Before anyone could ask why Nevada Republican leaders favor the likes of Joe Lombardo and Mark Amodei (to the exclusion of any challenger), party chairman opened the gathering with ‘I was not bribed!’

At a few minutes past 10 a.m. on April 30 – a sunny Spring Saturday – the 2022 Nevada State Republican Party Convention was gaveled to order in a second-floor meeting room of the Palace Station Hotel in downtown Las Vegas, and Nevada Republican State Party Chairman Michael J. McDonald rose to offer his scheduled greeting.

Then things got odd.

Mr. McDonald, a former Las Vegas-Clark County Metropolitan police officer, dispensed with the normal pep talk. Instead, he declared he’d been accused of “accepting a $250,000 bribe” to see to it that current Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo “gets this party’s endorsement” for the office of governor.

Mr. McDonald denied that allegation, which he said came from someone he had once considered a friend (but whom he declined to name.) He then said that if his accuser had evidence of such an impropriety, he should “bring it,” apparently to Mr. MacDonald’s home,” and that “one of us will leave in a body bag.”

This was a public event, attended by more than 400 people. Members of the Press were credentialed; there was a section of seats set aside for the Press at the back of the room. Yet I have been puzzled, over the past two weeks, to see no prominent press coverage of this rather dramatic announcement – nor of the quite surprising series of endorsements that came out of that convention, some of them in direct contravention of the evident wishes of party leaders.

I am not challenging Mr. MacDonald’s denial that he received a large personal “bribe.”

Such denials carry several risks, however. First, they draw attention to an accusation that few in the room (including me) had likely previously heard of. Secondly, they invite reporters of even normal curiosity to ask the deny-er “Who made that accusation?” and then – far more importantly – to focus in on the very SPECIFICITY of that denial.

“OK, Michael, taking it as a given that you didn’t ACCEPT such a bribe, has anyone OFFERED you any payment in search of that outcome?”

Possibly followed up with “Sheriff Lombardo certainly has surfaced with surprising rapidity in recent weeks as the apparent favorite in this race – especially for a guy not generally known up till now as a great Trump-style MAGA Republican, anxious for everyone to own an assault rifle with 30-round magazines and for a massive crackdown and deportation of illegal aliens. That only happens if someone’s behind such a suddenly ascendant candidate to the tune of the odd million dollars. . . .

“So, leaving aside any talk of personal BRIBES, have any amounts of money in that range been offered to the state Republican Party, or found their way into the coffers of the state Republican Party, in hopes of, um . . . greasing the wheels to help Mr. Lombardo find his way to your party’s nomination?”

I don’t know the answer. But since the chairman brought the subject up so dramatically, shouldn’t someone ask?

The office of Clark County Sheriff is supposedly non-partisan. Less than a year ago, it’s unlikely most Nevadans even knew Sheriff Joe Lombardo was a Republican. He certainly was not known for his activism in Republican Party circles. If there was any general consensus about Joe Lombardo, it was that there was something very odd – perhaps even creepy – about his nervous “No questions” press conferences following the mass shootings at a music festival adjoining the Mandalay Bay Hotel along the Las Vegas Strip on Oct. 1, 2017, when “lone shooter” Stephen Paddock is asserted to have killed 60 festival-goers and wounded 411 – during which time both the casino’s unarmed rent-a-cops and Metro’s finest somehow failed to locate and bust into the shooter’s 32nd-floor hotel suite for, like . . . hours.

The reluctance to make early public disclosure of all hotel and hallway surveillance footage, the curious development that no maid had apparently entered Paddock’s room for many days (simply because he left a “Do Not Disturb” sign hanging on his door), Sheriff Lombardo’s rather embarrassing perceived need to “update” (which is to say, “change”) the official time line of events . . . even later questions about what happened to funds raised supposedly to help survivors and victims’ families . . . did not make Sheriff Lombardo the Hero of the Hour in the public perception.

Let’s face it: The Las Vegas economy is dominated by the giant hotel-casinos. Clark County sheriffs may wear uniforms, but they’re more political office-holders than “cops,” and they’re generally understood to do the casinos’ bidding (allowing casino security to “back room” advantage card players; “failing to notice” the droves of illegal aliens working at these properties) – many being rewarded with high-paid “security” jobs by these same big corporations after they retire.

