Rant

In a post from Sunday, I’m Very Disappointed in You abc123 used a term I’ve not heard or maybe not noticed before, “Honest History.”

It is a term that I am going to add to my standard vocabulary. Phrases such as “inferior courts,” “Second Amendment protected,” and “criminal illegal alien.” All of these terms, in my opinion, create a truer representation of the situation than some word games being played by the media.

What is “honest history?” It is a statement of what happened to the best of our knowledge. There is nothing left out, nothing hidden, and no lies.

Was there slavery in the United States? Honest history requires us to say “yes.” We need to go on to report that it was horrific, immoral, and evil.

Honest history then requires us to fill out that picture. That not all white men were slave owners. That some slave owners were black. That the primarily white northerners spilled wealth and blood to free the slaves.

There were northern states that did not repeal their slavery laws until after the 13th Amendment was ratified.

Or how about the honest history of the trade triangle? Yankee ships left Boston with holds full of rum. They sailed to Africa, where the rum was traded for slaves. Slaves captured by blacks. The slaves were then transported to Caribbean islands, where they were traded for molasses. That molasses was transported to Boston to be turned into rum.

At every stop, the traders made a profit. Triangle trade routes are more profitable than bidirectional trade routes.

Honest history includes telling the history of women and underlings that contributed to great inventions. There is evidence, I don’t know how strong, that the cotton gin was created by Eli Whitney’s wife.

Today, there are too many people who can’t give us honest history. Compare the pure drivel of Howard Zinn in A People’s History of the United States. His telling of history is dishonest. It is told to hide the truth. There are more books debunking his drivel than Zinn wrote.

The 1619 Project is another example of dishonest history. Are parts of those histories true and correct? Likely. Do people come away from reading those books with an honest understanding and view of history? Unlikely.

I enjoy studying history. There is something I learned over time: different viewpoints make for different stories.

When I read stories about Vietnam, the story was often told from the viewpoint of a single soldier. I remember one book where a recon team was marching through the jungle. One of the soldiers had to switch to his glasses because his contacts were bothering him too much. Another had a bad case of diarrhea. This caused him to cut the bottom out of his pants so he could just squat over the side of the trail and let it all come out.

These were personal stories. They may or may not have been entirely fictional, but they allowed me to hike through jungles in my mind’s eye. They felt honest.

But there are other books that big picture. Oh my goodness, Winston Churchill’s The Second World War is a godawful read. Not because he was a poor author, but because his story is at such a high level you need notes and maps to follow along.

It is full of dates, names, and places. The names are generals and political leaders. The places could be as big as a country or as small as a town. Troop movements were often expressed in terms of corps being moved. I think the smallest unit I remember was a division.

Unless you know the geography much better than I do, it requires a map to follow.

Churchill’s histories are honest with an honest statement of his point of view.

Today, we are much more likely to be told what to feel and think rather than an honest history.

Who? What? Where? When? Why? are the questions that should be asked and answered.

These questions might never be answered in a “news” story. But you will walk away knowing who you should hate. Who is the villain. Who is the victim.

Take the time to read any headline, and you can spot the biases and likely lies without even reading the rest of the story.

I’ve been a teacher for 38 years. I still remember when I was taking my education classes early in my career, and my conservative uncle, who was a school superintendent in the Chicago suburbs, gave me a bit of advice that stuck with me. He said, “Do not join a teacher’s union.” At the time, I didn’t fully understand what he meant. I guess I was too young and idealistic. But now, decades later, I understand exactly what he was trying to warn me about.

Over the years, I’ve gone back and forth on union membership. Sometimes I joined the NEA (National Education Association), sometimes I didn’t. If there was no pressure, I stayed out. If everyone else around me was joining, I’d go along with it. For the past 15 years or so, I’ve been a member off and on. But this year, as I prepare to move to a new school in a larger city where nobody knows me, I’ve made a clear decision: I will not be joining the teachers’ union again—especially after what I’ve seen recently.

