Benjamin Reed

The fall of a strongman does not end a regime so much as expose the machinery beneath it, where armed institutions, fear, and habit decide whether power reforms itself or hardens into something more dangerous.

A clean operation can remove a dictator, but it cannot erase the precedent that the United States is willing to decide, by force, who gets to lead.

Selective skepticism is not accountability; it is a loyalty test disguised as truth-seeking, and when veterans wield it against each other, credibility stops being a standard and becomes a weapon.

Adventure has its own discipline: it makes you earn every mile, read every piece of water, and accept that the best days are sometimes the ones where you catch nothing except the truth about why you came.

Between Myanmar’s bloodletting, the 2016 interference debacle, and Cambridge Analytica, Facebook stopped looking like a neutral town square and started looking like an accelerant that only reached for the fire extinguisher once the building was already burning.

Dick Cheney didn’t just steer America into war, he helped turn war into a business, and soldiers like me and my friends paid the bill in blood while he and his circle counted the profits.

The killing of an MIT professor is not just a crime story, but a reminder that America’s scientific power lives in real people, real places, and is more vulnerable than we like to admit.

You do not get to interview your defenders for ideological purity when the rockets are already inbound, you take the ones who hold the line and you judge them by what they do under fire, not by what comfortable people say about them afterward.

Liberal democracies did not fail because they defended themselves after 9/11, but because they spent the next two decades pretending that ideology, borders, and integration no longer mattered in a world where all three still kill people.

I am not crossing into Cambodia because I want to, but because borders now behave like quiet intelligence services, and once you have been attached to a war, even a routine visa run starts feeling like you are moving through someone else’s threat matrix.

Fuentes sells antisemitism and Kremlin-friendly authoritarian nostalgia the way the internet sells everything else, as meme-flavored entertainment stripped of consequence, and Europe cannot afford to treat that kind of cultural poison as harmless content.

Bondi has always sold the illusion that the world’s older hatreds cannot reach the sand, until December 14 proved how quickly ideology can turn a public shoreline into a killing ground.