… which you will if you live in Western Europe, and you possibly will if you live in the United States.

Amil Imani writes (in part) at American Thinker:

Islam is religious fascism.  Both the beliefs and practices of Islam amply prove my assertion. … There is a whole raft of teachings and laws that clearly describe non-Muslims in all manner of derogatory terms and grant them no or few rights.

If you are not a Muslim, and you happened, by some misfortune, to be living in a place ruled by sharia, you want to be at least either a Christian or a Jew. If you are anything else or nothing at all religious-wise, then you are just that: nothing. Jews and Christians enjoy a measure of second-class citizenship under Islam as long as they pay heavy religious taxes (jizya), mandated in Quran 9.29, and behave themselves as docile subservient subjects.

Islam’s maltreatment of non-Muslims is … very sad, inhumane and tragic.

Having said that, I readily admit that there are many Muslims who are decent people by any measure. There are, in fact, some Muslims whose humanity transcends their Muslimness. Not all 1.5 billion Muslims are horrible people. We all can attest to that. In fact, it is Islamic ideology that forces Muslims to behave barbarically.

Below is a tragic case that demonstrates my point.

A year or so ago, an elderly Bahá’í woman in the Islamic Republic of Iran remained behind when her children, in desperation, escaped from their ancestral home for other lands because of the official genocide policy of the Islamic government.

The lone old woman had a Muslim tenant living in her house. The Muslim tenant demanded that the women give him her house. The rent money from the house provided her with a modest income for her to survive.

The old woman refused. The Muslim man threatened to kill her if she did not give him the house. The woman corresponded with her children and explained her predicament. She also tried to seek justice from the authorities.

The Muslim man made good on his threat and murdered the old lone woman and took possession of her house. Under sharia law, only Jews and Christians (of course, in the [early, later largely abrogated] Meccan Quran) are tolerated as members of sanctioned religions who enjoy a modicum of rights.  Members of the Bahá’í faith are declared heretics by law and are halal-ul-dam (free blood, meaning they can be murdered with no compensations or legal penalties). Bahá’ís in the Islamic Republic are completely disenfranchised from all rights of citizenship.

A Muslim female attorney, at significant risk to her reputation and her person, consented to represent this family for redress. This attorney is one of those numerous truly upstanding human beings who holds her own humanity above Muslimness.

Islamic societies box women into their “place” of subservience to men, obediently docile. A woman daring to take up the cause of a dead kefir in a vicious theocracy of the Islamic Republic of Iran? That’s true courage. That’s the litmusy test of a sterling human being.  I salute her and salute all Muslim women who are breaking out of their horribly unjust “place” in Islam.

The attorney petitioned the court on behalf of the children of the murdered old woman. She sought redress by taking a folder of documents and correspondence to a judge. The moment the judge learned that the documents had been touched by a Bahá’í, he took out a box of tissue papers from his desk drawer and used the tissue to handle the folder. This man who was supposed to be an unbiased upholder of justice considered the murdered Bahá’í woman najes (unclean, untouchable, simply for being Bahá’í).  He was following his religious duty not to even touch anything handled by a Bahá’í.  Would this bigot be the kind of impartial agent of law to administer justice?

The dead woman and her children got nothing.  The murderous Muslim got the house.  It is sadly reminiscent of the time of Muhammad, when kefirs (infidels) were always treated as fair game and entitled to little or nothing.

The writer ends with a warning to non-Muslims:

It is this kind of treatment that awaits you if Muslims take over and, in obedience to their belief, institute horrific sharia.

You will not be without moral guidance.

Here is some from the Ayatollah Khomeini, “the Father of the Iranian Republic”:

A man can marry a girl younger than nine years of age, even if the girl is still a baby being breastfed. A man, however is prohibited from having intercourse with a girl younger than nine, other sexual act such as forplay, rubbing, kissing and sodomy is allowed.

If one commits the act of sodomy with a cow, an ewe, or a camel, their urine and their excrements become impure, and even their milk may no longer be consumed. The animal must then be killed and as quickly as possible and burned.

A man can have sex with animals such as sheep, cows, camels and so on. However, he should kill the animal after he has his orgasm. He should not sell the meat to the people in his own village; however, selling the meat to the next door village should be fine.

And be aware that he said this:

An Islamic regime must be serious in every field,
There are no jokes in Islam.
There is no humour in Islam.
There is no fun in Islam.

About that he is right.

This is from much maligned Infowars.

It records a professor saying it is essential to teach Marxism.

