We're Not At The End, But You Can See It From 30,000 Feet Up

Societies don’t choose their values, their values are foisted upon them from up above or by the circumstances of the moment.

The inside of an airliner cabin reveals the state of American society. Source

I hope everyone enjoyed our time apart. Let’s get back into with some lighter fare, shall we? Light by my standards, at least! A lot has obviously happened during my absence, so while I regain my bearings, let’s talk about a number of interesting topics that came to mind while on my assignment overseas.

The Social Fabric Unravels In The Unfriendly Skies

I came across this piece during my travels and found it relevant, given my circumstances. It’s from the Substack

Moms Justice Alerts

and concerns the issue of “air rage.” It’s not the longest essay ever and should be read, but I did want to discuss the author’s more important points.

She says of air rage more generally:

What we’re seeing at 30,000 feet—and increasingly at ground level—isn't just individual breakdown. It's the inevitable result of a ruling class that has systematically dismantled the shared cultural norms and expectations that once made civil society possible. The Perry incident is a symptom, not the disease.

The fact that we as individuals are being forced to shoulder the burden of societal breakdown is a major theme of the piece. As individuals, we must make and pay more money to get away from it all, to carve out a slice of heaven for ourselves, to have a pleasant, predictable experience while doing things like flying.

Likewise, individuals must also shoulder the majority of the blame for social breakdown. It’s never the fault of institutions. I’m not talking about “systemic” failures here, not in the leftist sense of trying to explain Black criminality, as though people are being influenced to behave in totally degenerative and dysfunctional ways.

I’m talking instead about how we are expected, by our institutions, no less, to act one way, but the institutions themselves behave another way, often creating the problems in the first place. We as individuals cannot make mistakes, but institutions can make all the mistakes in the world and never really pay a price for it.

Southwest Airlines tried patting itself on its back by praising the conduct of its employees. But their conduct obscures the fact they couldn’t be bothered until the situation had completely unraveled:

Southwest Airlines’ response to the incident is instructive. “We commend our Team for their professionalism during the incident,” a company spokesperson told the New York Post. But according to passengers interviewed off the record, the “professionalism” included a significant delay in addressing Perry’s increasingly erratic behavior before it escalated to physical assault.

“She was clearly intoxicated and agitated from the moment she boarded,” one passenger told confidential sources. “But the crew seemed more concerned about staying on schedule than dealing with an obvious problem passenger. It was only when she started grabbing hair that they acted.”

Sound familiar? It should, because that’s the way our society handles everything at all levels. We never deal with a problem when it’s first detected. We deal with it when punches or even bullets start flying. By then, it’s too late. You can’t de-escalate violence without violence. Our public school teachers never deal with bullies until a kid ends up with a busted lip. Afterwards, it’s nothing but damage control, passing the buck, and shifting blame.

Moms Justice Alerts says the same:

This pattern—institutional inaction followed by damage control—mirrors the broader dysfunction plaguing American institutions. Whether it’s the FBI’s surveillance overreach, the intelligence community’s politicization, or airlines’ systematic degradation of service, the playbook is always the same: ignore problems until they explode, then blame individuals rather than systemic failures

Here’s the thing: we don’t even hold individuals absolutely accountable. It varies from person to person, from situation to situation. Some people just have far more rope than others. Perhaps it proves that treating individuals equally is an unrealistic expectation, but we’ll let that be. For the most part, Mind Your Own Business, Let People Enjoy Things is the prevailing American sentiment. It’s about the only thing most people seem to agree on these days. But even someone who really believes it in the most literal sense also agrees that a line needs to be drawn somewhere. Nobody knows where that line is, though, because we lack a shared common culture that establishes what’s permissible or not without having to resort to state intervention.

Here’s the bottom line:

The Perry incident didn’t happen because one woman had too much to drink. It happened because American institutions have created an environment where basic civility and shared expectations have been systematically eroded. When airlines treat passengers like potential terrorists, when law enforcement operates with minimal accountability, and when media outlets profit from viral content regardless of its impact on social cohesion, incidents like this become inevitable.

There’s a conversation to be had about implementing policy measures to prevent situations like what happened on that Southwest flight. For example, I think airports need to quit serving alcohol. My time working at the airport convinced me of that. I can’t tell you the number of times someone missed a flight because they were drinking at the bar and got distracted and how the alcohol amplified their anger over missing their flight.

