(The posting of this article has become an annual tradition at this blog since it appeared in 2012.)

The next year  sweeps around the earth like the hand of a clock, from Australia to Europe and across the great stretch of the Atlantic it rides the darkness to America. And then around and around again, each passing day marking another sweep of the hours.

In Times Square crowds of tourists gather in clumps behind police barricades, clutching their corporate swag beneath video billboards shifting and humming in the cool air. And the same scene repeats in other squares and other places even if it doesn't feel like there is a great deal to celebrate.

While the year makes its first pass around the world, let us leave it behind, open a door in time and step back to another year, a century past.

December 31, 1912.

The crowds are just as large, though the men wear hats. The word gay is employed with no touch of irony. Liquor is harder to come by because the end of the year, one hundred and two years ago, has fallen on a Sunday.

There are more dances and fewer corporate brands. Horns are blown, and the occasional revolver fired into the air, a sight unimaginable in the controlled celebrations of today's urban metropolis.

The Hotel Workers Union strike fizzled out on Broadway though a volley of bricks was hurled at the Hotel Astor during the celebrations. New York's finest spent the evening outside the Rockefeller mansion waiting to subpoena the tycoon in the money trust investigation. And the Postmaster General inaugurated the new parcel service by shipping a silver loving cup from Washington to New York.

On Ellis Island, Castro, a bitter enemy of the United States, and the former president of Venezuela, had been arrested for trying to sneak into the country while the customs officers had their guard down. Gazing at the Statue of Liberty, Castro denied that he was a revolutionary and bitterly urged the American masses to rise up and tear down the statue in the name of freedom.

Times Square has far fewer billboards and no videos, but it does have the giant Horn and Hardart Automat which opened just that year, where food comes from banks of vending machines giving celebrating crowds a view of the amazing world of tomorrow for the world of 1912 is after all like our own. We can open a door into the past, but we cannot escape the present.

The Presidential election of 1912, like that of 2012, ended in disaster. Both Taft and Roosevelt lost and Woodrow Wilson won. In the White House, President Taft met with cabinet members and diplomats for a final reception.

Woodrow Wilson, who would lead America into a bloody and senseless war, subvert its Constitution, and begin the process of making global government and statism into the national religion of his party, was optimistic about the new year. "Thirteen is my lucky number," he said. "It is curious how the number 13 has figured in my life and never with bad fortune."

Americans today face the lightbulb ban. Americans then were confronted with the matchstick ban as the Esch bill in Congress outlawed phosphorus "strike 'em on your pants" matches by imposing a $1,000 tax on them. This was deemed to be Constitutional. In Indianapolis, the train carrying union leaders guilty of the dynamite plot was making its secret way to Federal prison even while the lawyers of the dynamiters vowed to appeal.

The passing year, a century past, had its distinct echoes in our own time. There had been, what the men of the time, thought of as wars, yet they could not even conceive of the wars shortly to come. There were the usual dry news items about the collapse of the government in Spain, a war and an economic crisis in distant parts of the world that did not concern them.

A recession was here, after several panics, and though there was plenty of cheer, there was also plenty of worry. The Federal Reserve Act would be signed at the end of 1913, partly in response to the economic crisis.

Socialism was on the march with the Socialist Party having doubled its votes in the national election.  All three major candidates, Wilson, Roosevelt and Taft, had warned that the country was drifting toward Socialism and that they were the only ones who could stop it.

"Unless Socialism is checked," Professor Albert Bushnell Hart warned, "within sixteen years there will be a Socialist President of the United States." Hart was off by four years. Hoover won in 1928. FDR won in 1932.

At New York City's May Day rally, the American flag was torn down and replaced with the red flag, to cries of, "Take down that dirty rag" and "We don't recognize that flag." The site of the rally was Union Square, one of the locations where the rag ends of Occupy Wall Street now hangs out.

There was tension on the Mexican border and alarm over Socialist successes in German elections. An obscure fellow with the silly name of Lenin had carved out a group with the even sillier name of the Bolsheviks. China became a Republic. New Mexico became a state, the African National Congress was founded and the Titanic sank.

There was bloody fighting in Benghazi where 20,000 Italian troops faced off against 20,000 Arabs and 8,000 Turks. The Italians had modern warships and armored vehicles, while the Muslim forces were supplied by voluntary donations and fighters crossing from Egypt and across North Africa to join in attacking the infidels.

The Italian-Turkish war has since been forgotten, except by the Italians, the Libyans and the Turks, but it featured the first strategic use of airships, ushering in a century of European aerial warfare.

There was a good deal going on while the horns were blown and men in heavy coats and wet hats made their way through the festivities.

World War I was two years away, but the Balkan War had already fired the first shots. The rest was just a matter of bringing the non-phosphorus matches closer to the kindling. The Anti-Saloon League was gathering strength for a nationwide effort that would hijack the political system and divide it into dry and wet, and, among other things, ram through the personal income tax.

Change was coming, and as in 1912, the country was no longer hopeful, it was wary.

The century, for all its expected glamour, had been a difficult one. The future, political and economic, was unknown. Few knew exactly what was to come, but equally few were especially optimistic even when the champagne was flowing.

If we were to stop a reveler staggering out of a hotel, stand in his path and tell him that war was five years away and a great depression would come in on its tail, that liquor would be banned, crime would proliferate and a Socialist president would rule the United States for three terms, while wielding near absolute power, he might have decided to make his way to the recently constructed Manhattan Bridge for a swan dive into the river.

And yet we know that though all this is true, there is a deeper truth. For all those setbacks, the United States survived, and many of us look nostalgically toward a time that was every bit as uncertain and nerve-wracking as our own.

December 31, 1912 was a door that opened onto many things.

Our December 31 is likewise a door, and if a man in shiny clothes from the year 2115 were to stop us on the street and spill out everything he knew about the next century, it is likely that there would be as much greatness as tragedy in that tale.

As the year sweeps across the earth, let us remember that history is more than the worst of its events, that all times bear the burden of their uncertainties, but also carry within them the seeds of greatness. Looking back on this time, it may be that it is not the defeats that we will recall, but how they readied us for the fight ahead.

America has not fallen, no more than it did when the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1912. Though it may not seem likely now, there are many great things ahead, and though the challenges at times seem insurmountable and the defeats many, another year and another century await us.

To understand ISIS, you have to understand the difference between terrorists and Islamic terrorists.

Ordinary terrorists have two goals; to compel the enemy to meet their political demands and to rally their supporters to consolidate their class, race or national identity group behind them.

Islamic terrorists are not interested in the “political demands” part. They will occasionally accept concessions and even offer Hudnas, temporary truces, but no permanent separate peace can be achieved with them. It’s why Israel’s peace process with terrorists has gone on failing for decades. It’s why the attempt by Gaddafi to achieve peace with the LIFG ended in a civil war and his death. It’s why Obama’s attempts to negotiate with the “moderate Taliban” failed miserably.

Al Qaeda and ISIS are not “negative” protest movements formed in response to our foreign policy. That’s a foolish self-centered idea held by foolish self-centered Westerners. Al Qaeda and ISIS are “positive” movements that seek to achieve larger religious goals entirely apart from us. Islamic terrorists are not responding to us. They are responding to the Koran and to over a thousand years of history.

Osama bin Laden did not carry out 9/11 to inflict harm on Americans. That was a secondary goal. His primary goal was to rally Muslims to build a Caliphate by encouraging them to attack America.

The ritualistic “Why do they hate us” browbeating favored by the chattering classes is nonsense. Al Qaeda hated us because we were not Muslims. But it was only using us as the hated “other” to consolidate a collective Muslim identity. We are to Islamists what the Jews were to Hitler; a useful scapegoat whose otherness can be used to manufacture a contrasting pure Aryan or Islamic identity.

No dialogue is possible with an ideology whose virtue is premised on seeing you as utterly evil.

You can negotiate with terrorists, though you shouldn’t. But Islamic terrorists rarely even bother to negotiate. Their core focus is on rallying local Muslims and the Ummah behind them. They don’t recognize national borders so any hope for a permanent peace behind recognized borders is wishful thinking. Islam is a transnational movement. Islamic terrorism is a race between terror groups around the world to carve out their own Islamic states and then use them as a springboard to a Caliphate.

ISIS is the end stage of Islamic terrorism. Its leader is a Caliph with all Muslims obliged to submit to him. The Islamic State is not just in Syria and Iraq. It is everywhere that a Muslim outpost swears allegiance to the Caliph. On its own maps the Islamic State encompasses parts of Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Russia. The more local Islamic terror groups pledge allegiance to ISIS, the bigger it becomes.

