I sure wish I had not learned so much over the last five years.  In retrospect, five short years ago seems almost like Mayberry.  Here are some important things that I didn't know five years ago or now.

• There actually is a Deep State, and those who constitute it really do not honor the election results or the will of the people.
• There really appear to be lawless elements within the upper echelons of the FBI, CIA, and NSA who are not accountable for their crimes and are thus above the law.
• The fourth branch of government, the bureaucracy, really is unaccountable to the "unwashed masses."
• Many of our top military command, along with many in the military-industrial complex, don't always hate wars.  There's a lot of money and many promotions to be made during a time of war.  The last four years saw no new wars and even troops coming home.  For some, that is bad for business.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are no longer works of fiction, but prophecies.
• George Orwell was righter than Nostradamus.   
• The news media centers of New York City and Washington, D.C. are not neutral arbitrators of the truth; rather, they uncomfortably resemble TASS and Pravda from the Soviet Union days.
• The old robber barons like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan are starting to look a whole lot better compared to the new robber barons like Dorsey, Zuckerberg, and Bezos.  
• The United States Supreme Court would actually refuse to hear a legitimate case because it was frightened of violence.
• The left insists on conflating and equating evangelical Christians with White supremacists.  This should terrify the Christian community.
• Words such as mom, dad, aunt, uncle, brother, and sister are now not words of love and respect, but considered politically incorrect verbiage in Congress.  
• Censorship, the cancel culture, and becoming a nonperson come from the left, not the right.
• The left, not the right, actually is going to try to deny citizens' rights afforded to all in the Bill of Rights.
• Violence from the left is regarded as free speech and noble, while violence from the right is classified as sedition and felonious by powerful institutions.
• It really is not Republicans vs. Democrats, but globalists vs. nationalists.
• The new McCarthyism, blacklists, history re-writers, and re-education camps are coming from the left, not the right.
• Fences and barriers are a good thing for our nation's capital but somehow a bad thing for our nation's borders.
• Our Founding Fathers of yesteryear would be called "domestic terrorists" by some today.
• Presidential elections really can be stolen by corrupting just a handful of precincts in just a handful of states.
• Calling into question the validity of the 2016 presidential election is patriotic, while calling into question the validity of the 2020 presidential election is treasonous.

The good old days of just five short years ago sure do make us nostalgic for Mayberry.  Trouble is, we now must decide, how are we to respond with what we now know?  Sigh.

Photo credit: LaurMG, CC BY-SA 3.0 license.