I recently re-watched the World War II film A Bridge Too Far.  It is the story of the largest airborne operation in history.  Although it was a serious defeat for the Allies, it did provide the material for Cornelius Ryan’s splendid book which director Richard Attenborough made into the epic war film of the same name in 1977. The movie featured an all-star cast that included Robert Redford, Sean Connery, Ryan O’Neal, Gene Hackman, Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, Maximilian Schell, James Caan, Elliot Gould and Lawrence Olivier, among others.
In the pantheon of great war movies, Attenborough’s ambitious three-hour epic is often overlooked. Yet, the sweeping cinematography and attention to historical detail make for some of the most realistic and well-crafted combat scenes you will find. But I think this film is special for another reason. It is an homage to distinctly male values much dissipated today: duty, honor, camaraderie, chivalry, and testicular grit rarely exhibited by men depicted in today’s Hollywood…wherein it seems the pasty-faced overly-sensitive coastal metrosexual vampire or the buff but caricatured superhero is what passes for manhood these days.
To say they don’t make ’em like they used to is cliché. But even some clichés are born from valid observation.
I Googled “50 Best Guy Movies” and for one list plucked at random, which ranges from The Searchers to The Bridge On The River Kwai, Dirty Harry, Cool Hand Luke, to The Dirty Dozen, the average year of production is 1976. Where have all the men gone? United Talent agent Louise Ward offers an explanation of sorts: “I believe there’s been a certain feminization of the American male. As a result, there are a lot of ‘mama’s boys.’ …That kind of nurturing softens what we’re used to seeing on the screen.”
Ms. Ward is partially right. Indeed, there are a lot of “mama’s boys” in this country. But I wish it was just in the pampered manner to which she refers. The real concern is there are a diminishing number of “papa’s boys” out there. 40% of kids in the United States, from the first grade to their senior year of high school, do not have a father at home. As such, any boys this entails lack fathers to instill in their sons proper values. It seems like more and more often when we see young boys today, it is usually on a police bodycam video brandishing a gun or knife, being shot for their efforts, and then eulogized as martyrs of police brutality, rather than the tragic byproduct of the collapse of the nuclear family.
In a refreshingly blunt interview a while back, Denzel Washington presented a stark assessment of the crisis of fatherless boys in ever greater numbers roaming our streets.  After relaying the story of an eleven-year-old Chicago boy who was already in a gang before being murdered by a fourteen-year-old, Washington said: “You blame ‘the system?’  Where was his father? It starts in the house. It starts in the home. ‘Yeah, well my father got locked up.’ Well where was his father?” In a personal reflection he then credited his not going down the wrong path — as did two of his childhood friends — with his having a relationship with his father while they did not. “Where’s the father?” is the most pressing sociological question of our time. And yet we are not allowed to discuss this obvious truth. But talk about it or not, the truth will be heard. It is heard every time a thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo is out on the Chicago streets at 2:30 A.M. brandishing a gun and inevitably dies by the sword of his choosing. Where was his father? That should be the first question we ask.
My own father died two days after I turned sixteen. That was 37 years ago, and there is not a day that goes by when I do not think of him. I often tell people that I feel like I stumbled blindly into my adult years, “under-cooked” so to speak. That was due to the hole in my life that only a stern male role model (in my case a combat veteran Marine) could fill. My mother did a terrific job, and she was my hero in this regard. But I wonder how many mistakes I have made in my life that I would have avoided just by virtue of my dad’s guidance and counsel, not to mention a well-deserved smack to the back of the head. The simple fact is, as any objective sociological study will reveal, a fatherless boy, no matter his race, is at risk in all aspects of life — be it incarceration, drug use, failing in school, emotional and social dysfunction, depression, violence, or overall poverty. Because no one is there in his formative years to keep him on the right path, and instill in him what it means to be an honorable man.
It has been said that politics is downstream of culture. And in the USA, culture for generations was most reflected in, and influenced by, Hollywood. And once upon a time, in films like A Bridge Too Far, what values and behaviors did Hollywood still feel comfortable celebrating?
In my favorite scene, we see a classic <a style="font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit;" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Li65P_3lvM&amp;playnext=1&amp;list=PL2432C1CFDF5A9980&amp;feature=results_main" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3D-Li65P_3lvM%26playnext%3D1%26list%3DPL2432C1CFDF5A9980%26feature%3Dresults_main&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1619016739171000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGLhaxqFtY3-r1i-K5VaS9Hu8dXXg">demonstration of old school bravado</a> when the tough-as-nails Col. John Frost (Hopkins) is called to the roof of his bombed out HQ by the umbrella-wielding Maj. Carlyle (Christopher Good). Stepping over the rubble, a German soldier (Lex van Delden) approaches the surrounded band of exhausted and ultimately doomed British 2nd parachute battalion troops bearing a white flag of parlay.
German: “My General says there is no point in continuing this fighting. He is willing to discuss a surrender.”
Frost (to Carlyle): “Tell him to go to hell.”
Carlyle (shouting down to the German): “We haven’t the proper facilities to take you all prisoner! Sorry!”
German: “What?!”
Carlyle: “We’d like to.  But we can’t accept your surrender. [Pause] Was there anything else?”
Ballsy stuff there. The Waffen-SS, not known for being softies on a battlefield, were so impressed by their gallant British foes that they permitted cease-fires for tending to the wounded.
When the Arnhem bridgehead is finally liquidated, in the film we see SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Bittrich (Schell) offer a gesture of kindness and respect to the wounded Frost, who is now his prisoner; he salutes him with clicking heels, and offers his brave captive a bar of chocolate.
Attenborough’s classic aptly demonstrates the respect among soldiers that only men of a more masculine age can understand. Though not depicted in the film, during the actual battle, an SS squad leader Alfred Ringsdorf took stock of his British opponents when reporting to his commander the delay in liquidating the stubborn Tommies still holding one end of the Arnhem bridge:  “Believe me these are real men!” he said.  “They won’t give up that bridge until we carry them out feet first.”
I mention A Bridge Too Far in today’s context as it is filled with such real men who did extraordinary real man things that would defy a modern soft-handed latte-sipping self-identified cisgender male’s imagination! One of the most intense American scenes is the 82nd Airborne’s Maj. Julian Cook (Redford) leading his band of paratroopers in collapsible canvas boats rowing across the Waal River under murderous German artillery and machine gun fire to successfully assault the Nijmegen Bridge. When the boats first arrive, the men, including Cook, are visibly shaken by their flimsiness. But he suppresses his fears and shouts, “What’d you expect? Destroyers? Come on, put it together!” Cook’s unit took over 50% casualties in this mini D-Day.
The men who fought our wars over the centuries are not superheroes. They would be the first to tell you this. Eugene Sledge, a Marine veteran, would remember candidly that what concerned him most as his landing craft headed for the boiling cauldron of the Peleliu beaches in 1944 were two things: one was “would you measure up in the eyes of your buddies” and the other was “I was afraid I was going to wet my pants.” But he went in anyway and would fight bravely throughout the Palau and Okinawa campaigns. Once the shooting starts any notion of fighting  for “King and country” as the old saying goes dies away. Men through the crucible of facing challenges together form a bond and ultimately fight for each other. One thinks of Henry V’s famous speech before Agincourt:
We would not die in that man&#8217;s company 
That fears his fellowship to die with us… 
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; 
For he today that sheds his blood with me 
Shall be my brother; be he ne&#8217;er so vile, 
This day shall gentle his condition;
In yet another famous reflection, from another war on another continent in another century, an American Civil War soldier in a letter to his wife lamented that should he die in battle he would not “see our boys grow up to honorable manhood” in his absence. (He was killed at First Bull Run).
We currently live in a culture in which that sublime phrase “honorable manhood” is often dissuaded, even ridiculed, by our cultural powers that be, only to be replaced by snarky admonitions against “toxic masculinity.” And we are seeing this mindset seeping into film. Alas, says The Dark Knight Rises casting director John Papsidera: “The ugly truth is that American leading men just aren’t terribly manly anymore.”
Not so the men in A Bridge Too Far. My son, who was barely ten when he first watched Attenborough’s magnum opus, was fascinated by this movie. My theory is that when he saw how these soldiers comport themselves with stoic valor that belies their genuine fears it tapped into his still developing, innate manhood; something primordial in him triggered a connection with alpha males like Col. Frost, the taciturn Gen. Gavin (O’Neal) the rock steady British Gen. Roy Urquhart (Connery), the no-nonsense cigar-chomping Col. Stout (Gould) and the fiercely determined Sgt. Dohun (Caan) – that last of whom risks court-martial to honor a promise to keep his severely wounded lieutenant alive.
I’m not saying there are no real men left in any war films. Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan, Hacksaw Ridge and the new Midway do their parts. As did the fine HBO series Band of Brothers and its underappreciated companion piece The Pacific (in which Eugene Sledge’s experiences on Peleliu and Okinawa, and his post-war battle with PTSD,  was a storyline). Perhaps truth is braver than fiction. Whatever the case, I fear that a generation of boys is growing up with a terribly destructive void in their lives. Nature abhors a vacuum, and absent a real dad to keep a boy in his lane, a faux paternal substitute — gangs, drugs, crime, video games, the darker side of our culture — will step in to fill the gap. We are seeing that impact now.
Bona fide manliness is under assault from two flanks. The feminization on one side, (see: Drag Queen Story Hour) and the brutalization on the other (see: Chicago on a typical weekend). The former makes us vulnerable to threats from without, the latter from within. Neither bodes well for the country. As such, this generation of young American boys, lost and all-to-often fatherless, could use a dose of such undiluted old-fashioned machismo tempered in decency and character as displayed in films like A Bridge Too Far. If anything, to convey to them just what those two things below their belts really stand for. The way an engaged father might. Especially in an overly sensitive age in which genuine real men are needed to navigate an ever more threatening and chaotic world, on the screen and off.
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader and writer whose articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, Celeb Magazine, Zerohedge, Frumforum, and other news outlets.  He is the author of the acclaimed World War II novel Of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630">Another Time And Place</a>. His newest novel, The Extraordinary, will be released on Aug 31 and is available for <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Extraordinary/Brad-Schaeffer/9781642939422">pre-order</a>. 
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Saving Private Ryan