Yet today, less than five years later, Joe “No Questions” Lombardo is widely – and almost overnight – considered the front-runner for the Republican nomination to challenge enormously unpopular Democrat Governor (and former Clark County Commissioner) Steve Sisolak, the guy who allowed thousands of Nevadans to die on ventilators under the deadly “CDC Protocols” after he (Sisolak) banned Nevada physicians from using cheap, effective therapeutics including Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19.

(No, no one knows where he got statutory or constitutional authority to ban those drugs. He just did. Then Sisolak was caught buying them up and hoarding them in case they might be needed in the prisons. My personal presumption is that Tinkerbelle could defeat Steve Sisolak next November. . . . even if she comes out as a tranny.)

Why is “No Questions” Lombardo suddenly leading in these alleged “polls”? Because someone has thrown a huge chunk of money into his campaign, obviously. Who? Anyone who’s covered Nevada politics for as much as a couple of years would have to be playing dumb to fail to name the two most obvious suspects – the owners of Las Vegas’ major hotel-casinos (the state’s biggest industry), and/or the powerful Culinary Union, which represents many, many of those hotel-casinos’ employees, an arrangement which curiously ends up being more advantageous for the union’s bosses than for their menial-level rank and file.

Why? Leave aside for the moment the suspicion that Joe Lombardo “carried the casinos’ water” to keep the “narrative” of the 2017 mass shooting under control. Long before that, for decades, these interests have tried to arrange things so someone they can trust to do their bidding – to not upset the apple cart when it comes to the many low-wage illegal aliens they employ to keep their room rates down, for instance – occupies BOTH the Democrat and Republican ballots for governor. (Tax-hiking Brian Sandoval was a “Republican”? Hoo-hah!)

(A kind of a “Can’t Lose” proposition. What the sports books call “a middle” – the kind of situation that can arise if – presuming Dallas beats Denver by exactly 10 points – the house gets to keep ALL BETS.)

Note what Mr. MacDonald did NOT deny. Have large sums of money flowed to the Nevada Republican Party (quite legally, for all I know) in an effort to help assure a primary victory for Sheriff Lombardo in the party’s June 14 primary? The chairman could have denied THAT. But he did not. Further, he could have declared that to PROVE the party was a pure as Caesar’s wife, he was instructing the party’s Endorsement Committee to THROW OPEN the convention’s endorsement vote for governor.

Shouldn’t he have taken a step like that, before he got around to asserting that anyone who questions him and the leaders of his party on the odd ascendancy of Joe Lombardo can expect to “go home in a body bag”?

But he did not.

THE COMMITTEE RECOMMENDED AN ENDORSEMENT VOTE FOR JOE LOMBARDO . . . ONLY

Instead, a few hours later, many of the delegates received the party’s official list of “Endorsement Recommendations.” (These were supposedly an attachment which could be accessed via an email we were supposed to have received “on our device.” I was home checking my email at midnight the night before. No email, no attachments. I had to borrow a printout from a delegate from another county. A rather odd level of secrecy, I thought. How much would it have cost to print out a hundred copies and stack them at the back of the room, given that delegates had collectively shelled out more than $57,000 to attend?)

We were told these recommendations were based on months-long scrutiny of each candidate’s adherence to the party platform (including “social media posts,” etc.), as well as a gauging of their “electability” based on financing, campaign staff. Etc. Significantly, the delegates were not told how those factor were WEIGHTED.

Whereas the Endorsement Committee, chaired by former Nye County Chairman Joe Burdzinski, recommended endorsing TWO candidates for U.S. Senate (Sam Brown and Adam Laxalt), and no fewer than FOUR candidates for Lieutenant Governor (Tom Grady, Stavros Anthony, Dan Schwartz, and John Miller), the committee recommended that only ONE candidate receive the delegates’ endorsement for governor, that being . . .

. . . Joe Lombardo.

Joe Lombardo.

That’s nuts. Joe Lombardo now claims to be “pro-Second Amendment.” But it doesn’t take much work to find articles from 2016 in which the head of the Nevada Firearms Coalition was criticizing Lombardo for his gun-control positions:

( https://360newslasvegas.com/sheriff-joe-lombardos-call-for-ban-on-high-capacity-gun-magazines-in-nevada-drawing-fire-from-gun-rights-group/ ), . . .

