The Friday Brief, June 5, 2026
D-Day, Jared's Sex Island, Election Results, GLP Miracles
Inside
D-Day Will Always Matter
Fascist DEI: Bill Pulte and Other Bad Hires
Epstein Island II: Kushner Boogaloo
John Thune and Slush Fund
Coming Soon To A Nation Near You
L.A., California, and Iowa
Like Amazon, But For Ebola
GLP-1s Are Magic
Scenes from the Home Front
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D-Day Will Always Matter
They are largely gone now, those men who tumbled into a night sky over France from C-47s torn by flak. They rest now, those boys who charged off Higgins boats onto the shingle beachheads ripped with machine gun fire from German bunkers.
All but a handful are lost to time and memory, fading from view…but remember them we must, because of the scope of that day, its consequence and its meaning, its lessons matter more than ever for a nation that feels lost and helpless, and unable to muster itself for the fights at hand and the bigger challenges ahead.
Eighty-two years ago tomorrow, the largest amphibious invasion in human history hurled itself against Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. One hundred fifty-six thousand men. Five beaches. Nearly seven thousand vessels. Thirteen thousand aircraft. And behind all of it, a plan so vast and so fragile that the man who ordered it forward carried in his pocket a note he prayed he would never have to read aloud.
Consider that note.
"Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foodhold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”
Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, the most powerful soldier on earth that day, sat down before the invasion and wrote out his own confession of failure. He misdated, the penciled scrawl betraying his tension. Then he folded it away, against the chance the whole enterprise drowned in the surf.
That is what command looked like once in this country. Not a man who never served, preening over honors he never earned. Not a Secretary of Defense playing dress-up warrior for the cameras and ducking out on the moral responsibility of the job.
Ike was a general who, on the eve of the decisive battle of the war, prepared to swallow the blame himself and hand every ounce of credit to the kids on those beaches. Ike’s modesty was not a weakness. It was the muscle underneath the whole machine, an exemplar of values in powerful demand today.
Set that against the gimcrack manhood on offer now, the strutting, the chest-thumping, the hollow valor of men who mistake volume for courage and a tactical beard for character. They confuse cruelty with strength and noise with strategy. Ike would have made them out as phonies in a heartbeat.
The Hegseth model is all surface and no spine, a Halloween costume of the warrior ethos worn by the type of man who would never have Eisenhower’s strength and grace, and never will, because the moment they are tested, they race to the camera explaining why it wasn’t their fault.
For all Trump and Hegseth’s thunderous self-regard as tough guys and hard men, they would have failed the test of something like D-Day.
Everyone involved was afraid. The men in the landing craft were seasick and shaking. The planners had seen the casualty projections. Eisenhower knew a single turn in the weather could shatter the entire operation, and he gambled on a window his meteorologists barely promised him. The bravery of June 6 was not the absence of fear. It was the decision to climb down the cargo nets anyway, to leap from the plane into the dark and the cold and the fire, because the alternative was a continent in chains.
Everything was at stake. Western civilization had a Luger to its head. Had the landings failed (and they nearly did at Omaha, where the dead piled at the waterline), the war would have turned.
At Omaha, with many of their officers dead, ad hoc groups for NCOs, soldiers, and combat engineers organized in the face of chaos and slammed against the German defenses. Navy destroyers like the USS McCook and USS Frankford came so close to shore that they risked grounding to hammer Nazi positions with their 5-inch guns and save the boys on the beach.
The men of D-Day simply refused to fail.
If they had, the world would be a darker place than we can imagine.
Hitler keeps Europe. The Reich endures another decade, turning back East to at least stall Stalin. The camps keep running. There was no margin, no second beach, no reset. Hell, the best case for Europe if Normandy had failed was that Stalin would win and take it all under the Soviet empire…which is a nightmare counterfactual all its own.
The survival of the free world depended on whether a generation of high school boys, shop clerks, and farmers from every corner of this nation would do an impossible thing on an impossible morning.
They did the big thing. That is the entire lesson, and we have nearly forgotten it.
We tell ourselves now that we are too divided, too soft, too old, too tired to meet a great test…and we say it almost with relief, because helplessness excuses us from the labor our hearts tell us is ahead.
But the men of Normandy were not born for greatness. They were led honorably and well and seized greatness and victory. They earned it. They were ordinary Americans handed an extraordinary task, and they rose because they had to, because someone had to, because the hour demanded it, and they were the ones standing on the ramp.
We will be called again. The threat this time will wear a new uniform, and perhaps will be our fellow citizens, but the question is identical: when the moment comes, will we climb down the nets? Will we do the terrifying work for survival and victory?
The boys on the beach answered for their generation. The note in Eisenhower’s pocket stayed folded. Now it falls to us to be worthy of them, not by sinking into despair or hollow posturing, but by doing the hard, unglamorous, necessary thing when everything is on the line.
They did it once. So can we, if we must.
And at this moment, I am more convinced than ever that we must.
Read Alex Kershaw’s D-Day Twitter Feed
Intel and Observations
Fascist DEI: Bill Pulte and Other Bad Hires
The Link: Everybody Hates Bill Pulte
The Tim Noah piece linked above covers just what a low shitbird Bill Pulte really
