Edward Cline's Blog, page 20

A Four Year Nightmare

It is difficult to imagine just how low the United States has sunk when one is confronted with the prospect of a Secretary of State employing, with her full knowledge, someone whose ideology calls for the replacement of the Constitution with a barbaric code of law, the suspension of individual rights, and the submission of the country to actual or de facto Islamic rule. This is in addition to its submission to socialist tyranny. One asks oneself: They're allies now, but what will happen if and when one of them wins? Will the winner turn on the other? Too likely. Either Leftists will begin thumbing their noses at Muslims, or Muslims will begin chopping off Leftist noses.

I had a nightmare the other night. My nightmares usually make little sense. They are fueled by too much coffee and other stimulants that put one's autonomous system and subconscious on steroids. Nightmares are vivid, fleeting grab-bags of disparate worries and concerns that migrate to another corner of one's mind and suddenly, from out of nowhere and triggered by some anxiety, collide and merge into bizarre montages of German Expressionist film images and sounds. My own nightmares take the form of newspaper columns, dispassionately narrated by a voice that is a blend of Orson Welles's foreboding cynicism, Jean Shepherd's spritely naturalism, and the funereal voice of Garrison Keillor.

Last month a group of five House representatives, headlined by Michele "gangster government" Bachmann of Minnesota, called for a multi-agency investigation into the backgrounds of numerous Muslims now employed in various capacities in federal agencies and departments. Andrew McCarthy estimates there are thousands. One of those letters went to deputy inspector general of the State Department, and one of the persons named in the letter was Huma Abedin, Secretary Hillary Clinton's deputy chief of staff.

That Hillary Clinton is a welfare statist to the core is not entirely irrelevant to the issue. But her own ambition and hope to change America, thwarted on the domestic scene – President Bill stole all the headlines, and HillaryCare was not to be – conform perfectly with President Barack Obama's ambition and hope to reduce America to being just another bankrupt member of the global village, instead of it being the last best hope of Western civilization.

The latest nightmare entertained me with the idea that Franklin D. Roosevelt's Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, who held that office from 1933 to 1944, was being influenced by a deputy chief of staff by the name of Karl Fynn Abercrombie. The nightmare wasn't that specific. It came and went in a flash, too quickly to contemplate in any detail. But some of the faces were familiar, as well as the style of dress of the 1940's, and I recall peering into a dimly lit House of Representatives. In the dream, investigations were indeed initiated, and Congress and America learned to their collective dismay that Karl Flynn Abercrombie was none other than Karl Kluge, a Nazi spy, and that Hull knew it. As did FDR.

I do not know where the names Karl Flynn Abercrombie and Kluge came from. I cannot account for them, but I distinctly remember them. I knew Hillary's history, and Cordell Hull's, and so that knowledge, together with a lurking, unformed parallel of events in my subconscious, contributed to the nightmare. The last thing I can recall from the nightmare was a New York Times headline: "Kluge Unmasked as German Agent," and the narrator beginning to read the story. But that is when I woke up.

So I have decided to flesh out the nightmare.

The investigation into Karl Kluge, alias Karl Flynn Abercrombie, revealed that he had been Cordell Hull's chief foreign policy advisor since late 1935, when he was suddenly pushed forward by State Department underlings as a candidate to be Hull's advisor when Hull's original aide died in a car accident. His background was checked by the FBI, and a file on him was sent to Hull and to the White House. The FBI had found some highly incriminating information on Kluge – none of which was made public until the scandal broke – but both Hull and FDR considered the man properly and thoroughly vetted to hold such a sensitive office as Hull's primary advisor.

Kluge was indeed an American citizen, having been born in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1910, of parents of German-Swedish origin, who had arrived in the country in the last century. In 1920 they moved to Munich, Germany, after the turmoil there had abated. Both parents were teachers. After a while, the father, Albert Kluge, started a newspaper, Die Trompete von Leutenor, or, The People's Trumpet, while his wife, Silke, acted as editor. The paper promoted the ideas and politics of the National Socialist German Workers Party. It was firebombed twice by Communists, and Albert Kluge was frequently beaten up by them. But the paper survived, thanks to a subsidy from a German pharmaceutical company whose owner was a fervent Nazi.

In 1929 the paper was merged with the official newspaper of the Nazi Party in Berlin, Der Angriff ("The Attack"), founded by Berlin Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels. Albert and Silke were retained to write pro-Nazi articles under a variety of pseudonyms. Young Karl Kluge, freshly graduated from the University of Munich, also worked for the paper as a manager and then as a writer. He was quite brilliant and became a favorite of Goebbels, who taught him how to write stirring speeches. Occasionally he edited some of Goebbels's editorials. He added this paragraph to his employer's report on the Nazi victory in the Reichstag election of September 1930.

Those in the center know our goals: the National Socialist movement has no desire to join the bourgeois party bosses. We have no intention of ducking responsibility. We are not purveyors of pathos, as the newspapers like to say about us. We will accept responsibility only when we can justify it to the people and the nation. We do not think holy what the Republic thinks untouchable. The National Socialist movement wants a transformation of things as they are. We have not come to prop up that which is collapsing, but rather to topple it.

Then it was discovered, during casual conversation, that young Karl was an American citizen. Goebbels conferred with Hitler and other high ranking Nazis. Plans were made for young Karl. He was to be tapped for a very special mission, that of keeping the United States out of a war that was sure to come, and to persuade America to keep its nose out of German affairs.

Karl's last task before he left for America was the preliminary editing of a collection of Goebbels's editorials for a book, Der Angriff-Aufsaetze Aus Der Kampfzeit , or The Attack - Essays for the Struggle Period. The book was subsequently published in 1935 by the Angriff Press, a wholly owned Nazi publishing house. Karl Kluge's name was mentioned on the copyright page. He was quite proud of that. About the same time, Karl's father, Albert, died of a stroke. His mother, Silke, continued on at Der Angriff, and formed Die Deutsche Frauenfront, or the German Women's Front, which campaigned to convince women to become homebodies and baby factories.

In mid-1934 Karl Flynn Abercrombie turned up in America as a German translator for the State Department. During a period of loneliness combined with an excess of schnapps, he met and married an American hootchy kootchy saloon dancer named Alice Winer in 1935, about the time his name was put forward as a candidate to become Cordell Hull's chief of staff.

The incriminating evidence in Karl's FBI file included his and parents' work for Der Angriff. On his application for employment with the State Department, Karl had explained his departure from Nazi Germany by claiming that he had become disenchanted with the Party and feared for his own life because of his jokes about Hitler being Austrian and not a real German, and also about his ridiculous moustache, which he had heard other Party members scoffing was not much of a disguise. He also claimed that violent disagreements with his parents over Nazi ideology had made his life miserable. While the FBI agent in charge of checking on Karl's background commended Karl for his honesty and forthrightness, he nevertheless viewed Karl as a security risk and did not recommend him for promotion to Hull's office, citing the possibility of extortionate pressure being put on him to spy on the Secretary or otherwise act against the interests of the United States.

Kluge also explained that he had adopted the name "Karl Flynn Abercrombie" to avoid any anti-German bias or prejudice in government and outside the venue of the State Department.

In Kluge's file was also the note that on two separate occasions, in late 1934, some months after his arrival in the U.S., he had met in secret, in Buffalo, New York, Fritz Julius Kuhn, a German immigrant member of the pro-Nazi Friends of The New Germany and future Bundesführer of the German American Bund. Creation of Friends of The New Germany had been assisted by the German Consulate in New York. The Nazi Party in Germany later withdrew its endorsement of this organization (its antisemitism and violence against Jewish businesses were considered an embarrassment and counter-productive by the German Nazis), and later sanctioned the formation of the Bund, officially approving Kuhn as its head. The FBI could not say what had transpired between Kuhn and Kluge; Kuhn, a vocal and acerbic member of the Friends, had been under FBI scrutiny for some time.

Neither the Secretary of State nor the White House voiced any reservations about Kluge's record. Hull insisted that Kluge retain the alias of "Karl Flynn Abercrombie."

In 1934, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York claimed that the German Nazis intended to exterminate the Jews. In March 1937, he warned of the perils posed by the Nazi regime. The Nazi government organ, Der Angriff, claimed that he had been bribed by Jewish and Communist agents and was a criminal dupe of the Jews. Secretary of State Hull apologized to the Nazi government for the Mayor having offended it, but said nothing critical about the German Nazis' libelous statements about LaGuardia.

It came to light that Alice Kluge, while her husband was away with the Secretary of State on official business, had been secretly appearing as a striptease artist in disreputable clubs in Washington, Baltimore, and northern Virginia, and forming liaisons with various criminal characters. The discovery caused a small scandal and Kluge's name for the first time was prominently featured in news articles. Kluge and his wife apologized for the indiscretions and promised that their marriage would weather the scandal. Alice Kluge eventually became a shut-in alcoholic.

Members of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), established in 1938, had, among its other concerns, compiled a record of the doings of the Friends of The New Germany and later of the German American Bund. Members of the Committee were not happy with Cordell Hull's conduct of American policy, especially that connected with Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan.

Early in 1941, HUAC sent a report to Congress that hypothesized Kluge's influence on Hull's policies.

It suggested that Hull, and, by implication, the President, was more concerned about establishing friendly trade relations with Japan than it was about Japan's barbaric behavior in Manchuria.

It alleged that Hull had, in 1939, refused entry as tourists into the U.S. and Cuba of some nine hundred European Jewish refugees aboard the SS St. Louis because they did not have return addresses, and that, anyway, it was Cuba's problem, not his Department's. Many of the refugees were welcomed into Britain, but others were forced to return to Europe, where they likely perished in the Holocaust.

It alleged that in 1940 Hull had repeatedly instructed the State Department to delay sending money overseas to help Romanian Jews escape the Nazis.

It alleged that Kruge persuaded Hull to look favorably on the Vichy government of Nazi-occupied France, and to denigrate the forces of the Free French.

It alleged that Kluge had the ear of Hull and that of the White House when, in November 1938, two weeks after Kristallnacht, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes proposed using the territory of Alaska as a sanctuary for Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and other areas in Europe where the Jews were being subjected to persecution and murder. The president insisted that Jews consist of no more than ten percent of such a resettlement. The proposal died.

The report based its allegations of antisemitism on the part of Kluge by citing portions of The Attack - Essays for the Struggle Period, which Kluge had edited. One editorial, one of several entered into the report, was from a September 1930 issue of Der Angriff:

Who are the Jews? They are an alien race spawned by Satan to corrupt the German people, to lead them astray with their cheap goods and cheap prices. Jews are not the brothers of Germans. Jewish hirelings and Jewish gangs prey on German women and children to sully them with their hands and lusts. Jewish shop owners and Jewish capitalists swindle our people over their filthy counters and in their larcenous banks. But the day is coming when German manhood with take up the scythe and with great sweeping arcs decapitate the heads of the Jews. The German people will not be denied the right of retribution for the suffering they have endured by Jewish hands. The Reichstag election results guarantee us that justice.

The HUAC report recommended that all immigrant Germans now employed in various federal agencies be re-investigated to better determine their loyalty to the United States. It stated that many of these individuals still had family and relatives in countries already conquered by the Nazis, and that these persons could be pressured to act against the country's interests to preserve the well-being of their captive family and relatives. Such an action, read the report, was not intended to impugn the character or question the loyalty of said persons, however, it was wiser to conduct such an investigation and remove said persons from access to sensitive information than it would be to avoid offending their sensibilities.

Kluge's antisemitism and Nazi background were demonstrable. The report recommended that he be relieved of his post forthwith in the State Department.

The HUAC report not quite accused Hull and Roosevelt of antisemitism. A copy of the report was purloined and sent to the White House. Excerpts of it appeared in The New York Times and other pro-Roosevelt newspapers. Prominent senators immediately came to Kluge's defense, calling him a "fine patriot" and a "loyal American of the best kind." Hull and Roosevelt said nothing, but let their allies in Congress and in the press carry on the dispute. The Speaker of the House called Karl Kluge a man of "sterling character" and warned that the report's "accusations bordered on libel and defamation."

The authors replied that it did not accuse anyone of anything, but was intended to call for investigations that would better ensure the country's security.

The representatives were pressured to repudiate the HUAC report. Three of the authors disassociated themselves from it. The issue "went away."