Why Today’s Boys Could Use An Old-Fashioned War Movie

Masculinity

Woke Culture

I recently re-watched the World War II film A Bridge Too Far.  It is the story of the largest airborne operation in history.  Although it was a serious

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Counting Down The 10 Most Important Battles In US Military History

American History

George Washington

World War II

The story of America is one of the most fascinating in the history of nations. And as much as we would like that ascendency from colony to colossus to

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Talk of Meghan, Harry, and the Royal Family has lit up the internet airwaves for the past week. In the UK, they take these people so seriously that the Duchess of Sussex seemingly took out &#8220;Good Morning Britain&#8221; host Piers Morgan with a formal complaint to ITV, apparently after he doubted her story of victimhood told during her now famous interview with Oprah.
While I am not at liberty to say whether Markle’s action was justified, it is difficult to feel pangs of sympathy for someone so out of touch that, for her, “getting back to basics” and living “authentically” means subsisting on a $25 million stipend, inking a lucrative deal with Netflix, and getting to tell your unilateral tale of woe to one of the wealthiest and most influential people on the planet from the patio of your $14 million spread while holding hands with your husband — a prince. If only the people of Bangladesh or Somalia knew how good they have it!
Maybe I’m being harsh? All lives have pressures, and I’ve met enough miserable millionaires to know that money is not a guarantee of happiness. So that’s just the hardscrabble American in me talking, a Colonial rebel who likes to think his views of the monarchy are more in line with those of Police Squad’s Detective Frank Drebin than that of the tabloids.
<blockquote>“For no matter how silly the idea of having a queen may be to us, as Americans we must be gracious and considerate hosts.”</blockquote>
But then one must ask: why is it that so many in this country seem to really care about the Royal Family, even in 2021? After all, Oprah wasn’t just offering a therapy session. She’s a businesswoman who knows what her audience likes. Why do my countrymen and women care about an institution that is now clearly an anachronism?
In this weekend’s &#8220;Wall Street Journal,&#8221; Peggy Noonan offered that we care because we see the royals as a sign of stability. A reassuring symbol that the values and traditions we hold dear live on, and that the Queen especially personifies these longings for constancy. That may be her view. Ms. Noonan is 70, and a product of an earlier age of Reagan, Thatcher, and the Cold War. But I think for most Americans, there’s a different, more disconcerting reason.
The dirty little secret of America’s psyche is that, despite all that unpleasantness between 1775 and 1783 with Harry’s distant relative, George III, the monarchical urge is still very much within us. Nature abhors a vacuum, so in place of the British Crown, we have often substituted our own “American Royalty” in its stead. On this side of the Atlantic, the term “old money” originally referred to the industrial titans of old who built the country and amassed gargantuan fortunes in the process. Business success replaced bloodline as barons like Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Gould, Ward, Astor, Morgan and Rockefeller ascended to the pinnacle of American society.
The 400 in the Forbes annual list of wealthiest Americans is an homage to Mrs. Caroline Schermerhorn Astor whose ballroom could accommodate 400 comfortably, and with that number being the cutoff for invitations to her annual gala event. Our new royalty got the ticket. The rest of the country merely watched with awe from the outside, peering through the windows at a life of opulence beyond their wildest imaginations. Today, those family lineages meander through our national bloodstream, with Anderson Cooper being a direct descendant of the Commodore himself.
In the 20th Century, the media-driven age made us so thirsty for a new monarchy in the form of the Kennedy clan that when JFK came into the White House, the press even bestowed on the new administration a fanciful moniker taken from a British king of legend, “Camelot.”
As Meghan and Harry (and his mother) aptly demonstrate, celebrity and royalty are often symbiotic. Although the veneer has broken down with the overplaying of the woke hand, Hollywood provided Americans for decades with yet another avenue through which to express our love of monarchy. From Garbo and Gable to the present day, we speak of “Hollywood royalty,” offering those whose job it is to offer up fantasy an outsized influence over our culture, and even policy. Is it any surprise that Americans should be enamored with a fallen princess who also is a product of Hollywood?
In the film &#8220;Master and Commander,&#8221; Captain Aubrey offers that: “Men need to be governed. Often not wisely, but governed nonetheless.” But I would argue that it goes deeper than that. Men want to be governed. This is why I view one aspect of the story of the American experiment as, in essence, one that starts off with a Constitution and successive Bill of Rights that made us the freest and most independent people — and most unburdened by the impositions of a central government — in history. This apogee of liberty has subsequently been followed by 234 years of gradual erosion — sometimes imperceptibly, other times boldly — and the filling of that void with an ever-metastasizing and intrusive State apparatus.
Step-by-plodding-step, Washington D.C. — our Buckingham Palace — has been reclaiming those duties and responsibilities that the Americans of the Revolution felt were the purview of the individual. Rights, too, have once again become more a function of a perpetually multiplying list of State edicts than divine gifts of Providence. It is safe to say that should the Founding Fathers have had the misfortune of being teleported from Independence Hall in 1776 or 1787 to the House Chamber or Rose Garden in 2021 and witness the awesome amount of real hard power over the lives of Americans that the Federal government has assumed unto itself, they would be horrified. Could they have even conceived of not only the assumed power to compel citizens to remain in their homes and destroy their livelihoods, but a populace who so meekly acquiesced to such despotic demands?
In the mind’s eye I see a befuddled Washington standing along Pennsylvania Avenue as the Presidential motorcade passes by. Streets blocked off, police sirens wailing, black limo after limo moves past him, while helicopters swoop overhead. He casts his gaze to the executive mansion he never saw, situated behind iron gates secured by armed guards, concrete barricades, and high walls, with its patrolling sharpshooters pacing the distant roof warning any citizen not to come too close. He might think if only the tyrant King George could have ever projected such power, and signaled such disdain for and mistrust of his people. Seeing all this, Washington may have wondered why he ever rebelled in the first place.
So it is no surprise that Americans are paradoxically so enamored with the British Crown. Because we fought for eight years to shed their monarchy, only to spend the next two centuries allowing its American version to achieve control over our lives, if not in the form of a Queen, then certainly a President, Congress, and a cultural and business ruling class. And then, of course, there are those 2 million unelected, unbridled bureaucrats burrowed deep within their government fiefdoms who have inexorably asserted increasing dominance over our daily lives from where we live, what we eat, where and when we can work, and indeed what we can even say, to the point where we no longer even remember what 1776 was all about.
So that is why we love the royals. We may have left them, but in our hearts they never really left us. Maybe we should have just stayed put? I’d like to write more, but &#8220;The Crown&#8221; is about to come on. I never miss it.
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader and writer whose articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, Celeb Magazine, Zerohedge, Frumforum, and other news outlets.  He is the author of the acclaimed World War II novel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630">Of Another Time And Place</a>. His newest novel, The Extraordinary, will be released on August 31 and is available for preorder <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1642939420/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=poshilpre06-20&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=1642939420&amp;linkId=a7ca3e4c164863007150d850df9acd1b">here</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle

The Real Reason We Care About The Royals

Meghan Markle

Prince Harry

Readers Pass

Talk of Meghan, Harry, and the Royal Family has lit up the internet airwaves for the past week. In the UK, they take these people so seriously that the

