Mark Steyn talks about bad things in a recently published (April 25, 2016) video: environmentalism, Islam, state-created art.

Well worth the 27+ minutes it takes to hear it through.

We like the last few minutes best, starting at about 24.40 when he talks about how lucky we are to be living in a warm period.

The transgender population of the US is now estimated to be o.3% of the total.

The rest of us 322,000,000+* have to be real nice to them. For their sakes we must all make changes in the way we live and the way we speak. The government orders us to. And it tells us how. And it will punish us with the full force of the law if we disobey.

But with the best will in the world, what is to be done about the huge problem troubling government, business, states, stores, restaurants, hotels, schools, the military, the police, progressives and moralists: Which public bathroom/restroom/locker-room should transgenders use, the one reserved for the gender they started out as, or the one reserved for the gender they have become or are becoming or would like to become?

It is the dilemma of the age. 

From Truth Revolt, by Trey Sanchez:

Welcome to Obama’s America, where the government will provide you a list of approved words to speak and those you must never utter. Any violators will be punished and issued stiff fines.

It would sound like a conspiracy theory if it weren’t true, but it’s already happening in places like New York City and Chicago.

The following are legal requirements made by New York City’s Commission on Human Rights:

The NYCHRL [New York City Human Rights Law] requires employers, landlords, and all businesses and professionals to use an employee’s, tenant’s, customer’s, or client’s preferred name, pronoun and title (eg. Ms./Mrs.) regardless of the individual’s sex assigned at birth, anatomy, gender, medical history, appearance, or the sex indicated on the individual’s identification.

Most individuals and many transgender people use female or male pronouns and titles. Some transgender and gender non-conforming people prefer to use pronouns other than he/him/his or she/her/hers, such as they/them/theirs or ze/hir. [Footnote: Ze and hir are popular gender-free pronouns preferred by some transgender and/or gender non-conforming individuals.] …

This isn’t just the government as employer, requiring its employees to say things that keep government patrons happy with government services. This is the government as sovereign, threatening “civil penalties up to $125,000 for violations, and up to $250,000 for violations that are the result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct” if people don’t speak the way the government tells them to speak.

These government-enforced rules don’t apply just to adult citizens but to children as well. The Chicago Public School (CPS) system has now decreed that children must address teachers and classmates with their preferred gender pronouns and if they willfully refuse, they face charges of sexual harassment according to Title IX discrimination policies.

CPS Chief Education Officer Dr. Janice K. Jackson said:

The guidelines released today will help ensure every student and adult in the CPS family can participate in an environment of complete tolerance and respect. CPS, like much of the country, has become far more aware of the needs and experiences of the transgender community, and it’s crucial for CPS guidelines to reflect our commitment to promoting safe and inclusive schools. These guidelines build on our commitment to fostering healthy and supportive learning opportunities across the District so that each of our students can reach their full potential.

What’s more, students who decide to change their gender at school aren’t required to notify their parents and in fact are protected by the school if they would like to keep the decision confidential:

When speaking with other staff members, parents, guardians, or third parties, school staff should not disclose a student’s preferred name, pronoun, or other confidential information pertaining to the student’s transgender or gender nonconforming status without the student’s permission, unless authorized to do so by the Law Department.

Whoa! New problem coming up right there. How will they allude to the student under discussion? The right (preferred) pronoun could let the secret out. But the wrong pronoun could put the staff member, parent, guardian, or third party in trouble with the law.

And that’s not all. A tide of problems is washing in:

This is all going to get extremely difficult to navigate as “gender fluid” folks can change their gender status based on how they are feeling on any given day. Will anyone be able to keep with when “ze” is better than “he” or when “sie” is more appropriate than “she” since the rules themselves are just as fluid?

And who gives his full blessing to the government forcing its ideology about gender on the rest of the country? None other than President Obama himself, who recently gave his own decree to the nation’s public schools, threatening litigation and loss of federal funding if students aren’t allowed to enter the bathroom of their choice while under the care of the state.

This is no longer a plot from some fictional dystopia. It’s reality.

It is to be hoped that when the history of America in 2016 comes to be written, historians will understand that the most important issue facing the government then, in the last year of the 44th president, was not the advancing conquest of the Western world by Islam; not the bellicose threats of Russia to nations under the NATO defense umbrella; not the wars raging in the Middle East; not the vast trade imbalance between the US and China; not Third World poverty; not the zika epidemic; not even the looming general election that would decide the future of the nation and the rest of the world, but the issue of which bathroom transgenders should use.  

We hope this post will be of help to them.

*

*The US population was computed to be 322,762,018 at the start of 2016.

It is too late to save Europe from Islamization. In this century, the majority of the population will be Muslim, ruled by Sharia law.

