Lawyer

The Mainstream Media Is Hyping Up The Release Of The Mueller Report As If It Were Some Sort Of Key Historical Event

Are you ready for the biggest non-event in recent American political history?  The mainstream media is treating Thursday’s release of the Mueller report as an event of critical historical importance, but it isn’t.  Unless Attorney General William Barr was lying to us in his summary of the report, there aren’t going to be any major bombshells.  Of course anti-Trump forces will be sifting through the report for any nuggets that they can possibly use, but in the end it will be a fruitless exercise.  Trump never colluded with the Russians, and Mueller didn’t find enough to charge Trump with obstruction of justice.  So please feel free to skip reading the full 400 page report, because you can undoubtedly put that time to much better use in some other way.

This whole sordid ordeal once again has shown us that Democrats are a bunch of morons.  Once the Stormy Daniels scandal broke wide open, Democrats were given a bright, shiny gift on a silver platter, but they largely ignored it and kept hammering the Russian collusion angle because they are a bunch of idiots.

And of course most of our politicians don’t really want to talk about Stormy Daniels, payoffs and adultery anyway because they have been doing similar things behind the scenes themselves.

Somehow the idea that “Trump colluded with the Russians” became gospel for Democrats, and almost everyone on the left followed the herd because they are a bunch of sheeple.  There were a few dissenting voices on the left, but they were drowned out by the hordes of zombies that let CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times do their thinking for them.

The truth is that it has always been obvious that Trump never colluded with the Russians, and that is what the Mueller Report will show when it is released tomorrow morning…

Attorney General William Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein will hold news conference Thursday just before Congress receives a copy of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016.

The news conference will be at 9:30 a.m. EDT, said Kerri Kupec. The report is expected to go to Congress between 11 a.m. and noon EDT and likely will be released to the public around the same time.

But the mainstream media is trying to squeeze every ounce of false hype out of this story that they possibly can, and their endless coverage has helped push copies of the Mueller report to number one on Amazon in several categories.

And we aren’t going to get to see the entire report anyway.  As USA Today has noted, the report is being heavily redacted for a variety of legal reasons…

Barr has said Justice officials, including members of Mueller’s team, have been working to remove secret grand-jury evidence, classified information, material related to ongoing investigations spun off from the special counsel’s probe and personal information about individuals who were not charged as part of the inquiry.

In a curious move, in recent days officials from the Justice Department have been discussing the conclusions of the report with White House lawyers, and this is something that has infuriated Democrats because they believe that this is unfair.

The following comes from the New York Times…

Justice Department officials have had numerous conversations with White House lawyers about the conclusions made by Mr. Mueller, the special counsel, in recent days, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. The talks have aided the president’s legal team as it prepares a rebuttal to the report and strategizes for the coming public war over its findings.

But even after being briefed, the White House seems quite unconcerned about what the report will show.

In fact, one White House spokesperson just told the press that “the outcome is still the same”…

Meanwhile, ahead of the report, the White House insisted that it would exonerate Trump.

“Regardless of how Democrats and the media try to twist the report, the outcome is still the same: No collusion, no obstruction – complete and total exoneration,” White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said.

Ultimately, the big mainstream news networks will spend dozens of hours talking about the release of the Mueller report, but it will be a giant waste of time.

Yes, there might be some semi-interesting nuggets in the report, but it is highly unlikely that we are going to learn anything extremely important that we don’t know already.

As I have said from the very beginning, the Mueller investigation was a giant witch hunt, and it should have been shut down long ago.

But in America today, it has become fair game to try to personally destroy your political opponents.  And from now on, presidents and other high profile political figures are likely to be subjected to an endless barrage of investigations no matter which political party is in power.  This is going to make our country increasingly ungovernable, and it will lead us down a path from which we may never be able to return.

For Trump, this is definitely not the end of his legal troubles, because many other investigations are still ongoing…

Prosecutors in a half-dozen federal, state and city jurisdictions are pursuing overlapping inquiries focused on how Trump operated his namesake business empire, how a porn star was paid off in the final weeks of his campaign and how his inaugural committee raised money. New York state alone has three agencies conducting investigations.

