GT1-Blog

The Only Side That Matters: The Victims By Brian Wilson: The Bipartisan Patriot Please excuse my propensity for pontification, but some topics refuse to fit inside a neat little paragraph. This one deserved the extra mileage. At least it comes from a place with no party badge pinned to it. My question: Would the Epstein Files Have Hit This Hard If Trump Lost, or Are We Being Played Again? Earlier today I was watching the latest round of pundits on cable news, all of them pretending they have a personal window into the truth, when that old familiar feeling crept up the back of my neck. It is the same one I used to get on a bad call, the kind where the supervisors swear the scene is fine but something in the air says otherwise. Politics has that smell too, the smell of something hidden, something rotten, something they are hoping the rest of us are too worn down to notice. Which brings us to the Epstein Files and the question everyone whispers the second the cameras stop rolling. Would a...

America Loves Its Soldiers, Not Its Veterans Somewhere along the way, the country traded substance for spectacle. Outrage became a hobby. Headlines became bait. Every day feels like a new hunt for the villain of the hour, a fresh scandal to gnaw on until the next one drops. We scroll, we rage, we repost, we repeat. The noise gets louder, the attention span gets shorter, and anything that doesn’t scream gets buried underneath the digital churn. In that atmosphere, veterans don’t stand a chance. Their struggles don’t trend. Their battles don’t come with dramatic footage or partisan fireworks. Real suffering is too quiet for the algorithm. It doesn’t spike engagement. It doesn’t sell ads. So it drifts to the margins, pushed aside by louder crises that matter less and perform better. That’s the real tragedy. Not that this country fails to fix the problem, failure you can address, but that it forgets there’s a problem at all. Veterans become background characters in the national story, ment...

DISCLAIMER: This is satire. Relax. The real world of politics is already meaner, messier, and far more ridiculous than anything in these pages. While nothing here is meant as a jab at any one demographic, it is, sadly, a pretty fair mirror of just how absurd the U.S. political landscape has become, wobbling along in full daylight. Someone posted a meme that read, “The Government is Open and everyone has a Full Stomach. What will Libs protest next? Is Thanksgiving a Slave Holiday? Does Santa skip Trans chimneys? Was New Year’s created by a Nazi? Stay Tuned, America!!” and my mind, true to form, sprinted straight toward the extreme. Maybe it is because I have been buried in Thompson, Kerouac, Mailer, and, for reasons even I cannot explain, a heavy dose of Anthony Bourdain. Either way, the gearshift slipped, the wheels spun, and this is the story that spilled out. Satirical, absolutely. Far fetched, probably. Yet we live in a moment where truth keeps tripping over its own shoelaces and th...

From Checks and Balances to Power Brokers: The Dangerous Creep of Judicial Overreach By Brian Wilson: The Bipartisan Patriot They’re trying to make the Supreme Court into a trade war referee now, like nine folks in robes are gonna rewrite global economics between lunch and closing arguments. That’s not their job. The Court’s there to check power, not run it. But here’s what folks keep missing, it’s not even about granting Trump new power. What’s actually happening is the Court’s hearing a case to decide if existing law, the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, already gave the president that authority to slap tariffs wherever he pleases. It’s about interpretation, not invention. That law was meant for national emergencies, not some blanket permission slip for economic strong-arming. The Constitution’s clear: Congress sets tariffs, Congress regulates commerce. Always has. That’s in the DNA of the republic. But the Trump administration stretched that old law like taffy, sayi...

Siberian Gothic Expressionism: The Geometry of the Hole (Hostage / Jacob’s Ladder Variant — Distortion Edition) The cell was a geometry . A crooked architecture of human unease, a box of poured concrete in a country that had forgotten how to distinguish between a jail, a bunker, and a grave. In here, in the hole, dread had its own floor plan. The walls didn’t just contain me; they pulsed with every story I’d tried to bury. And something about the angles was wrong—too many corners for one room, like the place had shifted overnight. This wasn’t a prison. This wasn’t a safehouse. This was the house that lists a little to the left. I had helped other men stand straighter once, taught them how to steady their minds— but none of that mattered here. Not in this room. Not in this captivity, whatever it was. The air had a tilt to it, like gravity was showing favoritism. “Let’s go, you know the drill!” a guard yelled— or a captor. Hard to tell the difference when the voice echoed twice, once fro...

