“Electoral Brawlage” examines the first election and inaugural address of each U.S. president from Washington to Trump. This project will conclude in December 2026.

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While Gerald Ford wasn’t an unpopular president—and didn’t have long in office to make an impression all that much either way—the electorate was still not all that pleased with the Watergate scandal, Nixon’s resignation (which was seen as avoiding accountability) and Ford’s subsequent pardon of him (which definitely helped him avoid any heat.) The GOP understandably wanted to project strength and confidence in their incumbent president, so when the 1976 primary came around, the establishment threw its backing behind Ford.

His main challenger was Ronald Reagan, a popular former governor from California, who’d had a successful career as an actor before getting into politics. The contest went all the way to the convention where Ford won on the first ballot, though some attendees wondered if they’d picked the right man. Ford’s VP at the time was Nelson Rockefeller, but for this ticket he was replaced by a Kansas Senator and World War II veteran named Bob Dole. You may have heard of him. He’ll be back in another twenty years.

On the Democrat side, former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter threw his hat in the ring and beat a crowded field, winning Iowa and New Hampshire right out of the gate. For his VP he selected Walter Mondale of Minnesota, and the table was set.

If Ford was meant to have inherited Nixon’s machine (and his 1972 popularity), then he lost roughly half of the man’s support four years after that election. This was not entirely of his doing, as mentioned. Still, it wasn’t a demoralizing blowout. Carter provided a strong alternative option for eighty million active voters, and slightly over half of them decided on a new direction. They would elect the first deep-South president in almost 130 years.

Carter’s Inauguration

As is generally the case, Carter’s first speech to the nation as president is a good one, and he speaks with humility and faith, as well as a clear vision of what it is to be an American. He talks about the genesis of the American experiment two hundred years hence, and how he wasn’t there to offer a new vision, but to ask people to have faith in the old one. That right there is a sentiment I can get behind.

If we’re to be strong abroad, we need to be strong at home first, and show the world that they should do things the way we do them if they want our level of success, happiness, and prosperity. The people must be moral, their government must be competent, and at the end of the day, Americans couldn’t look to Washington to solve all its problems.

(In the fifty years since Carter’s election, Washington has firmly cemented itself as the cause of our problems, but I digress.)

You can watch his speech here:

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The other night I was watching the Seeking Persephone miniseries with my wife; she became a big fan of the books (she’s been a Sarah Eden reader for years) and during an important scene in the first episode, I spotted Sarah on a pew in a church. (She’s pretty distinctive, I would have seen her even if my wife didn’t excitedly point her out.)

Anyway, that got me thinking of other instances where authors showed up in their adaptations. R.L. Stine said hello to himself in Goosebumps (2015). Jeff Lindsey was in an episode of Dexter. Stephen King has been in a couple of his movies and shows, and Lee Child appeared in both the Tom Cruise and Alan Ritchson versions of Reacher. Stan Lee was in a decade of Marvel movies. (Yes I know he didn’t create them all, yadda yadda.)

It goes on: James Dashner was sitting on the board of the Evil League Of Evil or whatever during the end of The Maze Runner (2014); Stephenie Meyer ordered a sandwich in Twilight (2008); John Green sniffed his own farts in Kids Have Cancer And Are Sad (he’s the Nicholas Sparks of YA). You get it.

Well, I’m going to open the kimono here and tell you all a secret: us indie authors, punching a clock and filing a W-2 each year, entertain wild delusions of getting cameo parts in our movies, to the extent that I know where I’d be in all of mine. You do it too.

1: The Hero Next Door

Scene: Nick Stavros, in costume as The Spartan, accidentally falls onto a basketball court in the middle of an NBA game. He runs for his life, chased by security, and as he’s fleeing up the stairs a spectator jumps out to stop him. Nick doesn’t want to, but he decks the guy to secure his escape.

Where am I? Hell yeah I’m getting my bell rung by The Spartan during a televised primetime game.

2: Engines of Liberty

Scene: During the insane climax of Patriot’s Game, there’s a giant aerial battle over New Jersey between British dragons and a flying technomancer warship called the Saint George. The dragons are almost vanquished and on the top deck of the George, a crackshot artillery officer deals the killing blow to clear the path for our heroes.

Where am I? Surprise, it’s Ya Boi on the trigger! No speaking lines, just calculating execution.

3: Howling Wilderness (part of Engines)

Scene: 50 years after the end of Patriot’s Game, the Americans have a tradition of cross-country racing with machines and animals. Magic is outlawed but that doesn’t stop people from getting creative. I put twenty-six contenders in this book and they’re all pretty well-developed, even if they don’t all have lines.

Where am I? I think it’s only a real cameo if you don’t speak, right? So put me in as Von Steuben, the guy who rides a specially-bred bison through the Appalachian Rally Classic.

4: Kill the Beast

Scene: This whole book is a spoof on Beauty & the Beast with “Gaston” as the good guy.

Where am I? When the villagers decide to storm the castle, you bet I’m in that crowd, holding a pitchfork in both hands, French-ly.

5: Heartlanders

Scene: During our heroes’ quest they stop at a few airbases that are still up and running, and at one of them the servicemen take a group photo with President Reynolds, his crew, Frank, and the Kryptonauts.

Where am I? Dress me in coveralls and put me in right behind Reynolds and Frank. Frame that thing. Hang it in the Smithsonian. “Airman, your beard is out of regulation.” Don’t care.

6: Sleepless Hollow

Scene: The book takes place in 2020 but there’s a flashback to late October, 1776, after the Battle of White Plains. Six patriot spies have stolen a Howitzer and are trying to get it back to General Greene. As they pass a Dutch farm along the Hudson, they’re ambushed by Redcoats and a Hessian rider. They all die, but not before one of the rebels (Silas Proctor) fires the Howitzer and blows off the Rider’s head.

Where am I? I’m one of the spies who goes down in a volley of British lead. Very quick. No dialogue. Just a quick little “ACK!” and I’m out.

7: Fossil Force

Scene: One night while the Sentinels are out on patrol, a massive rainstorm passes through Vina Profunda and turns the roads to mud. This causes problems at a truck stop down the highway, as a tractor-trailer gets stuck in the driveway and is spinning its wheels. Since it’s dark out, the Sentinels get behind the truck and push, then disappear into the shadows once the driver is free.

Where am I? In the cab, baby. Where else?

At least one of these will happen before I die, and you’ll all be sorry you didn’t know about it before it was made. Go buy and read all of these books or a big scary monster will eat you.

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“This Week in 1776” is an ongoing almanac of events from that year in the American Revolution. Be sure to check out my novel HEARTLANDERS.

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Well lads, the high of victory in Boston is well and truly a distant memory, as the Patriot army has lost New York and it only gets worse from there.

New York

At the end of last week, lower west Manhattan caught fire. It is not known to this day who started it (the Brits arrested over 200 suspects but nobody was ever convicted.) Congress was upset with Washington but he affirmed to them that he never gave the order. Even so, it tactically aided the rebels more than the British, because now Manhattan was scorched and Howe had to waste man-hours and resources on it. Washington didn’t lament that either. He wrote to his cousin saying that it was either God or “some good honest fellow” who did what the army couldn’t.

That is the end of the Americans’ good news this week. We now check in on Nathan Hale and Robert Rodgers for some Ranger-On-Ranger violence.

What am I talking about? Nathan Hale was a Yale graduate, originally from Connecticut, and worked as a schoolmaster at the age of 21. He was also a captain in Knowlton’s Rangers, a short-lived unit of hand-picked infantry who were also trains as scouts and information-gatherers. A Loyalist counterpart to their unit was the Queen’s Rangers, led by Robert Rodgers, who would later defect to the Patriots and become the father of the U.S. Army Rangers. They still use his teachings to this day.

Unfortunately for Hale, he was caught by Rodgers and identified as a spy in New York. There was no lengthy trial or anything, as the rule of the day was the spies out of uniform can be immediately hanged. On the morning of the 22nd, Hale was hanged before a crowd. He’s famously said to have uttered “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” though this is a later memory by those present. Nevertheless a British diarist did record at the time that Hale was composed, and he said something to the effect that it was a good officer’s duty to obey his commander-in-chief.

The damn Brits hanged him and left his body as a display to the public, then buried him in an unmarked grave. May he rest in peace.

Washington is facing other problems with his troops. Lack of discipline and extremely low morale are seen everywhere. The camps is dirty and disorganized, and some of the soldiers are stealing ammo and powder, or they’re missing their posts. One private from Connecticut, Ebenezer Liffingwell, is sentenced to death for cowardice and for attempting to shoot an officer. (Read the full account of the incident here.) It sucks, but it’s the only way to keep other soldiers from thinking they can do this.

Washington writes to Congress that things are bad, desertion is high, and the army is falling apart. They need food and clothing before winter or they’re screwed.

Philadelphia

On September 24 it approves negotiating instructions for a treaty with France, and elects commissioners to the French court: Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee (who replaces Thomas Jefferson.) Secrecy is ordered; members may say only that Congress has taken steps for foreign alliance. Jefferson will decline; Arthur Lee later fills that slot.

Other committees are handling affairs with the army, with one focused on New York and the other on Ticonderoga, which is still a mess after Canada (I haven’t checked in on Benedict Arnold for a while.)

The South

Andrew Williamson (South Carolina) and Griffith Rutherford (North Carolina) meet up with their units and take stock of how the southern war is going with the Cherokee. Winter is coming so they split up and head home, burning what they pass. They don’t annihilate the Cherokee, they just leave them in dire straits for the winter. They scatter, and the threat is handled for now.

Visit Nauvoo Supply to order HEARTLANDERS, the most American novel I’ve ever written. It’s like if National Treasure happened during Fallout with G.I. Joes.

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2026 is America’s 250th birthyear. To celebrate, I’ve highlighted several significant American documents. This will be the final entry in this series.

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Guys, genuinely: thanks for following this project. I’ve seen the analytics and I’m grateful for your interest in it.

It’s been an extremely busy year and I’ve decided to wrap up “American Documents” after nine months, instead of going the distance to December. “Electoral Brawlage” and “This Week in 1776” will still go on. My workload has changed (for the better) and this was the easiest one to conclude.

On top of that, I was starting to feel like I was stretching the definition of a significant document. Why some Amendments, and not others? Some SCOTUS cases, and not more? Some presidential speeches, but by what criteria? Once you get past the Founding, a lot of this stuff becomes arbitrary.

I will still most likely write essays about the stuff that remains on my list, but I’ll do so after having read a few more books about them. Here’s what I was considering for the rest of 2026:

Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, where he warned the nation about the budding military industrial complex.

The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, from 1963, after the Cuban Missile Crisis

The Hart-Celler Act, which from 1965 onward massively altered the scale of immigration to this country.

Ronald Reagan’s “A Time For Choosing” speech, 1964, as an endorsement of Barry Goldwater for president.

Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative speech, 1983, a.k.a. the “Star Wars” program.

