The winner of the $1,000 first-place prize is N. A. Halkides. Mr. Halkides is a mathematician, systems analyst and freelance writer living in the greater Chicago metropolitan area. His essay, entitled Inside the Progressive Mind, is below.

Frontpage would also like to applaud two runners-up in the competition: Oleg Atbashian and Daniel Greenfield. Each of them will receive $500 for winning second-place and their essays will run consecutively in our following two issues.

Congratulations N.A. Halkides, Oleg Atbashian and Daniel Greenfield!

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Inside the Progressive Mind
By N. A. Halkides

The Progressive believes in precisely two things:  his own magnificence and the constructive power of brute force.  In combination, they lead him naturally from the role of pestiferous busybody to brutal dictator.  Where the productive man dreams of the things he might create if only left alone by his fellows, the Progressive dreams of the world he could create if only the lives and property of his fellows were at his disposal.  The roots of his pathology lie in that oldest and most destructive of all human vices, the desire for the power to rule over other men.

As naked power-lust is a rather ugly motive, the Progressive rationalizes his desire to rule as a concern for human welfare, seeing himself as a great humanitarian, far superior morally to the lesser beings who pursue merely “materialist” ends such as their own prosperity and who frequently object to his program for achieving Utopia.  This assumed moral superiority spills over into fields of practical accomplishment, and the Progressive imagines himself capable of allocating resources and even directing entire industries far more efficiently than a free market, often despite not even having any business or scientific experience.  But despite what the Progressive believes about himself, the desire to compel others to obey his orders is what drives him forward.  To satisfy this desire, there is ultimately no limit to what actions he will take, for he respects none of the restrictions on government officials intended to guarantee individual freedom that have been developed and set forth in written or unwritten constitutions.

It is easy to make the mistake of judging Progressivism by its earlier and less-severe manifestations and to conclude that its petty and paternalistic restrictions, for example New York Mayor Michael “The Nanny” Bloomberg’s recent crusade against large-size soda drinks, are simply bothersome annoyances.  In fact the transformation from irritating but superficially benevolent nanny to ruthless dictator not only occurs rather quickly, it is a logical consequence of the Progressive’s zeal to usher in Utopia and of the means he must use to achieve the smallest of his goals – brute force.  We should recognize the following principle:  Once the Progressive is permitted to intrude however slightly into matters that are properly beyond the sphere of government, then all aspects of the individual’s life may be subjected to control.  Once any degree of coercion is permitted, then no level of force is out of bounds.

Let us see how this principle applies to the Bloomberg soda ban.  First, if the government has an interest in regulating the individual’s behavior in the name of assuring his health, no private decision the individual makes which could affect his health is beyond its power to control.  (If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the “broccoli” argument that was raised in the court challenge of Obamacare by twenty-six states).  Second, since the government is to be permitted to use force to override the individual’s will, then it may use as much force as necessary to compel his obedience.  The punishment of merchants who refused to obey the Bloomberg ban was to be a $200 fine, which on the surface would probably not be thought of as extreme.  Note, however that this fine would probably have been sufficient to cause most restaurants to toe the line, and if it had proved inadequate there is no reason to believe Bloomberg would not have increased it to the point that no one would risk violating his edict.

If Bloomberg’s soda ban had been upheld (it was set aside by a judge during a rare moment when sanity prevailed in New York), the city could then have logically gone on to fine obese individuals or incarcerate them in “fat farms” where they would be forced to reduce, since nothing in principle would prevent this, and only the degree of public resistance might stand in the way of the ambitious politician determined to bring about these “superior health outcomes” – to use the modern technocrat’s jargon.  What specifically the Progressive attempts to control depends on his personal inclinations and just how far he senses he can push the general public.  Any weakness or lack of determination by the average citizen in resisting the nascent tyrant encourages him to push even further, whereas a determined resistance will often convince him to micro-manage some other aspect of our lives until a more propitious moment arrives to advance his original plan.  But in no case is the Progressive held back by any trace of self-restraint.

Now, packing unwilling citizens off to fat farms is only an example of how the Progressive might begin to move from “soft” to “hard” tyranny.  Do we have any examples in contemporary American politics in which Progressives have actually attempted something this obnoxious to personal liberty?  Consider the following characteristics of a “hard” tyranny such as Nazi Germany, the old Soviet Union, or Communist China today:

[1] Press Censorship – all media state controlled and opinions of which the government does not approve become punishable offenses.

[2] Complete Gun Control – only agents of the state are permitted to possess arms.

[3] One-Party Rule – this means an enforced hegemony, where if opposition parties are permitted to exist at all they are placed at such an extreme disadvantage they cannot truly challenge the ruling party.

[4] Control of the Nation’s Economy.

Let’s take these four one at a time and see what, if anything, Progressives have attempted along those specific lines.

[1] Press Censorship – in 2012, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats proposed gutting the First Amendment by removing its protections from citizens who band together to form corporations. This means that while an individual citizen might still literally get on his soap box and attack the government, publishers of newspapers, magazines, books, and web sites could be shut down by the ruling party.

[2] Complete Gun Control – while some of the more radical Progressives within the Democrat Party openly call for complete confiscation (New York Governor Andrew Cuomo considered the possibility in the run-up to the State’s infamous SAFE Act), most recognize the political danger that such a stand would put them in, and therefore advocate what they soothingly refer to as “common-sense” regulations meant to get us to the point of confiscation in slow and easy steps.  For example, Barack Obama pretends to believe in the 2^nd Amendment, although we may well doubt that his views have changed from his days as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Chicago where he told John Lott that he didn’t believe Americans should be able to own guns.  Mayor Bloomberg himself has recently turned his attention from oversize soft drinks to gun control, confirming the tendency of the Progressive to go from nanny to tyrant.

[3] One-Party Rule – Progressive Democrats have not moved to officially ban other political parties, but the fact that in many cities and states Republicans can no longer win control of either the legislative or executive branches of government under any foreseeable circumstances is extremely troubling.  A full analysis would be too lengthy to present here, but it appears that in at least some of these places, Democrats have secured a permanent governing majority in every election by means of special favors and income redistribution.  Republicans cannot match Democrats there except by playing the same game and in effect becoming Democrats themselves.  Under such conditions, there is no need to officially ban the GOP.

[4] Control of the Nation’s Economy – the purpose of Obamacare was plainly to take control of one-sixth of the nation’s economy rather than improve health care or health insurance.  The other major bill the Democrats passed when they had the chance early in Obama’s first term was Dodd-Frank, which increased the Federal Government’s control of the financial sector to a degree unprecedented in our nation’s history.  Given the opportunity, there can be little doubt that Progressive Democrats would bring additional areas of the economy under the control of the government.

Let me reiterate that once government is permitted to use force at all in a given matter, any degree of force is allowed.  Bloomberg’s $200 “big gulp” fine, as noted earlier, may not seem draconian, but turning an innocent citizen into a felon for merely possessing a standard-size gun magazine certainly does.   We can only guess at what penalties Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Progressives would have imposed on those bold enough to criticize them had they been successful at sweeping away the First Amendment, but as the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act (an earlier attempt to limit free speech) provided for both fines and imprisonment, it is safe to say those penalties would have been quite heavy enough, and that inside every Progressive beats the heart of a true fascist.  And what is perhaps most frightening of all is that in the age of Obama, they’re not even trying very hard to hide it any more.

Editor’s note: Below is the video and transcript of the panel discussion “How We Can Fight Back,” featuring David Horowitz, Pat Caddell, Bill Whittle and Rep. Tom Cotton. The event was part of the Freedom Center’s Texas Weekend, held May 3rd-5th at the Las Colinas Resort in Dallas, Texas.

How We Can Fight Back? from DHFC on Vimeo.

Bill Whittle:  It’s a pleasure to be hosting a panel this morning.  And I think the panel this morning goes to the heart of everything that we’re all interested in and why we’re part of the Freedom Center.  And why we’re here in Texas.  We want to talk about how we can fight back.

I think the opening premise for what we’re going to be talking about today is that all of us good-natured, polite conservatives — which is the giant character flaw that David pointed out last night, is our decency and our willingness to think well of other people — has been turned against us for 40 years now.

And we’re facing a 40-year, 50-year, 60-year deficit in terms of how to get out there and fight in the trenches with knives with the people that want this country destroyed.  Not because they disagree with us but because they want the country destroyed.

So our topic today this morning is how do we fight back.  And just generally terms as the moderator, because I’m not going to be doing much talking at all, I’d like to concentrate on two different areas.

I’d like to start off by talking about how do we fight back politically.  In other words, what can we do right now?  We have legislators in Congress.  We have a new off elections coming up in 2014.  So I’d like to start off by talking about what can we do right now with the tools that we have on the board right now in order to fight back.

And then I’d like to transition a little bit into the future, talk a little bit about what kind of candidates we’d be looking for in the future.  And also what we can do about the pop culture, which I believe was where the actual fight is.  So let me just –

Pat Caddell:  I gave a talk at — first in Florida with David with the weekend here.  And then I did one at CPAC which caused somewhat of a scene a few weeks ago.  I would urge you to go see the speech if you wanted.  You can find it.

It is the only speech given at CPAC which they managed to lose, in which I describe the consultant arrangement of consultant lobbyists establishment Republican complex as racketeering of the first order.  And is criminal under the RICO statutes.

And just one example of that and then I’m going to stop on that point.  $192 million is now the figure that the Chief of Staff of the RNC, Mr. Larson, and the political director of the Romney campaign, Mr. Beeson, was $80 million in October.

It was a $130 mill — it’s now $192 million is the figure in the FEC that their two companies split producing the disaster on Election Day.  Defended by the Chairman of the Republican Party, by the way.

I just want to tell you, as long as that establishment is in control and I’m going to get to the question because right now we’re having the South Caroli– nothing will change.  The Romney campaign was the single worst campaign in modern political history for a win — for a candidate who had a chance and should’ve won.

The worst campaign in history.  And the strate– it was a failure, as I have said, of tactic, strategy, message and most of all imagination.  And what we have not done is had a correct analysis, Bill, really, that lays out these strategings.  It’s all about, “Oh, the Hispanics did this.  Oh, if we only had big data.”

So the RNC hires — the RNC, which has no money for South Carolina, the race there in Massachusetts.  We’ll get to that in a second.  But they have money.  They hired Karl Rove’s firm, whatever he’s associated with, to do now to catch up on the data so he can do for Republican data collection what he did for Republican messaging in the last election.

This is — these arrangements are killing the Republican Party.  And if you look today, when you ask has it changed, I will say this.  We have a Republican Party in Congress in total retreat.

I mean, they do not — I — they cannot mount a narrative against the President, who is very vulnerable right now, at all.  And Tom I’m sure will want to disagree with me but I will give more to this, and it has to do with Benghazi, later.  But — because I do want us to talk about that.

But they basically just keep surrendering.  I mean, this is — you — armies in retreat are very dangerous because it turns into routs.  And what’s going to happen next Tuesday in Charleston, South Carolina, where I live?  A district that is 58% was an 18 point win for Romney.  58% to 40%.

Right now Barack Obama has a 40% approval rating.  And the Democratic candidate, Stephen Colbert’s sister, is probably going to win that race and I believe handily against former governor Mark Sanford.

You would have thought in the first election after November that the Republican estab– and this is what I want to talk about not learning anything, Bill.  The Republican establishment have run and said, “Oh, my gosh, we need to make sure we send a message in the country.”

You would’ve thought while there were 16 candidates in a primary in a run-off system that the National Republican Campaign Committee might’ve wanted to go out and not let the Democrat, who’s a really traffic candidate, Colbert-Busch, and a moderate Democrat.

You would’ve thought they would’ve stopped them from — you know, that they would’ve said, “Here’s the real issue in the campaign.  You want more Obama?  You want — you — Obama, yes, no.  You want Pelosi?  You want Obamacare?”

And made the raise a referendum which of course is what they still fail to do.  You know, which is what — as opposed to a choice of candidates and made it a referendum.  They did nothing.  They have done nothing, the Sixth Chamber of Commerce are silent on the race.

The Democrats are pouring in resources beyond what you can believe.  And the NRCC’s attitude is — well, because this comes from someone who talked to one of the major people there.  “Oh, that’s okay.  We’ll win it back in ’14.”  No, you won’t.

Because if she wins that seat, what will happen is two things.  Well, several things will happen.  The first thing is they’ll turn on the spigots.  The one thing about being President is you have a lot of money you can move places.  She’s going to be the bait.  She’s going to have stuff in Charleston you wouldn’t believe (inaudible).  They want to hold the seat.

Second thing on the — if this happens, which is — it couldn’t.  It’s possible it won’t but it — I’m — more likely it will.  She will — the Democrats are going to say, “If we can win in Charleston, we can win anywhere.”

But understand how the structure of this came about.  The Democrats actually were going to have a primary with a millionaire Democratic gentleman who was going to run.  The national party and the local party got — pushed him out of the race so it was an uncontested primary so she could emerge unscathed while the Republicans having their primary.

You think the Republican establishment in South Carolina and Charleston nationally did anything to say to Mark Sanford, who, whatever you think of Mark, is a flawed person.  He doesn’t belong to be running in this kind of race.

And said, “You’re not going to run.  And if you do, when we have a run-off we’re all going to unite around whoever’s in the run-off.  This is not about you.  It is about the country and the Party.”

The Republicans have done nothing.  The paralysis and the lethargy, and it’s a long answer to your question.  And it’s matched by what is going on in Massachusetts today.  And we could go after Gomez, the — was nominated.  Who’s a former — I think a former SEAL and a Hispanic candidate, the Republican nominee.

People said, “Oh, my God, could this be right (inaudible)?”  Of course not.  Well, there are two polls this week.  Fairleigh Dickinson shows it’s six points with Markey ahead, and Markey’s a very flawed candidate.  And then one the Democratic PPP people who have the race in Charleston at nine points for the Democrat, for Colbert-Busch, has the race at four points.

The National Senate Campaign Committee has so much debt it’s not doing anything that change — none of the outside groups are doing anything.  And my question is, even a piece of research that asks this question.

Oh, my God.  You know, you — it’d be nice to win somewhere.  It did — maybe the Boston Marathon has had an effect.  But as long as you have the same losers in charge protecting their arrangements, which is what the Republican Party is, you are doomed.

It is — Charleston is a sample of the — of what the — of — the epitaph of the Whigs that a historian wrote.  “First they lost their citadels of support and then they abandoned their principles.”  Which is how they went from being in the White House and disappearing within six years.

Bill Whittle:  Well, I couldn’t have put that any better.  I completely agree.  And  one thing I’ve noticed going around the country is that there seems to be a sea change since the Romney loss not among the RNC.

As I said last night with New Coke they seem to be determined to make things worse and worse.  But the donor base, the people who are supporting the RNC and the GOP leadership has had enough.  I think they’re really fed up.  I think that’s exactly right, Pat.

Tom, I want to ask you a question that I get a lot from people.  We hear a lot from people in Tea Party groups and Republican groups.  And they say, “We elected guys in 2010.  We elect conservatives.  They go to Washington and all of a sudden they don’t stand up for any of their principles.

“We send people who seem to be conservative firebrand.  They end up voting for more spending.  They don’t attack these guys.  They don’t go after them.”  And as a person who has the most remarkable conservative credentials I’ve ever seen, the endorsements on your website are just breathtaking.  Every force of good in the world has got their logo on Tom’s site.

Can you tell us, first of all, about some of the pressures that come upon you as a freshman to make you conform to this party of stupid that Pat just talked about?  And can you also tell us how you plan to fight them and how incoming candidates can maintain a sense of their individual moral and political identity in the face of this incredible pressure to conform?

Tom Cotton:  Well, first I just want to say thank you all for being here.  And thank you for the warm welcome.

We are trying not to be the stupid party, as I think Jon Stewart may have first labeled conservatives that.  And I think that we have made some modest progress over the last few months.  I’ve been in office now for four months.

You know, we talked — the start of this panel was going to be how we can get back on our feet.  I think Republicans were definitely off their feet and on the ground after the election.  And then most particularly at the fiscal cliff legislation that passed on New Year’s Day.

I was not a member of Congress yet but I had flown up to get ready to be sworn in just a few days later.  And the Party was very divided, obviously.  You saw that in the voting and you saw that in the votes of our leadership on that legislation.

But in the past four months we didn’t fight on the debt ceiling in January.  We simply temporarily suspended it so we could have fight on more favorable terrain that related to the spending cuts known as sequestration.

There was not any widespread belief in Washington that those cuts would go into effect.  Modest cuts of 5% in domestic agencies that had seen their budget grow by 17% over the last four years.  The Republican Party and the House stood together.

