As we celebrate Independence Day, it’s worth reflecting on America’s founding character — especially the man who defined it: George Washington.
Washington didn’t build his legacy on grand speeches. He led with silence, sacrifice, and restraint. He may not have written poetry, but he lived it — with grit in war, grace in peace, and great wisdom in his letters, journals, and Farewell Address.
This Fourth of July, as fireworks fill the night sky, let’s also make room for silence — for healing, for grief, for endurance.
He didn’t just fight for a nation — he helped shape its soul. Washington understood that a country isn’t defined only by its victories, but by how it makes meaning out of its wounds.
In our time of division and disillusionment, we would do well to reclaim the legacy Washington embodied. Resilience isn’t the denial of pain but rather transformation through it. And the only vision worth holding on to is the one that unites us in building our future as a nation.
Trauma doesn’t end the story. Often, it begins the most meaningful chapters. That’s true in my life — and in America’s. Growth has never come from comfort. It comes from hardship, from wounds we don’t hide from but confront. Psychologists call it “post-traumatic growth.” It’s the idea that suffering, when faced and integrated, can lead to deeper purpose, stronger relationships, and a more grounded sense of self.
I guess most Americans would just call it “history.”
I led soldiers into Iraq in 2003 and returned to a nation largely untouched by the war I had lived. But my reckoning came later — when a brief Wall Street career collapsed, when a home invasion shattered my sense of safety, and when therapy forced me to face what I had tried for years to outrun: trauma, guilt, grief.
What followed wasn’t just recovery. It was transformation — a quiet strength rooted in humility and meaning. Post-traumatic growth teaches that suffering, when faced honestly, can lead to deeper purpose, stronger relationships, and a more grounded self.
That truth doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to us all.
From Valley Forge to Gettysburg, from the Great Depression to Ground Zero, America has been forged in fire. Our greatest progress has rarely come in peacetime. Lincoln didn’t rise when things were easy. The Greatest Generation wasn’t shaped in comfort. Renewal always follows rupture.
We’re in such a moment again. Pressure is building — on our national identity, our personal stories, our sense of unity. But pressure can forge something stronger, if we let it.
We must reject the lie that trauma equals weakness. PTSD is real — often invisible, often devastating. But it’s not the end of the story. Alongside post-traumatic stress, we can teach post-traumatic strength. The kind Washington lived. The kind America has always needed.
That’s part of why I wrote “Downriver: Memoir of a Warrior Poet.” Yes, it tells a story of trauma — from childhood instability to the battlefields of Iraq, from Wall Street collapse to personal unraveling. But more importantly, it traces the long road of healing — not as a tidy comeback story, but as a messy, hard-earned path toward growth and integration.
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The journey is not reserved for veterans alone. It belongs to survivors of addiction, loss, illness, injustice, and personal collapse. It belongs to first responders, caregivers, and ordinary Americans living through extraordinary hardship.
But growth isn’t guaranteed. It requires honesty. It requires community. It demands a culture willing to honor both the warrior and the poet — the one who endures and the one who reflects, the one who fights and the one who heals.
Too often, we swing between denial and despair. But what if we told a different story? What if we treated our national wounds not as signs of weakness but as calls to deepen our roots?
We’ve done it before. The post-9/11 generation gave us new models of service and empathy. The scars of the COVID-19 pandemic will never fully heal, but they can teach us lessons about connection, community, and what really matters.
The question isn’t whether we’ve been wounded. We have. The real question is what kind of country we’ll become in response. Will we let trauma divide us further — or use it to rediscover what binds us together?
This Fourth of July, as fireworks fill the night sky, let’s also make room for silence — for healing, for grief, for endurance. Let’s honor not only what we’ve won but how we’ve grown.
That’s the path of the warrior poet. That’s Washington’s legacy. And it can be ours, too.
Elect strong conservative leaders in your state — or watch it go the way of New York City. That’s the unmistakable warning conservatives should take from New York voters nominating a Hamas sympathizer and self-proclaimed socialist for mayor.
How could this happen just one generation after 9/11? How does the city that suffered most from jihadist terrorism now embrace a foreign-born Islamist who wants to “globalize the intifada”?
When Trump calls for more farm labor from the third world — so long as the workers aren’t 'murderers' — he misses the deeper issue. Violent crime isn’t the only threat.
