Patriots are just weeks away from celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, marking America’s semiquincentennial.

Many citizens are clearly proud of the globally transformative superpower bequeathed to them and keen to honor the contributions and sacrifices made by generations past. There are, however, a great many who alternatively look back on American history with ingratitude and down at the country as currently constituted.

‘Let’s pay for one-way tickets.’

According to a new national Elon University poll conducted by YouGov between April 30 and May 4, 55% of Democratic respondents said that there is another country on Earth that they would rather live in than the United States today. Only 10% of Republicans said the same.

Overall, only 35% of respondents said in the run-up to America’s 250th birthday that they would prefer to live elsewhere.

When asked which term best describes how they feel about America turning 250 years old, 68% of Republicans said they felt proud; 19% said they felt grateful; 3% said they felt conflicted; 1% said they felt frustrated; 1% said they felt disappointed; and 9% said they had no strong feelings.

When similarly asked to describe their feelings, only 18% of Democrats said they felt proud; 17% said they felt grateful; 21% said they felt conflicted; 6% said they felt frustrated; 15% said they felt disappointed; and 24% said they had no strong feelings.

Asked specifically about their pride in the country — about the veracity of the statement “I am proud to be an American” to them personally — Democrats again came across as contemptuous. Only 26% of Democratic respondents said that the statement was “very true”; 22% said it was “somewhat true”; 21% said it was neither true nor untrue; 18% said it was somewhat untrue; and 12% said it was very untrue.

RELATED: The Bill of Rights is the antidote to soft despotism

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The Republican respondents signaled significantly greater pride in their homeland: 83% said the statement was very true; 12% said it was somewhat true; 4% said that it was neither true nor untrue; 1% said it was somewhat untrue; and zero respondents said that it was very untrue.

Whereas 85% of Republicans rated the health of American democracy as either excellent, good, or fair, Democratic respondents overwhelmingly — 64% — rated the overall health of U.S. democracy today as poor.

Democrats evidenced their low regard for the country in other answers, including to the question: “How successfully or unsuccessfully do you believe the United States is currently living up to its founding ideals?”

Fifty-four percent of Republicans said that the U.S. has very successfully or somewhat successfully lived up to its founding ideals; 20% said America has neither been successful nor unsuccessful in this regard; and 26% said it has been somewhat or very unsuccessful.

Democrats disagreed with their friends across the aisle in the extreme: 74% of Democratic respondents said the U.S. has been somewhat or very unsuccessful in living up to its founding ideals; 11% said it has been neither successful nor unsuccessful; and 14% said the country has been either very or somewhat successful in living up to its founding ideals.

“As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Americans have complex and diverse feelings about America 250,” said Jason Husser, director of the Elon University Poll. “Many Americans expressed significant concern about the health of American democracy today, and the country is split on its outlook over the next 50 years.”

When conservatives caught wind of this poll, many advocated for helping the Democratic majority realize their dream of living in another country.

Mike Davis, the founder of the Article III Project, wrote, “Let’s pay for one-way tickets, anywhere in the world, for all of them. And 6 months of living expenses. But they must renounce their American citizenship. And never come back.”

“Trump should launch a national program to help that 55% achieve their dreams — help them out with flights, the job search, and maybe even a few months of rent in their new home,” tweeted Nathan Roberts, the co-founder of Save Heritage Indiana. “Long term, this will save our country LOTS of money.”

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​Poll, Polling, America 250, Anniversary, Semiquincentennial, Democrats, Republicans, Pride, Nationalism, Patriotism, Politics 

There is a peculiar kind of intellectual cowardice that disguises itself as “skepticism.”

Instead of asking questions, engaging with evidence, or — God forbid — actually picking up the phone, it fires off a dismissive post and lets the crowd do the rest.

To Jones, it is highly possible that this anomaly indicates ‘the corridors of a ship.’

Lately, the target of this cowardice is a man named Andrew Jones. His offense? Daring to propose that a boat-shaped formation in the mountains of Eastern Turkey may just be the remains of Noah’s ark.

Jones, whom I recently interviewed over video chat, will be the first to tell you he is not an archaeologist.

