Afghanistan - Free Range International

January 25, 2025January 25, 2025

Catholic Church and NFWA Hit Hard by Closed Border

The flow of illegal migrants using the CBP One app to claim asylum has ended in the Rio Grande Valley sector. There are still people crossing who want to avoid detection, like the Russian mercenary with $4,000 and a drone in his backpack who was caught in Roma two weeks ago. But the constant flow of illegals from around the world who used the CBP One app to claim asylum after jumping the border has ceased.

The day President Trump declared the border a national emergency, I took a tour of the usual Border Patrol collection points along the McAllen/Mission area of the Rio Grande River. No buses were picking up recently arrived illegals, the Border Patrol presence was light, and the border was quiet. Anzalduas Park, which is on the River, has closed again and is now being used to launch and recover the law enforcement boats supporting Operation Lone Star.

Anzalduas Park was closed before when the Catholic Charities RGV ran out of hotel rooms to rent for COVID-19-positive illegals. to “quarantine themselves before being flown or bussed into the country under the FJB catch and release policy. The thousands of illegals pouring across the border who were not positive were stashed under the Anzalduas Bridge, which connects McAllen to Reynosa, Mexico.

These are new, and I saw a few more stationed at crossroads near the border fence. This is at the junction of FM 494 and the dirt road leading to La Lomita Chapel

La Lomita Chapel is on the other side of the levee. The Border Patrol

The restored Capilla De La Lomita is a few hundred meters inland from Anzalduas Park and once served as an important way station on the old Brownsville to Roma trail. The La Lomita (little hill) chapel was built in 1865 by The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (Oblates) from the new Archdiocese in Galveston. The pioneer priests of the Oblates were Belgian missionaries who learned Spanish and used Capilla De La Lomita as a headquarters to service four other chapels and seventy-five ranches from Brownsville to Roma. The Oblates were a fixture in the Rio Grande Valley for over a century, but they are long gone, replaced by Catholic Charities RGV, which the Brownsville Archdiocese sponsors.

The Oblates were poor missionaries who dedicated their lives to serving the people of the Rio Grande Valley. Catholic Charities RGV may provide services to the poor in the Rio Grande Valley, but their focus is servicing the tens of thousands of illegals who have poured over the border during the last four years. Catholic Charities RGV is essentially a government contractor that has spent millions of taxpayer dollars on hotel rooms, bus and airplane tickets, meals, and clothing. The Catholic church has gone from sending missionaries to care for the poor to aiding and abetting the exploitation of the poor by supporting the human and sex trafficking of Mexican Narcos.

One of the reasons President Trump won every border county in Texas was his promise to lock down the border. Allowing millions of unvetted migrants into the country hurts the working class, and most of the Hispanic residents of the border are working class. Why the Catholic Church has prioritized big fat government contracts to house and transport illegal immigrants who will drive down wages and drive up crime among the people they are supposed to be serving is a mystery. However, my experience with government contracts is that the people who win and manage them in the NGO world are handsomely compensated.

In the early 1960s, a poorly compensated Mexican American civil rights activist, Cesario Estrada Chávez, started the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). Chavez used the NFWA to raise wages and improve working conditions for farm workers. Once Chávez successfully unionized farm workers who became an implacable foe of illegal immigration. In 1989, César Chávez & Dolores Huerta founded La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE) to lobby for farm workers in the Rio Grande Valley. Farm workers in the Rio Grande Valley have always included Mexican-based harvesting crews, so I assume his view on wetbacks had moderated when he arrived in the RGV.

This is not a popular cause in the RGV. Inflicting drag queens on local children without their parent’s expressed consent would be suicidal. The number of parents who would support this is ridiculously low.

The second of Robert Conquest’s three laws of politics states: “Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing. ‘ That law has always proved true in my experience, which explains why LUPE is now focused on open borders, all-ages drag shows, PRIDE celebrations, and anti-Trump protests.

In the RGV, when a girl turns 15, we put her in a ball gown and spend thousands of dollars on a Quinceanera for her. Who needs drag queens when your 15-year-old girls dress like this?

While I was driving around the border, Taylor Cramer from RGV Truth was covering a LUPE inauguration day protest in McAllen’s Archer Park. His pictures capture exactly why this group is so marginalized. They are clearly unable to understand why Donald Trump won every county on the Texas border. They, like the democratic senators trying to derail Trump’s cabinet picks, cannot read the room. They do not understand why their divisive rhetoric and anti-American propaganda do not resonate with normal Americans. To prove that point, LUPE is the first RGV-based organization I have heard of using “Latinx” in their advertising.

Not a large turnout in a town that President Trump carried in a landslide. These people are no longer relevant in Rio Grande Valley, which is exploding with jobs, young families, and the opportunity provided by solid jobs for the middle class.

Latinx is not a popular neologism with my Hispanic neighbors, who use proficiency with the Spanish language as a more reliable gauge of who is and is not “Hispanic.” If you have blond hair and blue eyes and speak perfect Castillian Spanish, you’re not just Hispanic but upper-caste Hispanic. If you are a third-generation Hispanic kid who doesn’t speak Spanish, you’re essentially a white dude. This is a drawn-out way of demonstrating that looks don’t matter in the Rio Grande Valley, and nobody here appreciates divisive terms like “Latinx.”

Giving away free condoms and lube is not how you win friends or influence people in the Rio Grande Valley. LUPE should have followed the example set by our Jewish neighbors and set up free food, a petting zoo, and kiddie rides in the park.

Our national nightmare has ended with the nationwide repudiation of the progressive woke agenda. Yet the progressive left is still aligned with the thoroughly discredited global elite who continue to loot the peace while increasing income inequality. LUPE receives funding from the Soros Open Society Foundation, which claims to promote democratic practices as well as equity and justice. But not justice for the farmers, ranchers, and families of the Rio Grande Valley. The Open Society wants justice for the illegals who trespass on our property, trash our fields, cut our fences, steal our pets, and threaten our children.

Operation Lonestar is popular in the RGV but not with George Soros’s Open Societies Institute, which now funds LUPE. The thought that people should “migrate freely” is insane and not supported by normie Americans. Photograph courtesy of RGV Truth

LUPE and Catholic Charities RGV have no problem aiding and abetting the sex trafficking of women and children. They know that nobody comes across the Rio Grande River without paying the cartels, and they know how the cartels collect from women and children. Donations from the local church congregations do not fund LUPE or Catholic Charities RGV; our tax dollars fund them, as do international open-border organizations. These malignant RGV-based organizations will contract and shift focus after President Trump locks down the border. Maybe they’ll start serving the residents of the RGV instead of the illegals, who have been their sole focus for the past four years.

November 12, 2024November 12, 2024

A Bittersweet Veterans Day

Election Day was long and busy as I was the judge for the Cayetano Cavazos Elementary School polling station. This is a blue county, and I was appointed an election judge because I was one of the few Republicans who volunteered to work the polls. Shout out to the Vet the Vote organization, which is where I got the idea to volunteer. Regardless of political affiliation, the people working this election were professional, conscientious, and pleasant to be around. It was a fantastic experience.

