There comes a time when every conservative thinker tries to find some common ground with the left in some area. Today it's criminal rights and the headlines have Rand Paul denouncing the racist justice system while Grover Norquist and the Koch Brothers join with the left to back their reforms. As usually happens, the conservatives or libertarians turn out to be the useful idiots of the left.

Liberals have a long history of being the left's useful idiots. It's only fair that libertarians get a turn.

Republicans are still trying to figure out a truce on gay marriage. They retreated to civil unions, then accepted a full defeat on gay marriage and then acted baffled when Christian bakery owners were dragged into court for refusing to participate in gay weddings. When the left insisted that gay marriage was a civil rights issue, they refused to take them as their word.

Now they're wondering how an accommodation can be made with tranny rights. A brief look back at gay rights will show that the only possible accommodation is one in which men in dresses have a legal right to use the ladies room and every single closed female space and event. And yes, that means your business will be shut down if you object to Steve using the female locker room.

After a few skirmishes, some fundraising and angry letters, the accommodationists will find ways to accommodate that and we can look forward to conservative activists eagerly crowing about the first gay Republican presidential candidate around say, 2024, and the first Republican man in a dress in the Senate around the same time.

Of course by then it will be something else. Maybe pedophiles. Gay rights activists don't like the analogy, but their movement and its assorted allies, particularly in Europe's Green parties, have a long history of advocating it. The same pop culture methods that were used to sell gay rights and Bruce Jenner can easily be flipped around to sell NAMBLA.

By 2024, the Republican gay and tranny candidates will be dismissed as tokens while the media oohs and aahs over a vocal and charismatic campaigner for some other love that dare not speak its name.

And that's the point. It has always been the point.

The left does not care about gay rights. If you doubt that, consider how many of the left's favorite Muslim countries have gay rights. The left has recently divided its campaign passions between gay marriage and defending Iran. Iran denies the existence of gays and hangs them where it finds them.

The USSR treated homosexuality as a crime even while it was recruiting gay men as spies in the West. Cuba, the darling of the American left, hated both gays and blacks. The ACLU backed the police states of Communism. If the left supports an enemy nation, the odds are excellent that it is also a violently bigoted place that makes a KKK rally look like a hippie hangout.

To understand the left, you need to remember that it does not care about 99 percent of the things it claims to care about. Name a leftist cause and then find a Communist country that actually practiced it. Labor unions? Outlawed. Environmentalism? Chernobyl. The left fights all sorts of social and political battles not because it believes in them, but to radicalize, disrupt and take power.

The left does not care about social justice. It cares about power.

That is why no truce is possible with the left. Not on social issues. Not on any issues.

The left is a drunk in a bar trying to pick a fight with you. Trying to convince him that you didn't disrespect him, put something in his beer to make him dizzy or make his feet so heavy won't work. There's no 'agree to disagree' possible here. He's picking a fight with you because he wants a fight.

The left does not care about Bruce Jenner. It does not care about gay rights, equal pay, police brutality or even slavery. Its activists 'care' about those things a great deal right now, but they could easily be persuaded tomorrow to be outraged by telephone poles, shredded wheat or people in green sweaters.

They care mainly about emotional venting and exercising power over others. It's the same phenomenon witnessed during the Salem Witch Trials, the French Revolution or any other mob scene. Except the individual elements of the mob are on social media and have a hashtag.

The outraged social justice warrior was laughing at tranny jokes a few years ago. Now he's ready to  kill over minor verbal missteps. A few years from now he'll be laughing at them again.

There's a long human history to such atrocities, to mobs whipping themselves up into spasms of manufactured outrage, subsuming their own doubts, confusion and unhappiness into the 'cause'.

The cause is progress, but the real cause is the power of its enforcers to vent their unhappiness and destructive impulses on everyone else under the guise of reform.

You can't find common ground with the left because it is an activist machine dedicated to destroy common ground, not only with the right, but even with its own allies on the left. Progress turns what was once progressive into what is reactionary. And what was reactionary into what is progressive.

These changes have the mad logic of a byzantine ideology behind them, but to the ordinary person their definition of progress seems entirely random.

A Socialist a century ago considered factories progressive instruments of the future and men in dresses a decadent reactionary behavior. Now factories are reactionary pollution machines of globalization and men in dresses are an oppressed victim group who have transcended biology with the power of their minds. 

Republicans, conservatives, libertarians and other class enemies cannot possibly 'progress' enough to be acceptable to the left because it identifies progress with political conformity. A tolerant and progressive Republican is a contradiction in terms.

If he were truly tolerant and progressive, he wouldn't be a Republican.

The left will destroy the things you care about, because you care about them. It will destroy them because that gives them power over you. It will destroy them because these things stand in the way of its power. It will destroy them because a good deal of its militant activists need things to destroy and if they can't attack you, they'll turn on the left in a frenzy of ideologically incestuous purges.

The left's social justice program is really a wave of these purges which force their own people to hurry up and conform to whatever the Party dictated this week. Examples are made out of laggards on social media to encourage the rest to stop thinking and start marching in line. As Orwell knew well, these shifts select for mindless ideological zombies while silencing critical thinkers.

Yesterday we were against fighting Hitler. Today we're for it. Retroactively, we were always at war with Oceania. Retroactively, Bruce Jenner was always a woman. Retroactively, Obama was always right about Iraq, even when he appeared to be making the wrong decisions.

These changes are a test of reason. If you can reason, you fail. If you can Doublethink, you pass.

The constant shifts create their own version of future shock. They leave people baffled and uncertain. Society no longer seems to resemble what they knew, even though the real society of men and women has not really changed much, only the media's presentation of it has. But a beaten down mass of ordinary people now imagines that the country is filled with gay men and trannies. They accept that what they thought was common sense no longer applies and that it's someone else's country now.

And that is the prize that the left dearly wants. Surrender.

The left's media machine makes its madness seem cool even though behind all the agitating young things are a bunch of bitter old leftists. But the madness is a means, not an end. So is the facade of revolutionary cool to each shift.

The Futurists of Russia vowed to heave the past "overboard from the steamship of modernity". But when the Revolution came, the classics came back into the libraries and the Futurists were forced to stop drawing triangles and make their art conform to the conventional structure of a totalitarian state.  The time of change had ended. Once the left was in power, the future became a lot like the past.

You can't accommodate the left on social issues. You can't accommodate it on fiscal issues. You can't do it. Period.

The left exists to destroy you. It does not seek to co-exist with you. Its existence would lose all meaning. Any common ground will be used to temporarily achieve a goal before the useful idiots are kicked to the curb and denounced as bigots who are holding back progress.

The purpose of power is power. The left is not seeking to achieve a set of policy goals before kicking back and having a beer. The policy goals are means of destroying societies, nations and peoples before taking over. If you allow it a policy goal, it will ram that goal down your throat. It will implement it as abusively as it can possibly can before it moves on to the next battle.

It's not about gay marriage. It's not about cakes. It's about power.

More fundamentally it's about the difference in human nature between the people who want to be left alone and those who want power over others.

You can't work out a truce with tyrants. You can give in or stand up to them. There's nothing else.

1. There is no conservative party

Governor Haley and Al Sharpton

There is a Republican Party. The purpose of the party and its politicians, much like that of its Democratic counterpart, is to obtain money and privileges for its major donors.  That doesn't mean that its members don't have other ideals and agendas, but Republican politicians who rise high enough come from an urban and suburban establishment that is more liberal than its base.

Expecting them to care as much about your issues as you do is unrealistic.

They will only do the right thing insofar as it helps them

A. Get control of money

B. Advance their careers

C. Become popular

And this is a good thing. It means that they're controllable. It means that the Democrats are also controllable. And this is how the left took over the Democratic Party.

The only way to interact with the large body of politicians is through the carrot and the stick. The "destructive" Republican saboteurs the establishment complains about, whatever their motives, are serve as the stick, undermining and sabotaging efforts to conduct business as usual.

The only way conservatives can get anything done now is by threatening business as usual.

Washington D.C. is never going to be the solution, but to the extent that its business as usual is threatened, sabotaged and held hostage, it will have trouble putting its boot on ordinary people. Until the Republican establishment changes its ways, populist saboteurs are the best conservative weapon.