The President I thought engaged in overwrought rhetoric for a month saying that prisoners were in a rampage through the streets because prison guards were going to be furloughed.  That meat was going to rot in the factory.  That flights were going to fall from the sky because air traffic controllers were going to be furloughed.

We said that you can reduce spending this modest amount to help get our budget deficits under control.  We had a showdown on this about a week and a half ago when the President did force needless furloughs at the FAA that led to long flight delays.

And initially he had said you’re not going to change these furloughs until you increase taxes.  Which was basically saying to the American people we’re going to make you sit on tarmacs and wait until you cough up more tax revenue.

Bill Whittle:  Exactly.

Tom Cotton:  But ultimately because Republicans did stand firm on principle there the Democrats and the Senate folded.  They approved a legislation that would not increase spending or increase the deficit but would simply move money within FAA accounts.  Something we said was feasible all along.  Something that we forced them to do by this legislation, and the President signed it.

And I think it goes to show the American people now realize that we do face a debt crisis.  And that the kind of fireman first strategy that you see at local governments when they threaten to lay off firemen and teachers and police officers, not bureaucrats and administrators when they are trying to get a tax increase, that often you see in Washington as well is no longer persuasive.

So I think over the last four months Republicans have gotten back on their feet.  And you can see that in the polls as well.  I think Pat said that the President’s approval rating is 48% now among registered voters.

Pat Caddell:  On every issue he’s way down.

Tom Cotton:  Yes, on every issue he’s way down.  At his press conference this week I thought he seemed frustrated and defeated.  The take-aways from the press conference that he just wants to blame Republicans for everything.  That’s nothing new.

But he’s overreached over the last four months.  He got $600 billion in tax increases on January 1.  He continues to press for more tax increases.  He pressed through the failed gun control policies of the past.  And by standing firm and simply saying, “No, we’re going to stop bad laws,” which can be as important in Congress as passing good laws, Republicans are back on their feet.

And as Pat said, we’re not going to succeed by abandoning our principles.  Or becoming another liberal party.  We’re going to succeed by standing firm on entitlement principles that are announced in the declaration and that have always been the key to American success.

Limited in constitutional government, the free enterprise system, strong national defense, traditional morality and so forth.  There are concerns that we have to address of the American people.

In 1980 when Ronald Reagan came into office you had double digit inflation.  And you had a top marginal tax rate of 70%.  That’s not the case today.  For a lot of middle income American families that are paying little in income tax but a lot in payroll taxes, they’re facing challenges related to the cost of living.

Whether it’s the cost of tuition for their children or the cost of health care, the cost of utilities, all those are a direct result of failed big government policies.  Of spiraling inflation in tuition.  Of Obamacare.  Of efforts to impose cap in trade to the EPA or not reaching energy resources that are on public land and public waters for which we have genuine solutions as conservatives.

We just have to explain those solutions and how they address the concerns of today’s American families.  And if you look at the polls from the last election, Pat would know this better than I.  I think Barack Obama scored something like 70% or 80% on the question, “Cares more about Americans.”

Bill Whittle:  That was the election right there.

Tom Cotton:  I mean, we should not as conservatives think that that is an immaterial question.  I mean, can anyone imagine Ronald Reagan losing on that question?

Bill Whittle:  No.

Tom Cotton:  Of someone who cares about Americans like me.  Or going back further.  Can someone imagine Abraham Lincoln, if there was a public polling at the time, losing on a question that he cares about Americans like me.  That’s kind of your job as a public leader to care about the concerns of the country and the citizens of our country.

In terms of the divisions in our Republican conference and the House, sure there are divisions.  No two people are ever going to agree on anything.  Anybody who’s married knows that.  And when you have 234 people, they’re certainly not going to agree.

And we all represent very different areas.  You know, I represent a very big rural district in Arkansas that has concerns that are somewhat different from a district in the Northeast or the Midwest that is more heavily unionized or more focused on manufacturing, whereas my district has a larger agricultural and forestry and oil and gas presence.

You have to try to navigate those differences, though, and stand on principles that we know can succeed.  In terms of what you and Pat both said about trying to explain our position to the American people, it’s always hard if your party doesn’t hold the White House.

You don’t speak with one voice.  There are 234 members of Congress.  I am hired by the 730,000 constituents I represent in Arkansas.  And I serve them.  The same way with every other member of Congress.

So if they don’t — if you’re not directly accountable to someone, which no one in the Congress is accountable to each other, we’re accountable to our voters, all you can do is try to persuade and influence.  Some people go to Washington and change their ways.  I’ve focused on trying to go to Washington and change the ways of Washington.

And I have found simply if you focus on the policy of the matter and try to get the policy right, explain your policy differences, whether it’s to someone who wants you to vote yes or someone who wants you to vote no, and which there always are people on both sides, that there’s actually not a lot of pressure or intimidation or consequences.  People respect honest policy differences.

When you start making political calculations, though, explaining why you’re going to vote for a bill for this or that political reason, what you’re really saying is, “I base public policy and I base my political principles on political calculations.”

And all someone has to do is change your calculation, whether it’s using a poll or using other influence of key groups in your district or anything else.

Bill Whittle:  That’s funny because every time conservatives talk about policy we lose.  And every time we talk about philosophy and morality we win.  I was especially interested in what you said about Ronald Reagan and his compassion index.

That compassion vote is what cost us the election.  Romney won exit polls on the economy.  Won exit polls on job creation.  Won exit polls on debt reduction.  Won slightly on exit polls on national defense.  But Barack Obama was perceived to be he cared more about people.  Some huge number, 81% to 19% or something.  Yes.

And, by the way, one of the most encouraging things I ever saw was a poll taken just a little while ago that ran a head to head,  hypothetical competition, Ronald Reagan versus Barack Obama.  Everybody said the country’s different today.  He could never win.  Reagan won with 57% of the vote in that poll because he’s perceived to have cared.

Which is a great segue for you, David.  First of all, I get the sense that people have realized since the Romney loss that these traditional methods of doing things with the RNC and GOP is just not working.  It’s just utter path to failure.  It’s getting worse.

You’ll often hear people, David, you hear people say, “Well, politicians say, ‘Well, we can’t attack Barack Obama.  He’s too popular.’”  And I want to say, “He’s too popular because you don’t attack Barack Obama.”  (laughter)

So can you talk to us a little bit about this Go for the Heart message and how we are not even in the right arena as far as messaging is concerned.

David Horowitz:  Sure.  I want to first just deal with the fatalism of conservatives.  And the view that there’s all these takers and therefore it’s a foregone conclusion that we can’t win.

The statistics in the last election, Obama got 10 million fewer votes than he got in 2008.  If Romney had gotten the same votes that McCain got, who ran a terrible campaign, he would’ve won.  So this is entirely winnable.

On the care issue, the main statistic for me, I mean, I know the CNN poll, Asian-Americans voted 70% for Barack Obama.  Asian-Americans are traditionalists, family-oriented, entrepreneurial, not on welfare. And they voted for Barack Obama.  That is the failure of the Republican Party.

They voted for him because they thought he cared about them.  I don’t remember big appeals to Asian-Americans in the Obama campaign.  They didn’t throw goodies at the Asian-American community.  On the contrary, the Asian-American community suffers from all the affirmative action programs in universities and so forth.

The message — and he didn’t communi– he gave goodies, we know that.  But it was — it’s not enough — this is a huge country.  There’s like 130 million people voting.  You can’t buy everyone.  And you can’t even buy a majority.

He persuaded them how?  Because not only he but the entire Democratic Party runs campaigns every single time on Republicans are conducting a war against minorities, against women, against the poor.  It’s a big lie and Republicans have no answer for it.  That all they say is, “No, no.  I’m –.”  They’re always on defense.  And when you’re on defense, you’ve already lost.

The way to do it is not rocket science.  And probably most of you heard me say this before.  The — one is, you just copy the Democratic strategy.  The Democratic convention was all about the war — the victims of Republicans.  Nobody at the Republican convention gave a speech on the victims of Obama and they’re legion.  They’re — it’s the whole country.

Republicans always talk like accountants and they do talk about policy.  And they do talk about constitutional principles.  And for people who understand the economy, for people who under, you know, who have read the Constitution, you’re going to vote for Republicans.

But you have to speak to people’s emotions.  And the way to do it is you talk about the victims of the Democrats.  You don’t say, “Okay, we have a trillion — whatever it is.  $5 trillion deficit.”  Who understands that in the great unwashed mass out there?  It’s a war on the young.

This is the most massive transfer of wealth from young people who need it to older people who have it.  It’s unconscionable what he’s doing to young people.  We live in a country now where kids graduate from college with a degree in women’s studies or actually in radical feminism.  Or blacks graduate with a degree in racism.  (laughter)  And they have $100,000 debts starting life.

I just — nobody in this room who can imagine what it would’ve been like.  You’re 20 years old, you’re $100,000 in debt.  It’s horrific.  That’s the way (laughter)  — the way that — where’s a young man?  I’m looking out there.

And of course the biggest thing is that the Democrats control every major failing city that’s destroying the lives of mainly inner city black and Hispanic people.  And mainly kids.  They control the school systems 100%.  They’ve controlled them for 50 — well, actually 70 years.  Whatever it is.

Chicago.  They had a teachers strike in Chicago.  The teachers abandoned the kids in the schools.  Who are in the schools?  They’re all black.  And, I mean, I don’t know the composition of Chicago.  There’s probably some Hispanic kids.  Why did they go on strike?

This is in the middle of the campaign.  Why did they go on strike?  Wasn’t for salaries.  It was because they didn’t want their rewards, their bonuses, their raises connected to their performance.  They’re screwing poor black and Hispanic kids.  They don’t care about them.  And the President doesn’t care.

It was so easy.  Christie, whom I de– all of us are turned off now, for good reason.  But he was the most articulate and aggressive Republican.  He gave a speech.  He mentioned the teacher unions.  If you read that speech, he never once mentions the victims.

He was — it was about performance and reward but he didn’t say the kid, you know, it’s black kids in Newark who are suffering that we’re saving.  It’s so easy to do.  If every time you think of a policy you think of the negative effect on the symbolic victim communities.

These corrupt Republican consultants, I agree 100% with Pat on this.  And it’s the big problem.  Republicans are businesspeople.  And therefore they see everything as a business.  Democrats are missionaries.  They’re saving the world and they see it in terms of redemption.  Republicans have to see it that way a lot more than they do.

The final thing — well, there are two things I want to say.  Foreign policy.  Republicans have never, since 1945, have never, never won a national election where foreign — national security wasn’t a primary issue.  And they won many of them when they were a minority party.

The Democrats control both Houses (inaudible) 35 years for the House of Representatives, which really is the popular — represents the popular will.  But in 28 of the 42 Cold War years, Republicans won the Presidency despite the fact of being a minority party.

And the three of the four Democrats, the fourth was the wretched Jimmy Carter who pull — who was misperceived as a military man and a Southerner so a conservative.  But the other three, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, were Reagan Republicans by the standards that we have today.  They were militant anti-Communists.  They were strong on defense.  And aggressive in foreign policy.

The final thing I want to say is, as I said last night, this is really war.  The Democrats see politics as war.  Republicans see it as kind of business where you make deals.  When Democrats make a deal, it’s for a longer strategic objective, not being liked.  Republicans make deals so people will like them and they won’t criticize them so much.  Democrats make deals because they’re going to the next step.

If you read psychological warfare manuals, the first principle of psychological warfare is you attack the commander in chief.  And you attack him on moral grounds.  You tarnish him morally.  This is what the Democrats did when they sabotaged the Iraq war.

They went after Bush.  They said he was a liar.  They said he was conducting a war to kill young Americans.  The truth was that it’s the Democrats who were lying and they’re the ones who sent young Americans to die and then betrayed the war.  Something no Republican will say in public.  Republicans are too damn polite.

Obama is a liar.  It’s probably impolitic to just call him that straight.  You know, you just say he doesn’t tell the truth.  He doesn’t tell the truth.  And he doesn’t care.  He didn’t care.  That’s why there were four American heroes dead in Benghazi because the President didn’t care.

He didn’t care enough about your lives to make sure that the FBI interrogated the bomber, the surviving bomber until he found out his networks.  That’s the way you attack him.  You got to be rude.  Republicans, I mean, to me that’s the biggest problem.  They’re too damn polite.

Romney in the debates, well, you know, why didn’t he say, “You know, Mr. President, you spent $300 million calling me a murderer and a predator and this and that.  Why would you do that?” Never said it.  Instead he hugged him for the last two debates.  Come on.

Anyway.  I think we can win.  I think we can win big.  I think that this whole administration is a train wreck.  They’re going to botch everything.  And it’s just Republicans’ timidity in confronting them.

And we have a couple of Republicans who’ve done that.  We had Cruz, we had a South Carolina congressman questioning Hillary.  I mean, I would’ve gone a lot farther with Hillary than they did but that’s what we need.  We need Republicans who aren’t afraid to have people say, oh, that say that they’re rude and ill mannered.  And not care what the New York Times says.

Bill Whittle:  You wanted to add something, Pat?

Pat Caddell:  Yes, I want to add something to David.  You should all read David’s little book here on Go for the Heart.  I mean, Dave and I — I’m a Democrat.  I blanche at the putting everybody in the same box but that’s another matter.

And what bothers me about Republicans is actually I’m an — I belong to a new party.  It’s called the Americans.

Bill Whittle:  Yes.  (multiple speakers)

Pat Caddell:  It’s called the 75% of the American people, the 80% who believe in American exceptionalism.  Who believe that the dominant political ideology of America is common sense.  It’s not liberal and conservative, it’s common sense.

David’s points in this book — and by the way, on the Romney cares, I dare defy anyone to tell me one moment, spontaneous moment when Mitt Romney showed a bit of empathy for any American in the entire two years he was running for president.

Bill Whittle:  Yes.

Pat Caddell:  Okay?  You wonder how you end with those numbers?  And leave aside the rest of the campaign.  Look, Obama, for instance, what David said, what I’ve been saying.

I’m on a show called Political Insiders.  It’s on Sunday on Fox at 5.25, 5.30 with Doug Schoen, John LeBoutillier, for those of you who don’t know.  And we do politics a little differently.  We just get into the reality, not talking points.

But I said a couple weeks ago, “Look, the President is waging war on the American people.”  The point that David made.  Never in my — in the history of the United States we have a president that goes out of his way to try to hurt Americans to make a political point.

David Horowitz:  Yes.

Pat Caddell:  Now, why am I saying that and nobody in the Republican Party or Congress or anybody in the country doing it?  Why is there no narrative?  I mean, when Tom Colburn put out this stuff about all the cuts and the same thing with the FAA, you know, when you go and you go, you’re cutting out the White House tours of the people’s house but you’re willing to spend money on this.

Why isn’t that every day being hammered?  And why isn’t the same thing on — I’ll get to Obamacare I hope in a little bit.  But here’s the point that David made about the real victims.  In two thou– there was a better way and some people showed how to do it.

I was involved in the project first because of Lee Hanley’s generosity more than anything else called Real Leader.  It’s something we actually approach.  We used in Wisconsin.  It’s approach Steve Bannon and I did on a film called Hope and Change.  Which was to take Democrat.  Who do you want to win?

You know, I — Republicans need to and conservatives need to answer one question.  Do you want to feel good or do you want to win?  The — David said this is war.  And it is — then one side — and then notice how Dave and I come — understand exactly how the — my side — what theoretically was my side but what — how they wage war.

The — politics is life and death.  It is — and the re– on your side it’s all about arrangements.  And self-aggrandizements, basically.  And some principle.  But here’s the point.  Look at the minorities.  Look at these things.

You — Romney could’ve taken — I saw analysis this morning, could’ve taken 65% of the Hispanic vote would’ve been a loss.  The real issue with Asians, he lost because a lot of people didn’t bother to vote.  And he had nothing to say.

And during those debates when I had it with him in Benghazi when I said, “Hell, I thought he was going to endorse Obama.”  You know, when you become as craven as that campaign became because they assumed they would win, you have problems.

But look at this story.  We did a real leader.  In Hope and Change.  We took people who were undecided Democrats,  independents, a lot of them.  Women, blacks, minorities, Hispanics.  And let them tell their stories.

Americans — the thing with Obama was, everyone liked him.  They didn’t like him being attacked.  But thought he was a terrible leader, which is what the polls today show.  (coughs)  Our whole argument was, people will connect the dots.

When you start with politics that people are stupid and can’t figure it out, you are doomed.  It mean — you’re easy prey for an attack on, like — as the one the Democrats have done on the Republicans.

