Two years before Barack Obama announced his candidacy for President of the United States, he met with the leader of a hate group who had praised Hitler and declared that the Jews, "can't say 'Never Again' to God, because when he puts you in the ovens, you're there forever.”

The previous year, Obama had launched his national profile with a DNC speech proclaiming,
“There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.” And there he was, smiling alongside Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, the largest black separatist organization in the country, whose theology claimed that white people were genetically engineered devils who were due to be destroyed by flying saucers.

Also posing with Farrakhan and Obama were Mustapha Farrakhan, Joshua Farrakhan and Leonard Farrakhan Muhammad, his security chief and son, his other son, and his chief of staff and son-in-law.

Also there was Willie F. Wilson, a Farrakhan ally, who had led a protest against an Asian business by a mob shouting, “F___ the Chinks”. "We forgave Mr. Chan," he told reporters after that incident. "If we didn't forgive him, we would have cut his head off and rolled it down the street.”

Hope and change.

Obama had claimed that he had never heard the racist views of his pastor and mentor, Jeremiah Wright, but he certainly knew who Farrakhan was. Three years later, he would be forced to disavow him in a statement declaring, “I decry racism and anti-Semitism in every form and strongly condemn the anti-Semitic statements made by Minister Farrakhan.” Then why did he meet with him and pose with him?

The picture proves that Obama didn’t have a problem with Farrakhan’s racist and anti-Semitic views.

The photo of Farrakhan and Obama at a Congressional Black Caucus meeting on Capitol Hill had been kept buried since it was taken in 2005. A CBC staff member in a “panic” quickly set out to keep the photo secret. And the Nation of Islam and the photographer agreed to protect Obama’s political career.

“After the nomination was secured and all the way up until the inauguration; then for eight years after he was president, it was kept under cover,” Askia Muhammad, the photographer, said, “It absolutely would have made a difference.”

The relationship between Barry and Louie was one of the dirtiest secrets of the previous administration. After Obama left office, the Nation of Islam has become more open in discussing that relationship.

During Obama’s final months in office, Farrakhan revealed that the future president had visited him. That would suggest that Farrakhan and Obama had met on two occasions. Possibly more. A top Nation of Islam official had claimed that the two men would frequently “communicate with each other.”

"We supported him when he was a community organizer," Farrakhan said. "My chief of staff, Brother Leonard, knew Barack Obama, and we backed him with money and with the help of the FOI (Fruits of Islam) to get him elected."

Brother Leonard is Leonard Farrakhan Muhammad, his son-in-law and chief of staff, to whom the photographer had turned over the recently revealed photo. Leonard can be seen standing to Obama’s left in the Farrakhan picture.

“The bigger picture is I have a picture of myself and Barack together,” he told congregants. “You never saw it, because I would never put it out to give his enemies what they were looking for to hurt him.”



Possessing the photo also gave the racist hate group leverage over the President of the United States. It is unknown whether the Nation of Islam made use of the picture to obtain favors from the White House. But concealing the picture was one form of support that the racist hate group provided to Obama.

Even without the photo, there were traces of the relationship that caused problems for Obama.

Obama had participated in Farrakhan’s Million Man March. His pastor and mentor, the violently racist Jeremiah Wright, was an admirer of Farrakhan. Obama’s church honored Farrakhan with the Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award. A group photo which included Michelle Obama and Khadijah Farrakhan, the racist leader's wife, had made the rounds. No one had managed to bury that one.

It took almost as much work to get Obama to disavow Farrakhan as it did Wright. During the Democrat debate, he responded to questions about his support from the racist leader with lawyerisms.

"I can't say to somebody that he can't say that he thinks I'm a good guy," he said at one point. And he made sure to call the Nation of Islam leader, Minister Farrakhan.

Obama disavowed Farrakhan, but there were always hedges. And Farrakhan’s later remarks make it clear that the hate group leader accepted the distancing for the greater good of the “big picture”.

During the campaign Obama had claimed, “We’re not doing anything, I assure you, formally or informally with Minister Farrakhan.” Was that the truth or was it yet another lie?

Obama had never let anti-Semitism and racism get in the way of supporting a political ally. He had embraced Al Sharpton, the bigoted thug who had once bragged, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”

Obama had appeared at Sharpton’s National Action Network, the hate group whose lieutenant had chanted, “Don’t give the Jew a dime” outside Freddy’s Fashion Mart.

The racist arson that followed killed 7 people.

This was what Obama did in the open. The recently revealed photo gives us some idea of what he was doing in the shadows. There is so much about Obama that was kept buried to protect him.

The Farrakhan photo was suppressed by the Nation of Islam to protect his political career. Not until he was out of office did the hate group begin coming clean about its ties to Barack Hussein Obama. The Los Angeles Times still won’t release the infamous Khalidi tape. That’s been part of the consistent pattern of the media whitewashing and censoring damaging information about Obama’s racist connections.

The same thing happened with Rep. Keith Ellison, the DNC Vice Chairman, who had begun his political career with the Nation of Islam and may have spent as much as eleven years with the hate group. The media allowed Ellison to repeatedly lie about his membership and his history of anti-Semitism. He whined, “I had to account for things I had written as a college student,” even though he was documented defending the Nation of Islam’s anti-Semitism when he was a lawyer with four kids.

How deep do Obama’s ties to the Nation of Islam go? We will probably never know.

The media is as incurious about Obama’s radicalism as it is obsessed with comparing Trump to Hitler. It will go on being incurious about Obama posing with a bigot who once crowed, "Here come the Jews. They don't like Farrakhan, so they call me Hitler. Well, that's a good name. Hitler was a very great man."

Hope and change.

September 2009.

Obama hadn't even been in office for a whole year when he gave in to Moscow’s biggest demand by dropping the missile defense shield for Poland and the Czech Republic. During his campaign, he had enthusiastically backed the defensive program, declaring, “We have to send a clear signal that Poland and other countries in that region are not going to be subject to intimidation and aggression.”

Like all of his campaign promises that were based on political triangulation, law enforcement, counterterrorism, Jerusalem and gay marriage, it was a campaign lie to be thrown out after the election.

Putin praised Obama’s sellout of our allies as a “brave decision.” In his first year, President Trump touted the sale of Patriot missiles to Poland. That was a truly brave decision.

After the Russian invasion, Obama refused to provide Ukraine with military assistance. While he had handed out weapons to Islamist terrorists in Syria and Libya, the Ukrainians were only offered MREs. The same administration that covertly shipped a fortune in foreign currency on unmarked cargo planes to Russia’s Iranian allies took months to meet Ukrainian requests for boots and spare tires.

The Trump administrated unapologetically approved the sale of sniper rifles to the Ukrainians.

“I’m aware of not only the extraordinary work that you’ve done on behalf of the Russian people," Obama had gushed during his meeting with Putin. There were no protests from the same media that has since then repeatedly suggested that Trump’s praise for Putin indicated a soft spot for dictators.

Looking back at Obama’s first year and Trump’s first year, it’s easy to assess who was giving Moscow more. It wasn’t just missile defense. In the spring of ’09, Hillary was in Moscow toting a misspelled Reset Button swiped from a swimming pool. But it was Obama who had first urged a “reset or reboot”. That was the month he sent a secret hand-delivered letter to Russia offering to kill the missile shield. The Russians turned down his proposed deal, but he went through with the appeasement anyway.

Trashing missile defense was just one step in a larger effort to revive Jimmy Carter’s defense policies. In his first year, Obama began the push to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. CTBT would have allowed the Russians (and everyone else) to build up their nuclear arsenals while crippling our own. The new START treaty was drafted in ’09 and signed next year. And Russian violations of it were ignored.

It took a new administration to change that.

In his first phone call with Putin, President Trump blasted the START treaty as a bad deal that gave Moscow a free ride. Next month, the Pentagon officially came out and said what everyone knew.

This was a sharp contrast with the previous administration which had refused to detail Russian violations. It falsely claimed that it couldn’t answer the question because “the New START treaty forbids releasing to the public data and information obtained during implementation of the treaty.”

Before the Iran deal, the Russia deal had been Obama’s legacy. And the same lies, echo chambers and spin that would be used to cover up Iranian violations were being deployed to mask Russian violations.

The Russians couldn’t have been too surprised at Trump holding their feet to the fire. Trump had blasted the START treaty during the third presidential debate while Hillary Clinton had rambled on about cyberattacks. The Russians would have been far more concerned about nukes than keyboards.

That was the same debate where Hillary Clinton had accused Trump of being Putin’s “puppet”.

But if that’s true, where are the concessions and the appeasement? Every tangible foreign policy issue that the commentariat at conspiratorial lefty media outlets like the Washington Post, the Huffington Post and ThinkProgress had seized on as evidence of Trump’s collusion has come up short.

Remember when Trump was secretly conspiring to lift sanctions for Exxon-Mobil’s Russian drilling project?

"Could Massive Russian Oil Deal with Exxon Explain Why Putin Appears to Have Meddled in US Election?", Democracy Now shrieked. "Trump-Putin Bromance: Election Hacking, Oil Drilling," the Huffington Post caterwauled.

ThinkProgress made them seem restrained. "Trump, Putin, and ExxonMobil team up to destroy the planet.”