Don't expect them to do the right thing. Don't be disappointed when they don't. And certainly don't expect them to solve all this.

The only way they will ever do the right thing is if you have leverage over them.



2. Fight the small stuff

You don't have to think in terms of a national movement. You don't even have to think in terms of an organization. Those are things that we need, but you can fight the left in small ways at home.

I'm not talking about Sign X or donate to Y.

Just obstruct any liberal initiative, policy or program in your community. It doesn't matter what. It doesn't matter if it's innocuous. It doesn't matter if you agree with it.

Undermine it on principle. If you can, vote it down. Encourage others to vote it down. If you can't, look for ways to tie it in red tape by attaching other agendas to it.

The left wins its biggest victories at the planning stage. Its activists come early and stay late. They propose their plans, rig meetings, use kids and the elderly as human shields, and get their way. They are not used to any real opposition. Particularly the kind that doesn't bluster, but finds ways to tie their proposals in knots, to make them expensive and drag them out as long as possible.

Oppose them when you can. Concern troll them when you can't.

If you don't have that kind of position, think of the origins of the term 'sabotage'. Workers threw their shoes into machines and stopped the machine. Don't do anything illegal. Don't do anything that will get you fired.

But if you have the opportunity to make a liberal program work badly, if you have a legal way to put more stress on it, to tie up the energy and time of the people running it, to make it worse... do it.

We're the underdogs. We're the political guerrillas. This is not our system. It's their system.

Our job is to make it run as badly as possible.

Henry David Thoreau wrote that there's always injustice in government just as there's always friction in a machine. It's when injustice becomes dominant in government, then friction has its own machine.

The left's friction is now the machine. Get your shoes in the machine. It already runs badly, make it run worse. It already costs too much, make it cost more. You are now the friction. With enough friction, the machine breaks down.

That's part of what the left did to us. It dragged down our government and culture. It poked a thousand holes in everything. It made it too tiresome and wearying to go on doing this and that. Morale withered, confidence broke down and the left took over.

Now it's their turn to be on the receiving end.

I'm not going to give the Mario Savio speech...

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus -- and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it -- that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!"

That's for younger people. It's for a mass movement. 

But you can wear down the machine in a thousand different ways without risk. You don't have to throw your bodies on the gears. You just have to be a wholly legal burden on it and a pain in the ass of the people running it... and especially the people planning it.

The big stuff begins with the little stuff. When you fight the little stuff, the big stuff starts breaking down.





3. Deny legitimacy to the system

Liberals like to crow that ObamaCare is the law of the land. Now it's gay marriage. Tomorrow it'll be a ban on the Dukes of Hazzard.

All that implies legitimacy, order, a legal system. And that's not what we have.

What we have is a Supreme Court and a White House that acts with brazen illegality. ObamaCare was illegally passed. It was illegally preserved.

No matter how many judges sign off on it, it has no legitimacy. It will never have any legitimacy.

America is built on the simple premise that no system can be more legitimate than its natural laws and founding premises. It does not matter how many judges or politicians try to suspend the First or Second Amendments. All they are doing is removing their own legitimacy.

When a system acts illegally, then its dictates are not the law of the land, they are the law of force.

ObamaCare is coercion. Forcing people to participate in gay marriages is coercion. The FHA ruling is coercion. We may be compelled into compliance, but compulsion is all it is. It isn't law or justice.

The distinction is important.

When we follow the law, we do so because it is right. When we are coerced, we are at gunpoint by an illegitimate system. Those who compel us are not any different than criminals. 

Not only is the system illegitimate, but it is also inconsistent, though it claims there is equality under the law, is favors some at the expense of others.

The system is not only illegal, it is also hypocritical and corrupt. That must be emphasized at every turn.

Liberals maintain a narrative that their way is the inevitable path of progress. We know the truth. Their way has been tried and it failed a thousand times. The only thing inevitable is their eventual failure. Their systems will always be abusive, dishonest and corrupt.

They will always turn undemocratic no matter how they start out. They will always turn to coercion.

When we act and when we talk it is vitally important that we distinguish between the legitimate laws we follow and the illegitimate laws we comply with.

This may seem like a technicality, but it's a technicality that tyrannies have fallen on.

Every liberal victory is not a triumph. It is another pile of dirt on their own graves. It is another straw on the back of the camel. It is another demonstration that they are corrupt and illegitimate. Their latest victories were gained by abusing the process. They will in the long run lose them just as criminals eventually lose their loot. They have not defeated us. They have corrupted themselves.



4. We're not done

Every conservative these days seems to have a tipping point for when America will end. None of them are real.

This country was built out of a tiny fraction of the territory and population it holds today. It was built by a handful of people organizing and rousing a movement that spread to a minority of the population at the time.

If the revolution were happening today, it would look a lot like the way it looked then, with major cities in the hands of the establishment and the Loyalists and a handful of farmers that even their formally trained commanders held in contempt fighting against them and the might of an empire.

That's not coincidence. It's the whole of human history.

During the Revolutionary War, the entire rebel population of America would be outnumbered by the residents of Manhattan today.

Demographically outnumbered? They had it worse.

Economic collapse? They had it worse.

America isn't over until it's over. It will take a long time to happen. At some point the country will be completely unrecognizable, but that's relative. Would Washington have recognized America in 1952? Or even 1882? America has always been changing. We can't change it back, but we can change it to.

That's the real battle.

Contrary to what some conservatives like to believe, the left did not suddenly show up here in 1963 or 1905 and disrupt a formerly peaceful country. The left has always been here. It's a part of us.

No people and no country are untouched by evil. It's only a matter of what form it takes. But in any form, we know it by its destructive instincts, its facade of righteousness that poorly conceals a lust for power. Americans have fought it before. Americans have won.

It's big now, but it's not nearly as big as we think.



 5. A little rhyme and reason

I'll close with a few selected lines from a children's nursery rhyme from the days of the big bad USSR that once threatened the world, before folding under the pressure of its people who found the courage to stand up to it.

It's written for children... but like much that was written in the USSR, it had a message for adults.


The Monster Cockroach

Kornei Chukovsky

To the picnic they all come,
Munching candy and cake,

In a very merry mood,
For a day at the lake.

Then suddenly they grow numb and still!
Who's that coming down the hill?!

A fierce and dreadful Roach!
A mean cock-cock-Cockroach!
"Don't you dare to approach!"
He roars, he rages:

"I'll lock you in cages!
And swallow you ALL

"Or with a twitch of my mustache,
I'll turn you all to succotash!"

Alas! Not one dares to fight,
Every bird and beast take flight!

Now the Lion climbs a hill;
From there he speaks his royal will:

"We must regain our happy land!
Against the brute we'll take a stand!"

"And to the warrior who fears not this foe,
Who this monster will overthrow,
To him I'll give a juicy bone
And the finest pine cone!"

The creatures in one eager crowd,
Surge forth and cry out loud:

"We do not fear this nasty foe,
With tooth and claw
We'll lay him low!"

And they all rush to do battle-
Birds, fish, fowl, and cattle.

But the Roach moves his mustache
And bellows: "SUCCOTASH!"

One and all they beat a retreat.
The enemy they don't defeat!

Into the fields and woods they dash-
Terrorized by the Roach's mustache!

The Lion shouts: "What a disgrace!
Come back! Come out and show your face!
Pin the enemy with your horns-
Bulls, rhinoceros, unicorns!"

But each in his hiding place stays,
And wails: "Horns aren't cheap these days..."
And our skin is precious too-
What you ask we cannot do!"

Caught in nettles the crocodiles twitch,
And the elephants get caught in a ditch.

Lo! All that's heard now
Is the flow of tears;
All that's seen now
Is the trembling of their ears!

To the Cockroach they all yield-
He's now lord o'er wood and field.
He struts about among them,
Rubbing his tummy,
Looks at their young ones
And says: "How very yummy!"

The poor, poor parents
Are in distress.
Their dear babes
They hug and caress:

For what mother could give up her child,
Her baby tame or her baby wild?!
So that the monster could devour
Her precious crumb, her little flower!

So mommies and daddies moan and cry
As they bid their infants good-bye!