What he is, however, is the project coordinator for one of the most methodical investigations of a potential archaeological site in recent memory — one being conducted by geologists, geophysicists, soil scientists, and archaeologists with decades of experience between them.

Jones has lived in Turkey since 2020, building relationships with Turkish universities, navigating government permitting processes, and assembling a team capable of doing this work the right way.

And for all that, he is being rewarded with mockery on the internet.

Wyatt’s folly

For many critics, Noah’s ark research begins and ends with one man: the late Ron Wyatt.

Wyatt, a Tennessee nurse anesthetist turned amateur biblical archaeologist, has become the universal escape hatch for anyone who doesn’t want to engage with legitimate, peer-reviewed Noah’s ark research.

Never mind that Wyatt also claimed to have found the Ten Commandments and the Ark of the Covenant. For critics, he has become a kind of all-purpose scarecrow: Invoke Ron Wyatt, roll your eyes, and the conversation is over.

One of the strangest things about the criticism is the assumption that Ron Wyatt somehow created the Durupinar story from whole cloth.

In reality, the site’s Noah’s ark connection predates Wyatt’s fame by decades.

It was discovered in 1959 by Turkish Army Captain Ilhan Durupinar during an aerial NATO mapping mission. A Turkish-American ground expedition followed in 1960, covered in a spread in Life magazine. This was documented, publicized, and treated as a legitimate subject of inquiry before Wyatt was anywhere near it.

Signs of life

The site itself is a boat-shaped impression in the earth about 18 miles south of Mount Ararat. It passes the eyeball test. It doesn’t look natural.

But more importantly, it sits in a valley loaded with Armenian and Urartu historical artifacts, such as abandoned churches and old graveyards.

Just recently, according to Jones, a Turkish archaeologist visiting the site found pottery fragments.

“Maybe 50 feet away from the site, he [found] pottery just laying on the ground where the locals are plowing,” he recalls.

The archaeologist dated the fragments to the Early Bronze Age and Late Chalcolithic. “This is the age you’re looking for for Noah’s Ark,” says Jones. “If you’re doing biblical chronology, they would place it during that time period.”

Jones is careful not to overstate the significance of these finds, noting only that they demonstrate human activity during the same time period as Noah’s ark.

These aren’t irrelevant, peripheral details. They’re central to the flood story. Because if the biblical account places Noah’s landing in the region of Ararat, which it does, then the valley floor below Durupinar is precisely where you would expect civilization’s earliest post-flood fingerprints to be.

Which brings us to the first target of the critics: the site’s location.

The Ararat question

Wes Huff, a Christian apologist with a significant online following, recently posted a lengthy critique of the Durupinar project.

He claims that “the modern site of Mount Ararat has only been called that since the 13th century” and that “the broader issue is that the precise location of Ararat remains unknown.”

This is the kind of claim that sounds clever and smart if you don’t actually know anything about the subject.

When the Bible says Noah’s ark came to rest in the “mountains of Ararat,” it is describing a region: the Armenian Highlands. And the Durupinar site is squarely inside the highlands. This is not a fringe interpretation. It’s basic historical geography.

The word “Ararat” in the biblical text is not a reference to a single volcanic mountaintop. It is a transliteration of Urartu, the ancient kingdom that spanned what is now Eastern Turkey, Armenia, and Northern Iran.

“If you look [at] the Bible, it says Urartu, which is Ararat,” says Jones.

The Urartu people were the predecessors of the Armenians. Their capital sat at what is today the city of Van in Eastern Turkey, on the shore of Lake Van. Their ruins, castles, and settlements are scattered throughout the entire region, including in the valley directly below the Durupinar site.

The implication of treating Ararat as fundamentally unknowable is that any candidate site can be dismissed before it is seriously investigated.

Going to ground

Huff’s second major line of attack targets the methodology, specifically ground penetrating radar. His claim is that “you simply don’t know what you’re looking at with GPR alone.”

This is technically true, which is exactly why nobody on Jones’ team has ever argued otherwise.

But Jones does challenge what he sees as a widespread assumption that GPR is used to bolster “sensational claims.”

As Jones explains, “A lot of scientists [and] archaeologists [and] geologists use GPR. … It’s not the final word, but it helps you understand what’s going on below the surface.”

