It is easy to report on the United States “from the outside”, by scanning the discussion from the major media outlets. It is a different matter to describe what is actually going on from the point of view of “ordinary Americans.” To do that, one has to be in the country talking and listening to people.
To that extent, I have been in the United States twice over the last two months – the first time was in New York City and its suburbs on Long Island, and the second time for a much longer stay has been in the state of Colorado, where I have had the opportunity to speak with many Americans from across the Great Plains region of the state all the way down to the front range communities of Colorado Springs, Erie, Denver, Walsenburg, Pueblo and Trinidad.
Since I am profoundly in the tank for President Trump, I preferred to keep politically silent while in the very left-of-center New York area, but I kept my ears open to see if anyone there had anything to say. For the most part, no one did, save for a Roman Catholic priest who serves in Manhattan in an ethnic parish, who was profoundly supportive of conservatism. His community are Eastern European Slavs and while not Orthodox, he maintains a very close relationship with the Russian Orthodox community (both Moscow Patriarchate and Synod) and he is very much of one mind with these most conservative clergy. This was in late October, and the impeachment circus was not really in the major swing it got to afterwards, but the impression of the state of the nation from that priest was “we are in trouble, and Christianity is definitely needing to be stood up for.”
The second trip, which I am currently still on, is in the state of Colorado from Fort Morgan in the northeastern part of the state to Walsenburg in the southern part of the state.
Colorado is an interesting case study. As one of the first batch of states to legalize marijuana, one might think that the whole state is full of potheads. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
What is true is that many citizens in Colorado that I have talked with seem to be shell-shocked from the legalization debacle pushed by ex-Californian liberals now residing in Boulder, as well as another large liberal contingent in Denver’s Arapahoe County. These two deep blue counties, they say, ruined everything for the entire state of Colorado.
Former Governor John Hickenlooper, to his partial credit, once noted in a visit to a rural wireless company in Fort Morgan, Colorado that many of the people in the state’s big Front Range cities “don’t know where their food comes from.” I was there, and I heard him say this repeatedly in person.
But what Hickenlooper did not say is the greater projection of this ignorance, that the heavy populace of liberals in these two Colorado counties seem blissfully unaware (perhaps because they are smoking so much of their vaunted product) that the regular folks in the state do NOT support legalized marijuana, and further, they seem unable to account for vast amounts of supposed tax revenue from pot sales that have since gone missing over the last few years.
What is sad though, is that while many municipalities in Colorado, such as Walsenburg, have successfully passed laws to keep the cannabis dispensaries out of their towns, the county politics have gone the other way. For example, in Walsenburg, every road leading out of town takes the driver past at least one dispensary. Even in ultra-conservative Colorado Springs, the dispensaries could not be kept out, and anyone visiting from Russia seeing the vast number of green crosses everywhere would wrongly conclude that “this town has a lot of pharmacies.”
Nope. Those ain’t pharmacies. Keep your Russians safe. Don’t let them go in these places.
Another thing that is uniformly true across the state is the level of ignorance about Russia. I went on Colorado Springs radio station 740AM (KVOR) as a call-in person on one of their morning talk shows. I made brief reference to the reality of life on the ground in Russia – how it is asserting itself as a Christian nation, how the people there have no ill will towards the Americans, nor did they have anything do to with election interference, and how they do not want war with anyone.
The radio host, Richard Randall, was ecstatic to hear real news about what is going on in Russia. He instinctively knew that the American news media narrative was not correct, but because of the incredible degree of penetration of American propaganda against Russia (even and especially among many conservatives at Fox News, save Tucker Carlson), he had no idea how to get real information.
Now he has my phone number and e-mail, so there may be more opportunities for contact in the future, especially once I am back home in Moscow.
The general reaction from everyone I talked to in Colorado about Russia was delighted surprise and wonder. Most of the people I spoke to are conservative Christians, usually Baptist, and some Roman Catholics. However, the Orthodox Christian community in Pueblo had the strongest positive reaction. The people there were so grateful to hear of Russia’s Orthodox Christian ascendancy and renaissance that they were hugging me for joy and almost in tears to know that someone is embracing Christianity whole-heartedly.
In the United States, my impression of the Orthodox and Baptist and Roman Catholic communities all shared one thing in common: the experience of the Christian in exile. rejected by the world, ignored by the world, but also thinking that the whole world is like this, and that there is no Christian bastion anywhere. Add to that the increasing penetration of cannabis (now legalized in about thirty American states), coupled with the simultaneous sense of despair over what to do about the opioid and other drug epidemics (yet missing the simple act of making pot illegal again!), the incredible penetration of LGBT values imposed through the incredible amount of television and radio content available to American viewers (I caught things my friends and relatives somehow missed or filtered out), and it seems in many ways that life looks very bleak for American people.
Indeed it would seem that way. But it is also a common thread that these “American exiles” share a great love for President Trump. They are 100% dedicated to supporting him, and it is easy to see why. He may not be the voice of a Christian Moral Majority by any means, but it is plainly apparent to them that he represents them, not the coastal elites, not the cultural Marxists and their elite, but this vast population of plain ordinary Americans that otherwise feel themselves strangers in their own country.
For them, Mr. Trump is the only key to preserving what they once had ubiquitously across this land. He seems to be the only guy who remembers and who cares about it. While America’s economy is indeed roaring ahead, I suspect that the real appeal of Trump to this group of Americans is not that they have more money. It is that through him, they understand that someone in a very high place still has his sanity.
This all is coming to a head as we approach the House vote on the two flimsy articles of Impeachment crafted against Donald Trump. In any other era of American history, these complaints would never even be considered as a means of removing the President.
But the present times are full of flaky politicians. It is quite likely that the articles will pass the House and go to the Senate, and it is honestly difficult for me to believe the Senate will do the slap-down that Fox promises. I suspect the Senate situation is far, far weaker than my favorite pundits want to admit.
I hope I am wrong.
But If I am not wrong and the Senate folds to remove the President, there is little doubt about what comes next:
The nastiest, most pathetic and banal civil war that has ever been fought. It may never come to weapons fire, but it may as well. It will certainly lead to a rural / urban American split, which might itself prove to be the key to a conservative victory, since America’s food comes from mostly conservative places and conservative people. (The people don’t know where their food comes from, remember?)
It will be the nastiest conflict ever because it will be the LGBT / Cannabis / Globalist / Open border / Open society crowd against a whole lot of angry farmers with guns, many of these hiding in the hills in a manner that would do the Afghan tribesmen proud.
It will be the end of America as a superpower, and depending on the kind of people who seize power, it is quite possible that they will drag the rest of the world, mainly Russia, into the fight, perhaps by diversionary false flag strikes that the American populace has no good intelligence about, considering the propaganda lock the MSM has on the country.
If there was ever any set of factors to justify the existence of independent journalism, you have just read it.
There are great people here. There is no doubt that when pressed to it, they will fight. But reason should have prevailed long before this, and even our best people seem strangely blinded and deafened, and therefore unable to personally do what President Trump seems often to be doing single-handedly.
Forty years ago, many more of us were as freely outspoken as the President. He is not breaking any particularly new ground in terms of how he addresses things, but he IS doing it now when very few others in power are as well. The rest of us have been somewhat cowed into submissive silence, and that is one of the most saddening and frightening aspects of all of this.
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