But now we see another picture:
a flighty flying nimble creature-
A carefree Sparrow lands with a trill
right there on the Roach's hill,

And for a moment all are mute
Fearing the mustachioed brute:

"A monster?! Where?!

"It's a roach, a roach, a wee-bit roach,
A little beetle you fear to approach.
Look! It's a midge a mite,
A bug that can't even bite!

For our trouble we're to blame!
What a shame!
What a shame!"

The Hippo then comes forth
With slow pace and a worried face,
Muttering in an anxious way:

"Please go away, go away!
Your words will make him very mad,
He may think of something very bad!

Then the Hippo falls still,
Surprised by a sudden trill...

The sparrow bends her dainty neck
Peck, peck, peck-
Not a smidgen, not a speck!

The roach is swallowed in a flash,
All of him and his mustache!

Staff Sgt. Ahmed Altaie was the last American soldier to come home from Iraq. His body was turned over by Asaib Ahl al-Haq or The League of the Righteous; a Shiite terrorist group funded and trained by Iran.

Altaie had been kidnapped, held for ransom and then killed.

It was not Asaib Ahl al-Haq’s only kidnapping and murder of an American soldier. A year after Altaie’s kidnapping, its terrorists disguised themselves as Americans and abducted five of our soldiers in Karbala. The soldiers were murdered by their Shiite captors after sustained pursuit by American forces made them realize that they wouldn’t be able to escape with their hostages.

Asaib Ahl al-Haq’s obsession with American hostages was a typically Iranian fixation. Iran’s leaders see the roots of their international influence in the Iran hostage crisis. Its terrorist groups in Lebanon had abducted and horrifically tortured Colonel William R. Higgins and William Francis Buckley.

Higgins had been skinned alive.

Most Americans have never heard of Asaib Ahl al-Haq, sometimes referred to as the Khazali Network after its leader, even though it has claimed credit for over 6,000 attacks on Americans. Its deadliest attacks came when the Democrats and their media allies were desperately scrambling to stop Bush from taking out Iran’s nuclear program. Asaib Ahl al-Haq’s ties to Iran were so blatant that the media could not allow it to receive the kind of coverage that Al Qaeda did for fear that it might hurt Iran.

Obama had campaigned vocally against the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment which designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the hidden force behind Asaib Ahl al-Haq and much of the Shiite terrorist infrastructure, a terrorist organization. He had accused its sponsors of “foolish saber rattling”.

Nancy Pelosi joined the Democratic Party’s pro-Iranian turn, rejected a vote on the amendment and sneered that if the kidnapping and murder of American soldiers was “a problem to us and our troops in Iraq, they should deal with it in Iraq.” Earlier that year, she had visited Syria’s Assad to stand with him against President Bush even while Assad was aiding the terrorists massacring American soldiers.

Once Obama took power, coverage of the war was scaled down so that Americans wouldn’t realize that the rising power of ISIS and Asaib Ahl al-Haq were already making a mockery of his withdrawal plans.

But Asaib Ahl al-Haq was not merely an anti-American terrorist group; it was an arm of the Shiite theocracy. As a Shiite counterpart to what would become ISIS, it had most of the same Islamic goals.

While Obama was patting himself on the back for the end of the Iraq War and gay rights, Asaib Ahl al-Haq was throwing those men and women it suspected of being gay from the tops of buildings.

When buildings weren’t available, it beat them to death with concrete blocks or beheaded them.

Its other targets included shelters for battered women, which the Islamist group deemed brothels, men who had long hair or dressed in dark clothing. And even while its Brigades of Wrath were perpetrating these atrocities, Obama and the Shiite Iraqi government embraced the murderous terrorist group.

Qais al-Khazali, the leader of Asaib Ahl al-Haq, and his brother Laith al-Khazali along with a hundred other members of the terror group were freed during Obama’s first year in office. (But to provide equal aid and comfort to the other side, Obama also freed the future Caliph of ISIS in that same year.)

“We let a very dangerous man go, a man whose hands are stained with US and Iraqi blood. We are going to pay for this in the future,” an unnamed American officer was quoted as saying. “This was a deal signed and sealed in British and American blood.” “We freed all of their leaders and operatives; they executed their hostages and sent them back in body bags.”

The releases were part of Obama’s grand strategy of reconciliation for Iraq. The miserable reality behind the upbeat language was that Obama was handing over Iraq to ISIS, Iran and its Shiite militias.

Last year, Maliki had made Asaib Ahl al-Haq and other Shiite terror groups into the Sons of Iraq that were to protect and defend Baghdad. Asaib Ahl al-Haq and its leader were now the Iraqi security forces. The Shiite death squads were in charge even while they continued carrying out ISIS-style massacres.

Obama belatedly decided to respond to ISIS, but his war strategy depends on Asaib Ahl al-Haq.

Officially his strategy is to provide training and air support for the Iraqi military. But the Iraqi military’s Shiite officers conduct panicked retreats in the face of ISIS attacks while abandoning cities and equipment. The goal of these retreats is to make Asaib Ahl al-Haq and other Shiite militias into the only alternative to ISIS for the United States. Even though he pays lip service to Sunni and Kurdish resistance to ISIS, Obama shows that he has accepted Iran’s terms by refusing to arm and support them.

While we focused on ISIS, its Shiite counterparts were building their own Islamic State by burrowing from within to hollow out the Iraqi institutions that we had put into place. ISIS is a tool that Iran is using to force international approval of its takeover of Iraq and its own nuclear program.

An Iraqi official last year was quoted as saying that Asaib Ahl al-Haq’s men give orders to the police and military. “Before they were just around, now they are high-ranking officers in the military.”

Some defense experts wonder if the Iraqi military even exists. The bulk of the forces in Tikrit were Shiite Jihadists and they are armed with American weapons that they receive from the Iraqi government. Asaib Ahl al-Haq boss Qais al-Khazali claims that soldiers and Shiite militia members both wear Iraqi military uniforms.

The capture of Tikrit became an opportunity for the Shiite terrorist groups and Qasem Soleimani, their Iranian terror boss, to boast about their victory and loot and terrorize the local Sunni residents.

Obama’s official plan to arm and train the Iraqi military and security forces is a dead end because like the mythical moderate Syrian rebels, they are fronts for moving money and weapons to Jihadists. We are arming ghost armies and funding fake political institutions and the money and weapons end up going to bands of Islamic terrorists, militias and guerrillas that are actually calling the shots.

By aiding Shiite militias in Iraq and Sunni militias in Syria, we’re backing both sides of an Islamic civil war.

Obama turned over Iraq to the Shiites and then backed the Muslim Brotherhood’s efforts to force the Shiites out of power in Syria. The Sunni-Shiite civil wars tearing the region apart were caused by those two decisions. His solution to the wars is to continue backing the same forces responsible for them.

Despite assorted denials, Obama’s real ISIS strategy is to have Iran do the fighting for him in Iraq.

But Obama is backing one ISIS against another ISIS. Why is a Shiite Islamic state that kidnaps and kills Americans, throws gays off buildings and massacres women better than a Sunni Islamic state that does the same things? Not only is the Obama strategy morally dubious, but it’s also proven to be ineffective.

The rise of ISIS has helped Iran tighten its hold on Shiite areas in Iraq and Syria. Iran does not need to beat ISIS. Its interests are best served by maintaining a stalemate in which ISIS consolidates Sunni areas while Iran consolidates Shiite areas. The more Obama aids Iran and its terrorist forces as a counterweight to ISIS, the more Iran sees keeping ISIS around as being vital to its larger strategy.

By aiding Iran, Obama is really aiding ISIS.

Despite depending on our air support, Asaib Ahl al-Haq and its leaders are threatening to attack American planes and soldiers making it clear that they view the fight against ISIS and for Assad as part of a larger struggle for achieving Iran’s apocalyptic Shiite ambitions for the region and the world.

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently gave a speech in which he warned that, “We must prepare the country’s conditions, the region’s conditions, and, Allah willing, the world’s conditions for the reappearance [of Imam Mahdi] will spread justice.”

Like ISIS, its Shiite counterparts envision an apocalyptic struggle in which the other branch of Islam will be destroyed, along with all non-Muslims, leading to regional and global supremacy. Iraq is only one of the battlefields on which this war is being fought and Obama’s inept mix of appeasement and regime change, abandoning allied governments while aiding enemy terrorists has helped make it possible.

