Victor Davis Hanson: collected lectures - The 4 Freedoms Library2024-03-28T16:15:15Zhttp://4freedoms.com/forum/topics/victor-davis-hansen-collected-lectures?groupUrl=us&commentId=3766518%3AComment%3A207052&groupId=3766518%3AGroup%3A1416&feed=yes&xn_auth=noAre We the Byzantines?
52 Co…tag:4freedoms.com,2023-03-23:3766518:Comment:2783052023-03-23T16:26:20.818ZAlan Lakehttp://4freedoms.com/profile/AlanLake
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<h1 class="entry-title">Are We the Byzantines?</h1>
<div class="entry-meta"><span class="comments-link"><a href="https://victorhanson.com/are-we-the-byzantines/#comments">52 Comments</a><span> </span></span>/<span> </span><span class="posted-on"><span class="published">March 16, 2023</span></span></div>
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<div class="entry-content clear"><p>Victor Davis Hanson<br></br><em>American Greatness</em></p>
<p>When Constantinople finally fell…</p>
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<h1 class="entry-title">Are We the Byzantines?</h1>
<div class="entry-meta"><span class="comments-link"><a href="https://victorhanson.com/are-we-the-byzantines/#comments">52 Comments</a><span> </span></span>/<span> </span><span class="posted-on"><span class="published">March 16, 2023</span></span></div>
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<div class="entry-content clear"><p>Victor Davis Hanson<br/><em>American Greatness</em></p>
<p>When Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the Byzantine Empire and its capital had survived for 1,000 years <em>beyond</em> the fall of the Western Empire at Rome.</p>
<p>Always outnumbered in a sea of enemies, the Byzantines’ survival had depended on its realist diplomacy of dividing its enemies, avoiding military quagmires, and ensuring constant deterrence.</p>
<p>Generations of self-sacrifice ensured ample investment for infrastructure. Each generation inherited and improved on singular aqueducts and cisterns, sewer systems, and the most complex and formidable city fortifications in the world.</p>
<p>Brilliant scientific advancement and engineering gave the empire advantages like swift galleys and flame throwers—an ancient precursor to napalm.</p>
<p>The law reigned supreme for nearly a millennium after the emperor Justinian codified a prior thousand years of Roman jurisprudence.</p>
<p>Yet this millennium-old crown jewel of the ancient world that once was home to 800,000 citizens had only 50,000 inhabitants left when it fell.</p>
<p>There were only 7,000 defenders on the walls to hold back a huge Turkish army of over 150,000 attackers.</p>
<p>The Islamic winners took over the once magical city of Constantine and renamed it Istanbul. It had been the home of the renowned Santa Sophia, the largest Christian church in the world for over 900 years. Almost immediately, this “Church of the Holy Wisdom” was converted into the then largest mosque in the Islamic world, with minarets to follow.</p>
<p>So what happened to the once indomitable city fortress and its empire?</p>
<p>Christendom had cannibalized itself. Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy fought endlessly. Westerners often hated each other more than they did their common enemy.</p>
<p>In the final days of Constantinople, almost no help was sent from Western Europe to the besieged city.</p>
<p>In fact, 250 years earlier, the Western Franks of the Fourth Crusade had detoured from the Holy Land to storm the supposedly allied Christian City of Constantinople.</p>
<p>Then they ransacked the city and hijacked the Byzantine Empire for a half-century. Constantinople never quite recovered.</p>
<p>The 14 th-century Black Plague killed tens of thousands of Byzantines and scared thousands more into moving out of the cramped city.</p>
<p>But the aging and dying empire battled more than the challenges of internal divisions, or an unforeseen but deadly pandemic and the empire’s disastrous responses to it.</p>
<p>The last generations of Byzantines had inherited a global reputation and standard of living that they themselves no longer earned.</p>
<p>They neglected their former civic values and fought endless battles over obscure religious texts, doctrines, and vocabulary.</p>
<p>They did not expand their anemic army and navy. They did not reunite their scattered Greek-speaking empire. They did not properly maintain their once life-giving walls.</p>
<p>Instead of earning money through their accustomed nonstop trade, they inflated their currency and were forced to melt down the city’s inherited gold and silver fixtures.</p>
<p>The once canny and shrewd Byzantines grew smug and naïve. Childlessness became common. Most now preferred to live outside of what had become a half-empty, often dirty, and poorly maintained city.</p>
