Traveling southwest on the Catalina Highway toward the heart of Tucson, twisting and descending through Coronado National Forest, where the rock-hewn vistas meet the high, bright blue of sky that swallows any fear that God does not exist. It is such a place where one would expect to be surrounded by the radiating waves of heat on a baking blacktop, as a spectator to some aged, weathered vaquero of the lost ages of the Wild West. You can see it as you fall out of the prehistoric heat-swell of the canyons and mountains, each pitched against the other as if they were remnants of a war between Greek gods, scars and fissures, and the heaving of the earth: Tucson. The oldest city in the Arizona Territory that maintains its ties to the dusty wiles of its past through old, glorified museums, sun-faded rodeos, and capital-A Americana. The gunslinger and wagon-bound settler and the Indian and the law. They converge on a place that can still barely maintain its proper sense of being, balanced with tourist thirst traps. Along that highway through God’s country back to the terra firma of the U-S-of-A and one can pass the Trail Dust Town with its mock gunfights and chintzy steak house (complete with cowbell-ringing waitresses outfitted with hip-slung blue jeans and soft drawls welcoming you, “Darlin’”), and gift shops with sterling silver baubles outlined in turquoise and fool’s gold, and Kachina dolls, and paperweights of smooth glass encasing tarantulas, scorpions, and the various genus of poisonous vermin and arachnid that scuttles about the desert floor. And the tourists ramble into the shops crammed together, peering at the oddities and treasures on equally crammed shelves with wide grins and sweaty necks and bellies full of steakhouse T-bones and smelling of baked beans and Western dressing. Ask any of the shopkeepers who run the little enclave of strung-together gift stores, hot sauce and salsa shops, jewelers, novelty stands and Western wear haberdasheries — strike up a conversation that starts with a statement, but is really a question: “I bet you’ve seen a lot of changes here,” and let a Roy Murrow or Abe Walker or Sherri Lantis ramble about the Walmart on Speedway Boulevard or the In-N-Out Burger off South Kolb Road, or the damn university kids, and one gets a sense, just by the tired, crow’s feet-lined frowns and deep, distant eyes on wizened faces that there’s something that’s lost. What once was the destination of the kid who dreamed of Roy Rogers and John Wayne’s “Stagecoach” and the Earps, whose soundtrack was the slow, rap-rap-rap tempo of boot heels on raised-plank boardwalks accompanied by the ominous jingle of well-used spurs, had been buried with the myth that brought it fame, notoriety — and crowds. Speeding south into Tucson where Catalina terminates, joining Tanque Verde — a mainline road banking east to west with a slow curve south over the Pantano Wash, past the Trail Dust Town, past the pop-up cannabis shop, Golf ‘N Stuff, a series of squat, adobe-style apartments — the two-level kind with Spanish tile roofs and centered around a courtyard overrun with thorny catclaw acacia, prickly pear, and Larrea tridentata with its tiny yellow-tinged, waxy flowers giving that decidedly rain smell after a rolling storm. Then, take a straight shot south on Pantano until you run up to the airfield. The airfield. Stretches of planes, comatose and covered, baking in the unrelenting sun, swirls of heat rising between wings and shadowed bellies of hulking P-3 Orions and E-3C AWACS. All around the gray metal beasts sit silently in formation: here, C-130s, there, A-10 Warthogs, farther down field, one can make out the sleek, streamlined lethality of a grouping of F-16s with each seam and gap meticulously wrapped and sealed as if the very desert would cause the second death of these retired warriors. Where once they hunted and evaded the enemy as rulers of the sky, now the planes were at its mercy in the arid, unceasing desert heat. This isn’t any airfield. This is Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, where 3,500 retired or stored aircraft sit, month after month, waiting for their fate either to be cannibalized or revived into former air superiority glory. The story of these planes isn’t contained between Alvernon Way and South Houghton Road. It bleeds out into the desert. It creeps out like ghosts in the night, haunting the dreams of young men — those who used to dream of gunfights and horse trails and warm whisky in dark saloons and the jingle of spurs on hollow boardwalks. Now, they dream of going Mach 5.29, burning jet fuel, puking their insides out on test flights, and pushing the boundaries of the impossible because they refuse the idea of the impossible. Before the movie Top Gun was made, it was a story in a magazine. The May 1983 issue of California magazine was sitting in a dentist’s office when film producer Don Simpson picked it up, read a few pages, and immediately, in his guts, knew: this was a film that had to be made. This was a story of speed, adventure, danger, excellence, masculinity, death-defying, gravity-breaking, pulse-pounding adventure that had to be told. And he was right. And only a man who refused to be bound by the constraints of the physically possible and psychologically normal could see and recognize the American essence in this story. Never mind that Simpson was notoriously fueled by cocaine and booze — a man who took his filmmaking and partying with equal passion and determination. He tapped into the veins of what made America’s blood pump. After all, he was altogether unfazed by the death of his drug rehab coach in his pool house, naked. The temptation to bring this story to the big screen was too strong. The article’s author, Ehud Yonay, writes in “Top Guns”: Once over the Mexican border they pick up speed, and Yogi starts jinking. He whips the stick — the steering