Peggy Noonan has spent a lot of ink lately fretting over the events of January 6. As one who has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal where she runs a column every Saturday, I certainly respect her writings in many areas. Reagan’s speech she crafted after the Challenger explosion, for example, was right on the mark. Yet for years now — the Trump years to be precise — Ms. Noonan has morphed into one of the more eloquent representatives of the staid old white-shoe wing of the GOP. That group of noble politicians who never get their hands dirty out of “principle” and are perfectly content to “lose with dignity” to those willing to play in the mud to win elections… and with them shape policy. She has been a voice of that DC establishment so well represented by the Bush family she served through two administrations. Indeed, had Ms. Noonan had her way (as I would be shocked if she voted for Donald Trump) the person taking the oath of office in 2017 would have either been the wife of a former president or the son and brother of former presidents.
Thus has her spate of recent columns disparaging conspiracy theorists, waxing tragic over the Capitol Hill riot, labeling Republicans who ousted the war-mongering DC legacy Liz Cheney “cowards”, or lamenting a GOP in disarray, not surprised me. Her latest is “Why We Can’t Move On From Jan. 6.” Perhaps a more accurate title should be “Why I Can’t Move On From Jan. 6.” I think part of the reason is that, unlike the arson, the looting, the violence and murder that for eight months consumed dozens of American cities over which she seemed to lose little sleep, what occurred on Jan. 6 was just a tad too close to home for the Washington group-think insider and columnist. It’s one thing to watch on TV from the comfort of your DC office or townhome someone else’s small business go up in flames in Minneapolis, a bleeding police officer pelted with rocks in Chicago, or a genuine insurrection in Seattle wherein an actual new faux country is declared. But it is something else entirely when a screwball with a horn hat sits in your friend’s office chair.
Ms. Noonan has been a voice of reason in the past. And I have often found myself nodding in agreement with her, even if I think she relies too much on inductive reasoning through the personal anecdote to drive home broader narratives (“I was talking to a Democrat friend the other day, and he says…”). But the former speech-writer is also representative of the very insular arm of the GOP that made the ascendancy of Donald Trump — a politician she clearly despises — possible. Her bona fides are those of the classic old school Republican establishment that has fueled so much resentment among the party base. Her fixation with a two-hour act of trespassing in the nation’s Capitol is one such example. To read her columns you would think  a hogtied Pence, Pelosi, and Schumer were trundled out on a wagon and handed over to the guillotine as an illegal government was this close to upending the entire two million-person federal apparatus. Yes, four people did die. But three were from medical emergencies and one unarmed four-tour veteran was shot by a Capitol Hill policeman… nothing to see there. BLM/Antifa rioting, by contrast, saw ten times the death toll. But for Ms. Noonan, her take-away from the latter far more pervasive and destructive atrocities was often how the imagery would drive white voters to Trump.
Given how much Ms. Noonan continues to wring her hands over Jan. 6, one would think it was 9/11, Pearl Harbor and Antietam all rolled into one. Hardly. Although this certainly fits the Democrat narrative, for which they will thank her at the next Press Club Dinner. Was Jan. 6 a serious matter? Of course. It was also brief, contained, and lost the significance Ms. Noonan keeps trying to ascribe to it the moment it was blatantly politicized by the Democrats. The party and its media cohorts who spent four months lying about the death of a capital policeman whose tragic passing was completely unrelated to the riot for political gain were the same people who spent an entire year demonizing police, and even bailing out their attackers. So one is unconvinced by Congress’ new-found love for the thin blue line.
Where I think Ms. Noonan goes awry in her reflections on the Capitol Hill riot is that she cares more about what happened and how it happened than why it happened. For me, I want to understand what did the riot mean? In fact, what did Trump’s ascendancy to be Ms. Noonan’s party’s unlikely standard-bearer say about their own leadership? What forces were at work that made so many Republicans feel so voiceless, so disenfranchised, as to offer up a thrice-married Manhattan real estate mogul and reality TV star who’d never even run for city council as their voice? The Donald was a Hail Mary pass thrown in abject desperation, by a people who no longer felt they mattered to the powerful and aloof party insiders in the far away capital city.
As if to drive home that aloofness, consider the tone-deaf first sentence in Ms. Noonan’s column. “I started the new year with a bang, at a gathering in the Washington home of a European diplomat.” Am I supposed to be impressed? I want you to imagine you are not at that swanky “gathering” clinking glasses of Louis Roederer. Rather you are sitting at your kitchen table, running your fingers through your hair,  contemplating a stack of delinquent bills before you while your children sleep, not knowing that their parents have burned through their savings and thus may lose their home due to unnecessary unemployment foisted upon them by edicts from some of the very people in that diplomat’s home who, safe in the job security of big government, will never feel the devastating impacts of their own policies. “I was interested in how Europe was processing America’s political scene.” I must ask Ms. Noonan, does she think the many American parents wondering how they’re going to afford the next run to the grocery store really care about what a diplomat from Europe — living under the protection of F-22s and US Army divisions courtesy of this same couple’s ever-rising taxes — has to say about this country?
There are many tributaries that fed into the disaffection of tens of millions that led to Trump’s 2016 nomination and victory, but it can basically be boiled down to this: there has been a complete breakdown of trust in every major institution in the country. Once important pillars of the republic — a free and impartial press, enlightened education, open exchange of ideas, corporate responsibility, a thriving middle class, a political leadership that caters to the needs and hears the concerns of its constituents, and even the legitimacy of the electoral process itself — have been, in the eyes of millions, hopelessly corrupted by people with a ruthless willingness to wield the power these combined institutions can bring to bear on the average citizen. The 2020 election was for many the final straw. Remember, we don’t just have elections to elect our leaders… we have them so we don’t kill each other. So what happened in the Capitol doesn’t happen. But all that depends on belief that the process is fair, honest, and open. Clearly, right or wrong, millions believe this is not the case. But what brought so many to this state of mistrust? Isn’t that the real question Ms. Noonan should be asking? If she wishes to brush the concerns aside as “conspiratorial”, well, hasn’t Dr. Fauci shown that sometimes today’s “conspiracy” is tomorrow’s headline?
Ms. Noonan, who swigs cocktails with “diplomats” (among the most useless and parasitic of God’s creations) has become an incarnation of the reason Trumpism, with all its boorish offenses, rose to prominence in the first place. She has worked for two Bushes in the White House whose legacies were as follows: With the father, his reneging on a pledge to not raise taxes, creating a schism in the party that opened the way for a Ross Perot candidacy, which in turn gave us the rise of the Clintons (a corrupt machine that took Trump to finally eviscerate). And with the son: the longest and most unnecessary wars in our history (still going on), and a penchant for compromising with the left to the point where he and Ted Kennedy were shaking hands in the Rose Garden. As Shakespeare might say: “Conservatism should be made of sterner stuff.”
But Ms. Noonan and her generation are not true conservatives. If she were, she would have supported a President who opposed illegal immigration, cut regulations, lowered taxes on the middle class and corporations, sought to shrink the size of the federal government, and filled the courts with Constitutional strict constructionists. But for Ms. Noonan and her like, having spent decades inside the beltway, these are all nice and good, but what kind of a guest would Trump have made at her next cocktail party? Like many in her camp, she suffers a longing for the Reagan years, even though in hindsight they just served as a speed bump along the way to the nation’s shift towards rampant leftism. And it must be pointed out that Reagan-worship has become an anachronistic fixation. We are as far from the 1980s today as the 1980s were from the 1940s. Think about that a moment.
For those who live outside the Emerald City, the paradigms shifts in governance that occur when conservatives like Ms. Noonan, who believe in bringing knives to gunfights and thus see power and the culture ripped out from under them while they review the hors d’oeuvres for their next “gathering,” have real, lasting, and often devastating consequences far beyond the annoyance of having to update one’s rolodex. While she hobnobs with DC elites, parents in the heartland must face leftist indoctrination in their kids’ schools, out-of-control tuitions, stagnant wages, inflation, an opioid epidemic, job insecurity, social media decaying young minds, and a general sense that their country has gone from Ms. Noonan’s cliché “city on a hill” to a dystopian landscape of shuttered factories, outsourced careers, and a sense that those in charge (like those in Ms. Noonan’s social circles) really do not care what goes on outside the beltway, so long as the PAC, lobbyist, and contractor money keeps pouring in.
Ms. Noonan tells us that Republicans need to be freed to “develop policies that address people’s real issues again, not only their grievances.” Does she mean the way Trump, whom she opposed, was trying to do? One cannot craft policies that address people’s real issues without appreciating what are the grievances, any more than a doctor can prescribe a cure for a disease about which she asks no symptoms. Instead Ms. Noonan harps on how appalled one should be about Jan. 6. Ironically, in her latest piece, she does briefly happen upon an insightful observation when she offers that those who were not horrified “see the Capitol as already trashed through decades of bad governance.” She describes it as a “mess and a bit of a whorehouse.” Getting warmer. But then she reflexively pivots back into her poetic “city on a hill” schtick by assuring us that “greatness can erupt there, progress can be made, things improved.” That seems sadly out-of-touch with today’s Capitol Hill. A place infested with those whose mediocrity is surpassed only by their cynicism and naked hunger for power…and willingness to selectively wield the entire system as a cudgel to attain and hold onto it. I ask Ms. Noonan, honestly, what “greatness” does she see coming out of the offices of the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Jerry Nadler, Kamala Harris, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, AOC, Cory Booker, Kristen Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, Maxine Waters, Elizabeth Warren, etc.? I’d be curious to know what “progress” she sees emerging from a weekend retreat involving this crew.
So, yes, Ms. Noonan can bemoan the two hours in which a few hundred out-of-control citizens out of 100,000 briefly entered a Capitol building they felt no longer represented their interests anyway. But perhaps she should spend less time pondering what foreign diplomats think about the goings on of the country outside the DC ramparts, and maybe ask the people of this country instead.  And “I was having brunch with a friend at Alta Strada this weekend and over mimosas I asked her what she thought of…” is not what I mean.
Brad Schaeffer is the author of the acclaimed World War II novel <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Of-Another-Time-and-Place/Brad-Schaeffer/9781642932867" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Of-Another-Time-and-Place/Brad-Schaeffer/9781642932867&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1624127216938000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGhiBaHpY3EgyGwKmpzbdNJg_23rQ">Of Another Time And Place</a>. His newest novel, <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Extraordinary/Brad-Schaeffer/9781642939422" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Extraordinary/Brad-Schaeffer/9781642939422&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1624127216938000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHt4uzDjpdIILWYTjuVQwMUYnQmRg">The Extraordinary</a>, will be released August 31 and is currently available for pre-order. 
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Donald Trump Holds Campaign Rally In Virginia Beach

