When I Found Out How Members Of Congress Really Spend Their Time, I Just About Threw Up

Did you know that many members of Congress spend three or four hours a day “dialing for dollars” in cramped call centers that both parties have set up in Washington? I promised that I would keep all of you updated on what I am learning as I run for Congress, and what I learned the other day just about had me losing my lunch. I always imagined members of Congress spending long hours in their offices working on legislation and other important matters, but the truth is that most members of Congress are little more than glorified telemarketers at this point. Winning the next election is everything for most of these Congress critters, and so they spend far more time making cold calls to potential donors than doing anything else.

Have you ever had a politician call you up in the middle of the day begging for money? It is an absolutely disgraceful thing to do, but the truth is that money is the number one factor in determining election outcomes, and so our professional politicians have an endless appetite for it.

Every two years, more than a billion dollars is spent on congressional elections, and those that are masters at raising money just keep winning over and over again. Something desperately needs to be done to fix our fundamentally flawed system, but neither party seems to have any desire to take the money out of politics.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article about the fact that the U.S. House of Representatives will only be in session for 147 days this year. But even on those days, members of Congress are not exactly spending much time doing what they were elected to do.

During an interview with 60 Minutes, U.S. Representative Rick Nolan told Norah O’Donnell that members of Congress are expected to spend about 30 hours a week “dialing for dollars” in their respective call centers…

Rep. Rick Nolan: Well, both parties have told newly elected members of the Congress that they should spend 30 hours a week in the Republican and Democratic call centers across the street from the Congress, dialing for dollars.

Norah O’Donnell: Thirty hours a week?

Rep. Rick Nolan: Thirty hours is what they tell you you should spend. And it’s discouraging good people from running for public office. I could give you names of people who’ve said, “You know, I’d like to go to Washington and help fix problems, but I don’t want to go to Washington and become a mid-level telemarketer, dialing for dollars, for crying out loud.”

This is utterly shameful, and if I end up getting elected I will never do it. In fact, I will push legislation to ban this practice.

Former U.S. Representative David Jolly was also interviewed by O’Donnell, and he admitted to her that Republican members of Congress are actually given a telemarketing script to use while making these calls…

Simply by calling people, cold-calling a list that fundraisers put in front of you, you’re presented with their biography. So please call John. He’s married to Sally. His daughter, Emma, just graduated from high school. They gave $18,000 last year to different candidates. They can give you $1,000 too if you ask them to. And they put you on the phone. And it’s a script.

In 2013, new Democratic members of Congress were given a “model schedule” for how they should be spending their time. On that model schedule, two hours a day were allocated for “committee/floor”, and four hours a day were allocated for “call time”. In other words, those members of Congress were expected to only devote two hours a day to doing the jobs they were elected to do and four hours a day to making telemarketing calls.

If we ever want to end this disgraceful system we need to take matters into our own hands.

Shortly after I announced that I was running for Congress, I was given a list of thousands of names in my district. It is the same list that other politicians are getting too. Even at this moment, people are having their dinners interrupted by desperate politicians that are “dialing for dollars”.

If this ever happens to you, write the name of that politician down and never vote for that individual again.

I have pledged not to participate in this shameful system, and if I get the chance I will work to abolish it. Yes, every campaign needs funding, but making telemarketing cold calls to people at home is not the way to do it.

In fact, these politicians are actually trained to interrupt you during lunch and dinner because those are apparently some of the best times for raising money.

And these call centers in D.C. are as bad as you are probably imagining. The following is more from former Representative David Jolly…

It is a cult-like boiler room on Capitol Hill where sitting members of Congress, frankly I believe, are compromising the dignity of the office they hold by sitting in these sweatshop phone booths calling people asking them for money. And their only goal is to get $500 or $1,000 or $2,000 out of the person on the other end of the line. It’s shameful. It’s beneath the dignity of the office that our voters in our communities entrust us to serve.

Jolly is precisely correct.

Any politician that makes these sorts of calls is acting in a completely shameful manner.

