Convention Chaos Would Have to Be Unprecedented to Dump Trump

/0 Comments/in , /by

A lot of folks have been trying to figure out how to avoid being ruled by the future Clinton/Warren communist regime. As an ex-member of the Republican Party for over two years now, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is little hope for that party to win, especially in light of recent events.

Donald Trump has claimed that one can predict bias due to ethnicity, which has got to be one of the most anti-American things we’ve heard a Republican candidate say, in spite of the Democrats who say these kinds of things and thrive on race-insults and division. And we may be overthinking this, but, if someone of Mexican heritage is automatically biased against a guy who builds a fabled wall between Mexico and the United States, then wouldn’t that mean that in his brain, Trump believes he will not get “fair” treatment from any Latino voter?

Ah, forget it, trying to make sense of this egomaniac is tiresome. While we are told to unite behind him despite his lack of conservative qualities—not to mention absence of common sense and abundance of shallowness—some of us dream of a way to change the nominee rather than infringe on our self-respect.

But there is a bigger wrinkle than Trump at play. The Republican Party in our sometimes romantic minds is not the Republican Party Trump plans to take over. It’s not as if he’s going to turn the GOP into a big government party; it already is one. He will uphold the status quo and reinforce the establishment. He heaps praise on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) because he has power. He heaps disdain on Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) because he does not have power. If Trump’s the nominee, and if he wins the presidency, there will be zero attempt made by the Republican Party to adhere to the conservative principles on which it was founded. So, really, nothing will change in that respect.

Steve Deace has interviewed an RNC official who believes the rules are not set that delegates have to stick with the outcome of the state primaries on the first vote. That official, Curly Haugland, wrote a book titled “Unbound,” and he presses that all delegates can and should vote their consciences on every vote. Another convention expert said that though Haugland’s meticulous reading of the rules usually garners him a collective eye roll among the RNC members, he is correct in that the rules are unclear on binding. According to a book by convention expert John Yob, “Chaos: The Outsider’s Guide to a Contested Republican National Convention 2016,” Haugland’s years of being a rules geek are perhaps coming to a head as the anti-establishment fervor is at a fevered pitch, and he presides at the head of a North Dakota delegation who are all unbound.

Yob is a Michigan operative who now lives in the Virgin Islands and has contested the Republican Chair from St. Croix for control of the delegation. The U.S. Virgin Islands are special in that all nine delegates are unbound and chosen by very few voters, giving them quite a bit of relative power. In his book, Yob runs down every state delegation, how it’s elected, whether the delegates are bound or unbound free agents and other nerdy details. But no matter how much he discusses the rules and some history of conventions, the book stresses, at least to my reading, that the rules are unclear. In fact, a pretty clear takeaway from the book is that 2016 is ripe for a chaotic unprecedented convention, not just because Trump is running (his book was published before the presumed nominee was named), but because of the fractious lead up to this convention and the shifts taking place within the Republican Party.

If the elites of the Republican Party only understood that the anger that fueled the rise of Trump can be traced back to them in the first place, a lot of the divisiveness within the party would subside; but they believe they are still right, so it’s not going to end. Heck, Trump doesn’t even understand who or what the problem in Washington is. He just figures he can make better deals.

But it seems if you are hoping for a different nominee coming out of the convention, the chaos would have to be ten times anything that’s ever happened before, thus making it quite a farfetched dream. The revolt would have to be led by the delegates themselves. They would have to secretly coordinate across states, identifying SINOs (supporters in name only) of Trump, those not poisoned by the lies Trump told about the rest of the primary field.

But though the Yob book gives a pretty clear picture of how “anything can happen” at a convention, the truth is, unless several rules are changed, and other rules clarified, a coup is unlikely. Considering all the risky business with the number of first-time convention attendees and the capitulating nature of the Republican Party in general, we must figure Trump will come out of the convention as the nominee, with probably an establishment guy for vice president. Because in the end, the establishment needs to protect the status quo.

For those of us who believe Trump will lose to Hillary, it’s all bad news. (For more from the author of “Convention Chaos Would Have to Be Unprecedented to Dump Trump” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Bill Kristol Should Man up or Shut Up

/0 Comments/in , , /by

The #NeverTrump movement needs to get a grip.

The Weekly Standard’s open letter is an example of how desperate the #NeverTrump people have become. Anti-Trump Derangement Syndrome has infected the conservative movement and motivated many anti-Trumpers to embarrass themselves.

Jay Cost wrote a piece titled “An Open Letter to Mitt Romney.” This is basically an open letter to Mitt Romney desperately begging him to run for president. It is truly humiliating that the web site has sunk to the level of writing an open letter to a politician in an effort to shame him into a Kamikaze mission targeting the Republican nominee for President Donald Trump.

Although Cost makes the case that Romney is needed to be the statesman to stand against both Trump and Hillary Clinton, we all know that the primary objective is to stop Trump. If this effort is somehow successful, it will usher Hillary Clinton into the White House. Not coincidentally, Clinton has a foreign policy view that is much closer to the hawkish nation-building views of the Weekly Standard than that of the more restrained Donald Trump.

In the Weekly Standard open letter to Mitt Romney, Cost writes:

I write you not as a fellow conservative, not as a fellow partisan, but as a citizen of our republic. You have served your nation admirably for many years and by any ordinary standard are entitled to a happy retirement. But these are extraordinary times, and your nation still has need of your service. I respectfully implore you to run for president as an independent candidate in 2016.

Mitt Romney ran in the last election cycle and lost as a Republican. He would effectively be a write-in spoiler for the Republican Party under your scenario. Clearly, Romney could not win, but the candidacy would serve the purposes of the angry #NeverTrump gang.

Romney was the Republican nominee in the last election cycle, yet Cost argues for him to be the anti-Republican nominee candidate in this cycle.

Jay Cost writes the following:

Governor Romney, there is nobody else but you who is capable of such a bid. It is a credit to your modesty and sense of decency that you demurred and instead tried persuade others to run. But there really is nobody else. General James Mattis, Senators Ben Sasse and Tom Coburn, and David French are all estimable men, but the enormity of the task was too great for them to accept. Only you possess the experience, the political network, the good health, and the time to dedicate to this great endeavor. Only you have the standing with the voters to endure the assaults of Trump and Clinton.

