Tommy Robinson has been imprisoned (yet again) for opposing the Islamification of Britain.

The actual technical charges against him are irrelevant. His “crime” is his opposition to the  slow conquest of his country and Europe by the dark-age force of Islam, launched, facilitated, and protected by the governments, main political parties, churches, academies, and mass media of all the West European states. 

He writes:

So here we go again! Its Sunday night 10/6/18, the news of the amazing scenes yesterday in London are just filtering their way to me.But before I start on the positives of yesterdays demonstration let me 1st start with some negatives. Let me share with you part of my wife’s letter I received yesterday:

School rang me today though, before I went to work and said Spencer was really upset at school, to be honest he isn’t managing mate. Sam said to him ‘I’m doing a 5k run with my dad’, and Spencer said well I can’t do it with my dad and ran off crying. He cries himself to sleep. Sleeps with your pillow and ask me 50 times a day what day is dad coming home? I can’t even give him a rough date yet because you haven’t been give any! Just hope to keep telling him its not for long, nothing will change and he needs to be brave to make you proud. He said to me last night ‘I’m going to go and do something bad so I can be put in jail with dad at least then I will be with him’.

I’m not going to lie, reading this broke my heart. The prison removed my wife’s phone number over a week ago so I have not even been able to speak with my children, it also upsets me that in my son’s head he must think his dad has done something bad to end up in prison.

Before I sit and feel too sorry for myself I should put it into perspective. I’m away from my family for a short duration. Members of our armed forces’ children must go through this all the time which is why I admire the sacrifices they make, past and present.

I’m not going to go too much into my case as my appeal is just being lodged. What I will talk about is the difference you have all made to me. When I landed in this prison I was totally gutted. Gutted about what my family were about to go through. Gutted for those who I was in discussions with who rely on me to tell their stories. I was also adamant I would be killed on this prison sentence.

When I was leading the English Defence League I was sentenced to 10 months in prison in 2012, I was separated from everyone for my own protection and kept on solitary confinement for 22 weeks. I believe this was because the government feared what may happen on the streets if I was murdered in prison. Lee Rigby was beheaded in 2013 and our government witnessed that a soldier can be beheaded and no one will really react.

I was then sent to prison in 2014 for 18 months. I was literally fed to the wolves. I was lucky to escape alive, fighting my way through violent beatings at the hands of Muslim inmates.

The government knew I could be killed and no one would really do anything. It was a sad moment for myself, realising that if I’m murdered my death wouldn’t make much difference or change. I also realised my family would not be looked after and would go on to struggle for safety and stability.

OH WHAT A CHANGE 4 YEARS MAKES!

In the first few days here I began to hear that thousands are protesting outside 10 Downing Street. This was within 24 horus of my abduction by the state. I was told ‘your petition has 100,000’, then ‘hey its now at 300,000’ and then half a million. I heard people were climbing the gates of Downing Street.

I thought the people telling me must be getting it wrong. They must be confused with our Day for Freedom demo. I was completely unaware what was unfolding outside of the prison was a world wide FREE TOMMY movement.

I was in danger in my first days in this prison, housed with Muslim prisoners, then something changed. I was whisked from my cell and wing and taken and separated to safety. I believe now this was the moment Lord Pearson spoke up about my safety. His actions could have literally saved my life.

I then heard protests were spreading across the globe. I heard politicians, police and barristers were speaking out. I’ve heard so many people who have sat on the fence for years were now speaking out. To hear that 20-30 thousand people travelled to London this weekend to stand in solidarity with me is an amazing feeling. I truly am gobsmacked at the reaction from the public. I feel so loved!! Loved and appreciated.

I receive a bag of letters and emails every day. I read every one. I’m so grateful, I want to say a thank you to every single person who has supported me.

I understand how difficult it is to speak out. I understand that many people would have faced a backlash from friends, or even from work for speaking out on my behalf and I am truly grateful to people for standing with me.

Free speech is not free when it has social consequences. I sit here happy, happy that this sentence has backfired on the establishment. Happy that the public reaction has sent a message of the consequences if they have me murdered on this sentence.

I have said for so long that there will be a moment in our country, none of us know what that moment will be but it will change the direction of our nation.

I think deeply about this and for a while now I’ve been sure that I will be murdered for opposing Islam. A scary thought. But not as scary as thinking it will make no difference. Although now I sit here smiling with the belief that my murder would start a revolution, I’m standing laughing out loud – that may seem mad – but knowing this is so satisfying.

I’ve always said I’d sacrifice my life tomorrow if it would end the Islamic takeover of our beautiful land. Our battle is not as simple as against flesh and blood, but we battle a system! A corrupt system. Sitting here gives you so much time to think. We can no longer be looking from the outside in. We must involve our voice and our movement into politics. I have so many plans on what I want to do when I get out.

To hear that Geert Wilders travelled and spoke in London is so exciting for me.

