This is from PJ Media, by David Forsmark:

Our military [has] became a gigantic Peace Corps …  drinking billions of cups of tea, and handing out billions of dollars for projects. … Generals proclaimed that killing the enemy could not win the [Afghanistan] war. Senior officials fantasized that the war would be won by protecting and winning over the population. …  The futile effort to build a democracy diverted the energies of our soldiers and weakened their martial spirit.

For years, Pakistan was in the hunting-bin-Laden business, to the tune of $2 billion a year. If they actually had “found him” it would have been nice publicity, but that would have ended that particular gravy train. …

And all the time –

The ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, was neck deep with bin Laden from the beginning — and the location of his ultimate hiding place [in Pakistan] only adds to the suspicion that that association did not end after 9/11.

Our policy now is of continuous handouts to tribal leaders whose hands are constantly out, but who will do nothing to help us against the Taliban because they know there is a date certain where we will be gone and they will be on their own. [And] we do nothing to make them regret coddling the terrorists.

What is the American tax-payers’ $2 billion a year buying them? Nothing and worse: absolute indifference to their objection when a Pakistani citizen, the doctor who helped find bin Laden’s hiding place, was sentenced to 33 years in prison for doing just that (though ostensibly on some unrelated trumped-up charges).

More on this profound injustice comes from the Heritage Foundation:

Dr. Afridi, a Pakistani citizen, was picked up by the Pakistani authorities a few weeks after the May 2, 2011, raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The doctor, at the behest of the U.S., apparently led a phony vaccination campaign in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in an attempt to secure DNA evidence from the residents living inside the bin Laden compound. Afridi was unable to obtain the samples, but U.S. officials have acknowledged he provided information that helped U.S. officials locate bin Laden. …

In May 2012, after he had been held for a year, a Pakistani tribal court sentenced Afridi to 33 years in jail on trumped-up charges that he had cooperated with militants in the tribal border areas.

The real reason the Pakistanis convicted Afridi? Wounded pride. Pakistani military officials were livid about the U.S. decision to pursue the bin Laden operation unilaterally. But making Shakil Afridi the scapegoat for their anger is not acceptable. While some Pakistanis say their country is justified in detaining Afridi because he committed “espionage”,  the fact is that Dr. Afridi’s cooperation with the CIA benefited the national security of Pakistan — not to mention every other civilized nation on the planet. [Furthermore] the man he helped the Navy SEALs target was not a Pakistani himself, but an international outlaw, an enemy of both our nations. 

The silence of the Obama Administration on the Afridi case has been disheartening.

Or even positively infuriating.

In his hearing to be confirmed as Secretary of State, John Kerry downplayed the Pakistanis’ lack of cooperation in freeing Afridi. He chose to throw his weight behind the Pakistani government instead, saying, “We need to build our relationship with the Pakistanis, not diminish it.”

In reality, it is the Pakistani government that has “diminished” ties through its handling of the Afridi case in such a petty and ham-handed fashion.

In such a spiteful and cruel fashion, we would say.

It seems plain enough to us that Pakistan is not an ally but an enemy of the United States.

But that doesn’t mean, of course, that Obama will treat it as an enemy. So neither will his lackey, John Kerry.

The Obama regime regards no state that works against American interests as an enemy – especially not an Islamic one.

In any case, they have no stomach for fighting wars. Saddled with a defense force, they cast about  for a gentle use to put it to. And this is what they found, according to a suitably acid report by Investor’s Business Daily:

On Jan. 31, Obama’s Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey gave Coast Guard cadets the full Obama line [telling them]: “our contribution to the stability of the global economic system” comes before our armed forces’ duty “to protect the country from a catastrophic attack.”

And if that’s not dumb enough for you, in the House of Representatives, Democrats want to establish a new federal “Department of Peacebuilding” Cabinet-level bureaucracy, featuring a “Secretary of Peacebuilding” who would sit on the National Security Council. …

According to extreme left-wing Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif. … the Peacebuilding department wouldn’t just scale down U.S. military actions abroad but would enjoy jurisdiction domestically, going after school bullies and preventing cruelty against animals.

It would even set up a “peace academy” modeled after West Point and Annapolis.

Maybe President Obama will put the federal Peace bureaucracy in charge of domestic drones, which could shoot flowers at their surveillance targets.

Unless they spot members of the Tea Party, or Vets, in which case they would probably be happy to use up some of that otherwise obsolete stuff called ammunition.

Rush Limbaugh weighed in recently on the Republicans’ on-going debate about what went wrong in November. Elaborating on his earlier comment that he was “[for the first time in my life] ashamed of America,” Limbaugh said, “The Left has beaten us. They have created far more low-information, unaware, uneducated people than we’ve been able to keep up with . . . He added that the Democrats “control the education system . . . pop culture, movies, TV and books” and use that control to create “dependency” among voters.

These are extracts from an article by Bruce Thornton at Front Page. He endorses Rush Limbaugh’s lament. Both of them seem to think that not only has the Left “beaten us” in the present (“us” being Republicans, conservatives, anti-socialists generally), but that the Left’s victory is probably irreversible:

Some may think this is a dog-bites-man observation, but it’s worth looking more closely at the most important item in Limbaugh’s list – the educational system. Everything else Limbaugh mentions is made possible because of the deep corruption in public education from kindergarten to university.

We often focus on the ideological biases of the university, where the more lunatic examples of political correctness get the most attention. But in education as in economics, there is a trickle-down effect. The grandees at the elite universities train the PhD’s who go on to second and third tier institutions, where they in turn train the students who get high school and grade school teaching credentials. They also write most of the textbooks that end up in K-12 classrooms. Thus the progressive ideology metastasizes throughout the educational system, determining the curriculum, the textbooks, and the point of view of the teachers. At that level the ideas may be garbled, half-baked, incoherent, and a collection of clichés and slogans. But they are still toxic and effective at transmitting a world-view to impressionable minds.

When my kids were in public school I witnessed this process over and over. Questionable leftist ideas I had to sit through in graduate seminars turned up regularly in my kids’ English and history courses and textbooks. In the Marxist interpretation of history, for example, traditional historical narratives reflect the “false consciousness” of capitalism’s academic publicists justifying and “mystifying” a history marked by oppression and atrocities in service to a dehumanizing capitalist ideology.

The founding of the United States, then, was not about things like freedom and inalienable rights, but instead reflected the economic interests and power of wealthy white property-owners. The civil war wasn’t about freeing the slaves or preserving the union, but about economic competition between the industrial north and the plantation south. The settling of the West was not an epic saga of hardships endured to create a civilization in a wilderness, but genocide of the Indians whose lands and resources were stolen to serve capitalist exploitation. Inherent in this sort of history were the assumptions of Marxist economic determinism and the primacy of material causes over the camouflage of ideals and principles.

