Category Archives: people

Honors and Accolades  

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I have noticed the universal self-praise President Trump has been receiving as the number of his golf tournament championships increases annually.

I have been too humble to mention the comparable national attention this blog has received. But I have been encouraged by the presidents pride in his golf course prowess to fill you in on the honors and accolades this blog has achieved in the decade-plus in which it has been published.

This is the tenth consecutive year that this blog has won the international prize for the best blog published on bobpriddy.net.  Unlike the winner of the president’s club championship, this blog first must win the local, regional, and national prizes.

The humility that has prevented me from making these announcements has been eased by  President Trump’s self-generated humble displays of his great linksmanship, exemplified by his announcement three years ago.

It is an added tribute to his strength & stamina that he was able to win the tournament that year although he missed the first day of play. He had played a round of golf somewhere else a couple of days earlier and he counted that score for his Mar-a=Lago tournament. I have not read his tournament rules although I am sure there is a past-champion’s exemption for times such as those.

It was an innovative approach that the PGA should consider.

An added distinction came earlier this year in recognition that this series of insightful writings has neither caused nor ended a war when I was awarded the bobpriddy.net Peace Prize. I was not invited to the White House to celebrate that victory. But that’s fair because I haven’t invited him to the Priddy house to celebrate his gold victories.

It takes considerable strength and stamina to compile these entries each day—-and I don’t have a big airplane to take me someplace to compose them.

Strength and stamina are qualities we share in achieving these honors and accolades. He uses a golf cart.  I have a chair from which each of my fingers makes letters appear on a screen. In fact, I probably had far more key strokes than he had golf strokes, so my strength and stamina actually might be superior to his.

I differ, however, that golfing and blogging are “in a real way” like a physical examination because neither involves a prostate check.

Although I cannot match his claim that the same strength and stamina that it takes to win a golf tournament is the same kind of strength and stamina that it takes to govern because cats govern my house more than I do and often sit on my lap to supervise. He has no supervision.

He and I share the same ability to preserve our strength and stamina for the important times by maintaining an attitude that any time is a good time for a nap.

On rare occasions I have been forced to miss some days of posting, much as Mr. Trump missed the entire first day of his 2023 tournament that he won, although I think his number of missed days governing exceeds my missed days of posting.

For many years, bobpriddy.net also had a golf championship and, as is the case with Mr. Trump’s club tournament, I won every year whether it was on the glamorous Pirate’s Cove Course at the beautiful Lake of the Ozarks, or at courses in Michigan and Colorado or near Jefferson City.  Sometimes there were other competitors but club rules categorized all of them as amateurs and scoring records were not kept.

I would show you my wall of medals and my shelves of trophies but all of you know that I differ somewhat from the president by not being as prone to gratuitous displays as he seems to be. I can’t afford a ballroom. The best we can do is a walk-in shower and two walk-in closets.

I wonder if his club trophy is a new one each year or if it is a large trophy such as the Stanley Cup that is engraved with the winner’s name annually. I also wonder if it’s 24-carat gold. Mine are more modest although several are artistic creations in Lucite.

The burden of the passing years is a concern and it is hard to anticipate what will happen when this blog’s greatest inspiration exits the stage. There will be no bobpriddy.net museum and library.  I don’t think there will be room in my urn.

Nonetheless, congratulations to me for winning this important international award again. In all honesty, I could not have done it without him.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Smithsonian Museum of Un-American History 

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If Donald Trump thought he could get away with naming the Smithsonian Museum of American History something such as a Museum of Un-American History, he would already have signed an executive order doing it.

While most of us were paying attention to celebrating Independence Day, Trump’s White House Domestic Policy Council was issuing its latest accusations targeting that museum. For months his administration has been busy “reforming” our national parks, monuments, and museums to get rid of “anti-Americanism.”  He prefers to pretend that slavery was a friendly relationship between master and slave, that the Confederacy and its key figures who repudiated the United States Constitution and fought with a breakaway segment of our country openly based on protecting slavery were just advocating for state’s rights, that nothing serious happened to Native American nations, and that his White Christians are the only important religious policy setters of our society.

Last year, Trump ordered the Smithsonian to remove anti-American ideology from the 21 museums and galleries (and the National Zoo) that fall under the Smithsonian system.

The Trump Domestic Policy Council’s 162-page report refers to “thinly veiled anti-Americanism” at the history museum and accuses it of showing this country is “a fundamentally oppressive nation.”  The council accuses the museum of moving “toward an extreme political activism.”

Then it breaks down that activism as “anti-white activism,” and “illegal alien activism,” and “transgender activism.”  It is also critical of the museum for having exhibits and programs depicting slavery, race, and systemic inequality, as ABC News put it in one of its reports.

I have been to many of those 21 museums, some of them—including American history—many times.  I am a white Christian with an ancestor who settled in Virginia on a land grant given him by the first Queen Elizabeth and I can tell you the council report, as is the case with the majority of Trump’s appraisals of the general history of our nation, is pure BS.

Perhaps Trump doesn’t like to see (as if he has ever visited the place) the whites-only Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina where four black college students sat down on February 1, 1960 and politely asked for service.  They refused to leave when asked to leave, setting off demonstrations that led to eventual integration of the lunch counter and helped trigger the civil rights movement in the south and its large student base. Four years later, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.

One of the museum’s directors, Anthea Hartig, has called the exhibit in question, “central to our mission to explore, preserve and share the complexity of our past (that would be part of the America 250 celebration)…a bold and immersive experience across all three exhibition floors of the National Museum of American History. Suggestions that the Smithsonian had planned or intended to remove the lunch counter and stools are false. Daily, thousands of visitors view and learn from these cherished objects in the national collection.”

The Organization of American Historians charged the Trump administration with trying to “coerce Smithsonian leadership to shape ​its presentation of ⁠U.S. history so that it serves the administration’s political agenda – part of an ongoing and multi-pronged assault by the Trump administration against accurate and evidence-based history in American public life.”

Trump has issued an executive order directing notices be put at the entrances to the history museum with a warning that “the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.”

It is precisely love of country that makes Trump’s signs and his attacks on this and other Smithsonian museums so putrid.