In the past few weeks, I’ve read several articles that left me stunned. One headline from the Washington Free Beacon hit me like a ton of bricks: “Largest Teachers’ Union in the United States Erases Jews From the Holocaust.” According to the article, the NEA described Holocaust victims as “12 million people from various faiths”—never once mentioning the systematic extermination of the Jewish people. That omission is not just disappointing—it’s disgraceful.

It’s become increasingly clear to me that the NEA is no longer focused on students, academics, or educational excellence. Their priority now seems to be pushing political and ideological narratives. I’ve read how they’ve voiced support for groups aligned with Hamas and use language that downplays the suffering of Jewish people while glorifying the Palestinian “Nakba” and vilifying the state of Israel. According to their 2025 handbook, they want to “educate” the public about the Nakba, which literally means “catastrophe,” framing the founding of Israel in 1948 as a disaster rather than a historic triumph for the Jewish people and a vital democratic ally of the United States.

This is not why I became a teacher.

I’ve also seen videos from PragerU, like the story of a gym teacher who was fired because she wouldn’t allow a biological male to enter the girls’ locker room. She was then investigated simply for expressing Christian beliefs in her personal life. They actually questioned whether her faith could be “accommodated.” This isn’t just anti-education. It’s anti-freedom.

I am deeply disappointed, not just in the NEA, but in how so many educators have fallen in line with an agenda that is increasingly radical, anti-patriotic, and anti-Israel. The NEA has strayed far from its mission. It is now a political machine, not a professional organization serving teachers and students.

As someone who has dedicated nearly four decades to education, I feel disillusioned. I love my country. I support Israel. I believe in the importance of free speech, faith, and honest history. But I can no longer support an organization that undermines these values.

So goodbye, NEA. I’m walking away—with a clear conscience and my eyes wide open.

The Trump Administration has announced numbers for tariffs collected. The number is huge, something like $77 billion. Of course the panic vendors are now screaming that this means that Americans paid $77 billion in taxes. They also claim that the tariffs are causing the price of everything to skyrocket.

Let’s take the case of a lowly woodworker making a stool. The stool is made from two pieces of 2×4 by 8 ft.

Because the woodworker wants to up his game, he decides to use a different wood; he chooses Canadian maple.

A quick check on wood prices shows that hard maple is running $6 per board foot. The amount of lumber needed is 2*4*8/12 = 5.33 bf.

Or, 2*4*96 / 144 = 5.33 bf

At a cost of $6 per board foot, this means the cost of the lumber will be $32.

The woodworker uses a $25/hour labor rate. It will take him 3 hours to build the stool using hand tools and rough-cut lumber. That is $75 in labor.

There is another cost for the finish and time for finishing. We are ignoring that part of the equation. He also adds a 20% profit for the business.

Putting it all together, we get $32 for the wood, $75 for the labor, and $21.40 for profit, for a total sale price of $128.40.

Now say that there is a 25% tariff put on importing that wood from Canada. This would be $8 that needs to be paid to the US government.

From a bit of insider knowledge, I know that the $8 can be paid by the company shipping the wood, making the 25% come out of their profit. They might split the cost 50/50, or they can pass the entire cost on to the buyer, our woodworker.

Assuming our woodworker gets the entire $8 passed on to them, let’s see what that does to the cost of our stool.

$40 for the wood, $75 for labor, and $23 for profit, giving a total price for the stool of $138. With a 25% tariff on the cost of the materials, we see a $9.60 increase in the price. That is a 7.5% increase in the price of the stool.

The truth of the matter is that many products only use pennies of tariffed materials in their goods. Hershey increased the price of their chocolate recently. While the left is screaming “Tariffs!” the fact is that cocoa costs went up. The tariffs are a small part of the increase in costs.

The more value added in the US, the more the profit margin is the less impact tariffs have on your costs.

