The Yellow Jacket protests continue in France, and have spread to Holland, Belgium, Sweden(!), and Britain. 

We hope the uprising will seriously disturb all EU member states, and that its purpose is to overthrow their present governments and permanently destroy the EU itself. We hope it is a case of the peoples of Western Europe finally ridding themselves of the traitors they foolishly elected to govern them, who have used their power to ruin their own countries and the continent as a whole by letting in millions of hostile unassimilable Muslims from the Third World. 

Bruce Bawer, writing at Gatestone, says that is what he thinks and hopes it may be:      

I wondered whether this dramatic sign of popular discontent marked the start of the WesternEuropean public’s pushback against the elites’ disastrous multicultural and globalist project. …

The first thing one notices about the variety of motives cited in the media is that they are not unrelated. Anti-EU sentiment? Opposition to the huge immigrant tide? A major reason for anti-EU sentiment in WesternEurope is resentment at the power of Brussels to force member states to take certain numbers of so-called refugees. Similarly, protesters who are angry over high taxes know very well that a great deal of their money is being used to support immigrants who become welfare clients the moment they enter the country. …

AcrossWestern Europe, ordinary citizens feel ignored and condescended to by their political, business, academic, and media elites. Against the will of most of these citizens, their leaders are gradually surrendering their nations’ sovereignty to the EU, which Macron has frankly admitted wanting to transform into a United States of Europe.

Also against these citizens’ will, their nations have been flooded with Muslim immigrants who embody a major cultural challenge, have caused massive social unrest, and represent a devastating economic burden.

Although it is increasingly obvious that taxpayer-funded Islamization is leading Western Europe down the wrong path, the EU, which stands foursquare behind this disastrous development, refuses to reverse course. Naturally, the powerless man and woman in the street are scared, resentful, and, yes, outraged. Perhaps the question should not be why Western Europeans are rioting but why they did not start rioting a long time ago. 

The media in general, being against nationalism and for Islamization, are of course using their usual smear-labels to discredit the movement. The protestors, they say, are xenophobes, bigots, Nazis. They claim that Nazi banners have appeared among the Yellow Jackets. If they have, we suspect that globalist fans of Islam and the EU planted them there. It’s a common trick of the Left to do  such a thing. We remember when “Nazis” with racist banners were planted among Tea Party protestors in America to discredit the movement.   

So is this the beginning of a war of the Yellow Jackets for Western nationalism against the Black Masks for Islam and globalism? 

What discourages the idea is a sign that the yellow jacket is becoming the symbol of civil uprising as such. In Italy, Muslim immigrants themselves and their globalist allies donned the same yellow jackets to protest the policies of the nationalist government recently elected to oppose Islamization!  

An encouraging sign that the Yellow Jacket uprising is a movement to save  Europe is that it is shaking the arrogant rulers, the globalists in power. It has broken apart the coalition government of Belgium. And President Macron of France has had to abandon a policy of taxing citizens to the bone in order to pay for planetary coolants to be manufactured out of moonbeams.    

The war that will never end has had many names.

The Dead Sea Scrolls called it The War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness.

For some fifty years after the end of World War Two it was called The Cold War between Communism and Freedom. (More concretely, Communist Russia and its satellites and allies on the one side and the United States and its allies on the other.)

Now it is The War between Globalists and Nationalists.

Whatever it is called, it is felt to be a Manichaean struggle between Good and Evil.

David Samuel writes at The Spectator (U.K.):

To properly understand the trend of world political events in recent years, it is essential to appreciate that a titanic struggle for supremacy between two implacably opposed ideologies is raging right across the Western world. It is an undeclared war waged largely behind the scenes.

The attackers are powerful globalist and multi-national interests such as the EU and the UN, supported by many leftist groups funded, paradoxically, by mega-rich financiers. Their ultimate aim is the abolition of borders, migration between countries at will, the dismantling of national identity, the transfer of power to supra-national bodies, and eventually the imposition of a post-democratic unitary world government. The defenders are those who believe that Western-style democracy based on the nation-state remains the least-worst way yet devised of safe-guarding the life, liberty and prosperity of its citizens.

Public awareness of the struggle is almost non-existent because, with very few exceptions, the free world’s mainstream media long ago aligned themselves with the globalists and have shamefully failed to report even the existence of this battle. But once you start to look at world events through this prism, it’s amazing how clear and easy to understand they become. …

The war was going well for the globalists until two unexpected events in 2016 derailed their strategy. Brexit and Trump. Each represented an enormous set-back to the globalists in their quiet procession  towards victory. The gloves were well and truly off, the masks had slipped, and a real fight was now taking place. On Brexit, the EU can hardly believe its luck that the UK Tory government has shown itself to be so utterly incompetent in its negotiations to leave and in its defence of UK interests. To paraphrase a well-known character from a venerable TV series, ‘You may think there’s an extensive fifth-column at work in the highest levels of government, I couldn’t possibly comment.’ Whilst on the subject of subversion, it might be illuminating to compare the growing movement by those in Britain suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, with the EU’s long record of backing proxies to help overturn referenda unfavourable to them in many countries.

On Trump, every stop has been pulled out. Witness the all-out efforts of the Left, and here I include the entirety of the Democratic Party, to deny his election, to delegitimise his presidency, to drive him from office and to replicate on the US’s southern border the sort of mass invasion of illegal immigrants that had earlier swept over Europe’s southern borders. Meanwhile, the UN has been busy advancing its role in immigration globalism through its Global Compact.

The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, to give it its full name, originated with the bureaucrats of the UN General Assembly in 2016.  It morphed into the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants and then through various stages to become in July 2018 the Final Draft, which is due to be adopted at the IGC (Inter-governmental conference) on international migration in Morocco in December.

At all stages it has had the backing and support of the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, who as the former UN High Commissioner for Refugees was never slow to attack Australia’s immigration policies. The Compact is basically a means by which the UN can install itself within the legislative process of democratic nation states by persuading them to recognize the supremacy of international law, i.e. that proposed by the UN and its agencies, over domestic law. It has been described variously as ‘a vision for world order that promises disorder’ and ‘a plan for borderless chaos’.

