People From Minneapolis

"Our military men and women take an oath that is very similar to the oaths taken by every branch of government and every civil servant. The oath is as follows . . ."

"FOX News alert: I am pro-Trump. Everybody knew that before I joined the DC National Guard, and didn’t have a problem with it. In fact, most of my fellow soldiers—even in DC—felt the same way. Frankly, so did most of the military—especially combat arms. President Trump was, and is, beloved by warfighters. He funded them, untied their hands, didn’t use them unnecessarily, and let them win."

"Jus ad bellum, established in the UN Charter after World War II, lays out the conditions under which states may resort to war. It’s how you go to war justly. Once the firing starts, modern countries are directed to follow the “laws of war,” referred to as Jus in bello. This is how you fight war justly. It was supposed to be a global remedy—a rulebook—to end senseless violence."

"History regards the Greatest Generation not for their poetry, artistic endeavors, or their culinary brilliance. That title was bestowed because they were two-time world war champions. They were great because they understood they were at war and that the consequence for losing the war was annihilation. They killed the enemy. Sometimes in ways that would offend modern sensibilities. Two nuclear bombs ended a war that could have dragged on for years, costing millions more American lives. They won. Who cares."

"You don’t need any more explanations of why our enemies hate us. We can all turn on MSNBC if we want to hear that. We need more reminders that America is good, young American men can be brave, and that there’s a damn good reason why people flee their shithole countries to reach our shores."

"Godlessness ends great nations. The one thing we can all do is get on our knees and pray"

"Unlike our enemies, we don’t fight because we hate what’s in front of us, we fight because we love what’s behind us."

"Using my platform to share my Christian faith is the most valuable use of my time and resources."

"To state it bluntly, the realities of warfare—especially for those of us who have seen it firsthand—supersede the necessity to obey illegal commands that manifest in weakening the force and getting troops killed. This understanding, which requires fidelity to the Constitution, military values, and actual readiness, is what should keep our soldiers from the manipulations of leaders who want to use the military for their own social experiments. Every soldier swears an oath to the Constitution, nothing else, and should never bend a knee to a politician, a party, or a philosophy—let alone one that is an enemy to that very same Constitution."

"World War I was so brutal, so unabashed, there was a clamoring for some formally imposed restrictions on what countries could do to each other. The Geneva Conventions became a Jus in bello international law of sorts. Limiting the barbarity of conflict between nations. Guaranteeing that a military force would wear a uniform. Honor a chain of command. The conventions post–World War I established what would happen if you surrendered on the battlefield. The conventions signed at Geneva were to make humane what was never thought of to be humane: warfare."

"Why should America, the European “emergency contact number” for the past century, listen to self-righteous and impotent nations asking us to honor outdated and one-sided defense arrangements they no longer live up to? Maybe if NATO countries actually ponied up for their own defense—but they don’t. They just yell about the rules while gutting their militaries and yelling at America for help."

"For decades, the United States opposed any international-law presumption that “persons or objects in combat zones are civilians.” Especially in modern times, the battlefield is complex—and the enemy uses that against us. They never want to fight us toe to toe; civilians are central to their strategy."

"We all come at the subject of education- of "school"- with our own backgrounds. The Left calls this concept "implicit bias." They cynically apply it to race and gender, but it's very true when it comes to schooling. The goal of this book has been to challenge our long-held assumptions- our biases- about what we think is good for kids, and good for this country."

"But it's not just schools. Do yourself a favor and visit your local Barnes & Noble bookstore. Check out the kids section, and notice what books are front and center. The last time I visited mine, of the forty children's books displayed, at least thirty were progressive, agenda-driven books. This bookstore was not in a "liberal" community- this was in a conservative area. Books by or about Michelle Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Kamala Harris were all front and center. There was A Is for Activist and multiple books about George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. Gender and sexuality were well represented, not to be outdone by at least five books about climate change and the environment. It is nearly impossible, without really digging, to find books that contain patriotic, Christian, or conservative themes."

"Just doing what we are doing, and hoping our kids turn out "just fine," is not a strategy. I know many good families, good parents, who believe that living in a good neighborhood, with other good families, and going to "good schools" will insulate their kids. Instead, the story unfolds otherwise. The school tells students that their parents' beliefs are backward; they are young and naive if they hold traditional values, it's much easier to follow the crowd, social media reinforces every "woke" message, Hollywood does the same, and, voila, you have a high school graduate you don't recognize. Or, just as bad, a falsely fortified graduate who heads off to college and is completely consumed by the next level of "woke" educational and social pressure. If I had a dollar for every parent or grandparent who lamented as much to me during my travels, I would be a very rich man."

