Chris Abraham

There is an American ethos so deeply embedded that most of the people who live by it have never named it, never argued for it, and would be faintly annoyed if you asked them to defend it. It is not a political position. It is not a philosophy. It predates both. It is closer to weather—just the atmosphere in which everything else happens.

It goes like this: nobody is coming.

Not the government. Not the police. Not the cavalry. Not the international community. Not an NGO with a mandate and a logistics chain. Not your neighbors, not necessarily, not in time. Maybe not even God—at least not in the way people mean when they say God will provide, by which they usually mean someone else will show up and handle the material situation. Nobody is coming. Whatever is going to happen here is going to depend entirely on what you built, stocked, trained, and prepared before the bad thing arrived.

This is not a motivational slogan. Strip away the hustle content, the self-help podcast energy, the David Goggins voice-over, the LinkedIn sunrise photography—and what is left underneath is much older and colder than any of that. It is a baseline assumption about the nature of reality, baked into the American character by distance and sparse institutions and a long history of being genuinely, physically alone when things went wrong. Not pessimism. Not nihilism. Just realism, of a particular and very American variety.

The Numbers Are Not Abstract If you want to understand why tens of millions of Americans own firearms, carry tourniquets, stock IFAKs, run trauma kits in their trucks, keep generators in their garages, and maintain pantries that would last a month, you do not need to go looking for psychology or politics. You need to look at a map and a spreadsheet.

The national average ambulance response time in the United States is seven to eight minutes—and that is the urban average. In suburban areas it climbs to ten to twelve minutes. In rural areas, which is where most of the American landmass actually is, the average is fifteen minutes or more. A 2025 study presented at the American College of Surgeons found that total EMS call times in rural communities averaged 92.8 minutes compared to 74.1 minutes nationally. In frontier and remote areas, you are sometimes looking at response times measured not in minutes but in the question of whether the road is even passable.

Police response times follow the same curve. Major cities aim for five to eight minutes on priority calls and sometimes hit it. Denver averages nearly thirteen minutes. Portland has clocked twenty to twenty-seven minutes due to staffing shortages. Rural sheriff’s departments covering hundreds of square miles on skeleton night shifts are not delivering eight-minute responses. They are delivering whatever they can across whatever the geography allows, which is often not enough and sometimes nothing at all.

This is not a criticism of first responders. It is a description of arithmetic. Distance is real. Staffing is finite. Physics does not care about your emergency.

A cardiac arrest becomes unsurvivable without intervention in roughly eight minutes. An arterial bleed can kill in three to five. A home invasion is over, one way or another, in under two minutes on average. The gap between when the bad thing starts and when anyone with a badge or a trauma bag arrives is not a policy failure. It is a geographic fact of life for an enormous portion of the American population, and it has been that way since the first settlers pushed past the last reliable institution and realized they were on their own.

The IFAK on the belt is the answer to that gap. The tourniquet in the truck is the answer to that gap. The firearm by the door is the answer to that gap. The three-month pantry and the hand-crank radio and the water filtration system and the generator and the medical training and the range time—all of it is the answer to that gap. It is not paranoia. It is infrastructure. Personal infrastructure, built by individuals who have done the math and arrived at the same conclusion every American frontier generation arrived at before them: you are the first responder. You are probably the only responder. Build accordingly.

What the Ethos Actually Produces Once “nobody is coming” becomes an operating assumption rather than a dramatic phrase, a lot of American behavior snaps into focus.

Prepping is not a fringe activity. It is “nobody is coming” with inventory. The person with six months of freeze-dried food and a hand pump for the well is not preparing for the apocalypse. They are preparing for the ice storm, the grid failure, the flood, the supply chain disruption—the thing that happens in their county every decade or so that reminds everyone that the systems people in cities take for granted are actually quite thin and quite fragile once you get far enough from the center.

Firearms are not a fetish. They are “nobody is coming” made mechanical. A gun in the hands of someone who has trained with it and thought carefully about when and how to use it is a bridge—between the moment danger arrives and the moment help might, eventually, possibly show up. For a woman alone on a rural property, for an elderly man whose nearest neighbor is a quarter mile away, for anyone whose reality includes genuine physical vulnerability and genuine geographic distance from institutional protection, that bridge is not theoretical. It is the difference.