"Pick of Exxon CEO for Secretary of State clarifies why Putin wanted Trump elected: a $500 billion oil deal killed by sanctions," the sub yammered. Trump, Putin and oil represented "the gravest threat to humanity (and democracy) since the rise of the Axis powers".

Just one problem. Trump refused to let the deal happen. So much for that conspiracy theory.

Seizing on the potential Exxon deal was an act of desperation. The left was quick to juggle Russia collusion theories, but had trouble coming up with anything that Russia actually got from Trump.

Not only wasn’t there anything like Obama’s Year One windfall of appeasement, but Moscow was getting nothing but trouble. The new National Defense Strategy lists Russia as a major threat. It’s a return to the Republican view of Russia as a geopolitical threat that Obama had mocked Romney for.

The Washington Post, which boasts a new Russia-Trump conspiracy theory every five hours, responded by claiming that Trump’s policy of confronting Russia is exactly what Vladimir Putin wants. "Trump's strategy pushes confrontation with Russia, and Moscow is pleased," a Post op-ed declared.

What better evidence could there be that Trump is Putin’s puppet than that he’s standing up to him?

The new Russia conspiracy meme borrows the old Obama spin on Iran and ISIS which accused critics of “playing into their hands” by trying to fight them, instead of appeasing them. It was classic Orwellian spin. “Weakness is strength”, “lies are truth” and “opposition is collusion”. But it said something about the weakness of the collusion reality that the Post was forced to rely on such weak Rhodes-ian spin.

What had Trump done for Russia? Well he stood up to it. And that’s exactly what Putin wants.

The media’s case for collusion comes down to the hacking of Democrat emails. But while having Podesta’s missives exposed to daylight was clearly a traumatic event for the Dems, it’s not exactly up there with letting the Russians have a free hand in Europe. Or letting its Iranian allies go nuclear.

The media has blasted us with headlines about the meeting between Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer about the Magnitsky Act. But a year later, the Magnitsky Act is doing just fine. There’s been no review. Obama had singlehandedly dismantled the Cuban embargo. If Trump had really wanted to, the sanctions on Russia would be a memory. But instead the sanctions keep on coming.

The media made much of Trump's signing statement to CAATSA criticizing its intrusion on his authority. Obama had repeatedly made similar objections, though using very different rhetoric, in signing statements to previous bills. When the administration missed the October 1 sanctions deadline, the media again rolled out the conspiracy theories. “The Trump administration is delaying Russia sanctions that Congress demanded,” Vox bleated. The sanctions were sent in the very next day.

The media has come to specialize in spinning conspiracy theories out of process. It’s safer to focus on the trees, because then they don’t have to notice that there’s no forest. But it’s a sign of just how little it has to work with when it comes to real life policy as opposed to the conspiracy theories of its bubble.

“What did Putin want from Trump and what did he actually get?” a Newsweek article inquires. It’s forced to conclude that the answer is nothing. Russia received a whole lot from Obama in his first year. Trump has dealt it a series of setbacks instead. Newsweek concludes that Putin helped elect Trump, but got nothing in return. That would make Putin rather stupid. And no one has yet accused him of that.

But that’s what the current collusion conspiracy theories of the left have irrationally been reduced to. Putin helped elect Trump. And got nothing from Trump for it. Now it’s time to impeach Trump anyway.

Backing Trump never made any sense. Republicans have traditionally been more hostile to Russia. And Trump’s entire pitch was nationalism. Nationalist leaders in small countries might collaborate with Putin, but the nationalist leader of the United States could only end up on a collision course with Russia.

Obama’s first year was a golden period for Russia because he didn’t believe in national interests. Trump does. The left inevitably accuses the right of its own sins. Trump didn’t collude with Russia. Obama did.

(The following is the speech that I delivered this Sunday at the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition Convention in Myrtle Beach. My appreciation to Joe Dugan and everyone involved in organizing it and making it a reality once again. And to Don Neuen and Donna Fiducia of Cowboy Logic Radio for the introduction. And to anyone and everyone still fighting the good fight.)

This is a civil war.

There aren’t any soldiers marching on Charleston… or Myrtle Beach. Nobody’s getting shot in the streets. Except in Chicago… and Baltimore, Detroit and Washington D.C.

But that’s not a civil war. It’s just what happens when Democrats run a city into the ground. And then they dig a hole in the ground so they can bury it even deeper.

If you look deep enough into that great big Democrat hole, you might even see where Jimmy Hoffa is buried.

But it’s not guns that make a civil war. It’s politics.

Guns are how a civil war ends. Politics is how it begins.

How do civil wars happen?

Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that elections are how you decide who’s in charge.

That’s the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.

I know you’re all thinking about President Trump.

He won and the establishment, the media, the democrats, rejected the results. They came up with a whole bunch of conspiracy theories to explain why he didn’t really win. It was the Russians. And the FBI. And sexism, Obama, Bernie Sanders and white people.

It’s easier to make a list of the things that Hillary Clinton doesn’t blame for losing the election. It’s going to be a short list.

A really short list. Herself.

The Mueller investigation is about removing President Trump from office and overturning the results of an election. We all know that. But it’s not the first time they’ve done this.

The first time a Republican president was elected this century, they said he didn’t really win. The Supreme Court gave him the election. There’s a pattern here.

Trump didn’t really win the election. Bush didn’t really win the election. Every time a Republican president won an election this century, the Democrats insist he didn’t really win.

Now say a third Republican president wins an election in say, 2024.

What are the odds that they’ll say that he didn’t really win? Right now, it looks like 100 percent.

What do sure odds of the Dems rejecting the next Republican president really mean? It means they don’t accept the results of any election that they don’t win.

It means they don’t believe that transfers of power in this country are determined by elections.

That’s a civil war.

There’s no shooting. At least not unless you count the attempt to kill a bunch of Republicans at a charity baseball game practice. But the Democrats have rejected our system of government.

This isn’t dissent. It’s not disagreement.

You can hate the other party. You can think they’re the worst thing that ever happened to the country. But then you work harder to win the next election. When you consistently reject the results of elections that you don’t win, what you want is a dictatorship.

Your very own dictatorship.

The only legitimate exercise of power in this country, according to the left, is its own. Whenever Republicans exercise power, it’s inherently illegitimate.

The attacks on Trump show that elections don’t matter to the left.

Republicans can win an election, but they have a major flaw. They’re not leftists.

That’s what the leftist dictatorship looks like.

The left lost Congress. They lost the White House. So what did they do? They began trying to run the country through Federal judges and bureaucrats.

Every time that a Federal judge issues an order saying that the President of the United States can’t scratch his own back without his say so, that’s the civil war.

Our system of government is based on the constitution, but that’s not the system that runs this country.

The left’s system is that any part of government that it runs gets total and unlimited power over the country.

If it’s in the White House, then the president can do anything. And I mean anything. He can have his own amnesty for illegal aliens. He can fine you for not having health insurance. His power is unlimited.

He’s a dictator.

But when Republicans get into the White House, suddenly the President can’t do anything. He isn’t even allowed to undo the illegal alien amnesty that his predecessor illegally invented.

A Democrat in the White House has “discretion” to completely decide every aspect of immigration policy. A Republican doesn’t even have the “discretion” to reverse him.

That’s how the game is played. That’s how our country is run.

When Democrats control the Senate, then Harry Reid and his boys and girls are the sane, wise heads that keep the crazy guys in the House in check.

But when Republicans control the Senate, then it’s an outmoded body inspired by racism.

When Democrats run the Supreme Court, then it has the power to decide everything in the country. But when Republicans control the Supreme Court, it’s a dangerous body that no one should pay attention to.

When a Democrat is in the White House, states aren’t even allowed to enforce immigration law. But when a Republican is in the White House, states can create their own immigration laws.

Under Obama, a state wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom without asking permission. But under Trump, Jerry Brown can go around saying that California is an independent republic and sign treaties with other countries.

The Constitution has something to say about that.

Whether it’s Federal or State, Executive, Legislative or Judiciary, the left moves power around to run the country. If it controls an institution, then that institution is suddenly the supreme power in the land.

This is what I call a moving dictatorship.

There isn’t one guy in a room somewhere issuing the orders. Instead there’s a network of them. And the network moves around.

If the guys and girls in the network win elections, they can do it from the White House. If they lose the White House, they’ll do it from Congress. If they don’t have either one, they’ll use the Supreme Court.

If they don’t have either the White House, Congress or the Supreme Court, they’re screwed. Right?

Nope.

They just go on issuing them through circuit courts and the bureaucracy. State governments announce that they’re independent republics. Corporations begin threatening and suing the government.

There’s no consistent legal standard. Only a political one.

Under Obama, states weren’t allowed to enforce immigration laws. That was the job of the Federal government. And the states weren’t allowed to interfere with the job that the Feds weren’t doing.

Okay.

Now Trump comes into office and starts enforcing immigration laws again. And California announces it’s a sanctuary state and passes a law punishing businesses that cooperate with Federal immigration enforcement.

So what do we have here?

It’s illegal for states to enforce immigration law because that’s the province of the Federal government. But it’s legal for states to ban the Federal government from enforcing immigration law.

The only consistent pattern here is that the left decided to make it illegal to enforce immigration law.

It may do that sometimes under the guise of Federal power or states rights. But those are just fronts. The only consistent thing is that leftist policies are mandatory and opposing them is illegal.

Everything else is just a song and dance routine.