The Republican voters have spoken and they chose Donald Trump. None of the candidates mentioned ran this cycle. Bill Kristol needs to grow a pair and run for president. It is easy to beg and cajole every other conservative under the sun to run as an independent against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, yet it deifies logic that anybody would do something that Kristol, over at the Weekly Standard, is unwilling to do himself.

So, William Kristol –should man up and run for President or shut up.

One of the more cringe-worthy aspects of Cost’s piece was the following:

This is an incredible request, but you know that some Americans are called by Providence to give more than others. George Washington defended his nation during the Seven Years War, led it to independence in the Revolution, and by 1788 he wanted only to retire to his beloved Mount Vernon. But the nation needed him to launch the new government, so he answered the call. Four years later, he again wished for nothing more than the peaceful life of a country planter, but the harmony of the fragile union required yet another commitment from him. Again, he answered the call.

So Mitt Romney is the second coming of George Washington? I don’t think even Mitt Romney would be comfortable with that comparison. The open letter only serves the purpose as a magnificent troll of the media as MSNBC, Fox News and CNN will pivot to the piece.

Mark my words, before the end of this election cycle – the Weekly Standard will officially endorse Hillary Clinton for President of the United States. Ultimately, many on the #NeverTrump bandwagon will end up being pro-Hillary – some are already there. (For more from the author of “Bill Kristol Should Man up or Shut Up” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

5 Ways Orwell’s 1984 Has Come True Since Its Publication 68 Years Ago

/0 Comments/in , , /by

It’s debatable whether George Orwell surmised the ominous threat of totalitarianism that inspired him to pen the dystopic vision, 1984, would extend worldwide and resurface nearly seven decades after its publication. But the novel’s apt description of a world on end have undoubtedly come to pass.

Innumerable examples evidence how 1984 would better be described as a dark portent than a fascinating read, but one thing — the political language dubbed Newspeak, employed by the ruling government, Ingsoc — seems to have served as an instruction manual for the American empire.

Political language stands as arguably the most influential means to shape foreign policy. Through deliberate manipulation of speech, politicians can rally popular support for factually undesirable military operations — or stir fear of any enemy when geostrategic goals demand, even if the targeted group or government poses no actual threat at all.

On the 67th anniversary of the publication of Orwell’s 1984, the following list comprises only a fraction of possible examples of the U.S. government’s version of Newspeak.

1. Moderate rebels: If the public might not be thrilled with government plans to support terrorists, officials simply offer up the less-than-honest term, moderate rebels — and Americans verily stand behind funding and arming the now-non-terrorists to the teeth.

Most notoriously, President Obama and his administration continually advance the notion that training and arming so-called Syrian moderate rebels is somehow a good idea — by hammering the term into gullible minds through its willing mouthpiece, the corporate media. In fact, documents declassified last year proved the U.S. and its allies support for various moderate rebel groups not only led to the formation of Daesh (the so-called Islamic State), officials knew about — and desired — that to happen in hopes a “Salafist principality” would help depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Obviously spiraling out of control into a chaotic quagmire — despite the U.S. having spent $500 million training “4 or 5” rebels — reports earlier this year indicated, as Anti-Media reported, “the same Shia militias fighting with the U.S. to maintain its installed government in Iraq are battling against the U.S.-backed forces — including those armed by the CIA — by bolstering Russian and Iranian efforts to bring control of [Aleppo] back to Assad.”

Moderate rebels is just another opportunistic distortion of an already subjective term.

2. War on Terror: In itself, dystopic, perpetual war now appears to be a reality thanks to the U.S. declaring a War on Terror — a concept, whose reality to people in countless locations it plays out, should honestly be called the War of Terror.

Through the use of such preposterously vague terminology, U.S. bellicrats — the war-touting politicians determined to plump the wallets of the military-industrial machine — cemented the country’s dubious status as World Bully.

After all, waging war on a concept begets a bottomless trove of potential ‘enemy’ targets. World leaders unwilling to bend to the U.S.’ will, sovereign people unfortunate enough to be situated near a natural resource a corporate conglomerate needs, groups fighting for independence from an American ‘ally’ — hell, even segments of the U.S. populace are now deemed terrorists for differing political ideologies.

A War on Terror parallels 1984: “Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” Considering the broad focus coupled with the lack of an official declaration of war, it’s entirely feasible the U.S. will always be at war with Terror.

3. No boots on the ground: How many times has the State Department resolutely declared ‘there will be no boots on the ground in [insert any nation here]’? Concerning Syria, alone, the number topped 16 — and then, with a straight face, the Obama administration outlandishly claimed it never said so.

“It’s just not true,” John Kirby, State Department spokesman, pompously told an understandably perplexed reporter when questioned on whether officials had promised no boots on the ground in Syria. “It’s just not true.”

But, of course, it is true. Not even a question. Not even plausibly deniable. It’s been captured on video. Quoted in articles. So common is the phrase, in fact, it passes largely unnoticed. And no boots on the ground culminating with boots on the ground doesn’t end with Syria.

Five-thousand boots not on the ground somehow ended up fighting on the front lines in Iraq. And now troops are fighting Daesh in Libya. And elsewhere. No boots on the ground has become such a farcical claim, even corporate media have pointed out its illegitimacy.

Just as the War on Terror provides a blanket excuse to further American imperialist goals wherever convenient, no boots on the ground offers the technical out for the U.S. to deploy special forces — and their boots. On the ground.

4. Elections: Every four years, U.S. voters head to the polls to elect the lesser of any number of evils, after enduring over a year of propagandistic mudslinging between various presidential candidates. But this year’s run for the White House evidences the stark futility in that putative exercise of rights.

Countless anecdotal reports of fraud in nearly every state’s primary or caucus thus far largely magically work in Hillary Clinton’s favor. But this makes perfect sense — considering the establishment’s slavish devotion to the former Secretary of State on full display through the corporate media’s laughably slanted reporting. From the moment election season kicked off, the more cynical among us contended candidates are selected, not elected, whatever the system would have you believe.

All arguments to the contrary aside, the Associated Press might have unintentionally proved precisely that, just this week, with its early crowning of Hillary Clinton as the presumptive Democratic nominee. Irate voters and independent media immediately eviscerated the AP’s wholly invalid announcement as comically premature — but mainstream media parroted the claim in full force, exactly as expected. Now, quelle surprise, evidence Clinton might have literally colluded with the AP to ensure its claim would circulate prior to California’s primary to dissuade voters has surfaced.

