning with multiple public polls showing that a sizable minority of leftists in this country think political violence can be acceptable.

Today — just today — many conservatives are thinking about:

(1) a major leftist statewide candidate being exposed for sending texts to a political opponent (R) explicitly hoping for the death of another conservative political opponent…along with the deaths of that opponents’ young children. He WROTE DOWN that the pain of those deaths might promote his own agenda, which would be worth it, in his estimation. This candidate is now condemning his current conservative opponent for noticing this information.
» Read more

35 comments

Leftist mob attacks conservatives at Tennessee State University

12:25 pm

One member of the mob blocking the way
Click for full video

If you think the left is tamping down its violent rhetoric and terrorist murder attempts of conservatives, think again. Earlier this week an independent group of conservatives wearing MAGA hats decided to set up a table at Tennessee State University (TSU), inviting anyone to debate the merits or failures of DEI.

Very quickly a mob formed, stealing their signs and becoming increasingly threatening, with at least one carrying a screwdriver in a threatening manner. The police arrived, but did literally nothing to protect the students.

Eventually the students closed up their table and attempted to drive away, only to have their car surrounded by the mob and blocked from leaving. It took an extensive effort for the police to clear a path to let these students escape.

Watch for yourself below. And note, such mob violence against conservatives on campuses is not new. I have been reporting such events now for years. The only difference now is that the mobs appear to becoming more violent and aggressive.
» Read more

25 comments

Another day, another leftist sniper; Another day, another Democrat incites violence

12:02 pm

The recovered rounds from today's leftist sniper
Click for source from FBI.

The madness from the left continues: A rooftop sniper who had engraved “anti-ICE” messages on his ammunition today killed on one and injured two in Dallas before killing himself.

The now-deceased shooter who targeted a Dallas, Texas ICE facility wrote “anti-ICE” messages on his rounds, according to the FBI.

Three people at an ICE facility were shot by a gunman on the roof of an adjacent building on Wednesday morning. The victims were reportedly detainees, though law enforcement did not confirm this on Wednesday. Authorities did confirm, however, that no officers were injured in the shooting. One of the victims died at the scene, and the shooter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

At this same Dallas ICE facility last month a man was arrested when he claimed he had a bomb in his backpack. Nor are these recent attacks limited to this one facility.

This incident comes just two weeks after a threatening letter with a white powdery substance was sent to an ICE office in New York City. Less than a week ago, a violent rioter was charged with assault in San Francisco after he threatened to stab an ICE officer and harm his family,” a DHS senior official said in a statement about the incident at the time.

In another case six anti-ICE vandals have been charged in a shooting at a different ICE facility in Texas in July.

According to federal court documents, police initially responded to reports of vandalism at the facility, with several cars spray-painted with anti-immigration statements. However, when authorities arrived on the scene, one was shot in the neck. Authorities said the officer who was shot survived.

Meanwhile, California governor Gavin Newsom last night continued the Democratic Party’s vicious rhetoric that has encouraged this behavior by saying on Stephen Colbert’s leftwing propaganda show that ICE is President Trump’s “private domestic army.” Nor did Newsom stop there.
» Read more

19 comments

The real pushback against Disney, ABC, and Kimmel continues

2:33 pm

Jimmy Kimmel on September 15, 2025, spreading lies and slandering half the nation
Jimmy Kimmel on September 15, 2025, spreading lies and
slandering half the nation. Click for original video.

Not surprisingly, the leftist Disney corporation that owns ABC backed down yesterday from its suspension of Jimmy Kimmel, posting a pandering explanation for why it no longer considers it a problem that Kimmel spouted a blatant lie about the leftist killer of Charlie Kirk.

“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive,” Disney said in a statement Monday. “We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.” [emphasis mine]

Kimmel’s comments weren’t “ill-timed” or “insensitive.” What Kimmel said was an outright slander of every person who voted for Donald Trump by claiming it was one of them that killed Kirk.