That is my fleshed-out dream. Or nightmare. I could have gone on and related how in 1944 Kluge managed to photograph copies of the plans for D-Day – which Cordell Hull would have been privy to – and give them to a German courier who boarded a Nazi submarine that briefly surfaced off the Outer Banks in North Carolina, plans which allowed the Germans to accelerate the completion of their defenses at Normandy, thus ensuring a disastrous failure on June 6th. But that would have been stretching the story.

There is no stretching this real-life story, no need to dwell on the parallels. I hope the point is made that anyone remotely connected with the Muslim Brotherhood – and that would include any Muslims – through a familial connection or otherwise, should not be employed in any federal agency or department. But, then, most of the people now employed in those agencies and who are not Muslims should also be deemed security risks, beginning with the current Secretary of State.

The issue of Huma Abedin, Clinton's deputy chief of staff and "body woman," likewise "went away." When one scans the State Department's list of high ranking employees, her name is nowhere to be found. Which is a very curious thing, indeed.

Islam is at war with us. It means to conquer us or destroy us. Our leadership is apparently on the side of the enemy. That has been proven over the last four nightmarish years.

Andrew McCarthy and "Patriotic" Muslims

Earlier this month author and former Federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy gave a terrific, informative, and comprehensive address at The Center for Security Policy at the National Press Club. It was principally an answer and a rebuttal to the criticisms of a group of five House representatives who called for a multi-agency investigation into the backgrounds of numerous Muslims now employed in various capacities in those agencies. One of those letters went to deputy inspector general of the State Department, and one of the persons named in the letter was Huma Abedin, Secretary Hillary Clinton's deputy chief of staff.

McCarthy was the point man in the prosecution of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the "blind sheik," over the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He is a Republican conservative with a libertarian bent who writes for National Review.

Abedin, it seems, has very close family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist supremacist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the conquest of the United States (if not its destruction, as well). The Mainstream Media and its allies on the Left immediately charged Michele Bachmann, representative from Minnesota, with alleging that Abedin is an operative or spy for the Brotherhood. McCarthy and others have countered with the facts: that Bachmann, based on knowledge that Abedin especially has had family connections with the Brotherhood, suggested that perhaps she had not been as thoroughly vetted as a possible security risk. Bachmann and her colleagues on the House Intelligence Committee were requesting an investigation of the vetting of Abedin and other individuals. And nothing more.

The ensuing attack on Bachmann gave Senator John McCain of Arizona a chance to grandstand in Congress in Abedin's defense. Abedin and McCain, apparently, are friends. However, he committed the same error as the mainstream media made, and interpreted Bachmann's request for an investigation as an allegation of "guilt by association."

McCarthy not only deflated such a charge in his Center for Security Policy speech, but provided ample evidence that the Brotherhood has indeed infiltrated the highest ranks of government for the purpose of influencing American foreign policy. During his speech, he said he could not now say how many Muslims were in positions of influence or even had access to security-sensitive documents.

However, there was a reservation in McCarthy's depiction of the Islamic peril. That reservation compromises and qualifies everything else he had to say. These are the troubling paragraphs. The non-bolded Italics are mine:

Now, let me be clear about what I said and what I didn't say. I said Islamist influences, I did not say Muslims.

I don't know how many Muslims work in the U.S. government, but I feel pretty safe saying there are thousands. As a federal prosecutor on terrorism cases, I had the privilege of working with several of them. These were patriotic American Muslims, and a number of Muslims who may not be Americans but who have embraced America and the West. Without them, we could not have infiltrated jihadist cells in New York and stopped terrorists from killing thousands of people.

Without them, we could not have translated, understood and processed our evidence so it could be presented to a jury as a compelling narrative. Pro-American Muslims serve honorably in government, in our military, in our intelligence services, and in our major institutions.

We are lucky to have them because they have embraced the culture of individual liberty that is the beating heart of Western civilization. They have accepted the premise of our society that everyone has a right to freedom of conscience and equality before the law. They have accepted our foundational principle that free people are at liberty to make law for themselves, irrespective of the rules of any belief system or ideology. They construe Islam's spiritual elements and its laws as a matter of private conscience, not as a mandatory framework for society. (Italics mine.)

Those Muslims are not Islamists.

What is troubling is that this is a common sentiment among virtually all well-read, knowledgeable, and actively out-spoken anti- and counter-jihadist writers and observers. The only Muslims I would completely trust with my life would be apostates: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Walid Shoebat, Wafa Sultan, and a handful of others. These individuals have repudiated Islam in its entirety, discarded it as moral code, and warned that there can be no such thing as a moderate Islam. They have acknowledged that there is no such thing as a "moderate," peace-loving Muslim, either, that there is no halfway point between obeying Allah's commands and the laws of man-made governments, which Allah decreed, through Mohammad, were an "abomination."

Parenthetically, the concept of a conscience is strictly religious in nature, by which one's explicitly held moral principles are at variance with the more pragmatic or "practical" actions one must take to pursue one's ends. As such a dichotomy, a conscience serves more as a leash rather than as a guide to moral action.

Let us for the moment take McCarthy's statement as true – that these "patriotic" Muslims are not security risks and who sincerely do not wish harm on the United States – and pose some important questions:

Which parts of the Islamic doctrine do "moderate," peace-loving, "patriotic" Muslims reject, or object to, or claim have been misinterpreted by "extremists" and "radicals"? To my knowledge, this question has never been answered, neither by any "moderate" Muslims, nor by any non-Muslims such as Andrew McCarthy or Robert Spencer or Daniel Pipes. It would be interesting to know which parts of that doctrine do not call for death, destruction, enslavement or conquest – that is, the later, abrogating Koranic verses.

And if one could identify those parts, and segregate them from the belligerent, violent parts, could the remainder be justly called "Islamic"? Could a Muslim who adhered to those non-violent parts, and eschewed the violent ones, still be called a "true Muslim"? Would he be any kind of "Muslim"? Would "conservative" or "extremist" Muslims regard him as one, or label him a slacker, or an apostate?

If one has serious reservations about one's beliefs, yet steadfastly holds onto them in the face of the choices of rejecting them, compromising them, or of being consistent with them, is this a matter of faith, or of a congenital psychological or epistemological disorder? If a private conscience is a personal matter, characterized by a belief in an all-knowing, omnipotent deity who commands one to be moral (without any demonstrable, perception-based, reality-grounded proofs), where would one's strongest loyalty lay? With the belief, or with secular law? In a crisis, would a Muslim's personal 'belief system" trump his purported belief in the "foundational principle that free people are at liberty to make law for themselves"?

Islam's basic tenets reject any kind of individualism. Islam is inherently hostile to such concepts of individualism and political liberty. Islamic ideology seeks to extinguish those things. To wit, as cited in the Journal Huma Abedin worked on for twelve years:

The Western habit of reducing religion to the function of a residual force, separating it from the state and relegating it to personal and individual affairs, places a deep gulf between the West and other traditions, especially the Islamic. (p. 6)

The Islamic world sees the West as arrogant, materialistic, repressive, brutal, and decadent with a lack of human moral values. The domains of Islam perceive Western culture as threatening because of its materialism, imperialism and its championing of unfettered individualism at the expense of the common social good. These hallmarks of Western culture are seen as the source of all troubles. (p. 9)

Muslim intellectuals believe that Western modernity is based on a metaphysical foundation of immanence that denies transcendence. Sayyid Husayn Nasr describes, “The embodiment of the Divine Will, as a transcendent reality which is eternal and immutable, as a model by which the perfections and shortcomings of human society and the conduct of the individual are judged….”

Sayyid QuÏb described it [modern Islam] as “a disastrous combination of avid materialism and egoistic individualism.” (p. 9)

The war that has been declared against Western modernity now seeks a new modernity, and, unlike Western modernity, it is not based on a revolution of rising expectations and infinite progress, but, rather, on the idea of a human mind at peace with itself, committed to the sanctity of man and of nature. The search for this new modernity in the Islamic world gives a high priority to the ideal of justice and the balancing of individual human rights with the rights of the human community as a whole. (p. 11)

The most common notion of freedom in the West today is to do, be or say whatever one wishes without intervention. A substantial range of actions by individuals or groups cannot be questioned. But in the Islamic notion of freedom, an individual's or group's freedom is restricted if fellow human beings complain of sentimental or sensual feelings as a result of those actions. (p. 11)

All Italics are mine. Need I point out the inherent hostility of Islam to individualism? Islam requires the unquestioning submission of the individual to Islamic authority.

All non-Islamist or non-supremacist Muslims are faced with such a contradiction and the attending problematic conflict of conscience. If they refuse or are unable to question their faith, what then? If one could demonstrate to them that their faith is incompatible with their purported patriotism and loyalty, what would they do about it? Repudiate Islam, or continue to profess double and irreconcilable commitments?

It is likely that McCarthy's "patriotic" Muslims subscribe to the same subjectivist notion of individualism that the Left does, that all truths are "relative" and that one has a "right" to believe in anything one wishes, especially in the realm of religion, which is somehow sacrosanct and protected from any degree of critical examination (or is likewise exempt from mockery, satire, or parody).

"Radical Islam" is as much a redundancy as is the term "radical Nazism" or "radical Communism." In his books and columns, McCarthy recognizes "extremist" Islam as chiefly an ideology, and not a religion. What, then, is that ideology based on? The Koran. The "Mein Kampf" of Islam, as Dutch politician Geert Wilders characterized it. The testimony, struggle, and Fitna of Mohammad.

Now, Christianity is of such a nature that it could suffer numerous schisms which in the past divided Catholics from Lutherans, Quakers, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Episcopalians, Baptists, and other sects, yet all meet the definition of being "Christian." There are fundamental doctrinal differences in these sects, such as a rejection of the Trinity, or of the Eucharist, or of Papal authority, but they are all Christian.

Islam at first glance also features divisions or schisms between the Sunni and Shi'ite sects, between the Wahhabist or Salafist sect (which upholds the literal and puritanical doctrine of the Mohammad's immediate descendents or successors) and the Sunni sect, which disagrees with the Shi'ites only on picayune matters, such as who really succeeded Mohammad.

But whichever brand of Islam one examines, one sees a blueprint for a totalitarian society that commands unquestioning faith in the truth of Allah's injunctions. Based on the Koran, Islam, its internal divisions to the contrary notwithstanding, is a single, unified monotheist creed governed by Sharia law. Some commentators have even claimed that there is such a thing as "secular Islam." This is an oxymoron, a contradictory package deal. No religion can be "secular," that is, on one hand, based on a belief of a commandment-giving deity, but on the other, based on non-deity-derived, man-made law. Either the man-made law is derived from a commanding deity, or it is not.

"Moderate" Muslims and Islamists would be the first to agree. That is their commonality of belief and goal. The more consistent Muslims – the "radicals" and "extremists" – do the dirty work that more fastidious, laid-back, "tolerant" Muslims choose not to. They wage violent war on the West with self-sacrificing suicide bombers and the like, and with cultural and political jihad taken up by CAIR and other Brotherhood-connected "civil rights" organizations.

But because Islam is a "religion," conservatives refuse to condemn it. However, an ideology can also be a religion to its promulgators as well as to its rank-and-file adherents. Our experience with Nazism and Communism should have taught us that lesson. All forms of totalitarianism are primarily faith-based, grounded in a belief in the divinely-inspired infallibility of its iconic leaders. But religion is a multi-faith chapel conservatives refuse to criticize. Therein lies the conservatives' Achilles heel when the subject is Islam.

When push comes to shove in the so-called "war on terror," which side will these "patriotic" Muslims take? The question should be unnecessary. No Muslim should be employed in "government, in our military, in our intelligence services." Not even in local law enforcement. The defense of this country from its dedicated enemies should not be an exercise in "equal opportunity." The exclusion of Muslims from government employment should not be regarded as an act of "discrimination" or "bigotry," but rather as a policy of self-preservation. For all their other ideological faults, neither Woodrow Wilson nor Franklin D. Roosevelt invited "moderate" sympathizers with the Kaiser or Nazism to be on their advisory teams, nor employed them in any government agency during the two wars, nor extended hands of friendship to their waffling, excuse-making, taqiyya-trained apologists.

