… through the institutions and beyond.

Who was behind the “March For Our Lives”, into which schoolkids were launched by the tens of thousands? And even more women, according to Dana R. Fisher at the Washington Post:

Like other resistance protests, and like previous gun-control marches, the March For Our Lives was mostly women. Whereas the 2017 Women’s March was 85 percent women, the March for Our Lives was 70 percent women. … Contrary to what’s been reported in many media accounts, the D.C. March for Our Lives crowd was not primarily made up of teenagers. Only about 10 percent of the participants were under 18. The average age of the adults in the crowd was just under 49 years old, which is older than participants at the other marches I’ve surveyed but similar to the age of the average participant at the Million Moms March in 2000, which was also about gun control.

The occasion for the march was the shooting on February 14, 2018, of 14 students and three adults at a Florida high school by a 19-year-old mass murderer.

The pretext for it was to protest against the ownership of guns by citizens of the United States on the grounds that if the gun-ownership were to be made illegal such mass murders would not happen.

The real aim of it was to advance the cause of the Left – unarmed populations dependent solely on government for protection.

Who organized the march and who paid for it?

Breitbart reports:

The March for Our Lives Action Fund, for example, was registered with the District of Columbia Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs on Feb. 21, 2018 as a Deleware-based organization with a business address in Encino, California.

The agent for the fund is listed as CT Corporation System, a D.C.-based firm that handles compliance issues. Jeri Rhodes is listed as the executing officer for the filing.

Rhodes is the Associate Executive Secretary for Finance and Administration for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, which is a Quaker lobbying group with the goal to “advance peace and justice.”

The Quakers, famous for being pacifists, have for some time now been aiders and abettors of tyranny and terrorism. For instance, they run collective farms in North Korea, and strongly support the BDS movement and Hamas.  

Rhodes’s LinkedIn profile states that she once worked for Greenpeace.

For the evil Greenpeace does, see our post here.

Major players and organizations — including Everytown, Giffords, Move On, and Women’s March LA — told BuzzFeed News they are helping with logistics, strategy, and planning for next month’s March for Our Lives rally and beyond. Much of the specific resources the groups are providing to the Parkland students remains unclear — as is the full list of supporting organizations — but there are broad outlines.

Giffords,  an organization started by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) that fights gun violence, is working with Everytown and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America to plan the main march on Washington — as well as sister rallies across the country. A spokesperson for Giffords told BuzzFeed News that it is “lending support in any way the students need, especially helping to operationalize these marches from logistics to programming”. …

Planned Parenthood and the George Soros-funded Move On are also in the mix of left-wing groups behind the march.

BuzzFeed News reported, “MoveOn said it will encourage its millions of members to follow and promote the March for Our Lives movement on social media and attend the rally” and would help with security and other logistics.

A spokesperson for Planned Parenthood said it is “teaching and hosting trainings” for teens “to keep momentum going so they don’t get burned out,” BuzzFeed News reported.

The NPS [National Park Service] permit reveals “persons in charge” of the D.C. event, including Deena Katz, the co-executive producer of Dancing with the Stars who helped organized the Los Angeles Women’s March. …

March for Our Lives also started a GoFundMe page that has raised $3.3 million. The text on the page states:

The funds will be spent on the incredibly difficult and expensive process that is organizing a march like this. We have people making more specific plans, but for now, know that this is for the march and everything left over will be going to the victims’ funds.

… The NPS permit reveals more about the event, including the “event overview”, which states:

Approximately (500,000) student participants and adults from across the country, will no longer risk their lives waiting for someone else to take action to stop the epidemic of mass school shootings that has become all too familiar. In the tragic wake of the seventeen lives brutally cut shot in Florida, politicians are telling us that now is not the time to talk about guns. March for Our Lives believes the time is now.

The permit also says that the organizers have to spend millions on insurance for the event.

Procure public and employee liability insurance from responsible companies with a minimum limitation of $2,000,000 per person for any one claim and an aggregate limit of $5,000,000 for any number of claims arising from any one incident. The United States of America shall be named as an additional insured on all such policies. The permit number will be included on said policy. …

Nonetheless, the Florida students who are credited with organizing the march insist it is teens, not adults, who are in charge, while admitting adults are involved.

Cameron Kasky, 17, acknowledged that the anti-Trump group Indivisible is helping and said that their assistance is necessary because of the role race allegedly plays in school shootings.

Kasky said in an interview on Friday with National Public Radio:

You know our story was told because we are an affluent white community and we have to shine the spotlight that was given on us on everybody in the world that has to deal with this on a daily basis. So people like Indivisible, who represent students who are in lower-income communities and don’t get to speak out the way we do because people don’t listen — we have to connect with these students.

The March for Our Lives Twitter account also features a video with students stating the anti-gun talking points used by left-wing groups regularly, including blaming the National Rifle Association [NRA] for school shootings.

The March for Our Lives website states that 840 marches are planned in the U.S. and around the world.

Not planned by schoolkids, we may be sure.

Bruce Thornton writes at Front Page:

Last Saturday hundreds of thousands of high schoolers gathered across the country in a “March for Our Lives” rally. Organized and financed by anti-gun nuts and other left-wing outfits, and ornamented with Hollywood celebrities like George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey, the spectacle was filled with the emotional exhibitionism and juvenile policy recommendations one would expect from the most pampered and worst-educated cohort of young people in American history – the perfect shock troops for progressive propaganda. …

The author carries on a bit about the kids having no “faith”, meaning that he thinks being Christian would keep them from this sort of thing. He might note that the Quakers, who are intensely Christian, supported the march. And as to faith – the organizers and paymasters, and all too many of the indoctrinated students themselves, have faith in “progressivism” (aka communism). We do not agree with him about that, but what we like of what he says, we quote:

We have been witnessing for some time [a] combination of adolescent immaturity and therapeutic leftism in the college “snowflake” and “safe-space” phenomenon, and in the intolerance of dissent and willingness to use tantrums to shut up anybody challenging the self-importance of pampered, privileged college students. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that now high school students are being recruited by the left to “march” against the wicked NRA, which stands in the way of the longtime leftist goal of gutting the Second Amendment.The progressive goal of centralized and concentrated power, and the transfer of all authority and autonomy from the citizens and states to the federal Leviathan, is challenged by the right of citizens to own a means of self-protection that guards against the monopoly of force, historically the foundation of tyrannical power. And what better occasion for chipping away at the citizens’ right to keep and bear arms than the telegenic sentimentalism of a school shooting? And what better cat’s paw for achieving change than innocent high school kids and their trauma – carefully selected, of course, to bring the right message? The drama and pathos of victims, particularly when they’re young, is a great vehicle for peddling incoherent and useless policies – and for camouflaging the truth that those recommendations are basically misdirection from the progressives’ political goals.

