The editors of American Greatness held a symposium of scholars and writers who are for Donald Trump’s presidency.

We select some contributions and quote what we judge to be the most salient points.

The full texts of all the contributions can be found here:

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I always thought that Donald Trump was perfect … [being] the only person who could defeat Hillary Clinton. What with her corrupt ways, her alliance with the most destructive policies imaginable, and especially the manner in which through her immigration policies she’d render it impossible for any conservative to win in my lifetime, this was an easy one. It became easier still when I saw the fainéants and milquetoasts on stage with Trump at the first candidates’ debate in Cleveland in 2015. But on the positive side I also saw in Trump someone who could rescue what is living from what is dead in conservatism. And by dead I mean what passes for the higher thinking of today’s conservatism, the contempt for the poorest Americans, the indifference to mobility, the compromises with corruption, and mostly the sense of failure, the small-souled man’s belief that our best days are behind us. Against that, I take my stand. – F.H. Buckley is a law professor at George Mason University and the author of The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America.

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There are many reasons for Americans of varying political persuasions to support Donald Trump for President. Among these reasons, three are especially important: First, Donald Trump has a plan to re-energize the U.S. economy after more than a decade of slow growth, stagnating incomes, and rising government debt. He will slash corporate taxes to encourage businesses to repatriate more than $3 trillion that they are holding offshore because of the current corporate tax rate that is the highest in the industrial world. Those funds once brought back home can be invested in American enterprises to provide jobs and incomes for American workers. He will cut individual income taxes to encourage work and investment, and economic growth. Just as important, he will cut regulations that have accumulated during the Obama years and that are discouraging investment and the hiring of U.S. workers. Second, Mr. Trump will focus on national security in all of its dimensions by attacking the interlocking problems of terrorism, illegal immigration, and rising crime in the inner cities. He is committed to restoring America’s borders as an essential feature of national sovereignty and to fulfilling the first duty of government, which is to protect the security of its citizens. Third, Donald Trump is by far the preferred alternative to Hillary Clinton who promises to entrench further the failed economic and foreign policies of the past eight years. For conservatives and moderates who hope for a stronger and more dynamic America, and a nation of rising incomes, strong communities, and secure borders, the choice could not be clearer. Donald Trump … is the candidate in this race who promises to restore American greatness. – James Piereson is, most recently, the author of Shattered Consensus: The Rise and Decline of America’s Post War Political Order. His essays appear in many newspaper and journals, including The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and The New Criterion.

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I register my support on this list not as a conservative partisan, but rather as a young academic with a critical perspective on the prevailing left-right political paradigm — a subject I have taught at the university level both in the United States and in Europe. … The Bush-Clinton politics of the past 30 years is the rotten carcass of a politics that perhaps made sense in the past but has proven woefully inadequate to address the contemporary challenges we face. Donald J. Trump is the first major politician to reflect an understanding of this post-Cold War reality and to point boldly toward an alternative — for this he has my admiration and my support. – Darren Beattie is Visiting Assistant Professor Department of Political Science, Duke University.

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Donald Trump shows an intuitive grasp of what most politicians must have explained to them: here in America, the people rule. Popular sovereignty requires borders, and it requires security. The people cannot govern by reflection and choice if they must forever respond to accident and force. Popular sovereignty also requires that the people not be slaves to an unelected and unrepresentative administrative state. The laws as well as the agencies of government must be trimmed and tamed so that they once again serve the people. Donald Trump grasps this too: the Supreme Court is the least republican branch of the federal government, and the people cannot rule if they are subjected to capricious judicial edicts masquerading as constitutional interpretation. Trump has put forth a serious list of judicial nominees who would only go where the text, tradition, logic, and structure of the Constitution — rather than currently fashionable political preferences — point. Beyond this, Trump has wisely called for the resignation of a transparently political Supreme Court justice, thereby reminding us of constitutionally legitimate political checks against an overweening judiciary. – Bradley C. S. Watson is Professor of Politics and Philip M. McKenna Chair in American and Western Political Thought at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where is co-director of the college’s Center for Political and Economic Thought.

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No other presidential election in my lifetime has had so much at stake. The differences between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton could not be starker. If Clinton wins, she has promised that the Supreme Court Justices that she will appoint will overturn Citizens United. Few people seem to understand that would mean that the federal government would be able to ban movies and books deemed too political during election years. It is hard to believe that we could soon be living in a country where movies and books could be banned because of their political positions. The judges that Trump has listed as the ones he would appoint would protect the 1st Amendment and would not allow the government to ban movies or books based on politics. – John R. Lott, Jr. is President of the Crime Prevention Research Center.

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Of all the contenders for the office of president in the primaries and general, Donald Trump was alone in recognizing the seriousness of our national condition, and declaring that his goal was to make America great again. He understands that our national standing is on the line. A third of our adults do not “participate” in the labor force. Entrepreneurship and innovation are frozen. The stifling tax and regulatory policies of the last eight years have left us with the lowest productivity and family income growth in three generations. These are big problems, and Mr. Trump is willing to apply big solutions. Small-ball economics won’t save us. In national security matters, he has had the courage to break with past Republican mistakes and focus on America’s national security interests. We still have an opportunity to reverse course; after another four years of Democratic governance, it may be too late. Donald Trump is our last, best hope. – David P. Goldman (Spengler) is a columnist for Asia Times and PJ Media, and the author of How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too). 

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America has become unmoored from the constitution that has maintained and encouraged her freedom, justice, and prosperity and has entered a period of post-constitutionalism that imperils the natural rights of her people  Coincident with the decline of American constitutionalism has been the rise of a ruling class that exercises authority through control of the state and elite cultural institutions without regard to the interests or consent of the sovereign people.  The ruling class is insensible of, when they are not openly hostile to, the legitimate interests of the American nation and her people.  They long for a post-national millennial utopia and will use whatever means necessary to achieve it.  Trump’s candidacy has already done the nation a great service by giving voice to the nagging, sometimes urgent, concerns of ordinary people imperiled by ruling class hegemony.  They said only Nixon could go to China so perhaps only a billionaire could name the peril posed by the globalist ruling class.  Only Trump, of the two candidates running this year – or of any candidate running since 1984 – has shown an innate understanding of the challenges the country faces and a willingness to name them publicly and face them head-on. – Chris Buskirk is the publisher and a senior editor of American Greatness.

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There are three basic principles of government in America, and only Donald Trump is likely to maintain them. These are that government exists to protect our rights and not to redistribute our property, that the only legitimate source of authority is the American people themselves, and that the sovereignty of the people cannot survive without adherence to the rule of law. These principles can only be secured if we have a judiciary committed to implementing the original understanding of our Constitution and laws, and not one committed to altering the meaning of the Constitution and laws to shift resources to groups or causes particularly favored by elite opinion. These were the views of the late Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court Justice whose recent passing has left the United States Supreme Court precariously divided and unable to fulfill its responsibilities. Donald Trump has made clear that his potential Supreme Court nominees would be in the mold of Justice Scalia, and any of them would begin the necessary process of restoring the Supreme Court and our nation to a point where the federal leviathan can be restrained, and where the American people can once again enjoy our ultimate Constitutional right, self-government. – Stephen B. Presser is the Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History Emeritus at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, and the author of the forthcoming Law Professors: Three Centuries of Shaping American Law.

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America’s influence is in tatters, thanks to Obama and Clinton’s feckless foreign policies. Our friends no longer trust us. Our enemies are emboldened. This leadership vacuum has made America — and the world — far worse off than we were eight years ago. Terrorist attacks occur near-daily due to incompetent border-enforcement. ISIS is growing, thanks to Obama and Clinton’s suicidal policies. Trump has pledged to reverse these dysfunctions — through protecting our borders, fighting Islamic terrorism, and returning national-security-critical industries to America. At home, Trump would expand the economic pie for lower- and middle-income Americans through lowering taxes and reducing regulations. America’s dignity can be restored. But not if we continue the liberty-threatening, economy-killing policies championed by Obama and Clinton. Americans crave a change. Donald Trump alone can bring it. – Thomas K. Lindsay, has served as a university dean, provost, and college president. He was Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2006-2008. He is co-author and editor of the college textbook, Investigating American Democracy. 

