Mark Belling, the great longtime talk show host at WISN’s AM station in Milwaukee, frequently exhorts his listeners to analyze news stories by turning them around and considering what their reaction to the opposite would be.
If it’s about a white person, ask yourself, what if they said the same about a black person? If it’s about a Christian, ask yourself, how would the public react if they said it about a Jew or a Hindu? If it’s about a man, what if they covered an identical story about a woman the same way?
We get so used to certain kinds of news stories, that we hear more of the same, all the time, and don’t even bat an eye – but we should. We should be reacting with horror at much of the news today, and we don’t, for the most useless of reasons: we’re just used to it.
That’s not acceptable, but it’s the truth.
Why do we have about 20,000 murders per year in this country, and not raise an uproar? Because we can say “That’s mostly in the big cities; just stay away from the cities.” That’s patently absurd, but we hear it so much, our minds ease into that explanation, as if it were okay for the residents of America’s commercial centers to be at far worse risk of attack than the rest of us, just because of where they chose to live.
Why do we tolerate over 100,000 accidental deaths due to drug overdoses every year, and not tar and feather (or worse) every politician in the country? Again, we hear it so much, we have been immunized against such news. We hear of so many drug deaths, all the time, the news no longer shocks us. “Well, they were drug users, after all; that’s the risk you take,” is our common reaction. Is that fair, especially in an era in which even harmless candies or prescription medication might be laced with Chinese fentanyl?
In the end, no matter what the issue – from rapes and robberies to murder, from a 35 trillion dollar national debt to the ongoing collapse of the middle class – because we have read about these terrible issues, day in and day out, for so many years, they no longer horrify us as they ought.
In much the same way as overuse of penicillin reduces its effectiveness, and the daily consumption of small quantities of some poisons can enable the development of an immunity to them, so too does the tedious, repetitive reporting of the same issues blunt the astonishment and fury that such issues always ought to provoke.
The best example of this nightmarish societal problem is the outrageous campaign by the power-abusing, statist establishment to use the coercive power of the state to prosecute President Donald Trump.
(Incidentally, Gentle Reader, this is not some blind acolyte’s hero worship of the man, by the way. This writer has frequently acknowledged President Trump’s many shortcomings, particularly his errors in selecting appointees and the self-destructive nature of some of his rhetoric. But that’s not the point here.)
Whatever his failings, President Trump has demonstrated again and again that he is not a lawbreaker.
Nevertheless, because they can’t beat him on the issues, the Left has gone to unprecedented lengths to frame, shame, overwhelm, embarrass, and prosecute Donald Trump.
For example:
- They concocted the thoroughly discredited “Russian Collusion” hoax through the illegal use of the FISA court, using a fabricated report made up by a discredited foreign agent, funded and planted by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC, using the DoJ as their pawn, committing hundreds of crimes from perjury to treason over the course of the project.
- They raided President Trump’s private apartments at Mar-A-Lago, in an unprecedented FBI raid of a former president, to reveal that he had kept documents (properly secured in locked rooms) that he had had the authority to declassify and therefore to retain… even though they didn’t prosecute former Vice President Joe Biden for keeping thousands of classified documents in an often-open, unlocked, unsecured garage (and remember, as only Vice President, Biden did not have the power to declassify them when he took and jeopardized them).
- When President Trump gave a rally a mile from the Capitol and specifically told his crowd of supporters to stay respectful and peaceful and leave the Capitol alone, and then hundreds of FBI plants successfully exhorted some dozens of them to join them in walking into the Capitol (respectfully! – they stayed within the velvet ropes, for goodness’ sakes!), the Left accused him of causing an “insurrection” (which would make it the only unarmed insurrection in the history of the world), and then spent the following three years “investigating” and otherwise propping up that ridiculous narrative, with an effort to deny him his right to run for president again.
- When President Trump rightly called for investigations of the countless violations of election law that had resulted in the fabrication – and acceptance – of tens of millions of completely fraudulent ballots in 2020, they kept the cases out of court, using technicalities such as denial of standing in most cases, to ensure that the evidence could never even be revealed. And for three years now, their allies in the media have dutifully referred to his charges of election fraud as having been “discredited” when in fact most were never even heard, entirely to mislead the public into thinking that the 2020 election was a legitimate one despite its dependence on tens of millions of nonexistent voters.
- And most recently, the prosecutors of New York City, who routinely plead virtually every other crime down to a misdemeanor so they can quickly release drug dealers, brawlers, robbers and rapists back onto the streets, have prosecuted President Trump for their disagreements with the perfectly reasonable valuations in a couple of old loan applications, and similar charges that are so unimportant they have never even been prosecuted before – alleged crimes without a single injured party – resulting in an illegal, utterly ludicrous penalty of over a third of a billion dollars that everyone knows will be reversed at the next stage.
Add all this up, and what do we see? Outrageous prosecutions. Illegal harassment. Unconstitutional behavior by federal and state authorities. A virtually dictatorial abuse of power.
Anyone else would have had to buckle long ago. President Trump, due to his success in real estate, hotel management, and television, has the money – so far – to keep fighting.
But nobody else would.
Most of us don’t react with the horror we should. Most of us are so inured to this repetitive activity that we take the news that yet another kangaroo court has persecuted the President with a grain of salt. It happens so often, we are numb to it.
But it IS an outrage. It SHOULD be horrifying us.
There is a truckers’ movement awakening as we speak – thousands of truckers are refusing to carry loads to New York City to protest a government so corrupt that it would abuse the justice system this way. Will these truckers stand alone, or will they inspire other industries to join them in their noble cause?
Let’s return to the theme we began with. What if the establishment – that’s the federal, state, and city governments, the teachers’ unions, the Hollywood elites and the mass media – what if they weren’t doing this to President Trump, but were doing it to any other private citizen?
What if they were doing it to you?
If they would prosecute a plainly innocent man for these debatable but miniscule misdemeanors – in the case of this insane one-third billion dollar judgment from New York, statutes that have never even been prosecuted before – and on top of that, with a poisoned jury pool and a disregard for statutes of limitations, extending the penalty to wipe out not only him but also his family and his business too…
If they would do this to him, a man who at least can afford the lawyers to defend himself… imagine what they could do to you if you were the one who got in their way.
What if you wanted to run for district attorney, or alderman, or congressman? What if you wanted to run for county board member or state legislator, and one of their chosen puppets had been slated for that seat, so they wanted to keep you out of that race?
If we let them get away with doing this sort of thing to Donald J. Trump, they can do it to anyone.
Including you. Including your children and grandchildren.
This is the year that such dictatorial practices must be recognized for what they are. This is the year we must stop them.
Because if the Democrat Party gets away with it this time, there will be nothing on earth – not statute or law, sheriff or policeman, Constitution or conscience – to restrain their tyrannical impulses ever again.
Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
Also an actor in Chicagoland’s community theatre circuit, John will be playing “Old Joe” Boyd in the Gaslight Players production of the musical “Damn Yankees,” only on Friday, March 1 and Friday, March 8, 2024 in Des Plaines, Illinois.
If you enjoyed this article, then please REPOST or SHARE with others; encourage them to follow AFNN. If you’d like to become a citizen contributor for AFNN, contact us at managingeditor@afnn.us Help keep us ad-free by donating here.
Truth Social: @AFNN_USA
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA