Category: Social Commentary
We Are SOOOO F*cked

We Are SOOOO F*cked

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If you live in America, as I do, and you feel like the bottom monkey in that photo, no one would blame you. That might be true in some other countries right now, too, but I’m relating it mostly to my own country.

Watching the latest missteps, blunders, malfeasance, general incompetence, obvious dementia, and shameless dishonesty of what passes for our current Administration, there is not a day nor night that goes by that I don’t hold my hands to my head and say, “We are SOOOO fucked.”

Usually multiple times. It’s so bad sometimes I have to cover my eyes, unable to witness the latest travesty to waltz across the tube. And this from someone with a pretty strong stomach when it comes to horror scenes. Unfortunately, these horror scenes aren’t cinematic, but are Washington’s version of reality.

One has to wonder how what is supposed to be the most powerful country on earth has allowed itself to sink to this level. Actually, it can all be explained, and if you read my last post (which, if you haven’t, you need to now), you’ll understand precisely how it happened, just as you would if you’ve been reading my posts over the past several years.

No, it’s not a conspiracy theory (for which I have exceedingly little patience) to say it’s all part of a huge and far-ranging plot. No, it’s all been documented. And the plotters are already warming up for the next scene in their grand scheme to once more pull a fast one on the American public. One can hope we’re now inoculated to their schemes, perhaps more than we’re inoculated to the virus that is the single biggest thing the Democratic Party has going for it, but the cynic in me is not encouraged, despite the pundits’ blather to the contrary.

Now it is true that most American voters don’t believe the senile Jell-O Joe Biden is in charge in the White House, or anywhere else outside his self-delusional imagination, and that majority has to have grown even more watching some of his latest, if rare, and excruciatingly embarrassing, public performances. Anyone who has had an even passing brush with dementia in a loved one or otherwise knows what they’re witnessing. Of course, we should all be concerned that the country is being run by a shadow government, but the even bigger concern should be how that shadow government is driving the ship of state straight for the rocks, full speed ahead.

Their intent was pretty clear even before Jan. 20, and the evidence of what it consisted of was plainly manifest when, in one day, Jell-O Joe, at the direction of his handlers, whoever they are — and I do have some theories — undid four years of progress. Now, six months and a week and some into this horror show, it’s hard to even decide on an order for listing the most egregious elements which cross all fronts, domestic and foreign. So let’s just look at some of them, not in any kind of strict order.

The Border

Whose name is on those t-shirts? Can you spell Biden?

For me, it’s a toss up, which is more concerning, our troubled foreign policy, the huge upsurge in violent crime, or the catastrophe at our southwest border. In terms of immediate impact on the country and its inherent barbarity and inhumanity, I’ll go with the border. Jell-O Joe made it clear that our border would be open to anyone who goes to the trouble of crossing it, regardless of legal right to do so, and the hordes of border crashers — about a million in the first six months of this year alone, and heading to a new all-time record of 2 million by the end of the year — have been sure to quote him as having personally issued their invitation. And along with them has come a flood of illegal drugs, including enough deadly fentanyl sufficient to kill a large percentage of the country, illegal weapons, women and children being sex trafficked, violent criminals, and a wave of tens of thousands of new COVID infections. The Mexican cartels smuggling all those illegals have profited hugely, in the billions of dollars, from this free-for-all, and they didn’t even have to contribute to the Democratic Party or be a son of the President to cash in on this bonanza.

All the elements of what the Democratic Party seeks — a flood of future new illegal voters, augmentation of the permanent underclass on which the party depends for its very existence, and a wave of new COVID infections on which to build fear and set the stage for stealing the 2022 mid-term elections as it did in 2020 — are there, in plain sight. Well, plain sight, if the mass media cared to show what actually is going on along the border, especially along the lower Rio Grande. But of course, unless you’re watching Fox News, you may not have seen the mass of humanity, from more than 100 countries all over the world, pouring across our non-existent border every day since Jan. 20. And if you think this is only a border problem, consider that the Administration has been secretly busing and even using the military to fly illegal aliens all over the country.

To put things in perspective, consider that a million people is more population than six states. It would be the population of the 12th largest city in the country, between San Jose and Fort Worth. By the end of the year, at the current rate, two million people will be more than the population of 14 states and it would be equivalent to the fifth largest city, between Houston and Phoenix. Add the new numbers to illegals already in the country, and you’re looking at outnumbering all except the top few biggest states. Do the math, and you’ll see why this utter mockery of U.S. law is being allowed, oaths to faithfully execute the laws be damned. Adding insult to injury, you appoint a feckless Vice President who couldn’t care less about the border as the Border Czar, and a Homeland Security Secretary whose last concern seems to be security of the homeland, and who has no problem blatantly lying about what is going on at the border.

Crime

On the chance you haven’t been on an extended underwater cruise aboard a nuclear submarine or getting your news from CNN or MSNBC, you’ve been aware of surging violent crime around the country. Consider, if you will, these numbers which compare 2021 rates with 2020 rates, which already had surged in many cities compared with 2019:

Atlanta – Homicides are up 58% and shootings are up 40%

Portland, Oregon – Homicides are up 533% and shootings are up 126%

New York City – Homicides are up 13% and shootings are up 64%

Los Angeles – Homicides are up 22% and shootings are up 51%

Chicago – Homicides are up 5% and shootings are up 18%

Philadelphia – Homicides are up 37% and shootings are up 27%

Overall, 37 cities with available data saw an average increase in murders of 18% in the first three months of this year, compared with 2020. In Austin, murders are up 79%, rising from 19 to 34 in the first five months, year-to-year.

Police cars line up in Baltimore, one of the few big cities run by Democrats for decades where the murder rate hasn’t surged in 2021. Of course, the FBI already ranks it second in the nation — only St. Louis outranks it — with a higher murder rate than El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, from whence so many of those illegal migrants allegedly are fleeing crime.

