Basil Copeland

[@instapundit @instapundit]

Globalize the Reconquista!

[Juanita Broaddrick @atensnut]

Where are my Arkansas Senators?

@SenTomCotton @JohnBoozman

[Ant Middleton @antmiddleton]

Does anyone know what hospital the Southport child murderer has been admitted to? I’d like to pay him a visit…

[NSTRIKE @NSTRIKE1231]

🇮🇷🇺🇸The economic and military backbone of the Iranian regime has just been systematically severed—as catastrophic U.S. precision airstrikes completely isolate the country’s most vital maritime chokepoint, plunging Tehran into an existential crisis.

According to an explosive report by The Telegraph, devastating U.S. Air Force strikes have obliterated the critical bridge and rail networks connecting the strategic port city of Bandar Abbas to the rest of Iran. The relentless bombardment has effectively transformed the city of 500,000—which single-handedly handles nearly half of the entire nation’s international trade—into an isolated island. Crucially, the offensive has trapped Iran’s primary naval headquarters within the city limits. This vital naval hub, which dictates Tehran's ability to project power and threaten the global energy flow through the Strait of Hormuz, is now being methodically dismantled by routine American airstrikes pounding the facility two to three times every single day.

This operation represents a masterclass in strategic paralysis, effectively breaking Iran’s back without the need for a ground invasion. By severing Bandar Abbas from the mainland and reducing its premier naval base to rubble on a daily routine, the U.S. has simultaneously choked off Iran’s economic lifeblood and neutralized its ability to hold the global economy hostage via the Strait of Hormuz. This devastating interdiction campaign proves that Tehran's aggressive regional posturing has backfired catastrophically—leaving the regime economically suffocated, militarily castrated, and utterly powerless to stop the systematic destruction of its core strategic assets.

[mike bski @BskiMike22802]

Bernie. Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.

Let me get this straight, because I want to make sure I am reading your economics homework correctly, and I did not eat a bowl of alphabet soup this morning so bear with me. You just listed UnitedHealth's $5.48 billion quarterly profit as proof of corporate greed. Cute. Except that profit happened WHILE the Affordable Care Act — the law that guarantees these insurers a captive, subsidized, taxpayer-fed customer base — has been the law of the land for fifteen years. You are not exposing corporate greed, Senator. You are reading me the receipt for your own bill. The ACA did not shrink the insurance industry. It turned it into a government-guaranteed cash cow, and now you are shocked, SHOCKED, that the cow got fat. Eats soup with a fork, this one.

And here is the part that should really sting. Your own party just finished a 43-day shutdown demanding MORE money be poured into that exact system, because the temporary COVID subsidies YOUR PARTY wrote into the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — zero Republican votes on either bill, by the way — expired right on schedule, exactly as YOU designed them to. Not a single Republican voted to end those subsidies. You did. Then you shut down the government to admit, out loud, on the record, that a law literally named the AFFORDABLE Care Act cannot survive without emergency pandemic cash. That is not an insult from me. That is a confession from you.

So now the solution is Medicare for All. Naturally. Because when a fifteen-year-old government program made the insurance companies richer, the answer is obviously MORE government program, just bigger. If ignorance is bliss you must be the happiest man in the Senate. Independent estimates put full single-payer implementation at somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the ENTIRE federal budget. Forty to sixty percent, Senator. Larger than Social Security. Larger than defense. You want me to hand over half the country's checkbook to the same apparatus that just admitted its last healthcare experiment doesn't work without a subsidy IV drip.

Let's talk about who's asking. You have served in the United States government for something like forty years between the House and Senate, and by my count the bills you personally got across the finish line as lead sponsor could be counted on one hand, mostly involving the naming of federal buildings. Somewhere out there is a tree tirelessly producing oxygen for you, Senator, and it owes itself an apology for the return on investment. This is also the same man who, as a young idealist, tried out communal living on a hippie commune and did not exactly stick around long enough to collect a pension from it. Now you want the reins to fifty percent of the national budget. I keep hearing "tax the rich" out of a man worth several million dollars who charters private jets on his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour because, in his own words, he isn't waiting in line at United with the rest of us peasants. Bless your heart. That is rich even by Congressional standards. Couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel, but sure, hand him the checkbook.