Throughout election day, I was asked if I was a veteran, and when I confirmed I was a retired Marine, I was thanked for my service. That made me uncomfortable because our failure to win the Global War on Terrorism has left this country in much greater peril than it was in 2001. Not only did we do exactly what Osama bin Ladin predicted, which was to fight a long war we could never win, only to withdraw in humiliating disgrace. But we degraded our military capabilities and are now ruining the fighting spirit of the fighting men at the pointed end of the spear.

Our military is a broken, demoralized joke that cannot meet its recruiting or retention goals. When I enlisted in the Navy in 1978, the military was considered a hollow force, but that force was full of mean bastards who could fight. And we had the ships, combat aircraft, and officer corps required to take those rowdy misfits into a fight and crush any other adversary in the world. Now, we have a diverse force with women in the infantry and trans moralism making a mockery of the profession of arms. We no longer have the sea lift or aircraft to meet our peacetime obligations, let alone fight a peer-level war.

Battalion Landing Team 1/9 exercising in Australia during the summer of 1987. The Marine Corps can no longer insert and sustain a battalion in the field from Amphibious shipping. A task that was routine when I was on active duty. Photograph of 2ndLt Lynch and my radioman LCpl Kline courtesy of Marines magazine.

Our Navy has shrunk to the point it can no longer control the busiest shipping lane in the world. Instead of using the Red Sea, commercial ships are now re-routed around the horn of Africa, adding 3500 nautical miles to their transit, which takes 12 extra days and a million extra fuel dollars per trip. The Navy can only field 12 Amphibious ships worldwide because a former Marine Corps Commandant reduced the number of amphibious ships the Navy was required to maintain from 38 to 31. He did this to free up money for the Navy to build a new class of ships called Landing Ship Medium, which would support his Force Design 2030 plan. Those ships have not been designed, funded, or built and will never be because of this harsh rebuke from the Congressional Research Service over the ludicrous FD 2030 concept.

The Navy/Marine Corps team can no longer perform the missions they have been assigned for the past 85 years. Now that President Trump is returning, Congress suddenly has buyer’s remorse for agreeing to the radical reorganization it allowed under the commandants Berger and Smith. This article by a former mentor to officers of my generation, Colonel Gary Anderson, USMC (Ret), sums up the state of play well. I’m pasting his last two paragraphs below because they describe exactly how we ended up with a broken Marine Corps.

There are two types of incompetents, active and passive. Active incompetents don’t know they are incompetent. They are dangerous because they don’t know they are incompetent. They are dangerous because they act on the zany ideas. Passive incompetents know that they don’t know what they are doing. They are dangerous because they tend to defer to the active incompetents.

Berger and Smith are active incompetents. Biden and Congress have been passive incompetents. Shame on them. If Congress acted today to repair the Navy and Marine Corps and return it back to 2018 capabilities, it would take at least a decade to recover. Our civilian leaders were sold snake oil, and the rubes bought it.

Those same rubes are now plotting to undermine President-elect Trump. These are the same people who had no problem abandoning Bagram airbase when FJB arbitrarily and recklessly cut the troop numbers in Afghanistan. Without Bagram, there was no way to extricate ourselves from Afghanistan in an orderly manner. Everyone (not inside the Pentagon) who knew anything about Afghanistan recognized that total abdication of service stewardship. The resulting fiasco in Kabul was as easy to predict as it was uncomfortable to watch.

General Furness and Mac hosting me for the 2011 Marine Corps Birthday at Camp Dwyer in the southern Helmand province

However, all is not lost because these two fighting generals, LtGen Dave Furness, USMC (Ret) and MajGen Dale Alford, USMC (Ret), who know how to train and lead Marines, may have been sidelined, but they are not forgotten. They are featured in this All Marine Radio podcast that dropped yesterday, and listening to them is a tonic for the souls of concerned military professionals. It is worth listening to if you (like me) are alarmed by the current state of our military and think the current crop of general officers are a collection of sycophantic yes-men. LtGen Furness tells me the other services still have talent hidden in their flag officer ranks, too, which is remarkable given the ongoing war on competence being waged by DoD diversity/equity mandarins.

I made the mistake of listening to this while lifting weights and damn near broke my back when LTGen Furness popped off with, “I’m just happy somebody gives a shit about what I have to say.” Listening to two of the best generals of my generation will instill some much-needed confidence in today’s broke-ass military.

Have a Happy Veterans Day, and let us hope the incoming Trump administration taps these two retired generals or others just like them to resuscitate our broken, demoralized military.

October 31, 2024October 31, 2024

Here Comes the Judge

As I’ve grown older and wiser, I still haven’t wised up about joking with dated material. Last year, when physical therapists were torturing me after shoulder surgery, I would start to sing Roxanne, hoping they would stop the torture for some red light therapy. The PT techs had no idea what I was talking about. They had never heard of The Police or their hit song, Roxanne. They ignored my suggestions about using Red Light Therapy, preferring a more active, painful physical approach. For that, I’m grateful. My shoulder has healed nicely, and I’m back in the gym almost daily because I don’t have anything better to do.

Except during the election season because I volunteered to be an Election Judge. Here Comes the Judge is America’s first Meme and was a staple of the old Rowman and Martins Laugh-In show, which was popular in the late 60’s. It’s the first thing I thought of when a Hidalgo County Election Supervisor I call Neo, called me to ask if I’d like to be a judge instead of a poll worker. Neo isn’t the supervisor’s real name, but he only communicates to me through texts, which for some reason seem Matrix-like.

Democrats have the media, academia, the billionaires, the Yellow Generals, and the Deep State. We have the memes

I volunteered for election duty, hoping it would instill some long-lost confidence in our civic governance. I am terrified that the Democrats will steal this election, which, given the disaster of the Biden-Harris years, seems impossible. I live in the Rio Grande Valley, which has long been a Democratic stronghold but is now firmly Trump territory, given his massive appeal to working and middle-class Hispanic men. So, I was interested in seeing how the votes would be tabulated and if there was a chance for voter fraud or other shenanigans.

One of the many things to be thankful for is not seeing this kind of BS ever again. Propaganda is designed to demoralize, and nothing demoralizes me more than seeing a nitwit LARPing on the taxpayer’s dime.

We don’t have dominion voting machines in the valley; we use Verity Duo voting machines with touchscreen voting that produce paper ballots. Those ballots are then scanned into a separate Duo machine that is not connected to the internet or the voting machines and then end up in a locked ballot box that can only be opened at the county election office. The system seems as fraud-proof as one could make it because the paper ballots are the only thing that counts, and if the hand count varies from the scanner count, then all hell breaks loose at the county election headquarters.

The Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande Valley overwhelmingly support the Catholic Church and are not amused by Dem anti-catholic propaganda. This idiot woman cost Harris votes.

The only organized election fraud in the Rio Grande Valley comes from Politiqueras. These are teams of vote harvesters funded by Democrats that prey on the older Hispanic population in regional colonias, nursing homes, or adult daycare centers. This year, the Texas Office of the Attorney General’s Election Integrity Division is actively hunting these ballot harvesters, so I do not believe they can inject enough bogus ballots into the system to make any difference.

