Everything that America's reputation is built on, from WW2 to putting a man on the moon, was done as a ~90% White and Christian nation.
They didn’t fight for multiculturalism. They fought for their people, culture, and way of life.
Churchill knew his country was saved after Pearl Harbor. He slept “the sleep of the saved and thankful” that night because he knew the kind of men who were coming into the war on his side, the kind who could visit unspeakable violence against their own kin and yet endure and remain one country:
“Some said they were soft, others that they would never be united. They would fool around at a distance. They would never come to grips. They would never stand bloodletting... But I had studied the American Civil War, fought out to the last desperate inch. American blood flowed in my veins. I thought of a remark which Edward Grey had made to me more than thirty years before—that the United States is like ‘a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.’”
A reminder that the boiler is not just industrial capacity and raw materials and supply chains, as vital as they are. Those things are necessary but not sufficient.
It really is the strength and raw courage of men crazy enough to watch the whole first wave ashore on D-Day go down who then decide they are going into that hell, too.
If you sit down 24000 individual people and ask them to check the same box you will reliably get a ~1% error rate. There is a ton of research on this from form filling across a variety of industries. The only way you get a 0 defect rate over 24K ballots is if a fairly small group of people is consistently filling them out identically.
They actually have figures for this stuff. White males built roughly 30k miles of rail, Slaves built roughly 7k miles, and Chinese Immigrants built 690 miles.
When someone tells you that the Chinese or “immigrants” built American railroads. Just keep in mind that they put down roughly 690 miles of railroad.
Meanwhile the US railroad system in totality is around 144,000 miles.
so roughly 0.5% of our railroads were built by “immigrants” so to speak.
one of the single greatest tactic for your social life is the concept of "assumed familiarity". once you know this concept you notice it in every charismatic man. makes you instantly likable. just act like you've known others for years already.
White births up from 47.8% under Biden to 51.2% under Trump.
If negative net migration continues, White Americans will never become a minority.
And given that leftists aren’t having many kids, our country is going to get a lot more right wing in 20-30 years time.
You gotta love our military! Nothing says @USNavy like watching an outdoor showing of Top Gun on the deck of the USS Midway docked in San Diego.
Only in America! That’s why I love us!
Everyone is always rooting for you. Your parents want you to be a great son. Wife wants you to be a great husband. Your boss wants you to be a slam dunk hire. Every first date you’ve ever been on they’ve been rooting for you to get laid. Every time you started to tell a joke people hoped it would have a hilarious punch line. Your proximity to anyone is a reflection of themself, meaning the deck is never stacked against you, and your failures are completely your own
The funny thing is that German involvement in Huntsville did create a unique southern American and German blend of engineering excellence
As Charles Murray records in Apollo:
“What made this Germanic conservatism and precision remarkable was that by the late 1950s most of the people from Huntsville who were behaving this way weren't Germans at all, but the Americans who had been hired to work with them. Most of them were men from the small towns of the deep South, graduates of nearby engineering schools like Auburn and the University of Mississippi and Georgia Tech. The result was a combination of Germans like Eberhard Rees or Karl Heimburg or Walter Haeussermann—distinguished and courtly, talking about "ze vay ve do sings," very models of the rocket scientist—and Americans like Alexander A. McCool of Vicksburg, Mississippi...”
In 458 BC, Rome was on the brink of collapse.
An invading army had trapped the Roman consul and his legion in a mountain pass. Panic spread through the city. The Senate did the only thing they could think of:
They sent messengers to find a 60-year-old farmer plowing his field.
His name was Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. He had once been a senator, then lost his fortune paying his son's bail. Now he worked his own four-acre plot just to feed his family.
When the Senate's envoys arrived, they found him sweating behind a plow. They asked him to put on his toga so they could deliver an official message.
The message: Rome was making him dictator. Absolute power. Total command of the army. No checks. No oversight. No term limit.
He accepted.
Within 16 days, Cincinnatus had raised an army, marched out, surrounded the enemy, and forced their surrender. The republic was saved.
He had legal authority to rule for six months. He could have stayed. He could have expanded his power. He could have done what every other ruler in human history did when handed unlimited control.
Instead, he resigned on day 16.
He took off the toga, walked back to his farm, and finished plowing the field he'd left half-done.
Twenty years later, when Rome faced another crisis, they called him back. He was 80 years old. He took command, crushed the conspiracy, and resigned again, this time after just 21 days.
He died poor. On his farm.
2,200 years later, when George Washington was offered a kingship after winning the American Revolution, he refused and went home to Mount Vernon. The reason he was hailed as "the American Cincinnatus" is because Europeans literally could not believe a man who had won would willingly give up power.
King George III, on hearing Washington would resign rather than rule, said: "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world."
The lesson isn't that Cincinnatus was humble.
The lesson is that for most of human history, the people most qualified to lead were the ones who didn't want to. And the moment a society starts rewarding those who chase power instead of those who flee from it is the moment the republic begins to die.