<p>Meanwhile they underestimated the growing power of the Ottomans who systematically pruned away their empire. By the mid-15th century Islamic armies were ready to exploit fatal Byzantine weaknesses.</p>
<p>The Sultan Mehmed II grandly announced the Ottomans were now the real, the only world power. Ascendent Ottoman armies would eventually move on to the very gates of Vienna in an effort to rule all the lands of the ancient Roman empire.</p>
<p>We should take heed from the last generations of the Byzantines.</p>
<p>Nowhere is it foreordained that America has a birthright to remain the world’s preeminent civilization.</p>
<p>An ascendent China seems eerily similar to the Ottomans.<span> </span><a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-china-watcher/2021/03/11/beijings-visions-of-american-decline-492064">Beijing believes that the United States is decadent</a>, undeserving of its affluence, living beyond its means on the fumes of the past—and very soon vulnerable enough to challenge openly.</p>
<p>Left and Right seem to hate each other more than they do their common enemies.</p>
<p>Like the Byzantines, Americans gave up defending their own borders, and simply shrugged as millions overran them as they pleased.</p>
<p>Our once iconic downtowns, like end-stage Constantinople before the fall, are now dirty, half-deserted, dangerous, and dysfunctional.</p>
<p>America prints rather than makes money, as its banks totter near bankruptcy.</p>
<p>Americans similarly believe they are invincible without ensuring in reality that they are.<span> </span><a href="https://victorhanson.com/how-to-erode-the-worlds-greatest-military/">Our military</a><span> </span>is more worried about being woke than deadly.</p>
<p>Like Byzantines, Americans have become snarky iconoclasts, more eager to tear down art and sculpture that they no longer have the talent to create.</p>
<p>Current woke dogma, obscure word fights, and sanctimonious cancel culture are as antithetical to the past generations of World War II as the last generation of Constantinople was to the former great eras of the emperors Constantine, Justinian, Heraclius, and Leo.</p>
<p>The Byzantines never woke up in time to understand what they had become.</p>
<p>So far neither have Americans.</p>
<p><a href="https://victorhanson.com/are-we-the-byzantines/" target="_blank">https://victorhanson.com/are-we-the-byzantines/</a></p>
</div> Victor Davis Hanson: The Amer…tag:4freedoms.com,2021-07-20:3766518:Comment:2727852021-07-20T21:22:07.130ZAlan Lakehttp://4freedoms.com/profile/AlanLake
<h1 class="ArticleFull_title__2cUI6">Victor Davis Hanson: The American Descent Into Madness</h1>
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<div class="ArticleFull_headerFooter__authorInfo__huJvw"><img alt="Tyler Durden's Photo" class="ArticleFull_headerFooter__authorPhoto__2G1M8" src="https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com/s3fs-public/styles/thumbnail/public/pictures/picture-5.jpg"></img><div class="ArticleFull_headerFooter__author__2Ch4r">BY TYLER DURDEN</div>
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<div class="ArticleFull_headerFooter__date__3T7FN">MONDAY, JUL 19, 2021 - 06:40 PM…</div>
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<h1 class="ArticleFull_title__2cUI6">Victor Davis Hanson: The American Descent Into Madness</h1>
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<div class="ArticleFull_headerFooter__authorInfo__huJvw"><img class="ArticleFull_headerFooter__authorPhoto__2G1M8" alt="Tyler Durden's Photo" src="https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com/s3fs-public/styles/thumbnail/public/pictures/picture-5.jpg"/><div class="ArticleFull_headerFooter__author__2Ch4r">BY TYLER DURDEN</div>
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<div class="ArticleFull_headerFooter__date__3T7FN">MONDAY, JUL 19, 2021 - 06:40 PM</div>
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<div class="NodeContent_mainContent__38L44"><div class="NodeContent_body__2clki NodeBody_container__1M6aJ"><p><a href="https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/18/the-american-descent-into-madness/"><em>Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,</em></a></p>
<p><strong><em>America went from the freest country in the world in December 2019 to a repressive and frightening place by July 2021. How did that happen?</em></strong></p>
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<p><strong>Nations have often gone mad in a matter of months.<span> </span></strong>The French abandoned their supposedly idealistic revolutionary project and turned it into a monstrous hell for a year between July 1793 and 1794. After the election of November 1860, in a matter of weeks, Americans went from thinking secession was taboo to visions of killing the greatest number of their fellow citizens on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Mao’s China went from a failed communist state to the ninth circle of Dante’s <em>Inferno</em>, when he unleashed the Cultural Revolution in 1966.</p>