ISIS doesn’t plan to defeat America through acts of terrorism. The plan for defeating America, like every other country, Muslim or non-Muslim, is to build a domestic Muslim terror movement that will be able to hold territory and swear allegiance to the Islamic State.

The idea of an American Emirate may seem silly but consider Molenbeek, the neighborhood in Brussels known as the Jihadi capital of Europe, deemed a no-go zone by local authorities, right in the capital of the European Union.  You can take a taxi from NATO HQ to a Muslim micro-state linked to most of the major recent Islamic terror attacks in Europe including the latest ISIS attack in Paris.

Molenbeek provides ISIS recruits for its war and a gateway for ISIS attacks in Europe. The media is filled with articles about what ISIS wants, but there is no question that Molenbeek is what ISIS wants.

And it’s only Muslim immigration to Europe that makes an ISIS base like Molenbeek possible.

ISIS has short term and long term needs. In the short term, ISIS needs as many recruits as possible. And it is in the West where traditional Muslim ties of kinship and community are so frayed that the transnationalism of heading out to fight for a Caliphate in someone else’s country is most deeply appealing. ISIS aggressively seeks to recruit Muslims in the West because they have the skills, money and naiveté to be useful to the Islamic State. But in the long term, ISIS needs more Muslim immigration to the West to create a steady supply of recruits, collaborators and eventually Western emirates.

If ISIS is serious about making a bid for Italy, it needs a large Muslim population on the ground. It doesn’t even matter if this population comes from refugees fleeing ISIS. The children of these refugees will still be Sunni Muslims in a foreign land where Algerian, Somali, Syrian and Pakistani Muslims discover that they have more in common than they do with the natives. It is this accidental Western multiculturalism that erases tribal Muslim rivalries and makes the ambition of a single Muslim Caliphate appear plausible.

ISIS does not plan to defeat America with terror plots. But those plots will eventually accumulate into an organized domestic terror organization. An Islamic State in America based around a majority Muslim town or neighborhood with its own leader pledging allegiance to the Caliph of the Islamic State.

An American Molenbeek; and there are already plenty of candidates for that horrifying honor.

Any Muslim plans for expanding into the West depend on Muslim immigration. Whether it’s ISIS or its Muslim Brotherhood ancestor, or any of the other Islamist organizations and networks, they all require manpower. Some of that manpower will be provided by high Muslim birth rates, but it won’t be nearly enough, not for a country the size of America, without a large annual flow of Muslim migrants.

We are told that halting Muslim immigration would only encourage Muslim terrorism. But our open door to Muslim immigration certainly hasn’t stopped terrorism. Instead it has increased it by providing reinforcements to the terrorists. If we can’t stop Muslim terrorism with the population we have now, how are we going to manage it if the Islamic population continues doubling and even tripling?

Even if we defeat ISIS tomorrow, Al Qaeda and other Islamist groups descended from the Muslim Brotherhood will continue pursuing the same goals. And they will rely on the Muslim population in the United States to provide them with money, supplies, cover and an infrastructure for terrorism.

ISIS can’t defeat us with terror attacks. The only hope for an enduring Islamic victory over America is through the rise of domestic groups that pledge allegiance to the Caliphate. ISIS can’t invade America. It has to be invited in. That’s what our immigration policy does.

Trump isn’t a threat to national security. Muslim immigration is.

Islamic terrorists can’t defeat us no matter how many planes they fly into buildings. But they can and will defeat us if they continue landing planes at JFK and disembarking thousands and tens of thousands of settlers who will serve as a base population for their war against America.

Muslim immigration is the Islamic State’s only hope for victory over America.

Israel is facing a grave "king" crisis. Never mind the Muslim terrorists stabbing, slashing and shooting any Jews in range. The real threat was uncovered by Shabak's Jewish section, a gang of Jewish youths had plotted to "appoint a king". It's a lucky thing that Shabak had prevented the "return of the king" through the usual measures of planting informants and torturing detainees.

Just think, if they hadn't arrested and detained those "right-wing extremists", Israelis today might be forced to take orders from an undemocratic king instead of an undemocratic Supreme Court.

After Rabin's death, Kikar Malchei Yisrael, the Square of the Kings of Israel, was renamed Kikar Rabin. The kings of Israel had to make way for the eternal celebrations of outrage for the murder of the Labor PM at the hands of a pawn of a Shabak employee. That killing led to the same ritual cries about the threat of "right-wing extremism" which was somehow worse than the "left-wing extremism" whose pandering to terrorism had killed over 100 Israelis since Oslo.

It's a lot more than 100 today. And center-right prime ministers have come and gone with bold promises and only made things worse.  The regular chants of "Insert name here melech yisrael" at political conventions don't lead to any arrests. Though considering their tackiness maybe they should.

Still ex-Shabak boss Carmi Gillon has reemerged to cry "We’re at a worse point than before the assassination of Rabin.” Not in the sense that the terrorists set off by his old boss can now bombard Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. But in the sense that more "right-wing extremists" are noticing it. 

The star of The Gatekeepers, along with five other major Shabak bosses, is an expert on "right-wing extremism". Just ask Avishai Raviv, the Shabak informant who set up the "extreme right-wing" group Eyal, whose videos of blood oaths, Rabin-killing practice and claims of responsibility for assorted attacks that the fake group had nothing to do with made for great left-wing television. The drama climaxed with the killing of Rabin by a man whom Raviv had urged, "Be a man. Kill Rabin."

In the midst of the crackdown on "right-wing extremism", the agonized bewailing by center-right leaders about all the horrible "extremism" in their camp, it turned out that Raviv, the man in the "Rabin is a Traitor" t-shirts and Rabin in a Nazi uniform poster at a Netanyahu rally was working for Shabak's "Gatekeepers." And Shabak had to stop arresting people for telling politically incorrect Rabin jokes and figures on the center-right had to stop writing self-denounciations for thought-crimes.

But we are told that this sort of thing doesn't happen anymore. At least that's what Naftali Bennett assures us. Never mind the Susiya entrapment case which just wrapped up this month. Shabak doesn't do this sort of thing anymore. Except when it does. Bennett claims that the detainees want to "dismantle the foundations of the state." Shouldn't they be in the Knesset then?

If you want to plot to “dismantle the foundations of the state”, the right place for you is at the Haaretz conference, not a Shabak basement. Alongside ex-Shabakniks also plotting to "dismantle the foundations of the state". President Rivlin, who attended the conference alongside anti-Israel groups that are actually plotting to dismantle the state, without appointing any kings, calls the radical left-wing paper, "one of the most important papers for the existence of Israeli democracy.”

One of Haaretz's prize journalists, Gideon Levy, calls for the destruction of Israel, defends Hamas and promotes BDS. David Landau, the former Haaretz editor, told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Israel was a "failed state" and urged her to "rape" Israel. “I told [Rice] that it had always been my wet dream to see this happen," he said.

Nobody in Shabak detained Landau without charge and then imposed a court order to prevent his name from being published. Nobody worked him over in a basement for plotting to "dismantle the foundations of the state". Instead Rivlin eulogized the dead monster by saying "it was a pleasure to be his friend". The Jerusalem Post and Times of Israel which are tripping over themselves to call for more arrests of "right-wing extremists" showered more love on the dead terror pimp.

Left-wing extremism never seems to lead to any arrests. If you meet with terrorists illegally and wreck the country, like Yossi Beilin, or call for the murder of Jews on the right, like Peace Now co-founder Yigal Tumarkin, or even openly support terrorists like Hanin Zoabi, you will not find yourself in a Shabak basement somewhere being worked over by two grinning gorillas until you sign anything they tell you to.

Instead you'll wallow in EU cash, in literary and political awards, in newspaper columns and tributes. And even those on the center-right will say that your views may be terrible, but in person you're a surprisingly charming and thoughtful fellow.

There's never a left-wing extremist threat. Instead it's a grave threat that a dozen teenagers in some small village will spray graffiti or protest police brutality or appoint a king. And if they don't do it on their own, a dozen Shabak informants who have gotten into debt or petty crime will make sure that they get around to doing it so that the left-wing security state and the sellout center-right can scream their heads off about the "right-wing" threat.

Now the threat is back again.

The headlines are full of reports of "right-wing extremists" being rounded up and held without trial for such crimes as protesting other "right-wing extremists" being rounded up and held without trial. There's a poorly edited wedding video that purports to show a photo of something or other being stabbed by someone. Which is proof enough for more indefinite detentions for the case that never seems to actually come to trial. And petitions in support of Shabak.