Cincinnati, Ohio is named after him.
Most people who live there have no idea why.
The United States capital is in Washington D.C. for one reason almost nobody learns in school.
Congress got run out of Philadelphia by its own army.
In June 1783, just months after the Revolutionary War ended, around four hundred unpaid Continental soldiers marched on the Pennsylvania State House where the Continental Congress was meeting. They surrounded the building, jeered through the windows, jabbed bayonets at the doorway, and demanded their back pay.
Congress turned to Pennsylvania's state government and asked them to call out the militia to disperse the mob.
Pennsylvania refused.
The most powerful legislative body in the new nation realized, in real time, that it had no land of its own, no soldiers of its own, and no protection from the very state that hosted it. So they did the only thing they could do. They fled in the night.
That single humiliation, called the Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1783, is the reason there is a federal district at all. The framers later wrote into the Constitution that the seat of government would never again belong to any one state. It would belong only to itself.
But before that fix arrived, the capital wandered like a refugee.
Including Philadelphia, which served on and off five separate times, the capital of the United States has officially sat in nine different cities.
Baltimore, Maryland. Congress fled there in December 1776 when the British army was closing on Philadelphia and Washington's troops were freezing along the Delaware. They met in a tavern.
Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The capital was here for exactly one day in September 1777 before Congress decided to keep running.
York, Pennsylvania. They settled across the Susquehanna River for nine months. The Articles of Confederation, the country's first constitution, were drafted there. York is the only city outside the original thirteen state capitals that can credibly claim to have hosted the birth of American government.
Princeton, New Jersey. After the soldiers' mutiny, Congress relocated to Nassau Hall on the Princeton College campus, where the building still has a cannonball hole from the war.
Annapolis, Maryland. In December 1783, in the senate chamber of the Maryland State House, George Washington walked in, removed his sword, and resigned his commission as commander in chief of the army. He could have made himself king. Instead, he handed the war back to Congress and went home to farm. King George III, when he heard about it from across the Atlantic, reportedly said that if Washington really did that, he would be the greatest man in the world.
The Treaty of Paris, ending the Revolutionary War, was ratified in that same Annapolis room a few weeks later.
Trenton, New Jersey. Congress met there for a few weeks in late 1784.
New York City. From 1785 to 1790, this was the seat of government. George Washington was inaugurated there on the balcony of Federal Hall on Wall Street in April 1789. The Bill of Rights was drafted there. The first Supreme Court convened there. New Yorkers fully expected to be the permanent capital forever.
Then politics happened.
In June 1790, Thomas Jefferson hosted a private dinner at his rented New York home. Alexander Hamilton attended. James Madison attended. Hamilton needed Southern votes for his plan to have the federal government assume the war debts of the states. Madison and Jefferson, both Virginians, wanted something in return.
They wanted the capital out of the North.
The deal struck over that dinner table is now called the Compromise of 1790. The federal government would absorb state debts. In exchange, the permanent capital would move to a brand new city built on the Potomac River, near Virginia, on land that did not yet exist as a city, on swampy farmland and forest that would have to be carved out of Maryland and Virginia and built from scratch.
While they built it, the capital would temporarily move back to Philadelphia for ten years.
George Washington personally chose the exact site. It included his own neighborhood. Mount Vernon was just down the river.
The boundaries of the new district were laid out as a perfect ten mile by ten mile diamond by Andrew Ellicott and a free Black astronomer named Benjamin Banneker, the son of a former slave, who calculated the survey points using the stars. There is a quiet historical irony in the fact that the city of American government was mapped, in part, by a man whose own grandfather had been kidnapped from Africa.
A French engineer named Pierre Charles L'Enfant designed the streets, the broad avenues, the placement of the Capitol on a hill and the President's House nearly two miles away connected by a long ceremonial road. He was fired within a year for being impossible to work with. His plan was used anyway.
The federal government moved into Washington in November 1800. The Capitol building was unfinished. The White House was unfinished. John Adams, the second president, moved into the unfinished mansion, and his wife Abigail famously hung the laundry to dry in the empty East Room because she had nowhere else to put it.
Then in August 1814, during the War of 1812, a British army marched up from the Chesapeake Bay, fought a brief and embarrassing battle at Bladensburg in which American militia ran for their lives, and walked into Washington unopposed.
They burned the Capitol. They burned the White House. They burned the Treasury. President James Madison fled into Virginia. His wife Dolley refused to leave until she had cut a full length portrait of George Washington out of its frame and rolled it up to save it. That painting still hangs in the East Room today.
When Congress returned to the smoking ruins of the city, a serious motion was put forward to abandon Washington forever and move the capital permanently back to Philadelphia. The vote failed by nine votes. Eighty three to seventy four.
Nine votes. That is how close Washington D.C. came to ending in 1814.
The diamond shape of the original district is also gone now. The Virginia side, which included most of Arlington and part of Alexandria, was given back to Virginia in 1846 because residents there felt ignored by the federal government and wanted to vote in state elections again. That is why the modern map of D.C. has a clean square edge cut out of one side. It was once the rest of the diamond.