That’s how it works. It’s the moving dictatorship. It’s the tyranny of the network.

You can’t pin it down. There’s no one office or one guy. It’s a network of them. It’s an ideological dictatorship. Some people call it the deep state. But that doesn’t even begin to capture what it is.

To understand it, you have to think about things like the Cold War and Communist infiltration.

A better term than Deep State is Shadow Government.

Parts of the Shadow Government aren’t even in the government. They are wherever the left holds power. It can be in the non-profit sector and among major corporations. Power gets moved around like a New York City shell game. Where’s the quarter? Nope, it’s not there anymore.

The shadow government is an ideological network. These days it calls itself by a hashtag #Resistance. Under any name, it runs the country. Most of the time we don’t realize that. When things are normal, when there’s a Democrat in the White House or a bunch of Democrats in Congress, it’s business as usual.

Even with most Republican presidents, you didn’t notice anything too out of the ordinary. Sure, the Democrats got their way most of the time. But that’s how the game is usually played.

It’s only when someone came on the scene who didn’t play the game by the same rules, that the network exposed itself. The shadow government emerged out of hiding and came for Trump.

And that’s the civil war.

This is a war over who runs the country. Do the people who vote run the country or does this network that can lose an election, but still get its agenda through, run the country?

We’ve been having this fight for a while. But this century things have escalated.

They escalated a whole lot after Trump’s win because the network isn’t pretending anymore. It sees the opportunity to delegitimize the whole idea of elections.

Now the network isn’t running the country from cover. It’s actually out here trying to overturn the results of an election and remove the president from office.

It’s rejected the victories of two Republican presidents this century.

And if we don’t stand up and confront it, and expose it for what it is, it’s going to go on doing it in every election. And eventually Federal judges are going to gain enough power that they really will overturn elections.

It happens in other countries. If you think it can’t happen here, you haven’t been paying attention to the left.

Right now, Federal judges are declaring that President Trump isn’t allowed to govern because his Tweets show he’s a racist. How long until they say that a president isn’t even allowed to take office because they don’t like his views?

That’s where we’re headed.

Civil wars swing around a very basic question. The most basic question of them all. Who runs the country?

Is it me? Is it you? Is it Grandma? Or is it bunch of people who made running the government into their career?

America was founded on getting away from professional government. The British monarchy was a professional government. Like all professional governments, it was hereditary. Professional classes eventually decide to pass down their privileges to their kids.

America was different. We had a volunteer government. That’s what the Founding Fathers built.

This is a civil war between volunteer governments elected by the people and professional governments elected by… well… uh… themselves.

Of the establishment, by the establishment and for the establishment.

You know, the people who always say they know better, no matter how many times they screw up, because they’re the professionals. They’ve been in Washington D.C. politics since they were in diapers.

Freedom can only exist under a volunteer government. Because everyone is in charge. Power belongs to the people.

A professional government is going to have to stamp out freedom sooner or later. Freedom under a professional government can only be a fiction. Whenever the people disagree with the professionals, they’re going to have to get put down. That’s just how it is. No matter how it’s disguised, a professional government is tyranny.

Ours is really well disguised, but if it walks like a duck and locks you up like a duck, it’s a tyranny.

Now what’s the left.

Forget all the deep answers. The left is a professional government.

It’s whole idea is that everything needs to be controlled by a big central government to make society just. That means everything from your soda sizes to whether you can mow your lawn needs to be decided in Washington D.C.

Volunteer governments are unjust. Professional governments are fair. That’s the credo of the left.

Its network, the one we were just discussing, it takes over professional governments because it shares their basic ideas. Professional governments, no matter who runs them, are convinced that everything should run through the professionals. And the professionals are usually lefties. If they aren’t, they will be.

Just ask Mueller and establishment guys like him.

What infuriates professional government more than anything else? An amateur, someone like President Trump who didn’t spend his entire adult life practicing to be president, taking over the job.

President Trump is what volunteer government is all about.

When you’re a government professional, you’re invested in keeping the system going. But when you’re a volunteer, you can do all the things that the experts tell you can’t be done. You can look at the mess we’re in with fresh eyes and do the common sense things that President Trump is doing.

And common sense is the enemy of government professionals. It’s why Trump is such a threat.

A Republican government professional would be bad enough. But a Republican government volunteer does that thing you’re not supposed to do in government… think differently.

Professional government is a guild. Like medieval guilds. You can’t serve in if you’re not a member. If you haven’t been indoctrinated into its arcane rituals. If you aren’t in the club.

And Trump isn’t in the club. He brought in a bunch of people who aren’t in the club with him.

Now we’re seeing what the pros do when amateurs try to walk in on them. They spy on them, they investigate them and they send them to jail. They use the tools of power to bring them down.

That’s not a free country.

It’s not a free country when FBI agents who support Hillary take out an “insurance policy” against Trump winning the election. It’s not a free country when Obama officials engage in massive unmasking of the opposition. It’s not a free country when the media responds to the other guy winning by trying to ban the conservative media that supported him from social media. It’s not a free country when all of the above collude together to overturn an election because the guy who wasn’t supposed to win, won.

We’re in a civil war between conservative volunteer government and leftist professional government.

The pros have made it clear that they’re not going to accept election results anymore. They’re just going to make us do whatever they want. They’re in charge and we better do what they say.

That’s the war we’re in. And it’s important that we understand that.

Because this isn’t a shooting war yet. And I don’t want to see it become one.

And before the shooting starts, civil wars are fought with arguments. To win, you have to understand what the big picture argument is. It’s easy to get bogged down in arguments that don’t matter or won’t really change anything.

This is the argument that changes everything.

Do we have a government of the people and by the people? Or do we have a tyranny of the professionals?

The Democrats try to dress up this argument in leftist social justice babble. Those fights are worth having. But sometimes we need to pull back the curtain on what this is really about.

They’ve tried to rig the system. They’ve done it by gerrymandering, by changing the demographics of entire states through immigration, by abusing the judiciary and by a thousand different tricks.

But civil wars come down to an easy question. Who runs the country?

They’ve given us their answer and we need to give them our answer.

Both sides talk about taking back the country. But who are they taking it back for?

The left uses identity politics. It puts supposed representatives of entire identity groups up front. We’re taking the country back for women and for black people, and so on and so forth…

But nobody elected their representatives.

Identity groups don’t vote for leaders. All the black people in the country never voted to make Shaun King al Al Sharpton their representative. And women sure as hell didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton.

What we have in America is a representative government. A representative government makes freedom possible because it actually represents people, instead of representing ideas.

The left’s identity politics only represents ideas. Nobody gets to vote on them.

Instead the left puts out representatives from different identity politics groups, there’s your gay guy, there’s three women, there’s a black man, as fronts for their professional government system.

When they’re taking back the country, it’s always for professional government. It’s never for the people.

When conservatives fight to take back the country, it’s for the people. It’s for volunteer government the way that the Founding Fathers wanted it to be.

This is a civil war over whether the American people are going to govern themselves. Or are they going to be governed.

Are we going to have a government of the people, by the people and for the people… or are we going to have a government.

The kind of government that most countries have where a few special people decide what’s best for everyone.

We tried that kind of government under the British monarchy. And we had a revolution because we didn’t like it.

But that revolution was met with a counterrevolution by the left. The left wants a monarchy. It wants King Obama or Queen Oprah.

It wants to end government of the people, by the people and for the people. That’s what they’re fighting for. That’s what we’re fighting against. The stakes are as big as they’re ever going to get. Do elections matter anymore?

I live in the state of Ronald Reagan. I can go visit the Ronald Reagan Library any time I want to. But today California has one party elections. There are lots of elections and propositions. There’s all the theater of democracy, but none of the substance. Its political system is as free and open as the Soviet Union.

And that can be America.

The Trump years are going to decide if America survives. When his time in office is done, we’re either going to be California or a free nation once again.

The civil war is out in the open now and we need to fight the good fight. And we must fight to win.

Palestinian boss Mahmoud Abbas recently declared that Israel is "a colonial enterprise that has nothing to do with Jewishness". Moses, King David and thousands of years of Jewish history would disagree. Israel and the Jews are part of the story of human civilization. Over 50% of the human race has a holy book that tells of the Jewish journey to Israel. That includes Mohammed’s own copy of the Koran.

Israel isn’t a “colonial enterprise”. Palestine is.

Anyone who wants to find out where the name Israel comes from can open the Book of Genesis 32:29. The story even appears in Islamic hadiths. But where does “Palestine” really come from?

Palestine isn’t a Hebrew or Arabic word. The Greeks used it to describe the area. And when the Romans and their Arab mercenaries repressed the indigenous Jewish population, they renamed it all Palestine.

Palestine, after the Philistines: but why did the Greeks and Romans name the area after the Philistines?

The Philistines were one of the Greek origin sea peoples who had originally invaded and colonized the area. The Jewish resistance to Philistine colonialism is chronicled in the histories of Samson, King Saul and King David. It was natural for the Greek and Roman colonies that the Jews of the Second Temple era clashed with to use “Palestine”, the name associated with earlier colonies, to refer to their new colonies.

That latest phase of Greek colonialism led to an extended conflict between the Persian Empire and Greco-Roman civilization. The Romans made extended use of Arab mercenaries and rulers to secure their dominions. One such ruler was Herod, the son of an Idumean father and a Nabatean Arab mother, (according to the Greek historian Strabo they were both Arabic peoples), who repressed the Jews.