There's a petition  by 47 Rabbis "We support the fighters of the Shabak and all the security arms protecting our state, in plucking from the roots all expressions of Jewish terror. as this is crucial."

From the roots. All the way down.

Ya'alon demands the ritual "soul-searching" and warns that there are "implications to ignoring the rule of law  even in minor instances, such as illegal building in Judea and Samaria or those who raised their voices against the High Court of Justice." There are implications to Ya'alon's implications too. The implication is that political opposition to undemocratic institutions is itself a crime.

And, of course, the Rabbis must be investigated. Not Arik Ascherman and his group. But the pro-Israel kind of Rabbis.

All this for a case in which there are still no real charges, no real trial and no real evidence. In lieu of these things, a blurry video runs non-stop on television and an army of public figures rises to denounce the threat.

The Duma case was a joke from the start. The rash of fires in the Arab village were part of a clan rivalry. The official version of the crime couldn't have even physically happened. But the left had its agenda and the center-right, Netanyahu and Bennett had discredited themselves by failing to accomplish anything tangible, and so jumped on board to silence right-wing critics.

The only way to keep the Duma hoax alive is to extract confessions from someone, anyone. Shabak claims to be using "ticking time bomb" torture methods to extract these confessions. But after all this time where is the bomb ticking? The bomb is political. No one wants to fight Islamic terrorism and certainly no one is going to start locking up left-wingers for trying to "dismantle the foundations of the state". That just leaves the easy target, angry and upset teens and twenty-somethings, whose ethnic cleansing is constantly called for by the left and its international backers.

With enough torture, someone will confess to plotting to appoint a king, setting all of Duma on fire and even photoshopping Rivlin in a Nazi uniform. The center-right will bewail how "we" have become capable of such extremism. The left will demand even more powers for Shabak to fight the "right-wing threat" before its next boss heads off to a Haaretz conference.

Ex-Shabak boss Ami Ayalon endorsed Breaking the Silence (not to mention nukes for Iran) as did ex-Shabak boss Yuval Diskin. Shabak bosses can wage war against Israel and the IDF, yet no one is going to arrest them for trying to undermine the foundations of the state. Certainly they won't wind up in their own basement being worked over.

We have once again found the "enemy within". It's not the Muslims and their left-wing collaborators, but another phony right-wing terror group, that when examined closely will no doubt have an unfavorable ratio of Shabak agent provocateurs to actual members. But we can't fight the PLO or Hamas. We can't fight the New Israel Fund or Breaking the Silence. Or their Shabak pals. But we can always take another whack at the dangling pinata of "right-wing extremism" which, on close examination, turns out to be manufactured by the extremist left-wing establishment.

And then it'll be time for another Haaretz conference and the destruction of Israel

A number of editorials have appeared in center-right outlets accusing Trump supporters of wanting a dictator.

Well obviously.

Politics is a competition. Everyone wants to win the game based on the rules of the game. And the current rules of the game are not Constitutional. The left wanted a dictator. Obama gave them one. He implemented laws, started wars and took on powers which were not only beyond his authority, but which were opposed by the majority of Americans and elected legislators in Congress.

And he won. He got away with it. And that made his way of doing things the new game.

The media and some Republicans sputter that Trump's proposals couldn't be carried out. Well of course they could be. If Trump were to run things the way that Obama has.

There are two responses to this.

The left deems this unacceptable because it has a double standard. There's always some reason why its rulebreaking is okay, but why the rules must be applied to the right. Mocking the kids of presidential candidates is off limits... unless they're Republicans. Ruling by Executive Order is tyranny... unless a progressive does it. Starting wars based on lies is wrong unless... etc.

Now that kind of hypocrisy is only to be expected from politicians. The trouble is that the left encompasses the media, much of the legal system, academia and a raft of other key network institutions that make it impossible to have any kind of honest discourse about the rule of law.

That means the game is rigged. There are two sets of rules. So why play by them?

The conservative establishment has all sorts of replies, but none of them amount to much. Yes, the rule of law is important. But when the other side is breaking the law to destroy the law, the contention that it should be allowed to destroy the Constitution rather than violate the Constitution becomes idealistic absurdity. And it's not as if the conservative establishment is comfortable even doing what it can within the existing rules. It talks a good game and then explains why it can't do anything.

It's not hard to see why this state of affairs is intensely frustrating to activists and voters.

The support for Trump without regard to his qualifications, statements, integrity, credibility, knowledge, consistency, etc is the end result of this state of affairs. The claims that Trump is a Republican Obama are not completely wrong. Obama has shown that his way of doing things works. Not in the sense that he has fixed any problems. Instead he has made them worse. But he has delivered major policy wins for his base of supporters by flagrantly violating the law.

The Republican establishment understands the problem which is why their responses to Trump and his supporters are so much sputtering. Trump is running on his ability to get things done. This ability and his actual commitment to doing anything are dubious. But that doesn't matter when his opponents have no credibility at all when it comes to achieving any actual policy goals.

Worse still, in the Obama era, the idea that they will get anything done has little credibility.

Congressional Republicans laboriously explain their limitations. And then they pass a spending bill that offers all sorts of goodies to special interest groups while having no ideological victories to show their base. They're not completely incompetent. Instead they appear quite capable of self-seeking. It's just when it comes to delivering something for conservatives, they have come up completely empty after six years.

Is Trump's rise really supposed to be a surprise? Sure he has little credibility. But conservatives have been sold three bags of goods, they have spent a whole lot of money, and seen it go into the pockets of political consultants and their allied direct marketing firms. They're not in the mood for an idealistic speech from Marco Rubio about achievement. The base is bitter and burned out.

This isn't just the situation in the United States. It's also going on in the UK, in France and Israel, to name a few examples. It's the larger problem of competing with an illiberal left.

How do you uphold a liberal open system while fighting an illiberal left for control of it?

There are no easy answers. And most of the easy ones come down to messaging. But simply making a better argument isn't enough when the left flagrantly abuses power.

It's not simply a question of getting a Republican in the White House. Reagan and Bush II were both in the White House. How much did they really get done? Bush II had a Republican congress. But the left simply shifts power and legitimacy to whatever institutions it controls, elected or unelected, and then governs from there.

If the Republicans control the White House, the left proclaims that Congress is the true voice of the people and must be heeded while the guy in the White House is the next Hitler. If Democrats control the White House and Republicans control Congress, then we must all support "our president" and Congress is a bunch of obstructionist bigots fighting to bring back the Middle Ages.

If Democrats lose both, then the Supreme Court suddenly becomes the most legitimate institution. If they lose all three, then it's the heroic regulators, watchdogs and activist non-profits who matter.

The Senate was the House of the Lords, when it lacked a Democratic majority, but when Democrats held the Senate, but lost the House, suddenly the Senate was the voice of reason.

All of this amounts to the illiberal idea that an institution controlled by the left should be able to wield absolute power while institutions controlled by conservatives should not be allowed to wield any power at all. This illiberal contention is echoed by the entire opinion-shaping network of the left in the media and academia. And it is a shape-shifting tyranny in which the left is always in power.

Can you defeat that by winning elections and better messaging? Maybe. But so far Republicans haven't done it. They rarely even name the problem directly. And so it's unsurprising that they have lost the confidence of much of their own base. Or that confronting illiberalism with illiberalism is increasingly appealing to conservatives tired of empty promises and no results.

The GOP has failed to confront this basic problem and so it has no ability to fight off Trump.

Feeble efforts such as "Jeb can fix it" or claiming that Rubio killed ObamaCare don't impress anyone. Outsider candidates are thriving because they have more credibility when it comes to confronting that Gordian Knot even if, like Trump, they have no real idea that it exists or understand the left's threat.

The fundamental question of this race is, "How do you plan to defeat an illiberal leftist opposition?"

Few candidates in this race can answer it. Trump probably couldn't, but he doesn't need to. He answers it implicitly with his attitude. He's running on absolute confidence. No one else is.

This leaves the GOP with a major problem. It has lost to the left. Now it's losing to its own base.

Cameron faced that problem in the UK from UKIP. He managed to consolidate his position. In Israel, Netanyahu and Bennett, facing a similar revolt from a base that has heard some great speeches, but seen too many surrenders to the left, have backed the left's purge of the right, beginning with Yinon Magal and moving on the Duma hoax to smear the right as extremists and terrorists.

It's the same cynical gambit, albeit bloodier, that the GOP is running against Trump, Cruz and their supporters.