Bush 41’s “Read My Lips” campaign promise and the ensuing fallout.

Clinton’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy from 1993, which loosened some military conduct standards regarding homosexual behavior.

Bush 43’s address to Congress in 2001, shortly after 9/11.

Obama announces the death of Bin Laden, 2011.

Trump’s first major national address about Covid, March of 2020.

You see how the selection criteria becomes vague over time. I think all of these events are worth discussing, but as I said, it would be better in the context of some book that I’ve read.

So that’s it for now. Thanks again for reading, and stay tuned for other work to come. It’s finally autumn, and in a week, it’ll be October.

See you out there.

Visit Nauvoo Supply to order HEARTLANDERS, the most American novel I’ve ever written. It’s like if National Treasure happened during Fallout with G.I. Joes.

My Amazon page has my other books, including FOSSIL FORCE for young boys and Engines of Liberty for all ages.

I post several times per week on YouTube.

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Seeking Persephone (book, I haven't seen the show yet)

5-Minute Odyssey

Paid subscribers can help me buy the project car, so upgrade to paid!

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Reading LOTR to my kids. Thoughts on Gollum.

Revisiting “By The Great Horn Spoon,” which I read last year.

So far “Ghostlands” sucks.

Rooftop Korean (awesome)

American Scapegoat (forthcoming)

Galaxy Quest: I said ‘96, I meant ‘99.

Days of Thunder: I said Top Gear, I meant Top Gun, but hey. Fits.

Lots of movies I want to see, buuuuuuut project car! Please be a paid subscriber haha

Smallville season 9 is bad

Why women like Doctor Who (lol)

I'm not gonna watch The Sopranos

Gonna read some Watergate books (eventually). Make a suggestion if you've got one.

The early conclusion to American Documents.

Almost done with Fossil Force 2.

Reading list for this week.

Thank you for listening.

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Like the Five-Minute Iliad, this series will cover Homer’s other famous poem, but in fewer installments. Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |

I am using the Butler translation. Subscribe to follow along. For another excellent story about a man trying to get home to his wife amidst a divine conflict, read HEARTLANDERS.

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And finally, here we are. Odysseus returns home, kills a lot of dudes, and ends his absence. Whoops. Spoilers. Sorry Homer.

Book 21

Penelope gets it in her head (with help from Athena) to put the suitors to a test: whoever can string Odysseus’ legendary bow (this thing is epic and there’s a long story behind it) and fire an arrow through the holes of twelve aligned axes will be king of Ithaca. Just one catch: the bow is insanely hard to string and even harder to fire. Telemachus takes a crack at it (he’s not trying to Oedipus his mom, he’s just taking a run at the throne) but Odysseus gives him the subtle shake of the head and he withdraws from contention. After a few bum suitors try and fail to even string the thing, they decide to boil it in oil to soften it up, effectively cheating at the contest.

Odysseus steps in and takes his shot, enduring much ridicule from the suitors, including Antinous who threatens to kill him if he makes it. Unfortunately for him, Odysseus strings the bow with ease and plucks it dry, eliciting a loud thrum that coincides with a thunderclap from Zeus. Ominous sign? Boy, the suitors sure think so.

He nocks an arrow, aims, fires, and threads that needle like [uncomfortable and unchaste simile.]

Book 22

Instantaneous terror grips the suitors as Odysseus whips off his hood, reveals who he is, and for good measure, puts an arrow through Antinous’ throat as the dude is drinking Odysseus’ wine. Just bam, period at end of sentence.

What comes next is a bloodbath, with Odysseus, Telemachus, and Eumaeus stacking bodies. Melanthius, a livestock herder who has been a jerk to Odysseus, takes sides with the suitors and shuttles weapons/armor to them. They outnumber Odysseus and his fellows, but he has Athena in his corner and she’s not new to this at all. Before long he has the suitors vanquished, and then he sets in on the unfaithful maids for their thot behavior. Hilariously he makes them clean the mess in the hall before killing them.

Cherry on top, he and the boys mutilate Melanthius before executing him. Don’t be a tool, fool.

Book 23

With all that out of the way, Odysseus finally sits down with Penelope and tells her who she is. Naturally she doesn’t believe him, even though he’s showered, tanned, rested, and ready, with a little extra oomph courtesy of Athena working her magic. As high-maintenance women are wont to do, she decides to test him, playing mind games and such, while he’s being blunt and direct, saying things like “I am Odysseus,” etc.

She says they have to move her bed out of her bedchamber, which Odysseus scoffs at because it’s not physically possible. The bed is built out of a living olive tree, he knows because he made it himself all those years ago, you cannot move it anywhere. Surprise, he passed the test, and the married couple have themselves an emotional and teary reunion. Then they run upstairs to the aforementioned bed where very marital things (presumably) take place.

Athena continues her favoritism toward Big O by preventing the sun from rising so he can get a really long night in with the missus. When the sun finally comes up, Odysseus heads inland to find his father Laertes.

Book 24

Meanwhile, down in Hell (because it’s that kind of story), Hermes leads the suitors to Achilles and Agamemnon, and we’re treated to some long speeches about shameful deaths. When Agamemnon learns how the suitors died, he offers up blessings to Odysseus and Penelope.

Up top, Odysseus finds Laertes in a vineyard and proves it’s him by showing that gnarly scar on his leg. They also have an emotionally loaded reunion but they don’t consummate it the same way as O did with Penelope (I have to specify that because this is a Greek tale).

Back in town, the families of the suitors roll up for a revenge bender, even though their kin were all in the wrong (and for a very long time), but Zeus settles it all by restoring Odysseus to his kingship and wiping the families’ memories of the bloodshed. The feud ends with Laertes killing Eupeithes (the father of Antinous). Athena imposes peace, and at long last, the conflict is truly over.

Conclusion

What can I possibly say in summary of a work like this? I’ve generally avoided doing “reviews” or videos of epic classics on this scale because they’re so huge and so essential to the larger web of Western canon that my individual opinion of them is somewhat irrelevant.

But since that’s the case, the more meaningful metric of assessment is what I learned or gained from this reading of the text. What did I learn from The Odyssey that I didn’t know before? How did it change me? If it’s that important, what did it do to me that it’s done to other readers for the past 2700 years?

I think one key to understanding it is actually the span of time itself. Mankind doesn’t really change. We’re more than flesh and blood and bone, more than the time and place we come from. We’re made of the same spirit going back to the beginning, and Homer grabbed spiritual truths out of the ether when he penned these poems (Odyssey and Iliad.) He wrapped those truths in words and put them down in a way that future generations could pick them up and recognize them—even keep them going.

Odysseus was a great man, the text tells us this in plain terms; then it shows us why. He was courageous, determined, inventive, loyal (except in the cases of being totally obligated against his will, wink wink, to have sex with nymphs and such), and benevolent. Most gods were in his corner, some were opposed to him, and his actions—mostly righteous, occasionally not—were clearly tied to the moods of those gods. Zeus and Athena helped him on his way, but he had to answer to Poseidon for blinding his son.

Despite the centuries that separate me from this author and the culture he was part of, there’s a timeless truth about divine justice in this story. In our infinite Space Age wisdom, out “Greatest Thinkers” try to debunk the existence of divine forces that they can’t see or measure in a lab, but it continues to be the experience of billions of souls that those forces are in play, and it’s up to us to act on the wills of the righteous ones. This is at the core of the humanities as a discipline: yes, we study language and the arts and history, but what is it that truly motivates people? They answer to their highest values. They answer to their gods, whether they have names and faces or not.

Ultimately it’s a story of the bill coming due. Poseidon and Calypso were Odysseus’ punishment for a few bad decisions on the way home from Troy, just as Odysseus was the punishment for Antinous and the other suitors while he was gone. Just as Odysseus couldn’t be kept from home—not even by the gods—no mortal man can outrun justice for his actions, in this life or the next.

The final point I want to make is about Achilles, who garnered the most “screen time” in The Iliad and grappled with his legacy in the middle of a war. The takeaway from that story was, among other things, what must a man do to live forever? Achilles had a clear choice between irrelevance at home, with a large family, great wealth, and much prosperity; or immortality in legend by dying at Troy. It’s easy to pump your fist for the immortality of legend when someone else claims that prize, but when Odysseus meets Achilles in the underworld, he learns that bitter truth: being nobody while being alive is better than ruling in Hell.

So, as a roundabout way of saying it: The Odyssey is a story about what matters the most in life. Being the best warrior? Being the richest man? Sure. Those things are nice and cool and such. But even better than those qualities was the title of husband and father, and a king loved by those under his stewardship. A man who pursues those things will have the gods behind him.

Maybe it’s just something that I already wanted to be true. I hope I’m living that way, because I think it is. And I recognized it in Homer’s works this year.

Thanks for reading, guys.

Visit Nauvoo Supply to order HEARTLANDERS, the most American novel I’ve ever written. It’s like if National Treasure happened during Fallout with G.I. Joes.

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“Electoral Brawlage” examines the first election and inaugural address of each U.S. president from Washington to Trump. This project will conclude in December 2026.

If you like shootouts, car chases, dogfights, and American history, read Heartlanders!

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Buckle up, kids. This one is a ride.

In 1972, Nixon coasted to re-election over his Democratic opponent, George McGovern (D-SD, Senate.) McGovern had picked Sargent Shriver, a founding member of the Peace Corps, as his VP.

There’s no way to spin this as anything less than a massacre. Look at these numbers.

520 to 17. Are you kidding me? The only districts McGovern won were Massachusetts and D.C.! He couldn’t even take his home state! The popular vote margin was greater than 20 points! It doesn’t matter, it’s just funny!!!

Nixon was one of the most popular presidents of the 20th century. Honestly that makes what came next a little baffling to me, and I need to read some books to get a better understanding of the circumstances.

Agnew

First: Nixon’s V.P. Spiro Agnew took a hit for some financial “irregularities” during his tenure as governor of Maryland. Six figures of money went missing, and this is back when money had gold behind it, so it’s a LOT more now. This is why you can’t take kickbacks as a public official: yes everyone is doing it, but when they need to get rid of you, they’ll expose YOUR kickbacks. Taking out Nixon’s V.P. was part one of taking down the man himself.

As part of his plea deal, Agnew left office and basically disappeared into the history books.

Ford

Nixon was the first president to use this fixture of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment: he replaced his V.P. while he was in office. He nominated House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford, a man with more than a dozen House terms under his belt.

If you’ve heard me tell this story before, let me correct the record, because I got something wrong: I misread somewhere (several years ago) that Ford was Speaker of the House when he got picked. This is incorrect; Nixon was president during the Democrats’ forty-year uninterrupted hold on Congress. Ford wanted to become Speaker but he was in the House Minority the whole time. Let’s continue.

Ford was confirmed as Vice President in the fall of 1973. Nixon wanted someone else (his former Treasury secretary, John Connally) but his advisors told him the Senate would never approve him. Ford was liked by both parties and Nixon needed a smooth transition.