Take David Hogg, who was present during the attack last month on the high school in Parkland. The seventeen-year-old appears with four other Stoneman Douglas students on the cover of Time, and has become a darling of the anti-gun crowd for his profanity-laced tantrums that demonstrate perfectly the portrait sketched above: “The pathetic f***ers that want to keep killing our children, they could have blood from children splattered all over their faces and they wouldn’t take action because they all still see those dollar signs,” he said of the NRA and other lawmakers defending the Second Amendment.

Notice how this callow youth simply regurgitates the stale clichés of the gun-control fundamentalists. He obviously has no clue that the NRA has political clout not because of the pittance it gives politicians compared to, say, public-employee unions, but because millions of Americans support its mission to defend a Constitutional right they hold dear. … He has no clue that the demonized, perfectly legal AR-15 was already banned from 1994-2004, without lowering gun-deaths even as the number of guns increased. Like his equally addled elders, he can’t fathom that more regulations of guns do nothing to keep them out of the hands of thugs and psychopaths, but do complicate and limit the rights of law-abiding citizens.

No thought, no empirical evidence, no respect for facts, no reasoned arguments, just the potty-mouth, hysterical emotion, bathetic drama, and attention-getting antics of an immature child who thinks his feelings are the world’s highest priority. …

But we can’t blame the young. The progressive transformation of our culture has been directed at creating just such students, whose natural inclinations to self-drama and emotion rather than thinking make them perfect constituents for an ideology that flourishes among those who obsess over their feelings … 

And whatever is said of the youths applies equally to the women.

But there are youths of another sort.

Of course, there are millions of young people who somehow have managed to avoid this progressive siren song. … But they are demonized and scorned by the progressive pundits and politicians who distrust anyone who challenges their narrative. This silent cohort of the young is the true resistance against an ideology that prefers them to be robotic shock troops.

Here is a student, Kyle Kashuv, from the  school that was attacked, who feels the horror of the mass shooting and the sadness of the loss of lives as much as any other, but has thought about the event intelligently, and puts forward common-sense and practical ideas that could really work to  keep schools safe from such an attack. He points out that government – in particular the “cowards of Broward” meaning the progressive Sheriff and his cowardly underlings – failed in its duty, yet the protesters want to put more power in government hands. Because his ideas, including a refusal to blame gun-ownership, do not fit with the ideological aims of the organizers, they would not allow him to speak to the marchers from the platform.

He speaks here:

If you vote Republican now, you are voting for the USA to continue as the sort of state it was founded to be: a constitutional republic.

If you vote Democratic, you are voting for the USA to become a dictatorship.

There is a cold civil war being waged over whether the USA is to be a free country or a tyranny.

The following article was sent to us by Don L. With the help of our commenter bobbyvon, we have learnt that it is an abridged version of a speech by Daniel Greenfield (aka Sultan Knish).

How do civil wars happen?

Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that elections are how you decide who’s in charge. That’s the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.

The Mueller investigation is about removing President Trump from office and overturning the results of an election. We all know that. But it’s not the first time they’ve done this. The first time a Republican president was elected this century, they said he didn’t really win. The Supreme Court gave him the election. There’s a pattern here.

What do sure odds of the Democrats rejecting the next Republican president really mean? It means they don’t accept the results of any election that they don’t win. It means they don’t believe that transfers of power in this country are determined by elections.

That’s a civil war.

There’s no shooting. At least not unless you count the attempt to kill a bunch of Republicans at a charity baseball game practice. But the Democrats have rejected our system of government.

This isn’t dissent. It’s not disagreement. You can hate the other party. You can think they’re the worst thing that ever happened to the country. But then you work harder to win the next election. When you consistently reject the results of elections that you don’t win, what you want is a dictatorship. Your very own dictatorship.

The only legitimate exercise of power in this country, according to Democrats, is its own. Whenever Republicans exercise power, it’s inherently illegitimate. The Democrats lost Congress. They lost the White House. So what did they do? They began trying to run the country through Federal judges and bureaucrats. Every time that a Federal judge issues an order saying that the President of the United States can’t scratch his own back without the judge’s say so, that’s the civil war.

Our system of government is based on the constitution, but that’s not the system that runs this country. The Democrats’ system is that any part of government that it runs gets total and unlimited power over the country.

If the Democrats are in the White House, then the president can do anything. And I mean anything. He can have his own amnesty for illegal aliens. He can fine you for not having health insurance. His power is unlimited. He’s a dictator.

But when Republicans get into the White House, suddenly the President can’t do anything. He isn’t even allowed to undo the illegal alien amnesty that his predecessor illegally invented. A Democrat in the White House has ‘discretion’ to completely decide every aspect of immigration policy. A Republican doesn’t even have the ‘discretion’ to reverse him. That’s how the game is played.  That’s how our country is run. Sad but true, although the left hasn’t yet won that particular fight.

When a Democrat is in the White House, states aren’t even allowed to enforce immigration law. But when a Republican is in the White House, states can create their own immigration laws. Under Obama, a state wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom without asking permission. But under Trump, Jerry Brown can go around saying that California is an independent republic and sign treaties with other countries.

The Constitution has something to say about that.

Whether it’s Federal or State, Executive, Legislative or Judiciary, the left moves power around to run the country. If it controls an institution, then that institution is suddenly the supreme power in the land. This is what I call a moving dictatorship.

Donald Trump has caused the Shadow Government to come out of hiding: Professional government is a guild. Like medieval guilds. You can’t serve in it if you’re not a member. If you haven’t been indoctrinated into its arcane rituals. If you aren’t in the club. And Trump isn’t in the club. He brought in a bunch of people who aren’t in the club with him.

Now we’re seeing what the pros do when amateurs try to walk in on them. They spy on them, they investigate them and they send them to jail. They use the tools of power to bring them down.

That’s not a free country.

It’s not a free country when FBI agents who support Hillary take out an “insurance policy” against Trump winning the election. It’s not a free country when Obama officials engage in massive unmasking of the opposition. It’s not a free country when the media responds to the other guy winning by trying to ban the conservative media that supported him from social media. It’s not a free country when all of the above collude together to overturn an election because the guy who wasn’t supposed to win did.

Have no doubt, we’re in a civil war between conservative volunteer government and a leftist Democrat professional government.

Which is another way of saying it is a war for and against individual freedom.

The government of Sweden has a solution to the horror and disgust some dare to express about what it – the self-named feminist government – is doing to the country, which is: killing it with the parasitical sickness of Islamization.

The solution? Stop the adverse news being spread. Make criticism illegal. Punish those who tell the truth about what is happening.

From the Gates of Vienna, by Svenne Tvaerskaegg:

Sweden, once a model society of hard-working and peaceable Scandinavians with one of the highest standards of living in the world, is entering into a state of dissolution.