The Hunter Biden laptop disinformation campaign by our so-called intelligence agencies was clearly election interference, and those responsible should be held to account. But they won’t because you know why.

In Texas, there is no electioneering within 100 feet of a polling place, including clothing supporting a specific candidate or political party. I have yet to see a voter show up with a MAGA hat, and I doubt that it will be a problem if one does. Nobody mistakes me for a Harris supporter, and I’m so damn cheerful I doubt anyone will argue with me when I ask that the hat be removed while they vote. The only issue I have had is with college-aged women who want to document everything they do with their cell phones. The dad in me wants to plead with them to wear more clothes because they tend to be grossly overweight. But I simply ask they refrain from taking photographs in the voting area and they pout but put the phones away. There are no policemen assigned to our polling location, and there is no need for them. The voting public in the RGV is friendly, happy, and content with the integrity of the county voting system.

In order to be a serious country with a functioning military and state department, this kind of bullshit has to stop.

I’ve been checking in voters, and it has been a delightful experience. Voters step up to my table and present their driver’s license. I enter the first four letters of the last name, the first three of their first name, and their date of birth. Their name and address appear 98% of the time, indicating they are registered to vote. A label printer attached to my laptop prints off their name and address, and I paste that into my voters’ log, ask them to verify everything is correct, and sign. A second label contains a bar code that the Verity Duo scan machine reads, which then spits out a six-digit code for use at the ballot machines. The voter enters that code and votes, and when finished, the machine spits out a printed ballot with the voter’s name and information and the votes they have cast.

I remain concerned about voter irregularities throwing the election to the worst Presidential candidate I have ever seen. I am also worried that the deep state will not step aside and accept the will of the American people when they vote President Trump back into office. But I am glad I volunteered to work this election because it restored my faith in my fellow citizens and local government. I doubt I’ll ever have the same degree of confidence in the federal government, but four years of Trump and JD Vance would be a good start.

October 25, 2024March 4, 2026

I Spy: How Human Intelligence is Supposed to Work

Once again, highly classified American intelligence documents have been published on the Internet. This was not a massive leak by some low-level enlisted soldier or a disgruntled contractor but a focused leak of two intelligence products regarding Israel’s current preparations to strike Iran. The documents are revealing for several reasons. First, they expose our intelligence community’s sources and methods, which is bad. Second, Israel no longer trusts the Biden-Harris administration and isn’t telling them anything about its current or future operations, which is good.

An excellent summary of the situation is available on John Schindler’s Top Secret Umbra substack. It is worth reading to understand the seriousness of the leak and who in the Biden-Harris administration most likely leaked the material. The most likely culprit, a POS named Rob Malley, couldn’t be the leaker, as his security clearance was revoked in 2003 for spying for Iran. During that investigation, he was caught lying to the FBI, so guess what happened to him? Not one damn thing, because Rob Malley was the architect of Obama’s 2015 Iran deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). In Obama-Biden-Harris America, laws apply only to the little people or associates of President Trump.

President Trump demonstrated geostrategic common sense by placing the interests of the American people over the “legacy” of Obama when he canceled the JCPOA. President Biden demonstrated partisanship over common sense and a complete lack of interest in America’s safety and security by trying to revive the JCPOA, but ended up with a spy scandal centered on Malley instead.

Note the difference between the treatment of General Michael Flynn, who was tricked into a supposed lie by nefarious FBI shenanigans, and Rob Malley, who was and remains a straight-up traitor. The rule of law in America today is nonexistent if you’re a Democrat. If you’re a patriot who served this country with distinction for 35 years in uniform and a Trump supporter, you will be prosecuted and financially ruined for the most trivial offenses.

General Flynn was instrumental in establishing the Eclipse Group, a private spy network that provided desperately needed human intelligence (HUMINT) in Afghanistan. The Eclipse Group was created by a former CIA legend, Dewey Clarridge, who knew the CIA could not deliver HUMINT for several reasons, including institutional risk aversion. You can see that for yourself by watching the CIA get taken to the cleaners in a bogus HUMINT operation on the NETFLIX series Spy Ops. My post explaining that ludicrous operation (the segment is titled Taliban Spies) is here.

Eclipse started operations after my recruiter, Willi 1, and I (Willi 4) met with some senior CENTCOM staffers in Dubai in July 2009. Not long after we started, Kabul’s CIA station chief sent cables to Langley, complaining vociferously about our activities. Nobody in the Pentagon or CENTCOM gave a shit what the CIA had to say about us because they sucked and weren’t providing anything useful to the military. The CIA then turned to their favorite New York Times reporters Matt Mazzetti and Dexter Filkins, who wrote several articles full of half-truths, outright lies, and innuendo. The articles referred to my friend Willi 1 and me (my source code was Willi 4) as “commercial Jason Bourne’s,” which we found amusing.

After driving the Khyber Pass from Jalalabad, the Commercial Jason Bournes Chilling in Peshawar, Pakistan.

But this post isn’t about that. I want to explain what a legitimate HUMINT operation looks like by lifting some material from my unpublished book Free Ranging Afghanistan. On the morning of September 26, 2010, I received a panicked call from the senior Afghan official who ran my spy ring in Regional Command East, which encompassed the provinces of Nuristan, Nangarhar, Kunar, and Laghman. He told me he was on his way to my guesthouse with bad news about the kidnapping of an aid worker. He had been told one of the women working for DAI, a large American aid implementor, had been kidnapped on the Asadabad to Jalalabad highway. That was incorrect, as I knew DAI personnel would never be allowed to drive that highway and, being a USAID implementor, would have had an armed ex-pat personal security detail. But I knew exactly who would be on the road without an armed escort: one of the girls working for the Idea New program, and there was only one of those: Linda Norgrave.

In 2010, I was working as a heavily armed humanitarian for the Central Asia Development Group (CADG), overseeing large-scale irrigation and cash-for-work projects in the cities of Jalalabad, Asadabad, and Gardez. CADG was a “direct implementation” outfit, which meant we did not have expat security teams, B6 armored SUVs, or UN Minimum Occupational Security Standard (UNMOSS)-rated living compounds. Idea New was also a direct implementation outfit associated with DAI, and they lived and worked out of the DAI Jalalabad compound.

I was at my guesthouse, The Taj, which had a Tiki Bar we opened every Thursday evening for the international community (mostly aid workers) that was then thriving in Jalalabad. Like every other international working in Nangarhar province, the British ex-pats working for Idea New came over with the DAI crew every Thursday evening for happy hour. One night, my Aussie wingman, Ski, and I listened to their program manager explain their modus operandi, explicitly stating that being armed was ridiculous, but we said nothing. He went on to challenge us on the wisdom of an armed Westerner trying to fight his way out of a Taliban ambush, and we still said nothing. We never thought we could fight off a Taliban ambush on our own, but Linda was not taken in an ambush. She was kidnapped by Taliban associates on a main road, something that would never happen to us. Gun-wielding Westerners introduced a lot of friction into a kidnapping equation, which was the point of being armed.