. . . calling for limits on the size of pistol and rifle magazines (for everyone but his Boys in Beige, of course) banning certain firearms, allowing his men to seize firearms without due process under “red flag” laws, etc.

More significantly, candidate Lombardo now claims to agree with the GOP platform on enforcing our Immigration laws. But as sheriff in 2019 he WITHDREW the Metropolitan Police Department’s formal cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 287(g) program, in which officers run an arrested individual’s information through the ICE database, then detaining illegal aliens for pickup by the federal immigration enforcers.

(See: https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/opinion-columns/victor-joecks/victor-joecks-lombardo-duped-illegal-immigration-activists-2491069/ . . . or . . .

https://360newslasvegas.com/ice-stands-by-illegal-alien-detainer-reports-regarding-sheriff-lombardo/ . . . )

After a thousand hours of digging – over a period of MONTHS – former Nye County Chairman Joe Burdzinski’s committee failed to find any of this stuff?

Furthermore, in seven years as Clark County Sheriff, Joe Lombardo has never launched or cooperated in a SINGLE known raid of the major hotels along the Las Vegas Strip, rounding up for deportation the thousands of illegal aliens employed there as maids and kitchen helpers – many of whom the Culinary Union has even registered to vote, whereupon the union brags about driving such illegals to “early voting stations” in supermarket parking lots the week before election day.

(Busing illegals to the polls in Clark County? See:

https://lasvegassun.com/news/2016/oct/29/unions-flex-muscle-in-nevadas-high-stakes-senate-r/

Illegal aliens pressured to register & vote in Las Vegas? See:

https://vinsuprynowicz.com/?p=4562 )

Fortunately, convention delegates at Palace Station April 30 ignored not only the unlikely notion that Joe Lombardo believes in and would work to implement the Republican platform and agenda, but also the notion that such rivals as activist attorney Joey Gilbert, former U.S. Sen. Dean Heller, and North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee (NONE OF WHOM WERE RECOMMENDED FOR ENDORSEMENT BY THE OFFICIAL PARTY COMMITTEE) somehow would NOT. The delegates endorsed Joey Gilbert by a whopping two-to-one margin . . .

. . . and REJECTED the recommendation they were spoon-fed by the Party apparatus, that they should endorse poseur Joe Lombardo and ONLY poseur Joe Lombardo. In the end, the delegates gave “No Questions” Lombardo less than 40 percent support, at which point his dozens of young supporters, sporting brand new red-on-black Lombardo T-shirts, stood up and shuffled out of the room, never to be seen again.

A ‘GIMME’ FOR RINO AMODEI, WHILE CHALLENGER DANNY TARKANIAN GETS STIFFED. WAS IT SOMETHING AMY SAID?

But that wasn’t the Endorsement Committee’s only odd recommendation. In Northern Nevada, the committee recommended endorsing 11-year-incumbent Congressman Mark Amodei – despite the fact Amodei was the very first Republican Congressman to urge the impeachment of Donald Trump over the laughably bogus “Ukraine phone call” allegations – while said committee completely ignored Second District MAGA challenger and elected GOP Douglas County Commissioner Danny Tarkanian.

Tarkanian’s wife, former Nevada Republican Party Chairwoman Amy Tarkanian, took the floor and explained she and her husband had received no email offering to let Tarkanian fill out a questionnaire; that they had never been invited to take part in an oral interview with Mr. Burdzinzki’s official Endorsement Committee, that the endorsement committee had ignored her husband’s candidacy entirely. (Mr. Tarkanian’s challenge was not obscure — the Tarkanian family are Nevada celebrities.)

She received no satisfaction. The delegates were offered no opportunity to endorse Mr. Tarkanian in the Second District Congressional race.

I thought maybe Mr. Tarkanian was exaggerating when he says Amodei believes President Trump “was responsible” for the riot started by the FBI agents provocateurs (none of whom have been called before Nancy Pelosi’s sham committee, let alone arrested or jailed) at the Capitol in Washington City on Jan. 6, AND that Amodei was the first House Republican to support the bogus Trump “Ukraine phone call” impeachment.

