Of Foxholes and Atheists and Donald Trump

 The leftist elites always hate Republicans, but there is something much deeper going on with their hatred for Donald Trump. The desire to destroy him has an almost religious element to it.

They say there are no atheists in foxholes. The basic premise is that when facing an existential threat, particularly when lives are on the line, people will look for something stronger than themselves, often God, to pull them through.

The opposite might be when things are good. Then, atheism, or at least an indifference to God, grows.

Sadly, in this context, the last 75 years have been very good for the West. WWII was horrible, of course, but there were some good things that came from it.

The first good thing features two sides of the same coin, and that coin is the utter destruction of Germany and Japan. I don’t mean their defeat, but rather the utter destruction of their infrastructure and that of many of the nations fighting them. The result for the relatively unscathed United States was that its full wartime manufacturing footing put it in a position to provide pretty much of everything the war-torn world needed. The result was that by the middle of the 1950s, the American economy, with 5% of the world’s population, approached 40% of world GDP. Times were indeed good.

The other side of that coin was that because the German and Japanese infrastructures were so completely destroyed, they could leapfrog over many iterations of evolution and begin again with the latest technologies, machinery, and processes. The result was that by the 1980s, the Japanese and German economies were the most powerful in the world after the US.

The second positive outcome of WWII was the Cold War. Now the Cold War had many downsides, including the hot wars in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere, but what it did was draw a clear line between who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. America and the West were far from perfect, but we knew that at the end of the day, the West was the land of freedom, while the communists were tyrannies constantly seeking to expand.

The result of that clarity was that, for the most part, Western nations understood there was real danger in the world and prepared for it. They focused on trading with one another, they took defense seriously, and while they sometimes tolerated communists in their midst, they rarely made heroes of them.

The consequence of that Cold War clarity, and the Soviet and Chinese understanding that the West was willing to fight to preserve freedom across the planet, was a relative peace. And that relative peace was the West’s undoing.

For the half-century from the end of World War II until 2000, the world experienced more economic growth than it had in the previous 2,000 years combined. Driven by relative peace, world trade took off both within the West and with the developing world.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to perpetual prosperity. The West, basking in its victory over the Soviets and its certainty that communist China would evolve into a modern Western democracy if only allowed to sell us tchotchkes, began to turn on itself.

The peace / communist parties, which had been funded by Moscow and had always been a fringe element of modern Western polity, suddenly morphed into environmentalists and cloaked their anticapitalist ideas in far more voter-friendly “Earth First” shibboleths. Now, just as the money spigot from Russia was coming to an end, a far larger resource was becoming viable…Western governments.

The result was the extraordinary growth in the power of the far left in Western politics. And it wasn’t just environmentalism that was driving the train. As the Cold War wound down, Western nations used their “peace dividends” to shower citizens with benefits while simultaneously seeking to regulate their economies into perfection. (Spoiler alert: It didn’t work!)

The perfect encapsulation of the West’s metastasizing can be seen in the form of the European Union. Imagined as a vehicle to foster peace and then trade between perpetually warring European states, it morphed into a leviathan that not only seeks to control virtually every aspect of citizens’ lives in its member states, but it seeks to control who can grow what and when, how states can control their borders and even whether sovereign states can conduct their own elections.

Like so much of the modern West, an idea that started out as something ostensibly good metastasized into cancer. Stopping the pouring of chemicals directly into rivers morphed into eviscerating farms. A temporary safety net for the downtrodden morphs into generational welfare. An empathetic desire to help victims of war morphs into an invasion by legions of military-aged men.

And it’s not just capitalism and freedom that have taken body blows. The third leg of the stool upon which western civilization stands is Christianity, and it has been brutalized by Western prosperity, as have the foundations of Christianity, namely, marriage and children.

As they say, idle hands are the Devil’s workshop. The West’s relative prosperity has caused citizens not focused on a common enemy to turn on their own history. From British universities dropping Shakespeare and Chaucer to the New York Museum of Natural History removing Teddy Roosevelt’s statue to the Spanish government’s vow to “decolonize“ the nation’s museums, to the cancer of DEI, across the West, nations are turning their backs on their own foundations, the things that set them apart from—and above, frankly—every other civilization in human history. From socialism to communism to Islam, Western intellectuals have led the charge, via schools and the media, to champion everything that is anti-Western, anti-capitalist, anti-masculine, and anti-white.

At the end of the day, the globalist elites co-opted the hard-won prosperity and peace by leveraging technology, Chinese tchotchkes, and social media algorithms to aim society’s guns at the very things that built success in the first place. They’ve created a Mexican standoff where everyone loses as the core elements of Western civilization are undermined by policies specifically formatted to destroy them, while the resulting “culture” is not equipped to support anything close to the same level of civilization.