But the point, if you get people and let them speak right now, because politics ads are incredible.  But they work.  And if you put — and we showed this.  And the evidence — I didn’t do the polling on it.  People did analysis.  They, “Oh, my God, that’s the greatest approach ever.”

The Republicans won’t do it because it won’t talk in terms of what — and this is my problem, Tom, with your leadership in Congress.  You don’t talk about people the way David said, people’s lives.

That what’s happening to them, the discussion in Washington is irrelevant to their lives.  Anyone who saw the Waiting for Superman which — about education.  What an issue this is.  The Dem– my party basically has bought off the leadership of its interest groups, particularly minorities, and said, “You give us your votes and by the way we’ll give you this.”  But we really give you nothing.

But you don’t show the price.  And that’s what I said about the approach we took.  People’s (inaudible) Obama had failed them.  Somebody did a — (inaudible) poll.  Did a film on this.  Out of 30 some people in a focus group, 20 of — were undecided, 25 of them went — 20 some of them went — immediately said they’d vote against Obama because it resonated with them.

You have to be smart about this.  And you have to have strategies.  And there aren’t.  And you — and I agree with David, you go and show people how they are being had.  The biggest issue in this country is corruption.

80 something percent of the American people believe this entire system from left to right is rigged for people who have money and lobbyists, and they’re right.  The big banks, the whole bit.  That corruption issue.

But what do the Republicans do?  You’re the out party so are you the anti-Washington party where 75% of the people are against the political class?  When you do the fiscal cliff deal which Tom is suggested was not a — by his — just his body language would — didn’t think was a great deal.

What do you do at the end?  Joe Biden walks in and says, “All we want this Bacchus, all these tax breaks for Salingers and everybody else.”  And the Republican Party swallows it whole.

The Republican Party went along the other day with a bill to gut the disclosures that Peter Schweitzer’s team had found about insider trading with Congress, Nancy Pelosi.  They gutted it without a vote in the House.  I went — I mean, without a debate.

Same thing with (inaudible) you do Obamacare and exempt the Congress.  These things infuriate Americans.  But why and only after it gets exposed to I hear Boehner get up, say “Oh, no, no, we won’t do that.”

Bill Whittle:  Well, let’s stay on the political arena before we go to a little bit wider thing with the culture.  And we’ll go around the panel one more time and maybe we’ll start with you, Tom.

Let’s just say for the sake of the argument, we’ll give you all three the same question.  Let’s just say that you’ve become the RNC chairman.  You’ve become the RNC czar.  You have an unlimited pot of money.

You have absolute control.  Everybody has sworn allegiance to these new ideas that are going to save this party and get us back to some relevance.  So let me just ask you, starting with you, Tom, if you had the ability to command the RNC structure and you were to concentrate on three issues, candidates, message, and policy, as succinctly as you can, if you had absolute dictatorial power, what would you do?

Tom Cotton:  Yes.  (laughter)

Bill Whittle:  Okay.  You make good president.

Tom Cotton:  No, I mean, just — pol– the RNC doesn’t do as much work on policy as do our elected leaders.  We elect our leaders to make policy.  The RNC should provide kind of the party infrastructure that we need.  Some of –

Bill Whittle:  Let me rephrase it, then.  Forget about the existing structures.  If it were up to you and you had resources and people went along with you, and you thought it was — you — what would you do to change this party’s ability to communicate with the people?  Again, in terms of candidates, messaging, and some key policies.

Tom Cotton:  I would build that infrastructure that is necessary to provide the campaigns to help identify our voters, to identify people who might be our voters, and to get those voters to the polls.  Whether it’s absentee or early or on Election Day.

Pat talked about the race in South Carolina and how we had 16 different candidates.  I don’t think that it’s the prudent course for Washington party officials to be intervening in primaries.  You saw this a couple cycles ago, put the heavy thumb on the scale for Charlie Crist in Florida and look what happened?  We got Marco Rubio instead and Charlie Crist revealed his true colors as a Democrat.

We need to let the primary electorate and states make their decisions.  For candidates, I think we can do a better job of candidate training.  That’s something you can offer to any kind of candidate, whatever political persuasion they are, whether they come from the more conservative wing of our party or the more moderate wing.

But candidates especially in high profile races, in senate races, for instance, need the most advanced training they can get.  The challenges we had in data and Get out the Vote last cycle of which Pat spoke are not insurmountable.

This happened in 2000.  In the final days of the 2000 election George Bush was campaigning in places like California because they thought they had place like Florida locked up.  He ended up losing the popular vote by about 500,000 votes.

He and the political team around him realized that this was a serious problem so they developed something called the 72-Hour Project.  They tested it out in off-year, off-cycle elections in, like, Pennsylvania judges races, of all things.  And they refined it.  And in 2002 they turn out war.

In 2004, John Kerry hit his voter targets in every single county in Ohio, for instance.  Maybe every single precinct.  That’s — you know what a campaign says?  If we get this many votes in this county or this precinct, we’re going to win.

Record performance.  It’s just that the RNC and the Bush campaign had an even greater record performance.  And in 2006 I’ve read stories that the RNC 72-Hour Project was reaching its targets in key precincts and key counties.  The problem is they had so turned off our voters that they were turning out Republicans and independents were going to vote for Democrats.

And since then it’s just kind of atrophied.  So it’s not that Republicans can’t compete on this kind of political infrastructure.  We can, we just have to make it a priority.  And it really is something that the Party needs to do because as someone who was recently a candidate, I can say that requires a lot of work, a lot of investment, a lot of time.

And it’s something that benefits all candidates from our presidential candidate down to our city council candidates.  But campaigns have to be more focused on their own campaign, on their own strategy and on their own message to the voters.

So that’s one thing that I would really focus on if I was advising the RNC is to develop the competing structures that we need to offset the advantages that emerged in the Democratic Party in the last four years.

But I agree with David, it’s not hopeless at all.  I mean, really none of the above won the last presidential election because of the thaw in votes as opposed to a lot of enthusiasm for Barack Obama.

Bill Whittle:  We’ve only got about ten minutes left, so I’d like to finish this round and then have a very quick culture round.  Dave, what would you do if you had utter control of the apparatus of the Republican Party?

David Horowitz:  Well, I agree that there’s a lot of structural problems.  I mean, I’d try to have a lawyer at every polling booth in the country watching the fraud that the Democrats are conducting.  I think the ground war is really important.

Bill Whittle:   A videographer would be nice to have there, too.

David Horowitz:  If you had James O’Keefe.  Yes.  (laughter)  But I still think that the messaging is the issue.  They have to go after Obama and take him down.  He will take down all the congress races that are close.

And it’s really, in my view, easy to do.  I didn’t mention the fact that the Obamas are living like Louis the XVI and Marie Antoinette.

Pat Caddell: Let them eat cake.

David Horowitz:  While the coun–

Pat Caddell:  Let them eat cake is (inaudible).

David Horowitz:  Yes.  And that hypocrisy, I mean, again, you just push him up against the four vacations in three months.  He spent the — well, Peter Schweitzer did this, too.  The — whatever it is,  900 hours on golfing and 400 hours on the economy.

He just doesn’t care about you.  That’s the — you’ve got to go after Obama.  And every Republican consultant and Boehner and everybody else will say you can’t do that or we’ll be destroyed.  That’s a big problem.

The other thing is, well, when you have an issue.  I mean, it’s such a big problem because Republicans don’t have the intuitive sense to do it.  But I’ve put this out before.  The housing crisis, which was the trigger of the whole financial collapse.

Republicans are good.  They understand that Barney Frank.  They don’t understand that Barack Obama was a key to that.  But since Jimmy Carter, this is the whole Democratic Party.  Jimmy Carter introduced the Community Reinvestment Act.

It brought the whole house of cards down.  Why?  Because they attacked banks as racist for following prudent economic policies.  Very simple policy that every American can understand very easily.  You don’t lend money to somebody you know can’t pay it back.  It’s really simple.

But they abolished that principle for banks by [nowmowing] it.  Well, that’s an old term.  But by –

Bill Whittle:  No, that’s right, though.

David Horowitz:  By calling them racists.  It was that simple.  And Obama was the ACORN lawyer.  Now, who suffered from that?  Well, of course we all did through the financial crisis.

But who were the primary sufferers?  One.  Poor people.  And poor black and Hispanic people who got suckered into buying homes that they were going to lose.  I mean, how traumatic is it?  And how evil is it to say, “We’re going to give you the American Dream.  You’re going to have your own house.”  Knowing that it was going to be taken back two years later.

That’s a very easy thing to communicate to people.  Where’s — I mean, I don’t know all the statistics on this but I do know that black America lost 54% of its net worth, $100 billion because of the fall in housing prices.

The greatest social success story in our time, probably in any time, was the rise of the black middle class since World War II.  And they just took half of it away.  Now, the Republican consultants if they hear you say this will say, “Well, we’re never going to win the black vote.  So forget that.”

That’s not the point.  That black vote is — the black — the — what happens to black people is symbolic for all minorities.  And for all independent people who want to have a good conscience and care.  That’s — nobody mentioned this in the campaigns.

I’m telling you this, it’s really simple.  It’s not rocket science.  It’s just having the cojones to do it.  (laughter)  That’s it.

Bill Whittle:  We’re running short on time but, Pat, if you had a scalpel –

Pat Caddell:  Well, I just want –

Bill Whittle:  — and you could cut the stupid out, what would you do?

Pat Caddell:  The first thing is I would understand is what — and let me just say this.  In The Game of Thrones there’s a scene when the — on the wall where the guy said, “You didn’t send the ravens.  You have one job.  You were supposed to send the ravens.”

And as my friend Ray Levine says, “This is my party.”  He’s a Republican.  Says, “They don’t know how to send the ravens.”  This is a 30 front war, as Michael Barnes, my lawyer, likes to call it.  This is World War II.

Think of this where you ware.  It’s World War II.  We’re six months after the election and there’s still no — everyone’s still retreating.  A 30 front war has many fronts, some of them are — and that’s how we won World War II.

We were on our butt on December 7, 1941.  The fleet of the United States — Pacific fleet is at the bottom of Pearl Harbor.  And we have the 27th largest army in the world.  And within four years you liberate the entire world.  It did not happen by accident.

It happened because Marshall had an idea about you had, as I said, these many fronts.  And you fought the important ones, the big ones, you had the little ones.  You didn’t get to 1944 and the invasion of Normandy without 1942 and ’43.

You have to do this.  You have to have stories.  David Horowitz just told two things that Republican consultants and most Republicans wouldn’t understand.  How do you talk to young people about how they’re being screwed, number one?

And two, how do you — the — what you just said about what happened with the minority communities, it bothers the conscience of all Americans.  It is back what I said, the issue, Stupid, is corruption.  It is a system where people –

And by the way, Fannie and Freddie were as much Republican as Democrat.  My God, they bought everyone in Washington.  And it was the worst thing.  But you’ve got to send the ravens. And most importantly is this, you have to have a strategic center.

There is no strategic center.  There’s no strategic (inaudible) that says here you go.  Here’s how to do it.  I — if we had time, I would go through you how the Left after the 2000 — the far Left in the 2000 — after 2004 decided they weren’t going to have all these consultants and Democratic Party screwing them anymore.  They were going to own it.

The people responsible, what is happening in the Republican Party are its donors.  They are the people writing the checks to the people who are defrauding their own people and playing them for marks, as I said at CPAC.  They played the donors for marks.  They’ve played the Republican grassroots for sheep.

And this is, you know, and everybody in the country for fools.  And this you have to stop.  And you have to — and so I think there’s a way to do this but if you think you can do it through the established order.  And let me just say when I say that in Congress they don’t do it.  This emotional Socialist.

I saw, and I hope you all see this Gosnell documentary that Fox had on last night.  It is just one of the most powerful things.  It’s about how minorities are being handled on social issues.  And what happened there.

But just take this latest decision where Obama reversed himself.  Talked about science yesterday.  About the decision of the FDA in light of the judge’s decision that 15 year old girls can buy the morning after pills off the shelf.

You can’t get a tattoo without your parents’ permission.  You can’t buy a cigarette till you’re 18.  What — why didn’t the Republicans the minute that judge made that — put an emergency piece of legislation in?  Why wasn’t there a message say, because this is the kind of Socialist you want to fight.

It’s about parental control.  It’s not about abortion or it’s about parents having a right.  But none of that ever happens because you don’t have narratives.  And that’s telling stories.  And that you have to do.  And that gets you, I think, to your culture question.

Bill Whittle:  Well, we’re about –

Pat Caddell:  We are out of time.

Bill Whittle:  No, it’s okay.  Here’s what we’re going to do.  No one can drop a World War II reference on me without me coming back with one.  (laughter)  So let’s do this.  We’ve got about five minutes left to wrap this up.

As you said, Pat, after December 7, 1941, the United States was knocked on its heels.  We were defeated everywhere.  The Japanese continued to sweep throughout the Pacific.  We couldn’t get ashore for a year in Europe and that was in Tunisia, of all places.

And Americans wanted to get back in the fight.  And I know all of us want to get back into the fight.  So the only thing we actually did during World War II to get us back into the fight was a symbolic event, but it had enormous morale consequences.

And that was the Do-Little Raid.  They put bombers on an aircraft carrier.  They sent them out across the ocean.  They bombed Japan.  I think they slightly damaged a factory and may have hit a school.  But Americans got a chance to say, “We’re back in the fight.  We bombed Tokyo.”

And in the words of George Patton in the great movie Patton, “Where we going, General?”  “I’m going to Berlin.  I want to shoot that paper hanging son of a bitch myself.”  (laughter)

So with about a minute each, if you could do one simple, immediate, quick thing to get the morale of this team back up and give them a sense that we’ve got to fight left (inaudible).  We start to get a sense of victory, what is the one thing you would do on the table right now?  You got about a minute, sorry about the time.  Dave, where would you go?

David Horowitz:  Well, I think there’s just — what did you say?  There’s 30 fronts?

Pat Caddell:  Thirty fronts.

David Horowitz:  [Milwad] is coming up for confirmation hearings.  He was Barney Frank’s right-hand in screwing black America.  To — I mean, if he was confronted that way.  But it’s difficult.  We don’t have enough black representatives to do it.

But if you do it and call him a hypo– first of all, I should say all these things about defending minorities against the Democrats is a man bites dog story.  So whoever does it is going to get news right away.

And I would just do that on every front that we have.  I mean, there’s just, you know, Pat has come up with several here.  It, again, it’s not rocket science.  It’s a question of thinking outside the box for Republicans.  And being willing to be called bad-mannered the way Ted — our speaker tonight, Ted Cruz, has been.

We had three guys, Lee and Rand Paul and Cruz.  And they stood up and they made symbolic gestures.  Just symbolic.  I mean, the filibuster is, you know, and they got attacked by Republicans and by Democrats.

But the people responded.  They’re the stars now of the Party.

Bill Whittle:  That’s right.

David Horowitz:  And anybody who realizes that and is willing to brave the lightning.  If the lightning hits you and you survive, you’re a star right away.

Bill Whittle:  There you go.

David Horowitz:  Instant.

Bill Whittle:  Tom, there’s 535 Americans that live in a democracy.  The rest of us don’t but you do.  You live in a democracy.  (multiple speakers)  What would you do if you had a minute or two –

David Horowitz: It would take a totalitarian system –

Bill Whittle:  You have — you’re one of the 535 Americans that actually lives in a democracy, gets to vote on the most important issues.  If you could get a quick win, what would it be?

Tom Cotton:  I’d pick up on something that David said earlier and that is make the case to the American people about how Barack Obama is failing to keep America safe.

That starts with his actions abroad, what he’s done in Iraq to precipitously withdraw there.  What he’s doing to undermine the efforts that our troops in Afghanistan have made.

It goes to Syria where Bashar al-Assad has crossed a red line of his own making and apparently now we’re going to have CSI Syria because we’ve got to establish the chain of custody, which is what the President said the other day.

And his failures in counterterrorism.  If you look at the number of jihadists who have reached their targets in the United States, these are very salient issues, I think, to the American people.

As David said, they’ve always been at the forefront of elections at the presidential level when the Republican candidate has won.  And in my experience on the campaign trail, for instance, on Benghazi for two weeks after those attacks on September 11th, that was the first question I always got asked.

So I’d take all those.  I’d make four speeches.  I’d have committee hearings.  And I’d get to the bottom of why the President is failing to keep America safe.

David Horowitz:  The national security issue (applause) — the national security issue is the issue that unifies the Republican Party.  When you’re talking national security all these social issues, all the divisions in the Party disappear.