Training—range time, first aid courses, wilderness medicine, situational awareness, physical fitness, the whole culture of competence that outsiders sometimes find excessive or aggressive—is “nobody is coming” applied to the self. If you are the first responder, you had better know what a first responder knows. If you are the last line of defense, you had better be able to hold that line. Competence is not vanity in this context. It is preparation for the predictable.

The independence that can look antisocial from the outside—the privacy, the self-sufficiency, the resistance to being organized, governed, managed, or assisted by strangers—is not sociopathy. It is the boundary maintenance of people who have learned, by experience or inheritance or both, that dependency is a vulnerability. That the systems and institutions and authorities you come to rely on may fail, move slowly, prioritize someone else, or simply not exist where you are. Better to need nothing from no one than to discover at the worst possible moment that the thing you were counting on was never really there.

The Outward Projection Here is where it gets interesting. Here is where the domestic ethos becomes a foreign policy and a moral worldview, whether anyone intended it to or not.

The same American who keeps an IFAK in his truck and a rifle in his safe looks at a village in Afghanistan, a neighborhood in Gaza, a coup somewhere in Africa, an authoritarian crackdown somewhere in Southeast Asia—and something in him does not reach for intervention the way a European might. Not because he doesn’t feel anything. But because the deepest thing he knows about the world is that nobody came for him either. He built what he built. He learned what he learned. He stocked what he stocked. He made his peace with the gap between the moment of danger and the moment of help, and he filled that gap himself.

From inside that worldview, arriving uninvited in someone else’s country with guns and democracy and women’s empowerment workshops and USAID agricultural development programs and a PowerPoint about governance reform is not obviously different from a stranger pulling up to your farm and announcing he’s here to help whether you want him to or not. The intervention may be well-intentioned. The intervener may genuinely care. But the ethos says: you do not have the right to reorganize another person’s life under the banner of care. You cannot hoist a destiny onto people. You cannot force liberation. You cannot export ambition. Help can be offered. It cannot be imposed. And the line between rescue and domination is a lot thinner than the rescuers tend to believe.

This is not isolationism exactly. It is not indifference. It is a rough, sometimes inarticulate, but genuinely held belief that people have the right to sort out their own situation—and that outsiders who arrive certain they know better have a poor historical track record and a remarkable ability to make things worse. The road to many of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters runs straight through someone’s excellent intentions and someone else’s unwillingness to be saved on terms they didn’t set.

Why America and Israel Recognize Each Other This is why the American gut-level identification with Israel has always confused Europeans, and why explaining it through the lens of evangelical theology or AIPAC lobbying or Cold War geopolitics always feels like it misses the actual thing.

The actual thing is recognition. Shared epistemology. Two countries that looked at their geography, their neighbors, their history, and arrived at the same irreducible conclusion: nobody is coming.

Israel is a country that has been living the American frontier ethos on a national scale since 1948. Surrounded by declared enemies. No strategic depth. No reliable cavalry. A history that makes the concept of waiting for rescue not just naive but suicidal. Israel built its own army, developed its own weapons, trained its own population, and made the foundational decision that survival was not going to be outsourced to the goodwill of the international community—a community that had recently demonstrated, in the most thorough possible way, exactly how much that goodwill was worth when things got bad enough.

The American who keeps a rifle in his safe and an IFAK on his belt and has made his peace with the fact that the sheriff is forty-five minutes away on a good night looks at that and does not see aggression or militarism or disproportionate force. He sees a people who did the math. He sees the same conclusion he came to, applied at national scale, under conditions of existential pressure he is fortunate enough not to face personally.

Europeans, living in countries roughly the size of American states with dense populations and nationalized emergency services and a postwar security architecture that has insulated them from the hardest consequences of geography for eighty years, look at the same thing and see belligerence. Paranoia. An inability to trust institutions and alliances and international norms. What they are actually seeing is the view from a place where the ambulance takes ninety minutes and the police are forty-five minutes away and you have decided, rationally and without drama, to be your own first responder.

The disagreement is not really about Israel. It is not really about guns. It is about whether rescue is a reasonable thing to expect. Europeans, on the whole, have decided it is. Americans, on the whole—the ones outside the dense cities, the ones who have actually sat with the arithmetic—have decided it is not. And that single difference in foundational assumption produces two completely different moral universes, two completely different foreign policies, two completely different relationships to force, self-defense, preparation, and the question of what you owe other people and what other people owe you.