If we don’t get the money out of politics, we are just going to end up with a bunch of sleazebags in Washington that spend most of their time on the phone bugging people for money.

Is that what we want?

Do we really want our laws to be made by those that can prove that they are the best telemarketers?

Nobody is supposed to talk about these things, and I suppose that this is yet another article that is going to get me into trouble.

But I don’t care. Our system is deeply broken and it needs to be fixed. Hopefully by shedding some light on these issues I have moved the ball in the right direction.

Are ‘Toxic’ Democrats Destined To Become A Permanent Minority Party?

It has become exceedingly clear that the Democratic Party is in deep trouble.  Close to 55 million dollars was spent on the race in Georgia’s sixth congressional district, and that shattered all kinds of records.  Democrat Jon Ossoff was able to raise and spend six times as much money as Karen Handel and yet he still lost.  This was supposed to be the race that would show the American people that the Democrats could take back control of Congress in 2018, and so for the Democrats this was a bitter failure.  The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee actually injected almost 5 million dollars into the race themselves, and Planned Parenthood threw in another $700,000.  But after all of the time, effort and energy that was expended, Handel still won fairly comfortably.

The Democrats are trying to spin this result as some sort of “moral victory”, but as Dan Balz of the Washington Post has pointed out, there are “no moral victories in politics”…

There are no moral victories in politics. Republicans won on Tuesday in the most important special election this year. Democrats lost, as they have done in the other special elections in GOP-held seats this year.

For the national Democratic Party, the debate continues about developing a message that goes beyond attacking Trump, or assuming dissatisfaction with the president will be enough.

It has been a very long time since there has been so much national attention on a single House race.  A number of high profile Hollywood celebrities became personally involved in Ossoff’s campaign, and they were absolutely devastated when he lost…

Celebrities who donated time and money to Ossoff’s campaign, including actresses Alyssa Milano and Rosie O’Donnell, used their social media accounts to react to the Democrat’s loss shortly after the election results were confirmed late Tuesday night.

Milano, who personally drove voters to the polls in April’s preliminary election and was actively campaigning for the Democrat for most of Election Day, tweeted simply: “Grouphug” and “Get in.”

Meanwhile, electronic music producer Moby and vocal Trump critic O’Donnell appeared to be frustrated by the results, with Moby questioning how Democratic “still can’t win” even with “buffoon” Donald Trump in the White House. O’Donnell tweeted: “DONALD TRUMP IS THE DARKNESS ITSELF.”

Where does the Democratic Party go from here?

Their anti-Trump message is not working, and their usual divide and conquer tactics are not working either.

At this point either the Democratic Party is going to have to reinvent itself, or they could be facing a long, painful string of election defeats for the foreseeable future.  To say that things have not been going well for the Democrats lately would be a major understatement.  I really like what Rush Limbaugh had to say about this on his radio show…

“You have no idea the degree to which the media and the Democratic Party are destroyed today. I’m talking about how they feel … which is complete and utter defeat, frustration and devastation,” he said on Wednesday, hours after Republican Karen Handel was a multiple percentage point winner over defeated Democrat Jon Ossoff.

“The dirty little secret is the media and the Democratic Party is turning off average Americans. They are not persuading, they are not convincing people Trump is a reprobate,” he continued. “They do not know how to beat Donald Trump. There are depressed and despondent.”

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why Jon Ossoff lost.

All of the anger and violence that we have seen lately has greatly tainted the Democratic Party.

The Democrats have become the party of Kathy Griffin.

The Democrats have become the party of Antifa and mock Trump assassinations.

And the Democrats have become the party of James Hodgkinson.

U.S. Representative Tim Ryan was right on the ball when he admitted that his party’s brand has now become “toxic” in much of the nation…

Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, who tried to unseat Ms. Pelosi as House minority leader late last fall, said she remained a political millstone for Democrats. But Mr. Ryan said the Democratic brand had also become “toxic” in much of the country because voters saw Democrats as “not being able to connect with the issues they care about.”

“Our brand is worse than Trump,” he said.

