A Waning Red Dawn Legacy

It was a dark and stormy night; my brain had morphed into a mush-like jelly, and I found myself struggling to find a show, despite having infinite options including Top Gun: Maverick. Or pick another Glen Powell favorite; Twisters works too. But no, I violated my Powell principle, passing on the Running Man remake for the inevitable Netflix Doomsday Scroll. That darned algorithm can lead to places, and that tiny banner, last chance, haunted me over a movie I hadn’t seen in years.

Red Dawn.¹

Not the gutless remake where the studio digitally swapped out Chinese flags in post editing, replacing them with Kim Jong’s hermit kingdom banners. That cowardice explains why Hollywood doesn’t make John Wayne-type movies anymore.

So I clicked.

And the Star Wars-style scroll began:

• Soviet Union suffers worst wheat harvest in 55 years.
• Labor and food riots in Poland.
• Soviet Union invades Eastern Europe.
• Military build-up in Latin America.
• The US stands alone.

This isn’t just any 80s action movie. This is Patrick Swayze, showing that early glint of Road House greatness, as he plays Jed Eckert—the embodiment of bad ass moral clarity under sniper fire with paratroopers dropping down around him. Open fields. Bazookas. The teacher gets offed in the first five minutes. And the Soviet-led invasion of a Colorado town forces him, his younger brother, and their friends into a guerrilla resistance. Jed doesn’t bargain; he takes command, suffers casualties, makes awful, impossible decisions.

His family dies. Friends too. His entire resistance is decimated during the climactic final battle. There are trains. Catastrophic explosions. Spoiler, but who hasn’t seen Red Dawn?

That’s the movie. But what stuck with me decades later runs deeper.

Sadly, many have forgotten its ethos; a relic even the remake botched. I hadn’t dusted off the VHS tape in years, but it exceeded my rewatch expectations. That nostalgia again. But what makes Jed the American-dream-hero isn’t any miraculous triumph against the bad guys when the credits roll. No clean victory—he carries his dying brother off in his arms. It’s his absolute refusal to compromise, damn it. He’s the protector, an amplifier of communal values when the entire system collapses around him.

These beliefs are woven into how we think about leadership.

For me, Eckert represents the hard path. He didn’t choose it for glory, or an easy win. There wasn’t an effing alternative. The North Star was to hold the damn line Gettysburg-style and never waver.

Your Core-Self Matters, Write Yours Down

Jed’s personal code is part of the Americana-fabric and bleeds into corporate culture. It’s everywhere, as if it’s part of our shared constitutional contract:

• Integrity: Hold your friends and peers to account
• Service over self: You play a small role in a lengthy four-act play
• Think long-term: The hard path pays off down the road

Consider your own values. Picture a leader you respect—someone who handles complexity while protecting the people around them. When layoffs loom, they fight; when leadership pressures shortcuts, they say, “Find alternatives versus blindly cutting.” Here, the American Dream is not “get rich quick,” but “build something a bit more durable, stand by your word, create opportunity.”

Better yet, write your values down. Not because they’ll never change or evolve, but because you need a baseline. When the news cycle spins and politicians pivot and the algorithm feeds you outrage, you can ask: Does this align with what I said mattered? That’s the test. Not whether you’re on the right team or the winning side, but whether you’re still standing for what you wrote down when things were quiet.

In the swirling news cycle, it feels like we’re retreating. Senators run amok like botox chameleons. Corporations shed workers to feed the GPU furnace. Few wear ideas on their sleeves anymore and nothing in the AI-infused outrage machine feels quite right. I’m confident our hero Jed would smash his phone against the nearest rock and call it mercy.

The U.S. Neville Chamberlain

Examples are everywhere. Nothing hits this Cold War kid as wrong as Steve Witkoff’s push for the 2025 Ukraine “peace plan.” Some in the press have compared it to Neville Chamberlain’s naïve diplomacy in WWII; that’s the guy who thought he could negotiate with Hitler and came home waving a worthless piece of paper. Listening to him talk makes me cringe. Deep down. It’s like he ran Putin’s wish list through Google Translate and called it diplomacy. I don’t have proof of that, this is a monologue, but the bones are similar based on the concessions and territorial assumptions buried in the original document. Reporting suggests Witkoff coordinated closely with Kremlin officials while selling this to American leadership as a fresh idea. That’s not high-powered negotiation. It’s ventriloquism. And history has a way of letting the doll pick up the knife.

Does Witkoff want Chamberlain’s legacy? Really?

His defenders might argue any deal beats endless war. Millions have already died on both sides. An Athenian general, once said, in essence, “Let them leave on a road paved with gold.” The idea is to give a defeated opponent a face-saving way out of the conflict, avoiding any desperate last stand that could be costly. It’s pragmatic.²

To be fair, Witkoff’s version wasn’t a carbon copy of Russia’s draft, even if it shared the same bones. His version introduced meaningful deviations that blunted extreme Russian demands, adding elements Moscow would never have volunteered. Notably, Ukraine can have a significantly larger military (hundreds of thousands instead of the smaller cap) keeping its conventional weapons. He also threw in frozen Russian state assets for reconstruction, a move that would have placed economic leverage in Western hands.

