It is an article of faith that whenever the Left accuses conservatives of doing something that is “a threat to our democracy,” they are doing it themselves, only much worse.  In truth, when a Leftist says “it’s a threat to our democracy,” what they really mean is, it may threaten our Woke Imbecile Democrat rule.  This week Victor David Hanson authored an article detailing the the ten ways that the Left has seized and warped the United States, in the pursuit of its revolution, which threatens to pervert every aspect of American life and culture.  Here are Dr. Hanson’s top ten reasons that the left is pushing America toward the abyss.  1) The Attack On Free Expression.  In schools, in the workplace, anywhere in public really, the Left is stifling free speech.  We used to say, “It’s a free country,” but now we have to think twice about any utterance, lest it run afoul of the campus speech code, or be considered proof of a hostile work environment.  The Left permits only one side to every issue, theirs.  And college students, who once were advised to challenge authority in places of higher education dedicated to the exchange of ideas and opinions, have been transformed into fragile snowflakes who run for the nearest safe haven in the face of the mildest dissent.  2) The Weaponization of Justice.  Friendly Justice Department employees have shielded many a president from close legal scrutiny, but the current Justice Department denizens                prove that “Justice” while a title, does not describe what they do.  Never before has a Justice Department gone out of its way to manufacture criminal charges against the incumbent’s chief rival, while at the same time ignored the blatant corruption of the incumbent.  3) The Attack On The Supreme Court.  The Left once relied on the Court to provide programs it lacked the votes to enact.  Now that the Court is more conservative, that is to say, is two thirds composed of judges, rather than partisans, the Left threatens it with violence and legal action, and denounces it as as illegitimate.  I suppose that makes them law deniers.  4) The Fusion Of  Democrats And The Media.  Yes, journalists have always been rather liberal, but there was a time, not so long ago, when they actually reported the news.  Journalism no longer exists.  The media has become a news management business, trashing Trump and all Republicans constantly with lies, and ignoring or denying truths that might hurt Democrats.  I get the hatred of Trump.  You’re not supposed to pick fights with the people who buy ink by the barrel, and Trump made that his trademark.  The Fake News really is fake, but they don’t like being reminded of it.  The Hell is that they’re killing Trump while protecting a Corrupt Demented Imbecile who’s driving the nation off a cliff.  I also don’t understand their endgame.  See Number 1 above.  The First Amendment that they’re helping the Left to destroy is the only thing that’s protecting their phony baloney multi-million dollar jobs.  If the Left wins, they’re fired, and Chairman Xi will send over somebody wearing a blue Mao suit to read the news for $62.50 a week.  5) The Deconstruction Of The Common Law.  Where to begin?  The Common Law developed from English court decisions going back hundreds of years, was developed from the Mosaic Code, the Commandments which embody the Golden Rule.  The certainty of the application of the law to offenders is the basis of modern society.  Law enforcement permits commerce to thrive and protects citizens from tyranny and vigilante justice.  The Left wants to end all that.  Defund the police.  Let criminals and illegals run amok, without consequences, and society contracts.  The well to do escape.  The cities die.  Jobs disappear.  And the very fabric of society is rent.  No sane person would do this.  6) The Erosion Of The Military.  For all our differences, the one constant used to be a respect for the military, which was considered the one part of the government that worked as designed.  Not anymore.  Our military under Biden worries more about proper pronouns than it does preparedness.  The Leftist insistence on promoting diversity to permit transgender troops is appalling.  The military exists to ensure national security, not easy access to abortions.  7) Sexes.  There used to be only two.  As part of its drive to destroy the family, the Left is hard at work blurring gender lines, encouraging gender changing mutilations, and perverting the minds of children with graphic depictions of deviant sex.  Not so long ago, Democrats told us Joe Camel was a danger to children.  Today, if Joe changed his name to Josephine and put on a drag show, the Left would make it a required part of every curriculum.  8) Race, Not Class.  All racial inequality is now blamed on whiteness.  The Left is promoting the resegregation of campus dorms.  Since affirmative action has failed, they’ve moved on to reparations.  According to the Left, merit, fitness, literacy, and even highways are racist.  9) Debt As A Construct.  For the Left, national debt is meaningless, inflation is caused by greedy corporations, and all private property is up for grabs in the name of social justice.  It’s not a new concept.  They learned it from Karl Marx.  We’d be far better off with Groucho.  10) Universities.  What were centers for thought and investigation are now factories for indoctrination.  Progressives have been coming for our children for 100 years, and they’ve now got them.  Socialist educator John Dewey started kindergartens in America, not to give American kids an extra year of education, but for the stated purpose of getting them away from their parents a year sooner, before the family’s values could be ingrained in them, and thus made harder to destroy.  Dr. Hanson lists all of us who reject Leftist orthodoxy as counterrevolutionaries, clinging to out racist and archaic Bill of Rights.  Wake up.  The Left has been at war with us for years.  Because they believe themselves to be Holy Warriors, they’re convinced that any atrocity they commit is justified.  This explains their preoccupation with Trump Derangement Syndrome.  Most of us might be able to be sent to reeducation camps to be retrained, but as Counterrevolutionary Number One, Trump must be destroyed.  That’s why the people who continually tell us, “no one is above the law” have decided that Trump is beneath the law.  If Dr. Hanson’s story scares you, and it should, tell a friend.

