Gage Skidmore  is an American photographer  known primarily for photographing American politicians. 

James Carville says Trump is the greatest threat to America since the fall of communism.  

It is easy to laugh away such a declaration, but I think there is an invaluable truth expressed.  Trump is as important in stature as the United States’ most formidable military and political opponent of the twentieth century. 

Trumpism as an ideological force has the mass and acceleration of a Soviet Empire that threatened to conquer the world.  Nobody speaks about the Bush Doctrine in such terms.   Nobody confuses the Obama Doctrine or the Carter Doctrine as projecting that kind of power.  Yet here we are, just three years after the election, and somehow the belittled and mocked hotel owner from Queens has stumbled into creating a movement that matches in strength and potency what took Marx, Lenin, and Stalin over a century to perfect.   Consider the fear that Carville and his ilk must harbor about what is to come.

What does he see that makes him tremble so?  In a word, greatness.

These are very trying times.   The pattern of life has changed , no exciting things to took forward to.   The winter visits we looked forward to  with family and friends visiting from the south  chasing our milder weather.    Driving up with their caravans,   calling in to say hello, catching up on the news .   Of course we miss the everyday  activities we used to  take for granted.   But most of all we miss the  very much looked forward to visit from our sons, daughters  and family .  

Brandon Smith

All over the Western world ever since 9/11 there have been incremental steps towards what many liberty advocates would call a “police state”; a system in which governments are no longer restricted by the boundaries of civil liberties and are given the power to do just about anything they want in the name of public safety. The use of “the law” as a tool for injecting tyranny into a culture is the first tactic of all totalitarians.

The idea is that by simply writing government criminality into the law books, that criminality somehow becomes justified by virtue of legal recognition. It's all very circular. Whenever government abuse of the people is initiated, it's always initiated in the name of what's “best for society as a whole”. To save society, the individuals that make up a society must be sublimated or destroyed. This mentality is the complete opposite of what the Founding Fathers in America fought and died for, but as Thomas Jefferson once said:

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

by Barry Rumpf

Have you noticed in the TV news clips of teachers and students protesting in the streets supporting movements like BLM and other misguided fads. Many of them looked as if they came from a CFMEU picket line.

Irrelevant? I think not. Back in the old days when such erstwhile fundamentals as literacy and numeracy were still of prime importance and education had not been hijacked as a convenience for teachers, as opposed to a service for students, far more than imparting knowledge was involved.

Education had a commendable role in imposing a code of behaviour, of setting standards of conduct, of leading by example. This benefitted even those students who were not otherwise getting the best out of their schooling. It helped instil the essential elements of character forming.

I’m sure we all remember that fateful month of March. One after another states began to issue lockdown orders, closing businesses, restricting travel, and ordering people to stay home. That was the month when the United States went from viewing COVID-19 as a minimal threat to issuing some of the most draconian lockdown measures in the entire world. 

Life changed almost immediately.

The stock market plummets, the unemployment rate skyrockets, the masks get tighter, the social fabric frays. The government goes on an unprecedented power grab exerting more control over society more viciously and more arbitrarily than ever before.