See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We are in a long-term global conflict between the Empire of Liberty and the Coalition of Tyranny.

Seen at a global level and over time, it is clear that the world is coalescing into a confrontation that will define history for centuries to come.

Subscribe now

On one side is what Thomas Jefferson, in 1780, called the Empire of Liberty. It is fitting that on this 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we should look back to the Founding Fathers. They saw themselves as fighting for a universal set of principles that transcended the 13 colonies.

When you read the Declaration of Independence, it becomes obvious that they were writing for the entire world and for all of the future.

The very opening is a universal statement which we do not study often enough:

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. “

Note that this is a universal declaration about the Creator endowing the rights of all people. It doesn’t specify Americans.

Share

President Abraham Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address during the Civil War, based his case on the Declaration’s principles. Lincoln began:

“Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Lincoln closed with a universal, timeless challenge: “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

From the beginning, Americans took this universal sense of freedom seriously and communicated it to the world in missionary groups, businesses, ambassadors, writers, and a host of cultural approaches that defined the world of Emperors, Kings, and dictators as inferior and ultimately doomed to be replaced by freedom with the rule of law.

By definition, the American system is a threat to every leader who wants to dominate by force and fear rather than by persuasion and freely given permission.

This made us the natural opponent of Wilhelmine Germany, the Nazi-Fascist Imperial Japan Axis coalition (which President Franklin D Roosevelt declared “unconditional surrender” as our goal), and the Soviet Union. It also set us against today’s coalition of tyrannies, who are legitimately hostile to a system that declares their power to be illegitimate, their oppression of their people to be morally unacceptable, and their efforts to extend their tyranny into other countries a threat to our freedom.

Thus, we find ourselves in a global conflict between the Empire of Liberty and the Coalition of Tyrannies.

The current coalition, the replacement for the Axis powers or the Soviet Union as threats to a future of freedom, is essentially Communist China, the Russian dictatorship, the Iranian religious dictatorship, and the North Korean dictatorship.

These countries have come closer and closer together in their opposition to freedom in general and the United States in particular.

Seen from their standpoint, the coalition against freedom and against the United States in particular makes perfect sense.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States came very close to becoming a true hegemonic power. Our military was by far the most effective in the world. Our technology, especially in computing, artificial intelligence, and space, was accelerating ahead of the rest of the world. Our economy was the largest in the world, and on a per capita basis, it remains much larger than China’s. Our consistent reference to the rule of law and our willingness to use our dominance of the world financial system to sanction those with whom we disagree have all made us a mortal threat to any system based on tyranny, the suppression of its own people, and its desire to operate in the world without American approval or supervision.

Refer a friend

The growing alliance among Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea has produced patterns of mutual support that require global rather than regional analysis.

What happens in Ukraine will matter to the entire coalition of tyrannies. North Korean soldiers, Chinese economic and military aid, and Iranian drones have all helped sustain Putin’s effort to conquer Ukraine.

The minute the Iranian dictatorship can get a truce with the Americans, its coalition allies will help rebuild its missile and nuclear program (in 2007, the Israelis destroyed a nuclear program in Syria, which was designed and manned by the North Koreans).

If the coalition of Tyrannies wants to take the risk, they could fly a handful of surplus nuclear weapons from North Korea into Tehran and make Iran a nuclear power literally within days.

Any American analysis that does not begin with this worldwide conflict and this four-nation alliance of tyrants is inherently wrong and dangerous.

It has been impossible for our foreign policy and national security “experts” to explain what is happening because we have not had the right focus and the right language framework.

The natural tendency is to focus narrowly, locally, and on immediate events. This is strengthened by our news media’s need to fill 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with “instant news” and “breaking news”. There is remarkably little long-term analysis and thinking. What does exist tends to have been shaped by the memories of the Cold War and the assumptions of the last 40 years.

Words matter, and frameworks of reality matter. It was George Kennan’s February 22, 1946, “long telegram” on “the sources of Soviet Conduct” which, in 8,000 words, convinced most of official Washington that we were in for a long Cold War. Four years later, on April 7, 1950, the State Department issued NSC 68, in which Paul Nitze, in 58 pages, outlined the strategy of containment, which largely defined the next 41 years of American policy until the Soviet Union literally disappeared.

We do not yet have either Kennan’s explanation of reality or Nitze’s strategy for responding to that reality.

We are floundering in a sea of tactics, localism, presentism, and ad hoc invention of tactical responses to a long-term strategic global threat.

We need to look now for our generation’s Kennans and Nitzes.

Without the right framework, the right words, and the right strategies, we will continue to flounder, remain ineffectual, and risk having freedom defeated by tyranny.

Leave a comment

You can manage your subscription preferences to choose the updates, newsletters, and alerts you want to receive on the website.

Callista and I had an amazing trip on Friday. The Swiss have a tradition of inviting all ambassadors on a field trip once a year. President Guy Parmelin hosted us on an amazing tour of a castle and a very advanced health experimental center.

I had often driven by Chillon Castle on Lake Geneva, but I had never had a chance to visit it. It is amazing as it is on an island and the island defines the shape of the castle, so it is more like a boat than a normal castle.

Read more

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Read more

Despite all the current anxieties about polling and the Republican Party, the long-term trend is clearly favoring Republicans and making the Democrats’ job more difficult.

The daily media and most analysts are trapped by two patterns that block them from seeing prevailing realities.

Subscribe now

First, the modern media must fill every second with something new to keep people coming to their sites. Random events can dominate days of coverage simply because they happen. If you are a competitive news source, you have no choice but to run with the pack if you want to retain your audience.

Stories about the insane would-be shooter from California are good for days of coverage.

King Charles III visiting is good for almost a week of coverage.

Little known congressmen being investigated and possibly expelled can use up a day or two of coverage.

In this scattered focus on whatever is immediate, it is hard to think long term or with any sophisticated analysis.

Second, in addition to chasing the stories of the day at the expense of covering history, the news media and its analysts are hypnotized by presentism. This is what’s driving the Polaroid snapshot way in which most reporters, columnists, and analysts think about and report on what they have defined as the news.

We often think of presentism as applying today’s values to past figures, distorting or ignoring historic context. But it works to block thinking about the future, too.

Share

On Dec. 7, 1941, the presentists of the day would say the United States lost to Japan at Pearl Harbor. However, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, steeped in history, said he slept well that night knowing that with the United States in the war, victory was inevitable even if it would take a while.

President Ronald Reagan had a vision of freedom prevailing and ending the Cold War. He went to Berlin in 1987 determined to say “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” His wise, professional, presentist team unanimously opposed the line. The CIA predicted the Soviets would remain in East Germany for another generation and thought Reagan would look foolish. As late as the drive to the speech at the Brandenburg Gate, Reagan’s senior staff members were begging him to drop the line. Reagan knew that they had a presentist view of the immediate — but he also knew the tide of history was with him. He gave the speech, with the pivotal line included. Two years later, the wall came down.

In May 1988, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush was 19 points behind in the presidential polling. All the supposed experts and commentators believed Gov. Mike Dukakis was the inevitable next president after eight years of the Republicans in the White House. However, the Reagan-Bush team knew how to run aggressive, come from behind campaigns. They were not bound by presentism. Others focused on each day’s activities, but they focused on implementing a vision which could change everything by the election. Ultimately, they went from down 19 percent in May to up 8 percent on Election Day. The Bush campaign, combined with Gov. Dukakis’s mistakes, led every fourth American to switch his or her vote to the GOP.

The current presentist view is that the Republicans are inevitably heading toward loss of the House and possible loss of the Senate during the November midterm elections. The war in Iran, the price of gasoline, and the gridlock in the Congress are all presently weighing down the Republicans.

Refer a friend

Having been through a lot of campaigns, I have a different view.

The long tide of history is running against the Democrats and the left. We know this from years of polling at America’s New Majority Project.

The Democratic Party is hostile to the American people and deaf to the complaints of their constituents. The Republican Party has some immediate challenges, but the Democrats are faced with a long-term tide of disaster.