So far, Jack Smith, a/k/a Jack the Knife, has twice indicted Donald Trump.  The first indictment is for classified documents at Mar a Lago.  The second indictment alleges that Trump somehow defrauded the government by believing that he won the 2020 election and saying so.  Mr. Smith was appointed the special prosecutor by AG Merrick Garland because he is uniquely qualified for the job.  Smith was the head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section under Il Duce Obama, where he proved himself to be willing and able to stretch any statute, bend any rule, and ignore or circumvent any constitutional protection to prosecute a politician.  Smith’s proclivity for conducting himself like a rabid dog, rather than as an ethical prosecutor, has gotten him into some trouble over the years.  Smith’s victories in trial courts have sometimes failed to stand up on appeal.  Smith’s prosecution of former Virginia Governor McDonnell and his wife, supposedly for bribery over their acceptance of gifts is a case in point.  There was a conviction in the trial court, but the U.S. Supreme court reversed it 8-0.  In so doing, the Court observed “there is no doubt that this case is distasteful; it may be worse than that.  But our concern is not with tawdry tales of Ferraris, Rolexes, and ball gowns.  It is instead with the broader legal implications of the Government’s boundless interpretation of the federal bribery statute.”  The High Court rebuked Smith and warned that “the uncontrolled power of criminal prosecutors is a threat to our separation of powers.” In the end, the McDonnell’s were vindicated, but only after spending $27 million to defend themselves.  Smith unsuccessfully prosecuted former presidential candidate John Edwards for campaign finance violations.  When Senator Bob Menendez crossed Il Duce Obama, it was Smith who unsuccessfully prosecuted Menendez for bribery.  Smith has shown that he has no respect for the concept of attorney-client privilege, being in the habit of piercing the privilege to use attorney-client communications to prosecute defendants.  A Federal District Judge ruled that Smith illegally wiretapped calls between  a former Arizona Congressman he was prosecuting and his attorney.  Smith also used attorney-client communications to obtain the Trump indictments.  Jack the Knife conducts himself more like a racketeer than a prosecutor, by using blatant intimidation techniques in his prosecutions.  In the McDonnell case, he tried to coerce a plea from Bob McDonnell by threatening to indict Mrs. McDonnell if he refused.  He refused, and the wife was indicted.  In the Arizona case, Smith and his team obtained testimony from a cooperating witness by promising the witness $25,000 which they never paid.  In the Trump documents case, an attorney for codefendant Nauta, claims a prosecutor on Mr. Smith’s team threatened that the attorney’s application for a judgeship would be considered more favorably if he and his client turned against Mr. Trump.  The attorney has filed a complaint with the chief U.S. judge in Washington alleging prosecutorial misconduct.  Smith also has repeatedly tried to gag defendants while himself leaking to the media.  Just to keep the tallies straight, as this is written, there are three indictments against Donald Trump, including some 78 criminal counts, which carry aggregate penalties of about 641 years.  The Manhattan case is a joke, turning a legal payment for a non-disclosure agreement into a felony bookkeeping charge, all of which occurred more than five years ago, beyond the statute of limitations.  Whether this prosecution can go forward at all depends on the interpretation of an obscure provision of New York law, which permits extension of the limitation when “the defendant has been out of the State” the entire time.  This provision was intended to permit the prosecution of fugitives beyond the reach of the New York courts.  The argument will have to be that as president, Trump was “out of the State.”  That’s ridiculous, and I expect that the NY Court of Appeals will need to rule on this before any trial can begin.  The documents case, venued in Florida, has more merit, but just a little.  The dispute was between Trump and the National Archives, which has custody over classified documents.  But the law giving custody to the Archives carries no criminal penalty, so Smith had to stretch it into a conspiracy.  The problem with this is that the Presidential Records Act permits former presidents to keep some records, and Smith’s indictment isn’t clear about which particular documents were mishandled.  In a nutshell, this is an indictment that would only be brought against Donald Trump, whom the Establishment has never considered to be a legitimate President of the United States.  There seems to be a Trump exception to every legal protection afforded to criminal defendants in general and former presidents in particular.  