The Barbershop: Dennis Byrne, Proprietor

What do Nancy Pelosi and Vladimir Putin have in common?

The Kremlin

A fence around the seat of government

The Kremlin, meaning a “fortress inside a city” in Russian, has for centuries stood for a tyrannical form of government. Within its walls despots, from the earliest czars, through Lenin and Stalin and up through Vladimir Putin, ruled with iron fists.

They had reason to hide behind walls. They oppressed millions upon millions of people. Stalin killed millions, some say more than died in the Holocaust. Even now, after the fall of the communist regime and the end of the Cold War, the Kremlin’s wall shields the Tyrant Putin.

Now the U.S. Capitol and the Supreme Court–the temples of our living democracy–are walled off from the self-governing citizens of the United States of America. Thank you Nancy Pelosi, who, like Putin, believes that she needs the kinds of protections deployed by the world’s worst despots.

That and thousands of mobilized troops and armored vehicles. Heavily guarded gates to make sure that no “unauthorized” persons get near the seat of government to exercise their right to petition their government.

Never before has anyone in the three branches of government assumed such unilateral power. To say to the world that our form of government isn’t working. That a republican form of government has the seeds of its own destruction.

Yes, a mob took control of the Capitol–even a short time was too much. I called it an insurrection. But, this? It is way too much.

I fear that just the immensity of this fence has not been accurately reported. It’s not just a temporary fence, the kind often seen used for crowd control. It is a (possibly) permanent physical barrier, as effective as that fence that Trump was building on the southern border.

To get a true sense of this mammoth structure, watch this full video: [embedded content]