No god, or supernatural messenger of a god, ever wrote a single word or dictated anything to any human being.

Persons who set down “God’s word” may have thought that a god told them what to write; felt that a god told them what to write; believed that a god told them what to write, but they themselves, mortal inhabitants of this natural world, wrote every line, every sentence, every law, every commandment, every story, every poem, every prophecy, every proverb in every “holy book” that ever was. If those who wrote were not the same as those who composed what they wrote, it is certain that the composers were also mortal men.

This must seem so obvious to atheists as to be hardly worth saying. It is so clearly a fact. Incontrovertible.

But billions of people do not accept the fact. And among the billions are thousands, possibly millions, of intelligent, erudite, and even reasonable people!

One such intelligent, erudite, and reasonable man is Maajid Nawaz, a Muslim and reformed “Islamist”, who founded Quilliam, “a London-based think tank that focuses on ‘counter-extremism’, specifically against Islamism, which it argues represents a desire to impose any given interpretation of Islam on society”.

In conversation with atheist Sam Harris,[1] Nawaz argues for a reformation of Islam through constructive interpretations of its “holy scripture”. [We are concerned here only with Nawaz’s side of the discussion. What Sam Harris says is well worth reading.]

The chief “holy book” of Islam is the Koran. Muslims believe it is “God’s final revelation to humanity”. They believe it was dictated to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel, who first appeared to him when he was forty years old as he lay in the Cave of Hira in the year 609, and that the full “revelation” was delivered at intervals through the rest of his life, a period of 23 years. Muhammad was illiterate. He recited to his companions what he said the angel Gabriel recited to him, and they wrote it down.

Nawaz asserts – for which we applaud him: “Islam is, after all, an idea; we cannot expect its merits or demerits to be accepted if we cannot openly debate it.”[2]

And he argues: “Any given subject has multiple interpretations, which demonstrates that there is no correct one. [His emphasis.] If we can understand that, then we arrive at a respect for difference, which leads us to tolerance and then pluralism, which in turn leads to democracy, secularism, and human rights.”[3] And: “My organization … [takes]  the unequivocal view that no place on earth should seek to impose any given interpretation of religion over the rest of society.”[4]

He sums up his mission thus:

A complete overhaul of cultural identity patterns and a reformed scriptural approach is required. … Such scriptural reform must involve denying those who approach texts vacuously … from absolute certainty that theirs is the correct view …[5]

The greater part of his contribution to the discussion is concerned with differences of interpretation of the “holy scripture” by the learned men of Islam: his point being that the Islamic texts have been and still can be subject to interpretation; and that new interpretations can assist a reform of Islam for this age, when bad interpretations are inspiring or causing evil actions by large numbers of Muslims banded together in terrorist organizations.

Maajid Nawaz has bravely assumed “the responsibility to counter” the “scriptural justification” for Islamic “extremism”.[6] He sees this as a way to make Islam compatible with the values of the West. We take his word for it that such interpretations are possible, and that spreading them through the Islamic world may help to bring about his obviously meritorious ends.

Let us assume – wishing him well with his project – that his interpretations of Islamic “holy scripture” (the hadith as well as the Koran) are enormously and wonderfully attractive and persuasive; that hundreds of millions Muslims come to accept them, perhaps even a majority of the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world today. The very case he demonstrates, that the texts are forever open to interpretation cannot but mean that there will still be bad interpretations, still likely to inspire evil actions. 

How likely is it that a reformed Islam will become so prevalent that “extremist” interpretations inspiring “Islamism” will be completely and forever abandoned, totally superseded, obliterated? If likely, then that would be, of course, a good result of Maajid Nawaz’s movement. But if unlikely, then his proposed remedy for the savagery, the cruelty and mass murder being carried out by such organizations as al-Qaeda and ISIS, is no remedy at all. It is worth trying. It may lessen the effects of Islamic “extremism”. But it is no remedy.

As long as there are multitudes who believe that they are in possession of “the word of God”, and that God tells them to harm others who do not believe the same as they believe, there will be no remedy.

In time, perhaps, religion will die out as a motivating force of human activity. We long for that to happen. But we cannot see that it will happen any time soon.

NOTES

1. Islam: A Dialogue, Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz, Harvard University Press, 2015.

2. page 88

3. page 105

4. page 109

5. pages 116,117

6. page 121

… is under debate today, because President Obama, speaking in Argentina, said that there is no significant difference between capitalism and communism.   

