Keith Lamont Scott was scum.

He had been convicted of assault with a deadly weapon in two different states and convicted of assault in three states. He had been hit with “assault with intent to kill” charges in the 90s. His record of virtue included “assault on a child under 12” and “assault on a female.”

Scott's wife had taken out a restraining order against him and warned that he was dangerous because he carried a gun.

The media spin; “Family and neighbors call Scott a quiet ‘family man.’”

Nothing says “quiet” like “assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill” and nothing says “family man” like assaulting women and children.

Keith Lamont Scott, the latest martyr of Black Lives Matter and its media propaganda corps, was shot while waving a gun around. He had spent 7 years in jail for “aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.”

This vicious monster’s career of crime ended when he was shot by Brentley Vinson, an African-American police officer, protecting himself from the latest rampage by this “quiet family man.”

Brentley Vinson is everything that Scott isn’t. The son of a police officer, Brentley dreamed of following in his father’s footsteps. He used to organize his football team’s bible studies and mentored younger players. Former teammates describe him as a “great guy” with “good morals.” His former coach calls him a “natural leader” and says that, “We need more Brent Vinsons… in our communities.”

Except that Obama, Black Lives Matter, the media, the NAACP and everyone else going after this bright and decent African-American officer has decided that what we really need are more Keith Lamont Scotts. And the streets of Charlotte are full of “Scotts” throwing rocks at police, assaulting reporters and wrecking everything in sight in marches that are as “peaceful” as Scott was a “quiet family man.”

That’s what Hillary Clinton wanted when she tweeted that, “We have two names to add to a long list of African-Americans killed by police officers. It’s unbearable, and it needs to become intolerable.”

What exactly should be intolerable? An African-American police officer defending his life against a violent criminal who happened to be black? Should black criminals enjoy a special immunity? The greatest victims of black criminals are black communities.

Whom does Hillary Clinton imagine she’s helping here? Instead of standing with heroic African-American police officers like Vinson, she’s championing criminal scum like Scott.

Tim Kaine, Hillary’s No. 2, wants us to think about Scott’s family. We should do that. Scott’s brother announced on camera that all “white people” are “devils.” Timmy should check to see if he can get an exemption from white devildom. But if there are any white devils, it’s men like Kaine and women like Hillary who enable the worst behavior in a troubled community while punishing those who try to help.

Every time the lie about “peaceful” protests is repeated, another black community becomes unlivable.

Twenty police officers have been injured and National Guard troops have arrived to deal with all those “peaceful” protests. Protesters chanted, “Black Lives Matter” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” before throwing things at police and then peacefully shooting each other. Stores had their windows broken and decorated with Black Lives Matter graffiti. A Walmart was peacefully looted and trucks were torched.

A police officer was peacefully hit by a car. Another was peacefully hit in the face with a rock. Mobs besieged and attempted to break into hotels. Reporters were attacked and a photographer was nearly thrown into a fire. White people were targeted by the racist Black Lives Matter mob and assaulted.

But all these peaceful rioters are probably just quiet family men too.

The peaceful protests are as big a lie as the “bookish” Keith Lamont Scott reading a book in his car. Police had no trouble finding a gun. They couldn’t have found Scott anywhere near a book. The only thing he could have done with a book is try to beat someone to death with it. Maybe a child.

Scott wasn’t a quiet family man; he was a violent criminal with a horrifying vicious streak. He and the rest of the Black Lives Matter rioters remind us of the monsters that we need dedicated police officers to protect us from.

The spin on what happened between a deranged black criminal and a courageous black police officer fell apart as fast as the Freddie Gray case, where black police officers were targeted and a city terrorized over conspiracy theories relating to the accidental death of a drug dealer.

The claims of racism are absurd. Not only was Scott shot by an African-American police officer, but Charlotte Police Chief Kerr Putney, who has taken the lead in defending him, is also African-American.

Are we supposed to believe that an African-American police officer and an African-American police chief are racists or that these two black men took the lead in a genocidal conspiracy to kill black men?

That’s the laughable premise of the racist Black Lives Matter hatefest that alternates between “Stop killing us” street theater and violent assaults on police officers, reporters and anyone in the area.

But the truth doesn’t matter. Black Lives Matter rioters are still chanting, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” long after the Michael Brown lie fell apart. They’re holding up signs reading, “It Was a Book.” The lie is backed by some of the biggest media corporations in the country, by $130 million from George Soros and the Ford Foundation, by Barack Hussein Obama and by Hillary Clinton.

These are the malign forces destroying Charlotte, as they trashed Baltimore. On the ground there are the vulture community organizers of Black Lives Matter, funded by the left, who parachute in to organize race riots, behind them are the reporters who sell the spin live on the air and the photographers who capture glamor shots of the racist rioters, and after them come the lawyers of the DOJ out to ruin, terrorize and intimidate whatever law enforcement survived the riots.

They did it in Ferguson and a dozen other places. Now they want to do it in Charlotte.

They want to do it because they hate white people and black people. They hate peace and decency. They hate the idea of people getting up in the morning and working for a living. They hate the idea of good officers, white and black men and women, like Brentley Vinson, who genuinely believe in doing the right thing. They want unearned power. They demand unearned wealth. And they thrive on destruction.

This is the real evil in Charlotte. And we need to stand up to it. From the ghetto to the manors of the liberal elite from burning cars to pricey restaurants in exclusive neighborhoods, it plots against us.

It is a lie repeated a million times. Sometimes the lie is simple. Other times it’s sophisticated. But the way to fight it is to begin with the truth.

The truth is that Keith Lamont Scott was a violent criminal who came to a bad end because of his own actions. Just like Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and too many other Black Lives Matter martyrs to count.

The truth is that everything Black Lives Matter does reminds us of why we need police officers.

The truth is that this is not about race, but about those who want to build and those who want to destroy. It’s about the difference between Brentley Vinson and Keith Lamont Scott.

It’s about what kind of country we want to be. Is it a country that celebrates a young black football player who chose to follow in his father’s footsteps, who organized bible study and helped others, who risked his life to keep other people safe. Or is it one that celebrates Keith Lamont Scott, who assaulted a woman, a child and anyone else he could get at, who terrorized three states and died as he lived.

Obama and the left want a nation of Keith Lamont Scotts. But now it’s our turn to choose.

The sort of people who set off class wars as a hobby have very particular classless societies in mind. The average left-wing revolutionary is not poor. He is a homicidal dilettante from the upper classes with a burning conviction of his own importance that he is unwilling to realize through disciplined labor. His revolution climaxes with a classless society in which he is at the very top.

Not near the top, not adjacent to the top, as he usually was before, but at the very top.

Utopia has a class system. At the top are the thinkers, the philosopher kings who develop plans based on how things ought to be and then turn them over to lesser men to actually implement. They are the priestly class of an ideological movement whose deity is politics and whose priests are politicians.

In a planned economy, they are the titans of industry and finance, they are the heads of banks and the men who move millions and billions around the board, and they are utterly unfit for the job. But they also make decisions in matters of war and science. And in all things. They measure political heresy in all things and all the activities of man are measured against their dogma and rewarded or punished.

This is the way it was in the Soviet Union or Communist China. But take a closer glance at the White House and see if you don't spot the occasional similarity.

In the middle of Utopia's class system is the middle class. This is not the middle class you are familiar with. There are no small business owners here. No one striving to make it up the ladder. Utopia's middle class is the bureaucracy, the interlinked hive mind of government and non-profits.