Money over lives, I guess.

On paper, these changes can look meaningful. But treaties are only as good as the parties who sign them. Does Russia keep its word? Security guarantees are worthless when the other side thinks signed treaties are rough drafts. So what, exactly, are we really negotiating for?

Heaven help us but somewhere along the way, the script flipped. Reagan stood at the wall and said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” This was the brand of American conservatism—Red Dawn as their scripture, rugged individualism and open distrust of communism. Now their heirs argue, “You don’t have the cards!” The new push is to make the deal, take what you can, and move on.

Huh?

The backwards position and sequence of events remains baffling to me as a simple armchair quarterback. And it raises the question, “Why?” It must be all of Putin’s shirtless poses cascading across social media. But, in reality, I’m not far from the truth. Perhaps, in this day of constant change and flying insults we don’t have time to step back and wonder, “Does this feel right?”

Or maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe those memes are that persuasive.

X, Stumbling into Solid Changes

Now, I haven’t posted on Facebook in nearly five years. X? Same story. A while back, I pinned my hopes on decentralized social networking protocols 2023 Social Media rant, a place where users own their content and the posts are portable. It’s like having—wait for it—a blog, write what you want and move it anywhere.³ Such novel technology.

However, this stuff never took off in any meaningful way. Threads never turned it on. Blue Sky talks about it, never living up to the hype. Automattic purchased Tumblr for pennies on the dollar, promised to go down this path, but it’s not developing new features anymore. Running a social media company is hard, and many platforms today represent some odd, fictional twisted reality or worse with AI slop running amok.⁴ You’d think politicians would take the simple step to require users to be real people instead of a Russian bot farm. I know, this runs into First Amendment tangles.

Social media companies can do something, though. And one finally did with such a minor, perhaps accidental, tweak.

I didn’t get exactly what I wanted, but I’ll give Elon credit. If anyone digs around on an account profile, X will show the origin location. Suddenly, analysts called this an “unmasking,” revealing that a surprisingly large number of high-profile voices operated in Nigeria, India, Thailand, Pakistan, and Eastern Europe. They’d spent years posting in perfect American political vernacular, using U.S. flags, patriotic bios, and partisan rhetoric. Some are a little over the top. A high number believe Zelensky is awful—he ran over his neighbor’s dog three different times.

The update didn’t expose all foreign operations, VPNs and spoofing are still a thing, but it revealed enough to question how political sentiment on X should be interpreted.

No, there isn’t an immense domestic chorus pushing Ukraine to become part of mother Russia again. Here, we had a transnational mix of click-farm operators, foreign influence networks, and monetization-driven accounts using US politics as engagement bait. An odd, global echo chamber wearing a US mask. These aren’t patriots defending their homeland. They’re mercenaries gaming our discourse for clicks.

Yeah, Jed Eckhert they ain’t.

This phenomenon is amplified even more by economic arbitrage. X clicks amount to pennies here, but those pennies are meaningful depending on where you live. That gap creates a powerful incentive for foreign operators to flood our discourse. The cost is trivial; the pay-off can be enormous.

The People’s Fake Opinions

A functioning democracy shouldn’t be at the mercy of rat-bastards running influence operations for profit, pumping political narratives into the bloodstream of a country they don’t live in and will never be accountable to. The point of our Founding Father’s vision of self-government is that the people make decisions, not offshore content mills, foreign bot farms, or opportunistic grifters who pretend to be American voters because it pays better CPM rates. When our political discourse becomes a revenue stream, this is where free speech is lost and we’re left with a manipulated information market where attention, not citizenship, drives outcomes.

I’d like to believe our society can handle disagreement. But can it handle a political ecosystem where outsiders are paid to distort it? At mass scale in a centralized manner? I guess we’ll find out.

How Unserious This Has Become

But it’s hard for countries to fight this war. Take Zelensky. That poor sucker. What did he do in a past life to piss off the gods of the universe? He’s fighting a resistance against Putin, then gets berated by a wannabe strongman in the Oval Office. This is Book of Job stuff. Or maybe it’s the Trojan War, where the remnants of the Greek Gods choose their heroes. And the former talk show host pulled the Hector card.

For those who skipped the classics, Hector was Troy’s greatest defender. Noble. Brave. And doomed. He fought for his city knowing the gods had already decided the outcome. Achilles struck him down, dragged the body behind his chariot. Zelensky’s playing that role now; defending his country while the supposed arsenal of democracy debates and sits on its hands. Zeus did that too, trying to stay balanced and nudging fate rather than picking a side. We know how that story goes: Hera and the other gods tipped the scales.