If a partiality to Marxism is common among the professoriate in US academies now, which seems to be the case, this  professor is typical, and what she teaches – or indoctrinates –  is typical.

A Communist regime has to be totalitarian. It cannot allow any degree of freedom. It cannot permit dissent.

China has experimented with capitalism. Now it is reverting to full tyranny:

Xi Jinping is not merely an authoritarian leader …  He is taking China back to totalitarianism as he seeks Mao-like control over all aspects of society.

So writes Gordon Chang at Gatestone, explaining how the Chinese state is enabled by technology to become like Orwell’s Big Brother with total surveillance of the population all the time.

By 2020, Chinese officials plan to have about 626 million surveillance cameras operating throughout the country. Those cameras will, among other things, feed information into a national “social credit system”.

That system, when it is in place in perhaps two years, will assign to every person in China a constantly updated score based on observed behaviors. For example, an instance of jaywalking, caught by one of those cameras, will result in a reduction in score.

Although officials might hope to reduce jaywalking, they seem to have far more sinister ambitions, such as ensuring conformity to Communist Party political demands. In short, the government looks as if it is determined to create what the Economist called “the world’s first digital totalitarian state“. …

Chinese officials … tell us the purpose of the initiative is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step”.

That description is not an exaggeration. Officials prevented Liu Hu, a journalist, from taking a flight because he had a low score. …

“I can’t buy property. My child can’t go to a private school,” Liu said. “You feel you’re being controlled by the list all the time.”

The system is designed to control conduct by giving the ruling Communist Party the ability to administer punishments and hand out rewards. …

Hou Yunchun, a former deputy director of the State Council’s development research center, said at a forum in Beijing in May that the social credit system should be administered so that “discredited people become bankrupt”. …

Not every official has such a vindictive attitude, but it appears that all share the assumption, as the dovish Zhi Zhenfeng of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said, that “discredited people deserve legal consequences”.

President Xi Jinping, the final and perhaps only arbiter in China, has made it clear how he feels about the availability of second chances. “Once untrustworthy, always restricted,” the Chinese ruler says.

What happens, then, to a country where only the compliant are allowed to board a plane or be rewarded with discounts for government services? No one quite knows because never before has a government had the ability to constantly assess everyone and then enforce its will. The People’s Republic has been more meticulous in keeping files and ranking residents than previous Chinese governments, and computing power and artificial intelligence are now giving China’s officials extraordinary capabilities. …

Chinese leaders have long been obsessed with what then-President Jiang Zemin in 1995 called “informatization, automation, and intelligentization”, and they are only getting started. Given the capabilities they are amassing, they could, the argument goes, make defiance virtually impossible. …

Xi Jinping … evidently believes the Party must have absolute control over society and he must have absolute control over the Party. … Already Chinese officials are trying to use artificial intelligence to predict anti-Party behavior.

Are all rulers tempted to control the population totally? Without constitutional restraints, how many democracies would find their leader turning into a monarch? Especially if technology makes it possible.

We can all too easily imagine a Barack Obama, a Jerry Brown, a Bernie Sanders, a Cory Booker succumbing to the totalitarian temptation.

Technology might even make liberal democracy and free-markets “obsolete” writes Yuval Noah Harari of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the Atlantic. “The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century — the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place — may become their decisive advantage in the 21st century.

Gordon Chang continues:

The dominant narrative in the world’s liberal democracies is that tech favors totalitarianism.

And he warns:

Beijing is almost certain to extend the social credit system, which has roots in attempts to control domestic enterprises, to foreign companies. Let us remember that Chinese leaders this year have taken on the world’s travel industry by forcing hotel chains and airlines to show Taiwan as part of the People’s Republic of China, so they have demonstrated determination to intimidate and punish. Once the social credit system is up and running, it would be a small step to include non-Chinese into that system, extending Xi’s tech-fueled totalitarianism to the entire world.

World-domination has always been the ultimate aim of Communism, from Karl Marx to the United Nations’ Man-Made Global Warmists.

So the wonderful inventions of free men in a free country, who had the spare time and acquired the capital to develop their ideas, are proving the best instruments for the destruction of freedom!  And oddly enough, most of the Inventors have no objection to abusive exploitation of their technologies. The inventors and tycoons of Twitter, Google, Facebook are adamantly socialist-minded.

Invention is individual. It happens only in freedom. Ironically, once total control is achieved by means of the great technological inventions of our age, there will be no more invention.

Communist totalitarian societies are stagnant. And stagnation is a long slow death.

A report at Front Page reveals that the Democrats (now taking their race-obsessed party ever further to the Left) favor illiteracy.

