LIVE Stream: Donald Trump Speaks on Foreign Policy in Washington, DC (4-27-16) via YouTube, April 27, 2016
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The Intellectual Case For Trump II: Trump Is The Culture Warrior We Need
April 22, 2016The Intellectual Case For Trump II: Trump Is The Culture Warrior We Need, The Federalist, Mytheos Holt, April 20, 2016
A candidate like Donald Trump should be impossible. A loud, unscripted, hard-edged reality show-style candidate with exceedingly flexible positions on many hot-button issues would be laughed out of contention for the Republican nomination in other years. A man whose serial gaffes and willingness to stick his thumb in the eye of the gatekeepers of good taste would be cooked before he stepped onto the debate stage. An utterly inexperienced politician, who describes our rights and privileges as particular to us as Americans rather than universal moral mandates, would be rejected by both parties at any other time in the modern era.
But in Trump’s case, these supposedly disqualifying positions and attributes have proven to be the basis for unexpected success. Why? In part, it is because he corrects massive ideological failures by the Right, which have enabled unmitigated cultural overreach by the Left, eliminating the social and cultural basis that permits a Western liberal order to exist.
For decades, the institutional Right has ceded American culture to the Left, in spite of many voices who pointed out ample areas where the Right could carve out a countercultural movement against leftist domination, or even co-opt some of modern culture for itself.
The cause of this is partially a denial of how swiftly the culture has moved Left, leaving the institutional Right under the false impression it is still fighting the culture war of the 90’s and early 2000s. The Right’s obsession with 90’s-era battles over sex, drugs, and rock and roll is more than just an anachronism: it represents a self-inflicted wound that ignored how the Left used the culture to repeatedly make the case for their vision of an ideal society. We now know the Left won that war, and in this context, Trump represents the first candidate for whom success could only come after a culture war apocalypse.
The Right of the ‘Young Fogies’
The culture wars permitted the Right to be taken over by what Jeffrey Hart—Richard Nixon speechwriter, sometime National Review editor, and all-around conservative giant—described as “young fogies.” Hart describes the phenomenon in an essay titled “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to a Modern American Conservatism,” in which he envisions as a dialogue between himself and a younger woman of the era. Here is Hart’s warning:
A lot of my students are not sold on conservatism.[…] They think conservatives are preppies who are against sex. […] In some visible cases, the main content of ‘conservatism’ seems to be a refusal of experience. We have more than our share of young fogies. I could name some names, but what the hell. In my view, young fogie American conservatives…place an altogether disproportionate emphasis on sex and sex-related moral questions. […] Some conservatives appear to confuse Victorian morality with the Western tradition, and even with Christianity.
Hart wrote those words in 1982, when candidates like Ronald Reagan were still winning young voters. But the “young fogie-ism” Hart warned against was already becoming a significant portion of the Republican brand, one that extended through the anti-video game, anti-rap, anti-sex, anti-sideboob, anti-violence handwringing that became an integral part of the Republican persona over the next two decades.
Trump is many things, but a fogie he is not. On the surface, Trump’s gold-plated lifestyle is nothing like the old Hollywood-style glamour of the Reagan White House. But for an era where most Americans have moved far beyond the culture wars of the past, where reality stars are our new tastemakers and Kim Kardashian is an icon mothers encourage their daughters to emulate, he offers an aspirational vision of wealth and accomplishment that appeals to the same combination of glitz and celebrity.
The Left Turns the Market Against the Right
Obsessing over the lost culture wars of the past is an error for the Right. But the real problem is that even if the Right hasn’t moved on from its previous losses, the Left has moved on from its previous victories. They remain focused on advancing their vision and building on their victories, to the point of eradicating any opposition from the public square. As a result, the character of the Left has fundamentally changed in a way that today’s Right seems quite incapable of grasping.
Hannah Arendt once quipped that the fiercest revolutionary becomes a devoted conservative after the revolution. This is certainly true of the Left, which has, since its culture war victories, co-opted much of the dogma of earlier conservatives and poisoned it. The old Left cast itself as transgressors against mainstream morality. This Left enforces and controls mainstream morality. The old Left championed transgressive free speech. This Left despises it.
Most importantly, the old Left cast itself as outside of capitalism. This Left is thoroughly corporatist, and only occasionally pretends otherwise. As a result, conservatives have stood by, oblivious and helpless, as the Left began to turn all our best weapons—especially the free market—against us.
This brings us to a second point: the inadequacy of the institutional Right at anticipating and explaining free markets. Conservatives and libertarians have been warning of capitalism cannibalizing itself since at least 1942, when Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter opened his book “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy” with disturbing news for his free market-sympathetic peers.
“I felt it my duty to take, and to inflict upon the reader, considerable trouble in order to lead up effectively to my paradoxical conclusion: capitalism is being killed by its achievements,” Schumpeter wrote. Much later on in the book, he observed even more cuttingly that “capitalism, inevitably and by virtue of the very logic its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.”
Cultural Neutrality Is Not Possible
Schumpeter was right then, and he is distressingly right now. The cancer of leftism has spread through capitalism even further than it had in 1942. The general assumption of the American people in the aftermath of the financial crisis and the collapse and bailouts of Wall Street is that they were witnessing failures of capitalism, and the Right has done little to correct this impression.
Trump’s brazenness in admitting to past acts of cronyism is another aspect that would, for any other politician, spell his doom. Instead, it has fostered a greater degree of trust from his supporters. This is because Trump alone seems to understand that capitalism has weaknesses at all, having been a capitalist himself. The greatest of those is the fact that capitalism—and its defenders—assume it can operate from a position of cultural neutrality. It can’t.
In the latest season of “South Park,” the titular town is overrun with advertisements masquerading as human beings: soulless robots who use gentrification and political correctness (“mental gentrification,” the show wryly notes) to eliminate actual human beings from the area. This idea that a certain species of capitalism might actually drive political correctness is daring and interesting, and relatively unremarked upon by those on the Right today.