As I have discussed repeatedly, the left doesn’t have any positive vision for the future to offer the American people.  They cannot win in the marketplace of ideas, and so they use anger, frustration, intimidation and violence as weapons.  For quite a while the Democrats successfully used “the blame game” and divide and conquer tactics to win elections, but now the American people are seeing through the charade.

The more angry and violent the left becomes, the more the American people are going to turn against them.  The following comes from Daniel Greenfield…

But Trump Derangement Syndrome is a symptom of a problem with the left that existed before he was born. The left is an angry movement. It is animated by an outraged self-righteousness whose moral superiority doubles as dehumanization. And its machinery of culture glamorizes its anger. The media dresses up the seething rage so that the left never has to look at its inner Hodgkinson in the mirror.

The left is as angry as ever. Campus riots and assassinations of Republican politicians are nothing new. What is changing is that its opponents are beginning to match its anger.  The left still clings to the same anger it had when it was a theoretical movement with plans, but little impact on the country. The outrage at the left is no longer ideological. There are millions of people whose health care was destroyed by ObamaCare, whose First Amendment rights were taken away, whose land was seized, whose children were turned against them and whose livelihoods were destroyed.

Of course it is quite true that the Republican Party needs to be cleaned up as well.  Many establishment Republicans use labels such as “conservative” and “Pro-Life” to win elections, but then they end up government like Democrats.  And so many members of Congress in both parties spend far more time and energy raising money for their next elections than they do serving the American people.

There is a reason why Congress only has a 17.6 percent approval rating at the moment.  Both major parties should take that as a sign that they need to clean up their acts, because the American people are sick and tired of the status quo.

America Is On The Verge Of Widespread Chaos And Civil Unrest

Things will never be the same in America from this moment forward. When 66-year-old James Hodgkinson attempted to gun down as many Republican members of Congress as possible at a baseball field in Virginia, he permanently shattered the notion that we could go back to the way that things used to be in this country. At one time, Republicans and Democrats may have strongly disagreed with one another over the issues, but there was always a certain code of civility that everyone understood and respected. But now that is long gone, and if our politicians and the big media outlets continue to fuel the rising hatred in this country, it won’t be too long before we are dealing with widespread chaos and civil unrest from coast to coast.

Most of the anger and frustration that we are currently witnessing is being fueled by the left. On his radio show yesterday, Rush Limbaugh accused the left of openly promoting violence…

“I have been worried for quite a while about the cumulative effect or impact of this constant anti-Trump hysteria everywhere in mainstream media: New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC,” Limbaugh told listeners.

“It’s hysteria. It’s lies. It’s things that are completely manufactured about Trump personally, about Trump and Russia, about climate change, about any number of things.

“I have been very concerned about what all of this is doing to the average, base Democrat voter. I have sensed them getting more and more fringe and imbalanced, and the evidence for it is everywhere in the things that they tweet. They openly promote violence, and advocate some of the most despicable things happening to their political enemies.”

Someone like James Hodgkinson is not produced in a vacuum. There has been a steady pattern of threats and violence against Republicans since the election, and all that Hodgkinson did was take things to the next level. Breitbart has put out an article entitled “15 Times Celebrities Envisioned Violence Against Trump and the GOP”, and WND published an even longer list entitled “20 times violence threatened, used, in wake of Dems’ political collapse”. When celebrities, politicians and media personalities constantly use language that is seething with hatred, it shouldn’t surprise us when their followers engage in violent acts.

I have warned many times in the past about the civil unrest that is coming, and now many of my fellow conservative commentators are sounding the alarm as well. For example, in the aftermath of the attack in Virginia radio host Michael Savage made the following chilling statement to his audience: “We are at a boiling point. There’s going to be a civil war.”

No American should ever want to see such a thing happen, but the left just keeps getting more and more radical. And even Hillary Clinton recently stated that she has joined “the Resistance”. The following comes from Ann Coulter…

Recently, Hillary announced her steadfast opposition to the winning candidate using a military term, saying she’d joined the “Resistance.”