But Tarkanian has audio to support the first assertion. And it takes only seconds to confirm Amodei’s treachery as the FIRST Republican House member to embrace the ridiculously trumped-up “Ukraine phone call impeachment.” (See, among others):

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-amodei-1st-house-republican-to-support-trump-impeachment-inquiry-2019-9?op=1

Never having voted in Northern Nevada, I’d just presumed Mark Amodei was a standard – if rather quiet – conservative GOP back-bencher. In fact, it turns out he’s long been a supporter of “DACA Amnesty,” in which any illegal alien who can claim to have arrived here before age 35 would be granted a “path to citizenship.”

Beyond that, on Nov. 15, 2019, Rob Lauer wrote at . . . : https://360newslasvegas.com/nv-rep-mark-amodei-promoting-new-amnesty-program-for-illegal-aliens/ . . . :

“Nevada’s sole Republican Congressman, Mark Amodei, voted with Nancy Pelosi on February 14, 2019 and against President Trump for a bill friendly to Cartels and human traffickers. According to Conservative Review ‘Perhaps the worst aspect of this law is a section that will grant de facto amnesty to illegal immigrants. Section 224(a) prohibits the deportation of anyone who is sponsoring an “unaccompanied” minor illegal alien – or who says they might sponsor a UAC, or lives in a household with a UAC, or a household that potentially might sponsor a UAC.’”

See Tarkanian’s rundown on Amodei at : https://www.realmarkamodei.com/

AMODEI VOTES FOR BIDEN’S $40 BILLION – WITH A ‘B’ – IN UKRAINE KICKBACK PORK

But the last straw for me was when Mark Amodei, the ONLY REPUBLICAN remaining in Nevada’s Congressional delegation (Thanks, Culinary Union!), voted on May 10 FOR the Democrats’ corrupt $40 billion Ukraine “kickback” scheme, without our representatives even being given time to read it, let alone debate it:

(See the official tally, at: https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2022145 .)

For 10 years, Republicans have been moaning “Oh, Nancy Pelosi didn’t give anyone time to read ObamaCare.”

And now this? When the Democrats’ massive spending combined with Joe Biden’s single-handed shutdown of the American energy industry have created a hyper-inflation that’s leaving American families unable to afford both gasoline and food?

$40 billion for the most corrupt shitshow in Europe (in which our NATO allies are funding the Russian army by paying for their natural gas in Rubles, BECAUSE BIDEN HAS SHUT DOWN OUR OWN OIL AND GAS PRODUCTION . . . yet such monstrously inflationary allocations of moneys WE DON’T HAVE provide not a dime to desperate American moms who can’t find baby formula?

(Baby formula shortage: https://rumble.com/v14csrl-baby-formula-shortage-felt-across-the-country.html .)

(Biden regime shipping palettes of baby formula to illegal aliens at border, rather than to American moms:

$40 billion is larger than Russia’s annual military budget. What’s the purpose? The neocon morons in charge in Washington are willing to risk a nuclear war with Russia over a stalemate that can’t be won, any more than France and England could win THEIR Crimean War in 1856. When’s the next “Charge of the Light Brigade”?

The United States has no conceivable geopolitical interest in Ukraine. We used to laugh at William Randolph Hearst responding to a reporter in Cuba, who reported there was no war there, “Stay on site; I will provide war.” Yet that’s precisely the kind of ginned-up, press-generated hysteria we’re now being fed.

How much will get kicked back to the Biden Crime Family (including “The Big Guy”) – all of whom are already unregistered agents of Ukraine and Red China to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, cackling with glee as they busily destroy this nation and our economy at the instructions of their foreign bosses?

Imagine what $40 billion could do at the southern border of the United States of America. As Boris Epshteyn says, “We will not forget who voted for this”:

( https://rumble.com/v14cro5-the-cowardice-of-the-house-gop-wboris-epshteyn.html .)

Remember, Democrats said $11 billion was “too much” to finish our own Mexican border wall!

And it now appears most of these billions won’t even GO to Ukraine — the bulk will be handed direct to U.S. “Defense” contractors to build stuff that the Russians will dutifully blow up as it makes its way from Poland to the Nazi legions (yes, complete with swastikas) that we’re supporting in East Ukraine, and to the CIA.