Nobody Is Coming Is Not Cruelty It needs to be said clearly because it will be misread: this ethos is not a lack of compassion. It is not a celebration of abandonment. It is not “poor people should suffer quietly” or “let the weak perish” or any of the other caricatures that get attached to it when people who have never had to live by it decide to explain it.

The person who lives by “nobody is coming” may feel genuine sorrow for people in genuine distress. They may help their neighbors, give to their church, show up when things go wrong in their community, and extend real and costly kindness to real and suffering people. What they do not do is build a moral identity around managing other people’s brokenness. What they resist is the idea that compassion confers jurisdiction—that because you feel bad about someone’s situation, you have earned the right to reorganize their life.

There is a difference between mercy and management. There is a difference between help that is offered and help that is imposed. There is a difference between showing up when asked and appointing yourself the author of someone else’s story because their choices make you uncomfortable or their outcomes look bad from your vantage point.

The old American rule is simple: help your neighbor. But don’t appoint yourself his sovereign.

That rule produces an ethos that can look hard from the outside. It can look cold. It can look like indifference to suffering that is real and severe and worth caring about. The ethos has a genuine dark side—it can become an excuse for neglect, for looking away, for a fatalism that mistakes structural abandonment for natural law.

But the alternative has a dark side too, and it is one the world has seen enough of: the helper who cannot stop helping, the rescuer who cannot distinguish mercy from control, the intervention that arrives with good intentions and leaves with body counts and dependency and a culture hollowed out by the arrival of people who were certain they knew better.

Nobody is coming is not the cry of someone who has given up. It is the statement of someone who has looked at the situation clearly, accepted the reality of it, and decided to get to work. It is the tourniquet in the truck. It is the rifle by the door. It is the generator in the garage and the months of food in the pantry and the training that nobody required and the competence that nobody handed out.

It is what Americans have always done when they got far enough from the center to understand that the center was not coming for them.

It is, in the end, the most American thing there is.

Appendix: A Field Guide for European Readers The essay above assumes a certain familiarity with American gear, culture, and infrastructure realities that may not be obvious to readers outside the United States. This glossary and FAQ is offered in the spirit of genuine translation, not condescension.

Glossary 2A / The Second Amendment The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” In practice, this has been interpreted by the Supreme Court as an individual right to own firearms for self-defense. For many Americans, 2A is not primarily about hunting or sport shooting. It is about the legal and philosophical right to be your own last line of defense. When someone says they are “a 2A person,” they mean they believe this right is foundational and non-negotiable—not a policy preference to be weighed against other considerations, but a baseline condition of a free society.

IFAK (Individual First Aid Kit) A compact, military-derived trauma kit designed to be carried on the body. Originally issued to soldiers, the IFAK has crossed over into civilian use among preppers, hunters, outdoor workers, law enforcement, and ordinary people who live or work far from emergency services. A standard IFAK typically contains a tourniquet, hemostatic gauze (which accelerates clotting in severe wounds), a chest seal (for puncture wounds to the lung), a pressure bandage, and medical gloves. The point of the IFAK is not to replace a hospital. It is to keep you alive during the gap between when the injury happens and when professional help arrives—a gap that, in rural America, can be measured in tens of minutes or longer.

Tourniquet A device applied tightly around a limb to stop catastrophic bleeding by cutting off blood flow. Modern tourniquets—the CAT (Combat Application Tourniquet) and SOFTT-W are the most common civilian versions—can be applied one-handed in under a minute. An arterial bleed in a limb can kill in three to five minutes. The tourniquet is the single most important piece of trauma gear for this reason. Carrying one in your truck or on your belt in rural America is roughly equivalent to keeping a fire extinguisher in your kitchen—an acknowledgment that bad things happen faster than help arrives.

Trauma Kit / Blow-Out Kit A broader version of the IFAK, often kept in a vehicle, home, or workplace rather than carried on the body. May include everything in an IFAK plus additional supplies for wound packing, airway management, and burn treatment. The name “blow-out kit” comes from military slang for a catastrophic wound. In civilian use it simply means a kit serious enough to handle a serious injury.