Islam is cruel, supremacist, and totalitarian. Sharia law is inseparable from Islam:

There is no dispute among Muslims that the Qur’an is the basis of the Sharia and that its specific provisions are to be scrupulously observed. The Hadith and Sunna are complementary sources to the Qur’an and consist of the sayings of the Prophet and accounts of his deeds. The Sunna helps to explain the Qur’an, but it may not be interpreted or applied in any way which is inconsistent with the Qur’an.

Sharia is spreading through the West, as land after land is colonized by the Muslims.

This is from Inquisitr:

Supporters of sharia zones have been harassing drinking establishments in Copenhagen, Denmark, to discourage the consumption of alcohol. This creeping phenomenon, which has Danish bar-owners up in arms, is also manifesting itself across Europe, Canada, and the United States.

Appealing to their government for help, bar operators in the Nørrebro suburb of Copenhagen, claim that advocates of sharia zones demand money, and throw stones through windows of targeted establishments. …  Heidi Dyrnesli of Cafe Heimdal recently told local Radio24syv, that some young men just walked into her bar and ordered all guests to leave.

Supporting the propagation of sharia zones to prepare the world for an Islamic caliphate, Iraqi-Canadian Abdul-Adhim spoke at Mohawk College in Ontario, on November 28, 2015, about the need for Muslims to band together under a united Islamic state. During his 40-minute lecture intended to address the Syrian refugee crisis, Abdul-Adhim digressed and instead promoted the building of an Islamic caliphate under sharia law, “the best system that exists on earth”. According to the Toronto Sun, He stated his case from a podium beside the banner of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a symbol of all Muslim countries as one caliphate.

The society (in Syria) has risen up as a society and says that we want Islam as our way of life. And the West will not have it and this is what we are seeing. … And therefore, how do we support the people of Syria? We must send money and help the refugees that are coming here in every way that we can.

In a roundabout way, Abdul-Adhim revealed the oft-repeated pattern of Syrian refugees gaining a foothold with a host country for the establishment of sharia zones, and setting the stage for a caliphate. …

Some American states and a Canadian province have taken measures to protect themselves from Sharia law; but in the United Kingdom, Sharia is now a parallel system with British law.

As of 2014, seven states in the U.S. “banned Sharia law”,  or passed some kind of measure that “prohibits the states’ courts from considering foreign, international or religious law”, although Muslims continue to operate their sharia zones in private. In 2006, the province of Ontario, Canada, banned arbitration of family law disputes under any body of laws except Ontario law, although arbitration under religious laws is said to flourish in Canada’s unregulated Muslim enclaves. In 2014, around 85 “sharia courts” were said to be openly functional in the U.K. under two rival services, Islamic Sharia Council and the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal.

According to U.K.’s The Sun, Abu Izzadeen, the self-styled “Director for Waltham Forest Muslims”, campaigned in 2011 to make London’s Borough of Waltham Forest the first of Britain’s sharia zones. He painted a picture of what it would be like to live under Quranic law.

“Women would have to cover up. It should be forbidden that they are not. Thieves should have their hands cut off.” …

As the Danish people wring their hands, sharia zones proliferate across Europe and other parts of the world.

When Sharia is the predominant  law of Europe:

Sharia forbids the consumption of alcohol, so will not the European wine industry be abolished? Beer prohibited?

Sharia forbids the depiction of the human form or any natural thing. Will the art galleries not be emptied, paintings and sculpture destroyed?

Will the libraries not be emptied, books destroyed?

Will theaters, opera and concert halls not be closed?

Will women not be compulsorily veiled in public?

Will homosexuals not be sentenced to death?

Will there not be polygamy, slavery, child marriage?

Will there not be public amputations, stoning, crucifixion, beheading? 

It would be a mistake to imagine that “most Muslims” will not permit this to happen “because they are moderates”.

From Wikiislam:

A Gallup survey carried out in early 2009 found that British Muslims have zero tolerance for Homosexuality. Not even a single British Muslim interviewed believed that homosexual acts were morally acceptable. Also according to a Zogby International poll of American Muslims taken in November and December of 2001, a massive 71 percent opposed “allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally”. Another worrying statistic to be found among Muslims in the UK, is that although they comprise just 2% of the total British population, they commit 25% of all anti-Homosexual crimes. So, with the rise of Islam in the UK and the rest of the world, we also see the inadvertent return to the morality of seventh-century Arabia, with Muslim gangs on the streets of England carrying out violent attacks on gays and mosques labeled as “moderate” calling for the murder of homosexuals at the hands of their congregation.

What will become of the once great schools and universities of the West?

What will be left of our culture?

What will be left of our civilization?

… and still does.

Here’s the trailer of Dinesh D’Souza’s movie about the horrible history of the Democratic Party:

People who do not believe in global warming have been told to shut up. No public debate, no contradictory discourse. No articles in scientific journals. They simply have been told that the case is proven.

