My son is seven years old and in the second grade. Ever since he was small, he has shown an aptitude for swinging a baseball bat. He hits left-handed, with beautiful extension through the elbows, quick hip turnover, and almost no wasted movement. From the well-worn patch of grass in our front yard that serves as home plate, he drills the tennis balls I throw him into the neighbor’s field, sometimes carrying them a good two hundred feet.

When he was five or six, I sent a video of his swing to a friend who had worked in several Major League Baseball front offices after a stint as a Marine Scout Sniper. He wrote back, “Did you have to work on that swing a lot, or is it one of those that’s just naturally gorgeous? He’s got the one thing that’s almost impossible to teach, and that’s the simplicity and lack of movement. It’s why some people can hit 100-mile-an-hour fastballs and almost everyone else can’t.”

The kid can hit.

Before you dismiss this as a dad brag, I should point out that I can take neither genetic nor instructional credit for any of it. Baseball is not even his favorite sport. That would be soccer. He has mastered Ronaldo’s post-goal “Siuuu!” celebration so completely that he sometimes wakes up for school doing it.

Here, however, is the dad brag you knew was coming.

Today was a rough day for him at school. Playground stuff. A lot of adults were talking to him, and by the time he got home, he needed space. He needed to decompress. Nothing happened that I would not file under the ordinary emotional turmoil of second grade, but ordinary does not mean insignificant when you are seven and living through it.

After dinner, he came to me and asked, “Dad, can I hit some balls?”

I did not particularly want to. I was sore, because being forty-seven and still doing jiu-jitsu is a reliable recipe for feeling that way. But I went outside with him because I thought we might finish the day on a high note.

He started warming up with a wooden bat. Then he asked me to throw him the hardballs instead of the tennis balls because, he said, he liked the noise they made when he hit them. That, of course, is a lie. I’m the one who likes the noise they make, and have said it to him dozens of times.

That was when I realized something. The kid did not really want to hit baseballs. Or at least hitting baseballs was not the whole of what he wanted. In his own way, he was apologizing.

For what, exactly, I am not sure. Nothing that had happened required an apology. Maybe “apologizing” is not even the right word. Perhaps he was trying to reconnect after a difficult day or he wanted to show me that he loved me. He knew what I liked, and he was offering it to me in the language available to him: a wooden bat, a bucket of baseballs, and that clean, hard sound carrying across the yard.

He was thinking about someone other than himself. Me.

I do not know what greater meaning to draw from that, beyond the fact that we all apologize for things differently. We all try to return to the people who matter to us in the ways we know how, sometimes for reasons we cannot explain even to ourselves. Maybe these were perfectly ordinary seven-year-old emotions. But in that moment, it seemed that my son knew me, at least on some level, better than I knew myself.

He’s the best little buddy I could ever ask for, and he’s all boy. Yesterday, he caught a snake and threw it into our above-ground pool because “He’s a good guy!” I’m not sure what qualifies a snake as a “good guy” exactly, but this one had it, and henceforth needed to live in the pool. The kid is a nonstop ball of motion who only puts down a baseball glove to pick up a football, or a lacrosse stick, or a basketball, or, to my chagrin, a frog or a snake. He’ll bike and skateboard and ski and snowboard down anything, as long as he can almost break the sound barrier and hit a jump that terrifies me but simultaneously represents him living his best life.

I have been miraculously lucky throughout my life to enjoy the things I enjoy. I am fortunate to be who I am and to be with the people I am with. Standing in the yard with my son reminded me of Robert Jordan, lying mortally wounded at the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls and asking himself honestly, “What do you want? Everything. I want everything, and I will take whatever I get.”

I want everything, too. And I will take the magic of my son, his incredible swing, and however he chooses to share it all with his dad.

Last night I took my 7 year old son, along with a few of his friends, to the “Night Of Fire And Destruction” at the Champlain Valley Fair in Essex Junction, Vermont. The monster truck show is a bit of a misnomer because there’s no fire and very little destruction; but its become a yearly tradition for us at least since COVID. The event itself is a gas; my son goes nuts, and it’s louder than anything I’ve ever heard, with the possible exception of the MICLIC the Marines shot across the final 100 meters into Fallujah.

It’s also a hell of a good chance to people-watch, in the way all carnivals are. Every year, the fair itself attracts tens of thousands of Vermonters to ride the rides, see the giant pumpkins and sunflowers on display, and eat kettle corn and drink race-car beer. Cheap plastic crap abounds, and we try to skedaddle before the kids meltdown but well after what normally passes in the Barkhuff household as a school-night bedtime. The people at the fair are a mix of Vermonters and, I’d imagine, New Yorkers and other New Englanders, and it’s not the usual Burlington crowd. Instead, it’s a crowd that busts out the “Female Body Inspector” T-shirts and, in every year prior to this one, a plurality of MAGA hats and Trump paraphernalia.

In years past, especially in 2024, the line for fried dough had more than one “Fuck Joe and the Hoe” tee, and it wasn’t hyperbole to see, even in Vermont, one out of every five people wearing MAGA gear. But the bloom is definitely off the rose. I spent four hours, two Bud Lights, and a bag of deep-fried Oreos worth of people-watching, and I didn’t see one overt Trump reference or red trucker hat. And it’s not like the demographic has changed:

I’m not sure what this means, on the whole. My observation is anecdotal, but it fits a broader pattern: Trump stores in the heartland are closing, merchandise is being sold on 50% “Clearance” racks, and even Marjorie Taylor Greene recently admitted, “I can’t remember the last time I saw someone wearing a MAGA hat or Trump shirt.” People may still be quietly voting Republican, but fewer of them seem interested in wearing the uniform.

My hypothesis is that Trump has become the one thing he could never afford to become: boring. From Charlottesville to Alex Pretti, his power depended upon being outrageous, transgressive, and perpetually at the center of the country’s attention. He made cruelty and frustration edgy. Now the act is exhausted, fortunately with zero permanent legislation passed, and the damage done reversible by a counterminded executive and a pen. The supposedly unstoppable movement is actually an aging tribute band playing the same angry songs to a shrinking audience.

Who really wants to hear “YMCA” when a box of Cheerios is eleven dollars?

Trump is a senile, angry old man trying to extract as much as he can from the taxpayers before his time runs out. He was elected as a champion of the “real Americans,” and he used his power to make a Marriott-style ballroom in Abraham Lincoln’s sitting room, start dumbass wars, and put Home Depot tarps in the reflecting pool.

Who should we chisel off of Mt. Rushmore to make room?

Political identities rarely disappear all at once; first, people stop advertising them. They take down the flags and leave the hats at home. Last night at the fair, it is obvious that this process was already underway. The show moved on; the monster trucks were louder than Trump, and for the first time in years, MAGA looked less inevitable than finished. It’s over.

While folding laundry recently, I allowed myself a YouTube indulgence and began rewatching Tom Hanks’ HBO miniseries adaptation of Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers. If you have never seen it, do yourself a favor and add the story of a company of paratroopers in the European Theater of Operations to the list. There were so many individual and collective heroes in the 11 months of intense combat Easy Company participated in that it is hard to keep track, but the thing I keep coming back to is the leadership, from officers and NCO’s alike. The series seems to have been written almost as an intentional leadership study. There is good leadership, bad leadership, and, if you pay attention, some average leadership. The best individual leader is an original platoon commander named Dick Winters, who is moved up to company commander on D-Day, and after months of naked heroism in that role, is promoted onto the battalion staff. It was only 5 months in command, but the manner in which he did it has, through Ambrose’s work, become a part of American combat lore.

There is an interview with Winters as an old man that I find more compelling than almost anything dramatized in Band of Brothers. The interviewer, John Payne, brings him back to Holland, October 1944, to a fight dramatized in the series. Winters, through a small communications snafu, had sprinted ahead of his men and run up onto a dike, fully exposed to the Waffen SS Company on the other side of it. A German, who was supposed to be keeping watch for his unit, stood in front of Winters, only 2 paces away. Winters, his voice breaking decades later, tells what happened next. The German smiled. The universal human expression of “I am not a threat.”

Winters shot him in the chest.

The seconds that followed were extraordinarily violent and extraordinarily effective. Easy Company joined Winters on line. Fire poured into the SS company. Easy, through Winters, had the drop on the Nazis and slaughtered them. Decades later, in the recorded interview, Payne asks Winters to discuss his state of mind in that moment on the dike. Winters replied, “The man standing on that dike is not the man talking to you today.”

And something clicked for me.

We often ask young men to do things they will not possess the wisdom to understand until they are much older. Combat is one, dramatic example. Combat is taking a 20-year-old deeply trained in certain responses to certain stimuli. He grows to love his fellow soldiers, and then we drop them in an environment where hesitation can be, and is often fatal. Where they are asked to make decisions in seconds that philosophers could debate for centuries. Then, physical injuries and death notwithstanding, he goes home.

Surviving those early experiences, even dominating them as a good soldier does, is not the same as understanding them or, short of that, at least properly contextualizing them.

The young Winters on the dike did not have time to develop a theory about courage that justifies his responses in war. There was no time to contemplate mortality or leadership or the morality of killing. There were just Germans in front of him and Americans behind him. His training told him what to do; his body supplied an almost unimaginable quantity of adrenaline; and he went into some automatic mode we all possess but few ever access.

Then he shot a man smiling at him. Understanding came later. There’s another interview as part of the series, where Winters, reflecting on the moment, says,“If you’re a leader, you lead the way. Not just on the easy ones. You take the tough ones too.”

That is almost certainly easier to understand at sixty than it is at twenty-six. At twenty-six, you just do it. You climb on the dike and shoot a man in the chest.

The first time I engaged and killed the enemy, many people were shooting, so who is to say that my bullets struck him at all? Immediately afterward, I had a lump in my throat that took days to go away. But it did.

I remember the MRE I ate after the gunfight ended and how terrible it tasted, like absolute cardboard in my mouth. But it wasn’t the MRE. It was me, trying to force-feed myself sustenance with a bone-dry mouth and trying not to think about what I had learned in my Catholic upbringing. There wasn’t time to process killing then, nor was there the wisdom, or even the distance, to start the living with it. Only distraction was available.

In those years between flipping the safety on an M-4 off and old age, there isn’t necessarily a grand philosophical calculation. There was once training and pride trumping fear and frozen moments, followed by decades, and, for me, odd moments where I became aware of someone else’s experience that mirrored what I saw. It is in those moments that what we ask young men to swallow comes back, still tasting like cardboard. It’s not the guilt that gets you, not anymore. I’ve long rationalized the war, and thought I would have done better to have killed more.

Of them.

It might have saved one of us.

What still tastes like cardboard and snot to me is seeing that pain in others. Experiences come first in life, context second, and meaning, if it arrives at all, a distant third. It’s a childlike response, because we were children. You simply don’t have the vocabulary to process what you experienced. You react to a meeting engagement or an ambush, and maybe you perform brilliantly, but maybe you barely survive. Some unknowable percentage of what happened is preparation, and another is character, and some of it is the dumb luck of where a bullet happened to travel.

Sometimes the memories are accompanied by the oddly melancholic realization that nothing in ordinary life feels quite as consequential as what happened when you were young. You can spend years trying to recreate that intensity. I’ve chased it in trauma bays and jujitsu mats and boxing rings, lord knows. But during that period you also watch other people become young men while you become an older one. You’re not that young man standing on a dike anymore, and that seemed to be what Winters was trying to communicate. He wasn’t repudiating the young man, but he also wasn’t boasting about him. It was an observation across the chasm of a life.

A bullet passing six inches to the left does not prove character, and I’m not special to have lived. It was too random for that. Courage and chance are both so deeply peppered across battlefields that existing now has less to do with something earned than I care to admit. Conversely, acknowledging luck does not require pretending that nothing was earned at 26.

I earned the right to know certain things about myself, but it took a long time to understand it. I discovered what happened when fear arrived and someone still needed to move forward. I discovered I could do what I had trained for in real life, the most empowering thing you can ever learn. I learned the difference between men who only talked about courage and men who quietly possessed it, and learned to be honest about the times I was the former and the times I was the latter. I was both of those, at different times.

Winters said, “When you’re a leader, you lead the way.” Young men hear that as an instruction, but an old man understands it as something much larger. You have to lead the way in making sense of it all as well, maybe more so. Maybe the most important thing I can offer to a young man is some cataloguing of my attempt to make sense of it.

We should try as hard as we can to never romanticize the transaction. A country takes people at precisely the age when they are strongest, most aggressive, and thirstiest for adult identity and sends them into the mud to kill other young people.

