Perception Management of Radical Islam

“We're in a new world. We're in a world in which the possibility of terrorism, married up with technology, could make us very, very sorry that we didn't act.” — Condoleezza Rice, Former U.S. Secretary of State

The term “Perception Management” (PM) has firmly entered the public lexicon. The Department of Defense even defines PM in one of its manuals, so the military folks obviously take it very seriously.

Perception management is a type of strategy that is aimed at guiding the motives, emotions, and conclusions of another party by means of using different approaches to alter that party’s perception of past events and the projections of future events. This particular type of strategy has been used in military operations in attempts to gain advantages over enemies, and has also found use in the business world among competitors. The goal is to alter the perception of the opposing party in a way that provides the manager with an advantage that can be used successfully to score a victory or otherwise defeat that opposing party.

There is some difference of opinion regarding whether the task of perception management must remain firmly rooted in the use of verifiable information that is presented in a manner that is likely to trigger the desired outcome, or if the strategy allows for the selective use of certain facts while ignoring others or even leaving room for the inclusion of data that is questionable. For those that focus on the use of verifiable data only, the task is to assess all the available information, then determine the best way to present those facts in a way that is likely to cause recipients to react in a certain manner. Sometimes referred to as spinning, here the focus is not on attempting to mislead per se, but instead to call more attention to certain bits of information while downplaying the importance of others. When successful, this approach has the benefit of having provided all the information, although in a format that definitely slanted the point of view in a specific direction.

At other times, the process of perception management includes the selective use of available data. In this scenario, certain facts are presented completely and concisely, while others are either presented only in part of are left out altogether. Doing so makes it easier to create a particular perception that can be sold to consumers, the citizens of a given country, or to a rival of some sort, assuming the opposing party is not privy to and does not discover the omissions.

In essence PM is not spin doctoring because perception managers don’t spin facts. They create facts and then sell them to the world as truth. Using these methods, a major untruth can be established so quickly and overwhelmingly across the world that no digging after the fact can make a dent in public consciousness that it actually isn’t true at all. And that’s what makes it so dangerous.

Examples of PM might be considered as: The sinking of the Battleship Maine, which got us into the Spanish-American War; the sinking of the Lusitania, which caused public opinion to enter World War I, the shooting at Fort Hood by a Radical Islamic terrorist shouting “Allāhu Akbar” was “work place violence”; and that Islam is a religion of peace and only a few nut jobs carry out terrorist activities.

Here is a quick test

Savages go on a shooting spree at the offices of a satirical magazine. While they're murdering journalists, the killers shout:

1. Hail Mary full of grace…
2. John 14:6
3. Shema Yisrael
4. Allahu akbar

A captive is beheaded by:

1. The Salvation Army
2. The Book of the Month Club
3. The National Geographic
4. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)

In Europe, demonstrators carry signs calling for "Death to the Jews" and proclaiming "Hitler was right!" are:

1. Octogenarian Nazis
2. Members of the Church of Scientology
3. Representatives of Jimmy Dean Pork Sausages
4. Moslems

Someone who plants a shrapnel-packed bomb near the finish line of a marathon is likely to belong to:

1. an Ashram
2. a Reform synagogue
3. a Masonic Lodge
4. a Mosque

You’ll probably get death threats if you:

1. Produce something called “Piss Christ”
2. Make a movie that presents Moses as a psycho
3. Call Tea Party members terrorists
4. Do or say anything which shows Mohammed in an unflattering light

The response to the latest Religion of Peace atrocity – the attack on a humor magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris that left 17 dead, 21 wounded — was craven, inane and utterly predictable. This count does not include the three Radical Islamic Killers.

The facts so far known and verified by the French authorities pin the attack on three French citizens – all Muslims. According to a report by Fox News the terrorist attack was sponsored by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) from its base in Yemen:

“Shortly after the massacre in Paris, a series of tweets went out from a known Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula Twitter account. They show images of the Paris massacre with photos of al-Awlaki and Samir Khan (editor of Inspire magazine, who was killed along with al-Awlaki).

An intelligence source told Fox News that the tweets suggest foreknowledge of the Paris attack.

On Friday, U.S. government sources confirmed to Fox News that 34-year-old Said Kouachi, who, along with his brother Cherif, was responsible for the attack in Paris, travelled to Yemen in 2011 and trained with or fought along side AQAP, and one of his goals was to meet with the Al Qaeda branch's leadership. A U.S. intelligence assessment described to The Associated Press shows that Kouachi was trained in preparation to return home and carry out an attack.

Soon after the Al Qaeda member claimed responsibility for the Paris attack on Friday, The Associated Press reported that the branch's senior cleric Sheikh Harith al-Nadhari issued a recording on the group's Twitter feed commenting on the "blessed raid on Paris." He denounced the "filthy" French and called them "the heads of infidelity who insult the prophets." He praised the "hero mujahedeen" who he said "taught them a lesson and the limits of freedom of speech."

In a recent report by Fox News Al Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen has released a video claiming responsibility for last week's deadly attack by two gunmen on the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris:

“Nasr al-Ansi, a top commander of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP as the branch is known, appeared in an 11-minute Internet video posted Wednesday, saying that the massacre was in "vengeance for the prophet."

Al-Ansi also said in the video that France belongs to the "party of Satan" and warned of more "tragedies and terror." He says Yemen's Al Qaeda branch "chose the target, laid out the plan and financed the operation," though he produced no evidence to support the claim.

The attack by two brothers, Said and Cherif Kouachi killed 12 people, including eight staffers at the magazine, which had reportedly drawn their ire for repeatedly depicting the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. Muslim orthodoxy holds that any depiction of Muhammad is blasphemous.

An eyewitness heard the gunmen say in French, "We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad!" as they fled the newspaper office, while another witness claimed the gunmen addressed him before fleeing, saying, "Tell them this was Al Qaeda in Yemen."

It did not take long for major media in the West to begin to alter the facts and the truth.

The White House and State Department refuse to use the words “Islamic” or “Radical Islamic” when talking about the latest or any other act of terrorism committed by Radical Islamist. Instead they use the word “Extremists” lumping all acts of terrorism together. They don’t even call Al Qaeda or ISIL radical Islam. In this way they are presenting us with a new set of facts — facts that are intended to led us to a new truth. In essence they are managing the perception of what is happing around the world when it pertains to Islam. The motives for doing this are unclear, but one must consider Barack Obama’s background and various statements he has made about Islam over the years.

It is the job of a conscientious and diligent press to challenge the action and statements of those in authority over us — this why we have a First Amendment in our Constitution. When a free press becomes the spokespersons for authority bad things happen. This is what happens in totalitarian states such as Germany under the Nazis, Russia under the Communists, North Korea, and Cuba.

Below is a video clip of CNN’s Christiane Amanpour reporting on the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo in Paris last week refused to use the words “Islamic Terrorism” or even “Terrorism” but instead used the word "Activists" when referring to the actions of the two Islamic gunmen. This video of her is introduced by Greg Gutfeld of Fox News and reported extensively across the Internet.

Of course what would one expect from a woman of Iranian heritage and married to American James Rubin, a former US Assistant Secretary of State and spokesman for the US State Department during the Clinton administration and currently an informal adviser to former US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and President of the United States Barack Obama.

There are other quotes from CNN contributors in this clip warning of an overreaction to the killings by “right-wing” activists. It should be noted that no such action has ever happened – even in the wake of 9/11.

Activists are people championing a cause. Most right-wing act activists are peaceful marchers. Many left-wing activists use violence – note the recent demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri and New York City.

Martin Luther King was an activist. Gandhi was an activist. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are activists. They don’t walk into an establishment with AK-47s and start indiscriminately blasting away. Major Nidal Hasan is a terrorist.

As Gutfeld states in his comments on Christiane Amanpour:

“I get it. The enemy is pre-ordained. It's us. Which means Howard Dean is right. This is a cult, a cult of apologists. But Dean is also right when he says this is not a religious issue, which means, if I don't see Islam when I fight terror, then you cannot see Islamophobia when I fight it.

What should we see instead? Again, a death cult, one that needs no understanding, just eradication. It would be nice for moderate Muslims to help, but if they don't, we can handle it, it's nothing personal, Muslims. Just step aside.

Finally, where did this cult learn to punish language? From the Quran? From Al Qaeda? How about Harvard, and our modern cult of hate speech activists, who see language as violence, creating speech codes with penalties? Seeing "activists" silence critics so easily must make them drool with envy.”

Gutfeld is pointing out how language and the management of perception is why we cannot mount effective attack on Radical Islam.

Fueling the Western paralysis in dealing with radical Islam is the late 20th century doctrine of multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism is one of those buzzwords that does not mean what it should. The ancient and generic Western study of many cultures is not multiculturalism. Rather, the trendy term promotes non-Western cultures to a status equal with or superior to Western culture largely to fulfill contemporary political agendas.