I immediately emailed Willi 1 and Dewey to explain that Linda Norgrove was a British national working for the American USAID contractor DAI on the Idea New program. Idea New duplicated our (CADG) technique of low-profile unarmored cars, singleton international program managers, wearing local dress, attempting to blend in with the locals as much as possible, etc, but they were not armed. Dewey called me on Skype, which he (incorrectly) thought the NSA couldn’t hack, to ask what we had, which wasn’t much. He told me to stand by to support one of Willi 3’s assets, which was inbound and might need comms, guns, or money.

As was typical for Willi 3’s network, his guy found the kidnappers by the 29^th of September and passed on their names, some fuzzy cell phone pictures, their chain of command, and a working theory for the kidnapping. The crew that had grabbed Linda had been identified in my order-of-battle reporting a month prior, when they arrived from Pakistan, and that report was added to our targeting package. Willi’s access agent linked up with us, and he was exhausted. We let him sleep for a day, fed and refitted him with serious walking-around money before he returned to Kunar.

Dewey passed our reporting on to both MI6 and the American DIA; the Brits read everything we wrote, and the Americans ignored everything we sent. President Obama talked the British Prime Minister into allowing the American military to take over the case because the Regional Command (RC East) was 100% American. On the 30^th of September, the American military took over the kidnapping case. On the 1st of October, I received a call from the RC East Human Terrain Team asking me to come in to “talk with a friend.”

“About fucking time,” was my curt response.

Thirty minutes later, I was introduced to a DIA agent in the Human Terrain Team office. He looked like every other DIA agent I had met: bearded, in his mid-30s, slim, fit, and wary. I was taken to a separate office so we could talk alone, and the first question he asked was whether I knew Linda Norgrove. I was stunned and looked at him hard to see if he was jerking my chain. I then asked a question I hated asking: “Do you know who I am?” He did not; he claimed to have never heard of the Eclipse Group, Dewey Clarridge, or the Pentagon private spy ring. It appeared he was telling the truth, though I didn’t care. I asked what they had so far, and he said the grid where her car was found. I didn’t believe that for a second but didn’t care because I came bearing gifts.

Instead of trying to explain the mountain of information we had on the kidnapping – primarily via Willie 3’s excellent network – we walked down to the Human Terrain Team office, where my friend Kerry Patton lent us his desktop computer. I pulled up our AfPakrp.org website and scrolled to report #825, a summation of reports 820, 823, and 824, and cross-referenced report 621a, which was when the Taliban kidnapping team leader, Mawlvi Baseer, first popped up on my network. Dewey had resorted to putting our products on a password-protected internet site after the New York Times hit pieces successfully ended our original contract. With the loss of the contract, we lost our man in Kabul, who had been placed there specifically to feed our intel products into the ISAF intelligence flow.

Ski and I jocked up for a trip into Kunar Province. Do we look like dudes you can kidnap during the day?

The DIA agent was stunned. Kerry said, “I told you, man, you should have listened to us sooner; these guys are the shit.” I told him to call me if he had any additional questions, knowing he had a lot to digest and would want to hustle over to the CIA building on the other side of the airfield. He asked if there was anything he could do for me, so I requested a case of German sparkling mineral water. I had heard through the grapevine that the CIA had flown in hundreds of cases.

On October 3rd, I asked for another meeting to inform my DIA contact that our guy was at the outer cordon in the upper Dewagal Valley and about to slip into the village of Dineshga, where he believed Mawlvi Baseer was keeping Linda. I gave him our agent’s Thuraya sat phone number and the three cell numbers he had recently reported for the head kidnapper, Baseer. On the 6th of October, our spy was back outside the cordon, having located Linda. The DIA called me in because they had intercepted his sat phone calls and now knew where Linda was. When I arrived at FOB Fenty, the DIA agent was almost giddy with excitement and handed me a case of German sparkling mineral water from the CIA stash.

He asked if we could send our access agent back into Dineshga to pinpoint Linda’s exact location. Willi 3 had anticipated this and already agreed to send his man back. I asked how the SEALs would ID our guy as a friend, not a foe, and was told I’d be briefed on exactly how to do that when the time came. I knew that was bullshit, as did Willi 3. Our man went back, made an innocuous sat phone call from just outside the building where Linda was, and then rapidly exited the scene. A few hours later, the SEALs launched and raided the compound we had identified as containing Linda. In the ensuing melee, one of the SEALs accidentally killed her with a fragmentation grenade after mistaking her for an armed combatant.

At that time, I had been living in Afghanistan for four years. Willi 3 had lived there off and on for over thirty years. Human Intelligence operators working in a country like Afghanistan needed years on deck before they could become remotely proficient at gathering legitimate intelligence. Without that deep knowledge and relationships forged over years, any attempt to create a spy ring would end with being taken to the cleaners by wily Afghans, as demonstrated by the ridiculous Netflix show, or being taken out back and shot in the head.

With four years of continuous service in the country, I qualified as a trusted liaison with ISAF and to outfit and harbor an access agent. I could never have found Linda with my assets, which were considerable back when the Pentagon paid us regularly. Willi 3 was the only Eclipse operative I knew (and I knew only four of the dozens in Eclipse) who could conduct human intelligence operations at that level. He was fluent in Dari and Pashto and had spent enough time developing the relationships required to run legitimate HUMINT spy rings.

Our intelligence agencies are incapable of replicating the Eclipse Group because they refuse to put in the time on the ground or accept the risk of living and working with the Afghans. The night we lost Linda, I was stopped and detained by Unit 02 – the CIA-sponsored Counter-Terrorism Pursuit Team for Nangarhar Province. But that’s a story for another time.

October 19, 2024October 20, 2024

The IDF: Modeling Competence over Equity

I join the freedom-loving peoples of the world in congratulating the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for eliminating the genocidal bastard Yahya Sinwar. Sinwar was the head of Hamas and claimed that when the time came, he would stand and fight, dying as a martyr. When the time came, he was running away with a fake ID and a pocket of donor dollars, hoping to go to the ground in Rafa. You remember Rafa, the town the spinless cowards running the United States, United Kingdom, France, Canada, and Egypt told the Israelis to avoid. Cackling Kamala even warned Israel about Rafa, saying, “She had studied the maps,” whatever that meant.

Yahya Shin-was after playing a game of FAFO with a competent military.

Israel is modeling the consequences of valuing competence over diversity in national leadership, intelligence organizations, and a hard-fighting army. They are not constrained by ridiculous rules of engagement from on high. Compare and contrast what we have watched the IDF do over the past year to how we handled fighting terrorists embedded inside Afghan communities. This conversation between Shawn Ryan and Nick “The Reaper” Irving is most informative on that exact topic. You should watch all five hours of this podcast to understand the quality of the human capital wasted by our feckless national leaders and their yellow generals.

There are enough warning signs about our hollow military and its morally bankrupt leadership for a hundred blog posts. From drone swarms loitering over our military bases. unmolested, the Pentagon killing hundreds with an experimental drug treating a virus that was not a threat to servicemen, to an army helicopter rotor washing civilian hurricane relief supplies, the signs that our military is broken cannot be ignored. But I want to focus on the one area I find the most upsetting: women in our combat arms.