All of this is why Donald Trump is for the left, a new Jesus Christ—not in the sense that he’s godlike, because I think we can all agree that he’s not, but because he embodies their eventual destruction. Thus, just as Christ was a heretic whose message of love and a gracious God had to be destroyed because it threatened the established order, Trump’s pro-America, pro-masculinity, and pro-Western civilization message must be destroyed because it threatens the New World Order.

The globalists argue that they are best equipped to structure the lives of citizens, organize world economies, and control everything from speech to cow farts to electricity generation. Any message that suggests that citizens should control their own lives, that capitalism makes for the most prosperous outcomes, and that free speech is a cornerstone of civilization must be quashed.

Western elites think Donald Trump is the common enemy they need to unify citizens under the banner of globalism. They’ve got it backwards. They’re more likely to discover exactly how many of their citizens feel like they’ve been crouching in a foxhole waiting for someone to inspire them to climb out, pick up their weapons, and charge into a battle of ideas to take back their lives. Imagine the sheer horror on the globalists’ faces when they realize that Donald Trump just might be that guy...

War By Other Means: Demographics

I’ve heard enough about the Crusades, that America was built on stolen land or that Israel sits on occupied land. That’s life. Get over it. 

The reality is, for most of mankind’s and civilization’s history, the world has been ordered by the most physically powerful individuals and civilizations.  I mention the Crusades first because for the last quarter century we’ve been told that Muslim terrorism is somehow understandable because of the Crusades. We’re led to believe that the evil European Christians were invading the lands of the innocent peaceful Muslims and trying to steal the Holy Lands.  Well, that is partially true.  Beginning in 1095 and lasting to 1291 various Christian expeditions were indeed sent to the Holy Land in order to reconquer Jerusalem and its environs.  The First Crusade succeeded in in 1099 and established four Christian states in the area that would stand until the last was conquered in 1291.

It definitely sounds like the Christians were the aggressors… until one actually picks up a history book. In 600 AD the Eastern Roman Empire, what we today call the Byzantine Empire, stretched from the Strait of Gibraltar to the eastern most part of modern day Turkey and included half of Italy, all of Greece, all of Egypt, Israel, Syria and Jordan.  It was a Christian Empire and it had been built by the military power of the Roman legions over the previous 1200 years. By 640 the Byzantine Empire was a shadow of itself but would remain a regional power for the next 800 years.

The Islamic caliphate, which had its beginning in Medina in 622 would by 640 conquer all of the Arabian peninsula, by 661 take all of modern Iran, half of Turkey and much of Egypt and Libya.  By 750 the caliphate would include all of Spain, southern France in the west and much of the Caucasus’s in the east. Indeed, it was only the heroic stand in the Battle of Tours in 732 that kept the Muslims from taking all of France and potentially all of Europe. 

This is the actual backdrop upon which the Crusades were launched.  And just to be clear, that caliphate was not established, enlarged or maintained by peaceful acquiescence.  Muhammad alone fought 27 battles against “unbelievers” and the bloody conquest continued for centuries after his death. 

But here’s the thing… What the Muslims did is no different than what anyone else did.  The Mongols built the world’s largest land empire by conquering 25% of the planet’s land mass and killing 10% of the world’s population while doing it. 

The British killed millions building an empire upon which the sun never set.  The Americans killed hundreds of thousands of Indians during the establishment and growth of the United States. But they were no different than the Aztecs, the Māori, the Comanche, and most civilizations around the world. 

Indeed, right up until the middle of the 20^th century conquest was how much of the world ordered itself and violence was how it was decided who would be ruling a country.  In much of Africa it has remains so.  Violence, or the threat of it is how problems were solved in most interactions for most of human history around the world. The guy with the physical power to make others obey usually makes the rules.

While violence remains and sometimes breaks out in conflicts between or within nations, the truth is that the last 75 years has seen, admittedly largely midwifed by the United States power, an historic collapse in the number of deaths from war. Violence, at least in the west, has, for the most part, been abandoned in favor of other forms of decision making. Whether it’s economic trade, international bodies like the UN or diplomatic negotiations, when mortal conflict does break out, its typically the last of a long series of resolution attempts. 

Why is this relevant in 2025?  Because the civilization the west has developed has metastasized into idiocy on the part of much of the population, particularly among elites. Prosperity has, apparently, dulled their senses. They have zero understanding of actual history. They recline in their comfortable chairs and watch movies and TV shows and read social media posts that tell them that the world is oppressed because of western imperialism and that it was the violence of white Europeans that shattered humanity’s peaceful harmony.

The consequence of this historical ignorance and self-hatred is suicidal empathy.  Across the west leftist elites have indoctrinated much of the population to think that somehow the institutions and civilization Europeans built will exist forever.  That somehow – while simultaneously being evil – the building blocks of our relatively peaceful and prosperous civilization can and will survive regardless of who actually inhabits the west. They take Francis Fukuyama literally when he suggested history basically stopped because liberal democracies had won. 

