The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men. – Samuel Adams

Is liberal democracy, the nation held together as such by a constitution of liberty, the genuinely open society, no longer able to sustain itself?

If so, why?

We know what enemies assail it, what developments continue to weaken it, but wonder why it has not proved strong enough to withstand them, if it is failing to do so.

Is there a fatal weakness in the best political system ever devised, exemplified by the Constitution of the United States of America?

Or do you think the long established libertarian nature of the US, Canada, Australia – perhaps even of Britain, far gone as it is – will yet prove stronger than the ruinous pull to the Left and the encroachments of Islam? Will it stop and reverse the trend now well underway towards tyranny?

John O’Sullivan wrote recently at the National Review:

I doubt Wokeness will triumph in the United States or anywhere in the English-speaking world where democratic and liberal traditions are deeply rooted, if at present very far from flowering. Those traditions will almost certainly be strong enough to contain a Woke regime long enough for an election to punish its preordained chaos, failure, and authoritarianism.

Are democratic and liberal traditions deeply rooted enough in the English-speaking world? Are they strong enough? Will electorates punish an authoritarian regime if they mistakenly put it in power? (What if such a regime abolishes elections?)

We look forward to our readers telling us any answers they may have to these questions.

(You can be as cynical about human nature as you need to be, if the answer, or part of it, lies there.)

Capitalists are lavishly funding the Communist revolution now underway in America.

Black Lives Matter, a Marxist revolutionary movement whose goal is to overthrow the free constitutional republic of the United States, has been given/promised well over a billion dollars “so far” by American businesses to help it realize its aim.

The Federalist reports:

At least seven “Fortune 500” companies donated funds to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation despite its Marxist roots and anti-capitalistic views.

According to Axios, “the 100 largest U.S. companies have so far committed $1.63 billion to organizations fighting racism and inequality”. Analysis of social media posts, blogs, and public statements … shows that Deckers Uggs, Amazon, Pepsi’s Gatorade, Microsoft, Warner Records, Intel, Bungie of Xbox and Microsoft Games, and Mondelez International’s Nabisco all specifically pledged money to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation following the death of George Floyd. …

The article includes a (non-exhaustive) list of of donating companies.

The beneficiaries complain:

What is surprising is the paucity of corporations and the stinginess of the donations. [!]

One of the BLM co-founders, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, explained the foundation of the movement, inspired by her and co-founders Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, in an interview [with The Real News] in 2015:

We actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists.

So of course was Obama, who stated proudly that he was a “community organizer”, which means, in blunt terms, a red revolutionary rabble-rouser.

The riots – no doubt joined by many “useful idiots” who are simply bored with being kept from work and confined to their homes by the quarantine regulations – have a purpose, a point, a meaning far beyond expressing indignation for the fatal police mistreatment of George Floyd, the petty criminal and historic international martyr.

BLM is the latest vanguard of Communist revolution in America, aimed –  as one African immigrant, leading revolutionary, and elected member of Congress, Ilhan Omar, says – at “dismantling the system”, meaning the overthrow of the free constitutional republic.

The movement and its entire agenda is supported by the Democratic Party, and if the Democrats are elected to power in November, the Communist Revolution of the USA will have been accomplished.

*

Reminded by Liz, we add:

Soros, the most evil of all anti-capitalism capitalists, uses his billions to employ legions of demons – these days he prefers them to be black and female – to promote crime and cripple law and order. His money gets them into powerful positions, notably the office of State or District Attorney. Then at his command they proceed to corrupt the criminal justice system.

Facebook will not allow us to post this statement of fact quoted from The Religion of Peace with the link to that website’s comprehensive list of proofs of its truthfulness:

Given the recent interest in assessing historical characters by
their views on slavery, it bears mentioning that Muhammad,
the prophet of Islam, owned and traded African slaves.

Details in Islamic scripture here.

It is not difficult to guess why Facebook rejects it. Any criticism of Islam, any mention of something not in its favor, is now taboo in the social media, the mainstream media, articles, books, videos, films.

“Progressives”, the friends of Islam, overrule the First Amendment wherever they have the power to do it.