This statue in the history museum by Horatio Greenough might be the symbol of Trump’s America.  Washington, all-victorious and all-virtuous, a symbol of American courage, a legendary figure whose human shortcomings are overlooked—including owning 317 slaves at the time of his death and dispatching the Army to punish Native Americans in the new Northwest Territory objecting to white settlers taking their lands (resulting in an ignominious defeat), a man who refused a $48,000 salary to lead the army and asked only to be reimbursed for his expenses that turned out to be about $450,000.

Next thing you know, the man who thinks Mount Rushmore is incomplete without him will decide this museum needs a Trumpian figure like the one of George Washington. I’m afraid a marble image of Donald Trump without his shirt might make the museum for adults-only because the statue would be too frightening for children.

One wonders if Trump ever saw The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the great western film about a man credited with killing a dangerous outlaw who actually was killed by another man.  After telling the truth to a newspaper editor near the end of the film, James Stewart’s character asked, “You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?”  And editor Maxwell Scott (played by Carleton Young) responds, “This is the West, sir.  When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

That’s Trump’s preferred history. Ignore the truth. Ignore the reality. Believe a legend—and he’ll tell you what the legend will be.

But this isn’t the West.  It’s America. Our history has had its troublesome times (including this seemingly endless period). How we overcome those troubles is a part of history that says we can always do and be better, a concept he has trouble grasping for himself as well as for the nation.

In this time of heightened awareness of our nation’s history, we cannot let the bigotry of our historically-illiterate President prevail. We cannot become a better people if we ignore the times when we were at our worst and a President who desires a return to that era should be resisted strongly by an unafraid nation.

We are likely to have more about Trump’s desire to make us as historically ignorant as he prefers to be.

(Photo credits: Smithsonian)

Secretary of Censorship 

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Let’s be clear about what I am about to discuss.  As a journalist, a writer, an author, a parent, grandparent and great-grandparent, and a long-time library board member, I will not let someone else, particularly a government official, dictate what is appropriate for me to read, to think, or to speak. Nor will I allow someone else, government official or private citizen, to tell me I do not have the right to decide what is appropriate reading material for my family.

It appears our latest Secretary of State has assumed the odious role his predecessor took on as a censor for our libraries.

Denny Hoskins has decided he has the authority to take state funding away from the Columbia Public Library because it has books in it that he doesn’t like and furthermore tells people it has them, taking it upon himself to decide that some members of the public who want to go to the public library should not make their own decisions about what they or their children can read.

Hoskkins had a fit recently when he learned the Columbia Public Library was going to have a “rainbow story time” for families who wanted to participate.  Josh Hancock of The Missouri independent reported library staff read books called “Rainbowsaurus” and “Big Wig” to the children and their parents. The first book is about a rainbow-dinosaur. The other book is, says Josh, “about a child who wins a costume contest in drag.”

The library spent all of $26 for a wig and contact paper for the event. Eighteen dollars went for the wig. Hoskins wants to withhold thousands of dollars in state library aid because the event was held.

Hoskins heard about it before the event and warned the library that it would lose all of its state and federal aid if it held the $26 event for people to willingly attend.

Then when the library, where like all libraries the freedom to read, to  think, to learn, and to form one of the most dangerous things allowed in a Democracy—ideas—are cherished held the event anyway, Hoskins and State Senator Rick Brattin threw together a news conference to announce punishment for the library’s refusal to follow their dictates.

Brattin is hoping to be a Congressman in one of the gerrymandered districts he and other legislative Trumpians drew up to protect the political interests of a president who is only interested in libraries in terms of a potential library that will preserve his greatness, and his surplus Qatar 747 that is costing a billion dollars to convert to presidential transportation.

“Unconscionable if not criminal,” Hoskins called the event. It was, he said, an effort to groom children.

Groom children? It’s a pejorative that has become popular on the Right, defined by the Cleveland Clinic as the “process of manipulation and abuse {that} can stem from what may initially seem to be an innocent relationship with a stranger or adult authority figure.”

A story time at a public library designed to foster “manipulation and abuse of children?”

These two justified their outburst with a letter from Attorney General Catherine Hanaway.  But the Independent story said that Hanaway “acknowledged the library’s right to determine its own programming and said she was prepared to act only if a program broke the law.”

It doesn’t break the law, which talks about giving pornography to minors or making a public display of sexually explicit material in public.

It’s quite a leap for these self-righteous officials to declare a rainbow-colored dinosaur is pornographic or a cheap wig as sexually explicit material.

Apparently Hoskins and Brattin have superior thoughts of such evaluations. Brattin complained the books had “a message that’s meant to sexualize” and advocated a “lifestyle” that would weaken the defenses of the children.

We wonder how the parents feel about being categorized as enablers of such behavior..

Boone County Prosecutor Roger Johnson told Columbia TV station KOMU that talking about LGBTQ+ issues is not a crime. Hoskins admitted at the ;press conference that “pornography is OK to be talked about because it’s a First Amendment right.”

The Independent says neither he nor Brattin could identify any laws that had been broken but Hoskins vowed that he would ask future legislatures “to ensure that this is illegal in the future.”

First Amendment to the contrary, of course.

One of the all-time great science fiction books is Ray Bradury’s dystopian novel about book-burning, Fahrenheit 451. Midway through story, one of those who burn books is confronted by one of those who memorizes them before they can be destroyed—

The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.’ Most of us can’t rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.

—Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Sometimes books do  indeed “remind us what asses and fools we are.”

Notes From a Quiet Hill (Worst Campaign Commercials, Best movie scenes, Cavernous Man-Made Potholes edition)

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We’re hoping to have enough time between automated Medicare phone calls to put these thoughts together. We did get a real person once a few days ago. He wound up apologizing.

Moving on to the pithy observations:

I can understand naturally-occurring potholes.  But I’m having trouble dealing with some man-made potholes in Jefferson City. A couple of years ago I had an expensive encounter with a pothole on I-70. We don’t have anything such as that in town but we do have some that give pretty big jolts.

The resurfacing of some of our streets has left some manhole covers below the street surface. Readers in Jefferson City might be intimately familiar with a real suspension banger for cars turning right from Jefferson Street onto East Capitol Avenue. For example.