Albeit wrapped up in the boring prose designed to put you to sleep before you reach the end of the sentence, as so beloved by the EU, it also plans to suppress any criticism of increased immigration by attacking freedom of speech.  In a sinister passage it commits to ‘promote independent, objective and quality reporting of media outlets, including by sensitizing and educating media professionals on migration-related issues and terminology, investing in ethical reporting standards and advertising, and stopping allocation of public funding or material support to media outlets that systematically promote intolerance, xenophobia, racism and other forms of discrimination towards migrants’. The devil is in the detail as to whether such terms are to be defined objectively or subjectively.

On 25 July, Alan Jones asked then Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton, whether he or his government would be signing The Compact and the best he could get out of Dutton was ‘Not in its current form’. Since then, of course, we now have a more conservative Prime Minister. So can we now expect Australia to join the US in refusing to sign The Compact? Let’s hope so. But what of a possible Labor government? With their track record of encouraging people-smugglers (50,000 illegal immigrants and 1,200 deaths at sea), we can only fear the worst. Our best hope is that we can open the eyes of public opinion to what is going on.

Before it’s too late.

Which side is winning?

It seems all too clear that the battle over borders – an essential  battle for the Nationalists to win if they are to preserve the nation-states – the Globalists are winning.

Benjamin Sanders writes at Altnews Media:

The Global Compact for Migration, in the works since April 2017, is a rather hushed up plan to move large numbers of people from the third world to countries with a strong, sustainable economy. In other words, the United Nations along with all the countries who have signed up to this plan want to move large numbers of people from Africa, the Middle East and Central America into Europe, North America and East Asia.

The key aspects of the plan reveal that illegal immigration will in future no longer be treated as a crime:

‘…protect the safety, dignity and human rights and fundamental freedoms of all migrants, regardless of their migratory status, and at all times…’

They also reveal that the United Nations wants regular migration, over an indefinite period:

‘…the development of a Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration…’

And the plan also outlines what they see as the need for steps towards a world government:

‘…make an important contribution to global governance and enhance coordination on international migration…’

But the most worrying part is the sheer amount of people …

Number of people, please, number! You cannot have an”amount” of people …

… they want to migrate to the west, with their estimations for future population growth revealing a shocking and flawed mindset among the global elite. They are either complicit in producing population sustainability estimates that are completely absurd, or alternatively they simply lack the common sense to see that these estimates are unsustainable. I suspect it is the former, though we will probably never know for sure.

As it stands, only America, Hungary and Austria have left or rejected The Global Compact for Migration, with Poland, Croatia, Czechia and Australia reportedly considering a similar move. Britain and over a 180 other countries are still signed up to it and are due to meet in December to finalize the policy and adopt it into practice.  This means that in less than 2 months, Illegal immigration will no longer be considered illegal; anyone with half a brain cell can see the ramifications of that. No wonder the mainstream media are not reporting on it!

As we have seen recently with the migrant caravans containing thousands of people moving north towards the Mexico-American border, one of the great struggles of our time is dealing with mass immigration and its effects. Despite populists seeing promising election victories over the last few years, migration continues to increase. In Europe recently, hundreds of migrants forced their way into Croatia, a country which is seeing increasing numbers of arrivals. Stopping illegal migration such as this in the future will be a rather pointless exercise if countries are forced by the UN to fly them in anyway, as The Global Compact for Migration agreement stipulates.

If Brexit succeeds, and if the British having recovered the power to make and enforce their own laws overcome the tactic of mass immigration by some means not easy to think of, the Globalist victory in that quarter could be reversed.

If President Trump gets his Wall built to keep out illegal Latin American immigrants, that would be another victory for the Nationalists.

If the Globalists win this war, it could be a very long lasting victory for them and, as both Samuel and Sanders agree, the end of our civilization.

The ray of light would then be that the war would not end.

Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, declares himself to be a patriot.

But not a nationalist.

“Patriotism,” he says, “is the opposite of nationalism.”

To his mind, patriotism is good, nationalism is bad.

He emphatically expresses his own patriotism, saying at various times:

Long live the Republic, long live France.

France is back.

France is a strong, wealthy country.

Our language, history, and civilization shine out across every continent.

I bring the spirit of French conquest.

He believes that France has reason to be proud – but not the French.

Not those who incarnate “the spirit of French conquest”.

For the French to be proud of being French would be nationalism. And nationalism is bad for two reasons:

First, because not just the indigenous French live in France.

Second, because France is only one of the 28 countries in the European Union.

If you are a citizen of one of those countries, you can like the country you live in, you can be proud of it. That makes you a patriot. Good. But you may not like it better than the other 27 countries. If you do, you are a nationalist. Bad.

Macron declares:

We are a continent of refugees, and if you say we can’t integrate refugees, that’s not consistent with our values, even if borders cannot be wide open. 

I want to be the president of all the people of France, for the patriots facing the threat of nationalism.

My responsibility will be to unite all the women and men ready to take on the tremendous challenges which are waiting for us, and to act.

He wants to unite them because very many of them – indigenous French citizens of France – still want France to be their country, not a country of refugees. They do not want the millions of (mainly Muslim) immigrants from the weak, poor Third World coming to live among them not to become French, but to benefit from the freedom and wealth  – which the French have attained through long centuries with their blood, sweat and tears – while keeping their own languages and customs, and even their own law. 

Those whose patriotism nationalism is expressed like that – the conservatives, the political Right – are Macron’s bad people.

The Left calls them “bigots”, “xenophobes”, “Islamophobes”, “Nazis”.

Macron calls himself a man of the Left, though not a socialist:

I am not a socialist.

I am from the Left, but I am happy to work with people from the Right.

Provided that the Right will accept the sharing of their country with multitudes of foreigners.

Macron saw his task as getting the nationalists to accept those multitudes. He called it “reforming” France.

We have no choice but to reform this country. I am not just a liberal movement. I come from the progressive Left. I am trying to refresh and counter the system.