I do know people who are having a difficult time because of the tariffs. Their product uses a gizmo they import from China. That gizmo is not made in the US because there was no profit in making that gizmo here.

Until there is a US competitor for those gizmos, she is going to have to pay the tariffs on those gizmos. She has announced a very modest increase in the price of her goods to cover her increased costs. She feels miserable for doing so.

Regardless, our economy seems to be doing much better in 2025 than it was in 2024.

A friend I know has no health insurance. They have great medical care. They just pay for it out of pocket.

There are three different medical care facilities that they use. Their primary care provider, urgent care, and the emergency room. They have used the emergency room for broken bones and a burst appendix. Those bills have been paid in full.

The urgent care people collect in full before you leave the building. Those bills have been paid in full.

The lowest cost is using their primary care provider.

Recently they needed to get their medications out of hock. To get their prescriptions renewed, they have to visit the doctor once a year for an evaluation. No big deal.

The appointment was made; they went. The office visit was a longer one. Time to leave.

Stopping at the front desk, they asked how much. This required a wait while the desk called back to get the billing code from the doctor. Office visit, level 4 was the code.

This took an expected visit price of around $85 and bumped it to $110. They figured out why and paid in full. The desk refuses to mark bills “paid in full” or even “paid”.

Nearly a month goes by when a medical bill shows up. It is a bill for the visit.

The bill has a new line item, “complexity,” for $50. It has another line item for “medical,” and the price of the office visit has gone from $110 to over $200. In total, the bill has gone up by around $170. This is more than the original charge.

What happened?

Well, the first thing is that the medical group refuses to tell you what you will be billed for at the point of service. They know what was done, but they don’t “know” if there is anything else.

This means that the office manager, not the doctor, can change the code if they feel that the doctor spent more time than they coded. Some one in the backroom added a complexity charge because they saw their primary care provider, who considers the entire history. (Which I thought was a good thing, not something to be punished for with a surcharge).

The “medical” was tacked on because they took a medical survey which the doctor read before entering the treatment room.

The billing office claims that the change in price of the visit was because of an honest mistake.

In short, the bill turns out to be an extra $36.70 over what was paid at the point of service.

No wonder nobody knows how expensive medical care is. The doctors office makes it impossible to know.

This has nothing to do with Shannon, but anytime I think about needing to lie to make a point, Shannon is first in my list of doers.

So the federales learned that there was an illegal pot farm using criminal illegal aliens for their workforce.

They raided the farm. While there, word went out that ICE was picking up criminal illegal aliens. This caused the usual suspects to quickly converge to attempt to impede the feds.

This led to Trump ordering federal agents to arrest people who attempt murder on federal officers or impede federal officers in their official duties.

They found slaves on that pot farm. These were children. Not children of the workers, nope, just children that were being used for slave labor on the farm. According to official reports, these children were malnourished and maltreated.

The lies immediately started to flow from Democrats and the evil left.

They are claiming that these children were actually legally working on this farm. The law says that the children of farmers can be given chores and other work on the family farm. This is an exception to child labor laws.

This is why you can find young teenagers working in the family store as well. They are the children of the store owners.

These were children as young as 14 who were given no options. They were not allowed to leave. They were forced to work. This is slavery.

It is pure evil to even suggest that these children wanted to be there.

Next, we can look at the “pot is legal in California!” argument. Yes, it is legal in CA. That farm might even have been licensed under California law. What is also true is that pot is still a controlled substance under federal law.

That makes the pot farm illegal under federal law.

The law in California also prohibits anyone under 18 from working in the pot industry.

As more than one person has said, more and more I am coming to believe that these people are not stupid, they are not morons, they are not ignorant, they are evil.

The following is taken from his X feed. I’ve manually unrolled it into a single quote.

I read it; you have too. Sorry for that.

The senator is correct; there is a tradition of collegiality in the courts and in the congress. That is why calling a liar a liar gets you in trouble in the congress. But lying does not.

