The Teacher and the Schoolyard Bullies

Once upon a time, not really, but just to make my point through use of an analogy, there was a student in grade school named Billy. One day Billy was on the playground playing when he happened to come across another student named Joey. For reasons unknown to anyone, Joey socked Billy in the eye and gave him a shiner. Billy was noticeably shaken and immediately went to his teacher Ms. Smith. He explained to her that he was out on the playground and Joey punched him in the eye. But instead of calling Joey over to punish him, she did nothing.

Although Billy was visibly hurt, he was no pushover. He went over to all the kids that were on the playground who saw the incident happen and asked them to vouch for him, imploring Ms. Smith to take action. There were plenty of other kids willing to step forward and act as witnesses on Billy’s behalf. Some weren’t even his friends but they knew a wrong had been committed and had to do something.

Ms. Smith heard them all out but a funny thing happened, she dismissed their statements. She couldn’t be bothered to do the right thing even with all the evidence and eyewitness testimony from the kids who courageously took a stand. Billy didn’t give up, however. He pursued the matter and went to the principal who also snubbed him, telling him his injuries don’t warrant punishing Joey for what he did to him.

Meanwhile, on the playground, another boy named Jimmy was playing with a soccer ball when a group of boys came by and stole the ball from him. Jimmy went to his teacher, Mr. Jones, and told him the story, asking him to please retrieve his soccer ball from the group of kids that stole it from him. Mr. Jones, however, half-listened to him and commented that it was not that big of a deal.

Both Billy’s and Jimmy’s complaints had fallen on deaf ears. No one in an authoritative position was willing to help. They knew if they wanted anything to happen they must take their issues all the way to the school board, where a final decision would be made.

Time was running out, however, because the school year was ending. Teachers and principals had vacations planned as well as a new school year to prepare for. If something didn’t happen soon the cases would be lost forever.

By now you’ve probably figured out the analogy. Democrats are trying to steal the election from President Donald Trump while federal courts and state legislatures refuse to take it seriously.

In another analogy, this appears to be like a football game during the final two minutes of the fourth quarter. Democrats got away with cheating on a few plays. Now they’re in the lead, have possession of the ball and are doing their best to run out the clock. Even the referees, who are supposed to enforce the rules, are doing their best to bring the game to an end.

There is still time, though, and President Trump should not concede because he knows that he has evidence of voter fraud that can turn this election around. If this can get to the US Supreme Court, the truth can finally be heard and Democrat voter fraud can finally be exposed.

Tom Folden is a political strategist, conservative thinker, and Editor of CommonSenseDictates.com, a website for common sense viewpoints. A human rights activist, he is a firm believer in the Constitution and the rule of law. He is also a singer/songwriter and recording artist. For interviews and/or appearances, please contact him at spencergroup@hotmail.com.

Things Not To Be Thankful For

Amid the tumultuous political climate the United States finds itself in, due largely to Democrats trying to steal the election and subsequently imposing their unconstitutional agenda on the rest of us, there are many things to be thankful for, to be sure, namely family, faith and our great nation which allows us freedoms and liberties, well for now anyway. However, there are plenty of things not to be thankful for. Below are just some of them.

The US Supreme Court, well, mostly just Chief Justice John Roberts and the liberal justices who seem to feel that their duty on the highest court in the land is to write law instead of interpret it and properly rule on issues that affect American citizens. For example, in 2012, after the passing of the disastrous and improperly named “Affordable Care Act,” also known as Obamacare, Republican lawmakers took it to the Supreme Court to challenge the constitutionality of the individual mandate falling under the Commerce Clause. The liberal justices and fake conservative Chief Justice Roberts, determined Obamacare to be constitutional due to the individual mandate being a tax, not a penalty. This should have negated the whole thing since the argument of the case was that the individual mandate was a penalty. Since it was ruled that it was a tax, it should have been dismissed.

Tyrannical governors. Certain governors abuse their responsibility as state leaders by dictating how the citizens of their respective states will act. From mandating wearing masks to setting curfews to shutting down schools to any number of things they want, these governors overstep the boundaries of morality and civil rights. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has enacted not guidelines but rules for celebrating Thanksgiving. These include having no more than six guests who must social distance and wear masks at all times. He did make a provision, however, in that people are allowed to pull their masks down to take bites of food, but promptly cover their mouths while chewing. Governor Andrew Cuomo has also set strict rules for celebrating the holiday season, but thankfully the US Supreme Court ruled against his stupid mandates.

