Deep-ocean explorer, historian, retired naval officer, non-profit director.
Joined May 2022
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Parks Stephenson retweeted
If we want the world to get better, we'll have to accept one thing: some people really are exceptional, and they really do create value.
I've explained how the system works. Now I'm going to tell you why Elon Musk is under attack.
It isn't because of his tweets or his positions. It runs deeper than that. Elon Musk is under attack because he exists.
In a world built on egalitarianism, the exceptional individual is an anomaly. Worse, he's a threat. Left free, he creates gaps: he produces more value, he moves faster, he climbs higher. Every gap he creates proves that the egalitarian project rests on a lie, the lie that we're all interchangeable.
Kurt Vonnegut saw it back in 1961 in a chilling short story, Harrison Bergeron. In an America made perfectly equal, the strong are weighed down, the beautiful are masked, and the most intelligent have their thoughts scrambled by piercing noises so that nobody rises above anybody. That isn't some distant dystopia. It's the ultimate logic of this system. If equality of outcome is the goal, then excellence is the enemy.
Here's a truth almost nobody dares to say: humanity moves forward through geniuses.
Look across the centuries. Aristotle founds logic. Gutenberg prints and sets knowledge free. Copernicus and Galileo move the Earth. Descartes and Pascal give reason its method. Newton writes the laws of the universe. Pasteur defeats microbes. Darwin explains life. Turing invents computing. Every time, one mind, a single one, tips history over.
In 1905, special relativity was in the air, and others were getting close. But general relativity, without Einstein, we might still be waiting for. And the digital revolution as we lived it, from the personal computer to a phone in every pocket, wouldn't look the way it does without Steve Jobs.
We almost always admire these geniuses once they're dead. Galileo had to recant on his knees. Semmelweis, who understood that washing hands was enough to save mothers, died in an asylum, mocked by his peers. Turing, who helped win the war, was convicted and then chemically castrated. Van Gogh sold almost nothing in his lifetime.
And then there's Nikola Tesla. The man who invented the electric world we still live in: the alternating current that powers our homes, the induction motor, the foundations of wireless transmission. He dreamed of sending energy freely across the planet. When J.P. Morgan stopped funding him, his Wardenclyffe tower was abandoned, then demolished. He ended his life alone, buried in debt, in a New York hotel room, feeding pigeons. He was found dead in January 1943, at 86. The man who electrified the world died with almost nothing.
The irony of history: his name is now written on millions of cars, the cars of the company Elon Musk took to the top. As if history wanted to pay its debt.
The system has always hated those who surpassed it, and it only celebrates them once they can no longer bother it.
It's hard to accept, but it's reality. It doesn't mean geniuses have more rights than anyone else. Before the law, before justice, and in their dignity, all people are equal, and they must stay that way. It means that some individuals, through their talent, their courage, and their risk-taking, create a thousand times, a million times, a billion times more value than ordinary people. And they don't keep that value for themselves. All of humanity benefits from it.
Elon Musk is one of those men.
He revived space exploration when governments had turned away from it. He forced the entire auto industry into a new century. With Starlink, he brought the internet to the most isolated corners of the planet. Every time, he was told it was impossible. Every time, he risked everything, and every time, he won.
He is the first person in history to cross a trillion dollars. People want him to apologize for it. I say the opposite: he deserves it, and he deserves much more. The value he's creating for humanity, with reusable rockets, the electrification of the world, and the road to Mars, is beyond any comparison with what he owns.
His fortune wasn't taken from anyone. It was created where there was nothing.
That's exactly what the system can't forgive him for.
In their worldview, nobody should be above anybody. Success is suspect, wealth is theft, excellence is an injustice to be corrected. Elon Musk is living, dazzling, unbearable proof that their model is wrong: a free man with talent and courage can create more value than all their administrations combined. As long as he exists, their story doesn't hold. So he has to be destroyed. The lawsuits, the investigations, the press campaigns, and the regulatory threats all come from there.
But here's what makes me deeply optimistic.
The system is cracking. It bet that people would end up preferring equality in mediocrity to freedom in excellence, and it lost. People saw the rockets come back and land. They saw what a single man could accomplish when nobody stopped him from acting. And they understood they had been lied to.
