On Saturday, Ziyed Ben Belgacem pays a visit to Orly Airport in Paris. He grabs a female soldier from behind and grapples for her rifle while holding a pellet gun to her head. He warns the other soldiers to drop their rifles and raise their hands.

He shouts, "I am here to die in the name of Allah ... There will be deaths."

He’s mostly right. It’s the plural part he gets wrong. The soldier goes low. Her friends shoot him dead. But he’s not entirely wrong either. There will be deaths. Even if they aren’t at Orly Airport.

French Police go on to investigate the motive of the Tunisian Muslim settler. His father insists that he wasn’t a terrorist. The media rushes to blame drugs for his attack. It reports widely on the drugs in his system rather than the Koran found on his body. No one asks if he was on drugs or on Jihad.

Ziyed Ben Belgacem had been in and out of prison. He was known to the authorities as a potential Jihadist and had been investigated for “radicalization” back in 2015. He had been suspected of burglaries last year and had been paroled in the fall. The system had failed all over again.

Prince William and Kate had been in Paris meeting with victims of the Bataclan Islamic terror attack. They returned to the UK, but media reports emphasize that the latest attack wouldn’t change their plans. But the UK was no refuge from Islamic terror. Not even Westminster Palace was.

On Wednesday, Khalid Masood, a Muslim convert, rents a car in a town near Birmingham from an Enterprise rent-a-car shop sandwiched between a Staples and a beauty salon offering walk-in eyebrow waxing. Over a fifth of Birmingham is Muslim and by the time the bloodshed was over and Masood was in the hospital, police raided a flat over a restaurant advertising “A Taste of Persia”.

Because diversity is our strength.

Masood’s victims were certainly diverse. The men and women he ran over or pushed off Westminster Bridge included Brits, Americans, Romanians, Greeks, Chinese, South Koreans, Italians, Irish, Portuguese, Polish and French. That is the new form that diversity takes in the more multicultural cities.

The victims are diverse. The killers are Muslim.

Prime Minister May spoke of it as a place where “people of all nationalities and cultures gather to celebrate what it means to be free.” But not all nationalities and cultures. Some come there to celebrate what it means to kill infidels for the greater glory of Allah. Just as some pray for London and others pray for the flag of Islam to fly over Westminster Palace.

Khalid Masood, like Ziyed Ben Belgacem, had been in and out of prison. Like France’s Tunisian Muslim terror settler, the UK’s Muslim terror convert had been investigated for “violent extremism”.

Nothing came of it.

For thirty years, Masood went in and out of prison. And one fine day he rented a car and began killing. He was on the radar, but nothing was done. And now some are dead and others are wounded. And the politicians who could have prevented it give their speeches and celebrate the magnificent diversity that filled hospitals with the citizens of a dozen nations.

"As I speak, millions will be boarding trains and aeroplanes to travel to London, and to see for themselves the greatest city on Earth,” Prime Minister May declared, throwing in a pitch for tourism. “It is in these actions - millions of acts of normality - that we find the best response to terrorism."

Come to London. Stroll and see the sights. You probably won’t get Allahuakbared to death. And if you do, the best response is a million acts of normality, apathy and denial.

Mayor Sadiq Khan vowed that after a brief vigil, it would be "business as usual".

He was right.

On Thursday, Mohammed, a Tunisian Muslim tries to drive a car through a pedestrian mall on a major shopping street in Antwerp. It was right around the anniversary of the Brussels bombings in which Moroccan Muslim settler terrorists had killed 32 people and wounded 300.

And a year later it was business as usual.

On Wednesday, King Philippe had dedicated a memorial in Brussels titled, ‘Wounded But Still Standing in Front of the Inconceivable’. "We have to stand up and say 'no' to those acts that are not believable, that are not bearable," its sculptor insisted.

But the seventh King of the Belgians had a somewhat different message. “It’s the responsibility of each and every one of us to make our society more humane, and more just. Let’s learn to listen to each other again, to respect each other’s weaknesses,” he said. “Above all, let us dare to be tender.”

The Tunisian Muslim driving into a pedestrian mall did not dare to be “tender”. He didn’t respect the weaknesses of a society that tolerated him.

Belgian soldiers deployed for the anniversary spotted him. The police gave chase. Pedestrians scurried out of the way. The Muslim settler from France was taken into custody for endangering the public. It is hoped that the arrest was made in a properly tender fashion.

Police found a riot gun, knives and fake passports in his car.

The Antwerp police chief said that Mohammed had been known to the police and had been involved in the illegal possession of weapons in France. But official reports blamed the drugs and alcohol in his system. Like fellow Tunisian Ziyed Ben Belgacem, he wasn’t a terrorist, just a drunk and a junkie.

The police urged everyone to keep calm and return to normalcy. Everything was being done to ensure the safety of Antwerp residents and tourists.

Business as usual.

Meanwhile the Antwerp Town Hall had gone from flying British colors in solidarity with the victims of the London attack to worrying over an attack at home. Just as William and Kate had come from terror in France to terror at home.