Nothing Winters did at forty or fifty or seventy could compete dramatically with what he did at twenty-six. There would never be another moment where he felt his heart pounding with that violent need for life that is so hard to explain on the page. Some part of Winters must have missed that person and, if he was honest, every single detail of that moment: the feel of the gravel underneath boots, the sweat, the snug id of a carbine pressed firm into your shoulder, the recoil, and the feeling that you were fast and everything else was slow. You can spend the rest of your life looking backward, trying to remain the twenty-six-year-old on the dike.

But the old Winters understood something the young Winters couldn’t: if you are fortunate enough to survive for another fifty years, the purpose of those years isn’t to keep proving that you once deserved them. It is to figure out what they taught you.

One of the privileges of my life as I age has been the opportunity to revisit moments that once seemed merely chaotic and discover that they contained lessons hidden inside them. As young men, we possessed something that, as old men, we no longer possess or no longer have access to: extraordinary physical capability, aggression, instantaneous courage, and a sense of invulnerability that belongs to young men.

But now I have this perspective to share. You will someday encounter moments when fear, responsibility and uncertainty arrive simultaneously. You will not have enough information, and you will not feel ready. Luck matters more than you would like to admit. But if you’re a leader, you don’t just take the easy ones; you take the tough ones too. And if you’re lucky enough to stay alive for years and decades, it will take you that long to see yourself again, if you ever do. Don’t try to decide immediately what the experience meant. You can’t. You have to turn your back on it.

Live awhile. The young man on the dike will be there waiting when you’re ready to talk to him.

Because no test is perfect.

A clinical test, say a blood test or a CT scan, has a few properties that are important to understand. Sensitivity measures how reliably a test identifies people who actually have a condition. A highly sensitive test catches nearly everyone who is sick, but it may also identify some healthy people as sick. It is concerned with “true positives,” in the language of science. Specificity, on the other hand, deals with true negatives. It’s a measure of how reliably a test excludes people who do not have the condition. A lot of specificity means fewer false alarms, but it may miss some people who are actually sick.

When I first learned them during a Boston winter, these concepts seemed like narrow pieces of medical knowledge I had to memorize. But actually, they profoundly affected how I think about nearly everything. Once the ideas click, you see them hiding inside every societal decision we make. The central idea is that every possible judgment call makes two kinds of mistakes. It can punish, exclude, or alarm someone who doesn’t “deserve it,” a false positive, or it can fail to identify someone who does, a false negative. Because no test is perfect, usually increasing sensitivity results in decreasing specificity. The reciprocal is also true, and no test is perfect. Because of this, what we argue about is which mistakes we are prepared to tolerate.

Consider the death penalty. A highly sensitive death penalty would be designed to catch and execute as many guilty people as possible. Cops would have fewer rules of evidence, prosecutors would face fewer procedural obstacles, and appeals upon a guilty verdict would be fast-tracked. This would result in fewer false negatives: fewer murderers would escape lethal injection. But it would inevitably produce more false positives. Innocent people would invariably, sometimes, be executed.

A highly specific death penalty would err on avoiding those false positives. It would demand stronger evidence with due process, provide defendants with extensive procedural protections including appeal after appeal, and require the government to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Some murderers would go free, but those who were executed would be more likely to be guilty. The familiar idea, to which I ascribe, is that it is better for guilty people dodge the hangman’s noose than for one innocent person to die is. That is actually an argument for specificity.

The same tradeoff appears in social welfare programs, like disability benefits. A sensitive disability system would be one in which anyone unable to work receives support. The tradeoff is that it must accept that some people who could probably work will also obtain benefits. A false positive looks like someone receiving assistance who does not truly need it. A specific system imposes stricter documentation requirements, more frequent reviews, and a higher burden of proof. This swats away the false negatives (someone seeking to fraudulently obtain benefits, for example), but means some people who truly need assistance cannot obtain it.

Much of American politics can be understood as an argument over these competing errors. Conservatives favor sensitivity in punitive measures like incarceration and would enable it with broader surveillance, aggressive enforcement, and rules to ensure offenders do not slip through the cracks; liberals favor specificity. For them, the reverse is true when it comes to social welfare: conservatives want specificity when distributing social benefits and are intensely concerned that an able-bodied person might receive disability payments, or that an undeserving family might obtain food assistance.

Liberals view the coin as flipped, accepting some fraud or overpayment as the price of ensuring that vulnerable people are not abandoned and apply specificity to crime: accepting that some guilty people will avoid punishment because the alternative is a system that imprisons more innocent people. The difference, most of the time and campaign propaganda aside, is that both sides fear harming people with the state’s power, but they do not agree on which person needs protection. Is it the taxpayer? Or the person too poor to pay taxes? Is it the innocent man charged with murder? Or the family of the murder victim?

Once you recognize this pattern, political arguments become more honest. The dispute over voting rules is not simply between people who favor election integrity and people who oppose it. One side is more alarmed by false positives, invalid votes being accepted; while the other is more alarmed by false negatives, eligible citizens being prevented from voting. Is it worse to grant asylum to someone in danger or occasionally admit someone dangerous? COVID was about whether it is worse to harm someone’s freedom and livelihood or to harm someone’s health? They’re arguing about their understanding of principles, but the real principle argued over is the tolerance for error.

There is another thing I learned in medical school that is relevant: the performance of a test depends partly on the population in which it is used. When something is a rare occurrence, all tests may produce more false positives than true positives. This translates directly into policy beyond healthcare. Because voter fraud is exceedingly rare, a broad system designed to detect it may burden many legitimate voters for every fraudulent vote it prevents. What gets interesting is the debate over whether this, the false detection of “fraudulent voters,” is, in fact, the point.

The best response to any of this, instead of placing moral arguments inside Medicare eligibility, is not just louder noise about where to place the threshold. It is to make the test better. In medicine, a more accurate test can increase sensitivity and specificity at the same time. A CT scan is, in fact, usually better than an X-ray (not always, though). It can identify more problems better, and it can identify the lack of a problem better. Sometimes, an anxious hypochondriac who keeps coming back to the ED over and over again just gets a CT scan so we can put their anxiety over vague, unrelated symptoms to rest. Public policy, in theory, should be able to pursue the same goal. It’s not insane to imagine a world in which people who need VA disability benefits get them, and people who don’t, do not.

Sensitivity and specificity began for me as medical-school vocabulary but became a way of understanding the world. So much so that I’d argue they ought to be taught to everyone in high school or even earlier. Because once you get it, you see it everywhere. You won’t ever unsee it.

Combat underlines strength and exposes fear in its rawest form. During the World War II battle for Carentan in the epic HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, Easy Company finds itself under relentless assault by a numerically superior German force. As machine-gun fire tears across the bocage, Private Albert Blithe panics, as he has done throughout his brief time in France. He remains frozen in his foxhole, crying, unable to fire his weapon while the men around him fight desperately to keep from being overrun. Then Lieutenant Dick Winters, his company commander, does something extraordinary. Instead of threatening court-martial or worse, Winters races across the line of foxholes, fully exposed to enemy fire. Standing over Blithe, he shouts above the roar of combat: “You can do it, Blithe! Fire your weapon, Blithe! Give it to ‘em!” It is not a rebuke; it is faith that inside this man cowering in a foxhole is a soldier ready to fight and kill and die with just as much courage as his fellow soldiers. Winters reaches the part of Blithe that fear had buried. Blithe rises, shoulders his rifle, and joins the fight.

Most people would not describe that moment as empathic. They would call it leadership, courage, or battlefield inspiration, which, of course, it is. But it’s more fundamental than that. Winters understands that Blithe is not choosing fear; he is trapped inside it. Instead of judging him from the outside, Winters intuits what it feels like to be inside that foxhole, overwhelmed by terror, and gives Blithe exactly what he needs: not pity or an ass-chewing, but belief. That is empathy. It is the ability to enter another person’s experience and understand their needs, even if, in that moment, they cannot articulate those needs themselves.

The real-life historical encounter between Winters and Blithe was less cinematic but more revealing. After the fighting at Carentan, which saw Easy advance across an open causeway and take numerous fatalities, Winters encountered Blithe at the battalion aid station amongst a coterie of wounded GI’s. Blithe told him that he could not see. He was suffering what was then called hysterical blindness, an involuntary physical manifestation of overwhelming psychological stress. Now, in a 2026 Emergency Department, we would call that a conversion disorder. It’s close enough to malingering that it is often impossible to tell if the symptoms described even exist. Yet Winters did not ridicule him or order him back to the line. He talked to him. He reassured the frightened twenty-year-old that he would be evacuated back to England and that he was going to be all right. Blithe suddenly announced that he could see again. Winters, in an interview available on YouTube, later remembered the incident with astonishment: the young soldier had become so frightened that he had effectively shut down, and what he needed at that moment was simply another man to calm him.

Both the historical event and the dramatization by HBO illuminate the same truth. Winters’s empathy did not require softness or lowering a standard. It certainly did not require pretending that fear did not matter in combat. Easy Company needed Blithe to function, other men could die if he did not. Winters’s empathy was useful precisely because it allowed him to understand what was preventing Blithe from meeting the standard and then help him meet it. Fear in combat is pervasive, and I felt it during my time in combat continuously. A memory I will never forget is the cramps in my right hand during my first night in Fallujah. The cramps were from squeezing the pistol grip on my M-4 like a vise, for hours, without even being aware of it. I remember wondering, truly perplexed, why my hand hurt so much? Fear coursed through my body, even as I stepped into the city as laconically as I could manage in front of a squad of more experienced SEALs, a Wintergreen Skoal in my lip, to mask the dryness in my throat.

Empathy should be understood as an essential masculine virtue rather than as some feminine counterweight to masculine strength. Empathy makes strength useful. A man can be physically powerful and externally fearless, but if he cannot understand the people around him, his ability to lead them will always be limited. Fathers need empathy to understand their children and physicians need it to understand patients. When you are responsible for some aspect of other humans, you must be able to leave your own experience and imagine what the world looks like from another vantage.

That does not mean agreeing with everyone. Empathy is not sympathy, approval, or weakness. Understanding why someone is afraid does not require agreeing that he should remain afraid, just as understanding why someone has failed does not mean excusing the failure. Winters didn’t allow Blithe to set his rifle down and wait for the shooting to stop, but understanding Blithe’s fear is what allows him to lead Blithe through it.

American masculinity increasingly seems caught between two terrible alternatives. One version tells men that traditional masculine virtues themselves are suspect: that aggression, competitiveness, and toughness are no longer relevant. The reaction of the “manosphere” has been an equally impoverished masculinity built around domination: never apologize, humiliate weakness, and treat compassion as evidence that someone lacks the stomach for the real world.

Neither provides men a true north.

The first can leave young men ashamed of instincts that, properly disciplined, are enormously valuable, and the second gives those instincts no moral purpose. A man is told to become harder without ever being told what his hardness is for. Masculine strength is a counterbalance for all of humanity, for those who, because of their own relative weakness, are vulnerable.

The purpose of becoming strong is not simply to demonstrate that you are stronger than somebody else or to dominate, it is to carry burdens others cannot and to enter places other people are afraid to enter. Empathy gives that strength direction to be applied.

We must teach our boys and young men that another person’s vulnerability is not primarily an opportunity to establish dominance. If every frightened person is a coward and every struggling person a loser, then empathy becomes almost impossible to learn, and eventually the boy applies the same standard inward. He learns that his own fear must be hidden rather than mastered. This outwardly “tougher” world view produces extraordinarily fragile men, incapable of true excellence, which requires self-examination.

Dick Winters offers a different model. Winters could recognize Blithe’s fear because he felt it as well, as he recollects in the YouTube videos he recorded for posterity. He had parachuted into occupied France, watched men die, led attacks against German positions, and been wounded himself. But he functioned despite fear, and this allowed him to recognize what was happening to the terrified young paratrooper in front of him. And instead of using that distance to elevate himself above Blithe, he performed the extraordinarily masculine act of raising Blithe up.

Blithe was twenty years old in that field outside Carentan. Later, he volunteered for a risky patrol and was shot in the neck. Winters thought he would die. But he didn’t; instead, he recovered, remained in the Army, and served during the Korean War, including making a combat jump in Korea into a drop zone surrounded by Chinese soldiers. He was awarded a Silver Star and became a Master Sergeant, making a career of military service. The frightened young man who temporarily could not see became an accomplished professional soldier.

A hero in his own right.