To “refresh and counter”. A contradiction, yes.  Macron’s politics are bundles of contradictions.

On further thought, he was not sure that “reform” is the right word for what he believes he has to do. To “reform” France would be too local a project. Too … nationalistic. The French, all of them, have not only to accept that they must share their country with hostile foreigners – and be generous to them, and adapt their own ways to the foreigners’ because the foreigners are not interested in adapting to the ways of the French – they must fundamentally change from being French to being Europeans.

But wait! Even that is too self-serving, too vain and arrogant – still tainted with the stain of a kind of nationalism. As France is not better than the other 27 countries of the European Union, so Europe is not better than the rest of the world. (With one exception, which we’ll come to.)

It would not be enough merely to reform France into a different kind of country, changed from a nation-state into a constituent state of a United Europe. Not enough because France  needs to be much more changed, to have its Frenchness so eradicated that it will be transformed into just one geographical area named “France” among hundreds of other geographical areas in a United World.  

Macron announced:

I am for a progressive world. I do not propose to reform France; I propose to transform it at its deepest level.

That is “globalism”. It is the goal of the “progressives” – the Left – everywhere.

The Left has always understood that for their dream of a communist utopia to work, human nature must be fundamentally changed. Changed “at its deepest level”.

In fact, of course, Europe is not “a continent of refugees”. At least not until very recently. Now Macron and his fellow European Union leaders are trying to make it so by importing multitudes from Asia and Africa. Until that began to happen, the countries of Europe were largely homogeneous.

The country whose population is a mixture, is the United States of America. The American nation is the one that does not define itself in terms of origin and descent, or by subjection to king or chieftain, or by adherence to a particular religion. It is a nation of many peoples bound into one by a Constitution. It’s existence is the greatest political achievement of humankind. Those Americans who are aware of this have great cause to be proud of their country. Cause to be patriots. To be nationalists. Their nationalism is not a narrow arrogance. It is an achievement. And its present leader, President Donald Trump, is a proud patriot, a self-declared nationalist who puts the interests of his own country first, who wants it to be a great force and example for promoting freedom in the world. A country tolerant of all religions. With all its citizens equal before the law.

And it is this country, this leader, this patriotism, this nationalism that Emmanuel Macron and his fellow European globalists despise!

Within America, the Left, the “progressives” do not like their country the way it is. They are  trying, furiously and violently, to change it. Insurrectionist organizations, many of them financed by the multibillionaire George Soros, are fighting by all means, including treasonous conspiracy inside the agencies of the state, to unseat the president, align the country with globalist Europe. Also to abolish borders and admit as many immigrants from the poor, weak Third World as desire to come and benefit from the freedom and wealth of the US, while keeping their own languages and customs, and even their own law. 

George Soros collaborated with the Nazis in his youth, when his native Hungary was under occupation by the German Third Reich. He is a Jew who helped the Nazis kill Hungarian Jews. He calls one or a group of his organizations the Open Society Foundations. His “open society” ideal is a socialist – which is to say a closed – society. When Karl Popper praised the “open society” he meant a conservative, capitalist, free enterprise society within the nation-state. So George Soros, whether ingenuously out of misunderstanding, or disingenuously and ironically, is misusing the label by sticking it on the collectivist system he works treacherously in many countries to instate.

Opposition to this Nazi-assisting, communist sympathizing, promoter of civil chaos is deplored by President Macron. He has not only embraced the Soros idea of an open society (“I am for an open society,” he states plainly), he also accuses those who denounce Soros of “anti-Semitism”. (Which recalls the classic example of “chutzpah”: the murderer of father and mother pleading for mercy at his trial on the grounds that he’s an orphan.)

When Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Emmanuel Macron courted him. The first state banquet given by the Trump administration was in his honor. On television news one could watch the slight figure of Macron scampering about to claim a place beside the dominating figure of Trump when photographs of NATO or European or world leaders were being taken.

But he reformed his fascination. As President Trump is a self-declared nationalist who likes the nation-state and insists on firm borders, Macron came to perceive him as the enemy. The enemy of globalism.

Breitbart reports:

French President Emmanuel Macron denounced nationalism during an Armistice Day centennial observance in Paris on Sunday.

“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism: Nationalism is treason,” Macron said …

Macron spoke in front of world leaders including President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

“If we think our interests may only come first and we don’t care for others, it is a treason of our values, a betrayal of all moral values,” he said. “We must remember this.”

Macron said that the moral values of France helped them fight for the future of their country.

He praised the world leaders that formed the first League of Nations, after World War I.

“They imagined the first international corporation, the dismantling of empires, and redefined borders, and dreamed at the time of a union, a political union of Europe,” Macron said.

The League of Nations! A horrible organization, brainchild of President Woodrow Wilson although his own country, the United States, never joined it. It was the precursor to the even more horrible United Nations. But Macron likes international bodies. He believes they keep peace between nations. The League, for all its imagining, did not keep peace between nations. World War Two broke out despite its being there. And the United Nations has not succeeded in keeping peace anywhere. It is a hopelessly corrupt organization. As is also the European Union. 

Oh, but for all his fondness for internationl bodies, for a United States of Europe, for open borders, Macron does not wish to be called a globalist.    

In an interview with CNN, Macron continued his condemnation of nationalism but was hesitant to claim the “globalist” label.

He doesn’t find it easy to say why. Perhaps because a lot of untransformed French voters understand that the Great Political Argument is now between Globalists and Nationalists and are on the side of the Nationalists.

“I would say I’m a patriot,” he said, but added: “I’m not a believer in a sort of globalism without any differentiation. I think it doesn’t — it’s very inconsistent, and it’s extremely — it makes our people very nervous. But I’m not a nationalist, which is very different for me from being a patriot.”

Now, just before the mid-term election in November, 2018, the enthusiasm for Donald Trump’s leadership seems to be greater than ever, to judge by the size of his rallies, the rapturous applause that greets him and his every statement. People wait through the night to get into a stadium where he is to speak the following night. Tens of thousands get in, more tens of thousands watch him on screens and listen to him outside. Though the weather is cold. Though the mainstream media tell voters that he is as bad as the worst dictator who has ever lived, this generous, unaffected, extremely capable businessman, with a star’s charisma and all the right values, has won the love and trust of at least half the American people.