British authorities claimed that they foiled a dozen terror attacks last year. There are arrests for terror plots in France and Germany. Every week there is either a terror plot or a memorial for the last terror attack before we are told to go on with our million acts of normalcy.

Some days the terrorists screw up. They pick what they think is an easy target, but she refuses to let go of the rifle. Or they overestimate how much alcohol and cocaine they need to nerve themselves up to kill and die. Other times they get it right. Or right enough. And the news flashes around the world.

Somewhere along the way it wasn’t life that became normal, but terror. And the insistence on normalcy just normalizes the terror. A week with three terror attacks across Europe is no longer extraordinary. We have come to expect that there will be men trying to stab and run us over from Paris to Antwerp to London. And we have come to expect another Islamic terror plot targeting Kansas City, Miami, Columbia, New York, San Bernardino, Boston, Tampa, Dallas, Rochester, Springfield and any city.

We don’t know when or where the next attack will come. But we know whom it will come from.

The question is what are we going to do about it? We can pretend to be baffled the next time some Jihadi with a rap sheet taller than the London Eye and longer than London Bridge goes on a killing spree. We can nod our heads while the politicians throw a vigil and encourage a million acts of apathy.

Or we can end the flow of future terrorists and deport the existing ones.

Because they can’t run us over if we don’t let them in. They can’t bomb us if we don’t let them stay.

We can listen to King Philippe and “dare to be tender”. Decades of such tenderness are what led us here. Or we can dare to make the hard choices that will make us and our children safe for generations.

Saturday. Wednesday. Thursday. How many more days will it take?

Pray for London, Brussels and Paris. Then pray for Berlin, Nice and London again. And when you’re done, it might be your city’s turn to be on the wrong end of that hashtag.

Pray that on the way to work you don’t get run over, shot or stabbed by a man yelling “Allahu Akbar”.

Pray that your government doesn’t decide to open the borders to as many migrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and any other terror state as can make their way over. Pray that the next government doesn’t do it either. And pray that if it does, they don’t move in near you.

 Because they can’t run you over, if you don’t let them in. They can’t stab you while shouting, “Allahu Akbar” if they never get a visa. They can’t shove you into the water, if they get deported. They can’t blow you up if they can’t get in.

 Pray that the local diplomats actually do some basic checks of the visa application for the next terrorist showing up at the local consulate. Pray that they do a better job than they did before September 11.

Pray that the next Muslim mass murderer comes in at just below the refugee quota. Pray that he doesn’t get in with the 50,000 cap for this year. Or the year after and year after that.

Pray that the local refugee non-profit doesn’t resettle him next door to you. Or the block over. Pray that the angry bearded man living across the street doesn’t decide that today would be a good day to cash in his chips for 72 virgins. Pray that he doesn’t decide that tomorrow. Or the day after.

Pray that he just keeps on collecting welfare without killing anyone. Especially you or anyone you know. Pray really hard.

Pray that when your government comes out with its traditional statement about how the terrorists can’t kill our diversity (though they can kill people of every race, gender, non-Islamic religion and sexual orientation) it comes packaged with some sort of immigration reduction and deportation plan.

Pray that the plan doesn’t get shut down by a judge and a coterie of human rights activists. Pray that the first time the future terrorist gets sent to prison for dealing drugs, he gets deported. Or at least the second or third times. Pray that when he goes off to Syria to visit ISIS, we don’t let him back in.

Pray that we have a government that kicks him out the first time he posts an Anwar Al-Awlaki video. Pray that your government finds some common sense when the terror attack is no longer just targeting random people, but targeting it.

Pray that common sense returns to politics. Pray for border security. Pray for mass deportations.

Pray for sanity.

Obama is a coward.

Trump will call someone a name while Obama will anonymously source a smear through three levels of staffers, political allies and reporters. Trump called CNN “Fake News” on camera. Obama sourced Operation Rushbo, targeting Rush Limbaugh, through a variety of White House people and left-wing allies. Trump will boot reporters he doesn’t like. Obama authorized secretly hacking the emails of a FOX News reporter. Trump had an openly hostile conversation with the Prime Minister of Australia. When Obama wanted to call Netanyahu “chickens__t”, he did it by having one of his people anonymously plant it with a reliable media sycophant, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, before later having a spokesman disavow it. Poultry ordure doesn’t smell any worse than that.

But Obama is very careful to launch dirty attacks without getting any on his hands. The insults are anonymously sourced. The retaliation comes out of the bowels of the bureaucracy. And he only finds out about it from the media. That allows him to retain what he cares about most: his popularity.

Obama and his people like to think that their dishonesty is a superpower. They pat themselves on the back for stabbing everyone else in theirs. Sometimes their smugness over how well they use the media to lie and smear gets out of control. Like the time Obama’s Goebbels, Ben Rhodes, boasted to the New York Times about how easy it was to fool everyone about the deal to protect Iran’s nuclear program.

After Trump won, it was business as usual.