Whatever hope voters had to install a (superficially) counter-establishment candidate in the highest office should evaporate in 2016 — the year Americans finally figured out the system is rigged beyond repair. Indeed, election truly amounts to U.S. Newspeak for selection.

5. News: In light of the last point, it’s a wonder so many Americans put faith in mainstream, corporate outlets for an accurate summary of the news, yet they still do. Just six corporations own 90 percent of all media platforms in the U.S., effectively controlling the narrative — whether on foreign policy, legislation, or any goal fitting its needs.

Indeed, many call corporate media the government’s mouthpiece for good reason — a number of executives and upper-level staff from mainstream outlets donate the maximum allowed to line the campaign coffers of politicians in every level of government. Plenty of others have proffered hefty sums to organizations with ties to candidates — such as the Clinton Foundation.

Though the merits of a media without any bias could be debated endlessly, to surmise such intermingling of interests leads to favoritism in the press wouldn’t be a stretch. What would be a stretch, however, would be calling reports from these outlets news in the traditional, original sense.

When the government needs Americans’ approval for, well, anything, it simply turns to the press to cough up an appropriately-tilted news item — and even Orwell, rolling in his grave though he may be now, would have called this process by the most honest non-Newspeak term available: propaganda. (For more from the author of “5 Ways Orwell’s 1984 Has Come True Since Its Publication 68 Years Ago” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Trump Has Jumped the Great White Race Shark, but What About Judge Curiel and La Raza?

/0 Comments/in , /by

Republicans are scrambling to deal with the statements which Donald Trump won’t stop making about Gonzalo Curiel, the judge picked to preside over an upcoming fraud trial, where plantiffs who claim they were ripped off by Trump University will air their grievances — even as Trump runs for president. In a self-serving move that seems much more aimed at avoiding civil liability for shady business dealings than at unifying Americans behind his candidacy, Trump claimed that Curiel cannot conduct a fair trial because he is biased. The “proof” Trump gave is unsettling: He said that Curiel could not try Trump impartially because he is of Mexican descent.

As the Wall Street Journal reported:

In an interview, Mr. Trump said U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel had “an absolute conflict” in presiding over the litigation given that he was “of Mexican heritage” and a member of a Latino lawyers’ association. Mr. Trump said the background of the judge, who was born in Indiana to Mexican immigrants, was relevant because of his campaign stance against illegal immigration and his pledge to seal the southern U.S. border. “I’m building a wall. It’s an inherent conflict of interest,” Mr. Trump said.

As usual, Trump muddled a legitimate point in a haze of provocative rhetoric. Judge Curiel should be looked at skeptically because of what he has done, not who he is. It is documented that Curiel joined and still belongs to the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association. That name is profoundly alarming: The National Council of La Raza is an extremist Latino pressure group that favors complete amnesty for illegal immigrants, expansive affirmative action for such newcomers, and a wide array of other policies based not on any moral or Constitutional principle — but instead on the tribal self-interest of Latinos, especially immigrants. (For a full, alarming account of La Raza’s radical agenda and links to Marxist organizer Saul Alinsky, see this article.)

Labor activist Cesar Chavez warned that the very term “La Raza” is “anti-Gringo” — in other words, racist. Trump critics have asserted that there is no direct organizational tie between the national tribalist group and Curiel’s organization. One wonders how media would have reacted if Trump belonged to a supposedly innocuous Anglos-only business group that called itself a “Klan.” Would reporters be satisfied if he answered, “Oh, we’re not that Klan. There’s no formal affiliation.” Indeed, Curiel’s group is affiliated with the National Hispanic Bar Association, which last year called for a boycott aimed at Trump’s business interests — interests akin to Trump University, which is the subject of the very case that Curiel is slated to impartially judge.

If only Donald Trump had said all this, and only this, instead of lazily citing Curiel’s ethnic heritage itself — which is no more inherently predictive of how he will judge a case than Clarence Thomas’s is.

What Trump actually said is profoundly unsettling. It suggests that American citizens in public life must be judged by their ethnic origin — in the same way that Japanese-Americans were during World War II, when Democrat president Franklin Delano Roosevelt forcibly interned more than 100,000 citizens and legal residents, regardless of whether or not they had shown any sympathies for the Japanese regime they had left behind.

In FDR’s defense, he was trying desperately to protect the country from sabotage in time of war, while all Trump aims to do is to win a fraud trial over a sleazy business that targeted gullible working class Americans — regardless of their race, creed or national origin. What Trump and Roosevelt’s stances do have in common is that they contravene American principles — which our Founders believed apply to every citizen equally, and our Constitution later extended to cover groups of people unjustly excluded, such as descendants of African slaves. At least FDR could honestly say he was busy protecting the nation.

Is Trump Just a Rough-Edged Burkean?

But of course that is what Trump claims, over and over again, on a wide array of issues from trade and foreign policy to immigration. Several sober conservative thinkers have pointed to Trump’s rise as proof that the “respectable” Right and the Republican party have abandoned the first task of conservatism in any country: prudently guarding the fragile fabric of society as it exists against radical changes (economic, social, and political) that might harm it in ways which intellectuals and policy wonks cannot predict.

That’s the conservatism of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk, and it is every bit as race-neutral as neoconservative or Classical Liberal theories that elevate other priorities, such as “national greatness” or limited government. Irish, Jamaican, or Korean conservatives could sign on to such a creed — though the status quo each is guarding would be rather different.

What makes conservatism complex for Englishmen and Americans is that each of the societies we defend can be seen as a Goose that lays a Golden Egg — a shining set of principles including ordered liberty, political equality, race-neutral justice, and economic innovation. These principles sometimes demand that we make the Goose a little uncomfortable, in its own best long-term interests. Indeed, those principles are the very reason that the Anglosphere came to dominate the global economy and become the gold standard of good governance — instead of Holy Russia, the Japanese Empire or Greater Germany.

The Americanism First Committee

But what if we become so fixated on the sheen of the Golden Egg that we do real harm to the Goose? Too many “Golden Egg” conservatives see America as an ideology first, which just happens to have attached itself to a country, as Marxism did to Russia (though Americanism yielded better political and economic outcomes). If you see America this way, you are liable to view your opponents — who might be motivated by prudence and legitimate, Burkean caution — as “un-American” tribalists, Babbits, or bigots.

Mainstream conservatives have heaped far too much scorn on Trump’s supporters, and some of it even spilled over onto those of us who backed Senator Ted Cruz — a man of thorough Constitutional principle, who actually kept the vital tension between the sheen of the Egg and the health of the Goose.

