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L i k e U s ! ! !

WHEN PROGRESS ISN’T PROGRESS

I started as an officer in Nowheresville, Texas over twenty-five years ago, and have as a consequence seen the “evolution” of policing and criminal justice down here over that time.

I have done so from the perspective of the guy-on-point up to what I would describeas mid-level management.  You can see a lot from there, and also how it plays into what has been happening in the world of security, law, and order.

Today, Nowheresville’s standard patrol unit has about four computers or pieces of digital equipment inside, not counting the radio.

Dominating the arrangement is a large, removable Toughbook military-grade laptop in a docking station that is the digital heart and soul of the effort.  You can do everything from check people’s identification and fingerprints to writing reports on it.

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DEMS ATTACK HEGSETH TO ADVANCE A COUP AGAINST TRUMP

On April 15, thirteen radical House Democrats introduced six articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth, accusing him of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The charges are spurious, alleging that he violated the War Powers Act (which didn’t apply), that he committed war crimes because Iran claimed that girls were in a building on an IRGC base that the U.S. struck, and managing the military in ways they disliked.

Those articles may have been the acts of radicals, but the fact is that the Democrats have relentlessly sought to undermine Pete Hegseth at every turn. Some of it is purely policy-driven: They want mentally ill people in the military, low recruitment, a focus on social justice, not winning wars, and the triumph of overt enemies.

However, DataRepublican has a more shocking contention. She says the continued efforts to destroy Pete Hegseth are the prelude to an actual coup. I particularly noted this because Democrats are engaged in a stealth revolution against our Constitution and the Founders’ vision. DataRepublican, however, a more kinetic coup, which requires disposing of Hegseth.

I’ve pasted DataRepublican’s full thread at the end of this post. This is a summary, with some added information:

Here’s the premise:

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A VIEW OF MOUNT EVEREST YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN BEFORE

everest-2019Photo taken at an altitude of 22,000 feet (6,700 meters) in a AS 350 B3 ultra-high altitude Eurocopter on our Himalaya Helicopter Expedition. We are looking into the Western Cwm (valley), West Shoulder of Everest in the left forefront, entire Southwest Face of Everest summit (29,029 ft-8,848m) to base on the left, Lhotse (4th highest on earth at 27,949ft-8,516m) straight ahead, the flank of Nuptse on the right.

The climbing route is from Base Camp to Camp I past the top of the Khumbu Ice Fall (bottom of photo), up the Cwm to Camp II at the foot of the Lhotse wall, scale via fixed ropes to Camp III perched on the wall, then up to the notch between Everest and Lhotse (on the horizon in the photo) that is the South Col and Camp IV. The summit is reached from there via the Southeast Ridge on the other side of the photo. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #91 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)

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TRADE OVER AID – TRUMP’S NEXT FOREIGN POLICY RESET

Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio opened a new front in that revolution, with a sweeping reset of America’s approach to foreign aid: “Trade Over Aid.”

Rubio ordered U.S. diplomats to line up foreign signatures for a formal end-of-April UN declaration.

The document commits aid-recipient governments to making themselves investable: freer markets, lighter regulation, lower taxes, stronger property rights, enforceable contracts, reliable courts, and real engagement with private capital.

Bottom line: no reform, no more money.

The point is so obvious only a Harvard professor could miss it. Real aid should make itself unnecessary. Just as there should be no more “Forever Wars,” there should be no more “Forever Aid.”

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ACTBLUE IS TOAST

House Republicans have spent months digging into ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s premier fundraising machine, and what they’ve found so far is so incredible that it’s hard to see how the fundraising platform survives.

A damning interim staff report from the House Administration, Oversight, and Judiciary Committees paints a damning picture of widespread illegal foreign donations flowing through the platform with the full knowledge of ActBlue's leadership, followed by a massive cover-up in the hopes of preventing Congress from finding out.

Two ActBlue officials — including former Vice President of Customer Service Alyssa Twomey, who oversaw the fraud-prevention team during the 2024 election cycle — and three former lawyers refused to answer a single substantive question from investigators. Combined, ActBlue employees invoked the Fifth Amendment at least 146 times across depositions with the three committees between July and December 2025.

The right to remain silent is constitutionally protected, of course. But it's worth asking: if there was nothing to hide, why invoke the Fifth — repeatedly, collectively, and across an entire chain of command?

Then there's the legal and compliance team.

By March 2025, every member of it was gone….

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HAWAII IN EUROPE

Equivalent to the Hawaiian Islands in the Pacific are the Azores in the European Atlantic. You’re looking at Lagoa das Sete Cidades (Lagoon of the Seven Cities), an example of the Azores’ astounding beauty. As Hawaii is a part of the US, the Azores are a part of Portugal – since the 1430s first discovered uninhabited.

