Dan Smith (@danamp26) header
Dan Smith (@danamp26) profile picture

I support American made products, veterans, police, fire, public works, and family. 🚫DMs. Husband/Dad/Engineer/Patriot. 🇺🇸 🇺🇸

Chicago area
Joined September 2025
Photo by Dan Smith (@danamp26)Photo by Dan Smith (@danamp26)Photo by Dan Smith (@danamp26)Photo by Dan Smith (@danamp26)Photo by Dan Smith (@danamp26)Photo by Dan Smith (@danamp26)Photo by Dan Smith (@danamp26)Photo by Dan Smith (@danamp26)Photo by Dan Smith (@danamp26)
“the guy on the middle cross said I could come.” Great sermon today at the Chapel in Grayslake Il. The response from the thief who acknowledged Jesus on the cross next to him, when he was asked how a thief like him got into Heaven. I love that response! We all need that forgiveness and hope
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I just don’t understand how socialists and liberals can think that it’s ok to take from successful people and give it to people who didn’t work for it. It’s crazy, and then people think it’s ok to vote for these people
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Brilliant!
Replying to @BernieSanders
Bernie. Bernie, Bernie, Bernie. Let me get this straight, because I want to make sure I am reading your economics homework correctly, and I did not eat a bowl of alphabet soup this morning so bear with me. You just listed UnitedHealth's $5.48 billion quarterly profit as proof of corporate greed. Cute. Except that profit happened WHILE the Affordable Care Act — the law that guarantees these insurers a captive, subsidized, taxpayer-fed customer base — has been the law of the land for fifteen years. You are not exposing corporate greed, Senator. You are reading me the receipt for your own bill. The ACA did not shrink the insurance industry. It turned it into a government-guaranteed cash cow, and now you are shocked, SHOCKED, that the cow got fat. Eats soup with a fork, this one. And here is the part that should really sting. Your own party just finished a 43-day shutdown demanding MORE money be poured into that exact system, because the temporary COVID subsidies YOUR PARTY wrote into the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — zero Republican votes on either bill, by the way — expired right on schedule, exactly as YOU designed them to. Not a single Republican voted to end those subsidies. You did. Then you shut down the government to admit, out loud, on the record, that a law literally named the AFFORDABLE Care Act cannot survive without emergency pandemic cash. That is not an insult from me. That is a confession from you. So now the solution is Medicare for All. Naturally. Because when a fifteen-year-old government program made the insurance companies richer, the answer is obviously MORE government program, just bigger. If ignorance is bliss you must be the happiest man in the Senate. Independent estimates put full single-payer implementation at somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the ENTIRE federal budget. Forty to sixty percent, Senator. Larger than Social Security. Larger than defense. You want me to hand over half the country's checkbook to the same apparatus that just admitted its last healthcare experiment doesn't work without a subsidy IV drip. Let's talk about who's asking. You have served in the United States government for something like forty years between the House and Senate, and by my count the bills you personally got across the finish line as lead sponsor could be counted on one hand, mostly involving the naming of federal buildings. Somewhere out there is a tree tirelessly producing oxygen for you, Senator, and it owes itself an apology for the return on investment. This is also the same man who, as a young idealist, tried out communal living on a hippie commune and did not exactly stick around long enough to collect a pension from it. Now you want the reins to fifty percent of the national budget. I keep hearing "tax the rich" out of a man worth several million dollars who charters private jets on his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour because, in his own words, he isn't waiting in line at United with the rest of us peasants. Bless your heart. That is rich even by Congressional standards. Couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel, but sure, hand him the checkbook. And before you tell me capitalism failed and it's finally socialism's turn — how's that working out for your ideological younger brother in New York? Zohran Mamdani just announced a THIRTY MILLION DOLLAR government grocery store in a city his own comptroller says is worse than broke. Kansas City tried this. Erie, Kansas tried this. That is not a hunch, Senator, that is a lab result, and I am a science teacher, so let me walk you through the peer review. An experiment only counts as science if it has been REPLICATED. Not run once. Run again. And again. Under different conditions, different continents, different decades, different "well THIS time we'll do it right" true believers standing at the podium. So let's replicate it together, shall we, because apparently nobody handed you the lab notes. Trial one: the USSR, 1920s and 1930s. Stalin seized the farms, collectivized the kulaks, and centrally planned the harvest. Result: the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Ukraine that starved somewhere between five and ten million people to death while grain was actively being EXPORTED past their starving bodies. That is not a rounding error. That is a control group that died. Trial two: Cuba, 1959 onward. Castro nationalized every business, every farm, every bank on the island. Sugar production, once the envy of the hemisphere, collapsed. The economy shrank thirty-five percent in a single decade when the Soviet training wheels came off. Extreme poverty today sits near eighty-eight percent. Same experiment. Same result. Trial three: Venezuela, sitting on some of the largest oil reserves on the PLANET, nationalized its oil industry and ran the socialist playbook to the letter. Production collapsed from three and a half million barrels a day to under one million. Hyperinflation peaked past sixty-three THOUSAND percent. Nine million people fled. You cannot bribe your way out of the results with oil money. We tried. It's in the data. Trial four, and this one should make every teacher in America wince: China's Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1962. Mao abolished private farming, herded peasants into communes, melted down their pots and pans for backyard steel that was too low-grade to use for anything. Somewhere between fifteen and forty-five million people starved. Some regions