And before you tell me capitalism failed and it's finally socialism's turn — how's that working out for your ideological younger brother in New York? Zohran Mamdani just announced a THIRTY MILLION DOLLAR government grocery store in a city his own comptroller says is worse than broke. Kansas City tried this. Erie, Kansas tried this. That is not a hunch, Senator, that is a lab result, and I am a science teacher, so let me walk you through the peer review.

An experiment only counts as science if it has been REPLICATED. Not run once. Run again. And again. Under different conditions, different continents, different decades, different "well THIS time we'll do it right" true believers standing at the podium. So let's replicate it together, shall we, because apparently nobody handed you the lab notes.

Trial one: the USSR, 1920s and 1930s. Stalin seized the farms, collectivized the kulaks, and centrally planned the harvest. Result: the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Ukraine that starved somewhere between five and ten million people to death while grain was actively being EXPORTED past their starving bodies. That is not a rounding error. That is a control group that died.

Trial two: Cuba, 1959 onward. Castro nationalized every business, every farm, every bank on the island. Sugar production, once the envy of the hemisphere, collapsed. The economy shrank thirty-five percent in a single decade when the Soviet training wheels came off. Extreme poverty today sits near eighty-eight percent. Same experiment. Same result.

Trial three: Venezuela, sitting on some of the largest oil reserves on the PLANET, nationalized its oil industry and ran the socialist playbook to the letter. Production collapsed from three and a half million barrels a day to under one million. Hyperinflation peaked past sixty-three THOUSAND percent. Nine million people fled. You cannot bribe your way out of the results with oil money. We tried. It's in the data.

Trial four, and this one should make every teacher in America wince: China's Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1962. Mao abolished private farming, herded peasants into communes, melted down their pots and pans for backyard steel that was too low-grade to use for anything. Somewhere between fifteen and forty-five million people starved. Some regions saw cannibalism. That is not a typo. That is what happens when central planners replace the price system with a five-year plan and a slogan.

Trial five: North Korea, present day, running the same command economy with the Juche twist. Famine in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands to over a million. Markets are technically illegal and thrive anyway in the shadows, because human beings will trade even when their government threatens to shoot them for it.

Trial six is my personal favorite because it is the cleanest natural experiment in the history of economics: East versus West Germany. Same people. Same language. Same culture. Same starting point in 1945. One half got markets, one half got the Stasi and collectivized industry. East German productivity settled at roughly thirty to seventy-five percent of the West's, and the population had to build a WALL to stop its own citizens from swimming, tunneling, and hot-air-ballooning their way out. Nobody builds a wall to keep people from fleeing prosperity, Senator.

Trial seven: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975 to 1979. They abolished money entirely. No markets. No private property. Total state control, straight out of the textbook you apparently keep on your nightstand. One point seven to three million people, roughly a quarter of the country, died of starvation, overwork, and execution in FOUR YEARS.

And for the extra credit column: Ethiopia's Derg collectivization, Tanzania's Ujamaa villages, Yugoslavia's market-socialism ceiling, Vietnam before it finally abandoned the model, India's decades of License Raj stagnation, and Poland and the rest of the Eastern Bloc running factories that burned three times the steel per unit of output compared to the free market next door. Every single trial, same hypothesis, same result. I have seen middle schoolers design better controlled experiments during a volcano science fair.

That is not one anecdote, Bernie. That is a stack of peer-reviewed, historically documented, independently verified trials spanning four continents and a full century, and the conclusion section reads the same every time: shortages, queues, corruption, and a body count north of a hundred million people once you tally every collectivized farm, every purged kulak, and every commune that ran out of rice. If an experiment fails this many times in this many labs, a real scientist stops blaming the equipment and starts questioning the hypothesis. You, apparently, would rather run trial number eight on 340 million Americans and call it "finally getting it right." Trying to reason with some folks really is like trying to baptize a cat.

