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History, Security

Trump Orders Military to War Against America

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Institutional Capture and the Presidential Declaration of American Civil War

After President Grant had crushed the slaveholders at war he dismantled their political platform. It rebranded as Christian nationalist “America First”, which Trump has put into the White House

Contemporary analysis reveals a coordinated strategy to dismantle the very institutional safeguards designed to prevent extremist infiltration by America First, using democratic processes to systematically eliminate democratic accountability.

The current systematic reversal of post-World War II accountability mechanisms in particular represents more than conservative policy preferences. It mirrors Hitler’s strategic pivot after 1928, when he demonstrated how the Nazi movement abandonment of direct revolutionary tactics could shift into legal, institutional capture. This is core to understanding the “cowboy hat” corruption of America today.

Source: Skousen manual for white militias

Hitler’s Strategic Transformation: From Revolution to Institutional Capture

Following electoral failures in the mid-1920s, Hitler fundamentally altered Nazi strategy. Rather than direct confrontation with democratic institutions, the movement pursued “legal revolution” by working within existing systems while systematically undermining them from within. This approach involved maintaining plausible deniability while coordinating institutional capture across multiple sectors simultaneously.

America First worked to spread and defend Nazism before, during and even after WWII

The strategy proved devastatingly effective because it exploited democratic tolerance and legal processes to dismantle democracy itself. By 1933, institutional capture had progressed sufficiently to enable the Enabling Act, which legally abolished legal constraints on Nazi power. The transformation occurred through existing channels, making resistance difficult to organize and justify.

Anyone promoting America First surely knows this history far better than most, because Hitler was their man.

The Semantic Battlefield Carpet Bombed With Reality Inversions

Pete Hegseth, as a self-declared Secretary of War, may be seen as a very particular appointment; one who operates from a background of documented instability that undermines any claimed authority.

  • In 2015, he threw an axe on live television that missed its target and struck West Point drummer Jeff Prosperie, who later sued for what he called “obvious negligence.”
  • A sworn affidavit submitted to the Senate documented that Hegseth’s alcohol abuse was so severe his second wife developed an “escape plan” involving a texted safe word to alert family when she felt unsafe, hiding in her closet on at least one occasion.
  • Witnesses reported him chanting “Kill All Muslims!” while drunk at a bar in Ohio, being carried out of a Minneapolis strip club while intoxicated and in military uniform during a National Guard drill weekend, and regularly passing out or vomiting at family and work events.
  • He paid $50,000 to settle a sexual assault allegation from a 2017 incident where, according to police reports, he was visibly drunk and blocked a woman from leaving his hotel room.
  • Fox News colleagues confirmed his drinking was an “open secret,” with beer cans regularly found in his office trash.

His reckless behavior, substance abuse-fueled volatility, and disregard for safety—whether throwing axes near people or abusing those closest to him—explains the man systematically inverting reality through linguistic manipulation precisely because his actions cannot withstand scrutiny.

“Divisive” Inversion: Hegseth divided the troops by calling women’s inclusion in military service “divisive;” divisively removing women from positions while calling it inclusion. His acts of exclusion come with calling inclusion divisive. The person who separates and removes, claims integration is separation. This isn’t policy disagreement, it’s white supremacist inversion language.

“Woke” Awareness: The systematic attack on “wokeness” targets consciousness itself. “Woke” means awake, aware, accountable—precisely the institutional vigilance that emerged from confronting fascism. Programs designed to identify extremist infiltration become the threat. Diversity initiatives that monitor exclusionary ideologies become “divisive.” Accountability mechanisms are reframed as persecution, another white supremacist talking point.

“Warrior” Aggression: The elevation of “warrior ethos” over “defensive” posture explicitly rejects legal and ethical constraints. When Hegseth declares “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” he positions legal frameworks as weakness. The semantic shift prepares military leadership for operations unconstrained by the accountability standards that distinguish defense from war crimes, a white supremacist platform foundational to over 150 years of domestic terrorism.

The KKK in 1921 used bi-planes to firebomb Tulsa, OK. They also dropped racist propaganda leaflets across America. The swastika was their symbol, and the X.