Watergate

But Ford wouldn’t have much time to get comfortable in the V.P.’s lodgings, because soon The Machine came for POTUS himself. This is another incident that I want to read about in detail because most of what I know about it come from high school history classes and cultural osmosis: the Watergate Scandal.

Basically Nixon was accused of sending operatives to spy on the Democratic Convention for political intel, and investigators later found evidence of him directing different agencies to stymie one another as they gunned for him. (Specifically he was said to have used the CIA against the FBI; again, I need to read about it.)

The evidence must have confirmed something because Nixon became the first—and to date, only—president to resign from office, promoting the thirteen-term Congressman into the highest position in the White House. In August of 1974, Ford became our thirty-eighth president.

Ford’s In-Not-Guration

Most of these inaugural addresses have been filled with statements of faith and some admission of humility in victory, but Ford’s remarks here (which he explicitly describes as not an inauguration) are truly those of a man out of his depth. He’s shaken, as the whole nation was shaken after seeing the most popular president in history get booted out of office less than a year after a resounding victory in the polls. Ford knew he wasn’t elected and that he’d only gotten in office through the good will of both parties in Congress.

As such, he sought to be the leader of both parties and of all Americans. The “long national nightmare” was over, the Constitution worked, and the Republic was built on laws, not men. The people couldn’t be afraid and couldn’t slip backward. There was only the future.

(And in less than two years, the country would celebrate its bicentennial.)

It must have been a heck of a thing to live through. The next election would be…really something.

Side note: I addressed Nixon’s resignation in HEARTLANDERS (link below) as a potential scheme by apostate Kryptonauts to interrupt the Bicentennial Renewal of the American covenant at the Heartland Shrine.

If none of that makes sense to you, repent and read the book.

Visit Nauvoo Supply to order HEARTLANDERS, the most American novel I’ve ever written. It’s like if National Treasure happened during Fallout with G.I. Joes.

It’s short, it’s fast, it’s full of smarts and action, and you’ll love the characters.

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“This Week in 1776” is an ongoing almanac of events from that year in the American Revolution. Be sure to check out my novel HEARTLANDERS.

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Last week the army was still on Manhattan, licking wounds from Brooklyn, while Franklin, Adams, and Rutledge told Lord Howe on Staten Island that independence was not up for negotiation. Talks won’t resolve this because America won’t go back and England won’t just give them up. This week the Howes stop talking and start landing.

September 15 the Redcoats start running flatboats onto Kip’s Bay, delivering the first four thousand professional soldiers to grapple with Connecticut militia. The militia folds. Washington, who was in Harlem, runs down to KB to try to whip the men back to the lines but he fails. When he writes to Congress in the aftermath he describes the attack as a “great surprize and Mortification.” Casualties are a few dozen in number, while a couple hundred get wrapped up as prisoners. British lose almost nothing by comparison. By nightfall, New York is in British hands.

The one thing that saves the army is “Old Put,” aka Israel Putnam, who marched a couple thousand men up the west side of the island with the help of one Aaron Burr, who knows the layout of the city. Howe sets up office for himself on Manhattan while Washington’s headquarters is in Harlem. Logistically he’s positioned to be in another trap. The odds are against him. The next day he sends Thomas Knowlton and some Rangers to test the British lines, but they end up fleeing into woods and fields before tangling with the Brits and racking up some kills. Despite the W, Washington pulls them back. It’s a minor victory that won’t win them the war and he doesn’t want to lose any more men to British prisons. It boosts the men’s morale, though the Brits do kill Knowlton, to everyone’s regret.

This is more or less the week when New York was lost.

Meanwhile in Philadelphia, Congress does the thing they do best: paperwork. September 16 they pass the Eighty-Eight Battalion Resolve. Each state gets a quota of infantry regiments by population—fifteen from Massachusetts, fifteen from Virginia, one from Delaware, one from Georgia, and so on. Enlist for three years or the war. Raise your own “line.” This plan gives them continuity and an experienced Army instead of one that is basically a rebuild every January when their contracts renew.

I said last week that down south, the Cherokee War has become a real war all in its own right. It morphs into a multi-state burning tour. On September 19, Andrew Williamson’s South Carolina militia, marching through the mountains to join Griffith Rutherford, walk into an ambush in a gorge near present-day Franklin, North Carolina. Cherokee take potshots at them from the slopes, and Williamson has to fix bayonets to stab his way out. The fighting is ugly but the SC militia pulls off the W and carries on burning towns.

Speaking of burning towns: back in New York, the night of the 20th, fire starts near the waterfront and spreads into town with an assists from the wind. Even though Congress told Washington not to burn the place, someone went ahead and did it anyway. The Brits will call it sabotage and turn more public opinion against the Patriots, and nobody is looking forward to conditions caused by the smoke in the coming days.

That’s a metaphor, but also, it’s not. Don’t worry, everything gets worse next week. I hope you’re not attached to Nathan Hale.

Visit Nauvoo Supply to order HEARTLANDERS, the most American novel I’ve ever written. It’s like if National Treasure happened during Fallout with G.I. Joes.

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2026 is America’s 250th birthyear. To celebrate, I’m highlighting 50+ significant American documents from our history. Find them all under the American Documents tab!

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President Kennedy had as one of his key domestic initiatives the improvement of race relations in America, and there was no easier target than the Jim Crow South with its segregated institutions. The Civil Rights Act aimed to desegregate places of business and education through various means—a goal that is right and noble on its face, but had since been applied in ways that run contrary to its goal at the output.

The 1964 Act is distinct from its 1991 successor under President G.H.W. Bush, which caused more problems for Americans than it solved, and I may yet do an article on that bill when the time comes. For now, the ‘64 Act established the following (taken from an Internet search) :

• Title I — Voting. Bars unequal application of registration rules in federal elections. Does not kill literacy tests.

• Title II — Public accommodations. No discrimination by race, color, religion, or national origin in hotels, restaurants, theaters, and other businesses affecting interstate commerce. Private clubs exempted.

• Title III — Public facilities. Justice Department can sue to desegregate state-owned parks, libraries, and the like.

• Title IV — Public schools. Attorney General can sue to desegregate. The text explicitly says it does not authorize busing kids around to manufacture racial balance.

• Title V — Extends the Civil Rights Commission.

• Title VI — No discrimination in programs that take federal money.

• Title VII — Employment. Bans discrimination by race, color, religion, sex, or national origin for employers above a size threshold. Creates the EEOC. “Sex” was added on the House floor (Howard Smith of Smith Act fame). Section 703(j) says the Act shall not be read to require racial or other preferential treatment to correct imbalance.

• Titles VIII–XI — Census data on registration, intervention in pending cases, a Community Relations Service, and miscellaneous procedure.

—This was all copied from an AI summary during my research. —GB

Passage of the bill was a true multipartisan accomplishment, and required the work of both Democrats and Republicans in the first two branches of government. Principle holdouts were the Dixiecrats of the aforementioned South, who viewed the bill as an encroachment on their rights of self-government.

Back when I was reading the Federalist Papers, I described the mechanisms of the Constitution like a surgeon’s scalpel, trying to figure out exactly where to cut so as to do the least amount of damage to healthy tissue in the pursuit of remedying a medical malady. “Both sides” of the Civil Rights debate had their points: black Americans were, by statute, locked out of equal opportunities in employment, education, and commercial accommodation, and that put them in an institutional hole that other races (mainly whites) didn’t have to deal with. White Americans in the South had the right to govern themselves and didn’t want to be told what their laws should be by distant politicians, most of whom weren’t from their states.

Nevertheless, there were unequal treatments applied on the basis of race as a matter of legal code, and those codes ran afoul of Constitutional rights enjoyed by black Americans, at least on paper. The South was right to resist impositions from Washington as a matter of principle, but wrong to deny American citizens entry to various accommodations on the basis of race alone.

What went right:

If certain Southern programs relied on federal dollars to continue operating, then the Fed was within its own rights to withhold those dollars if it determined that Constitutional violations were being enacted in the process. (Some of you are laughing when I say this in the year of our Lord 2026, and you’re right, just hear me out.) If race was the only distinguishing factor in the consideration of a candidate for education, employment, or commercial accommodation, then there was a problem.

However.

What went wrong:

Agencies and courts stopped enforcing a code and started enforcing a theory, aiming for equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. This is where opponents of the Civil Rights Act today have their strongest argument: in far too many instances, a claimant can accuse a defendant of discrimination even if said defendant has a grounds other than race for denying access to employment, education, or accommodation, and the law will quickly take the side of the claimant.

Any Act will be stress-tested for situational application in the courts, and the CRA of ‘64 was no different. Title VII as passed forbids discrimination. Griggs v. Duke Power (1971) read it to forbid neutral rules that produce unequal group results unless the employer can justify them. Congress later wrote disparate-impact rules into the 1991 Civil Rights Act. That is a different statute than the one President Johnson signed in ‘64. A test, a hiring standard, or a promotion rule can be lawful in every individual case and still be treated as suspect because the numbers do not match the local census (if you’re looking at the race category especially.)

Those disparate impact rules took a huge kick to the nuts at SCOTUS recently, some 35 years after they were passed, and should never have been implemented in the first place, but here we are.

If you’ve ever heard of a Michigan Supreme Court case involving the Dodge Brothers that allegedly resulted in corporations valuing shareholder stock over employee compensation, you can think of the CRA in the same terms: there’s what the law says, and then there’s how it’s been twisted and applied to do something it doesn’t actually say.

In short: discrimination based on immutable characteristics alone doesn’t pass the smell test, especially if federal funds are involved. But the application of such an ideal has been unevenly applied (or even wrested off-course of its original path) to say the very least. A 1991 follow-up to the 1964 Act made the problem worse, and it wasn’t until a 2020s SCOTUS decision that the “disparate impact” consideration got the axe.

History is complicated, and law makes it more so. Legislatures can write laws, executives can enforce them, but if a judge interprets them wrong, you’re in for a bumpy ride.

There’s a lot more to be said about this, but I’m keeping it short. It’s good that we ended one form of discrimination. It’s bad that we turned around and created another one. Someday we’ll learn.

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“Electoral Brawlage” examines the first election and inaugural address of each U.S. president from Washington to Trump. This project will conclude in December 2026.

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To call 1968 a chaotic year would be a tremendous understatement. The election was marked by violence, protests, assassinations, and a general sense of unease about the future, even with America’s bicentennial right around the corner.

On the Democrat side, Lyndon B. Johnson chose not to run for a second term. Even though he finished out JFK’s first, he did so with little enough time in office that he qualified for a second full term under the 22nd Amendment. (If he had served more than two years of the term to which JFK had been elected, he wouldn’t have qualified, but it was moot either way—he wasn’t running.)

