'THE BRITISH ARE COMING...THEY'RE HERE ALREADY!
The King of England has landed in town. It reminds me of when I stopped in Gibralter, a British Colony next to Spain while headed to Desert Shield. They told us "You can say anything about Margaret Thatcher, but don’t say anything about the Queen."
That reminds me:
"Socialism works until you run out of other people's money." ~ The Late Great Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Her and Reagan were good friends and both loves riding horses. She would bomb you with a quickness. She didn't play.
[When Princess Diana died there was a baby birth boom nine months later. The 'experts' said it was because hearts were broken and people wanted intimacy, so more people had sex.]
#KingCharles #Camilla #GreatBritan
It’s not every day that the King of England comes to town, but when he does, it tends to stir something deep in the souls of those who remember history, honor tradition, and understand the unbroken thread that ties the present to the past. For Americans, a visit from the British monarch is an echo of heritage, an acknowledgment that the civilization we inherited—and helped save more than once—still stands. As a veteran who once passed through Gibraltar on my way to Desert Shield, the news takes me back to a dusty outpost, a British Overseas Territory clinging to the Iberian Peninsula, where a local gave me advice I have never forgotten: “You can say anything about Margaret Thatcher, but don’t say anything about the Queen.”
At the time, the late Queen Elizabeth II sat on the throne, a quiet but formidable anchor for the free world. The warning wasn’t about political correctness; it was about reverence. In Gibraltar, that towering rock of a colony claimed by Britain since 1713, loyalty to the Crown was non-negotiable. You could critique policy, mock Parliament, grumble about No. 10 Downing Street, but the Queen was a symbol of permanence in a world of chaos—something the Left, then and now, has never truly understood. That moment also calls to mind the towering conservative figure who then presided over the United Kingdom: Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, who famously declared, “Socialism works until you run out of other people’s money.” It’s a line that cuts to the bone in today’s America, where redistribution is rebranded as equity and government greed disguises itself as compassion.
Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, two shopkeepers’ children who rose to lead the free world, didn't just share a political philosophy; they shared a personal chemistry forged in conviction. Both loved riding horses, a pastime suited to people who understand that direction requires a firm hand and a steady seat. Both understood that the West wasn’t just a geographic expression but a moral inheritance worth defending—militarily, economically, and spiritually. And contrary to the caricatures painted by their detractors, neither hesitated to use force when freedom was on the line. Thatcher, as one British tabloid put it, “would bomb you with a quickness.” When Argentina’s junta invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, plenty of transatlantic sophisticates clucked that the islands weren’t worth a war. The Iron Lady knew otherwise. She dispatched a task force 8,000 miles, reclaimed British soil, and freed a people who wished to remain British. She didn’t seek permission from the United Nations ditherers. She didn’t run a focus group. She led.
That kind of leadership is almost incomprehensible to today’s managerial class. Thatcher understood what the Left refuses to admit: civilization requires a backbone. Watching the King process through streets lined with both admirers and the professionally aggrieved, one can’t help but notice how much has been forgotten. A monarch today, even one with no executive power, stands as a rebuke to the leveling impulse of modern progressivism. A hereditary sovereign reminds the smug egalitarian that not everything can be reduced to a democratic plebiscite or an equity audit. Tradition, ritual, and continuity have claims on the human heart that no technocratic five-year plan can satisfy.
Thatcher’s quip about socialism exhausting other people’s money was funny because it was true. But it’s no longer just a quip. We are living in its burn phase. Across the West, welfare states built on the post-war consensus are groaning under demography and debt. Britain’s National Health Service, a secular religion in the UK, consumes ever more treasure while delivering worse outcomes. America’s entitlement state Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid is hurtling toward insolvency, and the solution offered by the ruling party is always more revenue, meaning more of your money. The socialists never run out of promises, just out of taxpayers. When the money runs dry, as it always does, they don’t repent; they reach for the printing press, unleashing inflation that steals silently from savers and wage earners.
