In 2016, Buy a Gun

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It’s time to double down in defense of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, in defense of the personal liberties that make our country so extraordinary. So this is my New Year’s Resolution.

I am going to buy a gun.

Maybe this sounds almost trivial coming from a committed libertarian. Big government types love to characterize us small government types as hunkered down in our basements, armed to the teeth, waiting for the End of Days, and clinging to our guns…. Not me. I’ve never felt particularly compelled to own a gun, although I have shot plenty of them over the years.

Now, I feel a responsibility.

I have spent a lifetime learning about, organizing a community around, and mobilizing in defense of, the non-negotiable right of each one of us to be left alone by government; free as long as we don’t hurt other people, or take their stuff. If you’re reading this, you likely have plenty of battle scars and deeply-held commitments just like mine. Together we have done so much in defense of Liberty.

But it’s just not good enough any more. I am particularly worried that we will lose what makes America so exceptional, as politicians grab more of our liberties from us in the name of “security.” Hillary Clinton is going after First Amendment speech and encryption. “Neo-Conservatives” like Senator Lindsey Graham think that the Fourth Amendment is antiquated; that your right to be secure in your person, home, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, no longer applies. Bipartisan congressional collusion has empowered an unaccountable mass surveillance state, and the Legislative Branch has abdicated its responsibility to authorize war, shifting ever more power to the Executive Branch.

And the President of the United States, who swore an oath of office to defend and protect the Constitution, shows open distain for its key provisions protecting our liberties, particularly the Second Amendment. Barack Obama seems to genuinely believe that he can staunch the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism simply by taking away the right of every law-abiding American to own a weapon — the right to defend yourself from attack from those who would want to hurt you and your family.

If you want to understand what’s at stake, take a look at the French government’s response since terrorists brutally murdered so many innocents inside the Bataclan Theater last November. “Imagine a Bush or Obama administration unchecked by the Bill of Rights or by Article 5 — which sets the bar high for altering the Constitution — and you’ll begin to understand the situation in France today,” writes Matt Welch in the Los Angeles Times. He continues:

After the November attacks, the French government approved extraordinary measures constraining civil liberties. To extend these measures permanently in the constitution, all the government requires is a three-fifths majority when Parliament meets again in February. France’s current state of emergency is already a doozy — warrantless searches, preemptive house arrests (more than 300 so far, without any convictions or involvement by a judge), plus the authority to shut down websites…. To this illiberal list, Prime Minister Manuel Valls on Dec. 23 added a controversial new item: the ability to strip French citizenship from dual nationals ‘who have been sentenced by a judge for committing crimes against the nation….’”

“What, exactly,” Welch asks, “is a crime against the nation?” One can imagine future *crimes* that have nothing to do with real acts of terrorism — or crime for that matter – a “constitutional” blank slate for some future tyrant to further centralize control.

In France, it is virtually impossible to legally obtain a gun.

The natural, inexorable tendency of governments to grab power from the citizenry is exacerbated during times of crisis by the political imperative to “do something.” I have no doubt that some of this authority-grabbing is done with the best of intentions – “to make us safe,” as more than one of the presidential candidates have recently put it. Leftists prefer to grab guns, and NeoCons prefer to grab your metadata and your due process, but the urge for control seems to infect almost everyone in a position of power.

But in defending the homeland from a decentralized, and increasingly homegrown, threat, more centralized power has a bad track record. All of the unconstitutional expansions of the surveillance state implemented since 9/11 failed to identify, let alone stop, jihadists Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik from gunning down fourteen innocent coworkers in a meticulously planned act of terror. “The governmental failure at San Bernardino,” writes Judge Andrew Napolitano, “was the confluence of a state government with antipathy and animosity toward the natural right of self-defense and a federal government attempting to devour far more data than it can handle.”

The fundamental challenge faced by increasingly centralized federal law enforcement apparatus was anticipated by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom in their 2007 book The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. Starfish organizations decentralize information and decision-making, and are leaderless in the sense that there is no central command center or bureaucracy that dictates things from the top down. A terrorist network fits the model, driven by a radical ideology that holds it together. Cut off an arm of a starfish, the analogy goes, and you don’t kill the organization, you just make it stronger by creating more starfish organizations.

How do we defeat a leaderless movement that has tapped into the power of decentralized information and decision-making? Is there a more potent, shared set of values that bind us as a community? Doesn’t this all remind you of the genius of America and the shared values enshrined in our Constitution? Why not double down on the Bill of Rights as a first response to terrorism?

It seems to me that our essential liberties are least pliable during times of crisis.

So, I’m going to buy a gun. I want to be prepared to defend myself and my family, and my community if necessary. I have been putting this off for years, but now it feels like free riding. Sure I have my excuses, because obtaining a gun in the District of Columbia where I live is particularly, purposefully, difficult.

But that’s not good enough anymore. Here’s more from Judge Napolitano:

“Can the civilian use of guns keep us safe? Of course it can. The police simply cannot be everywhere. Anything that diminishes the shooting-fish-in-a-barrel environment of no-gun zones is an improvement over the carnage we have witnessed in them.”