McCarthy asserts that we would not be able to wage an effective war against Islamic jihad or the "war on terrorism" without the help of Muslims. This is balderdash. As far back as the 19th century, there have been enough credible and clear translations of Islamic texts and documents that we need not employ battalions of Muslims to help us understand them, regardless of any Muslim's purported loyalty to the preservation of this country. All one need do is acknowledge that Islam is root-and-branch a form of totalitarian, eminently compatible with the Left's secular brand, and treat it as an enemy.

As things stand, we are not waging an effective war against Islam. President Obama's "outreach" to Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood is not the worst development. What is equally perilous is the conservative refusal to examine and excoriate Islam, as well.

The only trustworthy Muslim is an ex-Muslim. And that is something Huma Abedin is not.

Regulation of Property Leads to Censorship

Is there a correlation between the establishment of a welfare state and a trend towards censorship? Do growing restrictions of freedom of speech (e.g., the notion of "hate speech") occur inevitably with the congealing of a welfare state or an increasing regulation and expropriation of property? Must the expropriation of private property (including money) ultimately lead to the expropriation of one's freedom of speech? Can legalized theft of property ultimately lead to the legalized theft of speech? Are statism and censorship distinct, separate phenomena that tend to converge to establish totalitarianism, or are they inherently partners in same means and ends?

In short: Is there a crucial, fundamental connection between property rights and freedom of speech?

In 1962, novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand observed:

The legal hallmark of a dictatorship [is] preventive law—the concept that a man is guilty until he is proved innocent by the permissive rubber stamp of a commissar or a Gauleiter.

Or of a commissioner, director, or "czar."

No, America does not yet have a dictatorship. Rather, it is governed by myriad satrapies of statist agencies, bureaus, and departments controlling or regulating virtually every realm of human action. Today, virtually every statist law on federal and state books falls into the category of "preventive" law – laws that protect "consumers," laws that protect children, laws that protect investors, laws that protect employees, laws that protect patients. For over a century, as the volume of these laws has swollen to hundreds of thousands of pages of legislation, there have been men of the Left and Right who wish to organize them all under one unified régime: A dictatorship.

The McCain-Feingold law (or the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002) that regulates political speech is evidence that, yes, such expropriation or regulation will lead to the regulation or suppression of speech, and ultimately, to across-the-board censorship. Political views expressed by private individuals or organizations through private means (especially in broadcast media) have been barred and later granted limited sanction in court rulings (e.g., Citizens United vs. the FEC ). But such suppression is not only blatantly expressed in law, but it also comes in through the back door, as witness the experience of Diana West and the Washington Examiner "spiking" her column. The editor's refusal to run a column by a nationally syndicated writer for unknown, unstated reasons, is not strictly censorship (for the paper is private property), but it does smack of a degree of political correctness that would sanction overt censorship.

The regulation of private property spawned various kinds of mutated offspring. The regulation of political "campaign" speech in which certain entities are prohibited by laws such as the McCain-Feingold law from engaging in "for" or "against" particular candidates or a specific candidate's policies, could be said to be a result of law that regulates advertising.

In the beginning of a slide towards censorship, there may be no speech restrictions on regulated property. The regulation may be intended solely to control product pricing, or sales of certain products to various classes of potential buyers (such as alcohol or cigarettes to "minors"), or places of lawful sale (e.g., of beer in Pennsylvania, and of hard liquor in Virginia).

Mandatory "speech" is another form of censorship or speech regulation, such as on product labels bearing nutritional or compositional information, or restaurant menus that must include calorie information. Cigarette and tobacco packaging must carry warnings about smoking. Medicinal packaging must contain warnings and advisories about dosages. Because of an outrageous settlement from a lawsuit against McDonald's, coffee and other beverage containers served in fast food restaurants carry warnings on the containers that the contents are hot. This is "reverse censorship" because the omission of information has been deemed by a government authority or a court not in the "public interest."

Go to a Wal-Mart and tally up the number of things for sale that carry warning labels. These would include such things as pillows, tools, electrical appliances, toys, and food. While many manufacturers will claim that their warning labels are voluntary for liability reasons, one can be sure that another motive is to preempt government mandatory regulations.

Producers of these products have submitted to regulation as a defensive liability tactic and also to protect themselves from frivolous but expensive lawsuits. Such labels and warnings are ubiquitous in our culture. One wonders why warning labels for books and computer screens have not yet been mandated: "Reading this book or computer screen may lead to impaired vision or blindness."

In 1997, Mary L. Azcuenaga, head of the Federal Trade Commission, was "sorta" for the freedom of speech in advertising, and "sorta" against it:

The Commission has referred to the unfairness doctrine as "the FTC's general law of consumer protection, for which deception is one specific but particularly important application." The concept of unfairness potentially is so expansive that it could include virtually any practice that Commissioners do not like for one reason or another. Because of the potential breadth of unfairness, it is important that the Commission have a well-articulated standard for delineating this authority. Otherwise, the law could result in having the government make choices it thinks are good for consumers, instead of allowing consumers to make decisions for themselves.

The Federal Trade Commission, created in 1914, was another child of President Woodrow Wilson, its statist siblings being the federal income tax and the Federal Reserve Banking System.

Censorship can also take the form of Ad Usum Delphini *, more commonly known as politically correct speech, in which potentially offending terms or phrases are expurgated or substituted with bland or "non-offensive" proxies or euphemisms.

The notions of "hate speech" and "hate crime" are two such offspring of the regulation of political "campaign" speech. One's money – or property – may or may not be used to express one's opinion of a political candidate or his policy, depending on utterly arbitrary rules established by congressmen and at the discretion of policing bureaucrats. Such regulation is the natural result of state regulation of private property (from zoning laws to the composition of your home insulation and electrical wiring). If it was deemed "unfair" or "Illegal" to question a candidate's character and known policies during an election campaign in a privately produced and privately broadcast ad – and depending on the tone of the questioning, it could be deemed "hateful" – it was but a short step to criminalizing "sexist" language, racial epithets, or any other speech considered by the authorities, the courts, and "community standards" as demeaning, discriminatory, defamatory, or just plain "hateful."

Perhaps the most perilous instance of imposing politically correct speech in its own literature is the purging of

“This is truly censorship by our government, the government purging itself of documents,” Bachmann said. “We are not only seeing documents purged. We are seeing trainers purged and we are seeing the FBI library purged.”

The FBI began reviewing all of its counter-terror training materials last September in response to media reports describing controversial statements in documents and lectures, allegedly including the assertion that devout Muslims are more likely to become terrorists.

Islamic and Arab-American groups protested and demanded removal of all references they deemed to be anti-Islamic. Within days, the bureau launched a review to ensure all FBI training materials are factual and do not rely on stereotypes.

To lead its review, the bureau created a five-member advisory panel that includes three outside Islamic experts, whose identities the agency will not disclose publicly. After six months, almost 900 pages of documents were removed from the curriculum. Those are the materials members of Congress have been reviewing, but cannot discuss.

How can a devout Muslim not be "stereotyped"? How can a goose-stepping Nazi not be stereotyped? But stereotyping is not the chief fear of "Islamic experts." The stereotypical Muslim is just a straw man. Rather, it is the education of FBI personnel about the true, barbaric, totalitarian nature of Islam that Islamists and their dhimmi defenders wish to truncate. The FBI is charged with "fighting terrorism," but now is forbidden to identify the terrorists.

The regulation of speech, in our republic, at least in the 19th century, could not have been introduced "cold," that is, without precedents being set in courts, abetted by a co-opted and muckraking press and subtly advanced in incremental stages by a government-dominated education system, both institutions working to inculcate in men's minds the concept of regulated speech as a norm.

Principles of property and speech must first be interpreted in a "populist" vein, reinterpreted, suborned, and ultimately discarded. A nation's citizenry must not be spooked or shocked by overt censorship. It must be "conditioned" to accept it in stages. It must be hypnotized, or anesthetized, slowly introduced to friendly gagging so as not to risk untoward opposition. The citizenry must "educated," that is, indoctrinated with cultural relativism, cultural and moral diversity, subjectivism as a rigid "world view," and reduced to submissive, unquestioning, unexceptional individuals who need the tonic of "self-esteem" to become more productive and contributory members of the collective.

All this would be in conjunction with a number of Supreme Court and other judicial decisions that would serve to obfuscate the "social" purpose of private property and freedom of speech, and ultimately abolish them. (e.g., Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. on falsely shouting "fire" in a theater, leaving the government to determine what is a "false" alarm.)

Observers of these phenomena have attributed them to conspiracies, that is, to "master plans" of conquest conceived and carried out by evil geniuses. This is the easiest and least credible explanation of why statism has grown in the U.S. Certainly there are minds in existence that plot against freedom and freedom of speech. George Soros comes to mind. But such "geniuses" are not true geniuses. Theirs is a feral intelligence that can only detect and exploit the perceived faults and weaknesses of their prey. They can only react, not act. This is also the tactic and game plan of the Muslim Brotherhood in its "civilizational jihad".

The agenda of the current administration is copasetic with that of the Muslim Brotherhood, with similarities in means and ends. The Left wishes to impose secular totalitarianism. The Brotherhood and all its organizational offspring in this country wish to impose totalitarian Sharia law, which is more totalitarian than is Communism or Socialism, that is, it prescribes behavior and approved values from head to toe, from morning to night, from diet to sex, from birth to death. Hassidic Jews also live under similar rules, but there is no deadly retaliation against them if they fail to obey such rules, as there is in Islam, nor have Hassidic Jews declared jihad against the Western cultures they live in. Secular totalitarianism wishes to control men's physical existence. Sharia aims to control both his physical and spiritual existence.

And there is this crucial difference between Islam and Hassidic Judaism: The members of the latter wish to remain as insular as possible, while obeying secular law. Islam also encourages an insular policy, but its intolerable nature impels it to suborn and conquer the very secular society in which it may exist.

Evil, however, is inherently impotent. Why? It derives its alleged strength from its enemy's actual and demonstrable weaknesses. Evil is not self-sustainable. Its basic nature is nihilistic; as a parasite, it does not strive to live, per se, but merely to exist effortlessly for as long as its host is able to survive. If a host perishes from having to sustain a parasite, the parasite will perish with it or seek another host.

The teleological means and end of evil is not life, but negation, in other words – death, or non-existence, or existence without cause – which, in stricter terms, means non-existence, because existence without effort or cause is a metaphysical impossibility.

The United States has left itself vulnerable to the inroads and the debilitating and corrupting cancers of statism and Islam. One can trace this vulnerability all the way back to John Marshall era of the Supreme Court. Many of Marshall's decisions began a long succession of Court rulings that were concessions to statist power and controls over freedom of speech. Aristotle was a philosophical cofounder of the United States, but in virtually no time the philosophical termites of statism began eating away at that foundation.

Upon America's declaration of war against Germany in 1917, the Espionage and Seditions Acts of 1917 and 1918 contained provisions for censoring mail, newspapers, pamphlets and public speaking that directly questioned the war effort or that could be interpreted as materially frustrating or obstructing the war effort.

From that era we traversed to the Obama administration and the reign of Cass Sunstein, the "Regulatory Czar," who has announced his resignation from the administration. Among other things, he wished to criminalize politically incorrect speech and thought:

WND first reported in 2008 Sunstein’s proposal that the government ban “conspiracy theorizing,” including by sending agents to infiltrate websites and chat rooms. Among the beliefs Sunstein would ban, is that the theory of global warming is a deliberate fraud.

WND reported that in his 2009 book, “On Rumors,” he argued websites should be obliged to remove “false rumors” while libel laws should be altered to make it easier to sue for spreading such “rumors.” In the book, Sunstein cited as a primary example of “absurd” and “hateful” remarks, reports by “right-wing websites” alleging an association between President Obama and Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers.

Ostensively, Sunstein is leaving because of new "family obligations" and a chance to oversee a new Harvard Law School program. But it is only fair to speculate that he is leaving because it has been decided that he is a reelection liability. Back at Harvard, however, he will be up to his old tricks. The Washington Post reported:

Sunstein will depart by the end of the month, officials said. He is returning to the job he left, a professorship at Harvard Law School. In addition, Sunstein will head a new Harvard program on “behavioral economics and public policy.” Scholars who study Obama say that Sunstein had a major influence on Obama’s view of government — stressing pragmatism over ideology.

