Sometimes you don’t see the return on the work until YEARS later.
To everyone who has donated to The X, this is what you’re helping make possible: staying in these kids’ lives long enough to watch boys become men.
Congratulations, Isiah. Proud of you! 🇺🇸❤️
Being Apolitical is NOT cool or virtuous.
I hear good people say they “don’t care about politics” like that’s a badge of honor for somehow being “above it all” but this is privileged ignorance regardless of reasoning.
Good people will say to my face they “don’t care” about politics and what that actually means to me is I have to now fight double for you.
You aren’t going to pick the harvest but you still have to eat, so I guess I am going to pick for both of us.
Oh, and there’s a wolf stalking me but that’s okay, I’ll stay out here by myself, while looking over my shoulder and do your work too.
Now expand that to a whole generation of young adults.
Being politically illiterate is just as bad as being deficient in any category because it does in fact “matter” whether you choose to participate or not.
Politics decide our FREEDOM, the most important thing human beings could ever possess.
You like practicing your faith? Thank someone who “cares” about politics.
Christians are some of the worst culprits of this thinking.
Being politically literate is hard but it’s easy to start. Stay grounded in your values and talk to someone who IS knowledgable.
I always tell my kids, don’t try to learn about God from a non believer.
The same is true for politics. Someone who “doesn’t care” but then spouts off a talking point from a viral meme with zero context is NOT going to help you think.
You can value kindness, but without political literacy, open borders or crime leniency or endless social services or DEI or Free Palestine may seem kind…
BUT,
You have to know what the results of those decisions actually mean and what they lead to in order to judge whether they are in fact “kind” and those facts are often left of the memes.
Please start caring about politics, about policies, about protecting freedom of speech, religion, security, education…
It all matters and I would love some company in the field.
It is with profound sorrow that we bid farewell to Jeanne Gibson, our beloved Rosie the Riveter, has passed away today, July 29, 2026, at the remarkable age of 100. With her passing, we don't simply mourn the loss of a beloved friend, we honor the life of an American hero whose courage, dedication, and unwavering spirit helped shape history, and will continue to inspire generations to come.📷📷
At just 18 years old, Jeanne left her home in Minnesota in the summer of 1944 and answered her nation's call, becoming a welder at Todd Pacific Shipyards in Seattle. With determination and grit, she helped build destroyers that strengthened the Allied war effort during World War II. She later continued her service with the Army Transportation Corps in Juneau, Alaska, embodying the resilience and patriotism of the Greatest Generation.
Yet Jeanne's legacy extended far beyond the war. She earned her Ph.D., dedicated three decades to teaching, earned her private pilot license, and spent the rest of her life proving that courage, determination, and purpose know no age.
In 2024, Jeanne and her fellow Rosies were collectively awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, one of our nation's highest civilian honors, recognizing the extraordinary women whose sacrifices and determination helped secure victory during World War II.
To all of us at Pacific Historic Parks, Jeanne was far more than a Rosie, she was family. She traveled to Hawaiʻi time and again to share her remarkable story with visitors, inspire local students, and ensure that the sacrifices of the Home Front would never be forgotten. Her radiant smile, generous heart, and boundless enthusiasm touched every life she encountered.
She had a special gift for encouraging young girls, reminding them that no dream was too big and no obstacle too great. Through her words and her example, she inspired generations to believe in themselves and pursue lives of courage, service, and purpose.
Jeanne remained a tireless advocate for preserving the legacy of the Rosies, volunteering at Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park on "Rosie Fridays" and ensuring the stories of the women who helped win the war would continue to inspire future generations.
In one of life's poignant moments, just days before her passing, Jeanne was celebrated with a Wall of Honor banner at the park she loved so dearly and recognized during a San Jose Earthquakes halftime ceremony honoring Bay Area heroes. It was a fitting tribute to a woman whose life was defined by selfless service, quiet strength, and extraordinary grace.
Though Jeanne has taken her final flight, her legacy will never fade. It lives on in every story she shared, every young person she inspired, every life she touched, and in the enduring example of courage she leaves behind.
Our hearts are with Jeanne's family, her fellow Rosies, and all who were blessed to know and love her.
Rest in peace, Jeanne Gibson.
Thank you for answering the call when your country needed you most. Thank you for showing generations what courage looks like. We will remember you always
I still can't get over how good this is. Conservatives have always stuck with the "It doesn't work" argument against Leftism while pointing to their charts and graphs, hoping people will follow along.
But THIS is the argument to make. 👇Leftism is ugly. It's repulsive. It's disgusting. It's lame. It's immoral. It's boring. It's depressing.
This isn't a fight between two competing economic models, one of which happens to work better. This is a fight between beauty and ugliness. Building and destruction. Thankfulness and resentment. Love and hate. Greatness and cowardice. Good and evil.
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.
🦋
Atlas Shrugged made simple:
1. Society runs on a small number of highly capable producers – industrialists, inventors, engineers – whose work everyone depends on but takes for granted.
2. The system starts rewarding need over achievement: the more capable you are, the more you’re expected to sacrifice for those who aren’t.
3. Success gets treated like a debt – taxed, regulated, resented – until the most capable start asking why they bother trying at all.
4. One by one, led by a man named John Galt, they simply withdraw – walking away rather than keep propping up a system that punishes them for producing.
5. Without them, the whole structure collapses, revealing that the “automatic” prosperity everyone assumed was actually being generated by specific, irreplaceable people.
6. Atlas is the Titan from Greek myth, condemned to carry the sky on his shoulders forever – Rand’s stand-in for the producer class, holding up civilization while getting blamed for it.
7. “Shrugged” is the whole argument in one word: Atlas doesn’t fight, doesn’t protest – he just quietly sets the weight down. Nobody realized the sky was being held up by anyone in particular, until the day it isn’t.
You don’t want us? We just go…🤷🏻♂️
My closing message to the University of Miami School of Law Class of 2026:
I challenge each of you to find work that’s meaningful: work that makes you feel like you’re doing more than just earning a paycheck, work that makes your community safer, and work that enriches the lives of the people around you.
But good worthy work in the public service is hard. Anything that's worth doing is. And it'll happen from time to time that you won't want to work that hard anymore, that you won't want to get up early or go to sleep late, that you'll want to take the easy way out for once.
It happens to us all the time.
It's in those moments that I think to myself of my grandfather, Enzo, who left a whole continent behind to find a new life for himself and his family. And of my grandmother, Janine, that scared girl in the fire escape, battered and bruised, but not beaten. And of my namesake, Kalman, who after his entire family, five children and a wife were murdered in the gas chambers, found love and renewal again.
Whenever, in your lives, you feel that life’s challenges are too many; when you feel tired or uninspired; when you sense yourself slacking or becoming self-righteous, think of all the people in your own lives—your parents, your grandparents, your teachers, and your friends—who have sacrificed, given so much, and worked so hard to give you the privilege of being here today. And it is such a privilege.
And when it comes time to decide how, and toward what end, to use that privilege, remember to pay these people back by paying your debt forward. Live lives of service to your community. Live lives of meaning, so that decades after you are gone, a young man or woman can speak of you the way I have spoken of my own grandparents.
Always remember to love your country.
A truck loaded with thousands of copies of Roget's Thesaurus spilled its load leaving New York.
Witnesses were stunned, startled, aghast, stupefied, confused, shocked, rattled, paralyzed, dazed, bewildered, surprised, dumbfounded, flabbergasted, confounded, astonished, and numbed.