At least among the black population of America.

You’ve heard it so often you probably tune it out — leftwing Democrats claiming that the failure of our inner city schools is the responsibility of mean spirited, tight fisted, and outright racist Republicans who have no qualms about consigning minority children to the social ash heap.  This is the Big Lie of American education. Inner city education over the last half century is indeed a tale not only of failure but of gross corruption, fraud, theft and racist exploitation of mainly poor black and Hispanic kids for political and monetary gain.  But it has taken place with Democrats in control of the mayors’ offices, city councils, and education departments and the buck stops with them.

While Democrats were consolidating their control of the inner cities over the last generation, the kids trapped there have fallen further and further behind, victims of political cynicism and the soft bigotry of low expectations. In the inner city educational reality that Democrats have created, hundreds of thousands of children go through twelve years of public education—if they don’t simply drop out and melt away long before—without ever learning how to read, write, or perform mathematical tasks with even a basic level of competence.

Individual lives are wasted while leftwing political machines thrive. The deplorable condition of inner city schools is one of the gravest educational and human tragedies of our time, and it is told with no holds barred by John Perazzo in The Shame Of Our Schools. …

Among the facts John Perazzo has uncovered:

In Detroit, a city where no Republican has served as mayor since 1961, and where only one Republican in the past 48 years has even held a seat on the City Council, the math and reading proficiency rates of public elementary and middle-school students are consistently below 10%, sometimes as low as 3%.

The same is true in Baltimore, also a Democratic Party fiefdom for over a generation, where in one recent year, 13 of the city’s 39 high schools had exactly zero students who tested as proficient in math. 

Democrats always claim that the schools they control are underfinanced and that the schools of privileged white communities receive more taxpayer money.  The opposite is true. In city after city under Democrats’ control, school budgets are among the highest in the nation, higher annually per student in some cases than the cost of tuition at local colleges. New Jersey’s Camden Central School District, for example, spends an astronomical $25,000 annually per pupil, yet by any objective measure it is the scholastic equivalent of a train wreck with 90% of the district’s public schools ranked in the bottom 5% statewide. 

The teachers’ unions, a key element of the Democrats’ hegemony in many of these cities, feather the nest of their dues payers by demanding pay hikes, better benefits, additional paid sick days, less-stringent attendance requirements, and smaller class sizes, even as the children in their districts remain unable to read or write at levels that are anywhere near the norms for their respective age groups. In an 18-year period during which public school teachers in Chicago had been repeatedly appeased after going on strike no fewer than nine times, an astounding 33 of the city’s 64 public high schools ranked in the bottom 1% of all high schools across the United States.

The author recommends that the parents of inner city school children be given education vouchers for the amount “currently spent on the compulsory miseducation of their children”. With these “they could find schools that would provide the possibility of achievement and success”.

He notes also that “this goal will not be easily achieved because of the opposition of the Democrat political machines and their union allies that have driven these children into failure over the last generation“. …

The reprehensible failure of public education in America’s Democrat-controlled inner cities is the most significant civil rights issue of our day, dooming generations of poor minority children to a lifetime of ignorance and poverty.

Is that how the Left wants the people under its rule to  be?

Apparently so.

But why?

Perhaps because an ignorant illiterate population is easy to control?

One of our Facebook commenters, raised in a religious family and sent to a religious school, recently told us that the atheism he had arrived at eventually was not certain. Something could happen that would make him change his mind about it. We asked what sort of thing. He said he could not answer that.

We are convinced of our atheism.

We do not believe there is anything, or could be anything, supernatural.

We would like to hear from readers how they came to their atheism and whether anything – and if so what? – could change their minds.

James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas finds the subversives who undermine US democracy from inside the government.

In this video he umasks a denizen of the Deep State Swamp who boasts of his scams and considers himself effectively invulnerable to the consequences of defying the law:

To a conservative who lived in a Western country through the decades of the Cold War, the current fashion for Socialism in America is likely to be shocking and terrifying. To those who lived under the iron heel of Soviet Socialism in Eastern Europe, or any other Marxist regime, it must be many times worse.

(Throughout this article, “Socialism” and “Communism” are used interchangeably – as was customary in the USSR.)

Some dangerously under-informed American women entering the political arena seem really to think that it is a pretty thing, Socialism.

Here’s one of them – Democrat Cynthia Nixon, who fortunately lost her challenge to the Democrat Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo by a difference of 30% of the votes – smilingly, in all the self-deceiving self-confidence of ignorance, urging Socialism on New York voters:

 

And here’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who won the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th congressional district – demonstrating how innocent she is of Economics:

Another fan of Socialism, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, wants to be the Democratic nominee for the presidency in 2020.