“Legacy” Supremacy: The restoration of Confederate base names is justified through “legacy” and “tradition.” But whose legacy? The legacy of armed rebellion against the United States to preserve slavery becomes “heritage.” The systematic reversal eliminates the accountability that confronted this history. The KKK could have printed his speeches.

America First has meant white nationalist xenophobia consistently since the late 1800s

This linguistic inversion serves institutional capture by white nationalism, making resistance to hate appear unreasonable while positioning the divisive hateful actions as unity. The person creating division calls integration divisive. The person eliminating accountability calls accountability oppressive. The semantic manipulation enables systematic exclusion while blaming inclusion for the conflict that exclusion creates.

The Department of War is a Reversal: Symbolic Centerpiece of Institutional Capture by Enemies of America

Can you imagine a neighborhood developed today in Germany with streets all named to Nazi generals? America still allows developments where every street spreads militant racist propaganda for capture from “within”.

The renaming of the Department of Defense to “Department of War” serves as the symbolic centerpiece of this institutional reversal, explicitly rejecting the post-fascist commitment to defensive rather than aggressive military posture.

The 1947 transformation from “War Department” to “Department of Defense” represented calculated rejection of militaristic imagery associated with defeated fascist regimes. The name change aligned with UN Charter principles, supported narratives of American restraint, and helped justify unprecedented peacetime military expansion as defensive necessity rather than aggressive ambition.

The current reversal directly contradicts post-war institutional arrangements to Defend America, thus signaling it has lost its defenses against crime and corruption.

When Trump declares “Defense is too defensive” and Hegseth promotes “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” they explicitly reject the legal and ethical frameworks designed to distinguish legitimate defense from war crimes. The semantic shift prepares both military leadership and legal frameworks for different accountability standards.

The Economist/The New Yorker weren’t wrong

The Campaign Lies: The irony becomes stark when considered against Trump’s 2024 campaign messaging. Throughout the election, Trump positioned himself as the peace candidate while denigrating opponents as warmongers. Yet his first major military initiative explicitly rebrands the Pentagon to emphasize warfare over defense. This contradiction reveals calculated manipulation—campaign rhetoric promised restraint while actual governance immediately signals aggressive military posture that contradicts electoral promises.

Hegseth’s “We’re Back” Means Pre-Accountability Military Culture

When Defense Secretary Hegseth declares “this War Department, just like America, is back,” the historical context becomes crucial. The statement references not merely traditional military culture, but specifically pre-accountability military culture—the institutional arrangements that existed before the military developed systems to identify and counter extremist infiltration.

Systematic Symbolic Restoration: Hegseth’s comprehensive rebranding campaign extends far beyond the Department of War renaming. He has systematically restored Confederate-era names to military bases through bureaucratic manipulation, circumventing federal law by finding soldiers with matching surnames. He removed the name of Harvey Milk, the gay rights activist and Navy veteran, from a naval vessel. He terminated the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, calling it “divisive.”

Personal Symbolic Alignment: Hegseth’s documented history with extremist-associated symbolism reinforces this interpretation. His Crusades-era tattoos—the Jerusalem cross and “Deus Vult”—led to his removal from presidential security duty as a potential “insider threat.” These symbols have been widely adopted by white nationalist movements and were present at the January 6 Capitol attack. His 2024 addition of an Arabic “kafir” (infidel) tattoo demonstrates escalating symbolic messaging.

Pete Hegseth’s tattoo explained. Source: Princeton

Elimination of Accountability Mechanisms: Under the banner of fighting “wokeness,” Hegseth has systematically eliminated the oversight mechanisms that emerged from historical reckonings with extremism. Programs designed to identify extremist infiltration are characterized as persecution. Diversity initiatives that monitor for exclusionary ideologies are terminated as “divisive.” The very accountability structures developed to prevent institutional capture are being dismantled by those they were designed to monitor.

