RUTHFULLY YOURS

Robert Mueller’s sprawling special-counsel investigation is playing hardball.

It was not enough to get a search warrant to ransack the Virginia home of Paul Manafort, even as the former Trump campaign chairman was cooperating with congressional investigators. Mueller’s bad-asses persuaded a judge to give them permission to pick the door lock. That way, they could break into the premises in the wee hours, while Manafort and his wife were in bed sleeping. They proceeded to secure the premises — of a man they are reportedly investigating for tax and financial crimes, not gang murders and Mafia hits — by drawing their guns on the stunned couple, apparently to check their pajamas for weapons.

Mueller’s probe more resembles an empire, with 17 prosecutors retained on the public dime. So . . . what exactly is the crime of the century that requires five times the number of lawyers the Justice Department customarily assigns to crimes of the century? No one can say. The growing firm is clearly scorching the earth, scrutinizing over a decade of Manafort’s shady business dealings, determined to pluck out some white-collar felony or another that they can use to squeeze him.

You are forgiven if you can recall only vaguely that supposition about Trump-campaign collusion in Russian espionage against the 2016 election was the actual explanation for Mueller’s appointment as special counsel. To the extent there was any explanation, that is. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a Trump appointee, did not comply with the regulations requiring a description of the crimes Trump’s Justice Department is too conflicted to investigate, purportedly necessitating a quasi-independent special counsel.

The way it’s supposed to work, the Justice Department learns of a crime, so it assigns a prosecutor. To the contrary, this Justice Department assigned a prosecutor — make that: 17 hyper-aggressive prosecutors — and unleashed them to hunt for whatever crime they could find.

If you sense that this cuts against the presumption of innocence, you’re onto something. Because of that presumption, coupled with such other constitutional rights as the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable police searches, prosecutors are supposed to be measured in the use of their awesome powers, to employ only as much compulsion as seems appropriate under the circumstances. You don’t get a search warrant when a subpoena will do; if you have to get a warrant, you don’t do a covert pre-dawn entry when ringing the bell in the daytime will easily get you in the door.

In various places, our law reflects this common sense. For example, in applying for a wiretap authorization, besides describing the precise crime it suspects, the Justice Department must satisfy the judge that less intrusive techniques for obtaining evidence of similar quality have been attempted, or would be certain to fail if tried. (See section 2518(b) and (c) of the federal penal code.) The point is to instruct investigators that they must exercise restraint. The prosecutorial privilege to act “under color of law” comes with the duty to respect the rights the law guarantees.

Law enforcement is hard and sometimes dangerous work. Thus, there is leeway for officials to make errors in judgment. Without that leeway, they would be too paralyzed to do their jobs, and there would be no rule of law. But when prosecutors and investigators go way overboard just because they can, it is not law enforcement. It is abuse of law-enforcement power in order to intimidate.

There is no other way to interpret the brass-knuckles treatment of Manafort, a subject in a non-violent-crime investigation who is represented by counsel and was cooperating with Congress at the time Mueller’s Gang of 17 chose to break into his home. Did they really think they couldn’t have gotten the stuff they carted out of Manafort’s residence by calling up his well-regarded lawyers and asking for it? After he had already surrendered 300 pages of documents to investigative committees?

Besides scaring the bejesus out of him with the search warrant, prosecutors reportedly also told Manafort that they intend to indict him. Must mean they have a case, right? So, if Manafort is such a threat to obstruct justice that they needed to break into his home and grab the evidence before he could destroy it, then why hasn’t he been arrested yet? I mean, how could Mueller responsibly allow so dangerous a criminal to walk the streets?

The insurance commissioner for the state of Illinois announced that health insurance customers in the state will see premium increases average 35% in 2018.

Washington Free Beacon:

The four insurers serving the individual market in Illinois are Celtic Insurance Company, CIGNA HealthCare of Illinois, Health Alliance Medical Plans (HAMP), and Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC). Humana has announced earlier this year it was leaving the Illinois exchange.

For Obamacare’s lowest silver-plan, the four insurers are requesting a range of 15 to 43 percent in premium hikes, coming to an average of 35 percent.

