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THE NIGHT 'DALLAS' DEFEATED COMMUNISM: My First Taste of Freedom

February 22, 2022
Screenshot/YouTube
Klaudia Stan

Fictional Characters and Their Power

Ever since I can remember, my father had talked to me like I was an adult, and as such, I grew up learning how to survive the communist regime in my home country, Romania. It was December of 1989; I was a month shy of being four when my dad — my number one hero — had joined a revolution after being influenced by a television series: Dallas (1978).

I was hungry and cold. The time was after 8 pm because the heat was cut off as per Communist Party rules. Our little flat was small, but it was still challenging to keep it warm during the winter with the new government ratio. We lived in an apartment complex with several other neighbors that seemed nice, but daddy taught me to be careful what I said around them; They could be part of the Secret Police and tell on us. After being imprisoned and tortured for nine months in Pitesti Prison, he didn't trust anyone besides my mom, my sister, and myself.

I was hungry and cold. The time was after 8 pm because the heat was cut off as per Communist Party rules.

I was so cold I could barely move. Wrapped in a patched-up blanket, I would wait for my dad to call us to the living room. We didn't have much furniture in the flat, but my mother had planned to buy some soon, mostly second-hand purchases, to cover the walls for more privacy and to make it harder for the neighbors to hear our discussions. It was funny seeing her do a demonstration for my sister and me. She grabbed a glass and put it on the wall, then she pressed her ear to it and listened, then my sister and I took turns. My mom was right; we could hear our neighbor's conversation.

"C'mon girls, hurry up! It's time to watch those filthy Americans!" my dad yelled, interrupting us. He would always say it out loud and expected us to vocalize loudly "YAY!!!" and come running so that the people living under us could hear.

The living room was modest. We had an old, brown couch that would fit the four of us. A table on which the black and white TV sat, and a couple of chairs. The only decoration on the walls was a big picture frame of the dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. My dad said out loud: "Our leader looks excellent in this picture! He is a sharp man!" That was our cue that the charade night was about to begin.

He strolled towards the TV and pressed the button. That sound always scared me, it was loud and unpleasant, and it felt like he was opening the portal to another world. And indeed he was.

"Dear family, our great Leader gave us, the Romanians, the opportunity to see that we are in good hands! We live a productive, meaningful life. We need to watch this Dallas series to see how filthy Americans are!" dad said. We would hear the speech every night; the whole family had it memorized. One good thing about this propaganda: we all sat so close so that I could finally get warm. At least now, I only had one thing left to deal with — hunger.

I was too young to read the subtitles, and at my age, I didn't know any English. I was happy to watch the movie and listen to my parents' comments. There were, of course, negative commentaries and were said out loud. After the episode ended, he yelled, that is time for bed, and again we had to be loud and tramp to the bedroom.

A bullet-riddled hospital near Klaudia's family homeKlaudia Stan


Whispers Under the Blanket

My sister and I were in bed, hugging each other in an attempt to warm up. A few minutes later, we saw dad sitting by the bedroom door with the flashlight on his face, mouthing: "Let's go, slowly, don't make the bed squeak." We moved as slow as we could and tiptoed our way to my parents' bedroom next to ours. Their bedroom was bare too. The furniture consisted of a bed and a wardrobe. My mom was already in it with the blanket lifted like building a fortress, making hand motions to come. In a few seconds, we were all in bed, under the colossal blanket.

My dad holding the flashlight, asked: "So what do you guys think about the Americans? They are pretty wonderful, aren't they?"

I was always talkative and involved in adult conversations because my dad made me feel important; he would always ask for my opinion, so I told him: "Daddy, I think they have superpowers!"

"They do! It's called freedom. Americans are lucky people. I promise you guys that you will know what that means soon. People are already on the streets trying to take down the communist government. It's just a matter of time until we will be free."

My sister was part of the painful Union of Communist Youth (UTC) and hated everything about it. Her questions following my dad's promise were related to that. But my hunger was making me annoying, and I interrupted to ask questions pertinent to my need.

