Category: A Victory!

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Another potential ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE Anti Civil Rights ideas & "Friends" You have to be kidding, right!?!

The state’s stealthy strangling of TCW By David Keighley

IN HER role as editor of TCW, Kathy Gyngell did what British journalism has fought to do since John Wilkes and the North Briton; with leonine grit and courage she upheld freedom.

For 12 years, seven days a week, she made sure dissent was heard. She built TCW into one of the few places in Britain where the official story could still be challenged without apology. Lockdown. Vaccines. The BBC. Mass immigration. Net Zero. The degradation of childhood. The assault on the family. The collapse of policing. The cowardice of the Conservative and Labour parties. The long march of the managerial state. TCW took them on when most of the press was either asleep, captured or afraid.

That is why it had to be killed.

No minister announced the closure of TCW. No censor put a seal on Kathy’s office door. The British state is too slippery for that. It does not usually ban dissent outright. It smothers it through the pipes: advertising, mobile access, social media, search, platform rules, ‘brand safety’, ‘online safety’, ‘media literacy’ and the ever-ready smear of ‘misinformation’.

This is the new censorship. It does not argue. It obstructs. It does not defeat you in public or by debate. It makes you harder to find, harder to fund, harder to share and harder to trust. That is what happened to TCW.

The site was banned by online ad agencies. It was hit by Facebook during lockdown. Kathy was thrown off Twitter, along with vaccine-injured people whose testimony threatened the official covid narrative. The site was blocked on mobile phones for months after being caught by the British Board of Film Classification’s filtering regime. Readers trying to reach a lawful conservative website were obstructed as though they were looking for filth.

A serious daily website needs oxygen. It needs readers, advertisers, links, shares, search, mobile access, payment routes, donors and confidence. Break those routes and the publication bleeds. The state does not need to prosecute it. The platforms do not need to admit censorship. The advertisers do not need to explain themselves. Everyone hides behind process. Everyone says they are enforcing rules. Everyone claims clean hands.

Then the site dies, and the same people say, ‘Nothing to do with us.’ That is a lie.

TCW is closing as a daily site because the British state and its allies have made honest dissent increasingly impossible to sustain. The cowardice began under a Conservative government.

During covid, lawful doubt was treated as a public danger. Citizens who questioned lockdowns, masks, vaccine mandates, school closures and the destruction of livelihoods were smeared as cranks or extremists. Platforms were encouraged to police opinion. The MSM supinely obeyed.

The BBC was, as usual, complicit. Conservative ministers talked about liberty while presiding over one of the greatest assaults on free speech in modern British history.

Then the Tories put the machinery on the statute book.

The Online Safety Act was driven through under a Conservative government and received Royal Assent in October 2023. The Act passed into law on October 26, 2023, and made Ofcom responsible for implementing the new online safety regime.

It was sold as ‘protection for children’. In reality, it created a vast regulatory structure for online speech and made Ofcom the policeman of the internet. Platforms were pushed into permanent risk-avoidance. Lawful speech became a compliance problem. ‘Safety’ became the master word. Once that word rules, freedom withers. Free speech has never been ‘safe’.

This was one of the great betrayals of modern Conservatism. The party that should have defended liberty built the legal runway for censorship. It handed power to Ofcom, trained platforms to fear liability, and wrapped the whole operation in the language of harm prevention.

The result was predictable. Companies do not defend free speech when regulators are watching. They protect themselves. They over-remove, over-block, over-filter and over-comply.

That is how dissent gets buried.

The same Act reinforced Ofcom’s media literacy role. That matters. Media literacy sounds harmless. It is not harmless when the regulator, the Government, public broadcasters and tech platforms are all marching in the same direction. It becomes the polite name for teaching the public which sources to trust and which to distrust.

This is the bridge to the next phase. First the state regulates platforms in the name of safety. Then it works with broadcasters, tech companies, charities and public bodies to shape what citizens are taught to regard as reliable. Then it proposes to promote ‘trusted news’ above rival voices.