mechanism between his legs — from side to side and the plane rolls this way and that, letting him and Possum spot anybody making for their tail. From where they sit, however, it’s not their silver rocket that’s rocking but the entire vast blue dome of sea and sky. There are no ups or downs up here, no rights or lefts, just a barely perceptible line separating one blue from another, and that line is spinning and racing like mad in the distance. Yogi was still in junior high school when he realized that flying straight and level might be okay for some people, but if you like yanking and banking — the feeling of riding inside one of those storm-in-a-bottle souvenirs — then there’s just one place for you, and that’s the cockpit of a fighter plane. Now we have willow-fingered suss-gussets picking through the bones of our Americana like vultures on a highway roadkill, stinking and bubbling in the sun, the last soul that dared venture out under the cover of night to be barreled over by a rust-colored Buick Skylark. Capital-A Americana has been worn smooth over the decades by a culture that bristles at hard things. What once was the stuff that made legends has turned into cautionary tales. “Go West” was the slogan of the intrepid and the bold; now merely a bumper sticker catch phrase for glamping outlets and secret sauce limited-time burgers at Arby’s. We’ve had the essence of Americana squeezed out of us by intellectuals and ivory-tower academics and wannabe sophisticates wholesale by industrial-grade juicers, strained through a dozen gauzy layers of cheesecloth by the strangling hands of PC-mindedness, and sent through the clinking and clamoring bureaucracy like miles of twisting, nonsensical pipes, sloshing along until our Americanness has been sterilized and ostracized and thinned out to be wholly unrecognizable. There is no toughness, no fortitude into the unknown, no unforged paths, no aspirations toward the conquest: it’s been conditioned out of us. Then those same mawing shrieks who scold the veritable past squeeze harder. Is the Americana ethos extinct? There are many who want it to be. Those who take the “boy” out of Boy Scout, who allow Top Gun its theatrical moment but snub it at awards shows. Who see Sidney Sweeney in blue jeans and believe it’s a racist dog whistle. Who hear Lana Del Rey and dismiss her as a conservative avatar. And it’s politicians who “support our troops” but trash masculinity — the very trait that makes an effective warrior who he is. They are the inevitable heirs of condescending culture gatekeepers who castigated “ticky-tacky” mid-20th-century homes that housed the heroes of WWII, right along with the values and mores that enabled them to fight and win. Even at the Olympics, we went from wearing cowboy hats to Ralph Lauren beanies. Even our astronauts talk in soothing half-tones and repeat unremarkable Urban Dictionary pop-culture catchphrases of a Girl Scout Troop dad, rather than the successors to the first-generation astronauts forged by WWII, the frozen hell of Korea, and death-defying flights piloting experimental aircraft. Walk through the boneyard and feel the men who stood there. Men at war. Men who smoked Lucky Strikes, chewed Beeman’s gum, and pushed the limits of physical and spiritual stamina. They blasted off through the bleak desert rock toward heaven itself. Young men mocking the sky gods with a smirk and boldness and squaring up to Death as if to say, “Go ahead, old man, give it your best. I dare you.” It was the embodiment of single combat: man battling his fears and self-doubt. The American Empire is an ethos. It is a conquering force against our own trepidation and despondency as much as against the foolish, pretentious legions who repeatedly count us out. When men aspire to greatness, America achieves it. People are quick to dismiss the current rise in nostalgia for an era before social media, the firehose of stimulation of the information age, and siloed experiences. But they are mistaking nostalgia for a gnawing awareness that something is missing. And it’s correct to feel this way because something is — that thing squeezed and crushed and mashed and forced through an extruder until all that remains is a shredded pulp: The American spirit.  The American, in his set-jaw determination toward freedom, who holds the map to forgotten places, who hears “Go West” as a challenge, not a joke; the dreamer, the drifter, the risk-taker. He is the protector, the warrior, and the builder. These are men who understand that when they climb on that horse or sit in that jet or board a spaceship, they might not come home. They understand that death is the price for living. That hard things done by hard men are necessary for the continuation and building of a society that only knows the frictionless world of modernity. “Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated,” wrote Ernest Hemingway, in his gruff confidence, the writer who spared no kindness for self-inflicted weakness; no mercies for guilt-ridden lamentations of the relentlessly torpid. In a man’s life, resilience defines his unyielding core — the victory of single combat — man versus his own fear. Reclaim the essence of the American spirit; it’s still out there in the midst of the boneyards and tumbleweeds, inhospitable except to the man who dares forge his path on his own terms — not for nostalgia, or wide-smiling gawkers, or to keep the bone-picking vultures away, but because his spirit demands it. ***