Blacks are victims of these homicides and shootings to a disproportionate degree. While last summer’s widespread violence and lawlessness and the insane call to “defund the police” certainly set the stage for this surge, legislative, judicial, and prosecutorial abandonment of cash bail and releasing known and accused criminals to roam the streets have played no small role in the surge in violent crime, including aggravated assault, in dozens of cities across the country, from New York to Philadelphia to St. Louis to Los Angeles. A sane person would say more, not fewer, police were needed — including the 81 percent of black Americans who want the same level of, or more, policing — and would think a prosecutor’s job is to (speak of radical ideas) prosecute criminals, and not release them out on the streets to victimize more innocent citizens. Instead, George Soros financially backs these renegade prosecutors, the Dems blame it all on Donald Trump, and Jell-O Joe blames it on legal gun ownership instead of looking at their own incompetence and failed policies. This band of inveterate liars even had the chutzpah to say it was Republicans who wanted to defund the police. But, of course, we were talking about sane people, weren’t we?

Foreign Affairs

It’s called the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. But have you seen who is next in line?

If the worst thing about our current shift in foreign policy was a return of the apology tour that began under Barack Obama, things in this arena wouldn’t be too bad. But when we are berated by China for our alleged human rights abuses, and we just sit there and take it, and say nothing when Beijing mows under the rights of Hong Kongers and threatens Taiwan and Japan, that’s a more serious issue. And what can you say when the Commander in Chief has to resort to index cards to explain U.S. policy toward North Korea, or when the same said CiC keeps mixing up Syria and Libya on an international stage? What I’d say is that we’re in the proverbial deep doo-doo.

Biden restored $235 million in aid, frozen by the Trump Administration, to the Palestinians, and within weeks Hamas rockets were launched by the thousands onto Israel. For their good behavior and peaceful attitude, he added another $38.5 million to sweeten the pot and ostensibly pay for more rockets, which Hamas buys from the Iranians and other sources.

Of course, that’s just chump change compared with the $3 billion in funds that Biden unfroze so they could be returned to Iran. All part of the Administration’s plan to revive the disastrous nuclear agreement with that country. After all, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism which has vowed death to America and to Israel wouldn’t dream of using all that money for any nefarious purposes. Would it?

We’re pulling out of Afghanistan, which might not be the worst idea were we do to it in a controlled and honorable way. Instead it’s like we just discovered we passed our stop on the Metro and need to jump off the train and call an Uber at the next station. Never mind the carnage that many Afghans, who stood by us and supported us through the 20 years of this seemingly endless engagement, already are facing, or the abandonment of perhaps the best government the Afghans have had, ever.

Now no discussion of our misadventures in foreign affairs would be complete without mention of Secretary of State Antony Blinken inviting the UN, that bastion of human rights, to investigate “the scourge of racism, racial discrimination, and xenophobia” in the U.S. After all, the UN’s Human Rights Council includes such bastions of human rights as China, Cuba, Libya, Eritrea, Algeria, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. And let’s not forget Mauritania, where slavery is actively practiced to this day. Don’t you feel all fresh and clean, confessing your sins to these paradigms of liberty and justice? What? You don’t? You MUST be a racist!

Energy and Inflation

Under Trump, America became energy independent for the first time in 62 years. It felt pretty good knowing it wasn’t Saudi princes or Russian oligarchs profiting when I filled up at the pump. But that couldn’t be allowed to persist under Biden, and one of his first acts was canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline, keeping the oil it would have carried from Canada on less environmentally sound trains and trucks, and XTing as many as 11,000 good paying union jobs (which he likes to blather so much about). Now while America and its close ally Canada doesn’t need a pipeline, in Biden’s world, Putin, Russia, and Germany do, so he greenlighted Russia’s Nord Stream 2 Pipeline by waiving sanctions against the company building it, Nord Stream 2 AG, and its German CEO, Matthias Warnig. Oh, did we mention that Warnig is a close ally of Putin, is a former East German Stasi intel officer, and has served on the supervisory boards of major Russian companies? Now who is Putin’s puppy?

Homelessness isn’t just hidden away any more.

You may have noticed, as I have, how it’s costing you nearly 60 percent more at the pump than it was a year ago, and in some places, like California, gasoline is approaching $6 a gallon, more than in many European countries. Also rising are electric rates, up more than 20 percent in my case, and it’s not all due to the rising cost of petroleum. And if you miss those wild wonderful Jimmy Carter years, we’ve even experienced fuel shortages and lines at the pumps.

Rising energy costs are just one factor fueling inflation, which is surging at rates not seen in 13 years and, in some categories, in 30 years. Along with fuel, consumers are seeing increases in categories as diverse as food, vehicles, home purchases, and construction materials. Record federal debt — currently standing at $28.5 trillion, and climbing — and gratuitous federal payments that make it more attractive for many workers to stay home than go back to work add to the upward pressure on prices. We’ve — by “we,” I’m referring to our illustrious Congress, which the American public holds in even lower esteem than it does the mass media — now come to talk about trillions like they’re rounding errors. Can anyone spell Weimar Republic?

COVID

Finally, in this round-up, we come to what has been the national obsession of the past 18 months, COVID-19. If one wants to be generous, the best one can conclude is that the Biden Administration has succeeded — and that “success” lies in sending out incredibly mixed and confusing signals. If one looks closer at the facts, little of the twisting and turning public pronouncements make any sense, and both the hypocrisy of the Administration’s positions as well as their real purpose come into focus. While bleating about wanting more people to get vaccinated, the Administration comes out with new “guidelines” telling vaccinated people to again wear masks under certain circumstances. Never mind that a fully vaccinated American has a higher chance of being hit by lightning or bitten by a shark than contracting COVID-19, much less dying from it. By the CDC’s own numbers, breakthrough infections — not deaths, just infections — occur in one of 10,000 people. That’s .01%. Deaths from COVID in fully vaccinated individuals are even more rare. Yet we’re supposed to change our behaviors once more over this supposed new threat.

Much hoopla is made of the Delta variant of the virus, but what isn’t being said is the fact that this variant, while more contagious than initial variants, is less deadly. Far less, for vaccinated individuals. Those in power don’t want you to know that, but even in Britain, where this variant took off after its introduction from India, they’re acknowledging this fact.