Yes, billions of this money we don’t have (Biden and Co. just borrow it, driving up interest rates and inflation) is going to the CIA. Why? The guys who sign letters insisting the Hunter Biden laptop is “Russian disinformation” need MORE dark money to mess around in our domestic politics, defending the Deep State Decepticons against the purifying effects of exposure to sunlight?

Bannon & Epshteyn on the insanity of $40 billion to Ukraine:

https://rumble.com/v14ei3y-defies-logic-epshteyn-and-bannon-rips-dc-for-sending-40-billion-to-ukraine.html

I know what I did in response to Amodei’s treacherous vote, betraying the long-suffering middle class of America – including young moms who these days can’t even find baby formula on the shelves:

I went to Tarkanian for Nevada, at https://www.tarkfornv.com/about-danny , and donated all I could to Danny Tarkanian.

Go therefore, yourselves, and do the same.

3 Comments to “Before anyone could ask why Nevada Republican leaders favor the likes of Joe Lombardo and Mark Amodei (to the exclusion of any challenger), party chairman opened the gathering with ‘I was not bribed!’”

  1. Kingsnake Says:

    Democrats are the enemy, but I — a conservative — hate the GOP. It is an unsalvageable whore house of pigs rooting in Democrat shit for crumbs of financial sustenance. The GOP had the presidency, House and Senate 2017-18, and rather than un-screw The Lightbringer’s malfeasance, they … stabbed Trump in the back. Repeatedly. Then again when the Democrats stole the 2020 election. Utterly useless and unreformable. I refuse to ever vote for any Republican again, no matter how dedicated to the Constitution, or financial probity, they might otherwise appear to be. *If* I bother to vote again, it will be to whatever obscure 9th party candidate seems best to represent my interests. It is not until the GOP is eradicated that we can truly fight the evil that is the Democrat party …

  2. Vin Says:

    Hi, Kingsnake — How shall we enumerate the denizens of Washington City who are now so gleefuly attempting to destroy America? This is no longer just a debate between two factions with differing views about how to make things BETTER for Americans. No.

    How large a majority now controlling Congress now gleefully works to import (and promptly “amnesty” millions of illegal aliens including foreign male terrorists of combat age without a health inspection or any requirement that they even PRETEND to embrace our founding principles, in violation of laws they’ve sworn to enforce and of the Constitutionally embedded requirement that the central government enforce Vattell’s “Law of Nations,” which states any sovereign nation can and must block such invasions (and which my friends the Koch-funded Libertarian Open-Borders Purity Police refuse to even find & read)?

    How large a majority of those who have now taken control of our coercion-based youth propaganda camps (“public schools”) and lying corporate-owned propaganda organs (“the mass media”) now seek to impose a twisted, demonic regime in which green-haired “non-binary” teachers and “counselors” now seek to indoctrinate CHILDREN UNDER AGE 15 that they are “girls born into boys’ bodies” (or vice versa), that boys should wear dresses and submit themselves to chemical castration without parental consent? (which doesn’t seem to be working all that well, given the number of 14-year-old girls now being raped and buggered by boys wearing dresses in their middle-school girls’ rooms.)

    How many continue to shriek and ululate about the long-discredited dark fantasy of “Catastrastphic Man-Made Global Warming” (hey, all them polar bears extinct, yet?) to justify destroying our fantastically clean energy industry and — with it — our entire interconnected economy? They’re mad. If these were slavering dogs approaching our pets or children, we’d shoot them. Bumbling Joe Biden says he’s working on figuring out why there’s no diesel fuel . . . which could have been refined from Canadian crude that he’s blocked from moving south through the Keystone Pipeline . . . and in the same week he cancels more oil leases in Alaska, on federal lands and in the Gulf of Mexico? While “Energy Secretary” Pete Buttplug apparently believes the freight trains and semi trucks that should be delivering baby formula to the stores can run on wind-powered sails . . . or maybe solar panels?