A 21-year-old nonsmoker on the lowest cost silver-plan with Celtic Insurance can expect to see premiums of $315.33. For those with Cigna coverage, an individual in this category could expect to see a range of premiums of $448.97 to $344.23. Individuals with HAMP coverage can expect their premiums to go up from a range of $423.96 to $446.71. Those covered by HCSC can expect premiums to increase from a range of $358.46 to $520.94.

For those purchasing the second-lowest silver plan, the commissioner says many counties will see increases of more than 40 percent.

In October of last year, the Obama administration announced that premiums for 2017 would rise by double-digits. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, rate increases are a result of the increasing number of insurers experiencing losses on the exchanges.

“Years before the Trump administration came to office, Obamacare’s double-digit rate increases and onerous mandates have been squeezing the pocket books of the American people,” a spokesperson at the Department of Health and Human Services said.

“Americans are once again facing skyrocketing costs and plummeting choices because of Obamacare’s fundamental failures,” the spokesperson said. “Congress should bring relief to American families and end the Obamacare nightmare once and for all.”

Are these rate increases going to be typical nationwide? Those states with more insurance companies selling policies will see smaller increases, while those states where consumers have fewer options will probably see increases higher than an average of 35%. The key, as in any market, is competition. It’s not rocket science.

The Republican bill that Congress may vote on next week does not address the lack of competition in many states. And as the DHS spokesman points out, whatever uncertainty there is among insurance companies because Obamacare reform is up in the air pales in comparison to the fundamental and continuing flaws of Obamacare from the day it was implemented. The reason Obamacare continues to fail is that insurance companies can’t make money selling Obamacare policies.

Until that issue is addressed, we will continue to see skyrocketing premium increases driving more and more people out of the market.

The natural right of an individual to speak freely has been under assault by the Left for decades. With the election of Donald Trump, the pace and ferocity of the Left’s attacks on the freedom of speech have only accelerated.https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/22/what-did-the-founders-think-about-freedom-of-speech/

The urge among progressives to codify into law “hate speech” exceptions to the First Amendment—and even to repeal the freedom of speech altogether—is no longer the stuff of hushed fantasy on the Left. It is open and proudly spoken in the salons of D.C. and Berkeley. Members of the Orwellian-named Antifa movement attack anyone—from neo-Nazis to your run-of-the mill harmless conservative—who disagrees with the Left’s destructive ideology of identity politics.

Yet some speech is still considered more equal than others. Consider the media’s self-serving elevation of their right to speak over and against all other Americans. This has become hard to miss. Pompous news anchors with furrowed brows tell us in tones fraught with “concern” that President Trump’s refusal to be the media’s punching bag is something akin to third world authoritarianism. It is the stuff of a tyrant who wants to crush the press under his heel.

The typical conservative response to these attacks has been less than helpful. In some cases, they even abet the Left.

William J. Haun, a lawyer based in Washington, D.C., has penned an important essay at the Library of Law and Liberty blog that delves into these details. In the piece, he traces the feckless conservative response to the progressive rejection of free speech and attempts to shed light on the American founders’ understanding of free speech.

Haun notes that instead of arguing from a basis steeped in the American political tradition, conservatives have adopted an “absolutist” view of the freedom of speech that is fearful of “drawing principled distinctions.” “The Right…seems to find it an alluring posture given dominant cultural forces’ militant hostility to conservative views,” Haun argues.

Afraid of voicing any fundamental concerns regarding the consensus morality of the ruling class, conservatives resign themselves to make dubious utilitarian arguments that cannot possibly meet the challenge the Left has put forward. Nearly every contributor at National Review who writes on free speech, for example, regularly conflates speech that is obscene or vile with speech that is not harmful to the rights of others.

Underlying this “absolutist” rhetoric is the notion that “dissent from the dominant political and cultural orthodoxies (read: conservative views) would be protected” if “drawing content-based restrictions” was prohibited. But this is a fool’s errand. Lines will be drawn always. The real question is where such restrictions are—not if there should be any restrictions in the first place.