Quinn's First Law of Liberalism: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You want cheaper healthcare, you get record insurer profits. You want affordable food, you get a thirty-million-dollar failed grocery store. You want to fight the oligarchy, you fly private. Every single time. Set your watch by it.

I keep asking Democrats this question and I never get an answer: what have YOU actually done to help people, versus just handing out someone else's money? Because handouts without a ladder out is not compassion. It is a leash. And I think deep down you know that, Senator, or you wouldn't need the private jet to get away from the people you claim to be fighting for. You're about as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it comes to actually running anything, but boy can you point fingers.

You are the human version of period cramps on this topic, Bernie, and I mean that with the utmost respect for a man who has spent forty years discovering new ways to spend money he didn't earn. Has a leak in the think tank if he genuinely believes THIS is the moment socialism finally works. Unless your name is Google, Senator, you need to stop acting like you know everything about running an economy you have personally never had to run.

But what do I know. I am only a medically retired Army combat medic and a science teacher who actually reads the Congressional Budget Office numbers before I open my mouth about a trillion-dollar healthcare takeover.

@JoJoFromJerz @atrupar @TheYoungTurks #MAGA #Veterans #Trump

[Alice Smith @TheAliceSmith]

Every time a black person is race swapped into a white historical or mythic movie, it is an accusation that black people have no culture of their own.

[Basil Copeland @CopelandBasil]

@RyanWeather Thanks for the clarification. Looking forward to your work on this.

[Basil Copeland @CopelandBasil]

@RyanWeather Interesting. But is the data being used "homogenized" using questionable procedures?

[Derrick Evans @DerrickEvans4WV]

Either make some arrests or stop talking about all the election fraud.

It’s past time to hold people accountable.

[Derrick Evans @DerrickEvans4WV]

We literally have a Muslim invader taunting us by sitting at the desk of George Washington.

Americans better grow a backbone before it’s too late.

[Basil Copeland @CopelandBasil]

@atensnut Juanita, it is conceivable, once you realize that the population mix is not the same today as it was in 2001. What is inconceivable to me, is "Americans" supporting the influx of Islamic immigrants that made this happen. Only made possible by TWANLOC.

[The American Storm @BigJoeBastardi]

These are not heat indices, but actual temperatures. Let that put some perspective on how bad the 1930s were. Only 6 states have had their record highs set since 2000

[DogeDesigner @cb_doge]

"I will die in America. I'm not going anywhere. I might go to Mars but that will be part of America." 🇺🇸

一 Elon Musk

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

I was 20. He was 53. He had two or three bronze stars. I don’t remember. A moment of clarity emerged from the chemo. In 10 days he’d be in Arlington.

I said Dad knowing all you know now. The loss of friends. The loss to the nation. The loss of innocence. Years of painful chemo from Agent Orange. The loss to your family. Me just 20. My brother just 8. All the pain Vietnam caused. If you went back would you fight again?

Dad lowered his piercing blue eyes as his massive Ivy league intellect rolled into gear. Then he said one word. Yes. And closed his eyes for a moment.

I didn’t ask why. I knew why. The why was the devastation. The why was the millions killed by communists in Vietnam and Cambodia once America lowered its guard and walked away.

He hated LBJ and Westmoreland and McNamara and the whiz kids and the hippies who spat on him but loved the mission itself. The defeat of communism. Not because of its ideals and decay and chaos and godlessness but because of the murder and starvation and pain and suffering that communist rationalize.

Communism has killed tens of millions. Full stop. It’s the deadliest human experiment ever. Full stop. An experiment that’s useless because we know how utterly ends. Full stop.

I didn’t need to ask him why.

He told me before that he went to Vietnam because Konrad’s fight evil that’s what we do. That’s what WE do.

I often wish he hadn’t. But. I. I am glad he did. Without that choice he wouldn’t be the same man. He wouldn’t be dad.

Dad’s anger raged at time over American policy and the atrocities we are so very guilty of. Agent Orange. Bombing Cambodia. Feckless policies that lost us the war and cost lives both American and Vietnamese. But. He believed. And so do I. That an imperfect America, his America, fights against evil.