Sunstein’s work emphasizes the importance of consensus, social equality and broad political participation in American democracy. These themes are often echoed in Obama’s speeches.

Also, as a member of the Harvard Law Review editorial board in 1989, Obama helped oversee the publication of one of Sunstein’s most important essays. Titled "Interpreting Statutes in the Regulatory State," it argued that regulations are always open to interpretation based on “culture and context.”

One thing the author of the Post got wrong, as did the Obama scholars: Barack Obama is no pragmatist, but is an ideologue down to his golf clubs.

Remember that in totalitarian countries there is no private property through which citizens may protest or criticize government policies. All means of communications are owned or dominated by the state. This includes such countries as the former Soviet Union (and now Putin's fascist Russia, where successful businessmen are jailed and their property expropriated, and where journalists risk death for reporting the truth), Red China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, North Korea, and even Venezuela. In Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the press was nominally private (as was much private property, including banks), but controlled by the parties in power. Their editors dared not contradict the Party line in the least without risking arrest or a state take-over of the paper, or its simple dissolution.

American institutions are surrendering to de facto censorship with little or no such threat of force or government retaliation. Freedom of speech is intimately tied to the status of property. If a government can license and tax one's soapbox, prescribe what materials it can be made of, what times and where it may be used and when, and what may be said from it, it is only a matter of time before one is compelled to relinquish ownership of it altogether.

*"At the court of the king of France Louis XIV the education of the crown prince (Delphinus) was also pursued by streamlined [i.e., Bowdlerized] versions of classical Latin writers. These versions were written ad usum Delphini, that is, 'for the use of the crown prince,' and they were later adopted as textbooks in French schools."

Department of Justice Sputters on Censorship

I emailed this letter to Thomas Perez, Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, at the Department of Justice:

27 July 2012

Thomas Perez
Assistant Attorney General
Civil Rights Division
Department of Justice
Washington, DC

Mr. Perez:

Your astoundingly evasive and nearly comical response to Representative Trent Franks's direct, simple question today, during a session of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, about whether or not the Justice Department would criminalize speech against any religion (Frank: “Will you tell us here today that this Administration’s Department of Justice will never entertain or advance a proposal that criminalizes speech against any religion?” and three other variations of the same question) tipped your hand and that of your boss, Attorney General Holder, that you and your cohorts would certainly "entertain or advance" the criminalization of any and all such speech, especially in regards to your friends, the Islamic supremacists and lobbyists who apparently hold more sway in Washington than do Americans who value their freedom of speech. I have watched the video of that exchange, as have countless other Americans, and like them wonder just what level of disgusting and craven dhimmitude you and your ilk have stooped to.

You kept begging for "context" but the context was a question that required a simple, honest, straightforward denial or affirmation. That you could not answer such a simple question without sounding like a malevolent Elmer Fudd and fidgeting like a criminal suspect being given the third degree, telegraphed your sleazy, weasel character and informed anyone with a modicum of character judgment that lying is an integral part of your makeup. No decent person could watch your behavior with feeling revulsion. It was with great satisfaction to me that Representative Franks would not let you scurry from your corner and allow you to change the subject.

Be forewarned: I write extensively on the perils of Islam and its barbaric and nihilist nature, and in particular about the brutality of Sharia law – which so many Islamic supremacists have boasted will replace our Constitution, the loudest having been the doyens of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamic organizations in this country – if the Justice Department ever does issue such a totalitarian measure, I shall continue to write what I wish about Islam, which is simply a totalitarian ideology garbed in religious dogma. You are obviously, like your boss, and his boss, and all their advisors, of the Left, and there is an ideological symbiosis between the Left and Islam.

Oh, and I mustn't forget to mention Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her "close" advisor, Huma Abedin, and their efforts to silence criticism of Islam, most notably in partnership with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to have speech critical of Islam treated as legally enforceable "hate speech," whatever its form or intent.

You are a coward, a traitor, and a discredit to your country. You are a perfect fit for this administration. In the context of the principles on which this country was founded, you and your cohorts are the "blasphemers."

The letter is self-explanatory and contains all the information one would need to grasp the context that Perez attempted to evade and switch.

I sent a copy of it to Representative Trent Franks, as well. There has been no response from Perez, and none is expected, although it is likely that my blog articles, here and elsewhere, will come under scrutiny. But I take that scrutiny for granted, because the federal government is already monitoring blog sites for "national security reasons."

The threat contained in Perez's waffling responses extends of course to any kind of speech, particularly speech the government deems "hate speech" or "seditious speech" or "revolutionary speech" directed against its growing powers to regulate, stifle, gag, and destroy. If the Department of Justice criminalizes speech "against religion" (specifically Islam) or imposes any kind of "anti-blasphemy" law, that in itself would be anti-Constitutional, but would, of course, open the door to prohibitions against any kind of speech deemed "dangerous" or "harmful" or "defamatory."

It is clear from the video that Perez did not care for Rep. Frank's context, and wished to switch the focus from an admission of totalitarian ambition to one that would rationalize totalitarianism.

Perez is one of those political creatures whose careers have been solely in government "service." It would not be fair to claim that he knows nothing about the First Amendment of the Constitution. Creatures like him always know what absolutes they are dodging. It was a "hard" question to answer, Franks allegedly "threatened" Perez, and Perez was obviously in need of rescue. Some member of the committee came to his rescue by interrupting Franks on some procedural matter. The video ends there, and we don’t know how the questioning ended.

Perez's nomination for the post of Assistant Attorney General was endorsed or recommended to the Senate Judiciary Committee by literal menagerie of collectivist groups and statist politicians. And there is this revealing "credit" in his "vitae": "He also served as Special Counsel to the late Senator Edward Kennedy, and was Senator Kennedy's principal adviser on civil rights, criminal justice and constitutional issues." Kennedy also endorsed his nomination for the position. That speaks for itself, and is nearly as much an indictment of him as his wanting to leave the door open to censorship.

Instances of Perez's friendliness towards Islam and his willingness to criminalize any speech that smacks of "religious intolerance" (the term preferred by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and Hillary Clinton) are numerous. In June of 2012, The New English Review, for example, offered these tidbits about Perez's inclinations:

On October 7, 2010, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Thomas E. Perez, paid a visit to the US Attorney Nashville office and met with local Muslim groups including members of the board of the ICM. Perez told the group that included the Imams the both the ICM and Nashville mosques [about the controversial Murfreesboro mega mosque} that “his office has their back if it turns out that opponents [of the mosque] aren't as interested in zoning esoteric as they are in sidelining the practice of Islam in Murfreesboro.”

And:

Later in December 2011, Secretary of State Clinton would convene an international plenary session with OIC members and other foreign representatives at the State Department. The so-called Istanbul Process conference was directed at developing best practices for combating religious intolerance, a code word for Shariah blasphemy codes adopted by the Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez of the USDOJ Civil Rights Division spoke about development of best practices to comply with the UN religious intolerance resolution.

Call the Assistant Attorney General an infidel "Activist for Allah."

Perez can pontificate on "human rights" with the best of them. In December 2011 he addressed Clinton's State Department on the importance of protecting "religious freedom," in conjunction with the OIC conference chaired by Hillary in Washington that month.

The United Nations Human Rights Council echoed the Universal Declaration in resolution 16/18, which is the basis for this conference. As important as it is to assert such principles, however, it is equally or even more important to ensure that such principles are put into practice.

What is Resolution 16/18? Forbes Magazine published a post-OIC conference article by Abigail R. Esman. She isn't quite sure that it's such a bad thing. However, she begins:

While you were out scavenging the Wal-Mart super sales or trying on trinkets at Tiffany and Cartier, your government has been quietly wrapping up a Christmas gift of its own: adoption of UN resolution 16/18. An initiative of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (formerly Organization of Islamic Conferences), the confederacy of 56 Islamic states, Resolution 16/18 seeks to limit speech that is viewed as “discriminatory” or which involves the “defamation of religion” – specifically that which can be viewed as “incitement to imminent violence”….

….But this latest version, which includes the “incitement to imminent violence” phrase – that is, which criminalizes speech which incites violence against others on the basis of religion, race, or national origin – has succeeded in winning US approval –despite the fact that it (indirectly) places limitations as well on speech considered “blasphemous.”

Resolution 16/18 has undergone many revisions over the years in attempts to create ambiguous enough a language but still seem pseudo-specific enough to lock especially the United States into a commitment to "tweak" the First Amendment to suit Islamic notions of "blasphemy," "defamation," and "intolerance." This is in the notable tradition of Thomas Perez, to switch the context and establish the terms of "legal" censorship. Esman writes:

The background to all of this, unsurprisingly, is an effort on the part of Muslim countries to limit what they consider to be defamatory and blasphemous speech: criticism of Islam, say, or insulting the prophet Mohammed – which, as we’ve learned, can mean anything from drawing a cartoon or making a joke in a comedy sketch to burning a Koran. Such acts – according to some readings of the Koran and, indeed, according to law in some OIC countries – are punishable by death. Hence the riots that met the publication of the so-called “Danish cartoons,” the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the murder of Theo van Gogh, and on and on.

Books, novels, cartoons, and literature of all kinds could all be charged with "incitement to imminent violence." Prove that they aren't inciting anything. For Islam and Muslims, there is always a handy mob of demonstrators on call ready to claim "offense" and "defamation" and to carry signs that read, "To Hell with Freedom of Speech." They'll always be hovering in the background, prepared to initiate violence just to back up or make credible some attorney's charge that the violence is "imminent." This fact has been demonstrated countless times over the last few decades.

Dhimmified politicians and public figures who endorse restrictions on speech against Islam out of fear of "inciting" such violence are merely cowards. Figures such as Perez do not fear such violence; to judge by Perez's career and the careers of his ilk in the DHS and FBI, they take pleasure in suppressing speech for the sake of suppressing it. That would go far in explaining Perez's behavior when he chose not to answer Representative Franks' s question. He wished to change the subject and present a rationalized, "legalized" option of "entertaining or advancing" censorship.

For the reader's edification, here is a partial list of the organizations that endorsed Perez's nomination:

Leadership Conference on Civil Rights: Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, ADA Watch, Alliance for Justice, American Association of University Women (AAUW), American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), Americans for Democratic Action, Asian American Justice Center, Bazelon Center, Feminist Majority, Human Rights Campaign, Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, National Abortion Federatino, National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), National Association of Consumer Advocates, National Coalition for Disability Rights (NCDR), National Council of Jewish Women, National Council of La Raza (NCLR), National Education Association, National Fair Housing Alliance, National Health Law Program, National Partnership for Women & Families, National Women's Law Center, People for the American Way, The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law

As you can see, these are the organizations that are united in an alliance against the individual, against individual rights, and against reason, and all believe that the Constitution can be "tweaked" to sanction their collectivist "rights" and "entitlements." In Perez's view, individuals do not have "civil rights."

One would not otherwise waste time on detailing the career of a political wonk such as Perez, except that his contemptible but signature performance before the Subcommittee on the Constitution revealed the insouciant attitude the Department of Justice, under the aegis of a Marxist, Attorney General Eric Holder, has towards the Constitution and individual rights. In Perez's warped universe, there are only collectivized rights. Remember that he was nominated by President Obama. That also speaks for itself.

I encourage readers to send their own letters of protest to Thomas Perez (to AskDOJ@usdoj.gov – there is no direct email address for him), and a letter of support to Representative Trent Franks (at http://www.franks.house.gov/contacts/new – you will need to use his District's Arizona Zip code, 85308, for a letter to be accepted, but you can use your own address and contact information).

It is important that we let all wannabe totalitarians and career "humanitarians" such as Perez know that the American people are on to him and his "context" games. It is also important that we let Congressmen such as Trent Franks know that Americans are behind him.

It is crucial that we stand up for freedom of speech. Without that freedom, we cannot protect any of our other rights.

The Extremities of Extremism

In Joel Brinkley's July 20th SF Gate article, "Morsi's silence on extremism speaks volumes," the term extremists occurs five times, extremism once (in the title). Although he employs the term so many times, he does not know what it means. Aside from that paucity of understanding, his incredulity speaks volumes about his ignorance of the nature of the "Arab Spring."

Mohammed Morsi has been Egypt's president for less than a month, and already senior clerics in his country and around the Islamic world are loudly calling for the demolition of the pyramids, Egypt's most important tourist attraction and among the Seven Wonders of the World.

