Then and Now

During the War of 1812, “The Battle of Craney Island.”

 (Americana Corner) In the spring of 1813, the British Admiralty initiated a push to wreak havoc in the Chesapeake Bay and gave command of an expedition to Admiral John Warren. Cautious by nature, Warren would prove to be a poor choice, but his second-in-command was a tough sailor named George Cockburn, a Royal Navy Captain who first entered the service at the age of nine and would eventually rise to be the First Sea Lord, the highest-ranking officer in the Royal Navy. More importantly, Cockburn relished the chance to chastise the Americans. The British fleet arrived off Cape Henry in early February, and its initial target was the USS Constellation, anchored in the Elizabeth River at the Gosport Navy Yard near Norfolk. But, after briefly probing its defenses, Warren determined that Norfolk was too well defended for his small force to capture, and the fleet, after plundering the countryside around Lynnhaven Bay, moved on to easier targets.

Cockburn took a small flotilla along with a naval brigade of 400 marines north to Frenchtown on the Elk River, which had developed into a thriving commercial center due to its proximity to Philadelphia and other northern markets. On April 29, Cockburn landed a contingent of troops and burned several warehouses filled with flour and military supplies and destroyed five schooners before moving on to Havre de Grace, which received much of the same treatment. The British then headed north up the Susquehanna River and captured the Principio Ironworks, described by Cockburn as “one of the most valuable works of its kind in America,” destroying sixty-eight cannons. From there, the British crossed to Maryland’s Eastern Shore and destroyed the twin towns of Fredericktown and Georgetown along the Sassafras River before rejoining the fleet at Hampton Roads. Shockingly, the British had moved for nearly two weeks about the American countryside without meeting any serious opposition.

In early June, Admiral Warren received reinforcements, which gave him the largest fleet ever assembled in North American waters and, perhaps more importantly, 5,000 of Wellington’s veterans, and revisited his plan to destroy the Constellation. Warren sailed the fleet to the Elizabeth River, which empties into the James River from the south near Hampton Roads, one of the world’s largest natural harbors, or roadsteads. The entrance to the river was guarded by a strong contingent on Craney Island, but of more concern to the Royal Navy were the shoals that extended northward towards Hampton Roads for two miles, which meant that the more powerful British ships could not engage the American defenses on the island. Consequently, any British assault could only be carried out by troop transports and boats armed with light cannons that would be useless against the American entrenchments. Additionally, for nearly a half mile around the island, the depth of the water was less than four feet at high tide, and the sand was bare during low tide.

The American commander was General Robert Taylor, a lawyer from the town, whose contingent consisted of roughly 760 men. His chief engineer was Colonel Walker Keith Armistead, a superb army engineer and graduate of West Point, who established a battery of seven cannons led by Major James Faulkner in the northwest quadrant of the island and a second fort on the opposite end. Captain John Cassin, commander of Gosport Navy Yard, also ranged a line of gunboats across the channel between the southeast tip of the island and Lamberts Point.

The British planned a two-pronged attack, a frontal assault of fifty boats carrying 1,500 soldiers led by Captain Samuel Peschel and a flank attack across a small channel fordable at low tide led by Colonel Thomas Beckwith, a veteran of the Peninsular War. The problem with the British battle plan was that the sea assault needed to take place at high tide so the boats could get close to Craney Island, but the land assault could only be made at low tide. Ultimately, it was decided to attack at low tide, and, on June 22, Captain Peschel’s boats arrived off the island directly in front of the American artillery battery. The forward vessels grounded on the shoal three hundred feet from the American position and came under a galling fire.  Three barges were immediately sunk, including the Admiral’s barge (Warren was not present), and the men swam for the safety of the other boats. Finding that the ground beneath the boats was four feet of mud and impossible to wade through, the attack was called off, and the boats returned to the fleet.

Meanwhile, the flanking army, consisting of seven hundred Royal Marines and soldiers, landed west of Craney Island near Hoffler’s Creek. But, by the time the British approached the channel, the water was too high to ford, and, after receiving some punishing fire from the American battery, Colonel Beckwith called off the assault and returned to the fleet as well. Although casualties were light (the British suffered nineteen casualties while the Americans reported none), the Battle of Craney Island was an embarrassing defeat for the British.