There will always be moments when men need someone to demand more from them, the proverbial kick in the butt. Kindness is not the same as indulgence. But there will also be moments when a man has reached his limits in the moment. Dick Winters did not make Albert Blithe less afraid. He showed him that being afraid did not mean he was finished. These are lessons we ought not to forget in an age of internet cruelty and faux masculinity, as so many of our current leaders have.

There is something about personal loyalty to Donald Trump that is deeply unmanly, of which Todd Blanche is only the most recent example in the list of sycophants Pete Hegseth has on his Signal group chat. Blanche’s trajectory follows so much of what we’ve seen in throughout recorded history in tribes defined by a charismatic leader: treating personal loyalty as a standalone virtue. I understand loyalty to family and friends, and of course understand loyalty to those beside whom you have “been through some shit.” As my wife would attest, my phone is always on, and for the simple reason that the men I went to war with may need, someday, someone to pick up a call at 2:30 in the morning. But those loyalties are reciprocal, or attached to something larger than yourself. What I don’t understand is a grown man treating loyalty to another grown man as evidence of his own character.

Pathetic would be the word, and it’s the stigmata of, to use a crude term as a form of understatement, a bitch. I don’t even really understand grown men wearing another grown man’s sports jersey. I’ll cheer for Tom Brady and can admire what Tom Brady accomplished. But I’m not wearing BRADY across my back. He’s a football player, I’m a grown man. The distinction is partly a joke, but there is something deeper underneath. Appreciation of talent in another does not, nor should it, require submission.

There’s something about that level of personal loyalty that runs counter to the idea of agency, which for men and women who live greatly, is the sine qua non of existence.

The strongest men I’ve known have generally been difficult to own. They can be loyal as hell, but their loyalty has limits. In the military, the oath is deliberately not to a president or a commanding officer but to the Constitution. That distinction is one of the great insights of the American system. Officers can give orders, but their authority comes from an institution and ultimately from law. Implied in that construct is a key idea: YOU decide, seriously and without pretense, whether a given order is in keeping with your understanding of the Constitution. It has been ever thus, because the road not traveled there leads to evils as disparate as Napoleon, Charlie Manson, and Hitler.

This is why personal fealty has historically been such an important feature of authoritarian politics. World War II gave us the Duce and the Führerprinzip, the idea that authority flowed downward from the leader and that subordinates owed him obedience. These examples vary widely in the gallons of blood spilled and the backsteps they forced mankind to take, and comparing their crimes to contemporary American politics would be absurd. But the psychological mechanism is worth recognizing: replace allegiance to principles and institutions with allegiance to a person.

That bargain is often presented as strength, but it is transparently weakness.

Real men do not say, “Tell me what to think.” There is nothing masculine about adjusting your beliefs whenever the most powerful man in the room adjusts his. All disputes in all circumstances should not end with the conclusion that your leader was right. Loyalty here is not loyalty at all, but abdication of your own conscience and abandonment of those who, depending on your role in their lives, depend on it.

Independent judgment can be difficult. Thinking for yourself means occasionally disappointing your tribe and admitting that someone you admire is wrong. This encompasses acts as brazen as landing your helicopter aside a ditch in the village of My Lai to stop a massacre and as small as using a gendered insult like “bitch” (to describe men who are acting like, well, bitches) in a blog despite knowing some of your readers will object to reading the crude langauge used in places where men sweat, work, and converse with their guards down. Thinking for yourself and acting on those thoughts means being willing to lose access, status, money, friendships, promotions, invitations, and applause because there is something you value more than belonging. Principled men have places they will not allow themselves to be pushed.

That is the paradox of the political strongman. He presents himself as an avatar of masculinity while surrounding himself with men who are increasingly required to demonstrate the opposite qualities: obedience, dependence, and fear of exclusion. They compete to show who is most loyal and mimic his mannerisms. They wear red ties too long and sit next to him in Cabinet meetings, mirroring his body language. The supposed alpha male sits at the center of a court populated by men terrified of displeasing him.

The phenomenon doesn’t belong exclusively to Trump or even to Republicans. The temptation exists anywhere charisma and power intersect. Democrats can build personality cults. Activists can do it. Navy SEALs do it. Surgeons do it. Human beings desperately want membership, certainty, and proximity to power, and smart people and organizations keep a sharp lookout for that dynamic. Genius people and organizations do that as well, but are designed so that those loyalties are pitted against one another to ensure no one demagogue ever wins a final victory.

Loyalty itself is not the problem. Loyalty may be one of the most important masculine virtues. It is why my phone is on in the night, and why, on more than one occasion, I’ve talked in the middle of the night at length to a slurred voice I recognize. But healthy loyalty is horizontal and reciprocal while fealty is vertical. Fealty says that because you are the leader, my responsibility is to follow. That’s different.

Genuine loyalty requires telling someone no. A friend who lets you destroy yourself because he doesn’t want to upset you isn’t particularly loyal. A subordinate who tells his commander only what the commander wants to hear isn’t loyal to the mission. But a father who tells his teenage son after a speeding ticket that he is grounded and cannot drive for a month, despite the inconvenience to the family, that is loyalty. The person willing to say, “I am with you, but I will not follow you there,” is the most loyal person in the room.

That is masculinity as it ought to be. Stand on your own feet. Think with your own brain. Keep your word. Respect worthy leaders, but never confuse respect with surrender. When necessary, be prepared to stand against anyone, and keep your conscience clean.

And don’t kneel.

Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty yesterday, not to murder, but to two federal stalking charges arising from the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. He admitted in open court that he tracked Thompson, traveled to New York, and shot him outside a Manhattan hotel. He almost certainly will spend the rest of his life in federal prison, with a separate New York state prosecution for murder pending.

Somewhere over the course of my life (don’t remember where exactly), I heard an observation about murder that has stuck with me: almost all murders are committed by really stupid people seeking permanent solutions to temporary problems. Somebody needs money for meth, so he robs a convenience store. The clerk resists, or maybe he simply recognizes him, and suddenly a problem that might have lasted until Tuesday becomes a dead human being and a prison sentence that lasts until the murderer dies. Murder is a lot of things: evil, tragic, pathological, but it’s also most often spectacularly stupid. I have a problem; this person is associated with my problem; therefore, removing this person will remove my problem.

Mangione is interesting precisely because he does not fit our preferred stereotype of the stupid murderer. He was educated and came from privilege. He was also young and strikingly good-looking, which turns out to matter far more than we would like to admit. We like to believe hotness is superficial, right up until a hot person does something monstrous and we find ourselves searching for reasons why the monster must have had a point.

Mangione also had a grievance that millions of Americans understood. He had apparently suffered from severe back pain and described years of frustration with the health insurance system. In his guilty plea, he even explicitly connected those experiences to the path that ultimately led him to Brian Thompson, which tells me Mangione still thinks he did the right thing.

I spent thirteen years practicing emergency medicine, and back pain is among the most ordinary complaints in American healthcare. Spend enough time in an emergency department, and you will see almost every possible variation of it. There are the muscle strains and the sciatica and the herniated discs. The human spine did not evolve to walk upright; we’re supposed to be quadrupeds. Back pain is one of the things an ER can least help with; it’s almost never an “emergency” where paralysis is threatened, and we’re not the kind of doctors that can give you the things that would help you the most: physical therapy and time. But most Americans understand being furious because they cannot get an MRI or see a specialist. When you’re in pain, it sure feels like an emergency, even if it’s not, in the medical sense.

I have seen patients enraged by all of those things, and enraged at me for not being the kind of doctor who can help them. Their pain is genuine, severe, and life-altering, with imaging of their spine that looks like a sun-rotted wooden fence. But I have never encountered one who therefore acquired the moral right to murder an insurance executive.

That distinction should be embarrassingly obvious, yet the reaction to Mangione demonstrated that, for a lot of people, it isn’t. He became a folk hero in certain corners of the internet. There is Mangione merch. Admirers showed up outside courthouses. People who would ordinarily recoil from political violence found themselves inventing increasingly elaborate reasons why this particular political violence was different. That’s rooted in this: Americans hate their health insurance system, often for perfectly rational reasons. The problem is that what we call health insurance is not really insurance in the ordinary meaning of the word.

Insurance works beautifully for events that are individually unlikely but financially catastrophic. Your house probably will not burn down this year, so thousands of homeowners can pay into a pool that makes the unlucky homeowner whose house does burn down whole. The risk is distributed and relatively rare. That’s how it works; that’s how it always has worked ever since the Code of Hammurabi laid down rules for financing maritime voyages.

But healthcare is different because the fundamental event being insured against is not rare. Human beings get sick, and human bodies deteriorate. We all experience pain. Women become pregnant. Children need medical care. Eventually, unless something else kills us first, virtually all of us develop diseases associated with aging. Death, infirmity, and pain are not statistical anomalies or the slightest bit rare. “Insurance” doesn’t work in that scenario.

So we have a system in which private companies sit between patients and those nearly universal expenses while simultaneously paying hospitals, physicians, pharmaceutical companies, and countless other participants in an extraordinarily expensive healthcare economy. There is only one way such a system works: as a pyramid scheme, and that, essentially, is what entitlements such as Medicaid are. Companies try to whittle down the edges of the pyramid scheme as much as possible: if fewer people are collecting, taking money out of the pyramid, it can last longer. Might even be enough to pay for some sweet Christmas bonuses for the C-suite. To remain solvent, somebody somewhere must continually decide what gets paid for, how much gets paid, and what does not get paid. That produces the maddening bureaucracy Americans experience as prior authorizations, networks, deductibles, formularies, appeals and denials.

I am not even making a moral judgment about that system here. I am simply describing what has evolved in the United States. We have constructed an elaborate mechanism for financing something virtually everyone will eventually need, called it insurance, and then acted surprised when every participant in the system develops incentives that are frequently at odds with everyone else’s. This conflicts directly with what patients want: unlimited care.

That is a complicated problem that touches patients, doctors, hospital administrators, insurers, and elected officials. Very complicated.

Brian Thompson’s murder was a simple, stupid answer.

That, I think, is the deeper connection between Mangione’s admirers and a broader sickness, certainly in contemporary American politics, but also inherent in human nature. Idiocy on the left and idiocy on the right increasingly share the same fundamental idiocy: the conviction that complicated problems become simple if you are willing to be cruel enough.

Immigration is complicated, so deport everyone. Crime is complicated, so unleash the police. Healthcare is complicated, so shoot the insurance executive. Economic inequality is complicated, so identify a class of villains and punish them. Government is complicated, so fire everyone. Foreign policy is complicated, so bomb somebody. Cruelty creates the sensation of decisiveness, which allows people to substitute emotional satisfaction for the tedious work of solving problems.

The internet era makes it worse, because you can’t make good memes about complexity.

Mangione’s looks matter here, too, and we should acknowledge that. If the same crime had been committed by an unattractive, incoherent fifty-three-year-old man living in his mother’s basement, I doubt there would have been anything resembling the same romantic mythology. Mangione looks like someone Hollywood might cast to play Mangione, and I’d bet my kids’ college fund someone is already working on the screenplay. People want him to possess qualities he doesn’t: intelligence, courage, rebellion, righteousness. What did Ted Bundy, Casey Anthony, and Che Guevara all have in common?

Nothing about Brian Thompson’s death fixed American healthcare. It was the frustration of a dumb kid with enough narcissism to think he could be Dexter. He could have kidnapped Thompson and gotten better results. He could have studied really hard, taken the LSAT, passed the bar, and spent years suing the shit out of people like Thompson. He could have joined the military and enrolled in Tricare, claimed he was 100% disabled from boot camp, and ridden off into the sunset. Instead, he opted for a permanent solution to a temporary, solipsistic problem.

The defining stupidity of murder is not low intelligence. Mangione appears to have had plenty of intellectual horsepower. The stupidity is believing that eliminating a human being can eliminate the complicated conditions that made you angry in the first place. It is, for all the leftist horse shit hero worship Mangione provoked, the exact same thing I despise about Trump and his acolytes. How much of the mess America is in in 2026 is because so many of us just can’t handle the complexity of it all?

More than we care to admit.

There are a lot of theories floating around about the recent success of progressive candidates this cycle and last night (despite the narrowest victory possible in Wisconsin of a normie Dem). Maybe Americans are economically exhausted and we really are living through brooding resentment in a new Gilded Age, and voters are finally beginning to revolt against the concentration of wealth and power. Maybe Donald Trump has pushed the electorate left by demonstrating what an unconstrained right looks like, and turnabout is fair play. Maybe the Overton window has shifted, making ideas that sounded radical ten years ago like single-payer health care suddenly seem ordinary. There is probably some truth in all of these explanations.

