Politics

We have all had the unfortunate issue of having to deal with ignorant and incompetent people. For most of us, this is frustrating.

One of my personal weaknesses is the more I respect someone, the harder it is for me to accept incompetence or ignorance from them.

But what is “ignorance”?

Ignorance is not dumb. It is not stupid. Ignorance is not knowing.

Ally is a cookbook author. She is about to publish her third cookbook. We couldn’t be more proud of her and her accomplishments.

Over the Christmas holidays, she decided to try baking, something she isn’t good at yet.

She pulled out one of our older cookbooks, from the early 1950s, and followed the recipe, or she thought she did. The recipe called for 3 cups of flour, sifted.

Being good at English, she read that to mean, “Measure out three cups of flour, then sift it.” What it actually meant was, “Sift a few cups of flour, then measure out 3 cups of that sifted flour.”

The reason is density. Just like we measure gunpowders by weight, we should measure flour by weight. The density of the powders or flour can change; the mass does not. 1950s cookbooks created flour with a known density by sifting it.

Ally didn’t know this; she was ignorant of this. She is not stupid; she just did not know.

Ignorance is correctable; you can learn what you are ignorant about or decide it is beyond you. Even if it is beyond you, you will know that it is beyond you.

There are many things I’m ignorant about. I’m told I’m unusual because I don’t stay ignorant about subjects that are even remotely interesting to me. And according to some, I quickly become competent in areas that I was ignorant about just a short time ago.

This makes it difficult for me to claim ignorance about subjects. I consider myself ignorant about processing animal hides. Yet I know more about it than most people. I’ve yet to succeed at tanning a hide, but I know I don’t know. I know it is not beyond me; I know that I can become educated in the subject and become reasonably competent in the subject.

Recently it was pointed out to me, in this blog, that I was ignorant in reading or understanding technical drawings. I have no formal training and I need to do more. I’m doing my best without doing a deep dive.

Weaponized Ignorance

This is when a person is willfully ignorant. It takes an effort to be willfully ignorant, but for some, it is easier than actually thinking about what they are doing or saying.

When a person is willfully ignorant, refuses to learn, yet continues to opine on matters in which they are ignorant, then they have weaponized their ignorance.

The left is calling for laws and regulations to force “bad” law enforcement officers to not wear masks and to have their identification prominently displayed.

According to them, if they aren’t doing anything wrong, then there is no reason to be masked.

They are willfully ignorant of what happens when an agent is unmasked. They are doxed, and then bad things do happen to some of them.

The wife and I are watching a BritBox show called Blue Lights which takes place in Dublin, Ireland. Our introduction to one of the lead characters is when she is checking her car for bombs. As far as I know, this is true. They know that they will be targeted if the “bad guys” learn where they live and who they are.

These ignorant malcontents know what will happen if our officers are unmasked: they will be attacked. If not physically, then socially.

The left calls detentions and arrests by ICE and other federal law enforcement “Kidnappings”. They know that these are not kidnappings. Or they are willfully ignorant.

They scream about “due process” without ever realizing that these criminals have been given due process. Ten minutes of research would enable them to learn that there are immigration courts that do nothing but oversee migration cases. These courts can, and do, issue final removal orders and warrants.

They are screaming at ICE officers that they aren’t real cops and don’t have arrest powers. Of course they have arrest powers. Do even a bit of research, and you will find that most federal agencies have some sort of internal police force with arrest powers.

And being ignorant allows them to scream “Why!?” like a two-year-old toddler being put down for a nap. They would know why if they bothered to learn about the subject they are opining on.

Listen to Ketanji Brown Jackson asking questions from the Supreme Court bench, “I don’t understand.” “Explain it to me.” And most famously:

• Blackburn: Can you provide a definition for the word “woman”?
• Jackson: Can I provide a definition?
• Blackburn; Mhmm, yeah.
• Jacson: No, I can’t. Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.

Willfully ignorant.

