Access to cheap, reliable, safe energy is crucial to human well-being. Higher per capita energy consumption correlates tightly with human prosperity (see graph in this link and here). It is no exaggeration to say that we could not possibly be as wealthy as we are today — far wealthier than our great-grandparents — were it not for all the energy we have consumed. The multi-generational evolution of our sources of energy shows two clear trends. As developed economies progressed from wood to coal to oil to natural gas to nuclear, each step featured energy that was progressively more concentrated while also emitting less pollution. From Efficient Energy to Inefficient Energy The trend toward cleaner, more concentrated energy sources bumped into a countertrend five to seven decades ago. A strong anti-nuclear movement emerged. Environmentalists exploited Americans’ poor understanding of nuclear energy to turn public opinion against it. Consequently, government progressively impeded the adoption of this clean energy through ever-expanding federal regulations that artificially increased costs and delayed or halted the construction of nuclear power plants. In the 1990s, and especially after the turn of the century, the anti-nuclear movement morphed into a broader anti-energy movement, as I wrote in this space fifteen years ago. The green left worked to thwart the domestic production of fossil fuels. Some of them went from promoting natural gas as a welcome cleaner alternative to coal to vehemently opposing the cleaner fuel. A green leftist elite was able to exploit the unscientific climate change hysteria whipped up by a government-funded cabal of elitists to adopt a series that are some combination of sheer stupidity and sinister destructiveness. Their single worst policy happened in 2009 when Congress made the catastrophic policy error of classifying carbon dioxide as a pollutant. CO2, of course, is plant food; it is one of the necessary foundations of the human food chain. A pollutant? I recall in 1974 when American-made cars were legally required to have catalytic converters on their cars’ engines, the purpose of which, as scientists said at the time, was to convert poisonous carbon monoxide into harmless carbon dioxide. Since 2009, the green left has aggressively pursued their ultimate objective of imposing a top-down economic plan on the country — a misanthropic plan infused with green paganism that would keep the world’s poor countries poor — a plan whose follies and failures are now glaringly apparent for anyone with eyes to see. For almost four decades now, Uncle Sam has spent literally trillions of federal dollars subsidizing “renewable energy” (better labeled “intermittent energy”) — i.e., wind and solar — which are less concentrated, less reliable, and more expensive than fossil fuels and nuclear energy. The subsidies to wind and solar energy companies comprise one of the largest corporate welfare schemes in our country’s history. Its overall effect is to make us poorer by artificially boosting the price of energy. Ah, yes, our tax dollars at work. The leftist government-funded war against cheap, reliable energy is not only anti-economic, anti-capitalistic, and anti-prosperity, but fundamentally anti-human (hence the reference to paganism above). If the anti-human animus of our current energy policies fail to convince you that those policies are perverse, consider this: the supposedly “green” technologies of wind and solar energy are wreaking environmental havoc. Clearly, intermittent energy sources are not a viable answer to our society’s growing energy needs. Not only do solar panels and giant windmills require vast amounts of land (one study estimates land four times the size of South Dakota), but the massive amount of minerals that would have to be mined to continue expanding wind and solar are environmentally devastating. Equally problematic is the daunting task of figuring out how to dispose of all the waste generated by panels and windmills, virtually all of which have to be replaced every 20 or 30 years. Then there is the damage to countless ecosystems as solar panels and windmills kill vast numbers of birds, bats, and insects (as much as five percent of some insect species per year). If any fossil fuel company were killing one-tenth the wildlife that wind and solar are killing, the greens would be screaming to lock up their CEOs. Instead, in their pursuit of socialistic control over us, greens are too often willing to ignore the decimation of animal species wrought by “green energy.” And let us not overlook the dangers to human wellbeing posed by wind and solar, whether it be the depleting of aquifers, spikes in human suffering from “valley fever” and silicosis, or health hazards from increasing humans’ exposure to Bisphenol A which, according to the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, “is the most toxic substance we know.” There also are psychological effects. As reported in one medical journal, “People who live or work in close proximity to IWTs have experienced symptoms that include decreased quality of life, annoyance, stress, sleep