Start with population movements, which are a powerful indicator of what is working and what isn’t. The great bastions of blue state radicalism — California, New York, and Illinois — are all losing population. People are fleeing to lower-tax, conservative-values states. The next census will shift so many electoral college votes to red states that a Democratic Party victory in 2032 and beyond will become much harder to achieve. The shift of Americans from blue states to red states also will affect the number of House seats and make it much harder for Democrats to reach a majority.

The Democrats’ devotion to teachers unions, unionized bureaucracy, high taxes, and corrupt state governments is driving people to move away. This is increasing the Democrats’ isolation from the American people.

When President Trump said “these people are crazy” during his State of the Union Address, he was referring to the Democrats who refused to stand in favor of parents’ rights over their children with regard to leftwing transgender policies. He was hitting on a theme that more and more Americans understand.

The number of 70 percent to 20 percent — or even 85 percent to 15 percent — issues in which the Democrats reject majority positions and cling to hard left ideology is staggering. The latest proposal by Democratic frontrunner for Governor of California Tom Steyer is a perfect example. He wants to use taxpayers’ money to bring back all the illegal immigrants who Immigration and Customs Enforcement has deported. This is a deeply unpopular idea that verges on insanity.

As we enter the 2026 campaign, remember that Democrats in blue states are forcing people to leave. The entire Democratic Party is caught up in a series of ideological, values fights with the majority of the American people.

I suspect by Labor Day the presentists will be singing an entirely different tune.

Leave a comment

Two Focus Groups, One National Survey and a Few Questions Only November Can Answer

combined two small focus groups with a national survey and found one dominant theme: the cost of living is overwhelmingly the top issue for voters. Many people spontaneously brought up finances first, and a majority feel their situation is getting worse.

There is also deep distrust in politicians, with many voters saying they won’t believe the economy is improving unless they personally feel it. Government is widely blamed for rising costs, and voters want real, visible results.

The most interesting divide:

• Men want proof through action (e.g., legislation passed)

• Women want proof they can feel (e.g., lower grocery bills)

Bottom line:
Voters agree on the problem (cost of living) and their skepticism, but they disagree on what proof of success looks like, which creates a major messaging challenge heading into the 2026 elections.

Read More

You can manage your subscription preferences to choose the updates, newsletters, and alerts you want to receive on the website.

Read more

Given the recent revelations about fraud in government programs, at Gingrich 360 we put together a report detailing the core problems and how we think they can be solved.

Subscribe now

Fraud and corruption in government programs primarily result from flaws in system design, underutilization of existing fraud-prevention tools, and noncompliance with current legal requirements.

Fraud and improper payments are major and ongoing sources of government waste. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the federal government loses between $223 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud, based on estimates from fiscal years 2018 to 2022. This figure does not include revenue-related fraud losses, such as tax credits or other fees collected by the federal government; it also excludes losses at the state, local, or tribal levels unless those losses involve a federal investigation.

To continue reading, download the paper

Fraud And Corruption In Government Programs Report Final

606KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Trump administration and the MAGA movement has been working toward something remarkable that the leftwing media often ignores, overlooks, or distorts.

For nearly a decade, Trump and the movement have made a consistent effort to reverse decades-worth of antipatriotic policies and reassert the historic virtues of America and American history.

Subscribe now

Where the left believes that any flaw outweighs virtue, the Trump approach has been to put people in the context of their times. The Trump-MAGA approach recognizes the courage great men and women have shown in rising above the prejudice of their era and struggling to make America’s promises in its Declaration of Independence and Constitution an integral part of American life.

One example of this struggle between patriotism and antipatriotism took place in Washington last weekend.

On Saturday, the Trump administration unveiled a statue of Caesar Rodney in Freedom Plaza near the Willard Hotel. It was symbolically an important moment in the continuing struggle between the patriotism and its opposite.

The Rodney statue had been on Rodney Square in Wilmington, Delaware from 1923 until it was removed at the Wilmington mayor’s orders on June 12, 2020. It was part of an effort to appease the antipatriot movement that had gained temporary strength during the riots that followed the death of the George Floyd while in police custody.

