St. John the Philosopher

Radio personality and YouTube creator.

[St. John the Philosopher @johnphilosopher]

@TheBrandonMorse There’s a thrill to turning out the lights for a moment to appreciate the dark. But if the lights never come back on, we’re just fumbling in the black and it’s not fun.

[St. John the Philosopher @johnphilosopher]

@TheBrandonMorse Oddly enough, deconstructions of classical heroism (Watchmen, The Boys, Invincible, etc.) only work if the meta-context of truly good hero stories existing and thriving.

[Samurai Shiba @SamuraiShibaJP]

There's a saying on American social media:

"Be the American that Japanese people think you are."

I'm Japanese. I've lived in Tokyo my whole life.

So let me tell you what we actually say about you, when you're not in the room.

"When someone falls down on the street, we pretend not to see. We're protecting their pride. Americans run straight at them. They don't care about the pride. They care about the knee." (Office worker, 38)

"An American will stop four lanes of traffic for a family of ducks. And then everyone in the cars claps for the ducks." (Taxi driver, 61)

"If you lend an American a pen, you will never see it again. If you need a kidney, they'll ask your blood type." (Nurse, 45)

"At kids' soccer games, they cheer when the other team's kid scores. The other team's parents look confused. Then they cheer too." (Youth soccer coach, 52, lived one year in Ohio)

"A man sneezed on a bus in Chicago. Eleven strangers said 'Bless you.' He said 'thank you' eleven times. Nobody on that bus thought this was strange." (University student, 21)

"At an airport in Texas, I watched a soldier try to pay for his lunch. The cashier said someone already had. He asked who. She said, 'Somebody who didn't want you to know.'" (Retired teacher, 70)

"American fathers cannot braid hair. But they will watch a video at midnight for an hour so their daughter's hair looks right on picture day." (Hair stylist, 33)

"I ran the Chicago Marathon once. Strangers stood in the cold for hours holding signs for people they will never meet. At mile 20, a man I'd never seen read the name off my bib and screamed it like he'd raised me." (Runner, 48)

"When Americans get lost, they ask a stranger. If the stranger is also lost, they become a team." (Tour guide, 39)

"They ask the waitress her name. And then they remember it." (Restaurant owner, 66)

And one more. From my father. He's 76. He doesn't say much about anything. This is the longest thing I have ever heard him say about another country.

"Every time something terrible happens in America, I watch the news, and I look for one thing.

The people running toward it.

There are always so many."

So, America.

You don't have to become the Americans we think you are.

We're not imagining you.

We're remembering you.

[St. John the Philosopher @johnphilosopher]

There are Japanese teenagers that would make better Americans than most American college professors.

[Samurai Shiba @SamuraiShibaJP]

My wife teaches English at a high school in Japan.

Last week, she gave her students a writing prompt:

"If you could be American for one day, what would you do?"

She read me the answers at dinner. She had to stop three times because she was laughing too hard.

"Own a pickup truck. I don't need a truck. I just want to say, 'Don't worry, I'll grab the truck.'"

"Have a garage. Not for a car. For 'stuff.'"

"Buy 48 rolls of toilet paper at Costco. I live with my parents. I want them anyway."

"Get a free refill. Then another one. Then another one. Until they ask me to leave. They won't ask me to leave."

"Water my lawn at 6 a.m. in a bathrobe and wave at my neighbor."

"Call my teacher 'dude.'" (My wife underlined this one. Twice.)

"Hang a flag on my house for no reason. Just because it's Tuesday."

And a lot of them wrote some version of this:

"Tell my dad I love him. Out loud. At the dinner table."

Then she had the class vote for the best answer.

The winner wasn't funny. It came from the funniest kid in the class. The truck kid.

"Stand up when the anthem plays, put my hand on my heart, and look around and see everybody else doing it too."

My wife asked him why he picked that one.

He shrugged.

"Because then you're never proud alone."

[Eric Burlison @EricBurlison]

The 2024 abortion amendment passed with 51.6% after more than $31 million in spending.

Missourians were promised health care and got abortion up to birth.

Amendment 3 corrects it. Vote YES on 3.

[Samurai Shiba @SamuraiShibaJP]

In 1912, Tokyo sent Washington 3,000 cherry trees.

You know that part.

Here's the part almost nobody in America knows.

Three years later, America sent something back. Dogwood trees. Your tree.

Japan fell in love with it.

Today the dogwood is one of the most common street trees in Japan. Every spring, millions of Japanese people walk to work under your flowers. Most of them have no idea where they came from.

One of the original trees is still alive. It stands outside a high school in Tokyo. 26 feet tall. More than 110 years old.

Then came September 11th.

A Japanese singer was so moved by what happened in New York that she wrote a song about peace, and named it after your tree.

"Hanamizuki." Dogwood.

It's a wish that the people you love will be happy for a hundred years.

It became one of the most-sung karaoke songs in Japan. My sister played it at her wedding.

So tonight, somewhere in Japan, in a tiny karaoke room, someone is singing about an American tree, born from an American tragedy, wishing someone a hundred happy years.

America, you gave us a tree.

We gave it a song.