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Donald Trump is the only choice for those that look around the world — and at home — and see something very much wrong going on.  What is that wrong?  The inversion of common sense.  We conservatives have long-lamented the increasing state of political correctness and multiculturalism, the “kick me” sign on our country’s back, and the increasing hostility to our allies and appeasement of our enemies.  Donald Trump stands athwart the latter and has staked his campaign on reversing all of the former — in a way no other Republican has, in a very long time.  I will vote and urge others to vote for Donald Trump. – Seth Leibsohn is a Contributing Editor at American Greatness, a Senior Fellow of The Claremont Institute, and the host The Seth Leibsohn Show on KKNT in Phoenix. He is the co-author with William J. Bennett of The Fight of Our Lives.

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I am for Trump not only because of what he is not but because of what he is. He is not a progressive ideologue like Hillary and so there is greater reason to believe his nominations for the federal courts and executive branch will help extend the lives of these key freedoms. But I am also for Trump because he has shown great fortitude in insisting on the need to discuss topics of truly existential import like the growing influence of radical Islam in the United States. – Tiffany Miller is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Dallas

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The political amateur Trump was the only one in 2016 who could assemble a majority for the elementary principles of American democracy — the sovereignty of the people, the consent of the governed, and standing on one’s rights as Americans. Political correctness had prevented conventional partisans from making obvious objections to nonsensical policies ranging from restrooms to terrorism; objectors were derided as bigots or dog whistlers. But “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” is absurd if government continues to ignore real people. That is the open secret of Trump’s victorious message. – Ken Masugi has been a speechwriter for two Cabinet members and for Clarence Thomas, when he was Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He has taught at the U.S. Air Force Academy,  James Madison College of Michigan State University, the Ashbrook Center of Ashland University, and Princeton University.

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One contributor to the “Against Trump” forum in the Feb. 15 issue of National Review wrote, “Should [Trump’s] election results match his polls, he would be, unquestionably, the worst thing to happen to the American common culture in my lifetime.” If Wikipedia is to be trusted, the author of this sentence was born not yesterday but in 1961, since which America’s common culture … has been nearly obliterated. The same issue of NR contained a review of two books on Bush 41, whose break with the politics of Reagan hurried America down the road of globalist post-constitutionalism and initiated three decades of bipartisan political ineptitude … that has driven America from a high point in its history to its knees. It read in part: “If ever there was an indispensable man at an essential time, it was George H. W. Bush.” The publication of such rubbish in National Review indicates that not only has conservatism failed to conserve a way of life consistent with our founding principles … but that too many conservatives have been co-opted by the administrative state or have grown so accustomed to it that they have forgotten what that way of life looked like and are incapable of imagining its recovery. Hence the realignment we see occurring, long overdue, for which we have Trump to thank. – Douglas A. Jeffrey is vice president for external affairs and editor of Imprimis at Hillsdale College.

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All the contributors state or imply that Hillary Clinton MUST be kept out of the presidency, and only a majority of votes for Donald Trump will do that.

In addition, taken together, they cover the most important positive reasons why Donald Trump is needed now, urgently, to be president of the United States.

The Golden Rule for every citizen of a (comparatively speaking) free nation is: “Pay as little tax as you possibly can, preferably none.”

The New York Times – through long years one of the most despicable organs in the world – ILLEGALLY obtained Donald Trump’s tax returns.

What they reveal, and what the NYT is trying to make a scandal out of, is that Donald Trump pays as little tax as possible, preferably none.

For nearly twenty years he managed to make billions and pay no tax. That makes him a tax hero in our eyes. 

The hypocritical New York Times itself tries to pay as little tax as possible, preferably none. 

The Clinton Foundation made false declarations on its tax returns. Broke the law. When found out, hastily refiled “amended” returns. But that doesn’t interest the Clinton-serving, habitually lying, shamelessly thieving – altogether deeply immoral – NYT.

Wayne Allyn Root writes at Breitbart:

The Old Gray Lady (the New York Times, not Hillary Clinton) just attacked Donald Trump for supposedly paying no income taxes.

The New York Times knows exactly what it’s doing. It’s called fraud. It’s also called bait and switch. They are trying to distract you from the real crimes committed by Hillary Clinton.

They know Clinton is a criminal. They know she and her scheming husband Bill have committed terrible crimes against the American people. They know the Clinton Foundation is a charity scam. They know almost none of the money collected ever goes to charity. Any one of us running a charity scam like this would be in prison.

They know that the Clinton Foundation is basically a mafia extortion scheme set up to extort bribes from foreign leaders, foreign companies and foreign countries. They know Hillary put the Secretary of State’s office up for sale to the highest bidders. They know she took those bribes disguised as “donations” and repaid the “donors” with access to government awards, contracts and sweetheart deals. She took in billions of dollars, in a foundation in her name, then used our taxpayer dollars to reward the criminals buying access.

Hillary was running the CCC – the Clinton Crime Cartel.

Give Hillary credit. This scheme was more audacious than any mafia family has ever dreamed of. And more lucrative than even the mafia’s favorite products- drugs, booze, prostitution or pornography. Hillary is the new role model for the Gambinos.

Hillary’s scam was like printing money. No risk. Pay no taxes on the billions she collected – because it’s a “charity”.  Use the money for fancy dinners, 5-star hotels, private jets, big salaries and even penthouses for Chelsea Clinton. And pay no expenses either – because the payoff for the bribe is paid by taxpayers.

The New York Times doesn’t care. They don’t have any interest in investigating or reporting on the CCC – The Clinton Crime Cartel.

They are owned lock, stock and barrel by the CCC. They need Hillary in the White House. Who knows what favors they’ve been promised to keep the spotlight off Hillary’s serious crimes. Her crimes certainly include fraud, extortion, theft of taxpayer money, running a charity scam and income tax evasion.

And don’t forget purposely erasing 32,000 emails after hearing the FBI demanded to see them. You can bet those emails were about The Clinton Foundation and The Clinton Crime Cartel.

So the New York Times needed a cover-up to fool and distract the voters. They chose Donald Trump’s taxes. Their goal was to drown out Hillary’s real crimes by accusing Trump of LEGALLY reducing his taxes according to the letter of the law. The New York Times wants you to believe following tax law and LEGALLY reducing your taxes is a crime.

But what Hillary did … extorting bribes … selling out the country … selling the Secretary of State’s office … stealing our taxpayer money … and running ac charity scam … none of that should be an issue. “Move along sir … nothing to see here.”

Back to Trump’s taxes. The only possible tax issue is, of course, if a candidate cheats on his taxes. Donald Trump has been audited by the IRS for 20 years in a row. Not once has he ever been accused of cheating on his taxes. If he’d EVER had one irregularity, it would have been leaked by Obama and Hillary’s many friends in high places at the IRS.

You know, the same IRS agents who tried to destroy the Tea Party movement and conservative critics of Obama (like me). By the way, the New York Times never investigated the massive IRS scandal involving political targeting, intimidation and persecution. I have direct evidence obtained by Judicial Watch that the IRS targeted me for my political beliefs. But The New York Times had no interest. “Move along sir … nothing to see here.”

Since there has NEVER been even a hint of Trump cheating on his taxes, the desperate New York Times is trying to make LEGAL tax reduction strategies, advised by the smartest tax lawyers in America, into a crime. Donald Trump LEGALLY took advantage of every tax deduction offered by the tax system … and LEGALLY applied tax losses to future gains.