OPINION: The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan Needs A Lesson On Conservatism

Media Bias

Wall Street Journal

I attended an outdoor get together this weekend. It was in a big yard and set up in typical bar-b-cue fashion with about forty people. Wandering the party, I couldn’t help but notice that almost every conversation was about Covid, masks, and vaccines. The subject matter moved from group to group throughout the afternoon like an invisible snake winding its way around everyone’s feet and coiling up the legs.
The first person to make conversation with me opened up with a question that seemed to be the standard starter of the day. “Have you been vaccinated?” I told him I got my first dose a few weeks back and was getting my second this week. His eyes narrowed and he literally took a step back. “Oh, so I should stay some distance from you.” I frowned and asked him if he had been vaccinated already. He replied he had, a while ago. So what was he afraid of? I said. His answer was both revealing and depressing. “I don’t know.”
He didn’t know. Indeed, the virus has not just done damage to our physical health. It has wrecked the psyche of so many who claim to “follow the science” and blasted a gaping hole in our collective wisdom. This was a typical conversation with another neighbor who insists his entire family will continue to wear masks, including his toddler, even though all those in his household old enough to have been immunized:
Brad: “Why are you wearing a mask?”
Neighbor: “To be safe. It’s still nerve-wracking that my kids under 12 can’t get vaccinated. So even though everyone but Johnny&#8217;s vaccinated, we’ll still wear masks for who knows how long.”
Brad: “Look, you do what you want, but do you know that according to the CDC from May 2020 to May 2021 out of some 560,000 dead from Covid, only 35 were in your kid’s 1-4 age group? And who knows how many were already sick or had special conditions. I mean, that number doesn’t even register. That’s ten times less than the number of toddlers who drown every year. And not just in pools, but bathtubs, buckets, even toilets. And don’t get me started on how many die in car accidents. But I bet you’ll have no problem piling everyone into your car this weekend to head to the ocean. Does this make any logical sense to you?”
Neighbor: “Regardless of statistics, there’s also peace of mind. And different people have risk tolerance factors to varying degrees.” He went on to switch to the fallacy of the appeal to emotion, as often happens when numbers lay bare one&#8217;s illogical behavior. “What if your kid was one of the 35? I bet you&#8217;d think differently,” he asked.
I could have mentioned that every year 50 Americans on average are struck dead by lightning and ask him if he therefore races his kid indoors every time it gets cloudy because one of those 50 could be him? But I let it go. At that point I was dealing with something beyond “the science.” This is a phobia which cannot be reasoned with. (Oh yeah, I was making friends right and left this day).
This masked man is no fool. Rather he is a very bright, successful professional. And yet he has, as Rachael Maddow admitted, been “rewired” by the steady 400 plus-day drumbeat of fear-mongering and mendacity pounded into the collective subconscious by a complicit media, overbearing tech lords, and bungling governments. Not to mention the noxious branding of anyone who dares question the true threat (or lack thereof) this disease poses to the vast majority of Americans as a “science denier” worthy of ridicule and censorship. And now this otherwise smart man is unable to process any rational arguments that counter his Covid terrors. The same man who doesn’t think twice about leading his child by the hand waste deep into the churning, angry, unpredictable surf — after having hurled him at 70 mph in a two-ton metal box for 50 miles down the Parkway to the shore — is paradoxically stupefied with fear over a virus that has less chance of killing his child at this age than the flu. (I don’t recall little Johnny wearing any mask in preschool before March 2020).
Just as ignorance of, or willfully dismissing, the data — whether it be the actual numbers behind police shootings, gun violence, the link between fatherlessness and societal dysfunction, the true culprits in anti-Asian hate crimes, etc. — has bifurcated us into de facto political camps, so now has Covid done its part. More than a few in my area are already not just acquiescing to but actually calling for a &#8220;vaxx card,&#8221; without which one would be denied access to venues, public transportation hubs and vehicles, restaurants and bars, and basically any area where we congregate as part of our cultural experience. A two-tiered society of the privileged vaccinated and subjugated “deniers” (as those who seem to deny statistics nevertheless brand the rest in classic doublespeak).
Another attendee made the mistake of revealing that he had no intention of getting vaccinated. Gasps of horror ensued.  Some called him “crazy” behind his back. Others offered that he was being “selfish.” Welcome to the latest American psychosis. There is a rapidly metastasizing social stigma attached to those who opt to forego the vaccine. Because, as with so much else now, for many the message is not just that one gets immunized because they feel a medical need to do so. Rather, many will wear their vaccinations on their sleeves as a sign of, wait for it, how virtuous they are. How “selfless.&#8221; This motivation, combined with irrational fear even among those fully inoculated (“I don’t know”) is a tonic as powerful as anything Moderna could whip up over the weekend.
There is much talk now about our returning to &#8220;normal.&#8221; But for some, and I fear a lot, their psyches are like broken bones that have been mended but fused back together in a misshapen form. They will never be truly normal again. Their children will have imprinted on them the subconscious fear of their fellow maskless humans as first and foremost disease-carriers and threats; and the adults will cling to their masks long after the science tells them otherwise, while finding solace in government edicts from the likes of slippery self-serving bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci (PBUH) who, having tasted power and fame, are loathe to let it go and sink back into obscurity.
When someone at the party mentioned that one should be required to show a vaxx card to gain access to any indoor facility, I took a swig of beer and said: “I believe the phrase you’re looking for is ‘Ihre Papiere, bitte’.”  She  gave me a mock salute and said “Jawohl!” Is there a better illustration of what Covid has done to us in our minds more than our bodies? In a society already more divided than perhaps any time since the Southern Confederacy was formed, is it not surprising that Covid, like a virus that crashes a vaccine, has broken through the barrier of being just about “the science” to become yet another political wedge between us?
I have opted to get vaccinated given my propensity for asthma and age. And I am happy with that choice. But I would never force it on others. It&#8217;s their lives, their risk. And as for that party pariah who has opted to pass? Well, his reasons for abstaining rang to me as anything but “crazy” or “selfish.” They went thus: he is not in any statistically at-risk age or health cohort. These vaccines were hastily produced and put out en masse in a year. We have no idea what the long-term side-effects are. And he is perfectly willing to accept the risks of remaining vulnerable to infection as the debit side of the ledger.
After a while the attacks on him started getting to me. One person questioned, again out of his earshot, “What if he infects someone else?” Maybe at that point it was the beer talking, but I pressed him by asking who was the guy going to infect?  People like us who choose to get vaccinated? “Well,” he said. “There may be others out there who haven’t got the vaccine yet.  He could endanger them.” Then the risk is on them at this point, I retorted. Anyone who wants a vaccine now can get one.  Caveat inprotectus. “Yes, but you know the vaccines don’t always work,” he insisted. So then what the hell is the point of getting a vaccine? I shot back, motioning with my can that splashed beer on my shoes. My voice started to go up a few decibels and some turned to watch as I continued. Are we supposed to avoid each other and mask up until the CDC declares that death itself has been eradicated? And how did you get here anyway? Did you drive? And statistically speaking, when compared to the risk you incur by him breathing on you for five seconds in the open air (assuming he even has the virus) and then having that brief exposure break through your vaccine to infect you with a disease you may never even know you contracted, your stepping into a car and peeling out at 70 miles per hour onto the Garden State Parkway to drive home tonight is an absolute death wish! And another thing, do you—
At that point my wife pulled me away and muttered a few apologies to the stunned partygoer while recommending I maybe should walk home now. (That was fine with me. All they had left was Rose anyway).
Brad Schaeffer is the author of the acclaimed World War II novel <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Of-Another-Time-and-Place/Brad-Schaeffer/9781642932867">Of Another Time And Place</a>. His newest novel, <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Extraordinary/Brad-Schaeffer/9781642939422">The Extraordinary</a>, will be released August 31 and is currently available for pre-order. 
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