Everything grows here, cedar forest to giant tropical tree ferns, fruit from citrus to tropical, plants from corn to taro. Flowers are riotously everywhere. The sea swarms with fish being on the main Atlantic migration route for whales and dolphins. The islands are immaculately cared for by Azoreans, no pollution, air sparkling clear, weather in the 60s in winter, 70s in summer, so peaceful they are virtually crime-free.

Azoreans love drinking parties, cheerful festivals, and bright colors – with their charming homes painted the color of key lime pie, raspberry mousse, or oceanic blue. They love liberty so much they’ve had this motto emblazoned on their coat of arms for centuries: “Antes morrer livres que em paz sujeitos”—" Rather die free than live in peaceful subjugation.”

This is one of our planet’s truly magical places. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #11 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

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MIRACLE MAX IN EUROPE

[This Monday’s Archive was originally in TTP on April 21, 2005.  It is one of the most relevant-to-today Archives ever. I think you will find it revelatory – especially in the context of Obama and Soros combining to force Benedict to resign his papacy and install a Marxist Pope Francis in his place. And that now there is a gutless Leo in the Vatican, whom Trump justifiably scorns.  Trump would have worked well and admired Benedict.]

TTP, April 21, 2005

There was a very funny movie made back in 1987 called The Princess Bride. Imagine an Errol Flynn swashbuckler with a Monty Python script.

One of my favorite scenes is when the hero, Westley (played by Cary Elwes) is wounded and his friends drag his limp body to a Yiddish Wizard named Miracle Max (played by Billy Crystal) in hopes of saving him. But it’s too late. “He’s dead,” they tell Max.

“Look who knows so much,” Max replies after examining Westley. “It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There is a VERY BIG DIFFERENCE between mostly dead and all dead.”

It turns out there was an adaptive replay of this scene in the Sistine Chapel this week. The College of Cardinals dragged in the limp body of European Christianity – which means of European civilization and culture – and placed it at Josef Ratzinger’s feet. Can you save him? they asked, because we are afraid he’s dead.

Their Dean and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith replied that yes, he is mostly dead – but not all dead, so there is hope for his revival. That hope is what elected Cardinal Ratzinger to the papacy.

It takes both heroic optimism and heroic faith to attempt a revival of Europe now at death’s door. For many astute observers, Europe is doomed by a “perfect storm” of inescapably negative demographics, welfare state bankruptcy, and the creeping seizure of its cities by Moslem immigrants.

Yet the cause of all three is Europeans’ willful abandonment of their cultural souls. Restore that to them and all three of the clouds creating this perfect storm start to clear. Such restoration can only be done with and cannot be done without Christianity.

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A RELATIVE OF YOURS?

Copernicus Science Center, Warsaw, Poland.  If you’re Northern European, you’re related.  This is the reconstruction of a Neanderthal man who lived in Poland some 40,000 years ago.  Just about everyone from Northern Europe has between 1 to 2% Neanderthal DNA –  I have 1.8%.  So that’s what my cousin 2,000 times removed looked like!

One reason they all went extinct is they never had something we, Cro-Magnon Homo sapiens, invented: the needle. Made of bone splinters and using tendon threads, we sewed coats and pants together from pelts of animals – while Neanderthals could use pelts only as capes draped over them.

This allowed us to hunt big animals out in the Ice Age tundra, with Neanderthals confined to warmer valleys with far less game. By 28,000 years ago, they were no more while we thrived.

Warsaw’s Copernicus Science Center is a fascinating place to learn so much – and for kids to have so much fun learning with special exhibits for them.  (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #315 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

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HALF-FULL REPORT 04/17/26

Tuesday (4/14), Louisiana’s Sen. John Kennedy at the top of his game, bullseye truthful and belly-laugh funny at the same time.  True, true, true… the caveat is that the GOP is not just “far from perfect.”  It’s become too far from being patriotic.

Saddle up for another great HFR ride!

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TRIUMPH OF CHRISTIAN HEROISM

 

This is where is started in 722, the Holy Cave of Covadonga, where the Virgin Mary told Christian Knights to reconquer their country stolen from them by Moslem invaders.

 

This is where it ended in 1492, where the last remaining Moslem ruler, Boabdil of Granada, surrendered to King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile.

It took 780 years for generation upon generation of Christian Knights to fulfill their pledge to Holy Mary.  This October, Rebel and I with your fellow TTPers will retrace and relive from start to finish this epic triumph of Christian heroism known as The Reconquista.

 

To entice you to join us, just for this week – as we have to secure airline flights within Spain for everyone – we offer $500 off if you place your deposit by Friday (4/17).

To avail of the $500 off.. You just enter the code: 4SPAINSPECIAL

All the details, descriptions, and photos are here:  Triumph of Christianity: The Reconquista of Spain - October 9-19, 2026 .

