Teflon Don

This has to infuriate leftists.

I love it!

At Politico, "Teflon Don confounds Democrats":

Democrats have attacked the president every which way, but polling and focus groups show none of it's working.

Democrats tried attacking Donald Trump as unfit for the presidency. They’ve made the case that he’s ineffective, pointing to his failure to sign a single major piece of legislation into law after eight months in the job. They’ve argued that Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself and that his campaign was in cahoots with Russia.

None of it is working.

Data from a range of focus groups and internal polls in swing states paint a difficult picture for the Democratic Party heading into the 2018 midterms and 2020 presidential election. It suggests that Democrats are naive if they believe Trump’s historically low approval numbers mean a landslide is coming. The party is defending 10 Senate seats in states that Trump won and needs to flip 24 House seats to take control of that chamber.
The research, conducted by private firms and for Democratic campaign arms, is rarely made public but was described to POLITICO in interviews with a dozen top operatives who’ve been analyzing the results coming in.

“If that’s the attitude that’s driving the Democratic Party, we’re going to drive right into the ocean,” said Anson Kaye, a strategist at media firm GMMB who worked on the Obama and Clinton campaigns and is in conversations with potential clients for next year.

Worse news, they worry: Many of the ideas party leaders have latched onto in an attempt to appeal to their lost voters — free college tuition, raising the minimum wage to $15, even Medicare for all — test poorly among voters outside the base. The people in these polls and focus groups tend to see those proposals as empty promises, at best.

Pollsters are shocked by how many voters describe themselves as “exhausted” by the constant chaos surrounding Trump, and they find that there’s strong support for a Congress that provides a check on him rather than voting for his agenda most of the time. But he is still viewed as an outsider shaking up the system, which people in the various surveys say they like, and which Democrats don’t stack up well against.

“People do think he’s bringing about change, so it’s hard to say he hasn’t kept his promises,” said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake.

In focus groups, most participants say they’re still impressed with Trump’s business background and tend to give him credit for the improving economy. The window is closing, but they’re still inclined to give him a chance to succeed.

More than that, no single Democratic attack on the president is sticking — not on his temperament, his lack of accomplishments or the deals he’s touted that have turned out to be less than advertised, like the president’s claim that he would keep Carrier from shutting down its Indianapolis plant and moving production to Mexico.

Voters are also generally unimpressed by claims that Trump exaggerates or lies, and they don’t see the ongoing Russia investigation adding up to much.

“There are a number of things that are raising questions in voters’ minds against him,” said Matt Canter, who’s been conducting focus groups for Global Strategy Group in swing states. “They’re all raising questions, but we still have to weave it into one succinct narrative about his presidency.”

Stop, Democratic operatives urge voters, assuming that what they think is morally right is the best politics. A case in point is Trump’s response to the violence in Charlottesville. The president’s equivocation on neo-Nazis was not as much of a political problem as his opponents want to believe, Democratic operatives say, and shifting the debate to whether or not to remove Confederate monuments largely worked for him...

Keep reading.

What's Worse: Trump's Agenda or Deep State Subversion?

From Glenn Greenwald, at the Intercept, "What’s Worse: Trump’s Campaign Agenda or Empowering Generals and CIA Operatives to Subvert it":

DURING HIS SUCCESSFUL 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump, for better and for worse, advocated a slew of policies that attacked the most sacred prongs of long-standing bipartisan Washington consensus. As a result, he was (and continues to be) viewed as uniquely repellent by the neoliberal and neoconservative guardians of that consensus, along with their sprawling network of agencies, think tanks, financial policy organs, and media outlets used to implement their agenda (CIA, NSA, the Brookings/AEI think tank axis, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, etc.).

Whatever else there is to say about Trump, it is simply a fact that the 2016 election saw elite circles in the U.S., with very few exceptions, lining up with remarkable fervor behind his Democratic opponent. Top CIA officials openly declared war on Trump in the nation’s op-ed pages and one of their operatives (now an MSNBC favorite) was tasked with stopping him in Utah, while Time Magazine reported, just a week before the election, that “the banking industry has supported Clinton with buckets of cash . . . . what bankers most like about Clinton is that she is not Donald Trump.”

Hank Paulson, former Goldman Sachs CEO and George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary, went to the pages of the Washington Post in mid-2016 to shower Clinton with praise and Trump with unbridled scorn, saying what he hated most about Trump was his refusal to consider cuts in entitlement spending (in contrast, presumably, to the Democrat he was endorsing). “It doesn’t surprise me when a socialist such as Bernie Sanders sees no need to fix our entitlement programs,” the former Goldman CEO wrote. “But I find it particularly appalling that Trump, a businessman, tells us he won’t touch Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”

Some of Trump’s advocated assaults on D.C. orthodoxy aligned with long-standing views of at least some left-wing factions (e.g., his professed opposition to regime change war in Syria, Iraq/Libya-style interventions, global free trade deals, entitlement cuts, greater conflict with Russia, and self-destructive pro-Israel fanaticism), while other Trump positions were horrifying to anyone with a plausible claim to leftism, or basic decency (reaffirming torture, expanding GITMO, killing terrorists’ families, launching Islamophobic crusades, fixation on increasing hostility with Tehran, further unleashing federal and local police forces). Ironically, Trump’s principal policy deviation around which elites have now coalesced in opposition – a desire for better relations with Moscow – was the same one that Obama, to their great bipartisan dismay, also adopted (as evidenced by Obama’s refusal to more aggressively confront the Kremlin-backed Syrian government or arm anti-Russian factions in Ukraine).

It is true that Trump, being Trump, was wildly inconsistent in virtually all of these pronouncements, often contradicting or abandoning them weeks after he made them. And, as many of us pointed out at the time, it was foolish to assume that the campaign vows of any politician, let alone an adept con man like Trump, would be a reliable barometer for what he would do once in office. And, as expected, he has betrayed many of these promises within months of being inaugurated, while the very Wall Street interests he railed against have found a very welcoming embrace in the Oval Office.

Nonetheless, Trump, as a matter of rhetoric, repeatedly affirmed policy positions that were directly contrary to long-standing bipartisan orthodoxy, and his policy and personal instability only compounded elites’ fears that he could not be relied upon to safeguard their lucrative, power-vesting agenda. In so many ways – due to his campaign positions, his outsider status, his unstable personality, his witting and unwitting unmasking of the truth of U.S. hegemony, the embarrassment he causes in western capitals, his reckless unpredictability – Trump posed a threat to their power centers...

More.

Linda Kimball, 'Exposing America's Enemies: The Social Justice Seeking Communist Left'

At his post this morning, Robert Stacy McCain linked Linda Kimball's piece on "Cultural Marxism" at American Thinker. It's an old piece, which I've read before, but I googled some of the articles linked there. One of these is, "Exposing America's Enemies: The 'Social Justice Seeking' Communist Left," originally posted at the American Daily, but now dead.

I'm posting here some excerpts I've found at various other cites. Ms. Kimball apparently aroused some strong passions on this issue, at Democrat Underground, for example, and this was back in 2006.

Free Republic also posted it at the time:

On one hand, Americans were outraged and appalled by the May 1 immigrant demonstrations that clogged streets and virtually closed down some cities. Law-abiding citizens saw lawbreakers who not only seemed to feel justified in their criminal behavior, but also believed they ought to be rewarded for it.

On the other hand, Americans are more infuriated and disgusted with their duly elected government officials in both legislative and administrative branches for not enforcing the law and protecting the rights of citizens. President Bush and the weak-kneed GOP have deservedly come under fire. If our sovereign nation is to survive, however, it is of paramount importance that the harsh light of truth be focused upon the subversive element responsible for creating an atmosphere conducive to lawlessness and tyrannical militants brazenly declaring their intentions to ''conquer'' the Southwest and to throw Americans out of their homes and off of their land.

The subversive element--a motley collection of Marxists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, Maoists, anarchists, and malcontents--organized themselves in the 1960’s and became known as the New Left. For over forty years the New Left has been waging a Gramscian ''quiet'' revolution for the overthrow of the America of our founders. Today these subversives call themselves liberals, progressives, and Democrats. Even though there yet remain good, decent Democrats such as Zell Miller, the majority, as David Horowitz attested to, are social-justice seeking communists: “The Democratic Party is very close to being the (Communist-controlled Progressive) party of Henry Wallace…The vast bulk of the American left is a Communist left and they’ve introduced some fascist ideas like “identity politics,” which is straight out of Mussolini.” (How Marxism Dominates the Left, Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com, June 1, 2005)

America’s Communist Left operates in a vast interconnected matrix of revolutionary groups disguised as respectable civil rights and legal organizations. These front groups have consistently worked towards the transformation of America through subversion of America’s Rule of Law, Constitution, judiciary, and all institutions necessary to the longevity and health of our nation and civilization. These groups attack all national security measures, subvert immigration laws and procedures, lobby on behalf of terrorist and enemy combatants, and engage in propagandistic apologetics for the most brutal dictatorships in the world even as they constantly vilify and demean America and Americans. As they do these things to destroy America and shame Americans, they hypocritically portray themselves as defenders of democracy and humanity.

The purpose of this article is to expose, at least in part, some of the principal communist groups responsible for undermining and weakening America and who likewise serve as a power source, not only for the militant Marxist organizers of the recent demonstrations, but for Islamic jihadists as well.