If you don’t own a gun, you should consider joining me. It used to be our choice. Now it feels like a responsibility.

What does it say about our current political leaders when a lawful act, protected by the Constitution, feels like an act of civil disobedience? (For more from the author of “In 2016, Buy a Gun” please click HERE)

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Why Did the Pentagon Falsify Reports About Military Successes in Fight Against ISIS?

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Republicans from the House of representatives of the U.S. Congress announced the creation of a special task team that will investigate the facts of distortion of data about the operations of the coalition in Iraq and Syria. The group will be to identify falsification in the reports, as well as figure out whether the problem is systemic in nature. The decision to create special group was adopted in November after more than fifty analysts of CENTCOM complained that their reports on the results of operations of the coalition against ISIS have been reduced in order to present the situation more positively.

Despite the fact that the preliminary results of the investigation must b? submitted only in January, Rep Jackie Speier has confirmed that the falsifications which underestimate combat capabilities of ISIS took place indeed. As one of such examples is the May statement of General Thomas Weidle, which said ISIS “loses and remains in the defense”. However, immediately after his speech, terrorists had captured the Central quarter of Ramadi, the administrative center of Anbar province. If American leadership possessed a clear picture of what is happening, it could take emergency measures and even prevent the ingress of arms, military equipment and ammunition to the hands of militants. The value of US arms and military equipment captured by jihadists equals hundreds of million dollars.

Indeed questions about whether we can trust the CENTCOM generals had to appear in October last year when ISIS captured supplies which US Air Force were supposed to delivered to Kurdish militia in besieged Kobani. According to the military press-release, in order to avoid capturing one of the caches which was blown by the wind from the place of destination, the military container was destroyed by the air strike. The rest of caches were successfully delivered. However, Pentagon spokesman Steve Warren reported that the two containers were lost on the route and only one cache was destroyed.

Moreover the military representatives thwart one another talking about the diversion of weapons into the hands of terrorists, they are confused about the total number of dropped containers for Kobani defenders (Warren reported about 28 containers, whereas previously said only 6). (Read more from “Why Did the Pentagon Falsify Reports About Military Successes in Fight Against ISIS?” HERE)

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The 5 Most Outrageous Stories of 2015

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2015 was a big year politically and culturally. But not all the news, even big news, was good news. In fact, some of it was just outrageous.

Safe Spaces and Stupid Places

Sadly, this was the year college students and millennials alike embraced their own alternate reality and became the ultimate toddler, declaring a need for “space spaces” nationwide. Around Halloween, a controversy erupted when a professor at Yale sent out an e-mail that both defended free speech and criticized the school’s decision to censor Halloween costumes. During a confrontation about this e-mail, one of the privileged, clueless students screamed at the professor, “It is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students … It is not about creating an intellectual space!”

There was another similarly cringe-inducing stunt at the Missouri School of Journalism — aka Mizzou — in November. A student was filming an encampment of Concerned Student 1950 protestors and Melissa Click, an assistant professor within Mizzou’s communications department (technically she did not teach, she had a “courtesy appointment”). Click threatened the student and was caught on video calling for “muscle” to remove him. The “professor” resigned her appointment and the President of Mizzou ultimately resigned as a result of the circus.

Finally, a couple weeks ago, political satirist Ami Horowitz released a video he filmed asking students at Yale to sign a mock petition to abolish their right to free speech. Using phrases such as “We need our colleges to be safe spaces,” or “Making fun of people is just not cool,” he collected over fifty signatures in an hour. As one student commented on FOX News, it’s disconcerting and embarrassing students were “signing away their right to petition.” Sadly, and probably most ironically, Puritans founded Yale in 1701 to protect — and practically demonstrate — the First Amendment

Gun Control

There were multiple shootings, both here and abroad, that made national headlines this year. After every single shooting, the Obama administration and media trotted out their talking points on gun control as predictable as Hillary Clinton wearing an ugly pantsuit to a debate. After the Oregon shooting, Obama said mass shootings “are something we should politicize.”

Over at Slate, Chris Kirk claimed that “States with Tighter Gun Control Laws Have Fewer Deaths” despite that being completely false. And in the Senate, Democrats unveiled a sweeping gun control proposal in October which advocated tighter reforms (despite contradictory evidence claiming the opposite) — thankfully that measure ultimately failed. Reams of research and statistics show the fewer the gun control laws, the lower the crime statistics. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, California had the highest number of gun murders in 2011 and also boasts some of our country’s strictest gun-control laws. Yet Texas has fewer gun control laws and nearly half the number of gun murders as California. For a roundup of gun control myths that just won’t die, read The Federalist’s Sean Davis’ column on the subject.

Benghazi

The lengthy Benghazi hearing that took place in October — an attempt to discover the truth and bring to justice the men who died there — was no satirical matter. But there was such a myriad of accusations, claims, and outright lies that it’s earned a spot on this list. When the attack originally happened, Clinton and Mr. Obama stated they had no reason to believe it was a “planned attack.” In fact, they said it seemed to be a result of a mob upset over an Internet video bashing Mohammad.