Saudi Sheikh Ali bin Said al-Rabi'i called them heinous "symbols of paganism." In recent days, similar calls have been echoing through Egypt and the region, including one from a Bahraini sheikh who urged Morsi to "destroy the pyramids and accomplish what the Amr bin al-As could not." He was referring to the Prophet Muhammud's companion who conquered Egypt in the seventh century but didn't have the technological wherewithal to accomplish the task.

Morsi is the Muslim Brotherhood's triumphant president of Egypt. The Brotherhood is dedicated to transforming the country into one governed by primitive, brutal, misogynist, barbaric Sharia law.

What's surprising is that Morsi has had nothing to say about this, not a word. Neither has he said anything about numerous "freelance" efforts to enforce other elements of Shariah law across Egypt, even though his new government hasn't said that's his plan.

Of course, what people like Brinkley do not grasp is that Morsi isn't an "extremist." He represents the essence of Islamic religious and political doctrine. He isn't going to question calls to destroy the pyramids or impose jizya on Copts. His "silence" is an implicit sanction of those ideas and worse. After all, he ran on the platform of "purifying" Egypt. What does Brinkley expect Morsi to say? "Oh, that's just extremist talk. Pay no attention to it. I'm really just a moderate."

Or, take Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who "purified" his country of private property, freedom of the press, and prosperity.

Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has signaled a preference in the U.S. presidential campaign by comparing Mitt Romney to his own challenger.

Chavez, who is up for re-election a month before U.S. President Barack Obama, has in recent weeks expressed a clear preference for the man currently in the White House….

“I believe the person to best explain the loser’s agenda isn’t Barack Obama but rather Romney, because it’s the extreme right-wing agenda that borders on the fascism of the United States,” Chavez told tens of thousands of supporters in the western city of Maracaibo.

“In the end, it’s the same project,” Chavez said, referring to Obama as “a good guy.” (Italics mine.)

Chavez uses that well-worn equivocation of extremism = right wing = fascism. He's less adept at the Alinsky-inspired spiel than is President Obama, but then most Western news agencies remain firmly in the camp of approving of democratically-elected dictators – it's the voice of the people, you see – so they will never stop agreeing with the Chavez's and Obama's of the world. They repeat the terms like hamsters going round and round in a drum. Right wing is also one of those contentless terms, but it connotes "extremism" and jackbooted fascism or Nazism. Like extremism, it is a purely emotive term, meaning "force used by the filthy rich against the poor."

But I think that extremism is one of the worst terms ever to be coined and over-used." It allows "moderates" and fence-sitters and pragmatists to evade knowledge of what our enemies are up to. It also allows them to defraud the public of the true identity of its enemies.

The terms extremism and extremist date back to the 19th century, nearly always employed in a political context. The Oxford English Dictionary defines extremist as: "One who is disposed to go to the extreme, or who holds extreme opinions." Extremism is defined as: "Tendency to be extreme; disposition to go to extremes." The earliest recorded instance of the term, according to the OED, was 1846.

Of course, extremism can also mean inventing the light bulb, as opposed to almost inventing it. Or shutting a door, as opposed to leaving it cracked open. Or asserting that one owns one's life, as opposed to conceding that one owns only eighty-five percent of it, the balance the property of the state or of the people or of Allah or God or the next door neighbor.

In her article, "'Extremism,' or The Art of Smearing," Ayn Rand discusses the role of such terms as isolationism, McCarthyism, and extremism. About extremism, she wrote:

….[M]ost people do not know the meaning of the word "extremism"; they merely sense it. They sense that something is being put over on them by some means which they cannot grasp. (p. 175)

Now consider the term "extremism." Its alleged meaning is: "Intolerance, hatred, racism, bigotry, crackpot theories, incitement to violence." Its real meaning is: "The advocacy of capitalism." (p. 176)

She notes further:

To begin with, "extremism" is a term which, standing by itself, has no meaning. The concept of "extreme" denotes a relation, a measurement, a degree. The dictionary [not identified] gives the following definitions: "Extreme, adj. – 1. Of a character or kind farthest removed from the ordinary or average. 2. Utmost or exceedingly great in degree." It is obvious that the first question one has to ask, before using that term is: a degree – of what? (p. 177)

To answer: "Of anything!" and to proclaim that any extreme is evil because it is an extreme – to hold the degree of a characteristic, regardless of its nature, as evil – is an absurdity (any garbled Aristotelianism to the contrary notwithstanding). Measurements, as such, have no value-significance – and acquire it only from the nature of that which is being measured.

Are an extreme of health and an extreme of disease equally undesirable? Are extreme intelligence and extreme stupidity – both equally far removed "from the ordinary or average" – equally unworthy? Are extreme honesty and extreme dishonesty equally immoral? Are a man of extreme virtue and a man of extreme depravity equally evil?

That was written in 1964. Extremism no longer serves as the boogey man for capitalism. After nearly half a century, her analysis stands, because it delves into the nature of definitions, concepts, and anti-concepts, one of which is extremism. And, as usual, she exhibits her unique and unparalleled prescience with this observation:

Of all the "anti-concepts" polluting our cultural atmosphere, "extremism" is the most ambitious in scale and implications; it goes much beyond politics. (p. 177)

It is now 2012. Isolationism has fallen into the dustbin of discarded neologisms. In fact, the Left and liberals eschew isolationism, because America, in their eyes, has a moral obligation to be the moral policeman of the globe, selflessly expending lives and treasure in a never-ending campaign to bring "democracy" to hell-holes whose populations of cultural zombies have already "democratically" voted for stagnation and tribalism and tradition. America must do this, they claim, because it is the richest and most prosperous country in the world. It is obligated to expend its lives and treasure precisely because it is these things. Just as the rich, and the near-rich, and the middle class must divest their wealth, because they are those things. Or have it expropriated.

McCarthyism occasionally is trotted out by mentalities who have never otherwise heard of Joe McCarthy or who vaguely recall that he had something to do with anti-communism. Those who employ the term – it sounds evil, and conspiratorial, so why not use it? –now do so reluctantly and cautiously because they don't wish to alert their readers that our government is now run by communists, a.k.a., community organizers. They don’t want to risk someone asking, "But wait. Weren't Lenin and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh community organizers, too? And then there were Hitler, and Mussolini. Didn't they organize their communities, as well?"

There will be no intelligible response to such a query. No member of the White House press corps will venture to ask it. No journalist will even insinuate it in his copy, because he knows that politicians and bureaucrats now control the press, and that even the slightest allusion to the fact that dedicated communists and statists and totalitarians now run the government will be redacted, blue-penciled, and obliterated from his "news."

As Jeremy Peters reported on July 15th in The New York Times:

The quotations come back redacted, stripped of colorful metaphors, colloquial language and anything even mildly provocative.

Quote approval is standard practice for the Obama campaign, used by many top strategists and almost all midlevel aides in Chicago and at the White House — almost anyone other than spokesmen who are paid to be quoted. (And sometimes it applies even to them.) It is also commonplace throughout Washington and on the campaign trail.

The Romney campaign insists that journalists interviewing any of Mitt Romney’s five sons agree to use only quotations that are approved by the press office. And Romney advisers almost always require that reporters ask them for the green light on anything from a conversation that they would like to include in an article.

From Capitol Hill to the Treasury Department, interviews granted only with quote approval have become the default position. Those officials who dare to speak out of school, but fearful of making the slightest off-message remark, shroud even the most innocuous and anodyne quotations in anonymity by insisting they be referred to as a “top Democrat” or a “Republican strategist.”

They are sent by e-mail from the Obama headquarters in Chicago to reporters who have interviewed campaign officials under one major condition: the press office has veto power over what statements can be quoted and attributed by name.

But modern journalists have nothing to learn from the past. William Shirer, journalist, war correspondent, and author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, returning to Germany in 1934, encountered the very same phenomenon:

… William Shirer found upon his arrival in Berlin in 1934 that “though the German press was heavily censored and rigidly controlled there was no censorship of [foreign journalists’] dispatches.” A colleague warned Shirer that “while you did not have to submit your copy for approval by the authorities before cabling it, you had to weigh carefully what you reported about Hitler and the Nazi regime. If he or his aides, especially Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the fanatical Nazi minister of propaganda and the watchdog of the foreign correspondents, found it unacceptable—out you went,” as had happened to Dorothy Thompson the day the Shirers had arrived in Berlin and to numerous others in the preceding months.

"Quote approval" is just a euphemism for censorship, which is an "extremist" term. Shirer minded it very much. "Mainstream" journalists don't seem to mind being subjected to it at all, as long as they can maintain access to politicians and bureaucrats whose statements must be examined and vetted before being reported to the public. Or not. Truth, facts, accountability, honesty – these are all now the new instances of "extremism."

And under the broad awning of extremism are the notions of "hate speech" and Islamophobia. But gag orders and redacting somehow are not instances of "extremism."

Extremism has had a notorious longevity, precisely because, standing by itself, it means nothing, but in the right context, it can mean anything. It is a term that ignites emotions, not thought. That is its chief asset: the emotional factor.

The term extremist now does double duty: it smears anyone or any movement that opposes big government, reckless spending, high taxes, and so on, and implies that moderates are calm, rational, unhysterical champions of a pragmatic approach to issues, and would someone please banish those Tea Party whackos from our civil discourse? We only want to conserve the status quo, not see it smashed and dismantled for the benefit of the rich, and the near-rich, and the middle class. How can we work to build a perfect, progressive society when these people keep making noises about their vanishing liberty?

Liberty? Freedom of speech? Individual rights? These terms are all to be found in that damnable lexicon of extremism.

In regards to Islam, the term serves to distance or divorce "radical" Muslim politicians who advocate Sharia law, together with their violent underlings – the suicide bombers and other killers in the name of Allah – from a "moderate," peaceful Islam, which, even in its mildest form, is just a "moderate" form of totalitarianism. The pseudo-moderate defenders of Islam say, "Those suicide bombers and Hamas and Hezbollah and the Brotherhood, those extremists, they don't really represent Islam at its best" – but neglect to mention that there is no "best" about or in Islam, neither in its doctrines nor in its practice. Were it possible for the tens of thousands of victims of Islamic jihad – living or dead, in America and abroad – in a collective voice to attest to the "best" face of Islam, one would hear a resounding and eardrum-splitting merde!

A totalitarian ideology is what it is, and nothing else: a totalitarian ideology. It is socialism, which is only an overture to total controls. It is Islam, whose creeping Sharia can only lead to total controls. Secular totalitarianism requires individuals to defer to the state and perhaps give a Nazi or Communist salute as proof of his submission and loyalty. Islamic totalitarianism requires individuals to surrender their individuality and their minds and bow to Mecca as evidence of their submission and loyalty.

Extremism now not only serves as a semi-polite expletive with which to smear any defender of freedom, but also allows an enemy of freedom to point with dissembling insouciance to the guy who is actually practicing what the enemy preaches: indiscriminate violence, force, and destruction.

It is the dedicated, authentic, identifiable, and definable enemies of freedom who are the true "extremists." Slavery and death are their ultimate, most extreme ends.


*Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, by Ayn Rand. New York: Signet-New American Library. 1967. 349 pp.

Who's Destroying Western Civilization?

In his "An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America," Muslim Brotherhood member Mohamed Akram wrote:

Enablement of Islam in North America, meaning: establishing an effective and stable Islamic Movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood which adopts Muslims' causes domestically and globally, and which works to expand the observant Muslim base, aims at unifying and directing Muslims' efforts, presents Islam as a civilization alternative, and supports the global Islamic state, wherever it is.

The process of settlement is a "Civilization-Jihadist Process" with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions.

Steve Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism notes:

This May 1991 memo was written by Mohamed Akram, a.k.a. Mohamed Adlouni, for the Shura Council of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the introductory letter, Akram referenced a "long-term plan…approved and adopted" by the Shura Council in 1987 and proposed this memo as a supplement to that plan and requested that the memo be added to the agenda for an upcoming Council meeting. Appended to the document is a list of all Muslim Brotherhood organizations in North America as of 1991.

There are many fine, important, and informative essays and books on just how antithetical Islam is to Western values – to individualism, to private property, to freedom of speech – and on just how insidious and anti-life it is. But few are the books and essays on why Islam seems to be making progress in its "grand jihad" against the West.