disturbance, headache, anxiety, depression, and cognitive dysfunction.” Another study even linked wind turbines to significantly higher suicide rates. Reject Climate Alarmism For those Americans who believe that we have no choice but to turn to wind and solar or face a climate Armageddon, I offer here the sketchiest of thumbnail rebuttals to climate alarmism: Earth has gotten a degree or two warmer since the harsh Little Ice Age ended in the 1800s. Today’s warmer temperatures have made life safer for humans. Even today, after almost two centuries of warming, approximately twenty times as many humans die from cold than from heat. Today’s warmer temperatures (manifest most noticeably in milder nighttime and wintertime temperatures) have resulted in longer growing seasons that — combined with more carbon dioxide (i.e., plant food) in the atmosphere — have enhanced agricultural productivity to the point where our planet can produce enough food to sustain its eight billion people. Deaths from adverse weather events have plummeted rather than increased over the past century. And for those who may have been taught that carbon dioxide is the devil’s gas, consider this: Since the end of the Little Ice Age, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from ~290 parts per million to ~420 ppm (which is still at the low end of its long-term historical range). A major beneficial effect of this CO2 enrichment of our atmosphere is that it has caused a significant greening of our planet (see here, too) — a result you would think people calling themselves “greens” would applaud. If you still think wind and solar energy should be subsidized, consider this: As we head toward a future in which various technologies (e.g., AI, VR, cloud computing) will require ever-more electricity, it is becoming painfully clear that intermittent, less efficient, and more costly energy sources won’t meet our needs. Further, those inferior technologies are steering us toward potentially catastrophic failures of our electrical grid system due to the large fluctuations and consequent unreliability of electricity generated by wind and solar energy. Both the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) have issued blunt, dire warnings about this looming danger. A Free Energy Market The good news is that we have the capacity to expand our production of energy considerably and to reverse the deterioration in the security of our electric grid. We are the global energy superpower in terms of fossil fuels and have reserves more than sufficient to easily meet our needs. For reasons explained by advanced physics, additional CO2 in the atmosphere will have a negligible impact on warming, which should allay the concerns of those who believe that warming is bad, but it will cause further greening of planet Earth, so bring on those fossil fuels! We also have some nuclear options. The decades-old anti-nuke hysteria seems to have passed — finally! Nuclear power has long been shown to be safe and reliable. The French generate more than 70 percent of their electricity from nuclear power. They deposit their spent radioactive fuel rods in a vault under one of their cities. There are no compelling reasons to avoid this clean, prolific energy source. It is encouraging that, in June, the Senate overwhelmingly passed the ADVANCE Act. This legislation is designed to streamline the application process, reduce fees, and shorten approval times for the construction of nuclear energy generators. In short, ADVANCE does much to reverse the longstanding anti-nuke regulatory framework that has so tragically crippled nuclear power in our country. This is especially timely in light of the exciting possibilities currently being explored for small (maybe neighborhood size or even smaller) nuclear reactors in addition to larger units to power cities. We have arrived at a propitious time to reexamine our national energy policies. Clearly, intermittent energy sources are not a viable answer to our society’s growing energy needs. Neither is corn-based ethanol, a decades-old environmentally destructive boondoggle whereby the federal government subsidizes corn production on millions of acres of land that would otherwise be used for different agricultural products or simply serve as natural habitat. Government subsidies to wind, solar, and ethanol have been acting as a brake on economic growth while helping to balloon our soaring national debt. The first step in reforming energy policy should be to jettison all the wasteful, counterproductive subsidies to renewables. What energy sources should our electric utilities use? Frankly, I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. The only way to sort through the various options is to let markets work their magic. Free and open markets process far more economically valuable information than any genius individual or panel of experts possibly can. Personally, with all the positive benefits to human beings and our environment, I think we should continue to develop our domestic fossil fuels. I am equally open to the potential offered by nuclear. I am also willing to conder the possibility that there may be local areas where wind and solar make sense — as long as they can do so without government subsidies. In sum, then, a rational energy policy for the USA has three elements: 1.Adopt as law of the land that carbon dioxide is not to be classified as a pollutant. We need to embrace, not reject, fossil fuels. 