The Assessment Function: Military Purge Through Loyalty Testing

The unprecedented gathering of hundreds of military leaders served its true purpose on September 30, 2025, when Trump explicitly told assembled generals they would be deployed for “war from within” against American citizens in major US cities. But the event revealed something more disturbing: the commander-in-chief’s evident mental deterioration and the generals’ stone-faced response to both his incoherence and his unconstitutional orders.

Source: Encyclopedia of Alabama, 1 Sept 1868 Tuscaloosa Independent Monitor. The KKK threatened that March 4, 1869 — first day of Presidential rule by avowed racist Horatio Seymour — would bring lynchings of white Americans (“scalawags” and “carpetbaggers”). Instead the Presidency was won in a landslide by Civil War hero and civil rights pioneer Ulysses S. Grant)

The Threatening Order: “Last month, I signed an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances,” Trump told the generals. “This is gonna be a big thing for the people in this room because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”

If history means anything at all then American soldiers soon can expect to be put in front of a firing squad by colleagues loyal only to a dictator

Trump named specific cities for military deployment—San Francisco, Chicago, New York—then added ominously: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military—National Guard, but military—because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor.”

Armed National Guards and African American men standing on a sidewalk during the “red summer” of white supremacist mob attacks in Chicago, Illinois, 1919.

The Constitutional Crisis: As predicted and warned, this gathering and directive directly violated the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which bars the military from civilian law enforcement unless expressly authorized by law. The Constitution’s 10th Amendment reserves policing powers to states. Trump is ordering military officers to take up arms against fellow Americans, violating federal law and constitutional principles, to rapidly shift military leadership into a comply or die state.

Redacted page one headline of the “Austin American-Statesman” in Austin, Texas. Mon, Oct 6, 1919.

The Mental Deterioration: But according to The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, who documented the event, Trump’s performance revealed something equally alarming. The president “seemed quieter and more confused than usual,” following Hegseth’s speech by immediately noting “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before” as officers refused to provide the applause he expected.

Trump rambled incoherently, claiming the Department of War was renamed “in the 1950s” (it was 1947-49), that “the Atomic Energy Commission” confirmed his Iran strike destroyed their nuclear program (the AEC hasn’t existed since the 1970s, and Iran still has a nuclear program), and that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has lasted “three thousand years” (it began in the early 1900s). Perhaps most revealing of his serious mental failure was telling the Navy to use steel because modern ships have “aluminum that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it. It starts melting as the missile is about two miles away.” It’s one thing to be ignorant of history, common in America, but telling the Navy to use steel is unmistakably Hitler-level of military ignorance.

The Authoritarian Double-Bind: Most disturbing was Trump’s opening statement, which encapsulated totalitarian logic in a single breath:

Just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want. And if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank; there goes your future.

This is authoritarianism, explicitly:

You have freedom, but exercising it destroys you. You can choose, but only one choice is permitted.

The laughter that rippled through the room wasn’t amusement—it was the nervous recognition of threat delivered as joke. Officers understood immediately the reason for being summoned, they now served under a dictator: compliance masked as freedom, coercion presented as choice.

The Loyalty Test Revealed: The gathering’s dual purpose becomes clear. Military officers must now navigate a commander-in-chief who is both mentally unstable and ordering unconstitutional domestic military deployment. Do they follow constitutional oaths prohibiting such operations? Or obey orders from a president who threatens their careers for dissent while demanding they wage “war” against American civilians?

The Officer Response: The stone-faced silence throughout both Hegseth’s and Trump’s speeches provided its own answer. As Nichols observed, officers “could mostly tune out the sloganeering” of a beardless Hegseth, but “could not ignore the spectacle that President Donald Trump put on.” The question Tom said was haunting the room:

How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?

It was the question that cost Air Force Major Harold Hering his career in 1973.

The Assessment Mechanism: By physically consolidating military leadership while simultaneously delivering incoherent, threatening, unconstitutional orders, Trump and Hegseth identified who will implement illegal directives from a commander-in-chief showing signs of mental deterioration. The silence itself becomes data—revealing officers’ recognition that they face both constitutional crisis and command instability simultaneously.