The Left Treats Race and Sex as Brands
One of the key tactics of advertisers is to make consumers feel their life is missing something without whatever product the advertiser is selling. If you look at ads that attempt to showcase the difference between, say, data packages from different cell phone carriers, you’ll often see the competition depicted as holding back their customers from the awesome data package they could have because of greed, technological incompetence, or some other abstraction that, of course, the advertised carrier doesn’t suffer from.
Once someone buys a product, you want them to feel allegiance to it, a degree of brand loyalty that can sometimes resemble political tribalism (see Apple). The aim is to make customers believe that someone who consumes that particular product belongs to a community of other buyers, who just happen to be a particularly desirable community to be a part of!
When you distill it down to its essence, the worst forms of modern leftist politics play on all of these same tactics, playing down the ramifications of policy agendas to speak to a much deeper and emotional desire to be a good person. Did you vote for Barack Obama because you wanted to feel good about yourself, but still feel life’s missing something? Vote for Bernie Sanders, and he’ll deliver on the promise to give you everything you need. Not getting the wage you could be getting? It’s the patriarchy, so switch carriers and join our feminist army for Hillary instead.
The Left treats race and sex as brands, operating with messaging and tactics that are more than just organizing techniques: they’re a brilliant technique to capture someone without the insight to see through the pitch. The Left has realized it can succeed by creating cultural turf wars among different demographics as a substitute for a policy agenda that speaks to their real needs.
The Political Equivalent of Gawker
In this, they break from the past in many respects. Bill Clinton himself revealed how significant this shift was when he challenged Black Lives Matter. Clinton was advancing a policy argument in defense of his approach to crime in the 1990s, in the face of protesters who would hear none of it. His arguments were based on the facts, where the BLM protesters’ signs were based on the equivalent of brand loyalty to a cultural movement. No matter how correct Clinton’s case was, it inevitably fell on deaf ears.
The point is that the post-culture war Left has not laid down their arms. Instead, they have become the political equivalent of Gawker: a divisive industry seeking cultural flashpoints to exploit and highlight, devoted to manufacturing mutual hate for their own benefit. They thrive on the click-war hate that pits groups against each other.
It is not enough that women face challenges within a post-feminist society—they must be told that half the country is participating in a war on their priorities. In an atomized culture, breaking down people to the elements of ethnicity, sex, and gender is the Left’s go-to method of redefining society according to their priorities.
This is a key point that cannot be ignored. Because of the modern Left’s sophisticated use of advertising techniques, they have done something with their hatemongering that the Left of the past could only dream of: they have made it profitable. In so doing, they have turned a capitalist tactic on the culture that sustains it, and thus, on itself.
The Right Needs a New Cultural Vision
The Right must fight back against that. Yes, free markets remain the best economic system ever created, and a necessary precondition for a free society, but not a sufficient one. Does this mean the state has to get involved? Not necessarily. Conservatives could use another weapon to limit the spread of this kind of poison, and that’s culture.
Unfortunately, what little of a cultural vision we possess on the Right is so dated as to be largely hokey and irrelevant to the experience of Americans today. Because this new Left has become the dominant culture, the Right is obliged to form a counterculture. But countercultures are no place for young fogies. Countercultures shoot sacred cows, scandalize “respectable” norms, and generally wreak havoc for the sake of breaking down the hypocrisy and weakness of the dominant culture. By and large, it’s still the young fogies who run the show, and expecting them to create a counterculture, let alone a counterculture that produces actual art, is ludicrous.
The Right doesn’t have to conjure up its own art from scratch. It can and occasionally has co-opted modern entertainment as well. After all, don’t films like Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” series make the most powerful statement about the tension between chaos and civilization since John Ford? Don’t Nietzschean fairy tales like “Breaking Bad,” “House of Cards,” or even “True Detective,” not to mention most video games, utterly brush aside the Left’s fantasies about Rousseauistic, universal human goodness? Well, yes—but once again, Hart’s warning looms large, and fogie-ism rears its head.
An excellent example of this is an article titled “A Counterproductive Alliance,” discusing the increasing friendliness to right-wing ideas among video game fans after the #Gamergate controversy. The gist of the article can be summed up as: “How will we maintain our air of moral superiority if people show up to CPAC in costumes instead ofblazers and bowties?” Never mind that #Gamergate and movements like it were the most successful backlash against political correctness: for some “conservatives,” sayingyes to potential allies was too much to bear if it meant hobnobbing with the sorts of people who’ve never read a Bible or owned a varsity jacket.
Beat Dominant Culture at Its Own Game
This leaves the Right in a vulnerable and very unenviable spot: the most anachronistic elements of right-wing politics have rendered us too unimaginative to create a counterculture of our own, and too snobbish to appropriate the elements of the dominant culture that could serve as building blocks.
What’s a conservative who wants to stop culture, and thus politics, from being dragged to the far Left do? Answer: He or she has to hope that some part of mainstream culture co-opts the Right. Pray, in other words, that some Prometheus comes along who’s willing to steal fire from his fellow cultural elites to give to the Right’s forgotten constituencies, even if it annoys their more refined leaders.
Perhaps, say, some titanic elite figure who knows leftist pop culture’s weaknesses from the inside, and is willing to lose his cozy insider status to go at it like a wrecking ball? You know, the sort of person with enough cultural cachet to turn an episode of “Saturday Night Life” into an hour-long infomercial for his political vision, rather than a source of endless sneering gags about Republicans? The kind of person who can get away with barking orders at MSNBC hosts? That kind of person?
Oh look, it’s Donald Trump. Trump, alone among the 2016 Republican candidates, has been willing to seize the banner of the Right in the current culture war, and plant it straight in the backs of his fallen leftist antagonists. Trump did this the way countercultural warriors are supposed to win fights: he beat the dominant culture at its own game by rejecting their assumptions about what was allowed.
Hoisted on Their Own Petards
Compared to Trump at his most mocking and satirical, Gawker is tame. Compared to Trump at his most daring and impetuous, even the most ruthless of Hollywood’s antiheroes look peevish. Compared to Trump’s seemingly oblivious moments of benevolence, Upworthy looks mawkish and saccharine. Trump has made destroying the young fogies on the Right and Left the greatest thing on TV.