When I started my activism I looked to Geert and the life changing decisions he made to speak out against Islam. He has been an inspiration to me. I can’t list all the people I need to thank as there are so many but I know Alex Jones at InfoWars would be leading the shout for my freedom. I love him, he cracks me up.

Gerard Batten of UKIP, Lord Pearson, Raheem, Ezra, Katie Hopkins, my cousin Kevin Carroll jumping straight in with the demo. Danny for organising it. DONALD TRUMP JUNIOR for tweeting. I’d have done 6 months just for that recognition.

The list could go on and on. I’ll do my proper thank yous upon my release. One person I have to thank, my wife!

When I finally got through to her on the phone from prison I asked her, “Have you had enough yet?” Ha ha. I’ve not been a great husband but she has been a perfect wife and an amazing mother.

I simply couldn’t get through any of this without my family.

So Jenna, if you are reading this letter online then know I LOVE YOU and I MISS YOU.

My mates will ruin me for this soppy shit ha ha.

Lots of people say I give them hope, but I want you all to know that your reaction, whether it be supporting my family, paying for legal costs, or even just sharing videos or tweets, you have all given me hope and an absolutely priceless feeling.

Please excuse my handwriting but my hand is failing me. I’m using my time to put pen to paper and detail out my next book. I was already working on it before this sentence. Working title: “The Battle for Britain”. Basically bringing “Enemy of the State” up to date and also looking into the future.

So I’d like to thank Her Majesty for giving me the time alone on my own to work on it. Knowing that there are more plans for demonstrations until my release is great. It’s great to know that I’ve not been forgotten and their attempts to silence me won’t work. It’s now Monday evening and I’ve just watched LOVE ISLAND ha ha.

My wife’s number was put back on the system so I have spoken with my children today so I’m less stressed and more relaxed. My children will come to visit me in the near future.

Thank you all for the support. It’s your outcry and reaction that will keep me safe. Please know how inspired and grateful I am. I’m hoping Lord Pearson and Gerard Batten will also be visiting me here and lads if you are reading this ask Geert to pop into HMP Hull with you. My appeals have gone in, appeal sentence, appeal conviction and bail app.

Oh yeah thank you Pauline Hanson, thank you AFD for the offer of asylum.

The establishment thought this would close the book. Instead the public have just turned the page to continue the next chapter.

I love and thank you all.

Mum and dad sorry about the stress I give you ha ha.

Thank you to the free world.

It’s Tuesday, I’m being moved prison so my kids won’t see me this weekend.

They’ve been the jewel in the crown of New York City’s public school system: Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech (here’s a longer list). They provided a chance for any of New York’s students, regardless of finances or race or creed or religion, to pass the qualifying test and get a fabulous education among their peers. 

So Neo-Neocon reports and comments.

But that opportunity has met the diversity police in the form of Mayor De Blasio, who has proposed an end to all that …

Mayor de Blasio of New York has a plan to “do away with the single entrance test, instead offering admission to the top 7 percent of graduates from all middle schools. That would make up 90 to 95 percent of admissions, with the remainder coming from a lottery”.

If this plan is implemented, either the failure rate will go up or the curriculum will be dumbed down, or both.

Michael Goodwin writes at the New York Post:

Under Mayor de Blasio, New Yorkers watch as their City Hall becomes a font of bad ideas. Day in, day out, the dumb and the dumber tumble forth with a common flaw: little bang for big bucks.

But de Blasio tops himself with his plan to impose a virtual racial quota on the city’s top high schools. In a single move, he surrenders the effort to improve hundreds of failing schools while simultaneously aiming to undermine the truly excellent ones.

Without doubt, this is his Worst Idea Ever. …

The plan would throw objective, proven test standards out the window, and thus qualifies as educational malpractice. The mayor inadvertently admits as much by saying his new chancellor, Richard Carranza, “is focused on social justice”.

The mission of the Social Justice movement is to ensure that the stupid, the mad, and the criminal (of all races, nationalities, ethnicities, ages, and “genders”, except “cis-heteronormative” white males, and Asian scholars because they are not stupid, mad, or criminal anyway) inherit the earth. (No matter that the criminals will then despatch the stupid and the insane.)

Not so long ago, chancellors were hired to run schools and promote educational excellence for all students. Now they’re hired to engineer outcomes based on race, ethnicity and family income.

The lower the family income the more virtuous and worthy the appointee.

This is justice only if you believe identity trumps all other human attributes, including effort, character and achievement. Sadly, de Blasio and Carranza worship that false god.

It follows that they aim to make the student body at the top high schools more closely reflect the citywide student population, which is 70 percent black and Latino. As it stands, black and Latino students make up about 10 percent of the 15,000 enrolled at the most selective public schools.