He. Not a warrior in Vietnam but a medic. A medic who, at times, killed. A medic who more often saved.

He, my dad, died proud. He died without question.

Communism is at our doorstep once again. Once again the whiz kids, his fellow Ivy League alumnus, are telling us to go slow, pull punches, dial down rhetoric. Play nice with China they say. Mamdani is just a socialist they tell us. The UK will be fine they say. Voices begging us to give in and play nice.

Dad would not give in. He would fight. Fight for those who are poor and hungry or will be when a red wave smothers the world. Fight.

He would fight because the Communist experiment is not new. He knew, we know, how it will end.

I love you dad. LOVE is worth the fight.

Post Script - The people yelling for peace are not bad. The socialist ideals are not bad. The left learning communists in our institutions are not bad. Dad love them all. He loved America. But love should not be blind.

He loved America but knew that America IS dangerous. America is lethal. America drops nuclear bombs. America sprays agent orange. America destroys nations like Iraq and gives up too soon letting ISIS, the Khmer Rouge, the Taliban win. America swings too far right into McCarthy when threatened. America always makes grave mistakes.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto's knew to. He warned Japan not to wake the sleeping giant. He was right.

America is dangerous. But Communism is deadly evil. Mass murder on epic scale dealdy. Do not confuse the two.

I say this because we are at a turning point. We can fight Communism now. We can defend the constitution from enemies foreign and domestic now. We must fight now because if Communism takes over the sleeping giant will wake. Both sides will lose when the giant awakes.

The protests and far left communists in our streets want us to think they are not dangerous. They are. China wants to believe if a war breaks out they can win. They cannot.

We have a choice :
1) stand strong now, deter the evil, and stem the tide that’s dragging us far left
2) give communism room to murder and deceive
3) wait until men like dad, the sleep giants, wake.

Only one of the choices saves lives.

[Stephen Miller @StephenM]

Half of all college graduates in NYC are immigrants or from immigrant households. So when observers say college grads in NYC are embracing communism this is not a home-grown phenomenon.

[Alice Smith @TheAliceSmith]

The greatest force for stripping away the bedrock of Christian values from British life has been the Church of England.

[🇺🇸 Mike Davis 🇺🇸 @mrddmia]

Keir Starmer should be publicly tried then executed.

[Clandestine @WarClandestine]

While the normies are at each other’s throats over the details of a deal they have not read, I’m on cloud nine, because I can see what’s happening.

Obama, his co-conspirators, and his handlers, are being hunted.

The uranium is the key that unlocks the door of all doors. The uranium carries an isotopic signature that can be traced to its origin, and will confirm if any other nations or entities supplied Iran with uranium.

Flashback to 06/07/2026, just 9 days ago, Trump said that Iran “got all of this uranium during Obama”. Trump seems to be suggesting that someone supplied Iran with uranium during the Obama administration.

It doesn’t take a lot of detective work to deduce that Trump is almost assuredly referring to Uranium One, which he has called out a plethora of times in the past, calling out Hillary and Obama for giving 20% of our Uranium to Russia. Check his tweets from back in the day, keyword “uranium”.

If any uranium in Iran is found to have originated from Uranium One, as Trump has hinted, Obama, Hillary, and the entire brass of the Obama administration, would be guilty of treason, for supplying WMDs to our enemies in wartime. There’s also no way that a crime of this magnitude could be tried in the civilian courts. It would have to be handled by the military via tribunal.

That’s what’s at stake here. That’s why the uranium is so important, and that’s why Trump’s main focus this entire time, has been getting his hands on the uranium. We get the uranium, the entire house of cards comes crashing down.

As for how many assets get unfrozen, or how much neighboring nations invest in Iran down the road, I could not care less. If we get the uranium, all the other problems take care of themselves.

EYES ON THE PRIZE! THE URANIUM!

[The American Storm @BigJoeBastardi]

I think Solar panels have a place. On houses. Or over parking lots. But how in any rational world, do you destroy vegetation and local ecosystems with something that results in more heat?

[Varad Mehta @varadmehta]

She really is vile antisemitic filth and should be removed from the country immediately.