In the 60’s this narrative was married to identity politics: the defining of ethnic minorities and Third World peoples on the basis of their status as victims of this capitalist hegemony and it imperialist and colonialist mechanisms, which justified the plundering, oppression, and exploitation of the non-white “others” with racist notions of their natural inferiority. Various strains of postmodernism added a cultural relativism that put out of bounds any judgments of a culture’s values, since all such standards reflect the economic needs of the dominant power. Soon feminism added women to the list of victims sacrificed to the white-male power structure. …

Generations of credential students have sat in these courses and then gone on to teach in high schools and grade schools, and to write the textbooks and curricula that propagate this ideology. The result is a student population ignorant of the basic facts of history, the vacuum filled with melodramas of victimization, racism, oppression, and violence that cast the United States as a global villain guilty of crimes against humanity. …

So too with the movies, books, television shows, and popular music Limbaugh identifies as vectors of this disease. They merely reflect what their creators absorbed in school and what their audiences have been programmed to uncritically accept as true. Having been schooled in the evil designs of oppressive, greedy corporations that abuse workers and rape the planet, these cultural consumers are natural audiences for the plots of movies and television shows that recycle these dull clichés. Having been taught the evils of free-market capitalism that enriches the few at the expense of the many, they are natural constituents of a class-envy politics demanding the rich “pay their fair share,” which is nothing more than property redistribution useful for creating a class of political clients dependent on the federal government. Having spent years being indoctrinated with romantic environmentalism and Disneyfied visions of nature, they are susceptible to an anti-carbon politics that retards development of American oil resources in the name of “protecting the planet” from an apocalyptic rise in global temperatures caused by human and corporate misbehavior, a notion that barely qualifies as a hypothesis, let alone a scientific fact. But how could most products of our dysfunctional educational system tell the difference?

No surprise, then, that last year Obama won the 18-44 demographic––46% of the electorate––by about 15 points. This is the age group that has spent its whole educational career in schools that fail at teaching fundamental skills and basic information, but succeed at transmitting the progressive ideology perfect for creating conformist dependents …

Thornton acknowledges that some children “escape this warping influence “, which, he says, “is a testimony to parents and independent-minded teachers who are careful to counter this ideology”.

He concludes with a reminder of  the Jesuit educational maxim: “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man”.  And he observes, “Today’s progressives get children until they are 18 and sometimes 21. That kind of influence is hard to match.”

And now the Obama gang want to start the indoctrination even earlier, with free pre-school education for all children.

Have Republican policy-makers thought about how to cure the Left’s corruption of the school and university curricula? Is any Republican leader or conservative organization likely to think about it? Is there a solution short of abolishing all state-financed and state-aided education (which Republicans are extremely unlikely ever to think of doing)?

If the answer to all those questions is no, then is Rush Limbaugh right that “we are beaten”?

Our hopes lie with the invincible liberating selfishness of human nature; with the “natural order of liberty” – which was Adam Smith’s phrase for what Marx called “capitalism”; and with the knowledge derived form both thinking and noting the history of the last hundred years that socialism cannot work so it will not work.

The Left’s victory – like the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia – may last as much as a few decades, to the extreme detriment of America, but it will fail eventually because its teachings are untrue, as all religious doctrines always are.

First a story about a little English boy who was so tormented and terrified by Muslim school fellows that he committed suicide.

Next the story of a Norwegian boy and his puppy, told in an article titled Europe: A Continent in Flight by Bruce Bawer at Front Page:

Danish Christians and Jews are being bullied by Muslim thugs into checking out of their neighborhoods and moving to safer locales. French Jews are taking it on the lam from Paris to settle in marginally less dangerous parts of London. Londoners are leaving their increasingly dodgy city and, literally, heading for the hills. East Oslo is being drained of ethnic Norwegians. And all of them are running scared for one reason, and one reason only: they’re terrified of getting beaten up by primitive thugs with a primitive religion who, at these European taxpayers’ expense, have been imported from some of the most primitive parts of the world.

Years and years ago these cultural hooligans, these religious autocrats, these would-be enforcers of sharia, were welcomed to Europe by clueless, spineless political leaders, and – although the reality of “creeping jihad” has long since set in – they continue to be celebrated by most of those leaders … for purportedly enriching European culture. And all the while, as a result, European culture is quickly going down the tubes.

For a step-by-step account of just what those clueless spineless political leaders did to bring about the Muslim conquest of Europe by immigration, see our post Europe betrayed, February 11, 2010.

When you’re discussing such large-scale phenomena such as this one – hundreds of thousands of Muslims occupying this or that part of this or that city, hundreds of thousands of native Londoners relocating hither and thither in consequence – it can be hard to grasp it all, to reduce the big picture to a comprehensible, human scale. …  The other day the Norwegian newspaperAftonbladet reported on [a] European boy who found himself in the jihadist crosshairs and was forced to flee. …

On the evening of February 16, a boy – whose named has been withheld, whether because of his age, or to protect him from reprisals, or both – got on a bus in the town of Egersund in western Norway. He was headed back home to Stavanger, fifty or so miles away, and was carrying his puppy. Upon boarding the bus, he checked with the driver to make sure it was OK to take the dog onboard. The driver said yes: he had no problem with it. Unfortunately, three other passengers, whom Aftonbladet identifies as being “of foreign origin” (another source actually dares to use the word “Muslim”), did have a problem. One of the men walked up to the driver and expressed his strong objection to the presence of the pet; another approached the boy and informed him that if he did not get off the bus with his dog at once, they would beat him up.

What happened next is in dispute. According to the boy, the driver, afraid not to cave in to the men’s demands, pulled the bus over and ordered the boy and his dog off the bus. The driver, for his part, claims that he knew nothing of the tensions between the boy and the Muslims, and insists that the boy left the bus of his own accord. In any event, the undisputed fact is that the boy exited the bus at a spot on the highway that was smack dab in the middle of nowhere. The temperature was below freezing; the time, just before midnight. Fortunately he had a cell phone, and was able to phone a friend to pick him up. When she finally got there, some time later, she said, “he was cold and still and it was plain that the incident had had a powerful impact on him.” The national railway system, which operates the bus, has chosen to accept the driver’s account and will not investigate the boy’s complaint.

Whatever the specific details of the story, the narrative’s main point is clear – as is its larger import. The story of that boy and his dog, simply put, is the story of today’s Europe in miniature – the story of a continent whose natives are increasingly being tormented by Koran-wielding tyrants, and increasingly in flight. 

The Republican Party needs to freshen up.  The re-election of President Obama in November 2012 came as a shock to many, perhaps most, possibly just about all Republicans.