Obama put on his best imitation of decency while his people went on preparing to undermine Trump at every turn by smearing him, wiretapping him and doing everything possible, legally and illegally, to bring him down. It was the same phony act that he had pulled for eight years, bemoaning the lack of bipartisanship while ruling unilaterally as a dictator, destroying the Constitution while hectoring us about our values, denouncing racism while organizing race riots, complaining about the echo chamber while constructing one and lecturing us on civility while smearing anyone who disagreed.

Trump’s killer instinct lies in understanding that hypocrisy conceals weakness. That is what powered him through the primaries and then through an election. His instinct is to grapple directly with a target. That is also the source of his popularity. Meanwhile the source of Obama’s popularity is his hollow likability. He’s likable only because he is almost always too cowardly to say what he really thinks.

Americans have seen the real Trump: because he is, in his own way, always real. Obama is always unreal. When Trump and Obama have appeared together, Obama seemed less real. He is a brand wrapped in all sorts of images that have nothing to do with who he really is.

Trump has always understood that Obama’s bravado was hollow. Obama boasted that he would have defeated Trump. Then he went on to try to do that with attacks from behind the scenes routed through government loyalists and media operatives while pretending that he had nothing to do with any of it.

But Obama and his people had learned nothing from how Trump had won the election. When Trump is attacked, his response is to go directly for the attacker, no matter what the argument is or how it’s sourced. Trump doesn’t get bogged down in debates or befuddled by media echo chambers that are so totally enveloping that they resemble reality. He just smashes past them to the source of the smear.

That is exactly what he did by calling out Obama’s eavesdropping. He bypassed all the layers that Obama had put in place to insulate himself from involvement in the attack, the media echo chamber, the staffers who handed information to the media and the government loyalists who provided the information to the staffers, to strike at the wizard behind the curtain.

And, in doing so, he made a mockery of Obama’s bravado.

When Obama boasted that he could have beaten Trump, he meant that he could have done so using the same tactics that worked so well against McCain and Romney. Like most of the media, he had failed to understand that these tactics don’t work against Trump because he is a moving target. Trump created his own brand. Unlike most presidential candidates, he doesn’t need consultants, and unlike most Republicans, he isn’t worried at all about likability. That’s why he won an election and still has majority support for his policies, including the most controversial ones, despite poor likability.

Obama is obsessed with being liked. In the media space, effective messaging depends on likability. But Trump upended the same formula that had ruled presidential politics since Nixon vs. Kennedy. Instead he casually tosses likability aside to grapple with opponents, rivals and enemies. Trump won this election by forcing opponent after opponent to either fight him on his own terms or back away.

This includes the media, which has tried to grapple directly with him, with disastrous results.

The Obama machine, a massive propaganda matrix that alternates between lying and gaslighting, is not built to handle Trump. And Obama isn’t built to handle Trump either. Obama’s hipster transgressiveness made him seem cool when up against Romney or McCain, but everything Trump does embodies real transgressiveness. The machine is built on limiting the freedom of action of Republicans by intimidating them with political correctness and potential smears. But Trump doesn’t care about any of that.

Trump is willing to throw everything into an attack. Obama’s people build complicated traps that he walks through without thinking twice. Obama plays chess. Trump overturns the board.

Obama’s strategy was to create so much chaos that the White House wouldn’t be able to get anything done. Instead it would ricochet from scandal to scandal. Similar tactics had proven quite effective in the second terms of Reagan and Bush. But Trump thrives on chaos. Many of his supporters want him to be a disrupter. Chaos translates to effectiveness. The more noise he makes, the more he’s changing things.

President Trump has made it clear that in response to these attacks, he will directly challenge Obama. And that breaks down Obama’s entire plan of using proxies to do his dirty work while he gives inspiring speeches. Trump will not let Obama get away with attacking him and then hiding behind phony idealism. And he intends to make the Obama machine into the issue in these attacks.

Obama’s plan involved a gradual emergence to deliver more sanctimonious lectures about “who we are”. It did not involve getting directly into a fight with Trump. But, as his other opponents discovered, Trump doesn’t give you a choice.

The favorite quote of Clinton’s damage control man Chris Lehane came from Mike Tyson. “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Obama’s people like to think that this is what they’ve done to Republicans, Iran Deal opponents, police officers and even President Trump. But Trump is showing them what the expression really means.

Obama had a plan. Then Trump punched him in the mouth.

The plan to entangle key Trump people in scandals hit a roadblock. Instead the wiretapping accusations have become the issue. And Obama’s people have been forced to come out and offer cautious denials.

And Obama and his dirty tricks have been dragged out from behind the curtain.

Trump and Obama are two very different men. Their personalities, as much as their politics, will define this conflict. The media routinely accuses Trump of having totalitarian instincts. But the true totalitarians are men like Obama those who hypocritically use the machinery of government to go after their opponents while pretending to be virtuous. President Trump has always fought his fights directly.

And the battle for America has only begun.

A proposal has been making its way through the social justice sewer system to have white people pay a 5% privilege tax.

That would be a lot cheaper than the current wealth redistribution built into the tax system.

In 2004, black people made up 12% of the population and 20% of those who didn’t file taxes at all. It was estimated that 50.7% of African American households, 52% of Hispanic households and 37% of white households paid no income taxes.