West Point and the Naval Academy will roll into the weekend with undefeated football teams. If you look at those teams, you will notice they resemble Israeli combat formations in that they are all male. Our military leadership insists that there are no differences between men and women in mental capacity or physical strength despite several millennia of human experiences and our own lying eyes.

Men and women are born with dramatically different capabilities, which can be seen every time a woman’s national soccer team is beaten by an under-15 boys’ squad. It’s not polite to mention that fact, which most of us find merely amusing. But when women are inserted into ground combat units, the delusions of our elites are no longer funny. One of the many reasons our military faces a recruiting and retention crisis is this callous disregard for the lives of enlisted men who are saddled with females in combat zones.

The boys who thumped the women’s team were Texans which might explain it maybe. . .

Let me tell you about women in combat. On a warm summer day, I witnessed a Marine Corps patrol walking through the Nawa Bazaar in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan. I could see the point man was furious, as were the men behind him, and stopped to watch. Then I saw why; the men were carrying the weapons and body armor of their female “Lioness” Marines. The women were stumbling in a gap-mouthed stupor, hanging onto the body armor of the man in front of them. The locals crowding the bazaar were laughing and openly mocking the Marines. It was such a sad spectacle that I couldn’t take a picture of it; I was too embarrassed

What’s the current perception of the Marine Corps Lioness program? A quick Google search reveals dozens of articles about the trailblazing female Marines or the Special Ops: Lionesses TV show. That TV show stars Zoe Saldaña, who is 45, Nicole Kidman, who is 56, and Morgan Freeman, who is still kicking at 86. Can you imagine people that old on the battlefield? It’s a joke, insulting to our intelligence, but it’s a reality for too many of the idiots comprising our elite managerial class.

So, how is the recent deployment of paratroopers into the Middle East going? Unlike my deployment to Beirut in 1983, the current mission is not the subject of informed debate in the regime media. We have no idea where these troops are or what they are doing. Everything the Pentagon does now is top secret. Whatever these troops are doing, it does not impact the conflict that allegedly caused their deployment. One more display of gross incompetence at the national command level.

The Marine Corps Lioness program paid dividends only because our generals were incapable of the tactical adaptation of warning residents in targeted areas to get out before we came in. No military in history has done more to prevent civilian collateral damage than the Israelis. But once warned by them, the civilians who stay risk becoming collateral damage because the Israelis prioritized winning battles and preserving their troops over rules of engagement designed to appease their political masters.

Congressional cowards reacting to protestors who are not from Antifa or Black Lives Matter or unhinged women shrieking at conservative Supreme Court nominees.

The IDF is delivering a master class on intelligence operations and conducting ground combat operations. There are no women at the pointy end of their spear, just as there are no women from Ukraine or Russia slugging it out in the trenches of Ukraine.

There shouldn’t have been any American women at the pointy end of our spear during the 20 years we spent replacing the Taliban with the Taliban. But our senior generals aren’t as competent as Isleali generals, so they came up with workarounds that made female congresspeople swoon while leaving our best warriors like Nick Irving alone, exposed, and unable to call in the fire support they needed to survive. A military organization that places winning collegiate football games over the lives of its soldiers and Marines is not worthy of our support or admiration. They have earned nothing but our contempt.

October 15, 2024October 19, 2024

Let Me Tell You About Martha Raddatz

Ever since our ignominious retreat from Afghanistan, I wake up every morning angry. I habitually read the regime media over morning coffee, and my anger is magnified. I should ignore the media, but I can’t. My Dad and I sat together reading the morning paper daily when I was young, and I can’t seem to break the habit. As President Trump gains fraud-proof levels of voter engagement, the gaslighting from the corporate media is reaching unprecedented levels.

The gaslighting starts with fraudulent polling that inflates the support for Kamala and ends with the White House spokesbiped accusing the media of “disinformation” for reporting on their grossly incompetent response to Hurricanes Helena and Milton. Propaganda aims to demoralize its targeted audience, which is exactly what our national polling organizations and regime media are trying to do today. But it’s not working. Every morning, I laugh out loud as great Americans like JD Vance wreak havoc on them.

So, let me tell you a story about Martha Raddatz. In 2009, she showed up at the Taj to interview Dr. Dave Warner about his work supporting the super-effective LaJolla Golden Triangle Rotary Club (Jalalabad and San Diego are sister cities) and maybe his beer for data scheme, too. It was a long time ago, and my memory may not be accurate. What he didn’t talk about was his work on DARPA’s More Eyes program developing the PULSE platform, which would become the backbone of DARPA’s Memex censorship program. More about that below.

Martha took the time to interview me, allowing me to explain the stupidity behind Obama’s mini-surge with an end-date plan. She and Obama were friends during their days at Harvard, and I could tell I was pissing her off. She had problems with armed contractors, too, and did not believe me when I explained that if I ever shot someone in Afghanistan, no matter what the circumstances, I’d be fired and flown home immediately. I ended up driving her downtown to the governor’s compound because I had some intel about nefarious activity that way, and as we parked, three technicals full of armed Talliban-looking dudes pulled in next to us. Her producer was freaking out, Martha looked uncomfortable, too, but she had an effective poker face, so it was hard to tell what she was feeling.

I pointed at the gunmen next to us and said, “What did I tell you?” She asked if the armed men were Taliban, and I said no, they were speaking Pashayi, so they were from Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), which was headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. She countered that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was Taliban, and I again said no, he may be part of the Taliban Peshawar Shura, but his boys have been fighting the Taliban outsiders squatting on their turf recently. I speculated that was why one of his emissaries was here talking with the governor, Gul Agha Sherzai. Governor Sherzai, like Hekmatyar, was a powerful warlord, so they were doing warlord shit, not conducting official government business. The HIG fighters pretended we weren’t standing next to them the entire time, confirming my earlier intelligence about unusual activity at the Governor’s compound.

The report she filed after that trip featured Dr. Dave visiting several recently built schools that the LaJolla Rotarians funded. He explained that the brand-new desks were piled on the roofs because class sizes were so big there was only enough room for the kids to sit on the floor. Dr. Dave then took her to see Osama bin Ladin’s bombed-out Jalalabad compound. That is the only time you can see me in the broadcast as I was driving; the “armed security team” she referenced was me, and all I had was a pistol.

I remember President Obama commenting on his efforts to eliminate tax breaks for charitable donations because they benefited the wealthy, saying something snarky like, “I thought it’s supposed to be about charity, not a tax break.” I remember that because it irritated me then, but you can’t find that remark on today’s internet search engines, which is interesting.

The Rotarians are precisely the kind of Americans who would continue to fund their Afghan projects with or without tax breaks. Dr Dave’s Synergy Strike Force unintentionally (in my opinion) helped develop the concepts and software now being sold to foreign governments and used domestically to throttle inconvenient stories that deviate from accepted corporate/government narratives. Things like that unfortunate quip by Obama have the habit of disappearing in today’s politicized, controlled internet. You can read all about it in this excellent Jack Poulson article, Mai Tais, More Eyes, and Mercenaries.

