imjustKent @CaliforniaKent

He told his students to go to the windows. Get out. Jump if you have to. Then Liviu Librescu walked to the classroom door and pressed his body against it. He was 76 years old. He weighed 140 lbs The gunman was in the hallway. It was April 16, 2007. A Monday morning. Solid mechanics class at Virginia Tech, Room 204. Twenty-two students, most of them 19 or 20 years old. At 9:45 AM, gunshots echoed through Norris Hall. Room by room, the shooter was working his way down the corridor. Liviu heard it. He understood immediately. He had survived the Holocaust. He had survived a labor camp. He had spent decades living under Communist oppression. He knew exactly what evil sounded like. He told his students to escape through the windows. Second floor — it was a drop, but they'd survive. Then he walked to the door and held it shut with his body. The shooter tried to force it open. It wouldn't move. He fired through the door. Wood splintered. Bullets came through. Liviu stayed. Behind him, students were climbing out the windows. Dropping to the ground. Running. One by one, all twenty-two of them got out. The shooter kept firing through the door. Liviu held it shut until every student was safe. Then the bullets killed him. When police arrived, they found his body at the door. All 22 of his students survived. Not one was injured. Liviu Librescu was born on August 18, 1930, in Ploiești, Romania. He was Jewish. In 1941, when he was eleven years old, Romanian authorities sent him and his family to a labor camp. His father died there. Liviu survived. When the war ended, he was fifteen. He went back to school. Studied engineering. Earned a doctorate from the University of Bucharest. But Communist Romania had no interest in allowing a Jewish intellectual to succeed. He was blocked from academic positions. Passed over for jobs he deserved. He applied to emigrate. The government kept refusing. Finally, in 1978 when Liviu was 48 years old — Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin personally intervened. Romania let him go. He had spent most of his adult life trapped in a country that didn't want him. In Israel, he taught at Tel Aviv University. Published over 300 papers. Became an international expert in aeroelasticity — the science of how air flows over aircraft wings. In 1985, Virginia Tech offered him a position. He moved to Blacksburg, Virginia. He taught there for 22 years. His students loved him — demanding but kind, high standards, genuine care. He was still teaching full-time at 76. Still publishing research. Still showing up every Monday morning for solid mechanics. April 16 was the first day of Passover — the Jewish holiday celebrating liberation from slavery and oppression. Liviu Librescu died on the day his tradition sets aside to celebrate freedom. He spent his entire life escaping death and oppression by luck, by persistence, by the intervention of others. And on his last morning, he chose to stand at a door so that twenty-two young people could have the future he had fought so hard to reach. He could have run. He could have hidden. He could have climbed out a window with his students. He chose to stay. The Virginia Tech shooting killed 32 people that day — the deadliest school shooting in American history at the time. Room 204 had zero casualties. Because a 76-year-old Holocaust survivor held a door with his body until every student behind him was gone. His funeral was held in Israel. Students from Virginia Tech flew across the ocean to honor him. The Israeli government awarded him the Star of David Medal posthumously. Virginia Tech named a scholarship in his memory. His son said his father died the way he lived — protecting others. A man who survived everything evil threw at him for 76 years. On his last day, he made sure 22 kids survived too. Professor Liviu Librescu. August 18, 1930 — April 16, 2007. Holocaust survivor. Labor camp survivor. 302 published papers. 22 years at Virginia Tech. 22 students out the window. He held the door.

Why is everything so ugly? A thread🧵👇 There has been a systematic persecution and removal of Beauty in the West in recent years. Why? Because real Beauty has the power to build up or destroy a society. The transcendental quality of beauty makes it a powerful linchpin to pull to hasten our societal downfall.

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This has been a running theme of the Remnant podcast since the first episodes.

nxthompson @nxthompson

2 weeks ago

This is an amazing quote from Lindsey Graham about when he realized how politics works. theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/…

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@HormuzLetter Not how this works.