Prepping / Preppers Prepping is the practice of preparing in advance for emergencies, disasters, or disruptions to normal infrastructure. Preppers stock food, water, medicine, fuel, and supplies; they may also invest in backup power, communications gear, and self-defense capability. The popular image of the prepper is someone building a bunker for the apocalypse. The reality is more mundane: most preppers are people who have experienced or witnessed a natural disaster, a prolonged power outage, a supply chain failure, or some other event that revealed how thin the margin between normalcy and crisis actually is. In rural America, a two-week supply of food and water is not extreme. It is sensible contingency planning for people who may be snowed in, flooded out, or simply far from a store.

EDC (Every Day Carry) The collection of items a person carries on their body or in a bag every day, chosen for utility and preparedness. EDC culture ranges from the practical (a good knife, a flashlight, a phone charger) to the more serious (a firearm, a tourniquet, a medical kit). The EDC community is enormous and takes its gear choices seriously. It reflects the “nobody is coming” ethos applied to the individual level: if something goes wrong today, what do you have with you right now to handle it?

Concealed Carry (CCW / CHL) The practice of carrying a concealed firearm in public, typically under a government-issued permit. In most American states, any law-abiding citizen who passes a background check and meets basic requirements can obtain a concealed carry permit. In a growing number of states, no permit is required at all (this is called “constitutional carry”). For Europeans accustomed to firearms being the exclusive province of the military and police, the image of an ordinary person—a teacher, a nurse, a retiree—carrying a loaded handgun to the grocery store is startling. From inside the American ethos, it is simply a person who has decided not to be helpless if something goes wrong.

Castle Doctrine A legal principle, recognized in most American states, that a person has the right to use force—including deadly force—to defend themselves in their home without any obligation to retreat. The name comes from the old English common law principle that “a man’s home is his castle.” In practical terms, if someone breaks into your house in a Castle Doctrine state, you are not legally required to attempt to escape before defending yourself. This concept is genuinely alien to most European legal frameworks, which typically require proportionality and, in many cases, a duty to retreat if possible.

Stand Your Ground An extension of Castle Doctrine that removes the duty to retreat not just in the home but anywhere a person has a legal right to be. If you are threatened in a parking lot, a public street, or a park, Stand Your Ground law in many states allows you to hold your position and defend yourself rather than being legally obligated to flee. This is the law that generates the most European bewilderment and the most American nodding. The disagreement traces back to the fundamental question: does the state owe you protection, or are you responsible for your own safety?

The Sheriff In American counties, the Sheriff is typically an elected law enforcement officer responsible for policing rural and unincorporated areas. Unlike city police departments, sheriff’s departments often cover vast geographic areas with limited staff. A sheriff’s deputy responding to a call in a rural county may be covering a territory larger than some European countries with a handful of officers on any given shift. When the essay mentions “the sheriff is forty-five minutes away,” this is not hyperbole. In many American counties, it is a Tuesday.

Volunteer Fire Department / Volunteer EMS A significant portion of American rural fire and emergency medical services are staffed entirely by volunteers—ordinary citizens who have received training and respond to emergencies on a call-by-call basis. This is not a reflection of poverty or disorganization. It is a reflection of the scale of the country and the genuine impossibility of staffing professional departments across the entirety of rural America. When your nearest fire station is staffed by volunteers who have to drive to the station before they can drive to your emergency, the math on response times becomes very different from what a person in Amsterdam or Munich would expect.

The Grid Common shorthand for the electrical power infrastructure. “Going off grid” means generating your own power and becoming independent of utility companies. “Grid failure” or “grid down” refers to a widespread power outage. Rural Americans have enough experience with multi-day power outages from storms, floods, ice, and infrastructure failures that a backup generator is a practical investment rather than a doomsday prop.

Bug Out Bag (BOB) A pre-packed bag containing enough supplies to survive for 72 hours if you have to leave your home quickly. Typically includes water, food, first aid, a change of clothes, important documents, cash, and a means of communication and navigation. The name comes from military slang for leaving a position rapidly. In civilian use it is preparation for evacuation from natural disasters, wildfires, floods, or civil unrest. In California alone, wildfire evacuations have become a near-annual reality for millions of people. The Bug Out Bag is not a paranoid fantasy. It is a thing that, in certain American counties, you actually use.