But while then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the country one thing, she e-mailed a different story at least twice, to two different people. She also made a phone call — all stating the attack wasn’t the result of a video but was a planned attack by an “Al-Qaeda-like group.” (These are the e-mails Clinton also repeatedly acclaimed her work “was not done on.” Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) of the House Select committee deserves major kudos for repeatedly putting her feet to the fire over this issue:

“You can’t be square with the American people. You tell your family it’s a terrorist attack, but not the American people. You can tell the president of Libya it’s a terrorist attack, but not the American people. And you can tell the Egyptian prime minister it’s a terrorist attack, but you can’t tell your own people the truth.”

Clinton also spent half of the day’s hearing claiming the now-deceased Ambassador Chris Stevens knew, accepted, and died knowing the risks of his job. Clinton went so far as to say he “felt comfortable” on the ground, despite evidence that the State Department team in Libya asked for more security over 600 times. Clinton claimed she did not receive those requests, blaming her security team for that failed oversight.

Clinton’s Benghazi testimony was a nauseating display of both gratification and indolence for the world to see. With ease, humor, and an air of snide superiority, Clinton repeatedly lied while evidence proving each lie was blatantly displayed. A truly sickening act of a scummy bureaucracy and a sad day for the families who lost loved ones that day.

Feminist Nazis

This year, modern feminists upped the ante. Instead of advocating what previous generations previous have fought for — fair treatment and opportunities — today’s feminist nazi’s assume superiority, male-bashing and victimhood with a curious and scary ease. Christina Hoff Sommers, author and philosophy professor, described this new way of thinking in an interview with PBS:

“Many young women on campuses combine two very dangerous things: moral fervor and misinformation. On the campuses they’re fed a kind of catechism of oppression. They’re taught ‘one in four of you have been victims of rape or attempted rape; you’re learning 59 cents on the dollar; you’re suffering a massive loss of self-esteem; that you’re battered especially on Super Bowl Sunday.’ All of these things are myths, grotesque exaggeration.”

One of the unfortunate, and by now prosaic hallmarks of this new feminism, is the twisted equation: Ideology coupled with misinformation equals more whining, typically about the “patriarchal” system feminists have found themselves suffering within. Today’s feminists need to eschew the myths they’ve so readily embraced — the so-called wage gap, campus rape statistics, gender as a social construct — and arm themselves with accurate information so they may actually continue the work their grandmothers and great-grandmothers set out to do before them. Sommers describes more myths — and how to debunk them — in this Time column.

Progressive Media Coverage

Can the media be it’s own worst news story? Absolutely. This year the progressive left made huge strides in either ignoring legitimate news that might have painted a pet cause poorly, or broadcast news that was fact less, bias or otherwise poor form. When the Center for Medical Progress released its 7th video of Planned Parenthood selling parts of aborted babies, Buzzfeed failed to report it for several days, and in fact hadn’t done a full story on the videos in a month. Mother Jones completely dismissed the videos, while proclaiming the legitimacy of and outrage over an undercover animal abuse tape. CNN and other mainstream outlets claimed repeatedly the videos had been “edited,” though it was proven — by two different sources — that the videos were only edited for length.

The spin around the bias-wheel of liberal rags continues: When Speaker Ryan grew a beard, Slate hinted he might be converting to Islam. There are too many Vox errors to count, although Matt Yglesias once Tweeted that England had provinces and after the San Bernardino shooting Tweeted this gem:

One can only imagine what 2016 holds for this kind of fantastic journalism. (For more from the author of “The 5 Most Outrageous Stories of 2015” please click HERE)

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Scathing Open Letter to Senator Cruz: “Renounce Your Left-Libertarian Views on Legal Immigration”

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Dear Senator Cruz,

You know what you need to do to regain my support and the moral right to ask me for a “critical, personal favor”:

Renounce your Left-Libertarian views on legal immigration. Publicly recognize that we are being irreversibly culturally and politically terraformed at these suicidal legal immigration levels. Take a bold, unapologetic, non-slippery position to slash net legal immigration to zero for several decades in order to recuperate from the accelerating deluge levels we’ve been subjected to ever since corrupt Republicans stupidly went along with Ted Kennedy’s 1965 Democrat Trojan Horse. Not just pause it for 9 months while you “study” the alleged “new information” that we’ve known for decades. Zero net immigration including all kinds of visas while we deport all illegals, abolish anchor baby citizenship for the children of non-citizens, and abolish chain migration. Then return to the kind of sustainable, pleasant, beneficial, assimilable levels and criteria we enjoyed from the 1920s under Coolidge through the 1950s under Eisenhower.

You cannot call yourself a conservative or a Republican and do otherwise. Over-immigration is overwhelming the native-born citizenry’s voting control of our country, with people who will continue to vote overwhelmingly Democrat. It’s a coup d’etat. If not halted and reversed, then within 20 years, it will give the Democrats permanent supermajority control of the federal government and a supermajority of the states. At that point every one of your conservative issues will be permanently lost or vulnerable to permanent loss, along with our liberty, security, privacy, dignity, culture, quality of life, standard of living, cost of living, freedom of movement, elbow room, unpaved private land, and our human and natural environments. You cannot call yourself a conservative while continuing to support immigration policies that are permanently sabotaging all conservative issues.

As you know, I didn’t know about your support for massive increases in legal immigration until you voted for cloture on Obama’s top secret “free trade” Trojan Horse. It was only then that I took a close look at your record. I’d love to know what kind of back-room deal with NumbersUSA resulted in that phony “A+” career grade. It’s clearly a back-room deal, since the grade is demonstrably false, ignoring your objective public record and statements. Really, same grade as our biggest champion, Senator Sessions? After you repeatedly undermined Sessions’s efforts and consistently called for massive hikes in legal immigration? If you’re an “A+”, then what’s Jeff Sessions? AAA+++? That “A+” is an insult to Senator Sessions’s courage, sacrifice and fidelity on this issue.

Sincerely,

Russ Howard

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It’s Time for a ‘Persecuted Christians First’ Foreign Policy

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A debate is raging right now among Republicans about the appropriate foreign policy for that party. Should we continue the movement to promote majority rule across the world that George W. Bush announced in his Second Inaugural Address, and tried to implement in Iraq? His successor, Barack Obama, may have cut and run from Iraq, but he carried Bush’s democracy torch during the crucial Arab Spring, supporting rebel Islamist movements in Egypt, Libya, and Syria. To do less, advocates of this policy argue, would be to insult the peoples of other countries, suggesting that they somehow don’t deserve the blessings of American liberal democracy. That is roughly the position of Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, and Jeb Bush. It is broadly referred to as “neoconservatism.”

Or should we admit that democracy apparently isn’t for everyone, or at least for everyone everywhere all the time right at the moment, and instead support regimes that repress political Islam, protect religious minorities (especially Christians), and are willing to cut deals that favor U.S. interests? That’s the position favored by Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul. The common name for such a policy is “realism.”

The stakes are high. We are currently faced with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which is using military power to prop up the minority regime of Bashar Assad in Syria. Several Republican candidates, including Christie and Rubio, want to use the U.S. Air Force to confront the Russian air force with a “no-fly zone,” including the threat to shoot down Russian planes that attack Syria’s “moderate” Islamist rebels. Rand Paul was moved during the last GOP debate to call this proposal an occasion for “World War III.”

It is customary at this point to insert a long, ritual denunciation of Bashar Assad, as a brutal dictator fully as wicked as Idi Amin or Pol Pot, which is meant to settle the question. The man is EVIL. We Americans strive to be GOOD. So of course we must help to remove that awful man from power, regardless of what it costs, what it risks, or what result it actually produces for the people who have to live in the real, existing country of Syria.

And it’s true that Assad’s regime has used brutal means to stay in power. It’s also true that it currently stands as the protector of millions of religious minorities, Christians and Alawites, who rightly fear genocide and ethnic cleansing at the hands of any Islamist regime that would come to power. The Christian leaders of Syria are terrified by every rebel faction fighting Assad, however “moderate” Senator John McCain believes them to be. Likewise the Alawite minority, the core constituency for Assad’s regime. Based on the ethnic cleansing of more than a million Christians from Iraq in the wake of the U.S. invasion that toppled another secular dictator, each group believes that they face imminent death, or expulsion to miserable refugee camps — controlled, as such camps are, by intolerant Sunni Muslims.

So the Alawites and Christians are fighting for their lives, and their leader, Assad, is using whatever means come to hand to stop the Islamist takeover — including, some say, chemical weapons. Does this make him “genocidal,” as some assert? Or is he using desperate means to prevent a genocide, means not nearly as harsh as President Harry Truman used against the Japanese Empire? As citizens of a country that answered Pearl Harbor and the Holocaust by nuking two Japanese cities, after fire-bombing most of the others, and leveling massively populated cities in Europe, perhaps we ought not to be throwing stones at Assad, as he fights to save his Alawite people and Christian allies from ending up like the desperate Christians of Iraq.

Jewish Americans are rightly concerned about the safety of Jews in Israel, and all around the world. Thank God, given the callousness or outright hatred of Jews that pervades so many countries. In Iran and throughout the Arab world it’s official government policy (except in Egypt and Jordan — not democracies), to favor Hamas’s goal of “driving the Jews into the sea,” which means exactly what it sounds like: mass genocide. To guarantee its survival, Israel stockpiles nuclear weapons, which it would use as a last means of self-defense, and the results would be even uglier than what Assad is up to in Syria, faced with the very same threat. (In a bitter irony, Assad is allied with Iran, which hopes to develop nuclear weapons to threaten Israel — which we should absolutely stop Iran from obtaining. However, Assad’s regime in Syria contributes nothing to Iran’s nuclear program.)

Because of the gravity and urgency of the ongoing threat to Jews, many patriotic American Jews also act as a potent special interest group, advocating the U.S. alliance with Israel in support of the safety of Jews, and good for them. No one else is looking out for the safety of Jews, and as Rabbi Hillel once said, “If I am not for me, who is for me?”