A huge victory for Islam against the still-fairly-free world.

Questions about rights – what they are, who or what grants them, how they may be upheld – are not and cannot be settled. They’re continually subject to debate in our culture.

Everyone’s right to life is quite widely accepted – though not by Communists and Muslims, and only provisionally by French philosophers and American Democrats. A right to liberty has been acknowledged increasingly by most governments – not yet all – over the last couple of hundred years. But other proclaimed rights continue to be passionately demanded and challenged: Does everyone have a right to medical treatment, to education, to housing? Do we have a right not to be offended? If these are rights, how might they be protected?

Rights are things that can be possessed. Individuals own them.

Wrongs are things that people do, or have done to them.

What it is wrong to do was settled for civilized peoples thousands of years ago: it is wrong to kill, to harm, to steal, to lie.

But unsettled questions linger about wrong-doing:

How can wrong-doing be assessed? How should it be dealt with? By whom?

Are some killings not wrong? Is it not wrong to kill in war, in self-defense, in the execution of justice?

And to acknowledge certain (uncivilized) schools of thought we note that it is not wrong according to Communists for a leader to kill individuals for the benefit of the community; not wrong according to Islam for Muslims to kill non-Muslims or their own children; not wrong according to certain French philosophers to kill for the erotic excitement of killing; not wrong according to certain American Democrats to kill an elected president.

Globalism has failed. It was always a bad idea.

It was invented by Americans. Because Americans live in a man-made multi-ethnic state, they are comfortable with the concept.

But most countries are mono-ethnic. With few exceptions, each has its own distinct culture, history, language, character – some with an uncomfortable mix of religions. They are not man-made nations, they are time-made nations. They have evolved. Through very long stretches of time.

They do not resemble each other. Many have warred with each other and have old scars, ancestral antipathies. That’s why the League of Nations – envisioned and established by President Woodrow Wilson, yet strangely never joined by the USA – failed; and why the United Nations Organization is a hellish institution; and why the European Union is a racket run by a gang.

Americans built their nation out of several young states, fastened them together, “out of many one”, with the bolt of a constitution, and the project succeeded. The land prospered, from sea to shining sea, a vast enterprise park of ethnicities, religions, cultures where individuals work together in just one language. So certain Americans, well-meaning and incapable of allowing themselves to think badly of human nature, thought the whole world could be like the USA – in 6,500 languages. 

They were wrong.

Curtis Ellis, who was a policy advisor with the Trump presidential campaign, writes at American Greatness:

The CCP virus pandemic has added urgency to a long-overdue reassessment of the assumptions underlying the post-World War II “international rules-based order.”

To be clear, “international rules-based order” is a euphemism for globalism, and globalism has taken a beating these past few months.

We’ve seen how the true cost of doing business with China is a very high price indeed. We’ve seen how an economy reliant on global supply chains and just-in-time inventory management is a fragile one, and we’ve seen how the Chinese Communist Party is not the benign force we expected it to be when we welcomed it into “the family of trading nations.”

The pandemic has exposed the flaws in the globalization project the elites have been pursuing for the past 70 years.

The World Trade Organization is a cornerstone of that project and, like the World Heath Organization, its sister in the globalist pantheon, the WTO is now under fire in Washington. …

The World Trade Organization was born after the Berlin Wall fell. Gone were the days of a trade and military alliance of Western industrial democracies—the free world standing against a Communist bloc. In the new post-Cold War world order, goods and capital would flow freely in a global economy of universal prosperity and democracy.

Though the WTO was born in 1995, it’s conception dates to 1947. That’s when the State Department sought to create an international trade organization “to bring about world peace . . . and prevent World War III.”

A California congressman at the time described Washington’s negotiators as “boatloads of smug diplomats, all wise economists, experts, theorists, specialists and whatnots eager to barter away the little factory in Wichita, the little shop in Keokuk.”

While they failed in ’47, they kept the dream alive over the decades. “What’s good for the global economy” replaced “what’s good for America” as the guiding principle for Washington’s trade negotiators, diplomats, and strategists.