Every American … Republican or Democrat … has a right to take legal deductions and to apply and carry forward tax losses against tax gains. The New York Times knows this.

Last I checked if you lose a billion dollars in real estate (or stocks, or business investment) … then you make a billion … you owe zero. That’s a wash for tax purposes. Every businessman friend I’ve got has used the same math … and same LEGAL tax reduction strategy.

What’s the crime? There is none.

But extorting $2 billion at the Clinton Foundation from foreign countries and foreign companies through “donations” and $250,000 speaker fees … putting the State Department up for sale … and giving out billions in contracts and awards to the very people that donated to you … is a true crime. What the Clintons did is pure fraud upon America and the taxpayers.

LEGALLY taking tax deductions based on business or real estate losses to LEGALLY reduce your taxes is not only kosher … and legal … but it’s as American as apple pie.

Interesting that The New York Times ignores the real crime … and tries to make LEGAL tax reduction strategies a crime.

This is called fraud. This is also called “bait and switch”. …

Oh, one more thing. It turns out Hillary Clinton (in 2015) and the New York Times (in 2014) both used the same legal tax reduction strategy as Donald Trump to avoid paying any taxes.

It turns out these two gray old ladies are birds of a feather – frauds, liars, scam artists and hypocrites too.

Every sane tax-payer so arranges his affairs as to attract a MINIMUM amount of tax. What sort of fool would so arrange his affairs as to attract a MAXIMUM amount of tax?

Not even the evil fools at the New York Times.

The United States of America was – uniquely among nations – established on the idea of liberty.

Liberty is not, however, as The Declaration of Independence declares it to be, an “unalienable Right” endowed to Men by “their Creator”.

Nor is it “natural”.

It is a man-made artifact.

We quote from The Constitution of Liberty by F. A. Hayek, Chapter Four, Freedom, Reason, and Tradition:

Though freedom is not a state of nature but an artifact of civilization, it did not arise from design. …

The development of a theory of liberty took place mainly in the eighteenth century. It began in two countries, England and France. The first of these knew liberty, the second did not. As a result, we have had to the present day two different traditions in the theory of liberty … the first based on an interpretation of traditions and institutions which had spontaneously grown up … the second aiming at the construction of a utopia, which has often been tried but never successfully. …

What we have called the “British tradition” was made explicit mainly by a group of Scottish moral philosophers led by David Hume, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson … drawing largely on a tradition rooted in the jurisprudence of the common law. Opposed to them was the tradition of the French Enlightenment … the Encyclopedists and Rousseau … are their best known representatives. …

There is hardly a greater contrast imaginable between their respective conceptions of the evolution and functioning of a social order and the role played in it by liberty. …

The British philosophers laid the foundations of a profound and essentially valid theory, while the French school was simply and completely wrong. …

Those British philosophers have given us an interpretation of the growth of civilization that is still the indispensable foundation of the argument for liberty. They find the origin of institutions, not in contrivance or design, but in the survival of the successful. …

This demonstration … represented in some ways an even grater challenge to all design theories than even the later theory of biological evolution. For the first time it was shown that an evident order which was not the product of a designing human intelligence need not therefore be ascribed to the design of a higher, supernatural intelligence, but that there was a third possibility – the emergence of order as the result of adaptive evolution.

While liberty needs to be guarded by the rule of law, it will dwindle and perish under regulation.

The more a nation is regulated and organized, the less liberty the people have. A society highly organized and regulated by government is an unfree society.

The United States is becoming ever less free. Its successive governments have become increasingly regulatory, or to put it another way, increasingly Leftist. The trend was interrupted and to some extent reversed by the presidency of Ronald Reagan. When he left office, the decay of liberty resumed. In the last eight years, President Obama – a firm believer in regulatory government – has all too often imposed his personal will by dictatorial executive order. In doing so, he acted as an enemy of the country he presided over.

The great Sovietologist, Robert Conquest, noted that there are “Three Laws of Politics”.

John Derbyshire recently recalled them, writing at National Review:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

2. Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.

3. The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

And he adds:

Of the Second Law, Conquest gave the Church of England and Amnesty International as examples. Of the Third, he noted that a bureaucracy sometimes actually IS controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies – e.g. the postwar British secret service.

As the most historically important example of the Second Law, we can now add the United States of America.

Excellent as the US Constitution is, it has not kept governments from the fatal tendency.

The Democratic Party has become a wholly left-wing organization. If the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, is elected to the presidency in 2016, the people will lose such liberty as remains to them.

One rare brave voice raised for freedom in Europe is that of Geert Wilders. Over and over again he breaks the law of his country and the European Union by speaking for freedom against the encroaching tyranny of Islam.

He writes at Gatestone:

The great Ronald Reagan once said that “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” These wise words are more true today than ever before. We are the free men and women of the West.

Freedom is our birthright. But if we fail to defend it, we are bound to lose it. And, sadly, that is exactly what is happening today.

2016’s Black Summer of Jihad, with terror attacks all over the free world, teaches us that the enemies of freedom are already among us. The ruling elites all over the Western world have accepted millions of people into our countries without demanding that they assimilate.

Many of these immigrants acquired our nationality. But some do not care for our country at all. They do not love it. They do not respect it. Nor do they respect us and our values.

They carry our passports, but they do not belong to us. They spit on our identity and behave like conquerors.

This is particularly true of many immigrants with an Islamic background. That is not surprising. Islam is a totalitarian ideology aimed at establishing tyrannical power over non-Muslims.

Islam commands its followers to make all nations submit to Islamic Sharia law, if necessary through the use of violence and terror.

Last week, we had an important debate in the Dutch Parliament. We discussed the future of our country. I pointed out that we will have no future if we do not de-islamize the Netherlands. Our time is a time for action.

Islam is an existential threat to our survival as a free nation. It violates all the basic principles and freedoms of our Constitution. It discriminates against non-Muslims, who have no rights under Islamic Sharia law.

It discriminates against women, who according to the Koran are worth only half a man. There is no freedom of religion under Islam. Apostates deserve the death penalty, the Koran tells Muslims that Jews are pigs and monkeys, and Christians have to submit or die.

There is no freedom of speech in Islam either. Criticism of Allah or Muhammad is punishable by death. There is no right to personal integrity. Islam advocates cruel corporal punishments, such as whipping, amputations, stoning, beheading. There is no right to live in peace and dignity. Islam orders war until the whole world has been submitted to Allah.

Some seem to think that by allowing freedom to the enemies of freedom, we prove that we stand for freedom. The opposite is true. By refusing to draw boundaries to our tolerance, we are handing away our freedom. If we continue being naive we will lose everything.

By depriving Islam of the means to destroy freedom, we are not violating freedom; we are preserving it. We should not turn freedom into a snake eating its own tail. Freedom requires a democracy willing to defend itself.

We need a political freedom agenda. It looks like this.

We must end all immigration from Islamic countries. There is more than enough Islam in our countries already.

Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical office, expects 77 million immigrants to enter Europe in the next half century. Most of them are Islamic.

If we do not stop them, we will be facing a catastrophe. We will be colonized and Islamized. We will cease to exist. We can already see how disruptive relatively small groups are. Research by the University of Amsterdam showed that 11% of the Muslims in the Netherlands are prepared to use violence for the sake of Islam. This is more than 100,000 people.

The more Islam we get, the more dangerous and less free our society becomes. Let us keep our countries safe. And lock the door to Islam.

We must also stimulate voluntary remigration of those who are already here. And those who stay must adopt our values; they must assimilate and integrate.

It is not extremist to demand that Muslims, who want to live in our midst, renounce the hateful doctrine and texts of Islam and abide by our laws. If they commit crimes, act against our laws, impose Sharia law, or wage jihad, we must expel them. My party wants to strip all criminals with dual nationalities of their Dutch nationality and expel them to the country of their other nationality.