That’s from a CNS News report on October 29, 2015.

Seven months ago. Now non-believers are not just told to shut up – they can be charged with committing a crime.

Sultan Knish writes:

Big Green is big business. The global renewable energy market is estimated at over $600 billion. Obama’s stimulus boondoggle alone blew around $50 billion on green energy. Annual spending is somewhere around $39 billion a year and that’s just the tip of the Big Green iceberg.

California carbon auctions are climbing into the billions. And the endgame is a national and a global carbon tax that will allow Big Green to take money out of the pockets of every single human being.

Environmentalism isn’t a hippie with a cardboard sign. It’s multinational corporations and big banks. It’s environmental consultants padding the bill for every government project. It’s subsidies that get carved up ten different ways into highly profitable investments at taxpayer expense. It’s brand greenwashing and useless recycling programs. It’s a dime, a dollar or a hundred dollars added to every bill.

Big Green is booming business.

But it can’t succeed on its own. Without public policy based on the hoax that the planet is going to be destroyed unless Big Green gets more green cash, the scam collapses.

Even as the science behind the conspiracy theory that claims humans are warming the planet continues to fall apart, Big Green is escalating its crackdown on climate science. If you are going to falsely claim that 99.99% of scientists agree with you, the best way to ensure that is by criminalizing scientific dissent.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called for punishing and imprisoning dissenters. Bill Nye endorsed such a call …  And while it’s easy to dismiss Kennedy and Nye as famous crackpots, Attorney General Loretta Lynch admitted that there had been discussions about prosecuting climate dissenters. And that materials had been passed along to the FBI.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and 14 other Democratic attorney generals have begun working the more profitable corporate angle by targeting Exxon Mobil, hoping to cut off researchers and activists from their funding.  The agenda was blatantly on parade right from the start at a press conference of attorney generals under the banner of “AG’s United for Clean Power”. Imagine a group of attorney generals banding together under the name “AG’s United for Pepsi” to sue Coca Cola. That’s exactly what this was. The attorney generals were announcing that they are targeting one industry on behalf of a rival industry.

The Big Green group of prosecutors was launched by Al Gore, whose Big Green investments have made him a very rich man. Gore is the chairman of Generation Investment Management, a UK investment management firm that focuses on environmental investments. Its funds are valued at $7.3 billion.

Gore’s Inconvenient Truth ecohoax flick was financed by the head of the Capricorn Investment Group. Al Gore invests in Green Energy and then runs campaigns urging government Green investments. Now Gore has moved beyond that blatant conflict of interest to trying to criminalize rival industries. …

Big Green and its big Democratic backers claim that they are only targeting industries. Their goal is to bankrupt gas and oil just like they bankrupted coal, leaving Americans with no choice except overpriced and unreliable Big Green energy. But their targets aren’t just industries and the people who work for them. They have their sights set on eliminating dissenting ideas that make their fraud possible.

The campaign against Exxon Mobil seeks to treat the funding of dissenting ideas about Global Warming as fraud. It’s impossible to escape the [Galileo-like] implications of climate heresy trials in such a move. But the subpoena against the Competitive Enterprise Institute targets critics of Big Green’s climate fraud more directly and is a major step in the suppression of free speech. …

This campaign shows that the wealth of men like Gore or the Rockefellers isn’t only going to be built on crushing coal miners, depriving the elderly of heat in the winter and running up energy costs for working families. It also requires silencing and suppressing those people still willing to speak out against the Big Green fraud.

There’s nothing natural about our “transition” to Big Green. It’s the greatest financial fraud of our time. It makes no sense either economically or technologically. Instead Big Green profiteers had to invent a crisis, lie about the science, shake down governments and bribe everyone in sight. If the sky isn’t falling and the ice hasn’t vanished, as Al Gore claimed, then Big Green loses all its big wads of green cash. …

Big Green’s big investors are riding a tiger. They can’t get off or they’ll be eaten alive. They have no choice but to destroy their rivals and theirs critics. And ordinary people, from coal miners to working families to scientists, have no choice but to resist.

NONE of Al Gore’s dire prophecies made in his film An inconvenient Truth – released on May 24, 2006 – have come true. Nor will they. The only dangerously hot air threatening us is coming out of his lying mouth.

The is from Truth Revolt:

In honor of the upcoming 10th anniversary of the release of former Vice President Al Gore’s blockbusting, influential documentary An Inconvenient Truth, The Daily Caller News Foundation re-watched the lucrative propaganda film to see how closely Gore’s fearmongering about climate disaster matches up with reality.

Below are the highlights, or lowlights perhaps, of the Daily Caller’s conclusions about Gore’s convenient untruths:

1) Kilimanjaro? Still Snowy

Gore claimed that Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s tallest peak, would be snow-free “within the decade.”