The “experts” pursued their plan without debate or congressional vote. No one came right out and told the American people their nation and system of government were being replaced.

As Richard Gardner, the man who served as Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Spain explained, “The ‘house of world order’ will have to be built from the bottom up. . . . An end-run about national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than a frontal assault.”

Strobe Talbott served in Bill Clinton’s State Department when the WTO was founded. He described “The Birth of the Global Nation” in Time magazine in 1992: “Countries are . . . artificial and temporary. . . . Within the next hundred years . . . nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-20th century—“citizen of the world”—will have assumed real meaning by the end of the 21st.”

Long before the pandemic exposed the follies and fallacies of the globalist project, before it showed us how, when push comes to shove, national governments will always put their own interests first, administrations on both sides of the aisle had problems with the WTO.

Another problem of the WTO involves its appellate body—judges who interpret WTO rules and settle disputes among members. Yet the WTO doesn’t follow its own rules.

Article 17.5 of the WTO rules says cases that come before the organization—disputes between nations over unfair trade practices—must be settled within 90 days. In reality, cases drag on for years, during which time the victims go bankrupt while awaiting justice.

The rules also say judges cannot be affiliated with any government. Yet in a recent case involving paper imports, none of the judges met the WTO’s criteria, and one was actually an official of the Chinese government. The judges, not surprisingly, ruled against the United States.

Where should the judges come from? Another planet?

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer blasted the ruling as “the latest example of judicial activism” by the WTO aimed at undermining U.S. trade laws.

And when the WTO isn’t flouting its own rules, it’s making up new ones.

We thought we signed a contract when we joined the WTO, but it’s a contract with terms that keep changing. We put our country at the mercy of an entity with rules and authority that are constantly growing.

Past administrations both Democratic and Republican objected to WTO judges creating obligations to which the United States never agreed.

The Trump Administration, fed up with U.S. complaints falling on deaf ears, stopped approving new judges and froze the appeals “courts” process. In response, WTO bureaucrats went ahead and created a new judicial body outside the agreed-upon rules—and it is using American taxpayer dollars to fund its operation.

The WTO’s various power grabs threaten American sovereignty.

The Article XXI rule,the national security exception, reads: “Nothing in this Agreement shall be construed . . . to prevent any contracting party from taking any action which it considers necessary for the protection of its essential security interests.”

That’s what the United States signed and we take its meaning to be absolutely clear: We can take actions based on what we consider to be in our national security interest and the WTO can’t stop us.

President Trump determined the national security interests of the United States require us to be self-sufficient in producing steel and aluminum. To that end, he imposed tariffs to stop China and other countries from dumping their metals and driving American producers out of business.

But the Eurocrats in Geneva believe it’s up to their unelected “judges,” not the elected government of the United States, to decide what’s in America’s national security interest, no matter what Article XXI says.

Steven Vaughn served as counsel to the office of the United States Trade Representative. He believes there’s a fundamental problem with the WTO when we can read the same text and come to opposite conclusions.

“Somebody misunderstood what we all agreed to. We were told we had not given up any of our sovereignty,” Vaughn says. “If we’re this far apart just in terms of the basic concept, what is the point of trying to paper over them.”

How can you even talk about reform with an organization that doesn’t agree on the meaning of “cases will be settled within 90 days”? What good is rewriting rules for an outfit that doesn’t follow rules?

Why bother to remain in the WTO?

It has done nothing to stop the greatest threat to world trade today: Communist China’s beggar-thy-neighbor predatory trade practices.

China supports its export industries with subsidies, tax breaks, export rebates, low-cost loans, and cheap inputs including a militarized workforce. The WTO has allowed Beijing to maintain its trade barriers even as we lowered ours. It requires the United States to treat repressive regimes that use forced labor the same as our democratic allies.

President Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott saw the WTO, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank as “protoministries of trade, finance, and development for a united world”.

The WTO was part of a bold experiment to build a borderless, post-national world.

We can now say with certainty the experiment failed.

It’s time to take back control of our destiny, leave the WTO, and rebuild America

Leave the UN. 