Stung by this unexpected setback, Warren set his sights on the town of Hampton just across the James River from Norfolk. This time, Warren wisely gave the command of the assault to the more aggressive Cockburn, who landed 2,500 soldiers west of Hampton on June 25. The town was defended by 400 Virginia militiamen under Major Stapleton Crutchfield, who put up a brief but spirited defense before fleeing from the field; once again, casualties were relatively low, with both sides suffering less than forty killed and wounded. But the aftermath of the battle was the more significant affair as the Chasseurs Britanniques, a light infantry unit made up of French emigres, committed terrible atrocities on the local population, especially the gentler sex. Although the Frenchmen were dismissed from the service, this did little to atone for the violence, which was widely condemned by both American and British officials and made Cockburn’s name even more detested throughout the Chesapeake.

After cruising the bay for another month, most of the British fleet departed for Bermuda while a small force adequate to maintain the blockade remained in the Chesapeake. It had been a lackluster performance by the Royal Navy, but the following year would prove to be much different.

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Bullet Points:

** With little sign of momentum in peace talks between the US and Iran, attention has returned to three small islands that are crucial to controlling the Strait of Hormuz. Lying at the mouth of the Gulf chokepoint, the islands — Abu Musa, Greater Tunb, and Lesser Tunb — have been held by Iran since 1971, but are claimed by the UAE. They have come under US fire over the past week. If external powers look for ways to reshape security in the Strait of Hormuz, these islands are an obvious focal point — with relatively limited diplomatic cost given the ambiguity around sovereignty.

** It starts with the essential psychopaths and goes downhill from there.

** Saudi Arabia’s success in bringing women into the workforce has had unintended consequences that are now showing up in the courts. Female private-sector employment has grown at more than twice the pace of male employment in recent years, but the legal obligations on men have not changed, and they remain solely responsible for household costs, whether or not they are the main earner. In a more competitive labor market, some men are finding it harder to secure jobs. They are borrowing more, and some struggle to service their debts: Last year, Saudi courts received 1.6 million claims covering more than $44 billion in unpaid financial obligations — an indication of a social framework creaking under pressure it was never designed to bear. “The courts are applying a law written for a world in which women did not work. That world no longer exists,” he writes.

** What actually causes mass shootings? The truth is much more complicated than the media or politicians like to let on. We were curious, and started studying the subject. What actually causes mass shootings? The truth is much more complicated than the media or politicians like to let on. Ammo.com reports.  Our latest report examines common factors among mass shooters. Here are the highlights in that report:

• Between 1966 and 2025, 81.2% of shooters were in documented crisis before the event.
• While 51.0% of mass shooters had prior symptoms of mental illness, 68.2% had a history of domestic violence or targeted at least one member of their family.
• Gun ownership has remained stable (30%-32% of the U.S. population) between 1980 and 2025, while mass shootings have increased by 126.0%.

We also covered myths about gun control and mass shootings, as well as other factors.

https://ammo.com/research/causes-of-mass-shootings

** The Trump administration is escalating its crackdown on Medicaid fraud by suspending more than $1 billion in federal payments to California and Minnesota while auditors review claims flagged as high risk. According to POLITICO, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) deferred approximately $867 million for California and $199 million for Minnesota, saying the states must document the legitimacy of the claims before the funds are released. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said the administration is shifting from recovering fraudulent payments after the fact to preventing questionable claims from being paid in the first place.

** The Coast Guard’s most delayed and expensive acquisition creeps toward completion in a more distant future. The lead vessel is now expected to cost about $3.4 billion, matching the original estimate for all three planned Polar Security Cutters. The Coast Guard awarded the contract to VT Halter Marine in 2019 with plans to deliver the first vessel by March 2024. Bollinger Shipyards acquired Halter Marine in 2022, inheriting the struggling program and continuing development of what is intended to become the United States’ first new heavy polar icebreaker in more than 50 years.

** (ISW) Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 22, 2026: The Kremlin continues to reiterate Russia’s commitment to its maximalist war aims of complete Ukrainian capitulation while Russian forces fail to achieve operationally significant gains.

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The Elite Cult of Victimhood

Join the Revolution!

There is something patently ridiculous about watching people (many highly privileged) in the freest, most prosperous, most tolerant country in the world wrap themselves in the ragged costumes of revolutionaries. Most, if not all, self-identified and so-called “revolutionary” movements in America today are fraudulent. In an age and a country where everybody can afford to hold luxury bespoke beliefs, the people leading or people close to the people leading these movements are actually privileged dilettantes cosplaying revolutionary characters.

