We are still a great people. The rescuers remind us of that. But we lack the culture or the politics to reflect that greatness. The noble impulses that lead men to risk their lives in flooding are there. But our society no longer has the vessels to hold and sustain those impulses.

The media doesn't quite know what to make of the rescuers. You can see the itching to return to the stories that it knows and likes. Russia. Trump hit pieces. People punching each other in the street over politics. It swerves at the first sight of a Confederate flag on a rescue boat or Ted Cruz's Sandy vote. It doesn't want to dwell on the best of us. Behavior like that doesn't make sense anymore.

Generations have grown up with leftist protesters as their definition of heroes. Look in a history book and the last 70 years consisted of "heroes" who marched around waving signs until they got everything they wanted. And everyday in the news there are more "heroes" marching for illegal aliens, transgender bathrooms, the supremacy of black lives and any other identity politics cause.

But waving a placard to the adulation of the media isn't heroism. Saving lives is.

Our culture has quickly forgotten that less than two decades ago, men carrying half their weight climbed to the top of the World Trade Center to save lives. They died there.

The America of a hundred or even fifty years ago, would have immortalized them. Ours drowned them out in tantrums, in whines, in anger and outrage, in malicious noise.

They were a dangerous reminder that we were a great people. And our destroyers desperately wanted us to forget. They wanted us to sink to the bottom. Not to rise to the moment.

The secret of so much of our greatness was simply that we tried. We took our best and we made it the cultural norm. Every people tell themselves that they are wonderful and destined to rule the world. The Germans and the Russians believed it and it led them to ruin. But we told each other that we were decent and we became decent. We told our children that the moon could be theirs. And it was.

We told them that we could cure diseases. And we did. That we would prevail over the atom bomb. And we did. That we would change the world. And we did.

But more importantly, we told them about sportsmanship. We told them to stand up for principles. To take pride in hard work. To believe in the future. To tell the truth. To help old ladies across the street. To tie knots well. To sacrifice for family. To see themselves as heroes, however unlikely.

We made all of those things into a culture. That was the secret. Anyone could have done it. You just had to believe.

And that culture has been slowly dying. Some days it looks almost dead.

Our culture and politics exist to give us permission to lie in the mud. That has become their unhidden purpose. Decency is a dead language. Shock value is our entertainment. Contempt and outrage are our national discourse. The Chinese build cities and islands. We yell at each other over the Internet.

It's hard to remember a time when writing the Great American Novel was an ambition. The American novel is dead. Literature, like art, has become segmented into high brow garbage and low brow garbage. The aspirational middle brow culture is dead.

The movie theater is filled with billion dollar adaptations of comic books, Disney rides and cartoons. The handful of teens who can be pried away from their phones long enough to watch something they'll forget five minutes later aren't even the target audience. America is a stopover territory on the way to the real markets in the teeming cities of China.

How does a culture like that deal with heroism? It can't. It doesn't have the vocabulary for it.

We can still marvel at it. But it's not enough to be impressed by good men and women doing the right thing. Cultures that succeed don't just marvel, they preserve it and pass it on. They build dams around virtue. They harness it and plug in the next generation.

We wonder why the Iraqis or Afghans can't stop killing each other. We explain democracy to them, but it's as meaningless as trying to teach a goat how to paint. But behaviors have to be embodied in a cultural language. Otherwise it's just so much noise.

Civilization is written in the language of values. That language tells us how to behave and how to live. Without that language, we're savages. And savages are not that hard to find all around us. And when you spend enough time around savages, you begin to go native.

When doing the right thing isn't rewarded, few will do it. If everyone cheats, then not only will everyone cheat, but the idea of honestly doing the right thing will become a strange and meaningless thing. If principles don't pay, why have them. If decency is dying, why be decent.  If everyone cheats, cheat. If everyone steals, steal. If everyone lies, lie. Anyone who doesn't is weak and worthless.

Heroism is the beacon in the night. It inspires and shocks us. It reminds us of what we can be.

Men and women risking their lives for others is not such a rare thing even in our latter days. Men and women who are honest and decent are not all that rare either. But they are rare in our culture. They exist, but our culture has no room for them. The meaning of their lives isn't written into our culture. And so the moment passes and as a dog returns to its vomit, our culture returns to its vomit.

The extraordinary moment passes. But it doesn't need to it.

Everyone dies. Heroes, victims and villains all perish. But some values live on in a culture. And that is our choice. We can be a great people. But at the very least, we must remember that we are.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..."

The First Amendment assumes that the proper sphere of government is policies, not values. And so it protects the right of political participation and prohibits a state church that would define values.

The government had the right to decide to go to war with France. It did not have a right to decide what you should believe. Politics extended into the realm of policies, not beliefs.

But as religious belief declined, politics replaced it as the repository of moral and ethical values. This transformation began on the left. The left was the least religious in the traditional sense. And the most likely to build up an ideology of secular values with which to displace traditional religious values.

The last century witnessed an extensive effort to scrub religious values out of government. But this effort was matched by an equally comprehensive project to replace them with the left’s own values. Unlike the wall between church and state, there were few legal safeguards against writing values into legislation if they were irreligious ones. The church was deemed to be the true threat. Not the state.

But the end result looks very much like an establishment of religion. Even in the church sense.

The values written into the legislation reflect those of certain churches, but not others. When nuns are forced to pay for birth control and Christian photographers with traditional beliefs are compelled to participate in gay weddings, the government is picking religious establishment “winners and losers”.

The winners are roughly on the religious left and the losers on the religious right.

Unitarians win, Baptists lose. Quakers win, Mormons lose. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) triumphs over the Presbyterian Church in America. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America prevails over the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. It’s hard not to see this as an establishment of religion.

This isn’t about doctrinal battles or gay marriage. It’s about the culture war fallout from the left’s power to write its values into law and into the codes of conduct that hold sway in in private organizations.

We take the truth of our values on faith. They are a matter of subjective conviction, not objective fact. To those who believe in them, they appear to be the absolute truths of the enlightened. But they cannot be proven to be true in any meaningful way. You either believe in them. Or you don’t.

Google fired James Damore for questioning a tenet of its beliefs. That is in theory illegal. The search engine monopoly created forums in which employees were meant to discuss these very issues. Damore was not fired for expressing his views at work, but for politely expressing the “incorrect” view.

California law protects employees fired for both religious and political views. But the “hostile workplace” pretext that led to Damore’s firing is an example of how the left’s values are the basis of legislation. Much as “public accommodation” civil rights protect the demand to participate rather than the right of religious dissent, the protection of minority participation is at the heart of the left’s bid for equality. But this has never truly been a matter of law, but of values. The law mandates the elimination of obstacles. It does not demand that values winners and losers be chosen to achieve equality. That is a leftist bias.

The left defends imposing its values by force through outrage at selective “suffering” on the one hand and abstractions about the empowerment of participatory equality on the other. Ultimately though it cannot defend its values without reference to those values. That is typical of belief systems.

The left’s secular religion functions as a theocracy. It promises salvation through Socialism, warns that human sin will destroy the world through global warming and is engaged in a perpetual struggle against those who do not share its values. It wages war on religious freedom because it is a kind of religion.

There can be no political freedom where there is no religious freedom. Religion is more encompassing than politics can ever be. Politics addresses which policy best accomplishes a particular goal. Religion tackles the question of what the goal should be. If you don’t have the freedom to determine your own goals, then your ability to choose policies is as meaningless as some European elections.

Leftist systems seek to create “democratic” arenas in which we are free to disagree on policies, but not goals. They do this by writing values into the system so that only one sort of goal is deemed acceptable.