It has taken me too long to decide on an alternate way to church.  That’s not the only man-made pothole in our street system but it’s the worst I’ve encountered so far.

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Nancy and I are college graduates.  I even went to graduate school until I discovered her, at which point I got a real job so we could get married (This is only partly true but I’m not sure which part).  We, as educated people, have trouble accepting how awful the commercials are for the income tax elimination proposal on the August ballot.  In the case I’m about to cite, they are so intellectually silly that the point they want to make is lost, assuming they make a point.

Here’s the script for one that is a total turn-off in our household;

Some uninvited guests have been eating at your table for years. Property taxes and income taxes, helping themselves to money that belongs to your family. Amendment 5 shows them the door: it cuts property taxes, phases out the income tax, and shifts the burden to the big corporations that have been getting a free meal. This is your table. It’s time you had room at it. Vote YES on Amendment 5. August 4.

The shifting of the tax burden to big corporations is exactly the opposite of what we have understood the proposal to be about and the ad’s targeting of them is pretty bewildering.  As we understand the rational explanations of Amendment 5, the shift of the tax burden would be from the wealthy and the big corporations to the little guy.

Further, aren’t “big corporations” supposed to flock to Missouri because we’re cutting the taxes?  Not according to this awful commercial that says we need to “show them the door,” presumably the door out, not in.

000

The famous archaeologist Dr. Alan Grant died a few days ago.  We will always remember him for one of the most magical sequences in movie history—the day Dr. Grant saw his first living dinosaur—and when we saw it with him—and then the first dinosaur herd.

We know Dr. Grant, of course, by his real name—Sam Neill

Remember, he and the rest of the cast were not seeing what we saw on the screen, which made the acting that carried the impact of the scene so extraordinary. We were as emotionally awed as Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) were.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=sam%20neill%20sees%20a%20dinosaur&view=detail&mid=883E4913FA95A4A0FD448

Everything about the Jurassic Park movie franchise seemed formulaic after this.  But these first few moments are pure magic—and we saw them with the eyes of Alan and Ellie.

Off the top of our head we can think of few other movie scenes with the visual scope and emotional impact of those few minutes.

Perhaps our first view of the slowly revolving space station in 2001 (with perfectly chosen music making it even better). Maybe the great pull-back scene in Gone With the Wind that showed all of the casualties of the Battle of Atlanta.  Maybe the intensity of Pickett’s Charge in Ted Turner’s “Gettysburg” series.

You might have comparable scenes in your memory. Share them, if you like, in the box below.

(picture credits: Instagram)

Heather

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It is not uncommon in our household for one of us (usually Nancy), to ask the other, “Have you read Heather’s column today?—Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston University history professor who gives us great understanding of the historical roots of contemporary events, calls her column, “Letters from an American.”  It’s one of the top columns on Substack.

Her column a day after President Trump’s fact-free speech Thursday night lifts the veil to expose his handlers (string-pullers?) and the frightening future they are planning for our country. It is a lesson we better learn from our past. As any good academic person would do, she footnotes her comments.

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Yesterday President Donald J. Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller all threw the weight of the U.S. government behind a far-right conspiracy theory that says Trump and his loyalists are defending the United States of America against a communist takeover.

As Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich recalled today, two years ago, far-right influencer Jack Posobiec and co-author Joshua Lisec wrote a bestselling book called Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them). Trump ally and media guru Stephen Bannon wrote the introduction. Donald Trump Jr. blurbed the book, saying that it provided a playbook to deploy “immediately to save the West.” Then–Ohio senator J.D. Vance also blurbed the book, saying: “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”

Posobiec is a loyalist who worked to keep Trump in office after voters elected Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. He is known for courting controversy by promoting what Maya Oppenheim of the The Independent in 2018 called “wholly erroneous and debunked conspiracy theories,” including the infamous 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that Democrats were operating a child sex ring in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.

In Unhumans, Posobiec and Lisec argue that the United States is under siege by “the left,” which in their view means anyone from communists to “progressives.” “For the purposes of this book, we will call them the unhumans,” the authors write, because they “oppose everything that makes up humanity. As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.”

Lisec explained to Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs that the reason they called the book “Unhumans” “is because it’s a verb, to unhuman someone…. To ‘unhuman’ someone means to deprive someone of their rights to life, liberty and property.” The authors insisted that “communists” were trying to “unhuman” those they consider good Americans, and that “we can’t tolerate an ideology like that” and so must do it to them first.

Ignoring the fascist revolutions that gave rise to World War II, the authors tie together left-wing revolutions from the late Roman Republic to the French Revolution of 1789 to the Russian and Chinese revolutions to the present and claim that all political positions designed to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, or protect civil rights reflect that same left-wing radicalism. In their telling, Spain’s fascist dictator Francisco Franco, who said, “Wherever I am, there will be no communism,” is a hero.

Franco ordered illegal detentions, torture, and mass killings in the name of social cleansing. As Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times noted in 2024, the right wing has often championed Franco, but “it’s extremely unusual for a candidate for vice president of the United States to openly align himself with autocratic terror.”

The embrace of authoritarianism in Unhumans reflects the modern version of an ideology shaped after World War II by those determined to get rid of the modern state. Although the great majority of both Republicans and Democrats embraced such a government, right-wing reactionaries insisted it was a slippery slope to socialism. Defending business regulation, social welfare, infrastructure investment, and civil rights cost tax dollars and so, they said, redistributed wealth.

Over the years, reactionaries insisted that Americans who believed in such a system were un-American takers sucking dry the country’s makers. Increasingly, they demonized Black Americans or people of color and women as lazy and looking for government handouts, breaking laws with impunity, corrupting the country with their godless ways, and winning elections only by cheating.

And yet voters continued to elect lawmakers who supported the modern government. This infuriated the far right, but even establishment Republicans recognized that voters liked Social Security and cancer research, clean air and reproductive rights. While they turned out voters by railing against the “Liberals” who supported regulations and the welfare state, they made sure not to cut into those programs deeply enough to cause a backlash.