TOPSHOT-FRANCE-HEALTH-VIRUS-MASK

The Covid Psychosis Party

COVID

Face Masks

CNN’s ratings post-Donald Trump have <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/cnns-ratings-are-plummeting-post-trump-more-than-two-thirds-of-the-audience-gone">imploded</a> by 65%, barely scraping together 800,000 average primetime viewers, down from 2.4 million in January. But why would Trump’s departure from the limelight be so devastating to the Left’s anchor cable news outlet?
I admit, I hold no degree in either the social sciences or journalism. But I have been in the commodities markets since 1990. Markets are, as any trader will tell you, very human constructs. Thus, the understanding of psychology plays a key role in market analysis. I’ve been doing this for many years, in both a sales and principal capacity, and so I think I’ve developed a pretty good handle on human nature.
For this reason, I was not surprised in the least that as so went Donald Trump, so went the ratings for CNN. The reason is that so many of their viewers are lost without the &#8220;Bad Orange Man.&#8221; Hating Trump was their raison d’ȇtre. Their sheer, unbridled, utterly bizarre animosity for this man is what gave them a purpose, an identity, and defined their social circles and who was friend and foe. Trump hatred, to them, was like an intravenous feed. They hauled their I.V. stand with the bag of Trump Derangement steadily drip-drip-dripping into their veins everywhere they went. And news outlets like CNN were the Big Pharma that supplied them with the constant dose of the &#8220;Orange Man Bad&#8221; solution.
Those sad people, whose otherwise empty lives were so driven by their Trump obsession, were the junkies to whom CNN pushed a steady supply of anti-Trump narcotics. And the network kept upping the dosage to keep them tuning in, no matter how implausible, dead end, or banal the stories seemed to the rest of us — Trump Jr.’s Trump Tower dud, years of Russia collusion, Comey’s self-serving escapades, John Brennan’s embittered sniping, James Clapper’s dour mendacity, Carl Bernstein’s “this is worse than Watergate”, the build-up to “Mueller Time”, Trump the “racist”, Trump the “misogynist”, Trump the “xenophobe”, Stormy Daniels and her sleazy lawyer Michael Avenatti (who appeared on CNN some 65 times before going to prison), Trump’s taxes, the fake dossier and Russian “pee tape”, Michael Cohen’s bumbling, the Japan fish food crime that wasn’t, Trump’s fast food diet, an unhappy Melania, the Officer Sicknick lie, the “threat to Democracy” themes, and so on. It never ended. One I.V. drip after another crafted especially for their core audience of the Trump Deranged…written not to cure them of their affliction, but rather pump more unhinging pathogens into their systems.
But now the drug has been cut off. Thanks to Big Tech’s unprecedented and dangerous banishment of a former president from the de facto public square, the addicts have been forced to quit cold turkey. And so they no longer need to tune in to the pharmacy window.
For five years, CNN has been, as Joe Biden might say, a “one-horse pony.” All Trump, all the time. Between June 16, 2015 and January 20, 2021, if you played a drinking game whereby you drank a shot every time CNN said “Trump”, you’d be unconscious before breakfast.
But now Trump is gone. And CNN suddenly finds itself in the unfamiliar position of having to be a news organization. But what else is there but Donald Trump? Their entire news apparatus was geared towards taking down this one man. How do they re-calibrate? What will they talk about now? Joe Biden? Even the most partisan hack will candidly admit the man is a feeble, empty vessel who’s led out to read from this or that piece of paper, or sit at a desk and sign here, and here, and here. Yawn. As far as CNN&#8217;s needy viewers are concerned, the drug store is closed. Time to move on.
On a deeper level, what does this abandonment of the all-Trump-bashing-all-the-time network say about its former viewers? To swing back to psychology for a moment, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) lists a mental disorder as: “a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior.”
I have tried on occasion to discuss Joe Biden’s policies with someone who is otherwise brilliant in his scientific field, and yet I truly believe suffers from a mental disorder as defined by the DSM-5 which is directly the consequence of his obsession with Trump. While I could take the &#8220;good Trump&#8221; or leave the &#8220;bad Trump&#8221; (of which there were both) this man cannot go a paragraph of conversation or line of text without pivoting to excoriating the Donald, even though he has been out of office for over 100 days. Needless to say, his two sources of news over the years have been The New York Times and CNN. But, like some 1.6 million others since January, he no longer tunes in to CNN. What’s the point? As far as he is concerned, if Trump is not in the news there is no news.
My friend is no different than the mainstream press whose constant stream of anti-Trump vitriol he so eagerly devoured for half a decade. As <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/study-media-gives-biden-less-negative-coverage-than-any-president-on-record">The Daily Wire</a> reported, a recent Pew study shows that Joe Biden has received less negative coverage from the legacy media than any president in 30 years. That is hardly surprising. The mainstream media is now, for all intents and purposes, an extended press office of the DNC. What is more revealing is that half of all stories about Biden or his administration also mention Donald Trump. They simply cannot let him go.
One must think that CNN head Jeff Zucker is quite upset with Jack Dorsey for effectively de-platforming the man their viewers loved to hate. At least if Trump were still the mad tweeter, CNN’s writers would have something to write about every day. But now, with Trump gone, they are stuck just being another news outlet again. The Election of 2020, whose outcome they worked so tirelessly to influence for Joe Biden, effectively shattered their business model. Perhaps they should not have tried so hard to kill their golden-haired goose.
CNN’s ratings implosion is what happens when you become nothing more than an enabler for a feedback loop with your viewers that is based on the relentless destruction of one man. Because, when that man is gone, the gravity that held your viewers captive is gone, and they will scatter to the winds. In CNN’s case, by the hundreds of thousands. Live by the orange sword, die by the orange sword.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe"> member</a>.

Donald Trump

The Psychology Behind CNN’s Implosion

Readers Pass

Apparently Brood X of the latest cicada swarm may soon be upon my East Coast state. I can recall the last time these curious visitors emerged from their subterranean burrows to cover the trees, bushes, lawns, sidewalks, roads, and houses in overwhelming numbers. Waking up in the morning, the cacophony that hit my ears as I stepped outside with my coffee cup in hand was something totally alien. Indeed, the noise resembled not so much an organic mix as some mechanical sound effect from an extraterrestrial craft.
Personally, I&#8217;m fascinated when this happens. It’s a rare chance to interact so closely with life forms so abundant, so in my face, and yet so non-threatening, helpless, peaceful, and even oddly innocent in their benevolence. I won&#8217;t go so far as to declare that cicadas are &#8220;cute.&#8221; Bizarre is more like it. But they are pretty cool in their own way. (Thank God insects are small…I think even a ladybug would lose its nursery rhyme appeal if it grew to be five feet tall!)
Because of how strange they are, at first these six-legged black almonds with wings and beady red eyes hoisting themselves up onto trees and walls or whizzing through the air repelled me. But I&#8217;ve taken a more philosophical approach to them as of late. I&#8217;ve come to embrace what happens every so often and actually extract some life lessons from this story soon to unfold all around us.  How many of us have considered the cicadas&#8217; terminal one-month binge in the sunlight after a seventeen year hiatus of isolation and subterranean darkness, and asked: &#8220;What&#8217;s the point?&#8221; I can&#8217;t answer that directly. If you believe in God, as I do, you offer it up as a mystery and part of a master plan beyond our comprehension. To an atheist, perhaps, there is no plan per se, other than to provide a smorgasbord for the rest of the animals who live seemingly more purposeful lives.
But for me, what is intriguing, what compels me to stand at eye level to branches and just observe them for long stretches at a time as they crawl, flail their wings and hum their sonorous mating call — like I&#8217;m some Jane Goodall for bugs — is not just that they are different. What really captivates me is that they are indifferent. They are indifferent to us, indifferent to the dangers they face in the hostile world above ground, indifferent to the fact that their lives are soon to come to an end. That this time next month they will all be dead. Until that day of reckoning, though, they go about their routines utterly unaware of we human beings who so arrogantly claim to be lords of the planet just because we have the capacity to destroy it.
Though not the brightest of creatures, relying on sheer numbers rather than cunning for survival, there is something of the sublime in the cicadas&#8217; sudden appearance en masse. Dr. Steven Jay Gould, the late Harvard professor of evolutionary biology and other disciplines, offered that our world belongs to the littlest of creatures who in their hundreds of billions inhabit the vast empty spaces between people (and within us): bacteria, protozoa, and, if I may, insects. In fact he offered, &#8220;we live not in the age of man but the age of bacteria.&#8221; If cicadas are creatures geometrically larger and far less numerous, I think they do nonetheless serve as a lesson in humility…a reminder of our place in this world. And so when I hear again the steady calling of their mating song, often in decibels so high I must raise my voice to be heard in conversation, I&#8217;ll be reminded not of their smallness, but ours.
When you think about it what do we do that is much different? We live for seventeen years or so in childhood, bloom into (admittedly longer) adulthood, have children of our own, grow old and die, and the cycle repeats. That during our life journey to the unavoidable grave, we create, play, love, build and destroy, maybe gives our lives a measure of meaningfulness above a cicada&#8217;s by our standards. The Universe is 13.8 billion years old. And the fading remnant of the last flickering black holes once the final star burns out will not dissipate into the nothingness of the forever void for another 10^100 years. What, then, is an 80-year lifespan when juxtaposed against the unfathomable timescale of spacetime? What more are we to an indifferent Cosmos than cicadas are to us? But I still wonder, as prompted by our cyclical friends, what is it all about?
This is yet another question I cannot answer. But I can say that watching the life cycle unfolding in real time before me, I&#8217;ve thought about it more. Some of the little animals succeed in their mission and find a mate before their deaths. Many more, however, fail and are eaten, squashed, or simply expire unfulfilled in their quest. In the cicadas&#8217; world there are winners and losers. That is as much an unavoidable fact of life for humanity as for any species. Perhaps as a society we can learn something from that as we attempt in vain to artificially eliminate the latter category, but that is another discussion.
As for my personal life, I hope the reflections prompted by our impending, if temporary, visitors will encourage me to at least try to lead a fuller existence, knowing that, like the little cicada, my time here above ground is very limited. Certainly, some re-prioritizing is in order. I may never apprehend the &#8220;meaning of life&#8221; but I can at least vow to make the most of whatever life I am living while I am living it.
I&#8217;m not going to miss the cicadas when they&#8217;re gone. But I will look back on them with a modicum of gratitude for at least opening my eyes to life&#8217;s realities…and my own mortality. Like them, we are born, we live, we try to achieve something during our little window of animation, and then we die. But unlike them we have the capacity to choose how we spend this limited time and try to make for ourselves and those around us a more fulfilling, honorable, and happy life.
Perhaps then, for the cicadas, the ultimate meaning of their lives is to give meaning to ours. If I am still above ground in the sunlight seventeen years from now, I&#8217;ll be reminded of this all over again. I just hope I don&#8217;t forget what they have to teach me in the meantime.
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader and writer whose articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, Celeb Magazine, Zerohedge, Frumforum, and other news outlets.  He is the author of the acclaimed World War II novel Of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630">Another Time And Place</a>. His newest novel, The Extraordinary, will be released on Aug 31 and is available for <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Extraordinary/Brad-Schaeffer/9781642939422">pre-order</a>. 
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Cicadas Start To Emerge After 17-Year Slumber