Election Fraud. This election season has been a disaster for many reasons. Just when we all thought President Trump was on his way toward being re-elected, Democrat fraudsters pulled a fast one. Attempts at election fraud were blatantly obvious in Democratic-controlled districts in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin and others. Moreover, vote-counting stopped in several states on election eve but the next morning Biden somehow was ahead in votes, which is what needed to happen in order to manufacture votes for the former vice-president. Also, mail-in voting proved to be fraudulent, as anyone, whether a legal citizen or not, could simply mail in a ballot without a way it could be verified. It just gets accepted. Democrats even went to court months in advance to change the rules of the election process in order to make it easier for Democrats to cheat and steal the election. The integrity of the election has been undermined.

The dishonest and biased media. It’s no secret the media is on the side of Democrats. They are the publicity firm of the DNC. They’ve mastered the technique of getting away with lying, indoctrinating and omitting facts and stories. It’s utterly disgraceful that the institution of journalism, which was once somewhat transparent, is ominously shady. Most media outlets including CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, the AP, the New York Times, the Washington Post and others are in the tank for whatever Democrat is running against a Republican. Even Fox News now has its assortment of news anchors and correspondents that lean left, although most of its commentators like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham are solidly on the right. What the mainstream media do is tell a story that is so devoid of reality, omitting facts and keeping people from the truth. And they hide under a shroud of journalistic privilege. It’s malfeasance and high time to change the laws protecting these media crooks.

Certain Social Media Platforms. Like the mainstream media, certain social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter use their platforms to keep their users from learning the truth. With social media, however, it’s more devious. They’ve used algorithms to silence the right and allow leftist messages to prevail. It’s common to see a post on Twitter by a right-leaning source with a tag that says something like “This post is in dispute due to its non-factual content.” What gives them the right to deem the content non-factual? Interesting that I never see anything from a left-leaning source with the same tag. Twitter brazenly banned the Hunter Biden laptop story and had to admit and apologize for it, post-election. A study came out recently that showed a significant percentage of Biden voters would not have voted for him had they known about that. This is the threat to our democracy social media poses. It’s also time that these biased social media platforms are punished.

Well, time to reflect on the good things in life. Happy Thanksgiving.

Tom Folden is a political strategist, conservative thinker, and Editor of CommonSenseDictates.com, a website for common sense viewpoints. A human rights activist, he is a firm believer in the Constitution and the rule of law. He is also a singer/songwriter and recording artist. For interviews and/or appearances, please contact him at spencergroup@hotmail.com.

Joe Biden is Not a President-Elect, He’s a Candidate-in-Question

It has become increasingly nauseating listening to pseudo-reporters address former vice-president and candidate Joe Biden as “President-elect.” He is not President-elect. He is candidate-in-question.

This election has not been certified, making Biden the President of the United States. The Electoral College does not even meet until mid-December so in absolutely no way is it official. Although President Donald Trump has not been officially re-elected, it doesn’t mean another candidate has. It is both insulting and offensive that fake journalists go out of their way to call Biden and Kamala Harris president-elect and vice-president-elect, respectively, although it makes media people feel good to do so.

It is also massively disrespectful that after the media declared him the winner, Biden’s campaign team produced a pretend victory ceremony, as he and Harris gave pretend victory speeches. They then set up the faux “Office of the President-elect” and started setting up a transition team.

All this is happening in the midst of ongoing legal challenges the Trump legal team has made due to major irregularities that occurred on election night and after. On the evening of the election President Trump was winning the count in major swing states like North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, but the next morning, lo and behold, Trump’s leads in most of these states mysteriously disappeared.

At a press conference conducted on Thursday, November 19, the Trump legal team led by Rudy Giuliani and including Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis, laid out the basis for their challenges and discussed astonishing illegalities regarding the voting machines and software used that will prove Trump won. Although they did not present the totality of the evidence, because that is not what legal teams do prior to going to court, they did assure a dismissive media that cheating and fraud occurred and it was done with the intention of making Trump lose the election.

