The Navy has been through a lot over the past several months.

Ships have stayed at sea longer than planned. Sailors have missed more time with their families. Aircraft have flown hard. Weapons have been fired in numbers we have not seen in decades. Maintenance has been pushed to the right because the mission came first.

We cannot keep shrinking the number of ships while expanding the number of missions and pretend the math will somehow work.

Now the bills are going to start coming due.

Ships will return needing repairs. Aircraft will need maintenance. Magazines will need to be refilled. Sailors will need time at home. Families that have carried an enormous burden will want some normalcy back. All of that is understandable. But what happens next will tell us a lot about the future of the United States Navy.

We can spend the next few years talking about how hard the Iran fight was, how tired the force is, and how much everything costs. We can lower expectations, reduce deployments, accept fewer ships at sea, and convince ourselves that this is simply the new reality.

Or we can decide to get better.

That may sound overly simple, but it isn’t. This is the choice facing this generation of Navy leaders, Pentagon officials, members of Congress, and the defense industrial base. Iran did not create the Navy’s problems. It exposed them.

Listen to sailors and learn the right lesson

The extended deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln has become the most visible example of the strain on the force. Sailors and families have expressed frustration about deployment length, uncertainty, limited port calls, and conditions aboard the ship.

When we ask young Americans to spend month after month away from their spouses and children, they have earned the right to tell us when things are not working. Navy leaders should pay attention to quality of life, communications, food, sleep, medical care, and the information families receive back home.

But we should be careful about the conclusion we draw from their frustration. The lesson cannot simply be that deployments should never run long again. Wars don’t care about deployment schedules.

America’s national security commitments don’t disappear because a carrier strike group has been gone for eight or nine months.

Sometimes the mission requires more.

The real lesson is that America needs enough Navy that asking more of our sailors during a crisis does not become the only option available. That means more ships, more aircraft, more weapons, more logistics capacity, and more people.

It also means accepting something we sometimes became uncomfortable saying during the long years of peacetime operations: Serving in the military is supposed to be hard.

We should take care of sailors and their families. We should fix unnecessary problems and hold leaders accountable for poor decisions. But we also need a Navy that expects its people to be tough enough to fight and win a war.

RELATED: China is building power. America is still debating it.

Yuan Hongyan/VCG/Getty Images

The maintenance bill is coming

The bigger problem may be what happens when these ships finally come home.

Engines accumulate hours. Aircraft fly more sorties. Radars and combat systems operate continuously. Parts wear out. Repairs that might normally happen during a deployment get delayed because the ship is needed on station.

Eventually all of that work has to be done. And the Navy was already struggling with maintenance before the war. Public shipyards are overloaded. Private repair yards are stretched. Submarine maintenance has been a problem for years. Surface ships routinely spend longer in maintenance than planned.

Now we are going to add ships returning from combat operations. We should not act surprised when the backlog grows. The question is whether we do something about it.

That means putting real money into ship repair capacity. It means expanding public and private yards. It means training more welders, electricians, pipe fitters, and other skilled workers. It means using predictive maintenance and better data, so we know what is going to fail before it fails.

And it means getting serious about spare parts.

None of this is glamorous. There are no ribbon cuttings for having the right pump sitting on a warehouse shelf. But wars are often won by the side that can keep equipment operating.

Refill the magazines

Iran also reminded us that modern warfare burns through weapons quickly.

Missiles that take years to develop and months or years to produce can disappear from a ship’s magazine in minutes.

That should scare us, not because the Navy performed poorly — it performed extremely well — but because Iran is not China.

Imagine the weapons requirements of a sustained fight across thousands of miles of the Pacific against an adversary with a large navy, advanced aircraft, submarines, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and enormous industrial capacity.

The math gets uncomfortable quickly.

We should treat every weapon fired during the Iran conflict as a data point.

How quickly can we replace it?

If the answer is measured in years, we have a problem.

This is where the Pentagon and Congress need to stop treating munitions like boutique acquisition programs. We need production lines that can surge. We need long-term contracts that give manufacturers confidence to invest. We need second sources for critical components.

And we need deeper magazines.

You cannot surge missile production after the shooting starts.

Don’t become the Royal Navy

There is a historical warning here.

The British Royal Navy did not wake up one morning and suddenly stop being the world’s dominant navy.

The decline happened slowly.

Britain still had excellent ships. It still had talented sailors. It still had proud traditions. What it gradually lost was mass. The commitments remained large while the fleet became smaller. That should sound familiar.