On college campuses, multiculturalism not so much manifests itself in the worthy interest in Chinese literature, Persian history, or hieroglyphics, but rather has become more a therapeutic exercise of exaggerating Western sins while ignoring non-Western pathologies to attract those who see themselves in some way as not part of the dominant culture.

It is a deductive ideology that starts with a premise of Western fault and then makes evidence fit the paradigm. This is classic Perception Management.

A multicultural approach to the conquest of Mexico usually does not investigate the tragedy of the collision between 16th-century imperial Spain and the Aztec Empire. More often it renders the conquest as melodrama between a mostly noble indigenous people slaughtered by a mostly toxic European Christian culture, acting true to its imperialistic and colonialist traditions and values.

In other words, there is little attention given to Aztec imperialism, colonialism, slavery, human sacrifice, and cannibalism, but rather a great deal of emphasis on Aztec sophisticated time-reckoning, monumental building skills, and social stratification. To explain the miraculous defeat of the huge Mexican empire by a few rag-tag, greedy conquistadors, discussion would not entail the innate savagery of the Aztecs that drove neighboring indigenous tribes to ally themselves with Cortés.

For the multiculturalist, the sins of the non-West are mostly ignored or attributed to Western influence, while those of the West are peculiar to Western civilization. In terms of the challenge of radical Islam, multiculturalism manifests itself in the abstract with the notion that Islamists are simply the fundamentalist counterparts to any other religion. Islamic extremists are no different from Christian extremists, as the isolated examples of David Koresh or the Rev. Jim Jones are cited ad nauseam as the morally and numerically equivalent bookends to thousands of radical Islamic terrorist acts that plague the world each month. We are not to assess other religions by any absolute standard, given that such judgmentalism would inevitably be prejudiced by endemic Western privilege. There is nothing in the Sermon on the Mount that differs much from what is found in the Koran. And on and on and on.

In the concrete, multiculturalism seeks to use language and politics to mask reality. The slaughter at Ford Hood becomes “workplace violence,” not a case of a radical Islamist, Major Nidal Hasan, screaming “Allahu Akbar” as he butchered the innocent. After the Paris violence, the administration envisions a “Summit on Countering Violent Extremism,” apparently in reaction to Buddhists who are filming beheadings, skinheads storming Paris media offices, and lone-wolf anti-abortionists who slaughtered the innocent in Australia, Canada, and France.

The likes of James Clapper and John Brennan assure us of absurdities such as the Muslim Brotherhood being a largely secular organization or jihad as little more than a personal religious journey. Terrorism is reduced to man-caused violence and the effort to combat it is little more than an “overseas contingency operation.” The head of NASA in surreal fashion boasts that one of his primary missions for the hallowed agency is to promote appreciation of Muslim science and accomplishments through outreach to Islam. The president blames an obscure film-maker for causing the deaths of Americans in Benghazi (when in reality, it was a preplanned Al-Qaeda affiliate hit) — and then Obama makes it a twofer: he can both ignore the politically incorrect task of faulting radical Islam and score politically correct points by chastising a supposedly right-wing bigot for a crime he did not foster.

For the useful idiot, multiculturalism is supposedly aimed at ecumenicalism and hopes to diminish difference by inclusiveness and non-judgmentalism. But mostly it is a narcissistic fit, in which the multiculturalist offers a cheap rationalization of non-Western pathologies, and thereby anoints himself both the moral superior to his own less critical Western peers and, in condescending fashion, the self-appointed advocate of the mostly incapable non-Westerner.

Multiculturalism is contrary to human nature. Supposedly if Muslims understand that Westerners do not associate an epidemic of global terrorism and suicide bombing with Islam, then perhaps Muslims — seeing concession as magnanimity to be reciprocated — will appreciate such outreach and help to mitigate the violence, all the more so if they also sense that they share with the more radical among them at least some legitimate gripes against the West.

In the psychological sense, multiculturalism also serves as a way of dealing with affluent Western guilt: one does not have to put his kids in an inner-city school, visit the barrio to shop, or invite undocumented aliens over for dinner, when one can both enjoy a largely affluent and apartheid existence in the concrete, while praising the noble Other in the abstract. In the European context, the liberal French or British elite welcomes in the Muslim Other for low-wage jobs and to feed his multicultural sensitivities — only to outsource the immigrants to outlander suburbs that devolve into no-go zones even for the police. In the Clinton context, when Hilary lectures us that we must understand and even empathize with the minds of our enemies, we assume that Chelsea is not on the barricades trying to fathom what drives the violent “Other.”

Ultimately multiculturalism is incoherent, claiming that all cultures are equal, but then (privately) disturbed that Iranians behead gays or Saudi women cannot drive a car — or radical Muslims prefer to live in Europe than among the believers in Yemen. Yet even multiculturalism cannot quite equate honor killings with the glass ceiling.

Radical Muslims both emigrate to the West and yet, once there, seek through Sharia law to destroy the very foundations of what made the West attractive to them in the first place. Clean water, advanced medicine, entitlement support and free speech ultimately cannot exist in a society that routinely assassinates the outspoken satirist. In a less dramatic sense, the entire open-border, La Raza movement is based on the anomaly that the United States is such an inhospitable and racist place, while Mexico is such a benevolent homeland, that 11 million risk their lives to reach the former and abandon the latter.

For Muslims of the Middle East, there is a clear pathway to economic prosperity and a secure lifestyle; countries as diverse as South Korea, Japan, and Chile are proof of it. Within wide parameters, success only asks adherence to a mostly free market, some sort of freedom of expression, religious tolerance, a separation of science from orthodoxy, the rule of law, and consensual constitutional government — along with a cultural ethos of rough parity between the sexes, merit-based evaluation instead of tribal favors, and tolerance for ethnic and religious minorities.

Fail that, and human misery follows of the now familiar Middle East sort, in turn followed by the tired blame that the Jews, the Americans, the Europeans, or the West caused these self-generated pathologies.

If the Western establishment were truly moral, it would reject multiculturalism as a deductive, anti-empirical, and illiberal creed. It would demand that critics abroad first put their own house in order before blaming others for their own failures, and remind Western elites that their multicultural fantasies are cheap remedies designed to deal with their own neuroses.

Finally, it would also not welcome in newcomers who seek to destroy the very institutions that make the West so unlike the homelands they have voted with their feet to utterly abandon.

Has America Changed Too Much?

Has America Changed Too Much?“Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.” — Barry Goldwater

In 1960, Barry Goldwater published The Conscience of a Conservative. In it, he noted:

“Conservatism is not an economic theory, though it has economic implications. The shoe is precisely on the other foot: it is Socialism that subordinates all other considerations to man’s material well-being. It is Conservatism that puts material things in their proper place — that has a structured view of the human being and of human society, in which economics plays only a subsidiary role.

The root difference between the Conservatives and the Liberals of today is that Conservatives take account of the whole man, while Liberals tend to look only at the material side of man’s nature.”

Fifty-three years later that remains a constant. Unfortunately for conservatives, much of the hand-wringing over paths forward to victory involve haggling over taxes and balanced budgets and spending and debt to GDP ratios, etc.

Writing in Real Clear Politics Ben Domenech gets to the heart of this:

“The choice for the Republican Party is whether to invest more in the 2010 strategy of this populist strain, to refine it and connect more policy proposals to it … or to embark on an effort to restore the party’s standing as the adult in the room – the competent, clean cut, good-government technocracy that sees the chief appeal of Republican politicians as combining agencies and seeking out efficiencies rather than rolling back government power and draining bureaucratic swamps. The GOP swung back to this technocratic approach on a national scale in 2012, and let’s just say the electoral results left much to be desired.”

The budgetary and economic wonkery only gets the GOP so far and that isn’t far enough to victory.

In truth, I think it will take a magnetic personality to pull the GOP out of the gutter. We live in an age of personality politics. But that personality will have to have a message that resonates with the American public. What resonates right now with the American public is a deep-seated distrust of government. Any Republican way forward must capitalize on this. In other words, the faces in Washington who can play the role are very limited to people like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and — if immigration can go away as an issue and the base forgives him — Marco Rubio.

The message to seize on is pretty straight forward. Under Republican and Democrat policies in Washington, particularly accelerated in the past five years, the United States meritocracy has given way to an aristocracy.

Only those of means can get ahead. Increasingly, they view their role as making life comfortable for the less well-off instead of enabling the less well-off to become well off. Wall Street, banks, major corporations, politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and the rich are the only ones who can prosper because they are the only ones who can either navigate the system or afford to pay others who can figure out how to navigate the system.

For the rest of Americans, from small business to the middle class, the only path is one of dependence on a governmental structure too byzantine to figure out and, should one be smart enough to figure out, too costly through litigation, regulation, and complication to navigate through.

An America where, as Lincoln said, every man can make himself, is replaced by an America where men are made by how the government takes cares of their individual circumstances. Students are no longer trained to be creative, entrepreneurial citizens, but to be workers for others. The self-employed are encumbered to the point of needing to be employees of others. The nuclear family is disincentivized and destabilized.