As Haun contends, the conservative “absolutist” position can easily descend into a deep moral relativism:

The absolutist position is akin to a compass without a magnet: Without any extrinsic source of objective value—right reason and objective truth—to allow political communities to assign worth to any speech, speech’s worth is determined only by individual perceptions, and these perceptions are informed by one’s passions. When those passions are aggregated, as has happened with Progressive dominance on college campuses, the ‘marketplace of ideas’ lacks any strength to stop a mob silencing views that do not accord with those of the dominant consumers.

Democrats claim to have a monopoly on caring for the poor and suffering, and this week the left is portraying a GOP health-care bill as an attack on society’s vulnerable. So check out the data on how ObamaCare is a tax on some low-income families.

IRS data offers insight into who paid the law’s individual mandate penalty in 2015 for not buying health insurance, the latest year for which figures are available. Spoiler alert: The payers aren’t Warren Buffett or any of the other wealthy folks Democrats say they want to tax. More than one in three of taxed households earned less than $25,000, which is roughly the federal poverty line for a family of four.

More than 75% of penalized households made less than $50,000 and nine in 10 earned less than $75,000. Fewer families paid the tax in 2015 than in 2014, yet government revenues increased to more than $3 billion from about $1.7 billion, as the financial punishment for lacking coverage increased.

These Americans are paying a fine to avoid purchasing a product they don’t want or can’t afford but government compels them to buy. Such individuals don’t suddenly have access to less expensive or higher quality medical care, but they do have less money for household expenses, which can consume a high share of income for this class of families.

The unfortunate irony is that ObamaCare destroyed the private market that offered options that in some cases made sense for these people. For example: High-deductible, limited coverage for unexpected events.

Then again, the point of this coercion was to substitute the government’s political preferences for individual judgment, while forcing the young and healthy to pay more to finance the mandated benefits that Democrats think everyone must have. This is the status quo that Senators John McCain and Rand Paul are supporting with their opposition to reform.

Vladimir Putin did not hack the election. Barack Obama did.

Donald Trump said earlier this year that the Obama Administration wiretapped his campaign. “Like I’d want to hear more from that fool?” President Obama scoffed.

But CNN reported on Monday, “US investigators wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the election…. The government snooping continued into early this year, including a period when Manafort was known to talk to President Donald Trump.”

The network labeled their story an exclusive. But, in fact, Breitbart, radio host Mark Levin, the realDonaldTrump Twitter account, and numerous other sources reported the wiretapping more than six months ago.

In the wake of the belated bombshell, other voices at CNN hung on, precariously but unabashedly, to the dated narrative.

In a story updated subsequent to CNN confirming the Obama administration’s surveillance on Manafort and noting his residence in Trump Tower, CNN reporter Manu Raju continued to characterize the president’s accusation affirmed by his network as Trump’s “unsubstantiated claim that Obama had Trump Tower wiretapped during the election to spy on him.” In March, Raju’s reporting consistently cast doubt on the president’s wiretapping charge.

CNN editor at large Chris Cillizza wrote an article, appearing the day after his network conceded the truth of the wiretap charge, entitled: “Donald Trump still has no evidence that his wiretapping claim was right.” In March, Cillizza wrote a piece in the Washington Post on Trump’s wiretap claim under the headline: “Donald Trump was a conspiracy-theory candidate. Now he’s on the edge of being a conspiracy-theory president.”

The media went all-in this spring on the notion that the loose-tongued Trump once again spoke without reference to the facts. Newsweek’s Nina Burleigh labeled his charge “incendiary.” The Los Angeles Times called it “a phony conspiracy theory.” PolitiFact bluntly judged his accusation “false.”

Who will fact check the fact checkers?

Rather than correct the record, egged-face journalists embark upon a face-saving effort. But the media whitewash stands as neither the only nor the most relevant cover up.

The all-smoke-no-fire Russia investigation looks increasingly like a smoke screen aimed to put out a very different fire. Rather than an investigation into malfeasance by the Trump campaign, does the Robert Mueller inquiry serve as a clean-up operation to justify Obama administration malfeasance? The bugging of the opposition party’s presidential campaign, at least when done by Republicans, ranks not only as criminal but as the biggest political scandal in American history.