At least six congressional committees are studying Trump’s personal finances, his inauguration committee, his business practices before he took office and his conduct since assuming the presidency, seeking evidence of what senior Democrats have called corruption or abuse of his office.

Even if Trump wins in 2020, he will still be dealing with ongoing investigations, and when all of them eventually run their course I am sure that the Democrats will just start some new ones.

Our political system is literally in the process of self-destructing, and it is a horrifying thing to watch.

Get Prepared NowAbout the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

This Could Be Very, Very, Very Bad News For Trump…

The most important congressional hearing in decades will begin at 10 a.m. on Wednesday.  Attorney Michael Cohen was Donald Trump’s “fixer” for more than a decade, but now he has turned completely against Trump, and on Wednesday he is going to give the House Oversight Committee as much damaging information about Trump as he possibly can.  In fact, as you will see below, he plans to testify that Trump committed “criminal conduct” after he entered the White House.  Of all the challenges that President Trump has faced so far, this could potentially be the most difficult by a very wide margin.  If Cohen gives the Democrats enough ammunition, they will likely attempt to initiate formal impeachment proceedings.

When you are an attorney, you often learn the deepest, darkest secrets of your clients.  And normally you aren’t supposed to share those secrets with anyone, but Cohen is headed for prison and so he doesn’t really care about the consequences anymore.

If you have not been following the Michael Cohen saga closely, the following summary from Vanity Fair will help you understand how we got to this point…

For more than a decade, Cohen served as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, business consigliere, and all-around doer of dirty deeds, as he’s put it. In early 2018, however, Cohen and his former boss found themselves at odds over an alleged hush-money scheme. Cohen quickly became the subject of a federal investigation, an infamous early-morning visit from a dozen F.B.I. agents armed with search warrants, and a constant victim of Trumpian Twitter invective. In the process, Cohen also became an unlikely, and formidable, player for the other side in the Mueller ordeal—a man with crucial knowledge about both the Stormy Daniels affair and the Trump Tower Moscow saga, who, after some time and major changes in his position within Trumpworld, was willing to spill. This impression was amplified when Cohen implicated the president under oath while pleading guilty in August to campaign-finance violations, among other financial crimes, and in November to lying to Congress. The following month, he was sentenced to three years in prison.

More than anyone else in the entire country, Michael Cohen could be the key to taking down the Trump presidency, and the Democrats know it.

Cohen spent more than 10 years taking care of Donald Trump’s problems, and now he is going to air that dirty laundry for all the world to see, and this has the potential to be completely and utterly disastrous for Trump.

We’ll see how bad it is tomorrow.  Perhaps Cohen’s testimony will not be as bad as the left is hyping it up to be.  But multiple mainstream news outlets are reporting that Cohen plans to testify about criminal actions that President Trump committed “after he assumed the presidency”…

A person familiar with Cohen’s planned testimony said he was prepared to testify about “criminal conduct” by Trump after he assumed the presidency. The person, who was not authorized to speak publicly, declined to characterize the conduct but said it happened during Trump’s first year in the White House.

In other words, Cohen could be about to give Democrats the justification that they need to try to impeach Trump.

During the 2016 election, Cohen made a very large “hush money” payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, and Cohen was ultimately convicted of a campaign finance violation because that money was never reported to the FEC.  On Wednesday, Cohen reportedly plans to provide documents to Congress that will prove that Donald Trump wrote a check to reimburse him for that payment “after he became president”…

Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, will provide documents to the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday that he says prove Trump’s “illicit” acts, according to prepared congressional testimony obtained by POLITICO.

The documents include a check that Trump purportedly wrote after he became president to reimburse Cohen for a hush-money payment to the adult-film actress Stormy Daniels, who alleges she had an affair with Trump. Cohen says the money came from Trump’s personal bank account.

Personally, I don’t believe that “hush money payments” should be considered “campaign expenses” that must be reported to the FEC.

But it doesn’t matter what I think.  Cohen was convicted of a crime for making such payments and not reporting them, and if these payments were ordered by Trump then Democrats believe that he is guilty of the same crime.

In addition to “criminal conduct” committed by Trump, Cohen also plans to allege that Trump “made racist remarks in front of him”…

More broadly, Cohen will go into personal and character accusations against Trump, saying the president made racist remarks in front of him such as questioning the intelligence of African-Americans, according to the person.

These is no law against making such remarks, but without a doubt such testimony could be extremely damaging to Trump.

Needless to say, the Trump administration is deeply disturbed that Cohen is being given this opportunity to testify before Congress.

Cohen lied to Congress before, and Sarah Sanders told the press that it is “pathetic to see him given yet another opportunity to spread his lies”…

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders called Cohen a “disgraced felon” and said that “it’s laughable that anyone would take a convicted liar like Cohen at his word, and pathetic to see him given yet another opportunity to spread his lies.”

In the end, Republicans that are loyal to Trump will defend the president and will try to discredit Cohen any way that they can.

On the other side, Democrats could finally feel like they have the ammunition to get rid of Trump once and for all.  If Cohen’s testimony goes the way they are hoping, I anticipate that the major news networks will be full of talk about impeachment in the coming days.

Even if everything that Michael Cohen is alleging is true, I don’t think that Trump committed any impeachable offenses.

But of course the left sees things very differently.  They have been desperate to take Trump down for a very long time, and now they may finally have their golden opportunity.

Get Prepared NowAbout the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

More Evidence That Lawyers Are Ruining America – You Won’t Believe What McDonald’s Is Being Sued For Now…

One of the fastest ways to ruin anything is to get lawyers involved, and lawyers are running amok in America today.  Several decades ago, Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger warned that our nation would become “a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts”, and that is precisely what has happened.  There are more than 1.3 million lawyers in the United States today, and it is estimated that those lawyers produce more than 40 million lawsuits each year.  Many of those lawsuits are completely frivolous, but frivolous lawsuits are often settled because it can be much cheaper to settle them than to defend against them in court.  So it is essentially a form of “legal extortion” that has gotten wildly out of control.

Earlier today I came across another shocking example of this phenomenon.  McDonald’s is actually being sued for charging the same price for a Quarter Pounder with cheese and a Quarter Pounder without cheese…

Two McDonald’s customers in Florida are suing the fast-food giant for a hefty sum of $5 million because they say they’re being unfairly charged for cheese they don’t want on their burgers.

Cynthia Kissner and Leonard Werner argue that hamburgers and cheeseburgers are different prices on the McDonald’s menu, but when they order a Quarter Pounder without the extra dairy, they’re still forced to pay the same amount.

Seriously?

In the end, this is something that nobody cares about, but some lawyers out there saw an opportunity to make a quick buck and so they are going for it.

Once upon a time you could order a Quarter Pounder without cheese right off of the menu.  But if you go into any McDonald’s today you have to specifically ask them to leave the cheese off if you don’t want cheese on your Quarter Pounder.

Apparently, some lawyers in Miami believe that McDonald’s is being “unjustly enriched” because the price is not reduced for those that would like the cheese left off their Quarter Pounders…

According to the lawsuit, filed by Andrew Lavin of the Miami-based Lavin Law Group, McDonald’s used to sell four items in the Quarter Pounder family, with and without cheese, with prices adjusted accordingly — about .30 to .90 cents more for cheese than without.

This practice continued for years, the suit says, but now McDonald’s, “at some point,” ceased “separately displaying these products for purchase on menus, and currently lists the availability of Quarter Pounder with Cheese and Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese.”

I can’t believe that someone should be stupid enough to bring such a lawsuit.  Andrew Lavin should be immediately disbarred for this.

Attorneys like Lavin are financial predators, and fortunately it doesn’t look like McDonald’s is inclined to settle…

“We do not believe the claims in this lawsuit have legal merit,” McDonald’s said in an email. “The advertised Quarter Pounder burger comes with cheese. We try to accommodate our customers’ requests by allowing them to customize their orders, such as a Quarter Pounder with no cheese.”

It is rapidly getting to the point where our entire society is becoming paralyzed by fear of lawsuits and legal matters.  Just look at the White House.  President Trump could have gotten so much else done if he wasn’t constantly fighting for his life against a legal witch hunt.  Robert Mueller has been given unlimited time, staff and resources to investigate the President, and it has been over a year and Mueller still hasn’t found anything.

But it looks like his absurd investigation is not going to end any time soon.

After seeing what they have done to Trump, do you think that good people will be encouraged or discouraged from running for public office?

Of course it isn’t just politicians that are being targeted for this kind of thing.  You could literally spend years pouring blood, sweat and tears into building a business, and it can be destroyed in one moment by a single frivolous lawsuit.

And if you are a doctor, a lifetime of exceedingly hard work can be completely wiped out by one really greedy lawyer.

Look, every nation needs a legal system, and we do too.  But today our system is in desperate need of reform.  There are way too many lawyers, way too many lawsuits, and our entire society is rapidly becoming paralyzed by the misuse of legal power.

At one point I was optimistic that someday we would see some much needed reforms, but at this point I do not believe that it is going to happen…

Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist.  He is the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

Gorsuch Will Not Shift The Balance Of Power On The Supreme Court As Much As You May Think

Neil Gorsuch And Donald Trump - Public DomainOn Tuesday, President Trump announced that he would nominate Neil Gorsuch to fill the open seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.  Gorsuch currently serves on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, and he was confirmed unanimously by the Senate when he was appointed to that position by President George W. Bush in 2006.  Gorsuch appears to have some strong similarities to Antonin Scalia, and many conservatives are hoping that when Gorsuch fills Scalia’s seat that it will represent a shift in the balance of power on the Supreme Court.  Because for almost a year, the court has been operating with only eight justices.  Four of them were nominated by Republican presidents and four of them were nominated by Democrats, and so many Republicans are anticipating that there will now be a Supreme Court majority for conservatives.

Unfortunately, things are not that simple, because a couple of the “conservative” justices are not actually very conservative at all.

For example, it is important to remember that Scalia was still on the court when the Supreme Court decision that forced all 50 states to legalize gay marriage was decided.  Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the four liberal justices in a majority opinion that Scalia harshly criticized.  So with Gorsuch on the court, that case would still have been decided the exact same way.

Sadly, even though Kennedy was nominated by Ronald Reagan, he has turned out to be quite liberal.  In the past, not nearly enough scrutiny was given to justices that were nominated by Republican presidents, and a few of them have turned out to be total disasters.

And let us also remember that Scalia was still on the court when the big Obamacare case was decided.  Chief Justice John Roberts joined the four liberal justices in a decision that was perhaps one of the most bizarre in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.

For some reason, Justice Roberts was determined to preserve Obamacare, and if you read what he wrote it is some of the most twisted legal reasoning that I have ever come across.

As someone that was once part of the legal world, let me let you in on a little secret.  Most judges simply do whatever they feel like doing, and then they will try to find a way to justify their decisions.  So if you ever find yourself in court, you should pray that you will get a judge that is sympathetic to your cause.

Fortunately, Gorsuch appears to be one of the rare breed of judges that actually cares what the U.S. Constitution and our laws have to say.  In that respect, he is very much like Scalia…

Gorsuch is seen by analysts as a jurist similar to Scalia, who died on Feb. 13, 2016. Scalia, praised by Gorsuch as “a lion of the law,” was known not only for his hard-line conservatism but for interpreting the U.S. Constitution based on what he considered its original meaning, and laws as written by legislators. Like Scalia, Gorsuch is known for sharp writing skills.

“It is the role of judges to apply, not alter, the work of the people’s representatives,” Gorsuch said on Tuesday at the White House event announcing the nomination in remarks that echoed Scalia’s views.

One of the most high profile cases that Gorsuch was involved with came in 2013.  That was the famous “Hobby Lobby case”, and it represented a key turning point in the fight for religious freedom.  The following comes from CNN…

In 2013, he joined in an opinion by the full Court of Appeals holding that federal law prohibited the Department of Health and Human Services from requiring closely-held, for-profit secular corporations to provide contraceptive coverage as part of their employer-sponsored health insurance plans.

And although a narrowly divided 5-4 Supreme Court would endorse that view (and affirm the 10th Circuit) the following year, Gorsuch wrote that he would have gone even further, and allowed not just the corporations, but the individual owners, to challenge the mandate.

Donald Trump said that he wanted a conservative judge in the mold of Scalia, but I think that he was also looking for someone that he could get through the Senate.

And considering the fact that Gorsuch was confirmed unanimously by the Senate in 2006 will make it quite difficult for Democrats to block him now.  Gorsuch has tremendous academic and professional credentials, and he will probably have a smoother road to confirmation than someone like appeals court judge William Pryor would…

Trump may have favored Gorsuch for the job in hopes of a smoother confirmation process than for other potential candidates such as appeals court judge William Pryor, who has called the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history.”

But Pryor is still reportedly on the short list for the next spot on the Supreme Court that opens up, and by then the rancor in the Senate may have died down.

If Gorsuch is confirmed, what will this mean for some of the most important moral issues of our time?

As for abortion, even if Gorsuch is confirmed I do not believe that the votes are there to overturn Roe v. Wade.  But if Trump is able to nominate a couple more Supreme Court justices that could change.

But even if Roe v. Wade is overturned, it would not suddenly make abortion illegal.  Instead, all 50 states would then be free to make their own laws regarding abortion, and a solid majority of the states would continue to keep it legal.

The analysis is similar when we look at gay marriage.  If the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage in all 50 states was overturned, each state would get to decide whether gay marriage should be legal or not for their own citizens.  And just like with abortion, it is likely that only a limited number of states would end up banning gay marriage.

So the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court appears to be a positive step, but it does not mean that we are going to see dramatic change when it comes to issues such as abortion or gay marriage any time soon.

But at least Gorsuch can help stop the relentless march of the progressive agenda through our court system.  So in the end we may not make that much progress for right now, but at least the liberals won’t either.

America Has Become A Lawless Nation – Hillary Clinton Magically Cleared By The FBI

Hillary Clinton - Photo by Nathania JohnsonIt is hard to be proud to be an American today after watching FBI director James Comey magically clear Hillary Clinton of all wrongdoing.  Sadly, Comey is likely to go down in history as the man that struck the final death blow to the rule of law in America.  During his address to the media, Comey admitted that Clinton sent or received 110 emails in 52 email chains that contained classified material at the time they were sent.  But of course there were probably many more.  Comey told the press that it was “likely that there are other work-related emails that they did not produce … that are now gone because they deleted all emails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices.”  So basically Clinton turned over to the FBI whatever she felt like turning over, and then she destroyed the rest of the evidence.  As a former lawyer, this infuriates me, but it doesn’t surprise me.

In fact, it doesn’t surprise me at all that Hillary Clinton was allowed to skate.  I expected this all along.  If you search the thousands of articles that I have posted on The Economic Collapse Blog and End Of The American Dream, you will find many articles where I say that Hillary Clinton should be in prison, but not a single one where I ever said that I thought she would be going to prison.

This is how politics in America works today.  People like Bill and Hillary Clinton could openly sacrifice children to Satan on the White House lawn and still probably not get into trouble.  Despite scandal after scandal going all the way back to Arkansas in the 1980s, nothing ever sticks to them, and nothing probably ever will.

In this case, FBI director James Comey essentially had to rewrite federal law in order to clear Clinton.  This is something that Andrew McCarthy explained very well in his article entitled “FBI Rewrites Federal Law to Let Hillary Off the Hook”…

There is no way of getting around this: According to Director James Comey (disclosure: a former colleague and longtime friend of mine), Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18): With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent violation of her trust. Director Comey even conceded that former Secretary Clinton was “extremely careless” and strongly suggested that her recklessness very likely led to communications (her own and those she corresponded with) being intercepted by foreign intelligence services.

—–

In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require. The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense: The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant. People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence.

The amazing thing is that the FBI handled a highly similar case very, very differently less than a year ago.  Just check out what happened to Naval reservist Bryan Nishimura…

U.S. Magistrate Judge Kendall J. Newman immediately sentenced Nishimura to two years of probation, a $7,500 fine, and forfeiture of personal media containing classified materials. Nishimura was further ordered to surrender any currently held security clearance and to never again seek such a clearance.

According to court documents, Nishimura was a Naval reservist deployed in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008. In his role as a Regional Engineer for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, Nishimura had access to classified briefings and digital records that could only be retained and viewed on authorized government computers. Nishimura, however, caused the materials to be downloaded and stored on his personal, unclassified electronic devices and storage media. He carried such classified materials on his unauthorized media when he traveled off-base in Afghanistan and, ultimately, carried those materials back to the United States at the end of his deployment. In the United States, Nishimura continued to maintain the information on unclassified systems in unauthorized locations, and copied the materials onto at least one additional unauthorized and unclassified system.

Nishimura’s actions came to light in early 2012, when he admitted to Naval personnel that he had handled classified materials inappropriately. Nishimura later admitted that, following his statement to Naval personnel, he destroyed a large quantity of classified materials he had maintained in his home. Despite that, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched Nishimura’s home in May 2012, agents recovered numerous classified materials in digital and hard copy forms. The investigation did not reveal evidence that Nishimura intended to distribute classified information to unauthorized personnel.

So what is the difference between Nishimura and Clinton?

Neither of them ever intended to do anything wrong.

So why were they treated so differently?

Needless to say, social media is exploding with outrage over this decision to let Clinton go free.  Many Americans are openly asking why they should continue to play by the rules if politicians like Hillary Clinton are not required to do so.

Unfortunately, this is what America has become.  Our politicians are a reflection of who we are as a society, and as I have stated before Hillary Clinton is going to be the overwhelming favorite if there is an election in November.  At this moment, she has solid leads in all of the “swing states”, and she only really needs to win one of them…

Perhaps you enjoy talk of battleground states. Well, there’s a scenario for you, too. First, pick the six “closest” swing states (VA, NH, IA, OH, FL, NC). Got it? Now understand that New Hampshire excepted, Clinton only has to win one of them in order to reach the requisite 270 electoral votes to win. (Optional third step for Republicans only: start shotgunning Pabst Blue Ribbon and don’t stop until November.)

Lest any Trump supporters seek solace in poll numbers, recent polls have Trump sliding further behind in all the relevant swing states. According to a Ballotpedia battleground poll released last week, Trump trails by 14% in Florida, 4% in Iowa, 10% in North Carolina, 9% in Ohio, and 7% in Virginia.

Hillary Clinton is a horrible, evil, miserable human being, and right now she is the odds-on favorite to become the next president of the United States.

But ultimately it is the American people that are to blame for blindly supporting corrupt politicians such as Clinton, and if they willingly pick her to be our next president then we will certainly deserve whatever consequences follow.

Do Not Despise Small Beginnings – An Incredible True Story That You May Find Hard To Believe

Michael SnyderIt has been said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  Well, I would like to share a little bit of my journey with you, and hopefully this will inspire someone out there.  We live in a day and age when you don’t have to be a celebrity to make a difference.  I know this is true because ten years ago I was about as anonymous as you could possibly get.  I was newly married and working as a lawyer in the heart of Washington D.C. not too far from the White House.  That may sound glamorous to you, but it definitely was not.  Approximately one out of every 12 residents of D.C. is a lawyer according to some estimates, and so they are a dime a dozen.  And my work was about as meaningless as you could get.  If there was a lawyer version of a toilet scrubber, that would have been me.  Nobody knew who I was, and nobody cared who I was.  I was having no real measurable impact on the world around me, but I wanted to.  I just didn’t know how.