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July 2, 1863 was a sweltering afternoon, and two miles south of a little Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg, Union Maj. Gen. Gouverneur Warren was horrified. The chief engineer of the North’s Army of the Potomac, he was tasked by his commanding officer, Maj. Gen. Meade, to ascertain the strength of the Union position on the far southern end of the line. Believing that the 90,000-man army’s left flank was solidly anchored atop a steep, bald-faced hill called Little Round Top — which presented a commanding prospect over the entire battlefield — Warren was stunned to find only a handful of signalmen atop this most strategic piece of ground. And through his binoculars the Union general could see waves of men in gray and butternut uniforms, Robert E. Lee’s ferocious Rebel horde, marching at the double-quick through the broken ground to assault this most undefended hill.
Thinking fast, Warren spurred his horse down the reversed slope and galloped over to the first group of blue-clad Federal troops he encountered marching towards the left flank. It so happened to be the 140th New York Regiment, commanded by Col. Patrick “Paddy” O’Rorke, who was at the head of a long column of men from the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Division, V Corps. “Paddy!” shouted Warren as the tumult of approaching battle grew louder, telling all present that a major engagement was underway. “Give me a regiment!”
O’Rorke complied and soon had his men positioned on Little Round Top with the rest of the brigade following, just as the hollering Rebels approached. Throughout the late afternoon the fighting raged across the slopes of Little Round Top, with the extreme left of the Union line under relentless assault from Rebel forces who seemed to understand the significance of the high ground. At one point, the Yankee line just below the crest faltered, and once again O’Rorke and his mostly Irish-immigrant band of soldiers, who in civilian life had planted roots in Rochester, New York, answered the call. Following the sound of the guns, O’Rorke, on horseback, spotted the breach in the line below. He dismounted, determined to lead his men on foot into their first serious action of the war. “Down this way, boys!” the energetic Colonel shouted, drawing his sword. As his men formed into lines of battle, O’Rorke climbed a boulder and called out:  “Here they are, men!  Commence firing!” And the air became a torrent of .58 caliber projectiles ripping the opposing ranks apart.
Paddy O’Rorke’s family had emigrated to America in 1838 from County Caven, Ireland when he was a year old, but he never forgot his Irish roots. A graduate of the West Point class of 1861, he was slated for higher command. But it was not to be. “It was about this time,” wrote a sergeant of the 140th New York, “that Col. O’Rorke, cheering his men and acting as he always does, like a brave and good man, fell, pierced through the neck by a Rebel bullet.” His enraged infantrymen charged and several zeroed in on the hapless Confederate suspected of inflicting their beloved commander’s mortal wound. “That was Johnny’s last shot,” wrote another New Yorker on the scene, “for a number of Companies A and G fired instantly.” They riddled the unfortunate Rebel with no fewer than seventeen bullets.
Ireland had given yet another son of Erin to the cause of the Union. Of the 500 men of the 140th New York who went into battle to avenge their fallen colonel, a quarter of them would become casualties before the day was out. Many military historians have offered that O’Rorke’s actions that day, his heroism and selflessness, were crucial to the Union Army’s left flank not crumbling at the most critical time of the battle. Certainly the 140th New York’s conduct was at least as pivotal to the Union victory as was that of the celebrated 20th Maine, and their Medal Of Honor-winning Col. Joshua Chamberlain. But they were Irish, and this was America in the mid-Nineteenth Century where the nativist America Party had come into prominence and anti-Irish, anti-immigrant fervor was high (“Irish Need Not Apply”) in their adopted country. Little Round Top was never taken.
Meanwhile, further up the line in the smoking valley one hundred fifty feet below and a mile to the north, one of the most peculiar scenes ever witnessed on an American battlefield was taking place. And this drama would also come courtesy of Irishmen who’d left their old home and were now defending their new one. Under the command of Galway-born Col. Patrick Kelly, this unit of 530 staunch Irish Catholic immigrants from New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, was known as “The Irish Brigade.” As they awaited to go into what was the most violent and blood-soaked of the three days of the largest and costliest battle ever fought in North America, the men all took a knee, with caps in hand and heads bowed. As the men contemplated how long they had to live once the order to advance towards the rapidly approaching enemy was given, their chaplain, Father William Corby, stood upon a boulder. There, shouting above the din of battle swirling all around, he led a prayer granting the men absolution as their emerald green battle flag snapped in the warm summer breeze overhead.
The brigade then formed up in line of battle and pitched into the fight, charging headlong under intense fire through a wheat field strewn with the wreckage of war and into a tangled woodlot filled with Rebels in a desperate action to break up Lee&#8217;s attack on this sector of the line. They emerged from the fierce engagement minus forty percent of the men who&#8217;d just been granted absolution an hour before…but with all their battle flags and honor intact.
Other units made up of predominantly Irish immigrants fought throughout the war with equal élan, and the sacrifices they made for their new country defy the imagination. Some wore Confederate grey as well as Union blue, adding to their often tragic tale. At the Battle of Fredericksburg, the Union Irish Brigade was utterly annihilated as they were ordered into a series of fruitless, suicidal charges against a heavily entrenched Confederate army perched high on a hill and behind a stone wall. By the end of that day&#8217;s fighting, the brigade counted just 256 survivors in its decimated ranks — out of the 1,200 it took into battle that morning. “Irish blood and Irish bones cover that field today,” wrote one survivor.  Sadly, many of the men from the 24th Georgia who choked back tears as they methodically shot them down were Irishmen too.
All told, 150,000 Irish-born soldiers fought for the Union, 40,000 for the Confederacy, representing a significant portion of the soldiers enlisted in each army. This does not include the many more that were American-born and of Irish descent.
Today the Irish Brigade&#8217;s lineage, and by rights the memory of all the Irish fighting men during the Civil War, lives on in the &#8220;Fighting 69th&#8221; of the New York National Guard, who saw combat in World War I, World War II (Pacific) and even Baghdad in 2004-2005. Ironically, or perhaps poignantly, their nickname was bestowed upon them by Robert E. Lee, who after observing their bravery for himself at Fredericksburg, was heard to say as they formed for the grim charge “Ah yes, the Fighting 69th.” Not a bad endorsement.
So as you celebrate St. Patrick&#8217;s Day, remember the Irish who fought and strove and perished over the hallowed ground of our history. The emerald green banner has often been saturated with the blood of those who gave so much to insure that their newly adopted homeland should survive and prosper. And if perchance you should see some men and women in green parading through your streets on March 17, singing songs and hoisting a pint in toast to their heritage, you best remember the Gaelic battle cry of the Irish Brigade who preceded these happy bands: &#8220;Faugh A Ballagh!&#8221;, &#8220;Clear the Way.&#8221; Many an enemy on many a battlefield no doubt wished they heeded this call.
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader and writer whose articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, Celeb Magazine, Zerohedge, Frumforum, and other news outlets.  He is the author of the acclaimed World War II novel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630">Of Another Time And Place</a>. His newest novel, The Extraordinary, will be released on August 31 and is available for preorder <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1642939420/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=poshilpre06-20&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=1642939420&amp;linkId=a7ca3e4c164863007150d850df9acd1b">here</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire. 
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Sunday Morning Mass At Camp Cass, 1861. 9Th Mass. Infantry, U.S.A.

The Little Known Story Of An Irish Regiment That Helped Turn The Tides Of The American Civil War

Civil War

History

July 2, 1863 was a sweltering afternoon, and two miles south of a little Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg, Union Maj. Gen. Gouverneur Warren was