But there is another explanation that requires considerably less intellectual machinery: they have better candidates.

I have been around Democratic political circles long enough now to recognize a peculiar feature of the party. Dems reward seniority, caution, credentials, and being the safe choice. Maybe Republicans are the same way; I honestly don’t know their ecosystem nearly as well. But Democrats have built an enormous professional infrastructure around identifying candidates who look like people who have previously been successful candidates. You served in the state legislature and have the right endorsements, and nobody important dislikes you? Congratulations.

Most importantly, when somebody asks whether you can win an election, one of the first questions is inevitably: How much money can you raise?

I know this because, five or so years ago, I was recruited to run for office by some consultants, and this was indeed the first question I was asked. Leaving aside why I chose not to (family, Vermont would be a difficult path for a moderate, I swear a lot, being a Senator sounds fucking horrible), it felt, even then, like the wrong question. Sure, there was a time when that question was almost synonymous with electability. In the 1980s and 1990s, money bought attention because television was attention. If you wanted to introduce yourself to 500,000 voters, you couldn’t pull out your phone, record yourself talking for three minutes, and potentially reach them before dinner. You had to buy thirty seconds during the local news. Political communication had an enormous tollbooth sitting in the middle of it, and the toll was expensive. A candidate who could raise $10 million could purchase something a candidate with $500,000 simply could not: the ability to be seen.

But that world is gone.

Money still matters, obviously. Campaigns need staff, polling, field operations, lawyers, travel, data, advertising, and all the other machinery required to run a modern election. But money no longer has the monopoly on attention that it once did. Attention can now generate money rather than merely the other way around. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, podcasts, X, Substack, livestreams, and the millions of derivatives of these platforms have radically lowered the cost of political communication. A candidate can upload something from a phone and, if people actually want to watch it, reach an audience that would once have required millions of dollars to purchase.

That is a totally different skill set. If I wanted to get the most money into my campaign, I would reach out to Boomers on Cape Cod. If I wanted to get the most eyeballs on my campaign, I would reach out to Gen Z at the skate park.

For decades, Democrats have behaved as though fundraising ability were a proxy for political talent. But it’s not. The person who can spend four hours in a conference room dialing wealthy donors is demonstrating a real and useful skill, but it is not really what gets you elected now. Nor is assembling the right résumé, accumulating institutional endorsements, or surviving long enough inside the party apparatus to become next in line. Those are skills for succeeding within a political organization, but political organizations do not vote.

Every night, when the demands of the day have been met, and my wife and I want to unwind, we scroll through 10 minutes of reels on Instagram, which is free and hilarious. It’s not like we couldn’t watch paid programming during that time; Instagram is just more fun. Therein lies the dynamic of the Progs versus the normie D’s.

The strange thing is that we have a perfectly good word for the quality that suddenly matters more in the new media environment: charisma. The ability to make people pay attention to you. The ability to explain complicated things simply and to appear comfortable without appearing rehearsed. To be funny. To fight without seeming miserable. To make someone who was not previously interested in politics send a clip to his wife or his brother or the group chat.

Platner, as shitty as he turned out to be, understood this. Hong understood this. El-Sayed understands this. Mamdani understands it.

Normie Dems, for the most part, do not.

This sounds almost embarrassingly obvious, but modern campaigns have spent decades building systems that can obscure it. The Democratic Party is an ecosystem of consultants, fundraisers, pollsters, strategists, communications professionals, opposition researchers, media buyers, and advocacy organizations. I know, because through Civly I am one of them. All of these people can make a candidate better. But none of us can manufacture the quality that causes a stranger to stop scrolling.

The old model could compensate for mediocrity with money. If your candidate was wooden, you could shoot twenty takes, hire an excellent production company, test the message, buy enough television, and put the finished product in front of voters until they knew his name. Now you can’t fake it. Everyone has an iPhone and every second of your day is an unscripted recording studio. If you’re good in that environment, congratulations, you can be the mayor of Gotham.

This is why some progressive candidates outperform expectations without requiring us to conclude that the country has suddenly undergone a massive ideological transformation. Perhaps some of it has. Housing is brutally expensive, and younger Americans have good reasons to question an economic system in which asset ownership has produced extraordinary wealth for one generation while the price of admission keeps rising for the next. Trump has undoubtedly changed the ideological landscape. The Overton window really has moved.

But Occam’s razor should at least make us consider the simpler possibility: voters like candidates with rizz.

Democrats, being Democrats, will learn the wrong lesson from these electoral victories. If a charismatic progressive wins, the institutional instinct will be to study the platform and reproduce it. Which policy positions did she take? Which interest groups endorsed him? What percentage did he support increasing the marginal tax rate? An entire industry will emerge to explain the ideological formula, and it will be incorrect.

Politics is full of this mistake. Barack Obama’s success produced endless attempts to reproduce the Obama coalition, the Obama digital strategy, the Obama messaging architecture, and the Obama policy mix. Sure. But Democrats sometimes seemed reluctant to acknowledge the most obvious variable: Barack Obama was an unusually gifted politician. Bill Clinton was too. Ronald Reagan was. Donald Trump, whatever else one thinks of him, possesses an extraordinary instinct for commanding attention. You cannot reproduce that by copying the bullet points from somebody’s platform.

The institutional candidate is optimized to avoid mistakes, yet the internet rewards novelty. The institutional candidate learns to speak in carefully tested language, but the internet rewards authenticity, or at least the appearance of it. The institutional candidate is taught never to say anything that might become a negative advertisement. The compelling candidate says something interesting enough that people voluntarily distribute it. One system rewards risk minimization. The other rewards being worth watching.

This doesn’t mean Democrats should simply nominate the loudest person with a TikTok account. But enough voters, forever, have walked into that voting booth and, before any other thought crosses their mind about the affairs of the polis, fill in the circle next to the name of the man or woman that, at the end of the day, they kind of like.

That should be incredibly good news for political parties willing to adapt to it. It means the next great candidate does not necessarily need to have spent fifteen years accumulating favors or cultivating a Rolodex of wealthy donors. You don’t need to be a risk-averse wimp. A few months back, I had a candidate for a statewide office up here in Vermont tell me she hadn’t attended a large protest against ICE because it might make her appeal too radical and donors wouldn’t like it. This was an ICE protest in Vermont. In Burlington, Vermont.

If that’s not a safe space for a political candidate to earn some free media, I dunno what is. But that’s the kind of boring, stiff-as-a-board candidate that the Democratic machine enables.

So in parsing the results of last night, before Democrats construct another elaborate theory of the electorate, they might consider the simplest one: find some candidates who don’t suck.

In Iraq, during the war I fought in, the imbalance in military power was almost comical. The United States could put satellites overhead, Predators in the sky, F-16s on station, special operations forces on the ground, and precision-guided bombs through windows. We could see in the dark and listen to their communications. We could move men hundreds of miles in hours and put a missile through a particular room in a particular house. In the history of warfare, very few militaries have ever possessed anything approaching the concentration of firepower available to an American commander in Iraq.

So, because the enemy there was smart, the enemy stopped concentrating.

The western way of fighting wars has always been to mass firepower at the decisive point. This was the point of standing men in rows on a battlefield, in lines two and three ranks deep. There wasn’t a better way to have a wall of lead crash into an opposing force than that when a well-trained musketeer could get off maybe 4 rounds a minute. It is central to what we think of as the Western way of war: concentrate men, guns, ships, aircraft, missiles, whatever the technology of the age permits, and create so much violence in one place that the enemy cannot withstand it. The obvious response has always been dispersion: if you cannot defeat the enemy’s concentration, don’t give him anything worth concentrating against.

That was what we experienced in Iraq. Nobody with a functioning brain was going to line up tanks in the desert and fight the United States Army after what happened in 1991. Saddam Hussein tried something resembling conventional resistance again in 2003, and his military disappeared with astonishing speed. The insurgency that followed learned that lesson. They learned real quick that if we could find them, we could kill them. So they made themselves hard to find by being everywhere and nowhere at the same time. They became a guy with a garage-door opener connected to an artillery shell buried beside a road, a part of a network, not a formation.

Twenty years later, we are watching another version of the same contest, and this time I worry that we are, what a century ago was the ultimate expression of concentration of firepower: the battleship.

We have the most sophisticated and expensive military in human history. A Tomahawk cruise missile costs around $ 2 million. A Patriot interceptor, really the only thing able to intercept the Russian and Iranian missiles, costs about $5 million, and they’re not quick to make. We are using them up far faster than they can be replaced, and this reliance on stand-off technology isn’t new in warfare, but it’s overwhelmingly new in how the US military now fights.

The battleship idea stretches back to the ship of the line of Nelson’s day, when admirals concentrated cannon into enormous wooden ships and then concentrated those ships into fleets. Industrialization led to even larger ships, more accurate gunnery, and ended the reliance on the wind. By the Second World War, Japan had produced Yamato, a 70,000-ton monster carrying 18.1-inch guns capable of throwing shells weighing thousands of pounds across the horizon. She was arguably the ultimate expression of the battleship idea, which made perfect sense: ships must be bigger, heavier, and better armored to win a contest against a platform that was actually just a lighter, less armored version of itself.

But then Billy Mitchell and his airplanes changed the geometry.

Airplanes, by the standards of the day, were not impressive. They were fragile, cheap, and relatively easy to destroy. But it did something the battleship could not: it separated the firepower from the platform delivering strategic power. Destruction could be dispersed among cheaper platforms that were, in the aggregate of a carrier versus carrier clash, packing enough of a whallop to put a surface vessel on the bottom, no matter how large.

Pearl Harbor provided the spectacular demonstration, but it was against a fleet at anchor, and did not drive the lesson home as urgently as the sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse days later. The British Royal Navy lost the crown of it’s pacific fleet to a few dozen Japanese aircraft. Now, powerful capital ships underway at sea could be destroyed from the air. Eventually, Yamato herself went to the bottom under attack from American carrier aircraft in a suicide mission near the war’s end, well after the lesson had been learned. The greatest battleship ever constructed never fought the climactic battleship engagement for which she had been designed (the same was true for the Bismarck and the Tirpitz in the Atlantic).

Really, more than anything else, the economics of war had changed. If one side can destroy a fantastically expensive concentration of combat power using weapons that are cheaper, more numerous and more distributed, it has created conditions which take advantage of the ship of the line’s OODA loop.

The Iranians have known this for decades, and long before drones, they threatened the Staright of Hormuz with small, lightly manned speedboats. As any of my Surface Warfare Officer friends would attest, the danger was never that the Iranians could make the Strait completely impassable; the danger has always been that they could make it just impassable enough to spook oil tankers. And drones don’t even need to destroy to be effective; they can simply make the other side (us, in this case) maneuver and expend limited resources until something else can exploit the openings they have created. The exchange ratio is how they win. As with the IED problem in Iraq, we were forced to solve cheap problems expensively to protect our troops.

Once we found the enemy, of course, the outcome was rarely in doubt. The United States could bring almost absurd amounts of violence against a few men in a building; the only problem was that there were thousands of dispersed buildings. Dispersion and a Fabian strategy are how the Ukrainians have ground down Russia’s army over the last 4 years. Any significant concentration of men or equipment risked detection and destruction.

America and Russia are profoundly different countries with profoundly different militaries, but both have repeatedly committed the same kind of doctrinal stupidity: entering wars believing that overwhelming superiority in conventional combat power will solve fundamentally political problems. But it doesn’t because the weaker side disperses.

It happened to the British facing American militia on Battle Road in Concord. It happened to Napoleon in Spain. It happened to us in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. It happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan. It is happening differently, but recognizably, in Ukraine.

It all reminds me of the traditional boxing wisdom offered when fighting a dangerous, hard-hitting opponent: box a brawler. If he is stronger, more aggressive, and built to win exchanges in the pocket, you stay on your “bicycle”, use the jab, make him chase you, and frustrate him into overextending for attritive counters. The point is not really about boxing technique; it is about asymmetry. You don’t win by fighting your opponent’s fight; you win by making him fight yours.

We have spent generations becoming extraordinarily good at building exquisite things, because we were preparing to fight the Soviet Union, who, despite our differences, viewed warfare as we did: a problem of mass. F-35’s, Aegis weapons systems, and American submarines may be among the most complicated objects human beings have ever manufactured. Precision-guided munitions like JDAMs and Hellfire missiles give American commanders capabilities their predecessors could barely have imagined. But this tech dominance is brittle when the other side can throw lethal spaghetti at the wall indefinitely until something sticks.