Weaponized Incompetence

This is a step further than willful ignorance. This is when a person refuses to learn something so they don’t have to do it.

The husband who refuses to learn how to cook anything, forcing his wife to cook every meal or to eat out. My dad didn’t know how to cook; from the time Mom died until he was in care, he ate very poorly, mostly hotdogs. This was his choice.

This is the person who tosses the colored in with the whites, leading to the whites not being white anymore. Who is going to ask that person to do the laundry, knowing that their incompetence could destroy entire loads of clothing?

In the same way, what husband or boyfriend doesn’t panic when he sees his wife with a hammer and saw?

Hey, we were all ignorant and incompetent once. I have a picture of my brother and me cutting a piece of wood with saws. I’m using Grandpa’s panel saw, not a bad choice. My brother is using a hacksaw with 24 or more teeth per inch. Today I know that my brother would have been lucky to get a 1/4 inch into a piece of hardwood with that saw.

Now hold me to the same standard. I had a 16 tpi blade on my horizontal bandsaw. It would cut anything, but slow? Oh my goodness. I was using it because the rules say to have at least 2 teeth engaged in the cut at all times, and I was using it to cut 1/8-inch stock. I’ve upgraded to an 8 tpi blade. I can’t cut 1/8-inch stock the narrow way, but I can lay it down, and it cuts just as fast, if not faster. And I can actually cut larger stock at 3 or 4 times the speed of that other blade.

A leftist can’t safely handle a gun. Because they are incompetent, you and I have to store our firearms where they are useless to us but a child can’t access them.

The intentional ignorance and incompetence is draining. It hurts to watch them. It hurts to listen to them. They are so ignorant that they don’t know what they don’t know, but they are damn sure they are right and I am wrong.

It has been more than 24 hours since a paid agitator received the “Find Out” part of “FAFO”. Some things have become clear.

First, she is not married. She was living with a female partner raising children.

Her job was to be a paid agitator. She had taken professional development courses to further her career as a paid agitator.

Her partner was also a paid agitator.

She attacked a federal law enforcement officer with a deadly weapon. As such he does not need to wait to be lethally hit or severely injured before acting to stop the threat.

But the lie has entered the gestalt of the left.

She was an innocent woman attempting to flee an encounter with evil Trump minions, afraid for her life, when she was murdered for no reason at all.

I remember the anger I felt when I saw the video of Saint George Floyd being murdered by a police officer in full view of the world.

I remember how I was glad I was not there. Not knowing how I would have reacted to a cop attempting murder. Would I have killed the cop to save the life of that black man?

And it was all a lie.

That didn’t stop massive riots, the burning of cities, and the death of multiple people. All because the left and the media couldn’t stop lying.

It is my belief that the only reason we are not seeing massive riots already is the temperature is too low. It is too cold for a good riot.

If the weather changes for the better, it is likely we will see riots. If it doesn’t, it would not surprise me even a little that the media keeps things at a low simmer until it is warm enough for the riots to happen.

DefCon 3 right now, people. As it warms up, DefCon 2.

Keep strapped, keep your head on a swivel, stay away from stupid places, stupid people. Nothing good happens after midnight.

Brown University is in Rhode Island, one of the anti-gun states. There are no guns allowed on campus.

It is a gun free zone within a gun free city within a gun free state. Yet all of those things failed.

To provide a sense of security, the college webpage has a section on security cameras. They list some 800 security cameras and where each is located and their field of view.

Which is precisely the sort of information a bad guy would want to know because it shows not only the areas that are under surveillance but also the blind spots. Which the shooter took advantage of.

Which brings up the experiment done by a news organization several years ago to “prove” that guns don’t save lives. They told the selected “protector” that they were the only person with a gun in the room. That there was going to be a mass shooting event, simulated, and they were to stop the shooter.

Everybody except for the protector was in on the experiment, unbeknownst to the protector. Many of the protectors bragged to their “student” neighbors about being the protector.