Imagine if Trump lost and then announced that he’d joined the “RESISTANCE.” He’d be accused of trying to activate right-wing militias. Every dyspeptic glance at an immigrant would be reported as fascistic violence.

But the media seem blithely unaware that the anti-Trump “Resistance” has been accompanied by nonstop militaristic violence from liberals.

In recent weeks, I have heard from so many people all over the nation that are extremely excited about the possibility of me running for Congress. But anyone that is considering running for public office these days has to consider the fact that they will become potential targets for violence. For example, just recently one very sick individual actually threatened to hang Utah Representative Jason Chaffetz…

“I feel very safe and secure at the Capitol,” Chaffetz said Wednesday. “We work in a fortress with literally thousands of people to protect us, but once we leave the Capitol, it’s a whole different equation.”

Chaffetz wants U.S. marshals to be charged with assessing threats against members of Congress and securing them in more high-profile and widely attended events.

Chaffetz was the focus of a March death threat in which a Florida man vowed in a voicemail to “hunt your a– down, wrap a rope around your neck and hang you from a lamppost,” according to court records.

Could you imagine if your wife found that voicemail before you did?

But this is what the left is becoming. Because they don’t have any sort of a positive message to offer, they have to resort to threats, intimidation and violence. I have been writing about this quite a bit lately, and it turns out that Rush Limbaugh very much feels the same way…

They don’t have an agenda that’s optimistic and upbeat that they can run on, and they don’t dare be honest about their real agenda. So all they can do is to continue to do what they’ve been doing, and it’s not healthy, it’s not uplifting, it’s not inspiring. It isn’t representative or reflective of any of the traditional American values that for so long have united us. A sense of optimism, a sense of can-do, a sense of unity, a sense of nationhood. All of these things are under assault.

If the left continues to go down this path, the anger and the frustration are going to continue to grow, and eventually cities all over America are going to burn. This is the kind of a scenario that I laid out in The Beginning Of The End, and now it is actually starting to play out right in front of us.

Today, this nation is more divided than it has ever been in my entire lifetime, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. In fact, I expect even more anger and even more hatred as the divisions deepen.

Without each passing year, the left moves even farther to the left. It has gotten to the point where many on the far left actually refer to Hillary Clinton as a “moderate”, which is funny because at one time she was a cutting edge liberal.

On the right, there is an emerging movement to return to the values and the principles that this country was founded upon. So if the left doesn’t like current Republican leadership, then they really aren’t going to like the hardcore constitutional conservatives that are going to start replacing them.

We are in a battle for the soul of our nation, and the future of America is literally at stake.

It is a battle that we cannot afford to lose, because if the left wins there literally will be no viable future for our country at all.

Has Kathy Griffin Produced A Defining Moment That Will Cause America To Reject The Hate-Filled Ideology Of The Radical Left?

The image of Kathy Griffin holding up a bloody mock ‘decapitated’ head of Donald Trump will be burned into our memories forever, and she may have just produced the single most destructive moment for the radical left that this country has seen in decades. It is perfectly fine to disagree with President Trump and his policies, but to hold up his ‘decapitated head’ like an ISIS executioner would goes far beyond anything that would ever be acceptable in a civilized society. This is a moment that absolutely screams “too far”, and I believe that it will be this moment that causes many Americans to finally realize that the hate-filled ideology of the radical left is entirely bankrupt.

At this point the radical left doesn’t have any sort of positive message to offer the American people. They hate that wealthy people have so much money and so they want to raise taxes. They hate capitalism and use every opportunity that they can to try to destroy it. They hate conservative Christians and so they mock Jesus and the Christian faith every chance they get. They pander for money and votes by pitting one racial group against another. They are all about killing liberty, killing freedom, killing babies, and killing the values that this nation was founded upon. And they have demonstrated over and over again that they are willing to use violence to achieve their goals.