A weapon that provides 80 percent of the capability but can be manufactured twenty times faster may be more useful in a long war than the perfect weapon that exists only in tiny numbers. And ten perfect interceptors do not beat 100 incoming bogies. Militaries have trouble accepting this because institutions become emotionally attached to platforms, and suggesting that a relatively cheap airplane might make them increasingly vulnerable was therefore not simply an argument about technology. It threatened careers, budgets, identities, and an entire conception of naval warfare. We should be careful about laughing at their proponents, however, because we are in the process of repeating the mistake.

The entire history of warfare is the search for ways to concentrate violence faster and more effectively than the enemy can withstand it. What changes is what must be concentrated to produce that violence. Once we massed men shoulder to shoulder, in open fields, 30 meters away from one another.

I remember Iraq partly as an endless search for men who intuited the way to fight us. They knew that if they concentrated, we would kill them. So they disappeared into neighborhoods, cars, farms and cities. They gave us almost nothing worth dropping our exquisite weapons on. It was maddening because it worked. What the Iranians are doing now appears to be working as well; they are boxing a brawler, and a military and civilian leadership obsessed with past greatness is not well equipped to defeat an enemy obsessed with present efficacy.

The memory of what it actually felt like to stand in an emergency department in the spring of 2020, before anyone knew what this virus would become, before there was a vaccine, before there were effective treatments, before we had enough evidence to distinguish what was useful from what was wishful thinking. It is worth reminding the public what the lockdowns, the masks, the vaccines, and all the rest were actually for. I’m not defending Fauci’s cringey diary, or decision to invoke his Constitutional right against self-incrimination, but I am defending him and public health officials more broadly in their attempts to save as many lives as possible. That helped save my patient’s lives, and who knows, may have helped save mine as well.

I was an emergency physician through COVID. I remember what the country now seems intent on forgetting.

We emptied intensive care units in anticipation of the first and the second wave. At the University of Vermont, we discussed storing bodies on the hockey rink if our morgue capacity was overwhelmed. That wasn’t melodrama. It was disaster planning. It was the sort of planning every hospital in America hoped it would never have to use, while praying it had planned enough. At the time, early intubation was thought to save the most lives, but was also the most likely procedure to aerosolize the virus into the respiratory passages of the healthcare staff. I can’t remember how many intubations I did with just a respiratory therapist, pushing the propofol and rocuronium myself to keep the nurse out, to keep as many people as safe as possible. But enough.

Absolutely no trainees allowed in, back in those days.

At the peak of the pandemic, I shaved my head. Not because anyone told me to, but because I thought it would make it easier to wipe myself down with hand sanitizer before walking out after my shift and into my house to hug my children. Looking back, was that necessary? Probably not. But that’s the point. We didn’t know. Every shift ended with another question that no one on Earth yet had the answer to.

People now speak about masks or distancing as though they emerged from some grand ideological project, but they didn’t. They emerged from uncertainty. They emerged from physicians, nurses, epidemiologists, and public health officials trying to buy time while a novel virus raced through a population with no immunity. We were trying to buy time to keep as many people alive as possible until science caught up.

We threw spaghetti at the wall because there wasn’t yet a cookbook.

Hospital protocols changed constantly because the evidence changed constantly. We tried combinations of medications that now seem strange in hindsight. Azithromycin and hydroxychloroquine was one of them. The protocol wasn’t written by fools but by internationally respected critical care physicians who suddenly found themselves confronting a disease that literally no one had ever treated before. They were experts in respiratory failure, shock, and critical illness, and there was a small study out of France showing benefit. When it was recreated prospectively in New York City, it was associated with harm. This was when the mass graves were on the news.

I remember being super pissed off that our hospital wasn’t using convalescent plasma a few months later, but guess what? That didn’t work either.

Medicine under crisis is ugly. I have a very smart friend from medical school. Stayed in Boston at the Brigham for residency and MICU fellowship. Was an ICU attending at arguably the best hospital in the world, and this is what he said to me on the phone, early-early in the pandemic: “I think we have to be really humble in what we think about this thing because we are going to be really wrong about some things.” You might think we sat around dispensing certainty from on high, but it's the opposite. It was making the best decision possible with incomplete information, then changing course when better information arrived.

I watched young people die. I watched old people die. They died alone, or alone in the sense their family was not there. They usually died behind closed glass doors with, if they were lucky, a gowned-from-head-to-toe anonymous nurse holding their hand. But for the vast majority of the unlucky, that’s not what happens when you die in an emergency. By fortune more than anything else, I never personally watched a child die from COVID. I remain grateful for that.

More than one million Americans ultimately died. A million is a number so large that it becomes abstract. Imagine their bodies laid shoulder to shoulder, stretching roughly from Boston to Kansas City. In case you missed it, that’s World War II level casualties, and that’s the context in which Anthony Fauci made decisions.

Were mistakes made? Not out of context. Some judgments were wrong, public messaging was clumsy. Fauci himself has acknowledged errors in retrospect, and historians will debate individual decisions for decades.

But here’s the way I see it: America showed its ass back then. So many people decided old people dying was an easy trade to get out of a menu of relatively benign sacrifices. I understand some people lost their livelihood; but that mark on the ledger is in pencil and correctable; the deaths are in ink.

I dunno man, we did the best we could, and, yes, we pissed off a bunch of people who exercised a right to be selfish, without any concern for so many anonymous others who would die.

I always thought none of this would have happened if Trump had stayed true to his principles and started selling red MAGA masks. It’s not too late for that, honestly. It’s just way too late for me to sign off on pretending we, including Fauci, didn’t do the best we could.

It’s primary day in Michigan, and on the ballot are a middle-of-the-road, unexciting moderate Democrat backed by moderate Democratic money in Stevens, and a DSA-adjacent candidate with an economic message in El-Sayed. It’s the classic Dem on Dem internecine quarrel that almost always churns out a candidate committed to Democratic orthodoxy: the way to win power is to offer voters more money, more of the time.

But I haven’t seen either candidate pay lip service much less meaningfully address the key problem Democrats have had post-Obama: they don’t value male identity. This is ironic, wrong-headed, and electorally stupid given the obsession on the left over identity in general. A young man who cannot afford a home or support a family face real obstacles. But I have become convinced that we are answering the wrong question. The deepest hunger among young men is not for comfort or even for success. It is for necessity. Men want to be needed to do things for others that they cannot do on their own.

Looking back over my own life, I don’t think I was ever attracted to jobs because they looked easy. It was the opposite. Every meaningful decision I made was driven by the promise that someone, somewhere, would someday need me on a really bad day.

I wanted to become a Navy SEAL because it was impossibly difficult, and I wanted to earn a place in a community where failure had consequences and where other men would someday depend on whether I had prepared well enough. I was never drawn by the title itself; I was drawn by what the title represented. I wanted to be a champion who was sent as a champion to do champion things that others could not do.

Emergency medicine held exactly the same attraction. Nobody comes to an emergency department because things are going well. The people who truly belong there, with real, life-threatening emergencies, arrive on the worst days of their lives. They do not need sympathy; they need competence. They needed instant central access, or a crash intubation, or someone to ventilate their chest with a finger thoracotomy now. I wanted to be that someone, and then to casually eat an apple at my computer while I charted. I never wanted medicine because it was comfortable. I wanted medicine because it mattered.

The same is true, albeit in a less high-stakes way, of entrepreneurship. Starting a company is, of course, a pursuit of wealth and independence. Those things can certainly follow, but they are rarely what sustains someone through the grind I am only a year into. What drew me to building a company was the chance to burn the boats, to say I was going to succeed or fail in a new industry with enormous upside but with the very real possibility that I’d someday be crawling back to the hospital begging to work at Urgent Care. The risk wasn’t the necessity; the feeling that I was doing something that needed to get done or I was well and truly fucked was.

The common thread between all three experiences is not prestige. It is usefulness. I wanted to be needed, and so do almost all men. And if you’re willing to stand in line and vote, and participate in your democracy, above all else you are casting a ballot to show that someone needs you. Voting may seem small, but it’s a simple chance to show you matter. And far too many men, because of Democratic malpractice, go into the booth with a chip on their shoulder.

That grudge is not about taxes; it is about identity.

I suspect that is true for far more men than our culture recognizes.

Until my lifetime, boys were taught a path toward becoming indispensable. On a wooden ship, in a factory, in a mine, and on a battlefield, young men were taught that adulthood meant becoming someone other people could rely upon. The details varied from one generation to the next, but the message remained remarkably consistent: your value to the tribe comes from the responsibilities you willingly accept for the tribe (please, if you’ve not done so, read Sebastian Junger’s book on the topic).

Many of those traditions deserved to change. Women’s opportunities were unjustly constrained for centuries, and expanding those opportunities makes our society richer, fairer, and stronger. Equal opportunity for women never required less for men, but it is an easy sell to men that it does. In this century, we have told men they are no longer special for what their unique gifts offer society, and we have done so at scale. This cannot help but have a backlash.

Instead of telling boys what they should become, we became much better at telling them what they should avoid becoming. They heard plenty about arrogance, aggression, entitlement, and domination. Those warnings were often justified, but the Andrew Tates and Matt Gaetzes of the world are a tiny handful and will always be present. The battle is not for them; it is for those who have the ability to accept or ostracize them. A list of prohibitions is not an identity. Men need something to run toward, not merely something to run away from.

When swaths of society stop telling men that they are needed, someone else inevitably steps forward to fill the silence. The details hardly matter because they are always the same. What matters is that they answer the question respectable society has neglected to answer: We need you.

This is the massive hole in the Democrats’ big tent: these men are not voting primarily for economic interests; they are voting for identity. They are choosing the people who appear to believe that they still have a role to play. This is the disconnect between Trump’s moronic policies and the success his movement has had; voters aren’t reading the fine print of Project 2025, they’re voting for the back-slapping and sense of belonging they’d been missing.

Every healthy society must find honorable ways to tell boys that they are needed, because every civilization depends upon people willing to shoulder burdens, protect others, master themselves, and accept responsibility before seeking recognition. Those virtues are not exclusively masculine, and women embody them every day. But boys still need to hear that these qualities are expected of them and that the world will be better if they develop them.

Healthy masculinity has never been dominance; it is about responsibility.

I am very curious today to watch my childhood friend Steve Kornacki parse the returns tonight in Michigan. I suspect the candidate who will do best amongst men will be El-Sayed. Not because of his chromosomal makeup, but because he, more so than the mainstream Democratic Party, seems to understand that very often in 2026 America, the chip on the shoulders of men melts away the second someone turns to them and asks them for help.

I recently read my friend Stuart Stevens’ essay responding to Scott Galloway’s concerns about young men. Stuart’s argument is thoughtful, made in good faith, and fundamentally wrong.

His central point is that today’s young men are not living through the horrors endured by previous generations. They are, as he quips, “vaping in their mom’s basement” rather than dying with mustard gas in their lungs. On its face, that is undeniably true. American young men, for the most part, in 2026 are wealthier, healthier, safer, and more comfortable than the doughboys in 1918.

But it is also so far beside the point that it’s in a different zip code.

The men who choked on mustard gas in the trenches of France possessed something that many young men today struggle to find: an unquestioned identity. They knew who they were: American sons, workers, husbands, soldiers. Society may have demanded too much of them, but it rarely left them wondering what was expected of them.

Today’s young men often experience the opposite. They have unprecedented freedom, and suffer from a want of purpose. The question is not simply whether they can buy a house or earn a comfortable living; the deeper question is whether they know what it means to become a man. They are missing a masculine identity formerly provided by a factory, a coal mine, or a rifle platoon. Masculinity isn’t about dominance; it’s about earning an identity through responsibility.

Much of the conversation about young men has become trapped in economics: housing costs, student loan debt, the gig economy. Setting aside the central thesis of the Democratic Party’s platform (if we have an attractive enough economic policy we can advocate occasionally insane social policy), of course a twenty-five-year-old would like to own a home or start a family. But economics alone cannot explain the Democratic failure to win male voters, the “manosphere,” or the lunacy of incels and school shooters.

Young men did not flock to MAGA because they had carefully compared tax policy or monetary policy; it's way more visceral than that. They are responding to identity. Simply, their masculine identity. You don’t lose the Latino vote nationally because of student loans; you lose it because of the machismo gap.