The America where one could work hard and get ahead is less and less possible because Democrats wish to force us all onto a safety net on which all are entangled, ensnared, and punished if we escape. Republicans, for fear of being disliked, would rather nibble at numbers than paint a picture of a better America for everyone.

Just one fact worth noting: under the present system, enabled by Republican and Democrat alike, a single mother on $29,000 a year and government benefits would have to get to $60,000 in salary to make it worth her getting off the safety net. This is a bipartisan construct, but one only an outsider conservative can build a campaign around fixing to the betterment of the single mom and everyone else.

Ideas of the 1960s have now grown reactionary in our world that is vastly different from a half-century ago.

Take well-meaning subsidies for those over age 62. Why are there still senior discounts, vast expansions in Social Security and Medicare, and generous public pensions?

Five decades ago all that made sense. There was no such thing as double-dipping. Seniors often were physically worn out from blue-collar jobs. They were usually poorer and frequently sicker than society in general. The aged usually died not long after they retired.

Not now. Seniors often live a quarter-century or longer after a mostly white-collar retirement, drawing subsidies from those least able to pay for them.

Seniors are not like today's strapped youth, scrimping for a down payment on a house. Most are not struggling to find even part-time work. None are paying off crushing student loans. In a calcified economy, why would an affluent couple in their early 60s earn a "senior discount" at a movie, while the struggling young couple with three children in the same line does not?

Affirmative action and enforced "diversity" were originally designed to give a boost to those who were victims of historical bias from the supposedly oppressive white-majority society. Is that still true, a half-century after these assumptions became institutionalized?

Through greater intermarriage and immigration, America has become a multiracial nation. Skin color, general appearance, accent or the sound of one's name cannot so easily identify either "oppressors" or "victims."

So who exactly should receive privileges in job-hiring or college admissions — the newly arrived Pakistani immigrant, or the third-generation, upper-middle-class Mexican-American who does not speak Spanish? Both, or neither? What about someone of half-Jamaican ancestry? What about the children of Attorney General Eric Holder or self-proclaimed Native American Sen. Elizabeth Warren? What about the poor white grandson of the Oklahoma diaspora who is now a minority in California?

Even if the 21st-century state could define who is a minority, on what moral grounds does the targeted beneficiary deserve special consideration? Is his disadvantage defined by being poorer, by lingering trauma from his grandparents' long-ago ordeals, or by yesterday's experience with routine racial prejudice?

If Latinos are underrepresented at the University of California, Berkeley, is it because of the stubborn institutional prejudices that also somehow have been trumped by Asian-Americans enrolling at three times their numbers in the state's general population? Are women so oppressed by men that they graduate from college in higher numbers than their chauvinist male counterparts?

Of all the consequences that would result from amnesty, one that hasn't been discussed enough is the expansion of affirmative action.

Affirmative action takes existing racial grievances, institutionalizes them, and then magnifies them. Affirmative action encourages "a victim-focused identity in minorities" and fosters "a parasitic diversity industry"

Affirmative action policies will benefit minority immigrants, and minority immigrants will naturally support affirmative action policies. How do we know? Because Hispanics are telling pollsters so.

Sixty-five percent of Hispanics believe that affirmative action should be used to ensure that more Hispanics get to college or university, and 68% support affirmative action in employment, according to a 2011 Angus Reid opinion poll. A 2012 Georgetown University poll showed that 63% of young Hispanics (18-24) support affirmative action to "redress past discrimination," along with 75% of young blacks, but only 19% of whites.

Of course, making up for past discrimination doesn't apply to people whose ancestors never set foot in this country, but fairness was never the goal of racial preferences; former Democratic Senator James Webb famously noted that affirmative action simply favors "anyone who does not happen to be white."

The policy is bad enough. The greatest harm is the poisonous racial grievance reinforced by the policy.

People who believe that their racial group is often discriminated against will support affirmative action. On this point, the open-borders Republicans have done an extremely poor job of understanding Hispanic viewpoints about how this country treats them. Sixty-four percent of Latino adults claim that discrimination against Hispanics in schools is "a major problem," and 58% said the same of the workplace, according to a recent Pew poll.

There are very few policy issues that liberals don't reduce to supposed racism. Even "righteous indignation against diversity and reverse discrimination" is one of the "implements of racism" for upper-class whites, according to law professor Mari Matsuda, a founder of the highly influential critical race theory

It's safe to say that when a racial group perceive a high degree of supposed discrimination, they will not be voting for limited government, but will instead favor reverse discrimination. Those who assert the contrary — pro-amnesty Republicans — have the extraordinary burden of showing some basis in history or logic for believing that groups with a racial victim mindset will reject racial preferences.

It is a false hope that any significant number of those who receive amnesty will vote Republican, unless the GOP gets in the affirmative action game. Give a group amnesty, and they'll be thankful to all Democrats and a few Republicans, but Democrats will give them more of what they want from the state. The choice will be simple.

Consider also the calcified assumptions about college education. The expanding 1960s campus was touted as the future gateway to a smarter, fairer, richer and more ethical America. Is that dream still valid?

Today, the college-educated owe a collective $1 trillion in unpaid student loans. Millions of recent graduates cannot find jobs that offer much chance of paying off their crushing student debts.

College itself has become a sort of five to six-year lifestyle choice. Debt, joblessness or occasional part-time employment and coursework eat up a youth's 20s — in a way that military service or vocational training does not.

In reaction, private diploma mills are springing up everywhere. But there are no "diversity czars" at DeVry University. There is no time or money for the luxury of classes such as "Gender Oppression" at Phoenix University. Students do not have rock-climbing walls or have Michael Moore address them at Hillsdale College.

The private-sector campus makes other assumptions. One is that the hallowed liberal arts general-education requirement has been corrupted and no longer ensures an employer that his college-graduate hire is any more broadly educated or liberally minded than those who paid far less tuition for job-training courses at for-profit alternative campuses.

Scan the government grandees caught up in the current administration's ballooning IRS, Associated Press and Benghazi scandals. In each case, a blue-chip Ivy League degree was no guarantee that our best and brightest technocrats would prove transparent or act honorably. What difference did it make that White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Eric Holder, President Barack Obama and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice had degrees from prestigious universities when they misled the American people or Congress?

The now-aging idealists of the 1960s long ago promised us that a uniformly degreed citizenry — shepherded by Ivy League-branded technocrats -- would make America better by sorting us out by differences in age, gender, education and race.

It is now past time to end that fossilized dream before it becomes our collective nightmare.

But, to begin, the Republicans must be able to relate. With distrust in government at an all-time high, a relevant Republican is probably going to be a guy who hates the status quo, not one who talks Washington wonkspeak.

As Domenech concluded:

“The Republican Party needs to understand that shrinking its policy aims to more modest solutions is not going to be rewarded by the electorate. Yes, they need to tailor their message better and find policy wedges which peel off chunks of the Democratic base (winning political strategy is built on an understanding that every drama needs a hero, a martyr, and a villain). But what’s truly essential is that the party leadership rid themselves of the notion that politeness, great hair, and reform for efficiency’s sake is a ballot box winner, and understand instead that politicians who can connect with the people and deliver on their limited government promises – not ones who back away from them under pressure – represent the path forward.”

Unless the Republicans can find candidates who can eloquently express true conservative they will not win. Just putting up candidates like Mitt Romney who had one note to play is not enough. They must convince the majority of the electorate that only through a return to the values of our Founders and the Constitution can this Republic be saved from the tyranny of bigger and bigger government.

Are the Europeans Finally Getting the Message?

“This multicultural approach, saying that we simply live side by side and live happily with each other has failed. Utterly failed.” — Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, 2010

Two things happened last week. One made the news big-time on the mainstream media, the other bore scarcely a mention. Both incidents are indicative of the laissez-faire policy that West European nations have had towards immigration for the past 30 years. With the exception of Germany these nations have accepted immigrants from the Muslim world on almost an unrestricted basis in the name of human rights. Most of these immigrants come from third-world Muslim countries such as Bangladesh, Nigeria, Somalia, and the Sudan. Most claim refugee status to obtain entrée to these European countries and are usually granted it.

Once in the country of their choice or a country that will take them they gravitate to ghettos of their peers and settle in. they rarely learn the language of their new host country and bring all of their cultural baggage with them. This includes food, dress, treatment of women, honor killings, Islamic (Sharia) law, and disrespect for the host nations laws, police, and courts.

They suck off the teat of the host nation taking advantage of the nation’s generous welfare and healthcare systems. They pay little or no taxes and mostly live in public housing. The ghettos they live are run by some group of strong men and the Imams and clerics. The youth are unemployed and radicalized by the Imams

In July of 2001 the city of Bradford in West Yorkshire, England suffered 2 nights of rioting. It occurred as a result of heightened tension between the large and growing ethnic minority communities and the city's white majority, stoked by confrontation between the Anti-Nazi League and far right groups such as the British National Party and the National Front. According to a report in the Guardian:

“Racial violence erupted on the streets of Bradford yesterday as hundreds of Asian youths fought white extremists and police in some of the worst rioting yet seen in a summer of disturbances in northern towns and cities.