[St. John the Philosopher @johnphilosopher]

Fraud bounties are live! I called for this back when they were still trying to start DOGE. It’s all about incentives.

[Rapid Response 47 @RapidResponse47]

.@POTUS: Today, I'm thrilled to announce the Fraud Whistleblower Incentive Program. Americans will now be able to report cases of corruption and theft of taxpayer dollars in their communities via a new website — and they'll be given a commission of one percent.

[Frank Turek @DrFrankTurek]

We're supposed to take care of the poor, but the scriptures never say that's the government's responsibility. That's the church's responsibility.

[St. John the Philosopher @johnphilosopher]

@REVWUTRUTH Back in the day, this was the caricature of the male cheerleader that existed solely in the minds of TV sitcom school bullies. Actual male cheerleaders were big dudes whose sole purpose was tossing girls into the air.

Whatever this is, is disgusting.

[March For Our Lives @AMarch4OurLives]

The United States has more guns in civilian hands than every military in the world combined.

[St. John the Philosopher @johnphilosopher]

Skin cells die. Brain cells die. But the fat cells around my midsection must have accepted Jesus because they are freaking immortal!

[St. John the Philosopher @johnphilosopher]

Hot take: Bring back the guillotine. Pretty sure no one survived the successful removal of their head.

[ZUBY: @ZubyMusic]

People who support communism are genuinely retarded (or evil). Can't sugarcoat it.

[St. John the Philosopher @johnphilosopher]

@TJMoe28 A caveat: modern feminists seek to live more like the CARICATURE of a man derived from their dogma.

[St. John the Philosopher @johnphilosopher]

So many generations will never know the satisfaction of hanging up on someone with a phone that has a bell in it.

[Frank Turek @DrFrankTurek]

It's been put this way, that in Islam, your son dies for Allah. In Christianity, God's son dies for you.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯 @japan_nobunaga]

At Ground Zero, after the last living person was pulled out, the search dogs stopped eating.

So the police did something nobody had written down in any manual.

They climbed into the rubble, lay down, and pretended to be alive.

More than 300 dogs worked the World Trade Center site. They came from every corner of the country, on trucks and in cargo holds, with handlers who had been trained to do one thing. Find people who are still breathing under the ground.

That is what a search and rescue dog is built for. Not bodies. Life. They are trained on live human scent. When they find it, they bark, they dig, they light up, and the handler rewards them, and the whole thing means something.

The last living person recovered from Ground Zero was a woman named Genelle Guzman-McMillan. She had been buried for 27 hours. A dog found her.

She was the last.

After that, the dogs kept going out on twelve-hour shifts, across sixteen acres of smoldering steel, at temperatures that burned their paws, and they found nobody.

Nobody.

Day after day.

The handlers noticed it first. The dogs were changing. Their tails were down. They were not eating. They would come off the pile and lie flat and not look at anyone.

A veterinarian named Cindy Otto, who spent ten days there working night shifts to care for the animals, put it plainly. The dogs had been sent to find life, and every day they were finding the opposite.

It was breaking them.

An NYPD officer named Famiglietti described what happened next.

They pulled everybody off the rubble. Then they asked for volunteers.

The volunteers, police officers, went out into the debris and hid themselves. Under beams. In voids. Curled up in pockets of concrete. They were told to lie down like they were hurt. Then the handlers sent the dogs in.

Picture that.

A grown man with a badge, a man who had spent the last week pulling friends out of that same pile, lying down in it on purpose. Face down. Holding still. Waiting for a dog.

And the dog comes over the top of the wreckage, and catches the scent, and barks, and digs, and finds a person who is warm and moving and alive.

And the handler says good girl, good boy, and the whole team celebrates.

They called them mock finds.

They did it for the dogs.

They did it so the dogs would remember what they were for.

One of those dogs was a two-year-old golden retriever named Bretagne. She came from Texas with her handler, Denise Corliss. It was her first deployment. They worked ten days at Ground Zero. They found no survivors.

But firefighters would come off the pile, stone-faced, not speaking, and see the dog, and something would break open in them. They would kneel down. They would put their face in her fur.

One day a man walked up to Bretagne and started petting her. He told Corliss his best friend loved golden retrievers.

Corliss asked where his friend was.

The man pointed at the pile.

"He's in there somewhere."

He kept petting the dog.

Bretagne went on to work Hurricane Katrina and Rita. She retired at 10. She was the last known surviving search dog of 9/11.

On June 6, 2016, at age 16, she was carried into a veterinary office in Texas to be put to sleep.

Outside, a dozen firefighters from her fire department stood in a line in their dress uniforms, in the heat, and saluted as she went past.

They draped her in an American flag on the way out.

Three hundred dogs went into that pile looking for the living.

They found one.

And when they could not find any more, the men they worked beside laid down in the rubble and let themselves be found, so the dogs would not lose heart.

That is the whole story of Ground Zero, really.

Nobody could save the dead.

So they saved each other. 🇺🇸

[Immortal Tessy @TheresaArueyin1]

Can we normalize thanking Jesus in the morning before we do anything else.

[Mike Winger @MikeWingerii]

The bad stuff you think is true about Christianity is actually true about Islam.

[J.D. Jones @BlueCheezWhisky]

Read more Dostoevsky.