Why is twice-and-forever president, Barack Obama, limitlessly generous, submissive, helpful to the cruel theocracy of Iran?

Why has he helped it become a nuclear power?

Lee Smith writes at Tablet:

[In January, 2024] Kata’ib Hezbollah launched a drone that killed three U.S. soldiers in Jordan. But President Biden didn’t want to retaliate against Iran for fear of collapsing the pro-Iran policy established by his former boss Barack Obama, so U.S. intelligence officials leaked an assessment to the press that Iran doesn’t control the proxy groups it trains, funds, and arms to kill Americans and U.S. allies in the Middle East.

That got Biden off the hook‚ but it’s hard to pose as a global superpower while allowing the servicemen and women you put in harm’s way to be killed with impunity. Biden considered his options, then announced his intentions to hit targets in Iraq and Syria, which gave the Iranians a week to scatter high-value assets and personnel, after which he bombed meaningless targets in those countries. One U.S. official made sure to tell the Iranians through U.S. media that “there are no indications that members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were killed as part of the operations.” The U.S. president thereby signaled to the Iranians that they are free to continue directing their Arab assets to kill Americans.

Iran’s proxies and cutouts are successful in this sickening game that puts the lives of hostages and servicemen alike at risk only to the extent that officials in the Biden administration are willing to deny and disguise the regime’s active role in targeting Americans. By contrast, when Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 U.S.-Iran agreement that legalized the terror state’s nuclear weapons program, he signaled that unlike his predecessor he didn’t see Tehran as a regional partner to replace Israel and Saudi Arabia. Accordingly, when Iranian proxies killed an American contractor and laid siege to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad in December 2019, Trump cut off the head of Iran’s paramilitary snake by killing Soleimani. The January 2020 drone strike that got the Iranian terror chief also tagged then-leader of Kata’ib Hezbollah, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, thereby underscoring the fact that Iran is directly responsible for the actions of its proxies.

In comparison, Biden’s Iran policy is a hall of mirrors designed to hide facts likely to disturb the American electorate while allowing the White House to deepen its relationship with Iran.

All that is manifest or at least probable and credible.

But then Smith writes this:

For Americans, the most repugnant feature of what the Biden team sees as a program of regional integration under the Iranian banner is this: U.S. forces are based in Iraq and Syria to protect Iranian interests in those countries. Under the guise of counterterrorism missions, American troops are detailed to target any Sunni Arab population that the Iranians and their allies designate as ISIS, and thereby risk their lives to secure Iran’s position in countries the Islamic Republic has helped destroy.

America is actively helping Iran wage its battles for supremacy in the Islamic world? A shocking fact if true. It is bad enough that the Obama gangsters incomprehensibly fund the Iranian tyranny with American tax dollars, plead with the mullahs for permission to lick their boots, and pant in vain for their gratitude, but to deploy American forces to fight and die for those genocidal sadists would surely be going too far in using  America as Obama’s own property.

If it is true, why is Iran killing American soldiers?

The Iranians persist in targeting American troops to remind the White House who calls the shots.

Yes, the Iranians have directed more than 160 attacks on U.S. forces since October, but the reason for these attacks is hardly Israel’s post-Oct. 7 military response to Hamas: The Iranians have been launching regular attacks on U.S. troops in the region since Biden took office—starting with an attack against a U.S. airbase in Iraq in February 2021.

The Iranians and their proxies are free to attack American forces because the White House has abandoned them to the mercies of Tehran, effectively turning U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines into a security deposit ensuring that the Biden administration will continue to advance Iranian, rather than American, interests.

“Ensuring that the Biden administration will continue to advance Iranian, rather than American, interests.” 

But why, why, why?  If Obama is a Muslim at heart, does the Democrat Party of America have to put Iran’s interests ahead of its own, and not only ahead of its own but at the cost of its own?

Taking hostages, after all, is how Iran does business. When in its infancy the Islamic Republic seized the U.S. Embassy in 1979 and ransomed 52 Americans, it led the news almost every night, for 444 days. It cost Jimmy Carter the presidency. In the intervening years, the Iranians and their proxies have kidnapped so many people—like Terry Anderson (Hezbollah, 1985-91), Roxanne Saberi (the Iranian regime, 2009), Austin Tice (the Syrian regime, 2012 to the present) and most recently Elizabeth Tsurkov (Kata’ib Hezbollah, 2023 to the present)—that Hamas’s Oct. 7 abductions are just part of the background music of the Middle East. It should shock the world that a nation-state and its proxy forces regularly imprison, torture, and rape innocents until their governments cough up enough money to get them back—or until they are dead. But nearly half a century after the 1979 hostage crisis, the Iranians have acclimated most of the world to the idea that this barbaric practice is just a conventional instrument of their foreign policy.

As president, Obama further normalized Iran’s terms. He helped legitimize hostage-taking as a function of Iranian statecraft by directing his officials to use hostage talks as an entry point that could double as a diplomatic channel …  In 2009, the Iranians kidnapped three Americans who had inadvertently crossed over the Iraq border. Oman mediated U.S.-Iran hostage negotiations, and sure enough the White House used that line of communication for secret talks with Iran to legalize its nuclear weapons program. The nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was the Obama administration’s top foreign policy priority, with the end goal of turning Iran into a regional hegemon.

Why?

Representing the administration in those secret talks were [the under-devils] William Burns and Jake Sullivan now Biden’s CIA director and national security adviser, respectively.

With the nuclear deal concluded in 2015, Obama went back to the hostage stratagem and gave the Iranians a signing bonus of $1.7 billion, including $400 million in cash, in exchange for four U.S. hostages in January 2016. With that flourish, hostages became an official medium of exchange, which allowed the White House, in the absence of any formal diplomatic agreement or congressional approval or oversight, to ship pallets of cash to Tehran.

Biden loaded his administration with many of the same people who ran Iran policy under Obama, including former Iran envoy Robert Malley, whose security clearances were revoked [in April 2023]  after he was alleged to have mishandled classified information.

Why have we heard nothing more about that? Is (the odious) Robert Malley to be indicted? If not, why not? It’s a puzzle. If he gave classified information to Iran, that would be in line with the Obama agenda. Which may mean that the Biden administration is protecting him from any further punitive action. But if that is so,  who dared to revoke his security clearance? How is he or she to be punished? No doubt very discreetly. Top secretly.

In his role as head of the Washington NGO the International Crisis Group, and then while serving as a U.S. government official, Malley supported and facilitated an Iranian influence operation targeting Western capitals, including Washington itself, and pushed one of its assets, Ariane Tabatabai, into the U.S. government. She, too, appears to be part of the hostage-industry infrastructure. Tabatabai remains chief of staff to the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, a portfolio that includes hostage rescue operations. [Emphasis in original.] Recently her boss posted photos of himself traveling with Tabatabai to visit U.S. troops at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. For Tehran, the pictures signal that no matter what the headlines may say, the understanding with Washington is unchanged.

Which is surely evidence that Obama still reigns.

The hostage-industry infrastructure gives the White House a way to service the unofficial alliance between the two governments, without having to explain why the U.S. is sending money to Iran, or what the Iranians are doing with it. For instance, in August the Biden administration gave Iran access to $6 billion in previously frozen oil revenues in exchange for five Americans. Was any of that money used to fund Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre? The White House says no. Instead, it claims that according to Qatar, which brokered the deal and parked the $6 billion in its central bank, the Iranians haven’t touched it. The fact that the White House thinks the American public and their elected representatives should take the word of Iran’s bagman is evidence that Qatar’s exertions as an “impartial mediator” have normalized the idea that it’s OK to pay off the Iranians and their proxies for kidnapping and killing Americans and our allies.

This deliberate misdirection is what Obama intended in 2012, when he asked Qatar to establish a channel with Hamas on behalf of the U.S. Given that Doha is one of Hamas’s benefactors—as of 2023, total aid from Qatar to Gaza is believed to be more than $2.1 billion—the official U.S. line is that the Qataris have leverage over Hamas. They must, or why else would they be brokering negotiations to return the Oct. 7 hostages?