The Quiet Revolution

In 1984, “The Power to Lead” was published. In it, author James McGregor Burns admitted: “The Framers of the US Constitution have simply been too shrewd for us. They have outwitted us. They designed separate institutions that cannot be unified by mechanical linkages, frail bridges, tinkering. If we are to ‘turn the Founders upside down’…we must directly confront the constitutional structure they erected.” (A Chronological History: The New World Order by D.L. Cuddy PhD)

Turning the ''Founders upside down'' and directly confronting the ''constitutional structure'' are what the American Civil Liberties Union, National Lawyers Guild, and The Center for Constitutional Rights are committed to doing. Together, these three communist front groups comprise the “legal left,” and they slash and rip at the fabric of the constitutional framework.

The ACLU was established in 1920 by Roger Baldwin, a Stalinist who candidly admitted: “I am for socialism, disarmament, and ultimately, for abolishing the state itself.” On the Communist Party USA website, the ACLU can be found at this link: go here. http://www.cpusa.org/link/category/22/

When not working with and defending terrorists like Sami al-Arian, the ACLU terrorizes towns into removing Ten Commandments monuments and crosses and persecutes and intimidates Boy Scouts and law abiding Christians. The ACLU’s Immigrant Task Force and Immigrant Rights Project are a dual driving force in the Open Borders Lobby. Among current projects: dissolving America’s borders, erasing all evidence of Christianity and God, and requiring the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to provide free legal counsel to illegals while simultaneously demanding that illegals be provided with full welfare benefits.

The ACLU and its partner groups receive funding from a large assortment of subversive leftist funders. Among them: Arca Foundation, Ford Foundation, George Soros Open Society Institute, Rockefeller Foundation, Woods Fund of Chicago (Source: www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org)

The National Lawyers Guild was founded in 1936 by the Communist Party USA. The NLG is an active affiliate of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, which served as a Soviet front group during the Cold War. The NLG defines its mission as an effort to: “unite lawyers, law students, legal workers, and jailhouse lawyers of America (to) function as an effective political and social force…to the end that human rights shall be regarded as more sacred than property interests.” In other words, its mission is to ''deKulakize'' America in the name of social justice.

In 1999, NLG member Chip Berlet described a Guild ''communist debate'' session: “The cacophony at some meetings (arises from) debates featuring…Leninist, Trotskyite, Stalinists…Maoist…Marxist, anarchists, libertarians and progressive independents…with multiple identities as lawyers, legal workers, labor organizers, tribal sovereignty activists, civil liberties and civil rights advocates, environmentalists, feminists, gay men and lesbians, and people of color.” Chip Berlet is an activist with Morris Dees Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), another communist front group and Open Borders member.

Not coincidentally, it was the SPLC that ''redistributed''--in the name of social justice--an Arizona ranchers’ property to some illegal aliens. This incident was detailed in an article entitled: “Two Illegal Immigrants Win Arizona Ranch in Court,” (New York Times, 8/19/05). Dees was quoted as saying, “…it’s poetic justice that these undocumented workers own this land”

Like the ACLU, the NLG is a key member of the Open Borders Lobby. Its National Immigration Project consists of a network of lawyers, law students, and legal workers committed to “full democratic rights for all non-citizens”--in the name of social justice. The NLG receives funding from, among others, the George Soros Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation. (Source: www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org)

The last of the trio is the Center for Constitutional Rights. It was founded in 1966 by pro-Castro attorneys Morton Stavis, Ben Smith, Arthur Kinoy, and William Kuntsler. The CCR prides itself on using “litigation proactively to advance the law in a positive direction to guarantee the rights of those with the fewest protections.” This is communist code for: “We subvert America’s laws.” Among those deemed by the CCR to be in need of protection are terrorist organizations, enemy combatants, and illegal immigrants.

The CCR receives funding from the Ford Foundation and George Soros Open Society Institute. (Source: www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org )

Two principal front groups, both of whom disguise their treachery as ‘civil rights,” are United for Peace and Justice and Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride.

The UFPJ is a rabidly anti-American, anti-war coalition co-chaired by committed communist Leslie Cagan. Cagan, who worships upon Fidel Castro’s altar, was an original founder of the Committees of Correspondence, a splinter group of the Communist Party USA. The UFPJ was created Oct. 25, 2002 in the Washington D.C. offices of People for the American Way, which played a key role in forming UFPJ. UFPJ is a sponsoring organization of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride. UFPJ’s social justice agenda extends well beyond anti-war activism as it is also a pro-abortion, pro-open borders advocate that condemns nearly every aspect of American culture and our government’s foreign policy. (Source: www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org)

The Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride (IWFR), another key player in the Open Borders Lobby, is supported by the ACLU and Communist Party USA. Additionally, it has the backing of Dennis Kucinich, Howard Dean, and Joe Lieberman. Among other groups listed as members of the IWFRC’s national sponsoring committee are ACORN, National Council of La Raza, National Immigration Forum, and United for Peace and Justice.

At the link below are literally hundreds of sponsors of IWFR, such as: Democratic senators, representatives, county board supervisors, governors, town council members, radical organizations, liberalized Christian and non-Christian churches, and political parties (including CPUSA and Democratic Socialists of America: go here).

Many thousands of Americans have been taken in by a myth. The myth states that communism died when the Soviet Union imploded. It further says that in these ''enlightened progressive times,'' only superstition-believing McCarthyite rednecks still believe in the communist boogieman. The myth, of course, was created by New Left communists to whom seduction, deception, and psychological manipulation are the ''rules of the game.'' Gramsci’s transformational revolution is very much alive. It’s spreading the cancer of godless communism--the ideology from Hell--throughout the length and breadth of our culture, and corrupting and decaying everything it touches.

President Ronald Reagan cautioned that: “…without God, there is no virtue because there’s no prompting of the conscience. And without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure. If we ever forget that we’re one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.”

Americans---awaken and remember!

And here's more, from "Exposing America's Enemies, Part 2: Communist Progressive Democrats":

Social Justice is Communism

Judging from the adolescent name-calling and howls of protest which my previous article elicited from Progressive groups such as the Democratic Underground, it is obvious that the enraged howlers have no idea of what it really means for one to be a seeker of social justice. Either that or they really do know but are deceivers of the first magnitude.

Be that as it may, some clarification and definition of the terms social justice and communism is in order before proceeding on to the issue of Progressive Democrats.

To most Americans, communism means the Kremlin, gulags, killing fields, and Mao's brutal Red Guard. These things though were not the essence of communism. They were the visible manifestations of inhumane power and its consequences, all of which resulted when social justice seekers acquired total control to remake society and man.

The essence of communism is social justice, or justice in the social sphere. This is code for the elimination of poverty, of suffering, and of all differences between humans that erect walls between people. Fundamentally, social justice is a process of elimination that results in sameness (egalitarianism). When social justice seekers speak of the need for equality, what they're really calling for is sameness.

However, the attributes which make people different from each other and which social justice seekers are determined to eliminate, are the product of human nature and of freely made choices. For instance, some people are ambitious and hard-working while others are indolent and lazy and may willfully choose to live out of the pockets of the former.

It's the positive aspects of human nature that make a society dynamic. Dynamism is the animating force behind America's greatness -- her productivity, excellence, creativity, free markets, etc. In eliminating human differences, social justice seekers kill all of this, and as they did in the former Soviet Union, leave behind a smoking ruin haunted by despairing cookie-cutter claymation beings.

In speaking of the social justice process of elimination, Balint Vazsonyi remarked, prophets of socialjustice communists, whether by that name or any other name, focus on who should have less. Because they have nothing to give, they can only take away. First, they take away opportunity. Next, they take away possessions. In the end, they have to take away life itself. (America's 30 Years War, Balint Vazsonyi, p. 59)

The America of our Founders simply cannot coexist with the Search for Social Justice. For instance, as designed by our Founders, the Rule of Law exists to guarantee that unequal (different) people can have individual liberty, rights and possessions—including land ownership, which social justice seekers view as the original sin. Social justice demands that those who possess more of anything have it taken away from those who earned it and redistributed to those who did nothing to earn it.

Social Justice Seeking Democratic Progressive Caucus

The Democratic Progressive Caucus (DPC) is an organization comprised of about sixty Members of Congress. It was founded in 1991 by Rep. Bernie Sanders, former socialist mayor of Burlington, VT, and member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The DSA describes itself as the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International. (www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org)

The DPC advances its communist agenda behind innocuous sounding phrases such as social and economic justice. The three core principles of The Progressive Promise are:

1. Fighting for economic justice and security for all. (Code for: We’re going to ‘eliminate poverty and suffering’ by taking away all of your possessions and redistributing them.)

2. Protecting and preserving our civil rights and civil liberties. (Code for: We’re going to ‘eliminate’ all differences and pound everyone down to the lowest common denominator).