The numbers would likely have only gotten worse after the recession, which destroyed large numbers of African-American jobs, and the Obama years, which traded social welfare for economic progress,

An otherwise equal tax system with a 5% white privilege tax would be an enormous improvement.

How do you calculate the income losses for a white student shut out of college by affirmative action or a white business owner’s income losses due to preferential business programs aimed at minorities?

The white student would happily pay that 5% to be allowed to go to college instead of being told that more diverse students with worse grades will cut ahead of him in line because they are “disadvantaged”. It would be easier for the white business owner to calculate in a fixed privilege tax for an otherwise competitive market than the intangible forms of diversity discrimination that rig the game.

A 5% white privilege tax would be far too honest. The real tax is hidden and much higher.

But the white privilege tax does raise all sorts of fascinating questions. How do you calculate it? It can’t be by appearing or identifying as a minority. Such an unfair performative system would allow Rachel Dolezal, aka Nkechi Diallo, to escape paying her white privilege tax after unfairly exploiting her white privilege to head the NAACP.

If white people can just braid their hair in dreadlocks and spend a week in a tanning salon before renaming themselves Mkesi Daluboo or Willami Clintonoo, what good is a white privilege tax?

The only fair way to do it is with a DNA test.

Commercially available DNA tests make it easy to calculate the percentage of European and more diversely non-European ancestry. Every taxpayer could establish the exact diversity of his ancestry and determine his privilege tax that way.

The results would be interesting.

The average African-American is around a quarter European. That means he would be required to pay a 1.25% white privilege tax. Obama’s white privilege tax would be at least 2.5%. It would have been higher, but Africans have less European ancestry, with its accompanying white privilege, than African-Americans, even though they were never actually enslaved in the United States.

Henry Louis Gates Jr, the Obama pal who blamed racism for his confrontation with police, has 50% European ancestry. That will be a 2.5% white privilege tax. Please.

Latinos in this country average around 70 percent European ancestry. That’s a 3.5% white privilege tax.

The minority taxpayer likely to end up with the lowest white privilege tax would be Asian-American. Asian-Americans have some of the highest economic performance around, but they are also untainted by the evil curse of white privilege having no European ancestry whatsoever.

But Asian-Americans do have high intermarriage rates so before long their children, like much of the population of the United States, will end up with European ancestry and white privilege.

Is there an alternative to this madness?

We could make the white privilege tax performative so that Rachel Dolezal would pay zero white privilege tax while Clarence Thomas would pay 5 percent.

The wealthy white boy in dreadlocks who lights up at Bob Marley tribute concerts and denounces our “unjust, racist society” would be free of his white privilege tax while his fellow African-American student who is poor, works hard and speaks like William F. Buckley would be hit with the full privilege tax bill.

If race is just a social construct then we might as well be honest about rewarding obnoxious behavior.

Rachel Dolezal can run the NAACP, teach a useless identity politics course, sell hideous identity politics art, then go on food stamps after her fraud is exposed, and write a book blaming racism. The social construct we’re rewarding here is not race, but obnoxious and exploitative behavior.

And anyone can be obnoxious.

We can punish white privilege based on DNA tests or based on behavior. But the vast majority of Americans have European ancestry. And those who have the least European ancestry also have the least history of oppression. The mad social justice impulse to eradicate “whiteness” is a campaign to eradicate America. The only people who could be pure of “white privilege” are the newest immigrants from cultures that were too far away, xenophobic or homogenous to have European ancestry.

Only Japan or Saudi Arabia can be truly free of white privilege.

Either that or we follow the sordid tradition of punishing ideas of race. We can tax people for being insufficiently stereotypical. We can harm those who strive to succeed to benefit the Al Sharpton and Rachel Dolezal shakedown crew who monetize the failures of communities for their own profit.

There is one more option.

We can be Americans. We are, as President Trump said, “one people, with one destiny. We all bleed the same blood. We all salute the same flag. And we are all made by the same God.”

The civil war and the civil rights movement were both made possible by that common understanding of nationhood and origin. But the sad legacy of the civil rights movement is that it descended into divisive Black Nationalist movements that rejected a common nationhood and into radical leftist politics that rejected religion, while, in the Obama style, appropriating its dramatic gestures and oratorical force.

Take away any national commonality and you are left with quarreling tribes using bloc voting, group alliances and aggrieved narratives to lay claim to power and privilege.

Anti-racism has become a narrow tribal campaign that invokes diversity to appear universal. Its goal is not a more united country, but a more successfully divided one. The strange alliance of white leftists who want to destroy “whiteness” to create a truly universal society and Black Nationalists who want a tribal society can only result in a nation that is less united and more divided along the lines of race.

So why not levy a 5% white privilege tax? Every racist movement blames its abuses on its victims. It calls its greed, justice and its hatred, love of its own people. It makes up for its insecurity with anger.