These measures are part of our de-islamization plans and have been on our party platform for over ten years.

And, finally, in order to remain free, we must honor our freedoms by using them. That is why I will never give up my freedom of speech. Not in parliament nor anywhere else.

I have been dragged to court for asking party members at a meeting whether they want more or fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands. 65% of Dutch Moroccan youths have been suspected of criminal activities. They are six times as often suspects of violent crime as indigenous Dutch, and 22 times as often of hold-ups and street robberies. They also constitute almost 80% of the Dutch jihadis traveling fighting in Syria for IS. Just last week, a Dutch Moroccan was arrested in Rotterdam for supplying French jihadis with Kalashnikovs and explosives. Nevertheless, according to the public prosecutor, asking Dutch voters whether they want more or less Moroccans in the Netherlands is a criminal offense.

But no matter the outcome of the trial, I will keep speaking. No judge will ever be able to silence me. And no jihadist will succeed either. For twelve years already, I have been on the death list of several Islamic terror organizations, from al-Qaeda to IS and the Taliban. I am under 24/7 protection by the police. I live in a safe house, am driven around in armored cars, have to wear bullet proof vests in public, and have to stand trial in converted bunkers. But I will never shut up.

The more they try to do so, the louder I will speak.

It is time to raise our voices. Let them sound like thunder: Freedom has a price. The price is to always defend it, no matter the consequences. To be brave and let no-one bully us into submission.

So, let us do our duty and ensure that Reagan’s warning never becomes a reality: Extinction is not an option!

Freedom or Islam. You cannot have it both ways. There is no middle way. 

The Democratic Party has become the Party of Wall Street billionaires, Hollywood stars, Silicon Valley whizz-kids, and the ruthless Utopians of the Ivory Tower.

Its “progressivism” harks back to the last century. Its concerns are mystical like those of all religions: the earth burning up; the end of days; the humbling of humankind; the profound spiritual need for the Holy Family Clinton and its angels to reign over the whole earth.

Its high priests are richly dressed and housed, driven in stately carriages, flown on the wings of Boeings.

Still, it claims to have a bleeding heart. Ask not for whom it bleeds. Obviously, dull-witted Underdog, it bleeds for thee!

James Pinkerton writes at Breitbart:

The Democrats, once the party of working people, are now a party dominated by environmentalists and multiculturalists. And I can prove it.

As we shall see, when Democrats must choose between … providing jobs for workers, and … favoring politically-correct constituency groups — they choose the PC groups.

Indeed, the old assumptions about the Democrats as the party of labor are nowadays so tangled and conflicted that the unions themselves are divided. Some unions are sticking with their blue-collar heritage, but more are aligning themselves with the new forces of political correctness — and oh, by the way, big money.

The proposed Dakota Access Pipeline, running through four states — from western North Dakota to southern Illinois — would create an estimated 4,500 unionized jobs.  That is to say, good jobs at good wages: The median entry-level salary for a pipeline worker in North Dakota is $38,924.

Yet the advancement of what was once called the “labor movement” is no longer a Democratic priority.  The new priorities are heeding the goals of “progressive” groups — in this instance, Native Americans and the greens. Indeed, this new progressive movement is so strong that even many unions are climbing aboard the bandwagon, even if that means breaking labor’s united front. To illustrate this recent rupture, here’s a headline from the The Huffington Post: “Dakota Access Pipeline Exposes Rift In Organized Labor.” Let’s let Huffpo labor reporter Dave Jamieson set the scene:

The nation’s largest federation of labor unions upset some of its own members last week by endorsing the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota. Some labor activists, sympathetic to Native American tribes and environmentalists, called upon the AFL-CIO to retract its support for the controversial project.

In response to the criticism, Sean McGarvey, head of the AFL-CIO’s building-trades unions, fired right back; speaking of pipeline opponents, McGarvey declared that they have …

… once again seen fit to demean and call for the termination of thousands of union construction jobs in the Heartland.  I fear that this has once again hastened a very real split within the labor movement.

Yes, it’s become quite a fracas within the House of Labor: so much for the old slogan, “Solidarity Forever!” We can note that typically, it’s the old-style construction unions — joined, perhaps, by other industrial workers, if not the union leadership — who support construction projects, while the new-style public-employee unions side with the anti-construction activists.

In the meantime, for its part, the Democratic Party has made a choice: It now firmly sides with the new progressives.

To cite just one ‘frinstance, we can examine the July 2016 Democratic national platform, released at the Philadelphia convention. That document includes a full 16 paragraphs on “climate change”, as well as 14 paragraphs on the rights and needs of “indigenous tribal nations”. Here’s one of those paragraphs; as we can readily see, Democrats are striving mightily to synthesize the demands of both groups, green and red:

We are committed to principles of environmental justice in Indian Country and we recognize that nature in all its life forms has the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles. We call for a climate change policy that protects tribal resources, protects tribal health, and provides accountability through accessible, culturally appropriate participation and strong enforcement. Our climate change policy will cut carbon emission, address poverty, invest in disadvantaged communities, and improve both air quality and public health. We support the tribal nations efforts to develop wind, solar, and other clean energy jobs.

By contrast, the Democratic platform included a mere two skimpy paragraphs on workers and wages.

Some Democrats are troubled by this shift in priorities, away from New Deal-ish lunch-bucket concerns — because, as a matter of fact, it’s a shift away from the very idea of economic growth. For example, William Galston, a top White House domestic-policy aide to Bill Clinton in the 90s, had this to say about the Democrats’ latest platform:

The draft is truly remarkable — for example, its near-silence on economic growth. . . . Rather, the platform draft’s core narrative is inequality, the injustice that inequality entails, and the need to rectify it through redistribution.

… Perhaps it seems strange that a political party would lose interest in such an obvious political staple as economic growth. And yet if we look more closely, we can see, from the perspective of the new Democrats, that this economic neglect makes a kind of sense: We can note, for example, that the financial heart of the green movement is made up of billionaires; they have all the money they need — and, thanks to their donations, they have a disproportionate voice.

One of these noisy green fat cats is San Francisco’s Tom Steyer, who contributed $50 million to Democratic campaigns in 2014 and has been spending heavily ever since. We can further point out: If Steyer chooses to assign a higher value to his eco-conscience than to jobs for ordinary Americans, well, who in his rarified Bay Area social stratum is likely to argue with him?

Admittedly, billionaires are few in number — even in the Democratic Party. Yet at the same time, many other groups of Democratic voters aren’t necessarily concerned about the vagaries of the economy, because they, too, in their own way, are insulated from its ups and downs. That is, they get their check, no matter what.

The most obvious of these groups, of course, are government employees.  … Public-sector workers have an obvious class-interest in voting Democratic, and they know it — lots of Lois Lerners in this group.

Then there are the recipients of government benefits. … Welfare recipients, for example, are overwhelmingly Democratic. And Democratic politicians, of course, know this electoral calculus full well. Indeed, in this era of slow economic growth, nearly 95 million Americans over the age of 16 are not in the labor force; not all of them are receiving a check from the government, but most are. And that has political consequences.

We can take this reality — economic stagnation on the one hand, economic dependence on the other —a  step further: If the Democrats can find the votes they need from the plutocrats and the poor — or near-poor, plus public employees — then they can make a strategic choice: They can ignore the interests of working-class people in the private sector, and they can still win.

So for this cynical reason, the Democrats’ decision to stiff the working stiffs who might have worked on the Dakota pipeline was an easy one.

We can sum up the Democrats’ strategy more concisely: In socioeconomic terms, they will go above the working class, and also below the working class. That is, they will be the party of George Soros and Al Sharpton. So no room, anywhere, for the blue collars. (Of course, if any of those would-be pipeline workers end up on public assistance, well, they’ll have a standing offer to join the Democratic fold.)

