September 25, 2021__ Victor Davis Hanson – Reflections on 2020 – Part One>Victor Davis Hanson – Reflections on 2020 – Part Two>E.P. Unum – Reflections on a Saturday Morning in September _Reflections on 2020 the Worst Year in the Last Half-Century: Part One Victor Davis HansonEeyore’s CabinetSeptember 21, 2021 Remembering When the Woke AwokeWoke is not new. Consider it an old IED buried and forgotten, but even when dormant an always latent explosive that any heavy traffic—that is, 2020—could finally ignite.Why? Decades-long devolution from citizenship to tribal ideologies explained why extremist groups found followers and felt no common ties with most other Americans, concerning either the nation’s past or future.So, in the demonstrations, protests, rioting, and looting that followed the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, the country experienced racial shocks and polarization not seen since the pre-Civil Rights era—and yet was not particularly surprised that they occurred.Left unsaid was that the violence of 2020 was the logical dividend of years of racial separatism in the university, tribal chauvinism in popular culture, K-12 politicization of American history, and an affluent liberal elite who had virtue signaled and green lighted racial victimization as a mechanism to exempt from scrutiny their own unquestioned privilege.At first, even before 2020 when Confederate generals of bronze and stone fell, the public stayed largely quiet.Of course, the people did not like the mob’s vandalism and nocturnal iconoclasm. But on the other hand, they also did not quite see why the nation—even in the ex-Confederate states—had honored Stonewall Jackson or Nathan Bedford Forrest in the first place. True, some were brilliant generals, but almost all were diehard secessionists who had been unapologetic about the supposedly righteous cause of the rebellious slave-owning Confederacy.Still, most on the sidelines stayed quiet and assumed that the mobs would be satiated with destroying century-old monuments to the old idols of the Confederacy, and then soon dissipate.But the lack of arrests or even criticism of the vandalism only wetted the beak of the mob—as did those who wrote that they agreed with the aims of the mob, but not necessarily with their means. Within days, the iconic targets metamorphosized from Confederates to almost any white male heroic figure of the past, and without rhyme or reason: the author Miguel de Cervantes, Christopher Columbus, the Union General Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas Jefferson, Father Junipero Serra, George Washington, and a host of others including African American Civil War veterans and abolitionist Frederick Douglas. Even Mahatma Gandhi became a target, apparently given his early racialist writing while living in South Africa.Within mere days, hundreds of monuments in major cities were toppled or defaced. And still demands grew from Black Lives Matter and Antifa to rename sports teams, towns, and change vocabulary itself. Laws were supposed to vanish without the input of the legislature. The police were to be defunded, even the concept of bail discarded.Cancel culture, energized by social media, electrified by the Internet, and honed by the previous #MeToo frenzy, now began erasing out the careers of anyone in the past allegedly found guilty of a racist slur or insensitive act. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel was outed, who decades earlier had worn blackface. A New York Times opinion editor, James Bennet, was forced out. His crime? He had allowed Sen. Thomas Cotton (R-AK) to write a guest editorial arguing that the President has a constitutional right and duty to send in federal troops to the worst areas of urban rioting.Celebrities wrote nauseating public apologies confessing their racial sins to reclaim their livelihoods. Star New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees had initially opposed taking the knee during the National Anthem. But as a result, he was quickly faced with the destruction of his multimillion-dollar sports-celebrity-endorsement empire. So, he quickly pivoted and made the necessary adjustments:“In an attempt to talk about respect, unity, and solidarity centered around the American flag and the national anthem, I made comments that were insensitive and completely missed the mark on the issues we are facing right now as a country. They lacked awareness and any type of compassion or empathy. Instead, those words have become divisive and hurtful and have misled people into believing that somehow I am an enemy…”When the combined ruthlessness and fear of the Salem Witch Trials, Joseph McCarthy’s inquisitions, and Maximilien Robespierre’s show trials now began to drive the protests, the results were predictable. Street names were changed, plazas rechristened. One day I drove into the Stanford University campus and noticed that the street beneath my office had now been renamed “Jane Stanford Way.” Gone was “Serra Mall”—named after the 18th-century founder of the California missions, Father Junipero Serra. Intrigued at the damnatio memoriae, I quickly checked and found that almost all