If you’re expecting consistency from the likes of CDC Director Rochelle Walensky — who seems to have roughly the intelligence of your average chihuahua and kowtows to the party line, whether it comes from the White House or the powerful American Federation of Teachers — you’re not going to get it. Any more than you’ll get it from the Exalted Poobah Anthony Fauci who, among a litany of flip-flops that could occupy an entire piece, lies to Congress about the NIH’s possible role in creating COVID-19 in the first place.

Meanwhile, while studies show that having contracted COVID-19 conveys natural immunity in most cases, we have absolutely no information on how long the immunity granted by vaccination lasts or whether booster shots will be needed. One would think that finding some evidence addressing these questions would be a top priority.

Some people feel you just can’t be safe enough. That’s how the Administration wants you to be.

If you’re confused by the messaging coming out of the White House and its own version of Baghdad Bob, spokesbabbler Jen Psaki — who tells you to follow the guidance just because they told you to — look behind the scenes to see what people in power do. This might reveal their true motivation. Remember what I said up above about all those infected illegals being allowed in and then shipped all over the country? And how they’re indicative of how the Administration really isn’t serious about limiting spread of COVID and is a key piece in the Dem plan to create the nationwide fear and panic to steal the 2022 mid-term elections, like they did the Presidential election of 2020? If you have the bad habit, as I do, of applying logic to what people do, it’s hard to avoid coming to this conclusion.

Another indication of how little the Administration really cares about your well-being is the recent decision by the Justice Department to drop its investigation into the 15,000 COVID nursing home deaths in New York, or similar huge death counts in other Dem-controlled states, like Pennsylvania and Michigan, while limiting its investigation in New Jersey. Anyone who felt sorry for Attorney General Merrick Garland not making it to the Supreme Court can drop their regrets now that we see he’s just one more hard-left Dem apparatchik. So much for justice, even for the dead or their families.

Me, I’m happy to live in the free state of Florida and to have a governor not subject to the whims and wishes of the White House and the Democratic Party. I just hope all those people fleeing here from the unfree states don’t bring their stupid political ideas with them. As a country we might be like that bottom monkey in the photo, but here we’re hanging on as long as we can, trying not to be screwed any more than we are, anyway.

And make no mistake: We all are.

Photo credits: Featured photo by cottonbro on Pexels; used with permission. Biden Let Us In by Washington Examiner; used under Fair Use. Baltimore Police Cars by Bruce Emmerling on Pixabay; used with permission. Historic political cartoon, source unknown; used under Fair Use. Downtown Tent by Adam Thomas on Unsplash; used with permission. Masked Couple by Obi Onyeador on Unsplash; used with permission.

Beginning with this post, I’ll also be posting on Substack in my new community there, Issues That Matter. Follow me here, and there.
If You Don’t Read Anything Else This Year, Read This

If You Don’t Read Anything Else This Year, Read This

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Those who follow this blog know I have not had much to say so far this year. This is atypical of me, and actually it is not because I have not had a lot of thoughts to express. The simple truth is that, since Jan. 20, I have been too discouraged to go public with my thoughts, watching as four years of progress have been undone, and as the country has been further torn apart and degraded by lies, repression of the free flow of information, catastrophic policies, and failed leadership.

Now I am going to ask you to read what follows. Read this, even if you don’t read anything else this year. I did not write it. Full credit goes to Darryl Cooper, researcher, writer, and creator of the web site and podcast Martyr Made and co-host of the podcast The Unraveling. But what Cooper lays out tracks exactly with what I’ve been presenting on this blog over the past few years. Every word of what Cooper says is demonstrably true, correct, and backed up by documented facts. After you read this post, go back and read my past posts and you’ll see that what I’ve been reporting and postulating is correct and points precisely to where we are today.

This is actually the second piece I’ve asked my closest confidantes to read even if it is the only piece they read this year. The other one is the Nicholas Wade piece that appeared in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in which the former New York Times science writer and editor discusses, in-depth, the possible origins of COVID-19 and which lays bare the very real possibility that it was developed in the laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

It is essential that people see how we got to where we are today, how they’ve been lied to and misled, and why we now have what can only be described as a shadow government running the country. It’s not just me saying that. A Trafalgar Group survey — Trafalgar Group, for those who don’t know, scored highly in predicting the actual outcome of the 2020 election at a time when most surveys wildly missed their target — conducted in late June found that most American voters — 57% — don’t believe Joe Biden is actually performing his duties as President, and that includes nearly a third of Democratic voters. Only 36% of all voters believe Biden is actually in charge.

It doesn’t take great powers of observation to see that there is no way Biden is in full possession of his faculties, and increasingly voters are taking note of that. I’m not going to speculate at this point who really is running the country, since that’s not my purpose in this post, but do read about that survey and what it shows. Every American — indeed, everyone everywhere, given the far-reaching power of the American presidency — needs to be urgently concerned about this.

Now here are Darryl Cooper’s words, initially laid out in a series of 36 tweets on Twitter on July 8, on why ordinary people know the 2020 Presidential election was stolen:

I think I’ve had discussions w/enough Boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent to extract a general theory about their perspective. It is also the perspective of most of the people at the Capitol on 1/6, and probably even Trump himself.

Most believe some or all of the theories involving midnight ballots, voting machines, etc, but what you find when you talk to them is that, while they’ll defend those positions w/info they got from Hannity or Breitbart or whatever, they’re not particularly attached to them.

Here are the facts – actual, confirmed facts – that shape their perspective: 1) The FBI/etc spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign. We now know that all involved knew it was fake from Day 1 (see: Brennan’s July 2016 memo, etc).

These are Tea Party people. The types who give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday and have Founding Fathers memes in their bios. The intel community spying on a presidential campaign using fake evidence (incl forged documents) is a big deal to them.

Everyone involved lied about their involvement as long as they could. We only learned the DNC paid for the manufactured evidence because of a court order. Comey denied on TV knowing the DNC paid for it, when we have emails from a year earlier proving that he knew.

This was true with everyone, from CIA Dir Brennan & Adam Schiff – who were on TV saying they’d seen clear evidence of collusion w/Russia, while admitting under oath behind closed doors that they hadn’t – all the way down the line. In the end we learned that it was ALL fake.

At first, many Trump ppl were worried there must be some collusion, because every media & intel agency wouldn’t make it up out of nothing. When it was clear that they had made it up, people expected a reckoning, and shed many illusions about their gov’t when it didn’t happen.