(Gaza survives chiefly on the charity of rich states, non-governmental organizations, and the services of UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for “Palestine Refugees” only). Most of the donated money is retained by Hamas who use it to keep up continual violence and periodic warfare against Israel. Hamas is the government of Gaza, elected by the population. Israel supplied Gaza with fuel, food and special medical services, and employed thousands of Palestinian day-workers from Gaza, some of whom exploited their jobs as an opportunity to collect information useful to Hamas for its invasion of October 7, 2023.)

Accordingly, the Netanyahu government and Oct. 7 hostage families believe that since the U.S. has leverage over Qatar, it can compel the emirate to use its power and influence on Hamas. In this view, Qatar should defund the Palestinian terror group and throw its leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Meshaal out of their luxury hotel suites in Doha and put them in prison until Hamas releases its captives. But the Biden team isn’t going to pressure Qatar for the same reason it hit irrelevant targets in Syria and Iraq: it wants to preserve its relationship with Iran.

Why?

As the world’s go-to goodwill ambassador, Qatar says it’s impartial. But the only party in the region on whose behalf Qatar “mediates” is the one that takes hostages. Qatar works for Iran. It’s ugly, but it makes sense: If your foreign policy is keyed to the money you spend buying foreign elites and their institutions, and the source of that wealth is a giant natural gas field that you share with Iran, you take sides. And it’s not a hard choice: Is it the side that tortures and rapes hostages and kidnapped 28 Qatari royals, or is it the Americans, who won’t even shut down the local bureaus of Qatar’s flagship propaganda arm Al Jazeera, never mind make good on vague threats to move U.S. Central Command’s forward base out of Al Udeid airfield? It is Qatar that holds leverage over the U.S., which it exercises on its own behalf and Iran’s.

Consider the money that Qatar spreads around Washington, D.C. From the $14.8 million check that Obama administration peace processor Martin Indyk cashed as director of the Brookings Institution’s Foreign Policy Program to the billions Doha has spent on Al Udeid to lobby the Pentagon, as well as its massive investments in key American institutions like major universities, Qatar has leverage over nearly all parts of the U.S. government and American elites.

Qatar’s lavish expenditures are meant to show that the rewards for aligning with Qatar are great, while the punishment meted out by Iran’s fixer can be painful.

In 2017 Qatar hired former CIA agent Kevin Chalker to spy on and smear U.S. legislators like Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, and Democratic Congressman Ed Royce, who all supported legislation against Hamas. “An attack on Hamas is an attack on Qatar,” Chalker warned in a lengthy document prepared for his Qatari clients.

The ex-agency man also recommended that Qatar target rival United Arab Emirates by “exposing [the] enemy secrets” of the UAE’s well-connected Washington Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba. Chalker recommended that Qatar call on its media assets, identifying, among others, Max Blumenthal, anti-Israel activist and son of fading Clinton-world influencer Sidney Blumenthal; The Intercept; and The New York Times. Only months after Chalker produced the report, the Times published stories based on hacked Otaiba emails in a campaign intended, as reporter David Kirkpatrick acknowledged, “to embarrass the U.A.E. and benefit Qatar.” From the Pentagon to the capital’s paper of record, Qatar has Washington covered. It’s Iran’s stalking horse.

What happens in Gaza, then, will have consequences throughout the world—for Iran’s hostage infrastructure is built with something grander in mind than just trading human flesh for cash. After Oct. 7, Iran has made it clear that the purpose of its nuclear weapons program was never just to threaten Israel and Saudi Arabia, but also to hold the whip hand in world trade and energy markets. With Biden all but standing down the U.S. Navy, the Houthis, Iran’s proxy in Yemen, have closed Red Sea shipping lanes and forced major container shipping lines to take alternate routes, raising the prices of goods around the world. With a nuclear bomb in its arsenal, Iran’s next hostage is the global economy.

“Its nuclear weapons program was never just to threaten Israel …”  No, indeed not. It is first of all to destroy Israel.  And the only plausible explanation for Obama’s policy, still being pursued by his frontman Biden, of helping Iran become nuclear armed is because he wants Israel to be destroyed. 

Not all the Democrats in positions of authority are anti-Israel. There are even some who are strongly pro-Israel. So a Democrat-led American government could not openly destroy the small embattled country; but it can and does, with unwavering dedication and at enormous price, make it possible for Iran to attempt that truly genocidal operation.

As the Catholic Church did in ages past, and Islam still does, the Left strives to bring every nation, and every last member of every nation, under its rule: a rule not of law but of lawyers, law-makers and law-breakers; bureaucrats, bankers, communication controllers, billionaires.

In America there are still tens of millions who refuse to comply, and they are being treated as heretics, infidels, and pariahs. If you are a Trump supporter, or in the least degree opposed to the Leftists who have seized the executive branch of government and now control both houses of the legislative branch, you are likely to be forced into conformity and unquestioning obedience. The means to be employed will be cutting you off from the services you need to live a normal life.

Through institutions of government and enormously powerful corporations, the heresies of patriotism, populism, anti-tribalism, individualism, and defiant defense of free speech, private property, arms bearing, and the teaching of reading writing reckoning and history to your children, will be punished.

You will be denied the services of banks, credit card companies, the internet, social media, insurance companies, the national health service, schools, universities. It will be very hard for you to find a job.

There will be degrees of deprivation. If you are a mild offender, you may be allowed some health care, for instance, and a low-paying job. If you are a grave offender – one who goes so far as to persist in speaking well of Donald Trump – you may face long imprisonment. An active attempt to reinstate him could be ruled a capital offense.

If you capitulate and submit, your life will not be easy. Your record will be held against you.

Even if you always supported the Left and voted the totalitarians into power, you will receive only the information that the rulers choose to allow you. You will have no way of knowing – unless by chance you personally witness a reported event – whether what you are being told is true or false.

Bruce Bawer writes at Front Page:

I’ve been ranting for years about the perfidy of the left. At times I’ve been accused of exaggerating. On rare occasions I feared – or hoped? – that perhaps I was exaggerating. In fact I can now see that these people are worse than I ever imagined. Worse than most of us ever imagined. …

Worse than even Donald Trump “with all his insight” imagined.

He went into office determined to clean up the swamp. He was tireless. But not tireless enough. No mere mortal could have been tireless enough. Trump had denounced the swamp in apocalyptic terms, but it proved to be even deeper and more extensive than he knew. It reached into the upper echelons of the intelligence community and the military, into cabinet departments and the judiciary.

Not only did the Democrats try to derail his campaign and then his presidency. Even people whom he appointed to White House jobs proved unreliable. Far from being too suspicious, he’d been too trusting. He’d appointed two-faced D.C. insiders. He’d trusted people who turned out to be snakes in the grass.

The news media, with very few exceptions, made it their task to thwart his progress and poison his name with a constant flow of disinformation. They said Trump had told people to drink bleach. They said he’d called neo-Nazis “good people”. They said many other outrageous things that they knew were outright lies. They relentlessly repeated the charge that he did nothing but lie, lie, lie, when in fact it was they, the media, who were constantly feeding us lies. …

When enemies of Trump, and of freedom, created violence and mayhem in cities around the country, they were whitewashed, protected, and even praised by the media, by Democratic politicians, and by police officials. In a debate with Trump, Biden said Antifa was an idea, not an organization. Congressman Jerrold Nadler called it a myth.

Meanwhile Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey gave BLM $3 million. While the leftist gangsters went unpunished, citizens who tried to protect their homes and businesses from destruction by them were arrested by the police and demonized in the media. If you tried to spread the truth about all this on social media, you were shut down by Silicon Valley bosses who said you were lying.

And then the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

Republican officials in the states affected by the steal sat on their hands. State legislatures, ditto. Even the justices he’d named to the Supreme Court refused to hear Texas v. Pennsylvania, absurdly maintaining that a state didn’t have standing to challenge the conduct of a presidential election in another state.

Trump’s supporters, ever civilized, waited patiently while every possible means of stopping the steal was dutifully exhausted. When it came down to the final vote certification in Congress, an army of [between 600,000 and 2,000,000!) MAGA folk gathered peacefully in Washington to show that they had Trump’s back.