On Cicadas And What They Have To Teach Us

For those who have not seen Godzilla Vs. King Kong yet, I advise you to click the “X” on the upper right hand corner of your browser. For the rest of you, I will not bother doing a forensic deep-dive into the “meaning” of the monster vs. the world humans have made (and screwed up) genre, nor the moral lessons and warnings we may take away from such films. Other than there is an element of escalation in these films that does tend to mirror the diabolical ascendency of mankind…to wit, the more knowledge we amass, the more susceptible to engineering the machines of our own destruction we become. As we have gone from the longbow to the hydrogen bomb, so in the monster world have we gone from displaying a giant gorilla circus attraction to creating Mechagodzilla, the ultimate monster who inevitably turns on all mankind. I think Blue Oyster Cult summed it up best in their song “Godzilla”: “History shows us time and again how nature points out the folly of man.” Pretty deep, right?
My issue with this film isn’t the storyline or anything like that. It is the classic “check-your-brain-at-the-door” flick. I am a bit more forgiving in this vein than some. For example, I choose not to question how King Kong has grown to such gargantuan size. In Merian C. Cooper’s classic 1933 debut of the “Eighth Wonder Of The World,” Kong is billed as standing 50 feet (although the models indicate more like 25 feet or so). But now, Kong has literally grown to around ten times that height, standing eye-to-eye with Godzilla who is almost 400 feet tall. But, as Al Franken might remind us, “that’s…okay.” So, I let the more technical aspects slide. After all, to accept the premises of a fire-breathing amphibious Allosaurus of sorts and a giant silverback gorilla the size of the Wrigley Building, and then to hurl raspberry’s while mumbling “yeah, right, like that would happen!” seems a bit dissonant.
But there is one aspect of these monster films with which I do take exception. The writers, directors, even actors themselves, seem oblivious to the level of carnage and property damage these creatures visit upon mankind. In Godzilla Vs. King Kong for example, I try to envision just what was the aftermath of the epic battle between two monsters and then their teaming up as frenemies against the uber-killer robot Mechagodzilla as relates to the poor people of Hong Kong. This is a city with a metro area that is home to 7.5 million people. And these two monsters go absolutely insane in their epic battle in which every swing of Kong’s magic axe, every beam of Godzilla’s blue laser, every punch, kick, body slam, or even just the mega-ape’s bouncing from structure to structure in a devastating version of simian parkour involves the deaths of thousands caught out in the teeming streets or in the forest of high rises when the combatants suddenly appear without warning. Entire skyscrapers with thousands more inhabitants come crashing down, while fleeing pedestrians are either crushed under the giants’ feet like so many ants, atomized by Godzilla-fire and secondary explosions, or bowled over by flying debris, including cars, buses, I-beams, glass, concrete and all the detritus of a city in the throes of utter and total destruction that would have given Curtis LeMay pause.
I don’t know if anyone in such films actually considers the civilian death toll (not to mention how many sailors went down when these two destroyed a carrier fleet in another battle earlier in the film) but my guess is it is in the hundreds of thousands. In short, Kong, Godzilla and Mechagodzilla inflict on the people of Hong Kong the equivalent of dozens of 9/11s in their fifteen-minute romp. Or another 2004 tsunami. And nobody seems to care!
I try to imagine, were I to take on the role of the Family Guy character Buzz Killington, that I would make a fake documentary called Hong Kong: The City That Is No More, wherein I follow a rescue crew through the smoldering rubble in the days after this mother of all disasters befell the once prosperous, vibrant Chinese metropolis. One can envision the utter despair and misery of people wandering aimlessly through devastated streets, frame skeletons of fallen buildings, dust and blood and body parts everywhere you look. Some fires still burning. Cries for help beneath tons of debris. And, of course, every wall — those still standing at least — plastered with the tragic make-shift “Have You Seen So-And-So” slips of paper with grainy photos of smiling loved ones oblivious to their impending fates now missing. For an entire generation of Hong Kong citizens, their lives would forever be divided into the Pre-Monster and Post-Monster era.
In the end we see Kong and Godzilla make an uneasy peace with each other and then go their separate ways. And the final imagery of the film is one of a happy and majestic Kong, his work done, storming off all Kong-like into the artificial sunlight of his Hollow Earth habitat, while Doctors Nathan Linde and Irene Andrews, and little Jia, smile with satisfaction as the happy “The Air That I Breathe” flower power Hollies tune crescendos over the scene. But what of the dead and wounded of wiped out Hong Kong, not to mention the families of thousands of US servicemen and women? Who? Oh, right. Them. Perhaps instead of the Hollies, Pink Floyd’s “Goodbye Blue Sky” might have been more appropriate. “The flames are all long gone but the pain lingers on.” Not in Hollywood. Smiles all around. All’s well that ends well. Fade Out.
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader and writer whose articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, Celeb Magazine, Zerohedge, Frumforum, and other news outlets.  He is the author of the acclaimed World War II novel Of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630">Another Time And Place</a>. His newest novel, The Extraordinary, will be released on Aug 31 and is available for <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Extraordinary/Brad-Schaeffer/9781642939422">pre-order</a>. 
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

“MIDTOWN Meets GODZILLA” Show Opens In Tokyo

Godzilla Vs. King Kong: All’s Well That Ends Well? Really?