America expects its Navy to deter China, operate in Europe, protect shipping in the Middle East, defend the homeland, reassure allies, and respond whenever something goes wrong anywhere in the world.

We cannot keep shrinking the number of ships while expanding the number of missions and pretend the math will somehow work. Eventually something gives. Iran gave us a warning. We should take it.

RELATED: How to renew American scientific research

BSIP/UIG/Getty Images

Get better

There will be a temptation after this conflict to focus almost entirely on recovery. The Navy absolutely needs to recover. But recovery cannot become retreat. This needs to be a period of brutal institutional learning.

What broke? What ran out? What took too long to repair? Which supply chains failed?

Capture those lessons and move out — don’t spend five years studying them.

Some fixes will require money. Others will require leadership. Many will require getting rid of processes and assumptions that made sense during peacetime but make no sense after experiencing sustained combat.

This should change how the Navy trains, buys weapons, maintains ships, designs the fleet, and supports families.

Most importantly, it should change the Navy’s mindset.

The service should come out of this tougher than it went in.

The choice

Every generation gets a few moments when the direction of an institution can change.

This is one of them.

Iran showed what sustained combat does to a Navy. A war with a peer competitor would ask far more. So we have a choice — slump our shoulders and talk about how difficult this is and how far behind we feel.

Or we can stop talking, learn from the last couple of years, and get better.

Fix the ships. Refill the magazines. Expand the yards.

Take care of Navy families. Demand better leadership. And expect toughness from the force.

The United States Navy is still the most capable navy in the world. The question is whether we intend to keep it that way.

Iran should not be remembered as the fight that wore down the U.S. Navy. It should be remembered as the fight that woke it up.

This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.

​Aircraft, Congress, Iran war, Pentagon, U.s. navy, Modern warfare, China, Supply chains, Maintenance, Leadership, Opinion & analysis 

Hollywood has spent years peppering films and shows with transgender cast members, but Lilly Wachowski — who identifies as transgender — isn’t reaping the benefits.

“The Matrix” co-creator, formerly known as Andy Wachowski, is now struggling to find financing for “The Hunted,” a $10 million dystopian political thriller featuring an entirely transgender cast.

“Well, if you’re excited for a brand-new all-trans movie, I’ve got terrible news for you,” BlazeTV host Stu Burguiere jokes.

“Of course, these are the Wachowski brothers who made ‘The Matrix’ movies and now they’re called, in the article, the Wachowski sisters,” he explains.

“It is ironic that the guys who made ‘The Matrix’ got their lives destroyed because of the computer. It’s really an interesting thing,” co-host Dave Landau says. “Also, the trans thing is the reason why they can’t get financing, I think.”

“So the fact that they want to do the entire cast of that is a bit strange to me,” he adds.

Dave, who’s a twin himself, points out that it’s also strange that they both became women “at the same time.”

“It feels a little forced. I’m not going to lie. A little forced,” he says.

While the all-trans cast element of the film might rub conservatives the wrong way, Stu doesn’t believe that’s why Wachowski can’t get funding.

“I don’t know what their funding levels are looking like. If they’re looking to make a $200 million ‘Matrix’-style extravaganza, probably not going to get that funded,” Stu says.

“I think the real reason why they can’t get funding for the Wachowski brothers from ‘The Matrix’ franchise is because of at least the third and fourth ‘Matrix.’ Like both of them were absolutely horrible,” he continues.

“First one’s a masterpiece. I don’t know what happened,” he adds.

Want more from Stu and Dave?

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​Dave landau, Hollywood, Lilly wachowski, Matrix movies, Stu burguiere, The hunted, Wachowski brothers, Dystopian, Transgender, Blazetv show 

At the outset of Marco Rubio’s tenure as secretary of state, his department introduced a new paradigm for U.S.-European relations: civilizational alliance.

Rubio and his aides have persistently sought to remind Europe that our relationship is based not merely on trade deals and defense agreements, but ultimately on a shared Western anthropology and history.

The real objection is not so much to any national interest but to the assertion of American national interest.

Rubio’s July 4 message declared:

[America’s] seeds were planted by the philosophers of Athens, the imperial majesty of Rome, the monks and kings of medieval Christendom — centuries of European exploration, science, faith, and restless ambition finally unleashed from every constraint on the boundless American frontier. America was the destiny of an entire civilization.

These overtures, though sometimes welcomed by European citizens bearing the brunt of civilizational decline, have been met in conventional diplomatic circles with reactions ranging from ambivalence to indignation.