Reagan famously said, “We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity, and ultimately human fulfillment are created from the bottom up, not the government down.” He and Thatcher put that belief into practice. They cut taxes, deregulated, privatized failing state enterprises, and stared down public-sector unions who confused their own narrow interests with the public good. The results confounded the credentialed skeptics. Britain went from the sick man of Europe to a dynamic enterprise economy. America broke the back of stagflation and launched two decades of prosperity. The secret wasn’t clever tweaking by central planners; it was unleashing the creative energy of millions of free men and women. Both leaders understood something that today’s conservatives sometimes forget: economic freedom isn’t just about GDP growth. It’s a moral cause. It’s about the dignity of the individual, the right to keep the fruits of your labor, and the pushback against an overweening state that treats citizens as fiscal livestock.
The King’s visit also reminds us of the special relationship, that oft-invoked but rarely defined bond between the United States and the United Kingdom. To listen to some corners of modern progressive discourse, you’d think the relationship was an embarrassment, a relic of dead white males and colonial nostalgia. The Left sees it as a club of former oppressors. But that’s a profound misreading of history. The Anglo-American alliance, forged in the crucible of two world wars and tempered in the Cold War, is the most successful partnership for liberty the world has ever seen. It was Reagan and Thatcher who together sounded the alarm about Soviet expansionism when the chattering classes were still playing detente parlor games. She called the USSR “brittle” when others called it permanent, and she famously stated, “I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.”
That pugnacity is sorely missed. Today’s conservatives in both countries often find themselves on the defensive, trying to preserve what remains of the Thatcher-Reagan inheritance from constant institutional assault: administrative state overreach, woke capital, the erosion of national sovereignty through transnational bodies. The king’s presence, graceful but powerless, is a reminder that tradition survives, but only if it is defended. Crowns don’t keep themselves. Neither do borders, nor free speech, nor the right to earn an honest living without the government snatching half and scolding you to be grateful for the privilege. Each generation has to rediscover and re-fight the battles its grandparents thought they’d won for good.
It’s worth pausing to consider what Thatcher’s declaration on socialism and other people’s money actually implies for a conservative vision today. It means that compassion isn’t measured by the size of a government budget. True compassion is found in a humming economy that produces jobs, in a civil society of families and churches and neighborhoods that actually care for their own, and in a safety net that catches the fallen but doesn’t ensnare the capable. The socialist model always ends the same way, from Venezuela to Zimbabwe to the declining cities of blue-state America: a few party cronies get rich, the middle class is immiserated, and the poor are kept dependent, their votes purchased with their own stolen purchasing power. Thatcher understood this viscerally, and Reagan’s anti-communism ran on the same insight: that freedom is indivisible, that you cannot have political liberty long without economic liberty.
When I stood in Gibraltar, a young soldier heading toward the sands of the Middle East, the shadow of the Rock fell over a town that was fiercely British despite being attached to Spain. The Union Jacks fluttered from balconies. The people knew they were part of something bigger than a zip code a civilization with a memory and a mission. The King’s arrival in an American city today is, in its own way, a similar reminder. He represents a thousand years of legal and cultural evolution: Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, the stubborn insistence that the king himself is not above the law. That inheritance, passed from Britain to America, is the bulwark against arbitrary power, whether exercised by a despot or a woke diversity commissar with the full force of administrative law.
Conservatives should take heart. The fact that a British monarch’s visit still makes front pages, that people still line the streets, that the memories of Thatcher and Reagan can still stir applause, tells us something durable. The embers of the old virtues loyalty, honor, thrift, self-reliance, patriotism—haven’t gone out. They are waiting to be fanned into flame by leaders who mean what they say, who would bomb you with a quickness if you mistake our politeness for pacifism, and who know that money borrowed from our grandchildren to fund today’s vote-buying isn’t compassion; it’s theft. The King’s visit is more than ceremony: it’s a quiet call to remember who we are, what we inherited, and what we must fight, peacefully but relentlessly, to preserve. Because socialism still doesn’t work, and someone else’s money still runs out.
#MargaretThatcher #Socialism