That is the censorship escalator. Labour is now riding it with enthusiasm.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s 2026-2029 Media Literacy Action Plan, A Safe, Informed Digital Nation, dresses control in the language of confidence, safety, critical thinking and resilience. Published on March 16, 2026, it sets out the steps departments across government are taking to strengthen media literacy over the next three years, including helping people ‘think critically about online content’ and ‘find trustworthy information’. The state wants to shape how citizens consume information online. It says it wants people to find trustworthy information. That sounds innocent until you ask the only question that matters: trustworthy according to whom?

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has gone further. Its Green Paper, Watch this space: a new strategic direction for UK media, proposes a new media literacy duty for public service media. Published on June 23, 2026, it sets out a new strategic direction for Government media policy and sits alongside plans to improve access to ‘reliable news sources’ online. The BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and others would not merely produce programmes. They would help train the public in how to judge information.

That means the same broadcasters whose failures TCW exposed would be enlisted as guardians of public understanding.

The Government is also considering forcing platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok to give greater prominence to ‘trusted news’ providers, including the BBC, ITV and Channel 4. Reuters reported on June 22, 2026, that the proposal would require social media platforms to prioritise content from trusted news providers as part of the fight against misinformation. That proposal tells us exactly where this is going. The state will bless approved sources. Platforms will push them. Rival voices will be downgraded, distrusted or buried.

Ofcom’s little-known Making Sense of Media programme fits into the same scheme. Ofcom wants media literacy to become ‘everyone’s business’. It works with broadcasters, platforms, charities, local bodies and other organisations with public reach. It presents this as education. In reality it helps build a national information network in which the state, the regulator, public broadcasters, tech companies and approved civil society all pull in the same direction.

Do not be fooled by the language. This is not about helping vulnerable people spot email scams. It is about power.

The state wants to decide which sources are trusted. It wants the BBC and other approved broadcasters to instruct the public in how to judge information. It wants platforms to promote the right voices. It wants regulators to organise the field. It wants dissent managed before it becomes politically dangerous to their interests.

‘Misinformation’ is the weapon.

During covid, that word was used to silence questions which later proved legitimate. On lockdown, vaccine harms, school closures, masks, mandates, excess deaths and the origins of the virus, dissenters were attacked before the evidence was in. The same word is now used against those who challenge Net Zero, illegal immigration, gender ideology, two-tier policing, grooming gangs, Islamism, the BBC and the failures of the British state.

Call something misinformation and the work is half done. Advertisers panic. Platforms throttle. Donors hesitate. Investors vanish. Readers are warned off. A lawful opinion becomes a reputational hazard.

TCW lived through this before the system was fully formed. It can now be seen as a test case in practical censorship. It showed how a lawful dissenting publication can be worn down without ever being formally banned.

The Conservative government built the first serious machinery. Labour is now putting a sharper blade on it. This is why TCW’s closure matters. It is not just the end of a website. It is a warning about Britain.

A country with a free press does not need the state to define trusted news. A free people do not need Ofcom, DSIT, DCMS, the BBC, Google and Meta to teach them how to think. A democracy does not protect itself by privileging approved voices and starving the rest.

Kathy Gyngell and TCW did more for public debate than half the subsidised, self-regarding, award-winning media class put together. They kept the argument alive when argument itself was being recast as harm.

For 12 years, Kathy kept open a space where writers could say what the respectable press would not say. She did not have a wealthy institution behind her. She did not enjoy the protection given to fashionable magazines of approved dissent. She did not flatter the establishment. She did not launder conservative defeat as sophistication. She did not pretend that Britain’s governing class had merely made a few mistakes. She saw the rot and published those willing to name it.

That is why readers trusted TCW. It did not ask permission. It did not trim its sails to please donors. It did not become the safe, neutered, decorative conservatism the establishment can tolerate. It published through smears, bans, blocks, abuse, financial strain and institutional contempt.