2.Immediately terminate all energy subsidies and maintain a level playing field for competing fuel sources. 3. Let entrepreneurs and utilities produce fuels and electricity from whatever source they choose. Market forces will identify the most practical alternatives. Such a policy mix will solve our current energy challenges and boost prosperity for decades to come. READ MORE from Mark W. Hendrickson: Joe Biden and the Democratic Party Are Amoral Remembering James B. Edwards The post America Needs a Rational Energy Policy appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Roosevelt’s New Nationalism In the 1912 presidential election, Theodore Roosevelt championed the principles of “New Nationalism,” the title of his 1910 speech inspired by Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life. Roosevelt and Croly believed the federal government should intervene more strongly in the economy and ensure the public welfare, especially against concentrations of corporate power and political privilege. Conservatism is about a love of country, tradition, place, and posterity — born and unborn. Roosevelt and Croly were dedicated American nationalists, but they were also progressives, not conservatives. The Progressive Era of American history — in which Roosevelt and Croly were two prominent political figures — was characterized by the expansion of federal power, when the phrase “the United States are” was replaced by the more uniform “the United States is.” The New Nationalism sought to undermine local or regional power, including local legislatures, and redirect Americans’ loyalty to a central authority in Washington — not just the federal government, but specifically the executive branch. Roosevelt said in his famous speech: The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage. It is impatient of the utter confusion that results from local legislatures attempting to treat national issues as local issues. It is still more impatient of the impotence which springs from over division of governmental powers … This New Nationalism regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare. Over a century later, the heirs of American nationalism define themselves by the term “national conservatism,” proudly distinguishing themselves from the “market fundamentalism” of the Republican Party consensus during and after the Cold War. This movement unapologetically advocates industrial policy, protectionism and — like their progressive forerunners a hundred years ago — the use of federal power to advance their idea of the common good. National conservatives, from Tucker Carlson to Sen. Josh Hawley, venerate Theodore Roosevelt as a paragon of American masculinity, patriotism, and leadership — a bona fide conservative hero, notwithstanding his progressivism. National conservatism is a strange political development since nationalism and conservatism do not share a common tradition. Nationalism originated with the French Revolution and viewed the romantic mythos of “the people” as the source of legitimacy for the exercise of raw power in the modern nation state. As historian and former Librarian of Congress James Billington explained, “the [nationalist] drive for power appropriated the new idea of popular sovereignty and pushed into the background the earlier Enlightenment concern about constitutional forms and rational balance.” Ordered liberty and constitutional government — the pillars of Anglo-American conservatism — were wholly antithetical to the despotic nationalist regimes of the 20th century, in which the state became a surrogate god and vilified the Christian faith. Roger Scruton pointed out that nationalism “occupies the space vacated by religion” and strives for meaning, consolation, and redemption through the national idea. In a secularized and deracinated United States, nationalism is not a cure, but a symptom of a spiritual malady in the American soul. Nationalism Without Conservatism With Donald Trump and J.D. Vance on the 2024 GOP presidential ticket, national conservatism is now the dominant faction on the right and has won over a majority of the Republican electorate. Yet it would be more sensible to describe their movement as “national progressivism” — or simply “nationalism” — since they have abandoned a commitment to genuine conservative principles. The ostensible reason for the national conservative embrace of big-government politics was to advance a socially conservative agenda at the federal level after years of GOP failure to resist the left-wing onslaught against traditional American values. At last, the national conservatives are in the ascendancy, yet the Republican Party platform is now more liberal than the cigar-chomping Rockefeller Republicans could ever dream. In 2024, the GOP is pro-choice and only opposes “Late Term Abortion.” It regards the defeat of Roe v. Wade