If you can't beat the left, you can always ally with the left to beat your own base. This preserves the status quo. A status quo in which an illiberal left is always in power and a right that plays by the rules always lets them win, in or out of office. Conservatives win elections, but lose policies. 

The conservative establishment reinvents itself as the centrists standing between right-wing extremists and the left. In their deluded minds it's win-win, when it's really lose-lose.

Eventually the contention that anyone to the right of a mild-mannered establishment that talks tough during elections and surrenders between them is a fascist, an extremist, a Nazi or even worse leads to  the real thing. The actual extremists, the ones who want to smash everything and impose some sort of glorious totalitarian state, start getting a hearing and picking up members. Their goal is to splinter the right. That's also the goal of the establishment which would like nothing better than to be the only conservative alternative to actual crazies and so they feed off each other. And the left wins again.

The Tea Party revolt was launched to fight an illiberal left by restoring the Constitution. The trouble lay in the details. It still does.

Restoring the Constitution is going to mean prying an illiberal left from power across a wide network of institutions. There are plenty of activists, but few politicians, with the stomach for that fight.

And that fight will be tremendously ugly. Trump, by sheer force of personality, appears to offer a convenient shortcut. He'll Make America Great Again and hopeful activists read all sorts of implications into that slogan. The biggest one is that he'll fix everything so that they won't have to.

It's not dictatorship. It's anti-dictatorship. It's Cincinnatus temporarily becoming a dictator to stop a populist plot by a radical to seize absolute power by handing out free stuff to the masses, killing him, semi-legally at best, in a ruthless fashion. How America was Cincinnatus? Aside from Cincinnati, the Society of the Cincinnati was presided over by George Washington, who was often compared to the old Roman, along with two dozen signers of the Declaration of Independence, and quite a few officers. (The Society's message to Aaron Burr and fellow radicals was quite explicit.)

Trump isn't Washington. And Burr and his fellow radicals were eventually put down by Jefferson and cooler heads. The Republic survived Burr's various treasons and conspiracies. We did not go the way of the French Revolution. But the question of how to defeat an illiberal left remains.

If the Republican establishment really wants to defeat Trump, it needs to find a credible answer to this question. Instead of thinking about how to defeat Trump, it really needs to answer how it will defeat Obama and the forces that gave rise to him. If it can't figure out how to defeat illiberalism, it will be defeated by it.

Each and every act of Muslim terrorism is followed by a wave of denial.  The politicians who have done the most to cause the latest disaster are the eagerest to blame it on something, anything else.

The San Bernardino Muslim massacre was blamed on postpartum depression at CNN. Bill Nye blamed the latest Paris attacks on Global Warming. According to Hillary Clinton, Benghazi was a movie review with artillery. Islamic terrorism was blamed by the State Department on a lack of jobs, but Syed Farook had a good government job and his wife was the daughter of a wealthy family.

After rummaging through their big brass chest of excuses, Obama and his media allies have settled on gun control as their latest weapon of mass distraction.

California has the toughest gun laws in the nation. Unlike Ted Kennedy, the terrorists weren’t on the no-fly list that has become the latest desperate meme of mass distraction. And, despite Obama’s claim in Paris that mass shootings don’t happen in other countries because of gun control magic, they most certainly do. European gun control didn’t stop a Muslim mass shooting in Paris that killed 130 people.

Syed Farook and Tasheen Malik had built pipe bombs. The latest attack in the UK involved a knife. So did quite a few in Jerusalem. The Boston Marathon massacre used fireworks and a pressure cooker.

The Muslim mass murder of 3,000 people on 9/11 was carried out with box cutters.

If only we had some way to ban terrorists from buying pressure cookers, knives and box cutters.

Gun control is a distraction. A way to make something other than Islam into the problem that needs solving. If we banned guns, then the problem would be foreign policy. If we spent all our time working to aid Islamist political takeovers, then it would the weather. Obama has tried to aid Islamists and lower sea levels, so he has been reduced to blaming the inanimate objects of the latest terror attack.

Gun control, foreign policy and global warming are denialist gimmicks that reframe the problem.

Denialists will ignore the allegiances of terrorists like Nidal Hassan and Syed Farook to Jihadists to focus on individual pathologies. If that doesn’t work, they’ll pull back to a planetary focus and blame the weather patterns of the entire planet. They’ll zoom in with great detail on weapons purchases while ignoring the ideology that motivated the attacks. They’ll have a hundred different explanations for each attack that fail to account for the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism as a whole.

These aren’t reasonable arguments. Taken together they form a pattern of conspiracy theories.

The most basic aspect of the conspiracy theory is that it bypasses the obvious reasonable explanation and vanishes down a rabbit hole of complicated alternative explanations that make no real sense but allow the conspiracists to avoid dealing with the implications of the actual event that took place.

Leftists did not want to deal with the fact that JFK had been murdered by one of their own. So they invented a bunch of alternative conspiracies involving the CIA, Cubans and other “right-wing” villains. These conspiracies allowed them to avoid dealing with the violence at the heart of the left. But that violence continued to spill over anyway leading to riots and terror plots. In their alternate reality, none of it was their fault. The “Fall of Camelot” was caused by some “miasma of right-wing hatred” in Dallas.

Their response to 9/11 flirted with conspiracy theories.

A poll found that more than half of Democrats believed that George W. Bush had carried out the 9/11 attacks or knew about them beforehand. 1 in 4 Democrats believed that the World Trade Center attack was staged. 1 in 5 believed that the Pentagon attack was carried out by the United States government.

Democratic politicians, with some exceptions, usually knew better than to openly air blatant 9/11 conspiracy theories.  But they instead embraced a “soft” left-wing Trutherism that shifted the focus away from Islamic terrorism to alternative explanations that were meant to distract Americans from what really happened by finding sideways angles for blaming the attack on Bush and Republicans.
Bush may not have masterminded it, but Republican foreign policy caused it. Or worsened it.

It’s 2015 and the Terrorism Truthers have been reduced to frantically scrambling for any explanation from postpartum depression to the weather to explain the persistence of Islamic terrorism.

Trutherism works best when the Truthers aren’t in power. Muslim terrorism can’t be blamed on the government when both France and America are run by ridiculously notorious leftists. All that’s left is a “soft” Trutherism that seeks alternative explanations without being able to consistently answer the central question of why these attacks are taking place.

And this lack of a plausible central conspirator is the weak point of leftist Terrorism Denial.

Leftist Truthers like Obama are forced to constantly substitute new “right-wing” villains. Today it’s the NRA. Yesterday it was a Coptic Christian who made a YouTube video. But like the USSR’s efforts to blame its economic failures on a shifting gallery of villains, these explanations are unsatisfying. And they leave even leftists, never mind ordinary Americans, uneasy about a crisis they don’t understand.

There is something of Orwell’s “We have always been at war with Eastasia” to these deceits.

Today Muslim terrorists are attacking us because of the NRA. Yesterday it was because it was too hot. Before that, it was because of Israel. And before that, it was because of Bush.

But what if Muslim terrorists are attacking us because they’re Muslim terrorists?

What if we can’t beat them by banning guns, changing the weather, supporting Islamists or any of the other magical answers that completely fall apart at even the most casual examination?

The left’s response to Islamic terrorism has been built around a frantic effort to distract and divert us from exactly that question, blaming anything and everything but Islam, while sharply denouncing anyone who ignores the distractions and addresses that central question.

Attorney General Lynch responded to the San Bernardino terror attack by assuring Islamists that she intended to crack down on criticism of Islam. Criticism of Islam is dangerous, not because it leads to a mythical anti-Muslim backlash that we are constantly warned about as if it were more dangerous than Muslim terrorism itself yet never actually materializes, but because it destroys Terrorist Trutherism.

If Islamic terrorism is the problem, then the left and the Democrats who handed over their party to it are guilty of ignoring, minimizing and lying about a serious problem.

They have to go on lying, ignoring and minimizing, and even threatening to dump the First Amendment along with the Second, because they have long since become complicit in the crimes of their Islamist partner organizations.

Yesterday they blamed the weather. Today they’ll blame guns. Tomorrow, it’ll be something else.

We are always at war with Eastasia, unless it’s Eurasia. We are never however at war with Islam. The issue may be anything so long as it isn’t Muslim terrorism. Those are the words that no Democrat will utter. They will call it “man-caused disasters” or “violent extremism” or “hybrid workplace Jihad”.

It’s time to call this what it is, denialism, trutherism and conspiracism.

The famous epigram, “Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason”, expressed the absurd hypocrisy of a government of traitors. But what happens when there is a government of conspiracy theorists? Then conspiracies exist to divert attention from the failures and crimes of those in charge. The conspiracy theory itself becomes the conspiracy.