Meanwhile, the Left in America from academia to many of our churches holds the Golden Egg in rank contempt, as useful only for cramming down the Goose’s throat to choke it to death. Progressives see no contradiction in calling others “racist” on the thinnest possible evidence, while at the same time demanding that books be purged from curricula simply because their authors (such as Chaucer) were white.

I once sat in room full of priests in Baton Rouge and fumed as the official speaker invited by our bishop explained that it is by definition impossible for non-whites to practice racism — because that term only applies to the activities of the nationally privileged “group.” None of the clergy seemed to realize that this definition is both Machiavellian and Marxist, completely at odds with Christian principles of human dignity. Nor do the Protestant ministers who approved this charming document (h/t Allen West). See especially point #10.

Privilege-575x1024

It is statements like this which give rise to movements like Trump’s. (For more from the author of “Trump Has Jumped the Great White Race Shark, but What About Judge Curiel and La Raza?” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Exclusive: Here’s What Alaskan Mother Blames for Daughter’s Loss to Transgender Boy at Champion Track Meet

/0 Comments/in , , , , /by

As widely reported by national outlets over the past several days, a “transgender” boy was allowed to compete in Alaska’s Girls State Championship track meet last week. He placed third at the meet, bumping Mat-Su resident Jennifer VanPelt’s daughter, Allison, from the medal platform.

In a subsequent exclusive interview with Restoring Liberty, Ms. VanPelt revealed that neither she nor her daughter knew that a boy had competed in the girls’ race until sometime later, after media reports came out about it. When they read the boy’s name – “Wangyot” – in one article, Ms. VanPelt exclaimed to her daughter, “Wait! He raced against you! He placed ahead of you, he knocked you out of medal contention!” Her daughter, once the implication of this sunk in, was “really upset.”

Ms. VanPelt told me that Allison “busts her butt seven days a week to train to be able to beat most of the females in this state,” but that she doesn’t “bust her butt to beat a guy [because] men are physically different than women. She can’t grow a bigger heart, or bigger lungs, or more muscle mass like a boy.”

Upset over the fact that her hard-working daughter had been cheated out of a medal, Ms. VanPelt engaged. Even though she does not consider herself politically active – and has been described as “an introvert who raises chickens in [her] backyard” – Ms. VanPelt made her opinion widely known on social media. Several national media groups picked up her comments and now she finds herself at the epicenter of this important issue.

As part of her effort to expose what happened here in Alaska, Ms. VanPelt looked into why the ASAA (Alaska State Athletic Association) is allowing boys to compete in female events. She learned that individual school districts are now given the choice as to whether boys may compete against girls. If a district allows it, the State’s athletic program will not challenge that decision.

Ms. VanPelt thinks this is crazy and so do “close to 9-out-of-10 people” she talks to about allowing boy athletes to compete against girls. She counts as her supporters not just conservatives but liberals, feminists, and members of the LGBT community.

Essentially, Ms. VanPelt says this all boils down to a new cultural norm: the “right as a transgender supersedes your right as a female.” And she’s none too pleased that Alaska political leaders are refusing to speak out against the ASAA’s misogynistic policy.

Ms. VanPelt thinks that “out-of-control political correctness” in the culprit: “we’ve been groomed as a society that we don’t want to hurt other peoples’ feelings, so we shouldn’t speak out about it. We should just keep quiet and turn our heads.”

In looking toward the future, Ms. VanPelt warns “today were dealing with one transgender, what happens when half the field [are transgender]?

To stop this from happening, Ms. VanPelt believes there need to be more people of courage willing to “step it up and say, yeah, this isn’t right, were starting to get out-of-control here.”

I agree. Alaskan leaders – political and religious – should be ashamed for staying silent. They should be embarrassed into action. But we should celebrate those like Jennifer VanPelt who are almost singlehandedly taking on the elites and trying to reverse their perverse agenda.

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

I Wish I Had Been Told About These Risks Before I Had Gender Surgery

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Many Americans are unaware of the serious problems that face transgender persons.

For instance, a 2016 study comparing 20 Lebanese transgender participants to 20 control subjects reported that transgender individuals suffer from more psychiatric pathologies compared to the general population. More than 50 percent had active suicidal thoughts and 45 percent had had a major depressive episode.

While it may not be politically correct to link psychological disorders with the transgender population, the researchers see the evidence that a link exists. As a former transgender person, I wish the guy who approved me for gender surgery would have told me about the risks.

Quick to Diagnose

The experience of many gender-confused individuals is that medical professionals are quick to reach a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and recommend immediate cross-gender hormone therapy and irreversible reassignment surgery without investigating and treating the coexisting issues. Research has found that powerful psychological issues, such as anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, or alcohol or drug dependence often accompany gender dysphoria.

A study published in JAMA Pediatrics in March 2016 shows a high prevalence of psychiatric diagnoses in a sample of 298 young transgender women aged 16 through 29 years old.

More than 40 percent had coexisting mental health or substance dependence diagnoses. One in five had two or more psychiatric diagnoses. The most commonly occurring disorders were major depressive episodes and non-alcohol psychoactive substance use dependence.

Yet, transgender individuals are never required to undergo any objective test to prove their gender dysphoria—because no diagnostic objective test exists.

The cause of this condition can’t be verified through lab results, a brain scan, or review of the DNA make-up.

Research studies from 2013 and 2009 looking for a “transgender gene” showed not a smidgeon of abnormality in the genetic make-up that causes someone to be transgender.

No alterations in the main sex-determining genes in male-to-female transsexual individuals were found, suggesting strongly that male-born transgender persons are normal males biologically.

Psychological Care Urgently Needed

The study concluded that improved access to medical and psychological care “are urgently needed to address mental health and substance dependence disorders in this population.”

On the contrary, it did not conclude that improved access to bathrooms, hormones, or surgery are urgently needed.

A 2015 study of 118 individuals diagnosed with gender dysphoria found that 29.6 percent were also found to have dissociative disorders and a high prevalence of lifetime major depressive episodes (45.8 percent), suicide attempts (21.2 percent), and childhood trauma (45.8 percent).

It also remarked that differentiating between a diagnosis of dissociative disorder and gender dysphoria is difficult because the two can closely resemble each other.