"So we will not have to eat meat only at the weekend?" I asked.

"No."

"Well, how about oranges? Will they still be considered contraband?"

"No. I swear to you that soon, we will have plenty of food and dinners like the Ewing's from Dallas. We will be free and happy, just like the Americans!"

Our secret gathering was interrupted by the loud bang on the apartment's door. My mom, my sister, and I started to cry instantly. We thought we were doomed. The Secret Police heard us somehow; we haven't been careful enough! I was such a loud child, and it was my fault!

We got up and marched to the door. The bang was louder, and this time male voices screamed: "Open the damn door!"

My dad made a hand gesture to stay back. He wiped the sweat off his forehead, then cleaned it on his striped pajamas. After he was released from prison with the remarks: "Make sure you wear stripes so you won't forget where you can end up again!"

He unlocked the bolt and opened the door; It wasn't the Secret Police, but five male neighbors from the building, all agitated.

"My wife phoned me from work. She told me that the military is shooting towards the hospital. They are coming! The Leader gave orders to kill us all! The revolution is in our neighborhood and will soon be close to us. We need to block the downstairs door to prevent them from entering the building! Hurry!"

I started screaming and begged my dad not to go. It didn't matter. He wanted the freedom he saw in the Dallas series — He was unstoppable. My father changed into thicker clothes and went towards the kitchen table and unscrewed a leg, mumbling: "Well, Americans have guns, but heck, I can use a wooden table leg!"

He stormed out the door and we wouldn't hear from him for hours.

The night was dreadful.

There were screams and shots fired. At some point, the three of us left behind were laying on the floor on our bellies. Some bullets flew in our windows, and the shattered glass covered us.

I completely forgot about hunger and cold. There were screams and shots fired. At some point, the three of us left behind were laying on the floor on our bellies. Some bullets flew in our windows, and the shattered glass covered us. I started to cry again because I thought my dad was gone forever. We slowly moved out of that room and stayed in the hallway because there were no windows. The broken glass didn't hurt us because we were covered by the same blanket that witnessed our whispers.

The doorknob was moving, and the door opened. A hero was making his entry: my dad. His face was bloody, but I recognized him by his clothes and the table leg in his left arm.

"It's done. Turn the TV on now!" my dad said, out of breath. “The military is with us, and they captured the dictator. The communist era is history. We are free!" I got up and ran towards him; he was still in the doorway, all bloody with the wooden leg in his hand as I grabbed one of his legs and hugged it.

"One more thing," my dad told us as he was marching towards the living room. He took the Leader's picture from the wall, put the frame carefully on a chair, spat at it, and ripped it to pieces.

"I will buy a picture of Bobby and J.R. Ewing and put it here. God bless America for this inspiring movement!"

Bill Gates ends climate fear campaign, declares AI the future ruler

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

The Big Tech billionaire once said humanity must change or perish. Now he claims we’ll survive — just as elites prepare total surveillance.

For decades, Americans have been told that climate change is an imminent apocalypse — the existential threat that justifies every intrusion into our lives, from banning gas stoves to rationing energy to tracking personal “carbon scores.”

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates helped lead that charge. He warned repeatedly that the “climate disaster” would be the greatest crisis humanity would ever face. He invested billions in green technology and demanded the world reach net-zero emissions by 2050 “to avoid catastrophe.”

The global contest is no longer over barrels and pipelines — it is over who gets to flip the digital switch.

Now, suddenly, he wants everyone to relax: Climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” after all.

Gates was making less of a scientific statement and more of a strategic pivot. When elites retire a crisis, it’s never because the threat is gone — it’s because a better one has replaced it. And something else has indeed arrived — something the ruling class finds more useful than fear of the weather.The same day Gates downshifted the doomsday rhetoric, Amazon announced it would pay warehouse workers $30 an hour — while laying off 30,000 people because artificial intelligence will soon do their jobs.

Climate panic was the warm-up. AI control is the main event.

