Op-Ed

America First is not a slogan borrowed from the moment, but a throughline from the Founders’ hard-earned lessons that a nation survives and thrives only when it puts the safety, prosperity, equal justice, and unalienable rights of its own citizens at the center of every decision.

Over the last four administrations, Congress has steadily surrendered its constitutional authority, allowing presidents to expand executive power, especially through executive orders and unsanctioned military action, and unless the American people demand a revival of congressional oversight, the balance of our constitutional republic will continue to erode.

Bombing terrorist organizations is a tactic not a strategy, and SOCAFRICA’s 2015–2017 Gray Zone approach used a long-term, population-focused, partner-enabled campaign that integrated military and non-military efforts to neutralize Boko Haram and ISIS–West Africa by strengthening governance, protecting civilians, and building sustainable regional security.

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.

Denmark and Greenland should deny this envoy entry and engagement, because sovereignty is not a courtesy extended at Washington’s convenience but a hard line that allies have a duty to respect.

Washington’s Venezuela playbook under Trump looks less like a strategy for stability and more like a reckless regime-change gamble that could detonate humanitarian pressures, spike regional insecurity, and boomerang into political and economic blowback across Latin America.

America’s widening inequality and pay-to-play politics have left millions feeling trapped in a grinding rat race, and in that anger they handed power to a leader they suspected was corrupt, with consequences that will reward the New Nobility while everyone else gets squeezed.

With your shield or on it is not a slogan for the untested, it is a hard-earned standard that demands we treat war as a last resort because the bill is always paid in blood, broken families, and the quiet weight carried by those sent to do the fighting.

With your shield or on it, we are called to live anchored in sacrifice, honor, duty, and respect, holding the line for the people and principles that matter most even when the cost is personal.

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.