And thousands are walking away from the Democratic Party, discovering, probably to their surprise, that they are Trump supporters. They have formed a movement called #WalkAway, founded and led by Brandon Straka.

Brandon Straka

How the revelation that Trump Is Right came to this former Democrat, Jani Allan records at the Epoch Times:

When you are a gay, strikingly handsome cosmetologist, hairdresser, singer, and a theater actor in New York City, chances are you’re also a Democrat.

On the night that Trump won the presidential election, Brandon Straka wept; there are pictures of him crying.

He said:

I was devastated. I still believed the media! … They told us that Trump was a racist, a bigot, and a homophobe. I thought he would harm black, Jewish, and gay people; he was “dog-whistling” to hate groups. We were told that hate crimes were spiking and that Vice President Mike Pence was going to advocate conversion therapy for gays. …

The Democratic party was my tribe.

Then he began to notice a discrepancy between what the media said and what was actually happening.

A friend showed him a compilation video of the media trashing Trump. …

I saw all the moments that were replayed by the mainstream media. Remarks taken out of context. Black people edited out of audience shots. Endless fodder for the Trump-haters. Then the Charlottesville rally happened. I had had my eyes opened to how dishonest the media is and how they manipulate people’s behavior and then, they twist the narrative again. At Charlottesville, I saw clearly that Antifa are the aggressors. They become violent, but the media never denounce the violence of the left. More recently, there was the Kavanaugh lynching. There is no level to which the left will not stoop. [To them] the ends justify the means.”

Last year he wrote, produced, and sang Resist: A Rock Revolution. What began as a demi-opera — something written by a liberal devastated by Trump’s election — grew into Straka’s personal journey to conservatism. …

A friend warned him about speaking out.

Which made him all the more determined to speak out.

There is a reason it’s called the silent majority. There are reasons people don’t speak out and say, “Something is very wrong here.” They are afraid of being shunned by their friends, losing work, being considered crazy because they are no longer part of the hive-mind. Look what they did to Kanye West when he went to the White House. I wish I could reach out to him! But it just needs one person to speak up, one person to say, “The emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.”

Straka speaks as though slightly amazed …

Then, one day, I was jogging in Central Park and it came to me in a flash. I am not going to be silent! As a gay man, especially, I am going to be the unsilent minority.

That’s when  he decided to do the #WalkAway Campaign and make a video to launch it.

I wrote the script in 20 minutes. It was as if there was a printer in my mind. After I finished, I thought, “Everybody needs to hear this! … I’m an actor and a singer. I am good at setting a stage and telling a story. …”

A friend pointed the camera at him. This is what he said:

Once upon a time I was a liberal, but the Left has devolved into intolerant, inflexible, illogical, hateful, misguided, ill-informed, un-American, hypocritical, menacing, callous, ignorant, narrow-minded and, at times, blatantly fascistic behavior and rhetoric. Liberalism has been co-opted and absorbed by the very characteristics it claims to fight against. The Left has allowed themselves to become hypnotized by false narratives and conclusions perpetuated by social-justice warriors who misrepresent and misconstrue facts, evidence, and events, to confirm their own biases that everyone who does not comply with their prejudicial conclusions and follow their orders is a racist, a bigot, a Nazi, a white supremacist, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic, and alt-right extremist. 

It was May 26 when he posted the video, which he edited himself, on social media.  

Five months later, Straka has more than 97,000 followers on Twitter, and his Facebook video has been viewed a million times.  

The movement has been endorsed by Sarah Palin, Dinesh D’Souza, Tomi Lahren, Roseanne Barr, and Robert “Buzz” Patterson (who walked away after serving as the senior military aide to President Bill Clinton). 

Straka has become a cynosure of attention. … People like Candace Owens, from the conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA, are contacting him.

I didn’t think when I released my video I would be celebrating at a fancy hotel wearing an “I Love Trump” top hat and tuxedo.

Then this happened, to Straka’s immense delight:

On Oct. 27, he received a tweet from the president himself:

#Walkaway. Walkaway from the Democrat Party movement marches today in D.C. Congratulations to Brandon Straka for starting something very special. 

On Saturday October 27, 2018, “Straka and his ‘unsilent minority’ took the #WalkAway movement to Washington” and he led a march of thousands. 

The event was totally ignored by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, ABC’s Joy Behar, and the late night comedians. In fact, apart from Fox and the New York Post, none of the mainstream media covered the event.

Still, everyone [who knew about it] agreed that the #WalkAway from the Democratic Party D.C. march was a “YUGE” success.

So what lies ahead for Straka? That is, apart from his newfound political clout.

He said:

I want to make documentaries about American culture … I want to make it cool to be a patriot and an American.

Which can only mean an American who honors and will defend the Constitution. A citizen of the Constitutional Republic of the United States.

Americans are bound into a nation by the Constitution. Nothing else.

President Trump addresses one of his ENORMOUS rallies – this time at Southaven, MS on October 2, 2018. The enthusiastic happy crowd cheers and cheers.

The video is long. Too long, we thought, if you start at the beginning.

The president enters the arena at the 2 hour mark.

Highlights: he accurately calls the Democrats “the Party of Crime” and pours scorn on certain members of it. “Really evil people,” he says they are, and gives their names.

He starts praising Brett Kavanaugh, and deprecating the dishonest people trying to prevent his confirmation as a Justice of the Supreme Court, round the 2.12.20 mark. The crowd chants, “We want Kavanaugh,” from about 2.12.50.

The president speaks until 3.17.20.

For a little extra entertainment, go on watching after he finishes to see and hear those delightful political commentators Diamond and Silk. They passionately defend Kavanaugh and castigate his accusers.

Supplemental to that video, here’s a snip from another, featuring Trump the actor.