saw cannibalism. That is not a typo. That is what happens when central planners replace the price system with a five-year plan and a slogan. Trial five: North Korea, present day, running the same command economy with the Juche twist. Famine in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands to over a million. Markets are technically illegal and thrive anyway in the shadows, because human beings will trade even when their government threatens to shoot them for it. Trial six is my personal favorite because it is the cleanest natural experiment in the history of economics: East versus West Germany. Same people. Same language. Same culture. Same starting point in 1945. One half got markets, one half got the Stasi and collectivized industry. East German productivity settled at roughly thirty to seventy-five percent of the West's, and the population had to build a WALL to stop its own citizens from swimming, tunneling, and hot-air-ballooning their way out. Nobody builds a wall to keep people from fleeing prosperity, Senator. Trial seven: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975 to 1979. They abolished money entirely. No markets. No private property. Total state control, straight out of the textbook you apparently keep on your nightstand. One point seven to three million people, roughly a quarter of the country, died of starvation, overwork, and execution in FOUR YEARS. And for the extra credit column: Ethiopia's Derg collectivization, Tanzania's Ujamaa villages, Yugoslavia's market-socialism ceiling, Vietnam before it finally abandoned the model, India's decades of License Raj stagnation, and Poland and the rest of the Eastern Bloc running factories that burned three times the steel per unit of output compared to the free market next door. Every single trial, same hypothesis, same result. I have seen middle schoolers design better controlled experiments during a volcano science fair. That is not one anecdote, Bernie. That is a stack of peer-reviewed, historically documented, independently verified trials spanning four continents and a full century, and the conclusion section reads the same every time: shortages, queues, corruption, and a body count north of a hundred million people once you tally every collectivized farm, every purged kulak, and every commune that ran out of rice. If an experiment fails this many times in this many labs, a real scientist stops blaming the equipment and starts questioning the hypothesis. You, apparently, would rather run trial number eight on 340 million Americans and call it "finally getting it right." Trying to reason with some folks really is like trying to baptize a cat. Quinn's First Law of Liberalism: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You want cheaper healthcare, you get record insurer profits. You want affordable food, you get a thirty-million-dollar failed grocery store. You want to fight the oligarchy, you fly private. Every single time. Set your watch by it. I keep asking Democrats this question and I never get an answer: what have YOU actually done to help people, versus just handing out someone else's money? Because handouts without a ladder out is not compassion. It is a leash. And I think deep down you know that, Senator, or you wouldn't need the private jet to get away from the people you claim to be fighting for. You're about as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it comes to actually running anything, but boy can you point fingers. You are the human version of period cramps on this topic, Bernie, and I mean that with the utmost respect for a man who has spent forty years discovering new ways to spend money he didn't earn. Has a leak in the think tank if he genuinely believes THIS is the moment socialism finally works. Unless your name is Google, Senator, you need to stop acting like you know everything about running an economy you have personally never had to run. But what do I know. I am only a medically retired Army combat medic and a science teacher who actually reads the Congressional Budget Office numbers before I open my mouth about a trillion-dollar healthcare takeover. @JoJoFromJerz @atrupar @TheYoungTurks #MAGA #Veterans #Trump
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America turns 250 today. Let me read back the resume. We started by telling a king to pound sand, in writing. By 1803 we bought half a continent from France for about four cents an acre. We fought a war with ourselves and somehow stayed one country. We strung a railroad across the entire thing. We handed the world the lightbulb, the telephone, and the airplane in about thirty years flat. Then a man named Willis Carrier invented air conditioning and made half the planet actually livable. You are welcome, Texas. You are welcome, Dubai. Twice the whole world caught fire, and twice we showed up and helped put it out. We split the atom. We put men on the moon in 1969. Then we went back and hit golf balls up there, because why not. We invented jazz, blues, rock and roll, and hip-hop, and the whole planet is still dancing to it. We put a burger and fries on every corner of the earth. We built rockets that fly themselves home and land standing straight up. We flew a helicopter on Mars. We launched a car into actual space and it is still out there cruising. We also invented ranch dressing and somehow talked the entire world into putting it on pizza. Priorities. We even invented three of our own sports so we could win them. Baseball, basketball, and football. Real football, the kind with hands, because we named it and we are not taking corrections. The rest of the planet can keep soccer, which is fine, we are hosting it in our backyard this summer anyway. And yes, Canadian football exists, wider field, extra man, one fewer down, and we try very hard not to think about it. Frankly it was generous of us to invent our own games. If we put all that energy into soccer, nobody else would ever lift that trophy again. We would win it so often they would just rename it the America’s Cup and hand us the keys. You are welcome for the suspense. And in 2026 we threw a birthday so big a German tourist live-tweeted our gas stations to 750,000 people. Not every chapter was clean. We argued, we stumbled, we fixed what we broke, and we kept building. That is the whole trick. Two hundred and fifty years in, and we are still the loudest, brightest, most improbable experiment on the map. Not bad for a country that started as a strongly worded letter to a king. Happy birthday, America. 🦋
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HANESPD26 Stackable extra discount for Hanes on Amazon. Available for a imited time.