The closure of TCW as a daily site should shame every politician who claims to care about free speech. It should shame Conservative MPs who cheered or tolerated the Online Safety Act. It should shame ministers who mouthed support for liberty while online dissent was being throttled. It should shame the broadcasters who now expect to be treated as ‘trusted news’ while they helped create the climate in which dissenting outlets were cast as dangerous.

The fight will continue on Substack. The archive will remain. The network will endure. But do not soften the meaning of this moment.

A heroine of free speech has been forced to retreat from a platform she built by steely resolve and courage because Britain’s censorship state has made the cost of dissent too high.

TCW was not defeated. It was starved of oxygen by people who could not answer it.

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Dear Grumpy Advice on Teaching in Today's Classroom You have to be kidding, right!?!

The Germans sure made some weird looking planes

A Focke Wulf Fw 189 “Owl”

The eyes of the German Army on the Russian front.

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All About Guns You have to be kidding, right!?!

300 h&h mag but it’s 7mm and long?

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A Victory! This great Nation & Its People War

‘We Fight, Get Beat, Rise, and Fight Again’: The Story of How Americans Won Our Freedom by David Stewart

brandywine-wiki
David Stewart

 

Throughout our history, Americans have repeatedly beaten long odds, inspiring generations by accomplishing the impossible.

American military history in particular offers countless examples of men standing firm against overwhelming enemies, triumphing when all logic tells us they should fail. We as a nation have largely forgotten too many of our heroes—most of us know nothing of Nicholas Biddle, Dan Daly, Littleton Waller, or Philip Kulbes, among many others.

These great men deserve to be remembered, and foremost among them stands Major-General Nathanael Greene, a little-remembered leader of the American Revolution.

Greene, always outnumbered and continually out of supply, spent a year fighting General Cornwallis and lost every battle. But every American loss, carefully planned and managed, drained the British of irreplaceable men and materiel—a strategy Greene summarized as “We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again”—and ultimately forced Cornwallis to retreat to Yorktown.

By the summer of 1780, the Americans faced a very bleak military situation. The British held New York, Savannah, and Charleston. Major-General Sir Henry Clinton had just invaded South Carolina, quickly capturing Georgetown, Cheraw, Camden, Ninety-Six, and Augusta, and defeating the Continentals at Waxhaws. And in the three years since Saratoga, the American army had not defeated British Regulars in any major battles.

In mid-August 1780, Major-General Charles Cornwallis sealed British dominance in the South with his crushing victory at the Battle of Camden. In this battle, 1,500 British Regulars and 600 Loyalist militia defeated a 4,000 man Continental army commanded by Major-General Horatio Gates, the hero of Saratoga.

The Americans lost at least 240 killed, another 700 seriously wounded, hundreds of deserters, and lost a further thousand as prisoners, as well losing all their artillery, wagons, baggage, and horses. Washington relieved Gates of command, appointing Major-General Nathanael Greene to command the remnants of the American army in the Southern theater.

Engraving of a scene from the Battle of Camden, during the Revolutionary War, inAugust 1780. From a painting by Alonzo Chappel. (PhotoQuest/Getty Images)

Washington had reinforcements marching to join Greene and the latter, recognizing he could not supply the few men he had, much less a larger body, made a bold move—he dispatched one-third of his army, commanded by Brigadier-General Daniel Morgan, to the southwest while Greene led the rest of the army to the southeast.
Most of his contemporaries, both British and American, saw this decision as a major blunder—conventional military thinking warns never to divide your forces in the face of a numerically superior enemy.

Greene made this decision in part to relieve his own supply crisis. Though supplies might be on the way, it would be weeks before relief would arrive in meaningful volume, and the Americans had already exhausted all the locally available resources—they had to move on.

