Emanuel Cleaver: “Our Nation has gone through quite a tumultuous first 15 days of 2020. We marched right up to the brink of war after…”

“Our Nation has gone through quite a tumultuous first 15 days of 2020. We marched right up to the brink of war after President Donald Trump authorized the assassination of Iranian General Soleimani. And even though the Iranians did launch a measured attack, it is like the argument that the husband believed he won with his wife. It ain't over yet. Long before the current crisis with Iran, our peerless intelligence agencies began warning us of robust cyberattacks from Russia, China, North Korea, and, of course, Iran. These nations are all hell-bent on doing damage to us and using bots, an online method of passing disinformation to unsuspecting Americans, with the ultimate goal of turning unsuspecting Americans against each other. If we do that, we are repeating or allowing the repetition of what the Russians did in 2016, which is to again meddle in our upcoming quadrennial election. Now, for me, it is difficult to blame our enemies for seeking to exploit the weaknesses in our society, because it is so crystal clear to me that we are doing to ourselves what our enemies have been unable to do in the last 150 years. Our current extreme political partisanship and reliance on social media--which is, by the way, littered with disinformation--but with that, we have allowed a well to be dug into the soul of American democracy. Our Nation is wounded and it is a wound that our enemies will seek to further infect. Sadly, I must give some frightening news to our Nation.…”