Saturday, July 25, 2026

ANDY NGO: Some of the far-left anti-ICE, anti-government extremists in Portland, Ore. are going up to people in cars and harassing and threatening them. City allows them to do that.

Seems worth it.


 

NATIONAL CONSERVATIVE: Last September, Brian Karalus, the attorney for Shiloh Hendrix, had a White friend who was savagely maimed by a Black knifeman in Minneapolis. He almost died. The office of Mary Moriarty only charged the knifeman with 2nd deg assault and released him on a tiny $50k bond.

CATO INSTITUTE: The new Cato Institute survey asked 7 basic civic knowledge questions. A majority of Gen Z correctly answered only 1 of them.

"Gen Z Fails Basic Civics Quiz as America Nears Its 250th," Jonah Messinger and Emily Ekins, CATO Institute, July 2, 2026.

WHO HAS THE FINAL SAY?  More than two-thirds (68%) did not know who has final say if the president and the Supreme Court disagree about whether a president’s actions are constitutional; 32% knew that the Supreme Court has the final say.

WHY DID WE DECLARE INDEPDENCE?  More importantly, two-thirds (67%) of Gen Z do not know why the American colonies declared independence from Great Britain, while 33% correctly answered that it was to protest high taxes and a lack of representation in government. 

MAIN PURPOSE OF THE U.S. CONSTITUTION? Six in ten Americans (64%) under 30 likewise don’t know what the main purpose of the US Constitution is. Instead, 14% thought the main purpose of the Constitution was to declare independence from Great Britain (which is what the Declaration of Independence did), 17% thought the main purpose was to create a presidency, Congress, and Supreme Court, 8% thought it was to list all federal laws, and 4% thought it was to create two major political parties. Another 21% admitted they didn’t know. Only 36% knew that the main purpose of the Constitution is to establish and limit the powers of government.

WHAT DOES AMERICA'S 250TH COMMEMORATE? Nearly two-thirds (61%) of Americans under 30 are unaware of what America’s 250th is commemorating this year, while just 39% know we are celebrating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Of those who answered incorrectly, 11% thought America’s 250th was celebrating the first presidential election, 8% thought it was the ratification of the Constitution, 7% thought it was the victory of the Revolutionary War, 4% thought it was the pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock, 1% said it was the founding of Jamestown, and 30% admitted they didn’t know what America’s 250th is about.

FROM WHICH COUNTRY DID WE DECLARE INDEPENDENCE?  A majority (52%) of Gen Z Americans also don’t know what country from which the American colonies declared their independence, while 48% correctly answered that it was Great Britain. 

NUMBER OF GOV'T BRANCHES?  Gen Z came close to knowing that the federal government has three separate branches, with 50% who answered correctly and 50% who did not.

FIRST U.S. PRESIDENT? While about two-thirds (66%) of Gen Z correctly identified George Washington as the first president, a substantial minority (34%) could not.

KRZYSZTOF SZCZAWINSKI: The gun is the physical enforcement of the idea that all men are created equal. Which is why the American founders put it in the second amendment – not as an afterthought, but as the guarantee of everything else.


The gun is the most misunderstood object in Western civilization. Not a weapon. A technology. The technology that made the idea of equality physically real. 1. The longbow democratized warfare – a peasant could kill a knight with a stick and a string, and Agincourt proved it. The gun completed the process. The armored warrior class whose claim to social dominance rested on physical superiority became obsolete. The aristocratic monopoly on violence ended not with a philosophy but with a mechanism. The gun is the physical enforcement of the idea that all men are created equal. Which is why the American founders put it in the second amendment – not as an afterthought, but as the guarantee of everything else. 2. The Roman citizen had the right to bear arms. The Greek citizen had it. The English yeoman had it. The Swiss canton built its entire civilization on it. The disarming of the population has always been, in every civilization, in every century, the first act of the government that intends to stop being answerable to that population. Show me a disarmed population and I will show you a population that lost something else shortly after. 3. The Second Amendment is not about hunting. It is not about sport. It is about the relationship between the armed citizen and the state – the explicit constitutional acknowledgment that the citizen’s right to defend himself, his family, and his civilization against any threat, including the government itself, is not granted by the state and cannot be revoked by it. Power flows upward from the armed citizen, not downward from the armed state. 4. The gun defends the family. The woman alone with her children. The farmer on the edge of civilization. The shopkeeper in the neighborhood the police no longer patrol. The gun is the equalizer – the technology that makes the physical difference between a large man and a small woman irrelevant. Every argument for disarmament is, at its core, an argument that the state will protect you better than you can protect yourself. The evidence for this proposition is not encouraging. 5. In Europe, the disarmament is now nearly complete – and it happened precisely as the state’s ability and willingness to protect its citizens began to decline. The timing is not coincidental. A population that cannot defend itself must trust the state to defend it – which is a population that cannot effectively question whether the state is doing so. The dependency is the design. 6. The gun is a civilizational technology in the deepest sense: it requires responsibility, judgment, and the willingness to accept the consequences of your decisions. You cannot outsource it. You cannot have a committee fire it. It is the most anti-bureaucratic object ever invented – a direct, personal, consequential instrument that puts the full weight of the decision on the individual holding it. Which is precisely why the administrative state finds it intolerable. Not because it is dangerous. Because it is sovereign.

7. The family that can defend itself does not depend on the state for its most fundamental security. The civilization that can defend itself has not yet outsourced its survival to an institution that will negotiate the terms of that survival on its own behalf. The gun determines who controls violence – and therefore who controls everything that violence can threaten. Which is everything. The Sobieski who rode down the hill had a sword and sixty thousand horsemen. The equivalent today is the armed citizen who understands what he is defending and why. Every civilization that forgot this discovered it the hard way. The ones that remembered it are still here. 

J. MICHAEL WALLER: 1985 Reagan State Department report, “The Soviet-Cuban Connection in Central America and the Caribbean.”

Contrast this report with the one that recently came out by Rubio's State Department, "Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism."