Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen and countless others went to the Muslim world hoping to turn it into another Boston, another London and another Paris. Instead, Boston, London and Paris are turning into another Kabul, another Islamabad and another Mogadishu. Mohammed has come to the mountain.

Five years ago, the sight of Muslim terrorists beheading British soldiers was a horror that could happen in Afghanistan or Iraq. Now it has happened in broad daylight in the capital of the United Kingdom.

In a decade, 600,000 white Londoners have fled the city. Those are the sorts of numbers you would expect from the Syrian civil war. Their place has been taken by the million Muslims occupying the city.

Woolwich Common, adjacent to the area where the attack took place, is described as an “inner-city multicultural neighborhood” which is to say that it is more ethnically diverse than the London average; it has more violent crimes than average and is among the 5% of poorest neighborhoods. Only 58% of its population was born in England and a quarter of its residents immigrated in that same dreadful decade.

Multiculturalism has enriched the area with the Woolwich Manz, a Somali Muslim gang whose antics have led residents to fear walking the streets at night. The Royal Borough of Greenwich’s Social Inclusion and Justice Division informs us that there are thousands of Somalis in the borough, most of whom live in Woolwich Common and Woolwich Riverside.

Gang wars over the lucrative drug business have broken out between the Woolwich Manz and other African gangs. Already in 2007, the London Evening Standard said that area residents were describing the Woolwich Common Estate as a “war zone” with stabbings and shootings and a new generation of child soldiers being recruited into the war. It was a little piece of Somalia in the United Kingdom.

The two men who butchered a British soldier are believed to be Somalis. Last year it was reported that dozens of Muslims in the UK were being trained to fight for Al Qaeda in Somalia. There were concerns over what those men would do once they returned to the United Kingdom.

Al-Shabaab, the local Al Qaeda franchise, subsists on tens of thousands of pounds from the hundreds of thousands of Somali settlers living in the United Kingdom. In 2012, Al-Shabaab terrorists had threatened a terrorist attack against the UK, saying, “The nightmare that surreptitiously looms on British shores is bound to eclipse the horrors of 7/7 and 21/7 combined.”

That nightmare still looms. It is the nightmare of the savage wars of the Muslim world being exported to the United Kingdom.

Last year, Shabaaz Hussain was sentenced to five years in jail in Woolwich Crown Court for his fundraising activities on behalf of Al-Shabaab. Five years earlier, Osama bin London and his followers had been sentenced at that same court for the 21/7 plot which attempted to set off bombs in a number of London Underground stations.  The majority of Bin London’s followers were African immigrants.

Ramzi Mohammed, a Somali, turned to face a young mother with a baby in her stroller before trying to detonate his bomb.

Muslim fighters have torn Somalia apart. And importing 200,000 of them into the United Kingdom is beginning to have the same effect. There are an estimated 70,000 Somalis in Greater London. That makes London the 12^th largest city in Somalia. Nearly 2 percent of Somalia now lives in the UK.

80 percent of Somalis in the UK live in public housing. They have the lowest employment rate of every immigrant group in the country. And within four years, they had managed to rack up over ten thousand arrests. Every effort to integrate them has failed. Rather than the Somalis becoming British, shards of Britain have become little Mogadishus.

The Somalis are not alone in this regard. Muslim immigration to the UK has brought the norms of Somalia, Afghanistan and Egypt to the streets of London. Individual acts of violence can be overlooked. But there is nothing individual about all these cases. This is a culture of violence.

Islam sanctifies that culture of violence. It takes tribal killings and endows them with the status of a religious duty. Jihad is simply gang warfare, no different than the kind practiced by the Woolwich Manz, given theological meaning. Men have been butchering other men with machetes throughout Africa. But when a Muslim mutilates a British soldier with a machete, then he is engaging in a religious ritual.

This is no clash of civilizations because there is hardly anything resembling civilization on the other side. Islam began with a gang raiding caravans. It now persists in gangs raiding across Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe.

What happened near Woolwich Commons would not have been considered extraordinary in Afghanistan, Somalia or Syria. It is only extraordinary because it has been a long time since rampaging Vikings were disemboweling the locals. It is only extraordinary because the nation is hobbled by the assumptions of civilization. And one of those basic assumptions is that murderers with red hands will not carry out beheadings in your streets.

The United Kingdom has become a civilized place. Unfortunately its practice of importing savages makes that civilization of climbing roses and social progress unsustainable. If you import millions of people who follow a religion that sanctifies tribal violence, then you must expect tribal violence to tear apart what you have built. And if you do not wish that to happen, then you must close the gates on the barbarians.

There is no need to go fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. Not when they are already living in London in public housing and screeching diatribes about the coming conquest while treating themselves to all the luxuries of the welfare state. And as their numbers grow, ignoring them will become impossible.

The butchers who perpetrated this latest atrocity wanted to be seen. They wanted to break through the media boycott to tell the peoples of the United Kingdom that they were being murdered in the name of Islam. The story is already being met with the usual cognitive dissonance and being swept under the rug, but that just means that the next bunch will try even harder to convey the message that the war is here.

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Despite propaganda relentlessly churned out by the mainstream media to justify the Obama IRS crackdown on conservative groups, the fact remains that the American Right is severely outgunned by the much better funded Left. And while highly political left-wing organizations far outpace their conservative counterparts in number and assets, they have never been subjected to the kind of rigorous scrutiny and interference that the IRS has recently inflicted on right-wing groups, making allegations of partisan abuse by the agency difficult to refute.

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin stands as a case in point of the kind of misinformation being peddled by the Left to shield the Obama administration from the IRS scandal. Toobin writes in the New Yorker that Obama’s IRS didn’t do anything wrong. The Tea Party groups targeted by Obama’s bureaucrats got what was coming to them. Those organizations

were seeking approval to operate under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. This would require them to be “social welfare,” not political, operations. There are significant advantages to being a 501(c)(4). These groups don’t pay taxes; they don’t have to disclose their donors—unlike traditional political organizations, such as political-action committees. In return for the tax advantage and the secrecy, the 501(c)(4) organizations must refrain from traditional partisan political activity, like endorsing candidates.

If that definition sounds murky—that is, if it’s unclear what 501(c)(4) organizations are allowed to do—that’s because it is murky. Particularly leading up to the 2012 elections, many conservative organizations, nominally 501(c)(4)s, were all but explicitly political in their work.

However, as David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin show in their meticulously researched 2012 book, The New Leviathan: How the Left-Wing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America’s Future, the greatest exploiters of the “murkiness” of “social welfare” activism are by far left-wing organizations. The collective assets of liberal-progressive grant-making foundations are in fact 10 times the size of the assets of conservative foundations.

DiscoverTheNetworks.org, a website run by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, identified 115 major progressive or left-leaning foundations. In 2010, it found the progressive foundations had total assets of $104.56 billion.

The left-leaning National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and Think Progress, a popular blog run by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, identified 82 major conservative grant-making foundations. In 2010, they found the conservative foundations had total assets of just $10.29 billion.

The progressive foundations awarded $8.81 billion in grants compared to the conservative foundations’ paltry $831.8 million in grants. As long as grant makers “don’t violate IRS rules that bar direct contributions to candidates and parties, tax-exempt foundations can operate without constraints,” Horowitz and Laksin write.

This vast network of left-wing funders and activist groups dwarfs anything the activist Right has to offer. It is “self-sufficient and self-perpetuating … an aristocracy of wealth whose dimensions exceed any previous accumulations of financial power, whose influence already represents a massive disenfranchisement of the American people and whose agendas pose a disturbing prospect for the American future,” according to the authors.

For example, Horowitz and Laksin also show that the Left thoroughly dominates two huge areas of interest-group warfare today: immigration and environmentalist activism.

In immigration, they found that there are nine major conservative groups “that support traditional immigration policies” and 117 progressive groups “that support radical departures from traditional immigration policies and notions of sovereignty.”

The conservative groups (e.g. Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA Foundation) have net assets of $15.05 million (based on annual revenues of $13.8 million), compared to the $194.67 million in net assets (based on annual revenues of $306.11 million) held by progressive groups (e.g. National Council of La Raza, Redlands Christian Migrant Association).

In other words, progressive immigration groups have 22 times the revenues that their conservative counterparts have.

In the world of environmental activism, Horowitz and Laksin report that there are 32 major conservative groups that “promote market-friendly solutions” and 552 progressive groups that “promote radical views that are anti-business.” Collectively, the conservative groups have net assets of $38.24 million, a figure that seems insignificant compared to the $9.31 billion figure representing the progressive groups’ combined net assets.

The progressive environmental groups enjoy a 37 to 1 advantage over conservative environmental groups in revenues ($3.56 billion compared to $96.17 million).

And left-wing groups almost never face the kind of heightened IRS scrutiny to which conservative groups are subjected. Republican Richard Nixon may have used the IRS against perceived enemies of all political stripes, but IRS abuse is generally a tool of Democratic administrations. President Franklin Roosevelt directed the IRS to target newspaper publishers opposed to the New Deal and John F. Kennedy “raised the political exploitation of the IRS to an art form,” according to author James Bovard.

The Obama administration leaves its friends in the nonprofit community alone no matter how odious or reprehensible their behavior. Obama’s IRS harasses only right-of-center nonprofit groups.

Toobin goes on to lament the political nature of conservative 501c4 organizations, as if this were a unique characteristic of right-wing groups that would explain selective IRS harassment of them. For instance, Toobin writes that Americans for Prosperity (which also has a 501c3 affiliate), funded in part by the Kochs, are “[i]n every meaningful sense … operating as units of the Republican Party.” Such groups were “an instrumental force in helping the Republicans hold the House of Representatives” in the 2012 election.

One can argue about the precise impact AFP had on the last congressional election, but Toobin’s undue focus on AFP and other Koch-funded groups distracts from the fact that conservative organizations are consistently, dramatically outspent by their left-wing counterparts, which are deeply embedded in the Democratic political establishment and which operate unimpeded as arms of the Democratic Party.

For example, none of what conservative C4s have done is anywhere near as partisan as what ACORN, the left-wing poster child for nonprofit abuses, perpetrated in its 40-year reign of terror against American taxpayers.

For decades ACORN, with its intricate network of hundreds of nonprofit entities, defrauded Uncle Sam by spending government grants and tax-privileged dollars on partisan campaigns and voter drives that benefited Democrats exclusively. Every election cycle Project Vote, the ACORN affiliate President Obama worked for in 1992 and that Obama White House officials remain in close contact with to the present day, spends millions of tax-exempt dollars getting Democrats, dead or alive, to the polls.

Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department never lifted a finger to investigate a nearly $1 million misappropriation from ACORN by Dale Rathke, the socialite brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke. As I detailed in my book Subversion Inc., Dale blew ACORN employees’ pension money on parties, limousines, and shopping trips to New York.

President Obama’s 501c4 goon platoon, Organizing for Action, also enjoys tax-exempt status. Formally incorporated earlier this year, the Saul Alinsky-inspired, in-your-face group grew out of Obama’s election campaign and was previously called Organizing for America when it was a project of the Democratic National Committee.

And take the egregious case of Media Matters for America, which even the New York Times describes as a “highly partisan” organization. MMfA has been mysteriously immune from IRS audits.

Underwritten by George Soros, every working day the lavishly funded Media Matters churns out political propaganda calculated to pressure journalists into unquestioningly backing the Democratic Party line. It has absurdly characterized Chris Matthews and former New York Times editor Bill Keller as sellouts to the left-wing cause.

The organization’s CEO, the emotionally unstable former journalist and self-described “hit man” David Brock, declares that MMfA’s mission is to wage “war on Fox (News)” as well as “to disrupt [News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch's] commercial interests” and to turn regulators against his media outlets. MMfA claims to combat “conservative misinformation,” but concentrates its fire on Fox because it dares to air political viewpoints that sometimes overlap with the views of Republicans. The ultimate purpose of Media Matters is to silence opposition to the Left.

C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has complained to the IRS about MMfA, which he accurately describes as a “Democratic training camp.” (Any taxpayer may file an IRS Form 13909 with the Internal Revenue Service to complain about the conduct of a tax-exempt organization.) Gray notes that the group compiled an “enemies list” and had plans to engage investigators “to look into the personal lives of Fox News anchors, hosts,” and others.

“Anyone is free to promote or criticize political views of any stripe, using one’s own money and other resources,” Gray says. But MMfA’s “partisan success was built on a much different model: it uses the taxpayers’ subsidy, through Section 501(c)(3)’s tax exemption, to try to punish private persons and companies for airing political views.”

Giving Media Matters tax-exempt status affords it an advantage not enjoyed by its victim, Fox News. That tax-exemption in effect legitimizes MMfA “by having the government affirm that the organization’s operations are truly ‘charitable’ and therefore consistent with the nation’s public policies,” according to Gray.

As for the evil conservative corporate moneymen the Left and Toobin assail, Horowitz and Laksin’s research demolishes the idea that the activist Right in America is this huge, powerful empire bankrolled by right-wing counterparts to leftist billionaire donors like George Soros, Peter B. Lewis, and Herb Sandler. In reality, deep-pocketed conservative donors are generally hard to find. For every Sheldon Adelson (casino magnate), there are a dozen left-wing billionaires and millionaires like Tim Gill (software magnate), Rob McKay (Taco Bell heir), Anne Bartley (Rockefeller heiress), Pat Stryker (medical technology heiress), Susie Tompkins Buell (Esprit co-founder), Rob Glaser (RealNetworks), Norman Lear (Hollywood producer), and Rachel Pritzker Hunter (hotel heiress).

Toobin’s deeply flawed analysis of the IRS scandal unwittingly reveals the real reason those on the Left are countenancing the clearly politically motivated repression of conservative nonprofits and why the Obama IRS engaged in these tactics in the first place. As Toobin all but admits, Democrats view Tea Party groups, that is, right-wing populist 501c4 groups, as an existential threat to the Left. These 501c4s tend to be Republican-leaning organizations and they have been successful so far in derailing, or at least slowing, parts of President Obama’s ongoing transmogrification of America. (Note: Unlike donors to 501c3 groups, which tend to be educational in nature and less explicitly political than 501c4 groups, donors to 501c4 groups are not allowed to deduct their donations from their income tax. Organizations recognized under 501c3 of the Internal Revenue Code face stricter constraints on their behavior but are not required to publicly disclose their donors.)

Toobin and his ilk don’t think any conservative nonprofits ought to enjoy tax-exempt status because they are statists who view the rule of law as an obstacle to human progress. To them, teaching Americans to respect the Constitution and the God-given rights and freedoms it protects is not a legitimate activity, or at least not sufficiently legitimate to merit a tax exemption. These groups are working against the Left, standing in the way and preventing America from becoming a leftist utopia. They’re all enemy combatants. This is why numerous high profile Democratic politicians, like Sens. Al Franken and Chuck Schumer, had no reservations openly calling for the systematic targeting of right-wing groups and the selective suppression of conservative citizen inroads into an avenue of political power long monopolized by the Left.

As Jonathan S. Tobin (not to be confused with Jeffrey Toobin) beautifully sums up the leftist position in Commentary:

“As far as a lot of liberals are concerned, the problem here isn’t the Nixonian abuse of power by the IRS but the fact that these conservatives are being allowed to raise money to resist the policies of a liberal administration.”

The targeting campaign undertaken by the IRS was never about getting the tax code right. It was about getting the ideology right.

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There is a reason why snobby elites on the Upper West Side of Manhattan generously donate to leftist causes and support leftist politicians. Snobs and radicals often act in accord because they are not opposites, as some believe, but rather spiritual cousins – equally despising “the bourgeois,” sharing a low view of humanity as herd animals, and sorting people not on their individual merits but by color, income, occupation, ethnicity, gender, and any other characteristic except the content of their minds.

Elitists share the presumption that people of the world cannot think for themselves and have no room in their souls for individual ambitions and achievements outside of what the government is giving them. Short of stating it explicitly, elitism implies that “the masses” are mindless, spiritless creatures without free will, always in need of the largesse of the state, and for their own good the state ought to nationalize the country’s resources in order to feed its subjects.

While the road to tyranny is paved with elitist beliefs, it still takes a nation to take this road, and a self-appointed vanguard to convince, organize, and lead them.

The term “elites” doesn’t do justice to such a vanguard, which in addition to powerful snobs has its share of drug addicts, bohemians, housewives, union workers, and students, drawing its members from all classes, ethnicities, and professional backgrounds.

The trait that unites this diverse demographic is their smug and prejudiced belief in the superiority of their own ideology, often accompanied by malice and hatred towards those they deem inferior. Perhaps, it’s time to introduce a new term to the national discourse: Progressive Chauvinism.

My empirical observations have led me to conclude that Progressive Chauvinists are almost completely devoid of self-awareness, assuming the right to control the lives of others out of confidence in their higher mission to help the welfare of less fortunate, “backward” people who have miraculously been left without any ability to govern themselves.

In this sense, the United States has for some time consisted of two parallel nations: those who think of themselves as “progressives” and those who don’t.

Progressive Chauvinism is marked by a strong belief in the divine right of their kind to hold all key positions in society for society’s own sake, forcing the “lessers” to comply with superior progressive ways. Believing that their condescension and pity towards the lower beings are a sign of benevolence and compassion, they ignite with righteous anger whenever those ingrates dare be displeased with their enlightened dominion.

An example of such a malicious lack of gratitude is the existence of non-progressive blogs, talk radio, and Fox News – a threat to the progressive hegemony in the media, which is an inalienable part of the Progressive Chauvinist cosmology.

Remember Barack Obama’s secretly recorded “bitter clinger” remarks at an exclusive San Francisco fundraiser in 2008? The controversy that followed was mostly focused on his “guns and religion” comment, even though a much more disturbing glimpse into our future president’s mind was Obama’s condescending assessment of the source of the bitterness itself: government neglect.

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

In other words, the silly little people need enlightened benevolent masters to lead them to happiness. Without a powerful central government plugging every proverbial crack in every wretched small town, no one can ever be happy or achieve self-fulfillment. Rejoice, for if I’m elected, everyone will be issued approved guidelines, complete with permitted activities and instructions of what to do with their worthless lives in their degenerate little towns. But don’t you grow bitter: the federal government can make you happy, or it can make you unhappy. What’s it gonna be?

Progressive Chauvinists say the damndest things when they think they are among their own. The private fundraiser included the richest and most powerful people in San Francisco, all very different from Obama and complete strangers to him. How had he quickly become so intimate, saying things he’d never have said in public? Apparently, there was something in the air – the aura, vibrations, ambience – that screamed, “We’re Progressive Chauvinists just like you!”

Meanwhile, the rest of us can’t help but bitterly cling to our guns and religion in bewilderment: how can these people possibly function, let alone win elections, with minds so devoid of logic and jam-packed with inconsistencies, contradictions, and straight out absurdities?

How is it possible to hold so many mutually exclusive beliefs? To preach tolerance and be so intolerant? To grieve for terror victims and justify terrorism? To stand up for workers and destroy their jobs? To march for peace and defend the militants? To denounce corruption and vote for the corrupt? To espouse non-violence and commit violent acts? To speak of liberties and promote government dictate? To bolster feminism and deride successful women? To cheer gays and aid the gay-bashers in the Middle East? To champion minorities as a group and hold them down as individuals? To care about the children and condemn them to intellectual mutilation? To denounce guns and hire armed bodyguards? To support the troops and side with their murderers? To demand love and be full of hate?

The bad news is that these are not contradictions. Worse yet, sensible people will keep losing ground to those whom they shrug off as bumbling sacks of absurdities, for as long as they don’t understand that the above paradoxical statements aren’t, in fact, oxymorons, but contain a very consistent logic.

In this sense, the best key to unlocking the mystery of the Progressive Chauvinist mind, breaking the leftist code, and discerning their collectivist morality is a statement attributed to Karl Marx, which, regardless of whether he wrote it or not, is perfectly aligned with the moral philosophy of Progressive Chauvinism:

“The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism”

Let’s start with the last item on our list: How is it possible to demand love and be full of hate?

Love and hate are merely two sides of the same coin: one can’t love something without hating that which threatens to destroy the object of affection. Just as there can’t be a coin with one side bigger than the other, the amounts of love and hate in any given person are always equal – because these two are, in fact, not separate but one and the same natural human emotion, only with different integers. Thus, the bigger the love, the bigger the hate. Conversely, the smaller the hate, the smaller the love. A complete absence of hate would also mean a complete absence of love: the apathetic indifference of a vegetable.

The typical leftist appeals for greater love and the elimination of hate are easy to dismiss as well-intentioned naïveté  and politically innocent melodrama. They wouldn’t seem so benign, however, once we realize that such demands originate in the leftist concept of the human mind as a pliable social construct, resulting in a compulsive obsession to improve human nature by criminalizing normal human behaviors.

Although such pleas for obligatory love may seem broad and generic, they have very specific targets. It’s always about the reduction of hate and the opening of the hearts towards people and notions that are by and large found within the socialist frame of reference. I have yet to hear a plea to stop hating and start loving enemies of socialism.

At the same time, the “love crowd” shows no restraint in hating anyone and anything they perceive as a threat to their mythical notion of “progress,” wielding conveniently subjective terms like “hate speech” and “hate groups,” and coordinating their efforts to demonize and dehumanize their opponents.

Given that the difference between love and hate is the matter of a subjective integer, it may as well be argued that one man’s “hate group” is another man’s “love group,” one man’s “hate speech” is another man’s “love speech,” one man’s “hate fest” is another man’s “love fest,” and so on.

This may seem like an exercise in moral relativism, but it’s not. While moral standards exist on both sides, they are direct opposites of each other. That doesn’t mean that one side’s “hate crime” is another side’s “love crime.” According to the objective moral standards on the conservative right, a crime is always a crime, regardless of the motive. In contrast, the subjective moral standards on the left, make a distinction: if there are “hate crimes” that require additional punishment, that means there can also be “love crimes” that call for a lighter punishment, or can be excused altogether – for example, Bill Ayers’ youthful terrorism in the 1960s.

So then, is moral relativism a substitute for the leftist moral and ethical standards? Not at all.

Moral relativism is more of a logical trick the leftists are using to a great advantage in any discussion on culture, education, or foreign policy to undercut and discredit the other side’s moral standards while covering up their own, as well as to confuse and demoralize the unprepared.

As soon as the tables are turned and the left gains political power, all moral relativism ends – as it happened in the USSR and all other Marxist dictatorships. The trick they used to subvert the existing authority quickly becomes a liability, since it can be just as effectively used against their own power. The Soviet propagandists, who furthered the idea of moral relativism in the West, stamped it out at home. Collectivists have always been thorough in protecting their cultural hegemony, which cannot be said about their carefree individualistic opponents.

The left’s actual moral standards, whether or not their bearers realize it or are prepared to admit it, are consistent with the logic and ethics of class struggle as outlined in Marxist moral philosophy: anything is good and moral that benefits the revolutionary cause, while anything that hinders it is evil.

There are no moral absolutes except this revolutionary cause, which can be summarized as the historically inevitable transition of humanity from the unfair, individualistic capitalist system to the collectivist bliss of socialism, eventually evolving into the altruistic paradise of communism. This process, which leftists also call “progress” or “history,” is the only standard against which all things are tested and all values are judged. Thus, nothing that furthers “progress” can be evil, and nothing that stands in the way of “history” can be good.

That means that if, in the course of events, a certain idea, activity, person, or a group of persons stop being beneficial to the cause of “progress” and become a hindrance, they stop being good and become evil – and vice versa. With the rise of Progressive Chauvinism in the 20th century, that notion had been extended to entire classes of people, ethnic groups, and even nations, whose elimination was deemed beneficial for “human progress” and “the greater historical good.” The end always justifies the means.

Granted, not everyone on the left is a communist. Many of them would love to settle for a democratic socialist system with elements of private economy (they would just as much hate you explaining to them why such a system is yet another unsustainable utopia). In the meantime, they always end up siding with Marxist fanatics, whom they see as a powerful engine pulling in the same direction and capable of taking them to their destination sooner.

Such fellow travelers suit communist goals just fine. According to Marx, true communism cannot be built while the world is still polluted by capitalist exploitation, inequality, greed, and need. There has to be a transitional period of socialism – and it has to win globally, with all countries having more or less homogenized and equal economies, peacefully sharing the same ideas, and coordinated by one global governing body – an ideal construction site for the builders of communism. (The troubled European Union is a living proof of why this is a terrible idea, but don’t tell that to a Progressive Chauvinist).

Accepting the Marxist concept of “historical progress,” Progressive Chauvinists inevitably share the militant morality that comes with it – starting with Karl Marx himself, who once answered someone’s question, “What is your idea of happiness?” with one word: “Struggle.”

A grand utopian fallacy that inspires with a high moral purpose while absolving of the responsibility for one’s actions is a deadly mix. In the days of the Cold War, the notion of “historical progress” as a moral obligation of everyone in the global community enabled the Soviet Union to engage in exporting the revolution – with all the accompanying gore, violence, and depravity, in violation of international norms and agreements – enjoying the support of the advocates of “international peace,” which in the book of Progressive Chauvinism is defined as uncompromising attacks and subversion until any opposition to socialism is vanquished.

Reimagining Marxism in the 1960s, American radicals coined the phrase, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” The militant message remained the same: the revolution is the only absolute moral value, with all other issues relative and subordinate to it.

A typical war cry at any American “anti-war” rally starting with the 1960s has been “No justice, no peace!” This isn’t a contradiction: war is only to be opposed if waged by the enemies of socialism. The vision of peace in this case only includes the defeat and surrender of the United States, while the other side is free to invade and murder without a peep from the “world community.”

The brainchild of Joseph Stalin, the Western “peace” movement of the Cold War era was organized, trained, coordinated, and financed by Soviet intelligence with the purpose of weakening the worldwide resistance by the U.S. and its allies to the Soviet interference in world affairs. Every time a Soviet-backed Marxist group staged a coup, a terror act, or a guerilla attack against a legitimate government anywhere in the world, the “peace” movement would spring into action, denouncing the U.S. or NATO efforts to defend their allies. On command, the streets around the world would erupt with self-righteous “anti-imperialist” protests and the demands of “peace” – or, more precisely, the end of the opposition to Progressive Chauvinism.

The plan succeeded, most famously, with the U.S. abandoning South Vietnam. America was defeated, not on the battlefield, but in its own streets filled with leftist protesters, with the help from Progressive Chauvinists in the media who willingly promoted made-in-the-USSR propagandistic narrative. Soon afterwards, the Communist North, backed and financed by the USSR, invaded South Vietnam, slaughtering, jailing, and sending to re-education camps millions of formerly free people who opposed their brutal dictatorship. That, in the language of the leftist “pacifists,” was peace – something they celebrated by “making love, not war.” One of them was John Kerry, the former “peace” activist who is now in charge of America’s foreign affairs. Hopefully, this clarifies his idea of peace and, for that matter, of war.

Today’s Democrat Party seems to be re-enacting the old Soviet playbook, practicing the tactics and strategies developed by the Soviet Communists during the Cold War. This includes proactive, relentless, and simultaneous attacks on the opposition in multiple areas; preemptive demonization of the resistance; advancing the notions of “change” and “historical progress” as a moral obligation of every well-meaning citizen; spreading the perception that the opposition is standing in the way of history; using the media to disseminate prepared supportive narrative; planting disinformation; rewriting history; acting through allegedly neutral proxy organizations; discrediting “enemy” media sources; promoting class warfare; stirring strife and division among citizens; provoking conflict while blaming the opposition for a hostile reaction, and so on.

In the meantime, the Republicans are forced to play the role of the anti-communist Western governments: they are constantly caught unawares, ducking the accusations, hectically putting out fires, rushing around and trampling their own, trying to avoid taking the blame but taking it anyway.

On top of it all, the White House, State Department, and DOJ overtly and covertly export revolutions and arm insurgents in world’s hottest conflict zones, with John Kerry playing the role of U.S. Secretary of State.

The Democrats may as well change their name into a Progressive Chauvinist Party.

The game of “War and Peace” however, is only the most immediate, literal implication of their chauvinist moral principle. Tolerance is similarly a one-way street. Progressive Chauvinism assumes that everyone must be tolerant of their opinions and actions, while they retain the right to self-righteous intolerance. Even questioning such a right in polite company is inadvisable lest one be treated as a lower being.

Progressive Chauvinists have thus been able to establish their dominion over all aspects of civil society – from forcing unionization on individuals and private companies like Wal-Mart to intimidating the banks into issuing subprime mortgages to boycotting Fox News channel to humiliating donors so they would stop supporting non-progressive politicians and organizations – all without any significant pushback. I have yet to hear of an angry mob picketing the front lawn of a Chicago community organizer.

The chauvinist attitude, of course, is not limited to the left, but it is characteristic of any expansionist totalitarian ideology throughout history. A force that rivals Progressive Chauvinism in today’s world is Islamic Supremacism – also known to its victims as the “religion of peace.” The attitude is almost identical: in the book of Islamic Supremacism the meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to Islam.

Islamic Supremacists similarly dream of an ideal, egalitarian society of the future – a global caliphate that will govern over a peaceful world populated by a Muslim majority, while the remaining non-believers would be too intimidated to oppose their Muslim superiors and prefer to pay the jizya – a special Muslim tax on non-believers, or “protection money”- as a condition that they be left in peace.

This allows the Islamic Supremacists to claim with truthful self-righteousness that they stand for peace. An appropriate modifier – “eventual peace” – would give a more complete picture, however, of what they hope to achieve after the holy jihad wipes out all opposition to Islam.

The worst murderers in recent history didn’t think of themselves as evil men; they were devoted to their mission and believed that violence was justified by the common good. The real question, after all, is not as much the amount of love as the object of affection.

The National Socialists of the Third Reich were driven, not just by their hatred of Jews and other “Untermenschen,” but by an equally strong love of the fairy-tale narrative of the Aryan Supremacy, which inspired them to a higher mission of ruling over the “inferior nations” for their own good. The eventual plans to exterminate some of the Slavs and drive the rest of them out of Europe were caused “only” by their “ungrateful” resistance to the benevolent gift of Germanization.

Today’s Islamic Supremacists are motivated, not only by hatred of the nonbelievers in general and Israel in particular. They have just as powerful love of their religion, which inspires them with a higher mission of bringing peace to humanity by subjugating it to Islam and ruling over the less fortunate, backward people, who can’t correctly govern themselves since the only correct form of government is by Sharia law. The terrorist acts and violent jihad are merely an indignant reaction of the righteous and a punishment  to those inferior ingrates who have rejected the light of Islam and no longer deserve to live.

Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Che Guevara, and other notorious communist mass murderers all believed in historically inevitable progress; it justified their right to control the lives of others and sent them on a higher mission to help the welfare of less fortunate by means of dictatorship. Millions of their victims were merely human obstacles on the way to a beloved utopian world of historical progress that sparkled just beyond the mountains of dead bodies. It was the victims’ own fault; no one can stand in the way of history and live.

Different stories, one common denominator: a fairy-tale collectivist narrative that inspires its adepts with a higher mission, relieves of personal responsibility, and brings forth a messianic superiority complex complete with narcissistic, chauvinist attitudes. The stronger ones love this mythical vision, the stronger ones hate the real world with its lowly material concerns that threaten to deflate and discredit the dream.

It’s the chauvinists’ world, we just live in it.

Oleg Atbashian, a writer and graphic artist from the former USSR, is the author of Shakedown Socialism, of which David Horowitz said, “I hope everyone reads this book.” In 1994 he moved to the U.S. with the hope of living in a country ruled by reason and common sense, but he discovered a nation deeply infected by the leftist disease of “progressivism.” His writings and illustrations regularly appear in FrontPage Mag, American Thinker, PJ Media, and other popular conservative websites. He is also the creator of a satirical news forum ThePeoplesCube.com. 

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Amnesty raises the question of moral hazard. If we overlook law-breaking not just in occasional individual cases, but systematically and on a large scale, we undermine respect for the rule of law. Still, on occasion an amnesty can be relatively harmless.  If the IRS announced that anyone who has failed to file a tax return for some years can for a stated period of time file without facing charges for breaking the tax laws, little harm is done.

But what if the IRS were to say that the delinquent taxpayer need not pay the back taxes he or she owes? That would be a very different matter: an amnesty doesn¹t mean that you can keep what you stole, it only means that you won’t be prosecuted for having stolen it. Under an amnesty, law-breakers will be treated no worse than those who obey the law–they will be returned to the condition they were in before their offense. But amnesty doesn¹t mean that they can profit from their illegal behavior.

Now let’s go one step further: suppose that the IRS were not only to let tax delinquents keep their loot, but also offer them a large reward for coming forward. That would be moral hazard with a vengeance, because now breaking the law would be more attractive than obeying it. But that is essentially what the gang-of-eight’s bill does. In addition to amnesty (not being prosecuted for breaking the law), it allows illegal immigrants to keep what they stole (residency) and even to get a substantial reward into the bargain (state welfare benefits, and a path to citizenship).

It makes no difference if illegals take longer to get their citizenship than those who come here legally. What matters is not that illegals are treated somewhat worse than legal immigrants, but that they are treated much better than those who have resisted the temptation to cross the border illegally.  The message that the gang-of-eight are sending to them is that their restraint was a bad mistake: they should have broken the law and then we’d have rewarded them for doing so.

Everyone agrees that any reform measure must as a first order of business get control of our borders. But a reform that offers a reward to those who cross them illegally is the best way to lose that control. New illegal immigrants would pour across the borders when they see how well their predecessors were treated. Their numbers are already increasing in response to this bill. Can we really afford to let the world know that we don’t care if immigrants treat our immigration laws with contempt because we ourselves do?

Amnesty is a fuzzy word with overtones of Christian forgiveness: who but the hard-hearted could be against it? That is why it’s important to understand that what the gang-of-eight is proposing goes way beyond amnesty, and that it’s the things that the bill throws in in addition to amnesty that are its really objectionable features.

If we institute a guest worker program that greatly expands opportunities to come and work here, that program would naturally include background checks to rule out those with criminal records. (Yes, breaking the immigration laws really is a crime, one punished with serious jail time in Mexico, for example.) If we were to say that people whose only transgression was illegal entry into the US would still be eligible for the program, that would be a genuine amnesty: people who broke one particular law get treated in the same way as those who did not. Let¹s not misuse the word “amnesty” so that it is made to cover the quite different notion of rewarding and encouraging people who break the law. A real amnesty is worth discussing. Offering rewards for law-breaking is not. A bill that does that should never get a single vote.

John M. Ellis is an emeritus professor and former Dean of the Graduate Division at UC Santa Cruz.

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Just before Lerner got up to leave, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) raised an objection. “She waived her right to testify by issuing an opening statement,” said Gowdy. “She ought to stay and answer questions.” Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the committee’s ranking Democrat, countered that assertion. “Unfortunately this is not a federal court and she does has a right,” he said. “And we have to adhere to that.” Issa ultimately agreed with Cummings, and excused Lerner “subject to recall,” adding that he might consider giving her “limited immunity” to testify.

Prior to the beginning of yesterday’s hearings, the Fox News division located in Cincinnati, the alleged epicenter of the scandal, revealed that the IRS’s claim that the scandal is limited to low-level employees “is falling apart.” They obtained an IRS directory that explains the agency’s chain of command, noting that each of the six Cincinnati agents involved — Mitchel Steele, Carly Young, Joseph Herr, Stephen Seok, Liz Hofacre and a woman identified only as Ms. Richards — has both a different manager and, further up the chain, a different territory manager. The purpose of the chain is to prevent rogue agents from acting on their own.

Fox further reveals that a tax-exempt application must be processed within 270 days, or it triggers a system flag, requiring individual agents to maintain monthly status updates on cases until they are resolved. Because more than 300 groups were targeted through the Cincinnati office alone, over a period of 18 months to three years, thousands of flags would have been triggered. According to the IRS directory, a single IRS employee in Cincinnati, Cindy Thomas, the Program Manager of the Tax Exempt Division, would have received all of the flags.