After some of its quarter of a million Muslims headed to join ISIS, Quebec decided the answer was a $2 million anti-radicalization center headed by a specialist in cultural sensitivity. But if you’re about to be beheaded by a masked ISIS Jihadist, a specialist in cultural sensitivity isn’t going to help you much.

Western governments nevertheless keep rolling out their culturally sensitive approaches to fighting ISIS.

The key element in Obama’s strategy for fighting ISIS isn’t the F-15E Strike Eagle, it’s a Twitter account run by a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer which claims to “Counter Violent Extremism” by presenting moderate Islamists like Al Qaeda as positive role models for the Islamic State’s social media supporters.

So far 75% of planes flown on combat missions against ISIS return without engaging the enemy, but the culturally sensitive State Department Twitter account has racked up over 5,000 tweets and zero kills.

Cultural sensitivity hasn’t exactly set Iraq on fire in fighting ISIS and deradicalization programs here start from the false premise that there is a wide gap between a moderate and extremist Islam. Smiling news anchors daily recite new stories about a teenager from Kentucky, Boston or Manchester getting “radicalized” and joining ISIS to the bafflement of his parents, mosque and community.

And who is to blame for all this mysterious radicalization? It’s not the parents. It certainly can’t be the moderate local mosque with its stock of Jihadist CDs and DVDs being dispensed from under the table.

The attorney for the family of Usaama Rahim, the Muslim terrorist who plotted to behead Pamela Geller, claims that his radicalization came as a “complete shock” to them.

It must have come as a truly great shock to his brother Imam Ibrahim Rahim who claimed that his brother was shot in the back and that the Garland cartoon attack had been staged by the government.

It must have come as an even bigger shock to Imam Abdullah Faaruuq, the Imam linked to Usaama Rahim and his fellow terrorist conspirators, as well as the Tsarnaev brothers, who had urged Muslims to “grab onto the gun and the sword.” The culturally insensitive truth about Islamic ‘radicalization’ is that it is incremental.

There is no peaceful Islam. Instead of two sharply divided groups, peaceful Islam and extremist Islam, there is a spectrum of acceptable terrorism.

Muslim institutions have different places on that spectrum depending on their allegiances and tactics, but the process of radicalization is rarely a sharp break from the past for any except converts to Islam.

The latest tragic victim of radicalization is Munther Omar Saleh; a Muslim man living in New York City who allegedly plotted to use a Tsarnaev-style pressure cooker bomb in a major landmark such as the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. Saleh claimed to be following orders from ISIS.

Media coverage of the Saleh arrest drags out the old clichés about how unexpected this sudden radicalization was, but what appears to be his father’s social media account shows support for Hamas.

Likewise one of Usaama Rahim’s fellow mosque attendees said that Rahim and another conspirator had initially followed the “teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood” but that he had been forced to cut ties with them when they moved past the Brotherhood and became “extreme”.

Despite the media’s insistence on describing the Muslim Brotherhood as a moderate organization, it has multiple terrorist arms, including Hamas, and its views on non-Muslims run the gamut from the violent to the genocidal.

A year after Obama’s Cairo speech and his outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood, its Supreme Guide announced that the United States will soon be destroyed, urged violent terrorist attacks against the United States and “raising a jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life.”

Despite this, Obama continued backing the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power across the region.

There are distinctions between the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, but the latter is a splinter group of the former. Al Qaeda’s current leader came out of the Muslim Brotherhood. A move from one to the other is a minor transition between two groups that have far more in common than their differences.

And since the Brotherhood controls much of the Islamic infrastructure in the United States, the idea that Munther Omar Saleh or Usaama Rahim became radicalized because they went from a Jihadist group that takes the long view in the struggle against the infidel, putting political structures into place to make a violent struggle tactically feasible, to a Jihadist group that focuses more on short term violence, is silly.

Radicalization isn’t transformational; it’s incremental.

It’s the Pakistani kid down the block deciding that instead of joining the Muslim Students Association and then CAIR to build Islamist political structures in America, he should just cut to the chase and kill a few cops to begin taking over America now. Radicalization is the moderate Imam who stops putting on an act for PBS and the local politicians and moves to Yemen where he openly recruits terrorists to attack America instead of doing it covertly at his mosque in Virginia.

Radicalization is the teenage Muslim girl who forgets about marrying her Egyptian third cousin and bringing him and his fifty relatives to America and goes to join ISIS as a Caliphate brood mare instead.

It’s not pacifism giving way to violence. Instead it’s an impatient shift from tactical actions meant to eventually make Islam supreme in America over many generations to immediate bloody gratification. ISIS is promising the apocalypse now. No more waiting. No more lying. You can have it tomorrow.

Radicalization does not go from zero to sixty. It speeds up from sixty to seventy-five.

It builds on elements that are already there in the mosque and the household. The term “extremism” implicitly admits that what we are talking about is not a complete transformation, but the logical extension of existing Islamic beliefs.

Omar Saleh seemed cheerful enough about Hamas dropping Kassam rockets on Israeli towns and cities. Would he have supported his son setting off a bomb in the Statue of Liberty? Who knows, but his son was already starting from a family position that Muslim terrorism against non-Muslims was acceptable.

Everything else is the fine print.

When Usaama Rahim followed the way of the Muslim Brotherhood, he was with a moderate group whose spiritual guide, the genocidal Qaradawi was the godfather of cartoon outrage and had endorsed the murderous Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

The slope that leads from Qaradawi’s cartoon rage to trying to behead Pamela Geller isn’t a slippery one; it’s a vertical waterfall. And this is what radicalization really looks like. It doesn’t mean moderates turning extreme. It means extremists becoming more extreme. And there’s always room for extremists to become more extreme which turns old extremists into moderates while mainstreaming their beliefs.

In the UK, Baroness Warsi, Cameron’s biggest mistake, blamed Muslim radicalization on the government’s refusal to engage with… radicals. Or as she put it, “It is incredibly odd and incredibly worrying that over time more and more individuals, more and more organisations are considered by the government to be beyond the pale and therefore not to be engaged with.”

The reason why the government is refusing to “engage” with these organizations is that they support terrorism in one form or another. Warsi is proposing that the UK fight radicalization by mainstreaming it.

Mainstreaming extremism is also Obama’s policy. It’s the logic behind nearly every Western diplomatic move in the Middle East from the Israel-PLO peace process to the Brotherhood’s Arab Spring. And these disasters only created more Islamic terrorism.

The Muslim teenagers headed to join ISIS did not come out of a vacuum. They came from mosques and families that normalized some degree of Islamic Supremacism and viewed some Muslim terrorists as heroes and role models. It’s time for Western governments to admit that the ISIS Jihadist is more the product of his parents and his teachers than of social media Jihadis on YouTube and Twitter.

Radicalization doesn’t begin with a sheikh on social media. It begins at home. It begins in the mosque. It just ends with ISIS.

When Al Jazeera America was announced, the Qatari propaganda network was riding high. Once known as a dump for Al Qaeda videos, the Arab Spring had allowed the House of Thani to project its power across the region, toppling governments and replacing them with its Muslim Brotherhood allies.

 Qatar had been notorious for its ties to Al Qaeda, but those connections had done little for the oil-rich oligarchy. The Muslim Brotherhood however handed Egypt over to Qatar. And Al Jazeera’s propaganda had been widely credited with supplying the images and messaging that made it happen.

Qatar’s key Arab Spring asset however had been in the White House. Mubarak would not have fallen if he had retained the support of the President of the United States. Nor would Gaddafi have been toppled or Assad have come under so much pressure without US military intervention or the expectation of it.

Al Jazeera America was going to be the final building block allowing the House of Thani to brainwash millions of Americans and influence foreign policy directly at the source. It was a grandiose dream for a tyranny that was increasingly living beyond its means while playing a dangerous game of empires.

Qatar had become the dominant voice on the Middle East in Washington D.C. The takeover of Gore’s left-wing Current TV would enable the totalitarian regime to launch a news network that would build on its existing relationship with the American left which saw the mainstream media as not biased enough.

How hard could launching a successful news network be?