GPR is not the conclusion. It is a step. It is a standard, widely used, non-destructive geophysical survey tool deployed by archaeologists across Europe and the Middle East as a matter of course before any excavation begins. Dismissing it as inconclusive is like criticizing a doctor for ordering an MRI before performing surgery. The whole point is that you look before you cut.

New angles

What the critics also won’t tell you is what the scans have actually found. Because at this point, “we don’t know what we’re looking at” is getting harder to sustain.

The 2019-2020 GPR surveys didn’t just confirm the boat outline visible from the surface. They mapped angular, right-angled internal structures, which may indicate rooms and chambers running the length of the formation.

They used modern digital equipment capable of generating three-dimensional models and sharing raw data with independent reviewers. According to Jones, unaffiliated geophysicists examined the scans and identified several features they considered noteworthy.

Among them was a linear anomaly running through the center of the formation.

Jones is again careful about the distinction between observation and interpretation: “There’s a straight line of voids,” he says. “Now I interpret that as someone who’s thinking this is possibly Noah’s ark.” To Jones, it is highly possible that this anomaly indicates “the corridors of a ship.”

Natural geological synclines don’t produce right angles. Rock doesn’t spontaneously organize itself into rectilinear geometry at depth. That’s the kind of finding that, in any other archaeological context, would generate serious professional interest rather than a dismissive podcast appearance.

What lies beneath

Or consider the 2014 electrical resistivity tomography data, collected by an independent New Zealand researcher. The ERT scans identified three distinct horizontal layers running through the formation. The Genesis account describes Noah’s ark as having three decks. Jones’ team members aren’t the ones drawing that connection loudly. They don’t need to. The data draws it.

In 2025, new analyses of the raw GPR data found what resembled a central corridor or tunnel running through the formation, flanked by side tunnels tracing the interior perimeter of the ship shape, and beyond that, a large central void extending at least 13 meters below the surface.

And then there is the soil. In 2024, Jones’ team collaborated with Australian soil scientist William Crabtree and Turkish geologist Dr. Mehmet Salih Bayraktutan to conduct a formal survey of 88 samples across 22 locations inside and outside the formation. The samples were then analyzed at Atatürk University laboratories.

They found that organic matter inside the formation runs three times higher than in the surrounding soil, with significantly elevated potassium levels consistent with the presence of decayed biological material (specifically wood) rather than the inorganic rock and mountain soil you would expect from a natural formation.

Yet critics routinely reduce years of work by multiple specialists to a single talking point: “It’s just GPR.”

RELATED: 5 reasons this ‘Noah’s ark’ discovery is harder to dismiss than skeptics admit

Heritage Images/Getty Images

Amateur hour

Dr. Jeremiah Johnston, appearing on Michael Knowles’ podcast, went farther than simply questioning the methodology. He implied that Jones and his team were amateurs chasing hype, while claiming he could conduct a proper excavation of the site himself for $500,000.

Let’s think about the claim that the current work being done at Durupinar is all for publicity for a moment.

Jones has spent years in Turkey, building working relationships with the Turkish government, navigating the permit process required for each phase of the investigation, signing formal agreements with a Turkish university whose archaeologist has over 20 years of field experience and has been covered in American newspapers for his other discoveries.

He has assembled geologists, geophysicists, soil scientists, and archaeologists across multiple countries. He has submitted proposals to government bodies and waited on approvals. He has done the slow, unglamorous infrastructure work that actual, serious science requires.

Meanwhile, Johnston went on a show talking about what he would do with half a million dollars.

Geology first

Huff’s accusation that there are no archaeologists on the team is equally misleading.

The work done to date — the GPR, soil sampling, geophysical surveys — all falls under geology, not archaeology. You don’t call an archaeologist to run a magnetometer. You call a geophysicist.

Archaeology becomes necessary when you excavate. The project simply isn’t at that phase yet. The archaeologists on staff have been consulting, reviewing, and preparing. In fact, the Turkish university archaeologist who recovered the pottery fragments from the valley floor was performing the kind of formal pedestrian survey that is the standard opening phase of any archaeological dig.