Then a tiny percentage of them foolishly entered the Capitol building. And a tiny percentage of that tiny percentage – at least some of whom seem to have been Antifa goons – caused minor damage. Most of them appear to have milled harmlessly around the building, leaving paintings and statues untouched. The contrast with the conduct of Antifa and BLM insurgents during the previous year could hardly have been more striking. …

One of those people, an Air Force veteran named Ashli Babbitt, was shot dead by a Capitol Hill policeman. She didn’t do anything to provoke the shooter. It was impossible not to think of George Floyd, the career criminal who, on May 25 of last year, died while resisting arrest after committing a crime. Floyd was black; the arresting officer was white. In the ensuing months, Floyd’s death was used to justify rioting, arson, and vandalism by Antifa and BLM agitators, none of whom ended up being killed by a cop.

But nobody’s making a martyr out of Ashli Babbitt.

I’m not saying anybody should. I’m just saying that after four years of reportage that routinely demonized Trump, sugarcoated his opponents, and cruelly mocked his supporters, and after an election that was blatantly stolen yet described in the media as eminently fair, those supporters could hardly be expected not to explode – especially since they’d seen, during the previous few months, one leftist explosion after another rewarded with praise.

But they did not explode.

On January 6, Biden, oozing faux solemnity, addressed the ongoing situation on Capitol Hill. After months of referring to Antifa and BLM thugs as “protesters”, he called the non-violent people who’d entered the Capitol a “mob” of “domestic terrorists” who, in an action bordering on “sedition”,  had made an “unprecedented assault…on the citadel of liberty….This is not dissent, it’s disorder”.

He wasn’t alone. In one voice, people who’d spent months cheering leftist violence expressed horror at the breach of the Capitol building and blamed it on Trump. Once the Capitol was secured, the planned challenges to the vote steal were scuttled and the election of Biden and Harris duly certified.

Whereupon the left – and not just the left – moved with the swiftness of lightning.

Accusing Trump of having incited the Capitol breach, [Speaker] Pelosi and [Senate minority leader] Schumer raised the possibility of using the 25^th Amendment to deny him his last few days in office …

And she absurdly introduced a proposal to impeach him for a second time, though he had only a few days more as president. .

Republicans who were never strong Trump supporters to begin with were quick to profess outrage at Trump’s purported provocation. Cabinet members Elaine Choi and Betsy DeVos quit. The Wall Street Journal called on Trump to resign. Senator Pat Toomey gave a thumbs-up to impeachment. Forbes warned companies not to hire anybody with a Trump connection.

Both Twitter and Facebook deplatformed Trump, and when he shifted from his personal Twitter account to the POTUS account, Twitter silenced that one, too. Other enemies of the left were also kicked off social media – among them Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, and Steve Bannon. Facebook ejected the WalkAway movement, in the process deleting countless heartfelt posts by ordinary citizens explaining why they’d quit the Democratic Party. YouTube took down a video by Rudy Giuliani. Amazon, Google, and Apple removed Parler, a “free-speech” alternative to Twitter and Facebook, from their app stores. The CEO of Mozilla, developer of the Firefox browser, wrote an essay entitled “We Need More than Deplatforming.”

(Yet the social-media accounts of the Chinese Communist Party and Ayatollah Khamenei remained untouched.)

Pelosi tried to get the military to stop taking orders from the President. …

She urged the Chiefs of Staff to mutiny against their commander-in-chief! (They refused.)

The director of ABC News spoke of “cleansing” the Trump movement after January 20, whatever that might mean. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, who’d taken the lead in challenging the vote steal, to be expelled from the Senate. Simon & Schuster canceled Hawley’s contract for a book about cancel culture. Biden likened Cruz to Goebbels. …

There’s no intrinsic magic about America that protects it from becoming Mao’s China or Stalin’s Russia. Only utopians believe in the perfectibility of man. People are people. And some of the people who are now, or are about to be, in power in the United States would, if accorded enough power, do far more to those of us who falter in loyalty than merely take away our social-media accounts.

Indeed, as scary as the situation may be right now, one thing’s for certain: worse is on its way. The Democrats now control both houses of Congress and are about to be handed the executive branch. The totalitarian-minded elements in that party are on the ascent, backed up by Silicon Valley, the legacy media, and much of corporate America.

Bruce Bawer thinks that by “listing, arresting, and imprisoning ‘enemies of the state'” – as, he reminds us, was done in the terrible reign of Stalin, and under the brutal tyranny of Mao –

These people will overreach. Their lists will grow so long, their cancelations so widespread, that, as happened with the Reign of Terror, everyone who isn’t clinically insane will finally realize that things have gone too far and will, in one way or another, put an end to the madness.

He asks:

But how far will things have to go before that happens? How long will it take? And how many lives will be destroyed before it’s over? These, alas, are the all too sobering questions that have yet to be answered.

In the meantime, those of us who care about liberty will simply have to do our best to keep enduring the daily tsunami of evil ideology, fake news, and contempt for decent people, and to continue hoping that the true and good will yet prevail.

Much as we would like his optimism – such as it is, sorrowful and tentative – to hearten us, we are less sure that such a realization will come, or that “the true and good will yet prevail”.

What has happened seems to us to demonstrate that there is a tragic weakness in freedom and tolerance. They permit those who value neither to exploit them to gain the power to abolish them. 

Senator Ted Cruz makes it clear that the Democrats are doing everything they can to prevent Judge Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court being confirmed because they want to “re-litigate the 2016 presidential election”.

https://youtu.be/v4EWd_u1nc4 

Now Cruz has gone. (Kasich was hardly ever there.) Trump is the Republican nominee for the presidency.

The much respected magazine, National Geographic, carries in its latest issue an article on atheism. It is titled: The World’s Newest Major Religion: No Religion.

The author is Gabe Bullard. He writes:

There have long been predictions that religion would fade from relevancy as the world modernizes, but all the recent surveys are finding that it’s happening startlingly fast. France will have a majority secular population soon. So will the Netherlands and New Zealand. The United Kingdom and Australia will soon lose Christian majorities. Religion is rapidly becoming less important than it’s ever been, even to people who live in countries where faith has affected everything from rulers to borders to architecture.

But nones [those who are affiliated with none of the religions] aren’t inheriting the Earth just yet. In many parts of the world — sub-Saharan Africa in particular — religion is growing so fast that nones’ share of the global population will actually shrink in 25 years as the world turns into what one researcher has described as “the secularizing West and the rapidly growing rest.” (The other highly secular part of the world is China, where the Cultural Revolution tamped down religion for decades, while in some former Communist countries, religion is on the increase.)

Yes. And devout Muslims are pouring into Europe by the million: an extraordinary event that will entirely change the character of Europe, but which Gabe Bullard does not seem to have noticed.

And even in the secularizing West, the rash of “religious freedom bills” — which essentially decriminalize discrimination — are the latest front in a faith-tinged culture war in the United States that shows no signs of abetting anytime soon.

Within the ranks of the unaffiliated, divisions run deep. Some are avowed atheists. Others are agnostic. And many more simply don’t care to state a preference. Organized around skepticism toward organizations and united by a common belief that they do not believe, nones as a group are just as internally complex as many religions. And as with religions, these internal contradictions could keep new followers away.

These are not “divisions”. There never was a solid phalanx of non-believers that could split apart. These are different opinions. That is all.

“Keep followers away”? “Followers” who want a cut-and-dried non-believing ideology that they can accept holus-bolus as the religious accept the doctrines of their faiths? Absurd!

If the world is at a religious precipice, then we’ve been moving slowly toward it for decades. Fifty years ago, Time [magazine] asked in a famous headline, “Is God Dead?” The magazine wondered whether religion was relevant to modern life in the post-atomic age when communism was spreading and science was explaining more about our natural world than ever before.

We’re still asking the same question. But the response isn’t limited to yes or no. A chunk of the population born after the article was printed may respond to the provocative question with, “God who?” In Europe and North America, the unaffiliated tend to be several years younger than the population average. And 11 percent of Americans born after 1970 were raised in secular homes.