Deviations from the goal are not acceptable. Questioning the goal is heresy. And leads to sanctions.

Trump Derangement Syndrome, Google’s firing of James Damore and the violent attacks on conservative speakers are all examples of what happens when the goals are blasphemously challenged.

Politics is far more likely to turn violent over values rather than policy. That is why the Founders wanted politics to be confined to policy rather than values. We can rationally debate policy, but we can’t debate values. We can argue over what we feel to be true, but the revelations of our deepest selves cannot be proven. And when they are challenged, anger, hostility and even violence quickly follow.

The First Amendment helped build a system where our representatives debated what we should do, rather than what we should think. Politicians were meant to get things done, not argue dogma. The culture war we are in is less about what we should do than what we should think. The violent confrontations and clashes are not really about campus safe spaces or Confederate memorials, but how we should see ourselves. The confrontations are meant to be both polarizing and clarifying.

They’re a religious war. The left has established its religion. And violence against heretics swiftly follows.

America is in the midst of an ugly conflict because our political system was hijacked by the Church of the Left. The legislative and judicial hijacking of our system has turned our politics into a culture war. To end the conflict we must return to a true understanding of the First Amendment. It is not the role of government to tell us what to think or what to believe. And any government that embarks on such a totalitarian enterprise will tear apart our society and destroy our way of life.

As the left is doing.

Cambrils, Spain.

The road to September 11 wended its way through this Spanish town where Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker, met up with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the former refugee to Germany and current Gitmo inmate, who had been serving as Osama bin Laden’s point man for the attacks that would kill thousands.

The hotel where Atta and Osama’s man met is a few blocks away from where the Muslim terrorists climbed out of their crashed car, drawing knives, axes and machetes, before a police officer working overtime to earn extra money shot most of them dead on the spot outside the Club Nautic.

The distance between where Atta was planning 9/11 and the latest terror attack in Spain is 110 meters. Stroll past a pub, a hair salon and a real estate agency in this seaside resort town and you’re there.

Cambrils hadn’t been the original target of the terrorists. Their dream target was the Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona. When their bombs went off prematurely, they went to Cambrils and Las Ramblas in Barcelona because it was likely to have foreign tourists that they could run over, stab and mutilate.

The consistent pattern of the big Islamic terror attacks in recent years, from the Boston Marathon to the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, from Bataclan to the Manchester Arena, from the Champs-Élysées to London Bridge, is to look for nightlife spots or crowds of tourists all packed into the same place.

The Sagrada Familia, which at completion will be able to hold 14,000 people, would have been a target closer to the scale of September 11. When Pope Benedict arrived in ’10, 6,000 people were able to fill the cathedral. Around 10,000 visitors tour the building every day. Had the terrorists been able to move their original plot along, the way that Atta and Al-Shibh did theirs, thousands might have died.

The message of Driss Oukabir had been clear. “Kill all infidels and only leave Muslims who follow the religion”.

That’s always been the “sacred” mission of Islam. The bloody chapters of the plot played out in Cambrils, where the terrorists were gunned down as they tried to butcher pedestrians, Barcelona, where pedestrians were run over in a van, and Alcanar, where the terrorists squatted a house and filled it with gas canisters and TATP explosives before the whole thing was accidentally blown sky high.

But the Jihad didn’t come from these places. It came, as always, from an Islamic population center and its satellite mosque.

Ripoll, Spain.

Like the river that adjoins it, the history of this small Catalan town of 11,000 flows back to the beginning of human history. Dig in the right places and you can find everything from bronze axe heads to Roman tombs. These days you can also find Muslim terrorists squatting in their mosques and plotting murder.

The small Spanish town has a Muslim population of 1,000. Or 9% of the population. That’s far above the national average. It also produced 8 of the 12 suspects in the Barcelona attacks.

Catalonia was once occupied by the Moors. It’s under Islamic occupation again. Half of the ISIS arrests in Spain have been made in Catalonia. In a few decades, Catalonia went from consisting of Catholics and atheists to a 7% Muslim population. That amounts to around 510,000 Muslim settlers in the region.

To put that into perspective, there are more Muslims in Catalonia than in some European countries. From their perspective, Catalonia is Al-Andalus. It’s an ancient Islamic territory that is rightfully theirs.

37.5% of Muslims jailed for terrorism came from Catalonia.

“I tell you, Spain is the land of our forefathers and, Allah willing, we are going to liberate it, with the might of Allah,” an ISIS terrorist had declared.

Muslim demographic migration and settlement has been conquering Catalonia. But the Islamic State has been less patient about swamping Spain through birth rates and asylum requests.

The Jihad in Ripoll came from its mosques which were centered around Imam Abdelbaki Es Satty.

Imam Abdelbaki Es Satty might be dead or alive. Some think he died when the explosives in that squatted house in Alcanar blew up. Others think he might have made it to Morocco where he had told acquaintances that he was bound. Or perhaps he once again made it under the radar to Brussels.

The Moroccan Imam had started out as a drug smuggler. He had reportedly served time with one of the ’04 Madrid train bombers. Links have also been drawn to the Brussels airport bombing last year. The mosques who hired him and whom he was associated with are denying any knowledge of his mission.

One mosque’s president claimed that terrorism was the act of “crazy people”. He insisted that, “Islam is peace.” The latest Islamic atrocities however contradict that tired nonsensical cliché.

Abdelbaki Es Satty was Moroccan. As were most of the terrorists. Four sets of brothers made up much of the Spanish terror cell. Beyond religion, the Jihadists were also a tightly knit clan. A family.

While the Moroccan Muslims were out for blood in Spain, a Moroccan Muslim went on a stabbing spree targeting women in Finland. It’s unknown if there was a connection, but as with Atta and Cambrils, the terror routes are transnational. Catalonia is a perfect Islamic terror hub because of its proximity to France. Satty veered between Morocco and Brussels while plotting terror in Spain.

While Europeans debate about the EU, Muslims already live in a world of open borders. They swarm in on boats from Libya to Italy, they travel from Turkey through Eastern Europe to reach Germany, they move between the emerging terror hubs of Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Belgium and Sweden. They cross over from America into Mexico and from Canada into America. And then back to Canada.

In Ripoll, Mayor Munell insists there's no integration problem. “There is no problem of living together.”

There are never any problems. Just unexplained explosions. Screams and booms. The sound of bones breaking against a wall and the angry roar of a motor. And, above them all, the cry of, “Allahu Akbar.”

Meanwhile the same lies are told and retold.

The terrorists were irreligious. The Islamic community claims to know nothing about them. Or about Satty. The president of one of the mosques sneered, “I doubt if any of them could tell you the color of the carpet in the mosque.” If only they had come more often, they wouldn’t have turned to terror.

But the names of two of the terrorists are listed as donors to the mosque. And it’s the Imam who turned them on to terror.

Still it’s easier to ignore the terrible truth of Islamic terror. Even when it hits close to home.

In Cambrils, in Alcanar and Barcelona, the world briefly changed. The fifth Jihadist in the Cambrils car managed to stab a woman in the face before he was taken down. In Alcanar, body parts fell from the sky. Younes Abouyaaqoub, the last wanted member of the cell and the driver of the Barcelona van, shouted, "Allahu Akbar."

And then the police shot him.

The dead will be buried. The surviving terrorists will be imprisoned. The families of the victims will grieve. And in the towns and cities of Catalonia, another Islamic cell will start building more bombs.

There are streets, schools and parks across the country named after a violent racist who urged the KKK to murder civil rights activists and claimed that racial integration was a Jewish conspiracy.

There’s a boulevard in Brooklyn named after a racist who admired Hitler and boasted of being the first fascist. Harvard has a prominent institute named after a bigot who defended Nazi bigotry.