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For some reason, when I heard of the passing of the 70-year-old Rush Limbaugh from lung cancer, oddly enough, a scene from the TV series Mad Men came to mind. Don Draper, the mysterious and dapper ad man, explains to enthralled Kodak executives that the most important idea in advertising is new. “It creates an itch,” he explains. “You simply put your product in there as a sort of calamine lotion.” I think such a concept is at the heart of why “El Rushbo” as he was affectionately known by his loyal legions of over 20 million daily listeners, (and “Satan” by the Left in whose boot he was a burr for 37 years) was so successful. He was the first of what would be a media counter-revolution. A conservative backlash to what many across “fly-over country” saw as an ever steeper and more pervasive leftward tilt to the media and news sources they’d once trusted.
In 1984, when Limbaugh truly launched his career as the country’s premier political talk radio host at Sacramento-based KFBK, the media landscape was a barren place wherein alternative viewpoints had few if any outlets. In my hometown of Chicago, for example, if you wanted news you had a very limited, and ideologically monolithic, choice of media outlets. Your national news was confined to ABC (Peter Jennings), NBC (Tom Brokaw), CBS (Dan Rather), a few local stations like WGN and WTTW, PBS, some obscure UHF outlets, and in Chicago, two newspapers. The internet didn’t really exist. FM radio was mostly music, AM very hard to even tune into. And that was it.
Yet, those tens of millions of Americans who leaned right of center had no voice. No place to go where their views could be championed. There was nobody on the air of any import they could listen to and nod while mumbling “damned right.” Rush Limbaugh changed all that. He sensed there was an itch for alternative viewpoints beyond the liberal dogma seeping its way into our schools, universities, pop culture, politics, and ultimately supposedly “straight news” organizations. And he was unafraid to speak them aloud. After all, he reasoned, he was only repeating on an open forum what millions of Americans unsettled by the shift of their country into self-loathing, lawlessness, political opportunism, social permissiveness and corrosive morality, and general leftism among the institutions of power, were saying every night at the kitchen table.
Once he moved to New York with its vast audience, and especially after the FCC repealed its Fairness Doctrine in 1987, Limbaugh’s career skyrocketed and he soon stood at the top of a growing pile of conservative talk-show hosts — Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Glenn Beck, Howie Carr, Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt, et. al. — who rightfully look to him as the godfather of their uber-successful genre of infotainment.
At the ABC Radio Network he honed his style until be became the most recognized voice of the right in the nation. And he never wavered in his core message which could basically be summed up in a belief that the United States is a force for good, warts and all, and that the Left are out to destroy it. Every day, then, his radio broadcast was a three-hour long gladiator-like battle with the forces of evil, also known to his ocean of daily listeners as, well, “Democrats”.
But such a binary view of the issues and the players that shaped politics on the good and the bad side of the divide was fine with his legion of self-proclaimed “ditto-heads”. After years of being ridiculed, maligned, looked down upon, forgotten, and dismissed as knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing rubes, either through being labeled “clingers” or “deplorables” (let alone racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobe Nazis from Hell…or Missouri, like Limbaugh himself) by the elites in the media with the right credentials and right viewpoints, they were happy to follow a man who gave as good as he got. And the simple fact is the more the Left tried to demonize and marginalize Limbaugh, sifting through decades of transcripts for that one “gotcha!” career-ending gaffe, the stronger and more influential he became. They may as well have tried to put out a fire with kerosene.  And it drove them mad.
One can already imagine the tsunami of vitriol and grave-dancing overwhelming the Twittersphere at this moment. But somehow I think Limbaugh would be happy to have their vile celebrations as his epitaph. After all, as a man in his line of work understood better than most, often it is more revealing to judge a man by his enemies than his friends
The numbers Limbaugh put up are testament to that void in broadcasting that The Rush Limbaugh Show targeted and filled. In 2008, he inked a contract extension with syndicator Premiere Radio Networks worth $400 million. His model of being a conservative yin to the liberal yang upset the balance of media power in this nation — meaning it moved to restore balance by offering an alternative narrative to those proffered by a once-unopposed media class — and his impact, almost three decades later, has been profound. Because of Limbaugh more than any other media personality, conservatives dominate the airwaves, despite Leftist attempts to emulate his model, but with an opposite message. His ascendancy went hand-in-hand with the rise of the Fox Broadcasting Company  (1986) which Rupert Murdoch founded to directly compete with the big three networks where they lived…on Television. No doubt the success of The Rush Limbaugh Show had a profound influence on the astute Murdoch, as Limbaugh paved the way and exposed the multi-billion dollar market just waiting to be cultivated.
I could give a blow-by-blow account of Limbaugh’s extraordinary life from his 1951 birth in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, his many awards, wealth, marriages, books and the rest right up to his crowning moment when he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 2020, while already battling cancer, but there is plenty of that out there.
What matters most about Limbaugh, one must think, is how different the country he leaves behind is as compared to the one in which he launched his broadcast revolution in 1984. Today we are more polarized as a nation than at any time since 1860…in many ways even more so. The question is, how much did Limbaugh contribute to it, and how much did he merely expose? That depends on who you ask. The left-wing Huffington Post, for example, reports his death this way: “Rush Limbaugh, Bigoted King Of Talk Radio, Dies At 70.” I think right there is the answer. Only in a nation already infected with such strains of hatred and vindictiveness could a Limbaugh have thrived. As with the president who awarded him his medal, Limbaugh was not a divider. Rather he exposed the divide that already existed. One cannot be so successful at selling calamine lotion for the soul to those not furiously itching for an alternative viewpoint, their viewpoint, to have a voice, a champion.
And as much as the Left hates Limbaugh, as much they will no doubt rejoice at his passing (in the name of “tolerance”, of course) they made him. He was their Frankenstein. And now they get to live with his legacy…which gives “El Rushbo” fans the last laugh, even as they mourn his passing. “Talent on loan from God” as he would mischievously say, has been returned to its rightful owner. But his impact cannot be refunded. Love him or hate him, we are living in a new hyper-political age that Rush Limbaugh, and those who symbiotically loved to loathe him, has created.
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader and writer whose articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, Celeb Magazine, Zerohedge, Frumforum, and other news outlets.  He is the author of the acclaimed World War II novel Of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630">Another Time And Place</a>
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire. 
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

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‘Talent On Loan From God’: What People Still Don’t Understand About Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh

For some reason, when I heard of the passing of the 70-year-old Rush Limbaugh from lung cancer, oddly enough, a scene from the TV series Mad Men came to

&#039;Talent On Loan From God&#039;: What People Still Don&#039;t Understand About Rush Limbaugh

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Elon Musk Speaks At Satellite Conference In Washington, DC

‘A Real Life Iron-Man’: The Incredible Story Of Elon Musk’s Rise To World’s Richest Man

Elon Musk

Silicon Valley

SpaceX

Tesla

On January 7, 2021, with Tesla stock trading at all-time highs, Elon Musk, at just 49 years old, learned that he was the richest person in the world after

&#039;A Real Life Iron-Man&#039;: The Incredible Story Of Elon Musk&#039;s Rise To World&#039;s Richest Man

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January 28, 1986 was one of those dates where everyone remembers what they were doing when they heard the news. Conversational Spanish class at the University of Illinois. No English allowed. So one of the students relayed the shocking information thusly: “El Space Shuttle explotó!” We all looked at each other. “Explotó?” asked a classmate with incredulity. “Estás tratando de decir lanzado?” [Exploded? Are you trying to say ‘launched’?]. “No,” the distraught student insisted. “Explotó.” More uncomprehending stares. Finally in exasperation he blurted out: “IT BLEW UP!”
That was how I learned the Space Shuttle Challenger had been engulfed in a calamitous fireball nine miles over the Atlantic Ocean, a mere 73 seconds after lift-off. The shock of this event, the national trauma it induced, cannot be adequately understood today. It came as a bolt from the blue. And so much more so because among the seven highly intelligent, accomplished crew members was a high school teacher from Concord, New Hampshire. Chosen after a national search for an educator to ride the Shuttle, Christa McAuliffe was to be the first “regular person” to go into space. She was one of us. A decent, hardworking, affable sort, who was not only a beloved teacher but also a devoted wife and mother of two young children. The implication behind her trip on the orbiter was that space travel had become as routine as hopping on a commercial airliner. It had to be, right? Otherwise there was no way NASA, an acronym which by that time had taken on mythical qualities of competence and excellence, would ever put one of us into that thing. Would they? 
After absorbing the news, my class raced into the hallway searching out the nearest TV. We found one and gathered with other students who’d poured out of other classrooms while the horrifying spectacle replayed over and over from every angle. Off screen, somber news anchors pelted hastily assembled experts for premature theories as to what could have happened. We were curious about that, naturally. But what affected us most at that moment beyond the sudden and awesome violence of the event itself, were the images of distraught relatives in the viewing stands, their non-believing eyes groping skyward in shocked horror as the smoking pieces of the 2,000-ton orbiter fell like meteorites back to earth. Only the liberated solid rocket boosters continued in their chaotic zig-zagging ascent towards the heavens those seven riders would never see. Who would ever forget the faces of Christa McAuliffe’s parents as their expressions changed from exhilaration (that was their daughter up there!) to perplexity as the craft disappeared in the flames and smoke, to a sinking realization of their worst fears when the detached voice on the loudspeaker first said: “Obviously a major malfunction” and then, forty interminable seconds later: “We have a report from the flight dynamics officer that the vehicle has exploded.”
That night Ronald Reagan, in an act of presidential grace that often seems to be lost today, postponed his scheduled State of the Union Address to come on the air and offer his mourning nation what comfort he could and eulogize the seven Americans lost. But he also steeled us to learn from this experience, and persevere. “The future,” he said, “does not belong to the faint-hearted. It belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.”
In his address, Reagan expressed his unflinching belief in the space program. When the inevitable commission to investigate what actually caused the disaster was formed, the man he chose to lead it was William B. Rogers, a consummate D.C. insider with no technical expertise. Rogers was explicitly instructed not to embarrass NASA. But, as the series of mismanaged events that led up to the Challenger launch revealed themselves, it was impossible to not point the finger at the culture of the government agency. As it turned out, it was an organization that had been rolling the dice for years with the Shuttle program in efforts to keep up with a promised schedule that early on revealed itself to be impossibly demanding.
The commission eventually concluded—as one member, the iconoclastic physicist Richard Feynman, famously demonstrated by performing a simple experiment during a hearing—the cause of the accident was a faulty O-ring, made brittle by the cold, that wrapped around the right aft joint of one of the solid rocket boosters (SRB). Its failure allowed a plume of flame to penetrate the massive external fuel tank like an acetylene torch until the 350,000-gallons of liquid propellant ignited. The investigation, which included information leaked by a NASA whistleblower to The New York Times, revealed that the SRBs’ manufacturer, Morton Thiokol, had taken the unprecedented action of recommending against sending Challenger up on January 28 as planned. In an urgent conference call with the Kennedy and Marshall Space Flight Centers the night before launch, several Morton Thiokol engineers expressed grave concerns that the freezing temperatures could cause the rubber O-rings, with which they’d already seen signs of degradation under optimal conditions, to lose elasticity, compromise the seams, and thus lead to the exact catastrophic malfunction that did, in fact, occur.
But the Challenger mission had more at stake than usual. After twenty-four missions, the Shuttle launches had become back page news. This time, however, the “teacher in space” angle had revitalized flagging national interest in the program. News networks were devoting extra coverage, and classrooms all over the United States would be watching the lift-off in real time. Plus, it had already been scrubbed twice due to weather. NASA officials pushed back hard against the Morton Thiokol people who knew best the SRBs’ limitations. As NASA’s frustrated head of the SRB program, Lawrence Malloy, demanded: “Thiokol, when the hell do you want us to launch?  Next April?” In the end, NASA placed the contractor in the impossible position of providing definitive proof that the SRBs would absolutely fail. Morton Thiokol management, over the objections of several engineers, caved…a decision many would regret for the rest of their lives. Even so, NASA had a senior Morton Thiokol executive give his company’s assent to the launch in writing. Clearly, such a CYA gesture was tacit admission by space agency officials that they knew all too well this was a serious risk. They went anyway.
The deeper the investigation probed, the clearer it became NASA knew they were literally playing with fire. And after the accident they were trying to paper over if not outright cover up their avoidable errors. So much so, in fact, that New York Times columnist David Sanger would reflect: “The thought rose in the back of our minds that this really wasn’t an accident at all. That this was more like manslaughter.” Ultimately, though, perhaps the true villain was the system itself. Herein lies a possible answer to the most obvious question surrounding the decision to launch in such dangerous conditions. If it was too cold, why didn’t they just wait until it was warmer? Why would they knowingly risk seven lives, not to mention a multi-billion-dollar orbiter? The answer was that NASA was operating under the constraints of a schedule that promised far more launches than they could deliver. Eventually the game of high-pressure Russian roulette they were playing with the lives of their crews caught up with them.
So what more relevant lessons can we take out of this horrible event three-and-a-half decades in the past? One is that government agencies — even the fabled NASA which has done so much incredible work — can be compromised by political priorities that supersede safety and even common sense. In short, government makes mistakes, sometimes with catastrophic results, and yet it is very slow to accept responsibility, let alone reverse course. One cannot help but wonder if there is a lesson to be mined from the Shuttle failures that is applicable to government responses to COVID today; to wit, the implementation of policies that have seen our economy decimated, millions of livelihoods upended and destroyed, businesses shuttered, our children’s educations sacrificed, the rate of suicides, addictions, and other social calamities accelerated, China’s power growing, faith in the electoral system severely diminished, while over 400,000 Americans have died anyway, and more to come. In the future, historians may look back on these times with as much dismay as we do those fateful days before Challenger went to its unnecessary doom. In the meantime, do not expect anything but a giant wagon circle when this latest national trauma finally passes. As far as government goes, the bigger the mistake, the more entrenched those who made it will become.
Still, as I look back on those dark days in 1986, the Challenger disaster showed the best of our national character. We collectively felt like we lost people near to us that day. And as often happens in tragedy, we really did grow closer as a country. I like to believe that is one legacy of Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. Seven good souls who, as Reagan reassured us while we struggled to make sense of it all, “slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.”
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader and writer whose articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, Celeb Magazine, Zerohedge, Frumforum, and other news outlets.  He is the author of the acclaimed World War II novel Of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630">Another Time And Place</a>
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire. 
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Portrait of Challenger Crew