That is all the social justice movements of the left have to offer us. They campaign against racism with more racism. A toxic mix of narcissistic self-pity, angry insecurity and entitled greed lurks under their pseudointellectual identity politics. The men who founded this nation were not perfect, but they believed in being better than they were. The leftists riding the nuclear bomb of identity politics down through the clouds to a radioactive utopia of utter misery believe only in making it worse.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder was right. We are a nation of cowards on race. And that is what he, and the other racists and radicals, are counting on. We are too afraid to defy those who divide us.

Too afraid to stand up to him and to all those like him who have been passing off racism as progress, too afraid of false accusations of racism by racists like him and too afraid to rebuild this country as a united nation rather than a collection of intersectional tribes allied against the idea of a common racial enemy.

We can be one nation. Or we can start charging racial taxes. The choice is ours.

After Trump secured the nomination, Obama’s people filed a wiretapping request. As he was on the verge of winning, they did it again. After he won, they are doing everything they can to bring him down.

It was always going to come down to this.

One is the elected President of the United States. The other is the Anti-President who commands a vast network that encompasses the organizers of OFA, the official infrastructure of the DNC and Obama Anonymous, a shadow government of loyalists embedded in key positions across the government.

A few weeks after the election, I warned that Obama was planning to run the country from outside the White House. And that the “Obama Anonymous” network of staffers embedded in the government was the real threat. Since then Obama’s Kalorama mansion has become a shadow White House. And the Obama Anonymous network is doing everything it can to bring down an elected government.

Valerie Jarrett has moved into the shadow White House to plot operations against Trump. Meanwhile Tom Perez has given him control of the corpse of the DNC after fending off a Sandernista bid from Keith Ellison. Obama had hollowed out the Democrat Party by diverting money to his own Organizing for America. Then Hillary Clinton had cannibalized it for her presidential bid through Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Donna Brazile. Now Obama owns the activist, OFA, and organizational, DNC, infrastructure.

But that’s just half the picture.

Obama controls the opposition. He will have a great deal of power to choose future members of Congress and the 2020 candidate. But he could have done much of that from Chicago or New York. The reason he didn’t decide to move on from D.C. is that the nation’s capital contains the infrastructure of the national government. He doesn’t just want to run the Democrats. He wants to run America.

The other half of the picture is the Obama Deep State. This network of political appointees, bureaucrats and personnel scattered across numerous government agencies is known only as Obama Anonymous.

Obama Inc. had targeted Trump from the very beginning when it was clear he would be the nominee.

Trump had locked down the GOP nomination in May. Next month there was a FISA request targeting him. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court denied the request, and it is still unknown whether the request targeted Trump, or only his associates, but it’s silly to pretend that the submission of such a request a month after he became the presumptive GOP nominee was apolitical.

The second, narrower, FISA request came through in October. This one was approved. The reason for getting a FISA request in October was even more obvious than June. October is the crucial month in presidential elections. It’s the month of the “October Surprise” when the worst hit pieces based on the keenest opposition research is unleashed. Obama’s opposition research on Trump involved eavesdropping on a server in Trump Tower. Nixon would have been very jealous.

After the election, Obama Inc. began to spread out its bets. Some of his people migrated into his network of political organizations. Others remained embedded in the government. While the former would organize the opposition, the latter would sabotage, undermine and try to bring down Trump.

An unprecedented campaign for full spectrum dominance was being waged in domestic politics.

Political opposition wasn’t a new phenomenon; even if a past president centralizing control of the organizational and activist arms of his party to wage war on his successor was unprecedented. But weaponizing unelected government officials to wage war on an elected government was a coup.

Obama Anonymous conducted its coup in layers. The first layer partnered congressional Democrats with OA personnel to retain control of as much of the government as possible by the Obama Deep State. They did it by blocking Trump’s nominees with endless hearings and protests. The second layer partnered congressional Democrats with the deeper layer of Obama operatives embedded in law enforcement and intelligence agencies who were continuing the Obama investigations of Trump.

This second layer sought to use the investigation to force out Trump people who threatened their control over national security, law enforcement and intelligence. It is no coincidence that their targets, Flynn and Sessions, were in that arena. Or that their views on Islamic terror and immigration are outside the consensus making them easy targets for Obama Anonymous and its darker allies.

These darker allies predate Obama. The tactics being deployed against Trump were last used by them in a previous coup during President Bush’s second term. The targets back then had included Bush officials, an Iran skeptic, pro-Israel activists and a Democrat congresswoman. The tactics, eavesdropping, leaks, false investigations, dubious charges and smear campaigns against officials, were exactly the same.

Anyone who remembers the cases of Larry Franklin, Jane Harman and some others will recognize them. Before that they were used to protect the CIA underestimates of Soviet capabilities that were broken through by Rumsfeld’s Halloween Massacre and Team B which helped clear the way for Reagan’s defeat of the Soviet Union.

Under Bush, the Deep State was fighting against any effort to stop Iran’s nuclear program. It did so by eliminating and silencing opposition within the national security establishment and Congress through investigations of supposed foreign agents. That left the field clear for it to force a false National Intelligence Estimate on President Bush which claimed that Iran had halted its nuclear program.