Who or what is actually destroying Western Civilization from within? The Islamists? Or the West? What contributes to the Islamists' hubris, what encourages them and instills them with confidence that they can "conquer" the West, and especially the United States. Whose "hands" are working together with those of the "believers" to bring down Western civilization and establish Sharia law here and everywhere?

Islam would be as impotent as Scientology, or of a cult that ascribed mystical powers to pyramids, or a diet of bottles of Shaklee vitamins. Is Islam imbued with some inexorable and ineluctable power to conquer the West?

One thing is that Islamists are shrewd enough to exploit the corrosive policies of cultural relativism, multiculturalism, the commitment to "diversity," indiscriminate "tolerance," subjectivism, and a host of other policies that assault or negate reason and all standards of measurement of value, superiority and inferiority. Islam is as bankrupt of formal philosophy as is the culture it is "sabotaging." The intelligence exhibited by Islamists is merely a feral, predatory intelligence. Islam allows no other kind. Islam does not permit independent thought, only agreement with arbitrary assertions.

A wolf may be predatory, but that is how it is programmed by nature. It has no choice in the matter. A Muslim is a man imbued with volition and the capacity for choice; he chooses to limit himself to an ideology that permits him to be merely feral and predatory and submissive. His mind merely detects his enemy's weaknesses and vulnerabilities – weaknesses and vulnerabilities that are as self-inflicted as choosing to be a Muslim – and plots to exploit them.

Those weaknesses and vulnerabilities are the West's policies, noted above. And what are the philosophical foundations of those policies? The reigning philosophy is that one cannot know anything, either for certain or at all, that all values are relative, or subjective, that reality is whatever one wishes it to be. On one or more of those premises, there are no absolutes that a defender of the West can repair to or uphold.

The Seattle Times reprinted an Associated Press item about a Saudi religious figure warning Muslims and non-Muslims to "respect" the Muslim month of Ramadan.

Saudi authorities warned non-Muslim expatriates on Friday, the first day of Ramadan, not to eat, drink, or smoke in public until the end of the Muslim holy month's sunrise-to-sunset fast - or face expulsion…. The prince newly appointed to handle most aspects of law enforcement is known as a strict adherent to religious rules. Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz was governor of the holy city of Mecca before becoming Interior Minister.

I do not think very many people realize that showing respect and deference to Muslim practices and sensitivities outside of Muslim countries is a form of submission to Islam, regardless of the Islamic holiday or the day of the year. This is especially true of those who know little about Islam and have not grasped the implications of granting such respect. They are more concerned with not wanting to hurt Muslim "feelings" than they are with the content of those feelings.

According to the cultural relativism most Westerners are indoctrinated with today, Muslim "feelings" are sacrosanct and not to be troubled or offended. "Feelings," they are taught, are a tool of cognition, in themselves and in Muslims, so to offend Muslim feelings is to question a Muslim's world view, and a Muslim's world view – in which Allah owns everything and everyone and Mohammad was his prophet – is just as good as anyone else's. Showing disrespect for a Muslim's feelings implies that one's own feelings are somehow superior to his. So a Muslim's feelings must be respected.

There is no such thing as an absolute, goes the line, only perceptions of things filtered by a person's bias or prepossession or taste, and molded by one's culture, and so a Muslim's perceptions are just as valid as anyone else's. These perceptions cannot be judged because there are no absolutes by which to judge them. A host of Western philosophers have said so, such as Descartes and Kant and Hegel, and vetted by thinkers such as William James, Sartre, and John Dewey and many lesser lights.

Who knows, ask the dhimmis-by-default when they bother to ponder the question, and who perhaps have never heard of Hegel or Kant or Descartes, Muslims might be right. "Muslims feel, therefore they exist," is how they might parody Descartes and characterize the Islamic mindset, if they dared to carry the thought to that point. Who is any non-Muslim to judge a Muslim, or what a Muslim believes? While what works for Muslims may not work for non-Muslims, that's just a matter of feeling and up-bringing. It just isn't practical to offend a Muslim's feelings. Who can blame them for rioting and killing when the cultures Muslims immigrate to are hostile to their confidence that theirs is the only true religion and that are not natural environments in which to practice their creed? It is irrelevant that Islam is antithetical and hostile to the notion of individual rights. Muslims must be cut some slack, and be accommodated whenever possible. Civilizational clashes must be avoided. How else can non-Muslims prove they are tolerant and civilized except by respecting Muslims on bent knee and with bowed head?

The rumors that Islam is "eliminating" Western civilization by "sabotaging" it from within it are only half true. Thanks to a philosophy of unreason, promulgated by Western thinkers and taught in the best schools in the West over the course of two centuries, Western civilization is destroying itself "by its own hand." And the United States is proving to be very, very accommodating. It has even elected an unbroken succession of Accommodators-in-Chief, beginning with the Peanut Farmer.

That Brotherhood fellow Mohamed Akram was on to something.

Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann dared to call for an investigation of Muslims in the federal government, especially of Muslims closely or remotely connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. She was immediately attacked by the "gangster government" from all quarters, including that of the mainstream media.

Rep. Michele Bachmann says the Muslim Brotherhood, the international Islamist movement that recently came to power in Egypt, has made “deep penetration” within the U.S. government, and she wants an investigation of its influence within five federal agencies.

The Muslim Brotherhood, perhaps the world’s most influential Islamist organization, has long sought to unite traditional Islam with modern democracy in Middle Eastern nations. Its global influence further increased when one of its candidates, Mohamed Morsi, was declared winner of Egypt’s 2012 presidential election. But Bachmann, R-Stillwater, and four other members of Congress see the Muslim Brotherhood as a domestic threat.

The lawmakers singled out the movement last month in letters to federal defense, diplomatic, intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, requesting investigations into whether — and through whom — the Muslim Brotherhood is exerting influence within President Barack Obama’s administration.

Bachmann, who serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, ratcheted up the rhetoric in an interview last month with radio host Sandy Rios.

“It appears that there has been deep penetration in the halls of our United States government by the Muslim Brotherhood,” Bachmann said. “It appears that there are individuals who are associated with the Muslim Brotherhood who have positions, very sensitive positions, in our Department of Justice, our Department of Homeland Security, potentially even in the National Intelligence Agency.”

One of those individuals is Huma Abedin. Abedin is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's long-time personal advisor, especially on things Islamic.

Robert Spencer wrote about the controversy:

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is at the center of a firestorm over her request that the State, Homeland Security, Defense and Justice Departments, investigate potential “policies and activities that appear to be the result of influence operations conducted by individuals and organizations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.” This is an entirely legitimate call, as Bachmann abundantly illustrated in a 16-page letter to Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN), laying out the reasons for her concerns. Yet even Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who should know better, has upbraided Bachmann, criticizing her for including Hillary Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, among those she noted for having Brotherhood ties.

The Seattle Times also ran an editorial against Bachmann that concludes with a statement that should win the Politically Clueless Award for 2012:

While Abedin's 20 years of public service should save her reputation from assaults by an unthinking zealot who once equated the national debt to the Holocaust, Bachmann's latest actions deserve the same censure in Congress that Joseph McCarthy received for his witch hunt for Communists 60 years ago.

Not knowing or evading the fact that men dedicated to communism and totalitarianism are now running the government? This is an instance of either an appalling ignorance of history, or a willful evasion of the facts. But whichever diagnosis is correct, it underscores a critical disconnection from reality. In the first instance, it represents ignorance of reality; in the second, a willful dislike of reality. Mental lethargy can help to explain the first; mental evasion, the second (and evasion does require mental effort).

Leonard Peikoff, in his seminal, 1967 essay, "The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy" in the Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology by Ayn Rand*, explains this disconnection. After demonstrating the false distinction between "logical" and "empirical" arguments about ice sinking in water, he writes:

This argument confuses Walt Disney with metaphysics. That a man can project an image or draw an animated cartoon at variance with the facts of reality, does not alter the facts….An image of ice sinking in water does not alter the nature of ice [that it floats in water]; it does not constitute evidence that it is possible for ice to sink in water. It is evidence only of man's capacity to engage in fantasy. Fantasy is not a form of cognition.

"Logically," Huma Abedin has been in government service since 1996 (beginning with the Clinton administration) and so must be a loyal American and not dedicated to the overthrow or transformation of the government into a totalitarian, Islamic one. "Empirically," she cannot be a Muslim Brotherhood operative because she has not been seen wearing a suicide vest or caught using a secret decoder ring or photographed using an Islamic drop box to deposit classified government documents. Besides, she is a snappy dresser, something most Muslim women are not. Ergo, it is unconscionable to accuse her of having dangerous and sympathetic Islamic associations.

Peikoff continues:

Further: the fact that man possesses the capacity to fantasize does not mean that the opposite of demonstrated truths is "imaginable" or "conceivable." In a serious, epistemological sense of the word, a man cannot conceive the opposite of a proposition he knows to be true (as apart from propositions dealing with man-made facts). If a proposition asserting a metaphysical fact has been demonstrated to be true, this means that that fact has been demonstrated to be inherent in the identities of the entities in question, and that any alternative to it would require the existence of a contradiction. Only ignorance or evasion can enable a man to attempt to project such an alternative. If a man does not know that a certain fact has been demonstrated, he will not know that its denial involves a contradiction. If a man does know it, but evades the knowledge and drops his full cognitive context, there is no limit to what he can pretend to conceive. But what one can project by means of ignorance or evasion, is philosophically irrelevant. It does not constitute a basis for instituting two separate categories of possibility. (p. 116, Italics mine)

The illegitimate possibilities? According to Senator John McCain, Speaker of the House John Boehner, the MSM, and all those other dhimmis-by-default, Huma Abedin, a Muslim, may or may not be an influence on Obama's foreign policy via Hillary Clinton, regardless of her association or her family's association with an organization dedicated to conquering America and establishing totalitarian rule. As Robert Spencer relates, they are asking Bachmann for evidence now of an investigation that has not been undertaken by those responsible it. That is the "logical" position.

The "empirical" position is: So what if she's a Muslim? She's a nice, hard-working person.

The Western hands helping the hands of Islamic believers to "sabotage" the miserable house of Western civilization are many, small, and mean. Their owners' minds are either permanently lost in a Fantasy Land divorced from reality, or so myopically concrete-bound that they are in pathetic need of the corrective lenses of a rational epistemology.

Ignorant or evasive, together their minds constitute a "brotherhood" of another kind.


*Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology by Ayn Rand. (1966, 1967, 1979) Eds. Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff. New York: Meridian-Penguin. Second Edition, 1990. 314 pp.

Objectivist Round Up: The Final Edition

After *five years* of managing the Objectivist Round Up, Rational Jenn has decided to retire the Round Up. Many thanks to Jenn for all her work, and here's the link to the last edition.

Thomas Ricks Wants Your Kids

Just when you thought the government was finished scheduling your life and mapping out how you can become an exemplar of gung-ho "giving back" citizenship, another Pulitzer Prize winner concocts still another scheme to best exploit your life, time, and energies. One couldn't imagine a better way to complement the passage of Obamacare and the Supreme Court's upholding it on the notion that penalties are taxes and taxes are penalties than by proposing a new, improved, and eminently fair and cost-saving draft. After all, if we are now all officially wards of the state, why not? If doctors and other medical professionals can be de facto drafted to serve as serfs, why not your children?

Brought to my attention by Daniel Greenfield in his July 14th Sultan Knish column was Thomas R. Ricks's New York Times opinion piece of July 9th, "Let's Draft Our Kids." Greenfield handily dismisses most of Ricks's proposals as the ravings of an ignoramus and lunatic, but I saw something else in Ricks's article that beggared comment. What Ricks is proposing is a scheme for indentured servitude that makes the old Roosevelt era Civilian Conservation Corps look like a Boy Scout jamboree.

Richard M. Salsman, in his Forbes article, "A Finalized Path to Full, Socialized Medicine in America – Thanks to Conservatives," on the Supreme Court's ruling, noted on June 28th that:

With today’s ruling the U.S. government can do virtually anything it wishes to its citizens – liberty and rights be damned, without limit. Officially in America we now have a totally arbitrary and limitless government. That is, we have a “total government.” In short, we’ve got totalitarian government. As to how much further liberty we may lose in our lifetimes, it’ll depend only on how arbitrary and vicious reigning rulers choose to be, or not. There’s no real Rule of Law any more, only the Rule of Men – and these are mostly ignorant, reckless men.