However, we also need to have a conversation about the role our culture, or lack thereof, plays in creating these sorts of situations in the first place. America today uses laws entirely in place of expectations and norms to keep order, but unless you really intend to take everyone to jail, this leads to dysfunction. Countries with low crime, like Japan and South Korea, are that way because their people are highly-disciplined, in large part due to their notoriously hard-handed upbringings, and value conformity and rule-following.

Acting out in public is also frowned upon and often dealt with by other citizens in these societies. “Mind Your Own Business” doesn’t give you an out. Conversely, America has a much higher crime rate because we have lots of people who aren’t disciplined, who don’t raise their children properly, and our culture not only challenges conformity, it even encourages rule-breaking.

That said, most of us still follow the rules because humans are biological entities, and all lifeforms have an inherent bias for order. What we need, however, is a culture which promotes orderliness. No, following the rules blindly isn’t a good thing. But we need to understand why we follow them at all. And I think we all do, we’re just in denial about it. If we really believed we were free to do whatever we wanted in the most literal sense, nobody would follow any rules. What would be the point?

Institutions also need to be put on blast for their failure to enforce any kind of norms or standards of behavior. It’s amazing how airlines have no issues telling people to think a certain way about race, but can’t muster anything better than “be a decent, kind person” when it comes to personal conduct. Maybe it’s not the airlines’ responsibility to promote social virtue, but then they shouldn’t be telling us how to think about race, LGBTQ+, etc., either. They need to pick one: promote virtue or get out of the virtue-signalling business altogether.

Of course, institutions are both the source and a reflection of what our society values most. A culture which prioritizes Mind Your Own Business, Let People Enjoy Things above everything else will never be able to promote civility or establish shared expectations, because these are things antithetical to our actual shared ethos. Our society prides itself on letting people live out their best lives as individuals, with no responsibility to any kind of common good, until the Regime decides it’s time for everyone to unite around this or that issue. Individuals cannot have expectations of other individuals beyond broad, diffuse platitudes such as Be A Decent Kind Person. I consider myself a decent, kind person, and yet that phrase isn’t something I repeat to myself constantly.

Like most of our problems, this is yet another issue with no solution besides wiping the slate clean and starting over. Societies don’t choose their values, their values are foisted upon them from up above or by the circumstances of the moment. If good times cultivate weakness, then our society’s values will promote weakness. If hard times cultivate strength, then our society’s values will promote strength.

There’s no other way.

“Kick Me Out, And I Burn This Place Down”

I’ve been seeing lots of posts on social media like this:

The message here is pretty unambiguous: we’re Mexican, we’re proud to be Mexican, and we’re proud to have come to another country and succeeded in a way we never could’ve in Mexico.

And yet, if you were to then accurately point out that they’re not Americans, they’d be very offended. Foreigners feel entitled to the country and to the title of “American,” for the benefits and privileges it bestows them. A large portion of the population, almost exclusively immigrants or fairly recent descendants of them, are Americans when they need to be, foreign when they want to be. It’s all about what provides them maximum benefit in the moment.

The common thread here is that America is a country which provides them prosperity, but it means nothing else to them beyond that. A self-described foreigner - what is a foreigner if not someone who considers their roots to exist elsewhere? - holding upside down the flag of a country which has allowed them to take up as their home is an incredibly offensive display. There’s no other country in the world which tolerates this quite the same way as the U.S. When expressing discontent or even disdain for the country is considered as patriotic or even more patriotic than expressing love for the country, don’t be shocked if the loudest voices in the room are the haters.

It’s also disingenuous to suggest all these people are doing is protesting the government, when it’s so obviously more than that. They’re protesting the very manifestation of this country, it’s legitimacy, and its identity. While they insist we recognize their culture and their identity as Mexicans or whomever, they deny Americans theirs. Nothing triggers these foreigners than to tell them that America has its own culture and identity, too. It’s only that it was allowed to be diluted, then eventually relinquished, in hopes of making multiculturalism work. That was a terrible mistake.

The fact is, if America had no prosperity to offer them, it’d mean nothing to them. To these people, America was nothing until people like them showed up, and will be nothing once they leave. That doesn’t sound like something a “proud” immigrant or children of immigrants would say. It sounds something an abuser, a parasite, would say. “You’re nothing without me, don’t you dare try to kick me out, bitch!” Somehow, it’s intolerable if one’s husband says it, but it’s patriotic and empowering when a Mexican immigrant says it.