‘More like Manslaughter’: How Government Incompetence Led To The Challenger Disaster

Challenger Explosion

Ronald Reagan

January 28, 1986 was one of those dates where everyone remembers what they were doing when they heard the news. Conversational Spanish class at the

&#039;More like Manslaughter&#039;: How Government Incompetence Led To The Challenger Disaster

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Christmas is only a week away and along with celebrating the birth of my Lord, it also means that it&#8217;s time to get all misty-eyed as we are treated to reruns of Frank Capra&#8217;s iconic 1946 holiday film It&#8217;s A Wonderful Life.
I&#8217;ve watched this movie more times than I can count on both hands and feet and like many of us, I adore this bit of Americana. And I will take on all comers in arguing that Jimmy Stewart (in his first role after returning from World War II) as the multi-faceted George Bailey does some of the finest acting in any film in any genre.
But one character in this film has always bothered me. In fact, I believe that the more appropriate title of Capra&#8217;s project should have been It&#8217;s A Wonderful Life – If You&#8217;re Harry Bailey!
Think about it. George Bailey&#8217;s kid brother makes out like a bandit in this flick. And why is that? Because throughout this film, the vulpine Harry, played by Todd Karns, is a steam-roller of self-centeredness. I will even go so far as to say that Harry Bailey, though never intended to be a bad guy, is one of the most despicable characters in movies. In scriptwriting it&#8217;s formulaic that two villains be created to inject multiple layers of conflict. Obviously, Lionel Barrymore’s wealthy but bitter and twisted Mr. Potter is the uber-villain. But who is the other antagonist? That would be Harry Bailey, who plays his older brother George for a sucker throughout the film. In fact, one can even argue with merit that Harry is either directly or indirectly the root cause of all George Bailey&#8217;s miseries.
From a young age Harry seems to conspire to keep George pinned down in Bedford Falls. Meanwhile, Harry is free to pursue his own dreams while leaving a smoldering trail of his older brother&#8217;s shattered aspirations in his wake. As a child he falls through the ice, compelling George to jump into the freezing water to save him and lose hearing in one ear for his heroics.
Later, after their father dies suddenly, a deal is struck whereby George surrenders his college money to Harry. The idea is that when Harry graduates he&#8217;ll come back and take over the family business, freeing George to once and for all leave Bedford Falls behind. For four years George stays shackled to their father&#8217;s Bailey Building &amp; Loan, a small and wholly unfulfilling nickel-and-dime enterprise he despises, all the while counting down the days until Harry&#8217;s return while he plans his future travels abroad.
But when the big day comes what does slippery Harry do? After letting his brother sacrifice four years to honor the deal, Harry comes home and announces out of the blue: &#8220;Meet the wife!&#8221; Whuuuh? No wedding? No family&#8211;including a widowed mother&#8211;at the ceremony? Not even a pre-nuptials meet-and-greet? Nothing, save an enigmatic telegram beforehand announcing Harry is returning home with &#8220;big news?&#8221;
We very quickly see that there&#8217;s a reason for Harry&#8217;s secrecy of course. George learns through Harry&#8217;s bride, Ruth, that her new hubby&#8217;s (being a “genius at research” whatever that means) has already set himself up with a sweet job at her father&#8217;s glass company in Buffalo. In a brazen demonstration of insincerity, Harry pulls George aside and says all faux guilt-ridden: &#8220;Uh, Goerge, about that job. Ruth spoke out of turn. I never said I’d take it. You&#8217;ve been holding the bag here for four years… and, well, I won&#8217;t let you down, George.  But I would like to talk–&#8221; Whammo! The older Bailey&#8217;s face reveals a man whose hopes and dreams have just been ripped out and splattered onto the floor like a rotted pumpkin. Great brother, huh? He springs a heretofore unknown wife on an unsuspecting George and then uses her as leverage to renege on their deal after four years of expectations that his purgatory was at an end.
So, George takes another bullet for Harry and reluctantly stays on at the Bailey B &amp; L. Young Harry, with his new wife, a great job and degree in hand (the diploma originally intended for George remember) is free to move onward and upward to live his own wonderful life.
One would think the advent of World War II finally gives George a chance to see the world. Even if in uniform and with all the risks going to war entails at least adventure calls, right? Bzzzz! Sorry. He&#8217;s got a bum ear thanks to Harry falling through the ice, remember? Thus George is 4-F and ineligible for military service. America is mobilizing millions of her citizens and shipping them off to all parts of a globe George so desperately wants to explore, but because his good ol&#8217; kid brother was careless enough to slip through the ice, he&#8217;s outta luck, left behind to fight the battle of Bedford Falls. To add insult to injury, many of the less impressive and ambitious men of Bedford Falls like Bert the cop (who is wounded in North Africa, earning a Silver Star), Ernie the cab driver (who parachutes into France), friend Marty (who helps capture the Remagen Bridge) and the other band of misfits and screwballs that inhabit George&#8217;s small world return home as heroes.
Not to be outdone, Harry Bailey, both ears very much intact, goes off to do battle in the most exciting of fashions as a Navy fighter pilot. Naturally at war&#8217;s end he&#8217;s awarded the Medal Of Honor for his heroics (did we expect less?) and on Christmas Eve finds himself in the White House meeting with the President; at the same time a frantic brother George is desperately avoiding probing bank examiners as he stumbles about the snow-covered streets of Bedford Falls in a forlorn search for the eight grand in cash that his dimwitted Uncle Billy – who was supposed to be working for Harry at this point remember – allowed to be stolen right out from under him by the conniving Potter. It happened because the absent-minded Billy is so distracted from bragging to Potter about the exploits of, you guessed it, Harry Bailey, that he moronically leaves the money quite literally in the old man&#8217;s lap and struts off. Harry strikes again.
In the end, after his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody, does his job and everything works out okay—meaning George doesn&#8217;t either kill himself or do time for embezzlement—a uniformed Harry Bailey, having been flown up from Washington D.C., muscles his way to the front and center of a crowd of supportive townsfolk gathered at the Bailey home to help pay off George&#8217;s debt, and offers a toast: &#8220;To my big brother George, the richest man in town.&#8221; For now anyway. One wonders how long that will last before Harry pulls another self-centered stunt that will certainly benefit him at that same big brother&#8217;s expense. (Come to think of it, I didn&#8217;t see Harry reach into his pocket when the hat was passed around, did you?)
Don&#8217;t let that smile fool you, Georgie boy. Harry probably just wants something from you.
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader and writer whose articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, Celeb Magazine, Zerohedge, Frumforum, and other news outlets.  He is the author of the acclaimed World War II novel Of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630">Another Time And Place</a>
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire. 
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