Trump has unmasked that facade. He has put the far right in power, where they are destroying the modern American state. Right-wing officials have undermined the world trade system that underpins American prosperity, empowered economic monopolists by slashing regulations and public lands, decimated reproductive rights and healthcare, cut social safety programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid, slashed medical and scientific research, and dismantled the post–World War II rules-based international order that has maintained global stability for seventy-five years.

But the right-wing push to get rid of the modern state is deeply unpopular. And so Trump and his loyalists are embracing the idea that his opponents are in league with a historic throughline of left-wing revolutionaries.

Trump’s speech last night began with a completely fantastical vision of current conditions in the U.S. that has been widely debunked, point by point, by fact-checkers. But his portrait of a nation “doing really well” was a setup for his warning that the prosperity and success he touts are under direct threat by “leftists” both abroad and at home.

Trump claimed to present evidence that beginning with the 2020 election cycle, China “carried out what was believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history.” He referred to “China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files” and called this an “unprecedented election security nightmare.” In fact, as Louis Jacobson and Amy Sherman of PolitiFact report, documents the White House itself posted show that such information is publicly available for purchase, and such purchases are common.

Trump also said documents showed that “members of the deep state” worked “to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling.” But, in fact, the intelligence community told Trump about foreign interference in 2021, and Biden released its report when he took office. The report said China did not make an effort to change the outcome of the 2020 election.

Actually, one of the documents Trump released yesterday shows that Russia tried to influence the 2020 election to defeat Biden. Its operatives worked “with US officials and other prominent persons” to “spread claims about former Vice President Biden as well as Ukrainian politicians and alleged Ukrainian influence in the 2016 US elections.” Trump has denied Russian interference in U.S. elections.

Trump tied American journalists to this alleged plot, claiming the Chinese government was paying journalists to write negatively about him. He then attacked the media for being “part of a plot…to continue this [election] fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left.” He called for the government to revoke their broadcast licenses.

“The findings are stunning,” Trump said, and indeed if they were true, we should expect dramatic diplomatic rifts and lawsuits. But does Trump actually believe any of this? The White House today said plans for a lavish state visit of Chinese leader Xi Jinping to Washington, D.C., in two months have not changed.

Trump’s warning of a communist threat against U.S. elections was a setup for his insistence that future elections could be rigged and that the country must do as he says to stop that danger.

He said he had ordered the Department of Homeland Security “to notify every state about noncitizens on their rolls and direct them to be deemed ineligible.” And he demanded Congress pass the SAVE America voter suppression act, saying “the only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get elected in any other way.”

“These reforms are urgently needed to stop the vulnerabilities that I have mentioned,” he said, and he told Americans to call lawmakers to demand they pass the SAVE America act.

Today Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin demanded states run voter rolls through a federal digital tool designed to identify noncitizens who are ineligible for certain government programs. Federal judges have blocked federal demands for those rolls sixteen times and prohibited the use of the federal tool, noting it was not designed to scan citizens’ information and often flags recently naturalized citizens as noncitizens. Blocked by the courts, Mullin threatened state officials with criminal prosecution if they don’t comply with Trump’s demands.

Yesterday Secretary of State Rubio expounded on the administration’s opposition to “Radical Left terrorism.” A meeting at the State Department was billed as an examination of the “transnational” nature of far-left terrorism, but Shannon K. Kingston of ABC News noted that Rubio and other officials from the Trump administration spoke primarily about what they call “antifa” and conditions in the United States, including the assassination attempts against Trump.

Kingston noted that a 2025 analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) showed that left-wing political violence in the U.S. “remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers.”

Nonetheless, the White House said, “Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

There is a point to all this. Bannon argued in Tuesday’s War Room podcast that the idea of “communists” threatening to take over the United States through corrupt elections is “a predicate for immediate action.” That immediate action, he said, would be for Trump to declare “a national security emergency executive order…that took all of SAVE America plus plus plus plus.” And then, we can be sure, the Republicans will win the 2026 elections and, as Trump keeps saying, all the elections for the next 100 years. They would do so by default as the administration purged so-called communists from public life.

The parallels between Unhumans and the administration’s current rhetoric showed yesterday in Miller’s speech at the State Department. Bannon’s introduction to Unhumans begins with an epigram that reads: “Communism is when ugly deformed freaks make it illegal to be normal then rob and/or kill all successful people out of petty resentment and cruelty. The ideology is all just window dressing.”

Miller told the State Department attendees: “It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent antifa demonstrations, you see any photograph of those who are assembled, to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person, not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism. Why is that?… You look at two photographs, and you see, you know, a normal American street, you see an antifa protest. Why did the people that are violently demonstrating, why is there not one normal looking person among them? Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways, to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.”

In response to Trump’s address last night, the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, Cisco Aguilar of Nevada, released a statement saying: “That was some bullsh*t.”

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Notes:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-jack-posobiec-pizzagate-rape-melania-sign-twitter-conspiracy-theory-far-right-a8159661.html

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/trumpworlds-favorite-writer-says-the-right-must-emulate-dictators-in-battling-leftist-unhumans

https://www.thenerdreich.com/why-trump-keeps-talking-about-communism-the-unhumans-playbook/

https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/07/trump-administration-unleashes-global-campaign-to-crush-radical-left-terrorism/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/05/opinion/jd-vance-fascism-unhumans.html

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/17/politics/china-election-trump-xi-state-visit

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/homeland-security-secretary-markwayne-mullin-threatens-states-election-rcna588002

https://abcnews.com/Politics/rubio-urges-international-counterterrorism-crackdown-left/story?id=134820036

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jd-vance-jack-posobiec_n_66a2755fe4b04c3a302465e7

https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/steve-bannon-says-trumps-thursday-night-speech-must-be-predicate

usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2026-07-17/trump-says-these-documents-prove-his-false-claims-of-election-fraud-heres-what-they-really-say

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-trumps-address-on-china-the-2020-election-and-what-documents-show

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/that-was-some-bull-state-election-chiefs-condemn-trumps-long-debunked-election-lies/

Facebook:

lasvegassun/posts/cisco-aguilar-who-also-chairs-the-democratic-association-of-secretaries-of-state/1471435425029177/

YouTube:

watch?v=NoyiHAMTk3g

X:

atrupar/status/2078136910694715775

i/status/2078225308503671116

rcohen/status/2077528414852984883

Bluesky:

mcopelov.bsky.social/post/3mquj46i4hk2r

muellershewrote.com/post/3mqspe3ohnk2r

marcelias.bsky.social/post/3mquxehtpf22t

Instagram:

p/C712zy5Nk-X/?hl=en

The Stolen Celebration 

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You might have gathered if you read Wednesday’s entry that I was a little peeved that our President torpedoed the national celebration of our country’s 250th birthday.