We can see this Soros-Sharpton coalition in America’s electoral geography: The Democrats expect to sweep the upper east side of Manhattan, and, at the same time, they expect to sweep the south side of Chicago. Moreover, this high-low pattern appears everywhere: Greenwich and the ghetto, Beverly Hills and the barrio.  

In addition, Democrats can expect to do well in upper-middle class suburban enclaves, as well as college towns. And so if we add all those blocs together, plus the aforementioned public-employee unions, we can see that the Democrats have their coalition …  a 2016 victory coalition.

So now we can see the logic of the Democrats’ policy choices. And we can even add an interesting bit of backstory to the Democrats’ 2016 platform. In June, as a concession to the insurgency of Sen. Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton’s campaign agreed to include a contingent of Sanders supporters on the 15-member platform-drafting committee.

Specifically, the Clinton camp accepted the Palestinian-American activist James Zogby, the Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota, the environmental activist Bill McKibben, the African-American activist Cornel West, and the Native American activist Deborah Parker. …

The unions got a grand total of one name on that 15-member body. … So we can see: Big Labor isn’t so big anymore; it is now reduced to token status within the party.

Given this new correlation of forces, it’s no surprise that top Democrats oppose the Dakota pipeline. …

In this new era of green-first politics, the anti-pipeline forces must win, and the pro-pipeliners must lose. …

For her part, Hillary Clinton certainly knows where she stands: She’s with the new eco- and multicultural Democrats, not the old unionists — who were, after all, mostly “deplorable.” As she said to a cheering campaign crowd earlier this year, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

To be sure, Clinton has a heart — a taxpayer-funded heart. In fact, she has offered to put all those soon-to-be ex-coal workers on the government dole; she has proposed a $30 billion program for them.

Yet whether or not Congress ever approves that $30 billion, it’s a safe bet that if Clinton wins, more fossil-fuel workers will need to find some new way of earning a living. After all, just last year, the Obama administration pledged that the U.S. would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent by 2025. And whereas Donald Trump has promised to scrap those growth-flattening CO² targets, Clinton has promised to maintain them.

Indeed, during Monday night’s debate in New York, she promised to install “half a billion more solar panels” as part of her plan, she said, to create 10 million new jobs.

We can quickly observe that most blue collars don’t seem to trust Clinton with their livelihoods; Trump beats her among non-college-educated men by a whopping 59 points. Yet at the same time, we can add that if Trump leads among blue collars by “only” 59 points, that might not be enough for him to overcome Clinton’s advantage — her huge strength among the Soros-Sharpton coalition.

And here we can note, with some perplexity, that the leadership of the industrial unions is still mostly in lockstep with the Democrats. That residual partisan loyalty to the party of FDR might cost their members their jobs now that the Democrats have found policy goals other than mass employment, but hey, perhaps the union bosses themselves can get jobs at Hillary’s Department of Labor.

So if Clinton wins this November, what will happen to the private-sector blue collars, especially those in the traditional energy sector?

Sadly, we already know the answer to that question; the only unresolved matter is how they might react.

The Party of the American princess, the professor, the fashionable the cool the glamorous, the very rich and the very safe is the Party of the party. Of parties in Manhattan, Nob Hill, Santa Monica, Bel Air.

But its heart bleeds for … Oh, you know, blacks and Hispanics and gays and women and Muslims and …

And the workers?

You gotta believe it.

If you don’t … all you can do is vote Trump for President.

Leftism is so-o last century.

But it has done its destructive work.

It has driven the Western world into a state of decay.

Ed Klein gives an example of what he justly considers a sign of decadence in the US:

If you have any doubt about the deleterious effect of our culture on the direction of our country and its politics, I invite you to visit the Guggenheim Museum on New York’s Fifth Avenue.

There, on the fifth floor, you will find a long line of people in front of a sign that says “There is a two-hour wait”.

What are these people waiting two hours for?

They are waiting to enter a small rest room that contains an 18-karat solid-gold toilet.

This gold toilet is the creation of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. He has labeled his installation “America”.

Yes, in one of our country’s leading cultural institutions, people are waiting on line for two hours to urinate and defecate into “America”. 

Maybe the time has not yet arrived for an American Gibbon to write a new Decline and Fall, but we are approaching the point of no return.

The failure of most pundits to recognize this reality prevented them from grasping the significance of the populist revolt that has swept across America and made Donald Trump the nominee of the Republican Party.

In Europe there is no need to look for signs of decadence. Europe is decaying so rapidly, decadence is so much the everyday condition of existence, it is taken as normal.

Here then is – not a sign but – a symptom of European decadence:

Jacob Lewis, writing for The Sun, reports:

Sex rooms, bondage dancers and 60 hour drug raves… a rare look inside the world’s most exclusive club

Berghain Club, Berlin

Covered in face tattoos and piercings, the German stares me down, running a finger across his skull-shaped rings as he decides my fate.

My heart is racing and a tiny voice inside me is screaming, “Please, please!”

Then it comes, a slow nod of the head from the man in black.

My ordeal is over. I try hard to control my trembling body as I slowly walk forward inside, to safety.

Welcome to Berghain, “the world’s best club” — where getting past legendary doorman Sven Marquardt is to survive an ordeal that has been known to make grown clubbers weep.

Doorman Sven Marquardt

Housed in a former East Berlin power station, it is as famous for its door policy as for its [public] sex and drug binges at parties that run from Friday night to Monday afternoon.

There are even special “dark rooms” downstairs where couples have very explicit sex — to a soundtrack of bullet-hard techno beats.

Meanwhile upstairs on the main dancefloor, male and female performers — naked apart from the odd slice of bondage leather — dangle in cages attached to the ceiling or gyrate on podiums.

On the top floor is the Panorama bar with its X-rated sculptures.

Florence Welch and Jake Gyllenhaal are just two of a long list of stars said to have been denied access and the chance to boggle at it all.

But those that make it in speak of an almost religious experience.

Homeland actress Claire Danes, 37, has described it as “the best place on Earth”.

And Lady Gaga chose the venue to launch her last album, arriving for the night in little more than a bra and knickers . . . and a moustache.

Lady Gaga entertains

The club’s enigmatic entry rules are the subject of endless debate among Berliners and tourists alike.

Internet forums buzz with rumours about how to win the right to pay your 16 euro entry fee. Turning up in big groups, talking in line and wearing anything but black are all reported to see you waved away.

There is even a website called Berghain Trainer that uses your camera and microphone to analyse your body language and voice as you try and get past a virtual doorman.

The 1,500-capacity club opened in 2004 in a deserted part of town and has since become an institution.

This month it was even awarded the same cultural tax status as the city’s theatres and museums.

I arrived at 12:30am on a Friday night and had barely opened the cab door out the front before I was offered drugs by one of half a dozen busy dealers.

The queue is mostly full of stony-faced, black-clad hipsters, despite Sven insisting there is no dress code or even favoured “type”.

The bearded icon, 54, who recently designed a T-shirt range for Hugo Boss, said: “I don’t mind letting in the odd lawyer in a double-breasted suit with his Gucci-Prada wife. If they make a good impression, let them in. We also take guys in masks and kilts, or Pamela Anderson blondes in run-of-the-mill high-street outfits who tag along with bearded blokes, licking the sweat off each others’ armpits. That, for me, is Berghain.”

Tom Gallagher, a 25-year-old expat from Dublin has seen for himself just how liberal the dress code can be.

He recalled: “I was there at 6am having just been rejected when I saw a bloke wearing nothing but a huge elaborate wedding turban and high heels step out of a cab. The bouncers didn’t bat an eyelid and he strolled right in.”

I only managed to get in on my second attempt. For my first try I had worn black jeans, black boots and a buttoned denim shirt.

The queue of stern, silent hopefuls moved slowly, with as many being sent packing as made it inside.

I watched as all but two friends from an eight person group of stunning girls were rejected.