A Wonderful Job

It’s A Wonderful Life — If You’re Harry Bailey

Christmas

Hollywood

Christmas is only a week away and along with celebrating the birth of my Lord, it also means that it&#039;s time to get all misty-eyed as we are treated to

It&#039;s A Wonderful Life — If You&#039;re Harry Bailey

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The coronavirus pandemic continues to wreak havoc not just on physical but economic health across the world.  Yet for one country this has actually been a golden opportunity. Suspiciously so in fact. It is becoming increasingly clear that the advent of this global catastrophe is yielding positive outcomes for the very country that unleashed it in the first place: Communist China.
A while back on these pages I brought the readers’ <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/schaeffer-watch-out-for-china-and-what-theyre-doing-in-africa">attention</a> to China’s maneuvers designed to address perhaps its most glaring Achilles’ heel in its drive to make the 21st Century the Chinese century.  That is its lack of energy independence. Unlike its rival/enemy (as they see us at any rate) the United States, China is very much dependent on foreign sources of oil and natural gas to power its growing economy. It is, in fact, the world’s largest importer of fossil fuels, at roughly 10.04 million barrels per day; its energy usage due to its 1.4 billion population accounts for 25% of global energy consumption.
While Americans from Congress to academic circles call for the eradication of fossil fuels, including the promotions of a budget-obliterating so-called “Green New Deal,” Beijing is well aware that oil and natural gas will be with us for decades to come…even as they take parallel steps to be the world’s premier renewable energy producer.
Since 2013 China’s oil production — what there is of it — has fallen 15% while its consumption has risen 30% to 13.8 million barrels per day, meaning 75% of China’s oil usage comes from imports. This places them in a very vulnerable position. And it explains why they have been so aggressive in heavily oil and gas-resourced Africa, South America, Canada, and the Middle East. In many ways, they are in the same position as was Japan in 1941 when its drive for world power status was threatened by a lack of energy independence. The U.S. oil embargo was certainly the main catalyst for Pearl Harbor and the horrors of the Pacific War that followed. Nazi Germany was in the same quest for oil when it launched its operation into southern Russia in 1942 which ended at the mass-graveyard of Stalingrad. But China is too smart to make those mistakes. Nor is there a need for overt military action when far more peaceful and advantageous opportunities in the aftermath of their exported pandemic abound.
Indeed, the coronavirus, and the low oil prices it has caused, have provided China with a target-rich environment. Here is the most recent, and in many ways most disconcerting, example. While the U.S. media and politicians in D.C. look elsewhere, China ZhenHua Oil Co., a state-owned enterprise formed in 2003, has just inked a lucrative supply deal with Iraq. Iraq is a true petrostate, wherein almost all of the government’s revenue comes from oil sales. As such its economy has shrunk 12% this year, due to the plummet in oil prices in the wake of the severe global recession courtesy of the Chinese pathogen. Says <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-08/iraq-picks-china-s-zhenhua-for-pre-payment-oil-supply-deal">Bloomberg News</a>: “The deal is the latest example of China, via state-controlled trading companies and banks, lending to struggling oil producers such as Angola, Venezuela and Ecuador, with repayment in the form of oil barrels rather than cash.”
It&#8217;s a great move by the Chinese. Unleash a virus (either on purpose or at least not stopping it once it gets out accidentally) on the world. Watch the global economy collapse, and with it, oil prices. Then, swoop into a place like Iraq that has been so cash-strapped it cannot pay its civil servants, and bail them out. In this case, the five-year deal ZhenHua struck included a prepayment for one year’s supply which would infuse $2 billion in desperately needed cash into Baghdad’s coffers in exchange for 130,000 barrels a day in crude oil. Basically, Beijing has acted as a lender with oil as collateral and payback, currency. Also, what is unique about this deal is that China may then ship the oil to wherever they wish as opposed to agreeing to the standard regional restrictions on re-sale. In return China will waive the usual yield for the upfront cash. In effect, for Baghdad it is an interest-free loan, paid back in oil.
The deal means China will be far less reliant on powerful exporters, mainly the U.S., to secure its energy needs. Such a beneficial agreement could only have been possible with a collapse in the price of oil. And that free-fall was a direct result of the imploding global economy, again courtesy of the virus that China-originated virus. It’s almost as if there was a method to Beijing’s coronavirus madness? Oh stop!
One must wonder if Saddam Hussein was still in power, would Iraq have been so amenable. Who knows? And I am certainly not pining for the Butcher of Baghdad. But what we do know is that, as with so much of our botched and criminally negligent foreign policy involving the Middle East and the neocons’ delusional obsessions with “nation-building,” we shed a lot of our own troops’ blood and taxpayer treasure just so that enemies like China — far too clever to get their hands dirty and noses bloodied in the Middle East quagmire when their US patsies were willing to do the fighting and dying for them — could reap the benefits.
The simple fact is that for decades now we have been outplayed by Beijing. Often with the willing complicity of U.S. power elites on Wall Street, Capitol Hill and, coming soon, the White House, again.  And like him or hate him, Donald Trump was the one president who intuitively understood this — even if we may legitimately debate the efficacy of his approaches. But he will soon be gone. Instead, the American people, in their manic obsession with ridding themselves of an unpleasant personality, have put in the Oval Office a career politician and Sinophile. Had the Chinese Politburo themselves been charged with nominating the Democrat candidate for president, they couldn’t have picked a man more suited to serve Beijing’s interests.
So while great swaths of the U.S. economy are decimated by the on-going arbitrary and ill-conceived lockdowns on the orders of incompetent and power-mad leaders in a futile effort to stop the spread of China’s most damaging export of all, Beijing continues to methodically use the virus’ disastrous aftermath to solidify its position of global dominance, while further securing its energy independence from its target rival, and isolate the very nation whose sacrifice over the past decade made its latest deal with the nation we liberated possible.
ZhenHua means “Revitalize China” in Mandarin. The coronavirus, and the opportunities it has presented Beijing, have gone a long way towards fulfilling that aspiration. More the fools us.
Brad Schaeffer is a commodities trader and writer whose articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, Celeb Magazine, Zerohedge, Frumforum, and other news outlets.  He is the author of the acclaimed World War II novel Of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Another-Time-Place-Brad-Schaeffer/dp/1682616630">Another Time And Place</a>
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire. 
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

China’s National People’s Congress – Opening Ceremony

China Quietly Inks Billion Dollar Oil Deal With Iraq

China

Iraq

Trade War

The coronavirus pandemic continues to wreak havoc not just on physical but economic health across the world.  Yet for one country this has actually been a