What went wrong is the subject of a column by Scott Johnson at PowerLine:

Looking back at the election, it’s worth asking how we got here – because just about everything we thought we knew about politics and presidential elections proved to be false. Or at least just about everything I thought I knew.

First, that a reelection campaign is a referendum on the incumbent president – that was the fundamental thesis of the Romney campaign. Wrong! I bought it. The Romney campaign staked itself on the proposition that it needed to present Governor Romney as a plausible alternative to a failed incumbent. As a result they shied away from a comprehensive critique of the Obama presidency and from ideas generally. 

Second, that a bad economy dooms an incumbent president. Wrong! The Romney campaign seemed to think that the bad economy and high unemployment by themselves made the case for Romney. …

Third, that Americans reject government dependency and laugh off the promise of government support from cradle to grave. Just look at the Obama campaign’s promise of life everlasting in its famous interactive feature The Life of Julia. They told the American public to “See how President Obama’s policies help one woman over her lifetime” and how Mitt Romney would change her story. It was It’s A Wonderful Life redone for the welfare state. …

So … how can Republicans learn from [the Democrats’] success? I want briefly to mention four factors.

1. Technological expertise:

In the realm of technology, the Obama machine crushed the Romney machine. Following the election, the Obama campaign actually put its playbook online – here it is — detailing the workings of the operation called The Cave. … an efficient and data-driven operation that correctly predicted the behavior of millions of Americans. At the same time, it maintained the flexibility to make real-time adjustment and produced votes. Romney’s Project Orca crashed on Election Day.

Technology also helped the campaign’s record fundraising efforts. … Most of the $690 million Obama raised online came from fundraising e-mails. During the campaign, Obama’s staff wouldn’t answer questions about them or the alchemy that made them so successful. If there is such a thing as political science, I think the Obama campaign discovered it in its email fundraising. By a rigorous process of trial and error, they determined the most effective email subject line with which to raise money and the correct amount to ask for in order to maximize their return. …

2. Blackening the reputation of opponents – what we call “fighting dirty”:

The Democrats … have a genius for being able to blacken the names and reputations of men of the most sterling character — Mitt Romney is just one, and he was a dead man walking before he got the nomination.

Before he had even formally been nominated, the Obama campaign was running a devastating advertising campaign attacking his business record and personal character in key battleground states. I thought the attacks were ludicrous, but they did the trick.

Romney never responded. He never got off the mat. His campaign operated on the thesis that it was too soon to engage, that voters make up their minds at the end of a presidential campaign. Wrong again!

3. Taking notice of how the electorate is changing demographically:

Something’s happening with the issue of demography. The electorate in our presidential elections is shifting in a direction adverse to Republicans. The Republican consultant Jeffrey Bell has noted that, in the six presidential elections between 1992 and 2012, the Democratic Party has regained the solid popular vote majority it enjoyed during the New Deal/Great Society era from 1932 to 1964 — which it lost in the six elections between 1968 and 1988. …

If the country’s demographic composition were the same last year as it was in 2000, Romney would now be president. If it were still the same as it was in 1992, Romney would have won in a rout. If he had merely secured 42 percent of the Hispanic vote — rather than his pathetic 27 percent — Romney would have won the popular vote and carried Florida, Colorado, and New Mexico. They conclude that Republicans have a winning message for an electorate that no longer exists.

4.  The issue of dependency – or the maddening fact that a lot of people want a lot of free stuff:

Something is happening in terms of how Americans view dependence on government, too. Beyond Social Security and Medicare, we have the continued growth of Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security disability, welfare, and, just over the horizon, Obamacare. … The number of Americans seeking entitlement benefits from the government continues to increase.

We appear to be undergoing a “fundamental transformation” that goes deep into our character. As we can see in The Life of Julia, President Obama promotes it as a positive good.

[President] Lincoln … asked rhetorically in one of his 1858 campaign speeches, in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form. What are these arguments? he asked:

“They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument …” 

It’s as true in 2013 as it was in 1858.

In a recently published booklet titled Go for the Heart: How Republicans Can Win –  and also in an article to be found here – David Horowitz writes:

After voters re-elected an administration that added five trillion dollars to the nation’s debt, left 23 million Americans unemployed, surrendered Iraq to America’s enemy Iran, and enabled the Muslim Brotherhood to gain control of the largest country in the Middle East, the one lesson Republicans should agree on is that elections are driven by emotions, not reason. Moreover, when it comes to mobilizing emotions, Democrats beat Republicans hands down. 

Worse, Republicans appear unable to learn from their losses. Year after year, Democrats accuse Republicans of the same imaginary crimes – waging wars on women, not caring about minorities, and inflicting pain on working Americans to benefit the wealthy. And year after year, Republicans have no effective responses to neutralize these attacks. Or to take the battle to the enemy’s camp.

Horowitz believes that the central issue in any election is “caring“.

Before voters cast their ballots for policies or values they want a candidate or party that cares about them.

How crucial is this concern? In the 2012 election, 70% of Asian Americans cast their ballots for Obama …  because they were persuaded that he cared for minorities – for them, and Romney didn’t.

The Republican response to the Democrats’ attack (that’s “class warfare rhetoric”) doesn’t work because it’s an abstraction. … [Whereas] the Democrats’ attack on the rich is an emotional appeal to those who are not rich. It tells them that someone cares about them.

Using the term “class warfare” is a polite way of discussing a problem, a habit Republicans seem unable to break. It avoids finger pointing – naming an adversary and holding him accountable. Elections are adversarial. They are about defeating opponents …  about “us” and “them.” Democrats are as adept at framing “them,” as Republicans are not. Democrats know how to incite envy and resentment, distrust and fear, and to direct these volatile emotions towards their Republican opponents. …

An exit poll conducted by CNN asked, “What is the most important candidate quality to your vote?” Among the four choices were, “Strong Leader,” “Shares Your Values,” “Has A Vision for the Future,” and “Cares about People.” Romney won the first three by more than 54%. But he lost “Cares About People” by 81-18%. That says it all. …

Of course elections are divisive – that is their nature. One side gets to win and the other side loses. … Appeals to reason are buried in the raucous noise that is electoral politics. Sorting out the truth would be a daunting task, even if voters were left alone to make up their minds.

But voters are not left alone. They are barraged by thousands of TV and electronic media messages, which confront them with contradicting data and malicious distortions. These deceptions are not inadvertent. They are the work of the professionals who run political campaigns and who are hired because they are experts in disinformation and misrepresenting the facts. In the world outside politics this is called lying; in politics it’s called spin, and to one extent or another everybody does it. But Democrats do it far better and far more aggressively than their Republican targets. …

The Democratic Party has been moving steadily to the left since the McGovern campaign of 1972. It is now a party led by socialists and progressives who are convinced that their policies are paving the way to a “better world.”

