Blessed Are — · No. VII of VIII · The Peacemakers

Blessed Are the Peacemakers

The promise is paternity — the peacemakers shall be called the children of God. So we checked the family budget. It pays a trillion dollars a year to the war business, and in the same year it tried to bulldoze the one federal office whose entire job was peace.

By Orion Quin

Of the eight, this is the Beatitude that is a verb. The others describe a condition you are in — poor, meek, mourning. But peacemaking is something you do, active labor, and its reward is the highest kinship the list offers: to be called a child of God. So the question writes itself. In a nation's accounts, who gets treated as family — the peacemakers, or the people who profit when peace fails? Follow the budget. The budget always tells the truth.

The one program that always gets a raise

In fiscal year 2025 the United States spent roughly $919 billion on national defense. For 2026 the figure crossed $1 trillion — the first trillion-dollar military budget in the nation's history, more than the next ten countries on earth spend on their militaries combined, by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's count. War is not a cost the country reluctantly bears. It is the single largest discretionary thing the government buys, and it is the one program that, year after year, is handed more than it even asks for.

And here is the detail that should end the conversation about "efficiency." The Department of Defense is the only federal agency that has never passed an audit. Congress mandated the audits; the Pentagon did not attempt one until 2018 and has failed every year since, unable to fully account for its own assets. We are putting a trillion dollars a year into a machine that cannot tell us where the money went — and increasing it anyway. No food program, no school, no hospital would survive a fraction of that scrutiny. The war business is the one line item exempt from the question every other line is forced to answer.

And the peacemakers? Evicted.

Now the other side of the ledger, and it is almost too neat to believe. The United States Institute of Peace was created by Congress in 1984 — an independent body whose literal, chartered purpose is to prevent and resolve violent conflict around the world. In March 2025, federal personnel physically took over its headquarters, escorted its leadership out of the building, fired most of its staff — including people working in active warzones — drained its endowment, and moved to transfer its privately owned headquarters to the government. In May, a federal judge ruled the whole operation illegal and "null and void," and the Institute retook its building.

Read those two facts together, because they happened in the same year. The country wrote a trillion-dollar check to the war business and simultaneously tried to delete, by force, the one federal office whose job was peace. Isaiah promised swords beaten into plowshares. We ran the prophecy backward — melted the plowshares, and sent armed officers to evict the people holding them.

The unrewarded children

The peacemakers scripture has in mind are not only institutes. They are the mediators, the community organizers, the violence interrupters, the diplomats, the people who do the slow, unglamorous, unprofitable work of keeping conflict from igniting. Their budgets, taken together, round to nothing beside the cost of a single fighter wing. They prevent the wars that never make the news, and a war that never happens generates no contract, no stock bump, no ribbon-cutting. Peace is the one product with no profit margin — which is precisely why a country that worships the margin leaves its peacemakers unpaid and uncalled.

The denial, left standing

The strongest objection deserves its full hearing: peace through strength is a real doctrine, deterrence genuinely requires capability, and a dangerous world is not pacified by good intentions. Grant all of it. The administration will add that it was cutting waste, not peace. The court, which actually examined it, disagreed and called the dismantling unlawful. But notice what none of these arguments contests: not the trillion, not the failed audits, not the armed eviction a judge ruled illegal. Nobody disputes that war is funded without limit and peace was funded until someone tried to padlock it. They dispute only which of the two should be called the children of God.

The facts are not contested. The conscience is. The same closing line, because the same machine keeps running underneath.

From the Archive · In His Own Voice

[Reserved for a verbatim, cited passage from Mike Quin on war, the profiteers, and the workers who pay for both sides — set exactly as written, with the source named. Supply the passage and edition and it will be placed here in his own voice.]

Why a paper that builds things cares

Because the rule that governs everything we make is violated most expensively here: the machine serves the person; the person is never the raw material. An economy that has made war its most dependable product has turned the person — the soldier, the civilian under the drone, the taxpayer funding both — into raw material for the contractor's earnings call. Peace does not scale a profit-and-loss statement; that is exactly why a marketplace built to serve persons rather than harvest them has to value the thing the margin can't. We build tools that refuse to profit from the user's harm. It is the same principle, only here the harm is measured in cities.

You do not need a creed to prefer the plowshare to the sword. You need only to read the budget and notice which one the country can always afford. We read it. It is public. It does not call the peacemakers family.

Blessed are the peacemakers — for they shall be called the children of God. The budget calls the warmakers family and the peacemakers a line to cut. We mean to keep reading it aloud until the names are corrected.

Seven promises down. One remains — and it is the one that watches the watchers. Next, the capstone: they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake, and the price of telling the truth.

— Orion Quin · Dangerous Thoughts