Scientific advancement isn’t just making people question God, it’s also connecting those who question. It’s easy to find atheist and agnostic discussion groups online, even if you come from a religious family or community. And anyone who wants the companionship that might otherwise come from church can attend a secular Sunday Assembly or one of a plethora of Meetups for humanists, atheists, agnostics, or skeptics.

The groups behind the web forums and meetings do more than give skeptics witty rejoinders for religious relatives who pressure them to go to church — they let budding agnostics know they aren’t alone.

But it’s not easy to unite people around not believing in something.

It’s also totally unnecessary.

“Organizing atheists is like herding cats,” says Stephanie Guttormson, the operations director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation, which is merging with the Center for Inquiry. “But lots of cats have found their way into the ‘meowry’.”

Guttormson says the goal of her group is to organize itself out of existence. They want to normalize atheism to a point where it’s so common that atheists no longer need a group to tell them it’s okay not to believe, or to defend their morals in the face of religious lawmakers.

But it’s not there yet.

Why does anyone need a group to tell them that it’s okay not to believe in something they don’t believe in? But we accept that there are such people, and so agree that the group should “organize itself out of existence”.

The article then goes on to discuss who the atheists are in terms of race (fewer blacks than whites, it says), the sexes (fewer women than men, and the predominance of white men a manifestation of “privilege”).

Of course no one can possibly count the atheists of the world. We get Third World commenters on our Facebook page who tell us that they have to keep their atheism secret for fear of persecution and even death.

Gabe Bullard calls the distribution he alleges a “problem” of “diversity”.  His article is right up to date with its fashionable lingo.

To do him justice, he does quote one atheist – Mandisa Thomas, a black woman – saying that “the demographics of nones don’t accurately reflect the number and diversity of nonbelievers; it just shows who is comfortable enough to say they don’t believe out loud.” And:  “There are many more people of color, there are many more women who identify as atheist.” And: “There are many people who attend church who are still atheists.”

The cheeriest part of his article is this:

Compared to past campaign seasons, religion is taking a backseat in this year’s U.S. presidential election. Donald Trump is not outwardly religious (and his attraction of evangelical voters has raised questions about the longevity and the motives of the religious right).

But then he goes on:

Hillary Clinton has said “advertising about faith doesn’t come naturally to me”. And Bernie Sanders is “not actively involved” in a religion. … Aside from Ted Cruz, the leading candidates just aren’t up for talking about religion.

Apparently he does not recognize that Leftism is a religion. It is THE secular religion. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are both devotees of it. Bernie Sanders could be fairly called a high priest of it. They are as piously Leftist as Ted Cruz is Dominionist.

Bullard ends on a jocular note:

For all the work secular groups do to promote acceptance of nonbelievers, perhaps nothing will be as effective as apathy plus time. As the secular millennials grow up and have children of their own, the only Sunday morning tradition they may pass down is one everyone in the world can agree on: brunch.

We hope so.

What have atheists said about the article?

Atheist Jerry Coyne writes at his website:

National Geographic publishes article on atheism and secularism, but descends into Authoritarian Leftism and slanders against Harris and Dawkins

Well, it’s time to cancel your subscription to National Geographic — if you still have one. For a while it’s been turning into a religiously-infused tabloid rather than the educational nature/anthropology magazine that I loved of yore. In several posts I’ve documented its increasing tendency to coddle religion … and it’s only going to get worse since the magazine was taken over by Rupert Murdoch.

Now the magazine has hit its lowest point yet, polevaulting the shark in a new piece by journalist Gabe Bullard, The World’s Newest Religion: No Religion. While starting off as a decent bit of reportage about the rise of nonbelief and secularism, it suddenly descends into slander and clickbait, highlighting the “privilege” of nonbelief, the dominance of atheism by white males, and accusations that the “leaders” of atheism (whom they name) are misogynists.

And there is a comment made at Patheos which we like, although we very seldom agree with its Leftist atheists on anything except atheism itself.

The comment is made by Terry Firma. (He goes on, however, to say what he likes about the National Geographic article.)

He writes:

I wonder if any serious major publication would refer to people who don’t play sports as athletes, but that is essentially what NatGeo is doing here. Atheism is no more a religion than off is a TV channel, than being bald is a hairstyle, and than not-collecting-stamps is a hobby. People who assert that atheism is a religion either haven’t given it much thought or are trying to get a rise out of atheists.

Nicely said.

We are about to make sweeping generalizations, with no attempt to accommodate all shades of opinion. ( Shades of opinion are welcome in comment.) 

Left and Right inhabit different universes of discourse. Completely different issues concern them.

The biggest issues on the American Left (in random order) are:

• Climate and the Environment
• Sex
• Race
• Social Justice

To elaborate a little more:

The Left – internationally – holds man-made global warming to be an urgent threat to all life on earth, and tries in the name of saving the planet to force redistribution of wealth over the whole world, the redistributing agent being ideally a world government run according to Leftist values.

The one freedom the Left passionately advocates for is that of Each to seek sexual satisfaction of any kind, and for Each to choose a personal sexual identity, all personal choices connected with sex to be protected by law and subsidized financially, where required, by government.

The Left catalogues all Americans and all foreign nations according to a race analysis, according to which the white race is privileged and oppressive, and all institutions, led by government, have a moral duty to compensate non-whites and handicap whites.

All inequalities between sexes, races, and classes are considered by the Left to be unjust, the injustice being perpetrated by institutions and needing to be corrected by government using any means, including quotas for opportunity and advancement; adjustment of standards for inclusion and compensation; enforced limitations on the expression of dissenting opinion; the redistribution of wealth and power.

The Right does not concern itself with these issues unless compelled to, in which case its dismissive opinion of them is:

Man-made global warming is not true and would not be a bad thing if it were.

Sex is a private matter, only of public concern if it harms children.

Race is irrelevant to all political issues.

All justice is personal, having no meaning apart from the individual; standards must be upheld; power belongs to the powerful and cannot be bestowed; wealth is inescapably unequal in a free society, equality and liberty being mutually exclusive.

The biggest issues on the American Right (also in random order) are:

• Individual freedom
• The economy
• Defense
• The Constitution

A little more:

The Right holds that individual freedom is the highest value. All innovation, all progress, depends on it.  It requires absolute freedom of speech. The prime duty of government is to protect it.

Capitalism is the only system that lifts people out of poverty and secures prosperity. The Right wants the free market to be left to operate without government interference.

The government’s duty of protection requires a strong military to defend the nation from foreign attack; to maintain America’s superpower status of which the Right is proud; and specifically at this time to stop the advance of Islam and its terrorism.

The Constitution established the best possible system of government for a free society and the Right holds that it must be upheld and defended in its entirety.

The Left does not concern itself with these issues unless compelled to, in which case its dismissive opinion of them is:

The individual is less important than the collective, and individual interests are always subordinate to those of the collective.

Capitalism is evil, it values profits above people, it allows some to be rich while it keeps the many poor. The economy needs to be planned centrally by government for the equal good of all.

Wars should never be fought. Spending money on the military is a huge waste. America should not be the world’s policeman. It should not be a superower.

The Constitution is an outdated document. It says nothing about slavery. It stands in the way of an enlightened executive, such as President Obama’s, hampering his laudable efforts to change America into a more equal society.

Plainly, there is no common ground between Left and Right.

Dennis Prager writes at Townhall:

Just about all candidates for president regularly announce their intent to unite Americans, to “bring us together”.

It’s a gimmick.

If they are sincere, they are profoundly naive; if they are just muttering sweet nothings in order to seduce Americans to vote for them, they are manipulative.

In his acceptance speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, John Kerry, one of the most polarizing figures in modern American political history, said, “Maybe some just see us divided into those red states and blue states, but I see us as one America: red, white and blue.”

And President Barack Obama, who has disunited Americans by race, class and gender perhaps more than any president since the beginning of the 20th century, regularly campaigned on the theme of uniting Americans.

In his 2008 victory speech, President-elect Barack Obama said: “We have never been just a collection of … red states and blue states. We are, and always will be, the United States of America.”