The new currency of power

The world once revolved around oil and gas. Today, it revolves around the electricity demanded by server farms, the chips that power machine learning, and the data that can be used to manipulate or silence entire populations. The global contest is no longer over barrels and pipelines — it is over who gets to flip the digital switch. Whoever controls energy now controls information. And whoever controls information controls civilization.

Climate alarmism gave elites a pretext to centralize power over energy. Artificial intelligence gives them a mechanism to centralize power over people. The future battles will not be about carbon — they will be about control.

Two futures — both ending in tyranny

Americans are already being pushed into what look like two opposing movements, but both leave the individual powerless.

The first is the technocratic empire being constructed in the name of innovation. In its vision, human work will be replaced by machines, and digital permissions will subsume personal autonomy.

Government and corporations merge into a single authority. Your identity, finances, medical decisions, and speech rights become access points monitored by biometric scanners and enforced by automated gatekeepers. Every step, purchase, and opinion is tracked under the noble banner of “efficiency.”

The second is the green de-growth utopia being marketed as “compassion.” In this vision, prosperity itself becomes immoral. You will own less because “the planet” requires it. Elites will redesign cities so life cannot extend beyond a 15-minute walking radius, restrict movement to save the Earth, and ration resources to curb “excess.” It promises community and simplicity, but ultimately delivers enforced scarcity. Freedom withers when surviving becomes a collective permission rather than an individual right.

Both futures demand that citizens become manageable — either automated out of society or tightly regulated within it. The ruling class will embrace whichever version gives them the most leverage in any given moment.

Climate panic was losing its grip. AI dependency — and the obedience it creates — is far more potent.

The forgotten way

A third path exists, but it is the one today’s elites fear most: the path laid out in our Constitution. The founders built a system that assumes human beings are not subjects to be monitored or managed, but moral agents equipped by God with rights no government — and no algorithm — can override.

Hesham Elsherif / Stringer | Getty Images

That idea remains the most “disruptive technology” in history. It shattered the belief that people need kings or experts or global committees telling them how to live. No wonder elites want it erased.

Soon, you will be told you must choose: Live in a world run by machines or in a world stripped down for planetary salvation. Digital tyranny or rationed equality. Innovation without liberty or simplicity without dignity.

Both are traps.

The only way

The only future worth choosing is the one grounded in ordered liberty — where prosperity and progress exist alongside moral responsibility and personal freedom and human beings are treated as image-bearers of God — not climate liabilities, not data profiles, not replaceable hardware components.

Bill Gates can change his tune. The media can change the script. But the agenda remains the same.

They no longer want to save the planet. They want to run it, and they expect you to obey.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Why the White House restoration sent the left Into panic mode

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

Presidents have altered the White House for decades, yet only Donald Trump is treated as a vandal for privately funding the East Wing’s restoration.

Every time a president so much as changes the color of the White House drapes, the press clutches its pearls. Unless the name on the stationery is Barack Obama’s, even routine restoration becomes a national outrage.

President Donald Trump’s decision to privately fund upgrades to the White House — including a new state ballroom — has been met with the usual chorus of gasps and sneers. You’d think he bulldozed Monticello.

If a Republican preserves beauty, it’s vandalism. If a Democrat does the same, it’s ‘visionary.’

The irony is that presidents have altered and expanded the White House for more than a century. President Franklin D. Roosevelt added the East and West Wings in the middle of the Great Depression. Newspapers accused him of building a palace while Americans stood in breadlines. History now calls it “vision.”

First lady Nancy Reagan faced the same hysteria. Headlines accused her of spending taxpayer money on new china “while Americans starved.” In truth, she raised private funds after learning that the White House didn’t have enough matching plates for state dinners. She took the ridicule and refused to pass blame.

“I’m a big girl,” she told her staff. “This comes with the job.” That was dignity — something the press no longer recognizes.

A restoration, not a renovation

Trump’s project is different in every way that should matter. It costs taxpayers nothing. Not a cent. The president and a few friends privately fund the work. There’s no private pool or tennis court, no personal perks. The additions won’t even be completed until after he leaves office.