The eventual decline and fall of the Roman and Persian empires made way for the Islamic conquests of the region. But the Islamic bandit hordes had no original ideas. Their religion was a hodgepodge of Judaism, Christianity, assorted pagan beliefs and Mohammed’s violent fantasies. The rest of their culture they took wholesale from the Greeks. This game of historical Idiocracy ended with a collection of Arab colonists who call themselves “Palestinians” and claim to be descended from… somebody.

In Germany, Abbas declared that, “the nation of Palestine, throughout its long history, has been a beacon of generosity, and our people are an extension of the 3,500-year-old Canaanite civilization.” The Palestinian Authority that the unelected dictator runs was created in 1993. There was never any such independent country before that. And inquiring minds would love to know what an Islamic terrorist group and the Arab clans it oversees have in common with the Canaanite civilization. Fire, the wheel?

But then, Abbas also insisted that, "Mohammed the Prophet was a Palestinian”. According to Islamic tradition, Mohammed was an Adnanite Arab from Arabia. They claim descent from Ishmael and Abraham. That means they aren’t Canaanites. And a number of the Arab clans who make up the “Palestinians” do have their origins in Arabia. For a brief, shining moment, Abbas was telling the truth.

Previously, Abbas had also claimed that Jesus was a Palestinian. If you’re keeping track, that means the Palestinians are Canaanites, Arabs and Jews. That certainly covers a lot of historical bases.

But we’re just getting started.

“The Bible says, in these words, that the Palestinians existed before Abraham,” Abbas also insisted. The Bible doesn’t say anything in “these words”, but people took it to mean that he was claiming that the Palestinians were actually the Philistines. But then he took credit for the invention of the “Canaanite-Palestinian alphabet more than 6,000 years ago.”

There’s no such alphabet. The Palestinian Authority and Muslims in Israel use the Arabic alphabet which does have its extremely distant origins in the Phoenician Proto-Canaanite alphabet. But so does Greek, Latin and the letters you’re reading now. Like most of the “Palestinian” leader’s claims, it’s nonsense.

Within a few years, Abbas claimed that the “Palestinians” are descended from the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Jews and the Arabs. Only the last one is true. The “Palestinians” were part of a wave of Arab and Islamic invaders whose incursions continued well into the modern era. There are some 10,000 “Afro-Palestinians” in Gaza. Some are African settlers who came in the 19th century. The anti-Israel left would have you believe that a Sudanese Muslim who settled in Israel in the late 19th century is an indigenous “Palestinian”, but a Jewish refugee from Egypt is a foreign “settler”.

The Arab Muslims who live in ’48 and ’67 Israel are made up of various clans from around the region.

Abbas has referred to Jordan and Palestine as "one people living in two states.” Hamas interior minister Fathi Hammad had once asserted, "Personally, half my family is Egyptian. We are all like that. More than 30 families in the Gaza Strip are called Al-Masri (Egyptian). Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.”

The most famous Al-Masri is a billionaire who lives in a West Bank reproduction of an Italian villa named “The House of Palestine”, and was recently detained by the Saudis. Munib Masri served as a Palestinian Authority minister, holds a legislative seat and accounts for a quarter of the “Palestinian” economy. The greenhouse in his villa was a gift from Napoleon III to his mistress. Masri, whose family name originated in Egypt, and claims to be a Palestinian, is actually a Saudi citizen who lives in an imported Italian villa. He made his money supplying the US military during Desert Storm.

That’s what a “Palestinian” looks like.

The “Palestinians” are Egyptians, Saudis, Jordanians, Senegalese, Sudanese and a number of other Muslim invasive colonists. They are not Philistines, Canaanites or Jews. They’re as indigenous as Al-Masri’s “House of Palestine” made out of imported Italian marble and filled with European art.

The “Palestinians” are what they always were: a foreign Islamic Arab colony inside Israel.

The Big Lie of Palestine is that the Islamic colonists are the indigenous population of Israel and that the Jews are colonizing Palestine. But an indigenous people can never colonize their own country.

“Palestine” is a twisted colonial fiction. The name reflects Greek colonization of the region. And its use by the modern Islamic colonists shows their lack of any actual historical connection to Israel.

After all the agonized wailing about the deeply meaningful “Palestinian” connection to “Palestine”, they still haven’t come up with their own name for the place. One that they can properly pronounce. (There’s no proper “P” in Arabic.) But Abbas keeps coming up with new lies about which ancient people the “Palestinians” are descended from this week.

I can’t wait until he claims to be Cherokee.

The claim of the “Palestinian” colonists to Israel is a lie of Islamic imperialism. The Muslim powers of the region have funded the racist attacks by the PLO, Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups on Jews.

The “Palestinians” are not the victims of colonialism. They are its perpetrators.

The fighting between Israel and Islamic terrorists is a struggle between imperialism and colonialism. The imperialists are not the oppressed Jewish minority that has been forced out of nearly everywhere else in the region. It’s the Arab Islamic majority that represses minorities across the region.

“Palestine” is a pathetic attempt to launder one imperial identity with another followed by shameless efforts to appropriate the identities of nearly every ancient people in the region. Including the Jews.

The only way to end the conflict is to end the lies.

There are two statistics that explain the Democrat obsession with illegal immigration and open borders.

97% of immigrants in the appropriate grouping identify themselves as Hispanic, but by the fourth generation that number falls to half. Only 7% of immigrants describe themselves as Americans, but 56% in the third generation call themselves Americans. Even the use of Spanish is slowly declining.

If a minority stops existing after a few generations, did it ever actually exist?

The Democrats had abandoned their working class base to chase what they pretended was a racial group when what they were actually chasing was the momentum of unlimited migration.

In the economics of identity politics, Hispanics, unlike African-Americans, are not an enduring group. And that is a serious challenge for Democrats and their leftist allies who treat politics as a game of demographic Risk played with minorities across the states and cities of the United States.

Democrats have pinned their hopes for a national majority on a European origin group whose minority status is cultural and linguistic. And even without the old melting pot, foreign languages and cultural affinities decline across generations as immigrants become Americans. What Democrats really want aren’t a lot of Hispanics, but an endless firehose of first generation immigrants.

Democrat political affiliation falls with each succeeding generation and Republican affiliation rises. A family that speaks English is less likely to vote Democrat or view themselves as an oppressed minority. Even in California, support for subsidized lawyers for illegal aliens falls from a decisive majority among immigrants to a near tie by the second generation. It’s why Trump improved on Romney’s numbers with Hispanic voters despite defying every politically correct recommendation of the post ‘12 RNC autopsy.

Hispanic immigration becomes less politically helpful with each generation. The Dem majorities grow thinner and less reliable. Hispanic immigration, unlike Islamic migration, produces diminishing political returns for its sponsors. The only solution to the retention problem lies with open borders.

The Democrats don’t value the DACA illegal aliens who benefited from Obama’s equally illegal amnesty because, as they claim, they’re really Americans. They only care about them to the extent that they aren’t. And even they’re useful only as a wedge issue for open borders and unlimited migration.

As long as the census counts heads instead of citizens, migration creates Dem districts. And in machine politics, illegal aliens and non-citizens can even vote in those districts. But it’s momentum, not minorities, that the Dems are really after. A constant flow of immigrants transforms America. But when the flow stops, then the immigrants are the ones who become transformed by America.

The decline of legal immigration makes illegal immigration into an even more urgent cause for the left. The troubled economy of the Obama years paradoxically dissuaded legal immigrants leading the Dems to lean more heavily on illegal migrants. Those statistics eventually led Obama to openly endorse illegal immigration, to implement an illegal unilateral amnesty and to push hard for a total alien amnesty.

The problem was political, but so was its solution. The Dems had to normalize illegal immigration (right down to banning the use of the term and replacing it with the euphemism ‘undocumented immigrant’) not just for the immediate political benefits of putting tens of millions of potential voters on the table, but the long term benefit of maintaining the momentum of unlimited migration through open borders.

It’s why the Democrats will never agree to secure the border. They might have cut such a deal decades ago (though they would have sabotaged it, as indeed they did after the last amnesty), but these days it’s a political third rail. Legalizing illegal aliens is a sideline to maintaining an open border. If they have to choose between the two, the Democrats will always choose the political lifeline of open borders.

Illegal aliens will produce diminishing returns. It’s the open border that feeds the Dem pipeline. The Dems will take amnesty if they can get it, but they’ll never trade it for an end to their political pipeline.

That’s why California has become a sanctuary state. It’s why so many Dem cities are going sanctuary. It’s why Dem officials are actively targeting businesses and local law enforcement that cooperate with immigration authorities. It’s because illegal aliens have displaced Hispanics as the core minority.

Hispanics, in their totality, are less politically reliable than illegal aliens. The future of the Dems does not lie with an imaginary minority that dissipates after a few generations, but with the open border. Illegal aliens embody the borderless state of the country. The symbol is politically compelling for the post-national left, but the reality is even more compelling for Democrat electoral demographics.

The new conquerors of California understand just how shaky their grip on power really is. 44.6% of California residents speak a language other than English at home. Almost a fifth don’t speak English very well. California has no close competitors among other states in this category. But these same numbers have been declining nationwide even as they continue to cluster in California and other entry states.