The answer to his “What if…” is itself a question, “What if you were true to the Constitution?”

Ah yes, the bogeyman argument. “Dark money” is money that Republicans get, the money Democrats ‘s get from foreigners, pensioners donating $20k per year, that’s just “the people supporting Democrats”.

“…favored parties…win victories with astounding regularity?” How about winning because that’s what the Constitution says?

“novel judicial doctrines”? Like, “Obey the Constitution as it was written and amended?” Or maybe you mean all the court cases where the courts rule that firearms aren’t arms under the Second Amendment?

Maybe those amici curiae have always supported the Constitution. The secret funding is generally properly reported and is none of your business.

How do you tell if the plain text of the Second Amendment is implicated? The Brady Bunch writes an amici curiae brief. Or is it the Everytown now?

“But if they are true?” What if it is just you slandering people? What if it is you hiding the fact that your team loses on a level playing field? What if it is just you being stupid?

I don’t believe for one moment that Justice Jackson is looking for patterns or noticing the parties that win, I think her agenda is driving her drivil.

She might be looking at “interests, motives, and connections.” What she is not looking at is the law. What she is not following is the Constitution.

Where was your concern for mischief when the liberals found every liberal cause “constitutional”? The mischief you are referring to is veiled “collegiality” regarding Thomas. The Justice that saw the rules change had it brought to his attention and reported it.

Thomas is easily more moral and honest than you have ever been.

Truth and candor are judicial values. Jackson is a DEI hire, and it shows. There is truth and candor for you.

Ah, Sheldon, put on some clothes. You are neither the emperor nor pleasant to look at.

The far left has used lawfare for decades, and now they are losing that weapon.

I do agree with you; the schemers have much more to fear, and you know it. You are a schemer.

Thank goodness that Obama was only able to put two justices on the Supreme Court. Kagan and Sotomayor were both nominated by Obama.

Both were highly questionable nominations. I am grateful that Garland didn’t make it onto the court; that would have been insanely bad for this country. He did enough damage as AG.

Sotomayor was a joke. Underqualified, not a serious candidate, but the GOP allowed her to get on the court.

She was the least qualified Justice of my lifetime.

Kagan was qualified, sort of. The problem with her was that she was involved with Obamacare, which was on its way to the Supreme Court.

She lied when she said she had nothing to do with Obamacare. She then refused to recuse herself when the case did make it to the Supreme Court.

She is dangerous. She is dangerous because she isn’t stupid; she isn’t dumb. What she is is a Justice who is agenda driven.

She might become as good as Justice Ginsburg. Ginsburg wrote opinions and dissents that always came out in the direction of her agenda. She got there with well-written opinions that were grounded in good case law and good precedent.

She was a good Justice, just not capable of following the Constitution when the outcome didn’t fit her agenda.

Kagan is striving to be the new Ginsburg. If she doesn’t leave the court, she might just make it to that high standard.

Sotomayor is a middle-of-the-road justice. When she is gone, she will be remembered as the first liberal Justice to agree that AR-15s and their ilk are in common use.

The Biden Administration nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson. She has turned out to be a good politician.

The definition of a good politician is one that stays bought.

She was bought and paid for by the Democrat machine. The only requirement they had for her was that she would dependably vote for the Democrat agenda.

She has done this.

In an 8-1 opinion, the Supreme Court granted a stay in favor of the Trump administration. Eight to one.

Sotomayor decided to write a concurrence. Jackson wrote a dissent.

Now, I’m not about to read the drivel that Jackson wrote. The first 10 pages of her dissent do not cite to anything except a recent Supreme Court opinion. And her cite is garbage. It does not apply.

What it is is emotional blackmail wrapped around “we got away with it for the last hundred years; that means we should be able to get away with it for the next five hundred years.”