Decades of mass immigration from some of the most backward and violent countries in the world are slowly and irrevocably transforming the model society into its opposite. At first the problems were relatively small, and although they inexorably grew over the years, they tended to be concentrated in the ever-growing immigrant ghettos that sprang up around Sweden’s towns and cities. Most Swedes could continue to live their lives as before, largely unaffected by the increasing crime and chaos festering in the isolated suburbs of their clean and peaceful cities.

Swedish media helped to keep the population in their dreamlike state of peace, prosperity and security, while in the background a destructive policy was wreaking ever-increasing damage to the fabric of their society. With an almost religious fervor the media promoted the official government ideology of multiculturalism and its manifold benefits. Mass immigration was good for Sweden; it was culturally enriching; it vitalized the economy; it made life more worth living.

For a long time the propaganda barrage worked, but this is rapidly changing. The sheer scale of what has happened is becoming impossible to ignore, as the ghettos become more unmanageable and crime spills out into the rest of the country. Gang rapes, gang warfare, hand grenade explosions, shootings, riots and attacks against police stations, things just about unknown once are now becoming daily occurrences.

This year is an election year in Sweden, and the September election is going to be the most important election in Sweden’s history. Concern about immigration, multiculturalism, social disintegration and rapidly escalating crime will play a central role.

As the country gears up for the election campaign, Swedish media are in crisis. Confidence in mainstream media has been plummeting for years as the gap between what people see and what the media say increases, and public trust in state-run radio and television as well as the daily press is now at an all time low.^[1] Their failure to accurately report what is happening in their country has lead to the rise of a strong and increasingly influential alternative media as more and more Swedes turn to online publications such as Samhällsnytt, Fria Tider, Nyheteridag and other dissident news sources for their information.

Much the same is happening in all the countries of the West. Everywhere the mainstream media, even those that call themselves conservative, support the iniquitous “multicultural” policy of the rulers – in concrete terms, the importation of uncivilized masses from the Third World, mainly Muslims. To do this, they  suppress the truth and shamelessly publish outright lies. But the truth spreads through the “social media”.

Mainstream media are now in a very difficult situation. They are rapidly losing their credibility as well as their monopoly on information, and need to find a way to manage the unwelcome intrusion of reality into their propaganda bubble while neutralizing those who accurately report it. They seem to have found a way by reading the works of George Orwell: if propaganda no longer matches reality, then reality and those who report it must be suppressed by force. …

Sweden has invested a great amount of money and effort in promoting an international image of Sweden as a “humanitarian superpower”, an image that is now in tatters as the world watches in amazement at what is happening inside the country.

In an effort to stop the flow of unfavorable information from leaking out of Sweden and further damaging their image, the government has proposed a change in the law which would make spreading negative information about Sweden a crime of treason.

So if a citizen objects to the destruction of his country by a traitorous government, he – not the government – is guilty of the extreme crime of treason!

The main opposition party, the Moderates, announced over the weekend that they will support the proposal, which makes it just about certain it will become law. The dissident [online] media are understandably worried about the chilling effect this law will have on critics of government policy and how it may well result in alternative media journalists’ being jailed. The proposed law is considered to be going too far, even by some mainstream journalists, and an online petition against it has been started, but with such powerful political support it is hard to see how it can be stopped.

The new treason law is not likely to come into force before September, but the government is deploying other weapons to silence critics in time for the coming election campaigns. A state-funded authority is being set up to counter what it calls “fake news”. This authority will consist of the public broadcasting company SVT and Sweden’s major mainstream newspapers.The object of their anti-“fake news” campaign will not of course be themselves, who are the largest manufacturers of fake news in Sweden; it will be their competitors in the alternative media whom they are desperate to neutralize.

The government has also financed a group of online investigators whose job is to monitor social media and discussion groups and hunt down posters of what they call “hate speech” then report them to the police. Examination of the groups’ activities indicate that stopping “hate speech” may not be their main purpose, since they find so little of it, despite the resources they deploy. It seems their real purpose is intimidation.

They have already reported many hundreds of people, but after police investigation this has resulted in fewer than ten prosecutions. People will know they are being watched, and become wary of posting immigration- and multiculture-critical comments on social media, however innocuous, since the threshold for being reported to and investigated by the police is very low. Even YouTube is eagerly helping the authorities crack down on critical opposition. Dissident YouTube accounts have been demonetized and have even been completely deleted, thereby marginalizing and eliminating important opposition voices.

Unless there is a radical change very soon in the direction the country is taking, Sweden may cease to exist as a coherent cultural and political entity. The changes which have occurred in Sweden since the decision to become multicultural in 1975 have been so radical that a continuation of them after the September election means turning back will no longer be possible.

Advocates of the current post-modernist agenda and social conservatives both know this, and that the future of the country is at stake. The Swedish Security Police, Säpo, have warned about the polarization of Swedish society and how public discourse is becoming more bitter and hate-filled. They expect and have prepared for unprecedented levels of violence during the election campaign.

Isn’t it already too late for Sweden to save itself? It has become an authoritarian state; Swedish women, under feminist rule, live in constant fear of rape by the invaders; the police have declared themselves helpless to deal with Muslim crime (never using the word “Muslim”); Swedes have few children, the Muslim hordes have many; and worst of all, and despite all this, it seems that a majority of Swedes want their country to become an Islamic republic. The September election is likely to prove that lamentable probability to be a disastrous fact. 

A possible and excellent solution to the Islamization of the West presents itself: Muslims leaving Islam.

Having encountered the far better life, the far richer culture of the West; having felt the freedom; having seen the opportunities –  especially for women – many Muslims are daring to become apostates.

At least in America it is happening to a significant extent.

The Economist reports:

As the number of American Muslims has increased by almost 50% in the past decade, so too has the number of ex-Muslims. According to the Pew Research Centre, 23% of Americans raised as Muslims no longer identify with the faith. Most of them are young second-generation immigrants who have come to reject the religion of their parents. Some, however, are older when their crisis of faith arrives, already married to devout Muslim spouses and driving children to the mosque to study the Koran at weekends.

The vast majority, whether young or old, are silent about their faithlessness. One Muslim college student, who came home drunk one evening, was confronted by his father. Not thinking clearly, the son confessed to his father that he was an atheist, whereupon the father revealed that he too had lost his faith many years ago. Yet he still admonished his son for not hiding his secret well enough.

Publicly leaving Islam is difficult because many Muslims live in tight-knit communities. Many apostates are left closeted, afraid to put at risk their relationships with their parents, on whom they may still depend, or with their siblings and their friends. Non-believing Mormons, Hasidic Jews and evangelical Christians find themselves in a similar predicament. Within Somali enclaves in Minneapolis and Pakistani ones in Dallas, renunciation of Islam is tantamount to renunciation of an entire social circle. “The most frustrating part is living knowing that my life has to be guided by the rules I don’t agree with,” says one still deep in the closet.