Politics has always been about identity as much as policy. People vote for parties that make them feel seen, and when one side increasingly tells young men that external masculine traits are, at best, suspect and, at worst, dangerous, and the other tells them they are strong, needed, and capable, we get Donald Trump. Whether that message is always healthy or always true is (and it is neither, because MAGA masculinity is LARPING) beside the point, because it is a message about belonging.

None of this is an argument against the extraordinary gains women have made over the past half century. Those gains were long overdue. Opening professions, universities, boardrooms, and public life to half the population and their talents has made America stronger, wealthier, and more innovative. But every social advance has downstream effects, and we should be willing to discuss them honestly.

For generations, work provided many men with their primary identity. A job was not merely a paycheck. It answered the question, “Who are you?” A man could simply say, “I’m a carpenter,” “I’m a firefighter,” or “I’m a steelworker.” His occupation situated him within his family and his community. As economic and cultural changes have reshaped the labor market and traditional social institutions have weakened, that source of identity has become less certain. Driving Uber Eats does not make you feel like a man, and neither does working in an office park. They may pay your electric bill but they leave a vacuum.

I write this because long ago I lived it.

I did not become a Navy SEAL to avenge September 11. In fact, I checked into BUD/S in July of 2001, months before the attacks. I wanted to become a SEAL because I wanted an identity. I wanted to belong to something that demanded excellence, sacrifice, and courage. If I had possessed enough talent to become an Olympian on the track, I would have pursued that instead. The point was never simply the profession; it was the identity that came with striving toward an extraordinary standard.

Young men are searching for exactly that. They want to be special, and they cannot achieve it as easily through work any longer.

They are not necessarily looking for war, but they are looking for purpose and responsibility. They are looking for communities that expect something difficult of them and celebrate their achievement when they succeed. And this is why so many young men gravitate toward military service, combat sports, endurance athletics, firefighting, entrepreneurship, or demanding trades. These pursuits offer more than income. They offer an answer to the question, “Who am I?”

When we dismiss that yearning as nostalgia, privilege, or insecurity, we misunderstand it, and we leave a vacuum that others are eager to fill.

The Democratic Party’s much-discussed “brand problem” with young men will not be solved by a slightly different housing proposal or another tuition subsidy. Those policies are at best secondary. Until Democrats develop a compelling, affirmative vision of honorable masculinity, one that celebrates courage and ambition without apology, they will continue to lose young men.

The question facing America is not whether young men have central heating, smartphones, or better healthcare than their ancestors. Of course they do. The question is whether they know who they are.

History, including contemporary American history, suggests that when societies fail to answer that question constructively, someone else answers it for them.

War is different because, unlike almost every other act of government, it authorizes the deliberate taking of human life. Such an expensive moral debit incurs moral obligation and in a nation founded upon the revolutionary idea that all men are created equal the most fundamental of these is candor about who is being killed in our name. If the government sends young Americans into harm’s way and they die, the nation deserves to know, and their names deserve to be spoken. Their sacrifice deserves to be measured against the purpose for which they were sent, and the citizens in whose name they died deserve enough information to decide whether that sacrifice was justified.

The sine qua non of my philosophy is that human life is sacred. Sacred does not mean untouchable. There are circumstances in which taking a life is morally permissible or even necessary, and we wrestle with those questions in debates over capital punishment, physician-assisted suicide, and war. The sanctity of life should outweigh almost every competing consideration. Not every consideration, but almost every one. Convenience, news cycles, and the political embarrassment of the tiniest of men who started this war should not outweigh it.

This administration, by turns criminal and stupid, is making precisely that trade. It is implicitly saying that preserving a political narrative is more important than fully informing the public about the price being paid in its name. That should offend every American, especially those who have served in uniform. This is what our enemies do. This is what the Nazis did as dead Germans littered Europe, and it is what the Soviet Union did in Afghanistan with sealed zinc coffins quietly returned to families.

A republic owes them better.

The burden of citizenship is not merely waving flags on holidays or applauding soldiers at sporting events; it is accepting responsibility for what our government does in our name. If American forces kill, we should know where, why, and under what legal and strategic rationale. If American service members are killed, we should know that too, not months later, not after political calculations have been exhausted, and not only when disclosure becomes unavoidable. Democracies cannot meaningfully consent to wars whose costs are intentionally hidden from them.

Transparency is not merely an administrative virtue. It is a moral obligation that we honor the dead and inform the living. Authoritarian regimes often honor dead with showmanship, pageantry, and ceremony to the point of cringe, but they skip the most important honor an young soldier coming home in a box deserves: accountability for his government.

When governments obscure casualties or selectively disclose them, they distort democratic accountability itself. This is what Trump and Hegseth are doing. Citizens cannot judge whether a campaign is succeeding if they do not know its human cost, and Congress cannot meaningfully exercise oversight if the public remains unaware of the consequences of executive decisions. President Donald Trump has repeatedly failed this obligation, and decisions made under his leadership have cost the lives of young Americans while his administration seeks to minimize public attention to those losses. That represents more than poor leadership. It is a betrayal of the moral compact between a free people and those who volunteer to defend them.

Political leaders speak reverently of “the fallen.” They invoke sacrifice, courage, and patriotism. Those words mean very little if they are unwilling to allow the public to confront the actual cost of their decisions. Patriotism has nothing to do with “thank you for your service” or how often one praises the military. It is measured by whether one treats the lives of service members as infinitely precious, worthy of honesty even when the truth is politically inconvenient. Dictatorships wave flags and cheer, democracies ask questions and hold leadership to the fire when American children come home mangled in boxes.

Every death in uniform deserves a national accounting. Every family deserves to know that their loved one’s sacrifice was neither hidden nor exploited. Every citizen deserves the opportunity to ask the hardest question any democracy can ask: Was this worth it?

The answer in Iran is obviously no, and a just America would be holding impeachment hearings for these high crimes as we speak. A just world would see Trump and Hegseth walking slowly past open caskets on a Dover tarmac, trailed by a phalanx of men and women with cameras and microphones asking them if these cold, twisted bodies have been worth it.

As I write this, I’m fortunate enough to be on Oahu, looking across Turtle Bay at the Opana radio station. For those of you who don’t know, this is the radar station from which the American military detected 183 inbound Japanese aircraft on December 7th, 1941. The Lieutenant on duty that morning, Kermit Tyler, on his second day at the radar, made the logical, peacetime conclusion that the massive radar blip was a flight of B-17 bombers inbound from the US mainland. A completely logical conclusion, and a completely wrong one. It got me thinking about mistakes, and all the life left to live after we make them. It got me thinking about Bill Buckner.

By the fall of 1986, Buckner had already lived the kind of baseball career most players would gladly accept. Over twenty-two seasons he collected more than 2,700 hits, won a batting title, and earned a reputation as one of the toughest competitors in the game. He wasn’t remembered for 500-foot home runs or impossible athleticism, but because every season amidst the ice packs and cortisone injections he answered the same question with the same response: show up tomorrow and do your job. His ankles were ravaged by years of playing through pain, but he kept taking the field. He was, in the parlance of the times, a gamer. In another world, that would have been his legacy.

But it wasn’t to be.

Game 6 of the 1986 World Series should never have come down to Bill Buckner. The Boston Red Sox were one out away from their first championship in sixty-eight years. Champagne was already waiting in the clubhouse at Fenway Park on a cool October night. Across New England, children who had been allowed to stay up long past bedtime believed they were about to witness something their parents had spent a lifetime hoping to see. I was one of those kids. My father had grown up in Springfield, MA. My maternal grandfather in Lowell. It was in my blood, and I can still tell you, from memory, the 1986 Red Sox lineup. Like millions of Red Sox fans, I had grown up hearing about the Curse of the Bambino, the belief that selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919 had condemned Boston to generations of heartbreak. The greatest hitter of all time, Ted Williams, had never won a World Series. Neither had Carl Yaztremski or Carlton Fisk. Whether anyone truly believed in curses didn’t matter. We believed in history, and the history of the Boston Red Sox, for anyone still alive in 1986, was losing enough to define the Red Sox experience in its entirety. But on that chilly evening, it looked like it was all coming to an end. But then...

A walk put a runner on base. A single became another baserunner. Bob Stanley uncorked a wild pitch that allowed the tying run to score, and by the time Mookie Wilson stepped into the batter’s box, what had felt inevitable had become uncertain. Wilson chopped a slow ground ball toward first base. Buckner broke forward, bent to field it, and the ball skipped beneath his glove before rolling into right field as Ray Knight crossed home plate with the winning run. The Mets won Game 6 in a silent stadium, and completed the comeback the following night, taking Game 7 and the World Series with it.

The play became one of the most famous errors in the history of American sports. It also became one of the most misleading because the Red Sox had already squandered a two-run lead. Stanley’s wild pitch had tied the game before Wilson’s ground ball ever left the bat. Roger Clemens had been removed earlier than many, including seven-year-old me, thought he should have been. There were missed opportunities throughout nine innings, and any one of them could have changed the outcome. The defeat had accumulated; it had not been dumped in one fell swoop.

Memory, however, doesn’t work that way. We prefer tidy stories about blame, and instinctively search for a face to attach to failure because it is easier to understand than a web of small mistakes. Buckner instantly became that face. His name ceased to belong to a man directly responsible for the Red Sox appearance in the Series and became shorthand for collapse.

The reaction that followed, even before the days of social media, was quick, brutal, and astonishing. He received death threats, and reporters hounded his family. His name became a punchline in late-night comedy and a cautionary tale in sports. An entire career disappeared beneath a five-second highlight that television replayed endlessly. Even without Twitter or Facebook, outrage found a way to spread. In New England, his name became mud.

I believed it too.

When I was a boy, I absorbed the opinions of the adults around me without realizing I was doing it. I remember hearing fathers, coaches, and sports radio hosts talk about Buckner with contempt, and I accepted their judgment as my own. Looking back, I wasn’t evaluating Bill Buckner but rather learning how tribal loyalty works. I mistook outrage for wisdom because it was a visible and imitable way to be a part of the club. I hated Buckner.

Several years later, Buckner hosted a baseball clinic in Nashua, New Hampshire, just across the Massachusetts border from where I grew up. It became a topic of conversation among kids in my hometown. Some proudly declared they would never attend anything associated with Bill Buckner, as though refusing to spend a Saturday at his camp might somehow punish him. We were children pretending to exercise moral judgment, but in reality we were simply echoing the adults we admired even though they, in hindsight, were acting as children do. We thought we were demonstrating loyalty to a tribe. We were holier than thou.

Before I went to the clinic, my father quietly interrupted that narrative.

“Bill Buckner is an incredible baseball player,” he said. “And the Red Sox don’t even get to the World Series without him.”

I imagine I was silent at this. If my dad didn’t hate Bill Buckner, maybe I was missing something? Until that moment, Buckner had existed in my mind only as the man who let the ball roll through his legs. I had never considered that he had also spent twenty-two seasons doing everything required to put himself in that position in the first place. Without Bill Buckner, there is no heartbreaking Game 6 because there is no World Series appearance at all. I went to the clinic.

As I grew older, another part of Buckner’s story began to matter even more: he never hid behind the truth: the Red Sox had many opportunities to win that game before the ball reached first base. The truth was that his ankles were so damaged he should probably have been replaced defensively. The truth was that the game had already begun slipping away before Mookie Wilson stepped into the batter’s box. The truth was that blaming one player for an entire World Series loss was irrational. There were seven games!

Every one of those statements was accurate, and Buckner could have repeated them every time a microphone was placed in front of him, and he would have been right. Instead, he said something much simpler, “I should have made the play.”

Bill Buckner never claimed the loss was entirely his fault, because it wasn’t. He never argued that he deserved the hatred directed toward him because he didn’t. He simply accepted responsibility for the part that belonged to him and didn’t sabotage his own manhood by trying to dilute it through pointing out the screw-ups of others. That’s the difference between blame and accountability. Blame insists the burden is distributed to others, and accountability appears in the mirror and asks if you have carried your share.

Buckner either consciously or unconsciously understood that distinction. By refusing to defend himself, he surrendered something that most of us cling to desperately: the need to win the argument. In doing so, he gained something far more valuable. He remained a man whose integrity could not be measured by a batting average or a highlight reel because it had already been revealed in the way he carried failure.