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** I coach Little League Baseball with one of my best friends, “Barney.” Before I considered him a friend, he played 10 years of pro ball. Shortly before our first practice this year, he called a coaching staff meeting. This would be the first season of kid-pitch, and the intensity would be different than in years past. This is the same guy who puts six hours of effort into compiling stats and providing each kid with a customized report on what he did well and what he needs to work on at the end of the season. So, I leaned in when he announced we would have a coaching mantra for this season: “Make every kid want to come back tomorrow.” That was it. Meeting over. While I expected notes on mechanics, technique drills, and precision, instead, I got a lesson in the emotional experience. The only kids who get good at baseball are the kids who keep playing baseball. And the only kids who keep playing baseball are the kids who love it. If you love something, you come back to it. Tomorrow.  While I am on the more intense end of the spectrum when it comes to my kids’ activities — youth sports led to me being a college athlete — over the years, I have become observant of the culture that has changed so much since my childhood. In modern youth sports, so many adults become obsessed with performance before kids ever fall in love with the game.  As a conduit between the parents in the stands and the kids on the field, I have to be aware of this, whether or not it is my approach. Thus, my expectation for this season was that I was here to teach baseball. What I learned instead was that if a kid quits, none of the instruction matters. So before we taught a kid how to throw from the mound, we vowed to teach him to enjoy showing up.  Now, all this is admirable in theory. But for many kids, including my son, winning is always the most “fun” part. And we were far from winning form at the start of the year. We began the season with multiple first-year ballplayers, but if I’m being honest, some of our veterans looked like rookies. Errors were abundant, our best sluggers were going down looking, and for the life of us as coaches, we couldn’t convey what a cutoff man’s job was.  After a 1-2 start, a little luck allowed us to win our fourth by one run. The dugout floor was damp with tears more than once.  Up to this point, we had yet to lock our kids into their best positions. Every team has that star shortstop, stud pitcher, and big first baseman. But if a kid lived in right field all season, would he want to “come back tomorrow”?  The easy approach would have been to panic and optimize. Lock everyone into their primary positions and prioritize winning immediately. But were we going to emphasize short-term efficiency, or continue to develop our kids over the course of the season? In a culture obsessed with early specialization, we chose patience.  We learned something else along the way. Fun doesn’t have to be a distraction from learning. In fact, with 8-year-old boys in the Florida spring sun, fun should be encouraged. Practices started with water balloon fights and ended with everyone competing for the fastest throw on the radar gun. This wasn’t unserious coaching. It was an understanding of childhood. Eight-year-olds don’t learn well when they are terrified of disappointing adults.  After the slow start, we sat the team down at Monday’s practice. Barney brought a picture from his time with the Brewers. In the clubhouse, a sign reads, “Effort Knows No Score.” He then gave a talk about effort and attitude being the only two things we can control. Wins and stats are outcomes. Effort and attitude are inputs. Choices. The two things we can control. We made each player vow to bring those two things to the field every day.   We immediately noticed the results. Kids were showing up early, asking for extra time in the cage; team chemistry was improving (watching two eight-year-olds at shortstop and second base communicate on a double-play is pretty darn cool). The point is, the transition started internally before it showed externally. The season turned on a dime. The season ended with us riding a 9-game winning streak into the championship. That day began with me being awoken at 6 a.m. by my son, completely dressed in his uniform, asking if we could head to the cages two hours early to “warm up.” This is the kid who wasn’t sure if he wanted to sign up for this season.  We headed into the last inning down 4-1. The bats were ice cold. Adversity had hit us for the first time in a long time, and you could feel the pressure in the dugout. This would be our ultimate test: What does effort and attitude look like when things finally go wrong again? What it looked like for us was our left-fielder, who was 0-6 in the playoffs, hitting a leadoff triple, followed by our right-fielder, who had learned how to swing a bat three months prior, following on with a double to spark a rally to send us into extra innings. My son, who is no Aaron Judge, smacked one down the line too for his first hit of the game.   Photo courtesy of Gates Garcia We won by one run in extra innings and were crowned champions. But “championship” is too small for this team. The championship became evidence of something larger. It was proof of what kids become when adults create environments where effort matters, failure is survivable, joy exists, belief is constant, and toughness is encouraged without humiliation. I entered the season thinking my job was to help boys become better at baseball. I left realizing my real responsibility was to help shape how they experience challenge, failure, teamwork, accountability, and belief in themselves.   My son was in his uniform at 6 a.m., not because someone forced him — I was asleep. Not because of pressure — I was in no rush to be there that early. But because he had fallen in love with the process, and that goes for both of us.  At the end of every season, Barney defines the success of the season on one metric. How many of our 12 players are going to sign up again next year? While our record on the field was 18-3-1, we know we really went 12-0. *** Gates Garcia is the host of the YouTube show and podcast We The People with Gates Garcia. Follow him on X and Instagram @GatesGarciaFL.

