Where Are All the Men?

Your Sons. Their Slaughter. The Draft Is Coming. Here's How We Stop It.

Mar 28, 2026

It was New Year’s Eve 2005, and I was in New Orleans.

I had come to the city chasing Hurricane Katrina stories, documenting with my video camera the human wreckage left in her wake, when someone insisted I seek out a particular woman. You must capture her story. So I went, I found her. We met at the iconic Tipitina's, saddled up at the bar, chatted, and within the space of an evening had struck up the kind of fast, effortless friendship that New Orleans seems to conjure out of thin air. She invited me to her home for an intimate New Year's gathering with old friends, and I said yes.

It’s not like I had other plans.

What I didn’t know was where that evening would take me. Somewhere in the warmth of that gathering, with the city humming its strange voodoo magic outside, Richard, a man who did past-life regressions professionally, was among the guests. In New Orleans, on New Year’s Eve, with new friends urging you forward, you say yes to things.

So, with a little encouragement, I soon found myself ‘going under,’ back into something I had no framework for and have never fully been able to explain.

I had been given a directive by Richard: cross a fog-laden creek, wait for the fog to rise, and relay what I saw on the other side.

When it did, I was standing, looking up a gently sloped hill, surrounded by mangled trees and a silent meadow. Not a thing was alive. It either resembled what I had been traveling through, hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, or the remnants of a fresh war. I couldn’t tell, initially.

Not until Richard asked, “Are you a man or a woman?”

I responded, “I don’t know. I haven’t a clue.”

Until I looked down and saw wool pants tucked into my leather-clad boots. I was in uniform. Clearly a man. A man in war. I knew it was winter because I could see my breath swirl in the crisp, frigid air.

By the end of that regression, I came to the gut-wrenching realization that I had been responsible for the deaths of dozens, if not hundreds, of men. I had, in some long-ago chapter of the human story, wiped that place clean of its men.

Several dead Confederate artillery men lie outside Dunker Church after the Battle of Antietam in this photo by Mathew Brady’s gallery manager, Alexander Gardner.

What I did not know until the following morning was that my host, the woman whose home I was a guest in, had undergone her own past-life regression ten months earlier with Richard. As instructed, she too had been prompted to cross that same fog-covered creek. And when she did, she arrived on the other side not as a soldier, but as a little girl, looking around, bewildered, asking the same question over and over again:

Where are all the men? What happened to all the men?

Two strangers. The same time period. The same creek. The same war-torn meadow. The same deathly silence on the other side.

She had arrived at the absence. I had, apparently, been its cause.

I have carried that experience like a stone in my pocket ever since. And lately, these past weeks especially, it has begun to feel less like a past life memory and more like a premonition.

Because I look at what is unfolding in this country right now and I hear that little girl’s voice again:

Where are all the men? What happened to all the men?

WHAT POSSIBLY LIES AHEAD

No longer in the 1860s or 2005, for that matter.

Beginning April 20th, 2026, American men between the ages of 17 (with parental consent, meaning your son) and 42 can now be called upon to serve. The age ceiling has been quietly expanded. And while the drums of war beat louder by the day, with Iran positioned as the next theater of engagement, I want you to sit with one simple question: Do you know a single man in your life who is lining up to volunteer for a ground invasion of Iran?

Neither do I.

However, and this is the important part, under broader militia laws, able-bodied men between 17 and 45 are subject to compulsory conscription for militia service under “emergency conditions.” US Military And notably, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told CBS News that "we're willing to go as far as we need to in order to be successful" when asked about a draft.

WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU

Iran has a reported million-man army. They have been preparing for exactly this scenario for decades. They knew they were on ‘the list,' and they have had twenty-five years to study how to make a ground invasion into an American graveyard. This is not a pop quiz for them. This is the final exam they have been studying for nearly their entire national lives.

Nobody in their right mind signs up for that. Which tells me, with cold clarity, that the draft is coming.

And not a draft that pulls from the comfortable corridors of power. It never does. We all know this. It will be a draft that reaches into the backbone of this country; our construction workers, our electricians, our long-haul truck drivers, our utility linemen, our plumbers, the men who hold the physical infrastructure of daily American life together with their hands. The men who, when they go, leave behind not just families, but the very functioning of the communities we live in.