If the leaders of the Right are scared of Trump because he will say anything; the Left is scared of Trump precisely because he will say anything. He does not play by the rules, and that makes him less predictable and more dangerous. What Ronald Reagan and Trump have in common is obvious: an incredible capacity to use the media to captivate the American people. One learned this in Hollywood, the other in reality TV, but both deployed this skill to great effect.
There is, of course, a big difference, as well: everyone knows Reagan cast himself as a sunny, heroic figure. Trump, on the other hand, is taking his cues from his time as a pro-wrestling heel personality, i.e., a comically larger-than-life villain. But there’s a neat thing about villains, or at least well-done ones: they get to show where people’s ideas of good and evil fall flat. Trump does this brilliantly to the Left. He has taken the humiliating mockery that the media has trained so effectively on “hicks,” Christians, and Republicans, and turned it round to expose the smug, mostly leftist Babbits and young fogies of the Acela Corridor as no less ridiculous.
That’s a good start for someone who wants to make America great again, rather than letting America succumb to its eventual, leftist-driven death by a thousand clicks.
Distrust Yourself before You Distrust the Candidate
April 22, 2016Distrust Yourself before You Distrust the Candidate, American Thinker, David Solway, April 22, 2016
Trust can be a double-edged sword when it is not founded on insight. In politics as in personal relations, one can trust the wrong person or distrust the right one — with unfortunate consequences. Political candidates almost universally craft their public image to play to the voter’s perception of their character — the “kissing babies” syndrome. They know that their audience is susceptible to emotional manipulation and so present themselves as deeply concerned with the public welfare, as scrupulously honest and, most importantly, as likeable and trustworthy.
But let the candidate refuse to play by the rules of the electoral game, to cast politically-correct caution to the wind, and to say directly what is on his mind without hedging or skirting contentious issues, and he will immediately be trashed as a moral pariah or an unsophisticated pleb. Establishment politicians will turn against him in an orgy of vilification and horror, and a partisan media will launch incessant volleys of contempt, vituperation and slander against both his character and his candidacy, dismissing him as a demagogue-in-the-making, a Republican version of Bernie Sanders, a social barbarian, a ruthless capitalist, and so on. In an access of unconscionable blindness, even so generally astute a commentator as Carolyn Glick has fallen for this canard, erroneously claiming that Trump offers no solutions to America’s problems, merely focuses on blaming others while channeling hate. The disreputable tactic of blaming Trump for the programmatic violence of the Left — a disingenuous maneuver of which even Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz (aka TrusTed) were not innocent — is another instance of such malfeasance.
Such is the fate of a candidate who has dared to speak truth to cowardice and to grapple with the hot button issues of the current social, cultural, and political scene: Muslim immigration and the problem of jihad, open borders and the massive influx of illegal aliens, trade imbalance, the deterioration of the manufacturing industry, galloping debt, the shrinking of the middle class and the plight of the American blue-collar worker. The message may not always be carefully articulated (to put it mildly), but it is the one message that addresses the critical dilemma in which the nation now finds itself. It is a message that is anathema to the gated elite, both political and intellectual, which is preoccupied with preserving its palatinate of power and privilege.
The primary strategy of the elite, as I contended in a recent article, is to promote public trust in its chosen candidates and, especially, corrosive distrust in those who have run afoul of its agenda. Cue the Donald. Republican politicians, conservative intellectuals and many common voters are willing to risk the dissolution of the party in ganging up on the one candidate who does not rely on corporate donations and the unsavory commitments that come with them, and who, for all his flaws (and who is without them?) has been willing to take a stand in defence of national security and restored solvency.
In effect, the electorate is influenced to trust the aristocracy of correct sentiment and presumably educated opinion and to distrust the swashbuckling outsider who has not been groomed by the keepers of the political estate and does not adhere to the standards of approved discourse. The individual voter is never encouraged to distrust both his vocal preceptors and his own endocrinal reactions, to engage in research, to reflect on the basis of evidence, and to acquire genuine insight in the process. That is, he is not schooled to think, to struggle for objectivity, since the press and the political establishment implicitly agree with ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber that the American public is terminally stupid. Whatever the level of public intelligence, the nomenklatura plainly is not to be trusted.
Whom, then, can one trust? Certainly not oneself — at least, not one’s initial reactions, whether pro or con. Self-distrust is a healthy position from which to begin one’s search for truth — or if undoubted truth is not available to the human mind, let us say credible verisimilitude. Nor is it a question of whom one personally likes or dislikes. The issue is larger than that. To base one’s voting decision on personal liking or disliking of the man or woman in question, on the assessment of a candidate’s perceived personality or public manifestation, on a gut reaction to the face, the voice, the manner and the language is at best problematic. It is like living in an Oculus Rift world.
Trust, as we have noted, can be deceptive. People trusted Obama, possibly the biggest mistake the American people have ever made, and a vote for Hillary or Bernie, diligently angling for voter trust, would only prolong and intensify the agony. In my country, people did not trust former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, who navigated ably in the treacherous waters of a stormy political and economic world; instead they placed their trust in Justin Trudeau, who in six short months has amassed a $29.4 billion deficit, imported thousands of unvetted “Syrian” refugees at public expense, and is set to raise an already prohibitive tax rate.
Advocating for voter responsibility is a scarcely tenable proposition, and yet it is the sine qua non for democratic survival. I cannot say with assurance that Trump is the best man for the presidency, but I can say with confidence that his potential qualifications for the job have been obscured by an unremitting campaign of calumny and misapprehension that seems almost demented. The Michelle Fields controversy is an excellent example of how the media and the pundits have inflated a tempest in a teacup to tsunami proportions. I was once quite emphatically shoved aside by a pair of bodyguards when I approached Robert Spencer as he was being led to the podium –my bad, not his or his bodyguards’. A speaker under threat has a right to a protected space.