Richard Nixon’s henchmen wore surgical gloves to avoid leaving clues for law enforcement. Barack Obama’s henchmen were law enforcement. This makes Obama worse, not better, than Nixon. At least Nixon’s plumbers possessed the decency to leave their skullduggery to lock pickers and burglars. Obama used law enforcement for opposition research. In Banana Republics, the cops double as the criminals. The unprecedented use of the Justice Department to commit injustice marks a sad moment for the republic. It is Watergate on steroids.

Accusations that hit the mark, rather wild ones wide of the target, provoke fierce denunciations, outcry, and Joe Welch, have-you-no-sense-of-decency moralizing. The category-5 storm that engulfed the president after he tweeted about government surveillance on his campaign indicated that he uncovered an inconvenient truth, not that he told an ignoble lie. No one flips out when a critic makes a fool of himself with his own words. People do so when the words threaten to make a fool of them.

The Obama administration using the considerable powers of the federal government to spy on a hated critic’s campaign sets a dangerous precedent. It provides future administrations a means to infiltrate the innermost circle of the opposition party’s presidential campaign. This merely requires the pretext of wrongdoing to engage in wrongdoing.

It would be peculiar if, as he now claims, James Clapper did not know about the Obama administration’s monitoring of Paul Manafort. At the time, which appears to have been the autumn of 2016, Clapper was Obama’s national intelligence director. The (dubious) raison d’être of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) — a post-9/11 layering of yet more bureaucracy atop bureaucratic sprawl — was to ensure efficient information flow through the “community” of U.S. intelligence agencies.

That said, it is a gross exaggeration to contend, as some are doing, that new revelations about the surveillance of Manafort, the former chairman of the Trump campaign, show that Clapper lied in a March 2017 interview by NBC’s Chuck Todd. Instead, what we now know proves what I warned at the time of the interview: It was a mistake to construe Clapper’s answers to Todd as a blanket denial of Obama spying on the Trump campaign.

Carefully parsed, Clapper’s comments left open the possibility — which some of us regarded as a high probability — that Manafort and other Trump associates had been under Obama-administration surveillance.

Much is being made of Clapper’s assertion that “there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president, the president-elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign.” But what commentators are omitting is a critical qualification that I highlighted right after the interview (as did our Jim Geraghty and NBC News itself). Clapper made clear that he could only speak, as NBC put it, “for the part of the national security apparatus that he oversaw.”

Why was that significant? As I elaborated:

The director of national intelligence does not “oversee” the entirety of the government’s national-security apparatus. By statute, for example, the attorney general (who of course runs the Justice Department) oversees the process of requesting and executing electronic surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] (see Title 50 U.S. Code, Sec. 1801 et seq.).

The surveillance of Manafort was conducted under FISA. It would have been known to the Justice Department, which presents warrant applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and to the FBI, which conducts the investigations. But the surveillance operation would be known to the national intelligence director only if the Justice Department, the FBI, and whoever else was in the loop chose to share it with him. Apparently, they did not — confirmation that the ODNI is the excrescence many of us predicted it would be.

At the time of Clapper’s interview, the front-burner topic was whether Trump himself had been monitored. The president had just alleged, in a series of tweets, that his phone lines had been tapped at Trump Tower. I assumed (as I’m sure Clapper did) that Clapper would have been informed if Trump had been targeted for FISA surveillance when he was a candidate or president-elect. But even if that is a safe assumption, it does not mean that Clapper would have been alerted to every surveillance of a Trump subordinate or associate.

What about Clapper’s denials of wiretapping against Trump’s campaign, and at Trump Tower?

To listen to the commentary, Donald Trump used an inappropriate term at the U.N. — not just “Rocket Man,” but “sovereignty.”

It wasn’t surprising that liberal analysts freaked out over his nickname for Kim Jong Un and his warning that we’d “totally destroy” Kim’s country should it become necessary. These lines were calculated to get a reaction, and they did. More interesting was the allergy to Trump’s defense of sovereign nations.