    (I know: Let’s load a 50-pound sack of baby formula in the back of each of a million little battery-powered golf carts . . . )

    How many now conspire to strip away the medical liceneses of any doctors or other medical workers who insist on providing early treatment with safe and effective therapeutics (ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine) while declining to join the frenetic CDC campaign to murder hundreds of thousands of Americans by administering Kidney Failure by Prescription (“Remdesivir”) and hooking us up on ventilators which often cause death by stroke or heart attack within hours, causing America to have more deaths attributed to “COVID-19” than any other nation?

    ( https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/05/1-million-covid-deaths-real-reason-people-died-covid-united-states-every-country/ .)

    Who ever imagined government would join with “Big Tech” censors (probably even providing them with masses of free or low-cost CIA servers) to empanel vast swarms of “Truth Police” to make sure the vast majority of TV-watching, Twatter-following Americans remain totally unaware of all of the above, as they are equally unaware that the 2020 election was stolen, Joe Biden the senile crook INSTALLED in the White House by means so blatant that they are now detailed WITH IRREFUTABLE ELECTRONIC AND VIDEO EVIDENCE in feature-length documentary films . . . which the Mainstream Media are forbidden from even mentioning?

    (Hint: Use your usual search engine to try and find the film “2000 Mules.” Or listen and see if Tucker Carlson is allowed to mention the film on “Fox News,” even when interviewing the woman who researched it. Now look up that film at Yandex.com . Did you ever imagine your best source of uncensored information would be a RUSSIAN search engine?)

    I would say a sensible guess is about 83 percent of Congress — all the Democrats and two-thirds of the self-styled “Republicans” — are among the ranks of this demonic enemy. Among federal EMPLOYEES in Washington, D&C, — virtually none of whom can ever really be fired — the percentage may be even higher. (Good luck putting these traitors on trial before Washington juries.)

    Short of an endless stream of wagons hauling all these people to the guillotine, how do we rescue American sovereignty and liberty?

    Yes, the challenge is even harder when there are so many traitors (with “R”s after their names) among us. During the Battle of the Bulge, German spies infiltrated behind our lines, changing road signs and mis-directing traffic, But our boys did not give up. They started asking anyone in a nice new uniform if they could report who won the World Series, One of our generals was held for hours because he insisted on answering such a “test” question by stating the capiatal of Illinois was Springfield — while the G.I.s holding him knew it was Chicago.

    But have we lost, already? Do you really think Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and Doug Mastriano and a hundred other brand new MAGA candidates and even Donald Trump, himself — impefect as he may be — are on the Other Side?

    I decided last September to engage in an experiment. I’ll devote a year or more to see if there’s any way through my own, minimal efforts and resources that I can help purge enough RINO Decepticons, and promote enough patriot candidates of character, to make a difference.

    Donald Trump considered forming a third party. He decided it couldn’t be done in a short enough time frame, in an America conditioned for 150 years to vote either “D” or “R.” Based on the 50-year lack of (significant) electoral success of the Libertarian Party, I can’t say he’s wrong.

    You may of course sit out this last, desperate battle. Total success is not only not guaranteed, it’s unlikely. I have never ridiculed those who say “Don’t vote — it only encourages them.” If we merely wait to see who Mitch McConnell and Liz Chemey and Mike Pence and company offer us next fall, it may indeed be awfully late.

    Maybe there really isn’t any longer a solution other than to shoot the cute little nurse they eventually send to your door to smile and say “Our records show your shots aren’t up-to-date — no way to track you without that implant, you silly old man — and there’s a disturbing report here you may have been visiting some Unapproved Web sites, as well. I’m afraid I’ll have to check your computer. . . .”

    I just keep hearing this distant whisper, something about “erecting a multitude of New Offices, and sending hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance,” while “depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury” . . .

    . . . a distant voice which seems to say that even though prudence “will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed,” when “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government. . . .”

    . . . long before that little nurse shows up at my door.

    We’ll see.

    — V.S.

  3. Kingsnake Says:

    Yep.

    And, ultimately, no matter which party is elected, it is the unelected bureaucracy — the Swamp — who REALLY run things. And, if they don’t like the decisions made by those we elect to change things — like Trump — will ignore him at best, be insubordinate, or even traitorous, at worst. I’m not sure we can elect our way out of that. At some point, all empires collapse, the only question is the USA the Western or Eastern Roman Empire?