By separating his force and keeping them in motion, Greene believed his two smaller forces might find enough food to sustain them day-by-day because they’d be making much smaller demands on the areas through which they marched.

Painting of Nathanael Greene (August 7, 1742 – June 19, 1786) by Charles Willson Peale. (Bildagentur-online/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

But Greene chose to divide his army not simply to alleviate his own supply problems, but to exacerbate supply problems for Cornwallis. By dividing his command into two very small forces, Greene believed each could move far more quickly than the larger British army, and thus both of his small groups could stay ahead of any pursuing British force.

If Cornwallis over-confidently divided his own army to chase both American forces, Greene would have the two elements of his army draw the British units ever further apart, extending Cornwallis’ supply lines through the hostile Carolina backcountry, where Patriot militias could continually harass British supply convoys, and Greene’s own forces would clear the area of all local supplies.

If Cornwallis moved his entire force after either element of Greene’s divided army, the pursued wing would simply out-run the British while the other wing would devastate the long British supply lines.

Greene’s plan worked to perfection. On December 21, 1780, Morgan left Greene’s army at Charlotte, moving 6,000 men to the southwest. Two weeks later, on January 2, 1781, Cornwallis divided his command, dispatching Lieutenant-Colonel Banastre Tarleton to pursue Morgan while he shadowed Greene.

Over the next two weeks, Morgan repeatedly withdrew, always keeping rivers between his men and the pursuing British and drawing Tarleton ever further from Cornwallis. On January 17, Morgan decided to engage the British at Hannah’s Cowpens and destroyed Tarleton’s command.

An engraving depicting American military officer William Washington and British military officer Banastre Tarleton engaged in a sword fight, both on horseback, on the Green River Road during the Battle of Cowpens, in the American Revolutionary War, at Cowpens, South Carolina, January 17, 1781. (Kean Collection/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

An engraving depicting the Battle of Cowpens on January 17, 1781, during the American Revolutionary War. (Prisma/UIG/Getty Images)

Cornwallis turned what remained of his command west, racing to catch and destroy Morgan before Greene could intervene. The British burned their own wagons to speed their movement, but to no avail. Greene and Morgan re-united and withdrew into North Carolina, drawing Cornwallis ever further from his base of supplies.

When Cornwallis followed the Americans into North Carolina, Greene once again divided his force, sending Colonel Otho Williams to harass the British, who now suffered from ever-increasing logistical problems. On February 22, facing critical supply problems, Cornwallis abandoned his pursuit and began again marching south towards British-controlled territories.

Greene responded by also marching south, drawing close enough to tempt Cornwallis into battle. On March 15, 1781, Cornwallis rose to the challenge, attacking the Americans at Guilford Courthouse.

The British won a tactical victory, but lost men and supplies they could not replace. For the next few weeks, Greene shadowed Cornwallis’ army at a safe distance, threatening the fragile British supply lines.

He lost more than a dozen battles as he drew the British out of the Carolinas, but weakened his enemies with every encounter, a strategy Greene summarized when we wrote, “We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again.”

By late April 1781, Cornwallis led his army out of the Carolinas on an urgent march north towards Yorktown, where he hoped finally to re-supply his battered army. And, as I suspect you know, Washington and de la Fayette trapped Cornwallis at Yorktown, where his lack of supplies finally compelled Cornwallis to surrender his army.

“Surrender of Lord Cornwallis” painting by John Trumbull depicting the surrender of the British army Cornwallis’ command at Yorktown, Virginia, on October 19, 1781, to the American and French forces under the command of George Washington.

American armies actually lost most of the major engagements of the Revolutionary War—Bunker Hill, Quebec, Brooklyn, Kip’s Bay, White Plains, Germantown, Brandywine, Savannah, Charleston, and more.

But men like Nathanael Greene illustrate why the Americans ultimately succeeded, despite repeated failures. He recognized his central weakness—he commanded a small army constantly struggling to supply itself—and turned that weakness into a decisive strength.