A few days ago, Sabrina Haake, a federal trial attorney from Gary, Indiana specializing in First and Fourteenth Amendment defenses, wrote this piece that appeared on Altnet. She also has The Haake Take on Substack. It explains and amplifies my resentment at President Trump’s hijacking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  Here she reports on an investigation into those events.

Trump just robbed America of a sacred reckoning that may never come again | Opinion

House Democrats on the Natural Resources Committee have released a report describing how the  White House cheated the American public on its 250th birthday. It outlines interim findings that the Trump organization put together a shell company to supplant the Congressionally-created commission, America 250, with a partisan one, Freedom 250, defrauding donors and pilfering donations along the way.

In 2016, ten years in advance of the country’s 250th birthday, Congress created a nonpartisan commission called America 250 to plan and orchestrate the largest commemoration in U.S. history. Its mandated purpose was to encourage all Americans to ‘remember the nation’s past, celebrate the present, and look forward to building a promising future.’

America250 spent ten years organizing events, volunteer campaigns, and educational initiatives across all 50 states to celebrate our Semi-quincentennial. America250’s slogan, “350 for 250- Engaging all 350 million Americans in celebrating our nation’s 250th anniversary,” stresses civic inclusivity devoid of politics.

But last year, after his attempts to pack America250 with loyalists were unsuccessful, Trump created a competing commission, Freedom 250,  via executive order. Falsely describing Freedom 250 as the “national, non-partisan organization leading the celebration of our Nation’s 250th birthday,” Freedom 250 was incorporated as an LLC in October 2025. Under the National Park Foundation, governed by a board of Trump loyalists, Freedom 250 solicited pay-to-play from companies with major federal contracts pending— including Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Oracle —to financially support Freedom 250 instead of America250.

Defrauding the nation on its 250th birthday

The report describes how Trump demanded that his name and name-branded politics should dominate the historic celebrations. When America250 pushed back on Trump’s plan as too partisan, he supplanted the commission by creating his own.

After Freedom 250 hijacked federal planning activities, most scheduled performers withdrew from the celebration. They had agreed to perform at a national, nonpartisan concert, but cancelled when they found out it was overtly partisan. Other activities planned by Trump’s Freedom 250 included the very on-brand Military Parade for Trump’s birthday and this year’s White House UFC cage fight, along with the controversial Great American State Fair.  The latter featured partisan exhibits complete with a confederate flag; the 16-day event caused extensive damage to the lawns and the National Mall. Meanwhile, Freedom 250 continues the Trump-centric assault, planning construction on his  250-foot-tall “triumphal arch.”.”

Trump illegally billed his July 4 culminating speech on the National Mall as a “TRUMP RALLY,” making himself—not the nation, not our history— the central figure of America’s only 250th birthday celebration. Trump’s rally, replete with partisan rhetoric and fearmongering about Democrats, concluded with “the largest fireworks display ever,” costing taxpayers an estimated $45 million..

Millions for Trump’s cronies

A separate report from Public Citizen describes how a “Trumpified series of events at the public’s expense” awarded over $100 million in no-bid contracts to celebrate our 250th birthday to a network of Trump-affiliated political allies. One of those contracts awarded tens of millions of dollars to Event Strategies, Inc., the same firm behind the J6 attack on the U.S. Capital.

Out of $120 million in public funds Congressionally earmarked for America250 planned celebrations, over $100 million was funneled directly to entities with political ties to Trump, essentially turning it into Trump’s slush fund with little or no transparency, accounting, or public reporting. Overall, Trump’s Freedom 250 received between $65 and $80 million of the funding Congress allocated to America250.

Alas, the fraud and self-dealing didn’t stop there. Aside from the deceptive rebrand, awarding hundreds of millions in no-bid contracts to Trump cronies, inviting pay to play federal contractor donations, and diverting Congressional funds to Trump’s partisan commission, public donations intended for America250 were purposely diverted to Trump’s organization.

Wire fraud and deception are not Presidential activities entitling Trump to criminal immunity

According to interim findings, donors who tried to send money to America250 were misled and given Freedom 250’s banking information, meaning contributions solicited in the name of the Congressionally mandated commission were routed instead to the President’s substitute entity. As yet unverified, the facts suggests that America250 donors were defrauded through wire transfer instructions, bank account numbers, and routing numbers that funneled their donations to Trump’s Freedom 250 commission.

Trump converted America’s once-in-250-years celebration into a parade of self-regard and personal enrichment, embodying our founders’ warning about men like him. Assuming the evidence matches the allegations, his tactics constitute criminal fraud, and the evidence won’t be hard to track down. Electronic records of online donations and routing can’t be erased; metadata will prove what was sent, by whom and when, and how it was diverted to Freedom 250. Such deception also likely constitutes wire fraud as well as charitable solicitation fraud.

Democratic lawmakers are now demanding a full accounting of diverted donor records and contracts, while Republican leadership has largely blocked information, shielded people involved, and refused to hold hearings on the matter. Democrats, in the minority, have diminished subpoena power, but that is likely to change in November.

Trump’s criminal immunity will be challenged after the midterms; even now, it only applies to “presidential acts” arising from core constitutional duties. Establishing an entity to compete with the Congressionally mandated America250 commission was illicit, extra-judicial, and purely partisan, and very likely exceeds any official, constitutional, or statutory authority. Trump billing our 250th July 4 celebration on the national mall as a TRUMP RALLY sealed the deal.

Trump robbed Americans of a sacred commemoration that won’t come again for many generations, if ever. He wanted to make our nation’s 250th birthday all about him. History books will likely oblige.

85

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I have seen more than I will see,

Done more than I will do.