At the top of Utopia's class system are the philosopher-planners who issue the regulations. Or rather they offer objectives. The bureaucracy filters them through successive layers, transforming grandiose ideas into stultifying regulations and each successive layers expands them into further microcosms of unnecessary detail. This expansion of regulations also expands the bureaucracy. One feeds off the other.

Utopia has no lower class. That would be dystopian. Instead it has a client class. The client class is what used to be known as the working class. Utopia however transforms it into the welfare class.

Clienture transforms the working class into the welfare class. The destruction of the conditions under which the working class can exist forces its members either upward into the bureaucracy, a feat that is only possible for the younger generation willing to undergo the educational process, or downward into the welfare class.

The client class justifies the existence of Utopia's upper and middle class which are, in theory, dedicated to public service, to remedying the ills of an unfair society, which has been made fair by eliminating all free will and individual choice. But the client class exists to be subsidized. And its subsidies justify the subsidizing of the upper and middle classes of the planners and the bureaucrats.

This is Utopia's crisis.

Its upper class of philosopher kings expect to live like kings. They want to vacation in Aspen and New England. They want Bernie's summer home and Hillary's flat broke houses. And that does not come cheap. Utopia's middle class expects to live the way that our middle class does. And yet none of them actually produce anything. They will, in Obama and Elizabeth Warren's "You didn't build that" formula, claim that their public service makes the condition of productivity possible.

There is one problem with that. Their public service actually inhibits production. Whatever the rhetoric, they spend all their days killing the geese that lay the golden eggs. And then they are insulted when the goose doesn't recognize their contribution to her golden egg-laying.

Utopia has a series of interdependent classes that are subsidized by a productive class that is being starved out of existence. The inevitable outcome of such a system is one in which the lower classes are worked to death to subsidize its betters and the middle class is robbed by the upper class.

The left thus creates the predatory economic system it preaches against as a way of life. Its own abuses are inevitably worse than the system it replaces because it is not only exploitative, but its exploitation actively inhibits production.

The wave of Muslim refugee terror began with a bomb targeting a U.S. Marine charity run in New Jersey. By evening a pressure cooker full of shrapnel has exploded outside a Manhattan building for the blind. An hour later, a rampaging Muslim terrorist began stabbing people inside a Macy’s, asking them if they were Muslim and shouting the name of “Allah,” the genocidal Islamic deity of mass murder.

And that was one Saturday, two Muslim refugees and a wave of national terror 1,200 miles apart.

What did Elizabeth, New Jersey and St. Cloud, Minnesota have in common?

New Jersey has the second largest Muslim population in the country. This isn’t the first time it was used as a staging ground for Muslim terror.

11 of the 19 September 11 hijackers hung out in Paterson (known colloquially as Paterstine). Head toward Jersey City and you can see where Muslim enemies of this country stood on rooftops and cheered the attacks on September 11. It’s also where the World Trade Center bombing mastermind and the Blind Sheikh who provided religious guidance for a proposed wave of Islamic terror operated.

Go south and in Elizabeth you can pass the First American Fried Chicken joint where the Rahami clan made life miserable for their American neighbors before one of their spawn began his bombing spree.

New Jersey is a map of Muslim terror plots because of its huge Muslim population.

Ahmad Khan Rahami came to America as the son of an Afghan refugee. He stabbed a man two years ago. His family was a local nuisance who cried “Islamophobia” at the least provocation. His brother was a Jihadi sympathizer and may have fled the country after assaulting a police officer. By the time Ahmad was done, he had wounded a police officer and 29 other people. If his plot had succeeded, he might have pulled off the largest Muslim terror atrocity in the country since September 11.

Sadly, Syrian Muslim “refugees” continued to be dumped in Elizabeth, NJ to seed the next wave of Muslim terror. The International Rescue Committee, one of the two largest migrant agencies plaguing the Garden State, is based in Elizabeth, 8 minutes away from the Rahimi chicken place.

Last year Erol Kekic, the head of the group, insisted that the issue would “blow over.” Instead of blowing over, it’s blowing up.

Minnesota has suffered from the presence of the largest Somali migrant population in the country. And so a state which used to be known for its Swedish and German immigrants instead became a recruiting ground for ISIS and Al-Shabab. Al-Shabab, which is aligned with Al Qaeda, attacked the Westgate mall in Kenya a few years ago. The Somali killers quizzed their victims to distinguish Muslims from non-Muslims.

Dahir Adan, the Somali Muslim migrant who invaded America from a refugee camp in Kenya, attempted to duplicate that attack, asking those he stabbed at the Crossroads Mall if they were Muslims.

Dozens of Somali migrants in America have joined Al-Shabab and ISIS. The only difference between Dahir Adan and them is that instead of getting on a plane back to his native Somalia to join the local Jihadists, he carried out his Jihad against the nighttime shoppers in a Macy’s.

The Crossroads attack was the tragic price paid by innocent people for Muslim refugee resettlement.

Muslim Somali migration dramatically increased under Obama, rising from 2,500 in 2008 to around 8,000 and 9,000 in the last few years. Somali settlers represent almost 1 percent of the population of Minnesota. Most of the “refugees” dumped in St. Cloud were Somalis migrants and Lutheran Social Services has taken the lead in inflicting Somalis on the unfortunate natives of St. Cloud.

From the very beginning of their arrival, the Somali colonists were a problem for the people of St. Cloud. They displaced American workers and clashed with the native population. In this decade, St. Cloud has become 10% Somali. The Crossroads attack was the inevitable result of that demographic growth.

What happened in New Jersey and Minnesota is the same thing that has been happening in Europe. Islamic terrorism is caused by Muslim migration. As the Muslim population grows, so does its terror.

Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton had declared that the Somali occupation of the state is here to stay. “Minnesota is not like it was 30, 50 years ago," he sneered. "Anybody who cannot accept your right to be here should find another state.”

Now Dayton has condemned the “religious bigotry” that motivated the Crossroads attack and declared that, “There is no place in Minnesota for intolerance of all Americans’ constitutional right to worship according to their beliefs.”

But the preferred mode of worship of Dahir Adan came from the religious book that he listed as his favorite, the Koran. “Slay the idolaters wherever you find them,” (Koran 9:5), “Strike upon the necks and strike from them every fingertip,” (Koran 8:12) and “Fight them until there is no unbelief and the religion, all of it, is for Allah” (Koran 8:39). Islamic worship is murdering those who exercise religious freedom. That’s what Dahir Adan was doing at the mall when he asked his victims if they were Muslims.

You can have religious freedom or Islam. You can have the Constitution or the Koran. But you can’t have both.

“I ask everyone in the St. Cloud area and throughout Minnesota to rise above this atrocity and act to make religious and racial tolerance one of the ways in which Minnesotans again lead our country,” Governor Dayton has said. If he and other Minnesotans really want religious tolerance, then the only possible way to achieve it is by ending the disastrous settlement of Somali Muslims in Minnesota.

The anniversary of September 11 has come and gone. And we have learned nothing from the experience. The cesspools of Muslim terror in New Jersey have only grown. And no amount of moments of silence will clean them up. The latest terror plot in New York City originates from the same swamp.

Meanwhile peaceful states like Minnesota have become terror hubs through refugee resettlement.

Refugee resettlement is becoming our biggest terror threat. Obama wants to hike next year’s refugee admissions to 110,000. That’s a 57% increase since 2015. The summer’s statistics showed that more Muslims were being admitted as refugees than Christians.

This weekend’s wave of terror is the result of our refugee policy. And that policy is getting worse.