When Silence Is Legal,  But Never Moral By Brian Wilson: The Bipartisan Patriot As they say, something's rotten in the state of Denmark. All these new revelations, the Epstein files, the whispers about who knew what and when. It’s not just the sickness of the crimes themselves; it’s that faint echo of silence that always follows the powerful. Here’s the hard truth that sticks in your throat: under U.S. law, unless you fall into a few narrow boxes, teacher, doctor, cop, caseworker, there’s no actual legal duty to report sex trafficking. None. Morally? You’d have to be hollow not to. Legally? The system shrugs. That’s the jagged place where law and decency split ways, and where any good lawyer, defending whoever’s name shows up in those emails, can wedge a defense clean through the middle of our outrage. I don’t agree with it. Not one bit. But it’s real, and worth laying bare. The Law’s Blind Spot The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 was built to hammer the monsters who sel...

Finally completed a project I began back in September. Life has a way of interrupting good intentions, and this one got lost in the “needs work” folder until now. The Torture of Halloween: Why I’ll Never Understand Extreme Haunted Houses By BR. Giga It used to be simple. A fog machine. A kid in a rubber mask. Maybe a chainsaw without the chain if someone wanted to get ambitious. You screamed, you laughed, you stumbled into a pile of hay and bought cider on the way out. That was Halloween — a fun little flirtation with death, nothing binding. Now, apparently, it’s an endurance trial for people who pay good money to be waterboarded in a barn. The Rise of the “Trauma Simulator” They call them “extreme haunts.” That’s marketing language for “legalized kidnapping with a theme.” The participants, or “victims,” as some promoters charmingly brand them, sign multi-page waivers, surrender their phones, and then spend several hours being slapped, force-fed, insulted, gagged, drenched, electroshoc...

You Can Say: The History of Massachusetts By BR Giga (Brian R. Wilson) I have walked the slope at Charlestown where smoke still clings to the ghosts of the hill, and you can say it began there — not the war, but the sound. That raw, bright thunder of a people deciding they would rather die awake than live forever sleeping. You can say the air itself remembers — each musket crack, each heartbeat caught between courage and terror. The boys who stood on Breed’s Hill were not angels or heroes, just carpenters and farmhands who’d seen enough winter to know freedom, like spring, must be worked for. And from that hill, the story walked — down into Boston, where wharves smelled of molasses and rain, where bells tolled for both victory and debt, and a small nation began its long apprenticeship in contradiction. I have seen the stone faces at Concord, heard the iron whistle of Lowell’s mills, the hum of women’s hands weaving a future from thread and fatigue. I have seen the...

The Question Was posed: What's You're Most Memorable Rush Concert Experience" By BR.Giga The last one, without question. Toronto. Neil’s final tour. You could feel it in the air, like something sacred was about to finish writing its own story. Me and two of my oldest buddies made a long weekend of it. Started with a Blue Jays game, the kind where the beer’s too cold, the crowd’s half in love with summer, and every crack of the bat sounds like youth pretending it’s not over yet. We drifted through bars afterward, swapping the same old stories we’d told for thirty years. One of the guys got himself shut off, imagine that, getting cut off by a Canadian bartender. We laughed until we cried. Then came the show. Rush, for the thirtieth time for me, and somehow still new. Reverse chronology in motion: I could see every version of us in that arena, the kids we’d been in Massachusetts, the dads we’d become, the old friends standing in the glow of “The Spirit of Radio.” Neil was tra...

  The Question Was Pose: "Repeat something your Dad always said to you as a kid" “You’re Lucky I Love You” You kids ever wonder what it was like growin’ up in Massachusetts back when cars had ashtrays, cops had real mustaches, and you could still get away with bein’ a handful before anybody had letters like ADHD to blame it on? Yeah, that was me. Born in ’69. Built like a live wire that never found ground. Your great-grandfather, he was a cop. Stocky, built like a fire hydrant, smelled like Folgers and cold October leaves, voice like a slammed door. Worked nights, came home with road salt on his boots and that look, half tired, half ready to grab the world by the collar. He didn’t do timeouts. He did eye contact. And if you were smart, you broke first. He used to say, “You’re lucky I love you.” That was his all-purpose phrase. Covered everything from small fires to near-arson. Like that time I found his patrol radio in the hall closet. I must’ve been ten. Thought I’d check i...