Entertainment

Film Reviews

Hollywood

I recently re-watched the World War II film A Bridge Too Far.  It is the story of the largest airborne operation in history.  Although it was a serious defeat for the Allies, it did provide the material for Cornelius Ryan’s splendid book which director Richard Attenborough made into the epic war film of the same name in 1977. The movie featured an all-star cast that included Robert Redford, Sean Connery, Ryan O’Neal, Gene Hackman, Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, Maximilian Schell, James Caan, Elliot Gould and Lawrence Olivier, among others.
In the pantheon of great war movies, Attenborough’s ambitious three-hour epic is often overlooked. Yet, the sweeping cinematography and attention to historical detail make for some of the most realistic and well-crafted combat scenes you will find. But I think this film is special for another reason. It is an homage to distinctly male values much dissipated today: duty, honor, camaraderie, chivalry, and testicular grit rarely exhibited by men depicted in today’s Hollywood…wherein it seems the pasty-faced overly-sensitive coastal metrosexual vampire or the buff but caricatured superhero is what passes for manhood these days.
To say they don’t make ’em like they used to is cliché. But even some clichés are born from valid observation.
I Googled “50 Best Guy Movies” and for one list plucked at random, which ranges from The Searchers to The Bridge On The River Kwai, Dirty Harry, Cool Hand Luke, to The Dirty Dozen, the average year of production is 1976. Where have all the men gone? United Talent agent Louise Ward offers an explanation of sorts: “I believe there’s been a certain feminization of the American male. As a result, there are a lot of ‘mama’s boys.’ …That kind of nurturing softens what we’re used to seeing on the screen.”
Ms. Ward is partially right. Indeed, there are a lot of “mama’s boys” in this country. But I wish it was just in the pampered manner to which she refers. The real concern is there are a diminishing number of “papa’s boys” out there. 40% of kids in the United States, from the first grade to their senior year of high school, do not have a father at home. As such, any boys this entails lack fathers to instill in their sons proper values. It seems like more and more often when we see young boys today, it is usually on a police bodycam video brandishing a gun or knife, being shot for their efforts, and then eulogized as martyrs of police brutality, rather than the tragic byproduct of the collapse of the nuclear family.
In a refreshingly blunt interview a while back, Denzel Washington presented a stark assessment of the crisis of fatherless boys in ever greater numbers roaming our streets.  After relaying the story of an eleven-year-old Chicago boy who was already in a gang before being murdered by a fourteen-year-old, Washington said: “You blame ‘the system?’  Where was his father? It starts in the house. It starts in the home. ‘Yeah, well my father got locked up.’ Well where was his father?” In a personal reflection he then credited his not going down the wrong path — as did two of his childhood friends — with his having a relationship with his father while they did not. “Where’s the father?” is the most pressing sociological question of our time. And yet we are not allowed to discuss this obvious truth. But talk about it or not, the truth will be heard. It is heard every time a thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo is out on the Chicago streets at 2:30 A.M. brandishing a gun and inevitably dies by the sword of his choosing. Where was his father? That should be the first question we ask.
My own father died two days after I turned sixteen. That was 37 years ago, and there is not a day that goes by when I do not think of him. I often tell people that I feel like I stumbled blindly into my adult years, “under-cooked” so to speak. That was due to the hole in my life that only a stern male role model (in my case a combat veteran Marine) could fill. My mother did a terrific job, and she was my hero in this regard. But I wonder how many mistakes I have made in my life that I would have avoided just by virtue of my dad’s guidance and counsel, not to mention a well-deserved smack to the back of the head. The simple fact is, as any objective sociological study will reveal, a fatherless boy, no matter his race, is at risk in all aspects of life — be it incarceration, drug use, failing in school, emotional and social dysfunction, depression, violence, or overall poverty. Because no one is there in his formative years to keep him on the right path, and instill in him what it means to be an honorable man.
It has been said that politics is downstream of culture. And in the USA, culture for generations was most reflected in, and influenced by, Hollywood. And once upon a time, in films like A Bridge Too Far, what values and behaviors did Hollywood still feel comfortable celebrating?
In my favorite scene, we see a classic <a style="font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit;" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Li65P_3lvM&amp;playnext=1&amp;list=PL2432C1CFDF5A9980&amp;feature=results_main" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3D-Li65P_3lvM%26playnext%3D1%26list%3DPL2432C1CFDF5A9980%26feature%3Dresults_main&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1619016739171000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGLhaxqFtY3-r1i-K5VaS9Hu8dXXg">demonstration of old school bravado</a> when the tough-as-nails Col. John Frost (Hopkins) is called to the roof of his bombed out HQ by the umbrella-wielding Maj. Carlyle (Christopher Good). Stepping over the rubble, a German soldier (Lex van Delden) approaches the surrounded band of exhausted and ultimately doomed British 2nd parachute battalion troops bearing a white flag of parlay.
German: “My General says there is no point in continuing this fighting. He is willing to discuss a surrender.”
Frost (to Carlyle): “Tell him to go to hell.”
Carlyle (shouting down to the German): “We haven’t the proper facilities to take you all prisoner! Sorry!”
German: “What?!”
Carlyle: “We’d like to.  But we can’t accept your surrender. [Pause] Was there anything else?”
Ballsy stuff there. The Waffen-SS, not known for being softies on a battlefield, were so impressed by their gallant British foes that they permitted cease-fires for tending to the wounded.
When the Arnhem bridgehead is finally liquidated, in the film we see SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Bittrich (Schell) offer a gesture of kindness and respect to the wounded Frost, who is now his prisoner; he salutes him with clicking heels, and offers his brave captive a bar of chocolate.
Attenborough’s classic aptly demonstrates the respect among soldiers that only men of a more masculine age can understand. Though not depicted in the film, during the actual battle, an SS squad leader Alfred Ringsdorf took stock of his British opponents when reporting to his commander the delay in liquidating the stubborn Tommies still holding one end of the Arnhem bridge:  “Believe me these are real men!” he said.  “They won’t give up that bridge until we carry them out feet first.”
I mention A Bridge Too Far in today’s context as it is filled with such real men who did extraordinary real man things that would defy a modern soft-handed latte-sipping self-identified cisgender male’s imagination! One of the most intense American scenes is the 82nd Airborne’s Maj. Julian Cook (Redford) leading his band of paratroopers in collapsible canvas boats rowing across the Waal River under murderous German artillery and machine gun fire to successfully assault the Nijmegen Bridge. When the boats first arrive, the men, including Cook, are visibly shaken by their flimsiness. But he suppresses his fears and shouts, “What’d you expect? Destroyers? Come on, put it together!” Cook’s unit took over 50% casualties in this mini D-Day.
The men who fought our wars over the centuries are not superheroes. They would be the first to tell you this. Eugene Sledge, a Marine veteran, would remember candidly that what concerned him most as his landing craft headed for the boiling cauldron of the Peleliu beaches in 1944 were two things: one was “would you measure up in the eyes of your buddies” and the other was “I was afraid I was going to wet my pants.” But he went in anyway and would fight bravely throughout the Palau and Okinawa campaigns. Once the shooting starts any notion of fighting  for “King and country” as the old saying goes dies away. Men through the crucible of facing challenges together form a bond and ultimately fight for each other. One thinks of Henry V’s famous speech before Agincourt:
We would not die in that man&#8217;s company 
That fears his fellowship to die with us… 
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; 
For he today that sheds his blood with me 
Shall be my brother; be he ne&#8217;er so vile, 
This day shall gentle his condition;
In yet another famous reflection, from another war on another continent in another century, an American Civil War soldier in a letter to his wife lamented that should he die in battle he would not “see our boys grow up to honorable manhood” in his absence. (He was killed at First Bull Run).
We currently live in a culture in which that sublime phrase “honorable manhood” is often dissuaded, even ridiculed, by our cultural powers that be, only to be replaced by snarky admonitions against “toxic masculinity.” And we are seeing this mindset seeping into film. Alas, says The Dark Knight Rises casting director John Papsidera: “The ugly truth is that American leading men just aren’t terribly manly anymore.”
Not so the men in A Bridge Too Far. My son, who was barely ten when he first watched Attenborough’s magnum opus, was fascinated by this movie. My theory is that when he saw how these soldiers comport themselves with stoic valor that belies their genuine fears it tapped into his still developing, innate manhood; something primordial in him triggered a connection with alpha males like Col. Frost, the taciturn Gen. Gavin (O’Neal) the rock steady British Gen. Roy Urquhart (Connery), the no-nonsense cigar-chomping Col. Stout (Gould) and the fiercely determined Sgt. Dohun (Caan) – that last of whom risks court-martial to honor a promise to keep his severely wounded lieutenant alive.
I’m not saying there are no real men left in any war films. Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan, Hacksaw Ridge and the new Midway do their parts. As did the fine HBO series Band of Brothers and its underappreciated companion piece The Pacific (in which Eugene Sledge’s experiences on Peleliu and Okinawa, and his post-war battle with PTSD,  was a storyline). Perhaps truth is braver than fiction. Whatever the case, I fear that a generation of boys is growing up with a terribly destructive void in their lives. Nature abhors a vacuum, and absent a real dad to keep a boy in his lane, a faux paternal substitute — gangs, drugs, crime, video games, the darker side of our culture — will step in to fill the gap. We are seeing that impact now.
Bona fide manliness is under assault from two flanks. The feminization on one side, (see: Drag Queen Story Hour) and the brutalization on the other (see: Chicago on a typical weekend). The former makes us vulnerable to threats from without, the latter from within. Neither bodes well for the country. As such, this generation of young American boys, lost and all-to-often fatherless, could use a dose of such undiluted old-fashioned machismo tempered in decency and character as displayed in films like A Bridge Too Far. If anything, to convey to them just what those two things below their belts really stand for. The way an engaged father might. Especially in an overly sensitive age in which genuine real men are needed to navigate an ever more threatening and chaotic world, on the screen and off.
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader and writer whose articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, Celeb Magazine, Zerohedge, Frumforum, and other news outlets.  He is the author of the acclaimed World War II novel Of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630">Another Time And Place</a>. His newest novel, The Extraordinary, will be released on Aug 31 and is available for <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Extraordinary/Brad-Schaeffer/9781642939422">pre-order</a>. 
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Saving Private Ryan