Greene’s dogged resilience typified the men who won the Revolution, in the process forging the new nation.

David Stewart currently serves as a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Military History and Strategy at Hillsdale College, where he has taught since 1993. He received his Ph.D. from Ohio State and has published on a variety of topics relating to eighteenth-century military history.

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You have to be kidding, right!?!

The Navy’s Most Useless Ships Hit a New Low

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All About Guns Anti Civil Rights ideas & "Friends" Gun Fearing Wussies You have to be kidding, right!?!

Politician Wants America Gun-Free Like Japan

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The Great Pyramids as seen from a nearby Pizza Hut. Not sure what this means, but it must be profound.

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A Victory! Well I thought it was funny!

WWII Marines vs Criminals – The Battle of Alcatraz

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A Victory! This great Nation & Its People

What a Stud!

May 15, 1963.

Astronaut Gordon Cooper climbed into a capsule barely larger than a phone booth and launched into space aboard Faith 7.

The mission was simple on paper:

Orbit Earth 22 times.
Stay in space for a full day.
Come home alive.

For most of the flight, everything worked perfectly.

Then, on the 19th orbit, the warning lights came on.

First, a faulty sensor falsely reported reentry.

Then the electrical system failed.

One by one, the automated controls died.

Guidance system: dead.
Orientation system: dead.
Reentry calculations: dead.

At 165 miles above Earth, Gordon Cooper suddenly had no functioning instruments to bring him home.

And reentry is unforgiving.

Too shallow, and the capsule skips off the atmosphere into space forever.

Too steep, and friction turns it into a fireball.

The difference between life and death was fractions of a degree.

Mission Control could only watch.

So Cooper became the computer.

He drew reference marks on the capsule window with a pen.

He stared at the stars he had memorized before launch and used them to orient the spacecraft by eye.

He strapped a wristwatch to his arm and timed everything manually.

Then he did the math in his head.

No autopilot.
No navigation system.
No backup computer.

Just a man, a watch, and the stars.

At exactly the right second, Cooper fired the retrorockets manually.

The capsule dropped into Earth’s atmosphere.

For several minutes, communication vanished as plasma wrapped the spacecraft in fire.

Nobody on Earth could contact him.

Then the parachutes opened.

Faith 7 splashed down just 4.4 miles from the recovery ship USS Kearsarge — the most accurate splashdown of the entire Mercury program.

Later, Cooper described it simply:

“I used my wristwatch for time, my eyeballs out the window for attitude.”

That’s it.

In one of the most dangerous moments in early spaceflight history, a human being outperformed the machines.

We live in a world obsessed with automation and software.

But Gordon Cooper’s flight is a reminder that when everything breaks, the final backup system is still the human mind.

Calm under pressure.
Thinking clearly.
Making the call when nobody else can.

It was true in 1963.

It still is.

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Allies Well I thought it was funny! You have to be kidding, right!?!

Confessions of a Library Troll Med School Fart Stories By Will Dabbs, MD

Libraries are typically considered to be fairly civilized, quiet spaces conducive to learning.
However, that is not always the case. Photo by Carol Highsmith.

Most folks reading this are likely grown-ups. We have jobs, mortgages, families and responsibilities. However, for guys at least, no matter your station or means, little is more reliably entertaining than a good fart story.

There I was, a second-year medical student. For the previous year and change, I had functionally lived in the library. I should have taken my mail there. In exchange for the absurd amount of time I had logged in that accursed place, I developed some super friendships and had been privy to some genuinely bizarre goings-on. One of the more memorable was a truly gripping tale of urban survival.

Cultural mores are regional. What might be socially appropriate in one part of the world is breathtakingly offensive elsewhere. Our hero in this case was a foreign student whose idea of what was acceptable behavior in public obviously differed somewhat from our own.

This is where I went to medical school. In addition to a great many radical experiences,
I was also once nearly farted to death by a foreign student in the school library.