If you can bear to listen to him, here’s the video.

It is an exercise in taqiyya – Islamic tactical deception – at which he is adept. His history shows plainly that Obama knows full well there is a difference, and he strongly favors communism. (See our post, A very disgraceful speech, immediately below.)

And here’s Milton Friedman explaining that capitalism is the only system that lifts millions of people out of poverty:

Barack Hussein Obama is sympathetic to Communist regimes because he was raised from infancy to be a Communist and has continued throughout his life to like Communism.

As a young adult he was trained in the “community organizing” school of Communist radical Saul Alinsky.

In 1986, at the age of twenty-three … Obama was hired by the Alinsky team “to organize residents on the South Side [of Chicago] while learning and applying Alinsky’s philosopy of street-level democracy”.

So David Horowitz writes in his book Radicals*. The chapter titled A Radical Machiavelli outlines the whole story of Obama’s rise to power, diligently following the Alinsky way in order to use power for the radical transformation of America.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention that Obama chooses to make friends with Communist dictators – notably, this month, with the blood-drenched Castro Brothers who are still ruling Cuba.

They weren’t very eager to entertain him. No Castro or his deputy met the president of the United States at the airport when he landed. Raul Castro took him to a ball game, where Obama cheered delightedly (soon after he’d been informed that jihadis had bombed America’s NATO ally Belgium, causing massive loss of life and injury). Later he danced the tango. And he made a speech.

What did he say?

We quote from an article by Carlos Eire at PowerLine:

A classic example of Obamaspeak, this boilerplate speech consisted of four essential elements: some truths (few in number), several myths (plentiful), many platitudes (even more plentiful), and a string of lies (all braided with the myths and platitudes). …

Nowhere in this speech do the Castro brothers show up. Nowhere are their many crimes against humanity mentioned. Nowhere is any blame laid on them for enslaving and ruining “the Cuban people” or for poisoning relations with the United States. In their place, another abstraction shows up to play the part of the villain: “ideology”.

As he has done countless times before, Obama inserts himself in history as the ultimate slayer of the “Cold War” dragon, which is always drawn by him as a caricature, a fairy monster of sorts with no teeth and no fire in his breath, whose scales are fluffy and whose wings are as diaphanous as all abstract thoughts. “Ideology” in Obamaspeak, is no real threat to life and limb, no powerful enslaving force, but an illusory phantom from some distant past …

To ensure that his Cuban audience recognized his power to dispel this toothless abstraction, Obama [told] them: “From the beginning of my time in office, I’ve urged the people of the Americas to leave behind the ideological battles of the past.”

Never mind the Castro brothers, or the tens of thousands of Cubans murdered by them, the hundreds of thousands imprisoned and tortured, or the two million driven into exile, or the nuclear missiles they pointed at the United States, or the soldiers and spies they’ve sent all over the world, or the terrorists they have sponsored. …

Anywhere you look, it is easy to spot platitudinous metaphors and abstractions in this Obamaesque tapestry. There are so many of them, in fact, that they are hard to tally. So let’s just mention the more disturbing ones.

“In many ways, the United States and Cuba are like two brothers who’ve been estranged for many years,” he said, “even as we share the same blood.”

What blood? As it turns out, the closest Obama came to identifying that blood was to babble on about superficial similarities between Cuban and American culture, especially in the realms of music and sports.

Obama also spoke of “hope” repeatedly. He even had the nerve to tell Cubans of “hope that is rooted in the future that you can choose and that you can shape, and that you can build for your country.”

What hope, as long as the Castro dynasty is in control? What is this amorphous “hope” or this amorphous “future”? What of this “choosing” and “shaping”? How is that to happen when there is no civil society in Cuba, no rule of law, no chance to express oneself freely, no private property, no free market economy? …

The biggest lies in the speech have to do with history, and all of these falsehoods come straight from the Castro regime’s Ministry of Truth …

In Obama’s thinly disguised Marxist narrative there is a constant dialectic between an imperialist power (the United States) and an unjustly exploited subaltern (Cuba), and in this poisoned relationship, the United States is responsible for most of Cuba’s ills.