In a democracy, the people will at some point start to vote themselves bread and circuses. This is why our founding fathers created a democratic republic. The goal was that the people were one step removed from the people creating law. They also set the federal government to be at war with itself.

We want a dysfunctional government. We want the three branches to be at odds with each other. Stopping most of the things the government wants to do.

Over the last hundred years, Congress has been voting itself more power. They did this by removing power from the executive, Article II, to oversee the Article II parts of government. They placed limits on the executive.

We are in the “Find Out” stage. And the current Supreme Court is doing a grand job of following the Constitution.

I look forward to reading the next opinion by the Supreme Court. I want to know who is the next to take KBJ to task.

I spent a good portion of my early life in Canada, and so I have a decent understanding of the culture and history of the place. One of the things that was already beginning to fail, long before I left Canada to return to America, was the Canadian medical system. Let’s talk.

Let me start with a BLUF: American health care is great. American health insurance is fucking ridiculous. Canadian healthcare AND insurance is just whackadoodle.

I don’t currently have insurance. The hows and whys are not up for discussion, but the fact is I’ve paid much less for health care in the last 20 years than my family has through their insurance (either via what they pay off their paycheck alone, or what insurance pays… works for both). I get a “discount” when I see the doctor, get medication, have labs and scans done, etc. because I am uninsured. The quotes are there because the payment I make is frankly what everyone should be making, or rather it’s slightly higher than it ought to be but I can live with it.

American insurance causes people to overcharge on a regular basis, because if they don’t, then they could lose out on insurance payments altogether. I don’t even really understand it. It’s fekking complex. It’s the only industry in the world where MY broken leg and YOUR broken leg, despite being exactly the same, could have vastly different costs. Even when all other things are equal, a doctor’s office, surgeon, or anyone else in the medical factory cannot give you a price until after the work is done, and then they still can’t give you a price because Reasons.

Today, I had to go in and see my GP about my shoulder. I injured it several years ago, and lately it’s been giving me a lot of grief. It is time, even though I’m terrified of the bill for the MRI I’m about to get (anyone want to buy a cookbook? *sigh*). I went in and immediately she bundled together the visit I’d come in for with some other upcoming visits that I can now skip. Hooray, no paying for extra office visits! Win number one.

She looked at my shoulder, hemmed and hawed for a minute, and then started in. “Well, first we should probably send you to physical therapy…”

I stopped her. “I am self-pay, remember. What is going to be the best use of my money?”

“Oh! I forgot! Well, then we should go straight to the MRI. It’s possible they’ll refer you to therapy, but more than likely you’d have gone through weeks of expensive therapy only to be referred to get an MRI and have a different path forward. I’ll make out that paperwork right now.” And off she went. I came home with my papers for getting an MRI on my shoulder, and now I can shop around to find the cheapest place to get that MRI done.

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The differences are amazing.

A few months ago, somebody was shooting in the back forty. This caused somebody to report gun shots in the area. Must be some out of stater who has no ability to keep their nose in their own business.

Because it was a “shots heard”, the local cops, who I consider to be good guys, dispatched two officers in two squad cars.

They pull into the driveway. I go to the porch and say, “Hello! Can I help you?”

Per normal procedure, the cop doesn’t answer my question but asks his own.

“Were you shooting?”

“I don’t answer questions.”

If the police come to you, they are investigating a crime or potential crime. They are not there to “help” you, they are there to gather evidence to issue a citation, warning, or arrest somebody.

Anything you say can be used as evidence. It is a consensual encounter, which you can terminate at any time.

The next thing that will happen is the officer will repeat the original question. Most people can’t deal with the pressure of being asked the same question again and again.

My answer was again, “I don’t answer questions.”

The officer, per procedures, will then explain why they are there. They will then suggest that they are just “investigating” to find out what happened. They will then ask again. “Were you shooting?” “I don’t answer questions.”

All of this is per standard investigatory procedures.

At this point, the officer is likely to tell you what the crime was, “Did you know that you can’t shoot within 300 feet of an occupied dwelling?”