We know as fact: a) The Steele dossier was the sole evidence used to justify spying on the Trump campaign, b) The FBI knew the Steele dossier was a DNC op, c) Steele’s source told the FBI the info was unserious, d) they did not inform the court of any of this and kept spying.

Trump supporters know the collusion case front and back. They went from worrying the collusion must be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to realizing it was a scam, then watched as every institution – agencies, the press, Congress, academia – gaslit them for another year.

Worse, collusion was used to scare people away from working in the administration. They knew their entire lives would be investigated. Many quit because they were being bankrupted by legal fees. The DoJ, press, & gov’t destroyed lives and actively subverted an elected admin.

This is where people whose political identity was largely defined by a naive belief in what they learned in Civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries. Because it had stepped out of the shadows to unite against an interloper.

GOP propaganda still has many of them thinking in terms of partisan binaries, but A LOT of Trump supporters see that the Regime is not partisan. They all know that the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs Jeb Bush election.

It’s hard to describe to people on the left (who are used to thinking of gov’t as a conspiracy… Watergate, COINTELPRO, WMD, etc) how shocking & disillusioning this was for people who encourage their sons to enlist in the Army, and hate ppl who don’t stand for the Anthem.

They could have managed the shock if it only involved the government. But the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them. They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or gov’t official, because they feel most betrayed by them.

The idea that the press is driven by ratings/sensationalism became untenable. If that were true, they’d be all over the Epstein story. The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period.

This is profoundly disorienting. Many of them don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it’s probably true.

They watched the press behave like animals for four years. Tens of millions of people will always see Kavanaugh as a gang rapist, based on nothing, because of CNN. And CNN seems proud of that. They led a lynch mob against a high school kid. They cheered on a summer of riots.

They always claimed the media had liberal bias, fine, whatever. They still thought the press would admit truth if they were cornered. Now they don’t. It’s a different thing to watch them invent stories whole cloth in order to destroy regular lives and spark mass violence.

Time Mag told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving, among others, leaders of the protests, the local officials who refused to stop them, and media people who framed them for political effect. In Ukraine we call that a color revolution.

Throughout the summer, Democrat governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures. It wasn’t just the mail-ins (they lowered signature matching standards, etc). After the collusion scam, the fake impeachment, Trump ppl expected shenanigans by now.

Re: “fake impeachment”, we now know that Trump’s request for Ukraine to cooperate w/the DOJ regarding Biden’s $ activities in Ukraine was in support of an active investigation being pursued by the FBI and Ukraine AG at the time, and so a completely legitimate request.

Then you get the Hunter laptop scandal. Big Tech ran a full-on censorship campaign against a major newspaper to protect a political candidate. Period. Everyone knows it, all of the Tech companies now admit it was a “mistake” – but, ya know, the election’s over, so who cares?

Goes w/o saying, but: If the NY Times had Don Jr’s laptop, full of pics of him smoking crack and engaging in group sex, lots of lurid family drama, emails describing direct corruption and backed up by the CEO of the company they were using, the NYT wouldn’t have been banned.

Think back: Stories about Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact, and the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its source. The NY Post was banned for reporting on true information.

The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, “no fair!” That’s how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012. This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process.

And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote. He got 13m more votes than in 2016, 10m more than Clinton got! As election night dragged on, they allowed themselves some hope. But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight, they knew.

Over the ensuing weeks, they got shuffled around by grifters and media scam artists selling them conspiracy theories. They latched onto one, then another increasingly absurd theory as they tried to put a concrete name on something very real.

Media & Tech did everything to make things worse. Everything about the election was strange – the changes to procedure, unprecedented mail-in voting, the delays, etc – but rather than admit that and make everything transparent, they banned discussion of it (even in DMs!).

Everyone knows that, just as Don Jr’s laptop would’ve been the story of the century, if everything about the election dispute was the same, except the parties were reversed, suspicions about the outcome would’ve been Taken Very Seriously. See 2016 for proof.

Even the courts’ refusal of the case gets nowhere w/them, because of how the opposition embraced mass political violence. They’ll say, w/good reason: What judge will stick his neck out for Trump knowing he’ll be destroyed in the media as a violent mob burns down his house?

It’s a fact, according to Time Magazine, that mass riots were planned in cities across the country if Trump won. Sure, they were “protests”, but they were planned by the same people as during the summer, and everyone knows what it would have meant. Judges have families, too.

Forget the ballot conspiracies. It’s a fact that governors used COVID to unconstitutionally alter election procedures (the Constitution states that only legislatures can do so) to help Biden to make up for a massive enthusiasm gap by gaming the mail-in ballot system.

They knew it was unconstitutional, it’s right there in plain English. But they knew the cases wouldn’t see court until after the election. And what judge will toss millions of ballots because a governor broke the rules? The threat of mass riots wasn’t implied, it was direct.

a) The entrenched bureaucracy & security state subverted Trump from Day 1
b) The press is part of the operation
c) Election rules were changed
d) Big Tech censors opposition
e) Political violence is legitimized & encouraged
f) Trump is banned from social media.

They were led down some rabbit holes, but they are absolutely right that their gov’t is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them getting it. Trump fans should be happy he lost; it might’ve kept him alive.

Almost forgot: The security director at Dominion Voting Systems was for decades a member of anti-racist skinhead groups, and posted pro-riot/Antifa msgs on FB during the summer riots. Who knows if his approval of illegal means to achieve political ends affected his job, but…

Photo of Darryl Cooper by Tom Zawistowski, used under Fair Use.
Text of Darryl Cooper tweets drawn from We the People Convention.
Summer Solstice
That Time of Year Again: Thoughts on “the Longest Day in the World”

That Time of Year Again: Thoughts on “the Longest Day in the World”

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This piece initially appeared four years ago, on June 21, 2017, the Summer Solstice. Today, June 21, 2021, it is once more the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, and the actual solstice officially occurred at 3:32 a.m. UTC this morning/22:32 p.m. EDT last night. The time and other references and weather comments in the piece are as they were four years ago, when the post first appeared. I’m no longer living on the boat, and there have been other changes. This year it has been 52 years, more than half a century, since my father’s death, and yesterday was Father’s Day here in the U.S. I originally posted this piece on this blog, as an annual event, but last year decided to post it on my fiction blog, https://stonedcherry.com. This year, I’ll post it on both blogs. I hope you enjoy it.