Leave all international organizations.

Trade yes, join no.

To make America great again.

Adrian Vermeule is a Harvard professor of Constitutional Law who doesn’t like the US Constitution, is nostalgic for Roman Catholic statist totalitarianism, and proposes a new dispensation for Americans under “authoritative rule for the common good” which, he gleefully declares, requires the “overriding” of “the selfish claims of individuals to ‘private rights’”.

Vermeule is a convert to Catholicism. He does not mention Catholicism by name in this article, but his belief that morality is rightly defined and imposed by a central authority for the “common good” belongs to his religion. And the idea that self-sacrifice is the highest moral good is essentially a Christian teaching. A fear of heresy – people being allowed to voice an opinion that the state-as-church does not approve – suffuses his political philosophy.

“Free speech and free-speech ideology — that government is forbidden to judge the quality and moral worth of public speech,” he writes, “should be not only rejected but stamped as abominable, beyond the realm of the acceptable forever”.

The article in which he propounds these views appears in the Leftist journal, The Atlantic, as “part of the project The Battle for the Constitution, in partnership with the National Constitution Center”. (Go there to see how all the contributions to this project are actually against the Constitution.)

It is easy to see why The Atlantic likes his ideas. Stalin would have applauded them.

As for the structure and distribution of authority within government, common-good constitutionalism will favor a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy, the latter acting through principles of administrative law’s inner morality with a view to promoting solidarity and subsidiarity. The bureaucracy will be seen not as an enemy, but as the strong hand of legitimate rule. The state is to be entrusted with the authority to protect the populace from the vagaries and injustices of market forces, from employers who would exploit them as atomized individuals, and from corporate exploitation and destruction of the natural environment. 

The close resemblance between Left statism and Catholic Christianity could not be more candidly displayed.

This Constitutional Law professor would not allow a thread of the Constitution to remain … Oh, wait! He does allow a few threads to remain, useful for the re-construction of the United States of America:

The general-welfare clause, which gives Congress “power to … provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States”, is an obvious place to ground principles of common-good constitutionalism (despite a liberal tradition of reading the clause in a cramped fashion), as is the Constitution’s preamble, with its references to general welfare and domestic tranquility, to the perfection of the union, and to justice.

And he could endure the retention of some words, provided they were re-interpreted:

Constitutional words such as freedom and liberty need not be given libertarian readings; instead they can be read in light of a better conception of liberty as the natural human capacity to act in accordance with reasoned morality.

“Reasoned morality” being the “common-good” morality such as was propounded by the Catholic Church and for many centuries enforced by the Papal and Spanish Inquisitions.

This imposed “common-good” morality will be resisted at first, but –

Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.

Notice that citizens have become “subjects” under this ideal regime. And the state run by bureaucrats has become “the ruler” – more pope than king.

If it can be taken that The Atlantic speaks for the Left – and surely it can? – we are being told in the strongest possible terms that the Left wants and intends to abandon the Constitution – which alone binds the states of America together into a nation – and substitute a federal government with totalitarian policies and absolute powers that would establish Roman Catholicism as a state religion, substitute central planning for the free market, and implement the “green” policies of environmentalists further to restrict our lives as “subjects” of the Moral State.

If it was just one Catholic religious nut pleading for the establishment of this utopia, we could laugh at it and forget it.

But it is not just one. It is millions of – mostly young, school-indoctrinated – Leftist religious nuts wanting dependence on parental government; the drowning of individuals in an ocean of common-good; the implementation of anti-industrial “green” policies with the hard forced labor and poverty they’ll entail; sacrifice of personal ambitions and talents; acceptance of chastisement for sin (you “will come to thank the ruler” for it) and life-long indebtedness for food, shelter, and apportioned health care; total loss of self-determination; obedience.

Obedience. Bureaucrats will tell you what to do. Do it!  It is for the common good.

Above all, obedience. 

We ask an urgent question:

MILLIONS OF OUR ANCESTORS GAVE THEIR LIVES TO SAVE OUR LIBERTY. WILL WE NOW GIVE UP LIBERTY TO SAVE OUR LIVES?