Lloyd Billingsley writes at Front Page on Cory Booker’s claim to be Spartacus: a hero of resistance to ancient Roman tyranny re-canonized by Communists in the 1950s. Booker founded his claim on the extreme daring he showed in rising against the Left-alleged tyranny of President Trump – by making public certain documents, in relation to the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, that were in fact already public.

As Billingsley says, “Booker’s gambit was something of a bust.”

He goes on to tell us how one Communist, the author of the novel Sparticus, lost his faith.

The movie Booker cited is based on the 1951 novel Spartacus by Howard Fast, a Communist pisseur d’encre whom Time magazine had dubbed “Big Brother’s U.S. pen pal.” In 1953, Fast won the Stalin Peace Prize, the only American to win the award other than Paul Robeson, a black American Communist who spent his life defending all-white Soviet dictatorships.

Stalin died in 1953 and three years later, Soviet boss Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes and mass atrocities to the Soviet Communist Party’s 20th Congress. The revelation devastated many American Communists and motivated Howard Fast to write The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party, released in 1957.

Khrushchev’s revelations, Fast wrote, “itemizes a record of barbarism and paranoiac bloodlust that will be a lasting and shameful memory to civilized man”.  Communism is not social science but “naked terror, awful brutality and frightening ignorance“.  Fast denounced “Stalin and the collection of hangmen and murderers around him” and charged that the Communist Party is “based on pseudo-religious cant, cemented with neurotic fear and parading ritualistic magic as a substitute for reason”.  And the Spartacus scribe wasn’t done.

The only people who resisted the revelation of Stalin’s crimes, Fast wrote, were “the mental revolutionaries, the parlor pinks, the living-room warriors, the mink coated allies of the working class”. These were “Sick people who had seen no death [other] than a painted corpse in a funeral parlor, no other violence than an auto crash – these people lusted for an Armageddon their mad dreams had promised them.” …

The Spartacus screenwriter was Dalton Trumbo, who joined the Communist Party during the Stalin-Hitler Pact, when many others left, and remained in the Party after the Khrushchev revelations. Trumbo hated Fast’s Naked God but he wasn’t going to pass up a big payday. And since Trumbo had been one of the famed Hollywood Ten, Spartacus remains a classic on the big screen of the left, which duly consigned The Naked God to the forbidden list.

While some fled the Communist Party after 1956 many others remained and the Soviets continued to run candidates in American elections. In 1976 their candidate for president was Gus Hall, an old-line Stalinist, with Jarvis Tyner for vice president. College student John Brennan voted for Gus Hall and incredibly enough, only four years later in 1980 Brennan gained employment at the CIA, which he headed under POTUS 44.

One of those Americans who remained faithful to Communism and the Soviet Union was Angela Davis. In 1979 Davis won the Lenin Peace Prize, her primary for the Communist ticket in 1980, with Davis for vice president under Hall. The same duo lost to Reagan and Bush in 1984, and thereafter the Communist Party USA declined to run candidates and urged their supporters to vote for the Democratic Party.

In 1988, American Bernie Sanders spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union, where the gulags were still functioning and Soviet bosses torturing political prisoners in psychiatric hospitals. If Hillary Clinton had not rigged the primaries, Sanders would have been the Democrats’ candidate in 2016.

Cory Booker wants to be the candidate in 2020, and his bid for a  “Spartacus moment” suggests that he knows the Old Left back story. For their part, Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cynthia Nixon and Andrew Gillum [Florida’s Democratic Gubernatorial nominee. also advocating Socialism without perhaps fully realizing that he is], like their media supporters, show little if any familiarity with The Naked God, The God That Failed, and The Road to Serfdom.

Right. They show no familiarity whatsoever with the theory or practice of the Socialism that charms them so. If Cory Booker knows, and yet desires to impose the horror that is Socialism on his fellow Americans, he is a lot worse than they are.  

On every hand they rise crying “I am socialist!” thereby confirming ignorance of the actual record. Howard Fast, who died in 2003, knew what socialism was all about. So did Milan Kundera, who wrote, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”.

Candidates can’t recall what they never knew in the first place.

They need to be told, but their teachers have not told them, and will not tell them: Socialism is hungry, bleak, smelly, shabby, hopeless, poor, cold, painful and very frightening.