Notice the change in language, they are not asking if you did anything, they are asking for your knowledge of the law. Since they are not asking about you, it is more likely you will start talking to them. It doesn’t matter to them if you know or don’t know.

What they are doing is establishing “Mens Rea” or criminal intent. If the law you are breaking has a condition of Mens Rea, it can change what the charge is.

Alex Baldwin had no criminal intent to murder his camera girl. He had every reason to have constructive knowledge that pointing a real gun at a person, cocking the hammer, and pulling the trigger could cause death or significant injury. This is enough to establish Mens Rea for manslaughter charges. (IANAL)

At this point, the cop in question basically gave up and left. No fuss, no muss, no upset on my part.

Fast-forward to yesterday.

Somebody was out in the back forty shooting. I think I heard 16 rounds go off. So what? This is a freedom state.

I didn’t think much of it and went on with my life. This meant cleanup and then working on fixing the busted garage door and other metal working stuff, before being able to get back to wood working.

Two cop cars roll up, and an older cop gets out of his squad. I can see them through the open door of the shop.

He walks up and gets close to the shop but stops maybe twenty feet from the door.

This is intentional. He wants me to step out of the shop, which is part of my house. He cannot enter the shop without permission or a warrant. “Were you shooting?”

Wow, that sounds amazingly familiar. Almost as if it is SOP.

“I don’t answer questions.”

The cop then tries silence. Most people don’t deal well with silence. They want to fill it. So I just stood there smiling as he let the situation drag on.

He then asks again. SOP. I use my SOP, “I don’t answer questions.”

His SOP is in full display. Everything he says is according to the script. And he is getting upset that I won’t answer him.

“If I find out that you were shooting, I’m going to enjoy coming back here.”

“Is that a threat?”

“No, cowards threaten, I’m promising.”

You might think that the fat old man, with a pistol on his hip, (Oh shit, I just realized that even though I didn’t have my jacket on, I had still covered my pistol with my shirt. I thought I was open carrying at that moment) had gotten under his skin.

This is when the bad cop starts to show up in full force. “Why are you refusing to answer? Why are you not cooperating?”

“Because I have a right to not answer questions.”

Another part of the discussion is where they justify asking questions because I could have “potentially done something wrong.”

Notice that they don’t say “broke the law” or “did something illegal”. That is the correct translation of “done something wrong.”

I asked him, “Have you potentially done something wrong? How about him?”

Then the long silence, he could see that this was not going according to script, and the script was running out.

At some point, he switched from asking about potential crimes to “safety.”

“If you wanted to know about safety, you should have asked.”

“I did!” “Actually, you didn’t.” “Why are you being so difficult?”

“When I shoot, I always do it safely. I am always aware of what is beyond my target. I always have a good berm or backstop. I am well aware of the laws controlling when and where I can shoot, and I never violate them.”

The chief walked away. Refused to shake hands. His backup was a bit more polite. When I asked him if he would shake my hand, his response was, “Not now.”

I don’t blame him. If he had been willing to shake hands while his chief had not, it would have looked like he was backing me, and not his boss.

Keep your head on a swivel. Stay out of stupid places. Don’t be out at stupid times. Avoid stupid people. Stay strapped.

There are people who blame their actions on “The ’tism’.

I had not heard this term until recently. My oldest son is “on the spectrum.” He barely functions, not from emotional out bursts, but because he just isn’t mature enough.

My youngest son is also “on the spectrum”, he is high function, going to collage, doing well. His issues tend to be socal in nature. In other words, he has not had much success in finding new friends.

My youngest is also on the spectrum. She is very high functioning. You would not suspect she is autistic when interacting with her. She is social and she makes friends.

I was born before the great “autism” hunt. I do not have an official diagnosis of autism. There are many indicators that I am autistic.

A side effect of this was I was able to teach some of my coping methods to my children, to help them.

