“Monsters in movies are us, always us, one way or the other… Monsters are us, the dangerous parts of us. The part that wants to destroy. The part of us with the reptile brain. The part of us that’s vicious and cruel. We express these in our stories as these monsters out there.” – John Carpenter

This time of year, there is no shortage of monsters to frighten us.

Hollywood has given us vampires, zombies, mad scientists, masked killers and creatures that emerge from the darkness to prey upon the unsuspecting.

But perhaps the most frightening monster of all – is the government that has become so accustomed to wielding extraordinary power that it cannot imagine a future in which that power is diminished.

Enter the Doomsday Plan! 

Continue reading →

“There’s a world goin’ on Outside the world that I’m in” ~ Blackberry Smoke

I have spoken many times about how amazing the human brain is, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned how we often don’t realize what it is capable of, or how it is performing functions without our ever realizing that it is doing so. Even now, as I sit here typing, my brain is pulling data from multiple regions, then sending signals (kind of like e mails I suppose) along neural pathways to my fingers; which in turn type out what is going on inside my head. All this occurs almost instantaneously; my mind decides what it wants to say, then my fingers type it out; without me giving any thought to the process of how those thoughts get to my fingertips.

The same could be said about almost everything we do throughout our days; from tying our shoes in the morning to operating a motor vehicle; we do it without realizing the multitude of signals our brain is sending out to the various parts of our body. Yet there is one function that goes on inside our minds that, in my opinion, is of much more significance; the process by which we come to hold our worldview. For those of you who may not be sure what a worldview is, it is a comprehensive framework of beliefs, values, and mental models through which a person or society perceives, interprets, and responds to reality. One could say that it is our worldview that tells us what to believe; what is both true and real.

The amazing thing about this is that we never realize it is happening, but from the moment we are born our brain is flooded with data which it begins to process; some of it to be used to navigate through life, while some of it goes towards forming our worldview; how we perceive the world around us

It has been said that by the time we reach 13 years of age our worldviews are pretty firmly established in our minds, and that it takes something monumental, or catastrophic, before our minds consider revising them. Continue reading →

“You’re Still Here” is an original country song about getting older, looking back on life, and realizing there is still more life ahead of you… and is for anyone who looks in the mirror and sees gray hair, changing hands, and the years written across their face — but also sees a lifetime of memories, lessons, love, loss, and strength.

Getting older doesn’t mean your best days are over, and the years behind you don’t have to define the years still ahead. Continue reading →

The book cover of “Cries for Help: Injury and Death Buried in V-Safe Data” (2026) by React19. Brownstone Institute

I’ve learned something about myself and perhaps about the human brain this past week. I can only describe what I learned as profoundly impactful at all levels: philosophical, spiritual, psychological, and physical. It can only compare to the feeling of post-traumatic stress disorder one might experience on the battlefield.

Vicarious PTSD: Who knew? Continue reading →

In a previous article about socialism, I outlined the basic reasons why profit-seeking capitalists are essential to the productivity and income of workers and to satisfying the desires of consumers, why increasing government controls over the economy plays into the hands of exploitative corporatist elites, and why socialization of the means of production ultimately requires central planning to coordinate production and preserve a division of labor, which in turn necessitates the evils of totalitarian tyranny in spite of the democratic aspirations of many well-meaning socialists. In brief, ordinary people cannot gain a greater voice and a freer life through curtailment of private ownership; socialism necessarily leads to the mass poverty and mass regimentation of totalitarian tyranny. Continue reading →

“United States AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation.” ~ President Donald Trump, Executive Order 14365

But… “You can call me Al!“

The era of small government is over.

Anyone who tells you differently is selling you a lie.

Case in point: Donald Trump promised to shrink the federal government.

But what if Trump’s pledge to cut the federal work force wasn’t really about eliminating government bureaucracy but outsourcing it to the AI tech sector?

What if Trump, with the backing of a self-serving industry eager to automate government, is instead helping to build a government that no longer needs as many human beings to operate it?

Hundreds of thousands of federal workers are disappearing from the government payroll at the same time that Washington is racing to automate the work they once performed with artificial intelligence.

Since Trump returned to office, the federal workforce has shrunk by more than 270,000 employees, the result of hiring freezes, deferred resignations, early retirements and reductions in force.

At the same time, the Trump administration has embraced an aggressive campaign to automate government operations, with the General Services Administration instructing agencies to “eliminate, optimize and automate“ their work wherever possible.

This is not a return to smaller government.

It is a dangerous re-calibration of government power! 

Continue reading →

This should surprise no one: The Social Security Trust Fund is expected to run dry by 2032, at which point benefits will be slashed or taxes increased. Since slashing benefits is political suicide, we can expect Congress to swing into action as the perennial champion of a politically powerful voting bloc.

Like government as such, Social Security is akin to the “Too Big To Fail” mantra that powerful banks have secured for themselves. For these systemic financial institutions Dodd-Frank will not, as promised, take taxpayers off the hook for saving them. The problem is the problem will never go away, absent radical action. Continue reading →

What if Donald Trump decided to sing the blues?

In a world of fake news, political drama, and endless headlines, sometimes there’s only one thing left to do: pick up a guitar and sing about it.

This is Trump like you’ve never heard him before — a surreal blues performance about the media, power, and the never-ending battle over what’s real and what isn’t.

“The word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment.” ~ Justice Hugo Black, New York Times Co. v. United States (1971)

“National security” has become the government’s all-purpose permission slip to behave badly.

They have become the magic words that can make constitutional restraints disappear – especially when the courts defer to claims of national security. Courts have historically been reluctant to second-guess the executive branch when government officials invoke military necessity, classified information, foreign affairs or national security. Continue reading →

Deckard, a blade runner, has to track down and terminate 4 replicants who hijacked a ship in space and have returned to Earth seeking their maker.