Ahmad Khan Rahami and Dahir Adan were the products of our refugee policy of yesteryear. Today’s refugee policy will have far deadlier consequences and produce far more terror attacks.

Saturday was a bloody day of Muslim terror, but as the red tide of Muslim migration washes up on our shores, every day in our future will be a day of Muslim terror.

Only ending Muslim migration can stop that.

The two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan were known as “Little Boy” and “Fat Man.” The world today has two new nuclear bombs.

One is named “Fat Bill.” The other is named “Little Hillary.”

The “Bill Clinton” bomb is the one getting the most headlines as North Korea continues testing its nuclear weapons. The Communist dictatorship is on its fifth test already and achieved an explosion almost at the level of “Little Boy” which was dropped on Hiroshima.

North Korea has let it be known that this test has allowed it to produce standardized nuclear warheads “able to be mounted on strategic ballistic rockets” so that it can “produce at will and as many as it wants a variety of smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear warheads of higher strike power.”

Kim doesn’t just want a nuke. He wants a lot of nukes. And at the rate he’s going, he will have them.

And the man to thank for all that is Bill Clinton.

In the fall of ’94, Clinton told the American people that his deal with North Korea would help bring “an end to the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean Peninsula.

“After 16 months of intense and difficult negotiations with North Korea, we have completed an agreement that will make the United States, the Korean Peninsula, and the world safer. Under the agreement, North Korea has agreed to freeze its existing nuclear program and to accept international inspection of all existing facilities,” Bill Clinton assured the country.

He lied.

The North Korean Deal was as worthless as his wife’s Iran deal. North Korea never kept its agreement. Like the Iran Deal, the North Korean Deal was never ratified by the Senate. Named the “Agreed Framework”, it amounted to as little as its name implied. Clinton’s people knew that North Korea had a uranium enrichment program going but chose to look away from its violations of the agreement because it would have been a political embarrassment for their boss and his diplomatic achievement.

The already worthless deal quickly became even more worthless once it was implemented. Like the Iran Deal there were secret deals within the deal, some of which still remain secret, likely because they reveal the scope of the Clinton sellout to the Communist dictatorship.

Inspections were delayed indefinitely. North Korea’s nuclear program had become known when it had previously delayed IAEA inspections for seven years. This time around it refused to resume inspections until we built them a nuclear power plant. Seven years after the deal, the IAEA was still trying to get access. Toward the end, the projected timeline for full inspections had been pushed to 2009.

On January 2003, North Korea announced that “We have no intention of producing nuclear weapons and our nuclear activities at this stage will be confined only to peaceful purposes such as the production of electricity." In April, it announced that it had nuclear weapons.

North Korea’s violations were only made public under Bush. And so Clinton’s people who had given us the worthless deal blamed Bush’s people for scuttling their wonderful agreement.

Clinton’s North Korean Deal shared the same silly premise as the Iran Deal. It was based on the conviction that what North Korea really wanted wasn’t nuclear weapons, but nuclear power. If we just gave North Korea 500,000 metric tons of fuel oil a year and built some lighter nuclear reactors for the Communist dictator, it would lose all interest in building a bomb.

In a surprising twist that no one could have predicted, it turned out that North Korea wasn’t trying to cut electricity costs for its population of terrified starving slaves.

It really did want a bomb.

Bill Clinton sold America the same bill of goods on North Korea that Obama did on Iran. North Korea would have its isolation eased and “our relationship” with it would develop.

He was right about that. Our relationship developed to the point of North Korea threatening us with the nuclear weapons that he promised us it wouldn't have. Bill’s relationship with North Korea developed to the point of a paid speaking gig that was turned down by the ethics office at the State Department.

That’s the first Clinton Bomb. It’s named “Fat Bill.” North Korea has also supplied nuclear technology to Iran. And that’s the other Clinton Bomb.

It’s called “Little Hillary.”

Hillary Clinton has been very eager to claim credit for the Iran Deal. Indeed her boss’ worthless deal with the nuclear terror state closely echoes her husband’s worthless deal with another nuclear terror state.

Even the rhetoric was the same. In Bill’s speech, he claimed that the deal with North Korea “does not rely on trust.” In Obama’s speech, he insisted that, “this deal is not built on trust.”

Except that it did and it does.

Iran got to collect its own samples and turn them over to the IAEA. That’s the definition of trust.

Two new nuclear reactors are being built. Like the North Korean variety, they’re supposed to be strictly light-water. Secret exemptions allow Iran to store unknown amounts of low-enriched uranium that can be purified into highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium and to maintain hot cells that can be used for plutonium separation. And the agreement actually starts to lapse after 11 years, instead of in 15 years, allowing Iran to double its rate of enrichment with a six month breakout time to a nuclear bomb.

On that “conservative” timetable, Iran will go nuclear even faster than North Korea.

Like North Korea, Iran will keep its real weapons program going on the side. It isn’t interested in nuclear power, but in nuclear weapons.

North Korea showed off its real agenda throughout the deal by continuing to develop ballistic missiles. Now it’s finalizing the process of being able to mount nuclear warheads on those missiles.

Like North Korea, Iran is working hard on its ballistic missile program. And Iranian ballistic missiles are based on North Korean ballistic missiles. They have the same purpose. Iran’s most recent test in July made use of the North Korean BM-25 Musudan ballistic missile which can travel 2,500 miles. That’s based on a Russian missile that carried a 1 megaton nuclear warhead.

For the Iran Deal to be credible, we have to trust that Iran doesn’t want a nuclear bomb.

Hillary initiated the pivot to let Iran continue enriching uranium. As her campaign adviser said, “She recognized the difficulty of reaching a solution with zero enrichment.”

As with the rest of her politics, Hillary Clinton has held an infinite number of positions on Iran’s nuclear enrichment. But behind closed doors, this was her true position.

North Korea’s “Fat Bill” bomb and Iran’s “Little Hillary” bomb are interconnected. The two terror states, one red and the other green, one left-wing and the other Islamic, help each other.

Much as Bill helped North Korea and Hillary helped Iran.

The world faces the prospect of two terror states armed with nuclear weapons as the legacy for two politicians named Clinton who sold out their country and ushered in a new age of nuclear terror.

If a North Korean bomb is used in war, it will be Bill’s bomb. And if Iran uses nuclear weapons, it will be Hillary’s hellish explosion.

Stopping the two Clinton bombs may be the biggest national security challenge for a future president.

Looking back at 9/11 through the tunnel of years, like watching the painfully blue light of the memorial towers of light sweep the sky, is both remote and vast. Looking back through time is like looking at a mountain or the sky. At a skyscraper or thousands of graves. A vastness beyond meaning.

"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here," Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address. It was not that way at Gettysburg, but it has been that way at Ground Zero. All the words fall away and we are left only with the shock and the horror.

The hole in the world.

It is the second part of Lincoln's phrasing that reveals where the hole in our world lies. "It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here, have, thus far, so nobly advanced."

What unfinished work was advanced since that day? What work is there to advance? The Civil War could be won. The dead of Pearl Harbor could be laid to rest with victory. It is the dead of the unfinished wars who haunt us. It is why the Vietnam MIA is still with us. Victory carries its own meaning. As does even defeat. It is the twilight of the unfinished war whose meaning is unclear. When we cannot put a purpose to death, then it haunts us with the mortality of meaninglessness.

The true horror of death is not personal fear. It is the creeping sense of futility. The terror that we labor in vain and sacrifice for naught. It is this mortality of purpose against which we erect walls of conviction and ideas in order to achieve national and civilizational immortality.