What's coming is a new world, built on real meritocracy. Not a world where the same people inherit the same seats, but a world where everyone gets to play. The child of a factory worker, a farmer, or an immigrant can get in the game, and if he's good, he rises fast. Very fast. As high as his talent takes him.
The equality worth defending is equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. The first sets geniuses free. The second smothers them.
We think it's normal for a soccer player to earn a fortune because he's exceptional with a ball. We think it's suspicious for an engineer to get rich by bringing rockets back from space. The world will be better the day kids have Elon Musk posters on their bedroom walls, the way they have posters of Messi and Ronaldo.
Humanity never moved forward thanks to people who wanted nobody to stand out. It moved forward thanks to those who dared to outrun everyone.
Elon Musk is one of them. And this time, history won't wait until he's dead to recognize it.
🤖 Made with AI
Parks Stephenson retweeted
I’m Polish. If France is your future, I come from the end of that road.
France shows you the slow version. We lived the full one – the version where the state doesn’t just take care of everything. It owns everything.
In Poland it arrived with Soviet bayonets. In America it would arrive by vote – slower, softer, with better slogans. But the destination is the same, and so is the mechanism.
It starts with prices. When the state decides what things should cost, prices stop telling the truth. A price is a message: this is scarce, this is wanted, make more of this. Abolish the message, and the whole economy goes deaf. So the shelves emptied – first of meat, then of almost everything.
Every Pole knew the joke. A man walks into a shop: "No meat?" The clerk: "No, sir. Here is no fish. No meat is across the street."
We queued for everything. People wrote their place in line on their palms and kept lists through the night. You waited years for a small car, and often more than a decade for an apartment. Not because Poles were lazy. Because nobody in the system had any reason to produce what we needed.
At work, we had another joke: we pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us.
And the promise of equality? It produced the most unequal system of all. The party elite had their own shops – Poles called them the shops behind the yellow curtains. Those with dollars shopped in special stores. Everyone else got the queue.
Then the system needed informers, because nobody believed in it anymore. Our neighbors were recruited to report on us. You never knew who was listening – the colleague, the friend, sometimes family. So we learned to live a double life: one language in public, another at home.
Those who spoke up got the wolf ticket: no job, no promotion, sometimes no university place for their children. Nobody needed to send them to prison. They just couldn’t live.
The newspapers reported record harvests while the shelves stood empty. Everyone knew. Nobody said it. That is what a society looks like when the lie becomes the system.
In 1950 we were about as rich as Spain. By 1989, Spain was twice as rich. That is what forty years of "fairness" cost us.
Today in America, the method is softer. Your neighbor won’t inform on you to the secret police. Someone will report your post, and you’ll be cancelled – no job, no account, no platform. Different tools, same machine.
We got out. Ten million of us joined Solidarity, and in 1989 a system that looked eternal collapsed. Since then, Poland has become one of the great success stories of Europe – because people were finally free to build.
But we still carry it. More than thirty years later, you can see it in the careful answers, the closed faces - the system leaves faster than the fear does. It takes generations to get out of it fully once you fall into that trap.
Nobody votes for the queue. Nobody votes for the informer. They come with the promise.
Trust me, you don’t want to go down that road.
I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you.
I come from your future.
In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream.
Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them.
The promise was protection. The result is stagnation.
The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe.
I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has.
Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France?
Trust me. You don’t want to be France.
Parks Stephenson retweeted
Join Executive Director Parks Stepheson as he builds the new @COBI_Bricks USS KIDD Model.
youtu.be/Ry6Mo2R4xtc?si=JNAK…
Parks Stephenson retweeted
At first glance, this looks like nothing more than two lovers holding each other against a garden wall. But look at what her hands are doing...
The painting is by John Everett Millais, and the scene is set in Paris, on a specific and terrible date: the 24th of August, 1572, the eve of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, when thousands of French Protestants, the Huguenots, were slaughtered in the streets by their Catholic countrymen.
On that night, there was only one way for a man to be spared: if he tied a white cloth around his arm, a sign that he was a Catholic, the killers would pass him by.