Could this have been the forerunner of AI?

We don’t need permission from Silicon Valley or Washington to start thinking for ourselves. The moment we stop outsourcing our minds is when we take back America!

We are living through a quiet, systemic assault on human reason.

Every day, millions of Americans pull out their phones, run a quick web search, or ask an AI chatbot a simple question about current events. They assume they are using a neutral tool – a modern electronic encyclopedia.

They aren’t… 

Continue reading →

Eight years ago in the summer of 2018, an automated monitoring system at the US government’s Social Security Agency flagged a questionable transaction and immediately forwarded it to a human worker at the agency to investigate.

It took more than a year for a Social Security employee to look into it. And it was painfully obvious – Social Security was paying too much ‘supplemental security income’ to the recipient. Continue reading →

WE are in a war. Man has been in that war since day one. Just studying history shows that there are people who want to make all the rules, who want to control what we eat, if we eat, what we believe, and even how long we get to exist on this mortal coil.

Look at the wars from the earliest recorded time. The world is divided into three groups of people, those of us who want to live equally with everyone else, those who want to run the world and decide who can live and who can die, and those who don’t care enough to give a tinker’s damn.

So, it is the first two groups who matter. The third isn’t even good enough for cannon fodder. (Ah, yes. This is just my humble opinion, not edicts spelled out in media.)

We from group one (yes, I identify with the real white hats) have been fighting this war since high school. We saw that the school system was a second-group factor and fought it with words – all we had as ammunition. Continue reading →

“What if the rights and principles guaranteed in the Constitution have been so distorted in the past 200 years as to be unrecognizable by the Founders? What if the government was the reason we don’t have a Constitution anymore? What if freedom’s greatest hour of danger is now?” ~ Andrew P. Napolitano

What’s the point in celebrating the Constitution one day a year if we permit the government to violate it the other 364?

September 17 marked the anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, a document designed not merely to establish a government but to restrain it.

Yet restraint is in increasingly short supply.

Across the political spectrum, Americans continue to tolerate abuses of power so long as those abuses are carried out by the “right” people, against the “wrong” people, or in the name of some emergency deemed too important to question.

That is how constitutional government dies! Continue reading →

The Senate crawls back from recess on September 14. The marble hallways will fill up. The cameras will click. And the question hanging over the chamber is the same one America has been asking all summer: Where’s Mitch?

Not “how’s Mitch.” Not “what’s Mitch thinking.” Just… where.

Because the longest-running turtle in Washington has been MIA since June. Last recorded vote: June 11. Hospitalized June 14 after a fall. Then weeks of silence. Then rehab. Then “recovering at home.” Then more silence. Meanwhile the rest of the country is expected to clock in on time. Continue reading →

It is time mature and responsible, constitutionally minded adults take a stand for our children, unborn and born.

I think it is time we discussed the constitutional rights of our children. And when I say children, I refer to the unborn and the born. It appears that too often we are subverting the rights of our children to the whims of adults, relegating them unrepresented, especially our unborn children whose voices we cannot yet hear, but we know that they can experience pain. Think about the recent bill signed into law in the State of Massachusetts by Gov. Maura Healey that allows our unborn children to be dismembered in the womb all the way up to birth.

This year we celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, when our nation was established based upon the Natural Rights theory of John Locke. Our endowed, unalienable rights of life, liberty, and property (pursuit of happiness) emanate from the God of our Judeo-Christian faith heritage. Sadly, it appears that Gov. Healey believes that the right to life emanates from her pen, as she condemned unborn babies to a brutal death in the State of Massachusetts. Wonder what the Sons of Liberty would say? And what of those disturbed women who stood by clapping and smiling as she did so? The delusional Marxist ideological right to dismember unborn babies in the womb, albeit Massachusetts already allowed such up to 24 weeks, undermines the constitutional right of those babies. Continue reading →

Tower 2 of the Twin Towers collapses as a plume of smoke and debris fill the air while people watch from Broome Street and 6th Avenue on Tuesday, August 25, 2026, in New York, New York.

It started as a gorgeous late-summer morning in New York City. Then everything went straight to hell.

Where were you when you knew?

Twenty-five years have passed as if in a heartbeat. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was sitting on the deck atop my Brooklyn brownstone with stunning views of lower Manhattan, preparing to take my daughter to her first day of preschool when a small plane appeared to fly into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Or so we thought. Continue reading →

Families of first responders view the new 9/11 Memorial Wall at One Police Plaza on Sept. 9, 2026 in New York City. Family members of first responders, and other NYPD officers was a new wall display was unveiled honoring first responders who lost their lives during the Sept. 11, 2001 World Trade Center terror attacks and since. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Twenty-five years later, the central question is not if we remember 9-11.

How could we possibly forget?

The central question is what that memory requires of us.

And if, over the years, do those requirements change.

Sept. 11, 2001 was – and still is – a muti-dimensional tragedy. Continue reading →

The Democrat Party [nuthin’ “democratic” about it] has largely been the enemy of America, since 1913 with the election of Woodrow Wilson to the presidency and the passage of the Federal Reserve Bank Act and the Income Tax — and they have grown progressively worse through the FDR, LBJ, Carter, Obama and Biden years to the point that they are essentially authoritarian communists demanding the complete overthrow of our American system and the eradication of our constitutional republic and traditional America Herself, along with the virtues and principles that built Her — hiding the true horror and malicious and evil intent behind their agenda in the soft, comforting term of “the fundamental transformation of America”.

Their fundamental transformation will ultimately result in Hell on Earth and the reduction of every person in America to the lowest common denominator of “equality” in poverty — except of course for those holding the reins of power. ~ Justin O Smith