When one writes an op-ed, you are supposed to ease gently into the subject, so one does not lose the intended audience, i.e., those who harbor an opposite view. There is no time for that anymore. To quote the cinematically prophetic Howard Beale from 40 years ago in light of our current lawlessness, democrat cities rioting, our cancel culture, political correctness, and our pathetic excuse for journalism, he lamented then: …. "We know things are bad – worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we live in is getting smaller, and all we say is: 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms…. "I am as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

I refuse to believe that Democrats (of the non-hijacked by ultra-liberal, progressives, anti-Semitic, socialist kind) subscribe to the anti-capitalism, anti-constitutional, everyone's a racist mentality. When Biden and Sanders released their "unity platform" in July, I can't believe traditional Democrats subscribe to its contents except for the fear that the mob for questioning it also would target them. It might as well have been called the American Communist Manifesto. It calls for dismantling all border protection, eliminating cash bail, a climate agenda to the tune of $2 trillion (btw there is not even a stipulation of American made solar panels). Two-thirds of our electricity come from fossil fuels; they are proposing eliminating this by 2035. If you want a taste of what this means in real dollars, California has mandated zero carbon emissions by 2045, and their electricity prices are already 60% more on average than the rest of the country, to say nothing of their brownouts and blackouts from lack of capacity.

Notwithstanding any lies told by Biden/Harris since the manifesto calls for banning fracking on federal lands and water, which is estimated to cost 100's of thousands of high paying energy jobs and the almost immediate loss of energy independence, they want to bail out all the failed democrat states saddled with debt from their failed policies and most importantly bloated public sector union pensions that bought them their power in the past. Essentially, they want everyone else to share the financial burden of these few mismanaged, morally bankrupt states. They propose federal control of the suburbs zoning, economic development, and racial diversity. After opening our borders, they offer to extend "affordable care act benefits" (free healthcare) to almost all illegal aliens and their extended families. Can you imagine the massive financial and logistic burden this will cause on an already under-staffed health care system with 10's of millions of people (who aren't paying) getting services, to say nothing of the millions who will be drawn here for their share of our pie? I could go on, but it only gets more disheartening. All of this is to be paid for with a massive redistribution of wealth through ruinous new taxes. The presumptive President Harris has already pledged that Biden will revoke Trump's tax cuts "on day one." According to Goldman Sachs, these are the tax cuts that produced an economy that produced historic low unemployment in minority and female populations with the best wage growth amongst blue-collar and lower-income workers in nearly three decades. It is unclear how one could draw any other conclusion than it's a manifesto designed to destroy the economy to remake it with full government control.

This summer, Democrats, with the knowledge that their failed CIA/FBI coup attempt, the Mueller farcical investigation, and evidence-free impeachment trial failed to dislodge Trump from the public's psyche, tried a new tact. They have encouraged the BLM/Antifa crowd to terrorize our country with their "mostly peaceful" burning and looting of cities to attempt to scare us all into voting for Biden on the premise of its Trump's fault. We won't mention that the vast majority of this mayhem was encouraged or condoned in Democratically controlled cities. I can envision the unpublished bumper sticker now: Vote for Biden, or we'll burn America to the ground. An unsettling view of the new Democrat order; police ordered to stand down, and Soros backed prosecutors comes to us from Portland Oregon. In September, 90% of the protestors arrested during the Antifa and anti-police riots had their cases dismissed. One had even been charged with arson, attempted murder, and assault in connection with a Molotov cocktail attack on police. During the first Presidential debate, Biden called Antifa "an idea not an organization." We do need to give credit to where credit is due. The Democrat condoned Antifa's "idea," and the terrorists in the BLM movement have accomplished one noteworthy milestone. According to Property Claims Services, who track insurance claims, the riots between May 26 and June 8 of this year are the costliest human-made damage to property in American history at nearly $2 billion. What do you think that figure is now in the four months since then? Keep in mind that it is just insured claims as many have riot exclusions in their policies, and many small businesses were un or under insured. The bulk of these minority proprietors sadly were "taught a lesson" for their privilege.