3. Promoting global peace and security. (Code for: We—your Superiors—will finally feel secure and at peace once agendas 1-2 have been carried out to completion.) (Source: http://www.bernie.house.gov/document_display_text.asp?FileToConvert=/pc/index.asp)

In “Pelosi Leader of Progressive Caucus,” it was revealed: “Until 1999, the website of the Progressive Caucus was hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Following an expose of the link between the two organizations in World Net Daily, the Progressive Caucus established its own website.” (WorldNetDaily.com, Nov 11, 2002)

On the website of the DSA it boldly declares: “We are socialists…Democracy and socialism go hand in hand…wherever…democracy has taken root, the vision of socialism has taken root as well.” ( www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org ) The DSA increases its influence and power by networking with the Democratic Party to advance social justice programs and policies such as affirmative action and Stalinist hate crime laws. “Like our friends and allies in the feminist, labor, civil rights, religious, and community movements, many of us have been active in the Democratic Party.” (ibid)

Following are brief descriptions of some of the social justice seeking subversives in the Democratic Progressive Caucus whose words and actions embrace the tenets of communism:

1. Barbara Lee (D-CA): “former agent of the Black Panther leader and convicted killer, Huey Newton. Lee conspired with fellow communist, Cong. Ron Dellums, who used his authority to impede US foreign policy with regard to the Communist dictatorship of Grenada.” ( www.DiscoverTheNetWork.org ) “anti-American Communist who supports America’s enemies and has actively collaborated with them.” (Radical Road Map, James H. Hansen, p.189)

2. Jim McDermott (D-WA): “In 2002, McDermott and fellow Progressive Caucus member Rep. David Bonoir (D-Mich) and Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) traveled to Baghdad, where they publicly embraced Saddam Hussein and created propaganda on his behalf.” ( www.DiscoverTheNetWork.org )

3. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill), who has accepted an award from the DSA once told one of its writers: “The American people are not ideological; therefore, the way to go is to attack private power.” (ibid)

4. John Conyers (D-MI): “In 1981 Conyers co-hosted a delegation from the Soviet front World Peace Council, giving that group a forum in Congress. Conyers endorsed a Communist-led antiwar demonstration in Washington in 1983 and…spoke at another Washington demonstration led by ANSWER in 2003.” (Radical Road Map’s, James H. Hansen, p 189)

5. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) “has taken part in…CAIR (a radical group with ties to Mideast terrorist organizations) events…including a Ramadan iftar…hosted (on Capitol Hill) by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Loretta Sanchez (D-CA), and Barbara Lee (D-CA).” (Kucinich Headlines Muslim Fundraiser, WorldNetDaily.com, Nov. 30, 2003)

The Constitution requires that members of Congress “shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation to support this constitution.” The Oath of Office sworn to by US Senators reads:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the U.S…that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

Very simply, if Democratic Progressive Caucus members truthfully believed in the Christian-Judeo God and likewise in our Constitution--the document conceived of by our Founders and not the Lefts living document nonsense—they wouldn’t be social justice seeking communists. Rather, they would be Conservative Constitutionalists. That they are social justice seekers tells us that when they took their oath before God, they lied. Quite simply—they lied.

In Noah Webster’s 1828 edition of the American Dictionary of the English Language we find the correct term to apply to treacherous Democratic Progressives. That word is “traitor,” and the following definition is the one most likely referred to by our Founders. “Traitor: One who violates allegiance and betrays his country; one guilty of treason…who, in breach of trust, delivers his country to its enemy…who aids an enemy in conquering his country.”

Through use of Stalinist psycho-politics, America’s Communist Left imprisoned the consciences of Americans within psychic strait-jackets of political correctness. As long as we allow ourselves to be chained by political correctness, we will not be able to identify and speak openly about our enemies--those without, and those within. In the absence of freedom of conscience and of clear and honest speaking, we can neither formulate strategies for our safety nor deal appropriately with the treacherous deceivers operating amongst us who are colluding with our enemies and plotting to destroy our nation from within. The first order of business then, is for all Americans to break out of the psychic strait jackets of political correctness, thus allowing Truth to expose the treachery and treason at work in our nation.

Truth will set us free: “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:32.

Democrats Know Why Clinton Lost

Democrats know why they lost. Even Bill Clinton was warning of impending disaster, and thus he was all the more pissed once the results came it. It was the ultimate I told you so moment.

But autopsies continue to pour in, and if they've got some supreme pedigree, some establishment authority and gloss, the updated spin sort of excuses base Democrats of their stupidity. If they'd only known this before the election!

At McClatchy, "Democrats say they now know exactly why Clinton lost" (via Memeorandum):

A select group of top Dem strategists know why Clinton lost. Will the rest of the party listen to them? https://t.co/QnHAeYwdnw

— Alex Roarty (@Alex_Roarty) May 1, 2017

A select group of top Democratic Party strategists have used new data about last year’s presidential election to reach a startling conclusion about why Hillary Clinton lost. Now they just need to persuade the rest of the party they’re right.

Many Democrats have a shorthand explanation for Clinton’s defeat: Her base didn’t turn out, Donald Trump’s did and the difference was too much to overcome.

But new information shows that Clinton had a much bigger problem with voters who had supported President Barack Obama in 2012 but backed Trump four years later.

Those Obama-Trump voters, in fact, effectively accounted for more than two-thirds of the reason Clinton lost, according to Matt Canter, a senior vice president of the Democratic political firm Global Strategy Group. In his group’s analysis, about 70 percent of Clinton’s failure to reach Obama’s vote total in 2012 was because she lost these voters.

In recent months, Canter and other members of Global Strategy Group have delivered a detailed report of their findings to senators, congressmen, fellow operatives and think tank wonks – all part of an ongoing effort to educate party leaders about what the data says really happened in last year’s election.

“We have to make sure we learn the right lesson from 2016, that we don’t just draw the lesson that makes us feel good at night, make us sleep well at night,” Canter said.

His firm’s conclusion is shared broadly by other Democrats who have examined the data, including senior members of Clinton’s campaign and officials at the Democratic data and analytics firm Catalist. (The New York Times, doing its own analysis, reached a similar conclusion.)

More.

Far-Left Could Help Marine Le Pen

Well, this is interesting.

At the New York Times, "Marine Le Pen May Get a Lift From an Unlikely Source: The Far Left":

Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate in France's election, may get a lift from the far left https://t.co/HHsAk4ui52

— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 26, 2017

PARIS — The far-right leader Marine Le Pen faces an uphill battle in France’s presidential runoff, less than two weeks away. But she saw daylight through a small window on Tuesday, and from an unlikely source: her defeated counterpart on the far left.

Alone among all of France’s major political personalities, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of his own “France Unsubjugated” movement, who finished a strong fourth in Sunday’s voting, has refused to endorse Ms. Le Pen’s opponent, the former economy minister Emmanuel Macron.

Mr. Mélenchon’s critics say his obstinacy is petulant, wounded pride that can only help Ms. Le Pen’s National Front. But it also speaks to the passions that Mr. Macron, a seemingly mild-mannered centrist, provokes in large parts of the French electorate, far left and far right, who share a view of the 39-year-old former investment banker as a fire-breathing incarnation of evil market culture.

As populism and anger over the impacts of globalization energize much of the electorate, Mr. Mélenchon’s stand has added a new element of uncertainty into the final round of voting on May 7.

It has also set off a dynamic in the French race much like when Hillary Clinton defeated Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primaries last year — leaving his supporters, still in the thrall of populism, up for grabs as party allegiances broke down.

Mr. Mélenchon’s 19.6 percent of the vote Sunday is now a rich booty — triple the score of the mainstream Socialist Party, whose collapse has elevated Mr. Mélenchon to be de facto leader of the French left. He even won in big cities like Marseille and Lille.

But it is not clear where that vote will now go, not least because far-left populism and far-right populism may have more in common than the seemingly vast gulf between them on the political spectrum would suggest.

Mr. Mélenchon, 65, a former Trotskyite, ran a campaign denouncing banks, globalization and the European Union — just like Ms. Le Pen.

A grizzled orator with a penchant for Latin American dictators, he has the same forgiving attitude she does toward the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.

Both were competing for working-class voters suspicious of the global financial elite. Mr. Macron had already “ruined the lives of thousands of people” with his pro-market policies, Mr. Mélenchon said during the campaign.

And like Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Mélenchon regularly attacked the news media during the campaign. On election night, after his defeat, he tore into what he called “mediacrats” and “oligarchs.” They were “rejoicing” over “two candidates who approve and want to maintain the current institutions” of government, the longtime fan of Castro and Hugo Chávez said.

The shared lines of attack gave the candidates at the political extremes their best showings ever, if from opposite ends of the spectrum. Mr. Mélenchon almost doubled his 2012 result, refused to concede for hours and then attacked both finalists, refusing to distinguish between them.

In that, he is alone. Across the board, politicians and other former candidates have urgently counseled their supporters to vote for Mr. Macron to block Ms. Le Pen’s path to the Élysée Palace...

Keep reading.

Christy Clark, British Columbia's Conservative Premier, Backs Off Province's Carbon Tax (VIDEO)

Heh.

Canadian leftists must want this woman dead.

At the Los Angeles Times, with the hilariously biased headline, "British Columbia was once a leader in fighting climate change. Now, it's embracing fossil fuels":

British Columbia promotes itself as “Super, Natural,” and for many years it was praised for walking that talk.

Nearly a decade ago, the province enacted North America’s first tax on carbon emissions, putting it on the cutting edge of government efforts to fight climate change. The economy grew even as emissions declined. Climate activists around the world admired the move, but so did conservatives like former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who sought market-driven solutions.

Now, however, Canada’s West Coast is striving toward a very different kind of cutting edge: British Columbia is positioning itself to become a global leader in exporting fossil fuels, with plans to nearly triple crude oil exports through a controversial new pipeline and vastly expand production of liquefied natural gas to be sold in Asia.

And although the revenue-neutral carbon tax is still in place, the province’s current political leadership has halted the annual rate increases built into the original plan. Emissions, meanwhile, are rising again.

“They definitely have horses on either side of the wagon,” Tarika Powell, who studies fossil fuel exports for Sightline Institute, a Seattle think tank, said of the British Columbia government. “And they are going in opposite directions.”

In a province that has been influential in shaping environmental policy in Canada and beyond, the question is which horse will prevail — and one clue to the answer is expected to come next month, when Premier Christy Clark faces reelection.

Clark, who took office in 2011, leads the conservative but incongruously named BC Liberal Party. Her predecessor, Gordon Campbell, was also a member of that party, yet while Campbell pushed the carbon tax to approval in 2008 and still takes pride in it, Clark has shown little interest in climate leadership.

She instead has championed liquefied natural gas, which involves cooling natural gas into a dense liquid to make it easier and cheaper to ship.