Share

President Donald Trump responded to this surrender to antipatriotic forces in September of that year:

“Joe Biden said nothing as to his home state’s history and the fact that it was dismantled and dismembered. And a Founding Father’s statue was removed. Today, America will give this Founding Father, this very brave man, who was so horribly treated, the place of honor he deserves. I am announcing that a statue of Caesar Rodney will be added to the National Garden of American Heroes.”

Biden was running for president and didn’t want to fight with the leftwing that dominates the Democratic Party. So, he remained quiet while the most famous statue in Delaware was taken away.

This was ironic because in 1974 then-Sen. Biden added a pro-Rodney poem to the Congressional Record. At the time, he said that Rodney was a great patriot because the “ride from Delaware to Philadelphia enabled the Declaration of Independence to be approved.”

The fact was that Rodney, who had asthma and suffered from a disfiguring facial cancer, made an 80-mile ride through a thunderstorm to get to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. He was just in time to cast the vote making adoption of the Declaration of Independence unanimous among the colonies.

The Delaware American Revolution Bicentennial Commission described Rodney as “the patron saint of his native state. Delaware’s principal hero of the American Revolutionary War.”

Refer a friend

The antipatriotic movement in America is devoted to presentism and applying modern mores and values to historic figures. It rejects the realities of historic times. Its fanatical purity requires it to tear down statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as well as Rodney. Any historic figure that owned slaves is disqualified from historic recognition, along with all his or her achievements. It is an antihistorical effort to create a world of endless prejudice dominating facts.

After all, among the antipatriots, this year’s measure of exclusion could be slave ownership. Next year’s yardstick could be whether someone supported suffrage for women. The following yardstick could be whether he or she supported gay rights. Then will come support for every aspect of the transgender worldview. The list of who to exclude from history could become endless with each new standard driving out its predecessors.

Very quickly, all the Founding Fathers — and their ideas which planted the seeds for modern democracy and liberty in America and all over the world — will be erased.

American patriotism requires understanding the goals, intents, values, and lives of people in the context of their times. President Washington was truly, as one historian called him, the indispensable man. Without him there probably would never have been an America. To apply today’s values to disqualify honoring Washington would be a behavior worthy of a high school freshman but unworthy of learned adults.

President Trump understands that winning this cultural war between patriotism and antipatriotism may be more important than reorganizing government or any of a dozen issues the news media is more comfortable covering (and often distorting).

Rodney’s statue in Freedom Plaza is a down payment on writing a wrong and restoring a genuine American hero to his rightful place in history. And there are more to come.

Leave a comment

America's New Majority Project

Voters Prioritize Insurance Company Accountability in Health Care Reform

Read more

2 months ago · 1 like · 2 comments · America's New Majority Project

You can manage your subscription preferences to choose the updates, newsletters, and alerts you want to receive on the website.

Today’s report covers a lot, and I have a hunch things are going to accelerate as we move toward the election.

Obviously, the biggest news happening concerns the gunman at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He was a Cal Tech grad (and therefore presumably bright). He apparently observed that the security was weak at the hotel since it focused only on people coming to dinner and did not screen guests who might have checked in a day earlier (which he had done).

Read more

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• “Trump admin seeks health care price transparency” by Andrew Rice (The Center Square):

  Pricing in health care has been deliberately cryptic for the longest time. Insurance companies are reluctant to share their methods for determining the cost of drugs or medical procedures, leaving patients in the dark up until they receive the final bill. President Trump wants to change that.

Read more

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Final approval of the European Union’s $105 billion loan package to Kyiv is sending what Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, calls “the right signal” in a war that has fallen out of the spotlight amid the struggle with Iran.

It is unfortunate if people are paying less attention to the Kremlin’s war of aggression, though, because something amazing is happening in the war between the Russian Goliath and the Ukrainian David.

The Ukrainians have now withstood Russia’s vicious killing of civilians and destruction of civilian infrastructure for longer than all of World War I.