The Guy

I was sitting peacefully with a half dozen fellow denizens in the library’s central upstairs study zone, my head buried in a pathology text, when the hapless villain strolled by. As might we all, I looked up, nodded, and smiled. These things I did without conscious thought.

Without preamble, this vile, rotten dude responded by ejecting the most earth-shattering fart it has ever been my displeasure to survey. Witnesses to the event later attested that they observed books falling from shelves and overhead lights flickering in response to the deafening ejection. In retrospect, it was a miracle no one was killed.

The Thing

Flatus is the release of gas — predominantly methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and hydrogen sulfide — from the gastrointestinal tract. This gas is a byproduct of the chemical and enzymatic breakdown of our food. The typical adult human produces between 500 and 2000 milliliters of the rancid stuff per day. It is the hydrogen sulfide that produces the distinctive objectionable odor.

Given the volume and resonance of the discharge, I fully expected it to have blown a hole in his pants. Discreetly covering his backside with a sheaf of papers, Flatulence Man strolled blissfully on. He unleashed one more ground-shaking monster before calmly selecting a seat nearby. He then began to dig out his books nonchalantly. Our eyes burned, and our ears rang, yet this dude acted as if nothing of significance had occurred.

The Aftermath

For one pregnant trice, all remained still and peaceful. Not one sound broke the utter silence of the scene. Then, like that awesome moment during the demolition of a towering building between when the charges go off and the massive structure begins to topple, I gradually raised my eyes. There, seated directly across from me and now adjacent to the gentleman with terminal gas, sat my classmate.

His eyes, watering uncontrollably, met mine. I bit hard into my tongue, nearly drawing blood before I succumbed to the inevitable. We both then unleashed an uncontrolled torrent of pitifully-suppressed laughter. Mine felt as though it escaped through my nose and ears.

I stood up and quickly made my way to a quiet spot in the far corner of the library, now laughing so hard I thought my eyes might bleed.

My buddy met me moments later, and we both savored the hilarity of the experience. We replayed the details verbally so as to ensure that, should one of us not live through the evening, at least the epic story might survive. When we finally had regained some semblance of decorum, we purposefully made our way back to our seats.

No sooner had we resumed our places did the flatulent gentleman now retrieve one of those nasal suction devices used on congested infants and go to work zealously purging his sinuses.

The resulting snorking sound very nearly loosened the ceiling tiles. I looked on in amazement as my buddy veritably leaped from his seat, apparently fearing that some of the voluminous nasal discharge might inadvertently affix itself to his person.

All decorum was now hopelessly lost. My prospects for a profitable evening of study had perished along with it. I gathered my gear and made my way home, sincerely but fruitlessly wishing the rest of my library pals productive scholarship.

Ruminations

I don’t recall having seen the flatulent gentleman with the atypical personal hygiene habits again stalking the halls of the library after that fateful evening, his potentially lethal bowels ever ready to strike.

We all felt his scholarly pursuits might be best exercised in a better-ventilated area. Regardless, I sincerely expect to see his G.I. tract on display in a museum someday, either as a revolutionary new source of natural energy or a devastatingly effective chemical weapon system.

I think the school children of tomorrow should be able to appreciate such a remarkable medical oddity, albeit in a safe and controlled environment.

Regardless, I enjoy a certain deep and abiding kinship with Walt, Krista, Scotty, and the other survivors of that momentous evening.

Like survivors of an air crash, earthquake victims, or combat-hardened Navy SEALs, I feel that we have, by triumphing in the face of this unspeakable crucible, developed a bond that transcends the boundaries of most mortal experience.

Should I be so fortunate as to bump into one of these fellow physicians 30 years hence at some professional gathering or academic symposium, we will no doubt be reduced to tears over the retelling of that timeless evening when the mysterious stranger with the hyperactive bowels rendered the entire med school library uninhabitable.