That is a serious and longstanding concern, but a fundamental problem with the argument that the schools are not diverse is that Asian students are the single-largest group at most of the schools. They constitute 73.5 percent at Stuyvesant, 65.6 percent at Bronx Science and 61.3 percent at Brooklyn Tech. Overall, Asians of all backgrounds comprise less than 20 percent of students.

Their extraordinary presence in the top schools belies de Blasio’s claim that the schools are exclusionary because many Asian students belong to poor immigrant families where English is not spoken in the home.

If the mayor wanted an honest answer to the imbalance, he would order educrats to study why so many Asian students excel and try to duplicate their work habits among all students. Instead, Asian success is now being treated as a problem that must be overcome, just as several generations ago, high-achieving Jewish students were restricted by quotas at Harvard and other Ivy League institutions.

De Blasio’s plan would be phased in over three years and do away with the single entrance test, instead offering admission to the top 7 percent of graduates from all middle schools. That would make up 90 to 95 percent of admissions, with the remainder coming from a lottery.

The change would be a case of fixing what isn’t broken. For generations, the vast bulk of the students admitted under the current system succeeded, making those high schools prime feeders for the best colleges in America.

But those facts are ignored by de Blasio because they reveal the real problem — too many elementary and middle schools in black and Latino neighborhoods are perennial failure factories. He talks a good game about fixing them and is throwing a ton of taxpayer money at them, but has little to show for it.

He, like Mayor Michael Bloomberg before him, is making it easier to take the selective school test and offer free prep courses. None of it has made much of a difference in part because de Blasio has turned the schools over to the teachers union and has given up trying to get rid of the teachers who can’t teach.

The mayor is also a big fan of dumbed-down tests and graduation requirements, always with an eye toward engineering a phony racial and ethnic balance in results.

But if those results were real, he wouldn’t need a quota to gain more balance in the top schools.

He even made it next to impossible to suspend unruly and violent students because of a racial tilt, with principals complaining that many classrooms are now chaotic.

The only silver lining is that eliminating the test for some of the schools requires state legislation, and there is little chance of that happening now. Gov. Cuomo, thankfully, doesn’t appear interested, so opponents, including Asian parents’ groups, have an opportunity to organize and stop the quota travesty in its tracks.

They shouldn’t assume common sense will prevail. Not in Albany, and certainly not with de Blasio at City Hall.

(Hat-tip Robert Kantor)

The following quotations come from The Left’s War on Whiteness by John Perazzo, a booklet recently published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center:

With the university as its launching pad and megaphone, the left has set out to systematically demonize whiteness through the rapidly growing field of Whiteness Studies, which first began to appear in college curricula in the mid-1990s and since then has become a growth industry. …

Whiteness Studies programs … stigmatize whites as malevolent oppressors of  “people of color” and as authors of crimes against humanity. (pp.12,13)

The whole booklet is worth reading. These statements are the most interesting to us:

With its stranglehold on higher education secure, in the last few years leftists waging a war on whiteness have opened another battlefront in K-12 schools. Its first target has been teacher-training programs, turning them into indoctrination projects designed to produce K-12 teachers who are committed to the leftist worldview, especially the idea that “white” values and traditions pose a mortal threat to the well-being of nonwhite minorities. (p.21)

The mission of making whites feel guilty and ashamed must begin as early as possible in their childhood.

There is no virtue associated with whiteness that is not a vice in disguise. In an article published in September 2017, Pennsylvania State University professor Angela Putman criticized “whiteness ideologies” that extol the virtues of “hard work” and “meritocracy”. (p.16)

Heather Hackman, a former professor of multicultural education at St. Cloud University, exhorts schoolteachers to become political activists who reject “the racial narrative of White”, which, by her telling, aims to develop children who are “honest, hard-working, disciplined, rigorous, successful”, and capable pf speaking “proper English”. These goals, says Hackman, are actually the racist objectives of what she terms a “Super-Whitey” mentality that disrespects the cultural values of nonwhites.  (pp.21-22).

The implication is that nonwhite cultural values are: dishonesty, idleness, sloppiness, superficiality, incompetence, failure, and the inability to speak proper English. And that these are the better values.

It is a prescription for poverty, misery, and despair.

We hadn’t heard of him either. But now we know –

Daniel Jones is doing much evil. He and a huge crowd to which he belongs are all doing much evil. The people of the United States need to be told all their names.

The best critical observer of the passing parade of our age, Mark Steyn, writes:

There have been exciting developments in the “Russia investigation”. There always are, because that is the nature of open-ended money-no-object investigations. But, to me, the most interesting development was the testimony of Michael Caputo, who appeared just before me on Tucker Carlson’s show last night. Mr Caputo was, briefly, a very minor Trump campaign aide – and so his life has been destroyed. As he told the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday:

In 2009, my wife and I moved to my hometown of East Aurora, New York to have a family. Making far less money back home, we had a far better quality of life. That is, until the Trump-Russia narrative took off. Today, I can’t possibly pay the attendant legal costs and live near my aging father, raising my kids where I grew up.

