Attacks from Russia on Poland have drawn NATO defense forces into direct armed conflict.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk told the Polish parliament that Polish airspace had been breached 19 times. Polish F-16 fighter jets and Dutch F-35s plus other aircraft responded and shot down at least four drones.
NATO tells us “Since the Alliance’s creation in 1949, Article 4 has been invoked seven times.”
The Parties will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened.
What will be discussed for Article 4? The cost imbalance stands out most to me, as it represents the most fundamental challenge for NATO defense. Traditional air defense methods become economically unsustainable against swarm attacks of low-cost drones.
Poland says at least 19 drones were tracked in the attack. Consider that in context of Russia launching nearly 20,000 missiles, meaning nearly 15,000 one-way attack drones, at targets in Ukraine from September 28, 2022, through December 28, 2024.
The Polish are illustrating a dangerous NATO asymmetry perfectly: expensive fighter jets (F-35s operating at $36,000+ per hour) were sent to intercept Russian drones that cost a fraction as much. Even though Shahed drones only hit their target less than 10 percent of the time, such low cost means Russia can fire mass salvos almost daily and NATO will be desperate to force rapid deflation into symmetric or better defense spend.
This is not theoretical. Ukraine developed systems that cost around $5,000 against the Shahed drones that cost around $50,000 each. Meanwhile, an IRIS-T missile fired by NATO would cost around $450,000. Imagine spending nearly half a million dollars to stop a $35,000 drone, because that’s what just happened.
Defense against 19 drones for NATO? Nearly $10 million.
Firing 19 drones at NATO? Costs under a million for Russia.
Thus, with a 10:1 spend ratio, Poland shows NATO military technological superiority becomes their liability against Russian tactics of sloppy commercial grade drone swarms. The EU, like Ukraine, now urgently needs to innovate and deploy more logical interception methods, whether through directed energy weapons, electronic warfare, or lower-cost interceptor drones, to rapidly invert an economic attrition that Russia is deliberately imposing on the EU.
The drones are being made of commercial parts from companies headquartered in the United States, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, Japan, and Poland… so Russia is also literally attacking NATO with its own commercial technology, optimized for mass psychological impact at low cost rather than battle domination.
And it reads to me like classic evil KGB plausible deniability (“navigation errors”) that systematically poison and drain a victim — Soviet dezinformatsiya updated for the drone age. Each “stray” drone forces the alliance into an overresponse, a dangerous attrition without hitting obvious red lines.
Poland theoretically could drag NATO into spending over $70 million daily just responding to terrorizing drone attacks, while Russia’s daily production costs would remain ten times less. NATO cannot ignore the airspace violations, so each cheap drone automatically triggers this massive response cost.
Also, here is the history of Article 4 invocations, which mostly have been local disputes by Turkey:
February 10, 2003 – Turkey: Requested consultations over threats from the Iraq War; NATO launched Operation Display Deterrence (February-May 2003)
June 22, 2012 – Turkey: Requested consultations after one of its fighter jets was shot down by Syrian air defense forces
October 3, 2012 – Turkey: Requested consultations when five Turkish civilians were killed by Syrian shells
November 21, 2012 – Turkey: Requested deployment of Patriot missiles for border defense against Syria
March 3, 2014 – Poland: Invoked Article 4 following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and increasing tensions in Ukraine
2015 – Turkey: Called for consultations following terrorist attacks
February 24, 2022 – Eight Allied Nations (Bulgaria, Czechia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia): Jointly requested consultations after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine
Breaking news of more tragic gun death in America, as reported by the CBC:
“It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights,” [Charlie Kirk] said during an April 5, 2023, appearance at the Salt Lake City campus of Awaken Church. “That is a prudent deal.”
[…]
Moments before Kirk was shot on Wednesday, numerous livestreams of the event showed an audience member asking him how many mass shooters in the last 10 years have been transgender Americans.
“Too many,” Kirk responded.
The person said five was the number, then asked Kirk if he knew how many mass shooters in total America had seen in the last 10 years. “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Kirk replied.
Seconds later, a loud crack that sounded like a gunshot rang out and Kirk was seen briefly moving his hand to his neck before falling from his chair…
The victim was known for speeches advocating mass proliferation of guns as the solution to gun violence.
How did we stop all the shootings at gun shows? Notice there’s not a lot of mass shootings at gun shows, there’s all these guns. Because everyone’s armed. If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don’t our children?
Because everyone is armed? That sounds like war, and there’s a lot of death in war. The end of killing is denoted by the point where almost everyone puts away their guns. This was the real history of the Old West as well, not the fantasy version, as towns strictly banned guns to keep the peace.