Wrong. There’s still snow there year-round, and ecologists monitoring Kilimanjaro’s snowpack found that it may have shrunk a little, but they are confident it’s not going anywhere soon. “Preliminary findings show that the ice is nowhere near melting,” said Imani Kikoti, an ecologist at Mount Kilimanjaro National Park. “Much as we agree that the snow has declined over centuries, but we are comfortable that its total melt will not happen in the near future.”

2) Global Warming? Not Happening

Gore claimed that a rise in temperature due to man-made carbon dioxide emissions was “uninterrupted and intensifying.”

Wrong. Global temperatures showed little-to-no warming after Gore released his film. In fact, as the Daily Caller notes, “surface temperature data showed no significant global warming for a period of about 15 years, starting in the early 2000s. Satellite-derived temperature data showed, until the recent El Niño, no statistically significant warming trend for more than 21 years”.

3) Storms Aren’t Stronger

“And of course when the oceans get warmer, that causes stronger storms,” Gore said in the film. “That same year that we had that string of big hurricanes, we also set an all-time record for tornadoes.”

Gore’s film came out just after Hurricane Katrina. He mentions that the U.S. was hit with a string of severe storms in the early 2000s and that Japan saw a record number of typhoons. “The insurance industry has actually noticed this,” Gore said. “Their recovered losses are going up.”

But even findings from the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the organization with which Gore shared the 2007 Nobel Prize, show that storms aren’t more extreme since 2006. The IPCC reported in 2103 that there “is limited evidence of changes in extremes associated with other climate variables since the mid-20th century”. The IPCC also found “no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century” and “no robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin”.

4) North Pole? Still Cold

Gore claimed that the Arctic could be ice-free “within the next 50 to 70 years,” threatening extinction of polar bears and other Arctic animals.

But Chip Knappenberger, a climate scientist at the libertarian Cato Institute, states that the Arctic is almost completely surrounded by land, so the ice that forms there tends to stay there. Arctic ice coverage has shrunk in recent decades, but “I doubt the Arctic will be free of all ice in any summer, although the total area may well be greatly reduced in the future if it continues to warm there… Such a situation should not be overly worrisome, as there is ample evidence that it has occurred in the past and clearly, polar bears and everything else up there managed to survive.” ​Polar bears are actually thriving despite the slightly shrinking ice coverage.

5) New Ice Age? Also Not Happening

Gore warned that “At the end of the last ice age, as the last glacier was receding from North America, the ice melted and … an ice dam on the eastern border formed and one day it broke.” Fresh, cold water bled out into the North Atlantic, he claimed, causing the Gulf Stream to stall and sending Europe into another ice age. Gore then suggested that another Ice Age could begin if Greenland’s ice sheet melts and brings more cold water into the North Atlantic,

Australian scientists have since totally debunked this theory that the Gulf Stream, or AMOC, is weakening. “Claims of strengthening or reducing of the AMOC are therefore pure speculation,” they wrote in a paper published in March.

So, global warming isn’t swelling the seas, but alarmism about it has certainly swelled Al Gore’s bank account.

Has anyone since the medieval popes made as much money out of absurd rumors as this man has?

Truth Revolt titles its article: Being a Liberal, a Liar and a Horse’s Ass Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry.

Here’s a picture of the liberal lying horse’s ass, looking very pleased with himself. And why should he not? He got away with the biggest scam of modern times and became a billionaire by lying.

Hot air billionaire Al Gore

Yes. The Kremlin does have Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Mark Tapson reports at Truth Revolt:

A “war of words” reportedly has broken out between the Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) Alexander Bortnikov and Chairwoman of the Council of Federation Valentina Matviyenko over the issue of releasing tens of thousands of top secret and classified emails obtained by the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) from Hillary Clinton’s private but unsecured computer.

The European Union Times reports that, according to a Security Council report circulating in the Kremlin, in 2011 SVR intelligence analysts began “serious/concerning” monitoring of a Romanian computer hacker named Marcel Lazăr Lehel (aka Guccifer) after he attempted to break into the computer system of the Federation-funded RT television network.

The [Russian] analysts followed Guccifer’s activities as he broke into Hillary’s private computer – allowing the SVR to copy tens of thousands of top secret and classified emails.

Chairwoman Matviyenko then personally authorized a “partial/limited” release of them to RT [Russia Today, a government-funded television network], which published an article about them on 20 March 2013 titled “Hillary Clinton’s ‘hacked’ Benghazi emails: FULL RELEASE,” although this went unreported in the Western mainstream media until January 2016 when Vice News published their article called “Libyan Oil, Gold, and Qaddafi: The Strange Email Sidney Blumenthal Sent Hillary Clinton In 2011—and that confirmed our 1 August 2014 report about what really caused Secretary Clinton to order the destruction of Libya.”