Advice from Walt Disney on the appropriate reaction to dictators

Hitler Pattern Recognition: Why 1928 Parallels Matter

The 1928 Nazi pivot succeeded because democratic institutions failed to recognize institutional capture while it occurred through legal channels. The strategy exploited democratic tolerance and procedural legitimacy to systematically dismantle democratic accountability.

Contemporary institutional capture follows remarkably similar patterns:

  • Working within existing legal frameworks while systematically undermining institutional safeguards
  • Maintaining plausible deniability through bureaucratic interpretation and semantic manipulation
  • Coordinating elimination of oversight mechanisms across multiple sectors simultaneously
  • Framing accountability itself as oppression requiring resistance

The systematic nature of symbolic reversals—from Department of War to base names to extremism monitoring—suggests coordinated institutional strategy rather than isolated policy preferences. The comprehensive elimination of post-WWII accountability mechanisms targets precisely the safeguards designed to prevent extremist infiltration.

Democratic Resilience Against Dictator Donald

“Donald in Nutziland”. Source: Disney.

The critical question becomes whether democratic institutions retain sufficient resilience to recognize and counter institutional capture that operates through legal channels while systematically dismantling accountability mechanisms. The 1930s demonstrated that even established democracies remain vulnerable to extremist infiltration, particularly when economic anxiety combines with sophisticated propaganda operations.

The contemporary moment presents similar vulnerabilities: the systematic elimination of institutional memory, the coordination of symbolic reversals across multiple sectors, and the exploitation of democratic processes to undermine democratic accountability.

Understanding these patterns requires neither conspiracy theorizing nor partisan interpretation, but rather careful attention to documented evidence, historical precedents, and institutional analysis. The 1928 pivot demonstrates how democratic societies can be systematically undermined through legal channels when accountability mechanisms are eliminated and institutional memory is erased.

The Department of War renaming represents more than nomenclature—it embodies the systematic reversal of America’s post-fascist institutional arrangements, occurring alongside documented elimination of accountability mechanisms and coordinated symbolic restoration of pre-integration military culture. When considered within the broader pattern of institutional capture, Hegseth’s declaration that “we’re back” takes on historical significance that warrants serious attention from anyone still committed to preserving democratic governance against militant white supremacists seizing control from “within”.

Each red dot represents a local Klan chapter, known as a Klavern, that spread across the country between the 1915 “America First” Presidential campaign and 1940. Source: Virginia Commonwealth University
Source: Griot
Source: Tulsa Historical Society
Tulsa officials in 1921 immediately moved to erase all records of mass shootings by “America First” militias, building a giant “Klavern” headquarters directly over the firebombed Black businesses and homes.

Energy, Poetry, Security

EU Solar Wins: Infrastructure Warfare Prep in Plain Sight

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EU Energy Revolution is a National Security Upgrade

June 2025 marked a quiet turning point: solar became the EU’s single largest electricity source for the first time, generating 22% of the grid’s power. Not the largest renewable—the largest source, period.

Nuclear came in second at 21.6%—a position it’s going to have to get used to. With 350 GW installed and another 60+ GW being added annually, future solar has crossed from an “alternative” to the present “foundational infrastructure.”

Slovakia is in the best position to accelerate this further. The country currently sits at 22.1% renewable generation—among the EU’s lowest. But with rapid solar deployment options now on the table, Slovakia could leapfrog directly to the distributed generation model that’s reshaping Europe’s grid.

This transition is strategically sound: solar eliminates fuel logistics, severs dependency on energy imports, and distributes generation across millions of sites that can’t be targeted kinetically. No one misses worrying whether Russian billionaires will turn off pipelines from emotion, US billionaires will explode pipelines from neglect, or undersea infrastructure will be undermined.

At the same time we would be remiss to ignore how speed of technology adoption has outpaced security oversight (as usual). The gaps are creating risks and opportunities for controls that most existing frameworks weren’t designed to address.

What Changes in Transition

The shift to distributed solar fundamentally improves energy security—but in ways that require rethinking safety of power infrastructure.

Physical resilience through distribution: You can bomb a gas plant or a pipeline. You can’t meaningfully attack millions of distributed panels at scale. Solar is a genuine upgrade. Wars destroy centralized infrastructure; distributed generation systems simply reroute and carry on in scenarios that would cripple traditional grids.