It’s June 21, the day of the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s a day that holds various meanings for different peoples, and its significance goes back millennia. The solstice, whether summer or winter, officially took place at 12:24 a.m. U.S. Eastern Daylight Time this morning, or 04:24 UTC.

Just to set the record straight and dispel any questions about my scientific knowledge, I know it’s not the longest day in the world. It’s the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest day in the Southern Hemisphere. But we’ll get to this a bit later.

It’s been a mixed bag today here on the West Coast of Florida. We’ve been having a lot of rain, something we didn’t have much of over the winter, and the rainy times are interspersed with sunny breaks. Right now, as I look out the window of my boat, the sun is mostly out but I’m looking at the light through rain-drop spattered glass. At least we’re not getting the effects of Tropical Storm Cindy, which is much further west and at this moment dumping lots of water on the upper Gulf Coast.

In this country, the summer solstice marks the official beginning of summer, though in other places and other cultures it marks the middle of summer, as indicated by the name Midsummer Night, which can occur anywhere from the 20th to the 24th of June. And really it is midsummer, since the days, which have been lengthening since the equinox three months ago, now will start to grow shorter, the nights longer.

The sun has reached its apogee in this hemisphere, as it stands today directly over the Tropic of Cancer. I feel summer ending, we already are on the downhill side, the side that will take us through the hot coming months but already on the slide back into winter, the cold time of year. Just as in the Southern Hemisphere the days will begin to grow longer as the seasons move back to summer.

A year ago on this day I was in Alaska, where there never really was a night. Where I was, well below the Arctic Circle, the sun went down sometime around midnight, but there was a kind of twilight that lasted until the sun rose again a few hours later. Above the Arctic Circle on this day, the sun never sets, and it truly is the Land of the Midnight Sun.

My thoughts turn to other things on this day. Someone asked me the other day, which was Father’s Day in the U.S., what thoughts I had of my father on that Sunday. But really, I think of Father’s Day as a commercial holiday. I also remember the last Father’s Day I had with my father, and how my mother did her unwitting best to create conflict between me and my father. While I may wish a happy day to the fathers I know on Father’s Day, it is today, the day of the solstice, that I think of my father. June 21 was his birthday, which in most years coincides with the solstice. I was told as a child that it was the longest day of the year, which I translated in my own way into it being the longest day in the world, and I would go around telling everyone who would listen that it was.

“It’s the longest day in the world!” I’d exclaim each year on his birthday, from morning until night.

I think today of my father on this day, the 21st of June. Gone now, for nearly 48 years. And I think back to the day of his birth, June 21, 1913. One hundred and four years ago. Even had he not died young as he did, just 56 years old, it is hard to imagine that he would still be alive today had he not died when he did. A prolongation of the inevitable.

A factoid I learned earlier is that today is not the longest day in the history of the world, as one might imagine it to be given that the earth’s rotation on its axis generally was slowing. Rather, the longest day in the history of the world is believed to be June 21, 1912, and things like the earth’s tides and recession of the glaciers have caused a slight increase in the rate of the planet’s rotation since then. My father was born a year later, which arguably could have been the second or third longest day in the history of the world, if not the actual longest day in the world.

I wonder what it was like on that June day, the day of the solstice, the longest day of the year, the day my father was born, in Jersey City, New Jersey. Did his father and mother, his Italian parents, my grandparents that I never knew, know it was the solstice? Did they even know of the solstice? Regardless, I’m inclined to think they did not think of it, if for no other reason than that they had something else on their mind that day. And then I think of the things people from then knew and were taught and how many of those things have been lost today, in these encroaching new Dark Ages in which we find ourselves, and I have to wonder. Perhaps they knew, better than most people today know. Or care to know. And they did note the auspicious day on which their son was born.

I’ll think of my father again on July 27, the anniversary of his death, and by then even our summer, the summer as we define it, will be half over.

The solstices, like the equinoxes, serve as a kind of punctuation for me. I watch the ebb and the flow of the days, the seasons, the years, and they mark the passage of time, time that increasingly slips by way too quickly. All of life is punctuation, I think. Slowing. Stopping. Breaking things, even waves on the water, into different parts, different pieces, different rhythms and fugues and movements and phrases and sentences. It is through such punctuation that we mark our lives, mark our transit through summer and back into winter, from day into night, from life into death. Watching, as a reader of a story does, while the time of our lives flows past. When we lose that punctuation, everything blends into one big mass, and we feel lost in the current, flailing and drowning as we’re pulled inexorably along. At least I do.

Enjoy this song, which I found today amid my files, and with which I end this post, and enjoy the time that nature and life give us.

 

Click here if song doesn’t play.
Nothing to be Proud of

Nothing to be Proud of

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In October 2002, following the Chechen siege of the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow and the deaths of as many as 204 hostages and 40 Chechen terrorists when the Russian government pumped poison gas into the theater, my Albanian friend Laura called me. She was angry at how the siege was ended, with the deaths of many innocent people, and outraged at the Russian government’s attempt at claiming the use of the poison gas was necessary to end the siege and that the operation was “carried out brilliantly.”

What she said to me after that has stayed with me ever since. Paraphrasing her quote as best I can, she said, “There are things that are done wrong in the United States, too. But the United States fixes them, makes them right. That is the difference between America and Russia.”

At that moment, hearing those words, I never in my life had felt so proud of my country. That my friend, who had grown up under Communism, flourished under capitalism, and had experienced close up some of the inner workings – good and bad – of our government from when I had been posted to the U.S. Embassy in Tirana, had such a positive view of the United States, impressed and pleased me beyond what words could express.

Now, 18 years and some weeks later, in the aftermath of what has gone on in this country over the past four-plus years, and all the more in the aftermath of a scandalous Presidential election and the events leading up to it, I don’t think I’ve ever been more ashamed of this country. I am sorry to say, I think the country has become a parody of its former self, a sham, as fraudulent as the election we just went through, and we have nothing – nothing – to be proud of. Whatever values and strengths this country held before have been so run into the mire of corruption and shameless power grab that they are gone, and whether they ever can be recovered is very much an open question.