And even those who survive, those who come back, will not come back the same. War doesn’t allow for that. The body may return. The spirit is often left behind on some foreign ground. This is not an abstraction. Every generation that has sent its sons into the killing fields has learned this the hard way. We are not exempt from that lesson simply because we’d prefer not to face it.

The economic and societal unraveling that would follow? That doesn’t need much imagination either.

COVID 2.0

I say this as someone who was keenly aware of, and actively fighting, the machinery of engineered chaos when it was first unveiled at scale in 2020. The same playbook. The same players.

Fortunately many more see this pattern today than they did 5-6 years ago. If you're reading this, you get it. Iran didn't arrive at this moment by accident. It was cornered, poked, and provoked with methodical precision for years. The engineered demolition of the world we have known is accelerating, and we are watching it happen in real time.

And the end game? Lock us down. Once and for all. Not with masks and mandates this time. But with absence. With grief. With the hollow quiet of homes where men used to be.

All through the engineered energy crisis of madmen’s making.

But here is what I know about that playbook, and it’s one fatal flaw:

It didn’t account for the mothers.

During COVID, when the institutional walls seemed impenetrable and the official narrative felt inescapable, it was the women, the mothers, who rose first and loudest. They showed up at school board meetings. They pulled their children out of classrooms. Started homeschools. They built networks the experts said couldn’t exist. Returned to county meetings regularly, forced outside, exiled from their county government meetings, standing in seasons of rain, wind, heat, and forest fire smoke. They were mocked, dismissed, and surveilled, and they/we kept going anyway.

The same force is being called forward now. I can feel it. I am hearing a cacophony of voices, women’s voices, saying exactly what I am saying. This is not a fringe whisper. This is a gathering roar.

THE CALL TO MOTHERS

Speaking of war… Mother’s Day was never meant to be about flowers.

After the Civil War, a war that (who knows, I may have played a role in during a past life) abolitionist Julia Ward Howe made a Mother's Day call to women to protest the carnage of war. In 1870, having lived through its bloodshed and watching the Franco-Prussian War ignite overseas, she asked a question that burns as bright today as it did then:

“Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the costs?”

She called upon mothers to leave their homes for one day a year and work for peace in their communities. She translated her proclamation into several languages and traveled around the world. Her proclamation declared, in words that should stop you cold: “Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.”

**Julia Ward Howe, 1870.** From her Mother’s Day Proclamation for Peace

That was the original Mother’s Day. Not a box of chocolates or a morning of momosas. A declaration of war against war itself, issued by a woman who had seen enough carnage to know that no political calculation was worth a single son’s life.

When the holiday was eventually institutionalized by President Wilson in 1914, just before the start of World War I, it had already been stripped of Howe’s anti-war message. The commercial machine moved in. The florists. The card companies. Advocation of peace transformed into a mechanism of political derailment and profit; a profound act of maternal resistance was flattened into a day of sentiment.

That co-opting was not an accident. It never is.

What Julia Ward Howe understood, what the mothers before us always understood, is that the natural, primal instinct of a mother is to protect her offspring. It is not a political position. It is not a left or right conviction. It is something written into the bone. And when that instinct is activated at scale, when mothers across a nation look at what is being done with their children and say no, not this, not my son, it becomes one of the most powerful forces in human history.

We are at that threshold.

After war broke out in Europe in 1914, American women played a leading role in subsequent protests. On August 29, 1914, approximately 1,500 women wearing black dresses and black armbands engaged in a funereal march down New York City’s Fifth Avenue. The Women’s Peace Parade was one of the first public anti-war demonstrations in American history. SOURCE

I am not a mother. But I would lay my life down to stop the senseless marching of men into a slaughter designed to feed a blood-soaked appetite for sacrifice, a sacrifice that would hollow out this country from the inside. A sacrifice that would create a void no policy paper, no economic stimulus, and no government program could ever fill.

At what point do we say: I would rather die standing than on my knees?

This is one of those times.

Mothers - rise.

Not because someone told you to. Because the fog has lifted enough that you can see, across that creek, what’s on the other side.