While the technocrats wage total war, the political right has decided to brawl over the remaining axes.
As the republic burns, America’s political right decided that the best course of action is to lock the firehouse doors and brawl over the remaining axes. The people are now witnesses to an internecine war of staggering foolishness.
At the hour when the nation requires an ironclad, unified front against the cultural vandals of the progressive left, our supposed champions are cannibalizing each other over foreign sand and domestic phantoms.
Let us begin with the colossal absurdity of the Persian theater. The Beltway’s yes-men have bogged the nation down in a deeply unpopular and perhaps intractable war in Iran.
Recall. A decade ago, Donald Trump descended his golden escalator, promising: America First.
He vowed a repudiation of the blood-soaked blunders of the neoconservatives and Democratic establishment. Today, that promise is drowning in the blood and sand of another quagmire in the Middle East.
The forgotten American in the heartland cares little about the geopolitical machinations of Tehran. They care more about the leaky southern border, the evisceration of the middle class, the worth of their dollar, and the preservation of their homes.
The same Ivy League armchair generals who marched us into Baghdad and Kabul are now steering the ship of state into the Persian Gulf. They learn nothing, and they pay no price for their failures. The price is, instead, paid by the sons of plumbers in Ohio and mechanics in Pennsylvania.
When hawks cry divine, America pays the price in body bags and bankruptcies. Trump must end this Iranian folly immediately. Bring the troops home, secure the borders, and crush the domestic rot.
Instead of forcing this necessary reckoning, the now-splintered MAGA coalition prefers spectacular acts of self-sabotage instead. Consider the tragic, baffling descent of Congressman Thomas Massie, who was once a stalwart defender of the constitutional order and a reliable bulwark against the excesses of the federal leviathan.
Lately, he has abandoned his constituency to chase shadows in the political wilderness. Massie’s fevered obsession with “The Epstein Files” has consumed him. It is a bizarre witch hunt that has alienated his allies and banished him to the same exiled fringes as former cheerleader for the MAGA movement, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Meanwhile, America now faces a war for its soul, and only its forgotten folks remain fighting for its borders, language, and culture. In the face of this civilizational crisis, one can only wonder why Massie decided to stake his entire political existence on the black book of a wicked elitist.
The transformation of the Kentucky congressman from a rock-ribbed constitutionalist into a tin-foil crusader is profoundly disappointing.
The Epstein saga is a symptom of a sick elite, yes, but dissecting a dead degenerate’s social calendar does not close the border or halt the creeping inflation that robs the working man blind. It does not rebuild the crumbling educational system.
However, the great befuddled online horde thrives on these melodramas, lapping up every leaked document and pixelated screenshot as if it were holy writ. But political movements are not built on sensationalism. They are built on the hard, unglamorous work of wielding power to protect the citizenry.
Sadly, Massie plays to the cheap seats while the theater burns to the ground. He has traded the heavy armor of a legislator for the paper crown of an internet sleuth.
The paradox here is rich and perhaps fatal. Massie has become a tourist in his own movement, tilting at conspiratorial windmills while the country’s foundational pillars collapse around him.
Let us, though, honestly distribute the greater blame. Trump was dead wrong.
He never should have waged this Iranian war in the first place. He is equally wrong in wasting his once-impressive political capital by picking petty fights with a fractured base, squashing dissidents like Massie, instead of uniting the clans.
The Commander-in-Chief must rise above the fray and focus on the permanent things. A leader engaged in a struggle for national survival does not swat at gadflies. He ignores them.
By excommunicating Massie and Greene, Trump elevates their grievances and splinters a coalition that requires absolute solidarity. These personal vendettas are diluting the America First agenda.
The President must look past his bruised ego.
However, Massie is completely mistaken for unnecessarily poking the Trumpian bear. For what reason? To score cheap points with the fringe corners of the internet?
Deliberately provoking the president is not an act of courage, particularly when it actively destroys the only viable coalition capable of halting the activist left. It is an unforced error of epic proportions.
You do not win a war by attacking your own general on the eve of battle, no matter how flawed that general might be. Massie’s tactics constitute not only a political blunder but a dereliction of duty.
Reflect. On both ends of the Republican right, they’ve tossed away the permanent things to wage war over the ephemeral. America’s foundational principles are under relentless siege by a technocratic elite. To ignore this siege and to litigate the sins of the dead, instead, squanders both American blood and treasure in the deserts of the Middle East.
This is the height of political madness.
Russell Kirk warned us that when we abandon the moral imagination, chaos fills the void. Today’s right—or what’s left of it—is actively inviting that chaos. They’ve traded the inheritance of the nation’s forefathers for the fleeting rush of an internet feud and the bloodless ledgers of the military-industrial complex.
These Republicans, not one of whom is a conservative in any meaningful sense, must nevertheless cease this fratricide. Immediately. Both the ideological puritans and the conspiracy peddlers must step back from the ledge.
America cannot survive a two-front war against the progressive establishment and its own worst instincts.
Unite the right, end the foreign wars, ignore the phantoms, and focus on the true enemy. Anything less is a suicide pact.
© 2026 by Brian D. O’Leary. All rights reserved.