Greenfield regards Ricks as one of those ignorant, reckless men, brimming with collectivist schemes to bring about the full employment of a generation fresh from indoctrination and epistemological lobotomization in the public schools. Greenfield, for example, quotes Ricks:

A revived draft, including both males and females, should include three options for new conscripts coming out of high school. Some could choose 18 months of military service with low pay but excellent post-service benefits, including free college tuition. These conscripts would not be deployed but could perform tasks currently outsourced at great cost to the Pentagon: paperwork, painting barracks, mowing lawns, driving generals around, and generally doing lower-skills tasks so professional soldiers don’t have to. If they want to stay, they could move into the professional force and receive weapons training, higher pay and better benefits.

Greenfield: That "great cost" would clearly be more than balanced by taking hundreds of thousands of teens out of the work force and then paying for their college tuition and health care for life, so that they can do paperwork and paint barracks... even though we can already find volunteers to do this already. And in a shocking turn of events, those volunteers would actually choose military service as part of their career plan.

Those who don’t want to serve in the army could perform civilian national service for a slightly longer period and equally low pay — teaching in low-income areas, cleaning parks, rebuilding crumbling infrastructure, or aiding the elderly. After two years, they would receive similar benefits like tuition aid.

Greenfield: So now we're drafting people into a national workforce to clean parks in low income areas? Or we could just use paroled prisoners, long-term welfare cases and bored liberal kids for that.

And what about "conscientious objectors" who don’t wish to become indistinguishable elements in the Fascist gestalt? What will happen to individuals who value their lives, liberty, property and pursuits of their selfish happiness? Why, they'll be "free" to choose their fates.

And libertarians who object to a draft could opt out. Those who declined to help Uncle Sam would in return pledge to ask nothing from him — no Medicare, no subsidized college loans and no mortgage guarantees. Those who want minimal government can have it.

Greenfield:… sounds reasonable. So long as they wouldn't be expected to pay into the system and get tax discounts so they don't have to pay for anybody else's Medicare, college loans and mortgages for low income areas.

That is, those who don't "volunteer" to serve or who resist conscription will be left to sleep under bridges in discarded cardboard containers and root through garbage bins for scraps of food. In such a society of servitude, individualists will become pariahs and outcasts in their own country – the country founded to protect individual rights. Universal conscription such as Ricks proposes is a prescription for slavery and poverty.

That aspect of Ricks's idea is fundamentally unworkable, as any Alinskyite, fully committed Marxist, or wannabe Nazi will tell you. Those who do not "volunteer" will be forced to choose their mode of servitude. Totalitarians and totalitarianism do not offer anyone optional alternatives. It is but a short leap from "community organizing" to "national organizing." Ask the White House.

It is tempting to suspect that Ricks is probably enamored of that awful Denise Richards vehicle, "Starship Troopers," in which boys and girls donned combat gear to fight telekinetic insects from across the galaxy. In exchange for that "service," and if they survived, they'd get free college education and other societal perks, as well. Or perhaps Ricks dreamed up his scheme from having watched Occupy Wall Streeters demonstrate and riot and engage in criminal actions. "Very nice kids," he might have thought. "But they've got to be channeled into more constructive participation in our democracy."

Ricks is a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a contributing editor to Foreign Policy magazine, and also the author of several books on the military and military policies. The woozy mission statement of the CNAS betrays it as a left-wing "think tank" dedicated to developing "strong, pragmatic and principled national security and defense policies." It's interesting that the mission statement contains the glaring contradiction of pragmatism and principles. But I could detect nothing substantive in the rest of what the CNAS purports to accomplish.

What inspired Ricks to wax ignorantly on the "benefits" of a new system of compulsory servitude were the remarks of former top commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal in an interview on July 3rd, in Foreign Policy.

"I think we ought to have a draft. I think if a nation goes to war, it shouldn't be solely be represented by a professional force, because it gets to be unrepresentative of the population," McChrystal said at a late-night event June 29 at the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival. "I think if a nation goes to war, every town, every city needs to be at risk. You make that decision and everybody has skin in the game."

So, we should complement a volunteer force with mobs of conscripts in order to be "representative of the population"? Representative of what? Or of whom? Income classes? Levels of literacy? Gender preferences? Since when was our military dubbed to be an instrument of social policy? Oh, that's right. The military has served as a "proving ground" for social policies for decades now. The Democrats especially have been busy emasculating it ever since Bill Clinton's turn in the White House.

He argued that the burdens of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan haven't been properly shared across the U.S. population, and emphasized that the U.S. military could train draftees so that there wouldn't be a loss of effectiveness in the war effort.

So, the burden of sending "our kids" to serve in a military assigned to implement a foreign "social" policy of converting barbaric, backwater Muslim countries into "democracies," no matter the cost in their lives and dollars, should be more equitably shared by everyone. It was never in America's self-interest to invade Bosnia, Kuwait, Iraq, or Afghanistan except to retaliate against Islamic organizations and states that sponsored terrorism that had declared war on this country. But the Left has never approved of any war we have fought unless it was preeminently selfless and sacrificing.

McChrystal and Ricks are simply advocating a renewal of the policy originated by Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive wings of the Democrats and Republicans. About our entry into World War I, Sheldon Richman notes:

The messianic President Wilson could not pass up what he saw as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help remake the world. As historian Arthur Ekirch writes in The Decline of American Liberalism, "The notion of a crusade came naturally to Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister, imbued with a stern Calvinist sense of determinism and devotion to duty." He was goaded by a host of Progressive intellectuals, such as John Dewey and Herbert Croley, editor of The New Republic, who wrote that "the American nation needs the tonic of a serious moral adventure."

….Within months, the United States had conscription, an official propaganda office, suppression of dissent, and central planning of the economy (a precedent for Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal).

While Richman's thesis, which lays blame on the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 for the rise of Nazi Germany, opposes Ludwig von Mises's thesis that Germany was properly blamed and punished for the war (and I happen to support the von Mises thesis, which can be found in Omnipotent Government, reviewed here), Richman's assertion that the active involvement of the United States in European political affairs laid the groundwork for the next war and for our own brand of statism, is valid.

It is John Dewey's educational philosophy that governs American public schools today, while Herbert Croly, a Progressive, wrote the blueprint for American fascism, The Promise of American Life , in 1909. In it, he claimed that "the traditional American confidence in individual freedom has resulted in a morally and socially undesirable distribution of wealth," and that it was time for the federal government to become more aggressive in economic planning and to assign Americans a better reason for living and working than for their own selfish purposes. Croly explicitly recommended that the United States move from freedom to "corporate (crony) capitalism" and from a Constitutionally limited government to the welfare state. These are the principal characteristics of Fascism.

Thomas Ricks is the trollish heir to the policies advocated by Wilson, Dewey, and Croly in the last century. Nothing he proposes is new or original, as collectivist programs go, except that it proposes to harness the military as the vehicle of servitude. However, the sanctioning of totalitarianism by the Supreme Court and the formal scrapping of the Constitution by the Court have allowed him to come out of the Progressive closet to float his trial balloon of universal conscription.

That his brazen proposals would necessitate a greater national debt is irrelevant. Greenfield in his Sultan Knish column also points out Ricks's utterly reckless ignorance of the dollar costs of his scheme. All collectivist schemes are costly. Costs have never troubled collectivists. But it would be easy to imagine Ricks's appointment to a new Federal Bureau of Human Resources, in which he would lord it over the lives of young people by sending them hither and yon in national service. He would be a natural fit for this new "czardom."

He would also be a perfect companion for another totalitarian, Kathleen Sibelius, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Resources. In 2011, Forbes named her "the most powerful woman in the world." And Thomas Ricks would become "the most powerful man in the world."

They could squabble amicably over where to send you and your children. And if you protested or resisted the new conscription, they could flip a coin to decide what to do with you.

The Leftist-Islamic Alliance Against Freedom of Speech

Robert Spencer, a tireless defender of freedom and the freedom of speech against Islam, was attacked recently in the New York Daily News and charged with having "inspired" Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik to go on his killing spree in July 2011. The writer, Nathan Lean, in his July 9th column, "Expose the Islamophobia industry," connects several other counter-jihadist writers with Breivik's actions, and lumps them all together as "untouchables" who ought to be ostracized.

The Islamophobia industry insists that it is not just a fringe minority who distort an otherwise peaceful faith. Instead, they point to the Koran and suggest that terrorists derive their world views from its messages. If that is so, these anti-Muslim agitators are guilty based on the logic of their own argument. After all, Breivik read and interpreted the writings of people like Spencer and [Pamela] Geller. He deciphered their diatribes much like Osama Bin Laden interpreted the Koran. Both men were compelled to act on the messages they digested.

It is doubtful that Lean has cracked open a Koran, or has heard of the Hadith, or The Reliance of the Traveler. For if he had any solid knowledge of Islam and its principal texts, he would grasp that these works do indeed sanction the violence of Muslim terrorists. He would understand that Spencer has every right to be an "Islamophobe," that is, someone who is fearful of Islam and especially of Sharia law. It is interesting to note that while Lean inveighs against Breivik, who murdered dozens of people, he does not mention the thousands of people killed by jihadists in virtually every country on earth. Moreover, he does not suggest that Breivik also was inspired by al-Qaida, in addition to a potpourri of other "Islamophobic" writers. About Spencer and his outspoken co-counter-jihadists, Lean concludes:

Society has a responsibility to counter these individuals with overwhelming overtures of pluralism — and to systematically push the fear-mongers out of public discourse.

Spencer replies:

The claim that I "inspired" the Norway mass murderer Breivik because he cited me in his "manifesto" has become a staple of Leftist and Islamic supremacist polemic against people who are trying to defend freedom against Sharia. But it founders on the facts: never mentioned is the fact that Breivik cited many, many people, including Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy, and Thomas Jefferson -- who are just three of the many who are never blamed for his murders.

Also swept under the rug is the fact that whether he is sane or not, Breivik's manifesto is actually quite ideologically incoherent -- so far was he from being a doctrinaire counter-jihadist that he wanted to aid Hamas and ally with jihad groups.

It probably has not escaped the notice of the more observant readers that the alliance of the Left and Islam reflects the same agitprop strategies, chief among is that when the Left's or Islam's policies fail, or produce disasters, or cause deaths, or provoke hostility among the electorate, blame for the failure is shifted elsewhere. When Obama's policies produce the opposite of his alleged goals, he blames Bush, when in fact Obama's policies are a continuation of Bush's soft-pedaled socialism. The difference between Bush's socialism and Obama's is that Bush's policies were founded on an ignorance of economics, or of reality; Obama's policies are intended to negate economics and remake reality.

When Muslims murder, torture, rape, go on rampages, or otherwise resort to violence anywhere in the world to enforce conformity to their ideology, their spokesmen in the West blame "extremists." But they never say that the "extremists" are wrong. The ideology is never at fault, only its finger-pointing "misunderstanders."

Thus, as Spencer points out in his Jihad Watch column, anyone who criticizes Islam is a "misunderstander" who spreads "lies" and "fabrications" and so on about the perils of Islam and can be quick-marched to the same camp with actual jihadists. Then a leap of logic is performed and Muslim violence can be blamed on criticism of Islam. The Left and Islamists "abhor" violence, express "regret" when violence occurs, and do not blame the perpetrators, but instead the "instigators" of the violence, that is, those who exercise their freedom of speech by pointing out the evils and fraud of Islam and the consistent violence its ideology encourages and promulgates. They cluck their tongues in public over the violence sanctioned by their ideology, but chastise anyone who says the violence is part and parcel of their ideology.

They must be "pushed out of public discourse." That is, shamed, humiliated, boycotted, mocked, picketed, and ultimately censored. The irony is that there is no "public discourse" about the nature of Islam and the crimes committed in its name. Nor does the Left and Islam wish there to be.

It is six of one, half a dozen of another. The Left and Islam both promote collectivism and universal submission and subjugation to them. Of course they are allies. With the help of its Muslim occupiers, France recently elected a blatant socialist. Has anyone in this country heard a single Muslim speak out against Obamacare? Has any British Muslim spoken out against Britain's welfare state? No? Why not? Because to oppose collectivism one must advocate individual rights. It is individual rights that the Left and Islam wish to extinguish. They say: Control private property, or expropriate it, and it is extinguished.