The logical result of this delusion is, rather than strengthening the foundations of liberal democrat civilizations elites instead import millions of mostly military aged men who harken from a completely different worldview, Islam. With the expectation that they will assimilate and internalize those western values.

Anyone paying attention recognizes that’s not happening. Jordan Peterson articulates the reality:  Forty out of fifty Muslim majority countries in the world are authoritarian hell-holes. And only three are democracies: Morocco, Indonesia and Turkey. And I wouldn't put them in higher echelons of stellar states. Why is that? Is that a deviation from Islamic principles or is it the consequence of Islamism? Now nobody wants to have a discussion and it's no bloody wonder.

There are certainly doctrines in Islam that are very, very difficult to square with free, liberal, western Christian democracies. And those differences are not just apparent, they are deep!

Islam is a problem for the west and it’s growing. But the western elites, with their bodyguards, Swiss bank accounts and exclusive neighborhoods have no clue about the chaos they are inflicting on their nations. This is an invasion just as much as the 4^th and 5^th century barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire were. The difference is, the Romans at least fought until they were defeated whereas most western leaders are embracing those who will eventually subjugate them. 

To understand exactly how serious this ostrich like behavior is, one need only look at Britain’s latest attempt to address its violence problem. Deportation of criminal aliens?  No. Severe enforcement of laws?  Of course not. No, the Brits are now banning Samurai Swords and giving white men longer prison sentences for… checks notes… being white. 

Whether it’s the establishment of a Sharia compliant town in the heart of Texas, protests in Europe calling for a caliphate or the 50% higher birthrate among European Muslims compared to the general population, this is war by other means: Demographics. 

Western civilization has created more prosperity, freedom and technological advances than any civilization in human history.  The result of those advances has been to make westerners soft, fat and willingly ignorant of the nature of mankind and the history of civilizations. That’s unfortunate, because bondage has a way of clarifying reality, and that’s exactly where the west is headed if it doesn’t wake up soon. The world will once again become a violent place ruled by those with the most power and the least compunction about using it. That won’t work out well for anyone, but on the upside, at least the elites will finally have to face the consequences of their actions…

Shining Cities On Hills Take Centuries to Build but Can be Destroyed Quickly

 America’s Founding Fathers were nothing short of extraordinary.  Never before had a group of men come together to do things that would so change the arc of human history.  To a man it’s likely that they agreed with Sir Isaac Newton’s adage from 1676:  "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." This particularly applies to the two men most responsible for the nation’s founding documents, Thomas Jefferson & James Madison.

Jefferson, whose extensive library was the basis upon which the Library of Congress is built, was extraordinarily well read.  From Plato and Plutarch to Chaucer and Shakespeare to Blackstone and Burke, he was a voracious reader. Perhaps none more so than the giant of the enlightenment’s, John Locke. In addition to the intellectual arsenal all of this gave him, there were specific documents he drew upon in writing the Declaration of Independence.  Among these were his own draft of the Constitution of Virginia, George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights as well as the English Bill of Rights and its antecedent, the Magna Carta. 

Madison shared Jefferson’s familiarity with Montesquieu, Locke, Blackstone and crafted the Constitution with many of the same sources in mind. Given the different functions of the documents, Madison focused the Constitution on the fundamental nature of man and the need to constrain men’s most based instincts while Jefferson’s Declaration was focused on the passions that impel men to act.

The nation they bequeathed to us is of course, imperfect, but it is extraordinary nonetheless.  Based on these documents and the 2000 years of western civilization that preceded them, it has evolved with principles that have been, in aggregate, the most providential in all in human history. Fundamental elements such as freedom of speech, press, religion, the rights to a fair trial and to be free from government molestation in your home created an almost crystal clear limitation on the powers of government and the tyrannical nature of men. At the same time, outside of the explicitly government sphere you have things like private property, Capitalism and the Judeo-Christian tradition that reinforced the framework of the nation.

As everyone knows, America had extraordinary challenges from the beginning, starting with her Original Sin. But throughout she has had at her disposal in the form of the Constitution the tools to evolve and overcome her imperfections and advance. 

The culture Americans have today, or at least did until recently, focused on things like community, church, freedom of speech, limited government, private property, merit & individual achievement.

All of that took generations to build.  It took patriots standing on the shoulders of giants to build… And the result has been nothing short of spectacular.  For most of the last century the United States has been the most powerful nation in the world from both a military and economic perspective, and perhaps most of all, from an opportunity perspective.  From universities to Silicon Valley to Wall Street to main street, America has led the world in scientific advances, economic advances and, again, opportunity.  This is nowhere more clear in the fact that of the 954 Nobel Prizes awarded since its inception in 1900, over 404 of them (42%) are Americans, and of those 404, approximately 35% are immigrants.  And it’s not just intellectuals. There’s athletics. Of the 21,000 Olympic medals awarded since the revival of the Games in 1896, Americans have won over 3,000 or 15%. In this year’s games, approximately 10% of the American team was made up of immigrants or children of immigrants. And money. Of the world’s 2,781 billionaires in 2024, 29% of them, or 813 are Americans. Of those 813, approximately 11% are immigrants. 