We Christian Americans should do the same, for our persecuted brethren around the world. We must love our enemies, but not at the cost of letting them murder our friends. Within the legitimate bounds of American patriotism, we should act as a potent special interest group. We should adopt the slogan “Persecuted Christians First.” We must serve as the defense attorneys of the most abandoned, neglected people on earth (apart from the unborn): our brothers in Christ, the persecuted Christians around the world — especially those threatened by political Islam, which also endangers America and Israel. It’s the Christian thing to do. (For more from the author of “It’s Time for a ‘Persecuted Christians First’ Foreign Policy” please click HERE)

Watch a recent interview with the author below:

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The Utter Incoherence of Liberalism

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Few people abandon God because they are consciously seeking to stun their consciences. Instead, they cease to believe in Him because they have fallen out of love with Him. This can happen because of some event in their lives that fills them with bitterness and anger, which they blame on God and consider unforgivable. Maybe a parent abandons the family, or dies young in terrible pain. Perhaps a close friend or family member “comes out” as gay, and blames his personal torment on “Christian guilt.” Or some treasured, wholesome dream dies right before a believer’s eyes, and leaves an aching abscess at the center of his life. He decides, in moments of deep suffering and confusion, that “a good God wouldn’t allow this.” So either God isn’t real or He isn’t good.

The Trade-In Value of Faith

There is an immediate payoff for rejecting God and His word. Right off the bat, you lose your fear of eternal consequences for your actions. Instead of weighing on your conscience, they are almost unbearably light. You realize that the moral laws you’d once obeyed to keep up a healthy relationship with God mean nothing more than notes scrawled to the Tooth Fairy. Over time, the residual shame and guilt that once held you back drain away, as you discipline yourself to remember that they are irrational. You learn to feel guilty about guilt, to be ashamed of experiencing shame.

But you’re still not out of the woods, not completely free. You might continue to experience a sense that certain types of things are “fitting,” that some moral norms emerge from the nature of things themselves, even if they can’t be traced back to a Creator’s artistic intent. This ghost of divine order haunts your brave new worldview, whose benefits you have only just begun to enjoy: the fresh “freedom” of action, and the set of cool, secular friends whom you might previously have avoided. You share with these people a warm nuzzle of superiority to all those benighted believers hag-ridden by fear and guilt. You like hanging out with this new crowd, making fun of your old subculture and its provincial, backwater mores. (You stick a Darwin fish on the back of your Prius.) This new crowd dresses better and has more fun than those drags you met back in Young Life or Catholic school.

If there’s one thing your new friends have absolutely no time for, it’s the idea of natural law. They are all about natural foods and “green energy,” of course, about staying in some sort of harmony with biological nature. They will even engage in a kind of secular fasting, abstaining from GMOs, maybe even from animal products. But such disciplines and self-denial abruptly end at the gateways of central pleasures. That’s why the same ecologically conscious person who won’t drink milk from a “factory farm” will dabble in drugs or dose herself with birth control pills.

Relax. The sense that human actions are subject to some intrinsic order can be cured by regular meditation on the chaos and destructiveness seen in nature. Ignore the apparent patterns and epiphanies of beauty that beguile high-level scientists, and instead keep your mind fixed firmly on genetic deformities of lab rats, or the fact that some animals eat their young or indulge in incest. Keep up the horror you feel for chaos, suffering and death — but don’t ask yourself why you feel this way, where on earth you got the craving for perfection that no animals seem to experience. Pretty soon, you will think of order and beauty as accidental illusions in a universe full of noise. In such a world, how could it possibly matter where we mortals seek our fleeting pleasures? After all, we’re only human. …

At this point, you might think that you’ve yanked up by the roots every trace of the Father who betrayed you. But you would be wrong. You will still experience a sense that right and wrong do exist, and that you want to be good instead of evil. In fact, you’ll have all sorts of leftover expectations and prejudices from the Christian world you grew up in, and the stubborn remnants of Christian humanism in our culture. There is no point in trying to purge yourself completely of all of these, when instead you can adapt them, take the emptied-out church in your soul and rededicate it as a temple — a neat reversal of what the Christians did when they converted pagan Europe.

How to Become a Social Justice Superhero

You used to think that human life is sacred. Now you know that it’s merely “important.” You used to consider cruelty or lying sinful. Now you see them as “antisocial.” You once considered suffering the side-effect of sin, which could be transformed and harnessed into a means of sanctification. Now you know better, and realize that it isn’t sin but suffering that is the worst thing in the universe. It is the great Enemy, the Adversary against which you steel your soul. You must shun the occasions of suffering, and whenever you unwittingly stumble into it you must go to your spiritual father in therapy and repent.

You don’t want to cause any needless suffering to other people, either. We are all in this life together, and we ought to work cooperatively to minimize its grimness, to swathe ourselves in Styrofoam and blunt every corner with Nerf. The way to embrace goodness and remain what you desperately want to be — a “good person” whom others will like — is to join the fight against suffering, in whatever form it shows itself. The goal of all human life is the greatest number of comfortable, pleasant moments for the greatest number of people. And you can be part of advancing that holy cause, at minimal cost to yourself.