If all 19 of the current LNG proposals in the province were built, according to Powell’s research, British Columbia would become the world’s largest LNG exporter many times over, dwarfing the current leaders, Qatar and Australia. Emissions from LNG terminals and refineries could drastically increase the level of greenhouse gas emissions within the province — and much of those emissions would be exempt from the carbon tax, according to analyses of Clark’s plans.

It was Clark who froze the carbon tax in 2012 and has refused to raise it since then, essentially ignoring the advice of a special task force she created to make recommendations. Although Clark does highlight the province’s leadership on the carbon tax, she has cited concerns among some business groups and others that increasing it would hurt the economy.

Her closest challenger next month, John Horgan of the New Democratic Party, has said he supports raising the carbon tax because “it’s the right thing to do,” and he has lashed out at Clark for accepting millions in campaign donations from fossil fuel companies and other industry groups.

Yet a New Democratic Party strategy document obtained and leaked by the BC Liberals made it clear that even Horgan’s party is wary of being cast as supporting tax increases, regardless of the benefits. It also expressed concerns that the province’s Green Party would peel away votes if it took no action.

“The BC Liberals will call it a tax increase — and they’ll holler from the rooftops in rural B.C.,” the leaked document said.

“We must holler back with: ‘Our plan puts more money in the pocket for a majority of B.C. families. Hers doesn’t. Our plan actually accomplishes the goals of a carbon tax — reducing carbon pollution. Hers doesn’t. Our plan creates good jobs that last in a more sustainable economy with more opportunities for the future. Hers doesn’t.’”

The political sensitivity over the carbon tax within the province is striking given its influence outside it...

Keep reading.

Tom Perez, Keith Ellison and the Meaning of Anti-Semitism

From Caroline Glick, at RCP, "Perez, Ellison and the Meaning of Anti-Semitism":

Was former Secretary of labor and assistant attorney-general Tom Perez’s victory over Congressman Keith Ellison over the weekend in the race to serve as the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee a victory of centrist Democrats over radical leftists in the party? That is how the mainstream media is portraying Perez’s victory.

Along these lines, Prof. Allen Dershowitz, a lifelong Democrat who promised to quit the party if Ellison was elected due to his documented history of antisemitism and hostility toward Israel, hailed Perez’s election. Speaking to Fox News, Dershowitz said that Perez’s election over Ellison “is a victory in the war against bigotry, antisemitism, the anti-Israel push of the hard Left within the Democratic Party.”

There are two problems with Dershowitz’s view. First, Perez barely won. Ellison received nearly half the votes in two rounds of voting.

Tipping his hat to Ellison’s massive popularity among the party’s leadership and grassroots, Perez appointed the former Nation of Islam spokesman to serve as deputy DNC chairman as soon as his own victory was announced.

There is a good reason that Perez is so willing to cooperate with Ellison in running the DNC. And this points to the second problem with the claim that Perez’s election signals a move toward the center by Democratic leaders.

Perez is ready to cooperate with Ellison because the two men have the same ideological worldview and the same vision for the Democratic Party. As Mother Jones explained, “There’s truly not much ideological distance between the two.”

Far from being a victory for the centrist forces in the party, Perez’s win marks the solidification of the far Left’s control over the party of Harry Truman. Only hard leftists participated in a meaningful way in the race for leadership of the second largest party in America – a party that less than a decade ago controlled the White House and both houses of Congress.

The implications of this state of affairs are disastrous for the US generally. It is inherently destabilizing for a nation when one of the parties in a two-party political system is taken over by people who have a negative view of the country.

While America as a whole will suffer from the radicalization of the Democratic Party, perhaps no group will suffer more from the far Left’s takeover of the party than the American Jewish community. The vast majority of American Jews give their partisan allegiance to the Democratic Party and their ideological allegiance to the Left.

While Perez made a name for himself by fighting the enforcement of US immigration and naturalization laws against illegal immigrants, and Ellison rose to prominence for his activism in radical African American and Islamic circles, thanks to the so-called intersectionality of the far Left, that makes the cause of one faction the cause of all factions, today Perez is as much an apologist for Israel bashers as Ellison.

Perhaps in response to the danger that the far Left’s takeover of the Democratic Party represents, Malcolm Hoenlein, the long-serving professional head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations called on Sunday for the convening of a global conference on antisemitism. In a meeting with The Jerusalem Post’s editorial board, Hoenlein said that one of the goals of the proposed conference would be to reach a universally accepted definition of antisemitism...

Keep reading.

PREVIOUSLY: "7,000 Anti-Semitic Incidents Under Obama?"

President Trump Gets Warm Embrace at #CPAC2017 (VIDEO)

He skipped the conservative conclave last year, suggesting he'd be too radical for the right-wing mobs.

But he was welcomed like the king he is this year. What a blast.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Trump's popularity at CPAC gathering, which he shunned a year ago, shows how he's conquered conservatives":

Conservatives love Trump now b/c 'he has all the right enemies.' But how long this honeymoon? https://t.co/CQ5DoTAYbI @Noahbierman

— Marc Duvoisin (@MarcDuvoisin) February 24, 2017

A year ago, Donald Trump skipped the nation’s preeminent conference of conservatives, underscoring the friction between the populist candidate and many of the warring factions in his party during a heated presidential primary season.

Friday, Trump returned to the Conservative Political Action Conference with the blunt force of a conqueror, planting his brand of nationalist, anti-globalist populism like a flag.

His speech, with rhetoric that even Trump said would have been too controversial at the event even a year ago, marked his takeover of the conservative movement, one of several signs of his dominance throughout the conference, which also featured a rare and well-received speech from his chief intellectual influence and advisor, Stephen K. Bannon.

"There is no such thing as a global anthem, a global currency or a global flag," Trump said to great applause from thousands of conservatives. "I'm not representing the globe. I'm representing your country."

He echoed ideas he has espoused in the past — denouncing trade deals as the antithesis of "economic freedom," warning that Paris and other great cities of Europe have been ruined by mass immigration, criticizing Democratic and Republican presidents for their interventions in the Middle East.

Although many of the words were familiar, the venue and the passion made Friday's speech remarkable.

Trump spoke directly of his ambition to turn the GOP into "the party of the American worker."

"I'm here today to tell you what this movement means for the future of the Republican Party and for the future of America," Trump said. "The core conviction of our movement is that we are a nation that [must] put and will put its own citizens first."

While Trump tried to unite conservatives, the speech made little effort to bridge the country's larger political divide. For example, Trump dismissed people who have shown up at town halls around the country to protest reversal of Obamacare.

"They're not you. They're largely — many of them are the side that lost," he said.

The visuals around the waterfront conference outside Washington were just as striking: the red “Make America Great Again” caps, the throngs of college Republicans surrounding Trump’s aides and allies, the giant Trump-decorated pickup truck at the convention center entrance.

As he has repeatedly done in the last couple of weeks, Trump attacked the media for what he sees as unfair coverage. He also showed how much he remembers the details of how his campaign was described in the press, at one point praising The Times for its election tracking poll that consistently showed him leading.

“I must say Los Angeles Times did a great job — shocking,” he said. “A couple polls got it right.”

In reality, the USC Dornsife/L.A. Times “Daybreak” tracking poll overstated Trump’s support, although it did correctly pick up the backing he was getting from disaffected white voters, many of whom had sat out the 2012 election.

Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, an outlet that has presented itself as a voice of the white nationalist alt-right movement, joked a day earlier as he sat down for a marquee event about how far he had come.

He used to hold a competing event called “Uninvited” for conservatives whose philosophies were considered too radical for the conference, Bannon said at a panel featuring him and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus.

Bannon reveled in his newfound influence as the conference organizer interviewed him in front of thousands of people.

He praised Priebus, the former GOP chairman, another indication of how the mainstream of the party has come into Trump’s fold. But both men made clear that Bannon was the dominant force in shaping Trump’s vision.

Bannon spoke about defending his notion of American culture and lashed out against the “corporatist, globalist media” standing in the way of Trump’s “economic nationalist agenda.”

“If you think they're going to give you your country back without a fight," he said. "You are sadly mistaken.”

“We're at the top of the first inning of this,” Bannon said near the end of his remarks. “We want you to have our back.”

Conference organizers seemed to have gotten the message.

Breitbart News owns the first booth by the entrance of the convention hall, hawking “Border Wall Construction Company” T-shirts...

Keep reading.

What Comes After Hegemony?

A great piece, from Michael J. Mazarr, at Foreign Affairs, "The Once and Future Order":

What comes after American hegemony? https://t.co/DRA82dsfDF

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) February 7, 2017

The postwar liberal order has proved remarkably stable. But it has always incorporated two distinct and not necessarily reconcilable visions. One is a narrow, cautious view of the UN and the core international financial institutions as guardians of sovereign equality, territorial inviolability, and a limited degree of free trade. The other is a more ambitious agenda: protecting human rights, fostering democratic political systems, promoting free-market economic reforms, and encouraging good governance.

Until recently, the tension between these two visions did not pose a serious problem. For many decades, the Cold War allowed the United States and its allies to gloss over the gap in the name of upholding a unified front against the Soviets. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington fully embraced the more ambitious approach by expanding NATO up to Russia’s doorstep; intervening to protect human rights in places such as the Balkans and Libya; supporting uprisings, at least rhetorically, in the name of democracy in countries including Egypt, Georgia, and Myanmar; and applying increasingly sophisticated economic sanctions to illiberal governments. In the newly unipolar international system, Washington often behaved as if the narrower concept of order had been superseded by the more ambitious one.