Several factors explain the city’s decline, but one stands out: immigration. Forty percent of New York City’s population now consists of foreign-born residents — not including the children of immigrants. Mass immigration on that scale, especially from Islamic and third world countries, doesn’t just change the labor market. It imports foreign values and embeds them in the culture.
Trump should think twice about demanding more foreign agricultural workers for red-state America. His arguments about labor shortages miss the larger picture. This isn’t just about harvesting crops — it’s about reshaping schools, neighborhoods, and eventually, the ballot box.
In 2022, the Center for Immigration Studies mapped 2,351 Census Bureau-defined Public Use Microdata Areas to show the percentage of schoolchildren from immigrant households. No surprise: Urban districts in places like New York and Los Angeles show overwhelming majorities of immigrant families.
But that trend now stretches deep into red states. Cities and even rural counties are seeing shockingly high proportions of students from immigrant families.
In southeast Nashville, 65% of public-school students come from immigrant families. Iraq ranks as the second-largest country of origin. In Dallas, all 20 school districts report at least one-third of students from immigrant households. In most of those districts, a majority of families are foreign-born.
This trend extends well beyond major cities. In southwest Oklahoma City, 43% of students come from immigrant families. Greenville, South Carolina, stands at 35%. Birmingham and Chattanooga each hover around 20%.
Red-state cities and midsize towns now reflect immigration levels once limited to coastal urban hubs. That leaves rural America as the last holdout — and even that is changing.
The so-called farm labor trade has transformed heartland communities. These public school districts report the following immigrant family enrollment rates:
Until recently, these areas were overwhelmingly native-born. They maintained a strong continuity of American culture and civic tradition.
What happens when the next generation of these children grows up, votes, and brings in more from similar backgrounds? These red counties may not stay red for long.
Mitt Romney won Washington County, Arkansas, by 16 points in 2012. Just 12 years later, Donald Trump carried it by only six — even as he expanded his statewide margin. What changed? More than a quarter of the local student body now comes from immigrant households.
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Trump won rural Sampson County, North Carolina, by a 2-to-1 margin. Yet, by the 2022–23 school year, Hispanic students made up 44.2% of public school enrollment. The district now runs extensive English as a Second Language programs to meet ongoing demand. Even if Hispanic voters shift modestly right, when has such rapid demographic upheaval ever worked to conservatives’ advantage?
The pace of change is impossible to ignore. Importing foreign labor into rural counties inevitably reshapes culture — and, soon after, voting patterns.
Greene County, Iowa, illustrates the point. In 2023, Hispanic residents accounted for just 3.3% of the total population. But that number underrepresents their influence. Iowa State University researchers found Latino populations in rural Iowa tend to skew young, meaning they disproportionately fill the schools even when their overall numbers look small. That imbalance compounds over time.
When Trump calls for more farm labor from the third world — so long as the workers aren’t “murderers” — he misses the deeper issue. Violent crime isn’t the only threat. The more serious loss lies in surrendering the very communities that naturally align with traditional American culture.
As Vice President JD Vance put it during his Republican National Convention acceptance speech: “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”
That is the nation Trump must promise to defend — not just with words but with sound policy.
Across the United States, Americans of all backgrounds recognize Juneteenth on June 19, commemorating the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Confederate-held Texas learned of President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.
The same legal reasoning that ended slavery also supports a president’s authority to remove foreign nationals designated as domestic terrorists. President Donald Trump has the constitutional power to act in the interest of national security by deporting those who threaten the country.
When we celebrate Juneteenth, we implicitly acknowledge broad presidential national security powers.
Lawyers and judges study statutes and decide cases, but they rarely confront the true scope of executive power. The Constitution designates the president as commander in chief, but it provides little detail on the extent of that authority.
The closest legal precedent on executive power is Korematsu v. United States (1944), in which the Supreme Court upheld the race-based internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. In 1983, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel overturned the decision as applied to Fred Korematsu and others, but the broader question of presidential national security powers remained unresolved.
President Trump does not need to justify his actions under the much-criticized Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Instead, he should invoke the same principle that underlies Juneteenth: the federal government’s power to secure liberty by enforcing the law and protecting the nation.
At the time of the Civil War, slaves were considered the property of their owners, and the Fifth Amendment dictated that the government could not emancipate them without due process and just compensation paid to their owners. Additionally, the execrable 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision and the Fugitive Slave Act reinforced legal support for slavery.
Despite those legal obstacles, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves only in the Confederate states at war with the Union. Those in Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri remained enslaved because their states were not at war with the country.
