Reminder: the Crusades were a response to over 400 years of Islamic aggression against Christians and Europe.
632: Muhammad dies.
635: Muslims conquer the Christian city of Damascus.
636: Muslims conquer the Christian city of Antioch.
637: Muslims conquer the Holy Land.
639: Muslims conquer the first Christian country Armenia.
641: Muslims conquer the Coptic Christian country of Egypt.
650: Muslim armies reach southern Italy and Cyprus, taking thousands of captives as "slaves" and "concubines."
711: Muslims invade Spain, and by 715, they have occupied most of it.
717: Muslims besiege Constantinople but are repelled.
730: Muslims invade France, only to be stopped by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours.
792: The ruler of Al-Andalus calls for the invasion of France, and Muslim armies are assembled to attack it again, but they are repelled.
827: Muslims invade Sicily and Italy, persecuting monks. Sicily remains under Islamic rule until 1092.
846: Muslims invade Rome and force the Pope to pay tribute.
848: A third invasion of France occurs, and they are repelled for a third time.
909: Muslims occupy Sardinia.
937: The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is burned down by Muslims, and more churches in Jerusalem are destroyed.
1009: Destruction of the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem.
1012: Beginning of al-Hakim’s oppressive decrees against Christians.
1071: Turkish Muslims attack the Byzantines and occupy much of Anatolia.
1094: Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos asks Western Christendom for help against the Muslim Turkish invasions.
1095: Pope Urban II finally declares the First Crusade.
A Muslim asks a Christian about the Crusades in the Middle Ages.
“Before the Crusades, Islam had already invaded the Christian lands of Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Spain, Portugal, Turkey. And was trying to conquer Europe.”
Another Muslim asks about the European slave trade.
“The Islamic slave trade had existed for centuries before the European slave trade, from both Africa and Europe. And it never really ended.
Your own prophet Muhammad was a slave trader.”
In Georgia I entered a Chick-fil-A drive-thru line of forty cars.
I turned off my engine. I prepared to wait the way my ancestors waited out a siege.
Six minutes later I was holding chicken.
I do not know what happened to the other thirty-nine cars. The line moved like water that had somewhere to be.
A young woman walked between the cars taking orders on a small tablet, on foot, in the sun, smiling like the sun was her idea.
I said thank you.
She said, "My pleasure."
I did not think about it then. I should have.
At the window I thanked the young man for the food.
"My pleasure."
I thanked him for the sauce.
"My pleasure."
I thanked him for thanking me—
"My pleasure."
I want to be clear about what was happening.
This was a duel.
In Japan I trained in courtesy for forty years. Bowing angles. Seasonal greetings. The correct depth of apology for seventeen distinct situations.
I was a white belt in that drive-thru.
I escalated. I used my most formal English. I thanked him on behalf of my entire family line.
He said, "My pleasure," and gave me extra sauce.
Extra sauce. Unprovoked. A counterattack.
I returned the next day to reclaim my honor.
It was Sunday. The restaurant was closed.
All of them were closed. In the entire country. They close every Sunday, and they have closed every Sunday since the beginning, because the founder made a promise, and the promise did not expire when he did.
I stood in the empty parking lot and understood I had lost twice.
Once to a teenager with sauce.
Once to a man I will never meet, who kept his word so long it became a building.
In my country we say a samurai's word is his life.
I had never seen a restaurant say it back.
I returned Monday. I ordered. And this time I said it first, before she could.
"My pleasure."
She smiled and said, "It sure is."
America, I surrender.
It was my pleasure.
American shows in India a pill called Revlimid that she needs for her aunt who has a type of blood cancer costs $900 per pill in America
In India this same pill only costs around 30 cents
That is a 299,900% markup on price in America compare to the same pill in India. We are being robbed blind in America, we need healthcare reform immediately
She’s comparing a brand name you get in America vs a pill of the same medication in India. This is so ridiculous. Big Pharma in America is a criminal organization
The Henry Ford Vax vs. Unvax Study with over 18,000 children was so damning that the pro vaccine researchers refused to publish it due to backlash concerns. Now you know why…
Elon Musk just said the one thing about America they made sure you’d never learn.
The one thing that should’ve made you proud, not ashamed.