At the same time, the United States often took advantage of its preeminence to sidestep the order’s rules and institutions when it found them inconvenient. The problem with this approach, of course, is that international orders gain much of their potency by defining the sources of prestige and status within the system, such as participation in and leadership of international institutions. Their stability depends on leading members abiding—and being seen to abide—by key norms of behavior. When the leader of an order consistently appears to others to interpret the rules as it sees fit, the legitimacy of the system is undermined and other countries come to believe that the order offends, rather than sustains, their dignity.

An extreme version of this occurred in the 1930s, when a series of perceived insults convinced Japan—once a strong supporter of the League of Nations—that the system was a racist, Anglo-American cabal designed to emasculate it. Partly as a result, Japan withdrew from the league and signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy before entering World War II. Today, a similar story is playing out as some countries see the United States as applying norms selectively and in its own favor, norms that are already tailored to U.S. interests. This is persuading them that the system’s main function is to validate the United States’ status and prestige at the expense of their own.

For years now, a number of countries, including Brazil, India, South Africa, and Turkey, have found various ways to express their frustration with the current rules. But China and Russia have become the two most important dissenters. These two countries view the order very differently and have divergent ambitions and strategies. Yet their broad complaints have much in common. Both countries feel disenfranchised by a U.S.-dominated system that imposes strict conditions on their participation and, they believe, menaces their regimes by promoting democracy. And both countries have called for fundamental reforms to make the order less imperial and more pluralistic.

Russian officials are particularly disillusioned. They believe that they made an honest effort to join Western-led institutions after the fall of the Soviet Union but were spurned by the West, which subjected them to a long series of insults: NATO’s attacks on Serbia in the Balkan wars of the 1990s; NATO enlargement into eastern Europe; and Western support for “color revolutions” in the early years of the new century, which threatened or in some cases actually overthrew Russian-backed leaders in several eastern European countries. In a June 2016 speech to Russian diplomats, Russian President Vladimir Putin complained that certain Western states “continue stubborn attempts to retain their monopoly on geopolitical domination,” arguing that this was leading to a “confrontation between different visions of how to build the global governance mechanisms in the 21st century.” And Putin hasn’t just limited himself to complaining. In recent years, Russia has taken a number of dramatic, sometimes violent steps—especially in Europe—to weaken the U.S.-led order.

China also feels disrespected. The financial crisis at the end of the last decade convinced many Chinese that the West had entered a period of rapid decline and that China deserved a more powerful voice in the international system. Since then, Beijing has increased its influence in several institutions, including the IMF and the World Bank. But the changes have not gone far enough for many Chinese leaders. They still chafe at Western domination of these bodies, perceive U.S. democracy promotion as a threat, and resent the regional network of U.S. alliances that surrounds China. Beijing has thus undertaken a range of economic initiatives to gain more influence within the current order, including increasing its development aid and founding the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which it clearly intends to compete with the IMF and the World Bank. China has also pursued its interests in defiance of global norms by building islands in contested international waters and harassing U.S. aircraft in the South China Sea.

Worrisome as these developments are, it is important not to exaggerate the threats they represent. Neither China nor Russia has declared itself an enemy of the postwar order (although Russia is certainly moving in that direction). Both continue to praise the core UN system and participate actively in a host of institutions, treaties, and diplomatic processes. Indeed, China has worked hard to embed itself ever more firmly in the current order. In a 2015 speech in Seattle, Chinese President Xi Jinping said that “China has been a participant, builder, and contributor” in, of, and to the system and that it stood “firmly for the international order” based on the purposes and principles outlined in the UN Charter. China and Russia both rely on cross-border trade, international energy markets, and global information networks—all of which depend heavily on international rules and institutions. And at least for the time being, neither country seems anxious to challenge the order militarily.

Many major countries, including China and Russia, are groping toward roles appropriate to their growing power in a rapidly evolving international system. If that system is going to persevere, their grievances and ambitions must be accommodated. This will require a more flexible, pluralistic approach to institutions, rules, and norms...

Still more.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's the author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, which I've got on my reading list.

She's got an interesting interview, at ISR, "A Sense of Hope & the Possibility of Solidarity." She's a full-blown, unabashed revolutionary Marxist. Remember, my motto is "know your enemies." I'm constantly surrounded by people just like this at my college, and lots of students suck this stuff up like so many ganja fat ones:

The struggles of Indigenous people have a rich history, and really came together in the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s with other movements for liberation. In your books, it’s clear you are making the connection between land dispossession, labor, and class—basically Marx’s approach of historical materialism. You even quoted Marx from Capital in the beginning of chapter two, entitled “Culture of Conquest.” Why is this approach important to struggles for liberation?

I think Marxism is a hard sell in the Native movement and for African Americans but less so for Mexican Americans because of their political genealogies. Today it’s even difficult for Chicanos, as well as Native Americans, because Marxism is deemed just Western epistemology or a Western worldview. There is of course a lot of Eurocentrism in Marx’s early writings. There is the idea of progress, but people don’t look at his later work enough, when he was getting into ethnology.4 He didn’t know much about non-European peoples, yet making generalities about the whole world can seem imperialist. However, I found out when I was doing my dissertation, that using Marxism to look at the history of land tenure in New Mexico at different stages from Spanish colonization through US conquest and colonization was essential. Marx describes the initial looting of the Americas as reckless abandon, as well as the enslavement of Africans, and the genocide of Native Americans, and this describes the initial Spanish invasion and occupation of New Mexico, which led to the All Indian Pueblo Revolt driving the Spanish colonists out for more than a decade.5 The second period of eighteenth-century Spanish colonialism was far more of a negotiated relationship. It was still colonialism but it wasn’t the most vicious kind, and the Spanish army was there to defend that zone from French and British expansion.6

Through the history of Mexico becoming independent and then New Mexico being taken by the US, I tried to look at capitalist development and to link this with imperialism. I read all kinds of things from Marx and participated in Marxist study groups. At the time I hadn’t done a real study of Capital. I started reading about Oriental despotism, and Marx’s analysis of how the pyramids were built. These grand public works were built by forced labor, and I connected that to what I was seeing in precolonial Indigenous New Mexico—they had elaborate irrigation systems, which were also throughout Mexico and Central America. You have almost a dictatorship to control water, but the way Indigenous peoples organized it was with serial dictatorships. The ditch boss would be elected for one year and had total control of the water in each pueblo. These ninety-eight city-states along the Rio Grande and its tributaries also went to war with each other periodically over water, so it could be very serious. They could starve as a result of being in the desert. With the water supply, they had an absolute autocratic ditch boss and everyone had to contribute labor. There wasn’t a class of laborers, and after a year the ditch boss could never again be in that position. It had to change every year so that they didn’t get used to the power.

This history shows how people can organize themselves in different ways; capitalism and exploitative labor were not inevitable in human history. Just because capitalism came to dominate the world through European and United States imperialism, forcing the world to live under capitalism does not mean it was inevitable. We need to build upon Marx’s brilliant comprehension of how capitalism arose in Europe and how it works. But the social and political systems that produced ancient irrigation systems and widespread agricultural production in the Americas were not despotic.7 It has been said the beginning of the class system started in ancient Egypt, but I found things that didn’t fit that mold. I tried to apply the basic tenets of Marxism and especially what is known as “primitive accumulation”.

I want to mention here that there are a lot of words Marx used that should be retranslated. For instance regarding primitive accumulation, it’s just easy to say “primary” or “higher” but Marxists don’t know what you’re talking about unless you say primitive. In other languages, primitive means primary.8 It doesn’t necessarily have the baggage that the word “primitive” does for Indigenous peoples subjected to European ethnography. It became clear to me while working on my thesis that the first big onslaught of the primitive accumulationprocess that set off capitalist development happens over and over again, even today. This has entered into a part of Native studies with Glen Coulthard’s book, Red Skin, White Masks, in which he makes that argument.9 Coulthard identifies with the anarchist tendency, but he takes on Ward Churchill’s piece in Marxism and Native Americans.10 Coulthard says it’s ridiculous to not use such an important tool as Marx’s work.

In all my work, I try to apply historical materialism. However, I don’t think any of the original Marxists and following generations of European Marxists dealt with colonialism as the avatar of capitalism. Lenin theorized imperialism, but he dealt with it in the most technical way of financial capital, which is really important. And he did deal with national liberation. But I don’t think Marx or Lenin even began to understand the role the US was playing throughout the nineteenth century as the vortex of capitalism, and what I try to show is that from the very beginning the United States was based on colonial conquest, and on overseas imperialism following their independence from the British Empire.

*****

We’ve been trying to use Marxism as the framework to talk about Indigenous issues. If you merely say Marxism is European, you miss the point of the theory. People forget that Marx actually talked about who was expropriated, how people were actually dispossessed, and how that created the material basis ultimately for colonization, and how the vast majority of settlers and migrants who came to the US ended up in factories as low-wage workers.

I worked hard on the first chapter of my book about the precolonial era in the Americas, where there were prosperous and urban civilizations without capitalism, and that is so hopeful. Most radical forms of anarchism now are anticivilization, and they often look to Native people as the inspiration. They use Indigenous peoples, especially Native people in the Americas, pulling out what they want to justify their ideology. They are creating fantasies as evidence and even calling it science. Anarchists, especially the primitivists, view agriculture as the basis of all evil, because they are looking at agribusiness, and they don’t want to know at all that 90 percent of Native people in the Western hemisphere were agriculturalists—they don’t want to know that fact. So they romanticize Native people as “hunter-gatherers.”