of Stanford’s references to “Serra” were Trotskyzied. Had we all become collectively Orwell’s Winston Smiths, who nonchalantly noticed that certain incorrect names and events simply went into the memory hole?I recalled my high-school English teacher Mrs. Hearne of more than 50 years past, who warned us at age 16 when we read 1984: “You’ll know 1984 not when the year comes up, but when they start changing names and dates.”Throughout the nation barricades were put up across major thoroughfares. “Black Lives Matter” was emblazoned on main streets, often with either the help or approval of big-city mayors. Past state prohibitions about close contact and not wearing masks were utterly ignored. Tens of thousands hit the streets, oblivious to the current quarantines. They were exempted by timid mayors and governors, who had once issued supposedly iron-clad shutdowns. To square the circle of their impotence, officials now instead strangely went after small business owners who had followed suit and tried to restart their business.Somehow race superseded even notions of public health in time of a pandemic—as over 1,200 health care professionals insisted: “We created the letter in response to emerging narratives that seemed to malign demonstrations as risky for the public health because of Covid-19. Instead, we wanted to present a narrative that prioritizes opposition to racism as vital to the public health, including the pandemic response.” The advocates of science now reinvented a new science that postulated the ideology of the outdoor goer determined his susceptibility to the virus and danger to others.Protestors bragged in empty fashion of far greater targets—the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, and indeed Mt. Rushmore itself. In their frenzy of revolution, the United States was declared cancerous at birth, and thus deserving of toxic surgery that well might kill the host. That the architects of the radical protests, the creators of Black Lives Matter, or the originator of the 1619 Project, or the Antifa protestors themselves were discovered to have uttered vile racist or anti-Semitic slurs in their own pasts mattered little.Those calculating the effects on their own careers, either in fear of being outed to the Revolution, or in anticipation of gaining favor with it, began preempting the mob’s wrath, with the most bizarre array of virtue signaling seen in modern American history.University presidents promised to capitalize black as “Black,” as if new orthography alone might ease tensions or postpone their own resignations. At a time of university financial crises, due to the lockdowns and forced closures of campuses, they promised huge budget increases for segregated theme houses, new diversity facilitators and coordinators, hiring new faculty members focused on the impact of race in America, accelerated and expanded mandatory diversity reeducation for faculty and staff, and increased African-American admissions—while damning both the systemic racism of their country and warning would-be counter-revolutionaries of the wages of dissent. Some English departments promised not to enforce traditional rules of English grammar in the grading of non-white student papers.Retired generals who had spent their entire lives revolving in and out of Forts Benning and Bragg, suddenly announced they too had been suddenly woke to the prior insidious racist messaging of once naming U.S. military bases after Confederate renegade generals. Once unaware of their own supposed complicity in racism, they now opportunely asked that their century-old bases be renamed.Corporate CEOs, fearful of boycotts and more looted stores, outdid each other in obsequiousness—none more than Dan Cathy, CEO of the Chick-fil-A fast-food restaurant chain. He urged that white people shine the shoes of blacks in the manner that the disciples had washed the feet of Jesus. Indeed, Dan Cathy sort of did just that when in a televised moment he polished the sneakers of hip-hop artist Lecrae.“Take the knee”—a popular culture spin-off from HBO’s Game of Thrones in which the defeated either bowed on a knee or met their deaths—was now forced upon—or welcomed by? —police, coaches, and elected officials. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the respective top Democrats in the House and Senate, led a collective knee-taking in the Capitol, replete with African Kente cloth scarves around their necks. I wondered whether Ms. Speaker would wear such things when again showing off her $25,000 pair of refrigerators and $13 carton of designer ice cream or sneaking in once more to her hair salon to break her own advocacy of quarantines and masks.State and local officials wondered whether the uprising would win majority voter support. For a while at least they decided to weigh in on the side of the protestors and demonstrators. In Seattle, the mayor allowed a center of the downtown to be governed by a BLM warlord. In Oregon, a state official ordered the required wearing of masks for all the public—with blacks excepted from the order, at least until outrage at the racialist pandering caused her to rescind the order.In Seattle, mandatory