Brian Williams of MSNBC wondered whether the repeated use of the word “sovereignty” was a “dog whistle.” CNN’s Jim Sciutto called it “a loaded term” and “a favorite expression of authoritarian leaders.”

It was a widely repeated trope that Trump’s speech was “a giant gift,” in the words of BuzzFeed, to China and Russia.

In an otherwise illuminating piece in The Atlantic, Peter Beinart concluded that Trump’s address amounted to “imperialism.” If so, couched in the rhetoric of the mutual respect of nations, it’s the best-disguised imperialist manifesto in history.

Trump’s critics misrepresent the speech and misunderstand the nationalist vision that Trump was setting out.

He didn’t defend a valueless international relativism. Trump warned that “authoritarian powers seek to collapse the values, the systems, and alliances that prevented conflict and tilted the world toward freedom since World War II.”

He praised the U.S. Constitution as “the foundation of peace, prosperity, and freedom for the Americans and for countless millions around the globe.”

“The Marshall Plan,” he said, “was built on the noble idea that the whole world is safer when nations are strong, independent, and free.”

Just window dressing? Trump returned to similar language in his denunciation of the world’s rogue states.

When critics don’t ignore these passages, they say that they contradict Trump’s emphasis on the sovereignty of all nations. There’s no doubt that there’s a tension in Trump’s emerging marriage between traditional Republican thinking and his instinctive nationalism. Yet he outlined a few key expectations.

He said, repeatedly, that we want nations committed to promoting “security, prosperity, and peace.” And we look for them “to respect the interests of their own people and the rights of every other sovereign nation.”

Every country that Trump criticized by name fails one or both of these tests. So, by the way, do Russia and China. Hence Trump’s oblique criticism of their aggression in Ukraine and the South China Sea.

Trump’s standards aren’t drawn out of thin air. A consistent nationalist believes in the right of every nation to govern itself. Moreover, modern nationalism developed alongside the idea of popular sovereignty — i.e., the people have the right to rule, and the state is their agent, not the other way around.

Trump’s core claim that “the nation-state remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition” is indubitably correct; it is what makes self-government possible. If the alternative is being governed by an imperial center or transnational authorities, the people of almost every nation will want — and fight, if necessary — to govern themselves. (See the American Revolution.)

The U.N. is hardly an inappropriate forum for advancing these ideas. “The Organization,” the U.N. charter itself says, “is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.” To the extent that the U.N. is now a gathering place for people hoping the nation-state will be eclipsed, it’s useful to remind them that it’s not going away.

All that said, there were indeed weaknesses in the speech. First, as usual, Trump’s bellicose lines stepped on the finer points of his message. Second, even if sovereignty is important, it can’t alone bear the weight of being the organizing principle of American foreign policy. Finally, Trump’s foreign-policy vision is clearly a work in progress, as he accommodates himself to the American international role he so long considered a rip-off and waste of time.

Trump is adjusting to being the head of a sovereign nation — that happens to be the leader of the world.

The Jewish community was shocked when it learned that David N. Myers, a militant anti-Israel activist, had been quietly put into place as the head of the Center for Jewish History.

There was even more shock at the unquestioning support that Myers received from establishment figures at the Center and its constituent organizations like the American Jewish Historical Society.

There is a very good reason for that.

David N. Myers did not end up in his position by accident. The defenses of his anti-Israel activism contend that we should ignore his political views because they have nothing to do with his position. But it’s because of these views that he got the job and because of them that he will keep the job.

Myers’ appointment was not the beginning of a problem at the Center for Jewish History. It’s just the most obvious symptom of a serious ongoing anti-Jewish crisis in Jewish Studies.

Let’s start with an organization misleadingly named Scholars for Israel and Palestine which came up during the Myers debate because some of its members had called for sanctions against Israeli government officials.

Scholars for Israel and Palestine’s founding members included veteran anti-Israel activists such as Peter Beinart, Eric Alterman and David Myers. But its list of members also includes many key figures at the Center for Jewish History and the American Jewish Historical Society.

The Myers appointment was an inside job.