That’s the message which was sent by the riots in Los Angeles and elsewhere recently. They were violent because they had to be. The message they intended to send was that we better allow them to be part of this country, to enjoy all its benefits and privileges, according entirely to their desires, or else they burn and destroy everything, with us in it.

That doesn’t sound like something we’d want to hear from our so-called countrymen, our so-called neighbors. But what do I know? I don’t keep up with the times and this new form of patriotism is a big mystery to me. It always will be.

Mass Immigration Is Great, Bro. Please Believe Me, Bro.

One of the ways liberals will try to win an argument is by proclaiming, in the most enthusiastic way possible, that their most favored policies have been such a resounding success and that there’s just no arguing otherwise. I’m certain that this a form of argumentation, the term for which is unknown to me at this moment. Basically, you try to break the argumentative impasse by sheer force of rhetoric, the same way some people think shouting means they win they argument, the same way salesmen and hype men try to get someone to buy into a product or personality.

Liberal commentator Noah Smith tried to be hype man for mass immigration:

Man, I’ve seen mass immigration work out in America IN MY LIFETIME. Texas is majority Hispanic now and it’s an even better place to live. L.A. is mostly Mexican+Asian and it’s 1000x better than in the 90s. NYC is awesome. There’s been no riots, no alienation, no crime wave.

Well. Debate over, then! How can anyone argue against that level of enthusiasm?

Actually, we can, because enthusiasm isn’t an argument. Everything Smith says above is disputable - did Texas become a better place to live as a result of Hispanic migration? Or did Hispanics move to Texas because it was already a nice place to live? What exactly did Hispanics do to make Texas better?

Los Angeles is probably better now than it was in the 1990s, though the recent riots show this doesn’t mean it’s a nice place. As far as New York City being awesome, that’s an entirely subjective statement. If you like the big city, sure, I can see why people love it. But that just means you have a preference for cities, not that a city is awesome.

More hype:

The mass immigration of the 1980s-2000s worked out great. Immigrants assimilated. Poor immigrants moved up economically. Our cities became nicer and safer. Everyone learned English. It was great.

There are whole books about this.

And:

I recognize that mass immigration doesn't work out everywhere, all the time. I am not for open borders either. But if you’ve lived in America over the last 30 or 40 years and you think mass immigration went badly, I’m sorry, but you live inside a computer screen.

Since Smith is expressing opinions which are entirely personal and subjective, there’s not a whole lot to refute. I’ll say, though, that if mass immigration worked out great in America, it’s a historical first. There’s no other example in history where mass immigration was successful. In all other cases, it ended in failure. It seems Smith is confusing the fact that it hasn’t been a total disaster with it being a resounding success. The fallacies just keep building up.

If mass immigration did “succeed,” then it only could’ve with the acquiescence of the native population. Liberal critics say America has no culture beyond what it appropriates from foreign cultures. This isn’t entirely wrong, but it merely points to the price we paid for mass immigration to work. If America had a culture, the immigration experience would’ve been quite different, maybe less successful. Basically, America had to surrender itself, give up its culture, and quit making demands of newcomers. Anyone who leaves out this part of the story isn’t being intellectually honest. After all, everyone in the whole world is an American-in-waiting. Nobody is about to be denied.

The key to understanding the mindset of people like Smith is this: they think America was a backwards, s**t-hole quasi-fascist country until mass immigration saved the country from White people. There’s not much more to it than that. The same way Mexican immigrants think this country couldn’t exist without them, America was, in the minds of the Noah Smiths, awful before mass immigration and will become awful once we stop mass immigration. There’s just not much more to it than that.

Here’s the thing, though. No matter how many foreigners are imported into this country, most, by their own accord, will never be American. That’s because their entire reason for being here, their entire reason for having being “given their wings,” is because the real Americans allowed them, or never stopped them. And when it’s all said and done, no matter what becomes of this country, it’ll always belong to Americans, not them. They can find themselves a new country to demand ownership of.

I always think of this scene from the 2006 movie The Good Shepherd. When Matt Damon’s character, Edward Wilson, is chastised by Joe Pesci’s character, who’s been in the country since he was two months old, for lacking in culture compared to immigrant groups.

Wilson’s reply is stone-cold:

It’ll take more bravery today to say such a thing to today’s immigrant population, who’ve made it clear they’re willing to burn it all down in response. But it still needs to be said, now more than ever before.