Martha Raddatz listened to everything Dave Warner had to say because he is a dual PhD/MD. She ignored everything I told her because I was an armed contractor, which she found distasteful, except when she needed protection on her ill-advised drive around Bin Ladins’ compound. She treated me the same way she did J.D. Vance in the interview above. But I’m no J.D. Vance. I told her what I had to say, tried to show her that I knew what I was talking about, and then made myself scarce. I’m not as capable of shutting down media spin as Senator Vance.

I did not enjoy being treated in a condescending manner by an opinionated media clown. She should have reported everything I told her because all of it was proven correct in the ensuing years. But getting the facts straight is not what the American media does; it gaslights, it lies by omission, and it is heading towards the dustbin of history because nobody believes much of what those smug elitists say these days. They hate normal Americans like me, and I hate them right back, even though I unhesitatingly protected them (for free) when they did stupid shit. That’s how us ‘bitter clingers” roll: insult us all you want, and we’ll still have your back because you’re a fellow American, and that means something to us. I wish it did to them too.

September 30, 2024October 3, 2024

Remembering Baba Ken Kraushaar

Baba Ken Kraushaar passed away in the Washington, D.C. Veterans Administration Hospital this past weekend. He was one of the founders of the Free Range International Blog and a good friend who stayed in touch after our return home. He and his partner Ginny frequently hosted me at their waterfront home in Nanjemoy Creek, Maryland. I’m going to miss him.

Dr Dave and Baba Ken showed up at the Taj one night and told me, “Don’t worry about a thing, Tim san…we’re about to have the times of our lives .” They were absolutely correct in that prediction.

The first night I met Ken Kraushaar, I thought he was a spook. He was waiting for me at the Tiki Bar at the Taj Guesthouse in Jalalabad with Dr. Dave Warner, and they introduced themselves as the advance party of the Synergy Strike Force (SSF). They explained that the SSF had rules, like Fight Club, one of which was mandatory attendance at the annual Burning Man festival. Then they said, “We’re from the government, and we’re here to help,” which they could barely say they were laughing so hard.

Ken’s GATR system was lighting fast while it lasted.

Baba Ken was partnered with Synergy Strike Force but not always funded by SSF on his many multi-month-long visits to Jalalabad. Baba Ken had won a testing contract for the GATR Satellite Internet System, which required frequent fine-tuning due to the high winds swirling around the Hindu Kush. Ken started and mentored the Jalalabad Geek Squad, a collection of Nangarhar University students who learned to install and repair networks, routers, and laptops. And it was Baba Ken who donated a water well to Little Barabad Village after learning the district government refused to install one.

Baba Ken and me hanging out with a young Matthew Van Dyke, who was transiting Central Asia on a motorcycle.

Ken’s most important contribution to the overall success of the many projects spun out of the Taj was his commitment to being there. You had to live at the Taj year-round to witness the difference in the effectiveness of ex-pats who invested serious time in Afghanistan. Shem and I were the only people who lived in Afghanistan full-time; thus, we were uniquely positioned to judge Baba Ken’s enhanced effectiveness as he worked patiently to develop the Afghan human capital.

With a heavy heart, we here at Free Range International wish Ken fair winds and following seas. He will be dearly missed.

September 29, 2024September 30, 2024

Targeted: Beirut

I wrote my last post about Beirut the day before Jack Carr released his book on Targeted: Beirut. I had pre-ordered the book, so I immediately read it for his opinion on the debacle. My assessment that: “Nobody in that operation knew what we were supposed to do on the ground in Beirut” was spot on. My assessment may have been a bit wordy and awkward, but I’m no Jack Carr.

Targeted: Beirut was excellent reading, and it transported me back to the moment I first heard about the barracks bombing. I was driving into the Newport Naval Hospital, where I would be standing duty in the medical laboratory for the next 24 hours. It was a beautiful fall morning, and as passed Easton’s Beach I heard the news on NPR. I don’t remember much else about the day other than I was upset and angry at the attack on our Marines.

101st Airborne arriving in Cyprus September 2024

I was the Leading Petty Officer of the hospital’s Mobile Medical Augmentation Readiness Team (MMART), a collateral duty that allowed me to wear Marine Corps camouflage utilities once a month, which I thought was cool. We were mobilized after Grenada to augment Mobile Surgical Team 11 from Norfolk after they were overwhelmed by casualties from the Ranger contingent of that invasion. My other distinct memory of that time was the Personnelmen processing us before we deployed (who were women; the Personnelmen rating was changed to Personnel Specialist in 2005) were in tears. They thought we were heading into harm’s way, which wasn’t the case, as we would spend the deployment on the USS Guam LPH 9.

Our contribution to the Beirut story was a minor part of Targeted: Beirut, which focused on the Marine Amphibious Unit that was attacked on October 23, 1983. Carr weaves the book around the stories of several Marines and sailors as they endure their deployment ashore. Some of those men made it home, the others did not, and you don’t know who the lucky ones were as his face paced narrative unfolds. It is a masterful display of storytelling that will interest anyone curious about how the war on terror started.

Having been a participant, I knew most of the story but was unprepared for the one thing that immediately caught my attention. The difference in how the military and our government handled combat deployments in the 80s. There was severe tension between the State Department and the Pentagon; putting the Marines ashore in Beirut, where they were sitting ducks, was unpopular. The Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff didn’t want the Marines ashore; the National Security Council and State Department thought it a splendid idea, and that played out in the press.

101st Airborne arriving in an undisclosed location September 2024

President Regan sent the Marines in, and he made repeated primetime addresses to the nation explaining his rationale. The Marine position at Beirut International Airport was flooded daily with American press and TV crews from National, regional, and even local media. The media environment was so different 40 years ago that reading about it today was jarring.

Something I did not know was that Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger ignored a Presidential finding that ordered him to retaliate for the Beirut Barracks bombing. Our intelligence agencies had intercepted message traffic that pinpointed precisely who had ordered and carried out the attack. President Reagan then ordered the navy to retaliate, but at the last moment, Weinberger ordered them to stand down, explaining, “I just don’t think it was the right thing to do.”

In one of many speeches after the Beirut bombing, President Regan said:

“Let no terrorist question our will, no tyrant doubt our resolve. Americans have courage and determination, and we must not and will not be intimidated by anyone anywhere.”

Cap Weinberger didn’t have the courage or determination to do a damn thing. His unilateral action undermined the President, and the ensuing 40 years of terrorist attacks have revealed him to be a petty, naïve, Ivy League fool. We have a surplus of over-credentialed nitwits in our country who have sacrificed the lives of thousands of servicemen by declaring preposterous concepts like “proportional response” or “courageous restraint” viable military strategies.

When we were in Beirut with the 22nd MAU there was no proportional response. The gloves were off and the Marines responded to every provocation, no matter how small, with overwhelming force. My friend Mike Ettore and his platoon were assigned to the University Library where the local Amal Militia commander would taunt them by having dinner every evening across the street from them. After his militia attacked the Marines one too many times Mike got permission to take him out. He called in a sniper team to shoot the fool in the face when he sat down for dinner. Mike if I have that story wrong don’t correct me, its too good to retract.