Governors are using fear of the coronavirus pandemic to assume tyrannical powers.

The Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, for example, believes she has the right in such an emergency to issue dictatorial orders.

But the Republican governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, takes a contrary view. She defends the liberty granted to all Americans by the Constitution, in which there is no instruction that it must – or may – be suspended if a pandemic occurs.

We quote from an article by Jodi Giddings from Victory Girls, where “outspoken conservative women” express their opinions:

Americans are growing restless. We’ve done a decent job of doing what we can to help quell the coronavirus outbreak, but some of us are recognizing that many of our governors and other officials are jumping headlong into dictator-status in their efforts to fight coronavirus (or at least that’s the excuse they’re using). In response, a growing number of us are opposing the overreach. We’re Americans; we’re hard workers; we love our freedom; so it’s in our nature to resist anyone usurping our rights. And no two governors in America stand in starker contrast than Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and South Dakota’s Kristi Noem.

You might have heard that Whitmer restricted hydroxychloroquine a couple of weeks back, and most recently ordered that no group of any size may congregate, and has decided for her constituents what is and is not “essential” to their daily lives. … So, no, you can’t buy seeds and plants for which to grow your own food until she says you can, plebes. And to you small businesses: go get a small business loan and shut up.

Except Michiganders are not shutting up.

More than 15,000  cars and trucks “descend[ed] on Michigan’s state capital on Wednesday to protest what they’re calling Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s tyrannical new guidelines to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus in the state”.

Why? Because they recognize that freshman Governor Whitmer has governed like a dictator. …

She was forced, by active protest and a lawsuit, to “amend her dictate”.

The media had to report, though no doubt they hated to:

“Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is backing down in t“““he face of a pro-life activist’s federal lawsuit against her and Detroit police.”

… She got caught violating the First Amendment rights of her constituents. But make no mistake, the woman who’s made herself the decider of what is and isn’t “essential” would have continued trampling all over the Bill of Rights had no one punched her in the neck.

“Quarantine is when you restrict movement of sick people. Tyranny is when you restrict the movement of healthy people,” Meshawn Maddock, an organizer of the protest with the Michigan Conservative Coalition, told Fox News. “Every person has learned a harsh lesson about social distancing. We don’t need a nanny state to tell people how to be careful.”

The other governor discussed in the article has no wish to be a political nanny:

In contrast, Governor Noem of South Dakota has thus far refused issuing a stay-at-home order, or dictates that tell her citizens what they can and cannot buy, or where they can and cannot go….

For which she was subjected to “near-constant slings and arrows from just about every direction”, especially from the media.

She’s issued guidelines [for keeping safe], but Noem, to her credit … remains rooted in the principles of freedom and personal responsibility. …

She declared that she had faith in the people of South Dakota. Which is to say, in their common sense.

The South Dakota Medical Association sent Noem a letter last week asking her to issue a stay-at-home order but there’s no indication she has any plans to reverse course.

And just yesterday, Noem proactively announced a statewide hydroxychloroquine clinical trial to test the malaria drug’s effectiveness on battling, and even preventing, coronavirus.

She said:

“The public deserves the truth. And the truth is all the facts. And I would appreciate it if our media would remember that.”

Jodi Giddings believes South Dakota will gain residents. And we expect it will. Because people move from oppression to freedom.

I predict South Dakota will gain itself some freedom-seeking residents post haste…

The moral of the story is this: we are witnessing in real time what socialism looks like. The bread lines, the joblessness, the freedom-crushing dictates, the withholding of life-sustaining necessities that are inherent in that destructive system are on full display all across our nation. But we are also witnessing what the bedrock, unwavering principles of liberty look like, where a governor with a spine of steel, against massive pressure from all around her, has resisted the siren song of “give up your liberty for a little security”.  Instead she has empowered both her citizens to make their own decisions on how to keep themselves and others safe amid this health crisis, and her state’s medical professionals to make the right decisions for their patients without her interference. … And the [clinical] trial will both save lives and provide further data about the drug’s effectiveness to the country itself in its time of need, all without draconian dictates from the executive.

