“I’m not here to peacefully protest. I’m here to disrupt until my demands are met. You cannot rebuild until you break it all the way down. Respond to the demands of the people or prepare to be met with any means necessary.” — Jaiden Grayson, blm/Antifa leader of “autonomous” Seattle neighborhood, Andy Ngo video, 6/17/20

“We heard you. You’re right. We agree with you, protesters… You won. You won! You accomplished your goal.” — Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D, NY), ordering all 500 NY police forces to be “redesigned” to satisfy “communities” or lose state funding, nbc News, 6/13/20

“Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.” — op-ed, The New York Times, 6/12/20

Folks, the Democrat-run cities and states are in meltdown, all of a sudden said to suffer from systemic racism. It was just a few weeks ago that keeping law-abiding people from escaping lockdown was the only thing the media cared about. As the worst of the pandemic receded and the country started to open up again, the same blue states and blue cities were determined to put hairdressers and barbers in jail for daring to keep their businesses open. Restarting the economy was portrayed as literally murderous, with the biggest threats, supposedly, beachgoers and “superspreader” churchgoers.

Now, seemingly overnight, the biggest threats are blue-city police, businesses, and monuments — which must be smashed, looted, and burned. I can’t get past the fact 95 percent of all this misery is happening in Democrat-run states.

The whiplash is stunning. We went full-bore on covid-19 shutdowns until the moment leftists pounced on the legitimate protest over the horrific George Floyd murder. Suddenly, crowds pouring into the street cheek-by-jowl, mouth-to-mouth, butt-to-butt, and every other permutation, was actually healthy. On June 5, over 1,000 health professionals signed an open letter stating, according to cnn “We do not condemn these gatherings as risky for covid-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of black people in the United States.”

And the second Donald Trump announced his June 20 Tulsa rally, boom! Instant return to virus hysteria about the lethal danger of crowds, along with media obsession over a phantom pandemic second-wave. The common thread here: whatever Democrats think will hurt Donald Trump. That’s the entire energy behind all of this.

Democrats are going to war against Trump using the weapons they have: the economies of the blue cities and states they control. Whatever tools they need to keep the blue economies shut down — emergency lockdown orders, riots, gutted businesses, occupation, whatever — they will use, by any means necessary, to coin a phrase. Democrats are sure that if the blue state economies are shuttered, that will squash the larger economy. So if Democrat states have to hold the rest of the country hostage to get rid of Trump, they figure, so be it.

It’s a malicious strategy. Here’s what Kevin Hassett, White House economic advisor, said on Fox News on 6/12/20:

There’s a radical difference right now in the data between red states and blue states… [T]ake a blue state like Vermont, which elected a socialist senator. Their economy is basically closed, even though they have the fewest [coronavirus] cases per capita of any state in the country. And then other states are wide open. So I think that there is going to be increasing divergence between the economies of blue states, where unemployment is going to be staying very, very high and the economies are going to stay closed, and the red states that are mostly open now. We’ve got a whole bunch of states where credit card spending … is above where it was last year already, and then we have other states that are thirty, forty percent down [from last year] because they’re still closed.

Thirty to forty percent down! Given that there are 24 states with Democrat governors and 26 states with Republican governors, it is understandable that Hassett said this is the one thing that gives him pause in his optimistic projections for the future trajectory of the larger U.S. economy. It seems axiomatic that if half the country is basically furloughed — including the huge economies of California and New York — America can only limp along.

On 6/17/20, according to Fox News, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D, MI) gleefully extended Michigan’s state of emergency, which was about to expire. “The data shows that very few states dropped their infection rates as low as Michigan has,” she bragged, crediting her “aggressive” (read: tyrannical) actions. “Only Michigan and New York are on track to contain covid-19.”

But she won’t liberate Michigan. She’s a true-blue anti-Trump blue-stater.

It’s almost as if the obvious injustice and hypocrisy is the Democrats’ political message: we are in power. We are in control. We grant liberty for ourselves only; you get nothing. We create mayhem, we destroy what you value, we tear down the America you love, and we do it in your face with impunity to prove we can. We will force you to accept it. You cannot protest; we can. You cannot even take your kids to the playground.

While the law-abiding were in lockdown and forbidden to go to work, school, church or play, Democrat mayors all over the country freed felons, to supposedly “protect” them from the coronavirus. But no one protected the public. According to abc New York, 250 freed inmates from the infamous Rikers Island prison have been re-arrested, at last count, 450 times. Because they’re freaking criminals. They call us “grandma killers,” while the deliberate policies of at least three Democrat governors besides Whitmer and Andrew Cuomo actually killed thousands of grandmas and grandpas by forcing covid-19 patients into nursing homes — with devastating outcomes.

Meanwhile, President Trump is demonstrating he can revive the economy again. Retail sales were up 17.7 percent in May, the biggest monthly rise on record. While the Democrats are doing what? Demanding the defunding of the police. Tearing down statues. Defacing monuments. Allowing the takeover of a Seattle neighborhood and calling it “the summer of love.” They support the looting of stores. That’s what excites their base, and that’s what the Democrats are promoting. Are Democrats celebrating the economic news? No way. Widespread prosperity is not their friend. They are doing everything they can to sabotage it.

But there’s one thing the hostage-takers didn’t foresee. The blue states didn’t calculate for their own economic weakness. Amazingly, they themselves may not contribute as much to the national wealth as they thought they did. With every “surprising” and “unexpected” economic report and every shocking success of the Trump rebound, the blue states’ ability to strangle U.S. economic growth and the return to normal American life looks to have been highly exaggerated. What they contribute — while, yes, significant — is greatly reduced by their drain on the federal treasury. It can be argued that the red states have been largely carrying this nation all along.

Here’s how the President put it in his 6/5/20 Rose Garden press briefing celebrating the jobs numbers — a reported 2.5 million increase when a loss of over 8 million jobs was predicted by all experts — according to WhiteHouse.gov:

One of the reasons we’re in this position is because we had such a strong foundation. So we were able to close our country, save millions of lives, open. And now the trajectory is great. Don’t forget, New York is barely included, and that’s one of our big ones. California is barely included because they’re not open — and they should open, by the way.

What if the blue states tried to take America hostage, and the rest of the country beat all forecasts without them? The amazing productivity and innovation of the people who make the country work — in so-called “flyover country” — can set Lady Liberty free.

Set her free! And to keep her free: stop electing Democrats.

Illustration ©2020 by Christopher Hiers created for The Limbaugh Letter