The critics want to hold Jones to archaeology’s standards while he’s still doing geology. Presumably they’ll hold him to geology’s standards when he starts doing archaeology.

Worth getting right

I am ethnically Armenian. I grew up hearing stories about Noah’s ark resting in Ararat. Until recently, Mount Ararat itself appeared on the Armenian passport. It remains one of the most important national symbols of the Armenian people because of what it represents: the place where civilization began again after the Flood.

I’m not asking anyone to accept that on faith. Neither is Andrew Jones. What Jones is asking is simply this: Let the investigation finish.

The sonic core drilling that will finally produce intact subsurface samples is pending Turkish government approval, potentially arriving this fall. That drilling will either find what Jones believes is there or it won’t. The AMT surveys will either show bedrock in the wrong place to support a natural formation theory or they won’t. The geophysical data will either hold up or it won’t.

What the critics have offered is not a counter-investigation. They have offered no alternative data, no competing site survey, no engagement with the soil samples or the GPR profiles or the pottery finds. They haven’t even picked up the phone to request the data directly from Jones.

If Durupinar is nothing, if it is a geological oddity and nothing more, the data will show that, and Jones has said as much. He follows where the data leads.

The question worth asking is why so many people with such loud opinions about this site are so determined to make sure that data is never fully collected or taken seriously.

​Ararat region, Life magazine, Noahs ark, Durupinar site, Lifestyle, Bible, Biblical archeology, Turkey, Armenia, Old testament, Faith 

The other day, I was making a right turn at a busy intersection, and I almost ran over an elderly woman who stepped into the street unexpectedly.

She had lost her balance because she was crammed together with seven or eight other old people on the street corner.

If these elder protesters are being paid, whoever is hiring them must not care much about their safety.

This odd-looking group was waving to motorists and holding political signs with slogans like: “NO MORE DICTATORS,” “STOP RACISM,” and “NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL.”

I hit the brakes and waited while they helped the lady back onto the curb. Everyone smiled and waved to me. I waved back. They seemed friendly and nice, if not a bit delusional.

Old is new

I’ve seen similar groups in other places. It’s apparently a new trend. Old people randomly gathered on a corner, or on an overpass, or outside a supermarket, holding left-wing signs and waving at cars as they pass by.

The car drivers honk and wave back, and everyone feels good about themselves.

Some people claim these retirement-age protesters are getting paid for their efforts. I don’t know if that’s true. But I have to agree that they look strange and out of place. And not totally authentic.

Welcome to the neighborhood

Usually, these protests take place in affluent, left-leaning areas.

Since there’s so much honking and waving, I assume most people who drive by agree with their message: Trump is bad. Racism is bad. Criticizing open borders is bad.

But if everyone they engage with agrees with them, what exactly is the point of standing out there?

RELATED: ‘Nice to meet you. My kid is gay’: When dads turn ‘support’ into an identity

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The illusion of a dominant left

One reason might be to convince people that the left is firmly in the majority, in your neighborhood and everywhere else.

This is an important project for the left. This is why every late-night talk show audience boos loudly every time the host mentions Trump or anyone in his administration.

You never hear anyone cheer when these people are mentioned. And surely there must be a few conservatives in those audiences.

But no, you only hear boos. I don’t know how the shows do that. Maybe there’s a big “BOO” sign flashing at the audience. Or maybe they are told ahead of time that it’s required. Or maybe the “booing” sound is just edited in.

However they do it, the effect is the same. The right-leaning viewer, watching at home, gets the impression that he or she is in a very small minority. And that the vast majority of Americans hate Trump and his people.

This is not true of course. But the illusion can be effective nonetheless.

This is probably why you see your elderly neighbors standing on street corners: to make you think all your neighbors are leftist and adjust yourself accordingly.

The medium is the message

And what exactly is the message of these elder activists? Their signs are weirdly generic. It doesn’t appear much thought went into them.

Like “No More Dictators.” What’s that supposed to mean? That Trump is a dictator? That all our presidents have been dictators? Last time I checked, American presidents are fairly restricted in their powers.

Trump can’t get his ballroom built. Obama barely got his health care passed. Biden wanted to forgive student loans. And couldn’t.