Two people were stabbed and three seriously injured after a protest march against the National Front turned violent. At the height of the trouble, police in Bradford were pelted with petrol bombs, bricks, bottles and road signs and two city centre pubs had their windows smashed. At least 17 people were arrested.

Last night, the trouble spread to the mainly Asian suburb of Manningham, an area of sprawling and deprived terraced housing estates.

A group of about 1,000 Asian youths set fire to barricades on the area's White Abbey Road and tore up bricks and concrete paving stones to hurl at the police.

Thick smoke and fumes drifted down a half-mile length of the road as police tried to beat the rioters back. Youths set fire to several cars and through petrol bombs at buildings, briefly setting the roof of one alight, as mounted police and officers in full riot gear charged the groups of rioters gathered behind a burning wreck.

Fire engines advanced to tackle the blazes behind a tight cordon of riot police. However, under a hail of stones and bricks they were several times forced to retreat. Shortly after 9pm a delegation of community leaders, including local Tory councillor Mohammed Riaz, went through police lines to talk to rioters and calm tensions, but their efforts had little effect.

'What is happening here is terrible. Businesses are being attacked, cars set on fire and I cannot believe these scenes are taking place in a city in England,' said Riaz. 'There's no logic to this. Where is the protest, where are the National Front? There is no justification for this - they are setting back Bradford 10 years.”

Note the use of the politically correct euphemism “Asian” for Muslims.

Two years ago the Guardian reported “A decade after the riots, Bradford is still uneasy about race relations:”

“Ten years ago today Bradford witnessed race riots that lasted three days and brought the issue of race relations in the city to the country's attention. Bradford became known as a "racial tinderbox" where the city's large Asian community was estranged and at odds with the white working class.

You could see the troubles coming as rioting spread across the north from towns on the other side of the Pennines such as Burnley and Oldham. There were the largely forgotten riots of 1995, which should have acted as a warning signal. After those disturbances, Asian residents complained about a lack of opportunities and growing unease about relationships with the police and the white working class. Those calls were mostly ignored, the National Front took advantage and six years later tensions boiled over again.

I was a 17-year-old student at the time, and like many people in the city was shocked to see Manningham turned into a battleground. I remember picking up the Telegraph and Argus and seeing the faces of young men I'd played against in a football semi-final a few months earlier on the front page as wanted troublemakers. Harsh sentences followed for the Asian offenders and the city woke up to the fact that it had been sleepwalking into segregation for more than 30 years.

There was a definite change in the city as the initial shock of the riots turned to disgust and even hatred as people surveyed what "they" had done to "our" city. The fallout continued with the BNP gaining council seats in predominantly white areas like Queensbury and Keighley as far-right groups took advantage of the troubles to reinforce the "them and us" attitude. Lord Ouseley's report and the Cantle report followed and laid out the drastic action that needed to be taken to counteract the effects of segregation in the city and others like it.”

The British have been the most lenient with the immigration policies and until this past week they have been turning a blind eye to the changes in culture this policy is inflecting on the natural British citizens. They believe they are doing God’s work in allowing these “Asians” to dominate their politics and through political correctness have been reluctant to change the policies and take measures, as France and the Netherlands did, to restrict the immigration and begin deporting the radical Muslims.

Islam is London's largest and most significant minority religion. There were 607,083 Muslims reported in the 2001 census in the Greater London area. 40% of England's Muslims live in London, where they make up 8.5% of the population. According to the 2011 census 2.8 million Muslims live in the U.K. (4.8% of the populations of England and Wales).

(Click on the above chart to view a larger image)

According to 2011 report in the Mail Online the Muslim population in the UK will almost double to 5.5million within 20 years:

“Immigration and high birth rates will mean nearly one in ten Britons will be Muslim by 2030, according to a worldwide study about the spread of Islam.

And the forecasts mean Britain will have more Muslims than Kuwait.

From 1990 to 2010 the number of followers of the Islamic faith around the world increased at an average rate of 2.2 per cent annually. Last year there were 1.57billion around the world.

The British increase in the Muslim population from the current 2.8 million will be mainly driven by immigration, according to figures prepared by a Washington think tank.

Projections by the respected Pew Research Centre said the 40 years between 1990 and 2030 will see a fivefold rise in Britain.

In 1990 there were 1.1million Muslims in Britain, representing two per cent of the population.

By last year that figure had risen to 2.8million, or four per cent. By 2030 the number will hit 5.5 million - eight per cent of an estimated 68 million population, Pew researchers said.”

Britain is paying a high price for this nonsensical, liberal progressive social immigration policy.

Last Wednesday, Drummer Lee Rigby of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, a man who had served Queen and country honorably in the hell of Helmand Province in Afghanistan, emerged from his barracks on Wellington Street, named after the Duke thereof, in southeast London. Minutes later, he was hacked to death in broad daylight and in full view of onlookers by two men with machetes who crowed “Allahu Akbar!” as they dumped his carcass in the middle of the street like so much road kill.

As grotesque as this act of savagery was, the aftermath was even more unsettling. The perpetrators did not, as the Tsarnaev brothers did in Boston, attempt to escape. Instead, they held court in the street gloating over their trophy, and flagged down a London bus to demand the passengers record their triumph on film. As the crowd of bystanders swelled, the remarkably urbane savages posed for photographs with the remains of their victim while discoursing on the iniquities of Britain toward the Muslim world. Having killed Drummer Rigby, they were killing time: It took 20 minutes for the lethargic British constabulary to show up. And so television viewers were treated to the spectacle of a young man, speaking in the vowels of south London, chatting calmly with his “fellow Britons” about his geopolitical grievances and apologizing to the ladies present for any discomfort his beheading of Drummer Rigby might have caused them, all while drenched in blood and still wielding his cleaver.

If you’re thinking of getting steamed over all that, don’t. Simon Jenkins, the former editor of the Times of London, cautioned against “mass hysteria” over “mundane acts of violence.”

That’s easy for him to say. Woolwich is an unfashionable part of town, and Sir Simon is unlikely to find himself there of an afternoon stroll. Drummer Rigby had less choice in the matter. Being jumped by barbarians with machetes is certainly “mundane” in Somalia and Sudan, but it’s the sort of thing that would once have been considered somewhat unusual on a sunny afternoon in south London — at least as unusual as, say, blowing up eight-year-old boys at the Boston Marathon. It was “mundane” only in the sense that, as at weddings and kindergarten concerts, the reflexive reaction of everybody present was to get out their cell phones and start filming.

there is a disturbing passivity to this scene: a street full of able-bodied citizens being lectured to by blood-soaked murderers who have no fear that anyone will be minded to interrupt their diatribes. In fairness to the people of Boston, they were ordered to “shelter in place” by the governor of Massachusetts. In Woolwich, a large crowd of Londoners apparently volunteered to “shelter in place,” instinctively. Consider how that will play when these guys’ jihadist snuff video is being hawked around the bazaars of the Muslim world. Behold the infidels, content to be bystanders in their own fate.

This passivity set the tone for what followed. In London as in Boston, the politico-media class immediately lapsed into their political correct multi-culture blabber that seems to be a chronic side effect of excess diversity-celebrating: No Islam to see here, nothing to do with Islam, all these body parts in the street are a deplorable misinterpretation of Islam. The BBC’s Nick Robinson accidentally described the men as being “of Muslim appearance,” but quickly walked it back lest impressionable types get the idea that there’s anything “of Muslim appearance” about a guy waving a machete and saying “Allahu Akbar.” A man is on TV dripping blood in front of a dead British soldier and swearing “by Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you,” yet it’s the BBC reporter who’s apologizing for “causing offence.” To David Cameron, Drummer Rigby’s horrific end was “not just an attack on Britain and on the British way of life, it was also a betrayal of Islam. Perhaps it will eventually be labeled as “workplace violence.”

In the above video clip note the woman casually pulling her shopping cart as she approaches terrorist and the crowd of sheeple standing by and casually watching. I can guarantee this would not have been the case in Oklahoma or Texas. Also note how the ITV commentator refers to another act of violence when describing that the armed police shot the SOB machete-wielding killer.

The suburbs of the Swedish capital were engulfed in a fourth night of rioting early last Thursday in the country's worst civil unrest in years, leaving locals shaking their heads and wondering when calm would return to their usually tranquil city. A report in USA Today states:

“Since Sunday, hundreds of young residents of the suburbs of Husby, Jakobsberg, Hagsatra, Skarholmenset and others set dozens of cars on fire, damaged buildings — including schools and a police station — and battled with police. There were about 10 arrests, and one police officer was reported injured.

Police spokesman Kjell Lindgren says at least 30 cars were set ablaze across western and southern Stockholm early Thursday. Firefighters said they have "never before seen so many fires raging at the same time."

Fire also destroyed a restaurant in Skogas, south of Stockholm.