But the response to this explosive news conference was pitiful. Kristin Fisher of Fox News falsely reported that it was a “colorful news conference” that was “light on facts” and that “so much of what he (Giuliani) said was simply not true or has already been thrown out in court.” She sounded more like a reporter auditioning for a correspondent position at CNN, ABC, NBC or CBS, but certainly not one who is “fair and balanced.” She’s just another reason people are leaving Fox and switching to NewsmaxTV.

While the media mostly ignored the facts, they did eagerly cover the Biden/Harris “news conference” where Biden naturally struggled to coherently answer softball questions. The take away from this meeting is that the Biden team is frustrated that the White House is not cooperating with a Biden “transition team” and is not sharing information about President Trump’s successful COVID19 task force Operation Warp Speed. Lost on the Biden campaign is the fact that they are not entitled to any information since he clearly is not the president-elect but merely the candidate-in-question.

Tom Folden is a political strategist, conservative thinker, and Editor of CommonSenseDictates.com, a website for common sense viewpoints. A human rights activist, he is a firm believer in the Constitution and the rule of law. He is also a singer/songwriter and recording artist. For interviews and/or appearances, please contact him at spencergroup@hotmail.com.

What Elections Should Look Like Going Forward

While many people have bought into the lie that candidate Joe Biden has won the 2020 election for president of the United States, he clearly has not. He has not been certified by any state legislature. He was merely pronounced by the corporate media to have won, based on the faulty and fraudulent results of some state voting totals which made it appear that he had won.

However, the election results in many states are being challenged by President Donald Trump’s legal team, which has collected thousands of affidavits from witnesses and has compiled enough evidence that shows rampant election fraud in predominantly Democrat counties and states. The fact that this fraud has occurred is reason to standardize the voting process and streamline elections across the nation. No longer should individual states be allowed to make up their own election laws, which is what the state of Pennsylvania did months before Election Day. Every state should be required to follow the same set of election rules and procedures.

Since there seems to be some confusion as to how elections work, and since there seems to be ambiguity among different states in how voting occurs, election law should be codified federally and should not favor one party over another. Here is how it should look going forward.

One-day voting. Voting should take place on one day, Election Day, between a reasonable set of hours (e.g. 5am to 8pm). Under certain circumstances absentee voting may be allowed (e.g. for military and other select circumstances). In instances where people travel for work and are not able to be home to vote, they must be approved to vote by absentee ballot, and the approval process must be extremely strict, but absentee voting should be severely limited. Concessions should be made for each legal voter to take time on the day of election to vote. No company should be able to terminate any employee who wishes to exercise his/her constitutional right to vote. This means companies should schedule their everyday business with the day of election in mind.

No mail-in voting. There should be no mail-in voting, period. States should not be allowed to mail unsolicited ballots to residents, as many states and certain counties do. This has proven to be a system rife for fraudulent activity. Too many things could and do go wrong within this kind of system.

National Voter ID required. This is just common sense. Each voter should be required to show a national voter identification card in order to vote. Anyone without one should be turned away and barred from being within 100 feet or more of a voting center. There is no argument against a national voter ID policy that is legitimate. Anyone arguing against this appears to be a proponent of election fraud. Every legal citizen is able and has ample time to obtain a national voter ID so there is nothing racist, xenophobic, bigoted or otherwise about it. Those who are against a national voter ID are those who wish to cheat the system. Further, all legal citizens obtaining a national voter ID card should be required to show proof of citizenship. There should be no exceptions, period.

Military oversight. To avoid partisanship, the United States military should oversee all elections. There should be a team of military or National Guard members present at every voting center to maintain order. They should oversee the vote count and provide the vote totals to the federal state department. Representatives from each party should be allowed entry into voting centers to witness the count and observe all aspects of the counting process. Likewise they should be allowed to stop the count and question any aspect or procedure. If any observer is found to be deliberately obstructing the process, a replacement should be made. If any election official prevents or attempts to prevent an observer from entering the voting center, that official should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

All ballots to be hand-counted. To ensure the correct election results, all ballots should be hand-counted. This means that there will no longer be votes cast using computers or touchpads. Ballots will be designed to be easy to read and easy to fill out, leaving no question as to the intent of the selections made. Additionally, all ballots should be counted a minimum of three times. This can be done by having three different teams count the same batch of ballots, then compare the counts. This will make it easier to find discrepancies in counts and harder for vote fraud to occur.