Now there are many, many reasons that people suffer. You could (theoretically) dedicate yourself to fighting against hunger, combating domestic violence, or teaching illiterate children how to read. And maybe you actually do a little along such lines. But those forms of suffering are stubborn and intractable. You could use up your whole life wrangling them and still not make a dent. So the more efficient thing to do is to contract them out to a higher power — the federal government, with its hundreds of billions of dollars and vast powers of coercion. You vote, and Tweet, and talk to advance those causes.`

You choose for your own direct involvement much more manageable forms of suffering, which in one sense are closer to hand. You remember all the pain which you endured at the hands of religion: the pleasures avoided, the moments of guilt and shame, all to please the mythical Father at whom you’re still fitfully angry. So yoke the firm embrace of doctrine, and its stern rejection of error, with other forms of intolerance — especially racial. Then note the violent emotions which religion can provoke, and how many churchgoers also are gun-owners. Next comb through half-remembered history and fix on the worst incidents of violence committed by self-professed Christians. Do this for long enough, and you can come to believe that Christian churches are the single greatest source of suffering in America. And you can do something about it — which isn’t terribly demanding, actually.

You can make a point of scorning Christian beliefs, of praising other religions such as Islam (no matter what they actually teach — they’re not the threat). You can fight for every movement that loosens the bonds of Christian faith on your fellow Americans. You will use whatever means your fellow progressives present you, including the power of the state, to lift the crushing yoke of the Cross from helpless victims of ancient superstition. If need be, you will force them to be free. That means supporting same sex marriage, legal abortion, and restrictions on every attempt by religious believers to practice their faith in public — within the annoying limits of that dull Constitutional relic, the First Amendment, which progressive students at Yale are petitioning to repeal.

In doing all this, you will impress your newfound friends, cement your place in a social order where faith is already shameful, and feel a deep sense of accomplishment for very minimal effort. It’s the cheapest grace on the market, a grace which flows abundantly, rushing in to fill that Jesus-shaped hole that’s still in your heart. (For more from the author of “The Utter Incoherence of Liberalism” please click HERE)

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It’s Time for Candidates to Discuss the Enemy Within

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When Congress returns in January, there will be a robust debate over the authorization of use of military force (AUMF) in Syria and Iraq to fight ISIS. But while we debate a bunch of lousy options and the potential cost of lives and billions of dollars arming our enemies in endless Islamic civil wars, the politicians in both parties will never discuss the enemy within the United States. This is where the presidential candidates must lead by example.

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have already drawn attention to the first half of the homeland security threat – the endless migration from the Middle East as manifest through our suicidal immigration policies. Unfortunately, Republicans didn’t listen, and despite the universally-accepted threat of the Syrian and Somali refugees, they gave Obama the full $1.67 billion for refugee resettlement in the Omnibus bill.

However, it is the second half of the equation – the most foundational threat to our homeland and society – that has garnered almost no attention from anyone in politics. That is the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood organizations in America that have so much influence both on the Obama administration and the Muslim communities in our country.

Three questions should automatically come to mind in light of the San Bernardino attack and the nearly daily incidents of Muslims being arrested for plotting terror attacks or attempting to join ISIS.

Why is our government expunging any mention of Islamic terror from their official documents and hampering investigations into connections to local radical Muslim Brotherhood groups?

Why are so few moderate Muslims speaking out against the growing trend of radicalization?

Why are so many Muslims in America, even those who were born here, being drawn into groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda?

The answer to all these questions, point to the Muslim Brotherhood and the influence of their three North American affiliates that were implicated in the Holy Land Foundation terror trial: the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and the North American Islamic Trust.

Last Wednesday, I had the privilege of guest hosting the Sean Hannity show along with my colleague, Deneen Borelli, and we discussed why the Muslim Brotherhood represents a more foundational threat to our homeland than ISIS or Al Qaeda. They are the enemy within that radicalizes American Muslims (the ones that weren’t already radicalized), marginalizes and intimidates moderates, and influences the government to eschew any policy that even mentions Islamic terror much less policies that actually combat Islamic terror.

This is why we need the GOP candidates to step up to the plate. But until now they have largely been silent. Ted Cruz has introduced an important piece of legislation, which would designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terror group, but he needs to make this issue more front and center in his campaign.

Just last week, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron took the unprecedented step to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terror group after his government launched an exhaustive study into their activities. They will now ban visas to Muslim Brotherhood officials and increase surveillance of their offices. If the liberal Europeans are willing to protect themselves and root out their enemy within, cannot our “conservative” leaders muster the same courage?

Not surprisingly, Obama condemned Cameron’s move as a needless de-legitimizing of a non-violent group. But their use of “non-violent” means of subversion in western countries to marginalize moderates and quietly radicalize the Muslim communities and mosques is exactly what will destroy both America and Europe from the inside.