Government officials have called for calm while the rioters say they won't stop until there is a full investigation into the shooting death of a 69-year-old mentally ill Husby man last week who, police say, was swinging a machete as police attempted a house search.

"Everyone must work to restore calm," said Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt.

On Wednesday night and into Thursday, hundreds of residents walked the streets to answer the appeal for calm.

The unrest in poor, immigrant suburbs is only the latest to break out in Europe over the past decade following riots in Paris in 2005 and in London in 2011. But it has shocked both locals and those outside the rich northern country famous for its tolerance and generous welfare system known as the 'Swedish model,' a country also synonymous for its commitment to societal equality and justice.

Now, locals are wondering if Sweden has done any better than its European neighbors in assimilating its immigrant population, especially as administrations in the past two decades have been slowly dismantling the cradle-to-grave welfare benefits. That has led to rising income inequality that has hit the young and immigrants the hardest with unemployment running at 7% for the general population, and 16% among residents of foreign origin.”

In a related report from The Guardian:

“What began in Husby last Sunday has spread to more than a dozen of the city's other suburbs. And on Friday night, while police reported a quieter night in the capital, fires and stone-throwing were also reported in Uppsala, Södertälje, and even further afield in Linköping and Örebro, in central Sweden.

The morning after the truck-burning, however, Husby seems idyllic. There's a busy vegetable stall in the main square and a group of elderly men sipping beer in the sun. The rows of seven-storey blocks, built in the 1960s and 1970s as part of Sweden's "million homes" project, are all freshly painted, the gardens and playgrounds well-tended. At the local school, the windows broken the previous night are already being fixed.

"If you have broken windows and they see it, they will crack other windows, so we must fix it immediately," says Christer Svensson, who has come in to do the work. "I don't care, I make money out of this."

Outside the new library, which opened last month, another white, ethnically Swedish handyman is busy painting. "This place behind me, they've just spent 40m kronor [£4m] on it," he grumbles. "They don't talk about that when they talk to the TV, do they? They talk about the problems, they don't talk about everything people are doing for them.

"These people, they should integrate in this society and just try a little bit more to be like Swedish citizens."

Scratch beneath the surface and this is a sentiment shared by many in a country that arguably has the world's most generous asylum policies. Sweden has taken in more than 11,000 refugees from Syria since 2012, more per head than any other European country, and it has absorbed more than 100,000 Iraqis and 40,000 Somalis over the past two decades. About 1.8 million of its 9.5 million people are first- or second-generation immigrants.

"This is one of the countries that treats immigrants the best," says Mohammed Hassan, a Bangladeshi studying in Husby's new library, who previously lived in Brick Lane in east London. "It's much, much better than any other European country in which I've travelled."

The nightly rioting in Stockholm that establishment media ascribes merely to “youths,” is being carried out by Muslim immigrants.

A report from the Russia-based RT.com is one of the few which dared to print the M-word -- "Muslim" -- and even its author waited until the 21st of 25 paragraphs to mention it. But the report's headline and content deserve credit for properly framing the "segregation" problem:

‘They don’t want to integrate’: Fifth night of youth rioting rocks Stockholm

Youth gang riots in the Swedish capital Stockholm have entered fifth straight night. Hundreds of mostly immigrant teenagers tore through the suburbs, smashing windows and burning cars in the country’s worst outbreak of violence in years.

The night before, the fire brigades were called to some 90 different blazes. On the fourth night of violence, youths torched over 30 cars in 15 neighborhoods along with a restaurant in Skogas, south of Stockholm. Three law enforcement officers were injured, police spokesperson Kjell Lindgren reported.

Stockholm firefighters were busy throughout the night, saying they had “never before seen so many fires raging at the same time.” Some 90 blazes were reported in total, most of them reportedly caused by the rioters. Still, the fourth night of violence was relatively quiet compared to the previous three, RT's Peter Oliver reported from Stockholm.

Community leaders insist that a main reason for the violence is the high rate of unemployment in immigrant communities, particularly in the suburb of Husby near central Stockholm, one of the worst affected by the nighttime violence, Peter Oliver reported.

“In Sweden you’ve got welfare, access to the educational system – up to university level, you got access to public transport, libraries, healthcare – to everything. And still they feel that they [immigrants] need to riot through stones and Molotov cocktails. It’s ridiculous and a bad excuse,” Swedish Democrats MP Kent Ekeroth told RT.

For years, Sweden – one of Europe’s most tranquil countries, famous for its attractive immigration policies and generous welfare system – has been accepting an influx of immigrants, which now make up about 15 per cent of its population. These migrants have failed to integrate into Swedish society, and are only in the country to enjoy the country’s social benefits system, Swedish journalist Ingrid Carlqvist told RT.

“The problem is not from the Swedish government or from the Swedish people,” the editor in chief of Dispatch International said. “The last 20 years or so, we have seen so many immigrants coming to Sweden that really don’t like Sweden. They do not want to integrate, they do not want to live in [Swedish] society: Working, paying taxes and so on.”

Young Muslims who enjoy tolerance, social institutions and welfare while living in Sweden nevertheless refuse to integrate into the West, Gerolf Annemans told RT. Annemans is the parliamentary leader of Vlaams Belang (‘Flemish Interest’), a Belgian far-right nationalist political party.

“It’s always the same problem. There is a massive refusal by Muslim youngsters of the basics of Western society... and they take any excuse whatsoever to show that with violence – that is where the problem is,” he said.

Muslim immigrants in Sweden now total slightly more than 6 percent of the population, providing additional support for the maxim that a Muslim population of 5 percent is a tipping point for political turmoil. In other countries, Muslim immigrants at that point have begun to seek concessions, including, typically, the right to govern themselves by Sharia, or Islamic law.

In Sweden, the Muslim population has doubled in the last 14 years, with Muslims now accounting for over 41 percent of Sweden’s total population growth. The growth reflects not only increasing Islamic immigration but also a disproportionately high birth rate in a nation in which the native birth rate is trending toward zero-growth.

According to European Union statistics, an estimated 574,000 Muslims lived in Sweden in 2012, making up 6.05 percent of the population, compared to 1998, when there were 284,000 Muslims, or 3.21 percent of the total population.

The EU currently estimates that at current rates of growth, the Muslim population will reach 40 percent of the total population in Sweden by 2030.

While Sweden does not keep welfare statistics specifically for Muslims, experts estimate from available government welfare statistics on the foreign-born that somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of Sweden’s welfare payments go to Muslims, with the percentage on the rise.

In Stockholm, the rioting in recent days has centered on Husby, a low-income suburb of Stockholm with some 12,000 residents. Approximately 80 percent are first- or second-generation Muslim immigrants from Turkey, the Middle East and Somalia.

Swedish police estimated that about 200 Muslim youths were responsible for the violence last week that set hundreds of cars and several buildings on fire with Molotov cocktails, including a parking garage fire that forced the evacuation of residents of an adjacent apartment block.

After setting cars on fire, masked Muslim youths waited to pelt with rocks any police responding to calls.

Reports indicate Megafonen, a “youth activist group” funded by the city, planned the Husby riots. Police in riot gear scuffled with Muslim gangs roaming freely in Husby. Some 200 organized Muslim youth rioters armed with rocks and Molotov cocktails stood near the burning cars awaiting to pelt with rocks and Molotov cocktails police and fire departments responding.

The Muslim riots in the suburbs outside Stockholm bear a strong resemblance to the Muslim riots that began Oct. 27, 2005, in suburbs outside Paris.

Several common elements between the rioting in France in 2005, and again in 2012, with the rioting currently occurring in Stockholm:

Unemployed Muslim youth immigrants from welfare families relocated from Africa to Europe begin the riot in early evening by tossing Molotov cocktails to set parked cars on fire;

The violence is intensified and spread by mobs of Muslim gangs running wild through the suburb streets, spreading to the area in which cars and buildings are torched;

When police and fire department units respond, the Muslim rioters lie in wait to pelt them with rocks, sticks and Molotov cocktails.

In February, the Economist reported that in Sweden, only 51 percent of non-Europeans have a job, compared with over 84 percent of native Swedes.

“The Nordic countries need to persuade their citizens that they are getting a good return on their taxes,” the Economist noted, “but mass immigration is creating a class of people who are permanently dependent upon the state.”

In Sweden, 26 percent of all prisoners and 50 percent of prisoners serving more than five years are foreigners, the Economist detailed.

Nor is the conflict limited to social-demographic characteristics and economics; it also extends to cultural differences.

“Nordics fervently believe in liberal values, especially sexual equality and freedom of speech, but many of the immigrants come from countries where men and women are segregated and criticizing the prophet Muhammad is a serious offense.”

The Economist report concluded:

“The biggest battle is within the Nordic mind. Is it more progressive to open the door to refugees and risk overextending the welfare state, or to close the door and leave them to languish in danger zones? Is it more enlightened to impose secular values on devout Muslims or to dilute liberal values in the name of multiculturalism? Trying to reconcile these contradictions can lead to strange results. Alarmed by reports of female genital mutilation, Nyamko Sabuni, a Swedish cabinet minister, suggested compulsory gynaecological examinations for all young girls in Sweden.