Of course, when the bad guy entered the room, the protector never successfully stopped them. The entire experiment was set up for failure.

This was compared to a similar experiment set up in Texas. In the Texas experiment, the protectors were chosen at random; the level of experience the different protectors had varied from none to significant. They used simunation (blue guns that shoot nasty little pellets).

What they found was that the total number of victims was reduced in all cases. That in some situations the attack was stopped shortly after it began. There were no false shootings.

One of the interesting sequences was when the bad guy came into the room with the good guy. The good guy put multiple rounds on target before being “killed”. During the debrief, they asked why he only took body shots after noticing the body armor.

His reply, “I’ve been shot with those things; I wasn’t going to shoot somebody in the face with them.”

The point of this rambling is that guns save lives. This was another example of a gun free zone creating a victim pending zone.

Keep your head on a swivel, things are not getting better.

We use rhetoric to move people. To inspire. To convince people to change. This is a part of the protected free speech codified in the First Amendment.

The courts, throughout the years, have leaned heavily on more speech to counter unpopular speech. Until they didn’t.

Like today, the courts have agendas, not always good agendas, not always in favor of The People. For a while, there were entire classes of speech that were illegal. Sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly.

The indirect path was “Criminal Syndicalism”.

In summary, a man called the local news and asked if they wanted to do a report on a Ku Klux Klan meeting. The reporter said yes, brought his cameraman, and they filmed the meeting. During the meeting, the man wore a hood and said lots of Klan-like things, burned a cross, all while open carrying. After the main event, the leader, still wearing his hood, gave a short speech, two paragraphs long. Part of the speech was a statement that they were going to march on Congress on the 4th of July and then split into two groups to march into Augustine, Florida, and Mississippi.

This was aired. Then a second rally was filmed with the same type of speech given, also aired.

The leader was arrested, charged, and then convicted in a court of law. His appeal to the Ohio appeals court was granted, but they affirmed the lower court’s decision. The case then went to the Ohio Supreme Court, where they also affirmed the lower court’s opinion. Finally, the case was appealed to the Supreme Court on constitutional grounds.

In 1927 the Supreme Court upheld California’s Criminal Syndicalism Act, finding that advocating violent means to effect political and economic change involves such danger to the security of the State that the State may outlaw it. Whitney v. California, 275 U.S. 357 (1927), and Fiske v. Kansas, 274 U.S. 380 (1927), both gave this power to infringe on speech to the State.

Later Supreme Court cases, Dennis v. United States, 351 U.S. 494 (1951), for example, thoroughly discredited the Whitney opinion.

These later decisions have fashioned the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action. —id. at 447.

In other words, the speech must incite violence or lawless actions imminently.. What imminently means is not clear and is the reason lawyers make big money.

This is the current case law (IANAL). It is what we judge protected speech by. Is the person inciting violence or the breaking of the law?

A statement of “Kill Bill!” when Bill is over there is clearly incitement. It is imminent, and it is a call for violence as well as a call for breaking the law. If Bill isn’t there, this might not be incitement because it is not imminent. In the same way as “Kill the one-horned, one-eyed, purple people eater” isn’t incitement because that entity isn’t real.

I am more than willing to say, “The only good communist is a dead communist.” I am not asking you to kill communists; I’m not even saying that I am willing to kill communists. It is simple rhetoric.

What if I go a step further, though? What if I were to say, “It is OK to kill communists.” This is still just this side of incitement. There is no imminent aspect, and there is no target.

And this is precisely what we have been hearing for years from the left: “It is OK to punch a Nazi. You should punch Nazis. If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, …, And you push back on them.” These are not incitement, as they sit. There is no target in the first two, and in the last, it is not a call for violence. Just simple verbal confrontation.

But these things do not exist in a vacuum. They live within a context.

When that same group assigns a label, they can then attack that label. When one part of a group is calling you a Nazi and the other part is calling for the death or merely the beating of Nazis, it does rise to the level of incitement.