It’s time to take away Obama’s weapons of mass distraction and expose his Trutherism for what it is.

Islamic terrorism isn’t caused by a thousand different problems, conditions, conspiracies and excuses. It’s caused by Islam. Every attempt to distract from that is Denialism and Trutherism.

And we owe it to the victims of the latest attack and all the attacks to end the denial and the lies.

Around the time that the United States Constitution had been hammered out, across the way in the UK, social theorist Jeremy Bentham was coming up with the Panopticon.

Bentham had denounced the ideas of the Declaration of Independence as "subversive of every actual or imaginable kind of Government". He demanded that force be used to "teach this rebellious people" that "there is no peace with them, but the peace of the King".

After the "Peace of the King" failed in the United States, Bentham turned to his obsession with the Panopticon. The Panopticon would be a prison in which all the prisoners could be watched all the time to achieve, in Bentham's words, "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example."

Bentham's Panopticon never worked, but the internet has made the Panopticon and its ability to obtain "power over mind" a reality. In a "quantity hitherto without example".

Social media has made private discourse public. In the Wilson days of WWI, when hysteria was at its peak, people could be arrested for private conversations. But that was the exception, not the rule. It was only in the worst Communist societies that informants were so rife that private discourse was almost completely stifled. But the internet shreds the line between public and private.

The new informer doesn't file a report at the local KGB office. He participates in a social media collective which among its hobbies plucks some obscure "problematic" remark out of the social stream and turns its speaker into a target for a mob. A lynch hashtag is born and someone loses their job. All of this is done with the self-pitying catastrophic crybullying so typical of social justice warriors who scream that they're the victims even while they're gleefully destroying someone else's life.

It's no coincidence that this foul habit emerged out of Communist China where morality mobs targeted petty offenders on the internet in collective shaming rituals that sometimes escalated into violence or suicide. The Communist dictatorship that gave us the Cultural Revolution helped give birth to its hideous CyberStalinist offspring which enforces political correctness through bullying.

Social media made the surveillance society possible. Even in the early days of the internet, the metaphor of the Panopticon was revived to predict its future. Art students still continue to churn out laboriously pretentious projects involving surveillance cameras and faceless mannequins. But it's the voluntary participation in social media that provided material for surveillance.

The old internet was anonymous. The new internet was data hungry. Nearly every major dot com is built on collecting and making use of information about people. Google, Facebook and a hundred other companies offer free products in exchange for personal data. Free apps for smartphones are built on gaining access to your address book. Everyone is trying to build the biggest and most comprehensive database for selling ads and manipulating user behavior.

That is where the Panopticon really begins. Surveillance without intervention is voyeurism. Surveillance with intervention is tyranny. The awareness of surveillance changes behavior. That was the fundamental idea of the Panopticon. Surveillance alone was power. To rephrase Focault, "we become the principle of our own subjection." The awareness of surveillance changes how we live.

All tyrannies understood that to control people they had to follow the Panopticon's model in which the people were to always perceive themselves as being potentially under surveillance. It was the perception that mattered more than the reality, eliminated the difference between private and personal, transformed Homo Sapiens into Homo Sovieticus (or Homosos in the dissident jargon), a self-righteous hypocrite, a politically correct criminal to whom Doublethink was natural.

Social media makes it easy to impose collectivist virtue signaling behaviors. Get a rainbow avatar to celebrate gay marriage. Retweet this social justice clickbait to show you're outraged at the thing that "the internet" is outraged by. Demonstrate that you engage in goodthinkful social justice thoughts and are guiltfree of crimethink.

The echo chamber, the political bubble, is also a Panopticon. Herd behaviors are rewarded. Dissent is punished. No one is quite sure who on their friend list might turn on them, denounce them for some "problematic" remark or lack of enthusiasm for a cause, cripple their social networking, their careers and their social life. Panic in the herd is routine. A social justice social media message is somehow wrong. A joke turns out to be offensive. The 21st century Winston Smith begins to breathe hard, apologizes for his political error and vows to educate himself on proper intersectionality principles.

He edges closer to the telescreen which is always watching him and always shouting at him to pay attention. It's the "paying attention" that matters more than the message.

The less you think, the safer you are. In a politically correct society, every idea is potentially "problematic". The safest attitude is to pass on approved ideas in exactly the terms which they were uttered. Any independent thinking or deviation even in support of the cause is dangerous. It may be "Problematic". It may be "Doubleplusungood Crimethink". It's safer just to retweet. To express ambiguous outrage and support for whatever is on the timeline Telescreen. To just appear to be part of the collective "outrage of the internet", to shame someone else for Social Justice Crimethink.

Instead of being shamed yourself for some problematic social justice offense.

Orwell's 1984 envisioned the Telescreen as a Panopticon erasing the privacy of the home.

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork." But social media and social justice warriors make for a much more efficient erasure of not only personal space, but mental space.

Thought Policing is the goal of Political Correctness. Crowdsourcing it makes it possible for a small number of angry activists and their amateur imitators to terrorize a large population.

The left has always understood the supreme value of controlling discourse. The media manufactured a consensus, shaping public opinion by creating the illusion that its view was public opinion. When Obama says that X "is not who we are", he is manufacturing our consensus and imposing his value system as our own. Push polls, personal perspective and man-on-the-street stories help reinforce this artificial consensus by personalizing it. But the media was always a basically crude tool.

Most Americans get their news from the media, but distrust its biases. Jon Stewart and his imitators radicalized the media by making bias into the news and eliminating the line between entertainment, editorial commentary and information, even while castigating the media for exactly these habits. The media eagerly embraced Stewart's savaging by turning up the bias and virtue signaling to eleven.

But in a Panopticon, the guards are meant to see all the prisoners, but never to be seen. The media is always seen, but can never see in. The media could speak through its Telescreen, but its Big Brothers couldn't listen in. It could not force the public to participate in its discourse. Often the public just tuned out the more bothersome media agendas.

Social media can see in. It avoids the problems that the NSA and any government surveillance program faces trying to sift through a ton of data by crowdsourcing it to the activist informer. Everyone can be the KGB now. Everyone can not only love Big Brother, but be Big Brother.

At least for 15 minutes or so.

The left's ultimate goal is the total politicization of society by eliminating personal space. The USSR originally did not want to build kitchens in homes, because it wanted workers eating in cafeterias. The kitchen is a private family space. A cafeteria is a public space that could be controlled. Even when the cafeterias failed, families were kept in collective apartments where dozens of people lived together in mutual hostility and distrust. In such a space, nothing is private or personal.

To totally control the individual, it is necessary to completely eliminate his personal spaces, his capacity for authenticity and individuality. In such an environment, every man becomes a convict, a prisoner of a social collective, a drone in a hive and a cringing beast in a frightened herd.

That is the Panopticon. It's the world that political correctness is building for us. It's made possible by technology and the eagerness of the crybully to put up a new iron curtain for his safe space.

Political correctness politicizes every area of life from food to literature to entertainment to clothes. Nothing is apolitical and therefore nothing is personal. The individual cannot be allowed to exist. He must join the collective. No government has made the Panopticon work perfectly, but the collective can.

The left is simply the war of an ideological collective against the individual. It is the war of the political against the personal. It is the war of power against freedom. It is the war of the progressive Panopticon against the mind of man.

The following are videos and transcripts of two talks that I recently gave on Muslim migration.

The first was at the Freedom Center's Restoration Weekend panel.


"Muslim Migration into Europe: Eurabia come True?" from DHFC on Vimeo.


Daniel Greenfield: There's an old Hemingway quote about going bankrupt. How did you go bankrupt? Two ways, gradually and then suddenly.

Here in the United States, we've had a front row seat to gradual bankruptcy. What does that mean? Under Obama, good policies have been replaced by bad policies. Good money has been replaced by bad money. Debt has been piled up in every state of the union. We have the same speech. The state of the union is strong. We're investing trillions of dollars in Muslim, green energy self-esteem. Of course, that's not an investment because an investment is when you get money back. It's just spending, but that's how you go bankrupt. And at the end of the day, the bill comes due and suddenly it's, "Where did all the money go?" "How did we suddenly go bankrupt?"