racial reeducation was required of white public employees to force them to renounce further claims on their purported insidious privileges. In New York, Mayor Bill DeBlasio ordered a lockdown on all public gatherings except those organized by Black Lives Matter. It was as if the progressive Left had studied the insidiousness of Jim Crow and now sought to apply such protocols in reverse.Sports franchise owners—themselves nearly all white, their teams overwhelmingly black—outbid each other to appear the most sympathetic to the popular furor. Some promised that players could wear BLM insignia.Others swore that before the National Anthem was played, the so-called “black national anthem”—the early twentieth-century inspirational “Lift Every Voice and Sing” be played first. Ironically the song was written and set to music by James and Rosamond Johnson as a tribute to Abraham Lincoln (whose statues were currently being defaced). The song at its inception had served as a reminder of national redemption and victory (“our new day begun”). Unnoticed was that the song’s celebration of Christianity and optimism was oddly antithetical to the gloomy Marxism of the BLM founders.The progressive establishment began worrying—a little bit—that the logic of the revolution they had supported and nourished was beginning to devour their own cherished icons and soon themselves as well. Losing Mt. Rushmore might be one thing but seeing the beloved Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University renamed opened a can of worms—among them most notably careerist concerns and social status branding.Why not then the prestigious Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. as well? Indeed, if the standard was now the racism of the past hurtling into the present to justify destroying icons, how safe could the pillars of elite progressive higher education endure—Columbia, named for Columbus, Princeton for Prince William of Orange, Yale for a slave owner, Stanford for a railroad tycoon and exploiter of Asian labor?___________________________________________________ Reflections on 2020the Worst Year in the Last Half-Century:Part Two Victor Davis HansonEeyore’s CabinetSeptember 23, 2021 The Silicon Valley Octopus Flexed its TentaclesIn George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the author describes a soulless world created by an authoritarian cadre that controlled even the thoughts of its subjects through massive electronic surveillance. An all-powerful state bureaucracy warped language, ideas, and history to convince and coerce the residents of Oceania that a benevolent “Big Brother” was ensuring them a society of caring, equality, and fairness—despite being opposed by a myriad of purported enemies, foreign and domestic.Orwell most often had in mind not contemporary democracies of the late 1940s. He worried far more about the postwar Stalinist Soviet Union and its everyday embrace of surveillance, propaganda, thought crimes, gulags, show trials, forced hospitalizations, and erasures of so-called enemies of the people from all historical records—all to promote a supposedly revolutionary communist agenda.Seventy-two years later Orwell is again considered prescient because he foresaw how electronic communications in any society could intrude into the lives of ordinary people while being manipulated by the state. And these efforts would not be just to spy on citizens’ thoughts and actions, but to so warp and insidiously rehabilitate them that eventually there would be no dissidents at all. All would ultimately come to “love” Big Brother.There were two prime subtexts to Orwell’s dystopia.One, with technological progress comes moral regress—an age-old warning dating back to the 7th-century B.C. Greek poet Hesiod’s railing about “bribe takers” and corruption during the ascendance of the civilizing city-state. The wizards who created big-screen televisions and electronic monitoring in 1984 were, to Orwell, no more ethical because of their spectacular technological and scientific expertise.Two, communism, or indeed totalitarianism in general (as we see in Orwell’s novella Animal Farm) is an especially dangerous partner of electronic surveillance and communications, perhaps even more so than right-wing dictators or oligarchs.Leftist totalitarianism employs a sophisticated propaganda of caring, Big Brother-equality, and steady human progress that far more effectively disguises its self-interested lust for power and control.Contemporary government often uses its power of instantaneous communications to construct not just narratives, but reinvent vocabulary to construct alternative realities, usually in the effort not to pass judgement on any ideology or group—except perhaps traditionalists and conservatives.During recent years, the U.S. government, for example, rebranded terrorist operations as “overseas contingency operations.” A 2009 terrorist attack at Fort Hood, Texas soon became mere “workplace violence.” “Man-made disasters” was the term often used for terrorist strikes.The common theme of such doublespeak was an effort not to suggest any tie between radical Islam and a propensity to kill or maim