And this is why Republicans won during the Cold War.  Because the factions understand that that’s the crucial issue.  Let me just say on the Iraq.  I agree with you 100% on Iraq.

Two things.  One, the reason that we have given Iraq to Iran, our mortal enemy, is because Obama didn’t care.  He didn’t even participate in the negotiations.  And he didn’t stand up for having a base there.

He betrayed every single American and Iraqi who gave their lives for Iraqi freedom.  And not one Republican has said that.  That was a horrifying betrayal not to secure Iraq from the clutches of Iran who every American understands wants to wipe us off the face of the earth.

Bill Whittle:  Pat, you got (multiple speakers)?

David Horowitz:  The moral thing, there’s no after –

Bill Whittle:  You got one minute.  You got one minute for your Do-Little Raid.

Pat Caddell:  I was — I’m going to take two because it’s important.  And this goes right to — you know, I’m sorry, Michael.  This is really important.  The one thing–

Bill Whittle:  I want to stop (multiple speakers).

Pat Caddell:  — you do right now, right now, is that John Boehner stopped this trying to hide and put his head in the sand with five committees dealing with Benghazi and have a special select committee which has a chief counsel to pursue.

The Benghazi, as I have said since November, and after — including Mr. Romney’s craven performance of not mentioning it, which allowed the media not to cover it, by the way.  Which disqualifies him in my eyes to even be President.

The, you know, which you — this issue blows up everything.  Because it is the greatest cover up, as I have said since day one, about Watergate, it’s about the media.  It is about Tom Donlin.  I will make the accusation, I’m telling you.  But until — and it’s fraying at the edges.

And Boston Marathon took the lid off.  The two are directly related to Islamic radicalism and to this administration’s policy of firing FBI agents.  Allowing the Muslim Brotherhood Care organization to edit and decide what’s in the training manuals of the FBI.

I’ve been doing polling for two years for Secure America now.  John McLaughlin and I appeared here for David’s group.  And so we’ve got numbers.  This is not just unites the Republican Party. It unites a huge majority of everyone in America.

It’s Democrats, Hispanics.  And you know most importantly (inaudible) women more than men.  This is, and in a process in this (inaudible) committee to in fact take this apart.  And when you start taking this apart, it will all collapse.

And it will have major — it’s called going for the jugular.  Yes, it’s political.  So was Watergate in a sense.  Watergate was immoral.  This is immoral.  And the President, look, the deal made with Hillary Clinton was simple.  And Bill Clinton cut it.

I said this on Political Insiders, why you should watch it.  I said the day of the 60 Minutes interview before it happened, “This is the greatest pay-off in history.”

Barack Obama is paying off Hillary Clinton by asking 60 Minutes to do this interview of this nothing thing so we could basically promote her for president.  Because she had agreed to take the fall for his absence being able, not caring.  What David said.

He could make a phone call to someone who announces their sexual preference, but he couldn’t make a phone call the night of Benghazi?

Bill Whittle:  Beautiful.

Pat Caddell:  This is — these are moral questions.  And you have to be willing to blow them up.  And that — and if Boehner continues, there are 101 Republicans.  I don’t know if you’re one of them, Tom, the demand of the select committee.

If you — then if you people who give money don’t tell John Boehner not another penny till you do what’s right, then you’re responsible for it.

Unidentified Audience Member:  Hear, hear.  (applause)

David Horowitz: He’s right.

Bill Whittle:  Eat your cookies.  Well, I know I speak for everybody up here and certainly for the Freedom Center to say what a pleasure it is to have a free conversation in a free country like Texas.  I flew out here from Los Angeles, and I always come — I always enjoy coming to visit America.  I grew up in America.  Don’t mess with Texas, it’s a whole ‘nother country.

Thanks very much (inaudible).  We got a busy day today.  And I hope you enjoyed the panel.  (applause)

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In recent weeks, scandal after scandal has rocked Barack Obama’s administration.  His presidency might be imperiled.

Or it might not be.

Obama steadfastly remains an activist, a “community organizer.”  Nor has he forgotten that which he learned from the godfather of all community organizers, Saul Alinsky.

In his Rules for Radicals, Alinsky writes that the goal “of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a ‘dangerous enemy.’”

Now, given that he is the President of the United States, Obama’s should be recognized by the world as the face of “the establishment.”  Obama, though, does not want this, for to be associated with “the establishment” is to be identified with the status quo, politics as usual.  But Obama promised hope, change, and even “the fundamental transformation” of America.  To make good on this promise, he needs the support of the electorate.  Yet to elicit this support, he must convince Americans not just that he is not a member of the establishment.  He must convince them that he is its enemy.   

More specifically, he must have us believe that it is those in the establishment that view him as a “dangerous enemy.”

Alinsky explains that the term “‘enemy’ is sufficient to put the organizer on the side of the people,” and that “the brand ‘dangerous’” proves that “the establishment” has “fear of the organizer,” “fear that he represents a threat to its omnipotence.”  Once this fear is established for all to see, the organizer can get to work.

Doubtless, Obama did not want for any of these scandals to come to light. Now that they’ve arisen, though, they can be exploited to depict himself as a Washington outsider and his Republican nemeses as “the establishment” that has vowed to destroy him.  Potentially, this strategy trades off short-term loss for long-term gain.

Again, Alinsky is instructive here: “If by losing in a certain action” the organizer “can get more members than by winning, then victory lies in losing and he will lose.”

There is another respect in which Obama will exploit “the crises” of government that the Republicans are trying to expose in his administration.  Rahm Emmanuel warned us against letting “a good crisis go to waste.”  Crises disorganize our ordinary categories and assumptions.  At the same time, according to Alinsky, they both reflect and “stir up” the “dissatisfaction and discontent” of the people.  This is great news for the organizer, for he can then “provide a channel into which” people “can angrily pour their frustrations [.]”

Your average person—the average voter—wants crises resolved. He longs for normalcy, some semblance of calm.   Now, Obama remains more popular than his Republican opponents, and he long ago succeeded in convincing many Americans that the GOP is the establishment while he is their “dangerous enemy.”  As long as they are perceived as “crisis mongers,” Obama counts upon the public growing weary—and frustrated—with them.  At the same time, he can style himself the hero, the organizer par excellence, who will relieve Americans’ of their exasperation by conceding that there are crises and then swooping in to solve them.  Of course, such “solutions” will come at the cost of an ever larger government, one that is even more amenable to his agenda.

But this is exactly what Obama wants, of course.

So, Obama, in spite of being among the most politically powerful people in the world, has many Americans believing that he is an enemy of the establishment. And though all of the crises of government over which his opponents are sounding the alarm are scandals for which his administration is responsible, it is Obama who will be able to take credit for resolving them.  The country has never had a president, and not even many politicians of any sort, really, who were better suited to pull off these two seemingly insurmountable tasks than is Obama.  Why?

That the media continually run cover for him obviously explains quite a bit.  Yet the President’s rivals err gravely if they attribute his success solely to the media’s partisan loyalties.

In the popular imagination—reinforced daily by Hollywood, the media, and academia—the American political establishment remains under the control of whites generally and white men specifically (i.e. “the good old boy network”). And blacks remain victims of racial oppression.  President or not, Obama’s blackness is seen as automatically rendering him an enemy of the establishment. His Arabic name, however, signifies an even wider gap between Obama and the latter.

Republicans must hold Obama accountable for his actions.  At the same time, they must reckon with our current racial politics—and the ease with which Obama, the Alinskyite, will use these perceptions to his advantage.     

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It’s not that I don’t have a good marketing team – I do.  In fact, I have an amazing marketing team – I even have two publicists who regularly book their clients on Good Morning America, Piers Morgan Tonight, The Today Show, and other big shows that reach millions of viewers.  Funny thing is, they can’t seem to book me on any of the big shows, despite the fact that my film is being released from coast to coast.

In fact, it’s been extremely difficult to get mainstream media outlets to help us spread the word, and the ones that are talking about it are doing everything they can to discredit the picture – this isn’t exactly surprising, given that Hating Breitbart is, ultimately, a devastating indictment of mainstream media malfeasance.  That’s why I spend so much time on Twitter – so I can compensate, in some small way, for the overwhelming institutional resistance to our film.

So you can imagine my utter lack of surprise when Lizz Winstead, co-creator of The Daily Show, showed up on my Twitter page to trash talk the film – shocker.  In case you follow these things, this is the same Lizz Winstead who tweeted “This tornado is in Oklahoma so clearly it has been ordered to only target conservatives.” She’s a real humanitarian, Ms. Winstead, and funny, too.  In any event, and for the sake of full context, before Ms. Winstead began gleefully tweeting about dead children in a Red State, I had sent out a tweet encouraging people to review the film on iTunes and Amazon to counterbalance the effort to snuff the film out.  Ms. Winstead, in response, chimed in:

Dude. Who even knows abt this to suppress it?

I won’t bore you with the back and forth – Twitter is far more compelling in real time than in retrospect.  Ms. Winstead eventually concluded with, “Or maybe, just maybe people just don’t want to see a film that pays tribute to Breitbart.”

That would be a fair enough point, except that there’s a twist to this story, like all good stories.  As it turns out, our publicists reached out to The Daily Show on three separate occasions.  We were told, essentially, “Thank you for your interest in our show, but hell no.”  Ms. Winstead and her friends might argue, I suppose, that was because our production quality sucked and our content wasn’t compelling – so why would they want to degrade their show with our mediocre crapumentary?

Except, again, as it turns out, that three years ago, on March 31st of 2010, The Daily Show broadcast, for profit, footage that I had shot during the production of….yes, you guessed it:  Hating Breitbart.  In fact, Andrew Breitbart, the person that Lizz Winstead believes nobody wants to see, appears twice (without credit) and is featured prominently in the footage they broadcast. And so, it would seem, that our content is just fine for borrowing, but not good enough for promoting.

So that, Ms. Winstead, to address your question, is how you suppress a film. You deny it exposure, and then you mock it for not having exposure.  Classy.  Almost as classy as mocking the dead children of probable conservatives.

Ms. Winstead may not believe that people “want to see a film that pays tribute to Breitbart,” but her tweets about Oklahoma precisely demonstrate why Andrew Breitbart’s message was and is so important – because Breitbart passionately rallied against a media culture that has perpetually caricatured conservatives as racist, sexist, homophobic, intolerant, bigoted monsters.  It is only within an environment where Conservatives are so radically dehumanized that a supposed liberal like Lizz Winstead could even think for a moment that it’s acceptable to glibly tweet about such horrific destruction and suffering.  The media culture that has provided fertile ground for such callousness is what Andrew Breitbart dedicated his life to changing.  Within the span of 48 hours, Lizz Winstead went from mocking our film to proving its thesis.

Taxes are opportunities. Spending is stimulus. Amnesty is reform. The left is as good at language as it is bad at governing. It can’t change reality, but it excels at changing the description of reality. Common sense is the enemy of the left and the left defeats common sense by corrupting language so that nothing makes sense and common sense can never come into play.

The proposal to put women into combat is a transparently bad idea for reasons of common sense. Without an ongoing conflict and with deep cuts to the military, there is no shortage of manpower that requires desperate measures and compromised standards.

There is no reasonable reason for it all except the need to transform the military from a warfighting force into a beacon of liberal values. The new military does not exist to win wars, but to show up in beards and burqas and win the hearts and minds of our enemies with gay marriages and abortion clinics. Thousands or tens of thousands may die, but their deaths will be a chance to show how restrained we are in our lack of retaliation. How determined we are to lose the strategic high ground while claiming the moral high ground.

In preparation for giving the green light to female infantrymen, another term that will have to be changed, and female Army Rangers, General Martin Dempsey, who had previously cheered on the introduction of homosexuality to the military, promised “clear standards of performance for all occupations based on what it actually takes to do the job”.

These standards, General Dempsey said, will be “gender-neutral”. But what is gender neutrality exactly? No one really knows except that it will involve being neutral about gender or genders being neutral. If not for the fancifully Orwellian language that the teleprompters of the powerful spew up, it might be taken to mean that there will be the same standards for all soldiers regardless of their gender.

That would be a sensible, if doomed approach. Soldiers in Afghanistan may have to carry 127 pounds on their backs. A study in the heyday of the manpower crunch, when the Army was looking for a few good men, women or anything in between, still found that women could not meet male upper body strength ratios

Captain Katie Petronio, who led combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, wrote, “There is no way I could endure the physical demands of the infantrymen whom I worked beside.”

The British version of gender-neutral, gender-free, replacing gender-fair policy, attempted to ignore gender in military training and resulted in a doubling of injuries for female soldiers. In gender-fair training, women only suffered four times as many injuries as male soldiers. In gender-free training, women suffered nearly ten times as many injuries as male soldiers. An absurd term like gender-free could be coined, but it couldn’t be implemented because no one can be free of their gender. Gender is not open to regulation or deregulation. It is an absolute reality.

Gender-neutral may sound like gender-free, but it’s actually more like gender-fair. Our leaders may be stupid enough to insist on female Army Rangers, but they aren’t stupid enough to insist on standards that are neutral in the objective sense. Rather they are neutral in the subjective sense.

What does that mean? The gender-neutral standard is embedded in regulations, but it isn’t interpreted to mean identical objective physical metrics, but identical subjective physical metrics within each gender. The gender-neutral standard is actually a partisan gender standard. And it is arranged so that the politicians can have their gender-neutral cake and eat it too.

As the Congressional Research Service explains, “The use of the term ‘gender-neutral physical standards’ raises questions depending on how it is defined.” How do you define gender-neutral so that it isn’t neutral?

“The Services have used this and similar terms to suggest that men and women must exert the same amount of energy in a particular task, regardless of the work that is actually accomplished by either.”

Examples include, “if a female soldier carries 70 pounds of equipment five miles and exerts the same effort as a male carrying 100 pounds of equipment the same distance, the differing standards could be viewed as ‘gender-neutral’ because both exerted the same amount of effort, with differing loads.”

Or, “The Air Force Fitness Test Scoring for males under 30 years of age requires males to run 1.5 miles in a maximum time of 13:36: the female maximum time is 16:22. A female who runs at this slower rate would actually receive a higher score than a male who runs nearly three minutes faster.”

There’s nothing gender neutral about that. But gender-neutral really means neutral to the gender. And neutral to the gender is another way of saying that there are two differing standards. The standard changes to accommodate the gender.

It’s not what most people imagine that gender neutral means and it’s not what it is supposed to mean because Congress defined gender-neutral as being “evaluated on the basis of common, relevant performance standards, without differential standards of evaluation on the basis of gender.” But by leaving “relevant” in there, the door was open for a debate on the meaning of “is”, and the clear meaning of the rule was inverted so that instead of the standards neutralizing gender, gender neutralized the standards.

“Lifting a 95-pound artillery round must be done by a Marine, either male or female,” a Marine Corps memo noted. 95-pound artillery rounds are a gender-neutral standard. Like anything else on the battlefield, they are a true standard that cannot be graded on a gender curve. Training is meant to prepare soldiers for the reality of the battlefield. And the battlefield does not discriminate.

Affirmative action has lowered standards in most professions, but there are professions where lowering standards is impossible. Colleges can accept poorer students and companies can reserve jobs based on quotas. The cost of unqualified employees in the workplace is financial, but the cost of unqualified soldiers on the battlefield is lethal.

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The PA, for its part, is making threats about what it will do if the talks don’t start up again. Israel Hayom reports that “The Palestinians have done all the legal work necessary to join 63 U.N. agencies, conventions and treaties [and are] planning to apply as a state to 16 international organizations if peace talks with Israel [do] not resume by June.”

The Palestinians want to make this unilateral-statehood push on the basis of the UN vote last November that gave them the status of a nonmember observer state. The United States (along with Israel, of course) was one of the few countries voting “no” and, at least declaratively, strongly opposed the Palestinian move.

Meanwhile, not for the first time, the Palestinians—both official bodies and civilians—have been engaging in behavior not notably consonant with visions of peace.

Earlier this week it was reported that:

A Palestinian man who was detained by the Palestinian Authority security forces in Hebron has lost the ability to speak as a result of severe torture, according to a report released by the Independent Commission for Human Rights.

Mohamed Abdel Karim Dar of Hebron was hospitalized after being tortured while in detention, the report, which documented 28 cases of torture in PA prisons in the West Bank last month, said.

Dar had been detained by agents belonging to the PA’s Preventive Security Service and held in solitary confinement, the document said.

“He lost the ability to speak and suffered from wounds to his body as a result of banging his head against the wall and tying his hands while being held in solitary confinement,” the report added….