Al Jazeera might have been riding high in the early days of 2013, but its comeuppance was already on the way. A few weeks after its announcement, the protests against its man Morsi began to take off. By the time AJA launched, Morsi had already been toppled and Al Jazeera propagandists would find themselves behind bars for their part in Qatar’s Brotherhood coup against the Egyptian government. While Al Jazeera portrayed them as journalistic martyrs, one of the most notable arrestees, Mohamed Fahmy, sued Al Jazeera for endangering him by acting as “an arm of Qatar’s foreign policy” that “was not only biased towards the Muslim Brotherhood — they were sponsors of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

These were all obvious facts that were being ignored by the mainstream media which dismissed Al Jazeera’s critics as ignorant Islamopohobes. But even as its Muslim Brotherhood allies were losing in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Syria, Al Jazeera America would come under fire from its liberal media pals.

Al Jazeera America had made the media an offer it couldn’t resist. The leftists who flocked there had anticipated employment at a vanity network subsidized by the House of Thani that would let them do unfiltered left-wing advocacy without caring if they ever got any viewers or made any money.

It was enough that Al Jazeera appeared to share their hostility to America and Israel.

Their journalistic instincts did not lead them to ask why a foreign government would be interested in funding their journalistic fantasies or how Muslim tribal leaders could be considered progressive.

Or how they could manage to run a modern news network.

Al Jazeera America had been a disaster from the start. Its $500 million buy of Al Gore’s Current TV had been expensive but considered worth the price to get access to a huge number of cable households through Gore’s sweetheart deals with big cable companies. But the cable companies knew the difference between Al Gore and Al Jazeera and they wanted that oil money Qatar was throwing around.

So did Al Gore.

Gore had initially protected Al Jazeera by accusing cable companies who wanted to drop it of Islamophobia, but then turned around and sued Al Jazeera when it backstabbed him by using millions of dollars of his money in a slush fund to pay cable channels for airing its propaganda.

The House of Thani was forced to dig deeper to get Al Jazeera America into as many homes as possible, but it still wasn’t getting any actual viewers. Its average daily ratings of 13,000 viewers were less than half the already miniscule 31,000 viewers of Gore’s failed Current TV project.

Qatar had paid $25,000 per viewer and with some nights registering a zero in the demo, recouping that money through advertising was not a realistic business plan.

And then things got even worse.

Al Jazeera America’s biggest hit was “Real Money with Ali Velshi” with 54,000 viewers. Those were the kinds of ratings usually associated with cable hits like the deceased FOX Soccer Channel, but that was as good as it got for Qatar’s $500 million investment. And like all good things at Al Jazeera, it wouldn’t last.

Al Jazeera wasn’t just owned by a bigoted inbred dictatorship where everything works through nepotism; it was also run that way. Ehab Al Shihabi, its CEO, went to war with Velshi just before his own firing after the media began widely reporting on just how badly Al Jazeera America was being run.

Ehab Al Shihabi had not just burned through billions of dollars on a failed project; he had also burned through the mainstream media professionals hired to give the Qatari propaganda news network a friendly American face. Al Jazeera America had brought over CBS’s Marcy McGinnis to serve as Senior Vice President of Newsgathering, but she resigned blaming Al Shihabi. Her departure was part of a pattern of senior female personnel leaving or being forced out at the Muslim news network. Joining her was Executive Vice President of Human Resources Diane Lee and Public Relations Senior Vice President Dawn Bridges.

Al Jazeera America’s leadership had been built around Muslim men and Western women. The Western women were experienced news veterans while the Muslim men often had no real qualifications for the job. Behind the press releases, Al Jazeera America was run much like Qatar or Saudi Arabia where native Muslim nepotism hires bully and humiliate the imported Western executives who do the real work.

But Al Jazeera America was not operating in Qatar and it needed to draw on a talent pool from two groups that its bosses harbored a pathological hatred for; women and Jews.

The crisis at Al Jazeera America first went public when mainstream media outlets began reporting on a lawsuit by employee Matthew Luke which claimed that Osman Mahmud, the Senior Vice President of Broadcast Operations and Technology, had engaged in sexist and anti-Semitic behavior.

Mahmud had reportedly stated, “Whoever supports Israel should die a fiery death in hell.” Further emphasizing the links between Al Jazeera and the Muslim Brotherhood, he had also ranted that, “The enemies of Muslims in Egypt, their puppets and blind supporters are due to face death in the hospitals and streets of Egypt.”

Since then the news network has been in free fall, battling lawsuits and bad publicity. It’s a failure that has been building for a while, but it took Qatar’s abuse of fellow news organization friends and colleagues for the mainstream media to begin legitimately reporting on it.

Qatar’s old wall of silence has come down. From its FIFA corruption to the mass death of guest workers, some of its dirty laundry is finally being aired. The media is still reluctant to talk about its role in the Arab Spring or the Qatari weapons smuggling operations in Libya and Syria conducted with Obama’s complicity. Those are areas where their own progressive project too closely intersects the Islamist one.

The media was burned by Al Jazeera, but that doesn’t mean that the leftist-Islamist alliance is dead.

Al Jazeera America however is a monumental disaster that cost billions of dollars while doing very little. The news network was doomed from the start. Cable news is a slowly dying industry that is being killed by the internet. Spending a fortune to launch a new cable news network that no one wanted was a stupid act of arrogance that only a backward Islamic tyranny or Al Gore would be capable of.

But it was a testament to Qatar’s hubris that its rulers were convinced that they could draw large American audiences in a country where its brand is mainly associated with Osama bin Laden videos. It was this same hubris that led Qatar to overextend its support for the Muslim Brotherhood leaving it isolated and hated by its own neighbors.

The Muslim Brotherhood and Al Jazeera America were undone by their own hubris. There’s a lesson there, but Qatar’s arrogant rulers aren’t likely to learn it.

It’s fashionable for the media to mock the “clown car” of the Republican presidential primary field.

And it’s true that the Republican Party is burdened with a surplus of overqualified candidates with name recognition; successful governors, smart young senators and even a celebrated surgeon and CEO.

Meanwhile the Democratic Party’s “inevitable” candidate is inevitably generating financial scandals faster than her husband generated his inevitable sex scandals.

Competing against her is Senator Bernie Sanders who is currently discussing 90 percent tax rates and why he believes women want to be raped. His winning campaign slogan is “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants when children are hungry in this country.”

You also don’t need a choice of 23 highly qualified conservative free market candidates when you can choose between Hillary Clinton and a senile Socialist from Vermont visiting late night talk shows to discuss his rape fantasies. Either Hillary Clinton will take all your money or Bernie Sanders will take all your money and then take away your underarm spray deodorants for the sake of all the hungry children.

And you’re lucky if that’s all he does.

The Republican primary field may be laissez faire overcrowded, but the Democratic primary field celebrates a centrally planned economy in which there is only one mandated winner; Hillary.

The Democratic Party is like shopping at a Soviet supermarket. There isn’t anything to buy and what little there is, is so terrible that you would rather go hungry than take it home.

If a creepy old Socialist and the Clinton Crime Family don’t suit you, what about a former mayor of Baltimore? Martin O’Malley is polling badly in his own state and his biggest career accomplishment was cleaning up Baltimore. Since Baltimore is now run by roving street gangs killing each other on alternate blocks, that’s not the best possible resume for a presidential candidate. Unfortunately the only other thing that O’Malley is famous for is taxing the rain as governor.

He can either run as the former mayor of the city that the country is watching tear itself apart on television or he can run as the tax-happy politician who will tax even more things than Bernie Sanders. Voters can choose between a wealthy Socialist whose net worth is ten times that of the ordinary American, but thinks ordinary people are too rich because they can afford underarm deodorant.

Or they can cast their vote for a man who will tax water falling from the sky.

If you don’t like those choices, Lincoln Chafee, who has been a Republican, an Independent and now a Democrat, has entered the race with a vow to switch the country over to the metric system.

Chafee, inspired by his time in Canada, called for “a bold embrace of internationalism” by going metric. He also promised that the chaos, waste, expense and accidents involved in switching the country to a new measurement system would “help our economy”.

He also implied that it would atone for the Iraq War.