No race called until count is complete. During the vote and the count process, the progress of the count should be kept confidential and not available to the media. All legal and legitimate votes should be counted before any winner is announced for any race. This will put the media into a frenzy and disrupt their election night coverage but so be it. The objective is to eliminate influence. As such, all media companies should not be allowed access inside voting centers and should be forbidden to call elections. It should be the responsibility of one designated entity to call an election for the winning candidate of any given race.

Equal representation. No state should have a one-party rule format, such as California has rigged for itself, which favors Democrats. Only one candidate from each party should be allowed to run in any given race. No race should have two candidates from the same party running.

Polling accountability. Polls taken before elections and during campaign seasons render unfair influence on voters. Many polls are interpreted by biased polling companies and organizations to make the campaign climate appear to be something that it is not. For this reason polling companies should make it clear upon releasing the “results” of their polls that they are not scientific and are subject to being highly flawed. Any polling company and organizations associated with them that fail to do this should be fined and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

USPS accountability. Since several employees of the United States Postal Service were caught discarding election mail and others claiming unscrupulous activity occurred during the 2020 election season, it should be extensively investigated and federal election officials should take extreme measures to ensure that all election mail is properly handled in the future.

Obviously many of these proposals will need to be ironed out and fine-tuned if they are to become part of election law, and still other things will need to be considered, but it’s at least a good first step toward recovering the integrity of our elections.

Tom Folden is a political strategist, conservative thinker, and Editor of CommonSenseDictates.com, a website for common sense viewpoints. A human rights activist, he is a firm believer in the Constitution and the rule of law. He is also a singer/songwriter and recording artist. For interviews and/or appearances, please contact him at spencergroup@hotmail.com.

Not So Fast, Democrats

Today former Democratic vice-president Joe Biden was pronounced the 46th president of the United States. While this is very sobering and disconcerting to a lot of people, to others it is just the next phase of the election and the beginning of an investigation that must take place.

With mounds and mounds of evidence of election fraud, from refusing Republicans to observe the ballot count in Philadelphia, to the thousands of ballots that were marked for Trump found in inconspicuous places, to Pennsylvania unconstitutionally fixing the election laws in order to help Democrats, to “glitches” in ballot software that switched Trump votes to Biden votes in Michigan and up to 30 states, this election certainly is not over no matter who declares it so.

Additionally, the states and counties where the election controversy is occurring all happen to be Democratic. Is this just a coincidence? Is this not suspicious enough for anyone with half a brain to think something is fishy here? Of course it is. Any honest person, pundit or politician knows in his/her heart of hearts that there is an attempt to steal this election.

Last night US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito ordered late ballots in Pennsylvania to be segregated and removed from the general count. Why then has the election been decided? What happened with the ballots that were to be separated? Were they illegally counted and covertly put into the general count? There are too many questions that need to be answered.

At the onset of the “pandemic” in this country, Democrats saw another opportunity to fraud the American people. They pushed for mail-in voting to be the standard by which Americans vote. And in many states, they got their way. This created a massive opportunity for fraud.

But this is what Democrats want – an easy way to cheat.

As twice failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton made clear to Joe Biden, “Do not concede under any circumstance,” President Trump should not concede under these circumstances. What is going on right now is nefarious. It is a coup that has been orchestrated for several months, perhaps years, to steal this election, to defraud the American people and to put Joe Biden, or whomever the Democratic candidate would be, in the White House.

Not so fast, Democrats. There is still a long way to go before a candidate is elected. There are tons of evidence that need to be reviewed and ballots that need to be re-counted. Trump deserves his rightful day(s) in court. So, not so fast.

Tom Folden is a political strategist, conservative thinker, and Editor of RightWingWriter.com, a website for conservative viewpoints. A human rights activist, he is a firm believer in the Constitution and the rule of law. He is also a singer/songwriter and recording artist. For interviews and/or appearances, please contact him at spencergroup@hotmail.com.