The man in this painting is a Huguenot. And the woman who loves him is desperately trying to save his life... she is winding a white band around his arm, gazing up at him, pleading with him to just wear it, to tell the small lie that will let him live and stay with her.
But gently, without anger, he is stopping her. With one hand he loosens the cloth she is tying. He will not wear it. To wear it would be to deny his faith, to save his body by betraying his soul, and he cannot do it, not even for her, not even to live.
Millais fills the scene signs of what is coming: she wears a ring, he wears none, a marriage that will never happen. And the two of them are pressed so close that you cannot tell, at a glance, whether this is an embrace or a struggle. It is both. It is a woman trying to hold a man in this world, and a man who has already made his peace with leaving it…
Parks Stephenson retweeted
A reporter recently asked Jay Leno whether he had considered getting a girlfriend.
His wife, Mavis, has advanced dementia.
Jay looked genuinely confused.
“I already have one,” he replied. “I’m married.”
He later explained that people make vows when they marry, yet somehow seem surprised when someone actually keeps them.
Jay and Mavis Leno have been married since 1980. They met four years earlier at a Los Angeles comedy club, where he was performing and she was in the audience.
Jay became one of America’s most recognizable entertainers, hosting The Tonight Show for decades and building a famous collection of automobiles.
Mavis chose another kind of public life.
From 1997 to 2019, she chaired the Feminist Majority Foundation’s campaign against gender apartheid in Afghanistan. Long before most Americans understood what Taliban rule meant for women, Mavis was speaking publicly about girls banned from school, women barred from work, and entire lives erased from society.
She traveled, lobbied government officials, and spent years demanding that the world pay attention.
Today, an award for global women’s rights carries her name.
Then, slowly, the woman who had fought so fiercely for women the world ignored began losing pieces of her own memory.
In 2024, Jay sought legal conservatorship over her estate because her condition had progressed to the point where she could no longer manage important decisions herself.
The hardest part, he said, was not paperwork or public attention.
It was the mornings.
For nearly three years, Mavis would sometimes wake believing she had just learned that her mother had died.
Not remembering the loss as something from long ago.
Experiencing it as new.
She would cry.
Jay would sit beside her, comfort her, and help her through the grief.
Then the next morning, it might happen again.
Today, his life looks quieter than people might expect.
He still performs and spends time with his cars, but he rarely stays away overnight. He returns home, cooks dinner, and watches television with Mavis.
They enjoy animal documentaries and travel videos, visiting distant places through the screen when real travel has become difficult.
Sometimes she cannot walk through the house alone.
Jay lifts her into his arms.
As he carries her, he sways gently as though they are dancing.
He calls it “Jay and Mavis at the prom.”
She laughs.
She still recognizes him.
She smiles when he enters the room.
She tells him she loves him.
And when she sees something unfair on television, she still reacts with the same anger that once fueled decades of activism.
That part of her remains.
People often approach Jay and tell him how sorry they are.
He does not fully understand the sympathy.
Mavis is not in physical pain, he explains. She becomes confused, and sometimes frightened, and he is there when that happens.
He does not describe it as a burden.
He describes it as being needed.
The woman who spent years insisting that society must not abandon vulnerable women now needs someone beside her each evening.
The man she married is still there.
Not because the situation is easy.
Not because he expected this version of their future.
But because a promise made decades ago still means what it meant then.
For better or worse.
In sickness and in health.
Jay Leno does not consider his devotion extraordinary.
To him, it is simply marriage.
Parks Stephenson retweeted
My father cried.
I had never seen it. Not once in my life.
70 years old. Post-war generation. He hated America with everything he had.
60 years. Not one kind word. Not one.
Then March 2011 came.
He sat in front of the TV. Every day. Silent. Fists on his knees.
Your Marines digging black mud with their bare hands for Japanese strangers.
Your 19-year-old sailors sleeping on cold steel floors so our grandmothers could have beds.
Your carrier sailing INTO the radiation while the whole world ran out.
He watched all of it. And said nothing.
Then one night I passed his room and I froze.
Behind that door, my father, the strongest and most stubborn man I ever knew, was sobbing like a child.
I couldn't move. I just stood there in the dark hallway, listening, crying with him.
Then he said it. One sentence. It tore 60 years apart:
"I was wrong about them."