The ghost of Saddam Hussein still haunting his palaces would probably prefer a more devastating revenge, but his mustachioed spirit will have to settle for Chafee confusing shoppers in aisle 9.

If you still need a scorecard, Bernie Sanders will take away your underarm deodorant and possibly molest you. Martin O’Malley will tax any rain that falls on you and Lincoln Chafee will make shopping at the supermarket more expensive and confusing as an apology to the world for overthrowing Saddam.

Communist Yugoslavia had more inspiring elections. North Korea’s dictator hates ordinary people less than the 2016 Democrats running in a race to see which of them can deprive you of more things for the greater good. This isn’t a clown car. It’s a burning Yugo filled with the acid dreams of decaying leftists.

Hillary Clinton couldn’t have come up with a better argument for winning the Democratic primaries if she had handpicked each and every one of the three losers and lunatics running against her.

And it wouldn’t be too surprising if she had.

Every corrupt revelation about the Clinton Crime Family can be countered by pointing to the rest of the primary field. Hillary can just go on sitting out the primaries while Bernie Sanders unintentionally campaigns for her by explaining how he would like to rape the voters economically and physically.

Of course that’s not the picture on any television set tuned to the channels of the mainstream media.

There Bernie Sanders is a principled public servant who occasionally writes eccentric things about wanting to rape women and while his ideas about 90 percent tax rates may not be workable yet, they show how much integrity he has. Lincoln Chafee is yet another principled public servant even if, like Charlie Crist, he has trouble settling on a single set of principles. Martin O’Malley only taxed the rain because he cares about the environment and Hillary Clinton isn’t responsible for anything that her foundation or email server does. And even if she is, she isn’t because what difference does it make?

Meanwhile the Republican primary field of successful governors, doctors, CEOs and senators is a pack of laughable contemptible cretins who don’t deserve half the respect of Senator Rape, Governor Kilometer and Mayor Mob. Not to mention Secretary of State Benghazi.

The Republican field is not only more diverse with Ben Carson, an African-American neurosurgeon, Bobby Jindal, the Indian-American governor of Louisiana, and Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of HP, it’s unequivocally more serious. Its top candidates across the political spectrum are discussing serious issues and making important policy proposals. Its governors are reformers who tackled big problems in their states.

Meanwhile the Democrats have Hillary Clinton who spent her time as Secretary of State partying and doing favors for major donors while Americans died. They have Bernie Sanders who thinks that the problem is that Americans can afford different brands of deodorant while he wallows in his own Socialist stink. They almost have Elizabeth Warren, who lacks the courage to actually come out and run against Hillary, but whose supporters in the media keep trying to kneecap her like Tonya Harding’s boyfriend.

The media mocks the Republican presidential field as a clown car while the Democrat field is a bankrupt Socialist banana republic consisting of cranks, thieves, failures and lunatics.

It doesn’t look like America. Instead it looks like a Marx Brothers take on Cuba.

While the Republican field brings fresh ideas and personalities, the Democrats have dusted off a collection of unappealing politicians whom even their own voters can’t get enthusiastic about.

Hillary Clinton is the frontrunner despite polling underwater in likability. Even Marylanders don’t want Martin O’Malley to be president. And Bernie Sanders will be lucky to carry Vermont and Berkeley.

If I were a Democrat, I would be ashamed of belonging to a party incapable of fielding anything better than a bunch of crazy corrupt hacks who can’t even be bothered to come up with a credible platform that doesn’t involve the metric system or stealing all the deodorant.

Or in Hillary’s case, promising anything to anyone who will give her enough money. The Democratic Party has fielded the worst slate of presidential candidates in the country. Maybe even the world. Its only possible support comes from voters who hate America, rain, ounces and deodorant.

What is Islam? The obvious dictionary definition answer is that it’s a religion, but legally speaking it actually enjoys all of the advantages of race, religion and culture with none of the disadvantages.

Islam is a religion when mandating that employers accommodate the hijab, but when it comes time to bring it into the schools, places that are legally hostile to religion, American students are taught about Islam, visit mosques and even wear burkas and recite Islamic prayers to learn about another culture. Criticism of Islam is denounced as racist even though the one thing that Islam clearly isn’t is a race.

Islamist organizations have figured out how lock in every advantage of race, religion and culture, while expeditiously shifting from one to the other to avoid any of the disadvantages.

The biggest form of Muslim privilege has been to racialize Islam. The racialization of Islam has locked in all the advantages of racial status for a group that has no common race, only a common ideology.

Islam is the only religion that cannot be criticized. No other religion has a term in wide use that treats criticism of it as bigotry. Islamophobia is a unique term because it equates dislike of a religion with racism. Its usage makes it impossible to criticize that religion without being accused of bigotry.

By equating religion with race, Islam is treated not as a particular set of beliefs expressed in behaviors both good and bad, but as an innate trait that like race cannot be criticized without attacking the existence of an entire people. The idea that Islamic violence stems from its beliefs is denounced as racist.

Muslims are treated as a racial collective rather than a group that shares a set of views about the world.

That has made it impossible for the left to deal with ex-Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or non-Muslims from Muslim families like Salman Rushdie. If Islam is more like skin color than an ideology, then ex-Muslims, like ex-Blacks, cannot and should not exist. Under such conditions, atheism is not a debate, but a hate crime. Challenging Islam does not question a creed; it attacks the existence of an entire people.

Muslim atheists, unlike all other atheists, are treated as race traitors both by Muslims and leftists. The left has accepted the Brotherhood’s premise that the only authentic Middle Easterner is a Muslim (not a Christian or a Jew) and that the only authentic Muslim is a Salafist (even if they don’t know the word).

The racialization of Islam has turned blasphemy prosecutions into an act of tolerance while making a cartoon of a religious figure racist even when it is drawn by ex-Muslims like Bosch Fawstin. The New York Times will run photos of Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” covered in dung and pornography, but refuses to run Mohammed cartoons because it deems one anti-religious and the other racist.

The equating of Islam with Arabs and Pakistanis has made it nearly impossible for the media to discuss violence against Christians in those parts of the world. The racialization of Islam has made Arab Christians, like Bangladeshi atheists, a contradiction in terms. The ethnic cleansing of the Yazidi could only be covered by giving them a clearly defined separate identity. Middle Eastern Christians are increasingly moving to avoid being categorized as Arabs because it is the only way to break through this wall of ignorance.

While racialization is the biggest Muslim privilege, race provides no protection for many Islamic religious practices. Muslims then seek religious discrimination laws to protect these practices even if it’s often a matter of debate whether their lawsuits protect their religious practices or impose them on others.

Islam is a theocracy. When it leaves the territories conquered by Islam, it seeks to replicate that theocracy through violence and by adapting the legal codes of the host society to suit its purposes.

Islamic blasphemy laws are duplicated using hate crime laws. Employers are obligated to make religious concessions to Muslim employees because of laws protecting religious practices, but many of these practices, such as refusing to carry out jobs involving pork, liquor or Seeing Eye dogs, are really ways of theocratically forcing behaviors that Islam forbids out of public life much as Saudi Arabia or Iran do.

Accusations of bigotry are used to outlaw ideas that Islam finds blasphemous and religious protection laws are used to banish behaviors that it disapproves of. By switching from race to religion and back again, Islamists construct a virtual theocracy by exploiting laws designed to protect different types of groups.

Religions in America traded theocracy for religious freedom. They gave up being able to impose their practices on others in exchange for being able to freely practice their own religions. Islam rejects religious freedom. It exploits it to remove the freedom of belief and practice of others. When it cannot do so through religious protection laws, it does so through claims of bigotry.

Religions were not meant to be immunized from blasphemy because that is theocracy. Instead religions are protected from restrictions, rather than from criticism. Islam insists on being protected from both. It makes no concessions to the freedom of others while demanding maximum religious accommodation.

While race and religion are used to create negative spaces in which Islam cannot be challenged, the creed is promoted positively as a culture. Presenting Islam as a culture allows it easier entry into schools and cultural institutions. Islamic missionary activity uses the Western longing for oriental exotica that its political activists loudly decry to inject it into secular spaces that would ordinarily be hostile to organized religion.