European elites are loath to admit they have a civilization to maintain, and if they do, they speak of it with contempt.

Rather than face the matter head-on, the most typical response has been to accuse the U.S. of brashness and insincerity. Critics scoff that we are hypocrites for touting civilizational alliances while unabashedly pursuing America First policies. This apparent contradiction rests on three errors.

First is ignorance of the very Western tradition Americans wish to revitalize, in which duty to one’s country is second only to God. This wisdom was passed down from Cicero to Augustine to Aquinas, who taught that “just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God, so does it belong to piety, in the second place, to give worship (cultum) to one’s parents and one’s country.” The duty of patriotism stems from the gift of life we received from particular people in a particular nation.

Naturally, those who see no significance in national origin can see no duty stemming from it.

But in truth, even nations that share a common civilization are perfectly free — and indeed obliged — to be patriotic and to pursue their own interests for the sake of their citizenry.

Working to preserve a shared civilization is exactly what helps them clarify the just pursuit of interest or “interest well understood,” as Tocqueville calls it. For example, a businessman who is outmaneuvered in the market never objects to competitors seeking their own prosperity. He objects only if they cheat to get it. So too with nations. This is doubly true for the civilization that produced Aquinas and Tocqueville, Parliament and Congress.

Second, these dynamics of Western civilization are lost on contemporary Europeans because they have abdicated both individual and national sovereignty. They fear individual action apart from collective consensus. Of course, this is to misunderstand both consensus and individuals, since authentic consensus arises only from the free assent of individuals. But contribution to a consensus is far from the only sovereign power individuals hold.

RELATED: Who gets the GOP when Trump is gone?

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There are a host of matters that individuals may decide for themselves without needing permission from anyone else. The sum of these choices makes up moral character and, indeed, sovereignty itself. To circumscribe them is to destroy the possibility of the moral greatness and virtue that the West champions. As is true for individuals, so also for nations.

The nations of Europe have to a large extent surrendered their sovereignty to the EU, which acts like a nation but does not take responsibility for its actions. Those in Brussels claim merely to be following the consensus of European nations, whose leaders themselves take no responsibility and dutifully follow the decisions of the EU.

To those within a system built on a shared abdication of responsibility, the sight of Americans letting their yes be yes and their no be no is an unconscionable disturbance of global order — and, if European member states catch on, to their job security.

Third, abdication of sovereignty is not applied equally. The real objection is not so much to any national interest but to the assertion of American national interest. If Ghana or Paraguay stood up at the U.N. and cited their national interest, everyone would murmur appreciatively. Only strong nations are not supposed to seek their interests, and since the U.S. is the strongest, we are expected to support the interests of others over our own.

This moral hierarchy is one of the glaring symptoms of how much globalist institutions have been captured and perverted by radical “Third Worldist” policies.

But this critique rests on another false premise: that American national interest is inherently at odds with the welfare of others. In practice, the opposite is often true.

America might be prosperous, but we also have millions of poor people living here, so many that we spend around 25% of our considerable budget for their ostensible welfare. The U.S. is also deeply concerned with global welfare. We dismantled boondoggle institutions like USAID precisely to redirect funds from woke nonsense to real needs. Just recently, Secretary Rubio spearheaded $100 million in direct aid to the Cuban people.

Finally, another 15% of U.S. spending goes toward preserving the longest large-scale peace since the fall of Rome, enabling billions of otherwise vulnerable people to live in relative security.

So separating U.S. interest from the interests of the poor and marginalized is dodgy at best.

On a deeper level, the contention that strong nations have no legitimate self-interest is a dangerous absurdity. Yet it is embedded deep in the minds of Western elites who distrust not the self-governing individual in principle, but only those who govern themselves well. The weaker, the meaner, and the baser, the more license they grant, particularly over those who are naturally stronger.

RELATED: China is building power. America is still debating it.

Yuan Hongyan/VCG/Getty Images

This is the logic that has afforded migrant rape gangs the protection of law in Britain and outlawed objection to them. It is the logic that grants or withholds jobs and benefits based on race and victim status. It is the logic that demands the United States submit to tyrannical institutions like the International Criminal Court that could not even exist without the Pax Americana.

It is difficult to pinpoint the source of these inversions. Many have suggested they spring from a perversion of Christian charity. That may be, although I hesitate to blame even the perversion of a theological virtue. Rather, one of the seven deadly sins seems a more likely culprit: despair.