No fuel supply chain: Once installed, solar has zero operational dependencies. No rail cars to intercept, no tankers to blockade, no refineries to sabotage. The strategic autonomy is real. No mines to send explosive drones into and shut down permanently, burning all the workers to death with a horrific fireball—you know, that famously clean coal dust Trump told the UN about. But I digress…

Faster recovery: A destroyed solar installation can be replaced in days or weeks. Rebuilding power plants takes many years. At scale, this means better grid resilience even if individual assets are compromised. Distributed resilience works under pressure—just look at Tokyo under occupation in 1948, which deployed hundreds of electric cars charging from hydro when the city had no fuel.

Nissan’s car making origin story is this Tama electric vehicle from 1947 with rapid “bomb bay door” rapid battery replacement on both sides.

These advantages are why the transition makes sense. But solar also introduced something new: millions of internet-connected control points with unclear security ownership.

The New Architecture Exposed

The computing analogy is familiar: mainframes had physical security and limited access. PCs introduced millions of endpoints requiring patches and antivirus. Mobile phones added cellular networks and location tracking. Each transition improved capability while requiring new security paradigms.

Solar’s transition is from physically secured, professionally operated generation to IoT devices managed by homeowners, monitored by installers, and remotely accessible by manufacturers.

The SPE report (SPE 2025 Solutions for PV Cyber Risks to Grid Stability) documents the concentration: thirteen manufacturers maintain remote access to over 5 GW each. Seven control more than 10 GW. Huawei alone shipped 114 GW to Europe between 2015-2023, with estimated remote access to 70% of that installed base. Chinese firms overall supplied 78% of global inverter capacity in 2023.

Individually, a compromised home solar system means nothing. Collectively, manufacturers have remote access to capacity equivalent to multiple large power plants. The report’s grid simulations found that coordinating just 3 GW of inverters to manipulate voltage through reactive power switching could trigger protective relays on nearby generators—potentially cascading into broader outages.

This mirrors early botnet dynamics: individual compromised PCs were nuisances until aggregated into DDoS networks capable of taking down critical services.

“No Operator” Problems

Traditional power infrastructure has clear security ownership. A nuclear plant has a security team, regulatory oversight, 24/7 monitoring. A rooftop solar installation has… a homeowner who set it up once and moved on.

Current EU cybersecurity frameworks (NIS2, the Cyber Resilience Act, Network Code on Cybersecurity) assume there’s an entity responsible for critical infrastructure security. For distributed solar, that entity often doesn’t exist legally. The installer completed their short job. The manufacturer is headquartered abroad. The homeowner thinks it’s appliance-level technology that someone else is responsible for, which would be fine if their Chinese-made-and-controlled toaster couldn’t accidentally destabilize the entire German power grid, but here we are.

During World War II, Deming was a member of the five-man Emergency Technical Committee. He worked with H.F. Dodge, A.G. Ashcroft, Leslie E. Simon, R.E. Wareham, and John Gaillard in the compilation of the American War Standards (American Standards Association Z1.1–3 published in 1942) and taught wartime production. His statistical methods were widely applied during World War II and after (foundational to Japanese auto manufacturing)

The SPE report further states that only 1 of 5 tested inverters supported basic security logging. Default passwords are common. Firmware updates are irregular. Network segmentation is rare. This isn’t malicious—it’s what happens when residential-scale deployment moves faster than security standards.

New Model, New Requirements. Ambiguity means neglect.

The technology doesn’t need to slow. The security framework needs to catch up. This is familiar territory for any director of security with a few years of direction under their belt.

Clear responsibility assignment: Either manufacturers are liable for their installed base security (like automotive recalls), or grid operators assume responsibility, or third-party security operators emerge as a market.

Communication architecture that matches the threat model: Germany’s approach with smart meter gateways is instructive—critical control functions (start/stop, power setpoint changes) route through regulated infrastructure. Monitoring and maintenance can remain direct. This applies standard IT security principles (network segmentation, controlled access) to distributed generation.

