The American deer camp was, between approximately 1880 and 1990, the autumn ritual of every rural family in the upper Midwest, the Northeast, and the Appalachians.
A cabin in the woods. Three or four men, three generations sometimes, who got there on the Friday before opening day, lit the wood stove, drank coffee that had been on the burner since 4am, played cards, told the same stories they had told the year before, and went out at first light on Saturday with rifles their grandfathers had owned.
A buck taken cleanly with one shot. Field-dressed in the snow. Hung in the woodshed. Butchered the next weekend in the garage with the family. Forty pounds of venison in the chest freezer. Steaks for the winter. Sausage made by the grandfather with a recipe nobody had written down. A roast for Thanksgiving. The hide tanned and turned into mittens for the youngest grandson.
The deer was free. The freezer was full. The boys learned to shoot, to clean a rifle, to gut an animal, to butcher it, to thank the woods for the deer, to be quiet for hours at dawn in the cold and notice things.
Roughly 14 million Americans hunted in 1980. By 2020 that number was 11.5 million, and the average hunter age had risen from 35 to 51. The next generation is not coming up.
Suburbanization removed the woods from the back door. Liability fears closed private lands. Public hunting access shrank. Time pressure on working families killed the long weekend at camp. The cultural drift made hunting socially suspect, then unfashionable, then, in some quarters, taboo.
The number of American teenagers who have ever fired a rifle, gutted an animal, or watched their grandfather butcher a deer in the garage on a November Sunday afternoon is, in 2026, statistically vanishing.
The freezer that used to be full of free, lean, grass-fed wild protein is full of ground beef from a Smithfield CAFO in Iowa.
The skill is one generation deep. If the grandfather did not pass it to the father, and the father did not pass it to the son, the chain is broken. YouTube is, at the moment, where the few remaining young hunters are getting most of their training.
A small American tradition that fed families for a century, taught a sequence of practical and moral lessons no textbook can replace, and connected three generations to the land their ancestors lived on, is closing down quietly, camp by camp, season by season.
The cabin is still there. The stove still works. The buck is still in the woods.
The grandfather is in the cemetery on the hill above the cabin. He cannot take the boy himself.
Somebody else has to.
If our Founding Fathers heard about CBDCs, kill switches, FISA, and geofences, they would probably overthrow the government all over again.
Protect the Fourth Amendment at ALL costs.
🚨 WOW. California governor candidate Steve Hilton (R) exposes that Gavin Newsom and Democrats shoved a $1,350 PER MONTH CHARGE for 20 years on every new single family home into a bill
"They snuck it into the bill that was supposed to SOLVE their housing crisis!"
"Vehicle Miles Travelled, and it's yet another sneaky, stealthy way that the Democrats in charge of California want to gouge you for the crime of driving your car."
"They're trying to punish single-family homes. They want to stop single-family homes from being built, and so they're going to put this charge on it, VMT, because if you build a new home, people are going to drive to their new home. That's vehicle miles travelled."
"They are trying to sneak in a charge, wait for it, of $1,350 per month for 20 years on every new single-family home. And this is in the bill, AB130, that Gavin Newsom said would solve the housing crisis. They don't want to solve the housing crisis."
California needs to wake up and vote red for once!
The greatest economic experiment in America plays out daily between California and Texas, and the results scream one truth: markets work, bureaucrats don't.
California collected $220 billion in state taxes in 2023 while Texas managed with $78 billion. You'd expect California's superior public services to justify spending nearly three times more per capita. Instead, California leads the nation in homelessness (181,000 people), hosts crumbling infrastructure despite the nation's highest gas taxes, and watches middle-class families flee to states that don't treat productivity as a crime. Sacramento's bureaucrats burn through $600 billion annually (state and local combined) yet somehow can't keep the lights on during summer or prevent human waste from covering sidewalks in San Francisco.
Texas collected far less but delivered what people actually want: functioning infrastructure, reliable energy, and the revolutionary concept that you keep most of what you earn. Since 2010, Texas gained 4 million residents while California hemorrhaged over 500,000. This isn't random migration; it represents human capital fleeing confiscatory taxation in search of economic freedom. Tesla, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard didn't relocate to Texas for the weather.
Voluntary exchange creates wealth while coercive redistribution destroys it. Every dollar California's legislature redistributes first gets extracted from someone who earned it, then filtered through bureaucratic machinery that consumes massive resources while producing zero value. Meanwhile, every dollar Texans keep in their pockets gets invested, saved, or spent according to individual preference—generating real economic activity.
California's political class promises paradise through taxation while delivering dysfunction through redistribution. Texas proves you can fund essential government services without turning citizens into tax cattle for an ever-expanding administrative state.
Illinois State had an incredible season that ended up just short of the FCS Championship. They are the first college football team to play 17+ games since the 19th century.
Illinois State end zone
The end zones will reflect what teams have in their home stadiums. “Redbirds” for Illinois State and “Montana State” for MSU’s end zone. #FCSChampionship