During the Civil War, Washington sat on the front line. It was surrounded on three sides by slave territory. Confederate forces came within sight of the unfinished Capitol dome at Fort Stevens in July 1864, the only time in American history a sitting president, Abraham Lincoln, came under direct enemy fire on a battlefield. He stood on a parapet to watch the fight in his stovepipe hat. A Union officer reportedly shouted at him to get down before he was shot. That officer, by some accounts, was a young captain named Oliver Wendell Holmes, who would later sit on the Supreme Court for thirty years.
The Washington Monument, started in 1848, sat as an unfinished stump for over twenty years because the country ran out of money and then had a war. If you stand at the base today and look up, you can still see a faint horizontal line where the marble changes color. The bottom third was quarried before the Civil War. The top two thirds came from a different quarry decades later. It looks like a healed scar on the skyline of the city.
So the next time someone asks why the capital of the United States sits where it does, the answer is not really about geography, or compromise, or Washington's hometown.
The answer is that in 1783, an army of unpaid soldiers chased the United States Congress out of its own building, and a state government shrugged and watched it happen.
Everything after that, the diamond on the Potomac, the burning of the city in 1814, the cannonball hole in Nassau Hall, the resignation in Annapolis, the dinner deal in New York, the missing piece given back to Virginia, the scar on the Washington Monument, all of it traces back to that single summer in Philadelphia when the founders learned the hard way that a government without ground of its own is a government on the run.
They never wanted to run again.
163 years ago today, Robert E. Lee fought the battle that military academies still call his masterpiece.
At Chancellorsville, he was outnumbered more than two to one. Joe Hooker had 130,000 men, the largest army ever assembled on the continent, and he had Lee pinned against the Rappahannock with a plan Lincoln himself approved. Hooker boasted to his officers, “May God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none.” He had spent the winter rebuilding the Army of the Potomac after Fredericksburg, and he believed he had finally cracked the code.
His plan was actually brilliant. Hooker left 40,000 men under Sedgwick at Fredericksburg to fix Lee in place, then marched the rest of his army upriver, crossed the Rappahannock and Rapidan, and came in behind Lee through a tangle of second-growth forest the locals called the Wilderness. By April 30, he had Lee caught in a vise.
Lee did the opposite of what was expected. He left 10,000 men under Jubal Early to hold Fredericksburg and marched west to attack Hooker, who outnumbered him three to one on that wing alone. When the two forces met on May 1, Hooker lost his nerve, pulled back into the Wilderness, and went on the defensive. Darius Couch later wrote that Hooker was “a whipped man” before a serious shot had been fired.
That night, Lee and Jackson sat on cracker boxes in a clearing and made the decision that would define both their lives. Jeb Stuart had discovered that Hooker’s right flank was hanging in the air, defended by the green XI Corps. Jackson proposed taking his entire corps, 28,000 men, on a 12-mile march around the Union army to hit that flank. Lee asked what he would have left to face Hooker. Jackson said, “The two divisions that you have here.” Lee had 14,000 men against 70,000. He looked at the map and said, “Well, go on.”
It was insane. Lee split his already smaller army in the face of a superior enemy, then split it again. Hooker did get reports. Sickles even attacked Jackson’s rear guard. But Hooker convinced himself the Confederates were retreating toward Richmond.
At 5:15 PM on May 2, Jackson’s men came howling out of the Wilderness into the Union right. The XI Corps was cooking dinner, rifles stacked. Deer and rabbits ran out of the woods first, then the rebel yell, then 28,000 Confederates in a line two miles wide. Two full Union miles collapsed in under three hours. Only nightfall stopped the rout.
Jackson wanted more. He rode forward in the dark with his staff to find a way to cut Hooker off from the river. Returning through the trees, his own 18th North Carolina mistook the horsemen for Union cavalry and fired at point-blank range. Three balls hit Jackson, shattering his left arm. Surgeons amputated it that night. Lee, told the news, said, “He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right.”
The fighting continued for three more days. Lee reunited his wings, drove Hooker back across the river, and dealt with Sedgwick at Salem Church. By May 6, Hooker was gone, having lost 17,000 men. Lee had lost 13,000, a much higher percentage of a much smaller army, including the irreplaceable one.
Jackson seemed to be recovering. Then pneumonia set in. On May 10, drifting in and out, he gave one last order to an imaginary A.P. Hill, then smiled and said, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” He was 39.
Lee won Chancellorsville. He lost the only subordinate who could execute attacks like that one, the man whose foot cavalry could march 30 miles a day and appear where no army was supposed to be. Two months later, Lee marched north without him. At Gettysburg, on the second day, he ordered a flank attack on Cemetery Hill that Jackson would have driven home by sundown. Ewell hesitated. The hill held. The Confederacy never came that close again.
Chancellorsville is the victory that won Lee immortality and cost him the war.