The lucky two didn’t so much glance back at their former friends as they entered.

Five others were swiftly sent packing with German efficiency and then it was my turn.

Sven sat in the doorway behind a lackey who dished out his judgements, swiping us left or right like we were faces on a Tinder app.

The gatekeeper stared into my soul for ten seconds. I stared back. Then just as the underling seemed to be about to wave me in, I heard a barely audible mutter: “Nein.”

Sven had decided. His minion spoke: “I’m sorry. You can’t come in.”

Judged uncool, I walked back up the path face turning red with shame, past the waiting crowds to the hotdog stand that makes a killing selling beer to rejects. Stall-owner Alex P, 38, gave me some tips for next time.

He said: “You should look like you can party. If you have a good vibe and don’t look like a f***ed-up English tourist then it’s easy. No buttoned shirts for example.” …

My rejection just made me more determined than ever to get in. The next day I went shopping in Zara for black clothes and met three other wannabes doing the same.

Digby Burges, 30, a master’s student from Australia now living in Berlin, admitted: “I’m trying to find some dodgy black shoes. They’re really ugly but that’s what Berghain wants.”

I bought a jacket similar to what I had seen Sven wearing, as well as a black felt cap, some suspect “fashion” specs and a black T-shirt.

And this time when I rocked up to the door I had a tactic.

Ignoring the two hour-long queue stretching down the road, I set my face to stern mode and strolled right to the front, slotting in arrogantly in front of a group of friends.

My gamble paid off — people were too worried about seeming uncool in front of the bouncers to call me out.

A few minutes later I was in front of Sven again. This time I made sure to tap my feet to the sound of techno beats and look impatient.

Then came the stare, the fingering of his skull rings. And moments later I was inside. Victory!

Photography is strictly barred and once in the club, both my iPhone’s cameras were covered with stickers. Privacy is the key to Berghain’s success. And it is not hard to see why.

Within minutes of arriving I find myself in the “dark rooms” where naked bodies romp in the shadows.

Mirrors and reflective surfaces are also banned in the club. This is presumably to save party-goers from the sobering horror of catching their reflection halfway through a 36-hour drink, drug and sex marathon.

Some clubbers have been known to spend 60 hours straight here, despite beats so hard that I feel like my ears are going to bleed, even though I’m no dance music novice.

Len Faki, resident DJ at the club since it opened, said: “What I value the most is the freedom and diversity it offers. It’s an open minded space that gives everyone the chance to be themselves, to express themselves without judgement.”

Alan Smith, a 33-year-old musician and British expat, said: ‘I think it’s really good that’s there’s a place where people can do whatever they want to do and not be judged. It’s very free. What I love about it is that there’s a real sense of freedom and sexual emancipation. These people are not wanting your approval, they’re just there to do whatever the f*** they want and have a good time.”

As I left the party, I saw the fresh-faced shoppers I’d met in Zara excitedly waiting in line in their new kit.

They called me later to let me know they never made it past Sven.

Thousands straining to be weird enough to be admitted to orgies.

Orgies have happened, do happen, will always happen.

When do they become a sign of decadence?

When a society becomes proud of them.

The “moderator” – more accurately called the “challenger” – at last night’s presidential candidates’ debate did a very bad job.

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

Lester Holt’s actions at the first presidential debate were inexcusable. And also unsurprising.

The day when media lefties were patient enough to believe that the system would work without being this blatant are over. They’ve been open this election about rejecting even the illusion of objectivity.

The only question is why do Republicans continue to allow mainstream media figures to moderate presidential debates? Lester Holt decided to debate Trump. But you can increasingly expect this kind of behavior from any media figure below a certain age to whom the concept of journalism is a dead and incomprehensible notion. Or rather, to them it means that it’s their duty to attack Republicans.

2012 should have buried this. And I don’t know why we’re still dealing with this in 2016.

A debate between two candidates, one Democrat and one Republican, is the only time that the GOP has unquestionable leverage to get its way by rejecting mainstream media moderators. There are still a handful of journalists working for the big news networks who could be trusted to be fair, but most of them are over 70. There’s obviously no future in that. I can’t think of a single media figure who has any remote credibility in this regard except maybe Tapper.

It’s the right of Republicans to demand independent, professional moderators who can be trusted to do their job of asking questions and checking the time, instead of offering false fact checks and trying to debate the candidates. Lester Holt’s antics should be the final nail in the coffin of the mainstream media moderator.

Hillary Clinton’s replies were so glib, so well rehearsed, it seemed obvious to us that either her campaign had supplied the questions to Holt, or Holt had let her campaign know them in advance. Or perhaps they colluded even more closely. 

Holt baited Donald Trump. But Trump should not have let himself be put on the defensive. He could have brought up Hillary’s easily hacked private server when she talked about cyber attack. She opened the door wide for him to talk about her insistence on bombing Libya. Then he could have attacked her on Benghazi. He repeated himself too much, wasting time. He should have raised the Clinton Foundation corruption without waiting for a question about it.

Still, some good news came out of the fiasco. This is our abstract of a Breitbart report:

From a “flash poll” after last night’s debate by Pat Caddell, the Democratic pollster: “95 percent of the people we contacted told us they were not going to change their vote based on the debate. Two percent of voters, previously undecided, switched to Trump after the debate. No undecideds went to Clinton. Trump won on the most critical factor, on whether Clinton or Trump was more ‘plausible’ as president, 46 percent to her 42 percent. That for him is really what this debate was really about. On ‘Who showed that they care about people like you?’ Trump won 49 percent to 44 percent for her. Trump, as the challenger in this race, gained what he needed. Like most debates, this debate did not shift the race. What it did do was show Trump as a strong leader. Trump really helped himself out tonight.”

Hope so!

Will tonight’s debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton decide the election?

Will Trump win and civilization stand a chance of survival? Or will the US superpower and hence the world fall into the hands of a traitorous twosome, a couple of crooks and their DEMonic gang?

As America and the world wait tensely for the outcome of tonight’s debate, the outspoken and witty Kurt Schlichter, who was slow to become a Trump supporter, urgently offers sound advice to him. It is unlikely to reach him, but is probably what he’s going to do anyway:

Hi Donald. I hope you’re taking this debate seriously because it’s pretty important. It’s important to you because I can’t even imagine your personal humiliation if that tired, wheezy, old half-wit the Democrats will be rolling out on stage in a Hannibal Lector dolly beats you. It’d be like losing the tango competition to Stephen Hawking on Dancing with the Stars. …

And it’s important for your family. Yeah, your family. Because what do you think that evil harpy and her friends in the elite will do to your kids if you lose? You don’t think Hillary’s IRS is going to just let them be, do you? The sadly corrupted FBI? But they haven’t done anything? It’s cute how you think guilt or innocence matter under Benedict Comey. Don’t look for an immunity deal here, Donald – you think Mr. Integrity won’t keep doing what he’s ordered to do by whatever Dem is in the Oval Office? No, your kids – your family – is in danger if you blow this, because Hillary hates you just as she hates all who defy her, and persecuting, even jailing your kids, will be a wonderful way to send the message about the price of defiance.

Oh, and it’s important to the country. There’s that whole potential for this hateful, stupid woman sparking a second Democrat-caused civil war with her power-mad executive decrees outlawing our constitutional freedoms …

Maybe you got into this campaign for fun, as a lark, but it’s serious now. It’s your reputation. It’s your family. It’s your country. You gotta win, and to win Monday you gotta put on the performance of your life.

So how do you win? By remembering how you got here.

You got there speaking for the deplorable people who the establishment is doing everything it can to exile from their own self-determination. You are speaking for the people Hillary and her media gestapo want to force into obedience. And all they need is one loud voice who will not be intimidated to stand up to these bastards and say “No.” …

That’s your demo. The people who are afraid to speak. The people who are supposed to shut up and take it. The people Hillary wants to segregate into a basket and toss into a bottomless pit. Speak for them on Monday. Speak for everyone who Hillary and her goose-stepping pals try to gag, silence and shame.