The organization…said that it had received complaints of torture and mistreatment against other branches of the PA security forces in the West Bank—13 against the police, seven against the Preventive Security Service, seven against the General Intelligence Service and one against Military Intelligence.

Earlier this month World Tribune reported that

Britain…has been playing a major role in training and financing Palestinian security forces in the West Bank…. [O]fficials said Britain has been training and advising virtually every major PA security force, often in coordination with the United States.

The report goes on to note that British intelligence “has repeatedly urged PA security commanders to stop torture,” but “acknowledged that torture and abuse continued in PA detention facilities against Hamas suspects and pro-democracy activists.”

The report later specifically mentions the Preventive Security Service and the General Intelligence Service as two of the outfits being trained by Britain “often” with U.S. cooperation.

And on Tuesday it was reported that

Over the past three months, some 200 firebombs and 80 explosive devices have been thrown at worshippers and Israeli soldiers at Rachel’s Tomb on the outskirts of Bethlehem in the West Bank.

The figures were provided by senior Israel Defense Forces and Border Police officers on Monday during a meeting of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. The committee gathered to discuss the security threats facing worshippers at the tomb.

Committee Chairman MK Avigdor Lieberman instructed the army to examine options to assure the safety of the worshippers and present the plans to the committee in one month.

The tomb, traditionally considered the burial place of the biblical matriarch Rachel, is a tiny enclave just south of Jerusalem already surrounded by thirty-foot walls and guarded round-the-clock by Israeli soldiers because of persistent Palestinian attacks for years.

Although the report doesn’t mention who the bomb-throwers are, they can be presumed to be mainly Palestinian civilians incited by the PA’s pervasive anti-Jewish education, preaching, and media.

Here, then, is a suggested agenda for Secretary Kerry’s next talks with the Palestinians:

● Threaten a complete cutoff of U.S. aid if they go through with the unilateral-statehood moves—a direct flouting of the official U.S. position over the past 20 years, including U.S. signatures on several Israel-Palestinian agreements, that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is only to be resolved through negotiations.

● Raise very seriously the issue of torture, since it is not at all clear why the U.S., along with Britain, should be training forces that torture pro-democracy activists.

● Demand, once and for all, an end to official PA incitement, since, again, it is not at all clear why the U.S. should be supporting an entity whose population—among much else—persistently violently attacks a biblical shrine.

It’s to be feared, though, that instead of taking such an approach, Kerry—who has already pressured Israel to free heinous terrorists so as to appease the PA, and lauded proposals by the Qatari prime minister to make Israel militarily indefensible—will instead be turning most, if not all, of the pressure on Israel.

In this bleak picture, the Obama administration’s current troubles are a ray of light.

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This is just a continuation of President Obama’s infatuation with Erdogan. When the two leaders met at the Seoul, South Korea, Nuclear Security Summit in March of 2012, Obama called Erdogan his “friend and colleague….We find ourselves in frequent agreement upon a wide range of issues.” Not content with this level of praise, Obama added that he considered Erdogan “an outstanding partner and an outstanding friend” who has displayed “outstanding leadership.” In fact, Obama so admires Erdogan’s “outstanding leadership” that Obama has allowed the United States to lead from behind Turkey in Libya and Syria, sucking the U.S. into a swamp inhabited by Islamist jihadists.

As Barry Rubin, the director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal explained:

“Once again the Turkish government has taken the lead on U.S. policy by pushing for direct U.S. aid to the rebels. That means giving money, weapons, and other aid to the Muslim Brotherhood and more radical groups to take power because the real moderates in the Syrian opposition are rare.”

Obama fancies Turkey as a model of a modern democratic Islamic state.  At their joint news conference last week, Obama praised Erdogan’s “reforms” and  said “we will support efforts in Turkey to uphold the rule of law and good governance and human rights for all.”

Erdogan’s idea of democracy is an electoral system that he can manipulate in order to remain in power. His Islamist party has moved inexorably to replace the secular republic established by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk with an Islamic state.  Erdogan’s jails have housed more journalists than any other country in the world, including Iran and Russia.  And talking about Russia, Erdogan appears to be taking a page out of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s playbook. Like Putin, Erdogan plans to play musical chairs between the prime minister post he now holds but cannot run for again under his party’s rules, and the presidency which he is intent on taking over in 2014 and converting into the country’s most powerful position from the symbolic one it is today. Erdogan will ram through whatever changes to the constitution are necessary to make this happen if a consensus cannot be reached.

“Turkey would walk into a dark dictatorship,” said Riza Turmen, a deputy from the opposition Republican People’s Party. “Turkey is already on this path. The parliament is unable to fulfill its duties even in a parliamentary system. The judiciary is not independent, the press is not free,” he told Reuters.

At last week’s joint news conference, President Obama lauded Erdogan’s supposed efforts to “normalize relations with Israel.” Erdogan then proceeded contemptibly to use the joint news conference to announce in Obama’s presence that he will be visiting Gaza next month, after previously rejecting Secretary of State John Kerry’s request not to go there at this time because it could interfere with just such a normalization of relations. Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh claimed that Erdogan’s upcoming visit to Gaza “emphasizes that the era of U.S. tutelage has ended.”

Aside from Barack Obama, Haniyeh has been one of Erdogan’s biggest cheerleaders.  Back in 2010, Haniyeh said: “Mr. Erdoğan has become our voice and won hearts of all Palestinians. We began naming our children after Tayyip Erdoğan. The name of Erdoğan has been immortalized in Palestine.” He also called Turkey “the new Ottoman.”

In his description of Turkey under Erdogan’s leadership as “the new Ottoman,” Haniyeh has a much better idea of Erdogan’s true agenda than President Obama does. Obama thinks that Turkey, like the United States, is interested in removing President Bashar Hafez al- Assad from power in Syria in order to bring about a free Syria “that is intact and inclusive of all ethnic and religious groups,” as Obama put it in his joint news conference with Erdogan last week.  That may be Obama’s naive aspiration but, as Hamas leader Haniyeh knows, Erdogan is interested in building “the new Ottoman” in the entire region, which means promoting revolutionary Sunni Islamism under Turkey’s leadership. Erdogan is using Obama to advance his Islamist agenda.

No doubt Erdogan will use his upcoming Gaza visit to further solidify Turkey’s prestige in the Muslim world, which will also help him politically at home. Expect, for example, Erdogan to push publicly for Israel to completely lift its embargo on the Gaza Strip. Expect him also to mark the three-year anniversary of the incident involving the Turkish-owned Mavi Marmara vessel in which a number of Turkish radicals lost their lives as they attempted violently to break Israel’s legal naval blockade of Gaza. They had assaulted Israeli naval commandos trying to stop the blockade-running ship. The radicals were heard chanting the jihad call to arms honoring Muhammad’s massacre of the Jews of Arabia: “Khybar, Khybar, O Jews, the army of Muhammad will return.”

Erdogan has exploited the Mavi Marmara incident for propaganda purposes for three years. But this was not just exploitation of an opportunity that happened to present itself to Erdogan. In fact, Erdogan was reportedly supportive of the flotilla idea all along before it set sail, because it would create a confrontation with Israel that would cost Israel in the court of public opinion, which is precisely what happened. A journalist on board the Mavi Marmara with good connections to government officials and the IHH group that organized the flotilla stated: “The Turkish government was behind the flotilla to the Gaza Strip and its objective was to embarrass Israel: ‘The Turks set a trap for you and you fell into it.’ The flotilla was organized with the support of the Turkish government and Prime Minister Erdogan gave the instructions for it to set sail. That was despite the fact that everyone knew it would never reach its destination.”

Immediately after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at the urging of President Obama, apologized to Erdogan for the Marmara operation and committed to reach final agreement on compensation, Erdogan began backtracking from his own promise to restore full diplomatic relations with Israel and stop certain legal proceedings brought against Israeli soldiers.

Erdogan told Turkish reporters that it was too early to talk about dropping the Mavi Marmara case against the Israeli soldiers, and that normalizing diplomatic relations would come gradually. “We will see what will be put into practice during the process. If they move forward in a promising way, we will make our contribution,” Erdogan said.

Turkey is reportedly holding out for extraordinarily high compensation which, even if paid, would not satisfy some of the families of the radicals who became “martyrs” on the Mavi Marmara.

Yet, in the face of Erdogan’s continued anti-Israel rhetoric and his backtracking on his promises of normalization, Obama still made a special point at last week’s joint news conference “to note the Prime Minister’s efforts to normalize relations with Israel.”

Obama continues to play right into Erdogan’s hands as the devious Islamist leader prepares to visit with the Hamas terrorists in Gaza next month, to provide weapons and other support to Islamist jihadists in Syria and to consolidate his increasingly authoritarian power at home.

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The Gang discussed Will a Price Be Paid for the Scandals? The dialogue occurred in Part II and focused on whether the administration’s minions will succeed in making it all go away. The discussion was followed by a spotlight on: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s Islamic Engravings on a Cabin Wall, in which the guests reflected on how a jihadist has explained that Allah made him do it — but how the media still can’t find a motive.

Part I focused on: When Scandals Rocked Obama’s World.

To watch both parts of the two part series, see below:

Part I:

Part II:

You can make sure that Jamie Glazov Productions continues to take you where no other media programs dare to go. Help us by clicking here and making a tax deductible contribution today. To see the archives of The Glazov Gang, click here.

Pastor Bob Roberts. Jr. is known for his efforts to build-bridges with Muslims. He spoke at the “Christ at the Checkpoint” conference put together by Palestinian Christians at Bethlehem Bible College. So did Florida Pastor Joel C. Hunter, who has been negative attention for his association with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity. Hunter is also critical of “Christian Zionists.”

An article posted on Hunter’s website reports how the “Christ at the Checkpoint” audience, including students from Wheaton and Eastern Universities, “were moved by the testimony of Palestinian men and women who shared the pain and suffering they experience on a daily basis caused primarily by the continuing occupation.”

Pastor Roberts reacted to the anti-Islam Innocence of Muslims video by suggesting that governments crack down on its distribution. He said, “There is a ‘clear and present’ danger the U.S. courts have ruled in regard to freedom of speech—I think that has to extend globally.”

In January, NorthWood Church hosted Azhar Azeez, Vice President of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). ISNA is an unindicted co-conspirator in a major terrorism-financing trial. Federal prosecutors labeled ISNA a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity, a fact confirmed by the Brotherhood’s own secret documents.

In November, his church’s Global Faith Forum will bring the spotlight to his interfaith efforts and those involved in them. Event speakers include Rep. Kay Graner (R-TX), former South Carolina Governor David Beasley and Christianity Today editor Mark Galli, but they aren’t the main attractions.

The conference website’s home page proudly advertises Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the U.S. from 2005 to 2007, as a main speaker. Before that, he was the Saudi foreign intelligence chief from 1977 to 2001, making him a top figure in Saudi Arabia’s proliferation of Wahhabism around the world for over 20 years. He represented a Sharia-based government that persecutes Christians.

Faisal Bin Muammar was an advisor at the Saudi Royal Court and Secretary-General of the Riyadh-based King Abdul Aziz Center for National Dialogue.

Safi Kaskas is a co-founder of East West University in Chicago and a “strategy consultant for a number of business organizations in the USA and Saudi Arabia.” He is a member of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists. A 1991 U.S. Muslim Brotherhood memo identifies AMSS as one of “our organizations and the organizations of our friends.” The memo says its “work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” The AMSS is also closely linked to the International Institute of Islamic Thought.

Another main speaker is Professor John Esposito, one of the top non-Muslim supporters of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood network. He is a frequent guest speaker at their events and was a witness for the defense in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation.

The aforementioned Azhar Azeez is again speaking. He is the Vice President of ISNA and has been on its Executive Council since 2002. He is also the senior National Director of Islamic Relief USA, a charity linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Wadah Khanfar was the director-general of Al-Jazeera from 2006 to 2011. Al-Jazeera’s extremism is well-documented. The Arabic station even gives Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yousef al-Qaradawi a weekly show.

Ayatollah Ahmad Iravani is President of the Center for the Study of Islam and the Middle East. He’s also been a teacher for 10 years at the Catholic University of America. He graduated from Qom, Iran and has taught Sharia Law in Tehran. He’s also participated in Catholic-Muslim dialogues called “A Common Word” that includes allies of Qaradawi.

Imam Zia ul Haque Sheikh is a member of the North American Imams Federation. Radical imam Siraj Wahhaj has served on the Board of Trustees. Its website lists Ashrafuz Zaman Khan as its President. Bangladesh has charged him with war crimes from his days in the Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami.

Dahlia Mogahed is from the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies and is a friend of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entities. In 2008, she said that CAIR and ISNA were designated as unindicted co-conspirators by the federal government in order “to silence, you know, institution-building among Muslims. And the way o do it is [to] malign these groups. And it’s kind of a witch hunt.”

Suhail Khan is a former Bush Administration official and Senior Fellow for Christian-Muslim Understanding at the Institute for Global Engagement. He has been accused of helping U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entities gain influence in the Bush Administration after 9/11 and of having Brotherhood ties himself. He denies that the Muslim Brotherhood even exists in America.

Rev. Jack Sara is President of Bethlehem Bible College and Pastor with the Evangelical Alliance Church in the Holy Land. The College put together the “Christ at the Checkpoint” conference and has a long relatonship with Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding.

It wouldn’t be surprising if Pastor Roberts didn’t know who he was dealing with. After all, he cited Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yousef al-Qaradawi as a “key Islamic leader” condemning anti-American violence. The desire for interfaith credentials seems to surpass the desire to have a standard.

This article was sponsored by the Institute on Religion and Democracy.

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Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Karen Lewis

A grade schooler took the stage and addressed a crowd of more than one thousand Chicago teachers, local politicians, and an assortment of communist, socialists, and other radicals protesting the upcoming closure of more than 50 Chicago schools. The child, a student at one of the schools scheduled to be closed, blasted Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel in a speech that lasted several minutes and largely parroted the positions held by the Chicago Teachers Union.

All of this occurred at a rally sponsored by the Chicago Teachers Union at Richard J. Daley Plaza in Chicago May 20, 2013. The rally was the most recent in a series of rallies sponsored by the CTU to protest the closure of these schools. Each of these rallies, as Front Page Magazine has previously documented, is attended not only by Chicago power elite, but also by a large number of radicals. This one was no exception.

CTU members hold a socialist sign.

Teacher wearing shirt promoting the radical organization Teachers for Social Justice.

One of the many attendees from Socialist Worker.

Here is a CTU member, and Chicago public school employee, addressing the crowd and railing against Wal-Mart, calling for a “living wage,” among a series of boilerplate left-wing demands.

The child mentioned above, whom Front Page Magazine was unable to identify, addressed the crowd and demanded that Rahm Emanuel halt all school closures and fully fund all neighborhood schools.

Two members of Occupy Chicago in trademark masks.

A photo of CTU members on flyer for upcoming socialist conference.

In a sign of radical protests to come, a junior in the Philadelphia public school system addressed the crowd. This particular student was a lead organizer in a new phenomenon for left-wing radicals: student unions. She mentions toward the end of the video that several thousand students purposely missed school for a day in protest of several school closures in Philadelphia.

The use of children as props was especially disturbing. Most of the children at this rally weren’t old enough to understand the many competing and complicated issues that are behind the closure of these schools. Yet all of them had signs or made speeches that mirrored the positions of the members of the CTU, and thus, presumably, their own teachers.

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“There are some ideas so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them” (George Orwell)

Columbia University Professor Joseph Massad is blind to reality.  His virulent anti-Zionist streak leads him to the most laughable constructs:  In “The last of the Semites,” Massad wants us to believe that the Zionist effort to remove the Jews from Europe in the 1930s and 1940s (to save them from imminent extermination) is undistinguishable from Nazi anti-Semitism! (Update: Al-Jazeera just pulled Massad’s article from their website, as announced here on May 19, 2013).

Two parties can be ferociously opposed to each other’s ideologies and yet unite temporarily to pursue a common strategic objective.  If Massad is not aware of this reality, he should revisit WWII and extend his ludicrous parallels between the Zionists and the Nazis to the British-American Allies who pursued the same military objective as the Soviets, while they despised Stalin’s ideology.  Is this too hard for Massad to comprehend?

It is clear that the sole purpose of Massad’s article is to delegitimize Israel.  This tiresome propaganda – driven primarily by envy, and buttressed by bankrupt Marxist dogmas and their unholy alliance with radical Islam – has been peddled over and over again to little or no effect.  Now, Massad tries a new thread, plucked out of ludicrous fantasies, without the slightest corroborating facts and with omissions galore not to disturb his narrative.