New York City, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles all have streets named after a supremacist and nationalist who palled around with Nazis. New York City has a statue of him. Washington D.C. has an art tribute to him. If we are going to take down Confederate memorials, there’s no way he can stay up.

He must fall.

In 1961, Malcolm X introduced George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi Party, on stage at a Nation of Islam rally. After Rockwell made a donation to the racist black nationalist hate group, Malcom X led a round of applause for the Neo-Nazi leader and called him, “Mr. Rockwell.”

There’s been a recent effort in Bethesda to rename Winston Churchill High School after Malcolm X. How can you rename a school honoring the leader who defeated Nazism after Malcolm, a Nazi collaborator?

Malcolm X wasn’t breaking any new ground by palling around with Nazis. There had been a longstanding alliance between black nationalist and white nationalist groups which shared a common belief in the racial inferiority of other races, opposition to the Civil Rights Movement and anti-Semitism.

The head of the American Nazi Party had described Nation of Islam boss Elijah Muhammad as “the Adolf Hitler of the black man.”

Malcolm X had previously met with the KKK. The Muslim racist bonded with the Nazi racist over anti-Semitism. "The Jew is behind the integration movement, using the Negro as a tool," Malcolm X told him.

Malcolm X’s Klan meeting was part of an alliance between the Nation of Islam and the KKK in opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. The Nation of Islam received protection for its mosques from the Klan.

J.B. Stoner, the KKK leader he met with, would be convicted of the bombing of the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham. The bombing had taken place three years before their meeting.

Malcolm X had even urged the KKK to eliminate “traitors who assisted integration leaders". The man after whom streets all over the country have been named was urging the KKK to kill civil rights workers.

"I sat at the table myself with the heads of the Ku Klux Klan," Malcolm X later admitted. "From that day onward the Klan never interfered with the Black Muslim movement in the South."

There's a statue of Malcolm X at the Audubon Ballroom in New York. It's some 40 blocks up from Malcolm X Boulevard. The Champions for Humanity Monument in Oakland's Kaiser Memorial Park includes Malcolm X. There’s a Marcus Garvey/Malcolm X installation in Washington D.C.

They must come down.

Wesleyan University hosts Malcolm X House. Berkeley has the Malcolm X Elementary School. San Francisco has the Malcolm X Academy. They must be renamed.

And all the streets named after Malcolm X must go. In New York, in Washington D.C., in Dallas, in Lansing and in Los Angeles. The signs must come down and their names must be changed.

It’s the only right thing to do.

Marcus Garvey Park sits east of Columbia University in New York. You can find the Marcus Garvey School in Los Angeles. And another one in Washington D.C. Not to mention Chicago and Memphis.

There’s a Marcus Garvey Boulevard in Brooklyn. It’s a street named after an admirer of Adolf Hitler.

Garvey, an early black nationalist, had met with KKK leaders to undermine the NAACP. “Between the Klu Klux Klan and the NAACP group, give me the Klan,” he had said. “You may call me a Klansman if you will,” he had added.

There are schools in America named after a racist who admired Hitler and Mussolini, and claimed to have been the first fascist.

"We were the first Fascists,” Garvey boasted. He also contended that, “Mussolini and Hitler copied the programme of the UNIA.”

Marcus Garvey urged his followers to read Mein Kampf. “What the Negro needs is a Hitler,” he declared.

“Hats off to Hitler the German Nazi,” cheered the national hero of Jamaica.

Rename Marcus Garvey Park. Rename every school and street named after the Nazi collaborator.

Not far from Malcolm X Boulevard in New York, you’ll come across W. E. B. DuBois Avenue. The W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute is hosted by Harvard. Fisk University has a statue of DuBois. The University of Texas at Austin has a DuBois sculpture. A huge 800 pound bronze bust of DuBois sits at Clark Atlanta University.

They must all come down.

W. E. B. DuBois, a co-founder of the NAACP, was never quite sure if he was a Communist or a Nazi. Despite his Communist sympathies, he also tried to find time for the Nazis.

DuBois praised Hitler who "showed Germany a way out when most Germans saw nothing but impenetrable mist." He suggested that the Nazis weren't really bigots and that their anti-Semitism "is a reasoned prejudice, or an economic fear." In "The German Case Against the Jews", he defended Nazi bigotry. Under Hitler, he claimed that there was “more democracy in Germany than there has been in years past.”

Take down his statues. Take away Henry Louis Gates’ cozy spot at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute.

If Confederate statues are unacceptable, then how can statues, streets and schools named after political allies of the KKK, Nazis and Neo-Nazis stay up? If General Lee must go, how can Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois remain?

General Robert E. Lee never cheered the head of the American Nazi Party the way that Malcolm X did. Nor did he break bread with the Klan or defend the Nazis. If he must go, actual Klan and Nazi sympathizers like Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois should be tossed in the trash.

The double standard that privileges the ugly racism of black nationalists doesn’t just protect them, but also covers up their racist alliances with Nazis, Neo-Nazis and white supremacists. It is impossible to end racism as long as special exemptions are made for certain forms of racism. That is not only true in the abstract, but in the concrete reality that black racists are allies and supporters of white racists.

The solidarity of racists against a color blind society is the cause of Charlottesville and the rise of racism. Black Lives Matter and the Klu Klux Klan feed off each other in the same way that Garvey, Malcolm X and the Klan and the American Nazi Party did. The left’s support for black racism keeps white racism alive.

There are statues of Martin Luther King everywhere, but the tragic truth is that Democrats rejected his vision and embraced the black nationalism of segregated safe spaces, racial supremacy and black racism.

Civil rights is dead. Malcolm X and the KKK won.

But if the left really wants to knock over the statue of a white racist, a prime opportunity has opened up in Manchester, England where a statue of Friedrich Engels, Marx’s Marxist collaborator, was just set up.

Engels referred to black people as “N___s” and “nearer to the animal kingdom”.

The left is welcome to topple that statue. But it won’t. It isn’t opposed to racism. It is racist.

What the left hates, what Malcolm X and the KKK hated, what Antifa and the Neo-Nazis hate, is a liberal society in which people actually get along with each other and don’t need a tyrant to “save” them. The left embraced identity politics to destroy American civil society. Their plan is working.

But if the left wants to start smashing statues, those of its racist leaders must also fall.

(This article first appeared at Front Page Magazine)

Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle. 1,477 people live in this little corner of Quebec with its apple orchards, elderberry fields and small wineries. But now 400 migrants can cross the border in a single day.

On the other side of the border is New York. There the language is English. In Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, the language of choice is French. But these days you’re a more likely to hear Arabic, Urdu or Haitian French being spoken here as Roxham Road fills with clots of migrants scampering out of America.

They’re not the leftist American celebs who threaten to leave for Canada if their side doesn’t win the election. Instead they’re the illegal and dubiously legal who got the message from President Trump.

The overloaded Mounties at the border crossing are being forced to cope with the jabbering illegals, grifters and fake refugees of Trump’s migrant surge. But where Obama’s migrant surge swelled America’s southern border with incoming migrants, Trump’s migrant surge is expelling them north.

The Syrians, or anyone claiming to be, are coming. So are the Sudanese, Somalis and Haitians. This is an informal border crossing and so the rules that might protect Canada from this horde don’t apply. Quebec has become the weakest link in the Canadian border with the vast majority of border migrants invading the “True North” through vulnerable points like the dead end of Roxham Road.

The same thing is happening in Emerson, a town of 689 people named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Minnesota whose Somali settler population is invading and victimizing this peaceful community. At night Somalis can be seen walking up to Emerson to take advantage of a new country and her people.