Musk: “After World War 2, the US could have basically taken over the world and any country. Like we got nukes, nobody else got nukes. We don’t even have to lose soldiers. Which country do you want?”
One nation held a weapon no civilization had ever possessed.
Total monopoly on destruction. No rival. No consequence. No limit.
Every empire in history that held that kind of power did the only thing empires know how to do.
They took until there was nothing left to take.
America had a greater advantage than all of them combined.
And rebuilt the nations it just defeated.
Musk: “The United States actually helped rebuild countries. So it helped rebuild Europe, it helped rebuild Japan. This is very unusual behavior, almost unprecedented.”
Not almost unprecedented.
It had never happened. Not once in 5,000 years of recorded civilization.
The nation with the power to take everything chose to rebuild instead.
Enemies became allies. Rubble became economies. Surrender became partnership.
Germany went from ashes to the economic engine of Europe in a single generation.
Japan went from unconditional surrender to the third largest economy on earth.
Three years after the war, America was flying food into Berlin.
Into the capital of the country that just tried to end the free world.
That decision reshaped every economy, every alliance, and every trade route on the planet.
Billions of people lifted out of poverty over the next half century trace back to one moment. One nation choosing restraint over domination.
No other country in history can make that claim. Not one.
Musk: “There’s always like, well America’s done bad things. Well of course America’s done bad things, but one needs to look at the whole track record.”
Every nation on earth has blood in its history.
But the measure of a nation was never its worst chapter.
It’s what it does when nobody can stop it.
When nobody could stop America, it fed its enemies and rebuilt their cities.
You’re being told every day that this country is something to be ashamed of.
By people who have no idea what the world looks like without it.
Every free market. Every open border for trade. Every democracy that took root outside Europe stands in the shadow of that single decision.
The values that built this country didn’t just shape America.
They shaped the modern world.
AI is about to hand a small number of people a power advantage that makes nuclear monopoly look primitive.
1945 was the first test.
AI is the last.
That power is going to exist. The only question left is who holds it.
The most powerful thing America ever did wasn’t building the bomb.
It was having the power to take everything and choosing not to.
The people trying hardest to tear that story down have never built a single thing worth defending.
America turns 250 today.
Let me read back the resume.
We started by telling a king to pound sand, in writing.
By 1803 we bought half a continent from France for about four cents an acre.
We fought a war with ourselves and somehow stayed one country.
We strung a railroad across the entire thing.
We handed the world the lightbulb, the telephone, and the airplane in about thirty years flat.
Then a man named Willis Carrier invented air conditioning and made half the planet actually livable.
You are welcome, Texas. You are welcome, Dubai.
Twice the whole world caught fire, and twice we showed up and helped put it out.
We split the atom.
We put men on the moon in 1969.
Then we went back and hit golf balls up there, because why not.
We invented jazz, blues, rock and roll, and hip-hop, and the whole planet is still dancing to it.
We put a burger and fries on every corner of the earth.
We built rockets that fly themselves home and land standing straight up.
We flew a helicopter on Mars.
We launched a car into actual space and it is still out there cruising.
We also invented ranch dressing and somehow talked the entire world into putting it on pizza.
Priorities.
We even invented three of our own sports so we could win them.
Baseball, basketball, and football.
Real football, the kind with hands, because we named it and we are not taking corrections.
The rest of the planet can keep soccer, which is fine, we are hosting it in our backyard this summer anyway.
And yes, Canadian football exists, wider field, extra man, one fewer down, and we try very hard not to think about it.
Frankly it was generous of us to invent our own games.
If we put all that energy into soccer, nobody else would ever lift that trophy again.
We would win it so often they would just rename it the America’s Cup and hand us the keys.
You are welcome for the suspense.
And in 2026 we threw a birthday so big a German tourist live-tweeted our gas stations to 750,000 people.
Not every chapter was clean.
We argued, we stumbled, we fixed what we broke, and we kept building.
That is the whole trick.
Two hundred and fifty years in, and we are still the loudest, brightest, most improbable experiment on the map.
Not bad for a country that started as a strongly worded letter to a king.
Happy birthday, America.
🦋
@MaryBowdenMD@MaleNurseRN@Tesla Trust me you'll regret not getting a Tesla. The Full Self Driving is worth getting over the anger, also putting your family in the safest vehicles in the world should mean a lot.