Liberals are increasingly on the defensive. The number of immigration-related attacks is rising. In 2010 Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly blew himself up in the middle of a crowd of Christmas shoppers in central Stockholm; remarkably, he managed to injure only a couple of people. In Sweden median household incomes of non-European immigrants are now 36% lower than for native-born Swedes, whereas in 1991 they were only 21% lower. But Denmark’s much-vilified immigration reforms may be paying off: the employment gap between native Danes and non-Western immigrants has declined to 24 percentage points, compared with 42 in the mid-1990s.

Sweden is now allowing in more skilled workers, having previously combined highly restrictive policies for this group with the world’s most generous policies for refugees. Trade unions used to have a veto over who was admitted and repeatedly used it. This may calm the immigration debate, but it may equally well increase the pressure to open the doors even wider for skilled immigrants while closing them for refugees.

A 20-minute drive from Rosengard to the western harbour takes the visitor to the Turning Torso, a high-rise, high-spec block that twists like a lithe athlete and commands spectacular views over the Oresund bridge linking Malmö to Copenhagen. Directly opposite its entrance is an establishment calling itself a “facelift centre”. Designer houses cluster around its base. Green’s supermarket sells local organic food and advertises yoga classes and tango lessons on the beach.

Thirty years ago Malmö was the capital of working-class Sweden, a no-nonsense city dominated by solid citizens who worked in the Kockums shipyard and voted for the Social Democratic Party. Then the global economy turned against it. The shipyards contracted and the local factories and textile mills closed. The once-dominant working class shrank to near-invisibility and the population split between professionals living in designer lofts and refugees living in Rosengard’s high-rises. The giant Kockums crane that had become the city’s symbol in 1974 was dismantled and sent to South Korea in 2002. In 2005 the Turning Torso became the city’s new landmark.

The decline of the working class and the increasing polarisation of professionals and immigrants is being repeated across the region. The Nordic countries are still among the world’s most equal, and in one important respect they are becoming more so. In 2010-11 around 60% of university graduates in Finland and Sweden were women. Sweden has almost as many female as male MPs. In Denmark the prime minister and a raft of other ministers are women.

But in other respects money is making the Nordics less equal. As a proportion of the economy, Sweden’s private-equity industry is second only to Britain’s in Europe, and Norway is awash with oil money. Some of the new rich are splashing out on Porsches and big houses, but most prefer to spend their money in subtler and less conspicuous ways. Even so, they live in a different world from the immigrants stuck in Rosengard.”

In a May 26^th report from The Independent:

“So is there something rotten in the state of Sweden? The scale of the riots cannot be compared to Paris in 2005 or to London two years ago, which eventually took hold far outside the capital. No one has been killed, and almost no one injured. The little suburb of Husby is a pretty place, built for rich white Swedes who have almost all left. It is incomparable to Tottenham’s Broadwater Farm estate, the ground zero of the London riots.

But even so, 80 per cent of the population are immigrants, who have for the most part fled from the troubled corners of the world - Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia, Kurdistan and more recently Syria - lured by Sweden’s traditionally welcoming attitude towards asylum seekers. But youth unemployment is high, at least by Swedish standards - 6 per cent.”

In February of 1993 I spent three days in Stockholm on a business trip. The first thing I noticed was the cab ride from the airport to my hotel. I had a Pakistani driver with a new Volvo. Next at the hotel I noticed many “Asian” staff working the restaurant and room cleaning service. When I asked my Swedish hosts about this they looked distressed as the politely attempted to excuse the increase in immigration of Muslims into “their” country. They were concerned about the increasing strain these poor and uneducated immigrants were putting on their social welfare system — a system these businessmen were not very happy about paying high taxes for. They were also concerned that these immigrants were not learning Swedish and assimilating into their culture. Sound familiar?

After a British soldier wearing a Help for Heroes charity T-shirt was run over, stabbed and slashed with machetes and a meat cleaver, and beheaded, the Tory government advised its soldiers that it is probably best not to appear in uniform on the streets of their capital.

Both murderers were wounded by police. One was photographed and recorded. His message:

“There are many, many (verses) throughout the Quran that says we must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I apologize that women had to witness this today, but in our land women have to see the same. Your people will never be safe.”

According to ITV, one murderer, hands dripping blood, ranted, “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you.”

Both killers are Muslim converts of African descent, and both are British born.

Wednesday also, Stockholm and its suburbs ended a fourth night of riots, vandalism and arson by immigrant mobs protesting the police shooting of a machete-wielding 69-year-old.

“We have institutional racism,” says Rami Al-khamisi, founder of a group for “social change.”

Sweden, racist?

Among advanced nations, Sweden ranks fourth in the number of asylum seekers it has admitted and second relative to its population.

Are the Swedes really the problem in Sweden?

The same day these stories ran, The Washington Post carried a front-page photo of Ibrahim Todashev, martial arts professional and friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who, with brother Dzhokhar, set off the bombs at the Boston Marathon massacre.

Todashev, another Chechen, had been shot to death by FBI agents, reportedly after he confessed to his and Tamerlan’s role in a triple murder in Waltham, Mass.

Though Tamerlan had been radicalized and Moscow had made inquiries about him, he had escaped the notice of U.S. authorities. Even after he returned to the Caucasus for six months, sought to contact extremists, then returned to the U.S.A., Tamerlan still was not on Homeland Security’s radar.

His father, granted political asylum, went back to the same region he had fled in fear. His mother had been arrested for shoplifting. Yet none of this caused U.S. officials to pick up Tamerlan, a welfare freeloader, and throw the lot of them out of the country.

One wonders if the West is going to wake up to the new world we have entered, or adhere to immigration policies dating to a liberal era long since dead.

It was in 1965, halcyon hour of the Great Society, that Ted Kennedy led Congress into abolishing a policy that had restricted immigration for 40 years, while we absorbed and Americanized the millions who had come over between 1890 and 1920.

The “national origins” feature of that 1924 law mandated that ships arriving at U.S. ports carry immigrants from countries that had provided our immigrants in the past. We liked who we were.

Immigration policy was written to reinforce the Western orientation and roots of America, 90 percent of whose population could by 1960 trace its ancestry to the Old Continent.

But since 1965, immigration policy has been run by people who detest that America and wanted a new nation that looked less like Europe and more like a continental replica of the U.N. General Assembly.

They wanted to end America’s history as the largest and greatest of Western nations and make her a nation of nations, a new society and a new people, more racially, ethnically, religiously and culturally diverse than any nation on the face of the earth. This is called multiculturalism.

Behind this vision lies an ideology, an idée fixe, that America is not a normal nation of blood and soil, history and heroes, but a nation erected upon an idea, the idea that anyone and everyone who comes here, raises his hand, and swears allegiance to the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights becomes, de facto, not just a legal citizen but an American.

But that is no more true than to say that someone who arrives in Paris from Africa or the Middle East and raises his hand to declare allegiance to the Rights of Man thereby becomes a Frenchman.

What is the peril into which America and the West are drifting?

Ties of race, religion, ethnicity and culture are the prevailing winds among mankind and are tearing apart countries and continents. And as we bring in people from all over the world, they are not leaving all of their old allegiances and animosities behind.

Many carry them, if at times dormant, within their hearts.

And if we bring into America — afflicted by her polarized politics, hateful rhetoric and culture wars — peoples on all sides of every conflict roiling mankind, how do we think this experiment is going to end?

The immigration bill moving through the Senate, with an amnesty for 11 to 12 million illegals already here, and millions of their relatives back home, may write an end to more than just the Republican Party.

When a people abandon their language, culture, and borders it is no longer a sovereign nation. It becomes a polyglot assembly of peoples adhering to their native language and culture in the manner of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire — it was neither Austrian, Hungarian nor an Empire. It was a multilingual, multiethnic, and multicultural assemblage with vague borders that ended with a gunshot by in Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.

Our Founders’ vision of the republic they had created was a nation open to immigrants willing to come to this new land and live under our organic laws.

It was James Madison who stated in a speech at Federal Convention, August 13, 1787: ”America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.” Their intent was not for immigrants to come to America and bring their old world baggage with them and see how much they could take from their fellow taxpayers.

The inscription on the Statue of Liberty, standing above New York Harbor, by Emma Lazarus reads”

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

It does not say:

Give me your tired, your poor, your disenchanted, and those wishing a better life,

Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free and realize the benefits of plunder,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, those who see the streets paved with gold,

Send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me to enjoy the bounty of our social welfare system, and wish for a land of multiculturalism,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door, be you legal or illegal, so you may enjoy your happiness in the generosity of the American taxpayer while retaining your language, culture, and customs.