The Democrats have secured their overwhelming grip on power. Migration and immigration ended democracy in California. It’s transformed formerly contested elections into single party affairs where Republicans need not even bother showing up. But the Jerry Brown junta won’t last forever. A fresh supply of immigrants and migrants is needed to keep the post-democratic California in Dem hands.

That’s why California’s political elites have gone the furthest in embracing open borders. It’s why the new sanctuary state is backed by the threat of state power against those following the law of the land. They aren’t protecting illegal aliens, in the usual lefty arrangement they are protecting their own power. The power struggle over illegal immigration isn’t just about cheap votes today, but tomorrow.

The Democrats need to maintain higher percentages of immigrants relative to the immigrants of previous generations. It’s a demographic Ponzi scheme that like all such schemes can only end in disaster. But the Democrats have embraced it out of greed and have no choice now but to keep the scam going even if it bankrupts cities and states, and eventually tears the entire country apart.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

When the Democrats bet everything on illegal migration, they alienated millions of voters who went on to help elect President Trump. The alienated working class vote forced them to double down even harder on illegal aliens. Losing traditional constituencies to identity politics has always radicalized Dems. And 2016 was no different. Instead of political accommodation, the Dems embraced #resistance.

But their new majority depends on open borders. A wall doesn’t just cut off the pathway of illegal aliens into this country; it cuts off the pathway of the Democrats to their new majority. And then their political Ponzi scheme falls apart, as such schemes usually do, when the momentum feeding it fails.

That’s why a border wall is a threat to the political survival of the Democrats. And it’s why they will do everything they can to stop it.

The United States of America (1787-2018) came to a swift and sudden end last night as the government shut down. The nation which had survived Pearl Harbor, the War of 1812 and Jimmy Carter ceased to exist.

The savage population, which had only been kept in line through a policy of rigorous gun
confiscations, food stamps and Green Energy programs unleashed its pent up rage in a spree of riots, looting and mass murder that had only previously been encountered in Somalia and Disneyland.

"The government shut down! We can do anything we like," shouted Sam Hasbley of Grassley, Iowa, while tearing the tag off a mattress despite an explicit warning label forbidding such a dangerous course of action. "Tear yours off. The government is shut down. It can't stop you."

Eyewitnesses spoke of further horrors. On a quiet street in a Massachusetts suburb, a man brought out a set of highly illegal lawn darts. In Sumtown, Maryland, there were allegations that an entire family had begun digging ditches to collect rainwater runoff.

With the fall of the government, citizen activists took it upon themselves to chronicle the culture of lawlessness. Men played Gibson guitars made of wood imported from India, but not finished by Indian workers. Women bought cold medicine without a photo ID. Children went hours without hearing lectures about the environment.

And there was worse to come.

The entire city of Detroit was seized by the Michigan Militia backed by Canadian air power. The village of Frankfurt, Illinois passed several ordinances in explicit violation of Title MXVIII of the Federal Charter of Approved Fruit Naming Ordinances. North Dakota seceded and declared that it was now the nation of Bismarckia, elected a Kaiser and petitioned to join OPEC.

An army of Mongols or possibly local residents dressed in Samurai helmets raided the Federal Dried Peach Reserve in Georgia hauling away thousands of tons of dried fruit and tossed them to waiting crowds. The end of food stamps in Martho, New Jersey led to an outbreak of cannibalism despite efforts by ACORN volunteers to bring order to the proceedings by soliciting volunteers to give up their privilege and be fed to the people.

In Massey Hills, Virginia, a gang of politically incorrect sports mascots entered a workplace and implicitly hurt the feelings of several minorities.
In Madison, Wisconsin, the entire United Organized Educators and Librarians Union attempted to commit mass suicide on the front lawn of the Madison Center of Union History to protest budget cuts and school closings. Their efforts proved in vain when the gasoline they poured on themselves in a failed attempt at self-immolation turned out to be apple juice.

In the midst of all this chaos, a weary nation's eyes turn to Washington D.C. But since the shutdown, which also shut off all power, water and press releases to the embattled city, no word has reached the outside world of what is taking place there. The last message was a smoke signal dispatched by Elizabeth Warren from the roof of a burning Capitol Building. An expert in Native American smoke signals decoded it to read, "I told you so. Now we're all doomed."

As the nation descends into chaos, one thing is clear. The government shutdown has once again doomed us all. Just like the last 17 times.

Last winter, the local media was touting Imam Abdullah Khadra as a victim of President Trump’s travel ban. Khadra, a Syrian, was here on a religious worker visa and was applying for political asylum.

The refugee Imam living in North Carolina called Trump's move, "absolutely inhumane and ridiculous."

Jewish leftists agreed. Lucy Dinner, the clergywoman from Temple Beth Or in Raleigh, denounced "singling out an entire group of people based on their faith." Lucy Dinner had previously signed a letter in support of anti-Israel activism by Eric and Jennifer Solomon. Eric Solomon was affiliated with the anti-Israel hate group, T’ruah, and Jenny Solomon ran controversial educational programs at the NC Hillel.

But the local media’s favorite Syrian refugee was soon caught preaching the murder of Jews.

Cary and Islam had previously been in the news when a heavily armed Muslim convert had been arrested last year by the FBI over a terror threat. “For too long the kuffar [non-Muslims] have spit in our faces and trampled our rights. This cannot continue. I cannot speak of anything. Say your dua [prayers], sleep, and watch the news tomorrow. It will only be the beginning,” he had warned.

But now an Islamic Association of Cary figure had upstaged him with his own rant.

In his sermon, Imam Khadra declared that all of Israel was “Muslim land” and would be reclaimed by Muslims. "The question is: Will you be among those who will contribute to regaining it or not?" he asked.

If his congregation was under the improbable impression that he meant regaining it through diplomacy and negotiations, the Syrian refugee went on to quote a notorious genocidal Islamic hadith.

“The Prophet Muhammad gave us the glad tidings that at the End of Time, we will fight those Jews until the rocks and the trees will speak: Oh Muslim, this is a Jew behind me,” the Imam declared.

The genocidal hadith envisioning an Islamic extermination of the Jews tends to be widely quoted by Hamas and other Muslim Brotherhood organizations. It concludes with, “’O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.'” Memri, which had exposed the Syrian refugee’s genocidal anti-Semitism, had recently showcased the genocidal online sermons of 3 other Imams.

At the Tajweed Institute in Houston, Sheikh Raed Saleh Al-Rousan, had recited the same hadith in December. "My brothers, the Prophet Muhammad brought the good tidings, when he said: 'Judgment day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews.”

“The Muslims will kill the Jews, and the Jews will hide behind the stones and the trees, [which] will say: Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him," he had preached.

The Houston Islamic cleric, who is from Jordan, then appeared to endorse the Muslim Brotherhood.

Earlier in December, Sheikh Aymen Elkasaby, the imam of the Islamic Center of Jersey City, had prayed for the extermination of the Jews. "Count them one by one, and kill them down to the very last one. Do not leave a single one on the face of the Earth."

During the summer, Sheikh Ammar Shahin of the Islamic Center of Davis had cited that same hadith. "Allah does not change the situation of people 'until they change their own situation.' The Prophet Muhammad said: 'Judgment Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews."

In four weeks, three Muslim clerics, from North Carolina to New Jersey to Texas, have been caught on tape preaching the mass murder of Jews. And those were only the ones who were caught doing it.

Imagine how many imams in how many settler mosques in America are preaching Islamic terrorism?

Imam Abdullah Khadra had claimed that Trump’s travel ban relied on unfair stereotypes and gave Americans the power to hate. But as he shows us, it’s Syrian migration that imports hate here.

The Imam works as the Director of Education and Youth Development at Cary Masjid's IQRA Academy. That means that this Syrian refugee has the ability to influence and shape young minds with his hatred.

The Masjid (or mosque) is also known as the Islamic Association of Cary or IAC. Its ambition is to become "one of the largest Islamic Centers in North Carolina". It claims that its school is “one of the most successful Islamic Schools in the nation”. And this is what its Islamic Supremacist leadership looks like.

The North Carolina Megamosque is nearing completion. When Imam Khadra was showing it off to a local CBS reporter, he claimed that “It will be a place of promoting peace and co-existence.”

Now we know it for the lie that it is.

Imam Khadra was expert at playing a role for the media. In the spring, the Islamic Association of Cary held a vigil of “Muslims, Christians and Jews” to mourn the “victims” in Syria. But the vigil had an anti-American theme, blasting President Trump for trying to keep us safe from the likes of Khadra.

"We care for all souls because we are all humans we belong to the same family," Imam Abdullah Khadra declaimed. "Whether we like it or not. We are all children of Adam and Eve, we are one human family."

Those are the sorts of things that the Imam says when the news media is on the scene. But when he’s speaking to a Muslim audience in a mosque, then it’s time to kill the Jews.

A few years ago, there was another interfaith rally opposing Trump outside the Islamic Association of Raleigh.

Eric Solomon was on the scene. “Language hurts, and language can lead to violence,” the anti-Israel T’ruah activist had insisted.

But where are the condemnations of Imam Abdullah Khadra? Where are the discussions of how Islamists preaching the mass murder of Jews can lead to violence? The same leftist clergy eager to condemn Islamophobia appear much less interested in standing up to Islamic anti-Semitism.