I’ve waited a week after the election to write anything about it, any kind of summation of what happened, what didn’t happen, and my response to it. But the election is just a symptom, a result, of a much greater sickness afflicting the nation. That sickness – and it’s not the coronavirus, it is an illness much more grave – is rampant, will remain rampant, regardless who finally is victorious in the election. Honestly, I have been so discouraged about this country and its prospects for the future, no matter how optimistic I try to be, I’ve had a hard time mustering the focus to write anything coherent. It’s even hard to find a starting point, there are so many things wrong in so many ways. I’ll make a stab at putting something out now.

A fraudulent election

I have no problem calling the recent Presidential election a fraud, just as I predicted it would be. I’m not talking about the numerous instances of voter fraud or electoral malfeasance that have occurred in a number of states. Those are bad and widespread enough to merit concern all by themselves, not that it’s the first time in U.S. history that they have gone on, and President Trump’s legal team is challenging some of those that could more likely determine the outcome of the election. No, I’m talking about the entire electoral process, which was designed to create chaos, doubt, and open the door to a Democratic power grab. But what would one expect of a party that dedicated itself over the past four years to the removal of a duly elected President and installed its presidential ticket through would can only be described as surreptitious back-room deals involving party elites and power brokers? Combined, it is the biggest political fraud ever perpetrated on the country.

As I’ve said before, Biden’s real running mate was the coronavirus, which was exploited to create this electoral debacle. There was no real reason why people couldn’t vote in person on Election Day, as has been the rule for a very long time in this country. But fears of the virus provided the perfect excuse for state after state to jump on the mail-in band wagon, setting the stage for the current mess. I had grave concerns about this, as did the President, and we both were right.

By declaring widespread mail-in (or, the bigger problem, mail-out) voting, the only outcome that could be predicted was a disastrous result, especially in states that had never done this before and were ill-equipped to run and manage a massive influx of mailed-in ballots. Those states had weak safeguards in place to avoid multiple voting, stolen votes, voting by dead people, and people who moved to other jurisdictions, not to mention weak processes and insufficient staffing to tabulate the ballots, but this was exactly what those who engineered this mess wanted. In the actual analysis, they have no respect for a fair vote but only sought power.

We now have several states still counting votes a week after the election, with no end in sight. To say this is Third World in nature insults Third World elections. I was an election observer on two different occasions in Albania, one of the poorest and least developed countries in Europe, especially in the 1990s, and even with written paper ballots the results were known the same night. The same in Algeria during my posting there, where results were known by the next day. What we have in this country now is a national disgrace, along with being a fraud, and every American should be ashamed of this travesty.

The accounts of electoral problems are legion. Poll watchers in Philadelphia and Detroit and elsewhere being denied access to observe the vote count, as they are everywhere permitted to do by statute. As many as 40,000 ballots suddenly showing up in one place, every single one of them for Joe Biden. Saddam Hussein would have been proud of such a result, as I’m sure Kim Jong-un would be, too. In Michigan we have a computer glitch that changed Trump votes to Biden votes, and that software was used in half the state’s counties, and in some 28 other states, too. Also in Michigan, poll workers being told to back-date ballots. Envelopes being separated from mailed-in ballots, eliminating the ability to check when they were mailed. And on and on and on.

President Trump has every right to challenge these problems, but he’s criticized just days into the process by the pro-Biden jackals in the mass media and is accused of not wanting to yield power. None of them criticized Al Gore who, in 2000, carried on for 37 days claiming to be President-elect when, in the end, George W. Bush was ruled to be the winner. And that fight involved just one county in one state. The current malfeasance stretches across a number of counties in at least a half-dozen states. So Trump is the bad guy, but Gore wasn’t? And why isn’t Biden calling for a proper outcome of the election, whatever it might be? Doesn’t the confidence of the American people in its electoral process matter enough? Instead, he claims victory.

Pennsylvania is the epicenter of the problems – just as I predicted it would be – and unfortunately Chief Justice John Roberts and the liberal members of the Supreme Court he sided with just about guaranteed it would be a mess. The U.S. Constitution, Article II Section 1, gives state legislatures the right to set electoral process in their states. When the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unilaterally changed the voting rules, it should have been an easy decision for the the U.S. high court to slap them back. Failing to do that and holding the case in abeyance, once Election Day rolled around it became a matter of putting the toothpaste back in the tube, and whether the mess in the Keystone State can be unraveled is very much in doubt at this point. There is even talk of canceling the entire electoral results in the state, it is such an intractable mess.

I’m also wondering why the Justice Department has not stepped in to some of the more egregious situations. It is the right of every American for their vote to be protected, and that includes protection from having the power of their vote stolen by electoral misdeeds and illegal votes cast. That falls to the Justice Department in the face of local officials, such as again in Philadelphia, openly flaunting court orders. Why the reticence to intervene?

All that said, I can feel good about my own state, Florida, in which more than 11 million votes were cast – almost the entire population of Pennsylvania – and results were known the same night. Whatever issues plagued the state in previous elections have been fixed, thanks in large part to Gov. Ron DeSantis. If Florida can fix it’s problems, so can other states. And it’s time for some sort of more coordinated approach to voter registration and the whole electoral process. As things stand, they’re an embarrassing and catastrophic hodge-podge.

The other issue that I think has to be raised for future elections is the whole question of early voting, not just mail-in voting. U.S. electoral law, in Chapter 2 of the U.S. Code, sets Election Day as the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November. Get it? Election Day. Not Election Season or Election Month or whatever. There is a real reason for having a single election day, with all votes to be cast on that day save for any cast by legitimate absentee ballot, with those counted on or by Election Day. Remember how that was? I do. And I voted in person on Election Day and, you know what, it went fine and I lived to tell about it. The whole virus thing was a sham and a fraud, and that it was allowed to be a factor in the election is yet another disgrace casting its shadow across the nation.