But there is today.

I have loved more than I will love,

Been loved more than I will be loved.

But there is today.

I have gone more than I will go,

Flown more than I will fly.

But there is today.

I have harmed more than I will harm,

Been harmed more than I will be harmed.

But there is today.

I have lived more than I will live,

Written more than I will write,

Sung more than I will sing,

Said more than I will say.

Learned more than I will learn,

But there is today.

There always will be today.

To be more;

To do more;

To love more;

To write more;

To live more;

To learn more;

To sing more;

Be.

Do.

Live.

Sing.

Learn

Love.

Today.

Tomorrow?

Another Day?

Let me have this day.

We shall deal with tomorrow

When it comes.

(copyright 2026  Bob Priddy)

CC250

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I was a member of the Cole County 250 Committee that was convened to celebrate the nation’s birthday.  Fifty years ago (have trouble being comfortable with starting a sentence about something I’ve done with such a phrase—I find it easier to say, “In 1976….”) I was Secretary of the Jefferson City American Revolution Bicentennial Committee.

My role with the CC250 commission was minimal compared to the work done by our leaders who worked tirelessly to make sure every community in the County was involved.  At the end, we four survivors of he JCARBC couldn’t help but compare this celebration to the one we pulled off in 1976.

In 1976, we had a national ARBC that funded projects and programs and events and helped develop and coordinate events in each state.  We hosted a statewide conference for local Bicentennial events. We opened a little store that sold tickets to our attractions (the main one being the American Freedom Train’s visit) or sold Bicentennial flags of varying sizes and mementoes, and publicized the events we coordinated locally.  On July 4th weekend, we had a big blowout downtown on Saturday and Sunday, concluding with the first major fireworks show at the Capitol—establishing an event that has been done every year since.

Restoration of Lohman’s Landing, one of the few surviving steamboat commerce sites still in use along the Missouri River, was a state-designated a state American Revolution Bicentennial Project. We installed a time capsule there.

Our Cole County group this year was led by people connected with the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution but included several others. We have planted trees in Cole County communities that we hope will grow tall and strong and beautiful, symbolizing our nation’s growth by the time the 300th anniversary comes alone. We have done programs about the American Revolution at our library. We sponsored a poster contest for our school children with the winning poster going to a national competition.

Saturday, July 4, we had booths on the Avenue of History—Madison Street in front of the Governor’s Mansion—-that included local historical and civics organization until storm clouds gathered and we decided to bail out.  The high winds that struck our area were not something we wanted to deal with.

The city had a parade and a fireworks display—-at the Capitol—when the storm had passed.

I’m proud of the work CC250 did.  The city, the county, and the state might have done more had the same kind of commitment been seen from the national commission formed to celebrate the anniversary.

Congress created the United States Semi Quincentennial Commission in 2016. It was to be like the 1976 commission—bipartisan and nonpartisan. It was given a $150 million budget to coordinate the nationwide celebration. There even were plans to pull one of the three locomotives used in the 1976 Freedom Train away from a museum in Baltimore, restore it, and use it for a 2026 Freedom Train.

The legislature in 2022 established The America 250 Missouri Commission to “plan, promote, and implement public celebrations and commemorations of the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Intendance.  The next year the legislature authorized the state commission to coordinate with the federal commission as well as other state and local programs for the occasion.

Then came Donald Trump.

He established the White House Task Force on “Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday. It was to organize events in Washington, D.C. while the America 250 was left in charge of coordinating national events. But by the middle of this year, the America 250 Commission had received only about $25 million of the $150 million originally approved by Congress.

While funding dried up for the Congressionally-approved commission, Trump’s task force was getting $68 million in taxpayer money from the Department of the Interior run by Trump appointee Doug Burgum.

In April, the American Freedom Train Foundation 250 announced there would be no national train tour for this anniversary.

Its news release did not directly blame Trump while saying, “Coming out of the tumultuous period at the start of this decade, planning for the Quarter-Millennial was behind schedule in relation to planning for the spirited Bicentennial. In an effort to honor America’s history and heroes, Ross Rowland, the visionary behind the 1975-76 Bicentennial version of the American Freedom Train, sought to get the train back on the tracks for the Quarter-Millennial celebrations. Following Ross’s unexpected passing in June 2025, others stepped up and worked to realize his goal.”

… The team was unable to secure the necessary operating agreements with railroads, and there was insufficient interest on the part of corporate America in sponsoring the train. These challenges, in combination with the tight timelines involved, proved to be insurmountable.”

The kind of national celebration of the anniversary we had in 1976 was replaced by the Trump show on the Mall in Washington that did not come close to the hype and the expenditures the president trumpeted.   His speech was hardly inspirational and as usual was delivered as if he were seeing the copy for the first time.

And so our nation’s 250th birthday fizzled despite the record amount spent on fireworks over the mall (which left the damaged reflecting pool littered with trash and fireworks debris and caused enough severe air problems that several people went to the hospital).

We did well in Cole County by way of honoring the 250th anniversary.  It was dignified and it left behind a series of trees to remind our descendants that some people sought more than the self-indulgent events on the National Mall that had less to do with the Declaration of Independence than it did for a president’s ego. But for some of us—and I want to emphasize that am not demeaning the things this year’s committee accomplished—a spark was missing.

Friday, we turn to a report revealing whole stole it and what might happen next.

But tomorrow we have a special message

Sports: The Sports Society Page; The top 100 in the NFL; The Three W’s as All-Star Selections, and our weekly dose of speed.  

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By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

 

This has been the most famous kissing photo in New York history—Alfred Eisenstadt’s image of a sailor and a nurse celebrating in Times Square the end of WWII.  Now there’s a rival (although, not really. It’s just an image inspired by historic one.)

 

For the society-watchers, here are some details reported by various media of the wedding of the year so far, the Swift/Kelce nuptials held in a quaint little chapel called Madison Square Garden:

The officiating officer was comedian Adam Sandler whose 2025 movie sequel Happy Gilmore 2 included a cameo by Kelce, whom Sandler called “a gentle, nice guy, and funny as hell…a great actor and a real human.” He told TIME magazine Swift is “incredible” and “ridiculously nice to his children.”  They didn’t have a lot of maids of honor and male counterparts. Her brother, Ausin, was “man of honor,’ and Kelce’s brother, Jason, was the best man.