President Trump, being supremely sane and sensible, tore up (figuratively speaking) the evil “‘deal” that Obama wormed out of the tyrants of Iran. If the unsigned agreement can be said to have achieved anything at all, it was the tentative postponement of a nuclear armed Mullahcracy of Iran for a few years. That small relief cost an enormous amount of money – more than a hundred billion of it in dollar bills – and deep national abasement in a long process of groveling by Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry at the feet of the demonic mullahs.

Obama probably saw the tenuous thing as his grand achievement in foreign policy, a real biggy in his presidential legacy. And then, “Poof!” – Trump blew it away.

Now Kerry has been in a huddle with the mullahs again, making a delusory – no, an insane – attempt to catch the pieces of the abstract document as they scatter on the winds and stick them together again. At Obama’s request, we imagine. Obama’s sobbing request. To his sometime, long time, lackey.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, whose implementation of President Trump’s foreign policy Kerry is trying to undermine, was questioned about it:

Scott Johnson comments cogently on Kerry’s private diplomacy in an article at Front Page, in which he displays this video.

In  another Front Page article he argues against a story by April Doss in the Weekly Standard in which the author denies the Obama administration’s misuse of FISA in pursuit of its plot against Donald Trump. The misuse was made. It involved the smearing of Carter Page. Scott Johnson writes:

Under Title I of FISA … it was the burden of the government to establish probable cause that Page was engaging in espionage, terrorism, or sabotage by or on behalf of a foreign power that involved a violation of a criminal statute. (Doss stated: “Although Page had left the campaign, the FBI feared Russia was using him for its own purposes. The application states that the FBI alleged there was probable cause to believe Page was an agent of a foreign power under a specific provision of FISA that involves knowingly aiding, abetting, or knowingly conspiring to assist a foreign power with clandestine intelligence gathering activities, engage in clandestine intelligence gathering at the behest of a foreign power, or participate in sabotage or international terrorism or planning or preparation therefor.”)

Carter Page did nothing of the kind. Not for himself, not for President Trump.

But John Kerry? Is he not “engaging in sabotage on behalf of a foreign power and so violating a criminal statute”?

Is he not “aiding, abetting”, and “knowingly conspiring to assist a foreign power” which is engaged in “international terrorism”?

He surely is, and he could be prosecuted under the Logan Act. But his penalty would be only a fine of $5,000.

He could be barred from holding any future public office. According to Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment:

No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath … as an officer of the United States … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have … given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

There has been a rumor that Kerry will run for the presidency in 2020, and that could stop him.

But is there any need to be concerned about Kerry conspiring with the mullahs? What can he offer them? What can he bribe them with?

And what could he persuade them to do that would change President’s Trump’s policy of no nuclear “deal” with Iran and the increase and strict enforcement of sanctions against it?

Nothing short of their abdication.

Let Kerry plot with them. Let him give them words of comfort. Let him conspire to assist them, never regretting that the administration he served gave them the means to pursue international terrorism.

He is powerless. Obama is powerless. Oh joy! Freude!

And a little touch of Schadenfreude too, why not?

As all the world knows, Muslims attacked America on September 11, 2001. They killed 2,977 people and injured more than 6,000. 

A lot of Democrats failed to understand the meaning of 9/11.

Ben Smith reported at Politico in April 2011:

The University of Ohio yesterday shared with us the crosstabs of a 2006 poll they did with Scripps Howard that’s useful in that regard.

“How likely is it that people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East?” the poll asked.

A full 22.6% of Democrats said it was “very likely.” Another 28.2% called it “somewhat likely.”

That is: More than half of Democrats, according to a neutral survey, said they believed Bush was complicit in the 9/11 terror attacks.

Democrats still do fail to understand 9/11. In July this year (2018), Nancy Pelosi, the erstwhile Democratic Speaker of the House, called it “an incident”.

President Trump understands it.

Bruce Bawer wrote at Front Page on 9/11 this year:

On September 11, 2001, New York – along with Washington, D.C. – was struck by mass death … . It shook the world. Mainstream European commentators attributed the terrorist attacks to legitimate Muslim grievances against America, and breezily dismissed suggestions that Europe might soon be struck as well.

Sweeping aside Osama bin Laden’s claims, President Bush asserted that the attacks had nothing to do with Islam, which he called a “religion of peace”.He then sent armed forces to “liberate” Afghanistan and Iraq, on the premise that the people of those countries, if allowed to vote in democratic elections, would choose a democratic path.

