The year is 2002 and the 72-year-old retiree steps cautiously out of the car and scans the street for danger. He’s concerned for his daughter’s safety. A man has been stalking him.

The old timer doesn’t scare easily. He’s a combat veteran, MIT PhD, and lifelong government operative. But a shadowy 6-foot-2, 250-pound figure has followed him and his friends across the country for years. The threat of violence is real.

For a moment, he forgets his troubles. He’s arrived at a Beverly Hills hotel because a Japanese children’s show wants an interview. He agreed because he enjoys talking to kids. It brings him peace. And it’s a rare chance to bond with his daughter.

300 seconds later Buzz Aldrin launches a fist into his stalker’s face with the force of a thousand Nazi V2 rockets.

You probably forgot about September 9, 2002, the day legendary astronaut Buzz Aldrin punched Moon landing denier Bart Sibrel in the jaw outside the Luxe Hotel in Beverly Hills, after he lured Aldrin to the location under false pretenses, and demanded Buzz swear on a Bible he walked on Moon. In fact, you’ve probably never heard the name “Bart Sibrel” in your life.

But many have, far more than they should, largely because conspiracies are all our culture has to say about Moon anymore.

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On April 25, 2024, nearly twenty-two years later, Bart Sibrel appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience. Nothing new was said. They recapped the same talking points shared in the same sativa-powered conversations held in the same bars, basements, and radio rooms across the nation for decades. And that pretty much sums up the last quarter-century of America’s relationship with societal progress in general:

A ‘stuck culture’ trapped in negative retrospectives and anger.

We already know what to expect of a left-leaning cultural education in America: endless critical theory, preaching, and recruitment into a spiritually corrosive religion of self-hatred. Yet even our right-leaning online factions often fall into this cynicism.

“The moon landing was fake.”

“They want you to believe this aluminium foil wrapped hunk of junk went to the moon and back.”

“The amount of fluoride in the brain required to swallow this story is staggering.”

These are all real and recent quotes from schizo-brained accounts on X, borne out of a reflexive, popular distrust of institutional authority. But we cannot succumb to the lazy, navel-gazing nihilism of doubting everything our ancestors built.

We cannot ‘RETVRN’ to 1950’s Americana. We can’t go back. But we can take scraps of ethos from the past and move forward toward a superior future.

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Just yesterday, Artemis II’s Orion spacecraft, nicknamed Integrity by the crew, splashed down onto Earth after a tantalizingly close flight to Moon. The Artemis II mission was the furthest humans have ever ventured into space — 252,756 miles away from our home planet. The crew received extensive photography training before the mission, and our return to Moon gave us awe-inspiring space photographs, like this:

Across the country, Americans gathered to hear the astronauts name a lunar crater after Integrity and name another, “Carroll crater,” after the late wife of Integrity’s captain, Reid Wiseman.

Of course, the mission wasn’t without its lunatic detractors, and deniers… similar to the one Buzz Aldrin clocked back in 2002. Guardian columnist Zoe Williams went on an anti-NASA crusade last week, ranting to anyone who would listen that “space exploration is pointless” because “there’s nothing to see and no one to talk to.”

Canadian Journalist Michelle Cyca lamented that the Artemis mission had officially kicked off “the Lunar Land Grab,” to the detriment of indigenous ecosystems after rocket launches (???), and expressed passionate concern about the racial diversity of astronauts on a forthcoming Moon settlement.

And, of course, there was The Verge, who raised questions about Moon Base’s legal viability. (In the words of Kane Hsieh, on X: “oh no call the moon police.”) (But also, Moon Base is completely protected under President Trump’s Artemis Accords.)

Take note that these critics are, primarily, non-Americans.

Their forefathers did not leave their continents behind, circumnavigate the globe, or brave the untamed West in the name of individual triumph. The United States was the first country to assemble the talent and willpower to land on Moon, and the only country with a legitimate claim to it today. Any globalist-concocted space treaties or international agreements only exist so long as America tolerates them (which it shouldn’t, as Pirate Wires argued last December).

Every human being who has ever set foot on Moon has sworn the Pledge of Allegiance, so, naturally, Americans are Moon’s indigenous people. The rest of y’all are just settlers. (We better hear a land acknowledgement every time you drop a rover or grab some of our lunar ice, and we’re definitely doing astronaut reparations off your helium-3 mining profits. (We’re only half-kidding.))

For those looking for a break from livestream NASA coverage and wanting to revisit what you might have missed… here’s a recap of our Moon coverage to date, PROOF we were pushing lunar statehood before anyone else showed up to steal our tagline.

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American Spaceman, Body and Soul (July 2021)

The original piece that started our line of coverage. Solana owns the “billionaires in space are stealing from the poor” crowd and argues the real fight over space is a fight for the soul of America.

Moon Should Be a State (December 2024)

Solana’s full case against the quiet belief strangling the country, that America is done growing, and the solution for our woes: lunar conquest.

Back to the Future (December 2024)

Ryan McEntush’s geopolitical breakdown arguing that in a legal vacuum, physical presence on Moon is the only thing that matters, and China knows it. Kill Space Launch System, go all-in on Starship, and reimagine America as an Astrocracy.

Pirate Wires in Times Square (February 2025)

What other media company is willing to beam “Moon Should Be a State” onto the most famous billboard in the world?

What Can We Send to Mars on the First Starships? (March 2025)

Rocket scientist Casey Handmer laid out exactly what SpaceX should pack into the first Mars-bound Starships, including a plan to drop tungsten spears from orbit at 8 km/s to expose subsurface ice.

Space Tech: Florida Wants Your Business (June 2025)

Blake Dodge went south and found that Florida has quietly become the nerve center of American spaceflight, with Space Florida slashing regulations and financing pads to lure every aerospace company with a pulse. The path to a self-sustaining lunar economy may well require Disney hotels on Moon.

We Choose to Go (Back) to Moon (April 2026)

New NASA administrator Jared Isaacman is gutting five decades of contractor rot and rebuilding the agency into a serious place to work again. And finally, for the first time in 54 years, three Americans are flying to Moon.

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As Artemis II’s captain, Reid Wiseman, said last September, “I could have a very comfortable life for [my daughters]. “But I’m also a human, and I see the spirit in their eyes that is burning in my soul too. And so we’ve just got to never stop going.”

—Alastair John Pitts, Ryan Hassan, and Hunter Ryerson