This is the classic two-step incitement pattern that courts, linguists, and political psychologists have studied for decades. Step 1: Dehumanization/Labeling. Step 2: Invocation of the “Accepted Remedy”.

When the left and the media trumpet, over and over again, that Trump is issuing illegal orders, this becomes part of the context. The media pushes the “Bush-appointed Judge halts Trump’s order, finding that he is unlikely to win on the merits.” to the front page. The Supreme Court slapping down that selfsame judge might get a paragraph on page 6, right under the ad for hemorrhoid cream.

This is the context that the six senators have taken advantage of; they created a simple video reminding military personnel that they are bound to the constitution and that they are required to ignore “illegal orders”. They can dishonestly claim that they aren’t calling for the troops to ignore Trump’s orders, but within the context, that is exactly what they have done.

Trump’s statement, on the other hand, isn’t an attack or an incitement. He has accused those six senators of a crime and stated the penalties for that crime. Only if they are found guilty of that crime are they at risk for that most final punishment.

But Trump, being Trump, didn’t cite to the code. He didn’t explicitly state what law the senators broke. This leaves vast amounts of wiggle room. And Trump could be wrong. And he likely got the punishment wrong. Regardless, it doesn’t rise to the level of a threat and is protected speech.

And here is where we start to have issues. I know that Trump is a flawed human. Just as Reagan was a flawed man. They can be heroes of mine without being my gods. I might agree with 99% of what they say or do; that doesn’t mean I will agree with them every time.

The left doesn’t think that way. Their heroes don’t walk with us. Their heroes don’t have feet of clay. Their heroes float above us, giving us the wisdom of the ages. They have their Ministry of Truth, their own Minitrue, to keep their heroes halos shining brightly.

But there is a third part of the equation that we don’t talk about. That is the audience.

When these talking heads, politicians, or party leaders speak, they are speaking to an audience. When some talking head says that “MAGA is falling apart,” they are not talking to you and me; they are talking to their audience. The fact that I hear their words doesn’t change who their audience is.

My parents were part of that leftist audience; they knew Trump 45 was bad. They knew it because they heard it from all the people they heard talking about Trump. I wasn’t a part of that audience. I heard the same words, I heard the same spin, I heard the same lie. I went looking for the truth, and found it wasn’t what I heard from “everybody”.

In the same way Trump talks to his audience. But there is a huge difference when he speaks to us. The media and talking heads all tell us what Trump really meant. They hear the same words and twist the message to meet their needs, not the needs of The People.

There is another, more significant difference. The audience of the left is prone to violence. The audience of the right is not.

The number of people in the left audience willing to do violent acts is huge. There are members of the right audience that want to react violently but not initiate that violence. The FAFO policy. Or as I learned from my parents and as I taught my kids, we don’t start fights; we end them.

Where I see conflicts forming is in my trust of those audiences. I trust the left to do violent things. I trust the right to be prepared and willing to provide FA, but not to initiate that violence. If you don’t have that trust, there are problems.

Unfortunately, that problem is about that crazy dude over there. There are crazies on both sides. If we care about optics, if we care about people, we don’t celebrate violence inflicted on others. This helps contain the smaller number of crazies on the right. The left glorifies their crazies.

Just look at the hero worship over a man who killed a CEO. That is simply evil.

Conclusion

I’m tired, and I believe that many on the right are tired of playing nice because the left will think badly of us. They already think badly of us. It doesn’t matter what we do; we will always be evil to them. For those in the middle that might look at the tired response of “Well F you right back” as being the same, we can’t roll over anymore. The only way forward is to fight back.

It doesn’t matter how many times they tell the same old lie, we still have to say “That is a lie.” It is long past time to stop being the doormat to the left.

So this gets complicated.

Article I establishes the legislative branch, Congress. Congress controls the purse. They decide how money is to be spent and what tax rates should be.