More than twenty years later, after the Red Sox finally won a World Series (that I had watched in a mess hall surrounded by thick Boston accents at 3 in the morning in Baghdad), when Buckner returned to Fenway Park, the crowd rose to its feet. The ovation lasted for several minutes. It was emotional, heartfelt, and overdue. In it was some measure of public apology, a penance of applause. The fans had not forgotten the error, of course. But the ‘04 win restored some measure of sanity to the mob, and we realized that the defining moment of Buckner’s life was not the ground ball; it was everything that followed. The applause was in recognition of a man who had endured extraordinary humiliation at their hands without becoming bitter, dishonest, or self-pitying. Bill Buckner was an athletic champion, and he carried himself as one even when, as he must have felt for many years, he was alone.

As a boy, I thought Bill Buckner’s story was about failure. But it wasn’t; it was about character. Anyone can accept responsibility when success makes the cost small. The true measure of accountability is whether you still accept it when there is real consequence attached. Buckner spent the final decades of his life answering that question every time someone asked him about a ground ball, and every answer reflected the same quiet conviction: I should have made the play.

Kermit Tyler ended up getting a bad rap too out of Pearl Harbor. He was blamed for it not just in military circles, but in blockbuster Hollywood movies (Tora! Tora! Tora!). Like Buckner, he didn’t deny or protest in any of the several official inquiries into his role. What he did do was spend the next twenty-five years proving that a single mistake, even one forever linked to infamy, need not define a life. He continued flying combat missions in the Pacific, even commanding fighter wings, and he accepted history's judgment with quiet courage, not hysterics and conspiracies.

Failing in life, sometimes in big moments, is not optional. How we deal with it is.

Pete Hegseth testified on Capitol Hill this week on his war in Iran. It is his war simply because without him, there would certainly have been no war. Of course, other individuals (Trump, Netanyahu, Caine) all own these American deaths and American waste as well, but Hegseth is the sine qua non of the lunacy America is presently engaged in. If you expected anything more than whining and blame-shifting from those in command, you would have been disappointed.

Genuine accountability after a war with Iran would sound something like this:

“We, the Republican Party and Donald Trump, won an election, and part of that election was a debate about foreign policy. One of the pillars of our policy was that Iran joining the fraternity of nations capable of annihilating a city with the push of a button was unacceptable. The American people understood that our position carried risks, and they entrusted us with the authority to act.

I mourn every American son and daughter who has died in this conflict. Before this hearing today, I vomited in a trash can because I knew I was about to speak about people whose parents tucked them into bed, whose spouses kissed them goodbye, whose children will grow up with hazy memories instead of plans for the holidays. There are no words that can erase that loss, and if I could trade places with them, I would. I honor their sacrifice not with empty slogans but with the understanding that they paid a price I never will.

Here is the difficult truth: they died to make you safer. They are now gone, and you remain. That is the terrible arithmetic of war. It is never clean and it is never fair. But it is the responsibility of civilian leadership to decide whether the security gained justifies the blood that is spent.

I take full responsibility for that decision. I encouraged President Trump to wage this war. I encouraged these young men and women to fight it. I signed the orders. Their deaths are not simply tragedies that happened during my tenure. They occurred because of choices I helped make. That burden belongs to me now, forever.

There is a saying in the military, “rank has its privileges.” Sometimes, this means creature comforts and an exemption from the privation and risk of modern war. But there is another saying as well, “rank has its responsibilities,” and I would happily take MRE meals and indirect fire attacks in place of what my role in this war has been: to make hard decisions that have led to the deaths of those under my command.

I continue to believe those choices were right. Leadership does not mean pretending that difficult decisions are painless. If preventing a nuclear-armed Iran required the use of force, then I believe history will conclude that we made the correct decision, despite its terrible cost.

But believing a decision was correct does not absolve me of responsibility for its consequences and the burden is heavier precisely because I believe it was necessary. Every casualty is now a permanent companion I will carry for the rest of my life, and very folded flag is a reminder that strategic decisions are measured in birthdays missed, children left without parents, and families permanently changed. I know their names, I pray for them every night before bed, and I pray for their forgiveness and understanding of what I asked of them.

The least I owe those Americans is honesty. I asked them to accept extraordinary risk in pursuit of what we believed was the national interest. That responsibility cannot be delegated to generals, hidden behind talking points, or explained away by saying that war is dangerous. It rests with those who choose war.

The obligation that follows is equally clear. I must spend lives wisely because they purchased something precious with the only currency they possessed. I owe them a relentless commitment to ensuring that currency is never wasted. Civilian control of the military is one of America’s greatest constitutional strengths precisely because elected leaders, not soldiers and not armchair critics, bear ultimate responsibility for deciding when the nation fights.

For all the grieving families, I am willing to say publicly and privately, “I made this decision. I believed it was necessary. I accept responsibility for what it cost. I will carry that burden for the rest of my life, and I will honor your sacrifice by ensuring your loved one’s life was spent as carefully and as purposefully as humanly possible.”

Pete Hegseth didn't say that, of course. And his failure to do so brings to mind the final line of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, itself a meditation on what war leaves behind in young men: "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

It is time to say the quiet part out loud.

For all of the rhetoric surrounding American strength, escalation, and resolve, the implicit political bargain that has guided Trump’s military policy has been remarkably simple: no American casualties. The promise has never been spoken quite so bluntly, but it hangs over every decision. Strike from the air. Launch cruise missiles. Fire long-range missiles. Employ drones. Use stealth bombers. Demonstrate strength. Just don’t bring home flag-draped caskets; it looks bad on TV.

That bargain helps explain much of the strategy we have seen. If airpower can accomplish the objective, use airpower. If standoff weapons can reduce the political risk, use standoff weapons. If there is even a possibility that ground combat could produce significant American casualties, avoid it if at all possible. The Iranians know this.

There is understandable logic behind that instinct. We spent more than two decades watching wars in Iraq and Afghanistan consume lives, treasure, and attention while producing results that often fell far short of the promises made at the outset. Trump’s war of choice against Iran sits at 29% approval. Americans aren’t weak. I’ve seen too many Americans bleed and die for me to buy that horseshit, but we do learn. A war like this is rarely as clean or as short as it is presented before it begins, and in this one, we just handed a new generation of Iranian leadership a chance to run a sequel to their national founding mythology of American defiance. Get ready for 40 years of embassy bombings, proxy wars, and maybe even a few exploding passenger jets (for old times’ sake).

And a reluctance to commit to sustained and expensive ground combat is not America’s weakness. It is the core of a democracy’s strengths.

Authoritarian governments can often conceal losses, silence dissent, and compel sacrifice indefinitely. Democracies cannot. Citizens ask whether a war is necessary. Parents ask whether the objective justifies the risk to their children, and voters demand explanations when casualties mount. Those questions are not signs of national decline; they are evidence that a free people still believe the lives of their service members possess immeasurable value. But Trump and Hegseth are trying to fight an authoritarian’s war in a 250-year-old democracy, and democracies ask questions about dead servicemembers.

There is a long history behind America’s faith in technology as a substitute for blood, and its biggest proponents have always been of the Hegseth-Lemay lineage: more violence with less risk. Since the Second World War, and particularly since the emergence of overwhelming American air superiority, policymakers have repeatedly hoped that precision bombing and technological dominance could achieve strategic goals without requiring large-scale ground combat. The dream is so seductive: overwhelming firepower with minimal American sacrifice.

But it doesn’t work.

Because airpower has never repealed the enduring reality that wars are ultimately contests of political will. Bombs destroy targets. They do not occupy territory, secure populations, build governments, or compel enduring political settlements by themselves. Again and again, Americans have hoped that this time would be different. Reality is more complicated.

The deaths in Jordan show the limits of the airpower approach, and in this ultimate sacrifice, what those young men deserve in return is clarity.

This is the other uncomfortable truth worth confronting. Political leaders of every party understand the power of the image of a flag-draped transfer case arriving home at Dover Air Force Base. Those images shape public opinion because they remind Americans that every strategic discussion eventually becomes deeply personal. Every casualty represents a family whose future has been permanently altered. Every folded flag marks birthdays that will never be celebrated together again.

Those images matter because the person inside the casket mattered, and the least their country can give them in return is honesty about why they were there, what mission they were serving, and whether that mission justifies asking others to accept the same risk. Democracies should never become comfortable with casualties, but neither should they pretend that technology has made sacrifice obsolete. Every time America sends troops into harm’s way, it incurs a moral obligation to tell the truth about the costs.

The thing that knocks the bottom out of Trump and Hegseth’s war is dead Americans. Iran knows this. That doesn’t bode well, and it’s about time we said the quiet part out loud.

I return again and again to this quote from T.R. Fehrenbach when I think of Tomahawk Cruise missiles and stealth bombers, “Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.”

Trump’s war, unpopular as it is, is based on ignoring this truth. Hegseth and Trump want us to believe they can defeat Iran on the cheap, yet if we’re going to be stupid enough to ignore what 75 years of contemporary history has taught us about American power, we owe it to the dead to be honest about how we failed them.

I, for one, am glad the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, will not sleep until our latest defeat by a third-rate military power is properly explained and addressed. Apparently, the evidence is in: The Strait of Hormuz would still be wide open today, gasoline would cost fifty cents a gallon, America’s last twenty years of military campaigns would have ended in decisive victory, and history itself would have bent in our favor if only boys in uniform had gone to war with sick lat spreads, shredded glutes, and python biceps.

Amateurs would argue that it is foolish to start a war of choice from the air with an adversary when a quarter of the world’s economy sits within said adversary’s multiple, disseminated, low-cost and sustainable weapons envelopes. But that’s why Napoleon famously said: “amateurs talk strategy, experts talk Zercher curls.”

Pete Hegseth has rightly decided that one of the great military readiness crises of the twenty-first century is testosterone. Between recruiting shortfalls, drone warfare, artificial intelligence, Chinese shipbuilding, electronic warfare, cyber operations, and the uncomfortable memory that America has spent the better part of two decades losing strategic competitions against opponents with a fraction of our resources, someone looked around the Pentagon and concluded that the real problem was that the 101st Airborne might need hormone replacement therapy.

I can tell you from personal experience, when I patrolled with one other SEAL to extract on NVD’s a click through the demolished city of Fallujah so as not to give away our team’s location, I wasn’t thinking “any one of these shadows in the rubble could be holding an ambush,” I was thinking “I wish my ass looked better in these pants.”

As one does.

And Hegseth gets it.

It’s about fucking time.

One can only assume this is the opening act of a much larger modernization effort. My Pentagon contacts are hinting that Jose Canseco is to be appointed Undersecretary of Bench Press, responsible for evaluating the military’s national deadlift readiness and ensuring every infantry battalion can post respectable numbers on Insta. His office could issue quarterly reports ranking combat commands by incline bench percentage. Leave all that cyber drone hunter-killer nonsense to the nerds!

10 mg of creatine is the newest addition to MRE’s, along with a pre-workout mix heavy on beta-alanine. Cherry flavored to start.

Promotion boards would naturally begin awarding additional points for visible vascularity. Command climate surveys could include mandatory measurements of forearm circumference. Ranger School is to be canceled. Soldiers lose weight during that silly course. Hard pass. No more swamp phase, just pump phase. Quad symmetry is more important than the OODA Loop.

Sure, all those nerds will say that history remains stubbornly unimpressed. Those soy boys will argue that the Wehrmacht fielded plenty of exceptionally fit young men which did not save Germany from catastrophic strategic decisions. Soviet soldiers marched through unimaginable hardship because logistics, production, leadership, and adaptation eventually overwhelmed tactical excellence. Vietnam did not hinge on who had the higher testosterone levels, and Afghanistan was not lost because American platoons skipped leg day. Iraq was never to be transformed by another set of curls.

No war has ever been won based on the individual physical fitness of soldiers. There are zero examples, ever. And thinking that is a determining factor in armed conflict is yet another demonstration of the sheer idiocy of Pete Hegseth.

War rewards organizations, not individuals. That was true at Cannae and Omaha Beach, and it is true now. American service members have never lacked courage. They have rarely lacked fitness, and when they did, it was in situations such as Corregedor that were defined by privation, not laziness. They have never lacked a willingness to sacrifice. What they have lacked, at critical moments, are leaders willing to match tactical excellence with strategic discipline.

Military service is the ultimate team sport. Nobody wins alone. The infantryman depends on intelligence analysts, mechanics, logisticians, medics, pilots, cyber specialists, satellite operators, engineers, and commanders making thousands of interconnected decisions correctly. Victory emerges from coordination, not individual athleticism. Our problem in Iraq was not overpowering the enemy, it was finding them. People are not dying in twenty-first-century combat because they are insufficiently masculine, they are dying because they underestimate adversaries who possess intelligence, creativity, and agency of their own. This has been reinforced in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf.

