Apologies for the wall of text, but seemed appropriate for today's America.

The modern image of “Dracula” is a Hollywood ghost story—an aristocratic vampire drifting through moonlit halls. But the real man behind the name, Vlad III of Wallachia, was nothing of the kind. He was a hard, unflinching Christian prince on the frontier of a collapsing Christendom, fighting for survival against the seemingly unstoppable Ottoman Empire. His inherited name “Dracula” came not from demonic darkness but from his father’s membership in the Order of the Dragon, a chivalric brotherhood devoted—like the warrior monks of earlier centuries—to resisting Islamic expansion into Europe. Vlad’s world was brutal, treacherous, and shaped by the stark calculus of medieval warfare. Impalement, the punishment that earned him his grim nickname, was not some exotic perversity he invented; it was a known and widely practiced execution method in both the Ottoman and Balkan worlds. Vlad used it with ruthless precision because it delivered exactly what the age demanded: maximum terror in the hearts of invaders who respected nothing but overwhelming force. When Sultan Mehmed II marched a massive army north, Vlad met him not with gothic fantasy but with a horrifyingly effective display of psychological warfare—the infamous “Forest of the Impaled,” thousands of Ottomans transfixed along the road to Târgoviște. To modern sensibilities it is barbaric; to a 15th-century prince defending a tiny Christian realm against the most powerful empire on earth, it was a grim necessity meant to stall an enemy that understood fear better than diplomacy. Bram Stoker later hijacked the name “Dracula” and stripped it of its historical context, creating a vampire who bore no resemblance to the real man. The truth is far more grounded—and more sobering. Vlad was no undead monster but a flesh-and-blood defender of Christendom, employing the harsh tools of his day in a desperate effort to preserve a civilization under siege.