Hilarious.

https://youtu.be/5DNcKVMp1Yo

Pat Condell on waiting for Brexit, and asking who were the morons – those who voted for it or those who voted against it:

https://youtu.be/R9T4dGAxtO0 

Is this the start of a big enough trend to wreck the Democratic Party, or at least to force a total revision of its policies, values, methods, and aims?

A former Democrat, Brandon Straka, is leading a movement of which he says:

Today I’m kicking off the #WalkAway campaign by releasing my video about why I am walking away from liberalism and the Democratic Party.

It is my sincere hope that you will join me in this campaign and that we may start a movement in this country – which not only encourages others to walk away from the divisive left, but also takes back the narrative from the liberal media about what it means to be a conservative in America. It is up to all of us to make our voices heard and reclaim the truth.

The Democratic Party has taken for granted that it owns racial, sexual, and religious minorities in America. It has encouraged groupthink, hypocrisy, division, stereotyping, resentment, and the acceptance of victimhood mentality. And all the while, they have discouraged minorities from having independent thought, open dialogue, measured and informed opinion, and a motivation to succeed.

Please like and share my video, and please post your own #WalkAway video!! If you are a former liberal who has walked away from the left, please share your story, or your message, or your thoughts in a video on the WalkAway Campaign Facebook Page.

If you are a lifelong conservative or non-Democrat, please share your story, message, or thoughts on what it truly means to be a conservative. Right now, the liberal media continues to perpetuate a false narrative about the “hateful” and “bigoted” right. Use your voice to let people know who conservatives really are. Be sure to use the hashtag #WalkAway.

Please like and follow me on Facebook and Twitter:
@usminority
The Unsilent Minority
and subscribe to my YouTube channel: The Unsilent Minority
https://youtu.be/4Pjs7uoOkag

Celia Farber writes at the Epoch Times:

Some 5 million people on Facebook and YouTube have seen the video by now. A very handsome gay man, who you just assume is about to scold you on progressive talking points, instead says this:

They gather at his two Facebook groups, “The Unsilent Minority” and “WalkAway Campaign.” Those who have the courage post their own video testimonials about the moment when the abuse, rage, and ugliness of the Democrats caused them to finally leave the party and “walk away”. 

“This is so much more than a hashtag on Twitter,” he said. “This is a testimonial campaign, a grassroots movement that is going to change the political landscape of this country.”

And that’s the astonishing twist here: If these people have been driven into the arms of Donald Trump, who’s left on the left? …

Those who are walking away are not Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”, but rather, in many cases, lifelong Democrats who simply could not take it any longer and have longed for this very moment, when somebody like them would make it safe for them to come out of the closet and speak their minds. …

A man adjusts his video camera and sits back. The walls behind him are a tasteful grey-blue. He’s a gay, affluent, native New Yorker, and he’s coming out of the second closet of his life. For Ricky Roberts, the moment came after the Orlando nightclub shootings.

“Trump said he was going to protect gay men, and he did, [with] the travel ban. Hillary was telling Americans not to ‘pick on all Muslims because of this’,” and that did not feel like protection, Roberts says. … “I can’t do it anymore. I really can’t. You know, listen, I’m a gay guy from New York City, but before that, I’m an American, I’m a patriot. …”

His assessment of the Democrats: “From immigration to everything, they are just a disaster. They’re anti-American, anti-common sense, [anti-]rational — anything good, they’re against it.”

It took Brandon Straka himself a little longer than that to see the light:

Straka, who grew up in a small town in Nebraska, was on board with the fear and loathing campaign around Trump until he began asking people back home why they had voted for him. To his astonishment, they told him about Obama-era regulations that had crippled their small businesses.

He started to research media canards like the one about Trump supposedly mocking a disabled reporter. When he found that it was a total distortion, he kept going, his anger rising.

He eventually became “completely “red-pilled”.  And isolated. He told himself that he would have to give up his lifelong dream of becoming an actor if he hit the “publish” button on his video, but, encouraged by one conservative gay friend, he decided to go ahead.

“This was a matter of the media specifically using and manipulating people’s deepest fears, based on legitimate traumas,” he explained.

Many gay people have experienced very serious homophobia and even physical violence. Can you imagine manipulating a domestic violence survivor’s fears just for political purposes? It’s insane. I was afraid of losing all my friends. As I began posting about these things on social media, people started attacking me and unfriending me. But I thought, “You know what, this is too important.” Maybe it’s the fact that I’m a gay man and I’ve already been through this — people making up lies about what it means to be gay and trying to shame me. … [But] the more resentment I received, the stronger I got. Finally, I thought, “To hell with it. I’m just going to blow the lid off this whole thing and make this video.”

The video has garnered 1.3 million views on his Facebook page and has been shared on many other popular pages. It is estimated to have reached some 5 million viewers so far.

There are some 27,000 followers of the Facebook group, with new people posting both video and text testimonials every day. Straka calls them “the patriots”.

Initially, my focus was on the gay community because I was so angry at how they were [being terrorized]. Then I thought, why should I limit it to just us? They’re doing the same thing to black people. And Hispanic people. And frankly, they’re doing the same thing to everybody in one way or another. But it’s really the minorities in America who don’t feel like we have a choice. That’s what they keep telling us over and over: “You’re not safe on the right. They don’t want you on the right. They hate you on the right. You’re only safe with us. We are here to protect you.” Meanwhile, are you kidding me? You’re here to “protect” me? All you are doing is use my fears to scare the [expletive] out of me — to terrify me and to try to manipulate the way that I vote.

Libby Albert, one of the WalkAway Facebook group members, said “This is taking off,” citing the snowstorm of thousands of hashtags on Twitter. “It’s kind of incredible.”

Said another: “It’s kind of incredible. It’s OK. Walk away.”

Under the auspices of The Freedom Association in Britain, Theodore Dalrymple – author of many excellent books, two of them often praised and quoted by Thomas Sowell, Life at the Bottom and Our Culture, What’s Left Of It – gave the inaugural Annual Jillian Becker Lecture on March 23, 2018. 

The annual lecture is in celebration of Individual Freedom and/or The Nation-State. It is given by a person who has spoken or written consistently in defense of either or both. Beyond that, the ideas expressed by the lecturer need not conform to either Jillian Becker’s views or those of the Freedom Association. A wide variety of opinion and context is to be expected and welcomed.