Many on the left believe that the West never offered humanity anything besides oppression and that it now offers a vast storehouse of ill-gotten gains, good only for distribution and dissolution. On a fundamental level, Western nations have no right to pursue their own interests because they have no right to exist.

America disagrees. Humanity’s best hope does not live in the grave of the West. It lives here, where the flame of Western civilization has been burning for 250 years. We intend to keep it burning, both for our own sake and for the world’s.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

​Marco rubio, National interest, Secretary of state, Western civilization, Eu, Europeans, American interests, Tocqueville, National sovereignty, Pax americana, Usaid, Opinion & analysis 

A caretaker hired to look after a 77-year-old man with dementia at a care facility in northwest Albuquerque has been arrested, according to a New Mexico prosecutor’s office.

Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman said Stephanie Paiz locked herself inside the man’s room on Friday, Aug. 14, before committing the heinous acts.

Paiz was charged with three counts of criminal sexual penetration and one count of criminal sexual contact.

An employee of the facility rushed to unlock the door and stop Paiz, according to Bregman.

The alleged abuse was captured on security cameras in the room.

Paiz was charged with three counts of criminal sexual penetration and one count of criminal sexual contact.

The president of the company that owns and manages the Ativo Senior Living facility said that Paiz had been a private caretaker hired by the family of the victim and not one of their employees.

Bregman said Paiz will stay in jail while awaiting trial.

Some studies say that one in 10 Americans older than 60 years old will experience some form of elderly abuse. Others have found only one in 24 case of abuse are reported to authorities.

RELATED: California woman arrested after police find decomposing body in plastic bags in locked closet

In one horrendous case from 2023, a 38-year-old registered sex offender named Damien Young threw a 65-year-old man through the window of a third-story building in Rochester, New York.

Young was charged with second-degree murder after the man died.

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​Dementia, Sexual assault, Elder abuse, New mexico, Crime 

Rosie O’Donnell has returned … and she didn’t bring her freshest material.

You would think her years-long sabbatical from the spotlight would have given her the time to come up with some choice zingers for her archnemesis, Donald Trump.

Jagger is 83 and looks in remarkably good shape. His rock peers? Not so much.

Instead, the best she could do was this moldy oldie: “Orange Voldemort.”

To be fair, the Queen of Not-So-Nice is also well past her sell-by date. The “A League of Her Own” star hasn’t been hot since Avril Lavigne ruled the charts. And it got even cooler last year when she fled to Ireland in mortal fear of President Donald Trump 2.0.

It’s hard to land acting gigs when you’re living thousands of miles away from La La Land.

Now, she’s back. Sort of. O’Donnell had a brief Broadway run with a one-woman show, and she’s been hosting “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” all week.

She used the ABC perch to mock President Trump, suggesting she was getting under his skin. Yes, Trump is the president of the greatest country in the world again, and O’Donnell had to leave her home fearing some make-believe threat he poses.

You know what they say, Rosie: If you can’t say something funny, don’t say nothing at all.

Midnight in Madrid

A director synonymous with New York is having a hard time making films there now.

Woody Allen’s 51st feature is set to start shooting this October in Madrid. The Oscar winner hasn’t shared much about the project, but we know that local officials are helping defray the film’s $12 million budget.

So why not the Big Apple? It’s complicated. First, Hollywood unofficially cut bait with Allen during the #MeToo movement. Suddenly, the industry took the disturbing allegations against the filmmaker seriously. He had previously been accused of molesting his daughter Dylan Farrow, but Hollywood looked the other way until it became uncomfortable to do so.

Plus, U.S. investors aren’t as keen on backing his low-budget, low-ROI stories anymore, let alone support a star with a murky past.

Then again, maybe the Jewish filmmaker is better off in Madrid, not the Big Apple. Does he really want to shoot a movie in Zohran Mamdani’s New York?

RELATED: SCOFF LIMITS: Trump-trashing ‘South Park’ somehow skipped Biden

Leon Bennett/Stephen Jaffee/Chip Somodevilla/Win McNamee/Infadel/Jim Watson/Getty Images

Just ‘Wonder’ing

Another day, another celebrity plays the race card. But does this actor have a point?

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II snagged an Emmy nomination for playing the obscure Marvel Comics hero Wonder Man in the Disney+ show of the same name. The series earned a quick second season greenlight before the Mouse House said, “Psych!” and canceled it.

Now the actor is suggesting to Vanity Fair that Marvel has a racism problem. Maybe. Sort of. Hey, he’s just asking questions.