FAQ for European Readers Why do Americans need guns when they have police? Because the police are often not there. In rural and suburban America, the average police response time to a high-priority emergency call ranges from eight minutes in a well-resourced city to forty-five minutes or more in a rural county. The average violent confrontation is over in under two minutes. A firearm in the hands of a trained person bridges the gap between when the threat arrives and when help might. Europeans live in much denser countries with much faster institutional response times. The calculus is genuinely different.

Why do Americans carry medical kits? Isn’t that what paramedics are for? Paramedics are wonderful. They are also, in rural America, far away. An arterial bleed kills in three to five minutes. Rural EMS response times average fifteen minutes or more and can exceed ninety minutes in remote areas. The tourniquet and the IFAK exist because the person standing next to the injured person is, for a critical window of time, the only medical resource available. This is also why Stop the Bleed—a national public health campaign teaching tourniquet use and wound packing to ordinary citizens—has been embraced by schools, offices, and community centers across the country.

Isn’t all this preparation a sign of fear or paranoia? From a European perspective, where institutions are nearby and generally functional, preparing for their absence can look like pathology. From an American perspective, especially outside major cities, it looks like basic competence. The question is not whether bad things happen—they do, everywhere—but whether you have thought through what you will do when they happen and help is not immediately available. Carrying a tourniquet is not more paranoid than knowing how to swim. It is preparation for a predictable category of bad outcome.

Why don’t Americans just support better public services instead of buying guns and gear? Many do. These are not mutually exclusive positions. A person can vote for better rural healthcare funding and still carry a tourniquet, because the funding hasn’t arrived yet and the arterial bleed is happening now. The ethos is not anti-government in a pure philosophical sense. It is simply realistic about the gap between what institutions promise and what they can deliver across the scale and geography of the United States.

Why do Americans identify with Israel so strongly? Is it really just about religion? For many Americans—especially secular, rural, and politically conservative ones—the identification with Israel has little to do with theology and everything to do with recognition. Israel is a country that looked at its situation honestly, concluded that nobody was coming to guarantee its survival, and built its own capacity accordingly. That is a story Americans find deeply legible. The specific content differs enormously. The underlying logic—you are responsible for your own defense, you cannot outsource your survival to the goodwill of others, competence and preparation are moral obligations—is identical.

Why are Americans so resistant to international humanitarian intervention? Because many of them are deeply skeptical that uninvited help actually helps. The same ethos that makes a person unwilling to become dependent on institutions that may fail makes them skeptical of institutions—however well-intentioned—that arrive in other countries claiming to know what those countries need. This is not indifference to suffering. It is a hard-won suspicion that rescue operations often serve the rescuer’s needs as much as the rescued, that intervention changes systems in unpredictable ways, and that people generally have the right to sort out their own situation without being managed by strangers with grants and theories.

Is this ethos specific to conservatives or rural people? It is more concentrated there, but it is not exclusive. Urban Americans who have lived through natural disasters, power outages, or periods of civil unrest often arrive at similar conclusions. The ethos is less a political position than a relationship to institutional reliability—and that relationship tends to be shaped by geography, experience, and proximity to the actual limits of what the state can deliver. The further you are from the center, in every sense, the more the center’s promises start to feel theoretical.

So Americans just don’t trust anyone? That is not quite right either. Americans tend to trust their immediate community—neighbors, churches, volunteer fire departments, local mutual aid networks—more than they trust distant institutions. The distrust is directional: it increases with distance and abstraction. The sheriff you know personally is more trustworthy than the federal agency you will never meet. Your neighbor with a tractor is more reliable in a flood than FEMA. This is not nihilism. It is a preference for concrete, proximate, accountable relationships over abstract, distant, bureaucratic ones.

There’s only one Jesus and he would absolutely show up at Burning Man. He’d be in the dust with everybody, eating the food, talking to the people nobody else was talking to, making the most broken person in the camp feel like the most important person in the world. That part the Burning Man crowd got right. What they left in the desert is what came next. Repentance. And sin no more.

Because every single encounter in the gospels follows the same pattern. Full presence first—he sits with sinners, touches lepers, talks to Samaritans, climbs into Zacchaeus’s world without being asked. And then the call to repentance. Every single time, without exception.