Do you understand what that took?
A lifetime of hatred. Gone.
Destroyed by soldiers carrying soup to strangers.
America, you didn't just save our towns.
You reached inside my father's chest and healed a wound he swore would never close.
He passed away believing in you.
Happy 250th. 🇺🇸🇯🇵
An old man who hated you died loving you. My father.
Parks Stephenson retweeted
NOBODY tells Americans this part of the story.
In 2009, Japan elected a government that treated your alliance like garbage.
Our Prime Minister looked your President in the eye and said "Trust me."
Then he broke his word.
Your bases were called a burden. Your soldiers were treated like a problem. US-Japan relations hit their COLDEST point in 50 years.
And our economy? Two lost decades. Deflation. Despair.
Then March 11, 2011.
America had EVERY excuse to say "not our problem."
A government that insulted you.
An ally that acted ungrateful.
A country that seemed to have forgotten you.
You know what America did?
24,000 troops. 24 ships. 189 aircraft.
You didn't ask if our politicians deserved it.
You saw old people freezing in the dark with no food, no water, no heat.
That was enough for you.
Here is what every Japanese person understood that day:
You didn't come for our government.
You came for US. The people.
Governments fight. Governments fail. Governments apologize and lie.
But you dug through black mud for strangers whose leaders had spit on you.
That autumn, 82% of Japanese said they felt friendly toward America. The highest ever recorded.
Not because of a treaty.
Because when we were at our weakest, and you had every reason to turn away —
YOU. SHOWED. UP.
Japan will never forget who came when even our own leaders had failed us. 🇺🇸🇯🇵
Parks Stephenson retweeted
America burned Japan's first gift of cherry trees. All 2,000 of them, on President Taft's direct order.
The 1910 shipment arrived in DC crawling with insects and nematodes. Agriculture inspectors condemned the lot, Taft signed off on the bonfire, and the State Department braced for a diplomatic disaster. Tokyo's mayor, Yukio Ozaki, responded by sending 3,020 more, grafted from the famous grove along the Arakawa River.
Those trees have spent a century paying the friendship back.
Four days after Pearl Harbor, vandals chopped down four of them. Park officials renamed the survivors "Oriental" cherry trees for the rest of the war to protect them from axes.
Then came the twist. By 1952 the original Arakawa grove in Tokyo, the parent stock, had nearly died from wartime neglect. Japan asked Washington for help. The Park Service shipped budwood from DC's trees back across the Pacific and restored the grove that created them. When a flood wiped out more Japanese trees in 1982, horticulturists took 800 fresh cuttings from the Tidal Basin.
These 250 new trees solve a real problem too. The Tidal Basin is sinking, and a $133 million seawall rebuild forced crews to rip out roughly 150 trees. Japan offered replacements before anyone asked, timed to America's 250th birthday.
So the genetics run in a loop. Tokyo's grove seeded Washington's. Washington's saved Tokyo's. The saplings going in this spring descend from both.
114 years of diplomacy, running on grafted branches.
JUST IN: Japan declares its friendship with the U.S. is “stronger than ever” as it gifts an additional 250 cherry blossom trees.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Stating this is “Just in” and using this image are misleading. Japan’s current Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi announced this gift in October 2025.
thehill.com/homenews/admin…
The man depicted in the included image is the late and former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe who was assassinated in 2022.
Parks Stephenson retweeted
For the United States Bicentennial in 1976, the government funded one of the wildest short films ever made.
Created by animator Vincent Collins & produced by the United States Information Agency, the film goes on a kaleidoscopic journey through iconic
American symbols.
Parks Stephenson retweeted
Parks Stephenson, Executive Director of the USS Kidd Veterans Museum joins James from All American Travels to discuss one of the most famous destroyers of WWII, the Fletcher-class destroyer USS JOHNSTON (DD-557).
youtube.com/live/umopwIlIEKU…
Parks Stephenson retweeted
Social media team here. If you're asking about KIDD, yes. If you're asking about JOHNSTON, @ParksStep3 will have to weigh in.