And so we read one enormity after another in Massad 4,000-word article:

• The ancestral connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel was concocted by the Protestant Reformation;
• Most Jews were opposed to Zionism, up to the 1940s;
• Lord Balfour was an anti-Semite;
• The Nazis and the Zionists showed “ideological similitude”;
• The totalitarianism inherent in Nazism and Communism was mere U.S. propaganda;
• The (derisively called) “Judeo-Christian civilisation” was the product of European and American white supremacy, now turned against Arabs and Muslims;
• The current relations between Germany and Israel are a continuation of past Nazi policies;
• Israel and Zionism were not the victims of Nazis because “[the Nazis] killed the majority of Jewish enemies of Zionism”;
• The Palestinians are the only remaining “Semites” and the last remaining bastion against anti-Semitism;
• The Jews “have nothing to do with Palestine”;
• The Zionist project is aggressive, colonialist, imperialist and tainted by “racial discrimination”;
• The Jews had their “nations” in Europe before they “forcibly settled the land of another people”;
• Israel’s claim of being the land of the Jewish people is “the most anti-Semitic claim of all.”

And what is the main voice that Massad quotes to support his narrative? Yasser Arafat, in his speech at the UN in November 1974!  In the wake of multiple plane hijackings, the massacre at the Munich Olympics and the murder of school children in Ma’alot – acts of terror committed by the PLO and its affiliates – Arafat delivered his infamous speech at the UN.  This was the first time a terrorist leader was welcomed and applauded at the General Assembly. He rehashed all the Marxist buzzwords (aggression, imperialism, colonialism, racism, etc.) that he diligently learned from his KGB handlers to attack Israelis and Zionists, which he branded “terrorists [and] war criminals”.  This is the kind of inversion of reality that Massad embraces in his fantasy world of historical revisionism.

Furthermore, in his desperate attempt to deny the Jewish people their national aspirations in their ancestral land, Massad declares that “the Palestinians have always insisted that the homelands of European Jews were their European countries and not Palestine.” Quite an authoritative source! This blatant theft of identity from the Jewish people, which is still condoned with impunity in many quarters, is specifically hailed as an undisputed truth in Article 20 of the PLO National Charter (1968).

It must be hard for anyone to be proven wrong after a lifetime spent in defending a losing cause.  The burning envy generated by Israel’s survival, progress and astonishing accomplishments against all odds in just a few decades must reduce its detractors to resort to claims of victimhood and self-righteousness, no matter how baseless.  Massad does not hesitate to escalate the accusations directed against Zionism to ever more ridiculous levels:  Now, the Zionists are the real Nazis and the Palestinians are the last remaining fighters against anti-Semitism!  Considering the growing anti-Jewish indoctrination of Palestinian school children and the hateful admonitions contained in the Hamas Charter, Massad’s ludicrous claims are nothing but a thinly veiled burst of Freudian projection.

The unusual insistence on race-related notions in Massad’s article (no less than 18 instances) betrays an obsession dear to the anti-Israel crowd.  Launched at the UN General Assembly in 1975 (Resolution 3379), the slanderous accusation equating Zionism – the legitimate national movement of the Jewish people – to racism is a reflection of the speech Arafat delivered at the UN a year earlier, and is now raised again by Massad (“European Jews … became the elements of settler colonialism intimately allied to racial discrimination”), even though this infamous resolution was rescinded in 1991.  But anti-Jewish hatred never seems to go away.  The “Zionism = racism” slander was revived at the Durban Conference in 2001, to give Massad and his fellow travelers a new lease on a life of hatred.

Massad cannot admit that the Jews have returned to their ancestral land and that the reconstitution of the Jewish State was enshrined in international law in 1920.  This incontrovertible truth would blow his narrative to pieces and would deprive him of his raging outbursts against Israel, Zionism and the Jewish people.

I know it’s next to impossible to have a diehard propagandist acknowledge factual evidence, but can one still hope that a professor of Intellectual History at Columbia University is not totally impervious to established historical and legal facts?  In his latest article, Massad offers only a crude sophistry that may be welcomed as profound insight by many among the biased Middle East academics who are, often wilfully, disconnected from factual reality.

Salomon Benzimra is the co-founder of Canadians for Israel’s Legal Rights.

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There are, alas, few other signs of the area’s Viking heritage.

The story begins on May 14, when Stockholm police were forced to shoot a man who was wielding a machete at them. He died. The cops were immediately accused of police brutality. A “community group” called Megafonen urged locals to demonstrate “for social justice and again st police violence.”

Last Sunday evening, apparently acting upon this suggestion, Husby erupted in the kind of wide-scale “youth” violence that has plagued suburbs in France and elsewhere for years. A school, a garage, and almost 100 cars were set on fire. And a gang attacked a cop.

On Monday evening, in further accordance with the Gallic precedent, things got even worse. Chaos reigned. Different reports provided different details, some of them sketchy. There were explosions. As of 9:36 PM Monday, Stockholm time, it was being reported that police officers were “running for their lives from youth gangs.” Twenty or so masked “youths” threw rocks at police officers and firefighters.  A reporter for the newspaper Expressen narrowly missed being hit by a metal pipe. One report mentioned “youths” stealing fire hoses. When “youths” set fire to a parking garage, police had to evacuate fifty people from a nearby apartment house. Four or five “youths” beat up a cop on a bridge before he managed to flee. As he ran off, a girl could be heard laughing and shouting “Allah akbar!”

In Husby, at least three police cars were reported to have been vandalized. Meanwhile reports began to come in of cars on fire in other parts of western Stockholm. “The situation is escalating constantly,”  a police spokesperson said on Monday evening. Late that night, The Local reported that over 100 cars had been set on fire in Husby and that a local shopping center had been vandalized, causing injury to three police officers.

Although Megafonen had itself urged its readers to demonstrate against police violence, it “explained” the rioting, in one statement, as an expression of frustration over high unemployment. “There is a great deal of hopelessness and powerlessness among the young people here,” read a comment by the organization, which added that it was important to “understand” the root causes of the rioting “and to find out what we can do” to make things better. In what seemed to be a contradiction, Megafonen spokesperson Rami Al-Kamisi called the rioting a “reaction to police brutality against citizens, our neighbors,” and said: “We understand that people react like this.”

In Norway, Ragnhild Bjørnebekk, who works at the Oslo Police College as a “violence researcher” (in the otherwise stagnant European economy, there’s a growth field if I ever heard of one) said that the rioting in Husby is only the latest of several “youth disturbances” in Europe sparked by “suspicions of police violence.” (Yes, you know those trigger-happy Scandinavian police.) Mentioning riots that had taken place in recent years in Greece, Gothenberg, Malmö, Copenhagen, and various French cities, Bjørnebekk attributed them all to anger over police conduct. (“Allah akbar,” of course, is Arabic for “Down with police brutality.”) Still, Bjørnebekk found it important to mention that this kind of rioting is a relatively new phenomenon in northern Europe. “Setting fire to cars and trash containers during riots is typical of countries like France and Greece, but unusual in the Nordic countries,” Bjørnebekk said. (As if differences between Scandinavian and Mediterranean cultures had the slightest thing to do with any of this!)

To be sure, Bjørnebekk was right in suggesting that nightly car-burnings and the like are still not a fixed part of the cultural landscape in the Nordic countries as they are on the outskirts of Paris, Marseilles, and so on. Yes, there are stabbings, rapes, gay-bashings, Jew-bashings, acts of vandalism, and other gang activity aplenty; non-Muslims who live in certain parts of Stockholm, Malmö, Copenhagen, and (increasingly) Oslo are systematically tormented in schools and on the streets by “youths” who seem to grow bolder and more aggressive by the year. And yes, there have been “youth” riots in Scandinavia: on a couple of nights in January 2009, a violent mob of “youths” descended on downtown Oslo and smashed in the front windows of businesses in an area of several square blocks, effectively paralyzing the very heart of the city. The rioting, which was supposedly a response to Israeli actions in Gaza (and which has pretty much been dropped down the memory hole), stretched police resources to the limit. But no, I guess it’s fair to say, as Bjørnebekk does, that so far regular car-burnings haven’t been a major element of the Nordic mix.

As is usual, of course, in such cases, Swedish media reports on Monday night were almost uniformly careful to avoid using any word other than “youths” (or some equally innocuous term) to characterize the perpetrators of the violence. Although here and there between the lines it was clear enough what was going on, there was nothing you could really put your finger on until Dagbladet – the Norwegian one, note, not the Swedish one – dared to mention that girl shouting “Allah akbar!” By Tuesday morning, the Swedish media, while providing reasonably extensive coverage of the night’s events, seemed to be making an effort to suggest that it hadn’t really been all that bad and to emphasize that,  in any event, things had now quieted down. I did a pretty thorough online search of the major Swedish media, but couldn’t find any report on the rioting that included the word Islam or Muslim or any reference to the girl who shouted “Allah akbar!”

The emphasis was, shall we say, on other matters. One article in Expressen, for example, focused on the fact that a policeman had actually – gasp – dared to draw his weapon during the hubbub. (The paper actually had a video of this horrible act.) The cop put his gun back after being informed that the rioter he was aiming at was only thirteen years old. (Police later told VG that several of the participants in the evening’s festivities were as young as twelve.) On Tuesday morning, Megafon held a “well-attended” press conference the obvious intention of which was to turn the criminals into victims and the police into villains. The organization accused the police of deploying “excessive force” against the rioters; one speaker added the charge that cops, during the rampage, had used offensive language to describe immigrant-group members. Another speaker asked: “Who should you call when it’s the police who attack? I have no idea.” The meme that it had all been the fault of police overreach quickly established itself, with Norway’s Aftenposten stressing laments by Stockholm “youth” that the police are never punished for their abuse of power, while the “youth” are always blamed.

Meanwhile, a police officer who has worked for many years in western Stockholm (and who apparently preferred not to be identified) told Aftonbladet that the rioting, though horrible, amounted to “a typical day on the job.” He added: “People generally have no idea how serious it is, but there have been so many incidents in the past year that I’m sure it’ll end up with a police officer being killed.”

The latest reports, at this writing, confirm that all this is plainly only the beginnning. The early hours of Wednesday morning saw a new round of stories in the Scandinavian papers announcing that Stockholm was being beset by riots for the third night in a row. Among much else, stones had been thrown at a police station and a school had been set on fire. The rioting, moreover, had spread even further, to several other parts of the city that had been previously unaffected. Brief video here. Stay tuned. There will certainly be more developments on this front in the days to come.

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We begin with Rosen and his involvement with State Department advisor Steven Kim. Kim is a naturalized citizen from South Korea who was indicted in 2009 for telling Rosen that the intelligence community believed North Korea’s response to additional UN sanctions would be another test of its nuclear capabilities. Rosen published a story to that effect on June 11, 2009, noting that the CIA had received the information form sources inside North Korea.

That story was posted the same day a top-secret report was made available to Kim, arms expert with security clearance, and 95 other members of the intelligence community. Using the surveillance techniques described above, the FBI built a case that the information Rosen received came directly from those documents. Yet Kim did not obtain unauthorized access to top-secret information, steal or sell documents or secrets, or collaborate with the enemy. He gave exclusive information to a reporter, a reality that occurs every day. Furthermore, according to the New York Times, four months prior to disseminating the information for which he was indicted, Kim was asked by a State Department press officer to speak to Rosen about North Korea, “and the two began to talk and exchange e-mails,” the paper reported.

Despite this reality, Kim is facing 15 years in prison for violating the Espionage Act.

The Washington Post explains that in building the case against Kim, the DOJ resorted to the aforementioned tactics to build their case. Thus, despite having substantial amounts of evidence gleaned from Kim’s computer and phone records, Justice insisted they needed access to two days’ worth of Rosen’s personal emails, and all of his email exchanges with Kim. Those records necessitated a subpoena.

In an affidavit obtained by the Post, FBI agent Reginald Reyes revealed the DOJ’s rationale for seeking it. “From the beginning of their relationship, the Reporter asked, solicited and encouraged Mr. Kim to disclose sensitive United States internal documents and intelligence information about the Foreign Country” he wrote. “The Reporter did so by employing flattery and playing to Mr. Kim’s vanity and ego.”

More importantly, Reyes further declared there was evidence that Rosen had broken the law “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.” A federal judge signed off on the search warrant.

The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald explains the implications of targeting Rosen. “Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information,” he explains. “That fact, along with the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ–that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for ‘soliciting’ the disclosure of classified information–is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself.”

Fox News’ Brit Hume echoed that assessment. “The Obama-Holder Justice Department is now prepared to treat the ordinary newsgathering actives of reporters to seek information from government officials as a possible crime,” he warned.

As in the AP case, the DOJ again insisted it followed guidelines that require them to obtain information by other means prior to subpoenaing reporters’ phone records. According to the office of Ronald Machen Jr., the U.S. attorney for the District, the government “exhausted all reasonable non-media alternatives for collecting this evidence before seeking court approval for a search warrant.”

According to the Huffington Post, “non-media alternatives” is the key phrase obscuring an inconvenient truth. “The DOJ didn’t contact the AP before secretly obtaining two months of journalists’ phone records, nor did it contact Fox News before getting Rosen’s records, a break with the way the government traditionally deals with media outlets,” it reported.

The U.S. attorney’s statement contained more hair-splitting. “Based on the investigation and all of the facts known to date, no other individuals, including the reporter, have been charged since Mr. Kim was indicted nearly three years ago,” said a released statement.

The key word here is “charged.” Yesterday afternoon, one Fox staffer under DOJ scrutiny became three. In an incredible revelation, the emails of two additional Fox staffers, reporter William La Jeunesse and producer Mike Levine, appeared in an Inspector General’s (IG) report–on the Fast and Furious gun running scandal!

It remains unclear whether those emails were leaked by DOJ employees to whom they were sent, or the DOJ once again issued secret subpoenas to obtain them. ”What we don’t know at this point is if the sources within the Justice Department may have shared those emails with investigators, or if the Fox employees’ accounts were directly accessed by investigators,” Fox News correspondent Shannon Bream reported. ”It’s simply a question we cannot answer at this point.”

We do know that La Jeunesse broke numerous stories outlining the details of Fast and Furious, and Levine was also involved in reporting on the scandal. Yet according to Bream, none of the three men targeted were ever contacted by the administration.

Adding insult to injury, the IG’s Fast and Furious report reveals even more abuse by the DOJ: it confirms that U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke intentionally leaked a document aimed at smearing Fast and Furious whistleblower John Dodson. Furthermore, additional emails uncovered by the IG reveal other DOJ officials also discussed smearing Dodson, one of whom was Tracy Schmaler, the former Director of the Department’s Office of Public Affairs. She was forced to resign after it was discovered she was colluding with the radical leftist advocacy group Media Matters to smear those attempting to cover DOJ scandals.

Fox News’ executive vice president of news, Michael Clemente, made it clear the network would not be intimidated by the DOJ. ”We are outraged to learn today that James Rosen was named a criminal co-conspirator for simply doing his job as a reporter,” Clemente said statement. “In fact, it is downright chilling. We will unequivocally defend his right to operate as a member of what up until now has always been a free press.”

Last Wednesday, in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Holder denied any knowledge of the AP investigation, claiming he recused himself. “I was not the person involved in that decision,” he insisted. “I was recused in that matter as I described in a press conference held yesterday. The decision to issue this subpoena was made by the people presently involved in the case.”

It remains to be seen if Holder is also going to claim ignorance regarding Rosen, La Jeunesse and Levine.

Last Tuesday might have provided a clue. Holder told NPR he isn’t sure how many times the DOJ has seized similar information during his tenure. ”I’m not sure how many of those cases … I have actually signed off on,” Holder said. “I take them very seriously. I know that I have refused to sign a few, pushed a few back for modifications.”

Holder also declined to say whether the the Justice Department’s policy on searches of reporters’ records will be reviewed.

As for the president, last Thursday Obama defended the DOJ’s seizure of AP phone records–even as he failed to mention his administration has pursued more government officials for leaks than all previous administrations combined. “And so I make no apologies,” he said about going after “information that might compromise” the missions of U.S. personnel “or get themselves killed.”

Again, it remains to be seen if the president will also defend the efforts undertaken by the DOJ with regard to the staffers at Fox News.

Despite the attempts by the American left to equate this administration’s appalling behavior with Bush administration supporters calling for prosecution of reporters at the New York Times and other new organizations that exposed top-secret information regarding the eavesdropping on potential terrorist phone conversations, or terrorist financing schemes, no journalists were even accused, much less prosecuted, for revealing top-secret information.