In the fantasy universe of collectivists, violence is never the fault of the ideology, it is always the fault of anyone who resists submission to the ideology or criticizes it. For secular collectivists (or the Left), as with Islamists, the fundamental means to the end is force.

The correlation between and alliance of the Left and Islam are not contrived, "constructed," coincidental, or accidental. They are fundamental, natural, and inevitable. Marx and Mohammad have gone forth into the world, holding hands, fingering their beards as their feral and predatory intelligences survey the landscape before them. For example, Marxists, socialists, and other leftists wish to collectivize property. If the property is thus "owned" by the state, then no freedom of speech is possible (except illegally underground, or via samizdat) but the "freedom" to extol collectivism. If property is Islamized – that is, owned, or controlled, by Muslims in a fully collectivized society governed by Sharia law (that is, Nazified), with nominal private ownership whose purpose and end are dictated by the state, or by the caliphate – then no freedom of speech is possible, either, except the "freedom" to parrot the party line of Mohammad. In either system, an individual who dares question the ideology gets swatted very quickly. That is what Gulags and chopping blocks and bomb detonators are for.

Then there is the "purgatory" or halfway point between the full collectivization by either ideology, a gray world in which freedom of speech is not expressly forbidden by law, but exists at the arbitrary whim or politically correct discretion of politicians or the judiciary. This is the situation in the United States. Brand any criticism of Islam as "Islamophobic" and the critics are conveniently diagnosed with dementia and committed to Antonio Salieri's Vienna loony bin, the papers signed by people like Nathan Lean. Or by Hillary Clinton and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the United Nations, or Barack Obama, or by Tony Blair and the Prince of Wales, and The New York Times.

James Bloodworth almost gets it right in The Independent (Britain) in his July 5th column, "It’s time to stop using the term ‘Islamophobia’":

There has, however, been an unfortunate consequence of all of this. It is now possible to shut down almost any contemporary political debate by blurring the distinction between legitimate criticism of Islam and the anti-Muslim prejudice of the far-right. This is perhaps best expressed by the appearance on the scene of terms like “Islamophobic racism” – a further extension of the concept of Islamophobia – which conflate the idea of “race” (the way a person is born) with religion (a set of ideas passed on in the home, the school and the community).

Bloodworth is one of those leftists (and The Independent is notoriously leftist) who frown on private property but uphold freedom of speech, meaning, for all practical purposes, that one should be free to speak on any subject, so long as it's standing up at the bottom of a public swimming pool (there are no private swimming pools, except in the backyards of the political elite) and one's words have no untoward or deleterious social consequences. Bloodworth is correct to claim that the inclusion of the idea of racism is illegitimate, because Islamophobia has nothing to do with race. It is a "set of ideas," however, he presumably has not examined very closely. He still harbors a distaste for the term, without examining the root meaning of "phobia," either, which means a fear of something.

A phobia can be an unreasoning fear of things like mice or spiders or cigarette smoke or the number thirteen, or it can be a rational response to a nemesis, such as being knifed or stoned or raped or stalked by a fellow wanting to be propelled in a fireball to Paradise and seventy-two virgins. The desire to speak one's peace, or to preserve one's freedom, he insinuates but does not elaborate, is not a form of bigotry.

On the surface, the Left and Islam indulge in and promulgate the reversal of cause and effect. The mobs of Occupy Wall Street go on a rampage because they do not have the wealth of their victims. Muslims murder infidels because they are disrespectful non-Muslims who enjoy more freedom. But the reversal is only superficial. In fact, causality plays no role in the violence sanctioned by the Left and Islam. In criminal law, the causality of crime is not regarded as a legitimate, rational motive. Motives are not on trial. Murder, property theft or destruction, or felonious assault in the name of an ideology, are not admissible as rational norms of behavior. Only actions are deemed worthy of judgment.

Leftists like Nathan Lean say – and they say it often – that one having something a criminal lacks because of "the system" has denied him that thing is the cause of the violence. The wealthy sui generis are the cause of the expropriation of their property. This illogic can be and has been extended to: The bourgeoisie must be eradicated because they are the bourgeoisie. Jews must be exterminated because they are Jews. Muslims say that if infidels don't have "religion" – their religion – then their lives are forfeit and they must be fitted with fetters and assessed for jizya or just gotten out of the way. Infidels must be conquered or killed because they are sui generis infidels.

If you are a blonde, blue-eyed Swedish woman, or a British school girl, or a red-headed German secretary, you deserve to be raped by a gang of ambitious, "morally superior" Muslims who want a taste of Paradise on earth before they turn into bomb-carriers. Islam grants Muslims dispensation for being in a hurry. If you are rich, or just moderately well-off with money in the bank in spite of paying confiscatory taxes wherever you turn, you deserve to be robbed and collectivized in the name of a fantasy society projected by the looters to miraculously evolve some time after your passing. The Left grants its activists in and out of government dispensation on the basis of need and the sui generis sainthood of a "have-not." For the Left and Islam, every action is forgivable, nothing is criminal.

The reversal of cause and effect is not causality at work, but rather the irrational and the anti-reason. Lighting a bonfire beneath a pile of iron ore is not going to produce an ounce of steel. Gagging anyone who speaks out against censorship is not going to acquit one of the crime of censorship, not unless some dhimmi American judge rules that "Islamophobia" does not qualify as "civil" or "public" discourse.

Pushing "Islamophobes" out of the "public discourse" is not going to stop Islamic jihad, stealth or violent. Muslims will only be encouraged to carry more signs saying "Free speech go to hell." Prohibiting the advocates of individual rights from criticizing socialist policies will only encourage wannabe beneficiaries of socialism to smash store windows, occupy private property, and shut or shout down forums on the price of liberty in the name of "freedom of speech."

And that, in a nutshell, is the symbiosis of the Left and Islam. Its fruit is totalitarianism. Ignore it at your peril.

A Clash of Supremacies over Obamacare

Before Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, wrote the majority opinion upholding the alleged constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (on one hand, denying its constitutionality under the Commerce Clause, but, on the other, sanctioning the individual mandate as a tax Congress has the power to impose), otherwise known as Obamacare (ADA), several states had announced that they would refuse to implement the law or conform to its specific provisions. At last count there were four, from the original twenty-seven, led by Florida.

Such opposition may move Congress to repeal Obamacare in part or in its entirety, instead of fighting the states (provided Republicans retain control the House and win control of the Senate); it may cause it to "replace" Obamacare with something less onerous (but no less unconstitutional); or it may cause another Constitutional crisis in which the states invoke the Tenth Amendment and are answered by the federal government overriding the states' supposed right to resort to that strategy.

The last major defiance of federal policy by the states on the basis of states' rights precipitated the Civil War.

The questions are: Can the states successfully resist the federal government on this issue? Can they unite in their opposition? Would the federal government back off, or offer a compromise, such as was reached during the Nullification Crisis of the 1830's? Can the federal government override their opposition? Will the federal government threaten to punish states that refuse to comply with Obamacare, e.g., by withholding federal highway funds or Medicaid funds, or by devising another strategy to induce compliance? And if the states champion noncompliance with any facet of Obamacare, on what moral grounds?

Three features of the Constitution will come into play in this pending conflict:

The Tenth Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, or to the people.

The Supremacy Clause of Article VI, Section 2, which states that the Constitution, and the Laws of the United States…shall be the supreme Law of the Land. This clause applies solely to the enumerated powers granted to Congress in Article I, Section 8, and to no other laws, assumed or imagined. This clause by inference also exempts the federal government from complying with state laws.

The Necessary and Proper Clauseof Article I, Section 8, which reads: To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof. This is the last of eighteen enumerated powers.

The Tenth Amendment, or the "states' rights or sovereignty" Amendment, has a dubious history. It has been invoked by states in the past to impose or legitimate the denial of individual rights to blacks or to sanction the statist mischief or criminal behavior of a state legislature. The Amendment has never been invoked to protect individual rights.

Furthermore, in the 20th century, the argument from state sovereignty or from "reserved rights" lost credibility when states began to accept federal money for various highway, welfare, and other federal programs. By accepting those funds, the states lost a great portion of their vaunted sovereignty. They could claim arm-twisting by the federal government, but once they submitted, the wind went out of their claims to state sovereignty. They became addicted to and dependent on the subsidies in terms of their own budgets and expenditures. They complemented the growth of federal power with the growth of their own powers. It may be too late to reassert their sovereignty now. States maintain that they can pick and choose which powers they reserve (in the name of "the people"). This they might do, but the federal government has in many instances adopted a policy of "benign neglect" in respect to allowing states to assert their own prerogatives.

The Supremacy Clause has been virtually ignored by Congress, because Congress has passed thousands of laws not enumerated in the Constitution ("implied" powers), but whose enactment has been rationalized by Article I, Section 8, whose first clause reads, The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.

The Necessary and Proper Clause has been as troublesome as the first clause, because it corrals together both legitimate and illegitimate functions of the federal government, in addition to all those "implied" or unenumerated powers. The first three clauses, together with the fifth, sixth and seventh, grant Congress powers it should never have been granted, and which have allowed the inevitable expansion of federal power. Proponents of the ADA based much of their sanctioning on the Commerce clause ("among the several States"), interpreting the term regulate to suit their own agenda, and ignoring its original meaning, which was to impose some kind of legal structure on the chaos in trade and commerce between states. The term did not sanction statist controls over commerce. (No kidding, Nancy!)

Naturally, statists counter with, "That was then. This is now. We are not as narrow-minded as the Founders and Framers. We have a broader and superior understanding of the term. Conditions have changed. Society is more complex. We are more enlightened. We have responsibilities the Framers never dreamed of."

Oh, they dreamed of them, all right. Or rather, had nightmares about such powers, which most of them never wanted to delegate or bestow. Those dreams and nightmares are discussed in The Federalist Papers and The Anti-Federalist Papers.

The states cannot oppose Obamcare with a straight face. Their own tax-and-spend-and-regulate programs lift chump change from their citizens' pockets, while Obamacare and other federal programs raid whole bank accounts across the country in what could be called the federal "interstate commerce" in robbery, fraud, and extortion. The states cannot cock a snook at the Supremacy Clause because it contains all the vices and villainy they practice, as well. Virtually the only things the states cannot emulate is to print their own money and run their own postal service.

The aforesaid powers are, from the perspective of recognizing and upholding individual rights, improper and wholly unnecessary. If the states wish to nullify Obamacare, they should understand that their own statist powers ought to be nullified, as well.

The states cannot challenge the Necessary and Proper Claus, either, because they have adopted their own unenumerated powers. For virtually every mammoth federal bureaucracy, in every state there is a Mini Me clone.

The states are the pot proposing to call gang-leader Kate "Ma" Barker black. One could view the conundrum from this perspective: The federal government is Ma Barker, obese, sly, and accustomed to having fancy and expensive things got through her sons' criminal activities; the states are her dependent, obedient, fiscally-challenged offspring. This criminal association creates an image it will be hard for the states to shake, or reconcile with their "principled" opposition to Obamacare, or even deny. You can bet that the federals will remind them of this and their friends in the mainstream will make a lot of noise about it.

The leftist mainstream media have served the federal government for decades now in a triple role: press agent, shill, and graffiti artist. You can count on the MSM to contribute their own confusion, ignorance, and collectivist biases to the fight the conservative governors and legislatures are spoiling for.

Forgotten, however, in all the chatter, lawsuits, and braggadocio over which governments claim prerogative supremacy over clashing legislation – the federal or the states – is the supremacy of the individual who owns his own life and the necessary and proper primacy of his liberty. Denied the recognition that he owns his own life, and seeing the primacy of his liberty negotiated away or simply erased from law, man becomes a part-time or full-time indentured serf.

There is not a single state in the Union that has not enacted its own à la carte nullification of freedom. So, on what grounds can the state credibly oppose the lavish, cannibalistic banquet of Obamacare? All the states can do, in opposition to Obamacare, is clam first "rights" to impose their own statist imperatives.

Put another way: Whose supremacy is it, anyway? Whose supremacy ought to be the issue – the State's, or the individual's?