All of this suggests that immigrants are good for America.  That’s true.  But that doesn’t mean we don’t have a problem.  We do. Because culture matters…

Unfortunately what we have seen over the last 30 years has been a flood of illegal immigrants from nations with no concept of the basics of American culture. The breakdown of the countries of origin tells the tale. The top ten nations from which illegals hail are as follows:  Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Columbia, Ecuador & El Salvador. Together they make up 80% of the illegals crossing our border. Those nations have no sustained history of free speech, limited government, private property, free elections or Capitalism. Contrast that with the previous waves of migration (1840-1889 & 1890-1911) when 89% of immigrants came from fellow European nations with overlapping western values. 

It is simply not sustainable for a nation to import tens of millions of people from nations with cultures that are anathema to its own. Indeed of the top ten most dangerous cities in the world, eight are in the countries listed above. The basic elements of western culture, of American culture are not found in DNA, they are found in communities, in the shared history of the citizens and in the laws of the nation. Large numbers of immigrants from nations with different mores can be destabilizing. From crime to the hundreds of billions of dollars necessary to support illegals to the strains on services such as education and healthcare to the dollars sent back home, illegals do harm to America.  Just this past week we’ve seen reports of Venezuelan gangs taking over  neighborhoods in Colorado and unleashing chaos in Dallas while 75% of arrests in midtown Manhattan are illegals. 

The only solution is deportation. By the millions. It will be ugly, it will be difficult, it will take courage in the face of withering media assaults and Democrat lamentations, but it is necessary.  If we do not build a wall and send the illegals home, it will be seen as an open invitation to the entire world to cross our border… and as Roy Beck explains with gumballs, that’s not sustainable.

Culture matters. The reality is, not all cultures are equal. If they were there wouldn’t be millions of people seeking to cross our borders. Western civilization in general and American culture in particular has taken centuries to develop, and a quick look around the world will demonstrate that cultures and civilizations that maintain themselves for centuries are few and far in between. 

If Americans don’t recognize that what we have is a gift and is something to be valued and protected, our shining city on a hill will soon devolve into the morass of chaos, violence, scarcity and tyranny where much of the rest of the world resides. If we really want to show compassion to those longing for what Americans have, the solution is not to open our borders and let them in, but rather seek to export the basic elements of freedom which are at the foundation of our success. There’s an adage of much disputed origin that perfectly articulates the idea:  Give a man a fish, feed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime. Our goal should not be to suckle the millions of illegals who swarm our borders and overwhelm our cities, but rather we should be to export the fundamental tenants of freedom and prosperity to the billions around the world so they can build their own shining cities on their own hills…

Western Civilization Hangs in the Balance, and it's Not Looking Good

When he embarked on his journey to discover a path to India Christopher Columbus’ lead ship was the Santa Maria. Built in 1460 it measured 62 ft with a crew of just 40, the Santa Maria would take Columbus to the New World and would change the course of human history.

Half a century earlier there was another man who sailed ships who didn’t change the course of human history. His name was Zheng He and he commanded the Chinese navy during the early 15^th century. His Treasure Ships were not only larger than the Santa Maria, they were more than six times the size, measuring 440 feet long with a crew of 600. And Zheng had an armada of them at his disposal during his seven Treasure Journeys between 1405 and 1433 that took him as far away as the Red Sea and the east coast of Africa.

Zheng’s navy was by far the most powerful the world had ever seen and he used it to explore and initiate trade and tribute routes. And what did the Chinese do with this extraordinary power? Nothing. After Zheng’s death the Treasure Journeys stopped. The Chinese had traditionally been an inward looking society and after Zheng’s 30 year exploration aberration, the old tradition returned.

Why are we not speaking Chinese today? Why didn’t the Chinese conquer the world (or at least try) when they had a navy exponentially superior to anything else in the world? Why did the kingdom that gave us paper and gunpowder not go on to dominate the world of commerce or ideas? Because the Chinese had very little competition in the area of said ideas. Ruled by an emperor who was all powerful, competition in the realm of ideas was rarely tolerated in China for most of its history, nevermind flourish. What the emperor said was gospel. And the emperor said we stay home.

Similar kingdoms held dominion over wide swaths of land yet had a very limited impact on the world beyond. The Mongol empire comes to mind, which was the largest contiguous empire in human history or the countless Muslim empires, up to and including the Ottoman empire. Robust competition of ideas did not exist in those empires any more than it did in China, and indeed most of us are not speaking Mongol nor Arabic nor Turkish.