Westerners—as if such an explicit connection might incite latent racists and xenophobes to emerge and harm Muslim-Americans. If, politically driven vocabulary was merely promulgated by government bureaus, the public would not notice much.But when the administrative state is enhanced by mass electronic communications to a degree never seen before and controlled by a small group of corporate interests, apparently immune from anti-trust legislation, then these constructed realities can intrude into all aspects of life in “Big Brother is watching you” fashion, as new narratives can become orthodoxies almost instantaneously.Modifiers were often tacked on to nouns in fear that words like “racism,” “bias,” or “aggression” might no longer be familiar referents in 21st-century multiracial America. And so, adjectives like “systemic,” “implicit,” and “micro” were prefixed to remind the public that just because there was no evidence of pathologies did not mean that they did not exist in woke la-la land.The primary dangers of the Internet, social media, downloads, uploads, smart phones, laptops, satellite television, and the entire array of electronic communications, entertainment and informational science are not just that such methods will be shaped and controlled by bad actors and hackers that manipulate such services and devices.Most people recognize rank propaganda when they experience it. Instead, rarely have so many global adjudicators of thought and expression been concentrated into such a small locale as California’s incestuous Silicon Valley and resulting in such insidious influence, wealth, and power.Consider that seven of the world’s ten largest tech companies according to a September 2018 survey are headquartered in Silicon Valley, roughly from San Mateo to Los Gatos, California. The combined market capitalization of just these seven corporations—Apple (#2), Alphabet (#4), Facebook (#6), Intel (#7), Cisco (#8), Oracle (#9), and Netflix (#10)—has reached about $3 trillion.Yet the influence and sway of these tightly clustered corporations exceed even their financial clout that often shields them from traditional government supervision. Google now enjoys about a 90 percent share of all Internet searches worldwide—over 60,000 searches per second. Given that the average global consumer conducts about 3-4 searches per day, most of the world’s online information is accessed according to a single company’s protocols that decide what information first pops up on the user’s computer screen—and what does not pop up at all.Facebook controls about 65 percent of all worldwide social media site visits. When fellow Silicon Valley social media companies are aggregated—Pinterest (#2 with 11.75 percent of worldwide social media visits), #3 Twitter (11.43 percent), #5 Instagram (a Facebook subsidiary, 6.47 percent), #6 YouTube (a Google subsidiary, 3.28 percent)—the result is that about 99 percent of all global social media daily visits are facilitated by just five companies, all located within a 50-mile radius.Unlike the energy, utility, communications, and travel industries, Silicon Valley’s internet and social media companies remain mostly unregulated. Yet they enjoy a monopolistic control over most of the various ways citizens access information on the Internet or communicate over social media and email. Does that reality have any effect on the freedoms of the citizen?Increasingly it does.Silicon Valley sees its mission as twofold: to profit by facilitating the public in communicating over the Internet and to do so in such a way that people are massaged into adopting correct political attitudes that are increasingly in turn institutionalized by the state.Next, such companies are virtual monopolies that harvest intimate personal details of their users and then sell or profit from their own users’ behavior as if it was their own domain. They take for granted that consumers have few other online choices.Yet because electronic knowledge retrieval and communications are integral to contemporary life and rely on private companies’ use of the public air space, they logically deserve the same sort of oversight that has governed public utilities. Such concern is critical, given the political and partisan ways in which Silicon Valley’s products in the past have been manipulated—analogous to an electric utility massaging its service to consumers to further its own political agendas.The so-called search engine manipulation effect (SEME)—the use of search ranking algorithms that determine the order of sites that a user will encounter when he seeks information on the Internet—has been routinely manipulated by Google in an overtly political manner.To take one example, during the 2016 election, there were widespread complaints that Google had altered its searches to reflect a bias toward candidate Hillary Clinton. Such charges were based on data analyses and perhaps due to the suspicion that followed Hillary Clinton’s hiring as her chief technology officer a high-ranking Google official. In addition, Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet (2015–17), the mother company of Google, helped to fund (somewhat stealthily), a