Reject Hate, Vote Trump

As we draw nearer to Election Day 2020, the choice for who should guide our nation as President of the United States keeps getting clearer and clearer. Do we elect a corrupt politician with 47 years of experience living off the government with a sordid history of shady business dealings while in office? Or do we re-elect a businessman with an impeccable record of success in his first term, all while battling a hostile Democratic House majority and Senate minority that sought to impeach him for unfounded allegations of collusion based on a congratulatory and diplomatic phone call with the recently elected president of Ukraine?

With less than a week to go, Democratic candidate and former vice-president Joe Biden continues to perform poorly on the campaign trail, when he’s on it, drawing what have to be record low numbers for those in attendance of his rallies. He continues to lie about things President Trump has said and done and is rarely fact-checked for his outlandish statements. He continues to present a landscape of confusion as to what he will do as regards his economic plan, his healthcare plan, and most notably, his energy plan.

On the energy front, he has contradicted himself about whether or not he will ban fracking. He claims he wants to “phase it out” so that renewable energy will become the new norm. Except that renewable energy can never replace fossil fuel energy in terms of its efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Essentially, he has hinted at following the dictates of the AOC- and Kamala Harris-endorsed “Green New Deal,” which would cripple our economy at an estimated $100 trillion price tag.

As for healthcare, he seems to be signing on to the Bernie Sanders “Medicare-for-All” plan. Medicare was originally designed to be a healthcare plan for citizens over age 65 as well as those with disabilities and certain terminal diseases. But as with most things Democratic politicians get their hands on, they want to turn it into a nationalized “come-and-get-it” medical plan, free to even illegal (aka undocumented) aliens, paid for by the wealthy.

His economic plan is to raise taxes so high it will leave the country in a depression worse than what’s known as The Great Depression.

He has been wishy-washy on so many other issues which leave people wondering: Will he pack the Supreme Court with liberal and radically left judges? How will he manage COVID-19? And what will he do about the rising violence in mostly Democrat-run cities across America, spawned by an irrational and vitriolic hatred for President Trump? With his track record of decades of failure, how can Americans expect him to lead effectively?

Why the hatred for Trump in the first place? For many, they have been deceived by a dishonest media which tell them that President Trump is racist, bigoted, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic, sexist, etc., etc., etc. It’s clearly not true but the leftist media aren’t going to tell the truth. When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, he spoke of the problem at the southern border where illegals come in, some who are rapists, some who are murderers (emphasis mine). He did not say all Mexicans are rapists or all Mexicans are murderers. He said some are, because it is true. The media know this well, but they refuse to correct this lie.

The media also lied about President Trump calling white supremacists “very fine people” when he spoke of the horrible tragedy that occurred in Charlottesville, VA in August 2017, where two groups of people were protesting the tearing down of statues, leaving one person dead and many others injured. What Trump said was “… and you have some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” He added, “You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”

Fending off haranguing questions from argumentative reporters, Trump clarified, “And you had people, and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many other people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”

This is that part that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, corrupt Democrats and the dishonest mainstream media deliberately omit and cause people to believe that Trump is racist. This is the hatred they have and continually perpetuate for President Trump.

All this should point to the clear and sensible choice. Re-electing Trump to office will ensure that we remain on a path of success. While it’s important to investigate for yourselves what is fact and what is fiction, when it comes to voting this election, it’s important to reject hate and vote Trump.

Tom Folden is a political strategist, conservative thinker, and Editor of CommonSenseDictates.com, a website for conservative viewpoints. A human rights activist, he is a firm believer in the Constitution and the rule of law. He is also a singer/songwriter and recording artist. For interviews and/or appearances, please contact him at spencergroup@hotmail.com.

Democrats Are Evidence Deniers

Democrats have a rich history of refusing to believe facts in difficult cases. They refuse to accept that Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election and now that the Robert Mueller report on supposed collusion between President Trump and Russia has been released they refuse to believe the evidence, or lack thereof, in it as well. It’s bad enough they believe there was collusion in the first place, it’s even worse, though, that they totally ignore the real collusion that occurred between Hillary Clinton and Russia. This makes them evidence deniers.

Typical of Democrats, as soon as the Mueller report was completed and a summary issued by Attorney General William Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein vindicating President Trump, they immediately jumped to their own conclusions instead of accepting the ones actually based on fact. They want so bad to find something to impeach him on so they are demanding to see the entire report, although they have no legal right, as it contains classified data they’re not privy to.