Do these old people not know what a “dictator” is?

Politics can be fun!

I’ve volunteered for different political actions in my area. I’ve waved signs from the sidewalk. But those were for specific candidates. Or particular ballot measures. We weren’t just spouting random slogans.

I‘ve always enjoyed political activism. It’s a great way to meet other conservatives and learn about the political process.

And interacting with actual voters is always great fun. Going door to door. Talking to people about the issues of the day. Listening to their concerns. Saying hi to their dog.

Old people are especially interesting to visit with. They are often the more independent thinkers, having experienced a wider range of historical events.

Simple. Obvious. Dumb.

But these old people I’m seeing now, they don’t seem to have anything of substance to say. They are more like bad political TV ads come to life. Simple. Obvious. Dumb.

And what about the physical dangers they face? Standing dangerously close to heavily trafficked roadways, exposed to the elements and whatever zombie street people might come along.

That woman who stumbled into the street in front of me? She could have broken her hip!

Call your ombudsman!

If these elder protesters are being paid, whoever is hiring them must not care much about their safety. These old people are apparently expendable.

But that’s classic leftist strategy. Once the minions have served their purpose, they’re tossed aside.

In the meantime, I continue to see these groups of old people lined up along the street, waving their signs, and expressing their tired outrage.

Noam Chomsky called this “manufacturing consent.” I would call it elder abuse.

​Antifa, Aarp, Retirement, Donald trump, No kings, Politics, Lifestyle, Protesters 

Protesters are claiming that Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees have been subject to poor conditions at the Delaney Hall ICE facility in New Jersey and have planted themselves outside the facility for the past week — with many protesters clashing with ICE agents.

“There were these rumors about a hunger strike going on in the ICE facility, and we are now up to day 13 of this alleged hunger strike. Now, that’s like dangerous territory. People aren’t eating for 13 days. That’s life-threatening. I would say that’s a problem,” Gonzales says.

“Their conditions are so terrible that they’re protesting,” she continues, noting that Democrats are claiming there’s “medical neglect,” “lack of sanitation,” and “spoiled food.”

“You’re going to be shocked to hear none of that is actually true. There is no hunger strike,” Gonzales says.

A post from Jennie Taer on X reads: “New data obtained by The Daily Wire shows that commissary sales at Delaney Hall surged 161% during the so-called ‘hunger strike’ rising from $11,498 on May 26 to $30,013 on June 1. While snack sales jumped, the detainee population fell from 724 to 621 during that same time period.”

The Department of Homeland Security quote tweeted Taer’s post, writing: “The hunger strike HOAX was actually just Delaney Hall detainees trading nutritious meals for Honey Buns and Hot Cheetos. It’s time for sanctuary politicians to drop the political theater and work with us to get criminal illegal aliens OUT of our communities.”

However, Democrats like Reps. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) and LaMonica McIver (N.J.) do not care about the stats.

“Here in America, immigration enforcement should be fair, just, and humane. That’s not what’s going on here at Delaney Hall. We spoke to several individuals, none of whom has a criminal record, many of whom have been detained here at Delaney Hall for months. Delaney Hall should be shut down,” Jeffries said in a video uploaded to social media, where he’s standing outside the facility alongside McIver.

“And every single individual, particularly those at a high level connected to this facility, they’re engaging in a depraved indifference to human life. And every single member of this Trump administration is going to be held accountable,” he added.

“Hakeem, the problem for you is every single one of them actually are criminals because they’re here illegally. It’s the ‘I’ and the ‘L’ that go in front of the word legally that actually indicates to you that they are in fact criminals. All of them,” Gonzales comments.

“Also, I love that LaMonica, she already looks like she’s in prison. She’s already dressed for prison, I guess,” she adds.

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

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​Sara gonzales, Ice, Illegal immigration, Hunger strike, Delaney hall ice facility, Hakeem jeffries, Lamonica mciver, Sara gonzales unfiltered, New jersey 

As the nation approaches what looks like a weak and divided commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, another milestone has arrived with little acclaim. Today marks the 239th anniversary of the introduction of the Bill of Rights in the U.S. House of Representatives.