War is a contest between systems and fought largely by twenty-year-olds whose courage is directed by thirty-year-olds whose job is to leverage technology, creativity, intelligence, logistics, and disciplined strategy more effectively than the other side. American military failures are top-down, not bottom-up. And of the wars in the American public conscience today, Ukraine and Iran, none have been started or directed by a man who knows what it means to press check a weapon and step off on a mission where they could come back in a body bag. The truth is, a nation that mistakes testosterone levels for military readiness is measuring the wrong thing entirely. The young Americans carrying the rifles have never been the weakest link.

Well, that’s what the nerds will say. So sign me up for more of the Hegseth leadership: bench press us all into more wars with your HRT and your shrunken, atrophied testicles, Pete. Just make sure our boys oil up right, those beaches in Cuba aren’t going to storm themselves, and we want DOD’s Instagram all over America’s FYP.

I don’t think that’s right, exactly.

Revenge may be part of the story, but it is probably not the most important part. What we are watching feels much more deliberate, because Trump might not easily forget slights, but even more so, he doesn’t forget who is weak enough to lean on.

Look at the list of Republicans who paid the highest political price for breaking with Trump. In the House, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Peter Meijer, Tom Rice, Anthony Gonzalez, Fred Upton, Jaime Herrera Beutler, John Katko and others either lost their seats, retired, or concluded there was no future for them inside today’s Republican Party. In the Senate, Richard Burr, Pat Toomey, Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse all left office, while Bill Cassidy lost a Trump-backed primary challenge because of his vote to convict after January 6. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski remain in office but tread carefully.

Most commentators stop there and conclude that Trump simply wanted retribution. That tracks, because he is a small, vindictive man. There is undoubtedly truth in that interpretation. Trump has always valued loyalty and has never hidden his resentment toward those he believes betrayed him. But he also makes real nice with those who can enable him, and it would be a mistake to confuse an emotional explanation with a strategic one. The better question is not why Trump is angry with these people. The better question is why removing them from positions of influence continues to matter years after the impeachment votes themselves have faded into his story.

Trump has been exceptional at one thing in his life, identifying those even more cowardly than he is and using it to his advantage.

Every presidency ends. Donald Trump is constitutionally limited to just this term. Sure, he could try to stay in office. But that didn’t work last time. So when he leaves, the power of the presidency disappears, but Congress retains every constitutional tool available to investigate the actions of a former administration. Committees can issue subpoenas, compel testimony, request financial records, and shape the public narrative surrounding a former president. Those powers become meaningful only if the people holding them choose to use them.

That possibility changes the way I think about Republican primaries. If a former president anticipated political or legal scrutiny after leaving office, one of the most valuable assets he could possess would not be another executive order or another campaign rally. It would be a Congress populated by allies who had every political incentive to look forward rather than backward. Whether those future questions involve financial matters, executive decisions, or ICE killings, the first and most effective line of defense is political rather than legal. Investigations begin because elected officials decide they should begin, and they die because elected officials decide they should not.

Viewed through that lens, Bill Cassidy and Thomas Massie look different. His impeachment vote is now several years in the past, yet replacing him continues to matter. A successful primary challenge does more than remove one senator. It sends a message to every ambitious Republican who hopes to remain in office. Independence may satisfy your conscience today, but loyalty may determine whether you have a political future tomorrow. This isn’t revenge, per se. It’s making sure you have a getaway car for the bank heist.

History offers countless examples of leaders who understood that formal power eventually expires while informal influence can endure for years. The surest way to preserve that influence is to shape the incentives of the people who inherit the institutions you leave behind. Fear often succeeds where persuasion fails, and examples are remembered far longer than speeches. A defeated Liz Cheney or a Bill Cassidy is first, one less vote on a subcommittee to investigate Trump, and second, a message that you still own enough of the second most important currency in DC behind money to demand respect: votes.

Some legal scholars have debated whether a president could attempt to pardon himself before leaving office. The Constitution has never been tested on that question, and no court has provided a definitive answer because no president has successfully attempted it. But Trump stocked the Court with his own justices, and they’ve already ruled that official acts of a President are above review.

Do you think Donald Trump’s hardening arteries will last longer than it will take for the case challenging the obvious bribes he is taking through Trump Coin to make its way to SCOTUS?

I don’t.

That is why I have become increasingly skeptical of the revenge narrative. Revenge is emotional and immediate. It satisfies a desire to punish someone for what they did yesterday. The MAGAfication of Congress isn’t about how he was embarrassed by a minor rebellion years ago, its about getting away with the theft occurring now. When difficult questions eventually arise after Trump leaves office, there will be fewer Republicans willing to ask them. The point is not simply to remove critics. The point is to replace them with people who understand exactly what happened to the last Republicans who chose independence over loyalty.

We often fail to recognize foreshadowing because it looks ordinary while it is unfolding. Only later do we realize that what appeared to be isolated political vendettas were actually preparations for a future contest that had not yet begun. Yes, Donald Trump is an imbecile who had to pay someone to take his SAT’s. But anything short of Trump dying someday in a prison infirmary means only that we, the ones who care about American democracy, are the suckers. And by that, I mean we didn’t realize he was shaping the political environment he expects to inherit after his presidency ends. Revenge may be the language we use to describe it today, but if you step back, it sure feels like a car parked in front of the bank with the engine running.

It’s very dangerous to believe we can always become the person we intend to be later.

I suspect Graham thought, as most of us do, that he had more gas in the tank. He probably assumed he would outlast Donald Trump, outlast this chapter of American politics, and eventually have an opportunity to explain the choices he made and reclaim the convictions he once held so publicly. I’ve met enough ambitious people to know that the majority of them think that today’s compromise is just the price of tomorrow’s influence. If only they can remain relevant a little longer, the lie goes, they will eventually use that relevance for something noble. But I could get hit by a meteor before I even post this, and the same could befall you before you read it.

As evidence, I cite Graham’s public statements before Trump was elected, and his private statements (as occasionally leaked) since. During the 2016 Republican primary, he recognized Donald Trump as a profound danger to American conservatism and to the constitutional order itself. He called him unfit for office and warned Republicans that embracing him would fundamentally change the party. That’s not a confused man. That means that the moral compromise once Trump was elected was not born of ignorance but of calculation.

This is the moral coward’s calculation. Graham believed he could survive his compromises because they were temporary. Trump would eventually be gone, history would move on, and he would remain. He could recover his reputation after the political winds shifted. He could always reclaim the moral ground he had surrendered because he believed he would still be standing when the opportunity arrived.

Instead, he died.

Lindsey Graham was a moral bagman. He collected moral compromise the way a child fills a bucket with seashells. Some of us carry grocery bags, filled with the ordinary burdens of providing for our families and making ends meet. Others carry body bags, bearing the unimaginable weight of bringing home the young Americans who never returned from wars they were asked to fight. Lindsey Graham became something different, carrying someone else’s bags in exchange for continued relevance and proximity to power. In doing so, he helped enable an administration whose wars of choice sent Americans home in body bags while its economic decisions made it harder for families to fill their grocery bags. He cost us American lives. He cost us American dollars.

Graham was also wrong about his bet in another way. History doesn’t, in the aggregate, remember the people who remain relevant the longest. It remembers the people who remained faithful when faithfulness became expensive. Graham undoubtedly succeeded in preserving his place at the center of Washington’s political conversation. Until the day he died, cameras sought his opinion and he was treated as an indispensable player. Relevance and greatness are not the same thing, however. One is measured by how often people ask for your opinion, while the other is measured by what you are willing to lose in order to keep your integrity.

Graham’s death is a reminder that none of us should assume we will someday become the people we hope to be. We imagine there will be time to apologize for old betrayals, to stand up for principles we have quietly abandoned, or to finally tell the truth after years of telling ourselves that the timing was not yet right. We picture a future version of ourselves redeeming the present one, but life offers no guarantee that the future will ever arrive.

The ancient Stoics encouraged people to remember death not because they were morbid, but because they understood that mortality sharpens moral clarity. If today were the last chapter of our lives, the excuses that seemed so persuasive yesterday suddenly lose their force. Ambition becomes less important than honesty, and popularity becomes less valuable than courage. The approval of the powerful does not matter in a hospital bed. It matters even less in the morgue.

Lindsey Graham’s legacy will not be debated by historians, political allies, and his critics, because he died small, exactly as he lived over the last decade. It is, however, a reminder that there is never a better moment than the present to become the person you claim to be in your best moments or the person you wish you had been in your worst ones. We are all carrying our own bags, and none of us knows when we will set them down for the last time. The only question that ultimately matters is whether, when that day comes, if we can lie in repose unencumbered by how we stood when we had the chance.

That’s the most gangster thing I have heard come out of a Western leader’s mouth in my lifetime, and the only thing close is the other Zelensky-ism: “I need ammo, not a ride.”

It is funny. It is defiant. It subtly pokes fun at the most self-absorbed physical coward to ever lead the United States of America who he was sitting next to, and was delivered by a man who has spent more than four years living with the knowledge that every public appearance could be his last. Putin tried to kill him, and wasn’t wrong to think his SOF could pull it off. I’ve been on missions to grab an individual back in the day, and ahead of the launch time, there’s a fair amount of confident shit-talking as guys load mags and gas up trucks. I can only imagine the bravado of the Russian Spetznatz and the Wagner mercenaries on the opening gambit of the war as they prepared to infiltrate Kiev and bring back Zelensky’s head. They came close. At one point, Zelensky’s security detail handed him a Kalishnikov and told him to get ready to defend himself. Most heads of state would find that a good time to relocate to an area where the government can carry on the war, like 1940 London.

But Zelensky still didn’t go anywhere.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Zelensky has accepted a burden that no Western leader has truly faced since Winston Churchill. He has led not from secure conference rooms or campaign buses, but from a capital that many believed would fall within days. He declined evacuation when it was offered. He walked the streets of Kyiv while Russian assassination teams hunted him. He visited soldiers at the front, and the killing fields at Bucha, and met grieving families whose suffering no speech could erase. He has lead with empathy and courage.

I’ve never been asked to carry that much weight and I doubt I could. Zelensky has become, in many ways, the modern embodiment of what Admiral James Stockdale described and what Jim Collins later called the Stockdale Paradox: the ability to retain absolute faith that you will prevail in the end while simultaneously confronting the brutal facts of your current reality.

And he does it with jokes.

Zelensky has never pretended the war was easy. He has never promised quick victories or painless sacrifice. He has not blown sunshine up anyone’s backside. He has spoken openly about losses, shortages, exhaustion, and death. Yet somehow, even while acknowledging every hardship, he has never appeared defeated. Too much hope and your are adressing reality with fantasy. Too much reality, and you give in to despair. Certain human qualities are remarkable when tested under extraordinary pressure, and Zelensky, like all good leaders, has the balance down.

As children, our heroes are often athletes, teachers, or parents. We watch them because we want to become like them. Somewhere along the way, many adults convince themselves they have outgrown heroes. I think that is a mistake. We all need examples, not of success per se, but of character. We need people whose lives force us to ask uncomfortable questions about our own. Would I have stood there? Would I have laughed in that moment? Would I have remained kind? Would I have found the courage to keep going?

David Foster Wallace, in his commencement address This Is Water, argued that everyone worships something. He warned that if we worship money, status, beauty, or power, those things will eventually consume us. “They will eat you alive,” he said. He was profoundly right.

Money goes. Beauty fades. Power shifts to someone else. Fame lasts until the next headline, and the more completely we orient our lives around them, the emptier we become.

But there is another way to understand what it means to “worship.” We can devote ourselves not to possessions, but to virtue: Courage, humor, integrity, and humility.

These are things that do not hollow us out. They enlarge us. We never fully possess them, so we are never finished pursuing them. Every day becomes another opportunity to practice them, another chance to become just a little closer to the person we hope to be.

I do not admire Volodymyr Zelensky because he is the president of Ukraine. I admire him because, when history demanded that he become more than a politician or a comedian, he answered with courage, humility, wit, and steadfastness. It is beside the point to litigate all of his decisions because what he has done for us demonstrated what moral and physical courage can look like under unimaginable pressure.

In a world increasingly filled with influencers, celebrities, and manufactured idols, I still think it is worth looking up to people who remind us what the best of humanity can be.

I still love Zelensky, not because he is flawless but because he reminds me of the qualities I hope I never stop chasing.