In a town where once no one locked their doors, locals now check their bolts and turn out the lights. And then they wake up to the nightmare of migrant mobs pounding on their doors and peering through their windows in the middle of the night.

"They banged pretty hard, then 'ring ring ring' the doorbell," a mother of two young girls said. "It was scary."

Muhammad, a Somali migrant, heard that President Trump had deported a bunch of Somali asylum seekers. And so he headed for Emerson with ten others. He claims he no longer feels secure in America. And he wants to bring the rest of his family along.

Unfortunately, Muhammad and all those like him feel all too secure invading Canada.

At Hemmingford, a Quebec town near New York with less than 1,000 people, Syrians, Yemenis, Bangladeshis, Sudanese and Turks swarm to get across. Women in burkas and hijabs ignore the commands to stop. Before they used to furtively cross the border at night. Now they openly march across it in broad daylight. They know that the Canadian authorities can’t do anything to stop them.

“They heard Justin Trudeau on the radio saying Canada would continue to welcome people being excluded under Trump’s policies and they took it literally, and they came,” a lawyer for a Syrian migrant clan said.

Just as migrants had reacted to Obama’s signal to come, they are reacting to Trump’s signal by going.

The Border Patrol watches as a horde of illegal aliens from Syria, Haiti and anywhere else head for Trudeauland. "Our mission isn't to prevent people from leaving," an operator is quoted as saying.

There are plenty of Haitians heading down Roxham Road after the Department of Homeland Security told the 58,706 Haitians in the Temporary Protected Status program to move along. TPS is one of those gimmicks that the government uses to boost immigration in a backhanded fashion.

Seven years ago, Haiti suffered an earthquake. Obama’s DHS announced that there would be no more deportations. Haitian illegal aliens instantly and magically became “quake refugees” even though they had been living in America when the quake happened. Trump’s DHS warned that the free ride was over.

And so it’s on to Canada.

The number of Mountie interceptions in Quebec tripled since Trump took office. The Mounties may always get their man, but they’re getting far too many of them these days. More than they can handle.

"Our agents are in a state of crisis right now,” the president of the Customs and Immigration Union said.

But they’re the victims of a broken Trudeau regime that puts migrants first and Canadians last. And the Mounties have been turned into a delivery service for bringing illegals and their luggage to Canada. A hundred soldiers have been dispatched, not to stop the illegals, but to put up housing for them.

"Our role is limited to putting up tents with a rigid floor and installing heating and lighting," Major Yves Desbiens said. When that’s done, some members of the Canadian Amy will stay on as the maintenance crew for the invaders. So much for the Army’s proud motto, ‘We stand on guard for thee.’

Who stands on guard for Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, for Hemmingford and Emerson? And for Canada?

In days gone by, armies kept invaders out of a country instead of accommodating them. But under Prime Minister Trudeau, the Canadian military is there to facilitate the invasion of Canada.

The arrests are a formality. The invading horde ignores the signs and warnings by officers to turn back. They’re arrested, given food and put on a bus along with their luggage to Montreal. There they can expect free health care and a $650 check. And clamorous demands for social services and housing.

The Olympic Stadium opened in more hopeful times for the ’76 Summer Olympics. These days “The Big Owe”, the stadium that nearly broke Montreal houses an even bigger and more expensive disaster. The $1.5 billion Olympic debt was paid off a decade ago after a long thirty years. Now the doughnut shaped arena swarms with freeloading migrants sleeping, eating and hosing off in the team locker showers.

The stadium plan comes down to Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre. Coderre had blamed the migrant swarm on President Trump’s immigration policies. But it’s the fault of Trudeau and Coderre’s migration policies. If your neighbor locks his door and you don’t, is it his fault if squatters break into your house?

"The City of Montreal welcomes Haitian refugees," Coderre had tweeted. "You can count on our full collaboration."

Collaboration was all too appropriate of a word.

Quebec Immigration Minister Kathleen Weil insisted that everything was fine. "We can handle it. There is not one ministry that is concerned about that — the federal government is not concerned about it."

Weil was echoing Angela Merkel’s delusional mass migrant coping slogan of, “Wir schaffen das.”

And what is there to be concerned about? Except that the Canadian crisis keeps getting worse.

In July, 50 people were arriving a day. Now it’s between 250 to 300. At Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, there was a 1000% increase in under two months. 700 have been crammed into the Big Owe. And Quebec will be on the hook for them even longer than for the stadium they’re living in. It will always owe them.

"There is no work for people in Quebec," a native resident complained. "There are no good jobs and we don't have money for the old people."

Meanwhile Syrian migrants have become a burden on Montreal schools which have been forced to hire specialized teachers. While back in Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, lunch had to be provided for 900 migrants. In Emerson, government officials wanted to house migrants in the town’s ice skating ring.

Trudeau’s government has dismissed the idea that there might be a problem. And for good reason.

When Trudeau took over he named the President of the Canadian Somali Congress as Minister of Immigration. Ahmed Hussen, the new Minister of Immigration, had come to Canada as a Somali refugee.

Hussen had consistently insisted that there was no crisis while ignoring reports warning that there was.

The door to Canada was pried open from the inside. And only Canadians can take it out of Trudeau and Hussen’s hands and close it again. Under the conservative Harper government, Canada had sane immigration policies while America was suffering under the scourge of Obama’s illegal border surge. Now the governments have changed and the surge has shifted with them.

Canada’s crisis reminds us that illegal immigration is not an inescapable problem. It’s a product of government policies. We can solve all. All it takes is leaders with the political will to do it.

Borders exist to protect a country. We see that in Europe. We see it in America and Canada. And leaders who refuse to protect the border are really refusing to protect the nation that it represents.

"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams

"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom." Benjamin Franklin

"Whenever we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary."  Thomas Paine

"It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains." Patrick Henry

Civilizations fall rapidly due to an inescapable catastrophe. Water sources dry up. A powerful empire invades.

Civilizations fall slowly due to a moral catastrophe. A moral catastrophe is not a failure of arms or food. It's a failure of the sustaining virtues of the civilization. As the society tumbles slowly downward, it will encounter defeat in battle, collapse of its infrastructure and food shortages. But these are symptoms, not causes. The cause is the degeneration of the society and its people.

A civilization is not a mechanical endeavor, but a moral one. The virtues that uphold a civilization, the ability to reason, to work hard, to study how to solve a problem, to sacrifice now for future gain, to cooperate with those outside the tribe, to value truth, beauty and goodness for their own sake are individual, but they are also social. A society that cultivates these virtues in people can prosper. As society loses these virtues, it grows dysfunctional. It loses winnable wars, it squanders vast wealth, it loses its work ethics, its ability to cooperate and to plan for the long term. It slowly dies.

Barbarians are not savages because they wear loincloths or bones through their noses, or even because they lack the majority of these virtues, but because they lack the ability to appreciate them. A barbarian who appreciates civilizational virtues can become civilized, but a civilized barbarian may wear a suit and tie, but is still a savage because he cannot even appreciate the virtues of his ancestors.

As a civilization declines, it becomes barbaric. Before the savages invade it from the outside, its own people have become savages. They enthusiastically welcome the savages. They are drawn to the culture and norms of the savages because these echo their own descent into barbarism. The cult of the noble savage is simply civilized barbarians glamorizing their own descent down the moral ladder.

Civilized men and women have principles. Such principles are the intersection of ideals and interests. Ideals on their own easily fall into an abstract nobility that can manifest as anything from sainthood to self-destructive aspiration. Interests on their own leave selfish people incapable of maintaining anything greater than themselves. Virtue negotiates between interests and ideals. This negotiation is expressed as a principle. A principle realizes an ideal and localizes it in an interest.