Your investigation and others into the allegations of Trump campaign collusion with Russia are costing my family a great deal of money – more than $125,000 – and making a visceral impact on my children.

That’s chump change for most senators and their vast entourages – and barely a rounding error in most of the budgets they approve. It’s also considerably less than, say, my own legal bills after the scofflaws at CRTV broke my contract and put me through a year of “binding arbitration” that Cary Katz and his sleazy business partners (“Governor” Pete Wilson of California, etc) are now refusing to be bound by (having lost the case). But, for most Americans, 125 grand in legal bills for a case you’re not even a party to is a big chunk of change.

And somewhere or other is a guy for whom blowing, say, 75 grand on lawyers is catastrophic, and they’re trying to turn him to sell-out Caputo so they can turn Caputo to sell-out whoever’s next up the chain. And they’ve got all the time in the world to bleed you dry.

Mr Caputo did something very unusual yesterday. He named names – or at least one name, from the Gulf Emir-sized retinue that attends each senator:

How many of you know Daniel Jones, former Senate Intelligence staffer for Senator Dianne Feinstein? Great guy, right? Most of you worked with him. One of you probably just talked to him this morning.

Of course, very few of us in flyover country knew Daniel until recently. Now we know that he quit his job with your Senate committee not long ago to raise $50 million from ten rich Democrats to finance more work on the FusionGPS Russian dossier. The one the FBI used to get a FISA warrant and intimidate President Donald Trump, without anyone admitting — until months after it was deployed — that it was paid for by Hillary Clinton.

In fact, good old Dan has been raising and spending millions to confirm the unconfirmable – and, of course, to keep all his old intel colleagues up-to-speed on what FusionGPS and British and Russian spies have found…

We know from the news that he’s been briefing Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of this committee. Which one of you works for Senator Warner? Please give Danny my best.

Great. So a Senate Intelligence Committee staffer is – what’s the word? – colluding with Russian spooks to keep the story alive. And he leaks more than those Moscow hookers:

I saw some of his handiwork just last month. Remember this lede paragraph, from McClatchy on April 13?

‘The Justice Department special counsel has evidence that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, Michael Cohen, secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to two sources familiar with the matter.’

That’s your pal Dan, isn’t it?

It’s unclear from the transcript whether any pals of Dan confirmed this. But Mr Caputo certainly has their number:

I mean, you’re all in this together. You’re the swamp.

What America needs is an investigation of the investigators. I want to know who is paying for the spies’ work and coordinating this attack on President Donald Trump? I want to know who Dan Jones is talking to across the investigations – from the FBI, to the Southern District of New York, to the OSC, to the Department of Justice, to Congress.

Forget about all the death threats against my family. I want to know who cost us so much money, who crushed our kids, who forced us out of our home, all because you lost an election.

I want to know because God damn you to Hell.

(If you would like to read Mr Caputo’s full statement, well, oddly enough I can only find it in a non-American publication – The Daily Mail.)

…  The process is the punishment. That’s particularly true at the federal level, where as a matter of policy they first wipe you out – drain your savings, empty your retirement account, nuke the kids’ college fund …and then dangle a deal in front of you in exchange for you pleading guilty “only” to a process crime, like lying to the lyin’ liars who run the FBI. It is an awesome thing to behold – particularly by comparison with, say, military justice, where the US has been holding 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for almost four times as long as the First World War and still can’t manage to bring him to trial.

In a sane system, he’d have been convicted and hanged in a fortnight. Instead, his lawyers are now arguing he’s been brain damaged by the United States. Who knows? But, given that the US has been nursemaiding him for over fifteen years, it’s not unreasonable to argue that, whatever medical ailments afflict him, they developed during Uncle Sam’s leisurely custody of him.

Thus American justice in the 21st century: It can ruin a no-name Trump campaign volunteer in nothing flat. But it can’t try a guy who murdered three thousand innocents in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, another two hundred in the Bali nightclub bombing, plus Daniel Pearl in Pakistan … and has confessed to all this and more. …

Despite this being the most litigious society on earth huge numbers of Americans remain oblivious to the vast amount of human wreckage piled up: Every day on cable news, I hear some Democrat telling the host that, if these former minor Trump aides have nothing to hide, then they have nothing to fear from investigation-without-end: We need to let the law do its job, and let the process play itself out. …

When the process plays itself out as lethargically and ruinously as this, the process itself is the problem – as Michael Caputo has discovered.

I wish him well, and I wish those toying with him as they’ve toyed with Carter Page and others are indeed damned to Hell.

We like the idea of their “damnation”. Unfortunately there is no Hell for them to suffer in eternally. It is here on earth, in this one and only life, that justice needs to be done. Will the Mueller conspirators be punished by the law? We hope they will, but see little to encourage the hope.

