On September 9, 2016, Hillary Clinton stood in front of a thousand donors at a New York City fundraiser and said this:
“You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.”
I remember where I was when I heard it. And I’ll be honest with you: for a split second, a small part of me nodded. Not because of the politics. Because a soundbite is designed to make you nod.
But I have sat at plenty of tables with the people she was describing. I sat at another one last weekend. And every time I do, I am reminded of the same thing:
Our differences are small. Our commonalities are strong.
That is the part the algorithm is working overtime to make you forget.
The Picnic
It was Easter weekend 2026. An outdoor park. My in-laws and their extended family — farmers, cattle ranchers, engineers, cooks, waiters, retirees. Every family had brought a dish. Paper plates bending under the weight of potato salad and brisket and casseroles somebody’s grandmother had been perfecting for forty years. Kids running between the folding chairs.
They knew I was a retired Air Force colonel. They’re a deeply pro-military crowd, and the questions started almost immediately.
I’d like to tell you I walked in without preconceptions. I didn’t. I try hard to be a balls-and-strikes guy — non-partisan, allergic to tribes — but I’ll admit I braced myself for a certain kind of afternoon. I figured I was going to spend it gently correcting ill-informed talking points about Iran, about Pete Hegseth, about “the woke,” about the military. Be patient, be professional, eat the food, drive home.
I was wrong about what was going to happen. The questions came, exactly as I expected them. I was wrong about what was on the other side of them.
A Detour Through 1998
I have to step back for a minute. Bear with me.
In 1998 I was a captain in my twenties, raised in a deeply religious household, with a set of assumptions about gay and lesbian Americans I had never once examined. I wouldn’t have called it hate. I would have called it “what I was taught.” But the effect was the same. I didn’t know anybody in that community. I didn’t want to. And when the subject came up, I said what I had been told to say.
Then I married my wife.
She came to me from a different world. Before I met her she was a Radio City Rockette. Her New York was full of dancers, singers, choreographers, and costume people — and a lot of them were gay and lesbian. When we got engaged, her friends folded me in. They fed me. They helped us plan the wedding. They toasted us when we got married.
None of them argued with me. Not one. They just sat next to me at the table long enough that the story I had been telling myself stopped making sense.
That was the first time I learned that sitting at somebody’s table is the fastest way to stop believing what you’ve been told about them. I have been re-learning that lesson ever since.
Last weekend I got another helping.
“If You Break It, You Buy It”
Iran was the first real question of the day. It was the obvious one.
Over the previous 48 hours, President Trump had told the country three separate times that the United States was going to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages.” Secretary Hegseth had stood next to him and nodded along. A deadline had been set for Tuesday, April 7: if Tehran didn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz by 8 PM Eastern, it would be, in Trump’s own words on Truth Social, “Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one.” Amnesty International had called the threats apocalyptic. Global markets were tanking. Reasonable people in European capitals were asking, out loud, whether the administration was seriously contemplating the use of nuclear weapons.
So somebody at the picnic — a retired rancher in an old trucker cap and sunglasses — asked me what I thought. Not in a hostile way. In a you’ve worn the uniform, tell me what I should think way.
I took a breath, and I walked him through it. Not the politics. The actual job.
Here’s the version I gave him, with the jargon stripped out.
You can’t bomb civilian infrastructure. Not because it’s against some political fashion — because it’s against the law of armed conflict, and because the second you do it, the American military owns the consequence forever. Article 54 of the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions spells it out plainly: you may not attack, destroy, or remove “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population” — which the treaty lists explicitly: food, drinking water installations, power plants, irrigation, the things a human being needs to still be alive the next morning. That isn’t a suggestion. It’s the line between a combatant and a war criminal.
Now think about what Iran actually is. Roughly 90 million people. Most of their drinking water doesn’t come from the ocean — it comes through power-dependent water treatment, through dams, through long-distance pipelines that need pumps, and through a fragile electrical grid that barely holds together in a good year. Take out the power plants the President is threatening, and you don’t just inconvenience a regime. You cut the water to 90 million innocent people — grandmothers, children, the guy who runs the corner fruit stand — by tomorrow morning.
And then what happens? Who cleans it up? We do. The same U.S. military this picnic loves is now flying C-17s — the airplane I used to fly — into a country we just bombed, stacked to the ceiling with pallets of bottled water and humanitarian aid. Because if you break it, you buy it. That isn’t a politician’s line. It is the rule professional soldiers live under. It is the reason people in uniform flinch when people in suits start talking about Stone Ages.
The rancher listened. Nobody yelled. Somebody said huh. Somebody else pushed back — and their pushback was real, not a talking point. What about American strength? What about deterrence? What about the cost of letting the mullahs think we’re bluffing? I listened back, because those are fair questions and they deserve fair answers.
And somewhere between the coffee refill and the paper plate in my lap, all of us ended up in roughly the same place: ironclad about American power, skeptical of American recklessness, clear-eyed about the cost of both. The middle. The actual middle. Not the cable-news middle. The picnic middle.
The Larger Tent
Then the conversation turned personal, the way it always does.
Someone asked about LGBTQ Americans in the military. They were uncomfortable with the topic. They weren’t hiding it. The question had that cautious tone people use when they know it’s loaded but they want a real answer from someone who will actually give one instead of a speech.
So I gave them one. And because of 1998 and my wife and everything that came after, I gave them the whole thing.
I told them the truth every service branch is living with right now: seventy-seven percent of young Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 cannot qualify to serve. Not because of who they love. Because they are too overweight, too medicated, too physically broken by a childhood without recess and school systems that gutted PE and sports until the recruiting pipeline collapsed. Obesity alone disqualifies about a third. The U.S. Army missed its recruiting goal by twenty-five percent in 2022. The shortfall is measured in the tens of thousands of troops a year. This is a national security crisis, and it has nothing to do with pronouns.