FSB director Bortnikov was “highly furious” with Matviyenko over her release authorization due to his concern that the Americans would discover the original source of the hacking, which they did by aiding the Romanian government in their investigation of Guccifer and his arrest in January 2014. He was convicted of computer hacking and sentenced to 7 years in a Romanian prison.

In March of this year, the report claims that Matviyenko “hinted/suggested” to her “peers/comrades” that due to President Putin’s favorable “opinion/thoughts” about presidential candidate Donald Trump, the Security Council should considering releasing all of Hillary’s top secret and classified emails to help Trump in the presidential contest against the “hated/repugnant” Hillary.

Trump has said that he could “get along with Putin”. That cannot be a bad thing for international relations. To regard  Putin’s respect – which we suspect and hope contains an element of fear –  as a mark against Trump, would be a mistake.

Within days, the Obama administration moved Guccifer from Romania to the U.S. where he awaits either a trial or deal to tell what he knows – the facts of which were concealed from the American people by NBC News, according to the report.

The European Union Times notes that the U.S. then

launched a disinformation counterattack against the [Russian] Federation by their releasing, on 15 April, of CIA intelligence doctored documents, referred to as the Panama Papers, casting unfounded, and undocumented, allegations against many Federation business people and politicians that the FSB describes as an “overt/notice now” warning to the Kremlin that should Secretary Clinton’s top secret and classified emails be released more damage to Russian peoples could be done.

So we’re already getting a glimpse of how smoothly relations with Russia will go if the “hated/repugnant” Hillary, whose lies and incompetence about her unsecured emails created this mess, becomes President.

America forbid!

Intellectuals of the Republican Party (see here and here) are showing the utmost stupidity in deploring and opposing that amazing phenomenon named Trump, instead of putting all their resources – all the money they can raise, all the influence they can bring to bear – behind him. That would be the surest way of keeping treasonous, corrupt, crooked Hillary Clinton out of the White House.

However, some intellectuals – the ones who can really think – understand how lucky America is to have a political superstar loom up to save it at this desperate moment in its history.

The British historian Paul Johnson writes at Forbes:

The mental infection known as “political correctness” is one of the most dangerous intellectual afflictions ever to attack mankind. The fact that we began by laughing at it – and to some extent, still do – doesn’t diminish its venom one bit. …

Nowhere has PC been more triumphant than in the U.S. This is remarkable, because America has traditionally been the home of vigorous, outspoken, raw and raucous speech. From the early 17th century, when the clerical discipline the Pilgrim Fathers sought to impose broke down and those who had things to say struck out westward or southward for the freedom to say them, America has been a land of unrestricted comment on anything – until recently. Now the U.S. has been inundated with PC inquisitors, and PC poison is spreading worldwide in the Anglo zone.

For these reasons it’s good news that Donald Trump is doing so well in the American political primaries. He is vulgar, abusive, nasty, rude, boorish and outrageous.

We admire all that about him too.

He is also saying what he thinks and, more important, teaching Americans how to think for themselves again.

No one could be a bigger contrast to the spineless , pusillanimous and under-deserving Barack Obama, who has never done a thing for himself and is entirely the creation of reverse discrimination. The fact that he was elected President – not once, but twice – shows how deep-set the rot is and how far along the road to national impotence the country has traveled.

Under Obama the U.S. – by far the richest and most productive nation on earth – has been outsmarted, outmaneuvered and made to appear a second-class power by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. America has presented itself as a victim of political and economic Alzheimer’s disease, a case of national debility and geopolitical collapse.

None of the Republican candidates trailing Trump has the character to reverse this deplorable declension.

The Democratic nomination seems likely to go to the relic of the Clinton era, herself a patiently assembled model of political correctness, who is carefully instructing America’s most powerful pressure groups in what they want to hear and whose strongest card is the simplistic notion that the U.S. has never had a woman President and ought to have one now, merit being a secondary consideration.

It can be of no consideration at all in Hillary’s case. She has no merit whatsoever.

The world is disorderly and needs its leading nation to take charge and scare it back into decency. Donald Trump fits the bill.Other formidable figures, including Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, have performed a similar service in the past. But each President is unique and cast in his own mold. Trump is a man of excess–and today a man of excess is what’s needed.

Yessss!

The Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, called on Donald Trump to unify the Republican Party if he wanted to earn his support.

If Paul Ryan gave his support to Donald Trump he would be unifying the Party.

He’s putting the cart before the horse.

A former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, reproached Ryan by pointing out –

Donald Trump may turn out to be the most effective anti-left leader in our lifetime. He is against political correctness. He is against bureaucracy. He places American nationalism first which I think we desperately need. I’m tired of being told we have to have phony agreements and phony efforts.

The Hill, in its report that Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, declared his support for Trump, quotes McConnell as saying:

As the presumptive nominee, [Donald Trump] now has the opportunity and the obligation to unite our party around our goals.