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Have you ever had a discussion with someone and you come to realize that they are not just unwilling to but are utterly incapable of even understanding your position?  I don’t mean agreeing with it.  I mean having the capacity to comprehend it at all.  Do you feel as if you and this person are living in two very different versions of the Matrix? I’ve had this experience with several otherwise very bright individuals as of late. Politics will do that, and I have my theories as to why it seems to be more so these days than it used to.   I think it illustrates why the calls for “unity” from the ostensible 2020 Election winner will fall on deaf ears for some 71 million Americans, and, more to the point, why the other 72 million will be baffled as to why.
Division is nothing new in this country.  One only need pull up video of Chicago’s Grant Park in 1968 to see that the left/right schism has been with us for decades.  And some similarities exist.  As with today, the forces of leftist social and political change needed a rallying point.  Their Donald Trump was Vietnam.
The difference between the 1960s and today, however, is that both sides at least had a common understanding of their nation.  Recall the song What Is America To Me?  The odds were whether you were pro-Nixon or pro-McGovern, you had a similar answer.  But for the fringe radical groups who waved North Vietnamese flags or burned crosses, most Americans left or right believed in the intrinsic goodness and promise of this nation.  Those on the right sought to preserve it, fearing the advent of the social dysfunction we see today.  Those on the left sought not to burn it down, but prod it to more closely align with its founding principles.  And the vast majority believed in a nation predicated upon civil rights, fighting just wars when necessary, equality before the law.  These were common bedrock understandings.  “God bless and preserve America” and “Very true, but we can do better” could still sit at the table together and, if not always agree, at least comprehend the other side’s rationale.  Both sides, for example, wanted to alleviate poverty.  They each had the same aspiration.  The argument wasn’t about the goal, but rather the most effective policies—reliance on free markets versus government activism, say—to achieve that goal.
Alas, I do not see such underpinning commonality today.  Because what has been forming for many years is not just a political rift, but a psychological one.  And this makes the divisions much more pronounced and, perhaps, insurmountable as in order to make common cause with another, it is essential to believe in the same reality.  But we do not.  Turn on CNN and then Fox, read The New York Times and then The New York Post and you will feel like you are on two different planets. All is political.  News is filtered through this lens.  And since the vast majority of the media aligns with one narrative, balance is gone.
Donald Trump, for all his faults, brazenly exposed this imbalance; “fake news” is now in the journalistic lexicon.  And he was right to do so.  The greatest lie perpetrated by the legacy media and the Democrat Party (but I repeat myself) has been that the epicenter of the division and “hate” in this country has been Donald Trump himself.  He is like Satan in the center of Dante’s hell who blasts out his cold winds of hatred, bigotry, and division into the world.  For the left-leaning masses this narrative is an easily digestible morsel that allows them to do what seems to be their forte these days: distill the most complex, deep, historically grounded and multi-faceted issues of politics and culture down to a simple bumper sticker or obnoxiously self-righteous lawn sign.  But what is happening to America cannot be encapsulated in bromides like “Hate Has No Place Here” or “Black Lives Matter”.
The divisions are deeper than many wish to admit.  Social media has done its bit for sure by both coarsening the dialogue and hardening the barriers.   The documentary The Social Dilemma reveals how the algorithms of platforms like Facebook and Twitter are designed to feed us what we like to see and hear to get more interaction, and thus will a Trump supporter find him/herself interacting more with MAGA people and a Biden supporter more with BLM.  It is an insidious feedback loop that corrals us into separate camps, fences us off from other ideas, and then reinforces our own viewpoints with like-minded content.  (I have over 400 Facebook friends and yet I seem to only interact with the same 25 or so, most of whom just echo my own thoughts.  This is how learning becomes indoctrination).
And yet, the various medias are just amplifiers and accelerators, not the root causes, of the core division that has been gelling in this nation literally for generations.   They could not be so effective without a pre-existing schism to exploit.  The simple fact is that today there is a good chunk of this country’s inhabitants who do not believe in America as an idea.  They topple the statues of our Founders.  They talk of effectively tearing up the Constitution by purging it of the very checks and balances that make it work.  They embrace the very Marxist ideology that several generations proved to be a failed idea, and one the USA opposed for half a century.  How do you engage with people who do not even understand, let alone believe in, their own country?  So how did such a shift in attitude from “God Bless America” to “God Damn America” take place?  How could it?
The real culprit is the generations of leftist indoctrination in our public schools and universities.  Take the founding and history of America itself.  In my lifetime, for example, Columbus has gone from hero to villain.   Every Founding Father who was not a hard-core abolitionist is now remembered not as a far-sighted, brilliant, if flawed, man who laid the foundations for the greatest nation in the history of mankind, but rather a slave owner, or one who certainly was okay with the institution, and, most damning of all, a white heterosexual male.  Our story is now relayed as one continuous dirge of conquest, betrayal, infestation and genocide on the part of the European white man against, well, everyone else.  School children are led to believe that the indigenous people the European interlopers encountered were docile fawns in Arcady, living in utopian harmony with nature.  As the native records of mass human sacrifice, tribal war, enslavement, and torture tell us, the scenes of primitive horror actually taking place in the New World pre-white man weren’t quite so rosy.
And so we have been cleaved into two competing realities.  Somewhere along the way the term “THE truth” became “YOUR truth.”  That’s not the way it works.  As many soon-to-be-disillusioned unity seekers will find out in due time.
No better example of competing realities exists than in any discussion over who is to blame for the divisions we now face.  I tried to have a conversation with someone who was a hardcore anti-Trumpite who cannot fathom why every American isn’t eager to “unite” around Joe Biden.  As if in his world all that was needed was Joe the Jedi Master to toss the Bad Orange Emperor down the reactor shaft and balance would be restored to the galaxy.  To mix movie metaphors, it’s as if the Men in Black held the laser to his eyes and erased any memory of not just the past four years but far longer than that.  He has no recollection of the vitriol heaped upon Reagan (the media’s go-to line was he was an “affable fool”) or George W. Bush, who for eight years was a “war criminal” and “Hitler” if memory serves.  He has no recollection of uniter Joe Biden speaking before a Black audience in 2012 and warning them that the GOP was “gonna put y’all back in chains!”
And of course, it is as if, in his mind, the past four years never happened.  He cannot conceive why tens of millions of Americans are answering a sincere call for unity with “Talk to the hand.”  It’s as if his side did not throw a mass temper tantrum for four years, denying that the duly elected president was even that.  #Notmypresident and #Resist never happened.  The pink pussy hats never marched on D.C.  Nancy Pelosi didn’t call the President the “imposter in chief”, a traitor even, or tear up his State of the Union Address on live TV.  He has no recollection of left-wing zealots  burning our cities, looting our businesses, harassing our police, or proffering false narratives to sow racial strife for political gain.  In his truth diners weren’t accosted by screaming mobs.  Campus thugs didn’t shout down conservative speakers, dox and drive out professors who didn’t toe the left wing line.  Far left activists didn’t bully Christian businesses.  The good names of decent and respected jurists weren’t intentionally destroyed.  All while the Democrat Party looked on in silent approval, even as they preached “silence is violence.”
Nor in his mind did a rabid Democrat establishment  try for four years to overturn the 2016 election by hurling anything they could at the president’s wall hoping something would stick.  It’s as if the term Nazi wasn’t bandied about so frequently as to lose its “Nazi-ness”.  As if radicals like Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashid Tlaib (D-MI), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) haven’t been calling for Trump supporters to be held accountable for their crimes in language any student of Soviet history would recognize.  It’s as if the Democrat Party did not exploit a tragic and destructive pandemic that has killed tens of thousands and put millions out of work with shattered dreams and uncertain futures for political advantage; nor did they cynically use the crisis as a faux pretext for revamping the entire electoral process in their favor.
As Michelle Obama aptly demonstrated in a recent tweet that is about as divisive as it gets, there was certainly half of the country on the side of “lies, hate, division and chaos” this election cycle.  What amazes me is that my leftist friend cannot see where it comes from.  I pointed out to him that they were boarding up windows not in fear of Trump supporters but Biden supporters.  What does that say about which side seeks disunity and chaos?
No matter.  I may as well have been talking to a blind water snake.  He is not just politically committed to one narrative, but psychologically and emotionally invested.  “Facts are stubborn things,” said John Adams.  But he never confronted the denial power of Trump Derangement before.   For the left, a group that has rejected God in favor of the self, politics is not just a way of viewing the world and affecting outcomes we all want, but rather it is their new religion.  Have you tried to have a rational, fact-based discussion with a religious fanatic lately?  (See blind water snake reference above).  So there will be no “unity”.  Because unity first and foremost requires a common reality. Good luck with that.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Pro-Trump Right Wing Groups Hold “Million MAGA March” To Protest Election Results

Unity Can’t Happen Because The Left Lives In A Different Reality

2020 Election

Donald Trump

Joe Biden

Michelle Obama

Have you ever had a discussion with someone and you come to realize that they are not just unwilling to but are utterly incapable of even understanding