The Soviet Machine

After World War II, the Soviets were at the height of power. They smacked the Germans, while sustaining mass casualties on the eastern front. Built the atom bomb, stealing the designs from the United States. Invented the polio vaccine. Created Tetris. But, they failed on many levels due to corruption and bureaucracy. The internet. Military cost overruns. Feeding a nation. However, nobody is better at negotiation, spying (Cuba learned from the best), and clandestine tactics.

Russia hasn’t hidden its effort to weaken the United States and its partners. The usual defense is that everyone does it. We shouldn’t argue equivalence for comfort. The record shows repeated influence operations and intelligence activity tied to Moscow. Take the following:

• Purchased radio stations, influencing those who control those waves for decades. Or they bought up alternatives in nearby countries.
• Pushed segregation in the United States, driving narratives to divide us.
• Targeted US employees in Cuba and abroad, deploying a type of sonic-style weapon. This took place after Obama tried to revive relations with the country.
• AIDS disinformation campaign, feeding the false claim that the U.S. created HIV (often cited as the canonical example of influence tradecraft that resembles modern disinformation playbooks).
• Embedded a Soviet agent inside the Manhattan Project and stole U.S. atomic bomb secrets at the source (mentioned earlier, I’d cite a source but this movie is pretty good).
• Infiltrated trusted U.S. software updates to spy on federal agencies at massive scale without detection as part of the Solarwinds hack, one of the largest in US history.
• Planted deep-cover Russian agents as part of their Illegals program to live as ordinary Americans while reporting to Moscow.
• Quietly penetrated Pentagon, NASA, and DOE networks in one of the first major cyber-espionage campaigns in the early 1990s. The country invented cyber warfare.
• Spent millions funding pro-Russian talking points with Republican influencers.

I could go on, page after page. So when I hear a politician say, or any talking head, say Russia isn’t a problem my radar immediately goes up.⁵

Influence is working.

They are winning this information game.

We used to stop them from doing this, punishing foreign actors for this interference. But not anymore, we gladly offer up access in exchange for advertising revenue. The Mueller report highlighted how a paltry 16 million in organic reach caused havoc—it doesn’t matter who won or lost, we allowed it. Did Facebook ever get fined anything for this type of meddling? We know the answer.⁶

In this era when facts are treated as props, know your values, question the feed, and hold power accountable for what it puts into the world. And as much as Ukraine has challenges and corruption at each turn, why pat Vladimir on the back and say, “Thanks for being my friend?”

I don’t believe that nonsense. For those who shout the merits constantly, take a few minutes to think about their incentives. Or their perceived incentives. It doesn’t take much sleuthing to find one or two podcasts that peddle this drivel. Sure, there is an audience for it, one that’s been created by foreign influence campaigns, or social media companies benefiting from the algorithm, or the whims of ego. That doesn’t mean we should be sell-outs.

A Shining City

So yeah, Ronald Reagan once gave this speech about the shining city on a hill. It wasn’t based on concrete or gold or power. It’s based on an idea. Holding up those ideals isn’t easy. Frankly, it’s far easier to amplify externally shaped narratives, foreign-influenced rhetoric, or opportunistic positions to vote pander instead of earning them through conviction. This shapeshifting lack of courage, authenticity, and integrity, a loss of any north compass, makes us susceptible to social influence operations—especially in this modern information environment, especially if you doomsday scroll far too much.

But it’s easy to remember that Moscow isn’t a shining city; it takes the mental contortions of a 24-hour news network fed by immense propaganda, some coming from our own White House, for it to dully shimmer even a little bit. It’s easy to spot because I can’t forget how the U.S. fought a cold war. The Russian government isn’t reformed or misunderstood. Good guys don’t sow this type of havoc or test hypersonic missiles on defenseless civilians to prove a point.

Red Dawn isn’t just a movie, it’s a frontier fairy-tale told with assault rifles. One where Jed Eckert knew who the enemy was. Paratroopers dropping from the sky. Tanks rolling through town. We don’t have that line of sight. The enemy waves a U.S. flag in their bio and quotes the Constitution with a pocketful of rubles funneled through a complex banking system.

Jed Eckert would never tolerate this; nobody should. Remember your values. Live them.

Wolverines.

Other Tidbits

• Released just a year before, WarGames tapped the same cultural paranoia about nuclear-era Soviet aggression, reflecting how saturated early-80s America was with Cold War dread. Shall we play a game?
• Lea Thompson filmed both Red Dawn and Back to the Future in close succession, going from fighting Soviet paratroopers to being Marty McFly’s mother, an almost absurd tonal leap in a single year.
• And six degrees of Kevin Bacon continues, Jennifer Grey was also in Red Dawn. Later, she reunited with that Swayze guy to film Dirty Dancing. I’m pretty sure that has a Rotten Tomatoes Score of 95. Maybe.

Footnotes