"On 9/11 I was a college student. Those attacks on New York City, the Pentagon, and in the skies reoriented the trajectory of my life- and the lives of an entire generation."

"In an odd way, this rise of ISIS, followed by their defeat, crystallized even further the need to tell the long, winding, conflicted, and utterly courageous stories of the men who have been fighting since 9/11. Did we win? Did we lose? Was it worth it? The legacy of warriors is worthy of elevation- a reflection of what we should really value."

"By their nature, these veterans are straight talkers. And they have strong, informed opinions. In the company of one another, keeping it in the family, they pull no punches. They share their stories for the benefit, as well as yours. They share a desire to step beyond the boundaries of their immediate military families- to include you. Each of the chapters in this book highlights an individual modern warrior who has agreed to share experiences and insights. The good, the bad, the weird, the beautiful, the ugly- the real story in their own words, from the interviews I conducted with them. I only interject as necessary for clarity and to make transitions smoother."

"As soon as I found classical Christian education, I realized how little I knew. I am a graduate of two of the most "prestigious" universities in America- Princeton and Harvard- yet I've never read most of the classics. Homer or Virgil, Plato or Aristotle? I've read next to nothing of them in school. I don't know a word of Latin or Greek, let alone really understanding the histories of Rome and Greece. I never had my faith infused into my education; it was always just an accessory. I can't properly diagram a single sentence, and couldn't tell you the difference between a verb and an adverb. I write like I speak. It just is what it is. We were all failed by our government schools, and we didn't even know it."

"I’ve got a bunch of kids and realize the only thing that matters is introducing them to Jesus Christ."

"I'm privileged to call many of these warriors friends. These are great Americans. They are heroes- even if they reject that title. Working on this venture with them has made me even more proud to be an American- which I didn't know was possible. These men and women are true patriots and true warriors. Like those before them, some may have joined the military for a cause or for the college money, but that soon became secondary to the brotherhood of war. When the bullets start flying, there are no Republicans or Democrats, whites or blacks- only brothers, the greatest of our men and women. This book is dedicated to everyone who has answered America's call. Who put it all on the line- and especially those who gave the ultimate sacrifice on the altar of freedom. We never, ever forget them. Warriors forever, in life and death. May their stories live forever."

"It was out of all these moments that the idea for Modern Warriors rose. While politicians and media can whitewash a conflict, the legacy always remains for those who fought there. The warriors who left their families, friends, and comfort to do the dirty work of their country. We need to tell those stories. And then veterans come home, with hopes and dreams- and scars of war. They struggle to transition to civilian life; many are wounded (seen and unseen); many wrestle with post-traumatic stress; suicide was taking more lives than the battlefield ever did. We cannot allow ourselves to look away, to shrug, and say that's just the way it is."

"If the world cannot agree on principles of honor or morality, how can we ever prescribe global terms of fair war? Land warfare, historically understood, is defined by how many people you can slaughter in one space, at one time—limiting the will and capacity of your enemy to fight. (Same goes for bombing, missiles, and drone strikes; just a different delivery mechanism.) War will never be anything but hell as long as human nature stays deceptive, vengeful, and angry. Much to the chagrin of utopians and progressives, human nature has not changed. And will not change. We are flawed. We are sinful. Men will always fight other men."

"During this project, I've visited many classical Christian schools as well. Some small, some large. Some urban, others rural. All of them are bursting at the seams and full of life. What strikes you when you enter them is how much more simple- or classic- they are aesthetically. The hallways and classrooms are simple, walls adorned with Bible verses, portraits of the founding fathers, cursive writing, and the American flag. If you enter a public school classroom, you are immediately hit with the opposite- bright colors and flowery slogans. At first the contrast seems stark, but it's intentional. The "beauty" in classical Christian schools is the knowledge and love of learning fostered in the classroom. The energy is not on the walls, but instead in the mission and the kids. It's the opposite of government schools, which have colorful walls and fancy technology, but an empty mission."

"I inoculate myself. Germs are not a real thing. I can't see them, therefore they're not real."

"This book is dedicated to the real 1 percent: the warriors- past, present and future- who answered freedom's call."

"About a bombing raid against Iran:"

"Said during a Senate hearing before becoming Secretary of Defense:"

"So this is the biggest deployment of my life, and there won't be a drop of alcohol on my lips while I'm doing it."

"If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?! Who cares what other countries think. The question we have to ask ourselves is, if we are forced to fight, are we going to fight to win? Or will we fight to make leftists feel good—which means not wining [sic] and fighting forever."