The Biggest Crisis: Media Corruption

I have been saying for years, long before the election of Donald Trump, that the biggest problem facing this country isn’t political but rather the bias and corruption in the mass media. In principle, political problems can be fixed (assuming, of course, a fair electoral process). But without honest and accurate information provided to the electorate, the entire process fails. As I’ve written, democracy dies in darkness, and that’s what we’re seeing right now.

How many American voters got to hear about the corruption and illegal activities of Joe Biden, or the Hunter Biden laptop and the emails it contains laying out the former Vice President’s abuse of power for private gain? Maybe 10 percent? Maybe fewer? Most of the national media – and by extension, local media – not only didn’t cover the story, but when it came up in passing they outright lied and said it was a product of Russian misinformation, which is demonstrably false. Backing up the “Blue Wall,” Twitter and Facebook blocked reports about the laptop and Biden corruption, froze accounts, and censored legitimate reports. Only the New York Post, Fox News, and some online sites with integrity reported the story. The British media carried it more than the American media did. If you didn’t have access to one of those outlets, you never heard about what might be the biggest scandal in political history of the past century (yes, bigger, by far, than Watergate).

Between the concerted cover-up of this story and an election that spread over weeks, the anti-Trump establishment kept the electorate in the dark to influence the outcome of the election. And this same corrupt media protected Biden, content for him to mostly stay in his Wilmington basement, ignoring the obvious signs of his growing dementia, and unwilling to ask him any questions beyond fluff. Who needs Russian or Chinese or Iranian intervention when we have CNN, MSNBC, the major networks, the print media, and Big Tech?

I am astounded when I hear some praising Biden’s “spectacular” campaign. What planet do these people live on? What campaign? It was the biggest non-campaign in American political history. And in reality, anyone with more than two functioning brain cells knows it’s not Biden who will be the real actor in the White House. It will be the largely unpopular Kamala Harris. And people question why I say the Dems depended on people being imbeciles for their victory.

For four years the media, the late night talk shows, and the chattering class spread lies and misinformation about Trump, and those lies and that misinformation echoes through the populace, building on itself. And it’s extended to everyone associated with Trump, to anyone who supports Trump, to anyone who votes for Trump. Being one of those maligned by these despicable characters, I am more than sick of the lies, the bullying, the slander, the threats, the ridicule, the browbeating, and all the rest. I am tired of being called a racist because I support Trump, tired of being called a racist for opposing Obama (that goes back 12 years). The media has cultivated nothing but division and hatred in the country. They have fostered violence. Anti-Trumpers, biolstered by these hateful lies, have threatened to kill (and have actually done so) Trump supporters. The media has this on its head. And it is shameful beyond words.

And now Biden and the Dems and the media say we should forgive and forget and let bygones be bygones? They’ve gone so far as to spread the lie that it is us who want to be forgiven. That is how delusional and dishonest these people are. And some, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are calling for taking names to punish those who worked for the Trump administration. Well, take note: I, and many tens of millions like me, don’t bargain with or submit to those who would steal our democracy from us and turn us into a one-party conformist state adhering in lock-step to a most radical leftist agenda. And I don’t make peace with haters and liars and frauds who refuse to acknowledge and repent of their hate, their lies, their fraud.

Now there are signs that even Fox News is being steered by top management away from being the one contrarian network one can count on to find out what is really happening in the country. I am reminded of how Putin, unhappy with the coverage of the Dubrovka Theater debacle by NTV, the last of Russia’s independent nationwide TV stations, forced a change of management there, effectively silencing dissent. If Fox News goes the same way, we are truly lost.

As the free flow of information is systematically strangled, so is our democracy strangled.

The Bigger Shame on the Nation

The even bigger shame will be all the actors who broke the law, lied under oath, fostered the Russia Hoax, and attempted to bring down a duly elected president in a brazen coup attempt. That it has taken so long to bring these people to justice is a travesty and a shame. Attorney General William Barr and Deputy AG John Durham had ample time to complete investigations and seek convictions. That they haven’t done so underscores my belief that this country has a two-tier justice system – if one can even still use the term “justice,” except in irony – and the likes of Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strozok, John Brennan, James Clapper, and, yes, Joe Biden, all of whom, and others, committed criminal acts worthy of prosecution, will be allowed to skate scot-free if Trump winds up losing the election.

There is something seriously wrong with our judicial process if so much time and resources can be poured into endless investigations with zero results. Or maybe that was the intent all along. Whichever, this is yet one more national scandal, as is the misuse of the FBI and the nation’s intel agencies for political purposes.

Adding insult to injury, some of these reprehensible characters, such as Brennan, already have been offered positions in the Biden transition team. The expectation is that the cover-up will be complete and all the misdeeds will just go away. And, mark my words, there will be prosecution efforts directed against Trump and others in his administration if Biden takes power. This has to be infuriating to anyone who cares about some semblance of justice.

In the final analysis, I think the country has failed itself. All of this was preventable, but decisions were made and actions taken, fostered by ill intent and the power of special interests over the course of decades, that have taken us down a path leading us away from core American values of fairness and honesty and accountability and transparency and justice. And I am left never more ashamed of my country and with nothing I can offer my friend Laura, or anyone else, to show we are better than any other corrupt country.

Featured image: Aggression, John Hain, Pixabay. Used with permission.
Disgrace, Gerd Altmann, Pixabay. Used with permission.
Black-backed Jackal, Geran de Klerk, Unsplash. Used with permission.
Hopeless, Gabriel, Unsplash. Used with permission.
The Future of America Lies in Your Hands: Vote!

The Future of America Lies in Your Hands: Vote!

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The choice for America hasn’t been more clear in more than a century and a half. Not since the election of 1860, which led to the victory of Abraham Lincoln, the subsequent Civil War, and the eventual end of slavery, has there been a more impactful election.

The choice can be stated in simple terms: If you’re willing to accept and be complicit in the biggest fraud ever attempted in American political history, then Joe Biden is your guy. If you want to continue the push toward a stronger America, toward sensible economic policies, and toward policies that recognize global realities and how strength promotes prospects of peace without kneeling to the country’s enemies, then Donald Trump is your guy.