Now compare that to the west. At one point the British Empire covered a quarter of the world’s landmass and a quarter of her people. Today more people speak English than any other language on the planet. There may be a billion people speaking Chinese, but 95% of them live in China while 95% of the English speakers don’t live in England. Similarly half a billion people speak Spanish and less than 10% of them live in Spain.

Beyond that, almost every aspect of life for most people today is the result of western ideas. Cars, phones, planes, elevators, televisions, cameras, computers, MRI machines, DNA testing, heart transplants, nuclear power, space travel, fracking, movies, advanced agriculture and much much more. For all intents and purposes, the west developed the modern world. And for all of its current deprivation, it is extraordinary.

So what accounts for the difference of the impact between what the Chinese accomplished over the last thousand years and what Europe did? Simple. Competition. And, in particular, the competition of ideas.

Competition, more than any single thing, is responsible for the advances of the west. Between countries there’s been competition. Within countries there’s been competition. Within religions there’s been competition which sometimes split sides across countries and between them. And the competition was relentless, frequently resulting in bloodshed and oftentimes in war, sometimes lots of both. In addition, alliances shifted regularly between countries and within them. There was rivalry, there was espionage and of course there was betrayal and treachery.

The real competition that helped to create the world we live in evolved in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman empire. What we know of today as France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Britain didn’t exist then. They formed over hundreds of years of competing tribes, towns and estates that evolved into domains and then into kingdoms.

Initially chieftains would compete with one another for the loyalty of local peasants in an effort to increase their power and holdings using such incentives as more food in exchange for their labor or fealty. Those chieftains would eventually evolve into local nobility and continue to expand their lands. Later, particularly in times of more instability dukes or kings would compete for the allegiance of local nobility by offering lower taxes or more freedom than their opponents.

The reality of this can be seen in the evolution of European nations, particularly France, Italy and Germany. The ebb and flow of borders over the 1500 years since the fall of Rome has been nothing less than stunning. And each of those nations, plus Britain and Spain were the core drivers of the evolution of civilization over the last 500 years.

All of that evolution came about because of competition, whether driven by ideas, religion, or simple power. At different times over that span the French were fighting against the British, the Spanish, the Papal States, Austria, the Prussians, the Russians and more. At other times they were fighting alongside those same nations. Britain and Italy and Germany and the rest of Europe have similarly chaotic histories.

And it wasn’t just external fighting. France, like most western countries, saw vast amounts of internal strive as the landed gentry and various regions fought one another for dominance or liberation. The same holds true for religion. While Christianity dominated Europe, the reality is that it battled with Islam for dominance for centuries and at one point in the 8^th century only being stopped at Poitiers in France and 900 years later at the gates of Vienna, Austria. Simultaneously Christianity battled itself bloody for the 500 years following the Reformation.

As if all of that chaos wasn’t enough, sometimes power and religion made for strange bedfellows such as when Francis I of France partnered with the Muslim Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Great in the 16^th century to fight their fellow Christians the Hapsburgs who controlled much of Europe beyond France at the time.

The most obvious outcome of all of this fighting and the shifting of alliances was a competition of ideas for everything from developing improved weapons of war to advances in art and architecture to science and math. Whether it resulted in competition to build the largest cathedral or the most luxurious palace, the most accurate painting style or the most efficient gun barrel, such advances were the fertilizer that fed modern civilization. It’s no wonder that this is where the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and advances such as flight, DNA, computers, cellphones and the Internet originated. So too freedom of the press, speech, religion and free markets, resulting in widespread prosperity and freedoms never before seen in human history.

All of that hangs in the balance as western nations face the catastrophic amalgamation of the woefully uninformed left, the rapidly increasing anti-freedom Muslim populations and increasingly despotic governments willing to abandon fundamental western principles in their pursuit of power. The $64,000 question is, how do we maintain those principles while increasingly those among us detest them and technology makes it easier than ever to target and marginalize those willing to stand up for them…

King Leonidas, ISIS and the Culture War Barack Obama Refuses to See… Nevermind Fight

A week and a half ago fascist thugs of ISIS attacked Paris. Three days later President Obama addressed the world from Istanbul and said the attack was “an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share.”

That is a wonderful sentiment, but like most things that come out of Barack Obama’s mouth, it’s wrong. There are not universal values.

Take freedom of speech. Across the planet, from China to Saudi Arabia to Russia to Venezuela, (and most places in between) nothing resembling freedom of speech such freedom exists. In the West, from Australia to England to Italy to Canada, freedom of speech ostensibly exists, but the restrictions continue to grow. Even here in the United States where freedom of speech is enshrined in our Constitution, it is under siege everywhere. On universities, the very places where ideas are supposed to be studied and debated, speech codes are suffocating liberty and mini fascists seek to limit your ability to say anything they disagree with. In everyday life criticizing anyone for anything opens one up for accusations of being racist or sexist or homophobic or some other form of intolerance.