What does this have to do with making friends?

It means it is hard. It takes an effort.

What you might consider to be a friend is unlikely to be a friend in my eyes.

Just because we are co-workers, and we are friendly with each other, does not mean we are friends.

Most people would have no difficulty in ticking off a dozen friends. Maybe even a dozen close friends.

I’ve had 4 true friends in my lifetime. Two of them were good friends. I say “were” because one is dead, and I am out of contact with the other.

Of the other two, one I have not seen since I left high school. The other is in prison because he is a kiddy diddler.

One I thought was a friend decided that anybody who supported the Supreme Court’s Dobbs’ opinion was no longer a friend to her. And later went as far as to say that anybody who voted for Trump was not a friend and could just fuck off.

Ally tells me that there are people attempting to be friends. I can almost see it, but I don’t feel it.

In 2008, Obama was running for office. It is the moment when I felt my country start to fracture. Friends were starting to turn on each other in ways I had not seen before.

I went to speak to a black co-worker. “Who are you voting for?” “Obama”, “Why?” “Because he’s black.”

Anybody who expressed any hesitation or discomfort about voting for a one—term senator from Illinois, who’s most common vote was “Present” was a “racist”.

It was that bad. Since I was working in a deep blue state at the time, I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t care who they were voting for. I wish they had better reasons than “He’s black.” It was their choice.

Oh, it wasn’t just the black co-workers, it was all the lefties.

How did I spot a lefty? Those were the ones openly talking politics, expressing their opinion about anyone who wasn’t voting for Obama.

From that moment on, I have been called racist, for my beliefs, constantly.

Look at Rep. Hunt. Now there is a black man. I like him. Why? Because he echos my beliefs. He stands up for America.

Now compare him to the half white Obama.

Obama’s mother was white, his father was black, he’s brown.

He ran as a black man. So what?

If every single person of color had voted for him and every single white voted against him, he would not have become the President of the United States. A majority of the people of the United States decided that he was a better man to be president than McCain.

For the next 8 years, I wasn’t allowed to say a negative thing about my President. To do so was to “prove I was racist.”

When Hillary ran for President, I suddenly became misogynistic. No change of my positions, just a different candidate by the Democrats.

And every lefty screamed at me that I was a bad person if I didn’t support every belief they held.

There was a TikTok sketch Ally showed to me. A woman says to her Republican friend that she is leaving the GOP.

Her friend responds with, “I’m sorry you feel you need to leave. We’ve been friends all our lives. You will continue to be my friend and are welcome here, anytime.”

The sketch then changes to a woman leaving the Democrat party. “I’m leaving the party. They just don’t match my core beliefs. You’ve been my friend all my life. You will still be my friend.”

The remaining Democrat woman turns to the first and, with a sneer on her face, “I’m not friends with Nazis”

That is what my life felt like during the Obama era. It was worse under Biden.

Our friendships became defined by our beliefs.

Going out in public, I would hear leftists yapping about how anybody who wasn’t like them was horrible, evil people. Nasty labels were everywhere.

I’ve seen “DemocRAT” from time to time. I’m “MAGAot”, a “fascist”, a “racist”, a “white supremest”, and every other nasty label you can think of.

Those people won’t speak with me. They can’t handle being asked for examples. They can’t handle being called on bullshit. They can’t be bothered to verify any of the narrative they spout with no evidence to back them.

I’m sorry for Ally.

She is a good person. We are good people. If you are in need, we will do our best to help you. When a “co-worker” had an emergency, she didn’t ask, “What are your politics? I only help good people.” No, she opened her pantry to them. She did it with no expectation of anything.

When they tried to repay her, she said, “Pay it forward.”

Well, they did pay it forward. Until they had to treat people by what they do instead of what they were told they do.

Make sure you keep your friends close. Make sure they know you are friends.

Stay strapped. Keep your head on a swivel. Don’t be in stupid places at stupid times.