Supply chain transparency without protectionism: The issue isn’t where hardware is manufactured—it’s that concentration creates leverage, and remote access by entities outside regulatory jurisdiction creates enforcement gaps. Solutions range from Lithuania’s 2025 law (requiring EU-based intermediaries for systems >100 kW) to hardware/software separation (devices source globally, control software must be auditable and locally hosted).

Standards reflecting actual deployment: Current inverter security standards treat them like industrial control systems. But a device installed by a contractor, connected to home Wi-Fi, and managed via consumer apps isn’t an industrial system. It needs consumer electronics-level security: automatic updates, secure defaults, encrypted communications, no exposed credentials.

State-run Opportunity and Patterns

Rapid deployment in lagging states doesn’t have to repeat the security debt accumulated elsewhere. The country could mandate security baselines upfront: require certified communication gateways for grid-connected systems, establish clear responsibility chains, ensure data localization for operational telemetry.

This isn’t exotic technology. It’s applying lessons from mobile computing and IoT security to distributed generation. The components exist—Hardware Security Modules, Trusted Execution Environments, regulated intermediaries, cryptographic firmware signing. What’s missing is regulatory clarity and enforcement.

Every infrastructure revolution creates security debt paid down over time. Early automobiles had no seatbelts. Early internet had no encryption. Early mobile phones had no app sandboxing.

Solar is mid-transition. Capability deployment happened fast (Europe added 60+ GW in 2024 alone). Security retrofit is lagging. That’s normal but fixable.

The unique aspect: solar’s security model should be superior. Distributed systems are inherently more resilient. But only if distribution is real. When remote access reconcentrates control with manufacturers, you’ve recreated centralized vulnerability while losing traditional plants’ physical security and professional operation.

Europe’s solar buildout is strategically sound. The cybersecurity gap is solvable with existing technology. What’s missing is regulatory clarity on responsibility and baseline security requirements for distributed generation at scale.

Any future rapid deployment can be a model—showing that speed and security aren’t trade-offs when architecture is right from the start. Or it could simply balance out tech debts and provide resilience while others catch up.

The tech works, for national security. The economics work, for national security. The climate math even works, for national security. Now the security model also needs to catch up and work… for national security.

Security

America Made Them Into Killers, Then Ignored Their Pain: The Predictable Result

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Thirteen Years of Warning Signs: Iraq War Veterans and America’s Mental Health Crisis

U.S. Police investigate the truck used in a mass shooting September 28, 2025. Source: AP

On September 28, 2025, Thomas Jacob Sanford drove his pickup truck through the front doors of a Mormon church in Grand Blanc, Michigan. He opened fire on hundreds of Sunday worshippers with an assault rifle, planted improvised explosive devices, then doused the building with gasoline and burned it to the ground. Four people died. Eight were wounded.

The day before, Nigel Edge approached a North Carolina waterfront bar by boat and opened fire with a suppressed AR-style rifle. Three dead. Eight wounded.

Both men were 40 years old. Both were Marines who served in Iraq during the mid-2000s surge and sectarian violence.

This should not be treated as a coincidence, given a thirteen-year pattern anyone can plainly see.

A Pattern Demanding Somebody Care

Since 2012, at least nine Iraq War veterans have committed mass shootings in the United States, killing 24 people and wounding dozens more. The locations vary—churches, bars, airports, military bases—but the warning signs remain hauntingly consistent:

Benjamin Barnes (2012): Sent “I want to die” texts before killing a park ranger. Ex-girlfriend had documented his PTSD, weapons arsenal, and suicide threats in custody court papers. No intervention came.

Ivan Lopez (2014): Being evaluated for PTSD at Fort Hood when he killed three soldiers after an argument over leave paperwork. He was taking Ambien and antidepressants. His mother had died five months earlier. He had $14,000 in debt.

Esteban Santiago (2017): Walked into an FBI office claiming the CIA was controlling his mind, was held for psychiatric evaluation, then released. Two months later, he killed five people at Fort Lauderdale airport. His family had begged for help.