Case in point, Trump stored documents for two years in a locked room approved of by the FBI and got indicted.  Corrupt Demented Imbecile Joe Biden, possessed classified documents dating to 1979.  He had no right to keep any classified documents.  He stored them in open boxes in his Delaware garage, and in the Penn-Biden Center at UPenn, where they were available to the Chinese nationals who bought and paid for the UPenn boondoggle, that paid Biden $900,000 to do nothing.  He has not, and will not be charged with any offense.  The latest, so-called January 6th indictment is just more Jack Smith sleight of hand.  All the charges involve the allegation that Trump knew he lost the 2020 election, but lied about it to try to change its result.  Once again, fanciful conspiracies are alleged.  What really happened was that Trump was seeking to have Congressmen and Vice President Pence challenge the election results in several States to permit State Legislatures to evaluate the electoral processes used, and which the Constitution states is the province of the Legislatures.  Democrats have challenged every election they’ve lost since 2000.  Smith turned it into this:  A conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the federal government; A conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified; and A conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.  That last one is a statute enacted after the Civil War to stop the KKK from keeping black voters from casting votes.  Its application to the Trump case is, to say the least, puzzling, and brings to mind the words of the Supreme Court in the McDonnell case, “the uncontrolled power of criminal prosecutors is a threat to our separation of powers.”  Trump relied on legal experts who found fraud and he said so.  Other lawyers disagreed.  Jack Smith has decided which legal opinions were correct, and now seeks to punish Trump for exercising his First Amendment rights.  It’s ironic that Democrats, who have spent so much time blaming Vladimir Putin for Trump’s victory, have adopted Putin’s tactics for dealing with political opponents, who he regularly throws into prison.  I wish I believed Trump could win in 2024, just to be able to see their heads explode.

The summertime used to be the quiet time for politics.  We got a little breather, and the political nonsense didn’t start up again until after Labor Day.  But not this year.  The 2024 presidential campaigns are underway.  Republican candidates are making appearances in early primary States.  Trump remains far ahead.  RFK, Jr. is running against Biden, so Democrat hacks are busy assassinating his character. Maybe that’s a poor choice of words.  Corrupt Demented Imbecile Joe Biden is running his reelection campaign.  Sleepy Joe has a unique campaign strategy which consists of going to the beach in Delaware, lying about the economy, denying he ever heard of his son Hunter, getting lost, falling down, and repeatedly indicting Donald Trump.  So far, Trump has been indicted for making payments to a woman in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement, which isn’t a crime and is barred by the statute of limitations; possessing classified documents, which the Presidential Records Act says is legal, something no ex-president has ever been charged with, and something Biden has done without consequences; and the latest – being a political figure who made a false statement about an election, which is a crime that special prosecutor Jack (The Knife) Smith just made up, despite a little thing called the First Amendment, and the fact that such an offense would send 99 and 44/100ths percent of our elected officials to prison.  Another State indictment is expected in Georgia.  The Biden plan seems to be, if you can’t beat ’em, jail ’em.  The idea is to pile criminal charges on Trump, and have him run for election while under indictment, already convicted of some offense, or preferably from a prison cell.  Unfortunately, Donald Trump is prepared to do just that.  Which brings us to the point of this week’s exercise.  Republicans are complaining about Biden’s weaponization of the justice system, and the two-tiered system, which ignores or minimizes blatant crimes by the Bidens, while persecuting Biden’s foes for things like fake Russian collusion, and things that aren’t crimes, based on novel prosecutorial theories.  Democrats, of course, refuse to acknowledge the obvious special treatment afforded to their own.  Case in point, the curious treatment of Hunter Biden.  Many have criticized the prospective Hunter pleas as a “sweetheart deal.”  Democrats, of course, deny this, as their desire to see justice done is wholly dependent on whether doing it will give them a political advantage.  