Unity Can&#039;t Happen Because The Left Lives In A Different Reality

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Plato warned us 2,500 years ago that “only the dead have seen the end of war.”  We Americans like to think we are a peace-loving people.  But the philosopher could have been speaking of our dead as much as any other.  We have, in fact, sent our young men and women into the crucible of ten significant wars, and countless smaller engagements, in a mere 244 years.  Today we honor those among us who wore the uniform and took the fight to the enemy in World War II, Korea, Viet Nam, the horn of Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, Central America, and many other lesser known theaters of war.  Veterans Day is not just a square on a calendar with a little American flag in the corner.  It is a reminder to those of us who have never worn the uniform of the debt we owe those who walked the wall on our behalf.
It is up to us, then, to make sure that when these brave souls do return home to us, hang up the uniform, and get on with their lives that we look after them.  And so today is a day for the nation to ask a question.  Are we being true to our veterans?
I do not mean this in terms of the VHA scandal.  We know the issues facing us there and, hopefully, are making moves to correct it.  And as with apparently everything under the sun now, politics shapes our views on how serious the scandal was to begin with, and how well it has been addressed since it first came to light.  One’s opinions on this matter will in large measure be a reflection of one’s news source.
We Americans are tasked with honoring a sublime commitment to our veterans beyond reducing waiting time for hospital admittance, clean linen, competent medical care and the like, all of which go without saying.  I am talking about our obligation to maintain the very nation these brave men and women gave so much of themselves to protect.
I think of my own father, a 2nd Lieutenant in the Marines who was wounded by a Chinese mortar while fighting in Korea.  His division was called “The Old Breed” and the name implies a continuum that transcends generations.  Veterans of Chateau-Thierry and Meuse-Argonne passed the chalice to the veterans of Guadalcanal, Peleliu and Okinawa, who passed it to the men of Inchon and Chosin, who again handed it to the men at Khe Sanh and Hue, and then to the care of the troops in the sands of Beirut and Iraq.  The history of the American fighting man goes further back in time to our very beginning as a nation.  Today, if we need a reminder of the sacrifices of her fighting children we can walk the battlefields of Gettysburg, Shiloh, Chickamauga, Monmouth, Saratoga, Cowpens.  In 1982 I walked the Antietam battlefield with my father; he was separated by three decades from his own service and 120 years from those who fought in this Civil War battle.  And still he teared up as he walked the ground on which so many fought and suffered and died.  He still felt a kinship with those who’d struggled here.  Veterans are like that.  They are a fraternity of self-sacrifice.  They will never fail this country, or shrink from the challenges of defender against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  They know their duty.  And they have kept the faith.
But what about the rest of us in this land for which they are willing to give their lives?  Are we doing our part?  In the mind’s eye, one imagines one of those famous Marines who planted the flag atop Mount Suribachi on bloody Iwo Jima pondering a line of wealthy, entitled, athletes, to whom this country has given so much, kneeling in protest of that same flag.   Would they feel a sense of bewilderment?  We see them asking what has happened?  And why has this happened?  Should they flip on the evening news they’d probably be stunned by the images of violence, bloodshed, rampant looting, and the other symptoms of the lesser nations from whom these veterans protected us taking place on American streets in American cities.   They might be befuddled as to why they cannot tell the difference between Portland in 2020 and Munich in 1933.  What, exactly, they might ask, did we risk our necks for at all?
It raises a salient question: for all that veterans have fulfilled their obligations to us, what are our obligations to them?  I think the answer is simple.  To preserve the nation they fought for.  To do this we must ask questions.  I’d like to know what they believed they were fighting for.  Did they fight so that a few billionaire tech lords could dictate who says what and when and where in the public space?  Did they fight so that 93% of the media would be effectively the propaganda arm of one political party?  Did they fight so that those in Congress whose mediocrity is matched only by their manic ambition would bog the nation down in one faux scandal after another, a sham impeachment, the destruction of good jurists’ reputations, a House Speaker tearing up a State of the Union Speech behind the duly elected President’s back?  Did they fight so that for four years large swaths of the nation would refuse to accept the outcome of a fair and free election, only to cast aspersions on those who now question the results of an election rife with fraud, and simply seek validation one way or the other?
Again, why did they leave home and hearth and lay their lives of the line?  Did they fight for a nation wherein people are now balkanized by race?  Skin color? Sexual preference?  Ethnicity?  Did they fight so that Marxist organizations like Black Lives Matter could be welcomed into the Mainstream while 70 million Americans are decried even by former first ladies as being on the side of “lies, hate, chaos, and division”?  Did they fight so that those who traffic primarily in money and influence, who never built anything of enduring value, could betray our working heartland by shutting down our factories and delivering the manufacturing base that made it possible for these veterans to wage war with more than sharpened sticks in the first place into the hands of our enemies?
With every shuttered factory.  With every small town that dies.  With every person who succumbs to Fentanyl courtesy of those with whom our political leaders and their sons make sordid deals.  With every window shattered.   Every store looted.  Every building burned.  Every business ruined.  Every statue and monument honoring our past defaced and torn down.  With every false press report declaring rampaging mobs “mostly peaceful.”  With every independent thinking professor or journalist black-listed for not toeing the far left line.  With every speaker shouted down in the lecture hall. Every judge falsely accused of heinous acts for political gain.  Every call to tear up our Constitution.  With every child born into a fatherless home.  And with very American student who leaves our public school system functionally illiterate, we are failing in our side of the deal.   Our veterans deserve better.
When I was a little boy, I used to play a game.  Or at least what I thought was a game at the time.  Only now do I understand what it really meant.  I would sneak into my father’s bedroom at night, and see how close I could get to him before he woke up with a start.  I was always amazed at how he’d open his eyes and jack knife up in the sheets and look around before I set more than one foot into the room.  He learned that in combat, when the enemy would attack during the night.  Sleeping with a hair trigger in a foxhole kept him alive.  It was a habit that, like so much else he brought home from the war, stayed with him long after the fighting was over.  When I got older, and would sit up with him while he had a drink to calm his nerves, he would tell me his war stories.  They were disturbing, fascinating, heartbreaking, terrifying.  I think now of the sacrifice he and countless other veterans have made so that his son seated across the table could live in a better world.  And I sometimes ask myself, is this a better world?  Are we a better people?  A better nation?  Is this even the America our veterans fought to preserve?  After everything we have seen in 2020, I don’t know.  I really don’t.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Veterans Day Wreath Ceremony in NYC

Our Vets Have Kept The Faith. Have We?

Military

Veterans Day

Plato warned us 2,500 years ago that “only the dead have seen the end of war.”  We Americans like to think we are a peace-loving people.  But the

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Soon, one of the wildest rides in the history of this nation will likely come to a close. But the real struggle for the true soul of the Republic, indeed the legacy bequeathed to us by the men of 1787 is before us.
The Georgia Senate races are going to a runoff. Anyone who cares about this country — and I mean really cares — should be far more concerned about the Senate turning blue than a feckless houseplant seated at the Resolute Desk easily reined in by Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, et. al.
What would losing control of every branch of the government look like? Well, here is the agenda of the party of Kamala Harris and her sidekick Joe.
1.) Pack the Supreme Court. This will forever turn the most independent body in government into nothing more than a super-legislature of lawmakers for life who will act as a rubber stamp to any left-wing laws or policies that come across its desk. The age of “judicial review” will be no more. And loose interpretation of the &#8220;living&#8221; Constitution could mean upholding laws that seek to restrict gun rights, religious freedom, and other bulwarks of that pesky Bill of Rights.
2) Grant amnesty and citizenship to realistically 20 million illegals within our borders. They will be almost all new Democrat voters. Forever tipping the balance in favor of one party.
3) Puerto Rico and D.C. could be granted statehood for one reason only: to give the Democrat Party four more Senate seats, again sealing one-party rule in the USA for the foreseeable future.
4) The Electoral College — the most crucial instrument to the decentralization of power — will be under attack. If we go one-man-one-vote, no Republican will ever win national office again and every state not in view of an ocean will be effectively reduced to mere flotsam and jetsam pushed about at the whim of the currents of the coastal elites.
5) Ending the Senate filibuster, which would further consolidate power in the ruling party.
If any, not even all, of these declared goals (or nod-and-wink goals) are achieved, you will not recognize this country. Anyone with a history book — a rarity in the US thanks to a criminally negligent public school system that has left 50% of Detroit’s adult males functionally illiterate — can see this is the path to banana republicanism. The great fear of the Framers, the &#8220;tyranny of the majority&#8221; will be upon us.
For those who are unconcerned about this state of affairs, or are so focused on the fortunes of team Trump to see what really matters, I ask you to show me one instance in history where one-party rule – other than the tiniest of nations – has not either led to a dystopian hellscape wherein a tiny batch of cloistered, wealthy and connected elites rule over vast swaths of marginalized and poor, or, conversely, an authoritarian structure does not rise to keep things running where civil liberties are a dim memory in favor of the trains being on time.
Either way, for all the Trump-haters, who ignorantly called the man who did more to try and decentralize power away from DC and back to the statehouse and town hall than any president in my lifetime, a ‘fascist,” just you wait. Try to imagine Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and whoever will be Biden’s handlers full power. You won’t need a history book to see what living under a one-party jackboot was like. You’ll be living it.
There’s a reason the “racist, anti-Hispanic” Trump got the majority of the Cuban vote. They’ve seen this movie before. If only the same could be said for the rest of the electorate.
I would be saying the same thing about total control ad infinitum were it potentially in Republican hands too. Neither GOP nor Democrat lawmakers are immune from the adage that &#8220;power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.&#8221;  The Framers gave us a divided government for a reason. &#8220;Gridlock&#8221; is not a failure in governance&#8230;it is an achievement.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author&#8217;s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire. 
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Chuck Schumer

Why The Senate Fight Is Far More Vital To The Republic

Kamala Harris

U.S. Senate

Soon, one of the wildest rides in the history of this nation will likely come to a close. But the real struggle for the true soul of the Republic, indeed

https://editorial.dailywire.com/news/why-the-senate-fight-is-far-more-vital-to-the-republic/

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Brad Schaeffer