This vision of moral and social progress has profound consequences for the way Democrats conduct their political battles. Unlike Republicans, Democrats are not in politics just to fix government and solve problems. …  Their goal is a new order of society— “social justice.” They think of themselves as social redeemers, people who are going to change the world. It is the belief in a redemptive future that accounts for their passion, and their furious personal assaults on those who stand in their way. …

Republicans see Democrats as mistaken. Democrats see Republicans … as enemies of the just and the good. Republicans have no parallel belief that drives them and their agendas, and no similar cause to despise and hate their opponents. …

If Obama and the Democrats were interested in addressing the immediate economic crisis they would not have used their monopoly of power to pursue a trillion dollar new social program opposed by half the nation and by every Republican in Congress.

The reason the Democrats made Obamacare their priority is because they are social missionaries whose goal is to “fundamentally transform” the United States of America, as Obama warned five days before the 2008 election. Creating a massive new government program that would absorb one-sixth of the economy and make every American dependent on government for his or her health care was the true order of their business. This was a program they saw as a major stepping-stone on the way to the fundamental transformation of American society.

That’s the way progressives think and Republicans had better start understanding just what that means. Progressives are not in politics to tinker with the existing system … They are in politics to achieve “social justice” – to transform the system and the way Americans live.

Horowitz then raises and tries to answer a burning question:

Why do progressives not see that the future they are promoting – with its socialist “solutions” – has already failed elsewhere, and particularly in Europe?

Because in their eyes the future is an idea that hasn’t been tried. If socialism has failed in Europe it’s because they weren’t in charge to implement it and there wasn’t enough money to fund it.

It is the very grandeur of the progressive ambition that makes its believers so zealous in pursuing it. Through government programs they are going to make everyone equal and take care of everyone in need. They are going to establish social equality and create social justice. It is an intoxicating view and it explains why and how they are different from conservatives. It doesn’t matter to them that the massive entitlements they have created — Social Security and Medicare — are already bankrupt. That can be taken care of by making more wealthy people pay more of their fair share. In their hearts, progressives believe that if they can secure enough money and accumulate enough power they can create a future where everyone is taken care of and everyone is equal. Everything Democrats do and every campaign they conduct is about mobilizing their political armies to bring about this glorious future, about advancing its agendas one program and one candidate at a time.

No Republican in his right mind thinks like this. 

Those who vote for Democrats want to be taken care of; want a government that would “care for every man, woman and child from cradle to grave”. And “Republicans are reactionary and hateful because they stand in the way of a society that can and should care for every man, woman and child from cradle to grave.”

Republicans take a view of politics that is fundamentally different. Republicans do not aspire to change the world. They want to repair systems that are broken. They are not missionaries, and they are not selling a land of dreams. …Because Republicans are mindful of the past, they are uncertain about the future, and therefore wary of impossible dreams. They hope for a future better than the present but they are mindful that things could be even worse. Many problems are intractable and will not go away. Because this is their attitude, conservative emotions can never be as inflamed as their progressive opponents’. Their instinct is to come up with practical plans and explain how specific problems might be solved. …

Republicans – or “conservatives” – can “never be as enflamed” as Democrats, and yet Horowitz urges them to behave as if they were, because “you can’t confront an emotionally based moral argument with an intellectual analysis. Yet this is basically and almost exclusively what Republicans do”.

The only way to confront the emotional campaign that Democrats wage in every election is through an equally emotional campaign that puts the aggressors on the defensive; that attacks them in the same moral language, identifying them as the bad guys … that takes away from them the moral high ground which they now occupy.

Start the next electoral campaign now, he advises Republicans, and put the other side on the defensive. Use the emotional weapons of “hope and fear”. Chiefly fear. Republicans must attack the Democrats as job destroyers. They must “frame them as the enemies of working Americans and the middle class”. They must pin the subprime mortgage crisis on them where it rightfully belongs.

The bottom line is this: If Republicans want to persuade minorities they care about them, they have to stand up for them; they have to defend them; and they have to show them that Democrats are playing them for suckers, exploiting them, oppressing them, and profiting from their suffering. 

It’s a case that can be powerfully made:

Large populations of the African American and Hispanic poor are concentrated in America’s inner cities … [where] the unemployment rates are off the charts, the school systems so corrupt and ineffective that half the children drop out before they graduate and half those who do are functionally illiterate. They will never get a decent job or a shot at the American dream.

In these inner cities, every city council and every school board and every school district are 100% controlled by Democrats and have been for more than 70 years. Everything that is wrong with the inner cities and their schools that policy can affect, Democrats are responsible for. Democrats have their boot heels on the necks of millions of poor African American and Hispanic children and are crushing the life out of them every year.

But Republicans are too polite to mention it.

… Democrats will fight to the death to prevent poor parents from getting vouchers to provide their children with the same education that well-heeled Democratic legislators provide for theirs. This is a moral atrocity. This is an issue to get angry about and mobilize constituencies over. This is an issue that could drive a Gibraltar-size wedge through the Democratic base.

But Republicans are too polite to do that. 

This is merely the most obvious atrocity that Democrats are committing against America’s impoverished minorities. Subverting family structures through a misconceived welfare system, encouraging food stamp dependency, providing incentives to bring into this world massive numbers of children who have no prospect of a decent life just to earn a welfare dollar. These are the corrupt fruits of Democratic welfare policies …  Republicans criticize these programs as “wasteful.” They need to start attacking them as destructive, as attacks on the human beings who are ensnared by them.

The way for Republicans to show they care about minorities is to defend them against their oppressors and exploiters, which in every major inner city in America without exception are Democrats. Democrats run the welfare and public education systems; they have created the policies that ruin the lives of the recipients of their handouts. It’s time that Republicans started to hold Democrats to account; to put them on the defensive and take away the moral high ground, which they now occupy illegitimately.

Government welfare is not just wasteful; it is destructive.

The public school system in America’s inner cities is not merely ineffective; it is racist and criminal. …

Because Democrats regard politics as war conducted by other means, they seek to demonize and destroy their opponents as the enemies of progress, of social justice and minority rights. Republicans can only counter these attacks by turning the Democrats’ guns around — by exposing them as the enforcers of injustice, particularly to minorities and the poor, the exploiters of society’s vulnerable and the reactionary proponents of policies that have proven bankrupt and destructive all over the world.

All these ideas of Scott Johnson and David Horowitz – that the Rpublican Party must fight harder, dirtier, much more aggressively, appeal to emotions, learn lessons on how to campaign from the Democratic Party and stop being so stupidly polite (for which they never get any credit anyway) – are all good. But are they enough?

Scott Johnson makes an important point about demographic changes. Perhaps even more important are generational changes.