I know, I know. You don’t like Trump’s tweets. You don’t like some of the off-the-cuff things he says. You don’t like the name-calling. I don’t either. But if superficial things like that influence you more than things like policies, confronting the political elites (of both parties), mental and physical competence, and not being taken in by bald-faced political fraud, then go ahead and vote for Biden. And don’t complain later when, on the outside chance that Biden wins, you see what you’ve actually voted for. And it won’t be peace or prosperity or togetherness or justice or any of those nice-sounding things. You’ll find how much you’ve been snookered.

If you’ve been following my blog postings over the past two-plus years, you would know why Joe Biden is an utterly unacceptable candidate for President. You would have seen accounts of his misdeeds – all since confirmed in recent revelations – and you would have seen the reasons why he has earned a criminal investigation on a number of counts. And you would have seen the duplicitous and hypocritical and deceitful tactics of the Democrats in Congress and their lackeys in the mass media.

Scary Stuff

If that isn’t enough to dissuade you from voting for Biden, you would have seen the evidence of the man’s ever-more-frequently obvious mental deterioration, rendering him unfit to hold the nation’s highest office. Despite his campaign handlers’ best efforts to keep him sequestered in his Wilmington basement, when Jell-O Joe is allowed out to speak to a smattering of supporters and neutered media representatives, he has taken to speaking – not just in his usual gaffes and misstatements – but in what can only be described as “tongues.”

Here is just one example of that. Listen to it yourself.

And another.

And lots more cited here.

And it’s not just mental. Listen to his labored breathing as he spouts gibberish here.

Scary? I think so. This is the man who would have his finger on the nuclear button. That should get anyone worried. Very worried, indeed.

The inescapable conclusion is that Biden’s supposed running mate, Kamala Harris, is the real candidate, and Jell-O Joe is just a placeholder. He’ll be in the Oval Office until his deteriorated mental state becomes impossible to any longer ignore, and then he’ll be eased out of office with Harris taking over officially. And meanwhile, both Biden and Harris, considered the most liberal member of the Senate, will be subservient to the will and insane policies of the likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren. Never mind that Harris couldn’t even muster enough support to make it as far as the primaries or that she is widely disliked, even despised, across the full range of the political spectrum. She, and the radical left, and the Dem power brokers, are whom you’ll really be voting for.

A Tale of Two Campaigns, A Tale of Two Americas

The photos above graphically illustrate the tale of two campaigns, and the two Americas they represent and appeal to. Both photos were taken at recent rallies in Georgia. The top image is the Trump rally held in Macon on Oct. 16, following earlier rallies, attended by tens of thousands of people, the same day in Fort Myers and Ocala, Florida. The bottom image is the Biden rally held in Warm Springs on Oct. 27. In contrast to the vibrant and raucous gathering of thousands of avid supporters – typical of all Trump rallies – we see a smattering of supposed Biden supporters, some of whom are actually reporters, isolated in 38 – count them, 38 – circles, to enforce social distancing, outside on the grass. Compared to a garden party, it looks more than silly. Later the same day, Biden attracted his largest crowd of his campaign, such as it has been, at a drive-in rally in Atlanta – 771 people in 365 cars.

This really is the choice put to voters: Which America do you support? A lively and growing and vibrant and courageous America, or an America afraid to even breathe, cowered into fear, locked down and looking forward to the “dark winter” promised by Biden? An America of hope, or an America of despair? An America where the individual is treasured, or one in which the individual is submerged and devalued and canceled in the dismal swamp of identity politics? An America of tolerance and fairness, or one in which venom and hatred and division are fostered by a corrupt political-media establishment? I know which one I’ll be voting for when I go the polls tomorrow. Do you?

I honestly have no idea how the election will turn out, which of those narratives America will choose. If you believe most of the polls – I don’t – Biden will win. Of course, those same polls said Hillary Clinton would win in 2016. So much for that theory. If you go by the enormous enthusiasm shown to Trump, whether in rallies or in the many impromptu displays like car and boat parades held around the country, contrasted with the lackluster showing of support for Biden, Trump has to take it. If you use such anecdotal approaches as I use, like my Yard Sign Theory, there will be places solidly for Trump and others solidly for Biden. Do the Trump yard signs outnumber the Biden ones? Based on my limited observations in different places, I’d give the nod to Trump.

Something like 90 million voters have already cast their votes, in mail-in, absentee, and early voting. I remain opposed to early voting in most cases since vital information, like what the Hunter Biden laptop contains, often comes in late in the game. I’ll go in person to my local polling place tomorrow and cast my vote, as I’ve been doing in most elections since my first vote when I was 18. I don’t know if we’ll know a winner by late Tuesday night. I suspect not. I suspect, unless there will be enough clear results in sufficient states to determine a clear winner, we may wait days, weeks, perhaps months to know who the winner is determined to be as Americans’ faith in their political institutions is further eroded. I hope that isn’t how things go, just as I hope there won’t be violence in the aftermath of the election, but I have my doubts about both. Many cities already are boarding up in anticipation of that violence.

In any case, I hope the sensibility of the country comes through and voters wind up picking the only acceptable candidate on the ballot. I hope they do that even if it takes having to grit their teeth and accept a candidate who is less than perfect. The alternative is too incomprehensible, too horrible, to even think about. And I hope that sensibility carries through down the ballot, too, to keep the Senate in Republican hands and to turn the House. The country doesn’t need more gridlock, nor does it need the one-party state the Dems have in mind for it.

And it’s not just the future of America that lies in the balance. In many respects, it’s the future of the world. I have had non-Americans writing to me to stress that point, and their concerns and fears mirror my own.

Readers of this blog probably know more about the issues and the opposing views of reality than most. Now go out and apply that knowledge and vote.

Featured image: Donald Trump in Omaha, Anna Reed, The World Herald; Joe Biden in Bristol Twp., Pennsylvania, Darryl Rule, LevittownNow.com. Both used under Fair Use.

Trump at campaign rally in Tucson, Rebecca Sasnett, Arizona Daily Star; Masked Joe Biden waves in Bristol Twp., Pennsylvania, Darryl Rule, LevittownNow.com. Both used under Fair Use.

Trump campaign rally in Macon, Ga., Getty Images; Biden campaign rally in Warm Springs, Ga., Independent Sentinel. Both used under Fair Use.