This viewpoint distorts the reality in the Western hemisphere. The civilizations of central Mexico and the Andes were still developing before the Europeans intervened. The civilizations of the Americas were going in a different direction than Europe or Asia. I think had Marx really been able to study or know what was hardly even knowable at that time, he would have said that capitalism in the Americas was not inevitable. I always say that 500 years ago with the invasion of the Americas, a wrong path was taken for humanity. So let’s say that capitalism is wrong and destructive, not that it was inevitable. For example, with the ancestral Puebloans, it was clearly a choice. They had a large civilization up on Mesa Verde [in present day Colorado]; they had irrigation ditches for miles and were overusing the wood, because everything was built of wood. They were probably becoming less democratic, and they made the choice to migrate to the Rio Grande area of northern New Mexico and break down into smaller villages. They continued to function like city-states, but they were smaller than the one large civilization up at Mesa Verde. And why not say that was a choice and just maybe that the Americas were going in a different direction, rather than interpreting this or the Maya devolvement as “collapse?” This is something to learn from: civilization without capitalism and how can it work. This is tied with the concept of humans being a part of nature; for example, conventional Marxist thinking argues that private property began with the domestication of animals in Africa. However, in America the ancestral peoples did not domesticate animals for food or as beasts of burden. In the civilizations of Central America, parrots and dogs were domesticated but were considered sacred. The Spanish invaders noted that the Aztec dogs did not bark, but they learned to bark from the Spanish war dogs.

Can you talk more about the relationship between settler colonialism and capitalism? What do you define as settler colonialism? What is the difference between settler colonialism and outpost colonialism?

Yes, it is really important. I am not sure I entirely succeed in the book on this because the tendency of European-based Marxism is to separate the two, and of course in the United States they are like two separate worlds. Because of Lenin, we have a good connection between capitalism and imperialism, and most people assume the connection. But with colonialism, bourgeois history tends to call things colonialism that weren’t colonialism, such as the Roman Empire. Yes, they had colonies, but it wasn’t capitalist-based. It was a different era; so people like to say “people have been colonizing each other forever,” but colonialism is just a different system under capitalism. In settler colonialism, Europeans export people with the promise of land, and private property, so that land itself becomes the chief commodity in the primitive accumulation of capital, and in North America, colonists also enslaved Africans as both market commodities and unpaid and unfree labor. This is a distinct form of colonialism, which obviously proved to be the most effective in building the most powerful capitalist state, the United States. The main form of European colonialism was to exploit resources—precious metals, African bodies, spices—in which Native labor was organized with European overseers and bureaucrats, as well as Native middlemen. This form of colonialism, of course, produced great wealth for the European monarchies and later European states and created the structures of unequal global markets that persist today.

I want to make clear that there is not one “settler colonial” or “colonial” experience. Each has to be analyzed on its own terms, depending on many factors, such as which colonial state and which period of time is being considered. The European fetish for gold that developed during the Middle Ages drove nearly all of the early colonial ventures, but rare spices were also worth their weight in gold. And most importantly, the study of any colonial situation requires understanding the level and nature of resistance to these invasions. In making general conclusions regarding the Anglo and Anglo-American colonization of North America, it is essential to keep in mind that each of the hundreds of Native nations had a unique experience of colonialism, always destructive, but varying in details and survivability.

It’s inaccurate to speak, for instance, of “the California Indians.” The eighteenth-century Spanish colonization of the coastal region from San Diego to San Francisco was carried out by Franciscan missionaries with the use of the Spanish army in seizing people in the whole region to be incarcerated in the missions, and to work for the missionaries in their commercial pursuits. So these weren’t typical settlers, but it was settler colonialism. On the other hand, the nearly half of California north of San Francisco was not colonized until the United States confiscated the northern part of what had become Mexico, and the rush of settlers arrived as gold seekers with the 1850s gold rush. These were not typical settlers either, combining extraction with genocide.

Colonialism in general is disruptive, destructive, damaging, sometimes depopulating entire areas, such as the Natchez villagers of the Mississippi Delta, and the Nahuatl-speaking villagers of western Nicaragua and western Honduras who were seized by Spanish slave traders in the sixteenth century, then transported to work in the mines of Peru. European settlers didn’t arrive to those nearly depopulated areas until later. This was similar to the way villagers of West Africa were captured, enslaved, and sold in the Americas, losing their existence as particular nations and peoples.

I would say that settler colonialism was an exceptional mode of colonialism. English settler colonialism in the North American colonies took its specific form from the mid-seventeenth-century English conquest of Ireland, in which English forces under Oliver Cromwell drove subsistent Irish farmers off their land and gave land grants to English and Scottish settlers. The developing English capitalism based in the wool industry required surplus labor to work in the factories, as well as large swaths of grazing land for commercial sheep production. The process of fencing the commons and driving English farmers off the land created that surplus labor force, but also a pool of settlers who were promised free land in America. The Protestant Anglos and Scots, who settled Northern Ireland, made up the majority of frontier settlers in the British North American colonies.

The Portuguese and the Spanish were specifically seeking gold and silver. Their hoarding of gold and silver actually limited their ability to develop capitalism. They didn’t really have a basis for that in the Iberian Peninsula after they deported all the farmers, craftsmen, architects, and other producers who were Muslims and Jews. Only in the eighteenth century did Spain begin establishing settler-colonies in the southern cone of South America, employing the same genocidal methods of eliminating or driving out the Indigenous peoples, which continued when Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay became independent.

However, only the United States developed effective capitalism outside of Britain. By 1840, it was already the largest economic power in the world on the basis of the global cotton trade and textile factories, also providing cotton to the British textile industry. Until recently, economic historians have dated the development of US capitalism to post–Civil War industrialization in the North. Several recent books have convincingly made the case for the cotton kingdom in the Mississippi Valley being the site of the birth of full-blown capitalism prior to the Civil War, based on slave labor and the capital generated by the value of the slaves’ bodies.13 This development included the parallel expulsion of the five large Native agricultural nations from the Southeast during the 1830s and 1840s, generating huge amounts of capital in land sales.

Farewell, Radical-in-Chief

From Matthew Vadum, at FrontPage Magazine, "Obama says goodbye to a nation he despises":

Farewell, Radical-in-Chief | Frontpage Mag https://t.co/ChVLU6vMsf

— Ƭαвιтнα Ɓℓιѕѕ ❤ (@BlissTabitha) January 11, 2017

President Barack Hussein Obama bid farewell last night to the nation he despises in what was, for him, a mercifully brief speech.

“America is a better, stronger place than it was when we started,” he said in all apparent seriousness.

After sending aid and comfort to an Islamic supremacist dictator in Egypt, he falsely claimed to have pulled the rug out from the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear weapon program. The Nobel Peace Prize winner left out how his illegal war destabilized Libya and the fact that the U.S. military deeply distrusts him.

He pretended the economy is going gangbusters while leaving out the fact that nine days away from his departure from the Oval Office, his signature legislative accomplishment, Obamacare, is collapsing as insurers run away from the so-called insurance exchanges. He acted as if fighting alleged manmade global warming was more important than just about everything.

It some ways it wasn’t much different than the warm and fuzzy victory speech the Divider-in-Chief gave in Chicago in 2008, except in this speech he got to lie about his record while throwing in cheap shots against his critics and the incoming president. (A transcript of Obama’s final great oratorical atrocity is available here.)

In a forum resplendent with the echo-acoustics our megalomaniacal president prefers, the pathologically dishonest Obama tried last night to cast himself as a unifying figure:

It falls to each of us to be those anxious, jealous guardians of our democracy; to embrace the joyous task we’ve been given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours. Because for all our outward differences, we in fact all share the same proud title, the most important office in a democracy: Citizen. Citizen.

So you see that’s what our democracy demands. It needs you. Not just when there’s an election, not just when your own narrow interest is at stake, but over the full span of a lifetime. If you’re tired of arguing with strangers on the Internet, try talking with one of them in real life.

A life form that just arrived from Alpha Centauri might have been moved as Obama tried to whitewash the unmitigated catastrophe his presidency has been.

Deploying all the usual tired old left-wing smears against conservatives, the lawless 44th president recited a long series of America-boosting sayings most of which he has never believed in. He said nice things about the dead white men much-derided by the Left whom we call the Founding Fathers, along with the government-restraining Constitution he has spent so much of his life spitting on. With a straight face this despotic destroyer of the rule of law called the Constitution “a remarkable, beautiful gift.”

Of course Chicago was an appropriate locale for the goodbye address. It’s a violent one-party city that is collapsing under the weight of its own corruption. He gave the speech at Lakeside Center at McCormick Place in Chicago, not too far from storied Hyde Park and the site of the future Obama Presidential Center.

The Windy City is where community organizing guru Saul Alinsky, whose teachings on tactics deeply influenced Obama, learned his craft from the Al Capone crime gang. Obama got his start in nasty Alinsky-style community organizing with the assistance of groups like the Developing Communities Project, Catholic Campaign for Human Development, and the Gamaliel Foundation.

Chicago is where young Obama cut his organizing teeth running the successful get-out-the-vote drive for ACORN-affiliated Project Vote in 1992 that elected the awful one-term senator, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois. She was a friend of Communist Cuba and African dictators who worked closely with agitator Heather Booth of the Midwest Academy, Democratic Socialists of America, and the Communist Party USA, all of which Obama welcomed into his political coalition.

Chicago is where the half-black Obama whose purported father was from Kenya learned to portray himself as what the Left calls “authentically” black, soaking up vile racist hatred while sitting in the pews of Jeremiah Wright’s sinister Nation of Islam-like church.

Chicago is where unrepentant terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn launched his career in electoral politics by hosting a living room fundraiser for his Illinois State Senate campaign. Although his presidential campaign vehemently denied Obama was close to Ayers, the former Weather Underground leader admitted years later that “we served on a couple of boards together.” Chicago is also where Michelle Obama worked at the same law firm as Dohrn.

