Running Iron Report

In this case the question came from a young person, and they can be forgiven the crudity of their curiosity, even if it is backloaded with tired assumptions force fed by bad television, video games, abysmal schools, and that grandest of American traditions:  the full criminal embrace.  While the characterization of cops has migrated from the Officer Friendly types on Adam 12 to masked bogeymen in “tanks” fiendishly no-knocking the wrong house, outlaws and very bad people enjoy the fruits of selective judgment.

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There is nothing more stirring and romantic than a people’s fight for independence. Who cannot be moved by an underdog taking up the rifle to make a stand and be counted in the community of nations? And yet the reality of revolution — and the civil war that it seems must almost inevitably follow — is grim, violent and often … Read More

Cattle have long been the bogeymen of environmental extremists, blamed for almost every eco-horror imaginable, but people need to eat, and despite sustained misinformation campaigns by detractors, they like to eat beef.  This year, the average American will consume 217 pounds of beef, and what’s missing from the traditional formulas, Hobbs says, is the long-term health and productivity of the soil.

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The president is a man of tremendous and highly sensitive ego, and he feels himself under constant and bitterly unfair attack. The world is full of tumult — and Fake News. The year is 1798. The French Revolution has plunged Europe into bloody conflict. The fledgling United States is itself embroiled in an undeclared maritime shooting war with revolutionary France, … Read More

Editor’s note: Running Iron Report is proud to support the efforts of our friend and contributor Greg Walker, who wrote this piece, in “fighting the good fight”. In 1962, my grandfather on my father’s side took his own life. This after killing his estranged wife. His murder-suicide shook our immediate and extended families to the core. I was just eight … Read More

If you are one of those rarified Americans who still believe, as this space fervently does, that natural rights are bequeathed to us by our creator, rather than granted to us by government masters, you will perhaps appreciate the gift of Robert Francis O’Rourke.

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Staff Sgt. Michael Mantenuto, 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne), took his own life on April 24, 2017.

The break-out star of the 2004 blockbuster Disney film “Miracle,” who became a Green Beret in 2013, had for years endured and fought against deeply entrenched behavioral health and substance dependency issues. Hospitalized for 28 days in 2015, Mantenuto returned to Fort Lewis, Washington, with great hope and a desire to help others like those he’d met over the previous month.

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Americans have a skewed image of what civil war entails, mainly because ours was somewhat exceptional, if not unique. Two vast geographical regions squared off and went at it in a large-scale conventional war featuring classical Napoleonic movement of great armies and titanic battles like Gettysburg, Antietam, Chickamauga and the sieges of Vicksburg and Petersburg. Victory or defeat hinged upon … Read More

Two presidential candidates did a very bad thing last weekend: They are promulgating a false narrative — a narrative that was comprehensively debunked by the investigation and report of the Obama Justice Department in 2015. The report is readily available online. Brown’s killing may have been tragic — nobody wants to see a young man’s life snuffed out — but calling … Read More

South of Adel, Oregon, beyond the diminished headquarters of the MC Ranch, Twentymile Road offers a sharp eastward turnoff onto County Road 3–15.  You take it, hitting the turn signal for no reason at all, pushing through irrigated pastures in the valley bottoms where the humidity is suddenly tropical and the smell of lush orchard grass, alfalfa, and timothy pours in through the open windows of the truck.  You think: a rainforest sprinkled with dust.

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