*

Ah, a sign that the wheels of justice might be beginning to turn against the villains:

A federal judge on Friday [May 4, 2018] harshly rebuked Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team during a hearing for ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort – suggesting they lied about the scope of the investigation, are seeking “unfettered power” and are more interested in bringing down the president.

“You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort,” U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III told Mueller’s team. “You really care about what information Mr. Manafort can give you to lead you to Mr. Trump and an impeachment, or whatever.”

Further, Ellis demanded to see the unredacted “scope memo”, a document outlining the scope of the special counsel’s Russia probe that congressional Republicans have also sought.

May the good judge decree that the unredacted memo be published so we can all read it.

This is a kind of review. But it is more of an argument about ideas that vitally affect the real world.

I am in emphatic agreement with roughly half of what Professor Steven Pinker says in his new book Enlightenment Now: the Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress*, and in vehement disagreement with the rest of it. Like him, I esteem the Enlightenment most highly; profoundly value science; and certainly want progress in everything that makes us happier and better informed, our lives longer, healthier, less painful, and more enjoyable. Like him, I am an atheist. It is chiefly with his ideas on Humanism that I disagree. Which may seem strange since humanism is atheist. And, certainly, on all his criticisms of religion I am in complete accord. More than that: where small “h” humanism is concerned with humane morals – the imperative to treat our fellow human beings and other sentient beings humanely – the great professor and I could sing in harmony.

“The moral alternative to theism,” he writes, “is humanism.”

But Humanism-the-movement holds principles that I not only do not like, but strongly dislike. They are principles of the Left. And  while he is not uncritical of the Left, Professor Pinker upholds those principles. Humanism, wherever it may be found, is a Leftist ideology. And because the Humanist movement is well-established, widespread, its opinions prominently published, and taught (or preached) where scholars gather, atheism is assumed by many to belong to the Left, inseparably, part and parcel of its essential ideology.

Atheism may be indispensable to the Left, but Leftism is not necessary to atheism.

Atheism as such carries no connotations. No political or ethical ideas logically flow from it. It is simply non-belief in the existence of a divine being. Nothing more. A person’s atheism does not itself make him more humane or less humane.

Steven Pinker implies that it does. Although he states that “atheism is not a moral system … just the absence of supernatural belief”, he also declares that “secularism leads to humanism, turning people away from prayer, doctrine, and ecclesiastical authority and toward practical policies that make them and their fellows better off.”

He reasons along these lines:

“Knowledge of the world is derived by observation, experimentation, and rational analysis.”

Not from holy books. Agreed.

“Humans are an integral part of nature, the result of unguided evolutionary change.”

Agreed.

There being no supernatural moral authority, and as human beings have natural needs –

“Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience.”

So far, no cause for quarrel. But he elaborates on this last statement to demonstrate that Humanists do this “deriving” well:

“Humanists ground values in human welfare, shaped by human circumstances, interests and concerns and extended to the global ecosystem …”

There it comes, as if it followed logically from scientific knowledge and humane secularism, one of the main obsessions of the Left: concern for the planet, for which, the Left claims, human beings bear responsibility. The words “man-made global warming” silently intrude themselves; as does the “solution” for it – global governance, by those who know what the human race must do; total communism, the highest principle of the Left; its vision of a whole-world Utopia. Though Steven Pinker himself is not a Utopian, he writes a good deal in this book about the virtues of “globalist” politics. He sees globalism as an enlightened, reasonable, science-based, progressive, humanist creed. To “maximize individual happiness”, he remarks, “progressive cultures” work to “develop global community”. He has much praise for international institutions – including, or even led by, the (actually deeply evil) United Nations. He is confident the UN and other international bodies such as the EU, formed after the end of the Second World War, can help keep the world at peace. In fact, there has not been a single year since 1945 when the world has been without a war or wars.

To the globalist view he opposes the populist view. Not wrong when stated thus. But he does not see the populist view as the one held by 63 million Americans who voted Donald Trump into the presidency of the United States because they wanted more jobs, lower taxes, and secure borders; or that of the British majority who voted to withdraw their country from the undemocratic and corrupt European Union. No. He sees populism as a cult of “romantic heroism”, a longing for “greatness embodied in an individual or a nation”.

He is adamantly against the nation-state. He thinks that those who uphold the idea of the nation-state “ludicrously” envision a “global order” that “should consist of ethnically homogeneous and mutually antagonistic nation-states”. Who has ever expressed such an idea? And he puts “multiculturalism” (the failing experiment of enforcing the co-existence of diverse tribes within a nation’s borders) on an equal footing with “multi-ethnicity” (the melting-pot idea that has worked so splendidly for the United States of America).

To him, nationalism is ineluctably authoritarian and fascist. He sees President Trump – who is in fact unswervingly for individual freedom – as a “charismatic leader” of the dictatorial Mussolini mold. The politics of the Right for Professor Pinker are irredeemably dyed in the wool with Nietzschean anti-morality, “superman” aspirations, and genocidal urgings. Libertarianism is tainted with it too. He writes: “ … Ayn Rand’s celebration of selfishness, her deification of the heroic capitalist, and her disdain for the general welfare had Nietzsche written all over them.”