It all turned out to be spectacularly wrong. The European savants were shown up by the horrific attacks on Madrid, Beslan, London, and elsewhere. Their perpetrators put the lie to the “religion of peace” rhetoric, repeatedly announcing that they were committing jihad, a core Islamic concept. …

In Western Europe, this recklessness had an impact well beyond terrorism. Sharia enclaves. Violent crime. A financial burden that has forced welfare states to cut back on education, health care, elder care. While other immigrant groups integrated into European host cultures, Muslims demanded – with increasing success – that those cultures adapt to Islam. …

Bush had massaged the Muslim world with insipid rhetoric about our shared heritage as “people of faith”; Obama had spun outrageous fantasies about Islam, transforming, in his famous 2009 Cairo speech, fourteen centuries of primitive brutality into a glittering parade of moral, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual triumphs. …

Finally, in Donald Trump, America has a president, and the Free World has a top dog, who gets it.

Yes, Trump could go further, in both words and actions, on Islam. But he’s already gone light years beyond his predecessors. He’s certainly gone far enough to outrage bien pensant types everywhere. And he’s gone far enough so that Americans who get it know beyond question that he gets it – and that he’s on their side. And they’re behind him.

As his rock-star reception in Warsaw last year reflected, most Eastern Europeans – who, unlike the editorial board of the New York Times, recognize a champion of freedom and a totalitarian ideology when they see them – are behind him, too, and are giving the finger to EU leaders who demand that they let in a Trojan horse.

Meanwhile, in Western Europe, where the haut monde hates Trump as much as do their stateside counterparts, millions – including those in Germany, France, and elsewhere who are finally rising up in boisterous public protests against their own despised leaders (but, except in Italy, still not casting enough votes for alternative parties to effect meaningful change) – see Trump as a long-awaited truth-teller, a sign of hope, a hero.

His enemies call him a fascist. On the contrary, he’s the first U.S. president since 9/11 who genuinely seems to grasp that Islam is fascism. He’s as far from denial and fatalism as it’s possible to be. He talks sense, he talks tough, and he takes action that’s in America’s interests. He’s crushed ISIS, shown Islamic heads of state who’s boss, and (against the resistance of both major-party establishments and the legislative and judicial branches of the U.S. government) done his best to pull in the welcome mat. While, at this point, most of his counterparts in Western Europe seem to be all about repeating empty multiculturalist slogans and managing a transition to the unimaginable, Trump is manning the barricades.

We applaud him for all that too.

And we add this:

The 9/11 Muslim attack on America was a profoundly religious act.

Obama claims that the eight years of his presidency were free of scandal. In fact, the scandals were many and appalling.

Obama claims to have stopped Iran becoming a nuclear power. In fact, he entered into a deal that permitted Iran to become a nuclear power.

Obama claims to have improved race relations. In fact, he worsened them. 

Obama claims to have launched an economic boom. In fact, he never achieved even 3% GDP growth.

In sum, he was a weak and destructive president. The harm he did would not be easy to repair, and America is lucky to have found the man to succeed him who could not only mend what he had broken, and is doing so, but is going much further, turning the failure round and achieving success. Even some unprecedented successes. And all in record time.

Obama sees the repair as an undoing of the changes he wrought. As he puts it, “The status quo pushes back.”

The complaint comes from a speech he made at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Ill., on Sept. 7, 2018, when the university honored him with the Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government.

The speech he gave on the occasion of receiving the prize included these claims:

Each time we painstakingly pull ourselves closer to our founding ideals, that all of us are created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights; the ideals that say every child should have opportunity and every man and woman in this country who’s willing to work hard should be able to find a job and support a family and pursue their small piece of the American Dream; our ideals that say we have a collective responsibility to care for the sick and the infirm, and we have a responsibility to conserve the amazing bounty, the natural resources of this country and of this planet for future generations, each time we’ve gotten closer to those ideals, somebody somewhere has pushed back. The status quo pushes back. Sometimes the backlash comes from people who are genuinely, if wrongly, fearful of change. More often it’s manufactured by the powerful and the privileged who want to keep us divided and keep us angry and keep us cynical because that helps them maintain the status quo and keep their power and keep their privilege. …

To which political party does that last sentence most aptly apply? We say the Democratic Party? But then, the Left has a habit of accusing its opponents of the faults, failings, bad emotions, plots, conspiracies, evil intentions, underhand actions, and failures of which itself is guilty.

Most of you don’t remember a time before 9/11, when you didn’t have to take off your shoes at an airport.

Did he mention who was responsible for 9/11 and for us having to take off our shoes at an airport? No. Because he never did and never will blame Islam for its acts of terrorism.