The woman caught in adultery. Mob wants to stone her. Jesus disperses them and turns to her: neither do I condemn you, now go and sin no more. In 2026 that’s victim blaming. You don’t issue behavioral directives to a survivor. Jesus issued the directive. The non-condemnation and the call to repentance arrive in the same breath because they are the same thing. The love is not complete without the direction.

The woman at the well. Five husbands, living with a sixth. He already knew. He brought it up anyway. Not to shame her—she becomes the first evangelist in the gospel, runs back to town saying come see a man who told me everything I ever did. You don’t get the living water without the accurate accounting of your life and the willingness to turn from it. He saw her completely, loved her completely, and called her to repentance completely. All three at once.

The rich young ruler. Kept all the commandments his whole life. Jesus looks at him and loves him—Mark records it specifically—and then calls him to total repentance: sell everything, give it to the poor, follow me. The man walks away sad. Jesus lets him go. Doesn’t chase him. Doesn’t negotiate. The love was real. The call to repentance was real. The man’s choice was real. Jesus honored all three by softening none of them.

The paralytic at the pool. Thirty-eight years sick. Healed instantly. And later Jesus finds him and says repent and sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you. Something worse. That’s in the text and almost nobody preaches it.

Burning Man Jesus and tent revival Jesus are the same Jesus. Full presence, full love, call to repentance, sin no more. He’d show up in the dust and love on everybody and then call them to turn from their lives and follow him. Not as punishment. As the completion of the encounter. The repentance isn’t the punishment. The repentance is the point. The love has a direction. That’s the whole gospel whether you’re at Black Rock City or a Wednesday night Bible study. Repent and sin no more. He said it every time and he meant it every time and he’s still saying it.

There is a sentence that gets deployed with tremendous moral confidence every time a Western military—or Israel—does something that produces dead civilians on camera. It goes roughly like this: *But the babies. But the mothers. But the children.*

It is delivered as though it were an argument. As though the speaker has just said something that, if heard clearly enough, would cause the bombs to stop.

It never has. It never does. And if you watch what actually happens rather than what people say, the conclusion is unavoidable: in the operational calculus of every serious military power on earth, civilian casualties are a cost, not a stopper.

*This isn’t cynicism. It’s just reading the record honestly.*

**The proportionality myth**

Americans, of all people, should understand this most intuitively—because American self-defense law is built on the explicit rejection of proportionality. Castle doctrine. Stand Your Ground. The reasonable-person standard. None of it requires you to match force with equivalent force. None of it asks you to consider the attacker’s welfare. The only question is whether a reasonable person in your position would have feared serious harm.

*You come into someone’s house with a knife, you might leave in a bag.* That’s not monstrous—that’s the law, and most Americans think it’s correct.

Scale that up and you have Israeli doctrine. You’ve been rocketed thousands of times. Your enemies have stated, in writing and in speeches, that your elimination is the goal. You respond with overwhelming, disproportionate force—and you’re transparent about it.

The **Dahiyeh Doctrine** isn’t a secret. It’s a policy, openly articulated: the cost of hosting weapons pointed at Israel is the destruction of the infrastructure hosting them. The civilian population is notified. Then the Apaches come.

The “but the babies” crowd finds this monstrous. What they don’t engage with is the alternative: proportional response means you’re willing to absorb rockets indefinitely in exchange for international approval. *That’s not a peace strategy. That’s just losing slowly while looking respectable.*

**America wrote this playbook**

Tokyo. Dresden. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. None of these were proportional responses to Pearl Harbor. They were terminal deterrence statements. The message was architectural: *the cost of continuing this war is that you cease to exist as a functioning society.* It worked. By any military-outcome measure, it worked.

The firebombing of Tokyo killed more people in a single night than either atomic bomb. You don’t hear much about that one. The “but the babies” machinery was not yet fully operational, or the babies in question were the wrong nationality, or—most likely—the outcome justified the accounting in retrospect, *as it always does for the winner.*

Obama ran the most expansive drone program in American history. Wedding parties. Funeral processions. American citizens abroad, killed by executive order, without trial. He accepted a Nobel Peace Prize in year one. He spoke beautifully about dignity and international norms. *The Predators were already in the air before the acceptance speech was finished.*

George W. Bush—Andover, Yale, Harvard MBA, son of a CIA director and a president—built a brush-clearing ranch persona and took America into Fallujah. What happened in Fallujah would make the Dahiyeh Doctrine blush.