Freedom of religion? One wonders how Coptic Christians in Egypt feel about freedom of Religion. Try wearing a crucifix in Saudi Arabia. How free do the followers of Falun Gong feel in China? Jews in Europe… Here in the United States Christians are under assault for refusing to participate in gay weddings while atheists seek to eliminate even the shadows of Christianity from the public square.

Freedom in general is not something found on most parts of the planet… Across the Muslim world women are slaves and getting raped is a crime for which one can be ostracized, jailed  or even killed. South America and Africa are rife with failed states where graft is the natural order of things and the populations are mired in poverty (real poverty… not what passes for poverty in the United States) while government officials and their connected cronies live in luxury. In China the government or government aligned corporations control virtually everything, even down to reproduction.

All in all, the values that Obama is suggesting are universal are nothing of the sort. Widespread notions of freedom of speech, freedom of religion and individual liberty simply don’t exist. The vast majority of people living on the planet today do not share or experience any of those values. There has never been a time in human history where a majority of people shared such values. Indeed it’s never even been close.

It is only with the rise of the West, where such freedoms and values were developed and flourished and codified, that the notion of “universal freedoms” could even be imagined. Such freedoms hit their apex with the writing of the United States Constitution. For the first time in human history there was a document that not only explicitly spelled out the rights of citizens that could not be impeded, but more importantly, explicitly limited the power of government to only those things it was specifically empowered to do by the citizens.

The reality is, the “universal freedoms” Barack Obama talks about simply don’t exist. They never have. But somehow he, along with the rest of the left pretend that they do, which is exactly why they seek to shift power away from the constitutionally constrained government of the United States to the unconstrained United Nations. They live in a fantasy world where if everyone would just put down their weapons and embrace one another that the world will suddenly be all right. They feel like if everyone simply kept the “fair share” of their income then magically the world become a nirvana in which every family enjoys a lifetime of Norman Rockwell dinners.

And that tells you exactly why ISIS is a problem and the West is in decline. Europeans, along with the left in America, willfully ignored what made the West a success in the first place… culture inspired by Christianity – although at times hindered by it as well, built on intellectual curiosity and empowered by individual liberty and freedom. The notions of freedom of religion and speech and private property as we know them today evolved in the West over a period of 800 years. They were not codified by an edict by a Pope or Martin Luther or Napoleon or Queen Victoria or even James Madison. These decidedly non-universal values came about as the result of a struggle between church and state and citizenry as well as between churches, states and citizens. Much bloodshed was spilled in the process of developing those values. They were hard fought for and won, and to the degree that they exist in other places around the world, for the most part they were brought there by westerners.

It is not so much that the West is collapsing because it’s being invaded (which it surely is) but rather rotting from within because it has spend the last half century protected in a cocoon of security provided by the American military. After rescuing much of the world from the Nazis and the Japanese in WWII, for more than half a century the United States has provided a bulwark against the Soviets and the Chinese and later the Russians. Under the protection of American power, the West - including the United States – deluded itself with the notion that peace was now the norm and that civilization had finally come to humanity. As such, it was possible to create vast social programs to nurture citizens from cradle to grave with little concern about fiscal or social responsibility. In addition, they opened their doors to allow millions of immigrants to enter their countries and enjoy those programs without ever being required to assimilate. Indeed, in many European countries assimilation could be almost impossible even if it were desired, which it rarely was.

Today we have the logical conclusion of the argument that no culture is superior to any other. Because Western culture is no better than any other, there is no basis to demand assimilation. Migrants by the millions move to the West and then seek to establish mini-me versions of the failed states and dysfunctional cultures they left behind… Indeed, across Europe there are movements under foot to implement Sharia law above national law while France, Britain and other nations are peppered with “No-Go” zones.

Given that it’s seen as racist or xenophobic to suggest that one’s culture is superior to another, it’s verboten to ask who put men on the moon, mapped the human genome or invented mobile phones. Such questions do not matter because all cultures are equal. And so it goes. As the self loathing West derides the very things that made it successful in the first place it finds itself under siege by those who are not only proud of their culture and values but are willing to both kill and die for them.

To see how this juxtaposition of passion and cultural apathy might play itself out, read or watch something about the Battle of Thermopylae. Observe how a small force of highly motivated and passionate fighters can have an impact exponentially larger than their numbers might suggest. King Leonidas and his men lose their lives and the battle… but the Greeks win the war. Unfortunately for America and the West, our impotent and incompetent leader is Barack Obama, who refuses to even see that we’re in the midst of a culture war, nevermind recognize that for the other side it’s literally a fight to the death. Let’s hope the next occupant of the Oval Office understands that America and the values she holds are not only, not universal, but they are exceptional, and indeed worthy of both praise and protection.