As a skilled lawyer, Lincoln understood that his national security powers, implied within his role as commander in chief, superseded constitutional rights in times of war. He did not seek congressional approval, compensate slaveholders, or seek the approval of the courts. In essence, when we celebrate Juneteenth, we implicitly acknowledge broad presidential national security powers.
Historical precedent reinforces this principle. During the Whiskey Rebellion, President George Washington used force to suppress dissent without formal wartime authorization, arresting rebels without warrants. Congress authorized a militia for Washington but did not grant him wartime powers. In his efforts to quell the uprising, he ordered door-to-door searches and forcibly arrested suspected rebels without warrants, bringing several to the Capitol for trial.
The most compelling legal validation of these powers came in United States v. Felt. Mark Felt, the FBI associate director best known as Deep Throat in the Watergate scandal, was later prosecuted for authorizing warrantless searches to track terrorist groups like the Weather Underground and the Palestinian Liberation Organization following the 1972 Munich Olympics attacks.
At his trial, five former attorneys general, President Richard Nixon, and Felt himself testified that presidents and their agents are not always bound by the Bill of Rights when national security is at stake. Their argument underscored a long-standing reality: The executive branch has exercised extraordinary authority to protect the country in moments of national peril.
Felt’s controversial prosecution led to the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978, which established that national security searches intended to prevent terrorist attacks need not adhere to standard constitutional rights. FISA effectively codified a national security exception to otherwise conflicting constitutional mandates.
Taken together, the Whiskey Rebellion, Juneteenth, FISA, and United States v. Felt demonstrate that national security concerns can, at times, take precedence over constitutional protections.
How does this apply to President Trump’s deportation policy? As commander in chief, he has determined that the Tren de Aragua and MS-13 gangs pose a national security threat. He classified these groups as terrorist organizations, recognizing that they entered the United States with organized criminal intent.
Most Americans would agree that, before a formal declaration of war against Germany, President Franklin D. Roosevelt could have ordered the assassination of Adolf Hitler. Similarly, few would argue against detaining Osama bin Laden or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before 9/11. The United States need not wait for an atrocity to occur before acting decisively.
We elect the president to make tough national security decisions, not to be second-guessed by judges from another branch of government. The limits of this power remain open to debate, however. While courts may take a restrictive view, the subject is rarely taught in law schools or settled in case law.
Historical and legal precedent suggest that when national security is at stake, terrorists are not entitled to lawyers or pre-deportation hearings. As counterintuitive as it may seem, Juneteenth itself sets a precedent. Again, slaveholders were not granted due process hearings before the Emancipation Proclamation, nor did they receive Fifth Amendment compensation for the loss of enslaved labor.
When dealing with foreign criminal organizations, we should not analyze these disputes through the lens of antiseptic legal theory. National security demands a more hardheaded approach. As the saying goes, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty — swift deportations may be part of that price.
On December 7, 2015, during the Iowa caucus campaign, Donald Trump announced his plan for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Nearly a decade later, the argument for such a shutdown has intensified. Pro-Hamas demonstrations among Islamic immigrants highlight concerns, and Trump’s presidency could represent the final opportunity to fulfill his pledge and prevent what some view as an impending European-style influence by Sharia-adherent invaders. The question remains: Is Trump up to the task?
Seven months before Trump’s statement, I wrote a column warning that Islamic immigration had doubled since 9/11 and was the fastest-growing subset of America’s already substantial annual intake. Between 2001 and 2013, the U.S. issued 1,628,854 green cards to immigrants from 43 predominantly Muslim countries.
With greater political capital and clearer legal precedent, Trump has an opportunity to expand his ban.
Now, nearly a decade later and nine years into Trump’s leadership of the Republican Party, the numbers tell a sobering story. From 2014 to 2023, the U.S. granted 1,453,940 green cards to the same 43 countries, averaging 145,395 per year — higher than the 125,000 annual average of the previous decade. This increase would be even greater if not for COVID-19, which slowed immigration for over two years. In 2023 alone, about 170,000 immigrants arrived from these countries, excluding at least 100,000 foreign students from the same regions.
Since 9/11, the United States has issued roughly three million green cards to nationals of predominantly Islamic countries, along with several million non-immigrant visas. This figure does not account for the significant number of illegal immigrants from these countries, particularly since Joe Biden took office.