political analytics firm, “The Groundwork,” to help elect Hillary Clinton.Of course, any private company has a perfect right to use its resources to promote any idea or candidate it wishes if such advocacy conforms to federal election and tax laws. But is Silicon Valley a wholly private industry, or in fact a quasi-public utility?Or is it a monopoly of a few companies that by design squeezed out all competition on the rationale it was not subject to anti-trust laws? Google, for example, seems as much a utility—or not a utility—as are power companies, television broadcasting, radio stations, or telecommunications that provide vital public services.Such electronic manipulation might be considered analogous to going to a public library and asking help in searching for books on a particular topic, only to encounter a library staff that consistently and by design serially directed the patron to studies by those of only one party. One Harvard University affiliated study found that Google’s search methodologies of ranking websites were adjusted according to political biases.Google could not explain the criteria by which it suppressed some 300 Trump political ads by Google and its subsidiary YouTube, or whether such protocols extended in the same manner to other campaigns. When one buys something online, adds for similar products often pop up uninvited on one’s computer screen within minutes. That same sort of intrusiveness is applied to politics to help the consumer/voter make the correct decision.Facebook, under pressure from conservative activist groups, conducted an outside audit of the various ways in which it censors content and advertisements on its Facebook pages. It agreed with third-party findings that it had shown bias in its blocking user content.More specifically, the audit found that computer-driven algorithms that adjudicate searches had built in biases. In addition, Facebook arbitrarily had banned certain expression as “hate speech” based on its ideological content. Its standards for adjudicating political ads were not constant or transparent, but instead predicated on the corporation’s political preferences.The Facebook workforce was found to be highly partisan and baked its own political preferences into its administration of Facebook. Translated: over six in ten using social media worldwide were subject to deliberate Facebook political manipulation.All citizens are affected by such censorship, if only in minor and aggravating ways. In 2016 YouTube censored a short historical video I did on the various reasons why the United States entered the Korean War. The presentation was apolitical. But it was solicited by Dennis Praeger’s “Praeger University,” an online repository of brief videos on hundreds of historical, economic, cultural, and political issues, often presented from a center-right perspective. The Korean War video had no political content. Instead, it was flagged as “inappropriate” by partisan online viewers.That is, no electronic algorithm caught the video due to sexual, violent, or inappropriate content. Instead, a viewer or viewers simply wished either to restrict access to the video out of political dislike of me, or randomly selected several Praeger videos to seek to flag as incorrect or unacceptable. The result was that YouTube allowed viewers to exercise political censorship over content that they did not particularly agree with or simply wished to do malice to.Again, YouTube is a subsidiary of Google. As a private company, it has a perfect right to censor any ideas or thoughts it does not particularly like. But does YouTube pose as a quasi-public utility in the public domain? It apparently does, since it purports to massage the content of its social platforms by hiring legions of content adjudicators, whose job is to scrutinize millions of videos, and who themselves are often accused of abject bias. In any case, there is an entire corpus of scholarship devoted to warning of the dangers of the monopolies of “big tech” and the threats it poses to democracy, both by controlling a public service and ruthlessly driving out all competition—in essence depriving American citizens of equal access to their First Amendment rights of free expression.In addition, Internet users have their information, usually unknowingly, mined by tech conglomerates ostensibly to sell to advertisers and merchandisers but also to monitor the political views of social media and internet users. In our 24/7 surveillance society, computer users have no idea who is being surveilled by whom, when, how, and to what extent and for what purpose—other than by using social media, email, and internet searches, Americans can render to data mining almost everything that is needed about how to contact, monitor, categorize, and manipulate citizens.One reason why current political polls are sometimes felt to be biased is respondents’ fear of offering their true political views even to anonymous pollster callers or texters—in fears such answers can be banked and later used or sold to the respondent’s detriment.Yet the online dangers to individual freedoms are not merely political or private companies using the public