Our own view – or vision – is that the Republican Party should bend towards libertarianism to appeal to a rising generation of voters who don’t want government to interfere in their private lives. No laws against smoking pot. Stop the wasteful, unwinable and counter-productive war on drugs. Have nothing to do with questions of who may marry whom. Leave the issue of abortion out of the political discourse and out of the party platform.

Also: Learn and use Spanish, even let it be a second official language, why not? – English, the biggest and most used of all languages, will not cease to be the first language of America (and of all nations in their dealings with each other). Lift the regulatory burden on business. Put human activity above the preservation of animal bird and fish species. Go heavily for fossil fuel and nuclear energy. Keep church and state sternly separated, and positively encourage secularism. Add all this to the perennial policies of lower taxes, smaller government, market economics – and strong defense (the issue over which we conservatives part company with pacifist libertarians).

And yes, as the man says, learn to fight dirty. Attack. Be personal and ruthless. Engage with malice and fury every issue the other side raises. Accuse them of everything bad you can think of with passion. It can be done by rational beings when there is reason enough to do it. And there is reason enough. The Democrats must be put out of power.

Let’s listen in on a conversation the socialists are having among themselves. Brace yourselves, fellow individualists!

In the New York Review of Books, Cass Sunstein writes about a book by Sarah Conly titled Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism. It is the book for the Age of Obama.

“Coercive Paternalism” is a flimsy euphemism. The book argues for dictatorship.

Cass Sunstein’s review is titled It’s For Your Own Good!

Conly’s case, as the title signals, is that we ordinary mortals cannot make the “right” decisions for ourselves and so need those who work in government offices, and are by virtue of that fact superior to us in knowledge and judgment, to decide for us how we should live.

Sunstein writes:

In the United States, as in many other countries, obesity is a serious problem.

For whom? If for the obese, the remedy is in their own hands. Only a socialist can think of fat people as a political problem.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to do something about it. … In 2012, he proposed to ban the sale of sweetened drinks in containers larger than sixteen ounces at restaurants, delis, theaters, stadiums, and food courts. The New York City Board of Health approved the ban.

Many people were outraged by what they saw as an egregious illustration of the nanny state in action. Why shouldn’t people be allowed to choose a large bottle of Coca-Cola? The Center for Consumer Freedom responded with a vivid advertisement, depicting Mayor Bloomberg in a (scary) nanny outfit.

Many Americans abhor paternalism. They think that people should be able to go their own way, even if they end up in a ditch. When they run risks, even foolish ones, it isn’t anybody’s business that they do. In this respect, a significant strand in American culture appears to endorse the central argument of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. In his great essay, Mill insisted that as a general rule, government cannot legitimately coerce people if its only goal is to protect people from themselves. Mill contended that

“the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or   mental, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.”

… Mill offered a number of independent justifications for his famous harm principle, but one of his most important claims is that individuals are in the best position to know what is good for them. In Mill’s view, the problem with outsiders, including government officials, is that they lack the necessary information. Mill insists that the individual “is the person most interested in his own well-being,” and the “ordinary man or woman has means of knowledge immeasurably surpassing those that can be possessed by any one else.”

When society seeks to overrule the individual’s judgment, Mill wrote, it does so on the basis of “general presumptions,” and these “may be altogether wrong, and even if right, are as likely as not to be misapplied to individual cases.” If the goal is to ensure that people’s lives go well, Mill contends that the best solution is for public officials to allow people to find their own path. Here, then, is an enduring argument … on behalf of free markets and free choice in countless situations, including those in which human beings choose to run risks that may not turn out so well.

Mill’s claim has a great deal of intuitive appeal. But is it right? That is largely an empirical question, and it cannot be adequately answered by introspection and intuition. In recent decades, some of the most important research in social science, coming from psychologists and behavioral economists … 

Collectivists all  …

…  has been trying to answer it. That research is having a significant influence on public officials throughout the world. Many believe that behavioral findings are cutting away at some of the foundations of Mill’s harm principle, because they show that people make a lot of mistakes, and that those mistakes can prove extremely damaging. …

Or because they, being socialists, have to try and defeat Mill’s argument for individual freedom.

Leaving aside the need to define a mistake, let’s look at what we now know the book is assuming: that there are beings on this earth, outside the category of “people”, who will never make mistakes; who are infallible in their judgment, and as omniscient as “God” is reputed to be. And Conly/Sunstein think  that therefore we should try to summon up enough good judgment to put ourselves in their hands. The hands of those who are angels of selfless kindness, motivated entirely and exclusively by consideration for us.

People may, for example, delay enrolling in a retirement plan, starting to diet or exercise, ceasing to smoke, going to the doctor, or using some valuable, cost-saving technology. Present bias can ensure serious long-term harm, including not merely economic losses but illness and premature death as well. …

So how is it anybody’s business except their own?

To those who have the mind-set of a collectivist, that question will never occur. If it is put to collectivists they will find it meaningless. You may as well be addressing them in a strange language. If they hear you at all they may get the impression that you are reacting with anger, but that will only be proof to them that you are too selfishly wrapped up in your own feelings to pay attention to their wise council.

A great deal of research finds that most people are unrealistically optimistic, in the sense that their own predictions about their behavior and their prospects are skewed in the optimistic direction. In one study, over 80 percent of drivers were found to believe that they were safer and more skillful than the median driver. Many smokers have an accurate sense of the statistical risks, but some smokers have been found to believe that they personally are less likely to face lung cancer and heart disease than the average nonsmoker. Optimism is far from the worst of human characteristics, but if people are unrealistically optimistic, they may decline to take sensible precautions against real risks. …

See in that paragraph how the very idea of the individual as a world in himself is lost to the sociological mind.

Emphasizing these and related behavioral findings, many people have been arguing for a new form of paternalism …

In the United States, behavioral findings have played an unmistakable part in recent regulations involving retirement savings, fuel economy, energy efficiency, environmental protection, health care, and obesity. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister David Cameron …

… who, make no mistake about it, is a man of the Left …

… has created a Behavioural Insights Team, sometimes known as the Nudge Unit, with the specific goal of incorporating an understanding of human behavior into policy initiatives. In short, behavioral economics is having a large impact all over the world, and the emphasis on human error is raising legitimate questions about the uses and limits of paternalism.

Can they not suspect that the Nudgers (and for the invention of  such “nudging” Sunstein takes credit in the review) may be as humanly susceptible to poor judgment as everybody else? Wait –  Sunstein does come to that. But he really, really likes paternalism.

Until now, we have lacked a serious philosophical discussion of whether and how recent behavioral findings undermine Mill’s harm principle and thus open the way toward paternalism.

As if every tyrant in history, every king, every chief, every dictator has not seen himself as the Father of his people!   

Sarah Conly’s illuminating book Against Autonomy provides such a discussion. Her starting point is that in light of the recent findings, we should be able to agree that Mill was quite wrong about the competence of human beings as choosers. “We are too fat, we are too much in debt, and we save too little for the future.”