Now demographic bankruptcy is also a very real thing. Economic bankruptcy is when you have no more money. You wake up one morning. There's no more money. Demographic bankruptcy is when you wake up one morning. There are no kids, and this is a very real problem. You've heard China is abandoning its one-child policy. It's now going to be a two-child policy. Germany though has a one-child policy of its own. The German birthrate is 1.3. That's a one-child policy. That's a 1.3-child policy. There's a slight problem here because if you've got a birthrate of 1.3, and you've got socialism, who is going to pay for all of this? The entire system is based on the idea that the next generation is going to pay in, and the next generation is going to pay in, and this whole thing can keep running along indefinitely, but the Europeans aren't having kids. I grew up in Europe myself for sometime, and it wasn't unusual. I was one of the few kids running around. There are a lot of elderly people. There were some middle aged people. There were not that many young people, and it's actually getting worse these days.

So if you look at Germany, Germany is a very bad case scenario, but there are even countries that have lower birth rates. Now this is a problem because in the normal birth rate, you're supposed to have a pyramid. The younger workers at the bottom. Then it gets narrower. There are the middle age, and then there are the elderly. In Europe, the pyramid is upside down. You have the elderly at the very top. You have a small wedge of people who are middle aged, and you have a shrinking wedge of people who are young, which means they are going demographically bankrupt. Now Europe has been going demographically bankrupt for awhile now because of its falling birth rates, so the socialists who run it have come up with an absolutely amazing plan, which socialist plans can't possibly fail. They're going to solve this demographic bankruptcy and this resulting economic bankruptcy when there's nobody to do the work or pay the bills or even write the welfare checks by bringing in millions and millions of Muslims to fill in the gap. So you're going to have people from high birth rate countries come in, and they're going to be at the very bottom of the pyramid.

They're going to do the work, so Hans and Fritz will retire. They can retire at 55 or whatever. He'll get his pension, and that'll be fine, and Mohammed will come in, and he'll work hard, and he will have a lot of kids, and the whole socialist system will keep working great. There's just one, tiny, little, minor problem with it, and I'm not talking about the terrorism, the Sharia, the no-go zones, the attacks on Jews, or all the other fun stuff. There's just one other minor problem, which is that the people coming in don't actually work. Muslim unemployment rates, yeah. I mean you can count on socialists to bring in more people who don't work to a country where the problem is that too many people already aren't working.

But Muslim unemployment rates in Europe, it's not unusual to see unemployment rates in the 20 and 30 percentile range. Among youth, you see unemployment rates in the 50 and 60 percent range, and that's not because, as the excuses go, they're disaffected. They're not given work. They're not given opportunities. They don't want to work, and why should they want to work? Because there's a basic cultural difference between Europe, between the West, and Islam, the Muslim world. Europe, the West, we're a work ethic culture. We believe in working. We believe in coming home and saying okay, honey, what did you do? I worked 8 hours a day. That's great. The Muslim world, it does not work like that because the Muslim world is a slave culture. We're in the south now. We're in Charleston. We're supposed to feel very bad about slavery, which is a 19th century thing in America. In the Muslim world, it's a 20th century thing.

Saudi Arabia abolished slavery, I believe, in 1962. 1962. The JFK administration came to the Saudis, and they said maybe you should give human rights to women, and let people vote and get rid of the slaves. Back then we had a little more leverage with the Saudis than we do now, so the Saudis grumbled and said all right. All right. Fine. We'll get rid of the slaves. That was 1962. That was a great moment in Muslim human rights. The Muslim world has never really abolished slavery especially in the Middle East except because of European pressure. The English forced the Egyptians, for example, to get rid of slavery. The Saudis still have slavery, by the way. They just made it an even worse form of slavery. The original form of slavery, the slave owners would at least take care of the kids. They would take care of the old people. It was still evil, but it was slightly less evil. The Saudis and the Kuwaitis and the Qataris moved on to this kind of concentration camp slavery where you take workers at the peak of their lives. You take young workers. You burn everything out of them. In some cases, you downright kill them. Then you dump them back to the country where they come from with some pocket change. This is concentration camp slavery.

It's what the Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, that's what they're built on. They have huge work forces. All these nice skyscrapers, you see all these paradises for the rich, they are built by slave labor. They are built by thousands of people just dying in the heat building this thing. They are built by this, and it's like Sparta except we supply the military, and we supply the wealth, and they just sit around on their asses all day and own the slaves. That's the Saudi -- that's all these societies. These are societies where the idea at the top is not to work. You do not work. You see all these leaders who are fat, who are ridiculously fat. They look like they have trouble walking across the room. The Saudi royals, Qatar, that's because they don't walk across the room. They sit on their asses all day, and they have these servants from Africa usually fanning them with palm leaves or whatever, and they're not going to fan themselves with palm leaves because that's what slaves are for. That's how a slave culture works. Even the people who aren't at the top believe that work is something you're punished with. It's not something you want to do, and socialists, by the way, believe the same thing. Work isn't a good thing. It's something you have to be forced to do.

This is a slave culture, and in the slave culture when people come into a country where it has generous socialism, that has generous welfare policies, they're coming there not to work. In fact, you have the whole idea that these people are refugees. They are not refugees. They are not coming across the border from Syria, making it across the border into Germany, and saying, "Thank God, we're in Germany now. We can be safe from the civil war." That's not how it is. They're crossing into Jordan. They're crossing into Turkey. In Turkey, there's no war. There's no war in Jordan. They stop being refugees the moment they leave Jordan or Turkey, and when they head to Europe, they're no longer refugees. They are economic migrants. It is very important to remember that. There is no war in Turkey. There is no war in Jordan. They are not refugees once they leave Jordan or Turkey.

Now why are they going to Germany, for example? Why? What's so great about Germany? Now I interviewed some of these guys, and they say you know what's great about Germany? Hitler. We like Hitler. Germany is bringing in people to accord with tolerance and European values, and what these people admire most about Germany is Hitler. They may not have heard that he died awhile back, so they may be a little unclear about the details, but what's so great about Germany? What's so great about Sweden? Why are they all headed there? Welfare. It's a great welfare state. You have a German teacher asking her students in class what they wanted to be when they grew up. Susie, what do you want to do when you grow up? I want to be an ecological engineer. Hans, what do you want to be when you grow up? I want to fly hot air balloons. Mohammed, what do want to be when you grow up? I want to be on Hartz IV. Hartz IV is Germany's welfare.

Germany has very generous welfare policies. So does Sweden. They don't want to go to a lot of these countries. You have interviews with these refugees who are in Slovenia. They've never heard of Slovenia before. They're not interested in Slovenia. They don't want to live in Slovenia. Slovenia doesn't have great, free stuff. They want to go to Germany for all the free stuff they can get, so Europe is dealing with its demographic bankruptcy by bringing in more people who don't want to work, by bringing in more people who are going to take more out of the government than they're going to pay into it. So the socialists have actually managed to take a crisis that they are responsible for and made it even worse. Now how did demographic bankruptcy happen in the first place? How did you get to a 1.3 child rate? That's a ridiculous number. It's not China. Nobody was forcing women to have abortions. Nobody was marching in at gunpoint forcing them to have abortions.

This was Germany. They voluntary did this to themselves, and it's not just Germany. It's across Europe. Why did this happen? This happened because they decided that their future wasn't their children. There are two reasons that people have children. One's slightly cynical. Children take care of you in your old age. The second one is that you care about children. Children are the future. Europe, of course, has no future because it doesn't have children right now, so the first part, Muslims have high birth rates. They have very high birth rates, so when you have Muslims coming in to Sweden, you have Somalis, for example, coming into Sweden, they have a birth rate that's three or four times higher than the Swedish population. Syrians are coming to Germany. Germany, as I said, has a birth rate of 1.3. Syrians have a birth rate twice that. Afghans, who are the second biggest group, forget about the Syrians. The Afghan refugee boom is now becoming very huge. It's a country of 30 million. A quarter of them polled have said that they want to leave Afghanistan. One hundred thousand are expected to try to get into Europe this year.

But their birth rate is much higher because this is an investment program. This is a retirement program. Their kids take care of them in their old age. In Europe, your kids don't take care of you in your old age. The government takes care of you in your old age. Under socialism, you have a cradle to grave state. The problem is that Europe now has a lot more graves than it has cradles. It has a whole lot of people, who are elderly. It doesn't have a lot of cradles. It doesn't have a lot of kids. The Muslims are supposed to solve this problem, but, of course, their retirement plan is have a lot of kids, charge them for the government. It's not a great plan because, again, you're not producing any more workers.

Now the second idea was that in Europe the things you would care about were not your children. They would be progressive policies. People weren't living to see -- I want to see my kids get married. I want to live to see my grandkids get married. Hell, it's I want to live to see the European Union. I want to live to see diversity, and they're living to see it now. I want to see light rail. In the UK, they're talking about it's important to have no more than one child because of global warming. You can't have too many children because of global warming. So global warming, leftist policies matter to them more than their kids. That's why they have no kids. They have faced demographic bankruptcy because they faced economic bankruptcy, because they face ideological bankruptcy.