Utopians kill and die for ideals. The Nazis, Communists and Islamists are Utopians. Civilized men live and fight for principles. Utopianism is a civilizational degeneracy. It usually precedes barbarism. Sensing the decline, men and women embrace some pure ideal, they idealize equality or race, and set off on a quest to construct a new civilization around it by destroying the existing civilization. They are convinced that their ideal will create a civilization that can live forever. When their ideal fails, they revert to their barbarian roots by worshiping the shamanic personality force of their leader. And these new barbarians murder, scream and cavort around the fire convinced that their new god can stave off the fall of night. And when the fires goes out, all that remains is ash, horror and rubble.

Civilized men and women understood that nothing mortal is immortal. That which is best in us, is virtue. It is that, which in our flawed and humble way, makes us closest to the God that made us. Our principles are how we aspire to keep that faith. When we lose our principles, we destroy whatever it was we sought to preserve, we become our own worst enemies and bring about our own destruction.

Principles are defined at their farthest end by what we must do and what we would never do. But their soul is self-awareness. The essence of virtue is to know thyself. Few are so innately good that they can always do the right thing without ever examining and questioning themselves. It is this self-examination through conscience that is the great moral labor of all religion and philosophy.

Everyone is naturally inclined to believe in their own goodness. But goodness comes from questioning one's own worth and examining one's own deeds. It comes from transcending our emotions, our anger and our pain, our self-pity, jealousy, resentment and vengefulness to become better than we are. The essence of virtue is not doing what comes naturally, but controlling the natural impulse and rising above it. That is how civilizations are built. We build civilizations by transcending ourselves. We destroy them by giving and taking permission to fall to our worst impulses.

Interests and ideals tend to opposite ends. In war, ideals may say that one should never kill and interests counsel one to survive by fleeing the battlefield. Virtues guide us to principles that overcome the extremes by finding our higher responsibility in the intersection of ideal and interest.

Civilizations depend on responsible people. It is the people who come to work every day and do their best who keep a country running. It is the soldiers who advance to the enemy and return fire, who win wars. It is leaders who do the difficult things who leave their country better than they found it. It is the men and women who search their souls, who leave this world better people than they entered it.

In a declining civilization, there are few responsible people. There are many who will want a title, but few who will do the job. There are many who will shout, but few who will reason. There are many who will wave a flag, but few who will fight for a cause. There are many who would destroy, but few who will build. There are many who will lecture, but few who will do.

In a civilization on the verge of a moral catastrophe, the invocation of virtues and principles is met with contemptuous laughter. It is widely understood that irresponsible behavior is better, that decency is for weaklings and fools, that anger is the only true virtue that suffices to achieve all ends. Manners vanish like autumn leaves in a breeze. Moral compasses show nothing. Intellectual consistency ceases to matter. Men believe contradictory things at different hours of the day. Illusory victories are always being achieved even as real defeats follow.

We wonder why great civilizations fall. Couldn't the Romans see what was coming? The first thing that goes in a moral catastrophe is virtue, the second is reason, the third is foresight, the fourth is competence and the fifth is self-control. And by then you have barbarians in the midst of civilization.

When virtue goes, civilizations rationalize destructive behavior. When reason goes, they become unable to even think about a problem with any degree of consistency. When foresight goes, they no longer understand consequences. When all those are gone, competence is all but  impossible. When there is no self-control, nothing matters anymore.

Civilizations are built on virtue. Without virtue, there is no civilization.

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to cheer on Communists and Nazis punching each other in major American cities while civil society disintegrates around them.

In Dallas, a black nationalist activist shot and killed 5 police officers at a Black Lives Matter anti-police rally. Instead of condemning BLM, Barack Obama defended a racist hate group whose role model is Assata Shakur, a wanted black nationalist cop killer, at the funerals of the murdered officers.

The left killed civil rights and replaced it with black nationalism. The racial supremacism of black nationalism that killed those officers is everywhere. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi are lionized as brilliant thinkers instead of hateful racists, Amazon has ordered a black nationalist secessionist fantasy from Aaron McGruder and Showtime aired ‘Guerilla,’ a miniseries glamorizing Black Panther terrorism.

But racism is a two-way street. So is violence. Extremists feed into each other.

You can’t legitimize one form of racism without legitimizing all of them. The media may advance this hypocritical position. Obama used the shameful “reverse racism” euphemism that distinguishes between black and white racism. But propaganda and spin don’t change the physics of human nature.

Either all racism is bad. Or all racism is acceptable.

Charlottesville is what happens when you normalize racism and street violence. Every normalization of extremism equally normalizes the extremism of the opposite side.

A civil society depends on a consensus. ‘Racism is bad’ is an example of such a consensus. If you normalize black nationalism, you will get more white nationalism. If you normalize leftist street violence against Trump supporters, you will also get more street violence against leftists.

Extremists want to eliminate the consensus of civil society. They want to destroy the idea that there’s any solution except violence through confrontations that show the helplessness of civil society.

That’s true of black nationalists and white nationalists, of Communists and Nazis, of Antifa and Vanguard, of the tankies and hipster Nazis of the Alt-Left and the Alt-Right. They’re a set of evil twins and when you unleash one, you unleash the other. Their real enemies aren’t each other, but everyone in the middle. The bourgeois normies who don’t want to replace society with their totalitarian nightmare.

Street violence raises the bar so that only the violent will participate in protests. If you “no platform” campus speakers, then the only speakers you get will be those willing to face bomb threats, arson, and physical assaults. If you fire people for their views, political activism becomes the province of anonymous trolls and unemployed street thugs. Extremism limits political discourse to extremists.

If Democrats really want to stop the rise of Neo-Nazi violence, there’s a very easy way. Stop normalizing black nationalism and the Alt-Left. End the racist witch hunts for white privilege. Make it clear that street violence is unacceptable and that racism is bad no matter who it comes from. Allow people you disagree with to express their views without trying to destroy their lives.

But that’s the opposite of what the Dems will do. They don’t want fewer Neo-Nazis; they want more of them. They don’t want fewer attacks like Charlottesville and Charleston. They want more of them.

The Dems have become an extremist party run by the radical left. Obama, Holder, and Lynch made common cause with black nationalist hate groups against civil society. It began when Obama defended the vile racism of Jeremiah Wright and concluded with DOJ organized race riots. DNC boss Tom Perez addresses La Raza and his deputy Keith Ellison is a veteran of the Nation of Islam.

The radical left wants to see Neo-Nazis gain prominence on the right to polarize the country. It wants to see our values and norms drowned in violence so that it has an excuse to eliminate free speech. It seeks to eliminate democracy by making the other side appear nightmarishly dangerous. It plots to impose a totalitarian system on the United States by empowering extremists to destroy the current system.

And their opposite numbers waving swastika flags want the same thing. The difference is that they don’t control the Republican Party the way that the Alt-Left and black nationalists control the Democrats.

Charlottesville is what happens when civil society fails. And those who set the terms of permissive discourse, who control the media, academia and social norms, are responsible for the failure.

Conservatives don’t have that kind of power. It’s the left that does.

Liberals, if there are any left on the left, can shut down racism and extremism. Or they can continue normalizing it until it’s mainstream and meaningless.

If you want to understand how we got to Charlottesville, the events at Evergreen State on the other side of the country are as good a place as any to start.

Evergreen’s President Bridges, the progressive who had called for safe spaces and allowed intersectional left-wing racists to terrorize his campus over their demands for racial segregation, was asked in an interview about accusations that he is a white supremacist.