It was recently reported that the U.K. is experiencing a sharp drop off in cooperation from local Muslims in rooting out terrorists from their communities. Undoubtedly, the Muslim Brotherhood intimidation is a big part of this deterrent against cooperating with the authorities.

Earlier this month, Phil Haney, a former DHS counterterrorism official, wrote an expose on how he was stifled from connecting the dots between some of the very same foreign terror groups Tafsheen Malik was affiliated with and local Muslim groups in America:

“But after more than six months of research and tracking; over 1,200 law enforcement actions and more than 300 terrorists identified; and a commendation for our efforts; DHS shut down the investigation at the request of the Department of State and DHS’ own Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Division. They claimed that since the Islamist groups in question were not Specially Designated Terrorist Organizations (SDTOs) tracking individuals related to these groups was a violation of the travelers’ civil liberties. These were almost exclusively foreign nationals: When were they granted the civil rights and liberties of American citizens?

Worse still, the administration then went back and erased the dots we were diligently connecting. Even as DHS closed my investigation, I knew that data I was looking at could prove significant to future counterterror efforts and tried to prevent the information from being lost to law enforcement.”

It’s not surprising that DHS’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Division (CRCL) was responsible for shutting down the investigation. CRCL is the nexus for the Muslim Brotherhood influence in our government. In 2008, under the Bush administration, then-DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff drafted a memo for CRCL that called on government officials to strip all references of Islamic supremacism from their training. This memo was drafted, in the words of Chertoff, based on “its discussions with a broad range of Muslim American community leaders and scholars.” In 2011, based on the same recommendations of these Muslim Brotherhood “scholars,” DHS published its training and guidance manual on the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) agenda. The manual instructs the bureaucrats to use examples to “demonstrate that terrorists and violent extremists vary in ethnicity, race, gender, and religion.”

If ISIS is the new quarterback for Islamic terror, the Muslim Brotherhood is their all-star offensive linemen. In theory the United States should have a great defensive line capable of overwhelming ISIS’ strategy. But with our very own Department of Homeland Security playing ball for the Muslim Brotherhood, the fox appears to be guarding the henhouse. (For more from the author of “It’s Time for Candidates to Discuss the Enemy Within” please click HERE)

Watch a recent interview with the author below:

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Understand Just How Badly You Got Sold out by the Ryan Spending Bill, and Why

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By Dr. Joel McDurmon. Conservative outlets all over are blasting the Paul Ryan-led omnibus bill for a total sell-out of conservative voters. Breitbart calls it a betrayal of America. Rush Limbaugh concurred, using language even more vulgar.

Reading through their reasonings and rantings, one can gather just how badly we have been sold out. But you would not see the depth of it, actually. The depth of this depravity can be judged merely by analyzing the vote as it was taken in the House.

The record vote reveals that only three (count them—3) Republicans opposed the bill. That means that virtually the entire clan of so-called “Liberty caucus” conservatives supported the sell-out.

But it gets worse. 77 Democrats voted for this bill specifically because Paul Ryan went out of his way to court their vote (with late-night, secret deals reminiscent of the ObamaCare passing). Ryan not only sold out conservatives on Trillions in spending and new deficits, but virtually rubber-stamped Obama’s executive orders, his regionalism program to back-door annex suburbs by major urban centers (the Alinskyite-activists’ dream for years), funds Planned Parenthood, and funds a variety of other miscreant bureaucratic measures (including increased funding for activist bureaucracies in the Department of Education, as well as slipping in an internet spying amendment, among others. . .

What the numbers reveal is that Paul Ryan (or the Republican establishment in general) actively courted Democrat votes when they didn’t need them. Apparently, Ryan and company wanted so badly to present this bill as “bipartisan” that he caved seriously on a number of leftist issues just to woo a couple handfuls of Democrats. (Read more from “Understand Just How Badly You Got Sold out by the Ryan Spending Bill, and Why” HERE)

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Paul Ryan Ends the Year with an Omni-Bust – Jail Break Is next

By Daniel Horowitz. It started in September with passage of the original bill to bust the budget caps and raise the debt ceiling for the remainder of the Obama presidency. Then it was the bill to reauthorize federally-mandated testing under No Child Left Behind for another five years. After that, it was the $65 billion highway bailout bill.

Moving on to immigration and our national emergency with the flood of migrants from the Middle East, Ryan promoted a phony bill on refugees. It did nothing to stop Obama’s refugee resettlement scheme and his violation of coordinating with states, as mandated by law. In doing so, Ryan blocked all amendments from conservatives to strengthen the bill, even though he promised an open process as Speaker. Finally, he promoted a visa bill related to Europe, which did absolutely nothing to address the core of the problem with the Visa Waiver Program, much less focus on the real problem – mass migration and refugees directly from the Middle East.

On Friday, Paul Ryan closed the loop by passing an Omnibus bill, which funds all of Obama’s priorities for the remainder of the year. Here’s a list of the top 11 Christmas presents Paul Ryan’s omnibus gave President Obama.