Why Today’s Boys Could Use An Old-Fashioned War Movie

Masculinity

Woke Culture

“Into The Jaws Of Death” Colorized

Counting Down The 10 Most Important Battles In US Military History

American History

George Washington

World War II

Talk of Meghan, Harry, and the Royal Family has lit up the internet airwaves for the past week. In the UK, they take these people so seriously that the Duchess of Sussex seemingly took out &#8220;Good Morning Britain&#8221; host Piers Morgan with a formal complaint to ITV, apparently after he doubted her story of victimhood told during her now famous interview with Oprah.
While I am not at liberty to say whether Markle’s action was justified, it is difficult to feel pangs of sympathy for someone so out of touch that, for her, “getting back to basics” and living “authentically” means subsisting on a $25 million stipend, inking a lucrative deal with Netflix, and getting to tell your unilateral tale of woe to one of the wealthiest and most influential people on the planet from the patio of your $14 million spread while holding hands with your husband — a prince. If only the people of Bangladesh or Somalia knew how good they have it!
Maybe I’m being harsh? All lives have pressures, and I’ve met enough miserable millionaires to know that money is not a guarantee of happiness. So that’s just the hardscrabble American in me talking, a Colonial rebel who likes to think his views of the monarchy are more in line with those of Police Squad’s Detective Frank Drebin than that of the tabloids.
<blockquote>“For no matter how silly the idea of having a queen may be to us, as Americans we must be gracious and considerate hosts.”</blockquote>
But then one must ask: why is it that so many in this country seem to really care about the Royal Family, even in 2021? After all, Oprah wasn’t just offering a therapy session. She’s a businesswoman who knows what her audience likes. Why do my countrymen and women care about an institution that is now clearly an anachronism?
In this weekend’s &#8220;Wall Street Journal,&#8221; Peggy Noonan offered that we care because we see the royals as a sign of stability. A reassuring symbol that the values and traditions we hold dear live on, and that the Queen especially personifies these longings for constancy. That may be her view. Ms. Noonan is 70, and a product of an earlier age of Reagan, Thatcher, and the Cold War. But I think for most Americans, there’s a different, more disconcerting reason.
The dirty little secret of America’s psyche is that, despite all that unpleasantness between 1775 and 1783 with Harry’s distant relative, George III, the monarchical urge is still very much within us. Nature abhors a vacuum, so in place of the British Crown, we have often substituted our own “American Royalty” in its stead. On this side of the Atlantic, the term “old money” originally referred to the industrial titans of old who built the country and amassed gargantuan fortunes in the process. Business success replaced bloodline as barons like Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Gould, Ward, Astor, Morgan and Rockefeller ascended to the pinnacle of American society.
The 400 in the Forbes annual list of wealthiest Americans is an homage to Mrs. Caroline Schermerhorn Astor whose ballroom could accommodate 400 comfortably, and with that number being the cutoff for invitations to her annual gala event. Our new royalty got the ticket. The rest of the country merely watched with awe from the outside, peering through the windows at a life of opulence beyond their wildest imaginations. Today, those family lineages meander through our national bloodstream, with Anderson Cooper being a direct descendant of the Commodore himself.
In the 20th Century, the media-driven age made us so thirsty for a new monarchy in the form of the Kennedy clan that when JFK came into the White House, the press even bestowed on the new administration a fanciful moniker taken from a British king of legend, “Camelot.”
As Meghan and Harry (and his mother) aptly demonstrate, celebrity and royalty are often symbiotic. Although the veneer has broken down with the overplaying of the woke hand, Hollywood provided Americans for decades with yet another avenue through which to express our love of monarchy. From Garbo and Gable to the present day, we speak of “Hollywood royalty,” offering those whose job it is to offer up fantasy an outsized influence over our culture, and even policy. Is it any surprise that Americans should be enamored with a fallen princess who also is a product of Hollywood?
In the film &#8220;Master and Commander,&#8221; Captain Aubrey offers that: “Men need to be governed. Often not wisely, but governed nonetheless.” But I would argue that it goes deeper than that. Men want to be governed. This is why I view one aspect of the story of the American experiment as, in essence, one that starts off with a Constitution and successive Bill of Rights that made us the freest and most independent people — and most unburdened by the impositions of a central government — in history. This apogee of liberty has subsequently been followed by 234 years of gradual erosion — sometimes imperceptibly, other times boldly — and the filling of that void with an ever-metastasizing and intrusive State apparatus.
Step-by-plodding-step, Washington D.C. — our Buckingham Palace — has been reclaiming those duties and responsibilities that the Americans of the Revolution felt were the purview of the individual. Rights, too, have once again become more a function of a perpetually multiplying list of State edicts than divine gifts of Providence. It is safe to say that should the Founding Fathers have had the misfortune of being teleported from Independence Hall in 1776 or 1787 to the House Chamber or Rose Garden in 2021 and witness the awesome amount of real hard power over the lives of Americans that the Federal government has assumed unto itself, they would be horrified. Could they have even conceived of not only the assumed power to compel citizens to remain in their homes and destroy their livelihoods, but a populace who so meekly acquiesced to such despotic demands?
In the mind’s eye I see a befuddled Washington standing along Pennsylvania Avenue as the Presidential motorcade passes by. Streets blocked off, police sirens wailing, black limo after limo moves past him, while helicopters swoop overhead. He casts his gaze to the executive mansion he never saw, situated behind iron gates secured by armed guards, concrete barricades, and high walls, with its patrolling sharpshooters pacing the distant roof warning any citizen not to come too close. He might think if only the tyrant King George could have ever projected such power, and signaled such disdain for and mistrust of his people. Seeing all this, Washington may have wondered why he ever rebelled in the first place.
So it is no surprise that Americans are paradoxically so enamored with the British Crown. Because we fought for eight years to shed their monarchy, only to spend the next two centuries allowing its American version to achieve control over our lives, if not in the form of a Queen, then certainly a President, Congress, and a cultural and business ruling class. And then, of course, there are those 2 million unelected, unbridled bureaucrats burrowed deep within their government fiefdoms who have inexorably asserted increasing dominance over our daily lives from where we live, what we eat, where and when we can work, and indeed what we can even say, to the point where we no longer even remember what 1776 was all about.
So that is why we love the royals. We may have left them, but in our hearts they never really left us. Maybe we should have just stayed put? I’d like to write more, but &#8220;The Crown&#8221; is about to come on. I never miss it.
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader and writer whose articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, Celeb Magazine, Zerohedge, Frumforum, and other news outlets.  He is the author of the acclaimed World War II novel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630">Of Another Time And Place</a>. His newest novel, The Extraordinary, will be released on August 31 and is available for preorder <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1642939420/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=poshilpre06-20&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=1642939420&amp;linkId=a7ca3e4c164863007150d850df9acd1b">here</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle

The Real Reason We Care About The Royals

Meghan Markle

Prince Harry

July 2, 1863 was a sweltering afternoon, and two miles south of a little Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg, Union Maj. Gen. Gouverneur Warren was horrified. The chief engineer of the North’s Army of the Potomac, he was tasked by his commanding officer, Maj. Gen. Meade, to ascertain the strength of the Union position on the far southern end of the line. Believing that the 90,000-man army’s left flank was solidly anchored atop a steep, bald-faced hill called Little Round Top — which presented a commanding prospect over the entire battlefield — Warren was stunned to find only a handful of signalmen atop this most strategic piece of ground. And through his binoculars the Union general could see waves of men in gray and butternut uniforms, Robert E. Lee’s ferocious Rebel horde, marching at the double-quick through the broken ground to assault this most undefended hill.
Thinking fast, Warren spurred his horse down the reversed slope and galloped over to the first group of blue-clad Federal troops he encountered marching towards the left flank. It so happened to be the 140th New York Regiment, commanded by Col. Patrick “Paddy” O’Rorke, who was at the head of a long column of men from the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Division, V Corps. “Paddy!” shouted Warren as the tumult of approaching battle grew louder, telling all present that a major engagement was underway. “Give me a regiment!”
O’Rorke complied and soon had his men positioned on Little Round Top with the rest of the brigade following, just as the hollering Rebels approached. Throughout the late afternoon the fighting raged across the slopes of Little Round Top, with the extreme left of the Union line under relentless assault from Rebel forces who seemed to understand the significance of the high ground. At one point, the Yankee line just below the crest faltered, and once again O’Rorke and his mostly Irish-immigrant band of soldiers, who in civilian life had planted roots in Rochester, New York, answered the call. Following the sound of the guns, O’Rorke, on horseback, spotted the breach in the line below. He dismounted, determined to lead his men on foot into their first serious action of the war. “Down this way, boys!” the energetic Colonel shouted, drawing his sword. As his men formed into lines of battle, O’Rorke climbed a boulder and called out:  “Here they are, men!  Commence firing!” And the air became a torrent of .58 caliber projectiles ripping the opposing ranks apart.
Paddy O’Rorke’s family had emigrated to America in 1838 from County Caven, Ireland when he was a year old, but he never forgot his Irish roots. A graduate of the West Point class of 1861, he was slated for higher command. But it was not to be. “It was about this time,” wrote a sergeant of the 140th New York, “that Col. O’Rorke, cheering his men and acting as he always does, like a brave and good man, fell, pierced through the neck by a Rebel bullet.” His enraged infantrymen charged and several zeroed in on the hapless Confederate suspected of inflicting their beloved commander’s mortal wound. “That was Johnny’s last shot,” wrote another New Yorker on the scene, “for a number of Companies A and G fired instantly.” They riddled the unfortunate Rebel with no fewer than seventeen bullets.
Ireland had given yet another son of Erin to the cause of the Union. Of the 500 men of the 140th New York who went into battle to avenge their fallen colonel, a quarter of them would become casualties before the day was out. Many military historians have offered that O’Rorke’s actions that day, his heroism and selflessness, were crucial to the Union Army’s left flank not crumbling at the most critical time of the battle. Certainly the 140th New York’s conduct was at least as pivotal to the Union victory as was that of the celebrated 20th Maine, and their Medal Of Honor-winning Col. Joshua Chamberlain. But they were Irish, and this was America in the mid-Nineteenth Century where the nativist America Party had come into prominence and anti-Irish, anti-immigrant fervor was high (“Irish Need Not Apply”) in their adopted country. Little Round Top was never taken.
Meanwhile, further up the line in the smoking valley one hundred fifty feet below and a mile to the north, one of the most peculiar scenes ever witnessed on an American battlefield was taking place. And this drama would also come courtesy of Irishmen who’d left their old home and were now defending their new one. Under the command of Galway-born Col. Patrick Kelly, this unit of 530 staunch Irish Catholic immigrants from New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, was known as “The Irish Brigade.” As they awaited to go into what was the most violent and blood-soaked of the three days of the largest and costliest battle ever fought in North America, the men all took a knee, with caps in hand and heads bowed. As the men contemplated how long they had to live once the order to advance towards the rapidly approaching enemy was given, their chaplain, Father William Corby, stood upon a boulder. There, shouting above the din of battle swirling all around, he led a prayer granting the men absolution as their emerald green battle flag snapped in the warm summer breeze overhead.
The brigade then formed up in line of battle and pitched into the fight, charging headlong under intense fire through a wheat field strewn with the wreckage of war and into a tangled woodlot filled with Rebels in a desperate action to break up Lee&#8217;s attack on this sector of the line. They emerged from the fierce engagement minus forty percent of the men who&#8217;d just been granted absolution an hour before…but with all their battle flags and honor intact.
Other units made up of predominantly Irish immigrants fought throughout the war with equal élan, and the sacrifices they made for their new country defy the imagination. Some wore Confederate grey as well as Union blue, adding to their often tragic tale. At the Battle of Fredericksburg, the Union Irish Brigade was utterly annihilated as they were ordered into a series of fruitless, suicidal charges against a heavily entrenched Confederate army perched high on a hill and behind a stone wall. By the end of that day&#8217;s fighting, the brigade counted just 256 survivors in its decimated ranks — out of the 1,200 it took into battle that morning. “Irish blood and Irish bones cover that field today,” wrote one survivor.  Sadly, many of the men from the 24th Georgia who choked back tears as they methodically shot them down were Irishmen too.
All told, 150,000 Irish-born soldiers fought for the Union, 40,000 for the Confederacy, representing a significant portion of the soldiers enlisted in each army. This does not include the many more that were American-born and of Irish descent.
Today the Irish Brigade&#8217;s lineage, and by rights the memory of all the Irish fighting men during the Civil War, lives on in the &#8220;Fighting 69th&#8221; of the New York National Guard, who saw combat in World War I, World War II (Pacific) and even Baghdad in 2004-2005. Ironically, or perhaps poignantly, their nickname was bestowed upon them by Robert E. Lee, who after observing their bravery for himself at Fredericksburg, was heard to say as they formed for the grim charge “Ah yes, the Fighting 69th.” Not a bad endorsement.
So as you celebrate St. Patrick&#8217;s Day, remember the Irish who fought and strove and perished over the hallowed ground of our history. The emerald green banner has often been saturated with the blood of those who gave so much to insure that their newly adopted homeland should survive and prosper. And if perchance you should see some men and women in green parading through your streets on March 17, singing songs and hoisting a pint in toast to their heritage, you best remember the Gaelic battle cry of the Irish Brigade who preceded these happy bands: &#8220;Faugh A Ballagh!&#8221;, &#8220;Clear the Way.&#8221; Many an enemy on many a battlefield no doubt wished they heeded this call.
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader and writer whose articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, Celeb Magazine, Zerohedge, Frumforum, and other news outlets.  He is the author of the acclaimed World War II novel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630">Of Another Time And Place</a>. His newest novel, The Extraordinary, will be released on August 31 and is available for preorder <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1642939420/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=poshilpre06-20&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=1642939420&amp;linkId=a7ca3e4c164863007150d850df9acd1b">here</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire. 
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Sunday Morning Mass At Camp Cass, 1861. 9Th Mass. Infantry, U.S.A.

The Little Known Story Of An Irish Regiment That Helped Turn The Tides Of The American Civil War

Civil War

History

For some reason, when I heard of the passing of the 70-year-old Rush Limbaugh from lung cancer, oddly enough, a scene from the TV series Mad Men came to mind. Don Draper, the mysterious and dapper ad man, explains to enthralled Kodak executives that the most important idea in advertising is new. “It creates an itch,” he explains. “You simply put your product in there as a sort of calamine lotion.” I think such a concept is at the heart of why “El Rushbo” as he was affectionately known by his loyal legions of over 20 million daily listeners, (and “Satan” by the Left in whose boot he was a burr for 37 years) was so successful. He was the first of what would be a media counter-revolution. A conservative backlash to what many across “fly-over country” saw as an ever steeper and more pervasive leftward tilt to the media and news sources they’d once trusted.
In 1984, when Limbaugh truly launched his career as the country’s premier political talk radio host at Sacramento-based KFBK, the media landscape was a barren place wherein alternative viewpoints had few if any outlets. In my hometown of Chicago, for example, if you wanted news you had a very limited, and ideologically monolithic, choice of media outlets. Your national news was confined to ABC (Peter Jennings), NBC (Tom Brokaw), CBS (Dan Rather), a few local stations like WGN and WTTW, PBS, some obscure UHF outlets, and in Chicago, two newspapers. The internet didn’t really exist. FM radio was mostly music, AM very hard to even tune into. And that was it.
Yet, those tens of millions of Americans who leaned right of center had no voice. No place to go where their views could be championed. There was nobody on the air of any import they could listen to and nod while mumbling “damned right.” Rush Limbaugh changed all that. He sensed there was an itch for alternative viewpoints beyond the liberal dogma seeping its way into our schools, universities, pop culture, politics, and ultimately supposedly “straight news” organizations. And he was unafraid to speak them aloud. After all, he reasoned, he was only repeating on an open forum what millions of Americans unsettled by the shift of their country into self-loathing, lawlessness, political opportunism, social permissiveness and corrosive morality, and general leftism among the institutions of power, were saying every night at the kitchen table.
Once he moved to New York with its vast audience, and especially after the FCC repealed its Fairness Doctrine in 1987, Limbaugh’s career skyrocketed and he soon stood at the top of a growing pile of conservative talk-show hosts — Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Glenn Beck, Howie Carr, Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt, et. al. — who rightfully look to him as the godfather of their uber-successful genre of infotainment.
At the ABC Radio Network he honed his style until be became the most recognized voice of the right in the nation. And he never wavered in his core message which could basically be summed up in a belief that the United States is a force for good, warts and all, and that the Left are out to destroy it. Every day, then, his radio broadcast was a three-hour long gladiator-like battle with the forces of evil, also known to his ocean of daily listeners as, well, “Democrats”.
But such a binary view of the issues and the players that shaped politics on the good and the bad side of the divide was fine with his legion of self-proclaimed “ditto-heads”. After years of being ridiculed, maligned, looked down upon, forgotten, and dismissed as knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing rubes, either through being labeled “clingers” or “deplorables” (let alone racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobe Nazis from Hell…or Missouri, like Limbaugh himself) by the elites in the media with the right credentials and right viewpoints, they were happy to follow a man who gave as good as he got. And the simple fact is the more the Left tried to demonize and marginalize Limbaugh, sifting through decades of transcripts for that one “gotcha!” career-ending gaffe, the stronger and more influential he became. They may as well have tried to put out a fire with kerosene.  And it drove them mad.
One can already imagine the tsunami of vitriol and grave-dancing overwhelming the Twittersphere at this moment. But somehow I think Limbaugh would be happy to have their vile celebrations as his epitaph. After all, as a man in his line of work understood better than most, often it is more revealing to judge a man by his enemies than his friends
The numbers Limbaugh put up are testament to that void in broadcasting that The Rush Limbaugh Show targeted and filled. In 2008, he inked a contract extension with syndicator Premiere Radio Networks worth $400 million. His model of being a conservative yin to the liberal yang upset the balance of media power in this nation — meaning it moved to restore balance by offering an alternative narrative to those proffered by a once-unopposed media class — and his impact, almost three decades later, has been profound. Because of Limbaugh more than any other media personality, conservatives dominate the airwaves, despite Leftist attempts to emulate his model, but with an opposite message. His ascendancy went hand-in-hand with the rise of the Fox Broadcasting Company  (1986) which Rupert Murdoch founded to directly compete with the big three networks where they lived…on Television. No doubt the success of The Rush Limbaugh Show had a profound influence on the astute Murdoch, as Limbaugh paved the way and exposed the multi-billion dollar market just waiting to be cultivated.
I could give a blow-by-blow account of Limbaugh’s extraordinary life from his 1951 birth in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, his many awards, wealth, marriages, books and the rest right up to his crowning moment when he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 2020, while already battling cancer, but there is plenty of that out there.
What matters most about Limbaugh, one must think, is how different the country he leaves behind is as compared to the one in which he launched his broadcast revolution in 1984. Today we are more polarized as a nation than at any time since 1860…in many ways even more so. The question is, how much did Limbaugh contribute to it, and how much did he merely expose? That depends on who you ask. The left-wing Huffington Post, for example, reports his death this way: “Rush Limbaugh, Bigoted King Of Talk Radio, Dies At 70.” I think right there is the answer. Only in a nation already infected with such strains of hatred and vindictiveness could a Limbaugh have thrived. As with the president who awarded him his medal, Limbaugh was not a divider. Rather he exposed the divide that already existed. One cannot be so successful at selling calamine lotion for the soul to those not furiously itching for an alternative viewpoint, their viewpoint, to have a voice, a champion.
And as much as the Left hates Limbaugh, as much they will no doubt rejoice at his passing (in the name of “tolerance”, of course) they made him. He was their Frankenstein. And now they get to live with his legacy…which gives “El Rushbo” fans the last laugh, even as they mourn his passing. “Talent on loan from God” as he would mischievously say, has been returned to its rightful owner. But his impact cannot be refunded. Love him or hate him, we are living in a new hyper-political age that Rush Limbaugh, and those who symbiotically loved to loathe him, has created.
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader and writer whose articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, Celeb Magazine, Zerohedge, Frumforum, and other news outlets.  He is the author of the acclaimed World War II novel Of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630">Another Time And Place</a>
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire. 
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