Bridges replied that he doesn’t believe that he is a white supremacist. And then added, “It depends on what you mean by white supremacist.” He concedes, “I am a white person in a position of privilege.”

White privilege is how the intersectional left defines white supremacy. Any white people who aren’t allying with them to destroy Western civilization are defined as white supremacists. And even those who do, like Bridges, can always be accused of white supremacy for not destroying it hard enough.

When you spend enough time accusing everyone who doesn’t share your politics or even your race of racism, you make the term meaningless.

That’s what the left did over eight years of Obama. By the time the election rolled around, Hillary was defining all Trump voters as racists and sexists.

When you spend enough time crying wolf, eventually a real wolf appears. A real wolf showed up in Charlottesville.

The left spent eight years dismantling any meaningful definition of racism for political reasons. The practical effect of their actions was to eliminate social sanctions for actual racists.

And the real racists were happy to take advantage of the new climate.

When the left insists that everyone with white skin is part of white supremacy, that Shakespeare, Beethoven and all of Western civilization embody white supremacy, it’s echoing the actual talking points of white supremacy.

If you tell all Obama critics and Trump supporters that they’re racists often enough, some will decide that maybe they are racists.

If you tell a student who objects to racially segregated areas on campus that she is a white supremacist, she will be more likely to become one.

When you marginalize everyone to the right of you, some of the marginalized will accept the definition.

And when that happens, the left wins, the extremists win, and it becomes harder to maintain any kind of functioning civil society in which we settle conflicts through compromises rather than street violence.

Compromises are uncomfortable.

After the Civil War, the Union was preserved, but Southerners were allowed to honor their cause. It was an uncomfortable compromise, but it helped limit the violence from a conflict that had claimed the lives of 2% of the population. The Taliban campaign by black nationalists to tear down Confederate memorials was a deliberate effort at shattering a compromise that kept civil society working.

And that too led to Charlottesville.

Uncomfortable compromises are how we learn to live with each other. It means that there can be memorials of Robert E. Lee and streets named after Malcolm X. Tolerating people whose views we don’t like is one of the best ways to marginalize domestic extremists. When one set of extremists is empowered to wipe out the other, we end up with a civil war. Just ask Edmund Ruffin and John Brown.

Democrats claim a mandate from the “Right Side of History” to eliminate all the compromises. Catholic nuns must pay for abortions and birth control, Christian bakers and florists must participate in gay weddings, every white person must confess their racism, and every left-wing extremist must get their way.

That’s how you tear a society apart.

The Bill of Rights is an uncomfortable compromise. It says that we have to put up with people we don’t like. The Democrats, under the influence of the left, are rejecting that idea. But that goes both ways too.

You can have a liberal society or an illiberal one. But you can’t have a society that is selectively liberal when it comes to your bigotry, but illiberal of the bigotry of others, that believes you have the right to say anything you please without consequences, but that no one else does, that you can punch, but not be punched. That’s a totalitarian state. And the only way to realize it is through violence.

Democrats need to take an honest look at the street violence in Seattle, in Portland, in Berkeley and Charlottesville, and decide if this is what they really want. If they don’t, it’s time for them to stop normalizing left-wing extremism. If they do, then they are to blame for the next Dallas or Charlottesville.


(This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine)

Let me Google that for you.

James Damore is an FIDE chess master who studied at Princeton, MIT and Harvard. He had been working as a software engineer at Google for four years.

Danielle Brown is the new Vice President of Diversity at Google. She has an MBA from the University of Michigan and campaigned for Hillary.

She had been working at Google for a few weeks.

James Damore wrote a memo suggesting that Google should pursue ideological diversity, end discriminatory efforts to achieve identity politics diversity and be honest about gender differences. Danielle responded by denouncing his paper. “It’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages.”

Google has spent hundreds of millions on diversity. It has put thousands of employees through implicit bias training. Leftists at Google are encouraged to accuse each other of hidden biases.

Brown and Google CEO Sundar Pichai made some vague noises about free speech. And fired Damore.

“This has been a very difficult time.” That’s how Pichai began his letter to Google employees. Some might have thought that he was about to discuss a massive data breach, not an employee writing something that he disagreed with.

It was a difficult time because leftists at Google had to confront the horror of an original thinker in their ranks. Some were so traumatized by his intrusion into their safe space that they threatened to quit.

And so Damore was fired for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes”. What were these stereotypes?

That the gender gap in coding could be explained because women are more interested in people and men are more interested in things. Women were more cooperative and he suggested and that the gender gap could be reduced by making “software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming.”

Google could have disagreed with him. And left it at that. Instead it was, “Off with his head.”

Pichai claimed that some Google employees were “hurting”. Social media accounts were full of bizarre claims that leftist employees were “afraid” to come to work. But the only actual casualty was Damore.

It’s never the oppressed leftists crying to friendly media outlets who suffer. Only their targets.

James Damore is what most people think of when they imagine a Google employee. A brilliant original thinker with interests spread across the scientific and technological spectrum. But Danielle Brown is what Google actually is: a Hillary Clinton supporter who handled diversity at Intel and Google.

Google is a search engine monopoly that makes its money from search ads. It began with a revolutionary idea from young engineers much like Damore. Then the engineers became billionaires. And the company that began in a garage hired a Vice President of Diversity to get rid of the brilliant young engineers.

The idea that made Google some twenty years ago was PageRank. It was ahead of its time in utilizing social technology to rate the relevance of a page. The idea has since been cannibalized as Google’s search algorithm favors its own products. And increasingly it also favors its own political views.

As the company swings left, it isn’t interested in the “wisdom of crowds”, only in its own agenda.

Google has embedded partisan attacks on conservatives into its search and news territories under the guise of “fact checks”. It has fundamentally shifted results for terms such as “Jihad” to reflect Islamist propaganda rather than the work of counterterrorism researchers such as Robert Spencer. And it wasn’t the first time. Google had been previously accused of manipulating search results during Brexit.

Censorship has long been a problem on YouTube. And it will now officially be caging “controversial” videos using a method developed by Jigsaw. Formerly Google Ideas, Jigsaw is Google’s left-wing incubator developing social justice tech.

The Southern Poverty Law Center guided Google’s censorship of Islamic search results. But there’s no reason to think that it will stop there until Google has completely cannibalized PageRank and replaced it with ProgRank in which search results will be dominated by left-wing sites in one category after another. First Autocomplete results and then actual search results will be censored and suppressed.

Google’s treatment of conservative users mirrors its internal treatment of conservative employees.

Internally, Google is a toxic environment where conservatives are threatened, blacklisted and even physically assaulted. Damore’s case went public. Countless other conservatives were forced out of Google and blacklisted by left-wing activists without their cases ever receiving public attention.

Once upon a time, James Damore would have represented what was best about Google. But Google doesn’t need brilliant minds. It needs to find more ways to squeeze ad dollars out of its monopoly. The pretense that it’s a hub of innovation is the meaningless default brand for a Bay Area tech company.

Damore was working on Google’s search infrastructure. And there’s little doubt that he was wasted there. Google’s search has grown more useless even as the company’s search revenues have grown. Google’s goal is to streamline and shape search results for a mobile environment by giving users what it thinks they want rather than what they are actually searching for. Google isn’t just politically left-wing, its product mindset has become all about forcing users to do what it thinks they should be doing.

Google’s efforts to get a foothold in social media have repeatedly failed because of this mindset.

Damore, like so many of us, wasn’t thinking the way that Google thought he should be thinking. And so it dealt with the problem by getting rid of him. When users search for results that Google doesn’t like, it guides them to what it thinks they should be looking for. If they persist, then the results vanish. If they upload videos it doesn’t like, they get censored. That’s the totalitarian left-wing Google model in action.