The exploitation, said Obama, began with the Spanish-American War: “The blue waters beneath Air Force One once carried American battleships to this island — to liberate, but also to exert control over Cuba.”

After that, with “control” over Cuba, the United States could not help but behave very badly. “Before 1959,” said Obama, “ some Americans saw Cuba as something to exploit, ignored poverty, enabled corruption.”

This is pure Castroite propaganda, which all Cubans born after 1959 have had force-fed to them as “history”. And in this false “history”, of course, it is always assumed that the Castro are the heroes who rescued Cubans from all of the exploitation.

That an American president should parrot such lies tells us a lot about the character of such a president, and the real-world value of his speech to the enslaved Cuban people. …

One of the biggest [lies] is the claim that the so-called embargo “was not working” and that it was “hurting the Cuban people”.  This could be seen as the linchpin of Obama’s argument for “normalizing” relations. It sounds reasonable. But the truth is that the embargo was not put into place to force the collapse of the Castro regime, but to contain the damage it could do to the United States and its allies. And as far as that goal was concerned, the so-called embargo was indeed working.

As to the claim that the embargo hurt the Cuban people, nothing could be further from the truth. What really impoverished the Cuban people and made them destitute was the insane economic policies of the Castro regime. Cuba has been trading with every other country in the world while the embargo has been in place, and for the past decade and a half the island has been visited by tens of millions of non-American tourists. Yet, despite the opportunities made possible by such exchanges, poverty, deprivation, and repression continued to be the lot of all Cubans.

This lie about the “embargo” forms the basis for another equally heinous one, the claim that “the United States of America is normalizing relations with the Cuban people”. …

There is no real “normalization” going on insofar as the lives of Cubans are concerned. In fact, repression has increased and the economy has worsened since Obama began warming up to the Castro regime in December 2014. Secondly, the so-called “normalization” process does not involve “the Cuban people” at all, but only the Castro regime, that is, Raul Castro, his geriatric military junta, and his slightly younger oligarchs.

Obama also lied about the changes supposedly taking place in Cuba, such as the economic improvements brought about by self-employment, which are highlighted with a series of bogus feel-good stories about cuentapropistas or entrepreneurs. Every Cuban knows that the self-employment ruse is one of the biggest lies of all, and no ticket to prosperity or freedom, because the Castro regime owns absolutely everything on the island. …

The speech reaches a crescendo with the invocation of the term “reconciliation” …

What makes the use of this term incorrect in the case of Cuba – and what makes all talk of “reconciliation” a lie – is that genuine reconciliation involves penance and an admission of guilt on the part of wrongdoers. Those guilty of the worst sins in recent Cuban history – the Castro brothers and their supporters – have not only refused to admit their guilt, but actually remain in power and refuse to stop abusing the human rights of the Cuban people.

Until those who rule Cuba step aside and admit their guilt – and until those at the top ranks are tried in a court of justice for their many crimes against humanity – there can be no genuine “reconciliation” in Cuba.

To speak of “reconciliation” as the payoff of Obama’s many concessions to the Castro regime is akin to speaking of “reconciliation” between a rapist and his victim while the rapist continues to rape his victim repeatedly, with no remorse and no end in sight.

Finally, to sum up his own vapid, narcissistic, and self-aggrandizing rhetoric, Obama closed the speech with a Spanish rendition of his 2008 campaign slogan, si se puede (yes, it’s possible, or yes we can).

Yes, sure. Tell that to the Ladies in White, Obama, please, as they are beaten and arrested every Sunday. Tell that to the political prisoners who rot in tiny cells. Tell that to the Cuban schoolchildren who are fed lies and propaganda disguised as “education” and who have no hope of ever earning more than twenty dollars a month as adults. Tell that to the mother whose son or daughter just drowned while trying to flee on a flimsy raft from the hell that is Castro’s Cuba.

Tell them, please, how anything is possible other than what the Castro regime deigns to dole out to them.

Until there are no more masters and no more slaves, there can be no end to slavery.

For Obama to fling his campaign slogan “yes we can” to Cubans is no different from some Northern abolitionist visiting a Southern plantation to tell the slaves to ignore their chains and think happy thoughts.

To employ that recycled slogan in Cuba was downright shameful, and a very fitting end to a very disgraceful speech.

*Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion by David Horowitz, Regnery, 2012. (Our quotation comes from p. 181.)

A world war is being fought, by one side only: Islam.