1992 LA Revisited

Nathan Pinkoski wrote a retrospective on the 1992 Los Angeles riots considering the city’s recent immigrant riots. He explained how framing the ‘92 riots in the context of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, as then-Vice President Dan Quayle did, misses the mark, and that the ‘92 riots actually marked a transition into something else entirely.

He explains:

The 1992 L.A. riots were postwar America’s first multiethnic riots. In prior riots, such as in Miami in 1980, controversial acquittals in police brutality trials provoked protests, which degenerated into riots wherein police and whites were targeted.

In 1992, the brunt of riot violence happened between minority ethnic groups. Blacks were not the only rioters involved. Latinos, including many illegal immigrants, made up over half of the first 5,000 arrests. Rioters ravaged Crenshaw Boulevard, a middle-class black neighborhood. And the rioters infamously wiped out most of Koreatown as its denizens scrambled to rooftops to fight them off.

By framing the 1992 Los Angeles riots in the familiar terms of a black race riot, Quayle distracted from this unprecedented, unnerving reality. Southern California was ground zero for America’s multicultural experiment, launched in 1965 with the Immigration and Nationality Act and carried on by the subsequent invention of a special minority race category of Hispanics, distinct from whites. Quayle’s doubling down on the old struggles of the civil rights era was a way to avoid reckoning with the new social situation that had been simmering in the decades since.

I’ve long said on this space that America’s relationship with the Black community is the most enduring and perhaps most intractable problem this country has. Long after all other problems have been resolved, the Black problem will remain. However, the recent Los Angeles riots also revealed that America’s race problem is quite complicated, going well beyond our relationship with the Black community.

Hispanics aren’t anywhere nearly as problematic as the Black community and many are well assimilated into American society, but far too many aren’t, seeing themselves as distinct and even a nation unto themselves. This is a problem which will become more glaring in the years to come and will need to be dealt with, though the solution, it must be confessed, may not be peaceful.

Pinkoski explains how, by 1992, California had undergone a demographic transition of epic proportions:

When Quayle spoke, California was undergoing massive population growth, adding seven new congressional seats in time for the 1992 election. Immigration, not natality, drove this growth. One RAND report observed that were it not for immigration, San Francisco and Los Angeles would have lost 400,000 residents rather than gained 600,000. This growth was downstream of high levels of illegal immigration from Latin America: in the 1980s, as much as one-third of California’s population growth may have been due to illegal immigration.

The fact that this growth was driven by immigration is the biggest part of the story. A society expects, on some level, to create population growth through natalism. Population growth through importing foreign populations is a different matter altogether. Not to mention, these are states and cities, not the whole country, being subjected to this level of growth. The idea it’s not going to have an impact or that it could only have a positive impact is fanciful. There are few forces in life more consequential, more destabilizing than demographic change. If that weren’t the case, the Left wouldn’t have spared no expense trying to bring more people into this country. They did it because it matters.

More:

In criticizing “white flight,” politicians such as Bill Clinton imagined homogeneous white suburbs contrasted to black inner cities. But in Southern California, that no longer described the demographic landscape. During the 1980s, the San Fernando Valley—“America’s suburb”—had diversified at a rapid pace. Areas that were 80% white at the beginning of the decade were 40% by the end.

Bill Clinton was a masterful politician, but he was about as intelligent as the average contemporary liberal - not really. It’s basically the same old tired message: White people need to have their spaces taken from them in the interest of equality and also White people leaving leads to the destruction of communities. The message ultimately seems to be, “White people: can’t live with them, can’t live without them.” Oddly enough, it can’t be said about any other group in the country.

The most compelling part of Pinkoski’s argument is how the Black population in Los Angeles effectively underwent a “Great Replacement:”

Quayle’s rhetorical strategy in May 1992 had been on the terms of the 1950s and 60s: riots were not justified because America had opened up new opportunities for blacks that had not been available at a prior time. “The country now has a black middle class,” he boasted. But that’s exactly what was disappearing from Los Angeles. During the 1980s, Asian and Latino immigration drove up the costs in previously affordable neighborhoods. This prompted “black flight” from the city and exacerbated economic and social tensions for those who remained.

Herein was the great scandal of the L.A. riots, which the Japanese noticed but Quayle preferred to hide: riot violence correlated with racial displacement. Neighborhoods experiencing Latino and Asian in-migration and black out-migration were more likely to see violence. Demographic replacement proved to be the most accurate diagnostic tool for understanding where violence broke out.