The popular Democrat that year was Robert F. Kennedy, John’s brother, who was winning the primary contest quite handily. Unfortunately he was assassinated by a Palestinian right after winning the California primary; the murderer, Sirhan Sirhan, was demonstrating his moderate Middle Eastern method of disagreement over RFK’s support of Israel during the Six-Day War. It’s a cultural thing, we wouldn’t understand, we should probably import more of those people here until we do. It’ll be fine. (Sirhan’s death sentence was commuted, I don’t know why we put up with this.)

Anyway, with RFK assassinated, the nomination went to Hubert Humphrey, the incumbent vice president under Johnson. (This, despite RFK’s main challenger being Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota for most of the primary.) Humphrey picked Edmund Muskie, a Senator from Maine as his running mate.

On the Republican side, Richard M. Nixon was back for another go. He’d been in Congress, the Senate, and V.P. under Eisenhower, then lost to JFK in 1960. He ran unsuccessfully for governor of California in 1962 and after that loss, most people thought he was done with politics. Like a west-coast revenant, he came back for another round in ‘68, choosing Spiro Agnew—governor of Maryland—as his V.P.

There was a third party, the American Independents, that comprised a sort of “final hurrah” from the rebellious South on the national stage: their ticket was led by George Wallace (former Alabama governor) and Curtis LeMay (USAF General out of California.) Their platform focused heavily on returning self-government to the states, limiting the power of the Fed, and empowering law enforcement in a time when crime was surging everywhere. Much of this was related to race-mixing issues and was downstream of federal policies like forced busing in schools.

Nixon won a strong Electoral count at over 300; Humphrey somehow took Texas and half the Rust Belt, and his home state of MN (along with Muskie’s, ME.) Nixon delivered CA, Agnew did not deliver MD. Nationwide, Nixon’s popular vote margin (irrelevant) was around half a million.

While Wallace racked up an impressive 46 EVs (and was the last third-party candidate to do so) he didn’t really put a dent in Nixon’s momentum, and even if he hadn’t been in the race, he wouldn’t have given Humphrey the Electoral win. It’s hard to say what the popular breakdown would have looked like without him, but that’s okay because it doesn’t matter. It never matters. If it matters to you, cry harder.

While my rule on third-party candidates is usually “they deliver power to the worst candidate,” Wallace’s run was a unique exception driven by regional differences in national interests. If you overlay the yellow states with The Map (you know The Map), you can guess what those unique differences were. I digress.

Nixon’s Speech

The issues of the day were race relations, the Civil Rights Act (which passed four years prior), the Vietnam War, rising crime, and the high-profile assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. The space program was also in full swing and the Apollo missions were set to put a man on the moon in just six months.

Read the speech here.

Nixon’s focuses were twofold: progress and peace. Not “progress” in the sense of excessive government and social liberation, but cultural and civilizational progress, paired with the improvement of technology and the quality of life for the world. He wanted peace with other nations, not just victory over them. This ideal would be tested during his tenure.

He wanted “equal dignity” between the races, a noble goal that struggles in the details and the execution to this day, for reasons beyond the scope of this article. Matching rhetoric with reason would be the only path to success, and people needed to lower the temperature when it came to their political passions. (This is still true.)

Government has a role to play in these things, but Nixon also acknowledged the limits of what government could accomplish on its own. Much of this work would fall upon ordinary citizens to achieve. Americans couldn’t simply vote a leader into power who would fix all their problems; in the majority of cases, they need to vote a leader who will stay out of their way and then do great things themselves.

You can watch a full video of it here:

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Like the Five-Minute Iliad, this series will cover Homer’s other famous poem, but in fewer installments. Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |

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I want to emphasize something from book 16 that I didn’t touch on last week, because it’s doubly relevant in this week’s summaries:

All summer long, as people geared up to see Nolan’s Odyssey, the political takes keyed in from both sides of the aisle. The Left insisted that the story was about the importance of being hospitable to strangers (a misreading) and the Right was mad about all of the stunt-casting, what with black Helen, trans “Achilles” (they were wrong), and other modernisms that didn’t make a ton of sense. As is pretty much always the case, if you do your own reading of the actual source material and make up your own mind, you’ll realize that both takes are morally bankrupt and also pretty stupid. Furthermore, there’s actual hay to be made about what’s going on.

Take the above excerpt, for instance: Odysseus is back on Ithaca, talking to Telemachus his son, and catching up on the goings-on in his house. When he hears about the suitors camping out there, trashing the place, disrespecting his wife, threatening his son, and mowing through his stores of food and wine, he asks his son why he’s putting up with it. Either Telemachus tolerates the abuse willingly, or he’s unable to resist it because the gods favor his enemies. (This idea is intrinsically interwoven in both Odyssey and Iliad.)

If the Right at large (and especially the detestable Podcast Class) had any cultural literacy—to say nothing of integrity—they could certainly ask why this idea didn’t gain further exploration in the film. But that doesn’t garner clicks from morons, nor does it redeem promotional offers on special sponsored items, promo code SAVEAMERICAVPN, but I digress.

You can’t separate the gods as motivating forces from these stories. You just can’t. And the reasons why are still relevant 2500 years later.

Book 17

Telemachus returns from the swine herd to his father’s palace, where Penelope chides him for having left, but he stands his ground and projects some of the aura that you might expect of leadership and royalty. He tells her about his journey to Pylos and Sparta (I think I accidentally said “Pyros” last week) but he doesn’t tell her that Odysseus is home—he and Dad are keeping that on the DL. Even so, his new friend Theoclymenus, interpreter of bird sign, offers a prophecy that said Odysseus is already home.

As this happens, Odysseus and Eumaeus are en route to town. They cross paths with a goatherd, Melanthius, who’s a major tool; he insults the beggar (Odysseus) and kicks him, prompting Odysseus to seriously consider beating the man to an absolute pulp, but he remembers his larger objective and keeps his identity a secret. There’s a recurring idea that if he stunts on too many hoes before the time is right, people will guess who he is, so he needs to take the abuse. Melanthius also threatens to sell Eumaeus into slavery to someone else, because you could just do that back then.

Odysseus can take humiliation, but what he can’t take is hunger, so he goes to his own house where the suitors are taking up all the extra space, and he starts begging for food among them as a way to judge their character. The good ones will help him and the bad ones will be jerks about it. (This is where the “misreading” comes in; they definitely understand that they should be hospitable to strangers, only because they might be gods in disguise, but the mechanism does work as far as sorting the bastards from the ones who are less so.)

Antinous, to the surprise of no one, is the worst of the suitors, and the greediest with “his” bread—but Odysseus calls him out by telling him it’s not actually his food that he’s eating, and that’s the irony of it all. Antinous is lording over someone else’s property. Do you see what I mean? The Right could make a capital issue out of this message if they had any integrity when it comes to discussing the arts.

As such, Antinous actually throws a stool at Odysseus. It bounces off of him and doesn’t hurt, but he pretends it does, because again he’s trying to hide his identity. The aura of Odysseus precedes him.

Final note for book 17: while most people don’t recognize Odysseus, his old dog Argus does, and wags his tail happily before dying (the dog is at least twenty years old, damn). Penelope requests a meeting with this new beggar/stranger in the house, and Odysseus gets word to her that they should wait until night, because they should meet in secret.

Book 18

The suitors debate how to handle the arrival of this assertive, if mysterious, new beggar, and they resolve upon a solution 2500 years in the making: Grecian Proto-Bumfights. Let’s have this old man duke it out with a local fat loser called Irus, who we assume is buff just because he’s huge, but he’s actually just corpulent and arrogant, and he’s about to Find Out. The winner of this scrap will get a full feast in Odysseus’ house, with meat and bread and wine. Odysseus plays coy, like “Oh nooooo you’re so yoooooung and I’m so oooooold you’re going to beat my aaaaaaaass…” but then he girds his loins and reveals the indomitable nature of his sleeper build, and the suitors are like “Daaaaaaaaaaaamn Grandpa’s on that Swole Patrol…”

Irus thinks he’s still got this, until he throws a swing that barely does anything, and Odysseus claps back with a one-hitter-quitter that has him spitting blood in seconds. Dinner is served, b****. Don’t mess with old guys who’ve seen it all.

On a prompting from Athena, Penelope goes downstairs to hang out with the suitors and Telemachus. There’s some conversation there, the basic takeaway of which is that they are terrible people and shouldn’t act the way they have been, but they’re drunk whores and justice may be right around the corner.

Book 19

This book was one of the best in the entire cycle and if I shared every bit I enjoyed, I’d double the length of this article. I’ll try to be brief.

Penelope finally has her conversation with Odysseus—he tells her his name is Aethon, brother of Idomeneus from Crete, so he keeps his origin story the same as when he told Eumaeus. He tells her a story about encountering Odysseus and gives her details that prove it was him—the entire conversation is essentially him telling her that Odysseus is alive and back without revealing his identity straight up. At one point Penelope even has a servant woman wash Odysseus’ feet and she notices a distinguished scar from an old boar attack that everyone would recognize, but Odysseus threatens her not to reveal who he is.

The exchanges between husband and wife were excellent and very moving in this chapter. Odysseus makes plans to kill all those who offended his wife and his house in the years he was gone. This is where I cooked up the takeaway in the title: Odysseus was punished by Poseidon for what he did to Polyphemus, but he was eventually allowed to return home because the suitors will be punished by Athena (through Odysseus) for what they’ve done to Penelope and Telemachus.

Several lines in this passage focus on the maids who were raised by Penelope but then went on to whore around with the suitors and engage in their disrespect of Odysseus’ estate. Telemachus participated too when he was younger, but as he grew up and took on his father’s image, he also began to inherit his wisdom (through no small help from Athena) and embraced the legacy that was left to him.

You’ll see why I find this such a powerful series of events in the Odyssey.

Book 20

Odysseus sleeps in his own house but really he’s just lying there awake, pondering on how to kill the suitors. He has Telemachus empty out the armory and hide the weapons elsewhere in the house so that Odysseus can trap the suitors inside and kill them with impunity.

There are a lot of lines in book 20 about respecting one’s traditions and upbringing; forget the importance of hospitality to strangers, the real thrust of this book is the importance of reverence for your ancestry and your inheritance.

The herdsmen arrive with livestock for a feast, there’s some more quibbling between the suitors and the house, and Theoclymenus offers up another vision/omen that things are about to get bloody up in the heezy.

Up next: Penelope brings the men a bow and some axes, but what ever for?

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“This Week in 1776” is an ongoing almanac of events from that year in the American Revolution. Be sure to check out my novel HEARTLANDERS.

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New York

Turtles? Under Things? In New York? What’s More American, I Ask You…

You guys have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for this one. On the night of Sept. 6-7, 1776, the Patriots deployed their brand-new sooper-sekrit weapon against the Redcoats: a submarine called the Turtle. If you watched TURN: Washington’s Spies on AMC back in the day, you’ll recognize this gorgeous piece of machinery and the genius (if failed) tactics it attempted to carry out. The show put the machine to good use and rewrote history to make its mission as a success, which would have been really cool, but alas. The fact that they tried it is just awesome.