Parks Stephenson retweeted
Korean man tunes into a Zoom meeting while on a roller coaster. There's no way they didn't know 😂
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
This video depicts a staged comedic skit by Ulsan Nam-gu officials promoting a local cart attraction, not a genuine Zoom meeting on a roller coaster. youtube.com/watch?v=pvumkI…
Parks Stephenson retweeted
Something All Must Witness To Believe
For those of you itching to see Puddles the Clown combine The Who’s “Pinball Wizard” with Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” this is for you.
Enjoy. Or hate. It’s a free country.
Well, relatively, anyway.
Parks Stephenson retweeted
Check it out! navalmuseumatlas.com/
Parks Stephenson retweeted
On April 11, 1945, off the coast of Okinawa, a kamikaze plane struck the USS Kidd. She kept fighting anyway.
Today, the USS Kidd sits in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, preserved in her 1945 configuration, one of the most remarkable WWII destroyers you can visit anywhere in the world. A National Historic Landmark that has never stopped telling her crew's story.
Discover the USS Kidd in the Naval Museum Atlas 2026 Calendar and don't forget to grab your in-game code on the Naval Museum Atlas website!
Parks Stephenson retweeted
To my American friends,
I want to speak from the heart, because this moment truly moved me as a Japanese citizen.
When President Trump made that Pearl Harbor joke, it wasn’t just humor to us. It felt like a weight I’d carried my whole life was suddenly lifted. My chest tightened, and honestly, tears came close.
For 80 long years, we Japanese have lived under a heavy shadow — the constant expectation to apologize, to reflect, to stay in “guilt mode.” Even though we’re the closest of allies, that old wound never fully healed. We felt bound by the past, by the Constitution America helped write for us, always a little smaller, always needing to prove we were sorry enough.
But in that single joke, Trump did something powerful. He turned a painful history into a shared laugh between equals. It was like he was saying:
“Hey, it was a long time ago. We’re good. Let’s move forward — as brothers.”
No more endless atonement. No more living in the shadow of being the “former enemy.” The curse broke. Japan feels free to stand tall again.
Right now, cherry blossoms are blooming beautifully all across Japan. 🌸
This spring, the sakura feels like a perfect symbol — a fresh beginning. Not two nations stuck in old roles, but true equals, proud brothers, shoulder to shoulder, ready to build the future together.
To the American people:
We don’t want to be subordinates forever. We want to be your real partners — strong, proud, and loyal. The kind of allies who ride or die together.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Thank you, America.
The strongest alliance in the world is rising again — as equals, as brothers, forever.
#PhoenixRising 🇯🇵🤝🇺🇸🌸
🤖 Made with AI
Parks Stephenson retweeted
🎞️ WATCH OUR NEW “YAMATO” MUSIC VIDEO!
👉 youtu.be/Dfh1aSdxr9U
Our brand-new music video is out now! Filmed in Belgrade, Serbia, in October 2025 with the help of our friends at @worldofwarships, the story takes place aboard the legendary Japanese battleship Yamato during her final moments before she slips beneath the waves - taking the entire band down with her.
Watch us battle crashing waves and fight to stay on our feet as the ship meets its dramatic fate. It’s an epic one, and we hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed bringing it to life! ⚓🔥
Parks Stephenson retweeted
NEW SONG "YAMATO” OUT NOW! 🌊⚓
🎧 Listen: sabaton.lnk.to/yamato
Friends! We’re excited to announce that our new single “Yamato” is available on all music streaming services. Listen to it NOW!
Don’t miss our music video premiere on YouTube at 4pm CET / 11am ET / 8am PT!
Yamato was a giant battleship, built in secret and launched in 1941 by the Japanese Navy as the most powerful of its kind. We’ve had countless requests to write a song about it, and we’ve finally delivered. Transport yourself back in time and uncover Japan’s rich naval history with us!
We’ve joined forces with @WorldofWarships for this one. So not only do you get new music and an official music video. Players can now experience something new in-game! For the very first time, a Sabaton-branded ship is available, alongside special in-game voiceovers from Joakim and Pär, plus much more!
So what are you waiting for? Immerse yourself in the world of Yamato!
Parks Stephenson retweeted
Podría ser el baile robótico perfecto jamás grabado...
xitter.gq/Im_Miyou/status/197597…