The Center posted a statement of support for Myers from members of the academic councils of the Center for Jewish History and the American Jewish Historical Society.

The most notorious figure on the list is Hasia Diner. Unlike some opponents of Israel who fashionably claim to be liberal Zionists, Diner co-wrote an editorial viciously denouncing Zionism and Israel.

In a hatefilled rant, Hasia Diner wrote that she abhorred visiting Israel, that the Law of Return was racist and that though she abhorred “bombings and stabbings”, the murder of Jews is what “oppressed individuals resort to out of anger and frustration”.

“I feel a sense of repulsion when I enter a synagogue in front of which the congregation has planted a sign reading, ‘We Stand With Israel’”, Hasia Diner concluded her ugly rant.

Hasia Diner had also complained that “it is impossible to have a conversation about Israel or BDS because one is accused of being anti-Semitic.” She suggested that anti-Semitism is “profoundly overused” and is “an easy, convenient label used to end a conversation or analysis instead of exploring what is really going on.”

Hasia Diner is a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History. And is a founding member of SIP.

Beth Wenger is the Chair of the Academic Advisory Council of CJH. Wenger signed a petition in defense of BDS anti-Israel activists and has accused Israel of mistreating “Palestinians.”

Wenger is also another founding member of SIP.

Marion Kaplan, the third Jewish CJH Academic Advisory Council member to sign the pro-Myers letter, had also signed a letter calling on Obama to end aid to Israel over its campaign against Hamas.

The letter demanded a permanent end to the blockade on Hamas and the withdrawal of Israeli soldiers.

In general, lawful Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood work to insert themselves into Western society, exploiting liberal, democratic bodies to promote their own illiberal and anti-democratic ideology.

Whether co-opting Western democracies to silence its critics, or funding American Islamist organizations with long histories of extremism and ties to terror, the Turkish regime is now a crucial component of the global Islamist threat.

For the past few years, the international Muslim Brotherhood has found a welcoming home in Ankara in the face of opposition from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Consequently, U.S. Islamist organizations have also turned to the Turkish regime for collaboration and support.

On September 18th, a Washington, D.C.- based organization, the Turkish American National Steering Committee (TASC), hosted an event in New York City with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “US-based Muslim Brotherhood supporters have a busy week coming up,” the Middle East analyst Eric Trager noted. “They’re hanging with Erdogan on Monday, protesting Sisi on Wednesday.”

Organizers of the TASC event included Ahmed Shehata, a lobbyist for the Muslim Brotherhood who has also worked for Islamic Relief and the Muslim American Society — two prominent Islamist groups designated as terrorist organizations by the United Arab Emirates in 2014.

Last year, following Turkish claims of an attempted coup against the regime, a TASC rally in support of Erdogan outside the White House included Shehata and a number of prominent American Islamist leaders, such as Nihad Awad, the Executive Director of the terror-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). As the Investigative Project on Terrorism notes, Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party subsequently sent a delegation to the United States to hold meetings with senior CAIR officials. Since then, Awad has continued to meet with representatives of the Turkish regime.

Such partnerships are not new. Since a coalition of U.S. Islamist organizations travelled to Turkey in 2014, prominent American Islamic groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood have become some of Erdogan’s staunchest advocates in America.

A week ago, I suggested that, sixteen years into “the war on terror”, we were making the same mistake as the British at Singapore and pointing our guns in the wrong direction. The only difference is that we’ve been doing it for a decade and a half and don’t seem to notice that, while we’ve been firing straight ahead, our buttocks have been entirely blown off. So we continue to run around the Hindu Kush in order that, in the President’s words, terrorists will “never again have a safe haven” in Kandahar or Jalalabad, while simultaneously allowing them ever safer havens in Manchester and Brussels and Paris and Stockholm, Ottawa, Orlando, Sydney…

I’ve tried to ease up on the “As I wrote some years ago…” shtick, not only because it irritates some readers but because it sows the fatal seed in my own self-doubting breast that I’ve said it all before and it made no difference. But there is a section in America Alone about the need for countries at war to use all elements of national power. And my concluding chapter begins by saying:

This book isn’t an argument for more war, more bombing, or more killing, but for more will.