This is where the chain of command gets critical. Only four people are above Thomas: Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller, who was “fired” despite the reality he was retiring next month; Joseph Grant, Commissioner of Tax Exempt and Government Entities who has also retired; Lois Lerner, who has invoked her Fifth Amendment privileges; and Holly Paz, Director of Exempt Organizations who was interviewed by the Committee on Tuesday.

Perhaps it’s time to subpoena Cindy Thomas.

Next up at yesterday’s hearing was Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal S. Wolin, who insisted his department knew nothing about the targeting of conservative groups. He pushed the administration’s line that President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew have “taken decisive action” to address the issues raised in the report by Treasury Inspector General (IG) for Tax Administration J. Russell George. That would be the report that insists the IRS abuse began in March of 2010, a contention debunked by the Thomas More Society, which released a public announcement August 4, 2009 about their involvement with two pro-life groups targeted by the IRS.

The utter disingenuousness of Wolin’s contentions is underscored by another inconvenient reality. A May 14 letter signed by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp and Ranking Member Sander Levin, demanding records of any communications between the IRS and the Treasury department, as well as any between the White House and the IRS, has been ignored. Camp and Levin had given the IRS until May 21 to comply with that demand. They refused to do so, and have not responded to multiple phone and email inquiries made by CNSNews.com.

Back at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearings, both Democrats and Republicans were outraged by the revelation that the IRS was aware its employees were targeting right-wing groups as early as May 2012, but hid that information from Congress. Issa noted that Holly Paz testified to that effect on Tuesday, revealing that an internal investigation conducted by IRS officials ended on May 3. Thus, it was established that the agency was aware of the targeting a full year prior to the release of the IG’s report.

And far more to the point, it was aware six months before the 2012 presidential election.

George was asked if officials at either the Treasury Dept. or the White House directed IRS employees to target conservative groups. He said officials told him “there was no direction from the department itself to those in the determinations unit in Cincinnati, nor their affiliate office in Washington.”

Yet in a critical exchange, George revealed his investigation never probed White House involvement. “[I]n all honestly, we didn’t look at the White House. We didn’t question anyone as to whether or not they’d received any direction from the White House,” he said.

During his testimony, former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman offered up the kind of rationale that is becoming a recurring theme surrounding this story. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) asked Shulman if he took responsibility for what occurred in Cincinnati. “You know, I don’t take personal responsibility for there being a list with criteria put on it, but I do accept the fact that this did happen on my watch,” he responded. “So you don’t take responsibility, but you recognize the fact that it happened under your watch?” Speier repeated. “Look, I recognize that this happened on my watch and I’m very sorry that this happened while I was at the Internal Revenue Service,” replied Shulman.

What also happened on Shulman’s watch was pointed out by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), in conjunction with White House visitor logs. The logs revealed that Shulman visited the White House 118 times in 2010 and 2011, during the period when conservative groups were being singled out for greater scrutiny. In an explanation for those visits that will likely strike fear in many Americans, Shulman claims many of them involved determining what the IRS’s role would be in implementing the healthcare bill.

Rep. Matthew Cartwright (D-PA) attempted to provide cover for the IRS, asking George if the doubling of applications after 2010 might have led to the targeting. The answer is irrelevant: the IRS’s own data show no such thing occurred, despite Lois Lerner’s earlier assertion that it did. George was further pressed to explain the basis of the IRS’s targeting. He blamed Lerner. “My response at this stage would be a lack of oversight, a lack of follow-up on the part of Ms. Lerner and the people within her immediate chain of command,” George said.

Later he attempted to rationalize the IRS’s behavior, saying that all of the groups he reviewed in his audit eventually got tax-exempt status. Chairman Issa cut through the obfuscation, noting that “you can actually deny better by not denying, because if you deny, they have a right of appeal,” Issa explained. “If you just let them sit in limbo, they’re screwed. And some are still screwed today.”

Issa’s claim is right on. Many organizations are still awaiting an IRS response regarding their status. A Washington, D.C. law firm that represents some of these groups says that the IRS’s claim that the system was streamlined after 2010 is demonstrably false in light of a massive increase in the amount of information the agency required of the firm’s clients. Like Fox, the firm debunk the “low-level employee” excuse because two of its clients’ applications had been referred to a “special task force” in Washington, DC.

The organization True the Vote, which applied for tax-exempt status in 2010, is still waiting for approval. They have endured three years of delays, during which time they have dealt with four different IRS agents, been subjected to six FBI inquiries, and have submitted thousands of pages of documentation to the agency, all to no avail.

As the afternoon wore on, another Democrat attempted to rescue the IRS, albeit indirectly. Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) used his time to denounce the “absurd decision” by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case. He claimed it has brought so much money into the political system that it threatens the ability of Congress to do its job. This absurd notion picks up where former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) left off ten days ago, when she contended broader amounts of political activity — also known as freedom of speech — made it harder for the IRS to do its job. However, it is in fact left-wing groups that dominate the non-profit sector, long before Citizens United, while their highly politicized work is rarely interfered with.

Another key moment in the hearings occurred when Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) told George that Holly Paz was present during 36 of 41 interviews conducted during the IRS audit. George contended he was unaware of the total, noting that many of the IRS auditors who produced that information are based outside Washington. This lack of knowledge, coupled with the aforementioned omission of targeted pro-life groups, and the failure to question anyone about possible White House involvement in the scandal, calls the thoroughness of the IG’s investigation into question.

After the hearing, Issa hardened his position with regard to Lerner. “When I asked her her questions from the very beginning, I did so so she could assert her rights prior to any statement,” Issa told Politico. “She chose not to do so–so she waived.” Stan Brand, general counsel for the House of Representatives from 1976 to 1983 disagreed. “I don’t think a brief introductory preface to her formal invocation of the privilege is a waiver,” he said. But Brand introduced the possibility that Lerner’s previous appearances before Congress may constitute a waiver of her Fifth Amendment rights. “Bottom line,” he warned, “I think we will hear no more from Ms. Lerner” unless she is provided immunity.

Thus, Lerner remains in the eye of the storm, which may be precisely the way the Obama administration wants it. As PJ Media’s Brian Preston notes, “several lefty bloggers known to be very close to the Obama White House were in fact meeting in the White House” on Tuesday, after Lerner’s attorney had announced she would be taking the Fifth. Two of them were Journolist veterans Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, and Josh Marshal of Talking Points Memorandum (TPM). In previous columns, Klein contended the IRS scandal was “a mess. But it’s not a mess that implicates the White House, or even senior IRS leadership.” Marshal insisted the scandal was a way for Republicans to reconnect with their base, now that the “touch points” of immigration and gays are no longer as effective as they used to be.

Yesterday, within 30 minutes of each other, Klein released a piece contending ”heads should roll at the IRS,” while Marshal insisted Lerner “has to go.” Preston notes the “synchronicity,” of getting “reliably friendly bloggers and columnists on board with a story that focuses attention away from the White House.”

It is more than that. It is also Rule Number 12 in Saul Alinksy’s “Rules for Radicals”: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy.”

As of now, Lois Lerner is the unsympathetic target of the IRS scandal. It behooves Darrell Issa to grant her some sort of immunity for the simplest of reasons: the American public deserves to know how deep the corruption goes within the most powerful agency of government they deal with — and how far it may extend beyond it.

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All wrapped up in a teenage hip hop performer whose work The Times calls “the defining document of the current Chicago sound.”

A few more quotes from the Times’ recent coronation. (And by all means, read the whole review.)