Read More

You can manage your subscription preferences to choose the updates, newsletters, and alerts you want to receive on the website.

I recently watched a demonstration of an artificial intelligence-to-human conversation. It was so realistic and dynamic that it forced me to think about how fast the future is coming to all of us.

In this demonstration, put on by a health care-focused AI company called Attune, a person was called by an advanced generative AI voice. Its tone, language, and cadence was so perfect, I would not have known it was an AI if I hadn’t been told.

Subscribe now

We have all heard computer-generated voices. They sound like computer-generated voices.

Many of us have heard a slightly better, but still clearly artificial voice, when we interact with more sophisticated apps.

This voice was not like those voices.

First, it had the inflection and pacing of a normal human voice. It could modulate at the appropriate times just like people can.

Second, it was amazingly fast at listening to comments and responding accordingly. In one demonstration, it was trying to schedule a medical check-up for someone. The person kept coming up with excuses for why each proposed date would not work. The AI voice listened carefully and — within the same timeframe as a real person — responded to each comment.

Share

It agreed that the human’s excuses were good reasons to try other dates. It reminded the human that the checkup was important, and it offered different dates. It was exactly like listening to a conversation between two people.

This level of believability has several immediate potential uses that could dramatically increase the quality of life, lower costs, or both. Some studies have already been done with elderly citizens in long-term care facilities and people in therapy for depression.

In both cases, the results have been remarkable. Elderly citizens, who you might think would be the most resistant to this new technology, find that they can have real conversations with their AI friend. Because the AI can track down information in real time, it can respond in detailed ways — and with great enthusiasm. For example, if you want to discuss old movies, it has access to every old movie and reviews. It can chat at length about how Humphrey Bogart interacted with Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca.” It can then discuss every cast member, the famous duel of the German and French national songs, and the details of producing the movie — all with great and convincing enthusiasm and within the framework of the human remembering a 1942 movie.

Give a gift subscription

Beyond entertaining human companions, the AI partner can also ask if he or she took medicines that day, how his or her blood pressure is doing, and (with the patient’s approval) it can even access a wearable device that would provide 24/7 feedback on the person’s vital signs.

Some people may dislike the idea of interacting with an artificial intelligence, but in recent tests up to 80 percent of people enjoyed the experience. Furthermore, the AI system can interact in any language and talk about any country or lifetime memory.

In some tests, people with depression and those trying to withdraw from addiction found that even one or two calls a day from an AI friend dramatically helped resolve and lessen feelings of loneliness.

And these friends may someday soon be more than phone calls. Last Sunday’s half marathon of robots in Beijing showed how rapidly technology is evolving.

Far from being a threat, this new AI revolution may end up introducing lots of new friends and lots of capabilities of which we never dreamed.

Leave a comment

America's New Majority Project

Concerns About Artificial Intelligence on the Rise

A poll finds a 14-point jump in Americans who are more concerned than excited about Artificial Intelligence since December 2022…

Read more

3 years ago · 1 like · Gingrich 360 Team

You can manage your subscription preferences to choose the updates, newsletters, and alerts you want to receive on the website.

I am going to start highlighting contestants in what I’ll call the Craziest Democrat competition.

This was inspired in part by President Donald J. Trump’s Feb. 24 State of the Union Address, when he said: “But surely we can all agree no state can be allowed to rip children from their parents’ arms and transition them to a new gender against the parents’ will. Who would believe that we’re even talking about it? We must ban it, and we must ban it immediately.”

Subscribe now

When Republicans rose in wild applause and the Democrats refused to respond President Trump said: “Nobody stands up, these people are crazy. I’m telling them they’re crazy.”

It seems several Democrats are working overtime to prove President Trump was right. Tom Steyer is one of them.

Steyer is a brilliant hedge fund investor who has billions to spend. He tried running for president in 2020 and spent $253 million on his campaign before dropping out without picking up a single delegate. In fact, Steyer spent $3,373 dollars for every vote he got.