It’s plain to see their objective here. Knowing Clinton and many Democrats have committed crimes which should put them behind bars, they’re desperate to conceal this from the nation and are trying to continue the running narrative of Trump collusion. Ultimately, they want to oust him from office. It isn’t working but they keep trying.

Time and time again Democrats have denied evidence. The case of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, where 18-year-old Brown assaulted a convenience store owner then assaulted Officer Darren Wilson minutes later, is a perfect example. There was crime scene evidence that Brown did not have his hands up when he was shot, as certain people claimed. But many Democrats in the media decided it was best to run this narrative. The claim which led to the coined phrase “hands up, don’t shoot” was proven to be a lie.

Even when there is a lack of evidence, as in the claims of “global warming” and “climate change science” having something to do with the planet’s deterioration, most Democrats refuse to accept the fact that it is made up, a hoax, and a scam, all in an effort to attain money and power. There is not a shred of evidence that so-called global warming has harmed the earth, the atmosphere, the ocean, polar icecaps and those poor polar bears. It’s all nonsense, but when the Democratic Party has control of the media, academia, Hollywood and other institutions, the narrative gets out there and unsuspecting minds believe it.

No one denies climate change. The climate changes, that’s a fact, it’s just not harmful and destructive to the earth. What’s harmful and destructive to our nation, however, is failing to believe real evidence and going along with a false narrative.

Now that the record has been set straight in the Mueller report, that President Trump did not collude with Russia, it’s time to expose the truth in the Clinton/Russia collusion case. I’m waiting for the evidence, though I’m sure Democrats will still deny it.

Tom Folden is a political strategist, conservative thinker, and Editor of RightWingWriter.com, a website for conservative viewpoints. A human rights activist, he is a firm believer in the Constitution and the rule of law. He is also a singer/songwriter and recording artist. For interviews and/or appearances, please contact him at spencergroup@hotmail.com.

Ideology Over Identity

In a recent “man on the street” survey conducted on a university campus, millennials expressed that they are fond of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and support his decision to put his name into the proverbial hat of Democratic presidential contenders for 2020. However, many expressed that he is too old and feel the next president should be a woman, and if at all possible, a woman of color. In other words, not an old white man. But Kamala Harris fits the bill.

This very issue was a point of contention in the 2008 presidential election when, unfortunately, Barack Obama was elected. It is never important that we elect the first black president or the first female president or the first minority president. What always matters is that we elect the best person for the job, no matter the race, gender or identity.

But in 2008 more Americans elected the first black (well, half black, half white) man over an old white man. And as is usually the case when Americans choose identity over ideology, Americans lose on so many levels.

In 2016 Americans expressed their distaste for the status quo, for the same political rhetoric of career politicians and for the wasteland that is government. They wanted someone different so they elected Donald Trump. For two years, even as the resistance, hate media and anti-Trump machine have tried to derail the presidency, things have changed for the better and there is still work to be done.

The ideology of the Trump administration, for the most part, is preferable to the identity politics so many Democratic contenders are peddling. Americans still want ideology over identity in 2020.

Tom Folden is a political strategist, conservative thinker, and Editor of RightWingWriter.com, a website for conservative viewpoints. A human rights activist, he is a firm believer in the Constitution and the rule of law. He is also a singer/songwriter and recording artist. For interviews and/or appearances, please contact him at spencergroup@hotmail.com.

Five Things Not to Do at a Political Rally

Whether you’re protesting or supporting an issue, there is a right way and a wrong way to behave at a rally. So often, though, people miss the point and end up weakening their position or even hurting their cause. Here are five things not to do at a rally you attend.

Don’t engage in violence

This is just common sense and obvious to those who are sane. If you’re the type of person who is easily prone to anger and violence, you might want to take an introspective look at yourself and consider seeking help. Violence at a rally hurts the cause you’re supporting and is unfair to those on your side of an issue. Also, it only takes one video clip of someone behaving badly to hit social media and go viral before the so-called mainstream media picks up on it and spreads it worldwide. This is a tactic the left frequently employs. Don’t get caught in their trap.