“Chief Keef serves as a reminder of what’s been whitewashed out of the hip-hop mainstream: a sense of the struggle bedeviling the communities that produce much of the music.”

“It’s a surprise that Chief Keef is beginning to gain traction because there’s strikingly little room for what he does in the hip-hop mainstream, which is preoccupied with success and, probably even more impossible for him, melody.”

Whitewashed? That is what critics call it when black rappers stop acting black and start acting white. I would pay to hear The Times tell us what that means.

Someday pop historians will be examining this moment as a seminal time in the birth of something very important, says The Times. Maybe by then The Times will reveal its policy of how it expects black people to act.

Note to The Times: If you are having trouble with that, just Google the term “minstrel show.” That ought to do it.

You are welcome.

For all the attention The Times devotes to the author of this “defining document,” the Chief Keef’s own words do not appear in the article.

You won’t be seeing them here either.  That is because the fuddy duddies who run FrontPage don’t like printing words that if you said them on radio, you would get fined $500,000.

That’s pretty much every line. Drugs. Violence. More drugs. More violence. Sex. Drugs. Sexual Violence. Over and over and over. Often expressed in the kind of black mob violence I document in White Girl Bleed a Lot: The Return of racial violence and how the media ignore it

And the hopeless squares who run FrontPage also do not think too highly of layering those lines over a video of several 17-year olds smoking reefer while  … well, this old fuddy duddy doesn’t even know how to describe what is going on in a way that fits a family-style news site.

Unless of course you are a member of the Manson family.

If you cannot wait for the verdict of future hip hop historians to learn about the birth of The Next Big Thing; or if you want to see a video of how The Times sees black people in their pre-whitewashed condition, you might want to check this for yourself.

First read the review. Then check this out to see what they are talking about.

Here’s a link to a video of his big hit “I Don’t Like” with lyrics.

Let me know what you think.

And the next time you wonder about how a culture becomes coarse and vile and despicable, or where teenagers get the idea that coarse and vile and despicable are OK, even admirable, don’t ask Chief Keef.

Ask The Times.

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Winstead, the co-creator of the Daily Show on Comedy Central, took the opportunity on Monday to tweet about the tornadoes ravaging Oklahoma. First:  “How long as Obama known about this Tornado?”  Then she followed up with a doozy: “This tornado,” she tweeted, “is in Oklahoma so clearly it has been ordered to only target conservatives.”

Outrage quickly ensued on Twitter, and Winstead pulled back from this offensive contention. But this wasn’t the first time she had used tornadoes in Oklahoma tastelessly for a cheap, pro-Obama shot. Back in April 2012, after the Oklahoma Senate killed a bill that would have allowed for alternatives to teaching of climate change, she tweeted, “GOPklahoma geniuses finally realized those tornadoes didn’t just show up onna count they were bored.” In other words, tornadoes happen because conservatives don’t wholeheartedly believe in anthropogenic climate change.

People who tweet about certain areas getting the natural disasters they deserve areas generally have a label: jerks. But for Hollywood, the real jerkiness is denying climate change. If you deny that driving an SUV somehow kills polar bears, you are not only uncouth, you are immoral. You can participate in rape of an underage child (Roman Polanski), murder (O.J), driving under the influence (everyone), and get away with it. But if you’re driving a Hummer while doing any of those things, you’re evil.

Climate change belief has become a substitute for moral belief in Hollywood. That’s why so many Hollywoodites spend their time pushing the green agenda. Only worship of Mother Earth could lead investors to sink $15 million into the waste of time and effort Promised Land. Only belief in Gaia could lead to an investment of $175 million in Waterworld (which grossed $88 million domestically). Environmentalist movies in Hollywood are far more common than movies about the dangers of terrorism.

The Hollywood set sees itself as the standard-bearer for the “civilization has ruined nature” clique. Of course, they bear that standard from high atop their energy-consuming mansions in the Hollywood Hills, while being chauffeured aboard their private jets. And they never seem to realize that while Americans have the luxury of worrying about gas guzzlers, the poor folks in the rest of the world don’t. The only way to raise those countries up financially is to produce goods and products that make lives easier. And the only way to do that is to embrace capitalism.

But Hollywood won’t do that. So Tinseltown is stuck between a rock and a hard place, trying to claim that the same capitalism that could end pollution is the cause of pollution (even as non-capitalist China leads global pollutant countries, and plutocratic Russia comes in third).

So instead, Hollywood will rail at all those rubes in Oklahoma. They’ll pretend that they’re doing something righteous and good by railing at the dupes who vote Republican in the sticks.

Then they’ll take the bucks they earn from mocking middle America, buy fuel efficient vehicles, and – in the imagery of South Park – create a cloud of smug over cities like Los Angeles. It’s even uglier than smog, and twice as irritating.

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The Gang discussed Dzhokhar’s Boat Manifesto. The dialogue occurred in Part II and focused on how a jihadist has explained that Allah made him do it — and 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.

She’s not alone in her special understanding of her duty as a Christian cleric. The other day came news that Louise Britze Kijne, vicar of Holy Cross Church in Nørrebro – a heavily Muslim neighborhood in Copenhagen – had, with the blessing of her ecclesiastical higher-ups and her own parish council, invited an imam, Abdul Wahid Pedersen, to speak to her congregation on the subject of “peace” just after the wrap-up of the Pentecost Monday worship service.

Originally, Britze Kijne’s idea was to have Pedersen speak during the worship service itself. But she changed her mind. Not because she realized it would a betrayal of her vocation or an affront to her congregants’ beliefs, but because she worried that it might cause controversy. And she didn’t want that.

In Christian belief, of course, Pentecost commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit to the Apostles after Christ’s ascent into heaven. Needless to say, there’s no Islamic connection here whatever. But Britze Kijne didn’t consider her innovation problematic. “The Bible’s account of the Pentecost shows that we are spiritual beings,” she told the newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad, “and therefore we can understand each other and share the belief in being created in God’s image – across languages and cultures that may otherwise separate us.” She said it was important for Christians and Muslims to “stand shoulder to shoulder” and discuss peace, “especially in this neighborhood that is best known to the public for gang wars and other problems.”

Britze Kijne is right about the prevalence of gang activity in Nørrebro. It’s through the roof. What she omitted to mention, however, is that the violence that has increasingly plagued the streets of Nørrebro has been committed by Muslims and fueled by Islamic teachings about infidels – the teaching, for example, that uncovered women deserve to be raped, and that those who refuse to follow the prophet generally have what’s coming to them.

For folks in Scandinavia, Abdul Wahid Pedersen is a familiar name. A Danish convert to Islam (he was born Reino Arild Pedersen), he runs a private Somali Muslim school and goes on TV a lot to speak about issues related to Islam, immigration, and integration. Many people in Denmark appear to have bought the view of him as a moderate or liberal member of his faith – partly, I suppose, because he’s not some scary-looking, hotheaded foreigner but a relatively mild-mannered native Dane, partly because of his high-profile involvement in various interfaith activities, but mainly because he’s made a cause of presenting the prettiest possible image of Islam to audiences large and small.

It is hardly an exaggeration, indeed, to describe him as carrying out a perpetual one-man promotional tour for Islam. Last year Jens Gregersen and Kit Louise Strand, who write for a website run by Islam critics Ralf Pittelkow and Karen Jespersen, attended a talk Pedersen gave at a church in the little Danish town of Stege. According to their account, he presented his audience with a “sterilized and purified version” of Islam and was clearly at pains to come off as a genial, loving, and (despite his faith) ordinary Danish guy – a far cry, in short, “from the traditional imams of Middle Eastern/Turkish/Pakistani origin.”