<p>In the last six months, we have seen absurdities never quite witnessed in modern America.<span> </span><strong>Madness, not politics, defines it.<span> </span></strong>There are three characteristics of all these upheavals. One, the events are unsustainable. They will either cease or they will destroy the nation, at least as we know it. Two, the law has largely been rendered meaningless. Three, left-wing political agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them.</p>
<h3><strong>Citizenship as Mere Residency</strong></h3>
<p>Two million people are anticipated to cross the southern border, <em>en masse</em> and illegally, over a 12-month period. If that absurdity were to continue, we would be adding the equivalent of a major U.S. city every year. The new arrivals have three things in common: Their first act was to break U.S. law by entering the country. Their second was to break the law by residing here illegally. And their third will be to find false identification or other illegal means to continue breaking the law. One does not arrive as a guest in a foreign country and immediately violate the laws of his host—unless one holds those laws in contempt.</p>
<p>Arrivals now cross a border that had been virtually closed to illegal immigration by January 2021. In the cynical and immoral logic of illegal immigration (that cares little for the concerns either of would-be legal immigrants or U.S. citizens), arrivals will be dependent upon the state and thus become constituents of progressives who engineered their arrival.</p>
<p>Yet the issue is not illegal immigration <em>per se</em>. If protests were to continue in Cuba, and 1 million Cubans boated to Miami, the Biden Administration would stop the influx, in terror that so many anti-Communists might tip Florida red forever.</p>
<p>How strange that the U.S. government is considering going door-to-door to bully the unvaccinated, even as it ignores the daily influx of thousands from Mexico and Latin America, without worrying whether they are carrying or vaccinated for COVID-19. Meanwhile, the progressive media shrilly warns that the new Delta Variant of the virus is exploding south of the border. Note how the administration applies standards to its own citizens that it does not apply to foreign nationals illegally entering the country.</p>
<h3><strong>Crime as Construct</strong></h3>
<p>Crime is another current absurdity. There exists a mini-industry of internet videos depicting young people, disproportionately African American males, stealing luxury goods from Nieman-Marcus in San Francisco, clearing a shelf from a Walgreens with impunity, or assaulting Asian Americans. These iconic moments may be unrepresentative of reality, but given the mass transfers and retirements of police, and the frightening statistics of large increases in violent crime in certain cities, the popular conception is now entrenched that it is dangerous to walk in our major metropolises, either by day or at night. Chicago has turned into Tombstone or Dodge City in the popular imagination.</p>
<p>Scarier still is the realization that if one is robbed, assaulted, or finds one’s car vandalized, it is near certain the miscreant will never be held to account. Either the police have pulled back and find arrests of criminals a lose-lose situation, or radical big-city district attorneys see the law as a critical legal theory construct, and thus will not enforce it. Or the criminal will be arrested and released within hours.</p>
<p>So a subculture has developed among Americans, of passing information about where in the country it is safe, where it is not, and where one can go, where one cannot. This is clearly not America, but something bizarre out of Sao Paulo, Durban, or Caracas.</p>
<h3><strong>The Campus Con</strong></h3>
<p>The universities over the past 40 years were intolerant, hard Left, and increasingly anti-constitutional. But they also fostered a golden-goose confidence scheme that administrators dared not injure, given the precious eggs of federally guaranteed student loans that ensured zero academic accountability and sent tuition costs into the stratosphere. There was an unquestioned supposition that a degree of any sort, of any major, was the ticket to American success. In cynical fashion, we shrugged that most prestigious institutions were little more than cattle branders that stamped graduates with imprints that gave them unearned privilege for life.</p>