Interestingly – and restoratively to my esteem for him – he also asserts that certain Marxists and certain Leftist movements are equally, or even more, colored with Nietzsche’s inhumanity: “[Nietzsche] was a key influence on … Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, and a godfather to all the intellectual movements of the 20^th century that were hostile to science and objectivity, including Existentialism, Critical Theory, Post-structuralism, Deconstructionism, and Postmodernism.”

Steven Pinker’s humanism, then, is not far to the Left, just “left-of-center”. And most of the humanists I have known (and argued with) would also place themselves on that section of the political spectrum. “[T]he moral and intellectual case for humanism is, I believe, overwhelming …,” he writes.

He concludes (and here he specifically rejects Utopianism):

“We will never have a perfect world. And it would be dangerous to seek one. But there is no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing. This heroic story … belongs not to any tribe but to all humanity – to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being. For it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance.”

That is the vision of the Decent Thinking Western Man. He believes that all human beings ultimately want the same things; that the good life is defined for all in the same general terms; that all  would agree to the Golden Rule, which has been “rediscovered in hundreds of moral traditions”.

But are those beliefs true? He himself records that there are many who do not value knowledge above ignorance, reason above superstition, freedom above coercion, even life above death. Which is to say, he writes about Islam (in which there is no Golden Rule). He knows Islam has no trace of “Enlightenment humanism”. He declares it an “illiberal” creed, and observes that “[M]any Western intellectuals – who would be appalled if the repression, misogyny, homophobia, and political violence that are common in the Islamic world were found in their own societies even diluted a hundred fold – have become strange apologists when these practices are carried out in the name of Islam.”

He finds one explanation for the double-standard of these intellectuals in their “admirable desire to prevent prejudice against Muslims”. But when it comes to revulsion against ideologists of repression, misogyny, homophobia, and political violence, is it prejudice or is it judgment? He says also that some of the apologetics are “intended to discredit a destructive (and possibly self-fulfilling) narrative that the world is embroiled in a clash of civilizations”. (Or, as I see it, of civilization against barbarism.) I wonder how anyone can look at the drastically changing demographics of Europe, or at least the Western part of it which will surely be under Islamic rule before the century is out, and not notice the clash.

But he does say that “calling out the antihumanistic features of contemporary Islamic belief is in no way Islamophobic”. Being the decent thinking Western man that he is, he is firmly for critical examination of all ideas.

His optimism shines out of the book. He thinks Islam can be reformed, even that a Muslim Enlightenment is possible. He believes there was an earlier age of Islamic Enlightenment, an “Islamic Golden Age” which could serve as a precedent. Well, if one wants to see bright possibilities, Islam may come to prefer science to the assertions of its prophet. It may become humane in its law and stop oppressing women. It may contribute to human progress. But whatever changes may come to Islam in the future, at present it does not value life above death, freedom above coercion, knowledge above superstition. And there is no good reason to believe it ever will.

Jillian Becker    April 12, 2018

*Enlightenment Now: the Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker, Viking, New York 2018. The quotations in the article come from the last chapter, Humanism.

The sheer incoherence of the Left must surely sink it eventually!

Feminists who claimed for decades to be fighting for women’s “liberation” defend the absolute subjugation of Muslim women. In their thousands, wearing silly pink baby hats, they bob about  Linda Sarsour, a Muslima in a hijab, cheering her every lying word as she tells them how much better for women Islam is than the Constitution of the USA.

Americans who worked passionately for years to keep the teaching of religion – Christianity in particular – out of public schools, are now letting Islam be taught in them. And not just allowing it but insisting on it. And what is being taught is not even the truth about that horrible religion. We would not object if the truth were being told. No; what the children get is a false, prettified version written by deceitful proselytizing Muslims. A supremacist, totalitarian, misogynist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, murderous, savagely cruel ideology is presented to young scholars as a kindly, gentle thing, full of good-will and brotherly love.

And this happened:

So, after being maligned and threatened, Councilman Tom Harrison retracted his objection to Islam being included in the school curriculum, apologized, and groveled.

The idea of the separation of church and state does not exist in Islam. And it will no longer apply in all public schools in the United States, despite the First Amendment of the Constitution. At least, not when it comes to Islam. Islam, a blood-thirsty intolerant creed, is excepted.

Tolerance. Inclusiveness. Diversity. Buzzwords of the Left. Yet Leftists passionately support the intolerance, exclusiveness, and dogmatism that characterize Islam. They ignore its doctrine  that everyone in the world must become Muslim or suffer dire consequences, including murder.