Another study found a “surprisingly high prevalence of emotional maltreatment” in the 41 transsexuals studied. It called for further investigation to clarify the effects of traumatic childhood experiences and the correlation between transsexualism and dissociative identity.

That finding tracks with what I experienced in my transgender life. In my life and in the lives of those whose families contact me, traumatic childhood experiences are present 100 percent of the time.

Childhood Gender Dysphoria

One area where medical professionals should tread lightly is in the diagnosis and treatment of children who have gender identity issues.

A 2015 study aimed to gather input from pediatric endocrinologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and ethicists—both those in favor and those opposed to early treatment—to further the ethical debate.

The results showed no consensus on many basic topics of childhood gender dysphoria and insufficient research to support any recommendations for childhood treatments, including the currently published guidelines that recommend suppressing puberty with drugs until age 16, after which cross-sex hormones may be given.

An analysis of the 38 youth referrals for gender dysphoria to the Pediatric Endocrinology Clinic at the University School of Medicine in Indianapolis showed that more than half had psychiatric and/or developmental comorbidities.

Without sufficient research and consensus on treatment of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and knowing over half have coexisting disorders, any invasive treatment, even if recommended by the current guidelines, is simply an experiment.

It’s time to stop using children as experiments.

Transgender Persons Are Struggling Psychologically

Transgender individuals need psychotherapy not access to cross-sex restrooms, showers, and dressing areas. Blaming society for the ills of transgender persons will not improve their diagnosis and treatment.

Reckless disregard for the mental disorders in favor of enforcing preferred pronouns is madness. It’s time to show compassion by telling the truth and stop pretending they are born that way.

True compassion is acknowledging the mental disorders and providing effective, sound treatment in an effort to slow the staggering number of suicides, before rushing to perform irreversible surgeries. (For more from the author of “I Wish I Had Been Told About These Risks Before I Had Gender Surgery” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

The New York Times Fails Logic Class, Chapter 46,080

/1 Comment/in , /by

There’s an old saying that goes something like this:

“One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.”

That would fit the NY Times editorial board.

In the United States, nearly one-third of adults, about 76 million people, are either “struggling to get by” or “just getting by,” according to the third annual survey of households by the Federal Reserve Board…

…Over all, the survey depicts an economy in which many Americans face daily hardship, while even the college educated — the presumed winners in the economy — still face big obstacles. The findings argue for continued low interest rates; for government policies and federal spending to help create good jobs at good pay; for affordable education that starts at preschool, thus fostering college-ready students; and for a safety net that can withstand today’s potent economic forces.

Oh really?

For the last 20+ years every hiccup in the economy has been met with “very low” interest rates. Rates have now been at emergency levels for a period of time approaching eight years.

It hasn’t worked to lift people out of that malaise, and the reason is obvious: The lower rates are the cheaperit is in “today’s terms” to borrow and those who can and do borrow first have “first mover” advantage.

Those entities are never those with fewer privileges and poorer net positions in life.

That means it’s never any of those who face said daily hardship that reap said advantage — it is instead those who exploit that segment of the population and they use it to screw everyone else!

Witness Uber, who is “leasing” cars to “drivers” at slavery-like conditions. How? Because “money is very cheap”, that’s how. How is it that Tesla, which makes cars nobody in the “struggling” class can afford, is in business with a loss-making enterprise? Same answer. How is it that college has gotten so expensive that you now can easily rack up $100,000 in debt to get a worthless degree and just three decades ago you could flip pizzas and pay cash to go to school? Same answer. How is it that the average new car loan is now six years and payments are often $500 or more, never mind the average new car sale topping $30,000? Same answer. Why has medical cost increasing at 7+% a year and now comprises 37% of the federal budget, doubling every 10 years for the last 2 decades — a trend that cannot continue for another 10 years as it will then consume more than the available cash ex interest payments? Same answer.

In 1920, faced with a massive over-capacity problem (fueled by speculative stupidity over the end of WWI, the return to civilian production and the boys coming home) and a crashing economy The Fed, then 7 years old raised interest rates into what was an incipient depression and the federal government balanced the budget.

The result? In 18 months the economy had fully recovered (as had employment) and we posted the highest rate of growth in industrial production ever recorded in American history.

The only reason that event is not called a Depression is that it was over almost before it began because instead of coddling those who were exploiting people in the most trouble and protecting those who had made foolish investment decisions with their capital surplus both the government and Fed instead pulled away the pacifier and allowed the markets and economy to do what it does when left alone — clear uneconomic decisions through bankruptcy and transfer of assets from those who did dumb things to those who do smart things.

There is no answer — ever — to be found in protecting idiocy, monopoly, exploitation and predatory behavior, all of which riddle our economic landscape today. The worst examples are found in exploiting those who have the least going on between their ears and thus the least ability to analyze and resist the siren call of “cheap money” — including young adults and those in the most-desperate of situations.

Thus the two biggest scams of today: College and medicine, along with all that surround both; the former has now generated over a trillion in debt that as a 25% delinquency rate (!!) and the latter routinely financially destroys any middle-class American who gets sick whether they have “insurance” or not, never mind being nearly one dollar in four that the federal government spends along with one dollar in five in the broader economy.

The NY Times editorial board either does know this and is in the back pocket of those doing the exploiting or they’re too stupid to survive.

Pick one, but don’t drink their grape Kool-Aid — it’s laced with cyanide. (For more from the author of “The New York Times Fails Logic Class, Chapter 46,080” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Trump vs. Reagan: What Is a Conservative?

/0 Comments/in , /by

Many of Donald Trump’s supporters have compared him to Ronald Reagan. It is quite instructive that Trump himself picked up the 1980 Reagan campaign slogan, “Let’s Make America Great Again.” Trump speaks positively of Ronald Reagan, and, like Reagan, claims to be a conservative.

“Of course Trump is a conservative,” writes a Trump enthusiast at Townhall. “Actually on the most important issues of the day, he’s the most conservative GOP Presidential candidate since Reagan.”

Many longtime Reagan conservatives beg to differ. The Trump comparisons make them bristle.

But if Trump insists he is a conservative, then it is incumbent upon him to do something that ought to be fairly simple: explain how and why he is a conservative. He should tell us—as Reagan often did—what conservatism means.

That was never a problem for Ronald Reagan. Reagan remains the prototype of modern conservatism. He is the ideology’s standard-bearer. In the dictionary next to the word “conservative” there should be a photo of Ronald Reagan.