Our work is civilizational purpose. In war, victory. In peace, prosperity. In industry, ingenuity. In science, scholarship. In fellowship, freedom. In contention, character.

Civilization is the passage of meaning from the dead to the living. The unfinished work of the dead is the perpetuation of their civilization. When our civilization is under attack, then we fight to keep it alive. But when we lose sight of what our civilization is, then we lose the meaning of the combat.

When we do not know what the unfinished work is, then we are unable to finish it. We are beset by a sense of purposelessness. We sense our own civilizational mortality.

War and civilization have one thing in common. At their most elementary level, they require that we know both the enemy and ourselves. The failure to know one is also the failure to know the other.

In previous wars, both sides knew the enemy all too well. In this war, we do not know the enemy or ourselves. We cannot define the borders between us. Moral equivalence all too easily creeps in. We kill and they kill. We bomb and they bomb. We have beliefs and they have beliefs.

A civilization that does not know itself easily falls into such childish equivalences. It ricochets from a borderless equivalence to a bordered tribalism both of which deny our exceptionalism. The former make a special exception for everyone else while the latter make a special exception for us. But neither know who we are except that we are us. Or rather, cynically, that we happen to be us.

Our unfinished work is not merely the defeat of terrorists. It is not even the defeat of Islam. Both are symptoms. They are diseases that attack troubled civilizations. Our unfinished work is civilization.

Civilization is the means by which we know ourselves. It is in the character of our arts, our wisdom, our striving, our achievements and our decency. Civilized men and women are not threatened by barbarians. They apply their skill and strength to subdue or destroy them. It is when civilization loses the ability to distinguish between its own virtues and those of the barbarian that it is destroyed.

If we had been civilized, then 9/11 would have been a temporary tragedy. But we had lost the ability to distinguish between ourselves and the barbarians. Out of this loss of confidence, we set out on a missionary expedition to save them by converting them to our faith in democracy. When that failed, we encouraged them to come and convert us to their faith in our inferiority and their superiority.

For that, when all else is swept aside, is what Islam is. It is the conviction that the infidel is inferior and the Islamic man his superior. It is this testament of faith embodied in the cry, Allahu Akbar.

The barbarian measures his superiority purely in strength. And when civilized men lose their civilization, but not their survival instincts, then they too do likewise. Even when it ends in victory, the work remains unfinished. Civilizations are not built by momentary victories, but by character.

America was not born because George Washington had the bigger army, but because those fighting for independence had the character to persevere and endure where the British and their mercenaries did not. They knew what they were fighting for and it was a bigger dream than mere empire.

The dream is that unfinished work. It is this unfinished work that animates civilizations.

A finished civilization is an edifice. A growing civilization has unfinished work... whose labors it envisions, harnessing its energies and applying its vision to leap from one grand purpose to another.

The fight against Islamic terrorism is unfinished for the same reasons that a thousand other symptoms of the malaise can be spotted in our civilization. We do not know who we are. We have skills, but we lack purpose. We have strength, but not virtue. We have conviction, without character. We have inherited the greatest civilization the world has ever seen, but we are preparing for its passing.

If we knew who we were, then we would also know who our enemies are. And the battle would be joined. If we knew who we were, then we could give the dead rest. If we knew who we were, we would not only win, but we would deserve to win. There would be no more apologies, hesitations and half-measures. There would be no more appeasement and insecurity. We would rise and win.

The forgetting has been a long process. Few living today can even remember a time before the great forgetting overtook us and we lost confidence, meaning and purpose. But the forgetting can be undone. The meaning is in each of us. We express it not only in words and essays, but in how we live our lives and how we give them up. In this way, war is a foreshortening of civilization.

And yet the same sacrifices and challenges of war are present in our ordinary lives. If we doubt that, consider the men who raced up impossible heights, their backs weighed with equipment, to save lives. For a brief shining moment, we saw them as examples to emulate. And then the noise and mire of the media carried us away again. And we laughed and we sighed and we forgot.

Civilization is aspiration. When we reach for something higher and better, it makes us stronger. When we admire actual heroes, then we touch the nobility on which great civilizations are built.

We exist in a vast universe. Each twinkling star in the night sky sweeps around it unknown, unseen worlds. Even the smallest mountain dwarfs us. Our cities are nothing to the ocean tide. Our voices are nothing to the howl of the storm. It is the vastness of our aspirations that carry us forward.

Our unfinished work is not merely to defeat the barbarians, but to build up a civilization against which not only their malice will crumble, but which will outshine them to nothingness.

Then the ghosts, the shapes half-seen in the blue rays of light, the twilight voices in the humid September air, will have their peace.

Time brings distance to all events. No pain is as fresh twenty years later as on the day it happened. The shock of the impossible becomes the new normal and then it becomes more background noise.

"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic," Joseph Stalin said. The statisticians in Doha, Tehran and Riyadh know it quite well when they count up their numbers. Compound death is more than a statistic; it is incomprehensible.

The banal media coverage of September 11 grapples with a story too big to tell that can only be broken down into human fragments of personal stories.

This is true for most of the dark footprints of history. There is no story of the Holocaust, there are only countless personal stories of survivors and the procedural story of the Nazi killing machine. These perspectives never come together into a single story only human fragments and procedural details, the departments and mechanisms, how many milligrams of Zyklon B it takes per kilogram to kill a person and how many people can be loaded on a train in how much time.

The coverage of 9/11 breaks down into these same mini-stories, survivors describing how they escaped, the families of the dead relating how they reacted to the news, the stories of firefighters and officers, and the procedural questions, how long it takes a falling body to achieve terminal velocity and what happens to the human body when it breathes in enough ash and soot. On the other side are the killers who plotted and planned, checked flight schedules, got their boxcutters and their korans and killed thousands for Allah.

The story of the attacks cannot be told because there is no boundary to it. Where do we begin, with a handful of upper class Muslims in Hamburg? With a scion of the Bin Laden clan becoming a Ghazi or with Hassan Al-Banna finding inspiration in Third Reich propaganda to modernize Islamism? With the Gates of Vienna, the Shores of Tripoli or Mohammed in Mecca? All but the last are incomplete, and even the last leaves too much out.

When a murder happens we trace back the motives of the killer. Was he abused as a child, did the authorities fail to act in time, what made a once sweet boy turn into a killer? To do the same for September 11 is to travel back over a thousand years and still come away with few answers except that sometimes human evil can be congealed into an ideology and passed along from generation to generation like a virus of hatred and cruelty.

"Where were you when the planes hit," attempts to orient us in time. But the question is only an attempt to make the impossible seem real. The businessman covered in ash and stumbling over the Brooklyn Bridge and the Seattle housewife waking up to see news coverage of it on television are more human fragments of a thing that is more than human. War.

War fragments perspectives, and though we have grown used to formal stories of war which began with a legal declaration of war and end with a surrender, these things have as little to do with war as a coroner's statement has to do with death. The laws of war, the treaties and the formalities are ways that human civilization attempts to make the wild force of human nature into a manageable thing.

Europeans and their colonial descendants may pen laws of war, but only they are constrained by them. In the real world outside the dinner parties of Washington D.C. and Brussels, there are no laws in war. Islamic law which has regulations for which foot to use when entering a bathroom (the left foot) and which side to sleep on (the right) has very few laws of war that cannot be nullified by necessity or even whim. On the battlefield, Islamic jurisprudence is boiled down to, Do what thou wilt in the cause of Allah, that is the whole of the law.