The contrasts between the two governors amid this crisis are clear: tyranny versus freedom; dependence versus self-reliance.

The shut-downs must end; Americans need to get back to work.

The fact: Americans are bound together as a nation by the Constitution. Americans have nothing but the Constitution to bind them together as a nation.

The logical consequence: America can only be governed by citizens whose prime object is to uphold the Constitution. Nobody who does not honor and defend the Constitution should be allowed any part in government. Those who regard themselves as subject to a system of law that opposes the U.S. Constitution should be prohibited from running for government office.

Stephen M. Kirby, a scholar of Islam and the author of 6 books about Islam, writes (in part – the whole thing needs to be read) at Jihad Watch:

[For a survey] I presented four questions to eighty Muslim public officials across the United States; each question asked the Muslim public official to choose between following the U.S. Constitution/our man-made laws or Islamic Doctrine.  An eye-opening 93% of these Muslim public officials would not express support for the U.S. Constitution or our man-made laws.  Of the six who did express this support, only two allowed me to mention their name. …

 And all six – as sharia permits in the interest of Islam – could have been lying.

I then decided to submit the same four questions to 36 Muslim American candidates who appeared to be seeking public office for the first time.

The Questions:

If you are elected to public office you will take an oath of office that includes swearing, or affirming, to support the United States Constitution.  With that in mind, I am interested in your response, as a candidate who follows the religion of Islam, to the following questions:

No. 1:  Will you go on record now and state that our 1^st Amendment right to freedom of speech gives the right to anyone in the United States to criticize or disagree with your prophet Muhammad, and will you also go on record now and state that you support and defend anyone’s right to criticize or disagree with your prophet Muhammad, and that you condemn anyone who threatens death or physical harm to another person who is exercising that right?

No. 2:  Our 1^st Amendment guarantees freedom of religion in the United States. As part of that freedom, anyone in the United States has the right to join or leave any religion, or have no religion at all.  Will you go on record now and state that you support and defend the idea that in the United States a Muslim has not only the freedom to leave Islam, but to do so without fear of physical harm, and will you also go on record now and state that you condemn anyone who threatens physical harm to a Muslim who is exercising that freedom?

No. 3:  According to the words of Allah found in Koran 5:38 and the teachings of your prophet Muhammad, amputation of a hand is an acceptable punishment for theft.   But our U.S. Constitution, which consists of man-made laws, has the 8^th Amendment that prohibits cruel and unusual punishment such as this.  Do you agree with Allah and your prophet Muhammad that amputation of a hand is an acceptable punishment for theft in the United States, or do you believe that our man-made laws prohibiting such punishments are true laws and are to be followed instead of this 7^th Century command of Allah and teaching of Muhammad?

No. 4:  According to the words of Allah found in Koran 4:3, Muslim men are allowed, but not required, to be married to up to four wives.  Being married to more than one wife in the United States is illegal according to our man-made bigamy laws.  Do you agree with Allah that it is legal for a Muslim man in the United States to be married to more than one woman, or do you believe that our man-made laws prohibiting bigamy are true laws and are to be followed instead of this 7^th Century command of Allah?

Only three Muslim candidates clearly stated that they would support the U.S. Constitution/our man-made laws over Islamic Doctrine …

And all three – as sharia permits in the interest of Islam – could have been lying.

Conclusion

These 36 Muslim Americans seeking public office would have to, if successful, take an oath of office that includes swearing (or affirming) to support the U.S. Constitution.  In theory then, one would think such Muslim Americans would be quite willing even now to express their support for that Constitution and our man-made laws.  The fact that 92% of them would not take this opportunity to express that support is troubling.

Troubling, but not surprising.  As we saw earlier, 93% of current Muslim public officials and 77% of aspiring Muslim reformers also declined to make such a choice.  This, in spite of the fact that anyone holding a public office in the United States is required to take an oath to support the U.S. Constitution and our man-made laws, and we regularly hear from aspiring Muslim reformers that Islamic Doctrine needs to be modernized and made more compatible with Western laws.  But when faced with specific choices … 91% of all the Muslims listed in these three categories would not express support for Western laws over Islamic Doctrine.