Khadra’s case proves once again that a travel ban for terror states is a good idea. A 2007 poll showed that 77% of Syrians supported financing Islamic terrorists including Hamas and the Iraqi fighters who evolved into ISIS. Less than 10% of Syrians opposed their terrorism.

Widespread support for Islamic terrorism among the Sunni refugees continues to be the norm.

The alleged Facebook page of Khadra’s wife shows evidence of troubling support for Islamist supremacism and bigotry The Khadras themselves are clearly invested in the religious civil war taking place in their homeland. And maybe that is where they should return to. And take their hate with them.

When they were attacking President Trump’s travel ban, the Khadras threatened to leave America. After the release of a video preaching racist violence against Jews, Imam Khadra should not receive political asylum. The idea of granting political asylum to a member of a regional colonial majority who favors persecuting the indigenous Jewish minority is a perversion of everything that political asylum means.

In Europe and America, taking in Syrian Islamist refugees isn’t charity: it’s suicide.

President Trump’s end year remarks to the New York Times acerbically summed up his relationship with the media. “I’m going to win another four years… because newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there.” The answering outburst of rage and contempt from the media burned all the hotter because the statement was not only intentionally provocative; it was also true.

The media has never been able to quit Trump. Its conviction that it can destroy him through coverage has repeatedly proven false. But that hasn’t stopped the media from throwing more coverage at him. And its motive for the non-stop coverage has always been the selfish pursuit of ratings, clicks and sales.

The New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN are all busy playing Trump-slayers when what they really want is four more years of rising subscriptions, ad sales and profits. Few politicians understand that conflict of interest better than Trump who has spent most of his adult life playing the media.

These days the media needs Trump more than ever. Its old purpose, reporting the news, is as dead as the telegraph. Reporting is expensive. It requires infrastructure and personnel. And it isn’t very profitable. In the age of the internet, few people will sit around and watch the pointless reporting from the scene of an event that was once the staple of local news and cable news.

And repurposing viral videos and stories can only fill so much of that hole. But the media doesn’t really report news either. Mostly it repurposes it to create narratives that it can then milk for days or months. Whether it’s a missing airliner, #MeToo or Russian collusion, the best narratives are part mystery, scandal and thriller. The news isn’t just fake: It’s metafictional. It turns real life into fodder for fiction.

The media has crossed the mirror’s edge where reality television, recreations of crimes and movies based on true stories once lived. It lives and dies by turning the news into a fictional narrative. And narratives are cheap. Every news network can run video of Mueller slowly walking down a hallway while a panel of experts discusses what the latest leak really means for President Trump. For the cost of a green room, a limo and a little promotion, CNN can have its very own House of Cards drama.

Trump is the media’s star. Without him, CNN would have to go back to chasing missing airliners. And he has an innate understanding of the media’s business model from the days when he was playing New York City tabloids against each other. The tabloidization of the national media is a development that has left the GOP’s Beltway establishment bewildered and confused. But Trump has always understood the media as a tabloid operation that specialized in the same heroes and heels as professional wrestling.

And he knows that he doesn’t have to beat the media. He just has to let it beat itself.

The combination of political anger and personal greed that drives the media is destroying its credibility. The media was most effective when it was playing the detached narrator and the impartial referee. Trump’s greatest trick was forcing it to get in the ring with him. That’s always been his trick for defeating his opponents. And the media has eagerly cast away its restraints and given in to its worst instincts.

It can’t defeat Trump by getting in the ring with him. But it’s a lot more fun. And it’s profitable.

Trump’s remarks to the New York Times taunt it with the truth about its obsession with him. Behind the ideology is greed. And the greed is stronger than the ideology. The media hates and needs him. It’s become addicted to both. The need intensifies its hatred. And the hatred intensifies the need.

The media spent eight years declining into irrelevance under Obama. Even before Trump, Obama had bypassed the media for social media. The big stories were fed to the press by Obama Inc. cronies like Ben Rhodes or hidden hand political smear shops like Fusion GPS. Even its core mission of cheerleading the left had become meaningless as younger lefties no longer bothered reading, watching or even clicking on mainstream media sites. The media was running out of customers, money and relevance.

Trump revived the media. The young lefties helping monetize the media again are coming for him. And every time he attacks the media, he makes it more relevant. The ritually insincere public wails about the unique threat to the free press posed by snarky tweets from the White House mask the private celebrations in every newsroom that Trump is making them into the center of attention once again.

The media is no longer just reprinting photos of Obama’s latest viral stunt from his house photog or running its stories by Hillary’s people to see how much more flattering they can be; it’s getting out there and leading the #Resistance while cashing in on all the publicity.

And it owes it all to Trump.

President Trump is confident that he can get the media to do what he wants because he understands that it only pretends to be driven by progressive virtue, but is actually motivated by classic vice. The core hypocrisy of the left is its belief that it can have virtue in the public sphere and vice in the private one.

Media stars can grope their female subordinates in private as long as they tout Planned Parenthood and Linda Sarsour in public. It’s okay to fly private jets as long as they push for plastic bag bans. Getting rich is great if they do it while dedicating their careers to opposing the idea of other people getting rich. If you tweet #BlackLivesMatter, you can make racist jokes with your friends. That’s the hypocritical left.

And the media pretends that it can bring down President Trump by getting rich covering him. Trump rode that hypocrisy to the White House. He’s telling the media that he’ll ride it to a second term. And that the media would rather see him in the White House than stop playing into his hands.

Trump beat the media by playing on its private motivations rather than its public ones. And now he’s mocking its hypocrisy in the pages of its top paper while it responds exactly as he wants it to.

President Trump needs the media to hate him. And the media needs him to hate. Trump benefits politically from that relationship, but the media only benefits financially from it. The media’s Trump rage ended Hillary’s career, put a Republican in the White House, pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accords, brought in the Muslim travel ban, recognized Jerusalem and did all the other things the media wails about every second of the day. And the media helped make them happen.

The media could have covered President Trump fairly, objectively and dispassionately. But that wouldn’t have been nearly as popular. It was much more lucrative to run 24/7 hysteria, to convince its own audience that the world was about to end and to stay tuned for the latest Trump revelation. Each time it did that, it boosted his image as a revolutionary anti-establishment politician bringing real change.

Media icons may ridicule Trump’s remarks in public, but they know the truth of them in private.

President Trump makes their jobs, raises and bonuses possible. He’s the reason why media outlets have started expanding, instead of contracting, their investigative resources. Sinking newspapers and networks have suddenly become profitable. CNN can spend three hours on a single Trump tweet. All it has to do is bring in four ‘experts’ to stir up the outrage and then sell commercials in between.

It’s not journalism. But it sure makes money.

The media could stop any time. All it would have to do is put principles over profit. Even the totalitarian political principles of the left. But it’s too greedy to stop. Trump has hooked the media on himself.

President Trump beat the media by using its worst impulses against it. And he’s taunting the media with the truth about its motivations and exposing the lie that it tells itself. He’s reminding media elites that behind their posturing, they will hypocritically betray their leftist ideals and win him another election.

(I wrote this article quite a few years ago. I feel that it's relevant now in light of the Oprah for President movement.)

Obama's political success was built on his ability to invoke values detached from belief systems. To break away symbols and ideals from religious and national value systems, and mix and match them into his own sound bites. Like the famous Hope poster, that mixed patriotic color schemes with socialist realism, or his own speeches which invoked the Founders in support of socialism.

The Obama wave was piggybacking on a culture where context had ceased to matter. Obama's image had more in common with the way hip hop artists sample songs, than with a symphony. His campaign was the perfect trailer to a movie that would never be released. It was the marriage of corporate advertising campaigns, pop culture, radical politics and Americana-- thrown together in a pot and boiled into one indecipherable mix that was appealing, and yet completely void of meaning.

Obama kept on saying very little of substance, yet entertaining his audiences. His speeches called up spirituality devoid of religion, Americana devoid of patriotism and ideals devoid of ideas. He appropriated them all and used them as props in his show.

His obvious inspiration for this was not Jeremiah Wright, who did provide plenty of textual inspiration, but Oprah herself. Oprah's success lay in marketing that same diffuse spirituality, not grounded in any actual belief system. Instead what she offered was an endless self-centered buffet, spirituality as self-empowerment, with herself and her chosen gurus as the center of a new commercial belief system.

Obama echoed that same self-centered appeal, telling audiences, "We are the ones we have been waiting for", a quote from one of Oprah's favorite authors, and appealing to their own search for meaning. A favorite Oprah theme. The search for meaning is a common enough crutch for the narcissist, who wants fulfillment on his or her own terms, rather than commitment. Oprah has been catering to her audiences' endless search for meaning. Obama was just the latest of those gurus.

The implicit subtext of the commercial search for meaning is that the meaning itself can never be found, but searching for it is what makes you a better person. That search for meaning as identity defines Oprah, it also defined Obama, who turned that into his own brand with two separate books chronicling his search for meaning, as his identity.

Obama had daringly sold his journey as America's journey, encouraging voters to not only identify personally with him, but to position his own background as the embodiment of America. Rather than identifying with Americans, he expected them to identify with him. Structuring his campaign as a journey, he spoke to the need for drama by the detached and disaffected. People who were too busy looking for meaning, to understand that meaning cannot be detached from the larger religious and cultural ideas that define civilization.