Here’s the thing - there aren’t many Americans, especially on the Left, who’d argue that Blacks didn’t have a reason to feel aggrieved. However, if Whites were to ever lash out the way Blacks did over demographic replacement, it’d be considered intolerable. Liberals can come up with all sorts of excuses for why that’s so, but none of them matter - nobody wants to be demographically replaced. Nobody should be demographically replaced. Yet that’s exactly what happened to Blacks in Los Angeles.

In a sane society, one not riven by racial tribalism, we’d see what happened to Blacks in Los Angeles as an example of the consequences of demographic displacement, an example of what not to replicate at the national level. Ironically, for all our sympathies for the Black community, we instead learned nothing from it and instead further imposed massive demographic change on the entire country. If you’d think any experience would be sufficient to warn America off of mass immigration, it’d be the Black experience. It seems, even on the Left, Black lives matter until it violates the narrative.

Pinkoski says the ‘92 riots represented a turning point in American history, where it became clear the country’s problems went well beyond its relationship with the Black community, and portended a future of multicultural conflict:

Bill Clinton and George W. Bush explored ever-more creative (or reckless) policies to complete the civil rights revolution, advance multiculturalism, and boost the economic standing of blacks. But the demographic balance that this national project presupposed—a largely white country working on behalf of its largest minority to remedy historic wrongs—slipped away.

This is probably Pinkoski’s most crucial point: the American experiment post-Civil Rights era depended on a willing White majority to implement. But as Whites receded as a majority in much of the country and the country became more diverse, other groups sought a place on the “oppression pyramid,” becoming more powerful in the process. In turn, they placed demands the country increasingly would become unable to fulfill, since the one group this whole experiment depended on - Whites - were now fading from power. No other group felt any obligation to correct America’s social problems; that’s for White people.

Pinkoski’s bottom line is that civic nationalism, America’s official creed, is impossible in a multicultural society:

Multiculturalism had succeeded—what had failed was Quayle’s civic nationalism. He had tried to update a 1960s-era national project, upholding civil rights and repudiating ethno-tribalism. However, that’s exactly what Southern California had embraced in the 1980s. Quayle tried to hide the rise of ethno-tribalism, and the social unrest that went with it, by pronouncing “diversity is our strength.” He made diversity into America’s national identity. It was an open embrace of ethno-tribalism. Accepted for decades and then accelerated under Obama, it took the open borders of the Biden Administration to showcase to the rest of the country how destructive that project was.

America is a land of many divides across many issues. I think, when it comes to the topic of identity, we’re split into three positions: America as a distinct people rooted in Anglo-Saxon culture, America as a civic nationalist project, and America as an empty vessel for foreigners to fill with their cultural richness. The second one is the mainstream, most popular stance, widely-accepted on both sides of the political chasm. The third is the second most-popular, and increasingly gaining strength. The first, which happens to be my stance, is the least popular and unlikely to survive the Fourth Turning.

I’ve already come to terms with the fact that America’s true identity as a distinct people rooted in Anglo-Saxon culture is all but dead at this point. However, you still see many Americans still holding desperately onto the civic nationalist project. Civic nationalism is sort of the nationalism of last resort, because it’s eschews the premise of an ethnos as the core of a nation, substituting it with ideas as the core of a nation, trusting people to think the right things instead of being the right things. It’s what you do when all other forms of nationalism have either failed or been rejected. Most Americans still hold onto civic nationalism because to admit that it failed - and it has - is to admit that the entire American project has failed and we’re now all fighting over what remains of the carcass.

Nobody on the Left or, to a lesser extent, on the Right wants to say it, but America is re-tribalizing. Civic nationalism cannot stand up to a force as powerful as tribalism, because the former is based on a belief system far too abstract and open-ended, thereby vulnerable to subversion or simply not concrete enough to defend. Tribalism is based on something more well-defined, and it’s easier to defend a line clearly drawn in the sand than an imaginary one.

Pinkoski also made an interesting point about he difference between the old-fashioned race riots and these more recent immigration riots:

The Floyd riots were in many ways old-fashioned race riots, part of a centuries-old American tradition. The ones in 2025 Los Angeles, where rioters wave Mexican flags, represent another kind of outburst. They are displays to galvanize the ethnic solidarity that has been entrenched since 1992, and that Dan Quayle tried to hide. For those on the street, being of Mexican descent overrides the moral and communal meaning of holding a U.S. passport. It’s no wonder that the President of Mexico speaks up on their behalf.