The other side, the civilized West and its outposts and allies, is letting the invaders into its territory and suffering the enemy’s attacks from within, over and over again.

Why?

The West has far greater military and technological strength than Islam. Yet it is choosing not to fight back. Or, where it now and then does, it chooses not to win.

Why?

There is surely no precedent for such an irrational, suicidal choice in all recorded history.

Sohrab Ahmari reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Islamic State jihadists staged a triple-bombing in the Belgian capital — two at the Brussels airport and a third at a metro station downtown — that killed [more than]  30 people … It was the latest reminder that Islamic terrorism is now a permanent and ubiquitous hazard to life in every city, on every continent.  In coming days European authorities will level reproaches about the missed warning signs, security lapses and the larger failure to integrate Belgian Muslims. Commissions will be formed. Sympathetic memes will proliferate on social media. Je suis Belge.   This routine has become numbingly familiar. And these habitual responses, while understandable, defer a reckoning with a larger truth: Not a single day now goes by without an Islamist suicide bombing, rocket attack, shooting spree, kidnapping or stabbing somewhere in the world.   Consider the past 10 days [up to March 22, 2016, when the bombings in Belgium were carried out].   On Sunday, March 13, jihadists sprayed gunfire on sunbathers in Grand Bassam, a resort town in the Ivory Coast popular with Westerners and wealthy Ivorians. The attack, which was claimed by al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, killed 16 people, including Burkinabe, Cameroonian, French, German, Ivorian and Malian citizens.   On Monday, March 14, two Palestinians fired on Israelis waiting at a bus stop in Kiryat Arba, in the West Bank, wounding one soldier before Israeli forces killed both. A third Palestinian terrorist rammed his car into an Israeli army vehicle in the area and was shot dead. Israel has suffered a wave of Arab knife-and-car attacks for six months, known as the stabbing intifada.   On Tuesday, March 15, al Qaeda’s Somali franchise, al-Shabaab, kidnapped three Red Crescent aid workers in the country’s southwest, according to local media. The abductions followed al-Shabaab’s seizure of a village in central Somalia, amid a broader Islamist resurgence in the Horn of Africa. The aid workers were freed a day later after local villagers pleaded for their release.   On Wednesday, March 16, a pair of female suicide bombers blew themselves up at a mosque in Nigeria, killing 24. No group has claimed credit, but the bombing took place in Nigeria’s Borno state, the birthplace of Boko Haram, an Islamic State affiliate that is Africa’s most savage terror outfit.   On Thursday, March 17, the stabbing intifada claimed a fresh victim when a pair of Palestinian terrorists jumped and wounded an Israeli soldier with a knife in Ariel, in the West Bank. Israeli security forces killed both assailants.   On Friday, March 18, suspected al Qaeda fighters fired rockets at the Salah gas facility in Algeria. No one was injured, but BP and Norwegian oil giant Statoil, which operate the facility, withdrew some staff and suspended operations.   On Saturday, March 19, a bomb went off in a tony shopping district of Istanbul, killing three Israelis (two of whom were U.S. citizens) and one Iranian, and wounding 39 others. This was the fifth mass-casualty terrorist bombing in Turkey in as many months, most of them claimed by or attributed to Islamic State. The same day, a mortar assault on a checkpoint in El-Arish, Egypt, killed 15 policemen. A Sinai-based Islamic State affiliate claimed responsibility.   On Sunday, March 20, al-Shabaab overran a Somali military base just 28 miles from the capital, Mogadishu, killing at least one person and seizing several vehicles. Also on Sunday, the Istanbul governorate canceled a hotly anticipated soccer match after receiving “serious intelligence” regarding a planned terror attack.   On Monday, March 21, Islamist fighters likely affiliated with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb targeted a hotel in the capital of Mali, Bamako, that houses a European Union military-assistance mission. EU personnel were unharmed, and one attacker was killed by hotel security.   Brussels was the first major terrorist incident in the West since November’s jihadist killing spree in Paris and December’s in San Bernardino, Calif. You could create a calendar like this one that stretches back for weeks and months, and the above doesn’t even include the civil wars and humanitarian calamities in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan.   The Syrian vortex is especially perilous. It has been drawing the barely stable nations that surround Syria into its spin and spewing out battle-hardened jihadists along with millions of legitimate refugees. The biggest refugee crisis since World War II was bound to pose serious security threats to Europe. Meanwhile, the longer Islamic State and al Qaeda thrive in Syria and Iraq, the stronger their adherents and affiliates elsewhere will become.