The rise and violent downfall of livestreamer Dalton Eatherly, better known online as “ChudTheBuilder,” has become one of the internet’s most explosive cautionary tales about race-baiting content, online extremism, and the blurry line between free speech and criminal conduct. Eatherly, 28, is now facing attempted murder and multiple felony charges after allegedly shooting a black man outside a Tennessee courthouse earlier this month in an incident that has drawn national attention and ignited fierce debate over the culture surrounding livestream “ragebait” creators. According to authorities, Eatherly — who built a sizable online following by filming himself shouting racial slurs at strangers and provoking confrontations in public — shot Joshua Fox during one such confrontation outside the Montgomery County Courthouse in Clarksville, Tennessee, on May 13. Fox, a veteran, was struck multiple times and airlifted to a hospital for emergency surgery. Eatherly was also injured during the shooting. Prosecutors have charged Eatherly with attempted criminal homicide, employing a firearm during a dangerous felony, aggravated assault, and reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon. During a Thursday hearing, his bond was reduced to $1 million after initially being set at $1.25 million. Authorities say the confrontation began as a verbal altercation before escalating into gunfire. According to court documents, Eatherly allegedly reached toward a firearm inside his jacket before the two men began fighting. Investigators say surveillance footage showed bullets ricocheting near bystanders outside the courthouse. In audio recorded after the shooting and later posted online, Eatherly claimed he acted in self-defense. Before his arrest, Eatherly had carved out a growing internet following through inflammatory livestream content that frequently involved using racial slurs in public while filming reactions. He regularly defended the behavior as protected speech under the First Amendment. His notoriety began growing in 2025 after a road-rage incident involving a black woman went viral online. Eatherly says the backlash cost him his contracting job and pushed him further into online content creation. From there, his audience expanded rapidly across livestreaming and social media platforms. He amassed more than 200,000 followers on X, launched online fundraising campaigns, and cultivated an audience who viewed him as a free-speech provocateur pushing back against political correctness. Critics, however, describe him as part of a growing ecosystem of “ragebait” livestreamers who profit from public outrage and racial provocation. “He’s trying to build this following by angering people,” Joshua Fisher-Birch, an extremism researcher with the Counter Extremism Project, told Rolling Stone. “They are incentivized over time to do more and more radical actions in the real world to gain followers online.” Civil rights advocates and legal experts have argued that Eatherly’s conduct may go far beyond protected speech. Tennessee attorney David Raybin noted that repeatedly approaching strangers while armed and aggressively hurling slurs could potentially constitute assault under state law if it creates fear of imminent harm. The case has also drawn significant support from elements of the online alt-right. Eatherly reportedly raised more than $100,000 for his legal defense within a single day after his arrest, with fundraising totals later climbing far higher. Inside the courtroom on Thursday, tensions surrounding the case were already apparent. Judge H. Reid Poland III ordered several attendees removed for disruptions, including provocateur Jake Lang, who was escorted out in handcuffs. Despite the mounting legal jeopardy, Eatherly’s case has become a broader flashpoint in the national debate over online radicalization, livestream culture, and whether platforms are financially incentivizing increasingly extreme behavior. For now, prosecutors appear intent on focusing attention back on the shooting itself — and the real-world consequences of internet notoriety spiraling into violence.