Apostasy is different from apathy, but that is also growing among Muslims. Among believers aged 55 or older, 53% say they perform all five of the mandatory daily prayers — no easy feat, considering that the first must be done before dawn. Among Muslim millennials, that proportion falls to 33%. Few would be ostracised for missing a prayer, or not fasting during the month of Ramadan — so long as those misdeeds were not made public.

In broad terms, there are two types of ex-Muslims. Those who are from less religious families simply drift away and face fewer repercussions. “It was a progression,” says one such ex-Muslim, who stopped praying at the age of eight after noticing that nothing cataclysmic happened when she missed a prayer one day. Then she starting sneaking meals during Ramadan, before moving on to alcohol and premarital sex. At 18, she was an atheist.

Then there are those in more religious households. They tend to have cleaner breaks, sudden realisations while studying the Koran or the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. Often the verses that trigger this are controversial ones about slavery or gender that family members and imams cannot explain satisfactorily. Coming across the writings of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Richard Dawkins, or Christopher Hitchens sometimes has the same effect. Some chafe at sexism or homophobia. “I remember one Halloween, I wasn’t allowed to go trick-or-treating because I had to clean up after dinner, but all my male cousins and brothers got to go,” says one female ex-Muslim who is not out to her family (nor will ever be, she fears).

To cope, some look online, seeking solace in anonymous forums. One, hosted on Reddit, has nearly 30,000 followers. Here ex-Muslims trade stories of families kicking their children out after they confess their disbelief. But they also traffic in lighter-hearted fare, like taking pictures of booze-and-pork meals during Ramadan — enjoyed in the daylight, of course

Despite all the pressure of family and community, more ex-Muslims seem to be going public. Ex-Muslims of North America (EXMNA), an advocacy organisation, has pushed for those who safely can to publicly declare their renunciations. “The goal is to change things enough so that we no longer need to exist,” says Sarah Haider, EXMNA’s director. The group launched a university tour, entitled “Normalising Dissent”, which has attracted angry critics and required extensive security preparations. Though she must contend with death threats, and has to be quite vigilant about infiltrators to her organization, Ms Haider persists. “Condemnation is still acknowledgment,” she notes.

While the penalties for apostasy can be high in the West, they are much more severe in the Muslim world. In Pakistan, blasphemy carries a death sentence. In Bangladesh, atheist writers have been hacked to death by machete-wielding vigilantes. An atheist who recently appeared on Egyptian television to debate a former deputy sheikh from Al-Azhar University was dismissed by the host and told that he needed to see a psychiatrist.

Millions who were so fortunate as to have been born into freedom in the countries of the West, now despise and even hate their country and their culture. The Left’s grip on education has meant that they have been indoctrinated to feel guilty over their own history and heritage. But the truth is, thanks to the Enlightenment the West is the superior civilization. The West is civilization itself – fighting an intense political battle for its survival against the destructive ideologies of the Left and encroaching Islam.

The more Muslims who come to appreciate our civilization, the more who abandon their religion and adopt our ways, the better for us, for them, for all humankind.

President Trump has explained that he had to sign the outrageous “omnibus” bill because he urgently needs the funds for rebuilding the US military.

Matthew Vadum writes at Front Page:

After eight long years of Barack Obama decimating the military, President Trump is proudly beginning the process of rebuilding the nation’s armed forces and defense  capabilities.

Decimating? Destroying one in ten of whatever? Much as we appreciate the article we are quoting, it was not a “decimation” of the military; it was letting the equipment of national defense, the weapons of war, decay. The very fabric of America’s ships and planes was allowed to rot.

Obama manifestly hated the US military. (Not “the military” in general – he had a soft spot for Iranian missiles and potential nuclear bombs.)

As the president signed the omnibus spending bill Friday that avoided another partial government shutdown and funded the government through the end of the fiscal year Sept. 30, Defense Secretary James Mattis, hailed the measure as “the largest military budget in history, reversing many years of decline and unpredictable funding.”

At the White House Trump explained why such a spending boost was necessary as he reflected on the serious damage that the previous president did to national security and military preparedness.

For the last eight years, deep defense cuts have undermined our national security, hollowed out  — if you look at what’s taken out, they’ve hollowed our readiness as a military unit, and put America at really grave risk. My highest duty is to keep America safe. Nothing more important. The omnibus bill reverses this dangerous defense trend. As crazy as it’s been, as difficult as it’s been, as much opposition to the military as we’ve had from the Democrats –  and it has been tremendous –  I try to explain to them, you know, the military is for Republicans and Democrats and everybody else. It’s for everybody. But we have tremendous opposition to creating, really, what will be by far the strongest military that we’ve ever had.

Trump said at the press conference that he was signing the massive pork-laden spending bill that contains “a lot of things that I’m unhappy about” because of “national security.”

But I say to Congress: I will never sign another bill like this again. I’m not going to do it again. Nobody read it. It’s only hours old. Some people don’t even know what is in it. $1.3 trillion — it’s the second largest ever.

The bill contains an impressive $700 billion in military expenditures, about $3 billion of which will go to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. Trump rattled off a list of other line items, $1.8 billion for 24 FA-18E/F Super Hornet aircraft fighter jets, $1.7 billion for 10 P-8, $1.1 billion for 56 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, $1.1 billion to upgrade 85 Abrams tanks, and $705 million “for the cooperative programs that we’re working with Israel and others on various missile defense systems.”

“We’re spending a lot of money on missile defense,” Trump added. “We have a lot of offense that’s been recently installed. We’re spending tremendous money on missile defense.”

Ramping up spending after Obama’s assaults on the military is critical, defense analysts say.

Obama did lasting damage to the military, according to Thomas C. Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute who after Obama left office inventoried the damage the 44th president did.

Obama attempted to end U.S. involvement in the Middle East by unilaterally pulling out of Iraq, carrying out a fake surge in Afghanistan, and ignoring the Syrian civil war, Donnelly writes. Obama let Russia annex Crimea, and China artificially create islands in the South China Sea.

Obama told outgoing then-Russian president Dmitry Medvedev in 2012 to pass the message on to Vladimir Putin to ease up on the missile defense issue until after that year’s approaching election when Obama would “have more flexibility”. 

There’s collusion for anyone who is really looking for it and not just inventing it in order to depose the president.

Obama also limited any future president’s ability to use the military overseas by curtailing its resources.

Comparing the five-year defense plan Obama left Trump with, with the plan Obama was left with at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, the Department of Defense “has lost more than $250 billion in purchasing power”.

In his first year in office, Obama ordered then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates to slice off $300 billion from Pentagon programs, “which had the effect of eliminating several of the major weapons-acquisitions projects that had survived Donald Rumsfeld’s attempt to ‘transform’ the force by ‘skipping a generation of weapons systems’.”

