Harlan is a financial planner who lives in Little Italy.
What has become of America? Democracy is supposed to be about equal justice, which should be cause to celebrate Independence Day, but I cannot believe that equal justice truly shapes the landscape of the nation today. I can already hear my liberal friends, preparing their venomous critique for what I write here. That’s too bad, because my goal is to encourage high-minded discussion with fair-minded readers, and to accept the type of criticism that I fully anticipate is worth it to express this view.
What’s happening to Donald Trump is a political crime. Someone please convince me that the sitting president is not using his administration to attack Donald Trump. I can already feel the anger teeming among my liberal friends, but as I’ve said in this forum many times, I am not a Donald Trump fanatic. He’s an effective bully, which made him unpopular and accomplished, including as president. Sorry, but it’s true. The economy was humming, the border was nothing close to the complete mess it is today, and there was no hot war in Europe. I could go on, but I’ve already made enough people mad enough. Please allow me to underscore this — I’m a registered independent and card-carrying libertarian. I paid a nominal amount to see one presidential candidate this year, a Democrat whose last name is Kennedy, so to make me a Trump apologist misses the point.
How is it that anyone can deny what appears to obviously be a two-tier system of justice in America? Both former President Trump and current President Joe Biden held sensitive documents outside of a government installation. The FBI raided one man’s home. The other man’s lawyers gently walked through his house while agents waited patiently to receive the documents. One man’s son faces misdemeanor charges that could be considered a felony, while the other man receives indictments from the current president’s Department of Justice and a district attorney funded by the wealthy left-wing money machines.
My message is simple — let’s start our political discussions from a place of truth. Meaningful discourse can and ought to can start from a place of honesty about certain realities. Here’s one example — please don’t tell me that the U.S.-Mexico border is secure. That’s not true, the kind of thing I like to call a lie. How about, instead, we have a conversation about the reality at the border and the value of adding higher numbers of immigrants to America?
Let’s dispute the facts in a civil manner so we can settle on some truths and then have a wider discussion about justice in America. A recent Gallup poll showed that from 2020 to 2022, the percentage of people who have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the criminal justice system fell from 24 percent to 14 percent. Maybe I’m not alone in my thoughts. Let’s talk about that.