So what am I even talking about?

As early as spring of 1775, an American inventor named David Bushnell cooked this thing up in his brain and got to work. It was make of oak and iron, built juuuuust large enough to fit your average Colonial, and worked entirely off of handcrank power. You had a vertical screw to manage depth, a horizontal screw for propulsion, and a rudder to control direction. Extremely analog, and limited in its range by only three factors: the strength of the current, the stamina of its marine, and the air supply (roughly half an hour—less if homie is breathing hard.)

Tactically its purpose was to navigate under a British warship, peg a sticky bomb with a timed fuse under the hull, then slip away before the boom-boom box went off. The Americans could then gain a logistical and psychological advantage by 1) easily destroying British ships and 2) leaving them no idea as to how. The Colonials already had God on their side, at this point they were going for extra credit.

Bushnell pitched the idea to Washington, who was probably eager to get a W against the Brits after spending so many months fortifying New York, only to lose a huge chunk of it in a short time. He greenlit the Turtle’s mission. Bushnell’s brother Ezra was the trained pilot, but he was sick on the night of the intended mission, so they called up the 2nd string quarterback Ezra Lee, because All You Ezras Look Alike To Me. Ezra didn’t have as much XP in the saddle, and as I forewarned with my foreshadowing (I’m a talented writer), the current was a significant obstacle.

The Turtle was towed out by surface boats as far as they dared to go, lest the Brits shoot them with their cannons, and then cut loose. Ezra Lee fought the current by hand for hours until he got close enough to Admiral Howe’s flagship, the HMS Eagle, then he capped the top and went under, navigating practically blind to get below her keel. From there he tried to turn a screw against the hull that was designed to chew through wood, but it wouldn’t bite; either he was hitting iron, or there was a barnacle patch, or something else was in the way, but it wouldn’t penetrate. He tried a few more times before his air limit caught up to him, and he had to abandon the attempt. He surfaced and fled, ditching his payload along the way, and it blew up in the water. No British ships were harmed but it did give them a scare.

The Turtle had two more missions in the coming nights but none of them succeeded. Thus the first attempt at American submarine warfare was an unqualified failure—even if it was sound in concept and theory.

I can’t find clips of the Turtle scene from TURN anywhere on YouTube; they worked it into the show in S2E8, “Providence,” but they switched up its usage: the pilot was Caleb Brewster, not Ezra Lee, the bomb worked, and it was part of a mission to rescue Abraham Woodhull from prison. Just one of many sequences where the show tweaked a lot of history. It’s a good show but it annoys me at the same time.

Anyway, enough of about the Turtle. It’s cool that Bushnell took the initiative and put his talents to work to make it, and that the Americans were willing to try unconventional things in their pursuit of liberty.

Philly

On Sept 6, Congress appoints Franklin, Adams, and Edward Rutledge to meet with Howe. They are instructed strictly to hear his propositions but not surrender their independence. Two days later on Sept 9, Congress officially declares “United States” to be the name for their cluster of governing bodies, and that “United Colonies” is out.

On Sept 11, Howe meets with the aforementioned Congressmen but does not acknowledge them as such, only as gentlemen. He insists on a renunciation of independence and what is, politely, surrender. They might make it out with some pardons. The delegation very diplomatically tells Howe to get bent, and they move to the next phase of their interaction: warfare. The record of “Greatest Offense Against America in New York on Sept. 11” would stand for 225 years.

The South

Not much to report; there are movements in the Cherokee War but they mostly amount to pieces rearranging on the board. There’s a bigger conflict coming next week.

Thank you for reading and I hope you like these articles.

Visit Nauvoo Supply to order HEARTLANDERS, the most American novel I’ve ever written. It’s like if National Treasure happened during Fallout with G.I. Joes.

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Welp. It’s today. 25 years since 9/11.

Some of you have heard my story—about where I was when it happened, and what the day was like. I rolled up to seminary in my truck with my little brother; we listened to the radio on the way in, just background noise, and maybe I heard something about an airplane and the Twin Towers, but I didn’t put anything together just yet. It was just before 6AM Pacific Time in Henderson.

The first plane hit the first tower at 8:46 Eastern. Seminary lasted about 45 minutes, and then I drove over to the school. Might have caught a snippet on the radio again, my mind was probably elsewhere. In the parking lot I ran into my best friend Derrick. He asked if I’d heard that someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center. My foggy brain recollected something from the radio and thought “huh.”

It didn’t really process at the time. In my head I envisioned some idiot in a bi-plane hitting the tower and putting a hole in it.

Then we went to first period, our U.S. Government class. My teacher put the news on the TV. They were replaying the impact of the second plane—a news chopper had come over to the WTC to capture footage of the smoke and just as we were starting to understand what we were looking at, that second plane came in and hit the other tower.

My teacher told us a third plane had hit the Pentagon and a fourth had gone down in Pennsylvania. All other flights were grounded and we were left asking just what the hell was going on.

Every teacher had the TV on for the rest of the day. I don’t remember learning anything. I doubt we studied or focused. We watched people somersaulting out of the higher windows, or clinging to the side of the building as smoke billowed out. In my youthful naivete I assumed people were only jumping because firefighters were down below with pads to catch them. That naivete didn’t last long. I understood after a few minutes how those jumps ended.

I called my brother when I got home. He was at college in Idaho. He read a lot of Clancy novels and was a big news junkie, so he had a better idea of international affairs—the question of the day was, who? Why? He thought it was China. My best guest was “someone in the Middle East.”

That’s the thing: we didn’t know. We couldn’t even process the idea that someone hated us enough to do this. That was the America of the 90s and early 2000s. We were wealthy, happy, and peaceful. And yeah, most of us didn’t care what the world thought of us, to the extent that we never even bothered to wonder. I wanted to save up and buy a muscle car, have a good senior year of high school, make out with a girl here and there, and get ready for my mission. I had six-pack abs and was making eight bucks an hour at Discount Tire and that was good money.

Then the planes hit.

That night—it was a Tuesday—we had a Young Men’s activity at church. One of our leaders worked for a towing company and he set up some cars for us to smash at the local junkyard. This activity was on the calendar for weeks before this happened. We were still trying to process it when we got there. A bunch of 16 and 17 year old kids, goofing off, having fun, but knowing something huge was happening out there in the world, and wondering whether it affected us.

(I was a cheerleader that year, and one of our rival schools had a cheer coach on the plane that hit the Pentagon, IIRC. That was as close as it got to Henderson and it was still too close.)

For the rest of September, we reeled from the sucker punch. Everyone paid tribute, and the government mobilized under President Bush to figure out who did this, where they were, and just how many bombs we were going to shove up their tailpipe in retaliation. Within days the blame landed squarely on the shoulders of Osama Bin Laden, leader of Al-Qaeda, affiliate of the Taliban, who were in charge of Afghanistan.

With a name and a face to hate, America united in the quest to exact justice. Everyone wanted a piece of this guy. South Park even rushed an episode where the kids got stuck on a military plane and wound up in the Middle East, Cartman ran into Bin Laden, and we learned that the entire debacle was the result of OBL’s tiny genitals. We were all on the same page.

In October, we hit Afghanistan. We started dropping bombs on suspected bunker sites. We narrowed the search down to thirty square miles. Twenty. Fifteen. Then the news broke that OBL had probably fled Afghanistan ten days ahead of our arrival. The search continued. November came around and my high school’s football team made a push deep into the playoffs. My sister was diagnosed with diabetes. She spent Thanksgiving in the hospital, and I spent that weekend freezing my toes off in Reno where our team lost in a snowstorm.

Whenever we got a whiff of the news, on TV or in the papers (we didn’t hang out online much), the hunt for Bin Laden was a central focus, along with the cleanup in New York. December came. Christmas felt a little…off. We wanted a pick-me up. Hopefully we’d catch him. The military was there now in full force, kicking names and taking a$$, so it’d happen any day now. Right? Nope. No joy.

This was the new reality. 2002 came along. We kept hunting. The War on Terror was real and rumor had it that in addition to Afghanistan harboring Bin Laden, Iraq was up to its old tricks under Saddam Hussein, and he had WMDs in production. We’d head over there the following spring, in 2003. Suddenly there were divisions on that point, and America became a place of Left and Right again. Didn’t matter. We expanded the GWOT to Iraq and overthrew Saddam. We’d catch him in the fall of 2003, but Bin Laden remained at large.

For years the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns carried on. They were staples of the entire Bush presidency, and remained a key point of the 2008 presidential campaign, at least until the housing market crashed and the subprime mortgage crisis obliterated most of everyone’s money. Barack Obama succeeded Bush, and foreign policy objectives shifted in the Middle East. We found Bin Laden hiding out in Pakistan, almost ten years after 9/11. SEALs took him out and expedited his arrival to the ocean floor. It was over. Right?

Wrong. Ten years in Afghanistan would become twenty. Iraq would become a staging ground for ISIS, and the leadership landscape would shuffle, and the conflict would stretch into a third presidency (Trump), and then a fourth (Biden), where it was swiftly “resolved” in the form of a hasty desertion, putting the Taliban back in charge with billions of dollars’ worth of American guns and armor. I suspect that at some point we will end up back in Afghanistan, and for the third time in my lifetime, a superpower will waste huge amounts of capital in the Graveyard of Empires—this time, fighting our own weapons.

For twenty-five years we’ve seen a mixed bag of responses to the most shocking casus belli in living memory. It marked the end of the world I grew up in, and hastened the departure onto the road that got us here. Granted, it wasn’t the only cause, but everything that’s happened was downstream of it, or connected in some meaningful way. It influenced our leaders, who were also in charge of our capital, who made policy decisions that incinerated the value of our currency, and also altered our border and immigration and refugee policies that rapidly remade our demographics, landing us in a swamp of fourth- and fifth-order consequences that we’re still figuring out.

And don’t even get me started on the conspiracy theories that came out of it. If you think Candace Owens has thrown spaghetti at the wall over Charlie Kirk, 9/11 has her begging for mercy. Somehow it was the Saudis, but it was also Bush, but it was also the Jews, depending on whether you ask Ron Paul potheads or Leftist crackheads. I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t know. I think plenty of conspiracies are viable and I also think most of the people peddling them are retarded. All I know at the end of the day is that it upended the world and now I tell my children about it like it’s a fantastical place they can’t visit.

Is this new? Not really. My dad grew up in the 70s and that wasn’t like the 90s all that much. He’s a Boomer, I’m a Millennial. But my world was more similar to his than the Alphas’ is to mine, and that matters. I remember having the faintest, vaguest inkling of that as I was out smashing cars with my fellow Priests at the Pic-A-Part that night:

This is a big deal. I’m gonna tell my kids about this someday.