Google is approaching the ecological dead end of its technological niche. There’s not much else to do except make fringe investments that are little more than disguised advertising and build more free apps to feed into its own ad business while driving traffic to them through its search and Android leverage.

If the business model ever fails or the government takes a closer look at its abuses, then it’s all over.

Meanwhile its Google.org philanthropy can fund pro-crime and anti-police causes. Google Ideas, now known as Jigsaw, can try to get involved in the Syrian Civil War. And the herd of leftists it hired can police internal messaging by spamming angry social justice memes and waiting for an actual engineer to contradict them. That’s what happened to James Damore. It’s happened to plenty of others before him.

When Google fired Damore, it sent a very clear message. The message wasn’t tolerance, but intolerance.

It said that its Vice President of Diversity knows more about biology than a researcher who received his biology degree in the top 3% of his class. It announced that there is no room for original thinking, heterodoxy or genius at Google. And it went even without saying, no room for anyone to the right.

When asked at a shareholder meeting whether conservatives would feel welcome at Google, Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt replied, “The company was founded under the principles of freedom of expression, diversity, inclusiveness.” But freedom of expression no longer comes before diversity. It’s breathing in the toxic fumes of fake inclusiveness and watching diversity vanish down the highway.

“Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity,” James Damore had argued.

But that’s not what the left means by diversity. At Google and everywhere else it means a plurality of people from different backgrounds, races, genders and sexual identities who agree with us.

It’s an artificial consensus that displaces the old democratic values of individualism and freedom. Instead it imposes a system of safe spaces that treat any dissent as an act of violence against the oppressed.

The gates of the internet cannot remain in the hands of a corporation intolerant of free speech. Google’s monopoly doesn’t only threaten the free market. It threatens freedom of expression on the internet.

It’s not just about James Damore. It’s about all of us.

(This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine)

Derek Harvey was a man who saw things coming. He had warned of Al Qaeda when most chose to ignore it. He had seen the Sunni insurgency rising when most chose to deny it.

The former Army colonel had made his reputation by learning the lay of the land. In Iraq that meant sleeping on mud floors and digging into documents to figure out where the threat was coming from.

It was hard to imagine anyone better qualified to serve as President Trump’s top Middle East adviser at the National Security Council than a man who had been on the ground in Iraq and who had seen it all.

Just like in Iraq, Harvey began digging at the NSC. He came up with a list of Obama holdovers who were leaking to the press. McMaster, the new head of the NSC, refused to fire any of them.

McMaster had a different list of people he wanted to fire. It was easy to make the list. Harvey was on it.

All you had to do was name Islamic terrorism as the problem and oppose the Iran Deal. If you came in with Flynn, you would be out. If you were loyal to Trump, your days were numbered.

And if you warned about Obama holdovers undermining the new administration, you were a target.

One of McMaster’s first acts at the NSC was to ban any mention of “Obama holdovers.” Not only did the McMaster coup purge Harvey, who had assembled the holdover list, but his biggest target was Ezra Watnick-Cohen, who had exposed the eavesdropping on Trump officials by Obama personnel.

Ezra Watnick-Cohen had provided proof of the Obama surveillance to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes. McMaster, however, was desperately working to fire him and replace him with Linda Weissgold. McMaster’s choice to replace Watnick-Cohen was the woman who helped draft the Benghazi talking points which blamed the Islamic terrorist attack on a video protest.

After protests by Bannon and Kushner, President Trump overruled McMaster. Watnick-Cohen stayed. For a while. Now Ezra Watnick-Cohen has been fired anyway.

According to the media, Watnick-Cohen was guilty of “anti-Muslim fervor” and “hardline views.” And there’s no room for anyone telling the truth about Islamic terrorism at McMaster’s NSC.

McMaster had even demanded that President Trump refrain from telling the truth about Islamic terrorism.

Another of his targets was Rich Higgins, who had written a memo warning of the role of the left in undermining counterterrorism. Higgins had served as a director for strategic planning at the NSC. He had warned in plain language about the threat of Islamic terrorism, of Sharia law, of the Hijrah colonization by Islamic migrants, of the Muslim Brotherhood, and of its alliance with the left as strategic threats.

Higgins had stood by Trump during the Khizr Khan attacks. And he had written a memo warning that "the left is aligned with Islamist organizations at local, national, and international levels" and that “they operate in social media, television, the 24-hour news cycle in all media and are entrenched at the upper levels of the bureaucracies.”

Like Harvey and Ezra Watnick-Cohen, Higgins had warned of an enemy within. And paid the price.

McMaster’s cronies had allegedly used the NSC’s email system to track down the source of the memo. The left and its useful idiots were indeed entrenched at the upper level of the bureaucracy.

Higgins was fired.

Like Harvey and Watnick-Cohen, Higgins had also become too dangerous to the Obama holdovers. Harvey had assembled a list of names and a plan to dismantle the Iranian nuclear deal. Watnick-Cohen had dug into the Obama surveillance of Trump officials. And Higgins had sought to declassify Presidential Study Directive 11. PSD-11 was the secret blueprint of Obama’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Pete Hoekstra, the former Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, linked PSD-11 to the rise of ISIS and called for its declassification.

Replacing Harvey is Michael Bell. When the Washington Post needed someone to badmouth Dr. Gorka, they turned to Bell: the former chancellor of the College of International Security Affairs at the National Defense University. Bell suggested that Dr. Gorka was an uneven scholar. And Dr. Gorka was accused of failing to incorporate other perspectives on Islam.

The pattern has never been hard to spot.

McMaster forced out K.T. McFarland from her role as Deputy National Security Advisor. Slotted in was Dina Habib-Powell.

McFarland was an Oxford and Cambridge grad who had worked at the Pentagon for the Reagan administration. Dina Habib-Powell had no national security background. She was an Egyptian-American immigrant and former Bush gatekeeper whose pals included Huma Abedin and Valerie Jarrett.

Powell, who has been described as the Republican Huma, said that Abedin “feels a deep responsibility to encourage more mutual understanding between her beliefs and culture and American culture.”

When visiting Egypt, Habib-Powell had assured the locals of how Bush, after September 11, “visited a mosque, took off his shoes and paid his respects.” "I see the president talk of Islam as a religion of peace, I see him host an iftar every year,” she gushed.

K.T. McFarland had written that “Global Islamist jihad is at war with all of Western civilization.”

It’s not hard to see why McMaster pushed out McFarland and elevated Habib-Powell.

Habib-Powell had attended the Iftar dinner with members of Muslim Brotherhood front groups. You can see her photographed at the American Task Force of Palestine gala. The ATFP was originally Rashid Khalidi’s American Committee on Jerusalem. She was there as a presenter at the Middle East Institute after a speech by Hanan Ashrawi. Her achievements under Bush included cultural exchanges with Iran, as well as cash for the Palestinian Authority and for Lebanon after the Hezbollah war with Israel.

While President Trump fights to restrict Muslim immigration, at his side is the woman who had once bragged on CNN, “Over 90% of student visas are now issued in under a week, and that is in the Middle East.”

But that is typical of the McMaster revamp of the NSC. It’s populated by swamp creatures who oppose the positions that President Trump ran on. And who are doing everything possible to undermine them.

President Trump promised a reset from Obama’s anti-Israel policies. McMaster picked Kris Bauman as the NSC’s point man on Israel. Bauman had defended Islamic terrorists and blamed Israel for the violence. He had urged pressure on Israel as the solution. Ideas like that fit in at McMaster’s NSC.

Meanwhile Derek Harvey, who had tried to halt Obama’s $221 million terror funding prize to the Palestinian Authority, was forced out.