In their current campaigns for president, Republican Gov. John Kasich and Democrat Hillary Clinton regularly proclaim their intention to bring Americans together. He, one suspects, because he is naive, and she, because she will say pretzels come from Neptune if it will garner votes.

Bringing people together is actually the theme of John Kasich’s entire campaign.

One headline on the “Meet John” page of his website says, “BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER, LIFTING PEOPLE UP.”

Senator Rob Portman said of Kasich on Feb. 1, 2016, “I am endorsing John Kasich because I believe he is the person our country needs to bring Americans together.”

And Clinton, who, according to CNN, is tied with Trump for the most negatives in presidential polling for either Republicans or Democrats since 1984, also speaks repeatedly about her ability and desire to bring Americans together.

The “Hillary Clinton for President Supporters” Facebook page has even said, “We’re in the business of bringing people together.”

What’s more, on April 6, 2016, CNN posted a YouTube video titled: “Hillary Clinton — We need a president who can bring people together.”

Lanny Davis, who served as special counsel to former President Bill Clinton, wrote on The Hill website that “Clinton wants to bring us together”.

Beyond Kasich and Clinton, Sen. Bernie Sanders made this a major theme in one of his ads called “Together”, which begins with Sanders saying, “Our job is to bring people together.”

Even Trump, who divides Republicans – not to mention other Americans – like no Republican ever has, uses this mantra.

A January article on The Hill site quoted Trump saying, “I can really bring people together.”

Gov. Chris Christie introduced Trump on Super Tuesday, and a NJ.com column released that night was titled, “Christie on Super Tuesday: Trump is ‘bringing the country together’.”

For the record, Sen. Ted Cruz speaks about uniting Republicans, but not often about uniting all Americans.

All calls for unity by Democrats are particularly fraudulent. Dividing Americans by race, gender and class is how the left views America and how Democratic candidates seek to win elections.

But calls for unity are meaningless no matter who makes them, because no one who calls for unity tells you what they really mean. What they really mean is that they want to unite Americans around their values — and around their values only.

Would Clinton be willing to unite all Americans around recognizing the human rights of the unborn? Would she be willing to unite all Americans around support for widespread gun ownership?

Of course not.

She is willing to unite Americans provided they adopt her views.

Would Sanders like to “bring people together” in support of reducing corporate and individual income taxes in order to spur the economy?

Would Kasich be in favor of “bringing Americans together” by having them all support increasing the size of government and the national debt? One hopes not.

I first realized the dishonesty of just about all calls for unity during a 10-year period in which I engaged in weekly dialogues with clergy of all faiths. Protestant and Catholic clergymen and women would routinely call for Christian unity. When I asked Protestants if they would support such unity if it entailed them adopting the sacraments of the Catholic Church and recognizing the pope as the Vicar of Christ on Earth, the discussion ended. Similarly, when I asked Catholic priests if they would give up the sacraments and the papacy in order to achieve unity with Protestant Christians, all talk of unity stopped. And, of course, the same would hold true for both Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews who routinely call for Jewish unity.

Even more absurd are the calls of naive Christians and Jews to have all the “children of Abraham” – Jewish, Christian and Muslim – unite.

The calls themselves can even be dangerous. One would be hard-pressed to name a single free society that was ever united outside of wartime. The only truly united countries are totalitarian states.

So, why do presidential candidates repeat this nonsense every four years? Because Americans fall for it every four years.

But it’s time to grow up.

The gap between the left and right is unbridgeable. Their worldviews are mutually exclusive.

The Left is dangerously wrong.

Of course both Trump and Cruz followers want passionately for the Left to be defeated in November 2016. But the defeat of Hillary and the Democratic Party, though it would be enormously satisfying to both factions, would not be enough for Trump voters. They want more. And that “more” is  revenge.

So we deduce from watching them and listening to them through the media.

We understand feelingly why that might be. The harm Obama and his gang have done to America and the world will take decades to repair, maybe even centuries. Europe will probably never recover from the Islamic invasion unleashed upon it by the devastating policies of the Obama regime towards Islam and the Middle East.

Whereas Cruz voters may be content with an election victory, Trump voters will also want Hillary in prison for a long stretch; Islam crushed; and, in as short a time as possible, Obama condemned by “history”.

Those who share that ache for revenge, will understand why all the reasons that anti-Trump conservatives pour out for not supporting Trump, fall on deaf ears.  

Michael Dansen writes at Truth Revolt:

Donald Trump is … a healthy antibody reaction to Obamaism … In a country that does not historically gravitate towards extremism at the highest levels of political office, he may be the medicine we need in order to even things out. Yes, the treatment may be harsh, but the patient is very sick.

In the words of the late, great Andrew Breitbart, if someone calls you a racist or a bigot, “Walk towards that fire.” A Trump presidency will prove that you can say things that are unflattering – but sometimes true – about preferred victim groups and the world will not come to an end. We will not re-introduce slavery. We will not become The Third Reich. We will not legalize rape. We will not make birth control illegal. There will be no reconstitution of Jim Crow. Those days are gone and good riddance.

The Right needs to learn to bring a knife, at the very least, to a knife fight. George W. Bush, who had this CRAZY notion that a country should use its military to kill its enemies, was destroyed over Iraq because he didn’t want to “lower himself” by responding to his critics. When called a “misleader” [read: “liar”] by the DNC in a July 2003 television ad over prewar intel, Karl Rove decided not to bring up the fact that WMD stockpiles actually were uncovered in Iraq.

Trump is always on offense and he’s a tougher target. Over-the-top Democrat attacks on Trump only help his cause. They’re having the same effect as protestors crashing Trump rallies – they make more people sympathetic to his campaign.

The Right also needs to push back against the Left’s specious income inequality arguments and their demonization of the wealthy. Democrats have been offering free stuff from rich people for 50 years. Not surprisingly, this is seductive and appealing. Rich people pay the OVERWHELMING majority of taxes in this country, but Dems still demand that they need to pay their “fair share”. Trump can be counted on to question and reject their premises – which is a major reason that progressives loathe the man with the white hot heat of a thousand suns.

As for Trump’s promised, controversial wall:

First, it is not a 2,000 mile wall. It will be built in certain sections which are the sites most common for illegal ingress.

Second, the U.S. has levers to elevate the Mexican government’s thinking on the subject of who pays for what – namely, foreign aid and impounding remittances.

Third, it’s a sordid situation indeed that Mexico City provides instructions to their citizens on how to subvert U.S. law, offers their consulates in the U.S. to help carry this out, and then calls us racists for noticing this. That Trump is controversial for being against de facto indentured servitude that’s incompatible with the melting pot ideal is the real controversy.

To opponents who hold to the “we are a nation of immigrants” school of thought: there is no limiting principle to that line of thinking and it is essentially an open borders argument. The idea that anybody who can physically get here deserves to remain here is absurd – even more so as we continue to build up the welfare state. We need more citizens who are contributing to the tax rolls, not who are net takers from them. America has traditionally gone through periods of opening the borders up through controlled, legal immigration from overseas and going through periods of assimilation and “insularity”.

We also had a common culture that was at first at least suspecting of the Dutch, Anglicans [sic] [he may mean Anglophones – ed], Germans, Catholics, the Irish, Italians, Jews, Greeks, etc. This was healthy as it winnowed the field of those who had what it took to be full-fledged American citizens and those who couldn’t quite hack it.

We’re not in unqualified agreement with that last paragraph. But we firmly agree with what he says next:

Do we have the right to prevent Muslims from entering our country after spasms of Islam-inspired terrorism? Yes.

He is implying that there is a sound reason to exclude Muslims. But his next point is that immigrants can be excluded for no sound reasons – even on whim only.

We also can prevent Congregationalists, left-handed people, towheads, Andorrans, etc. if that is the national course upon which we decide.

Because –

Immigration here is a privilege, not a right.

And so it is. It is the prerogative of the nation state to choose whom it will accept into its protection.