Gates halted the production of the F-22, limiting it to 187 planes instead of the 750 the Air Force originally wanted and scuttled another $80 billion in spending, which Obama transferred to non-defense programs, Donnelly writes.

“Non-defense programs” such as “outreach to Muslims”, wasn’t it?

In 2011 Obama chopped another $400 billion from the DoD budget without even telling Gates in advance, which led to the so-called sequestration or Budget Control Act (BCA) that capped defense spending for years but left entitlement spending intact. The move led to long-term spending on Pentagon programs by almost $1 trillion from fiscal 2009 to 2023, he writes.

President Obama slashed Army and Marines personnel and gutted the ships and airplanes of the Navy and Air Force. The reduced force is not as well prepared as its predecessors.

“During the Cold War, the units of the Army and Air Force were always about 90 percent ready in terms of personnel, equipment, and training,” but nowadays readiness is down to about 60 percent or less, [Donnelly] writes.

This also means that the military’s ability to do anything more challenging than routine operations, such as keeping sea lanes open, is severely limited. It is no coincidence that in his 2012 “defense guidance,” Obama lowered the standard by which we determine the optimal size of our forces. Since the years prior to World War II, and as befits a global power, we have maintained the capacity to conduct two large-scale campaigns at once. Obama lowered the bar to just one war at a time.

Obama’s cockamamie social engineering schemes devastated the military’s morale, something his successor aims to turn around.

Trump’s presser came after his announcement Thursday that U.S. Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster (active) would soon be replaced by former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton as national security advisor. Bolton’s appointment is an unalloyed good that will benefit U.S. national security.

McMaster replaced Mike Flynn, also a lieutenant general in the Army (retired) in February 2017 after just 24 days in the post, the briefest such tenure on record. McMaster was a disaster at the National Security Council where he spent his time protecting Obama holdovers and purging competent professionals attuned to the threat that Islamofascism, including the brutal totalitarian theocracy in Iran, poses to the United States.

With Bolton at Trump’s side and ramped up defense spending, America may well be on its way to having its greatness restored.

Yes, and may it be so.

The UK is accelerating its Islamization at an ever-increasing speed. The desire of the British establishment to submit to Islam appears to be overwhelming.

So Judith Bergman writes at Gatestone.

She first demonstrates how the state schools are becoming Islamized, then she continues (in part):

The [Christian] clerical establishment is … pressing Britons to accept and accommodate the ongoing Islamization more readily. …

Britain’s security establishment also seems longing to submit to Islam. Scotland Yard recently warned that hate crimes (“Islamophobia”, in other words, as no other hate crime is taken as seriously) are “hugely underreported”. Chief Superintendent Dave Stringer, Scotland Yard’s head of community engagement said: “The Met [the Metropolitan Police force] has seen a steady increase in the reporting of all hate crime, particularly racist and religious hate crime. Despite this rise, hate crime is hugely underreported and no one should suffer in silence.”

[But] it is virtually impossible for “Islamophobia” to be “underreported” in London. The UK is nothing if not clinically obsessed with “Islamophobia”. In 2016, London mayor Sadiq Khan’s Office for Policing and Crime announced it was spending £1.7 million of taxpayer money policing speech online. Less than six months ago, London police teamed up with Transport for London authorities to encourage people to report hate crimes during “National Hate Crime Awareness Week”, which ran from October 14-21. The events were mainly targeted at Muslims, with officers visiting the East London Mosque to encourage reporting hate crimes. British police have even been taking lessons about Islam and “Islamophobia” from radical Islamist groups such as Mend. One of the most active Mend figures, Azad Ali, has said that he has “love” for Anwar Al-Awlaki, an influential US-born Islamic terrorist, who was killed by a US drone strike in Yemen in 2011.

Meantime, while the police obsess over “Islamophobia”, regular crime in London is exploding. The latest statistics from the London Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime show that in the past year, homicides have increased 27.1%, knife crimes have increased 31.3%, and there were 2,551 incidents of gun crime, representing a rise of 16.3%. Police recorded 7,613 rapes in the 12 months through January 2018 compared with 6,392 for the previous year, a rise of almost 20%. … The figures also show an 8% increase in other sexual offenses in the past year, bringing the total number of reported rapes and sexual assaults in London to almost 20,000. Campaigners have suggested the real figure could be “significantly higher” once unreported attacks are taken into account. British police, meanwhile, say they are at a loss to explain what is causing the rise in rapes.

Because so many of the rapists are Muslims, and no one is allowed to say so. Those who do say so are hunted down by the police, who spend their resources on that absurd mission rather than on fighting real crime.

The Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner Sir Craig Mackey was recently asked if he had any idea what was behind the surge. His answer: “No, is the honest answer… there is something going on with sexual offending in London that we don’t fully understand, the causes of it. We see the end of it, [but] we don’t understand the causes.”

Meanwhile, 65,000 cases of child sex abuse reached a record high in 2017, or 177 every day: up 15% from 2016.

In Rotherham alone, after 16 years of dismissing the problem, the number of child abuse cases [Muslims “grooming” underage girls as prostitutes] rose to 1,510. The National Crime Agency (NCA) inquiry, “the biggest of its kind in the UK, has identified 110 suspects, of whom 80% are of Pakistani heritage”, officers said.

In its seeming eagerness to submit to Islam, the security establishment even appears to be willing to compare people responding to Islamization and Islamic terrorism with the Islamic terrorists themselves. In a recent lecture, one of the UK’s top counterterrorism officials, Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, outgoing head of counter-terrorism policing, compared Tommy Robinson, an anti-Islamist activist, often described as “far-right,” to Anjem Choudary, a radical terrorist-linked Islamist cleric who has advocated sharia in the UK and is now serving a prison sentence for urging support for ISIS.

“Robinson also became a regular fixture in our media, giving him the platform to attack the whole religion of Islam by conflating acts of terrorism with the faith, often citing spurious claims, which inevitably stirred up tensions” Rowley said, “Each side feeds into each other’s extremist rhetoric with the common goal of increasing tensions and divisions in communities”.

Tommy Robinson’s “claims” about Islam were not spurious. He is a brave teller of the truth about that barbaric ideology.

Islam is supremacist, totalitarian, homophobic, misogynist, deeply intolerant, obdurately dogmatic, murderous and savagely cruel. And that needs to be said publicly, loudly, and often. 

Rowley also said, “The right-wing threat was not previously organized. Every now and then there’s been an individual motivated by that rhetoric who has committed a terrorist act, but we’ve not had an organized right-wing threat like we do now”.

Perhaps Rowley might stop to consider why there is now an organized right-wing threat. The British establishment – people such as Rowley – have categorically embraced the “Islam is peace” narrative. The establishment has even let itself and its police be lectured by radical Islamist organizations such as Mend on what Islam is – and has doggedly refused to listen to any dissident voices.