Most of you don’t remember a time when America wasn’t at war, or when money and images and information could travel instantly around the globe, or when the climate wasn’t changing faster than our efforts to address it.

A strange combination of references. No one living remembers a time when America wasn’t at war, if the Cold War is counted. About the money and images he probably meant “remember a time when they could not …”  And then he throws in as a certainty that there was a time when climate was not changing fast, but it is now.

And this was all before a change. What change? Have the wars stopped?

The only change he almost got right was a change to faster communications than ever before.

He claims that all three factors together brought about this consequence:

This change has happened fast, faster than any time in human history. And it created a new economy that has unleashed incredible prosperity.

Only, of the three phenomena he mentioned, could the faster communications be said to have promoted prosperity.

Actually, he just gabbled nonsense. And all to get in a claim to an “unleashed incredible prosperity” – the prosperity he claims as his own achievement.

He goes on to say how he rescued the economy from wicked men.

[T]he reckless behavior of financial elites triggered a massive financial crisis, ten years ago this week, a crisis that resulted in the worst recession in any of our lifetimes and caused years of hardship for the American people, for many of your parents, for many of your families. Most of you weren’t old enough to fully focus on what was going on at the time, but when I came into office in 2009, we were losing 800,000 jobs a month. 800,000. Millions of people were losing their homes. Many were worried we were entering into a second Great Depression. So we worked hard to end that crisis, but also to break some of these longer term trends. And the actions we took during that crisis returned the economy to healthy growth and initiated the longest streak of job creation on record. And we covered another 20 million Americans with health insurance and we cut our deficits by more than half, partly by making sure that people like me, who have been given such amazing opportunities by this country, pay our fair share of taxes to help folks coming up behind me.

While it is true that employment rose before he left office, his claim that higher taxes (on “people like me”) were a formula for prosperity is false. President Trump’s tax cuts (for all tax payers) prove it. Furthermore, Obama heavily regulated business, and President Trump’s lifting of many Obama regulations has been a factor in creating the very real present economic boom.

And by the time I left office, household income was near its all-time high and the uninsured rate had hit an all-time low and wages were rising and poverty rates were falling. I mention all this just so when you hear how great the economy’s doing right now, let’s just remember when this recovery started. …

He came on then to his foreign policy.

Even though we took out bin Laden and wound down the wars in Iraq and our combat role in Afghanistan, and got Iran to halt its nuclear program, the world’s still full of threats and disorder. …

And even though your generation is the most diverse in history …

Nonsense! No generation is more “diverse” than any other.

… with a greater acceptance and celebration of our differences than ever before, those are the kinds of conditions that are ripe for exploitation by politicians who have no compunction and no shame about tapping into America’s dark history of racial and ethnic and religious division. …

[O]ver the past few decades, the politics of division, of resentment and paranoia has unfortunately found a home in the Republican Party.

Remember when a Republican Attorney General refused to prosecute a bunch of white people although they were breaking the law, on the grounds that he would not act against “his  people”? No. Neither do we. But we do recall Eric Holder- Obama’s black AG – saying something like that in a case of the Black Panthers …

This Congress has … embraced wild conspiracy theories, like those surrounding Benghazi, or my birth certificate.

The trick: he throws out, in passing, that the (factually accurate) report of his failure to send help to a US ambassador and three servicemen who were killed by Muslim terrorists in Benghazi was a “wild conspiracy theory’, and associates it with an unproved, unlikely, and petty story that he was not born in the United States. But the horrible events in Benghazi were proved and profoundly important.

He comes to his own party’s wild conspiracy theory:

[The Repulicans in power are] undermining our alliances, cozying up to Russia. What happened to the Republican Party? Its central organizing principle in foreign policy was the fight against Communism, and now they’re cozying up to the former head of the KGB, actively blocking legislation that would defend our elections from Russian attack.

And he calls the partial repeal of his unworkable health legislation “sabotage”:

Their sabotage of the Affordable Care Act has already cost more than three million Americans their health insurance. And if they’re still in power next fall, you’d better believe they’re coming at it again. …

He defends the media who gave him uncritical support in all he did, and never stp attacking President Trump. What is indefnsible in his eyes, is Trump hitting back at his media enemies. To do this, he lies again:

I complained plenty about Fox News – but you never heard me threaten to shut them down, or call them enemies of the people.

We did hear that his administration “spied on members of the media, illegally seizing the phone records of Associated Press journalists. Fox News reporter James Rosen called Obama ‘the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation’ after being threatened with possible jail time for refusing to reveal one of his sources”. (See our quotations from Matt Margolis below.)