domain to further their own agendas.Social media, such as Twitter and Facebook as well as online blogs, in one sense should be the freest of all expression. After all, there are few hierarchies that filter content and almost anyone can weigh on issues of collective interest. But increasingly “call-out culture,” “cancel culture,” or “outrage culture” function like Old West vigilantism. Given the hundreds of millions who hourly participate in the online community, an electronic mob can be alerted, organized, and directed to zero in on a single tweet, email, or Facebook posting deemed unorthodox or politically incorrect. Almost immediately, without evidence, thousands can focus on the targeted victim with violence, hate speech, boycotts, and career-ending ostracism, often “doxing” the target by releasing his private contact information to millions.Yet unlike the Old West, there is no electronic sheriff with a double-barrel shotgun to ensure the lynch mob does not storm the jail and string up his suspect. By that I mean there are no consequences when the often unnamed organize efforts to defame or libel political opponents, especially given the fact that Google, Facebook, and others have already acknowledged that they audit their own content often by standards that are most certainly not non-political. If anything, the proverbial internet sheriff is now often on the side of the politically correct mob.Silicon Valley relies for much of its information on the media, in particular major newspapers, news agencies, television, and internet magazines, what we now know as the mainstream media. In that way it serves as a force multiplier of its sources, from the way it orders search findings to the rules by which social media users must follow to communicate with others.Unfortunately, just as in case of the deep state and Silicon Valley, the so-called media is no longer disinterested. It too has an agenda that at times is antithetical to empirical presentation of the news––and to the unalienable rights that define the citizen.As for the technology’s retort that its gift of instant access to global information has made the citizens of democracies more knowledgeable and thus more equipped to exercise their voting rights responsibly, the very opposite seems to be true. School test scores are declining along with the general knowledge of the citizenry about their very own institutions. By the 21st century it was clear that youth were using the Internet far more than watching television each week (more than 16 versus 14 hours each week)—mostly focusing on online gaming, gambling, social media communications, or pornography.While smart phones and the Internet may not be the only culprits responsible for this new investment of leisure hours, there is ample evidence that most use these devices to electronically chat, play video games, view pornography, take and transmit pictures—and rarely to investigate and access historical, literary, or scientific knowledge. In that sense, the new online technology has offered new addictive entertainment that has crowded out reading from the average citizen’s day.Again, the result is a 1984-like surrealism. The citizen is convinced that what he sees and hears on the electronic screen or reads on the Internet cannot in any way be supported with evidence or reason.___________________________________________________ REFLECTIONS ON A SATURDAY MORNING IN SEPTEMBERBy E. P. UnumSeptember 25, 2021 Just some random thoughts on a bright, sunny Saturday morning in September: 1. Every day I wake up I give thanks to the Lord that Joe Biden was not our President and General Milley was not our top military leader when World War II was being fought. We would all be speaking Japanese and German today. 2. I find myself growing more and more in favor of LGBTQ. I know that may come as a surprise to many of you, but I am always in favor of doing what is best for our country and Let’s Get Biden To Quit seems like the right cheer at this moment. 3. I saw an advertisement the other day and had to do a double take. It showed a picture or Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez (AOC) in front of a new high-end expensive clothing and jewelry retail store called Neiman Marxist with a catchy phrase “I can’t wait to go shopping with your money”. Something to think about. 4. We are told that “in the largest airlift in history”, we brought six to seven thousand Americans safely back home to America from Afghanistan. Usually when something like that happens, the media captures their return to joyous family at various air bases around the country. I haven’t seen a single video. Have you? Where are all these people who were saved from certain death by the Taliban? 5. Maybe it is just me, but, while exempting itself, a government that feels it must mandate vaccinations or masks to its citizens over a virus that has a 99.6% survival rate runs counter to the very principles of freedom our nation was founded upon. If my government feels it must mandate my compliance than I am not free. At no point in history have the people forcing others into compliance been the “good guys”! 