Here I am. Today is “someday.” I have three kids. One of them says he wants to join the military. We’ve had talks about what that entails. I have a mortgage that I’m going to spend the next few decades paying off. Gas is still really expensive. We’re finding new ways to get bogged down in not-wars in the Middle East. Everyone is chronically online and we’re all really good at finding ways to hate each other.

Maybe I look at the past with rose-colored glasses. Maybe I have 42 years of life experience and I see things I just couldn’t see at 17. I’m just living through my fair share of intense historical events, right? I mean hell, my mom was almost 5 when Kennedy got shot. She was 15 when Nixon resigned—which had never been done before. My parents saw the Cold War end in their 20s—a war that started ten years before they were born. The fall of the Berlin Wall. The rise of the Internet. Their parents fought in Italy and Korea. Half of my life is comprised of the Global War on Terror. Historically speaking…these things happen.

It’s just that, for me, that was the beginning of the end. Do I know who “really” did it? No. I’m sure I don’t have the whole story. More to the point, I’m sure it doesn’t matter—not for me, individually, on the ground. What matters to me is giving my kids as much of a great childhood as I can. Giving them skills and memories and preparation for adulthood, so that they have that safe cache of 18 years of memories to look back on when they think of how the world should be.

I remember a more peaceful time. A more prosperous time. I remember when it all changed, and everything that has come in the wake of it. And if I know anything, I know this: I will have it again. Even better: I will give it to my kids. I can’t fix everything—I can just give them that vision, that ambition, that expectation, and send them out into the world to make it.

So here we are. 25 years after 9/11. I remember the world before.

Let’s build it again.

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History remembers the Alien Registration Act of 1940 as “The Smith Act,” mainly because the core writing of it came from Rep. Howard Smith of Virginia. The Act generated the first peacetime federal sedition statute since John Adams was president.

While Hitler was getting his groove on in Europe, America still wasn’t engaged in World War Two—but we weren’t blind to it either, especially not the communist side of things. A lot of proto-anti-fascist movements had migrated over here in during the Weimar years and many of those actors entangled themselves in FDR’s cabinet (read The Venona Secrets). American Communists were getting bolder in their calls to overthrow the government and that government wasn’t ignoring them.

FDR signed the Smith Act into law on June 28th of that year, about seventeen months before Pearl Harbor. You can read the Act here and the criminal core here.

All that said, what did the Smith Act actually do?

First, it made it a crime to interfere with the loyalty or discipline of the armed forces—urging insubordination, mutiny, or refusal of duty, or circulating printed matter that did the same. (We’ve seen the Democrats do this recently).

Second, and this is the clause the Cold War lived on, it made it unlawful to:

• knowingly advocate, advise, or teach the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing any government in the United States by force or violence, or by assassinating an officer of that government;

• print or circulate such matter with intent to cause that overthrow;

• organize, or knowingly join, a group that teaches or encourages that overthrow;

• conspire to do any of the above.

Third, it required every alien fourteen or older to register, be fingerprinted, and report. Aliens were the specific target for this law for a number of reasons, mainly because they were the source of anti-American agitation and also because they could be deported. The Act ratcheted up the number of deportations for aliens who called for a violent overthrow of the U.S.

In addition to deportation, convicted seditionists could be fined and imprisioned.

It’s significant to consider the ramifications of this Act because it directly criminalized speech, not just action. Guilty parties didn’t have to bomb things (though many did) or seize a government building (they did this too.) You just had to verbally support/advocate for it, and spread your ideas to others.

Since speech was the only action, this Act naturally ran afoul of the First Amendment, and ended up in the courts. The question was: is calling for revolution protected speech?

That would get a lot of play during the Red Alert (I refuse to call it a “scare” because it was a real threat) years of the 1950s, when McCarthy (who wasn’t wrong) sought to remove communists from the government. But the Smith Act predated “McCarthyism” by more than a decade. A lot of people thought it was drafted specifically to target the Communist Party USA, and while they were a big player, the statutes targeted behaviors and not individual groups. The first big trial for Smith Act violations was actually against the Socialist Workers Party in Minnesota, a state that has always sucked and continues to do so. After Trotskyite revolution advocates were locked up, the Act was then applied to the commies.

The First Amendment is a God-given right, and if we’re going to protect it, then protecting it from people who advocate for its destruction seems like an obvious measure to take. (Personally I think it makes sense.) But like I said: this question ended up in the courts, and was eventually whittled down bit by bit.

Dennis v United States

In July 1948 the government indicted eleven top CPUSA leaders, including General Secretary Eugene Dennis. The charge was conspiracy to teach and advocate violent overthrow, and to organize a party for that purpose. The trial in New York ran for months. All eleven were convicted, and a challenge made it all the way to SCOTUS, which sided with the government.

Chief Justice Vinson treated a highly organized group, advocating for government destruction, to be a hazard in the same way that an active group storming a courthouse would be. The conspiracy merited the punishment. Justices Black dissented, saying that if you can jail men for teaching an idea, you have handed the government a tool that will not stay pointed only at Communists.

At the time, the Dennis decision made sense given the immediate threat poised by the organizing collectivist institutions, but Black was also right that soon such a legal instrument would be pointed elsewhere. Legal minds in a republic ought to be careful not to forge a weapon they wouldn’t want pointed at themselves, which at the meta-level is what this case was really debating.

was defensible as an emergency reading of a statute aimed at a conspiratorial party that took its orders, in that era, from a foreign totalitarian state. I also think Black was right that the opinion was written too loosely. A republic that loves the Constitution should want the line drawn at action and incitement to action, not at the mere existence of a hated ideology.

Yates v United States

Six years later the Warren Court heard Yates v. United States, and held that teaching an abstract doctrine was okay but advocacy to action was not. It didn’t strike down the statute or formally overrule Dennis, but it figured out the fine line in what had been a gray area for far too long. You could teach Marxism in a classroom without organizing people to action. (But if you did that second thing, you were in deep doo-doo.) This was the forerunner to a lot of speech laws that we have today as regards violence toward government.

In 1969, the case of Brandenburg v Ohio would strengthen the findings in Yates, clearly stating that speech and advocacy were different in the eyes of the law.

So that’s it. For a while we had a law on the books that made teaching communism illegal, and we used to lock fools up over it. I’m sure we made the right decision. I mean, after all…gestures broadly.

Right guys?

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“Electoral Brawlage” examines the first election and inaugural address of each U.S. president from Washington to Trump. This project will conclude in December 2026.

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I’m just now realizing that I neglected to cover the 20th Amendment, which was ratified in FDR’s first term; among other things, it moved Inauguration Day from March 4th to January 20th, shortening the president’s “lame duck” period by six weeks. Given that the national election precedes Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, this puts a huge dent in what a lame duck government can accomplish. Every president from FDR onward has been inaugurated on January 20th.

The 22nd Amendment came in 1951, under Truman, and established the two-term limit that we know today. There are some stipulations, but that’s basically it.

I’ll mention here too that the 25th Amendment was ratified in 1965, during Johnson’s only full term as President; it established the succession of the presidency in formal terms (whereas in previous instances where the president died, the V.P. took over under uncodified mechanisms) and also established how a V.P. might be replaced in the case of vacancy. Fitting that it should happen under Johnson, the eighth (!!!) executive to ascend to the presidency in such conditions (and wouldn’t be the last—Nixon would resign in the 70s.)

Isn’t that wild? 9 presidents out of 45—20% of them—weren’t elected. At least not at the top of the ticket, so yeah, asterisk. But still. Wow.

Assumption

Before JFK Jr’s body was even cold, the government had mobilized to get LBJ sworn in on November 22, 1963. Succession and continuity are important and this was one of the more dramatic instances of a V.P. assuming the office of President.

Here’s LBJ’s national address from the 27th, five days after the assassination. It’s mournful and optimistic in a balanced way, and like Chester A. Arthur in the wake of Garfield’s murder, Johnson committed to carrying out Kennedy’s ambitious vision for the future: explore space, empower the United Nations, proliferate education, and avoid war unless necessary.

Election

A year after JFK’s assassination came the 1964 election. LBJ was the momentum candidate so the party rallied behind him, and he picked Hubert Humphrey to be his V.P.; Humphrey had challenged Kennedy in the last primary (1960) so choosing him was a unification move for the party’s sub-factions. Humphrey was a Senator from Minnesota, because Minnesota sucks.

The GOP ticket was represented by Barry Goldwater, a libertarian-leaning conservative Senator from Arizona, and William Miller, a Congressman from New York. Goldwater remains a popular figure in the old guard conservative factions, even though his chance at the Oval Office went up in flames come Nov. 1964. I have a book about that election that I still need to read. I’ll get to it.

Goldwater only won his home state and the deep South. Johnson flogged him everywhere else. This was one of the bigger landslides in American history. It was also the first time D.C. got to have Electoral Votes, which should never have been allowed, and only serves to enslippen the slope toward other things that they shouldn’t have and don’t deserve, like Senators. The Left loves to cry about D.C. deserving Senators, but they only do this out of ideological inconsistency; suppose you gave a Senator to every county in America, instead of two per State, just to “make it fair.” See how fast they’d run screaming from that idea. I digress.

Anyways. LBJ won, and Goldwater joined the ranks of the more humiliated losers, which isn’t to say that his policies were bad; people like continuity, they liked LBJ, and they wanted the stability of a retained incumbent.

Inauguration

Here’s Johnson’s inauguration speech. He has a strong opening wherein he mentions something that one of his Kryptonaut staff members must have let slip:

THE AMERICAN COVENANT They came here--the exile and the stranger, brave but frightened--to find a place where a man could be his own man. They made a covenant with this land. Conceived in justice, written in liberty, bound in union, it was meant one day to inspire the hopes of all mankind. And it binds us still. If we keep its terms we shall flourish.

That’s all well and good, but then he says this, which gets tricky:

JUSTICE AND CHANGE First, justice was the promise that all who made the journey would share in the fruits of the land.

The promise wasn’t that if you “made the journey” you’d get everything you wanted. That stuff was only at the other end of hard work and sacrifice, which were natural obstacles. Nowadays they are also artificial, imposed by bad policy and bad market decisions, but there’s also no shortage of politicians insisting that some people who “make the journey” should get free stuff, as long as The Big Guy gets they/their cut. Yes, I’m editorializing, no, I’m not wrong. Anyways.

LBJ’s presidency coincided with the Civil Rights Act, which was noble in intent and had many positive impacts, though its application has been…uneven. To thoroughly summarize my thoughts on that would go beyond the scope of this article. Nevertheless I don’t take issue with Johnson’s stance here:

Justice requires us to remember: when any citizen denies his fellow, saying: "His color is not mine or his beliefs are strange and different," in that moment he betrays America, though his forebears created this Nation.

Rejecting beliefs simply because they are “strange and different” is worth examining; rejecting beliefs because they are incompatible or antithetical with Western values and/or the Constitution’s guarantees is thoroughly justified, as the written law of our immigration code reflects. We can argue ‘til we’re blue in the face about whether “American” is a single skin color (it’s not), but beliefs, culture, and laws are absolutely essential components thereto, and can only be diluted to our detriment.