(In fact, there have been even more such attacks in that period. See The Religion of Peace for a more comprehensive list. And see their tally of lethal Muslim attacks world-wide since 9/11 in our margin.)

Here’s a picture of the train bombed by Muslim holy warriors in Brussels yesterday (the dead bodies cut off by the publishers, not by us).

And here’s the scene after one of the Muslim holy warriors’ bombs exploded at Belgium’s international airport.

Today, in Belgium, at least 31 people were killed and over a hundred injured by Muslim jihadis. There were two attacks on Zaventem airport at 07:00 GMT, in which 11 people were killed and 81 injured. A third attack, in which 20 people were killed, was carried out an hour later in Brussels on the Maelbeek metro station, near the European Parliament.

Muslims had threatened that there would be attacks when Salah Abdeslam, the plotter of the jihadi attacks in Paris last November, was found in Brussels and taken into custody four days ago.

The attacks will no doubt be put down as usual by stupid politicians to Muslims who have embraced a “brand” or “interpretation” of Islam, commonly called “Islamism”, which they say is not anything like the “real” Islam. But in fact there is not a sliver of difference between Islam and “Islamism”, only between active jihadis and non-active jihadis. Jihad – “holy war” – is commanded by Islam and all Muslims are obliged to pursue it, either actively themselves or in support of others who who pursue it actively.

Islam itself is an intolerable totalitarian ideology. It must be treated with the contempt and loathing accorded by most people to Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism. There is no good Islam. 

On Fox News “good” Muslims – absurdly chosen advisers to this or that US administration – are saying that in Brussels it is a problem of non-assimilation of the Muslim immigrants; of the young Muslim men who are killing people with nail-filled bombs because they are unemployed.

Is there anyone left who will swallow that story?

We quote below, in part, from our post, It’s not terrorism, it’s war, November 12 2014, in which we argue that terrorism is the method the jihadis are using, but their aim is to conquer, subjugate and kill. And that is what Western governments, which have insisted, and continue to insist, on importing millions of Muslims from the Third World, refuse to accept.

Jihad means Holy War. Jihad must be recognized as a war waged everywhere. 

Even if European governments found a way to stop and punish jihadi violence in their own countries, the war would go on. At present they are all acting ineffectively. Instead of joyfully letting all Muslim citizens who want to go and fight with IS/ISIS/ISIL go, and refuse them re-entry, and deprive them of their citizenship (as Geert Wilders so rightly recommends), they try to persuade them not to go, and if they return they give them “therapy”, as if Islam were nothing but a nervous breakdown in a few gullible individuals.  

It is foolish and dangerous to go on calling every Muslim “holy” warrior a terrorist. It is even more foolish and self-deceiving to call IS/ISIS/ISIL a “terrorist organization”. ISIS is one of the armies of Islam. 

Islam is an ideology of world conquest. It is fighting a war against the non-Muslim world. 

At the same time there are battles within Islam. Sunni versus Shia is a perpetual conflict. IS/ISIS/ISIL – the Islamic State – is Sunni. When Shia Iran becomes a nuclear power – which will be quite soon with Obama’s help – there will be a second Islamic force against the rest of the world, competing with the Islamic State for the victor’s crown.

Of course the Iranian force with its nuclear weapons will be a thousand times stronger than the Islamic State.

Even if  the Islamic State were to be defeated by American or Western forces, the war would not stop.

The war will continue on the streets of Western cities in Sweden, Britain, France, Spain, Belgium – and America. 

*

The EU “High Representative for Foreign Affairs”, Federica Mogherini –  a life-long Communist, and one of the European leaders who acquiesced in Obama’s “deal” with Iran – brought herself to tears while publicly addressing the Muslim terror attacks in Brussels. She was visiting Jordan at the time.

Like almost all European political leaders, she has been ardently in favor of bringing millions of Muslims into Europe.

She has been consistently unsympathetic – positively antagonistic – to the people of Israel, who have been under terrorist attack by Muslims for decades.

Europe reaps what Europe sowed. 