as the final victory in the abortion debate, not the actual end of abortion in the United States. It claims to value the “Sanctity of Marriage,” yet does not define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Resisting today’s “woke” leftism while accepting yesterday’s progressive liberalism — and repeating this process as the Overton window shifts — demonstrates that American conservatism is feeble and lacks a coherent, compelling and unified vision. Conservatism is about a love of country, tradition, place, and posterity — born and unborn. These are the means through which our identities are cultivated and may flourish, not chauvinistic exertions of federal power. As Edmund Burke wrote, “We begin our public affections in our families. No cold relation is a zealous citizen.” It is the sum of local, bottom-up attachments that comprise the national whole, but national conservatives are reversing this classical Tocquevillian distribution and adopting a top-down collectivist approach. Unfortunately, in the Republican Party of 2024, nationalism has trumped conservatism. Aidan Grogan is a doctoral student of history at Liberty University and the donor communications manager at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER). Follow him on X @AidanGrogan. READ MORE:  The Ascendent National Conservatives Conservatism After Trump The post Nationalism Has Conquered Conservatism appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Prehistoric man started his development by learning to hunt. His next challenge was to try to get on an inflatable unicorn in the pool. Man’s repeated failure in the struggle with the unicorn changed human evolution and led to the birth of defensive limbs, particularly the hands, to try to avoid losing teeth against the edge of the pool. My Experience With Unicorns A journalist must be prepared for all dangers: Stepping into the mouth of a volcano, crossing a trench in war, chasing a snake, photographing a nuclear explosion, or asking Kamala Harris an uncomfortable question. Death is always close. I, without going any further, last year rode a unicorn in the pool. Thoughts of my family, my friends, the years I might have left to live ran through my mind. I thought about all of them and yet I did it because it was my obligation to experience it before sitting down to write these lines. (READ MORE from Itxu: The Adventures of Taking a Towel to the Beach) My unicorn is about two meters in diameter and one and a half meters high, and my pool is four meters wide with an edge designed by the Islamic State to gradually end freedom of the press. The first thing I have learned is that, in the water, you can’t get on anything higher than your knees. Secondly, that trying to do so and not ending up exposed is impossible, no matter what kind of swimsuit you wear, and no matter what you tie it with, including the aquatic suspenders. What I Have Learned Archimedes’ principle says that a body immersed in a fluid at rest receives an upward force from below equal to the weight of the volume of fluid it displaces. This is false. Archimedes never tried to ride a unicorn. First, there is no such thing as a fluid at rest, unless it solidifies — like cement — and then it ceases to be fluid. Secondly, the other body is missing in the beginning. We already know that the unicorn pushes upwards, precisely so that you cannot climb up onto it, but then there’s me, pushing downwards, even though I am not displacing any fluids, you shouldn’t do that in a pool. Thirdly, Archimedes never took into account the evil character of the floating unicorn, which is a beast that enjoys seeing you suffer, that takes advantage of the slightest draft to break away just when you are just about to jump, and that has been invented to test the patience of swimmers, which is its only true vocation. (READ MORE by Itxu: How to Apply Sunscreen: A Handbook) Size Matters There are several sizes of unicorns on the market. In my experience, if it is too big, you will not be able to get onto it without the help of a ladder (this practice is deadly 99 percent of the time), and if it is too small, by Archimedes’ principle, it will sink a little, and immediately, the displaced fluid will be you. Ideally, you should buy one that is big enough for it not to sink, and small enough so that you don’t bounce too much on it when you jump in and end up catapulted out of the pool. Human Nature Man, by which I now mean the male, has five primary urges: hunger, thirst, sex, sleep, and climbing on things. There is only one of them that can be performed in the pool without resulting in death, and now I know that it is not climbing on things. Risk of Explosion One of the most unknown aspects of unicorn climbing is that in the attempt, there is a fairly high risk of float explosion. If the thing is very small, you come away with only a scare and a scratch, but if the thing is big, again Archimedes, you can be displaced at the speed of light in a vacuum, which could cause you to fall into the afterlife, now Einstein, on a real unicorn. Unicorn Navigation If by divine intervention you manage to get on (I managed it on