Yes, I’m taking a contrarian approach to Johnson’s first few points—not without grounds, make no mistake. That said, I don’t think his entire platform was a hidden dagger. Take for example:

No longer need capitalist and worker, farmer and clerk, city and countryside, struggle to divide our bounty. By working shoulder to shoulder together we can increase the bounty of all. We have discovered that every child who learns, and every man who finds work, and every sick body that is made whole--like a candle added to an altar-brightens the hope of all the faithful.

Again we go back to the things that cause us to work “shoulder to shoulder,” and those things are our culture, laws, and customs. Admitting too many subcultures that won’t assimilate to that mindset will ultimately dismantle that mindset (could this be the objective, hmmmm)…

In each generation, with toil and tears, we have had to earn our heritage again. If we fail now then we will have forgotten in abundance what we learned in hardship: that democracy rests on faith, that freedom asks more than it gives, and the judgment of God is harshest on those who are most favored.

Not wrong at all.

For we are a nation of believers…in justice and liberty and in our own union. We believe that every man must some day be free. And we believe in ourselves… Each time, from the secret places of the American heart, came forth the faith that they could not see or that they could not even imagine… this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest that is sleeping in the unplowed ground. Is our world gone? We say farewell. Is a new world coming? We welcome it, and we will bend it to the hopes of man…

I don’t dislike it as much as I expected. I’ve encountered bits of Johnsonian policy in the past and haven’t been the biggest fan of his, but I also haven’t made an in-depth study of his career. That will have to come later. Overall it was a good speech. Go check it out.

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“This Week in 1776” is an ongoing almanac of events from that year in the American Revolution. Be sure to check out my novel HEARTLANDERS.

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Sometimes it’s easy to write jokes and sarcasm into these summaries, and other times I’m impressed by the weight of what the Army was up against, so I just want to play it straight. This is one of those times.

The week of August 30–September 5, 1776 comprised one of the first real diplomatic tests of Congress as a legal body, and the colonies as a separate entity from Britain. But first, the military considerations:

New York

The evacuation finished on the morning of August 30 under cover of sudden fog, and if this were the American Iliad, you’d have to write in some cheeky behavior from Zeus to make that happen. Implications abound. With the whole of the army tired, hungry, and wet, the city is covered in men sleeping wherever they can—streets, houses, tents, whatever. Military order has basically evaporated. Nobody has their weapons ready and their individualized units are scattered. Washington, grateful to be spared and anticipating the magnitude of the task before him, sets up shop in the Archibald Kennedy house to get his bearings.

On August 31 he writes a full report to Congress, having just barely gotten off his horse and being without sleep for a ridiculous amount of time. All things considered, the retreat was a success, and they lost fewer men and resources than he’d feared. His officers would spend the day keeping the men in order, preventing them from looting, firing guns at random, and generally causing trouble. Remember, Daddy George wanted God on their side and for that to happen, they had to conduct themselves righteously. The officers started reorganizing the army and getting ready to move toward the northern end of Manhattan.

On September 1 the Army sets out under reorganized divisions: Putnam, Heath, and a recovered Greene. They were sort of stuck on Manhattan, though; the Brits held Long Island, their ships had the waters on lock, and the Howe Brothers could basically deploy troops on land wherever they wanted. The danger remained present. Abandoning the city seemed to be the prudent course of action, so on September 2, Washington wrote to Congress and asked whether they should burn New York on their way out. Otherwise it would be a very hospitable winter quarters for the British.

Congress received the letter and immediately shut down that option. On September 3, John Hancock said retreat was up to Washington, but burning the place was a big no-no. As such, Washington ordered his men to track British ship movements ruthlessly; they may very well have to fight again, and creatively so.

You guys are going to love what the Patriots attempt on the HMS Eagle next week.

Philadelphia

Remember John Sullivan? I might not have mentioned him, but he and Lord Stirling were two Patriots who got captured on Long Island. Sullivan will go on to have a successful military and political career, including a stint as governor of New Hampshire. For now, the Howe Brothers let him go to Philly with their proposal for surrender terms.

This is the diplomatic test: Howe told Sullivan to tell Congress that he could deal with them as gentlemen (a class thing) but not as Congress (a political thing) because the Crown didn’t recognize Congress as an entity. They were just unruly gentlemen who needed to get back in line, as far as the King was concerned. Howe wanted to give them good terms, and receive good terms in return, and have done with it before there was any severe bloodshed or destruction.

Congress understandably refused. The ink on the Declaration of Independence was still wet and they weren’t turning back. They sent their own proposal to Howe, that they would exchange two of their prisoners for Sullivan and Stirling, and continue according to their own objectives. Any dealings with Congress would have to be done with Congress as Congress. They wouldn’t settle for going unrecognized. This rule was passed on to other American actors including Washington, who was told that he shouldn’t receive any peace proposals from the Howes unless they were in writing and addressed to Congress or its agents.

If the Brits wanted to deal, they would have to deal with America, because Congress was not comprised of Ye Olde Fellow Brits.

The South

While the Americans and Brits duke it out in New York, the South continues to have its own war with the Cherokee. That campaign has morphed from a series of scattered raids and attacks to an organized affair along racial and political lines. The Cherokee are largely unified now, and the South Carolina militia is squaring off with them. There’s no military action this week, but I wanted to mention the state of things because the war gets a little spicier throughout September.

Visit Nauvoo Supply to order HEARTLANDERS, the most American novel I’ve ever written. It’s like if National Treasure happened during Fallout with G.I. Joes.

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Despite spending the last week listening to this book, I still struggle to get the entire title out in one go because it’s an absolute vomit-fest of otherwise disconnected terms that no human in the history of ever has ever tried to intertwine. The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamlined Baby will test your sanity with every attempt to remember the order of the words in its title. That said, there were some extremely good pieces in this collection.

This book came recommended as part of the “Make Graham Read Something” promotion, available exclusively to TMR’s paid subscribers. There are ten of you. Two have responded to the offer. The other eight can weigh in at any time. Shout-out to David who thought I would like this title; he was right.

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Tom Wolfe was a traveling writer in the 1960s who specialized in exploring micro-cultures across America. I don’t know which magazines or newspapers published his articles, and I assume that some of them were multi-parters because of the length, but he must have enjoyed a broad audience in his his time; the copyright years are noted as 1962, 63, and 64, and they cover scenes from Vegas to New York. There are 22 articles in all, and by the time you get through them, you’ll realize how much our culture has changed in the last 60 years…but also how our concerns are largely the same, albeit on a different scale.

He opens up the collection with a look at Old Vegas, when it was transitioning from the hotspot for Hoover Dam workers to the glitzy sin stop that we know today. Having grown up in the Vegas Valley, I have some memories of the old skyline—I remember seeing the Stratosphere (“Stupak’s Stump”) coming together, the opening of the Excalibur, and each individual construction of Steve Wynn’s repetitive triskelion attractions (Mirage, Venetian, Bellagio…I might be getting them mixed up now.) The Luxor lit up for the first time in my early teens and it quickly became the southernmost anchor for the Strip, with each mega-resort’s profile stretching out in a distinct line from left-to-right. (I’m from Henderson, that’s the order from there.)

But Wolfe’s examination of Vegas predates all those gargantuan, over-the-top attractions; Vegas was still growing, with most of the casinos being attached to individually-owned hotels, and the real magnetic pull of the place was its neon lights and crafty signs—signs that now occupy their own piece of real estate as a museum to yesteryear. That was the skyline he saw, not the one I know from my childhood, which has already changed in my lifetime.

(Fun little aside: I have driven a flatbed truck inside T-Mobile Arena while it was under construction—the exact center of it, on the dirt, where the Vegas Golden Knights now play hockey. There was a lot going on and I don’t have a picture of it to my regret; when I attended my first game in October of 2019, it was my second time inside that place. I digress.)

In a lot of ways, Wolfe’s Vegas article captures the core theme of his articles, or at least a recurring one (until he gets to the New York pieces.) The postwar boom brought cash to the middle class, and they built their own culture monuments, which were largely a working-class idea of what “fancy” was. Vegas became the American Versailles, a comparison that makes perfect sense if you know about America and Versailles.

From there he delves into the origins of such iconic American activities as demolition derbies, stock car racing, moonshine running, and other bareknuckle motorsports that concern themselves much more with spectacle than with precision. (Very American.) The 60s was a hell of a time to invent the demo derby…that should have come around in the 80s, those cars were all garbage. What a waste of beautiful, irreplaceable steel…yet Wolfe’s history lesson and artful editorialization make the whole thing worth reading.

His observations on the music scene probably had the most to offer to contemporary parents who wonder at the inane popularity of livestreamers and worry about oversaturation on the Internet. Turns out these were similar concerns among parents in the 60s, when disc jockeys had a disproportionate influence over teens, and young people were always tuned in to their transistor radios. He covered Beatle-mania, and how a stateside radio host ingratiated himself among England’s most famous quartet, thus becoming an unofficial fifth member—and a short time later he covered the surging popularity of the Rolling Stones who, by fashion and genre, were the complete opposite of the Beatles.

Again I’ll point out ways in which the 60s are similar to our day, namely that when a musical sensation bucks fashion trends and gains significant favor among young female listeners, young male listeners will adamantly assert that said musical sensation is a bunch of fags; we said it about the Backstreet Boys as our fathers said it about Mick Jagger. War never changes.

When Wolfe segues into nationwide phenoms, he starts to examine how the cashed-up middle class seeks recognition and elevation while still retaining its roots at the ground level; they liked knowing that they were working-class yet they sought after the social sophistication of actors with aura, like Cary Grant, or athletes who carried the aspirations of an entire ethnicity on their backs, like Cassius Clay (before he became Muhammed Ali.) There seemed to be an unhealthy fixation by the middle class on either lifting themselves up to glam-and-glitz status, or bringing the A-listers down to their level, and this is where celebrity gossip magazines started to do the heavy lifting. Grocery checkstand tabloids got their start here—writers would gossip or even make stuff up to move copies and earn a buck, and the people would eat it up as if their opinions of celebrities mattered at all.

The value of a book like this is that it shows us our time is only unique in its technology and social norms; human behavior largely is what it has always been, and even sixty years ago people were responding to new stimuli in unexpected (and self-serving) ways.

I’ll spare you an overwrought summary of the New York chapters, other than to say that the “Nanny Mafia” was an unknown thing to me, if entirely credible, and Wolfe’s description of the dating scene for mid-twenties divorced single moms is much closer to the nationwide norm now. (The sexual revolution and its consequences…) Wolfe’s choice to open the compilation with Vegas as the “low high culture” and close with New York as the “actual high culture” provided a strong contrast in two degrees of American haute couture, both coming from money, but one was the new money and the other is descended from legacies and trust funds. In between, you get a glimpse into different pockets of America and the things they build when they get the time and space to do so.