I could do a year's worth of writing on the Covid virus, but the most heartbreaking was how families had to deal with the death of institutionalized elderly loved ones and the lack of prosecution for their deaths. In May, the NYT reported that one-third of Covid deaths were nursing home residents or staff at that time. Nursing homes accounted for a majority of deaths in heavily hit states like New Jersey (52%), Massachusetts (59%), Pennsylvania (66%), and Connecticut (55%), and 80% of the deaths in otherwise lightly hit Minnesota. NY led the country with 5,403 nursing home deaths, but so many people were dying in NY that its percentage was only 20% yet for the perspective that was one of every 14 Covid deaths in the entire country. Notice anything about these states, all Democratically led, not Trumps doing. What happened here? In NY, the state health commissioner placed infected patients back in the homes. All the rest also "to relive the burden on the hospitals" NJ had a similar policy, even explicitly barring testing for Covid. NY never utilized all the temporary hospital beds provided by the federal government and those that already existed. They slaughtered these people, and no one is being held accountable. Can you imagine if Trump or a Republican had done this? Cuomo has insisted his policy "worked" and is lionized as a champion of fighting the virus, but to this day (10/12), his state still has double the deaths (33,294) of each of the next 4 top states. At the time of the NYT report, one less enamored reporter quipped, "If 5,000 dead was a success, what would failure look like?"

Florida's Republican Governor DeSantis moved early to protect nursing homes due to South Korea's data on its impact on those over 65 that was available to all health care directors. In a state with long term health facilities on every corner, in mid-May, 3x, many people died just in NY nursing homes than died in the entire population of Florida. Yet still, the media loves to criticize DeSantis, especially for his limited lockdown edicts.

The lockdowns have been particularly irksome after their initial use. In the beginning, they were undoubtedly justified as death toll estimates were originally in the millions and hospitalizations the potential of many times that number. In the beginning, with so much unknown, the lockdowns were to keep the health care system from being overwhelmed, a scenario that never materialized. However, Democrat leadership saw a tremendous opportunity in their devastating economic impact, so they moved the goalposts to justify keeping harsh lockdowns to throttle the economy. They did this in the guise of holding down the virus spread but just to further hurt Trump's re-election chances as they know but don't care their economic policy proposals would kill the economy. The devastating impact of these continued unnecessary lockdowns is not just my opinion. It is shared by the WHO. In an interview on 10/12 that I'm sure few saw as it was conveniently not covered by the mainstream media, Dr. David Nabarro, one of six Special envoys at WHO tasked to respond to Covid, said: "We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus." "The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we'd rather not do it." Dr. Nabarro's main criticism of lockdowns involved the global impact, explaining how poorer economies had been indirectly affected. … Look what's happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition." He is not alone. In a world first, a number of health experts from all over the world came together on October 4 calling for an end to Covid lockdowns. They created a proposal, called the Great Barrington Declaration, which said that lockdowns were doing "irreparable damage. "As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists, we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection,"… "Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health." The petition has 12,000 signatures so far. Who is not following the science now?

Lastly, I want to deal with Biden's failure to provide a list of his potential choices for his nominations to the Supreme court and his and Harris's refusal to address their position on "packing" the Supreme Court. In shades of Pelosi on the vote on the original Obamacare, Biden has declared, "You'll know my position on court-packing the day after the election." Harris refused to give a straight answer to packing the court in her debate but has stated in the past she is "absolutely open" to it. To make matters worse, on 10/10, Biden said voters "don't deserve" to know his position. Why does this matter? We have three different arms of government. Packing the court with party lackeys would reduce it to just another political body whose mission would be to sway outcomes to the whims of the appointing senatorial party and throttle actual constitutional oversight and decision making. We would also lose a critical check on Presidential power. In a country so divided, too many issues will be coming before the court needs a constitutional review, like the green new deal, abortion, healthcare, and marriage. The country deserves to know who a potential president would nominate to make these decisions in our highest court and whether he would debase the institution by packing it. Even Justice Ginsburg said: "If anything would make the Court look partisan," Ginsburg said, "it would be that—one side saying, 'When we're in power, we're going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to." I'm sure Biden forgot, but in 1983 he said FDR's proposal to pack the court:… was a bonehead idea. It was a terrible, terrible mistake to make. And it put in question, if for an entire decade, the independence of the most-significant body … in this country, the Supreme Court of the United States of America." We deserve to know where any candidate stands on an issue, especially our President. His refusal to tell us where he stands on this significant issue disqualifies him for the office. It seems like every four years. We hear that this is the most important election of our lifetime. One thing is sure, never before has anyone living in this country their whole life had the solemn duty to decide whether we destroy this magnificent country that has been a beacon of prosperity, freedom, and liberty since its inception (warts and all) or watch as economic, political, and cultural tyranny is unleashed on us all. The Democrats intend to tear down our institutions, subvert our constitution, which stands in their way of taking over the country by packing the court, killing the filibuster, packing the Senate with two corrupt new democratic states (DC and Puerto Rico), abolishing the electoral college (disenfranchising everyone not living on our coasts) and instituting mob rule. The choice couldn't be clear, freedom, or tyranny.