An unnamed commentator shows a video of a Palestinian woman failing to detonate a bomb that was meant to kill her and some Israelis. At an Israeli hospital where she was given (probably free) treatment, she announces with a friendly smile that she will try again. So that she can go to paradise as a martyr.

Here is anti-establishment Mark Levin, at CPAC 2016, on the state of the Republican Party. He deplores the fact that its leaders still don’t understand how their failure to use the immense power they’ve been given to oppose Obama, is the cause of the rebellion of millions of Republican voters (expressed in their enthusiasm for Donald Trump –  whom Levin does not actually  mention).

And we quote from an article by (anti-Trump) Kurt Schlichter at Townhall which says and deplores the same thing: the Republican Party leadership has learnt nothing from all that is happening.

Even morons don’t slap their paws on a hot stove twice, but then the GOP Establishment would have to work pretty hard to rise to the level of “morons”. Exhibit A in the case against the cloistered, sheltered Ruling Class is the latest column from mainstream media conservative catamite David Brooks. I’d link to it, but I don’t want to send traffic to the hateful New York Times. Just Google “David Brooks smug clueless jerk” and it should pop right up.

Brooks opposes Trump for all the wrong reasons. He thinks Trump is low class, which Trump is, but that’s where his analysis really ends. Trump, and his followers, are uncool – and even worse, they refuse to acknowledge the natural right of Brooks and his ilk to command them.

Substantively, except for Trump’s recent conversion to actually enforcing immigration laws (which offends both Brooks’ finely tuned sense of decorum and his desire to underpay his housekeeper), Trump and Brooks often seem to agree on a lot  … But while Trump knows his market … Brooks admits he does not actually know anyone who Trump appeals to. For that, he sort of apologizes and promises that in the future he will try harder to do better to comprehend the residents of the country he presumes to write about. …

How condescending. “Oh, I really should have understood the actual people who make up the conservative base better. Duly noted. Now all kneel before me!”

Understand that he’s no fan of Ted Cruz either, mostly because Ted Cruz is so uncouth that he actually presumes to fight the progressive elite that gently pats Brooks on his noggin and invites him to all the best parties, secure in the knowledge that on command he will obediently denounce, disavow and repudiate the same Republicans he is supposed to be representing.

So, Trump gets about 40% of the primary vote and Cruz about 30% and, while I did go to a public school, I still think that adds up to at least 70% of the GOP electorate voting for one or another candidate whose platform is essentially a middle finger to the people like Brooks who ran the party for the last 30 years.

We need to be clear on who the people supporting Trump are. I’m a Trump opponent, though I will vote for him against that evil harpy Hillary Clinton in the general because her combination of unhinged malice and bottomless stupidity will lead her to create a climate that invites lasting damage to the Union, including but not limited to actual violence. But many who agree with me about Trump’s perfidy are seeing what they would like to see rather than what truly is when it comes to the people who support him. …

So let’s understand who Trump’s voters are. … They are not just impoverished victims bitter because they can’t make Buicks anymore. There’s this meme that they are all dirt poor Appalachian oxy addicts, and that’s just silly. … While there is a huge economic displacement component to Trump’s appeal, most of his followers are the “work hard and play by the rules” people who get disrespected by the elite (when people like Brooks bother to notice them at all) but who do much of the work building and defending this country. Note the prominence of American flags [and] veterans’ issues … at Trump rallies. And then there is the talk of prioritizing America’s interests – do not underestimate the appeal to Americans of a politician willing to take America’s side.

Trump fans are not all racists and xenophobes. A lot of conservatives have used the same kind of leftist slanders to tar these people that helped alienate them in the first place, hence the way Trump’s rejection of political correctness is always cited as a yuge part of his appeal.  …

“Yuge” has now passed into the English language, because Trump uses it so often – because his ambitions, his plans, his wall … everything about Trump is huge. Or rather, YUGE.

True, Trump’s followers refuse to follow the rules of the PC kabuki dance that coastal elitists instinctively adhere to when discussing issues of race, sex, or Islam. That doesn’t make them terrible – it just makes them honest. Sure, the coastal types who carefully refer to illegal aliens as “undocumented workers” may frown when some guy from Phoenix calls these criminals what they are – you think the kind of citizen who supports Trump would get a pass if he broke the law? – but it’s the elitists who are the liars. It’s the elitists using PC to cover up the truth about the economic disruption and crime illegals cause, not the Trump voters.