<p>Yet universities now have both hands around their golden goose’s neck and are determined to strangle it. The public is becoming repulsed at the woke McCarthyite culture on campus, and will be more turned off when campuses open in the fall in 2019-style. At the Ivy League or major state university campuses, admissions are no longer based on proportional representation in the context of affirmative action, but are defined increasingly by a reparatory character.</p>
<p>Grades, test scores, and “activities” of the white and Asian male college applicants are growing less relevant. Only “privileged” white males with sports skills, connections, or families who give lots of money are exempt from the new racial reparation quotas. The new woke admission policy ironically is targeting the liberal suburban professional family, the Left’s constituency, whose lives are so fixated on whether children graduate from Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, or like campuses.</p>
<p>Given the radical change in incoming student profiles, the faculty increasingly will have to choose between accusations of racism, or grading regardless of actual performance, given thousands of new enrollees do not meet the entrance standards of just two or three years ago. Remember that since wokeism was always a top-down elite industry, minority progressives still will fight it out with white leftists in intramural scraps over titles, salaries, and managerial posts.</p>
<p>The public has had enough. For the first time, people will ask why are we subsidizing student loans, why are multibillion-dollar endowments not taxed, and why do we think a B.A. in sociology or psychology or gender studies is an “investment” that prepares anyone for anything?</p>
<h3><strong>Commissars and Jacobins</strong></h3>
<p>The critical race theory craze is reaching peak woke, or is already on the downslope. No complex and sophisticated society is sustainable with a Maoist creed of cannibalizing citizens for thought crimes. Commissars do not produce anything or serve anybody, but only monitor thoughts and speech to ascertain the purity of diversity, equity, and inclusion. They are not just a drain on the productive sector but will insidiously destroy it, since their currency is to ensure a timid, obsequiousness and banal orthodoxy.</p>
<p>We know from the failed Soviet system and from the French Revolution that the most mediocre in society became its most eager auditors of correct behavior. The arbiters of proper thought—the self-righteous paid toady, the perpetual victim employed in service to government payback, the freelancing snitch—were always the villains of freedom, productivity, and humanity, whether we read of the killing off of Alexander the Great’s inner circle, the forced suicides of the Neronian circle, the Jacobin murder spree, or the nightmarish world described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.</p>
<p>That the Biden Administration has now joined with Silicon Valley to hunt down on social media any dissenters from this month’s official policy on vaccinations and mask-wearing was not so shocking as to be expected from a media that banned coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In Cuban-fashion, millions of judge-jury-executioner online snitches, with government encouragement, will help root out incorrect thoughts at light speed.</p>
<h3><strong>Inflation Is a Mere Construct</strong></h3>
<p>We used to know what inflation was, its pernicious role in past civilizations, and how to combat it. The danger of worthless currency is a staple of classical literature from Aristophanes to Procopius. The scary fact is not just that we are destroying the value of our money—the exploding price of gas, food, appliances, lumber, power, and housing are overwhelming even Joe Biden’s entitlement machine—but that we are constructing pseudoeconomics to justify the nihilism.</p>
<p>Right now, we witness a multitrillion-dollar fight over borrowing beyond our $30 trillion debt to build “infrastructure,” a word that has been expanded to include mostly anything <em>but</em> roads and bridges. What exactly is so liberal about the farmworker paying $5 a gallon for gas to commute to the fields, the small contractor doing a remodeling job with plywood at $80 a sheet, or the young couple whose loan qualification is always a month behind the soaring price of a new home?</p>
<h3><strong>Our People’s Military</strong></h3>