The West has tried to make war into a moral force by governing its means, without regard to its ends. But in the Muslim world, war is moral so long as its ends are Islamic-- the means are a technicality that Islamic scholars may squabble over the way they do over every petty matter, but in practice it's anything goes so long as it serves the Ummah. And even those technical debates over civilians in war and terrorism are governed by the ultimate welfare of the Ummah.

What happens when people who believe that the ends justify the means fight against people who believe that the ends never justify the means? In Afghanistan and Iraq the people who believed that the ends justify the means have gained their ends-- while we have lost both the ends and the means, not going far enough for the hawks and going too far for the doves.

This is the broken way of war that we practiced in Vietnam and Korea, constrained by invisible boundaries of our own making that did not prevent us from bombing cities, but did keep us from wiping out entire villages. To our enemies, these morals of ours seem every bit as senseless as their foot washing regulations seem to us. Why do the people who bombed Dresden beat their breasts over Mai Lai, and why was Shock and Awe acceptable, but not Abu Ghraib?

The answers invariably come down not to some externally consistent philosophy or divine law, but our need to feel good about ourselves by setting up a code that makes us seem moral in our own eyes. That makes us feel good about war. And the first law of that code is that killing en masse without really meaning to is more moral than pointing a gun at a man and pulling the trigger. This is the plausible deniability morality of the firing squad which uses enough dummy cartridges so that no one can be sure who fired the shot. No wonder drone attacks are a favorite of an anti-war administration putting as much automation and distance as possible between the soldier and his target.

Laws tell much about a people. Our need to legislate the use of force, and their need to legislate everything but the use of force. We have learned to be afraid of our lurking potential for evil.

It is a fear absent in Islam where a man who serves Allah cannot be a devil no matter what he does, but we know all too well that the devil can come wrapped in a saintly cause. We know it so well that we sometimes forget that while devils do occasionally come wearing halos, mostly they come wearing horns. To our great pain and woe, we have forgotten that we are not our own enemies.

A hundred years ago the attacks of September 11 would have marked the beginning of a war, but in this century they only marked a day of pain and sorrow, and years of a war that was never truly a war. It is this conflicted un-war that the anniversary marks. A war that never ends, because it never began.

War is a framework for violence, which the Muslim world hardly needs. While we search for an enemy to declare war on, all they need is a Fatwa with a clerical argument dubbing us the enemy, our nation, our soldiers, our civilians and our children. All of us.

We have no comfortable war framework except nation building which pretends that war is really the Peace Corps with bombs, habitat for humanity with the homes blown up before they can be rebuilt.

Are we fighting because they attacked us or because girls in Afghanistan can't go to school or for some figment of regional stability in a country where stability isn't even a word. That lack of clarity is fragmentation.  And fragmentation makes all stories seem senseless.

The pain and shock of the attacks gave us a measure of clarity. We were hit hard enough that we felt once again that justice was on our side and we no longer had to feel guilty for standing up for ourselves. In a society whose highest morality has become that of the victim, we were suddenly victims and entitled to defend ourselves.

The need to question ourselves temporarily went away and it felt good. For a brief shining moment the country became aware of external enemies and was united. We stopped being fragments warring with each other and we became Americans.

Had that clarity been sustained, the country today would be a dramatically different place. But it diminished and fell apart, and our identity went with it.We were once again our own enemies and the real enemy went unrecognized. Now the anniversary of the attacks has become like the memory of an old war that was fought once, but no longer really matters. The nation is at war, but it doesn't know that it's at war. And those who know that we are at war, often can't even state who the enemy is.

Without that clarity and unity, all we have are fragments, individual stories without the means to wrap them together. Stalin was right, a million deaths is a statistic unless you find a way to bring together what it means to an entire people. For the Holocaust, it was "Never Again." For 9/11 it was a more ambiguous, "United We Stand", but what do we stand for and what do we stand against?

The anniversaries have long since been reduced to a national therapy session, with pain released and healed in the media's own talking cure. But it isn't the pain that matters, it's what we do with it that counts. We have not yet lost the war-- but we are losing it, and unless we decide as a nation what we stand for and what we stand again, then we will lose. It will take time, like our banks we are too big to fail, but given enough appeasement, enough immigration and enough terrorism-- it will come.

Over a decade of war has passed, and before that a thousand years of war with lulls and pauses, but the din of the scimitar being sharpened for war never truly stopped. Each year that passes is a chance to learn the lessons of the years that have gone by and to remedy their mistakes. The best way to pay tribute to the dead is to unlearn our mistakes so that what happened to them will not happen again. Everything else is the fragmentation of self-indulgence, the therapy of tears, the sensitivity of grief, that will ease our pain, but not our fate.

Every man and woman must defeat their own doubts before they can defeat the enemy. Only then they can they battle the false reasonableness of the consensus that denies war and the enemy, with a consensus that briefly formed after the attacks and that forms even more briefly after every attack, to see ourselves in relation to the outside enemy. To unite against that enemy and to rebuild our identity around a common conflict with those who want to subjugate and destroy us. It may be ten more years before we are ready to do that, but as long as it takes-- that unity is our only hope.

The raw reaction in the aftermath of an event is the true one and the more distance we put between ourselves and that reaction also increases our distance from the truth.

The years of war have added layers of distancing between that first raw reaction when we saw the towers fall. And it is important this day to return not only to the emotion of that moment, but to the clarity that is our greatest weapon. Only that clarity will end this war.

Sum up our failed Middle East policy in a nine-letter word starting with an S. Stability.

Stability is the heart and soul of nation-building. It’s the burden that responsible governments bear for the more irresponsible parts of the world.

First you send experts to figure out what is destabilizing some hellhole whose prime exports are malaria, overpriced tourist knickknacks and beheadings. You teach the locals about democracy, tolerance and storing severed heads in Tupperware containers.

Then if that doesn’t work, you send in the military advisers to teach the local warlords-in-waiting how to better fight the local guerrillas and how to overthrow their own government in a military coup.

Finally, you send in the military. But this gets bloody, messy and expensive very fast.

So most of the time we dispatch sociologists to write reports to our diplomats explaining why people are killing each other in a region where they have been killing each other since time immemorial, and why it’s all our fault. Then we try to figure out how we can make them stop by being nicer to them.

The central assumption here is stability. We assume that stability is achievable and that it is good. The former is completely unproven and even the latter remains a somewhat shaky thesis.

The British wanted stability by replicating the monarchy across a series of Middle Eastern dependents. The vast majority of these survived for a shorter period than New Coke or skunk rock. Their last remnant is the King of Jordan, born to Princess Muna al-Hussein aka Antoinette Avril Gardiner of Suffolk, educated at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and currently trying to stave off a Muslim Brotherhood-Palestinian uprising by building a billion dollar Star Trek theme park.

The British experiment in stabilizing the Middle East failed miserably. Within a decade the British government was forced to switch from backing the Egyptian assault on Israel to allying with the Jewish State in a failed bid to stop the Egyptian seizure of the Suez Canal.

The American experiment in trying to export our own form of government to Muslims didn’t work any better. The Middle East still has monarchies. It has only one democracy with free and open elections.

Israel. Even Obama and Hillary’s Arab Spring was a perverted attempted to make stability happen by replacing the old Socialist dictators and their cronies with the political Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood. They abandoned it once the chaos rolled in and stability was nowhere to be found among all the corpses.

It might be time to admit that barring the return of the Ottoman Empire, stability won’t be coming to the Middle East any time soon. Exporting democracy didn’t work. Giving the Saudis a free hand to control our foreign policy didn’t work. Trying to force Israel to make concessions to Islamic terrorists didn’t work. And the old tyrants we backed are sand castles along a stormy shore.