He returns to the Muslim question:

It will be a relief when we have a leader who does not say, after yet another Islamist atrocity, “First thing: get me to a mosque. I need to hug a Muslim and pronounce upon Koranic interpretations. The most important thing right now is not attending to our security concerns; it is stopping the bigoted, xenophobic, murderous impulse that lies just under the surface of our society!” …

And then he goes on to the Communist question (incidentally reminding us that from the start of the Cold War, Communists were denied immigration, or even a visitor’s visa to tour or study in the US).

For those who complain that there are some unsavory characters in Trump’s base, keep in mind that they may be scary but the left’s unsavory characters – in the media, academia, and the entertainment industry – are the inheritors of an ideology that has killed, according to The Black Book of Communism, 100 million people.

The outgoing president is also one of those unsavory inheritors. The electorate could not have made a worse choice other than an outright supporter of Islamic jihad … Oh, wait! …

Every day, as the Fascist Left becomes more openly anti-freedom, Donald Trump becomes more necessary.

It’s bad enough that the threat of tyrannical collectivism is growing daily as the Democratic Party, and the street mobs financed by deeply evil men like George Soros, intensify their war against freedom; it’s worse that the Republican Party fails to rise to the challenge, and would rather capitulate than fight. The Republican cowards cannot even see that they have a leader who is attracting tens of thousands to their ranks and is already frightening the enemy.

David Horowitz writes at Front Page:

The mob that came to disrupt the Trump rally in Chicago was neither spontaneous nor innocent, nor new. It was a mob that has been forming ever since the Seattle riots against the World Trade Organization in 1999, whose target was global capitalism. The Seattle rioters repeated their outrages for the next two years and then transformed into the so-called “anti-war” movement to save the Saddam dictatorship in Iraq. Same leaders, funders and troops. The enemy was always America and its Republican defenders. When Obama invaded countries and blew up families in Muslim countries, there was no anti-war movement because Obama was one of them, and they didn’t want to divide their support.

In 2012 the so-called “anti-war” movement reformed as “Occupy Wall Street”. They went on a rampage creating cross-country riots protesting the One Percent and provided a whipping boy for Obama’s re-election campaign. Same leaders, same funders and troops.

In 2015 the same leftwing forces created and funded Black Lives Matter and lynch mobs in Ferguson and Baltimore who targeted “white supremacists” and police.

Behind all the mobs was the organized left – MoveOn.org, the public sector unions run by Sixties leftovers,  and the cabal of anti-American billionaires led by George Soros.

The mobs themselves were composed of the hate-filled foot soldiers of the political left.

Now these forces have gathered in the campaign to elect the Vermont communist and are focusing their venom on Donald Trump. The obvious plan is to make Republicans toxic while driving a wedge through the Republican Party. The plan is defeat Republicans in November so that the destructive forces they have set in motion in the Democratic Party can finish the wrecking job that Obama started.

One of the professionally produced signs at the Chicago mob scene proclaimed, “This is what democracy looks like.” Actually it is exactly what fascism looks like. As every student of the Thirties knows, the break up of democratic forums by Nazi and Communist thugs paved the way for Hitler’s election. Just like the mobs of the Thirties, today’s left is driven by racial and class hate, and is utterly contemptuous of the democratic process – hence the effort to hang the Ferguson cop before the trial and to prevent Trump from expounding his views in Chicago.

And what has been the reaction of the presidential candidates, particularly those who propose to save the country? It is to blame Trump as though he and not the left had instigated the riot. If you play with matches like Trump did, opined Hillary Clinton, you’re likely to start a fire. This is the same Hillary Clinton who has compared Republicans to terrorists and called them racists, and who once accused a “vast right-wing conspiracy” of inventing her husband’s paramour. The Democratic Party has officially endorsed the Black Lives Matter racists and rioters.

But it is not only the left who is attempting to blame Trump for the Chicago debacle.

According to the proudly positive John Kasich, it was Trump who created the “toxic environment” that led to the riot – not the fascist movement that has been metastasizing in our universities and streets for more than a decade. In other words, when you finally go on the attack, attack a Republican rather than a Democrat. That way you get a pass.

Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and their spokespeople piled on Trump as well. “Ted Cruz Claims Trump Is To Blame For Violence At His Rallies,” ran a headline in the leftwing New York Times. 

His Republican attackers attempted to shame Trump for speaking to the anger of his conservative supporters instead of bringing everyone together – those who claim we live in a white supremacist society and the whites they are attacking, those who claim that Republicans are terrorists and racists and the victims of this abuse. As though you can create unity with people who hate you because you are white or rich, or believe that America is a nation worth saving. The fact is that Trump’s anger is pretty controlled, considering the hate-filled environment of Islamic terrorists, illegal immigrants, event disrupters and rival candidates openly smearing him. 

He is often guilty of over-reach – “punch him in the nose” directed at one disrupter, but this is hardly the sin his detractors suggest in comparing him to Mussolini. That is a much great violence to the man who is its target. Aside from Trump’s compulsive over-reach what is wrong with anger in the current political context?

Is it wrong to be angry at what Obama and the Democrats and the progressive mobs are doing to our country? How is this dissociation from Trump mob attack not the same surrender to political correctness that conservatives like Rubio and Cruz claim to reject? Aren’t Cruz and Rubio angry at what is being done to our country? Why are they willing to validate the hypocritical slanders of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, two architects of our disasters? 

This is the reality we must never forget: There is an anti-American radical in the White House who – with the support of his party – has delivered nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and a hundred billion dollars to our mortal enemies in Teheran who have declared their intentions to kill us. This suicidal deal was not an oversight, as Rubio has correctly observed, but the result of decades of thinking that America and Israel are adversaries, and our enemies are their victims.

The extremists of #Never Trump exemplify the malaise Republicans have been prisoners of for years, which is what the primary revolt is about.

Why was there no #Never Obama movement in 2012? For Republicans such a movement would be unthinkable. It would be too angry. It would be called racist. On the other hand, no one will call us racist for attacking a fellow Republican. So let’s join the left in smearing one of our own and hope that we can scrub off the stigmas that Democrats have tarred us with in the process. We’re not racists. Let’s not fight Obama, which will prove that we are. Let’s have respectful words for the lynch mob left.  If we capitulate the disaster unfolding before us, maybe it will go away. That is what the Trump crowd is angry about and mainstream Republicans should be too.

At the outset of the presidential debates all the Republican candidates pledged to support the party’s choice in November. Extra pressure was put on Trump to do so and he did. But now that millions of Republicans have cast their ballots for Trump, Rubio and Kasich are threatening to renege on their pledge, and destroy both the party and the country in the process.

And Cruz, while sniping at Trump’s alleged role in inciting the leftists is notably non-committal about whether he will support a Trump primary victory. None of them explain how you can fight fascist leftists without actually fighting them and opening yourself to the charge of anger.  

Perhaps it is money from the #Never Trump crowd – the extremists who want to thwart the popular vote and fatally split the party – that is behind this perfidy. But as someone who until very recently held high opinions of Rubio and Cruz, I am hoping that it is not too late for somebody to wake them up. I am hoping that somebody says: Cut it out. Come to your senses. Your scorched earth warfare is threatening the very existence of the right. Trump isn’t the enemy. Like you he is opposed to the Iran deal, supports a secure border, recognizes the Islamist threat, wants to reduce taxes and make the country solvent, and is greatly expanding the Republican base. Attempt to beat him at the polls if you think he shouldn’t be president but let the voters decide the result, and respect their decision. The alternative is a fratricidal war that could drive large numbers of conservatives away from the polls, and whose beneficiaries will only be America’s enemies at home and abroad.

Which Republican candidate has the force, the fortitude, the guts, the stones – and the following – to stand up to the persistent and now violent onslaught by the fascist hordes of the Left?

The hour has given birth to the man.

Former Governor Mike Huckabee told Fox News that Donald Trump’s success represents a peaceful “overthrow of the government” and that the Republican establishment should be glad it’s being achieved with “ballots, not bullets”. He added that the Trump phenomenon was a “political revolution in the Republican Party and in the country”. 