If a young American — man, woman, gay, straight — can meet the physical standard, the mental standard, and the moral standard, we cannot afford to turn them away. Full stop. We need a larger tent.
And here’s the part I think the credentialed left gets wrong: a larger tent does not mean redesigning the barracks. It does not mean bespoke bathrooms, bespoke showers, bespoke sleeping arrangements that grind unit cohesion into dust. The military is not a civilian workplace. It is a team with a very specific job, and that team works because we all eat the same food, sleep in the same tent, and carry the same rifle. If you want in, the door is open. But you are joining us. We are not rebuilding the house around each new arrival.
Everyone at that picnic agreed. Not because I browbeat anyone — because the argument respected both their concern and somebody else’s dignity at the same time. Nobody had to pretend to believe something they didn’t. Nobody walked away humiliated.
Try getting that on cable news.
The Enemy Isn’t at the Picnic
Here is the part of the afternoon I cannot stop thinking about.
Driving home, I ran the day back in my head. I had talked to a cattle rancher whose hands were cracked from work I will never do. An engineer who builds things that have to hold up when people are standing on them. A retired cook. Farmers. A waiter. Kids who had nothing to do with any of it running in circles around the whole scene.
Every single one of them was a whole human being.
Less book-smart than the people who go on television to explain “what rural America thinks”? Sure, maybe. But every last one of them was people-smart. They read rooms. They read each other. They care about their neighbors. They go to church. They want to live a fulfilling life and they want their kids to have one too. That is the whole deal.
The elite left — with its fancy degrees and its credentialed contempt and its constant jokes about “flyover country” — has decided these people are moral defectives who need to be educated, out-voted, or shamed into silence. The professional right, meanwhile, has decided these same people are useful only as rage props for the next fundraising email. Both of those elites are wrong. Both of them are lying about the people I met Sunday.
Nobody at that picnic was a rage prop. Nobody at that picnic was a moral defective. They were adults having an actual conversation with another adult, willing to hear me out, willing to change their minds a little, expecting me to change mine.
That is what America looks like when the algorithm is off.
The Troll in St. Petersburg
Which brings me to the part that should haunt you.
On May 21, 2016, in downtown Houston, Texas, two protests formed on opposite sides of the street in front of the Islamic Da’wah Center. One side, organized by a Facebook group called “Heart of Texas,” was there to protest “the Islamization of Texas.” The other side, organized by a Facebook group called “United Muslims of America,” was there to defend the center.
Fewer than fifty Americans showed up on each side. They screamed at each other. It nearly came to blows. It was ugly.
Here is what those Americans did not know: both Facebook pages were run out of the same building. An office park in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Internet Research Agency — a Kremlin-linked troll farm later indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for exactly this kind of operation. Facebook’s own testimony to Congress later revealed the IRA had spent roughly two hundred dollars on ads to promote the dueling rallies.
Two hundred dollars. One Russian building. Two sides of the same Houston street, Americans yelling at Americans about an invented conflict — Americans who would never have met each other if a stranger on the other side of the world hadn’t decided it would weaken the United States for them to scream in each other’s faces.
That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a federal indictment. It is the documented record of a foreign adversary figuring out that the cheapest way to harm America is to pay Americans to hate each other.
Now scale that up ten years. Scale it up to every angry hashtag, every cable-news food fight, every viral clip of a “woke” college kid or a “deplorable” rancher cherry-picked for maximum rage. How much of what you saw on your phone this week came from somebody who actually lives here?
How much of it was written by a troll who was counting on you to forward it?
What I Took Home
The sun was going down, the kids were wiped out, and before the food got packed up somebody said grace. The usual words — the usual thank-you for the meal, for the hands that made it, for the family at the table and the family who couldn’t be there. Fifteen seconds of quiet.
It was the best argument I have ever heard for why this country is still worth saving.
Hillary Clinton was wrong about half of them. I was wrong about some of them. And the trolls in St. Petersburg are counting on both of us to stay wrong.
Don’t give them the satisfaction.
The next time somebody hands you a viral clip telling you half of America is a monster — left or right, it doesn’t matter — do what I did this Easter. Go sit at their table. Eat their food. Ask them what they actually think, and then listen to the answer like a grown-up. You are going to be surprised.
And somewhere in an office park in St. Petersburg, a troll is going to be furious.
That’s how we win.
Sources & Fact-Check Trail
- Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark — LGBT for Hillary Gala, New York City, September 9, 2016. Full transcript: NPR. Background: Wikipedia.
- President Trump’s “Stone Age” statements on Iran, April 1–5, 2026: Axios; Al Jazeera; Amnesty International.
- Article 54, Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (1977): Foreign Policy; TIME; Atlantic Council.
- 77% of Americans 17–24 ineligible to serve: Pentagon 2020 Qualified Military Available Study, via Military.com.
- Houston “dueling protests,” May 21, 2016 — both Facebook pages operated by the Internet Research Agency: DOJ indictment; Texas Tribune; CNN.
About the Author
Michael Komorous is the host of Voice for Valor, a podcast dedicated to sharing the stories of military veterans, first responders, and their families. A combat-rated Air Force officer, Mike served as a nuclear missile operator, C-17 pilot, and MQ-1 Predator pilot before managing rated personnel across the Air National Guard. His policy career spans legislative affairs, defense acquisitions, and geopolitical strategy at OSD Policy, including analysis of the war in Ukraine.
Today Mike builds AI systems and leads Alpha Zulu Solutions, a service-disabled veteran-owned small business focused on defense technology and government contracting. He holds advanced analytics training from George Mason University’s Innovation Lab.
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