If I were going to assess the overall value of this book to me as a reader, I’d say it reveals (or amplifies things I already knew) about what we as a people prioritize when we can otherwise “get away with it.” That’s not a condemnation, just an observation, and to anyone with an interest in understanding what drives history—or for writers, how to build the culture of a world—you could do a lot worse than Kandy-Kolored…

As for the title, well, that’s a nickname from one of the articles for a custom-made car. But I’ve divulged enough about it already; I could spin my own couple-dozen pieces out of the contents of Wolfe’s writing here, and I’d only end up diluting the points he was making throughout it. If for nothing else, read it for chapter 8, “The Last American Hero.” It’s one of the longer (if not the longest) chapters in the book, and Wolfe successfully connects moonshine runner culture to an elevated Medal of Honor recipient count from World War 2.

Special thanks to David for recommending this one. It was an edifying read and I’m sure I’ll go through it again.

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2026 is America’s 250th birthyear. To celebrate, I’m highlighting 50+ significant American documents from our history. Find them all under the American Documents tab!

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The “G.I. Bill of Rights” is a nickname for the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 which, you’ll notice, was before World War 2 ended. What did the Act aim to accomplish?

Well, the advantage of having a second World War was that you could hopefully learn a thing or two from the first one. In this case, Roosevelt—who had been part of military command under Wilson—remembered the massive influx of able-bodied men coming home from the war in search of work and struggling to find it. Washington anticipated victory after D-Day and wanted legal/financial infrastructure in place to handle the sudden, rapid reintegration of 15 million men stateside, so the Readjustment Act was necessary.

In looking this up, I found that a lot of WW1 veterans actually got screwed by a combination of deferments in 1924 and the stock market crash in 1929; the government planned to pay the men what was effectively a retirement bonus in 1945, some 25 years after the end of the war, but then the Depression hit, along with WW2, which resulted in many of those veterans getting re-drafted. Some of them had even participated in big unemployment marches in the 1930s.

Roosevelt understandably didn’t want that to happen again. Neither did Congress. The Bill provided things like:

—Tuition for new trades

—Unemployment pay (as long as they were looking for work)

—Housing, farming, and business loans

—Healthcare

A lot of this stuff ended up being the forerunner of the modern VA, and you’ll still hear GWOT veterans talk about using their GI Bills when they got home. While the WW1 vets got a cash bonus, WW2 and beyond got goods and services of varying quality. (You’ll have to ask the serviceman in your life about his experience.)

We’ve lived with this program for so long that we think of it now as a no-brainer, but there was in fact a time when veterans weren’t financially taken care of, not even a little bit. The Founders didn’t build legal infrastructure for a standing military, and for good reason, but the twentieth century saw enough mobilization that such a program became necessary to attract new servicemen to enlist. WW2 was when that happened, and this was the Act that made it so.

Visit Nauvoo Supply to order HEARTLANDERS, the most American novel I’ve ever written. It’s like if National Treasure happened during Fallout with G.I. Joes.

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Like the Five-Minute Iliad, this series will cover Homer’s other famous poem, but in fewer installments. Part 1 | 2 | 3 |

I am using the Butler translation. Subscribe to follow along. For another excellent story about a man trying to get home to his wife amidst a divine conflict, read HEARTLANDERS.

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Aiight, so we’re halfway through this beast. Books 1-4 were the “Telemachy” wherein Telemachus leaves Ithaca and goes to Pyros/Sparta to ask Nestor/Menelaus what happened to his father, Odysseus.

Books 5-8 were Odysseus leaving Calypso’s island and arriving in Phaeacia or whatever (I’m tracking the character names but honestly the place names and throwing me) where he meets the local monarchy.

Books 9-12 were Odysseus recounting his actual Odyssey to King Alcinous and Queen Arete. And now, here we are.

Book 13

Alcinous is downright pleased to hear Odysseus’ story and to learn of his hardships (it had to be REALLY difficult to hook up with TWO divine beings for all those years). Since Big O should have left Troy a wealthy man, Alcinous generously sets him up with a LOT of treasure and an escort to Ithaca so he’s made whole. Odysseus ends up even richer than he would have been with his Trojan loot, AND everyone loves him, AND they’re waiting for him to come home with Chronic Acute Main Character Syndrome and just kick all sorts of sphincter, sphincter they could have kicked by themselves but wouldn’t even attempt until he showed up, dripping with aura…jeez are we sure this wasn’t written by a woman?

I’m not, because of what Poseidon does next. He’s so mad when he finds out Odysseus is home and rich and everyone loves him, that he goes crying directly to The Manager and whines to Zeus about how Odysseus is a big mean poopy-head and he’s fat and he blinded Polyphemus and so Poseidon is OWED revenge and come on, it’s not like he was gonna keep Odysseus from home FOREVER, he was just going to screw with him for like ten or twenty more years, come on Zeus, I’m the victim here…

Dude. This is straight female behavior. Am I sure this isn’t the Emily Wilson translation? Oof.

Anyway, Poseidon gets clearance from HR to punish the Phaeaicians by turning their boat into stone and also ringing their capital city with mountains, so that it is forever a huge dolor de culo to get in and out of town. Petty. Petty AF. Poseidon is 100% a chick.

Book 14

Odysseus pulls up in Ithaca, but doesn’t head straight for the palace. He needs to know the lay of the place and what the hickity-heck is going on. With some guidance from Athena, who uses her magic to change his appearance, he heads over to the local swineherd, Eumeaus, and they start swapping tales about who they are and what life has been like for them. You don’t end up wrangling pigs in the Mediterranean because everything has gone right for you, yanno? But before he tells his story, he asks Odysseus where he came from, and Odysseus doesn’t immediately declare his identity.

He makes up a false one that skews close to the truth—that he was at Troy, got shipwrecked, and made his way here—but claims that he’s originally from Crete. That would put him under the command of Idomeneus, who Odysseus knew, so that he can get the details right. The story also allowed Odysseus to present himself as a pressed/enslaved man under Idomeneus’ command, which would resonate with Eumaeus, as we’ll see in a second.

Odysseus says he’s glad he ended up in Ithaca though, because he heard that the ruler here (himself) was cool and good and generous and probably also handsome and definitely had six-pack abs, and people should, like, keep voting for him for king and stuff. Eumaeus declares instant BS and says “Bro you rolled up in a bad spot, Odysseus is probably dead, but even if he’s not, the gods hate him, or they would have brought him home by now. As-is, everything here sucks and his son can’t take the throne.”

What happens next can be described as “insider trading” because Odysseus makes a bet with Eumaeus that Odysseus will definitely come back to Ithaca, and probably really soon. They have themselves a nice pork dinner, complete with offerings to the gods, and go to sleep.

Book 15

We temporarily interrupt this program in Ithaca to bounce over to Sparta, where Telemachus is having a Young Male Protagonist In-Waiting moment, staying awake in Menelaus’ courtyard and staring at the stars, thinking deeply about, like, stuff. His ruminations are derailed by the sudden arrival of Athena who’s like “Dude, you have to get home now. Eurymachus has outbid the other suitors and without you around to remind your mom that she’s married to Odysseus, she’ll forget her husband and do something completely insane like marry another guy.” I no longer worry which translation I’m reading, we’re back in tradmale territory.

Telemachus boards a ship and sprints back to Ithaca. It’s not a bad drive, you can do it in around 7 hours, 5 if you’re American, but going by sailboat is a whole other story, especially when the sea god hates your dad. But anyways.

Athena combines her innate traits of combat and wisdom and informs Telemachus that he has to sail home by night, because the suitors (led by Antinous) are waiting to trap him on the western coast. He should land on Ithaca and meet up with that nice old swineherd, Eumaeus, and send him to tell Penelope he’s back. He says his good-byes to Menelaus and Helen (ugh) and heads home. Helen interprets a sign of a passing eagle to mean that [spoilers] Odysseus will return to Ithaca and bust heads.

We briefly interrupt this interruption of the main narrative to return to the main narrative, but only to then divert to another interruption back in Ithaca, wherein Eumaeus tells Odysseus his own story, namely that Eumaeus was sold into slavery a long time ago and purchased by Laertes (Odysseus’ father/the previous king of Ithaca), who is still alive but really old. He’s sad and retired and mumbling in the countryside and tbh I wonder what the point was of mentioning him, I assume it’ll be relevant later. Anyways.

We now un-divert from this diversion back to the previous interruption which converges with the main narrative: Telemachus arrives in Ithaca, having picked up another omen-reader along the way, a dude named Theoclymenus. He’s relevant because he reads a sign sent from Apollo, just as Telemachus is wavering in his convictions about his purpose: the sign confirms that Telemachus has the strongest claim to the Ithacan throne, and he needs to get back to his mom, but first, pigs!

Dude this story is getting weird. I’ll tell you that, as a writer currently struggling with a sequel, sometimes the middle is indeed muddy and you’ve just got to push through. I feel like that’s the Telemachus arc right now. Me, Homer, same.

Book 16

Telemachus checks in with Eumaeus. (I like the detail where Odysseus saw the dogs perk up at a stranger coming, but they didn’t bark.) Odysseus doesn’t say anything, just watches Telemachus check in with the swineherd. He makes sure Penelope hasn’t hooked up with any of the suitors yet (she hasn’t) and sends Eumaeus to tell her that he’s home, but don’t tell Laertes, because he’ll make noise about it, and Telemachus wants his return kept secret.

After Eumaeus runs off, Athena pops up, wipes away the enchantment on Odysseus and reunites him with his son. Telemachus has his doubts and even takes Odysseus for a god at first, but that’s just because Athena cranked the aura up a little too high.

The tearful reunion is pretty moving, and then they get down to business to address the problem of the suitors. There are about a hundred of them in total, which is a lot for two men to handle, but with Zeus and Athena in their corner they’re basically unstoppable, they just need to be smart.

The rest of this book is logistics, on par with the tragedy-of-errors that you might be familiar with from Shakespeare a la Romeo and Juliet. The skinny of it is that Telemachus returns to town and a herald announces him before Eumaeus can privately inform Penelope that he’s home. The suitors pull up and Antinous wants to kill him, but a few of the guys are actually decent and say they shouldn’t kill a royal unless the gods tell them to. Penelope chides Eurymachus and shuns his proposal, reminding him that Odysseus saved his father once. Eurymachus also declines to kill Telemachus. Then Eumaeus meets up with Penelope and tells her Telemachus is back. (Great timing.) Eumaeus goes back to his hut, where he finds Odysseus returned to the form of the beggar by Athena.

They spent the night again, and stuff will get real in the morning.

Visit Nauvoo Supply to order HEARTLANDERS, the most American novel I’ve ever written. It’s like if National Treasure happened during Fallout with G.I. Joes.

My Amazon page has my other books, including FOSSIL FORCE for young boys.

Find my video reviews on YouTube.

I finish around a hundred books a year, most of which are audio because of my job.

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