You (possibly overweight and improvident) persons who pursue your private unexceptional ends invisibly; or who aim high, investigating our universe; inventing new technologies; working in advanced mathematics; exploring new territories of the earth and the imagination, going boldly where no man has gone before; composing, discovering … You for whom one crowded hour of glorious (perhaps gluttonous) life is worth an age without a name … You who wish to die … Take your minds off your vocation, your vision, your inspiration, your personal drama or despair. Concentrate on being one of the herd. Be like the rest. Obey the masters in office. Be thin. Live austerely. Do as you’re told – or “nudged”?

Well, no. Nudging might not be enough.

With that claim in mind, Conly insists that coercion should not be ruled out of bounds. She wants to go far beyond nudges. In her view, the appropriate government response to human errors depends not on high-level abstractions about the value of choice, but on pragmatic judgments about the costs and benefits of paternalistic interventions. Even when there is only harm to self, she thinks that government may and indeed must act paternalistically so long as the benefits justify the costs.

“Benefits” in whose estimation? Costs to whom?

Conly is quite aware that her view runs up against widespread intuitions and commitments.

Not to say against the highest aspirations of mankind and the Constitution of the United States. 

For many people, a benefit may consist precisely in their ability to choose freely even if the outcome is disappointing. She responds that autonomy is “not valuable enough to offset what we lose by leaving people to their own autonomous choices.” Conly is aware that people often prefer to choose freely and may be exceedingly frustrated if government overrides their choices. If a paternalistic intervention would cause frustration, it is imposing a cost, and that cost must count in the overall calculus. But Conly insists that people’s frustration is merely one consideration among many. If a paternalistic intervention can prevent long-term harm — for example, by eliminating risks of premature death — it might well be justified even if people are keenly frustrated by it.

Apparently it has not occurred to those who nudge or coerce us for our own good that some among us may reject life long before old age.

Conly does concede, however, that people should be allowed to do certain things they may in their foolishness want to do. By a wild leap of imagination she arrives at stamp-collecting as an example of what might be permitted – 0r so Sunstein reports or suggests:

If people really love collecting comic books, stamps, or license plates, there is no occasion to intervene.

She describes the adverse reaction people may have to coercion by a dictatorial government as “frustration’. She seems to be unaware of the intense suffering those have endured who have had to live under dictatorships. And she seems to think that persons granted the power to force you to do such nice little things as to eat only what a government allows, put money away in savings accounts, and refrain from smoking will never, never use that power to lock you up or kill you. We itch to send her a long list of books that would inform and enlighten her if we had the least hope she would read them. But we are skeptics, and have no such hope.

We said that this is the theme of a conversation within the Left. The discussion in the review comes down to a small difference of opinon between the advocate of “nudging” (Sunstein), and the advocate of force (Conly). Sunstein does acknowledge differences of taste, and even the possibility of “official errors” – and fears repercussions:

Conly is right to insist that no democratic government can or should live entirely within Mill’s strictures. But in my view, she underestimates the possibility that once all benefits and all costs are considered, we will generally be drawn to approaches that preserve freedom of choice. … Our ends are hardly limited to longevity and health; our short-term goals are a large part of what makes life worth living. …

Freedom of choice is an important safeguard against the potential mistakes of even the most well-motivated officials. … Officials may well be subject to the same kinds of errors that concern Conly in the first place. … We might be inclined to favor freedom of choice as a way of … providing a safety valve in the event of official errors.

But having raised these few points of disagreement with Conly, Sunstein concludes that she –

… convincingly argues that behavioral findings raise significant questions about Mill’s harm principle. When people are imposing serious risks on themselves, it is not enough to celebrate freedom of choice and ignore the consequences.

If Sunstein, Conly, and their fellow socialists are not persuaded by John Stuart Mill, they will almost certainly not take account of what contemporary individualists have to say. But we can remind one another that among the consequences of freedom of choice are all the highest achievements of our history.

An American industrialist argues with a French government minister.

The story comes from the left-biased Washington Post, told by Edward Cody:

It is a battle of archetypes: Morry “the Grizz” Taylor, the millionaire American capitalist who owns the tire manufacturer Titan International, has taken on Arnaud Montebourg, a handsome French Socialist and political comer whose evocative government title is minister of productive recovery.

In an unusual public exchange, the two have been trading insults about the work habits of the French, who, according to folklore [and not the facts? – ed], attach more importance to coffee breaks and long, winy lunches than to efficient production. It is an old and entertaining subject but one that has assumed new urgency in the fifth year of an economic crisis affecting France and its European neighbors.

In a letter to Montebourg, Taylor started the battle by saying bluntly that French workers at a tire plant he had visited are overpaid, lazy and coddled by a Socialist government enforcing such legally mandated rights as a 35-hour workweek, five weeks vacation and early retirement. But the biggest problem, Taylor said, is what the workers do, or not, while on the job.

“The French employees get high salaries but only work three hours,” he wrote in the letter, which was made available to the French media this week. “They have an hour for their breaks and their lunches, chat for three hours and work for three hours. I said this in front of French union representatives. They said that’s the way it is in France.”

To which the “political comer” replied with a load of BS and added an irrelevant historical reference in a childish bid to puff up his national pride:

Montebourg shot back that Taylor’s accusations were “as extremist as they are insulting” and revealed “a perfect ignorance of what our country is.” He added: “Do you at least know what La Fayette did for the United States of America?” …

At this point the author of the report, Edward Cody, sees fit to pour what he thinks is justified derision upon Mr Taylor:

Taylor, a 68-year-old arch conservative, ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996 on a platform summed up in the title of his book “Kill All the Lawyers and Other Ways to Fix the Government.” (Montebourg is a lawyer by profession.) Although he got only about 1 percent of the vote in GOP primaries, Taylor has gone on his merry way buying up dying corporations for profit.

Having got only 1 percent of the vote in the GOP primaries, he should have refrained from carrying on with his business, or refrained from making it profitable? Is Mr Cody unaware that this sentence is a non sequitur as well as a give-away of his absurd leftist mind-set? He seems to believe that you are justified in whatever you do only to the extent that you are voted for. To parody Descartes: “I’m voted for, therefore I can pursue my career.”

Montebourg, 50, who garnered 17 percent of the vote in the Socialist Party’s presidential primaries last year, has positioned himself in President Francois Hollande’s government as an industrial nationalist. … He has advocated protectionist measures to ward off competition from cheap-labor countries such as China and vowed to protect France’s wheezing factories from predatory foreign capitalists by nationalization if necessary.

Good for him. It’s a reliable recipe for making the parlous condition of the French economy even worse.