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Wow
Replying to @HillaryClinton
@HillaryClinton Ma’am, I was the Air Force Lt. Colonel who carried the nuclear football for your husband inside that “people’s house” you’re suddenly so precious about. I saw it all up close for two years. While Bill was getting blow jobs in the Oval Office from an intern and groping female Air Force enlisted crew on Air Force One, you and your staff treated the military with open disdain, like we were the help, not the men and women sworn to protect this nation. The disrespect for anything non-Clinton was palpable. You lecture about “respect for the institution” while your husband lost the nuclear codes and shrugged it off. And when you finally slinked out in 2001? You and your crew trashed the place—vandalism, theft, glue in drawers, obscene messages, stolen property, and filth left behind for the next administration. The GAO confirmed it. Classy exit from the “people’s house.” The White House belongs to the American people, not your grifting dynasty. They just elected a fighter who actually respects the military and the office. Keep ripping off poor kids in Haiti, selling your merch and clutching pearls. Sit down, bitch. The adults are back in charge.
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Great quote from Rubio
This quoted post is unavailable.
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Dan Smith retweeted
The left will simultaneously stand outside an event with signs promoting political murder, hysterically scream about impending fascism, do podcast interviews explaining why political murder is justified, and explain why assassination victims had it coming, then also confidently declare that when one of their own takes them literally and attempts an assassination, that it must be staged.
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Well said! The difference is courage
I just got off the phone with someone who works in defense policy in Washington. What they told me should end every "Trump is reckless" argument permanently. "Every single president since Clinton received the same intelligence briefing on Iran's nuclear timeline. Every single one was told the window was closing. Every single one chose to kick it down the road because the political cost of acting was higher than the political cost of waiting." Trump got the same briefing. 60kg of 90% enriched uranium. 4 weeks to breakout. Material for 2 bombs. He chose to act knowing it would tank his approval to 35%. He chose to act knowing his own base would split. He chose to act knowing NATO allies would refuse to help. He chose to act knowing gas prices would spike. A senior analyst I know at a major think tank put it this way: "The difference between Trump and every president before him isn't intelligence. They all had the same data. The difference is courage." Read that again. Every president had the same file on their desk. Only one opened it and did something. I'll keep you updated. Turn on notifications. 🚨
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When someone asks you if you had to give one piece of advice, they’re looking for a shortcut. The most important piece of advice is to work hard. That’s it
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In the last 3 months, I have learned that the Venezuelan, Iranian and Cuban immigrants love USA more than Democrats do.
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Public works employees, who is the “sodfather” in your agency, the snow plow driver that causes the most sod damage every year? Tag them in this post.
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The ones that make fun of you are the ones that are envious of your courage- Gary Vaynerchuk
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From the daily email from Pray.com today. I love these last few lines from today's lesson: Rebekah didn’t begin the day expecting to find a husband. She simply acted upon her upright and selfless character. Instead of finding the right person to marry, we should focus on being the right person to marry. Refine your character. Serve others. Make meaningful connections. The rest is up to God.
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No that is funny. Box of French fries!
STOP what you're doing and buckle up. We warned you that we were just getting this party started. -We're estimating that well over 100,000 false reports about the whereabouts of ICE have flooded the "report ICE hotlines" that are meant to help far-left protestors impede ICE operations. -We're not saying we had anything to do with it, but we heard through the grapevine that more than 100 teams of veterans and off-duty officers have been "accidentally mistaken" as ICE by protestors... who then followed them DIRECTLY away from where ICE operations were able to take place. 🤣🤡 -We totally have nothing to do at all with ICE protestors showing up at the homes of ICE protestors to protest ICE... and then mass confusion following. It's so easy to cause mass chaos among these Communists when their collective IQ is lower than a box of french fries. @DHSgov @ICEgov @Sec_Noem @RealTomHoman @CBP @BorderPatrolHQ we’ve got your six.
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That’s pretty funny
We're not saying that Blue Lives Matter was behind feeding false information to far-left, anti-ICE protestors. We're not saying we had teams comprised of HUNDREDS of off-duty cops and veterans volunteer to run decoy operations so far-left activists THOUGHT they were conducting ICE raids. We're not saying they were in fact they were just driving around in what appeared to be unmarked vehicles with tinted windows... drinking coffee and listening to Guns and Roses.... being chased down and surrounded by protestors. What we ARE saying is that if it DID happen.... it sure worked remarkably well in NINE DIFFERENT STATES, allowing ACTUAL raids to successfully take place unimpeded, helping support the capture of HUNDREDS of criminals. Combat veterans, off-duty officers and patriotic Americans have had enough of the radical left... and are being activated across the country to back our #lawenforcement. And they're smarter...more skilled... more driven... better trained than the left … and actually enjoy sitting in a deer stand for days on end just waiting. @DHSgov @ICEgov we’ve got you.
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