Being experienced liars, Democrats continue to tell us Hunter got no special treatment, and that he shouldn’t have been prosecuted at all just because he had an addiction.  Let’s examine the facts.  The Hunter Biden prosecution was a long time coming.  The special prosecutor slow-walked the investigation, which had little to do with Hunter being an addict, and much to do with his suspect business activities, which brought in millions of dollars from foreign companies, who hired Hunter to do … well, nobody knows what.  The money came in, it got shifted and sifted through some 20 shell companies, and wound up in bank accounts of Biden family members, generating more than 100 Suspicious Activity Reports.  Meanwhile, Hunter neglected to pay taxes on much of the money, or even to file tax returns for a number of years.  Hey, he was busy.  He also, throughout this period, was distracted by a divorce, an affair with his sister-in-law, an illegitimate child with a stripper, and oh yes, his out of control addictions to alcohol, crack cocaine, and just about any other drug he could get his hands on.  Hunter’s descent is chronicled on the laptop he left in Delaware, in graphic photos and messages detailing debauchery, constant drug use, and misuse of a gun, which wound up in a garbage can.  Now, Democrats are against gun possession, but don’t fret.  Hunter got no special treatment.  His father just sent the Secret Service to get the gun back.  And while all this wholesome activity was going on, Hunter was selling his family name, now known as “The Brand,” to any foreign government interested in buying influence.  And so it came to pass that the special counsel, David Weiss had to do something with Hunter.  He stalled long enough to put Hunter’s 2014 and 2015 tax evasions beyond the statute of limitations, and gave Hunter a deal on two misdemeanor tax charges (no jail), and a diversion program on the gun possession, meaning, stay clean for two years and it gets dismissed.  The phony “legal experts” on MSNBC dutifully said this was not special treatment for a Biden.  Others, more attuned to reality disagreed.  Rapper Ja Rule had  similar gun and tax charges and got 24 months for the gun and 28 months for the taxes.  Another rapper, Kodak Black, got 46 months for the same gun charge on which Hunter got the diversion.  Here in New Jersey, there is a mandatory prison term of 12 to 42 months for gun possession, without the possibility of parole.  Then there’s the case of 2007 Biden donor Chris Tigani.  Hunter Biden asked him for $75,000 to pay for billboards for Joe’s 2008 presidential campaign, and Biden campaign financial director Dennis Toner suggested Tigani structure the payments as coming from his employees.  This turned out to be illegal.  The Obama Justice Department prosecuted Tigani for illegal campaign contributions.  Tigani cooperated, and offered to wear a wire against the Bidens.  The FBI said “No.”  Toner didn’t remember telling Tigani anything, and he got 24 months in prison, from the same David Weiss who’s prosecuting Hunter.  Tell me again how the Bidens don’t get special treatment.  So as for the Hunter plea deal, let me officially call it sweetheart.  Last week, when Hunter went to court to put the sweetheart deal through, the judge in the case refused to accept the pleas.  Democrats howled about a Trump-appointed judge, but now the facts.  What the judge did in temporarily derailing the deal was as much for Hunter’s benefit as for that of the public.  A guilty plea requires a meeting of the minds on both sides.  The government must understand what it is giving and getting, and the defendant must fully understand the consequences of the plea.  If not, no judge can take the plea, and there were some problems here.  Biden was under the impression that the pleas ended all investigations into his conduct.  The government had to admit that’s not true, as he’s still under investigation for other crimes.  The judge asked, “Is there any precedent for such a deal?”  Weiss said, “Uh, no.”  That doomed the deal, and here’s why.  Justice Department plea policy is to have the accused plead to the most serious provable charge.  That wasn’t done here.  The parties disagreed on the terms of the agreement, so you can’t take the pleas.  And most importantly for Hunter, if you’re getting into a diversion program, the program comes with a long list of dos and don’ts, like, do stay off drugs and alcohol.  The biggest don’t is don’t get charged with another crime.  You can’t put Hunter in the program today, and tell the court we may come back next week with a new indictment that will bounce him out of the program.  As a result, the sweetheart deal is on hold, for now.  I’m sure it will be back.  Meanwhile, the same Justice Department is trying to put Trump in prison for 400 years.  Justice may be blind, but she peeks out every now and then to see who’s in front of her.