This too is part of the pattern. As Caroline Glick has pointed out, the personnel being purged in the McMaster coup “are pro-Israel and oppose the Iran nuclear deal.”

When Adam Lovinger urged that “more attention be given to the threat of Iran and Islamic extremism,” his security clearance was revoked. Robin Townley was forced out in the same way.

Meanwhile, McMaster sent a letter to Susan Rice, Obama’s former National Security Adviser, assuring her that the NSC would work with her to “allow you access to classified information.” He claimed that Rice's continued access to classified information is "consistent with the national security interests of the United States."

Why does Susan Rice, who is alleged to have participated in the Obama eavesdropping on Trump people, need access to classified information? What national security purpose is served by it?

The same national security purpose that is served by McMaster’s purge of anyone at the NSC who dares to name Islamic terrorism, who wants a tougher stance on Iran, and who asks tough questions.

And the purge of reformers and original thinkers is only beginning.

The latest reports say that McMaster has a list of enemies who will be ousted from the NSC. And when that is done, the NSC will be a purely Obama-Bush operation. The consensus will be that the Iran Deal must stay, that Islam has nothing to do with Islamic terrorism, that we need to find ways to work with the aspirations of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that Israel must make concessions to terrorists.

If you loved the foreign policy that brought us 9/11, ISIS, and billions in funding to terrorists from Syria to Libya to the West Bank, you won’t be able to get enough of McMaster’s brand new NSC.

And neither will America’s enemies.

The swamp is overflowing. The National Security Council is becoming a national security threat.

As the health care debate goes on, Senator Bernie Sanders will toss in a socialized medicine bill.

Bernie’s bill won’t be a realistic piece of legislation. The 1 percenter Socialist from Vermont has three successful bills to his name. Two of those involved renaming post offices. He was a marginal figure during the ObamaCare debate. The financials of the plan won’t work. But they never do.

ObamaCare insurers are losing billions. Aetna pulled out after $700 million in losses. United Health jumped after losing $720 million. The single-payer that Bernie wants to propose will be even worse.

Vermont’s single payer experiment cost $4.3 billion out of a $4.9 billion state budget. The California Senate passed single-payer with no way to cover the $400 billion cost in a $183 billion budget.

Democrats who wouldn’t vote for it faced death threats and accusations that they were “murderers”.

That’s what every argument about socialized medicine comes down to. Either you support it or you want people to die.

Bernie Sanders has been accusing Republican repealers of killing thousands. If ObamaCare is repealed, "36,000 will die yearly". Then he claimed, “up to 28,000 Americans every single year could die.”

Is it 36,000 or 28,000? Who cares? The point is, if you’re against socialized medicine, you’re a murderer. The right numbers, either the budget or the casualties, don’t matter. Emotions trump statistics.

In 2015, the year after ObamaCare took effect, the death rate rose for the first time in a decade. 2,471,984 deaths occurred in this country in 2008. In 2014, we were up to 2,626,418.

That’s a difference of 150,000. And going up, not down.

You would think that if the ObamaCare mandate is saving so many lives, we ought to be seeing fewer deaths, not more of them.

Life expectancy in the year after ObamaCare fell for the first time since 1993. That was, coincidentally, the year of Hillary’s big push for socialized medicine.

Socialized medicine is better at taking lives than at saving them. Just ask Bernie.

The closest the Vermont Socialist has gotten to medical management was his time as VA committee chair. After hundreds of thousands of veterans died waiting for care, Bernie covered up the carnage. He claimed it was a right-wing conspiracy, sabotaged efforts to hold hearings and dismissed the complaints.

"When you are dealing with 200,000 people, if you did better than any other health institution in the world, there would be thousands of people every single day who would say 'I don't like what I'm getting,'" he insisted.

Bernie lied. 307,000 veterans died.

The Socialist Senator was obsessed with the VA because it was another template for socialized medicine. He denounced the criticisms of it as a right-wing plot to privatize the VA. Advocates of socialized medicine respond in this typical tribal fashion to rationing scandals whether it’s the NHS or the VA.

Socialized medicine isn’t a system. It’s an ideology. No amount of deaths or statistics can discredit it. And that is another reason it’s so dangerous. It combines the entrenched bureaucracy that rots all government programs from within with the fanatical conviction that it is the road to utopia.

It doesn’t matter how many people a progressive program kills. It must be defended on principle.

Socialized medicine is sold with a lie. The lie is that you can get all the medical care you need for a low price. Or even for free. But socialized medicine doesn’t have less rationing than the hybrid government-market programs that progressives keep incrementally creating and then tearing down. It has more.

Insurers that offered the most options suffered the biggest losses under ObamaCare. The ObamaCare insurers that made money did it by offering few doctors and low quality health care. The more they rationed services to patients and payments to doctors and hospitals, the better they did. And that’s how ObamaCare was designed to work. Full socialized medicine is even worse.

Socialism always sells the same lie. Take anything, remove the profit motive, scale up taxes and you can distribute it more fairly. But instead socialized medicine cannibalizes the health care market. Patients get tightly rationed health care. Doctors and hospitals are squeezed on reimbursements. The system never rations itself. Instead it rations care and becomes a policy vehicle for social engineering.

Even while Obama Inc. was touting ObamaCare, it was moving forward with cuts to health care services for active military personnel. ObamaCare replaced viable health care plans with unusable plans that were catastrophic care in all but name. Rationing was always the name of the game.

Socialism doesn’t build services, it builds bureaucracy. The bureaucracy rations the services it administers while building bigger buildings, hiring more personnel and expanding its organization. Bureaucrats get nicer chairs while patients bleed out waiting to see a doctor. Medications vanish from the formulary while unions negotiate bigger contacts with more perks. The bureaucracy insulates itself from criticism by identifying its existence and funding with medicine. Oppose it and you’re a murderer.

That’s socialized medicine.

The world was riveted by the drama of Charlie Gard’s death at the hands of British socialized medicine. The director of one hospital was being paid $78,000 a month. Another exec was receiving $55,000. Great Ormond Street Hospital, the institution made famous by Peter Pan, which seemed obsessed with killing Charlie, had a dying child abused by Jimmy Savile, in the Baby P case, Sabah Al-Zayyat missed the fact that an abused child had a broken back and its head of cardiology was booted for molesting young boys. A report had claimed that the hospital couldn’t pay its bills and children were beating treated in hallways and waiting rooms.

Take the worst abuses in a free market system. Then make them permanent. That’s socialized medicine.

The death rate in America is 8.20 per 1,000 people. In the UK, it’s 9.40. The death rate rose in the UK around the same time that it was rising in the US. It was the biggest rise since 1968.

And the NHS, the gold standard in socialized medicine, has death rates 4 times higher than America. Seriously ill NHS patients were seven times more likely to die than they were in the United States.

Almost 10% of British patients died in a surgical study compared to 2.5% of American patients. The head of anesthesia at Great Ormond blamed the NHS' waiting lists for the death toll.

Socialists lie, hospital patients die.

The American left shrieks that without socialized medicine, we’ll die. The facts show that socialized medicine kills. The left promises that socialized medicine will mean health care for everyone. The facts show that it will mean less care, fewer doctors and more health care rationing across the board.

Call it single-payer, Medicare-for-all or any other euphemism, socialized medicine is death.

Members of Congress get their medical care through the Office of the Attending Physician: an institution that dates back to 1928. For a $596 annual fee, you can get your primary care that way. That's where Bernie Sanders' medical note came from indicating he uses it for his medical needs.

Congressman Steven LaTourette came down with pancreatic cancer after OAP doctors failed to notify him that he had a lesion. He died last year. Socialized medicine really will kill you.