Obama broke out the same tactics when he went after Iran Deal opponents. Once again members of Congress were spied on and the results were leaked to friendly media outlets. Before the wiretapping of Trump’s people, the NSA was passing along conversations of Iran Deal opponents to the White House which were used to coordinate strategy in defense of the illegal arrangement with Islamic terrorists.

The same wall between government and factional political agendas that Nixon’s “White House Plumbers” had broken through on the way to Watergate had been torn down. NSA eavesdropping was just another way to win domestic political battles. All it took was accusing the other side of treason.

And worse was to come.

During the Iran Deal battle, the NSA was supposedly filtering the eavesdropped data it passed along.

In its last days, Obama Inc. made it easier to pass along unfiltered personal information to the other agencies where Obama loyalists were working on their investigation targeting Trump. The NSA pipeline now makes it possible for the shadow White House to still gain intelligence on its domestic enemies.

And the target of the shadow White House is the President of the United States.

There is now a President and an Anti-President. A government and a shadow government. The anti-President controls more of the government through his shadow government than the real President.

The Obama network is an illegal shadow government. Even its “light side” as an opposition group is very legally dubious. Its “shadow side” is not only illegal, but a criminal attack on our democracy.

When he was in power, Obama hacked reporters like FOX News’ James Rosen and CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson. He eavesdropped on members of Congress opposed to the Iran Deal. Two men who made movies he disliked ended up in jail. But what he is doing now is even more deeply disturbing.

Obama no longer legally holds power. His Deep State network is attempting to overturn the results of a presidential election using government employees whose allegiance is to a shadow White House. Tactics that were illegal when he was in office are no longer just unconstitutional, they are treasonous.

Obama Inc. has become a state within a state. It is a compartmentalized network of organizations, inside and outside the government, that claim that they are doing nothing illegal as individual groups because they are technically following the rules within each compartment, but the sheer scope of the illegality lies in the covert coordination between these “revolutionary cells” infecting our country.

It is a criminal conspiracy of unprecedented scope. Above all else, it is the most direct attack yet on a country in which governments are elected by the people, not by powerful forces within the government.

"We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain,” President Lincoln declared at Gettysburg. “That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Obama’s shadow government is not just a war on President Trump. It is a war on that government of the people, by the people and for the people. If he succeeds, then at his touch, it will perish from the earth.

Obama’s third term has begun. Our Republic is in danger.

Tonight the celebration of the holiday of Purim begins. Purim is a Jewish holiday often neglected outside the more religious communities in America and the State of Israel because it commemorates an attempt to exterminate the Jews. And we all know that stopped being a problem long ago.

If Purim had culminated with some smart power diplomacy and a lesson on tolerance, liberal Jews might be more inclined to celebrate it. Unfortunately it ends with a genocidal madman being hung from a tree and the Jews fighting for their lives, winning and slaughtering their enemies.

And instead of feeling guilty about it, their descendants eat pastries, dress up in costumes and get drunk. At least those of their descendants who believe in survival instead of surrender.

Liberal Jews complain about the difference of values they have with Israeli Jews who insist on survival instead of surrender. They have an even bigger difference of values with the Jews of the Bible. And with Jews throughout history. Not to mention with the religion of the Jewish people.

The more liberal a Jew is, the less likely he is to celebrate the substance of his people's holidays as they conflict with his worldview and virtues. Moshe, the Maccabees and Mordechai don't seem like role models, not even if you rebrand them as community organizers and claim that they were fighting prejudice. There is something relentlessly bloody-minded about them. They care very little about a sustainable environment or LGBT rights, and instead walk through the corpses of their enemies with no regrets or apologetic winces. They stand up for their own people in a regrettable show of tribalism that perpetuates the cycle of violence instead of preaching about Tikkun Olam.

The story of the Megillah, the Scroll of Esther, is the story of how Mordechai, the descendant of the first Jewish king of Israel, snubbed the Grand Vizier of a multicultural empire by refusing to bow to him. The obstinate Benjaminite so infuriated the Vizier that he plotted to kill all the Jews.

The smart thing to do would have been to bow to Haman. To invite him to AIPAC and let him give a pre-written speech and then give him a standing ovation. Then the important official might have been willing to help out the struggling Jews of the Second Commonwealth in Israel. Instead the narrow-minded fanatic offended Haman. And the angry Agagite decides to strangle the newly reborn Second Commonwealth of Israel and all the other Jews throughout the Persian Empire.

By refusing to bow to Haman, Mordechai had turned the formerly moderate Haman into an extremist. He had radicalized him. Jewish leaders hurried to reassure Haman that this fanatic was in no way representative of their values of tolerance and appeasement. Hadn't they attended the feast where the sacred vessels of their own people were used to serve wine and spirits to the mob? Rather than anticipating the return to their land at the end of the prophesied 70 year period of exile, they had cheered the brutish tyrant and made Sushan, his capital, into their new holy city.