Leftists prefer to see Islam as a culture rather than a religion. Their worldview is not open to Islam’s clumsy photocopy of the deity that they have already rejected in their own watered down versions of Christianity and Judaism. But they are constantly seeking an aimless and undefined spirituality in non-Western cultures that they imagine are free of the materialism and hypocrisy of Western culture.

Viewing Islam as a culture allows the left to project its own ideology on a blank slate. That is why liberals remain passionately convinced that Islam is a religion of social justice. Their Islam is a mirror that reflects back their own views and ideas at them. They pretend to respect Islam as a culture without bothering to do any more than learn a few words and names so that they can seem like world travelers.

By morphing into a culture, Islam sheds its content and becomes a style, a form of dress, a drape of cloth, a style of beard, a curvature of script and a whiff of spices. It avoids uncomfortable questions about what the Koran actually says and instead sells the religion as a meaningful lifestyle. This approach has always had a great deal of appeal for African-Americans who were cut off from their own heritage through Islamic slavery, but it also enjoys success with white upper class college students.

The parents of those students often learn too late that Islam is not just another interchangeable monotheistic religion, that its mosques are not places where earnest grad students lecture elderly congregants about social justice and that its laws are not reducible to the importance of being nice to others.

Like a magician using misdirection, these transformations from religion to race, from race to culture and from culture to religion, distract Americans from asking what Islam really believes. By combining race, religion and culture, it replicates the building blocks of its theocracy within our legal and social spaces.

Separately each of these has its advantages and disadvantages. By combining them, Islam gains the advantages of all three, and by moving from one to the other, it escapes all of the disadvantages. The task of its critics is to deracialize Islam, to reduce it to an ideology and to ask what it really believes.

Islam is a privileged religion. And there’s a word for that. Theocracy.

Obama introduced himself to the nation as the son of black and white parents. He has gone back and forth between Christianity and Islam like a philanderer in a bar.

Now he has added a third religion and race to complete his identity politics trinity.

At the last White House Chanukah dinner, he claimed to have a Jewish soul. At a synagogue speech last month, he called himself “an honorary member of the tribe”. Now his former senior advisor has quoted him as saying, “I think I am the closest thing to a Jew that has ever sat in this office.”

Of course Barack Obama has also been Irish. He stated, “I consider myself an honorary Italian, because I love all things Italian”. Newsweek dubbed him “The First Woman President” in 2008 for “bending gender conventions” and promoted him to “The First Gay President” four years later. Cabinet Secretary Lu and Congressman Honda argued that he was “The First Asian American President”.

If you make up an ethnic group or race, by tomorrow Barack Obama will be a member of it. By next week, he will be lecturing it on why it isn’t living up to their shared values.

Obama’s Jewish toadies, like his multicultural frog pond toadies of all races and ethnicities, have been trying to sell Barack Obama as a “Born-Again Jew” for seven years.

His left-wing mentor Abner Mikva claimed during the original campaign, "When this all is over, people are going to say that Barack Obama is the first Jewish president.” But Abner hedged his bets, baptizing Obama in a Mikvah by urging him to study the speaking patterns of Baptist preachers instead.

New York Magazine put Obama on the cover under a photoshopped Kippah as “The First Jewish President” and whined inside that, “Barack Obama is the best thing Israel has going for it right now. Why is that so difficult for Netanyahu and his American Jewish allies to understand?”

And that’s always the conclusion. Photoshop a Kippah on Obama’s head, dub him an honorary Jew and then use that to excuse his attacks on Israel.

Jerry Seinfeld accused his dentist of converting to Judaism to be able to tell Jewish jokes. Obama undergoes an honorary conversion to be able to bash Israel.

As an “honorary member of the tribe” he is entitled to all the anti-Semitic jokes and all the anti-Semitic policies he wants. When he signs off on nukes for Iran and a PLO state cut through the heart of Jerusalem accompanied by demands for the ethnic cleansing of half-a-million Jews, it’s as “The First Jewish Anti-Israel President” who cares about the Jewish State so much that he has to destroy it.

When Peter Beinart switched his career from the New Republic hawk who after September 11 wrote “The left has proved remarkably creative over the years at blaming virtually any Middle Eastern malfeasance...on the Jewish State” to the Daily Beast’s Israel basher who could blame bad weather or a lost sock in a dryer on Israel, he declared that he was bashing Israel because he was a “Liberal Zionist”.

Beinart, among others, has argued that Obama only bashes Israel because he too is a liberal Zionist.

Jeffrey Goldberg, the White House’s choice for heading up its media anti-Israel campaign to relay vital tidbits like the fact that the administration thinks Netanyahu is “Chickens__t” has been pushing the “Jewish Obama” meme the hardest. After his latest agonized interview with Obama featuring the kind of journalism usually only found when teen girls interview their movie idols for Tiger Beat, he explained that “The First Jewish President” only hated Israel because he was “The First Woody Allen President”.

Or as he put it, “Obama’s impatience with Israel, and his dislike of Netanyahu, is rooted in the fact that he is a very specific kind of Jew – an intellectual, Upper West Side, social action-oriented, anguished-about-Israel liberal values Jew.”

Not the bad kind of Jew who peers through a rifle scope on the Golan or pores over a Bible.

Obama’s finest Jewish toady was reassuring liberal Jewish tribals that the man in the White House didn’t hate Israel because he was one of “them”, but because he was one of “us”. Obama’s hatred of Israel is in the finest tradition of neurotic Manhattan liberals who can’t decide whether to bemoan Israel’s descent into nationalistic warmongering or take nude photos of their adopted Asian stepdaughters.

Or, as Woody Allen preferred it in the late nineties, both.

In his synagogue speech, Obama made the pitch that he embodies Israel’s classic leftist values of the Kibbutz and its Labor politicians. His disagreements with Israel are based on “our shared values”. He was turning the language of values commonality so often used by American politicians into appropriation.

Not only was Obama the country’s first Jewish president, but he is also its first Israeli president. He can’t be anti-Israel, because he represents Jewish and Israeli values better than Netanyahu.

The correct Jewish term for Obama contending that he is more Jewish than the Jews is “Chutzpah”.

Goldberg foresees a “civil war” between the Woody Allens and the Benjamin Netanyahus. “A civil war… between an American Jewry that has been nurtured on the values of the Civil Rights Movement, and an Israeli Jewry that has been taught, harshly, that the Middle East is not a place of mercy.”

As entertaining as it might be to watch a boxing match between Woody Allen and Netanyahu, he has missed the real civil war. Obama does embody the Jewish values of a Goldberg or a Beinart because their Jewish identity is synonymous with the left. He equally embodies the Catholic values of Irish or Italian leftists or the Cherokee values of Elizabeth Warren. When your religious values have no religion in them, when your culture is a punchline and you want to sacrifice your heritage for an inspiring speech, then why not?

While Goldberg claims that the “anguished-about-Israel liberal values Jew” is the dominant Jewish archetype, demographics are reducing it to a minority in New York within a generation.

Even the Upper West Side is turning Modern Orthodox. And Woody Allen, whom I witnessed yelling at a white-bearded Orthodox Rabbi over the Palestinians a few decades ago, came out in defense of Israel during the last war and suggested that a lot of the criticism of Israel is disguised anti-Semitism.

When you’ve lost Woody Allen, then you’ve lost your “anguished-about-Israel liberal values Jew” vote.

The civil war has already been fought and won. Jews in the UK are voting conservative and support Netanyahu. So do the majority of Canadian and Australian Jews. Being anguished about values is a luxury for those whose synagogues aren’t being bombed and whose children aren’t being beaten.

When you have something to really agonize about, then you stop agonizing about your values.

The liberal Jews “nurtured on the values of the Civil Rights Movement” are dying out and are being replaced by Jews nurtured on the values of the Bible. They see no contradiction between Jewish values and a Jewish State because their values come not from the Torah of Tikkun Olam, but the Torah of Moses and Joshua, of King David and King Solomon, of Maimonides and the Maccabees.

Obama appears confident that American Jews will accept him as more Jewish than the Jewish State, but Romney picked up the most Jewish votes since Reagan and Jewish midterm support for Democrats fell 21 percent in eight years. As his pal Bill Ayers, who recently called for a boycott of Israel, could tell him, “You don't need a Weatherman. To know which way the wind blows.”