  The Question Was Posed: What's the "easiest" Stephen King book to read? I wrote this a while back, I think it works for this question. Stephen King’s Night Shift: A Wicked Good Time Capsule By BR.Giga Night Shift ain’t just a pile of spooky stories, it’s the sound of a young writer from Maine figuring himself out, one typewriter clack at a time. You can almost smell the burnt coffee, hear the space heater ticking under his desk, the wind sneaking through the siding. Came out in ’78, but it still feels like something fresh off the night shift at a paper mill, rough, honest, and a little haunted around the edges. There’s twenty stories in here, give or take, and they run the whole range: quick jabs, slow burns, stuff that crawls, stuff that jumps. Some read like warm-ups; others feel too big to stay short. But three of ’em have always hit me right where it counts, Jerusalem’s Lot, Graveyard Shift, and Gray Matter. They’re different kinds of nightmares, but all cut from th...

The Question Was Posed: A cult that pretends it’s not a cult? By Brian Wilson On Faith, Bureaucracy, and the Weight of Belief A cult that pretends it’s not a cult? Maybe. But that’s too easy, isn’t it? Easy words for a hard inheritance. The Catholic Church isn’t a mystery to me; it’s muscle memory. The smell of wax and wood polish. Knees on cold tile. The quiet shuffle when the hymn ends and nobody knows what to do with their guilt yet. It’s not some secret organization hiding behind stained glass, it’s a factory of meaning. A place that mass-produces forgiveness in small, wafer-thin doses. You grow up thinking you’re praying. Then you realize you’re negotiating. You hand over your small sins like spare change, and someone behind a screen whispers you clean again. You walk out lighter, sure, but never quite empty. That’s the trick. Faith survives in the spaces doubt leaves behind. People call it a cult because it asks for obedience. But so does marriage. So does love. So does hope. And...

The Oath Before the Storm By BR.Giga: The Bipartisan Patriot Tomorrow, Congresswoman-elect Adelita Grijalva will finally raise her right hand and take the oath of office, and though it may look like just another ceremony on the Hill, it’s anything but. Her swearing-in gives the House its 218th vote on the Epstein discharge petition, the one thing standing between rumor and revelation. Once she signs, the leadership can no longer bury the matter in committee or drown it in paperwork; the vote must come to the floor. And if that happens, the sealed Epstein files, flight logs, calendars, visitor lists, ledgers, the whole sordid architecture could see daylight. You can practically feel the tremor running through Washington tonight, like a nor’easter blowing in across the Potomac. For Donald Trump, that gust is personal. His name has circled Epstein’s orbit for decades, friendly at first, later disavowed, and now stranded somewhere between coincidence and consequence. If the files open full...

What It Means to Be a True Patriot By BR.Giga We toss the word patriot around like it’s a souvenir now — printed on shirts, shouted through feeds, slapped on bumpers, worn like proof. But a true patriot doesn’t need a label. They need a conscience. Patriotism, the real kind, was never loud. It was stubborn, steady, sometimes lonely. It meant telling the truth even when it cost something. It meant arguing with your country the way you argue with someone you love — not out of spite but because you still believe it can do better. Washington warned, “Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.” He knew even back then how easy it is to love the flag more than the people beneath it. Somewhere along the road, we swapped duty for display. The marketplace took our symbols, shrink-wrapped them, and sold them back at a markup. Now we buy the T-shirt, repost the meme, sing the anthem between commercials — and call that devotion. Jefferson said once, “Dissent is the highest form of patrio...

Semper Fidelis (A Song of the United States Marine Corps — November 10) By BR.Giga I sing the song of thunderous hearts! Of men and women molded by fire, born where the flag unfurls above storm and salt, where the ocean itself salutes their march. O proud day! November’s breath upon the fields, and the earth remembers the step of the few— the proud—the Marines! Forged at dawn in Philadelphia’s forge, tempered on every shore where Liberty stands guard. I hear their cadence echo from Belleau Wood, their voices rise from Iwo’s crimson sand, their silhouettes in frozen Chosin winds, their boots printing history across Fallujah’s dust. Every age, a new recruit— every age, the same immortal flame. From sea to shining sea, their mothers’ prayers are folded into the flag, their fathers’ pride stitched into each stripe. In the hush before reveille, I feel the drumbeat of generations— a living pulse that will not yield. O Marines! the Republic’s steadfast keepers, your oath is...