One might wonder if it is fair to ask Muslims to make such a choice.  It certainly is because of the irreconcilable conflict between major tenets of Islamic Doctrine and Western Laws, especially the U.S. Constitution.

For as long as sharia is an inseparable part of Islamic doctrine, no observing Muslim should be allowed to run for elected office in the United States.  

Is America in the throes of a revolution? Are we sliding unstoppably into totalitarian communism?

Angelo Codevilla writes at American Greatness:

Some conservatives, rejoicing that impeachment turned into yet another of #TheResistance’s political train wrecks and that President Trump is likely to be reelected by a bigger margin than in 2016, expect that a chastened ruling class will return to respecting the rest of us. They are mistaken.

Trump’s reelection, by itself, cannot protect us. The ruling class’s intolerance of the 2016 election’s results was intolerance of us.

Nor was their intolerance so much a choice as it was the expression of its growing sense of its own separate identity, of power and of entitlement to power. The halfhearted defenses with which the offensives of the ruling class have been met already advertise the fact that it need not and will not accept the outcome of any presidential election it does not win. Trump notwithstanding, this class will rule henceforth as it has in the past three years. So long as its hold on American institutions continues to grow, and they retain millions of clients, elections won’t really matter.

Our country is in a state of revolution, irreversibly, because society’s most influential people have retreated into moral autarchy, …

Autarchy, or autocracy, is rule by a dictator. Has any Democrat proclaimed a desire for a dictator, or to be a dictator? If so, we missed it. The Democrats want absolute power in their own hands, but have’t yet wished up a Stalin or a Mao. It’s highly likely that Bernie Sanders would like to be an American Stalin, but has he admitted it?

Besides which, there is not a single Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States who could run a poll in Iowa, let alone the country. 

Moral autarchy? Not sure what that means. But okay, let’s accept the term in order to follow the writer’s argument.

… have seceded from America’s constitutional order, and because they browbeat their socio-political adversaries instead of trying to persuade them. Theirs is not a choice that can be reversed. It is a change in the character of millions of people.

Does character change? Does the character of a people – a nation – change? What characterizes any nation must by definition be what does not change about it. For a country to change its character it would have to have its population replaced by a different population – as is happening rapidly in Sweden, France, Spain, and Germany.  The Democrats seem to like the idea of America becoming more “Hispanic” than “Anglo”, but it hasn’t happened yet, and might never happen.

There has been a change in America over the last 70 years or so. It is not a change of character. In all their variety, Americans are recognizably the same as they were 100 years ago. What has changed in America are ideas about values and morals, about what matters and what doesn’t.

And that is what the article under discussion is really about.

The sooner conservatives realize that the Republic established between 1776 and 1789—the America we knew and loved—cannot return, the more fruitfully we will be able to manage the revolution’s clear and present challenges to ourselves. How are we to deal with a ruling class that insists on ruling—elections and generally applicable rules notwithstanding—because it regards us as lesser beings?

The resistance that reached its public peaks in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the impeachment imbroglio should have left no doubt about the socio-political arbitrariness that flows from the ruling class’s moral autarchy, about the socio-political power of the ruling class we’re forced to confront, or of its immediate threat to our freedom of speech.

Chief Justice John Roberts, presiding over the Senate’s impeachment trial, was as clear an example as any of that moral autarchy and its grip on institutions.

Pursuant to Senate rules, Senator Rand Paul sent a written question through Roberts to House Manager Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) regarding the extent of collaboration between Schiff’s staffer Sean Misko and his longtime fellow partisan, CIA officer Eric Ciaramella in starting the charges that led to impeachment. Roberts, having read the question to himself, declared: “The presiding officer declines to read the question as submitted.”

The chief justice of the United States, freedom of speech’s guardian-in-chief, gave no reason for declining to read Paul’s question. The question was relevant to the proceedings. It violated no laws, no regulations. The names of the two persons were known to every member of the House and Senate, as well as to everyone around the globe who had followed news reports over the previous months. But the Democratic Party had been campaigning to drive from public discussion that this impeachment stemmed from the partisan collaboration between a CIA officer and a Democratic staffer.