Pedersen’s moderate image, however, is a meticulously crafted subterfuge. In reality, he’s a staunch, consistent champion of sharia law who insists that while punishments such as stoning may seem less than humane, mere humans have no right to question the will of Allah. He firmly endorses polygamy, defends female genital mutilation, and supports the death penalty for apostates and adulterers. When Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad traveled to Copenhagen in 2009 for the  UN Climate Conference, Pedersen was one of several leading Danish Muslims who met with him. In the same year, Pedersen walked off a TV interview program in fury after being asked about the practice, popular among some Muslims, of “restoring” the hymens of non-virginal brides before marriage.

In their account of Pedersen’s talk in Stege, Gregersen and Strand noted the consummate skill with which he worked his trusting audience of small-town churchgoers, taking advantage of their “polite and responsive” reception, their utter incapacity to mock or scorn an invited guest, their readiness to paper over any uncomfortable aspects of Islam “with quiet hymns, coffee and homemade cake.” In Stege, Pedersen acknowledged that sharia law will be introduced once Denmark becomes a majority-Muslim country, but he apparently managed to convince his audience that a sharia-run Denmark will be a perfectly livable place for its Christian citizens – a veritable City on a Hill overflowing with mutual respect and understanding. Pedersen slipped up only once during his visit to Stege, responding to a pointed, informed query about the treatment of Christians under sharia by furiously calling the questioner “stupid” – but he quickly collected himself, putting “the big smile on his face again” and resuming what Gregersen and Strand described as his “charm offensive.”

Such criticism of Pedersen is extremely rare. In any case, it plainly hasn’t put a dent in the willingness of credulous church officials to provide him with platforms for his noxious propaganda. Unsurprisingly, Britze Kijne’s invitation to Pedersen enjoyed the full support of her bishop, who told Kristeligt Dagblad that he saw no problem with the idea, calling it a “really nice and welcoming initiative.” Pedersen himself told Kristelig Dagblad: “We must show that we can easily step into each other’s houses and say conciliatory words. As Christians and Muslims we do not have religion in common, but we have faith and longing for God in common. We believe in the same God, but in different ways.”

Well, yes indeed, there is a big difference – an all-important difference – between the gospel message of love and forgiveness and the stoning of apostates and adulteresses in accordance with the dictates of Islam. When Christian leaders overlook that difference, they’re not serving the cause of multicultural harmony – they’re serving as dupes and pawns of the perpetrators of creeping jihad. And, in doing so, betraying their flocks, their faith, their country, and their God.

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As previously reported, the Bavarian Verfassungsschutz decided on April 12, 2013, to begin monitoring local chapters of PI and the allied Freedom Party (Die Freiheit) due to their consistent criticism/condemnation of Islam. Such hostility to Islamic ideas prompted suspicions by the Bavarian Verfassungsschutz that these groups opposed Germany’s constitutionally-anchored equal rights before the law with respect to Muslim individuals. Verfassungsschutz offices in Germany at both the federal and the provincial level such as in Bavaria have the mandate to observe and report on such anti-democratic extremist groups.

Munich’s municipal Office against Rightwing Extremism (Fachstelle gegen Rechtsextremismus) noted this monitoring in a flyer available online. This “Info Paper Referendum ZIE-M [Infoblatt Bürgerbegehren ZIE-M]” discusses PI/Die Freiheit’s ongoing petition drive against building a proposed Center for Islam in Europe-Munich (Zentrum für Islam in Europa-München or ZIE-M). Containing citations from the previously discussed Bavarian Verfassungsschutz press release, this flyer warns that the “petition against the ZIE-M is being conducted by a group that stands under the observation of the Bavarian Provincial Office for Constitutional Protection.” Such observation ensued “because its [the group’s] activities violate our constitution.” In conclusion, the flyer admonished: “Please thoroughly consider therefore, whether you want to support this petition with your signature.”

Even as local Munich authorities are publicly associating such a stigma with a private political initiative, though, the federal (Bundes-) Verfassungsschutz has declined to follow Bavaria’s lead in monitoring PI and Co. As reported by a disappointed İsmail Kul at the Deutsch Türkisches Journal (“German Turkish Journal” or DTJ), Bundesverfassungsschutz President Dr. Hans-Georg Maassen saw no justification for watching what Kul described as a “hate page” and the “Der Stürmer 2.0,” in reference to the infamous Nazi propaganda organ Der Stürmer. At a Verfassungsschutz symposium in Berlin during the last week of April 2013, Maassen in response to a question had stated that “in Germany one may say that they do not like Islam, just as one may say that they do not like Christianity.”

Beyond Maassen’s assessment, meanwhile, the questionable Bavarian Verfassungsschutz decision has prompted other concerns. Writing in Germany’s leftwing Tageszeitung (taz), for example, Daniel Bax on May 7, 2013, had the possible “impression” of political motives underlying this decision, however much Bax welcomed action against the “notorious Muslim hater Michael Stürzenberger.” For Bavaria’s ruling Christian Social Union (Christlich-Soziale Union or CSU) this might be “more a matter of fighting a political competition on the right than seriously proceeding against anti-Muslim prejudices.”

In this context Bax referenced Bavaria’s chief executive from the CSU, Minister President Horst Seehofer. Two years earlier during a March 9, 2011, Ash Wednesday CSU convention speech he had pledged to fight “until the last round” so that immigrants would “not immigrate into German social welfare systems.” This statement brought Seehofer a criminal complaint under Article 130 of Germany’s Criminal Code against “Incitement to Hatred [Volksverhetzung]” from the Social Democratic (SPD) parliamentarian and former state secretary for transport, Ulrich Kasparick.

Explaining his decision on his personal website, Kasparick apparently conflated Seehofer’s Ash Wednesday speech with nationally controversial comments made earlier on October 9, 2010, to Germany’s Focus magazine. Therein Seehofer stated that it was “clear that all in all immigrants from other cultural backgrounds such as Turkey and Arab countries have a harder time” in assimilating. Seehofer concluded that “under all circumstances we need no further immigration from other” and “foreign cultural backgrounds.”

Thus the principled basis for Bavaria’s monitoring of PI/Die Freiheit is doubtful, even as this monitoring will almost certainly have concrete practical effects. Individual citizens will definitely “thoroughly consider” publicly exercising their right to sign an anti-ZIE-M petition, irrespective of its merits, if such civic expression entails contact with those denounced as enemies of the state. The previously reported “indirect effects” of Verfassungschutz monitoring analyzed by Germany’s high court are clearly evident in this case.

Yet Bavarian authorities have not satisfied the high burden laid down by the high court for imposing such burdens on Stürzenberger’s coterie of Islam critics. As the speculation about improper political favoritism influencing the Bavarian Verfassungschutz suggests, PI/Die Freiheit do not fundamentally differ from the unapologetic Seehofer in their cultural critique of Islamic belief’s effect upon behavior. Whether from Seehofer or PI/Die Freiheit, however, important issues involving an evaluation of Islam demand unhindered debate and dialogue. As correctly stated, however curtly, by Maasen, to “like Islam,” or any other faith, or not cannot be a matter of state sanction in a free society.

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

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

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!

*

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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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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