Bryan Riley (2021): Under the influence of methamphetamine and divine delusions, he murdered a family of four including a 3-month-old baby. His girlfriend knew he had PTSD. He believed God told him to save someone who didn’t exist.

Matthew Livelsberger (2025): Detonated a truck bomb outside a Trump building in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day to “relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took”. He had PTSD, depression, and multiple traumatic brain injuries. He was in the Army’s mental health program. He’d had three counseling sessions in the five months before his attack—then stopped seeking help because of Special Forces stigma.

Michael Brown (2025): Killed four people in a Montana bar next door to where he lived. His family had warned authorities a “snap could happen.” The VA allegedly told him he “no longer qualified for assistance.” Montana State Hospital refused admission unless court-ordered. He refused his schizophrenia medications.

And now Sanford and Edge, within 24 hours of each other.

Ideology Serves as a Distraction

The early reporting tried to frame Sanford’s attack as anti-Mormon extremism, with the President even calling it anti-Christian. Investigators suggested “possible anti-Mormon rhetoric.” The narrative was ready: religious hatred, domestic terrorism, the usual script was rolling immediately. But that’s NOT what the evidence so far really shows. Sanford drove past several other churches on the way to target the one he had no documented connection with.

What he did have was a ten-year-old son born with a severe medical condition requiring multiple surgeries, lengthy hospitalizations, and experimental treatment. The financial strain was crushing enough that he’d started a GoFundMe in 2015. He’d taken leave from his job as a Coca-Cola truck driver just to care for his child.

Edge had sued the VA just four days before his attack, alleging they conspired to block his treatment. He’d filed multiple frivolous lawsuits fed by social media memes, claiming his parents were “LGBTQ White Supremacist Pedophiles.” His ex-wife hadn’t heard from him in a decade. He’d legally changed his name. He was drowning in documented mental health crises his family couldn’t stop.
These weren’t ideological attacks. These were men in crisis—financial, medical, psychological—who had been failed by every system meant to care about them.

An Invisible Damaged Generation

Sanford and Edge represent a specific cohort: the Iraq War veteran generation, now entering middle age.

They enlisted young, served in Fallujah, Ramadi, Baghdad during the height of urban combat and IEDs. They came home to a country that had moved on, to a VA system that was overwhelmed, to civilian jobs that didn’t exist or didn’t pay enough.

Now they’re 40. The adrenaline has worn off. The coping mechanisms that worked at 25 don’t work anymore. Marriages fail. Parents die. Kids get sick. Medical bills pile up.

And the mental health system that was supposed to be there? It disappeared.

America’s Failed Basic Duty of Care

After sending its citizens into harm’s way, America ignored the basic health care they required. A ProPublica investigation found that half of routine VA inspections revealed mental health care failures—botched suicide screenings, failure to follow up with at-risk veterans, wait times stretching for months. Sixteen veterans who received substandard VA care have killed themselves or others since 2020.

Over three-quarters of the VA’s 139 networks report “severe” shortages of psychiatrists and psychologists. Rural veterans—who comprise 27% of those with serious mental illness—use intensive mental health programs at rates 58% lower than urban veterans. The further an American lives from urban areas, the higher the dangers.

The pattern is clear of veterans who seek help, show warning signs, even directly alert authorities, and then get no understanding or care. FBI evaluations release dangerous individuals after days. VA offices deny help even with diagnosed schizophrenics. Families file explicit warnings only to be told nothing can be done without court orders. Mental health programs abandoned due to systemic military and cultural stigma. Every case above represents a missed intervention point for public safety and healthcare, a system-wide failure, a preventable tragedy.

Every single one showed very obvious warning signs and American “safety” experts closed their eyes. Every single one fell through gaps in the system.

When Combat Trauma Meets Middle Age

Research on Iraq War veterans reveals the kind of simple truths most Americans still don’t seem to want to recognize:

They have 3-4 times higher violence rates than the general population—but that still means 91% never engage in severe violence. The 9% who do share specific risk factors: combat exposure during the surge or sectarian violence periods, traumatic brain injury from IED blasts, PTSD or moral injury, major life stressors, social isolation, and inadequate mental health treatment.