“Collaboration” is the polite term for it; “conspiracy” the more accurate one.

Accordingly, the mainstream media had informally but totally banned discussion of this fact, supremely relevant but supremely embarrassing to Schiff in particular and to Democrats in general. Now, Paul was asking Schiff officially to comment on the relationship. Schiff could have explained it, or refused to explain it. But Roberts saved him the embarrassment and trouble—and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) spared senators the problem of voting on a challenge to Roberts’s  ruling. The curtain of official concealment, what the Mafia calls the omertà, remained intact. Why no reason?

Just as no dog wags his tail without a reason, neither did Roberts wag his without reason. Neither the laws of the United States nor the rules of the Senate told the presiding officer to suppress the senator’s question. Why was Roberts pleased to please those he pleased and to displease those he displeased? In short, why did this impartial presiding officer act as a man partial to one side against the other?

This professional judge could hardly have been impressed by the ruling class’s chosen instrument, Adam Schiff, or by Schiff’s superior regard for legal procedure. Since Schiff’s prosecution featured hiding the identity of the original accuser—after promising to feature his testimony—and since it featured secret depositions, blocked any cross-examination of its own witnesses, and prevented the defense from calling any of their own, it would have been strange if Chief Justice Roberts’s bias was a professional one.

Is it possible that Roberts favored the substance of the ruling class claim that neither President Trump nor any of his defenders have any right to focus public attention on the Biden family’s use of public office to obtain money in exchange for influence? That, after all, is what Washington is largely about. Could Roberts also love corruption so much as to help conceal it? No.

Roberts’s professional and ethical instincts incline him the other way. Nevertheless, he sustained the ruling class’s arbitrariness. Whose side did he take? His dinner companions’ side? The media’s? His wife’s? Roberts’s behavior—contrary as it was to his profession, to his morals, and to his political provenance—shows how great is the ruling class’s centripetal force.

The sad but inescapable consequence of this force is that conservatives have no choice but to follow the partisan logic of revolution—fully conscious of the danger that partisanship can make us as ridiculously dishonest as Adam Schiff or CNN’s talking heads, into rank-pullers like John Roberts, and into profiteers as much as any member of the Biden family.

Do conservatives have no choice but to go along with “the revolution”, with the abandonment of the values that inspired the Constitution, with corruption as a matter of indisputable but unchangeable fact?

The writer then seems to change his mind. He suggests there is a choice:

And yet, revolution is war, the proximate objective of which is to hurt the other side until it loses the capacity and the will to do us harm. That means treating institutions and people from the standpoint of our own adversarial interest: controlling what we can either for our own use or for bargaining purposes, discrediting and abandoning what we cannot take from our enemies.

Opposing them by the means they choose, the weapons they use? That – so the writer suggests – is our best recourse?

Unlike our enemies, our ultimate objective is, as Lincoln said, “peace among ourselves and with all nations”. But what kind of peace we may get depends on the extent to which we may compel our enemies to leave us in peace. And for that, we must do unto them more and before they do unto us.

Which is true? Do we have no choice but to join “the revolution” – a change from a free open society of self-reliant individuals into a government-controlled, race and sex obsessed, doom prophesying, totally organized community? Or are we still in control of our destiny? And if we fight our revolutionary enemy, must it be with their weapons, or ours? On their terms, or ours?

We do not see that there has been a revolution – though the Obama administration tried to make one. We do not think the only way to save America from totalitarian one-party rule is by following the rules laid down by the Gramsci-Alinsky school of sedition and the Cloward-Piven blueprint for chaos. (See here and here and here and here.)

By great good luck we have President Trump leading us in another direction, showing us another way, prioritizing better (characteristic) values: freedom, individual enterprise, innovation, industry, competence, patriotism, strength, ambition, self-confidence, prosperity. For a few more years at least. During which the Left revolutionaries may, in the fury of their frustration, stamp themselves into the ground.