Goldberg insists that “Obama is asking Israel (pleading with Israel, in fact) to be… more Jewish.”

And Obama’s way of trying to make Israel more Jewish is by denouncing Jews for building houses in Jerusalem. Similarly “Liberal Zionists” denounce Netanyahu for wanting Israel to be a “Jewish State” because they want it to live up to the Jewish values of Barack Obama, Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright.

It’s all a matter of definitions.

To the Goldbergs, making Israel more Jewish means making it less Jewish. By surrendering land to terrorists, expelling Jews from their homes, dividing up Jerusalem and giving up on a Jewish State, Israel will become more “Jewish”. And when its last Jewish Prime Minister, Mohammed Hussein Osama, informs them that Jewish values demand the end of Israel, they will applaud him for his Jewishness.

The other way of being Jewish is by having Jews live in a Jewish State where they speak the Jewish language and live lives based on thousands of years of Jewish tradition, heritage and religion.

The left’s values are self-nullifying. They destroy whatever they touch. The American left must destroy America for the sake of “American values”. The Catholic left must destroy the Catholic Church. The Jewish left must destroy Jews. Its idea of Jewish values is unmaking Jews, Judaism and the Jewish State.

The left has boldly appropriated Jewish values and identity. It has tried to pass off its politics as Tikkun Olam and the Democratic Party as the new synagogue. The Judaization of Obama is the last effort by a discredited ideology to fool its followers into believing that its anti-Jewishness is Jewish.

The Yiddish description of a hypocritical fraud is “As Kosher as a pig's foot.” Obama supporters who partake of his particular set of Jewish values are unlikely to be familiar enough with the Bible to understand the significance of a pig’s split hoof, the Midrashic tale of the pig that stretches out its cloven hooves and squeals, “See how Kosher I am” or even the Kosher status of a pig.

But those Jews who do, recognize “The First Jewish President” for the Kosher pig hoof that he is.

Progressive America has a fever and the only solution is more welfare. Celebrities are trying to buy only $29 worth of fair trade arugula at Whole Foods and then taking snapshots of it in a mistaken effort to show how little food stamps buy. Obama is urging more social welfare spending as the answer to the race riots he stirred up across the country by embracing the Ferguson “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” hoax.

Outraged rich liberals are furiously lecturing the rest of the country on income inequality as if there were no escaping the fact that we’re a society of greedy plutocrats that doesn’t care about the poor.

Obama called for “massive investments in urban communities”. Last year, we spent $75 billion on food stamps. The year before that it was $80 billion. That’s up from $33 billion in 2007. The number of participants has doubled approaching 50 million.

Is spending $80 billion on food stamps alone for a sixth of the country not a massive investment?

Food stamp use in Baltimore under Obama increased 58%, but even back in 2009, a quarter of Baltimore and a third of its black population were on food stamps. Baltimore already accounts for almost half of the food stamp using households in the entire state.

Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings called for an “inclusion revolution” after the riots, but the revolution in his district happened a while back where a fifth of the households are on food stamps. Even though the household racial split in the seventh is about even, 85% of food stamp households are black. Cummings says that Baltimore needs to be a model for the nation. It’s a hell of a model.

The nation can’t survive turning into Baltimore. The city is subsidized by Maryland taxpayers, a state full of bedroom communities for consultants and employees of the Federal government. Maryland didn’t become the richest state in America through entrepreneurship and hard work, but by siphoning off massive Federal spending. Billions have already been “massively invested” in Baltimore with no return.

Poor urban areas have not been “abandoned” by a cold selfish nation that spends all its time watching FOX News, as Obama claims, they have been subsidized up to their ears. Every poverty statistic is presented as if it were evidence of our guilt, when it’s actually evidence of our incredible generosity.

The angriest portion of the population lives in subsidized homes, goes to subsidized schools, shops with food stamps and even works at subsidized government jobs servicing the needs of the aforementioned. MSNBC talking heads claimed that the rioters and looters targeted the grocery and check cashing places that were oppressing the community. The only community they were oppressing was that of taxpayers.

Those were the places where urban dependents turned taxpayer subsidies into food and cash. They took their cut of a transaction that deprived millions of working families of their income and turned it over to looters.

And when the looters found the opportunity, they looted them.

Rioters don’t gleefully loot stores of snacks and liquor while posing for selfies because they’re outraged and oppressed, but because their sense of entitlement has turned them into amateur sociopaths.

None of this is about oppression or poverty. It’s about an incredible sense of entitlement.

We’ve blown past the antiquated mores in which living on charity was shameful. What’s shameful now is not spending enough money to subsidize the inflated entitlement of the perpetually outraged.

We are cruel for only dumping $80 billion into food stamps instead of $160 billion or $1.6 trillion or whatever insane figure is meant to be the real objective. Means tested welfare spending under Obama has been in the trillions. Why not the quadrillions or the quintillions? There’s no actual spending limit.

This entire twisted debate about the sad plight of the inner city is an indictment of us for not spending enough money funding every possible gimmick for the rioters and looters while believing that some crimes, such as dealing drugs or beating random people to death, should be punished by time in prison.

All the proposed progressive policy solutions have one thing in common; less responsibility. From wrecking the criminal justice system to pouring even more money into the giant urban pit, they ask America to take more risks and responsibility while expecting even less from Baltimore’s residents.

The single factor in Baltimore’s poverty statistics that mattered the most wasn’t race; it was family. Families headed by a married couple were better off than blacks or whites individually.

There are other names for that phenomenon. Responsibility. Commitment. Work ethic.

Baltimore’s problem isn’t segregation, lead paint or any of the other liberal hobgoblins. It’s a lack of responsibility. Responsible people get married. Responsible people find work or create work.

Jobs aren’t created by government programs. They’re created by people.

If a community doesn’t have jobs, that’s not the fault of the capitalist pigs living on their yachts while lighting their cigars with trillion dollars bills. It’s a reflection on the people who live there.

Tellingly the justifications for the looting involved claims that the businesses don’t come from the ‘community’. The question is why is the average business in a depressed urban area run by immigrants who just got off the plane with few other resources than a large family and a willingness to work their way into the ground? And it’s one of those questions that answer themselves.

It’s not racism. It’s not because life on a particular street is utterly hopeless. If it were, the Chinese or Indians couldn’t make a go of it there.

If an immigrant with eight kids and fewer language skills than even one of the graduates of Baltimore’s overfunded and thoroughly broken schools can swing the financing to open a store that provides vital malt liquor, lottery and potato chip services to the neighborhood, why can’t the looters pawing through the debris of his store figure out the same trick?

They can. They choose not to.

Hanging out with your friends and committing petty crimes that escalate until they lead to that dreaded “prison pipeline” is a lot more fun than working fourteen hours a day so your kids can go to college.

Especially if the rest of the country can be induced to subsidize your lifestyle using violence and guilt.

It’s easier to loot a convenience store or a check cashing place than it is to open one. It’s easier to go back to another round of looting American taxpayers than it is to get a job.

National poverty and crime rates mysteriously declined after welfare reform in 1996. Unemployment rates fell dramatically. So did murder rates.

But the welfare lobby won’t be satisfied until it rolls back the clock to the welfare, poverty and crime rates of the seventies. Now that the race riots are here, we can look forward to experiencing the entire glorious failed experiment in human misery all over again. It’s as if the Russians had decided to bring back collective agriculture because they were tired of having so much food in their stores.

Baltimore’s problem isn’t poverty. It’s entitlement. And entitlement is just another word for irresponsibility. The inner city doesn’t have a poverty problem. It has an irresponsibility problem.

This isn’t a problem that more “massive investment” can fix. It can only make it worse.

The only answer to a sense of entitlement is perspective. Our values offer us perspective. They teach us responsibility by telling us that the things that really matter are the ones that we work hard for.

The left took away those values and the sense of responsibility. They divided America into oppressors and victims. They stirred up hate mobs to burn and loot over the outrage of the moment, radicalizing irresponsibility and feeding entitlement. But the victims aren’t the ones who live off other people.

They’re the oppressors.

Victims work for a living. Oppressors live off them. The victims take responsibility for their lives. Oppressors only show entitlement.

The incredible entitlement of the welfare lobby has to end if the inner city is to have a future.