What the Left has never understood, not for a moment since the New Left prophets such as Herbert Marcuse changed the category of persons they declared themselves to be the champions and saviors of  – substituting Lumpenproletarians, convicted felons, hoboes, women, Third Worlders for Karl Marx’s romanticized workers – is that they are patronizing the subjects of their crusade. They are the most extreme of social snobs.

They claim to be acting out of compassion, but there is an awful lot of condescension in their compassion, and an awful lot of vanity in their condescension.

Very few of them ever leave their comfortable quarters in the schools or parliaments or penthouses or manors or leafy suburbs where they write their books, speeches and op-eds, to visit the unsafe regions of the world where the folks they have made their Cause actually struggle to survive. They know almost nothing about them, and do not want to know. How shocked would they be to learn that the most rabid hatred of other races, religions, tribes, or mere skin color, is to be found there, among the “oppressed”, the “deprived”, the “wretched of the earth”?

So yes, there is a privileged white patriarchy consumed with moral vanity. But it is not to be found on the conservative Right. Here no one cares what color a person’s skin is. We do not think with our skins.

The privileged white patriarchy is to be found where ill-informed women march in pink baby hats. Where self-righteous students scream out their opinions against citizens’ ownership of guns. Where George Soros signs his checks.

Race. Sex. Global warming.

The three planks in the platform of the Left.

And the greatest of these is global warming.

It is wicked of us human beings to cause it. We must do penance, and make amends.

James Delingpole writes at Breitbart:

The climate alarmists have finally got their day in court against those pesky free-thinking intelligent people they call “climate deniers”.

Big mistake. The overconfident alarmists appear to have bitten off more than they can chew. They imagined that they’d fool the world into thinking that this was a case about ordinary, wronged citizens – specifically the cities of San Francisco and neighboring Oakland – taking on the evil, sea-level-raising, planet-destroying might of Big Oil.

In reality, as is becoming clearer by the day, it’s the “science” of climate change which is really on trial here. And given that the “science” of climate change is so shaky that it might as well be called “witchcraft” this is not a discussion that’s likely to end well for the shysters who are promoting it …

The cities of San Francisco and Oakland are suing five Big Oil firms – Chevron, Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, BP, and Royal Dutch Shell – alleging that they have conspired, Big-Tobacco-style, to conceal the harm of their products. Apparently, these oil majors ought to be compelled to pay billions of dollars in compensation for the damage they have done, inter alia by causing sea levels to rise.

Already the plaintiffs have run into a major problem. Judge William Alsup – who by rights really ought to have been one of their guys, given that he’s a Clinton appointment who lives in California – turns out to be the real deal. … [He]  has pretty much dismissed the … conspiracy theory. “From what I’ve seen, and feel free to send me other documentation, but all I’ve seen so far is that someone [from an oil major] went to the IPCC conference and took notes. That’s not a conspiracy,” he said.

This does not augur well for the plaintiffs.

The oil majors have been about as helpful as a chocolate fireguard in this case. You’d think that with all those billions, they’d have a little to set aside to make a decent fight in defense of their own industry. But in fact, for reasons ranging from cowardice to convenience to cynicism, most of them are heavily invested in the alarmist cause. Exxon’s Rex Tillerson wanted the U.S. to stay in the Paris Climate Accord; Shell’s CEO Ben Van Beurden is a veritable Uriah Heep when it comes to grovelling about the evils of his industry; BP once tried to rebrand itself “Beyond Petroleum” lest anyone confuse it with a company whose business model depended on extracting sticky black stuff from the ground.

When the judge asked the various parties to give him a tutorial on climate change, only Chevron bothered to do so. Instead, most of the best scientific arguments have been made for them by skeptics offering amicus curiae – “friends of the court” – briefs. Despite what you hear claimed by climate alarmists, skeptics receive little if any financial support from the oil industry because the oil industry just doesn’t want the flak – and it knows that skeptics are so committed to their cause they’re prepared to say this stuff for free, so why bother?

One amicus curiae team, supported by the Heartland Institute, comprises Christopher Monckton, Willie Soon, David Legates and William Briggs. … Here … is a short summary [of their  brief]:

There is no “consensus” among scientists that recent global warming was chiefly anthropogenic, still less that unmitigated anthropogenic warming has been or will be dangerous or catastrophic …

Even if it be assumed [for the sake of argument] that all of the 0.8 degC global warming since anthropogenic influence first became potentially significant in 1950 was attributable to us, in the present century little more than 1.2 degC of global warming is to be expected, not the 3.3 degC that the  IPCC had predicted.

The other team comprises William Happer, Steven Koonin and Richard Lindzen. Here is a summary of their argument:

The climate is always changing; changes like those of the past half-century are common in the geologic record, driven by powerful natural phenomena.

Human influences on the climate are a small (1%) perturbation to natural energy flows.

It is not possible to tell how much of the modest recent warming can be ascribed to human influences.

There have been no detrimental changes observed in the most salient climate variables and today’s projections of future changes are highly uncertain.