Both immigration and race are deeply divisive, hotly-contested topics. However, while race has proven much easier to generate popular sentiment over, it’s also sort of a exhausted framework for looking at the world. Why that is, I’m not sure, but tribalization probably has something to do with it. With so many different groups now vying for supremacy or redress for their grievances, it’s just not as easy as before to play the race card.

The only thing that’s for sure is that ethnic, racial, and religious conflicts are certain to become more prevalent in the U.S. in the years to come. In the 1960s, the legitimacy of the country remained mostly unchallenged. In the 2020s, the very legitimacy of the country is at stake, and everyone is trying to lay claim to it. Ironically, Americans, most of whom are White, are the one group who don’t really have a seat at the table in this discussion. Yet, they’re also the only group holding the illusion of nationhood together at this point.

What happens when their seat is taken away entirely?

Currently, the big story leading the news is the ongoing war between the U.S. and Israel versus Iran. Over the last weekend, the U.S. bombed Iran’s nuclear sites, a once unthinkable act that seemed like it would never happen, until it finally did.

It’s still too early to say what the long-term repercussions of this decision will be. Or if there even will be any. A lot of people were predicting World War III following the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, leading to the crashing of the Selective Service website thanks to social media irresponsibility propagating talk of conscription, but it obviously didn’t. Bombing Iran’s nuclear sites is obviously a step above killing a single figure, high-ranking as he might’ve been. But taking out Soleimani, too, was considered a highly escalatory act at the time.

For now, I want to share two brief thoughts on the situation with Iran. First, only one country is really threatened by Iran having a nuclear weapon: Israel. The U.S. isn’t threatened by Iranian nukes. The U.S. actually doesn’t have strong interests in the region, not like it once did, and is stuck in the Middle East primarily because of Israel. This means the U.S. has no real justification for striking Iran’s nuclear program besides protecting Israel.

This also means the U.S. has to resort to citing Iran’s past crimes, including the Iran hostage crisis, its sponsorship of terrorism, and its actions against U.S. forces during the Iraq War to justify the strikes. The problem is that there’s a statute of limitations for these things. Not in a legal sense, no, but certainly in a practical sense. There comes a point where it just doesn’t make sense to pursue retribution for past transgressions.

The Iran hostage crisis ended on January 20, 1981. All hostages returned home alive. Though the incident is often considered a humiliating failure for America, the reality is, you couldn’t have asked for a better outcome. A dramatic rescue, which was attempted, but failed without truly getting underway, would’ve likely resulted in some of the hostages being killed. For us today to justify destroying Iran’s nuclear program over something that ended quite peacefully 44 years ago is illogical. Imagine indulging grievances in 1981 over events 44 years prior - you’d be in the 1930s. Ask anyone who was alive in the early 1980s; the ‘30s were ancient history by then.

But what’s most offensive to me is that America will send it’s warfighters off on these dangerous missions to bomb other countries on behalf of foreign countries or for distant causes, but we’d never do the same for our countrymen. In fact, our military gets utilized almost exclusively in pursuit of so-called “interests” no policymaker seems able to articulate in a simple manner to the American public. We’re supposed to take for granted that our Soldiers, Airmen, Marines, and Sailors are being deployed for a worthwhile mission, but does anyone really know?

Meanwhile, countless Americans are being killed by Mexican drug cartels and Venezuelan gangs and their illegal immigrants. The names and faces Laken Riley and Jocelyn Nungaray come to mind. Where’s their retribution? Why aren’t we hunting down the cartels the way we did al-Qaeda and ISIS? Why haven’t we bombed Venezuela? I’m being totally serious here, by the way. The amount of American bloodshed caused by Mexico and Venezuela is substantial and could form the basis for a military action. In the old days, members of another tribe touching your women and children justified the elimination of that other tribe. We think we’re above that, but I’m not sure that’s anything to brag about.

I look forward to the day we remember why we have a military. Why we build civilization in the first place. We built it to protect our people, our women and children. Not to defend the existence of other countries, not in pursuit of interests of little to no significance to Americans.

That day seems very far off.

Trial Of The Year

We’ll close with an update on the Karmelo Anthony case. It appears he’ll be charged with first-degree murder:

(NewsNation) — Texas teen Karmelo Anthony, who is accused of stabbing Austin Metcalf at a high school track meet, has been indicted on first-degree murder charges by a grand jury, the Collin County district attorney announced Tuesday.