the 10th attempt; the cause of divine intervention being my friend’s words: “Can’t you do it?”), once you get on, the normal thing to do is to sunbathe. But often the pool is not private and you may have to try to change course so as not to kill someone who is swimming. It is almost impossible to pilot a unicorn, but what I have been able to discover is that if you spin your feet, underwater, at high speed, as if they were propellers, the unicorn will not move as you want it to, but it will laugh its head off. It has a very funny laugh. The Selfie As everyone knows, there is only one reason in the world why man has been trying, since time immemorial, to ascend a floating unicorn. And that reason is, of course, to take a selfie. Since it’s impossible to climb a unicorn without getting your phone soaked, it’s best to get someone else to take it for you. It’s almost impossible to get the perfect angle. In any case, tell your friend to make sure the photo is suitable for minors. I took one myself — with which I intended to illustrate this article — and I had to censor it. Getting Down If you think the hardest thing in the world is to get on a unicorn without killing yourself, try getting off. The only way to get off a unicorn is to jump into the water, but the thing traps you in such a way that it’s impossible to be rid of it. I’m going to give you some free advice if you’re a guy: you’d better sink it before you try to jump. I tried to jump with that huge head between my legs and now I don’t understand why they warn us about smoking causing impotence when the really dangerous thing in this area is getting off a unicorn. I haven’t felt so much pain since the last time I saw a Maduro press conference. (READ MORE: Maduro, Get Down From Your Tree and Scram) Selling It On eBay The unicorn is a typical purchase that is very entertaining for the duration of the challenge whilst still a novelty. By the third day, you’ll realize that the damn thing takes up too much space in the pool, that it’s uncomfortable to sunbathe on, and that the adventure of riding it usually lands you in the hospital for shock, suffocation, or drowning. Then you will want to get rid of it. Tell it to put on its best smile, wait for a nice day, and take the best picture you can of it in the calm pool water. Put it up for sale on eBay at half the original price. Believe it or not, millions of people dream every night of having one like this in their pool. If you want a faster sale, in the product description, add its story in first person: “Hi. My name is Bobby. I’m a floating unicorn. Fun, down to earth, a friend to my friends, and very cute. I turn your bathing experience into an unforgettable adventure. For children and adults. My bastard owner has threatened to puncture me and throw me away. I only have 40 hours left. I’m begging that you adopt me immediately to save my life. Sincerely, Bobby”. Translated by Joel Dalmau. Buy Itxu Díaz’s new book, I Will Not Eat Crickets: An Angry Satirist Declares War on the Globalist Elite, here today! The post How To Ride a Unicorn appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Despite the best efforts of Google and the mainstream media to “memory hole” the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, each day brings fresh — and inevitably appalling — information about what happened in Butler, PA. Most recently, texts from the Butler County Emergency Services Unit offered fresh evidence that Thomas Crooks had been spotted early enough to allow for timely intervention, leading yet again to the simple question “how could this failure have occurred?” When I wrote of this last week for The American Spectator , I argued that “business as usual,” formally, something called “normalcy bias” likely accounted for the failure, a problem compounded by lack of training, lack of coordination, and, above all, lack of management emphasis. Perhaps now that Kimberly Cheatle has become the former Secret Service Director, the management issue can be decisively addressed. We can only hope. I strongly suspect we’ll find that this kind of training has been neglected at the Secret Service. Still, we shouldn’t for a moment let the Democrats and the media off the hook — their unremitting demonization of Trump quite likely gave Thomas Crooks a feeling of “legitimacy,” while also undoubtedly contributing to the frankly half-assed approach taken by the Secret Service to its responsibility to protect the former President. We must continue to insist on answers, and we must not allow this near catastrophe to simply disappear beneath the weight of media indifference. Female Agents Not the Problem in Butler We should also refuse to settle for lame, facile explanations of what went wrong. In particular, I hope that we can put to rest the notion that the protection failure at Butler came down to a reliance on female Secret Service agents, particularly female Secret Service agents who failed to conform to the image of the Hollywood female superheroes. I have no patience with those who would offhandedly dismiss women in protective services. I’ve known many female agents, and, to a woman, they fulfilled