[The plaintiffs] have two major problems: a) they’re not intellectually in the same league as the skeptics and b) the science just doesn’t support them.

The Warmist team’s leading academic is Professor Myles Allen of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University. This sounds impressive. But he didn’t do himself many favors when at one point, he told the court “Now oxygen is almost 29 percent of the atmosphere.” OK, so perhaps he was just having a Condor moment (the correct figure is 21 percent). His bigger difficulty is that his argument for the existence of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory is riddled with omissions and inaccuracies which are cruelly exposed.  Allen’s presentation, for example, made much of Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish chemist who posited that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would cause “global warming” (though Arrhenius considered this to be a good thing, not a bad thing). But our understanding of climate change has moved on since then, not least in the recognition that water vapor is a far more significant greenhouse gas than CO2.

As [an] anonymous demolisher notes …

Myles Allen points out that CO2 is potent relative to the non-GHGs of O2 and N2, but fails to address H2O. That is like claiming an aspirin cured the pain AFTER being given a huge dose of morphine, and never mentioning the morphine.

There is much more in this scathing vein, such as this dismissal of Allen’s claim to the court that carbon dioxide is rising to levels not seen for 20 million years.

Cherry picking at its best. CO2 has been as high as 7,000 ppm and NEVER caused catastrophic warming or ocean acidification. Life has thrived through all levels of atmospheric CO2. Coral  Reefs formed during periods where there was much higher CO2. The globe fell into an ice age when CO2 was 4,000 ppm, 10x what it is today. BTW, plants die when CO2 falls below 180 ppm.We are near the lowest level in geological history for CO2, and we are dangerously close to the level where plants starve to death.

Warming is infinitely preferable to an ice age.

Funny how Dr. Myles Allen forgot to include the longer-term CO2 graphic [which] follows standard of living far better than temperatures.

The bottom line is, if you’re going to duke it out on the science, you’d better make damn sure that your science is better than your opponent’s science. In the Alarmists’ case this just isn’t an option.

Up till now the Alarmists have understood this. It’s why they roll the way they do, preferring to use the Appeal to Authority (and underhand bullying and smearing attacks) rather than engage skeptics in public debate. Whenever they’ve done the latter, they’ve tended to lose – as Tony Thomas notes at  “Do not debate!”, that has been warmist policy  ever since their talent was trounced by the sceptic team in a two-hour New York public debate at Radio City Hall in 2007.

The audience initially polled 57.3% to 29.9% for a “Global Warming Crisis”, but after the debate that flipped 46.2% to 42.2% in favour of the sceptics. US warmist “experts” subsequently refused even to share platforms with sceptic rivals if informed critics of their shtick are given equal standing.

In March, 2013, Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA/GISS climate group, fled the TV interview room when he learned Roy Spencer, an expert on earth temperature readings from satellite, was arriving and would subject him to questions. A year later Dan Weiss, the director of climate strategy at the liberal Center for American Progress, did an equivalent runner rather than face sceptic Marc Morano in debate, as did Hollywood icon and “Titanic” director James Cameron in 2010.

In a recent exception, warmist Jon Christensen (UCal LA) and sceptic Willie Soon (Harvard) went head to head at a Comedy Club in Los Angeles in January. The result was not scored but the audience jeered whenever Christensen denied California’s soaring power prices were hurting low-income families.

This attempt by alarmists to take on five oil majors smacks of hubris. Or desperation. Or suicidal complacency. Or perhaps a mix of all three. Because the alarmist position happens also to be the longstanding establishment position, it’s possible that they have been lulled into forgetting the trial belongs to another era: the one before Donald Trump came along and drove a coach and horses through the so-called climate “consensus”.

This cannot end well for the Alarmists who brought this dishonest, vexatious, and expensive case.

What did they think they were playing at?

And wasn’t it all drummed up for political ends? That at least was the understanding among the Nomenklatura who orchestrated it all.

From our post Turning point (April 4, 2016]:

If they were honest, the climate alarmists would [all] admit that they are not working feverishly to hold down global temperatures — they would acknowledge that they are instead consumed with the goal of holding down capitalism and establishing a global welfare state.

Have doubts? Then listen to the words of former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015:

One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.

So what is the goal of environmental policy?

We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.

For those who want to believe that maybe Edenhofer just misspoke and doesn’t really mean that, consider that a little more than five years ago he also said:

The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.

Mad as they are, Edenhofer’s comments are nevertheless consistent with other alarmists who have spilled the movement’s dirty secret. Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, made a similar statement in anticipation of last year’s Paris climate summit. [From which President Trump sensibly withdrew the United States.]

This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution. This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.

So world-wide redistribution is the aim. Global Communism dictated by those who know how the world should be managed.

And must manage it. To avert planetary disaster. It’s that big a crisis and only they can save us. Because … global warming.

… 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.

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.