Don’t call your opponents names

When someone isn’t able to have a civil conversation and discuss the facts of an issue, taking the low road and reverting to name-calling is a sure way to weaken an argument. Plus, it’s extremely childish. Let your opponent do the name-calling and you’ll be the bigger person.

Don’t bring ineffective signs

What’s the point of showing up with a sign that has a paragraph of information on an 18” x 24” footprint? What passerby is able to read small print on a poster board in two seconds as he’s driving by? It might be effective for anyone standing close enough to read it, but in that case you’re likely preaching to the choir. Instead, come up with a short message that fits your poster’s space using large enough letters and dark enough ink to be able to be read. If you have a ton of information to share, your better option is to create flyers or leaflets and hand them out.

Don’t dress up in a silly costume

If what you’re wearing is just over-the-top and goofy (e.g. dressed like Uncle Sam), you’re likely to turn people off and never win them over to your side. The line between having an unapologetic love for your country and being overly patriotic is not blurred. Sporting a shirt with the American flag is great, but do everyone a favor and don’t wear clothes that look like they were made from an American flag. Like it or not, people judge and sometimes they have a legitimate point. Who wants to be a part of a group where a few people dress in ridiculous attire and make the rest look bad? Most don’t.

Don’t use a bullhorn

As eager as you may be to emphasize your points, being in public shouting through a bullhorn just annoys people, and they aren’t going to listen to you if they’re annoyed. Sure you may have something very important you feel people need to hear, but this method is ineffective. Unless the rally is a meeting open only to members of your group, avoid using a bullhorn.

Taking part in a rally can be highly fulfilling, liberating and empowering. Carrying out what you feel is your patriotic duty is important but sometimes it comes at the cost of others ridiculing you. But have courage and take comfort in knowing you’re right in standing for what you believe in. Most of all, be smart. Don’t give ammunition to your opponent.

Tom Folden is a political strategist, conservative thinker, and Editor of RightWingWriter.com, a website for conservative viewpoints. A human rights activist, he is a firm believer in the Constitution and the rule of law. He is also a singer/songwriter and recording artist. For interviews and/or appearances, please contact him at spencergroup@hotmail.com.

The Temporary Reopening of Government Could Benefit President Trump

Last week President Trump made the classy move to temporarily reopen the federal government and allow those workers who missed one paycheck financial relief. This could end up actually working in Trump’s favor. Even if Democrats don’t see it as a victory for him, he could claim he has a heart for those who weren’t getting paid and make House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer share the blame for the shutdown. It can’t all be on Trump, but he needs to make that point clear.

When the three of them had an open, transparent meeting inside the Oval Office prior to the shutdown, Pelosi’s and Schumer’s stubbornness was on display for all the world to see, along with their disdain for the safety of Americans and lack of consideration for all who are and have been affected by illegal immigration. Without partial funding for the construction of a border wall, Trump said, he would have no problem shutting down the government. Then he doubled down and said he would take ownership of it, even when it’s Pelosi and Schumer who were being inflexible.

Although Democrats voted for funding a border wall over 10 years ago, they are now saying and doing the opposite. But that is typical of Democrats. They say what they need to in order to get elected one more time. When funding for a wall was approved then, and even when they promised increased border enforcements as part of President Reagan’s Immigration Control and Reform Act of 1986, they dragged their feet until it was forgotten. The problem only snowballed to what it is now.

Trump is not letting that happen again. He reopened the government with a directive for Congress to find funding by mid-February. If they ignore his directive (as they most likely have no intention of complying) he plans to use his power as POTUS and declare a national state of emergency to get it done. If that happens, he only needs to explain that he gave Democrats a chance and they blew it.

Democrats will again have shown Americans that they don’t care about their safety and were never serious about taking the first step toward building a wall, which would cost a fraction of what illegal immigration currently costs U.S. taxpayers. Indeed, the cost in human lives alone is more than the cost to build a wall on the entire southern and northern border. There’s no price that can be put on human life.

Tom Folden is a political strategist, conservative thinker, and Editor of RightWingWriter.com, a website for conservative viewpoints. A human rights activist, he is a firm believer in the Constitution and the rule of law. He is also a singer/songwriter and recording artist. For interviews and/or appearances, please contact him at spencergroup@hotmail.com.