101st Airborne somewhere in the Middle East September 2024

President Regan and the faction supporting the deployment of the Marines were dead wrong. That was made clear by Carr when he explained how we ended up with Lebanese President Amin Gemayel, a feckless alcoholic with a libido problem worse than Bill Clinton’s. Amin replaced his capable brother Bashir Gemayel as President after a car bomb killed Bashir.

New York Times reporter Milton Freedman wrote that Bashir was “something of an expert in gangland murders.” That may have been true; the New York Times was considered a legitimate news organization back then. What was also true was Bashir had the respect and cooperation of the other ethnic minorities in Lebanon. His drunk-ass playboy brother had no support among the Shia, Druze, or Sunni minorities. Treating him like a legitimate partner for peace was a fool’s errand, just as it was with the leaders of Iraq and Afghanistan. Believing that a battalion of Marines could accomplish anything was likewise ridiculous. However, in 1983, that controversy played out in the press, allowing the American people to have an informed opinion.

Compare that to last week’s deployment of the 101^st Airborne to the Middle East. Do you see any discussion about placing American troops in harm’s way to accomplish an undefined mission in today’s gaslighting media? No. What does the Pentagon think about this deployment? Who knows? These days, everything the Pentagon does is classified. Do you know where those troops are? What they are doing? Why they are there? Nope, all we know is they were deployed “out of an abundance of caution.” Weasel words that mean nothing describing a deployment that will accomplish nothing, ordered by an unknown member of a failed administration.

I’ve salted this post with pictures from Beirut and the few images I found of last week’s deployment of troops into the Middle East. Have you noticed the difference between the two? Forty years of “diversity is our strength,” DEI mandates, witch hunts for nonexistent white racists, and race crime hoaxes have resulted in the tip of the spear being lily white. How the hell did that happen? I liked it better when the infantry was multi racial.

But that isn’t the worst of it. Today, Our military is less capable by orders of magnitude than in 1983. We don’t have a fleet oiler to refuel our Atlantic, Mediterranean, or Red Sea ships. We don’t have the amphibious ship lift to move more than a puny Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), the smallest Marine formations once available for crisis response. Today’s Marine Corps MEU lacks enablers like tanks, engineers, medium-lift assault helicopters, Armored Amphibious Tractors, snipers, or organic mortars. Marine infantry battalions are 41% smaller than they were in 1983. And those infantry battalions are saddled with the dead wood of female infantry, inflicted on them by yellow generals who believe that the difference between men and women is a mere social construct.

As you read Jack Carr’s excellent historical account, you will frequently see quotes from parents and generals expressing the hope that the Marines did not “die in vain.” Likewise, you will see a standard trope: “Where do we get such men?” when reflecting on the sacrifice of the Marines in 1983. Yet those men died in vain, as has every service-member lost during the war on terror. We may well have a handful of “such men” serving in today’s hollow force, but not many, and they will be chased out by the DEI mandarins who despise competency because it threatens the bankrupt concept of equity. When you cannot do what is important, the unimportant becomes important. That sums up our broken, hollow, woke military today; it’s a national disgrace somebody’s children will pay dearly for in the near future.

But don’t let my glum assessment of today’s armed forces be the last word. Buy Jack Carr’s new book and enjoy an excellent read about a day gone by. I promise you’ll enjoy every minute spent with this page turner.

September 24, 2024September 27, 2024

Back to Beirut?

Forty one years ago, the 1^st Battalion 8^th Marines were attacked by the first modern suicide bomber at the Beirut International Airport. A dump truck packed with 12,000 pounds of explosives crashed through a flimsy gate and into a building being used as barracks for the Marines, killing 241 Marines and sailors. At the time, I was a Navy corpsman assigned to the Naval Hospital in Newport, Rhode Island. I was also the leading petty officer of the Surgical Support Team, and we were rapidly mobilized, vaccinated, and sent overseas to join the unit, replacing the devastated Marine Amphibious Unit in Beirut. In the ensuing months, I witnessed, mostly from our ship but sometimes on the shore, an American military disaster.

Doc Lynch on the ground in Beirut. standing in front of what was left of the Barracks

Nobody in that operation knew what we were supposed to do on the ground in Beirut.

In November 1983, the various warring factions were stupid enough to attack the Marine positions, which allowed for some mission clarity. One thing Marines understand is killing people, so when attacked, they responded by killing everybody shooting at them. That caused the various warring factions to stop shooting any weapons anywhere near Marine positions. With no enemies attacking them, the Marines returned to displaying the flag as our political masters dictated. The Marines also found creative ways to trick Lebanese militia into firing their weapons near them so they could kill more of them. That’s what bored Marines do in undefined combat adjacent spaces.

The anniversary of that pointless disaster is the perfect day for the FJB administration to announce another pointless deployment of American combat troops into the Middle East, where they will do… What? Question number one is, who’s deploying them? It can’t be Joe Biden because he turned over his first cabinet meeting in over a year to Jill Biden. Is this Dr. Jill’s idea? Or is Cackling Kamala doing the saber-rattling? These are questions the regime media will never ask because the answers will reflect poorly on their democratic sponsors.

What the hell is this? Why are we forced to act like this is normal or acceptable?

Could you imagine the media frenzy if Melania Trump chaired a cabinet meeting? What if Melania took over a cabinet meeting, and the next day, the military made the following announcement:

“In light of increased tension in the Middle East and out of an abundance of caution, we are sending a small number of additional U.S. military personnel forward to augment our forces that are already in the region,”

We know precisely what would happen: the end of the world, with media hysteria cranked up beyond the endurance of mere mortals.

What will a “small number of military personnel” do in the Middle East? What capabilities do they bring to the fight? If the Pentagon wants to exercise “an abundance of caution,” how about you leave those troops in the United States? They cannot influence a damn thing happening on the ground in Lebanon. We tried that in 1983, thinking the mere presence of a Marine Corps expeditionary unit would stop the internecine fighting in Beirut. We stopped nothing. Instead, we presented an attractive target for Iranian-financed proxies to destroy in the biggest nonnuclear detonation in history.

We just completed a 20-year, multi-billion dollar effort to replace the Taliban with the Taliban and have learned nothing. The same “smartest kids in the room” who gave us the Kabul fiasco are driving this ridiculously under-resourced response to a war that is none of our business. It has been all war all the time in Lebanon for the past 40 years, and we’ve done nothing about it. Why start now by once again exposing our military to grave danger while failing to give them a mission, a desired end state, or adequate resources?

Maybe “Doctor” Jill thinks getting American troops killed overseas is a brilliant election-year strategy. It would certainly generate some “rally around our troops” support, forcing attention away from Kamala and FJB. That may be smart politics if you’re a raging sociopath. Melania Trump, who is fluent in five languages with a measured IQ an entire standard deviation higher than “Doctor” Jill, would never risk the lives of American troops for political gain.

In 1983, if the military said it was building a pier, it would have built one that could handle the moderate seas of the Mediterranean.

The truth lands with a thud and requires no further explanation. The truth is, we have no idea what we are doing in the Middle East. We didn’t have a clue in 1983, and we don’t have one today. Nor do we have a capable military, adequate naval shipping, or capable Marine Corps battalions. We can’t even build a temporary pier, something the Roman army was quite proficient at building 2500 years ago. Those capabilities have been sacrificed on the altar of equity and inclusion by men who placed access to power and post-retirement riches over the stewardship of their respective service branches. Other people’s children will be paying the price for that folly in the future. And it will be a painful lesson for all involved, just like Beirut in 1983.