The pushback against Disney and ABC over Kimmel however has not diminished. The independent companies Nexstar and Sinclair, which own 30 and 40 affiliate television stations that are presently part of ABC’s network, have not backed down. Both have announced they will continue to refuse to air Kimmel’s show, Jimmy Kimmel Live! Sinclair has further said that it won’t change its position until Kimmel apologizes to Kirk’s family and makes a “meaningful personal donation” to them and Turning Point USA.

Sinclair has additional personal reasons for standing up to Disney, ABC, and the terrorist left. It had planned to air a tribute to Charlie Kirk, but decided to cancel it because of multiple violent threats from the left to is local stations.
» Read more

14 comments

The left’s hatred and violence is finally driving people away

12:51 pm

Erika Kirk, at the moment she publicly forgave her husband's murderer
Erika Kirk, at the moment she publicly forgave
her husband’s murderer. Click for video.

As numerous pundits on the web have already noted, the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week has clarified most starkly the political divide in both the United States as well as across the world.

On the right, we have Kirk’s widow yesterday speaking at a memorial service for her husband, and with tears standing before the world to forgive his killer.

I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it is what Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate. The answer, we know from the Gospel, is love. And always love. Love for our enemies, and love for those who persecute us.

Her speech matched the general tone of most of the speakers at that memorial service. The service itself, as well as the numerous peaceful candlelight vigils nationwide in memory of Kirk, illustrate clearly the response of the right to this heinous act. No riots, no violence, no calls for bloodshed. Only prayer and a cold fury to make sure such violence never happens again.

That tone was set by Kirk himself, before he died. All he ever did was want to debate his very mainstream conservative ideas with leftists, with good will and rationality. He proved it in a text he sent to leftist pundit Van Jones just before his murder:

I’d love to have you on my show to have a respectful conversation about crime and race. I would be a gentleman as I know you would be as well. We can disagree about the issues agreeably.

The left’s response to Kirk however has been not love or good will but hate. Hundreds and hundreds of partisan leftists went on social media to gleefully celebrate his assassination. Leftist politicians and entertainers defamed both him and what he stood for, with lies and slanders. And when the television show of one entertainer, Jimmy Kimmel, got canceled by ABC because Kimmel had falsely claimed on the air that a Trump supporter had killed Kirk, one leftist and former teacher’s union employee decided it was okay to protest Kimmel’s cancellation by firing multiple bullets into the offices of an ABC affiliate in Sacramento. The man, Al Hernandez Santana, also has an extensive X feed where he had expressed hate for Donald Trump, often wishing him dead.

He is clearly not sane, but he is also not an outlier on the left. The response of the left to Kirk’s murder has revealed that for too many Democratic Party supporters, Santana is mainstream.
» Read more

16 comments

At last some real pushback against the left’s slander culture

12:04 pm

For years I have been writing about the slander culture of the left, whereby they can say any lie about anyone who disagrees with them without any consequence. These lies are often pure slander and defamation, based on no facts. Often they grow to a point that anyone attacked in this manner becomes a persona non grata, ostracized by all society out of fear.

Here are some recent examples of this kind of slander:

This is what destroyed the Proud Boys organization. The left — and the propaganda press that works for it — labeled it as “racist”, “white supremacist”, and “neo-fascist” based on no evidence, so that soon it collapsed because ordinary people were afraid to associate with it. And in describing this slander campaign back in 2019, I correctly predicted even worse:

I fully expect the rhetoric against Trump supporters in the coming election to spread and get more vicious. This in turn will act to encourage more extreme actions, including violence comparable to what Antifa now does with impunity in Portland. Be prepared. When people abandon the truth for emotional labels inspired by hate, they are liable to do anything.

Meanwhile, this lying name-calling never seemed to carry any consequences. Big name Democratic Party politicians, celebrities, and leftist pundits could defame conservatives routinely in the same manner and get away with it. The only ones who would suffer would be the unjustly accused.