Once Congress allocates money, it is the responsibility of the Article II executive to spend the money.

The Article III judiciary is there to make sure that what Article I and Article II branches are within the boundaries of the Constitution.

Congress decided that they were not allocating money for non-essential work for the 2025-2026 budget year, which started October 1st.

This means that only essential money can be spent.

SNAP is not considered an essential expenditure. And before you get upset about this, the military is something in the Constitution, and they are not considered essential.

This means that The Executive, The President, ordered the United States Department of Agriculture to stop SNAP payments.

SNAP benefits are administered at the state level. The state gets money from the federal government, skims a bit off the top, and then sends the money to those with EBT cards. Note, having an EBT card doesn’t mean you are on SNAP. EBT cards are bought and sold all the time. Yes, that’s illegal.

A group went to a district court in Massachusetts. Why? Because it is a progressive hell hole.

They claimed that it was illegal for the president to turn off the SNAP spigot. The judge agreed and issued a temporary order requiring the Article II Executive to take money from a pot of money that Congress had allocated for something else and send it to the SNAP program.

The Article II Executive appealed to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, claiming that the Article III district court did not have the power or authority to order the Article II Executive to break the law and send money that Congress did not allocate to the SNAP program.

The First Circuit looked at the facts; the petitioner is the Trump administration, and they lose.

This ran out the clock. Even if a judicial order is illegal, you must follow it or face contempt charges.

The money was stolen from one program, sent to the USDA, which then sent it to the states. The states then sent it to the EBT cards.

The Article II Executive appealed the case to the Supreme Court on the emergency docket. KJB then issued an administrative stay. Yeah, even a broken clock is right once or twice a day.

The USDA then started the clawback process, demanding the money back.

The states said, “We don’t have it, we sent it out.”

The states should have clawed back all the unspent money on EBT cards.

Regardless, those states now owe the federal government all the money they spent.

The good news is that 8 Democrat Senators have voted for a CR through January.

“Democrats care more about illegal aliens than Americans!” is a proven fact!

Is it?

This is part of having an open mind. And Lord, is it difficult.

I believe this to be true. The left has demonstrated this over and over again.

Unfortunately, it is not as simple to prove to them.

Let’s look at an example: A soldier is in combat; he has a choice. He can kill 9 enemy combatants, and in the process he will also kill a civilian noncombatant. If he does nothing, he will be killed.

For me, the answer is simple: the life of one American is worth more than all enemy combatants, and collateral damage happens. I want the soldier to pull the trigger. It is the right thing to do.

For many, this is not a simple answer. They value the lives of those enemy combatants as humans first and enemies second. To kill even one person that is not a confirmed enemy is abhorrent. It is better that 100 enemy combatants roam freely than one innocent be killed.

We can see this with the noise being made regarding the targeting and elimination of drug trafficking vessels. I don’t need to know who is on the boat when it is destroyed. It doesn’t matter to me if they were forced to be there, if they are getting paid to be there, or if they just wanted to do it. They are moving poison into my country, which will destroy or kill my countrymen.

Stop them.

The left looks at those boats and makes a true statement: “Those boats might be doing something innocent.”

I believe that Harry describes it thusly:

Does this mean that they care more about the scum running drugs into our country? No, it means they are terrified of making a mistake and will bend over backwards to make sure that those people have every opportunity to suggest they are innocent.

A discussion I had a few years ago with leftist Ally was about immigrants. I bluntly said I didn’t want immigrants from third-world shitholes. I prefer educated people from first-world countries, or maybe some from second-world countries. She argued that those ignorant farmers from third-world countries would be bringing needed skills to this country.

I’m sorry, there are only so many farmers that cannot maintain their infrastructure that my country can absorb. And we’ve taken as many as we should.

But the leftist was looking for good in the policy. I was looking at a hundred head of horses. She was telling me there might be a zebra in that herd that we should save.

When you see a hoofprint of a horse, don’t go looking for zebras. It is much more likely to be a horse.