In any case, the work habits of the French have long been a hot topic here, the subject of jokes but also of such serious discussion that even the Socialist government has tried to reform the labor laws.

So Taylor was not “perfectly ignorant” about them after all.

The conversation has intensified in recent months, as France’s economic growth has flat-lined and factories continue to close, producing a 10 percent unemployment rate. For many economists, a big culprit is the high cost of production — an hour of work is $46 in France, compared with about $30 in the United States.

Despite the discouraging statistics, Taylor’s company tried for several years to buy part of the failing Goodyear tire factory in the northern city of Amiens, intending to abandon general production to specialize in heavy-duty agriculture tires. But the negotiations fizzled because, Taylor charged, French unions made unreasonable demands that were backed by the government.

When Goodyear announced Jan. 31 that it planned to close the plant, putting 1,250 French employees out of work, Montebourg wrote to Taylor suggesting that negotiations might resume on the plan for a partial acquisition. But the American would have none of it.

“Do you think we are that stupid?” he wrote back. “Titan is the one with the money and the know-how to produce tires. What does the crazy union have? It has the French government.”

Bravo, Mr Taylor!

Montebourg retorted that 20,000 foreign companies operate in France, including 4,200 American subsidiaries that employ nearly half a million people and find they can do business just fine. “Far from your statements, which are as ridiculous as they are nasty, all these businesses know and appreciate the quality and the productivity of the French workforce, the commitment, the know-how, the talent and the competence of French workers,” he said.

Unwilling to leave it there, Taylor granted an interview Friday to the French news service Agence France-Presse and fired off another missive to Montebourg by e-mail.

“The extremist,” he told the minister, “is your government and its lack of knowledge on how to build a business.” Relentless, he added: “Since you bring it up, why is unemployment so high in France and especially among young people? It is because of your government’s policies, sir.”

Quite so.

The movie Atlas Shrugged Part II is out now. 

Don’t miss it.

Here’s the trailer

Also good to watch is Ayn Rand being interviewed by Mike Wallace (1959), accessible by clicking on her (black-and-white) head when the trailer ends.

We applaud her answers.

(Here’s the link to the interview – thanks to our commenter Frank.)

On our Facebook page, Leila Howell Cook writes:

I would like to see someone write a good post on the differences between conservation and environmentalism because I think too many people consider them one and the same and they’re not. I don’t think there is anyone that considers taking care of our natural resources a bad idea. If we want it there for use in the future, especially for our children, then we have to preserve it now. That concept goes back as far as human time, I think. It just makes good sense to take care of what is around us and to try and not misuse it. Environmentalism is a politically driven movement that uses as its facade the concept of conservation but only as a smoke screen for a bigger agenda. To me, providing incentives for companies to adopt practices that don’t pollute is much more positive than limiting commerce. You catch more flies with honey. Educating the public on why they need to be mindful of resources and the positive benefits it provides is much nicer than being shamed into it. Education has always proven to offer the most progress in society – not the government acting as the mean nanny.

As we’re in full agreement with her opinion, and as she asks …

I don’t suppose the Atheist Conservative would want to write one, would you?

… we take up her suggestion.

*

Conservation is a conservative cause.

But conservation of what exactly?

We speak of conserving what has been achieved by our civilization: ideas and inventions from classical Greece and Rome, from the Enlightenment, from the Industrial Revolution, from our own Age of Science and the Computer and the Internet; and what we hold to be the greatest product of history, the idea of individual liberty under the rule of law realized in the establishment of the United States of America.

But the subject in hand is conservation of the natural environment.

Russ Harding, director of the Property Rights Network at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and educational institute headquartered in Midland, Michigan, wrote an essay in October, 2008, in which he came to the conclusion that conservationists and environmentalists viewed the relationship of human beings and nature so differently, it’s hard to see how they can come to any agreement or act together to look after the environment.

His essay is titled Conservationist or Environmentalist?  Here’s an extract:

The impetus for the conservation and environmental movements may be similar, but the two movements have developed distinctly different value systems, the result of very different world views.

Conservationism, properly understood, employs traditional values of environmental stewardship. A good steward takes care of what has been entrusted to him or her, thereby leaving an inheritance for the next generation. This worldview allows that it is ethical to employ natural resources for the betterment of humankind, as long as they are properly cared for and managed with a concern for future generations.

It is permissible to cut trees, for example, as long as new ones are planted in their place.

Similarly, wildlife and fish can be harvested as long as they are left in sufficient numbers to ensure future populations.

Humanity is seen as an integral part of the ecosystem rather than an intruder in the natural world. 

By contrast, the worldview of many modern-day environmentalists is much different. The mindset of such adherents is pantheistic – in which nature is deified and worshipped while the welfare of humans is prioritized beneath the animal and plant kingdoms and other aspects of the natural world.

According to this worldview, humans exist separate from nature and act immorally when they disturb or disrupt nature. Even the slightest disturbance – such as cutting and replanting trees – represents a violation of nature by humans.

But –

Everything man does impacts the earth.

So let’s try conservationism. Conservationism recognizes that mankind is on the earth and is part of the system. It asks that we think before we slash and burn a rain forest in the Amazon and seeks to find ways of preserving forests and people.

The differing worldviews between conservationists and environmentalists makes agreement on environmental and natural resource public policy all but impossible. …

When clean air, water and land are not as important as protecting the sanctity of nature from human intrusion, agreement on practical solutions to real environmental threats becomes difficult. …

Let us hope that the traditional worldview of the conservationists prevails. A future based on the environmentalist worldview is too bleak to contemplate”

There are environmentalists who believe that the “health” of the planet requires the total elimination of the human race. (See our post Fresh wild raw uninhabited world, January 2, 2012.)

No ideal could be more radical. It is true nihilism. Those who hold it fail to understand that if there are no human beings, if there is no human consciousness, not only is there is no “health” or “sickness”, there is  no “earth”, no “nature”. These are concepts, and (as far as we know) ours is the only conceiving consciousness in the universe. We are the namers and arrangers of our world, the inventors and granters of meaning and value. As well as using and nursing the physical world and other beings that it contains, we endow it for our kind with ideas and creations: language,  knowledge, explorations, music, mathematics, inventions, artifacts, commerce, laws, institutions, philosophies, history, fantasies (including gods), and jokes.

To extreme environmentalists all that counts for nothing. Pfui! Away with it!

For the milder sort, we may exist as a species but in small numbers, disturbing the wild as little as possible, content to be little more than food for beasts or worms.

Environmentalists with their contempt for humanity are devotees of Leftism. They are not sure whether they want to control us in order to foster wild nature, or use the pretext of caring for wild nature in order to control us.