Admittedly, there is no yellow brick road to the right choice. One can only work to be as well-informed as possible and to study the issues with close attention. And to distrust one’s own subjective — that is, immediate, visceral, idiosyncratic or ad hominem — reactions to the politician who lobbies for your unearned favor or challenges your congenial assumptions.
Trump After New York: the Presumptive Nominee
April 21, 2016Trump After New York: the Presumptive Nominee, Gingrich Productions, Newt Gingrich, April 20, 2016
It is time for the GOP establishment to work with this new reality rather than wage war against it.
***********************
The scale of Donald Trump’s victory in New York turned him from frontrunner into presumptive Republican nominee.
The vehemently anti-Trump faction of the party will reject this conclusion.
The news media will dither and analysts will knit pick.
The pseudo-sophisticated will point to the cleverness of stealing delegates legally pledged to Trump.
It is all baloney.
Trump’s emphasis on the will of the voters will “trump” these arguments and analyses. When one candidate has won the lion’s share of the popular vote–and almost certainly Trump will have won more than his two rivals combined–the Republican base is not going to support overturning that outcome with insider cleverness at local, state or national conventions.
And even those efforts are likely to be moot since Trump seems poised to win the nomination outright.
Let’s start with New York.
As I write, the latest numbers are 89 delegates for Trump, 3 for John Kasich, and zero for Ted Cruz.
Let me repeat: the champion of the stop Trump movement just won ZERO delegates.
Ahh, the sophisticates say, but this is Trump’s home state. Of course he won all the delegates. If that is the standard, let’s look at the results in Cruz’s home state.
In the Texas primary on March 1, Cruz got 104 delegates, Trump got 48, Rubio got 3 and Kasich got none. In Cruz’s home state, Trump got nearly one third of the delegates in a four-person race.
One other really big state, Florida, has also had the chance to vote. And what happened there? On March 15, Trump won 99 delegates. Cruz, Rubio and Kasich combined won zero.
So in the three biggest states to have voted so far, the delegate count is Trump 236, Cruz 104, and Kasich 3. (California will vote on June 7 and the latest CBS poll shows Trump at 49 percent, Cruz 31 percent, Kasich 16 percent.)
Trump is far ahead in delegates in the three biggest states to have voted.
Of course, Trump’s core argument is not about delegates. It’s about the popular vote.
In Florida, New York, and Texas, Republicans have voted. Roughly 2.4 million voted for Trump, compared to 1.8 million for Cruz and 500,000 for Kasich. In these three biggest states, Trump has attracted more votes than Cruz and Kasich combined.
All evidence is that California will further widen that margin based on recent polling.
Trump is probably going to win all of New Jersey’s delegates (which is winner-take-all, with poll numbers resembling the results in New York). He’s probably going to win Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Maryland as well (though by a narrower margin) and possibly Rhode Island.
It is likely that Kasich will come in second and Cruz will come in third in all of those states. That could strengthen Kasich enough for him to rival Cruz in California (further widening the “Never Trump” candidate’s gap behind Trump).
Cruz’s best shot to turn the race around may be Indiana. That state could be a legitimate battleground for all three candidates. (Kasich is the governor of Ohio right next door, so he also has a shot at Indiana.)
Cruz may win a few small western states. He may also cleverly keep poaching Trump’s delegates at state conventions in an effort to overturn the popular vote with insider maneuvering.
There are two problems with those strategies.
First, Trump is correct in asserting that a manipulated nomination defying the popular vote would be anathema to the Republican base. It would make Cleveland and the fall campaign chaotic and unmanageable.
Second, Trump is probably going to win the nomination on the first ballot.
Take a clear-eyed look at the numbers. After New York, Trump has 845 delegates. Cruz has 559, and Kasich has 147.
So Trump is 139 delegates ahead of the other two combined.
He is almost 300 delegates ahead of Cruz, his closest rival.
Every analysis of the next few weeks indicates Trump’s margin will widen and he will move steadily closer to 1237. Already, he is only 392 short before any undecided delegates, Rubio delegates, and the like are counted.
These are the numbers of a presumptive nominee, not a front runner. If this were any candidate but Donald Trump, the media would be saying his rivals’ efforts were hopeless and the establishment would be pressuring them to exit the race.
It is time for the GOP establishment to work with this new reality rather than wage war against it.
Islam is Winning and Western Civilization is losing – Parts I and II, America and Israel
April 19, 2016Islam is Winning and Western Civilization is losing – Parts I and II, America and Israel, Dan Miller’s Blog, April 19, 2016
(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations are winning. Islamic terror in America, Europe and Israel has killed a thousand or so people. That’s a lot, but Islamization kills entire civilizations; with the death of our civilization, more deaths than Islamic terrorism has brought can be expected.
Should we give up and voluntarily commit civilizational suicide? Much of Europe has already done so and that’s what Obama and His minions are seeking for America. The forces pushing for it are strong and we can react with greater strength only if we have the will. Do we?
Part I – America
a. Muslims already in Obam’s America
The video embedded above promotes a new book titled See No Sharia, which deals with the Muslim Brotherhood and related Islamist organizations. The Muslim Brotherhood’s vision for America is laid out in a document put in evidence at the Holy Land Foundation criminal trial of several Islamist Muslim Brotherhood conspirators for funding Hamas, a terrorist organization, in violation of U.S. law.
[w]ritten in 1991 by a top Muslim Brotherhood operative, Mohamed Akram, and entitled “The Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal of the Group in North America,” this internal correspondence was meant for the eyes only of the organization’s leadership in Egypt. So, the document is direct and to the point: It explicitly states that the mission of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America is “destroying Western civilization from within … by [the infidels’] hands and the hands of the believers so that Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” [Emphasis added.]
Following guilty verdicts against indicted conspirators, the Obama administration could (and should) have sought indictments against their multiple unindicted co-conspirators. It chose not to do so, most likely because pursuing the matter further would have been inconsistent with Obama’s world view — which seems to be consistent with that of the Muslim Brotherhood, et al.