The leftist always seems to be looking for the zebra. They always seem to be looking to give bad ideas one more chance, because this time they will do it right.

There are very few people that are actually evil. Fewer still who believe themselves to be evil.

How do we know that they care more for illegal aliens than Americans? Well, they choose them over us every time.

This is only partially true.

For many on the left, there are no illegal aliens. They are just people. They are just migrants. They are just workers.

This is why we hear about “Masked men kidnapped a local worker.” They are just a worker. Those were just masked men. They could have been evildoers. We don’t know that they are federal agents.

And if they say they are, they could be lying. We need badge numbers, faces, names, and home addresses to vet them.

Those on the left don’t see these people as any different from you and me. In many cases, they see the people they know as being better than you and me. Since these people are no different from them, then anything that happens to those “workers” could happen to them.

This is not to say there aren’t leaders manipulating the sheep. They are out there. They communicate, and they plan. The message goes out via all the different signals and the NPCs all turn as one, newly programmed with the newest phrase.

Bibliography

• Elizabeth Elkind, Democrats Prioritizing Illegal Immigrants Over Citizens ‘Mind-Boggling,’ White House Says, Fox News (Apr. 15, 2025), https://www.foxnews.com/politics/democrats-prioritizing-illegal-immigrants-over-citizens-mind-boggling-white-house-says.
• David Leonhardt, Where Democrats and Voters Differ on Immigration, N.Y. Times (Jan. 17, 2024), https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/17/briefing/immigration-policy-democrats.html.
• Priscilla Alvarez, Top Democrat Expresses Confidence in US Intel on Boat Strikes, but Says Briefings Need Improvement, CNN (Nov. 5, 2025), https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/05/politics/boat-strikes-democrats-briefing-trump-admin.
• Dareh Gregorian, Senators Criticize Trump Administration After Democrats Were Left Out of Drug Boat Strike Briefing, NBC News (Oct. 30, 2025), https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senators-criticize-trump-administration-democrats-left-drug-boat-strik-rcna240943.
• Brad Lander, The Nightmare I Saw at Manhattan’s ICE Detention Facility, MSNBC (Nov. 3, 2025), https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-ice-manhattan-26-federal-plaza-brad-lander-rcna241144.

We talk about “them” living in a bubble. And I do mean “us” and I do mean “them”. Both teams make the accusation.

The question then becomes, how much do other viewpoints leak into your bubble?

From where I sit, I am constantly exposed to what the other side seems to be saying. It is on every mainstream media. Often times in lockstep. I do mean lockstep. There are more than a few examples of talking heads saying the same words.

I don’t know how much of the conservative viewpoint actually reaches into the left’s bubble. I assume there is some, but I do not believe it is very much.

As an example, consider this piece of dialog from Last Man Standing

This was done as comedy. It was funny because it reflected a reality. That the left has a view of the right that is a caricature of reality.

When we deal with the caricature of a person, we are not interacting with a person; we are interacting with a clown like version of that person. It is insulting to the person in question, and it leaves you looking foolish.

EBT and SNAP

This is a good example of the strawmen being built.

“The left cares more for illegal aliens than they do about Americans!”

vs.

“The right doesn’t care that people are going to starve without EBT and SNAP!”

These are strawman arguments. Or maybe better, they are such misrepresentations that it is impossible to have an honest discussion.

If you look at me and tell me that I, personally, don’t care that people will starve, I will point you to the donations our family has made. Anticipating SNAP and EBT being cut off, we reached out to people and communities that we know, offering help.

So why would you say I don’t care? Why would you say that my family doesn’t care?

“Well, that’s different.” isn’t really an answer. The left has used a very broad brush to paint people standing over here as evil, uncaring subhumans.

We arn’t.

I believe, no, I know, that the left doesn’t care more for illegal aliens than Americans. What I believe is that they want to help everybody, regardless of the cost. Because they wish to help everybody, they are willing to do things to accomplish those ends.