A Caliphate foothold in America and Barack Obama’s ignorance about the Crusades, the Inquisition and American History

Barack Obama’s relationship with Islam is definitely strange, at least as relative to that of most Americans. The United States may not be a Christian nation, but it is has always been a nation of Christians in that the overwhelming majority of the country has always been Christian, and remains so today. Given that 0.6% of the United States’ population is Muslim, most American’s familiarity with and knowledge of Islam comes from reading and what they see on TV. Neither can give someone the same familiarity with Islam as would be felt had the grown up with the faith as part of their family and their neighborhood. As shallow as is most of America’s familiarity with Islam today, before 9-11 it was even more so.

But of course September 11 did happen. Watching the scenes of revelers in the West Bank and other places cheering the attacks and thinking back on the first WTC attacks, the USS Cole, the embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi… Americans could have easily come to the conclusion that Islam was at war with the United States. But they didn’t. In fact, after September 11 President Bush was quite clear that that was not the case. And the predicted wave of attacks against Muslims across the country never materialized.

In fact, although there were some isolated attacks, just the opposite occurred. Prayer events where Imams were invited to speak took place across the country. Muslims were interviewed on TV and radio programs seeking to understand the religion and the motivations behind the attacks. In 1942 the hero of the left locked up 120,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps while in 2001 the bête noire of the left encouraged Americans to embrace Muslims.

Then in 2008 something remarkable happened. Americans elected to the presidency someone who, although ostensibly Christian, was the son of a Muslim, who grew up in a Muslim country, who attended a mosque (irregularly) and who was educated in a Madrasa.  That, in a country where only 50 years before serious questions existed as to whether or not a Catholic could be elected.

All of this is to simply say, America knows that it’s not at war with Islam.

That being said however, apparently Islam is at war with much of the world… and in some places, with itself. Of the 31 active wars going on in the world today (those with at least 100 causalities per year) fully 20 of them involve Muslims on one side or the other… or both. That’s 65% of the conflicts while Muslims make up 20% of the world’s population. At the same time, 29 of the FBI's 30 most wanted terrorists are... Muslims. 

Which brings us back to Barack Obama and his unwillingness to call the Islamist terrorists Islamist terrorists. While most Americans understand that not all Muslims are terrorists, they recognize the demonstrable fact that Islamic terror is a real thing, a real threat, and are simply puzzled by Obama's obfuscation on acknowledging the obvious.  But he has given Americans much to be puzzled about when it comes to his perspective on Islam.

In 2007 candidate Obama, after reciting the Arabic call to prayer (apparently with a perfect accent) he told a reporter for the NY Times that that sound was “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”

In 2009 after Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 soldiers and injured more than 30 at Ft. Hood, Texas, while yelling Allahu Akbar – a thread that seems to run through such attacks – Barack Obama told the country this was simply “workplace violence”.

In 2010 Charles Bolden, Barack Obama’s head of NASA told Al Jazeera that one of the president’s three mandates for NASA was: “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.”

In 2012, following the attack on Benghazi which killed 4 Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Barack Obama’s State Department spent $70,000 on ads in Pakistan denouncing the US made anti-Islam video the administration falsely blamed for the attacks. He further spoke at the UN, not in defense of free speech, but to suggest that “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

Finally there is the President’s recent comments equating Islamist terror (although he refuses to use the term) with the Crusades, the Inquisition and slavery & Jim Crow in the US. Of the many things that Barack Obama has said that have puzzled Americans about his perspective on Islam, this might be the most egregious. It shows he has no understanding of history, either Christian or American.

The Crusades were a largely defensive effort as part of a centuries long geopolitical struggle that saw the Muslims stopped at Tours, France in 732, saw the Umayyad Caliphate control Spain from the 7th to the 11th centuries and saw the Ottomans turned back from Vienna in both 1529 and 1683.

In stark contrast to Islamic terror, the Inquisition was “not born out of desire to crush diversity or oppress people; it was rather an attempt to stop unjust executions.” This was necessary because prior to the Inquisition local nobles were responsible for passing judgment on heresy and arbitrarily convicted both the innocent and the guilty, often for reasons that had nothing to do with the church and everything to do with political expediency. The Inquisition was the Church’s attempt to eliminate such injustices.

Finally there is slavery and Jim Crow. What Barack Obama doesn’t bother to mention is that from before there was a United States Christians across the colonies fought slavery in the name of Christ. Indeed abolitionists existed throughout our history and Christianity was its driving force. That slavery became a blemish on American history is unfortunate, but it was economics that kept men in bondage, not Christianity, after all the Kansas–Nebraska Act had nothing to do with Christ. So too with Jim Crow. It was culture and economic power that separated the races in the south rather than religion. While some may have used Christianity as an excuse to support such laws, there was always a significant and vocal fight from Christians against such unequal treatment, including in the South. And it was Christianity that Martin Luther King harnessed to inspire the nation to bring the system down.