Yet that was exactly what Obama appeared to offer, context free ideas, faith without religion, hope without anything tangible to actually hope for.

If Oprah offered fast-food meaning on television, Obama offered fast-food solutions in politics. Paying for it was never an issue. Consequences were off the table as well. By clothing a self-centered appeal in altruistic clothing, people felt they were engaging in self-improvement, when they were only being manipulated by professional egotists.

Oprah and Obama shared broken families and a profound greed and resentment that they learned to disguise professionally as empathy and ambition. By channeling the resentments of others, they could get what they wanted, without appearing harsh or abrasive. By selling other people on answers they did not believe in themselves, they could position themselves as spiritual leaders, without the fuss and limitations of organized religions, written creeds and higher deities. Instead they marketed their own life stories as a form of spirituality, convincing their followers to become invested in their success. Their own achievements were no longer personal, but national and global.

Self-realization as religion is a self-indulgent faith, which is what makes it both hollow and appealing. It begins with religion as therapy, and ends with therapy as religion. It borrows religious metaphors, while discarding their meaning. That is the faith that Oprah and Obama have successfully sold millions on. A vaporous hope and faith, with nothing standing behind them. Both came with an innate understanding of the profound weakness of their followers in a post-modern age. They copied the templates of the intersection of religion and entertainment, removing any gods from the equation, and leaving behind personal narratives, feel-good cleaning rituals and of course, money.

Yet there is a larger problem behind Obama and Oprah, the problem of a culture that neglect context, and instead favors short-term entertainment. The Obama Administration may go down as the most expensive public entertainment in American history. And the same empty yearning, which Obama exploited so very well, will still be there.

There is a hole in our culture, and it is there because the verities that once defined us have been marginalized. Religion and national identity are relentlessly mocked by the same media culture that has usurped their place, with its own replacements like Oprah. What once provided meaning to people, lies by the wayside. And instead people search for personal fragmented meanings, for happiness and self-realization, when the search itself represents a denial of the mature commitments that make happiness and self-realization possible. Behind that fragmentation is a culture at loss to understand its own identity filled with lonely individuals looking for something to hang on to, and predators whose own identities come from gaining their confidence, and preying on them.

The left has always understood that it can only succeed by replacing religion and nationalism, either through direct assault, or by dressing their own ideas up in mock nationalistic and religious colors. The left was never atheistic. Its religion was government, its functionaries and doctrines were its priests and its creed. And its depredations have left behind a West with a wounded soul.

It is not only the likes of Oprah and Obama who know how to exploit that wound. There are far worse predators drawing closer to the campfire. Islam is preparing to engulf a Europe that has turned its back on its own values. What predators will come for America in the night is still an open question. With Obama, we have seen the first ugly glimmer of what may be coming. But unless America reclaims its soul, worse predators drawn by the blood of a wounded culture will come.

We're in the middle of a civil war.

It may not be a shooting war. For the most part. (Though don't tell that to some Republicans at a charity game practice who were targeted by a Bernie Sanders supporter.) But it's a war all the same.

The war is still being fought with paper and protests. But it's based on irreconcilable differences between parts of the country. Much like the ones that brought on the war between brothers.

This is a topic that I've written about quite often over this past year. Rush Limbaugh saw fit to read and promote some of those pieces. And now I'll be giving a talk on the subject at the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition Conference in Myrtle Beach, SC. It'll take place from Jan 20-22. I'm scheduled to speak on the 21st, but there are plenty of other great speakers there.

Many of you know Anne-Marie Murrell, of Politichicks, who just doesn't give up. Tom Fitton, who heads Judicial Watch, an organization doing a great deal to expose the lingering corruption of the Obama years, the always great Kevin Jackson, a real patriot, Lt. Col. Buzz Patterson, Kathleen Willey, who came up against the horror of the Clintons firsthand, Admiral Lyons, whose spirit has to be seen live to be believed, the always funny Evan Sayet, Gordon Chang, with his vital analysis of the big game in the Pacific, Stephen Coughlin, who has been exposing our collaboration with the Jihad from the inside, and many others. And, of course, putting it all together is Joe Dugan.

The event will take place in the Crown Reef Beach Resort - 2913 South Ocean Boulevard - Myrtle Beach, SC 29577. To find out more information or register, click here.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Prime Minister Thatcher once famously observed that socialists "always run out of other people's money." But what actually happens when socialism runs out of money?

Venezuela, a once wealthy nation with black gold coming out of the ground, is a test case.

The socialist regime ran out of other people’s money, and then out of money, years ago. The government met protests by its starving population with a 40% minimum wage hike. That’s the usual socialist solution to what leftists call ‘income inequality’. The problem is that 40% of nothing is still zero.

The “Strong Bolivar” introduced by former dictator Hugo Chavez, who died of an overdose of Cuba’s socialist medicine, leads the world in one economic category: a 3,000% inflation rate. Currently a dollar will buy you 111,413.23 bolivars. Wait a while and there will be a better bargain in bolivars because economists are forecasting a 30,000% inflation rate. In Venezuela, even the poorest American can become a millionaire in bolivars. The only question is why would anyone actually want bolivars?



The socialist currency of the revolution isn’t counted, it’s weighed on scales. The only thing “strong” about the bolivar is the exercise you get from carrying bags of them everywhere. You could forge bolivars, but the fake money would cost you more than the real money. If you can actually print bolivars, go ahead and get in touch with the Venezuelan government which can’t afford to print its own money.

Venezuela’s central bank (under socialism, everything is centralized) can’t pay for the paper to print all the worthless money. And none of the companies that might sell the socialists the paper will take its worthless paper money in exchange for their paper. There’s no point in printing anything less than 50 bolivar notes because they’re worth less than the cost of the paper. But putting Obamanomics in action, Venezuela ordered billions more bills: more than the United States and Europe have combined.

Paying for minimum wage hikes by printing money doesn’t actually work. That 40% minimum wage hike comes as the buying power of Venezuelans can drop by 50% in one month. The socialist regime keeps printing money and inflation keeps skyrocketing. A 30,000% inflation rate by the end of 2018 is a conservative estimate. More liberal estimates peg it at 200,000%. And then the sky’s the limit.

Is Venezuela’s finance minister out of his mind? No, he’s a leftist. So he believes inflation doesn’t exist.

Luis Salas is the perfect man to head up the economies of Venezuela or California. He’s a sociologist who claims that, “Inflation does not exist in real life.”

Venezuela’s economy also doesn’t exist in real life.

Minister Salas claims that inflation isn’t caused by printing infinite amounts of money, but by corporate conspiracies. So the worse the inflation gets, the more the corporations must be conspiring to cause it.

Bafflingly, the inflation keeps growing worse, even as Venezuela is running out of businesses and corporations to blame for its worthless money. The score currently stands at Sociology: 0 and Math: 1.

“When a person goes to a shop and finds that prices have gone up, they are not in the presence of ‘inflation,’” Minister Salas insisted.

But when you go into a store in Venezuela, it’s because you’ve been on line for most of the day (or you’ve been paying someone to stand on line for you) only to find that there’s nothing in the store except a milk ration which you have to go through a fingerprint scanner to buy and bring back to your starving family. Either that or you can join the hungry mobs looting the delivery trucks as they come in.

Venezuela’s socialist government made sure that ‘greedy’ farmers and businesses wouldn’t be able to raise prices by pegging product prices below the cost of production. The products are paid for with socialist funny money while farmers and businesses have to import products for real money.

So there’s no food. Much of the country is starving. Medicine is also hard to come by because pharmaceutical companies won’t take theoretical sociologist money that it will cost them more to ship out of the country than its actual face value.

So Venezuela’s government has been reduced to trying to pay for medicine with gold and diamonds.

Hugo Chavez had once touted the “marvelous community experience” of bartering. Now his collapsing narcostate is reduced to bartering its precious metals and jewels to survive.

Ordinary Venezuelans have long ago been battling imaginary inflation in the real life horror of socialism by trading in their worthless money for subsidized products and then reselling them on the black market. But increasingly they’re just bartering them to avoid the increasingly worthless currency.

Venezuela’s new supermarkets are the Facebook groups where the people trade sugar for beans. It’s a marvelous community experience that Hugo Chavez’s daughter, the richest woman in Venezuela, hasn’t been able to share with the rest of the populace. When Maduro, the former bus driver driving the country off a cliff as its insane leftist dictator, began chowing down on an empanada during a televised speech, the mouths of his starving people watered and a million memes were born.

But Maduro is promising Venezuelans that a replacement for money is coming soon. Venezuela’s dictator plans to create his own bitcoin, a cryptocurrency based on the only thing his failed state has, oil.

Forget the ‘monero’ and make way for the ‘petro’.

“The 21st century has arrived!” Maduro told a populace that is stuck in medieval times.

Venezuela’s past technological experiments haven’t exactly gone well. The joint Iranian-Venezuelan car company produced a vehicle more radioactive than Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The Chinese Vergatario socialist smartphone comes in handy when bartering for groceries on WhatsApp.

The ‘Petro’ will be backed by oil, gas, gold and diamonds. Except that Venezuela might be proposing to back its imaginary money with reserves that it already mortgaged to Russia. And that would make its imaginary money even more imaginary than it already is. But creating its own bitcoin would be a perfect solution by providing worthless money to everyone that wouldn’t even need to actually be printed.