So, let’s start with Reagan’s understanding of conservatism—a good yardstick with which to try to size up Trump. In fact, to narrow the comparison even tighter, I will go with a Reagan definition of conservatism that he provided prior to the presidency, without the aid of a White House speechwriter scripting him.

On February 6, 1977, Reagan spoke to CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, a venue he would address no less than 13 times through his final year in the White House, not missing a single CPAC during any year of his presidency. (Donald Trump bailed out of CPAC this year.)

On this particular date, which happened to be Reagan’s 66th birthday, he acknowledged that conservatism is often described differently by “those who call themselves conservatives.” Nonetheless, differing claims by different people calling themselves “conservatives” does not mean that we cannot identify certain common conservative principles. To that end, Reagan stated:

The common sense and common decency of ordinary men and women, working out their own lives in their own way—this is the heart of American conservatism today. Conservative wisdom and principles are derived from willingness to learn, not just from what is going on now, but from what has happened before.

The principles of conservatism are sound because they are based on what men and women have discovered through experience in not just one generation or a dozen, but in all the combined experience of mankind. When we conservatives say that we know something about political affairs, and that we know can be stated as principles, we are saying that the principles we hold dear are those that have been found, through experience, to be ultimately beneficial for individuals, for families, for communities and for nations—found through the often bitter testing of pain or sacrifice and sorrow.

There’s a definition that every self-professing conservative needs to take to heart and mind. It is one you could find in conservative classics, such as Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, or glean from decades of reading William F. Buckley’s flagship publication of the conservative movement, National Review, or from the older Human Events—all of which Ronald Reagan read assiduously. Reagan had an informed comprehension of conservatism because he devoured these writings. He did the intellectual heavy lifting that facilitated his full conversion from a 1940s New Deal FDR liberal to a conservative trying to save the Republican Party from the Rockefeller Republicans who were not conservatives.

What Reagan said here in February 1977 is worth underscoring: The essence of conservatism is to preserve and conserve time-tested values that have endured for good reason and for the best of society, for citizens, for country, and for order—internal and external order (see Kirk’s The Roots of American Order). Again, think about that definition. Do not fall for the Leftist canard that cruelly caricatures conservatism as merely wanting to preserve anything and everything from the past, from slavery to Jim Crow to women not voting. Quite the contrary, conservatives want to preserve the values and ideals that are timeless and time-tested for the benefit of humanity, not the detriment. We conservatives cling to and seek to conserve and preserve not just any ideas but worthy ideas. If we merely sought to keep any, say, 19th century idea, then why aren’t we fighting for Marxism or some variant of socialism, as many of our “progressive” friends still do? That isn’t conservatism, regardless of what you heard about it from some liberal professor or clicked in a Google search.

In that same speech to CPAC, Ronald Reagan enunciated a number of conservative principles and positions: freedom and liberty, free markets, religious freedom, constitutional rights and protections, anti-communism, smaller government, local government, individualism, voluntarism, communities, families, self-reliance, hard work, common sense, reason, faith in God. (In my book on Reagan conservatism, I distill 11 principles that I believe capture Reagan conservatism.) He called for a prudent and just government that spends money wisely and whose stewards act with integrity and honesty. Here, too: we need a nation comprised of outer order and inner order, a virtuous government that is the product of virtuous citizens.

And finally, Reagan told CPAC that the time had come “to present a program of action based on political principle that can attract those interested in the so-called ‘social’ issues and those interested in ‘economic’ issues.” He wanted a complete conservatism that combined the two core strands of contemporary American conservatism (the social and economic) into “one politically effective whole.”

There is much more I could say about this, but let’s pivot to Donald Trump’s explication of conservatism. I’ll consider the two recent occasions where Trump was asked to give a definition.

In New Hampshire during an ABC News debate in February, Trump was asked point blank, “What does it mean to be a conservative?” In response, Trump stated:

Well, I think I am, and to me, I view the word conservative as a derivative of the word “conserve.” We want to conserve our money. We want to conserve our wealth. We want to conserve. We want to be smart. We want to be smart where we go, where we spend, how we spend. We want to conserve our country. We want to save our country. And we have people that have no idea how to do that, and they are not doing it. And it’s a very important word and it’s something I believe in very, very strongly.

Ironically, this definition (I’ve provided the entirety of Trump’s statement) does not suggest that he believes in conservatism “very, very strongly.” He might believe in conserving money and wealth very, very strongly, which is fine, but that isn’t a definition of conservatism.

There is no sense in Trump’s statement of any grounding let alone a rich or nuanced cognizance of conservative philosophy.

What’s worse, Trump gave that definition with a look of surprise and unpreparedness—with a deer-in-the-headlights look. That is worse because only two weeks prior he was asked the same question in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” where his response was shockingly dismal. The candidate this time should have been equipped to give a better answer.

That other Trump definition, offered to CBS in January, was at best a stream of consciousness, with occasional disconnected outbursts of random policy observations. Here is (verbatim) what he told CBS when asked for his definition of a conservative:

Well, I think it’s a person that doesn’t want to take overly risk. But I think that’s a good thing. I think it’s a person that wants to—in terms of government, I’m talking about—a person that wants to conserve, a person that wants to, in a financial sense, balance budgets. A person that feels strongly about the military, and I feel very strongly about the military. And, you know, you have some of these people they don’t even want to focus on the military, our military is falling apart. I feel very, very, and I have always felt very, very strongly about the military. By the way, if you look at vision, when you look at the word “vision,” I was the one that said, “take the oil,” I’ve been saying that for years, and I said, “take the oil, let’s take the oil,” and nobody would listen, then all of a sudden after Paris they started saying “maybe that’s right, we’ll take the oil.” They still don’t do it the proper way. You know, I was—which is a little bit different than a normal conservative—but I was very much opposed to the war in Iraq. A lot of these guys were all for the war in Iraq, look what that’s got us: We spent $2 trillion, we lost thousands of lives, we have nothing, we’re now handing Iraq over, just handing over to Iran. Iran is going to take over Iraq, and I said that was going to happen. I said that years ago, in 2003-2004, that Iran will take over Iraq with the largest oil reserves in the world. And that’s not a conservative position. When I was, you know, saying, don’t go into Iraq—I’m a very militaristic person, I’m very much into the military, and we’ll build our military bigger, better, stronger than ever before, but—and that’s safe, that’s actually the cheapest thing to do, opposed to what we have right now, but I was opposed to the war in Iraq. Most conservatives were gung-ho. I mean, these guys, every one of them, wanted the war in Iraq. Look where it got us.