How do we get here? We get here because it is easier to fight the bogeyman than to fight real evil. It is easier to fight the uncaring conservative that just wants people to starve than it is to talk to them and find out the reasons.

It is easier to write off a progressive as caring more for non-Americans.

Hand up or Hand out?

Much of this revolves around a perception of how help should be handled and what the costs are.

I would hope that both sides can agree that there are people who are cheating or gaming the system. I hope both sides can agree that there are people who need and deserve help. The question then becomes a balancing act. How much fraud are we willing to endure such that every person in need and who is deserving gets help? How many people will struggle to reduce fraud?

There are thousands of people who deserve and need supplemental food assistance. I want us to take care of those people.

What is the best way to do so? That is a discussion that we should have. My conservative beliefs suggest, strongly, that such help should come as close as possible to those in need. Their local community, be that a church or the community center, as local as possible. Then, maybe, we should be looking at town- or city-sized communities. Then state and rarely federal.

This begs the question, who decides?

Dick was my best friend. He is now in the special prison for kiddy diddlers. His wife worked hard; he didn’t work nearly as hard. There were always reasons he wasn’t getting a job. Because he was a thief and unwilling to work, his family lost their home.

We took them in. We found room in our home for them all. We were feeding them and housing them. His wife was buying food for all of us to contribute to the running of the house. He contributed nothing.

One day my wife had had enough and went off on him. Get his lazy ass off the couch and DO something. Get a job or make her life easier. He chose to leave to live with his mother.

His stepdaughters accused him shortly after, he was arrested, he was prosecuted, and he was found guilty.

We knew he wasn’t producing. He didn’t deserve our assistance. His wife was. His wife and stepdaughters lived with us for another year or more before they found their home.

We know our neighbors. Even those that don’t associate. We know them. I’m always unhappy that my grayman fails because people call me by name and greet me when I am out and about. I don’t think I have done anything to be recongized.

I’m sure if we needed help, we would get it from our local community.

Another example of local. A friend of ours lost their house to a house fire. People started showing up that evening to offer them help.

We handed them a chunk of cash with no expectations. Others in the community did the same. They had a place to stay that night. They had food and clothing the next day. Insurance kicked in a few days later. But the community were the first responders. They community took care of their own.

That expresses how I have observed conservatives respond to issues.

I know that progressives also responded to that fire and helped out.

The difference, which I have personally observed, is that progressives check to see if the person has the correct social score before they assist. Conservatives respond first and worry about politics and social scores later.

I know that the person that we helped out has full-on TDS, or did.

Conclusion

Stop looking at the labels. Stop looking at the strawmen. Instead, look at what people are actually doing.

Open your mind and listen; maybe there is a reason for their opinion. Don’t write off a differing opinion as evil, most people are not evil.

A Right leaning friend of mine posted the above, and it made me think. This was my reply to him:

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From the Maine Wire, Mon. October 20, 2025:

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Congratulations to the No Kings protesters! They did it! There are no kings in the US. Trump is still our president.

I had to go out yesterday to sign up at a new range. The new range is nice. But they are a membership club; pay in advance for a year, take an orientation class, provide proof you can pass a background check (a CCW or a recent firearm purchase qualifies), and proof of a safety class.

This was a worrisome trip because I would need to head out near the local college town; I knew the “No Kings” idiots would be out protesting the lack of freedom of speech. And they might have become violent. Best to avoid.

I was able to avoid because the range isn’t near the town. It was good to know that I didn’t have to deal with them.

On the way home, pulling into my local town square, who should be there? Those selfsame people I was trying to avoid.

There were some yelling across the street as there were counterprotesters. I couldn’t tell who were the protesters and who were the counterprotesters. Or maybe it was just poor English on the part of the protesters, making their signs impossible to understand.

The sad part is that this nonsense has made it to my little town. My alert posture just went up a few more notches.