What Kathy Griffin was attempting to communicate was so horrible and so over the top that even CNN has decided to fire her…

“CNN has terminated our agreement with Kathy Griffin to appear on our New Year’s Eve program,” spokesman Shimrit Sheetrit confirmed to USA TODAY in a statement Wednesday.

The network used even stronger language a day earlier: “We found what she did disgusting and offensive,” read a statement sent to USA TODAY Tuesday night by Sheetrit. “We are pleased to see she has apologized and asked that the photos be taken down.”

And even her old buddy Anderson Cooper denounced her on Twitter…

For the record, I am appalled by the photo shoot Kathy Griffin took part in. It is clearly disgusting and completely inappropriate.

It is hard to imagine that Kathy Griffin will have much of a career left after all of this, so hopefully she has been saving her money. In fact, she has already lost a major endorsement deal…

Squatty Potty, a Utah-based business that creates and sells bathroom products — including a popular toilet stool made famous by one of the company’s well-known viral videos — has decided to pull down a new ad that Griffin stars in.

“We were shocked and disappointed to learn about the image Ms. Griffin shared today,” Squatty Potty CEO Bobby Edwards said in a statement issued to Faithwire. “It was deeply inappropriate and runs contrary to the core values our company stands for.”

I don’t know what she thought would happen. If a conservative had done the same thing to Obama, we would probably be talking about prison time right about now. Griffin went so far over the line that even the Church of Satan has disavowed her.

And of course this isn’t the first time that she has done something like this. During a 2007 awards show, she openly mocked the name of Jesus. What she said was so horrible that I do not want to repeat it.

Surprisingly, not everyone on the left is turning their backs on Griffin. In fact, Democratic Senator Al Franken says that he is not going to cancel an appearance with Griffin that is scheduled for July.

Al Franken will be up for re-election in 2020, and I think that it is time for the people of Minnesota to find a new senator.

Of course I think that things are going to be very difficult for most liberal Democrats moving forward. If anger and hate are the core of your message, and if you survive by constantly pitting one group against another, eventually the American people are going to see through the games and will start choosing another direction.

Whether she intended it or not, Kathy Griffin is now the poster child for the radical left in this country, and she just did Trump and the Republican Party a huge favor by showing the true face of her movement. I really like how Mike Adams made this point…

There’s no other way to say it: Kathy Griffin and the deranged, lunatic Left are mentally ill and pose a very real danger to society. This wretched, terrorist-style beheading video posted by Griffin encourages deadly violence against Trump supporters and sends a message that murdering political opponents of the intolerant Left is a normal, acceptable activity.

That’s what the deranged Left already believes, of course. Fanned into flames by a wildly dishonest, discredited fakestream media, Trump Derangement Syndrome has now escalated into a left-wing murderous rage that now celebrates gruesome images of beheadings that were once the sole domain of fanatical terrorists. What’s even more disturbing about all this is that Kathy Griffin apparently thought posting a video showing a bloodied, decapitated Trump head in her fist would somehow be hilarious or inspiring in some twisted way.

So how should we respond to all of this?

Instead of responding to this kind of hate with even more hate, I propose that we respond with lots of love.

Let’s show the American people that there is a fundamental difference between the right and the left. Let’s show them that true conservatives are all about loving everyone and doing everything that we can to promote life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Let’s show them that we believe in a positive, united future for our country based on the values and principles that are enshrined in the United States Constitution.

We don’t have to attack Kathy Griffin because she has already destroyed herself and done an immense amount of permanent damage to her political movement.

The American people are going to be looking elsewhere for inspiration, and we should be ready to supply it. If we can clearly communicate a positive, uplifting message, we can start to clear out the cesspool that Washington D.C. has become and begin to build a brighter future for all Americans.

