A few random thoughts to consider, concerning life in America these days:
Online Sales:
A lot of people try to sell things on eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and similar sites, and wonder why their goods don’t move, no matter how good the photos or how low the prices. Well, here’s the thing: no matter whether you’re a major department store or an independent seller, there are certain things that a buyer needs to know in order to consider the product: you must post the size, the material, things like that.
Whether it’s a man’s shirt (17.5×34, 100% cotton) or a dining room table (31H x 42”W x 60”L without leaf, or 84”L with two 12” leaves, solid wood). Without this kind of detail, your potential customers can’t tell it’s right for them.
It is shocking how many social media / personal sales sites lack this basic information. It costs you nothing to add this information, and it makes all the difference in your success.
Political Candidates:
A lot of people have a personal aversion to considering political parties when choosing which candidates to vote for. It’s true that our parties aren’t perfect, but trying to vote without consideration of party makes the process much more difficult. It is therefore especially important to recognize certain behaviors that are deal-breakers in life. If a candidate got an actual Nazi tattoo on his chest, for example, whether it was yesterday or twenty years ago, that means he at one time held personal views that you would not want in public office. No matter what else he says in speeches today, no matter what he writes about, this is not someone you want in office.
The same goes for a candidate who intentionally misquotes Scripture, claiming that Jesus was pro-illegal alien or that the Bible is silent on the issue of abortion.
Even if you don’t much care about the Bible or these particular issues, the fact that the candidate would choose to knowingly lie about what the Bible says about them should set off an alarm bell in your head. There are enough candidates out there to choose from who are honestly right or wrong with their own heartfelt issues; the ones who not only take questionable positions but justify them by making false claims of support that are easily debunked are just disqualifying themselves from rational consideration. Don’t dismiss obvious warning signs; accept them and react accordingly.
Criminal Justice
For thousands of years, society has had a simple process: identify guilty criminals – the robbers, the rapists, the killers – and remove them from society. Our process got better over the centuries; trial by jury, the introduction of defense attorneys to counter the prosecutors, the rules of evidence, the development of DNA tools. But the basic goal remained: find out who has proven himself too dangerous to run around free in society, and remove him from society.
In recent years, however, there are politicians in western societies – especially the United States and Western Europe – who have decided that even when they know who committed a crime, and prosecution would be easy, they want to allow those robbers, rapists, and killers to remain loose. This has become the norm in major urban areas like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and many more, usually due to the election of socialist district attorneys and state attorneys general, but sometimes due to the passage of enabling legislation by legislatures and governors.
The assumption is that these are just different approaches, and one works better than the other, but of course, everyone wants a safe environment in the end. This assumption is false.
The fact is, everyone knows that the only way to have a safe environment is to lock up the known, proven criminals. So if a politician – or a whole political party – advocates letting the known, proven criminals run free, then that means they actually want society to be unsafe.
Why might anyone want that? Well, because they want people to feel scared, so they feel more dependent on the party of government. And because they want to get the support of the criminal element, because if you can only win elections by stealing votes and campaign cash, you need supporters who are thieves themselves. And because, at heart, such politicians are criminals themselves.
The Roadways
We have seen a disturbing number of transportation incidents in recent years, and the patterns are deserving of attention.
Many passenger drivers are uninsured illegal aliens. While some illegal aliens are fine drivers, many are not, and when the unsafe ones cause accidents, their lack of insurance costs the victims, and the rest of society, greatly.
Worse, many truck drivers are illegal aliens. This is even more dangerous, because in order for an illegal alien to obtain a truck driving job, it means that numerous others in society are corrupt. The trucking company that hires him, the training company that allegedly trained him, the state government that issued his CDL – all these must be corrupt for an illegal alien to sit behind the wheel of an 80,000 lb truck filled with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of commercial goods.
They cause accidents, injuries, loss of valuable goods, loss of human life.
And there is, again, a partisan aspect to this: Republican politicians oppose open borders and stand for CDL and auto insurance enforcement; Democrat politicians support open borders and facilitate uninsured drivers and illegal alien trucking.
Why? Why on earth would anyone support such destructive policies?
See above.
The Chicago Bears
Sports teams move around, all the time. Sometimes from one end of a metro to the other, sometimes across the country. The history of our major national teams, particularly in football and baseball, is a fascinating review of population growth, demographic movement, and the personal choices of team owners and investment groups.
The Bears are in the news these days, however, for an unusual reason: For years, they have lamented the problems with Chicagoland – from taxes to crime, from transportation congestion to regulatory challenges. They love their fan base and have no intention of leaving Chicagoland, but the city of Chicago, county of Cook, and state of Illinois have simply become inhospitable to businesses.
Many assume it’s a plea for tax breaks for the team owners themselves, but it is clearly not. Viewed strictly from the business perspective of team ownership, it would be cheaper to stay put, despite the tax burden, than to uproot the team and move to the suburbs or, more likely, the neighboring state of Indiana.
But we must also look at the team’s employees and management. All these highly-paid players and coaching staff, all the goods they sell at the park, even the commute to and from work – all these must also contend with Chicago sales taxes, Illinois income taxes, and a host of other costs that are simply unfathomable to most Americans outside our nation’s few insane urban centers.
Whether they are doing so consciously or unconsciously, the Bears are taking advantage of their position’s bully pulpit to remind the world of how incredibly inhospitable the (Democrat) leadership of Chicago, Cook, and Illinois are, and how utterly disastrous this one-party rule has become, not just for the business community but for everyone else impacted, from employees to fans, from vendors to neighbors.
And the Powers That Be dismiss their concerns, attack them in speeches, and accuse them of disloyalty for so much as raising the issues.
Just twenty or thirty miles to the southeast of their current park, however, life is infinitely more safe, affordable, and welcoming. Why might that be?
Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer, speaker, and consultant. A President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon. His trade compliance training practice is available either in person or by webinar.
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.
Substack: American Free News Network Substack
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