See No Sharia, and to some extent the related video, illuminate ways in which Obama’s America has been seduced by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Muslim Brotherhood-related Islamist groups into requiring our law enforcement agencies to reject the notion of Islamist Terrorism and to accept instead that of non-denominational “Violent Extremism.” We are repeatedly told that Violent Extremism has nothing to do with Islam.
Although the connection between the Muslim Brotherhood and Nazism should not be overlooked, it generally is.
It was the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Cairo in 1928, that established Islamic Jihad as a mass movement. The significance of the Muslim Brotherhood to Islamic Fascism is comparable to the significance of the Bolshevik Party to Communism: it was, and it remains to this day, the ideological reference point and the organizational core for all later Islamist groups, including Al Queda and Hamas. [Emphasis added.]
While British colonial policy contributed to the rise of Islamic radicalism, the Brotherhood’s jihad was not directed against the British, but focused almost exclusively on Zionism and the Jews.
Membership in the Brotherhood rose from 800 members in 1936 to over 200,000 in 1938. In those two years the Brotherhood conducted a major campaign in Egypt, and it was against the Jews, not against the British occupiers. This campaign against the Jews, in the late 1930s, which established the Brotherhood as a mass movement of Islamic Jihadists, was set off by a rebellion in Palestine directed against Jewish immigration from Europe and Russia. That campaign was initiated by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini. [Emphasis added.]
Al-Husseini was extremely impressed with Adolf Hitler and his anti-Jewish rhetoric. In 1941 he visited Hitler in Berlin. He was so enthralled with Hitler and the Nazis, and their plans to exterminate the Jews that he decided to remain in Berlin. He lived there from 1941 to 1945, recruiting Muslims in Europe for the Waffen-SS. He was very close to Hitler. Husseini’s best friends were Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann.
He convinced Hitler that he would be able to persuade his Muslim brothers in the Arab world to carry out the extermination of Jews in the Middle East, just as the Nazis were doing in Europe.
Back then, Hitler was largely focused on the elimination of Jews. That remains the focus of Hamas, of which the Muslim Brotherhood remains a principal supporter. Might it be due to long-standing Muslim Brotherhood ideas that many blame all of the conflicts in the Middle East on the Jewish “occupation” of Israel? That view is held by Obama and members of His administration. Hence, their persistent efforts to turn parts of Israel over to the “Palestinians,” culminating in a two state solution giving Hamas and the Palestinian Authority enhanced leverage in driving Jews from Israel.
Under pressure from the Obama administration, our law enforcement agencies cooperate with Islamist organizations to implement Sharia principles to fight “Islamophobia” rather than to locate, arrest and prosecute Islamist terrorists and wannabe Islamist terrorists. One possible rationale is that if we are nice, they may reduce their efforts to “radicalize” Muslims and, perhaps, stop some Islamic attacks. Another more likely rationale is that our dear leaders actually believe that Islamophobia (along with the Jewish “occupation” of Israel) is the principal cause of Islamic terrorism and that Sharia compliance (along with the “two state solution” and death of Israel) will solve the problems.
America has no blasphemy laws and should want none. They would violate our First Amendment right to freedom of speech. The Organization for Islamic Cooperation, consisting of fifty-seven Islamic nations, has been pushing the United Nations to impose Sharia law-style laws prohibiting blasphemy. They do not seek such laws for their own nations because they already have them to protect Islam. They seek them for America and the rest of what’s left of Western civilization, but seem to have little or no interest in prohibiting “blasphemy” against Judaism or Christianity.
The cartoon is blasphemous under Sharia law because it depicts Muhammed; some Muslims seek to kill those who produce such material. An “art exhibit” featuring an image of the Virgin Mary in a glass of urine is considered sacrilegious; some Christians seek to have government funding removed. I am reminded of this rather old Andrew Klavan video:
b. Muslims coming to Obama’s America
As correctly observed in an article titled How Obama’s Refugee Policies Undermine National Security,
The issue of the admission of Syrian refugees into the United States has understandably ignited a firestorm of protest by Americans concerned about their safety and the safety of their families. These Americans are not exhibiting “xenophobia,” the usual claim made by the open borders immigration anarchists. They have simply been paying attention to what James Comey, the Director of the FBI, and Michael Steinbach, the FBI’s Assistant Director of the Counterterrorism Division, have stated when they testified before congressional hearings about the Syrian refugee crisis. They made it clear that these refugees cannot be vetted. There are no reliable databases to check and no capacity to conduct field investigations inside Syria to verify the backgrounds of these aliens. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
I focused on these issues in my October 7, 2015 article for FrontPage Magazine, “Syrian ‘Refugees’ and Immigration Roulette: How the government is recklessly playing with American lives.”
Further reports have provided disturbing information that ISIS operatives have seized blank Syrian passports and other identity documents, along with the printing devices used to prepare passports and other ID, and have sold these documents to reporters in false names. These identity documents are indistinguishable from bona fide documents because they are bona fide documents — except that the photos and biometrics do not relate to the original person but create credible false aliases for anyone willing to pay for them.
Even if we had the documentation referred to above, it would be of little help because due to pressure from Muslim Brotherhood-related groups, we are not allowed to “profile” Muslims. As noted here,
obeisance to politically correct proscriptions against “profiling” is just one of the myriad ways in which we tell the jihadist enemy we really aren’t serious about the latest battle in the 14-century-long war of Islam against the infidel West.
. . . .
This lack of seriousness is endemic in this administration. Refusing to call ISIS “Islamic,” even going so far as to censor comments by French president François Hollande that used the word, bespeaks a dangerous frivolity. . . .
Our problem, however, goes beyond the politicians. Too many of us have failed to understand that this war did not begin on 9/11. It did not begin when al Qaeda declared war on us in the 90s and attacked our embassies and naval vessels. It did not begin in 1979, when our alleged neo-colonialist depredations supposedly sparked the Iranian revolution and created today’s Islamic (N.B., Mr. President) Republic of Iran, the world’s premier state sponsor of terrorism. It did not begin in 1948, when five Arab nations, all but one members of the U.N., violated Resolution 191 and attacked Israel. It did not begin when after World War I the victorious Entente powers exercised mandatory powers, granted by the League of Nations and codified in international treaties, over the territory of the Ottoman Empire that had sided with the Central Powers.
All these acts of aggression were merely the latest in a war begun in the 7th century when Islam attacked the eastern Roman Empire and began its serial dismemberment of the heart of Christendom, the old word for the West. For a thousand years the armies of Allah successfully invaded, conquered, occupied, enslaved, and raided the West, in accordance with its doctrine of jihad in the service of Muslim domination, and in homage to Mohammed’s injunction, “I was told to fight all men until they say there is no god but Allah.” This record of success began to end in the 17th century with the rise of the modern West and its technological, economic, and political advantages. [Emphasis added.]
But the war didn’t end with that Muslim retreat, even after what bin Laden called the “catastrophe” –– the demise of the Ottoman Caliphate, and the division of its territory into Western-style nation-states. The West won that battle, but it did not win the war. One reason is the Muslim nations of the Middle East never suffered the wages of their aggression. They sided with the Central Powers in World War I. They sat out World War II––apart from the many thousands who fought on the side of the Nazis––and received fugitive Nazis as guests after the war. Their serial aggression and terror against Israel has never been repaid with bombed-out capitals or punitive postwar reprisals. Their governments have never been punished for funding and proliferating mosques and madrassas teaching hatred of the infidel and terrorist violence in the service of jihad. [Emphasis added.]
Instead of paying the price of aggression, partly because of the Cold War, more recently because of Western failure of nerve and civilizational exhaustion, Muslims have been the beneficiaries of billions in Western aid, Western arms, Western defense against enemies, Western lax immigration policies, Western appeasement, and Western suicidal ideas like cultural and moral relativism. In short, Muslims have never accepted their defeats, and have never experienced the humiliating cost of their aggression, because the modern West has never forced them to pay for it. [Emphasis added.]
Thus they look at our unserious, godless culture of consumption and frivolity, of self-loathing and guilt, and these serious believers are confident that 350 years of defeat in battle have not led to defeat in the long war. And so the war goes on. The frivolous Western dogs bark, but Allah’s caravan moves on. [Emphasis added.]
Part II — Israel
Israel is constantly attacked by various UN organizations, most recently UNESCO, which has named the Western Wall after Muhammed’s flying horse, Barack Buraq.
There is a concerted effort among “Palestinians” and their supporters to erase all evidence of the historical connection of Jews to Israel. The UN, controlled by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, is a willing partner in these efforts. Besides being motivated by Islamic Jew-hatred, this endeavor is in line with the Islamic supremacist tendency to appropriate the holy places and sacred figures of other religions.
Buraq is claimed to have transported Muhammed from Mecca to Jerusalem, hence giving Palestinians valid claim to all of Israel. Here’s one depiction of Buraq. Obviously, there are no photographs of Muhammed actually riding him, because images of Muhammed are prohibited. Look closely at the picture. Where did the horse’s head come from?
Here’s an explanation of the Muslim nexus with the Western Wall:
Various scholars and writers, such as Ibn al-Faqih, Ibn Abd Rabbih, and Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, have suggested places where Buraq was tethered, mostly locations near the southwest corner of the Haram.[7] However, for several centuries the preferred location has been the al-Buraq mosque, just inside the wall at the south end of the Western Wall plaza.[7] The mosque sits above an ancient passageway that once came out through the long-sealed Barclay’s Gate whose huge lintel remains visible below the Maghrebi gate.[7] Because of the proximity to the Western Wall, the area next to the wall has been associated with Buraq at least since the 19th century.[8]
A New York Times editorial published in October of last year purported to compare the Jewish and Muslim claims to the Temple Mount. An article by Daniel Greenfield at Front Page Magazine posed a few questions for the NUT NYT editorialists.
The Temple Mount is holy to Jews because of the Temples. So the New York Times chose to discuss whether the Temples really existed. It’s holy to Muslims because Mohammed supposedly flew there on a flying horse (with a woman’s head).
. . . .
Let’s interview some of the same scholars and archeologists as to whether the entire Muslim basis for laying claim to the area has any basis in reality. The New York Times discusses the need for “independent scientific verification” of the Temples. How about “independent scientific verification” of this?
Here are some things for the New York Times to verify…
1. Buraq was a flying horse with a woman’s head. Can we get any verification that such a creature ever existed.
2. Buraq flew from Mecca to Jerusalem and back in one night. “The distance between Mecca and Jerusalem is 755.1 miles. To complete this feat in one night would have meant that Buraq must have been jet propelled in the 7th Century.” Please provide independent scientific verification of the existence of a flying horse with a woman’s head that can travel faster than the speed of sound.
Oddly the New York Times doesn’t appear to be interested in independent scientific verification of Islamic Supremacist myths.
Evidently, UNESCO puts more stock in flying horses than in Jewish claims to the Temple Mount.
In view of the gravity of the Islam vs. Everybody Else situation, I decided to try to inject a bit of humor into only one of the many problems Israel faces with the UN, the OIC, Obama’s America, Europe, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority and others. I had originally intended to write a more comprehensive piece on Islam vs. Israel, and will probably do so after I post Part III of this series dealing with the Islamisation of Europe.
A better and more detailed account of the UNESCO – Temple Mount absurdity is provided here.
Conclusions
Obama’s America has the will to “win,” but confuses winning with eradicating Islamophobia and slicing Israel into pieces to give to the “Palestinians” and perhaps Syria, hence bringing “peace” to the Middle East. Under that definition of “winning,” Israel, the only democratic nation and the only solid ally of the United States in the region, will cease to exist; the Islamists will have won.
We need a very different version of “winning,” one under which our constitutional freedoms and our democratic nature will be cherished and protected. Both are inconsistent with Sharia law and are not part of any definition with which Obama would agree.