With the exploding population in the Muslim world and the increasing poverty and civil unrest more and more poor and uneducated Muslims will be looking for refugee status in Europe, Canada, and the United States. The same holds true with our own southern neighbors with the exception of the civil unrest. The twenty years will see a dramatic change in the European welfare states as more and more of these immigrants tax their social welfare systems and there will be more takers than makers. Their liberal progressive social policies will become increasingly unpopular with the native born as the influence of these Muslim immigrants not only drain their government’s coffers, but also change their culture. As Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany stated in October 2010: “This multicultural approach, saying that we simply live side by side and live happily with each other has failed. Utterly failed.”

The Intolerance and Bigotry of the Left

"Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." — George Washington (Farewell Address, 1796)

Today we live in a society where morality is considered relative to the times. In many cases there are no absolutes when it comes to morality and those who believe that religion and morality go hand in hand, as George Washington did, are considered to be either intolerant or racist. This is the mantra that the Left tosses around on a daily basis in the mainstream media and our TV and films.

The latest example of this appears in Salon Magazine in an article by Mary Elizabeth Williams writing about Olympic Gold Medalist Gabby Douglas and her expression of Christian faith. Rather than simply ignoring Ms. Douglas’ comments on her religious faith when she tweeted; “Let all that I am praise the LORD; may I never forget the good things he does for me” Ms. Williams felt compelled to write a negative article ridiculing Douglas’ expression of faith by stating:

“I’ve often wondered what it is about Christians like Douglas that unnerves me so. The closest I’ve been able to figure it is that Douglas and her ilk seem to espouse a faith based on what is commonly referred to as “The God of Parking Spaces.” It’s the deity that grants wishes to those who ask nicely. Douglas is a girl who has described God as the figure who’s “waking me up every morning and keeping me safe in the gym every day.”

There was no need for Williams to make such statements about a 16-year old girl who won a gold medal and expressed her believe in God and Jesus Christ. Williams could have written about numerous positive aspects of Douglas’ life but instead she had to take a whack at her Christian beliefs. Why?

Evidently, quite a few liberals amongst us are just as patriotic as the rest of us; unless our athletic avatars tarnish their medals with the stain of faith. According to Salon sourpuss Mary Elizabeth Williams. I understand the reasons for watching the Olympics extend well beyond the usual jingoistic expressions of sports fandom. Anyone who has seen Usain Bolt rocket through the 100 meters like a gazelle on amphetamines knows what I mean. Just as art can be appreciated for its own sake, so can athletic accomplishment.

So, who are these miserable curmudgeons like Williams? They’re the people who sneer at us for chanting “U-S-A,” but don’t bat an eyelid when the Europeans bellow their way through most of Wagner’s Ring Cycle while watching a 1-0 soccer match. They’re the people who just can’t bring themselves to be patriotic; even for a moment. We know who they are; we also know how they vote. To paraphrase Ms. Williams: they’re “commonly referred to as “liberals.”

I was raised in an extended family that voted for the Democrat no matter who he was. They considered themselves to be progressive and liberal and believed the Democratic Party was the party of the working people and would bring them the most benefits, especially when it came to unions. The exception to this was my father, who while professing to be a progressive did not like unions and was not a member of one.

These progressive family members and many of our middle-class neighbors who held similar beliefs were also intolerant of other nationalities, races, and ethnic heritages. Yet they considered themselves to be “liberal”.

Somewhere along the way I broke with this tradition of “liberalism” and progressive ideology and became a conservative — a Constitutional Conservative who was more in tune with the philosophy of our Founders, The Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution than the oft failed schemes of the progressives and their big government ideology. Perhaps this is due to the fact that I became a professional who was not beholden to a union and was an entrepreneur who started and successfully ran a professional engineering consulting business for over thirty years.

It was during this time that I was able to travel the world and see the damage done by progressives with their socialistic policies and the tyranny they imposed on the people. I was also able to develop some theories about liberals and progressives and how they group think. You can see is these theories have any validity by watching TV news shows, reading liberal publications and listening to liberals speak.

American progressives hold these truths to be self-evident:

All cultures and religions are equally meritorious (except for Christianity)

There is no objective truth (until and unless progressives declare the truth)

You cannot legislate morality, therefore everything is "moral" — except Christian morality.

Progressives celebrate diversity and are tolerant, inclusive, and accepting of all fellow humans — except conservative, white and Christian people)

Progressives are intelligent, thoughtful, reality-based, and benevolent

Objective? Diverse? Inclusive? Thoughtful? Reality-based? Benevolent? Not really. Progressives and liberals are the worst offenders of their own axioms when they talk about the "evils" of those who dispute liberal versions of facts, policy, or, especially, morality. The bigotry liberals direct toward those with whom they merely disagree is staggering.

Liberals believe in free speech, unless it offends someone's tender sensitivities (meaning only that liberals disagree with it). They protest the "wealthiest 1%," but exempt from their condemnations billionaire liberals and wealthy movie and rock stars, most of whom share the same ideology. Many liberals believe corporations and capitalism to be evil, even though the capitalist system and many of the corporations of which they disapprove have created the products and standard of living liberals enjoy.

But the American left reserves its ugliest bigotry for Christians. When liberals speak or write about practicing Christians, especially evangelical Christians and, in this presidential election year, Mormons, no slander is unacceptable and no religious custom is off-limits. America's most prominent liberal has condescendingly denigrated Christians as "bitter clingers" to guns and religion. Liberals have seriously asked: "Do All Evangelical Leaders Believe Gays Should Be Put to Death?" They worry about reports that evangelicals are voting in record numbers. And they invent scenarios which question whether religious convictions resonate in the political arena. Every Christian, of any age or gender, is fair game for liberal animosity — or left-wing redefinition. Liberals bash Christians with impunity; because Christians are Christian, and behave in a Christian manner from which liberals fear no reprisal. Ironic, huh? And opportunistic, too.

Thomas Jefferson believed in something called the “American Mind.” It was Jefferson who said, our Constitution was the product of “the American mind” and was made with the same purpose as the Declaration—to establish a regime where the people are sovereign, and the government protects the rights granted to them by their Creator.

The basis of Jefferson’s beliefs, and those of our founders, was the philosophy of classical liberalism (not to be mistaken for today’s liberal thinking) of economic and social writers such as John Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke. They believed in small government, free markets and personal freedom. The classical liberals advocated policies to increase liberty and prosperity. They sought to empower the commercial class politically and to abolish royal charters, monopolies, and the protectionist policies of mercantilism so as to encourage entrepreneurship and increase productive efficiency. They also expected democracy and laissez-faire economics to diminish the frequency of war.

However, liberalism in the United States shifted between 1877 and 1937 from laissez-faire constitutionalism to New Deal statism, from classical liberalism to democratic social-welfarism. Another regularly asserted contrast between classical and modern liberals. Classical liberals tend to see government power as the enemy of liberty, while modern liberals fear the concentration of wealth and the expansion of corporate power. Classical liberalism has grown into two divergent philosophies since the beginning of the twentieth century: social liberalism and market liberalism.

So what do today’s liberals believe in if they do not subscribe to the ideology of tradition classical liberalism as expressed by John Locke and our Founders. After observing thousands of interviews with liberals over the years here is my take on the “Liberal Mind.”

Liberals believe they can change human nature.

Sure, human beings can be shaped and molded to a certain extent. Any parent who has spanked a child can tell you that. However, most people care more about what they're having for lunch today than an earthquake that kills ten thousand people on the other side of the world. We're just built that way and no amount of sensitivity training, preschool classes, or Michael Moore documentaries is going to "fix" it.

Our Founders knew that human nature was flawed and that the best way to counter the ambition of one group was to place it in opposition to the ambition of an opposing group or as James Madison stated to pit ambition against ambition. Madison stated in Federalist No. 10:

“The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well as speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”

Madison wrote on Human Nature in Federalist No. 51:

“It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

No race or class of supermen, who can govern us, exits. There are no masterminds. There are no Philosopher Kings as Plato describes. Madison believed that man had a nature to abuse power: “If given the opportunity human beings will violate each other’s rights. The protection of individual rights is the primary purpose of government. Without government there is no effective security for our rights.

Liberals believe we can talk everything out with our enemies.

One of the weirder quirks of liberalism is their belief that many of our bitterest enemies have rational reasons for disliking us and that can easily be talked away if they realize we're good people. Hence, the common liberal refrain of, "Why do they hate us?" The reason this is a particularly odd belief is that liberals don't even believe this about conservatives in the United States. The average liberal thinks that if we're nice enough, we can reach an understanding with Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck can't be reasoned with.

Throughout the last 100 years history liberals have been wrong. They have been wrong about Nazi Germany when Neville Chamberlain and his European ilk believed they could negotiate with Adolph Hitler over the fate of Europe only to find out that they were being used by the Nazi dictator. Liberals were wrong about Ronald Reagan when he took on the Soviet Union in a direct and powerful manner. Liberals were wrong when they felt Castro was a liberator of Cuba. In fact liberals have a problem dealing with problems head-on. They would rather talk than act. As most liberals are so closely tied with academia they would rather talk than. If today’s liberals (not the classical liberals of the sixteenth and seventh centuries) were in the majority in 1776 we would never had had the Declaration or Independence and we would still be subjects of the British Monarchy. Liberals just can’t face up to tyranny. If you don’t believe this just think about the masses of liberal European Jews that believed they could deal with Hitler and the Nazis.