And speak forcefully and clearly. Now, she’s trying to psych you out with talk of an army of consultants and shrinks working to pack her stroke-ravaged brain with one-liners and charges to unleash on stage. Typical limo lib play – go consult some hack experts. You are consulting your gut, and even if I recommended another way to prep it’s too late. So double down on the intuition that got you this far. You know people; Hillary doesn’t. Talk to them. We both know the media is much worse than anyone imagines – Hillary will absolutely have all of the questions in advance, and the “moderators” will be under orders to destroy you. Ignore them. Ignore her. Talk to us. Talk to the People. …

Stop Hillary on Monday. Be tough. Be disciplined. Be ready to ignore the shills and that loathsome felon and speak to us.

All that’s at stake is your reputation. Your family’s safety. Your country’s future.

No pressure.

The whole thing is to be found here.

If a person is a Muslim, and he carries out a terrorist attack, he cannot be a “lone wolf” – unless he states that he is doing it for some cause other than his religion, such as vegetarianism or Catalonian independence, which no Muslim has thus far been known to have espoused. If a Muslim performs a violent act against a non-Muslim, or a member of what his sect regards as an heretical sect, he is doing what he has been taught is the right thing to do ever since he entered the misery of the madrassa as a tiny tot.

Andrew McCarthy is of the same opinion on that point. But he does not think, as we do, that the ideology of Islam compels aggressive action – whether or not in the form of terrorism.

So we are partially in agreement with Andrew McCarthy, and partially skeptical of what he asserts, when he writes this at PJ Media:

Some time ago, the invaluable Patrick Poole coined the term “known wolf”, sharply shredding the conventional Washington wisdom that “lone wolf” terrorism is a major domestic threat.

Pat has tracked the phenomenon for years, right up to the jihadist attacks this weekend in both the New York metropolitan area and St. Cloud, Minnesota.

Virtually every time a terror attack has occurred, the actor initially portrayed as a solo plotter lurking under the government’s radar turns out to be — after not much digging – an already known (sometimes even, notorious) Islamic extremist.

The emphases are his, with some of our own added from now on.

As amply demonstrated by Poole’s reporting, catalogued here by PJ Media, “lone wolves” – virtually every single one – end up having actually had extensive connections to other Islamic extremists, radical mosques, and (on not rare occasions) jihadist training facilities.

The overarching point I have been trying to make is fortified by Pat’s factual reporting. It is this: There are, and can be, no lone wolves.

The very concept is inane, and only stems from a willfully blind aversion to the ideological foundation of jihadist terror: Islamic supremacism.

The global, scripturally rooted movement to impose sharia – in the West, to incrementally supersede our culture of reason, liberty, and equality with the repressive, discriminatory norms of classical Islamic law – is a pack. The wolves are members of the pack, and that’s why they are the antithesis of “lone” actors. And, indeed, they always turn out to be “known” precisely because their association with the pack, with components of the global movement, is what ought to have alerted us to the danger they portended before  they struck.

This is willful blindness, because of the restrictions we have gratuitously imposed on ourselves. The U.S. government refuses to acknowledge the ideology that drives the movement until after some violent action is either too imminent to be ignored or, sadly more often, until after the Islamic supremacist has acted out the savagery his ideology commands.

The U.S. government consciously avoids the ideology because it is rooted in a fundamentalist, literalist interpretation of Islam. Though it is but one of many ways to construe that religion, the remorseless fact is that it is a mainstream construction, adhered to by tens of millions of Muslims and supported by centuries of scholarship.

Oh, please Mr. McCarthy, tell what are the other, the “many ways” to “construe” Islam? No one who makes that statement ever gives examples or demonstrates the differences.

I say “the U.S. government” is at fault here because, contrary to Republican campaign rhetoric that is apparently seized by amnesia, this is not merely an Obama administration dereliction — however much the president and his former secretary of State (and would-be successor) Hillary Clinton have exacerbated the problem.

Since the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, the bipartisan Beltway cognoscenti have “reasoned” (a euphemism for “reckless self-delusion”) that conceding the Islamic doctrinal roots of jihadist terror — which would implicitly concede the vast Islamist (sharia-supremacist) support system without which the global jihadist onslaught would be impossible – is impractical.

But how could acknowledging the truth be impractical?

Especially given that national security hinges on an accurate assessment of threats?

Bipartisan Washington “reasons” that telling the truth would portray the United States as “at war with Islam”. To be blunt, this conventional wisdom can only be described as sheer idiocy.

We know that tens of millions of Muslims worldwide, and what appears to be a preponderance (though perhaps a diminishing one) of Muslims in the West, reject Islamic supremacism and its sharia-encroachment agenda.

Do we know that? How do we know it?

We know that, by a large percentage, Muslims are the most common victims of jihadist terror.

That we certainly know. It is manifestly true.

We know that Muslim reformers are courageously working to undermine and reinterpret the scriptural roots of Islamic supremacism – a crucial battle our default from makes far more difficult for them to win.

Why is it taking them so long? It must be a very hard task. Is it perhaps impossible?

We know that Muslims, particularly those assimilated into the West, have been working with our law enforcement, military, and intelligence agencies for decades to gather intelligence, infiltrate jihadist cells, thwart jihadist attacks, and fight jihadist militias.

Glad to hear it.

None of those Muslims – who are not only our allies, but are in fact us – believes that America is at war with Islam.

So why does Washington base crucial, life-and-death policy on nonsense?

Because it is in the thrall of the enemy. The “war on Islam” propaganda is manufactured by Islamist groups, particularly those tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.

But if packs of Muslims are at war with us in the name of Islam,  then OUGHT we not to acknowledge the war and fight it?

While we resist study of our enemies’ ideology, they go to school on us. They thus grasp three key things:

(1) Washington is so bloated and dysfunctional, it will leap on any excuse to refrain from strong action;

(2) the American tradition of religious liberty can be exploited to paralyze our government if national defense against a totalitarian political ideology can be framed as hostility and persecution against an entire religious faith; and

(3) because Washington has so much difficulty taking action, it welcomes claims (or, to be faddish, “narratives”) that minimize the scope and depth of the threat. Topping the “narrative” list is the fantasy that the Islamist ideological support system that nurtures jihadism (e.g., the Muslim Brotherhood and its tentacles) is better seen as a “moderate”, “non-violent” partner with whom we can work, than as what it actually is: the enemy’s most effective agent. The stealth operative that exploits the atmosphere of intimidation created by the jihadists.

We agree with all that: only we would add that the present government is full of people – including and above all the President himself – who are strongly pro-Islam.

In other words, in proceeding from the premise that we must do nothing to convey the notion that we are “at war with Islam” – or, in Obama-Clinton [and characteristically Leftist -ed] parlance, in proceeding from the premise that we need a good “narrative” rather than a truth-based strategy – we have internalized the enemy’s worldview, a view that is actually rejected by our actual Islamic allies and the vast majority of Americans.

The delusion comes into sharp relief if one listens to Hillary Clinton’s campaign bombast. …

[W]e know that a lot of the rhetoric we’ve heard from Donald Trump has been seized on by terrorists, in particular ISIS, because they are looking to make this into a war against Islam, rather than a war against jihadists, violent terrorists, people who number maybe in the tens of thousands, not the tens of millions, they want to use that to recruit more fighters to their cause, by turning it into a religious conflict. That’s why I’ve been very clear. We’re going after the bad guys and we’re going to get them, but we’re not going to go after an entire religion and give ISIS exactly what it’s wanting in order for them to enhance their position.

Sheer idiocy.

Right.