The events in the past two days in connection with former host Jimmy Kimmel of Jimmy Kimmel Live! however tells me that the murder of Charlie Kirk has truly changed things.
» Read more

37 comments

The left’s face of evil

12:34 pm

Laughter at learning Charlie Kirk had been shot
Laughter at learning Charlie Kirk had been shot

In the past day social media has been filled with numerous examples of individuals on the left proudly posting videos and commentary on line celebrating gleefully the murder of Charlie Kirk (here, here, here, here, here for just a few examples). There is even now a webpage, Charlie’s Murderers, that is complying these examples, having already obtained more than 20,000 submissions.

One could reasonably argue that these videos and hateful comments do not represent the left and the Democratic Party. They are put out by “influencers” who want to impact opinion. Ordinary Democrats are simply not like that.

Sadly, that is not true. These leftist “influencers” represent without doubt the left’s base culture, and the picture to the right proves it. It comes from a video taken by a student in a class at North Texas University. Apparently the class had just learned that Kirk had been killed, and were joyfully laughing about it. The student recorded this reaction, and then in horror protested.

Why are we cheering for someone getting shot? … He has a family!

Her protests was immediately ridiculed by the others, who as the picture shows were happy to learn Kirk was killed for his political beliefs. Worse, according to the tweet, the teacher “singled her out and asked her to leave.” Watch for yourself:
» Read more

77 comments

America’s educational system is failing because it no longer teaches students how to think

1:06 pm


From the movie Idiocracy: “But Brawndo’s
got what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes!” Click for video.

Recently the satirical site the Babylon Bee illustrated starkly and with great humor the sad state of American universities.

Genius Trump Enacts Plan To Dumb Down Chinese Population By Inviting Them To Attend American Universities

Trump’s plan was praised by national security experts, who cited it as a brilliant maneuver to reduce China’s influence on global affairs in the long term by shrewdly allowing their students to be made substantially less intelligent at educational institutions in the U.S.

“Pretty soon, Chinese kids will all be dumb, just as dumb as American students,” the president reportedly told his advisors. “We’ll let in hundreds of thousands of Chinese students, have them waste their time at American universities sitting in gender studies classes and college courses about Taylor Swift, and the next thing you know, China will be in the toilet. If it worked here, it can work there. It’ll make things very difficult for the Chinamen, believe me. Very difficult.”

The joke worked because it has now become common knowledge that for much of the American educational system — especially at its so-called “elite” universities — the quality of education has hit rock bottom. Students are not only not learning much of importance, they are being indoctrinated into believing in absurdities, such as a man can become a woman merely by saying so, or that communism will finally work if only the right people were given the power to install it.

Worse, they are being taught that the left is the only correct political choice, and any other ideas are simply evil. The murder of conservatives is therefore absolutely a just act. From an April 7, 2025 tweet by Charlie Kirk:
» Read more

10 comments

Democrats today showed us their murderous colors

3:52 pm

The left's response to murder is to celebrate it
The left’s response to this murder
is to celebrate it

I had an essay planned for completion this afternoon on how to reform our education system, but that can wait until tomorrow. What matters today is the public assassination of Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, a college-focused pro-American conservative organization that has done more in the past ten years to reshape American culture than any pundit or politician anywhere.

Why was Kirk murdered? The murderer is still at large but we can make a reasonable guess. Kirk, only 31, was an outspoken conservative who unequivocally believed in the fundamentals of American society, including freedom, small government, color-blind rules, and the right of every person to pursue happiness. This is not propaganda on my part. I have listened to many of Kirk’s speeches and appearances, and at no time did he do anything to contradict these conclusions. If anything, he made these beliefs crystal clear to anyone who would listen.

Because of those beliefs, he had become a major opponent of the Democratic Party and its now radical Marxist/leftist/queer agenda, which also now hates America and everything it has stood for since its founding almost 250 year ago.