VARIETY reported Kelce’s boss, Andy Reid found the advice given the couple by Sandler to be “really touching.” (Sandler told them, “Kiss every chance you have. Every day. Whether  you’re going to bed or going to work. Whenever, go ahead and kiss her.”)

An immediate honeymoon does not appear to be on the horizon, according to knowledgeable Swift-Kelce constant observers.

So, it’s official. The All-American jock and the homecoming queen are no longer just a couple. They’re a MARRIED couple. We hope they have the strength to endure the heat of the spotlight and the expected tabloid headlines forecasting the worst.

Now we can get on with the less important stuff.

(CHIEFS)—-CBS Sports has put out a list of the 100 best players in the NFL. Kelce isn’t on it but the Chiefs have three percent of that list—Parick Mahomes, center Creed Humphrey, and Defensive Lineman Chris Jones.  Mahomes is number 7 on the list, Humphrey 23rd, and Jones is 62nd.

The list was put together by CBS’ Pete Prisco, who has covered the NFL for thirty years. He says of Mahomes, who was number one last year, “He’s still one of the best – if not the best – quarterbacks in the league.”

Humphrey, who allowed zero sacks and only seven pressures in 708 pass-blocking snaps last year “was the best center in the league again last season, displaying the ability to move people in the run game and excel in pass protection. Patrick Mahomes has to love having him as his center.”

Jones’ 63 quarterback pressures last year ranked him third in the NFL. He was 18th on last years list and Prisco comments, “He’s not the player he was a few years ago, but he’s still capable of being a force inside. The sack numbers have declined in recent years, and he hasn’t had double-digit sacks since 2023.”

His top five players are Rams Defensive End Myles Garrett (whose 23 sacks last year set a new record), Rams QB Matthew Stafford, the MVP last year, Bills QB Josh Allen, Cincinnati WR Ja’Marr Chase, and Bengals QB Joe Burrows, who, like Mahomes, missed a chunk of games las year with an injury.  The only other player rated above Mahomes is Detroit Offensive Tackle Penel Sewell

(HARDY)—The most recent report on Missouri Tiger running back from Coach Drinkwitz is that he is ahead of schedule in recovering from a gunshot wound to his leg but he still has a lot of recovering to do.

His situation has not kept him from being listed as a pre=season All-American by the Walter Camp Foundation. On the list with him is Kewan Lacey of Ole Miss, who started his college career at Mizzou before transferring in 2025.

The Tiger PR machine reminds us we are about 58 days away from the first game of the 2026 season opener with Arkansas Pine Bluff.

(UFL)—Almost two dozen players from the recently-finished United Football League season have been given a chance to make a National Football League roster.  Two of them are from the St. Louis Battlehawks—receiver Hakeem Butler, who led the league receiving yards, and Corner Back Sean Fresch Jr.  Both are going to get looks from the Denver Broncos.

Baseball—-

(ALL-STARS)—We are a week away from baseball’s All-Star team. Missouri’s teams have one position player starter, Kansas City shortstop Bobby Winn, and one reserve position player, Jordan Walker of the Cardinals.

Royals starting pitcher Michael Wacha, a former Redbird, is on the AL pitching roster. Wacha is 5-6 for one of the worst teams in baseball this year. He’d have a much better record if he had better run support from a generally punchless lineup. His ERA is a decent 3.45. He has 91 strikeouts in 114.1 innings. He leads the league in innings pitched.

As always, there are those whose absence sparks some comment. The biggest might be former Cardinals pitcher Sonny Gray, who leads the American League in wins, at 10-1 and is second in ERA (2.61) to Tampa Bay’s Nick Martinez, who also didn’t make the AL roster.

Gray’s teammate from St. Louis also with the Red Sox, first baseman Willson Contreras, might make the team after all because chosen starter Vladimir Guerrero Jr., is having back issues and says he’ll sit out.

The Cardinals’ only representative on the National League All-Star roster is outfielder Jordan Walker, who ways he was near tears when manager Oliver Marmol announced to the team in the locker room that Walker had made the squad. Marmol says, “Part of the message wasn’t so much just the fact that he’s produced over three months, it’s three years of perseverance to get to this point.”

Cardinals first baseman Alec Burleson is not on the National League roster although he started this week tied for third on the RBI list (four behind Jordan Walker’s 67). Some also think St. Louis DH Ivan Herrera should have made the team. He had ten homers and 58 RBIs at the start of this week.

The game is a week from tonight. It’s the 96th one. The American League leads 48=45 with two ties. The game will be in Philadelphia.

Moving along with those who move along—-

(NASCAR)—Joe Gibbs Racing rolled up a 1-2-3 finish at Chicagoland last weekend with Chase Briscoe outrunning Christopher Bell with Denny Hamlin getting the best view of their last lap fight.

Hamlin started from the pole

Briscoe, Bell, and Hamlin were joined by four other Toyotas in the top ten, the best 1=10 finish in Toyota’s history in NASCAR Cup races.

Briscoe’s remark in victory lane, “I feel so American winning in the Bass Pro Shop’s Red, White, and Blue car, 4th of July weekend, 250 years,” while driving a Japanese-badged car might seem a little odd to some. However, Toyota’s larges Camry manufacturing plant in the world is in Georgetown, Kentucky, where it had been producing cars for 38 years.

(INDYCAR)—The IndyCar title chase has tightened with Pato O’Ward’s win at Mid-Ohio ahead of teammate Christian Lundgaard, the first time Arrow-McLaren has finished 1-2 in its long IndyCar history.

O’Ward got past Lundgaard, who was headed for his second straight win, when Lundgaard went wide on a turn and O’Ward got under him. He stretched the lead to almost a full second at the end. At one time he had a 2.5 second lead on Lundgaard but ten laps later, with ten to go, the lead had been whittled to a second and a half.

O’Ward has ten wins in the series on nine different tracks and is only the second driver to win ten or more games for the team since Johnny Rutherford picked up 18 driving for the team 1973-79.