The biggest goal, in McConnell’s eyes, is to defeat Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, and prevent what is largely expected to be a continuation of many of President Obama’s policies if she takes the Oval Office.

That goal is surely one that Trump and (most of?) the old guard of the Republican Party can and do agree on.

But in general: No, Senator McConnell, you have got it wrong. Donald Trump has the opportunity and the obligation to unite the party around his goals. If he drops everything he says he stands for, everything he proclaims as his intention, the very ideas that are drawing the approval of millions of voters throughout the country, in order just to fall in with your old, stale, failed ideas, those millions of voters will not vote for him in the general election and the Republican Party will not win the presidency.

You stalwarts of the old guard must put all your resources behind him, back him up with so much enthusiasm it actually looks like and may even become an amazing Republican novelty – passionate commitment.

It is up to you, Senator McConnell and Speaker Ryan, to unify the party and satisfy the people by joining your obvious nominee, Donald Trump. That is your obligation.

We are bombarded with comments and emails telling us that we are wrong to support Donald Trump.

Millions are voting for him. He is the Republican nominee for the presidency. Yet most articles about him in the conservative media are emotionally hostile.

Breitbart is an exception.

A. J. Delgado writes at Breitbart:

America’s bullies – the sneering, “we know better than you” establishment classes – have made many cower in silence rather than proclaim that Trump is a tremendous presidential candidate and has earned their support.

It is a replay of the worst aspects of high school peer-pressure, about what’s OK and what isn’t, based on selfish interests and prejudices.

Well, enough of that. Trump is already changing America for the better – and is encouraging us to boldly stand up for our beliefs about what’s best for our nation and best for our fellow Americans.

So let’s get right to it. Shifting America back on course requires Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. Not only is he the only Republican candidate who could win the general election, but he is the only choice Republican voters should consider (and should consider themselves lucky to have on their side).

The author gives 20 good reasons for choosing Donald Trump.

Here are some of them:

His business accomplishments.  Shocker! Imagine having a president who has actually built and created things! Imagine having a president with a proven track record as an enormously successful businessman. But, silly me – why have that when we can have, for instance, a first-term senator, career-politician who’s never even passed any significant legislation or a governor whom, despite some laudable accomplishments, most of the nation, including Republicans, can’t stomach?

He’s pro-women. In the plot to take down Trump, one of the first tactics tried was to cast him as anti-women. But Trump has worked with many peers and sparred against many rivals – male and female alike – and thus actually shows he treats women as equals (e.g., Yes, he joked about Carly Fiorina – he also joked about Rand Paul. Get it?). Or are we, as women, demanding to be coddled and spared the same treatment as the gents? … 

A man of sound morals. For those who judge a man’s character based on whether he called someone a “loser” during a silly Twitter feud, well, there is no helping your stupidity so stop reading this. The rest of us, however, know to look at a man’s actions and his record in life. What is Trump’s? For one, he’s known for treating his workers well. Second, is there no ugly scandal or brush with the law – he seems to lead a fairly straight-arrow life. Then there’s his family life. Two divorces? Sure. Marriages sometimes don’t work out. Ask Newt Gingrich or even Ronald Reagan himself. He’s on friendly terms with both ex-wives, though. What does that tell you? And his children routinely express what a loving, supportive father he’s been. Point me to another businessman of Trump’s money with four adult children, all of whom have stayed away from scandal and disgrace despite growing up in the spotlight. We’d be hard pressed to find one – meaning, Trump clearly did something right. Heck, forget the “Art of the Deal” — Trump should write the “Art of Parenting”. …

His policies are spot-on, particularly immigration. For brevity, this article is not meant to discuss the nuances of Trump’s proposed policies and positions. But he’s right on pretty much every position he espouses, first and foremost that of immigration, the most critical issue facing America.

How about taxes? Trump is the only one willing to take on the hedge-fund managers and blast their ridiculously unfair tax rate. It’s the ideal position – someone with a conservative tax plan but who realizes attacking the hedge-funders’ sweet deal doesn’t make one a “liberal” – and simply shows an individual with an astute understanding of finance and a genuine sense of fairness.

How about a dedication to veterans? Check!

A strong but sensible foreign policy? Check!

Negotiation skills. Presidents have the benefit of being surrounded by highly talented experts in their respective fields – it’s the entire basis for the Cabinet appointments. But, what’s the one area on which a president is on his own? Negotiations. When our leader walks into an international forum, or that one-on-one meeting with the British PM, there is no adviser that can speak for him. It’s the one time the president sinks or swims on his own merits. As such, a stern – even arrogant — president with negotiating expertise is of paramount importance. Governors have keen negotiating skills, sure – so do CEO’s. Trump is so good at it, though, he – literally – wrote the ‘bible’ on it.