As such, the left — including numerous mainstream elected Democrats and their minions in the propaganda press — have repeatedly slandered him — without any evidence — as a fascist, racist, Nazi, hate-monger, and bigot. Those ugly words — utter lies — made him a target for the crazies on the left, and now one of those crazies has snuffed out his life prematurely.

The left and its propaganda press will work hard to make excuses for this evil act, but as they do so they will simply prove my point above. Already anchors on MSNBC are slandering him again, calling him “divisive” and “awful” who said things that upset people and thus we shouldn’t be surprised he was killed. “It was HIS fault!” On social media leftists are celebrating this evil act, showing us how utterly evil they are.

Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk

Kirk’s work will go on. In fact, expect it to expand considerably on campuses nationwide. The American people will no longer tolerate this evil. They are going to shut it down, aggressively, and with joyous fervor. And the left will once again scream “Facists!”, but the only fascists Americans will see are the murderous hate-mongering people on the left.

As for Kirk and his family, today’s events are horrible beyond words. We can only express the deepest sympathy to his wife Erika, who is now left a widow with two small children. She and those kids have been robbed of a husband and father, for no more reason that the words that Charlie Kirk spoke.

America stands for better. Kirk knew this, and spent every day of his short life trying to bring our country back to its original values of freedom and good will. It is our obligation to honor that man and those values and do whatever we can to make his dream a reality.

94 comments

New study of 300,000 people in Italy proves COVID jab caused gigantic increase in cancer cases

1:23 pm

Figure 1 from the study
Figure 1 from the study. Click for original. Anything
to the right of the vertical line indicates an increase
cancer diagnoses.

As noted bluntly by Health & Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr. at a Senate hearing last week, “We were lied to about everything:” A new study of the entire population 11 years and older of a single province in Italy, 300,000 people in total, has now proven that the mRNA COVID jab results in a terrifying and skyrocketing increase in the numbers of cancer cases.

The researchers found that “vaccinated” individuals had far higher hospitalization rates for new cancer diagnoses than the unvaccinated, particularly for breast, bladder, and colorectal cancers. Hospitalizations for cancer were 35% higher in the vaccinated (HR 1.23). The risk spike was strongest among men and those with no prior COVID infection.

  • Overall Cancer Risk: +23% after just one dose
  • Breast Cancer: +54% increased risk
  • Bladder Cancer: +62% increased risk
  • Colorectal Cancer: +35% increased risk

The researchers warn that the danger persisted and continued increasing after multiple doses.

In other words, the entire world is now facing a possibly major increase in cancer cases and a significant lowering of life expectancy, because it panicked in 2020 over a respiratory virus comparable to the flu. Those few voices (such as mine) that tried to resist that panic and call for a reasoned response were routinely blacklisted and silenced, and the result is now an impending disaster, on top of the catastrophes we have already suffered due to lockdowns, social distancing, and mask and jab mandates.

Kennedy summed up this situation quite well at that Senate hearing on September, 4, 2025. He was attacked ruthlessly over and over again by Democratic Party senators, only to hit them back twice as hard, noting how they are all in the pay of the pharmaceutical companies that make the jab, bribes totaling millions. He started however with this stark condemnation:
» Read more

36 comments

NASA inspector general: Dragonfly mission is vastly overbudget and behind schedule

9:24 am

Artist rendering of Dragonfly soaring over Titan's surface
Artist rendering of Dragonfly soaring
over Titan’s surface

According to a new NASA inspector general report issued today, NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Titan is now billions overbudget and is likely not be ready to launch in 2028.

You can download the report here [pdf]. From its executive summary:

Dragonfly was selected under a New Frontiers Announcement of Opportunity with a $850 million cost cap on Principal Investigator-Managed Mission Costs, which primarily includes development costs but excludes launch vehicle and post-launch operations costs. However, by April 2024, those costs had grown to $2.6 billion and the launch delayed by more than 2 years, from April 2026 to July 2028. The cost increase and schedule delay were largely the result of NASA directing APL to conduct four replans between June 2019 and July 2023 early in Dragonfly’s development. Justifications for these replans included the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain issues, changes to accommodate a heavy-lift launch vehicle, projected funding challenges, and inflation.