It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way

Is there any way to unite our country once again? We live at a time when our nation is deeply polarized and many people have chosen to completely give in to hate. There are a lot of Democrats that deeply hate Donald Trump with everything that they have inside of them, even though they might not be able to clearly explain to anyone exactly why they hate him so much. And the same thing could be said about many Republicans when it comes to top politicians among the Democrats. Yes, there are very important issues that divide us, and there are certain things where compromise simply is not an option. But just because we disagree with others politically does not mean that we have to hate them. The following is another excerpt from my new book, and hopefully it will inspire people to start loving their enemies (even their political ones) …

*****

What do you think would happen to our society if we decided to just start loving one another? I am writing this at a time when the United States is the most polarized that it has been in decades. Democrats hate Republicans and Republicans hate Democrats, but all of this hate is not really getting us anywhere. I think that most of us have forgotten that we are supposed to love our enemies. If we only love those that agree with us and that are just like us, what is that going to accomplish?

Following the election in November, there were news reports about leftists that were being “triggered” simply by seeing the name of Trump somewhere. I don’t know if I have ever seen so much rage directed at a new president, and some of the things that are being said and done by those on the left are absolutely frightening. For example, Kathy Griffin made national headlines when she posed for photographs “with a ‘beheaded’ President Trump”…

Kathy Griffin sent shockwaves through the internet when she posed with a “beheaded” President Trump.

The comedian looks somber in pictures that are reminiscent of ISIS beheading videos and photos. She holds a facsimile of Mr. Trump’s detached, bloodied head by the hair.

The photo was taken by Tyler Shields, who is known for controversial art, including a photo of Clint Eastwood’s daughter burning a $100,000 Hermes handbag.

(http://www.cbsnews.com/news/kathy-griffin-takes-photos-with-beheaded-trump/)

Why would someone do such a thing?

Many of those on the left have no idea why they are feeling so much rage. They just know that Trump is on the “wrong team” and that he supposedly stands for things that they aren’t supposed to like. But if you would ask many of them to put their feelings into words, most of them would not be able to do so in a cohesive manner.

Of course many on the right have heaped a tremendous amount of abuse on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in recent years. Even though they stand for things that are truly appalling, does that justify the horrible mistreatment that they have received?

You can love people without agreeing with them. In fact, you can deeply love someone and still disapprove of every single thing that they stand for. And even though Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both completely unfit to hold any political office anywhere in the country, that doesn’t mean that we should hate them. Like so many other political leaders, Obama and Clinton have done some exceedingly terrible things, but that doesn’t mean that they are beyond all hope. All of us have done things that we are now ashamed of, and all of us have needed some grace at various points in our lives. We should always be willing to love our political enemies, to forgive them, to pray for them, and we should always want the very best for them and for their families.

As it stands, America is at a very dangerous place because of all of the anger and frustration that are boiling just under the surface. According to a recent Reuters survey, only 25 percent of Americans believe that the country is heading in the right direction, and the protests in our streets have turned increasingly violent in recent years.

Many on the left are using terms such as “Nazi”, “racist” and “dictator” to describe Donald Trump, and that is the kind of language that can spur people to take violent action. There are some that believe that America is heading for a “civil war”, and there are others that believe that one has already started. But none of us should ever want that to actually happen.

In my adult life, I have never seen America so divided, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

What if we decided to start loving one another no matter what we look like, where we are from or who our ancestors were?

What if we decided to start loving one another no matter who we voted for or what our particular political beliefs may be?

What if we decided to start loving one another no matter how much the mainstream media, our politicians and the entertainment community tried to stir up hate?

Not too long ago, a distant relative decided to cut off all communication with Meranda and I simply because of a pro-Trump article that I authored. Apparently someone must be anti-Trump in order to be loved and accepted by this particular individual.

Of course similar things are happening all over the country because of animosity toward Trump.

But if we are not willing to talk with one another, how will we ever solve any of the problems that this nation is facing?

Don’t get me wrong. I am certainly not suggesting that we should ever compromise our most cherished values and principles. If the left is going to hate us because we refuse to move from the values and the principles that this nation was founded upon, there isn’t much we can do about that.