US-POLITICS-TRUMP

‘Talent On Loan From God’: What People Still Don’t Understand About Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh

Elon Musk Speaks At Satellite Conference In Washington, DC

‘A Real Life Iron-Man’: The Incredible Story Of Elon Musk’s Rise To World’s Richest Man

Elon Musk

Silicon Valley

SpaceX

Tesla

January 28, 1986 was one of those dates where everyone remembers what they were doing when they heard the news. Conversational Spanish class at the University of Illinois. No English allowed. So one of the students relayed the shocking information thusly: “El Space Shuttle explotó!” We all looked at each other. “Explotó?” asked a classmate with incredulity. “Estás tratando de decir lanzado?” [Exploded? Are you trying to say ‘launched’?]. “No,” the distraught student insisted. “Explotó.” More uncomprehending stares. Finally in exasperation he blurted out: “IT BLEW UP!”
That was how I learned the Space Shuttle Challenger had been engulfed in a calamitous fireball nine miles over the Atlantic Ocean, a mere 73 seconds after lift-off. The shock of this event, the national trauma it induced, cannot be adequately understood today. It came as a bolt from the blue. And so much more so because among the seven highly intelligent, accomplished crew members was a high school teacher from Concord, New Hampshire. Chosen after a national search for an educator to ride the Shuttle, Christa McAuliffe was to be the first “regular person” to go into space. She was one of us. A decent, hardworking, affable sort, who was not only a beloved teacher but also a devoted wife and mother of two young children. The implication behind her trip on the orbiter was that space travel had become as routine as hopping on a commercial airliner. It had to be, right? Otherwise there was no way NASA, an acronym which by that time had taken on mythical qualities of competence and excellence, would ever put one of us into that thing. Would they? 
After absorbing the news, my class raced into the hallway searching out the nearest TV. We found one and gathered with other students who’d poured out of other classrooms while the horrifying spectacle replayed over and over from every angle. Off screen, somber news anchors pelted hastily assembled experts for premature theories as to what could have happened. We were curious about that, naturally. But what affected us most at that moment beyond the sudden and awesome violence of the event itself, were the images of distraught relatives in the viewing stands, their non-believing eyes groping skyward in shocked horror as the smoking pieces of the 2,000-ton orbiter fell like meteorites back to earth. Only the liberated solid rocket boosters continued in their chaotic zig-zagging ascent towards the heavens those seven riders would never see. Who would ever forget the faces of Christa McAuliffe’s parents as their expressions changed from exhilaration (that was their daughter up there!) to perplexity as the craft disappeared in the flames and smoke, to a sinking realization of their worst fears when the detached voice on the loudspeaker first said: “Obviously a major malfunction” and then, forty interminable seconds later: “We have a report from the flight dynamics officer that the vehicle has exploded.”
That night Ronald Reagan, in an act of presidential grace that often seems to be lost today, postponed his scheduled State of the Union Address to come on the air and offer his mourning nation what comfort he could and eulogize the seven Americans lost. But he also steeled us to learn from this experience, and persevere. “The future,” he said, “does not belong to the faint-hearted. It belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.”
In his address, Reagan expressed his unflinching belief in the space program. When the inevitable commission to investigate what actually caused the disaster was formed, the man he chose to lead it was William B. Rogers, a consummate D.C. insider with no technical expertise. Rogers was explicitly instructed not to embarrass NASA. But, as the series of mismanaged events that led up to the Challenger launch revealed themselves, it was impossible to not point the finger at the culture of the government agency. As it turned out, it was an organization that had been rolling the dice for years with the Shuttle program in efforts to keep up with a promised schedule that early on revealed itself to be impossibly demanding.
The commission eventually concluded—as one member, the iconoclastic physicist Richard Feynman, famously demonstrated by performing a simple experiment during a hearing—the cause of the accident was a faulty O-ring, made brittle by the cold, that wrapped around the right aft joint of one of the solid rocket boosters (SRB). Its failure allowed a plume of flame to penetrate the massive external fuel tank like an acetylene torch until the 350,000-gallons of liquid propellant ignited. The investigation, which included information leaked by a NASA whistleblower to The New York Times, revealed that the SRBs’ manufacturer, Morton Thiokol, had taken the unprecedented action of recommending against sending Challenger up on January 28 as planned. In an urgent conference call with the Kennedy and Marshall Space Flight Centers the night before launch, several Morton Thiokol engineers expressed grave concerns that the freezing temperatures could cause the rubber O-rings, with which they’d already seen signs of degradation under optimal conditions, to lose elasticity, compromise the seams, and thus lead to the exact catastrophic malfunction that did, in fact, occur.
But the Challenger mission had more at stake than usual. After twenty-four missions, the Shuttle launches had become back page news. This time, however, the “teacher in space” angle had revitalized flagging national interest in the program. News networks were devoting extra coverage, and classrooms all over the United States would be watching the lift-off in real time. Plus, it had already been scrubbed twice due to weather. NASA officials pushed back hard against the Morton Thiokol people who knew best the SRBs’ limitations. As NASA’s frustrated head of the SRB program, Lawrence Malloy, demanded: “Thiokol, when the hell do you want us to launch?  Next April?” In the end, NASA placed the contractor in the impossible position of providing definitive proof that the SRBs would absolutely fail. Morton Thiokol management, over the objections of several engineers, caved…a decision many would regret for the rest of their lives. Even so, NASA had a senior Morton Thiokol executive give his company’s assent to the launch in writing. Clearly, such a CYA gesture was tacit admission by space agency officials that they knew all too well this was a serious risk. They went anyway.
The deeper the investigation probed, the clearer it became NASA knew they were literally playing with fire. And after the accident they were trying to paper over if not outright cover up their avoidable errors. So much so, in fact, that New York Times columnist David Sanger would reflect: “The thought rose in the back of our minds that this really wasn’t an accident at all. That this was more like manslaughter.” Ultimately, though, perhaps the true villain was the system itself. Herein lies a possible answer to the most obvious question surrounding the decision to launch in such dangerous conditions. If it was too cold, why didn’t they just wait until it was warmer? Why would they knowingly risk seven lives, not to mention a multi-billion-dollar orbiter? The answer was that NASA was operating under the constraints of a schedule that promised far more launches than they could deliver. Eventually the game of high-pressure Russian roulette they were playing with the lives of their crews caught up with them.
So what more relevant lessons can we take out of this horrible event three-and-a-half decades in the past? One is that government agencies — even the fabled NASA which has done so much incredible work — can be compromised by political priorities that supersede safety and even common sense. In short, government makes mistakes, sometimes with catastrophic results, and yet it is very slow to accept responsibility, let alone reverse course. One cannot help but wonder if there is a lesson to be mined from the Shuttle failures that is applicable to government responses to COVID today; to wit, the implementation of policies that have seen our economy decimated, millions of livelihoods upended and destroyed, businesses shuttered, our children’s educations sacrificed, the rate of suicides, addictions, and other social calamities accelerated, China’s power growing, faith in the electoral system severely diminished, while over 400,000 Americans have died anyway, and more to come. In the future, historians may look back on these times with as much dismay as we do those fateful days before Challenger went to its unnecessary doom. In the meantime, do not expect anything but a giant wagon circle when this latest national trauma finally passes. As far as government goes, the bigger the mistake, the more entrenched those who made it will become.
Still, as I look back on those dark days in 1986, the Challenger disaster showed the best of our national character. We collectively felt like we lost people near to us that day. And as often happens in tragedy, we really did grow closer as a country. I like to believe that is one legacy of Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. Seven good souls who, as Reagan reassured us while we struggled to make sense of it all, “slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.”
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader and writer whose articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, Celeb Magazine, Zerohedge, Frumforum, and other news outlets.  He is the author of the acclaimed World War II novel Of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630">Another Time And Place</a>
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire. 
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Portrait of Challenger Crew

‘More like Manslaughter’: How Government Incompetence Led To The Challenger Disaster

Challenger Explosion

Ronald Reagan

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Brad Schaeffer