It should be a day of celebration every year. The Bill of Rights is one of the most important documents in human history. James Madison, one of the nation’s central founders and a future two-term president, introduced it in Congress on June 8, 1787.

We have less than half a decade to avert a fiscal collapse of the federal government and the social and economic destruction that would follow.

The central lesson of the Bill of Rights lies in Madison’s purpose: to bind every level of government to one overriding mission — protecting individual rights against majority tyranny.

The Bill of Rights Institute summarizes Madison’s concern well. Before the Constitutional Convention, Madison wrote “Vices of the Political System,” an essay detailing the flaws of the Articles of Confederation. One of the chief defects, in his view, was that tyrannical majorities in the states passed unjust laws violating the rights of minorities. He had seen the oppression of religious dissenters in Virginia and became the leading advocate for the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

At the Constitutional Convention, Madison argued for separation of powers, checks and balances, bicameralism, and federalism as safeguards for liberty. But he lost one key feature of his plan: a national veto over state laws meant to prevent majority tyranny in the states.

Today, we are light-years away from Madison’s vision and from the founders’ plan to protect it. Neither Madison nor anyone else could force the American people and their governments to live within the letter and spirit of the Constitution and the common law. The founders could only encode their vision into the Constitution, laws, and judicial precedents, then hope later generations would preserve it.

They often have not.

In 1840, only a half-century into the American experiment, Alexis de Tocqueville anticipated the rise of “soft despotism” in the United States. He saw that the passion for equality could erode devotion to natural law, natural rights, and self-government.

Tocqueville warned of a sovereign power that takes each individual “into its powerful hands” and covers society with “a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules.” Such power, he wrote, “does not tyrannize” but “hinders, represses, enervates, extinguishes,” and finally reduces the nation to “a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

He also warned that this mild, regulated servitude could exist “in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.”

That is the danger America now faces.

Tocqueville foresaw that citizens might voluntarily give up sovereignty in exchange for temporary economic stability and government largesse extracted from their neighbors. In doing so, they would surrender the things that made the nation great: self-rule, protection against majority coercion, voluntary association, free enterprise, and ultimately each person’s dignity as a unique human being.

RELATED: The timeless truths behind the Declaration of Independence

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Restoring respect for the Bill of Rights and the founders’ vision is essential if we hope to rescue the United States from the soft despotism into which the American experiment has devolved — and from the harder totalitarianism toward which it now hurtles.

Documents and laws alone will not achieve that. In our present decline, the only way to reverse the slide is to remove the temptation that feeds it: the ability of majorities at all levels of government to vote themselves ownership over other people’s property, liberties, and lives.

In an ironic turn, the United States may now be approaching a resolution of sorts: the collapse of the national government’s ability to pay for everything Congress, presidents, and courts have promised Americans over the past century and a half.

Entitlements such as Social Security, food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, federal housing subsidies, and other national bribes have become insupportable. They now threaten a debt spiral as high interest rates and inflation weaken the economy and erode the government’s tax base.

The federal debt has already risen above 100% of gross domestic product — the nation’s entire annual economic output. More ominously, the debt is accelerating. The total now sits just short of $40 trillion. It is projected to rise to $55 trillion by 2031, an increase of more than one-third in five years. By 2036, it is projected to reach $77 trillion, nearly doubling in a decade.

Meanwhile, federal and state governments have steadily eroded individual rights, freedom of association, free enterprise, election integrity, and countless other safeguards of liberty.

This is the outcome of majority tyranny. We have less than half a decade to avert a fiscal collapse of the federal government and the social and economic destruction that would follow. What would arise from such a catastrophe is impossible to know.

History offers little comfort. The chances are strong that whatever replaced our flawed yet hardy constitutional system would not resemble the order our forefathers established in the 1700s. A nation founded on individual rights and self-government could vanish from the earth.

That is what Americans must confront as we approach another election season and another referendum on our founding values.

​Bill of rights, Soft despotism, James madison, America 250, Constitutional convention, Articles of confederation, American government, Founding fathers, Opinion & analysis 

The next time one hears of virtue, honor, and “the profession of arms” in the U.S. military, one should ask whether those words still mean anything.