Here is a video in which a dissident voice makes itself heard. Anne Marie Waters, leader of the new political party For Britain, gives a rousing speech to inspire popular resistance against the Islamization of her country. She rightly rages against the “fascist” EU, then – starting at about the 5.50 minutes mark – daringly condemns Islam. “Millions of us are offended by this religion,” she declares.

(Hat-tip for the video to our British associate, Chauncey Tinker)

Another gift of a video from the great Pat Condell:

Louis Sarkozy, the atheist son of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, writes at the Washington Examiner:

On Feb. 23, 2017, national security adviser H.R. McMaster reiterated his stance that Islamic ideology is essentially irreligious, and that Jihadi terrorists are not true to the religion they claim to be part of.

Well, he’s going now. Out of the White House where he should never have been. Because – or partly because –

He discouraged the use of the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” because “terrorist organizations like ISIS represent a perversion of Islam, and are thus un-Islamic”.  In December, McMaster warned us to “never buy in or reinforce the terrorist narrative that this is a war of religion”.

Although commonplace, this argument is simply wrong. While I rightly acknowledge it’s perfectly possible to follow Islam without committing or encouraging terrorism, we cannot ignore the link between doctrine and behavior. It is impossible to deny the role that Islam, as a set of ideals, plays in international terrorism and gross abuse of human rights in the countries where it is enacted by law.

When it comes to religion, doctrine matters. And how can anyone hope to have a productive discussion about the tenets that make up Islam when even the mildest criticism of the doctrine labels you bigoted, racist, or (gasp), Islamophobic?

As an atheist, I stand outside the reach of all religions equally, and recognize that religious history and doctrinal differences matter.

Generally, public criticism of any religion, ancient or contemporary, is completely acceptable, and should be encouraged. It is noteworthy, then, that criticism of any other religion nowadays will earn you at worst a dose of invective, whereas saying the wrong words or drawing the wrong cartoons about Islam will get you killed in any country where Islam is the official religion, and liable to earn you physical repercussions in countries where it is not.

Why is that it in Western countries, merely pointing out the similarities between the writings of the Quran and the Hadiths and the violent and intolerant preachings of groups such as the Islamic State is cause for censure?

We certainly have no problem holding Christianity responsible for its part in the horrific Spanish Inquisition, nor do we stutter at recognizing Christian scripture as having encouraged anti-Semitic attitudes along European history.

Ah, I can hear the rebuttal already: “Of course there are horrible passages in the Quran. It was written at a different time, and there are similarly horrible ones in the Bible!”

Without a doubt, the Bible is a bloody, violent book filled with unspeakable atrocities. But then, why is it that no Christian feels personally targeted when Deuteronomy 21:18-21, which encourages the public stoning of disobedient children, is criticized?

It is because Christianity has gone through, over the past few hundred years, a modernization process where it has been ejected out of civil law, and where its most vile and intolerant preachings are no longer ordained as official doctrine by the church’s institutions.

With some exceptions (such as enduring Medieval attitudes toward homosexuality and fundamentalists’ rejection of science in favor of creationism) the most vile, intolerant, and backward parts of Christian practice have been abandoned.

Islam, on the other hand, has become more intolerant than it was a millennium ago, when Muslims were creating algebra and algorithms and naming the celestial bodies. The result is that Christians can shake off most criticisms of their own scripture and their beliefs, but the Islamic world seems a lot more thin-skinned.

Affable but important  disagreement here. Actually, Islam was never  tolerant. (See our post, The Myth of Islamic Enlightenment, March 10, 2010 here.) The creation of algorithms has nothing to do with tolerance. And algebra is much older than Islam. 

One of the great algebraists in the Islamic world was the Persian mathematician, scientist, poet, Omar Kayyam. ( Yes, he of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, translated into English by Edward FitzGerald.) Omar Kayyam was an atheist.

I, however, reject the often-brought-up and dangerous notion of this conflict being a “war of civilization”, pitching the united secular West against the similarly united dogmatic Islamic world.

Right. (We call it a clash of civilization with barbarism.)

This is wrong simply because it is an inaccurate depiction of both sides. This particular struggle is far more complicated and it is certainly not contained by international borders or racial origin. This is a war of ideas, not of skin color.

Which is why the first victims of Islamic extremism are almost always Muslims: women, apostates, homosexuals, modern Muslims seeking the evolution of their faith, and yes, even just Muslims who belong to the wrong traditional Islamic sect.

Similarly, the people often most opposed to helping the victims of Islamo-fascism, those who refuse to hold Islamic ideas accountable for their role in these crimes, are not Muslims at all, but westerners brandishing multiculturalist arguments.

Meaningful change can only come from within the Islamic world, from the reformist voices that want to modernize Islam to fit today’s standards of human decency and compassion. These are the people whom we must try to empower today by giving them coverage, a platform to speak out of, and most importantly, by acknowledging their suffering and struggle.

It is for this reason that we must not delude ourselves with the idea that all cultures are equally good in every way. We should not shy away from sensitive conversations about the role of religious dogma, even at the risk of being called racist or Islamophobic. Such insults are minor and insignificant compared to the atrocities that the victims of this violent and intolerant doctrine suffer every day.

Good stuff for the most part. If only Nicolas Sarkozy had understood what his son does, and had kept the Muslim masses out of France when he could have done so!

It’s now too late to remedy the harm done or prevent the developing disaster, even if there were a French leader who wanted to do it. All Western Europe will fall under Islamic rule, including Britain.

Those glorious Greeks of old conceived and implemented an Idea that took civilization thousands of thought-miles forward: individuals from any country, any nation, any tribe, could live together under the same rule of law.

What bound them, what commanded their loyalty, would be the Law rather than the Land: the Ius not the Rus – in the language of the grand old Romans who adopted the same idea. 

In the Roman Empire, at first, all the religions of all nations and tribes were tolerated, though tolerance and respect were demanded also for the gods of Rome.

It was a demand that the Judeans, who worshiped one god only, objected to. Their obstinacy on that score did not serve them well.

The Judeans became actively rebellious against Rome, whose protection they had originally invited. The Romans put down the rebellions, finally abolishing the province of Judea entirely. The Judeans turned into the wandering tribe of the Jews.

Before the first of the two great insurrections that ended in the dispersion of the Jews, an energetic Roman citizen of vast ambition came to the Judean capital, Jerusalem, from Tarsus in the Roman province of Cilicia in Asia Minor, and started a movement that was ultimately to destroy and replace the Roman Empire.