Even without the Arab Spring, their days were as numbered as old King Farouk dying in exile in an Italian restaurant.

If stability isn’t achievable, maybe we should stop trying to achieve it. And stability may not even be any good.

Our two most successful bids in the Muslim world, one intentionally and the other unintentionally, succeeded by sowing chaos instead of trying to foster stability. We helped break the Soviet Union on a cheap budget in Afghanistan by feeding the chaos. And then we bled Iran and its terrorist allies in Syria and Iraq for around the price of a single bombing raid. Both of these actions had messy consequences.

But we seem to do better at pushing Mohammed Dumpty off the wall than at putting him back together again. If we can’t find the center of stability, maybe it’s time for us to embrace the chaos.

Embracing the chaos forces us to rethink our role in the world. Stability is an outdated model. It assumes that the world is moving toward unity. Fix the trouble spots and humanity will be ready for world government. Make sure everyone follows international law and we can all hum Lennon’s “Imagine”.

Not only is this a horrible dystopian vision of the future, it’s also a silly fantasy.

The UN is nothing but a clearinghouse for dictators. International law is meaningless outside of commercial disputes. The world isn’t moving toward unity, but to disunity. If even the EU can’t hold together, the notion of the Middle East becoming the good citizens of some global government is a fairy tale told by diplomats while tucking each other into bed in five-star hotels at international conferences.

It’s time to deal with the world as it is. And to ask what our objectives are.

Take stability off the table. Put it in a little box and bury it in an unmarked grave at Foggy Bottom. Forget about oil. If we can’t meet our own energy needs, we’ll be spending ten times as much on protecting the Saudis from everyone else and protecting everyone else from the Saudis.

Then we should ask what we really want to achieve in the Middle East.

We want to stop Islamic terrorists and governments from harming us. Trying to stabilize failed states and prop up or appease Islamic governments hasn’t worked. Maybe we ought to try destabilizing them.

There have been worse ideas. We’re still recovering from the last bunch.

To embrace chaos, we have to stop thinking defensively about stability and start thinking offensively about cultivating instability. A Muslim government that sponsors terrorism against us ought to know that it will get its own back in spades. Every Muslim terror group has its rivals and enemies waiting to pounce. The leverage is there. We just need to use it.

When the British and the French tried to shut down Nasser, Eisenhower protected him by threatening to collapse the British pound. What if we were willing to treat our Muslim “allies” who fill the treasuries of terror groups the way that we treat our non-Muslim allies who don’t even fly planes into the Pentagon?

We have spent the past few decades pressuring Israel to make deals with terrorists. What if we started pressuring Muslim countries in the same way to deal with their independence movements?

The counterarguments are obvious. Supply weapons and they end up in the hands of terror groups. But the Muslim world is already an open-air weapons market. If we don’t supply anything too high end, then all we’re doing is pouring gasoline on a forest fire. And buying the deaths of terrorists at bargain prices.

Terrorism does thrive in failed states. But the key point is that it thrives best when it is backed by successful ones. Would the chaos in Syria, Nigeria or Yemen be possible without the wealth and power of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iran? Should we really fear unstable Muslim states or stable ones?

That is really the fundamental question that we must answer because it goes to the heart of the moderate Muslim paradox. Is it really the Jihadist who is most dangerous or his mainstream ally?

If we believe that the Saudis and Qataris are our allies and that political Islamists are moderates who can fuse Islam and democracy together, then the stability model makes sense. But when we recognize that there is no such thing as a moderate civilizational Jihad, then we are confronted with the fact that the real threat does not come from failed states or fractured terror groups, but from Islamic unity.

Once we accept that there is a clash of civilizations, chaos becomes a useful civilizational weapon.

Islamists have very effectively divided and conquered us, exploiting our rivalries and political quarrels, for their own gain. They have used our own political chaos, our freedoms and our differences, against us. It is time that we moved beyond a failed model of trying to unify the Muslim world under international law and started trying to divide it instead.

Chaos is the enemy of civilization. But we cannot bring our form of order, one based on cooperation and individual rights, to the Muslim world. And the only other order that can come is that of the Caliphate.

And chaos may be our best defense against the Caliphate.

America's terrorist shortage may be reaching an end. If Orlando didn't satisfy you and San Bernardino left you wanting more. If you thought, why can't we have more Boston Marathon bombings, Obama has your back, and your front and any other directions that a pressure cooker full of nails can hit you from.

The land of Washington, Jefferson and Mohammed Atta has reached a new milestone by
taking in Syrian refugee number 10,000. It’s unknown if the TSA will shower him with balloons and confetti once he passes the gate while clutching a Koran and a copy of the Caliphate Cookbook.

Either way we hit the big explosive ten thousand. And the clock is ticking.

Media outlets are puffing out sympathetic portrayals of the oppressed Syrians moving into some neighborhood near you, and far from the bosses behind the major media outlets. All these folks fleeing the violence of their own religion want is a safe place to live. And safe inevitably means non-Islamic.

There’s an obvious lesson here that neither they nor our expertly chattering classes seem able to grasp.

But a few years from now there will be bodies and the killer will have the same last name as one of those oppressed refugees who weren’t looking to be safe, but to make us unsafe.

Indistinguishable from press releases, the stories tell us that the refugees have been thoroughly screened. Or as thoroughly as you can screen people coming from a country that we have no diplomatic relations with and major portions of which are on fire so that even if its government, which also used to sponsor global and regional terrorism as a hobby to pass the time on long summer days, was willing to cooperate with our immigration authorities, the information would be mostly useless.

How are we going to screen a Syrian or Iraqi man who claims to be from a city held by ISIS?

Are we going to phone the local ISIS office and ask the head headchopper to confirm that the fellow smiling for the camera isn’t affiliated with ISIS? Perhaps the local Jihadi Jack or Allah Akbar Abdul will regretfully inform us that they would be happy to help, but the local government office was burned down during a massacre of Christians, Yazidis and American hostages.

But there is really no doubting the fact that Obama has subjected Syrian refugees to the most thorough screening imaginable.

The most persecuted peoples in Syria are Christians and Yazidis. Obama has officially resettled 9,144 Syrians. 9,077 of them are Muslims. A mere 47 Christians and 14 Yazidis managed to slip through the nets of his careful screening process.

Remember those people on television pleading to be saved from genocide and mass rape? Obama took in barely a dozen of them.

8,984 of the poor oppressed refugees are members of the genocidal Sunni Islamic majority in Syria. That’s 98 percent.

That’s not a statistic. It’s a war crime.

A dozen from the victimized minority… and nine thousand from the genocidal majority.

When Obama talks about how thoroughly the refugees were “screened”, this is what he means. He and his people thoroughly screened out the Christians and the Yazidis. They kept out anyone who isn’t a Muslim. Christians make up 10 percent of Syria and 0.5 percent of Obama’s resettled refugees.

How is it possible that the most persecuted group in Syria is also this disadvantaged in resettlement?

Imagine a government welfare program located in a major city with a ten percent minority population whose recipients were 98.2% rich white men? Obama, the DOJ, the EOC, the FBI, the EPA and OPIARE would be burying it in lawsuits, investigations and media lynch mobs before you could whistle.

And yet the champions of disparate impact investigations who treat simple numerical discrepancies as proof of discrimination want us to believe that the 98.2% and the 0.5% are an accident of fate.

Obama, Hillary and a million media voices squawk that a “religious test” for immigration would be Un-American. But there already is a religious test. It prioritizes Muslims and excludes everyone else.

