Last night, someone opened fire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
This has happened before.
In 1835, a man fired two pistols at President Andrew Jackson at point-blank range.
Both misfired.
Jackson beat the attacker with his cane.
He was 67 years old.
The attacker was later found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Jackson’s response?
He blamed his political enemies for orchestrating it.
Sound familiar?
Political violence is never new.
The scripts are just recycled.
Today is World Book Day.
The most powerful spy agency in WWII didn’t rely on secret agents.
It relied on librarians.
The OSS — the predecessor to the CIA — hired hundreds of scholars, librarians, and academics.
Their job: read everything.
Newspapers. Academic journals. Train schedules. Phone books.
80% of wartime intelligence came from public sources.
Not secret operations.
Not double agents.
Just people who knew how to read.
The Soviets did the same with Western academic journals.
The Nazis monitored American public libraries.
The most dangerous weapon in history wasn’t a gun.
It was a library card.
What’s the most powerful “public” source of intelligence today?
The Soviet Union trained dolphins to be spies.
Not a joke.
During the Cold War, the USSR recruited bottlenose dolphins for military service.
Their missions:
— Detect enemy submarines
— Plant bombs on enemy ships
— Kill enemy divers with CO2 injections
They were stationed in Sevastopol, Black Sea.
They were paid in fish.
When the USSR collapsed, Ukraine inherited the program.
By the 1990s, Ukraine couldn’t afford to feed them.
They sold some to Iran.
Meanwhile, the US Navy had the same program.
Two superpowers. Decades of investment. A secret dolphin arms race.
Oh — and Red Alert got it completely backwards.
In the game, the Allies use dolphins.
In reality? It was the Soviets.
Sometimes the truth is stranger than the fiction.
Which Cold War secret do you think we still don’t know about?
Two of the greatest writers in history died on the same day.
April 23, 1616.
Shakespeare. Cervantes.
One wrote about kings who go mad chasing power.
One wrote about a man who thought he was a hero — but was just fighting windmills.
Both were writing about the same thing.
They just didn’t know it yet.
400 years later, nothing has changed.
The kings are still going mad.
The windmills are still winning.
Who’s the biggest Don Quixote alive today?
Drop your answer below 👇
Today, thousands were evacuated from a Paris suburb.
The reason? A WWII bomb found underground.
80 years later.
Still live. Still deadly.
This happens more than you think.
Every year, Europe digs up an estimated 2,000 tons of unexploded WWII ordnance.
Germany calls it the “Iron Harvest.”
Farmers in Belgium still plow up shells every spring.
A construction worker in London hits a bomb every few years.
The war ended in 1945.
The war never ended.
Some wounds stay buried until someone accidentally finds them.
Which makes you wonder — what are we burying today that the next generation will have to deal with?
Every empire that tried to force Iran into submission failed.
Alexander the Great conquered it. The Persians took it back.
The Arabs conquered it. Persia absorbed Islam and made it its own.
The Mongols burned Tehran to the ground. Iran outlasted the Mongols.
The British controlled its oil for decades. Iran nationalized it.
The US backed a Shah for 26 years. Iran expelled him.
The ceasefire expires today.
History is not on the side of the people who think this ends quickly.
The men who wrote “All men are created equal” owned 1,400 slaves.
Let that sink in.
Today Americans celebrate Patriots Day.
The birth of freedom.
But whose freedom?
— The 500,000 enslaved people who got nothing?
— The loyalists who were burned out of their homes?
— The working-class British soldiers who had no choice but to fight?
The Founding Fathers were brilliant. Courageous. Visionary.
They were also hypocrites.
Both things are true.
That’s not an attack on America.
That’s what makes the story worth telling.
The US has tried this before.
In 1953, the CIA overthrew Iran’s only democratic government.
The crime? Iran wanted to own its own oil.
The CIA bribed mobs. Paid journalists. Forged documents.
It worked.
They installed a Shah.
The Shah tortured dissidents for 26 years.
Then he fell.
What replaced him?
The Islamic Republic.
The regime America is bombing today — was built by America in 1953.
History doesn’t repeat. It invoices.