Last week, in an interview with Democracy Now, James Goodale, former general council for the New York Times, revealed the likely motive for the administration’s determination to criminalize reporting of classified information. ”Obama has classified, I think, seven million–in one year, classified seven million documents,” he explained. “Everything is classified. So that would give the government the ability to control all its information on the theory that it’s classified. And if anybody asks for it and gets it, they’re complicit, and they’re going to go to jail. So that criminalizes the process, and it means that the dissemination of information, which is inevitable, out of the classified sources of that information will be stopped.”

That reality raises an extremely important question: who’s going to stop the Obama administration?

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Fourteen days after the September 11, 2012 attacks, Obama appeared at the United Nations to deliver a eulogy for the man he had not troubled to save and to declare that the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.

Obama denounced the “crude and disgusting video” that had “sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world” and explained that it couldn’t be banned only because of the pesky Constitution. Two days later, the man behind the video, a Coptic Christian protesting the Muslim persecution of Christians in Egypt, had been arrested. The actual perpetrators of the attack still walk the streets of Benghazi.

That lopsided injustice appeared to have been the plan all along. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had told Charles Woods, the father of murdered Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods, that the administration was going to arrest and prosecute the man who made the video.

It was the only promise that Obama and Clinton made about Benghazi which they faithfully kept. Everything else was a lie. Doubletalk had become an administration habit. Obama would say one thing and do another. Or he would loudly tell a lie and quietly speak some version of the truth in order to hedge his bets.

On May 13, 2013, standing alongside British Prime Minister David Cameron, Obama said, “The day after it happened, I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism.” The phrasing suggested an admission, rather than an assertion. A thing that had to be dragged out of him. But even that much was not true.

At the United Nations, Obama had not used the word, terrorism. On 60 Minutes, he carefully avoided calling it a terrorist attack. There and on The View, he took refuge in delaying tactics about a developing investigation that was doomed from the start because the FBI had no power to take any action in a city run by the same terrorist militias that had carried out the attacks.

In campaign speeches, Obama mentioned acts of terror, plural and unspecified, while administration proxies like Susan Rice blamed a YouTube movie trailer for the carnage and Obama and Clinton spent $70,000 on an apology commercial denouncing the video in Pakistan.

There was no question that the dominant message coming out of the White House after the attacks was that the trailer for The Innocence of Muslims was to blame. The infamous talking points trimmed away any mention of terrorism and reduced a heavily armed attack to a spontaneous protest over an online movie trailer.

This Sunday, Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer was sent to do a tour of the morning shows where he declared that Obama’s whereabouts during the attack were irrelevant and that the process by which the talking points were altered was likewise irrelevant.

At his joint press conference with Cameron, Obama had taken the same line, declaring the investigation a “sideshow” and insisting that there was nothing there and that no one had known what was going on. Gregory Hicks, the lead diplomatic figure in Libya, however had testified that everyone there knew that it was a terrorist attack and that it had nothing to do with the video.

At 2 AM, local time, Hicks had briefed Clinton. Despite everything the one man in the position to know what was happening was saying, the administration chose a disastrous and dishonest narrative instead.

The dishonesty isn’t ending any time soon.

At a joint press conference with Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, a known supporter of terrorism, Obama once again shifted the blame to Congress for a lack of security and the failure to intervene.

The myth that the State Department lacked the funds to provide security in Benghazi was the defense against accusations of administration malfeasance. But it’s a myth that fell apart when Charlene Lamb, the deputy assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, testified in Congress that budget issues had not prevented the hiring of more security personnel.

The Washington Post had pointed out that Congress would have provided supplemental security funding if it had been requested. Despite pleas from diplomats on the ground, it was not. Instead the State Department’s bureaucrats and donor diplomats were busy squandering money on all sorts of wasteful vanity projects.

The State Department had plenty of money. It just chose to use it in the wrong ways. It had millions to spend on embassy art, ridiculously overpriced Kindles and even on an Afghan YouTube channel.

At the press conference, Obama went so far as say, “We’re going to need Congress’s help in terms of increasing the number of our Marine Corps Guard who protect our embassies” when under him, not only were 20,000 Marines being fired, but at the presidential debate, Obama had mocked Romney’s objections to his drastic naval cuts by saying that we no longer needed outdated horses and bayonets.

The real reason that the Marines had not been there protecting Benghazi was the same reason that no military forces came to the rescue once the attack began. It was the same reason that Obama blamed the video and used the United Nations as a forum for denouncing that video, instead of denouncing terrorism.

The issue was never the budget. It was appeasement.

The United States was not incapable of using armed force over Benghazi. Obama’s first Libya lie, the one that led to the war, was the claim that Gaddafi forces were about to carry out a massacre in Benghazi. No such massacre had occurred anywhere or was going to occur, but it was enough for Obama to go to war, without ever admitting that he was at war.

Was the military power that was leveraged to defend Benghazi incapable of being leveraged to defend the mission in Benghazi? Was overthrowing Gaddafi really easier than protecting American diplomats and security personnel under siege?

Benghazi was, from beginning to end, a story of appeasement gone bad. The serial lies by a serial liar have covered up the ugly truth that American lives were sacrificed on the altar of appeasement. Four men are dead and a fifth has been locked up to keep the lie alive.

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Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

On the bright, beautiful, and crisp fall day that was early morning, September 11, 2001, few Americans were familiar with stealth jihad, or considered Islamic terrorism a threat to America.  Yet, there was a voice crying in the wilderness, warning of a danger that already existed here.  That voice belonged to Steven Emerson, whose documentary film titled Jihad in America was aired by PBS on November 21, 1994.  Islamic militant groups in America, including CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) began their protestations and intimidation even before the broadcast date.  Since the airing, the use of intimidation has been ramped up and gone global, having a stifling impact on terrorism/jihad-related broadcasts in the mainstream media throughout the Western world. This oppressive atmosphere has affected the conduct of Western governments, including the Obama administration.

Emerson’s newly released Jihad in America: The Grand Deception is a must-watch documentary — an educational tool for Americans to learn about the network of stealth Islamist jihadists in the U.S. that has grown in the aftermath of 9/11.  The fact that evil lurks just under the surface in America (brought to life last month at the Boston Marathon) seems to be difficult to acknowledge, yet ignoring it is at our peril.  Unfortunately, Americans have a short memory span, and most prefer to turn away from unpleasant realities, especially in the Obama Age.  Hence, all the more reason to circulate information about this essential documentary.

The 70-minute documentary by Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) deals with the covert structure and growing influence of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimun) and other such radical Muslim groups, masquerading under the deceitful moniker of apolitical religious groups, as well as civil rights groups in the U.S. This IPT documentary reveals how the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) has infiltrated the highest institutions of the land, including the Obama White House, the U.S. Congress, U.S. Departments of State and Homeland Security, Hollywood, the mainstream media, law enforcement in various states, the publishing industry and American museums.  The film not only presents examples of MB infiltration, but reveals how the MB and its affiliates intimidate policymakers to submit to their demands by their use of our open democracy to undermine our institutions, all of which is done to further their quest for global rule under Sharia law.

This film includes previously unseen interviews with articulate and most courageous Muslim individuals, former FBI agents and federal prosecutors, a prominent Hollywood director, journalists, as well as a top official of the Muslim Brotherhood.  This documentary features secretly recorded audio and video speeches of radical Islamists, including individual preachers and groups, original MB documents, and unsealed federal documents.

In an interview Steven Emerson had with Lou Dobbs of Fox News on January 21, 2013, the host introduced The Grand Deception as follows: “Our guest [Steven Emerson] says that the ‘Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamist off shoots are hiding in plain sight right here in the U.S.’”  What followed is Emerson’s explanation of the documentary title. “A group of Muslim Brotherhood activists secretly got together in Philadelphia in 1993 in a meeting that was actually wiretapped [the wiretaps have since been declassified] by the FBI.  They [the MB activists] openly talked about deception as the primary campaign tactic that they would use to change the image of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. by creating new front groups, by changing the terminology, and by claiming they were against terrorism publicly, but in fact raising funds for Hamas privately. The word deception is the word that I used in the title because that is exactly what is going on throughout the country with these radical Islamic groups.”

One of the radical Islamists the documentary presents is a Brooklyn, NY-based Imam named Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, who, according to Emerson, had been invited in 1991 to give an invocation to the U.S. Congress (the first Muslim to so) and would subsequently be recorded saying about the U.S., “You know what this country is? It is a garbage can, it is filthy and sick.” The film also points out that this anti-American, hate-spewing Imam, was invited to appear at anti-terrorism conferences and was paid by the U.S. government.

Muslim Brotherhood victories in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya have provided encouragement for the hundreds of MB cells worldwide, including those in the U.S.

The film shows Attorney General Eric Holder undergoing congressional drilling in 2010 from Rep. Lamar Smith, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, on how he refused to acknowledge the role of radical Muslims in terrorism on American soil and refused to use the words “radical Muslim” or “Muslim.”

In another frame of the film, Dr. Mamoun Fandy, an Egyptian-born American scholar, President of the Fandy Associates think tank and a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, declared that the MB is the “mother” of all radical Muslim groups.  He pointed out that “instead of isolating the MB, the West and the U.S. [especially under President Obama] have engaged them and regarded them as “moderate.” According to Fandy, the West was tremendously naïve about the nature and intentions of the MB.  According to Emerson (in conversation with this writer), Fandy was let go by Georgetown University because of his views on the MB.

The film records the spiritual leader of the MB, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, speaking to a Muslim audience in Toledo, OH and revealing the goals of the MB.  “We will conquer Europe and we will conquer America for Islam through religious proselytization” (dawa in Arabic). MB documents captured by the FBI in 1991 further reveal this insidious plan by the MB to conquer America for Islam.  It includes increased immigration and settlement as part of the MB’s plot of stealth Jihad, just as they have done in Europe.  Their aim is to destroy Western civilization from within by destabilizing “their miserable house,” and replacing it with God’s religion — Islam.

Others in the film include Kamal Helbawy, an MB leader who is quoted as saying “Anything mentioned in the Quran, we believe 100%.” Amir Abdel Malik Ali is shown addressing a Muslim Student Association event at UCLA in 2011, shouting “I will die to establish Islam in America,” and Dr. Zudhi Jasser, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), who, in an interview with Emerson, pointed out that “for Islamists like the MB their utopia is establishing Sharia [Islamic law] rule in America.”

Following the airing of the film, Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR in Los Angeles, accused Emerson of stirring up anti-Muslim feelings.  Ayloush employed the typical tactic used by Muslims when caught with the ugly truth about Islamists’ goals in the West. The Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) has been calling for a ban on what they consider “Islamophobia,” which is nothing less than an attempt to kill free speech.  The Obama administration has, however, concurred with the OIC and has banned references to Muslim or Islamic terrorism.  Emerson has challenged CAIR’s Ayloush to an open debate to discuss the facts featured in the film. To date, there has been no response from Ayloush.

This reporter asked Emerson for a conclusive remark on Jihad in America: The Grand Deception.  Emerson expressed disappointment at the lack of outrage on the part of the major media and cable TV networks to the collusion between the U.S. government (the Obama administration) and the Muslim Brotherhood.  He said that the TV networks refused to show his film.  Emerson is nevertheless optimistic that the truth he has revealed about the Muslim Brotherhood deep penetration into the highest echelons of the U.S. government and society will be become widely known in spite of the media and government obstructions.

For all Americans, Jihad in America -The Grand Deception is a must see.

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I still remember the shock of joy I felt at the news of the release of one such prisoner in February of 1987. Christian dissident Alexander Ogorodnikov had spent almost nine years in the Gulag for his leadership of the Christian Seminar, an underground movement that had sprung up in answer to the needs of young Christians of many denominations who had found faith in Jesus Christ and were hungry for a way of following Him in their daily lives that the institutional churches could not offer. It was because of this authenticity and practicality that the movement, which encompassed thousands across Russia, so threatened the Communist authorities that they arrested and imprisoned its leaders.

For years advocates had prayed, written letters to Congress, and sent “Return Receipt Requested” missives to Soviet government authorities and Gulag officials on Ogorodnikov’s behalf. At conferences and special gatherings we all added our names and personal messages on letters to Ogorodnikov himself – which he rarely received, but of which the Soviet authorities kept meticulous track.

In late 1986, I was one of a few dozen participants in a conference at Princeton University, hosted by Dr. Ernest Gordon, retired dean of the school’s chapel, and founder of the Christian Rescue Effort for the Emancipation of Dissidents (CREED). Rolling his R’s in disgust as only a Scotsman can do, Gordon read aloud a letter that Ogorodnikov had written to his mother in May, but only now had reached the West. As a former Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders infantry regiment officer and prisoner of the Japanese during WWII, on the Burma Railway, Gordon understood Ogorodnikov’s agony.

Ogorodnikov was in the depths of despair. He had already been in Soviet prison camp for seven and a half years. We were heartbroken as Gordon read how Ogorodnikov begged his mother to appeal to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet to order his execution by firing squad. As an Orthodox Christian, he would not commit suicide. “This is the only way for me to end the prospect of lifelong, painfully slow torture,” Ogorodnikov explained.

Soviet authorities intended to break Ogorodnikov because of his refusal to compromise, be silent, or even leave the Soviet Union rather than be sent to the Gulag as they had suggested when he was arrested in 1978. He suffered from malnutrition and related diseases. As a result of beatings and other mistreatment he was left partially paralyzed in his face and arm. His eyesight was also damaged because of the deliberate darkening of his cell.

Frequently Ogorodnikov was thrown into the shizo, punishment cell, where the temperature was below freezing. He wrote to his mother that he was “systematically deprived of books” and “constantly tortured by hunger and cold.”  He revealed that he was forbidden to pray and that his cross had been brutally torn from his neck 30 times.

“I have spent a total of 659 days on hunger strikes to protest their refusal to let me have a Bible and a prayer book,” he said. Forced feedings were often administered brutally during hunger strikes. The Soviet government had destroyed Ogorodnikov’s marriage to Yelena Levashova, the mother of his son, Dima, pressuring her to leave him by indicating that he would never be free. And they made him feel alone and forgotten by the world and his fellow Christians by keeping from him all the letters that had been sent to him over the years.

There was deep concern over Ogorodnikov’s fate in the notorious Perm Camp 36 if the United States and the world community did not intervene. And the United States and the world did – including President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who successfully linked human rights to national security in their foreign policy. On February 14, 1987, Ogorodnikov was informed that General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev had personally ordered his release. Later that year, I met Ogorodnikov – the flesh-and-blood answer to prayer – when he was the surprise guest at Dr. Gordon’s next CREED conference.

After his release, Ogorodnikov never rested. He fought for justice for other dissidents and raised funds to take care of those who had been physically and/or mentally broken by the Gulag. He also ministered to Armenian refugees who had fled from Islamist-dominated Nagorno-Karabakh. Even in freedom he was constantly harassed by the KGB, but he continued his work. He founded a new political party, the Christian Democratic Party, and an associated organization, the Christian Democratic Union of Russia (CDUR) that established the first private school in the Soviet Union.

In January of 1991, I was part of church two-week mission team to Moscow to encourage and help Ogorodnikov as he prepared to open the first soup kitchen in the Soviet Union. Ogorodnikov took us to see the building that would serve as the new soup kitchen, and he took us to see orphans in State custody that would soon be taken care of in a private, Christian orphanage. Our team provided hundreds of pounds of food to Ogorodnikov and his helpers who were already feeding the homeless on the streets and in the train station and feeding the old-age pensioners in their own flats. Our presence was also a declaration to the Soviet authorities that Ogorodnikov had friends and supporters of all that he was doing for Russia.

My meeting with Sasha.

A new biography Dissident for Life: Alexander Ogorodnikov and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in Russia, by Koenraad De Wolf (English edition 2013, Eerdmans) is a tribute to Ogorodnikov and all of those steadfast believers – in freedom, in human dignity, in God – “crushed, but not destroyed” by the Soviets. Their oppression and persecution was eloquent testimony, exposing the lies at the foundation of the Communism system and helping to bring down its edifice.

Dissident for Life brought back all the memories of my own experience of Alexander Ogorodnikov. But it also made me reflect on the significance of that experience as I had never realized while it was happening and wonder what experiences, what relationships in today’s ongoing cosmological fight for our freedom may ultimately be those that will make a similar difference.

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The incident began when four Muslims surrounded the priest and told him to hand over his cell phone. One thief knocked him unconscious. The attack may have been motivated by criminality and not jihad, but the two are part of a common trend.