<p>Americans during this entire descent in madness sighed, “Well, at least there is the military left.” By that, I think they meant John Brennan had all but wrecked the CIA, while James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Kevin Clinesmith, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page, et al. had weaponized the FBI. But the military was still a bastion of traditional, nonpartisan service, whose prime directive was to defend the country, win any war it was ordered to fight, and to maintain deterrence against opportunistic enemies. It was not envisioned as a “people’s army.” It was not a revolutionary Napoleonic “nation in arms.” And it was not a “liberation army.” The Constitution, 233 years of tradition, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice all reassured America of its wonderful defense forces.</p>
<p>And now? We are in the process of a massive reeducation and indoctrination campaign. The revamping not only draws scarce resources away from military readiness, but targets, without evidence, the white working class, and defames it as insurrectionary—the very same cohort that disproportionately died in Afghanistan and Iraq.</p>
<p>If only General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Admiral Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations, had been as animated, as combative, and as fired up in congressional testimony about winning in Afghanistan or deterring the Chinese in the waters off Taiwan as they were in defense of their recommended lists of Marxist-inspired critical race theory texts!</p>
<p>One purpose of the Uniform Code of Military Justice was not to prevent retired top brass from attacking beloved presidents, or even blasé ones. Its aim was to remind the country that it is the business of <em>civilians</em>, not pensioned retired military subject to recall in times of crisis, to galvanize opinion against loudmouth unpopular presidents like Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, or Donald Trump.</p>
<p>The reason why the “revolving door” became a bipartisan worry was that four-star officers had mastered the navigation of Pentagon procurement. They possessed a rare skill easily—and hugely—monetized upon retirement, and thus its use was to be discouraged wholeheartedly.</p>
<p>And now?</p>
<p>The code is a mere construct. The revolving door is an advertisement for advancing to high rank. Policing the thoughts of American soldiers is apparently more important than fathoming the minds of our enemies on the battlefield.</p>
<h3><strong>Keep Cuba Castroite?</strong></h3>
<p>What was so hard about understanding that Cuba since 1959 has been a Communist gulag, antithetical to human freedom and consensual government? What was so difficult about conceding that Cuba had been an ally of the nuclear Soviet Union, always egging it on to war against the United States?</p>
<p>Yet here we are with protestors against a failed, evil state in the streets of Havana, and our own government, media, and professional classes are worried that ossified Communism in Cuba may fall.</p>
<p>After opening the U.S. southern border to pseudo-political refugees, the Biden Administration is terrified that thousands of real ones might come to Miami in the fashion it invited millions to storm into Texas. The Biden Administration, and the Left in general, finally revealed what many of us have known: it had no real ideological view on illegal immigration. Its immigration policy was entirely utilitarian and hinged only on whether illegal immigration altered the demography of the electorate in the <em>correct</em> way.</p>
<h3><strong>The United Nations Über Alles</strong></h3>
<p>Finally, almost all Americans used to agree that the U.S. Constitution was unique and guaranteed personal freedom in a way the United Nations charter could not. Dozens of fascist, Communist, totalitarian, and authoritarian regimes, usually the majority of governments on earth, ensured that any General Assembly or U.N. committee ruling would parrot the views of its illiberal and corrupt members.</p>
<p>Not anymore. Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has invited in the U.N. to assess whether the United States meets global standards of justice or, in fact, is racist and in need of global censure: “I urge all U.N. member states to join the United States in this effort, and confront the scourge of racism, racial discrimination, and xenophobia,” he said last week.</p>
<p>That is like asking Libya in 2001 to assess whether our airline pilot training met proper standards or having China adjudicate the conditions in U.S. prisons.</p>
<p>America went from the freest country in the world in December 2019 to a repressive, and frightening place by July 2021. It went not so much hard-Left, as stark-raving mad.</p>
<p>That abrupt descent, too, is not workable and millions will collectively decide they have no choice but to push back and conclude, “In the 233rd year of our republic, we tens of millions are not going to cede freedom of thought and expression to thousands of Maoists. Sorry, no can do.”</p>