The report now estimates the budget will eventually rise above $3 billion, cost that is eating away at NASA’s entire planetary budget, making other missions impossible. The project itself is far from ready, with multiple unfinished issues that make its present launch target of 2028 very unlikely.
» Read more

6 comments

The Cracker Barrel kerfuffle proves the now powerful reach of the alternative/conservative press

3:40 pm

Cracker Barrel's logos

While much of the entire “controversy” over the decision by Cracker Barrel to change and then restore its old logo seemed to me to be a tempest in a teapot, the fact that the firestorm itself quickly forced Cracker Barrel to back down tells us something far more important: The alternative press (mostly conservative) is no longer confined to the fringes of culture, but now has real reach throughout society.

This cultural change can’t be underlined enough. For most of my long life, conservative news and cultural outlets had little impact on the general culture. They would make their points, often cogently and based on facts, and find themselves generally ignored. Only a decade ago, when conservatives complained about the leftward drift by major corporations or universities into racial quotas, bigotry, blacklists, censorship, and totalitarian Marxism, few noticed and more significantly, the companies or universities shrugged off the criticisms nonchalantly, as if the complaints were nothing more than a tiny gnat flying about in the air.

I speak from experience, because a decade ago I was posting regularly about this drift in both universities and corporations, was getting my posts picked up by many conservative news aggregates, and yet those posts had no impact at all. Nothing changed. If anything, the corporations and universities cited actually accelerated their racial quotas and their emphasis on bigotry, blacklists, censorship, and totalitarian Marxism.

No more. In the past four years the general culture and how it gets its information has fundamentally changed. That culture now listens to the right, and the result is fast and immediate change.

The Cracker Barrel kerfuffle proves this. Cracker Barrel proudly announced its logo change on August 19, 2025. In less than 24 hours numerous conservatives across the entire internet were lambasting the company about it, accusing the company of abandoning its past and going woke. This comment was quite typical:
» Read more

20 comments

The beginnings of the first political coup in American history

3:54 pm

Obama, the boss behind the scandal, just before his election in 2012
Obama pontificating just before his election in 2012.
The change he brought was to toss the Constitution
in the trash heap.

Doug Ross has created a very readable six-part series, with illustrations, outlining in great detail and in dramatic form the corruption of the FBI and the entire intelligence community in the latter years of the Obama administration, beginning first with an extensive cover-up of Hillary Clinton’s illegal use of a private server for sending classified emails, followed by the initial stages of the Russian collusion hoax against Trump that was also used to justify spying on his campaign.

The series admits to be being a dramatization, but is also is based entirely on actual facts that are now documented and known. Nothing of substance or importance here has been made up. And by giving the story a slight patina of drama it becomes much more readable and understandable.

Take a short bit of time and read it all. The actions of numerous dishonest and power-hungry individuals in the FBI, the Justice Department, the Obama White House, and other agencies, will leave you appalled. And heading the list is Barack Obama, taking actions that were unquestionable illegal, immoral, and above all treasonous. He conspired with federal workers to not only cover up crimes, but to attempt to overthrow the elected president of the United States.

The key quote that describes quite succinctly the unconstitutional nature of this scandal comes from part 4, by Rick Ledgett, then deputy director of the National Security Agency.

“This is evidence of systematic violation of Americans’ constitutional rights.”

All six parts can be found at the links below. The series presently ends in May 2016, but Ross fully intends to continue it through the 2016 election and beyond, covering the entire Russian collusion hoax created by the intelligence community, under orders of Barack Obama, that worked to undermine and overthrown Donald Trump’s election as president.

Every American should read it all. It gives a good picture of the initial process that allowed utter evil to take over the entire Democratic Party.

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