He called himself by the Hebrew name Saul (later changing it to Paul). He took the idea of the One  God and mixed it up with mythologies of Roman gods, claiming that the One God had a Son who was killed and rose again from the dead. He named the Son by the Greek name Jesus. His Jesus had been a living person, a Judean who had led a small weak rebellion and was executed for it. His followers maintained that he had “risen in the flesh”, and Saul/Paul was so excited by the tale – enhanced by the claim that the resurrected man was the long hoped-for Jewish Messiah (“Christos” in Greek) – that he invented a new religion. It came to be called Christianity. He moved about the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire from whence he’d come, preaching it; finally taking it to Rome itself, where he died. He won converts. No one knows how many in his lifetime. Some of them reverted to their old polytheism or Judaism, but a fair number remained faithful to the new two-in-one divinity. Some converts composed books about the life of “Christ Jesus” – which Paul himself had not been interested in. The books, and Paul’s letters, eventually provided the mythology of the new religion.Through them the two-in-one divinity became a three-in-one divinity, a “Holy Spirit” being added to God-the-Father and God-the-Son.  The Son was chronicled as being begotten by the Jewish God upon a virgin mother (a concept familiar to the polytheists of classical times).

By this means and that means, the religion spread; through Paul the wandering preacher, the books of the myths, and the appeal that the religion itself had (with its promise of a blissful everlasting afterlife for the obedient faithful, and despite the threat of an eternity of torture for the disobedient unfaithful, the judgment being made by the Triple God alone). It became the Catholic Church, highly organized everywhere, headed and led by the the Church in Rome. More than a hundred years after Paul’s death, a Roman Emperor embraced Paul’s religion, and a few decades later Christianity was imposed on the whole Empire as its the official religion. Gone was the tolerance of earlier years. A few decades more, and Rome itself, weakened by Christianity, fell to the barbarians. The Church slowly took the place of the old order. The Church became the Roman power throughout western Europe. (The Eastern Empire, with the Emperor seated in Constantinople, is another story.)

Paul of Tarsus, though he never knew it, sustained and extended the power of Rome through his invention. But the Great Idea of the Greeks in the days of their glory, and of the Romans in the days of their grandeur, was changed.  Sure, individuals from any country, any nation, any tribe, could live as a “community” under the same rule – but it was the rule of the Roman Catholic Church, and that law was a different kind of law. It was the imposition of dogma: an orthodoxy, a uniformity of belief, essentially intolerant. 

Darkness descended. The Great Idea died.

It rose again after many hundreds of years. It was resurrected as the Idea on which the United States of America was founded.  

For two hundred and twenty-two years the Great Idea has made the United States of America, with a population of individuals deriving from many lands united as one nation under the law, free, prosperous, and powerful. United by Ius not Rus. Geographical origin, ethnicity, physical appearance, religion had no bearing on the rights the law gave all who lived under it. The unifying rule of law insisted on tolerance. By doing so, it guaranteed liberty. 

Now, it seems, that is changing. The Great Idea is under attack in the USA.

Tribes are being formed; some friendly to each other, some inimical to each other. Political cliques and cults, secessionists, states’ governments, defy the federal law. Many prefer to think of themselves as Blacks rather than as Americans, and their enemy as Whites. They actively seek to return to the savage ways of inter-tribal strife. It is atavism. It is a drawing down of darkness as intolerance spreads.

A good description of the disintegration is given by Sultan Knish. He writes (in part) at his website:

The Nation of Islam [NOI] preaches that black people are the master race. It doesn’t just hate white people, Jews and a whole bunch of other folks. It hates them out of a conviction in its own superiority. According to its teachings, “the Blackman is the original man” and lighter skinned people were “devils” created by an evil mad scientist to rule over black people until they are destroyed by UFOs.

It even teaches that monkeys are descended from white people.

Progressive media essays defending Obama, Rep. Keith Ellison, Rep. Danny Davis, Mallory and other black leaders for their Farrakhan links have urged concerned liberals to look at the positive aspects of the Nation of Islam, its love for black people, not the negative, its hatred for white people.

But it is the “positive” that is the problem.

Intersectionality promises to package tribal identity politics into a utopia of social justice. But the essence of tribalism is the superiority of your people and the inferiority of all other groups. …

The clown car of identity politics runs smoothest when it has a common enemy: white people. Coalitions like the Women’s March assemble an array of groups who are united by their hatred of Trump, white people, Israel and root beer. And it works as long as no one lifts up the hood and looks at the engine.

Black nationalism is racist, sexist, anti-Semitic and homophobic. The Nation of Islam isn’t an exception. From Jeremiah Wright, “Italians… looked down their garlic noses”, to Eldridge Cleaver, “rape was an insurrectionary act” to Amiri Baraka, the ugliest possible supremacist bigotry is its natural state.

“We are all beautiful (except white people, they are full of, and made of s___),” Amiri Baraka wrote. “The fag’s death they gave us on a cross… they give us to worship a dead jew and not ourselves.”

“I got the extermination blues, jew-boys. I got the Hitler syndrome figured… So come for the rent, jewboys,” the Guggenheim fellowship, PEN and American Book Award winner, and former Poet Laureate of New Jersey ranted.

Baraka was one of the country’s most celebrated black nationalist poets and he was a former member of the Nation of Islam. Baraka’s Black Mass circulated the NOI’s racist creation myth.

It was the NOI’s conviction of black superiority and white inferiority that attracted Baraka and so many other black nationalists. The NOI is one of a variety of black supremacist religious groups, from the similarly exotic Moorish and Black Hebrew churches, to NOI splinter groups such as Five-Percent Nation and black nationalist churches like the one attended by the Obamas and presided over by Jeremiah Wright.

But religious black supremacism is only a component of a larger cultural movement that lies at the heart of black nationalism and mingles historical conspiracy theories with racial supremacism.

The comingling of black nationalism with intersectional politics has produced a new generation (often of second-generation radicals) that dresses up its racism not only in the lyricism of the old black nationalism of Wright and Baraka, but in the obtuse academic jargon of intersectionality.

That’s where Tamika Mallory and Ta-Nehisi Coates come from. But political word salads and poetry only conceal what you choose not to pay attention to. And that’s why we’re talking about Louis Farrakhan.

The mass of progressive media articles, essays and explainers deployed to protect the Women’s March can be summed up as, “Stop paying attention.” And what we’re not supposed to be paying attention to is the slow death of liberalism and its substitution by the intolerant tribal extremism of identity politics. …

Intersectionality is a lie. Like the Nation of Islam, it’s not just a lie in its negative hateful aspects, but in its promise of a utopia once the “white devils” and their “white privilege” are out of the way.

Groups of identity politics extremists and their white cishet [pronounced “sis-het”, meaning heterosexual and “not transgendered”, ie. normal. – ed.] lefty allies can only be briefly united by the negative, not the positive. The “call-out culture” meant to spread social justice through the movement isn’t just a form of political terror; it fails to reach the innate bigotry of each identity politics group. …

Identity politics movements can’t fight bigotry, because they are naturally bigoted. Instead of actually rejecting bigotry, they project it on a convenient target like Trump, and then pretend that by destroying him, they can cleanse society. The more targets they destroy, the more they need to find to maintain an alliance whose only true unifying principle is a mutual denial of each other’s supremacist bigotries. And so the battle against racism becomes a war against microaggressions and structural white supremacy.