Giving the speech in Chicago was also appropriate on a symbolic level. Chicago (like Detroit) epitomizes Obama’s failed, bankrupt left-wing ideology, and lack of leadership...

Still more.

Senator Sessions Isn’t a Racist, His Left-Wing Accusers Are

From Sultan Knish, at FrontPage Magazine, "They’re coming for Sessions":

They’re coming for Senator Sessions. The Alabama Senator, soon to be Attorney General, has been denounced by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which bills its poison pen letter as coming from “civil and human rights organizations.” Just don’t ask which ones.

The “civil rights” organizations include the AFL-CIO, which had just denounced its own “ugly history of racism” last year, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, whose leaders have at times defended and excused the anti-Semitic and racist Islamic terror of Hamas and Hezbollah, and the National Council of La Raza, whose name means “The Race” and reflects its racialist agenda.

A thuggish union that concedes its own ugliness and two racist groups, one of which defends Islamic terrorists, are the worst possible people to pass any kind of judgment on Senator Sessions.

But it gets worse.

There’s the Center for Responsible Lending, funded by the Sandlers, who helped cause the economic crisis by peddling subprime mortgages. Lending doesn’t get more responsible than that. And there’s also the National Lawyers Guild, which started life as a Communist front group and arguably continues as such, praising North Korea’s “free healthcare and education systems.” Move over Cuba, North Korea has even more shovel-ready free health care for the oppressed comrades of the working class.

I don’t know why the Conference couldn’t manage to get Al Qaeda to sign on to their letter against Sessions. Maybe Osama bin Laden’s iPhone can’t get any bars at the bottom of the Arabian Sea.

But this motley crew of racists, traitors and terrorists has issued its ruling and found that, “Senator Sessions is the wrong person to serve as the U.S. Attorney General.”

The right person is Vladimir Lenin. Unfortunately he’s dead and not qualified to practice law.

You would think that the “144 undersigned organizations” representing billions in wealth and untold amounts of power and influence, could manage a more coherent smear campaign. Instead the letter rehashes the same old discredited smears. Senator Sessions’ joke about the KKK smoking pot is described as “speaking favorably about the Ku Klux Klan” even while admitting that “he was helpful in the Center’s successful effort to sue and bankrupt the Ku Klux.”

Sessions is accused of undermining “voting rights” by prosecuting the “voting rights activists” who were caught mailing hundreds of absentee ballots. These “voter suppression tactics targeting African Americans” came in response to complaints of fraud by African-American officials like Perry County Commissioner Reese Billingslea and John Kennard, Alabama's first black tax assessor, who said, "The only reason these people are hollering racism now is because they are in trouble for breaking the law."

Then under "Association with White Nationalist and Hate Groups," the letter, which seems to thrive on parading its own stupidity around, proves that Sessions must be a bigot because he had received awards from the "David Horowitz Freedom Center and Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy."

Sessions was honored by the Center for Security Policy at the Smithsonian Postal Museum with its Keeper of the Flame award, which recognizes “those individuals who devote their public careers to the propagation of democracy and the respect for individual rights throughout the world.”

Past recipients have included Dick Cheney, Joe Lieberman, Garry Kasparov and Ronald Reagan.

Perhaps the Conference could specify which white nationalist hate group Lieberman and Kasparov belonged to.

Senator Sessions received the Annie Taylor Award from the Freedom Center in 2014. The next year’s recipient would go on to be African-American Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke.

It’s unknown which white nationalist hate group Clarke belongs to. Perhaps the Conference could ask the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose inept smear of Sessions it appears to have relied on, to tell them.

The Annie Taylor Award has gone to Iranian dissident Amir Fakhravar, journalist Oriana Fallaci, Baroness Caroline Cox and Democratic Senator Zell Miller. But perhaps the most notorious white supremacist to receive the award was Ward Connerly, the African-American chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute.

As smear campaigns go, the Conference’s letter is laughably terrible.

“Senator Sessions has a 30-year record of racial insensitivity,” it claims. That’s quite a claim and it isn’t backed up.  If Sessions had spent the last 30 years going around shouting racial slurs, you would think that there would be more evidence of that to present in the left’s poison pen letters.

The Conference insists that the Attorney General has to be approved of by “every member of the public”. If that were the case, we couldn’t get a single Attorney General approved.

It states that Sessions supporting the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder raises questions about his fitness. Is the Conference really demanding an Attorney General who won’t uphold Supreme Court decisions?

The Conference’s letter is short on facts and heavy on innuendo. It’s clueless about its own charges. And mostly it opposes Sessions because he doesn’t agree with its radical policy agenda. The letter accuses him of opposing illegal alien amnesty and being skeptical about Global Warming which, according to the letter, “disproportionately affect low-income families and communities of color.”

World ends. Minorities hardest hit.

Further evidence of Sessions’ unfitness is found in that he voted to defund Planned Parenthood, opposed a push for Green Energy and Obama’s pardons for drug dealers. In short, he’s guilty of being a conservative Republican, not a radical leftist.

That’s really why the Leadership Conference opposes him, but it can’t come out and say so. The failed effort to smear Sessions as a racist isn’t about his record; it’s about blocking anyone on the right while cynically abusing a serious accusation for partisan political gain. No one who knows Sessions, including one of the accusers who serves as the basis for many of these smears, believes that he is a racist.

Furthermore the accusations are coming from actual racists like La Raza and the ADC. The ADC honored Helen Thomas after she called for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel. It was where Ralph Nader insisted that, “Jews do not own the phrase anti-Semitism.” The Leadership Conference shows no signs of having a problem with any of this.

Senator Sessions isn’t a racist. His accusers are.

#CrookedHillary's Inescapable Cloud of Corruption

Following-up, "#CrookedHillary: State Department Access Granted to Clinton Foundation Donors (VIDEO)."

From Lisa Boothe, at the Washington Examiner, "Clinton's Inescapable Cloud of Corruption":

While many in the media have declared the presidential election all but over, damning accusations of pay to play at the Clinton Foundation and reports that the FBI found 15,000 work-related documents that Hillary Clinton failed to turn over represent the political land mines that still lie between her and the presidency. Multiple ongoing Freedom of Information Act civil suits, perjury allegations, an IRS probe and alleged joint U.S. Attorney-FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation represent the inescapable cloud of corruption that could be the Democratic nominee's undoing.

As the drip, drip, drip of information highlighting the intersection between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department surfaces, the political fallout for Hillary Clinton is unavoidable. The newly exposed emails demonstrate another lie told by the Clinton campaign. Despite her lawyers stating that only 30,000 emails on her server were related to work, the 15,000 puts that number closer to 45,000. But more importantly, it paints a clearer picture of what Hillary Clinton was attempting to hide by setting up private servers in the first place and attempting to wipe them clean.

What is particularly troubling for Clinton is that liberal publications like the Huffington Post and Boston Globe are calling for the Clinton Foundation to shut down. The calls will undoubtedly grow louder as reports continue to expose the overlap between top foreign donors to the foundation and the access it gained them to Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. That access puts into question the impartiality of the decisions Secretary Clinton made while in office and the potential conflicts of interest she would be confronted with as commander in chief. The Wall Street Journal has reported that "At least 60 companies that lobbied the State Department during her tenure donated a total of more than $26 million to the Clinton Foundation." And according to the Associated Press, 55 percent of Clinton's meetings and calls with people outside of the government were donors to the Clinton Foundation.

More than 40 percent of the Clinton Foundation's top donors are based in foreign countries, prompting the Washington Post to write, "Rarely, if ever, has a potential commander in chief been so closely associated with an organization that has solicited financial support from foreign governments." Many of those foreign governments have a history of human rights abuses. It is estimated the Clinton Foundation has accepted tens of millions of dollars from Middle Eastern countries.

Emails recently released by Judicial Watch and reports by Fox News demonstrate the close level of communication between State Department and Clinton Foundation officials. Judicial Watch recently released 725 pages of State Department documents showing coordination between Hillary Clinton's Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin and Douglas Band, a former longtime aide of President Bill Clinton and employee of the Clinton Foundation, who worked together to grant access to then-Secretary Clinton for high-dollar donors like Crown Prince Salman of Bahrain.

After failing to set up a meeting with the secretary of state through State Department channels, Salman, who contributed $32 million to the Clinton Global Initiative, went through the Clinton Foundation and successfully set up a meeting 48 hours later...

That's the best summary and analysis of this so far.

Keep reading.

A Defense Strategy for the New Administration

From Mac Thornberry and Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., at Foreign Affairs, "Preserving Primacy":

Should the United States fail to protect the global commons, no like-minded power will take its place. https://t.co/Kdh1RRWAIX

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) August 18, 2016

The next U.S. president will inherit a security environment in which the United States con­fronts mounting threats with increasingly constrained resources, diminished stature, and growing uncertainty both at home and abroad over its willingness to protect its friends and its interests. Revisionist powers in Europe, the western Pacific, and the Persian Gulf—three regions long considered by both Democratic and Republican administrations to be vital to U.S. national security—are seeking to overturn the rules-based international order. In Europe, Russian President Vladimir Putin has seized Crimea, waged proxy warfare in eastern Ukraine, and threatened NATO allies on Russia’s periphery. Further demonstrating its newfound assertiveness, Russia has dispatched forces to Syria and strength­ened its nuclear arsenal. After a failed attempt to “reset” relations with Moscow, U.S. President Barack Obama has issued stern warnings and imposed economic sanctions, but these have done little to deter Putin.