Kyle Kirkwood joined O’Ward and Lundgaard ont he podium. Points leader Alex Palou finished fifth and saw his lead over Kirkwood to shrink to  still-substantial 56 points after eleven of the 18 races IndyCar will run this year.

(Photo Credits: Times Square Kiss—Google Images; Wedding—JJ’s House; Walker, Witt and Wacha—MLB; Briscoe—NASCAR; O’Ward—Bob Priddy at WWTR

 

On Hypocrisy

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Let’s go on a journey as I track down an interesting internet post by the title of today’s essay.  As regular consumers of these entries know, your author is pretty critical of the evangelical blessing of Donald Trump’s actions, which has led to some surprises as I’ve followed one of those investigative strings that began with that internet post that seemed appropriate for these times.

Let us begin with:

I love cartoonist Wiley Miller and his Non Sequitur offerings. It led me to seek out some related comments from some far distant pre-internet sources.

Shakespeare wrote, “God has given you one face and you make yourself another.”

Socrates had a couple: “Be as you wish to seem,” and “The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”

Nineteenth Century social commentator and author Ambrose Bierce called Hypocrisy “prejudice with a halo.’

So we arrive at a post popular on Facebook that originated on Linked In written by “digital circuit rider” Dr. Cliff Kelly, Professor of Digital Media & Communication Arts at Liberty University in Virginia for the past twenty years.

Liberty U was founded by Jerry Fallwell Jr. and describes itself as “a private evangelical Christian University rooted in Southern Baptist Traditions” that is “deeply committed to evangelical Christian Principles.”

Kelly’s writing raised the eyebrows, given his connection to Liberty and its mission. It begins:

You can’t spend Sunday morning in church praising Jesus, talking about love, compassion, mercy, humility, honesty, and caring for the vulnerable, then spend Sunday afternoon defending an administration that does the exact opposite.

Well, that seems to fly in the face of the familiar photographs of evangelical leaders, including Baptists, placing their hands on Trump as a kind of blessing.

How, then, could Kelly write something so strongly attacking what seems to many of us to be a theological double standard that also seems to be against the moral basis of his university?  Let’s find out.

When Kelly was on the Chicago City Council (1973-1988) he sponsored the first ordinance proposed in the city to ban sexual orientation discrimination. His proposal is now part of Chicago’s Human Rights Ordinance. But Liberty hired him.

Adding to the chemistry of this situation is the Southern Baptist Convention’s election of Florida Pastor Willy Rice as its president. One of his strongest supporters was identified by Newsweek’s Shane Croucher as “a former official’s staffer in the Trump administration.” His election was considered “an ideological shift to the right in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination” that already was pretty conservative and has been criticized by Rice for being too “Woke.”

One of his influential supporters was the Center for Baptist Leadership headed by a former Trump administration employee William Wolfe who once said, “I want my boys to grow up in a country where they don’t look like they’re the foreigners here.”  Think of Bierce’s comment.

But Croucher says Rice does not seem attached at the hip to Trump. He’s not a Trump opponent in any way but he hasn’t minded differing with him—-such as Trump’s post showing him as a Christ-like figure healing the sick, which Rice said was  “wrong and should be removed,” while also saying, “I continue to be thankful for many things our President has done.”

He firmly condemned the 2021 attack on the Capitol fomented by Trump. Although saying there were “defensible reasons” for evangelicals to support Trump in his rise to power, “but there are grave concerns about what unhealthy political passions in this recent season have revealed about the state of the church in America.” Additionally, he has warned of an “unhealthy and dangerous co-mingling of religion and politics,” observing, “We don’t need Donald Trump to save us. I know this will sound hard to some, but God never called us to Make America Great Again.”

“That people who claim to follow Christ have embraced conspiracy theories like Q-Anon is to our shame. Some of the same people, who hear about other cults and conclude that they would never fall for such nonsense, are the same ones posting and sharing utter falsehoods about orphans trapped beneath cities who are being rescued by President Trump, liberals practicing cannibalism, and the mysterious Q, This is garbage!”

Now it seems a little easier to understand how Kelly was able to write his piece.  Here’s the whole thing:

You can’t spend Sunday morning in church praising Jesus, talking about love, compassion, mercy, humility, honesty, and caring for the vulnerable, then spend Sunday afternoon defending an administration that does the exact opposite.

And before someone says, “But I’m a Republican,” let me remind you of something: God doesn’t serve political parties. Jesus didn’t die for Democrats. Jesus didn’t die for Republicans. He didn’t wear a red hat or a blue one. He didn’t tell people to pick a team and hate the other side. He called people to love their neighbor, care for the poor, welcome the stranger, seek truth, show mercy, and hold the powerful accountable. You can’t praise the Good Samaritan while cheering policies that target immigrants and asylum seekers.

You can’t celebrate “love thy neighbor” while mocking the poor, cutting assistance for struggling families, and treating human suffering like a political talking point. You can’t talk about protecting children while separating families, demonizing entire communities, and creating fear as a governing strategy.

Jesus fed the hungry. He didn’t ask for their paperwork first. Jesus healed the sick. He didn’t check their political party. Jesus stood with the marginalized. He didn’t use them as campaign props. Jesus challenged the powerful. He didn’t worship them. This administration has normalized cruelty, retaliation, greed, vengeance, dishonesty, scapegoating, and the constant division of Americans against one another. It attacks journalists, demonizes opponents, mocks compassion as weakness, treats empathy as a flaw, and encourages people to view fellow Americans as enemies rather than neighbors.

The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Ask yourself honestly: are those the values being demonstrated? Or are we seeing anger, fear, revenge, hostility, insults, loyalty tests, culture wars, and endless outrage? You don’t have to be a Democrat to see it. You don’t have to be liberal to see it. You just have to compare what Jesus taught with what this administration celebrates.

If your politics require you to ignore cruelty, excuse corruption, justify lies, or abandon compassion, then politics has become your religion and your politician has become your idol. God doesn’t have a political team. Jesus doesn’t wear a campaign hat.

And no politician is important enough to place above the values you claim to believe in every Sunday morning,

Sounds pretty Socratic and pretty Wiley-ish to us.