In comparison, England’s total Muslim population stands at about 3.8 million, yet the country has experienced widespread challenges from incorrigible Islamic subversion. While the United States’ larger size makes assimilation challenges relatively less troublesome, the sheer numbers remain critical when assessing the potential for radicalization and domestic terrorism threats.
Shouldn’t we prioritize assimilating those already here and addressing the growing problem of homegrown radicalization before expanding immigration from nations plagued by Islamic supremacism?
With a history of Islamic terror attacks on American soil and increasing cultural subversion marked by anti-Jewish hatred and pro-Hamas sentiment, why hasn’t the Trump administration acted with greater urgency to halt immigration? The Trump v. Hawaii decision affirms Trump’s clear authority under Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act to restrict immigration categories in the national interest. The lack of decisive action is difficult to reconcile with these pressing concerns.
During Trump’s first term, an October 2017 order banned visas from countries including Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, as well as North Korea and South Sudan. The ban on Iraq was later lifted, and restrictions on other countries were limited to specific visa categories or shorter durations. Combined with lower court injunctions and Biden’s subsequent election, these policies had little impact on the overall flow of radical Islamists into the United States.
Now, with greater political capital and clearer legal precedent, Trump has an opportunity to expand this ban. The focus should extend beyond countries lacking “vetting” tools or diplomatic cooperation to include any nation with a significant presence of Islamic terrorism and anti-American sentiment. The growing size of pro-terrorist rallies in the U.S. underscores this urgency — these demonstrations grow because the number of immigrants admitted from such countries increases each year.
Trump’s use of Section 212(f) immigration authority will serve as an early indicator of his presidency’s direction. Cutting spending and addressing complex domestic issues may lack immediate momentum, and deportations require significant resources to reverse Biden’s immigration surge. However, restricting further immigration from these countries, allowing time to assimilate record numbers already here, is a step Trump can take swiftly and with settled legal precedent.
If not now, when? The clock is ticking.
As his days in office draw to a close, President Joe Biden has released nearly a dozen Yemenis from the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba as part of a larger goal of closing the facility permanently.
On Monday, the Department of Defense announced that 11 prisoners would be transferred to Oman: Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman, Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi, Khalid Ahmed Qassim, Suhayl Abdul Anam al Sharabi, Hani Saleh Rashid Abdullah, Tawfiq Nasir Awad Al-Bihani, Omar Mohammed Ali al-Rammah, Sanad Ali Yislam Al Kazimi, Hassan Muhammad Ali Bib Attash, Sharqawi Abdu Ali Al Hajj, and Abd Al-Salam Al-Hilah.
Both al-Alwi and al Sharabi worked as bodyguards for the late Osama bin Laden, former leader of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda and organizer of the 9/11 attacks.
Al-Alwi, who was also allegedly a member of Al-Qaeda, served on bin Laden's security detail in Afghanistan. A 2016 intelligence file noted that he had been "pardoned" for a number of infractions at Gitmo since his capture and suggested that he may still have an "extremist mindset" based on some of his statements while in prison, the New York Post reported.
In addition to working as bin Laden's bodyguard, al Sharabi, another suspected member of Al-Qaeda, was also allegedly involved in "an aborted 9/11-style hijacking plot in Southwest Asia," according to his 2020 intelligence file.
None of the 11 transferred detainees has ever been charged with a crime, though American courts have never firmly settled whether enemy combatants ... should be treated as accused criminals.
All 11 Gitmo prisoners are Yemeni nationals who were captured shortly after 9/11. They will all be transferred to Oman as part of a pledge from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in September 2023.
"The United States appreciates the willingness of the Government of Oman and other partners to support ongoing U.S. efforts focused on responsibly reducing the detainee population and ultimately closing the Guantanamo Bay facility," the DOD press release said.
None of the 11 transferred detainees has ever been charged with a crime, though American courts have never firmly settled whether enemy combatants captured on a battlefield should be treated as accused criminals, conferred with full due process rights and subject to the justice system.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, considered the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, is an exception. After more than 20 years at Gitmo, Mohammed is expected to avoid the death penalty by pleading guilty to plotting the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Fox News reported.
Co-conspirators Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who have also been held at Guantanamo Bay since 2003, were also offered plea deals.
With the 11 detainees gone, Gitmo now has just 15 remaining prisoners, a tiny fraction of the number of prisoners held there at the peak of the War on Terror. In 2003, the facility housed 680 prisoners.
H/T: The Post Millennial
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