Nor has the administration’s “pivot” to Asia, now five years on, been matched by effective action. China continues to ramp up its military spending, investing heavily in weapons systems designed to threaten U.S. forces in the western Pacific. As a result, it is proving increas­ingly willing and able to advance its expansive territorial claims in the East China and South China Seas. Not content to resolve its disputes through diplomacy, Beijing has militarized them, building bases on natural and artificially created islands. The United States has failed to respond vigorously to these provocations, causing allies to question its willingness to meet its long-standing security commitments.

The lack of U.S. leadership is also fueling instability in the Middle East. In Iraq, the Obama administration forfeited hard-won gains by withdrawing all U.S. forces, creating a security vacuum that enabled the rise of both Iranian influence and the Islamic State, or ISIS. Adding to its strategic missteps, the administration fundamentally misread the character of the Arab Spring, failing to appreciate that the uprisings would provide opportunities for radical Islamist elements rather than lead to a new democratic order. The administration also failed to learn from the previous administration’s experience in Iraq when it chose to “lead from behind” in Libya, intervening to over­throw Muammar al-Qaddafi, only to declare victory and abandon the country to internal disorder. It then drew a “redline” over President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria but failed to act to enforce it. The result is growing instability in the Middle East and a decline in U.S. influence.

The threat of Islamist terrorism has grown on the Obama administration’s watch. Al Qaeda and ISIS, both Sunni groups, have gained new footholds in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and even West Africa. Obama’s negotiations with Iran, the home of radical Shiite Islamism, have not curbed the country’s involvement in proxy wars in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen or its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. What the talks did produce—the nuclear deal—may slow Tehran’s march to ob­taining a nuclear weapon, but it also gives the regime access to tens of billions of dollars in formerly frozen assets. The ink on the agreement was barely dry when, in March, Tehran tested ballistic missiles capable of delivering a nuclear warhead, in blatant defiance of a UN Security Council resolution. Adding to all this instability, military competition has expanded into the relatively new domains of outer space and cyberspace—and will eventually extend to undersea economic infrastructure, as well.

With the current approach failing, the next president will need to formulate a new defense strategy. It should include three basic elements: a clear statement of what the United States seeks to achieve, an understanding of the resources available for those goals, and guidance as to how those resources will be used. The strategy laid out here, if properly implemented, will allow the United States to preclude the rise of a hegemonic power along the Eurasian periphery and preserve access to the global commons—without bankrupting the country in the process...

Sounds great.

Frankly, I'm not worried about the U.S. maintaining its material preponderance, even with China supposedly "catching up."

It's that we need robust, non-politically correct leadership. Global preponderance is a state of mind as well as an objective reality. I'd argue that President Barack Hussein wanted to chop the U.S. down to size, to attack U.S. global hegemony at home, for ideological reasons. He's still doing with his appeasement and apology tours.

America will lead again, in both word and power. It's just a matter of the political dynamics. A Hillary Clinton administration's just going to be four more years of Obama's failed policies. But the pendulum is going to swing back to American exceptionalism at some point. Of that I remain optimistic.

But keep reading, in any case.

Democrats Are Using Khizr Khan to Advance the Cause of Global Islamic Jihad

Following-up from earlier, "Kizhr Khan Khantroversy Nontroversy."

From Robert Spencer, at FrontPage Magazine, "Khizr Khan, Servant of the Global Umma":

The mainstream media is wild with enthusiasm these days over Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim soldier, Humayun Khan, who was killed fighting in Iraq in 2004. Khizr Khan, brimming with self-righteous anger, spoke at the Democratic National Convention, where he delivered what the Washington Post dubbed a “brutal repudiation of Donald Trump.” Trump responded, elevating Khizr Khan to the status of full-fledged flavor-of-the-moment media celebrity. There’s just one catch: Khizr is using his son’s memory not to advance the cause of the United States, as his son apparently died trying to do, but to advance a quite different cause: that of the global umma.

The well-heeled and powerful backers of the global jihad – those who have enabled the Islamic State (ISIS), al-Qaeda, and other jihad groups to grow as powerful as they have today -- are enraged at Donald Trump. They are deeply worried by his call for a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration into the United States, as that will make it much more difficult for jihadis to get into this country. They are anxious to stigmatize any and all resistance to jihad terror – and so, happily enough for them, is the Democratic Party, which has eagerly signed on to the longtime strategy employed by Islamic supremacist advocacy groups in the U.S., to demonize all effective measures against jihad terror as “bigoted” and “Islamophobic.”

So it was that Khizr Khan, in the full fury of his indignation at the DNC, trotted out a straw man, falsely claiming that Trump wanted to “ban us from this country.” Trump has said nothing about banning Muslim citizens of the U.S. from the country, only about a temporary moratorium on immigration from terror states. Even worse, all the effusive praise being showered on Khizr Khan in the last few days overlooks one central point: he is one man. His family is one family. There are no doubt many others like his, but this fact does not mean that there is no jihad, or that all Muslims in the U.S. are loyal citizens.

Khizr Khan is enraged at Donald Trump, but is Trump really the cause of his problem? Jihad terrorists, not Donald Trump or “Islamophobes,” killed his son in Iraq. And if Donald Trump or anyone else looks upon Muslims in the U.S. military with suspicion, it is with good reason: does any other demographic have as high a rate of treason as Muslims in the U.S. military? In 2003, a convert to Islam, Sgt. Hasan Akbar, murdered two of his commanding officers in Kuwait. In 2009, Major Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 Americans at Fort Hood.

Other than those attacks, a Muslim in the U.S. Navy discussed sniper attacks on military personnel. A Muslim U.S. naval engineer allegedly gave an Egyptian agent information on how to sink a U.S. carrier. In 2015, a Muslim National Guard soldier in Illinois planned an Islamic State jihad attack against a U.S. military base. Last February, a U.S. Army enlistee who vowed to “bring the Islamic State straight to your doorstep” pleaded guilty to attempting to detonate a car bomb at Fort Riley military base in Kansas. Just days ago, a U.S. Air Force veteran was convicted of trying to join the Islamic State.

Then there is the U.S. Muslim who gave the Islamic State U.S. military uniforms, combat boots, tactical gear, firearms accessories, and thousands in cash. Where are those uniforms now?

It is good that there are Muslims in the U.S. military who are loyal. But can we have a discussion about those who aren’t, and why they aren’t, and what can be done about it? Such a discussion is vitally necessary, but it wouldn’t serve the classic objective of the global umma, to increase the dar al-Islam (house of Islam) at the dar al-harb (house of war). Nor would an open discussion of Khan’s Sunday morning assertion on Meet the Press that terrorists “have nothing to do with Islam.”

We constantly are told this, but the repetition doesn’t make it true. In the first place, jihadis repeatedly make clear that they think what they’re doing has everything to do with Islam:

“Jihad was a way of life for the Pious Predecessors (Salaf-us-Salih), and the Prophet (SAWS) was a master of the Mujahideen and a model for fortunate inexperienced people. The total number of military excursions which he (SAWS) accompanied was 27. He himself fought in nine of these; namely Badr; Uhud, Al-Muraysi, The Trench, Qurayzah, Khaybar, The Conquest of Makkah, Hunayn and Taif . . . This means that the Messenger of Allah (SAWS) used to go out on military expeditions or send out an army at least every two months.” — Abdullah Azzam, co-founder of al-Qaeda, Join the Caravan, p. 30

“If we follow the rules of interpretation developed from the classical science of Koranic interpretation, it is not possible to condemn terrorism in religious terms. It remains completely true to the classical rules in its evolution of sanctity for its own justification. This is where the secret of its theological strength lies.” — Egyptian scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd

“Many thanks to God, for his kind gesture, and choosing us to perform the act of Jihad for his cause and to defend Islam and Muslims. Therefore, killing you and fighting you, destroying you and terrorizing you, responding back to your attacks, are all considered to be great legitimate duty in our religion.” — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow 9/11 defendants

“Allah on 480 occasions in the Holy Koran extols Muslims to wage jihad. We only fulfil God’s orders. Only jihad can bring peace to the world.” — Taliban terrorist Baitullah Mehsud

“Jihad, holy fighting in Allah’s course, with full force of numbers and weaponry, is given the utmost importance in Islam….By jihad, Islam is established….By abandoning jihad, may Allah protect us from that, Islam is destroyed, and Muslims go into inferior position, their honor is lost, their lands are stolen, their rule and authority vanish. Jihad is an obligation and duty in Islam on every Muslim.” — Times Square car bomb terrorist Faisal Shahzad

“So step by step I became a religiously devout Muslim, Mujahid — meaning one who participates in jihad.” — Little Rock, Arkansas terrorist murderer Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad

“And now, after mastering the English language, learning how to build explosives, and continuous planning to target the infidel Americans, it is time for Jihad.” — Texas terrorist bomber Khalid Aldawsari

All of these, of course, may be dismissed as “extremists,” although they were also all devout Muslims who were determined to follow their religion properly. And then there are the many passages of the Qur’an exhorting Muslims to commit acts of violence:

2:191-193: “And slay them wherever you come upon them, and expel them from where they expelled you; persecution is more grievous than slaying. But fight them not by the Holy Mosque until they should fight you there; then, if they fight you, slay them — such is the recompense of unbelievers, but if they give over, surely Allah is All-forgiving, All-compassionate. Fight them, till there is no persecution and the religion is Allah’s; then if they give over, there shall be no enmity save for evildoers.”

4:89: “They wish that you should disbelieve as they disbelieve, and then you would be equal; therefore take not to yourselves friends of them, until they emigrate in the way of Allah; then, if they turn their backs, take them, and slay them wherever you find them; take not to yourselves any one of them as friend or helper.”

Still more.