The surprise here is that the lecture is introduced by a Christian priest, the Rev. Peter Mullen, who mentions, in good humor, that both Jillian Becker and Theodore Dalrymple (aka Anthony Daniels) are atheists.

The Freedom Association fought long and hard for Brexit, and was one of the organizations that contributed significantly to the victory of the Leave campaign.

The title of the lecture is: Threats to Freedom.

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.

It’s altogether too much for THEM to bear! The man is a billionaire who loves life, lives well, and enjoys himself tremendously both at work and at play; has a wife who is one of the most beautiful women in the world, and is also graceful, gentle, intelligent and competent; has handsome successful children and bright charming grandchildren; and, on top of all that, has become the most powerful man in the world. To add a final insult to THEM, he is perfectly healthy at the age 0f 71; immensely energetic and strong; and fully capable of continuing to do what he wants to do.

And then, try as THEY might to find something he has done terribly wrong to blot his intolerably immaculate escutcheon, THEY cannot find anything!

Actually, it is even worse for THEM. Far worse. Because not only is he victorious, THEY are defeated. Probably (with luck) irrecoverably. He has risen to power at a moment when THEY had  almost conquered the world; almost made it poor; almost brought the nations – possibly even including the USA – into universal homogeneity at the lowest level of subsistence in subjection to THEM running a world communist government (in order to “save the planet” from people using cars and making things in factories); almost destroyed Western civilization.

We are enthusiasts for Trumpism because we are warriors against THEM.

As such, do we exaggerate his achievements? If so, by how much? Overlook his flaws? If so, what are they?

As a corrective to our possibly overindulgent judgment of the president, we reproduce an article by Victor Davis Hanson; surely a reasonable and fair assessment of the Trump presidency thus far and prospectively. It is also necessary to know that it appeared at the mostly, persistently, and emphatically anti-Trump National Review:

As President Trump finished his first full year in office, he could look back at an impressive record of achievement of a kind rarely attained by an incoming president — much less by one who arrived in office as a private-sector billionaire without either prior political office or military service.

As unintended proof of his accomplishments, Trump’s many liberal opponents have gone from initially declaring him an incompetent to warning that he has become effective — insanely so — in overturning the Obama progressive agenda. Never Trump Republicans acknowledge that Trump has realized much of what they once only dreamed of — from tax reform and deregulation to a government about-face on climate change, the ending of the Obamacare individual mandate, and expansion of energy production.

Trump so far has not enacted the Never Trump nightmare agenda. The U.S. is not leaving NATO. It is not colluding with Vladimir Putin, but maintaining sanctions against Russia and arming Ukrainians. It is not starting a tariff war with China. The administration is not appointing either liberals or incompetents to the federal courts. A politicized FBI, DOJ, and IRS was Obama’s legacy, not Trump’s doing, as some of the Never Trump circle predicted. Indeed, the Never Trump movement is now mostly calcified, as even some of its formerly staunch adherents concede. It was done in by the Trump record and the monotony of having to redefine a once-welcomed conservative agenda as suddenly unpalatable due to Trump’s crude fingerprints on it.

On the short side, Trump has still not started to build his much-promised border wall, to insist on free but far fairer trade with Asia and Europe, or to enact an infrastructure-rebuilding program. Nonetheless, Trump’s multitude of critics is unable to argue that his record is shoddy and must instead insist that his list of achievements is due mostly to the Republican Congress. Or they claim he is beholden to the legacy of the Obama administration. Or they insist that credit belongs with his own impressive economic and national-security cabinet-level appointments. Or that whatever good came of Trump’s first year is nullified by Trump’s persistent personal odiousness.

At the conclusion of Trump’s first year, the stock market and small-business confidence are at record highs, and consumer confidence has not been higher in 17 years. Trump’s loud campaign promises to lure back capital and industry to the heartland no longer look quixotic, given new tax and deregulatory incentives and far cheaper energy costs than in most of Europe and Japan. Trump has now ended 66 regulations for every one he has added. Few believed a Republican president could cut the corporate-tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent while capping state- and local-tax deductions for mostly high earners to $10,000. Those are the highlights of a comprehensive tax-reform and -reduction agenda that will likely accelerate the economy to an even more rapid growth rate than Trump’s first two full quarters of annualized increases in GDP of more than 3 percent. Dozens of large companies are already passing along some of their anticipated tax cuts to employees through increased wages or bonuses — dismissed as “crumbs” by House minority leader Nancy Pelosi. Rising workers’ wages and anticipated tax credits and savings for the lower and middle classes for now are rendering almost mute the age-old fights about state-mandated minimum-wage laws.

The mostly unheralded nixing of the Obamacare individual mandate — once the great ideological battlefield of the Affordable Care Act — will insidiously recalibrate the ACA into a mostly private-market enterprise.

Domestic oil production is slated to exceed 2017 record levels and soon may hit an astonishing 11 million barrels a day. “Peak oil” for now is an ossified idea, as are massive wind and solar Solyndra-like government subsidies and the mostly unworkable Paris Climate Accord. Gas, oil, and coal production are expected to rise even higher with new Trump initiatives to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge field in Alaska, encourage more fracking on federal lands and offshore, and complete needed pipeline links while encouraging coal exportation.

For all the political horse-trading over extending or ending the Obama executive orders on DACA, illegal immigration has declined according to some metrics by over 60 percent. It is now at the lowest levels in the 21st century — even before the ending of chain migration and enacting of new border-security initiatives. Abroad, the ISIS caliphate is for all purposes now extinct. Its demise is in part due to Trump’s outsourcing of the conflict to Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who liberated ground commanders from Obama-administration-era legalistic rules of engagement. Trump’s appointees, such as Mattis, National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, have worked in concert to restore U.S. deterrence.