A few tens of thousands had gone back to Israel, which the empire had repopulated with other peoples. There they struggled to survive, building half the day and keeping watch with their spears from the time the stars came out until the sun rose.  Most Jews however had remained behind in the Persian Empire. The struggling settlements of the Jews under the last of the prophets seemed like a futile proposition. The future belonged to empires, to Babylon, Persia and Rome. 

There was no room anymore for the sort of pride displayed by Mordechai. This was Haman's hour. Israel was gone and would never return. Rebuilding the Temple was a fool's dream. Why go off to some place your ancestors had come from, to slave in the hot sun, to choke on dust and sleep with a spear by your side expecting an attack from the nomads that had settled in the land?

In Sushan, the wine is plentiful, the bazaars are never closed and the empire will never fall.

There is no room for ancient dreams in the new empire. No room for old fables about slavery and freedom. Perhaps in ancient times some deity had liberated them from Egypt, but here in the modern present, it was the fall of the Babylonian Empire which had raised them up out of slavery and given them a place among the subject peoples of a new empire. They bowed to Haman and to the new order. They gave up their dreams and their religion and drank headily of the wine at the festival of the king. On their couches, they dreamed they saw a new world opening before them.

But Mordechai, narrow-minded fanatic that he was, only saw an old world. And he was determined to fight for it. He wasn't willing to let the old dreams die. To bow to Haman and to imagine, as so many Jewish leaders have done, that some accommodation with evil could be made on mutually beneficial terms. Mordechai was not a man of the Empire. He was an Ish Yehudi. A Jew.

He saw through the illusion of empires and new ages. He saw what his first ancestor had seen when he looked at the sky. He saw that the only true permanence was G-d. Nations would fall, empires would perish and even the stars would burn out. Only G-d would endure.

And so he did not bow. And Haman understood what his refusal meant.

Had Mordechai refused to bow out of personal pride, Haman might have had him and his family killed. But Mordechai refused to bow to Haman because he was a Jew. Haman sensed that the old man had seen through him. The emperor was naked. The old man in rags at the gates did not worship power. He might rule, but had no appetite for it. He worshiped only G-d.

Was it personal conviction? Haman investigated and learned that Mordechai was a member of an  obscure people. A people who do not worship the empire, but worship G-d.

And so they all had to die. The king was bribed. The letters were sealed and sent. The decree was death. It was all over.

But Mordechai had seen more than the nakedness of Haman, the crawling, insecure lackey, filled with hatred for the Persian ruler, flattering him and craving the ultimate power he could not have. He had seen the nakedness of the empire and the age. His eyes had seen past the horses and palaces, the ranks of scribes penning decrees, the harems, bureaucracies and armies.

Mordechai knew that all this would pass away. He had seen through the illusion that every age brings with it the end of history, a new age whose achievements break with the past and usher in a boundless future. The shadow crosses the sundial, the walls come crashing down and the new era of history ends up buried under the rubble of time.

Exile divides the Jewish people into Jews and New Age Jews. Jews wander on their meandering course through history concerning themselves with a past that modern people dismiss as myth and legend, more ancient than that story about Troy, and even more dubious.

The New Age Jews always see the coming of a new era of history, a bright and shining plateau that makes all those old moldy beliefs completely irrelevant. History ends and now a new age of human progress begins. The age of Alexandria, the age of Sushan, the age of Berlin. How, in such a new age, could they be expected to take a few bygone fairy tales retold by barbarians seriously? Such things weren't for enlightened people who were witnessing the peak of human civilization.

The old Jews know what the New Age Jews do not, that history has not ended, that the past is still with us and that it has sharp teeth. They know that Man has not changed, that his sophistication is still only a shell and that sooner or later the shell cracks. If it does not crack from within, then it is cracked from without. 

Those who feel time in their bones know the patterns of history, reading ages like constellations, can never lose themselves in one age or fall into the fallacy of a new era. They know that there is nothing new under the sun. Machines may come and go, but the world is a broken place because the hearts of men have not turned from their ways. And so they remember that every age carries within it the seeds of its ruin. They witness the ruin, climb out of the ashes and move on.

Liberal pieties embrace the new age, fixate on a final transformative era of history at the hands of messiahs who promise hope and change, who will uplift us and inspire us to make the world into a better place. But history never ends. That is the lesson of the Holocaust, of Purim and of countless other horrifying intrusions of the old into the new. The shining new era that begins with grand public spectacles and displays of the power and might of an empire, ends with corpses and men and women fighting and running for their lives.

Jews like Mordechai understand this. New Age Jews do not.

The confrontation between Mordechai and Haman was a collision between two different conceptions of history. It was a contest for the Jewish soul.

Mordechai defied Haman to remind the Jews, who had abandoned religion and nation for the new age of the Persian Empire, of the ugly and bloody truths under the hollow glories of that new age.

In every age, the Jewish soul is nearly lost and then redeemed. The people seem on the verge of vanishing, but then survive. Mordechai understood that the future of the Jews did not depend on the Persian Empire. It depended on their willingness to remember who they were. And so he defied Haman and brought on a Holocaust. And at the end of it, the Jews fought for their survival.