And so here we are near that big ten thousand mark.

It’s not the only milestone.

America now admits more Muslim refugees than Christian refugees worldwide. Give us your tired, poor huddled masses yearning to behead. Send us your wretched, teeming refuse eager to get on welfare and then shoot up a Florida gay nightclub or a Texas army base to maximize the diversity of their victims.

13% of Syrian refugees, supposedly fleeing ISIS, stated in a poll that they support ISIS. That’s 1,300 ISIS supporters in that big ten thousand. Along with 47 Christians and 14 Yazidis.

This is what Obama’s right side of history looks like. His moral arc of the universe is a Jihadi sword on a Christian neck.

Support among Syrians for Al Qaeda runs as high as a third. Three-quarters of Syrians, a decade ago, backed Hamas.

The Temple you blow up with a HIAS donation may be your own.

So there will be more bombings, shootings and arsons. There will be more rapes and grooming gangs. There will be more bearded men scowling at you on street corners while waving the black flag of the Jihad. And there will be more “American” youths being droned in terrorist training camps.

And, to distract from all of this, there will be more hysterical media stories trumpeting the latest petty Muslim grievance. Sorry murdered Christians and Yazidi sex slaves, you just don’t matter as much as a supposed dirty look that some Muslim somewhere received and then wrote a Facebook post about that went viral when the media reported on it. Was your wife just murdered in a Muslim terrorist attack? Here, enjoy this latest piece on how Muslims at the site of the latest terror attack fear a backlash.

Our Muslim terrorism shortage has finally been solved. The media will never have to worry that it will be deprived of being able to cover the latest act of “Nothing to do with Islam” terrorism while advocating for gun control. The Koran’s call for killing non-Muslims doesn’t kill people. Sam Colt does.

As Allah is our witness, we’ll never go a weekend without a suicide bombing again.

10,000 is just a drop in the bucket. Our entire immigration system, from top to bottom, favors Islam. That horrifying 98.2% and 0.5% contrast is only a microcosm of the way that the game is rigged.

If you are a member of ISIS, you have a better chance of reaching America than your Yazidi sex slave.

That is the simple indictment of the monstrous crime committed by the left. It is not only Obama alone who perpetrated this evil. It is every member of the left, every willing liberal who cheered the refugees who aren’t and refused to hear about the refugees who are. In the last century, they allied with Stalin. In this century, they allied with Mohammed.

The empty hearts of the bleeding hearts did not bleed for the political prisoners in gulags or the starving peasant, the Rabbi shot in the snow or the dissident tortured in a psychiatric hospital. They bled red only for their Communist killers. Today the great empathizers care nothing for the victims of Islamic terror. Their every effort is directed at bringing as much of the Sunni Muslim population responsible for ISIS, Al Qaeda and Hamas to the United States at the expense of their Christian and Yazidi victims.

The Syrian ten thousand are a crime against America and they are a crime against humanity.

Obama has left the victims of Islamic terror to rot while filling our towns and cities with its perpetrators.

I delivered the following speech at the American Freedom Alliance's event in August. Thank you to the organizers and everyone who came out to be a part of it.



We’re winning. I know it’s a farfetched idea right now.

There’s an Islamic terrorist attack every week or every few days. A bomb goes off. A man with a, quote unquote, history of psychiatric problems, takes a machete, a gun or a truck to a bunch of non-Muslims while shouting Allahu Akbar, and the media repeats the same old lies. You know the lies. I don’t need to repeat them.

How can we be winning then?

I’m going to ask you to switch around your way of thinking.

As counterjihadists, we spend as much time fighting the big lie, the one that Islam isn’t the problem, that maybe there are a tiny minority of extremists who have misunderstood Islam, they read the Koran upside down and decided that peace really meant war and love meant murder. We throw ourselves against the lie. We try to beat it down. But the lie is dying.

To understand why, we need to understand what the lie is. The lie is denial. It’s an effort to stop the inevitable. The inevitable is the clash of civilizations. It’s the war between Islam and the free world.

Think of the bank executive embezzling money to feed his cocaine habit. And making new excuses for where the money is going. Or the cheating husband who keeps making up new excuses to his wife.

They’re going to get caught and they know that they are going to get caught. Their lies are buying time.

The media excuses for Islamic terrorism are buying time. The excuses are buying Islamic terrorists another year or another decade. We know how this works.

Before World War 2, they used every excuse to prevent the free world from doing anything about Hitler. They didn’t prevent the war. They couldn’t prevent the war. Because Hitler was always going to invade. The Muslim terrorists are invading. There is no question that we are going to have to fight them.

The only question is how much time will it take. How much damage will they do before we are free to fight back. That is what is at stake.

How many countries will the Jihad take over before we are free to fight back? How many of us will be murdered in Islamic terrorist attacks in the coming years?

The lies we see in the media, the Muslim terrorists who are all lone wolves, herds and herds of lone wolves roaming our cities, the Islamic terrorists who all have psychiatric problems, are not a cause, they’re a symptom.

The lies, the ones referenced by many of the other fine speakers today, get worse as the problem gets worse. Because they’re a desperate effort by the deniers, the deniers of Islamic terrorism, the deniers of Islam, the defenders of the failed multicultural model, to stop the inevitable. To many of you it might look like they’re winning. We’re isolated and they control the media. They are the official experts and the authorities. They are in charge.

But they’re losing. And they know they’re losing. That’s why the lies are getting desperate.

As Muslim terrorism gets worse, we rise and they fall.

The bad news is that Islamic terrorism is going to get worse. And the good news is that it’s going to get worse.

No I’m not confused. The two are one and the same. Think about it.

America isn’t weak. So how come we can’t beat the terrorists? Why are we still fighting and dying?

We’re not weak. We’re indecisive. The terrorists shock us and play on our sympathies. They disguise themselves, they walk among us and then when they get caught, the media says they’re misunderstood.

The stronger the terrorists become, the weaker they get. Their greatest strength is weakness. In our society, monsters who claim to be weak, oppressed or misunderstood get away with murder.

When they take off their masks and stop pretending to be victims and come out of the closet as oppressors, that is when they become really vulnerable.

ISIS is the next step in Islamic terrorism. That doesn’t mean that ISIS will win or that it’s going to be around for even another few years. But Islamic terrorism, the kind that involves suicide bombings or flying planes into buildings, is a phase.

It’s phase one. In phase one, the terrorists work within a civilian population and strike for maximum shock value. When a society is weak enough, they take over and control territory.

That’s what happened with ISIS in Iraq. They hammered the Iraqi authorities with shock attacks and they were so weak that they collapsed. And then ISIS took over. That’s what Islamic terrorists eventually hope to do in Europe. Build up their numbers, smash the local authorities and then just take over.

And then instead of No Go Zones, you have No Go Cities.

There are parts of Europe where they might even be able to do it. And that would be their worst mistake.

Our greatest weakness was that we were divided. That the defenders of Islamic terrorism in the West, both Muslim and non-Muslim, could always offer excuses for it. There were always reasons why we couldn’t hit it as hard as we had to.

The stronger Islamic terrorists become, the stronger we become.

Our greatest weakness was that we were divided. That the defenders of Islamic terrorism in the West, both Muslim and non-Muslim, could always offer excuses for it. There were always reasons why we couldn’t hit it as hard as we had to.

The stronger Islamic terrorists become, the stronger we become.

Their strength is never going to match our own. When they try to take us on directly, they will lose.

That’s history.

Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and the USSR were strongest when they didn’t confront us directly. They went down to defeat once they made the mistake of coming out in the open.