The fatal stabbing occurred during a track meet at a Frisco high school, shocking the community and drawing widespread attention.

“Earlier this spring, our community was shaken by what happened at a school track meet in Frisco — the violent loss of 17-year-old Austin Metcalf,” Collin County District Attorney Greg Willis said in a statement. “Today, I summarized that evidence, and I asked the Grand Jury to return a first degree murder indictment against Karmelo Anthony — which they did.”

Willis said his office has been presenting evidence to the grand jury for weeks. The case now moves formally into the court system, with the trial schedule to be set by the court.

I’m not sure how to feel about this, honestly. Anthony is guilty of something, I’m sure of it. There’s very little, even based on Anthony’s own testimony thus far, which suggests this was a defensible killing. However, first-degree murder is among the toughest convictions to secure. The evidence not only must be overwhelming, it must also prove without any doubt that Anthony intended to take the life of Austin Metcalf. I don’t know what evidence the police have leading prosecutors to that conclusion, but if such evidence exists, I haven’t seen it.

To me, a more appropriate charge would’ve been a lesser degree of murder, perhaps even manslaughter. My concern is that the charge might be too much for the state to prove. I don’t know if a plea bargain is on the table, but if the burden of proof is too much to overcome, Anthony’s defense may simply decide to roll the dice and take their chances at acquittal. If so acquitted, then that’d be as much a failure to render justice as the acquital of O.J. Simpson. Unlike that case, there’s no question whatsoever Anthony killed Metcalf. It’s merely a question of why.

There also exists surveillance video of the incident, leading many to speculate this is the reason why such harsh charges were ultimately applied. However, as Sarah Fields explained on X, the video may not tell a whole lot at the end of the day:

I have seen the video via an ORR (Open Records Request). The actual stabbing event CANNOT be seen—only the moments before and after. You cannot see what is happening, and you cannot identify faces. The footage is very grainy and recorded from far away (the opposite side of the stadium). The actual stabbing is not shown, as this portion is being withheld by the DA for possible evidence in the case. (However, I’ve been told that much of it may not be admissible since nothing is clearly visible.) After the stabbing, EMS arrives on the scene nine minutes later.

You can see an individual running down the bleachers, tripping and falling, then getting up and continuing to run. This individual was Karmelo.

The publicly released clip has no evidentiary value.

This suggests there exists more evidence we aren’t privy to, or the totality of circumstances points to this being not only a wholly unjustified killing, but a premeditated one. Keep in mind: premeditated doesn’t mean the killer needed to have deliberated on it for days. A person can decide right then and there to intentionally kill someone. That’s all the premeditation required.

Anthony’s defense team will undoubtedly play the race card in an attempt to generate sympathy. I suppose this case will serve as a test to see whether race, especially when it comes to Blacks, is still the greatest fault line in America today. I doubt this case will be anything close to a 2025 O.J. Simpson case, but I think reaction to the verdict, whatever it might be, will tell us whether the Black experience is still the most important story in the American narrative today. It might not be the “Trial of the Century,” as O.J.’s was called. But it could be the trial of the year.

Speaking of defense, it appears Anthony’s family has squandered the substantial war chest accrued via the GiveSendGo fundraising service, forcing him to request a court-appointed attorney:

BREAKING: Karmelo Anthony submitted an Indigent Packet to the Collin County Court, requesting court-appointed legal representation as an indigent (financially destitute) defendant.

However, just 24 hours ago, the Anthony family updated their GiveSendGo campaign to reflect a need to raise an additional $1.4 million for “a legal team.”

Karmelo Anthony’s mother, Kala Hayes, who manages the GiveSendGo, stated on April 17th (two months ago) that they had just gained access to the funds. At that time, they had already raised $350,000. The fundraiser has now reached $538,000.

According to a source, their current known attorney, Mike Howard, is more than likely charging a retainer fee of $10,000–$30,000 and charges $400–$500 per hour. Where did the money go?

Why do they need $1.4 million? Will they be granted indigence and an appointed attorney with a GiveSendGo of this magnitude? Is this considered fraud?

It seems life is cheap in the Anthony family. Austin Metcalf’s life, now their own son. They are who they are.

Now that I’ve gotten it all off my chest, it’s your turn to do the same. What are your thoughts on anything discussed here today? Share them in the comments section below.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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