Hillary Clinton watched Gaddafi get killed and said, on camera, *we came, we saw, he died*—and laughed. Unguarded. Authentic. The mask slipped and what was underneath was something old and feral. Libya became a failed state with open slave markets. Nobody was held accountable.

The “but the babies” brigade was present for all of this. Op-eds were written. Protests were held. Candlelight vigils occurred. *The bombs continued.*

**The honest read**

If civilian casualties in Gaza or Lebanon or Iraq or Yemen were actually, operationally, a red line for Western governments—if “but the babies” were more than a ritual performance of concern—something would have been done. **Not said. Done.**

The sanctions that materially constrained behavior. The military aid with real conditions attached and enforced. The alliances severed. The ICC referrals followed through on. Something with teeth.

None of that happened. What happened was statements. Grave concern. Calls for restraint. *And then the next weapons shipment.*

This is not a left or right observation. Trump doesn’t perform the grief. Previous administrations performed it exquisitely. *The outcomes were identical.*

What “but the babies” actually functions as is a release valve—a way for observers to register moral discomfort without requiring moral action. It lets everyone feel like they said something, which is apparently sufficient.

**The deterrence logic nobody wants to say out loud**

The reason disproportionate response persists—across Israel, across America, across every serious military power—is that it works as deterrence in a way that proportional response does not. If attacking Israel costs you thirty for one, the calculus for the next attack has to include whether you can absorb thirty for one. If attacking America costs you your country’s entire infrastructure, as Afghanistan and Iraq learned, the message transmits even if the execution is catastrophic.

*Bad optics don’t bury your kids. UN resolutions don’t stop rockets. Grave concern issued from Geneva doesn’t reconstitute a city.*

The nations and people actually facing existential threat have looked at the “but the babies” argument and made a calculation: the opinion of people who are safe, and who will remain safe regardless of our choices, is not a variable we are optimizing for.

*That’s not a bug in their reasoning. That’s the whole point.*

*The “but the babies” argument would be the most powerful moral force in modern geopolitics—if it had ever once actually stopped anything. It hasn’t. Which means it isn’t an argument. It’s a feeling. And feelings, however sincere, don’t win wars or end them.*

Punk was not love. I was there—not as a punk, I want to be clear about that, because enough people from my Hawaii years are still on Facebook to call me out. I was a new wave kid. Smiths obsessive. New Order, The Cure, Depeche Mode, pastel oversized button-down, home-bleached jeans, black Converse. But Hawaii had a small scene and the nights were long and I ended up orbiting the punks by proximity—leather jackets in eighty-degree heat, homeless or close to it, moshing in 7-Eleven parking lots, fighting regularly because plenty of people wanted to fight them just for how they looked.

What I saw was not love. It was nihilism, anarchism, and the circle-A spraypainted on everything. Anti-government, anti-police, anti-authority in every direction simultaneously—not Democrat, not Republican, anarchist. The Doc Martens had a lace code that told you what someone was willing to do before they opened their mouth. Some colors had to be earned through violence. Johnny Rotten got knifed outside a pub. People died in the pits. Suicidal Tendencies got banned from playing all of Los Angeles. This is what it actually was.

The second generation showed up later and brought the community organizing, the benefit concerts, the mutual aid, the feelings. Real and valuable—but downstream of a first generation that made the space by being genuinely dangerous. The second generation kept the aesthetic and replaced the content. Their children put it on merchandise.

John Lydon going populist nationalist isn’t a betrayal. Punk’s target was always whoever sat at the top of the institutional pyramid telling ordinary people what was acceptable. In 1977 that was the Crown and the conservative establishment. In 2026 it’s the media class, the credentialed gatekeepers, the cultural institutions that decide which opinions are permitted. He’s still pointing at the pyramid. The pyramid moved.

I just bought the “Punk Is Love” mug for $20. It’s mine. It’s wrong about everything. I drink out of it every morning and think about those kids sweating through leather jackets in paradise, who would have found the entire concept so funny they might have actually hurt someone.