This is not how it works. The War Powers Resolution doesn’t give the president a “free” 60 days—and the Constitution certainly doesn’t either. Regardless, we’re talking about a single war. You don’t get to pause it and then pretend it’s a different war.

Mark Satter @marksatter

2 weeks ago

NEW: President Trump formally notified lawmakers this weekend that the nation is once again at war with Iran, giving his administration another 60-day clock to use the military in the region without congressional approval. W/ @connorobrienNH @LeoShane politico.com/news/2026/07/1…

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The French, the Russians, and the Chinese all believed they could perfect human nature if they just broke enough eggs. Our founders believed the opposite. They believed man was fallen, that power corrupts, that no one — no king, no assembly, no vanguard of the proletariat — could be trusted with unchecked authority. So they built a system that assumes the worst about us and protects us from each other and from ourselves. They didn’t dedicate the nation to a perfect man. They dedicated it to a proposition. That all men are created equal. Endowed by their Creator. Not by the state, not by the party, not by the revolution — by their Creator, which means no revolution can take those rights away, because no revolution granted them in the first place. That is why people are willing to die to get here — and I mean die. They cross deserts. They pile into boats that have no business on open water. They wait years in line for a piece of paper. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is dying to break into Russia. Nobody is stacking themselves into a shipping container to reach the People’s Republic of China. The traffic runs in one direction, and it has for two hundred and fifty years, and that one fact tells you everything the propagandists on the left and the isolationists on the right don’t want you to know. The poor of the earth, the persecuted of the earth, the ambitious of the earth — they vote with their feet, and they vote for us. A refugee understands what a tenured professor cannot: that this is the best there is, because he has seen the alternatives up close, and the professor has only read about them in a book he misunderstood. ewerickson.substack.com/p/the-shining-…

Your pub's flag isn't on the moon

R⎊M @LDNRom

4 weeks ago

So America turns 250. That's cute. My local pub is 364 years old.

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The greatest ex we ever had 😢

@SMB_Attorney Biglaw 27 years. Not like this for everyone. I can tell you that for sure.

Congratulations, Democrats, you’ve reached the “But is he too much of a Jew-face?” tier of presidential candidate vetting.

Jacob N. Kornbluh @jacobkornbluh

4 weeks ago

👀 CNN anchor Elex Michaelson at end of politics panel discussion re: Ossoff 2028: “As a Jew, some people read a little more Jewish than other people. And Jon Ossoff may not read as Jewish as Josh Shapiro does, for whatever that’s worth.”

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@timecaptales It’s as if the entire nation was high in 1976.

House Democrats before NY primaries vs after CO-01 primary

Jim VandeHei @JimVandeHei

4 weeks ago

If you had to bet who’ll have the energy, organization, new ideas and star power for 28 Dems, it’s not close: socialists. The Sanders-Mamdani-AOC wing is swarming the Dem party, and Dem leaders will gradually than quickly do what establishment Rs did w Trump: acquiesce.

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The moment you realize what life looks like for people who don't know anything about AI, Politics or the Economy.

That's a schizophrenic offense #Cubs

250 years ago today, on June 29, 1776, New Yorkers looked out at the water and saw a nightmare on the horizon. The British fleet had arrived, and so many ships filled the bay that witnesses said the masts looked like "a forest of pine trees" growing out of the sea. The timing could not have been more brutal. This was the empire's answer to the rebellion, and it was overwhelming. The first wave of around 45 warships and transports dropped anchor off Sandy Hook and Staten Island carrying General William Howe and roughly 10,000 troops. Within days it kept growing. Then his brother Admiral Richard Howe arrived with more. It would eventually swell into one of the largest seaborne invasion forces of the entire 18th century, hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of professional soldiers and German mercenaries, aimed at one city. Now sit with the timing. While that forest of masts was filling the harbor, delegates down in Philadelphia were in the final days of debating whether to declare independence. They voted for it on July 2 and signed off on the wording on July 4. So at the exact moment America was being born on paper, the most powerful military on earth was already anchored off its coast, getting ready to strangle it in the cradle. The people of New York understood exactly what they were seeing. Alarm bells rang, panic spread through the streets, and soldiers sprinted to their posts to stare at a force they had almost no hope of matching. Washington's army was outnumbered, outgunned, and about to get badly beaten in the battles for New York that followed. That's the part that gets lost in the fireworks every Fourth of July. Independence wasn't declared from a position of strength. It was declared with an enemy armada already sitting on the doorstep, knowing full well what was coming. They signed their names anyway.