<p><a href="https://www.zerohedge.com/political/victor-davis-hanson-american-descent-madness" target="_blank">https://www.zerohedge.com/political/victor-davis-hanson-american-descent-madness</a></p>
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</div> The new VDH podcast has arriv…tag:4freedoms.com,2021-06-06:3766518:Comment:2725452021-06-06T07:32:22.441ZAlan Lakehttp://4freedoms.com/profile/AlanLake
<p>The new VDH podcast has arrived!</p>
<p><a href="https://www.podbean.com/pa/pbblog-umwjx-b52834" target="_blank">https://www.podbean.com/pa/pbblog-umwjx-b52834</a></p>
<p>The new VDH podcast has arrived!</p>
<p><a href="https://www.podbean.com/pa/pbblog-umwjx-b52834" target="_blank">https://www.podbean.com/pa/pbblog-umwjx-b52834</a></p> Victor predicts there defini…tag:4freedoms.com,2020-11-16:3766518:Comment:2279512020-11-16T16:44:22.900ZAlan Lakehttp://4freedoms.com/profile/AlanLake
<iframe width="475" height="267" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LflcPmWr7CM?wmode=opaque" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>Victor predicts there definitely will be another war in the Middle East.</p>
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<p>Victor predicts there definitely will be another war in the Middle East.</p> It is primarily a matter of b…tag:4freedoms.com,2020-07-13:3766518:Comment:2075372020-07-13T20:43:21.204ZPhilip Smeetonhttp://4freedoms.com/profile/PhilipSmeeton
<p>It is primarily a matter of blood and race. Our way, manner and being is inherited directly down from our ancestors.</p>
<p>The Asians and Africans the same.</p>
<p>I still maintain that Christianity is a destructive force, alien and unnatural. Self sacrifice for its own sake is an abomination. The false promise of an afterlife disgusts me. Morality has to be practical and reasonable and serve you and your family's best interest. Giving people undeserved bad conscience is a moral aggression…</p>
<p>It is primarily a matter of blood and race. Our way, manner and being is inherited directly down from our ancestors.</p>
<p>The Asians and Africans the same.</p>
<p>I still maintain that Christianity is a destructive force, alien and unnatural. Self sacrifice for its own sake is an abomination. The false promise of an afterlife disgusts me. Morality has to be practical and reasonable and serve you and your family's best interest. Giving people undeserved bad conscience is a moral aggression that destroys lives and nations. The priests get their kicks from manipulating and condemning their flock.</p>
<p>Socialism, at first a force for justice and liberty, has developed its own breed of power thirsty priests. That have learned their lesson from Christianity and get their kicks from beating the common man with a bludgeon of false morality and conscience.</p>
<p>They hate freedom and want to control us.</p> tag:4freedoms.com,2020-07-13:3766518:Comment:2075322020-07-13T14:31:43.353ZAlan Lakehttp://4freedoms.com/profile/AlanLake
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9igzw0_1kRQ?wmode=opaque" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9igzw0_1kRQ?wmode=opaque" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe> tag:4freedoms.com,2020-07-10:3766518:Comment:2074202020-07-10T20:55:58.803ZAlan Lakehttp://4freedoms.com/profile/AlanLake
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oalSABvRUeE?wmode=opaque" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oalSABvRUeE?wmode=opaque" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe> In Reagan's time the Left had…tag:4freedoms.com,2020-07-05:3766518:Comment:2075112020-07-05T20:37:21.418ZPhilip Smeetonhttp://4freedoms.com/profile/PhilipSmeeton
<p>In Reagan's time the Left had not yet gone completely insane.</p>
<p>In Reagan's time the Left had not yet gone completely insane.</p> tag:4freedoms.com,2020-07-05:3766518:Comment:2074132020-07-05T19:56:10.406ZAlan Lakehttp://4freedoms.com/profile/AlanLake
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IG2-m-jG064?wmode=opaque" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IG2-m-jG064?wmode=opaque" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe> Two brothers born into the sa…tag:4freedoms.com,2020-06-24:3766518:Comment:2072552020-06-24T11:47:52.199ZPhilip Smeetonhttp://4freedoms.com/profile/PhilipSmeeton
<p>Two brothers born into the same family, both equally endowed, One a success in life, the other a complete wreck. This I have experienced in two families that I have known intimately..I have no explanation as to why. The one contributes, the other a burden.</p>
<p>Two brothers born into the same family, both equally endowed, One a success in life, the other a complete wreck. This I have experienced in two families that I have known intimately..I have no explanation as to why. The one contributes, the other a burden.</p>