Next, he endorses the lie that President Trump sympathizes with Nazis:

We’re supposed to stand up to discrimination. And we’re sure as heck supposed to stand up, clearly and unequivocally, to Nazi sympathizers.

How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad.

How hard can it be to say that Islamic terrorism is bad? That Communism is bad? Too hard for him, it appeared.

Then comes the most blatantly impudent accusation of them all:

And we won’t win people over by calling them names, or dismissing entire chunks of the country as racist, or sexist, or homophobic.

Who, every minute of every day, calls whom “racist, or sexist, or homophobic”? Or all three?

Matt Margolis comments at PJ Media:

Today we saw just how far academia is going to perpetuate the myth of Obama’s “scandal-free” administration when he was awarded the Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government by the University of Illinois. Not since the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize has Obama been so undeserving of an award. But, I submit that this award is even worse than the Nobel Peace Prize he didn’t deserve. In 2009, the Nobel committee was at least ignorant of what Obama’s record would turn out to be. There is simply no excuse in 2018 for Obama to be receiving an Ethics in Government award. … The Paul H. Douglas Award is now forever tainted.

What, exactly, did the committee at the University of Illinois think Obama did to earn an Ethics in Government award? The Obama years were plagued by scandal and defined by a hyper-partisan government.

Last month I cited six Obama scandals where a special counsel should have been appointed to investigate but was not. Unlike Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Obama’s attorneys general, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, were partisan lackeys who did everything they could to protect Obama from being held accountable. Obama, Holder, and Lynch knew that if they left the investigating to Republicans in Congress they could write them off as partisan witch hunts and use any and all tactics possible to obstruct and stonewall those investigations, or in some cases, run their own sham investigation that cleared them of any wrongdoing.

I document thirty different scandals in my book The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama. Each scandal on its own makes the idea of Obama receiving an ethics award laughable. All of them together make this award blasphemous. From the moment Obama took office he was under a dark cloud of scandal, having been involved in illegal negotiations with [the condemned criminal] Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich to give him a cabinet position in exchange for Blagojevich nominating an Obama-preferred candidate to his vacated Senate seat … yet Obama just received an Ethics in Government award? What a joke!…

There are plenty of well-known scandals that the committee that decided to award Obama had to have been aware of but chose to ignore. There was the Fast and Furious scandal, which involved sending guns to Mexico in the hopes of tracking them to drug cartel leaders. Not only did they lose track of a large number of guns, but one gun was found to have been used in the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. The Obama administration tried to cover it up, and they stonewalled a congressional investigation, resulting in Attorney General Eric Holder being held in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over documents. Is this what constitutes “ethics in government” to the University of Illinois?

The Obama administration also abused the Espionage Act to target reporters and their sources. They even spied on members of the media, illegally seizing the phone records of Associated Press journalists. Fox News reporter James Rosen called Obama “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation” after being threatened with possible jail time for refusing to reveal one of his sources.  Is this what constitutes “ethics in government” to the University of Illinois? …

There were also –

The Solyndra scandal [see here], the Benghazi cover-up, Uranium One, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, the covering up of thousands of deaths of veterans waiting for care at VA hospitals, manipulating intelligence, paying ransom money to Iran, Project Cassandra [see here], spying on Donald Trump, the Hillary email scandal, which I should add, also implicated Obama, who communicated with Hillary via her private email address and used a pseudonym himself.

It’s bad enough when Obama claims he was scandal-free. But, when he receives an ethics in government award, it diminishes the meaning of ethics. It’s time to stop pretending Obama was scandal-free or ethical. … I’ve only scratched the surface of Obama’s scandalous and unethical presidency. 

The only reason why Barack Obama was elected president was that he was black. He had nothing else to offer. A sufficient number of white Americans voted for him to get him into the White House for no better reason than that they needed to feel good, to prove to themselves, and the country and the world, that they were not “racist“.

Barack Obama, for all his expensive education, was ill-informed and strangely ignorant – and he embraced ideologies inimical to America. He seemed not to know how many states there were in the country he governed. He thought Austrians spoke a language called Austrian. He did not know how to pronounce “corpsman”. And he was a follower of the Communist “community organizer” Saul Alinsky, and a lackey of the Muslim Brotherhood.

He lied and commanded others to lie. Under his leadership, his party worked an elaborate plot, which it still pursues, to destroy the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump with false and slanderous allegations of treason.

If prizes were awarded for lying, Obama would deserve them all.