Purim, a holiday preceded by a fast kept by the men going into battle and their loved ones, is not about forgiving your enemies, progressive taxation or coming out of the closet. It is about survival. Not mere survival, but the skin of the teeth sense of how close we came, that moment of revelation which pulls back the curtains of the material world and reminds us of the impossibility of our survival under all the ordinary rules of the world that new ages are found on. It reminds us that behind the scenes of the brick and mortar, steel and steam world, is something else entirely. A force that breaks apart the towers of history, that saves us when we should have died, that has entrusted us with a mission. It reminds us of what the world is and reminds us of Itself and of what we are.

When you stand on the edge of death, life is a revelation. It is not our deaths under the Egyptian sun, the blades and bullets of a thousand empires and kingdoms, or the ovens of Dachau that we are obsessed with. It is that moment of survival. The revelation that even amid the horrors of all that we have witnessed and the terrible things that we had to do to survive, we have risen out of the ground, watched the flesh cover our bones and stood alive again upon the earth. Every time we survive, we are reminded of the fragility of the world and of our enemies who wielding every power and trick, have failed to destroy us. Each time we rise, we transcend the world, in confronting our dead, we confront our immortality.

It is not a purely joyous experience. The day of Purim is preceded by a day of fasting. Before the celebration comes a day of battle as the struggle to survive, the long decline into the abyss, the final desperate hours, suddenly give way to the upheaval of an impossible salvation. We remember the pain, the sense of the grave closing over us, the bodies lying everywhere, the certainty that we will be next. We accept the hopelessness of our situation and then we walk out of the grave and praising G-d, sit down to the feast.

This is Jewish history. It is an alien one to the New Age Jew who clings tightly to the new era and its rules, to its pieties and its mores, who scowls at the old ones for refusing to come and join the imperial festivities where the vessels of the temple are used to serve drinks and the mob toasts that the 70 years have come and gone, and still there is no chance of the Jews returning to their Jerusalem and reclaiming the lost history. "The past is the past," says the New Age Jew. "The past is the present is the future," says the Jew.

The feast of the New Age is the celebration of the end of history, a golden time when there is an unlimited bounty for all, where the wine and the free health care will never run out, where everyone will live together under one government in perfect brotherhood for all time. Many Jews are drawn to this feast, its golden vessels, its vast bounty and its glorious ideals. But then enters the Grand Vizier and some of them begin to frown for though he wears rich garments and speaks soothing words, he is a monster. They don't always know how they know it, but it is a nagging feeling that creeps into them that there is something rotten at the heart of this new age.

Most of them still bow to him, touching their heads to the floor, some even embrace him and celebrate his vision. They assure others that he is our friend, the only man who can realize the promise of this age, a wise and noble leader whose vision of change brings new hope. But one or two stay away from the feast and refuse to bow to him. Instead they look to Jerusalem, to where the battle between good and evil was once fought, and where it will be fought again. They know him for what he is.

The Grand Vizier knows that he must destroy them, must destroy them all, because they have seen through what he is, and they have seen through the shallow trappings of the golden age of fools. They know that there is more to the world than the might of men and the cornucopias of kings. They know that he is not all-powerful and when he looks at them, a scowl wrinkles his face, because he knows it too.

So he casts a lot, random chance in a random world where chance is supreme and the whim of every ruler outweighs the weight of history. The bills are signed, the laws are passed, the decrees go out, the officers from the vast imperial bureaucracy are assigned to inform every citizen that their new age will be inaugurated with blood. A people who are not a proper part of the multicultural empire of laws must be wiped out in a properly democratic fashion. Crowd-sourced genocide.

And then the Grand Vizier ends up dangling from a rope, the tanks break through to Berlin, the chariots fall into the sea, the mustachioed dictator dies in a bedroom in Moscow his clothes soaked in his own urine-- and everything has gone completely wrong.

It's an old story and a new story. We tell it over and over again because it is always happening. It is our story and the story of the world. It is the story we have accepted from our parents and it is the story that we will pass on to our children. It is the story of the blood sacrifice of the New Age that goes wrong. The sacrifice survives, bloodied and scarred, the New Age goes down to ruin.

Purim exists because Queen Esther asked the Jews of Israel to write of her for generations. The Persian Empire she had become a part of, the sacrifice she made by leaving the physical stream of Jewish history to be repaid by becoming a vital part of its spiritual history, would fall. Not in her time, but it would. The memory would be carried on by the Jews. Purim is that memory.

Jewish holidays celebrate the interconnection of Jewish survival and productivity with G-d.  The Second Commonwealth fell. Israel may fall. A thousand years from now, the world may little resemble anything we can imagine. And yet, somewhere, Jewish children will celebrate Purim as they have for thousands of years. They may even celebrate other holidays, still unimagined, other memories of salvation from horrors yet to come and remembrances of tragedies yet to be experienced. And if we look through history, as Mordechai did through Haman and the Persian Empire, we may be able to see them on the other side, the descendants of those who survived the whips of Egypt, the slave markets of Babylon, the armies of Rome, the sword and the flame, the concentration camp and the suicide bomber, celebrating a million holidays yet to come.