Our enemy is not the mere “tens of thousands” of jihadists. (She’s probably low-balling the number of jihadists worldwide, but let’s indulge her.) It is not merely ISIS, nor merely ISIS and al-Qaeda – an organization Mrs. Clinton conveniently omits mentioning, since it has replenished, thanks to Obama-Clinton governance and despite Obama-Clinton claims to have defeated it, to the point that it is now at least as much a threat as it was on the eve of 9/11.

ISIS and al-Qaeda are not the sources of the threat against us. They are the inevitable results of that threat.

The actual threat, the source, is Islamic supremacism and its sharia imposition agenda.

Right again.

The support system, which the threat needs to thrive, does indeed include tens of millions of Islamists, some small [? – ed] percentage of whom will inexorably become violent jihadists, but the rest of whom will nurture the ideological aggression and push the radical sharia agenda – in the media, on the campus, in the courts, and in the policy councils of government that they have so successfully influenced and infiltrated.

Obviously, to acknowledge that we are at war with this movement, at war with Islamic supremacism, is not remotely to be “at war with Islam”. After all, Islamic supremacism seeks conquest over all of Islam, too, and on a much more rapid schedule than its long-term pursuit of conquest over the West. Islamic supremacism is not a fringe movement; it is large and, at the moment, a juggernaut. But too much of Islam opposes Islamic supremacism to be confused with it.

For which, what is the evidence?

Moreover, even if being at war with Islamic supremacists could be persuasively spun as being “at war with Islam” – i.e., even if we were too incompetent to refute our enemies’ propaganda convincingly – it would make no difference.

The war would still be being prosecuted against us. We have to fight it against the actual enemy, and we lose if we allow enemies to dupe us into thinking they are allies. We have to act on reality, even if Washington is too tongue-tied to find the right words for describing reality.

Not “too tongue-tied”; too pro-Islam.

The enemy is in our heads and has shaped our perception of the conflict, to the enemy’s great advantage. That’s how you end up with inanities like “lone wolf”.

So Andrew McCarthy acknowledges, indeed insists, that we are “at war with Islamic supremacism”.  

Is not Islam essentially a supremacist ideology?

If it is, then we are, or OUGHT to be at war with it.

If it is not, demonstrate to us that it is not. No one has done that. Simply stating that “tens of millions of Muslims worldwide, and what appears to be a preponderance (though perhaps a diminishing one) of Muslims in the West, reject Islamic supremacism and its sharia-encroachment agenda” doesn’t cut it. If Islam demands conquest and total world domination, and if there are millions of Muslims who reject that, it only means those millions are not observing their religion.

And Islam DOES demand conquest and total world domination.

Three Islamic holy commandments out of many:

From the Koran.

Sura 8.39: And fight with them until there is no more unbelief and religion is all for Allah.

Sura 61.9: He it is who hath sent His messenger with the guidance and the religion of truth, that He may make it conqueror of all religion however much idolaters may be averse .

From the Hadith (“sayings of Muhammad”):

“Fight everyone in the way of Allah and kill those who disbelieve in Allah.” – Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 992

If one denies that this is Islamic orthodoxy, isn’t one endorsing the false “narrative” of successive US governments?

Islam is at war with us. Do we fight that war or not? If we do not …. what then?

So the light of reason has broken over Senator Ted Cruz. He has seen at last that Donald Trump MUST win the presidential election.

Any vote not cast for Trump helps Hillary Clinton into power. Another presidency of the Left will do all it can to change the demographic composition of America with the intention of creating a permanent Democratic-supporting electorate.

This election is very probably the last chance Americans – those who value the liberty their country was founded to preserve – will have to save themselves from the tyranny of full-blown socialism, the advance of Islam, the dissolution of the nation-state, the end of the rule of law, and a life that is collective, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

The enlightened Ted Cruz writes:

This election is unlike any other in our nation’s history. Like many other voters, I have struggled to determine the right course of action in this general election.

In Cleveland, I urged voters, “Please, don’t stay home in November. Stand, and speak, and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket whom you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.”

If “voting your conscience” means preserving your moral purity while your free nation crashes round you, you are making a vain and foolish choice. Your nice clean little conscience, brother, doesn’t matter a damn when your civilization is at stake. 

Fortunately, Cruz brought his conscience in line with political good sense.

After many months of careful consideration, of prayer and searching my own conscience, I have decided that on Election Day, I will vote for the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

If Jesus advised him to vote for Trump, then Jesus has at last developed some degree of useful intelligence.

I’ve made this decision for two reasons. First, last year, I promised to support the Republican nominee. And I intend to keep my word.

Second, even though I have had areas of significant disagreement with our nominee, by any measure Hillary Clinton is wholly unacceptable — that’s why I have always been #NeverHillary.

Six key policy differences inform my decision.

First, and most important, the Supreme Court. For anyone concerned about the Bill of Rights — free speech, religious liberty, the Second Amendment — the Court hangs in the balance. I have spent my professional career fighting before the Court to defend the Constitution. We are only one justice away from losing our most basic rights, and the next president will appoint as many as four new justices. We know, without a doubt, that every Clinton appointee would be a left-wing ideologue. Trump, in contrast, has promised to appoint justices “in the mold of Scalia.”

For some time, I have been seeking greater specificity on this issue, and today the Trump campaign provided that, releasing a very strong list of potential Supreme Court nominees — including Sen. Mike Lee, who would make an extraordinary justice — and making an explicit commitment to nominate only from that list. This commitment matters, and it provides a serious reason for voters to choose to support Trump.

Second, Obamacare. The failed healthcare law is hurting millions of Americans. If Republicans hold Congress, leadership has committed to passing legislation repealing Obamacare. Clinton, we know beyond a shadow of doubt, would veto that legislation. Trump has said he would sign it.

Third, energy. Clinton would continue the Obama administration’s war on coal and relentless efforts to crush the oil and gas industry. Trump has said he will reduce regulations and allow the blossoming American energy renaissance to create millions of new high-paying jobs.

Fourth, immigration. Clinton would continue and even expand President Obama’s lawless executive amnesty. Trump has promised that he would revoke those illegal executive orders.

Fifth, national security. Clinton would continue the Obama administration’s willful blindness to radical Islamic terrorism. She would continue importing Middle Eastern refugees whom the FBI cannot vet to make sure they are not terrorists. Trump has promised to stop the deluge of unvetted refugees.

Sixth, Internet freedom. Clinton supports Obama’s plan to hand over control of the Internet to an international community of stakeholders, including Russia, China, and Iran. Just this week, Trump came out strongly against that plan, and in support of free speech online.

These are six vital issues where the candidates’ positions present a clear choice for the American people.

If Clinton wins, we know — with 100% certainty — that she would deliver on her left-wing promises, with devastating results for our country.

My conscience tells me I must do whatever I can to stop that.

We also have seen, over the past few weeks and months, a Trump campaign focusing more and more on freedom — including emphasizing school choice and the power of economic growth to lift African-Americans and Hispanics to prosperity.

Finally, after eight years of a lawless Obama administration, targeting and persecuting those disfavored by the administration, fidelity to the rule of law has never been more important.

The Supreme Court will be critical in preserving the rule of law. And, if the next administration fails to honor the Constitution and Bill of Rights, then I hope that Republicans and Democrats will stand united in protecting our fundamental liberties.

Hoping that Democrats will protect fundamental liberties is like hoping for rain in the Sahara desert.

Our country is in crisis.

Hillary Clinton is manifestly unfit to be president, and her policies would harm millions of Americans. And Donald Trump is the only thing standing in her way.

A year ago, I pledged to endorse the Republican nominee, and I am honoring that commitment. And if you don’t want to see a Hillary Clinton presidency, I encourage you to vote for him.

Bravo, Ted!

Hear him, all you obstinate conservatives and Republicans!

On November 8 you will pass through Last Chance Gate. Go through it and turn Right.

If you turn Left, the next gate is the one displaying the immutable instruction: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”