Variously called “principled realism” or a new “Jacksonianism”,  the Trump doctrine has now replaced the “strategic patience” and “lead from behind” recessionals of the prior administration and not emulated the neoconservative nation-building of the George W. Bush administration. New pressures on nuclear North Korea have prompted the toughest U.N. trade sanctions in history on the rogue state. After Trump’s fiery and erratic rhetoric and muscular displays of U.S. naval and air power in the Pacific, Pyongyang has agreed to landmark talks with Seoul. China is slowly beginning to pressure North Korea to stop launching missiles. Beijing’s Asian neighbors are beefing up missile defense and growing closer to the U.S. For now, the bad cop Trump and the good cops Mattis and McMaster have encouraged friends and frightened enemies, although the shelf life of such diplomatic gymnastics is limited.

Trump almost immediately voiced support for mass demonstrations in Iran, in a manner Obama failed to do in 2009. An ironic fallout of the disastrous 2015 Iran deal may be that the theocracy so hyped its cash windfalls from American relaxation of embargoes and sanctions that it inadvertently raised Iranians’ expectations of a rise in the standard of living. Then it dashed just those hopes by squandering hundreds of millions of newfound dollars in subsidizing Hezbollah, conducting a costly expeditionary war to save the genocidal Bashar al-Assad regime, and likely continuing an exorbitantly costly nuclear-weapons program. What is different about Iran’s internal unrest this time around is twofold. The Trump administration is not invested in any “landmark” deal with Tehran that requires ignoring protesters in the street. Trump also does not envision revolutionary and terror-sponsoring Iran as a “very successful regional power” with “legitimate defense concerns”. Rather, he sees Tehran, along with ISIS and al-Qaeda, as the chief source of Middle East unrest and anti-Americanism.

Moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, in line with past congressional mandates, along with threatening to curtail Palestinian aid, only reifies what is now widely accepted. The new Middle East is not the old. There are no longer any ongoing and viable “peace plans”, “road maps”, or “summits”.  America is becoming energy-independent and immune to oil boycotts. There are new and greater threats than Israel to Arab regimes, from nuclear Iran to the scourge of Islamic terrorism in Iraq and Syria. Patience is wearing thin as after 30 years the Palestinians still cannot create transparent and consensual government. Seventy years after the birth of Israel, the Palestinians still insist on being called “refugees” — when most of the world’s millions of displaced persons decades ago moved on.

Yet as Trump heads into the 2018 midterms, his favorability ratings are unimpressive. Because of loud Democratic threats of using impeachment proceedings to undermine the Trump project, the 2018 fight for the House is taking on historic importance. It is not just a referendum on the Trump agenda, but likely a means to seek to discredit or remove Trump himself — even if the prosecution in the Senate would likely never find the necessary 67 votes. In sum, an embattled Trump now finds himself in a war on all fronts. The first and most important conflict is one of favorability. Trump’s actual approval ratings, as in 2016, are probably somewhat higher than the low 40s reported in many polls. But Trump’s image is still astonishingly dismal in relation to his unappreciated achievements. For congressional Republicans to survive the midterms and retain majorities, Trump perhaps has to hope that the economy will grow not just at 3 percent but even more robustly — with marked rises in workers’ take-home wages due to tax cuts and labor shortages. Is it really true that politics can be reduced to “It’s the economy, stupid”? Obama failed to achieve 3 percent growth per annum over his eight years. As a result he may have lost both houses of Congress, but he also was reelected. More likely, no one quite knows the exact political consequences of economic growth. Between November 1983 and November 1984, the economy grew at 7 percent and ipso facto ushered the once “amiable dunce” Ronald Reagan into a landslide reelection victory over a previously thought-to-be-far-more-impressive Walter Mondale. Yet this time it may be that 3 percent GDP growth will not mitigate Trump’s personal negatives but 4–5 percent would.

It is said that Trump is also at war with himself, in the sense that his tweeting alienates the key constituencies of women voters and independents. Conventional wisdom assures that Trump’s off-the-cuff invectives only fuel his critics and overshadow his achievements. In the heart of immigration negotiations, Trump was quoted secondhand as having called Haiti and other formerly Third World countries “sh**hole” countries and thus undesirable sources of mass immigration to the U.S. Whatever the reliability of reports of the slur, Trump is certainly not the sort of politician to have said instead, “It would seem wiser to encourage diverse immigration, including immigration from the most developed countries as well as the least developed” — even as many people privately agree with Trump’s earthy assessment that immigration should be far more selective and include a far greater variety of countries of origin.

Both Trump’s spoken and electronic stream-of-consciousness venting can be unorthodox, crude and cruel, and often extraneous. But can anyone measure whether and to what degree his Twitter account energizes and widens his base more than it loses him supporters otherwise sympathetic to his agenda? The orthodox wisdom is that Trump should let his achievements speak for themselves, curb his raucous campaign rallies, and restrict his daily tweets to expansions on his agenda and achievement and leave the feuding to subordinates. When Trump has avoided ad hominem spats, and been filmed conducting policy sessions with his cabinet and congressional enemies and friends, he has looked and acted “presidential”.  How good then must Trump’s record become to overshadow both the prejudices against him and his own inner demons to achieve favorability ratings that will provide coattails for his congressional supporters and fuel an even more ambitious second-year agenda? Again, time is running out, and in the next ten months the economy must boom as never before or Trump must learn to sound more like a Ronald Reagan than a Howard Stern.