Or for more “cultural confidence”, as I call it in the ensuing paragraphs. That was eleven years ago. But the void on the culture front was obvious even earlier. My 2002 book The Face of the Tiger (yes, yes: “as I wrote even more years ago”) includes the following:

President Bush has won the first battle (Afghanistan) but he’s in danger of losing the war.

Well, we are losing. I think that’s undeniable. But why is that? Well, we have the best trained and most technologically advanced military – and nothing else:

Against that are all the people who shape our culture, who teach our children, who run our colleges and churches, who make the TV shows we watch — and they haven’t got a clue. Bruce Springsteen’s inert, equivalist wallow of a 9/11 album, The Rising, is a classic example of how even a supposed ‘bluecollar’ icon can’t bring himself to want America to win. Oprah’s post-9/11 message is that it’s all about who you love and how you love’. On my car radio, John McCain pops up on behalf of the Office of Civil Rights every ten minutes sternly reminding me not to beat up Muslims…

The Islamists are militarily weak but culturally secure. A year on, the West is just the opposite. There’s more than one way to lose a war.

I wrote that in August 2002. Obviously, the idea of a “war” subcontracted to an elite professional soldiery while consciously forswearing all other levers of national power (including immigration policy) would have struck any strategist from 50, 100, 200, 400 years ago as entirely absurd. Yet it has persisted for a decade and a half, to the point where the remnants of the hot war – the behind-the-scenes special-forces action in the Islamic State; the periodic shootouts between Nato forces and our Afghan “allies” – actively obstruct clearheaded thinking on the far more vital cold war.

William Kilpatrick expands that point in a sharp essay on the big picture. He begins with a blunt statement of where we’re headed:

Europe is currently in the process of submitting to Islam, and America also seems destined to eventually submit. If you have young children or grandchildren, it’s likely that they will have to adapt at some point to living in a Muslim-dominated society. It won’t necessarily be a Muslim-majority society because, as history testifies, Muslims don’t need a majority in order to successfully take control of non-Muslim societies.

If and when Islam persuades America to submit, it most probably won’t be through force of arms. The civilizational struggle in which we are now engaged is primarily a culture war. America used to be good at cultural warfare because America once had cultural confidence. The Cold War was in large part a cultural war, and America won it because it didn’t have qualms about demonstrating the superiority of the American way to the Soviet way.

But times change. These days, may Americans would rather shred their culture than spread it. Cultural shame rather than cultural pride rules the day. And, not surprisingly, people who are ashamed of their culture can’t be counted on to defend it.

That’s true. The Dallas School Board has smoothly progressed from chiseling the names of Confederate generals off its schools to “studying” whether also to remove the names of Jefferson, Madison and Franklin. Without whom there would be no such thing as America. Indeed, without whom there would, in a certain sense, be no you. The erasure of your total civilizational inheritance turns everyone into “Dreamers” – blank slates who find themselves in America through mere quirk of fate, and for whom the great Republic is no more than a geographical location. Or if you prefer, Un-Anchored Babies: You can be born here, but, if the entirety of your culture has been wiped clean, what’s the diff? Once Jefferson and Madison and all the rest are gone, a kid whose great-great-great-whatever got off the Mayflower is no different from the child of Mexican drug smugglers: we are all children of Year Zero.

This psychosis isn’t confined to America: In London Lord Nelson is feeling the heat, and in Canada Sir John A Macdonald. The Guardian wants to topple a statue of H G Wells. Wells’ political views are not mine – but, in the fullness of his life, he got some things wrong and some things spectacularly right. That’s not good enough for the thought police: 19th century men, and 18th century men, and 16th and 13th and back through the millennia, have to get everything right by 2017 standards – or their statues must be guillotined:

Robert E Lee must be toppled because he was racist. Thomas Jefferson must come down because he owned slaves. Christopher Columbus has to go because he had no transgender-bathroom policy on the Niña, Pinta and Santa María. The mobs in the street have no idea who these guys are – except that they are not like them, and so cannot be permitted to stand.