September 12, 2024September 12, 2024

Orange Tigers, Yellow Generals and Daryl Cooper

The Reynosa tiger has, unfortunately, been captured on our side of the Rio Grande. I thought that it had most likely been stolen by one of the cartels but I was wrong. Although it entered the river opposite the Junk Yard Bar in Granjeno it was driven west by the border walls (not hard to predict) and probably exited the border wall belt at the Bensten State Park. The cat then worked the scrub lands making a beeline for Star County where there are plenty of cattle and scores of wild Ocelots. It was trapped outside the hamlet of Los Longoria most likely by Texas Game Wardens. It will probably be returned to the Quinta La Fauna Zoo which, given Mexico’s international ranking of #3 for animal abuse is a crime against nature, but property rights, not animal rights, animates our legal system so I suspect there is little choice in the matter.

If the tiger had made it across expressway 83 he would have been home free in Star County

I have been asked by several of my former Marine Corps associates how I could support President Trump after his competency, executive skills, and temperament were called into question by the four-star Marine Corps and Army Generals who worked for him. The answer is as simple as it is infuriating, they dumped on Trump only because it was well inside the Overton Window of our failed intelligentsia and its rent-seeking nomenklatura. Those four-star conformists would have never, in a million years, done the same to Obama, Clinton, or Biden because that would jeopardize their access to the riches showered upon the upper echelons of our ruling class. It doesn’t matter that Obama’s surge with its announced end date was exactly the kind of White House incompetence that they railed against as junior field grade officers. It doesn’t matter that they despised Willy BJ when he was in the White House for his gross sexual assault on an unpaid intern. If you asked about the disparity in power between a sitting president and an unpaid intern, which is the modern definition of rape, their answer would be it’s time to move on.

The last time I saw two of those generals (Allen and Mattis) in person was in the CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, where I had been summoned to explain how The Pentagon’s Private Spy Ring worked. I worked for General Allen when he was a major and knew him well, I met General Mattis only once when on active duty and did not know him at all. The Pentagon had cut ties with us after the second New York Times front-page fake news article about the ring. So our founder, retired CIA legend Dewey Clarridge, started a password-protected website, put our intelligence there, and gave the password to selected journalists and members of the House. They saw, in real-time the cost of ignoring our intel when suicide bombers hit ISAF exactly where and when we said they would. They saw how quickly we found the kidnappers responsible for grabbing two sailors who had mistakenly driven into Wardak province and then witnessed the consequences of ignoring our offer to mediate when the surviving sailor was killed. His kidnappers panicked when ISAF flooded the province with soldiers. exactly what we predicted would happen.

In August of 2008, my cell (the Willi cell) sent this to Dewey Clarridge and told him Osama bin Ladin was living there. That’s how good we were at the intel game, making us an existential threat to the regime intelligence apparatus, who drove a stake into us via their useful idiots in the media.*

I thought that Generals Allan and Mattis would be thrilled at having an effective human intelligence operation up and running inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, but I thought wrong. Winning was not on their agenda, pleasing Obama was their priority, so the last thing they wanted was an effective HUMINT network gumming up the works as they focused on a hasty retreat mandated by a nitwit of a president. Criticism of Obama was outside the Overton Window of the movers and shakers in Washington, DC. The yellow generals would claim they were respecting the office, not the man, but that changed instantly when the Bad Orange Man was in office. Trump represented the same threat to the political class that our Eclipse Group presented to the CIA so the rules about deportment around a sitting president suddenly changed allowing the yellow generals to use their prestige to kneecap him.

Yet it turned out Donald J Trump had good instincts when exercising the office of the presidency. He called out our NATO allies for underfunding their defense while expecting us to fight for them. He made this country an energy exporter driving costs down with cheap oil and natural gas. He closed the border and instituted a stay-in-place policy that made a dent in the sexual exploration of children being trafficked across our southern border. And he salvaged the Supreme Court by installing a couple of almost conservative justices. The “chaotic, unfocused, undisciplined” Trump White House was a godsend compared to the disaster we have been living through ever since FJB waddled his corrupt ass into the Oval Office – and not a word from the four-star high-functioning conformists who were more than happy to trash Trump.

Biden and Harris intentionally abdicated their responsibility to secure our borders which is one of the basic functions of government. Now we have armed gangs from Tren de Aragua taking over buildings in Aurora and Chicago. Towns like Springfield Ohio are being colonized by thousands of feral Haitians who lack the ability or intentions of assimilation while establishing their enclaves from which they can raid the public parks for ducks and swans to eat. The incompetent city leaders of those unfortunate locals mimic their federal overlords by lying about these situations until too many social media posts pile up to ignore. The Regime media, as usual, labeled these reports as unverified rumors until evidence of their veracity became undeniable.

Fact check – there is no credible evidence (according to the legacy media) that your lying eyes are telling you the truth – Haitians eating local park waterfowl have been “debunked” despite police audio proving it’s true. There is a video of police arresting Haitian woman for eating her neighbors cat but that too is a figment of your imagination according to our gas lighting media.

The invasion of millions of illegals comes with a worsening competency crisis in every nook and cranny of the federal government. We watch in stunned silence as our tax monies are wasted, we can’t staff our military, we can’t recover stranded astronauts without the help of private contractors, we can no longer even build a temporary pier, and we are incapable of holding transparent, fair elections. The basic roles of government are being ignored leading to a deep and pervasive legitimacy crisis for the Regime. Challenging the consensus on which the Regime based it’s post World War II identity is a new line of attack on their legitimacy which explains why the Regime and their adjuncts on social media freaked out over the Tucker Carlson interview of Darryl Cooper.

The Shibboleths of the progressive left, feminism, egalitarianism, DEI, tabula rasa, and anti-white racism do not square with how things work in the world. Darryl Cooper and those who understand how reality operates are now free to fire broadsides into fake progressive media narratives without repercussions. Instead of being destroyed by the ensuing hysteria from the White House, Regime media, (and the Powerline blog), he is now the number one downloaded podcaster in every category on every podcast hosting site in the world. That would not have been the case five short years ago indicating a major shift to the right of the Overton Window.

Everyone wants to believe they would be this guy if they came of age in 1930’s Germany. Based on his work I think Daryl Cooper is the only person I know who could claim this title. The rest of us … not so much.

Alternative media podcasters should be able to argue that a morbidly obese alcoholic who worked from his bed all morning may not have been that great a man without automatically being labeled an anti-semite or holocaust denier. But being labeled by the left no longer matters. The regime media can engage in the fact-free sliming of opponents as right-wing extremists all they want but when every person not down with their agenda is labeled a “right-wing extremist,” the words have lost their meaning. This explains why the American media is no longer trusted or believed by any adult proficient at exercising their own reasoned choices.

* The full story of the Eclipse Group will be found in the new book Free Ranging Afghanistan scheduled for publication in the summer of 2025.