@250YearsAgoLive Let’s do this!!!!

I'm coming from France, from Europe — and for god's sake, don't do that. I've already watched this movie. I know exactly how it ends. Let me run the tape for you. We started at the same line. In 2008 the EU economy was actually bigger than the US — about 110% of American GDP. By 2023 it was down to 67%. Over that window the US grew 87%. Europe grew 13.5%. Per capita it's uglier. European income was ~76% of American income in 2008. Today it's 50%. France — Descartes, the Concorde, the nuclear program — now has a GDP per capita below Arkansas, the 48th poorest US state. Germany sits around Oklahoma. Of the 50 largest tech companies on Earth, four are European. Four. No Nvidia, no Google, no SpaceX, no OpenAI. What we built instead is a regulator that writes a 383-page report explaining why we have no champions — and then implements 10% of its own recommendations. This isn't bad luck. It's a system working exactly as designed. Hayek explained the mechanism in 1944 and Europe didn't listen. The Road to Serfdom isn't a slogan, it's a machine. You start with the nicest intentions — fairness, equality, security. To deliver them the state has to plan. To plan, it has to override prices, contracts, individual choice. And when the plan fails — it always fails, because no central planner holds the knowledge that millions of free actors hold — the lesson is never "planning was the error." The lesson is "we didn't plan hard enough." So it takes more power. Then more. Every failure becomes the alibi for the next seizure. Socialism never arrives at its destination. It just never stops paving the road — and the road only goes one place. Europe didn't go full Soviet. It went soft. It chose comfort over greatness, redistribution over creation, safety over risk — and the result is a continent that is rich, gorgeous, and quietly dying. Managed decline with excellent cheese. The wealthiest museum on Earth. Now the part Americans need to hear, because you think you're immune. You're not. Peter Thiel keeps warning about the Antichrist, and people imagine a movie villain. Wrong. The Antichrist never arrives promising war and tyranny. He arrives promising peace and safety. He's the universal manager who will protect you from every risk — climate, inequality, AI, each other — in exchange for one small thing: that nobody is ever again permitted to do anything new, anything dangerous, anything great. He's one-world stagnation enforced by fear. The final committee. Socialism is his vehicle. It's the ideology that says risk is theft, that excellence is unfair, that the cure for every problem is more central control. It's the perfect on-ramp to a planet-wide regime of safety and stasis. And here are the stakes nobody says out loud: America is the last engine. The frontier of compute, the people still trying to make us multi-planetary, the builders who'd rather escape the trap than manage it — almost all American. The product of the one place left on Earth that still rewards builders over bureaucrats. If America picks the European path, there is no second America to bail the species out. No frontier left. The engine of human progress switches off — not in a century, in a few years. Why am I this certain? Because socialism doesn't merely slow you down. It rots everything it touches. It rots the economy — see the numbers. It rots incentives: punish building and reward grievance, and your best people stop building. It rots the culture: a society that resents winners eventually produces none. It rots the spirit: you trade the dignity of agency for the comfort of dependence and you call it progress. I'm not throwing rocks from the outside. I'm writing from inside the wreckage, watching the most talented continent in human history vote, year after year, for its own anesthesia. America — you are the control group. You're the thing the rest of us point to when we need to remember what's still possible. Do not become us. For god's sake. Don't do that.

Elon Musk @elonmusk

a month ago

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I don’t want to alarm anyone but it does seem the Bolsheviks are making a bit of comeback.

@JesseTinsley The last lined slayed me. Guilty as charged.

“England historically has struggled here in Massachusetts” — #WorldCup announcer on Fox 👀