His proof? He brought up not just his show, which co-starred Ben Kingsley and race-swapped his character from the comics, but another doomed MCU affair.

Remember the multiyear effort to reboot the “Blade” franchise, formerly featuring Wesley Snipes? The studio hired the uber-talented Mahershala Ali as the titular vampire before multiple attempts to launch the film failed. Says Abdul-Mateen:

I think the optics are obvious. If I’m a big business, if I’m Disney, if I’m Marvel, I don’t want to be attached to these optics. So it should be a priority to change that narrative and to do what it takes to responsibly change that narrative with quality stories, with quality resources.

It never hurts to play the race card in Hollywood, and you don’t have to have an open-and-shut case for it. The star ignores the hyper-successful “Black Panther” series, which will get a third installment soon. It also downplays Marvel’s attempt to have Anthony Mackie, who is black, take over for Chris Evans as Captain America.

That film, “Captain America: Brave New World,” didn’t make as much as most big MCU projects.

If this were the peak woke era, “Wonder Man” might be suddenly “uncanceled” after his comments. As is, Abdul-Mateen’s best chance for revenge is holding an Emmy trophy high on Sept. 14 …

Prayers up for Parton

Mick Jagger famously sang, “What a drag it is getting old,” on “Mother’s Little Helper.”

The irony? Jagger is 83 and looks in remarkably good shape. His rock peers? Not so much. Rod Stewart, 81, just pulled the plug on his troubled 2026 tour after receiving a coronary stent.

Lionel Richie couldn’t dance on a ceiling, or elsewhere, in the early stages of his current tour. Health issues have plagued the veteran star, now 77. And then there’s poor Frank Beard. The drummer for legendary ZZ Top just passed away at 77.

Dolly Parton is still with us, but the 80-year-old legend just took a step back from the spotlight after feeling a little “swimmy-headed.” Don’t do this to us, 2026. We’re warning you.

​Celebrity, Dolly parton, Donald trump, Entertainment, Hollywood, Jimmy kimmel live, Lifestyle, Madrid, Marvel, Mick jagger, Movies, Rosie o’donnell, Woody allen, Yahya abdulmateen ii, Toto recall 

On a recent episode of the “Steve Deace Show,” the BlazeTV host framed a stark choice facing the American right when it comes to the nation’s young men: channel their energy into constructive leadership and real solutions, or watch it keep flowing toward pure grievance and nihilism.

He frames this dichotomy by holding up two very different figures. On one side you have Zach Lahn, the Iowa Republican nominee for governor — a sixth-generation farmer and businessman who shocked the establishment by defeating a Trump-endorsed congressman in the primary and has positioned himself as a paradigm-shifting “Iowa First” candidate focused on regenerative agriculture, cost-of-living pressures, and health freedom.

On the other side is James Fishback, who was a Florida Republican candidate for governor this election cycle. Fishback lost the Republican primary to Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), but Fishback is still important to analyze as someone who has built a following among younger men through aggressive online content, “anti-Israel” rhetoric, and a style Deace dismisses as pure grift.

What happens next, he warns, will shape an entire generation and the future of the nation.

The predicament America’s young men are facing today, Deace explains, is dire.

“Here’s the current deal on the table for them, particularly if they’re white: You’re automatically a racist. You’re automatically to blame for things that happened hundreds of years before you were ever born. There’s an automatic aura of suspicion around you. Your life will be half over probably before you can afford a home,” he says.

“The likelihood you will find a wife that is not proud of the amount of men she bedded on the way to meeting you and hasn’t had an abortion or three … shrinks by the day, and you went to college to get a job that we’re probably going to give to an Indian or a Muslim,” he continues.

This unfortunate set of circumstances, Deace argues, creates a restless “energy.”

“That energy is going to find conduits. It’s going to go somewhere,” he says. “It’ll be up to us to determine which direction we’ll go.”

The “constructive channel,” Deace says, will lead to “action” that sparks positive change.

“That’s what Zach Lahn represents. That’s what I think frankly JD Vance represents. … They represent younger men who understand we are in radical need of paradigm shifting,” he explains.

On the other hand, Fishback, according to Deace, has “no credentials at all,” “couldn’t survive a background check of page one of Google search,” and has a campaign built on “obvious grift.”

“James Fishback will go away. … What you don’t know though is there’ll be another one next year and then there’ll be more — unless there’s a constructive outlet for this energy,” Deace warns.

To hear more, watch the episode above.

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​Steve deace, James fishback, Zach lahn, Blazetv show