The recent wave of ridiculousness started with AOC, the Democrat bartending lassie from Westchester surrounded by her gaggle of supporters from the Rotten Apple. Now these “democratic socialists” have added more comedic value to the show.

America has no shortage of self-described dissidents, resisters, radicals, abolitionists, insurgents, and movement leaders who speak as if they spend their days dodging secret police and composing manifestos by candlelight in some damp cellar. They borrow the vocabulary of people who opposed absolute monarchies, communist dictatorships, military juntas, and theocracies as they invoke the moral authority of men and women who faced prison, torture, exile, and death merely for saying aloud what everyone around them knew to be true.

The problem is that most American revolutionaries face no such danger. In truth, many of them are wealthy in their own right, are children of privilege, or from a “protected class” that has been funded and/or supported by the very society and systems they oppose.

They organize publicly, raise money, and give interviews. They sell books, teach university courses, operate nonprofit organizations, collect speaking fees, post revolutionary slogans on social media, and in an absolute denial of irony, appear on cable television to explain, at length, how thoroughly they have been completely silenced.

They may advocate the abolition of capitalism, the destruction of the constitutional order, the elimination of police departments, or the dismantling of any institution they find offensive, and the government does not arrest them for their opinions. Quite the opposite: the constitutional system they despise protects their right to condemn it.

This does not mean that political dissent in America carries no cost. People can lose friends, jobs, reputations, or professional opportunities. They may be mocked, opposed, criticized, or subjected to threats from private individuals. None of that is trivial, but it is not the same thing as state persecution, and pretending otherwise cheapens the sacrifice of people who have lived under governments where dissent itself was a crime.

A Soviet dissident could be sent to a labor camp for circulating forbidden literature. An Iranian protester may be beaten, imprisoned, or killed for defying the religious state. Opponents of totalitarian regimes have disappeared into prisons because they challenged the legitimacy of those in power. The American activist, by comparison, is often arrested only after blocking a roadway, occupying private property, assaulting someone, destroying property, resisting a lawful order, or violating some other law that applies to everyone else—and as is typical, are on MSNOW or CNN fifteen minutes later crying about being silenced.

Being punished for speaking against the government is political repression. Being punished for breaking a generally applicable law while protesting is not automatically political repression, and yet American activists routinely erase the difference because the confusion is useful. When the supply of oppression is running low, they just invent more. An arrest for trespassing becomes proof that dissent has been criminalized, and a prosecution for vandalism becomes evidence of fascism.

The rhetoric is carefully constructed to transfer moral authority from genuine victims of tyranny to people who are often suffering little more than the consequences of their own behavior.

This is where revolutionary politics in America begins to resemble cosplay. The clothing, slogans, raised fists, chants, and heroic self-descriptions are borrowed from movements whose members paid terrible personal prices. When merch for sale hits their website, it shows the danger they face is largely theatrical. Many of these revolutionaries know that after the march they will return home, post photographs of themselves online, solicit donations, and complain that the system which protected their protest is somehow equivalent to a dictatorship.

Some undoubtedly drink their own moonshine, and fraud does not always require conscious deception. People can become so immersed in ideological theater that they mistake inconvenience for persecution and disagreement for oppression. Instead of playing a character, they become Norma Desmond (Sunset Boulevard – look it up).

Sincerity is not the same thing as truth, but it sometimes looks like it – and that is what makes these cosplayers dangerous. They can, and undoubtedly will, win elections. Democrats are waking up to this now – Van Jones, a radical progressive Democrat, basically just said, “All this stuff we used to talk about, don’t these DSA morons know we were just talking shit? They actually believe we meant it! What the hell are we gonna do now?”

America is certainly not beyond criticism, and no government should be trusted merely because it calls itself constitutional. Abuse of authority can occur here, and citizens should remain alert to it, but preserving that vigilance requires intellectual honesty. If every arrest is repression, every opponent is a fascist, and every political disappointment is tyranny, then those words eventually mean nothing.

A genuine dissident risks punishment for telling the truth. An American “revolutionary” often risks applause, a book contract, perhaps a brief stay in a holding cell after refusing to leave someone else’s property, or some harsher punishment like being disappeared to the gulag of a weekend show on MSNOW.

It’s all a con.

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Identify the AFV

1

Try to be specific.

2

3

130 built

4

870 built

Parting Shot

Make of it what you will.

End