Consider a military in which the highest flag ranks sell influence for future employment, commanders conspire to steal optics before deployment, soldiers loot their own supply rooms, chiefs sell night-vision devices online, officers defraud grieving families, and bureaucrats steal money meant for military children.

Petty theft below, influence peddling above, and a thick frosting of platitudes about honor everywhere.

It sounds like Russia — a kleptocratic band of mercenaries where the uniform is just another way to get paid. The officer corps that emerges from this culture is not simply politically adrift, but morally unformed.

Institutions designed to form officers became institutions designed to credential them.

As Alasdair MacIntyre argued in “After Virtue” — the most important book the military profession has not read — although we still use the words “honor,” “duty,” and “integrity,” we have lost the traditions that gave those words their content.

We are, MacIntyre argues, like the survivors of a catastrophe who have salvaged pieces of a scientific textbook without retaining the theories that made them coherent. This describes the average Army values poster.

The loss of the military’s honor culture is exemplified in its typical response to an ethics scandal, which follows a predictable liturgy. A stand-down is called for. A policy is updated. A general delivers remarks about what the uniform represents. Yet nothing changes because the problem is not a deficit of information. It is a deficit of formation.

MacIntyre’s insight is that virtue and honor — the public recognition of virtue — cannot be transmitted through instruction alone. They require practices: socially established, cooperative activities with internal standards of excellence conducted within institutions that have a coherent sense of purpose.

Honorable officers are made by placing them inside a community where virtue is demanded, rewarded, and — critically — where its absence is punished publicly and without mercy.

The Army values and their equivalents are the ghosts of morality: a past civilization’s catechism recited by an institution that can no longer summon the world that made them intelligible.

The linguistic evidence is all around. No one says “that’s dishonorable” anymore — not in barracks, not in the Pentagon, not in the pages of professional military journals. The word survives only as a legal term, a bureaucratic category. As something one man could say to another’s face and have it land, honor has been mocked entirely out of the language.

You can call a fellow officer unethical, unprofessional, or toxic. But call him dishonorable, and you sound like you wandered in from a Patrick O’Brian novel. MacIntyre’s point drives this home: An institution cannot enforce a norm whose name has become a joke.

RELATED: The Pentagon is blowing a fortune fighting bargain-bin drones

Jordon R. Beesley/U.S. Navy/Getty Images

Honor factories

It was not always this way. For most of American military history until very recently, West Point and Annapolis stamped honor into young men through consequences so immediate and so public that the culture became self-enforcing. A cadet who lied, cheated, or stole did not receive counseling or remedial training. He was gone, and the entire corps knew what had happened and why.

Honor functioned because shame functioned, and shame requires witnesses.

The results were not incidental. The officer corps that fought from Cold Harbor to Normandy was decisively shaped by such institutions. These were not perfect men. But they were men whose relationship to honor had been formed by years of practice.

At the service academies, honor adjudication has become increasingly legalistic, with due-process protections, administrative review, and all sorts of punishment short of separation now built into the system.

The total institution — Erving Goffman’s term for an organization with sufficient control over its members’ lives to form their character — is systematically liberalized into an expensive state college with uniforms. Honor talk remains in the brochure, but the machinery around it treats dishonor as an adjudicative problem rather than a communal rupture.

No civilizational catastrophe forced a reckoning with what courage and loyalty meant. In conditions of relative peace and institutional stability, the honor culture of the services was eaten away within a single generation.

The post-Vietnam civilianization of military culture brought enormous external pressure to make the academies more like the universities they competed with for talent. Overreaching judicial decisions through the 1970s and 1980s extended due process protections to cadets that made swift, public expulsion essentially impossible.

The rise of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the 1990s introduced the concern that strict honor enforcement produced disparate outcomes that disadvantaged certain populations.

Each of these pressures was arguable in isolation. Taken together, they achieved something none of them individually intended: institutions designed to form officers became institutions designed to credential them. Formation requires the authority to demand, correct, and, if necessary, expel. Credentialing requires only that the student complete the program.

The good news is that these are policy choices, and while they can theoretically be reversed, they will be difficult to undo. Unlike military revolutions of the past, which left wreckage that demanded reconstruction, this one is comfortable — and lucrative.