Many Latinos love him. … The media keeps insisting Latinos despise Trump. Except, we don’t. In fact, many of us love him. Myriam Wichter, the Columbian immigrant from the recent Las Vegas Trump rally, is not an anomaly. Hang-onto-your-horses for this whopper of a “revelation”: America’s Latinos have the same wants, needs, and concerns as other Americans! Our priorities are the same as “Anglos”: jobs, healthcare, and so on! A truly novel concept!

And here are some more comments made in the course of the article which we like:

The more the powers-that-be try to take Trump down with breathless: “Can you believe he said ____?!” the more the American public shrugs and says: “Eh, sorry, still love him” or, worse yet, as seems to be the case lately: “Hey, actually, we like him even more now! I’m glad someone finally said ___!”

Attempt after attempt on ‘Teflon Trump’ slides right off him and instead backfires and blows up in their collective faces. …

It’s make or break time – and drastic times call for, well, not drastic measures but certainly something different. …

Yes, Trump is different. Guess what? That’s a good thing. His ideas – e.g., a sound immigration policy, returning manufacturing jobs to America, negotiating better trade deals – are not at all radical, but do go against the Washington status-quo. You see, we’re supposed to select another perfectly malleable politician – a Republican not unlike a Democrat – who won’t shake things up too much while in office. Same ol’, same ol’. And you, little person, you are supposed to vote for more of the same and like it. But the American public has reached a tipping point – we’d rather gouge out our eyes than select another career politician or Washington insider.

An exaggeration that, no doubt, but it reflects the mood of those who support the man.

Read it all here.

Why is the West embracing the idea of its own extinction?

A very large number of human beings, the most enlightened, best informed, ever more productive, brilliantly entertained, comfortably accommodated – prosperous indeed beyond ancestral dreams – are choosing to give up existence. Is it simply because they cannot think of any reason to go on living? 

Seems so. They do not want to have children. Almost all Western countries – the great exception being the United States of America (fertility rate 2.06) – have fertility rates well below stability (2.1), which means they are dying out, each generation getting smaller. A strong indication that the present generation has no care for the future of the race.

Western intellectuals – in almost total unanimity in the academies – denigrate their civilization, find no value in it, even express disgust with it.

We have written about this annihilationist mood of Western intellectuals and elected leaders in a number of posts, among them these:

In “A vision of pure meaninglessness”  (December 14, 2008), we discuss the wish of environmentalists to protect the planet from human beings:

The environmentalists hold to the view, as little fact-based as all their views tend to be, that over-population is a threat, when in fact most countries, notably all of Europe and Japan, have precisely the opposite problem: birth-rates so low that the Italians, the Irish, the Spanish, the Portuguese (all predominantly Catholic countries, note) as well as the British, the Scandinavians, the Russians, the Japanese are literally dying out.

The environmentalist view is that human beings are messy creatures, doing more harm than good to the planet. The Green vision is of a clean, nay a pure planet. In truth, their ideal could only be realized by the total elimination of the filthy human species.

Fresh wild raw uninhabited world (January 2, 2012) deals with the same theme:  

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [in] its infamous report … alleged that human beings, just by bumbling about their daily business in spots here and there in the vast empty spaces of the continents, were having a deleterious – worse, a drastic – still worse, a disastrous effect on the climates of the planet. Its fans have had it up to here with the human species. If they could have their way they’d be rid of every last one of the squalid two-legged contaminators, and let the planet, finally cured of human infestation, spin on round the sun forever fresh, a wild, raw, goodness-packed organic world.

And in To be or not to be (January 10, 2016) …

A professor of philosophy named David Benatar published, some eight or nine years ago, a book titled: Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence. 

He makes the case that to live is to suffer and so it is best not to live. Just coming into existence is “a serious harm”. People should not have children. All babies should be killed in the womb. Humanity should become extinct.

He argues that the pain living beings endure is always much greater than the pleasure they enjoy. So they should not live. To avoid pain is a good thing; to miss pleasure is merely not a bad thing. The harm must always outweigh the joy.

It would not matter – he contends – if the human race ceased to exist: human existence has no value. 

No value to whom? The only possible answer is “to human beings”.

And we constantly write about European governments inviting vast numbers of Muslims into their countries from the Near, Middle and Far East, and Africa, to share their cosy welfare states – even those which are most rapidly subsiding into poverty. The Muslim immigrants will breed prolifically, become a majority, and impose sharia law on Europe as soon as they can.

Today, Giulio Meotti – writing at Gatestone – describes how what’s left of the nation-states of Western Europe are lowering their defenses, depleting their militaries, finding no reason to protect themselves with force even should they come under violent attack.

Actually, in some cases, because they are coming under violent attack:

On March 11, 2004, 192 people were killed and 1,400 wounded in a series of terrorist attacks in Madrid. Three days later, Spain’s Socialist leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, was elected prime minister. Just 24 hours after being sworn in, Zapatero ordered Spanish troops to leave Iraq “as soon as possible”.