6. I sure do miss all those horrible, insulting, arrogant emails and tweets President Trump issued. How about you? Just my own opinion, but while Trump may have been demanding as a CEO, I can put up with the emails and tweets especially if he is not ripping away my freedoms and crushing my personal finances. Give some thought to this. 7. Isn’t it curious how the Biden Administration an find $86.9 million to put illegal border migrants up in hotels across America complete with food, health care and some spending money, but they can’t find a way to improve the lot of homeless veterans living on the streets of our cities? Something is wrong with that picture. 8. It occurred to me that only in America can you go to jail if you cheat trying to get into college, but if you are an illegal immigrant trying to cheat by sneaking into America through our porous Southern Border, you can go to college for free thanks to Joe Biden and his Build Back Better Program. 9. On November 2, 2020, gasoline prices at the pump were in average $1.80 per gallon. On September 25, 2021, eleven months later, gasoline prices at the pump are now hovering around $3.26 per gallon and in California they are reaching $4.26 per gallon and heading higher. Has Joe Biden said anything about this other than…. wait for it… “C’mon Man”? 10. I saw a snapshot portraying the following Democrats in a group: Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Maxine Waters, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Gerry Nadler, George Soros, Adam Schiff, Hillary Clinton, Illan Omar, Rashida Talib and Diane Feinstein…the leaders of the Democratic Party. The first thought that came to my mind was: these people, taken together is solid proof that you can destroy a country without firing a single shot! This group of miscreants has collectively done more to weaken and harm our nation than any other group on earth. They are individually and collectively a disgrace to America. 11. If my memory serves me correctly, I believe Joe Biden called Vladimir Putin a “stone cold killer” to which Putin replied, “It takes one to know one”. I do not think even Putin knew how prescient his retort was given the fact that just recently Biden authorized a predator drone strike on an Afghan family killing ten including seven children. Biden hasn’t had much to say about that sad fact and nether has General Mark Milley. These people sure were not ISIS-K as Biden told us they were. 12. Don’t you just love the sensitive, tactful way Jen Psaki responds to questions from the media at White House Press Conferences, especially those from Peter Ducey from Fox News? When Peter asked her why Joe Biden, who has been in Congress as a Senator and Vice President for fifty years why he has not ever been down to the Southern Border, her response was “what would you have him do by visiting the border?”. How about show some real concern and compassion for our citizens living on the border and for our border agents who are tasked with this humanitarian crisis. Biden has not visited the Southern Border because he doesn’t care and because he would be forced to confront the crisis his policies have caused. 13. Fathom the lunacy of the Progressive far left members of Congress voting to not replenish the Iron Dome defensive system we provided to Israel to defend against wanton rocket attacks fired by Hamas and Hezbollah intending to kill Israelis. We saw firsthand how effective this system was and the lives it saved, but our ignorant anti Semites in Congress showed their stupidity by seeking to weaken Israel just as they seek to weaken the U.S. Appalling. 14. Isn’t it exciting that Hunter Biden is back in the news again…the news as reported by responsible news organizations that is? It seems back in 2015 Hunter was selling access to his father, Joe Biden who was then the Vice President of the United States. He was demanding a $2.0 million “retainer” for “access to #2 who is thinking about running for President”. Then there is Hunter’s long-awaited private sale of his personal artwork scheduled to take place soon. No one is supposed to know of just who buys his creations, being showcased for hundreds of thousands of dollars but the interest is apparently international in scope. Can you spell corruption? Wonder how much of the proceeds from these sales will find their way into the coffers of the Biden family? 15. I don’t know about you, but I am tired and real angry about all the lies being told to me by my government. I am tired of the twisted stories, the deceit, the corruptness, the over-regulation, and the wasteful spending. I’m tired of the hubris and fed up with “Grandpa Joe Biden” who is a crook masquerading as President, speaking to American citizens as if they were little babies. And I am real pissed off at what Biden, Lloyd Austin and Milley are doing to weaken Americas military by forcing the entire military and elite special ops personnel to take the vaccine or leave the service! I’m talking here about SEALS and Army Delta. It is foolish, ignorant and downright wrong. How about you? 16. LGBTQ….Let’s Get Biden To Quit ……now. ___________________________________________________Illegitimi non carborundum