Dodge City, Tombstone, and Deadwood often required visitors to check their firearms with the sheriff upon entering town. Literally the exact opposite of what the victim had been telling his large crowds.
Dodge City formed a municipal government in 1878 and its first ordinance, for example, stated:
Any person or persons found carrying concealed weapons in the city of Dodge or violating the provisions of this ordinance, shall be fined in any sum not exceeding one hundred dollars or be imprisoned not exceeding thirty days.
Tombstone had similar laws, and even the famous O.K. Corral gunfight partially stemmed from the Earps enforcing the town’s gun ordinance, officials removing guns to keep the peace after the Clanton gang (like Charlie Kirk) had refused to disarm in town.
Typical American frontier town sign banning guns, above an ad for health drinks.
…in all our years together, he [Wyatt Earp] never described a gun battle to me. He considered it a great misfortune that he had lived in such a time and under such circumstances that guns had figured at all in his career.
Kirk’s argument that gun shows don’t have mass shootings because “everyone’s armed” reflects his philosophy that increased danger creates deterrence. This directly contradicts common sense and how actual frontier communities achieved peace, through regulation and control, not proliferation.
His tragic death from gunfire has drawn bipartisan condemnation from political leaders across the spectrum. This violence represents the breakdown of democratic discourse, regardless of one’s position on any particular issue.
The post-Civil War period, despite its many challenges, saw the end of the massive armed conflict precisely because one side laid down their weapons. Or, as the great President Grant put it:
President Grant’s tomb, so large the Statue of Liberty could fit inside, says it plainly for all to see.
Grant, the best General and President in American history, told us to choose peace over the escalation of armed conflict. Having seen more armed conflict than perhaps any American leader, his choice to memorialize “Let us have peace” rather than any celebration of military victory speaks volumes about what he learned from that experience.
Let’s talk about deep historical currents behind a new book called “The Singing Word: 168 Years of Atlantic Poetry“.
Walt Hunter’s “The Singing Word” lands today, and it represents far more than a simple anthology of American verse. This collection of 168 years of Atlantic poetry embodies a profound act of historical continuity, a legacy that traces directly back to one of the most shameful episodes of presidential overreach in American history.
President Jackson Assaulted Free Expression
Foundational DNA of The Atlantic comes from the postal crisis of 1835 that helped catalyze the magazine’s eventual creation. President Andrew Jackson, faced with the American Anti-Slavery Society’s “Great Postal Campaign”—an effort to educate and liberate the South with over 100,000 prints of abolitionist literature—responded with what can only be described as state-sanctioned censorship.
For example, on July 29, 1835, the Post Office was raided in Charleston by a white supremacist mob calling themselves “The Lynch Men.” They seized bags of newspapers and burned them in a massive bonfire, along with effigies of leading abolitionists, before a crowd of nearly 3,000 people. But the truly shocking aspect wasn’t the mob violence, because it was President Jackson’s response.
Rather than defending the American founding fathers’ beliefs in sanctity of privacy in mail and the First Amendment, Jackson encouraged and inflamed the censorship. His Postmaster General, Amos Kendall, was ordered explicitly to arm Southern postmasters with permission to refuse delivery of materials they opened and disagreed with, arguing they had a “higher obligation” to preserving slavery in their communities than to federal law. Jackson even included condemnation of the abolitionists in his 1835 State of the Union address, calling American freedom fighters the “monsters” who should “die,” and advocated for federal legislation that would authorize postal surveillance and censorship of “incendiary” anti-slavery materials.
This was America’s big test in federal mail surveillance and censorship a precedent that would echo through McCarthyism to modern NSA overreach in Room 641a.
The Literary Counterrevolution
Jackson’s presidency by 1857 had ended two decades earlier, but the intellectual wound he inflicted on American discourse had not healed. The transcendentalist movement, centered in Boston and Concord, had watched in horror as democratic principles buckled under pressure from slavery’s defenders and their presidential enabler.
When publisher Frank Underwood approached the New England literary elite about founding a new magazine, he found a receptive audience among writers who had lived through Jackson’s assault on free expression. The Atlantic Monthly, launched in November 1857, was explicitly conceived as an anti-slavery publication that would provide what one editor called “cultural leadership” to counter the “cultural leveling” they saw as inherent in Jacksonian democracy.
The magazine’s founding circle reads like a who’s who of American intellectual resistance to Jacksonian authoritarianism: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Greenleaf Whittier. These were not merely literary figures—they were conscious architects of what they hoped would be a more enlightened American discourse.