"The same thing goes for elite private schools, and many Catholic schools. Social justice has become the gospel for most parochial schools in our country. It's no better than government schools; in fact, in some ways it's worse. Government schools are silent on faith, but many religious schools are self-loathing- apologizing for our faith and our history. No matter the school, I know something for certain: two or three hours of "church" each week is not sufficient to counteract forty hours (or more) of social justice indoctrination. Following the crowd = enabling the enemy. Or, as the Left often puts it, status quo = complicit."

"Should we follow the Geneva Conventions? What if we treated the enemy the way they treated us? Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism? Hey, Al Qaeda: If you surrender, we might spare your life. If you do not, we will rip your arms off and feed them to hogs. Makes me wonder, in 2024—if you want to win—how can anyone write universal rules about killing other people in open conflict? Especially against enemies who fight like savages, disregarding human life in every single instance. Maybe, instead, we are just fighting with one hand behind our back—and the enemy knows it."

"We've heard it before: get married, have lots of kids, and raise them in Christian homes. To that I add this: never let them set foot in progressive government schools. Break the cycle! Instead, join a movement- an insurgency- that contributes to something that will outlast your life. In an upside-down world, classical Christian education is the only comprehensive educational model that can restore our Western Christian Paideia, and give our kids at least a fighting chance to save America and Christendom. Join the insurgency! And then spread the word."

"Without the grace of Jesus Christ, and of many others, I would not be here today. Our kids need Christ. We all need Christ. Without a grace-filled life with conviction, children cannot thrive- something I desperately want for my kids. The church, the school, and the family must be dedicated to the reality of God's grace alone, and each child's faith alone. The call to discipleship begins with faith, but this is where classical Christian education picks up. That faith can be made stronger when wisdom and virtue are cultivated."

"I am a Chinese American actor and there was nothing for me, and how can you take that slap in the face back and forth each year? Being from Minnesota, I’m a fighter, you know. I was an artist and wanted something more because it’s a lifetime of work. You just don’t want to get a paycheck to become a cliché person."

"We are a consumer society, and the danger of being a consumer society is that we begin to define our walk with God, or our Christianity, in terms of what we consume rather than what we do. The danger is that we can get to a place where our faith is made up of consuming faith (not living it). If someone asks you, “Are you Catholic,” and you respond, “Yes. I go to Bible study. I watch EWTN, I listen to Catholic radio, I’m always on the Catholic news sites …” that has nothing to do with being a disciple. It can be part of it, but I think right now there’s a need to go from theory and understanding to action, and to relationship. If we busy ourselves so much with the consumption of the Faith, we can trick ourselves and our faith becomes a hobby."

"It’s great to read the Bible. What we need to do as parents and grandparents is we need to build a culture of Scripture for our children, evangelicals and fundamentalists and non-denominational Christians all do that intuitively because that’s all they have in terms of the sacramental, is the Scripture. We do have the living word of God, Jesus and the Eucharist. I think that building a culture of Bible reading and Bible study and meditation, lectio divina, is something that is critically important."

"Since the first century, the Church has addressed the moral evil of abortion and the killing of a defenseless baby in the womb. People who are casual about the sin of abortion and who choose to view it as a political issue rather than the serious moral issue that it is are guilty of violating the Fifth Commandment. You cannot be "pro-choice" (pro-abortion) and remain a Catholic in good standing. That's why the Church asks those who maintain this position not to receive holy Communion. We are not being mean or judgmental, we are simply acknowledging the fact that such a stance is objectively and seriously sinful and is radically inconsistent with the Christian way of life."

"The church, through the bishops, must teach the Gospel. I have the duty to teach about human life and dignity, marriage and family, war and peace, the needs of the poor and the demands of justice. As we learned during the civil rights struggle, we have a moral responsibility to state the truth about the dignity of every human being regardless of race. It doesn’t matter whether a particular politician or a candidate for office agrees with us or not. The same is true today."

"We must all – all of us – work diligently to revitalize out sacred liturgical worship, especially through more frequent and widespread celebrations of the Traditional Latin Mass. We need the mighty sustenance of the older rites, which we crafted in tougher times and polished like treasured jewels for centuries and lovingly handed down by forebears to their children who knew, as life had taught them, that hard times were ahead."

"In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon makes two moves with respect to civil society. First, he locates its genuine manifestation in Europe—the motherland. Then, with respect to the colony, he locates it only in the zone of the settler. This second move is vital for our understanding of black positionality in America and for understanding the, at best, limitations of radical social movements in America. For if we are to follow Fanon’s analysis and the gestures toward this understanding in some of the work of imprisoned intellectuals, then we have to come to grips with the fact that, for black people, civil society itself—rather than its abuses or shortcomings—is a state of emergency."