Now Steyer is running for Governor of California. With Eric Swalwell dropping out over a series of allegations that he is a sexual predator, Steyer has become the leading Democrat in a race — in which two Republicans are doing surprisingly well.

Steyer’s craziness is illustrated by his immigration policy. He has promised to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in California (which violates the constitutional system of federal supremacy by suggesting a state can opt out of a federal law).

But further, he has promised to put ICE agents and their bosses in jail. As he put it, he will take on ICE “the same way we took on the mob.” Again, the idea that a state could prosecute federal officials for enforcing federal law is preposterous. It would be the equivalent of launching a civil war between our largest state and the federal government.

Share

But it doesn’t end there. Steyer has pledged to “bring those detained and kidnapped by ICE back home.” The American people favor prosecutors putting criminals in jail — and deporting illegal immigrants who commit crimes. But Steyer would spend the taxpayer’s money to create “a much larger and stronger immigration legal defense infrastructure in our state — funding for more attorneys, investigators, accredited representatives.”

At America’s New Majority Project, we have not yet specifically tested Steyer’s ideas, but we know as a general reality that most Americans would deeply oppose spending tax dollars to bring back illegal immigrants we have already deported. When reminded that many of those deported were in fact criminals, the opposition will grow even stronger.

Steyer’s craziness does not end with immigration. He is for government-run health care on the Bernie Sanders socialist model. He is for massive tax increases on businesses to pay for a host of expensive new programs. These new taxes would be in a state which is already driving away businesses and successful people.

Finally, Steyer picks up many of the dumbest and most destructive policies of the European greens. He ignores every fact about how much Europe has priced itself out of business by killing traditional sources of energy and going to unreliable, expensive alternative sources. Steyer in effect promises he can make California as expensive and as dependent on fantasies as Europe. The result would be an economic disaster — on top of all the other taxes and costs he would build into the system.

And none of this is new. Back in October 2017, President Trump referred to Steyer as “wacky and totally unhinged.” In that sense Steyer has an eight-and-a-half-year lead on others contenders for the Craziest Democrat competition.

Refer a friend

But the most interesting thing about Steyer’s lunacy is it could pave the way for a Republican governor of California.

There is a new post-Swalwell withdrawal Emerson College Polling/Inside California Politics poll which shows surprising results from California’s electorate:

• 17 percent support Republican Steve Hilton,

• 14 percent support Republican Chad Bianco,

• 14 percent are for Tom Steyer,

• 10 percent support Democrat Xavier Becerra,

• 10 percent support Democrat Katie Porter,

• 5 percent like Democrat Matt Mahan,

• and 23 percent are undecided.

In California, if no one gets a majority in the primaries, the top two candidates go to the general election. With four Democrats splitting the Democratic vote, it is possible that the two Republicans could end up in the general with no Democrat opponent. It has happened in local races before.

But it is more likely that Steyer will lock in Democrat support and end up in the runoff with one of the Republicans. Still, given Steyer’s failure to win votes in his 2020 presidential run, it is conceivable he could collapse and California could have a Republican governor.

As Gov. Gavin Newsom prepares to run for president, his worst nightmare would be leaving a Republican in charge of Sacramento. This Republican governor could spend a lot of time investigating corruption, waste, and incompetence at the heart of the California Democratic machine. Newsom would be constantly fending off attacks from his home state as he’s trying to win the national campaign.

So, as a Republican, I hope Steyer sticks to his convictions — and gets even crazier.

Leave a comment

You can manage your subscription preferences to choose the updates, newsletters, and alerts you want to receive on the website.

There have been a lot of things going on in my world.

On Friday, we had a moving and impressive retirement ceremony for U.S. Army Col. Rick Gonzalez. Col. Gonzalez served his country for 35 years and his wife Greta has been with him every step of the way. He was the head of the military mission to Switzerland and worked closely with Callista in the embassy. Callista thought he was terrific to work with, and she will miss him. As an Army brat whose father served 27 years in the infantry, I really appreciate Col. Gonzalez and his family’s commitment to defending America. It was a terrific ceremony with a lot of emotion.

Read more