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EUROPE HAS A NEW LEADER

[This Monday’s Archive was first published in TTP on March 25, 2016. The ten years that elapsed since that date and that of yesterday (April 12, 2026) are vivid testimony to how power corrupts so much that an inspiring advocate of freedom can become an advocate of crushing it. There is irony in the title given the events of yesterday.]

TTP, March 25, 2016

In May of 1989, I had a cup of coffee with a young man in a café in Nickelsdorf, Austria.

In his mid-twenties, he had crossed an unguarded section of the border with Hungary just two hundred yards away to meet me.  There was mud on his shoes from the fields he had crossed.

He was a founder of an Anti-Communist freedom movement in Budapest called Fidesz (the Hungarian acronym for Alliance of Young Democrats).  Since 1983, I had made it my business to meet people such as him.

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AS CHINA FALTERS, MEXICO RISES

China is losing its grip on global manufacturing, and one of the biggest new winners is Mexico.

That does not make Mexico a rival in the way it did China.

North America is reorganizing around American power at exactly the moment China is becoming older, costlier, riskier, and weaker.

Mexico is rising not against the United States, but because it is plugging itself more deeply into the only industrial system on Earth that is actually positioned to win.

The sheer size of the bilateral relationship is remarkable. U.S. goods trade with Mexico reached $872.8 billion in 2025, with U.S. exports at $338.0 billion and imports at $534.9 billion.

In 2023, Mexico replaced China as America’s largest source of imports, a position China had held for twenty years.

That’s a quiet revolution. For years, the world economy rested on a simple arrangement: America consumed, China manufactured, and the foreign policy class pretended this was both permanent and wise.

It was neither.

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IRAN – A LONGER VIEW

The prognosis of the Iran war is now so couched in politics and so warped by the American Left that the public has grown tired and wants it all to go away.

But in truth, the situation is so fluid that any accurate prediction is impossible.

Yet there is good reason to believe in an eventual outcome quite favorable to the U.S. and one far better than the status quo ante bellum.

The Strait of Hormuz

Prior to President Donald Trump’s most recent announcement that the United States would first blockade and then reopen and control traffic through the Strait, only a few ships were going through, mostly those aligned with Iran, opposed to the U.S., or neutral.

Thus, the Strait was disrupted to a far greater degree than during Iran’s earlier efforts at closure during the “Tanker War” phase of the Iran-Iraq War, as well as its chronic harassment of shipping in 2018-19. And now?

If Trump quickly clears and secures control of the Strait, and if allowable traffic reaches, say, 60-70 percent of prewar levels and if the U.S. avoids a full-scale war, instead responding disproportionately to any renewed Iranian attempts to close it — then, within one to two months, oil prices will begin to taper off.

The American challenge with the war is not military but political.

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TRUMP, IRAN, AND THE THEATER OF MORAL PANIC

Pearl clutchers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your credibility.

A week ago, on Easter Sunday — Easter Sunday, forsooth! — President Trump horrified delicate souls by issuing this minatory post on Truth Social:

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F–kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. That meanie used a bad word, called the Iranian mullahs “crazy bastards,” and taunted them by saying, “Praise be to Allah.” How disrespectful can you get?

There was worse to come. On Tuesday, as zero hour approached, President Trump went whole hog.

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

Oh, oh, oh! Can you believe it? He just threatened to destroy the storied civilization of Persia, Cyrus the Great, Darius, and the Achaemenid Empire! The collective knickers of the anti-Trump establishment were twisted tight. . . . The frenzied knot of moralizing mouthpieces competed mightily to show the world how lustrous their consciences were.

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UGLIFICATION AS CONTROL – THE ASSAULT ON BEAUTY

This morning at 4 am, something not unusual (for me) happened: I woke with an insight after falling asleep mid-chapter reading C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy.

Ransom, his main character, was based on J.R.R. Tolkien, and I had been having a conversation with Professor Tolkien in my sleep.

What I wrote down was this: Triptych: Wealth. Power. Beauty.

These are the three things humans desire. Beauty is generally within our reach. Wealth and power must be worked for but are achievable in our great Western civilization. And these are precisely the things that socialist and Marxist movements, or indeed any ideology that seeks control over others, work to destroy.

It’s not that they hate the good and the beautiful so much as that the desire to dominate is more powerful. In The Lord of the Rings, Sauron and Saruman knew that domination of others is easiest when people are hungry, diminished, and surrounded by the drab and the ugly.

Of the three, I am most fascinated by beauty.

 

Power and Wealth

Everyone knows about the first panel, wealth. As socialism creeps into a system, we see more and more confiscation of wealth: progressive taxation, expensive regulatory tangles, redistributionism, and equity.

Promises of fairness harden into, as the hobbits in “The Scouring of the Shire” discovered, the powerful gathering far more than is ever shared back out. The ordinary man is “given” just enough to stay fed but hungry, kept dependent upon the government.

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