Now we're not immune to this stuff. We're going slower than Europe, but we're also going gradually, politically bankrupt. We're going economically bankrupt, and we're going demographically bankrupt. The Muslim population in the United States has increased 67 percent since September 11. It's a great way to commemorate September 11. Sixty-seven percent increase. The Muslim population in the United States is younger. Their birth rate is higher just like in Europe. In the UK, you can look at the sea at the bottom level. When you hear that Mohammed is the most popular name in the UK for children or the most popular name for children in Oslo -- so Oslo is 10 percent Muslim, but it's Muslim at the bottom where it matters, where the children are. And England and Wales it's 4 percent Muslim, but if you look at the children under 4, 9 percent are Muslim, and that is the future.

We think economic bankruptcy, the numbers sometimes sneak up on you because we don't pay attention to the numbers that matter. When it comes to demographic bankruptcy, the numbers that matter are under 30, under 20, under 10, under 4. The median age in Germany is 46. The median Muslim age in Germany is 34. They are a much younger population. They're having more kids which means they define the future. Now this is important for us to realize because this immigration thing is not just a problem of borders. It's a problem of values. It's important for us to have the children. It's important for us to raise the children that are going to be the future because if we fail to do that, if we do what the Europeans do then we turn it over. At some point we're going to be facing an economic crisis, and we're going to do what the Germans did, which is say we can bail ourselves out with 5,000, 10,000 Muslims. Germany expects 1.5 million Muslims, according to a leaked government document, but with family reunification that can be up to 7.3 million people, and that's just one country.

They're promising that this is going to solve our demographic problems. This is going to be the future, but what they've really done is said that our future, socialism, matters more to us than our country. It matters more to us than our people. It matters more to us than our children. We can't allow our United States to go that route. We can't allow refugee resettlement to fill our cities, to fill our towns with people who are supposed to be our future, who we are told are going to do the work that we don't want to do. Socialism is the underlying problem here. The migration we're seeing is caused by socialism. It's caused by left-wing policies, and now the left wing as it always does manages to make a crisis that they caused even worse. The United States is now going to be facing the same crisis. We saw that again with Obama recently. We're going to be seeing more and more of it as time goes by. If we don't recover the birth rate, if we don't fundamentally change the demographics, we're going to go the way of Europe.



This second talk is from the Glazov Gang, Jamie Glazov's video series.


Tonight I would like to talk to you about the greatest threat to national security. The weather.

As you might have heard, Global Warming is, according to the raving madmen running what’s left of the Democratic Party into the ground like a flaming comet, the greatest threat to national security.

Pay no attention to Paris. Never mind what happened in California. The real threat is your thermometer.

But tonight I want to break from the deep thoughts of such respected minds as Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama to talk about the true greatest threat to national security.

The jet plane.

Sometimes terrorists fly jet planes into buildings. Sometimes they arrive on them at airports, step out, smile and apply for political asylum.

That was how the ringleader of the original World Trade Center attack did it. He was a refugee.

These days the media has spent a lot of time talking about how we’ve been betraying the values of the Statue of Liberty by wanting to make sure that our country isn’t invaded by Islamic terrorists.

The funny thing about that is that a refugee Islamic terrorist actually headed up a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty. The man known as the Blind Sheikh, whose followers were linked not only to the World Trade Center bombing, but to a variety of other Jihadi-about-town terrorist activities, had a whole long list of New York City landmarks he wanted to blow up. And like every tourist, they included the Statue of Liberty.

But that seems only fitting because if there are two things Islamic terrorists really hate, it’s unveiled women and liberty. The greatest threat to national security, to our freedom and our future, isn’t the weather. It’s migration. In ancient times wars began when nomadic groups migrated into someone else’s territory. Today it’s our territory that is being migrated into.

A quarter of Afghans told Gallup that they want to leave, Afghanistan is a country of 30 million, and more than 100,000 are expected to try to go to Europe this year. Some simply found out that Germany was open and they began walking. That’s how these things begin, but it’s not how they end.

Some Syrians have actually made it over to our southern border. And I know the official story is that all the Syrian migrants are just widows and orphans hobbling on their missing legs to escape ISIS. And the moment they reach America, they kiss the ground and begin singing, “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

But in the real world, polls show that 1 in 5 Syrians supports ISIS and a third like the local Al Qaeda franchise.

A 2007 poll showed 77% supported financing Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood terror group operating in Israel, and about the same one were all for aiding the so-called Iraqi fighters who later morphed into ISIS.

Even the polling of Syrian refugees shows 13% support ISIS. 19% of them view America as the greatest threat. 37% of them oppose US airstrikes on ISIS.

These are the “poor victims” we’re taking in. And boy are we ever being taken in.

Even if that first 13% is as bad as it gets, that still means that Obama’s first hot batch of 10,000 Syrian refugees will contain 1,300 ISIS supporters.

What can 1,300 ISIS supporters do to America? Just wait and find out.

The United States already resettles more people than anyone else. Not a single Muslim country participates in the resettlement programs.

Not one.

Turkey and Jordan have refugee camps but they aren’t giving any of them citizenship. And the Syrians themselves, when they were flooded with Iraqi refugees, treated them like garbage and used them as sex slaves.

The United States does more than anyone else and we are being taken advantage of. Let’s look at some of the numbers.

There are an estimated 60 million people displaced or on the move. And as we’ve seen with Afghanistan, a whole lot of people can begin moving once the opportunity presents itself.

640 million people surveyed want to move somewhere else. 150 million of them would like to come to America. 42 million would like to move to Canada. That’s more than the entire population of Canada. 26 million would like to move to Australia. But Australia only has 23 million people.

26 million would like to move to Germany, and these days they can.

That poll was from 2012. The numbers would be even worse now.

The U.N. refugee agency says more than 218,000 migrants crossed the Mediterranean in October —more than in all of 2014. It estimates that more than 600,000 people crossed the Mediterranean this year.

Those are disturbing figures. Don’t take it from me. The spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees called some of them, "beyond anything that could have been expected even a few months ago." With chain migration, that’s only the beginning.

Germany froze family reunification for two years, because of estimates that each migrant would bring along as many as 8 family members.

Which means you have to multiply each migrant crossing the border by 8.

Now you can see why even Sweden is beginning for mercy.

Sweden is set to bring in 180,000 asylum seekers this year. This is a country where the young male population is at around 600,000.

But the real demographic bankruptcy is in the birth rate. In Sweden, a quarter of the children are already born to immigrant mothers. A lot of them are Somali Muslims. Somalia’s birth rate is three times higher than Sweden’s.

Germany’s birth rate is at 1.3. Syria’s birth rate is more than twice that. Afghanistan’s birth rate is four times that. European countries skew old. Muslim countries skew young. So, for example, the median age of Germany’s population is 46. The median age of its Muslim population is 34.

Once all the migrants, who are in the majority young men, are accounted for, the median age will be even lower. You hear a lot of worries about some European countries on the migration route ending up with more migrant men of fighting age than exist in the native population. That’s effectively an invasion.

But when you’re talking about countries with low birth rates, it’s not that hard to achieve a scenario where the young male migrants displace the young male population of the country.

It’s why Mohammed is the most popular name in the UK or in Oslo. Oslo is less than 10 percent Muslim, but it’s Muslim where it counts, among the youngest generation.

In the UK, 1 in 3 Muslims is under 15. Among children up to 4 years old, Muslims are at 9 percent. That’s double their proportion in the overall population.

The future of the UK is in that child population. And that population is already 9 percent Muslim. We like to think that it doesn’t apply to us, but it does. The Muslim population in the US has increased 67% since 9/11. The US has a higher birth rate, but most of the same numbers apply to us.

We’re not immune to math. We’re not immune to geometric progression.

The Muslim population in the US is younger, their birth rate is higher and the potential for national transformation is huge. Warfare, invasion, takes a younger population.

The Muslim world has a large disposable young male population. A chunk of that population is making its way to Europe even as we speak. It seems like a big chunk to us, but by their standards, it’s hardly noticeable. It’s that disposable young male population which doesn’t bother to get jobs, which parties and does drugs, then suddenly finds religion and redemption by killing a whole bunch of non-Muslims.

It’s not just Europe’s story. It’s our story too.

Think about the Tsarnaev brothers who went from drug dealers to Jihadists.