every professional requirement — and some were capable of running rings around most of their male counterparts. (READ MORE from James H. McGee: The Paris Olympics Aren’t Representative of the France I Know) But even those critics who were not overtly misogynist were quick to dismiss the women of Butler. These women were “too short, or too dumpy,” even if this was sometimes dressed up in kinder euphemisms. In other words, they didn’t look or act like the superwomen we’ve been conditioned by Hollywood to expect in action roles. They couldn’t toss Trump to the ground with a single smooth move, or deflect bullets with Wonder Woman’s magic bracelets. They didn’t look like Brie Larson, or Scarlett Johansson, or Gal Gadot, or any of the legion of women action adventure characters who seem to have wholly taken over the action movie genre. Even in the relatively down to earth world of TV detective shows, one can count on the female characters to be svelte and outrageously athletic, always capable of running down a fleeing suspect (think of the “Tiffany” character on “The FBI”) and throwing even the burliest man to the ground. But real world professionals, male or female, come in many shapes and sizes. Not all of them work a side job as supermodels, and not all of them are showily buff. During my career in nuclear security, I worked alongside a number of former Tier One special operators, and few of them resembled TV’s Jack Reacher. Most of them you’d have passed by on the street without remark, and they liked it that way. But if you saw them in context, you saw what real strength looked like. Similarly, when I led an executive protection team into the Peruvian uplands, an area infested by Shining Path terrorists, my Peruvian national police liaison looked more Ernest Borgnine than Clint Eastwood. He was physically tough as nails and strong as an ox — and mentally as grounded as a certain fabled Shaolin monk. In much the same manner, the women I’ve worked with from the military, from law enforcement, and from security have come in many shapes and sizes. Some were no more svelte than the agents at Butler, some were short, some tall, some visibly athletic, some subtly strong. The good ones — and, over several decades, I knew many — all had one thing in common, an inner strength and a dedication to being the best. They worked at it, and they insisted on pulling their own weight. None of them were DEI hires, and, without exception, they’d have been insulted at the very notion of being given a place they hadn’t fairly earned. Hollywood, in its mindless portrayal of female military, law enforcement, and security professionals has done these women — the real-life women — a profound disservice. My American Spectator colleagues Scott McKay and Lou Aguilar have called out these portrayals over and over again in their entertainment commentaries. They’ve never suggested that women have no place in action and adventure, but they have called, repeatedly, for more realistic representations. Since retiring from the security arena, I’ve taken up a second career as a novelist, and, from the outset, I knew that I wanted no part of this Hollywood mindlessness. In creating the three major female characters in my novel, Letter of Reprisal, I approached them in the same spirit that I approached their male counterparts. Every character, male and female, was inspired in some measure by real people, people I’d known and worked with during nearly four decades of security work. “Inspired,” of course, not explicitly modeled. One starts with someone — or a composite of several someones — in mind, but as characters take life in a story, they inevitably become their own people — but I never asked the characters to do anything beyond the capabilities of their original real world prototypes. Each of the women in Letter of Reprisal fits the definition of “strong female character.” One is a highly skilled aviator, one a law enforcement veteran, one a dedicated scientist. Each of them shares the same challenges as the male characters, each suffers — one of them dies — and, in their different ways, each shares in the team’s ultimate triumph. Action thrillers, by definition, are departures from every day experience, but realism, that is, stories in which exhilarating action comes accompanied with pain, suffering, and heartbreak — these are the stories that I believe worth telling. Moreover, you can’t depict strength without measuring it against adversity, and adversity, real adversity, has nothing to do with trading spin kicks with the bad guy. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a family in which “strong female characters” played, over the course of several centuries of American history, a powerful role, so much so that they actually became the subject of a scholarly article. In a recent American Spectator article I told the true story of another female ancestor and how she faced down a band of marauders with a shotgun. These women were not shrinking violets, by any measure, but neither were they woke fantasy figures. Long before “feminism” became a thing, these were women who held their own in any setting. And their legacy gave me a deep appreciation of real-life “strong female characters.” Which brings me back to the women of Donald Trump’s protection detail. I have made it very clear that the performance of the Secret Service team at Butler PA can only be described as incompetent, indeed criminally incompetent. Addressing Secret Service Problems It’s good that Director Cheatle is gone, and it would be better if DHS Secretary Mayorkas was fired. They, after all, set the tone for the team’s performance, with every evidence that protecting Donald Trump was a lesser priority than protecting Biden, or Harris, or the assembled NATO leaders, none of whom were as much the objects of violent threats. Whoever communicated the idea that Trump’s security was somehow a lesser priority for the agency owns a huge part of the responsibility for what failed at Butler. (READ MORE: In My Hometown — Trump the Fighter) Furthermore, I don’t think it premature to call for disciplinary action against the Secret Service agent in charge at Butler, whoever that person might be — and it’s interesting that this agent has been kept well out of the public eye. But we need not wait for the FBI or a congressional investigation to know that this person utterly failed. I know how hard it is to simply fire a Federal employee, but perhaps the Secret Service field office in Guam might need a new agent. Or perhaps this person might be tasked with setting up a new field office in Thule, Greenland. Every day, fresh details emerge that tell a story of serial incompetence, of near criminal negligence, of a protection team unprepared for the moment of crisis, evidently lacking in training, unwilling to effectively integrate local law enforcement into the mission, incapable of responding to the threat as it emerged before Trump’s appearance on stage, and clumsily uncoordinated in its actions in the immediate aftermath of shots being fired. But if we’re honest, truly honest with ourselves, none of this has the slightest to do with the fact that some of the agents were female. Yes, the struggle to re-holster a pistol was a bad look, something that shouldn’t have occurred, but I’ve seen men struggle the same way. This is an issue of frequent practice, of developed “muscle memory,” and this is something that atrophies quickly with lack of rigorous refresher training. When the inquiries are completed, I strongly suspect we’ll find that this kind of training has been neglected at the Secret Service — perhaps there’s a need to spend less time on DEI and “allyship” and a little more time on the firing range. The issues at Butler ran far, far deeper than one agent’s clumsy weapons handling. Maybe the agents in question were DEI hires, and if so, it might be time to discard such priorities in favor, once and for all, of hiring strictly on the basis of merit. But we don’t need to hire ex-basketball players to serve as a target screen for the protectee. Willingness in the critical moment to take a bullet is part of the protective services ethos, but simply being expected to serve as a target is ludicrous. Physical strength is a part of the equation, but moving a protectee out of the line of fire is about trained use of leverage, not muscle mass — and the first rule of protective service work is to ensure that the protectee understands his or her role in getting out of the line of fire. We don’t need, nor should we want, our protective services agents to be all cast in the Jack Reacher mold, or, for female agents, that of Jennifer Lawrence or Zoe Saldana or Michelle Yeoh. Let’s leave them for the movies or TV. Better still, let’s get away altogether from “strong female characters” cut from the comic book superhero mold. Our real world expectations might become more reasonable, and maybe — just maybe — we’d find that realistic male and female action heroes are just a lot more entertaining. James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. A forthcoming sequel finds the Reprisal team fighting against terrorists who’ve infiltrated our southern border in a conspiracy that ranges across the globe. You can find Letter of Reprisal on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited. The post Female Superheroes Not Needed at the Secret Service appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

?? ELECTION FRAUD ? ? ?? President Trump has released summaries of 2020 election fraud in Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. ?? pic.twitter.com/LSv3UgaiTI — JOSH DUNLAP (@JDunlap1974) August 4, 2024

from The Salty Cracker:  TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

BREAKING VIDEO: UN Spokesperson Calls For NATO/UN Troops To Occupy Western Nations To Enforce Lockdowns, Force Injections pic.twitter.com/1R9YMwz8x3 — Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) August 5, 2024

by Jim Hoft, The Gateway Pundit: Nearly three weeks ago President Trump was shot in the ear and nearly assassinated at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Since that time the Secret Service and FBI have refused to be straight with the American people on what was really going on that day. We still don’t know […]