We’ve lived through so many government scandals that you’d think these political A-holes would have figured out by now how to stay out of trouble when they do something wrong, but they never learn.  Invariably, a small fault erupts into a major scandal, and we’re reminded that, “It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup.”  Watergate is the best example.  The June 1972 break in at the Democrat National Committee offices really was “a third rate burglary.”  Nixon’s Reelection Committee allowed maniacs like Gordon Liddy to do a variety of totally improper, stupid, and wholly unnecessary things, with the help of a retired CIA agent and Cuban mercenaries.  Had Nixon fired everybody involved immediately, it would have been embarrassing, and he still would have been reelected.  Instead, Nixon protected people around him who had done him damage, and participated in discussions of such things as hush money payments.  You know the rest.  It was front page news for 2 years, because the media always hated Nixon and welcomed any opportunity to do him in.  This month, we’ve passed the seventh anniversary of the biggest, and most dangerous political scandal in American history, and most media outlets refuse to so much as take notice of it.  In June 2015, Donald Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower and announced he was running for president.  His announcement was greeted with scorn and laughter.  President Donald Trump?  Ridiculous!  Media outlets gave Trump lots of coverage, and just kept laughing, until it became apparent that Trump had a chance to win.  That couldn’t be permitted.  Trump was an outsider who rejected political business as usual as practiced by both Parties.  Trump made the usual political promises, the difference being that he actually intended to do what he promised.  He wanted to lower taxes, stop runaway government spending, bar politicians and their staffs from becoming lobbyists, cut 20% of the federal bureaucracy, revamp trade policies, curb the excesses of the intelligence agencies, reduce regulations, and perhaps most egregious of all, end pointless wars.  Those things couldn’t be tolerated by crooked politicians on both sides who live to tax, regulate, rake in lobby money, and who have sold themselves to defense contractors.  As a  result, even before Trump won, government entities had decided that he must be stopped at all costs.  Now, Hillary Clinton, who really was taking millions from Russians funding her Foundation, and whose campaign manager and his brother (the Podestas) really were being paid by Russian bankers, got a phony dossier from Russian intelligence sources that accused Trump of Russian collusion.  The Obama Justice Department used the dossier to begin investigating Trump in July 2016, although agents now admit they knew at the time it was false information.  They used this false information to get FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, something that never had been done to a presidential candidate.  They tapped Trump’s phones, and those of his staffers.  When Trump complained, the lapdog media, coconspirators in the scheme, scoffed, and every step of the way claimed there was “no evidence” of such a thing.  Remember those words.  They’ll be back.  After Trump’s election, the FBI’s James Comey went to the White House, and treated Trump as a criminal target, filing an investigation report of the meeting.  The Justice Department secretly investigated it’s boss, the president.  Anyone remember Rod Rosenstein entertaining suggestions that he go to a meeting with the president wired to record the conversation?  There followed 5 Congressional investigations of Trump, a bogus special prosecutor, and the 2 year Mueller investigation, all of which revealed no evidence of Trump wrongdoing, because there never was any.  People around Trump, including family members, were subpoenaed, forced into hours of pointless testimony and millions of dollars of legal fees, hounded, and even prosecuted.  Bureaucratic moles leaked Trump’s confidential conversations with world leaders, and executive branch employees avoided and frustrated the orders of the chief executive.  Then Congress impeached Trump twice, Democrats enlisted Corrupt Demented Imbecile Joe Biden, and they ousted Trump, with the help of pandemic-inspired electoral hanky-panky.  Getting rid of Trump was Part A of the scandal.  Part B began with the choice of Biden to replace Trump, and the efforts to keep Trump from being reelected.  The media first had to pretend Joe Biden wasn’t a senile nincompoop in 2020.  Then, the narrow Republican victory in the House of Representatives in 2022 necessitated more more extensive coverups.  The evidence that Joe Biden and family are crooks was blatant in the Fall of 2020.  