There are over 750 government-designated “Sensitive Urban Zones” in France, referred to as “No-Go Zones” by Dr. Daniel Pipes. About 5 million Muslims live in these areas of France where law enforcement doesn’t exercise decisive control. When the authorities do have to step in, a violent backlash quickly arises. There are many videos of Muslim worshippers holding illegal prayers in the streets when their mosques overflow without any response from police.

On New Year’s, about 1,200 cars were set on fire and police clashed with residents in the Muslim-majority districts of Strasbourg and Mulhouse. In August, a two-day rampage was sparked when a Muslim was arrested for driving without a license around the time of a funeral. Massive riots have broken out in these no-go zones because of the hostility to reasonable law enforcement. Over half of the French prison population is Muslim, where many are radicalized.

A lack of integration is the most common factor in Islamic terrorists. These unassimilated areas are not just breeding grounds for criminals, but for extremism as well—particularly when foreign Islamist governments and organizations get involved.

The Saudi Arabia-based Muslim World League, described by Andrew McCarthy as “the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal vehicle for the international propagation of Islamic supremacist ideology,” is helping finance the construction of 200 new mosques. The French Council of the Muslim Faith wants to eventually double the 2,500 mosques in the country.

Qatar, the supposed U.S. “ally” that subsidizes the Muslim Brotherhood, is also active in France’s Muslim community. It is financing mosques and the Union of Islamic Organizations in France, the Muslim Brotherhood’s main branch there. It demands the government to pass a law against “Islamophobia.” The Qatari government is also investing $65 million in the suburbs where over 1 million Muslim immigrants live.

This isn’t purely an act of humanitarianism or a business investment. The Qatari constitution is based on Sharia Law. The Christians in Qatar, almost 6% of the population, are allowed to practice their faith but cannot proselytize  to Muslims. Hypocritically, Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani publicly pledged in December 2011 to “spare no effort” to proselytize the Islamic teachings of Muhammad al-Wahhab, the founder of what is often called “Wahhabism.”

In 2011, a secret French intelligence report warned of extremist trends in the city of Marseille, thanks to “self-appointed” and charismatic imams. Only a “relatively low” number of the 250,000 Muslims living there support violent jihad, but “Islamic fundamentalism has progressed to the point where it has won over the majority of the Muslim population.”

French President Sarkozy was not afraid to challenge the Islamist trend, even if it opened him up to false charges of “Islamophobia” and bigotry. In the months leading up to the election, his government instituted new requirements for citizenship, including language fluency, passing tests on history and culture and pledges of allegiance to “French values.”

On the one hand, Soeren Kern, who has closely watched the underreported Islamist trends in France, said Hollande’s victory over Sarkozy was “the first time that Muslims have determined the outcome of a presidential election in a major western European country; it is a preview of things to come.”

Hollande’s government has endorsed 150 new mosque projects including a mega-mosque in Paris that was touted as a step towards “progressively building a French Islam.”  Hollande also promised to grant amnesty to all 400,000 illegal Muslim immigrants and to modify the laws so non-citizen Muslim residents can vote in the municipal elections in 2014.

On the other hand, Hollande’s government has taken some action to encourage assimilation.

In August 2012, the French government re-designated 15 of the no-go zones as “Priority Security Zones.” Soeren Kern reported that this was part of a plan to reassert authority over the most crime-ridden zones. Aware of the resistance ahead, the French government deployed riot police, detectives and intelligence personnel. If the campaign is successful, another 40 of the no-go zones will become “Priority Security Zones.”

The Islamist trend in France must be reversed. Pew found that the current 6.5 million-strong Muslim population in France, which is 7% of the population, will grow to about 10.3% by 2030. That’s nowhere near a majority, but it’s enough to swing elections, politically Balkanize the country and create a cesspool for criminals and terrorists.

This article was sponsored by the Institute on Religion and Democracy.

Once favored to become pope, Scola made his remarks at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart for the opening of a conference focusing on Roman Emperor Constantine’s 313 Edict of Milan granting imperial toleration to Christianity.  Scola advocated a “healthy secularism” allowing religious freedom, defined by him as a “true litmus test” for a civilized society.  To Scola, this “freedom means above all encouraging religious pluralism and opening to all forms of religious expression,” including “eliminating laws that criminally punish blasphemy.”

As the Catholic cable television channel EWTN reported online, the role of blasphemy laws in Muslim-majority countries in persecuting Christians and other religious minorities formed the global context of Scola’s remarks.  As reviewed previously by this writer, the authors of Persecuted:  The Global Assault on Christians have extensively documented that “Christians are the single most widely persecuted religious group in the world today,” a “terrible trend…on the upswing.”  Moreover, “it is in the Muslim world where persecution of Christians is now most widespread, intense, and, ominously, increasing.”  Abolition of Muslim blasphemy laws, often used to prohibit propagation of Christian beliefs contradicting Muslim doctrine, would eliminate one important instrument of Islamic repression.

Such religious freedom would protect not just private rights, but also public peace.  “Religious freedom,” notes Scola’s fellow Catholic, Professor Thomas F. Farr of Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, & World Affairs, “the evidence shows, can be an antidote to religion-related extremism, including terrorism.”  Freedom, analyzes Farr, dilutes fanaticism by forcing various faiths to justify their claims intellectually without coercion in a marketplace of ideas.  “What if,” speculates Farr,

Osama Bin Laden had been raised in a Saudi Arabia that allowed for religious freedom?  What if, instead of being steeped exclusively in the toxic teachings of Wahhabism and Sayyid Qutb, he had been exposed to other forms of Islam, to critics of Islam, to other forms of religious belief, and to liberal religion-based arguments about justice and the common good?

Christians like Scola and Farr have a perfectly sound theological basis for faith-based advocacy of religious freedom.  As the prominent Protestant pastor and theologian John Piper has written, numerous Biblical verses relate that “Christ did his work by being insulted” in stark contrast to Islam in which the “work of Muhammad is based on being honored.”  As the somewhat religiously eclectic but committed freethinker Thomas Jefferson wrote to a majoritarian-Christian America in his landmark 1779 (adopted 1785) Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, “all attempts to influence” individual religious belief

by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations…are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to extend it by its influence on reason alone.

Ironically, Christian calls for religious freedom with respect to Islam would manifest precisely the Christian concept of the “church militant” (ecclesia militans).  Muslim entities like the 57 Muslim-majority member states (including “Palestine”) of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) have often tried to hide advocacy of de facto Islamic blasphemy laws behind a supposedly “ecumenical veneer” of opposition to “defamation of religion” in general.  Christian calls for religious freedom, come what may in criticism and/or condemnation of any particular faith, ostentatiously breaks ranks with this united front claimed by some Muslims, leaving them to defend religious repression on their own.

European opponents of blasphemy laws like Scola, though, will have to begin actually with their own continent.  Scola’s native Italy as well as seven other European countries (out of a total of 45, or 18%) had blasphemy laws according to a 2011 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life study.  Somewhat similar to blasphemy laws, laws against “defamation” of religion also existed in 36 European countries (80%), while collectively religious restrictions of various sorts exist in 47% of countries worldwide.

As many have already noted (see here, here, and here), ultimately arbitrary European enforcement of such laws today more often than not involve the Islamic faith of recently arrived immigrant communities, not Europe’s historically dominant Judeo-Christian beliefs.  Accordingly, concerns about limiting free speech with respect to Islam played a role in the 2012 abolition of the blasphemy law in one of the eight European countries listed by Pew in 2011, Holland.  The Dutch precedent is a model to follow for all faithful people who believe that they have a religious truth that will set free, a truth that need not fear freedom.

This article was sponsored by The Legal Project, an activity of the Middle East Forum.

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But is Nigeria more multicultural than Sweden? Yes, if you’re referring to the fact that it has over 250 native ethnic and linguistic groups with a wide range of cultures, from Fula to Hausa to Yoruba. But if you’re talking about multiculturalism as an ideology that compels public servants to view the establishment of greater and greater ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity as an undivided virtue, regardless of all objective evidence to the contrary, Nigeria has nothing on Sweden. While only a tiny minority of Nigeria’s population is of foreign origin, over 25% of Sweden’s inhabitants have a foreign background. And people like Borg are determined to drive that number steadily higher, by hook or by crook – on the insane grounds that a nation like Sweden should look to a nation like Nigeria as a model for its own future development.

Indeed, it’s a measure of the utter irrationality of the modern religion known as multiculturalism that a Western politician like Borg is able to lavish such praise on an overpopulated, underdeveloped African country whose very name is synonymous with cheesy Internet scams; a country that has a life expectancy of 47 years, a 32% illiteracy rate, a political culture rife with corruption, and a deplorable human-rights record; a country where twelve of the 36 states are governed according to sharia law,  where over a hundred people perished in Muslim riots over the 2002 Miss World pageant, and where jihadist violence has taken hundreds of lives in recent years.

What the hell is up with Sweden? It’s a question people have been asking for decades, and in a new book, The Swedish Story, Swedish blogger Jon Sjunnesson sets out to answer it. And he does an effective job of it: even for those of us who have paid no small amount of attention to Sweden over the years, Sjunnesson’s book offers a helpful overview of the Swedish national character and the history of the Swedish welfare state, perceptively singling out the distinctive traits that have made Sweden the “extreme experiment” that it is and succinctly summing up some of the more notorious episodes in modern Swedish history.  But this isn’t all: he also illuminates socialism and the socialist mind in a way that I think will be useful for Americans – for what he’s drawn here is a vivid map of the territory into which our president and many of his cronies and supporters wish to lead us.

Take education. Of course, real education means, above all, helping students learn how to think critically. In a country like Sweden, however, schools and universities are primarily sites of indoctrination whose purpose is to create good socialists. If the Swedish system celebrates kids who are great at sports while all but punishing kids who stand out academically (“Excellence of bodies yes, brains no”), part of the reason is a fanatical devotion to equality of result, and part is an awareness that kids with first-rate minds are potential critics of the system. Hence socialism’s preference for mediocrity over excellence.

And, one might add, for social science over hard science. Yes, Sweden awards Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics, and medicine, but its educational system discourages an interest in math and science – because, you see, experts in these fields end up serving industry, which exploits workers and produces environmentally hazardous waste. For decades, consequently, Sweden has suffered a deficit of scientists, engineers, doctors, and technicians. Students who choose to enter these fields, furthermore, tend to be so ill-prepared that they “need remedial classes.” There’s also a lack of plumbers, construction workers, and other laborers – for just as Sweden’s social engineers distrust science, they look down on vocations involving manual labor.

In Sweden, the brainwashing starts early – not in school, but in day care. No fewer than 85% of Swedish children under age three are in municipal (or municipally administered) day care. This figure is probably the highest percentage in the world. It is, Sjunnesson notes, the kind of experiment in mass, government-controlled child-rearing that Plato envisioned in his Republic and that “was central in Orwell’s and Huxley’s dystopias.” If you’re a Swedish parent who doesn’t want your kid brought up to be a good little socialist soldier – well, good luck: you have few if any real alternatives. Parents who don’t put their kids in day care “are often suspect in the eyes of social authority.” As for home schooling, it’s forbidden under a 2010 law (the only such legislation in the EU aside from a German ban enacted in 1938 because “the Nazi party did not want anyone else to school the young”). In any event, the cause of home schooling hasn’t gained much traction among Swedes, who have been efficiently trained to view any expression of unease over state-run education as “deranged” and to accept the socialist proposition that children belong not to their parents but to the state.

Sjunnesson makes a crucial point about the high tax rates in Sweden and other Nordic countries. The high taxes are necessary, of course, to fund the welfare state. But they serve another purpose. Socialists recognize members of the middle class, who are all too frequently driven by an ambition to better their circumstances, as a potential threat to the authority of socialists, whose machinations make such ambitions harder to fulfill. How to nip this nuisance in the bud? Easy: impose sky-high taxes on them. For, as Sjunnesson points out, people who have been able to accumulate some savings in the bank are better positioned to “stand up against authority” and “rise with self-confidence”; they’re not “as servile as if they had nothing.” Sweden’s tax system, then, is designed to make it extremely hard for Swedes to save money – and it works: compared to other Western countries, “Swedes have unusually small amounts of savings.” And consequently, people who might otherwise be vocal critics of the socialist welfare state are very aware of being dependent on it, knowing that if they get sick or lose their jobs they won’t have their own resources to fall back on. Confiscatory tax, then, serves not only as a means of enriching and expanding the socialist state, but as a form, itself, of socialist control.

“Meek as sheep”: that’s how Sjunnesson describes his fellow Swedes. They’re afflicted with a “silent conformism,” the result of a “spiral of silence” driven by a “fear of exclusion” and a perceived need to maintain a social order founded on perceived consensus views. Whether the perceived consensus views actually are the consensus views doesn’t matter: “When no opposing views are heard, people do not believe there are any even if they themselves dissent.” Those who do dare to dissent are branded as extreme – even though those “extreme” views may be thoroughly mainstream in other Western countries – and are often targeted for violence by self-styled “anti-fascists” who behave exactly like fascists. Sweden is, note well, a country in which members of the anti-establishment Sweden Democrats Party are demonized for dissenting civilly and peacefully, while certain entertainers are celebrated for singing about their desire to commit acts of violence against Sweden Democrats. Then there’s the story of how a frank Fox News report on the Islamization of the city of Malmö led an irate member of Parliament to demand that the Swedish counterpart to the FCC close down Fox News’s operation in Sweden. As Sjunnesson sums it up: “freedom of speech means little in Sweden.”

There’s much more of interest in this book. About, for example, the inculcation of virulently anti-male attitudes at all levels of the Swedish educational system. (“Boys cry when they hear how bad they and their father are and men have always been.”) About how the system rewards irresponsibility on the part of young unmarried mothers and the men who impregnate them. (“With a baby, a single parent sidesteps all waiting lines and the child may be the only means to an apartment for decades.”) About a national self-hatred so fierce that “schools have asked pupils not to wear [Swedish flag] t-shirts or wave the yellow and blue flag as it could be interpreted as racist.” About a country where adults admire and envy youth beyond all reason, and accordingly exhibit greater levels of hedonism and infantilism than their counterparts anywhere else on the planet. And about levels of anti-Semitism that made international headlines yet again just the other day, when Israel’s Eurovision delegation was harassed and threatened on the streets of Malmö.

For an American reader, Sjunnesson’s book about a supposedly free country where the media march in lockstep and where dissent can be dangerous carries a special resonance in the wake of revelations that the IRS has targeted conservative groups and the Justice Department has snooped on AP and Fox News journalists. To some observers, the depth of the Obama administration’s hostility toward any hint of criticism in the media has been especially puzzling, given that most news media have in fact been absurdly supportive and protective of Obama throughout his presidency. But to a true socialist government, any dissent is intolerable. In Norway, where the domination of the news market by state-run TV channels and radio stations and by state-subsidized newspapers already give the government a very strong hand in shaping the media message about itself, officials have now gone a step further, proposing that the state award grants to fund journalistic projects of its own choosing – an outrageous suggestion in a democratic country, but a no-brainer for those with a socialist mindset.

In socialist countries, after all, the state doesn’t exist to serve the people; the people exist to be shaped into unquestioning servants of the state – servants who accept that the state is them and that they are the state. In such countries, it’s taken for granted that there’s no need to place any limit on state power or to provide mechanisms to protect citizens from that power, because, by definition, as Sjunnesson puts it, “the state always is good.” We may mock the European Union for banning jugs or bowls of olive oil on restaurant tables, but this is what socialism does: the powers that be need to have their fingers in every pie, need to minimize the number of situations under which freedom may actually be experienced, need to accustom citizens to a society in which their lives are increasingly regulated. They need, in short, to create a country in which the land and the system are, in the minds of the general public, one – a country, that is, in which the people simply cannot imagine the nation itself without the socialist state.

No so-called democracy on earth has gone as far in this direction as Sweden. For the Swedish people, Sjunneson says, “the country is the welfare state…Swedes have have no home but the welfare state and no identity outside its yarn” – outside, in other words, its narrative about itself. Winston Smith, Orwell’s narrator in 1984, suggests that the only hope of overthrowing the totalitarian government of his native Oceania lies with “the proles”; Sjunneson, for his part, believes that his fellow Swedes are so brainwashed by welfare-state propaganda that the only way Sweden can save itself at this point is by admitting “one million new immigrants from India, China, Africa and Latin America” who have service skills or technical knowhow, who have no truck with jihadism or multiculturalism, who want to move to Sweden not for a handout but to study hard and work hard, and who will, in time, found more rigorous schools and start more vigorous businesses.

A pipe dream, I fear. Yet Sjunneson’s portrait of his country is a cautionary tale whose lessons the rest of us ignore at our peril.

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