Combat trauma doesn’t fade—it compounds. PTSD symptoms often worsen in middle age as veterans lose the energy to suppress them. The hypervigilance that kept them alive in Fallujah becomes exhausting in suburbia.

Add civilian stresses: Sanford’s son with catastrophic medical needs. Lopez’s mother dying and $14,000 in debt. Santiago with $5-10 in his bank account. Livelsberger’s wife leaving after infidelity disputes. Barnes in a custody battle with restraining orders.

The “perfect storm” of mass murder symptoms emerges: unresolved trauma + life crisis + failed mental health system + military firearm access = catastrophe.

That should terrify everyone living in the neighborhoods where thousands more just like them are struggling in hidden pain while arming themselves for sudden action.

What Other Countries Do Differently
UK Iraq veterans show similar PTSD rates to Americans—9.4% compared to our estimated 11-20%. But they rarely commit mass shootings.

Why?

Basic gun control means mental health crises don’t escalate to mass casualties. Australia’s comprehensive mental health approach achieves better outcomes despite 22% of defense personnel experiencing mental health problems. Canada emphasizes immediate care access without bureaucratic barriers.

The US has 1.2 guns per person. Australia has 0.13. When mental health crises occur, gun availability determines lethality.

We could have both—the Second Amendment and proper mental health care.

We’ve chosen neither.

This isn’t complicated. Research identifies clear protective factors that reduce violence risk by 76-92% even among high-risk veterans: stable employment, meeting basic needs, social support, comprehensive mental health care, and temporary firearm restrictions during acute crises.

Critical intervention points include:

The transition period: First 3-5 years post-deployment require mandatory mental health screening and follow-up. Each year of delayed PTSD treatment increases symptom persistence by 5%.

Major life stressors: Divorce, death, financial crisis, medical emergencies—these trigger violence regardless of time since service. Brown’s mother died in 2021, twenty years after his Iraq deployment. Sanford served 2007-2008; his attack came seventeen years later.

Crisis presentations: When veterans show up at FBI offices claiming mind control, when families file warnings, when lawsuits get filed against the VA days before attacks—these demand immediate, aggressive intervention.

Comprehensive care: Mental health can’t be separated from financial stress, employment problems, and social isolation. Integrated support addressing all factors works. Fractured, bureaucratic systems fail.

The cost of doing this? Billions annually. The cost of not doing this? We’ve seen it nine times since 2012. We saw it twice in one weekend in September 2025.

We’ll see it again until mental health is prioritized for warriors.

The Human Cost

Twenty-four people are dead across these nine incidents. Dozens more wounded. Families destroyed. Communities traumatized. And nine veterans—who might have been saved with proper care—are dead or facing life in prison.

Everyone lost.

We can’t call these incidents random or ideological.

We can’t frame them as isolated acts of evil. We can’t focus on gun control or security measures or whatever fits our preferred narrative.

We can acknowledge the uncomfortable truth: we created these men. We sent them to war during the bloodiest years of urban combat and sectarian violence. We brought them home with blast injuries, PTSD, and moral injury. We promised them care, then systematically defunded, privatized, and bureaucratized that care until it became effectively inaccessible.

Then we acted shocked when Santiago walked into the FBI saying the CIA controlled his mind—and we sent him home. When Brown’s family said he might snap—and the system said it couldn’t help without a court order. When Edge sued the VA four days before killing three people—and nothing happened.

This is Gross Abandonment of Veterans

Nine Iraq War veterans. Thirteen years. Two dozen dead. Dozens more wounded.

There is no inherent danger from veterans. Ninety-one percent never engage in severe violence. This is about the causes of violence, which means systematic institutional failure to provide promised care to people we trained to kill, sent into impossible political wars, and then left them behind and broken without hope or help.

Until we decide to address this—with funding, with commitment, with the same determination we had when we sent these men to war—it will keep happening.

The warning signs are clear and continuous like a flashing light cutting through the fog. We’ve seen it for over a decade. We just don’t seem to care enough as a nation to provide sufficient mental health care to our wounded warriors.