We can win against Islamist encroachments on our government and in our society only if enough of us recognize the dangers they entail. Then, we will have not only the means to win but the will to do so. A first step will be to bid Obama good riddance and to welcome a successor who recognizes the dangers of Islamism and is prepared — and wants — to move quickly and effectively against it.
Let Me Ask America a Question
April 15, 2016Let Me Ask America a Question, Wall Street Journal, Donald Trump, April 14, 2016
On Saturday, April 9, Colorado had an “election” without voters. Delegates were chosen on behalf of a presidential nominee, yet the people of Colorado were not able to cast their ballots to say which nominee they preferred.
A planned vote had been canceled. And one million Republicans in Colorado were sidelined.
In recent days, something all too predictable has happened: Politicians furiously defended the system. “These are the rules,” we were told over and over again. If the “rules” can be used to block Coloradans from voting on whether they want better trade deals, or stronger borders, or an end to special-interest vote-buying in Congress—well, that’s just the system and we should embrace it.
Let me ask America a question: How has the “system” been working out for you and your family?
I, for one, am not interested in defending a system that for decades has served the interest of political parties at the expense of the people. Members of the club—the consultants, the pollsters, the politicians, the pundits and the special interests—grow rich and powerful while the American people grow poorer and more isolated.
No one forced anyone to cancel the vote in Colorado. Political insiders made a choice to cancel it. And it was the wrong choice.
Responsible leaders should be shocked by the idea that party officials can simply cancel elections in America if they don’t like what the voters may decide.
The only antidote to decades of ruinous rule by a small handful of elites is a bold infusion of popular will. On every major issue affecting this country, the people are right and the governing elite are wrong. The elites are wrong on taxes, on the size of government, on trade, on immigration, on foreign policy.
Why should we trust the people who have made every wrong decision to substitute their will for America’s will in this presidential election?
Here, I part ways with Sen. Ted Cruz.
Mr. Cruz has toured the country bragging about his voterless victory in Colorado. For a man who styles himself as a warrior against the establishment (you wouldn’t know it from his list of donors and endorsers), you’d think he would be demanding a vote for Coloradans. Instead, Mr. Cruz is celebrating their disenfranchisement.
Likewise, Mr. Cruz loudly boasts every time party insiders disenfranchise voters in a congressional district by appointing delegates who will vote the opposite of the expressed will of the people who live in that district.
That’s because Mr. Cruz has no democratic path to the nomination. He has been mathematically eliminated by the voters.
While I am self-funding, Mr. Cruz rakes in millions from special interests. Yet despite his financial advantage, Mr. Cruz has won only three primaries outside his home state and trails me by two million votes—a gap that will soon explode even wider. Mr. Cruz loses when people actually get to cast ballots. Voter disenfranchisement is not merely part of the Cruz strategy—it is the Cruz strategy.
The great irony of this campaign is that the “Washington cartel” that Mr. Cruz rails against is the very group he is relying upon in his voter-nullification scheme.
My campaign strategy is to win with the voters. Ted Cruz’s campaign strategy is to win despite them.
What we are seeing now is not a proper use of the rules, but a flagrant abuse of the rules. Delegates are supposed to reflect the decisions of voters, but the system is being rigged by party operatives with “double-agent” delegates who reject the decision of voters.
The American people can have no faith in such a system. It must be reformed.
Just as I have said that I will reform our unfair trade, immigration and economic policies that have also been rigged against Americans, so too will I work closely with the chairman of the Republican National Committee and top GOP officials to reform our election policies. Together, we will restore the faith—and the franchise—of the American people.
We must leave no doubt that voters, not donors, choose the nominee.
How have we gotten to the point where politicians defend a rigged delegate-selection process with more passion than they have ever defended America’s borders?
Perhaps it is because politicians care more about securing their private club than about securing their country.
My campaign will, of course, battle for every last delegate. We will work within the system that exists now, while fighting to have it reformed in the future. But we will do it the right way. My campaign will seek maximum transparency, maximum representation and maximum voter participation.
We will run a campaign based on empowering voters, not sidelining them.
Let us take inspiration from patriotic Colorado citizens who have banded together in protest. Let us make Colorado a rallying cry on behalf of all the forgotten people whose desperate pleas have for decades fallen on the deaf ears and closed eyes of our rulers in Washington, D.C.
The political insiders have had their way for a long time. Let 2016 be remembered as the year the American people finally got theirs.
Who Is the Real Ted Cruz?
April 11, 2016Who Is the Real Ted Cruz? Commentary Magazine, Noah Rothman, April 11, 2016
(Commentary Magazine has with substantial consistently opposed Trump and favored Cruz. This article, which deals with Cruz’s positions on immigration, does neither. — DM)
Image by © Porter Gifford/Corbis
The New York Times noted the indisputable similarities between this statement and that made by Jeb Bush, who said that families coming to the United States illegally are performing “an act of love.”
Ted Cruz is whoever he needs to be whenever he needs to be it. In a fashion, that’s no liability when it comes to running campaigns and winning elections. It does, however, give pause to voters concerned with authenticity and judgment. Who is the real Ted Cruz? That’s a subject of debate.
**************************
From the moment he embarked on a political career, Ted Cruz had his finger on the pulse of the core Republican electorate. For this key voting bloc, he calibrated his appeal to satisfy the largest number of conservatives without sacrificing his brand as a principled truth-teller. It is a clever strategy, but one that only works when executed skillfully. For years, Cruz was that skillful operator. He probably never anticipated that he would be outmaneuvered at his own game.
Cruz’s approach to navigating the bramble thicket of center-right sentiment by presenting himself as the most conservative candidate that can still appeal to a majority of the GOP primary electorate has not been without cost. To preserve his image as the most conservative figure in the room, Cruz sacrificed authenticity. For Republicans who concern themselves little with such qualities as predictability in their standard-bearers, this was no sacrifice at all. Cruz did not foresee that an even more skilled executor of the populist bombast tone that the Texan had spent years cultivating would outflank him. Donald Trump keenly demonstrated that conservative purism was never the quality for which the “angry” electorate was pining. A deft negotiator of the political game, Cruz is again changing tactics. In adopting yet another persona to overcome the adversity of the moment, though, Cruz is once again giving up on genuineness.