Trump is simultaneously at war with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Once again, the critical element is time in the sense of the looming midterm elections. So far, after months of media speculation and press leaks, there is no evidence of Russian–Trump collusion. Robert Mueller’s investigative team has been riddled by charges of conflicts of interest, workplace unprofessionalism, and political bias. The basis of the entire writ against Trump, the Fusion GPS–Steele dossier, is now mostly discredited. The file’s lurid sexual accusations alone likely won it notoriety in 2016 among journalists and Obama-administration enablers. The more that is learned about the Steele opposition-research file — paid for by the Clinton campaign, polluted by Russian rumor-mongering, peddled to the FBI, manipulated by the Obama administration to justify FISA surveillance, likely leaked to pet reporters by Obama-administration and Clinton-campaign officials — the more apparent it may become that Mueller is investigating Russian collusion in entirely the wrong place. Another irony is that pushback against the Mueller fishing expedition may prompt reinvestigations into the earlier election-cycle-aborted inquiries about Clinton email improprieties. The Obama administration also likely acted improperly in ignoring the Clinton–Uranium One connections and Hillary Clinton’s violations of agreements with the Obama administration to report the sources of all private donations to the Clinton Foundation during her tenure. So far resistance at both the Department of Justice and the FBI to releasing documents pertaining to all these avenues of interest has stymied House and Senate inquiries. If the Republicans lose the Congress, these investigations will shut down entirely. Democratic majorities will give Mueller a free hand to do as he pleases without worries about past complaints over the ethical shortcomings of his investigation. Select Intelligence and Judiciary Committee hearings will likely give way in the House to impeachment proceedings. But if within the next nine months there are new explosive revelations about the improper or even illegal uses of the Steele dossier and the Clinton scandals, while the Mueller team settles for face-saving indictments of former Trump subordinates for transgressions that have little to do with the original Mueller mandate to investigate Russian–Trump collusion, then Trump will win the legal war. In that case, Trump finally will not only weather the collusion crisis but find himself a political beneficiary of one of the most scandalous efforts to subvert a political campaign and improperly surveil American citizens in recent American history.

Trump wages a fourth war against the proverbial mainstream media, whose coverage, according to disinterested analyses, runs over 90 percent anti-Trump. Negative Trump news fuels Trump-assassination chic in popular culture, the rants of late-night-television comedians, the political effort to grandstand with impeachment writs, calls to invoke the 25th Amendment, and lawsuits alleging violations of the emoluments clause. The threats of a Madonna, the raving of Representative Maxine Waters, the boasts of the “Resistance,” the efforts of blue states to nullify federal immigration law or to dodge compliance with unwelcome new federal tax statutes, and the conspiracy fables of Representative Adam Schiff are all fueled by media attention and preconceived narratives hostile to Trump. The anti-Trump news is still determined to accomplish what so far the Clinton campaign, Obama holdovers, and deep-state bureaucrats have not: so discredit Trump the messenger that his message becomes irrelevant. Trump apparently fights his war against the media in the fashion in which toxic chemotherapy battles cancer. His personal and electronic rants against “fake news” and “crooked” journalists are intended to exhibit media biases and thus discredit negative coverage just before the public tires of Trump’s own off-putting venom. On the one hand, Trump’s anemic approval ratings might suggest the media are winning in their 24/7 efforts to portray Trump as a Russian colluder, rank profiteer, distracted golfer, tax cheat, sexual predator, trigger-happy warmonger, or senile septuagenarian. On the other hand, the media are polling worse than Trump. And his battle has nearly destroyed the credibility of CNN, which has fired marquee journalists for false anti-Trump narratives, been embarrassed by hosts mouthing scatological venom, suffered employees’ hot-mic wishes for Trump’s death, and seen its anchors and special correspondents reduced to on-air rants. For now, no one knows whether Trump’s war against the media is pyrrhic, in that he may defeat his journalist enemies and even render their entire networks discredited, but at such costs that he is no longer politically viable.

Trump is waging a fifth and final war against Democrats. So far Trump has sucked all the oxygen out of the Democratic atmosphere. Politicians and operatives are so obsessed with proving Trump a liar, a cheat, a pervert, a con artist, or an incompetent that they have offered so far no viable opposition leader or alternative agenda. But will just being not-Trump make Democrats preferable? The centrist Democratic party of the 1990s no longer exists. It has become instead a coalition of patched-together progressive causes. The redistributionism and neo-socialism of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are now Democratic economic mainstays. Barack Obama’s lead-from-behind legacy remains Democratic foreign policy. Identity politics still constitutes the culture of the party establishment.

In more practical terms, for all the animus against Trump the person, his agenda — tax cuts, deterrence, reindustrialization, middle-class job growth, closing the borders, the melting pot — is increasingly polling well. In many cases, Trumpism is more popular than Democratic signature issues such as tax hikes, larger government, more entitlements, open borders, more identity politics, and European Union–like internationalism.

The idea of Oprah Winfrey as the 2020 Democratic nominee and the unwillingness of Democrats to secure the border reveal what can happen when a party is reduced to defining itself as not being the incumbent president. The Republicans learned that lesson in their four-time failure to defeat the hated Roosevelt. Democrats in the 1980s had little to offer the country other than not being the supposed buffoon Ronald Reagan. Shutting down the government is also rarely a winning strategy for an out party — as the Republicans learned in their politically disastrous 1995–96 showdown with Bill Clinton. In 2018, it may be enough for congressional candidates to run on anti-Trump invective without expressing strong views on the issues or identifying with any particular national leader. But it won’t be so in 2020, especially if the Trump agenda grows more popular and Trump allows it rather than himself to become his signature message.

For now, all that is certain about Trump’s first year is the 2016 truism that past prognostications and current polls are irrelevant. The jester candidate, Donald Trump, destroyed, not just beat, his 16 primary rivals. The doomed candidate Trump defeated the most well-financed, experienced, and media-favored Democratic candidate in memory. The inept President Trump’s first year was not liberal or directionless, but marked the most successful and conservative governance since Ronald Reagan’s. Trump’s critics insist that his comeuppance is on the horizon. They assure us that character is destiny. Trump’s supposed hubris will finally earn an appropriately occasioned nemesis. But in the meantime, nearly half the country may be happy that the establishment was not just wrong but nearly discredited in its non-ending, prejudicial dismissal of the Trump agenda and, so far, the successful Trump presidency.

So: HOWL globalists, socialists, warmists, feminists, Muslims, and Democrats.

He is impervious to your insults.

He is charitable and generous. Yes, he is.

He is not a “racist” or “anti-woman”. Certainly not.

He does not take drugs, drink alcohol – or even coffee.

He has not colluded with the Russians, or any other foreign power. (Obama did with the Russians and the Iranians. Hillary Clinton did with anyone who would pay her.)

He flourishes, he laughs, he acts, he wins.