Barack Obama’s obdurate unwillingness to call Islamic terror by its name stands in stark contrast to his seeming eagerness to characterize a wide swath of activities and events in America as racist. Given that everything from 9-11 to videotaped beheadings to the burning people alive in cages has played itself out right in front of our eyes under the cry of Allahu Akbar, the former makes Americans wonder if Barack Obama is not perhaps some kind of Manchurian Candidate who seeks to soften American resistance to some future caliphate foothold. At the same time his seeming eagerness to immediately insert race into everything from votes against him to the Cambridge police dustup to the Michael Brown incident makes many Americans wonder if Barack Obama is not a modern version of Aesop’s Boy Who Cried Wolf, who sees racism around every corner, regardless of the facts.   

At the end of the day a leader doesn’t necessarily have to be of the same party or color or race or religion of those he leads. But he does have to share their basic values and understanding of the world if he desires their continued attention and engagement. With the Yoga like contortions he persists in engaging in in order to avoid calling Islamist terror what it obviously is and Islamic terrorists what they are, more and more people are beginning to wonder about Obama’s view of the world and view of America.  They understandably wonder how much that view - coming from a guy who didn't even know you're supposed to put your hand over your heart during the national anthem, something most 5th graders know - dovetails with theirs.  It’s about time.

The Cult of Liberalism

Religions are largely kept together by the faith of the followers as opposed to proof. Whether it’s Christianity, Judaism, Islam or any other religion, it’s not science or empirical evidence that keeps millions or billions of people believing, it’s faith. Indeed, religions are full of claims that our current scientific knowledge would say are impossible, but nonetheless, faith persists. Given horrific events that seem to fly in the face of what one would expect from a compassionate or just God, faith still persists. Believers believe, and they interpret events in their lives and the world in a way that comports with their religion. At the end of the day, religion is about faith, period.

By the above measure, liberalism is a religion. How else would it be possible that in the face of a history of demonstrable failure that there are those who continue to believe? Liberalism, in the form of outright Communism failed miserably everywhere from the Soviet Union to Cuba and a multitude of places in between. Yet the faith remains. Liberalism in the form of socialism has failed miserably across Europe as practically the entire continent is floundering in mounting debt, double digit unemployment and depressingly low growth rates. Yet the faith remains. Liberalism in the form of Democrat party policies have destroyed wide swaths of America’s landscape, from cities like Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia to black families that suffer from unprecedented rates of unemployment, unwed motherhood and tragically high rates of crime. Yet the faith remains.

Add willfully blind faith to presence of an anointed one among us and you get a cult. Which is exactly what liberalism and the virtual worship of Barack Obama has become:

Obamacare: Every day seems to bring new information that only adds to the understanding that Obamacare is a disaster of epic proportions. Yet faith remains.

Economic Growth: Barack Obama’s “recovery” has been the worst since the Great Depression and incomes have fallen over $4,000 per household since he took office. Yet the faith remains.

Welfare: Welfare has become so generous that in 35 states, it’s actually more profitable to sit at home and collect welfare benefits than it is to go out and find a job. In Hawaii the pretax wage equivalent of welfare benefits is $60,590 per year. In Washington DC it’s $50,820 while in Massachusetts it’s $50,540. Those are dollars that have to be paid for by taxes on those working. Yet the faith remains.

Race: In less than 50 years from the day Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial the United States elected a black man as president, twice! Yet race relations in the United States are worse than they have been in decades. Yet the faith remains.

On virtually every single empirically measurable measure, from education to economic growth as well as simple observable measures such as regulation and freedom, liberalism has been a failure in general and particularly so under Barack Obama. Yet, despite the fact that the consequences of this failure hurts the very people it's supposed to help, the faith remains.  

While the 1st Amendment enshrines the notion of freedom of religion, today the United States is being governed by the cult of liberalism, which seems more like a religion than many of the mainstream religions in the world.

It demands subservience to its policies and is willing to use the police power of the state to impose them while nonbelieving infidels must be marginalized. Speak critically of the Messiah and you are a racist. Disagree with gay marriage you’re a homophobe. Suggest that its culture and unwed motherhood that are ravaging black families and again you’re a racist. Advocate for limited government or state’s rights and you’re an extremist. Promote school choice and you don’t care about children. Advocate for lower taxes and you’re greedy. Champion free markets and you’re a selfish capitalist. Question man made global warming and you’re anti-science. Disagree and you must be discredited and vilified.

Liberals often champion a wall of separation between church and state. This may be the one time they might actually be right about something. However it isn’t Christianity that the country needs to be saved from, it’s the secular religion of Liberalism with Barack Obama as its messiah.