The FBI convinced social media companies to erase all mention of Hunter’s laptop, which contains documentary and photographic proof of his crimes, including soliciting bribes from foreign entities, and laundering the money through a series of shell corporations to fund Biden family expenses.  Hunter’s business partners have admitted the crimes.  Emails and bank records prove the crimes.  Hell, there’s even a video of Joe Biden bragging about how, as vice-president, he forced the government of Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating his son’s misconduct by threatening to withhold U.S. loan guarantees.  But, every time Biden criminality comes up, we’re told “there’s no evidence,” or “it’s unproven.”  Now, this by itself wouldn’t be shocking because politicians routinely get a license to steal in Washington, but the media disinterest, the Justice Department’s slow-walking of investigations, and outright refusals to provide documents must be judged against the backdrop of a so-called justice system that is being wielded by Democrats to repeatedly indict Trump for de minimus nonsense, and things that aren’t crimes in the first place.  They have to engineer a 2024 election in which the Democrat (it won’t be Grandpa Simpson Biden) runs against four time indicted, and perhaps already convicted felon Donald Trump.  But why all the fuss?  They say the fish stinks from the head.  Well here’s the head.

         That’s right.  In 2016 government officials took what they knew was false information from a political candidate, used it to smear her opponent before the election, and to topple his administration after the election.  This is called a coup de etat.  In so doing, they lied, they perverted and tainted the judiciary, they defied the chief executive, they ignored legitimate Congressional inquiries, they made a mockery of the First Amendment by telling private companies what should and shouldn’t be heard and seen, while all the time violating myriad laws in the process.  Their crimes are now impossible to to hide, and should Trump somehow be reelected they will have nowhere to hide.  Hence, the continuing coverup, now in its seventh big year.  The coconspirators include elected officials, bureaucrats, so-called law enforcement officers, a veritable rogues gallery of once respected so-called intelligence officials, and of course, the media whores who swear to every lie, hide the truth, deny the truth, and attempt to destroy any who dare dissent.  Each and every one of these bastards is willing to destroy what was once the freest, and most well respected nation on Earth, and replace it with Soviet-style justice, just to save their own sorry asses.  Donald Trump is far from perfect, but it’s not about him anymore.  If these bastards get away with this, the Constitution is just a joke, and Banana Republic corruption will become the norm.

Josef Stalin famously said, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are only a statistic.”  The accuracy of that statement was driven home earlier this month with the death of Robert DeNiro’s 19 year old grandson, Leandro Rodriguez, who was found dead in his New York City apartment, of an apparent drug, or drugs, overdose.  Now, just to keep the record straight, on these pages I have made no secret of the fact that I do not like Robert DeNiro.  I have described him as an under-educated, overpaid, foul-mouthed cafone, and that opinion hasn’t changed.  I have no use for him or for his politics, but this is different.  I have seen posts on Facebook that almost have taken delight in the death of his grandson, suggesting that DeNiro got what he deserved, and I think these posts are appalling.  Nobody “deserves” to lose a grandson, and no 19 year old “deserves” to die.  But that being said, the death of 19 year old Leandro shouldn’t have come as a surprise.  He had a bad multi-drug habit, that his family had to know about.  Shortly after his death, Leandro’s mother said he had bought fentanyl-laced pills.  He was found in his apartment, next to a quantity of white powder and various items of drug paraphernalia.  Postmortem toxicology revealed cocaine, fentanyl and benzodiazepines in his system. Clearly, Leandro had a bad problem.  Because his grandfather is a celebrity, Leandro’s tragic death was front-page news.  That’s not usually the case in New York.  Nearly 3,000 people die from drug overdoses in New York City every year, more than 7 per day.  The leading cause of death the past 6 years is fentanyl.  The majority of the victims are black,  and most of the deaths occur in the Bronx.  These thousands of drug overdose victims don’t get their names on the front page of the newspaper, and little notice of them is taken by elected officials and law enforcement.  