Here again, what I’ve quoted is the entirety of Trump’s response. My transcript leaves out nothing.

Trump’s “definition” is, in short, anything but a picture of conservatism. To the contrary, what you just read is a picture of a non-conservative exploiting a conservative movement in order to try his hand at getting elected president via the Republican Party—the party of Reagan conservatism.

This definition from Trump is confusing, incoherent, and incomprehensible, and it is a vindication of legitimate concerns by true conservatives that Donald Trump as the GOP’s new standard-bearer is poised to do enduring damage to the modern conservative movement that Ronald Reagan did so much to advance.

Is Donald Trump a Reagan conservative? Certainly not by any definition he has hazarded to try to give. (For more from the author of “Trump vs. Reagan: What Is a Conservative?” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

The False Comparison of Trump to Hillary

/0 Comments/in , /by

A lot of Republicans still upset over Donald Trump winning the nomination resort to a false equivalence between Trump and Clinton in order to justify sitting the election out or even voting for Hillary.

Take a recent example by the National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru. First he lists Hillary’s manifold sins that Trump is innocent of: lying to the parents of the Benghazi victims, promising to nominate hard-left jurists to the Supreme Court, and supporting Obamas’ high-tax economics and unconstitutional amnesty of illegal aliens.

Then Ponnuru offers a catalogue of Trump’s sins Hillary hasn’t committed: mocking a reporter’s disability, indulging a preposterous conspiracy theory about Ted Cruz’s father and Lee Harvey Oswald, threatening a trade war with China, or threatening war crimes against the families of terrorists. Trump’s list presumably balances Hillary’s flaws, in order to make the point that both Trump and Hillary are equally distasteful, thus making the election a Hobson’s choice for principled conservatives.

But this comparison is false and misleading, for Trump and Clinton have had very different careers with different obligations and responsibilities.

Most obviously, Donald Trump is a private citizen who has never held public office. He is a businessman in a world where decorum and class often aren’t as important as sharp elbows and tough negotiating skills, where making a profit is more important than consistency or sparing people’s feelings. His goal is to make money, and his flamboyant life-style is our culture’s sign of his skills and success at doing so. Moreover, his flaws of personality and character, like his rude bluster and outrageous claims, are not, alas, that exceptional or different from those of millions of other private citizens, which may explain his populist appeal. And in his line of work, especially as a reality television star, such braggadocio and insensitivity may be assets. Intellectuals of more delicate sensibilities and refined manners may not like such déclassé qualities or grubby dealings, but most of them don’t live in a hard, risky world of tough negotiations and profit and loss.

Hillary Clinton is in a very different line of work from Trump’s. Her whole life has been spent as what we laughably call a public servant. In other words, she is supposed to be working not for profit or her own status and enrichment, but for the public weal. For progressives, that means striving for “social justice,” income equality, the abolition of prejudice and bigotry, the emancipation of women, the improvement of the middle class, and the salvation of the planet from the merchants of death by carbon. This is what she tells us over and over, and this is her case for why she should be president.

But while Trump’s character flaws have been assets in his profession, Hillary’s arrogant sense of entitlement, relentless money-grubbing, chronic mendacity, and obvious dislike of people other than her minions all undercut her claims to be a public servant, and help explain why she has serially failed at that role.

Of course, some presidents have shared the same flaws as Hillary, but they at least showed some restraint in exploiting their position for private gain, and at least could pretend to be a warm “people person,” as the ghastly phrase goes. Even Richard Nixon appeared on Laugh In. But Hillary has been inept at camouflaging her unseemly ambitions and even pretending to be a caring tribune of the people––in contrast, say, to Elizabeth Warren, who is just as much a hypocritical one-percenter as Hillary, but manages to come across as sincerely passionate. With Trump, however, you know exactly what you’re getting.

Finally, if a businessman like Trump fails, he reaps most of the damage. But if a “public servant” like Hillary fails, the security and interests of every single one of us are damaged, even as she advances her own political and fiscal interests as much as Trump does. Trump’s alleged shenanigans with Trump University are nothing compared to Hillary’s exploitation of her position as Secretary of State to steer money to her foundation, which is to say to herself, her husband, her daughter, her friends and political cronies, no matter the damage to America’s interests. Trump’s inconsistencies and alleged exaggerations about his net worth or charitable contributions are a dog-bites-man story compared to Hillary’s lies about Benghazi and her private email server. Nothing Trump has publicly said or done is as self-servingly despicable as Hillary’s implications that the grieving families of the four dead Americans in Benghazi are not telling the truth about her personal promise to them to “get” the obscure producer of the on-line video supposedly responsible for the attacks, when she knew that claim was untrue.

In short, Trump has been accountable to the bottom line. Hillary has been accountable to the people. Trump has succeeded in his job; Hillary has failed abysmally at hers. Making the two equally unpalatable to the principled voter is making a false equivalence between two different kinds of public life.

Perhaps Trump’s flaws would make him a bad president. But other presidents who had flaws equally distasteful––such as Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, or Bill Clinton––managed to do some good things as president regardless. With Trump there’s at least a chance he could turn out to be a better president than his bluster and insults suggest. Hillary, on the other hand, has a long public record of using her position for personal gain, and putting her ambition ahead of her responsibilities to the country she supposedly serves. Her role as First Lady was marked by bungling health care reform, indulging silly fantasies of a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” and allowing herself––an “I am woman hear me roar” feminist––to be publicly humiliated by her satyr husband while attacking his victims. Her tenure in the Senate lacked any substantive legislative achievements, and her stint as Secretary of State furthered Obama’s destruction of America’s global influence, power, and security from Syria to the South China Sea. It may be possible that she could experience a road-to-the-White House conversion and become a good president, but given everything we know from her 25 years of public “service,” the probability is close to zero.

With Trump, in contrast, we know that at least he won’t be as destructive to our political order as Obama has been. With Hillary the odds are much higher that she will continue Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of our country into an E.U.-like technocratic regime of smug elites whose aim is to erode individual freedom and compromise our country’s sovereignty. Worse yet, if she becomes president, she will most likely nominate two or three Supreme Court justices, creating a court that will gut the and First and Second Amendments and legitimize further the dismantling of the Constitution’s divided powers and limited executive. And don’t put your faith in the Republican Senate that confirmed Loretta Lynch to shoot down every one of Hillary’s picks, even if that means eight years of an eight-member court.