The elitists need to change, not the Trump fans.

But, of course, change is the one thing Brooks never even considers. Sure, he now acknowledges the need to socialize with people outside of Manhattan, by which he no doubt means flying to Iowa next time and awkwardly picking at a plate of French toast in some diner adjacent to a couple farmers in John Deere caps, silently wondering if the butter was locally sourced and counting the minutes until his flight back to La Guardia. But Brooks displays no intention whatsoever of altering any of his views based upon what he claims to have learned. Illegal immigration? Nope, he’s still at “Shut up racists”. Guns? Nope, he’s still at “Let me determine what few weapons you hicks should be glad I allow you to keep”. Obama? Nope, he’s still at “We can’t possibly actually oppose him – look at those [pants] creases!”

See Brooks, you and your buddies haven’t really learned anything because you haven’t shown any inclination to change anything.

Deep down – actually, not that deep down – you don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. You think your own base is stupid and easily led, and you’re just mad because they are too smart to let you and your ilk lead them anymore. 

Donald Trump in 2013:

Why does the Washington establishment need to be uprooted and thrown out?

Why do millions of Americans long for a fresh start, a swift scraping away of all the foul accretions that adhere to government like poisonous barnacles?

Paul Driessen answers these vital questions. He writes at Townhall:

Washington is out of control. Legislators, judges and unelected bureaucrats want to control our lives, livelihoods and living standards, with no accountability even for major errors, calculated deception, or deliberate, often illegal assaults on our liberties and on citizens who resist the advancing Leviathan.

These themes animate Republican and conservative politics because they are happening – regularly.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is renowned for its annual Ten Thousand Commandments reports on federal rules. A scary but mesmerizing new analysis now maps how the Washington bureaucracy lawlessly imposes agendas that all too frequently contravene or disregard what We the People support, what is best for the nation, and even what Congress has enacted or refused to encode in legislation. …

No one even knows how many Executive Branch agencies there are – estimates range from 60 to 438 – much less how many new rules they implement and impose each year. Officially … they issued a staggering 3,554 new rules in 2014, while President Obama signed “only” 226 new laws enacted by Congress. Worse, of the 53,838 (!) formal final regulations included in the Federal Register from 2001 through 2014, only 160 (0.3%) received a “cost-benefit” analysis; we have no idea how the rest affect us. …

This does not include tens of thousands of decrees issued in the form of:

* notices, bulletins, proclamations, circulars, guidance memos, and new or revised interpretations, policy statements and procedures;

* investigations, inquiries, warning letters, negotiated settlements to legal actions (often involving collusion between agencies and activist groups), explicit or veiled threats of legal action, armed agents raiding homes and businesses, or adverse publicity, coordinated with activists and the media; as well as

* blog posts, news releases, and emails or telephone calls to citizens or company employees.

All these actions have the force and effect of law. But few or none are covered by Administrative Procedures Act “public notice and comment” requirements, so they often escape scrutiny by courts, watchdogs and Congress. Many are supported only by “homogenized”, manipulated data; elaborate, imaginative or imaginary regulatory benefits; cavalier dismissal of costs; and no mention of benefits from the activity, chemical, energy source, industry or jobs being regulated, sometimes into oblivion.

EPA’s Clean Power Plan assumes that shutting down America’s coal-fired power plants – a tiny fraction of such facilities worldwide – can somehow stop climate change that is actually governed by numerous powerful natural forces over which humans have absolutely no control. The plan also assumes any global warming will be dangerous and ignores the many thousands who will be rendered jobless.

A “social cost of carbon” scheme concocted by a multitude of federal agencies makes the same faulty assumptions. It then hypothesizes every imaginable and illusory “cost” of carbon dioxide emissions – to forests, agriculture, water resources, “forced migration” of people and wildlife, human health and disease, coastal cities, ecosystems and wetlands. But it completely ignores every one of the obvious and enormous benefits of using fossil fuels … and of CO2’s immense fertilizing effects on forest and crop growth.

President Obama imposed both of these programs because Congress refused to enact almost 700 different cap-tax-and-trade and other climate bills. Rather than working with Congress to achieve at least some of what he wanted, Mr. Obama simply had his agencies issue decrees …

Where Congress has enacted legislation that the president dislikes – on illegal immigration or the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate, for example – he simply tells his agencies not to enforce the “offensive” provisions. Meanwhile, Endangered Species Act rules are enforced with an iron fist against ranching, oil and mining operations, but ignored in the case of wind turbines and solar installations.