Conservatives are the real conservationists. A good conservative is a good conserver. He practices good stewardship by looking after, in his time, in his turn, the home he inherited and will hand on to the generations coming after him. The Greek word for a Home is Oikia, from which we get our words economy and ecology. Most of us want the house we live in to be pleasantly clean and in reasonable order. We want the greater Oikia wherein we dwell, the natural world that sustains us, to be pleasant too. We want the air we breathe and the water we drink to be fresh, the soil to be fruitful, the climate benign.

It’s enough. It’s good. And our huge planet, largely unpeopled, is not only oblivious to our doctrines and feelings, but also not much altered or long harmed by what we do.

Day by day, step by step, Islam advances towards dominance in every Western country, including America.

This is from Front Page, by David Solway:

Terrorism is an effective Islamic tactic, but “entryism” — the penetrating of academia, the media, government, labor unions, protest groups and the very social climate — is even more so. What we are observing is the practice of subversion … The neighborhood mosque, as we have seen, is only the beginning of our troubles. If its pacific nature cannot be guaranteed and its respect for local statutes and civic life assured, its effects will spread outward in waves of destabilization, one of the chief aims of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The mosque’s “pacific nature” and “respect for local statutes and civic life” certainly cannot be assured. And while they last, the forms and institutions of Western civic life are all too easily exploited by the quiet invaders.

Here’s an example of how it’s being done in Britain (via Vlad Tepes):

Note how easily the polite, reasonable, unaggressive voices of opposition are overruled by the bad-tempered chairwoman.

And here we quote from an article by Alan Caruba at Family Security Matters:

“The Faith of the Prophet Mohammed will continue to impact and transform all aspects of American life: social, political, and economic. Save for a cataclysmic event that will shatter demographics, Islam by 2050 will emerge as the nation’s dominant religion.”

The author quotes from a book by Paul L. Williams titled Crescent Moon Rising: The Islamic Transformation of America.

Williams offers facts that are nothing less than astounding.

“Muslims continue to pour into the country occupy positions (vacated by aging Americans) as physicians, engineers, and scientists. Others arrived to perform tasks that American workers are unwilling to perform in food-processing plants, agricultural facilities, and telecommunications. In addition to the Muslims who come here with employment visas, thousands more arrive with student visas to enroll in colleges throughout the country. Still others with ‘diversity’ visas to enrich America’s racial composition.”

“In 1992, nearly fifty thousand Muslims arrived in the United States and received permanent residency status. In 2009, that number soared to 115,000. In truth, no one knows for certain how many Muslim immigrants are presently living in the country.”

“In addition to the legal and illegal Muslim immigrants, eighty thousand refugees enter this country under resettlement programs. Nearly seventy-five thousand from Islamic countries.”

“Islam, at present, is the most rapidly growing religion in the country, with outreach programs on college campuses, in prisons, and within the military.”

“Islam provides an antithesis to secular America”, says Williams, offering a version of “traditional values” that would impose restrictions that few Americans anticipate; a ban on liquor, a reduced status of women, dress codes, and much more. “Muslims do not recognize the legitimacy of all faiths,” warns Williams. …

And those few – Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism – that they do recognize as “legitimate”, are suffered to exist, but sharia requires their adherents to be subjugated, and blood money (the “jizya” tax) to be extorted from them.

In an earlier America, there were restrictions on immigrants from various parts of the world deemed antithetical to the nation’s values. The early waves of immigrants came mostly from England and Nordic nations. They were followed by those from Italy, Germany and Eastern Europe as the need for more workers for America’s growing industries required more immigrants. Asians were not particularly welcome and Arabs were even less welcome. This changed with the Hart-Celler Act, signed into law by President Johnson in the wake of the Civil Rights Act. It ended an immigration quota system that had governed America for most of his history. It was, for the record, widely opposed by a two-to-one margin. It is a legacy from Edward Kennedy who shepherded the bill through the Senate.

It wasn’t until the shock of 9/11 that most Americans became aware of the hostility, the malevolence, and the spread of Islam.

Williams notes, “September 11, 2001, was not a day that changed everything. It was rather the day that revealed how much had changed. The real shock came not only from the devastation, but also the demographics. The world for many Americans became a place suddenly unrecognizable.”

This has already become a fact of life for Europeans and is rapidly become one for Americans, particularly in large urban centers where the presence of Muslims is visible for their dress, the many restaurants and outlets that cater to them, and the increasing number of mosques found everywhere. USA Today reported in February 2012 that “The number of Islamic places in the United States soared 74% in the past decade…the overall number of mosques quietly rose from 1,209 in 2000 to 2,106 in 2010.”

Largely unseen and unknown are the many Muslim organizations throughout the U.S., some of which have been found to have terror connections, and all funded not merely to spread the faith, but to ultimately impose it on our present political structure and open culture. …

Even so, Americans elected and reelected Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a Muslim father and adopted son of a Muslim step-father. He is a President who keeps insisting that al Qaeda is receding as a threat when it is, in fact, a growing threat everywhere. And, soon enough, here again.

On the other hand, offering a ray of hope, there is this by David Goldman, aka Spengler:

By 2050, elderly dependents will comprise nearly a third of the population of some Muslim nations, notably Iran — converging on America’s dependency ratio at mid-century. But it is one thing to face such a problem with America’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $40,000, and quite another to face it with Iran’s per capita GDP of $7,000 — especially given that Iran will stop exporting oil before the population crisis hits. The industrial nations face the prospective failure of their pension systems. But what will happen to countries that have no pension system, where traditional society assumes the care of the aged and infirm? In these cases it is traditional society that will break down, horribly and irretrievably so.

My 2011 book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too) assembled evidence that the decline of Islam as a religion explained collapsing fertility, just as the decline of Catholicism explained collapsing fertility in lands once blessed by large families — Spain, Italy, Poland, Ireland, and Quebec. Iran’s total fertility rate plunged to an estimated 1.6% in 2010, barely above Europe’s rate of 1.5 children per female. In 1979, when the Islamists took power in Iran, the average woman bore seven children. Nothing like this sudden snapping shut of the national womb has ever happened before in all of history. And the rest of the Muslim world is headed in the same direction. …

Islamist leaders like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan have been shouting from the rooftops about the trend for the past five years, as my book reports. Excluding the independence-hungry Kurdish minority, Turkey’s fertility rate is probably around 1.5 children per female, about the same as Iran’s, and a guarantee of national decline.

We are cheered by this information. Though we don’t understand why David Goldman writes: “In September 2006 I warned that the Muslim world was heading towards a demographic catastrophe.”

It may be a catastrophe for the Muslim world, but if the Muslim womb really is “snapping shut”, it is surely extremely good news for the rest of us.

At present the Muslims who are colonizing Europe are bearing children at a higher rate than the indigenous populations. Will the European Muslim womb “snap shut” too?  And if so, will the snap come in time to save Europe from falling under the savage totalitarian rule of Islam?