THAT IS THE POINT

After Obama, and the utter failure of a Republican-majority Congress to oppose the evil that he has done, a political revolution is necessary, and Donald Trump – with all his faults that two of our readers insist on pointing out to us over and over again – has emerged as the leader of it.  

Joan Swirsky writes at Canada Free Press:

Sure enough, presidential candidate Donald J. Trump racked up impressive statistics in his Fox News debate tonight, effectively trouncing the competition that included Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

Once again, however, Fox’s Megyn “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” Kelly ambushed Mr. Trump by falsely stating that the Better Business Bureau had given Trump University a D-minus rating, when in fact it’s rating is, as Trump asserted, an A! …

(Sorry about the small print. Efforts to make it bigger have failed.)

The same trouncing happened last week when Trump’s victories in the primaries garnered him the lion’s share of electoral votes by winning Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Virginia, which, according to Philip Bump of The Washington Post, “no Republican has ever won going back to 1960”.

Both pundits and pollsters attributed the massive turn-outs to Mr. Trump’s having excited, inspired and therefore mobilized the electorate — in some cases well over 100% increase above the 2012 midterms. In one instance, Mr. Trump beat Sen. Cruz by 450,000 votes; in another he beat Sen. Rubio by over a million votes! …  Trump had “significant support across educational, ideological, age and income classifications”.

In his victory speech last week, looking and sounding presidential, Mr. Trump accurately proclaimed: “We have expanded the Republican Party.”

This ought to have been music to the ears of Republicans everywhere, especially “establishment” types who constantly seek to attract influential voting blocs comprised of African-Americans, Hispanics, and young people, all of whom — mysteriously, incomprehensibly, self-destructively — have huddled under the Democrat tent for decades, gaining not a micrometer of progress in their personal lives, wages, schools, crime rates, the pathetic list is endless. Trump, only nine months into being a politician, has accomplished this incredible feat. But the more he succeeds, the more the Grand Poobahs of the Grand Old Party, as well as the media (both right and left), have devolved into what appears to be a clinical state of hysteria.

Think about this. Barack Obama’s record violates every principle and value that Republicans and Conservatives claim they stand for … and yet those same Republicans and Conservatives — in full control of the Senate and House — have been notably absent in mustering up anything more than mild rebuke to counter Mr. Obama’s assaults on our country. But to them, Trump is the real threat!

That’s what the frenzied GOP, media, and also-rans are trying to do, figuratively closing any openings in what they believe is their own personal Ship of State now that the threatening weather called Donald Trump is upon them. …

Ironic, isn’t it. If any entity deserves a comeuppance, it is the very arrogant, go-along-to-get-along, ineffectual, leftist-whipped, emasculated, cave-to-Obama, bow-to-the-lobbyists, accommodate-the-Arab-lobby establishment! Impotent? Emasculated? Yes, money and power are mighty motivators, but it is a tacit acknowledgment of their own sissified selves that is now spurring Trump’s critics into action.

And they’re trying their damnedest! On March 2, a gaggle of Republican national security leaders — no doubt many of them members of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations whose animating raison d’être would be threatened by a Trump presidency — wrote an open letter to Trump expressing their “united opposition” to his candidacy. They don’t like his “vision of American influence and power in the world … advocacy for aggressively waging trade wars … rhetoric that undercuts the seriousness of combating Islamic radicalism … insistence that Mexico will fund a wall on the southern border…,” on and on. Comical, isn’t it, that everything they’ve failed to address with any seriousness or success compels them to slam the guy who promises to address those issues and succeed.

On March 3, 22 Republicans declared that they would not vote for Trump.

August writers like the Wall St. Journal’s Bret Stephens have been apoplectic about Trump for months,sparing no slur or invective. Author and military historian Max Boot has dug deep into his assault repertoire to make sure no insult has gone unhurled. And the usually dazzling Andrew C. McCarthy at National Review Online is simply unable to contain his hostility to Trump’s candidacy, just as most of the other writers at NRO have jumped on the anti-Trump bandwagon. And that’s not to omit the florid hysteria emanating from com.

We have often quoted Bret Stephens and Andrew C. McCarthy with admiration and respect – and will again – but they fail to understand what is happening in the country.

On March 4, desperate anti-Trump operatives pimped out good ole patsy Mitt Romney to go before a teleprompter and read the words written for him by an anti-Trump operative. …

But no one forgot that Romney, a lifelong liberal, lost both senatorial and presidential elections and that the last image of him — etched indelibly in the American public’s consciousness — was of him debating his rival for the presidency, Barack Obama, and simply folding like a cheap suit!

Romney — who The Wall St. Journal called “a flawed messenger” — didn’t look or sound like he had dementia, so it’s strange indeed that he barely mentioned the endorsement Trump gave him for his campaign for president, and the lavish praise he heaped upon Trump.

Romney’s hit job evoked the following 22-word, devastating and well-deserved tweet from Trump: “Looks like two-time failed candidate Mitt Romney is going to be telling Republicans how to get elected. Not a good messenger!”

All of the abovementioned people — and dozens I haven’t named — are growing frustrated that their old tricks of marginalizing and finally destroying the target in question haven’t worked. They long to emulate the JournOlist of 2007, when over 400 members of the leftist media colluded to quash any and every criticism or fact-based doubt about Mr. Obama’s Constitutional eligibility to hold office, to intimidate any critic into silence.

To this day, has anyone seen even one of Barack Obama’s college transcripts, his marriage license, a doctor’s evaluation? Now it’s the Republicans — actually those cocktail-swigging “conservatives” who routinely cozy up to the lobbyists they’re beholden to — who have gotten together to defeat Trump. These feckless so-called leaders decided that their target, a self-funded former liberal, was worth more of their negative, insult-laden literary output and passionate commentary than the Marxist-driven, jihadist-defending, anti-Constitutional, anti-American regime in power.

If you ever wonder how this could happen, why Republicans and self-described Conservatives could rebel so ferociously against a candidate who promises to strengthen our military, bring jobs and industry back to America, seal our borders against the onslaught of illegal aliens, and make America great again, wonder no more.

FOLLOW THE MONEY

Doesn’t it always come down to money? Money leads to power and influence and control, all of which politicians — that too-often pliable and buyable species — lust for. It’s not only the ephemeral day-to-day power they fear losing, it’s the entire network they’re enmeshed in, which involves all the treaties and deals and “arrangements” they’ve signed onto and the pelf it promises to keep on yielding. (For Exhibit No. 1, see The Clinton Foundation and the mountain of cash it reaps.)

Imagine their fear of a president who actually cuts the pork, actually strikes deals that don’t line his own pockets, actually exposes the bad deals that have been made by the bad players in Washington, D.C. Imagine what Trump will learn about the massive under-the-table, self-serving deals that were made in the Iran deal and others.

The same lust for power applies to media moguls whose wealth is not limited to TV stations and newspapers but to the very deals made by government and on Wall St. No one knows this better than Mr. Trump, the author of the mega-bestseller, The Art of the Deal. That’s why his critics are so terrified. They pretend to be offended by the kind of comment or gesture that they themselves express routinely. But they’re really afraid of being in the presence of someone who is utterly immune to either their blandishments or strong-arm tactics. …

As Mark Cunningham wrote in theNew York Post: “All the noise about Donald Trump’s ‘hostile takeover’ of the Republican Party misses a key point: Such takeovers only succeed when existing management has failed massively. And that’s true of both the GOP and the conservative movement. Trump’s a disrupter but most of the fire aimed his way is just shooting the messenger.”

Monica Crowley, editor of online opinion at The Washington Times, explains that the “emotionally fragile Republican ruling class” deluded themselves into thinking that Mr. Trump couldn’t possibly win. “Then actual voting began. And the first-timer, the brash anti-politician, began racking up resounding victories …”

In addition, Crowley writes: “Like his style or not, Trump is an in-your-face guy. Voters want that kind of guy taking it to President Obama’s record, to Hillary Clinton … and to the unbridled, destructive leftism that has rendered America virtually unrecognizable.”

And, I might add, taking it to the wimps in the GOP!

A great new movement, a grassroots rebellion, has arisen in America. Those who realize this, and understand why, have no trouble seeing Donald Trump as president of the United States after the disastrous, almost ruinous, deeply depressing presidency of Barack Hussein Obama.