Without Pearl Harbor, Japan would have ruled Asia. If Germany hadn’t declared war on us, Hitler might have been able to hold on to big parts of Europe. The USSR won its biggest victories when it was pretending to be our ally. But the moment it turned on us, the end began. It took a while, but that was when the end began.

Americans are nice people. We like the underdog. We want to give the other guy the benefit of the doubt. Lots of Americans liked Uncle Joe Stalin. They thought that maybe Hitler had a point about Germany being the victim in WW1. And Japan had a point about colonialism in Asia. Hitler, the Communists and Imperial Japan had a good thing going. And they ruined it.

Now Muslim terrorists are making the same mistake. They’re not victims. They’re supremacists. And supremacists might play weak for a while, Hitler did, but they really want to show how strong they are.

Everything ISIS does, every horror they commit, is about showing us how strong they are. Like all the bad guys before them, they mistake our empathy for weakness. And they move in for the kill.

This is the trajectory of Islamic terrorism.

Phase one is shock terrorism. Phase two is the insurgency. Organized forces seize control of territory. They take over entire cities and impose Islamic law. You’ve seen them do it in Iraq and Syria. They want to do it in Europe. They want to do it here. This is how Islam expanded from the very beginning.

Phase three is the Islamic State. ISIS is an example. But so is Saudi Arabia. We’re forgotten just how the Saudis won. And it wasn’t pretty. But it’s when terrorists win that they are at their most vulnerable.

Islamic terrorism of the kind we’ve gotten used to is easy. Put on a bomb vest and blow yourself up. It’s not that hard. What’s hard is actually controlling territory. That’s when you’re vulnerable.

Then you can’t hide among the civilian population. You have to be out in the open. You can’t just use human shields when you have an army. And you need to turn money into services. You have to do all the hard, dirty and difficult jobs of government. Even if you do them as badly as Governor Brown.

A cell of three people somewhere in New Jersey is really hard to disrupt because you don’t know about it. Secrecy is the greatest weapon of Islamic terrorists. It goes out the window when they have a state.

Victimhood becomes much harder. It’s why the PLO and Hamas don’t really want a Palestinian State. They want to demand one until the camels come home. And they want to blame Israel for it.

But actually having a state means having responsibility. You get treated like a country. And you get bombed like a country.

The best weapon that the enemy has isn’t its firepower. It’s not even WMDs. It’s willful blindness in our society. It’s a narrative which says that the terrorists are a tiny minority of extremists and that if we reach out to the moderate majority, everything will work out. It’s a very seductive narrative.

In war, your own weakness often matters more than the other side’s strength. Our weakness is that we want to be the nice guys. Their weakness is that they want to be the tough guys.

Our weakness keeps us from finishing the fight. But their weakness neutralizes our weakness.

The greatest threat to the victory of Islamic terrorists comes from themselves. They make it impossible for themselves to win because they don’t understand us. And we don’t beat them because we don’t understand them.

This cycle plays out a lot. We see it in Israel. We see it with America in the Middle East. We think that a compromise can be achieved, but that myth just drives the cycle of violence. The enemy doesn’t want a compromise. They want to win.

We’re a cooperative society. They’re a hierarchal society. We want new people to come in and contribute. But when they come in, they want a hierarchy in which they’re on top.

The two are not compatible. And the cooperative society starts committing suicide when it tries too hard to cooperate and compromise and work together with an enemy that wants to take over.

The enemy grows in strength by pretending to be weak while we wait for a compromise. Until the enemy makes it obvious to us that there will never be a compromise. And that’s when things get ugly.

Because the lie starts coming apart.

It’s easy to promise that Hitler isn’t a threat when he’s just making noise in a beer hall. It’s harder when he’s invading Poland. If your whole identity is tied up in claiming that Islam isn’t a threat, then the worse the threat becomes, the harder you have to lie.

And when the lies aren’t enough. You have to censor and criminalize. You have to lock people up.

That is where Europe is, as some of today’s courageous speakers have told us. It’s where Australia has ended up. It’s where America is heading. Don’t kid yourself. They will begin locking people up if they get the chance. You’ve seen it with the Innocence of Muslims. Like the bosses of the Soviet Union, they will go to the wall before they lose.

And they will lose.

The entire narrative is built on hiding the truth. Don’t talk about Islamic terrorists or you’ll create them. Don’t call ISIS, Islamic. Pretend that we can compromise and triangulate our way to some settlement. Blame Israel. Blame Islamophobia. Blame anyone who tells the truth about terrorism.

The façade is really impressive. When you watch politicians and the entire media reciting the same talking points day in and day out like lobotomized parrots, it’s daunting. But this is what’s going on behind the curtain. The big lie is dying. Everything you see, the foreign policy of this administration, is an effort to keep the lie alive at any cost. And they’ve failed over and over again.

Withdrawing from Iraq. The Arab Spring. Negotiating with the Taliban. The Iran Deal. Everything they’ve done only accelerated the process that they were trying to suppress.

The good news is that we’re going to win, not just on the battlefield.

But we, and I mean those of us in this room, are going to win the war of ideas.

We’re going to win because the process of getting there will destroy the narrative. Every victory by Muslim terrorists brings the day of truth closer. It destroyed a big piece of the narrative. And you can see that happening all the time.

Israel is a micro example of what’s going to happen. Israel has been compared to the canary in the coal mine. It was pushed into making a deal with the terrorists. There was going to be a two state solution. A Jewish State and a state run by very moderate reformed terrorists. But the moderate terrorists turned out to just be terrorists. Instead of peace, the peace process brought a horrific wave of terrorism. The left tried every excuse. It played on every emotion and it lost. Israelis don’t believe that making peace with terrorists will work and the left keeps losing elections.

The same thing is going to happen in Europe. It’s going to happen in America.

It’ll take longer because our exposure isn’t as bad. You can see the process beginning in Europe because they’re more exposed these days. Americans have tried different solutions, neoconservatives, democracy, appeasement, isolationism. That is part of the process of solving the problem.

When you see the denial all around you, this is the important thing to remember. No lie, no spin and no scam can beat reality. Reality will always win. Reality is going to win.

Everything we’ve gone through since September 11 and even before that has been the reality distortion field, the one that says there’s no such thing as Islamic terrorism, colliding with reality.

If there are days when you get up and think that it’s hopeless, that people will never know the truth and that we’ll be going through the same motions, twenty years from now, don’t.

Every lie that has been told, every media story lying about Islamic terrorism, lying about Hamas and Iran, every piece of propaganda used to support the narrative, is the little Dutch boy with his finger holding back the flood.

But the flood is coming. In fact it’s already here.

When we speak the truth, we are on the side of reality. You’re here because you choose to face reality. And that’s the first step to victory. You can con your way to temporary victories through lies. The left wins temporary victories over reality. And then reality wins. Truth wins. Remember that. The road has been a long one and it’s not over. But the road to victory doesn’t just happen in places like Afghanistan or Iraq, it begins in rooms like these with people like you.

You may not think it can happen. Most people didn’t believe the Soviet Union could fall. But when you get up close, you can sense the desperation at the top and you can see the cracks slowly spreading. And you can recognize that the volume of the lies, the crackdowns on the truth, are signs of desperation.

What you’ve been witnessing is the last days of the Soviet Union when the government lied frantically and desperately about what was going on until reality crushed it.

The next generation of Islamic terrorism will crush the lie. And then we’ll crush it.

Thank you for coming. Thank you for being part of the good fight. And remember, no matter how dark the hour seems, we are winning… and we are going to win.