Under collusive sue-and-settle lawsuits, parties impacted by decisions never have an opportunity to speak or present evidence, or even be notified that a suit has been filed or adjudicated, until it is too late.

The entire system allows unelected, unaccountable government officials to decide winners and losers, and reward cronies and allies with taxpayer-funded grants and subsidies, while punishing critics and enemies.  “Progressive” judges defer to “agency discretion” and give bureaucrats free rein to do as they please, even when the rules, decisions and decrees do not comply with legal, constitutional or scientific requirements.

No citizen, small business or even large corporation can possibly even know all these edicts exist, much less understand or comply with them. Moreover, at least 4,500 carry criminal penalties, many regardless of any intent to violate a rule or commit a crime – and “ignorance of the law is no excuse”.  …

Federalism, states’ rights, state and local laws and customs, and personal liberties increasingly cease to matter.

The federal Goliath now costs US families, businesses, hospitals and organizationsover $1.9 trillion a year! That is twice the entire federal budget in 1981. It’s equal to the entire budget in 1986, nearly half the incomprehensible Obama budget for FY-2017, more than the budgets of all other countries except China.

“The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they [resist] every kind of improvement,” economist and political analyst Ludwig von Mises observed 72 years ago. “They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent.” …

The same agencies write, impose, enforce and adjudicate the rules, and impose punishment for infractions. They work tirelessly and imperiously to “fundamentally transform” our nation’s legal, energy, economic and social systems …

They impose edicts that would never be supported by the People or enacted by Congress, and that they rarely if ever apply to themselves. They lavish billions on allies, while denying funding and legitimacy to critics, siccing IRS dogs on opposition groups, and threatening civil and criminal “racketeering” actions against anyone who “denies” the alleged “reality” of dangerous manmade climate change.

They seek to ban fossil fuels, biotech crops and insecticides – even from Third World families suffering from abject poverty, rampant malnutrition and disease, and a near total absence of electricity. They do all they can to silence and punish alternative views, and even the notion that there can be alternative views.

For seven years, our “Try and stop me” president and administration have used and abused their powers to impose their agenda.

What we need now is a “Try and make me” president, who will refuse to enforce their edicts. Who will use his pen, phone and power to review them, root out any fraud and abuse behind them, and defund and bury them. Who will work with Congress to restore the rule of law and our Constitution, economic growth, and the role of personal liberties, opportunities and responsibilities. 

Is there a candidate for the presidency who could be that “Try and make me” leader?

… who now confront what they did not predict. About Donald Trump.

Glenn Reynolds writes at Instapundit (via PJ Media):

THERE’S SOMETHING GOING ON HERE, BUT YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS, DO YOU, MR. BROOKS?

David Brooks wrote at the New York Times:

Trump voters are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else. Moreover, many in the media, especially me [sic], did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.

Well, David, you should get out more. You might also try reading InstaPundit regularly. But mostly, you owe a bigger apology than this.

The Tea Party movement — which you also failed to understand, and thus mostly despised — was a bourgeois, well-mannered effort (remember how Tea Party protests left the Mall cleaner than before they arrived?) to fix America. It was treated with contempt, smeared as racist, and blocked by a bipartisan coalition of business-as-usual elites. So now you have Trump, who’s not so well-mannered, and his followers, who are not so well-mannered, and you don’t like it.

*

 … And see the slanderers squirming (we hope).

Our reader and associate Robert Kantor, who sent us the Instapundit article, adds these words:

The Tea Party was smeared relentlessly by the people who now call for civility. Biden denounced it as a terrorist group. Others denounced is as filled with neo-Nazis and racists. It was called the American Taliban and was indirectly blamed for the shooting of Gabby Gifford. Worst of all, Tea Partiers were dubbed Teabaggers, a word used to describe a certain homosexual act. President Obama used this term, as did many Democratic Party luminaries. The only violence at a Tea Party rally occurred when some union thugs beat up a black Tea Party supporter. 

And now the leftist media has gone hysterical [over Donald Trump rallies where the Left is protesting violently], with the word “Nazi” heard over and over again.