"We begin to see how Marxism suffers from a kind of conceptual anxiety. There is a desire for socialism on the other side of crisis, a society that does away not with the category of worker but with the imposition that workers suffer under the approach of variable capital. In other words, the mark of its conceptual anxiety is in its desire to democratize work and thus help to keep in place and ensure the coherence of Reformation and Enlightenment foundational values of productivity and progress. This scenario crowds out other postrevolutionary possibilities—that is, idleness."

"Capital was kick-started by the rape of the African continent, a phenomenon that is central to neither Gramsci nor Marx. ... Capital was kick-started by approaching a particular body (a black body) with direct relations of force, not by approaching a white body with variable capital. Thus, one could say that slavery is closer to capital’s primal desire than is exploitation. It is a relation of terror as opposed to a relation of hegemony. Second, today, late capital is imposing a renaissance of this original desire, the direct relation of force, the despotism of the unwaged relation. This renaissance of slavery—that is, the reconfiguration of the prison-industrial complex—has once again as its structuring metaphor and primary target the black body."

"The black subject reveals the inability of social movements grounded in Gramscian discourse to think of white supremacy (rather than capitalism) as the base and thereby calls into question their claim to elaborate a comprehensive and decisive antagonism. Stated another way, Gramscian discourse and coalition politics are indeed able to imagine the subject that transforms itself into a mass of antagonistic identity formations—formations that can precipitate a crisis in wage slavery, exploitation, and hegemony—but they are asleep at the wheel when asked to provide enabling antagonisms toward unwaged slavery, despotism, and terror."

"Whiteness, then—and, by extension, civil society cannot be solely “represented” as some monumentalized coherence of phallic signifiers but must first be understood as a social formation of contemporaries who do not magnetize bullets. This is the essence of their construction through an asignifying absence; their signifying presence is manifested by the fact that they are, if only by default, deputized against those who do magnetize bullets. In short, white people are not simply “protected” by the police. They are—in their very corporeality—the police."

"The worker calls into question the legitimacy of productive practices, while the slave calls into question the legitimacy of productivity itself."

"He was entering the national political picture for the first time, pleading eloquently for a national Farmer-Labor Party. There were little lines around his eyes that afternoon and he looked older somehow. He spoke effectively in the evening, but without the thunder and lightning that used to bring the most bitten audiences of independent farmers to their feet as a single man. After the meeting a few of us took him to a late show, trying to cheer him up, he looked so tired. At the table there, or dancing, he was conspicuous. People didn't know who he was but they sensed that he was "somebody." For even then with fatal sickness creeping over him, he radiated a graceful power, a magnetic fellowship that was irresistible. There were no tables when we came in—but the waiter took a look at Floyd and found one. He looked about him slowly, obviously a stranger here, yet at home. And people who saw him that night must have wished, as we were wishing, that they could see him again soon. Unlike us, though, they could not have been aware that this was but a breath-taking before an important engagement, a rest after a very minor skirmish, another pause before a battle in which he was bound to play a leading, if not decisive, role. And today that battle is nearer than before. The forces are gathering, now deflected by the false prophets, now rallied, now re-assembling where the rank and file sense the worthiness of the issue and a glorious outcome; still unprepared, now confident, now hesitating, ready. But Floyd Olson is dead."

"Floyd Olson died on the threshold to greater things. A seat in the United States Senate was just a step away. The Presidency of the United States was a possibility. In the event that he had achieved either, history would have recorded him, we believe, as among the great Americans. The idealistic policies he advanced will be accepted as commonplace in the next 10 years. The cause of progress and liberalism has received a heavy blow in his death. There are other leaders, perhaps, who saw as he saw. There are advanced thinkers, no doubt, who carry on from the point where Floyd Olson, because of his tragic death, left off. We know of none, however, who has the Olson combination of brains, humanity, personality, and energy—a combination necessary to the accomplishment of radical and essential changes in a society shown, during the past generation, to be sadly out of gear."

"At his funeral, tens of thousands gathered for the services in the Minneapolis Auditorium—the largest and most impressive funeral which Minnesota had ever given a man in either public or private life. Two hundred thousand people lined the streets and followed the hearse to the grave. The rich and poor alike gathered—the poor to pay their last tribute to their friend and champion; the rich to pay their respects to a man who played the game hard but fair. A great American had passed on. Thus fate snatched this leader of the common people as he was about to ascend the threshold to carry on the battle for them on the national scene."

"A nation cannot be preserved which does not preserve its citizens. Industry is retrenching, reducing wages, lowering the standard of living, destroying buying power, and throwing more and more men and women on the streets to shift for themselves. Just how that is going to solve our economic problems is beyond understanding."