Rebuilding the culture

The service academies are the only total institutions remaining in the American military enterprise. If honor cannot be rebuilt there, it cannot be rebuilt anywhere — because nowhere else in the military does an institution have sufficient formative authority to do the necessary work.

What restoration looks like is not complicated. Public consequences for honor violations being swiftly administered and witnessed by the community. Superintendents having the moral courage to empower an honor system run by cadets with genuine authority to separate their peers, not a board whose findings are subject to administrative review and legal appeal.

A culture in which the response to a classmate’s dishonor is not sympathy but shame — for him and, if they tolerated it, for those around him.

The non-toleration clause of the honor code — a cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do — was once the Sword of Damocles. It made the entire corps complicit in enforcement rather than being diluted by heavy-handed oversight.

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When a cadet violated the honor code at the Virginia Military Institute, the cadet commander would formally assemble the corps and announce: “Cadet X has been found guilty of an honor violation. His name will never again be spoken within the walls of this institution.” And then the drumming out — the cadet was brought to the center of the quad, marched to the gate, and thrown out.

In 2021, amid legal concerns and political pressure during a state-ordered racism investigation, VMI stopped naming expelled cadets during the drum-out.

Shame requires an audience. When you remove the audience, you remove the shame. When you do that, you remove the social technique that humanity used for thousands of years to enforce honor from the inside out rather than ineffectively from the top down.

Consequences must communicate to every observer that dishonor is not a career setback but social death. The burden of proof is entirely on those who would defend the present arrangement, which produces flag officers who leave public service under a cloud, pass through a mild embarrassment ritual, and reappear almost immediately as best-selling authors, board members, fellows, or global-security sages.

The academies cannot do this alone, and no honest argument claims they can, but they are the only place left where the military has the authority to begin.

When institutions fail to enforce virtue through honor, the only remaining answer is the man who enforces it from within — who understands that he cannot be responsible for the Army, but is unconditionally responsible for himself and refuses to be complicit in his own degradation.

The ultimate purpose of the service academies is to produce military officers who win without losing their souls in the process. We are not made to be machine men with machine hearts. We were made for something greater.

What is required is deep and far-reaching — a national renaissance, a rebirth on the 250th anniversary of America, out of the conviction that there are things worth being, not merely things worth having.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the American Mind.The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the views or positions of the U.S. Army, the Department of War, or any part of the U.S. government.

​Us military, Military academies, Honor culture, Honor code, West point, Dei, Alasdair macintyre, Army values, Annapolis, Service academies, Opinion & analysis 

A 98-year-old was brutally beaten inside his Brooklyn apartment building amid an argument earlier this week — and police said they’re searching for the female culprit.

Investigators said the female responsible for the attack punched, kicked, and struck the elderly victim with a broomstick and metal chair inside his apartment building in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, News 12 Brooklyn reported.

The beating is yet another in a stretch of attacks involving older Brooklyn residents.

The attack took place around 4 p.m. Thursday, the station said.

Investigators released video showing the woman appearing to drop off flyers at a building, News 12 Brooklyn reported, adding that investigators said the woman on the video is the person they’re trying to identify.

Investigators told the station that the 98-year-old man had just entered the apartment building when he got into an argument with the female.

Then the verbal spat reportedly became violent, the station added.

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Investigators told News 12 Brooklyn that the woman repeatedly punched and kicked the elderly man — and then she began hitting him with a broomstick and a metal chair.

She then ran from the building and headed east on Maple Street, the station said.

Despite the brutal beatdown, the victim suffered only minor injuries and was treated at the scene, News 12 Brooklyn reported.

New York City police are looking for the suspect, CBS News added.

The beating is yet another in a stretch of attacks involving older Brooklyn residents, News 12 Brooklyn said, adding that a 72-year-old man was punched multiple times in the face in Brownsville last week — and just days later, an 83-year-old woman was slashed in the head while walking to church.

No arrests have been announced in this latest case, News 12 Brooklyn said, adding that those who recognize the woman seen in the video are asked to contact Crime Stoppers.

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​Physical attack, 98-year-old victim, Nypd, Brooklyn, New york city, Female suspect, Brutal beating, Crime