What’s being built is not indulgence — it’s stewardship. A restoration of aging rooms, worn fixtures, and century-old bathrooms that no longer function properly in the people’s house. Trump has paid for cast brass doorknobs engraved with the presidential seal, restored the carpets and moldings, and ensured that the architecture remains faithful to history.

The media’s response was mockery and accusations of vanity. They call it “grotesque excess,” while celebrating billion-dollar “climate art” projects and funneling hundreds of millions into activist causes like the No Kings movement. They lecture America on restraint while living off the largesse of billionaires.

The selective guardians of history

Where was this sudden reverence for history when rioters torched St. John’s Church — the same church where every president since James Madison has worshipped? The press called it an “expression of grief.”

Where was that reverence when mobs toppled statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Grant? Or when first lady Melania Trump replaced the Rose Garden’s lawn with a patio but otherwise followed Jackie Kennedy’s original 1962 plans in the garden’s restoration? They called that “desecration.”

If a Republican preserves beauty, it’s vandalism. If a Democrat does the same, it’s “visionary.”

The real desecration

The people shrieking about “historic preservation” care nothing for history. They hate the idea that something lasting and beautiful might be built by hands they despise. They mock craftsmanship because it exposes their own cultural decay.

The White House ballroom is not a scandal — it’s a mirror. And what it reflects is the media’s own pettiness. The ruling class that ridicules restoration is the same class that cheered as America’s monuments fell. Its members sneer at permanence because permanence condemns them.

Julia Beverly / Contributor | Getty Images

Trump’s improvements are an act of faith — in the nation’s symbols, its endurance, and its worth. The outrage over a privately funded renovation says less about him than it does about the journalists who mistake destruction for progress.

The real desecration isn’t happening in the East Wing. It’s happening in the newsrooms that long ago tore up their own foundation — truth — and never bothered to rebuild it.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Trump’s secret war in the Caribbean EXPOSED — It’s not about drugs

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

The president’s moves in Venezuela, Guyana, and Colombia aren’t about drugs. They’re about re-establishing America’s sovereignty across the Western Hemisphere.

For decades, we’ve been told America’s wars are about drugs, democracy, or “defending freedom.” But look closer at what’s unfolding off the coast of Venezuela, and you’ll see something far more strategic taking shape. Donald Trump’s so-called drug war isn’t about fentanyl or cocaine. It’s about control — and a rebirth of American sovereignty.

The aim of Trump’s ‘drug war’ is to keep the hemisphere’s oil, minerals, and manufacturing within the Western family and out of Beijing’s hands.

The president understands something the foreign policy class forgot long ago: The world doesn’t respect apologies. It respects strength.

While the global elites in Davos tout the Great Reset, Trump is building something entirely different — a new architecture of power based on regional independence, not global dependence. His quiet campaign in the Western Hemisphere may one day be remembered as the second Monroe Doctrine.

Venezuela sits at the center of it all. It holds the world’s largest crude oil reserves — oil perfectly suited for America’s Gulf refineries. For years, China and Russia have treated Venezuela like a pawn on their chessboard, offering predatory loans in exchange for control of those resources. The result has been a corrupt, communist state sitting in our own back yard. For too long, Washington shrugged. Not any more.The naval exercises in the Caribbean, the sanctions, the patrols — they’re not about drug smugglers. They’re about evicting China from our hemisphere.

Trump is using the old “drug war” playbook to wage a new kind of war — an economic and strategic one — without firing a shot at our actual enemies. The goal is simple: Keep the hemisphere’s oil, minerals, and manufacturing within the Western family and out of Beijing’s hands.

Beyond Venezuela

Just east of Venezuela lies Guyana, a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map a year ago. Then ExxonMobil struck oil, and suddenly Guyana became the newest front in a quiet geopolitical contest. Washington is helping defend those offshore platforms, build radar systems, and secure undersea cables — not for charity, but for strategy. Control energy, data, and shipping lanes, and you control the future.