In 2008, I started to look into something called blogging.  I learned that there were more than a million blogs already on the Internet by that time, and so I had no idea why anyone would possibly want to read anything that I had to say, but I decided to try it.  I began with a few free Blogger blogs, and my readership in those days could have been measured with a magnifying glass.

But I stuck with it.

And that is one of the keys to success in any area of life.  So many people give up if they don’t have immediate success.  And that is so sad, because all “overnight success stories” had to start somewhere.

So do not despise small beginnings – they can ultimately lead to something great.

Eventually my readership began to grow, and the real turning point for me came when I left the legal world at the end of 2009 and started The Economic Collapse Blog.  Of course that had very humble beginnings as well.  The first month the site was live I only had about 4,800 pageviews.  But that was a whole lot more than I had before.

Very early on I decided that I was going to try to put out the highest quality articles that I could possibly write, and people really responded to that.  They knew that they weren’t getting straight answers about the economy from the mainstream media, and they were seeking out alternative sources of information.  We have seen the “alternative media” absolutely explode in recent years, and I am proud to be part of that revolution.

In early 2010, my wife and I decided to take a leap and move across the country to a little town outside of Seattle, Washington.  We didn’t really have much money, so it was kind of a crazy thing to do.  But we felt called to do it, so by faith we packed up our lives and moved all the way across the continent.  We figured that I could make a little money writing and she could make a little money painting furniture and we could figure out a way to survive somehow.

We spent a little over a year out near Seattle, and during that time The Economic Collapse Blog started to grow by leaps and bounds.  We also had other websites such as End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News that were really starting to grow as well, and so we felt secure enough to seek out a more permanent home.  That was always the plan anyway, because we wanted to get away from the large population centers.

God eventually led us to a wonderful home in the mountains in a very isolated part of the northwest United States.  And my wife and I both agree that this is the best place that either of us have ever lived.  We absolutely love the peace and quiet, and the view that we have across the valley is priceless.  I could have very easily sat up on that mountain living a very quiet life for the rest of my days and been very happy.

But God had other things in mind for us.  When we moved up there, we believed that God was instructing us to prepare for what He wanted us to do.  So we studied, and we prayed and we kept working on our websites.  And then we studied, and we prayed and we worked some more.  We never knew what kinds of doors God was going to open up for us.  By faith we just tried to do what we believed that He was instructing us to do.

And of course many of you already know about the amazing doors that God has been opening up for us over the past few years.  He is doing things that I never even would have imagined asking Him to do.

The reason why I am sharing all of this is to say that if someone like me can be used to make a difference, so can you.

If a completely anonymous Washington D.C. lawyer can move to the mountains in the middle of nowhere and be used to touch millions of lives all over the planet, that just shows that all things are possible with God.

Of course not everyone has a talent for writing.  But we all have some way to make a difference.  Individually, each one of us in limited, but collectively we can make a massive difference in this world if we are willing to work together.

When I was growing up, I wanted to be a rock star someday, but to this day I still don’t have any musical talent.  However, there are people out there with amazing gifts in that area, and I often find myself in awe of their talents.

Other people can make a different in other areas.  What some people are about to do with YouTube videos absolutely amazes me.  Others write gripping novels or host amazing radio shows.  And yet others organize street protests or get heavily involved in local politics.

We all have different gifts and abilities, and we all have ways that we can make a difference.

Part of my message is to warn people about the incredibly hard times that are coming, but part of my message is also to give hope to people so that they can come through those hard times.

You may choose to curse the darkness when it comes, but I plan on lighting a candle.

No matter how bad things get, I will not bend, I will not break and I will not fear.  It is when times are the darkest that the greatest heroes are needed, and we need people that are going to be willing to face the great challenges that are coming with tremendous strength and courage.

Even in the midst of all of the chaos and all of the darkness, my wife and I believe that the greatest chapters of our lives are still ahead of us.

And we invite you to work with us to make a difference.  God took the broken pieces of my life and turned them into a beautiful thing, and He can do the same thing for you.

No matter how hard things may seem right now, please do not give up.

It’s not over.

In fact, your future is only just beginning, and all things are possible…