There is perhaps no better barometer to gauge the sentiment of the activist right than the issue of immigration. Ramesh Ponnuru presciently forecast a political storm on the horizon when, in February of 2015, he observed that the Republican Party’s class of political professionals had reached a consensus on the matter of immigration. That consensus diverged sharply from that of a small but committed faction within the Republican coalition. For many months,public opinion surveys and state-level exit polls have demonstrated that only a small minority of GOP voters believe immigration is the most important issue facing the nation. Occasionally, Republican majorities even tell pollsters they favor a pathway to legalization or even citizenship for the nation’s illegal immigrant population. There is, however, an intensity gap on the issue that favors the anti-immigration reform GOP voter – their passion is a marked contrast from the lukewarm pro-reform voter – and Cruz picked up on this sentiment early.
There may be no better example of the pose Cruz struck for the benefit of his admirers on the right than a November 2014 speech on the Senate floor in which the Texas senator postured as the successor to Marcus Tullius Cicero himself. In adapting a passage from Cicero’s famed orations against the Catilinarian Conspirators, Cruz indicted the president’s anti-republicanism on matters ranging from border security to the IRS. The Texas senator’s dramatics sent eyes rolling right out of their sockets among his myriad critics, but they were not the intended audience. Similarly, Cruz cemented animosity among his Senate colleagues when he helped organize opposition to a House measure intended to address the crisis of unaccompanied minors surging across the border in the summer of 2014. His stated concerns were that the emergency measure would not include pre-2012 election language designed to stop the implementation of that year’s executive orders on immigration (which would have failed in the Democrat-led Senate).
From the perspective of establishmentarian Republicans, the conservative wing had imposed paralysis on the GOP. Ted Cruz fatally undermined the Republican position — that what was occurring on the border was a crisis precipitated by the president’s leadership – by robbing the GOP of agency and leaving it to the president to resolve what the GOP had for weeks been calling a national emergency. For anti-immigration reform activists on the right, however, this was a noble display of opposition to any border measure that was judged insufficiently compromising. Indeed, Cruz made his opposition to immigration reform along the lines of the 2013’s “Gang of Eight” reform bill central to his campaign. So, this must be the real Ted Cruz: an immigration maximalist and the tribune of the conservative wing of the GOP.
Not so fast. The anti-immigration reform absolutist is no Ted Cruz that any of the senator’s colleagues on George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign would recognize. In a five-page 1999 memo for Bush on the issue of immigration, Cruz said he opposed “amnesty” but noted that the Republican nominee should strike a calibrated tone on the matter. He advised Bush to advocate for higher caps on the number of skilled workers coming to the country. As for illegal immigration, Cruz advised Bush to state his opposition to the phenomenon and to advocate stricter border security measures. “At the same time,” Cruz wrote, “we need to remember that many of those coming here are coming to feed their families, to have a chance at a better life.” The New York Times noted the indisputable similarities between this statement and that made by Jeb Bush, who said that families coming to the United States illegally are performing “an act of love.” Even amid deliberations and maneuvering in the Senate over the reviled “Gang of Eight” bill, Cruz supported an amendment that would, in his own words, get illegal immigrants “out of the shadows” and allow them to apply for legal status.
That is not the real Ted Cruz, says Ted Cruz. No, this Ted Cruz was merely playing a republican game designed to scuttle the reform bill. Don’t believe him, Cruz’s colleagues who worked with him on immigration matters during the 2000 campaign insist. “I’m disappointed in Ted because he’s a very bright, articulate lawyer with a substantial base of knowledge about immigration,” said Houston attorney Charles Foster, who worked with Cruz on Bush’s immigration team. “But instead of using that knowledge, he’s acting like a typical politician and just talking about the border being out of control.” Indeed, Ted Cruz has begun to adopt the language of the “typical politician.”
To continue to compete with Donald Trump for the mantle of most uncompromising figure in the race is a losing prospect. Cruz will always be outbid in that contest. Instead, the Texas senator is talking like something he and his supporters dismissed as a contrivance: an electable, bridge-building centrist.
In an April 9 speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition (according to the invaluable dispatches ofAtlantic editor David Frum and CNN reporter Teddy Schleifer), Cruz softened his approach in an effort to expand his appeal to the GOP’s “electability” voter. Cruz hyped his appeal to Hispanic voters, noting his own ability to win 40 percent of this demographic in the recent Texas primary. He touted the necessity of expanding the Republican map into purple states like Pennsylvania, where the party has not on the presidential level since 1988. He repeatedly touched on the issue of tone, and noted to this socially liberal group of voters that campaigns based on divisive cultural issues are rarely produce general election winners. “Nobody wants to elect a hectoring scold,” he said.
Cruz noted that he is better positioned today than any of his competitors to unite the GOP behind him and that unity will maintain critical party cohesion in November. Frum observed that Cruz touted the United States and Israel as the only two nations on earth founded to serve as “havens for the oppressed.” “Immigration must serve the needs of the American people,” Cruz added. “Business wants wages low. I want to see wages rise because businesses are competing for labor.” This is a tough-on-immigration tone that nonetheless appeals to pro-reform voters – voters the party’s maximalists probably convinced themselves they had defeated.
Is this the real Ted Cruz? Who knows? Ted Cruz is whoever he needs to be whenever he needs to be it. In a fashion, that’s no liability when it comes to running campaigns and winning elections. It does, however, give pause to voters concerned with authenticity and judgment. Who is the real Ted Cruz? That’s a subject of debate.
Trump: The system is rigged, it’s crooked
April 11, 2016Full Measure – Trump, NATO and other stuff
April 11, 2016Full Measure Episode 28: April 10, 2016 (P2 via You Tube, April 10, 2016
WarSclerotic 
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