The November election is not a choice between two equally bad candidates. It’s the moment when we reject the candidate who we know, based on her long public record of corruption, lying, and grasping for power and wealth, will take us further down the road to political perdition. (For more from the author of “The False Comparison of Trump to Hillary” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Reality: Trump on Islam

/0 Comments/in , /by

Former NSA head Michael Hayden recently joined a chorus of Trump’s critics blasting him for offending Muslims. “The jihadist narrative is that there is undying enmity between Islam and the modern world, so when Trump says they all hate us, he’s using their narrative,” he said.

That’s true. It’s also meaningless because in this case the narrative is reality.

Jihadists do hate us. Islam has viewed the rest of the world with undying enmity for over a thousand years. Some might quibble over whether a 7th century obsession really counts as “undying”, but it’s a whole lot older than Hayden, the United States of America, our entire language and much of our civilization.

Islam divides the world into the Dar Al-Islam and the Dar Al-Harb, the House of Islam and the House of War. This is not just the jihadist narrative, it is the Islamic narrative and we would be fools to ignore it.

The White House is extremely fond of narratives. The past month featured Ben Rhodes, Obama’s foreign policy guru, taking a victory lap for successfully pushing his “narrative” on the Iran deal. Rhodes takes pride in his narratives. His media allies love narratives. But none of the narratives change the fact that Iran is moving closer to getting a nuclear bomb. Narratives don’t change reality. They’re a delusion.

Narratives only work on the people you fool. They don’t remove the underlying danger. All they do is postpone the ultimate recognition of the problem with catastrophic results.

Islamic terrorism is a reality. Erase all the narratives and the fact of its existence remains.

Instead of fighting a war against the reality of Islamic terrorism, our leaders have chosen to fight a war against reality. They don’t have a plan for defeating Islamic terrorism, but for defeating reality.
So far they have fought reality to a draw. Ten thousand Americans are dead at the hands of Islamic terrorists and Muslim migration to America has doubled. Islamic terrorists are carving out their own countries and our leaders are focused on defeating their “narratives” on social media.

Hayden repeats the familiar nonsense that recognizing reality plays into the enemy narrative. And then the only way to defeat Islamic terrorism is by refusing to recognize its existence out of fear that we might play into its narrative. But Islamic terrorism doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.

You don’t have to believe in a bomb or a bullet for it to kill you. A plane headed for your office building or a machete at your neck is not a narrative, it is reality. If we can’t tell the difference between reality and what we believe, then reality will kill us. And nothing we believe will change that.

We are not fighting a war of narratives with Islam. This is a war of bombs and bullets, planes crashing into buildings and blades digging into necks. And yet the men in charge of fighting this war remain obsessed with winning a battle of narratives inside the Muslim world. They have no plans for winning the war. Instead they are occupied with managing the intensity of the conflict, taking out the occasional terrorist leader, bombing only when a jihadist group like ISIS has become too powerful, while waiting for their moderate Muslim allies to win the war of narratives for them by discrediting the jihadists.

The narrative mistake is understandable. The left remains convinced that it can get its way through propaganda. Its record is certainly impressive. But it’s strictly a domestic record. Getting Americans to believe seven strictly irrational social justice things before breakfast is very different than convincing the members of a devout tribal society with a deep sense of history that they really don’t want to kill Americans. All that the narrative war accomplished was to show that the propagandists who convinced Americans to vote for their own exploitation have no idea how to even begin convincing Muslims to do anything. Think Again Turn Away was an embarrassment. Various outreach efforts failed miserably. American politicians devoutly apologize for any disrespect to Islam, but Muslims don’t care.

Hayden isn’t wrong that there is a narrative. But Nazism also had a narrative. Once the Nazis had power, they began acting on it and their narrative became a reality that had to be stopped by armed force. But at a deeper level he is wrong because he isn’t reciting the Islamic or even the jihadist narrative, but a deceptive narrative aimed at us in order to block recognition of the problem of Islamic terrorism.

The Islamic narrative isn’t just that we hate them. More importantly, it’s that they hate us. Muslim terrorists are not passively reacting to us. They carry a hatred that is far older than our country. That hatred is encoded in the holy books of Islam. But that hatred is only a means to an end.

Hatred is the means. Conquest is the end.

Assuming that Muslims are oppressed minorities is a profound intellectual error crippling our ability to defend ourselves. Islamic terrorism is not an anti-colonial movement, but a colonial one. ISIS and its Islamic ilk are not oppressed minorities, but oppressive majorities. Islamic terror does not react to us, as men like Hayden insist. Instead we react to Islam. And our obsession with playing into enemy narratives is a typically reactive response. Rising forces generate their own narratives. Politically defeated movements typically obsess about not making things worse by playing into the narratives that their enemies have spread about them. That is why Republicans panic over any accusation of racism. Or why the vanilla center of the pro-Israel movement winces every time Israel shoots a terrorist.

Western leaders claim to be fighting narratives, but they have no interest in actually challenging the Islamic narrative of superiority that is the root cause of this conflict. Instead they take great pains not to offend Muslims. This does not challenge the Islamic supremacist narrative, instead it affirms it.

Rather than challenging Islamic narratives, they are stuck in an Islamic narrative. They are trapped by the Muslim Brotherhood’s narrative of “Good Islamist” and “Bad Islamist” convinced that the only way to win is to appeal to the “Good Islamist” and team up with him to fight the “Bad Islamist”.

The “moderate” Muslim majority who are our only hope for stopping Islamic terrorism is an enemy narrative manufactured and distributed by an Islamic supremacist organization. When we repeat it, we distort our strategy and our thinking in ways that allow us to be manipulated and controlled.

It isn’t Trump who is playing into jihadist narratives, but Hayden and everyone who claims that recognizing Islamic terrorism plays into enemy narratives while failing to recognize that what they are saying is an enemy narrative.

The very notion that the good opinion of the enemy should constrain our military operations, our thinking and even our ability to recognize reality is an enemy narrative of unprecedented effect.

And this is the narrative that our leaders and the leaders of the world have knelt in submission to.

Narratives only have the power that we assign to them. No narrative is stronger than reality unless we believe in it. Not only have our leaders chosen to play into the enemy narrative, but they have accepted its premise as the only way to win. And so they are bound to lose until they break out of the narrative. (For more from the author of “Reality: Trump on Islam” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.