Significantly, the magazine’s very first poem of national prominence was Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” which appeared in 1861. The timing was no accident: as the Civil War began, The Atlantic was deliberately invoking the Revolutionary War’s spirit of resistance to tyranny—a not-so-subtle rebuke to Jackson’s legacy and the Southern rebellion it had helped nurture.
Poetry as Political Resistance
The Atlantic’s poetry from its earliest years reveals a publication acutely conscious of literature’s political power. Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which appeared as the magazine’s lead story in February 1862, wasn’t merely patriotic verse—it was a direct answer to the Confederate appropriation of American symbols and a conscious effort to reclaim the moral authority that Jackson’s administration had ceded to slavery’s defenders.
The magazine understood what Jackson had proven: that controlling discourse meant controlling democracy. If the President could declare certain ideas too dangerous for the mailbox, then independent media became essential to preserving the “unfinished project of the nation”—a phrase Hunter uses to describe The Atlantic’s ongoing mission.
Contemporary Echoes
Hunter’s organizational framework for “The Singing Word”—dividing the collection into “National Anthems,” “Natural Lines,” and “Personal Mythologies”—reflects this historical awareness. The “National Anthems” section particularly resonates with The Atlantic’s founding purpose: providing alternative visions of American identity that could compete with authoritarian populism.
In his curatorial statement, Hunter explicitly connects past and present:
What emerged as I read was an optimism and realism—a sense that, however bad things are, the idea of America is worth fighting for, and worth questioning and scrutinizing in new ways.
This language deliberately echoes the rhetoric of The Atlantic’s founders, who saw themselves as defending American ideals against their political corruption.
President Jackson was one of the most, if not the most unjust, immoral and corrupt men in American history.
The anthology’s span from 1857 to 2024 encompasses not just the Civil War era that birthed the magazine, but also Reconstruction, the World Wars, the Civil Rights Movement, and our current moment of democratic stress. Each era has produced its own version of Jacksonian authoritarianism, and each has found The Atlantic publishing poetry that serves as both witness and resistance.
An Unbroken Line
When we consider poets like Robert Frost wrestling with American identity in “The Gift Outright,” or Adrienne Rich challenging power structures in her feminist verse, or contemporary voices like Juan Felipe Herrera expanding the definition of American poetry itself, we see the same impulse that drove Emerson and Longfellow to found The Atlantic: the conviction that literature must engage with democracy’s ongoing struggles.
Hunter’s collection thus represents more than literary archaeology. It documents an unbroken tradition of American writers using verse to contest official narratives, expand democratic participation, and preserve space for dissenting voices—precisely what Jackson’s postal censorship attempted to eliminate.
The Stakes of Literary Memory
“The Singing Word” arrives at a moment when democratic norms face renewed pressure. The anthology’s subtitle, “168 Years of Atlantic Poetry,” quietly asserts the durability of institutions that defend free expression against authoritarian assault. By bringing together voices from Longfellow to Limón, including poets “whose work has never before been published outside of the magazine,” Hunter demonstrates how literary institutions can preserve and amplify voices that might otherwise be silenced.
The collection’s price and wide distribution through major retailers represents another form of resistance to Trump/Jackson corruption and elitism. While Jackson used federal power to suppress abolitionist literature, The Atlantic uses democratic capitalism to ensure its counter-narrative reaches the broadest possible audience.
Donald Trump’s favorite president: Andrew Jackson as father of the “white republic”. Historian Matthew Clavin: Andrew Jackson was terrible, and likely would have despised Donald Trump for being just like him.
In this light, “The Singing Word” becomes not just an anthology but a manifesto: proof that American literature at its best serves as democracy’s memory, its conscience, and its most persistent hope for renewal. The poets collected in Hunter’s anthology didn’t just document American experience—they fought for the right to define it against those who would narrow its possibilities.
From the ashes of Jackson’s postal bonfires to the digital age of “The Singing Word,” The Atlantic’s poetry represents 168 years of resistance to the authoritarian impulse, which once again is closing the door on American democracy. In our own moment of political extremism and media manipulation, this anthology arrives as both historical witness and contemporary call to arms: proof that the republic of letters remains a reliable guardian of democratic expression.
“The Singing Word: 168 Years of Atlantic Poetry,” edited by Walt Hunter, was published by Atlantic Editions on September 9, 2025.
A passenger was killed and two drivers hospitalized after a two-vehicle crash Friday evening at the intersection of Highway 246 and Domingos Road, just east of Buellton.
The California Highway Patrol responded to the scene around 6:54 p.m. on September 5, along with Santa Barbara County Fire and EMS. According to CHP investigators, a 2012 Tesla Model S was attempting to cross the highway when it was struck by a westbound Ford F-150.
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