House Democrats joined with six Republicans on Thursday to block legislation advancing the long-awaited Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, tanking the bill after Republicans added language limiting the museum to celebrating biological women and barring exhibits portraying males as female. The measure failed on a 216-204 vote after every Democrat voted against it, joined by a small bloc of Republican defectors, halting what had previously been a bipartisan effort to establish the museum on the National Mall. The legislation was led by Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY). The collapse of the bill came after Democrats abandoned legislation many of them had previously supported, once Republicans amended it to explicitly define the museum around biological women. New language added by Republicans stated the museum would be dedicated to “preserving, researching, and presenting the history, achievements, and lived experiences of biological women in the United States,” while also prohibiting the museum from depicting “any biological male as a female.” Democrats immediately denounced the changes, arguing they excluded transgender-identifying individuals and handed too much authority over the museum to President Donald Trump. Republicans countered that a women’s history museum should, by definition, focus on women. “The addition of the word biological made them all run for the hills,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said Wednesday. “If that’s controversial in the Democratic Party, we’re in serious trouble.” Malliotakis similarly blasted Democrats for withdrawing support over the added language. “A women’s history museum is supposed to be dedicated to women, period,” Malliotakis told Fox News. “And the fact that they’re going to pull their support after overwhelmingly co-sponsoring this bill because the word biological was inserted, to me, is ludicrous.” Democrats insisted the issue extended beyond transgender inclusion. The revised legislation also gave Trump authority to select an alternative site for the museum on the National Mall and included language calling for “equal representation of the diversity of the political viewpoints and authentic experiences held by women in the United States.” Leaders of the Democratic Women’s Caucus accused Republicans of turning a bipartisan project into a political fight. “They amended the bill to give Trump and his allies unregulated power over what content and which women can be included in the museum, and the museum’s location,” caucus leaders said in a statement. “A museum about women, fought for and supported by women, should not be controlled by one man.” The Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum was initially authorized by Congress in 2020 alongside the planned National Museum of the American Latino, but construction has remained stalled pending congressional approval of a permanent site. House Republicans widely viewed Thursday’s vote as an opportunity to force Democrats into a politically uncomfortable position on gender after the party’s struggles during the 2024 election cycle over questions involving transgender-identifying athletes and definitions of “woman.” But Republicans also faced internal resistance from fiscal conservatives and lawmakers skeptical that another Smithsonian museum was necessary. Several GOP lawmakers reportedly objected that women were already represented across existing Smithsonian institutions and raised concerns that the institution could ultimately become a platform for left-wing causes rather than a celebration of women’s achievements throughout American history. A source familiar with Republican concerns told Fox that lawmakers feared the museum could evolve into “a shrine to abortion activists like Margaret Sanger or the latest progressive cause” without stronger guardrails written into the legislation. In the end, those Republican defections combined with unanimous Democratic opposition were enough to sink the legislation, leaving the future of the women’s history museum uncertain and construction plans once again stalled indefinitely.

Kyle Busch, the two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion and one of the most accomplished drivers in stock car racing history, has died at the age of 41. NASCAR, Richard Childress Racing, and the Busch family announced his death Thursday in a joint statement, calling his passing a “sudden and tragic” loss for the sport. Earlier in the day, Busch’s family revealed he had been hospitalized with a “severe illness” and would miss race weekend activities at Charlotte Motor Speedway while undergoing treatment. “Our entire NASCAR family is heartbroken by the loss of Kyle Busch,” NASCAR, Richard Childress Racing, and the Busch family said in a joint statement. “A future Hall of Famer, Kyle was a rare talent, one who comes along once in a generation.” Busch spent more than two decades at the top level of stock car racing and became one of the most polarizing and successful drivers in NASCAR history. Known to fans as “Rowdy,” Busch won 63 Cup Series races, ranking ninth on NASCAR’s all-time wins list, and captured Cup championships in 2015 and 2019. He was also the winningest driver in the history of NASCAR’s secondary national series, recording 102 wins in what is now the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series and 69 wins in the Craftsman Truck Series. Born in Las Vegas on May 2, 1985, Busch came from a racing family and followed his older brother, fellow NASCAR star Kurt Busch, into the sport. Busch debuted in the Cup Series in 2004 before becoming a full-time driver the following season with Hendrick Motorsports. After three seasons with Hendrick, Busch joined Joe Gibbs Racing in 2008, where he became the face of Toyota’s NASCAR program and developed into one of the sport’s defining stars. He later moved to Richard Childress Racing in 2023, driving the No. 8 Chevrolet during the final chapter of his career. Busch’s aggressive driving style and fiery personality made him one of NASCAR’s most divisive figures, earning both loud boos and an intensely loyal fanbase known as “Rowdy Nation.” Beyond his driving career, Busch also helped develop future NASCAR talent through Kyle Busch Motorsports, his successful Truck Series team that won 100 races and multiple championships. A cause of death has not yet been released. This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.