The directive was a monumental political victory for extremist Islam. Since then, Europe’s boots on the ground have not been dispatched outside Europe to fight jihadism; instead, they have been deployed inside the European countries to protect monuments and civilians.

“Opération Sentinelle” is the first new large-scale military operation within France. The army is now protecting synagogues, art galleries, schools, newspapers, public offices and underground stations. Of all French soldiers currently engaged in military operations, half of them are deployed inside France. And half of those are assigned to protect 717 Jewish schools. Meanwhile, French paralysis before ISIS is immortalized by the image of police running away from the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo during the massacre there.

You can find the same figure in Italy: 11,000 Italian soldiers are currently engaged in military operations and more than half of them are used in operation “Safe Streets”,  which, as its name reveals, keeps Italy’s cities safe. Italy’s army is also busy providing aid to migrants crossing the Mediterranean.

In 2003, Italy was one of the very few countries, along with Spain and Britain, which stood with the United States in its noble war in Iraq – a war that was successful until the infamous US pull-out on December 18, 2011.

Today, Italy, like Spain, runs away from its responsibility in the war against the Islamic State. Italy’s Defense Minister Roberta Pinotti ruled out the idea of Italy taking part in action against ISIS, after EU defense ministers unanimously backed a French request for help.

Italy’s soldiers, stationed in front of my newspaper’s office in Rome, provide a semblance of security, but the fact that half of Italy’s soldiers are engaged in domestic security, and not in offensive military strikes, should give us pause. These numbers shed a light not only on Europe’s internal terror frontlines, from the French banlieues to “Londonistan”.  These numbers also shed light on the great Western retreat.

US President Barack Obama has boasted that as part of his legacy, he has withdrawn American military forces from the Middle East. His shameful departure from Iraq has been the main reason that the Islamic State rose to power – and the reason Obama postponed a military withdrawal from Afghanistan. This US retreat can only be compared to the fall of Saigon, with the picture of a helicopter evacuating the U.S. embassy.

In Europe, armies are no longer even ready for war.

The German army is now useless, and Germany spends only 1.2% of GDP on defense. The German army today has the lowest number of staff at any time in its history.

In 2012, Germany’s highest court, breaking a 67-year-old taboo against using the military within Germany’s borders, allowed the military to be deployed in domestic operations. The post-Hitler nation’s fear that the army could develop again into a state-within-a-state that might impede democracy has paralyzed Europe’s largest and wealthiest country. Last January, it was revealed that German air force reconnaissance jets cannot even fly at night.

Many European states slumber in the same condition as Belgium, with its failed security apparatus. A senior U.S. intelligence officer even recently likened the Belgian security forces to “children”.

And Sweden’s commander-in-chief, Sverker Göranson, said his country could only fend off an invasion for a maximum of one week.

During the past ten years, the United Kingdom has also increasingly been seen by its allies – both in the US and in Europe – as a power in retreat, focusing only on its domestic agenda. The British have become increasingly insular – a littler England.

The former head of the Royal Navy, Admiral Nigel Essenigh, has spoken of “uncomfortable similarities” between the UK’s defenses now and those in the early 1930s, during the rise of Nazi Germany.

In Canada, military bases are now being used to host migrants from Middle East. Justin Trudeau, the new Canadian prime minister, first halted military strikes against ISIS, then refused to join the coalition against it. Terrorism has apparently never been a priority for Trudeau – not like “gender equality”,  global warming, euthanasia and injustices committed against Canada’s natives.

The bigger question is: Why does anyone choose to fight in a war? Civilized nations go to war so that members of today’s generation may sacrifice themselves to protect future generations.

But if there are no future generations, there is no reason whatever for today’s young men to die in war. …

Spain’s fertility has fallen the most – the lowest in Western Europe over twenty years and the most extreme demographic spiral observed anywhere. Similarly, fewer babies were born in Italy in 2015 than in any year since the state was founded 154 years ago. … Italy’s population shrank. Germany, likewise, is experiencing a demographic suicide.

This massive deployment of armed forces in our own cities is a departure from history. It is a moral disarmament, before a military one. It is Europe’s new Weimar moment, from the name of the first German Republic that was dramatically dismantled by the rise of Nazism. The Weimar Republic still represents a cultural muddle, a masterpiece of unarmed democracy devoted to a mutilated pacifism, a mixture of naïve cultural, political reformism and the first highly developed welfare state.

According to the historian Walter Laqueur, Weimar was the first case of the “life and death of a permissive society”. Will Europe’s new Weimar also be brought down, this time by Islamists?

By Islam, yes.

Because that’s what Europe wants – doesn’t it? How else explain what’s happening to it? What it is letting happen to it.

But why?