But it still wouldn’t be worth anything.

And bitcoin is already in Venezuela. Tech savvy citizens who turned to imaginary money to escape worthless money aren’t about to switch to government money that’s both imaginary and worthless.

What happens when socialists run out of money? They start pawning the family jewels for more imaginary money while creating conspiracy theories about a capitalist war on socialism.

The left hates reality and math. Its theories turn money worthless. And you can’t eat theories.

Venezuelan socialists took a booming economy, destroyed its currency and reduced it to a barter economy. That’s what happens when socialists finally run out of other people’s money.

If you want to imagine the future of socialism, picture trading sugar for beans on social media.

That’s the leftist economy of tomorrow brought to you by their welfare policies of today.

In October, 125 psychologists and assorted mental health professionals marched to New York’s City Hall while wearing red tags warning, “DANGER.” Leading the march was Peter Fraenkel, author of Sync Your Relationship, Save Your Marriage, mournfully beating a drum in a solemn march. Fraenkel, a psychologist and “professional drummer” was able to combine his love of drums and hatred of Trump.

The ‘Duty to Warn’ march had begun at New York Law School where the experts demanded that Trump be removed from office based on their inability to understand the 25th Amendment. And then the mental health experts marched to the beat of Fraenkel’s drum in what they insisted was a “funereal and dignified” procession.

"Please wear professional attire or dark clothing," the mental health experts were instructed. "There will be a slow drum beat, ‘DANGER’ tape, and flashing warning lights.”

The paperwork urged, “Bring a drum if you have one” and, “come as your solemn, concerned self.”

If only the organizers had put a fraction of their obsessive delusions into actually trying to justify the claim on their shiny blue banner that, “Trump is psychologically unfit to lead this country.”

There were no drums when Bandy X. Lee, the organizer of Yale’s ‘Duty to Warn’ conference showed up on Capitol Hill to “brief” Dem politicians about Trump’s mental illness that she diagnosed over Twitter. Lee, a self-proclaimed expert on the prison system, apparently isn’t even currently licensed to practice.

But on Twitter, Bandy X. Lee explained that she had been "licensed on two continents," has "excellent credentials," a "flawless ethics history" and speaks "four languages.” On Vox, Lee claimed that Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem was a “pathological” example of him “resorting to violence”. Then she blamed him for “an increase in schoolyard bullying.” Appearing on MSNBC, she warned that Trump “could be the end of humankind.”

All this craziness didn’t stop Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Rep. Jamie Raskin from inviting her for briefings.

Around the same time that Fraenkel was beating his drum in Manhattan, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump was released by Macmillan. The book contained unsolicited accusations and diagnoses from “27 psychiatrists and mental health experts”. It was edited by Bandy X. Lee.

Contributors included Tony Schwartz, a former New York Times reporter who had worked on the Art of the Deal with Trump. His mental health qualifications are unclear. Also included is Gail Sheehy, a former New York Magazine writer, who had written a Hillary biography. The epilogue features Noam Chomsky, whom Lee describes as a “linguist and philosopher-historian”. Not to mention leftist genocide denier.

What makes Tony, Gail and Noam, mental health experts? In a movement that diagnoses the President of the United States over Twitter and then insists he be removed from office, that doesn’t really matter. And it’s why none of the media accounts have even bothered to note that some of Lee’s mental health experts are actually members of the media with no apparent mental health credentials.

In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, Tony Schwartz diagnoses Trump with a risky “sense of self-worth”. Gail Sheehy accuses him of “narcissism and paranoia” and a “trust deficit.”

In a book already dedicated to violating the professional ethics of the Goldwater Rule, Lee manages to include amateur armchair diagnoses by writers who are even more unqualified than her to make them.

But it’s not as if the professionals are any better.

Bandy X. Lee boasted, “In the book we have as authors Phil Zimbardo, Judith Herman, and Robert Jay Lifton, who are notable not only for their contributions to mental health but for their amazing ethical record. These are living legends who have also stood on the right side of history.”

Lifton is a “leading psychohistorian” who accuses President Trump of "malignant normality" and urges other "psychological professionals" to confront "the malignant normality of Trump and his administration." He appears to define “malignant normality” as behavior he disapproves of for political reasons, but that isn’t actually a form of mental illness. That undermines the whole theme of the book.

And it’s in the book’s foreword.

Philip Zimbardo and Rosemary Sword accuse Trump of being a “present hedonist.” And this is “based on Zimbardo’s time perspective theory.” Zimbardo is both the inventor of the theory and the guy writing about it. Rosemary doesn’t seem to have a degree, but as “part of her Hawaiian heritage, she was trained in the Hawaiian psychology based on forgiveness known as ho’oponopono.”

Ho’oponopono was derived from appeasing the Hawaiian gods. The Hawaiian gods must hate Trump.

Zimbardo and Sword claim “that Trump qualifies as among the most extreme present hedonists we have ever witnessed comes from the plethora of written and recorded material on him, including all his interviews, hundreds of hours of video, and his own tweets.”

So there’s a practitioner of the Hawaiian art of ho’oponopono diagnosing Trump over Twitter. And her colleague, a living legend, is accusing him of a condition that appears to emerge from his own theory.

Everyone in the book agrees that Trump is bad. They just can’t agree on a diagnosis.

Michael Tansey claims it’s a delusional disorder. Laurence Dodes blames sociopathy. Craig Malkin argues it’s narcissism. David Reiss pushes for dementia and cognitive impairment. Steve Wruble claims he has daddy issues. That is, he claims that both he and Trump have daddy issues.

Thomas Singer believes Trump mirrors “our collective attention deficit disorder, our sociopathy” and we must “recognize our own pathology.” Not only is Trump crazy, but we’re crazy for electing him.

Everyone except Singer is probably nuts.

“Donald Trump is so visibly psychologically impaired that it is obvious even to a layman that “something is wrong with him,” John D. Gartner insists. But nobody can diagnose him because “Trump’s is a genuinely complex case.” Even though “many writers have tried to analyze and diagnose Trump, and have gotten pieces of the elephant right. What is missing is the whole elephant.”

What’s the whole pink elephant? According to Gartner, possibly, malignant narcissism, antisocial personality disorder, the bipolar spectrum, hypomania and also maybe, pure evil.

What are his medical sources for these claims?

"Insight into this question comes from, of all sources, Joe Scarborough, host of the popular MSNBC show Morning Joe," he writes. Then he mentions, "David Brooks is not a mental health professional, but he astutely commented on what appeared to him to be Trump’s increasing hypomania."

Ho’oponopono looks a whole lot better than a shrink who watches MSNBC and reads the New York Times and then tries to diagnose a man he never met based on media rants. And that is what all these diagnoses are reducible to. They originate from the media and then the media reports on them.

Do we even need psychiatrists to diagnose Trump over Twitter and television?

“We don’t have to rely on psychiatrists to see that this president is not consistent in his thinking or reliably attached to reality. We have had vastly more exposure to Donald Trump’s observable behavior, his writing and speaking, than any psychiatrist would have after listening to him for years,” Gail Sheehy insists.

That’s quite a turnabout in what was supposed to be a book by psychiatrists and mental health experts proving their case. Instead Sheehy, who isn’t a psychiatrist, insists that we don’t actually need psychiatrists because we’ve seen Trump on television.

But does that mean Sheehy’s readers can start remotely diagnosing her?

James Gilligan insists, “If psychiatrists with decades of experience doing research on violent offenders do not confirm the validity of the conclusion that many nonpsychiatrists have reached, that Trump is extremely dangerous—indeed, by far the most dangerous of any president in our lifetimes—then we are not behaving with appropriate professional restraint and discipline. Rather, we are being either incompetent or irresponsible.” And so psychiatrists must back up lefty biases against Trump.

It’s not medical science, but leftist politics, that’s calling the shots here.

Many of the essays don’t even attempt to diagnose Trump. Instead they self-diagnose the political trauma that Trump inflicted on them. Jennifer Contarino Panning even invents a “Trump Anxiety Disorder.” The strangest essay belongs to Steve Wruble who attacks his Orthodox Jewish father for supporting Trump in an essay, titled appropriately enough, “Daddy Issues.”

He moans that when he told his father that “Trump was unconsciously sabotaging his chances of winning the election” his father dismissively replied that a Hillary win would be bad for Israel.

"Despite giving my father what I felt was my intellectual gold, he only commented on what was important to him," Wruble whines. "Donald and I are expert at putting our fathers on pedestals while at the same time trying to knock them off in order to make room for us to have our time being seen as special."

Steve Wruble’s essay is in its own way the most honest of the bunch. Because it’s not really about Trump. It’s what Wruble and the other mental health professionals and amateurs project onto Trump.

Wruble blames Trump for the conflicts with his father. And identifies with him. These aren’t essays, they’re Rorschach inkblots. The ‘Duty to Warn’ movement tells us nothing about Trump and everything about the sort of people who take to the streets beating a drum against him.

Trump isn’t crazy. But his accusers often don’t seem too sane.

Noam Chomsky concludes the book by suggesting that Trump would perpetrate “some kind of staged or alleged terrorist act.” The epilogue of a book accusing Trump of mental illness ends with a crazy conspiracy theory by one of the accusers.