Conrad Black understands it. He writes at the National Post, of which he was formerly a proprietor:

Donald Trump polled extensively last year and confirmed his suspicion that between 30 and 40 per cent of American adults, cutting across all ethnic, geographic, and demographic lines, were angry, fearful and ashamed at the ineptitude of their federal government.

Americans, Trump rightly concluded, could not abide a continuation in office of those in both parties who had given them decades of shabby and incompetent government: stagnant family incomes, the worst recession in 80 years, stupid wars that cost scores of thousands of casualties and trillions of dollars and generated a humanitarian disaster, serial foreign policy humiliations, and particularly the absence of a border to prevent the entry of unlimited numbers of unskilled migrants, and trade deals that seemed only to import unemployment with often defective goods. I was one of those who thought at the outset that Trump was giving it a shot, and that if it didn’t fly it would at least be a good brand-building exercise. …

Americans, unlike most nationalities, are not accustomed to their government being incompetent and embarrassing. History could be ransacked without unearthing the slightest precedent or parallel for the rise of America in two long lifetimes (1783-1945) from two and a half million colonists to a place of power and influence and prestige greater than any nation has ever possessed — everywhere victorious and respected, with an atomic monopoly and half the economic product of the world. Forty-five years later, their only rival had collapsed like a soufflé without the two Superpowers exchanging a shot between them. International Communism and the Soviet Union disintegrated and America was alone, at the summit of the world.

And then it turned into a nation of idiots, incapable of doing anything except conduct military operations against primitive countries. The objective performance of the latter Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations, and the Gingrich, Reid-Pelosi, and Boehner-led congresses, and most of the courts, have for these 25 years been shameful and as unprecedented in American history as the swift rise of America was in the history of the world. The people turned out rascals and got worse rascals.

We would not be so hard on Newt Gingrich. He’s been saying sensible things about Trump.

Donald Trump’s research revealed that the people wanted someone who was not complicit in these failures and who had built and run something. Washington, Jackson, the Harrisons, Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and others had risen as military heroes, though some of them had had some political exposure. Jefferson and Wilson were known as intellectuals, Madison as chief author of the Constitution, and Monroe and John Quincy Adams as international statesmen. What is called for now is a clean and decisive break from the personalities and techniques of the recent past. Donald Trump doesn’t remind anyone of the presidents just mentioned, but he elicited a surge of public support by a novel, almost Vaudeville, routine as an educated billionaire denouncing the political leadership of the country in Archie Bunker blue-collar terms.

Last (Super) Tuesday, he completed the preliminary takeover of the Republican Party.He demonstrated his hold on the angry, the fearful, and the ashamed by passing the double test: he had held no elective office, but he was a worldly man who knew how to make the system work  and rebuild American strength and public contentment. All the other candidates in both parties were vieux jeu, passé. Only a few of the governors (Bush, Christie, and Kasich) had run anything successfully, none of them had built anything, and all were up to their eyeballs in the sleazy American political system — long reduced to a garish and corrupt log-rolling game of spin-artists, lobbyists, and influence-peddlers. Bernie Sanders gets a pass, but he is an undischarged Marxist, and while many of his attacks on the incumbent system and personnel have merit, his policy prescriptions are unacceptable to 90 per cent of Americans.

It was clear on Tuesday night that Trump’s insurrection had recruited the Republican centre and pushed his opponents to the fringes. The conservative intellectuals, including my friends and editors at National Review, as well as Commentary, the Weekly Standard, and some of the think tanks, attacked Trump as inadequately conservative. They are correct — he isn’t particularly conservative, and favours universal medical care, as much as possible in private-sector plans, but a stronger safety net for those who can’t afford health care, and retention of federal assistance to Planned Parenthood except in matters of abortion. Traditional, quasi-Bushian moderate Republican opponents and liberals  were reduced to calling him an extremist — claiming he was a racist, a “neo-fascist” said Bob Woodward, America’s greatest mythmaker and (albeit bloodless) Watergate assassin, and a “Caesarist” by the normally sane Ross Douthat in The New York Times. (He was confusing the triumphs of the early Caesars with the debauchery of the later Caligula and Nero and the earlier bread and circuses of the Gracchi, but it is all bunk.)

John Robson [a columnist and editorial writer for the National Post], took his place in this queue on Monday, claiming Trump was squandering an inherited fortune (he has multiplied it), and concluding that Trump is “a loathsome idiot”.  The sleaziest dirty tricks campaigner of modern American history, Ted Cruz, claimed Trump was in league with gangsters.

We would not be that hard on Ted Cruz.

On Tuesday night, Cruz ran strongly in his home state of Texas but his support is now confined exclusively to Bible-thumping, M16-toting corn-cobbers and woolhats, and he has no traction outside the southwest and perhaps Alaska. The orthodox Republican candidate, Marco Rubio, is now a Chiclet-smiled, motor-mouth loser, having first been exposed as such by Chris Christie (the New Jersey governor who could have won the nomination and election four years ago and is now running for the vice-presidential nomination with Trump). Rubio should bite the dust in Florida next week. On Super Tuesday evening Donald Trump made the turn from rabble-rouser to nominee-presumptive. The only early campaign excess he has to walk back is the nonsense that all the 11 million illegal migrants will be removed, and then many will be readmitted. Of course the selection process must occur before they are evicted, not after.

Even the formidable and adversarial journalist Megyn Kelly acknowledged that he looked and sounded like a president. He spoke fluently and in sentences and without bombast or excessive self-importance. He is placed exactly where he needs to be for the election, after Hillary Clinton finishes her escapade on the left to fend off the unfeasible candidacy of Bernie Sanders. (This is if she is not indicted for her misuse of official emails — Obama is nasty enough to have her charged, and almost all prosecutions of prominent people in the U.S. are political, but she is now all that stands between Donald Trump and the White House, but is almost a paper tigress.) Trump sharply raised the Republican vote totals and the fact that he carried 49 per cent of the Republican voters in Massachusetts, a state with almost no extremists in it, indicates how wide his appeal has become.

Obama may well be “nasty enough” to have Hillary charged, but is he law-abiding enough?

Hillary Clinton was, as Trump described her when she unwisely accused him of being a sexist, a facilitator of sexism; simultaneously the feminist in chief and First (Wronged) Lady, as spouse of America’s premier sexist. She was elected in a rotten borough for the Democrats in New York State, and was a nondescript secretary of state. She has been caught in innumerable falsehoods and her conduct in the entire Benghazi affair (the terrorist murder of a U.S. ambassador) was reprehensible. Her indictment for various breaches of national security and possible perjury is regularly demanded by former attorney general Michael Mukasey and other worthies. …

All these and more failures, as well as unseemly activities with the Clinton Foundation, will be mercilessly pounded on in the campaign. Donald Trump will not simulate the languorous defeatism of the senior Bush or Mitt Romney, or the blunderbuss shortcomings of Bob Dole and John McCain. (Romney’s savage attack on Trump on Thursday served to remind Republicans of how he squandered a winnable election in 2012 and faced in all four directions on every major issue.)

It really is incomprehensible why Mitt Romney laid himself open, with his vituperative attack on Trump, to an obvious blow in retaliation; that he failed miserably when he was a Republican nominee for the presidency. Any opinion of his on any candidate could only remind everyone of his failure. He figuratively lay down in front of Trump and begged, “Kick me!”  Which Trump obligingly did – though not too hard.

Eight years ago, it was time to break the colour barrier at the White House. Now it is time to clean the Augean Stable. Donald Trump has his infelicities, though not those that malicious opponents or people like John Robson, who simply haven’t thought it through, allege. But he seems to have become the man whom the great office of president of the United States now seeks. He is far from a Lincolnian figure, but after his astonishing rise it would be a mistake to underestimate him.

We prefer him not to be a “Lincolnian figure”.

But we like Conrad Black’s turn of phrase when he says that “the great office of president of the United States now seeks” Donald Trump. 

Certainly an enormous number of Americans want to place him in that office. Which might be the same thing.