Transforming questions of fact into questions of intent has been the great achievement of twentieth-century totalitarians. It is a dangerous achievement which has survived the collapse of both fascist and Communist empires and has become a hallmark of much of the Western intelligentsia.

Liberals have no respect for our culture and traditions.

To liberals, our cultural, economic, and political norms were formed by backwards troglodytes making arbitrary decisions based on superstition and racism. Unfortunately for them, as a general rule, that's not so and proceeding as if it is, will often lead to exactly the same difficulties that our ancestors already dealt with in times past. No matter how smart we are, as Thomas Sowell would say; "For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.”

The German composer Carl Orff once said; Tradition is the glue that holds a society together.” It is tradition that holds families, communities and nations together; it is also something liberals frown upon. To a liberal morality is relative to the times and not absolute. There are three things that make a people into a nation — borders, language and culture. Without these three items a nation cannot exist. Today’s liberals despise all three. They want open borders where anyone can cross with impunity. They don’t want one language in our schools, government, and businesses. And they believe in multiculturalism, something that the Europeans are drifting away from as they have found out the problems and class separation it has caused in nations like France, Germany, and The Netherlands.

Liberalism is a fundamentally immoral political philosophy.

Ironically, given all their talk about "shades of gray," liberals have a very moral dualism view of the world. They consider their fellow travelers to be on the side of the angels, while the people who disagree with them are treated as evil. This leads to an "anything goes" mentality when dealing with their foes: ignoring the law via a "living constitution," politically based prosecutions, shouting down opposing speakers, and treating lying about their agenda or opponents to be moral. On the other hand, liberals will support other libs, no matter how corrupt, sleazy, or vile they are as long as they're politically useful to the left. See Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, John Murtha, and Robert Byrd for examples of that. In other words, as Margaret Thatcher has said of the Left, "For them, the end always seems to justify the means."

Today’s liberals believe there is no absolute morality. They believe morality is relative to the times and situations. Liberals believe that the killing of the unborn is not immoral when it comes to women’s rights, but they have a right to withhold baby formula from a new mother if she does not want to beast feed. They believe there are no sin and no judgment.

Fay Voshell writes provocative article in American Thinker about the mind of the progressive when it comes to religion and morality.

Liberals believe merely being liberal makes them good people.

Liberals who're obsessed with money think they're compassionate because they give away other people's tax dollars. They believe they care more about the earth than other people, even as they fly around in private jets, because they babble on about global warming. They can be dumb as a rock, but believe they're smarter than most other people because they're liberals. In other words, in the minds of most liberals, liberalism is an all-purpose substitute for actual virtue instead of just another political philosophy.

Liberals believe conservatives and free-market capitalists are evil because they believe in free-market solutions, individual freedom, and personal responsibility. I think Frédéric Bastiat said more eloquently then I could have when he stated in his treatise on the Law when talking about the mind of the socialist:

"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain."

You must remember that in Bastiat’s day “liberals” were of the classical type and socialist were considered those masterminds who believed in big government, as today’s liberals do.

Liberals have too much faith in government.

Even most liberals would admit that government regularly fails the people. If you don't believe that, just ask them about the Bush Administration and they'll give you an earful. However, liberals tend to believe that with the right person in charge and with enough of other people’s money, government won't be so slow, stupid, inefficient, and badly run. Human history proves that they're wrong about that deal.

Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

The secret to the power and success of the United States has been in the family, entrepreneurs, and morality. Our Founders knew this from the get go. They believed government had only one purpose and that was to protect the rights and property of its citizens — not to become the nanny state the liberals so desire. People such as Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller did not rely on government for their success — they relied on their ideas and faith in those ideas. When they failed they simply tried again and again until they achieved success.

Once again as Sowell states:

"The presumed irrationality of the public is a pattern running through many, if not most or all, of the great crusades of the anointed in the twentieth century--regardless of the subject matter of the crusade or the field in which it arises. Whether the issue has been 'overpopulation,' Keynesian economics, criminal justice, or natural resource exhaustion, a key assumption has been that the public is so irrational that the superior wisdom of the anointed must be imposed, in order to avert disaster. The anointed do not simply happen to have a disdain for the public. Such disdain is an integral part of their vision, for the central feature of that vision is preemption of the decisions of others."

Liberals have minimal interest in whether the programs they support work or not.

To most liberals, whether a government program betters people's lives is completely irrelevant to whether they'll support it. A program that doesn't work and costs billions, but sounds compassionate and helps Democrats politically is a huge success in the eyes of the Left. Once you understand that liberals think this way, their baffling support for programs that make no "common sense" is much easier to understand. As Thomas Sowell stated:

“In their zeal for particular kinds of decisions to be made, those with the vision of the anointed seldom consider the nature of the process by which decisions are made. Often what they propose amounts to third-party decision making by people who pay no cost for being wrong--surely one of the least promising ways of reaching decisions satisfactory to those who must live with the consequences.”

How many liberal programs costing trillions of dollars have failed over the past century? The list is long. The New Deal failed. The War on Poverty failed. The onerous regulatory policies of the EPA have failed. Just consider how many African children have died from Malaria when DDT was banned by masterminds who did not consider or care about the consequences of their actions. They were playing to unfounded fears, flawed and biased academic reports and the media.

It was government intervention that was the root cause the crash of the housing bubble by forcing banks to make loans to people they knew would not be able to pay them back. Government intervention into the college loan business is the main contributor to the inflationary rise on the cost of college today.

In their haste to be wiser and nobler than others, the liberal anointed masterminds have misconceived two basic issues. They seem to assume (1) that they have more knowledge than the average member of the society and (2) that this is the relevant comparison. The real comparison, however, is not between the knowledge possessed by the average member of the educated elite versus the average member of the general public, but rather the total direct knowledge brought to bear though social processes (the competition of the marketplace, social sorting, etc.), involving millions of people, versus the secondhand knowledge of generalities possessed by a smaller elite group of academics and masterminds. A farmer in Nebraska has far more knowledge and a vested interest in the land they farm than any ten masterminds in Washington.

Why are the horrors of Nazism so well-known and widely condemned but not those of socialism and communism? What goes untaught — and possibly is covered up — is that socialist and communist ideas have produced the greatest evil in mankind's history. You say, what in the world are you talking about? Socialists, communists and their fellow travelers, such as the Wall Street occupiers supported by our president, care about the little guy in his struggle for a fair shake! They're trying to promote social justice." Let's look at some of the history of socialism and communism so touted by liberals.

What's not appreciated is that Nazism is a form of socialism. In fact, the term Nazi stands for the National Socialist German Workers' Party. The unspeakable acts of Adolf Hitler's Nazis pale in comparison to the horrors committed by the communists in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People's Republic of China. Between 1917 and 1987, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and their successors murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, China's communists, led by Mao Zedong and his successors, murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese. The most authoritative tally of history's most murderous regimes is documented on University of Hawaii Professor Rudolph J. Rummel's website here, and in his book "Death by Government." According to Rummel 262 million people have been killed by government in the twentieth century with the bulk be exterminated by so called “liberal” socialist or communist regimes. Rummel states:

“Just to give perspective on this incredible murder by government, if all these bodies were laid head to toe, with the average height being 5', then they would circle the earth ten times. Also, this democide murdered 6 times more people than died in combat in all the foreign and internal wars of the century. Finally, given popular estimates of the dead in a major nuclear war, this total democide is as though such a war did occur, but with its dead spread over a century.”

How much hunting down and punishment have there been for these communist murderers? To the contrary, it's acceptable both in Europe and in the U.S. to hoist and march under the former USSR's red flag emblazoned with a hammer and sickle. Mao Zedong has long been admired by academics and leftists across our country, as they often marched around singing the praises of Mao and waving his little red book, "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung." President Barack Obama's communications director, Anita Dunn, in her June 2009 commencement address to St. Andrews Episcopal High School at Washington National Cathedral, said Mao was one of her heroes.

Whether it's the academic community, the media elite, stalwarts of the Democratic Party or organizations such as the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Green for All, the Sierra Club and the Children's Defense Fund, there is a great tolerance for the ideas of socialism — a system that has caused more deaths and human misery than all other systems combined.

Today's leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from those of Nazi, Soviet and Maoist mass murderers. One does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one has to believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights.

Today's leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from those of Nazi, Soviet and Maoist mass murderers. One does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one has to believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights.

The unspeakable horrors of Nazism didn't happen overnight. They were simply the end result of a long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for "social justice." It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans — who would have cringed at the thought of genocide — who created the Trojan horse for Hitler's ascendancy. Today's Americans are similarly accepting the massive consolidation of power in Washington in the name of social justice.

If you don't believe it, just ask yourself: Which way are we headed tiny steps at a time — toward greater liberty or toward more government control over our lives?