Benjamin Reed

If the United States is serious about protecting children and national security, it must draw a hard statutory line that bars anyone who moved comfortably in Jeffrey Epstein’s world, including Donald Trump, from ever again holding federal office.

What happened in that stairwell is less important than what came after: a cottage industry of self appointed referees who profit from shredding another man’s service while preaching a code they no longer live by.

From Phuket, I watch Thailand sit on the fault line between Washington and Beijing, absorbing every shock with the quiet discipline of a country that learned long ago that peace is something you patrol, not something you are given.

The arrest of a GRU-linked cyber-operative down the road was a reminder that the world’s sharpest edges have a way of slipping quietly into ordinary places.

I went to Ukraine thinking I could choose how to help, only to find that on the morning the war began everything I knew—plans, love, even my sense of who I was—was smashed by artillery, paperwork, and the chaotic, makeshift mercy of volunteers who’d been thrown together to survive.

The lens hummed, the mud stilled, and for a heartbeat I couldn’t tell who was hunting who.

Watching Pokrovsk ground to dust meter by meter, I see Washington and Budapest flirting with an alliance of convenience that would codify the stalemate into Western policy and rename exhaustion as realism.

We’re not waging a war on drugs so much as carpet-bombing our own reflection—sanctifying punishment while mainlining denial—drones humming like church organs as we tithe to the same appetite we pretend to exorcise.

In Rio, where rainforest meets surf and glass balconies overlook stacked mosaics of tin and prayer, I learned that the state, the narcos, and the civilians breathe the same air while fighting different wars that end at dawn and begin again by night.

Russia’s war in Kherson has descended into a sport of civilian hunting; a moral collapse broadcast online for the world to ignore.

When Russian armor crossed the border and the drones began their ragged buzz over Kyiv, I learned that heartbreak and geopolitics break you in the same place, and the only answer was to hold the line long enough for principle to matter.

While we served beside Ukrainians under fire, Charlie Kirk framed disengagement as “peace” and treated their struggle like a talking point.