But even though they may hate us, we can choose to love them. When we do good to those that hate us, it has a far more powerful effect than if we return hate with more hate. The following is one of the most famous quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr…

Darkness cannot drive out darkness;
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate;
only love can do that.
Hate multiplies hate,
violence multiplies violence,
and toughness multiplies toughness
in a descending spiral of destruction….
The chain reaction of evil —
hate begetting hate,
wars producing more wars —
must be broken,
or we shall be plunged
into the dark abyss of annihilation.

Those are very wise words.

We will never defeat the leftists that are trying to destroy our nation by hating them. But if we shower them with light and love many of them will eventually come over to our side.

I am a big believer in the marketplace of ideas, because I also believe that truth always wins in the end. If we can respectfully engage with those that disagree with us and show them that there is a better way, we will win many of them over.

One of the reasons why the left has made so much progress in recent decades is because most of the population has abandoned the core values that once made America so great. If we rediscover those values, they can provide a basis for healing and reuniting our broken nation.

For example, in the Declaration of Independence our forefathers declared that “all men are created equal”. We should all be able to agree that every single individual is of immense value, and that all of us should be treated equally under the law no matter where we came from, no matter what our skin color is and no matter how much money we have.

The Declaration of Independence also tells us that we have been endowed “with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. If you follow my work on a regular basis, you know that first one is absolutely huge for me. Elsewhere in this book I am going to spend an entire chapter on that topic. But for the moment I want to focus on Liberty. In every human heart there is a desire to live free. This is one of the reasons why big government liberalism is such a bankrupt philosophy. Big government always ends in tyranny, and I don’t know any true American that actually wants tyranny.

There are so many things that both the left and the right should be able to agree upon.

One is that Congress has become a cesspool of filth and corruption. Can’t we agree that the way that we run our elections needs to be greatly reformed and that special interests and big donors should have much less influence in Washington D.C.?

Another thing that we should be able to agree upon is that we should have a country where freedom and liberty are maximized. Instinctively, most of us want to live our lives without someone else constantly telling us what to do. We all proudly sing that we are “the land of the free”, and we need to start making that a reality once again.

We should all also be able to agree that terrorism is a growing problem, and that we should do all that we can to keep our communities safe. Of course there are disagreements about how precisely to do that, but in the face of a common enemy that is intent on destroying us the American people should be able to come together.

In addition, we should all be able to agree that we need to strengthen the Social Security system so that it will always be there for retiring Americans that need it. Unfortunately, our politicians raided the Social Security trust fund and have badly mismanaged the system, and so now the future of the program looks shaky. But we should be able to work together to get it back on solid ground once again.

Of course all of us want an economy that is vibrant and growing, and that hasn’t been true for a very long time. Barack Obama was the only president in U.S. history not to have a single year when the economy grew by at least three percent, and over the past ten years U.S. GDP growth has averaged just 1.33 percent per year. If we would just take the shackles off of the economy we could do so much better. The greatest era of economic growth in our history was when there was no Federal Reserve, no IRS and no income tax, and we can do it again.

We all want better lives for our families and our communities, and we can make America great again if we start doing the things that made America great in the first place.

Ultimately, much of this book is about restoring American values. It is about restoring God, family and country to their proper places and getting our priorities back in order. It is about learning to love others the way that we love ourselves.

It has been said that a house divided against itself will surely fall. And if we continue down this road of hatred and division, America will surely fall no matter what ideology eventually triumphs.

There is nothing that says that we all have to hate one another. It doesn’t have to be this way, and we need a new generation of leaders that are willing to take us in a different direction.

Because right now what we are getting from the corporate media and most of our politicians is a steady stream of strife, discord, bitterness, resentment and hatred.

The only way that we are going to become “a shining city upon a hill” again is if we learn to love one another truly and deeply and from the heart. To close this chapter, let me share with you what President Ronald Reagan said about this shining city during his farewell address to the American people…

The past few days when I’ve been at that window upstairs, I’ve thought a bit of the “shining city upon a hill.” The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we’d call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.

I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.

Reagan’s dream is still alive, but in order to live in harmony and peace we must reject hatred and division.

Just because America is deeply divided today does not mean that all hope is lost.

There is a better way, and we can get there.