The only provision addressing immigration actually quadruples the number of low-skilled workers brought in under the H2-b program, ignoring the cries of Americans while doing the bidding of the K Street lobbyists. And once again, every single proposed amendment was blocked from consideration on the floor of the House.

Every one of the aforementioned bills passed with either unanimous or super-majority support from Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats. The Omnibus bill was no different. It passed with more Democrats than Republicans, garnering the support of all but 18 of Pelosi’s troops.

Nonetheless, it is still quite revealing that roughly 60% of Republicans supported a complete giveaway to Obama; a Christmas present that was jubilantly lauded by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. It is evident that a majority of Republicans believe so strongly in the cult of Paul Ryan’s personality that, unlike with John Boehner, they are willing to follow him off the cliff into the political abyss.

So what does Paul Ryan have planned for next year? Did he “clear the decks” and capitulate this year so that he can be free to fight Obama’s fundamental transformation next year?

Not a chance.

Ryan told Meet the Press he plans to focus on common ground next year. And as Chuck Schumer already made clear, common ground means giving the Democrats what they want on the most critical issues of our time.

“I think what we will probably try to do is where we can get things done, where we can find common ground without compromising principles, get those things done. Make sure that government works.”

And guess which issue was first out of Ryan’s mouth? Criminal justice “reform”!

Thus, Ryan’s biggest priority for next year is the same as Obama’s biggest priority for the remainder of his presidency – to release as many violent criminals from prison as possible. Lost in the news cycle on Friday was news that Obama plans to commute the sentences of 95 additional drug felons. And as is always the case, a number of them are not merely drug felons but criminals convicted for armed robbery and firearms violations. You read that correctly: at a time when Obama plans to clamp down on law-abiding gun owners, he is releasing violent gun felons from prison. And yet, instead of stopping this dangerous policy, Ryan and the Republicans plan to codify it into law.

Don’t you just wish the Democrats had their version of Paul Ryan leading them in the House and Senate? (For more from the author of “Paul Ryan Ends the Year with an Omni-Bust – Jail Break Is next” please click HERE)

Watch a recent interview with the author below:

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Will The GOPe Do A “Murkowski” On Trump?

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What Happens to the GOP If Trump Wins?

With Trump as its standard-bearer, the GOP would suddenly be asked to rally around a candidate who has been called by his once and former primary foes “a cancer on conservatism,” “unhinged,” “a drunk driver … helping the enemy.” A prominent conservative national security expert, Max Boot, has flatly labeled him “a fascist.” And the rhetoric is even stronger in private conversations I’ve had recently with Republicans of moderate and conservative stripes.

This is not the usual rhetoric of intraparty battles, the kind of thing that gets resolved in handshakes under the convention banners. These are stake-in-the-ground positions, strongly suggesting that a Trump nomination would create a fissure within the party as deep and indivisible as any in American political history, driven both by ideology and by questions of personal character.

Indeed, it would be a fissure so deep that, if the operatives I talked with are right, Trump running as a Republican could well face a third-party run—from the Republicans themselves. . .

Any candidate attempting a third-party bid would confront serious obstacles, such as getting on state ballots late in the election calendar. As for down-ballot campaigns, most state laws prohibit candidates from running on multiple lines; so a Senate or congressional candidate who wanted to avoid association with Trump would have to abandon the GOP line to re-run with an independent presidential contender. The Stevenson example shows that leaving a major party line is fraught with peril—although the write-in triumph of Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski in 2010 suggests that it can sometimes succeed.

The very fact that serious political thinkers are contemplating such a possibility demonstrates that when Republicans look at the perils posed by a third-party bid from Donald Trump, they may be looking in the wrong direction. It’s not Trump the Defector that could trigger the biggest threat to the party, but Trump the Nominee. (Read more from “What Happens to the GOP If Trump Wins?” HERE)

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Smart Strategy or Overconfidence? Rubio Plays Hard-To-Get with Voters

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Marco ­Rubio no doubt wants to sit behind the big desk in the Oval Office. What is not so clear is how hard he is willing to work to get there.

Republican activists — including many who appreciate Rubio’s formidable political gifts and view him as the party’s best hope for beating Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton — say they are alarmed at his seeming disdain for the day-to-day grind of retail politics. Even some staunch supporters are anxious.

“Rubio has not put in the face time that he really needs to have, I don’t think,” said Al Phillips, an influential South Carolina pastor who backs Rubio. “I think that’s been somewhat to his detriment.”

That may be, as some of his allies fret privately, a sign of overconfidence in his own abilities. Or it may be a smart strategic decision that the personal touch is overrated in an era in which celebrity billionaire Donald Trump is leading the field with a campaign that consists largely of mega-rallies, barrages of tweets and television interviews that are literally phoned in.

And Rubio is certainly capable of turning on the charm with one key constituency: deep-pocketed donors. He recently secured support from billionaire hedge fund managers Paul Singer and Kenneth Griffin. He’s believed to be the favorite to win over billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. (Read more from “Smart Strategy or Overconfidence? Rubio Plays Hard-To-Get with Voters” HERE)

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