This is the national security threat that we are up against. It’s not as glamorous as Global Warming. There are no telethons and Al Gore won’t stand in front of a giant spreadsheet until the polar bears come here. But it’s real and it’s here now.

The real national security threat comes from the oldest form of war. Migration.

Entire civilizations were wiped out by migration. If we don’t shut the doors, we might become just another footnote in someone else’s ancient history.”

Holidays are a calendar. They mark points in emotional and physical time. They remind of us who we are.

Many of those celebrating Chanukah celebrate a holiday that does nothing more than celebrate 'celebration', the rituals and rites of entertainment, a special food, a symbol whose meaning they don't remember and a little family fun.

Chanukah is many things but it is not a safe holiday. It is a victory celebration in a guerrilla war. It is a reminder that Obama's war on Jerusalem was preceded long before him by Antiochus's war on Jerusalem. It is a brief light in a period of great darkness.

The great irony of Chanukah is that those likeliest to strip away its historical and religious meaning would have been fighting against the Macabees. The battle to preserve the meaning of Chanukah is part of the struggle to preserve the Jewish traditions and culture that the left attacks.

Today's struggle for Jerusalem, for Judaism, for freedom of religion and a meaningful life continues that same old struggle of Chanukah.

The overt militarism of the Chanukah story has made it an uncomfortable fit for liberal Jews who found it easier to strip away its dangerous underlying message that a time comes when you must choose between the destruction of your culture and a war you can't win. In those dark days a war must be fought if the soul of the nation is to survive.

There are worse things than death and slavery, the fate that waited for the Maccabees and their allies had they failed, the fates that came anyway when the last of the Maccabees were betrayed and murdered by Caesar's Edomite minister, whose sons went on to rule over Israel as the Herodian dynasty.

Nations can survive the mass murder of their bodies, but not the death of their spirit. A nation does not die, until its soul dies, and the soul of a nation is in its culture and its faith, not in the bodies of its citizens.

Tonight that first candle, that first glimmer of flame over oil, marks the night that the Maccabee forces entered Jerusalem, driving out the enemy armies and their Jewish collaborators, and reclaiming their people's culture and religion.

The light of the flame was a powerful message sent across time that even in the darkest hour, hope was not lost. And Divine Providence would not abandon the people. Time passed the Maccabees fell, Jerusalem was occupied and ethnically cleansed over and over again, and still the menorah burned on. A covert message that still all hope was not lost. That Israel would rise again. 

Israel had used signal fires and torches held up on mountain tops to pass along important news. The lighting of the menorah was a miniature signal fire, a perpetuation of the temple light, its eight-day light a reminder that even the smallest light can burn beyond expectation and light beyond belief and that those who trust in G-d and fight for the freedom to believe in Him, should never abandon hope.

That divine signal fire first lit in the deserts by freed slaves has been passed on for thousands of years. Today the menorah is on the seal of the State of Israel, the product of a modern day Chanukah. The mark of a Jerusalem liberated in a miracle of six days, not eight. Six as in the number of the original temple Menorah. And the one on the seal as well.

For those liberals who believe that Jewish identity should be limited to donating to help Haiti, agitating for illegal aliens and promoting the environment; Chanukah is a threatening holiday. They have secularized it, dressed it up with teddy bears and toys, trimmed it with the ecology and civil rights of their new faith. Occasionally a Jewish liberal learns the history of it and writes an outraged essay about nationalism and militarism, but mostly they are content to bury it in the same dark cellar that they store the rest of the history of their people and the culture that they left behind.

Holidays aren't mere parties, they are messages. Knots of time that we tie around the fingers of our lives so that we remember what our ancestors meant us to never forget. That they lived and died for a reason. The party is a celebration, but if we forget what it celebrates, then it becomes a celebration of celebration. A hollow and soulless festival of the self. The Maccabees fought because they believed they had something worth fighting for. Not for their possessions, but for their traditions, their families and their G-d. The celebration of Chanukah is not just how we remember them, but how we remember that we are called upon to keep their watch. To take up their banner and carry their sword.

History is a wheel and as it turns, we see the old continents of time rising again, events revisiting themselves as the patterns of the past become new again. Ancient battles become new wars. And old struggles have to be re-fought again until we finally get them right.

Modiin, the rural center of the old Maccabee resistance, is a revived city today, larger than it ever was. Modiin-Maccabim has some 80,000 people living there. In the ancient days, this was where the Maccabee clan rose against the Seleucid conquerors over religious freedom. Today it is a place that the European Union labels an illegal settlement. A place that Jews have no right to live even though it is within sight of the Maccabees who lived and died there. Over two thousand years after Chanukah, Jews are still not allowed to live in peace in Modiin.

The new Maccabees are farmers and teachers, men and women who build families and homes in the lands of their ancestors, who brave the threats of terrorists and international tyrants to live their lives and raise their children. Knowing that they will not be allowed to live in peace, that everything they stand for is hated by the UN, in the capitals of great empires and even by their own government, they still put flame to wick and mark the first day of many days of the miracle that revived the spirit of a nation and inspires it to this day.

Not only may Jews not live in Modiin, but they may not live in Jerusalem either. And yet they do. They persist, to the eternal frustration of empires, in this quiet resistance of building a future with their buildings, their bodies and their lives. They persist in living where so many would like them to die. And they persist in lighting the menorah when so many would rather that it be forgotten.

The Jew today is called on to forget. To turn his children into bricks in order to construct the utopia of their new world order. To bend to the progressive wheel and wear the social justice chain, and cast his own offspring into the sea of zero population growth. To give up his  nation, his land, his faith and his future to toil in the shadow of the pyramids of socialism. To go down to labor in Egypt once more, in South America and Haitian slums, in barrios and villages, in ghettos and madinas, to give up who he is in order to serve others in the new slavery of social justice.

It takes courage to resist physical oppression, but it takes even greater courage to resist cultural oppression. The terms of physical resistance are easy to understand. Force is used against force. Cultural resistance is far more difficult, and by the time the necessity for it is apparent, it can often be too late.The Maccabees had to resist not only physical oppression and armed force, but the cultural oppression of a system that regarded their monotheism, their nationalism, their traditions and rituals as barbaric. A system that much of their own fellow Jews had already accepted as right and proper.

The Maccabees rose up not only against physical oppression, Israel had and would face that over and over again, they rose up against an assault on their religious and cultural  identity.  The lighting of the Menorah is the perpetuation of that cultural resistance and when it is performed properly then it reminds us that cultural oppression, like physical oppression, is ubiquitous, and that just as the forms of cultural oppression can often go unnoticed, so too the resistance to it can go unnoticed as well.

Every year that we celebrate Chanukah, the left makes another attempt to "desecrate the temple" by destroying its meaning and replacing it with the usual grab bag of social justice issues under the union label of "Tikkun Olam". And each time we push back against their ruthless assault on Jewish history and tradition the same way that the Maccabees did, by reclaiming our sacred places, cleaning away the filth left behind by the occupiers, and lighting the Menorah to remind us of who we are.

Chanukah marks the culmination of the Maccabee campaign for the liberation of Jerusalem. It is the time when we remember the men and women who refused to submit to the perversion of their values and the theft of their land. It reminds us that we must not allow our land to be stolen under any guise or allow our religion, history and culture to be perverted on any pretext. The light of the Menorah reminds us that the sacredness of a nation is in its spirit and that preserving that spirit is an eternal struggle against the conquerors of land and the tyrants of souls.

Chanukah is a Holiday of Resistance. It commemorates the physical and spiritual resistance that is required of us sooner or later in all times. Chanukah takes us back to the armed resistance and the moral awakening that liberated Jerusalem and connected the Jewish people with their G-d once again. And that reminds us to never give up, not in the face of an assault on our bodies or on our culture. The lights go out, but they are lit again, each day, for thousands of years, reminding us to hold on to our traditions and our faith, rather than trade them in for the trendy trinkets and cheap jewelery of progressive liberalism.

To light the menorah on Chanukah is to pass on a signal fire that has been kept lit for thousands of years. From the first holiday of Passover, after which the freed slaves kindled the first Menorah, to the final holiday of Chanukah, that light burns on. The historical cycle of Jewish holidays begins with Moshe confronting Pharaoh and demanding the freedom of the Jewish people. It ends with the Maccabees standing up to the tyranny of Antiochus and fighting for the right of the Jewish people to live under their own rule on their own land.

The lights of the menorah embody the spirit of the Jewish people. A spirit that has outlived the atrocities of every tyrant. In the heart of the flame that has burned for a thousand years lives the soul of a people.