Moreover, Colombia — a country once defined by cartels — is now positioned as the hinge between two oceans and two continents. It guards the Panama Canal and sits atop rare-earth minerals every modern economy needs. Decades of American presence there weren’t just about cocaine interdiction; they were about maintaining leverage over the arteries of global trade. Trump sees that clearly.

PEDRO MATTEY / Contributor | Getty Images

All of these recent news items — from the military drills in the Caribbean to the trade negotiations — reflect a new vision of American power. Not global policing. Not endless nation-building. It’s about strategic sovereignty.

It’s the same philosophy driving Trump’s approach to NATO, the Middle East, and Asia. We’ll stand with you — but you’ll stand on your own two feet. The days of American taxpayers funding global security while our own borders collapse are over.

Trump’s Monroe Doctrine

Critics will call it “isolationism.” It isn’t. It’s realism. It’s recognizing that America’s strength comes not from fighting other people’s wars but from securing our own energy, our own supply lines, our own hemisphere. The first Monroe Doctrine warned foreign powers to stay out of the Americas. The second one — Trump’s — says we’ll defend them, but we’ll no longer be their bank or their babysitter.

Historians may one day mark this moment as the start of a new era — when America stopped apologizing for its own interests and started rebuilding its sovereignty, one barrel, one chip, and one border at a time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Antifa isn’t “leaderless” — It’s an organized machine of violence

Jeff J Mitchell / Staff | Getty Images

The mob rises where men of courage fall silent. The lesson from Portland, Chicago, and other blue cities is simple: Appeasing radicals doesn’t buy peace — it only rents humiliation.

Parts of America, like Portland and Chicago, now resemble occupied territory. Progressive city governments have surrendered control to street militias, leaving citizens, journalists, and even federal officers to face violent anarchists without protection.

Take Portland, where Antifa has terrorized the city for more than 100 consecutive nights. Federal officers trying to keep order face nightly assaults while local officials do nothing. Independent journalists, such as Nick Sortor, have even been arrested for documenting the chaos. Sortor and Blaze News reporter Julio Rosas later testified at the White House about Antifa’s violence — testimony that corporate media outlets buried.

Antifa is organized, funded, and emboldened.

Chicago offers the same grim picture. Federal agents have been stalked, ambushed, and denied backup from local police while under siege from mobs. Calls for help went unanswered, putting lives in danger. This is more than disorder; it is open defiance of federal authority and a violation of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.

A history of violence

For years, the legacy media and left-wing think tanks have portrayed Antifa as “decentralized” and “leaderless.” The opposite is true. Antifa is organized, disciplined, and well-funded. Groups like Rose City Antifa in Oregon, the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club in Texas, and Jane’s Revenge operate as coordinated street militias. Legal fronts such as the National Lawyers Guild provide protection, while crowdfunding networks and international supporters funnel money directly to the movement.

The claim that Antifa lacks structure is a convenient myth — one that’s cost Americans dearly.

History reminds us what happens when mobs go unchecked. The French Revolution, Weimar Germany, Mao’s Red Guards — every one began with chaos on the streets. But it wasn’t random. Today’s radicals follow the same playbook: Exploit disorder, intimidate opponents, and seize moral power while the state looks away.

Dismember the dragon

The Trump administration’s decision to designate Antifa a domestic terrorist organization was long overdue. The label finally acknowledged what citizens already knew: Antifa functions as a militant enterprise, recruiting and radicalizing youth for coordinated violence nationwide.

But naming the threat isn’t enough. The movement’s financiers, organizers, and enablers must also face justice. Every dollar that funds Antifa’s destruction should be traced, seized, and exposed.

AFP Contributor / Contributor | Getty Images

This fight transcends party lines. It’s not about left versus right; it’s about civilization versus anarchy. When politicians and judges excuse or ignore mob violence, they imperil the republic itself. Americans must reject silence and cowardice while street militias operate with impunity.

Antifa is organized, funded, and emboldened. The violence in Portland and Chicago is deliberate, not spontaneous. If America fails to confront it decisively, the price won’t just be broken cities — it will be the erosion of the republic itself.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.