But, as Stalin said, one death is a tragedy, and the death of someone connected to a celebrity calls for immediate action, and into action the authorities went.  Within days, police, aided by the DEA and Homeland Security no less, had arrested Sophia Haley Marks who was well known to law enforcement as the “Percocet Princess.”  According to a police source, Marks is notorious for selling pills to under-aged buyers, as young as 15.  Police found text messages on Leandro’s phone between him and Marks, who apparently is a drug dealer with a conscience.  She sold him counterfeit oxycodone (percocet) and xanax for $105, but warned Leandro, “Do you r[eal]ly need them … I [don’t] wanna kill u,” later adding, “I j[ust] don’t like serving u them cuz they not script,” and cautioning,“don’t go overboard with these.”  Of course, telling a drug addict not to go overboard is like telling a lion to go vegetarian.  Although Marks was a notorious drug dealer, I guess she wasn’t a priority for law enforcement.  The death of a celebrity’s relative changed that.  And the Feds had to get in the act, because in Manhattan, drug dealers are just released without bail after arrest.  Marks obligingly sold 50 fentanyl-laced percocets to the DEA, warning the undercover agent, “please be careful with these … don’t do more than one at a time … my friend just died.”  In New Jersey, and many other States, that admission would be tantamount to a confession to drug-induced homicide, but New York has no drug-induced homicide law.  The federal charges, however, expose Marks to a sentence of up to 40 years, undoubtedly far more time than she would get from Alvin Bragg in Manhattan.  As they say, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, so it’s not surprising that the DeNiro family got a quicker law enforcement response than most.  The real question, however, is what, if anything, will be learned from the tragedy of Leandro’s death.  Maybe it’s time that we, as a society, reexamined drug addiction in general, and the prevalence of fentanyl in particular.  As kin to a celebrity, we know Leandro’s name.  But what about the thousands of dead young people throughout the land who have been killed by fentanyl.  We lost 58,000 people in Vietnam over 10 years, and built a monument.  Fentanyl kills nearly 100,000 nameless, faceless young people every year, and they’re ignored.  Although too much fentanyl killed them, most of these victims didn’t overdose on fentanyl, because they never knew what they were taking contained fentanyl, which is added to a variety of illicit drugs.  On this point, at least Leandro had a chance.  He was warned the pills he was buying were counterfeit and could kill him.  In the end, no warning could overcome his addiction.  The nameless, faceless others get no such warning.  And what is our society doing about a threat that kills 100,000 Americans a year?  Nearly nothing.  Although we know the fentanyl is being shipped in from Mexico, after having been manufactured by Chinese chemists, using Chinese ingredients, we’re not going after the Mexican cartels, and of course, Corrupt Demented Imbecile Joe Biden can’t complain to his Chinese masters.  After all, business is business, right Hunter?  And we’re admitting millions of illegal aliens, to include fentanyl smugglers, and Mexican cartel members, who are expanding their businesses North of the border.  On top of this, we have Woke cities, including New York, that are enabling and encouraging illegal drug use, and drug legalization.  In the early 1980’s, serious people argued that cocaine wasn’t dangerous, and should be legalized.  Then Len Bias died of an overdose, sanity returned, and the legalization talk decreased.  But today there are no guide rails.  Idiots are still touting legalization, and governments are aiding and abetting illegal drug use, in some places setting up stations where government employees will actually inject the drugs into the addict.  They supply needles and crack pipes, free of charge, and are handing out Narcan, to revive comatose victims.  They call this compassion.  I call it suicide by government.  And it’s shameful.  Leandro’s mother rightly blames the drug dealer for her son’s death, but there’s more blame to go around. Government, on all levels needs to declare the fentanyl problem an intolerable threat to America, and do something to interdict the supply, while at the same time working with addicts to reduce demand.  Maybe if celebrities demanded action, the government would do something.  Leftists like Robert DeNiro like to call things “existential threats.”  Well here’s a real existential threat.  100,000 annual deaths isn’t only a statistic.  The actors are on strike now, so maybe they could use this down time to at least act like they care.  Will the actors act?  Not likely.