The whole thing is a ticking time bomb. And it keeps going off every few years. When it blows up, lefty activists rush out, as they are doing now, to plead, wheedle and warn that the real enemy is “white supremacy” and everyone needs to stop paying attention to the racist or sexist views of their own allies.

These “rainbow coalitions” of racist radicals don’t fight bigotry; they mobilize bigots for racial wars.

Tamika Mallory praising Farrakhan isn’t shocking. It would be more shocking if she didn’t. It’s hard to find major black figures in politics and the entertainment industry who don’t hang out with him.

Both Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama, the first two serious black presidential candidates, did. The Congressional Black Caucus hosted him. London Mayor Sadiq Khan acted as his lawyer. The list of black entertainers is all but endless. Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube (both members), Michael Jackson, Eddie Murphy, Spike Lee, Arsenio Hall, Common, Kanye West, Mos Def, Young Jeezy and Erykah Badu to name a few.

Not every individual who meets up with Farrakhan necessarily shares all his bigoted views, but many find his tribal affirmation of black superiority appealing and they value that more than they do any kind of tolerant society. That’s what Tamika Mallory, in her own awkward way, was trying to tell us.

Black nationalism is a tribal cause. It will always put its people first. The same is true of the rest of the hodgepodge of political identity groups that form up the intersectional chorus. No amount of calling out will change that. That’s why the calling out is mostly directed at safe targets, preferably white.

There is no larger unity at the end of the rainbow. Only smoother versions of Farrakhan. Barack instead of Baraka. Rants about “white devils” and “satanic Jews” filtered through academic jargon.

A movement of bigotries can only divide us. And that’s all identity politics has to offer America. Instead of equal rights in a united nation, we will be members of quarreling tribes. And those tribes, like Farrakhan’s fans, will be incapable of seeing members of other tribes as having the same worth they do. …

The left claims that it’s fighting for equality. What it’s actually fighting for is a tribal society where the notion of equal rights for all is as alien as it is in Iraq, Rwanda and Afghanistan, where democracy means tribal bloc votes and where the despotism of majority rule invariably ends in terror and death.

Tax payers of the United States protest! You have a world to leave to its own follies, and nothing to lose but your exploitation.

What is it now, among myriad wrongs, that in particular needs protesting about?

Foreign aid.

Foreign aid always does more harm than good. It keeps tyrants in power. If any of it gets into the economy of the targeted country, it distorts the local markets. The only increased happiness it causes is in the minds of the donors themselves, the socialists in the deep state who feel generous and compassionate when they give away other people’s money.

And when the money goes to al-Qaeda … 

Well, to a state that fosters al-Qaeda …

… and to the arch-fiend of international politics, George Soros, to help him achieve his nefarious aims to abolish all borders and so destroy the nation-state, it is not just a misguided idea, it is evil in action. At present he is intent on undermining Hungary, and Macedonia (see below), and the United States itself.

That is what your tax dollars are doing, by the will of the State Department through USAID.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is an independent agency of the U.S. Government that works closely with the State Department and receives overall foreign policy guidance from the Secretary of State. It has  an annual budget of $27 billion.

Judicial Watch reports:

The U.S. government keeps sending an Islamic nation that serves as an Al Qaeda breeding ground hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid. The cash — $768 million since October 2016 — flows through the famously corrupt U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID), which has a monstrous budget and little oversight. The money is reportedly helping to counter a humanitarian crisis in Yemen, the headquarters of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). In its Country Reports on Terrorism, the State Department reveals that AQAP militants carried out hundreds of attacks including suicide bombers, vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs), ambushes, kidnappings and targeted assassinations. …

Dozens of terrorists freed from the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have joined Al Qaeda in Yemen. Among them is an Al Qaeda chief who masterminded a U.S. Embassy bombing after getting released … His name is Said Ali al-Shihri and after leaving Gitmo he became an Al Qaeda deputy chief in Yemen and he organized a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen’s capital.The former captive was also involved in car bombings outside the American Embassy that killed 16 people. Remember that the convicted terrorist who planned to blow up an American passenger jet over Detroit on Christmas in 2009 trained in Yemen and the plot was organized by Al Qaeda leaders in the Middle Eastern Arab country. A recent study published by the RAND Corporation concludes that the most significant threat to the United States comes from terrorist groups operating in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

So why does the U.S. government continue giving Yemen huge chunks of taxpayer dollars? Because it is “gravely concerned about a worsening humanitarian situation” in the Islamic nation, according to a statement issued this month by USAID. The document was released to announce a recent $130 million in “emergency food assistance to Yemen”.  The U.S. government has determined that “protracted conflict” has created the “world’s largest food security emergency” in Yemen as well as the “world’s worst cholera outbreak”.  More than 17 million people are at risk of severe hunger or starvation, according to the agency. …

USAID is well known for gushing out cash with no follow up or oversight to assure the money is spent appropriately and the Yemen allocations are probably no exception. A perfect example is that millions of dollars in malaria drugs provided to Africa are stolen each year and sold on the black market. … The U.S. government has spent billions of dollars to combat malaria in Africa in the last few years. One USAID program alone has dedicated north of $72 million since 2011 to give 19 African countries free malaria drugs, $15 million in 2016 alone. The agency has long acknowledged that malaria drugs financed by American taxpayers are regularly stolen in Africa.  …

Earlier this year Judicial Watch obtained records showing that USAID spent millions of taxpayer dollars to destabilize the democratically elected, center-right government in Macedonia by colluding with leftwing billionaire philanthropist George Soros. 

The scheme was masterminded by Barack Obama’s U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia, Jess L. Baily, who worked behind the scenes with Soros’s Open Society Foundation to funnel large sums of American dollars for the cause, constituting an interference of the U.S. Ambassador in domestic political affairs in violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Judicial Watch’s ongoing probe has so far revealed that USAID earmarked at least $9.5 million to intervene in the Balkan nation’s governmental affairs, which deviates from its mission of providing humanitarian assistance.

The US is interfering in the domestic political affairs of another country? You mean like it accuses Russia of doing in US domestic political affairs? Say it ain’t so!

Nope. Can’t do that. Judicial Watch knows that the US Department of State is doing just that.

Worse – it is doing it IN COLLUSION with George Soros. 

Has Judicial Watch told the President? Now that Rex Tillerson has gone, and Mike Pompeo is President Trump’s choice for his successor as Secretary of State, will USAID be guided to better practices?

Ideally the agency would be roughly guided out the door, and the door closed on it forever.